The Fundamentals of Small Business SEO Strategy

If you market online, even if it is a small business, you need SEO strategy, very basic SEO strategies at the very least. These very fundamental and basic strategies will enable your business to gain some marketing traction online even amidst the huge and at times suffocating competition. Essentially there are four marketing fundamentals your small business needs to focus on to have a successful SEO strategy. Many expert marketers generally agree on the following.

1.    Content Marketing
2.    Link Building
3.    Technical SEO
4.    Local SEO

 

1. Content Marketing

If you market online, the success of your marketing efforts depends largely on good content.  This content must be authoritative, informative, educational and even entertaining. That is what helps it to attract a good following. In the SEO world, content is king. No matter how user-friendly your business website is, without good content, it can hardly attract good traffic. For this reason, it is fundamental for your business website to house web pages and blog articles that contain high quality and valuable content. When this content is optimized with the right keywords for search engines, it attracts organic traffic from search engines.

2. Link Building

Link building is a digital marketing technique of driving links to your website, through a variety of methods. Your business website gets backlinks when another website or online platform links to your website. If such linking websites are reputable and authoritative online, they help boost your own site’s authority. This is why marketers deliberately use online techniques to earn more of high-quality links, as against massive volumes of low quality links. Better still if your website earns these links organically through search engines. Major search engines like Google tend to rank websites with high-quality backlinks higher. That way, Google’s algorithms strive to show more of high-authority sites to web surfers. This translates to good organic traffic back to your business website.

3. Technical SEO

Technical Search Engine Optimization, SEO, is yet another fundamental requirement for a small business SEO strategy. It allows the business website to be technically sound for online search operations. For your business website to be technically sound, it must:

•    Have a fast load time, say about 5 seconds or less.
•    Be optimized for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.
•    Be easily found and indexable by search engines.
•    Be easily navigable.
•    Be secure, by always having an up-to-date SSL certificate.
•    Avoid broken links and 404 pages.

Form the foregoing, it clearly shows that Technical SEO involves the technical optimization of your entire website. It affects the site structure, navigation, load speed, and link structure. Without a fast, functional, and user-friendly website, no amount of content or backlinks will be enough to maximize your rankings. Meaning, without it, no other activities will be sufficient to attract the required traffic back to your website. Technical SEO requires real knowledge and skills of website management and development to put in place. If as a marketer you do not have this requisite knowhow, it is advisable to hire the services of a technical SEO expert and or webmaster to handle the technical optimization of your website for you.

4. Local SEO

Most major search engines like Google now recognize that most small businesses are essentially local. Hence, the need to make local searches a priority in their search results. Welcome to local SEO. Local SEO is a type of SEO that is unique to local businesses. This is because many local businesses serve specific geographical areas. Moreover, their potential customers are often using geo-specific terms to find these businesses in their local area. When searchers type a search term on Google with “near me” phrase, Google usually sends search results nearest to the location of that searcher. That makes is easy to find local businesses online if they are optimized for local SEO searches.

Tested and Effective Internet Marketing Strategies to Stimulate Business Growth

As you may have noticed, the online and digital marketing terrain keeps undergoing continuous changes. These changes at times pose very huge challenges to marketers. To survive as a marketer therefore, you must develop the capacity to design, initiate and implement new techniques peculiar to your type of business. These techniques can help your business be efficient and competitive in a hugely competitive market space. Here are some simple techniques you can try out immediately for good results in terms of stimulating a measurable business growth in your business.

User-Friendly Website Design

Your website is your business window in the huge virtual space of digital marketing. It must be well designed and user-friendly to serve that purpose adequately. Ideally, business websites are expected to play very crucial roles in any online marketing effort. This is because it is only through websites people can locate your business online and patronize your products/services anywhere they are in the world. For this reason, having a user-friendly and aesthetically designed website is what helps your business to attract the right online audience and somehow motivates them to respond to your call-to-action to do business with you. It is to it many will return later for repeat business if their onsite experience on your website was pleasing and satisfying to them. So, if you can design a device and user-friendly website for mobile devices particularly smartphones as well as computers, your audience will find it easier to access it and navigate through it to do business with you.

