For any online business, you need to always have more traffic to make sure your business is thriving online. Some businesses struggle to plan how they are actually going to achieve online success and through what avenues they will achieve this. Here are 7 ways that will help you guarantee your online success.

1. Have a Sales and Marketing Plan

Having a plan is the first place you need to start when looking at what you want to achieve for your business online. Firstly, you need to look at how many sales you wish to achieve for your business in it’s first year online e.g. £150,000. You then divide that by your potential average order value (e.g. £50) which would mean around 3,000 orders over the year.

You then need to look at how many visitors you would need to achieves these sales, using conversion rates expected for eCommerce (ranges from 0.5% to 10%). Lets say 2%, which means you will need around 400 visitors per day.

Once you have your business model, you can look at your figures to devise a sensible and achievable plan to hit your financial target. Don’t forget to include a list of traffic sources, as you never really know where a customer may find your business online.

2. SEO

Your Search Engine Optimisation is a huge part of achieving sales, especially when it comes to your potential customers finding you through google based on your keywords. There are two types of SEO; Onsite and Off-site.

• Onsite – Everything on your website including product descriptions, keywords used on your web pages. You will need to write up all of the research that goes into setting up all of this onsite SEO.

• Off-Site – This will include driving traffic from competitors to social media channels, researching relevant sites to build links, engaging with audiences, bookmarking and article submission. You can hire someone for just €4 per hour to do this for you.

3. Social Media

Having all of your social media accounts sharing the same brand consistency that your website has is vital. As I have said before, you never know where your customer is going to come from so make sure your social mediais in check. Set up all of your social networks but focus on one or two until you have mastered them, listen to what your customers are saying, deliver competitions to keep them engaged and don’t forget to use hashtags.

4. PR

PR always has and always will be important to your online business. You first need to approach a PR agency that have the necessary contacts for you to share your business with and have a press release written professionally. Your brand and the campaign message need to be in tune with each other.

You then need to design a strategy to send a press release to a specific journalist to write about in online and offline magazines/newspapers ect.

5. Digital Marketing

Digital Marketing is a huge part of online businesses and without constant work, you may lose touch with your customers. Blogging, email marketing, auto-responders, live chats, surveys are all crucial parts of digital marketing and generating more leads.

If you don’t know whether your digital marketing is successful, make sure you analyse your traffic to see where it’s coming from by using a Social Media Dashboard and also looking at your email marketing analytics (especially if you use Mailchimp)

6. PPC

Pay Per Click is now an important part of online success and if you have some spare cash, I would suggest investing it in PPC but first, make sure you understand how to do it. Make sure you look at Google’s PPC software in detail so you know exactly how to use it. If you are still struggling to master PPC, look at those around you who may know a PPC expert that could be introduced to you on recommendation (like me).

7. Affiliate Marketing

You will now need to look at affiliate marketing as a way to drive more sales. You will need to look at various affiliate marketing companies and chose one that is best suited to your business and the sector it works in. Once you have done this, design and implement a strategy for affiliate marketing and utilise bloggers and online portals with targeted traffic that you can utilise.

Are you ready to guarantee online success for your business?