Bizsuccess

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Reprinted with permission from Shannon Willoby

Thinking about having a mobile website developed for your small business but aren’t sure if it’s worth the investment? Today we’re exploring this topic to find out if the advantages vs. cost are enough for you to make the jump to mobile.

Adam Gottlieb of The Frugal Entrepreneur thinks that embracing mobile, in all forms, is an essential part of a small business owner’s success. He said, “Small business owners need to respond to the growing proliferation of mobile devices. This actually includes several trends: mobile marketing, mobile payments, and responsive website design for mobile devices.”

Ready to check out the top three advantages of having a mobile website developed for your small business? We’ve listed them for you below:

Increase Customer Engagement

Google states, “Mobile websites produce an average 75% higher rate of engagement (revenue, page views, etc.) per visit for mobile users.” This means that if you already have a website, but it hasn’t been optimized for mobile use, you could be losing out on exposure and profit. More »

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Reprinted with permission from Nikko Marasigan

According to digital business analytics company comScore, there are over 100 million smartphone users in the United States alone as of early this year. In conjunction with that staggering figure, experts estimate that 68.6 million people do their shopping on their smartphones. Because of these ever-growing numbers, more and more businesses are beginning to see the potential of mobile marketing.

Unfortunately, the majority of small business owners have yet to exploit this flourishing market. From Web.com’s survey of 500 entrepreneurs running small businesses, only a mere 14% have websites optimized especially for mobile use. Yet 69% acknowledge the fact that mobile marketing will be of utmost importance in their business strategy for the next five years. Out of those that have already put in the effort in employing a mobile marketing strategy including a mobile website, 84% have experienced a boost in their trade.

The results are evident. Mobile marketing poses a bright future for marketing for small businesses.

How Mobile Marketing Helps Small Businesses

Mobile marketing contributes to business efforts greatly through a number of factors. There is a continuously growing use of mobile surfing, as people want to be online more and more even when on the go.

They take out their phones and type in keywords on search engines when looking for something, including products and services. In fact, the above mentioned eMarketer study anticipates that about 88.1% of users in the US will do their research on products online this year. It also predicts that about 83.9% will buy something via online transaction.

By having a mobile-friendly website, small businesses become visible to the millions of mobile Internet users. Thus, both audience and profits can grow exponentially. More »

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Reprinted with permission from Team Seven Boats

This is the question that most internet marketers are concerned about today. More than 45% of internet users check their emails and also search for products and services through mobile devices, especially smartphones. In order to tap this consumer base, you have to make some tweaks in your online marketing plan. For example, email marketers have to keep some basic mechanics in mind for those consumers who will read their emails on smartphones. They have to get to their marketing message even faster! Smartphone users are not going to scroll down on their mobile devices (small enough as the screen is) to finally locate your core text. In other words, you have to get to the point quickly.

For websites that are planning to target Smartphone or mobile users, small changes are required in their mode of functioning as well. To begin with, get rid of Flash intros that take a lifetime to upload. These were a pain on computers itself, so they are excruciating when it comes to smartphones! Keep the content and designing clutter-free. Mobile device users must be able to find links to click on immediately and without much of a hassle. Make use of Flickr or Pinterest. Create fresh content and keep updating your website regularly. Do not allow stale material in the form of news and updates to accumulate dust on the website or on your blog, forums, etc. Also, make greater use of social media networks. Smartphone users are more like to check their Facebook and Twitter profiles every now and then. More »

Say you want to buy a printer cartridge online. The chances are that you will enter the words ‘Epson’ (or another manufacturer), ‘printer’ and ‘cartridges’ in your favorite search engine.

For those three words above on Google, you get about 1,980,000 results but only the first 10 or so will be displayed on the first page of results. The chances are that, if you do order, you will do so from one of the sites on the first two pages that came up.

Yet these sites may not offer the very best overall value, the best service or product guarantees and may even be abroad. Most people cannot be bothered to look past the first few pages – “because it is an okay deal”. You have a life away from online shopping, right?

Was it just luck that the company you chose to give your hard-earned money to came up in the first two pages of results while the remaining 1,979,990 suppliers came later? No way. These top sites are up there because they are optimized, by careful planning and rank boosting, to be easily found for these particular search words.

Search engine optimization is primarily the tweaking of various parts of a website to make it easier to find by search engines for specific keywords. Full optimization also means examining and improving many other elements of ancillary parts of the site as well as building links and also proactively marketing the unique value of what is on offer.

Most traffic on the internet is driven by the large search engines. Google may be the largest and best-known of these but Yahoo! and MSN are also big players. If your site is not found by these and other search engines, your message will not be seen by those you want to reach.

