Online business is what everyone is talking about these days. “Bring your business online”, they say, “you can reach a larger audience,” they say. In reality, it can be a lot more complicated than that. Before diving into the deep end with an overwhelming amount of knowledge, here are 4 crucial tips and action steps to help you figure out how to have a successful online business.

How to have a Successful Online Business

1. Content is king

Have you heard of “content is king”? Well, it is true. You can’t expect people to want to stick around if you don’t provide immense value through your content. Nowadays, everyone can get information online and get their questions answered online. Your job as an online business is to attract your target audiences by providing incredible content to capture their attention and interest. 

Content can come in many forms, written content like blog posts and social media posts; audio like podcasts; videos like talking-head videos, webinars or presentations, and a lot more.

Content is useless unless it is optimised to be discovered by search engines. It has to also be maximized for your visitors. You must please both types of your visitors, your audience, and the search engines.

Online content is king only if you can position your keywords in proper areas. The tough part is establishing what key phrases to use. A keyword phrase can be a single word or a phrase. It is the term that web internet users make use of to search for info. 

Action Steps 

Make sure to do your research before so you can determine the number of people searching for these terms? How many websites currently deliver content on that particular search term? Meet the demand with your supply. 

Organise your content based upon the 50-150 high-demand as well as low-supply keywords. Your website should be structured in three tires. Tier one is your home page. Tier 2 is constructed from your main keywords. Tier three keyword phrases are sub-topics of rate 2 web pages. Doing this makes it simpler for visitors to navigate through your site as well as it makes it much easier for search engines to discover all of your pages.

Search engines do not like to fish around for all of your web pages and links. This is why you need to make sure to add international links and a site map. A site map is one page that contains web links to all of the content web pages. Make sure to submit your sitemap to be reviewed. You can submit your sitemap to Google through Google Search Console. 

Using these three tiers can help you go from subject to sub-topic to sub-sub-topic all by natural in-content web links. 

For example, tier 1 can be your homepage on health and fitness. Tire 2 is your page with everything about cardio activities. Your tier 3 pages can be branded off from your tire 2 topics, focusing on different treadmill regimens. 

Do you see exactly how your audiences and search engines would like this framework? They click on ”Cardio” and are offered links to more specific pages concerning cardio topics. Search engines like this three-tier structure as well. It implies they do not need to dig into different layers and can easily index your website. 

There is even more to content than finding successful keyword phrases as well as structuring your site into easy-to-navigate tiers. You should optimise every web page on your website to help you rank high on search engines and engage with your targeted audiences. 

Research other blog posts or articles that are targeting the same or similar keywords as you. Understand what they are doing well and what they might not be doing so well. Write longer blog posts than them, add more images or infographics. You can also put your keywords and phrases in the file name, title, description, and search phrase area of your page. Then sprinkle the keywords throughout the content. 

When your site starts ranking for your keywords and keyphrases and people are discovering you, your audiences will start to place you as the expert. Your website will become known as the area for information about [insert your specific niche].

When visitors discover your website while searching on websites like Google, they are most likely looking for a certain solution. If they land on your website and you try to sell them something right away, they will click the back button and find another website that will provide the necessary information they need. This is why providing valuable content is critical. Give your site visitors what they want. Answer their inquiry and in the process let them learn about your services and products.

The more comprehensive and useful your content is, the longer your visitor is likely to stay on your website because they are reading. Online search engines observe this and place you in a better position. Just how well your site can keep site visitors is known as “retention.” Your site has to attract and keep site visitors for as long as possible.

Supply valuable content that can position you as the professional and also focus on very successful keywords. You can not go wrong with your website if you do those things. The trick is to satisfy your visitor as well as online search engines. 

These are amazing tools that will be able to help you improve your SEO rankings on your website and figure out the right keywords to target:

• SEO Yoast– SEO Yoast is one of the most popular plugins to optimise SEO for your website. You can use SEO Yoast to help you optimise your keywords, keyphrases, synonyms, related keywords and provide powerful analysis for the readability of the pages and tell you how to improve your website.
• RankMath– Rank Math is a powerful WordPress SEO tool that is completely free. It helps optimise your Search Engine rankings.
• SEMRush– It is one of the most powerful tools to use to improve your SEO performance. You can get insights into your competitors’ strategies in display advertising, organic and paid search, conduct a deep link analysis, understand referring domains’ authority and a lot more.
• Ubersuggest– you can use for free with a limited number of searches a day, which should be enough for a new business. Ubersuggest is great to help you find the right keywords you can target for and a lot of other functions. 

2. Generate Website Traffic

Traffic can be summed up in 2 words- free and paid. 

Paid advertising includes all Pay Per Click (pay-per-click), paid offline advertising and marketing are forms of spending for your traffic. 

