Branding YOU Better! – Susan Newman Lerer

Below are assorted Tips to help you or your business get better results as far as traffic and customers

Google Maps and Yahoo Local Maps:

Whether you have a storefront business or a service you need to be listed in maps.

A- If someone is looking for your type of business, you want them to know where you are. Not because they are going to come knocking on your door, but because they might be looking for someone local that they can meet with in person, in their own area.

A-In web listings you do not have the ability to have people write reviews for you, and in maps you do. The more reviews you have, the better you will place in the listings of the web as well as in maps, perhaps with a star!

A- You have the ability to write more information about your business so when someone finds you, they have a better chance of clicking through to your site.

____________________________

Google Analytics – Why you need this

A- How can you know how many people have visited your site? What countries they come from? Whether they have been to your site before and are returning? How long they stay? What pages are looked at the most? Do they come to your homepage and leave before going in further? Who has put a link on their site going to you?

You can track this type of information and more, so that you can give more people what they are looking for.

A few key stats:
What is the bounce rate? The bounce rate refers to how many people came to your homepage but then left without looking further.
How long on average do they stay? If it’s under a minute that’s not really good.
How many are first time visitors and how many have returned? If it’s 90% always new, that in combination with length on site and the content they looked at, could tell you a lot about what they are looking for.

____________________________

Your Content – Within your website and working for you on the web like in Google (web & images)

A- Remember that your content within your website is searchable and google reads this as well as your imagery! So many people just upload images directly from their camera and the image has no name, just a bunch of numbers. The imagery can be working for you throughout the web.

For EX: Search in google images for “Earth Day Posters 2010” and notice how many on the first page are mine? Naming images is just as important as naming pages and the text you’ve written on your pages.

____________________________

Naming titles, descriptions and Keywords for your website and/or blog

A- Some sites have a “header” and in this page whether your website or blog, you can put in the code area, a title, descriptions and keywords.

A- Depending on how your site was put together, manual html (page-by-page) or a blog with pages and posts, you can have the ability to add specific titles and keywords to those pages.

Imagine a website with 100 pages, each page having some similar keywords yet some with unique titles and keywords, and all of them working to bring more traffic and customers to your website.

Being as specific as possible: In writing your keywords and titles to pages and posts, try to imagine how someone would find your page if they searched for it in Google or Yahoo. (Rather than just describing what you do). If someone types in “Red Eyed Tree Frog Poster” I’d hope that Frogs Are Green would be right up there on the first page, and it is!
____________________________

Google Adwords – Why this is helpful and an economical way to gain more traffic

A- Creating an ad is quite simple and you can assign a modest budget like $1 a day just to see how it performs for a week or two. Once you see the results and keywords where you got the most clicks, you can not only revise your ad, perhaps using those phrases, but can put those keywords into your website.

A- You can create a few ads, and have them advertising different things. As you moniter each ad you can then determine to stop one or put more of your budget on another one.

___________________________

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube & Savor The Success – Using them each properly to send more traffic and/or customers.

A- You must separate these into the ones that are purely social and the ones that are strickly business. Obviously we go on Facebook to chat and socialize with friends, watch fun videos, get a laugh here and there, while we’re working hard. I must say that lately Facebook has started annoying me a tad and here’s why. Many of the businesses out there have friended me, but me personally, not “liking” my business page (although many do that of course). What this means is that as I’m scanning the latest posts, so much of what I see are people selling to me about one thing or another. Am I going to have to hide all these people in order to just see my friends? It would be great if Facebook could give you another option when friending someone, linking just which page with which. Maybe I don’t personally want to follow a business, but my company does.

A- Remember that you always use your business page to send business announcements and the personal page only for social posts.

Twitter and LinkedIn can be connected to Facebook, so be careful that if they are, someone who’s following you for important details on Twitter may not be interested in the latest trick your cat or dog can do.

A- LinkedIn has enormous business potential. If you fill out your complete profile, and then join assorted groups where you’d like to comment or post a discussion yourself, you have the ability to connect with thousands of people at once.

For EX: Frogs Are Green just launched both our photo contest and our kids art contest. I posted a notice in almost every group about them both. This draws discussion and comments as well as traffic and entries!

Remember that the few main reasons people are on the web are either to learn something new, sell something or socialize and have fun.

____________________________

Email marketing – Economical and so very important

A- If you haven’t yet used email marketing, here’s why you should
1- It gives you the ability to send out an email with no attachments which means that less recipients who will reject it as spam.
2- People have the ability and register to receive it (willingly) or can opt out anytime.
3- When people are blasted day and night by others, they may forget all about you and a monthly or bi-monthly reminder or advertising new items or specials is a good way to gain sales, since these are people who like you to begin with.
4- they have the ability to email it just as it is without distortion to a friend
5- you can track from past emails if they were effective, how many opened the email, how many clicked onward, etc…

I will say this though, the best email marketer is someone who doesn’t pester people every week. I only send my email newsletter every other month and very rarely does someone opt out.

____________________________

Blogs – Posts and Pages and the settings being right

It’s very important to make sure that you have adjusted the settings on your blog so you are in control.
1- Only you as the admin should be able to approve any comments, you don’t want nasty or unwanted spam live!
2- You can install re captcha which makes it harder to post a comment and will reduce spam.
3- Be sure to set the page/post address so it’s working effectively for you. Do you want to see the year, the month and the title or some code and page number?
4- Be sure to name titles, images, content and captions so they are helping you the most.
5- Decide which you prefer, to put a link and have someone click on it and leave your site, or make that link open in a new window, so your site is still open below.
6- Be sure to create categories and sort the posts.
7- be sure to have some kid of call to action or ask a question so people are more compelled to respond

• ← Cheering the Rebranding of the YMCA to simply “the Y”
• Why Facebook Needs An Upgrade, Which “Me” Are You Following? →