by Amber Miller | Apr 25, 2017 | Marketing
There’s a lot more to Britney than the awesome experience she brings to our team. We’d like to take a minute here and talk about 10 more things you might want to know about our admin star!
(Q) Favorite thing to do on the weekend?
Spending time with family and friends! We just moved to Mesa, Arizona from San Diego, California so taking the kids to the beach or the zoo was my favorite weekend activity. Now that we are in Mesa we are still looking for fun weekend things but I love sitting poolside with a good cocktail!
(Q) Where is your favorite shop or place to shop at?
I’m kind of obsessed with Target! They have everything, plus Starbucks and a dollar section.
(Q) Where was your favorite vacation?
Growing up our family vacations were spent floating on the river in either Laughlin or Havasu. My husband just got out of the Navy after 12 years. During those 12 years, he deployed three times, we moved seven times and lived in four different states. We really haven’t had time to take a real vacation. Now that he is out and we are settled I hope to change that!
(Q) What food do you dislike the most?
Seafood! I can’t stand the smell, flavor or texture of anything that comes from the ocean (except fried calamari!)
(Q) What is your favorite music?
Rock and Country. I am super excited to finally see Metallica in concert this year!
(Q) Do you like Movies?
Yes. My three-year-old daughter Emma usually has control of what movie we watch. We have watched Moana every day since it came out! (My husband and I can’t say “You’re Welcome” without singing it like Maui!)
(Q) Favorite Restaurant?
BJ’s Brewhouse – they have the BEST chicken tender salad and strawberry martini!
(Q) Do you have any favorite pets?
Before my husband and I had kids we had a Siberian Husky, Gretzky. He was our first baby and the BEST dog! We lost him in 2013 due to kidney failure. We are hoping to add another husky to the family soon.
(Q) The BEST gift you ever received?
My pink glitter KitchenAid stand mixer!
(Q) You love people who…?
Make me laugh!
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 | Apr 16, 2017 | Delegating, Virtual Assisting
Utilizing the services of a virtual assistant can save you hours of time a week to focus on the more exciting aspects of your business. But what do you even give your VA to work on? Depending on who you’re working with, virtual assistants can handle tasks as simple as updating spreadsheets to basically running your whole business for you online.
If you’re looking for ways to cut down on your workload and utilize the talents of your assistants, here are 5 things to outsource to a virtual assistant.
Social Media Updates
Why spend your precious time writing and updating all of your social media accounts when you can have someone do it for you? Spend that extra free time making connections face to face.
Email Management
Virtual assistants can be white labeled, which can be super handy if you need someone to manage your email customer service accounts. Have your VA connect with your customers for you.
Scheduling
Sick of trying to manage your company calendar? Your personal calendar? Most virtual assistants can handle this tedious task for you.
Online Research
Need to gather some information for a new product, new competitor, new laws in your industry?? Send your virtual assistant on the hunt for you.
Data Entry
We know you hate tedious tasks that take up your precious time. Data Entry is one of those things. There’s no reason for you to focus on adding information when you should be focusing on how to reach more clients. Hand the tedious tasks off!!
Our team of virtual assistants can accomplish a lot more than what’s on this list. If you’re interested to see how we can help grow your business and save you time in the long run, give us a shout out. Have some other ideas on what you can give to a virtual assistant?? Please share with us in the comments below!
by Amber Miller | Apr 8, 2017 | Training, Web Design
Did you know that you could add audio to your WordPress images? We had no idea until we stumbled upon this little gem of an article the other day talking about adding audio to images… Say what?! This feature gives users the option to play short audio clips on selected images while browsing your site. Cool huh?
Think of the possibilities! You could add short stories giving background information about the image, showcase a product or service, simply add music, create a how-to clip about a specific step in a procedure, really…we could go on all day.
So I’ll just start with how to get started…
How to Add Audio to Images Using WordPress Editor
If you use WordPress Editor, all you need to do is install and activate Audio Story Images. Once the plugin is activated, all you need to do is:
- Upload an image and audio file to your media library. (Make sure you are in LIST view, not GRID view).
- You should see a column for “Audio Story”. Click “Attach” next to any image you would like to add audio to. Select the audio track using the radio buttons on the popup and click “Select”.
- Insert image into page using normal “Add Media” button in the WordPress editor.
