Business • Research •
A Blueprint for Small Business Success
By now, you’ve read about how important it is for businesses to have an online presence. In a nutshell, we’re talking about creating a website that allows your small business to become visible and credible in order for potential leads to find your brand. But how can you increase these benefits?
One of the easiest ways is by creating content that helps promote your small business’ brand—and what better way than by writing articles on the topics they’re searching for? That’s right: content marketing! You don’t need any prior experience or expertise when it comes to creating content; all it takes is some inspiration from our five steps below:
Step 1: Registering a Domain Name
Your first step to getting your business online is registering a domain name. A domain name is the web address people use to find your website, like www.example.com or www.bestsiteever.com. Registering a domain name is relatively inexpensive and an easy way to get started online!
Domain names are legal agreements—and they must be unique! It’s common for people to try registering domains that already exist (known as cybersquatting), but because these domains are already taken, this practice can cause legal issues down the road if you decide you want something different later on in your business’ history or if someone else decides they want it too when they see its popularity grow over time.
Step 2: Hosting and Building a Website
The next step in the process is to choose a website host. There are several hosting providers out there, such as Namecheap.
The first thing that you will need to do is sign up for an account with one of these hosts, who offer different types of plans at various prices. If you choose a host that provides unlimited storage space and monthly bandwidth usage, it can be very useful if your site becomes popular or gets a lot of traffic because it will help keep costs low down the road when those numbers go up.
You’ll also need to decide on which domain name provider (DNS) provider you want to use for managing your domain name(s). If someone wants to visit your website by typing “www.” somewhere into their browser address bar—for example: www [dot] example [dot] com—then all computers have something called DNS servers that know how this should translate into an IP address that connects them through the Internet so they can reach your server from anywhere around the world!
Step 3: Creating Content
Content is the heart of your business. It’s what will build relationships with your audience and drive them to do what you want. But what is content? Good content is anything that adds value to a reader’s life, whether it be through humour, entertainment or information.
The first step in creating good content for your small business online is knowing who you are trying to reach. Are you writing for millennials? Baby boomers? Teenagers? If you don’t know where they hang out on the internet then how can you expect them to find you? This information should guide everything from the type of language used in each blog post (Millennials like slang) down to which social networks or platforms are most popular among different age groups (Facebook dominates with older generations).
Once you know who needs reading material from your company, focus on making that material useful and interesting so they actually read it and come back for more!
Step 4: SEO and Google My Business
- SEO and Google My Business
SEO is the process of improving the visibility of a website or web page in search engine results. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or web page in search engine results. This can be achieved by incorporating elements that make your site more appealing to search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo etc., including internal linking and key word usage.
Google My Business: Your business listing on Google should include your name, address, phone number and hours as well as a link to your website/social media accounts if appropriate.
Recommended Reading: The Importance of Link building with Backlinks for SEO
Step 5: PPC and Social Media Ads
The next step is to start advertising on Google AdWords and Facebook. This will help you increase your brand awareness, website traffic, and conversion rate. With this strategy in place, you’ll also be able to increase sales!
Google AdWords allows you to create highly targeted ads that appear specifically based on search terms or topics that users are looking for. You can also choose from different types of ads depending on what works best for your business: text ads, display banners (similar to billboards), video advertisements (similar to YouTube videos), mobile app advertisements, etcetera. To get started with Google AdWords just visit their website here.
One way we do this at Synmek is by placing banner ads with links back home when someone searches for certain keywords related directly or indirectly. We’ve found this method very effective in getting people who wouldn’t otherwise know about us onto our site where they can learn more about what we offer and potentially become customers.
Final Thoughts
By following our 5 steps above, you can start building your credibility and establishing your small business online. We do recommend hiring a professional web design & digital marketing company to save you time so you can focus on your business. You can ask web designers for a website rfp (request for proposal) to get a better understanding of how much and how long it will take to create your new website.
