Just writing a blog to write a blog isn’t enough; to truly be successful, you have to think strategically about topics that will lead to converting visitors into customers.

With that in mind, here are 5 thought starters for your next blog post.

1: Explore off-label uses for your product

One great way to highlight your product without overtly selling your product is by showing off-label uses. How are people using your product in odd ways?

The “Will it Blend” series is a great example of this. The series, which shows what products can be blended (does an iPad blend?!), is Blendtec’s way of highlighting their blender in a subtle way. They devised a great way to talk about a blender without creating an infomercial.

Similarly, you should find ways to highlight your product in ways that don’t act as a hardsell.

2: Create tangential content

There are certain industries that will have a hard time creating content. For example, what if your product was ovens? How much content could you possibly write about an oven?

Instead, what if you wrote about baking? This is a tangential topic that relates to your product, but is compelling and interesting. Clearly, bakers care about their ovens.

How are you taking advantage of tangential content? You might not need to if your industry is interesting; but if it’s not this is definitely a strategy to consider.

3: Create a top list or wrap up

The “top list” or “wrap up” is a staple in the publishing world. Lists of content are simple to skim and highly social – people love sharing them.

Create a “Top 10 things you need to know about our product” or even possible “50 things you didn’t know about the people that work here”. Articles that highlight your product or your company can become powerful when shared socially.

Use this type of post to create content that you know you want shared.

4: Interview popular experts in your field

One of the best ways to network with influencers in your industry is by simply interviewing them for your blog; it’s a great way to build awareness of your business.

Ask the experts questions your customers want answers to, giving them the advice they need to better their business.

Contacting most influencers is actually not that difficult. It’s truly just a matter of asking. Most experts are happy to share their thoughts, especially if it means some free press for them!

Experts are a great way to spread news of your business and to build easy content that your readers will want.

5: Interview one of your top customers

Nothing sells products better than hearing how other customers are succeeding because of your business. Take advantage of this phenomenon by interviewing some of your customers for your blog.

Don’t simply highlight your product or business in these blog posts, but instead make your customers the star.

This is a great strategy for driving new customers and also maintaining your high value clients.

Next Steps…

Now that we’ve identified five simple topic strategies for maximizing the effects of your business blog, all that’s left to do is to start executing.

Start by putting together an editorial calendar and planning when you want to publish each posts. These should be your important content; take the time you need to make sure the content is well written, has relevant imagery, and is overall compelling.

What kind of content has performed well for you? How do you decide to write about? Leave a comment and let us know!

If you are, then our new developer’s program is for you. We’ve just introduced a number of features to help you more easily manage your client’s websites and even offer them added value.

Members of the SiteFox Developer program receive a discounted rate on all business accounts and priority support for their clients.

Use SiteFox to give your clients:

• Managed and secure WordPress hosting
• WordPress tutorials for getting started with their website
• In-depth marketing resources to help grow their website
• Analytics to help see how their website is performing

Joining the Program

The first step to joining the SiteFox Developer’s program is to fill out the form below. Once you’ve submitted the form, we’ll reach out to you.

Here’s to yours and your client’s success.

The truth is that as your website becomes more and more important (people look for you online before searching anywhere else), making sure you are giving users a positive experience becomes more important too.

Creating a positive experience can be simple; most times the simpler the better, small businesses tend to get in trouble when they try to make things overly elaborate.

Here are five things you want to make sure your website doesn’t have, these are major obstacles that the average web user hates.

Autoplay Music or Video

There’s nothing more embarrassing than browsing the web, only to open a website that suddenly blasts music.

Autoplay music is the equivalent of forcing every new customer in your store to take part in an impromptu flash mob.

Don’t focus on ambiance on your website. Let your imagery and design portray your business and what it does; if you need music or an autoplay video, your website design needs help first.

Welcome Page

One underlying rule of the Internet is that it should be fast. The goal is to get people to the information they’re looking for as quickly as possible.

That’s why things like “welcome pages” are a major mistake. They create an unnecessary obstacle to the content the user wants and is looking for.

You gain nothing by forcing the user to click an arbitrary link bringing them to the actual page.

In the advertising world, these pages are called “hyperstitials“. Why would you want to put an unnecessary ad up in between your website and the user?

Missing Important Content

Most web users are “researchers”; they’re looking for something in particular.

Your website should cater to these researchers and make it as easy as possible to find the information they need to make a decision. In the instance of your business website, you want to give them all the information they need to choose you.

It’s imperative that your website have contact information, your hours, who you are, what you do, and other basic information. You should make this front and center; highlighting it since a majority of your website visitors will most likely be looking for this information.

Focusing on Unimportant Content

While you focus on content you know users will be looking for; don’t begin adding information that isn’t important. Unless your story is a reason why someone would choose your business, don’t highlight this over your contact information.

You can, and should, have supporting content on your website, but it shouldn’t be the most important information on the page. It should be displayed as supporting content, possibly on a secondary page instead of on the home page.

Illegible Design

Finally, if you’re spending all this time putting together great content and designing a website that shows visitors what they want, make sure your designs make it easy to read and consume.

