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Posts Tagged ‘business’

  1. Improving Customer Communication on Your Website

    January 28, 2012 by Blair Stover

    Red computer mouse

    Image via Wikipedia

    The reason you have a website is to gain new customers, right? You might have spent a lot of money on having your website designed and built and you have incorporated SEO and undertaken a campaign to promote the site, but all this is for naught if you don’t make it easy for potential clients to reach you. While web design is crucial – you want good layout, easy to read fonts, etc. — the ability to communicate is as important as is the design.

    You don’t need to have a website or business that specializes in ecommerce only. The purpose of your website is to get visitors to convert to clients and buy your goods or services. Many websites offer only one way conversation – look around, see what we have, and buy. You want to have a website that initiates conversation and contact.

    Keep in mind that most people do not want to and will not give their names, addresses and phone numbers simply for the privilege of contacting you through your site. Make it easy and give them a reason to leave a contact name and email address. Offer a free downloadable report if they do leave that information.

    Make it easy by making your website user-friendly. It might be interesting – to you – to use a tab that says something other than “Contact Us” but this phrase works and customers look for it. Have your company’s contact information easy to find – name, address, phone number and email contact.

    Offer an option for instant chat, if possible. Make your contact forms easy to fill out, easy to find, and don’t require your visitors to pre-qualify before they are allowed to contact you. Make a few changes to your existing website and see if your conversion rate soars.

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  2. Small Business and the New Facebook

    October 11, 2011 by Blair Stover

    Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...

    Image via CrunchBase

    You may not be surprised to learn that Facebook has changed again. These new changes affect brands and companies that utilize Facebook for marketing more than ever now. So what does this mean for small businesses?

    The first change involves privacy settings for sharing. Users now have  more control over who is able to see the content they post on their  wall, or home page. Facebook defaulted “Public” as a setting rather than “Everyone”. “Public” means that one’s updates, photos and additional user information can be viewed by anyone in the public. This is helpful as this will most likely result in less public-facing citations.

    If you were excited about Facebook Deals, you should know it is over. Facebook has discontinued the project. However, the company stated that it is looking into the best way to be of service to local businesses, as it learned much from this project. Another feature which will soon be phased out is location tagging. This is the feature Facebook members use with their cell phone to “check in” when at locations.

    Rather than targeting ads by precise interests and keywords, Facebook now allows those who advertise on their media network to target ads based on topic. This will simplify the list of keywords companies were managing. Now, a business can target the interests of their clientele.

    Restrictions on types of advertising have been eased by Facebook. So long as ads are properly targeted, Facebook now allows legal gambling operations to be promoted. This includes offline casinos. Furthermore, ads for herbal and dietary supplements are now allowable, as long as they do not include banned ingredients such as, ephedra, anabolic steroids or human growth hormones.

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  3. Maximising Your YouTube Marketing

    August 17, 2011 by Blair Stover

     

    Image representing YouTube as depicted in Crun...

    Image via CrunchBase

    If you are not getting desired results with your YouTubemarketing, take action. According to Nielson, both mobile and Internet viewing have increased 20 to 35 percent over last year while traditional television viewing increased only fractionally over last year. This alone is an important reason to focus on your YouTube marketing. Try the following tips to maximize this marketing.Be aware that each minute, thirty-five hours of new video are uploaded into YouTube. This offers a huge amount of competition. This is exactly why you want to make the most of your YouTube marketing efforts. Firstly, create compelling videos. Your videos should address the needs of your intended audience. Consider what will be compelling, valuable and helpful to your prospective customers. Have your videos focus on slide shows, expert interviews, frequently asked questions, how-to’s, etc.

    Next, make your videos easy to find from within YouTube and outside of YouTube. Remember that Google owns YouTube. Videos frequently appear as first page results on search engines. You can essentially skip over your competition to the top of the results of a search page in this way. To make your video findable focus on the title, adding a colon after the initial key words, make your description as keyword-rich and descriptive as possible and tag all and any related keywords in the tags field.

    Create a branded experience. You can do this on YouTube without becoming a partner or paying out for a brand channel. By turning your channel into a destination, your YouTube channel can become a second home. Choose background colors that coincide with your branding. Make your layout in “Player View” and set your featured video to autoplay. Add a playlist of the videos that represent your products and services.

     

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  4. Facebook and Why It Won’t Go Public

    June 16, 2011 by Blair Stover

    When a company is worth near 50 billion dollars you would think people would want to have their hands in all that wealth, and they do.  But Facebook is yet to go public and people looking to invest in the ever-growing corporation are being left out of one of the most successful businesses of the decade.  The question is why, why hasn’t Mark Zuckerberg gone public with Facebook?

    The truth is that Zuckerberg is very likely to fight going public for as long as he can.  This may be telling us something about the financial situation Facebook is in at the moment.  While the corporation doesn’t have to disclose financial information, as they currently are not over the 500 shareholders mark, many believe that Facebook should be ordered to disclose their financial information now.

    Zuckerberg is simply waiting for the right time.  There will come a time when Zuckerberg wants to cash in on the billions waiting for him.  Should we take into consideration that in a very successful film release this year, The Social Network, audiences were led to believe that Zuckerberg doesn’t care too much about money?  If anything truthful can be taken from the movie as truth it may be that Zuckerberg likes having control of his company.  Once Facebook goes public he will have to relinquish some of that control.

    We know that Facebook is growing into a money-making powerhouse simply because of the latest deal that the company has been involved in.  Goldman Sachs has apparently paid Facebook roughly 450 million dollars and has promised to invest a billion dollars in the company in the future.  That is a lot of money.  Now think about if Facebook gets ten offers this year to do the same thing.  That’s over 10 billion dollars in growth over the next year.  If Facebook is currently worth 50 billion dollars then that equates to a 20% growth in one year, which is mind blowing in the business community.

    To Mark Zuckerberg’s credit there are some problems within the stock exchange.  The regulation system was set up in the 1930′s so we can’t expect it to be prepared to handle a company as large as Facebook has become very smoothly.  Facebook may also be worried by the fact the stock market isn’t necessarily run by investors but computers looking for patterns.  The bottom line is that Zuckerberg is resisting the pull to go public; so we know that Facebook won’t be going public until the man behind the Facebook curtain is ready to.

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