So you own a business and a website, but you’re wondering what all the talk about blogging is and if blogging for a business is something for you. First we need to understand what a blog is. A blog for a business has two characteristics. First, a blog for a business is easy to create and publish and second it allows readers to give feedback or become part of a discussion. In most aspects a blog (post) has a lot of the characteristics of a web page. The biggest difference is a blog is dynamic, most web pages are static.
So why would a business want a blog. First, if you want traffic to your website, blogs are the way to go. Search engines love new content, and if you create a blog that discusses stuff that interests your potential buyers, you can build a community having conversations on your website, with your advertising and your ability to control the direction to some extent. Blogs can also be a tool for your company to communicate your company policies, recent events and decisions
Items to think about:
I DON’T HAVE TIME- Actually you should be saying “I DON’T HAVE TIME NOT TO”. Like it or not, the web and blogs are the future, embrace it now or get left behind so get creative. So here are some suggestions:
Your website is your online center of operations, but if you use social media as part of your advertising, market positioning and promotional efforts, your presence is scattered across the web.
While establishing a business presence in popular social venues like Facebook and Twitter may be crucial to your online community building initiatives, maintaining that presence can test your endurance and ability to maximize the impact of your efforts. Fortunately, several tools and techniques are available to help you meet these challenges.
Streamline Your Efforts With Feeds
Posting to your company’s blog, your Facebook Fan Page, Twitter, and other social media sites can become quite a burden, especially if you post fresh content at least three to four times a week as I recommend. By implementing an effective feed strategy, you post only once, and you can outsource the distribution to your various social media accounts:
Cross-Promote Your Fan Page and Website With Facebook Connect
On Facebook, you have two business goals–turning Facebook members into Fans and Fans into customers. You do this by using your Fan Page to engage with your audience and steer traffic to your company’s website. At the same time, you should be encouraging website visitors to become Facebook Fans and distribute your content to their Facebook Friends. Facebook offers several basic solutions to accomplish this feat, all of which are accessible from http://www.facebook.com/facebook-widgets:
Fan Box: A Fan Box includes the title of your Fan Page and, optionally, a sample of the most recent posts and a list of Fans.
Page Badge: A Badge is a scaled-down version of a Fan Box. The bare-bones version includes only the name of your Fan Page. You can edit the Badge to include the Fan Page status (a few words of the most recent post), picture and number of fans.
Share: With the Share feature, visitors can share content on your site with their Facebook Friends by simply clicking a button.
Twitter link: With Twitter link, you can have Facebook tweet for you whenever you post Status Updates, Links, Photos, Notes or Events to your Facebook
Page.
Tip: You can find plugins for most blogging platforms that enable visitors to share your posts via their social media accounts. For example, Add to Any for WordPress allows visitors to share posts through Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and via e-mail.
Facebook also offers some higher-end tools for developers. Implementing these features on your site requires a more advanced skill set:
Publishing to Facebook: This enables Facebook members to publish Status Updates directly from your site, notifying their Facebook Friends of your content.
Comments Box: Facebook members can post a comment about something on your site that appears both on your site and on Facebook.
Live Stream: Facebook Friends can view live video on your site while chatting in real time about what they are watching.
For more about these and other Facebook Connect features, visit developers.facebook.com/connect.php.
Enlist Twitter Users to Spread the Word
You tweet to drive traffic to your site, but what are you doing to recruit brand evangelists to tweet about your business, products and services for you? If the answer is “Nothing,” you have work to do. Twitter offers free widgets and buttons you can add to your site simply by inserting a line of code.
Login to your Twitter account, scroll to the bottom of the page, click Goodies, click Widgets or Buttons, follow the on-screen instructions to obtain the code, and then paste it into your website or blog code where you want the item to appear.
With so many social media venues to attend to, you may feel as though your community-building initiatives are becoming fragmented beyond your control. By coordinating your efforts with a few readily available tools, you regain control, focus and save time, too.
