Posts from — June 2009

As a small business, you may not be able to keep up with the national companies online advertising budgets, however, you know that for SEO (search engine optimization) purposes, new content for your website is a must. If you have already started a company blog, you may be asking yourself, what do I do next? The next step you need to take is to start driving traffic to it. You can take the relevant content you’re creating and use it to help keep current customers and drive new business. So, here are a few steps you can take to start driving more traffic to your website using your new, or existing, company blog.

1. Inform people that you have a blog. Tell your current customers, leads, friends, and family that you have a company blog. Make sure all of your employees tell their friends and families about the blog as well. You can put together a quick email to friends and family that all employees can send out – and send an email to your current leads and customers. Have all employees add a line to their signature line asking people to check out and subscribe your blog. Make sure you have a feed for your blog. Your blog should have a built-in ability to create a feed, or you can use Feedburner or another similar service that offers tracking statistics.
2. Submit your blog to pinging services. There are great services out there like Ping-O-Matic, Pingoat, Google Ping and My Yahoo that you can inform that you’ve written a new post. They’ll send their spiders to go and look at your blog and include in into their blog results. This is very necessary if you have your blog for SEO purposes.
3. Become active in the blogosphere. Start reading and commenting on relevant blogs you find that may have readers interested in your content. This provides two great results. The biggest reason you want to do this, however, is to provide that blog’s readers another place to get information on a relevant topic. You also may get a link to your site, which can be useful for SEO purposes. There are many times a blog may not pass the “link juice” from your link… but you will still get traffic.

In order to maintain traffic to your site and increase it, you need to keep blogging regularly. Whether your blogs are daily, bi-weekly, or weekly, you need to make sure your readers have something new to come back to. By blogging consistently and trying some of these tips to increase your traffic, you will see results… an increase in traffic!

If you need more help in driving traffic to your blog, contact The Envision Agency, Small Business Marketing. We specialize in marketing solutions for small businesses.

Email marketing can give huge returns. Here are some tips for email success.

When you’re looking for another avenue to gain more clients, many people think about email marketing. Most companies don’t plan to tackle email marketing until they have been established because it takes time to do it right and the returns may not justify the cost at the start up of a business. Where ever you are in your business, if you’re considering email marketing, here are some tips to make sure you get the biggest bang for your buck.

Make sure you’re compliant. You don’t want your email campaign to cost you more because you get caught for violating the CAN-SPAM Act. The FTC has a page on their site that makes it easy to understand what you can and cannot do (click here).

The CAN-SPAM Act isn’t the only thing you need to watch for compliance reasons. If your industry has further regulations on advertising, make sure you follow those. I’ve done tests comparing the “less compliant” version against the version that my legal team wanted me to send. The legally compliant version performed significantly better. And, we didn’t need to worry about getting penalized for non-compliance.

Send email to people who subscribe. You will get a much better return from someone who has requested more information from you than from someone who hasn’t. They are more likely to open and respond to your emails and less likely to mark you as SPAM or complain. To improve your email list, make sure you have an area where people can subscribe on every page of your website and offer it with every communication you have with customers. You can also offer something free for a subscription, such as a coupon, free white paper, etc.

Segment your emails. Use what you know about your customers to send them relevant information that they can use to take further action with you. For example, if you are a pet store, don’t send your users an email about cat food if they’re a dog only household. PetsMart does a great job with their email campaigns: they know everything from what type and number of pet(s) you have to the type of food you buy and your pets’ birthdays. If you only have birds, you won’t receive anything about dogs or cats.  Use the information you collect to provide your subscribers with a better experience and you’ll have a HUGE gain from your emails.

It can take time to set up your email marketing campaign so you can get the most out of it. It’s easier to start it and make small changes to optimize that try to get everything 100% correct the first time. You’ll find through testing and optimization that something else will work better than what you originally thought. If you need help setting up your email marketing strategies or would like to optimize a campaign you already have going, give The Envision Agency, Small Business Marketing a call.

The Unwritten Rules of Social Networking

Social networking has great allure. There are millions of Facebook users, everyone is talking about Twitter, and we’ve all received the funny YouTube videos. With more businesses following the social media trend, there are more opportunities that an accidental faux pas can alienate people rather than welcome new customers and hurt your chances of success with this new media.

