This article was last updated on April 18, 2022
The World Wide Web is an absolute necessity for financial advancement nowadays. Indeed, if you are to realize any sort of significant profit, investing in your online appearance, marketing, portfolio etc. should be on your list of priorities. However, when the term “online influence” is mentioned, we must admit how vague it sounds. In fact, to create an online image that will impact the world even in the slightest way, one would need a whole team of people who are working around the clock.
The key to online success lies in finding what you are good at and making sure that people know about you. In other words, finding your niche – making a good marketing approach to inspire trust and having enough valid materials to back up those claims. Another possible scenario is that you are already good at something, but lack the necessary advertising approach for your business to bloom. In order to be a successful entrepreneur you must understand the value of marketing. The following article will clarify what are the current most lucrative approaches to online marketing.
How to Create Online Presence If You Are an Entrepreneur
Creating a Website
Nowadays, a website is absolutely essential. However, just because you need one does not mean that simply having one will improve your chances. In fact, a poor website design will do more harm than good. If you intend to sell products, then having an online shop will play a crucial role in your success. Recent studies show how 72% of the consumer’s body is actually using the internet in order to research and purchase a particular product. These are usually millennials, age 25-34, meaning, more than half of your target audience will most likely find you online and, as we all know, first impressions matter.
Of course, creating a website is merely a first step. All you need to do is find a good web designer, find a good available domain name, and a satisfying web hosting service. Once you have all the aforementioned ingredients, you can proceed to the next step – creating website content and advertising. After all, digital marketing is a growing market. It is predicted that online shopping retail will spike up to $370 billion in 2017. This all means that it is fertile ground for investments, but it also means that the competition is tough, thus you need to make sure every step is executed and implemented correctly.
Content Creation
Based on the content on your website, people will assess you, but most importantly, Google will rank you. Needless to say just how much people trust Google’s judgment, since it is the most powerful web browser today. You can no longer get away with keyword stuffing; you must create relevant content with valuable insights. This is why web designers are extremely busy. It has become a full-time job and one worthy of your budget. Truth be told, if you are a web designer, there is a bright and profitable future ahead of you. Simply put yourself into the shoes of a customer – would you trust a provider with poor web design and poorly written product descriptions? It only looks like someone who is desperate to sell products that nobody wants. With a design of greater aesthetic value, you can properly repackage the merchandise and increase their chances of sale.
Now let us address the specifics of content design. Your website should contain written content and video content, since they are both sharable and linkable, and you should do this for the purpose of advertising, but this issue will be tackled later. As far as written content is concerned, it was already mentioned how keyword stuffing is a rude and outdated technique. Studies have revealed how the best approximate length for a text that targets a specific keyword, should be around 2000 words. Moreover, make sure the text is insightful and relevant to the topic, because context is evaluated as well. In other words, do not write something solely for the sake of writing it.
Video content has a great degree of importance in quality online advertising. Unlike text, a video can be made to be much more engaging, plus the retention capacity of the viewer is greater than the one of the reader. The text can be written in the an engaging manner, but it can sometimes diminish the amount of relevant data that you can convey. Videos are much better teachers than text, and due to visual aids, they’ll grasp attention with ease.
According to Cisco System, this trend will remain popular, and it is firmly believed that by the year 2018, almost 90% of global Internet traffic will be attributed to videos. To support this claim, simply look at YouTube. It has become the 2nd largest search engine, which means that it is bigger than Yahoo, Bingo, ALO and Ask, combined. Even Facebook has invested into becoming a video marketing platform, only proving the claim how videos are potent tools for both starting and older businessmen. Here are some metrics to solidify the claim:
- There are over 4 billion views on a daily basis on Facebook
- In April, 2015 BuzzFeed’s video view count went over 500 million views.
- 35% of customers are reached via videos on Facebook, only 4% are reached via text and 14% via photos
Clearly, this is the most potent advertising tool so far, which is why online stores and social networks are filled with video content.
Advertising Tactics
This section is going to cover how to efficiently advertise yourself, or your line of work online, as well as how you can earn money while advertising other entrepreneurs via the same means. Let us cover the most efficient form of online marketing first, also known as SEO (Search Engine Optimization). SEO is a great way to tackle the issue of a website’s domain authority and there are many means by which you contribute to this cause. Here are some of the ideas for SEO marketing provided by Anand Mishra, CEO of Star Infranet – IT industry experts who specialize in providing a creative input, for people trying to make money online.
