BUSINESS GROWTH GUIDE 2020- By Vikas Rana
Note: This guide is updated regularly so you can be sure that you are not reading any obsolete information.
The following guide is a compilation of basic and advanced actionable tips to help you grow your business. The guide also includes website traffic and lead generation tactics prepared over the months by myself and the other experienced consultants at WebsiteFix Digital.
Unlike other guides, you’ll find less fluff and more actionable steps. Each step is actionable, proven & tested and will provide you with an effective outcome for your business. Scan through the list of these powerful tips and look for at least 8-10 tips that you could employ to start with.
If you would like help with SEO, website design, a comprehensive lead generation plan and marketing strategy tailored to your business, contact one of the WebsiteFix Marketing Consultants.
Our promise is this: if you stay with us and follow the steps in this guide- the steps that we gathered over a long period of time- your business will thrive.
I’m always open to having a conversation about your business so feel free to approach me. You can also email me here- vikas@websitefix.com.au
Thanks.
Vikas Rana About author: WebsiteFix a fast-growing digital marketing agency in Australia offering nationwide services in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide & Brisbane. For over a decade, our consultants have worked with over 100 SMEs, some of Australia’s best-known brands and publicly listed companies. Websitefix.com.au Ph: (07) 3191 5431 Services- SEO, Website design and Social Media Marketing
Introduction
Web is full of blogs and articles on business growth but most of them are either just theories with many pages of text making the same point or they are written for marketers in technical jargons rather than easy to implement techniques for small business owners. Further, there is hardly any complete guide which includes all the actionable tips and tested business and marketing tools all at one place. So, we decided to create one.
Moreover, this comes with a FREE Support. It comes with the peace of mind for you that we are here to offer your FREE Support if you get stuck at some step or have any questions regarding any step provided in this guide.
In this guide, you will find actionable and proven tips as well as exclusive tools (tested by our team) to take your business to the next level.
Do we have you hooked on what’s really possible for your business now?
Prepare your mind for each of the steps that are coming and make sure you implement them.
“Knowing information is not the same as owning it and following it through. Information without execution is poverty”- Tony Robbins. So, make sure you take these tips on board and follow them.
Without taking much time, let’s get on board.
Growing a business consist of many things such as strategic business decisions, business management and marketing tools, an awesome website, techniques to get traffic to the site, content marketing, SEO- most important, social media marketing, and various techniques to get more leads. We have taken care of each of this and divided the guide in different sections which will provide you actionable tips for each category mentioned above.
You can expect less theory and straight to the point actionable steps in this guide. Again, if you need help with any of these steps, WebsiteFix team is there to help you. We’re just a call away.
We highly recommend you print this guide for future reference. So, are you ready to get on this journey with us?
Let’s Start!
More quality traffic to your website = more business. So, here are some online marketing tips to help you build the traffic to your website. Later in this guide, we will also go through offline methods to grow your business.
Exclusive Tips to Build Traffic for your Website
1. Let’s start with something that is creating a huge buzz on internet these days. Content marketing– Writing amazing content around your product/ services and then promoting it to reach out wider audience. Content strategy is important but here we will discuss the process behind it.
- Before jumping on writing the content, make sure you find the most share worthy or trending content in your niche. Here is how to do it- You can do this via tools such as BuzzSumo or Content Studio– Find the best content ideas from here and see if you can write great articles with a different angle on the similar topics which have been a big time social hit. Tools such as Content Studio also allow you to find and share the popular articles directly to your social channels or schedule it to publish later. How cool is that!
- Creating share worthy content will highly boost your traffic provided you’re promoting it well. You’ll find tips to promote your blogs later in this guide.
2. Story Telling. One of the greatest assets a business has is their story. Here at WebsiteFix, we didn’t end up where we are here in 2020 without making plans and executing those plans, without our great people, and without great leadership. WebsiteFix has a story. Your company has a story.
Storytelling Connects You with Your Customers. How do you show clients and prospects how you’re going to help them succeed? Tell them your story. Show them how you can help them grow their business the way that you grew yours or helped clients’ business. It’s important to connect who you are with the business of your customers.
Telling your story should become a key part of your overall content strategy, because people don’t buy from brands or companies, they buy from people.
3. GET SOCIAL and create Social Sharing System. Are you still manually sharing your business content on the social channels instead of scheduling it? Well, stop doing it and save time because time means money in business, right? There is a way to automate this process.
- Make use of tools such as Hootsuite or Buffer.
