You’ve probably spent a lot of time, and money, getting your website ‘just so’.  Now you want people to visit it, find out what you do and hopefully, buy from you!  Many people believe Google will instantly bring hordes of potential clients – if only that were true!  Search Engine Optimization takes time to produce results and needs ongoing testing and tweaking.  Using Pay Per Click campaigns will certainly help – but can be expensive.

Whether your business sells products or services, the following list of low-cost and no cost ways to get more visitors aren’t at all techie to do.

1.  Tell people about it – don’t assume everyone knows about your website.  If you’ve recently added something interesting, that’s a good reason to mention it when you’re out networking.

2.  Business card – give people a reason to take a look at your website, offer them something interesting like an article or free report (this will also give you an opportunity to include them in future email marketing campaigns)

3.  Online Directories – there are so many of these directories that they aren’t as useful as a few years ago.  But it’s still worth taking advantage of free listings that include a link back to your website so long as the directory looks reputable.

4.  Social Network Profiles – people you connect with on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are more internet savvy and will probably want to visit your website to find out more about you, even before connecting.  Give them a warm welcome

5.  Email Signature – so often forgotten, this is a great place to encourage people to click through and visit your website (or blog).  Make sure to provide a ‘live’ link and check it works OK.

6.  Postcards and direct mailers – just because traditional mailings are offline, don’t stop promoting your business’s online home.

7.  Letterhead – same as 6. above.  (Does anyone actually use letterheads anymore?)

8.  Invoices – why not include a discreet promotional message and your web address? (I’d advise against anything too brash when you’re also asking for money)

9.  Voicemail – Use the outgoing message to encourage people to visit your website after they’ve left a message for you.  It’s quite unusual, so they may just do it!

10. Articles (online and offline) – If you’ve written something of interest, be sure to provide a link (url offline) so readers can click to find out more.

If you consistently use all the above methods, you will get more visitors to your website.

Do you have anything to add to the list?  Please share in the comments below, we’d love to know

If you thought autoresponder messages were just for sending those ‘Out of Office’ replies to emails, we’d like to introduce you to some much more interesting uses!

Autoresponders are a great way to automate some of your marketing online.  They are a series of email messages you write in advance and then schedule to be sent out at intervals you determine.

In order to set up autoresponder messages you will need to sign up to an email service such as AWeber or MailChimp.

4 Uses for Autoreponders in your Business

Communicate with prospects after they’ve signed up to your list and downloaded the freebie you tempted them with.  If you offer a monthly newsletter, it can be a long time between when people join your list and the date of your next issue.  A series of carefully written short emails will keep their interest and hopefully result in more serious enquiries.

Send out an E-course. Sending out a series of lessons by email is a popular way to deliver the sign-up freebie.  In many ways it can be better than one huge and overwhelming free report type of download.

As a replacement for an Ezine. If the thought of writing a regular email newsletter fills you with dread, then writing a series of ‘evergreen’ articles may be the answer.  Most autoresponder providers enable you to set up messages at least one year ahead of time.

Keep in touch with clients after a purchase. All too often communication grinds to a halt when customers have made a purchase.  Setting up a few special follow up messages will make sure they continue to feel appreciated, enable you to suggest other products/services they may want to consider, and can also reduce the number of refund requests you receive.

As with all low-cost online marketing tools, it can be easy to get carried away!  Spare a thought for the people receiving your autoresponder messages and make sure you’re not bombarding their inboxes too frequently.  You’ll soon know if the number of ‘unsubscribes’ goes up!

We hope you’ve enjoyed this brief introduction to autoresponder messages and will be revisiting the subject again soon.  If you have any questions, please let us know in the comments below

If you’ve ever got lost trying to write down or type a long URL like: http://www.verylongdomainname.com/index/wherenext123/perhaps here/perhapsthere/?01dontknow/youhavetobejoking/phewatlast.html, the chances are the person giving it hasn’t heard of URL shorteners or that it could have been made it into http://bit.ly/atlast (I don’t know if that’s a real web page by the way!).  This also makes the web address much easier to remember, and pass on.

Shortening an unwieldy and long URL is very convenient. If you use Twitter, you’ll know the number of characters is at a premium (only 140 per tweet), so the shorter the url, the longer the rest of your tweet message can be.

When you use a long URL in an email, there can be problems as a long link is more likely to ‘break’, in other words clicking on it doesn’t take readers where you intended them to go.  Instead they end up with an error message.  While you’d think people would get in touch and let you know the link was broken, often they forget because they’re busy, and you’ll always wonder why there were so few click throughs to your latest promotion.

