Posts Tagged ‘traffic’
Social bookmarking is the process of storing, organizing, searching, and managing bookmarks of web pages that you want to remember or share with your social network. Effective social bookmarking sites include StumbleUpon, Reddit, and Delicious.
Why Social Bookmarking?
You absolutely need to use social bookmarking sites when you publish new content, whether that’s new web pages, blog posts, or news and press articles. Social bookmarking works because it will drive large amount of traffic to your website.
Social bookmarking communities view bookmarks either chronologically, by tags, or by search engines. When you bookmark a page on your website and share it with an online community, it classifies that page as useful within the particular category you specified. The bookmark is then disseminated and shared among a viral community.
Social bookmarking is the third most effective medium of searching and finding useful information, preceded only by Google searches and directly visiting websites. It is a powerful marketing tool you should use to promote the information on your website and drive an amount of traffic almost equitable to what you get from Google searches.
How to use social bookmarking effectively
Rich Brooks of Social Media Examiner wrote in a recent blog post:
“It’s always best when someone else bookmarks your content, so it might makes sense to have a small ‘bookmarking club’ with friends where you promote each other’s work. This ‘seeding’ will often encourage others to bookmark your content.”
His advice is very useful in that bookmarking your own content will work in terms of search rankings, but it may end up looking like just promotional efforts in the eyes of your consumers.
When you publish new content (i.e. new web pages or blog posts), make sure you bold your keywords, add related links back to your website, and use tags to categorize your information to make searches more effective. Then, bookmark your site on a few different social bookmarking channels like StumbleUpon, Reddit, and Delicious.
In a day or two, review your web analytics and see exactly where your traffic came from. You’ll be surprised to see how quickly social bookmarking can work for you.
One creative way to drive more traffic to your website and encourage interaction with your customers is by integrating your blog into your business website. Rather than solely using a blog or website respectively, using both together can improve the interactivity with your customers.
Interactivity is becoming increasingly important for consumers and their purchase decisions. A business website gives the consumer general information and a professional business presence. A blog allows consumers to see updated and fresh information, testimonials from recent purchasers, and even comments and conversations posted by existing customers.
Search Engine Optimization
Blogs are also great for increasing your search engine optimization, or your visibility online. By posting fresh content on a daily basis you increase your search engine ranking and the ability for people to see you online. Blogs can also drive traffic to your website by providing useful information while also using links and a call to action to direct your readers to your company site.
Personal Touch
Having a blog on a site like WordPress or Blogger will give your company a personality that many other companies don’t have. Publishing more personal content rather than pushing sales pitches gives you an advantage over your competitors. Because consumers are seeking more intimate relationships with the online companies they purchase from, a blog can be a great way to establish communication, relationships, and credibility with your consumers.
How To Integrate Your Blog and Website
There are several ways you can integrate your blogging platform and your business website. If you choose to use an existing platform like WordPress or Blogger, make sure to include links on every post you publish that directs your readers back to your website. Also, have links to your blog on the homepage of your business website. This encourages people to learn more about you, your company, your product, and your consumers.
If you wish to have a more seamless integration, consider investing in a content management system that includes a blogging platform. This means that your blog will be an actual page of your website and you wouldn’t need to send your customers away from your website in order to connect with them.
Having a business website can be a huge cost advantage and very profitable. However, there are some downsides to it. For example, having a brick and mortar location in a high-traffic area can get you some great sales, but how do you get people to notice you on the web?
As a small business, you need to devote most of your time towards marketing your website to consumers that need your products or services. You just don’t get the natural traffic that larger brand names have and because of that – you have to work a little harder.
Stand out
It’s difficult to stand out on the web, but in order to appear higher up on a Google search (clearly a priority since most people never search past the second or third page of search results), work on your search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is the process of weaving popular search keywords into your copy so Google is more likely to rank your website above others when people are searching for something that relates to your brand, product, or service.
You can also use social media to your advantage by working a Twitter page or a Facebook page. Once you find people talking about issues that relate to what you’re selling, you can jump into the conversation and provide a solution. For example if you run a daycare business, listen to people speaking about the trials of having young children, join the conversation and offer a solution.