- You can connect your social channels such as Facebook page, profile, twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and more to these tools and schedule your posts to be published later. In Hootsuite, you can also create “streams” where you can see what’s latest on web for a particular topic. For instance, if you’re a Property Manager, you can see what’s latest in Real Estate. Use this knowledge to create latest news or blogs on your site or simply share them straight on your social channels.
- Be consistent in updating your social channels if you want to achieve engagement and increase followers. More followers= more users seeing your content= more website traffic= more business.
- Include an image in your tweets.
- Ask questions
- Organize accounts into Twitter lists
- Find and engage with influencers in your area
- Schedule routine drive-bys of your social media accounts
- Respond to everyone
4. What are you sharing on your social channels? Do you have a strategy or just randomly throwing your product info. news etc. to your followers? Is it appealing to your audience or just satisfying your desperation to sell? Instead of only sharing messages about your product or service, why not share some tips that help your audience. Create share worthy social media images.
tips: You can also share some Monday motivation or Friday fun facts, pictures of your staff party or networking event. Anything that connects with your audience and talks to them is great. Don’t forget to ask questions or ask them to participate in your post. Brain storm ideas about what else you can do other than sharing just the information about yourself.
5. Speaking of content, have you created a CONTENT CALENDAR for all the news, blogs, sales messages or brand message and events that you will be publishing on your social channels? If not, do this now!
- Many successful businesses keep a content calendar for the whole week or even for months. Of course, you can always change it based on recent information but using a content calendar to pre-plan the next few days for your social media can save a lot of time and give you peace of mind.
- Brain storm some ideas, find some great content using above techniques, make use of Google image search to find images, search for latest in your topic in Google news, gather your brand messages and schedule them in content calendar or put them in Buffer or Hootsuite tools to be posted later.
- A brand message may look something like “Are you looking to automate your Accounting? Checkout our range of exclusive tools ….” You can use social media management tools like Hootsuite to schedule the same message to publish on your channels with a gap of say 3 days. These are repetitive messages and can be published multiple times. Use these tools to automate it rather than manually posting it every third day.
6. Are you still thinking about getting SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) for your site? Well, it’s time to take action now because while you’re still thinking, your competitors are enjoying the party happening on first page in Google.
- The day you understand all the benefits of SEO, you won’t spend a second getting it on board.
- SEO is one of the best ways to get branding, quality traffic and leads. Because of the increased complexity in SEO (thanks to Google’s algorithm updates), many digital marketing strategies needs to be implemented to achieve results. So, getting SEO (provided you have experienced SEO consultant working on your site) means you’re getting a bundle of digital marketing benefits all wrapped in one package.
- SEO is one of the most powerful tool to boost your business. For instance, at WebsiteFix, we have recently helped an Electrical company based in Brisbane to grow their top keywords (one of them is high volume & highly competitive keyword “Electrician Brisbane”) ranking from page 9 to top of page 1 in Google. The enquiries haven’t stopped flowing since then and keeping them very busy.
- For instance, Urbane Man, an ecommerce store (Men Grooming products) have increased their sales by 15% in just 2 months with our SEO services .
7. Have you implemented the CONVERSION TECHNIQUES on your website? Do you have a form on your website for users to enquire with a clear call to action or you’ve just given a phone number expecting users to call you?
Not including an easy to fill form for enquiry is a mistake. There are still many users who would rather enquire online or request you to call them back rather than picking up the phone and making an effort to call. So why waste an opportunity? Add a quick enquiry form to your site.
8. Explain your product or Service. The last thing anyone wants is another sales pitch. They want the facts. In simple, clear language explain your products and services, what they do, how they work, and what to expect. Make your website sell as well as your best salesperson.
What do your customers want to know and learn when they’re buying? Use your how to content to answer these questions. While you’re at it, link that content with your Product and Pricing pages.
9. How-To Content. Your customers are working to educate themselves. They are sponges for knowledge and they love “how to” content. Software companies like Salesforce, for example, does a great job educating its customers. Visit their site and you will find tons of Demos to let consumers use the product and get a feel of it before buying it.
10. Create master piece content based on each topic in your niche and promote it regularly on social. Long form content at least 1500 words with great graphics has huge chance to get more shares. This type of content also has a better chance to rank in Google.
11. Make Creative headlines for blogs that get more clicks and attracts huge social shares.
12. Social Proof Your Brand. Your customers are not going to take your website at face value. They’re going to Google your brand to validate it’s as good as you say it is. So, give them content to find. This is where your social media, public relations, and influencer marketing can generate a ton of value. It creates a halo around your brand in search engines with articles, reviews, and proof statements that your brand is credible. Also, get positive testimonials as they will appear in right side bar when users search for your brand (provided you’re registered with Google Local).
