Is Business Quiet? Need More Money/Sales? Use a Database!
Tag: digital business course
How Long Does it Take to Write a Blog Post?
THE TRUTH IS, writing a blog post takes time. If it were the case of just writing some sentences, it wouldn’t take that long at all.
But what’s the point of that? The last thing you want to do in a busy, information-saturated world is waste people’s time. It’s an insult and you’ll put them off.
After all, these people have given up time in their busy days to read what you have to say. Don’t ruin this special relationship forever by churning out rushed, poor quality content or waffle.
Always think: What’s in it for them? Continue reading How Long Does it Take to Write a Blog Post?
The New Year’s Approaching: Think About New Content Marketing for Your Business
The Value of Content Marketing
The beginning of a new year, which is typically the quietest as people take a while to adjust to the work and school routine, is when a lot of business owners spend time setting goals for the year ahead.
Just as individuals set their own personal new year’s resolutions, many business owners use January to set some new year’s resolutions for their business’s marketing activities.
Here are the Digital Marketing tasks that staff can do to bring more inquiries and more sales:
- Business blogging vs paid Google Ads or Facebook Ads
- Email Newsletters
- Optimising images and photographs for SEO
Continue reading The New Year’s Approaching: Think About New Content Marketing for Your Business
FREE Digital Business Course
Learn How to Run a Business Online
In a post I published about starting your own business, I said that all small business owners should have an understanding of traditional and digital marketing. You’ll be surprised how many don’t!
All businesses have a digital aspect to them these days so it’s vital that business owners and managers know how to manage the digital aspects of their business.
This starts by understanding some of the terms used and how websites, domain names, hosting and the Google search engine works. Continue reading FREE Digital Business Course
Blogging for Business Training Course
Create a Business Blog to Start Your Content Marketing Strategy
I started Business Blogging when we took our training courses online because there is a lot of information to share about MYOB, Xero, Microsoft Excel and the other software programs that help small business owners streamline their business, manage their accounts and finances and perform sales and marketing to bring in new sales.
Another reason was my realisation that keywords are king in the age of discovery where getting discovered by Google results in over 70% of the traffic to many websites!
Keywords Are King
A lot of small business owners throw thousands of dollars at Pay Per Click advertising in the hope of getting more visitors to their website. The most common service to help people spend these advertising dollars is Google’s own Google Adwords. Here’s a blog post about Google Adwords from 2010.
[quote]Have you heard the promise “I can guarantee your website appears on page 1 on Google”? It’s often by using Google Adwords and targeting selected keywords that companies can deliver on this claim, but at what cost?[/quote]
Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC)
Google Adwords is the perfect capitalist advertising tool because every advertiser competes for the keywords they want. The more competitors there are for a keyword or keyphrase the higher the cost per click – How scary is that!?
I understand that “Insurance” is one of the highest cost keywords you can “bid for” and there would be some pretty big players in that business. They keywords in this paragraph is “bid for” because that is exactly what happens, you place a bid for the maximum you are willing to pay for that keyword or keyphrase for EVERY time someone CLICKS on your ad.
There are ways of making sure a competitor doesn’t send you broke by clicking on your ad over and over, but essentially this strategy involves choosing keywords and bidding in the marketplace with all of your competitors.
Would You Rather Have People Come to You?
Bidding for keywords using Google Adwords is a great way to quickly test an idea or a strategy because you can guarantee website visitors, albeit at a high price, but people come across our website from all sorts of different keyword searches and that is where this blog has come in very handy.
I admit when I first started blogging for business the concept seems very NERDY! It’s like keeping an online diary for all to read and share. Then I justified it by affirming that keeping a blog is really just like having a “News” section to your website, demonstrating that your business is active and there’s a lot going on. Now I realise that it’s even more than that! Blogging for Business helps you
- build an online reputation,
- explain how some customers use your products
- encourage readers to become customers
- encourage readers to be part of your community
- enable customers to be advocates and recommend your business
Having a business blog with useful content, good use of relevant keywords and landing pages that give internet users answers to their questions will help you begin the journey into Inbound Marketing, where potential customers discover YOU and what you have to offer. Do it right and you’ll just need to guide your website visitors to the conclusion you want – usually a sale.
