Our CEO's Top Internet Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses

Need a boost for your business? Recently, our CEO, Jay Berkowitz, did an interview with Barry Epstein on what small business owners need to know about marketing on the web. Here are Jay's top tips for small businesses:

• Follow the 4-second rule: within 4 seconds, someone who visits your website should be able to tell who you are and what you do.
• Offer a U.V.P: a U.V.P., or Unique Value Proposition, offers visitors to your site a freebie in order to collect valuable information from them, such as an email address.
• Use Wordpress: Wordpress offers a simple webiste setup - you can get your website up and running in 15 minutes, and can skip an expensive designer.

Want more tips on small business solutions for internet marketing? View the rest of Jay's interview on our website. He'll give you all of the details you need to make his top tips succeed, and offer additional information and advice for store owners on what is most important for success on the web.

Have Your Audited Your Content?

You may have heard that content is king and you need to your customers interested in your products and services by creating it - but how do you know that you're creating content that the customer wants? How do you know how much content and what types you have created, and if there are any holes in your content marketing strategy? Here is where a content audit comes in handy.

According to Christopher Detzi, a comment audit can be used to determine 4 things:

1. Reveal the true scale of the website’s content (there was less than we thought).
2. Clarify and refine the project scope (it took on a different focus than we had expected).
3. Facilitate strategic discussions about design objectives and direction (which were different from what our stakeholders had imagined).
4. Establish a common language for the team to use throughout the project (which was more complicated than we had anticipated).

Your analysis of your marketing content must be both quantitative and qualitative to be effective - that is, you need to determine how much content you have and what types of content you have. The content audit above is a great place to start when trying to determine the content types. You can further break your content down by what category it falls under (for example, internet marketing content might further be divided into SEO content, PPC content, and social media marketing content). This should help you get a clearer picture of what you already have and key areas you want to focus on that you may have missed, or don't have a lot of. After your audit, revise your strategy accordingly and don't forget to track it with your SEO tools to make sure that it's having the intended effect.

Have any personal tips on creating and curating content? Let us know in the comments.

Counting on Humor to Create Consumers

Have you ever heard of an "Explainer Video?"

Explainer videos or “explainers” are powerful marketing tools that deftly use humour to engage audiences while communicating a company’s value proposition. - Lumeo Inc press release

That's right - you can easily boost conversions, engage audiences, improve SEO, and kick off a viral marketing campaign with a video like this. 50% of internet users regularly watch humorous videos, and if you get creative with your content, yours could be one. To get some ideas, watch this fantastic commercial by the Dollar Shave Club and read this TechCrunch article for more ideas on how to get started.