Author Archives: David Jones

How to Increase Visitor Engagement with Your Site?

Creating a website for your business is a start and you will most likely pass through the eye of a needle in getting a consistent amount of visitors who actively engage with your site.

Keeping them longer on your site – that is how you start your engagement with them. To do that, we’ve listed some of the measures to take that will increase visitor engagement within your site:

1. Change the Theme of Your Site

For a website to keep and maintain visitors, its visual appearance must be appealing to them. Your website says a lot about your business and it gives that first impression that lasts. Be sure that important information is properly placed in your web pages and that you use professional looking and user-friendly themes.

Keep in mind that your website theme defines what your business is about and losing your potential customers just because you didn’t take your time (and money) enhancing how it looks is such a waste.

2. Make it Load Faster

Making your site load faster is important not only for user experience but also for ranking in Google. Sites with longer loading time tend to have higher bounce rates and low average user sessions.

Additionally, sites with over 2-seconds response-time is enough for Google to back-off in crawling other pages in that same site. With this in mind, your competitors with fast websites improve their ranking leaving you buried deep in Google search results.

This means that with a slow website you are not only losing a sale, but you’re also affecting your site’s overall performance. Impress your visitors by going that extra mile in making your website load as fast as it can, which will eventually land you sales and loyal customers.

3. Improve Your Website Copy

In creating a website, it is essential to have a good website copy that communicates what you want your visitors to do on your site. Copies should be precise and don’t leave your visitors confused, but encourages them to stay and find out what you can offer them.

People’s patience and attention span have dwindled tremendously. This means that with the few seconds of attention they give you, you must capture their interest and see you as something they need. Otherwise, you’ve just wasted an opportunity for them to convert.

4. Make Your Call-to-Action Buttons Big and Visible

Strong call-to-actions are what you use to grab the attention of your visitors. Create big and visible CTAs that stands out, but not big enough to lure them away because you look desperate. CTAs has been tagged as the ‘the most important part of a site’ by Soni of LoginRadius. When done correctly, it’s power in boosting conversion is not a secret to most website owners.

CTAs must be relevant to what your goals are. You don’t want to put a “Buy Now” button and direct it to a page that doesn’t involve buying. Most importantly, try to create different versions of your call-to-action buttons, this gives you ideas of what works best and what converts the most.

Conclusion

Testing and modifying each effort you use is one of the keys to your site’s development. Use Google Analytics to track how your visitors interact with your site, how long they stay, or what page they visit. It shows you a glimpse of your visitors’ behavior and gives you ideas of what to tweak next on your site to further their engagement with your site which ultimately awards you with a conversion.

Originally posted on July 9, 2017 @ 8:49 pm

7 Ways to Effectively Market Your Medical Services Online

In a world where technology and information flow all around us, we can’t help but understand the reality that we need to take advantage of these things. For it’s in using these that we can further improve our careers, processes, or whatever it may be. This fact applies to everyone, especially to medical professionals.

In this article, we’re going to tell you the best ways to market your medical services online. For sure, this will improve your professional reputation and make your income skyrocket!

Build your own website

Probably the best way to make your medical expertise known online is by making a website. It’ll be where you’re going to advertise your practice, experience, and services, as well as the information on how your potential patients can contact you.

Gone were the days when you have to spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars every year just to maintain a site. Now, it’s just a piece of cake to make one.

Even a simple one such as this Boulder Sports Massage website opens your business up with more opportunities to generate more leads and sales!

All you need to have is a web developer, hosting service, and content writer. Or if you’re a jack-of-all-trades and you know how to do those, then great! You’ve got no excuses to have your own site.

Take “real” pictures

What we mean by this is that you shouldn’t rely on stock photos for your website or social media accounts. These make you feel generic and cheap.

To make your customers trust you more, it’s best if you take actual photos of your team. Take pictures of your office and clinic. It’s through this that you’ll give your patients a glimpse as to how effective your medical practice is.

Try email marketing

When it comes to customer retention, you need to make sure that you’re making constant contact with them. The best way to foster that patient-doctor relationship is by emailing them. Though there are a lot of ways to contact them, nothing beats the professional feel of emails. Notify your patients if they need a diagnosis or ask an update from them regarding their health.

