Archive for Technology
Must Haves For Your Blog
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Blogs are a great way to connect and build relationships with your potential clients. Depending on what you talk about, they can help you reach a completely new audience and they give your audience a way to get to know you and your brand, and to participate in your community. All of these are important for both growing your business and growing your blog following. Often, however, even the biggest blogs make little mistakes. They forget or overlook some important features. Here are seven features to implement on your blog:
Subscribe or RSS feed. There’s nothing more frustrating, as a visitor, than finding a blog you enjoy and not being able to subscribe to it. People are busy, too busy to remember to visit your blog on a daily or weekly basis. Cut them a break, and yourself, and offer an option to subscribe to your blog so each new post is delivered via email, sent to a reader or shows up on their iGoogle page.
Contact/About information. Have you ever visited a blog and thought, “I wonder who this blog belongs to? Where are they? Who are they?” Trust me, readers think this and they want to know. If they can’t find out a bit about you, determine your credibility or make some sort of connection, they’ll move along. Retain your visitors by sharing a bit of information about yourself including a means by which they can contact you.
Comments. Some blogs intentionally do not allow comments and while they have their reasons, most people like to be able to leave a comment if they have something to say. If you’re considering not allowing commenting because you want to avoid spam, then check out a few of the spam blockers like Askimet, which is available for WordPress blogs. If you’re avoiding allowing comments because you don’t want to respond to them, consider outsourcing the job and having someone moderate your posts, or just set ten minutes aside at the end of each day to respond. People like the interaction and it draws more readers.
Archives, popular posts, popular comments, tags and other associated identifiers. People search and read blogs differently. Some simply read the most recent post and move on while others search by category or tag. Some people will want to read the most popular posts and others will want to sift through your archives post by post. Provide a number of options for your visitors to search by.
SEO plug-ins. One of the wonderful features about a blog is that it’s welcomed by the search engines due to frequent and easily indexed content. That being said, there are an abundance of quality search engine plug-ins, particularly for WordPress, which make optimizing your posts for the search engines quick and easy.
Social networking and bookmarking features. With Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, and other social networking and bookmarking sites growing in popularity, it pays to include options on your blog. You can ask people to tweet your posts, post or link to them on Facebook, Digg them and so on. It’ll draw traffic and subscribers.
Google Analytics. You want to know how many people are visiting your blog, where they’re coming from, how many posts they read and how long they stay on your site, right? Google analytics will tell you all that and more. To make good decisions about how to grow your blog, it pays to have the kind of information an analytics tool can provide.
Blogging is extremely popular and useful, and along with this popularity comes a bevy of useful tools. Take advantage of these tools and resources to grow your subscribers, profits and business.
Get More Sales By Using Audio
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When it comes to adding content to your website, consider using audio as an additional content and communication strategy. Audio not only broadens your product offerings and marketing tools, it can also motivate purchases.
How Audio Motivates Purchases
One of your biggest assets as the owner of a small business is your personality, and audio makes it extremely easy to communicate that personality to your audience. If people like you, and we’re assuming they do, then they’re more likely to purchase from you. You can use audio messages to connect with your audience and influence liking. Even a simple welcome message is a great start.
People buy from people or companies they consider to be an authority in their industry. Audio is an exceptional tool for you to use to demonstrate your authority on your niche topic. How to audio messages, interviews and lessons are all tools to demonstrate authority.
We often make purchasing decisions based on the opinions of others, particularly if those “others” are people we respect, admire, or want to be like. You can tap into this social proof trigger by interviewing an expert or posting audio testimonials on your website.
How to Use Audio on Your Website
We’ve already touched on a few ways you can use audio on your website to influence buying triggers. There are essentially two paths you can take – you can use audio as a product in your catalog or as a marketing tool.
Product Creation – Audio lends itself to many profitable products which you can sell or give away as a thank you or bonus, for example:
- Email training courses, workshops, and seminars
- Tutorials
- Podcasts
- Guest interviews
Marketing Tools – Many of the above items, which are mentioned as products, can also be used as marketing tools when they’re given away as freebies or thank yous. In addition to the above, here are some other possibilities for using audio in your marketing strategy:
- Product reviews
- Personal message
- Sales content
- Viral marketing
- Testimonials
Audio lends itself to a whole new audience which of course is good for you because the more followers you have, the better. When creating your content strategy or looking to the future, begin using audio in your product catalog and to market your business. Then watch your business grow.
