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Every website has the same purpose: buy.
It doesn’t matter if you’re selling a product (”buy my DVD-set”), a service (”hire me to turn your program around”), or an idea (”go green today”). It doesn’t matter if you’re a freelancer, a small business owner, a global superpower, or just on the web for fun.
If your visitor doesn’t take action (buy), you lost them. Building your website without appreciating a visitor’s perspective will lead to a poor site experience, and you’ll be scratching your head, wondering why visitors are leaving (while money leaks out of your pocket).
If, like most website owners, your team has followed conventions without considering why, you could do better. Here’s how:
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Extolling the virtues of social media as a marketing channel for your business is the dishonest fantasy of social media mavens. Social media is essential to online business success, just not in the way you thought.
That is the Social Media Myth, and I’m here to debunk it.
In this article, I’ll define what social media really means, describe your challenge in social media as a business, develop a framework for you to create your own social media strategy, then show you some examples of what social media success looks like.
I make the assumption that you are familiar with what some social media platforms are, just not how to use them. If you haven’t heard of a social network or blog, you should conduct some brief research before continuing.
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The web is full of helpful cookbook recipes on marketing your small business. These guides are valuable, and will help you improve your business, if you follow them. But which ones should you use? The problem is, you only have so much time in the day. To become adept in every tactic, you’d have to become a marketing expert and stop working on your business.
Everywhere you look, you can find guides for networking using Twitter, driving quality traffic with Stumbleupon, sending yourself viral on YouTube, and getting on the front page of Digg. There is plenty of instruction on how to use offline marketing, too, whether to distribute a press release or get in the mainstream media.
It’s simple to find guidance on “how to”, but not as much about “which to”. Read on to learn how to determine which marketing tactics are right for you.
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