- Drive traffic
- Stand out in the market
- Give people a reason to link to your site and share it with others
- And more
The problem for most people in coming up with ideas on what content to create.
The infographic below from CopyBlogger.com gives you 22 ways to overcome that problem…
Wow. A lot has happened since my last post just 8 days ago.
Who would’ve thought that the Coronavirus would’ve caused so much chaos, so quickly in our lives?
My last post was called “Every Small Business Should Use Email Marketing” and in it, I explained why every small business should be using email as a part of their marketing.
Well, this current situation reveals another reason why email is such an important tool for small businesses to have.
Why? Because it would allow you to be able to easily and quickly contact your customers, even when you CAN’T talk to them face-to-face.
And it would allow you to do that in a much faster way than calling each individual customer. (Although, that’s something you could/should do along with emailing them.)
Anyway, whether your business has an email list or not, NOW is the time for you to focus on email marketing more than ever.
How Small Business Owners Can Build a Customer Email List
Here are some ways you can begin gathering emails:
- Ask for your customer’s email address when you’re ringing up (or writing up) their order.
- If you have their mailing address, you could send them a postcard with a special offer if/when they sign-up to your email list. (Offer something that is low cost for you, but that has a high value to them.)
- If you have their phone number, then you could call them and make that same special offer to them if/when they sign-up to your email list. (They could give you their email address over the phone.)
- Make that same offer on your website. How do they receive it? It is automatically sent to them after they join your email list.
Incentives That Business Owners Could Offer to Encourage People to Join Their Email List
You could offer many different types of incentives. The only thing you’re limited by is your imagination and/or your budget.
Here are some ideas to get you started:
- You can offer them valuable information. It could be information that you give them via text, audio, or video. You just need to write or record this information.
- You could offer a discount on a product or service. Make sure that this product or service is valuable to your customers and is something that has a high profit margin so that you can afford to do this.
- You could offer a free gift. You need to again make sure that what you offer is a desirable product and something you can afford to give away for free. (You need to make sure that the value you will get from being able to make regular offers via email makes up for the cost of giving this gift away.)
What You Will Need to Do Any of These Things Easily and Effectively
In order to do any of these things, you will need to sign-up and pay for an email marketing service.
Again, there are many email services out there. (Google “email services” to see all the ones that are out there.)
But if you want to know what I use, I use a powerful and inexpensive service called Aweber.
*YOU CAN SIGN-UP FOR A FREE TRIAL OF AWEBER BY CLICKING HERE OR BY SIGNING UP BELOW.
Free Trial Aweber Email Marketing Service
If you’d like a free trial of the service I use, then you can sign-up with them below.
(Contact me if/when you do sign-up and I can walk you through the basics of how to use the service.)
*AFFILIATE DISCLAIMER: I proudly feature affiliate links for some products that I love. It adds no extra cost to you, but enables me to earn a commission if you purchase. This is just one way I can continue to provide you with valuable information on this site.
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- If you wanted to contact your customers today — and not have to pay a dime to do that, how would you do that?
- If you wanted a way to build a list of prospects and potential customers or clients — one that you could build a relationship with relatively at no cost, how would you do that?
The answer to both of those questions is simple.
It’s email them.
In other words, your solution is to use email marketing.
What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is exactly what it sounds like. It’s marketing that you do via email.
It could be marketing to prospects, your current customers, or former customers.
How a Small Business Can Begin Using Email Marketing
It’s not hard for a small business to begin using email marketing.
It really comes down to two steps:
- Begin asking for people’s email addresses
- Begin emailing those people regularly
But you don’t want to have to email each of these people individually.
That would be a pain.
Instead, you want to use an email service so that you can:
- begin to collect email addresses
- organize them
- and email them.
(*There even ways that you can do this automatically.)
You want a way that people can sign themselves up for your email lists.
What’s a Good Email Marketing Service for Small Businesses?
There are many email services out there. You can Google them to see all the ones that are out there.
What one do I use?
I use a powerful and inexpensive service called Aweber.
*YOU CAN SIGN-UP FOR A FREE TRIAL OF AWEBER BY CLICKING HERE OR BY SIGNING UP BELOW.
More to Come
There are a lot more details on how you can effectively use email marketing for your business.
Stay tuned for more of my upcoming posts to learn more.
