Author: Tony

How to use Pinterest for marketing your business

With the amount of technology we use, the amount of Television and movies our society consumes, it is no wonder that a social media site like Pinterest is one of the fastest growing websites out there. Tapping into the popularity of Pinterest can be a great business tool.

What is Pinterest?
It is an online pin board where users can “pin” photos of things that they like or find useful from the web. Their friends will see their pins and they can comment on them, like them, and even re-pin on their own account. Users categorize their pins in what ever way they choose as a way of organizing their pins.

Why should I use Pinterest for my business?
Because of the way Pinterest is organized, the pins themselves are indexed by search engines. When you start an account for your business and start pinning your products or services in an interesting or unique visual way, your content will be indexed, has the potential to go viral, and you are boosting your social media score with Google.

Be Unique
Your pins should be quality photos or images and unique in some way. For an example, if you sell beauty products, your pins should be more than just photos of your products. Take before and after photos of your anti-aging serum. Take a series of how-to photos demonstrating the latest eye shadow trend.

What if your business is strictly a service? Think of your target market and the things that they are interested in. For example, if you are a counselor and your target market is married couples. Think of stress reliever tips that you can write up on an interesting background and pin on your boards. People love to pass around sayings.

Set up your tools
The greatest asset of social media is passing information. The biggest “miss” of users of social media is not anchoring their information. With Pinterest, the things you share have to be anchored to a website rather than uploaded to Pinterest (like you can do with Facebook). The best thing you can do for your business is have a blog area where you upload your photo – and an article to go with it, then to pin it to your account. Now when ever someone re-pins or clicks on your pin, they have the option to follow the pin all the way back to your website.

Free Website Builders

Ever hear the phrase “free is never really free?” If you are looking into building your business website with a free website builder site, this article will help you understand what you are really building. It’s better to build a free website with full knowledge of what you’re buying and what you can and can’t do with it.

Build a Website and Get Found
There is misleading information with the advertising of a few website builder sites. One very popular service gives the impression “Build it – get found.” (Actually most of these types of web builders give you this impression.) The truth is there is no software out there that will build you the perfect site that will suddenly give you search engine results. Most of these free services are pay-per-click partners, meaning they receive a commission when you sign up for the pay-per-click services through their website. The site will entice you with a credit for Google Ads or Facebook Ads. Google and Facebook are really hoping that you’ll keep using their ad services, and because you end up in the sponsored links area of a search (if you bid enough per click) the website builder can now say that you “get found.”

Google Ads are useful for people who have websites that do not receive high search engine results naturally. Bidding for clicks allows them the opportunity to have their web address compete with sites that have been designed better or have a higher Page rank. It can, however, be costly to outbid your competition, especially in competitive industries like insurance. If you are local insurance agent often your corporate office marketing department is bidding high dollar for the same local keywords that you are bidding on. Corporate is essentially competing with you for premium PPC spots. Your Free website can become a very expensive website in order for you to “get found.”

Time isn’t on your side
If you read the how-to articles and postings published by any search engine, they all say the same thing – it takes time for the search engine to index the billion new websites published each month. Ok, so it’s more like 50 million each month. The point is that there are too many websites waiting in line to be recognized by Google for their unique domain and content in a short amount of time. Within 6 months, you’ll know where the search engines are going to place you, for good or bad. If you’re in a niche market, you may get lucky and your natural search engine placement is within the top 40 sites for your keywords. This does not happen very often, but in theory, it could happen. The long wait for placement is another selling point for pay-per-click ads. If you bid enough, you’re immediately placed well in the sponsored links on the right hand side of the search results. If you don’t have a big PPC budget, patience is a virtue for website placement in a natural search, but don’t hold your breath for good results.

Nice Graphics and No Business
The big sell with any website builder service is a nice looking result. You are provided with professional looking graphics, quality images and stock photos, and usually a few special features that allow you to upload your own product images, logo, and unique content. The end result is an attractive website. But the catch is that you will have to market your website heavily in order to gain any measurable traffic. This means paying for web ads, paying to advertise your web address on all the rest of you marketing materials or spending hours online adding your website link to as many other websites as you can (you should be doing this last one regardless of how your site was created).

The biggest piece of advice I have for businesses that are wondering what to do about a website when their marketing budget screams “pick cheap!” Cheap can cost more in the end. The costs may not be felt as lost money, but the cost of not increasing your business with your website is a cost I consider more expensive. Just think of the number of customers that you can add when your website is found in searches for your type of product or service. Over a year’s time, the amount of money spent on pay-per-clicks is probably more than what a good SEO designer would charge for a custom website. You don’t need to spend thousands on a website that will perform in your target market.

If you find yourself in a situation where you absolutely do not have a budget for a website, take a look at creating a blog for your website. Most blogs are free and allow you to pick a template, change some basic colors and even upload your own header image in some designs. You can add pages at will, add photos, link to videos and more. Since no free service is perfect, the trade off is using the blog service’s name in your blog title. You could pay to have an original domain name redirected to your blog, or you can pay a designer to create a blog on your domain name, but that is assuming you had money to create your website in the first place.