- Publish page and test!
How to Add Audio to Images Using Divi
The process is a little more complicated with Divi, but once you get the process down, it’s really not much different than the WordPress Editor process. Really, there’s one additional step. lol.
- Follow steps 1 and 2 from WordPress Editor instructions above.
- Add a normal text module to the page and use the “Add Media” button to insert the image.
- Save the image module and update the page. You will not see the audio image in preview mode so you will need to publish to see it.
- Publish the page and test!
That’s it folks! We would really love to hear how you plan to use this cool new feature in the comments below. If you find yourself in need of a technical virtual assistant to help you with your WordPress website, shoot us an email, and we can help you figure it all out together.
by Amber Miller | Mar 29, 2017 | Blog, Business Development, Delegating, Entrepreneur
If you’re trying to run a small business with little help, then you know how overwhelming things can become. Most of the time financial resources come into play, or people feel they can complete projects quicker themselves. The truth of the matter is if you ever want to succeed in business, you’re going to need to delegate.
When you hire a virtual assisting team to help run your business, you’re hiring a team of professionals that will most likely complete a job quicker and more efficiently. In addition, allowing a team to take over all of your administrative, web marketing, and web development tasks will save you a lot of money in the long run. This allows business owners to get back to what they do best, bringing in new customers and expanding their business.
Here are three tips on how you can delegate successfully:
- Figure out what you’re willing to delegate
When you’re first starting out, you should consider assigning smaller tasks and work up to the larger, more complicated tasks. This will give your virtual assisting team time to learn your procedures, policies, and way of doing things.
- Pick the right person for the job
Find out the strengths and weaknesses of each of your team members and pass along projects to those you believe are the best fit for the job. A couple of things to look for in virtual assistants include; confidence, self-motivation, and able to work without constant supervision.
- Make sure you communicate CLEARLY!
This is probably the most important key to great delegation. No matter what the task, always be upfront about expectations, deadlines, and provide all of the information the team or person will need to complete the goals for the task. Communication should be clear and concise — the more direction you give your team, the better your chances of them coming back with exactly what you wanted.
Delegating in business is critical to your success. Set yourself up for the future by investing in yourself now. Get started with an experienced virtual assistant team like Smart to Finish that can make your business succeed and your life a little easier.
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 18, 2017 | Blog, Business Development, Entrepreneur, Memberships
Are you looking for other ways to increase profits using the web? Aren’t we all? One thing to consider is starting a membership site. It’s really quite simple… set up a website, charge a monthly fee, offer your customers awesome content, keep it running, aaaaaand profit. Ok – maybe there’s a little bit more to it than that, so that’s why we’ve got this handy list of benefits to owning a membership site.
• Dominate the competition in your niche
If you have a membership site, you’ll stand out amongst the people who have a score of e-books but nothing else to offer their customers.
• Get more money out of your list
You may have heard that “the money is in the list”. And, you’ll want to get as much money from your list members as you can. A membership site is the perfect way to do this.
• Increase customer loyalty
If your site has great content and you respond promptly to all queries, a membership site will increase customer loyalty a lot better than selling individual products. This is because the customer will feel as if you’re more accessible.
• Develops a sense of community
Membership sites that have a forum help encourage a sense of community. So not only do the members interact with you, but they can interact with each other. This is a good selling point and a benefit for the owner of the site because it is another thing that will help increase your customer’s loyalty.
• Great way to build a list
If you want to start a free membership site, or offer portions of your membership site for no cost, it can present an effective way to build a list.
• Develop passive income
Although internet marketing is a great career, the money can be a little unstable. A membership site is a good way to not only make more money, but to make the income you do bring in a lot steadier.
• They don’t need to be complicated
A lot of people assume that a membership site is complicated. Not necessarily. There are plenty of options that are simple, such as exclusive content delivered via autoresponder.
Back to that profit, let’s look at the math… say you have a membership site that offers exclusive content related to your niche. If you charge $19.95 a month and have 100 subscribers, that translates to nearly $2000 profit and all you needed to do was refresh the content and make sure the site is running properly.
Not a web person? Or a writer? We can help you with both. Shoot us a note at Smart to Finish – we can build, maintain, and market your new membership site and really make it a seamless process.
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!
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