Many things have been said about the internet over the last decade. People said it was just a fad that was going to pass and many said it was going to change the way we do business around the world. We are happy that the latter has happened, which has allowed many of us the opportunity to own a business with global reach. A question we ponder regularly is with such a large population approaching over 7 billion, how can you reach your target customer on the internet?

This is the fun stuff. The kind of thing that will keep you awake until 3:00 AM and have you back up at 7:00 AM ready to go. (As a side note the internet doesn’t shut off, so we do recommend having cut off times where you walk away from the computer and do something like take your iPad outside and smell the fresh air.) Now on to how to reach that target audience.

After you have defined your business and determined your target market you can move on to the following steps.

1. How informative is the content on your web site? Would you consider yourself a source for that type of information or can it be better? If the answer is it can be better then you know what you need to do. Search engines love original content, so give it to them.
2. Can people who have discovered your site because of the great content stay connected to you via a social media like Facebook or Twitter? Do you have an RSS feed on your site a visitor can subscribe to? How about an email sign up form so you can send your customers updates to their inbox about new products, news and more about your business? Check to see if you have any of these things visible to the user when they are on your site? Alright, go check and then go onto step 3.
3. This is the last tip … We can’t tell you every trick in the book today, we have to keep you coming back for more. This is a simple one, but you would be amazed at how many people don’t actually check this. Does your site function in every major browser on the internet? There are a few of them out there. There’s Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari to name a few. Make sure you get access to all these browsers and view your site on all of them. After you’re done checking your site on a computer then check it on many different mobile phones and tablets.  After you’re done testing you might be surprised how your site looks to many potential customers.

That is just some food for thought, but we are sure you will be able to use some of these tips to help make your web site better and reach more customers on the internet.