Search Engine Optimization, SEO

To make your website visible to search engines, you need search engine optimization, SEO. With a good SEO, search engines will rank your website high in their SERPs. That is good for organic traffic, which your business really needs to help it grow. Most digital marketing experts always have a preference, for SEO as their foremost digital marketing technique. By investing in SEO techniques, you are simply making a long-term investment to ensure growth and survival for your business in a highly competitive business environment. The reason is, SEO is more efficient and cost-effective than most other online marketing techniques. That’s why it is always a preferred choice technique for digital marketers.

Email Marketing Techniques

Email Marketing has been around for a while but it is still a cost-effective marketing technique for business growth.  It comes in very handy for marketers to easily reach out to both potential and existing customers. Email is an effective marketing technique you can use to offer a valuable product for free, share a guidebook containing important information to your audience, and build a mailing list of those who indicate an interest in what you are offering. Email marketing helps to increase traffic, leads and even conversion rates particularly if you have a well-articulated newsletter containing promos and incredible product offers, which you regularly send to your audience by email.
 
Running Ads on Social Media

These days, most social media platforms have become very powerful marketing tools for millions of online marketers. The very popular social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram LinkedIn, Facebook and others are the preferred choices for marketers because of their huge popularity, ease of use and high effectiveness at spreading information quickly and widely at relatively low costs if at all. For this reason, social media ads can be very effective when it comes to getting new customers and leads/prospects. If you are marketing on social media, you have the additional benefit of taking advantage of using their free in-house analytics to measure the progress of your ads campaigns. Most social media platforms are friendly for content marketing including videos, graphics, photos, and images, which help marketers to grow their following as well as their businesses steadily. Running ads on most of the platforms is budget-friendly to boot. 

How Emails Help Your Content Promotions

As a professional online marketer, if you want to successfully build a loyal audience and promote your content, you are missing out if you are not leveraging email marketing. Online, email marketing remains one of the most effective channels for content promotion. Email marketing is a highly cost-effective channel through which your content can reach, engage and impact many people online. A very effective way to get leads and boost sales for your business!

These here tips will certainly give you some credible, tried and tested ideas on how to improve content promotions by way of email marketing.

Build a Credible Subscribers List

For email marketing, building a subscribers list is absolutely essential. Building a list of subscribers who are actually interested in your brand and the content you create is the first and most important step to take going forward. You can get that done by simply adding a “Subscribe to my blog” button on your website. Leveraging on the exit-intent pop-ups which encourage visitors to sign up for content updates from your blog also help to build that list. For effectiveness, your subscribers list should be well aligned with the demographics of your target audience. That helps to improve your content promotion results.

Create Rich Quality Sharable Content

Creating a rich content is a basic essential in email marketing. It must be easily sharable too for effective marketing reasons. If you routinely create content that is of high quality, relevant to your target audience and provides value to them, you get very good results for your efforts. Be sure you are familiar with what your subscribers are looking for. By relying on social listening tools and resources like BuzzSumo or Quora, it is possible to identify the top-performing topical ideas in your business niche. Generally, many subscribers are always looking for business/marketing advice, effective online marketing tips, business growth strategies and suchlike information. That’s exactly why creating content that caters to the interests and needs of your audience is of extreme importance in email marketing.

Design Quality Mobile-Friendly Newsletters

The world is increasingly in a hurry and many people now do business on the go. Welcome to the world of smart phones/mobile devices. Presently, more and more people tend to access their emails by way of smart mobile devices especially smartphones. That’s why it is essential to always design mobile-friendly newsletters if you want to effectively promote your content. By choosing a compelling subject line, it helps to generate curiosity and encourages people to open your email. If the content is well written and informative, it arouses the needed curiosity to further read more of it. When laced with embedded backlinks, CTA buttons and social media sharing buttons, it can easily go viral thereby attracting more subscribers and customers to your business.

Commit to Scheduling your Emails

As an email marketer, if you want people to actually open your emails and read and share your content, it is essential that you develop an email marketing schedule. Doing so helps to remove emailing randomness and its attendant negative effects on your marketing efforts. By letting your subscribers know well in advance when to expect your emails and what kind of content to expect, you get better responses/results. That must however fit into your overall strategic plan. For email marketing success, you need to plan your content promotion and distribution strategy to ensure that your content gets maximum exposure, without which, your results will be hugely limited. Strategically, no matter how well-written your content is, it isn’t worth much if it is unable to reach the right audience.

