Are You Optimizing Your Landing Pages?

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Make it obvious – A great way to help get the conversion is to give the guest exactly what they came searching for. Match their keyword search query with your headlines and text. Use a great deal of white space and highlight the rewards they will receive. And most importantly, employ a strong call to action to get the conversion.

The obvious answer is, you would. Let us take a peek at 5 ways you can better optimize your landing pages for more conversions, whether for sales or lead generation.

5 Tricks for Optimizing Landing Pages

Succinct and to the point – Normally a landing page has one distinct intent that you want to make crystal clear upon arrival. You need to tie in your search query with your headlines and copy. Use bullet points to emphasize benefits and important information. Use clear, robust calls to action that leave no question what the reader needs to do next.

Choose your words carefully – Include your main keywords and direct your reader to the steps you want them to complete. You have confined space and time here, so economy is the word of the day. Try and use the most robust language you can.

Do not ignore conventional SEO – Items like title tags, descriptions and keyword intention also make a difference with landing pages, and can help them rank in Google’s search results. Additionally, by utilizing high quality on-page SEO you are far more likely to get high relevance and quality scores from Facebook and Google with paid ads.

Test several iterations – You’ll want to test various versions of your landing pages for headlines, images and color, among other things. While it can take more time, it is an uncomplicated way to seriously improve your sales!

Use social proof and trust evidence – If you can fit in recommendations, make sure you do so, and trust seals and badges are also valuable. Every bit of trustworthiness you can add will benefit you.

How to Utilize LinkedIn for your Small Business

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Remember when LinkedIn was that place you visited when you wanted to either post of look for a new job? It’s so much more than that now, and for small businesses, it is now a powerful tool for branding and networking your company.

LinkedIn helps you brand, is an outstanding place to post pillar content, and gets your name and brand in front of people you’ll want to work with.

Let’s take a look at 5 tips for helping your small business get a better footing on LinkedIn.

5 Tips for Small Businesses on LinkedIn

Create a powerful profile – Even though this may seem like tired advice to those who’ve set up profiles on many sites, on LinkedIn your profile is usually the deciding factor in whether or not someone connects with you, which is the whole point of being on the site. So it’s very important to use your profile for all it’s worth. There’s a lot you can inject here, so spend some time to explore how best to use yours.

Use great images – Take every opportunity to inject visual content into your LinkedIn content by using images, videos, presentation and more. People respond to visual far faster and better than mere text.

Get involved in groups – It’s a proven fact that those who get involved in groups on LinkedIn have about 4X more profile views than those who don’t. Moreover, it’s a prime opportunity to showcase your authority and knowledge in front of a highly-targeted crowd.

Work at connecting – If you are working at presenting yourself, posting great content, and contributing to LinkedIn, you will notice that your connection requests soar. If you build it, they will come!

Use LinkedIn Company Pages – This is a wonderful way to showcase your small business on LinkedIn. Use it as another social property supporting your main site, and drive visitors to it from your company page.

Every small business could use a little help, and a terrific place to find some is through LinkedIn’s small business helps. These free resources help you grow, optimize and further utilize this platform for all it’s worth. Don’t neglect to look into this!

How to Get Better Conversions with Improved Calls to Action

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After putting together that wonderful offer that is sure to get your business to the next level, you set up your salespage and other selling materials such as emails, landing pages, thank you pages and more.

Then you send it out, and it falls flat.

So what happened? Was it the copy’s fault, is the price too high, or is your color scheme all wrong?

Well one thing that for sure didn’t happen is a lot of A/B testing on the various elements of your offer. And although some of these could be the culprit, odds are the answer is found in a much simpler solution: Your calls to action.

What Makes a Terrific Call to Action

It is a truism that regarding calls to action the most important aspect is to make sure that you specifically tell your reader precisely what they need to do next. Leaving it up to them hardly ever results in what you are seeking.

custom-call-to-action-buttonsStrive to be very direct, and use plain language, no matter what action you are asking them to take, from a free download to a sales button.

Craft a Sense of Urgency

You want your readers to act now, so creating an aura of urgency around your product or offer is essential. If there are limited quantities, or the sale is for a limited time, state that. If the promo pricing ends soon, emphasize that. Do whatever you can to get them to act today!

Several Elements of Great Calls to Action

  • Use several calls to action on the page, including one “above the fold”
  • Consider using numbers as they increase user attention
  • Make your offer pop by contrasting colors with the rest of the page
  • Inject emotion into your calls to action whenever possible
  • Be sure and stress benefits and not features

If maximum conversions is your goal, (and why wouldn’t it be?) take the time and effort to create a call to action that is worthy of your product. Test out your offers ceaselessly to find the best possible combination of elements. You’ll be glad you took the time!

