I hope that by now we’re all clear on the fact that starting up an online business is a process which is going to take time to yield results, that’s of course if it does yield any positive results at all. The point is unless you already have a lot of money to throw at the venture, you’re not going to whip up something like an e-commerce site and then have it start raking in retirement-worthy amounts of money.
So in line with the spirit of looking long-term by way of your marketing exploits to grow the business and gradually build up profits, we’re going to explore the essentials of organic marketing practices. For those of you who don’t know, organic marketing refers to growth and exposure that’s more “natural” by way of getting your online business indexed by the major search engines (by Google, really), this as opposed to other marketing and advertising channels which are geared more towards the promise of bringing quicker results, if not instant.
Focus on value, value and more value
I’m sure you’ve heard this what you probably think is once too many times, but this is indeed what it’s all about. Focus on giving value to your visitors. It’s okay to have them feeling like they are getting more than what they bargained for as this creates a positive link to your brand or your business. The cheapest value you can give is very useful information…
Value-addition channels
Now, as far as it goes with the actual channels through which you would be looking to add this value discussed, the usual organic marketing channels come to mind, including articles (article marketing), reciprocal links (or back-links), social media marketing, user interaction, fresh content publication, etc.
It all comes down to this; whatever organic marketing channel you’ll be engaging in, i.e. creating content which is to be linked to your primary online business offering, keeping it real as far as the value contained in the content is the order of the day. I promise you – once you look beyond the short-cuts which promise you a quicker path to bumping up your traffic and subsequent sales, you’ll be amazed at just how much success you attain. For example, with the mentioned social media space as one of the organic marketing channels you’d be using to publish valuable content and link back to your main business site, something like posting inspirational quotes that resonate with you personally is a great example.
This way other users who “like” and follow your Facebook page for example will be compelled to share your content naturally, creating engagement activity that will ultimately give priority to your content. This creates a knock-on effect as far as search engine rankings because as much as many people may not be aware of this, platforms like Facebook are direct competitors of the likes of Google.
So Google will want to rank your primary business page higher in their search engine results if it means they can take business away from Facebook for example and have users find those results via their own search engine as opposed to discovering it through Facebook.