Archive for June, 2010
Marketing Essentials for Solopreneurs
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You know the importance of marketing your business. You may even have written a marketing plan and are now implementing it. But is simply marketing your business going to bring you the results you need? Do you have a way to measure the success of your marketing? If your marketing isn’t successful, do you know how to find out where you went wrong?
These questions are some of the important reasons why you need a properly set-up marketing strategy plan. A marketing strategy plan will help you gain maximum benefit from your marketing. It goes a step beyond a marketing plan.
A marketing plan describes the activities you are going to do to promote your product or service. A marketing strategy plan establishes the basis for your marketing and provides the goals for all your marketing activities. It gives you a tool you can use to define your market, position yourself, and increase your sales.
Here are some of the things a well thought-out marketing strategy will tell you. This information will help you gain maximum results from all of your marketing efforts.
Describe your business and your objectives. This is where you will write down what your business does and what product or service it provides. You will also consider what the goal of your business is. When you have established your goals, you will be able to choose marketing activities to help you reach those objectives.
Describe your products or services. This describes what you do and how you provide your product or service. It is important to understand exactly what service your business provides so you can tell others about it effectively. This may seem obvious, but many business owners can’t describe exactly what it is they do. Including this in your marketing strategy plan will ensure that you understand what you do and why it’s important, and can relay that information to others.
Profile your target market. Who are you providing your product or service for? This will tell you who you should be marketing to. Research your market to find out what appeals to them about your product. This will help you market it to them effectively. Learn everything you can about your market so you can speak their language and make sure your marketing is appropriate.
Know your business’s role in relation to your competition. This will help you understand your unique position in the marketplace. Find out how you’re different than your competitors, whether it be stronger or weaker. You can use this in your marketing to make yourself stand out from the competition.
Your marketing strategy plan will provide the goals for all your marketing activities and help you reach them. It will also simplify your marketing because you have done your research ahead of time. For these reasons, a marketing strategy plan helps ensure that you gain maximum benefit from your marketing.
How To Write Keyword Rich Copy For Your Website
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Your website traffic generation strategy quite likely contains content. However, if you spend time on your title page or home page, you can pull quality traffic there too. Here’s how to write a keyword rich title page for your website.
1. Make a list of your primary and secondary keywords. These are the keywords people use to find your information. If you don’t know your primary and secondary keywords, spend some time using tools like Google’s AdWords tool, WordTracker, KeywordDiscovery and other keyword research tools to find out what keywords and keyword phrases are used. Also consider installing something like Google Analytics so you know what keywords people are using to find your website.
2. Categorize your pages including your home page or title page. Outline which pages you’ll use your keywords and keyword phrases on and how you’ll incorporate them into your copy. For your title page, you’ll focus on using your primary keywords and keyword phrases, just one or two, and you’ll choose a few secondary keywords to weave into the copy.
3. Write your title page copy. Don’t worry presently about your primary and secondary keywords, simply write the copy or content. However, try to write your copy so that headings and subheadings are a natural part of the structure. These heading components of your copy play an important role with your keywords.
4. Once your copy is written, return to it and look at it objectively. Where can you fit your keywords naturally? Focus on using your primary keywords in your headline, in your first paragraph and also where they fit naturally throughout your copy. Your secondary keywords will also go into the body of your copy.
5. Go back and use your keywords and keyword phrases in your headings and subheadings. Search engine spiders look in these key places for keywords and keyword phrases.
6. Test keyword density. Once you’ve gone back through your title page and placed your primary and secondary keywords in, test it. Use a tool like GoRank’s Keyword Density Analyzer and type in your domain and keyword phrase. It will give you a percentage for specific areas of your page including your copy. Experts recommend a keyword density of no more than 5% (five words per 100). However, don’t get too carried away. Firstly, you want humans to benefit from reading your page and then lastly search engines.
7. Make sure everything is coded accurately. You want to make sure your html code is accurately reflecting your keywords. Double check your title tags, your header tags, your meta tags for the page and your keyword tags. Also, if you have any images, give them a description and an image tag so the search engines don’t completely overlook them.