If you fail to optimize your small business website, you may miss out on many potential customers who are looking to pay someone for just what you have to offer. That failure may be costing you money right now. More »

How to Powerfully Market YOUR Small Business, Establish YOU as the Expert and Increase YOUR Sales!

Writing and submitting articles is an effective marketing strategy to deliver targeted visitors to your website, increase your search engine rankings and boost sales.

However, it is easy to equate article writing with onerous tasks such as writing high school or university essays. The memories of the pain involved in this form of writing can take time to fade away. The good news is that after learning a few simple steps, writing your own articles isn’t as hard as it appears.

One of the biggest hurdles most new writers face is finding ideas to write about. The easiest way to begin is to write about things you are interested in and preferably passionate about. You already have knowledge in these areas that can be shared with others. It is easy to under-estimate your own abilities in areas you are experienced in. Talented people are often surprised by the level of questions novices ask (it is important to remember that there is no such thing as a stupid question – only stupid answers).

Once you have decided on a general area, a good way to narrow the topic down is to focus on the problems that people have. Typically, people read articles because they want to be entertained or they want information. Writing entertaining articles is a particular and more difficult skill. However, writing informative articles can be as simple as sharing tips that you have learned. A guiding principle is to expect the readers to be looking for “What’s in it for me?” More »

One of the easiest, fastest, and cheapest ways to grow your business and try out new marketing ventures is by forming a small business partnership. Not only will it increase your business, it helps your customer list to grow faster and can be an endless supply of valuable resources.

As a small business owner you realize that your customers manipulate the buying procedure and are usually overwhelmed with marketing advertisements that make it extremely difficult for any one business to stick out.

For this reason, small business owners are forming partnerships with other businesses as an alternative way to help increase their business and make their list grow faster. More »

Those are among the most effective words you can use in your marketing and PR efforts for your small business.

As a small business, the primary disadvantage you have in marketing is that your competitors can repeat their message to the market far more often than you can. So…you need to have a better message, one that resonates with your target market and is memorable even when it’s not heard that often.

Stories are the key to making this happen.

For as long as we’ve been talking to each other on this planet, we’ve been using stories to illustrate a point or get a message across. (do you think 1,000 years ago they were quoting statistics to convince people to buy a particular kind of beaver pelt?)

Here’s a quote from Annette Simmons’ book “Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins” where she describes the value of stories in business communication: More »

As a small business owner looking for marketing tips when dealing with your local marketing strategy, you may be wondering how you can take advantage of some of the recent developments in marketing and social media to help drive local awareness.

Small business owners everywhere are tweeting and Facebooking and “going viral”, but you may find that many of these vehicles don’t seem as helpful when you try to apply them to a neighborhood or local area.

Here are some local small business marketing tips to help you take some of the latest tools in marketing and them work in your neighborhood.

Start a Community Blog – You can build your brand as a local business by setting up a community blog to talk about local happenings, items of note for local residents, and so on. Invite others in the community to contribute. Over time, you can build a community resource that will drive traffic to the blog and in turn, drive awareness for your business. More »

A graceful parting with difficult clients requires finesse, but it can be done.

If you’ve never shown a customer to the door, consider yourself a rarity and read on anyway, because chances are good that someday your turn will come. Sooner or later, most businesses reshape their clientele for one of two reasons:

1. On the proactive side, businesses part with low-profit customers to focus on those who deliver greater bottom-line results.

2. On the reactive side, businesses sever relationships with customers whose demands abuse company policies and damage business profitability and morale.

Either way, parting requires effort and finesse. Wishes aside, in the business world there’s no equivalent to a social network’s easy “unfriend” button. Here’s what to do instead.
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Want to make your small business look big? Here’s what customers are looking for when they visit.

So you want your website to make you look big. More power to you.

But the business experts I talked to recently say small is cool with customers, too. Small businesses, they say, have a personality, flavor and sensibility that big businesses can’t match. And when it comes to what you put on your website, they urge: Don’t be afraid to tout your smallness.

“Small businesses can have more fun with their sites, more so than large corporations,” says Alice Bredin, president of Bredin Business Information, a Cambridge, Massachusetts, company that helps large business-to-business companies market themselves to small businesses. “A small-business site needs to include something that reflects the creativity and personality of its owner.”

Maybe you’re a couple working side-by-side in a spare bedroom or a fourth-generation entrepreneur working to someday hand it over to a son or daughter. Maybe you’re putting yourself through grad school. Or you operate from a remote site in the hinterlands and you use only recycled materials. Presented well on a home page and/or an “About Us” section, all of these may have unique selling points to customers.
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