Marketing

February 23, 2016 by Eric Rowen 1 Comment

Why Blogging Is Important For Business

Unfortunately many people have a two step approach when it comes to blogging.

Step 1 – Write a blog post.

Step 2 – Ring in Sale$

If you’ve been taking the above approach you’re probably disappointed at your results so far and are likely considering quitting this whole blogging idea.
You need to look at the purpose of blogging in a whole new way. There are two main purposes to blogging.

1. To establish authority
2. To capture drive by visitors

Lets talk more about each:

Establishing Authority

By writing an article on a topic/subject and then posting it for the world to see you are essentially doing two things. You are establishing yourself as an authority on that subject to your potential customers and secondly you are establishing yourself as an authority to search engines like Google/Bing/Yahoo etc.

The more articles you produce – over time – the more credible you become and people start seeing you as an authority on Subject X. Also at the same time search engines like Google have been indexing your blog posts. Google will start to associate you with your keywords (content) and with each post your search rankings edge up a little more giving your website better ranking.

Capture Drive-by Visitors

Once your content starts getting attention of visitors and drive-by’ers the next thing you want to do is develop a way to capture visitors email addresses. Notice I didn’t say try to SELL them something.

Let’s say someone has read a few of your posts and got some good advice and value out of them. Wouldn’t it be logical that they might want to read more? So why not offer them exactly that? Have a call to action that says ‘Sign up to get exclusive articles each month on how to …XXX’, or ‘Download our report on..XXX’. Now we have an actual name and/or email address that we can follow up with.

People that have signed up to your service are about twice as likely to buy something from you than someone that hasn’t. I don’t know about you but if I can sell something twice as easy I’ll take that any day.

This technique isn’t limited to e-newsletters, or reports. You could offer a webinar, a manual on how to maintain your XXX, or even invite them to a live in person workshop/seminar you are holding.

Another question I’m often asked is ‘how long do I have to do this to see results?’. I wish I could give you a definitive answer like X days/weeks unfortunately each industry and its audience is unique and what might work a certain way for one might not work as well for another. You might need to do a little more research before getting started or you could test approaches and see which one works best.

The keys to successful blogging are:
1. Decide what results you want out of it in the first place (define a goal)
2. Brainstorm your list of content to produce
3. Always do your best to deliver value where/when you can.
4. Work on converting the drive by visitor into a sign-up fan.
5. Have a plan for following up on your subscriber list.
6. Rinse and repeat.

I should also mention that one of the most important elements of blogging is your headline. If you headline wont capture interest, then no matter how great your article is – no one will be reading it. Here are some headlines you can use to help get you started.

What about you? Do you have any tips to help other folks get results with their blogging? Please leave a comment below.

p.s. Could you share this article on your social media? Thanks

November 14, 2015 by Eric Rowen Leave a Comment

3 Things You Should Do To Increase Website Conversions

You have a website and you have been diligent in keeping it up to date with new content, your traffic has been slowly increasing over time. BUT you aren’t seeing an increase in people taking actions (conversions). You want to maximize the potential of your website as a lead generator, here are a few improvements you can implement to help you reach your goals.

1. Highlight Your Credibility

While visitors to your website might be actively thinking about purchasing from you there is a natural hesitancy and they will be looking for some kind of proof that you can deliver on your offers. Strategically placed testimonials can help visitors trust you more and builds credibility. If you have worked with some larger companies you might want to include their logo as well. (with their permission-of course).

2. Email Opt-In

You’ve heard it before “the money is in the list”. You should be building your email list with an opt-in form. Offer something of value in exchange for your visitors email. A list of quick tips, maintenance of your product manual for example. Ensure it is placed high on your page, the lower down on your page the less likely people will use it.

3. More You

So who exactly is ABC business anyway? Are there pictures of you or your staff on your website?

(see what I did there 😉 )

Why not put a face to ABC biz. Visitors are often looking for ways to connect more than just reading text on a page. Images of people help bridge that impersonal gap between customer and business.

When you’ve finished reading this, this is what I would love you to do:

Copy the link in the address bar of the post. Think of a friend who is working on a business or has a product to share with the world. Email this link to them, saying you found the read helpful (if you did).

You’re awesome and excellent at the same time if you can do this.
Thank you

Do ask me anything. I’m here to help of course.

UPDATE: Looking for more conversion tips? Check out this post from Itamar Gero founder of Siteoscope.com

Increase Your Website’s Conversion Rate: 25 Effective Ways to Do It

March 2, 2015 by Eric Rowen 4 Comments

Help Your Website – 4 Quick SEO tips.

I recently went to a seminar on Search Engine Optimization. (SEO)
(For those a little less tech savy – Search Engine Optimization basically means things you can do to your website to help it rank higher on search engine results – like Google.)