Some URL shorteners enable you to ‘personalise’ the result. For example, you might want to include ‘mynewproduct’ – so the shortened URL would be http://tinyurl/mynewproduct (hopefully not a real web page!)

If you use Hootsuite as your Twitter client, they offer two URL shorteners: Ht.ly includes a ‘social bar’ (see below – the bar is at the top of the screenshot).

This means you can easily Retweet the blog post and have access to submit the link to Digg, Reddit, Delicious, FaceBook, etc.

The second of Hootsuite’s URL shorteners is Ow.ly – which creates a simple short link.  Both Ht.ly and Ow.ly provide click through statistics.

Click through stats are possibly one of the most compelling reasons to use a URL shortener (not all of them provide this service, so check the one you use does).  Being able to see how many people are clicking through to your webpage or blog using your link is very valuable marketing data to have.

It’s a good idea to check the shortened link before you give it out – just click to make sure it takes you to the page you want to go to!

There are many (over 100) different URL shortening tools, some more reliable than others.  For an in depth analysis of performance and uptime, see Mashable’s helpful blog post from earlier this year.

Have you tried URL shorteners?  If so which do you like?  Please share in the comments below – and if you found this post helpful, we’d love a retweet

Chatting to fellow business owners at local networking events recently, I’ve discovered that some people who use the social networks to make new business connections often favour one of ‘the big 3’ sites (Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn) and ignore the others.  This is a mistake as they could be missing the opportunity to reach a whole section of their target market.

LinkedIn – known as ‘the professional network’ and used by corporate-types seeking employment in large organisations.  In addition, consultants and professional service providers connect with people they know in ‘real life’, congregate and converse in the groups.  Anyone who take the time to learn and apply the more advanced features can get a lot from this network.

Facebook – regarded as the place to be if you’re in a B2C business, although there are plenty of opportunities to connect and communicate with other business owners.  I’ve noticed some professional service providers turning their backs on Facebook, believing it isn’t a serious place for business owners.  Admittedly contributions to groups and pages tend to be more light-hearted and conversational, but they’re good places for building relationships as well as connecting with those who prefer FaceBook to LinkedIn.

Twitter – so many business owners dismiss this micro-blogging platform as a ‘waste of time’ – which it can be if you don’t have a plan on how to use this online wonder, but it’s an all important link to all the other pieces of the social media network.  Twitter is for making new connections, who you may go on to also connect with on other sites; for automatically updating your status on LinkedIn and FaceBook; for inviting people to visit your blog and read about your latest promotion.

Joining more than one social network will increase the number of connections you make, and it greatly increases the number of times you can get your message in front of those connections.  And it needn’t mean spending hours online!

How many networks do you belong to? Do share your experience in the comments below.  If you found this post helpful, a Retweet would be appreciated

I’ve just visited a very odd website.  It belongs to someone I met at a recent networking event and I wanted his email address to make contact as I can’t find his business card.

When I couldn’t see any details on the home page, naturally I went straight to the ‘Contact’ page – to be confronted by a form.  And that’s all that was on the page – no phone number, no address, no email – nothing but a form to complete – which I don’t want to do.  I know forms have their place, but surely not as the only way of getting in touch?

I wonder how often this chap’s phone rings with new enquiries?

It got me thinking about how we often don’t see the obvious on our own websites (I even had a quick look at ours to make sure you can contact us easily!)

Find out if you’re a mystery to your clients by taking a critical look at your website.  Better still, ask someone who hasn’t seen it before to visit it and ask them to answer a few questions:

• How do they get in touch with you?
• Can they explain what you do?
• Do you make it clear who you do it for?
• Is it obvious what you want them to do next?

Visitors to your website should be able to easily see all this information on your home page (even if it’s just a summary and they need to click through to other pages to read more detail).  After all, the home page is often the one most first-time visitors land on, so it’s important to let them know if they’re in the right place quickly.

Make it very easy for your customers and prospective customers to find basic information.  If you don’t, they’ll click away because they don’t have time to solve a mystery.

Have you come across websites that kept you guessing?  Do share in the comments below.  And if you found this post helpful, please retweet it!

Following on from Sam’s post on this topic last month  – I thought I’d share 3 of my current favourites with you too!

WiseStamp.com – If you use Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo or AOL to send your emails, and Firefox or Chrome as your internet browser (there are plans to increase coverage very soon), do take a look at this very versatile tool which will let you create a professional-looking signature block for emails.  The free version (although it’s polite to make a donation) provides 2 alternative signatures and several templates to try.  I especially like that we can include social media links AND a latest blog post, by pulling in the RSS feed.

