Author: Min Tang

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Weblog Admin

How to Maximize The Impact of Your Blog Posts

 

It’s long been established in the marketing world that creating quality blog posts is just about the best way to promote yourself organically online. However, one thing that many people overlook is figuring out how to optimize each blog post for maximum effectiveness. After all, it should be every company’s aim to produce content that resonates with their customer base. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case. On the other hand though, there are ways you can augment the impact of each of your blog posts –– so that your good work pays more dividends! Here are four ways to get the most out your blog posts:

Be Specific

Consumers are a sophisticated bunch, and Google and other search engines are beginning to catch up to their habits. Often, a customer will know exactly what type of product or service their looking for before they enter in a query to a search engine. For instance: a scientist that needs new drawing needles doesn’t search for “lab equipment.” No, rather, consumers will enter in specific search items. In the same way, your blog should mirror your customers’ searching habits. To that end, you may also want to explore researching a niche market to see if there are profitable opportunities to be had there.

Repurpose Old Content

Once you’ve published your blog post, there’s nothing more to be done with it, right? Wrong. Old blog posts are prime candidates to re-optimize because they offer a chance to link to current blogs and web pages. Indeed, linking and backlinking between your blogs and web pages is a fantastic way to establish a network with high authority.

Timing is Everything

If you want to engage with your readers, you need to have your finger on the pulse. Understanding what they want to read, and when they want to read it is vital if you’re going to make a splash with any of your posts. After all, publishing a blog about the best Black Friday deals in December isn’t going to do anyone a lick of good.

Outdo Your Competition

At the end of the day, your blog doesn’t have to garner a million views to be a success. Instead, you really just need your posts to be more effective than those of your closest competitors. So keep a close eye on how your rivals manage their blog. Identifying an area where you can outstrip your competition can lead to blog posts that not only engage your customers, but draw in new leads as well. In this practice, use a little common sense and play to your strengths. If you do, your blog will be better off for it.

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Business Ideas

5 Great Apps for Small Businesses

Small business, especially in their infancy, can be massively labor intensive. Even though it’s a labor of love, there seems to be more things to do than there are hours in the day. This means that every tool and resource you have counts so much more, because you need to simplify your life as much as possible. Thankfully, there are tons of apps designed to help small businesses with transactions, bookkeeping, productivity, and networking. Keep control from your smartphone.

  1. FreshBooks

FreshBooks is cloud based and easy to use. It works for billing, invoicing, and creating invoices. It also allows you to track your business expenses, which is especially important for a young business. When you’re working on a tight budget, you need a good idea of what your running tab is before you spend any money. It does cost a small monthly fee to use, but it’s worth it in what you’ll save by rolling all of those responsibilities into one interface.

  1. Square

Square takes payments anywhere and everywhere. If you have a physical location where you’re billing clients or charging customers, Square can integrate with any mobile device to accept payments. Since they charge a small fee for every transaction, it doesn’t cost money to use. The fee you pay with Square is slightly less than what you would pay with a lot of other payment processing options, so you’re getting convenience while keeping costs low.

  1. Slack

Slack is the perfect internal communications hub. It’s especially important to have an app like Slack if some of your employees are remote workers. If everyone has Slack, you can streamline your communications and keep a record of what’s going on. Nobody will feel confused, and you can host meetings even when someone is on a business trip. Slack is a freemium app. There are advanced features that cost a little bit to use, but you can start off with free Slack while you’re deciding whether or not you need them.

  1. MailChimp

MailChimp is perfect for branding and marketing. You need to be able to keep your customers up to date with what’s going on in your business. It’s easy to integrate into the majority of eCommerce platforms, which makes your job a lot easier. MailChimp will allow you to make your newsletters or sales emails with a drag and drop process, so you don’t need to be a seasoned genius to put something professional looking together. It’s freemium, and it’s definitely worth a try if you want to simplify your marketing.

  1. LinkedIn

Small businesses need to network all the time. LinkedIn is a dream for meeting other business owners who may be able to cross promote with you, as well as finding great hires in your community. Meeting people and making connections is crucial to the continued success and growth of your business. LinkedIn also provides articles, resources, and expert advice. If you want to stay breast with what’s happening in your industry, you’ll probably be able to find out on LinkedIn. Who says social networking at work is a bad thing?

Apps make fun and games a lot easier, but they’ll also improve your ability to run your business. Your smartphone is one of the most powerful tools you have to help you set a promising future for your professional success.

Merrigan Leone is a blogger and a businesswoman who currently works for Bizinfo.in as a Content Manager. She specializes in online marketing, career development and freelancing. In her free time, she enjoys traveling across the world and cooking.

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How-To Guides Weblog Admin

How To Reduce Your Site’s Bounce Rate

Even the most effective SEO effort will be thwarted if you overlook this factor. You might well draw visitors to your site in the tens and even hundreds of thousands, but the crucial element is the number who stay and view more than one page when they arrive. In other words, have you made sure your site is “sticky”?  If you haven’t, you’re going to see a lot of people “bounce” out of your site after viewing a single page.

Here’s how to reduce your site’s bounce rate.

Write Accurate Meta Descriptions

When your site comes up on the first page of search engine results, along with a few others, users generally skim the meta descriptions to see which site has the information for which they’re looking. If yours promises it’s the one and they don’t find it immediately upon arrival, shoppers will go back to the results to find someone’s site who does. Make sure your meta descriptions accurately reflect the content to which the links lead, or you’ll lose visitors right away.

Minimize Load Times

The average consensus is approximately two seconds. That’s all the time 47 percent of first time visitors are willing to afford your site to load a navigable page. This is even more critical in mobile computing. What’s more, if they do tolerate slow loading and shop there anyway, the frustration they accumulate along the way can lead them to abandon the shopping cart. The best free ecommerce websites, like the ones offered by Shopify, are optimized to load quickly.

Link The Proper Landing Page

When you run promotional campaigns to drive traffic to your site, provide a link to the page most relevant to the advertising. Expecting users to land on your home page and click through to the one associated with the marketing effort is setting yourself up to experience a high bounce rate. Message matching is crucial to keeping users engaged after you’ve drawn them in with an ad.

Feature One Clear Call To Action

Stacking more than one call to action (CTA) on a single landing page looks desperate and unprofessional at best—shady at worst. Have a solid idea of the action you want users to take and lead them directly to it. Furthermore, presenting more than one CTA on a landing page can be confusing to shoppers. Think about it; you’re asking them to scrutinize each one carefully to be sure it’s going to where they’re trying to be. Every landing page should have a single goal—lead the visitor to the information they’re seeking so they can feel duly informed and make a purchase.

Streamline Product Pages

Yes, the temptation to inform your customer about every aspect of the product is great. And, yes, the more information you provide, the less chance you have of experiencing costly returns. However, you have to strike a balance between too little information and too much. The key intel most shoppers seek are a well-photographed image of the item (from multiple angles if the product warrants it), along with a brief description of the merchandise, your return policy, customer testimonials and pricing.

Mastering these five tips will take you a long way toward reducing your site’s bounce rate. If you draw shoppers in with accurate information, optimize loading times for speed and take them to the appropriate landing page, they’ll stick around long enough to discover your well-defined calls to action and well thought out product pages. Get all of this right and you’ll see more conversions.