You have your business and you want to get more customers.

You have a website.

You are on social media.

But, now what? How can you try and optimize your opportunities, strategies to get more people into your store (if you have a brick/mortar location) or how can you get more people to visit your website to then learn more about your products or services?

To discover smart ways to grow an online business with social media, I interview Ian Cleary.

Ian Cleary, founder of Razor Social, helps people achieve better results and become more productive with online marketing using the best tools and technology. It was a pleasure to sit down and get some wisdom directly from Ian.

Should You Use Periscope and Why I Do

It was a hot seat format interview and Ian was wonderful and quite a pleasure to speak with about social media for businesses. In fact, we did the interview live on Periscope as well so it added an extra fun element to the interview. In less than four months, I have grown a significant following on Periscope and it has been a good fit for my personal business style. If you also feel that the idea of sharing and giving helpful content to others via video is a good fit, you may want to give it a try.  Periscope, a live video streaming social platform that launched March 2015 on IOS and May 2015 on Android, has grown rapidly and has over 15 million users as of September 2015. You may want to learn how to use Periscope for business as a part of your strategy to grow an online business quickly.

Smart Ways to Grow an Online Business Quickly 

Grow Your Business Website Traffic

Having a blog on your website is an important and great place to start when you are working on getting more traffic to your website. Every article you write on your blog is an extra article for Google to index. So the more content you have on your blog the better for your website and opportunities to get more traffic.

Quick Tip: If you are going to write a blog post but don't want to be spinning your wheels on what to write about, go to SEMrush.com, put in your competitors website address and have a look at what keywords are driving traffic to your competitor's website. Then a smart strategic plan is to write blog posts around those keywords. This will allow you to take a bit of your competitors traffic and be writing about what already has traction. There is a paid level of SEMrush.com, however the first 10 keywords are FREE. Without actually spending any money, you can get great keywords and then write detailed content around them.

Getting Customers In the Door

It isn't just about sharing lots of content on your website if you want to get people to come into your business (if you have a brick/mortar) or use your services. You need to reach out and find the most relevant people to get in touch with on social media.  The best way to do that is to make sure you are finding the right people.  For example, on Twitter, reach out to find people in the local area that are relevant people and interact with them. The opportunities are there but it is crucial that you be strategic and find the right people in your local area that are active on Twitter. Once you begin interacting with the right people you can then use special offers, engagement and let people know about your services or products. Otherwise, if you are out there just talking on social media randomly, you are much less likely to get the connections you are needing.

Quick Tip: On Twitter, use popular hashtags relevant to your business, industry or location. This is going to help you stay connected with others using the same hashtag and give you an opportunity to build online relationships with potential customers,

Management Tools are Essentials for Busy Business Owners 

Find yourself at the end of the day exhausted and realize you haven't had the time to post, engage or be consistent on social media? By having a really good management tool in place to make sure you are very organized when you are sharing your content will maximize your time on social media. No one wants to miss out on business opportunities for growth, and by showing up and using tools to help you, it will be making the best use of your time.

There are a lot of options for social media management and varied price points. Some great resources to check out are Agorapulse and Buffer.

Ian Cleary Success

A huge contributing factor to Ian Cleary's success in business is having a great blog on his website . It is a good source of content and helps his readers know about varied tools they can use to be smarter in their businesses.

Quick Tip: Make Sure you are writing great content on your blog consistently which will help people get to know you and your business.  That doesn't mean that each blog post is about your product or service. “If you want to sell products or goods online, you have to keep getting people to your website”, says Ian. When they come and see good information that helps, it attracts them and brings them back to your website. When you are then sharing your information out on social media they are going to come back to your website. This builds the like, know and trust factor. And that is the secret sauce.

Build Your E-mail List

When people come to your website and blog for great helpful information, some will be ready to buy, some may not be ready to buy and some will eventually be ready to buy. In order to not lose the opportunity to get the business of a potential client, you want to make sure that you are building your e-mail list.

Not everyone is ready to buy now, but they might be in 3,6 or 12 months. If you are building your e-mail list, that is where a lot of the money you make is going to be coming from and it is a missed opportunity of you don't have an e-mail list.

Listen Now

Listen and watch the full, unedited interview of Ian Cleary here (click below)

Key takeaways mentioned in this blog post:

• Connect with Ian on his website.
• Check out Ian's Free Marketing Resources.
• Watch the interview of Sweet Tea Social Marketing and Ian Cleary.
• Use the SEMRush Tool to find what keywords are driving website traffic to your competition.
• Check out Agorapulse and Buffer for social media management tools.

In Conclusion

To be effective as a online business, you must maximize the power of your social media marketing strategy with your website. These 5 smart ways to grow an online business were inspired by interviewing Ian Cleary.

Which of the ways mentioned in this blog post are you most excited about working on for your business? Why is that? Please share your thoughts and comments below.