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4 Simple Ways to Attract Customers to Your Small Business

In today’s saturated marketplace, getting ahead in the business world is tougher than ever. They need to amp up their marketing efforts in order to thrive and succeed. If you’ve tried different strategies, but you still haven’t achieved your desired results, don’t fret. We’re here to help you out.

Use these simple and inexpensive tips to attract customers to your small business. Try any of the methods listed below to see which one works best for you.

Identify your target audience

The first and most important step is to identify who your target audience is. Have a crystal clear picture of who exactly you are targeting. You wouldn’t know where to start looking if you don’t know the type of customers you seek.

You may have great products and a marketing campaign in place, but this won’t help you reach your bottomline without a composite of your ideal customer.

Online advertising is the way to go

Living in the digital world, most people spend most of their time online. They would log in to their social media accounts to get in touch with their family and friends. Some even rely on the internet to know what is happening around them. So if you are looking to capture the attention of your target audience, online advertising is the way to go.

Get listed on popular local directories, be active on social media, post blogs regularly and update your website from time to time. With all these strategies combined, you are guaranteed to build a strong online presence and attract a lot of potential customers to your business.

Start a contest

Everybody loves free stuff. This is why contests are always a big hit. It’s not just the idea of receiving free items that encourage people to join contest, but the thrill of beating others and winning.

Let’s say you’re in the wedding business and you sell wedding rings. Couples who are planning to get married will be very much interested in joining. But first, they need to share their love story in order to enter the contest. The couples that get the most number of likes wins. Contestants will need to share this with their family and friends in order to get as much likes.

Yes, you’ll be losing money since you’ll be giving away a pair of wedding rings, but imagine the kind of buzz this could create for your business.

Offer deals and discounts

Everybody is looking for a way to save money. People see deals and discounts as a great way to save money. This is one of the best ways to capture the attention of your target audience.

Since deals and discounts are offered for a limited time only, people are tempted to buy something even if they didn’t plan to. After all, it’s cheap, and the items would revert back to their original prices after a few days, so why not buy now?

Now before you jump into these methods to attract your tribe, make sure you also know where your audience is online!

Which Social Media Channels Fit Your Target Audience

You may have amazing products and provide great services. You also spend time creating good quality content. No matter how engaging or persuasive your content is, you won’t be able to achieve great results unless it reaches your target audience.

Most business use social media to engage with their fans and followers and even build a relationship with them. Considering there are several social media channels out there, do you ever wonder if you’re reaching the right audience?

Which social media channels fit your target audience? Keep reading to find out.

Twitter

Twitter makes use of hashtags that allows businesses to target people who are talking about and engaging with topics related to their business. This social media platform is ideal for sharing real time information, timely trends or live events, and will result in high levels share and engagement.

Use this social networking platform if your target audience is young adults. 24% of internet users log in on their Twitter account on a daily basis. Younger, more educated crowds aged 18 to 29 uses Twitter. 29% of college grads use Twitter and lots of it.

Facebook

Facebook is the biggest socal networking channel, with over 1.86 billion monthly users. Yes, Facebook is crowded, but it gives you the ability to narrow down that 1.86 billion users by gender, age, location, interests, marital status, employment, and income; thus, making it easier for you to reach the right audience.

Majority of the entire adult population is on Facebook. In fact, 88% of milennials and 62% of adults aged 65 and up use Facebook. As such, this would be a great place to start with your social media campaign.

Instagram

Instagram is geared towards younger millennial users. A hefty 38% of female internet users use Instagram. To make the most out of your social media campaign, make sure that you provide attention grabbing photos and high quality videos to your audience. Remember, content is king on Instagram.

LinkedIn

People tend to use LinkedIn for interacting with clients, influencers and other professionals. This is a great option for business whose products or services are highly specific to professionals. It is also ideal for B2B marketers.

Just like Facebook, LinkedIn allows you to target users based on gender, location and age. In addition, it also allows you to filter based on field of study, company industry, company size, degrees, job title etc.

Attract customers | Small business marketing | 4 marketing tactics for small business | How to find target market | Facebook marketing for business | Social media marketing for small business | social media marketing tips

 

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Tips to Get Your Emails Noticed and Read

Emails are the most commonly used communication tool in business today. Businesses, big and small, use email to communicate with their clients and customers. Wouldn’t it be great if every customer and client reads and responds to your email? Unfortunately, most people only read the subject line.

