Online Business Complete Guide to Start and Scale in 2021

When you talk about owning a business, you ought to sense the feeling of responsibility. Business is not only about making money but it also holds commitment for people who are working for your business. So, to meet such responsibility, you need to grow your online business to meet the needs. How do we grow the business then?

Business is categories either as B2B or B2C which means they are serving other businesses or directly serving the customers. In this article, we shall focus on businesses that are willing to grow online. These businesses which we shall discuss would fall under both the above-stated categories. We shall understand how we can grow a B2B or B2C business online. So let’s begin.

Table of Contents

What are B2B and B2C businesses? What is the difference between B2B and B2C businesses?

B2B stands for business to business where a business produces products or services to serve any other business. While B2C stands for business to customers. In the B2C sector, one business develops products or services to serve the customers directly. So, let’s find out the complete differences between B2B and B2C.

Business to Business	Business to Consumer
Marketing is more complex (clients and prospects need to understand how products work and integrate with existing systems)	Simple marketing and sales cycles
Prices highly variable	Fixed prices
High volumes, wide product range	Low quantities
Need for flexible shipping and logistics solutions	Easy shipping
Tax and regulation has a high impact on sales and therefore large workforce employed to work within these restrictions	Little regulation and tax complexity
Wide product range and high volumes	Products easy to showcase and market

When we talk about which sector is difficult to serve? Then a common answer you will hear often is “Depends” but we shall make this answer a bit clear.

Serving a B2B Sector.

When we serve our product or service to another business then we have the following advantages.

They are more professional in dealing with you.
Getting big contracts or high ticket clients are easier.
You can handle requests without any abusive experience.
You can also get practical and archivable deadlines to meet.
Finally, you shall also get an opportunity to a long term business client which can become your major source of recurring income.

Those were some advantages of working in a B2B sector. So, you can look to build your business in this sector if you are planning to start a business with an idea.

We do have some disadvantages of working in a B2B sector like

It is difficult to get a client with high-end businesses as your market leaders are already ahead of you in bidding, for acquiring clients. So its a bit struggling to get good clients easily.
You need to create your professional presence to built trust in your sector so that companies can use your services and products. Hence most of the time, you can’t start scaling from day One.
You need to invest a lot in marketing when you work in the B2B sector (Not necessarily but most of the time it is true) and marketing in the B2B sector is comparatively higher as already the competition is higher but it also has that “Depends” factor in it.

But, it is always a great experience working in this sector.

Serving a B2C Sector.

It is one of the most crowded sectors as there are many challenges when you are directly serving a customer. Let us have a look at the pros and cons.

Advantages of working in a B2C sector

You can sell out quickly to your customers, there is not much to nill round meetings, or follow-ups so it gets easier to pull revenue quickly.
You get an ample amount of opportunity to pitch your products to get sales.
The target audience can be approached in multiple ways without following any standard procedure or hierarchy.

These were some common advantages but with that, we also have some common disadvantages as well. Like

You may encounter abusive instances with your customers.
Fraudulent cases are very high in the B2C sector.
You may find yourself working with very low margins.
Being a smart salesperson is important when you directly deal with unprofessional customers.

There are plenty of advantages and disadvantages of working or serving the above-mentioned sector but the question remains the same. If you want to scale your business by serving any of the above-stated sectors then how would you do that?

In this blog, we will be discussing “how to scale business online”. This will comprise of scaling

B2C businesses online.
B2B businesses online.

What are some Prerequisites Before scaling any business online?

Whenever you accept the challenge of scaling a business online, there are few prerequisites. We call it a competitor analysis. You need to know who you are competing in an online space. To outrank their business, you need to study their marketing strategy. With that, you get two growth ideas.

The marketing strategy that is making them the market leader
Steps that you can do better than them and provide a better value to consumers or businesses being served by them.
Building strategies that can scale your business growth.

Let us get some ideas about how we can do an online competitor analysis and the methods to scale businesses online.

Steps to follow for doing competitor analysis and Growth strategy ideas

Whenever you start doing your competitor analysis, make sure you consider all the marketing channels and avenues under study. We can categories these studies into the following categories.

SEO strategy study.
Social Media Strategy study.
Email Marketing strategy.
Online Paid Marketing strategy.
Local business growth strategy study
Affiliate Strategy study.

Let us study all these strategic studies one by one.

SEO Strategy Study

Step 1: I would highly recommend you to get access to some of the premium tool like

Ahrefs or
Semrush

Alternatively, you can also read my blog on how to do competitor analysis using ubersuggest which is a completely free tool to study your competitor’s marketing strategy on the search engines.

Step 2: If you are using semrush for competitor analysis then you first need to figure out your niche keywords which will help you identify your market competitors. Do prefer finding keywords with high volume with low keyword difficulty. For finding the keyword difficulty, I personally prefer Google keyword planner as it is the soul creator of these metrics.

Step 3: Now, with the help of your niche keywords, you can find your competitors who are in the top 10 positions of search engines. They are your actual competitors. Scrape all those top 10 websites for all your niche keywords and study their top pages.

