Category Archives: Small Business Online Marketing Strategies

Marketing your small business online can be an effective way to market your products and services.  It can also be an enormous waste of time and effort, especially if you are using the wrong online marketing strategies

First, your design, writing, and offer all have to work together.  Poor copywriting, bad design, and painful user interfaces can all drive away your hard-won traffic. Using social media to shout at people can also drive people away (instead of drawing them in).

Get tips on the right way to write for the web. It’s different than writing for print and you may have to toss out some of the rules you learned back in school.

Small businesses make plenty of other online marketing mistakes, such as using too much jargon, or concentrating too much on a pretty design, instead of usability. Hard to use designs are just as bad. If visitors can’t use your site, they will leave.

And, of course, there’s landing pages.  Landing pages are your 24/7 sales team.  They’ve got to answer all the questions you can’t answer in person.  If they’re not working, neither are your sales (or your profits).  Learn the most common landing page goofs and how to correct them.

The Biggest Web Site Subscription “Fail.” Ever.

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fail roadNewsday (a newspaper in the New York area) just spent $4 million (US) putting their web site behind a paywall.

Subscription cost: $5 per week.

In three months, they’ve gotten 35 subscribers. That’s $11,428.57 per sign up.

Total earnings so far, $9,000. Not much of an ROI. And a pretty big web marketing failure.

Apparently, the site is awful. It’s hard to navigate. Many of the links are broken. The reporting isn’t very good.

When not to charge

Newsday apparently thought that putting content behind a paywall would work for them the way it’s working for The Wall Street Journal. The Journal’s content, however, is perceived as more valuable, and more focused, namely business news.

In addition, many companies pay for employee subscriptions. No company will pay for Newsday – it’s too general, and not even a very good newspaper.

When to charge

If you’re going to charge, charge for something that matters to your audience. Charge for convenience. Or exclusivity. People will also pay for convenience (say taking 20 articles scattered around your site and packaging them together with new material).

Charge for information that solves a specific problem (like poorly performing web sites – look for more on this next week). Or charge for something that’s not on your web site at all.  You can also charge for something that offers special access or personal attention.

Don’t get so caught up (like Newsday did) in your own needs that you forget what your subscribers and clients want. Or what they will think is worth paying for.

Photo: fireflythegreat

Do You Make This Common Online Marketing Mistake?

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mistake

You carefully set up your online marketing campaign, selected “your people“, offered solutions to their problems, designed eye-catching graphics, and sent it out into the world.

And it went splat.

What happened?

You missed an important step.

When you create an online campaign, there are three places you can send people.

Home pages

Your home page is the “front page” of your web site.  The door where most people enter your site.  Check your stats; it’s probably got more visits than the other pages.  It’s great as a general introduction to what you do and to invite people to explore your site further (here’s mine).

It’s not so good as a direct sales tool.

Product pages

Then there’s a product page.  That’s a page that’s talking about a specific product or service you offer.  It can be a selling page, or informational (like this one on Amazon).  This is better as a sales tool, and but there’s a better choice (especially for services).

Landing pages

Finally, there’s a landing page.  The landing page is a special page (or sometimes a mini-site) set up to sell something, encourage sign ups (to a newsletter), or encourage visitors to download information.

Landing pages have fewer navigation buttons, so that visitors concentrate on what’s in front of them (and don’t wander off elsewhere on your site).  The goal is for visitors to arrive, read what you have to say, and take action right there.

There’s a fierce debate on the web about long vs. short copy, but landing pages tend to be long in order to answer questions and explain everything about the product (since you can’t do that in person).

When you run a campaign, send people to a landing page.  Tell them what they need to know to buy your product.  Don’t distract them.  Get more sales!

Image:  jyri

Can You Find the Mistakes in This Web Copy?

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wrong way

Image thanks to geralt

Yesterday, I posted some web copy and asked what was wrong with it. The company is pure fiction, but the copy is adapted from an actual web site.

I have changed the names and altered the details of the site to avoid embarrassment, but the website copywriting mistakes are real.

Find the web copywriting mistakes

Here it is again.

A badly designed web site can have a negative impact on your site’s effectiveness and the money you earn from it.

After the initial consultation phase of your project, Wow Wow Web Design will create your web site using professional design tools. There are people who will offer to produce graphics for you at highly discounted rates. However, the quality of their design may be poor.

