As a modern business owner, there are a lot of things you have to keep in mind, and it is important to present your business in the best possible way. Do as much as you can to focus on the aesthetic beauty of the business, and look at how to boost the company in a visual sense. Of course, there is much more to a business than just the way it looks, but you also have to make sure this is a decisive factor.
There’s nothing worse than going to the DIY store, spending hours picking out the paint color, decorating your room, and then deciding you hate it. You’re reminded of your bad decision every time you go in that room. Why did I choose yellow? What was I thinking? When you create your website, it comes with the same headaches. Get it wrong, and you’ll loathe it every time you enter the URL. But get it right, and you’ll have a brand you can feel proud of. One you can show off to your peers, customers and one that truly reflects the person and business you want to be.
Before we talk about influencer marketing campaigns, here’s a bit of background. If you’re familiar with my blog, you’ll know that I recently talked about how to get “natural” backlinks to your website, by writing high quality content that people feel compelled to share with their own audience. That’s a great strategy, but of course it does take time to get that snowball effect – for your post to reach the right audience, and for that audience to write about, and reference, your original post.
Choosing to be an online business can definitely have a lot of advantages. You won’t have to invest in a costly office space, after all, and all of the management fees that come with it.
It’s going to be easy to recruit skilled employees as well since they can work from anywhere in the world, first of all, and you can easily get it organised as long as you have your systems in order.
It’s a pretty incredible transition, going from being someone with a conventional 9-to-5 job and hating every minute of it, to taking the plunge and starting your own business, to not only running your own business, but actually having it be enough of a success that you then need to hire employees.
It’s been a while since I’ve done a traffic post, but on my consultancy website (LaurenLambie.com) I’ve achieved some really fantastic traffic lately so I wanted to write up a blog post to share what has been working for me – and how it can help you to. The reason I’m keen to share this is because there are no complicated SEO tactics involved at all so it really is something you can achieve yourself, even if you have a relatively new blog (LaurenLambie.com has only been around since 2016).
Please note this post may contain affiliate links. Please refer to my disclosure for more information.
There was a bit of number crunching involved here. You can see from the screenshot that this particular post (The 109 Most Popular Instagram Hashtags For Entrepreneurs) had 5849 views during that 30 day period, but I do get a lot of referrals from Pinterest (more on that in a bit). When referring to my analytics, I get around 78% of my traffic from Google, so based on that, we’re talking about around 4-5k page views just to that post, from Google. (i.e. 4562 if you assume 78% of those 5849 views came from google – it’s an assumption but it’s not far off I’d imagine).
Like I said in the intro, there was no huge SEO optimisation happening in this instance – I don’t spend a great deal of effort on things like link building to my website, for example. What I did do, however, was follow best practice. In other words, when I created that post (and all the other posts on that site) I played by the rules and created content that I knew Google would “like” (and by like, I mean that they would see it as good, authentic, high quality content).
Most of my knowledge there came from an eBook that I had read through (on recommendation) by Lena Gott, a blogger who’d managed to boost her traffic from 17k to 400k (per month) in just 10 months. I won’t list all her strategies here as it wouldn’t be fair – buy her book – it’s not a lot of money and well worth it – even applying 1 or 2 of her 21 strategies has an amazing impact on your traffic levels.
I will outline what I personally did that I think helped my SEO. Firstly, I wrote a blog post that people were already searching for. I had a broad idea that I wanted to write about Instagram hashtags, did my research on Google and Pinterest, and found that some of the most popular posts were all about lists of good hashtags. So that’s what I wrote about! It’ so tempting to just write about what you want to write about, but instead, write about the stuff your readers want to read. A bit of market research before writing a post goes a long way!
I also use Yoast, the SEO WordPress plugin, to make sure that my post scored highly from an SEO perspective – good use of keywords, good quality content, links etc. Yoast is a market leader – I’ve seen countless SEO experts recommend it. I’d say it’s a must-have plug in if you want to get any traffic from Google.
Lastly, I spent time researching and writing the post. I did the research I needed to find the relevant hashtags, and that’s valuable to people – when anyone reads that post I had saved them quite a few hours of their own research. The result? People are linking to my post as a recommendation. You remember at the top I said I don’t do link building? Well, I don’t actively go out looking for posts to link to my website, but people are reading my posts and linking to them because they’re relevant and valuable – that’s what Google wants. The lesson here? Don’t try and play the system. Always do what Google wants you to do if you want Google to send you traffic.
Now, there was a time, not so long ago, when Google wasn’t really sending me any traffic for this post, but I was still getting a lot of views to it. Most of that traffic came from Pinterest, and it’s no coincidence that it’s one of my most popular posts on Pinterest, or that – as of the time of writing this – it has over 3000 social media shares. Here’s a screenshot:
I think this has been incredibly useful to Google when they are trying to determine whether they should rank my content. And that’s one of the reasons why I use Pinterest. Sure, the traffic from there is good, but Google traffic is great, and one seems to boost the other. Pinterest is me making a long term investment in my blog posts, making sure they get consistent traffic, month in, month out. And should something bad happen to Pinterest, I will still get the traffic from Google.
Now, don’t just stick a pin on Pinterest and hope it sends you traffic. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that (I can testify to that; I’ve used Pinterest for years but it’s only in the last 2 years it’s really sent me traffic – because I’ve had a proper Pinterest strategy in place. Again, much too much to talk about in this post but that strategy came from a blogger called Carly who writes the blog Mommy on Purpose – you can purchase her eBook here (side note: before reading her eBook I took a far more expensive, premium course in Pinterest, but read Carly’s eBook after it was recommended multiple times – the expensive course – which I won’t name – allowed me to start seeing a few hundred Pinterest referrals – but Carly’s eBook turned that into thousands).
I’ll link to those two eBooks again. I’ll also link to a couple of good posts on this blog which you can read that cover different aspects to SEO.
For a solid, proven pinterest strategy: Carly’s fantastic Pinteresting Strategies eBook
A basic SEO post for the complete beginner: Do You Ignore SEO? This Blog Post Will Change Your Mind
Starting a business from nothing and making it a success is truly a remarkable achievement and can give you a feeling of accomplishment like no other. When you first start up at home, you tend to take on all things yourself. You keep the costs low from working out of your home, you tackle all aspects of the business and you work hard. But often after a while, this business can outgrow just you, and the option of expanding becomes a real possibility. If you are at this stage, then these are the options you have.