Get them to your site! It’s one thing to have a website just sitting on the internet, but you also need to drive traffic to it. Online presence management is the art and science of doing exactly that.
What good is a website if no one sees it?
Keep reading to get your guide to modern online presence management, and take control of your brand’s digital persona.
SEO
The origins of online presence management lie within the techniques of Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. SEO means setting up your website so that the search engines can find your content, and increase your position in the SERPs [search engine results pages].
The field of SEO is constantly changing because the way people create websites and the way search engines interact with them is constantly changing. What worked yesterday isn’t likely to work today. SEO is a constantly evolving enterprise.
More than any of the other methods listed here, SEO requires your constant attention to best practices. Read SEO blogs and look for tips on Youtube and Instagram. Learn from experienced SEO practitioners and apply the methods they use.
Social Media Presence
The human race has put itself online. Our social relationships and professional networks are publicly shown in ways that have never been seen before. There are tens of thousands of social media NETWORKS.
You may have heard of the popular ones like Facebook and MySpace, but there are many, many more.
Part of web presence management s dealing with the many social media channels that affect your brand. This can be about engaging outside influencers or using your own people to build an interconnected social network.
You can create a presence on the major sites like Facebook and LinkedIn.
Some companies develop full-blown social media management systems. These platforms manage and organize a brand’s entire social media presence. Make a brand-related social post on one network, and push it to the other networks you are interested in.
As an example, imagine you represent a brand that sells something – say dog food. You could incentivize people to post pictures of themselves, their dog, and your product online. This incentive could be anything, from product discounts to a straight up bride with cash.
Something like “$10 off your next purchase” if you show a picture of our product online. Not only is this kind of thing perfectly acceptable, you’re almost negligent if you don’t do it. No one knows at this point how much of the internet is a spontaneous expression or part of a complex commercial production.
What is clear is that brands need to stimulate social media interactions in a proactive way if they want to succeed.
Reputation Management
Part of the scope of your online presence for business is the reputation your brand presents to the outside world. Life isn’t fair, and sometimes you can get a bad name by accident, or through the malevolent actions of disgruntled employees, customers or competitors.
You need to manage your reputation, and that can have all kinds of implications for a brand. Responding to support requests, and posts about your brand on forums sites are just part of reputation management.
You may have to take the fight offline and into the physical world by doing things like having lawyers send ‘cease and desist’ letters to bad actors who are trying to hurt you. You might even have to sue someone! Whatever the case, you can’t just take it lying down.
You have to fight to protect your good name.
Paid Traffic
With most social media platforms like Facebook, or LinkedIn, as well as at the search engines like Google and Bing, you can directly pay for traffic to your site with programs like “Pay Per Click” [PPC].
This is a very important part of digital marketing and online presence management.
If you know how much your profit per customer is, and you can calculate how much it costs to acquire a customer, you can decide if paying for traffic is a good idea.
If you make $2 a customer, and it costs LESS than $2 to get one, you’re in business. If the reverse is true, you had better start looking for a new job!
Blogging
Another part of your online presence management is blogging. A “blog” is a place where someone writes articles about a certain subject. This site contains a blog for instance.
Search engines value blogs because it is something a person has to write, and it proves at least one person cares about the subject she is writing about. It takes a human to write a good blog post, and the fact a human does it is of value to the search engines.
You can encourage bloggers to make posts about your brand or service. You can employ professional writers to make guest posts on influencer blogs that relate to your brand.
Back to the dog food example: you could contact blogs that are related to dogs, and request to make guest posts on those sites. The guest post can offer legitimate and valuable information and tangentially link back to the product you are trying to manage.
Web Design
How your site looks will influence how well your brand works. Don’t expect any kind of market penetration if your site looks like an amateur hour. The good news is that design is pretty cheap these days.
You aren’t restricted to using designers in Western countries. Just because a person can’t read or write English, that doesn’t mean they can’t fiddle with colors and fonts. Web design can be done 100% in the cloud today.
Online Presence Management
Online presence management is a keystone to modern marketing in the digital age. You ignore it at your brand’s peril. Pay attention to every channel where your brand comes in contact with the online public, and you’ll put have the best chance to succeed in your space.
Check out our blog for more great articles on how you can use technology to make your business a winner!
