How to maintain your business or blog’s online presence

Maintaining your company’s online presence is no easy thing to do, particularly if you’ve always considered yourself as someone who’s not particularly great with technology. The digital world can be extremely new and confusing to a lot of people – so here are some tips that will help you out with your online presence if you’re not sure where to begin.

Buy A Domain Name

First of all, when you’re setting up your company website, it’s important that you buy a specific domain name. Even if you’re using a site that’s easy to navigate like WordPress, it still looks a lot more professional if you have a specific domain name, and it will also make you a whole lot easier to find online with a simple Google search if a prospective client or customer wants to check out your business.

Make Your Site Easy To Navigate

Ease of use is one of the most important things about your site. If a possible client is looking through your site and finds it hard to use, chances are they’ll just close the window and look for another company that does the same thing instead. Although it’s important to make sure that your site looks good, it’s more important to make sure that it’s hosted on a good, reliable server so that it doesn’t crash, and that it’s extremely easy to navigate. Make sure that you’ve tested it a lot before it goes online – although it may be very obvious to you how to use it, you need to bear in mind that you’re looking at it from the position of someone who already knows the company, business, and site inside out. Testing will confirm just how easy it really is to use.

Hire A Graphic Designer

Let’s face it, you can’t do everything yourself. If you’ve never worked in graphic design before, then you simply won’t be able to ensure that your site is created to a high enough standard. If it looks unprofessional, people will just click away and use a different service instead. A graphic design strategy is crucial to the success of your business online. Not only will they make your site look good but they’ll also make it easy to use – and as we’ve said before, that’s absolutely crucial. They’ll also be able to ensure that your social media matches up with your site and your business cards in terms of graphic design, creating a cohesive brand.

Make Yourself Easy To Contact

You need to make sure that you’re easy to get in touch with for anyone who might want to work with you or become a customer. On your site you should have a very clearly labeled page that contains your contact information, including an email address, a phone number, and a postal address – remember that you can use a forwarding service if you don’t have a specific office yet and you don’t want to put your home address online. You should also make business cards which give out all the same information and that make it clear what exactly your business does. Break it down into one short, punchy sentence.

Start Using Social Media

Using social media correctly is a great way to start getting in touch with more people and advertising your services to a wider audience. Sites like Facebook and Twitter are crucial for pretty much all businesses but you could also consider other social media sites to promote yourselves. Instagram is great for any business that focuses on anything visual or anything resembling the current hipster aesthetic, and if you want to appeal to teens and other young people then Tumblr is a great thing to get to grips with. If your audience is primarily family-focused, you could start working on a site like Pinterest, which a lot of busy moms use.

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Keep Searching For Your Company

It’s important that you stay aware of what exactly your online presence is, so you need to keep searching for your company name. You can always add SEO terms to your site to make sure that you keep coming up top of the search engines when people look up your company name. You could also consider checking out any review sites to make sure that people have been positive about your company and the work that you do. Of course, not everything will run smoothly one hundred percent of the time – so if you see a negative review then you have a chance to do something about it by apologising and figuring out how to amend your service so that it doesn’t happen again. Once you’ve sorted out whatever issues you might have had, you can always get sites like Indeed to remove the negative review. But remember not to dismiss any constructive criticism out of hand – other opinions are always useful and valid even if they might sometimes be tough to hear.

Consider Your Voice

It’s important to make sure that you maintain a certain voice online. Hitting the right balance of professional and cheerful can be difficult but it’s important to make sure that you get noticed while steering away from any scandals. Politics and religion are definitely no-go areas, and if you want to tackle anything like racism or sexism then you need to make sure that you have a wide audience of testers making sure that what you’re posting is absolutely okay – you don’t want to get attention for the wrong reason! You can never go wrong with a loving Beyonce or Ryan Reynolds meme.

Hire An Expert

Finally, it could be time to hire an online expert if you’re finding it all a bit too challenging. Not everyone can excel in every area and if you’re more into finance or accounting or design or sales to achieve the perfect chatty tone that your Facebook status requires, then you could always hire a social media expert to manage your channels or a digital communications staff member to work out what your online strategy should be.

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