What’s important to the success of small-business owners and entrepreneurs? Knowledge, skill and talent.
People have confidence in trustworthy individuals and want to work for them in a culture of integrity. The same is true for customers.
Be flexible, except with core values.
It’s a given that your plans and strategies will change as time goes on. This flexibility for rapid change is an inherent advantage of small over large business. However, no matter the pressure for immediate profits, do not compromise on core values.
Don’t let fear of failure hold you back.
Failure is an opportunity to learn. All things being equal, venture capitalists would rather invest money in an individual who tried and failed founding a company than in someone who never tried.
Make timely decisions.
It’s okay to use your intuition. Planning and thought are good. But procrastination leads to missed opportunity.
The major company asset is you.
Take care of yourself. Your health is more valuable than the most expensive machinery or computer software for the company. You don’t have to choose between your family or your company, play or work. Maintain your health for balance and energy, which will, in turn, enhance your mental outlook.
Keep your ego under control.
Don’t take profits and spend them on expensive toys to impress others. Build a war chest for unexpected needs or opportunities. This also means hearing out new ideas and suggestions no matter how crazy they sound.
Believe.
You need to believe in yourself, in your company, and that you will be successful. This confidence is contagious with your employees, customers, stakeholders, suppliers and everyone you deal with.
Encourage and accept criticism graciously. Admit your mistakes.
You need to constantly work on convincing your employees that it’s okay–even necessary–to state their honest opinions even it if conflicts with the boss’s opinion. Just stating it once or putting it in a mission statement won’t cut it for most people.
Maintain a strong work ethic.
Your employees will follow your lead. It will also help you beat your competition by outworking them, particularly when your product or service is very similar.
Rebound quickly from setbacks.
There surely will be plenty of ups and downs as you build the business. Learn from the setbacks and move on. You can’t change the past.
Periodically get out of your comfort zone to pursue something important.
Many times you will feel uncomfortable in implementing a needed change in technology, people, mission, competing, etc. For the company and you to grow personally, you sometimes have to step out of your comfort zone.
Many organizational and leadership shortcomings can be overcome or mitigated with the good attitudes described above. All can be learned except passion, which comes from within. Take time out of your hectic schedule to periodically reflect on these attributes. You may be inspired to act.
This article is based on the contents of the book Bootstrapping 101 by Bob Reiss. Reiss is an Army veteran and graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Business School. He has been involved in 16 startups and is a three-time INC 500 winner. He has been the subject of two Harvard case studies and is a frequent speaker at University Entrepreneurial classes.
Today, most business purchasers looking to buy a product or service start the process by using a search engine to find vendors and product information. How can you make sure that your business is found when these people are looking for you or your competitors? You need to make sure you rank high in the search engine results, for as many search terms as possible, and hopefully for many of the terms that are searched on more frequently. The first step toward ranking high in the results for the most common terms that people search is to have the right keywords as part of your online presence.
Some things to keep in mind:
1) Create a keyword list.
Start by thinking about the 3-5 words that you think people will search on to find your business or businesses like yours. Then use keyword tools to understand how often people search on the terms related to your business. I used the keywords “marketing”, “lead” and “small business” for this example.
Here is a tools that allow you to enter one word (like “marketing”) and get a list of related search terms as well as the number of times people search for each term.
Google’s Keyword Tool is a little bit different because it does not give you the total number of searches, it just tells you if the search activity is low or high on a 1 to 5 scale. But, it has another useful tool that allows you to put in your website (or a competitor’s website) and then it will analyze the site and spit out keywords that are related to the site. This part of the tool is useful if you don’t really know where to start on finding keywords.
Google Keyword Tool allows you to find keywords related to your website or a competitors web site.