Use large headlines, legible fonts ( we use a font size of 15px ), and most importantly a color scheme that is easy on the eyes. We tend to recommend our clients use a light and inviting background color, with a dark font; to stay away from and not use the inverted dark background and light font.

You can use this tool to figure out if your text is legible. If it isn’t, the tool will recommend a color scheme to help make it easier to read.

The easier it is for people to read your content, the quicker they can scan it and make a decision.

Next Steps…

Web users are impatient; if you don’t give them the content they want in a design that is easy to consume, most users will leave your website.

Take the time to audit your website and make sure you’re not using an outdated trend that is turning away users.

Lastly, look at your web analytics to ensure that people that visit your website are actually staying and reading the content.

You want to know if people spending time on your website. Are they finding what they want? Are they contacting you and choosing your business?

What bothers you about business websites? Have a success story about how you turned around your website? Share it with the group so we can all learn.

Thankfully, tying everything together is easier now than ever before. Almost all the major social media websites have created simple plug and play widgets for bringing everything together.

Link to Your Social Media Profiles

The first place to start is to ensure that you’ve made it simple for website visitors to find your social media profiles. There are two ways to make this connection: using the social media icons or integrating profile widgets.

If you decide on using social media icons, it’s as simple as finding a set of icons that you like and including them in your theme. You’ll simply upload the icon and make it link to your social media profile.

Integrating social media widgets is a little bit more difficult, but still relatively easy.

Most of the major social sites have a way to create a profile widget. For example for Facebook you can go here, and for Twitter you can go here.

Once you create the code, the next step is to paste it into a “Text Widget” on your WordPress website. You can find the “Text Widget” under Appearance > Widgets. These are the widgets that appear in your website’s sidebar.

Social Share After Content

Linking your social profiles allows visitors to easily find you online, but it doesn’t increase your online presence. This is where social sharing comes into play.

One of the best ways to grow your online audience is to increase the virality of your web content – in other words, making it easy for readers to share your content.

The simplest way to increase the shareability of your web content is to allow readers to share it with one click; or by adding social sharing buttons to your articles and pages. This allows users to simply click the button and share it across their social profiles.

If you’re using WordPress, adding social share buttons is as easy as installing a plugin.

Here are a handful of great plugins for adding share buttons:

• Digg Digg
• Slick Social Share
• Socialize
• AddThis
• ShareThis

The plugins are overall the same, with a few difference among the styles and layouts. ShareThis and AddThis are external services that include a number of share buttons and give you greater insights; at the expense of ease of sharing.

Depending on your needs and wants, install one of the plugins above to include the social share button at the end of each post.

Social Share After an Action

The theory behind including a social share button after a piece of content is that the reader will think “I just read this article, it was great, let me share with my friends that I just read this”.

That same mentality can be applied to other actions; further increasing the value of these actions.

For example, Amazon does a great job of doing this after you buy something. They continually prompt you to share that you just bought something – hoping that in your excitement you’ll tell your friends, who might visit the website and buy something.

P.S. If you haven’t, I highly recommend the Return on Relationship book that we bought in the image above

If you don’t sell a product, think of the other action points you might have. What about after someone leaves a comment? How about after someone signs up for your newsletter?

These are all actions someone performed that you can prompt readers and users to share.

The plugins outlined above include something called a “shortcode”, which is WordPress’ way to include code in a post without having to code. Using the plugin’s shortcode, you’re able to include social share buttons within your posts and pages.

Use the shortcodes to add the social share buttons to any pages that are part of an action; such as the “thank you” page of your newsletter subscription flow or contact page.

Next Steps…

Creating a social media presence in a vacuum is a recipe for failure. The true lift comes from integrating your owned media and your shared media (your social media profiles); as well as increasing the shareability of your brand.

How are you convincing people to share your content? What have you seen that’s worked? Share your experiences in the comments below.

Your website, when well optimized, can act as a new and effective marketing channel. Use your website to act as your online sales person; introducing your business to new customers and converting them into customers.

Table of Contents

• Benefits of a Business Website
• Creating Your Website
• Optimizing Your Website
• Capturing and Nurturing Leads
• Common Mistakes to Avoid

Benefits of a Business Website

The benefits of creating a professional business website aren’t always apparent at first, but if you consider the impact on your reputation and visibility, it becomes much more clear.

As more business and research is done online, the need for a professional business website increases. The reason is because potential customers tend to look online for the business they want to work with; in this instance your website is your first impression.

The more professional looking a website, the more trust the customer has in your ability to fulfill their needs. Your website can be the signal that distinguishes you from a “shady” business compared to a professional business.

Your small business website increases your online visibility (attracting new customers) and sets your reputation (building trust with potential customers).

Creating Your Website

In the past, creating a website used to be difficult. Generally, you needed some kind of HTML or coding experience to setup and build a website.

Thankfully, that has changed. There are a number of content management systems (CMS) that allow you to apply styles and themes, customize layouts, and update content without ever needing to learn how to code.

