When you’re first starting to manage your online presence as an entrepreneur, it can be a challenge to decide what to dedicate your time to and what order you should go in to make things happen. The way that many break it down is into three categories—Website, SEO, and social marketing. This is a great way of conceptualizing what kind of online presence needs to be developed, but it is also a good way to think about the order in which you should make changes and improvements when first getting started.

A quick caveat: Before you can really get started on these three projects for developing your online presence, you really need to make sure that you have done preliminary brand development. You want to make sure that you have a good logo, the resources to build an adequate online presence, and some preliminary content development (for example, a mission statement or “about us” section). This will help to not only speed up the process of initial steps, but will also allow you to move more smoothly through the steps below.

So again, there are 3 major steps (Website à SEO à Social Marketing). If you go in the wrong order and do SEO before worrying about your website, you’ll be sending people to an unfinished website and lose their trust. If you decide to go the social route first, you won’t get nearly enough traffic to your website because you have no SEO. Consider the steps to making each of these things happen below:

#1 Build an awesome Website.

If you have been scrambling for a place to start, you can probably imagine why a website the first thing you need to do. Everything that follows in building an online presence is going to require you to build an awesome website first. You need to be able to proudly link back to your site to encourage traffic to head in your direction.

The four aspects I am going to briefly outline are in the order I would recommend doing them in to see the most success. These four aspects, like all of the other sections in this post, are also just a few of the many things that you can do. Feel free to add and adjust tasks as you see best fit for your brand or business.

  1. Web Design. Make sure that you build a site that is aesthetically pleasing, functional, and has concise/well-written content in all of the places you need it. If you are going to be building the site yourself (once you have a domain, etc) this article has some very good information for beginners. In many cases you will be working with a graphic or website designer, and you want to make sure that you share a vision with them for how the site should look. Also, make sure that regardless of which route you take that you are optimized for mobile. It is essential.
  2. E-commerce stores. Once you have a basic and fluid design for your site, you will want to begin setting up the merchant portion of your site if you are an e-commerce company. If you are an e-commerce site, you may also consider checking out this article on 20 things you can do for your e-commerce site as a small business, and keeping some of them in mind as you develop this portion of your website.
  3. If you are sitting reading this step 3, and thinking: “Our company doesn’t need a blog”—think again! Blogging has been shown to help significantly with SEO and other important aspects of achieving a reputable online presence. If you have capable writers on staff, you can begin this portion of your website in-house (if no one is willing or able to write, see #4).
  4. Hire Writers. As I mentioned above, if you do not have the ability to write content yourself, consider hiring freelance writers. It is always better if you can get someone who knows a thing or two about SEO so that they are not only writing about your business but also writing in a way that is going to boost you in search results.

#2 Focus on SEO.

The second major task, once you have your site up and running, is to start climbing the ranks of Google through SEO (or Search Engine Optimization). In many cases you may be starting completely from square one. That is more than okay—most businesses start out with no search engine optimization. There are definitely some tasks that you can begin to work on right away (just as soon as your website is developed). These are my suggestions.

In many cases you may also want to go straight to #5—hiring an SEO firm or management service.

  1. Set Up Google Analytics. Google Analytics is essential for tracking how your website is doing. You are going to want to set this up first. Google analytics is free, but now has premium version as well. This is one of the best tools available for building and understanding your audience, analyzing your metrics and site data, and is certainly an industry must-have. Once you have analytics set up, there is a ton of data you can begin to look at to consider areas of improvement. Below are five things you can begin to examine with Google Analytics:
    • Traffic sources & where your traffic is coming from.
    • Visits via social media (see the next step to get this in motion)
    • New visitor information (and why they might leave)
    • Visitor experience on your site
    • Call to Action performance
  2. Consider PPC (Pay per click). Your goal is to get new people landing on your site as frequently as possible (remember, this is why you set up an awesome website first). Pay per click (more commonly, PPC), is an internet advertising model used to direct traffic to websites. If you decided to go this route and consider PPC advertising, your business would pay the publisher (this is typically a website owner or a host of website) when the ad is clicked. If this is within your budget, I highly recommend considering starting PPC advertising as soon as possible.
  3. Consider an SEO firm. In my (slightly biased) opinion—the best thing to do is work with an SEO firm. They are experts after all, and if you are just beginning that knowledge can be extremely valuable. See our site, at No Risk SEO for more details & your first moth free.

#3 Take to Social Marketing.

Last, but certainly not least, social media marketing. Many people are confused as to why social media pages are not the first thing that you do, or why they do not go hand in hand with developing a website. My answer comes down to the quality of leads, and ultimately how your business is presented in the online world. If you wait to start social media accounts once you have set up a website and started considering SEO, you are going to have a more reputable site to link to and your audience is going to consider your business more highly.

Secondly, while social marketing is absolutely essential nowadays, it also takes an extraordinary amount of work and effort! If you are trying to Tweet, respond to Facebook comments, post to LinkedIn and worry bout all of the steps we mentioned in #1 & #2, you might be too overwhelmed. Getting the initial steps out of the way, and then launching social media presence gives you time to brand yourself in the online world, which is something a lot of businesses don’t consider doing with how easy it is to set up social media accounts.

All of these things aside, if you already have social media accounts (and followers) do not lose them. Just make sure that you make improvements as need be since you have developed your site and started working on building your online presence.

  1. Social Media Accounts & pages. Definitely set up your social media accounts as soon as you have launched your website. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Google Plus, etc. should all use your brand’s logo and look just as professional as your website.
  2. Consider launching social campaigns to get your audience excited about your business. There are a variety of ways to approach this, but once you get your accounts set up this should definitely be on your radar early on.
  3. Add Social Media Buttons. It has been my goal to convince you that setting up a website before social media accounts (unless you started off with them in the beginning) serves an important purpose about brand presentation. However, your website and social media go hand in hand! Make sure you put links to your social media pages on your website with visible buttons, once you have the accounts launched.

Develop an Ongoing Strategy

With these three initial steps in mind, you want to develop an ongoing strategy for your online presence once you have achieved the basics. Think about ways you can improve through SEO analysis, or social media campaigns you can launch to attract more traffic. Constantly develop new content for your blog and make an effort to check your analytics on a regular basis.

Is there anything you would add to the list? Let us know in the comment section below.