Expand Your Audience; Use Social Media
All of the Social Media platforms enjoy a large following. Millions of people frequent Facebook despite their reputation of taking advantage of their subscribers. People who regularly look at websites don't necessarily spend time on social media sites, and vice...
You Can’t Manage Your Business Without a Marketing Plan
All businesses, regardless of size, recognize the importance of a well-crafted marketing plan and budget. While larger corporations may have more resources, small businesses must also allocate funds strategically to maximize their efforts. However, budgeting alone is...
How to Use a Problem Solving Marketing Approach
Problem solving marketing will help you find your customers. Did you ever think about being in the solutions business? If there were no problems to solve, you'd have no sales. What is problem solving marketing? Your prospect is looking for an expert. He is seeking...
Use a Landing Page for Leads
As you manage your website and your online presence, you will need information from a visitor. You should link to a landing page for leads designed expressly for a reader to give what you want. You want his name and email to add him to your email list. Email marketing...
Does a Small Business Owner Really Need to Blog?
Blogging takes a lot of time and is an easy task to postpone. There seems to be no short-term payoff. The answer is YES there is a short-term payoff for the following reasons:A well-written blog post helps establish credibility There is a lot of noise on the...
Use Just Organic Content or Add Curated Content?
In the food we eat, organic carries the connotation of healthy, carefully grown food to put in our bodies. Organic content has come to mean that which is prepared specially by an author for the reader of his website. The author writes with the same care that the...
Tell Me Again, Why Do I Need a Website
Committing to a website is a lot like marrying your girl/boyfriend. There are a lot of benefits, but it involves a significant commitment. Before you say "I Do" answer these questions:What purpose will the website serve for my business? Will it be passive,...
Use Electronic Mind Mapping for Content Creation
Electronic mind mapping techniques help you organize your thoughts in an outline before assembling them in a document. For visual learners, mind maps offer an overview of how a document might be put together. You can move thoughts around before you commit them to...
Need Ideas for Blog Topics? Talk to Sales
A well-written blog post helps establish credibility Everyone needs ideas for blog topics now and then. It’s not easy to come up with a new topic every week. Where can you find that kind of information? That kind of inspiration? After all, your content has to attract...
Write Content to Give Visitors What They Want
Sam Walton used to say “Give customers what they want and a little more. If you do they’ll come back over and over.” Sam was right! The background shows the store he started in Bentonviille, AR in 1950 and the inset shows the growth they had achieved by 2010. Like...
How to Use Mind Mapping to Create Content
Mind mapping is an approach to writing that frees your brain to go wherever it wants. You utilize brainstorming, but just by yourself. Begin mind mapping with a clean sheet of paper and a pencil. The technique is to put the primary topic of the content in the center...
It’s So Easy to do a Website Update
So it’s been a while since you’ve worked on your website? Perhaps you have been focused on sales and there’s been no time. Maybe you took time off to add a product line, merge with a competitor, expand to another city. But now things have settled down and you are...
Ready to Move to Video?
Video marketing can open a whole new world for your company - Begin your move to video by creating several videos including: A short introductory piece on your homepage above the fold. Use it to introduce your website, your business and what you can do for your...
Why Should You Use Video Marketing?
Internet visitors love video storytelling As a small business, how will you use video marketing? Whether in social media, website pages, blogs or even email; video is devoured daily. Across the spectrum video marketing will expand exponentially in 2019, and why not?...
Start Small with Continual Improvements
A new approach is making major changes in how we build websites. The technique has several names. In this blog, we will call it Start Small with Continual Improvement or simply Start Small. The Start Small strategy is to build a minimal website, yet one that will...
Create a Video Script That Ranks on Page One
Even accomplished public speakers, work from a script. They want to make sure they cover all of their important points, in sequence, with the right tone and wording. And no Hollywood producer would think of working without a movie script.With video, a script is even...
How to Create Inexpensive Marketing Videos
Small businesses need to create videos Many small and medium-sized companies want to make inexpensive marketing videos. They correctly believe that videos are more likely to attract a visitor’s attention than blog posts. Since businesses create over two million blog...
How Often Should You Update Your Website
You want to keep your website fresh and technically current, but when is enough, enough? Photo by rawpixel.com from Pexels Updates range from minor to major: You should establish a blog and add content to your site by creating blog posts. If you have blog posts...
