To build your online presence in 2022 with all the options available can get pretty frustrating. It’s not just about choosing the right platform and the right tools. It’s also about building the right strategy. This includes knowing what audience you’re reaching out to, and what you’re trying to build.
Whether it’s a brand, a physical product or a virtual service, you’ll need to master certain techniques to build your presence effectively and organically.
So, here is a comprehensive guide to not only building, but increasing your online presence in 2022.
The Basics
Without brushing up on the basics, you won’t be able to take the next step. These may seem pretty mundane and tedious to you right off the bat, but they’re essential first steps.
1. Create a Website
If you’re building a brand, at times it’s not enough to have an Instagram or Facebook page. You need to have a build a website presence that is all your own. Whether your website is minimalistic or extravagant, some sort of presence away from social media can benefit you.
Whether this can serve as a marketplace for your products or a blog for conversations with your audience is your choice. You can make more of your own rules on your website. You can show off more of your videos, images, etc. Also, you can customize exactly how you want everything to look.
Of course, creating your own website means that you’ll have to invest in a CMS (read below).
2. Build Email Lists for Niche Clients
Building an email list is not just to send New Year’s and Christmas greetings to your consumers. It’s about engaging with your potential customers and website visitors on a regular basis. This could be monthly, or weekly, depending on your goals.
You can even start sending out a newsletter to promote developments for your personal brand. Even if your brand is simply your own content, and not a product. This is very useful. Again, this goes back to investing in a good CMS to create forms, slide-in-CTAs, etc.
All this can go a long way to acquiring a loyal, and active audience.
3. Work On Your SEO Basics
SEO basics have been evolving ever since Google was a search engine. Today, SEO is about more than just longtail keywords and the right headings. It’s about contributing meaningful, useful, actionable content to your website. This doesn’t just improve your overall SEO but makes your website more authoritative.
SEO is also about website design today. It’s more than just optimizing your website for mobile devices. It’s about optimizing your website to be more responsive and load faster.
All these things play into the overall SEO score for your website. Which in turns translates into greater traffic for your website. That is the one thing you can’t forsake if you want to build your online presence in 2022.
4. Engage with Your Customers Regularly
This doesn’t mean you need to spam your customers with new content all the time. On the contrary. You should look for what your customers like and engage them about that. You should also ask questions, and comment on threads where your customers are active the most.
This shows them that you care, and most importantly, that you’re present while they’re engaging with your content This makes you a more sincere presence in their world rather than just a seller or influencer.
5. Analyze Results and Incorporate Insights
If you take away anything from this article, it’s that constant improvement and self-reflection is essential. Experimenting and trying out new ways to engage with your audience is great. However, more important than that is looking at the results and reassessing the situation.
Use Google Analytics, or your own SEO trackers, and Facebook social media tools, etc. categorize your strategies as successes or failures. However, it’s what you do beyond that, that’s important. Take the lessons learned after an experiment and use them to improve your engagement, and to build your brand.
6. Build a Wide Social Media Presence
It’s important to use social media platforms which serve your purpose, as well as where your audience is. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, whatever the platform may be, you should try it. This will at least show you where your audience resides. That way, you can focus on the social media platforms which matter.
At least that way, you won’t leave out great opportunities simply because you never tried.
Now that we’re done with the basics, let’s talk about going above and beyond to increase your online presence in 2022.
Go Above and Beyond
7. Build Your Presence on New Forums
New social media platforms emerge all the time. Be an early adopter and cash in on the benefits of being one. Not all platforms will be slam dunks, of course. However, if you don’t become an early adopter, you may lose out on reaching out to a new audience. You may also lose out on learning a lot as well.
It’s the latter which is the most important. You can learn more from your failures than your successes. Reaching out to new social media platforms and forums is the best way to widen your reach. It’s the best way to find new audiences where you never knew there could be.
8. Produce Actionable, Unique Content Regularly
As mentioned before, SEO has become more about actionable, useful content than keywords. Hence, if you can produce useful, actionable content for your audience, you will stay relevant and build on your brand.
