5 Ways to Promote Your Vegan Business Online

The strategies behind promoting a vegan business on the Internet are not much different than any other conventional business. However, because the universal vegan community is so strong, it can often be easier finding relevant online communities, networking and relationship opportunities, and exposure on other websites.

All of these elements, combined with a solid web presence, can help increase the visibility and growth of your vegan business in many ways. Below we delve into five of those ways, and how you can actively leverage each of these strategies to expand your traffic potential and grow your company.

Establish & Optimize Your Web Properties

First and foremost, it’s vital to have specific web properties to represent your online business. The most common, and often most effective, is a website. Other assets include social media profiles (such as your company’s Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest pages,) as well as your Google My Business listing and other directory profiles (such as Yelp.)

The type of vegan business you operate will dictate your ideal web properties. For instance, if you sell vegan products and you’re trying to build your brand, then you may want to have a website and social media presence on Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. However, if you operate a local business, then you could get away with having only a Google My Business page.

Overall, it’s best to have a website and few social media profiles that best represent your audience. You can even leverage “optimizing” these web properties to be better found in search. For a good example of this, see JustCBD and its online presence.

Be Found in Search

Going back to the local business example, there are certain ways you can optimize your website and Google My Business listing. Otherwise known as search engine optimization, or SEO, there are specific strategies that help increase your business’ search ranking in Google.

In other words, you can optimize aspects of your site and Google My Business listing for specific keywords that reflect your business (i.e. “vegan restaurants in Seattle” or “vegan cat food.”) To learn specific strategies, then Beginner’s Guide to SEO from Moz is a good resource.

As for non-local businesses, choose your keyword targets wisely. It’s often hard to outrank Amazon.com and other high-authority websites. So if you’re thinking about optimizing your website for “vegan protein,” you should probably consider taking that further with something like “organic vegan protein supplement,” "vegan protein powders without stevia" or “vegan paleo protein powder” depending on what it is that you sell. Understanding your potential rank for keywords surrounding vegan protein powders is vital to your success.

Grow Your Online Footprint

One factor that’s going to help your site rank higher in Google is links directing from other sites. In essence, the more links pointing to a site, the greater credibility and authority that site will earn. For this reason, you should invest a great deal of your efforts conducting outreach and further your business presence on other websites.

Grow the online footprint for your vegan business by following some of these action items:

• Get listed on local and business directories. Yelp.com, Yellowpages.com, Yahoo! Local, and Bing are good places to start for local directories. Beyond local, search around for vegan directories or other communities related to your product/service/cause/etc.
• Be active on social media platforms and engage with influential people, businesses, and brands that resonate with you and your company. Establishing relationships can result in wider exposure in front of new audiences (i.e. an industry influencer with 100k twitter followers retweets an article you wrote.)
• Reach out to other vegan websites for networking, sponsorships, link exchanges, and guest blogging opportunities. Contributing to other websites can help increase your online footprint all while generating some quality links back to your website.

Produce Content Regularly

To truly become an authority figure in your online vegan niche, I strongly suggest producing content on a regular basis. Whether that be weekly articles, a monthly video, or a combination of mediums, establish some type of content schedule and stick to it.

This can be both an enjoyable and creative aspect to growing your business. Coming up with great ideas for content marketing is not only fun, but highly effective for SEO and online exposure. When you produce interesting content that gains the likes and shares of your social media audience, you can really empower your company’s growth potential.

Whether it's having a blog for publishing product review posts or a YouTube channel to shoot video reviews, you can get creative by proucing content on products and topics you want to push, such as reviews on Garden of Life RAW protein powder reviews or Vega Sport Protein powder reviews.

Stay Engaged on Social Media

Helping to facilitate the efficacy of your content marketing and outreach efforts is social media. In addition to being found in search, having a strong social media presence is the bee’s knees to building your vegan business.

Like we alluded to above, invest in handful of social media platform that reflect your business model and target audience. If it makes sense to be on SnapChat, Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+, then do it. But if Instagram and Facebook are all that you need, then so be it. Unless you have advanced social media automation tools or social media savvy employee, managing all these platforms can be time consuming.

It’s time consuming because regularly posting and sharing content; reaching out and connecting with new people and brands; and engaging with your audience by responding to their comments; these are variables that define a stellar business.    

Author Bio

Tyler Tafelsky is a search marketing specialist with eight years of experience in the profession. Tyler is an advocate of plant-based living and leads an active role in the fitness community. His current projects are Better Triathlete where he writes about bikes, training, and recovery.

