Build your online business presence on a budget

“Online presence” might seem like a vague and meaningless term that only marketers use. But I assure you, it’s a real thing.

Per HubSpot: “An online presence can be defined by how easy it is to find a brand or company online. It's important for building your brand's reputation, increasing brand awareness, and providing visibility to your products or services when users are searching for related keywords.”

In most cases, your online efforts should revolve around your business goals—namely, the goal of directing potential clients to contact you for your products services. That said, it doesn’t hurt to establish name recognition online and get your business out there, even among people who aren’t likely to become clients.

The good news is that you don’t need a huge marketing budget to make a name for yourself online. Most of the suggestions you’ll find here are either free or they cost a few hundred dollars or less.

Build a Business Website

Before working on expanding your presence, you need somewhere to start. I suggest building a business website if you don’t already have one or updating your existing website if you haven’t touched it in a while.

Take a hard look at the content management system (CMS) you intend to use. WordPress is easily the most popular website-building platform available. It’s also extremely versatile, but it isn’t always easy to use if you don’t have any web development skills. If you aren’t a tech person and you’re starting from scratch, we suggest using Squarespace to build a simple business website.

Your website should have the following essential pages:

Homepage
About page
Products or services page
Blog page
Contact page

Depending on your industry, you may want to build additional pages for company values, case studies, shareholder information, or careers. But these pages are a good place to start if you’re starting with nothing. Your website should give a clear description of what your business offers and how people can get in touch with you.

If you’re expanding or updating an existing website, now is a good time to consider building those additional pages and updating your old ones. You should also consider creating a blogging schedule (more on that later), so your website will be updated regularly with fresh content.

Regardless of which website platform you choose, consider updating your website to a new theme if you’re using an old one. The best website themes are clean and concise, and they are optimized for viewing on mobile devices.

Create Social Media Pages

Next, you can create pages on the three biggest social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Your social media pages don’t need to be complicated, but make sure your branding is consistent across all of them. That means using the same logos, color schemes, and language to ensure no one gets confused about what business each page represents.

Most business social media pages include the following elements:

Cover image
Profile image (usually your logo)
Short description about your company
Milestone information (when the company was founded, etc.)
Contact information
Call to action (such as a button)
Other information (such as hours of operation)

You may also want to gain a presence on platforms other than the big three. For example, some companies like to make how-to videos and post them to their YouTube channels. Others are active in answering frequently asked questions about their industry on Quora.

If you know where your customers are active online, you should join them there. Just be sure you have a strategy to stay active on these channels so you can keep people engaged.

Once you’ve built your social media pages, you can start to expand your presence by publishing content, advertising, and interacting with people. Here’s what I suggest if you want to gain a footing online without footing a huge bill.

Create Written Content

Blog posts are the bread and butter of the content marketing world. They’re generally 500+ words and cover a specific topic in a moderate amount of depth. The topics you write about should always be relevant and of interest to your clients and customers.

Try to post to your blog regularly. I suggest two blog posts per month at a minimum—preferably four or more.

Content marketing is a long-term strategy, so you might not see results immediately from the blog posts you’re posting. Over time, posting regular content can compound and earn you a substantial amount of traffic.

Each time you post a new blog, share a link to it on each of your social media pages and add a message. For example, if you were to share a blog post about your company’s participation at a recent conference, you could include a message on your post that says, “We had a great time at the conference. Here’s a breakdown of everything we learned and how you can apply it to your own business.”

If possible, you can create unique messages for each post on each of your social media accounts. The above message would be good for Facebook. On Twitter, you’ll need something short and catchy, and on LinkedIn, you could tighten up the language a bit and expand upon it.

Ideally, your posts will get clicks, shares, and comments. Each action helps you expand your presence just a little bit and generates traffic on your website when people go to read the post.

Do SEO—Search Engine Optimization

Marketing agencies aren’t always straightforward about what search engine optimization entails. I’ve seen marketing companies charge thousands of dollars for “SEO Services” when all they’re doing is what’s called “on-page SEO.”

When it comes down to it, “on-page SEO” generally involves optimizing headlines, HTML tags, and images on your website so they’re easy for search engines to understand. It does take time and some skill, and it is certainly important. But once you know how to do it, you’ll realize it’s just a set of steps you must take each time you post new content.

One of the most important tasks of SEO that not every agency does is generating backlinks—links from other authoritative websites to your own. This is challenging to do, but it can help you expand your online presence significantly. It makes Google love you because it essentially tells its algorithms, “There are a lot of people linking to this website, so it’s an authority on this subject matter and you should serve it at the top of search results.”

If you research backlinking strategies, most websites will tell you that the most important thing to do is “write great content so people want to link to it.” While this is true, you won’t generate many backlinks by waiting for people to find your blog and hoping they like your post enough to link to it.

Thankfully, there are some proactive things you can do to generate backlinks:

Guest Posting

This is when you author a piece of content with your name attached to it that is posted on someone else’s website, linking back to your own. This strategy is usually a trade (“I’ll write a guest post for your blog and you’ll write one for mine”).

If you have a professional network, they’re a good place to start with this strategy as they already know and trust you. Just offer to write a guest post and ask if they’ll do the same. You’ll get some free content out of it, too.

Guest Quotes

This is like guest posting, but instead of writing an entire piece, you simply offer a quote as a subject matter expert with a link back to your website. It’s a quick and easy way to get your name out there and generate backlinks. You can start with your professional network here, too.

Backlink Exchanges

This is when you ask someone to add a link to your website into one of their existing articles, sometimes in exchange for a link to their website from one of your existing articles.

