Ideas for Business

Blogging can be hard work, especially when it comes to delivering good quality content on a regular basis. The key phrases there are “quality content” and “regular basis.” We’ll leave it up to you to decide on the timing of your content. Some small business blog writers find that two or three times a week is sufficient. There are others who publish two or three times a day.  If you aim for daily, you’ll at least have the search engine visiting your site daily, and we know that fresh is best if you have the quality.

The main issue then is quality content. Quality can be looked at in several different ways, chiefly in style (language, spelling, grammar and layout), topic, and voice. We’ll assume you have a reasonable education and that you use a spellchecker when writing. Voice is you – the way you approach a subject, the tone you take. For most small business owners, the final ingredient, topic, is often the real stumbling block (and you’re not alone there). How many times have you sat down and wondered what you should be writing about today. Some call this writers block, however, the reality is different. If you have covered your business inside out in previous posts, you may feel you have covered every base.

I can tell you now, you won’t have, however, that won’t stop your “writers block.” There is an answer, and you’ll find it through the various social media channels. Search those channels using some of your keywords. You’ll be surprised with the results. Look for questions, issues that are affecting people, or news. Use that as the inspiration to create new content. Where possible, be different, take a new angle to that already used, then your content will stand out from the crowd on a topic that is on people’s mind. Writers block solved.

Twitter chats are a  strange phenomenon that are becoming increasingly popular. According to one news story, advertisers are even willing to pay to sponsor chats (perhaps that opportunity you could consider). So what exactly is a chat, and is it worth following up on? Twitter chats make use of the hash tag to connect like minded people in a chat session. There are some chats that are so popular they resemble a wild public meeting more than a chat session, with Tweets flying in faster than you can read them. Those particular chats have probably gone beyond what is useful for most businesses.

That doesn’t mean that Twitter chats are useless. If you can lead a chat yourself, and the number of participants are not out of control, then much can be gained through a chat session.  As a chat leader, you organize a time and time limit for a chat session. There are several free services that participants can use to follow a chat session. These include TweetChat and TwitterFall. By including the hashtag for that chat group, people can follow the tweets, adding their own comments along the way.

How can you use a chat session to aid your business? The easiest way to approach this issue is by considering what subject could be covered if you sat down in real life chat session with a group of people. If they were customers, it could be a q&a session, or a tips session where customers offer tips on how to get the most out of your product. Your role then is to follow along, adding advice where necessary and correcting any flaws.

You can join other chat sessions (including those organized by your competition) to learn more about the products you are selling, to learn online techniques such as marketing, or to just determine what issues people are talking about. By adding your own comments, you can improve you own image and help to develop your brand. Twitter chats can be useful additions to the social media marketing options for many small businesses.

When monitoring a pay per click advertising campaign there are several sets of numbers that are important. Click through rates (CTR) are one area that many advertisers concentrate on with the theory being the more visitors you receive to a site, the more opportunities their are for sales. However, your click through rate needs to be seen as a comparison to several other sets of data, in particular conversion rates and costs per click. Your campaign may be receiving a thousand clicks per day, and the cost may be as low as a dollar a click, however, if you are only converting at 1% with a profit per sale of $10, you’re actually losing $900 per day.

On their own, click through rates are a false statistic at the end of the day. You are much better off with lower click through rates if they are targeting better keywords and achieving higher conversion rates. Away from the statistics, one problem that many advertisers fail to deal with is the relationship between their advertisement and the landing page.

If your PPC ad unit promotes widgets, yet your landing page is dedicated to red widgets, then you are going to lose a lot of customers. Your ad unit has failed to deliver. If advertise widgets, then you need a landing page dedicated to widgets, not just red widgets. If you only sell red widgets, then your ad should specify red widgets.

By being more precise with your ad unit, you will see a big drop in the number of click throughs. However, people who do click through will do because, in the example given, they are interested in red widgets. If your landing page is well designed, you should see a considerable change in your conversion rates for that ad unit as well. The end result, less traffic, possible at a higher cost per click, but with a much improved conversion rate. If you marketing plan is costed effectively, you should be in the black and making a reasonable profit as well. PPC for small business is not about generating as much traffic as possible, it is all about generating quality targeted traffic that converts/

The new Facebook fan page setup, while looking good, has also made it easier for businesses to keep a watch on their competitors.  When visiting a fan page, there is a box that has the number of “Likes” noted. If you click on that box, you will gain an insight into a raft of analytics related to that page. What can you learn? Do any of these numbers give you any competitive advantage?

• The number of people who are talking about this particular fan page
• The trends related to new Likes and the number of people talking about that fan page
• Popular age groups, cities, and even the most popular week and the most visited week.

If you want to look around a little more, you can see what issues your competitors considers to be important. You can create sticky content, that is, a post that is pinned to the top. You can also ‘star’ important posts. These become prominent spanning columns on the fan page. Finally, you can check to see how they are using their custom tabs.

We don’t recommend copying what your competitors are doing. What works for them may not work at all for you. However, knowing how they do things, what they think is important, and what their fans like, can help you to streamline and make better use of your own content. Knowing where your competition is in the online marketplace is important if you want to succeed. Social media has made a lot of this knowledge easy to collect – you just need to review it and make some sense of it for your own business.

The Panda and Penguin Google updates have certainly spooked a lot of people. The slightest move in website traffic volume is now being blamed on either one (or both) of these updates, and whilst significant drops in traffic are a worrying sign, a closer inspection sometimes shows the opposite to be true. I recently looked a website that had seen a 50% drop in traffic, and that drop coincided with the Google Penguin update.

Google Analytics is a great tool when used effectively. Using this tool, I could drill down into the various statistics for the both the day before the Penguin update, and for the day after when there was a significant drop in traffic. What I found to be interesting was that Google’s Webmaster Tools showed there was not a significant change in the average search rankings for the targeted keywords. So why the huge drop in traffic? Surely people didn’t suddenly stop using those search terms?

In this case, the drop in traffic came from two sectors, mobile, and Europe. For some reason this website had been ranking highly in search results in Europe. It was also ranking highly in mobile search. Neither of these two sectors were important to this business. They were not geared to provide a service to European customers, and being net based business, mobile traffic had tiny 0.01% conversion rate, so the loss of that traffic wasn’t harming the business.

Whilst there was a distinct drop in traffic numbers to this site, the number of sales were the same both pre and post Penguin. In fact, the post Penguin conversion rate as a number almost doubled – and so it should, half the traffic for the same volume of sales. When looking at traffic numbers from search results, it’s important to dig to find out exactly where you have lost traffic. Is it one page, is it site wide, is specific to a region or connection method?

If this business had kept a closer eye on their search analytics, the fact that almost a third of traffic was coming from Europe may have opened doors for new business. That window has closed now, however, they can look at much improved conversion rates.