How to Start a Profitable Online Business in Canada
It’s never been easier to start a profitable online business in Canada. In the past, you’d need a certain level of technical expertise to create a website, but these days, there’s an abundance of tools and technologies that make it easy for anyone to create an online business. Furthermore, these tools and technologies are relatively inexpensive. What this means is that just about anyone can start an online business.
To make an online business profitable, you need to do four things:
- Create a site that’s easy to navigate and encourages conversions
- Optimize your website for search engines
- Promote your business
- Test and tweak your site and marketing to improve its performance
Create a Site that’s Easy to Navigate and Encourages Conversions
When you create a website, you’ll need a web host. For Canadian businesses, it’s best to choose a Canadian dedicated server hosting option. This is because the closer you are to your server, the faster your website will load. Page loading speed is one of the key aspects of a successful site. Slow page loading speeds can discourage users from remaining on your site, negatively affecting your profits.
The next thing you’ll want to consider is the design of your website. A profitable website is one that’s easy for users to navigate and convert. You want to make it as easy as possible for users to perform conversion actions like signing up for services or making a purchase. This includes having a well-placed navigation menu, well-placed links to various parts of your site, and pages that answer any questions a user may have about your product or service.
Optimize your Website for Search Engines
One of the keys to profitability is being discoverable on search engine result pages. Search engine optimization or SEO is the process of increasing traffic to your site by ensuring your presence in organic search results. The more traffic you have coming to your site, the more likely you’ll be profitable. One of the ways you can improve your discoverability is by adding keywords to your page. You should use keywords that relate to your business and are likely to be searched by your target user. Other factors that affect your website’s discoverability are page-speed, meta description tags, and mobile responsiveness.
You might also consider buying search result ads. A search result ad appears at the top of the search results page, increasing the chances that you’ll get traffic on your site.
Promote Your Business
To be profitable, you need customers. To get customers, you need to promote your business. An excellent way to promote your business is by writing content that demonstrates your expertise in your business’ industry. This will help drive traffic to your website by providing knowledgeable articles to your potential clients. You can market these articles by posting them on Medium and Quora. You can also market your business and articles through social media.
Social media is also an excellent way to get the word out about your business. You can join groups and create ads to reach your target audience and educate them about why they should be using your product or service. For example, joining a LinkedIn group is a great way to connect to your target audience and share your informational articles. If you have some money in your budget, you can use Facebook ads to reach your target demographic. Facebook ads have a sophisticated method of pinpointing your audience on their platform so you can make sure your ad gets on their feed.
Test and Tweak your Site and Marketing to Improve its Performance
One of the benefits of an online business is that you get data almost instantaneously. With a brick-and-mortar business, it could take weeks to know whether your marketing campaigns are getting results. With an online business, you can see right away what’s working and what’s not. This allows you to test out different elements of your site or ad campaigns to see what’s effective and what isn’t. As a result, you can alter what’s not working and replicate what is. Therefore, to create a profitable business, you should be continually testing and adjusting things on your site and in your marketing to improve performance.
Summary
A profitable online business in Canada starts with the right website and host. You will need to create a website that is easy to navigate and use a host that ensures fast page loading speeds. For Canadian sites, this will be a host with data centers in Canada, as the closer you are to your server, the faster your site will load. Your page loading speed also affects your placement on a search engine’s result pages. You need to be easily found on search engine result pages to ensure you’re getting enough traffic to your site to be profitable. To further increase traffic, you should be promoting your site through informational content and social media. Lastly, you should constantly be working to improve your marketing and website’s performance by testing and tweaking the various elements.
