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Five Online Marketing Tips in Five Minutes

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We hoped your week rocked like ours. Focus Consulting is expanding rapidly as more and more customers realize the value of our online marketing and social media training. Managing a website is not an easy task. For this edition of our Friday Newsletter we thought we’d share five great tips to help you make your website a killer marketing tool.

1. Change something on your website every week : It does not matter what it is, but change something. I can be your blog, it can be property information, it can be an informational article. But change something. I have a secret to confess to you – even I forget to this. But when I do the results are amazing. How amazing? This is what happened to one of our sites this week: The site in question averages about 50-65 visitors a day. We worked with the client and helped them write a simple blog article. It was just a couple of paragraphs. I am being dead serious when I say their traffic was over double the regular traffic the next day. Google loves new content. They eat it up. Those who update their website more often are more relevant. More relevant = ranked higher = more customers = more revenue.
2. Add a free mailing list to your website : We recommend MailChimp to all of our clients. The best leads are the ones that want to hear what you have to say. Get those leads on a mailing list and update them every week. They will love you, and as long as you constantly stay in touch with them they will refer you new business.
3. Move to a faster hosting company : Shhhh. One of the big secrets on the internet is that your website speed matters  – a lot. If you do step number one above but it comes from a slow website Google will rank you lower. That is why Focus Consulting uses only the best web hosting servers. And we are constantly making changes to our customers sites to make them faster. We also run our customer’s sites through independent third-party tools that prove that they are the fastest sites on the internet.
4. Create a video featuring the company star – YOU ! : Pictures and video on your website are like the toppings on an already great dessert. Both take an amazing website and make it even more yummy. We have shown time and time again that customers using online video get people that stay longer on their sites. It does not have to be professionally done. Just press the ‘Record’ button and tape yourself talking about what you love to do and what you are good at. Get that up on YouTube or Vimeo and link to it from your website. Make it serious, make it silly, make it fun – but just make it. Your readers will love it, and they will remember you and your smile over your competition. Don’t forget to smile :)
5. Get a fresh design : This goes in line with number one above. Got a boring site? It does not have to cost you thousands of dollars to spruce it up. When we move our customers to WordPress they find out that there are hundreds of free themes and designs out there for the choosing. That is why we love WordPress so much. You can switch designs in five minutes and not lose any of your pages or blog posts. Don’t like your design next week? No problem. Changing designs in WordPress is easier than changing your socks! Who do we recommend? If you don’t have 3 grand to spend head over to Allographics Oklahoma City Web Design. I have problem saying we are 100% biased. So check them out and do your own due diligence. Most people that talk to them end up working with them.

Filed Under: Internet Marketing Training, The Full Blog

Focus on Marketing: Text Message Marketing Experiment

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When you are marketing and selling services anything , you realize quickly that you are constantly experimenting. It may be online, it may be in the real world, it may be in video, print or radio. But you are always trying new and different tactics to see what the impact is to your bottom line. (Note: If you are not doing this then you need to start.)  The only way you learn what works and (more importantly) what doesn’t work is by failing. I would really not even recommend that word failing. It is all learning. Learning what works well, and learning what is not worth your time, effort, or marketing dollar.

The Experiment:

We recently tried a 30 day experiment with TextMarks. Text messaging is a huge industry, and it is only going to get bigger. It was a simple experiment; see how many people we could sign up and get to take action based on informational and marketing messages that we sent on a semi-daily basis via text message.

The Result:

In short it is not for us. We had a decent number of signups and we sent out updates on regular basis. But there is so much ambiguity about the messaging going out and the action people are taking that it quickly becomes frustrating.

The Challenges:

The biggest one for me was measurement. I am a fanatic when it comes to measuring my online marketing efforts. I want to know about every inbound and outbound click. When people are coming to my site I want to know from where, when, who and why. When people are leaving my site via a link I created I want to know which link and when. I can easily measure all of these things with our email marketing program MailChimp. We almost have this down to a science. When we were issuing our text messages I was not able to tell very much about what people were doing on my site once they came in – or even if they came in. I cannot directly measure and trace the entire lifecycle of the customer visit.

