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8 Ways to Improve Your Online Presence in 2023

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A robust online presence is crucial to the success of your business.

Regardless of the kind of business you operate, there are many things you can gain from having a strong online presence. With a powerful online presence, you can boost brand awareness, increase leads and increase sales. So, as we are moving closer to 2023, every business must plan to take its online presence to the next level.

In this post, we will explain some important things every business should do to improve its online presence in 2023.

Build a user-friendly, attractive website

When creating an impressive online presence in 2023, the importance of having a website cannot be overemphasized. Your website can make it easier for people to know what you are capable of offering them. Additionally, it can tell people more about your work process, work hours, location, contact information and lots more.

But you shouldn’t just create any site. It must be user-friendly and visually appealing. This is because the expectations of consumers are high nowadays. As a result, they will not waste their time on a low-quality, hard-to-navigate website. So, you should hire the service of experienced website developers and designers to ensure your site meets the required standard.

Use SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a digital marketing strategy for increasing your brand’s visibility in search results. As your website ranks higher in search results, more people will be able to come across your brand. Therefore, SEO can make a big difference in your online presence.

To optimize your site for SEO in 2023, you should invest in finding the most relevant keywords. Afterward, use the keywords appropriately and naturally in your headers, meta description, blog content, social media posts, etc.

Also, you shouldn’t forget the three most crucial aspects of SEO, which are:

When done correctly, SEO will help you to reach more potential customers, thus, boosting your online presence.

Take advantage of local directories

Although it may seem that local directories are only meant for local businesses, all businesses can gain from them. With the directories aid, many would-be customers can check out your business without going to your site. So, as you are trying to boost your business’s online presence, you need to create profiles on local directories such as Google.

Invest in online ads

While a business can grow online organically without ads, online ads can make the job easier and faster. Therefore, if you want to improve your business’s online presence, you need to invest in online ads. Facebook, Google, YouTube and other platforms now allow users to pay for ads. These ads will showcase your offers, ensuring that more people know about your business.

Online ads are helpful for businesses in different ways. Firstly, it can be tailored to suit your target audience. You can use age, interests, location, gender, behaviour and other parameters to determine who will see the ads. Secondly, the ads can be done in varying formats, such as images, texts, infographics and videos.

Focus on only the most important online platforms

You can explore numerous platforms when it comes to boosting the image of your business online. However, you must be careful, as being present on several platforms may not be advantageous to your business. Generally, you will have to spend lots of time online marketing your business through numerous platforms. This can be pretty distracting and even prevent you from offering quality services and products to existing customers.

As a result, you should only focus on the most vital platforms. If you can only maximize the use of your website, emails and three social media platforms, you should concentrate on them. You just need to select the best platforms that will assist you in getting the most from your online presence.

Post shareable and emotional content consistently

Another way to improve your online presence is to post content your audience can share with friends. By sharing your content, it will be able to reach more people, thus, boosting your online presence. Nevertheless, most users will only share content that resonates with them emotionally. So, creating emotional and shareable content from time to time on your website and social media pages is paramount.

Infuse emotional phrases and words into your headers, captions, blog posts, etc. Add exciting images, videos, stats and emojis to your content. Also, you can directly encourage the readers to share your post.

Use email marketing

Even though email marketing is one of the oldest means of digital marketing, it is still crucial today. Many internet users utilize emails and check their inbox messages regularly. According to Optinmonster.com, about 99% of email users open their emails at least once daily. So, if you can reach out to existing and would-be customers through emails, you will increase your online presence in 2023.

To optimize email marketing, you must build an email list and craft unique subject lines and content. Also, you must send emails regularly, but don’t spam your audiences.

Explore guest posting

As you continue to look for ways to improve the online presence of your business, you shouldn’t limit it to your platforms. For instance, guest posting can be a great way to let more people know about your business. Guest posting refers to the process of creating a blog post on another platform’s blog. You need to add a link to your website or blog in the blog post. When people engage with your post on the website, they may click the link and visit your website.

When choosing a platform for guest posting, ensure it is a platform with many audiences. Such a platform will allow you to reach more people.

After doing everything above, you should keep track of the progress of your effort with Google Analytics, SEMrush, Ahrefs, etc. Keep updating these things until you have accomplished the goal of improving your business’s online presence in 2023.