Step 4: When you study their top pages then make a note of the following data.

What are the keywords for their top pages for which they are ranking high and getting higher traffic? Make sure that those keywords must have good volume as it may happen that those top ranking keywords are LSI keywords with low volume. Getting ranked on such keyword is not so difficult and many times google too, index your pages or blog on such silly keywords. So, be wise in filtering those gem keywords. I call them millionaire’s keys.
Check the backlink of the top pages of your competitors and when you prepare a similar or even better than the competitor’s top-ranking content then you can try acquiring backlinks from those webmasters by outreaching.
Check your competitor’s blog to identify how they have segmented their SEO strategy to target different categories of your niche.
Study your competitor’s website navigation. This will help you in understanding the best UI/UX that converts. It will help you save time in A/B testing that is not working in your target niche.

So by these 4 steps, you will be having

Your millionaire keywords.
Your competitor’s list whom you want to beat online.
Backlink opportunities.
Competitor’s best keywords.
Blogging ideas.
The landing page design ideas.

With SEO strategy study, you are ready to outrank your competitors on search engines. Since your potential consumers and clients are present in other online avenues also, hence we need to study how your competitors are using those platforms for their benefits. Let us understand, how to do competitor analysis using social media.

Social Media Strategy study.

Social media is a place where your potential customers come online to spend their free or leisure time. Any businesses can use this opportunity to pitch their products or services to a targetted set of people using these social media advertising platforms or other ways of unpaid marketing on social media. Depending on the audience, social media platform and your offerings, you can segment your marketing strategy. So let’s have a look as to how we can leverage social media as our money-making machine for online business.

Step 1: Again, i would highly recommend you to have access to the following tool before jumping into the tussles of social media marketing.

Crowdfire ( Free auto-posting tool to social media channels )
Semrush
buzzsumo.

They have paid versions as well as you can try any group buys services if you are a newbie and can’t afford these tools. If you have good money with you even being a newbie, then you must prefer subscribing to their services.

Step 2: You can use a social media strategy template to follow your post scheduling according to various holiday calendars designed for different countries.

Step 3: Grow your social media fan following on different channels.

Let’s discuss this in detail.

In this article, we will be covering four major social media platform that can give you exponential growth online. Using these four platforms, you can use all paid, unpaid methods to increase your business visibility. So the four platforms that we shall be talking about and ways to use it for business growth are.

Facebook.
Instagram.
Quora and
LinkedIn
Recent growing platforms.

In the recent growing platform, we shall tell you about the current trending social media platform which you can utilize for your business growth purpose.

How to grow your facebook page followers?

Well, there are two alternatives to grow your facebook page followers and one unethical way which i won’t recommend but i will tell you in this topic.

UnPaid method.
Paid method.
Unethical method.

If you want to increase your facebook page followers and also want engagement from them in your Facebook posts then there is a simple Unpaid method.

Steps to grow facebook page with an unpaid method.

Organic growth, reach and engagement on Facebook has become quite difficult these days. Facebook wants companies to pay money to get that reach. Also, an average user on facebook doesn’t crawl the entire feed so you get very less opportunity to reach your audience with organic dependency. So here is a better way to get your targetted set of people to engage on your page.

Join all your niche relevant facebook groups.
Make sure that when you join these groups, they must have a good amount of audience.
Don’t join too many facebook groups on a single day itself. Keep this process natural. I would recommend you to join not more than 5 groups on alternate days.
Share your website blogs that are relevant to those groups. Don’t post promotional content in those groups. It may happen that the group admin may expel you from those groups if you try to be too promotional.
When you share relevant posts in those groups, make sure that you do it from the facebook page that you want to grow. There is an option to join facebook groups as a page instead of a user.
If your content goes relevant to the group then the admin would obviously approve your post and then imagine, a group having 100k people, your post will potentially have a reach of at least 1-10 percent.
People would be liking your post. When people like your post, click on the invite button to invite them to like your page. Sometimes people would like your facebook page by themselves if you be a regular good contributor to such groups.
Those people will be immediately notified about an invitation to like the post.

Benefits of the above step

Your facebook page will get targetted people fan following. Those people will be active users and hence you may find good engagement on your facebook page posts.
The social traffic on your website will increase.
Your email subscriber on your website will also see a rise if you setup popups on your blogs. Prefer doing this with MailChimp.
Your target people in your niche will also hit your website pixels and codes for remarketing purposes.

Following the above steps, you can create a good presence of your online business among the right audience without spending a single penny.

Steps to grow facebook page with the Paid method.

Most of you reading this blog would already be aware of the paid marketing ways.

Running sponsor ads or
Boosting page post,
Running a contest for a free giveaway.
Crossposting collaboration.
Influencers shootouts and promotions.

How to make a winning ad copy for sponsor ads in facebook marketing?

There are two ways in which you can make winning ad copies to run on facebook that can convert.

By using your creativity or
Copying your competitor’s creativity.

