You will often see, particularly on this site, references to your online presence. This basically means what people can find online relating to your business and how easy it is to find that information.

This consists of all your online marketing activities and you need to do something or have someone regularly checking and updating this information in order to make sure that what is found about your business is up to date and accurate.

There are a few places where you should be online, no question asked, well that is if you are doing business.

These are free platforms that are aimed at helping people find you and find out what you do and they are:

• Facebook
• Google Maps
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Pinterest
• Instagram

Those are the primary social media sites, and you should have a presence on at least 2 of them. Depending on your industry you could be on all of them.

These are easy to setup, don’t charge and are a brilliant way to initially get setup to be found online. It is very important that if someone types your business name into google or other search engines there are at least some results and the information they provide is current and it really does not take long to ensure that is the case.

I do of course think that the ultimate goal with any listing you have should be to drive traffic to your own website, there all your up to date information can be found and people should be able to get a full understanding of the products and services you offer.

So your next online project once you are listed on a social media site or two is your own website.

Ideally this would be a full website on your own domain, but to start you can choose one of the more budget friendly options such as Zimsite.

Zimsite offers a one page website with everything you need to get online, this includes a free sub-domain so there are absolutely no costs to getting started. We will be introducing upgrade features for sites in the future, but for now we have focused on the core of what every business would need. You can also opt to go for another site builder option like Wix or Weebly. Either way you need to have a good looking website where you can showcase your products and services and let potential customers get a full understanding of them.

When you go onto a Facebook page for example, it is nice to see some current projects a company has done, maybe a few of their headlines, but if you want to find information on a product or service, trying to scroll through their entire newsfeed to find out what exactly they do that can be rather tedious. This is why with your own website you can have all your information presented in a format that matches your company look and feel and make it easy for people to find exactly what they are looking for.

That is as simple as it is getting started with your online presence, get those right and you are well on your way to being found online and starting to draw in customers.

Spend time updating and improving those things and then when you have that running smoothly you can start to increase your efforts in the way of listing in online directories and finding online advertising options such as Google ads, Facebook ads and other online advertising opportunities.

It does not show a good impression of your business when you are advertising your website or social media page and people go there and they are incomplete. If you still have placeholder text on your site, or your Facebook page doesn’t have a cover image, rather than spending any time advertising your links, spend that time completing those things, or simply delete them. It is terrible to go to a website and see that the owners of the site haven’t even bothered to complete it before publishing it, it does not put your business in a good light at all.

Get in touch with us if you need any assistance reviewing, completing or starting your online journey. We are always happy to help where we can.