Encourage sales
If your site is easy to navigate, provides fresh (continuously updated) content, and unobtrusively directs people towards purchasing your product, you’re well on your way to having a profitable web presence. Your site must look professional, organized, and trustworthy. For example, if you can’t take quality pictures of your product, ask your supplier to send you some images you are allowed to use on your website.
There are so many little things you can do to engage your customers and encourage people to buy from your website and not your competitors. Take the time to review what you have, and invest the time to improve your business website and current market position.
Picture this: You’ve finally set up a website for you small business, you’ve hired the best designer in town…and nothing’s changed. If this sounds like you, you’re pretty much stuck until you gain control over your content.
As a business owner with an online presence, having the authority and access to your web content is crucial to your website’s success. If you want a professional site that successfully represents your company, brings more customers to your business, and increases your revenue stream, there are a few techniques you need to use.
Use a Content Management System
It’s your website. Essentially, it’s another branch of your business. Because it’s not quite as straight forward as your brick-and-mortar location, you might not realize exactly how much work goes into making your website an effective location of commerce.
If you have a content management system, you can easily update content to keep up with the ever-changing consumer demand. You also have control over the keywords, meta-tags, and meta-descriptions that drive traffic from search engines to your site. This is important because keywords are always changing and your website needs to change with them.
Eliminate Clutter
Definitely avoid using industry-specific jargon. People are interested in buying your product to solve a specific problem. If you clutter up your content with too much information that is beyond the level of even the most basic customer, they can quickly be put off by it. In the simple words of Jen Udan from ChooseWhat.com:
“If they don’t understand what you’re selling, they won’t buy.”
Keep Your Website Simple
While flashing lights and fun graphics are always cool, they might actually render your site ineffective. People are looking for answers to their questions when they reach your website. If at anytime they feel confused, it doesn’t take much for customers to leave your website and visit a competitor’s.
Make sure everything on your website is clear. Your homepage should have basic information about your product and its benefits. In addition, every page should have a clear call to action. This call to action needs to be identified by you, the business owner. What do you want your browsers to do after reading your information, call you? Subscribe to you? Order from you? These questions need to be answered before writing any content because it should provide the framework in which you write any and all of your information.
Marketing for small businesses can be difficult. It is important to remember that you are a small business, with a small budget and you need to make wise decisions. Larger businesses have a little more wiggle room when it comes budgets and resources. You as a small business owner need to know how to allocate your resources as efficiently as possible.
Business know-how gives us some advice on how to market wisely as a small business. Follow these tips from a post on Business know-how and learn how marketing can help you greatly if done well:
1. Offer a Cheaper Version
Some prospective customers are not willing to pay the asking price for your product or service. Others are more interested in paying a low price than in getting the best quality. You can avoid losing sales to many of these customers by offering a smaller or stripped down version of your product or service at a lower price.
2. Offer a Premium Version
Not all customers are looking for a cheap price. Many are willing to pay a higher price to get a premium product or service. You can boost your average size sale and your total revenue by offering a more comprehensive product or service …or by combining several products or services in a special premium package offer for a higher price.
3. Try Some Unusual Marketing Methods
Look for some unconventional marketing methods your competitors are overlooking. You may discover some highly profitable ways to generate sales and avoid competition. For example, print your best small ad on a postcard and mail it to prospects in your targeted market. A small ad on a postcard can drive a high volume of traffic to your website or generate a flood of sales leads for a very small cost.
4. Set up Joint Promotions with Other Small Businesses
Contact some non-competing small businesses serving customers in your market. Offer to publicize their products or services to your customers in exchange for their publicizing your services to their customers. This usually produces a large number of sales for a very low cost.
5. Take Advantage of Your Customers
Your customers already know and trust you. It’s easier to get more business from them than to get any business from somebody who never bought from you. Take advantage of this by creating some special deals just for your existing customers and announce new products and services to them before you announce them to the general market.
