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Why Small Business Owners Should Start Their Own Blog

August 5, 2022 No Comments

Marketing on a budget remains a challenge for many small businesses. This article explains the benefits of blogging and how to create a successful business blog.

Research shows that 20% of startup businesses close up in their first year of operation. The businesses that do survive that first year find it difficult to stay afloat, and 65% end up shutting down within 10 years. One of the main reasons cited was poor marketing. With few resources available, it can be a challenge for small business owners to effectively promote their brands.

Blogging is a very cost-effective tool used in marketing. So, if you are not sure if your small business should own a blog, I would say yes, because of its marketing advantages. There are currently 5 billion internet users worldwide, and 60 percent of consumers claimed to read blogs on a regular basis, which represents a huge prospective market to reach through blogging.

How can blogging help your business?

There are great benefits your business can enjoy from blogging, including:

Establish customer relationships: There are new businesses emerging every day, and that has made it quite difficult to maintain customer loyalty. However, with high-quality blog posts about your business and products, you can keep your visitors engaged and build strong relationships with them. You can interact with your blog visitors by answering questions or responding to their comments. In the long run, this will help you build trust with your audience.
Thought leadership: People often look for solutions online whenever they encounter a problem. Invest time in SEO so that your business shows up in the search results. By sharing your knowledge and experience, you can become the expert they will turn to whenever they need advice.
Create a sales lead: Blogging is a great way to generate traffic for your business. Make sure you research your target audience to understand their needs so that you can carve a niche for yourself. The use of SEO-based content can generate traffic to your website, which may turn into sales leads for your business.

Starting a new blog for your business may seem like an intimidating task. So, here are a few tips to help you create a successful blog:

1. Provide value

One of the main reasons people read blogs is because they want to learn something new. Blog posts with how-to guides, tutorials and tips are very popular, and they can help you achieve a vast amount of traffic. For example, Nepal Hiking Team has a comprehensive blog that shares information on everything you need to know about Nepal, from things to do and local Nepalese foods to transportation and souvenir guides. They offer a valuable resource for anyone looking for information about Nepal or planning to visit.

2. Allow guest posting

People love to share their ideas and experiences. Allowing them to guest-post on your blog gives them the opportunity to do that as well as interact with you and other visitors. Guest-posts are also great for helping you understand who your readers are and what they are interested in. A great example is Hackernoon, the online platform where anyone can publish and share anything related to technology.

3. Make it interactive and allow comments

A blog that allows its visitors to comment and ask questions on related topics draws more attention than those that do not. Create a user-friendly platform where guests can post their comments and ask questions. Making your blog interactive is very important for building good customer service and better understanding your customers, which may eventually generate more sales leads.

4. Monitor and analyse your blog traffic

According to Hubspot, many people prefer blog posts that are informative, entertaining and teach new things. It is important to track your blog traffic to determine which of your blog posts are performing best and find out what interests your readers. You can capitalize on that to grow more traffic and leads for your business.

5. Get external links to your blog

The “web” is literally a web of networks. By attracting external links from other online sources for your blog, you can considerably increase your Google ranking and get more traffic for your site. Consider launching a press release campaign or guest-posting on other, more authoritative sites for this.

With commitment, creativity and effort, blogging can be a very effective marketing tool for your small business. Blogging is a low-cost marketing strategy with great benefits if utilized properly.

By Kimmie Tang

Sourced from Entrepreneur

In News

How Google Analytics Help Small Business Owners to Make Better Business Decisions

April 15, 2019 No Comments

By Jyotirmay Samanta

The goal of Google Analytics is to help you as a business owner to deliver a high-quality website to your customers and provide you with all the necessary information regarding the website statistics

Google analytics might seem scary at the first site. But you are an accomplished owner of a dynamic and customer-focused small business and your website represents your business! So, being inquisitive about the traffic data is your religion. As a fact, you want to know much more than just traffic data.

To give you a broader overview of what Google Analytics does, it helps businesses gain insights on their website’s traffic, where the visitors are coming from (channels, mediums, source, referrals, paid channels), which keywords draw the most traffic, what pages are visited most etc!

The data can then be drilled down to see the page views, sessions, bounce rate, new vs returning users, and session duration. Further, drill down the data to see what time of the day the users visit, what browser they visit from or what device they access your website from, the behaviour flow etc.

Google Analytics not only provides you with a lot of data, but it also pushes you in the right direction when it comes to your website optimization. You can actually get insights on whether you need to optimize the on-site SEO of your site or make your site more mobile friendly or whether to improve the website’s speed etc.

We will take a detailed look into all these in a moment and analyse how Google analytics helps business owners take important business decisions based on a huge amount of real data points. If you are a novice when it comes to Google analytics, this is the post that will push you in the right direction.

[1] Google Analytics Reports – The holy grail for understanding your website traffic

Audience Overview report :
Audience overview reports provide information on your website’s traffic at a glance. Along with that, it also provides insight into the characteristics of your users. It gives you details of your audience’s cohort, demography, age, the technology they use, behaviours and interests of your website visitors.

Image Credits – Moz

How does Audience overview report in Google Analytics help your business?

