Online Marketing: Website

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Friday, 18 August 2017

Skip Marketing 101 and Read This Instead

As a small business owner, you understand how complicated running a business is. You’re the chief operating officer, bookkeeper, recruiter, trainer, top salesperson, office manager, and head of marketing — which is why you don’t have time to sit through a Marketing 101 class.

You know marketing is a critical component of your business success, and you need easy, fast tactics that will bring quick, impressive results. Instead of attending a seminar or reading a 500-page book, here are the top eight things you should know about marketing your small business:

1. Not marketing is not an option.

No matter how great your product or service is, it won’t sell itself. You’re going to need some advertising, promotions, publicity, email, or social media, and most likely a combination of all those things. Not sure where to start? A good rule of thumb is to look at what your competitors are doing and where they’re doing it. Is your chief competition advertising in the local newspaper? Are they all over Facebook? Have they totally missed opportunities on Twitter? Are they under-utilizing their website? Identify channels where you’ll need to go head-to-head, and look for opportunities your competition may be missing.

2. Online display advertising can have a big impact for little cost.

Your budget is probably as tight as your schedule, so it’s important to get the most impact for each dollar you spend. Online advertising is a great option for small businesses because it can achieve widespread distribution for less money than you might spend on traditional ad channels like radio, TV, and print. Check out our blog on choosing the right display advertising network to learn more about online advertising.

3. Play on people’s love of events.

Buzzwords like “experiential marketing” may make it seem like this is something new, but marketing with events like in-store promotions has been around for as long as there have been brick-and-mortar businesses. That’s because promotions and events reward the people who are already coming into your store, and draw in new customers who may be shopping with you for the first time. Events like ribbon-cuttings, fundraisers, and customer appreciation days help build awareness and brand visibility. Plus, events play on one of your core strengths as a small business — the face-to-face interactions that your customers just can’t get from a mega-business. Read our blog on ways to promote your small business event.

4. Make the most of your website.

It goes without saying (or it should) that you have a company website. But if it’s only a glorified business listing, you’re missing out on one of the most powerful, cost-effective tools for marketing your small business. An engaging website not only gives current and potential customers important information about your business — such as your location, hours of operations, products, and services — it can be a vibrant sales portal and a channel for gathering customer data. Your website is far too important to have an amateur look or feel, so have your website designed by a professional.

5. Email marketing is the new direct mail.

In the old days, a small business would either pay big bucks to purchase a mailing list and have a direct mail piece professionally designed, or spend countless hours to generate the list and piece themselves. Either route could prove fruitless if the piece was poorly designed and the list was inaccurate or irrelevant. Email is far more cost-effective than the old ways of doing things. Free email tools like VerticalResponse makes it easy to design professional, effective, and mobile-responsive emails, compile and manipulate mailing lists, sign up new email subscribers through your website, and track results.

6. Social media is the new word of mouth.

Social media has made it easier than ever for customers to praise or criticize your small business. What’s more, social media has created communities of like-minded consumers where shareability amplifies the value of your marketing messages. Even better — you don’t have to pay to reach your customers via their favorite social media platforms. Yet it’s also important to strategize your social media campaigns so that you’re reaching your target audience with relevant information through their preferred channels. Check out our blog for useful tips on how to expand your social media presence.

7. Win with loyalty rewards.

Nearly every company seems to have a loyalty rewards program these days, so it’s easy to forget that the concept originated with small businesses. When the local baker slipped an extra cupcake in your mom’s order, or the florist threw in a pretty vase because your dad always bought flowers there — that was loyalty marketing! As a small business owner, you’re uniquely positioned to maximize the value of a loyalty program, because you’re already building loyalty in face-to-face interactions with your customers. Starting a rewards program can be as simple as offering a punch card that rewards shoppers with merchandise after they fill the card. The key is to give customers relevant rewards and make it easy for them to earn those rewards, so they’ll always have a reason to come back.

