2016 -

The Secret of Successful Facebook Advertising for your Local Business

When it comes to successfully marketing your local business, Facebook is the best bet. It is also easier to advertise on Facebook than through any other medium. You don’t even have to worry about the audience and how to get them; that’s because the audience is already classified according to your specifications. Once you specify your geographical location, age group, gender and language, much of your work is already done. If you are a local business, much of the targeting is done for you, including the exact placement of the ads, whether it is a mobile or desktop; it is pretty easy and catered to your local requirements.

Reach Out to your Specific Audience

When you place Facebook ads, let it mention the name of your city. This way, people reading this ad will immediately notice that it is meant for them in the first place. For e.g., if your ad title is “Web Design Services in Melbourne”, then it will have a greater impact on your target audience, who will then realize the Facebook ads are meant for them and that you are based in the same town.

Boost Post Option

When you choose to boost your post, you may start as little as $5. Select ‘people you choose through targeting’ and choose your city as well as the age group of your audience. You may choose to boost different kinds of posts. If you are into Facebook marketing, you may promote your blog. If you are a restaurant, then you may promote your new menu or restaurant pictures.

Create an Event

Another way to attract people is through an event. If you are dealer of cars, then have a ‘Weekend Test Drive Extravaganza’ planned on a weekend. Advertise this event and drive traffic to your social media page, as well as your website. If you are a restaurant, you may perhaps arrange for a special ‘Recipe Class with a Celebrity Chef’, and create an event on Facebook.

Offer a Discount

If you are a restaurant, then you may offer a happy hour discount to boost sales. If you have a clothing store, you may offer a buy 2 get 2 offer. The kind of offer will depend on the type of business.

Value Added Content for Local Market

Always provide content which caters to the local market. If you are a restaurant, you may write blogs about different cuisines or ‘Special items’ on your menu. If you are a website designer, you may write blogs about ‘Web-design trends & techniques’. Giving value added content will help you gain credibility as an expert in your particular field.

If you are a martial arts expert, you may post a video of everyday self-defence techniques. Likewise, if you are a yoga expert, you may post a yoga routine to start the day. So instead of asking people to buy your services all the time, you can shift gears and provide them what they want, and that is – providing value via blogs or videos.

Thus you can make your marketing cater to your local audience. Make sure to use the name of your city on your offer or promotion. Last but not the least, make sure that your offer is enticing enough for people to click through it. This is how you can use Facebook marketing to take your small business to the next level.

9 Content Marketing Ideas for Success!

Marketing has evolved over the years, and attempts to woo future customers with traditional self-praising ads are just not adequate. Customers want to know more about your product, interact with you, and see if they are getting value. It is only then, they will become advocates of your brand and buy your products and services. Thus, content marketing is a means of achieving this trust and building a long lasting relationship.

content marketing ideas for success

Make a top 20 list

You can start off by making a ‘Top-20’ listing; search the web for top Bloggers, Tweeters and Instagram influencers, for your particular field. You can provide detailed information about these 20 people and what is so special about them. Let the audience know why you are so interested in their blog. Be genuine and make it interesting. You may also tag these influencers, in your postings. Some of these influencers may even re-tweet you, thus giving a lot of traffic back to your website and even improving its SEO value.

Answer industry specific questions

Content writing is all about providing value. People are always on the lookout for valuable information. You can answer various doubts pertaining to your industry via forums like Quora as well as your own blog. People will thus, get to know you by reading your answers and this helps you gain the reputation of being an expert in your chosen field.

Let the world know your Team

Interview your own team member. Let the audience know what an average day in the office, feels like. Talk about their aspirations, dreams, life and current affairs. Your fans and visitors on social media, as well as your blog, will realize that they are not dealing with machines, but human beings.

Reveal your new products (sneak peek)

Reveal your new products to your audience first! They will feel special by your gesture and love to be the first ones to start the buzz.

Make a tutorial video about your product

Make a video about how your product is used. Not every product needs a tutorial for usage instructions, as people will usually be familiar with them. However, if it is a new and revolutionary product, about to take the market by storm, it doesn’t hurt to show the world how it actually works. And the video will definitely generate a buzz!

Have a 50% OFF sale

Nothing sounds dearer to the human ears than hearing someone say “FREE” OR “50% off”. So capitalize on these magical words, and announce a 50% sale. Also make sure it is for not more than 3 days; create a sense of urgency! Make a nice graphic, put it on your website and watch the magic happen!

Hold a contest

Outside of a 50% sale, the other word which generates an equal amount of interest is “Contest”. Plan a contest for your fans. It may be as simple as taking a ‘Selfie’ with your product and posting it on social media. You may use the services of Gleam, in order to increase the chance of your contest being shared and becoming viral.

