Internet Marketing Tips for Small Businesses

What's a Call to Action button?

If there's one question I ask my Clients over and over again it would be this: what action do you need your visitors to take on your website in order for you to make money? These actions include:

• buying something
• signing up for a newsletter
• becoming a member
• making a donation
• and lots more.

How do visitors take those actions on your website? By clicking your Call to Action buttons - whether it be a "Buy Now" button or "Subscribe" button doesn't matter.

Several factors influence whether your visitors will act when you tell them to. These factors include your sales copy, the target audience, the nature and quality of your offer, visitors' perceptions of the economy and how clickable your Call to Action buttons are. A very simple way you can boost conversion (percentage of your visitors that take action) on your website is to make sure you're large, colorful, contrasting buttons.

What makes a good button you ask?

Here's a few features of a good button:

• Color: should be bright and contrasting. For example, on an orange website you could use green buttons - avoid buttons in colors adjacent to orange on the color wheel like yellow or red.
• Location: visitors shouldn't need to scroll to find your Buy Now button. You need to make it easy for your visitors. Put the button in an obvious location on your page.
• Language: use action verbs like Buy Now, Signup, Download, Subscribe, etc. In the book Call to Action by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg, they also mention the need to reduce friction and increase urgency. For example, if a visitor is considered about privacy then telling that visitor you won't share their contact information can reduce friction. Similarly, reminding visitors near a Buy Now button that you have an amazing moneyback guarantee policy can reduce friction too. Limited time offers are a great way to increase urgency.
• Size does matter: the larger the button, the easier it is to see and click. You want your visitors to click it right?
• Margins: don't crowd the most important graphic on your website. Give your Call to Action button some room, and let it do its job.

Call to action button showcase

Check out some great buttons at leemunroe.com. Scroll down to the "Showcase of good examples of Call to Action buttons".

Once your website is optimized for your keywords, getting links from relevant, high-ranking, quality websites is the next step in dominating search results.

Why's that you may ask? Because the more websites that link to your website, the more credible search engines assume your website must be. Of course, the websites that link to your website have to themselves be credible!

I was watching the clip below over at Web Marketing Today. In it, Aaron Wall from SEO Book (an excellent resources website containing lots of useful SEO tools) explains seven ways you can get people to link to your website.

Here's the seven ways he mentioned in the clip:

1. Offer discounts or coupons as benefits to non-profits.
2. Write original, useful content in a blog on your domain.
3. Redirect affiliate links using 301 redirects.
4. Have a contest where people vote on something they're passionate about.
5. Use offline networking opportunities.
6. Write guest columns or articles.
7. Attract journalists who may cite you on a topic.

If you've done a search on Google for a particular service in Toronto, you may have "Local Business Results" at the top of the search results:

Wouldn't it be nice if your business was listed on here to? (for the appropriate search of course)

Not only is getting your business listed on Google's Local Business Center free, but the "Local Business Results" appear above the normal search listing! There is one slight potential drawback: the map centers in the center of a city. Businesses located on the edges of a city may get reduced exposure.

Sound good? Simply follow the steps below to list your business:

Step 1: Go to Google's Local Business Center website and login or create an account as necessary. After you're logged in, click the button labeled “Add New Business”.

Note: if you don't see the “Add new business” button, click the link “Add new listing”. You'll see "Add new listing" rather than "Add new business" if you've already created a Google Local Business Center account in the past with your email address.

Step 2: Enter your business's basic information.

You'll notice once you've added your address the map on the right will zoom to your location. Click next when you're ready to proceed.

Step 3 (Optional): If your listing already exists, you may see the screen listed below. Click “Claim Listing”. This will allow you to change the listing details.

You may now edit your listing information or suspend the listing.

Step 4: Enter detailed information about your business including your businesses category, services or products offered (using either the Categories or Additional Details areas), hours of operation, accepted payment methods, your logo under the Photos section and more. You may also associate a video with your listing if you've uploaded a video about your business to Youtube.

Step 5:After submitting your business information, Google will now ask you to verify your listing. You have three options:

• phone
• sms
• mail (snail mail)

I find the phone option to be the easiest and most convenient.

Step 6: Using the phone option, Google will call you using an automated message service. You have the option of being called now or in five minutes. Click whatever option suits you. Google will then display a PIN (personal identification number) on screen. You will be asked to enter that PIN on your phone's touchtone pad when Google calls. If you selected “Call Me Now”, you may expect to be called very promptly – usually within 10 seconds. Answer the phone, push 1 and then enter your PIN followed by the pound sign (#).

Step 7: Congratulations! Upon successful completion of the call, your business should be listed on Google Maps within 1 business day.

Want to have an unending, high-volume stream of traffic coming to your website? Simply be first on a Google search of a popular keyword! I kid of course - being first on Google for a popular keyword is not an easy task. Here's some tips to help you get there:

1. While not as important as it once was, ensuring your website has appropriate meta tags is still worthwhile. Identifying no more than 7-10 keywords per page in the keyword meta tag is preferable to letting the search engines decide what keywords are important for your page. Also, the description meta tag will allow you to control what piece of text search engines display from your website on search listings.
2. For each page of your website, your keywords should make up 2-3% of the words. If they do not then search engines assume your pages are not related to your keywords - this is bad!
3. Research your keywords using tools such as Google's Keyword Research Tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) or WordTracker (available at SEOBook's website - http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/). There's little to gain by optimizing your website for a next-to-no volume keyword. Conversely, discovering a high-volume keyword related to your industry (and that your potential clients use) that your competitors aren't optimizing for can be a great advantage!
4. Link building (putting links to your website throughout the web) is the most important factor that affects your search engine ranking. This is something we'll need to work on with your website once we clarify the keywords you'll be optimizing your site for.

Are you waiting for your website visitors to contact you? Stop waiting and ask that they contact you! Deciding in advance what you want your website visitors to do on every page and then persuading them to do so should happen for each page of your website! Here's a few tips to help you along:

1. Don't be afraid to use your website to tell your visitors what you want them to do! Having visitors see your website and contact you is the primary purpose of your website - telling them to do so is essential.
2. Make it easy for your website visitors to contact you - increase the size of your phone number in the top left corner, and tell them to call you today/now/immediately in order to have a warm, caring person talk to them like a human being. I apologize for the long sentence.
3. Remove or reduce the amount of homepage devoted to your company/team/bio information. It's true that people do business with people, but the most important person on your website is the visitor and they tend to read about solutions to their problems. Visitors like to see content that talks about them and their problems. Devote as much space as possible on your homepage to the visitor's potential problems/concerns/needs, convince them that your services are the best solution and then make it easy for them to contact you.