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Sourced from Entrepreneur

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Newspapers to lose £50m in online ads as firms use coronavirus ‘blacklist’

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Publishers struggle to make advertising revenue despite record digital readership

UK newspapers face losing £50m in digital revenues as advertisers use “blacklist” technology to block ads from appearing next to all stories that mention the coronavirus pandemic.

When advertisers run digital campaigns they use keyword blacklists – stocked with trigger words such as “attack” and “death” – that automatically stop ads running in potentially problematic stories that feature them. Publishers say that words related to the pandemic – such as coronavirus and Covid-19 – are appearing on blacklists across the industry.

This has meant that while national and regional newspaper publishers are gaining record numbers of digital readers seeking to keep up to date about the pandemic, publishers are struggling to make ad revenue from their interest.

Advertisers’ blacklist technology is also indiscriminate meaning that even positive or innocuous pieces such as those on the Joe Wicks YouTube PE phenomenon, family activities for the housebound, or articles recommending TV shows, films and books to read in isolation are also shorn of adverts.

“While we have seen a huge surge in demand from readers for trusted, accurate reporting, advertising ‘blacklists’ are preventing adverts from appearing alongside online stories with the word coronavirus in them,” said Tracy De Groose, executive chair of Newsworks, the campaigning body for the UK newspaper industry.

“If the pandemic lasts for another three months the total loss across our news brands is expected to be £50m, threatening our ability to fund the quality journalism that is vital to ensure that the UK public is accurately informed during the crisis.”

The UK’s national and regional newspaper publishers have put their rivalries to one side and published an open letter calling on advertisers to rethink the addition of coronavirus-related words to blacklists.

In the industry letter scheduled to be published on Wednesday, De Groose says: “We understand many marketing budgets are under real pressure now. All we ask is that when you launch your next campaign you check you’re not unknowingly blocking trusted news brands from your plans.”

Publishers also feel they are not being treated fairly as other platforms flooded with coronavirus content, such as social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, are not treated in the same way by advertisers.

“The same advertisers [blocking ads on newspaper sites] are running campaigns on radio and social media, where all the chat is about the virus, which is inconsistent, to say the least,” says Nick Hewat, commercial director at Guardian News & Media, publisher of the Guardian and the Observer.

“Publishers are the only ones who are punished, in an advertising sense, for reporting and distributing the news that society desperately needs. The system needs an overhaul, the technology needs improving.”

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Feature Image Credit: Newspapers have gained record readership online but that isn’t translating into revenue. Photograph: Matt Dunham/AP

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Sourced from The Guardian

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Consumers see Much Greater Risk Than Reward in Online ads That Stalk Them

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People are freaked out by ads that follow them around after a google of the product.

By Mediastreet Staff Writers

Personalised ads now follow us around the web, their content drawn from tracking our online activity. We in the ad industry have suggested that people are okay with it – that people see benefits roughly equal to perceived risks.

A study by University of Illinois advertising professor Chang-Dae Ham says otherwise, suggesting the ad industry may want to reconsider its approach.

“The perception of risk is much stronger than the perception of benefit,” Ham found in surveying 442 college students on how they coped with what is known as online behavioural advertising. “That drives them to perceive more privacy concern, and finally to avoid the advertising,” he said.

Previous studies have looked at various aspects of online behavioural advertising (OBA), but Ham said his is the first to investigate the interaction of various psychological factors – or mediating variables – behind how people respond to it and why they might avoid ads.

“The response to OBA is very complicated,” he said. “The ad avoidance is not explained just by one or two factors; I’m arguing here that five or six factors are influencing together.”

Ham examined not only interactions related to risk, benefit and privacy, but also self-efficacy (sense of control); reactance (reaction against perceived restrictions on freedom); and the perceived personalization of the ads.

He also looked at the effect of greater and lesser knowledge among participants about how online behavioural advertising works. Those with greater perceived knowledge were likely to see greater benefits, but also greater risk, he found. Similar to those with little perceived understanding, they tilted strongly toward privacy concerns and avoiding ads.