Image credit: Mayumi T. Photography

3 Tips to Start Cultivating a Business Web Presence Today

Every marketer knows that building a web presence is a must - but not every marketer knows how to go about it. While a website is good foundation, there are a number of ways to cultivate a greater web presence that can help grow business.

Here are three simple tips that will help you expand your company's web presence and allow you to increase both the visibility and profitability of your online brand.

1. Optimize Your Site Properly

Most people are familiar with the idea of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), but that alone is not enough to build a successful and effective web presence. Of course, it is one of the things that's necessary, so you shouldn't neglect it.

These days, Google isn't interested in rewarding content that's stuffed with keywords at the expense of readability. In fact, it will be heavily penalized. If you want your site to top the search results, write content that's engaging and relevant, and make sure any keywords flow naturally with the other text.

However, attracting new traffic to your site is not enough. If visitors simply read what you've written, shrug their shoulders, and move on, then you've failed. You need to take that traffic and turn it into leads - and then take those leads and convert them into sales.

How do you do this? By giving them a clear, strong message about what you can offer them. Don't bombard people with walls of text. Instead, tell them in one sentence what your business offers that your rivals can't. Use simple words and easy-to-understand concepts, and avoid overly technical terms. Web presence optimization companies like Web Presence Group suggest that using Schema mark-up is also an effective way to optimize your website for better SEO performance.

2. Use the Power of Social Media

Building a really solid web presence doesn't only mean promoting your business on the web itself. Some sources now suggest that more people use social media every day then use the web - and if you're not also using it, you're missing out on a huge potential market.

Your competitors won't be making that mistake, so getting involved in the world of social media is a must. There are many networks out there, but only a few have real power to help your business grow. These include:

• Facebook - the world's largest social network, with over one billion users around the world.
• Twitter - fast-moving and anarchic, this makes a great place to seed viral marketing campaigns.
• YouTube - for targeting young people, nothing beats a well-made video. Keep it short, though!
• LinkedIn - you can't advertise directly here, but it's perfect for building business contacts.
• Pinterest - creative and slightly more female centric, this image-focused platform offers highly effective advertising.

3. Develop Your Content Strategy

However great your business and what it offers may be, if your promotional strategy consists of nothing more than a few pages on your website, you're not likely to succeed. If you have a good product to sell, then take it to other outlets, too.

One of the best options is blogging. Many people who aren't likely to visit a dedicated website are interested in reading bite-sized chunks of information on a regular basis. Post something every day about an aspect of your business and you can get your message across without overwhelming them.

Press releases are also worth publishing, since getting one picked up by business news sources will effectively provide you with free advertising. You shouldn't keep too narrow a focus on your own business, though, as this can come across as spamming. To build a really popular web presence, make yourself known as an authority in your field. Publish short, interesting, unique pieces about your industry, or about some of the people who make your business great. Human interest stories are always popular!

Web Presence Optimization: The New SEO?

SEO, as a field in which webmasters strive to boost the traffic of a page by making it appear higher on Google searches, has long been an important form of Internet marketing. Recently, however, the broader field of web presence optimization or WPO has become the most attractive and interesting way to bring more traffic to a site. 

The basic concern is that SEO itself may be too narrow, and WPO does a better job at tapping into multiple methods and media to increase traffic. In this post, we will talk about contemporary WPO strategy, and how important it has become for e-commerce.

WPO: The Evolution of SEO

The underlying difference is that SEO is centered on the site itself. It might include all kinds of content on the website, tweaking different design elements and testing out different strategies to determine the best configuration. In contrast, web presence optimization expands the focus to all elements of a brand's presence on the Internet. That includes content like social media posts, posts on offsite blogs, and advertisements. More and more frequently, the idea of content marketing has become central to online marketing. Content marketing involves using strong, organic, and original content to attract visitors and traffic. 

So, a business that is focused primarily on selling skincare products might, for example, create a detailed article centered around providing tips for better skincare for men. This will open the door for the business’ target market to naturally find their way to the site, without having to get hassled by annoying advertisements. Normally, content marketing uses onsite content to draw in eyeballs, but the idea of WPO opens up the possibility of deploying content that will send traffic to the brand's site from offsite locations.

SEO has always been an important part of the overall marketing strategy for brands with online presence, but it doesn't say much about any off-site content. WPO is a more useful way to characterize online marketing, because it encompasses the ability of a brand to deploy content anywhere on the Web. This has already been an important element in content marketing. The main showcase of content marketing is usually the on-site blog, but building an audience for that blog requires venturing off-site and making guest posts in more prominent blogs in the field. That is just one example of a link between offsite and onsite marketing that leads to increased traffic.

