6 Simple Ways to Grow Your Online Business

Unfortunately, most of us don’t have thousands of dollars to put towards marketing. However, you’ll need some kind of advertising strategy if you want to grow your online business. 

Here are 6 simple and inexpensive ways to promote your eCommerce shop online and offline.

How to Grow Your Small Online Business

Sometimes the most successful marketing strategies are free, easy to implement, or require little ongoing effort. Other times, you’ll have to sacrifice cost for simplicity and vice versa.

1. Start Writing and Delivering High-Quality Content

While developing a content strategy isn’t exactly simple, producing high-quality content is the easiest and fastest way to increase your traffic. That’s because search engine optimization (SEO) tactics that help your website get more visitors mostly rely on content creation.

SEO, unlike paid advertisements, works in the background and continues to attract visitors to your site long after you’ve optimized your content. Once you set yourself up as a subject authority, social media sites and search engines will recommend your content.

2. Diversity Your Operation and Income Streams

To grow your business, you need to diversify your operation. That means including elements in your site or social media that draw in a larger crowd or benefit from existing traffic. For example, you could start adding traditional advertising streams, like custom magnets from StickerYou.

Besides expanding your inventory or ad revenue, startups can promote a YouTube channel that helps them engage with their audience. If you work really hard at marketing your channel, you could earn additional revenue from it. In the end, diversifying can future-proof your business.

3. Integrate a Social Media Marketing Strategy

One of the best things about marketing on social media is how effective it can be without spending money. However, you can’ just make an Instagram or Twitter profile and expect people to flock to you. To be successful on social media, you need to actively engage with it. 

To start your social media marketing journey, share the content you already post on your website to social media and always add a featured image. Posts with images on LinkedIn receive 200% more engagement than text posts, so it pays to invest in high-quality photography.

4. Create a Mobile-Friendly Website Experience

As of April 2022, 58.16% of internet users worldwide access websites through their mobile smartphones. If you don’t have a website that’s responsive on mobile, you could turn away customers. Thankfully, adjusting your content for a mobile audience isn’t too difficult.

Most content management systems, like WordPress and Wix, actually help you commit to mobile-friendliness. But if you don’t know where to start, use large buttons, optimize your images for faster load times, and limit your navigation menu to a few pages and subpages. 

5. Hyperfocus on Your Target and/or Niche Market

Some businesses feel that marketing to a general audience will make them more money, but that usually isn’t true. Some cold leads may stumble upon your website and buy your products and services, but you can’t rely on them for stable growth. You need a more focused strategy.

To understand your audience better, conduct customer and competitor research. You can do this easily by looking at visitor data on your website and social platforms. Look at and study what your visitors interact with the most and what your competitors do to attract their own following.

6. Network with Other Non-Competing Influencers

Influencer marketing is all the rage, and it isn’t hard to see why. Your customers are more likely to trust a real person they follow over someone who’s looking to profit. Even though you’re both making money from this deal, influencers still win the day for being more accessible.

You can find influencers to hire on social media by searching tags for your industry. For example, if you sell workout clothes, search for “fitness guru.” Always check first if they have a product they’re already selling, be it their own or another competing business.