How To Increase Your Business's Online Presence [Step By Step Beginner's Guide]

Are you getting as much traffic and leads as you want? Here we'll show you how to grow your business's online presence and have a killer ROI.

Building your online presence can be broken into 2 parts: gathering traffic and building a brand.

There are plenty of steps we can take to start gathering traffic. But first, let's talk about the ones that don't work so well.

Any channel where you can't control the narrative and the user experience will be a medium that gives you a non-optimal ROI. These could be forums, directories, and even social media...

Yep, read it and weep: social media might be a poor investment for your business. In a study by firm McKinsey, they found that social media was one of the lost generators of traffic for any businesses.

mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-s…

That's not to say that you shouldn't focus on social media. But if your goal is to increase your business's online presence and run a profit, you might should look at other channels.

Search engine optimization (SEO) and Google organic traffic make up one of those "more profitable" channels. Ask yourself: what are readers searching for before they realize they need my product?

If you're selling home-recording software, a user might be searching for "how to improve acoustics for Youtube". You can answer this question and help your reader realize that they need your product.

You can follow a similar process with Youtube or other search engines. Find what your readers are searching for with good keyword research (youtube.com/watch?v=YQumPfMy-jc&t=1s) and then provide it to them.

It might also be worth trying to find people who can mention your business.

If you're running an authority site, guest posting is a popular tactic to get backlinks and mentions. If you sell your own products, I would try to find an affiliate.

Affiliates promote your product for a percentage of the sale price. If you have an amazing product, show an affiliate that his or her audience will get a lot of value out of it. One quick email can produce enormous amounts of leads and brand authority for your online business.

The same tactic works for influencers. Find someone influential in your niche and pay them or give them free stuff in exchange for a shoutout.

And then you can always give free things to build your branding. This could be some type of contest where users get entries for sharing and promoting your brand.

You could also give a free tool to people who might be interested in your business. Ahrefs uses a free backlink checker tool to do this; you could use something similar.

Once you have your traffic engine going, it's time to move your visitors down your funnel. You want to take everyone who is interested and help them get started interacting with you.

This is the point where social media can be valuable. Facebook groups are working super well right now and will be out of vogue in the future. But it's the principle we need to be following.

Gather your people in a group under your brand, allow them to ask questions and get solutions. They'll begin to remember that they can always come to your brand for help.

The end goal of any online business should be to collect emails. Email marketing is the only traffic source where you will keep 100% control.

Build this email list by providing free stuff. Market to them with your newest releases, discounts, and anything else you want them to have.

Every channel of traffic should have the end goal of promoting your email list.

And once you build all of these together, that's how you increase your business's online presence in a sustainable, profitable way.