How to Grow your Online Business

Many online businesses have grown during the pandemic, as stores closed and more and more of our lives were lived online. Now, as the world opens up again and the economy rallies, it’s key to sustain and accelerate this.

So we asked Georgina Atwell, founder of the UK’s largest online community reviewing children’s books Toppsta, which grew by 114% in the pandemic, for her top tips for growing an online business when you’re a small team with a limited budget:

1. Set your KPIs. Firstly and most importantly, you need to define what your KPIs are. For us, it’s the number of people visiting the website, the number of readers who have created an account and the number of reviews. Our KPIs are very much associated with our website and not our social media channels because we’re focused on providing an online community for children

2. Target your key customers. It’s worth writing down all the different customers that you have. Just write down 3-5 things you think you know about them – what they’re looking for, where they currently go to fulfil their needs, which social media platforms they are on etc. Then you need to think about which customers represent the biggest opportunity, and this may not necessarily be the *biggest* group. Then you need to prioritise these customers and have them front and centre in your mind for ALL your online business activity. Even better, find people who fit the profile and whenever you’re working on something new, ask for their feedback and reward them with unique offers.

3. Do you even need a website? If you’re selling products or services, it may be that you don’t need a website at all and can just focus on growing your social media reach. This will save you a huge amount of time and budget but it comes with a warning, if for any reason your audience starts to use a different platform, you’ll have to start building your channel from scratch. So it’s worth having at the very least, your own email marketing list so you can message them directly without falling victim to the latest algorithm change.

4. Analyse your data. Our Google analytics tells us that only a tiny percentage of our website traffic comes from our social media channels, the vast majority of our visitors come from Search Engines. So we’ve grown our website traffic considerably through researching which book-related queries are coming through from search engines and writing quality blog pieces that answer those questions, keeping in mind our key customers at all times. We use Ahrefs.com but there are various tools on the market that can help with this. Writing blog pieces takes a lot more time than social media posts but the benefit is that once they’re written, these pieces continue to drive website visitors, month after month, with only occasional updates.

5. Understand the different social media platforms. We use Facebook to reach parents 35+; Twitter to reach teachers, librarians and the publishing industry and Instagram to reach young parents and teens. So where we promote a book depends on which audience we’re trying to reach. A blanket approach across all channels will create a lot of unnecessary extra work. Focusing on appropriate channels depending on the product means less work and better engagement rates.

6. It’s not all about marketing. It’s the less sexy side of the business but it’s really important if you do have a website that it’s easy to use, quick to load and renders well on mobile. Search Engines will penalise you if this isn’t the case and even the most loyal customer will give up if you make it too hard. It’s worth integrating something like Feedbackify on your website so that users can flag any issues quickly.

Remaining focused on your customers, analysing data and tweaking your approach to make sure it’s always appropriate, will ensure that you are maximising your time and growing your online business.

By Georgina Atwell

Georgina Atwell is the founder of Toppsta, the UK’s leading children’s book review site, where kids, parents and teachers go to read book reviews and recommendations for the latest children’s books.