Blogging and linking – Blogging is one of the most profitable hobbies nowadays, provided that you are a good writer with a great amount of insight in a particular niche. Bloggers are frequently hired to create the type of content mentioned in the first part of the article. First of all, the content created on your site needs to be valid linkable material; meaning, your content won’t be perceived as spam when used for the purposes of “guest blogging” (writing on other blogs that have topics closely related to your niche).
This is a very subtle and very powerful form of marketing, as long as you do everything right. Bloggers and ghostwriters are hired via various job platforms, to create quality content for websites, blogs, and for guest blogging. This resulted in 40% more bloggers than in August 2010, also 50% of all internet users read blog posts more than once a day. Almost 40% of US companies used blogging for advertising purposes in August 2010 – this number is probably much higher now.
It is also worth mentioning how using wrong or so-called “forced” SEO can actually backfire and harm your website. We have already established that spamming is one of those castigated tactics, thus you should no longer use single keywords but rather focus on long tail keywords. These phrases are less popular, which means they can rank with more ease. Use “leather belts for men” rather than just “belts” or “belt”. Finally, when guest blogging, don’t use the same anchor text, and don’t link your content on irrelevant blogs – this kind of linking will only harm your domain authority.
Sharing your content – Photos, videos and written content are to be shared on social media sites, in order to create some social buzz. Around 84% of marketers use social media for advertising purposes; this is also known as social media marketing. This also means that, if you have a lot of followers on your social media profiles, you are likely to be contacted to share or promote certain content. In other words, if you are social network enthusiast, your time spent online might not go to waste. This is why vloggers have become extremely popular on YouTube.
The problem with social media marketing is that you can’t directly measure the success which is achieved by using it. However, 42% of marketers claim that Facebook is actually quite an essential element of advertising. Facebook can be quite an ally when it comes to finding your target audience – people leave their personal info, their place of residence, occupations and hobbies when making a profile. When you use Facebook to boost your posts and create a buzz, you can target certain groups of people, thus making sure the right audience will actually see your post.
Meta tags and good descriptions – When posting content, like videos or pictures, on your site or on YouTube, make sure you enrich it with all the relevant meta tags in the description. To accurately decide on these tags, search for the product you want to sell, see what comes up first, find out what were the meta tags on that item, and use them to optimize your product.
When it comes to descriptions, they need to be unique – having the same text on more than one page on your website will reflect negatively on your website. Furthermore, do not copy descriptions from other websites – unique means that they can’t be found via copyscape.
Content network delivery – If you want your website to become more widespread, you can use content delivery network services for it to become uploaded on more than one server. This localizes the site on more than one place, makes the streaming service much more responsive, and it positively influences the responsiveness of the entire website. The more servers you occupy, the greater the chances of your site appearing first when someone conducts a Google search.
SEO for Bing, Ask, Yahoo, AOL and mobile devices – Even though Google is the leading search engine, Bing, Yahoo, Ask and AOL are also used, and it wouldn’t be a flawed initiative to optimize for those engines as well.
To increase the popularity of your site, make sure it is optimized for mobile platforms. This will have a positive impact on authority, plus 37% of consumers are more likely to participate in a transaction on a website that is mobile-optimized. Over 61% of companies have either optimized or created a new website optimized for mobile platforms.
Skills You Can Monetize
This leads us to a conclusion that, due to the popular and most effective advertising approaches, the skills which are easily monetized nowadays are: web designer, graphic designer, creative writing, video and photo editing, and good performance for vlogging. Additionally, since creating and maintaining a website is crucial, by being familiar with HTML coding, and being acquitted with platforms like WordPress, Magento, Drupal etc. will secure a stable source of income, since websites are frequently updated and fixed. Just take a look at some requests on Elance.
Here you can see some offers in the Design and Multimedia section:
And, here are some offers for Writing and Translating:
Websites need to be translated as well, in order to increase the level of accessibility. In other words, translating texts and transcribing videos is another lucrative profession. It is also worth mentioning that, if you lack the aforementioned skills, you do not need to spend years of education to be a reliable freelancer. There are numerous tutorials online – it will take some time to master the displayed skills, but to reach a solid level of competence, you will not need more than a year. It just takes your undivided attention and interest to learn something quite valuable for success in today’s world. Almost anything you wish to know to do now has a tutorial online, so use this amazing perk of the the World Wide Web.