Our favorite is WordPress (this blog runs on WordPress). It’s the most popular open-source CMS available. We love it because there are hundreds of plugins and themes available to customize WordPress to your needs. Also, it is easy to optimize for SEO and social media, helping further increase your business’ visibility online.

Using WordPress

Getting started with WordPress is extremely simple. If you haven’t installed it yet, you can follow this post or sign up for SiteFox and we’ll install it for you.

Once the WordPress installation is running, you can log into the admin console and begin editing or creating new content.

There are two types of content: Posts and Pages.

Posts are your average blog style content, a time-based linear list of articles. If you’re creating a blog or want your business website to include a blog, you’ll add a new post whenever you want to update your blog.

Pages are your evergreen informational contact. The pages feature is more appropriate for your contact page, about us page, meet the team page, and even your homepage.

Recommended Website Layout

There are a number of ways you can actually layout your website pages (hierarchy, not design); but for most of the businesses we’ve worked with, we’ve found a simple layout that tends to work for most.

Generally, you should use a page to create your homepage. This means that when someone visits http://www.yourbusiness.com/ they would see a page that quickly explains what you do, who you are, and how to contact you.

We’ll then also create subsequent pages to add more context and information. For example, you should create the following pages:

• About Page
  • At http://www.yourbusiness.com/about you can outline exactly who you are, what makes oyu different, why people should do business with you
• Contact Page
  • At http://www.yourbusiness.com/contact you should explain how someone can get in touch with you. It should include your contact information and potentially a contact form.

Depending on your business, you’ll add more pages as you need; but the above two are absolutely paramount.

Those that want to create a blog, can then create a page at http://www.yourbusiness.com/blog that displays all the posts.

The ability to quickly and easily add a blog is what makes WordPress so powerful for businesses. It allows you to evolve your website overtime and easily add a blog when you’re ready.

Example Themes

Another reason to choose WordPress for your business website is that there are a multitude of themes available for businesses to choose. With these themes, you can have a professional template applied to your site at the click of the button.

Here are some example themes that we like for business websites:

• The Chameleon
• Evolution
• Executive
• The Practice
• Studeo
• Scope

Optimizing Your Website

Once you have your website published and live, the next step is making sure it’s fully optimized and generating inbound leads. There are two aspects you should ensure you’ve optimized for: Social Media and Search Engines.

Social Media Optimization (SMO)

The first is social media optimization, or ensuring your content and business can be shared easily.

The easiest way to ensure your content can be shared is by simple adding social media sharing buttons. Most of the social networks have their own social sharing button (example: the Facebook like button or Twitter tweet button).

Another easy way to integrate these buttons is to use the ShareThis or AddThis service. These services make it easy to embed many of the social networks, without having to add each button individually. They even have their own WordPress plugin, making it easy to add the functionality to a WordPress website.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Once you’ve optimized your site for sharing, you’ll want to make sure search engines can find and index your content.

The first step in this is to ensure you have content the search engines want to index and surface. This is why having a business blog is so important.

Each piece of relevant, quality content you write on your blog acts as an entry point for new customers.

If you already are creating content and want to further optimize it, I highly recommend you review your title tags and header tags. Not sure how to fix these things? Most of the themes we recommend already have these optimized, otherwise a freelance developer can fix these things fairly easily.

Capturing and Nurturing Leads

The true benefit of a business website comes from capturing and converting new leads. What good is a website if it doesn’t attract new customers?

Ultimately, the best medium for converting prospects into customers is email. Few things are better than actually being in someone inbox; this makes capturing emails extremely important.

One of the ways to begin capturing emails is by creating a “business newsletter”. I’m sure you’re thinking – “wait, I have to make time to update one more thing?!”. Thankfully, no.

Use your blog to power your content. Give readers the ability to subscribe to the latest updates from your blog, and use a platform like MailChimp to publish your blog content in your newsletter.

Subscribers get the value they wanted and are able to get the latest content you create (it’s valuable and relevant, right?).

Capturing Leads

The first step in converting leads into customers is actually capturing the lead. If you’re using the newsletter strategy; capturing leads is as simple as including a “subscribe” form for visitors to subscribe for your newsletter.

As your lead capturing system becomes more sophisticated, you can use tools, such as Unbounce, to create specific landing pages for each marketing campaign you have.

For example, maybe you’re writing an article for a blogger and they’ll be including a link back to your website. Instead of linking to your homepage, drive that traffic to a relevant landing page that outlines how they can sign up for your free newsletter. Once they sign up, they become a lead and someone you can nurture into a customer.

Nurturing Leads

The newsletter is your basic content emails, it’s there to help build trust with your brand and convince customers to open your emails. The second type of email is the nurture email, these emails help create a desire for your product.

Nurture emails are emails that are sent to new leads to slowly nudge and inform potential prospects of how your business could help them. They should not be overt, but instead be informational.

For example, a business that sells a social media analytics software, might send an email about how most marketers don’t track social media and how it might be hurting their bottom line.

MailChimp and most other email platforms allow you to send nurture emails through a system called the “autoresponder”. The autoresponder allows you to pre-set a number of emails you want to deliver to every new subscriber; you would simply program the emails and MailChimp would deliver them on set intervals.