For a really advanced tool that combines a lot of data from a variety of sources, you can use the SEO Book Keyword Tool. There is a lot of data and links in the table of results it produces, I will leave it to you to investigate:
2) Combine and analyze the results. As you search, cut and paste the results into a spreadsheet. (I have found that in Excel it works best to copy the results from the Overture Keyword Tool and then using “paste special” and then “paste as text”.) Once you have done this for 2-3 key terms, you should have a spreadsheet with 200 or 300 rows. To analyze the results and make them useful for your business, we need to figure out which terms are the best ones for your company to focus on. To do this, try the following steps:
A list of search terms scored for volume and relevance and sorted by a total score.
3) Pick your keywords and use them on your web site. You really want to boil it down to a list of the 3-5 most important individual words, and then a list of the top keywords and phrases that you will use on your website. I usually like to focus on the top 30 terms from the spreadsheet. You should use the keywords in the page titles, the URLs, the page metadata and the text on the page itself.
Want all of this automatically? Contact Compliments International and we can put this together for you today!
Much has been touted about the new social media tools that allow businesses unprecedented access to marketing channels in the digital space. Now any business entity can become as famous as a major brand, thanks to the power of viral online marketing.
One thing to keep in mind is that Google has elevated the value of social media efforts in its search algorithm. You can see this for yourself: Google several different people you know. If any of these folks you entered have a Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn profile, these pages nearly always come up in the top spots of the search results. Because of this, you can quickly and constantly modify your overall online profile using these tools or others such as YouTube or the photo sharing site Flickr.
However, even most social media experts agree that the constantly changing digital world, with its wide array of social media tools and platforms, can be overwhelming. As a small-business owner, you have to wear a lot of hats: You have to sell, you have to execute, you have to manage your human resources, and you have to maintain your finances. The only goal with you is making sure your company performs and profits. How on earth are you going to be able to keep up with the latest and greatest social media tools?
So what should you focus on before jumping full-force into a social media marketing effort? Actually, the focus should not be so much on keeping up with every new tool that comes along, but on effectively reaching and staying connected with your target market.
1. Define Your Goals
First of all, you need to define what outcome(s) you hope to achieve through your social media efforts. Define your goals. Then ask yourself, ‘What are the easiest and fastest ways to achieve these goals?’ Whether you own a dry cleaning company, a retail store or a small accounting company, you need to be able to clearly spell out your goals, and then choose the tools that will help you most effectively achieve them.
You need to ask yourself, “What social media platforms will help my company accomplish its goals the fastest?” Focus on only one or two of the sites you determine match your needs and really make them work. (You can see why you need to have a clear understanding of your company’s goals before you can begin defining your social media goals.)
2. Walk the Walk
If you’re going to promote your company on social media channels, your product or service should appear to be very strong. Whether prospects or clients visit your site, your blog, your Twitter page or Facebook fan page, or see it described on other people’s social media sites, you need to make sure they see a very professional, on-brand product. Your company’s profiles need to be attractive and in sync while showing readers that you and your team know exactly what you are doing.
3. Make Your Profile Dynamic
Remember, since most established and effective sites will be around for a while, you don’t have to go crazy and sign on to all of them at once. In fact, one of the biggest mistakes you can make as a business owner is to set up a profile for your company on a social media platform and then not maintain it.
No one likes to frequent a store that is empty most of the time … People are influenced by what other people are doing and where other people are going, in the virtual world just as they are in the real world. If someone pops in to your network and sees a lot of activity–new members joining, a new post or two written by you or other members, maybe some great new photos to browse–the buzz of activity will hold their attention and make them want to stay awhile. But if that person visits your site and sees no new activity or commentary added in the past three days, they’re outta there.
This phenomenon has occurred with many [social media profiles] as they have evolved: the ones that are updated the most are the ones that people come back to more frequently.
4. Delegate and Manage
Make sure you have designated or hired someone to maintain the profile. If you make an in-house person responsible, make sure he or she understands how to use the platform(s) and is fully engaged in the process. Another option is to hire an outside company to ensure that your profile pages are updated regularly with content and news that is valuable and interesting to the audience you’re trying to attract.
