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.

Is Social Networking Useless?

Posted on by

social networkLast Thursday, Bob Bly asked his readers
whether they agreed with Kent Lewis, President of Anvil Media that social media is not an effective marketing tool. Mr. Lewis, who was interviewed by DM News, (3/2/09, p.10) stated that he saw social media networks as personal collaboration tools, rather than an information or research source. Commenting on this, Bly said that he’d tried Twitter and found it mostly a bunch of useless gab.

I agree that Twitter (and Facebook and etc.) can certainly be a giant waste of time, but there are opportunities there as well.

For example,

  • an airline sending tweets to passengers that their flight is delayed
  • a popular restaurant announcing that there are a few reservations available for that night (first tweet back, first served)
  • reporters tweeting queries to a service that broadcasts their queries (HARO)
  • a cable company using Twitter to communicate with customers having problems (and get them fixed)
  • a friend used it to get sponsors for a project
  • Tribes, which has not only connected people all over the world, but produced two e-books (group), inspired several more, plus blogs, and collaboration on real-world projects

What do you think? Waste of time? Or useful tool? Chime in!

Photo: luc legay

Is SEO the Answer to All Business Marketing?

Posted on by

David Meerman Scott’s post yesterday about SEO and your crap filled site reminded me of a recent conversation I had. A client had just hired a new CEO, who was gung ho about SEO. He’d gotten good results at his previous job and was all excited about applying the same principles at his new company.

Sounds good? Well, it wasn’t. The trouble wasn’t lack of traffic. They had a well-known brand, and lots of visitors to the site. The problem was that the site was huge – hundreds and hundreds of pages. The content was hard to find. It took 8-10 pages to register for an event. You couldn’t use credit cards directly, you had to go through paypal (and leave the company’s site). It was confusing and took too much time.

The problem wasn’t an SEO issue, it was a usability issue. The site needed to be streamlined, updated, and re-tuned for the customer (not the company).

Face toward your customers, not toward yourself.

Danard Vincente

Learn These Trade Secrets

Posted on by

magazine standNearly every interest, business, industry, and activity has a newsletter or a magazine. These publications focus solely on people in particular industries. And most of them are free.

Here are 5 ways to use them:

1) Keep up with what’s going on in your industry, your customers’ problems (or the problems that businesses like them are having), and get information that will help you better serve your customers, or develop new products and services.

2) Many have online forums or email newsletters. Use the first to make useful (not promotional) comments. Answer questions and, where appropriate, point to an article or a resource on your Web site that will be helpful. This is also a good way to get traffic to your site. Once on that page, offer an e-book, or other “ethical bribe” to sign up for your newsletter.

3) As a promotional tool. Submit articles and get your name, and your business, in front of readers who are potential prospects. Just remember, write something that offers information and solutions, not a sales pitch. Check their editorial calendars (usually posted on their Web sites) and also look at the masthead to find the name of the editor. Writing articles in trade publications will raise your profile among your target audience, and establish you as a believable expert in your field.

4) Write letters to the editor (see yesterday’s post)

5) Advertise in their e-newsletters or in the magazine (if budget allows). Many also have event calendars, which you can use to publicize an upcoming conference or seminar.

To find a list of trade magazines, and subscribe, visit my Web site at KaplanCopy Trade Publication List

Photo: mannhobai

Get More Clicks (Without Spending a Cent)

Posted on by

typewriter lettersI got 120 new visitors to my book web site yesterday (without spending a cent). There’s been a raging debate on Shelf Awareness (a book industry newsletter) about the pros and cons of e-books. I run a Squidoo lens arguing that printed books are better, so I decided to weigh in on the topic. I wrote a letter to the editor arguing that publishers (and authors) will have to change their strategies and interact with readers in order to survive, and included a link to my lens.

Shelf Awareness posted the letter in their newsletter, and the clicks started coming. 77 in the first hour and a half, about 87 by lunchtime and 120 by this morning. Letters to the editor may seem like a relic of the last century, but people still read them. And, with the Internet, instead of waiting days or weeks for the magazine to print, the response is virtually instantaneous. Even better, you can include a live link, so readers can click directly to your site for more information.

Remember, don’t be overtly promotional. Offer insights, useful information, and reasoned arguments for your position. Target the publications you write to. Keep them within your sphere of expertise. There’s no sense writing in to a neurosurgery magazine if you’re not a neurosurgeon. Then, sit back and watch the clicks roll in.

Photo: Laineys Repertoire

How to Get More Sales From Your Web Site

Posted on by

Photo: bull3t

What people see when they first visit your site can make a big difference in the number of sales you get. When someone comes to your site, your goal is to get them to do something (download an article, sign up for a newsletter, or just find out more about you.

Here are some tips on how to improve your site, and make it easier for your prospects to do what you want.

Skip the introductory flash/enter page. Send people straight to the information they’re looking for.

Avoid script fonts. They’re hard to read on a computer screen, and tend to blur slightly (even on a large screen).

Center your images. I just looked at a site with photo on top that wasn’t centered properly. There was a line down the middle of the image and part of it repeated towards the right side of the page.

Be clear and simple. Make sure your pages load quickly. Don’t use lots of large graphics. Use a thumbnail image and add a click-through to a larger one if necessary (so buyers can get a better look at something). Clearly mark your links (underlined or a different color).

Contrast is important (especially online). Don’t use too much of a single color.

People buy from people. If you’re selling a membership, or access to an expert, put his or her photo on the site.

Paint mental pictures. If you sell a product, add descriptions that bring them to life. The reader should be able to imagine the result as well as see it: “Each design is individually hand-crafted in a process that takes 15 days to complete. Using tools no larger than a pin, the artist carefully joins together 20 pieces to create his sculpture.”

Be specific. Don’t say, you’ll save hundreds of dollars, or free extra reports worth thousands. Use an exact number instead; such as “save $155” or “free reports valued at $1,245.”