Let Go of the Reins and Start Outsourcing

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Chalkboard "Outsourcing"Running your business online can be a fearsome task in itself, but it is made even more so by insisting on not outsourcing some of the work you have to have done.

The truth is, there are people out there who can do many of the tasks you’ve got on your plate, and probably a lot better than you, especially if you are in a rush and overburdened. The fact is, keeping all this work to yourself is practically ensuring that you won’t be growing your business very much at all. You simply won’t be able to do the things needed to scale.

Here are a few specific reasons why you need to be outsourcing. Take a look and see if this doesn’t make sense to you.

There’s some things only you can do – And you need to be tending to those. These include things such as planning, networking, finding new clients and sewing up deals, and in general, being the visionary behind your company. This can’t be outsourced. By freeing you up to do more of this type of work, you set yourself up for more business and success in the future.

Accelerate your growth – A benefit of the above, when more hands are helping deliver a project, you are able to reduce the time necessary for projects and thus book more. Moreover, when one person moves on, gets sick, goes on vacation or simply fails to deliver, you don’t have to explain these delays to the client. This can also help you avoid the “single point of failure” mistake.

Increase your levels of expertise – Outsourcing tasks to people who may just know how to do it better than you has benefits too. Not only is your firm more capable now, you benefit by having a higher level of expertise you can sell and package. Also, let’s be honest, no one person can know and do everything.

Isn’t it time to make the leap and set your business up for growth and greater productivity by outsourcing work you don’t need to do yourself to others?

Here are some resources we use to find great people to do work for us, both locally and abroad.

Typically you can find great people, for really reasonable prices, and don’t be afraid to negotiate rates.

https://www.upwork.com/ – Great for data entry, design work, virtual assistants

https://www.freelancer.com/ – Great for programmers and software design

http://www.craigslist.org/ – Great for part time assistants, errands, house chores, etc

http://www.callruby.com/ – Need someone to answer the phones for you, this service is great.

I hope you enjoyed this article, please share this resource with everyone you know, so we can get the word out.

 

Get Going with Visual Content Marketing

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There is little doubt the world is growing increasingly visual, at least the online world. Today people are a lot more inclined to view visual content than they are to read textual material. For proof you have to look no further than your Facebook newsfeed. 87 percent of the most-shared posts contain photos, and posts having visual content result in 180 percent greater engagement.

This has created a massive opportunity for marketers to exploit, and if you haven’t already, it’s safe to say you’re a bit late to the party. But have no fear, as we have found 5 great ways to create unique, visual content for your marketing.

5 Ways For You To Use Visual Content in your Marketing

Infographics – This relatively new visual content form has several great advantages. Firstly you can cram a lot (or a little!) data in a very creative form. Second, and possibly most important, they are easy to share and people are usually eager to do so, which results in traffic and backlinks.

Videos – Versatile and easy to share, videos also offer the ability to be shared widely, and are easy to create in a number of forms. You can produce simple slideshow videos, web cam videos, live on location videos, short Vine or Instagram videos (6- 30 seconds long!) and many more ideas. This form is also excellent for generating traffic and links.

Develop Unique Imagery – It has become easier than ever to craft unique images that are solely available for your marketing purposes. Since it’s become an unwritten rule that images must accompany or overpower textual content now, it’s up to you to create these. In addition many of these can be posted to sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram for more traffic and links.

Screenshots – Screenshots are an awesome way to convey social proof. They are super easy to make, and you can easily insert them into many types of posts, or create slideshows with them.

Data Shares – Using charts and graphs are an easy way to illustrate data through visualization. Hard to convey concepts in text are more fully understood with an accompanying data share.

Here’s an example of a Visual Content Marketing Guide you can use to, well, guide you.

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5 Social Media Goofs to Avoid

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Do you want to create tons of social media buzz quickly? Wade into social media without knowing what you’re doing, post something without thinking it through, and see how much attention you get!

Many a business has found out the hard way what NOT to do in social media, and paid the price in lost revenue and reputation. The old saw that no publicity is bad publicity never had to face a world where your comments and words can fly around the world in an instant, and get shared in hundreds or thousands of places.

Since we rely so much today on social media word of mouth, let’s take a look at 5 ways you can help eliminate some of these social media mistakes.

5 Social Media Mistakes that Are All Too Easy to Make!

Being combative online – When you experience a customer complaint and they bring it to your attention in one of your social media channels, this is an opportunity for you to shine rather than fight or hide. Take the high road, respond professionally, go the extra mile and remember that this type of person for most businesses represents a tiny percentage of customers. No matter what you do, don’t get into a food fight online!

