Category Archives: Traffic

Guest Bloggers, Marketing, Traffic, Websites

How Much Time Should You Spend On Marketing?

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As a solo-professional or small business owner, you have many responsibilities. Not only do you have to run your business and manage all the tasks associated with that, you also have to market that business. But just how should you divvy up your day? How much time should you spend on marketing? I believe you need to spend at least half of your time on marketing. In fact, as a business owner, I believe you really only have two main responsibilities:

1) Spending your time on revenue-producing activities

2) Marketing your business

Your time is valuable, so you shouldn’t waste it on mundane tasks that someone else could easily do.

You should be spending half your time generating income for your business. This might include things like servicing your clients and creating products.

The other half of your time should be spent on marketing to grow your business. That might include activities like writing articles and press releases, doing speaking engagements, writing and publishing an ezine or newsletter, advertising, relationship marketing, networking or Internet marketing. Any activity that is designed to bring you more clients or more sales.

But what about “all those other things” that have to get done?

All those administrative business tasks like paying bills, invoicing clients, going to the bank, picking up office supplies, fulfilling orders, monthly bookkeeping and clerical tasks like filing?

Or all of those household tasks like grocery shopping, cleaning your house, and doing laundry?

Find a way to delegate “all those other things”

…so you can focus your time on your top two priorities. If your time is worth $50 an hour or $150 an hour and you are spending it on $10 an hour tasks, it just doesn’t make sense.

What if you can’t afford to hire help?

I was in this boat for a long time myself. My mentors kept telling me to create a team and delegate. But I thought I couldn’t afford to. When I finally took the leap of faith and began assembling a team, my entire business and life changed.

I went from being a lone ranger doing everything in my businesses (yes, it was very tiring!) to a team that includes a bookkeeper, CPA, attorney, virtual assistant, writer, art director and production artist, media buyer, web developer, product manufacturer, fulfillment house, computer technician, real estate partners, property management company and others I’m sure I’m forgetting about right now.

No, I don’t have an office with all these people on staff.

I am still a “company of one.” These people are partners that I pay for specific services when I need them.

And I’ve enlisted the help of my family with the household tasks and hired housekeepers so I don’t have to spend my valuable work hours or my precious free time on these activities.

Yes, I still do some things I probably shouldn’t.

But the point is, over the past two years, I’ve learned to find experts and utilize their services to help me grow my business.

And even though I thought I couldn’t afford to hire a team…

Now I can’t imagine running my business (or my life) any other way. And paying for this help has never been an issue. Because the time they have freed up allows me to focus on my top two priorities, which has grown my businesses.

Your Marketing Step

Look around. Are you trying to do it all yourself? Are you running your business as a lone ranger? Are you spending time on activities that someone else could be doing?

If you are, I encourage you to step back and re-evaluate how your business is structured. And create a structure and a team that will allow you to spend your time on marketing and revenue-producing activities. And then watch your business grow!

Want to see how I spend my time? Visit my blog to find out!

Debbie LaChusa created The 10stepmarketing System to make marketing your own business as simple as answering 10 questions. Learn more about this unique, step-by-step system and get a free Marketing E-Course when you subscribe to the free, weekly 10stepmarketing Ezine at http://www.10stepmarketing.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Debbie_LaChusa

Marketing, Traffic, Uncategorized, Work Connexions SMO

Who Should Publish the Company Blog?

Among the questions executives ask about social media is where should it be located? Who should launch, manage and publish the blog(s), vlog(s) and/or podcast(s)? The obvious choices are marketing, public relations, human resources or communications. However, making the right decision is both critical and complex.

To some extent, the answer lies within the internal structure of the business. Taking the org. chart into acount, to determine where social media should live, a business might ask questions such as these:

  1. Who is most likely to understand the use of social media and then to use it in ways that benefit our customers, our employees and our business most?
  2. Who has the time, budget and expertise to create engaging communications?
  3. Who is least likely to use social media to market and sell products?
  4. Who is most likely to use social media to draw customers into conversation with us; thereby, developing loyal customers, brand evangelists and new customers who appreciate our efforts to give them a voice?

These questions are the basis for the internal discussion. Whoever the business chooses to host social media, they must be excellent writers, they must be creative, they must have access to everyone within the business, they must be familiar with the customers and the communities in which the business has locations, and they must be trusted as open and honest communicators. Furthermore, they must have the courage and the ability to challenge managers and executives who want to turn social media into a bottom line tool.