3 Low Budget Marketing Tricks
Posted on: December 7, 2010
Most new small businesses don’t have the budget necessary to launch a huge advertising campaign or employ an elaborate marketing strategy. However, there are a few things you can do as a small business owner to successfully market your product in a competitive market.
Try these methods and see if they don’t generate customer traffic and increase your revenue stream. The most important thing is to get your name out there and get people to start buying. Once you have a customer base you can work on retaining it, but you need to build your customer base from the ground up first.
Coupons
It sounds fairly simple but truthfully it works. When you give customers and incentive to buy your product over your competitors, generally they commit. It’s truly not that expensive to print coupons. You can get 500 to 1000 coupons for anywhere form $40 to $80 depending on the size and content you want. The focus here is not on the image or presentation of the coupon, but the offer.
Contests
Contests are a great way to generate traffic, especially if you’re hosting a contest on your website or your social media site. For example, if you hold a “tag yourself” contest on Facebook, you’re bound to get some attention. Have a contest where the first person to take a picture with your product and tag themselves wins some sort of free promotion. You may even get good media coverage out of it.
Exclusive offers
By making people feel special, or making them feel like they got some sort of deal over others, they have even more reason to go with your company over your competitors. By offering some sort of exclusive purchase or sneak-preview of merchandise to customers that have already bought from you, you are enhancing your customer loyalty. This works especially well in referral programs. Having your existing customers market for you can be one of the most effective marketing strategies you use, and you don’t even have to pay them for it! Offering some sort of reward is incentive enough.
There are several different marketing strategies you can use. However, for the sake of your small business budget, there are 3 very important strategies that help with organic traffic gain as well as giving your pocket expenses a break.
Step 1: Optimize Your Website
You need a base where people can search for your product, find you, and remain interested enough to order from your website. You truly will not be able to succeed in today’s market if you don’t have a website as your platform for transactions. Your website should in essence, run itself. With quality content, enough information, and the encouragement of feedback and conversation, you have the ability to invite people to learn more about your product or service – and buy it. Your site should have:
- Strong and well researched keywords
- Quality content that actually answers questions
- The use of meta tags and descriptions
- E-commerce capability
Step 2: Build Your Customer Base
Once you have your (quality) website up and running, it’s important to keep those customers coming back to you. One of the most basic marketing strategies you can employ is a subscribers list, or membership option. You can build a base of customers through an email list as one example, if your site has:
- A sign-up option
- A blog
- Newsletters and promotions to send to subscribers
Step 3: Maintenance
Once you have your quality website up and running, and a strong customer base with which you consistently interact, you need to be maintaining your website with fresh content. One great way to do this is to write blogs (daily!) and have them on your website and really anywhere else you can distribute them.
This helps with your exposure, search engine rankings, traffic, and credibility. The reason it helps with credibility is that it shows the initiative you have to answer customer questions and constantly provide fresh information. It shows that you are not all about the transaction, but more about the relationship you have with your customers.
If you are a small business owner dabbling with your advertising and marketing strategy, you may be tempted to offer free products as promotions. While this can be a great idea to achieve short-term results, it can actually hurt your business in the long run.
Free can be dangerous
Offering something for free can train consumers to think that your offer does not have much value. In time, consumers might actually come to expect things for free. For example, remember the days when we were all happy to get a free standard cell phone after signing that dreaded two-year contract? These days, we have come to expect a free cell phone with every new contract.
Online businesses are starting to offer free shipping, which can cut seriously into their profits. Hotels offer free Internet service, etc. These things are going to become extremely difficult to charge consumers for because they have come to expect these commodities as “free.” These perks aren’t even free anyway, we pay for these commodities via other buried charges.
Free can be copied
If you are offering some sort of accessory, or supplementary product for free, your competitors are fully capable of offering it too—especially if you are successful. If you are gaining a lot of traffic and attention through your free promotions, your competitors won’t be far behind. What you think starts out as a transient tactical marketing strategy can actually bury you in the industry.
You don’t want to get caught in an industry albatross where you keep cutting prices to undermine your competitor and both of you end up losing an intense amount of money.