Leverage Your Emails

One of the best strategies for content promotions is to leverage your emails. By doing so effectively, it can help you to generate more site visits, more article views and engagements. If you can successfully build a credible subscribers list, write compelling subject lines and email copy, you can promote your blog content effectively. That is what gets the good results from your marketing efforts by way of leveraging your emails.

Send Newsletters Weekly

Every ambitious email marketer must always think of ways to create even more value with his content. In that quest, simply posting a blog post without making any efforts to effectively promote it is not good enough. One very effective way to promote blog posts is to create a newsletter that features your top-performing content preferably every week. Such weekly newsletters tend to get more clicks than the newsletters promoting individual posts. In your weekly newsletter, you can promote different types of content pieces, from blog posts to videos and podcast episodes. A major advantage of weekly newsletters is that even if a subscriber manages to miss an update from you, they can readily find all of your content pieces in your weekly updates. That way, provided they stick to your weekly schedule, your subscribers are not likely to miss any of your updates.

SEO Tips to Better Rank Your Website on Google

It is increasingly profitable for many small business owners to rank their websites for Google being the search engine which accounts for over 60% of total searches online. These business owners do this by working on effective SEOs for their websites. These SEO techniques help Google to rank these websites high in SERPs thereby helping to grow the businesses. For the growth and survival of any small business online, there is need to invest in SEO techniques for the business. This makes SEO a must-use technique for every small business online. If you choose to ignore or neglect SEO for your own small business, you inevitably become vulnerable to your competition. SEO helps your business to easily compete with and beat other brands even on a small budget. This is aside from the fact that SEO is a worthwhile investment which yields several traffic-related benefits for your business.

If you follow these here small business SEO tips to help rank your website on Google, you can easily grow the business with SEO.

Acquire a Mobile-Friendly Business Website

If you acquire and use a mobile-friendly website for your business, it helps to provide a rich experience for your brand users. That makes it to really look professional and user-friendly since over half of local search results now come by way of mobile devices. To enhance that, the website must be well structured, easy to use and fast loading. Its esthetics, style and design, must be simple, eye-catching and attractive.

Use a Separate Webpage for Each Product on Display

For your local SEO efforts to be effective, it is advisable to create specific pages for each product you are selling. Doing so allows you to rank higher for each product page for multiple keywords. The common practice of many small businesses listing all their products on one page particularly on the homepage is not a good practice for SEO reasons. Listing your products on separate pages and sub-pages helps to make searches easier for your customers, reduces search efforts and boosts your rankings. Customers tend to do better business with your website as a result and the impact on your revenue is positive.

Acquire Local Backlinks

No business operates in a vacuum. The reason a business must relate with other local businesses complimentary to it by way of backlinks. To acquire local backlinks, it is a very smart idea to always ask your business partners, local business directories, local news publications, bulletins, trade journals and suck like publications to link and cover your business. Many of them will gladly do so because they need good content as well for their own publications. If well connected, local backlinks and citations can be very important parts of a successful local SEO campaign for most small businesses.

Optimize for Local and Voice Searches

Presently, marketers are paying more and more attention to local searches because of the huge benefits. The reason it is now imperative to optimize your website for local searches. With more than half of local searches attributable to voice searches, optimizing your website for both local and voice searches is now a very good business idea for small business SEO efforts.

Ensure Your Business Listings are Up-to-Date

If you are doing business online, listing your business on directories may not be strange to you. You must know that business listing profiles such as Google My Business, GMB, are very important for your business. With GMB profiles on Google, businesses benefit from good Google rankings which help them to easily attract and get good customers to do business with. To help Google optimize your GMB profile properly, you must endeavor to keep it updated with your latest business contact details, including working hours, business addresses, phone numbers, email, social media accounts, etc. which help searchers to easily make contact with your business.

Identify and Use Targeted Keywords

If you have some experience with SEO techniques and online marketing, you must know that keywords do not have equal value for your business. Some keywords do have high search volumes but not very profitable, while some could be profitable but have small volumes. This is why you need carefully targeted keywords in your SEO efforts. The success of any SEO campaign depends hugely on the use of targeted keywords. That’s why you need to carefully choose the right and profitable keywords to optimize your small business website. Give a preference to long-tail keywords since they are easy to rank and more profitable than short keywords. The intent behind a keyword is what makes it profitable because that is what users are searching for. Finding it easily is what helps to direct users to your website and the products you are selling therefrom.