Making winning ad copies out of your creativity requires an experience of what call on action or message can compel viewers to convert. But, what if you are a newbie in making ad copies?

Well, not to worry, you can copy your competitor’s ad copies, redesign them according to your products or service and store the ad copies in the creative studio on facebook business tool before publishing the ads.

How to find winning ad copies of competitors?

To find winning ad copies of your competitors, you can visit facebook ads library and find what your competitors are advertising.

Your competitors are smart and most of them have In house design team. Whenever they run ads, there is an in-depth team discussion on every small aspect of running that campaign. Even the call on actions is discussed multiple times with the experts in the organization to begin a paid campaign. You can use their ad copies and built a similar ad and create campaigns that work. Follow the steps below to find your competitor’s ad copies that they are running as sponsored posts.

Step 1: Visit the facebook ads library.

Step 2: Enter your competitor’s name in the search box.

Step 3: Use the filter option to find all Active and inactive ad copies of your competitor.

You can create similar ad copies and can get a similar return on investment as your competitors.

How to find niche social media influencers?

It is very difficult to find the perfect influencers that can bring huge sales for you. But there are some amazing tools that can filter the best influencers for you that converts.

You can try tools like Influencers hub.

It helps you get unlimited targetted traffic from youtube, Instagram, Facebook, twitter and high traffic popular blogs in any niche from top influencers.

Following are some benefits that you will get when you use tools like influencers hub,

Get Powerful Unlimited Targeted Traffic In Any Niche
Find Influencers using minimum, and maximum followers size i.e. Influencer having followers between 100k to 1 Million
Find Influencers On YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter based on Country
Find Influencers having High Traffic Blogs based on Alexa Rank, Country Rank, and Load Time when you search for it via keyword, niche or country
Send email to the Influencer instantly on their Email ID
Check all the saved Influencers in My Influencers Section
Create, and manage Campaigns to send traffic anywhere
Set Contract with information like Traffic Destination URL, Your Budget for Influencer, Campaign Task, and Details
Set Tracking by entering your google analytics or Facebook pixel code.
Simply Send this campaign URL as your proposal to all the targeted Influencers.
Get Influencers to Promote your offer to their large 100k or 1million+ subscribers on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and High Traffic Blogs.
Find Influencers On YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter based on Niche.
Find Influencers On YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter based on Keywords.
Get Email ID, and Contact Details of Any Influencer On YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and High Traffic Blogs Within a Click
Send personal message or mail to the Influencer instantly
View Detailed Information about each Influencer like Engagement Rate, Post, Followers, Following, Last Account Activity, Last Online Time Analysis of each post of each Influencer to get an idea of profitability with them.
Set & Save Your Bulk Messages as Templates to re-use again
Detailed Analytics section helps you find the winner campaign, and provide you with minute details to help you decrease your traffic cost, and increase ROI.

So, with tools like influencers hub, you can generate killer targetted audiences and boom your business revenue overnight.

Use Buzzsumo to grow on Facebook.

Buzzsumo is an online tool that tells you, which content is working great online and who are the right people who can help you, spread your content to the correct audience.

How you can grow your Facebook page using unethical ways?

I will never recommend you to follow this method. Facebook is very dynamic in changing its algorithm. It never discloses any of its algorithm functions or updates and you will end up losing your social media pages and sometimes the entire business as Facebook is the 2nd largest online platform after google where you can interact with a large potential customer base. Just to mention some of the unethical ways.

You can use any auto liker to increase fake fan following on your business page.
Then You can send email using targetted email lists to message potential customers to join your Facebook groups where you can pitch your page or products and services.
You can make a Facebook profile on your business name and add 5000 people. Once done, you can request Facebook to convert your profile into a fan page.

The above three methods can be dangerous so don’t try this until you want to take the risk. i will not recommend you to follow unethical ways if you are serious about your business.

How to grow your Instagram Fan following?

I will list down a very simple way. If you follow this method with consistency then it would help you grow your Instagram with a targetted fan following people.

Find at least 5 tags in your niche that have a large number of followers and posts.
Like 20 recent posts under these 5 tags and post some genuine comments on a few of them.
Follow some of them who are relevant to your niche.
Repeat this step daily.

I assure you growth on your Instagram page as well as a rise in social traffic on your website with the targetted audience.

If you are into B2B business and want to scale your business revenue then you must use these two social media platforms.

Quora
Linkedin.

These two social media platforms have a high-income professional traffic audience. Let us understand how you can leverage these platforms for business growth.

How to grow your business from Quora

Here are the top five Quora statistics that marketers should know:

Quora has 300 million monthly active users.
The site has a 43/57 female-to-male ratio.
Adult users who are 18 years and older with a household income greater than $100K spend 2x more time on Quora than LinkedIn.
Businesses using Quora Ads are seeing up to 4x more conversions.
400,000 topics are available on Quora.

Quora is increasingly the place for business audiences, which means it’s the place for marketers as well—not only to grow their brand’s online presence but to keep up with industry trends and even learn a few tricks from other marketers.