Here are some tips to get your emails noticed and read. Use these tips and you’ll notice an increase in your open and response rates.

Subject line matters

Most people are so focused on the body of the email that they don’t give the subject line much thought. In order to get your email noticed and read, you want your subject line to stand out. Remember, this will be the first thing recipients see when you send an email. If you use generic emails, then you are less likely to get a response. This is especially true if the person receives about a hundred emails a day.

Be specific

Mention in your email what it is specifically you want the person to do. Do you want him/her to click a link to learn more about something? Do you want the recipient to connect you with someone? Or do you want the person to meet with you? Be clear about what you’re asking for.  If the recipient doesn’t know what you want, even after reading the email, he/she likely won’t respond.

Keep it short and simple

Long emails can look intimidating. No one wants to wade through long paragraphs looking for important bits of information.

When it comes to emails, the shorter the better. If possible, limit your message to 3 – 5 sentences. Your emails won’t stand a chance if it takes longer than a few minutes to read. Be considerate of the recipient’s time.

Pay attention to the time of the day

Email is a great way to reach out to your clients or target audience because it feels like a non-intrusive way to get a hold of someone. After all, it will be in their inbox and they’ll see it once they check on their email. But with emails coming in almost every hour, the one you sent last night can easily get lost in the fray.

To improve the chances of your email getting read and responded to, you want to send an email when the person is actively checking on his/her email. Early in the morning, during lunch break or during office hours is the best time to send an email.

Email marketing tips | How to get Email Marketing working for you | Increase email open rate

Email marketing tips | How to get Email Marketing working for you | Increase email open rate | Tips to get your emails open and read

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Search Engine Optimization in 2017 [VIDEO]

 

Hello everybody! I’m Caitlin McDonald with Boundless Marketing. Today I want to talk a little bit about SEO or search engine optimization.

Search engine optimization is even more important now than ever has been in the past. The reason is because article creation in general has shifted over the past year or two years. Basically there are so many different players out there, which is phenomenal, but in order to stand out you have to work even harder than you had to in the past. Especially if you’re just starting out, these blogging tips are really going to be helpful as you are making a position for yourself.

I have a couple of tips for you. The first ones we have talked about in the past, but then I’ll go into more detail, as well.

The first tip is that when you are writing those blog posts, don’t shy away from writing longer blog posts. We used to always emphasize splitting longer blogs up between part one, part two, and part three so that in one piece of content you’re going to be linking to different pages.  Now it’s actually a lot more important to have longer blog posts. I recommend going up to 5000 words within a single blog post. This is because when you’re really writing that depth about something you’re providing very valuable information to your clients and to your readers.

The next piece is when you’re writing a blog post that this longer, such as 1500 words long, you need to make sure that you’re dividing the content up into different sections. We do this by utilizing heading tags, bullet points, bolded words, etc. Now, heading tags are very easy to implement. Basically, when you’re writing, you’re going through and need to figure out where the obvious divisions are in your content. Are you coming up to a point where you’re going to be talking about five tips to do something, followed by five ways to implement it, and then techniques for follow up? Each of these is a clear division in the content. All you do is you highlight the text, and in the text editor you select the text style for Header 1, Header 2, Header 3 etc.

Which header tag you choose really this depends on how long your content is and how frequently are inserting the breaks in content.

This last piece we haven’t talked about before is using different types of media within your content. Right now, as you can see, I’m doing a video, but I’ll also have the transcript and some images. By creating and including diverse types of media in your blog post, you can help your post rank higher in your industry or in your category for specific keywords.

In general, not every reader is going to learn the same. Somebody who is more into listening and looking rather than reading, is going to be drawn to one type of post rather than another. Additionally, within posts you want to create the images that are going to be shareable. Having those shareable images really helps with the optimization for Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, etc. If you don’t feel comfortable with filming a video you can also do a podcast. That’s another great way to increase the different types of media that you have on the site.

Now the next piece that I recommend doing is sharing all of your information or knowledge as downloadable resources and freebies on your website. I’ll go into more detail in that in a later post, but these tips will point you into the right direction as you’re jumping into using search engine optimization on your blog posts.

