Big Ideas Blog

May 16, 2013 by June Brockmeyer Leave a Comment

Infusioncon Expert Insights: Daymond John

At Big Ideas, we’re always looking for new ways to share useful tips and insights with you. Managing a small business can be extremely difficult and since everyone faces different challenges, we decided to take some time and interview some of the Infusioncon 2013 keynote speakers and entrepreneurs about what they do best.

To kick off our new video series we have a one-on-one interview with Daymond John, Urban Entrepreneur and Shark Tank Judge. In this video, John shares all you need to know about his S.H.A.R.K. Points and also gives small business owners a few tips on how to succeed.

Enjoy!

Filed Under: Videos Tagged With: Daymond John, InfusionCon, Infusionsoft

May 15, 2013 by Infusionsoft Contributor Leave a Comment

Five Landing Page Secrets Used by Ecommerce Pros

Guest post by Megan Totka

We’ve searched high and low to help find ways to get your business more sales leads and have developed a list of the top landing page secrets used by Ecommerce professionals. After all, the best marketers know that earning a high search ranking is only half the battle; you need to actually get new customers. Once your potential customers and on your page, you have to attract and keep their attention to prevent them from clicking back to the search results page. You don’t want to lose them to your competitors!

Experts at InboundMarketingAgents.com say that companies with thirty or greater landing pages generate a whopping seven times more leads than companies with fewer than ten. All businesses want more leads. Take advantage of these five secrets used by the world’s top ecommerce pros to help you design conversion-driving landing pages:

Create a Call to Action

After people land on your webpage, they need some direction of what to do. Landing pages should have a call to action. A call to action from the business directs the visitors on how to proceed without any confusion.

Encourage Trust

If customers trust a website, they’re likely to take action. The customer feels at ease and doesn’t worry about identity theft, credit card fraud or spam. A customer that trusts a website will focus on getting signed up and making a purchase. Some ways to boost your credibility include adding reviews, awards, social media likes and testimonials specifically from your satisfied customers.

Prove Relevance Through Headings

Even a great landing page may suffer if its visitors aren’t able to locate the answers they’re seeking. Use page titles and headings to point potential customers in the right direction. It’s essential that the titles are consistent with the content of the page the user is redirected to in order to prevent frustration and annoyance – - and a customer who heads right back to the search results.

Concentrate on Baby Steps

To increase success and complete conversions, think baby steps. Customers are more likely to complete their transaction when they only have to take small steps at a time. People are more likely to complete forms that are brief instead of lengthy. They are more likely to share their zip code over their full addresses.

Eliminate Distractions

Anything that may pose as a distraction is a deterrent to your website. Distractions give your prospective customers a reason to lose focus on the desired action. Take away menus, text and any clutter from your page that may prevent the desired response from happening.

At the same time, some videos and images may complement the goal of the landing page and promote visitor action. Pictures and images of real people using the product or how-to videos can improve conversion rates.

A perfect landing page needs to offer solutions, be relevant and encourage prospective customers to take action and decide they need your product or service. In order to keep your conversion levels at an optimal rate and turn more visitors into customers, you should be willing to make changes as necessary.

To finely tune your call to action, take the advice from Infusionsoft’s e-book.

Megan Totka is the Chief Editor for ChamberofCommerce.com. She specializes on the topic of small business tips and resources. ChamberofCommerce.com helps small businesses grow their business on the web and facilitates connectivity between local businesses and more than 7,000 Chambers of Commerce worldwide.

Filed Under: Sales and Marketing Trends Tagged With: attract interest, call to action, small business ecommerce

May 15, 2013 by June Brockmeyer Leave a Comment

The BIG Idea of the Week: Spring Cleaning your CRM

This month on “The BIG Idea of the Week” we want to talk to you about Spring Cleaning your CRM and provide simple tips that will help in managing your small business.

This week, we’re continuing our chat with Wes Schaeffer, Infusionsoft Certified Consultant, also known as The Sales Whisperer. He joined me via Skype last week to talk about some tips and tricks when it comes to cleaning up your database.

One great thing about utilizing a CRM system for your small business is that you can be as organized as you need to be. In our interview, Schaeffer talks about how having Infusionsoft can simplify a few of the steps you need to take to clean up your database, but if you don’t have Infusionsoft don’t worry, the tips can also work for you.

