8 Strategies to Build Your Online Business

A business strategy is a targeted and measurable action plan for aspects of your business.

It gives you a competitive advantage and helps you focus on your business’s strengths and weaknesses.

Strategic planning is a way to improve your communication, your market plan, your technology adoption, or any other aspect of your company.

You’ll end up developing many types of business plans as you grow your business, and all are designed to give you a competitive strategy and roadmap for success.

These strategies all offer high potential returns.

The more time you invest in these strategies, the more powerful they become.

1. Personal branding

Branding yourself gives you the opportunity to leverage a more trustworthy, personal image to promote your brand.

Branding gives you more power to meet and network with others, form more partnerships, and lend a face to your otherwise faceless organization. It’s free, from a monetary perspective, however, you will need to invest time.

2. Content marketing

Content is the backbone of the internet.

Here’s Google’s definition of content marketing

Content Marketing is arguably one of the most important internet marketing strategies because, without it, many other strategies wouldn’t exist (or wouldn’t be effective).

Two primary reasons why content marketing is beneficial:

• Content educates potential customers about your product or service.
• Content provides an opportunity for you or your business to be a thought leader in your industry.

3. Content syndication

Content syndication is when a piece of web-based content is republished (i.e. syndicated) by another website.

Content syndication can be an excellent source of referral traffic.

4. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

SEO is the process of making your site visible to search engines, so you get organic traffic from people searching for your products or services.

The majority of your organic ranking in the search engines comes from the technical structure of your site and your ongoing content strategy.

SEO is not an investment if you’re already creating new content regularly however it’s well worth that extra investment if for no other reason than to make sure your site is properly indexed by the search engines.

5. Conversion optimization.

Most of these strategies aim to get more people on your site, but what do those people do once they’re there? Conversion optimization helps you ensure you get more value out of each and every visitor by maximizing your rate of conversion.

Sometimes, this means including more conversion opportunities, and other times, improving the ones you already have.

6. Social media marketing.

There is significant potential in building and nurturing a social media audience.

Again, content will come into play heavily here, as it will likely be the factor that attracts your audience to begin with.

Here, you stand to gain greater brand visibility, a greater reputation and far more inbound traffic with your syndicated links.

7. Email marketing.

Email marketing has a good potential for ROI because it costs almost nothing to execute. Start collecting subscribers from your existing customer base, your social media followers, and other new opportunities;

from there, even a simple content newsletter can help you encourage repeat traffic to your site, facilitate more engagement with your brand and keep your brand top-of-mind with your audience.

8. Webinars

A webinar is essentially a seminar that takes place online. It can be in the form of a presentation, demonstration, or discussion.

Webinars are often used as lead magnets for email marketing and the right topic can drive a large number of new subscribers.

Webinars can be recorded and used as standalone products or even a series of products. They are a great medium for both live and recorded training.

Webinars tend to be more engaging than simple videos, even if they are used in exactly the same way. The actual start time and live Q&A tends to make people feel like they are receiving significantly more value than if they were watching a video with the exact same information.