8. Build a network of relationships.

When you’re wearing your sales hat, you’re probably thinking “always be closing.” When you’re acting as chief financial officer, you’re thinking about minimizing costs and maximizing profits. Whatever hat you wear at any time of day, you should always be building a network of relationships with your customers, other businesses, and other business owners. Joining and participating in local networking organizations is a great way to build professional relationships with other businesses, such as by offering a discount to workers at nearby shops. Or send a stack of coupons to the HR department of the area’s biggest employers and suggest the coupons be used as performance rewards for their employees.

You could spend a lifetime educating yourself on how to market your small business — and maybe down the road you’ll even have time to take that Marketing 101 class! For now, however, these eight strategies will help you create a solid base for your small business marketing efforts.

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Wednesday, 16 August 2017

Here’s How to Find the Right Mix and Fine-Tune Your Offer

Have you ever wondered if your strange collection of skills and interests could be woven together to build a profitable business?

If you have, you’ll love today’s Hero’s Journey article.

Lauren Pawell is a rare breed: she has a background in development and marketing. That’s a combination you don’t see every day!

Some people might have encouraged Lauren to choose one field or the other. But she persisted and has built a business that artfully combines her many passions.

Lauren’s story is this month’s Hero’s Journey feature. We’re tapping the collective wisdom of our community members to bring you reports from the front lines of the content marketing world. See all the Hero’s Journey posts here.

Read on as Lauren shares what she’s learned over the years and how you can use her hard-earned wisdom in your own business.

Building a one-stop revenue-building shop

Lauren Pawell: What sets Bixa Media apart is my background in both development and marketing. This allows me to sit at the intersection of business, technology and design.

We help entrepreneurs turn their WordPress and Shopify websites into revenue-generating powerhouses. We do that through a mixture of website design and development, content marketing, search engine optimization, paid advertising, and online reputation management.

Not only can we write killer copy, but we can also evaluate your technology options, decide which is best for your needs, and build everything for you, while keeping your business objectives at the forefront of the process.

I find our clients really value having a partner who can help them from A to Z.

Perhaps more importantly, we’re able to tell our clients where not to waste their dollars and effort, and where to focus their resources.

Even if this doesn’t always match what a client had in mind, our honest feedback resonates with business owners.

We offer two types of services:

1:1 online marketing services: For medium-sized businesses who are looking to outsource their online marketing, we offer a variety of services designed to amplify their online exposure and generate more customers.
DIY programs: For small businesses or solopreneurs who don’t yet have the resources to outsource their marketing, we offer educational marketing programs through Websites That Generate.

My business is primarily online, although I do plenty of networking offline — I find they go hand-in-hand. The offline contact tends to tip the scale in our favor, especially when it comes to securing large contracts.

Putting the brakes on spinning wheels

Lauren Pawell: I started my business for two reasons.

First and foremost, after working in marketing overseas for a few years, I saw so many small-to-medium-sized businesses with a wealth of online opportunity at their fingertips. But they just didn’t have the right guidance.

As a result, they were spinning their wheels in so many different directions with little-to-no impact.

I wanted to help them pick that low-hanging digital fruit, so that they could continue to grow their businesses and entrepreneurial dreams.

So, in 2011, I moved back to the United States, booked my first client at a friend’s birthday party (notice that offline touchpoint!), and haven’t looked back since.

The best part of that story? Our first client still works with us today and has gone from a one-man business to a 20+ person company. Now that is why I started Bixa!

I don’t share the second reason with many people, but I feel it will resonate with the Copyblogger audience.

In 2011, I had been through one-too-many bad bosses and was tired of not being in charge of my own destiny, from both a personal and career standpoint. That freedom I craved drove me to start my own company.

My driving motivation is to help other entrepreneurial spirits achieve the same freedom I have.

Conversion experiments that paid off

Lauren Pawell: Converting cold traffic into qualified leads is a finicky beast, especially when it comes to selling online education.

It’s not hard to understand why — cold traffic doesn’t immediately pull out their wallets. It took quite a bit of trial and error to dial in our lead-nurturing process, but we did it.