Converting Online Visitors to Clients/Customers
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Smart business owners know that high conversion rates are essential. In order to sell products and services, website traffic needs to convert to customers. So what are the key tactics to improve conversion rates? Here are three smart ways to convert online visitors to customers.
If you’re using a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign then make sure you’re sending each advertisement through to a unique sales page designed with those keywords in mind. That way each sales page can be fine tuned to convert that particular prospect.
Test and track everything. Testing and tracking results is a business owner’s single biggest conversion tool. You may have a perfect textbook sales page, but if it isn’t converting then it doesn’t matter how pretty it is. Test your headline, test your call to action, test your testimonials, your price, the colors you use, your font and size. Test everything and fine tune your page until it’s receiving the conversion rate you want.
Build a relationship with your prospects. The best way to convert visitors to customers is to make them an offer they can’t refuse. Give them something, or many things, for free. Give them books, audios, videos, monthly access to new content limited to members; give them an online workshop, seminar or course. Giveaways are an exceptional way to get your customers to do one thing – sign up for your opt-in list.
Why is your opt-in list so important? Because it gives you the opportunity to build a relationship with your prospects and turn them into customers. It gives you the permission and the opportunity to connect with them weekly (or more frequently) and provide them with valuable content, promotions and maybe even more giveaways.
Your opt-in list is a list of pre-qualified prospects. By signing up they’ve already told you they’re interested in what you have to offer. This makes your opt-in list process critical to your conversions and increasing your conversions. Take the time to craft advertisements that send people to a custom landing/opt-in page, just like we suggested in #1. And as mentioned in #2, take the time to test and track your results. Sometimes changing a few words in your opt-in offer can make all the difference between a list of 1000 and a list of 10,000.
Increasing your conversion rate can make all the difference in your business. It’s a strategy worth paying attention to, right? With the average customer making two to three purchases annually, a conversion increase of only a few percentage points can equal a better business for you.
7 Reasons to Use WordPress For Your Website
Posted by: | CommentsYou are ready to do it. You are ready to have your voice be heard. You are ready to start your own website or blog. Good for you – now to decide which platform to use…
Blogger, WordPress and TypePad are just a few of the more popular platforms. While there are several different applications that are low cost and/or free, most solopreneurs find themselves in the world of WordPress. There are many good reasons to choose WordPress over the competition, including open source content management and SEO ability. If you find yourself trying to decide which is right for you, here are some everyday reasons to use WordPress as your platform of choice.
1. Personality Zone – WordPress is all about you. There are hundreds of free themes available to personalize and provide an Internet presence that represents who you are as a solopreneur.
WordPress themes are flexible and can be customized to your niche audience, service and product line. Best yet, if you get tired of the theme you are using on WordPress, simply change it by uploading a new theme. With a simple click of a button WordPress moves your content to the new theme for you.
2. Plugins! Plugins! Plugins! – Get the idea? Plugins are another way to customize your space. Popular plugins include contact forms, site statistics, search engine optimization, and photo resources. WordPress currently offers many different free plugins and is adding to their plugin resources daily.
3. Pagination – Back in the early days of blogging or using a platform of this type, blogs appeared as online diaries with one post following the next and comments intermixed between. With WordPress you can actually create pages to separate your material or to provide additional information.
Maybe you have a blog that focuses on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Each of these could be placed onto their own unique page, making it easier for your readers to find the information they are looking for.
You can also create additional pages such as ‘Contact Me’, or ‘About Me’ pages. This functionality also makes WordPress the perfect platform
for businesses, not just bloggers!
4. Performance – Believe it or not, not everyone who uses WordPress is an expert at web design. Creating your own website or presence can be a daunting task for anyone. WordPress provides easy to use functionality with a built in dashboard to help manage your sight. Also, because of its popularity WordPress has many resources available to their users including online forums, help references, and support teams. Best yet, if you just want to try blogging out for a bit before you invest in your own domain name, WordPress allows you to register your blog on their site for free at www.wordpress.com.