13. Do you understand the concept of a LANDING PAGE (LP)? If not, start making use of it asap. Landing page concept needs to be researched so best if you research more on it or call us for more info but in short, landing page is different to your usual service page. LP usually have less call to actions (preferably just one) and quick enquiry options like a form and phone number. Further, it is usually shorter with less text compared to a normal service page.
- When you are running a campaign, promoting an event/ offer and advertising it online, it is best to send your users to a landing page (optimised exactly for that campaign) rather than sending them to your usual service page which usually have variety of information and various call to actions.
- Some make a huge mistake of sending the users from an ad to their home page and users are lost where to find the information about the promoted campaign. Avoid doing this and make use of a LP.
14. Set up a pop-up on your site asking user to sign up for newsletter or enquire. Attention span of online users is decreasing. A research said it is only 15 secs before they move to another site. So, grab their attention before they leave you. Use tools like Optin Monster which comes with exist intent technology means if users trying to exist a page, they will see a pop up. This technique has proven very effective for many to reduce bounce rate.
15. Is Pop-up a spam? Many users ask us this question if the pop ups will be spam or hurt SEO. If you have a nice-looking pop-up in a compact window (not blocking the whole site) and if it is easy to close it with no spam techniques implemented then no, it won’t hurt your site.
16. If you’ve got a hot lead, you need to follow up immediately. A study from InsideSales. com found that salespeople are nine times more likely to convert a lead if they follow up within five minutes.
17. How to respond to a lead?
When communicating with potential client and following up on a lead-
Be brief. • State your objective. Why are you writing? • Ask for next steps. Let the prospect take control of their buying process. • Reference things current customers love about your solution. You can even include brief customer testimonials or interviews. • Track your emails. • Send content relevant to the prospect’s business needs. • Ensure your communications are personalized to the prospect’s activities and interests. For example, did they attend your company’s webinar or visit your booth a trade show? Maybe they asked a question on social media or engaged with content on your website.
18. Start a Forum on your website – it can rank for long-tail keywords, decrease your site’s bounce rate, increasing time-on-site, as well as build a community in your niche.
19. Start a Facebook group that drives traffic to your site –a niche-specific group where members can ask questions & get support (point them to your site where relevant).
20. Submit your blog posts to StumbleUpon, Reddit, alltop.com & triberr.com– It still works!
21. Send Newsletters to your email list and promote your blogs to get traffic. Update your customers about your latest company news, products, services, new offers via newsletters.
22. Answer a HARO (Help A Reporter Out) query via https://www.helpareporter.com/ – HARo is a great platform to communicate reporters who are looking for stories for their news items or articles. If you have an expertise in a field, help them out and get free publicity. Answering a pitch only take a few minutes, and can result in great PR, high-quality inbound links and referral traffic to your site.
23. Make a list of popular forums (ex: flyingsolo business forums) in your niche and regularly participate in them. Participate in conversations, help others and point them to your site where relevant.
24. Reach out popular sites/blog – collaborate with them. Offer them something FREE (your product, service) in return to guest blogs or a banner ad on their site.
25. Make a list of INFLUENCERS (those who have thousands of followers on web) in your niche. Ex: @jeffbullas is an influencer for digital marketers with 558,000 followers on twitter. Interview influencers in your niche and add it to your blog– They will be very likely to promote your blog with his/hertheir interview to their audience. Mention them in your tweets. They will re-tweet it.
26. Create a “top 10 …” post ex: “Top 10 Business Software” and link to all of them in your blog. Linking out is a great SEO strategy anyway. – Also, let them know so they can share on their social channels.
27. Get on YouTube. Use content ideas (as discusses earlier in this guide) to create videos based on them. If you are ignoring YouTube so far, how about this-
The total number of people who use YouTube – 1,300,000,000 and it gets over 30 million visitors per day.
28. Create share worthy images – Use Pablo free tool to create images for your social media site. Try including your post title and URL in your blog post images for optimal effect. Share them on Pinterest. Use relevant hashtags. http://hashtagify.me/ is great tool to find relevant # Pablo allows you to connect with Buffer so- create image and directly share it to all channels with just one click.
29. Make a list of hashtags in client’s niche to use them in different social posts- twitter, Pinterest & Instagram. If you have a twitter business page, twitter analytics has a section – Recurring events– where they give you latest tweets used by users on recurring basis. Use those # to promote your own tweets (if related).
