With the pervasiveness of the internet, it’s easier than ever to build clientele for your home based business, but in order to do so, you need to know a few basics about internet marketing.

What are Your Marketing Goals?

You should begin your internet marketing strategy by focusing on two primary goals.

First, you want to communicate a message to your target audience. That message should include information about who you are, what services or benefits you intend to provide for your customers or clients, and why they should choose you over the competition.

The second goal should be to sell to those potential clients. In order to accomplish that goal, you need to be visible online, which leads us to the second step in internet marketing for home based businesses.

How Will You Accomplish Your Marketing Goals?

The internet offers many venues by which you can communicate your message and sell your products. Let’s take a look at some of the most effective.

●      Company Website

An effective website is non-negotiable in order to create a successful home based business. Great websites focus on optimizing for conversion, optimizing for organic search, and testing for continued improvement. Discussing these points in detail exceeds the scope of this post, but you’ll find plenty of help in getting started on our website.

●      Social Media

Social media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter level the playing field for home based businesses because they are free and they provide access to millions of potential customers. Start small by picking one venue such as Facebook and mastering it before moving on to a blog or Twitter account.

●      Advertising

Once you master the free advertising venues of social media, you may want to move on to paid advertising such as banner ads or pay per click ads. These options can produce excellent returns, but make sure you receive enough business from each one to justify the expenditure.

Internet marketing for home based businesses offers a great way to get your company off the ground and operating in the black. Take baby steps along the way and master each step before moving on to the next in order to create a successful home based business that meets your needs and gives you the flexibility you’ve always dreamed of.

We work exclusively with small internet businesses.    Give us a call and see how we can help you make your business more successful.

Conversion rates often seem to operate parallel to social media efforts rather than actually intersecting with them. Social media does a great job increasing the quantity of leads, but what’s the point if the website itself doesn’t convert well?

The good news is that you can improve conversion with social media by working to integrate your social media efforts with your other online marketing. Let’s look at a few ways social media can help you increase conversions on your website.

Increase Quality of Leads

While it’s true that contests and giveaways that you host on Facebook can vastly increase the quantity of your traffic, most of those visitors won’t stick around once the contest is over.

However, social media can also increase the quality of your leads by encouraging interaction with your company outside of your website, thereby generating interest among people who already want what you have to offer. For these targeted leads, you can expect to improve conversion with social media efforts, simply by getting your message to the right people.

Encourage Page Improvements

If you’re planning to host a contest or post a link and you expect a large influx of traffic, that’s great motivation for making sure your landing pages measure up to intense scrutiny. As you seek to improve conversion with social media, focus on optimizing landing pages and product pages that will be seen by the majority of your traffic.

You may see a temporary drop in conversion rates because of the traffic increase, but once the contest is over, the improvements you made to your page will result in long term conversion rate increases.

Increase Credibility

Integrating social media into your website can have a big impact on conversion rates by increasing your credibility with visitors. People tend to trust companies that their friends trust, so if you incorporate

YouTube videos or Twitter streams on your landing pages and people see that you have a large social media following, they may be more likely to buy from you. The more you can integrate social media into your other online marketing efforts, the better you’ll be able to measure ROI for your social strategy.

While social media often seems to be vague in terms of measurable results, you can improve conversion with social media by taking steps to integrate it with your website, improve your landing pages, and increase quality leads that will ultimately lead people to take the actions you want them to take.

Additional Resources:

Social Media Strategy: What You Need to Know

Social Media Tips for Small Businesses

Are You Engaging Your Customers With Social Media?

The landing page is the welcome mat that invites the user into the company door. If your digital welcome mat is messy, distracting, boring, or uninviting, then users will turn around and walk away without converting. Making sure that you get those conversions is key to a website’s success.

Here are 4 easy-to-test elements of your site that can dramatically improve your landing page, and therefore your conversion rate.

Headline

Your headline can literally make or break your landing page. A great headline will grab the user’s attention immediately and draw them to the rest of the landing page. Landing page optimization gurus have a wide variety of opinions on what makes a successful headline.

