Many businesses had to turn to online marketing and sales during the Covid pandemic as their physical shop or business premises had to shut down. The businesses that were able to continue trading could only do so virtually so a website or social media accounts were vital.

As we see lockdown restrictions lifted and more and more people being able to resume more of a normal life, it may be that you feel your online business is not needed anymore, but there is always a need for online marketing. It may be that some of your customers are not local to you so would never of used you had it not been for your virtual presence. Often the biggest cost in time and money is the initial set u of a website or social media profiles. Once all this hard work has been done, it makes sense to keep them running. You want to give your customers and potential customers many different ways of communicating with you and making a purchase from you. Even after all social distancing measures have been removed, there may be some people that still do not feel confident going out in to shops yet, so it is important to offer them other options.  

At present online marketing is even more important than ever. Many retails still have not been able to open their doors since we went in to a second lock down and some shoppers are still shielding meaning that ll their shopping is now having to be done online. In order to get a piece of the pie you need to make sure that your website and products can easily be found on the search engines such as Google.

One way to instantly improve your rankings for some of you main keywords / phrases is to set up a PPC campaign. PPC stands for Pay Per Click and is a form of online marketing. You essentially set up adverts online that people can click on to be taken through to a specific page on your site. You then pay a fee for each time the advert is clicked. This can increase your traffic in minutes and help you compete against some large businesses.

It can be relatively easy to set up a PPC campaign but making it affective can be a different matter. You do need to know a what you are doing when it comes to setting them up. If you are not going to be using an agency to help you then you need to have a good read through all of the information about the different settings for campaigns and ads/ ad groups.

If you are thinking about building a directory website, there are a lot of things to consider. You need to think carefully about how your website is going to work. Are you going to charge a fee for people to create a listing for their business or are you going to charge to sell advertising space around the site, or maybe you chose to do both. It can be hard to make money from a directory website, especially to start with as you will need to prove to people that it is successful before they will want to part with any money to be advertised on there.

Often directory websites have to start off small and then over time as the site grows in popularity, you can start to charge more money. You will need to have a decent budget in which you can pay your graphic designer, programmer and hosting.

It is important to work out how you are going to enable people to list on it as you probably want it to be as automated as possible. You can buy prebuilt systems out there that you can then adapt to work how you want it to. They will usually have payment gateway options already installed.

Websites analytics can be so important when it comes to improving your site. Most servers have some sort of analytics package installed on them but often these are not very user friendly and only give you basic information. You should start by installing A stats package such as Google Analytics. This software is easy to use and gives you access to a huge amount of data that can be vital to improving your site and increasing sales.

There are a number ways in which you can use this data to your advantage. Looking at the sources of traffic to your site and allow you to see how people are finding you. It can also tell you how successful other areas of your marketing are. For example, you can see the number of referrals from social media sites such as Facebook.

Bounce rates are important too as they tell you if visitors are leaving your site within a fe seconds of landing on a page. If this is happening you need to investigate why. It may be that the page in questions is not loading correctly or is not related to the search term that it is showing up for. All of this will help you improve your site as and when needed.

The recent Covid pandemic has pushed many businesses in to having to go online. It has made them have to adapt their businesses much more quickly and move fast if they want to keep up with the competition. The number of new domain names registered over the past 12 months has shot up as new businesses have started up and existing businesses that did not have a web presence has realised the importance of trading online.

With so many people being furloughed or working from home, many people have finally found the time to start looking into other business ventures. It may be that they have been making something as a hobby for some time now, but never really got to sell their products. Working from home has given people the perfect opportunity to try out these new ventures and get their ideas and products to market. A certain amount of these business unfortunately wont last or will close when working returns to normal, but for some it has been a life changing experience and allowed them to make a lot of money. For those businesses who are already established, trading online is likely to be here to stay now and they will be able to and another avenue to their marketing opportunities.