How to Get Your Business Online ASAP
If you’ve been running a primarily in-person business, it may be time to consider how you can shift your business online. Here I discuss three ways you can get your business online as soon as possible.
While recent health scares have reinforced the concept of “online business,” the trend towards conducting your business online has been shifting increasingly over the last decade.
This doesn’t just apply to e-commerce either, although in that arena e-commerce is growing 3x faster than offline retail sales (Click Here for more online vs offline commerce stats). Every business should be seeking to enhance their communication, relationship, leads, and sales online.
Here is a short list of benefits your business can enjoy if you get serious about your online presence:
- Create a New Business Asset that Gets More Valuable the More You Add to It
- Reduced Operational Costs (think less travel, customer support reps, sales staff, marketing materials, event attendance, and more)
- Improves Your Company Image (where do people learn more about you before doing anything else?)
- Makes Your Business Accessible 24/7 Whether You’re Working or Not
- Improved Customer Service (Imagine an extensive FAQ section that answers questions that you get all the time)
- You Automatically Go Global
The latest “benefit” is that you can potentially weather a shut-down of your in-person business. This could be vital to your business’ survival.
How to Get Your Business Online NOW
Getting your business online requires a few key, operational steps that literally every business can do. This list assumes you have a website in one form or another (Click Here if you need help with that). The capabilities are simple and should be able to be implemented on almost any platform (we use WordPress).
#1 | Improve Communication Through News Notifications (Blogging)
A Facebook post is great and everything, but people get a million of them and they easily get lost. Worse, their impact doesn’t last very long or contribute to your “findability” (also known as SEO) online.
By simply making posts for news, updates, and other business information on your website’s blog, you will be driving traffic to your business, prove that you’re active online, and improve your SEO.
#2 | Commit to Email Marketing
Email marketing is the most effective online marketing available, and while many businesses may have thousands of customer emails, they have never used them to increase sales or communicate. Click Here for some cool stats about email marketing.
A lot of business owners I speak to are afraid to “annoy” their customers with emails. Don’t worry about this! People who don’t want the information can easily unsubscribe or ignore your emails.
You’re not doing it for the people who don’t want the information, you’re trying to connect with the people that do.
With that said, a once a week email is ideal in my experience, and once a month is the bare minimum you should be doing. You can direct people to your website (which will be much better for your business) or to your social media content (if you have to). Either way, you’ll be connecting with your customers better than ever before.
Mailchimp is free for up to 2,000 emails and can be set up in minutes. You want to see your website traffic increase by double or triple-digits? You can literally do it overnight.
#3 | Create a Real FAQ Section
Creating a Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) section is one of the best and easiest ways to build tons of content on your website. Just create a list of the questions that you get asked the most, and write down the answers (or better, shoot videos).
Create a post for each topic, then your visitors can easily find the content on your website or you can send them a link instead of having to retype or state the answer a million times. You will look professional, decrease your time spent on customer services, and build your website into a resource of useful information.
Add some SEO keywords in there, and now you have an organic traffic engine that will never stop running.
Need Some Help?
We’ve built tens of thousands of pages of content for our clients, and we can help you get started as well. Click Here to schedule a free 20-minute consult, or Click Here to view our website design pricing. If you become a client, you’ll instantly get access to our MegaMad Client database of tutorials and resources.