Yes, social media, if done correctly, will result in return on investment in a variety of forms, including an increase in loyal customers who buy more and who talk positively about the company; an increase in the ability to produce more innovative and better products and services based on customer feedback; the ability to improve the company at every level, again based on customer feedback; and an increase in new customers as they learn about and come to trust the company.

That is the 10,000-foot view of where social media should reside and what to expect from social media. But like any strategy, before launching social media as part of your communications mix, every business should analyze the tools to understand what they do and how they may be used and how social media is and is not the right fit for your business. Using these communications tools is not to be done lightly.

My best advice is to study every detail and discuss all the pros and cons. And then if you decide social media is a good fit for your business, launch the tools internally first. Get employees from every functional area involved, and ask them to be your sounding boards. As in most things, employees know your customers best, and they will contribute incredibly good suggestions and recommendations, if you engage them and give them buy in.

For more information about Lewis Green visit him at http://lgbusinesssolutions.typepad.com/solutions_to_grow_your_bu/

Biz News, Traffic, Websites

Writing Web Content

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The web has made all forms of communication more informal. People have forged relationships with others that they never see, through a constant stream of messages. The decreased formality of the language used was a natural progression, as more people gained access to e-mail and used it as a casual method of staying in contact with family far away.

With the rise of social media, blogs and online advertising campaigns, writing on the web has evolved into a specialised field. Vast amounts of literature have been published on the subject. It even features in university courses.

When it comes to reading on computers, most readers don’t read the full page. 79% of users scan the page for content only. Speed is another problem with reading on the web. Reading from a computer screen is 25% slower than reading from paper. As a result, writers should try to keep their web content to about 50% of the paper equivalent.

Experts can disagree on what constitutes a web writing style and what doesn’t. Most writers advocate a comfortable, conversational writing style. Your writing should be a reflection of who you are and should be similar to the way that you would speak to a friend. The use of humour is usually recommended, in tasteful amounts.

Headlines need to be instant attention grabbers. A reader skimming over a page is not likely to be attracted to a bland headline so it is important that you make yours stand out. Some experts say that you can do this be being playful or clever, while others say that you must not use clever or “cute” headings since these will pass beneath a reader’s skimming radar. Try to be as descriptive as possible while keeping it short and punchy. It always helps to use action verbs rather than flat ones. The first word is important so try not to waste it by using “The” or “In” or something equally mundane.

The body of your work should contain all of the information that you want to convey, or all the news that you want to share, using the fewest words possible. Try to keep your sentences short and concise, even if you are a natural word wanderer. Given a choice between a big, impressive sounding word that shows off your vocabulary and a short word that gets the message across, go with the short word. Paragraphs should contain one idea only. Don’t split an idea over two paragraphs either. This ensures that your paragraphs are neat and allows your writing to flow well.

Once you’ve caught the reader’s attention with your expertly written headline, you have to hold it with the content of your article or webpage. A good tactic to use is to approach the reader on a personal level. People are more likely to react to situations that they can relate to personally. This applies to all media, including web writing. People’s purchasing habits and their emotions are closely linked. It is important to try and tap into them on an emotional level so that they will be more inclined to relate to your site or product.

A strong start is important to attract attention, and a strong finish is equally important. People remember beginnings and endings, it’s the middle bits that often fade into oblivion. You need to create an ending that will leave them thinking for a long time after they’ve switched their computers off. It’s not always an easy thing to do, especially if your subject matter does not lend itself easily to exciting images and thought provoking ideas. In such instances it’s best not to yield to the temptation to write something extreme, and that appeals to your darker sense of humour, for the sake of sensationalism. No matter how well written it is, blood and gore do not make a good ending to a client’s article.

Recommended sites:
http://www.excessvoice.com/web-copywriting-tips.htm
http://www.sun.com/980713/webwriting/
http://www.webreference.com/content/writing/refer.html

Biz News, Consultancy, Marketing, Social Media Sites, Traffic, Work Connexions SMO

Try The New Work Connexions Site

wcx

We have been working for some time on launching a new site focused on Business Development. We our now throwing the doors open and inviting old and new users to join our community and grow your business. Over the next weeks we will be moving data and users over to the new site, ready for a new spring campaign. So come and try it out at www.workconnexions.net

business, development, Traffic

Entre Card Is It The Best Business Website Card Yet?

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I have Just Signed up for my Entre Card to see what it is all about. Inspired by  Owen who has just developed a widjet so that you can see the last droppers (visitors). Could this replace blog catalogue and mybloglog who’s traffic to my site has dropped of recently. It seems a very fair system. You gain a credit every time somebody picks up your details by clicking on your Entree Card widget. This is by far the best system yet. The sign up process is very simple and you can get up and running in within  20 minutes. So if you have 20 mins to spare I recommend giving it twirl. I am looking forward to reporting back soon with more in depth thoughts about this. Don’t forget to check out Owen’s widget here.
 