30. Be authority figure– Regularly share the high-quality content in your niche on Fb and twitter. Followers see you as an authority figure when they see you sharing great content regularly.
31. Post your content to Facebook Groups and LinkedIn Groups. This works very well in bringing more traffic and sales.
32. Ask a well-known blogger to guest post on your site – They’ll likely share the post with their audience, driving traffic to your site.
Smart Ways to Generate More Leads
33. Create a Meetup Group or attend one in your niche. Participate, communicate and help others in the group with your expertise. You can get a lot of referral enquiries from there.
34. If you’re a start-up or entrepreneur, why not partner with an experienced Sales Professional. Share some profits with him/her. You’ll get more sales and he/she will get an extra income. It helps both parties.
35. Use Facebook pixel marketing to re-target those who visited the site but didn’t convert.
36. Use Adwords re-targeting to target those who visited site but didn’t convert. There are also other tools such as AdRoll- The retargeting and prospecting platform of choice for over 35,000 advertisers worldwide.
37. If you’re in B2B business, regularly visit events (even if they are not-directly connected to your niche) such as accounting seminars, web design meetups, bloggers meetups, start up and social media meetups or business growth events. Provide free help to those who are seeking advice. You may become only ‘go-to guy’ for them for your product/service. They may also refer you to their friends or family (Referral).
38. Create a great offer around your product or service and advertise on https://www.groupon.com.au/ You’ll not just get sales, but also get more traffic, branding and SEO benefits as they usually ad a link back to your site from the Groupon deal.
39. Find potential clients on Google, Facebook and twitter. For instance, if you are a photographer you should be searching for those who are going to have a special event such as Birthday, party, wedding or professional event. Offer them free advice and quote to start conversation. Using simple search term such as “Looking for Photographer” in Google, or social media can also work. Be creative and find different similar search terms to search for your potential clients/customers.
40. Referral Program– Create a very attractive referral program- share it with your network and clients. Also use other online marketing methods discussed in this guide to promote this referral program.
41. Affiliate marketing still works if that is something you would like to do.
42. Form an alliance. Aligning yourself with a similar type of business can be a powerful way to expand quickly. Find a professional or agency in similar industry but not a direct rival and then offer them your expertise. You can also offer white label services to get more work.
43. Diversify- Sell complementary products or services. Think what else can you offer related to your current range of products or services and how you can add more value to your customers or clients.
44. Become a paid speaker or columnist to give more exposure to your business.
45. Becomes a guest author (aka guest posting) to write for a popular site/blog and throw in link to your own site. Make sure you write great content for them to add value to their website.
46. Target other markets. Your current market is serving you well. Are there others? You bet. If your consumer market ranges from teenagers to college students, think about where these people spend most of their time. Could you introduce your business to schools, clubs or colleges? You could offer discounts to special-interest clubs or donate part of [your profits] to schools and associations. Baby boomers, elderly folks, teens, tweens…let your imagination take you where you need to be. Then take your product to the markets that need it.
47. Apply for Awards. You’ll be surprised to know that for many business awards, very few actually apply which increases your chances to win. Winning a business award is great for your online presence and PR. Showing off your awards on your site adds a great deal of credibility to your brand and makes a good impression on first time visitors on your website.
48. Get great Testimonials from your happy clients. Add them on your site or social channels. Making a video testimonial can work wonders and increase your conversions.
49. Increase your price. Increasing your price by ensuring you give more value to your customers can often be the quickest way to generate more revenue. Remember that every 10 per cent increase in price contributes more than the same 10 per cent increase in sales without all the effort. For instance, if your profit margin is say 20 per cent then every 10 per cent increase in your price is equal to 5 times that increase in new sales.
40 Merger and Acquisition– If you’re a large company, Merge with or acquire another business. For instance, FatWire’s acquisition of divine in 2003 grew its customer base from 50 to 400, and the company grew 150 percent, from $6 million to $15 million. Company founders expects no less than $25 million in coming years.
—– X —-
If implemented correctly, all the above tips will add great value to your business. Try to implement at least 8-10 of these steps without any delay. If you have a question about any of these steps or simply need professional help to prepare a custom online marketing campaign for you, just give us a call. Our friendly staff at WebsiteFix will be happy to help you out.
Vikas Rana
Latest posts by Vikas Rana (see all)
- How to activate Muladhara chakra (Root Chakra)? - May 19, 2023
- How an SEO expert can help you with your business in 2023? - March 15, 2023
- Is everything in universe energy? - February 7, 2023