Don’t let yourself become overwhelmed. Try working on just one or two (three at most) social media sites at a time and get your marketing firm to put the rest on autopilot till more energy can be dedicated to them. Once you get these up and running, and you feel that you and your staff has the time to manage it, you can think about adding more. Constantly evaluate where people are finding you or interacting with you to determine any new social media avenues.
Regardless of what tools you use, you need to ensure you have chosen the ones that enable you to set up an online profile that is the most effective for your company. And you need to commit the necessary time and effort to ensure that these tools will continue to help your business.
I enjoy evaluating our analytics and seeing that the top referral site is Google, then Facebook, then Twitter, then Bing, Yahoo, MSN, Digg, etc…. We carefully watch our numbers to see where our entry points are.
Compliments model is somewhat different than many, because we create a central hub and all communications start within the hub and carry out to the networks through API originating from the hub and connecting views back to the hub! We rarely break the pattern or go out side this digital media hub.
Websites are not websites anymore.
When a brand manager sits down to evaluate what she or he is doing online and in the mobile channels, the first realization they have is usually it’s not up to snuff with the massive amount of online usage that consumers are engaged in. And, more often than not, they must also grapple with what their peers and competitors are doing in these spaces as well.
As brands continue to try to out-design competitors, there could also be a bigger, scarier realization: your website is not important anymore.
Becoming a publisher of content online is what the digital channels are really all about. Brands still get caught up in the functionality and minutiae of what their website is. All of those shiny bells and whistles won’t amount to anything if you’re not constantly and consistently publishing content (which can be done in text, images, audio, video or any combination of those formats) that adds value to the consumer’s life. When you explain to a brand manager that online works not because of what you’re showing people, but rather on content they’re publishing, the response is often: “but we sell Product X; we’re not in the publishing or content creation business.”
News flash: yes you are a publisher. And, if you’re not, you better start being one.
The age of creating basic websites that shill your products and services with mumbo jumbo and corporate rhetoric is over. The age of brochureware websites is just that – an age. It can’t (and wasn’t meant to) last forever. The new types of employees that are going to fill the marketing, communications and sales departments of the most successful companies are going to have job titles like community manager, editor in chief, blogger, podcaster, videographer and social media director.
Don’t be surprised if terms like “ROI” and “CPM” suddenly become replaced with terms like “engagement” and “customer reviews.”
Look no further than Amazon. What was originally an online e-commerce website for selling books has pushed well beyond that. The sheer retailing power of Amazon is staggering. Beyond the selection of products they have expanded into (not to mention the development and sale of multiple technologies and the acquisition of other companies along the way), they are a juggernaut of content creation. Around every product you will find Amazon’s description sidled up against major industry news outlets’ reviews, alongside customer reviews and much, much more. Authors of books are invited to add their own blog feed, there are forums for discussions and even video demos.
It’s no longer about the cheapest price or free shipping at Amazon, it’s about publishing information and product clarity so consumers feel confident in their purchase decisions.
Amazon is able to sell massive amounts of product because it is able to create an online atmosphere of confidence by publishing original content, republishing mass media content and by creating a platform for any individual to publish her own perspective of what the product is like in the real world. Is Amazon an online merchant? Is Amazon a great website? Or, is Amazon really one of the leading publishers of content, reviews and insights about products and merchandise? Others have created websites that sell the same products for cheaper. Competitors have designed websites that are way more engaging and pleasing to the eye. But Amazon has been winning the retail war by becoming a trusted provider of content that surrounds the products they sell. This is paramount to understanding what success looks like in the online channel. This concept of “brand as publisher” extends well beyond your garden walls as well. When you create a page on Facebook, it’s not about “build it and they will come.”
You create content within the platform that entices customers to become your “fans.”