This content can be in the form of entertainment, useful tips, interesting content, or a new product. Just know the audience you’re speaking to, and put a unique spin on your content. That last part is important because you will more than likely produce content that is already out there. So, the only way to stand out is to put a unique spin on it. To put your own brand on it.
9. Build a Brand
This is what we’ve been talking about all this time. It’s not all about promoting your products or services, believe it or not. It’s about establishing a connection with your audience that shows them who you are and what you stand for.
Every brand has a philosophy and an image which its customers perceive, but may not be able to fully explain. This can come across in its logo, its slogan, or even its general presence online. You need to cultivate that philosophy and image for yourself. Instead of having that philosophy being imprinted on to you, you need to control that conversation.
So promote your brand online with your posts, your messages, or logos, your images, etc.
10. Use Online Advertising
Online advertising gets a bad reputation at times for being a shortcut for growth. However, there’s nothing better if you want to promote a specific event or a specific product. Pay per click marketing and social media promotions are the best way to introduce yourself to new people. With a new audience can come new engagement. And with new engagement can come new traffic and a boost in sales or revenue. You can’t pass up that opportunity.
11. Partner with Other Brands
You need to develop a close relationship with other brands in your industry. It’s always better to make friends than enemies in your own space. You’ll always have competitors, but this doesn’t have to turn into a fight. Not everyone has to be Coke and Pepsi.
You should go to other influencers’ podcasts or even guest post on different websites. Not only will that improve your chances of engaging with new audiences, but also increase your online presence in 2022.
The podcast and the guest post are like the new articles and talk shows now. Like an article in the New York Times would’ve made you famous way back when, the right guest post can do the same. Of course, it will only do this for a select audience. Yet, the opportunity is too great to pass up.
Similarly, a podcast can be like a late night show appearance for you. Millions of people potentially watch podcasts today. If they are made aware of your presence, that could mean gold for you.
Influencer Marketing is the Future
Finally, let’s get to influencer marketing.
12. Reach Out to Influencers
Influencers are like small islands of activity in the ocean of the internet. Their audiences are engaged, loyal and excited. Each influencer can be a like an entire channel within themselves. That’s why you need to invest in relationships with them. They can provide marketing for you that no other platform can.
Also, influencers can give you flexibility in your budget. Marketing to a large audience of thousands of subscribers or followers can be much cheaper than using traditional marketing methods. Influencers with millions of subscribers are now a dime a dozen. Those with hundreds of thousands of subscribers are even greater in number.
This means you can use a limited budget to market to your audience.
13. Don’t Forget TikTok
TIkTok is a rising social media platform that already rivals the communities on Instagram and Facebook. Hence, you shouldn’t forget to invest there. Influencer communities are being built there which dwarf communities on other platforms depending on the country.
Automate Mundane Tasks
Finally, let’s talk about automating mundane tasks. This is something which you will eventually need when your presence becomes large enough. Automating tasks like posting and scheduling content is only logical. It’ll give you more time to focus on things which are important like new ideas and new experiments.
There are two basic things you need to do for this.
14. Invest in a Good CMS
A good CMS will allow you to schedule posts, engage with your customers, gain insights from data, etc. All that data can be put to good use to create new ideas. With a good CMS, you’ll essentially get a bird’s eye view of everything that you’re working on. This means that all the lessons you’ll need to learn and all the data you’ll need to gather will all be in one place at one time. This is an opportunity that you shouldn’t pass up. In fact, if you do pass it up, you can guarantee failure, or a reduction of your online presence in 2022.
15. Invest in a Reliable Content Creation Service
The second biggest investment you need to make is in a content creation service. Eventually when your operation becomes big enough, you’ll need to produce content on a scale which is bigger than your current churnout rate. You’ll need help to do that. Content creation services can give you content to post for weeks, if not months in advance.
With these tips, you can build your online presence in 2022 effectively. Just remember to learn from your mistakes, learn new skills, and post regularly. If you do that, you can guarantee an organic reach that will grow more and more.
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