Now it may be that our marketing and our service does not lend itself to text messaging. This will be the subject of more experimenting in the future. Is it only good when you want people to take immediate action? Do people seem more interested in coupons and sales via text message rather that just information ? Were my links I sent being shown as links on all mobile  devices? All of these are great questions that I wish I could have measured.

For now we are going to drop it. But I’d like your feedback in the comment below….

Do you text message a lot? Do you subscribe to any text messaging alerts like we had here? What attracts you to a text message and taking action? What are some good and bad implementations of text messaging marketing systems that you have seen?

We’d love to hear your comments on this.

Filed Under: Social Media Marketing, The Full Blog

Measuring, Getting Fired, And Google First Page Search Results

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Are you measuring your marketing online ? – As the old saying goes: “You can’t improve what you can’t measure”. This holds true whether you are working in the real world or the online world. But what should you be measuring, and how do you get started? First – get a Google Analytics account and have your webmaster add that to your website ASAP. Any good webmaster can do it in a matter of minues. Then once you’ve had that installed for week start tracking the following numbers every week on a spreadsheet or a piece of paper: Number of visitors (should be going up), pages per visitor (shoud be going up), how much time each visitor spends on the site (should be going up), and your bounce rate (should be going down). If you need help tracking these numbers (or even need a website to get started tracking these numbers) contact us at Focus.

How to piss away a 20 year career in 140 characters and 30 seconds – We here at Focus love to share examples of social media gone bad. Why? Because we don’t want you to kill your personal reputation, your company’s repuation or worst of all to lose your job. How fast can it happen ? One bad Facebook update or one bad Twitter update and you are history. A CNN reporter found out the hard way this week when she was fired for a Twitter message she posted. Remember the cardinal rules: If you would not say it in a bullhorn on a rooftop or say it with your mom/dad around don’t say it online. And don’t let other inexperienced people do your updates.

Want First Page Google Results? Danger Danger – It is everybody’s dream – to have their service or product show up in the top 10 positions of the very first page of a Google search . It has been shown time and time again that this can make or break you online. There are companies out there that promise they can do this for you. (We are not one of them because we know you cannot do it cheap and organically at the same time). But we were pitched by one this week that said they could do it – and that they were those only ones around that could. What made it pretty funny for us is that we had seen the same pitch from a different company exactly a week before. It is definitely doable if you have the money to afford the ads at that level. But please be very careful of companies like this one that are paying hefty fines for misleading companies when promising Google page one results. If you’d like more information on Google or Facebook advertising contact Focus and let’s chat.

Filed Under: News, The Full Blog

Mailing Lists, Private Membership, and Website Live Help

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Do you have a mailing list on your site? Mailing lists and newsletters are one of the best ways to build customer loyalty and communicate with your clients on a regular basis. We use Mailchimp here at Focus and we recommend it to all of our clients. Why? Because your cost is ZERO until your email list gets over 500 members. There is no reason for you to not sign up. You can have your own mailing list form on your site in a matter of days. Click here to see how they work and get your own account today.

Focus Beginner Marketing Private Membership Coming - We have a lot of people that come to us that are just getting started in marketing online. And they have no clue as to where to start. Do you start with Social Media? Do you build your website first? But what about the Facebook Fan page? These are all questions that Focus can help you with. And we are building a private paid member area just for you to be able to learn more about this topic . Our private communty will be geared towards the person that has no time to learn online marketing, or that wants to learn it but needs to start at square one. Stay tuned! This is exciting stuff.

Have you ever wanted to offer LIVE help on your website? This week we discoverd a great FREE utility that allows you to offer a live chat session to people browsing your products and your site. And you can also proactively initiate a chat with the shopper. That product is called Livezilla! and can be found HERE. Do you love free? We sure do. This product does some amazing things. You can see exactly what part of the country the person is browsing from. You can see what page they are browsing on your site. If you are chatting with them you can send them an exact page to browse. This is great if people are hunting for something on your site that is hard to find. Check it out and let us know how you like it.

 

Filed Under: News, The Full Blog
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