Almost everyone can start an online business.
Creating a successful one, however, is a different story.
You need a handful of elements in place to run an online company that can stand the test of time.
That’s what this guide covers.
We’ll discuss the top tips for establishing a successful online business.
Let’s hop right in.
1. A Cohesive and Competent Team
Your business’s success relies heavily on your team’s competence, commitment, and cohesiveness.
That’s why you need to invest in training and online tools to bolster your team collaboration.
There are several project management tools online that are feature packed and affordable. (Some even have free plans.)
Project management tools help you easily track your projects and tasks’ progress.
Task handoffs also become a breeze since project management tools have commenting, tagging, and status change features (among other things) that help your employees document the progress of each task.
Training-wise, there are online education/training platforms, such as Udemy, where you can access training videos and articles, among other materials, at a cheap price point.
When you invest in training your team and bringing in tools that will help make their lives better, it sends the right message to your team and drastically skyrockets your productivity.
2. Invest in SEO
You need search engine optimization (SEO).
Whether you’re looking to generate leads and sales, grow your brand visibility, increase your site traffic, etc., you benefit greatly from SEO.
Here’s the deal, you could spend wads of cash running paid ads to generate sales instantly. But the moment you turn off your ads, over 90% of your site traffic (and sales) quickly disappears.
There’s no longevity in paid ads.
You only get traffic when your ads are switched on, sucking the soul out of your marketing budget.
SEO is different.
When your page ranks high on the search engine results pages (SERPs), it’ll continue bringing you free, organic, relevant traffic.
Now imagine having hundreds of pages bringing you free traffic.
Can you see how that can lower your costs and grow your profits?
The good news is…
The SEO strategy templates used by seasoned marketers are available online.
You don’t need to do SEO like a confused 3rd grader doing calculations for NASA. By using SEO strategy templates, you have a base framework you can work on—one that’s used by industry experts.
Of course, if you don’t have the time and energy to conduct SEO, consider hiring an SEO company with proven results.
By working with 3rd-party SEO providers, you can focus on your business while marketers with years of SEO experience handle your SEO work.
Considering how time-consuming and tedious SEO can be, working with SEO providers can do wonders for your productivity and your business overall.
3. Provide Exceptional Customer Support.
Customer support can do more than just, well… customer support.
You can get more mileage out of your customer support if you know how to apply leverage.
Do this with your customer support team:
- Train them to upsell. Since your customer support team answers customer questions and issues, they’re in a great place to upsell or cross-sell your products.
- Train them to gather data. Your customer support team can collect customer data, which you can use to make business decisions.
- Your customer support team is an excellent source of content ideas. Since they communicate directly with your customers, they have a solid grasp of the issues your customers are facing. Ask your customer support team about the top issues your customers face, then create content around them.
- Leverage your support team to get 5-star ratings from review platforms. Every time your customer support team addresses a customer issue, they ought to suggest that customers leave a positive review about your business.
Providing exceptional customer support can do wonders for your online business.
It helps grow sales, encourages brand loyalty, and even reduces customer churn.
4. Push Out High-Performing Content.
Quality content can work miracles for your business.
With it, you can:
- Provide tons of value to your readers
- Establish your brand as an authority in your niche
- Increase your sales
- Skyrocket your social shares and follower count
- Etc.
It’s also worth mentioning that you need quality content to rank high on the search engines—at least if you want to rank long-term.
Most, if not all, search engines view content quality as a major ranking factor.
That means if your content isn’t written well and isn’t optimized for the search engines (and human readers), your chances of ranking are drastically hindered.
Remember, if you’re dead serious about helping your readers, you need to put a premium on writing quality content AND making sure your content ranks so your audience can see ‘em.
You need SEO articles to pull that off.
Here’s a short checklist on how to write SEO articles.
- Conduct keyword research. Look for relevant keywords that aren’t too competitive yet with decent search volume.
- Optimize your articles for your target keywords.
- Add your target keywords in crucial sections of your write-up. (e.g., Your titles, meta description, subheadings, file names of your images, etc.)
- Add an FAQ section in your articles. Get your questions from Google’s People Also Ask section.
- Study the articles ranking in the top 10 of the SERPs. Cover all the points they included in their articles, if possible. The key is to one-up your competitors.
- Improve the readability of your article by limiting your paragraphs to one to two lines only. This rule is made to be broken; however, try adhering to it as best as you can.
The list above can be so much longer. Creating SEO articles can be quite challenging, after all.
Of course, if you don’t have the bandwidth to produce content, there are content writing companies where you can purchase articles that generate organic traffic.
Remember that content production and promotion are critical to a successful business. The value quality content brings is a game-changer for online business owners.
5. Bolster your Security
Cybersecurity threats and data corruption are common issues online companies face. Especially for those running an online platform.
For example, if you’re running a SaaS company, you need to ensure your GitHub backups are automated. That way, you can easily retrieve your crucial business data and minimize the damage should you encounter any issues.
Without an automated backup system, you risk losing massive amounts of data, which poses many problems to your business.
Imagine running a SaaS company, and your platform stops running for over 24 hours because of technical issues.
At that point, you’d surely get lots of nasty emails from your users. (Even an hour’s worth of outage can cause untold damage to the users and the SaaS company.)
Imagine your platform not running for two, three, or four days, even weeks.
By then, you’d have lost thousands of dollars worth of revenue and get bashed left and right by mobs of disgruntled users.
TL;DR: Don’t sell short the importance of cybersecurity and file backups. They’re an absolute must.
What’s Next?
No one can tell the future.
Whether a business succeeds or not several years down is yet to be seen.
However, by putting in place the right tools, strategies, mindsets, and frameworks, you drastically increase your odds of success.
Use the tips above to grow your online business now.
