by Amber Miller | Apr 21, 2017 | Blog, Business Development, Marketing
Marketing in the digital world is a whole different ball game compared to competing with your local market. How in the heck does a small business compete with those huge corporations who have teams of marketing people dedicated to making the company more prominent than you? It can seem like an impossible task, but we’re here to tell you… it’s not.
In fact, there is A LOT you can do to boost traffic to your website. If we told you about all the ways, the blog post would never end. We’re going to hit you with three things we think will grab you that new traffic in no time. So, without further ado…
1. Build An Email List
Didn’t know you could boost traffic through an email list did ya? Newsletters are actually a really great way to promote your website. Make sure to add a sign up form on your website and encourage your customers to sign up. Use the newsletter to promote new sales, events, and guess what, stuff on your website!
2. Blog Like Crazy
Content is king and honestly, he’s always going to rule. If you want spiders crawling your website, you need to post high quality content and post it often. We recommend at least getting one blog up a week if not more. You can talk about anything… industry news, new products or services, how your company is impacting your community, how to articles, the list goes on. Not sure what to post about? Shoot us a note – we’ve got lot’s of topic ideas for you.
3. Optimize Your Site For SEO
All that content you’re posting isn’t going to do you any good if it’s not optimized for search engines. There’s no point in trying to manipulate search engines these days. Your main focus should always be to make your website as readable as possible for robots crawling your site. Run reports frequently with tools like Google Analytics and Search Console. They can help you find issues with your site so you can optimize the heck out of it to get better results.
Are you looking for some other ways to boost traffic to your website? Like we said above, we’ve got a plethora of ideas. Just shoot us a note and lets get talking. Small business to small business, we got your back.
by Amber Miller | Mar 21, 2017 | Blog, Business Development, Marketing
Once you have a site up and running, your next task is to entice people to sign up for your email list, membership sites, or buy your products/services. There are several ways you can do this and it is a good idea to try each of these methods to maximize your signup rate. Below we’ve included 5 ways you can effectively get people to sign up.
• Sell to your list
If you have a list, hopefully they are already accustomed to buying things from you. Current customers are a very powerful thing when it comes to selling new products or services. They’ve already bought from you before which means they’ve trusted your brand before — who is stopping them from trusting you again?
• Create a list
If you don’t have a list set up – work to create one. Offering free goodies in exchange for emails is a sure fire way to building an email list. Write an ebook about a topic in your niche market – something that will enrich your customers in some way.
• Sales page
You’ll definitely need to create a sales page (also called a landing page) to direct traffic to. If the sales page is highly effective then all you need to do is direct more traffic to the page to get signups. Test test test and review!
• Market the sales page
This may seem obvious but once the sales page is up and running, you’ll want to market it using any means you can think of. You can put a link for it on your blog or website, use social networking, email and content marketing, etc. Basically, employ any means you’d use to market a standard website.
• Start an affiliate program
This one is really fun. Once you get the affiliate program up and running, just start an affiliate program. This means that other people will promote your landing page to their lists and you’ll reach a wider range of people. Granted, it will cut into your profits but this is an easy way to get people coming to your site.
This list of ways to get people to sign up for the site is by no means complete. If you can think of other methods, by all means use them and share them in the comments below! Contact us if you could use a couple other ideas on getting people to sign up for you stuff!
by Amber Miller | Mar 10, 2017 | Blog, Infusionsoft, Marketing
In all reality, this is a post about email marketing. In the next several years, email marketing is going to make up a big part of your overall online marketing strategy. So much so that it can make or break your business. We all know there are a ton of reputable email marketing programs out there, but what each of these programs lacks is an all-in-one email marketing solution.
And that’s why we would like to talk about Infusionsoft. If you really want your email marketing efforts to take off, you should seriously consider signing up for the software. Why you ask? Well, here are five reasons why… but we could literally go on forever if we wanted.
- You need an email provider that can be trusted.
Email deliverability is HUGE in email marketing today. If you’re using a program that isn’t trusted by ISP’s, then it’s very likely your emails won’t even get delivered in the first place. Since Infusionsoft has a very low tolerance for spam, it keeps the email deliverability rate healthy.
- You need an email program that can easily integrate with WordPress.
Did you know that about 25% of the web is run off WordPress? It’s most likely that your small business is using a CMS such as WordPress. Infusionsoft has the ability to link right up with your WordPress site and even offers some fun enhancement features!
- You need an open API program that allows you to scale and grow.
A small business isn’t going to stay a small business forever (if everything goes our way right?). You need room and flexibility to grow without having to change software as you grow out of it. Luckily for you, Infusionsoft offers an open API which allows its’ users to add custom add-ons.