5. Permalinks – When you create your blog and/or website, you want the world to be able to connect to that specific blog quickly. This is where permalinks come into play. For every blog you post, WordPress creates a unique permanent link to that specific post.
6. Ping Back to Me – What is auto pinging anyway? It is a tool that allows you to notify the search engines that you have posted a new entry. By default, WordPress has pingomatic.com built right into the platform, so the search engines are automatically notified that you have posted to your blog. In addition each time another website or blog owner links to one of your blog posts, you are notified on your WordPress Dashboard as well as in the post iteself in the comments section.
7. Pathways Back – Have you ever commented on another person’s blog? Many times the blog will only post your user information when you leave a comment, but if you use WordPress and you are commenting on another WordPress blog, then WordPress has the ability to automatically provide a link back to your blog for anyone to see. A great and free tool to increase your readership.
This is only a small list of reasons bloggers choose WordPress to host their blog. Ultimately, you need to choose the platform that’s right for your needs. Keep in mind, WordPress prides itself on being one of the most user friendly platforms and is constantly striving to make things better for users.
Why What’s in Your Twitter Profile Matters
Posted by: | Comments“Hi, do you want to be my friend?” Thousands of people ask each other this on Twitter every day by following someone. The first thing most people do when one of these requests shows up in their inbox is check out the profile of the person asking. Because unscrupulous marketers find a way to spam any electronic program available these days, and abuse the flow of information by sending unsolicited requests through automated programs, you need to take the time to check out their profile, rather than blindly following everyone who follows you first.
When a person begins to follow you on Twitter, try to get a feel for them. Who are they? Do you share common interests? Is there something there that could turn them into a client, a joint venture partner or a referral source at some point? These are all good questions, but you must remember- they are asking the same thing about you when you follow them.
Your Twitter profile is a snapshot of who you are. It’s a quick 5-10 second glimpse into your world so someone can get to know you better. When you create an account with Twitter, you can chose from one of the pre-made backgrounds or you can use one of the many free Twitter-related tools to custom design your own. If you are really serious about branding yourself or your business on Twitter you can opt to have your Twitter profile custom made by a professional, just like a website.
Here are a few tips to think about when designing your Twitter profile.
• Keep it neat – Too many items on the page, just like a website, distract the viewer’s eyes from the content of the profile. Keep it simple and say what you need to say.
• Keep it consistent – Make sure your profile, and the wording in it, is directly in line with your brand, marketing campaign and other areas of your business you want to emphasize.
• Keep it short – Remember, you only have a few seconds to show off what you have before someone makes a decision whether or not they want to follow you back or follow you at all. Keep your point short and sweet.
• Keep it useful – What do you offer? How can they contact you? Where can they find samples? Make sure your Twitter profile is as useful as possible. People don’t like to hunt for information.
• Keep it interesting – Give your viewers a reason to talk to you. Ask them a question, make a controversial statement, do something small to get them into a conversation with you so you can determine their needs.
• Include links to your websites or even a freebie they could download.
Twitter is a useful tool for any business, but without a proper profile, the business has no identity. Make sure you take the necessary time to design a useful, branded and interesting profile so when you ask someone to be your friend, they don’t have to think twice. There are many other ways to pump up your Twitter profile, but if you follow the six steps above, you will be on a good path to developing a healthy brand.
Use Social Networking in Your Marketing Plan in 2010
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You’d be hard-pressed to find someone these days that isn’t a part of at least one social network. Use that to your advantage. Join in and find ways to engage users, promote your website and increase your traffic for at no cost.
Social Networking Craze
Social networking is one of the easiest ways to stay connected to friends and family near and far. You can share pictures, stories and send instant messages when you are both logged in. This way of keeping in touch has extended into the business world and become useful as a marketing tool. Joining a social network is free so there’s no reason not to give it a try. These sites bridge the gap across the miles better than simple email.
Which sites can you use? Actually, business owners have found most of the more popular sites useful: YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and MySpace. The results from each site are different for every business so don’t be afraid to test and track which ones yield the best outcome for your business. Once you sign up with a valid email address and password, you are ready to get started.
Using sites like these, you can create a page that tells all about you and your business. Look for friends, family and business associates who are also connected so you can keep up with what is going on in their lives and businesses as well.