[i] As a business owner, it is paramount that you can comprehend what kind of audience your website is drawing and whether that is the customer persona you are targeting. Audience overview report pushes you in the right direction by providing clear and consistent frames of reference backed by a whole lot of data.

[ii] Once you gain insights on your customer behaviour, you can leverage it to formulate marketing strategies to increase engagement with them. It will help you target your niche audience.

[iii] Also, this helps you keep a check on how your business is doing compared to your competitors. All these extremely useful data can be used to optimize your site’s performance in order to make it more target-customer centric.

Customer Acquisition Report

This report in Google Analytics tells you from what channels and sources your website visitors landed on your website, such as search engines, social networks or referrals and what campaigns are drawing how much traffic. Acquisition report basically helps determine which marketing tactics are working and which are not.

How does Customer Acquisition report in Google Analytics help your business?

This report is an overview of your marketing tactics. This report lets you know what kind of content your audiences are enjoying and which digital marketing channels are the most successful for your business. Leverage this data to develop and optimize marketing strategies that result in higher conversions.

It can help enhance the SEO and the UI/UX of your website. If you see some pages having a high bounce rate, then divert your attention to analyze why users are abandoning those pages.

Acquisition report helps you track which sites are responsible for most referred traffic to your site and focus on developing strategies to gain more referrals from them.

Real-time Behaviour Report

With the help of real-time reports on Google Analytics, you can monitor website activity as and when it happens, i.e. in real time. You can get an overview of the no. of people that are on your site right now, which pages or events they’re interacting with, and which goal conversions have occurred. You can also continuously monitor the effects that new campaigns and site changes have on your traffic.

How Real-time reports in Google Analytics help businesses?

[i] Time-specific content marketing – With real-time data, you will get insights on when there is more number of visitors on your site; so, you can push content to your blog around that time. This will give your content a boost and increase exposure.

[ii] Also, it will give you an idea of how engaging your content is. If people are bouncing off the content too soon, you might start thinking of something else.

[3] You can also view the behaviour of your visitors with real-time analytics. This will help you get details about what is working and what’s not. Say your visitors land on your “Contact us” page but bounce before filling the form. Here you know that you will need some alterations to keep visitors engaged.

Point to remember: In order to take better decisions, make sure you avoid inflating your own website traffic. This can be done by filtering out your own IP Address.

Moving to a little more advanced Google Analytics level :

[2] Segmentation with Google Analytics :

Segmentation is a way for businesses to understand the behaviour of various groups of users (segments) on your website. It shows data based on certain criteria and tells you how different group of people (segments) interact with your website, such as all data for visitors from the United States. It also compares the performance of that segment to the performance of the whole site.

How Segmentation in Google Analytics helps Small businesses?

[i] As data is found in abundance in Google when businesses start out, they might have trouble coming to a conclusion with all that data. Segmentation converts quantitative data to qualitative data with respect to your specific business requirements, making it easier for small businesses to interpret and analyse the data.

[ii] Small business owners can segment traffic by date and time, traffic channel, geographical region etc.. You can also create custom segments to measure various sales funnel benchmarks like reaching CTA button, adding products to cart, reading your blog etc.

[iii] Segmenting website visitors in groups and targeting campaigns w.r.t each group and comparing one segment to another – really helps to derive various insights in the interest of your business. Analyse them and use them to drive campaign success as well as conversion.

[3] Setting up Goals in Google Analytics

Goals are basically created so that Google Analytics can let you know when something important has happened on your website. Goals in Google Analytics allow you to track specific user interactions on your site.

How Goals in Google Analytics Helps Your Business

[i] Businesses can set goals to keep track of specific URLs. Whenever that particular URL is visited, the goal will be triggered. Say thank you pages or order confirmation pages. This will help you know the number of completions within a specific period of time.

[ii] Businesses can set goals to track the no of users that spent a certain amount of time on your site. Also, track the no. of users that don’t spend that time on your site. This way you can track both customer engagement and also how fast your customer service provides support.
[iii] Set up goals to see the number of pages each visitor sees before they quit the website. This is also used to measure engagement. This is of help for eCommerce businesses who might want to analyse the actual users who are looking to buy.

[iv] Google Analytics also lets you set up goals when users take some specific action on your website like plays a video, shares some piece of content etc. For businesses that have a unique content strategy like video, marketing can totally use this method for their advantage.

[4] Customized Reports and Google Analytics

Google analytics has too much data, but only a portion of it is used to draw meaningful conclusions and help you optimize and make better business decisions. The reports that Google Analytics provides are okay for surface level data and offer a glimpse of what’s actually going on. Also, sorting through all that data manually is time-consuming. What custom reports do is, it collect all the data and presents them in a format that is easier to analyse.

How Does the Custom Report in Google Analytics Help Businesses?

[i] All businesses have unique strategies and thus they need specific data and more importantly, customizable analytics. With custom reports, businesses can drill down into fine details and discover correlations you wouldn’t see otherwise.

[ii] Custom reporting dashboard provides a consolidated all in one view that can be digested easily and is simpler to share and export. Also, there is provision for the dashboard to be emailed to you as a pdf either daily or weekly.