Similarly, a brand on Twitter is really just publishing thoughts of value in 140 characters at a time in a consistent enough pace that builds interest in who’s doing it, what they’re about and how they connect back to their consumers. Communities are created around this content, and those communities are expecting an engaging back-and-forth type of conversation or communication. That can’t happen with a static website.
This was such a fantastic opportunity. Please take a moment and check out Jennifer’s interview with Eddie Reyes the HUB Coordinator for UNT and the host of Diversity in
Jennifer Bagley Radio Interview
Action.
This is packed with valuable information to help take your business to the next level.
Jennifer Bagley is the CEO of Compliments International and is one of the top international experts in web design, social media marketing and search engine optimization.
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So traffic to your website is good, but the phone is still not ringing. What now? Let’s face it, unless the phone rings or you start getting emails requesting information all the effort to build a website and get traffic to the website does not do any good. What we are talking about is the Conversion Rate. The simple definition of Conversion Rate is the percentage of visitors to your website that do what you want them to do. This could be place a phone call, click on a link, fill out a form, make a purchase, etc. You have to decide what your definition of a conversion rate is (what you want visitors to your website to do).
Because the definition of Conversion Rate is different for each website and each situation it is difficult to get specific data, but let’s try to set some realistic expectations. Typically there are three types of sites with different Conversion Rates. Sales websites (e-commerce) range from .5% to 8% with an average of 2.3% based on numbers published by FireClick. For lead generation sites, 2-3% is normal with a best in class of 5%. Subscription websites have conversion rates between 1 and 7%.
So here are some areas to look to improve website conversion rates.
Trust – We recently wrote an article on 16 items to help build trust into your website. If you want people visiting your site to do the actions you want (your conversion rate) they have to trust your site. Some of the highlights include providing your guarantees or return policies, making sure you have a professional looking website, and publishing testimonials and third party endorsements. Are you giving the impression of high quality when presenting your product or service?
Intuitive layout – Can people find what they are looking for on your website? If you want to improve website conversion rates make sure people can find what they are looking for quickly and what you want them to do is obvious. Important information or actions should never be more than two clicks away, preferably one click. Have someone that knows nothing about your product or service look at your website. Ask them what they would do and what they think they are suppose to do. You will be surprised at what you can find out. Is it obvious what you sell, what you want people to do? A good book on usability is Don’t make me think by Steve Krug.
Eye Tendency Map
Differentiator – If you want to improve your website conversion rates you need to be unique. What is your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)? What makes you different than all the other websites supposedly providing the same product or service? How do you solve the problem or need the visitor to your website has? Be memorable!
Analyzing activity – It is very difficult to manage what you can’t measure. You need to manage your website conversion rates by measuring your website conversion rates. Several key measurements to look at are Bounce Rate(how many people that come to your site end up going to a competitor), Page Views (Is you website providing information they want) and Time On Pages/Site (are you keeping their attention). You need to understand which pages are interesting to your visitors and are keeping them around and which ones they are determining have no relevance and are moving to other websites to solve their need. Google Analytics will tell you answers to most of the questions you here(A couple other pay-for products are Clicktale and Crazyegg). Try to figure out the biggest segment of traffic is looking for and cater to them. Next use keyword phrases and links to cater to the next biggest segment.
Relevance – It is critical that you get the right traffic to your website if you want to have a high website conversion rate. If people are coming to your website looking for cows and you are selling apples you are not going to have a high conversion rate. Look at the keyword phrases people are using to get to your website. Remember it is much easier to sell what someone wants than to convince someone to buy what you have. Publish information that makes you the subject matter expert and answers the questions people have. Write Posts to answer the Frequently Asked Questions FAQ’s). If you want to find out what visitors are thinking with surveys a couple of good programs are Survey Monkey, 4Q online surveys, Kampyle or Ethnio.