- You need an all-in-one solution.
Do you really feel like hiring a bunch of people and companies to manage your online shopping cart and credit card processing? No, we didn’t think so… Infusionsoft can do it all for ya.
- You need to track your lead sources.
What good are marketing campaigns if you don’t know where your leads are coming from? Infusionsoft can help you track these leads and give you information on where they came from. Who would have thought all those Facebook Ads you did last year resulted in 75% of your online sales!
Still need more reasons why you need Infusionsoft in your life? Shoot us a note. We would love to talk to you about your business and help you understand just how much Infusionsoft can benefit your marketing efforts.
Want to check out the software some more, hurry on over to Infusionsoft so you can see all of the benefits they have to offer.
by Amber Miller | Mar 3, 2017 | Marketing
Before we even start, we need to understand what this fun new marketing tool is and how it works. Facebook Live is a stunning feature of the social platform that allows users to stream live video on their profiles. After the live stream is completed, the video is then permanently uploaded to the users timeline. Currently, you can stream live for 30 minutes and even have the ability to write a description of the event so users know what they’re tuning into.
So, how can Facebook Live help market my small business?
The possibilities are endless when it comes to live video. You can showcase new products and give your fans a sneak peak before anyone else. Give an inside look to your business by showing your customers behind the scenes look at how your business works. Engage directly and in real time with your customers and fans by discussing topics of interest or by answering questions. I could really go on…
Instead, we would like to recommend checking out The Small Business Guide to Generating Leads with Facebook Live published by InfusionSoft. This guide will provide readers with everything they need to know to take advantage of this latest marketing trend. Go ahead and download the guide for free here.
Still have questions about Facebook Live after reading the guide? No worries, we have your back! Just shoot us a note and we will help you get on the road to success.
by Amber Miller | Feb 24, 2017 | Blog, Marketing
1. Unrealistic Expectations
Internet Marketing (IM) won’t cure AIDs or make you an instant millionaire. Many people get into Internet marketing with unrealistic expectations that they’d never consider entertaining if it were in some other field. Just because you don’t need to go to school for years to get a degree in Internet marketing for you to be able to open an online business doesn’t mean that it won’t take hard work and commitment to succeed within this arena. Like other business endeavors, it’s going to take money and time to get started and the results won’t be instantaneous.
2. Not Enough Research Before Beginning
If people fall prey to any of the unrealistic expectations we’ve discussed, the outcome is that they don’t spend enough time researching and planning their online activities to make them a success. Instead, they’ll think it’s just a matter of slapping a website up and putting a shopping cart on it to get orders. That couldn’t be the furthest thing from the truth. You have to start by knowing what niches are hot online and how you plan on attracting people to your site. Even if you managed to get a huge traffic stream, do you know enough to convert those visitors into leads or customers? This is where people fail miserably when they could have improved the chances of success simply by taking some extra time upfront to research and learn how to implement a successful online business.
3. Unclear Branding
Fuzzy branding can apply to multiple aspects of your online business. It can be as obvious as a bad domain name or it can even be how poorly you’ve designed the site. It’s any fault in your site that is an Internet faux pas that makes it difficult for your visitors to associate your name with the brand of product or service you’re offering. Instead, they’re left scratching their heads trying to figure out what your site is all about.
4. Poor Traffic
The site is now up and you’ve done your research to optimize it for success, but you’ve noticed that it isn’t getting enough traffic. Why is that? Many Internet marketers think that putting up a fantastic website is all that you have to do to attract traffic. There are millions of people on the Internet, so it seems a fair assessment that getting a thousand eyeballs a month is not a big deal. Actually, the most successful Internet marketers adopt promotional strategies to maximize their traffic streams and to make their websites a success.
The main way to increase traffic is to find sites that already have a large audience and to siphon off some of those people back to your site. There may be rules about what types of links you can post and how to do this, but it’s basically the same process.
5. Inability to Convert Traffic to Customers
Even if you manage to attract gobs of traffic, the real goal of any Internet marketer is to sell or make money. You have to monetize that traffic in order to achieve your dreams of success. If you aren’t aware of the strategies to convert traffic to customers, you will let many valuable opportunities pass you by. Worse, you will feel as if you are working your tail off for few rewards. Always keep in mind that it isn’t enough just to have a popular site; that site has to produce income, one way or another.
6. Not Planning Ahead for Sales
The whole point of Internet marketing is to sell online. It may come as a surprise then to find out that many Internet marketers fail to plan their sales funnel ahead of time. Doing things by the seat of your pants may work to make a few sales here and there, but to really exploit the power of the Internet and make a living doing Internet marketing, you must plan ahead for sales using a carefully thought out sales funnel.
