What are the challenges of building an online presence?

Whether you’re launching an online business or some other digital project, building an online presence is essential to success. When done right, it helps with everything from brand visibility and awareness to building trust with prospective customers. 

To successfully establish yourself or your brand online, you’ll need to engage across multiple online streams, such as social media, a personal or business website, and create valuable content. 

It may sound simple, but building an online presence comes with its own set of unique challenges. In this article, we’ll go through some of the disadvantages of online business and building a presence online and how to overcome them, covering:

• Management
• Flexibility
• Growth
• Security
• Copyright

Let’s dive in.

Management 

Taking your business online and building an online presence can require making the right commercial choices to set you up for success later on. As a result, one of the critical challenges of online business is figuring out how to manage everything. 

For instance, you may want to dedicate yourself to finding success online, but you may need to balance it with attending to your physical business, which is the core source of your revenue. You could also end up using the wrong platform to launch your site, leading to problems down the line.

Here are a few ways to avoid these obstacles of online business management.

Knowing when to delegate

There’s only so much one person or a small business can do, and even then, not everyone has the technical knowledge to keep a website and online marketing campaign running, especially if you are balancing an online store with a brick-and-mortar one. 

So, one of the first choices you’ll likely make is who else you bring on this journey. You may need to hire external resources to design your website, maintain it, create graphics, run advertising. By having go-to people and services to rely on, you’ll alleviate some of the difficulties of running an online business.

Choosing the right platform

Managing digital products is one of the most persistent online presence challenges. This can mean choosing the necessary products from different providers or sticking to one platform. Many think it’s better to shop around and purchase products from different providers, such as your domain from one place and your hosting from another.  

People who take this approach feel they have more control over their online presence. They can pick and choose where to save money and where to splash out, being very precise about the products and services they choose, as well as the companies they purchase from. They believe they can get a better deal this way, balancing value for money and expertise.

This can be true, but it has its downsides. One critical disadvantage is the difficulty of connecting products and managing them all daily. Setting up and integrating all the products and services you need to work together can be a pain when they’re sourced from various platforms. 

They may not integrate right away, bringing extra hassle to set up. To maintain your site, you may need to work with different dashboards and systems and contact different companies should you need assistance. 

Another pain point of juggling multiple platforms is keeping track of budget, invoices, and online payments, especially when renewal pricing is often different from purchase pricing.

If that sounds like a nightmare, then you should keep all your products and services with one provider. While shopping around is understandable, it isn’t necessarily the right decision, especially when you find a platform that provides everything you need to get online and maintain your online project. 

But how do you know if a provide is any good? An excellent all-in-one platform should let you:

• Easily set up and connect all your products and services
• Manage all your owned products in a single place
• Fix issues with the help of customer support by a single company rather than multiple parties

A provider that offers a guided or automatic setup and integration process is invaluable. It ensures that even those with limited technical knowledge can get online quickly and easily. 

Look for providers that offer intuitive solutions for connecting your hosting product with your domain and additional products. The ability to add or change products during the setup process is also a significant advantage. 

Flexibility

If you’re new to website creation, it’s easy to be lured in by the promise of website-builder platforms. Some providers offer easy drag-and-drop tools to assist with website design. Others operate as complete off-the-shelf website providers, where you select a plan based on your desired website design and pay a subscription to keep it live.

If you don’t have many resources and want a professional-looking website without much effort or know-how, choosing a popular website builder seems like a no-brainer.

However, these using “easy” website builders can become on of the most common online business problems: getting locked into a platform that doesn’t allow for flexibility. Keeping your website hosted with them will usually cost more in the long run. They’re also limited in how much you can customize and grow your site. 

Furthermore, if you need to migrate to another hosting provider, it may be challenging from a technical perspective to keep your design and move your files. These platforms often have custom coding specific to them and can’t easily be moved to another host.

To save yourself a headache down the line, you should choose a provider that doesn’t lock you in and makes it easy to migrate your site. Outside of website builders, most providers use control panels such as cPanel and some custom control panels. Custom control panels may look simpler for a non-tech-savvy user, but cPanel is generally easy to use for both beginners and advanced users and can facilitate migration between different providers.

Speaking of migration, before you choose a platform, research migration costs and whether your provider offers migration assistance. When moving your website from one provider to another, free migration services and assistance can save you time and effort. This will ensure a smooth transition without data loss or downtime, which is vital for new online businesses.

Growth 

Selecting your hosting products when you take your business online can be similar to choosing a physical store location. For both, you want a space where your business can flourish and provide a smooth experience to customers without any interruptions or security issues.

One of the critical disadvantages of doing business online can be downtime. After all, you can’t do business if your site isn’t accessible. That’s why you must choose a speedy provider with high uptime and unmetered bandwidth. These elements are critical for ensuring your website is always available and loads fast. To avoid availability issues, aim for providers that guarantee at least 99.99% uptime.

Before you decide on a provider, you should also keep in mind how you plan to expand in the future and whether the host can handle user growth. Your website growth should not be limited by hosting plan restrictions. 

A good practice is to select hosting plans and a provider that makes it easy to upgrade or rescale. This flexibility will allow you to customize to meet your evolving needs rather than feeling restricted.

Also, try to choose a hosting provider that offers extra products that will help drive your business’s success, such as business email.

Security

When it comes to the cons of online for businesses, security is a big one, especially with cyber security threats continually rising. A security breach can be more than just your site being taken offline for a while. It can also impact business data and sensitive customer information. 

To stay safe, the right service provider that has integrated security into the platform is everything. Pick a provider that handles security on every level, from your domain and site to your account. Here are some security essentials to keep in mind:

Domain essentials

Always look for free domain privacy. This keeps your registration details private on WHOIS, a public directory where the contact information of domain owners is listed. Robust DNS security is also essential to keeping your domain safe from domain hijacking and DDoS attacks. Look for DNSSEC authentication and built-in DDoS protection.

Website essentials

To keep your site as safe as possible, pick a platform that provides free SSL certificates, good backup options, virus and malware monitoring, DDoS protection, and firewall protection. These features protect the data of both you and your users and should keep your site up, running, and malware-free.

Account essentials

Protecting your account from unauthorized access is also integral to keeping your online business venture safe. High-quality measures that should be provided include two-factor authentication, suspicious login monitoring, social engineering prevention, and the option to use Passkeys instead of passwords. 

Copyright 

One of the inherent risks of online business is copyright issues. Many aren’t aware of the laws surrounding sharing another person’s intellectual property on their site, whether it be a photo, art, music, writing, or more. You may be accused of presenting other parties’ intellectual property as your own if it's not attributed correctly. Unless the content is public domain, you generally need explicit permission or a license to use, change, or copy it.

You should also adequately protect your own intellectual property. In the US, your content is technically protected by copyright as soon as you publish it online. However, that may not always deter plagiarists. Adding a trademark to your website or watermarks to your images may help prevent your content from being stolen. For added peace of mind, you can register copyrights here.

Conclusion

Selecting the right platform and products is central to successfully building an online presence. You'll avoid the most common challenges and simplify the whole process by following the advice in this article. So, whether you’re a small business looking to expand or have a personal project you want to share with the world, now is the time to take the plunge and get online.