Growing your business online is important to remain competitive and to safeguard its future. How to grow your business online is an important consideration for every business today, however small and large.

The overall success of a business is linked closed into its success online. With this in mind, here is an 9 point strategy to grow your business online.

1. Identify Goals

Define your goals and identify clear cut objectives. It does not have to be a formal report. You can start by simply listing down what you hope to achieve. Study what competitors are doing. List the goals or objectives for your website e.g.

• Increase sales
• Generate leads and enquiries
• Arrange meetings of product demos for potential customers
• Manage support requests for your existing services (Only if this is what you hope to achieve)
• Build a community

2. Evaluate Your Existing Website

Almost every business has a website. However very few businesses have professionally designed websites that have been built strategically to help meet the company’s objectives.

Now that you have your goals and objectives listed, see if your existing website helps to achieve your goals. If not consider updates that need to be performed.

It may not require a complete redesign. Re-designing some of the existing elements, introducing a couple of new features, placing relevant website elements differently may be sufficient to meet your objectives.

4. Create a Content Strategy

Quality content is at the heart of most successful methods used in internet marketing today. It is practically impossible to get your business noticed on the web without creating and publishing great content regularly.

Why You Need a Content Strategy?

Following are some of the reasons every business requires a content strategy to grow online:

• Quality content helps build a community around your website
• It improves your search engine ranking.
• It allows you to target new users from social media
• It established your authority in your niche
• Most internet marketing & SEO techniques depend on new content to be created continuously e.g. article marketing, social bookmarking, etc

What Should your Content Strategy Include?

Your content strategy should consist of the following:

Content publishing: Identify the type of content you will create, frequency, topics, etc)

Content marketing: Identify how your will promote your content e.g. blog, social media, article directories, RSS feed, etc

5. Start Blogging

Many businesses fail to realize the importance of blogging for business. A successful blog can be a very important asset for your business.

Studies have shown a direct relation between content creation and customer acquisition

Why Every Business Needs a Blog?

• Having a blog on your website improves your search engine ranking
• Blogs help form a community around your website
• Blogs promote loyalty and encourage users to revisit your website
• Blogs help form relationships with website visitors
• Blogs offer the opportunity to engage with website visitors
• Blogs encourage social sharing and helps expand your social connections
• Blog helps your company’s image among consumers

6. Use Social Media Strategically

Most businesses have a Facebook page and a Twitter profile. However very few use social media for business strategically. The true benefits of social media are realized when a businesses uses social media to connect and engage effectively with consumers

This can only be achieved via ongoing participation and a strategic approach.  With a little effort the results can be significant. According to the 2011 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, 78% of marketers saw increased traffic with just six hours a week invested in social media.

7.  Use Right Tools

Use of the right tools is essential for online success of your business. Tools will save valuable time as well as help increase your productivity and efficiency. You can take advantage of tools for various tasks.

Tools to research keywords, help with blogging, social media plugins for your website, tools that let your post to multiple social networks, SEO tools, tools measure website statistics, social media influence, and many more.

8. Set Benchmarks to Measure your Performance

It is not possible to gauge your success if you do not measure your growth and performance.

Set some benchmarks to measure your performance with respect to your goals and objectives. E.g. if your goal is to increase traffic to your website, you can set a target of 10K visits by the end of month 4. If one of your objectives is to increase your email database, you can set a target such as 1k new subscribers by the end of month 2, and so on. Similarly, you can set benchmarks for measuring social media performance.

You can set realistic targets for each of the objectives identified for your business earlier.

9. Evaluate and Refine

Your internet marketing strategy should not be rigid. You should be able to adapt  and refine as required. E.g. you may have to adjust your growth benchmarks based on results received.  Similarly, based on performance you may have change or adapt the methods used to promote your website. If some techniques are producing better results than the other.

Conclusion:

A business requires a strategic approach and well thought out plan to online marketing in order to succeed on the internet.  A haphazard approach may work in the short term to drive traffic to your website, but will fail beyond that. The 8 point strategy discussed above is designed to help small businesses succeed online.