A few highlights:

We use Facebook ads as our hook

A new email subscriber generated from a Facebook ad was not likely to immediately jump up and buy our program. However, when we started to establish trust and demonstrate our authority through a few different mediums, we were far more successful.

Here’s what we do:

First, we run the new subscriber through a long welcome series over email. We send them 7 emails over 20 days, all of which include a lot of copy. It helps us weed out unqualified leads.

While in many approaches we did not want a lot of unsubscribes, in this case, we welcome them. It allows us to filter out anyone who doesn’t immediately love us.

After this, we direct the subscriber to our private Facebook community

There we share weekly educational content over video and give 1:1 feedback, similar to what they would experience in our course. This also helps establish us as a trusted and authoritative figure.

Then, we deliver free educational webinars on specific topics

This helps the subscriber better understand their problem and the solution they need to transform their situation.

Finally, we open our doors periodically

Last, but not least, we sell our program through email during specific times of the year, and are available on live chat to answer any questions the prospects have. (This, again, is similar to our course experience).

Some may say we give away too much for free, but I find this really helps us find great students. Plus, it allows our Facebook ad spend to generate far more ROI.

When we didn’t follow this solution and jumped straight from Facebook ads to a webinar to a sales email, our conversion rates weren’t great. Now, they are stellar.

So, if you feel like you are wasting dollars on Facebook ad spend, consider the rest of your funnel. Now that we know what works, it’s far easier to justify scaling up our marketing spend.

Venturing into online education (one validated step at a time)

Lauren Pawell: In Q2 of this year, I decided to test the idea of online education programs.

I wanted to be less reliant on 1:1 client work, which can be unpredictable. And I wanted to help all the entrepreneurs we were turning away due to a full calendar on our end, and limited resources on their end.

To validate the idea, we began being incredibly transparent about our marketing tactics.

We educated our audience through a number of mediums, notably: email, online webinars, and a private Facebook community.

I believed that through great educational content, we could:

Empower solopreneurs, allowing them to achieve quick wins in their businesses
Determine whether there was a demand for our DIY programs

This effort has been quite successful. We recently presold an educational course (before it was created) that our audience was begging for.

By validating an idea through free content first, we were then able to dedicate the resources to creating paid educational programs. A course takes a lot of front-loaded work, especially content creation. The last thing I wanted to do was create a program no one wanted.

As an added benefit of this education-first approach, when 1:1 prospects come through the door, they are already sold on working with us. Because they already understand the “why” behind our recommendations, the selling is 90 percent done by the time we write a proposal.

The Rainmaker Digital products Lauren uses

Lauren Pawell: We use quite a few Rainmaker Digital products, including:

Rainmaker Platform to power our online courses and membership programs at Websites That Generate
Genesis Framework + StudioPress themes to power clients’ websites
Copyblogger Authority and Digital Commerce Institute to continue learning and engaging with the community

I also happen to be a new Copyblogger Certified Content Marketer. And I’m attending the upcoming Digital Commerce Summit in Denver.

So, needless to say, I’m a Rainmaker Digital diehard!

Refining and scaling up for the future

Lauren Pawell: In the final quarter of 2016, we’ll focus on refining our sales funnels and scaling up our DIY programs.

Our educational courses at Websites That Generate haven’t been marketed on our website, or really even promoted outside of email. That’s because I wanted to run a few groups of people through our programs to ensure we really dialed them in.

Now that we’ve gotten the process down, we’re ready to scale up. The first step in that process requires some adjustments to our sales funnel. Then, we can scale up our lead generation through Facebook ads.

An unsolicited piece of advice

Lauren Pawell: If, like me, you’re considering creating an educational program to complement your 1:1 services, I highly recommend the Rainmaker Platform.

All of the technology was so easy to set up, allowing us to focus most of our effort on the course creation and marketing.

When it comes to selling a course and serving your students, the less you have to worry about the technology, the better.

Find Lauren Pawell online …

Thanks to Lauren for appearing in our Hero’s Journey series.

Do you have questions for her? Ask them in the comments.

Source

Thursday, 10 August 2017

25 Online Marketing Courses That Will Make You a Better Affiliate Marketer

Want to become better at affiliate marketing? Improve your skills by taking an online marketing course.