 

 

Consultancy, Guest Bloggers, Marketing, Traffic

Small Business Guide To Optimizing Universal Search

The buzz in the search marketing media and increasingly, the business press, on the importance of unified or universal search is gaining momentum and is unavoidable. Small and medium sized business web site owners and webmasters are now presented with the challenge of making sense out of the recent rash of search engine interface and functional improvements and how to adjust their online marketing efforts accordingly. Many are not sure what to do. Hopefully this short guide will shed light on the fundamentals and give some basic direction on next steps.

Early this summer Google rolled out one of the most significant changes to its search engine ever called Universal search. This update was followed a week or so later by Ask.com announcing Ask 3D. After a leak and then a more official announcement late September, Microsoft Live officially announced the 2.0 version of it’s search engine to include universal search features and Now Yahoo and has followed suit with their version of Unified search, being called the “new Yahoo! search“. What does all this mean for most businesses marketing online?

What is Universal Search?

First, I should explain what Google Universal, Ask 3D, Live Search and the new Yahoo! Search are, and how they’re different from the way search engines have traditionally retrieved and displayed search results. As an overview, the latest and greatest versions of the popular search engines include more than the text based web pages in the search results that we’ve all been used to the past 10+ years.

These “upgraded” search features from the major search engines now also find and bring back results in varying media formats including: images, news, local listings, video, blog posts, products and more depending on the particular search engine. But let’s break it down a bit further.

Ask and You Shall Receive

Ask 3D means bringing in three dimensions of search into one set of search results, i.e. the three columns in the search results page. For example, if you search for “Shrek 3”, on the left are additional suggested search terms and related searches to other movies. In the middle are paid listings with regular text based results below. On the right are search results from images, video, Wikipedia and other sources depending on the query.


click for large view

One of the big challenges in making search a positive experience for users is to deliver the right answers according to the searcher’s intent. Searching more content sources than just web pages allows the search engine to deliver extra sets of relevant content that people may be looking for rather than making them sort through the typical web page results to find the content they’re looking for or worse, have to perform yet another search on another specific type of search engine.

Ask 3D is unique compared to Google Universal, Live Search and the new Yahoo! search because it most distinctly separates the different data sources on the page.

Google’s New Universe

Google Universal blends Images, Maps, Books, Video, and News into the standard search results page. If we use the “Shrek 3” query again as an example, you’ll see listings from YouTube mixed in with the web pages including a preview image and the option to watch the movie trailer right within the search results. Normally, you’d have to click and visit another web page to do that.


click for large view

So rather than having to perform unique queries on Google, Google News, Google Images, etc individually, Google Universal searches all of those databases and returns the best matches in one set of search results. Findings reported in a recent study by Enquiro show that searchers are more engaged with content throughout the unified search results page rather than just the top 3 listings.

That makes sense because if you search for something and see a video thumbnail in the middle of the search results page, it will draw your attention – provided the title and description text are relevant of course.

Microsoft Search is A-Live!

The new Live Search promises better relevance, speed and look/feel enhancements as well as enhanced search results for queries related to “high interest” categories like: Health, Entertainment, Shopping, Celeberaties, Local, and Video. When a search is performed, like our favorite “shrek 3”, you’ll see video thumbnails displayed near the top of the standard search results with related searches suggested on the right. One neat, and surprising to me, was that the video clips play when you put your cursor over them. No clicking necessary.


click for large view

It’s A New Yahoo

With the new Yahoo! search, the same unified search characteristics apply. Yahoo searches it’s various databases or indexes of content and brings them back into one set of search results as you can see in this “shrek 3” example search. One interesting feature is that when you search for something location/event oriented, you get a set of results at the top of the page sorted by category, date and most popular. That information comes from Yahoo site, Upcoming.org. The other more notable feature of Yahoo’s new search is the “search assist” feature that suggest phrases as you type.


click for large view

While each version of “unified search” is slightly different, they all share the same characteristics of bringing back content from multiple data sources with the intention of providing a better user experience.

Why do these changes with the search engines matter to search marketers and web site owners?

First, it creates an online marketing challenge. A web site might have enjoyed certain positions on key terms within a search engine only now to find that their ranked web pages have been pushed down by video, image or local search results.

To address the situation, web site owners are faced with the proposition of making the effort to optimize their video, image, blog, local, news and product content. That’s easier said than done, because in most cases, small businesses have but a smattering of those content types at their disposal. If you don’t have the content format, you certainly can’t optimize for it. Even if you did, optimizing video for example, is a different thing than optimizing for news search.