Integrating Social Media & Content Marketing

Social media provides another simple example. There are many ways to use social media for marketing purposes, but one of the most important aspects of successful social media usage is applying the media channels to direct readers or viewers to the brand's website. This might be done by using social media to announce sales and deals, to link to new content, create a personal connection to the brand, or any other method. The key, however, is that the social media accounts belonging to a brand always provide redirecting links to the brand's primary web presence. Each post is an opportunity to forge a connection to the reader and bring them closer to the brand.

Social media isn't the only way to direct people to the site. Content such as videos and ads can appear offsite and still attract traffic. It's fairly clear how advertising works—properly designed and placed ads induce clickthroughs to the main site. Content in aggregators like Youtube provide an alternative method. The goal is still to produce content that attracts traffic, but it isn't the same as advertising. Ads need to fit fairly specific constraints: video ads cannot exceed a certain length, and the same goes for the size of text or image ads. Youtube content can be freeform, offering new ranges of opportunities to reach people with the brand's message.

SEO itself fits in well with the idea of mixing onsite and offsite content. SEO excels at bringing people to the site via search engine results. The more people use external content to reach the site, the higher it will rank on Google searches, so there is a large degree of synergy between SEO and offsite marketing methods. Far from being a binary choice between two different methods, offsite work and SEO are actually two kinds of marketing that work best when used together.

The general umbrella of web presence optimization unitesSEO, offsite content, and other brand-focused forms of online marketing. Investing in all forms of marketing within WPO presents strong synergistic benefits that mean it is much more beneficial to put some time and effort into many areas than to focus on just one. Balancing and timing investment in campaigns of various types can massively boost traffic for any brand.

3 Ways to Improve Your Company's Web Presence

While many marketing teams invest their time and resources in SEO and optimizing their company's presence in Google, it's common to overlook other non-SEO aspects of a web presence (that can actually contribute to better SEO results.)

If you're doing SEO or Internet marketing for a business or online brand, then it's important to embrace many forms of web presence optimization. Below we discuss five ways/channels/strategies to better improve your company's web presence.

Be Prolific on Social Media

A couple years ago, many businesses were hesitant to establish a presence on social media. Now, social platforms have become integral to marketing, advertising, and creating a voice on the web. In essence, managing a prolific social media presence is essential in web presence management for companies.

Consider every possible social media network out there (Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.) Be prolific and establish a presence on every social network that seems even remotely relevant to the company. Even if you don't have the labor force or resources to keep a Pinterest account active, simply having a profile for your company will provide a link back to your site which can help with SEO.

However, having active and socially-popular social profiles can make your inbound marketing and SEO efforts more powerful. Not only do your social profile links have greater rank-juice, but the content you share on social media (i.e. a blog post from your website) can have greater potential to get more likes, tweets, pins, +1's, and other valuable social signals that define credible content.

Establish a Content Strategy

Parallel to the last point about sharing content on social media, another powerful form of inbound marketing (and a supplement to SEO) is content marketing.

The beauty behind crafting a content strategy is that you can exercise a high level of creativity.

First, define the type of content that your company is capable of creating. You can keep it traditional with articles and blog posts, or delve into richer media like video and graphics.

Next, define the topics of the content you want to convey. What problems, questions, solutions, or other subject matter do you want to cover in your content.

Lastly, produce and publish your content, and share it relentlessly via social media. For SEO, sometimes it's good cover topics that are semantically-relevant to your keyword targets. For instance, if you operate a computer repair company that provide virus removal services, an article or video on how to troubleshoot and remove basic computer viruses.

This educational approach helps to make your company more credible and trusted. It also helps in expanding your web presence optimization efforts.

Get Listed 

Especially important for local businesses, get listed on directories like Yelp, Yahoo! Local, Bing, Google+ Local, and the many other online directories is very key to improve your company's web presence.

Many of these directories provide a link back to your site (good for SEO.) Additionally, many directory profile pages have the capacity to rank in Google and generate traffic to your business, especially Yelp pages and other powerful listings for local businesses/local SEO.

This is just a big picture perspective when it comes to optimizing and managing your company's web presence. There are number of more specific strategies worth exploring. But by investing your resources in these three channels, your company can better thrive on the web.

5 Cornerstones to Successful SEO Campaigns

In order to have a successful SEO campaign, there are several decisions, actions, tweaks and changes that will be required in order to ensure the user receives the right information. SEO and online marketing is a never ending pursuit which has evolved over the years and experts have come to know that what worked yesterday, is not what will work today.