Steps to follow for growing your business from Quora.

Use the following query string on google to scrape your niche relevant questions on quora.

site:www.quora.com “Your Keyword”

This will give you a list of all the questions on Quora that are relevant to your niche.
Use tools like web scraper to export all these questions into a google sheet or any CSV file.
It may happen that you get too many questions.
Now you need to write a detailed answer in those questions so that your answer is ranking at a higher position under that answer.
If you have too many questions to answer than prefer answering those questions first, which have a higher number of followers.
Also, while you get your google search results after entering the above query string on the google search bar, Google will show the total answer under that particular quora questions, just beneath the URL. See the screenshot below to understand better. The questions with a larger number of answers are competitive and if you get on top of such answers, then you bound to get larger views over your answers which you can redirect to your online business website.

quora for online business. — Finding high engaging questions on quora.

Getting top on answers on such highly crowded questions is difficult. To get on top you need to

Write the best answers,
Share your answer and get upvote as most of the time, a quality answer with higher upvote is shown on top results. Even quora send high-quality answers to quora digest and in quora users inbox as answers to read.

But what if you are still not able to get that visibility? You can use the advantage of wiki answers on quora.

Go to your question on quora.
Just below the question, you will find a space called a wiki answer.
You can edit that portion and enter your business website link.
Make sure that you need to enter links in an appropriate way and don’t try to be too promotional as all wiki answers are never posted instantly and it goes under moderation after which it is manually checked by quora moderators and approved to display in the wiki answer section.

Caution: Do not spam quora with your website link as quora will identify that and all your answers and links can be deleted overnight. Your quora referral traffic will go from XXXX value to big zero.

How to Grow your business on LinkedIn?

If you are working in the B2B sector then LinkedIn is the best social media platform from you. How? Let us know that.

LinkedIn is a good platform for discovering leads. Hubspot found that LinkedIn is 277% more effective at generating leads than Facebook and Twitter.

LinkedIn is a powerhouse of quality leads for your business. You can run your lead generation campaign and get the first breakthrough for your business client acquisition.

Steps to follow to grow your business on LinkedIn.

These are trial and tested ways through which you can increase your online business visibility on Linkedin.

I would always recommend you to buy the premium LinkedIn service to increase your potential to interact with qualified leads directly.
LinkedIn allows you to build a maximum of 50,000 connections. Anything beyond that will go to your followers’ list.
Adding potential connections will help you build a reach to them either through LinkedIn feeds or through the articles that you can publish on LinkedIn.
You can also share content in LinkedIn groups on a regular basis to build your presence.
Creating a business page is also a great way to build your audience. Now you can invite your connections on LinkedIn to follow your business pages.
The LinkedIn marketing solution helps you advertise your product and services and reach your target audience.

LinkedIn marketing solution overview.

LinkedIn provides the following type of marketing campaign which you can use to reach your potential customers or clients.

Text ads

Single Image Ads

Carousel Image Ads

Video Ads

Message Ads

Follower Ads (Page Promo)

Clicks/Message Inbox

Here is a rough estimate of the cost that LinkedIn shows for running ads for the above-mentioned marketing campaign.

Ad Type	Budget	Budget	Budget
	1 Day	7 Days	30 Days
Text ads	₹930.00 – ₹1,500.00	₹6,500.00 – ₹11,000.00	₹28,000.00 – ₹45,000.00
Single Image Ads	₹730.00 – ₹1,500.00	₹5,100.00 – ₹11,000.00	₹22,000.00 – ₹45,000.00
Caraousal Image Ads	₹730.00 – ₹1,500.00	₹5,100.00 – ₹11,000.00	₹22,000.00 – ₹45,000.00
Video Ads	₹730.00 – ₹1,500.00	₹5,100.00 – ₹11,000.00	₹22,000.00 – ₹45,000.01
Message Ads	₹1,100.00 – ₹1,500.00	₹7,900.00 – ₹11,000.00	₹34,000.00 – ₹45,000.00
Follower Ads (Page Promo)			₹12,000.00 – ₹15,000.00

With the above Budget, you should get an approx reach as given in the table below.

CTR
1 Day	7 Days	30 Days
0.0074% – 0.011%	0.0074% – 0.011%	0.0074% – 0.011%
0.48% – 0.72%	0.48% – 0.72%	0.48% – 0.72%
0.52% – 0.78%	0.52% – 0.78%	0.52% – 0.78%
0.48% – 0.72%	0.48% – 0.72%	0.48% – 0.72%
		0.034% – 0.051%

Clicks/Message Inbox (Key Results)
1 Day	7 Days	30 Days
2 – 8	13 – 58	54 – 250
6 – 19	41 – 130	180 – 560
6 – 18	40 – 130	170 – 550
6 – 19	41 – 130	180 – 560
97 – 420	680 – 2,900	2,900 – 13,000
		24 – 150

So, you can be an expert with LinkedIn marketing solutions and increase your online business visibility.

