Make Your Business More Accessible Online

Some time ago we posted an article about what you can do to improve your business. We covered topics such as addressing workplace safety concerns, allowing flexibility in work schedules, and generally keeping employees. All of these things are vital for crafting a productive and even enjoyable work environment. In this post we’re going to cover more topics related to the improvement of your personal business. But this time, we’re going to focus on what you can do to make yourself more accessible to potential clients and customers online.

The overarching way to think about this sort of effort is that you just want to make things easy for people who might seek out or even stumble upon your business. But here are some of the specific steps you might consider taking.

Make Your Site Accessible Via Mobile

It (hopefully) goes without saying that your business needs a website. Even a simple one will do, so long as it’s clean, attractive, and helpful. You should update it regularly with fresh information and content, but that doesn’t mean it has to be a huge endeavor. It depends largely on the type of work your company does, but generally speaking the site just needs to attract consumers, present information, and incentivize sales.

It also has to be accessible via mobile platforms, however, and this really isn’t negotiable these days. Last year we learned that mobile web browsing had overtaken desktop browsing for the first time. That means a majority of internet activity is taking place on tablets and smartphones, and your site needs to be formatted accordingly. One way to go about it is to simply design an app that acts as a mobile branch for your site. However, some web design platforms will also let you adjust formatting specifically for mobile viewing, so that it’s optimized for whatever platform is being used.

Diversify Payment Options

If your business involves any kind of sales online – products, services, or even a subscription of some kind – you should recognize that in 2017, people don’t always want to shell out credit card information when making online purchases. This is because there are simply other options available these days. Sites like Amazon and popular airlines allow for PayPal rather than straight credit card usage; some sites even build in “Amazon Pay” to allow people to use Amazon balances. Gaming sites across the internet have even embraced Bitcoin because of its superior security benefits and privacy, keeping players from having to deposit with their credit cards.

These are the kinds of trends that you should watch closely if, as mentioned, you offer any kind of online sales. You want to be accessible to people who might not be comfortable using conventional means of payment when there are more anonymous and/or more secure options. It’s actually not particularly difficult to set up PayPal or even Bitcoin acceptance these days.

Grow Your Social Media Presence

This sounds like the kind of clichéd, overused advice that gets hurled at millennial entrepreneurs with no actual intent behind it. But it’s actually pretty valuable for a modern business, specifically with regard to becoming more accessible online. Entrepreneur online did an article on steps to grow your business in the first year and mentioned the idea of not only creating high quality content but delivering it at high speed. The concepts of delivery and speed are incredibly important takeaways.

Delivery matters in that you don’t want people to have to want to visit your site in order to see any changes or updates you’ve made; you want to show them those changes and updates. Speed matters in that you want to do this instantaneously, so that you maximize the time consumers have to act on the changes you’ve made before you make more. You can accomplish high-speed delivery of news, updates, and fresh content through a well-rounded social media presence, sending out tweets, updating a Facebook page, etc.

This may all sound like a lot of work, but in reality these are fairly straightforward steps to take. And they can make all the difference for your site, and by extension your business.