There is no shortage of useful, well presented and actionable information out there that can help you learn a new digital marketing skill set or help you dial in your game even better.

After all, the better your marketing skills, the better you will be at driving traffic to your website.

But never fear: we’ll show you how to sort through the jungle of online marketing programs to find the one that is perfect for you.

How to Choose the Right Marketing Courses for You

Online marketing courses require an investment of some sort. Even if they are free or low-cost, you’re still investing your most precious resource: time.

So, before you just dance with the first good-looking gal at the ball, take a step back and really think about what you need from your course.

Would you be willing to pay for a course or do you prefer a free option?
Are you primarily looking to gain knowledge about Internet marketing as a whole?
Are you looking to zero in on one method, like social, mobile, SEO, or paid traffic?
Do you want/need some sort of formal certification?
What level of expertise (beginner, intermediate, advanced) are you hoping to achieve from your course?
Would you prefer a regular classroom environment or are you more comfortable learning at your own pace?

Once you know the answers to questions like these, you can start to sort through your options.

Some of your biggest choices will be:

Free or Paid Courses?

There are plenty of great free or low-cost courses out there, but typically speaking, the best information comes from behind a pay wall.

Free courses often offer some great and very useful information but you may find that if you're looking for advanced knowledge, you are better off paying for a quality course.

General Info or Highly Focused?

If you’re just getting started, a broad-based, general style digital marketing course is probably the way to go. This will give you an idea of various types of online marketing.

However, if you already have a solid base but really want to dive into the minutiae of something like PPC, then a more specific course is what you need.

Informal Course or Certificate Program/Degree?

Are you hoping to gain a certification, diploma, or degree from your course?

If you're doing these courses with the goal of bettering your affiliate marketing efforts, a certification is not going to be of much importance. But if you'd really like one, make sure to pick a course that offers this.

Beginner, Intermediate, or Advanced?

What level of knowledge are you seeking from your marketing course?

Are you interested in learning advanced SEO techniques? Then sign up for a course designed for people who already have some SEO knowledge.

However, if you are a complete newbie, your best bet is a course that will hold your hand and guide you through the basics of online marketing.

Live or Self-Paced?

Do you prefer a course with a real, classroom-like environment? You should opt for a live course in that case. While you will be studying from home, these courses will require you to log on for live sessions and finish your homework. In general, they are a bit more demanding.

If you would rather study on your own, pick a course that is self-paced. You can read and review the course materials when it suits you and can study at your own speed.

25 Online Marketing Course Options For You

Once you have analyzed your needs based on the above requirements, you will probably have a better idea of exactly what type of course you want to do.

Below is a list of courses, divided into free and paid categories, as this is often the most important criteria. Within each of these categories, the courses are further divided into the type of marketing skills you will acquire upon completion of the course.

Free Online Marketing Courses

There is no lack of quantity when it comes to free online marketing courses and programs. The real trick is finding the quality ones.

There’s nothing worse than investing the time and effort into a course only to finish it and think, “Well @$%*! I knew all of that already!” To keep you from throwing monitors through windows, here are a few free online marketing courses worth your time:

General Online Marketing

1. Google's Online Marketing Challenge

Where better to learn about online marketing than from Google itself? This digital marketing course very comprehensively covers search engine marketing, search and display advertising, mobile, social, analytics and video.

Level: Beginner

Cost: Free

2. Hubspot Academy's Inbound Certification

If you’re looking for a free course from a trusted online marketing source that covers all of the bases, then stop drilling; you’ve hit oil, friend! Hubspot will help you break into the world of online marketing with modules on everything from SEO to conversion optimization. Even better, once you get the basic course out of the way, there's a paid option as well.

Level: Beginner

Cost: Free

3. Diploma in E-business

ALISON is a great resource for free training in online business. The E-business course helps newbies understand the basics of online marketing and how to make the most of Google Adwords, Analytics, AdSense and more.