Recently Trending Social Media Platform

According to a recent report from sensor tower, Tiktok was the most downloaded social media app leaving behind Facebook and Instagram.

Tiktok is growing but it is not good for all kinds of businesses. It can be a promising platform for B2C sectors like e-commerce. Dropshippers can really scale their revenue if they chose products that a tiktok user would love to buy for example a camera stand, flashlights, clothes, etc.

So, that was a brief about how you can scale your online business using a social media platform that has a large size audience base.

Email Marketing Strategy

You must have seen this often that a popup comes on your screen when you visit a website. The whole idea behind it is to capture email leads. So why capturing email lead is important?

With email leads, you can

Remain in touch with your customers through their mail inbox.
You can promote your offerings or new blogs.
You can automate the entire user behaviour according to their email open rates and click behaviour and create a psychological marketing strategy.
Email marketing helps you with getting returning customers.

So the question is how to build an email marketing strategy? Let’s discuss this in detail.

Steps to follow for building an email marketing strategy.

The basic step starts with identifying what is working for your competitor. After doing that study, either you can copy that to save time in AB testing or create something better strategy then their’s. Alternatively, you can plan your own strategy from scratch.

For building an email marketing campaign, I would highly recommend these tools, You can choose any one of them to capture email lead but the prime important tool is MailChimp. If you have a Shopify eCommerce store than sorry, MailChimp has no more facilities to integrate your store to the MailChimp email marketing tool. You will have to look for MailChimp alternative.

MailChimp.
HelloBar.
Zapier.

Personally, I have been using MailChimp and hello bar at a massive scale but many successful businesses are also using zapier to automate the user interaction with email marketing.

So here are the steps to follow if you want to spy your competitor’s email marketing strategy first. How to do this?

Land on your competitor website.
Wait for a popup to come. If the popup doesn’t come, create an account on their website.
This will disclose their email onboarding series strategy with which they are trying to bring back website visitors.

This will remove all curtains from your competitor’s style of email marketing. Now either you can copy their email swipes or create something better than them. Alternatively, you can build your strategy from scratch as below.

Email marketing strategy building from scratch.

Follow these simple steps.

Personalize your email message. By personalizing I mean you need to send email starting with Dear ‘Snehil Prakash’ instead of dear ‘valued customers’. With MailChimp, this is possible. You can set merge tags as FNAME, LNAME, etc and the mail will automatically take the names and create the personalized email using your pre-saved email template. According to a report on the value of personalized email,

Personalization can generate $20 in ROI for every $1 invested.

Segment your subscribers. It’s because when you segment your database, your email campaigns become much more targeted to your audience. According to a study by Hubspot, segmentation improves the open rate.

Imagine a situation where you haven’t done the subscriber segmentation and you are going to organize an event in your country but the subscribers in your email list is worldwide.

It will be an awkward email where you will be inviting your email subscriber from the united states to come down to India tomorrow to attend your event.

9 out of 10 marketers never segment their audience in an email list which is a bad choice.

Send mobile-friendly emails. Most of the time when you design your email copy, make sure that it has a responsive design. You must check your email template in different views like desktop or mobile or inbox view to check all the alignment of elements used in the design of the email. According to Yesmail report,

Mobile Email Conversion Rate Jumps 70 Percent Year-over-Year

Automate email campaigns; By this, I mean to run your email onboarding series according to triggers which is actually the action that your email subscribers take after receiving your email. A lot of businesses are automating email marketing using Zapier but you can also archive this using MailChimp. According to Forrester research

Trigger-based email marketing campaigns can generate 4x more revenue and 18x greater profits!

If you haven’t taken the above steps in your email marketing campaign then it is the right time to make these changes.

From the above three avenues of digital marketing, you can improve your online business visibility on the search engine, social media and email inboxes of your clients and customers but it is always difficult to get your online business presence made available every time. This is important to develop your presence most of the time in your potential customer’s memory as it will help them make a decision to take in favour of your brand if they can recognize you. Here comes another powerful story of online marketing. We call it paid Marketing which you will understand further in this article.

You can also use free SMTP servers to manage all your email marketing campaign. I personally feel using SendinBlue. The SendinBlue is pretty good free SMTP server service which is simple to use and also aids API, Plugins and Integrations. Combining SendinBlue with WordPress is very easy. We highly recommend using Sendinblue.

Paid Marketing Strategy

Paid marketing strategy is one of the most crucial marketing avenues where the campaign needs to be dealt with expertise. Any malpractice can burn your marketing budget and the returns on investment will definitely show you a negative graph.

A poor ROI cycle is always a nightmare for any business owner. So the million-dollar question and answer is discussed further in this article.

How do you build your paid marketing strategy?

Identify the right channels. Before you start your paid marketing strategy, you need to identify what are the right channels for you to start your paid marketing campaign.
Make a list of all the best channels. The best avenues for paid marketing are those platform where the user base is higher like
- Google and its partnered channel
- Facebook Feeds, video and stories.
- Instagram marketing.
- Quora ads.
- Linkedin Marketing solutions.
- Reddit promotions.
- Tiktok marketing.

and there is a huge list of such channel but you need to find the right one according to your product or service that you are offering.

