Digital Strategy
Millions of people use Twitter everyday to share information, ideas and random updates about what’s going on in their lives. It’s also a great place for shoppers looking for deals, businesses trying to make a sale, and organizations looking for advocates and donors.
Here are three tips you can use to effectively get your point across and generate leads in 140 characters or less: Continue reading “How to use Twitter for Business”
A few months ago Yahoo! Mail users were greeted with Yahoo!’s latest ad placement. The new ad spot is brilliantly featured as the background for the Yahoo! Mail’s login page where millions of Yahoo! Mail users are bound to see it. The spot is a win-win for advertisers looking to score on impressions. This is perhaps the best online placement I’ve seen that makes good use of idle space – you can’t miss the 1,440px × 1,024px image, and there’s no fast-forwarding past it.
I’m expecting Yahoo!’s bold move to inspire other Web sites to create similar placement opportunities for advertisers. Continue reading “Best Billboard? Yahoo! Mail Homepage”
Facebook has announced that they will close their Gift Shop on August 1st. But their exit will not end party for others. The company made it clear in their announcement that third party gift applications such as Birthday Cards and Hallmark Social Calendar etc. will continue to work, and gifts received through their own application will continue to be visible on user profiles. Continue reading “Facebook closing Gift Shop – but not for entrepreneurs”
Ever wonder why your email open rates are low even though your email list is made up of people who willingly subscribed to receive your emails? Here are three tips to get subscribers to open your emails:
Write better subject lines. Subject lines give people a reason to open emails; keep it short – use no more than 60 characters (and there’s never a reason to put your company name in the subject line if the email is coming from your company). Also, get to the point; the subject line should either be informative or action oriented. Continue reading “Three Steps to Better Open Rates”
Everyone wants certain keywords to put their Website among the top 10 search results on Google, Bing or Baidu. The baker wants his Web site to show up every time someone search for “tarts”, the travel agency wants their site to show up every time someone search for “Jamaica” and so on. The fact is, sometimes your company name is the number one keyword driving traffic to your Website. Does this mean your keyword strategy is a failure? Absolutely not.
If your company or organization name is among the top keywords sending traffic to your Web site it doesn’t mean people are coming to your Web site for the wrong reasons – it means they are coming! Continue reading “When your Company Name is Your Top Keyword”
Recently one of my clients called expressing much frustration that visitors to her Website were not staying long enough. Business was going well and most of her customers came to her through her Website but still the average time on site was less than 3 minutes per visitor. What was she doing wrong? Why weren’t her visitors staying longer?
Rather than worry about how much time people are spending on your Website, here are two questions you should be answering Continue reading “How Much Time Should Visitors Spend on Your Website?”
If referrals are important to your business or organization, then visitors to your Website should be able to forward your content to friends in just a few clicks instead of taking time to “copy and paste” your Web links before emailing them to friends.
Online communication today is more than “email”. More and more people are choosing to use social networks as their primary communication platform.
Some of the top Websites are finding that a growing number of their new visitors are coming from social networks where their regular visitors are sharing Web links. For example, news out of TWTRCON (the annual “Twitter for Business” conference) is that social media is the fastest growing source of traffic to the Wall Street Journal Online, wsj.com! Up to 15% of visitors to wsj.com get there through links posted on Facebook, twitter, StumbleUpon or other social media Websites. Continue reading “Is Your Website Social Media Friendly?”
Businesses that depend on email marketing to engage customers will notice two things about their email list every year; 1. Your email list will shrink by at least 15% before the end of the year, 2. Your bounce (email return) rate will be greater than it was the previous year – but does this mean you are losing your subscribers? That depends on your Website.
Customers no longer depend on emails to keep up with the latest news from their favorite marketers – thanks to SPAM (the worst kind), your recipients have grown tired of wading thru emails to decipher which ones they really want to read. Continue reading “Stop Your Email List from Shrinking”
How do you keep customers coming through the door on a major holiday when everyone seem gone fishing or at the beach? Coupons! Mr. Wash is one company that’s getting this almost right. Every holiday weekend their subscribers get an email with coupons for up to 50% off their services. The coupons are “one per customer” and all you need to do is print it and present it for a nearly free car wash. Sounds easy enough? Well, not if you read your emails on a mobile phone.
Old coupons, new challenges. People who must show up in person to get deals from companies like Mr. Wash face two challenges with the ‘print and present’ coupon model Continue reading “Coupons 3.0 – Getting it Right”
Small business operators and educators are sometimes too busy to keep up with latest greatest social media tools. It’s hard enough to decide which one to take on, much more learn how to use them to boost your business. Well we’ve got a tip for you: start with Twitter! It is one of the best gateway social media tool for small businesses and here are 3 reasons why:
Realtime results: Start off by using Twitter as a search engine. Unlike Google, Twitter’s search results are delivered in “realtime” so you get the latest feedback and information on any request, in every subject area and in just about any language. Twitter limits the number of characters per post, so your results are “straight to the point”. Continue reading “Why Twitter is Good for Small Businesses”