He begins to talk about your branding.

“I always encourage people to do something with their thank you page anyway. People have taken the time to either give you their name and contact information and/or buy something. Do some type of up-sell there, even if it’s just your link to your social media to ask them to engage or have a true up-sell there,” says Schaeffer.

Schaeffer also suggests that you use the tools you have available to organize things like past order information, payment information, activity history etc. By doing this on your Dashboard or whatever platform you see everyday, you’ll feel more organized and it will save you time.

“It’s a great way to streamline how you spend your day,” says Schaeffer.

Schaeffer also says that the key is to use your CRM more efficiently.

“Creating tasks, creating appointments, having them all in one place…now is that really Spring cleaning? maybe, maybe not but I think it’ll clean up your desk, it’ll clean up the paper, it’ll clean up the lists that we all juggle,” says Schaeffer.

The reason why Spring cleaning is so important for entrepreneurs and small business owners is because you can define what it means to you.

To contact Schaeffer directly you can tweet @SalesWhisperer, visit his facebook page or go to his site. Remember to follow & tweet at us @BigIdeasBlog. We’re also on Facebook so please give us a “like”.

We’re excited to start the conversation with you!

Filed Under: Videos Tagged With: CRM, june brockmeyer, Spring, Spring cleaning, Wes Schaeffer

May 15, 2013 by Andrea Parker 2 Comments

Four Free SEO Tools for Small Businesses

Guest post by Daniel Page

Not every business can afford to pay for a decent SEO tool or service. Often, when they can’t afford qualified and experienced SEO experts, single employee and small businesses turn to cheap SEO companies in the hope that they can get an advantage over their competitors without much capital outlay.

Generally, that’s a bad idea. Good SEOs are in high demand and can charge accordingly. It’s unlikely that a cheap SEO is going to be effective; in fact, many of the quick boost techniques that such SEOs use are going to cause problems for a site, either in the short term if they are very bad, or in the medium term if they have some chops, but their techniques rely on link building tactics that Google and its peers are going to penalize at some point.

It’s often safer for a small business that can’t afford experienced SEOs to do some of the basic work themselves. There are plenty of great SEO resources available to learn from, and many of the tools that SEOs use have a free tier that offers sufficient functionality for preliminary analysis and strategy building.

SEO is a complex endeavor, and, as the saying goes, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but if a business’s founder or webmaster can educate themselves to use SEO tools to their advantage in the early days of a business, it can give them a foundation that’s useful when the time comes to actually hire an expert to take the company to the next level.

We’re going to have a look at four free tools that small businesses can use to get to grips with the state of their site and that of their competitors.

MajesticSEO

Backlinks are one of the most important parts of SEO. Incoming links to a site are a large part of what determines its ranking in the SERPs. MajesticSEO is a great tool for analyzing a site’s backlink profile. That’s useful for both competitor analysis and for keeping an eye on who is linking to your business’s site.

The free version of the tool is limited, but it does give some idea of how a business and its competitors compare, and will give ideas for link-building opportunities.

Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is a tool for crawling a site. It goes through a site, link by link, and reports back on any problems it finds. That can be links to nonexistent pages , duplicate content, missing titles and headers, and URI issues. All of these can affect Google’s ability to crawl a page and can impact search rankings.

Pingdom Tools

Pingdom Tools are not, strictly speaking, SEO tools, but they can provide very useful information about a site’s functioning. Site speed is one of the signals that Google uses in determining ranking. All other things being equal, an unresponsive site will rank less well than a responsive competitor, and Pingdom’s site speed tool will provide information about how quickly a page loads and how long each element is taking.

Google Keyword Tool

Google’s keyword tool is the best way to determine how much competition there is and the search volume for the keywords that a site wants to rank for.

These are only a few of the many available free SEO tools, but they’re the minimum that any business should have at hand for getting to grips with the SEO of a site. If you have a favorite tool, feel free to give it a shout out in the comments below.

To get help in driving traffic to your website, download “Green Light,” Infusionsoft’s e-book.

Daniel Page is the Director of Business Development for ASEOhosting, a leading provider in SEO hosting and multiple IP hosting. Follow ASEOhosting on Twitter at @aseohosting or like them on Facebook,

Filed Under: Small Business Technology Tagged With: free seo, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, small business tools