Install Remarketing Tags. Once you have successfully identified your marketing channel, the next step is to install all remarketing codes and pixels on your landing pages to execute your remarketing.
Find Winning ad copies. I had already explained you ways to find the winning ad copies in the content above.
Start A/B Testing. With A/B testing of ad copies combined with A/B testing of landing pages, you can identify an estimated budget that will be consumed in reaching your target audience with a good ROI.

That was the outline of running a paid marketing campaign. Without A/B testing, never burn your marketing budget. It can burn your business.

Local Business listing strategy

Local business listing is also called as Local SEO. Using this strategy any online business can reach its customers or client in their local region. This way of marketing helps small businesses to scale online. So let us know how an online business can build its visibility in the local region.

How to create Google my business local listing

Go to google my business.
Create an account with your email id.
Select your business location and mark it as your location.
Submit your location.
Google will send a postcard to your registered address that you have set as your business location.
The postcard will have an OTP that you need to enter into your google my business account.
This will confirm your business location and hence, your business can be found on Google Map.

Benefits of Google my business listing.

It will show your business on google map searches.
On google search results, your business will be shown.
You can gain trust for your customers as they can review your business.
Your traffic will boost as it allows you to divert traffic from google search to your website.
You can easily stand out from the competition.
It works like free advertisements.

Affiliate Marketing Strategy

Affiliate strategy can be a viral marketing strategy if you do it in the right way. In this section, I will tell you a complete affiliate marketing strategy which will give you an exponential boost to your product and services.

I call affiliate marketers as zombies. They can boost your brand name if you keep strong control over how they can do the powerful marketing on your behalf. To start with the affiliate marketing strategy, you need to keep these outlines in your mind map.

The guidelines for the affiliates to follow.
The signup process for affiliates to approve their affiliate links.
Marketing materials like image banners, embedded codes, email swipes, relevant keywords, etc.
Affiliate approval process.
The onboarding process for affiliates.
Payment methods for approved affiliates.
Fraudulent planning to avoid fake marketing from poor marketing practices done by affiliate marketers.

Once you have that outline of starting an affiliate marketing strategy, you are ready to understand the steps to set up your affiliate system on your website.

Top 10 Affiliate marketing platform for business owners.

There are many affiliate marketing avenues where you can list your product and service as a vendor and allow marketers to promote your business on your behalf. This way, you can run all paid ads without burning your own marketing budget.

On these affiliate marketing avenues where you register yourself as vendors, some of them are paid while some are free for online businesses. Whatever platform you chose, you need to be very strict in approving the affiliate marketers to allow them to promote your online business. In some cases you may encounter with affiliates who use wrong ways to promote your online business and products that may give your business penalties from big daddies like google, Facebook etc as these affiliate zombies can do spamming for the affiliate links that you provide them. A smart and true affiliate marketer knows how to promote business links.

So, always check affiliate profile and past records to filter non-spammy marketers. You can also give a chance to a newbie but make sure that they have a genuine audience with them to promote your online business.

Some of the best affiliate vendor websites are

Share a sale – Best place for serious online businesses to get smart marketers.
Affiliate Window
CJ Affiliate.
Clickbank
Peerfly
Clickfunnels
Maxbounty
Vcommision.
JVzoo- Best for e-product launches.
Warrior plus – Best for e-product launches.

So, you can go to these places and register your products and allow affiliate marketers to promote your online business in return of good affiliate commission.

Competitor analysis and strategic conclusion.

Using the above plans, you can use all the avenues of digital marketing. Create marketing strategies and schedule all your plans. Do follow a social media calendar and keep interacting with your potential customers through all media of high traffic market places. The more you are in touch with your buyers, the higher would be your trust built with time.

Whatever product or service you are scaling with your online business and brand name, make sure that your presence and interaction remain intact from all market places that suit your niche. Most of the businesses and its marketing team start with SEO and waste a major amount of time doing SEO and content marketing only. SEO should always be on priority one but you should never underestimate the power of other marketing avenues.

How to Start a New Business Online?

In the entire above block of the article, we have talked only about businesses that are live. By live I mean those online businesses which are already running but not able to generate a 10X to 100X growth. Using the above guide, it will be easy for any online business to enjoy that exponential growth that they always wanted to see but what about a new online business? How can a new business grow from scratch?

For a new online business, all the above methods and strategy would work but there are small caution points that new businesses should take care before starting their online business.

Prerequisites for starting an online business.

When you start a completely new online business then there are few basic infrastructure and resources that you need to have from day one.