How to Use Them Effectively
Let’s look at a site like Facebook. It is highly popular and can be beneficial for both business and personal use. On the business side, you can post links to your website when new products are launched, new newsletters are published or sales are going on. If you blog, post links to your newest blog posts (or to guest blog posts you’re doing elsewhere around the blogosphere). Highlight contests, guest bloggers and other events that you are a part of. Have an online radio show? You can invite friends to listen to live podcasts to learn more about your business.
On a site like YouTube, you can post videos and add the links to your Facebook profile, Twitter stream, etc. Invite friends to view and leave comments.
The best part about social sites such as these is that friends and business contacts can pass your links on to others who might be interested in the topics as well. Quite possibly viral marketing at its best!
Relationships Matter
The one thing to remember about promoting your website or blog on social networking sites is not to do so just for that purpose. Relax and get to know the people you are trying to reach out to. They say that social networking can be addictive. While it can be a double edged sword if you’re not careful, setting boundaries will make it addictive in a good way by growing your business.
Just like so many other marketing tools, the name of the game is relationships. You can build meaningful ones not only with friends and family, but with your target audience and business associates on all the social networking sites like LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, Facebook of course, and others.
Comment on your friends posts and visit their links as well. As an Internet marketing tool, social networking works both ways. Don’t think of it as a means to an end but one of the more fun marketing tools you get to use to grow your business.
If you aren’t currently using any social networking platform, now is a great time to start. It can serve dual purposes in your life; both to your benefit. Each business contact you meet, invite them to be your friend or follower. Who knows? You could be connecting with a future joint venture partner or find that diamond in the rough service provider to help you take your business to the next level.
If it feels like I am speaking another language or you want to learn more about social networking and its advantages for your business, join me for Social Media Made Easy.
New on Facebook
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Have you been to our Facebook Fan Page recently? I would love for you to go to the fan page right now and share your business insights with us. I would love to interact with you and have a meaningful discussion around creating the business of your dreams.
Recently we’ve talked about:
- How to know if your social media marketing is working
- More Facebook changes are in store
- How to drive quality traffic to your blog
- Blogs to watch during 2010
- and so much more!
I want to encourage you to take a few minutes to visit our discussion board. While you are on the discussion board, take a moment to introduce yourself and give your business a little shameless self promotion in “What’s Your Solopreneur Biz?“. Also, please feel free to start your own topics!
If you’re not already, go on over to our Facebook Fan Page and become a “fan” today! We would love to have your input in our discussions.
Using Twitter to Generate Blog Traffic
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Twitter is not just for fun but can also be used much like other social networking media to gain more traffic. In this case, you want to attract more blog traffic. Twitter can help with that.
Like other social networks, millions of people use Twitter. It is a micro-universe of potential visitors just waiting to be tapped. The question is how to get them to take a look at you.
First of all, sign up for an account. You can’t find the right people unless you get in the game. Don’t worry about creating a business account at this point. You are only concerned with connecting with people now.
Next, get involved. Read other people’s tweets, join as a follower for popular tweeters. You can use Twitter applications to track the tweets of others and also do keyword searches for interesting tweets. Comment on current tweets and get a feel for how it works and who everyone is following.
The best thing about Twitter is that it works in real time from your PC or MAC. You can ask questions to find out any type of information. If you are looking for followers (Twitter friends) interested in business relationships (if that is what your blog is about), pose the question in a tweet and wait for responses. You’ll be surprised what you hear back.
Posing questions is one way to find suitable traffic for your blog. You want more visitors but the kind of visitors who are likely to come back
and buy from you if you are selling a product. It is a research tool that returns immediate results.
More advice
There are a few things to observe. In your tweets, use keywords. It might be hard with so few characters, but you want to include searchable words that anyone will enter into a Twitter search engine to find your tweets.
Don’t be a spammer. If your tweets always include links to your blog or your work on other sites, people will get the idea that you are not there
to connect but just to fill the site with links. Use the site to find others with similar business interests or to pose interesting views and get feedback. You can link to your blog when appropriate but don’t overdo it or people will get that fishy feeling about you.