Our autoresponder is setup to do the following:

• Welcome Email
  • All new subscribers receive a welcome email, thanking them for joining the newsletter.
• Nurture Email
  • After a few days, the subscriber will receive a handful of emails talking about business website, social media marketing, or online reputation; all content that is highly relevant to what we do.
• Sales Email
  • Lastly, we send an email inviting the subscriber to sign up for our service (sometimes we include discounts).

Using a system allows you to quickly scale your inbound marketing and automatically convert leads into customers.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

As you start to setup your website, you’ll come across potential pitfalls or common mistakes. Be careful to not fall into these common traps.

Don’t Skimp on Your Website

The most important mistake most small businesses make is that they skimp on their website. Invest in the professional look and feel of your website; and don’t hesitate to ask for advice or feedback.

Your website is your first impression and can make or break your business’ reputation. Treat it no differently than you would any other marketing material.

Having a Website is Not Difficult

One of the biggest misconceptions is that having a website is difficult and time consuming; the truth is it doesn’t have to be.

If you use a content management system like WordPress, creating and updating your website can be done without the need for a developer or any coding. It really can be simple and easy.

Automation is Not Bad, if Done Right

You’re a small business owner, you’re busy running your business – that’s how it should be. Having a website shouldn’t eat up your time, the key is finding things you can automate.

Systems like autoresponders for nurture emails allow you to automate tasks without looking like they are robotic.

The more you can automate, the more you can do to grow your business.

Conclusion

Your website is an integral part of your business’ reputation and brand. It allows you to be visible online, attract new customers, and convert leads.

The tools to have a successful and professional website are available, now it’s just a matter of taking advantage of them.

That’s why we outlined our favorite plugins and exactly why we love them (and use them). SiteFox clients might find these plugins familiar; we pre-install most of the following plugins with each new installation – that’s how much we like them…

Table of Contents

• 1: Yoast SEO Plugin
• 2: SEO Slugs
• 3: W3 Total Cache
• 4: Redirection
• 5: Google Analytics for WordPress
• 6: Disqus Comments
• 7: Post Plugins Library
• 8: Popular Posts
• 9: Similar Posts
• 10: Gravity Forms

1: Yoast SEO Plugin

The Yoast SEO Plugin is one of the simplest ways to manage your website’s search engine optimization.

It allows you to setup title tags, indexation rules, and remove the “category” slug from the URL. The plugin also makes it very easy (just one checkbox) to add in open graph data, optimizing your website for social media.

Click here to visit the plugin page…

2: SEO Slugs

When you’re writing an article, WordPress automatically turns your article headline into the URL slug (if you have your permalinks setup to use postname).

The SEO slugs plugin, removes all the extraneous keywords from the URL. It removes words like “the, it, etc”. That way you keep only the keywords that are relevant and search engines can place greater focus on these terms.

Click here to visit the plugin page…

3: W3 Total Cache

WordPress works by saving all the content and information on a page into the website’s database. This means that whenever you load a page, the server has to access the database and display the information from there.

Accessing a server’s database can be slow and cause the website to take longer to load. That’s why it’s so important to make sure that your WordPress website has proper caching setup.

Caching allows your server to save the information from the database on a page and only have to access the database if something changes. This process is much faster and makes your website load super fast.

The W3 Total Cache plugin is one of the most robust and feature friendly caching plugins available. It’s something we highly recommend!

Click here to visit the plugin page…

4: Redirection

Have you ever been browsing the web and then come across a page that gives you a 404 error? The error page is not user firendly and usually just stinks.

So, what do you to do make sure you don’t show the 404 error to your users?

The Redirection plugin monitors what URL caused the 404 error and makes it easy to setup redirects (transfer your users from the 404 error to a URL you defined).

Use this plugin to make sure your users never see a 404 error.

Click here to visit the plugin page…

5: Google Analytics for WordPress

We’re huge fans of data – it’s something that helps us make knowledgeable decisions. That’s why we love the Google Analytics plugin for WordPress.

Google Analytics is a free analytics system that Google offers. It tracks how many people visited your website, where they came from, and what they did.

The problem is that installing the Google Analytics tracking code can be difficult for non-technical users. Thankfully, the Google Analytics WordPress plugin installs it for you and makes it easy to customize for your needs.

Click here to visit the plugin page…

6: Disqus Comments

The standard commenting system that WordPress comes with is fairly bare and feature less. There’s a lot most users request from their comments. Thankfully, Disqus makes it super easy to add a lot of the features you want without having to do a lot.

Disqus is a third party commenting system that makes it easy for readers to leave comments using their social media profiles, get updates when someone replies, and even upload images to their comments.

The Disqus WordPress plugin makes it super simple to integrate the Disqus comment system onto your WordPress website; it’s definitely a service to check out.

Click here to visit the plugin page…

7: Post Plugin Library

Although this plugin doesn’t seem like it does anything, it’s actually a super powerful plugin that powers two other plugins that we love.

The Post Plugin Library is required to install the Popular Posts plugin and the Similar Posts plugin.