Advantages to using a Blog Service
Search engines love blogs. Blogs are simple entities that are mostly text, and search engines love text. You will have better luck with search results if you use free blog software than you would using a free or low cost website builder. The two are constructed differently on the back end, but let’s not go into detail about that. Blogs are also expandable with thousands of free plugins that can add new features or functions to your site. If you’re a do-it-yourself’er, the more accustomed you get to marketing your website, the more you will learn and grow. And there are blogs about blogs so you will always have thousands of resources to help you learn more and do more.

If you need to go cheap, make sure you choose a website option that moves you toward you business goal. Cheap is never easy and can sometimes cost more in the end. Do your research, know your goals, and be educated about what you’re buying.

Paid Search Advertising – PPC (pay-per-click) SEM

Let’s discuss Pay-Per-Click, AdWords, Paid Search Advertising, and website SEO Inverness ND. Search engine optimization SEO and getting found online for a small market like Inverness might be easier than you think. Search engine optimization SEO isn’t really that difficult and is often considered the low-hanging fruit for local search. The problem we see is that businesses are investing in Pay-Per-Click advertising without fixing simple website SEO optimization and most businesses haven’t invested in a mobile-friendly website. This is like putting the buggy before the horse. It doesn’t make any sense to start online digital marketing or PPC campaigns without a good starting point – an up-to-date quality website.

When it comes to website marketing and online marketing just about any web marketing expert should be recommending website SEO search engine optimization and mobile optimization first. More about Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing.

How to write compelling content

Compelling content can be more important than the product itself. The copy of your website needs to bring urgency to purchasing now. Your story must romance the buyer into purchasing from you. Now.

Suite 171 believes that you know your business better than anyone else, but sometimes clients don’t quite have the ability to write it down effectively. This is where copy-writing and content development is crucial. You could have the best product on the market and still lose website leads/customers because of your lack-luster content.

Here are five tips to keep in mind for writing your website’s content.

1. Assume your visitor has never seen or heard of your product before.
2. Know what emotional trigger your product or service fulfills and use it in the copy.
3. Are you using all three learning styles to sell your product or service?
4. Grammar, spelling, punctuation!
5. CALL TO ACTION!!!!!

1. Assume your visitor has never seen or heard of your product before.
It is a common mistake for businesses to assume that visitors are familiar with their product or service and therefore not supply enough information on their website. Often the people searching for your product or service are doing some research to learn more about you or your product. If they don’t get their questions answered in the text of your site, often they will keep looking for the answer on some other businesses website. We have seen this often with well known industries that assume their visitors already know what it is and are just looking for a phone number to call. Wrong. You can’t afford to leave money on the table by not giving enough descriptions, question and answers, photos, charts, testimonials and more. If you believe that nobody reads the content on your site so why bother… you will pay the price for being wrong.

2. Know what emotional trigger your product or service fulfills and use it in the copy.
Consumers buy products and services for many different reasons from necessity to compulsion. However the reason they choose one brand over another, one company over another or one craftsperson over another is all based on an emotional trigger. “This is the company we have always used….” is based on security and doesn’t mean you can’t convince them to choose you instead. You simply need to find the emotional trigger that makes them want to choose you more. A great resource to help you find your product or services’ emotional trigger is a book by Sally Hogshead, “Fascinate: Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation”.

3. Are you using all three learning styles to sell your product or service?
Every human on the planet has a learning style preference, whether they know it or not. Learning styles are broken into three different categories, auditory learners, visual learners, and kinesthetic learners (people who learn by doing). Integrating elements into the content that touch all three learning styles will increase the effectiveness of your message to more people.
Auditory Learners: Some people learn more efficiently or quickly by hearing the information. These learners are auditory learners. They are the people who could listen to a lecture in school and never have to open the book, or they repeat all the best lines in the movie as you are walking out of the theatre having only seen the movie once. Often the way to reach auditory learners is through the story. Auditory learners will hear the words they are reading in their head and if you make the story interesting as someone would read it aloud, you will catch these learners. Descriptive explanations of how your product works, what people will experience at your business, and success stories are examples of content that would be compelling to these learners.

Visual Learners: People who want to see what things look like, see the numbers, see the charts and graphs, see the process are visual learners. It is hard for visual learners to put the pieces together with wordy descriptions. Having photos, videos, charts, samples, before and after photos, design galleries, and other things for them to look at will make these learners happy. Visual learners will remember the words on the page too. Visual learners often are described as people with photographic memories. The learn what they see.

Kinesthetic Learner: These are the people who learn by doing. They need to touch things, feel the texture, do the work. You might think that a website would exclude this learning style because visitors are simply looking at a screen. Give these learners something to do on your site. Give them a test to help them pick out which of your products would fit them best. Offer free samples they can feel or touch. Give them directions to come down to your store to test out the product themselves. Show video or describe in detail what the product or service feels like. Create a demo that requires your visitor to click buttons, type words, choose options. The kinesthetic learner is the doer and the more they do on your site, the greater the chance they’ll choose you.

4. Grammar, spelling, punctuation!
Ain’t you gonna buy my produck?
Need we say more?

5. CALL TO ACTION!!!!!
Sales most basic principle is to ask for the sale. On your website you cannot forget this point. There are a number of ways to ask for the sale and you should include as many as possible. Redundancy is your best friend on the web. Come right out and say it – buy now, call now, email now, chat now and include the appropriate button or information for them to act upon. Include the reason to act now, limited time sale, % off for buying now, internet special, sign up now for free (insert incentive). People want to know they are getting a deal. Give them that in your call to action.