Growing your online business is a slow process, but it’s also a lucrative process. In this article, we’re going to show you some easy ways to grow your online business in Singapore.

Master of One
Concentrate on a sector and drill down into the various sub-sectors. You’re not Amazon. You have no business attempting to cover everything. It’s always better to master a specific product type before expanding. That way, you can build a small yet reliable online clientele.
There are a number of ways to pick a specific niche:
· Choose what you’re passionate about.
· Research your chosen market and find out what sells.
· Invent a new product (this is not for the faint of heart).
Is Your Online Selling Platform the Best it can be?
With so many companies selling online, there’s no compromise when it comes to the platform. If your site is clunky and difficult to use, your customers will flock to someone else. In Singapore, you have a market that’s extremely savvy about technology. They expect the very best.
If you can’t afford to build your own selling platform, consider where else you might sell. Companies have made fortunes by making stores on eBay and Amazon. That takes away much of the work involved with maintaining your own platform.
Tracking Results
This is for businesses that have been selling for at least a few months.
Every month you should set aside some time to track your results. This works best when you have at least a year’s worth of data to compare to. Seasonal changes happen, but you have to take note of any major slumps or spikes.
Part of growing an online business is to react to mistakes and discover leaks in your plans. Here are some of the things you might look for:
· Are all sales coming from one or two selling channels?
· Is one product more popular than another?
· How have revenues changed?
These results can tell you about the success of your marketing efforts and your position in the market. They can also illustrate consumer trends.
Online Placement
Singapore is like any other localized market. To reach this market, you have to gear yourself towards it. This means choosing proper keywords for your store. Discover these keywords through proper research using the tools Google provides you.
Social media is just as important for correct optimization. Changes to Facebook mean reaching your audience organically is more difficult than ever. Learn to use Facebook ads. Insert relevant interests and conduct split testing on the images you’re using. Spend 20 minutes per day monitoring Cost Per Click (CPC) and click-through rates.
Does Your Niche have a Glass Ceiling?
Sometimes you have to consider whether you’ve reached your apex. Not all markets have a great clientele. Selling low-cost products to a limited number of people is a recipe for hitting the glass ceiling.
In this case, you need to look at the results and be honest with yourself. Singapore only has so many people. If you’ve reached the glass ceiling and no amount of marketing will change that, it may be time to consider expanding into other niches.
Too many online businesses fail because they can’t look outwards when the time is right. You can’t underestimate the importance of reviewing your results and constantly innovating.
Do all this and you’ll soon see your online business growing at a remarkable rate in Singapore.

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In order to stand a chance at succeeding in SEO, a careful balance must be attained between gaining domain and brand authority, improving search volume/traffic and, of course, the all-limiting budgetary allocation. One helpful method to achieving this is comprehensive competitor analysis.

Competitor analysis can help a business create a concise, practical and solid strategy. All other faucets of SEO, from keyword research to link-building, stand to be improved by researching and analyzing competitors’ strategies.

Below is a breakdown of the process:

1.    Keyword research

In keyword research, you must be realistic as a site owner. Say you opened a business selling furniture. Unless you have the same budget that IKEA has, you cannot realistically hope to rank anywhere near the first page. Small to medium businesses can ill-afford $5,000 monthly on SEO, where larger companies like P&G, Coca-Cola and IKEA spend hundreds of thousands on internet marketing annually.

A more useful approach is to narrow your field to a specific niche that is achievable for your business. This may be through narrowing your target location, or keyword concept. A great tool to help in this process is Mindmapping, which helps you organize keywords into concepts. You can create your keyword list using various tools:

•         Using SEMrush: types your competitors’ sites in order to identify which keywords they have been ranked for.
•         Using Spyfu: find out what keywords your competitors are bidding for on Google AdWords
•         Using Keyword Planner: identify a list of all possible search terms relating to a primary keyword in your niche.

2.    Know your competition

Using your list of keywords above, search Google and note down which sites are ranking in the top 10. Usually, the same sites will appear for multiple keywords. Identify those which appear the most, and separate them as your top competitors.

Using SEMrush, type their domains to find out the number of keywords they rank for on organic search as well as their search traffic. Sites that have higher search volumes for major keywords have higher authority hence make stiffer competitors.

From this list, identify sites that present ‘true competition’ for you. For instance, if you have a small jewelry shop, Tiffany.com would not be considered your true competitor. Long-tail keywords/location-specific search can help you to identify this.

3.    Competitor analysis

This is where the real work begins. The first step is to find out their general performance metric. For instance, use Juice Tool from LinkResearchTools which provides metrics like Domain Age, Link Velocity, Domain Authority, Social Shares, and Inbound Links, among others.

Next, download their backlink profile through Ahrefs. Sorting according to Domain Rank reveals link authority from the greatest to the least. Using the backlink tool from Majestic, analyse their trust-flow and identify the semantics of their link profile.

LinkResearchTools’s Competitive Landscape Analyzer can help you find out averages in your field to give you a starting point to work from.

4.    Content and Social Media

Next, delve into your competitors’ social media and content marketing strategies. Key pointers include frequency of social media updates, engagement ratios, number of fans/followers, and nature of content shared. Look into their blog as well to determine how active you must be in content creation, sharing and follower acquisition. These provide useful starting points for you.

5.    Barriers to entry

Having understood your competitors, it’s time to map out a strategy to beat the odds given the data you have collected. These include number and quality of links to raise, keywords to use and avoid, content to build and frequency of updating, social media strategies, among others.