Offering products for free every once in a while (everything is okay in moderation), is fine. Whether it’s a free consultation or a free sample, it can be at your advantage to offer something for free as a kind gesture even.
However, offering anything for free requires a significant amount of discretion.
As Steve McKee from Bloomberg Businessweek said in his post:
“It’s when you offer something for nothing as an enticement to buy that the danger sets in. If you try to fool your prospects by making your pitch about what’s “free,” you’ll also be fooling yourself.”
Vitrue, a company that specializes in social media marketing and expertise for brands and companies, recently published a study that explored the depths of Facebook and its benefits.
The white paper, called “Managing Your Facebook Community: Findings on Conversation Volume by Day of Week, Hour and Minute,” analyzes Facebook posts from August 10, 2007 to October 10, 2010. The study used over 1,500 selected streams and observed over 1.6 million posts and 7.56 million comments. These data were used to show when Facebook posts and comments were happening.
This insight will give any small business owner the know how of when to engage with their consumers.
Here are some of the most applicable findings:
- The three biggest spikes of user activity occur on weekdays at 11 a.m., 3 p.m., and 8 p.m.
- The biggest spike of user activity 3 p.m. on weekdays
- Wednesday at 3 p.m. is the consistently the busiest period of user activity
- Sunday is the slowest day of the week for user activity
- Morning posts are 39.7% more effective for user interaction
What can you learn from this?
Essentially, posting comments and updating your business’s Facebook page in the morning is going to be more effective than posting at any other time. Vitrue also notes that publishing at the top of the hour (:00 to :15) sees more interaction and engagement than posts at any other time.
This makes perfect sense if you take into consideration who is looking at your Facebook posts. People in a working environment will most likely browse through Facebook quickly before some important obligation at the top of the hour.
So, as a small business, use your Facebook wisely. Post new information in the morning, on the busiest days (Wednesday is a huge day), at the top of the hour. Social media marketing is a great way to gain traffic and customers. If you use it the right way, social media can transform your revenue stream.
As a small business, you need to focus a majority of your efforts on marketing your product or service effectively. By using low-budget methods like social media marketing (among other methods), you have a greater chance of gaining customer traffic and increasing profit margins.
Here are 7 effective ways to market your small business without spending the big bucks, as according to an article on Business Know How.
1. Don’t Advertise Like a Big Business
Big businesses advertise to create name recognition and future sales. A small business can’t afford to do that. Instead, design your advertising to produce sales…now. One way to accomplish this is to always include an offer in your advertising – and an easy way for prospective customers to respond to it.
2. Offer a Cheaper Version
Some prospective customers are not willing to pay the asking price for your product or service. Others are more interested in paying a low price than in getting the best quality. You can avoid losing sales to many of these customers by offering a smaller or stripped down version of your product or service at a lower price.
3. Offer a Premium Version
Not all customers are looking for a cheap price. Many are willing to pay a higher price to get a premium product or service. You can boost your average size sale and your total revenue by offering a more comprehensive product or service, or by combining several products or services in a special premium package offer for a higher price.
4. Try Some Unusual Marketing Methods
Look for some unconventional marketing methods your competitors are overlooking. You may discover some highly profitable ways to generate sales and avoid competition. For example, print your best small ad on a postcard and mail it to prospects in your targeted market. A small ad on a postcard can drive a high volume of traffic to your website or generate a flood of sales leads for a very small cost.
5. Trim Your Ads
Reduce the size of your ads so you can run more ads for the same cost. You may even be surprised to find that some of your short ads generate a better response than their longer versions.
6. Set up Joint Promotions with Other Small Businesses
Contact some non-competing small businesses serving customers in your market. Offer to publicize their products or services to your customers in exchange for their publicizing your services to their customers. This usually produces a large number of sales for a very low cost.
7. Take Advantage of Your Customers
Your customers already know and trust you. It’s easier to get more business from them than to get any business from somebody who never bought from you. Take advantage of this by creating some special deals just for your existing customers, and announce new products and services to them before you announce them to the general market.
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