Some prefer short, punchy headlines, while others prefer longer thought-capsule headlines. Really, all that matters for your site is that you find an answer that provides the best conversion rate possible. Thankfully, it is easy to test a variety of headlines with a series of simple A/B tests.

Opening Paragraph

If your company doesn’t have a good writer in-house, you may have to employ a copywriter in to help test your opening paragraph.

Opening paragraphs need to connect your headline to your call-to-action in a smooth, persuasive manner. Once again though, landing page optimization gurus differ widely on the best way to go about doing this.

If your conversion rate is unexpectedly low, it could be worth testing a couple of different opening paragraphs, to see if this can raise your conversion rates.

Call to Action

This element is much like the doorknob on your door. It needs to be small, turn smoothly, and not distract the user from what’s inside the door.

The user needs to know exactly where to put their digital hand, and know exactly how to get in the door. This can be accomplished with attention-grabbing (but not distracting) colors and shapes, and text that is straight-to-the-point.

It is amazing how many landing pages fail to test this element of their landing page. Optimization here can have a dramatic impact on conversions.

Product Benefits

Once you’ve got a user hooked, some users need a little bit more information on the benefits of your products or services. The product benefits section can either draw these users back to a conversion, or if poorly presented, result in that user abandoning the attempt.

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Your most important benefit should be first, but keep in mind that the user might have a different opinion than you about which is most important, so test several different arrangements of product benefits.

What simple elements have you tried testing on your website?  Did they yield big results?

We snickered at her and continued playing what could loosely be interpreted as kickball—not sure we made as good a use of our time as her. Last I heard, she’s running a highly successful engineering consulting firm, which leads me to a general conclusion about my own field: sometimes in the wide world of web analytics it’s good to take a second and review the terminology. And especially if you’ve never taken the time to understand the jargon bantered about by the kids down in the IT basement, here’s a crash course on the relevant techno-slang.

Web Analytics: the collection and evaluation of all data regarding the use of your website, including how many hits each page received, who linked to your site, and so on. This information can be used to identify which portions of your site are receiving the most attention and which are leaking potential customers.

Abandonment: also called cart abandonment, whenever a visitor stops partway through the checkout process  for whatever reason, be it confusion or a usability issue.  Conversion optimization seeks to minimize this.

Bounce Rate: the percentage of visitors enter your site, look only at one page and then exit (the visitor enters and bounces right off your website)

Conversion: whenever a visitor performs a desired action, be it making a purchase, downloading a white paper,completing a Contact Us Form,  signing up for an email newsletter, or printing a coupon. The Conversion Funnel is the process each visitor goes through to perform this action—try to keep it short, sweet, and relatively painless. A high Conversion Rate is what you’re after.

Entry/Landing Page: The first webpage seen by a visitor upon entering your site, whether by a search engine query a web banner, a link from another website, or a PPC (pay-per-click) advertisment.

Recency: the number of times a unique visitor goes to your site within any particular time period (once a day, every two weeks, once a month)

Segment: usually of visitors, that web analytics seeks to identify in order to help you craft appropriate marketing and content changes to increase conversion rates

Session: the time a unique visitor spends on your site in one sitting

Unique Visitors: the number of inferred individual people who visited your website once (or more) within a designated time frame.

Hits:First a little background on “hits.” A “hit” occurs when a visitor accesses your website; their computer sends a request to your website’s server to begin downloading a page. Each element of a requested page (graphics, text, multimedia, etc.), is recorded by your site’s web server log as a “hit.” The first few years that websites were a reality, webmasters got really excited about the number of “hits” to their web pages and initially a large number hits were equated with a really popular website (lots of traffic). But a typical page will cause more than 20 hits on the server and that number can go up dramatically depending on page design and visit patterns, so webmasters and analysts soon figured out that tracking hits didn’t give them accurate picture traffic to a website. Instead, today we use metrics such as page views and visitors as guides for traffic measurement.

Did we miss one?  If you need help navigating through your web analytics reports, we can help you interpret the information and put it into action.