In the meantime, I wrote two posts about how important email marketing is today (even more than ever) on my site DirectResponseContentMarketing.com.
You can read both articles at the links below…
-
What’s the Primary Thing That SEO Expert Brian Dean Focuses On? Email.
- CASE STUDY: How Brian Dean (from Backlinko) Built a Massive Email List (and How You Can Too)
These articles will inspire you to begin focusing more of your marketing efforts on email and show you how to effectively do that.
Free Trial Aweber Email Marketing Service
If you’d like a free trial of the service I use, then you can sign-up with them below.
(Contact me if/when you do sign-up and I can walk you through the basics of how to use the service.)
*AFFILIATE DISCLAIMER: I proudly feature affiliate links for some products that I love. It adds no extra cost to you, but enables me to earn a commission if you purchase. This is just one way I can continue to provide you with valuable information on this site.
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Did you know that I stopped posting blog posts here?
But don’t worry.
I’ve been writing articles on a new website of mine.
It’s called Direct Response Content Marketing and it’s based on a new form of content that I’ve come up with.
Check out my latest post here.
You can check out some of my other articles here:
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A Lesson from a Smart Russian Smuggler
A man named David Hunt tells a story I want to share with you today.
It’s a story that reveals the problem we all have with overcoming our problems or seizing the opportunities in our lives.
Listen to Hunt’s story and then I’ll explain what I mean…
“Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev used to tell of a time when there was a wave of petty theft in the Soviet Union. To curtail this the authorities put up guards around the factories.
“At one timberworks in Leningrad, the guard knew the workers in the factory very well. The first evening, out came Pyotr Petrovich with a wheelbarrow and, on the wheelbarrow, a great bulky sack with a suspicious-looking object inside.
“‘All right, Petrovich,’ said the guard, ‘what have you got there?’
“‘Oh, just sawdust and shavings,’ Petrovich replied. ‘Come on,’ the guard said, ‘I wasn’t born yesterday. Tip it out.’
“And out came nothing but sawdust and shavings.
“So he was allowed to put it all back again and go home. When the same thing happened every night of the week the guard became frustrated. Finally, his curiosity overcame his frustration.
“‘Petrovich,’ he said, ‘I know you. Tell me what you’re smuggling out of here, and I’ll let you go.’
“‘Wheelbarrows, my friend,’ said Petrovich, ‘wheelbarrows.’”
Why You Can’t Solve Your Biggest Problems or Seize Your Greatest Opportunities
The reason that you can’t find solutions to your biggest problems and the reason you’re missing the greatest opportunities in your life is NOT because no solution exists or no opportunities are there.
It’s simply because you’re focused on the wrong things.
You’re staring at the sawdust while the wheelbarrows roll on by!
If you don’t do something about this, then the wheelbarrows will keep getting through and your solutions and opportunities will continue to elude you.
I think the first step to eliminating this problem is by changing your focus.
How to Change Your Focus
- Determine what you are focused on now.
List the things that you currently are focused on in your attempt to overcome your problems and search for opportunities. - Take each of those areas that you are focused on and determine one of two things:
A) Is there something you’re overlooking?
B) Is there somewhere else you should be looking?
Once the guard did this, he realized what he’d been looking for was right in front of him the whole time!
The same thing can happen to you.
]]>That’s too bad because he was the founder of the Hilton hotel chain and he was a great business person.
I really like this quote about success from Conrad Hilton.
It’s a good reminder for all of us!
Copy and Paste Version of This Quote
If you would like to copy and paste this quote, then here you go…
]]>“Success seems to be connected with action. Successful people keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don’t quit.”
— Conrad Hilton
Most business owners never think about this but understanding how to present your business to the world in visual ways is really important these days.
That’s because more and more people are processing and consuming information in visual form.
So, if you can figure out how to present your business in effective visual ways, you’ll reach more people, more effectively.
In the slide deck below, Paul Biedermann, from Redesign2.com, will reveal some other important reasons why your business needs to get visual…
Why Your Business Needs to Get Visual (SLIDE DECK)
Paul describes his slide deck like this…
“Communications and the way we digest information are going through nothing short of a sea change. The shift to the visual is evident everywhere we look, in all media. The time to get visual is now.”
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What’s the simplest and fastest way for my business to make more money?
Well, I’ve got the answer to that question for you today.
And the good news is that the answer to this question really comes down to just two things.