Your Blog Becomes More Valuable Every Week
The other great thing about Blogging for Business is that your blogging site and the landing pages you refer to become more and more valuable over time as they remain in Google’s cache. They also become tools that can be used by your staff as they refer the blogs to customers who have specific questions that are answered in your blog posts.
Google is the current flavour for search engines and they seem to be doing a great job to stay in front, but Bing (owned by Microsoft) and others in China and Russia are always looking for ways to do better and get more people using them and having an active and useful blog will ensure success no matter how the search engine market changes.
Choose EzyLearn for Your Blogging for Business Training Course
We’ve been blogging about our online training courses since 2008 and we are a training company that designs courses in a logical fashion from basic to more advanced skills to ensure you experience the epiphanies most students are looking for when they do a course.
We include all of our content for one low price and we add updates that we create during the year to our existing courses, creating more content and better value for money every month.
Best of all our Blogging For Business Training Courses includes real life blog site membership, exercises where you get to create your own blog posts and link to landing pages, participate in social media and in a community of like minded beginner bloggers.
Learn more about the Blogging for Business Training Course.
Web Analytics Made ‘Ezy’
Ok, so you’ve got a website and on it you have all this information about your company — who your people are, what you do, how customers can contact/connect with you — and best of all: you get heaps of page views every month! Talk about winning the Internet! You’ve got this website marketing business down, am I right?
Except that maybe you don’t. And for this reason, we’re currently developing a new Digital Business Course to help businesses transition into the online world. A big part of that transition involves understanding how web analytics work, which is the bread and butter of any successful website — and indeed, successful business.
How to Use Web Analytics
To get the most out of web analytics, you kind of need to change the way you view your website. You need to see it as a form of marketing, just like an advertisement in a newspaper or a piece of direct mail. Once you start treating your website the same as you would any other marketing activity, it’s likely you’ll have some questions you’ll want answered.
Your Conversion Rate – Do YOU Know It?
Somewhere on this list — though we imagine that it would be on the top — should be “What’s my conversion rate?” To answer this question, you need web analytics. We recommend Google Analytics, namely because it’s free and extremely easy to use.
Your conversion rate is the number of people who have visited your website and carried out some form of action — signed up to a newsletter, made a request for more information, downloaded an e-book, and so on. In short, it’s any action that involves the exchange of information that you can later use to develop into a sale.
Constant Improvement
But the real genius of analytics lies in how it allows you to isolate problems with your website’s content and refine them. For instance, if you have a rather average conversion rate, but a high bounce rate (the number of people who leave your website within 30 seconds of landing on it), there’s a good chance that’s there’s something wrong with the keywords you’ve selected for your SEO. Or you’ve selected keywords that your website’s content doesn’t address properly. Either way, you need to fix this.
Finding Out How Your Customers Think
Once you do, you should see you bounce rate drop off and your conversion rate increase, which means more opportunity for more sales. And just think: if you didn’t have analytics, you’d have never known. This is what makes web analytics invaluable for small business owners, because it gives you rare insight into what makes your customers tick — what are they really looking for, and how can you adapt your business to meet their needs? — and provides you with the opportunity to meet those needs.
In essence, small business owners now have the same resources at their disposal as large multi-nationals, who typically spend bucket-loads on research and development, focus groups, and the like, trying to ascertain what exactly their customers are looking for — and even then, often don’t get it right.
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At EzyLearn, we use web analytics extensively to ensure we’re constantly meeting the needs of our students and potential students. Through web analytics data, we ascertained that a number of small business owners were looking for a cheaper alternative to MYOB, so we developed two new cloud-accounting courses: the Reach Accounting Training Course and a Xero Training Course to satisfy that need.
For more information or to receive alerts about our forthcoming Digital Business Course, subscribe to our blog by clicking here.