Despite the frequent shift in online marketing strategies, there are five cornerstones that remain constant and ensure that an SEO campaign is successful. Using these cornerstones will ensure that have you more traffic to your website.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is a powerful avenue that has grown in popularity over the years with the increase in the number of social networks. Over the years, the internet has grown and with its tremendous growth, it has led to the emergence of search engines, web platforms and social networks.

Social media networks today have become the means of interaction between global users. SEO experts utilize social media marketing in order to increase traffic to one’s website, as well as build brand authority and social signals (which help to promote greater credibility and rankings.). There are several ways of ensuring social media marketing is successful and they include creating a business page, targeting the right followers and constant interaction with followers.

Content Marketing

Quality content today is vital for the survival of any web platform. Users everyday are looking for information from tips, steps of doing something and general advice. Quality content not only helps to increase traffic to your website but it also helps your website to be ranked highly on search engines.

SEO experts define quality content by:

• informative and useful to the users
• newness and relevance
• quality, value, and accuracy
• search engine friendly or keyword relevant for SEO

Experts employ experienced writers who are able to provide quality content which has the right keyword density, right information and it’s written in legible English. For instance, if a company is doing SEO for surgeons, they may want to offer insights into the local SEO landscape and some of the things surgeons (and their marketing teams) can be doing in-house to help promote their website. Because in most cases of SEO for surgeons, local strategies like citation optimization and directory listings are momentous for SEO.

Brand Building

This is a strategy where experts help to improve and increase your business brand recognition to users online. A brand is known to be an emotional and psychological connection that customers have with a business products and services.

Experts can help to improve brand recognition by improving user experience, ensuring that the customers are fulfilled, through content and social media.

Web Optimization 

Recent changes by major search engines such as Google and Bing has led to the focus on mobile friendly websites. According to experts, a website that is not mobile friendly loses 25,000 users every day.

Experts advice website owners to convert their website to be mobile friendly. This can be achieved easily by utilizing responsive frameworks and implementing the top web presence optimization strategies.

Link Popularity

This refers to having website links that are pointing towards your site and they are located on other websites. Link popularity has been a critical component that has been utilized by experts to increase a website ranking on search engines.

Experts accomplish link popularity by having your links on highly credible websites rather than a high quantity of sketchy sites. This helps to improve your ranking as well as increase traffic to your website.

Go Beyond Ecommerce SEO With Web Presence Management Services

For an ecommerce site to thrive on the web, it is important that it makes use of various comprehensive marketing and promotion strategies. Though many online stores have made heavy investments in ecommerce SEO services and strategies, just SEO along may not be enough to survive the stiff competition.

In addition to ecommerce SEO services, a more complete solution is found through web presence management services which focus on a more strategic approach to both brand-building and web marketing. A strong web presence management is defined by five major pillars. Below we delve into each of these pillars and how to orchestrate a more all encompassing approach that goes beyond a standard ecommerce SEO service program.

1. Search Marketing

It is the process of gaining visibility and traffic from search engines, through various paid as well as unpaid efforts. It encompasses Organic SEO and Pay Per Click (PPC).

• Organic SEO includes techniques and methods to obtain a high ranking on a search engine results page that are unpaid and algorithm-driven. Various popular strategies like optimizing for keywords, writing high-quality content, and building backlinks fall under this category.
• PPC advertising is a highly successful method of capturing quality exposure of search engines for certain keywords which drives profitable traffic to the website. Web presence management services can include the creation of PPC advertising accounts, as well as the optimization and management of previously existing PPC accounts to boost their performance.

2. Content Marketing

Creation and promotion of excellent and significant content acts as a big step in attracting quality leads. Blogging is one of the most popular content marketing techniques. Web presence management services promote the e-commerce brand by making use of various opportunities pertaining to content marketing, ranging from blogging & articles to illustrations, images, graphics, and videos.

3. Social Media Marketing

Making use of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to build and promote communities and relationships with users is known as Social Media Marketing. It involves creating attention-seeking content that is worth sharing. Over the time, social media marketing has gained significance for establishing long-lasting connections with the target audience.

Investing in web presence management services can aid in overall brand promotion and awareness. The website marketing team, together with the web service managing experts can together work to create an optimal approach for managing the social media pressure that the brand is facing.

