You don’t have to have a business which sells product or services online to still have the Internet help your business to grow. These days most people use the internet daily to assist them with their research and help them find product or services they are looking for. Actually, the internet search engines are probably more commonly used than the telephone Yellow Pages.
If your potential and existing clients are using the internet to help them in business, then it is important that they can find you and your business on the internet. This means that you require one of more of the following: a website, a blog or social media accounts (preferably all three).
Whatever you decide to do, you must also be prepared to continue learning. You do need skills to make all these different procedures work well for you. It is a defeatist attitude to simply say “I don’t have time” – if that is true, then you are making enough money to enable you to employ someone else to do it for you.
I find learning new skills is both exciting and rewarding. I ‘feel’ up to date and professional – and you will too! Once I have this new knowledge, I love to share it with others, particularly through my blog. This simply makes me an expert and appear good spirited. Isn’t that the sort of business person you would like to deal with?
Website
Make sure that your website appears professional. You do not want it to seem to be ‘cluttered’; it must be easy to navigate and the information must be unique and relevant. Above all, make sure that you keep it up to date. So many websites have such things as listings of ‘coming events’; recently I saw such a listing that was for two years previous! I just searched for another website – I felt that this business was probably not up to date (as their website wasn’t) and they did not appear to care for their customers/viewers.
Blog
Your blog must have up to date information too. A blog is your own personal information tool. It is an online marketing tool that can be very powerful, IF you constantly add new posts and keep your readers informed. Once they are prepared to ‘Like’ and make comments on your posts, you will know that your blog is working.
Emails and Social Media
Do you use your email as a marketing tool? Do you have a succinct and powerful signature that appears on every email you send out? Do you send a simple but informative newsletter by email? Above all, do you have an email list where people give you permission to send them emails? Such a data base is a very desirable tool to have.
Many people complain that it is so time consuming to keep up with information for their social media accounts, such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Did you know that information that you put into your WordPress blog can have an automated summary placed into Facebook and Twitter? The summaries can then have a link back to your blog so that the entire post can be read.
Videos
You need to understand just how powerful a video can be when marketing your business. It is true that the video needs to be interesting and ‘eye catching’, but you can learn how to be creative with this technique once you begin making videos. A client of mine made a video of herself painting a wall hanging on silk. She did this so that her client could see how she was progressing with this large commission. She also added great information into the ‘description’ section, including a link to her website where she was promoting running online silk painting course. Suddenly she was getting people signing up from America, Canada, England and Australia.
Your business can grow if you utilise the Internet. My team and I can advise and assist you to take this step forward if you are unsure of just what to do or how to do it.
Written by Ven Grollmus
So many business folk thing that having a website is all they have to do to have an online presence. However, this is just the beginning. To really build a business online one has to be involved in a number of activities and must be regular in what they do, if they want good results.