So you’ve reached your earnings potential with your online business. You have sustained the highest profit for the past few months, and there’s no stopping you. You have been observing the best practices to optimize your sales and run your business smoothly. What’s the next step to take?
Breaking through the glass ceiling, of course!
There are no bounds to how much success you can achieve with your online business. Whether it’s an affiliate blog or an eCommerce site, there are always ways to do better and generate higher sales than you can imagine.
Below are bold ways through which you can elevate your online business to greater heights.
Conversion Rate Optimization
One of the biggest concerns you should have is your site’s conversion rate. Most of the sales that webmasters get come from transactions on their sales pages. As much as possible, you want all visitors to your money pages to convert. In reality, however, that’s not always the case.
There are lots of factors involved that explain why some visitors don’t convert on your pages. This is where conversion rate optimization or CRO comes in.
Aside from tweaking on-page factors to improve conversion, CRO analyzes user behavior to help you identify pain points on your site pages. These are issues that cause users to abandon their carts or abruptly leave the page.
There are tools you can use to analyze CRO. One of the more popular ones is CrazyEgg, a heat mapping tool that tracks user behavior on your site. The individual behavior can help you determine why some people leave and what you need to do to prevent them from bouncing.
Other tools that you can use are Hotjar and TruConversion.
Using any of these tools will provide you all the data you need to set up a more optimized site for conversion.
For more information about conversion optimization, read this excellent guide on CRO at Qualaroo.
VPS Hosting
When your online business started out, you chose a shared hosting to keep your costs low. While this is a rational choice, you should be aware that you need to provide your website with a premium hosting service to avoid alienating your audience.
The hosting is responsible for sending information to the browsers of visitors so they can view your site on their end. If your site picks up traffic, then the hosting works double time to keep up with the back and forth of data. When the traffic is too much for the hosting to handle, your site will break and go offline.
If this problem keeps recurring, then you need to consider moving to VPS hosting and maintain the momentum of your business.
Virtual private server (VPS) hosting proves to be a viable option for online businesses receiving massive traffic. This hosting is a step above shared hosting but a level below dedicated hosting. It is a server found within a bigger server, which is similar to shared hosting.
However, VPS provides server root access and dedicated resources in an isolated environment.
As a result, your site will be able to manage heavier traffic, on top of having better protection and customization.
Influencer Marketing
If you could get help from a person with thousands of social media followers and who attracts millions in monthly site traffic, would you say no?
Through influencer marketing, you can tap into the followers of influencers related to your niche or industry so you can drive more traffic to your website and raise awareness for your business.
Unlike other strategies, influencer marketing is built upon trust. Since there is an established rapport that exists between the influencers and followers, promoting your business through influencers should have a more positive effect on your downline.
Followers will be more receptive to what influencers say because they trust them. This is in complete contrast to ads where you promote your business to strangers or people with whom you do not have an existing relationship.
To join in the fun, you need to sign up as an advertiser so you can connect with publishers from different fields. There are lots of influencer marketing platforms with which you can sign up. Below are the most popular ones:
- Neoreach: Build your network of influencers and run your campaigns so that you have full control over how they will turn out. You can also hire in-house experts to develop the campaigns for you.
- TapInfluence: Get help from influencers to create positive content related to your brand. You can then amplify best-performing content for maximum impact using the platform’s distribution channel.
- Little Bird: Find influencers on Twitter and use the data unearthed by the platform to leverage them to your advantage.
User-generated content
If you already have a vibrant online business community, then it would be advantageous if you could mobilize your members to create content for you.
User-generated content (UGC) comes in the form of testimonials, reviews, submissions, social media posts, and so on. Your customers or entrants will create content that you can use to the benefit of your online business.
One of the many benefits of UGC is that you get to work with your audience members and strengthen your relationship with them. Doing so is crucial, especially if your business is getting bigger and out of hand. Asking your customers for help in developing content allows you to keep in touch with them on a more personal level.
More importantly, your conversion rate will improve. Since 70% of customers rely on peer recommendations for making purchasing decisions, user testimonials result in a 29% higher conversion rate compared to campaigns and websites that don’t boast UGC.
As far as tools are concerned, Yotpo is one of the more popular ones out there. It allows you to leverage UGC as part of your content marketing strategy. By gathering authentic customer reviews using Yotpo, you can increase engagement and sales of your online business.
An up-and-comer in the field of UGC marketing is StoryBox. This platform lets you gather different types of content from users that you can feature on various pages on your site. From StoryBox, you can monitor the progress of your campaign using different metrics to measure its effectiveness.
5. Automate your marketing
You’ve built your online business virtually brick by brick. While the fruits have been plentiful, the process is arduous. To maintain the level of success you are at, you need to find a way to take the load of menial tasks from your shoulders so you can focus on hitting your goals, if not surpassing them.
Achieving this will be difficult if you have lots of tasks on your plate. That’s why you need to choose a marketing automation tool that will take care of the dirty work.
This type of tool lets you create autoresponders and automatically send sequence emails to your subscribers or customers. The tool can also aid in creating blog posts, providing SEO suggestions, and improving your social media messages, among others tasks. This way, you can breathe easier with your marketing.
Once all your actions have been automated, all you need to worry about is gauging the results and tweaking them as you see fit to improve the results of future campaigns.
When it comes to marketing automation platforms, you can’t go wrong with Hubspot. It does everything described above and more. Hubspot serves as your full online business solutions suite, from managing your marketing-sales alignment to testing email templates and seeing which converts the best.
If you want a tool that does less but is just as effective, you can begin with MailChimp’s email marketing and automation services. This solution is perfect if you want an overview of your email marketing campaign. MailChimp has a wealth of premium features such as A/B testing, autoresponders, and more.
Conclusion
Achieving success with your online business is not the most difficult aspect of being an entrepreneur. Sustaining your success for years is. As your goals grow in gravity and scope, you need all the help you can get. Luckily for you, there are tools that will assist you along the way.
By referring to this post to help supercharge your online business, you can improve your strategy by including the relevant tactics featured here. Also, these tools will make your job much easier so you can automate the tedious tasks and focus on doing the fun stuff.
Like the post? Have other tactics and ideas to take an online business to greater heights? Share them by commenting below!