The top rules to know about social networking:

Be Subtle

Yes, you’re going online to win business. Don’t start out with a “free” download or a sales request right away. Be genuine and don’t try a pushy sales approach. Let them come to you.

Stay Aware

You’re putting your business out there to be discussed. Know what is being said about you by searching for what is being said for your business. Empower your customers to make a difference in your business and listen and respond to complaints.. Don’t ignore or delete them.

Be Transparent

The easiest way to lose credibility and your following is to lie or smudge the truth a bit online. Tell the truth, and nothing but the truth and you’ll be fine. Let them know that you’re a company spokesperson and that you’re here to facilitate communications. People love to discuss the bad more than the good, but put a stop to your desire to delete the bad… acknowledge and learn from it and don’t dwell. If you handle it well, your customers will too.

There are guidelines for all marketing, and social media is no different. As long as you have good manners and don’t inundate everyone with useless drivel, you can do great. And the occasional faux pas can, if you admit it, make you more approachable and human… not an unforgivable corporation. Just make sure you learn from your mistakes, otherwise you will alienate your customers.

Looking for more guidance for your social media campaign? Know you need it but don’t have time to implement a strategy? The Envision Agency, Small Business Marketing can help.

Social media and social media branding are buzz words for online marketers. As a business owner, you have heard these bandied about, but may not know exactly what people are talking about. Here’s a layman’s guide to the top social networking, also known as social media, terms.

Blogs
These are fast and relatively simple to create. They are an easy way to promote consistent conversations with your readers and can really help with your online SEO and social media efforts. On the downside, if not managed properly, they can be unorganized and are prone to spammy comments.

Microblogs
These are sites like Twitter. You only have a certain number of characters (140) to get your message across. This can be useful for very quick customer support, customer updates, listening to customers, and link sharing. The drawbacks are that you only have a small number of characters and your readership can quickly lose interest if you’re not providing great content.

Wikis
Think of Wikipedia. Wikis are places where you can give answers and start discussions on specific topics. These are based on a “group consenus” and can be a great way to listen to your customer base because they facilitate “bottom up” conversations. But, because of this, they can take a lot of time to keep up and can be difficult to organize.

Forums
Forums are still very popular. And, as such, are still powerful. You can reach many people at once with a discussion thread, but you do need to watch yourself and make sure you’re relevant. It’s a many-to-many communication tool and you do need to make sure your messaging is on point.

Public Networks
LinkedIn, Facebook, and MySpace are all networks that are open to the public. You don’t own the content or the network and you are at the mercy of people within the network. The great thing is, if you go into them understanding that, it is a great place for you to build your social network along with the other options.

There are many options out there – and for social media branding to work, you’ll have to mix and match what you’re comfortable with and give up some control. When you’re ready to do that, with the right strategy, you can build your online brand up and create a very loyal customer following.

Need help deciphering the social media world? The Envision Agency, Small Business Marketing works with small businesses to help develop their social media brand and help them capitalize on their local markets. Contact The Envision Agency, Small Business Marketing today to see if they can help you.

You have built a website, put up the content, and are now ready for even more traffic. But are you sure you’re ready? Before you spend the time, effort, and money driving more traffic to your website: you should make sure your website works the way you want it to. In short, you need to make sure your website is hitting the goals you initially outlined before you bring lots of traffic to it. Otherwise, if it doesn’t do exactly what you thought it would, you’re wasting money and time.

Define the goal of your website. Ask yourself,

• Do you want it drive leads or sales inquiries?
• Should it sell a specific product or service?
• Is it there to provide information and build you as an expert in your field?

Once you define the goal of your website, ask a third party what your website does. You can ask employees, family, friends, and customers:

• Why they would visit your website.
• What they were driven to do on the website.
• What their experience with the website was like. Did they like the site? Was it easy to find what they were looking for? Was it easy to register or purchase your product/service or make an inquiry?
• Would they recommend the site to friends and family?

Evaluate your website goals with the experience your third party had. Do they match? If they do, you’re ready to start driving more traffic to your website. If they don’t, you should reevaluate your website and make the necessary changes so your website does hit your goals.

Need help determining if your website will drive your traffic to have the appropriate reaction? The Envision Agency, Small Business Marketing can help you evaluate your website and ensure your visitors are taking the desired action. Once you know your website is doing what it should, The Envision Agency, Small Business Marketing can help you increase the amount of traffic your website receives.