It takes time to build up a following of followers on Twitter just like any other social networking site. The plus with Twitter is that the results are more immediate that with other social sites. Find the targeted visitors you are after with a few questions and then join in the twittering to build a rapport that translates into more traffic.
LinkedIn and Facebook and Twitter, Oh My!
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I am getting lots of positive feedback about our recent focus on social media. It’s the most powerful new marketing tool in decades and you owe it to your business success to have an understanding of how it works. Here are three opportunities to help you do just that!
1. It’s time to get down to the nitty-gritty on social media.
Join me on Monday, November 16th at 2:00pm ET for the free teleseminar HOW to Use Social Media to Grow Your Business. On this call, we are going straight to the heart of the matter – with a focus on specific strategies to make you successful. You’ve heard the theory, now let’s look at action steps!
Register for the free call here:
www.solopreneur.biz/teleseminar
2. LinkedIn is the “premier networking site for professionals”.
I’ll be the special guest on a call for The Coaches Console on November 19th at 3:00pm ET to discuss tips for making the most of LinkedIn to promote a coaching business. The special call, Link In or Lose Out, will help you understand the site and ways to use it strategically. You’re invited to join us for the free call or just register to get the recording later.
Here’s where to register for Link In or Lose Out:
www.coachesconsole.com/thursat3/linked-in.html
3. The first class of Social Media Made Easy has wrapped up with rave reviews from the participants.
Join the next session of the class starting Monday, November 23rd at 2:00pm ET to get yourself started on the most important social media sites. Four weekly hands-on, interactive webinar sessions will walk you through getting your business presence on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and more. This is the last time this class will be held in 2009 so don’t miss out.
Get the details of Social Media Made Easy and register now:
www.solopreneur.biz/easy
All these calls will be highly interactive so you can be sure to Learn what YOU need. Bring your problems, questions and a way to take notes. Chose one of the three options or join me on all of them. Your business will thank you!
Don’t forget to Mind Your Own Biz.
Warmly,
Janet
PS – Register now for the call(s) of your choice and then make sure to mark your calendar so you don’t miss it. Here are those registration links again:
HOW to Use Social Media to Grow Your Business:
www.solopreneur.biz/teleseminar
Link In or Lose Out:
www.coachesconsole.com/thursat3/linked-in.html
Social Media Made Easy:
www.solopreneur.biz/easy
Backlink Basics Explained
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It sounds like some place you go after dark that you shouldn’t go. But, backlinks are actually a good thing as far as getting noticed on the Internet. Keep reading and you’ll find out all about them and how they can be useful to you.
Backlink Basics
To put it in the simplest terms, backlinks are links from other websites and blogs back to your website. They increase your visibility on the web and also make the search engines really happy with you. It sounds easy, but getting links can take some time and effort.
Also, did we mention the spiders and bots? They work on behalf of the search engines. These little marvels crawl not just content but also inbound links (backlinks) to your website. So, you’d probably figure that you can go to every website you can and post a link back to your site, wouldn’t you? In the grand scheme of things, this is not always a good idea.
Here’s why. Those bots are smarter than you think. They even evaluate the types of backlinks you get. For instance, let’s say that you are just beginning and are trying to establish yourself. You go to other sites and ask to exchange links with them for free. Some are readily eager so you do it. As it turns out, these sites are offensive, plagiarize content and don’t know the first thing about keyword optimization.
Now, all of these things won’t be true at the same time but it goes to prove a point. A poorly kept website or even a troublemaking one can lower the quality of your backlinks and thus your favor with the search engines. What you want is backlinks that are of the same or preferably better quality as your site.
Quality Backlinks
How do you determine quality? One way is to look at their following. Do they have a lot of readers? Are their articles rated on the first page of search engine results? Does everyone know their name (just like “Cheers”)?
Keep your links within your chosen niche. While there may be some gardening websites with a high search engine ranking, linking here won’t do you any good if your website sells business coaching services to technology companies. The bots look at that too.
So, what criteria do you need to consider when approaching the subject of backlinks?
• Choose similar or better quality websites to use for your backlinks
• Choose websites and blogs with similar topics of interest as yours
Get the word out about your website. Use any resources you have available to you first and then go searching for other high-quality sites to bring you more traffic.