Search Engine Optimization in 2017 [VIDEO] | Blog SEO | Search Engine Optimization in Blogging

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How to Create a Sales Page that Converts

The following template can be used to build a sales page that converts!

Step 1: Your headline: Keep your course title clear, but use the subheading to be descriptive and focus on how the item can transform your life. Below this include your first call to action button.

Step 2: Description: Keep this to 2-4 short paragraphs and focus on what it can transform.

Step 3: Add a Case Study or Testimonial: Include an image or video, name, and links to appropriate pages. If you are just started, ask your friends or other people you have helped.

Step 4: Add your second Call to Action button

Step 5: Introduce yourself! Give a bio block or a video. Make sure you answer the questions of why people should work with you.

Step 6: Add details about your offer or course. Start bringing up the class curriculum. Here you want the module titles and lecture titles.

Step 7: Include a second Case Study or Testimonial

Step 8: Answer any questions you often receive from your students or clients. Focus on answering objections people may have. Think about why would people not purchase your course?

Step 9: Add in your third Call to Action button

Take a step back and you are all set!

9 Steps to Create a Sales Page that Converts. Incredibly easy guide for your sales pages [Sales Pages for Online Course]

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How to go from 0 to 100,000 Website Visits

Moving from 0 to 100,000 visitors takes a lot of leg work, no matter how easy a blog post or interview makes it sound. Unless of course you are buying ads, which provides a short-term solution, you’ll need to get working!

Depending on your industry, Pinterest. Reddit, Quora, and LinkedIn can all provide avenues to increase your site traffic. I’ll take a look at each below.

In order for any of these to be successful, however, you need to make sure there is a reason to go to your website. I recommend a combination of new blog posts, freebies, and diverse media (videos, infographics, etc).

  1. Pinterest: On Pinterest there are a variety of ways you can boost your traffic. You need to start with the basics.
    • Complete your profile and confirm your website. By confirming your account, your profile tends to rank higher in search results. Also, let people know what to expect if they follow you.
    • Use Rich Pins. These add more content to your pins from your site, which can increase their impressions and clicks.
    • Optimize Descriptions: Not only do you want your pins and boards to appear in search results, you also want to entice people to click them.
    • Engage: Don’t just go through and Follow everyone you can to gain Followers, go through and Like, Comment, and Repin appropriate Pins before Following someone (yes, there are automation tools like this, such as NinjaPinner or Tailwind*).
    • Participate in Group Boards: Find group boards that fit your business and request to join them. Of course follow the rules when you pin to these boards, but they open the door to a much wider audience (BoardBooster* is great for automating your pinning).
  2. Reddit: The goal on Reddit is to get a lot of Upvotes. When a post makes it big, it can bring thousands of visitors to your site. Reddit is set up to prevent spammers, so you do need to be cautious about what type of content you are posting here.
    • Find your subreddits: These are the subcategories that you can post to. You need to find the ones that is made up of your target market. You can find these subreddits through searches on Reddit. Look for the results that are relevant and have high traffic. You can also use Metareddit to find subreddits. Just make sure that the subreddits you decide on FIT your topic and aren’t too broad.
    • Research the posts in the Subreddit: take note if you see consistencies in the posts and what the most upvoted posts tend to be. You will want to emulate what works within each specific subreddit.
    • Participate: Hold off on posting your links for just a bit more and focus your energy on commenting on other posts (new accounts can only comment once every 10 minutes or so).
    • Post your own links! But only if it fits the guidelines for the subreddit. When you are posting, don’t hesitate to test different headlines and time of day. Always be clear about what the post is about and then don’t try to upvote your own things. Redditors can smell marketing from a mile away, so don’t try to hide what you are doing. Of course sometimes, even if you get downvotes, you still may make a sale, which has happened a few times to me).
  3. Quora: We are just starting out on Quora, so there are other folks who can provide better insight here, but participate and provide great answers to questions.
    • On Quora the best way to  is to get traffic to your website is to find questions to answer have followers, but less than 10 answers. This means you have found a question people are interested in learning more about, but you can have your answer stand out compared to others.
    • Don’t be afraid to answer questions that aren’t directly related to your business, either. You have expertise in a lot of different areas, so you can more generally have your profile stand out if you start receiving up votes across the board.
    • Research how other people are answering the question. Are they writing quick responses or going into detail? This can show you how you need to be writing the replies.
  4. LinkedIn: If you are B2B, you need to be on LinkedIn. I highly recommend using Group Discussions to push out your blog posts and LinkedIn Articles to re-publish your popular blogs with a call to action back to your site.
    • Find Groups: LinkedIn has switched around their interface, but the goal is to find active groups that fit your target market.
    • Participate: Just like with Reddit and Pinterest, you need to participate. This means liking and commenting on other members’ discussions.
    • Post Discussions: Often your discussion will be flagged if you just post the link to the blog post, so you want to start by asking a question as the discussion title. In the body of the discussion, use some of your blog post and then provide the link to your site.