Click here to visit the plugin page…

8: Popular Posts

The Popular Posts plugin is a great tool for highlighting articles that are receiving a lot of traffic. With this plugin you’re able to list your most popular posts wherever you want, using the plugin’s templating system.

Highlighting popular posts drivers users further into your website and increases the likelihood that they’ll spend more time on your site.

This plugin is extremely easy to customize and install, especially if you are simply listing popular posts in your sidebar.

Click here to visit the plugin page…

9: Similar Posts

Much like the Popular Posts plugin, the Similar Posts plugin acts as a tool for increasing how long users spend on your website. Displaying similar posts at the end of an article is a great way to help users discover more of your content.

The Similar Post plugin uses much of the same templating and customization functionality that the Popular Post plugin uses. This makes it simple to implement both plugins on one website.

Click here to visit the plugin page…

10: Gravity Forms

The last plugin we love is actually a premium plugin (it’s not free like the others). We tried to keep out premium plugins, but this is one of those that we just can’t live without.

The Gravity Forms plugin allows you to easily and quickly create forms on your website that users can fill out. It makes it very simple to embed a contact form or newsletter sign up form.

The forms are stylish and easy to use. They can be setup to notify an email whenever the form is submitted or it can be integrated with a number of third party systems including MailChimp, FreshBooks, or even the SiteFox Email Manager.

If you’re serious about your website and blog, the Gravity Forms plugin is definitely a good investment.

Click here to visit the plugin page…

Next Steps…

Most of the plugins above are simple to install and configure. It’s just a matter of getting a WordPress website up and then using the plugins to extend it.

If you have any questions on how to use one of the above plugins or how to install it, don’t hesitate to leave a comment below! We’re happy to help answer any questions you might have.

Of course if you need someone to help you do it for you, consider signing up for a SiteFox WordPress hosting plan. We’d be more than happy to help configure your website the way you want it during your WordPress setup!

Email is one of the best ways to keep in touch with previous customers, soft sell potential customers, and interact with your target demographic.

Small businesses often overlook email marketing because it seems difficult to build your email lists. How do you get people to sign up to receive emails from you? It’s actually not that difficult.

When you put in the right infrastructure, you can easily and quickly grow your email list. This list is your pool of potential customers, it’s one of your most valuable assets. Invest in it and it’ll build your business, one email at a time…

Table of Contents

• Embedding Email Subscriptions Forms
• Giving Consumers the Options
• Using List Eruption
• Leveraging Contests and Giveaways
• Integrate with Social Media

Embedding Email Subscriptions Forms

The best place to start is by reviewing where you’ve setup your subscription forms. How are you helping users find your newsletter and join it?

There are three places that perform extremely well: the sidebar, after blog posts, and on custom landing pages.

Sidebar:
One of the best places to keep a subscription form is on the top of your sidebar on the right. This area is one of the most often looked at sections of your site as users read right to left. There’s a reason most of the time publishers put an ad there.

After Blog Posts:
Another great place to include a form is right after an article. Use a call to action that lets users know that they can get updates whenever new posts are published.

This builds in an inherent value for subscribing to your newsletter: the promise of getting all new posts.

Custom Landing Pages:
Once you have your basic elements setup, you’ll want to start doing custom landing pages. These are pages that you link to or drive users to that specifically outline why they should join your newsletter.

For example; whenever we guest post somewhere, such as Search Engine Journal, we link to a special page we’ve created just for that post. The page outlines where the user came from and why they should sign up for our newsletter.

Custom landing pages work extremely well for convincing one time readers to join your email list.

Giving Consumers the Options

After you’ve setup your website to collect leads from general readers, the next step is maximizing the collection of leads from users that are already performing some other action on your site.

You’ve probably already seen collection like this previously; for example the checkbox on forms that says something like “yes, I want to get updates about your business”.

These conversion points work extremely well because the user has already decided to give you their information to perform the action they wanted to, it’s fairly simple for them to justify joining your newsletter as well.

Contact Forms:
The contact form is the first place you should include a newsletter conversion option. Since many people reach out to you to ask for more information or ask questions, they’re already looking to consumer more of your content.

Adding a simple checkbox that automatically adds the user to your newsletter, makes it simple for the lead to join your newsletter without having to resubmit their information.

Comment Landing Pages:
Another action that businesses should capitalize on is the comment. When a user reads a blog post and leaves a comment, give them the option of joining your newsletter.

By commenting they’ve shown that their interested in your content and are more likely to sign up for your newsletter.

If you use the WordPress CMS, use the Yoast Comment Redirect plugin to add a landing page for all first time commenters.

Check Out Process:
If your business manages an online shop, be sure to offer all recent customers the ability to sign up for your newsletter.

This can be done by adding a checkbox on your actual checkout pages. That way as users buy your products, they can be signed up to your newsletter as well.

Businesses that are ecommerce enabled should make strong use of their newsletter to inform customers of new products and sales. Consumers that have already bought from you are more likely to buy again.

Using List Eruption

Aside from strategically including subscription forms there are a number of active ways to build your newsletter list. The first of which is using a plugin called “List Eruption”.