Tungle.me – I only started using this online diary a few weeks ago and so far am very pleased.  It enables me to arrange meetings with several people, or just one person by emailing over my availability – avoiding that annoying email ping-pong that usually ensues when trying to agree dates and times.  Tungle not only emails me when a meeting has been booked, it also sends a reminder if anyone hasn’t booked, so I can follow-up.  The other parties don’t need to sign up for an account in order to schedule a meeting either (which can be a barrier for some people).

Another great feature is that Tungle not only books confirmed appointments into my Google Calendar, it also syncs automatically with my lovely new BlackBerry (Bold 9700) so I can schedule meetings even when away from the office.  (Also syncs with iPhones).

Paymo.biz – I originally tried out this timer tool to find out where my time was disappearing to! (see post on my other blog).  More recently, I’ve found it very useful for tracking time spent on various projects and client work.  There’s a downloadable desktop widget which is very quick and easy to use and great if you need to stop working on a task, handle an interruption and then restart the timer.  The reports are very detailed, as long as you take time to type in a few notes, and can act as professional looking back-up time sheets to invoices.

We love to hear from you, so please share any favourite online tools you’ve found helpful. And be sure to re-tweet this post so we can keep spreading the word about the good stuff!

Following the recent announcement by Ning’s new CEO of his intention to phase out their free service, we thought it high time to write a few words of caution on the potential risks associated with over-reliance on free online services.

Here at Savvy Marketers, we teach how you can establish and increase your business web presence using the free (and low cost) tools available.  We still believe this to be a great way to get started, especially if you’re on a shoestring budget.  However, once your business starts to grow, you experience some success and make money, it’s a good idea to move away from the free tools and invest in paid versions.  Here are a couple of additional reasons to consider:

Support – most free services and tools are offered free while they’re still in BETA and the developers are testing them out, so they’re are more likely to crash without warning which can cause you all kinds of problems.  When you run into difficulties, there’s very rarely a help desk to contact.

Ownership of Data – If you’ve spent ages building up lists of valuable contacts in the social networks including Twitter, FaceBook, Flickr, YouTube and LinkedIn, it doesn’t bear thinking about the effects on your business of losing them all suddenly if a network went down or ceased to exist overnight!

Similarly, if you use a free blogging platform like Blogger, Posterous or WordPress.com – all your words of wisdom are vulnerable to disappearing without warning.  The same applies to any podcasts on free sites, slides on Slideshare – the list is long.

It’s your responsibility to take the precaution of downloading your lists of contacts and keeping copies of your material on your server or other back-up device, and we would recommend you do this even when you use paid online services.  (Sam recommends Sugarsync back-up service)

We don’t want you to stop using the free internet tools and services to start or build your business (we intend to!), just be aware of the possible pitfalls and take action to safeguard your valuable data.

Once you’re in a position to make the move to paid services, remember that you’re investing in the growth of your business, you’re helping the economy to recover – and thus enabling more people to buy from you!

If this post raises any concerns or questions about a free service you’re using, please let us know in the comments below, and we’ll do our best to help.

It’s high time we explored another of the social networks on this blog (before becoming completely Twitter obsessed!).  LinkedIn may not have so many active members (a mere 55 million, compared to Facebook‘s monolithic 400 million!), but then it serves a very different audience. To be honest, this is the site I’ve found the hardest to get to grips with – and I’m still learning.

At first glance the LinkedIn site seems rather plain but that’s actually a refreshing change from the busy, bright pages of some other social networking sites!  It certainly gives the impression of being a professional site to belong to.  Not a gift or lost turtle in sight!

Who is LinkedIn for?
I believe it can work well for those employed (or wanting to be employed) by larger organizations, as well as for professional service businesses of all sizes.  As with most networks, it attracts people from around the world engaged in different businesses, but thankfully it  doesn’t work so well for the network marketers and ‘get-rich-quick’ merchants who seem to proliferate on FaceBook.

Here’s a whistle-stop summary of just a few of the useful features to get more from your LinkedIn membership.

Profile
Resembling a professional CV and listing present & previous employers/businesses, this is the place to talk about you and your expertise.  (Some people still get it wrong and try to write a sales pitch!)  A friendly and professional photograph (of you, not your logo) add a further human element.

Connections
As with all online networks, it’s best to start off by connecting with people you know ‘in real life’.  LinkedIn provides options (see screenshot) to help with this and has a great additional feature, based on the ‘six degrees of separation’ model.  Once your new contact is confirmed, you can see everyone they’re connected with (unless they’ve chosen to make that information private).