Level: Beginner

Cost: Free

4. Affilorama Free Lessons (shameless plug)

If you didn’t know it already, here at Affilorama we offer a pretty awesome online marketing course — all designed with affiliate marketers in mind.

When you join our site, for free, you get a wealth of actionable knowledge that will help you build your online business including: the Affiliate Marketing Quick-Start Guide, a downloadable Roadmap to Success and 120 video lessons on topics such as content creation, SEO, PPC and more.

Level: Beginner

Cost: Free

Pay-Per-Click Advertising

5. AdWords Certification Exams

If you'd like to learn all the nitty-gritty of online advertising, Google's Adwords certification courses are an excellent resource. The courses are each designed for you to be able to study and take the certification exams once you're ready. I recommend having at least a basic familiarity with Adwords before attempting the exams. Each exam has extensive study guides so you will be well versed with Adwords fundamentals, search advertising, display advertising, mobile advertising, video advertising, and shopping advertising.

Level: Intermediate/ Advanced

Cost: Free

6. PPC University

Best known for its AdWords campaign grader, Wordstream is one of the most popular names in paid search content creation. This course is free and perfect for beginners in paid search. Even seasoned pros can pick up a few lesser-known tactics.

Level: Beginner/ Intermediate

Cost: Free

Search Engine Optimization

7. SEO Training Course

This Udemy course, instructed by Moz is the ideal starting point for SEO beginners. The course will take you through the basics of SEO strategies. It's also useful for understanding how effective use of social media can also influence search rankings.

Level: Beginner

Cost: Free

8. Advanced SEO: Tactics & Strategy

This Udemy course, also instructed by Moz is ideal for those who want to gain a deeper understanding of some tactical SEO methods. While the course description says it's suitable for all levels, I think this course will be more useful if you already have a basic understanding of SEO.

Level: Intermediate/Advanced

Cost: Free

Social Media Marketing

9. Social Media Quickstarter

This Constant Contact course is the ultimate overview of what you need to do establish a presence for your business on the top social networks. Networks covered include: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Google+, and YouTube. There is also additional advice for blogging and online reviews.

Level: Beginner

Cost: Free

10. Diploma in Social Media Marketing

Another ALISON course, this self-paced offering is perfect if you want to gain an understanding of the basics of social media strategy for your business. In addition to Facebook and Twitter marketing, the course also covers podcasting, blogging and email marketing basics.

Level: Beginner

Cost: Free

11. The Fundamentals of Social Media Marketing

Created by social media management platform Hootsuite, this six-part course will introduce you to social media marketing principles, strategy, content marketing, community management, social advertising, and more.

Level: Beginner

Cost: Free

Copywriting & Content Marketing

12. Internet Marketing for Smart People

When it comes to content creation and online marketing, you’ll be hard pressed to find people doing it better than Brain Clark and the team over at Copyblogger. The course is heavily focused on quality copywriting and content marketing, and how to bring it all together to improve your Internet marketing efforts.

Level: Beginner/ Intermediate

Cost: Free

13. Copywriting 101

Another Copyblogger course. This one is available as a free e-book download, and it's the ideal starting point to understand what makes effective, compelling copy. If you're not a writer but want to improve the quality of your content, start with this mini course.

Level: Beginner

Cost: Free

14. Writing for the Web

Ever wondered how writing for the web is different to other types of writing? This is the course for you. Created by a user experience consultant, this Open 2 Study course, will give you an understanding of online reader behavior, how to structure web pages, how to write SEO-friendly content, and how to create effective, user-friendly content.

Level: Beginner/ Intermediate

Cost: Free

Google Analytics

15. Digital Analytics Fundamentals

Understand the core principles of Google Analytics and how to use it to measure and improve your website's performance with the help of this course from Google's Analytics Academy. When you develop a better understanding, there are several more advanced courses available as well.

Level: Beginner

Cost: Free

Paid Online Marketing Courses

There are no lack of options when it comes to paid online marketing courses, either. You will find courses that can range from $20 to a few thousand dollars. Here are a few courses that you have to pay for, but promise a lot of bang for your buck.