Free organic traffic is more challenging to draw in and it takes more work. But it costs you absolutely nothing in most cases and can continue to bring in traffic for you. Mostly all free website traffic is the outcome of people discovering your website through search engines. You can apply the techniques and tactics we talked about previously to attract both your ideal audiences and the search engine. 

Action steps

Now, let’s look at how you can use organic marketing and paid advertising to generate traffic for your website. 

• Create articles and submit them to specific niche sites
• Post in forums like Reddit and Quora. Lots of forums will certainly not permit you to market your product and services. That is totally understandable. What I recommend doing is honing in on one or two forums and whenever someone has a question relating to your specific field, you can provide extensive responses and content and drive them to your website.
• Submit your sitemap to major online search engines whenever you make a significant amount of changes or add content to your website. 
• Partner up and collaborate with non-competing sites. Work with a company that compliments your product and services to maximize your reach.
• Work with influencers and micro-influencers to reach their audiences and get them to be an affiliate to your products or services. 
• Don’t be ashamed to brag a little. Publish your website on your company documents, your profile, and your social media. Also, add your company information to your email signature and business cards to optimise the chance of visitors getting turned into paying customers.  
• Provide fantastic customer service and be there for your audiences. This can help build strong relationships with your existing customers and get them to talk about you to their friends.

The bottom line is, if you don’t have website traffic, then no one can find your content and know about you. 

Once you get a flow of traffic, you have to analyse and figure out where are these website visitors coming from? Is it through Google search, social media, or other websites recommending you? Understanding this can help you focus your efforts in areas that can potentially generate more sales for you. 

3. Be honest and genuine to create Superfans 

Anyone can market services and products online. All it takes is a link to a payment gateway like Stripe or Paypal. The distinction between successful online business owners and those wanting to make a buck is your brand. Your brand has a voice. The look and feel of your brand and your website can leave an impression for your visitors. 

Know your target audience better than they know themselves. Help them solve an issue before they even know they have the problems. By being honest, genuine, and helpful, you can create superfans that will be there to scream about from the rooftop and stay with you every step of the way.  

In addition to the content you create and offer, you need to concentrate on providing detailed answers to your customer’s troubles or issues. Be the one that can solve their worries and problems so you can become their go-to expert in the field. 

Marketing can be cold, distant, and forceful. Providing useful content and speaking honestly and genuinely with your audiences is different. During that time you are positioned as a specialist. Any type of suggestions that you make will be more valued.

Strong sales cause individuals to set up their defenses. It makes your audiences go back to question what your objectives are. Providing value should lead those that are interested in your solutions into a funnel that converts them into superfans.

This works closely with your content, which I talked about in point one. You have to offer value to your visitors. You have to be considered as the professional and the useful friend that is suggesting to help your audiences. People will not feel sold by that. Your visitors and fans will appreciate that you are providing responses to their troubles as well as making a recommendation for a product that can give much more useful information. It’s seen as a favour as opposed to a hard sell.

4. Monetise

A lot of online businesses put monetisation as the first step, while yes, you should always think about whether or not your niche can be monetised. After all, making money is a key step to running a business right? However, you need to think about your audiences and content, before selling. 

People go to the internet most of the time to look for information, not to immediately jump into spending money and buying products online. Most people will look into free solutions before considering paying. If your target audience types a question or problem into Google and the first thing they see is a page that asks for their credit card details, you can be assured that they will run the other way. 

Action steps

There are a few things you can do to help increase your conversion rates:

• Start with recommending 2-3 services or products that you use and love! You wouldn’t recommend a mediocre product to your good friends, right? Having more than this makes it difficult for your visitor to decide which is best for them. It is also very difficult for you to recommend them all.
• People need to see your content over and over again before deciding to buy. Mention about your products, services, clients, and/or customers whenever you can. This allows visitors to know that you have offerings and they can be one of your customers too.
• Turn your visitors into subscribers with lead magnets and use weekly newsletters to provide excellent content. 
• Experiment and analyze your data with different price points, graphics, sales page

When first-time visitors get on your website, they are looking for information. So give them the information. If you can go above and beyond to give them value, then the visitors will very likely explore more of your website and get on your email list. 

Apply step number 1 of creating valuable content with immense content, step number 2 with optimising your website traffic, step number 3 of building trust, and turning your visitors into fans, and then generating sales will be easy. Your target audience looks for information, they find you, they get free solutions from you, they establish trust in you, they think of you as an expert. 

The goods news is, once you have set up this system, you will be able to continue to pull in hot, targeted traffic from the search engines month after month. All of this traffic is free! No advertising costs! Monetisation naturally occurs.

Conclusion

There are many online businesses but not all of them are profitable. To become a successful online business, make sure to take these tips and action steps into account. What do you think about these tips on how to have a successful online business? Hold yourself accountable and put the steps you’re going to start taking today in the comment section down below!