Make use of Facebook

Facebook is now being used by 80% of Americans, and that statistic is growing by the day. With this, it makes perfect sense for you to create an official Facebook page for your medical services. Post high-quality photos updates on your services, and connect with people who might be potential patients.

You can also take a queue from David B. Reath MD’s Facebook page where he held a weekly quiz called “Truth-O-Meter” to engage with his fans. He posts a question every Tuesday and draws a winner who will be announced on his Youtube channel to receive awesome freebies.

Understand the importance of keywords

People type in certain keywords when they search for medical services online. Because of this, you want to make the content you post on your website or social media accounts to be “searchable” or rich in keywords.

Make a list of popular keywords such as your specialty, treatments offered, and the location of your clinic. You’ll surely appear at the top of Google’s search engine when you do this.

Advertise on Google

Google Ads is one of the best ways to advertise your medical service as it reaches a lot of potential patients. When people search for a doctor or something medically-related, your medical practice is most likely to appear on a site a person has opened. It’s a great way of advertising.

Advertise on Bing

Bing is the second largest search engine next to Google, so you might also want to advertise your medical services there. The same process applied to Google Ads. But what’s different here is that you’re doubling the coverage of the ads, thus also doubling the possible new patients you can get.

Originally posted on August 6, 2017 @ 9:37 pm

How to Build a Business Empire by Selling on Amazon

Choose a selling plan

Amazon offers two plans: Individual and professional. The individual plan allows you to sell 40 items or less and charges only $0.99 per sale while the professional one will enable you to sell more than 40 items but costs $39.99 per month. Both can incur other selling fees as well.

If you’re new to this, it’s probably best to pick the individual plan at first and decide whether you’re ready to the next level.

Pick your product well

The type of product you’ll choose will determine if you will be successful in this venture.

First, search for a product you’re looking to sell.

Is someone already selling it?

If no one is selling it yet, do you think people will buy it?

There’s a ton of things you’ll have to think long and hard to come to a final decision.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to choosing the perfect items for your store.

Price it competitively

When pricing your items, you need to search for competitors who currently have your products on sale. Pricing is really up to you. However, there are risks involved.

If you want to price it higher than others, make sure you have an edge against them. But if you don’t have anything up your sleeves, try to price it slightly lower than your competitors.

Handle inventory and shipping

Since you are reselling items, you’ll need to have an inventory. It could be your room or an empty basement.

Fret not. If you don’t have space at home and wants to be in this business, make sure to check out Fulfillment by Amazon.

Final thoughts

Selling your very first item could be a truly memorable experience. This could get you going and inspire you to continue and finally expand. If you need more information on starting your Amazon journey, check out this guide from Shopify.

Scaling your brand could be a matter of finding the right niche and knowing how to market correctly. It will take time, but as long as you stick with it, you’ll soon achieve significant growth. Good luck on your new journey!

Originally posted on November 15, 2017 @ 10:06 pm

5 WordPress Plugins that Every Online Business Needs

Creating your website and perfecting your landing pages doesn’t end there just yet. You need to consider what it looks like, how fast it loads, or if it’s secured enough to go live.

1. SEO

SEO or Search Engine Optimization has proved itself way too many times with the success of million dollar websites. Unless you don’t have competitors, you won’t be seen by people looking for products or services that you have. For a beginner, SEO may be too complicated to understand and implement.

One of the top downloaded plugins on WordPress is Yoast – your best buddy when it comes to optimizing your website.

2. Cache

Thinking about caching your WordPress website means you are thinking about increasing its performance. Think of caching as taking notes and saving it for later use. In web science, caching reduces the delay of transferring data from the website the user is visiting its browser. It means, when a user visits your website again, their browser don’t have to redownload your HTML pages, images, scripts, etc. because they’ve already saved some of those in their browsers.

Nobody likes to wait for a website that’s taking forever to load. According to DoubleClick, one out of two users expects a site to load in less than two seconds. Take a look at Design Bombs’ comparison of the best WordPress caching plugins and decide on what you think is perfect for your business website.

