Tag Archives: online marketing tips

A spring cleaning challenge for your marketing – part 2

Posted on by
Reply

Last Friday, I gave you step one of my 2 part Spring Cleaning Challenge for your online marketing. If you didn’t see it, check out Part 1 here:

Hopefully, you’ve taken the time to go through and do that. Not only is it just good practice to look through your site every so often, it may remind you of things you started, but didn’t finish, or ideas you had that are primed for execution now!

Item 2:

Go, right now, and take a look at the analytics or stats for your website and blog. And if you don’t have some sort of analytics set up, we need to fix that.   Pronto!    Please!!

Look closely at what your highest sources of traffic are.  Can you do more with them? For example, if you are getting a high number of visitors from Twitter, maybe you could spend some more time there, and phase out another site that isn’t even showing on your traffic sources right now.

Or, if you’re getting a lot of traffic from a few articles you submitted months ago, maybe now is the time to put a specific article marketing strategy into place, and generate lots more traffic through the regular submission of fresh articles.

Or maybe, you’re getting traffic from a collection of websites and blogs of people you know, work with, or that are affiliates of yours. This is a great one, because it’s quick and easy to deepen the relationship, and generate more traffic from the same sites. You can do this through regularly commenting on their blogs, starting conversations with them in social media, becoming a guest contributor to their blog (you already know their audience is interested in your content!), or simply asking them! A quick email is a great ice-breaker. All you need to say is that you’ve noticed a lot of traffic coming through from their site, and you wanted to thank them for it. You can offer to guest post for them, or suggest that there may be the potential for a Joint Venture between the two of you. And if they’re affiliates of yours already, just ask them what they would like in order to promote you better, and earn more commissions.

Finally, once you know where the highest sources of traffic are, take a good hard look at where you’re spending your time. If you spend hours every week writing articles, but don’t see article directories as a major traffic source, maybe that time would be better spent somewhere else.  This isn’t about creating more tasks for you to do (because almost all of them will probably offer some value to you), it’s about knowing where the biggest return on your time investment is, and focusing your efforts there.

Have you been struggling with figuring out your analytics, creating a
system to automate some of your marketing tasks, or any other  Marketing
Tech headache? Got a question and wish you could just pick the brain of
someone that works with blogs, social media and shopping carts all day
long? Join our next Marketing Tech Q & A call! For only $17, you get
access to our hour-long Q & A call where you can ask all those questions
that have been bubbling around in your brain!
Check it out at www.marketinggeeksinc.com/marketing-tech-qa

Have you been struggling with figuring out your analytics, creating a system to automate some of your marketing tasks, or any other  Marketing Tech headache? Got a question and wish you could just pick the brain of someone that works with blogs, social media and shopping carts all day long? Join our next Marketing Tech Q & A call! For only $17, you get access to our hour-long Q & A call where you can ask all those questions that have been bubbling around in your brain!

A spring cleaning challenge for your marketing – part 1

Posted on by
Reply
This is it, only mine is white!

This is it, only mine is white!

This past weekend, I got super excited when I happened to find the absolutely perfect kitchen “island cart” at one of my favorite stores. My kitchen is on the smaller side, and we don’t have a ton of cabinet space, so I’ve been looking for “just the right” piece of furniture for my kitchen for a long time. So when I found one that was just perfect, you know I snatched it up and raced home with it! I then spent a good portion of my weekend (which was rainy and cold, by the way – spring has left Michigan for the moment!) completely reorganizing my kitchen.

While I didn’t see this particular episode as spring cleaning (it was more excitement!), I think that spring still gets a lot of us in a mood to clean things up and refresh our surroundings.

And if now is a good time to get rid of old winter clothes that no longer fit, it’s also a great time to freshen up your website, your online presence and your marketing.

Just like clothes in your closet, there are probably tasks in your marketing plan that no longer fit and serve your business. And at the same time, there might be a buried treasure hiding under all the junk – something you’ve forgotten about or didn’t know you had in the first place!

You may be spending lots of time on a social networking site that no longer has the audience you’re wanting to connect with. Or maybe your business has evolved, and you’re still getting traffic to your website, but have never checked to see where it’s coming from. And if you don’t know where you’re getting interested visitors from, how in the world can you go out and get more?

So here is a little Spring Cleaning Challenge for you:

Item 1:

Go through your website carefully, and make sure it’s up to date. While things like copyrights, email addresses and phone numbers may seem obvious (and please get at least those right!), look at things like

  • Is your pricing current?
  • Do you have events listed that are way old?
  • For those events that are over, do you have recordings? If so, are they available? If not, now’s a great time to make those available for download – either free or paid. Look, we just created a fresh new freebie or product!
  • Do your newsletter/autoresponder signups and website contact forms work?
  • Is your bio current? Check your website, as well as your social media profiles, article directory sites, and anywhere else you have yourself listed.

On Monday, I’ll give you part 2. But over the weekend, take a look at your website and get that current!

Why it pays to read the Facebook blog

Posted on by
Reply

As some of you may know, my ex-husband passed away over the summer. That was a strange experience for me, as we hadn’t been close for a while, but I was connected with him on Facebook,  joined the Memorial Group that some of his friends set up, attended the funeral, etc.

In browsing through the Facebook blog yesterday, I came across a very interesting post that touched on my story above. Facebook has actually addressed the issue of what to do with the Facebook account of a friend and family member, should they pass away. They allow people to submit profiles to be “Memorialized” which means that they are removed from the general search so people don’t continue trying to add them as friends, but leave them live so that friends and family can post memories and messages on their wall.

pink toolboxYou can read the entire post here. I like that Facebook has addressed this issue already (there’s a great story behind it) since, having 200+ million members, this is quite likely to come up. And it also reminds me that often, there are many features of online sites we use daily that we are not even aware of, unless we take a few moments to explore them. This is usually best done through the site’s blog. So my Marketing Tech Coach tip for you today is to take a couple minutes to look at the Facebook blog every so often, or any site you use regularly. You never know – they may have a tool or feature that you could really use!