made simple for business owners
Landing Page 101: Benefits, Content and Design – Infographic
May 15th
What exactly is a Landing Page?
A landing page (also referred to as a squeeze page) is any website page where you direct traffic to prompt a specific action on the part of the visitor. This is where your visitors “land” by following an ad, a call to action in your website, or a link in social media.
Q: Why not just lead visitors to your Home page?Because your Home page will be too general presenting your audience with a lot of information that can distract them from taking any one specific action.
Whereas landing pages have one very specific goal and are designed to accomplish that single purpose.
Q. Why Bother with Landing Pages?Landing pages serve as your automated lead generation engine on your website. In most cases, the purpose of landing pages is to capture visitor information – an email address or other lead generating information – for future follow-up.
Your offer to entice the visitor to leave their contact information may be access to an instructional video, a free ebook, a free book chapter, a significant discount on merchandise, registration for a free webinar or telecast. You can also introduce a free product trial or whatever best suits your business AND your visitor.
Q: Isn’t More >
Website Design – Time To Rethink Your Website?
May 8th
Which Part of Website Design Did You Focus On?
Question: When you first set-up your website, where was your focus? Was it on the website design and layout, the graphics, the content or the visitors?
Answer: Chances are pretty high you didn’t think about the visitors much or at all.
Right?
You’re not alone.
As I prepare to upgrade my website, I’m discovering some critical aspects of website design I’ve completely ignored. And the bottom line is I don’t want to commit the same mistakes moving forward.
I’m not going to bore you with all the long list of things I’ve ignored. What I would like to share with you is my biggest website design aha.
I’ve long understood the hub and spoke concept of sending and generating traffic back to my website through SEO, organic traffic, social media, my e-newsletter, and through other distribution methods.
What I’ve totally ignored is a process for visitors once they arrived on the site.
Why is this important?
It is important because most visitors will come to your site either through a link to your blog post or through organic traffic and never return. Yes, that’s right. One visit.
Maybe they got some value from your blog post.
Maybe they saw a short video that was entertaining.
A More >
Public Relations Partnered with Visuals Generates Leads
May 1st
Why bother with Public Relations?
Unfortunately, it is too easy to overlook public relations these days when everybody is screaming social media, website traffic and all things online.
But public relations can and does play a critical role in helping a small business with its online presence and in generating bottom line sales.
First, let’s review some of the traditional advantages public relations has over traditional media: PR…
- serves as a very economical way to reach masses of people
- creates awareness
- puts a shine on your company’s image
- infers activity and innovation
- creates a distinct advantage over competitors that are not using PR
- is more credible than traditional advertising
That last point, credibility, is an important factor in a marketplace where today’s consumers place very little value in advertising and prefer the recommendations and referrals of their friends online.
How can PR help with social media and online marketing?Easy!
You see there are some current trends that are pushing public relations into a very effective lead generation tool.
1. Increased emphasis on visual media
We’ve all heard about how the visual is becoming more important on Facebook and other social media platforms.
Well, all text press releases are disappearing and are being supported by cool images, entertaining or informative videos. Consumers are responding. In fact, the More >
Marketing Lessons Thanks to J.C. Penney’s B of D
Apr 24th
6 Marketing Lessons from the JCP Snafu
One just has to love the way large corporations continue to give small business folks with mucho marketing lessons. And such is the case with the Board of Directors (B of D) of J.C. Penney.
If you’re in business, particularly retail, you’re familiar with the JCP story, so I don’t have to regurgitate it for you. If not, you can read a good report of what transpired from this Wall Street Journal article.
I want to shine a flashlight on the rather obvious mistakes made by the B of D in hopes of helping the small business owner. These marketing lessons are universal – for big and not so big alike.
That said, there is a lot of behind the scenes B of D power plays happening that you and I will never know. But the shenanigans are pretty obvious even to outsiders and most likely contributed to the current sorry state of affairs of JSP. But I want to look at the common pitfalls that the JCP story tells us.
Full J.C. Penny DisclosureI’m not a stockholder in JCP, however, the store has been an old friend. My single Mom used to buy our annual back-to-school clothes at More >
Local Search – 5 Quick Steps To Boost Visibility
Apr 24th
Does Local Search Still Matter?
Of course local search still matters.
While much of the online marketing focus remains on social media, it’s easy to ignore the fact that local searches is the elephant in the room. Tweet This
Last year, Google revealed it does 100 billion (with a “B”) searches each and every month. Tweet This
Of these, estimates are that somewhere between 20–30 percent are “local” searches with 40 percent of these searches via mobile. Tweet This
Based on these estimates, this means that the size of local market is approximately 30 billion.
With increasing popularity of everything mobile and the propensity for mobile users to take immediate action, the prospects are pretty good that local search is going to continue to grow.
Are you getting your fair share of the local search market?
Probably not.
That’s okay. You can change that.
Here are 5 tips to get your local search marketing efforts back on track.
1. Boost Local Search by Boosting Local Business Listings – Tweet ThisIf you haven’t already, claim all of your free business listings from Google, Bing and Yahoo. If you’re in retail or the service industry add Yelp, foursquare, WHERE and SCVNGR to the list.
If you have these accounts already set-up, dust them off More >
