Five Essential Ways to Drive Traffic to your Website

One of the best ways to promote any business is through a company website. This allows you to reach potentially millions of customers with your products and messaging but you have to find a way to get more people to your website if you want to compete with business rivals. To ensure that your customers come back to your website on a regular basis you need to implement effective ways of bringing them back. 

Here are 5 essential ways that you can build and keep healthy web traffic.

Updates:

Keep your website updated regularly. This way you can ensure that customers who are interested in your business (whether services or products) will be kept afresh of what you are offering. This could include a revamp of the website, a new product, a special promotion, a new service or even the introduction of a new member of your business. 

Newsletters:

Producing a weekly or monthly newsletter is a great way to keep your customers updated with the latest news, services and products. To ensure that new clients sign up to your newsletter, ensure that you do a special promotion of a product or a service that is only accessible through the newsletter. 

Website Appearance:

Looks are important so make sure you have an appealing website. Having a website that looks good and is easily navigated will ensure that people have a positive experience and want to return again and again. Ensure that all content on your website is accurate and easily readable – if the content is not relevant, complicated or does not have any value for your visitors they will not be encouraged to come back.

Marketing & PR:

Active marketing and PR is extremely important in any business; if you don’t market your business, then people will not know that you exist. There are many ways in which you can market your website – contribute to social networking sites relevant for your business, comment on blogs,  Don’t deliberately advertise your services or products in there because you will annoy everyone and get your account blocked. Use your website as your signature and make genuine replies. In addition, ensure that you list your website on all the free business directories on the web. 

Company Blog:

Creating a blog for your business can help you reach target audiences globally. It also contributes to making your website more dynamic and search engine friendly. Make your blog interesting and content rich to ensure that people are engaged in reading, and help pull and attract traffic to your site. A blog is a great way of keeping your current and potential clients up to date and connected with your business. Types of content that can create engagement on your blog include: helpful articles, infographics, video clips, images, new product releases.  

Movers and Shakers: Why Companies Seek Influencers

A lot of companies seek out, follow and engage influencers. If you have a powerful network with a lot of friends and contacts, that is worth something. However, it’s not all just who you know that matters, it’s also what you can bring to the table. What you know matters, too.

Knowing that the influencers can make or break a business based on favorable or unfavorable reviews, comments made, or through biased spotlights on products and services, some of the biggest companies in the world are now seeking and using social influencers to help them promote.  For example, Disney often runs promotions to give influencers tickets and merchandise for new movie releases. American Express offers gift cards. Chevy handed a few lucky influencers the keys to a brand new Sonic for a three-day weekend.

Having Clout Equals Success

Why would they do this?  Feedback, of course. Word of mouth referrals have long been the key to successful enterprises, even before the rush of social media became a big hit. From solo-preneurs to mom-and-pop businesses; to giant Fortune 500 companies, any smart business principal understands the value of good ‘old fashioned word-of-mouth recommendations. Count that on a widespread basis and before you know it, everyone who is anyone has heard about your product, service or invention.  As a recent example, the “50 Shades of Gray” book was a recent phenomenon that began by a few happy readers who loved it and told others. Now it is a blockbuster movie, all started by a “buzz” of some avid readers.

Some influencers get formal invitations as “brand ambassadors” and get invited to special events. If rubbing elbows with band members, models or actors and getting VIP passes sounds like a cool gig, well… becoming an influencer is one way to do it.  Would you like it if a big brand or ad agency courted your attention just for having a ton of friends, fans and followers on your multiple social platforms?  Of course. Who wouldn’t?

How to Gain Online Social Popularity

Bearing this in mind, anyone can become "influential" in certain niches. There are communities for every type of interest, hobby, activity, personality.  Examples such as tech communities, video gaming, reading/writing, cooking, crafting, etc. enable you to be part of the popular “in crowd” with those things you most enjoy, while also boosting your reputation as a person to know on that topic. Companies target people like you to help promote their products and services. Being known as an expert can also give you leverage in the job market within your chosen field.

This can also be done by helping them through reviews and advertising on your blog. If you have a popular blog with a lot of followers, the big companies will begin to notice. You’ll get subscribers from media (TV, magazine publishers, etc.) and more and more offers will pour in.  It does take some effort. You have to blog about topics that people are interested in, while devoting your time to develop a niche. If you just write about a bunch of random stuff, it may not generate the results you seek.

With this in mind, you can move forward with more caution in what you choose to share or not share with your social circles. Leverage your influence by keeping the posts relevant, short, and related to your goals. Don’t promote capricious products you’re not familiar with because if they fail, this can decrease your credibility. Most importantly, keep your communications positive in their message and shy away from foul language, obscene cartoons, or anything offensive that could come back to haunt you later on.

Mobile Marketing – Why Small Businesses Need a Good Strategy in Place

Mobile devices – such as phones, tablets and Smartphones – have overtaken desktops as the best tools for accessing the Internet as well as all other web-related services. Mobile devices have also emerged as the best platforms through which a small business can deploy all its marketing tactics. In fact, mobile devices have emerged as the tools of choice for customers to read web content, check emails, and shop online.

Reports indicate that 9 out of every 10 Americans possess a cellphone. More than half of the cellphones in the hands of Americans are smartphones. Consequently, it is safe to say that the world is in the smartphone era, thus one more reason for embarking on mobile marketing. If you are going to use this form of marketing to benefit your small business, a focused mobile strategy needs to be in place covering the following considerations:

• Development of a mobile app and/or mobile responsive website 
• Investment in user specific messages and content as well as notifications
• Social media assets and integration
• A loyalty program that offers customers rewards and perks

Loyalty programs will entice existing customers to continue buying from a business. Loyalty programs are also attractive to new customers who desire to know the benefits they stand to obtain by choosing to purchase their preferred products and services from a specific business.

Cost-Effective 

All forms of marketing must have a high impact. Fortunately, mobile marketing does just that. More importantly, small businesses care about the impact of any marketing promotion on their finances. In this regard, the cost-effective nature of marketing via mobile devices is the best way through which small businesses can achieve their desired goals. Marketing via mobile devices is more affordable to small businesses.

The initial investment that the small business owners make regarding the resources and time required to develop the technology is what requires the most cost outlay. Once up and running, mobile marketing programs provide cost-efficiencies against traditional media expense requirements such as postage, printing and air time.

The cost effectiveness of mobile marketing to any local or small business is also demonstrated by the fact that the cost of developing and delivering it continues to decrease with time. The more the volume increases, the lower the costs of developing and delivering the marketing campaign grows. For a startup, this is great news considering that it needs to save a huge chunk of its finances/capital to build its profitability.

Immediate Results

The best news with mobile marketing is that the content gets to the customers immediately. Moreover, it provides two-way engagement. What this means is that customers are free to respond to the marketing message that they receive. This assists to create the environment for interactivity and direct engagement to thrive between a small business and its customers. There are no intermediaries to create complexities or distraction between the business or customers. The message gets to the customers in its purest form. Similarly, the response by customers gets to the business in it’s purest form.

Faster Response Rates

The fact that customers walk around with their mobile devices means that they will respond faster to any marketing message that a small business sends to them. Moreover, a small business can have real time access to tracking results including downloads, page visits and customer opt-ins. This information is important for a small business to be able to evaluate the effectiveness of mobile strategies as well as be able to adjust and optimize plans accordingly.