How Digital Marketing can Help Small Businesses During a Pandemic

In an unexpected period of a pandemic as is currently being experienced around the world, forced restriction tends to cripple many small businesses. Many will eventually go out of business altogether if they don’t learn to think outside the box. The time to think digital marketing is now because many small business owners are undergoing pains physically, emotionally, and most importantly financially. Now, without a reliable source of income and to avoid going out of business altogether, the way to go is the use of technology. Smart small business owners are increasingly moving towards digital platforms and using digital marketing techniques to sustain their small businesses.



These here are credible ways to use digital marketing techniques to keep small businesses afloat during the pandemic.

Embracing Change in Business Strategy

If your business must survive during the pandemic, you must be able to think outside the box and embrace change. Even if you you’ve not been using digital platforms effectively, the time to embrace such platforms is now. Yes, it may require some risk to do but taking such risks and remaining in business is much better that going out of business on account of the forced restriction. If you embrace digital marketing, it can help you to stay in business and even to grow the business while the pandemic lasts.
 
Exploring Online Marketing

Online marketing by nature has many incredible opportunities for business. Depending on the nature of your business and your own capabilities, you can think deeply to find ways to stay in business even with the pandemic. Because of the severe restrictions on the free movement of persons and goods, you need effective strategies to overcome the challenges posed by these restrictions in our daily lives. Keenly exploring online marketing possibilities helps out to address many of these challenges. If you need to promote your products extensively and very widely, online marketing is the best and only platform most suitable for increasing awareness and reaching the right kind of audience without hassles. You can rely on online marketing to open doors to a very large audience beyond the physical reach of the offline business to target which the pandemic has severely restricted.

Reaching More Customers

Characteristically, digital platforms have no restrictive boundaries. Because of this lack of restrictions, there is no limit to the number of customers you can reach and how far and wide you can expand your business if you so decide. During this pandemic, many smart small business owners are making use of the opportunity of using digital platforms to expand their businesses and to reach more customers. With the use of a simple well-designed website, small businesses can reach out to customers anywhere in this world 24/7. Now, isn’t that wonderful even with the restrictions of the pandemic? Digital marketing makes that possible with hugely beneficial results for small businesses.

Better Customer Reach at Lower Costs

During this pandemic, many small businesses have grown tremendously through digital platforms and at a rapid pace. By using digital marketing platforms they easily reach thousands of customers around the world even within a limited marketing budget. That is possible because the comparative cost of reaching a wide audience online is much lower than doing same offline. Unlike traditional methods of reaching customers, digital marketing allows you to directly reach a large number of customers and potential customers who are interested in your type of products. All these at comparative lower costs to boot since traditional advertising methods involve spending larger amounts. Even with a higher cost, traditional ads do not guarantee that your ads are reaching the right audience with the right message.

Better Time Usage

With the advantage of digital technology, small businesses can better manage their time and resources during a pandemic. Digital marketing platforms involve very smart and effective decision making which tends to guarantee better returns on the money and time invested in the business. This comes about when these small businesses are able to use their time wisely by implementing the best and most effective digital marketing strategies to create more awareness and attract even more customers to their businesses.

Using More Effective Small Business Strategies

Earlier, with the restrictive nature of the pandemic, many had thought small businesses were completely done for. Digital marketing changed that narrative for good because it brought with it, a new way of thinking by testing and tasking the creativity of small business owners. Free and easy-to-use digital marketing tools such as Google analytics help small business owners to know what people are looking for on the internet and how they interact with what any business is offering. These tools are highly effective in helping to find the right audience and targeting them accurately. With digital marketing tools, it is easy to formulate good strategies to help track ads campaigns and effectively evaluate every move and to make changes as necessary to target customers effectively. Thus, with correct strategies in place, it is fairly easy to get whosoever searches or visits a business website to actually do business with the website.


