Exciting times! At this point in the process of launching your new online business, your website should be up and running, and now it’s time to tell the world about your new venture. In this article, we’re going to talk about marketing and promoting your business.
We’ll cover many important topics, including reporting, analytics, SEO, lead generation, email marketing, social media, paid advertising, press releases, affiliate programs, and companion apps.
Here we go! 🤪
This is Step 7 of the 8 steps in your journey to start an online business.
- ✅ STEP 1: The Basics
- ✅ STEP 2: Define Your Business
- ✅ STEP 3: Set Up Your Infrastructure
- ✅ STEP 4: Set Up Your Products
- ✅ STEP 5: Set Up Your Backend
- ✅ STEP 6: Set Up Your Frontend
- ✅ STEP 7: Marketing
- ⬜ STEP 8: Money Matters
Reporting & Analytics
Before you tell the whole world about your new online business and drive tons of traffic to your site, make sure that your site tracks your visitors and sales!
There are many benefits for tracking and analyzing how your visitors use and navigate your website:
To track this type of data, you’ll want to set up a few tracking and analytic programs on your site.
How do you set up Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a tool that you can integrate into your website that will allow you to track your visitors, report your website traffic, and measure your return on investment (ROI).
To set up Google Analytics for your site, follow these steps:
<!-- Google tag (gtag.js) -->
on any pages on your site or globally after your <head>
tag.For more details and step-by-step help, check out the official Google Analytics setup instructions.
If you’re using WordPress, you might want to check out this Google Analytics plugin:
Google Analytics WordPress Plugin
Also, if you’re going to use Google Analytics to track your visitors, make sure to add any necessary declarations about your use of Google Analytics and the collection of data to your Privacy Policy page.
How do you set up Google Search Console?
Google’s Search Console is a very helpful tool that will help you understand how your site is performing in Google’s search engine.
Once you verify your site on Search Console, you will be able to see insightful data and access useful tools, such as:
To access all of this neat data, you just need to follow these simple steps:
PRO TIP: Be patient! After you set up Search Console, you’ll usually have to wait several days (or even weeks) before Google has a chance to index your site and start showing search data.
What about tracking other search engines?
We’ve been focusing on Google since it represents probably 80-90% or more of all search engine traffic, but don’t forget about the other search engines, like Bing, Yahoo!, Yandex, Baidu, DuckDuckGo, etc.
Most search engines have corresponding webmaster tools that offer insights similar to Google’s Search Console. For example, here is the webmaster site you can use for Bing.
PRO TIP: If you’re using the Rank Math SEO plugin on a WordPress account, the plugin can automatically notify Bing and Yandex (via the new IndexNow API) about any new pages and blog posts you create. 😎
What are Business Intelligence tools?
Business Intelligence (BI) is a general term that refers to the collection, storage, and analysis of all types of business data, such as your customer orders, website traffic, visitor demographics, customer service experiences, accounting, and development issues.
BI software is specially designed to help you aggregate and process large amounts of data from lots of separate platforms. These business insights tools allow you to easily unify, visualize, and explore vast amounts of data through charts, graphs, reports, and dashboards.
Here are some BI systems that you might like to check out:
Business Intelligence Software
Search Engine Optimization
One very powerful marketing approach is to attract visitors to your site by using Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
SEO is an invaluable set of techniques that help your web pages rank higher in search results, which can lead to significantly more visitors and sales for your business.
If you want to learn more about SEO, don’t miss our in-depth article all about SEO tools, tips, and tricks.
SEO toolkits are all-in-one software packages that provide a variety of SEO tools for market research, competitor analysis, keyword tracking, search engine results pages (SERP) tracking, site audits, paid advertising analysis, and much more!
Here are some popular SEO toolkits you should consider.
SEO Toolkits
In addition to SEO toolkits, if you’re using WordPress, it can be very beneficial to also use an SEO plugin that integrates various SEO tools and recommendations directly into your WordPress editor experience.
SEO WordPress Plugins
Lead Generation
Lead generation is one of the most important components of running a successful online business. It’s a process of collecting contacts and converting them into leads that have the potential to become customers.
It’s a crucial part of any online business, and it involves a variety of marketing strategies and tactics. By using lead generation, you can expand your reach and get more potential customers to your website.
With the right strategies and tactics, lead generation can help you boost your online business and drive more sales.
Lead generation is a two-step process.
PRO TIP: An extremely common technique for lead generation is to create highly-optimized landing pages that are specifically designed to funnel visitors down a sales path, without any other distractions on the page, ultimately leading them to take a specific action, such as signing up for a newsletter, buying a product, or creating an account.
Landing pages can be part of an existing website or live on a standalone domain all by itself. Landing pages usually do not include any distracting elements, such as site menus, ads, or links to other articles.
The whole purpose of a landing page is to convert a visitor into a lead or paying customer.
What are the benefits of lead generation?
Lead generation has numerous benefits that can help any online business succeed. Here are some of the key benefits of lead generation:
Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the most effective lead-generation strategies. It involves sending emails to potential leads and nurturing them with relevant content and offers.
