Tag Archives: Professional Web Developers

7 Pillars of Marketing a Local Business Online

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When I first started writing for The Virginia Gazette in 1998, the Web was a giant mystery. Almost 13 years later, it’s still a mystery for most! With the emergence of Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, Google, Linkedin, and a host of other sites, getting started with online marketing seems more daunting than ever. Yet, as consumers flock to the Web daily to research local products and services, visibility for your business via the Internet literally spells success or failure. Bottom line: online marketing is NOT optional anymore and you need every one of these 7 pillars to succeed, especially in a local market.

Pillar #1: A Website You Control

You must operate with your own website which enables you to make basic changes to it yourself, preferably right through your web browser. Waiting for a “webmaster” to update text and pictures does not qualify as a smart use of your time or money. WordPress, an open-source (free) publishing platform, makes an excellent choice for managing and organizing virtually any size website.

Pillar #2: Google Maps

Google now stands alone as the “900 lb. Gorilla” of the online search world. However, most don’t realize that “Google Maps” is the most basic component of local online marketing with Google. Get all the details at http://Google.com/places/. This tool is one of the fastest ways to get found in Google and, best of all… it’s free!

Pillar #3: Basic SEO

SEO stands for “search engine optimization” – which means making your website relevant when someone searches for your business name or terms related to what you sell. Building all the content, information, and text on your site around a central theme is the #1 thing you can do to increase your chances of ranking well in Google and other search engines.

Pillar #4: Make Value-Added Offers

Most people don’t make offers on their websites. Their web pages look like everyone else’s and say basically the same things. You must make offers on your site that spur people to action. Offer a discount or faster service. Give an incentive to come in today. Most importantly: make your offers big, bold and obvious on your site while giving people a reason to do business with you right now!

Pillar #5: Drive Traffic

You won’t make a dime with your website if the right people don’t see it. The fastest way to drive traffic is to buy it, specifically with the Google AdWords pay-per-click program. Pay-per-click means you only pay when someone clicks your “sponsored” ad on the search engine listings, and Google’s AdWords is the largest pay-per-click advertising network. However, make sure you set up a “geo-targeted” campaign when starting out so only people in your local area see your ads (instead of wasting time and money showing your ads to people who could never patronize your local business).

Pillar #6: Local List Building

Building up a local following you communicate with using online tools rates one of the smartest and most cost-effective things every local business can do. Whether through email, text, Twitter or Facebook (or some new tool), communicating with a targeted group and providing value-added information and offers can bring huge rewards. One coupon with the right offer to the right audience can turn a ho-hum Thursday into a blockbuster sales day.

Pillar #7: Consistent Follow-Up

The biggest online marketing mistake I see people make is NOT following up with prospects and customers. Use email and other communication tools to keep in contact with your prospects and customers and give them reasons to do business with you (by making offers) while providing useful information they want. As a wise man once said, “The fortune is always made in the repeat business.”

Source smallbusinessmarketingweekly.com

How I Turned the Company Website into a Hugely Successful Business

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By Steve Weissmann, President, Tumbleweed Tiny House Company, Sebastopol, Calif.

I started managing Tumbleweed Tiny House Company in April of 2007. We build tiny houses that range in size from 65 to 172 square feet. For the first five months, our sales averaged more than $30,000 a month.

Then the real estate and stock markets crashed. November of 2007 was our worst month, with just $2,300 in revenue. We hit rock bottom and had to lay off two of our four employees.

We knew that the construction market was in real trouble, and that we needed to find revenue elsewhere. That’s when Jay Shafer, the company founder, and I decided to change our business model to cater to the do-it-yourself builder.

As part of that shift, we also decided to take our website, which had always been mostly an online brochure, and turn it into a serious revenue producer.

Our first task: Test the heck out of the website’s design to figure out what works. Ultimately the changes we made were small but they had a huge impact. Our sales for the month of December 2010 reached $123,000 — all of which was generated online. Here’s how we did it.

Website transformation

The Tumbleweed brand was already established when we started the transformation. People knew about us, and the website got a lot of traffic. But the online sales for our “Small House Book” and house plans, as well as sign-ups for our building/design workshops were pretty minimal.

So we increased the site’s interactivity, giving visitors the opportunity to post comments and exchange ideas. This encouraged people to come back more than once. We also worked to get even more traffic by implementing basic search engine optimization practices. That got us up to 2.4 million visits for the year.

Then I started to think that it wasn’t about getting visitors to the site — they were already there. The problem was in understanding how the visitors engage with the site. What they do when they get there? What pages do they go to? What are they buying?

Behavior testing

This is where split testing, also called A/B testing, came in.

The way it works is that you make two versions of a Web page — sometimes as many as five versions — and you see which version gets the most engagement — the most clicks. You have a specific goal — whether to get visitors to click to the next page, buy something, or sign up for a newsletter.

For example, I may put up two different pictures of a house with a button for ordering our book. “Visitor Group A” sees one picture and button on its page, and “Visitor Group B” sees a different picture and button on its page. Whichever test page gets the most purchase clicks is the one I’m keeping.

We used the software programs Google Optimizer, AWeber and OpenX to run and analyze these tests for our site and our e-newsletter.

Small changes, big results

We found that simple adjustments to the navigation bar at the top of our homepage had a huge impact.

Originally, our navigation bar showed “home,” “houses,” “plans,” and “book” listed from left to right. We eliminated “home,” and then went with “houses,” “Small House Book,” and “plans,” moving them all the way to the left in that order.

Just making those small changes doubled the sales of the book. Twice as many people were going to the book’s Web page because the link buttons were now located in a higher-visibility area. Through our testing, we found that the further you move something to the top left of the page, the more clicks you get. Very small improvements can make a difference, and we’ve learned how to test the impact of those changes: switching colors, pictures, and where elements are positioned.

And we’ve discovered that word choice matters. For example, buttons in software’s default mode often use the word “submit.” But we’ve found that any other word works better than that. For example, just changing “submit” to “download,” “join” or “sign up” can double the number of responses.

The impact

Before the economic crash in September of 2007, our success rate for visitors who bought our book, plans, and workshops was 1 in 600. After the crash, it was 1 in 1,000. Then I started doing the split testing; now it’s about 1 in 200.

We have also used testing to increase sign-ups for our e-newsletter. The first year we had about 4,000 people sign up, the second year we had about 6,000. This year we’ve added 65,000 new readers. The conversion rate for signing up improved drastically from 1 in 148 to 1 in 28.

In 2009 we did $220,000 in sales. In 2010 with seven employees, we did $585,000.

– As told to Peter Weed

Steve Weissmann’s passion is building and developing a Web-based business with the hope that one day he can travel the world and work from anywhere.