With each of these tactics, you need to be CONSISTENT and focus on sharing high-quality content. If you want to learn more about how to grow your traffic, please join my free email course on digital marketing.

*Affiliate Link

The Definitive Guide on How to Grow Your Website Traffic from 0 to 100,000: Moving from 0 to 100,000 visitors takes a lot of leg work, no matter how easy a blog post or interview makes it sound. Unless of course you are buying ads, which provides a short-term solution, you’ll need to get working!

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10 Ways To Build Your Online Reputation

This post is updated from December, 2010.

Social media presents a unique opportunity for anyone to develop a personal or business reputation to build their careers, boost sales and increase relationships. The key is to leverage the tools of the Social Media to effectively build your online reputation. You need to understand what your goals and intentions are in order to be successful.

Here are 10 ways you can be successful in this journey, so you can achieve your short and long term goals rather than waste time:

1. Be aware.Continually listen to conversations happening across the Web related to your career or business and learn from the content you read, listen to, or view online. Social media success depends as much on listening as it does on publishing.

2. Be focused.Define your niche and focus the majority of your social media participation on conversations and content related to that area of focus. A focused brand is more powerful than a broad brand. Always lead with your strengths on the social media and be consistent in your content and conversations in order to successfully build your online reputation.

3. Be authentic.Your social media participation is useless if your content and conversations read like corporate rhetoric or a promotional brochure. Instead, be real and be human. Imagine you’re speaking with your audience in person rather than online and adjust your content and tone to match your target audience’s needs and expectations for you based on your brand promise. This is where videos can be a great tool for people to really know who you are.

4. Be trustworthy.Honesty is an essential part of building your online reputation using the tools of the social media. Transparency isn’t just a buzz word, it’s a strategic imperative, which should apply to your social media participation as well as all other aspects of your career or business.

5. Be meaningful.The content you publish on social media must be useful and meaningful to your target audience or there is no reason for them to read it or start a dialogue with you about it. Furthermore, if your content doesn’t add value to your audience’s lives, they won’t talk about it and share it with their own audiences.

6. Be “non-self-promotional.”No one will want to read your content or interact with you on the social media if your content and conversations read like a marketing pitch. Follow the 90-10 rule of marketing and spend 90% or more of your time in social media activities that are not self-promotional and only 10% or less on activities that are self-promotional. When you do want to directly try to get more exposure to build your online reputation, you can do so without annoying other people.

7. Be accessible and responsive.An important part of building your online reputation via social media participation is understanding that it’s not all about you. Instead, you need to spend a great deal of time acknowledging other people on the social media in order to build a relationship with them. In other words, they need to understand that you care about them, too. You need to respond to questions, comments on your blog, tweets, and so on.

8. Be reciprocating.You can’t expect people to reach out to you and share your content on the social media and not return the favor. If someone engages with you on your blog, Twitter, Facebook or another social media destination, then you can’t ignore that person — just as you wouldn’t ignore someone in a face-to-face situation. For example, you also need to leave comments on other people’s blogs, share their content on Twitter and Facebook, and more. You can’t operate in a silo on the social media and expect to be successful.

9. Be uncontrolling.The thought of giving up control and letting your content, conversations and name spread across the Web can be frightening. However, without the sharing of content and interactive dialogue that happens on social media, your online reputation cannot develop. You have to be willing to give up control and let people share and talk about you and your content in order for your online reputation to grow. Don’t worry about negative buzz about you, your brand, or your business. There is always a way to react to negativity on the social media.

10. Be involved.Don’t spend all of your time in one place. While quality is more important than quantity when it comes to building an authentic reputation online, you do need to spread your wings and be social. Focus on other avenues such as a blog, YouTube, Google Buzz, Backlinks, and much more. You need to use all aspects of Internet Marketing in order to see return.

