Understanding how to identify your online goals for your business is an important hallmark of success. These should be similar to your normal daily business goals, but there will be specifics you need to think about when it comes to selling and promoting your business online.

Here are some questions you should ask yourself.

First, it’s important to decide what your goals should be with your online presence. Where are you already in the process? Do you currently have a website, but it just needs a little love and attention? Does it need to be updated to be device responsive in an increasingly mobile world? Is it to sell a product or service online? Or are you trying to promote your brand or location awareness?

If you are trying to market your product or services online, you must first determine what area you are willing to sell in. Are people going to have to come to you to pick up things, or are you going to ship the items to them? How far are you willing to ship things? Is your product perishable or cannot be shipped overseas?

You can put your product on other established retail sites like Amazon, Ebay or Etsy, but then they will get some of the profit before you do.

Shipping requirements may force you to overprice your product to make a profit. That alone could make it cost prohibitive to sell in an online marketplace.

There are often limitations on what you can sell through each platform based on their rules. You may be able to get your product to market quickly and make it available to consumers, but you may not get as much out of it as you could sell it directly.

Promoting your business through brand or location awareness takes advantage of a different set of tools available to almost anyone with the time and inclination to use them.

Great examples of these tools are Google My Business (now renamed Google Business Manager), online directory listings (Yelp, FourSquare, etc.) or specific encoding on your website itself (NAP/Business Schema ) to help send you more information specific to your location. researchers.

You can also include specific landing pages or form submissions on your website for each promotion so you can further track which data and which promotions are performing well and which are not.

While many of these things can be done directly by you, sometimes it makes more sense to dedicate your time to your business and hire a professional who specializes in the skills involved in all of these things.

Melanie Wilson and Brian Brown represent web design and hosting company Roost Web Strategies.

www.roostwebstrategies.com