4. Reputation Management

It is important that a brand's or website's image is positive on the Internet. A web presence management program from www.WebPresenceGroup.net ensures just that. It involves various techniques like publishing press releases, positive review generation and optimizing the company's web presence on various popular platforms like Google+, Facebook, Foursquare, and many more.

Some other useful forms of reputation management are timely responds to customer complaints, using the customer feedback for future developments, and making sure that no incorrect information regarding the e-commerce brand persists on the Internet.

5. Analytics, Performance Tracking & Reporting

The web presence management service providers analyze various rankings and the performance of your e-commerce brand to create a report which is used to improve the services and the marketing of your brand in order to get more leads. The analysis and tracking includes - finding the website’s conversion rate, calculations of the total number of orders placed, unique buyers, most selling products, and total revenue generated.

By making use of web presence management services, your online ecommerce brand gains the chances to thrive and succeed among its competitors. Using these services provides you with a web presence that's not only well-geared for SEO and search marketing, but also one that's top of mind with your target market.

Website Optimization: The Path to Empowered Entrepreneurship

The competitive online environment for most industries and professions is growing in intensity. With business to consumer interaction becoming even more online-based, the need for a quality, well-optimized web presence is essential to survive.

Most marketers and business owners realize the importance of owning a website, but many fail to learn power of website optimization and SEO. That is, they neglect the investment of optimizing their websites to attain greater exposure in the search engine results.

There are many considerations that go into a well optimized website. In this post, we'll break apart a few of the most important considerations that smart marketers and business owners can take full advantage of.

Website Optimization: Higher Performing Websites That Are Visible in Search

A well optimized website addresses two primary components:

• The website's mark-up language
• The website's keyword relevancy

The complete picture of website optimization involves a spectrum of skill-sets. The web developer must build the site so that the back-end's mark-up language is crawler friendly for SEO. This usually involves the use of certain coding techniques as well as scripting technologies.

The second component of website optimization focuses on establishing keyword relevancy in the website's content. Otherwise known as on-page optimization, this process requires researching the best keywords and infusing them in various areas throughout the website's content. There's a wealth of resources on the web for website optimization and help doing SEO.

Entrepreneurial Advantages of Website Optimization

Having a well optimized website can offer many advantages for your business. A professionally developed and keyword optimized site has the potential to increase your site's chances of being found in the organic search listings. This can be further magnified when working with a professional website optimization company that can offer link building and SEO copywriting resources.

An attractive looking website can also be a great candidate for Pay Per Click advertising. Local PPC in particular is a highly effective means for more website traffic. One company that's dominating the niche for local Internet marketing and web design is Peoria web design company OIC Group.

OIC Group specializes in Peoria web design services coupled with local Internet marketing strategies that center on search engine optimization, Pay Per Click advertising, and social media marketing. They can also help you untap that potential behind blogging for you business. By designing a blog on you website, you can write and share compelling articles about what your company has to offer.

In today's digital marketing era, pursing opportunities in website optimization and Internet marketing is a must. The marketing channels have progressed, and only strong, adapting businesses are surviving the changes. There are a wealth of ways to grow you web presence, to strategize wisely.

Creating a Cohesive Website Optimization for Your Company

The true prupose behind website optimization extends far beyond the traditional practices of search engine optimization (SEO). That is, there's much more to website optimization than keyword optimizing a web pages and building links, all in an effort to attain greater search engine exposure.

Although your company's website optimization strategy should indeed focus on SEO, it should also equally include the practice of Conversion Rate Optimization, (or "CRO").

CRO is the art and science of crafting and fine-tuning your website for better performance after visitors land your website. The primary goal here to maximize the value of your traffic to generate the greatest conversions and thus leads/customers to your company.

So what are the elements that your company's website optimization strategy include? Below is a list of some of the components you'll want to consider when developing a true website optimization strategy for your company.

• Website Usability: how well users interact with your website's functionality
• User Interface: the design, structure, navigation, and overall layout of your website
• Website Load Speed: the quickness in which pages load on your website
• Crawlability: the efficiency in which your website is crawled and indexed (lack or presence of HTML errors, Flash media, etc.)
• Keyword Relevancy: how well keywords are used throughout your website for SEO purposes
• Page Copy: how fluid and strong the readable text is on your web pages
• Media: use of videos and images to help establish value and meaning on your website
• Calls-to-Action: graphics, buttons, and text that motivate users to take action

These are just a few elements that your company's website optimization strategy should include. To learn more about how to develop a cohesive website optimization campaign for your company, visit WebPresenceGroup.net, a leading website optimization company that provides free audits for qualified companies.