 
Paying More Attention to Digital Marketing

The forced restriction as result of the ongoing global pandemic has actually induced many small business owners to think about and pay more attention to digital marketing. They now have more time on their hands to effectively plan for and engage more digital marketing strategies for their businesses. Digital marketing being a combination of full-fledged marketing strategies that include brands' awareness now becomes very handy to target potential audiences to convert them into loyal customers just like doing business in the physical world. Paying more attention to that now helps small businesses to easily generate trust among the customers by creating user-friendly interfaces and strategies that help to build faith in the shopping audience. With more and better time at their disposal, small businesses can now effectively set their business goals for online marketing while growing their businesses seamlessly with the aid of digital technology.

Stimulating Employment

Quite surprising! While other businesses may be shrinking during the pandemic, small businesses can indeed grow and even generate more employment with the use of digital technology.  Small business owners actually have lots of business growth opportunities because of the peculiarities of digital marketing. Since more businesses are going online, services of web developers are increasing in demand. Webmasters, bloggers, content marketers, advertisers and in fact most businesses that can be done easily online are increasing in demand. With small businesses now better able to engage with the right audience and showing their unique products and services to potential customers, demand increases. This is coupled with the fact that they can with the use of digital technology better target potential customers and generate more leads and sales because of the unique services they provide at comparatively lower costs.

Effective Email Marketing Techniques

Email Marketing is one of the oldest forms of digital marketing techniques. Many marketers now believe it is “old school” but even at that, many still rely on it for their marketing campaigns. The effectiveness of email marketing is directly dependent on the email list of potential customers you have built over time. No doubt such a list takes time, efforts and resources to build. That is why when built, it serves as a very valuable asset at the disposal of digital marketers. Without a credible email list, email marketing is grossly ineffective. A simple marketing message sent to hundreds of thousands of persons in your email list has an uncanny effect of getting some good responses. The more responses you get, the higher your chances of getting good patronage for your business.

When coming up with an email marketing campaign, it pays to consider the following:

#1. Optimize emails for mobile devices. With nearly everyone now going around with mobile smart devices, optimizing emails for mobile devices is highly imperative. They increase use, patronage and effectiveness.

#2. Going straight to the point. Internet users notoriously have very limited attention life span. So, with email marketing, going straight with your marketing pitch is what works best for good results.

#3. The subject line needs to be engaging enough so that it attracts the attention of the reader. Because of limited attention span internet users are notorious for, you can’t afford to beat about the bush to get your message across. The real reason you need to get your message engaging enough with the hope of its being taken seriously at first reading.

#4. The language should be simple and persuasive. The choice of language counts a great deal on its effectiveness. If it is simple and persuasive enough, the positive response to the message appears better enhanced.

#5. Don’t forget to discuss the pros of your product/service. As a marketer, you are not just selling products/services, you are selling solutions. Your business is problem solving. A product which helps to solve real problems gets better patronage than others. Email messages must get that across very vividly even at first glance.

BOTTOM LINE: You don’t just send emails to thousands of recipients. You send emails to recipients offering to solve problems for them. That is what works to get customers through email marketing techniques.


 

Tips for Writing SEO-Compliant Content

As every online marketer very well knows, targeted traffic is very crucial to succeeding in affiliate marketing. The more targeted traffic you can drive to your website, the more the sales you can make. Therefore, your first duty as a marketer is to explore credible ways to build traffic to your affiliate marketing website. You can’t get organic traffic if important Search Engines like Google are unable to locate your website easily then rank it for searches. That is what is technically called SEO, Search Engine Optimization and it usually takes some techniques to get it right. Part of those techniques is to have a good placement for your website on Google SERP pages. If you do that correctly, you will attract more visits, which is good for affiliate marketing, especially if it is targeted. SEO is a very important success factor in affiliate marketing and it all starts with the content. By using these tips, they can help you to go a long way to create content that is search engine friendly.


 
Here are some of the techniques you need to get your content ranking high on SEO.

Choose Your Keywords Correctly: First you must decide on your keywords depending on the niche business you have settled for. This is where keyword research comes in. This you can do by using Google web technology tools to find keywords relevant to your affiliate marketing niche. Before writing a content, you should always have your chosen keywords in mind because every post must contain one or more of your chosen keywords for effects.

Target One Keyword at a time: You can’t afford to be aimless with your content creation. For that reason, every piece of content you create should have a clear purpose with a keyword as its unique identity. For best results, each article or piece of content should target one main keyword even if with some expertise, you may choose to add a few secondary keywords which help to capture clusters of long tail keywords related to your main keyword.

