11 Useful Tips For Improving Your Online Business
Many online business owners are finding it extremely challenging to meet their set objectives due to various factors including tough competition in the online market place and difficulty in gauging the customer requirements.
There are certain ways in which online business owners can take the competition head on and also satisfy their existing customers and draw in a stream of new leads.
If you are an online business owner, the 11 secrets that are given in the subsequent sections would definitely help you in rapidly expanding your online business.
1. Setting up a scalable business web site
The main requirement of a good business web site is its scalability feature. To begin with, product web sites would draw only a limited amount of traffic. Over a period of time, through effective internet marketing, the incoming traffic would continue to increase.
Your business website should be able to serve all the customers coming in to get a feel of your products. The performance with respect to time taken to navigate between different pages should remain the same irrespective of the incoming traffic density.
2. Using Email Marketing
Email is a powerful tool that can be used to maintain a list of prospective leads and confirmed customers. Regular weekly or monthly online newsletter can be sent to these leads, who show greater interest on your line of products.
3. Creating a presence in Facebook
If your online business doesn't have a Facebook fan page, then it’s time to create one. A Facebook fan page can be used to continuously communicate with your prospective leads and existing customers.
A fan page can also be used to provide information related to trouble shooting, which will be very much useful to the customers using your line of products. You can also start an online contest through your Facebook fan page such as a quiz contest and award prizes to the worthy participants.
4. Having a Twitter Handle
Twitter Handle has become a must for online business owners. You can use that handle to provide updates to your followers. You can also get feedback from your followers on the quality of the product and also on the quality of services provided by your service team.
There are Tweet Scheduling tools available such as HootSuite and TweetLater that can automatically schedule and post messages related to your business
5. Marketing products through YouTube videos
By making use of social video portals like YouTube, Dailymotion and Vimeo, you can upload your product information related videos and also the videos containing the feedback provided by various customers. These socially viral videos would create a buzz about your range of products.
6. Participating in Forums and blogs
There would definitely be a certain number of forums and blog sites that are specific to your line of products and business. By becoming a member of this forum, you can post interesting information about your product such as new features added to the product and also share some customer reviews.
7. Using Pay per click advertising
Though this is an older way of marketing your products, online advertisements still has its benefits.
There are a number of pay per click advertising platforms available including the popular ones such as Google AdWords. You only need to pay for the ads that have been clicked by a customer.
8. Creating Google + Business pages
Google+ is slowly catching up with Facebook and Twitter in terms of the number of registered users. Having a Google+ Business profile would add weight to your existing social presence.
9. Having content that's SEO Friendly
Whatever content related to your product that is available in social sites and other online forums should contain Search engine friendly key words and terms in order to rank highly in the search engine results.
10. Keeping social media interactions meaningful
Sufficient care should be taken to prevent the followers and friends from unliking or unfollowing your social business pages.
11. Using Surveys to get the customer feedback and also perform market surveys
You can integrate your social media accounts to survey providers and participate in surveys regularly.