Email marketing can help you build relationships with your leads and convert them into customers.
When it comes to email marketing, there are a few key strategies you should consider:
What are some potential problems of doing email marketing?
Some potential problems of doing email marketing include:
PRO TIP: In addition to requiring lots of manual work, being prone to mistakes, and being very tedious, doing mass email marketing by hand from your personal Gmail account is not a good idea!
For all of the reasons above, it’s highly advised to use an email marketing platform to automate the sending of your emails.
Which lead generation and email marketing platform should you use?
Here is a short list of the many lead generation and email marketing tools that allow you to easily capture leads and set up automated follow-up emails.
Some focus primarily on emails and newsletters, while others include a suite of lead generation and marketing tools, such as landing pages, funnel creators, forms, and website builders. And many of these tools offer other marketing and business-related services that might benefit your company. So, take a look around and use their free trials before committing!
Lead Generation & Email Marketing Platforms
Social Media
Regularly posting to social media is another highly-effective marketing strategy. By using social media, you can build relationships with your followers and get more leads.
By social media, I’m referring to almost any platform that has a social component that allows comments or sharing with friends, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, WeChat, etc.
When it comes to social media marketing, there are a few key strategies you should consider.
Luckily, there are lots of social media tools to help you with your social media campaigns. The tools below can help you create, schedule, and post content across multiple platforms. Some social media tools can even help you find and curate new content to post via your accounts.
Social Media Tools
Paid Advertising
Paid advertising can greatly increase traffic to your site and brand awareness. By using paid ads, you can reach a wider audience and increase your chances of getting more leads.
Here are a few strategies to consider for paid advertisements:
Realistically, to really get the most out of paid advertising, be prepared to spend a lot of time and effort… and money. You’ll likely need to continuously tweak ads, analyze performance, and test out lots of ad copy variations.
Most social networks like Facebook and Twitter allow you to run ads or promote your posts.
In addition to social networks, search engines provide a huge ad space opportunity. These are ads that appear when people use search engines to try to find something on the Internet. For example, check out Google Ads and Microsoft Ads.
These companies also offer the ability to show ads across a huge network of 3rd-party websites through platforms such as Google AdSense.
If you’re planning on doing paid advertising, definitely make sure to check out the SEO toolkits listed early in this article since most of them have tools that can help you estimate advertising costs for desired keywords, as well as allow you to see the types of ads your competitors are already running.
Press Releases
A press release is a written statement that is distributed to media outlets, such as newspapers, magazines, websites, and radio and television stations. It is a type of digital marketing technique that is used to inform the public about a company’s latest news, products, events, or other information.
Press releases typically contain a headline, a summary of the information being shared, and contact information for the company.
Press releases have been a tried and true method for generating brand awareness and attracting traffic and leads.
You can use them to promote the launch of your new online business, whenever you launch a new service, when you host a major event, or when you hit a major business milestone.
Journalists and bloggers often use press releases as a source for writing new articles. These new articles not only drive new visitors to your site, but they can also provide valuable backlinks to your website, which also can help drive more traffic to your site through better placement in search engine results.
Although it is possible to manually submit a press release one by one to multiple outlets, it is much more efficient and desirable to use a company to distribute your press releases to their media contact lists and via newswire services.
Press Release Services
Affiliate Program
An affiliate program is a type of performance-based marketing that allows you to partner with other businesses, bloggers, and influencers to promote your product or service and get more leads. In exchange for promoting your site, you can offer your affiliates a one-time bounty or share of any sales you receive.
By using an affiliate program, you can expand your reach and get more leads.
It’s a win-win-win scenario:
Affiliate programs usually work by giving an affiliate a unique code that they can attach to the end of a URL that links to your website. Then, when a visitor uses that link from an affiliate’s site, you can track that the visitor came from the affiliate, thus allowing you to associate any future sales or signups with that affiliate.
Here are a few ways you can incentivize affiliates to market your products or services on their site:
The technology, tracking, and payments required for successful affiliate programs can get a bit tricky, time-consuming, and complicated. Although you could create your own in-house affiliate program to do all of the tracking and payments to affiliates, it is advisable to use an established affiliate program service to take care of all of those details for you.
PRO TIP: When you review affiliate programs to use for your business, some terms can be a bit confusing. To keep things straight, just know that the terms “advertiser” and “merchant” refer to your business, whereas the term “publisher” refers to an affiliate that will publish their own content to advertise your products. Thus, you want to look into creating an advertiser or merchant account for your business via one of these affiliate programs.
Affiliate Program Services
Companion Apps
For most online businesses, your website will be your primary focus. However, that doesn’t mean you should ignore possible companion apps that you can offer in addition to your website.
Here is a list of some other tools and applications you should consider offering to your customers if it makes sense for your specific business and niche.
Move on to the final step!
Good job! With all of this marketing stuff behind you, you’re now ready to move on to the last step in the guide to starting your new online business! 😁
Head on over to the last article that’s all about money matters: making even more income, paying employees and contractors, and taking care of your business taxes.