10 ways to build your online reputation: 10 ways you can be successful in this journey, so you can achieve your short and long term goals rather than waste time.

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Putting Together a Social Media Schedule

This is updated from a post on Oct 26, 2010.

One of the most important parts of being active in the social media world is taking responsibility for your Facebook, Twitter, and any other internet marketing outlets you have. When we put our posts out and we like other peoples posts that is a good start to taking responsibility. When we send out Newsletters or email marketing campaigns we want other people to read them right?

Well it is a two sided road; I mean we all have to put in our efforts to read other peoples stuff as well. My tip for that is picking your inner circle of people and people you have made a power partner and start by reading their newsletters and/or emails. The same thing goes with our social media posts. We want people reading our post, tweets, events, questions etc. also emailing us wanting to work with us or learn more about what we do. We have to do that with others. The one thing I always say about social media is it brings people, communities, and companies together all over the world.

So how do we do that? It is easy . . . we put together a weekly schedule and then we implement it into our routine just like checking emails, and making calls.

Monday- Using www.Hootsuite.com schedule your posts to go out onto your Facebook personal page, Facebook business page, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, and Ping.fm. Using my post before this one to help first create your strategy so you know what you need to post on your social media profiles and when. (Schedule an hour and a half to start)

Tuesday- Login to Facebook and add 10 people into your business list, research these people. Find people that have common interest or maybe looking for your services and put them into the business list you created. Then get onto Twitter or Twellow and search for your Keywords or location. You can search for people using keywords or type in keywords people would use to find YOU and add 50 people. (Schedule about 45 min to start, once you get the hang of it you can probably get it done in 30 min)

Wednesday– Spend some time on LinkedIn checking emails and finding people you may know and ask them to connect with you. (Schedule 45 min)

Thursday- Login to Facebook and add 10 people into your business list, research these people. Find people that have common interest or maybe looking for your services and put them into the business list you created. Then get onto Twitter or Twellow and search for your Keywords or location. You can search for people using keywords or type in keywords people would use to find YOU and add 50 people. (Schedule about 45 min to start, once you get the hang of it you can probably get it done in 30 min)

Friday – Repeat what you have done Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. We are going to add another step into today, Once you are done adding people on Facebook and Twitter you want to go back to Facebook and go to your page, under your logo you will find a tab that says “Suggest to Friends” Click on that and then click the drop down tab to your list you made once that list pulls up on the top right hand side it will say “Select All” hit that and then send invitations. What this is doing is asking all the people you have been adding as friends to become a fan of your page!

Now this is what I do and share with people you are more than welcome to move it around however it works for you. Please let me know if you have any questions or suggestions of things that have helped you. I look forward to hearing from you.

Putting together a weekly social media schedule: ne of the most important parts of being active in the social media world is taking responsibility for your Facebook, Twitter, and any other internet marketing outlets you have. When we put our posts out and we like other peoples posts that is a good start to taking responsibility. When we send out Newsletters or email marketing campaigns we want other people to read them right?

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Your Social Media Framework

Without a structure, it can be difficult to come up with topics for social media posts. We often see business floundering as they try to come up with posts each day or don’t realize there are tools to schedule out their posts so one day a month they post 5-10 items.

Being consistent on social media is one of the most important things that you need to be on social media. This includes both posting at consistent intervals and being consistent in your tone, messaging, and imagery. Your tribe will begin to understand what your business is like through this consistent message. Even if you post only one time per week or one time per month, at least you have that steady flow of information going out online.

To help you create your posting schedule, here are some sample topics you can include, as well as a weekly overview of how your posts can be organized.

Sample Social Media Topics:

  • Quotes
  • Product/Services Overview
  • Testimonials
  • Blog Posts
  • Industry Articles
  • Local Events/Activities
  • Related Topics
  • Day in the Life of Images/Stories
  • Videos
  • Infographics
  • How tos
  • User generated
  • Podcasts
  • Livestreams
  • Ebooks
  • Guides
  • Share a Post
  • Questions
  • Surveys

The next step is organizing these so you again have consistency and can optimize your time and resources. For example, your blog posts will get the most traction if you always update them on the same day. This means they should consistently be shared on the same day.

Example Social Media Calendar

 

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