If you’re one of the few lucky business that don’t have to lift a finger to grow your online presence, more power to you. Unfortunately, that's not the case for everyone. Most business owners need to devote time (and, sometimes, money) to get more eyes on their online brand and grow their potential customer base.

The good news? It doesn’t take that much time. In 30 minutes a week (or less), you can grow your online presence and increase your reputation across the web.

Respond to Customers and Prospects

Estimated time: 15 minutes

Interacting with your customers on social media, your blog and review sites will take up most of your 30 minutes, but it’s definitely the most important thing on this list.

Your customers have questions, concerns, ideas and testimonials, just waiting for your response. The best way to show off how attentive and engaging you are as a business is to respond to everything you can. Take a few minutes each day to like, comment on and respond to your customers' and prospects' social posts – especially as they relate to online reviews. Also, share out any social posts from your customers where they talk about visiting your business, especially if they contribute a photo to a Facebook campaign of yours.

Check in on your Yelp and Google Reviews every day or two to see if someone has left you a good (or bad) review. No matter how many stars they award you, be sure to respond to the review, either to thank them for their continued support or to try and right whatever wrong they feel has been brought upon them by your business.

Boost A Post or Promote Your Local Business on Facebook

Estimated time: 5 minutes

You can easily get more eyes on your social media posts and accounts by boosting 1-2 posts a week or by hitting the “Promote Local Business” button on your business’s Facebook page.

Boosting a post costs only a few dollars and can help get more eyes on events that you’re hosting, blog posts you’ve written or even questions you’ve asked to your followers. Simply hit Boost Post, set a budget, decide who you want to target and submit. If you’re looking to grow, we suggest targeting the friends of your followers or an audience with specific demographics that you choose.

If you’d rather promote your business page as a whole, hit  the Promote Local Business button. Your page will appear in the newsfeeds of people in your area that align with the demographics that you set up.

Once you’ve chosen your audience for either boosting or promoting, set a daily budget and a duration, and watch your reach numbers go up.

Incentivize Your Customers to Post About You on Social

Estimated time: 0 minutes

If you have an automated rewards program, you’re automatically awarding your customers for checking in on Facebook at your location, talking about your business on Twitter, referring their friends on socialand contributing photos to your Facebook campaigns. Because this happens in the background, you don’t need to spend any hands-on time or energy on getting more eyes on your brand and showing off the benefits of your business.

What does this do for your business? Instead of posting about your business to your already-established audience, your customers are sharing about your business to their social networks, increasing the reach of your online presence without you having to post on social.

Up Your Blogging Game

Estimated time: 10 minutes

Depending on how much bandwidth you have to write blogs about your industry, you can reach a much wider audience with blogging than with just social alone. This is because the more unique content you can create, the higher you’ll rank in search engines.

Your blogs don’t need to be too long, or even written by you. In fact, ask your staff, teachers or partners if they’d like to write a blog about their topic of choice in your industry. All you need to do, then, is edit what your writers created, add some links that point back to your other blog posts and offerings (this is big for SEO), add a photo and you’re done!

If you can post one blog a week, you’ll directly influence your business’s ability to show up in search. If you have more time to devote to writing blogs, then definitely post more! The most important thing is that you’re creating original content that prospective customers can search for and learn more about your brand and business in the process.

How do you grow your online presence? Tell us in the comments below!