What You Don’t Know About Your Social Media Can Hurt You!

Social media happens in the wink of an eye. Word travels so fast that you might go to bed feeling wonderful and wake up to a firestorm. This can be certainly apt to be true if you are not in the practice of routinely monitoring your social media channels. Keeping track of the conversations about you and/or your brand online can be far more than a reputation management best practice. Attention given to those looking for information early in the sales process can result in a significant increase in conversions. Primarily, however, this is about creating a firewall between trouble and you. Cutting the bad news off at the pass is the objective here, and there are some quite simple ways to manage this, which of course is everyone’s concern. It doesn’t have to take all day, as shown in this HubSpot article.

How to keep up with your social media online

• Use available tools such as TweetDeck or HootSuite to monitor social media mentions of on several platforms. They are easy to configure, and allow you to see quickly a broad summary of what’s happening across your social channels.
• Since Google has recently decided to end Google Reader and Google Alerts seems to be broken, marketers who have relied on these useful services are left scrambling to find viable alternatives to get and read newsfeeds. A few you might consider are NewsBlur, AOL Reader and for mobile, Flipboard. For Google Alerts try TalkWalker or Social Mention.
• Make sure you check your blogs, social networks, videos, and your Facebook pages for questions or concerns. Answering and dealing with issues at the early stages can help you avoid trouble and also lead to greater sales and conversions.

Monitoring your social media world doesn’t have to take hours or anything special other than diligence. The key is getting and staying organized, and making use of the tools available to make this task less time-consuming. The benefits far outweigh the hassle!

Is Your Website Costing You Sales?

It’s hard enough to get traffic and develop a workable sales funnel. Don’t make it harder by shooting yourself in the foot by having a dysfunctional and wholly inefficient website. Small business websites are especially vulnerable to these types of mistakes, as they may not have the technical expertise of larger businesses available to make sure they are properly functional. To that end, below are some tips that will help you make your site appealing and useful to your visitors, and ultimately result in more sales and conversions.

7 Tips for improved website conversion

1. Fresh Content – Nothing screams “Let me out of here!” like content that hasn’t been updated since 2010. Updating your sites’ content doesn’t just help you with sales and conversion, but with search rankings also. This applies to products or courses that are no longer available as well. Take them off.
2. Lousy website navigation – Make sure that any visitor to your pages can navigate your site effortlessly and efficiently. Have a link to your home page from EVERY page. If you make it hard to get around, they just won’t even try.
3. Boring pages – Be sure you use white space liberally. Split up long chunks of text into digestible pieces, and make good use of sub-headlines. (also a search benefit) Don’t litter your pages with ads, since this is another guaranteed way to send visitors packing.
4. Have a mobile version of your website – Since we’re in a day and age when more than 50 percent of all of all search traffic comes from a mobile device, wouldn’t it be smart to have a mobile version? Just sayin…
5. Too Much Flash – There are two major problems with Flash. Simply put, cram enough of it on your page and it’ll take eons to load. Also, Google has a tough time indexing flash.
6. Broken Links – If you have broken links that don’t get the visitor where they want to go, they just go elsewhere!
7. Calls to Action – Probably the number one conversion killer is not having strong and effective calls to action, and in most cases more than one!

This is but a short list, but definitely plenty to get you on the right track. Don’t make it more challenging than it is: optimize your site today!

3 Great Tips for Keeping People from Leaving Your Site Quickly

What is your bounce rate and why does it matter? Your bounce rate is the rate at which visitors depart from your web pages. A look at your Google Analytics may reveal some rather sobering information to you. If you have a bounce rate anywhere around 50 percent, then it’ obvious you ought to make some changes!

Why is your bounce rate important?

First of all, Google has made the bounce rate a component of its search engine ranking algorithm, and a site that sports a high bounce rate may have its pages driven into oblivion. What’s worse, since most people are exiting shortly after they get there, odds are your site isn’t accomplishing what you’d like it to. There are cases when a high bounce rate can be caused by your site’s pages loading slowly, but if that’s not the case, we’re offering three good ideas to keep people from leaving your pages quickly.