Use the chosen Keyword in Important parts of the Content: What counts here is to try to add the keyword in the right places on the content. Experts recommend that you place your keyword most preferably in the title, in the first paragraph, in the last paragraph, and in between. Adequate care must however be taken not to stuff your content with keywords as Search Engines like Google are now smart enough to detect such gimmick. If they do, they could penalize you severely for it. It pays to also include keywords in the alt-text of images.

Use Hierarchy in your Content: If you want to make your content easy to find by visitors, you must use hierarchy in it. This involves the use of Headers and Sub-Headers to show relationships between the different sections of your content. When visitors find it relatively easy to find and navigate your content, it makes them happier. The happier your site visitors are with your content, the more likely they are to stick around to view and hopefully click on your affiliate promotions. Search Engines too also love Headers because Headers provide them useful clues which help the Search Engines to better understand what your content is all about.

Build Internal and External Links: Link building is important because, the number, quality, and relevance of links pointing to any content is an important ranking factor used by foremost Search Engines like Google. Therefore, when writing a new content, you must endeavor to find older content that is relevant to your current content and add links pointing at them. It is not smart to just embark only on promoting your affiliate marketing links. Using appropriate links also helps to promote your older content. Once you complete any article, it helps to also link to it from some of your older content making sure you use the main keyword in the anchor text of the internal link.


 

Top 6 Most Effective Online Marketing Methods

Yeah, these days, nearly everyone wants to market online. Right now, virtually every business commands an online presence of some sort. As a result, internet marketing has remarkably reshaped the marketing sector. Also referred to as e-marketing, digital marketing or web marketing, internet marketing involves all tactics used to promote products and or services over the internet. With a vibrant and ever-growing online community, internet marketing has fast gained traction and is fast establishing itself as a great alternative to the traditional forms of marketing. These are proven facts attested to by marketing experts. Some of these experts recommend the following as some of the most effective online marketing methods.

Use of Banners

Banners are easy to design, easy to adapt and use online. The technique has become very popular and in use right now. It involves the use of a tactically placed advert within a web page that is designed and strategically placed to catch the attention of web visitors. Upon clicking on it, visitors are redirected to your site of choice. Simple!


 
Use of Pop-Ups
 
Online, pop-ups are characterized as very aggressive form of marketing when used properly. If not properly used, they could come off as annoying and frustrating. It is best to use pop-ups in your own website or other websites of choice. When clicked on, they direct the visitor to what you want them to see. They attract attention easily and have been quite popular with marketers because of the good results they deliver.

Use of Search Engines

The use of search engine advertising techniques requires some deft expertise to be effective. It involves the creation and deployment of choice words and phrases (i.e. key terms) attractive to search engines.  That requires such techniques like SEO and PPC tactics which are quite effective strategies. The two techniques both seek to boost the business website ranking in search results. These search results rely heavily on the list that presents when search engine users key in terms that relate to the products and services you are selling online. These search results may include organic search results, which are free, and paid search results which are paid for per click, PPC.

Blogging

To write a successful blog, you must have some expertise you are able to share for the benefit of readers/customers. It is a strategy which calls for creativity through progressively and continually posting content on your blog that resonates with your readers. It uses storytelling and sharing of experiences to deliver an advertisement. It works best with blogs that have a large following as good blog information easily gets widely dispersed virally.

Video Advertising

This tactic involves the use of videos to promote products and services. Online videos appear to rely heavily on “seeing is believing” strategy. Popular online video sharing platforms like YouTube and Instagram provide an ideal environment for video advertising to thrive. The essence is to virally share videos about a product or service to as many people as possible online. Many of these videos are designed to show how-to get things done. Some are explainer or customer testimonial videos designed to advertise goods and services online.

Social Network Platforms

These platforms have become really popular with people as a means of socializing. With a huge number of subscribers, social networks have managed to distinguish themselves as powerhouses of online advertising. Many businesses seeking to reach a large number of customers quickly and cheaply are increasingly resorting to social networks to promote their products and services. The most popular of these platforms include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Instagram. Depending on your preference, you can deliberately target a given group or segment of customers. With targeted customers, conversion chances improve dramatically.


