As more and more commerce and business moves into the digital realm it becomes easier to earn revenue online. The key is of course, deciding what your business model is and then working daily to build that out and garner an audience or following around it. So how does one go about this? The truth is that it’s a lot more simple than you probably realize and just requires a few core elements and consistent effort… So let’s get started.
A Responsive Website
By the most recent estimations roughly 63% of your digital traffic is going to be viewing you on a mobile device. This is hugely important and is also a ranking factor for organic SEO. Since the majority of web traffic is now mobile and Google values “user experience” over just about everything – it only makes sense. You need to make sure that your website is built to accomodate mobile users. When we get design jobs we now start with the mobile version of the site – desktop design is now secondary.
Social Media Pages
Social Media is no longer just a buzz word. It’s now a big part of our every day digital life. One reason we advise clients to create social media pages on as many platforms as possible is that, again it is helpful with organic search. If you are having daily interactions with customers, fans, etc. on social media channels that is relevant to search crawls. If you want to own the front page of Google for the name of your business having 6 – 8 social channels can be HUGE. If you do a Google search for the term “Holistic Wellbeing Expert” you will get one of our former clients Randi Ragan. She owns this SERP largely because of the way we keyword optimized her website & social media channels. At the time this article was published (June 27, 2016) She was the first 8 listings on page 1 of Google for the term “Holistic Wellbeing Expert” – The point is that Social Media channels are important to how you rank so create them and use them.
Content Is Still King
The tired old cliche’ “Content is King” exists for a reason – it’s true. The internet ecosystem models the television ecosystem in a lot of ways. Think about it like this – in order to have free content online, you have to have ads. There are also “paid subscription” or “premium content providers” where you pay a fee so that you have unfettered access to that content without ads – kind of what cable used to be – or premium cable like HBO & Showtime still is.
The point is that no matter what you do there is content to be made. If you’re a body shop that does great body work – have a blog and show before & after pictures of your work. If you run a gym, film daily segments of your training sessions and share them on Facebook. Google is essentially a content library and if you want to be found there you’re going to have to provide good content. The point I’m getting at is that if you run a daily business in most cases this content will create itself. Thanks to social “snippet” content it doesn’t have to be anything grand or epic. A 30 second clip of you punching a heavy bag will share on Instagram with the right hashtags and no doubt net you a few new likes & followers. As a wise brand once said: “Just Do It.”
Organic Traffic
The all important life blood of the internet is traffic – it’s like digital oil. Pretty much every terrible or great thing being done online is done to get traffic, increase audience, gain visibility. Everything we have just outlined in this post is designed to help you gain traffic and essentially, sales, ad views, etc. Whatever is going to make you more money online. Of course there are ways to buy traffic and advertising is a huge part of that but that is a whole other article.
Creating content around your business or service and sharing it daily on social media through a responsive website works. If you consistently do this each day, you will see growth. As you build out a web of content you will begin to see new traffic trickle in from the differnt keyword searches you are now beginnign to appear in and it spirals out from there.
Digital Farming
As a final thought I want to leave you with this – it’s something I heard from a Stephen Covey course and I think it’s important. Content & Social Media work is like farming – it’s something you have to do every day consistently to see results. It’s not like cramming for an exam where you can wait until the last minute and then hurry and do a bunch of posts. It’s a daily incremental and consistent effort to stay visible in these different channels and build out that web of content. If you stick to it you will see results!