If you can turn your passion into a thriving online enterprise, the rewards are numerous and legendary.
Working for yourself, being free to relocate to wherever in the world you want, making money doing what you love – what’s not to like? However, if you’re going to make a success of this venture, you must invest time and energy – but even more important, you have to be smart.
Toil is admirable, but knowing where your best chances of success lie is key to transforming your passion into a viable source of income. Below are a few tips to help you make the most of your online presence and get closer to your dreams.
How to Grow Your Online Presence
1. Stick to What You Love
It goes without saying that if you’re not passionate about something you’re trying to show people, then their enthusiasm will be equally limited.
You’re your own best selling point when you’re sharing what you genuinely care about; your audience will connect with this, and they love the authenticity.
Likewise, we tend to build up our most profound knowledge of what genuinely interests us. So, if you’re looking to brand yourself as an expert or authority on a particular subject, it makes perfect sense to stick to what fascinates you!
Playing to your strengths is age-old advice, but it’s often easy to forget. More than this: even if you make a success out of something in which you’re not especially interested, will it feel as good in the end?
2. Make Your Homepage a Home
Your homepage is your ‘face’ on the web – it’s what represents your online presence; it’s where you express yourself.
Keep it active, make it dynamic and crucially, ensure that you find a platform that suits your needs.
3. Marketing Intelligence
To make prospective clients come to your business, you need to understand what it is a customer might want from your services.
Unfortunately, this can be easier said than done, as the quick turnover of trends can often lead to unreliable/outdated information that has the potential to tarnish a brand’s image.
One option for those attempting to keep up with changes in customer behavior is enlisting the help of a web scraper.
For those that have a history with eCommerce businesses, this is likely to be a familiar term.
But for those that haven’t come across it before, web scraping is the software-based process of downloading every available piece of data from a website or webpage (incl. images, text, code, certain analytics etc.) and translating it into an easily digestible format.
At first glance, the benefits that this has for building your presence may not be obvious, but the ability to acquire analytics from any website is a definite boon to your marketing strategy.
This allows you to gather information from your competitors, including purchasing and pricing trends for their services, and ensure that you are consistently on the cutting edge of new developments in the industry.
4. Social Media Salvation
One mistake that is common among businesses which are unclear on the merits of incorporating social media into their strategies is inactivity.
With the sea of information that is being thrown at each individual on a daily basis, a company that isn’t updating their social accounts on a regular basis will quickly fall out of
A lack of social media engagement can also be due to the inconsistency of your brand’s voice, which can make it difficult for customers to connect with your company over another similar provider.
Ensuring that all of your promotional images and writing share a similar tone is integral to building up your brand as something that is distinctive and easily recognized.
5. Use Multi-Media to Diversify Your Appeal
Everyone has their preferences when it comes to connection. Some people like a well-written article, some people love a good video – so offer something for everyone!
Use different media channels and formats to increase your content’s connectivity, whatever subject you choose.
Videos especially are great for increasing your reach and boosting your online presence, as you can share them easily via social media.
Having a strong opening that captivates viewers in the first few seconds is crucial, as this is often all that people see as they scroll their live feeds. However, if you can make it work, you can magnify your exposure with great video content.
6. Content Marketing
While images may draw in an audience, excellent content is what will inevitably be the thing that makes them stay.
A robust, engaging portfolio of both digital and physical content is the best way to add both credibility and recognition to your company.
Content marketing is simply the process of using media of varying kinds (though usually writing) to promote and propagate your brand.
With that said, the responsibility to create a consistent stream of writing doesn’t have to fall to you, as there are many agencies that offer link building packages that incorporate both quality content and SEO advantages at the same time.
7. SEO
SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, is the process of making your website easier to categorize by search engines, allowing you to climb the rankings and potentially end up as the number 1 result for certain search terms.
By linking from a high-traffic, relevant term to your site, your business’ relevance to that keyword in search engines goes up.
This is an incredibly effective approach to getting your company in front of a relevant audience.
Read also: How I Got 103,231 Blog Page Views Last Month
8. Your Friends Are Your Best Friends
Online presence is all about getting your name out there, and every friend who’ll share your blog, your content, your videos, is a potential ambassador for you.
In the early days, especially, personal shares are vital for spreading the word.
Directly messaging friends asking them if they’d care to help you out is an excellent way of doing this. It’s far more personal and relatable than mass-messaging, and it can also increase friends’ interest in what you’re doing.
9. Smile!
Be positive in your message and personal in your engagement.
Taking the time to directly interact with people who you want interested in your brand or to spread the word about you, is a thousand times more effective than one message that everyone will scroll right past on their live feeds. Take an interest in other people, and they will take an interest in you.
Most of all, remember to enjoy the journey of building your online presence! Know your passion, believe in your message, and this will come organically.
While this may not be a comprehensive list by any means, it has hopefully given you an insight into the possibilities available to you.
The world of online marketing can often be a difficult one to navigate by even the most experienced businesses, but there will always be ways to get a leg up on the competition.
Stock Photo from LightField Studios @ Shutterstock