The business of optimizing content for search engines just got a lot more complex.

With Challenges Come Opportunities

Many businesses won’t even notice why their search visibility has changed until it’s far into the game. Some will resort to beefing up their paid search campaigns, which you’d think might be an objective for the search engines, and some will roll up their sleeves and tackle the opportunity head on. With unified search results, there exist additional, high profile exposure opportunities where none of that type previously existed. The way for smart marketers to approach these opportunities is with a holistic perspective.

Optimizing holistically starts with an inventory of a company’s digital assets. Text, images, audio and video are all considered along with the incorporation of keyword messaging across company communications. Matching digital assets with channels of distribution provides marketers with even more opportunity to reach customers since each channel (blogging, email, media relations, social networking, forums, etc) can drive traffic independently as well as improve standard search visibility.

If a small business is not in the habit of creating content in multiple formats, then it will mean change. In fact, substantial changes may be necessary with content creation, approval and publishing processes along with the need for ongoing education. The key is to identify those content creation processes that are already occurring that could be altered or leveraged for the purpose of publishing more media content online. Process changes will still be necessary, but if a business can use some of what they’re already doing with other marketing promotions to improve their search visibility in a world of universal search, it will save effort, money and enable results more quickly.

Optimizing for Universal Search in Action

An example might be a situation where a new product is being released. In such a situation, many small businesses will post a new product page with a photo on the web site and email their list of industry publications and local reporters the announcement. They might even post a press release.

To take advantage of such a situation where unified search results can be leveraged might include the same process of updating the company web site with the product content. Such an effort would also include creating content in additional media formats, such as shooting a short video with an engineer or product manager explaining some of the features/benefits of the product. Just about all digital cameras can take a few minutes of video. The video can be edited with free video editing software like Windows Movie Maker to add credits or even add background music.

Promoting a Good Image

To leverage image search, the image file names could use keywords relevant to the product. Alt text used in the coding of the web page describing the image could do the same as well as a short text caption beneath the image. The image(s) can be submitted to image sharing web sites like Flickr.com with relevant keywords in the image category, title, description and tags. The description of the product on the image sharing site can include a link back to the product web page on the company web site.

Associating relevant keywords with the image will help media or image search engines understand what the image is, and subsequently categorize and rank it. The link from the image description on the image sharing site can send both visitors and search engines to the product page.

Video is the New Rock Star of Search

The product page on the company web site can also include the short video to give visitors another way in which to learn about the product. Embedding the video in the product web page also gives search engines another media format to index and display in unified search results. Submitting the product video to video sharing web sites such as YouTube.com with a relevant, keyword-rich description will make it even easier for the video to appear in video search and unified search results.

To take it a step further, you could upload screen captures of the video to image sharing sites and link back to the video from the description. The image and video could also be packaged with the press release to provide the media more interesting and engaging ways to learn about the new product. Submitting the press release via wire services can also leverage new search visibility. There are many more steps possible in promoting such content ranging from social bookmarking to blogger relations to the creation of viral linking campaigns, but this is a start, a foundation.

Making Universal Search Easier is Hard Work

The overall idea is to create, optimize and promote the kinds of media formats (text, images and video in this example) that both customers and search engines will respond to. Making it easy for search engines to find your text, images and video means it will be easier for those representations of your product to show up in unified search results.

It may sound like a lot of work but this is the reality of the new search. Optimizing relevant media formats to meet the information channel and format consumption preferences of customers is what will allow small businesses to continue competing against the “big guys” on the web.

The upside is that a substantial increase in media types being indexed by the new search engines all linking to a company web site will provide the kind of advantage standard search engine optimization no longer offers. In other words, optimizing for the different media types provides a competitive advantage.

The Work Will Never End But the Benefits Are Long Term

As long as there are search engines, there will be some kind of optimization for improving search engine visibility. What small business marketers need to consider are all the digital assets they have to work with and enable content creation, optimization and promotion processes to give both search engines and customers the information they’re looking for in the formats they’ll respond to.

About The Author:
Lee Odden is President and Founder of TopRank Online Marketing, specializing in organic SEO, blog marketing and online public relations. He’s been cited as a search marketing expert by publications including U.S. News & World Report and The Economist and has implemented successful search marketing programs with top BtoB companies of all sizes. Odden shares his marketing expertise at Online Marketing Blog offering daily news, interviews and best practices.

Comment or start a discussion in our forums: http://www.workconnexions.com/forums/Regional/UK.aspx