Ham’s study of online behavioural advertising follows from his interest in all forms of hidden persuasion, and his previous research has looked at product placement, user-generated YouTube videos and advergames. But OBA is “a very special type,” he said, in that it elicits risk perceptions and privacy concerns different from those in response to those other forms.

The study conclusions could have added significance, Ham said, because research has shown that college-age individuals, like those in his study pool, are generally less concerned about privacy than those in older age groups.

If his findings are an accurate reflection of consumer attitudes, Ham said they could represent “a really huge challenge to the advertising industry” since online behavioural advertising represents a growing segment of advertising revenue.

Ham thinks advertisers, in their own interest, may want to make the process more transparent and controllable. “They need to educate consumers, they need to clearly disclose how they track consumers’ behaviour and how they deliver more-relevant ad messages to them,” he said.

Giving consumers control is important because it might keep them open to some personalised online advertising, rather than installing tools like ad blockers, in use by almost 30 percent of online users in the U.S., he said.

With little understanding of online behavioural advertising, and no easy way to control it, “they feel a higher fear level than required, so they just block everything.”

It’s all the more important because the technology is only getting better and more accurate, Ham said. Tracking systems “can even infer where I’m supposed to visit tomorrow, where I haven’t visited yet.”

 

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How to stop ads from following you online

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USA TODAY Tech columnist Kim Komando explains how to stop annoying ads from following you online. Special for USA Today.

Is this just a coincidence? If you recently looked at cameras online, you’ll see ads for cameras. If you browsed new outfits, shirts and trousers emerge in the margins of your browser.

Not long ago, “interest-based advertising” creeped out a lot of people. They couldn’t understand why (for example) Facebook knew what they had just shopped for on Amazon. The truth is that personalized ads are the result of a very impersonal process.

Your details are crunched bits of data that make marketing more efficient. Interest-based advertising uses information gathered through your browser. Special algorithms analyze your visits over time and across different websites. This helps predict your preferences and shows you ads that are more likely to be of interest to you.

Sometimes, all this tracking can overwhelm the average customer. While the process is basically automatic and unmanned, such ads can feel like an invasion privacy. This is why many people look for ways to throw them off your scent.

Here are three simple ways you can do just that.

Wipe out history, turn off cookies

To start, you’ll want a clean slate. Eliminate any trace of your past searches. Clear all your browsing data, history, cache and cookies from your web browsers.

Next, disable or limit tracking on your gadget. This includes favorite services like Facebook. If you’re not sure how exactly how to do this, here are the steps to wipe out where you’ve been and what you’ve done. 

Next, make sure you delete third-party advertising cookies, too. Learn how to remove them and prevent them from coming back. 

Afterwards, take a moment and test your browser with an online security and privacy checker. I like the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s tool that shows you the information about the browser you’re using and your risk level. Tap here for the free download and more details. 

Opt out of ads

You may only notice a handful of culprits, but many companies use algorithms to track your behavior and send you targeted ads.

Thankfully, there’s a way for you to opt out of interest-based, or “behavioral,” ads. The Digital Advertising Alliance lets you review its participating partners. When you first  visit the DAA, the websites will scan your computer. Once the scan is complete, you’ll be shown a list of partners advertising directly to you.

From there, you can learn more about the practices these companies use for interest-based ads. You can opt out using “opt-out cookies” that are stored in your browser with your preferences.

Here are the steps to opt-out of this form of online targeted advertising.

Go incognito

Every major web browser — Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, and Opera — has private, or incognito, browsing. Turning this feature on means your browser will ignore cookies, including ad-tracking cookies. Your computer won’t record your browsing history, almost like you were never online.

When your browser is in private browsing mode, it will show a special icon. In Firefox, it’s a mask; in Chrome it’s a little spy; and in Edge it’s “InPrivate.” These all indicate that you’re in incognito or private mode.

Private browsing will keep your computer safe from casual snoopers. Someone who jumps on your computer won’t see where you’ve been.

Learn more about private browsing as well as anonymous tools.

Keep in mind that online ads aren’t necessarily a bad thing. Yes, they can annoy us, but they’re also the reason most online content is free. Without them, media outlets and content creators would have to find a different source of revenue. For most of us, seeing a few presumptuous ads is a tiny price to pay.

Feature Image Credit: (Photo: Getty Images)

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