1. Use Social Media to Make New Contacts

When you add Social Media to your arsenal, you have just as much reach as the big players. In fact, Social Media is allowing the little guy to shine as it’s all about the personal touch.

Using video not only drives laser targeted traffic to your business – it enables your customer to view you, your products or services and creates a bond of trust. Most sales offline are based on trust and recommendation, so video is an excellent tool to use as creating that trust without meeting in person is harder to do.

Sites like Facebook and Twitter allow you to directly connect with your niche, but the real power lies within the ability for your audience to share your information around. If you haven’t yet created a Twitter account or set up a Fan Page on Facebook – then I would highly recommend you do so.

Make sure that you post things of use and never blatant sales pitches as this really doesn’t work. Make sure that your profile links on social sites like these point to your blog rather than your money site.

2. Get Yourself a Blog in Addition to Your Money Site

A blog is a really, really good idea because when done correctly, you are giving out great info and creating a customer bond without even trying to sell anything.

Blogs are great tools for delivering info, adding special offers, creating an email list and filtering prospective customers through to your main money site. They are also excellent because you can update them regularly and use keyword rich post titles so that your customers can find you easily online.

I’d highly recommend WordPress.org as the blogging platform of choice as it is so versatile. It can be added to your existing website under a sub-domain of yoursite.com/blog, the flexibility of it will allow you to seamlessly blend it into your main site and the features and benefits of all the plugins you can use to enhance your blog are way too long to list.

Check out my post on content ideas for your blog if you need inspiration.

3. Re-Sell To Your Customers

Oh, I know it sounds simple but you would be surprised at just how many business owners who don’t do this. The simple point is; You are selling an excellent product or service, you have very satisfied customers who are obviously interested in whatever you are selling – so why not sell them something else?

You must have your favourite retailers? The ones that you always end up going back to because they sell what you want and are reliable – you know the kind I mean.

How often does an email from one of these retailers pop into your inbox with some special offer? You may not have intended to purchase that day, but when the 2 for 1 offer lands, you can’t resist clicking through….. and spending money! It doesn’t have to be retail, you can apply this to any business model.

You can do this in a number of ways, all of which I advise you do;

• Set up a newsletter for past and prospective clients.
• Send a follow up after sales message – include a special offer
• Cross sell on your site. If they are buying one product, offer a discounted second product or show a list of related items
• Make sure you keep your email newsletter regular so that your customer is comfortable with receiving them and opening them up
• Use your Social Media sites to stay in touch with customers, so that they can always hear about your latest offerings and spread the word
• Say thank you and treat your customers to exceptional customer service. If you do this, they will come back to you without much nudging! They are your biggest asset – so look after them.

4. Use Customer Testimonials and Reviews

As I mentioned before, selling is all about trust, so what better way to let your new customers know that you can be trusted, than letting them see some comments from previous customers.

Depending on what you are selling, you can use user reviews, which are incredibly powerful. Amazon turned the world of online selling with this exact method. It builds customer trust and loyalty.

Testimonials for a service you have provided also go a long way to building a great relationship with future clients. Don’t be afraid to ask for testimonials for the great service you provide. Most folks will be more than happy to send a few words. If you can get them to add a pic and a link to their business, then it really does solidify the deal!

And if they are kind enough to agree to a video testimonial – then all the better. Imagine you have a gardening business that you are promoting online, once you have completed your job – you can take a little Flip Camera (I use one of these) with you to the customer and ask if they’d mind giving you a little video testimonial. If they’re not camera shy and they are delighted with the work you have done, then they’ll happily agree. If not, you can still take some footage of the work you have completed and add a written testimonial from them. There are numerous business models that this works incredibly well for.

5. Drive More Traffic

It goes without saying that the more targeted customers you get to your site, the more sales you will ultimately enjoy. Using the ways we have discussed above, especially Social Media, will certainly afford you plenty more traffic. But don’t forget about the search engines. If someone searches for something you sell on Google – you want to be appearing at the top of that search, or at the very least within the top five sites.

The easiest way to get more traffic is to do some keyword research, find out the terms people are using to find your site or sites like it and make sure you optimise your site correctly.

You can read more about how to do this on previous posts I have written;

Ranking in Google

Do You Really Want to Rank for That?

Constructing Great Keyword Rich Titles

There’s plenty more in the archives, so have a dig about! If you found this post helpful – perhaps you could give it a tweet or hit the ‘like’ button below and share it on Facebook.

And of course, if you have any comments or thoughts or your own tips you’d like to share, then please do leave them below,

Nikki

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Seriously? Are you going to be defeated that easily?

You know, it’s better to see that there is competition in your chosen niche than find your way to the top of a market that isn’t in demand. If there are plenty of other companies vying for the top spot, luring customers in various ways and making a pretty penny into the deal – then this is a ripe market that you can exploit quite easily.

We’ve spoken about SEO Basics before and Why You Need to Know About Search Engine Optimization – so I won’t go over old ground too much, but unless your market is saturated and your competition is in the league of Amazon or Apple (even then you can squeeze in for some juicy, low-hanging fruit) you really have nothing to worry about.