Your business name. Your business name must be unique and its domain name with a .com TLD must be available. I always recommend people to have a .com TLD domain because you don’t know about the future, it may happen that your business doesn’t see a good response in your country but it may have a huge demand in some other country. So, if you have a .com domain then it will be easier for you to scale your online business internationally. I have written an article on how to choose a domain name. I strictly recommend you to read that before buying a new domain name of your business. Always prefer deciding a business name along with the availability of the domain name to it. It may happen that you decided the business name, got it registered and later you find that its .com is not available. In that case, you may use a domain broker to acquire that domain at a larger price or you don’t even get that opportunity to buy. So keep this thing in mind for sure.
Best hosting service for your business. This is a very important part of running an online business. This will be discussed later in this article but to give an overview, if you are a business, never see anything less than a VPS for hosting your online business. If you are a large scale plan then you must look for cloud hosting or dedicated hosting. But, if you just about to start then never go for shared hosting.
A good design for your website. Your website is your business identity. If you are a business then you must have a high-quality website. I would recommend you to build your website on WordPress but if you are an e-commerce business then you can either go with WordPress’s woocommerce or build a Shopify store. Later in this article, I will recommend you ways on how you can find the best website design for your business.
SEO Expert. Most of the business in this world are doing this mistake of not having an SEO expert from day one in the team. Your business’s online presence can be completely tarnished and blacklisted if your websites have poor SEO scores and your business won’t get that visibility that you always wanted to have.
Graphics team. If you can’t afford to have an inhouse graphics team then there is also an easy way to get this work done by expert outsourcing. Let me introduce you a smart graphics outsourcing team called as Manypixels. I am not recommending you manypixels randomly but this recommendation is out of my personal experience. I use manypixel services for my clients. (Not for myself, so don’t judge graphics from my website ). They can handle multiple graphics request in a day and can deliver you in a very short time. The way that they accept graphic request is amazing and they really deliver you the graphics in the form which you have visualized in your plan. That’s why I gave them good ratings on trust pilot. Just to show you guys that I use manypixel, you can check their website where they have my Trustpilot review on their homepage. My recommendation to you is only because I want you guys to avail the best services for your business.

So these were some basic prerequisite that you must have when you are ready to execute your plan for starting a business with an online presence. As stated above, Now I will be telling you how to choose the best hosting plan and the best website design for your online business website.

How to choose the best hosting plan?

For any business website, we need to have the best UI/UX that is

Highly appealing in look.
Having good navigation for providing the best user experience.
Positioning your business message properly.

But imagine that your website is meeting all these parameters but your website doesn’t load properly and the visiting users bounce back. All designs and setups will go worthless. Hence you need the best hosting service to effectively load your website for your potential customers or client.

Checklist to choose the best hosting plan.

Some of the most important consideration while choosing the hosting plans are;

The amount of disk space.
The bandwidth offered by the provider and Data transfer speed.
Number of domains that you can host.
Business Email accounts.
Privacy and security.
Technical support offered. Prefer 24*7 service.

So let us understand these aspects in detail to get the best hosting service for your online business infrastructure.

Disk Space.

Whenever you host a website on the server, it needs to have some disk space. You can consider an analogous situation like your computer. When you store multiple files on your computer hard disk, then your computer running speed starts reducing. In that case, you remove temporary files, you increase ram memory and hard disk space.

Similarly, your server should have good disk space. The higher is the Disk space, the faster will be your website loading time. Prefer having an SSD Storage disk. It provides fast data transfer.

Also, you should keep in mind, the extra space occupied by log files generated by your servers in your disk space.

Having a good SSD disk space is a prior requirement hence always keep this checklist in hand while choosing your hosting solution.

Bandwidth

Bandwidth is the amount of data that can be transferred at the same time. The Bandwidth is provided either on a limited or unlimited basis which is calculated monthly. If you consume your monthly bandwidth allowance then your website may not be able to transfer data from your servers where your data is stored in the disk to the website visitors.

Domain Hosting Limits

When you purchase any servers/hosting plan for your business, the providers give you the option of hosting a fixed to an unlimited number of domains.

Since your business will be having a unique name so you may not require more than one domain to host but having the unlimited hosting option would come to your bucket just by paying only a little extra so don’t miss out that opportunity.

Business Email accounts.

Most of the hosting service provider gives an option of business email but I can give you a free alternative to businesses who are just about to start.

Prefer using FREE Zoho Business email service as

It gives a free start of 5 business emails.
Secure and encrypted service.
Migration is available.
24/7 Customer support.
Provides integrated calendar, contacts, tasks, notes, and bookmarks within your inbox.
Team collaboration service available.
Out of office automation available.
Create group email accounts for specific teams.
Custome capacity management for emails.

So you get all these features for 5 business emails completely free. This is a very good option for newly started online business ideas. Creating a business email is always a good practice when you are serious about your online business.

You need business emails to be more professional in dealing with your clients and customers. Consider a situation where you get an email from Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon. One email comes from Jeffbezos@gmail.com and another comes from jeffbezos@amazon.com.

It is quite clear that the authentic and trusted email is jeffbezos@amazon.com and there can be any random guy on Jeffbezos@gmail.com claiming to be Jeff Bezos.

So a domain name business email creates more trust and if you can get 5 such emails for free from Zoho mail then you must get that.

Privacy and security.

Some of the security tools that your web server must include are secure servers using SSL protocol, SSL certificates, and high-quality software.