 

6 Techniques to Blog Like a Pro

According to online marketing experts, nearly everyone now blogs to support their businesses. That is content marketing. You may be aware that blogging and creating other types of online content can provide a big boost to your small business marketing strategy. However, be informed that it takes a lot of planning to actually make content work toward your main business goals. If you are already into it or you want to commence blogging, there are blogging techniques you can deploy to get results like a pro. Here are some of such techniques.

01. Create Content That Gets Real Traffic and Links: The essence of blogging is to get traffic to your business. This you can do by using effective ways to increase links to your blog and improving your reach. That means you must always put a very good content out there. You can improve this content to make it more shareable particularly on Social Media.

02. Use Your Blog to Improve Your Business’s Online Reputation: The fierce battle for reputation is what makes online marketing tick. It is your business reputation that contributes largely to bringing customers to your business again and again. For that reason, no matter where you blog, you must pay particular attention to reviews and feedbacks relating to the content you are sharing. That helps you to monitor and work to improve on what is said about your business online.  One credible way to build a good online reputation!

03. Choose and Use the Right Keywords for Your Blog Niche: This technique is as old as content marketing itself and pros always emphasize it. If you want online surfers/readers to easily find your blog content by way of organic search, you need to deploy some SEO techniques. This will require you to choose and use some relevant keywords to your blog niche. That is called optimization which could be a bit tricky at times. SEO may pose a bit of technical challenges, so, if you are unable do it yourself, you can pay experts to help optimize your blog for you.

04. Always Provide Your Readers Personalized Content: This is very important for blogging. It shows you are an expert at something which you are able and willing to share it. If you habitually share sufficient good content regularly, you quickly get many readers hooked up to your blog. Posting generalized content on your blog may not solve specific problems your readers want solved. So, finding ways to create personalized content that is useful to an exact target audience is what works to get readers/traffic to your blog.

05. Use Customer and Competitive Research to Shape Your Blogging: Here, the use of Google Analytics comes in very handy. With it, you can research on and also “spy” on your customers and competitors to know what works for them and what doesn’t. Digging into customer and competitor data can help you find out which type of content gets the best results. That way, you can redesign your own content to better their results using Google Analytics research information.

06. Get More Email Subscribers for Your Blog: This takes a bit of time to set up and to garner sufficient emails. But, once up and running, it is a very good source of reliable traffic. You can lure your readers with token gifts like eBooks to get their emails. Your blog can also be designed with email subscription options which ensure your readers actually see your blog content as soon as it is posted. With their subscribed email addresses, your blog gets right in their inboxes as soon as you make the post.

5 Credible Ways to Boost Your Small Business Sales

As a small business owner, there is no doubt you are desirous to increase your sales at all times. The good news is, there are many different paths you can take to increase your business’s sales. Many members of the small business community do have lots of great experience to share when it comes to credible selling techniques. These here 5 tips come in very handy.



01. Simplify Your Content Strategy. Selling online revolves around good content marketing. Making your content simple and straight forward always gets better results. Content marketing can be a great way for you to increase sales for your business. But fancy strategies can sometimes distract readers from the real purpose of your content. The simpler your content is therefore, the better it is for your marketing efforts.

02. Write Captivating Headlines and Titles. Well this is what your readers get to see first. If you want their attention, your content headlines and titles must be easily captivating and attention-arresting. If you’re going to use content marketing or any other type of written copy to market your business and increase sales, you need to be able to write great headlines and titles. It is attention you want and that is what helps you to grab it. Simple!

03. Set Smart Business Goals. As one popular cliché says, “if you don’t know where you are going, you will end up someplace else.” Setting good goals somehow helps to solve that common problem. Anytime you want to increase sales or accomplish other things for your small business, you must start with your goals. Setting smart goals can mean the difference between success and failure.



04. Latch on to the Art of Upselling. When working to increase sales, it’s often preferable to get your customers to buy more or to buy an upgraded version of the product they’re looking to purchase. That’s where upselling comes in. When smartly and intelligently used, you can get much more products sold by way of upselling than any other.

05. Target Holidays and Festivities. For smart business owners, it is no longer news that you can increase sales using holiday marketing tactics. Even when the economy suffers a downturn and people are left with less disposable incomes, holiday seasons traditionally draw many people out to shop. For this reason, holidays can be a great opportunity for you to increase sales. Targeting holidays and festivities therefore is a very smart way to increase sales for your small business.