The simple strategy for beating your competition lies within their webpages – they are giving you all the information that you need – you just need to go and have a look.

Simply studying what they have done and doing it better yourself will ensure that your business will rise to the top. Google doesn’t care who is running the site – whoever comes out top in their search, is the one who is best matched for their customers search query.

So, it’s back to basics – see what keywords they are targeting, make sure that you are optimised for them too, make full use of your title tags, meta description, page content and anchor text. These simple things combined with GREAT content will be enough for you to win any battle. Remember that most of your competition is there by fluke – they have optimised unwittingly and have no idea about search optimisation. So you already have the advantage.

Of course, if you’re scared of hard work then forget it, because an ongoing campaign to create great content that is well optimised is a huge time consumer – but if ever you have any niggles or doubts, just look out of your window one morning and watch as Karen dashes out the door with an armful of kids before heading to the office to have ‘the man’ barking orders at her all day….. still seem like too much effort now?

Photo Credit Alessandro Paiver

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Do You Know How to Optimize Your Site?

I rather got on my soapbox the other day regarding Search Engine Optimisation, because it’s getting to the point where I think it’s more a case of many people just not ‘being bothered’ to learn it rather than just not ‘getting it’.

And this bothers me why? Well, I kinda get a bit peeved about it when I am always answering questions about it only to find that many of the web masters then don’t bother to implement it as it would cause them a little bit of work (sigh!).

And here we all are, this new surgence of brilliant mums coming through and breaking down all sorts of obstacles to bring our dreams of online business alive….. only to kiss it goodbye again as frankly, dunking a Hob Nob and chatting on Twitter is far more interesting than seeing to our Meta Tags!

I’d like to share some of my forum rant with you now, and I hope that you will get some value from it and consider learning about the fundamental basics of SEO. Sign up to my newsletter on the right if you want some more info.

The more I research into the background of reg folks trying to get a business, the more I want to get this stuff out there! I’m seeing designers, (mostly self taught) who are creating beautiful sites for people but with no SEO on them at all – none – nada – zip – zilch! It makes me wanna cry! More to the point, the people who are buying these sites have no way of accessing their templates and have to pay their designer to make any changes – which is scary when you consider that the designer has no clue about SEO in the first place.

I see shop after shop and site after site,  just not doing even the basic SEO, keyword research or marketing – then I hear them whining about how badly their business is doing and then eventually I go look them up and they’ve gone – Twitter – gone! Facebook – Gone! Website – Gone! And it’s so sad and often completely avoidable.

And then there are the *cough* SEO Experts *cough* that spout out all sorts of crap on Twitter and various other platforms. It’s frightening because people are FOLLOWING these people and BELIEVING what they are saying, but there is no real expertise here, there is no real ethos into the background of the ‘accomplished results’.

Am I an SEO expert? Or a Social Media expert? No – I wouldn’t label myself as an expert. I’ve been fortunate enough to learn from the very best, world class experts for the past few years, but even though that may be the case – I still consider myself their student. That said, I know more than the “Twitterspert” who seems to know everything from flicking through an eBook and having Aaron Wall on their friends list (sigh).

Let me give you an example of what I mean,

If you look at the images below, you’ll see that I rank very highly for ‘best ecommerce tips’ Wooooooh! Should I go over to Twitter with claims of ‘you can do this too’, or ‘I can do this for you’ – because I could, or shall we look a bit deeper?

Well, you’ll also see that I have included the shot from the Google adwords tool, where it says that there is insufficient data for ‘best ecommerce tip’ which basically means I am ranking at the top of page one for a term that no-one is searching for Now, I also rank highly for ‘ecommerce tips’ and that’s without me actually doing any promotion or linking, but the traffic for that is still fairly rubbish with about 260 searches.

So, what’s my point? Well, there is a lot more to SEO that just ‘ranking’ for a word, it’s choosing the right words for YOUR business in the first place and knowing how to do that, then it’s placing them correctly and then it’s all about the campaign around it. So whilst all of these ‘so called’ experts yap away on Twitter about how they got their client to rank for _____________ (insert pointless keyword) I just shudder and despair about another business going down the toilet!

But another problem we have – is the ‘instant results’ syndrome! Everyone wants results but no one wants to really do the work. There is so much stuff (much of it crap) about how to optimize your sites out there that people are rightly confused. Days can be wasted whilst you search about for information and then you give up and chat to your friends on Twitter instead.

It’s Not an Excuse or a Reason to Give Up!

As a mumpreneur you need to take responsibility for all of your business as you can’t always rely on the traffic you get from social networking.  If you are designing sites for clients, then at least try and learn the basics of SEO so that you can add title tags and Meta descriptions before you hand it over, or make it possible for your clients to be able to access their templates and make the changes needed. It will work in your favour too – when was the last time you checked your portfolio? Are all your clients still at the end of the link or have they vanished and did you maybe play a part in that by handing over a site that was essentially worthless in terms of traffic generation?