Having a secured server helps you to prevent vulnerable access to your database and all your emailers are encrypted and secured. The communication is private and doesn’t allow any vulnerabilities. Also, having an SSL secured website also helps your website rank better on the search engine.

Server Technical support.

This is a priority feature which you should look at priority one. If your service provider doesn’t have a 24/7 support then don’t look any further and simply reject opting for their service.

This is important because it may happen sometimes that your website faces downtime. By downtime I mean, your website may lose connections with the server or you may face major cache issues or anything that won’t help your website reach in the format you wanted to show to your potential viewers. This leads to business losses.

Site loading is a very primary concern. Did you now.

How One Second Could Cost Amazon $1.6 Billion In Sales

Read here to know how the site loading speed affects amazon.

Now we cannot compare a new online business with amazon. Amazon has its own web servers with a different name which we know as amazon web services or AWS. So this company is self capable of hosting their business online but if you have an online business where if we assume that you sell any product or services then you need a strong website backed by 100 percent uptime. For any technical glitches, there has to be tech support that can bring your website back to a live state without causing disruption in the services.

My Five Star rating to “WPOven Hosting”

For all the above mention, I would personally recommend WPoven to everyone. More than marketing, I believe WPoven has focused more on providing product value that’s why all its clients have been hosting their business on their managed WordPress VPS. Let us know why it is my choice.

WPOven is a Newark, Delaware United States-based Web hosting service provider for your WordPress websites. Established in 2013 which is quite an old company that is well established in this sector for providing hosting solutions for businesses.
Automatic WordPress Core updates.
Built-in server-side caching.
Robust site security.
Daily off-site backup (Amazon S3), with one-click restore.
Site staging.
Daily malware scanning.
Expert WordPress support.

Some of the unique features for which I support WPoven for hosting needs.

Unmetered traffic for a definite growth on your website.
Unlimited WordPress installation. They provide me with hosting unlimited domains on the VPS. For there basic plan also they allow unlimited installation with a minimum recommendation of 25 installations.
Built-in Analytics; Analytics is a great tool to understand the organic and non-organic traffic entering your site. WPOven gives complete monitoring on this aspect.

These small features have a big impact on my online businesses, websites, and blog. So, i can give a five-star rating to choose WPoven as your hosting provider.

How to make the best website for your online business

As we already talked about having the best UI/UX for your website to see better growth in terms of revenue. So, in this block of the article, I am going to tell you the secret of how you can create smart websites with amazing feature without any coding language.

With this secret, you will be able to design any type of website whether it is an educational portal, an eCommerce website or any kind of business website.

You can visit the website known as Envato marketplace. On this place, you can find any kind of website themes, codes. So in all, it offers digital assets for use in creative projects, with over 8 million digital products from a global community of over 6 million designers, developers, photographers, illustrators and video producers, operating across eight marketplaces. Let us know about their market place and what you can get from them.

Envato Themeforest: From this website, you can find amazing website templates that you just need to install on your servers and with customization, your online business website would be ready to go live. They provide themes for platforms like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Shopify, Magento and many more.
Envato Codecanyon: They provide you codes and script with which you can build great software and solutions and start a new product-based business. So, again this is like an easy way, to begin with, your own product that can make sales.

With the above two market places on Envato, you can build your websites and software that can support your business. I will give you a small procedural step to make your website with themes bought from Envato ThemeForest marketplace on WordPress. So here it goes.

Visit Themeforest for web templates.
Filter your search according to your requirement, for example, if you are looking for a multivendor eCommerce website then you can search for multi-vendor on ThemeForest.
Filter the result according to high ratings and sales. If the rating and sales are high for a particular theme then it must be working well for everyone.
Check if that theme has a support system so that you can get any bugs resolved. Also, check for their documentation.
Buy that theme and download all files on your system.
Install WordPress on your domain using WordPress installer on your server Cpanel.
Once the theme gets installed, Import the theme demo content.
Then read the theme documentation and edit the demo content according to the requirements of your online business.

So, that way, you create a WordPress website. I prefer WordPress for all web development projects.

Final Thought

This entire article on scaling online business has talked about tips, techniques, infrastructure requirement, analysis and research that will help any business to grow online. If you follow this entire guide with the recommendations, tools that I have suggested in this article then it will be a cakewalk for you to grow online.

When people talk about business, they assume it as a difficult affair. This mindset needs to be changed. We are in the digital age now, where making money online is not so difficult. You can share your knowledge and making your basic earing fetched easily. You just need to know how things are done. For that, there are an ample amount of resources present online already.

Stop giving an excuse for your laziness and start working from today. Your one day can push you behind million of your competitors who have the same idea which you are willing to start with. Stop investing money on buying things that are not necessary for you right now. Invest your money. Saving little, invest more. If you save more and invest less, you are bound to go backwards in the race of becoming a market leader.

Start your business career by investing more and saving less. This will change your revenue pattern and you will start saving more and investing less or having both in equal proportion once your online business grows to good levels.