What does List Eruption do?
List Eruption is a plugin that incentivizes current subscribers to recommend your newsletter to their friends. The system works by allowing you to offer a bonus product or coupon to subscribers that recommend a certain number of other users.

The plugin integrates seamlessly with WordPress and most popular autoresponders. This means that you can setup and deploy the system quickly and easily.

How does it work?
Most businesses that have a newsletter show a “confirmation” page to users once they’ve signed up for their newsletter.

With List Eruption, you can show a form that gives the user a unique referral URL. Whenever a user signs up using that referral URL the original subscriber receives credit.

After they’ve received a specific number of credits (that you define) they receive an email informing them that they can now redeem the bonus you outlined.

What incentives work?
The best incentives are either information resources or coupons; anything the user can use or download instantly.

If you have a service business, offering users an ebook that helps solve a problem gives enough incentive to share with their friends. The ebook need not be extremely long or in-depth, just something that most of your subscribers want answered.

Online shops can take advantage of exclusive coupons for discounts or free shipping, to incentivize more subscribers.

Leveraging Contests and Giveaways

Another great way to build your email list is by taking advantage of contests and giveaways. These kinds of promotions give users a simple and quick incentive to join your newsletter list.

With the right kind of contests you’re able to both get people excited about your business and have them join your subscriber lists.

How do contests work?
Creating a contest that drives newsletter subscribers is actually pretty simple. The basis of the strategy is to tell readers that they can enter for a chance to win a prize, but to enter they have to submit their email address. Always pose your newsletter as a bonus to entering the contest.

Setting up a contest
Actually executing the contest means simply creating a page with a subscription form, the contest information, and end date.

Simply track who becomes a subscriber from the form and within the time period you have designed. Once the contest is over, contact the winner and send them the prize.

The other applicants should be added to your newsletter list and start receiving either your autoresponder or general email updates.

Promoting the contest
The hardest part of this strategy is actually getting the word out about your contest.

Start by reaching out to others in your industry to let them know the contest is happening. The promotion of the contest should be no different than the marketing you do for you content you put together.

If there’s a budget allocated, consider using Google Adwords to drive traffic to the contest page through advertising.

The goal is to get as much traffic to your contest page as possible and use the contest to convert readers into subscribers.

Integrate with Social Media

Just like everything else online, don’t treat your newsletter as an island. Instead, use other marketing channels to cross promote it.

Use the viral aspects of social media to drive traffic to your subscription forms and to increase awareness of your newsletter. Fans of your social media profiles have already shown that they trust your business, give them another option for connecting with you.

Use your Facebook fan page
Depending on the system you’re using, embedding a subscription form on your Facebook fan page can be fairly simple.

Campaign Monitor has a great article explaining exactly how to do it (click here to see) and MailChimp even has their own application ( click here to get the link).

Invite users to join your newsletter
You should also be sure to use your social media channels to invite users to sign up for your newsletter.

One trick is to setup a recurring message that you send out once a week or once every two weeks that lets people know about your newsletter.

Some people like to post updates just before they send a newsletter, to give an incentive for new subscribers (an example update might be, “Just finishing up our monthly newsletter, better sign up now before you miss it!”)

Add social sharing buttons
Even if you don’t end up using List Eruption, you should definitely embed social sharing buttons strategically throughout your subscription process.

The first place to ensure you have social sharing buttons is on your “Thank You” page. This is the page you show to new users after they’ve confirmed their subscription. Make sure you setup your social sharing buttons to share your landing page and not the “Thank You” page.

If you use a newsletter archive page (most newsletter providers allow you to do this), you’ll want to include social sharing buttons on here too. This allows people to share the page and potentially convince new users to join your newsletter.

Next Steps…

Small businesses tend to overlook the opportunity that newsletter lists afford them. The ability to send a message and contact current customers and potential consumers can drive significant revenue.

Before you’re able to create the huge impacts that newsletters can make, you have to build your list. Start simple and you won’t get overwhelmed.

Have you already started a newsletter list? What are you doing to promote it? Have you seen a positive return from sending messages? Leave a comment and let us know!

Credit: Jon Gosier

If you’re not sure who you’re voting for this year, check out the infographic below to see how each candidate stands on small business issues.

I’m sure it will change and hopefully we’ll get some updates. In the mean time check it out and let me know what you think. How much of an impact does the candidate’s stance on small business issues impact your choice?

Most likely you did one of two things: searched a business directory (maybe online) OR you asked a friend for a recommendation.

Having people recommend your business is the basis of word of mouth marketing. It’s doing something so memorable that people talk about you; it’s tied to customer service, viral marketing, and just being a business people like working with.

How are you maximizing your word of mouth marketing? What are you doing to make sure people talk about you?

Table of Contents

• What is Word of Mouth Marketing
• Why Word of Mouth Marketing is Important
  • Pitfalls of Advertising
  • During Product Creation
• Elements of Word of Mouth Marketing
  • Buzz Marketing
  • Influencer Marketing
  • Viral Marketing
  • Social Media Marketing
• The Web’s Influence on Word of Mouth Marketing
• What Elements Facilitate Sharing
  • The Content
  • Ease of Sharing
  • Asking
• Campaign Tracking
• More Information
  • More Reading
  • Videos

What is Word of Mouth Marketing?