Not being present – If you’re the type who comes around once a month or so on your social channels, and expects this to be anything but a waste of time; well, take this advice. Be present, be engaged, and be social. This only works if you are using the platforms to get your audience to know, like and trust you. Anything else is a waste of time.

Buying social love – If you think you can simply purchase your way into thousands of fans and followers and all will be well, you’ve got another thing coming. You will likely have your account banned, and if you don’t the “fans” won’t be worth anything to you, as they don’t know you, and you haven’t earned any trust with them.

Too many pitches – You can and should market to your social following, but only after you’ve earned the right to by giving, contributing, engaging and winning trust. Then, only do so perhaps one out of five posts.

Having the right person post – Many mistakes come about as a result of having an inexperienced staff member handle your business social media accounts. This is not a job for a novice! Either hire someone who knows their way around social media or train one!

5 Ways To Extend The Reach Of Your Content

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How to Extend your Content’s Reach

You did it! You created awesome content that will solve many of the world’s ills with ease. If only they get to read it.

Unfortunately, not everyone is sure on how to make sure their content reaches the most possible eyes. In today’s world of instant gratification, you have to go a bit further if you really wish to have your content spread widely.

To help you to get your head around how to make this happen, we’re going to have a look at ways you can extend your content’s reach.

5 Tips for Promoting your Content

megaphone girlUse your email list – Sending an email announcing your new content is a super easy (and free) way to get more views to your content. Encourage your subscribers to socially share and forward this email to people they know who might be interested.

Post on Social Media – Your social media channels are yet another goldmine for traffic. Make a short post, again encouraging them to share and comment, and drop in a link. Since we don’t always know who has a huge following, this can result in quite a lot of visitors.

Place Ads on Social Media – Social media channels can be a great place to advertise. Often it is very low-cost, and highly targeted. In particular try Facebook and Twitter. A recent wrinkle is the mobile ad platforms, where large amounts of traffic can be had for mere pennies!

Use Content Amplification Services – Have you ever seen links on web pages that are headlines linking to articles out on the Web? These are very likely coming from content amplification services like Outbrain or Taboola. You can see your headline on major sites you could never hope to get on otherwise, sites like USAToday, FoxNews, ABC News, CNN, ESPN and many others. And, you are only charged when people click through to your page.

Seek out Promotional Sites – There are several highly-trafficked sites that are easy to place your links on. Many of these are free or very low-cost. A few of these are sites like Inbound.org, Snip.ly, Scoop.it, Slideshare, BlogEngage, Triberr and AllTop.

5 Ways to Market Your Small Business on a Limited Budget

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on a budgetOkay, we can all agree that not every business boasts an unlimited marketing budget, allowing you to take advantage of every opportunity under the sun. Even large companies have limitations, and working creatively within your budget, however meager, is a key to online success.

So in this post we’re going to have a look at 5 effective ways you can market your business on a limited budget. We’ll detail them; all you need to do is do them!

 

Check Out These 5 Tips for Marketing with a Small Budget

Be Social-Minded – Right now social media is where the people are, and you will be missing out if you do not take advantage of this. Social sites offer you the best opportunity to share your content to a vast audience, many of whom you are not yet connected to! Get active on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and also Pinterest and Instagram if you have ANY visual aspects to your business. This is great for direct traffic, referrals, and customer service.

Utilize Email – There is no reason not to build and maintain an email list for your business. In fact, running without an email list seriously hampers your long-term prospects. You can count on your competition using one. If you’re afraid of costs, there are great free solutions like Mailchimp if you’re just starting. You can upgrade to a paid account when your business justifies it.

Create a Destination Blog – Creating a blog that grows in stature, has repeat visitors and is shared widely is a huge asset for a small business on a limited budget. You can really do anything you want from your blog platform; build lists, conducts surveys, hold contests, build authority, announce new products and sales. Make your blog the hub of activity around which your business operates.

Use Visual Content – We all love to watch and gaze at visual content, and your visitors are no different than you. The fact is, employing visual content makes it far more likely that you’ll keep visitors around longer, keep them more engaged, and generally give a better user experience.

Dip your Toes into Paid Ads – Don’t be scared off of paid advertising simply because you have a small budget. There are many platforms that permit you to run ads to highly targeted people for mere pennies. Facebook and Twitter ads can be had for low prices, and your daily budget doesn’t have to exceed just a couple of dollars. Mobile ad platforms are even less expensive. Check this out today!