How to Create a Versatile Website

If you market online, you must be aware that one of your most important assets is your website. Your website is the face of your business online. It is through it you can really show your global audience who you are, what you offer and where your business can be found. It thus adequately serves as the primary means by which potential customers can get in touch with you and your business. Creating such an important digital marketing address therefore becomes significantly very important. Here are things to consider.

First step is to create a website, which will stand at the forefront of your online presence. That requires some diligence and practical techniques because you’ll want the website to be able to effectively attract traffic/visitors and grow your online footprints/presence. You can only expect this if you are able to buy ad placements on other sites, share valuable content and make your business visible on services like Google Maps and social media platforms. This is what allows your business to earn the trust of your potential customers even amidst an ever-growing myriad of competitors. That’s one veritable way to build an attractive and reputable brand image online.

If you make your website versatile enough, you can seamlessly receive feedback directly from customers, leads and potential customers. With that, you can naturally create a sense of intimacy and nurture a community-like environment where your business is viewed as open and honest one even with minimal investment in time and other resources. Through your website, you can deploy tools and technologies for data analytics and similar services. These will enable you to learn more about your customers and to build/strengthen your business relationships with them.

A versatile website provides you with a great opportunity to generate organic traffic from search engines in addition to traffic gained from advertising and other online digital methods. This makes your website available 24/7 to attract customers and move them all the way through the buying process to do business with you.

As a marketer, you can’t just sit back and expect your website to attain versatility all by itself. You’ll need to take some time, do some quality work with a bit of dedication on the site to make it an effective and versatile tool to do business with online.

Here are a few tips to make that happen.
•    Acquire a good domain name that is short, memorable and easy to remember.
•    Keep your overall design clean and simple.
•    Invest in secure and scalable web hosting with reliable support.
•    Make sure the website is mobile-friendly. Meaning, it is responsive and appears correctly on mobile devices.
•    Make sure that its pages load quickly and are easy to navigate.
•    Create a clear and convincing call-to-action, CTA.
•    Constantly optimize the website and stay on top of SEO best practices.
•    Keep your contact information easily visible so that customers can find it on each page.
•    Be sure the site is accessible to all models of internet smart devices.
•    Make sure your “about us” page is well optimized and has several avenues to make contact with you.
•    Above all, engage all internet protocols to make sure the site is secure enough to do business with.

If you are a small online business owner, it is expected that you’ll be selling your products or services out of your website. Therefore, you’ll need to have it affiliated with a reputable e-commerce platform. That is made possible if the website is versatile enough. A simple website designed and hosted with the aforementioned tips can easily be affiliated with very popular and reputable e-commerce platforms like Wix, WooCommerce, Shopify and Business SquareSpace, These platforms have in-house tools you can rely on to establish and grow your online store without too many hassles and complications if your website is versatile enough.

8 Creative Ways to Increase Visibility for your Small Business Online

Your small business needs online visibility to do well online. This you can do in many ways aside from such common ways as your website, social media profiles, online listings, and ads. If you are already used to the common ways, you can now try these here eight creative ways to increase visibility for your small business online.

1. Make your Content Accessible to Everyone

This includes people with disability particularly sight impairments. You can attract more traffic to your website if you explore ways to make your website pages and emails accessible to people with disabilities. With about 25% of adults having one form of disability or another, using internet technology to market to this formidable group can help to dramatically increase your online visibility. If more people with disabilities have more and better access to your online content, it presents you a very valuable opportunity to expand your online visibility.

2. Be Sensitive to Diversity

This is diversity in race, gender, disability and peculiarities. Now more than ever before, incorporating diversity into your workplace and marketing material is more important than ever. This is the sign of the times to really embrace full diversity in your marketing activities. If you represent the diverse range of people within your audience in your online assets, you can get noticed by more people while also demonstrating social responsibility at the same time.

3. Seek Guest Posting

By exploring many ways to use guest posting to reach more potential customers, you increase your online visibility as a result. What you do is to deliberately search for any complementary businesses or local media outlets that have a strong online presence. Reach out to them to see if they’ll accept your guest posts on their website. If they do, you do not only get your business in front of their audience, but a link to your site from theirs can help to improve your SEO. You give out similar favors by accepting guest posts on your own blog. Both gestures help the online visibility of benefiting websites.

4. Leverage the Power of Videos

Your small business can tactically leverage the power of video for more shares and memorability and that is great for your online visibility. How-to videos are very easy to create and share too. Viewers usually retain over 90% of a message when they watch it in a video compared to about 10% when reading it in text. That is why videos are very effective marketing tools online. The shareability of videos is also very high particularly on popular social media sites like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and the likes.

5. Content Sharing by Employees

If a small business owner encourages his employees to share his business content with their own social networks, the visibility therefrom is great. Content shared by employees usually receives more engagements than content shared by brand channels. Small business owners can always take advantage of this by sharing content particularly blog posts with their employees and encourage them to share it on their social media networks in particular. That helps to generate more feedback and user content which search engines notice. Such content can greatly help your ranking and visibility.

6. Build Beneficial Relationships

To seek online visibility, having a good relationship with many different people is hugely beneficial. Going about it alone as a business owner might be daunting at times but factoring in other people with whom you have a strong relationship can help you in a number of ways. Many of such people who have their own audiences and relationships they routinely deal with can be of great help. People in this category who easily come to mind are content writers, loyal customers, fellow business owners, reporters, vendors, influencers, celebrities, sport personalities and so on. A connection with these connections can introduce you to their own connections. The ultimate goal is to cultivate mutually beneficial relationships from which organic opportunities can arise. A hugely beneficial network grows from there and that is great for your online visibility. 

 

7. Use Mobile-Specific Marketing Strategies

Good news for small business owners! Google is now using mobile-first indexing for all sites on the web. By this development, if you have a mobile optimized website, it helps your online visibility. In addition, with more than half of internet searches now being performed on mobile devices, your website can greatly benefit from such huge search data. If your website is mobile optimized, it helps to make sure your website pages and emails render properly on tablets and smartphones. It also seamlessly leverages mobile-specific strategies like, podcast ads, SMS marketing, voice search, mobile search ads, local SEO and so on.

8. Intensify Email Marketing

The biggest advantage of email marketing is that email recipients have already opted in to receive your emails. Unlike social media followers who merely opted to follow you, email inboxes don’t compete for info from hugely crowded news feeds. Marketing by email can be specifically targeted in both messaging and timing and the marketing responses can be very great for your visibility. They help your business with lots of opportunities to get quality exposure. Once you take quality time to build an email list over time, segment the list, create quality and highly informative content for your emails, and optimize the emails well enough, they help your business exposure/visibility tremendously.