Whether you need a big web site or a small one, we can provide all your design needs.

No work process

There’s a general statement about an initial consultation, but no indication what happens after that. Talking about your work process is good, but spell it all out. Take people through what you’ll do and when. Let them know how you charge (all at once, in stages), what the process is like and how many designs a client will receive,

No differentiation

Why choose Wow Wow over any other company?

They don’t seem to specialize in any particular industry, or type of work.  Are they wizards of Blogger? Or only do WordPress?  What if you need ecommerce tools? Will they tell you if they’re not a good fit? How transparent are they about their work process?

How will you know if they are a good fit for your project? Professional design tools sounds good, but which ones?  If a client needs changes or updates further on, how will those be handled?

Do they offer tools that let you easily make small updates yourself? A project dashboard?

They’re not remarkable in any way.

No trust/value

They point out that cheaper alternatives may lead to poor results, but give no proof that their services are better. There’s nothing there about the designers themselves either. What is their background?  How long have they been doing this? What do their clients say about them?

No tribe

What is their market? What kind of fish are they trying to catch?  Do they specialize in large companies? Or would they rather work with smaller businesses?  Plumbing suppliers? Artists? It’s impossible to tell.

Who is their perfect client? They don’t seem to have one.  It looks like they’re trying to sell to everyone. Which means they’re selling to nobody.

Yes, that’s a lot to ask for from a few paragraphs, but the clearer you are about your value, your specialty, your point of difference, and your preferred clients, the better your results will be.

A Quick Easy Secret Copywriting Tip Anyone Can Use

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Go look at your Web site’s home page in a new window. Or, pull out your company brochure.

It’s OK, I’ll wait.

Read the first two or three paragraphs.

Do they pull you in? Make you want to read more? Or, is the best opening sentence buried?

Here’s an example, from the completely fictional Wow Wow Web Design company.

After the initial consultation phase of your project, Wow Wow Web Design will create your web site using professional design tools. There are people who will offer to produce graphics for you at highly discounted rates. However, the quality of their design may be poor.

A badly designed web site can have a negative impact on your site’s effectiveness and the money you earn from it. Whether you need a big web site or a small one, we can provide all your design needs.

Easy copywriting tip

What’s the tip?  Look at the paragraph again.

The best sentence is buried at the beginning of the second paragraph.  Move that up and see how much better it reads. Now it’s telling you right away how bad website design could hurt your business.  Once you recognize a problem, you’ll want to know how to fix it.

A badly designed web site can have a negative impact on your site’s effectiveness and the money you earn from it.

After the initial consultation phase of your project, Wow Wow Web Design will create your web site using professional design tools. There are people who will offer to produce graphics for you at highly discounted rates. However, the quality of their design may be poor.

Whether you need a big web site or a small one, we can provide all your design needs.

There are several other things wrong with this copy. Do you know what they are?

Find out here.

Image: spekulator

Earn More Money by Giving Free Gifts

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Publishers, including The New York Times, Hachette, and Penguin) are panicking over e-books.  They’re resisting the Kindle, trying to force DRM, and retain end-to-end control over pricing.

However, according (ironically) to an article published in The Times itself on Jan. 22, 2010, other publishers have decided to embrace e-books – and find ways to make money by actually giving books away.

It’s part of what Seth Godin calls the “gift” culture in his new book, Linchpin (plain old link).  Gifts bring us closer, and free can actually earn more money.

How does this work?

HarperCollins and Scholastic, among others, are offering free downloads of books by new or little-known authors for a limited time.  The idea is that if the readers like the free book, they’ll want to come back and buy more books by the same writer.

Earn money with free

For example, Samhain publishing offered free digital versions of a romance novel.  It was downloading 26,897 times.  Meanwhile, sales of the author’s two other books went from 97 and 119  to 2,666 and 3,297 respectively.  Not huge numbers, true, but found money for both publisher and author.

You can do it too

This works in other businesses too.  Give away the information and posts in your blog for free.  Offer e-books, newsletters, free articles, and white papers as downloads.  Let them spread.  Give readers permission to re-post them and share them (with credit).  Spread your ideas.

Then, add paid how-to workbooks, bundle posts with extra information and create paid e-books, add video or audio and you’ve got a workshop.  The more specific, personal, and unique the service, the higher the value, and the more it costs.

Are you using free information to make money?  Share your stories in the comments.

Image: mydogsighs