Writing a keyword rich title page is easy when you follow these steps. While preparing your page for the search engines, remember it is a human that buys your products or services. The major key is to make sure to write your copy so that it is customer focused.
Solopreneur.biz Coaching Blog Contest
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Solopreneur.biz has moved from page 2 to page 1 in the Best Coaching Blogs of 2010! A big woohoo! We are now listed at #8, but we still need your help.
If you find Solopreneur.Biz to be of benefit to your business, please go to Best Coaching Blogs of 2010 and vote for our blog, which is currently in place number 8 on page 1! The contest is not only fun, but you can also see who else is nominated. The blogs listed are some of the best in the coaching industry. Get your feed reader ready, because you will not want to miss out on the great content.
Remember, you can only vote once, so hop on over right now to vote.
Solopreneur, You Never Know Who Is Reading
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The world of a blogger is often lonely. For a solopreneur with a blog, it can be a frustrating process. You pull from the depths of your creativity for ideas for posts, you spend hours crafting them and honing the words to be just right, you post and you sit with the silence that often follows. Sometimes you have comments or even better, dialogue, in response to your posts. Usually, you just hope that your blog subscribers are checking, reading and enjoying. The truth is that it’s almost impossible to know who is reading what you have written. This is no excuse not to write nor is it a reason to slack off in your quantity or quality. Because people are reading and you never know who they may be.
This idea came home to us this week when we discovered that this blog had been quoted by a writer for Forbes.com. Here’s the link to read the article about time management and distractions for solopreneurs, a topic we cover periodically. The writer, Linda C. Smith, has an impressive list of writing credentials. She is experienced herself in the entrepreneurial world as she is a writer, a mosaic artist and a distributor of a nutritional product. I also went and explored one of Linda’s blogs and recommend it as another spot for you to generate ideas and even participate in conversation about your needs as a small business owner.
Please share your comments here about our quote on Forbes.com, Linda’s blog or your own ideas about what it’s like to be an entrepreneurial blogger.
Get the Most Out of Video Marketing
Posted by: | CommentsVideo marketing is becoming more and more popular all the time. Because many people are visual learners, they prefer to learn new information by watching a video rather than by reading pages of information. Additionally, videotaping yourself can make you seem more personable and approachable. Your viewers hear your tone and see your expression, which can make your message more compelling.
Video marketing is also extremely affordable. Many computers come with a webcam that can record videos. If your computer does not have one, you can get one very inexpensively at an office supply store or online. Another popular tool for recording videos is the FLIP Video, which is robust, compact and affordable. Best of all you can take this mini video camera with you. As a result, video marketing is a cost-effective way to market your website. Here are some ways to get the most out of your video marketing.
Remember your primary goal. When you’re making your first videos, there are a lot of different things to keep in mind and experiment with. First and foremost, your video is intended to promote your business. It should inspire viewers to visit your site and convert your visitors into paying customers.
Keep your video a reasonable length. Around two minutes is generally about right. That is how long it should take you to say something that it takes the average person ten minutes to read.
Promote your video on Twitter and Facebook. When your video is ready to share, publish your link on Twitter and on Facebook. Invite your followers and friends to watch your video and respond. Give them an incentive to watch by posting a teaser of what they’ll learn when they watch.
Track your results. There are tracking tools that can tell you how much of your video was played before the viewer closed it. You can also find out how many of your prospects decided to visit you after watching your video on a different website. Take advantage of these tools to measure your success and make necessary changes to your video marketing campaign.
Give your videos relevant file names. When you save your video, give it a meaningful name that is relevant to the content and interesting to your viewers. It is more likely to be viewed if the title is applicable to what your prospect is looking for.
Submit your video to video hosting sites. You can attract more prospects by submitting your video to other sites. YouTube is the most popular video hosting site right now. You can also submit it to Vimeo and Google Videos.
Add a call to action. At the end of your video, remind your prospect to visit your website or take another desired action. This is why you created the video in the first place – to motivate your viewer to take action.
Video marketing may be new, but it is here to stay. Following these tips will help ensure that you experience the greatest possible success from your video marketing.
For additional ideas feel free to check out and subscribe to my YouTube channel.