Modify – You need to make changes, but they need to be small changes and you need to track the differences these changes make to your website conversion rates. The term is “Micro Modifications”, changing one small item and seeing what it does to your conversion rate. This can be moving a phone number from the Header to the Body, changing a Buy Now Button from Green to Red, or changing the wording on a link from “Click Here To Find Out More” to “Find Out How to Win …”. You cannot change all of these at one time and know which improved website conversion rates. There are some great free tools for tracking these changes. One of the best is Google Website Optimizer. When you make modifications for testing a good rule of thumb is a sample size of at least 1000 visitors.
By Darren Squires
“If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to understand the other person’s point of view and see things from their angle.”
Know what your market wants and then give it to them it’s a lot easier than trying to convince them to buy something you want to sell.
So where do we start in selecting keywords and keyword phrases?
Step 1 – Clearly and succinctly define what the product or service you provide is. It is absolutely critical that you can, in 1 or 2 sentences, tell someone exactly what you do or provide and how you can solve a problem or need they have.
Step 2 – Start to put together a list of what you think are the keywords and keyword phrases that describe your product or service. At this point we are looking for a long list of words or phrases you think apply. We will narrow the list of keywords and keyword phrases down later.
Step 3 – Next we are going to try to figure out what the other person thinks and what keywords they use. Google has a great free tool to help. Go to Google Adwords. If you prefer some other keyword and keyword phrase tools you can check out SEOCentro’s keyword tool or Keyword Trackers tool . For Google you will have two options, you can put in your list of words or you can select an existing website and have Google tell you what it thinks the keywords are. In both cases you will get a whole list of other suggestions.
This is only a starting point. You want to sort the list by volume (this is Google’s volume which currently represents 66% of all searches) and start to look at the Advertiser Competition. Although it is not an exact science, the Advertiser Competition (which is how much people are paying Google to be on the front page of searches for a particular keyword or keyword phrase) is a good indication of how much competition there is going to be for a particular keyword or keyword phrase.
Also note that some of the words you thought were important may not be or ones you thought were unimportant are actually search more than expected. If you are optimizing for a word nobody is searching for you are wasting your time!!!
Step 4 – Start to narrow down your list. Ultimately you want to narrow down to 1 or 2 primary keywords or keyword phrases that are part of a list of 10 keywords or keyword phrases. In addition you want to create your secondary list of 10 to 20 keywords or keyword phrases that are relevant and you will use periodically.
Ultimately you are going to have to figure out if a particular keyword or keyword phrase is attainable with your budget and is relevant. If you don’t have the budget of a Wells Fargo or Lending Tree you are probably not going to get on the front page for the keyword “Mortgage”, but you might be able to get on the front page for “Mortgage Dallas” or “Dallas Mortgages”.
People have a tendency to get excited about the fact that the keyword “Mortgage” has 101,000,000 searches a month. But most people do not consider relevance which is going to lead to better conversion rates. How many of the people searching the keyword “Mortgage” actually live in the state you are located. If you have an E-commerce site and can ship anywhere, location may not matter, but it’s something to consider.
You are looking for the best combination of these 5 factors:
Step 5 – Do a Google search for each of the keywords you have selected and see who comes up. If you want to see who the top 40 are for Google, Bing and Yahoo for a keyword or keyword phrase a great site isSEOCentro’s Rank Checker.
Take a couple of the web addresses that show up in the search and put them into Website Grader. You are looking at a number of factors. Age of the website, how well was it built, in bound links, indexed pages, page rank, etc. to determine if the first page of this particular keyword is one that is attainable. If not, look for another keyword.
If you are interested in a more comprehensive analysis of competition for keywords Objectware Inc. has agreat article.
Step 6 – Go back to step 4 and revise your list. Once you have a solid list of keywords or keyword phrases other people are looking for, are relevant and attainable you are ready to move to the next step, writing your page content and/or writing your blogs and posts.
NOTE: Our previous article on how to write a post can be used and applied to static pages as well.
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