When you have an online business, you need to think about your long term plans. Instead of just reacting to the traffic on your site today, think about how you can keep them coming back, helping your business grow as they do.
Getting your website up and running is an exciting thing at first. You get a lot of people coming to visit your site, they're buying things and you seem to be doing pretty well. But after a time, the initial excitement wears off and you begin to ask yourself, "Is this all there is?" Before you get to that point, you need to learn the three basic steps to take in order to grow an online business and stay relevant in the ever changing virtual marketplace. Thankfully, most of this information is common sense, but that doesn't mean you can't learn a thing or two (or three).
Get People to Come to Visit
Your main concern in the beginning year or so of your website is getting people to come to your website. You can do this by employing a number of basic tactics:
1. Learn about search engines - When you begin to learn what search engines are looking for in a site in order to rank it higher, you will begin to get more hits on your site.
2. Tell everyone you know about the site - Put your website address on everything that you can in order to get people coming to your site.
3. Link with other related sites - If your friend has a website, link with them or link with others in the same market as you to increase your website traffic.
4. Make your site exciting - By offering new and fun things on your website, you will encourage new traffic on your site every day.
5. Advertise your site on other sites - By heading to video share sites and posting a video of what you do on your site, you might just drive new traffic to your web page.
Keep Them There
Once you have visitors coming to your website, it's your job to keep them there and to keep them coming back. There are several ways to do this:
1. Change your content, but not your layout - When you keep things in places where people can easily find them, you will allow the loyal web surfers the ability to easily browse from page to page to find what they way.
2. Introduce new features on your site that are easy to use - Add a video blog or perhaps a few animations that are easy to load up and that change regularly.
3. Include 'teasers' on your site - Make mention of things that are coming up on your site (and on the website only) in the coming days. This will keep people coming back to see what's new and exciting.
4. Offer discounts - By helping loyal customers and visitors buy merchandise with discounts, you are going to keep them coming back and looking for more to buy.
5. Make sure your web hosting is top notch - When your site is always available, no matter what the web traffic is, you will keep people coming back. If you ever have any server problems, fix them immediately and then apologize to those that may have been affected.
Find Ways to Branch Out
You can't stay exactly the same when you're trying to compete in the ever-changing world of the internet. You need to find new ways to add to your current business so that you're always interesting to your customers. Try looking for suggestions from your customers in your comments sections of your site to see what else they might want to buy that would complement or add to their buying experience with you. For example, if you sell sailboats, maybe you can begin to offer instructional videos for sailing so that they can enhance their skills.
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