The Two Primary Ways a Small Business Can Make More Money
There are really only two primary ways a small business can make more money.
1. Get people to buy more
2. Get people to buy more often
That’s it. There’s really no other options! These two things might appear to be really simple, but if you effectively implement them in any small business, you could see a drastic increase in revenue.
Let”s look a little more closely at each of these things so that you can learn how to implement them effectively in your business…
The First Way a Small Business Can Make More Money: Get People to Buy More
The first way that a small business can increase their revenue is by encouraging people to buy more while they’re making their purchase.
There are many ways you can do this, but here are three ways that you can implement this method:
- Create Bundles or Packaged Offers – Two Examples: McDonald’s offers “meal deals” | A dentist might offer a cleaning, exam, and x-ray for $99
- Offer Additional Products or Services with Every Purchase – Two Examples: Car rental places offer insurance plans or the ability to purchase a tank of gas | Cell phone stores offer car chargers, phone cases, and/or insurance
- Offer an “Upsell Option” for All of Your Main Products or Services– Two Examples: A car detailer can offer a deluxe or platinum offer | A furniture store might offer a customer who comes in to buy a cheap, lower quality couch a bigger or higher quality couch
THE REASONS YOU SHOULD DO THIS:
When you do this, you’re increasing the total purchase size per customer.
The benefit of doing this is that your customer is already in the buying mood.
If you do this honestly, honorably, and effectively, then your customer will walk away happier than if you never offered them these additional things!
QUESTIONS TO ASK:
- What products or services can be naturally bundled together in a way that helps my customers?
- What additional products do my customers normally come back for after a purchase that I can offer them at the point of purchase as an add-on offer?
- What are some “Deluxe” versions that we can begin to offer our customers?
The Second Way a Small Business Can Make More Money: Get People to Buy More Often
The second way that a small business can increase their revenues is by encouraging customers to come back more often and make more purchases.
There are many ways you can do this, but here are three ways that you can implement this method:
- Loyalty Programs – Two Examples: A dry cleaner can offer a simple “loyalty” punch-card that entitles the customer to a free dry cleaning after every 10 purchases| A restaurant can offer a simple “loyalty” punch-card that entitles the customer to a free meal after purchasing 12 meals
- Offer “Customer-Only” Discounts – Two Examples: In April, a florist might offer their customers a special “Customer’s-Only Mother’s Day Discount” if they come back in a purchase a bouquet of flowers | A plumber can offer every first-time customer a special 25% off offer for the next time they need plumbing work done
- Call or Email Your Customers and Let Them Know About Special Offers: Two Examples: If a restaurant finds that Tuesdays are slow days for them, they could email their customers a special “Tuesday Discount Day” offer. | If an auto mechanic finds that business is slow in the summer, they could have an assistant call all of their best customers in May and offer them a special “Summer Deluxe Tune-up Offer.”
THE REASONS YOU SHOULD DO THIS:
When you do this, you’re increasing the total number of purchases per customer.
The benefit of doing this is that selling to a customer is much easier and less expensive than selling to a new prospect.
If you do this honestly, honorably, and effectively, then your customer will be happy to purchase from you again.
QUESTIONS TO ASK:
- What are some easy, simple, and inexpensive ways we can immediately start rewarding our customers for their loyalty and encourage other customers to be more loyal?
- What customer discounts can we create that will encourage customers to choose our business instead of another one?
- Have we been collecting the contact info of our customers? What are some special offers that we can create and contact them about that they would be happy to know about?
I wanted to do that because what I share in this video is important for any small business owner to understand if they want to market effectively.
You see, the second step of any/all effective marketing is getting attention.
Without this step, there is no marketing.
Or I guess you could say that without this step there will never be any effective marketing of any kind.
Really think about that for a second.
How can you create effective marketing of any kind – whether it’s content or copy – if you don’t get attention?
Watch my video below and you’ll understand exactly what I mean…
Without Attention, There is No Marketing
P.S. If you like this video, then check out my other videos on my Youtube channel and make sure to subscribe!
]]>If you already are aware of content marketing, then you should check out the infographic below from contentmarketinginstitute.com and pointvisible.com.
B2B and B2C Content Marketing Stats for 2019 (INFOGRAPHIC)
The infographic below reveals some content marketing stats that you should keep in mind as you create content marketing in 2019…
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