• Employ videos – Video is demonstrated to be a beneficial factor in retaining people on your pages longer. Videos as well as other multimedia content will keep users engaged, increase traffic and quite possibly increase sales and other desirable actions. YouTube embeds could also help your search rankings in both YouTube and Google. It’s interesting how the exact same content of 1500 to 2000 words watched in a video, audio or other multimedia fashion will result in a far different outcome.
• Make better and more easily readable content – Often content is posted onto a web page as one big chunk. Do your best to split your content into shorter, more readable paragraphs, and make use of subheads, bullet points or lists to break up the monotony. Images help convey points also, and are visually appealing to the eye.
• Highlight related content within your site – Very often you will have content on your site that’s directly related to the piece at hand. Be sure you link to other content on your site that folks might be interested in, and give them a reason to stick around! This could be as easy a fix as using a Related Post plugin if you have a WordPress blog.

Is your old iPhone or iPad sluggish? Have you detected that it’s not loading videos, playing games or scanning the Web as quickly as it used to? This isn’t unusual: Devices often slow as they age. Fortunately, you don’t always have to invest in a new iPad or iPhone. Lifehacker writer Whitson Gordon in a recent story offers tips to speed up a sluggish machine.

No Updates

It’s commendable that you’d like to stay updated on the latest offerings from Apple. But downloading that latest version of iOS might make your iPad or iPhone even slower. Simply put, the newest operating systems and upgrades are often too cumbersome for older devices. Refrain from the updates until you purchase a newer iPhone or iPad.

No Third-Party Apps

You might like third-party apps, too. But Whitson again offers some advice: Rely as much as possible on Apple’s own apps. They’re the ones created to work best with your iPhone or iPad. And if you instead rely on outside apps, you might exacerbate the sluggishness of your device.

Prune the Fat

Finally, if your iPhone or iPad is too slow, it’s time to take a critical look at the music, videos and apps you have stored on your device. Whitson suggests erasing any apps, programs or music files that you rarely access. A bit of pruning on your behalf could inject new life into your sluggish device.

Get Some Laughs and Some Sales at the Same Time!

The great 19th Century Irish playwright and humorist Oscar Wilde uttered these last words: “Either this wallpaper goes, or I do.” Why some adventerous wallpaper company hasn’t used this is beyond me, nonetheless it does go to underscore the point that humor sells. Humor essentially disarms people, often by getting them to view your point in a way they hadn’t looked at before, and initiates rapport that you might have had a difficult time creating some with your latest PowerPoint filed with facts. Art Linkletter told us that laughter is the best medicine, and he was spot on. It could be the cure for what ails your business too! Let’s take a look at 4 ways to use humor in your small business marketing.

4 easy ways to use humor in your small business marketing!

Take advantage of pop culture – This is a generation which has mostly left the evening news in favor of the likes of Jon Stewart, Steven Colbert and the other night time mavens that have built careers around the daily misfortunes of celebrities, sports stars and politicians. It’s all fair game, so don’t be afraid to use your share if you can find a way to make it humorous. Getting your audience smiling and in a good spirits right from the start can go a long way toward helping build rapport with them.

Make humorous videos – It only takes a few moments on YouTube for enough evidence to persuade anybody that a funny video gets lots of eyeballs! Even the lamest concept, delivered in a quirky way will get views and be shared widely. It doesn’t require a degree in cinema to make it happen either. Many just shoot them with their cell phone, o if you want to go whole hog, use an app like GoAnimate or Xtranormal to make quick and visually interesting animated videos.

Create funny memes – Who hasn’t noticed these on Facebook and other social sites? Incorporating this concept with the millions of users on sites like Pinterest, Instagram and Tumblr is a recipe for outrageous traffic numbers.

Connect with humor in your content – Don’t be scared to be a bit quirky or scandalous in your content. People connect with humor as it is a shared experience. We’ve all been through it, and humor is an excellent way to engage on a level deeper than your average marketing message!