Participate at an event and write about it

People love to hear valuable tips as well as experiences of others in the same field; you may include such topics to make your content writing all the more interesting. For example, if you were at a trade show, you may re-collect your experiences there and write a blog about the whole trade show participation. You may even compose a point wise checklist of the “Do’s and don’ts about trade show participation”.

Share the inspiring story of how you became an entrepreneur

People crave for inspiration, and if it is coming from people of their own field – then there is nothing like it! Share your story and tell the audience about what inspired you to start off on your own. Tell them about the difficulties you faced and how you overcame them to setup your own business. Let them know, what it takes for a business to succeed.

These are the different ways in which you can use content marketing to provide value as well as market your products and services.

How to make your Blog more Search Engine Friendly

A webpage is not visible to the world wide web unless it is crawled by the search engine bots. The top search engine Google approximately crawls 40 billion web pages and keeps them cached. These pages are ranked in order of their relevance and quality. In order to gain a high ranking from google, websites need to make sure that SEO optimisation is done in the right way and the below mistakes are avoided.

Absence of a Sitemap

A sitemap tells the search bots where to crawl. Having a searchmap saves time, infact it makes its job ten-times faster! If there is no site map, the search bot crawls all possible places and even those parts of the site which may contain duplicate content. Unless these pages are marked as ‘ no-follow’, Google crawls the duplicate content and marks it as bad links – which is not good for SEO optimisation.

It is therefore very much necessary to have a site map for search engine submission. A site-map tells Yahoo, Ask, Bing, Google and other search engines, how to crawl your website in the first place. You need to setup Google’s Webmaster Tools and Search Console so that you will be aware of what’s happening when Google crawls your website, and rectify errors if any. For best results, make sure that search engine submission has been done for all the popular search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.

Messed-up Code

Make sure that the text to program-code ratio is 50-50. If not, it will be perceived by searchengines as spam. If you are writing the content, then make sure you speak to the developer to make sure that elaborate content is written on all required pages. Make sure that the content reflects the keywords in the right way. If there is too much code and very little text, then it is likely to be perceived as spam and excluded by google in its quest for quality content.

Be active on social media

You need to make the best use of social media. Social media updates get indexed immediately, although they disappear soon as well. Some social media updates reach viral status; these have a tendency to stay-on depending on the degree of their viral status.

Good Backlinks

You also need to make sure that our blog receives links from highly ranked sites. Websites with a high Domain Authority (D.A.) rating, need to link to your site. It can be done by submitting articles on reputed websites with high PR ratings.

You also need to submit your links to directories, but you must be very selective at that. Some directories are categorized as bad, and you don’t want to be associated with them; it is not a good idea to either ‘link to’ or get links from those sites.

Embrace Social Media

It is always a good idea to create social media profiles across channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram,YouTube, Pinterest and Google plus. Posting regular updates gives search engines something to crawl about, and hence keep you on top of their results.

Social media is not exactly a sales generator, however when you search for a company, its social media profiles are also shown in the results. This means that although they don’t directly affect the Google ranking, they definitely appear in the search results and hence are a welcome source of traffic.

Social media also helps you to generate a one-to-one relationship with your online audience. They will get to know more about your product and services before trying them first hand. Online reviews on social media, help customers take better decisions before buying your services.

Link to Previous Content

Give references to previously written articles via hyperlinks. This act of linking to your previously written blogs increases your authority on the subject. Interlinking these blogs is also good for SEO. You can also channel traffic from one blog to another, thus increasing the visit-length, which again is good for SEO.

Following the above SEO tips, will keep you in good terms with search engine bots and get your website visible on the top of search engine results.

How to Get more Followers on Instagram

Creating a good number of followers in Instagram requires patience, consistency and quality content. Then you can reap the benefits of the fastest growing social network.

HOW TO INCREASE INSTAGRAM FOLLOWERS

Having created an account on Instagram, one of the fastest growing and popular photo sharing social networks is a great feeling; especially when you realize that it is a great marketing channel with 5 million active Australian users. However, shortly after making your first posting, you may realize that your reach is limited. That is because you don’t have any Instagram followers in the first place. So, here are a few techniques to get them.

Choose a Theme for your photos

If you are a sports photographer, you may choose the best photos you have clicked in your chosen sport. You can have a hashtag for yourself where you post them. People, who follow you, will come to expect the best sports pictures from you every day; so don’t experiment by posting your personal photos once in a while. However, you could definitely post photos depicting you at work. That way, your Instagram followers will know how your company goes about its daily work, and the process involved.

Have a Great Profile

When people come across your profile on Instagram, they will immediately make a decision based on its look and feel. So make sure that your profile looks impressive; include your best photos and delete the bad ones. Pick 20-25 of your best photos to go with your profile; it’s all about quality and not quantity.

