Categories: BUSINESS

Planning Your Online Identity: Advice for Small Businesses

There are many moving parts whenever you decide to launch a new company, from the initial idea through the final stages of sales and marketing, resource management, production, shipping, and more.

Establishing a credible online identity for your company is essential at any business planning and development stage. A company’s internet presence is crucial in today’s global market, regardless of its size or area of operation.

In this piece, I’d like to lay out a concrete plan for creating, expanding, and building your company’s online presence that will, from day one, meet all of the requirements listed below:

Establishing a solid web presence at a low cost
It will be simple to maintain your online identity.
Your company’s rapid expansion can be attributed to your web presence.
The results of your internet presence will be quantifiable.
As your company expands, so will your online presence to accommodate it.
A more innovative, better, cheaper, easier, and faster alternative to setting up a regular website for your organization can quickly meet all the criteria above. Blogs are the alternate platform of choice.
A blog is similar to a website, but it has numerous advantages that websites don’t that can help businesses, tiny ones, succeed.

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Now, let’s examine how a business blog fulfills all the criteria above.

An Economical Online Profile

Many would argue that “free” is the lowest possible price. However, there are numerous traps that you will want to avoid when it comes to having a “free” web presence for your business, such as “free” web hosting or constructing your web presence on a domain name that you do not own. In this case, “free” may cost you more than you expect, especially if you need prompt and thorough assistance from your host or make extensive alterations to the site’s configuration.

So, let’s disregard “free” options in favor of developing an “inexpensive yet professional” online presence. Plan to have your domain name and employ a professional web hosting service, no matter what kind of online presence you determine is best for your business. The domain name and web hosting resellers are widely available online, and the two together can cost as little as $150 per year.

However, hiring a web developer or designer to create a website is a new ballgame. Indeed, you can always find someone who knows HTML to make you a website for next to nothing, but it’s also true that, like most websites, it probably won’t accomplish much to advance your business.

Blogs are unique. Example: if you want your website to look like it cost thousands to design, but you only spent hundreds on WordPress, you can download the full version of the publishing software, host it on your server, and then choose a professional design from hundreds of available free WordPress blog templates.

An Admin-Friendly Online Presence

If you don’t know how to change web page coding like HTML and upload files to your server, you’ll need a web developer, web designer, or webmaster to help you. This adds another layer of complexity to managing your online presence and can also increase the time and effort required to do so. All it takes to get your thoughts into the world is a keyboard and a few mouse clicks. You won’t have to worry about tinkering with HTML code, hosting servers, or other technical details. Simply put your thoughts on paper and hit the send button. Nothing could be simpler than that!

An Effective Online Profile for Rapid Enterprise Expansion

Most websites are static, so once you publish your material, you need to think of strategies to entice visitors to visit your site. However, a blog’s interactive elements might draw users to your site independently.

An Effective Online Presence That Can Be Measured

Whether you opt to create a company website or start a business blog, you should implement an information system that provides you with data about your site (such as the keywords people are using to find your place in search engines) to assess your site’s performance and make more informed business decisions. Google Analytics, Google’s site analytics program, is excellent for this. It’s free and provides a wealth of information about your site.

A scalable online presence that can expand as your company does

If you require support from web developers to integrate new software, set up databases, etc., adding new capabilities to an existing website can add a whole new layer of complexity, not to mention cost and effort.

A blog, particularly one run by a content publishing platform like WordPress, makes adding new features to your site easily with no effort and time investment. By adding simple modules developed by plug-in developers for the blogging community, your online presence can be expanded in various ways, including adding e-commerce, creating a membership site, enhancing multimedia capabilities, and so on.

Blogs, therefore, are difficult to surpass in terms of adaptability. You can start with a rudimentary blog to educate and inform visitors about your business and expand it to its full potential as your needs grow.

I hope you’ve learned something new about creating an online presence for your new business from this post, and I wish you the best of luck with your business blogging endeavors.

Through company blogs and other cutting-edge web technologies, Martin Aranovitch aids small business owners in expanding their operations online. Check out Martin’s Business Blog Tutorials [http://www.selfpublishweb.com] for in-depth video guides on launching a blog for your company and generating leads and sales within 48 hours. You can also read Martin’s business blog, which is stuffed with helpful advice and tools for entrepreneurs.