[5] Setting Custom Alerts in Google Analytics

It so happens that sometimes there is a huge dip in the web traffic or a huge drop in conversions. Manually attempting to track these fluctuations would mean keeping your eyes glued on Google Analytics 24/7. Well, you have better things to do. But again, keeping a tab of the critical fluctuations is important. Lucky for both you and me, Google Analytics came up with custom alerts to help track these variations for your website. Create custom alerts for data that are most significant and meaningful for your business and Google Analytics sends a custom notification if a change triggers one of your custom alerts. Also, you can create annotations about an alert so that you can come back as and when required to see why that alert occurred.

How Does Custom Alert in Google Analytics Help Businesses?

Stay on top of your website performance and react accordingly and make necessary changes when notified. Traffic spikes after a new campaign can indicate that the campaign is performing as expected.

[6] PPC Campaign and Which Channel Converts the Most Customers

Anyone using PPC advertisements knows that it is a key revenue driver for their businesses but also know how expensive it can get! Integrate your AdWords account with your Google Analytics and carry out a PPC audit in Google Analytics to ensure all clicks are reported accurately in Google Analytics. This will help make informed decisions.

How Tracking PPC Campaigns in Google Analytics Help Small Businesses?

[i] Adwords already show you which keywords and ads initiate the maximum conversion. Google analytics, in addition to that, will show you the customer journey, so, you’ll get an idea of what factors on your website influence the conversion rate.

[ii] With Google Analytics, you also get additional data like bounce rate, Pages Per Visit, repeat customers etc to optimize your AdWords Campaigns and make more informed business decisions.

-:: Parting words::-

The goal of Google Analytics is to help you as a business owner to deliver a high-quality website to your customers and provide you with all the necessary information regarding the website statistics. So, they let you know who’s visiting your site, who are converting and who’s not interested. Along with these which location they hail from and what social or referral channels bought them here. It also lets you set up goals and segregate your traffic. Then it helps to present all these data in an all-in-one view dashboard so that analysing all that data and taking suitable actions becomes easier for you. So, Google Analytics basically helps you market to the right people, in the right way and at the right time.

Feature Image credit: Shutterstock

By Jyotirmay Samanta

CEO of Binaryfolks Pvt. Ltd.

Sourced from Entrepreneur India

In News

5 Digital Marketing Trends for Busy Small Business Owners

September 4, 2018 No Comments

Sourced from Vavmy

Small business owners wear numerous hats. One minute you’re the CEO, the next minute an assembly line worker, or an end-of-the-day accountant. As a result, your marketing efforts may not get as much attention as you would like. According to the 2017 Small Business Marketing Trends Report created by Infusionsoft, finding time for marketing is the top challenge small businesses will face in 2017.

With such limited time for marketing, it’s imperative for small business owners to work smarter and not harder. The good news is, there are several effective digital marketing trends you can easily take advantage of that will yield a good return on your investment.

Mobile. Mobile is the most upwardly trending platform in media today. Think about it. When are you not in an intimate relationship with your phone on a daily basis. Mine knows more about me than my wife. With more and more consumers using their mobile devices to read email, surf the Web, and check social media, it’s important that each part of your digital footprint is optimized for mobile.

Video. Most social media platforms have video capabilities—and consumers are racking up millions of hours watching this content. Producing videos for Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Snapchat is an excellent way to increase engagement with your audience and inspire brand loyalty. And if the videos are live streamed, that’s even better as it creates a sense of intimacy between you and your followers.

Furthermore, small business owners can derive great benefits from the use of their promotional video, commercial, content tease, or sales pitch as a pre-roll through YouTube’s network. You’ve seen these spots that precede the video you’ve chosen to view. Guess what. They work. Statistics show more and more users are either viewing the entire spot or clicking through to an actionable web page.

Influencers. It’s not a coincidence that businesses turn to celebrities to help market their products: People are most likely to take recommendations from those they trust and admire. But just because you can’t afford to get Kim Kardashian to tweet about your business for $10,000 a pop doesn’t mean you can’t leverage the power of influencers. Chances are there is a social media influencer in your market—like a popular blogger or YouTuber—who you can hire to be a brand ambassador for you. You may even be able to save money by entering into a barter arrangement with that person.

Personalization. If you think that adding your subscribers’ names to your email campaigns is all you need to do to personalize your marketing, you’re not doing nearly enough to build a connection with your audience. In order to truly personalize your digital marketing, you must understand your customers’ habits and preferences—which will go a long way toward getting their attention and cutting through the advertising noise they experience every single day.

Metrics. According to Infusionsoft, 47 percent of small business leaders have no idea if their marketing campaigns are effective or not. To understand what your customers click on and what they share, take advantage of the analytical tools provided by Google and social media platforms. This will allow you to produce more of the content your audience responds to—and eliminate the content that isn’t worth your limited time.

Although trial and error is a natural part of marketing, as a busy business owner, you simply don’t have time to mess around with techniques that aren’t going to be effective. By incorporating these growing strategies into your marketing plan, you can expand your reach while still getting the best return on your time and money investment.