This seminar was a good refresher on basic tactics that most people can implement on a regular basis on their own websites.
I thought I would share 4 of them with you to help you get a little boost in your search engine rankings. I won’t get into the full explanation as to the “why to do” but rather just give you the quick and dirty “what to dos”.

Before you start tactics to increase your rankings on Google you have to know what words or phrases you want to rank well for.

1) Choosing Your Keywords/Phrases

A good tool that can help you is the Google Adwords Planner. (yes, its free to use – you just need a gmail account)
You can enter in some keywords and see how many searches people have done on it/them and theres another tab that will give you alternate suggestions of words/phrases you could use as well.

2) H1 – “With great power comes great responsibility”

H1 (which is a HTML tag and stands for Heading 1) should be used wisely. There should be only 1 H1 on a page AND your heading tags should be
in order. So you should use them in order as in h1, h2, h3 and not skip in the order. So don’t go from H1 to h3 then h4 etc.
Surprisingly other than the h1 tags the rest of the h tags is less important – you could use 3 h2 tags on a page if you wanted.

3) Meta Description

If you use the plug in – SEO by Yoast then you have the ability to type in your own Meta description on posts. Now here’s the tip – The order matters. So use your most important keywords first and less important ones as you type.

4) Alt tags

If you upload images don’t forget to include alt tags. Alt tags are text descriptions of the image – because search engine algorithms can’t read an image file. They can only read the text that is included with it. Now don’t get crazy here – just stuffing keywords on every image – your alt tags should still be descriptive of what the actual image is.

Short and sweet for this weeks post. Be consistent in using the above four tactics on your website and help the search engines along a little when it comes time
to show the search results to your next potential customer.

Do you have a favourite SEO technique – please comment below.

January 26, 2015 by Eric Rowen Leave a Comment

5 Reasons Why You Need to Redesign Your Website

Whens the last time you sat back and evaluated your website? No time like the present. Time to enhance things that worked well and time to drop or change things that didn’t meet your expectations.

Why don’t we have a look at your top sales tool. You know the one, it works 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year and doesn’t ask for a day off. Yep, I’m talking about your website.

Did your website meet, exceed or fall below your expectations? If your current website looks dated, doesn’t work the way you want it to or worse yet has broken links/pages, chances are that its time for a redesign.

Before you run out and grab the first web designer you see, stop and take a few minutes to actually write down what you want the redesigned website to accomplish or goals you would like the new website to have.

Here are 5 Reasons Your Website Needs A Redesign

1. People aren’t visiting your website like they used to.

When you look at your website statistics over a period of time – does the line trend down? Is the overall number of visitors going down? There can be many causes of fewer and fewer people visiting your website. Using your analytics take a look at the specific pages people are visiting as well as the ones very few are visiting. This will give you an idea of which pages you might want to enhance and/or some you might want to drop altogether.

2. Your website just looks plain old.

The pace of technological change is staggering. Websites done as little as 3-4 years ago can easily look outdated. Is your website ‘responsive’? (that means does your website adapt and change depending on which device is being used to view it). Were your customers even shopping on their smartphone 4 years ago? Remember your website is usually the first impression people have of your business – do you want them to associate your business with words like – old, outdated, slow, behind the times?

3. Does your website make your phone ring? or bring in interested customers?

Isn’t that the main reason you have a website to begin with? If your website isn’t performing the way you want it to, don’t just say oh well and ignore the problem. Bring in a professional to have a look at why and give you suggestions on how to improve it. Depending on the number of changes you need it might be more economical and efficient to give your entire website a overhaul.

4. You aren’t giving people a reason to visit your website.

Warning – I am going to be a little blunt here. Sometimes I hear business owners saying ‘I am too busy to update my website’. But guess what – your competitors aren’t. They are regularly adding new content on their website and getting new viewers. A new product launch, a new sale, an announcement about the company etc. If you had lots of new visitors when your website launched but now have very few it’s time to have a hard look at why. You need to dedicate resources to the task and give people a reason to come back.

5. Missing pages, broken links, images that don’t load.

Websites are almost like living breathing organisms, ok I might be exaggerating a little here but what I am trying to say is that things change over time. A website you had a link to 3 years ago has since moved that information to a different page – which causes your link to be broken. Perhaps you deleted a webpage you didn’t need anymore – but what if someone had bookmarked that page because they liked it – now a dead link as well. Nothing turns people off more than trying to navigate a website only to encounter these annoyances. Is that what you want your customers to experience?

Starting a website redesign project may seem a little overwhelming at first, but a good web professional will walk you through the process step by step and before you know it you’ll be breaking out that champaign and re-launching your shiny new website to awaiting fans.

Short on time and/or expertise? Get us to help you out. Check out our Roadmapping service.