In it’s simplest form Word of Mouth (WoM) Marketing is tapping into the conversations that occur between people to sell your product. The Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WoMMA) defines it as:

Word of mouth marketing: Giving people a reason to talk about your products and services, and making it easier for that conversation to take place.

Effective WoM strategies cultivate and amplify these conversations, understanding that they are the most powerful way to convince a consumer to buy your product.

The Internet has redefined the power of WoM Marketing, removing a majority of the obstacles placed on it. For example, online we’re able to track the conversation with buzz monitoring tools, and we’re able to minimize the effect of geography. The web’s ability to bring us all together also breaks boundaries for conversations.

Why Word of Mouth Marketing is Important

Pitfalls of Advertising

As the consumer has evolved, WoM Marketing has become more effective. Savvy buyers have become skeptical of traditional advertising, and use the Internet to research before buying. They look for everything from professional reviews to what other consumers are writing about the product.

Empirical evidence suggests that advertising claims (in ads that are processed) are frequently not accepted. Calfee and Ringold (1994) reported the consistent observation in public opinion polls that roughly two-thirds of consumers claim they doubt the truthfulness of ads. Previous research (Obermiller and Spangenberg 1998, 2000) supports the proposition that consumers are socialized to be skeptical toward advertising, and the extent of their skepticism is a determinant of their responses to advertising. Credit

Television advertising has become largely ineffective, as marketers are attempting to reach a large audience with a broad message. Not only is the message not targeted, but most consumers simply don’t trust them.

The least trustworthy of advertising is online ads, which rank less than “Ads before movies”. The most trusted, after “Recommendations from consumers”, are newspaper ads. However, they have problems of their own.

Newspapers are experiencing a large drop in readership and are being forced to re-think their business model. Traditional printing is much more expensive compared to publishing online and many newspapers are buckling under the economic strain. As a result, newspaper advertising has become more expensive.

During Product Creation

If Word of Mouth Marketing is introduced as a strategy during product creation, it can lead to exceptional products. When product creators emphasize ‘wowing’ their consumers instead of bettering their bottom line, the latter comes from the former.

Elements of Word of Mouth Marketing

Word of mouth marketing is an over-arching category for multiple strategies; of which are buzz marketing, influencer marketing, viral marketing, and social media marketing. The techniques all require conversation between consumers, but differ in how the conversation is started, cultivated, and where it occurs.

Buzz Marketing

Buzz marketing is creating something that everyone talks about. Whether it be your product or a service, it’s effected people in a way that they need to tell their friends about it. The message (not one that you’ve defined, but the abstract message – that your product is something worth sharing) will pass from person to person.

Influencer Marketing

Whereas buzz marketing leverages a shareable product to get everyone talking about it, influencer marketing requires outreaching to influential individuals. The hope is that if the product is good, an influencer will talk about it to everyone they influence who in turn pass it to their friends.

Convincing an influencer to recommend your product requires that you be able to identify who an influencer is. You can use multiple criteria to do this: length of posts, number of comments, inbound and outbound links, velocity of posts, or social media friends.

Finding Influencers and Consumer Insights in the Blogosphere

Viral Marketing

Viral marketing is creating a story, video, or ad that is passed from consumer to consumer. The difference with viral marketing is that your message is being passed, compared to the recommendations passed from influencer and buzz marketing.

This form of word of mouth marketing maintains the most message control, however it’s generally a hit or miss with what will go viral. There’s no formula to what people are likely to love, and what’s likely to be dumped in the trash.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing stands out because it requires a medium for which to market. Unlike the other forms of Word of Mouth marketing, which can occur online or offline, social media marketing is specifically using social networks, blogs, social media to facilitate word of mouth marketing.

The Web’s Influence on Word of Mouth Marketing

Word of mouth marketing occured before the Internet became an integral part of our everyday lives. But in those days word of mouth was limited by geography, and the number of relationships we could keep. The Internet has broken down the barrier of geography, increased the number of friends we can connect with, and increased how quickly we can reach out to people. It’s given us a number of new tools.

Social networks are the first, allowing us to visualize our relationships and keep in touch. Sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn allow us to segment out who are friends, who are colleagues, and quickly reach out to our entire network.

As more and more information is being archived on the web, Internet users turn to social news aggregators and social bookmarking sites to leverage friends when finding what’s important on the web. As users vote up or bookmark specific stories, the time required to find something we might like is reduced.

The Internet has also changed our psychology on personal and private life. Things that would once be considered private are published freely on blogs. We’ve also changed our mind on what constitutes free versus paid content, as professionals begin publishing their thoughts and ideas. Both blogs and micro-blogging platforms (Twitter) afford us the opportunity to share our insights, our thoughts, our feelings, our experiences to the world.

What Elements Facilitate Sharing

There are certain elements to word of mouth marketing that can help a message spread. They are not based on statistics and studies, but experiences and a general idea. The three elements are “the actual content”, “the ease of sharing”, and “asking to share”.