7. Lack of Automation Tools and Services
At first, the temptation for most Internet marketers is to do everything manually to save money. This will quickly become unmanageable as your lists get bigger and your product line becomes more varied. Add a few extra sites to manage multiple income streams, and you can quickly become confused or overburdened with the multiple minute details of operating several Internet commerce sites. The solution is to start automating things before your business gets too unwieldy and you lose customers.
8. Failure to Track and Test Results
After a failure to plan ahead for sales, one of the biggest faults that young Internet marketers tend to fall into is a failure of tracking and testing results. They may not even be aware that there are techniques, like split testing, that can help them to define why one sales campaign works better than another. It might even be due to something simple, like a different headline in the sales copy that can generate 50% more sales, but having done no split testing, they will never figure that out. It’s very important to continually track and test the results of different sales campaigns and strategies to see which ones work for you and which ones yield poor results.
9. Failure to Meet and Exceed Customer Expectations
It’s not enough to just give people a good deal these days. It has to be a great deal that is perceived to be of such great value that it would be a shame if they lost out on the opportunity to buy. One of the ways to create value packages like this is to understand your customer’s needs and then exceed their expectations on what they think they can get for their money. This is a strategy that is becoming necessary as the recession wears away people’s discretionary income and people are buying based on perceived value.
10. Poor Backup Systems
If your site goes down, do you have a mirror site or backup strategy to get back up as quickly as possible? If the answer is no, then as Murphy’s Law suggests, this will happen at the worst possible time – mostly when you are rolling out one of your hottest, time-sensitive campaigns for the entire year. The impact will be immediately felt in lost sales. If you continue to have problems like this, you will also lose customers who will judge your online business based on the fact that you offer spotty service.
If you are still having trouble with your online marketing strategies and need someone to take a look at what you got, give us a shout out. We have a team of professional digital marketers who are ready to help you build your business!
by Amber Miller | Feb 1, 2017 | Blog, Business Development, Marketing
As a fellow small business, we know just how hard and expensive it can be to build your business. There are a ton of things you can do to quickly drive business to your company, but many of these things can cost small businesses an arm and a leg in the long run. It’s risky to try some of these ways because if they backfire or don’t give you the kind of return you were looking for, you could easily bankrupt your business.
Luckily, there are a lot of other things you can to to boost business without spending a ton of money. Below, we’ve listed six of these ideas to help you get on the road to success.
1. GIVE SOMETHING AWAY ON YOUR WEBSITE FOR FREE
People love free stuff. They do. And most people are even willing to give you a little something in return if you’re willing to give them free stuff. Stick an ebook or whitepaper up on your website and ask for an email address in return. Your customer is getting some great industry information, and you’re growing your email list for free.
2. START SOCIAL ACCOUNTS
If you’re not already on social media, then you’re WAAAAY behind in your marketing efforts. You absolutely have to be on social media today — not only is it awesome for communicating with your customers, but it’s perfect for showcasing new products and sales! The best part about it, profiles are free.
3. DON’T STOP AT SOCIAL MEDIA, GO TO WHERE YOUR CUSTOMERS LIVE ON THE NET
Do your customers have a favorite niche forum they like to talk on about your industry? Get on there too and become a trusted advisor.
4. SIMPLIFY YOUR BUSINESS
Sell a lot of different things? It might be time to cut some of that out. Anything that is unprofitable and hard-to-sell needs to go! Spend all of your time and money on items that will give you adequate ROI.
5. GET YOUR WEBSITE LISTED ON THE WEB
There’s a lot more to getting on Google that just publishing a website. Make sure to submit your site to the top directories on the web. It’s free to submit your site to most directories and it will help boost your SEO in the long run.
6. LAST BUT NOT LEAST, LEARN TO DELEGATE
You’re not superman/woman. You can’t do everything yourself. If you’re a one woman/man show; it might be time to hire some help and delegate out some of that work. If you’re too busy packing orders and managing suppliers, then you certainly don’t have time to do any marketing or other important tasks you need to focus on to grow your own business. One thing to note: hire a virtual assistant instead of an employee. VA’s are cheaper in the long run and you don’t have to worry about keeping them busy all the time if there’s no work to be done.
Obviously, there are a ton of other cheap things you can be doing to grow your business. If you’re stuck and you need someone to help you figure out what to do next, give us a shout out. We’re a small business too and we’ve learned a lot over the years – let us share our experiences with you to help you grow!
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