When I’m talking with customers who are wondering what to blog about, I always suggest starting with their frequently asked questions from their customers – what are the common problems that motivate a customer to reach out to them. Pick one of those and write a blog post exploring the question and then your answer. …
Read moreHow solving a clients problem led to them hiring me
One of the under-recognized groups that are being affected by social distancing, stay at home orders, and shelter in place orders is small business owners. The reasons these various orders can affecting these businesses are varied and include things their customer base not being able to get to them, or conserving spending because of an …
Read moreWhat can you do if your business is slow right now?
Creating content is a never-ending part of running an online business. Everything is content – web page content, blog posts, newsletters, social media content. Maybe you’ve even got video and/or podcast content in the mix. Then, when you try to follow the marketing advice of creating/sharing content regularly, it can seem very overwhelming. But there’s …
Read moreHow to repurpose your content for maximum exposure and less stress
Marketing funnels are one of the best ways to help generate leads while you are off doing other things – working with your customers, playing with your family, vacationing, sleeping – whatever. Funnels help you to connect with your audience without having to send every email individually. Exploring the funnel Basically, the idea of a …
Having images on your site makes it a lot easier to read. We are visual people, and images should be used to help the reader understand your content or relate to it in some way. Pictures and other graphics also make your content seem less daunting. When your visitors come to your site and there …
As part of their continued effort to make mobile internet usage more user-friendly, Google changed their search algorithm to penalize pages that have “instrusive interstitials,” which refers to popups and popovers that cover the majority of the visible area. “They can frustrate users because they are unable to easily access the content that they were …
I came across this neat little tool the other day, and wanted to share it – the Call-to-Action Button Generator. I see a lot of websites with call to action buttons that don’t seem to fit in so well. Wrong color, wrong font, weird size/shape. It’s sad to see websites that people clearly worked very …
I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts lately while I work. I’m one of those people that can’t work in silence – the silence is actually distracting to me. So I work in coffee shops, or have the TV on in the background, or the radio, or, duh, podcasts. Listening to podcasts while I …
It’s January again – how did that happen? Well, okay, I know how it happened, but it just doesn’t seem like enough time has gone by for the Earth to have gone ALL the way around the sun again. But it has, and now is the perfect time to set yourself up for a great, productive …
It never fails – I’m scrolling through my Facebook stream and I see an article that I want to read, but know I don’t have time to read it just then. Sometimes I take a screenshot, so I can go back to the Page or Profile that posted it to find it later. Sometimes I …
Under the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, there are certain conditions that have to be met for marketing emails to be sent from or to US residents. If you’re not familiar with those requirements, this video from the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) highlights seven things businesses that use email to promote their products or services need to …
MailChimp is a great email marketing platform, and is very user friendly to set up and get started with. In this video, I’m going to through step-by-step how to customize the design of your sign-up forms to coordinate with your website and more accurately convey your brand.
I was running around the house this morning, getting the kids ready for their respective destinations today. And it occurred to me that, on some level, marketing is like parenting. The basic tasks associated with marketing go something like this: define your target market determine their pain points – what do they need? find a …
For years, I’ve been watching everyone else do video marketing – tips, webinars, classes, product reviews, etc. And it always seemed like something that I didn’t have the right skillet to do. Or the right budget to pay someone to do for me. Until I found a 30 day video marketing challenge. Hm. The goal …
I was speaking with someone today about how using a Content Management System (CMS) can help them have more control over their small business website and was surprised to learn that she wasn’t familiar with the term. This was interesting to me as I thought it was a fairly well known term and was also …