We occasionally receive an email from someone who found our website, saying, “I liked your blog post and I think my blog post has some relevant information that your readers will find interesting. Would you be willing to use my blog post as a source in yours?”

They are simply asking us to link to their website from our blog post. If we think their website is authoritative (there are ways to check), we’ll scan it for an article that could support one of ours and suggest that they add a link to our website as well.

You can follow the same approach by reaching out to other businesses in exchange for backlinks. This can take some time, as it’s often cold outreach. You’ll have better success if you can offer original research and authoritative content as a supplement to another company’s web page.

Become a Source For Reporters and Bloggers (HARO)

One of the best ways to expand your online presence is to get quoted in the news. This isn’t always easy to do, as reporters tend to be selective about their sources. You may not have much luck contacting news sources directly and offering to be an expert source of information.

Help a Reporter Out (HARO), owned by Cision, provides a streamlined way to get your name in the news. Reporters use it to seek quotes and opinions from subject matter experts.

You can use HARO as a backlinking strategy. Just create an account and answer reporters’ and bloggers’ questions as an authoritative expert in exchange for backlinks.

The one downside to HARO is that there are no guarantees a reporter will use your response. They usually receive several responses to a single question, and they may only need one quote. It takes time to answer questions, so it can be a bit frustrating when no one picks you up.

Some other sites similar to HARO are ProfNet (another Cision product) and SourceBottle.

Get Listed in Business Directories

This is an old-fashioned backlinking strategy, but it’s still worth doing if you haven’t done it already. This will generate multiple pages on the internet that list your business and provide a link back to your website.

A lot of SEO people say these backlinks don’t amount to much from the perspective of search engine algorithms, but they do provide an avenue for people to find you through those directories. You also need to be selective about which directories you use. There are hundreds out there, and not all of them are worth it.

Here are a few places where you can start your search for directories:

21 Web Directories That Still Have Value—Search Engine Journal
The Ultimate List: 57 Online Local Business Directories—HubSpot
The Ultimate Free Business Directory List for the USA—BrightLocal

Get Active on Social Media

We already suggested sharing your blog posts and other published content. You could stop there and still see some significant activity.

But there are a few other things you could do, too.

Share News Stories That Are Relevant to Your Business and Your Clients

In addition to sharing the content you create, you can share “third-party” content that is relevant to your business and your audience/clients. The idea is to posit your company as a source of expertise and a go-to place for information related to your niche on social media.

This also keeps your social media pages fresh with content and prevents your pages from looking inactive.

When I worked at an agency, we created spreadsheets with hyperlinks to articles and used automation tools to share new articles for our clients’ social media accounts every day. Each share included a unique message, each of which I wrote myself.

You don’t have to get that mechanical with this strategy. If you prefer, you can simply scan the news until you find something that might be interesting, relevant, or fun for your clients to read, then share it with a comment.

Create “Highly Shareable” Posts

If I’ve learned anything about social media marketing over the years, it’s that there is no formula for “going viral.” Certain types of content go viral more than others, but they tend to be either extremely funny, extremely cute, extremely inappropriate, or extremely shocking.

Still, one thing people do crave is authenticity, and they love to see that a business has humans behind it. You could work out a strategy for sharing more personal, “behind the scenes” content on your social media accounts to generate interest and to put a face to your business.

If you’re involved in any charity work, or if you’re otherwise active in your local community, don’t be shy about it. It’s important to establish that your business has a place in the world and isn’t a static entity behind a website.

Comment as an Authoritative Source on Public Posts

This is a strategy that has become increasingly popular among professionals, and not just on social media networks.

In this strategy, you provide your expert opinion in the form of comments on forums and other semi-public online spaces. Facebook, Twitter, etc. tend to be a bit out there sometimes, so this is often better suited to LinkedIn and forum/Q&A sites like these:

Quora: Many experts and professionals answer questions on here, but there is also plenty of miscellaneous content. Some third-party tools can help you optimize your strategy on Quora, like this one.
Reddit: There’s some zany stuff on Reddit, but plenty of people go there when they need quick answers to questions about personal finance, real estate, and even science.
Stack Exchange: This was created for IT people (and nerds in general), but it has become an entire ecosystem of Q&A sites on various topics, including personal finance and home improvement.

The one thing to keep in mind about these types of sites is that they don’t always allow you to post links back to your website. They may not let you “advertise” either, aside from mentioning what business you belong to. Still, they can help get your name out there.

Produce Press Releases

The last suggestion I have is to create press releases. These are usually paid news releases that are aggregated from a single source to several different websites. The most basic press releases only cost a few hundred dollars.

Press releases aren’t always effective in generating large amounts of traffic to your website quickly. Few people read the business websites these services aggregate to. But they can create a huge web of backlinks instantly, which is always helpful.

They also get your name spread across the web, which doesn’t hurt.

Here are a few services you could use:

Most of these providers have requirements for what they’ll publish, and they’ll charge you based on the length of your press releases. Short press releases usually cost a couple of hundred dollars.

You’ll need something relatively newsworthy to write bout, but I’ve found that they are lenient in what they consider “newsworthy” because they want your business. Any type of business milestone, development, or accolade is worth writing about. Opening a new office, taking on a new partner, closing a big deal—you can create a press release for anything like that.

What to Do Next

What you see here are some basic, affordable strategies to generate an online presence for your business. These aren’t the only things you can do on a budget, but unless you have a full-time marketing team, they should keep you busy.

If you’re interested in optimizing your strategy, think about paring it with original content and authoritative research. Contact us today to learn how to get started.

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Building an online presence for your business on a budget