Optimize Your Marketing Potential by Creating a Website – Info Entrepreneurship

Today, since information is easily accessible to everyone with a stable internet connection, establishing an online presence for your business is a necessity. Customers are increasingly turning to social media and Google to search for information about products and services before making purchases. No matter what products or services are involved in your business, creating your own website broadens your reach to potential customers worldwide and establishes a connection between the company and each individual customer.

In the process of building your business, you are likely marketing your products and services. It’s no longer enough to rely on the traditional print, radio, TV and other out-of-home methods of advertising to draw attention to your business. Social media and online marketing should already be at the top of your marketing strategy list; the first step is establishing your business’ website. Furthermore, you don’t necessarily need to be selling products online to require a website — most small businesses have them to display information such as services offered, store locations, operating hours, press releases, or even blog articles. Whatever the purpose your website serves, customers are more likely to trust a brand or service if it is discoverable online. Establishing your own website also allows your business to better develop brand awareness online, which is where most of today’s consumers spend their time. So it’s not a question of if your business actually needs a website, but more of what it’s function will be and how it can be optimized in order to reach the most people possible. Here are a few things you need to create your website and optimize it into a money-making avenue:

How to Create Your Website

Now that you’ve made your decision to create a website for your business, you must first figure out what purpose it will serve. Do you plan on selling your products and services on your site? Will you mostly use it for creative content or business blogs? Will you use it for press releases or business information? Whatever purpose it may serve, having a clear idea about what you want on your website will make the process much easier for you as well as whoever is building your website. Many website-building platforms are easily accessible for you to use on your own. Robert Mening, website developer and author behind websitesetup.org, has written a step-by-step guide on how to build your own website — here is a quick breakdown of the basics:

• Decide on your domain name and host: You can learn more about deciding on a domain name and host from this article on registering a domain name for your business.
• Choose your platform: A platform is also known as a content management system. Some examples of platforms are Jumia, Drupal, and WordPress. WordPress may be your best option if you are building your website on your own. Mening’s guide for building your own website discusses this process more in detail.
• Choose or create a theme: Thousands of themes are already made and adaptable to multiple platforms depending on the purpose of your website. If you choose WordPress as your platform, they provide clean and simple templates for free. If you are planning on selling products on your site, themeforest has several options as well.
• Build your pages: A solid, static homepage is essential, but if you plan on optimizing your website’s potential, you must build on multiple pages (again, depending on the purpose of your site). Brand pages, category pages, and product pages (if you plan on selling online) and an information section, a blog section, etc. are some of the basic pages. Be clear about what types of information you want your website to display.
• Test your website before it goes live: Once you have built your site, you should go through a user experience (UX) test to see if everything is functioning well before you publish your site.

How to Optimize Your Website for Online Marketing

Now that you have your business up and running on the web, it’s time to maximize your platform and turn it into an avenue with the potential to earn. Here are a few pointers:

1. Connect Your Social Pages

If you don’t already have your social pages set up, do so now. Drive traffic from the millions of social media users to your site by providing links to your website on your social media pages. Create a social media marketing strategy with an objective to drive traffic to your website by running drive to website campaigns via Facebook Advertising. You can also work backwards by linking your social media accounts on your website in case your potential customers’ first points of contact are your website. Establishing a well-rounded approach to your online presence will benefit you in the long-run — the more active you are online, the better!

2. Create Meaningful Content (that is SEO optimized)

If you aren’t creating content on your site to promote your business, your online efforts are not at their full potential. Invest time and resources to create high quality, engaging content to drive traffic to your site, which should be filled with informative articles and content. The more engaging, the more likely people will share your content; this, in return, does wonders in bringing traffic to your website. Tools such as AddThis and ShareThis facilitate user content sharing. “Content” does not only refer to blog articles, photos, and videos, but also visually appealing infographics and any other easy and effective ways of promoting information about your business. Creating content that is SEO optimized is an important tool in online marketing success. The main point of SEO is for Google and other search engines to find your site and rank your page relevance so that it comes up at the top of search engine results. Online business consultant Jon Rognerud lays down a top-level checklist of how to optimize your website content here.

3. Allow Interactions on Your Site

Allowing interactions refers to everything from customer reviews and testimonials to comments on your blog content. By allowing users to interact with your brand and website, you allow the creation of user-generated content that makes your business more than just another “brand.” Tools such as Livefyre and Disqus allow users to add comments on your content via their Facebook accounts. It’s different for you as a brand to convince people to buy your product compared to others who have already tried and tested it. Making your website interactive allows transparency on your brand and products that could possibly encourage others to try your brand.

4. Optimize Your Site for Lead Generation

Lead generation involves acquiring customer information that you could eventually use in transferring potential customers into your purchase funnel. This means dedicating a section of your website to acquiring email addresses so you can regularly send customers newsletters from your business. This is a process that requires several steps of planning, but to start, set up “pop-ups” on your website so that once users visit, they are prompted to sign up for your newsletters. Mailchimp and Sumo are some user-friendly platforms that are quite simple to use. Mailchimp, in particular, makes email marketing a breeze with quick and easy templates you can use to start sending out regular newsletters. Moreover, you can also send out detailed sign-up forms (that are compliant to the latest data privacy laws) to collect information from users for these newsletters. Be sure to handle whatever information you collect from your potential and current customers very carefully and be transparent about how you will be using their information. Also, you should never share customer information to third-parties, but if it’s vital, be sure you have a Data Privacy Policy to avoid any legal issues.

There is much more to consider to fully optimize your website’s marketing potential, but these basic points will help you get started. Remember that setting up your website and generating meaningful content is not a one-time thing; you should maintain, test, and continually improve your website’s’ content and performance. You must generate sustaining efforts in your online marketing strategy to keep your brand relevant and engaging for online customers. Consider this a long-time investment and possibly the best investment you could make in ensuring success to your business in the future.