Do you ever get through the day, accomplishing your task list or thinking that there must be something you can do right now that will make a difference in your business?
Going through the motions of every day activity is something we all struggle with at some point.
Here are 5 things you can do today to make a difference in your business.
1.) Implement a Blogging Strategy
This seems fitting, doesn’t it? Of course I would have to mention this since this post itself is part of the 31 days of blogging challenge. Aside from that, it’s easy to see how implementing a blogging strategy could set your business in the right direction.
You might think that a blogging strategy is too long term and time consuming to make a difference today, but that isn’t so. Setting up a blog is easy, writing one piece of content can bring in long term traffic for years to come, which can mean a long term source of inbound leads.
Having some sort of content also allows you to gain more exposure by implementing some content marketing, that can increase your traffic and possibly generate leads.
Places to share your content include:
- Other social media
- LinkedIn Groups
- Google+ Communities
So if you’re looking to make a difference in your business right now, spend 30 minutes to an hour writing a blog post, syndicate it on social media and share on LinkedIn and Google+ communities. Not only can you get traffic from those networks, each new page on your website is a new opportunity to rank for a variety of keywords.
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2.) Create City Specific or Service Specific Landing Pages
If you already have a website set up, then this shouldn’t take very long at all.
Setting up landing pages is a great strategy for SEO especially when you’re in a small area wanting to rank in multiple surrounding cities.
However, it isn’t only a strategy for those that are wanting to rank in different cities, it can also be used to optimize for certain terms. For example, many hosting companies will setup landing pages for “WordPress Hosting“, “Joomla Hosting”, and other CMS’s + the hosting keyword. This allows them to maximize the potential traffic and rankings, while also creating a higher quality score and using a more relevant page for adwords traffic if they’re using PPC.
You can do this for a variety of industries… Lawn care companies can have “Houston Aeration” “Houston fertilization, lawn treatment”, etc. This will also help with increase location relevance AND industry relevance assuming you’re using proper on page optimization.
I love marketing statistics, and one statistic that should stand out to you is that websites with more than 30 landing pages generate 7X more leads than companies that have under 10 landing pages. If you have 40+ landing pages, then you generate 12X more leads, based on a study put out by Hubspot.
Check out this infographic from Ion Interactive:
3.) Start a Lead Nurturing Program
We all know that not every single lead that comes your way, is going to buy from you or even ready to buy right this second. That’s why it’s important to setup some sort of follow up system or lead nurturing strategy.
Of course the more detailed you are in your inbound marketing, and lead nurturing setup, the better off you will be but you can literally get started and have a basic system up and running within an hour or two.
You can sign up for pretty much any autoresponder, both Aweber and Mailchimp are great but if you do any sort of affiliate marketing you will want to choose aweber since Mailchimp isn’t kind to affiliate marketers.
Lead nurturing in general will produce a 20% increase in legitimate sales opportunities. Not bad for just a little bit of up front work, right?
- Sign up for an autoresponder service
- Create Email series, educating the lead
- Overcome objections before the lead even has objections
- Qualify the lead via lead nurturing
While there are certainly more robust options that can increase your effectiveness, this will allow you to close more sales without leads falling through the cracks due to lack of followup. A small time investment for revenue that will continue to come in without an increase of effort.
4.) Improve Systems and Processes
How can you do this today? I know a lot of people are wondering how that can be possible, especially those that are just “winging it” and have no process or no system.
If you handle project based tasks, like a web designer, event coordinator, or any kind of technology job, chances are you deal with project management. One thing you can do, is implement a project management system, utilizing a platform to help you manage tasks and projects. One platform I use and recommend is Teamwork, they have a free trial and free plan for smaller businesses but it’s a great way to oversee an entire project without the hassles of major platforms like BaseCamp.
Project management is just one aspect where you can improve systems and processes.
Ask yourself, what are tasks you do regularly regardless of who the customer or client is? How can you automate this or make things easier for yourself?
Having proper processes will allow you to scale up in your business and handle an increasing amount of work which means an increasing amount of revenue!
It doesn’t need to require a lot of time to make some improvements. Just a couple small things can make your life easier and save hundreds of hours of your time down the road.
5.) Do Some Backlink Building
Backlinks aren’t just something you do to increase your search engine rankings, but also an opportunity for you to bring in additional referring traffic to your website.
Read these 7 backlink building tips for local SEO
It doesn’t have to just be backlinks though, you can build directory listings, citations, etc. to increase your internet real estate. Some of these may have a tiny impact on your local rankings but some have a nice amount of internal traffic, where you can get leads, calls, and clicks to your website directly from the 3rd party directory.
I remember back in 2011 or 2012 when Thumbtack first came out, I was given a free “pro” account, not sure what they’re called now. Anyway, nobody ever heard of thumbtack and I questioned whether it would make sense to even go through with the free pro account and spend the time optimizing it. However, it paid off in the end, as I generated an average of 15 leads a month for about a year.
15 leads a month at just a 20% conversion rate is 3 sales on a monthly basis from an hour or so spent optimizing a listing. No brainer isn’t it?
Focus on building quality backlinks, don’t worry about the stupid, low quality forum “profile” backlinks, those aren’t going to help much. Generate backlinks that can generate traffic. Those are the ones that matter.
Also, take a look at claiming the top 50 citations for local SEO purposes, but also for national companies. Many allow you to include a backlink to your website.
Summary
Now you should know if you are twiddling your thumbs, not sure of what to do next, you have a few things here that can benefit your business by you taking actions today.
Often times in business, it is the basic stuff that people do very well that leads to the overall success of a company. Wondering what to do next, is not going to get you there.
What are some things that you think can be done today that will make a lasting impact on a business?