Finding New Customers with Inbound Marketing
Reaching more prospects and finding new customers is the primary challenge of every small business. How to find them, how to get them to listen to your story and how to make them your customer. Inbound marketing is an excellent solution.Inbound marketing can answer...
How to Update Your Website?
You want to keep your website fresh. How can you keep readers coming back? No major changes should be done in the first three months while your viewers become familiar with your site. The exception to this rule would be if there was a major omission in the website...
Create a Landing Page for Email Subscriptions
In an earlier post, I talked about the importance of a landing page designed to turn visitors into leads. This post describes how to create a landing page for email marketing to collect these leads.Turn visitors into leads I’m sure you know that there are several...
Content Writers, How to Dictate Creative Content
Recently, I talked about the features and advantages of mind mapping. Mind mapping lets you remove some of the pressure of creating content by permitting you to merely doodle notes about your content. In turn, dictation allows you to create as fast as you can talk....
Save Money, First Build a Minimum Viable Website
Venture capitalists in Silicon Valley invest huge sums of money in tech startups that build new products. To improve the likelihood of a return on their investment the tech industry developed a methodology called Minimum Viable Product or MVP. MVP is a strategy for...
e-mail You Can’t Resist
Do you have two or three email authors whose e-mail you can’t resist? You know they have something to sell you. There will be buttons to press that tempt you. Graphics that tout the latest and greatest offer. But you also know there will be valuable nuggets of...
How to Retain Control of Your Website Project
“website” (CC BY 2.0) by medithIT Preparation is the key to reducing costs in creating or refreshing a website. The website is for your business; you must retain control of your project. You know your business best, and you need to be prepared to guide...
Blog Posts Require Images to be Read
A blog post is not complete by itself: you must know how to add images to attract attention for it to be read. Marketing experts write continually about the importance of great content and that is absolutely true. But your post won’t get clicked without an...
Create Content Using Long Tail Keywords
As people do Internet product research, their queries get more and more specific as they approach their buying decision. These queries use long tail keywords: long tail because of the way they appear on a graph. Do you use long tail keywords when you do a Google...
Easily Find Irresistible Blog Topics
Keep the search for blog topics in the back of your mind. Record possible blog topics when you are: Reading the newspaper and see mention of something relevant to the industry that you serve. Scanning industry publications. If you agree with an opinion...
5 Ways to Upgrade Your Website for Fall Marketing
If the National Football League teams just finished their OTA's can Fall be far away? Now is the time to upgrade your website for Fall. Get Organized for Web Marketing If your business slowed down this summer, now is the time to think about preparing your marketing...
Beating the Summer Slump
Summer can be a dreaded season for small business. Prospects are on vacation. Every email seems to get an out-of-office reply. Calls go unanswered. But as a small business owner, you can’t let it get you down. How to beat the summer slump. Plan Ahead for the...
How to Attract Prospects to Your Website
To attract prospects and customers to your website you must be ready to speak to them. But who will they be and what information will they need? You know what type of prospect you want and what will interest them. They will be like your current...
What is a Buyer’s Journey?
The buyer’s journey is like a seller’s sales funnel but from the point of view of the buyer. The buyer’s journey differs depending on the complexity of the problem. Buying a book is different than buying a Wi-Fi network for your home, office or plant. For...
6 Steps to Create Outstanding Content
I used a Mont Blanc fountain pen and pad for several years when doing creative writing. I dropped the pen and damaged the nib. I sent it to Mont Blanc describing how much inspiration I felt writing with their pen. They replaced it for free. Whether you use a Mont...
Keeping Websites Fresh
Fresh is important to fruits & vegetables, laundry, ideas, and website content. One of the great things about hotels is slipping into bed at the end of your day and feeling fresh sheets. While glancing through a newspaper or magazine you occasionally find a...
Digital Marketing, the Yellow Pages Alternative
Need a yellow pages alternative? Many of us grew up using the Yellow Pages when searching for a product or service. Need a new tire? Painter? Electrician? Plant yard? We automatically reached for the Yellow Pages. It never failed to provide a list of businesses to...
Design for Mobile First
Why design for mobile first? Google announced earlier this year that mobile devices were used more often than desktops for searches. That's not surprising really since our smartphones are always at hand. A quick search when just a little information is required is...
Let’s Work Together
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