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Need Ideas on Website Design

Websites are fantastic tools for all businesses and those without one are certainly not in touch with modern world trends. Any business that wants to succeed and stay above the competition must get a website up and running whereby they can present themselves to the entire world and conduct online transactions.

Websites are great, but for them to really work and have a positive impact for the business they represent then they need to have a couple of things. Many websites often fail in their purpose just because they miss a few important aspects like those outlined below:

1.    Good Design

It is rather obvious that having a visually appealing website is important. This is because humans generally prefer to have or be associated with good things. A creative graphic designer should be able to come up with a beautiful website, which is very important for all websites.

2.    Good Site Navigation

Good site navigation with links that work is important because it determines how easy and quickly visitors get around your site. The importance of a proper and straight to the point system on a site cannot be understated because it can mean the start or the end of a good deal, when a customer finds or fails to find what he or she is looking for, or even how to pay for it!

3.    Good Content

Sometimes people ignore the value of good content on their website in the form of pictures, videos and written words, which enhance one’s brand personality. Having great content on your website is quite important in keeping your customers engaged, educated and entertained while visiting the site.

4.    Favourable Web Hosting

There are many web hosting service providers, including those that are free and thus save on running costs. It is however important to have your website hosted by companies that will be most beneficial to you regardless of cost. This could mean things like getting a web hosting firm that has servers close to your target market or the one that has marketing policies that also complement your business.

5.    Browser Compatibility

Different browsers exist today, and more keep turning up. If you intend to reach people on a global level, then you have to incorporate cross browser compatibility in your website. This is especially important for proper and secure e-commerce to take place.

6.    Mobile Optimization

People all around the world are increasingly using smartphones and tablets to browse and surf the internet. Having a website that easily and smoothly shifts from desktop mode to mobile view is now more of a necessity than an option.

7.    Business Information

This should actually be the number one on the list of importance. Information about what your business is all about and what it deals with in terms of goods and services or otherwise, should be right on the first page. There should also be proper SEO elements incorporated here to make sure potential customers searching for you and your products get to your website fast.

8.    Accurate and Up-to-date Contact Information

Cyber crimes are on the rise today and people are starting to be more vigilant in all their online activities. They want to be sure who it is that they are dealing with and that’s why they’ll always check and verify who the website belongs to before engaging in any monetary business. If the contacts listed on your website are not clear or lead elsewhere, then no one can trust you.

9.    Social Media incorporation

Social media has progressively become an essential tool for all online businesses. It is becoming more and more important for websites to incorporate the social media within them because they provide platforms on which you can advertise on as well as interact with your customers.

10.   Tracking and Analytics

This is a means for you to keep track of how your website is doing which is without question, very important to you. Google actually has a great tracking and analytics tool that you can incorporate to see how your site ranks and thus determine whether your SEO efforts are working for you.

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Why are you revamping? Are you bored with your current site already? Or do you think it could look better?

Whatever you have in mind, the bottom line is: You want to revamp your website and you are certain it will work. But it cannot work if you don’t carry out the renovation correctly. Below are steps that will help you to ensure a successful website revamp:

• Set Clear Goals

Your website is naturally the determinant of how many leads you generate. Therefore, as you think about redesigning your website, generating as many leads as possible should be at the top of your mind.

Think about the business goals and then what you aim to achieve by redesigning your website. Set clear and SMART goals concerning the new site.

2. Take the Stock of Existing Site

Up until now, you have been building assets each day with the best intentions. These assets include blogs, inbound links and the content. You don’t want all that to go to waste. In fact, you want to use those assets to build a better and more functional website.

To protect these assets, take a stock of them and ensure that they link into the redesigned website.

3. Develop the Buyer Personas

Before you can create content that engages with the reader and finally makes them consumers, you will need to have buyer personas. The content should always speak to these personas.

To create these personas, start with interviewing people closest to you. These are people inside the company or family members. Then interview those customers you want to keep – your favourite. After that go to social media and study your competitors concerning what they are discussing with their customers. Most importantly find your potential customers’ problems and ensure that the redesigned website will help you solve their problems. Gather all this information and it’s time to create your buyer personas.

4. Research

After giving the necessary focus to your customer, site assets and business goals, it’s time you learn about the competitor. What are they doing?

Visit their website and blogs, read their content, understand their content offers, keywords and watch their videos.  This is important if you are to make good decisions regarding your website revamp.

5. Put Down a Plan

After researching, bring together the information and create the website revamp plan. This is the blueprint you will follow in the redesign project.

6. Map the Navigation

Just like in house renovation where you design each room by itself, create a flow and bring in the furniture, design each page of your website the same way. Focus on each page as a single element then the navigation between the different pages and fill each of them with necessary content. Remember the content assets you took stock of? Keep them in mind at this stage.

7. Site Wireframes

After mapping out the navigation in the website, you will need to mock-up every page. Essentially, your site wireframes are your new site’s blueprint.

Mock-up every page and show where header images, content, CTAs and navigation will go. This is very important.

8. Create Content Early Enough

Most people leave this step until they are “done with everything else.” But this is not wise. In fact, you should create content for the redesigned site as early as the planning process. This is important as you can test the new content alongside the design.

9. Scoping

The last step is where you get to know what everyone else thinks about the new site. Make sure to get consensus with other decision makers before you start redesigning.

In Conclusion

Redesigning a website is a great idea to help your brand remain fresh and competitive online. However, doing it without a laid out plan makes the whole process pointless and even worse than keeping your current website. If you have to do it, make sure you do it right.

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