How to Build Up an Online Portfolio and Presence for Your Business

The internet is an invaluable tool for businesses, particularly in a time like now, where people are stuck indoors due to the pandemic and can’t go about their daily lives in an ordinary way. It’s helping businesses reach people online and connect with new potential customers that they otherwise never would have had the chance of stumbling across.

If you’re a business owner, entrepreneur, or are thinking of creating something marketable around your passions for sale, it’s vital that you take advantage of the internet and the tools and opportunities it presents to get your ideas out there and grow your business.

Here’s some quick and effective tips on how you can build up an online portfolio and presence for your business and grow the venture fast.

1. Make Connections

A great place to start when building your online presence, whether it’s for your own personal portfolio or a small business venture, is to reach out to like-minded people, share ideas and connect with them for inspiration. You can do that on platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook and online forums.

Not only will this allow you to get a feel for what the market and competition is like (seeing what others do and how you could do better), but you also might be able to help out others, offer them something unique, and find potential customers or collaborators for the future.

As a general rule of thumb, in order to garner a healthy community, you have to be your genuine self and engrained in that community.

Of course, making connections also means being available to potential clients and customers that will come across your content. You want to advertise what you’re doing in a subtle, non-aggressive way, and get people interested in what you offer. But, in order to develop followers and connections, you want to provide something valuable and meaningful that will get them engaged.

If your business venture is a passion project, then you’ll likely have lots to say and advice/ experiences to share, so don’t be afraid to put them out there. While it can be difficult at times, you should also make sure that your communication is solid and consistent, and that anyone can get in touch with you directly regarding questions, comments or concerns.

2. Offer Varied Content

Of course, across your website and social media profiles, you want to make sure that you’re offering content that is engaging and valuable. And depending on the type of audience you typically attract, you should also try and think about how enticing it is, as well as how adjustable or transferrable it is, depending on how your audience likes to consume their information.

As an example, if you look at the property market, RWinvest offer a range of different content, depending on what investors need, and how they prefer to consume information. Long-form guides and downloadable PDF files give the statistics and advice for specific areas, while video content provides a visual addition. Podcasts provide informative discussions that can be listened to passively or on the go.

Borrow a leaf from this content marketing model, which many other companies are using, and think about how you can create varied content in popular formats around your own product or service, so it’ll become available to your consumer on all fronts in a convenient manner for them.

3. Get the SEO Right

Finally, another essential part of growing an online presence is getting your SEO right. That entails picking the right platform to showcase your content and offerings, including picking social media platforms where your target audience hangs out most, SEO friendly blogging platforms like WordPress and Medium for writers, and optimizing your business website for SEO with targeted title tags, meta descriptions, keywords, and populating your site with high quality, high value content.

If you’re creating a product portfolio for products that you make and sell, you can choose an ecommerce-based platform, like Shopify. If you’re trying to create a photography portfolio, or one that’s photo-forward, you can opt to use a platform with a lot of galleries and templates for showcasing images, such as Squarespace.

Moreover, make sure your website is optimized for mobile viewing and take proactive measures to build links to your site and webpages by reaching out to your connections (step one, above) and other high authority sites in your niche and informing them about the top-notch content you create.

Don’t forget to optimize your mobile site (as well as desktop site) for speed, as Google officially announced in 2018 it had shifted to mobile-first indexing as the new de facto standard for search, with a focus on mobile websites. Make sure your site is optimized for both Android and iOS, adopting the industry standard, best-practice of mobile-friendly, responsive designs.

With these three fundamental tips, you will be well on your way to building a solid online presence and portfolio for your business. Do let us know if there are any other tips you have for building up an online presence for a business that you’d want to share in the comments section below.