Top Tips for Running a Successful Small Online Business

The power of the internet has grown exponentially in the last ten years. E-commerce has flourished, and millions of entrepreneurs worldwide can offer their services or products to an international marketplace that benefits from an extremely high number of online customers. Over 2 billion people now use the internet to buy products, and they are fully prepared to purchase from international suppliers, provided that the goods are of suitable quality, price and can be delivered in a reasonable time. This online environment is the perfect space to set up a small business and cultivate significant revenue streams. However, it must be recognized that the online marketplace is extremely competitive, and small online businesses will be competing directly with larger, more established companies. To run a small online business successfully, it is worth considering some key strategies that will boost your profitability. In this article, three top tips for running a successful small online business will be discussed. 

Use SEO best practices

Setting up a professionally designed website that displays your products effectively is one of the first steps to getting your online business up and running. It is important to understand that you must attract high volumes of online traffic to your site to allow sufficient visitors to be converted into paying customers. Put simply, if your website does not feature on the first few pages of search engine results when potential customers search for a product, you will struggle to generate high sales volumes. Consider that the top search result on Google gets approximately 25% of all clicks and it will become apparent just how important it is to rank highly on organic search results. Small online businesses need to use search engine optimization (SEO) best practices to boost their website rankings and gain more traffic. You can find detailed information on how to improve the SEO of your site by clicking here. 

When shipping products

Once you generate sufficient online traffic and your business begins to benefit from improved sales, you must consider the most efficient and cost-effective ways to ship your products to the customer. An important factor to note in shipping is when a customer purchases several goods from you in one transaction. Sending multiple packages is not the most cost-effective way to fulfill orders in this scenario. It is far better to use a large box shipping firm that can send your items for less in large boxes. This will ensure that your delivery costs remain as low as possible and profit margins can be maximized. 

Promote your site

SEO best practices will help increase visitor numbers to your site, but it is also incredibly important to promote your site online to raise awareness of your business. Promoting on social media sites such as Instagram and TikTok is an effective and relatively inexpensive way to increase traffic and custom. Create short but memorable promotional content that contains a link to click through to your website (ideally to the product page of the item that you are promoting). This will help make the purchase process easier for potential customers and allow you to benefit from a higher conversion rate of your web traffic.