A Light at the End of the Tunnel

Over at the WebMums camp, my group of BETA testers are doing a pretty fine job on learning how to optimise their sites and we’re already starting to see some great results. These folks have taken some action and realised that you can’t build a business on tweets alone, has the realization of that dawned on you too?

For SEO tips and info on the website optimizer course – sign up top the newsletter on the right.

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After working with and around folks (mainly work at home mums) with online businesses for the past couple of years, it hasn’t gone un-noticed how people are starting to (finally) savvy up to the importance of optimizing their websites.

It’s not enough to have a brilliant idea and just ‘go with it’ you need to have that idea verified before you go plunging in – and for the plungers, there is some serious treading water going on that needs to be addressed now.

Over at the WebMums community, I was continually getting asked: How to SEO my Site or Can You Explain What SEO is?

I wrote a fair few articles on the subject and I helped a lot of people out but I still felt that there was a bit of a ‘need’ for want of a better term. So, I decided to create an Ecommerce Course that covers everything from on and offsite SEO to Social Media Marketing, Email Marketing, Traffic and Conversion. The reason that the course is tailored towards ecommerce, is because most of the women around the Web Mums community were ecommerce based, but service based businesses and bloggers….read on….

I’m hoping that by creating this course, it will help lots more women (and some of them men folk) to have successful online businesses and to understand and appreciate the fine art of being ranked in the search engines and most noticably – Google!

So – why am I telling you this? Well, I’ve had some people testing the course out over the past few weeks and I’ve decided to let a few more in before I actually open it as a membership site. I think it really needs to be put through its paces before I release it and if you ‘fit the bill’ and you come on board as a BETA tester, then you get access to this course for FREE.

That’s a MINIMUM saving of £81 right there!

So, I will walk you through the steps you need to take to make sure that you have a profitable business. You’ll learn how to find the best keywords, how to use them within your site, how to drive traffic, how to become the market leader within your niche – plus a ton more. This is all backed up with a forum where you can ask specific questions and get help with any aspect of the course or your business that you are struggling with.

It’s Not All Plain Sailing

In return for me handing you this free course on a plate I will require your feedback. This will mean that you will give feedback after each week and you’ll also be required to fill out a few questionaires. If you fail to abide by that, then your place gets offered to someone else.

I refuse to put this course out without having had a certain amount of feedback from people across the board, that meet various criteria, because that way I can be sure I am releasing a quality product that will help people rather than some utter crud that many people try to convince us is ‘great’.

Now, I mentioned above that Bloggers and Service Based businesses should read on, well that’s because a lot of the info contained within the course is still relevant and I am going to tailor courses more focused on these groups after this one is released, in the meantime, I could still use your feedback on the relevant parts and you will still gain a huge amount of value. So do feel free to sign up and let me know what line of business you are in.

Once you have filled in your details in the boxes below, you will receive an email asking you to confirm that you’d like to be included on this list. This is to protect you from spam emails. Make sure you click the link to confirm your interest, you will then receive an email from me explaining the next step.

I look forward to hearing from you,

BETA TESTING FOR THE ECOMMERCE COURSE HAS NOW CLOSED, IF YOU WOULD LIKE INFO ON WHEN THE COURSE GOES LIVE, THEN FILL IN YOUR DETAILS IN THE OPT-IN BOX.

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Time and time again I see web masters flogging themselves to death to rank for a certain keyword. They believe that if they can only get to page one on Google with this keyword then the floodgates of wealth will open.

After weeks (sometimes months) of trying, they finally make it to the prime front page on Google and (man the trumpets) ….. er…….nothing / nada / zip / zilch!

WTF?

When I find these poor, broken souls, weeping softly in the dank, dark corners of forums, I offer to help and often find that their keyword is actually worthless! The reason that it hasn’t changed their life is not because they sucked at getting the traffic – it’s because they sucked at doing the research!

A simple search using the free Google Keyword Tool shows me that no-one is actually searching on that keyword. No-one is going to Google and typing in ‘ Where Can I get Me A ______’. I ask “Have you checked whether there is any value to this keyword before you decided to ruthlessly pursue it?” The deafening silence is normally answer enough!

So, first things first – make sure that the keywords you are targeting are actually worth it or you will be wasting your time.

So, now that you have done a little research and found the main keywords you want to rank for – where are your going to put them? Well, for the page to rank well in Google you will need them to appear within the following:

• Your meta title tag <title>Keywords here</title>

• Your meta description tag <meta content=”keywords within your page description” />

• Your H1 or H2 tags <H1>Title of your content with keywords</H1>

• Within the content of the page

• Within the ‘alt tags’ (for your images)

• As anchor text from external links to the page

If you can do all of this, then you are going to start to rank for your chosen keywords fairly quickly. The more quality links that you get coming in – the better your chances of ranking higher.
Now, you just need to do this for EVERY page that you want to rank within your site – not just your home page!

So, before you move on, make sure that you are targeting the RIGHT keywords for your market and not the ones that you THINK you should.

Photo Credit Chris Baker.

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