
Why Clients Don’t Like Questionnaires
Many of us send questionnaires, hoping the answers will shine a magical light into a business owner’s needs. But clients often race through i,he forms tossing out haphazard answers, just to be done. There’s got to be a better way.
Should I Show Prices On My Website?
It’s a question that comes up all the time. My network of marketing pros have had many debates about the pros and cons, with newbies and seasoned pros weighing in on the topic. Transparency, knowing your value, and multi-tier pricing all factor into the winning decision: just do it.
Email Marketing Metrics – Know Your Data
How will you know if an email campaign is successful? While a high open rate is good news, it’s just one of many of the statistics you could track. This guide will help you decide which ones to give your time and attention.
Resources for Your Business
I originally intended for this to be a collection of free image and video resources. However, I can’t ever let a little thing be a little thing, so now it includes resources to find fonts and templates, and tools to help you streamline your processes and organize your tasks.
The Super-Important “About You” Page
Your About page is the true workhorse of your website, with the potential to convert more visitors into customers than your Home page and Service pages combined. Use this incredibly valuable asset to showcase how you can help your customers.
Prepare for Your Website Design Meeting
You want to have a rockin’ new website, and I want to make it happen. We’ll need to go over a lot of information at our initial website design meeting. It’s important that you know what part your new site plays in your overall business plan? This should help.
Has Your Hobby Become A Business?
It’s been a year of big changes for everyone. If you are among a growing number of people who are converting their beloved hobby into a money-making business, you are going to need to establish yourself online. Social media alone won’t get you the same top-tier results as having your own website.
The Difference Between Email Marketing and Newsletters
It’s easy to lump together the concepts of “sending out email newsletters” and “doing email marketing.” But it’s important to understand the difference, and to learn to utilize where they overlap so you can create strategies that work for you.
Your Website Deserves Professional Care
Website Maintenance. Sounds terribly important, doesn’t it? The phrase brings to mind a tiny team of nanobots crawling around the internet, brandishing wee wrenches. But to reap the most benefit from the hard-earned marketing dollars that you spent building your online storefront, you must take good care of it.
Serving Up Fresh Content
Content is the most important and time-consuming part of website design. Too often people ask for cool functions and neat features, with content a mere afterthought. But your content delivers the real value of your website and your design should be completely based on it, answering this: What is the unique value that you, and you alone, bring to your customers?
Treat your Website like an Investment
Once people understand the power of a custom website, the eye-catching visuals within a functional, easy-to-use framework, they get excited and think of the possibilities. Then they start thinking of cutting costs. You should consider your website to be your most important marketing tool. Because it is.
Email Marketing Done Right
Everyone you want to do business with has an email account. And everyone checks their email daily, several times per day. It’s usually one of the first things we do each morning. Email marketing is one of the smartest ways you can spend your advertising budget – if you do it right.
Branding Your Business
Savvy business owners know who their ideal audience is, and develops branding that appeals to them. Also important: knowing who is *not* the target audience. Trying to appeal to everyone is a common newbie mistake and a red flag for buyers. Let’s go over some branding basics and I’ll share some resources that cover the topic in greater detail.
Spring Clean Your Home Office
Cleaning can often feel like a chore. But Spring cleaning feels like a privilege, a joy, like “Oh wow, the weather is lovely and I get to do this!” Whether you want to tacklet it all in one day or make a project of it, your efforts will be rewarded with boosts in productivity and mood.
End of Workday Routine
I’m starting a new end of workday routine. Trying to build a business out of thin air takes effort, focus, gumption, drive, perseverance and research. Oodles and oodles of learning new things. I’ve worked far into the night on too many occasions. It takes a toll, there’s a woeful lack of work/life balance. And both the work and the life suffer for it.
Experiencing and Avoiding Burnout
It’s common for us small business owners to bite off far more than we can chew. We love to hustle and grind, hit our goals and have that wonderful feeling of productivity. But we must be careful, because a tomato-shaped timer and a stack of post-it notes cannot win over the pervasive bleah of burnout.