Recommendations
Offering and requesting recommendations is a good way to show viewers of your profile that you have friends/former clients who are prepared to say nice things about you, and of course, you then have published testimonials to impress potential employers/clients.  I would just caution against a too obviously parochial approach when using this feature.

Groups
Another great way of making new, like-minded contacts, taking part in discussions and demonstrating your expertise and generosity in your areas of interest.  If you’re on LinkedIn, we’d love you to join our Savvy Marketers Group!

Answers
Where you can also post questions you’d like answers to from the collective wisdom of other members.  The real power of this feature lies in watching out for other people’s questions in your area of expertise and sharing your answer.  If the question originator likes your reply they can ‘rate’ it which helps you build your expert status.

Applications
These are optional ‘extra’ features you can add to your profile page to share more about you and your business.  For example you can include an Amazon reading list, let others see what’s being tweeted about you on Twitter, set up a Poll to do some market research – just for starters.  Other interesting applications include:

Events
Quick to set up and easy to share forthcoming events with all your contacts.  A short summary is posted on your profile page and it can be linked to other networks or booking websites.

Blog
You can import the feed from your WordPress or Typepad blog and show off latest posts on your profile page.

Slideshare
This is an underused facility to share PowerPoint presentations with your profile visitors. and another opportunity to showcase your knowledge.

There’s lots more to share about this powerful professional network, so we’ll be revisiting again soon!

Do you have any tips or success stories to share about LinkedIn?  Please use the comments section below!

Whenever we run workshops or give talks to groups about the benefits of using the internet to market small business, there’s one question we invariably get asked.

“Will social media marketing work for my business?”

The short answer is you don’t know – until you try it!  In our experience, owners of small businesses are discovering all kinds of benefits from using social media marketing methods – and many different ways of using the social networks too.  It isn’t just about immediately getting more sales!

However, it would be foolish to keep using precious time and resources on activities that aren’t working and measuring results and effectiveness are a vital part of marketing.  Here are a few ways you can start measuring social media effectiveness:

Website visitors – You don’t only want to measure the number of visitors to your site with a tool like Google Analytics, you need to capture their details to be able to contact them again.  This is where having a sign-up box will help.

E-Commerce – It’s surprising the number of potential customers who don’t complete the purchase, even though they fully intended to buy.  Most Shopping Carts will let you know where and how many people jump ship, so you can correct and reduce the loss.

Blog – Providing interesting content will encourage readers to comment.  Also, make it easy for people to subscribe to the feed and offer more than one way for them to do this (either to a reader or by email).

Article Marketing – monthly reports will show you how many views each article got, the number of clicks on each link, and even which keywords people used to find the article!

Newsletters – Using a good provider (not Outlook!)  will enable you to see how many people received your mailing, how many opened it (although this isn’t completely accurate as some people have a preview window which automatically opens the message) and most importantly, the number of clicks back to your selected web pages.

Social Networks – Of course you want to know which networks are bringing the most visitors to your website or blog.  Using (currently) free tools like http://bit.ly/ and http://ow.ly/url/shorten-url (part of the Hootsuite Twitter client) mean you can easily track this.

I hope this has given you some ideas to try out in your social media marketing.  What else have you tried that can be measured and works well?  We’d love you to share by leaving your comments below!

For small business owners who embrace the internet, social networking presents so many opportunities to connect, communicate, share and get their marketing message ‘out there’.

Many individuals, from college students to pensioners, are also enjoying the novelty of being part of a growing online community, connecting with like-minded people, sharing their thoughts and experiences, as well as following TV and film celebrities who have discovered the PR value of belonging to Twitter and Facebook.

I spend a lot of time online (probably far too much!) and am often taken aback by some of the rather frank and personal tweets and status updates. I’m talking about strong language, personal attacks and bigoted views. Of course I realise much of it is done for the ‘shock’ value but really, it isn’t clever and it certainly isn’t a good move for your future reputation.

You are not only communicating with people you know. Once you hit ‘update’ your message is available for the whole online world to see, forever after. Even that little @ message replying to a close friend is visible to all other followers (and your Facebook and LinkedIn contacts if you’ve set your updates to synchronise). Do you really want a potential employer/partner/business associate to read every detail of what you got up to on that weekend or see the party photos you just posted on YouTube?

As a raving fan of social media marketing, the last thing I want to do is put you off joining in. Indeed you must join in for the good of your business! What I’m saying is please think before you post, message, tweet or have a rant. Are you happy for the world to read your update, or would it be better kept as a private phone call, email or DM?

Sharing personal stuff is a bit of a minefield. Yes it’s important to let people get to know who is behind the business, but if you’re having a bad day, perhaps it would be wiser to stay away from the keyboard….