I have never been a fan of anything Christmas before Thanksgiving, but since that’s not terribly practical, I think that not sending Christmas email before Halloween will have to do. These days, many businesses will say that I’m wrong, but I am personally annoyed by Christmas advertising before November 1.
Well, it’s Nov 1 and time to begin. Before you start with any email campaign please read my thought on doing this right.
Let me also say to offer something of value to your readers. It’s all well and good go send sales and discount coupons, but if your think “value” and offer something unexpected like a cool craft pattern or an old family recipe, readers will be more inclined to pay attention to the rest of your email.
For a small business offering more personal service is your biggest advantage. Your email could also become something treasured by your reader (fan) and make it more likely to get passed around.
The email insider has more good tips.
Mack Collier was mentioning on his blog how sites that blog have 55% more traffic and 97% more inbound links. Sounds pretty good, right? More traffic is better, end of story. With the price of bandwidth these days it’s not usually bad to get a lot of visitors and maybe a few will convert to a sale.
I know how on this site that different kinds of posts will bring different kinds of visitors. My Friday Just For Fun posts are usually pretty popular, but I don’t see them bringing me the kind of visitor who will hire me. Should I not post this kind of thing because of that? Mack then talks quite a bit more about getting more quality traffic from your blog. Here’s the post…
Here’s a post on the HubSpot site that shows exactly how much having an active blog can improve your website’s traffic.
I’ve written about how I believe having a blog can help, here are some numbers to back it up.
Can social networking hurt your business? You bet it can! I have written many times before about how quickly bad publicity can spread these days.
One of the main reasons that I hear from small business owners about why they don’t want to spend the time to get into social networking is that they are worried that someone will say something bad about them.
I have some news for all of those people, no one needs your blog or forum to tell the world about what they think of your business. I recently read a good post by Frank Marafiote called How Social Networking Can Kill a Business. His main point is “Don’t let the mud hang there on the wall with no counter-response. Otherwise, readers will assume it is true.”
My main point about this is how can you respond to something that you don’t even know is there? You need to be involved in social media at least to the point where you know what is being said about you.
I was working on a site for a new customer and they asked for a contact form on their site. Not a big deal, it’s something that I have done dozens of times before. This time I did something that made me quite embarrassed.
Let me start by saying that when I design a site for a new customer I usually start in a private folder inside my site. I usually design the first page only. I’ll get some idea of what they are looking for, then put up a page or two for the client to review. They can ask for changes and then I’ll put up another first page or two. This process keeps repeating until the client is satisfied then I can put up the rest of the site pretty quickly.
This does two things that I like. First the client gets to see what I’m doing before they have to send me any money. I have many clients that I have never met in person and several have been burned by designers who took their money and never delivered what the customer really wanted. This way they see that I am going to deliver something that they will be happy with, then after they pay me I move it to their domain name. Because these pages are on my site I get more control over the site itself until the client does actually pay me. It’s not infallible, but what is?
Today we got past that point and the client wanted to see the rest of the site. Because it was still on my site I just started putting up the rest of the pages using the first page as a template. That brings me to the contact form. I decided that the form was probably not going to be used until we actually moved the site to the customers domain. I set up the form and when I got to the form action section I just typed in x.com and moved on, not thinking about the repercussions of that. I told the customer that the form wasn’t set up to work yet, but they went ahead and tried it anyway. When they did they were redirected to a porn site. I felt like a hack.
My advice is to do what I say and not what I do and TEST EVERYTHING before you post your work. I also got the idea to add this story to my blog when I read this post.
One of the things that I tell my customers when we first start to design their site is to try to think of keywords that they should use in their content to help search engines find them. To put these keyword(s) in the headlines and once or twice in the main text.
I have written before about keyword suggestion tools that help you determine popular keywords that people search for, but what I never really had was a process for deciding which words that my customers should be using. I usually have them tell me what keywords that they want to be found for and many times they weren’t the best ones for people to find them for or were not very popular search terms at all. I’ve said many times before what good are millions of visitors if they just come and then leave right away? You want keywords that bring traffic, but visitors that are interested in what you have to offer.
Recently I read a post on the SEOmoz blog that described a step by step process for helping discover what keywords would work best for a customer’s site. This is some great advice and it always helps to have a standardized process for determining what needs done. I highly recommend reading…
There’s a great post on the Wall Street Journal ’s Small Business site that talks about what can happen if you suddenly get some great free publicity.
A service called Bag, Borrow or Steal which rents high end designer handbags and sunglasses is getting a mention in the new Sex and the City movie. The company is doing some really great things to take advantage of the expected traffic. Things like adding bandwidth, contests, games and inventory.
You might think that there’s nothing that could be bad about this, but there is. What if they buy too much inventory or their mention gets cut out of the film? It’s a fine line to walk. A new customer might not come back if they can’t get on to your site or you don’t have what you want and too much inventory can easily put you out of business.
I think that Bag, Borrow or Steal seems to be doing things right and I look forward to finding out how this turns out. It’s an article worth reading and remember something this large might not happen to your business, but you can try to get free or paid mentions in your local media and then plan well for the results.
I really like to read and recommend people who think like I do (or maybe I think like they do). It’s more beneficial for both parties involved when they are on the same page. It makes my work feel harder when a customer won’t even consider my advise and usually tells me that they are more interested in their own point of view rather than their customers.
So when I read something that says “Target those markets and customers that you love that love you back” I feel obligated to pass it along. I ran into a post on the Small Business Trends blog that offers some really great promotion advise from many of the worlds top experts. It’s called “Top Experts Dish with their Best Kept Marketing Secrets”.
I hate the word dish used like this, but it’s still a great set of suggestions. Be sure to read the comments, too. There are some great ideas there as well.
.
For most people when they visit your site that’s pretty much all that they know about you. Especially for a small business with few or any brick and mortar locations this first impression means everything.
That means if you are selling a product on your site you need to have good clear professional looking photos of your items. If your pictures are not very good your visitors will assume that your merchandise is also not very good.
I am not saying that you absolutely need to hire a professional photographer, but if you are going to take the pictures yourself you will need to work more like one.
There may also be resources available from the manufacturer of your products. Many times they will offer their distributors and resellers free or low cost selling aids.
I got some of these kind of pictures recently to add to a website and I realized that they needed some help. I went looking for some product photography tips and I found this article by Table Top Studio which I think is very good.
.
I like to read the Wall Street Journal’s Small Business section. It seems there are always good ideas for business looking to promote themselves in new and unusual ways.
I find myself paying close attention to their blog and often following their related content as more of it becomes free. Recently I read and enjoyed their story By Teri Evans about ways to make your company more creative and I would like to share it.
.
