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Did you know that“90% of e-commerce start-ups end in failure within the first 120 days? This is often because it’s difficult to get the kind of web traffic required to keep the business afloat, especially as many businesses now operate entirely online. However, when managed effectively, e-commerce businesses can grow from strength to strength. Finding ways to ensure your online business thrives is key to your success.

With that in mind, here are four ways to ensure your online business thrives, even during trying times. 

Ways to ensure your online business thrives – Ensure you rank highly on different search engines.

According to a recent study, “90.63% of all pages in our index get zero traffic from Google, and 5.29% of them get ten visits per month or less.” This is because users will often click on one of the web pages brought upon the first page of results instead of venturing any further. As such, if your website does not rank highly on search engines, you’ve got little chance of getting discovered.

Fortunately, there are many different ways in which you can begin to climb the rankings. For example, you could learn about effective website SEO so that your content contains specific keywords and phrases that the search engines are looking for. You can also begin to use link-building strategies to make your domain appear more authoritative!  

Ways to ensure your online business thrives – Maintain your website

If a user clicks on your website only to find that it is full of broken links or loads slowly, they’re very likely to exit right away. This means you’ll have very little chance of winning them over and converting online traffic into sales. 

As such, it’s important that you invest in website maintenance services that can ensure your website is working effectively 100% of the time. For example, they can be used to perform system updates, back-up content, or simply to track your website up-time so that you’re able to come in and resolve issues if necessary. Either way, investing in maintenance means a better user experience and, by extension, more sales conversions.

Use high-quality videos and photographs

When a user visits the sales page on your computer, you must make a great first impression, especially if they are a first-time buyer. As such, you should feature a range of clear, high-quality photographs and videos on your website. This makes it easier for the user to see what they are buying, making them more inclined to trust your brand. For example, one study found that “up to three-quarters of all shoppers make their purchasing decision based on the product photography.” 

Ways to ensure your online business thrives – Build and maintain a strong social media presence

The more traffic your website receives, the easier it will be to ensure that your online business thrives. This is because your products/services will receive more attention. Many people take to social media to discover new brands. You can increase web traffic by building and maintaining a strong social media presence.

Ensure that you post consistently and that your content accurately reflects your brand and what you have to offer.

Now that we’re around halfway through the year, it’s the ideal time to stop and think about where your business is and where you want it to be. How has the business been performing up until this point? Are you making the profits you predicted? How have your sales been? What is your marketing achieving? Make these business changes now.

If any of the elements that need to come together to make your business work and be successful are not doing their job, now is the time to make some changes and put things right so that the second half of the year is better than the first. If you don’t know where to start, here are some specific areas to look at and improve where necessary. 

Make These Business Changes Now – Find New Outsourcing Partnerships 

Outsourcing some areas of your business can help you hugely. You’ll be able to streamline what you do, ensuring that you become a lot more efficient. Plus, you can reduce costs overall. It’s true that you’ll need to pay for the work to be outsourced, but this would be cheaper than a full-time employee, for example, plus you wouldn’t have to pay for all the equipment that you would otherwise need to have. If you found good external IT support, for example, you could be sure that your computing systems and networks were working as they should, and downtime due to errors and connection problems would be greatly reduced. 

If you are looking for changes to make in your business that you can implement easily, finding new outsourcing partners is a great place to start. Think about the areas of your business where you don’t have expertise or that take a long time. These tasks take up time you could use to work on core aspects of the business. Then look for specialised partners who can take on these tasks for you. The end result will be a better business that is more efficient and highly regarded. 

Think About Your Pricing Strategy

Business owners can be afraid to put their prices up, even if it’s only by a small amount because they don’t want to lose their current customers. The problem is that sometimes you actually need to put your prices up because your supplier has or because the cost of running your business has become higher. If you don’t increase your prices to account for these things, you might soon be running at a loss, or at least not making a profit. If this goes on for too long, you’ll find that your business can’t sustain it and can no longer continue. 

This is why it might be that one of the major and urgent changes you have to make in your business is linked to your pricing. Look at each product and make sure that you are making money on it. Then you can look at what demand there is in the market, and what your competitors are doing in terms of pricing. This will all help you determine whether any changes are necessary as well as if any changes will be received well. 

If you do have to make price increases, make sure that you offer something in return. You’ll need to justify the price increase as much as you can, so don’t just put the price up and leave it there, or you might lose customers. Think about the added value (that won’t cost anything) that you could give people. 

Make These Business Changes Now – Enhance Your Marketing Efforts

Good marketing is crucial for any business. If yours is not working for you, you’ll be missing out on sales and new customers. This will clearly have a negative impact on your business. This means that you won’t be as successful as you might otherwise have been. 

It makes sense to improve your marketing efforts and ensure that the message you are sending out to your potential (and former) customers is the right one. Start by evaluating your current marketing to see how effective it is. Measure how many customers contact you because of it. Ask people how they heard of you when they get in touch. In this way, you’ll know what’s working and what isn’t. You can then allocate funds to the right areas and stop paying for advertising that no one is seeing. 

 

You should also know who your target market is. Your marketing is not going to be one hundred percent effective unless targeted effectively. When you have undertaken market research to determine who your target market is, you can make your advertising speak directly to them, increasing the chances of a sale.