The Content

This is the most important element of word of mouth marketing. Is your content, your product, your service so good that I’d tell my friends about it? Does it make me feel good when I share it?

Telling a story usually helps generate conversations. Not a story as in a fairy-tale, but a story that brings me into it. For a restaurant this might be the ambiance, for a product maybe how it’s better than the rest. People love to tell stories and making your marketing a story, makes it easy to share.

Ease of Sharing

The simplicity of sharing media online is what makes it so easy for content to spread on the web. Internet users are so used to quickly skimming articles and surfing on. Give visitors the ability to share, and they’ll do it. Don’t expect readers to take the extra effort to pass it on.

To remove those obstacles, add buttons like “email this” or “share this” to invite consumers to pass things on. The “email this” button removes the obstacle of forcing a reader to open their email application and find their friends. While the “share this” button allows users to add the article to social sites without having to open a new browser window and navigation to the social site.

You work hard to remove steps from check-out on an e-commerce site, and removing steps from sharing is no different for a strategy that is dependent on work of mouth marketing.

Asking

Lastly, simply asking your consumers to pass along your information helps. Dan Zarrella did a short analytical look at what defines a “ReTweet” or the passing along of a message across Twitter. He found that a tweet that included the word “Please” was ReTweeted 5 times more often than one without. Although this is by no ways definitive, it gives us an idea that simply asking (nicely) can help compel users to pass along the message.

Campaign Tracking

Once your message begins to spread you’ll need some way of tracking it. Figuring out who’s talking about you, what they’re saying, and if the message is even spreading, is important for the success of any campaign. Consumers and bloggers that have written about you should be highlighted as people to reach out to in the future when there are updates on your product or service. But how do you find people talking about you? There are a few ways, some of which are paid and some are free.

The first and what will pass for most people, is to use the free Google alerts. You can create an RSS feed, where Google will alert you whenever a page that includes the defined keywords is indexed. For example, I have one created for the term “Samir Balwani”. Whenever someone mentions my name, I get an alert in my feed reader to let me know where. With this information I’m able to track mentions of my name over time.

There are also many paid programs out there to track references to brand names, keywords, and other things. The two most well known trackers are Trackur and Radian6.

More Information:

More Reading:

Word of Mouth Marketing 101 from WOMMA.org
Influencers Handbook from WOMMA.org
Word-of-Mouth the Most Powerful Selling Tool: Nielsen Global Survey
eMarketing: Word of Mouth Works Worldwide
Marketing Vox: WOM Builds Loyalty as Businesses ‘Tribalize’
Marketing Vox: Consumers Seeking Products Online Share Findings via WOM

Videos on Word of Mouth Marketing:

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Please pass this article on to your friends, and don’t forget to bookmark it for later.

We quickly learned that it was really about maximizing our returns from each channel.

One of the things we did early on was setup a document to track each channel and gauge its efficiency for registering new clients. The efficiency is based off a number we derived after deciding on how much of our revenue we wanted to invest in marketing.

We’ve been using the spreadsheet for a while now and it’s really helped us strategically invest money in ways that maximize our return. So, we decided it would make the most sense to make it available for everyone.

If you want to download the sheet, just click here. (We hope you like the spreadsheet and will share this article with your friends too!)

Table of Contents

• Understanding the Spreadsheet
• Using the Spreadsheet
• Download it for Free

Understanding the Spreadsheet

The spreadsheet is designed to give you an idea of how much you’re spending on acquiring new clients, by marketing channel. It also, helps you decide on an optimal marketing budget based on the revenue from each client.

Use the spreadsheet to see determine what your profits will be based on fixed and variable costs per client. You can even see it graphed out, to ensure that as your company grows so will your profits.

Once you have that information outlined, you can choose how much you want to spend per client to attract new ones (the cost of acquiring a client). Input that cost to see how it impacts your profits and revenue.

When you manipulate the costs per channel, it will highlight red if it’s above your optimal acquisition cost. This makes it easy to identify which channels are underperforming.

Using the Spreadsheet

Using the spreadsheet is actually really easy. The formulas are set throughout the page to make your life easier. Just edit the boxes that are highlighted yellow to input the costs and profits for your business.

You can use a free analytics software like Google Analytics to get the information needed for each channel’s unique visits and goal completions.

If you need to keep track of offline marketing. You can add another row for that. Instead of using the metric “Unique Visits” for offline marketing, we recommend using “Reach” or how many people were introduced to your business due to your offline marketing efforts.

Note that the spreadsheet is specifically for marketing that has an ROI element. We use a different spreadsheet for our branding efforts and hopefully, once we see it working well, we’ll publish that one too!

Download it for Free

Click here to download our “Marketing Efficiency Spreadsheet”.

Once you’ve downloaded the file, just open it using Microsoft Excel and you’ll be able to edit and manipulate the sheet however you need to.

Next Steps…

We’d love to hear your thoughts on the sheet. Did it help you build your marketing strategy? Is something missing? What should we add to make it more comprehensive?

Leave a comment below and let us know what you think. Also, don’t forget to join our newsletter to be alerted when we release new tools and updates in the future.