3. Security

Your website is the place where you point your possible clients to, losing it may cost your whole business to fall. It is not just smart to install security plugins but is a must if you want to keep your business away from intruders. Even though WordPress itself offers a bunch of security updates, hackers are still persistent to find their way and exploit bugs they come across to.

The most downloaded security plugin – Wordfence, does a deep server scan of your website. Gaining more than 22 million downloads in total and mostly a 5-star rating, it is worth a try to install to your website.

4. Social Sharing

Most of your visitors probably use social media, and a good percentage of them are sharers – people who love to share something they’ve read somewhere on their social accounts. When you see content on your website is shared, it means that your visitors like it. A case study of Fizzle shows that sources of web traffic are mostly from social media websites.

Adding a highly customizable social sharing button like Share Buttons by AddThis increases your chances on being shared easier by your readers.

5. Opt-in Form

Opt-in forms are how your business gets its leads. Most of the time, you will have to offer something of value to your visitor in exchange for their email. These emails are going to be your leads and potential customers. Remember that you don’t just put opt-in forms wherever on your website, try to look compare what you think is the best opt-in form plugin you need to be adding on your website.

Using WordPress is an excellent choice because it offers a lot of functionality, but you’ll be doing a lot better by installing plugins that could help solve your little problems for you. Here are some of the best WordPress plugins every business needs – including yours.

Originally posted on May 29, 2017 @ 7:19 am

The 5 Foundations of Launching an Online Selling Business

When you are full of ideas and feel like everything you’ve imagined is going to succeed, it may be tempting to quit your day job as soon as possible. However, you know that there are consequences in this big decision you are trying to aim for. A carefully constructed online business requires intensive research and analysis to be able to come up with a solid plan.

To help you start your journey to quitting your full-time job, or maybe you just want an online business on the side, here are the five essential steps you need to be doing first:

1. Search Google Rigorously

One search on Google will show you your fierce online competitors. Whoever ranks first is most likely going to be who you’ll try to compete with. A quick Google search also shows the brands that pay for ads, meaning, if they pay for ads, then some customers are willing to pay for their services or products too. While it will take a huge part of your day to do an intensive research, it’s going to make a difference in the future of your business.

2. Score Ideas on Amazon

Often, Amazon is filled with a bunch of products that have plummeted from the ground to success. Also, Amazon is full of consumer insights that you’ll uncover. Know what their pain points are, what they love, and what products do they need. So, if in case you have no product idea yet, you can score on Amazon the product that will most likely be profitable.

3. Search for the Best eCommerce platform

The eCommerce industry is not a tiny one. You being a future digital storefront owner, must select which eCommerce platform is best for you and your business. For example, if you sell clothes online, you’re going to need a platform that lets you show photos in different variants and styles without hassle. Aside from the platform itself, you should also consider what integrations and pricing it offers.

4. Use Ahrefs

Looking into Ahrefs can make or break your business idea. To stay on top of your game, use Ahrefs as your tool that can provide you with lots of insights. When you plug in here the keywords you’ll most likely use for your online business; you’ll be able to see how many competitors are ranking on the first page of the search engines.

Also, with the use of Ahrefs, you’ll be able to see what websites link to them and who they’re linking to the most. Are they getting most of their traffic from Pinterest? Then now you know what platform you’ll be using for paid marketing.

5. Browse Reddit

Known as ‘The Frontpage of the Internet,’ the Reddit community has been known to produce high-quality information that any online business owner can use. Subreddits like r/entrepreneur and r/smallbusiness has a lot of resources to use to your advantage. Some new business owners and marketers also use Reddit to gauge if their ideas are going to be profitable or not.

Final Thoughts

Even at a young age, one can develop their skills when they’ve been taught by like-minded adults. The first step into online selling business is knowing if your product or service is a good fit for the online world. It’s essential that you use a business-minded approach to this new venture of yours. Lastly, before you go and spend all your hard earned money on business cards, domain registration, and website creation, make sure that you’ve worked through all the five steps mentioned above.

Originally posted on August 29, 2017 @ 12:35 am

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