Malleck Design

How to have an effective online presence

Thursday, March 17th, 2011

Having an online presence is crucial in todays market. But what constitutes an effective online presence? Is it just web design? Is it good enough just to have a website because your competitors do? What else is involved if anything?

Here are some keys to having an effective online presence in 2011:

Get established

If you don’t currently have a website, this would be your first step. Having a well planned, well written and well designed website is the cornerstone to an effective web presence. Setting up your own piece of real estate online accomplishes a few specific things right off the bat:

• Establishes credibility
• Allows prospects to engage with your brand directly
• Creates an environment that can help to differentiate you from everyone else
• Creates an environment that will help you achieve your business goals

Many businesses stop at this stage. The mindset is that you can “set it and forget it”. But we need to kill that mindset. If that’s the way you think then you may as well flush the amount of money you spent on your website down the toilet. You need promotion.

Promote

Once you get established online, it’s time to drive some traffic to it. Consider where your target audience hangs out online. Social media outlets are powerful tools in driving traffic to you website. If you are a B2C company, many of your prospects may very well be on places like Facebook and YouTube. If you are a B2B company you might find success on sites like Linked In or Biznik. Once you get on these social networks it’s time to start engaging and publishing some content. Here’s a simple strategy:

• Write a blog post or update your site
• Share that new content on all your social media outlets
• Have discussions with the people who comment or re-tweet your content

Pretty simple. There are much deeper strategies that really work, but this is a good one to get you started.

Analyze

Now that we are driving some traffic to our site we need to analyze how our site is performing. We can do this though Google Analytics and other forms of web analytics.

Adjust

From the data we glean we can make decisions on how to tweek the design or the copy on our website in order to reach our business goals.

Repeat steps 2-4 and keep adjusting your strategy. Having a website up and running is the first step, but owning a successful website is a hands-on process that should be a regular part of your workflow.

Tags: internet marketing, Web Design, Web promotion
Posted in Best Practices, Promotion, Web Design · 2 Comments »