Grow Your Business Through Events

Your website is often the first contact a prospect has with your business. A well-designed and informative website is essential for any small business owner. As a marketing professional and web designer, I inherently evaluate every website that I visit. Because small business owners are my target market, I’m constantly looking at websites. It is very clear that many of these businesses either do not have the available resources or do not have a good understanding of the importance of a well build website. Either way, many have dropped the ball regarding their web presence. Here are the top fivemistakes I see small business owners make that can cause visitors to abandon the site.

1. No Contact Information – When a visitor comes to your site they should be able to locate your contact information within 3 seconds. The most consistent (and obvious) place to display your contact information is in the footer of your website. In addition, having a contact, us page or about us page placed prominently in your navigation will allow visitors to easily reach you. It is also advantageous to place your contact information directly on the pages where visitors are most likely to be moved to make a purchase. These include your services and testimonials pages. Read the rest of this entry »

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Are you tracking your online statistics? Most businesses have discovered the benefit to online marketing opportunities. However, many neglect to evaluate the performance of their electronic efforts. Let’s think about it like this, you spend $500 to have your website professionally designed, invest an hour or more per day to social media initiatives, write tons of (key word rich) articles, blog posts, guest blog posts and at the end of the day no one sees or reads any of it. Problem right? YES!

If you aren’t tracking your online marketing efforts (and all of your other marketing tactics) your business is likely to miss its mark. There are simple (and free) ways to track the majority of your online marketing efforts. So where do you begin?

Website Analytics

Google Analytics is a web analytics solution that gives you insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. With Google Analytics, you’re more prepared to write better-targeted ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives and create higher converting websites.

Google Analytic’s (in my opinion) is the most robust free web analytics tool currently available. Simply sign up for a Google Analytics account, follow the instructions to “Create a New Website Profile”, and Google Analytics will generate the needed tracking code and instructions on where to insert the code into your website or blog.

Twitter Statistics

Here is a list of 8 Twitter tools from Social Media Today that are great for tracking your twitter behavior and statistics. Some even allow you to look at some statistics for other users. http://www.socialmediatoday.com/SMC/80437 My two favorites are TWITALYZER and TWITTERFRIENDS.

Facebook

Facebook provides “Insights” which offer Fan Page owners a post ranking, as well as some metrics regarding who your fans are. From the insights page you can see how engaging your posts are, the gender, location, and age bracket of your fans as well as subscribe and unsubscribe trends.

Some of the basic things you should be looking for are the demographics of the people you engage with, how people are finding you, the types of keywords they use to reach you, and what content is the most popular. Use this information to assess if you are reaching your idea target market and what types of content you should continue to publish.

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Anyone who has ever asked me for advice or tips on marketing their business has heard me discuss SEO (search engine optimization). I optimize every online interaction I have, for years I have optimized my name and had at one point dominated the top 30 results for my maiden name (Brandi Ewing). So it is my pleasure to offer this fab post by Vahe Arabian on Search Engine Optimization for your small business.

Vahe Arabian is a Search Engine Optimization/Google Optimization Specialist and Online Marketing Blogger. His focus is always upon discovering new ways to improve website usability and interactivity, and upon making use of emerging legitimate SEO methods.

Following the Ask Mrs. Starr: Where Do I Begin? Article, which spoke mainly about building client base using your blog to project your expertise is very true, but how are you going to be found and establish more clients if there is no indication or method of finding you?

Let’s establish right from the beginning that your website is your online real-estate. This website is representing you, your brand and everything for what it stands for. Let’s also mention the analogy that a search engine is a map, a directory and that your URL is the driveway to your real-estate. There are billions of webpage’s on the internet, some of which are writing the exact same content as you and is ever increasing. By following a few simple online marketing processes and having a unique differentiation strategy i.e. by providing unique context and tools, you are making sure that when someone is looking for a particular need or topic that you are an expert in, which it has a bright red x marked on the map directory for you to be found.

So how do you say we can do this? Maybe I can’t be found in search engines since there are bigger and better competitors than me. NOT TRUE!! Everyone is one the same playing field level, it’s all about small businesses being a bit tech savvy and planning a great strategy to ensure that your website appears on page one.

The deliberate online marketing process, to ensure that your website can be found is called search engine optimization or “SEO”. It involves the process of improving web pages so they rank high in search engines for a specific keyword phrase. How do search engines find your web page online? Here is a six-step process:

1. Spiders/ Robots: These automated programs scan websites by following links from any website, depending on several on-page seo factors.
2. Websites get recorded: So now it found your website, it would then retrieve that content from your webpage, URL and Title/ meta tags
3. Info added to search engines data base: This is called cache’
4. Indexing program Identifies words and data: Having completed relevant SEO as mentioned above, this would give you some control in where your website might appear, rather than none.
5. Search submitted: Search engine identifies word matches
6. Search results: Information presented in HTML interface; in simpler terms, results are shown on your web browser page.

Don’t worry now if you don’t currently understand terms such as Meta tags and on page seo (website factors), because in my next few posts I will be explaining how to target your keywords, using them in your content and determining these so called “on-page” seo factors to leverage your site in order to appear higher in search engine results page.

Read more on Online Marketing Search Engine Optimization by Vahe Arabian

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Social media is a marketing tactic that allows you to promote your business and allows your prospects and clients to connect with your business. Social media is all about interaction. Through social media, you are able to get people talking about your business. Visitors to any social media site are easily able to share your content with others they are connected to. In addition, people are able to share their opinions about your company and its products and services.

Although the cost of using most social media tools is free, a significant investment of time is required in order to effectively integrate social media into your marketing mix. Therefore, it is important to ensure that you are doing everything possible to encourage interaction thereby maximizing the benefits of social media.

I am a fan of a lot of other businesses fan pages, and one of the common mistakes I see many businesses make is discouraging interaction with their fans buy not showing posts from fans on their wall.

Wih the default settings your posts and your fans posts appear on seperate tabs.

When visitors to your fan page see others posting, commenting, and interacting with you and your business they are more likely to do the same (call it the monkey see, monkey do principle LOL). If this interaction is hidden you are less likely to have someone post on your wall. The image below shows were I posted a comment on the mainelement:love page, my post shows up along with her content on the main page.

This simple change to your settings will bring all of your content together on your wall. From your fan page click “Edit Page”, scroll down to the Wall Settings and change the default view for wall to “Posts by Page & Fans”. It’s that simple!

And if you haven’t already make sure you become a fan of Starr Studded Weddings & Events!

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