How to leverage your online business

First you need a business. It may sound strange but many people start a blog with the intention to make some money without having a business model. Many don’t even have a product or service to sell. That is why their actions are random. The focus is missing. The simple existence of a product and/or service will force the business owner to do some thinking.

It’s not easy to do business online. It takes time and determination and above all a plan. You have to think to strategy, tactics, goals, ways to achieve it, ways to measure your success and ways to adjust your actions. You can’t do all these without a solid business model and a product/service to sell.

As you can see you will also need a website or a blog. Look at it as your home base. This is where you can offer detailed information about your business, your products, tips and suggestions, news related to your market and so on. All your actions will contribute to your brand: it doesn’t matter if you are on your blog, on a social network or a real-life billboard. But what I’m trying to say is that all the elements you use to market should come together on your blog/website. For example you use YouTube for video marketing and Twitter as a microblogging platform to establish your place in your market and to build relations and you use FaceBook to relate with others through text/images/video. All these elements and much more should be present on your blog/website.

The reason for that is because all your marketing efforts should have the purpose to drive traffic to your home base. You can post comments on other blogs as a way to interact with the blog owner or those that reply there. If you are successful then people will visit your blog. Why? Because this is what friends do: visit each other, spend time on a beer.

Identify related blogs that have the same influence, subscriptions and traffic as yours. It will be much easier to interact and write guest posts which will help you spread the word about you and also get a valuable incoming link. Think about it. If you manage to develop a small network of 5 such blogs then you can grow together by developing a common strategy. You can also use this small network to help each other on social networks.

Once you start developing a certain presence on the web: your subscriber numbers goes up, your traffic is decent, you have lots of friends that interact with you on different social networks you can also try and use widgets to spread your content and get links to your blog/website. Link baits function very well all the time: how to articles, tips articles, list articles or list with resources can spread fast – especially if you use the appropriate social network to bookmark your content.

Let me know what you think about this article? What are your ways to leverage your businesses online?