Put on your Best!

Always go back and delete the photos which look outdated, or meaningless. Make it a point, to post only your best photos on Instagram. You don’t want to lose your audience just because of a couple of randomly clicked snaps.

Use Existing Channels

In order to get your first set of 50-100 followers, you may start with existing channels like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Pinterest and LinkedIn. You may also email all your address book contacts about your new Instagram account and the kind of photos to expect in their feed.

Connect with other Instagram Users

Once you have connected with your known contacts, it is time to connect with the rest of the world. Do not resort to short-cuts and get cheap followers for a price. It is better to live with ’10 persons you now, rather than be with 100,000 strangers, whom you don’t know. It is also futile to have 20 hashtags embedded in your tweet in order to attract different audiences.

HOW TO INCREASE INSTAGRAM FOLLOWERS2

However, you can check out the pictures posted by other Instagram users and like and comment on them. It must contain sincere appreciation. Show genuine interest and tell them what exactly you liked in their design or picture posts. Chances are that they will check out your profile and if appropriate, they will follow you in return.

Regular Engagement : the key to getting more followers on Instagram

Once you have a list of followers, you must keep them engaged. Keep posting photos regularly. Always remember that quality takes precedence over quantity. If you get some positive comments or even likes, take a note of it and remember to thank you.

Getting more followers on Instagram is all about quality and engagement; there are no shortcuts. Once that is achieved, you are ready to move onto the next step and that is Instagram marketing.

All About Google’s RankBrain Algorithm

Google’s RankBrain algorithm leads to a better set of Google results, which are as accurate as one can possibly get to understanding search queries and the inquisitive human mind.

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Google changed its algorithm on 26 October 2015 to a machine reading technology called RankBrain. This technology involves the use of artificial Intelligence, so as to interpret search terms entered by the users in a much more predictable way. The idea is to make it work like human intuition. In fact, colloquial terms or spoken language is interpreted in an accurate way, and ‘bang on target’.

This artificial intelligence system, capable of machine learning is ranked as the 3^rd most important factor in determining the page rank of the website, the others being (1) Quality Content and (2) Quality Back-links.

There are totally about 200 ranking factors, which determine the page rank of a website.Thus Rankbrain has an important role to play in SEO. These factors basically dictate what must be shown in the search results and definitely influence their page rank.

Thus, Google aims to eliminate websites which do not give any value with regards to their content.

Google had sent two algorithm changes before this latest one. One was given the codename Panda (in the year 2015) which targeted sites with bad quality content. 2012 saw the emergence of another algorithm, called ‘Penguin’ which eliminated fake or unnatural link profiles and got them banned. More than anything else, RankBrain is an advanced variation of Google’s earlier update called ‘Hummingbird’ which was introduced in 2013. Hummingbird carefully considered each word in a query and understood them not just as a string of words, but as a meaningful sentence in its proper context.

What changes with RankBrain?

Continuing the legacy of Hummingbird, Google’s RankBrain update not only produces results based on queries but also, ‘reads in between the lines’ and deciphers the human motives behind their typing of a particular string of words and thus, returns ideal results. Also, if a user enters a search term which the search engine doesn’t understand, then it searches for the word or phrases having a similar tone or meaning and displays the results accordingly. Thus, RankBrain is very efficient in handling unfamiliar search queries, which could otherwise lead to ‘no results’.

How can Website Owners take full advantage of this system, or rather optimise for RankBrain?

Google is now more concerned about its users; with the RankBrain, it focuses, not just on the typed keywords, but the ones that they haven’t been typed. However unfamiliar, the keywords may appear, Google uses RankBrain to make more accurate guesses about the user’s intent (behind those words) than any other human being can ever think of. Thus, the results are much more accurate.

google rankbrain

When a website is designed, the focus should NOT be on pouring all possible keywords into the content, like it was done in the past. The focus should be on the users themselves; you need to know where they hang out and what sort of pages they visit online. You may check social media like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. Quora is also a very good place where you find specific user queries. You may search questions related to your particular field. You will find that they are more detailed than any search queries you may find on Google. Use these search terms on Quora to get an idea about how to structure your content, for the ease of the end users. RankBrain is more about user optimization rather than usage of specific keywords. In fact, if you are following the standard SEO practises, there is certainly no need to panic at the emergence of any new Google algorithm.

The Types of Searches

The intentions behind typing queries can be broadly classified into three types:

For knowledge, research or reviews
For navigation or travel
For online shopping or product purchase

The above searches are self-explanatory; thus, importance is given to user intentions and the tone of the query to produce an exact match, even if our search string is incomplete.

How will users benefit?

RankBrain, aided by its artificial intelligence does the following conclusions

Find out how people search on Google.
Look out for local language queries, decipher them and give better quality results
Give better quality suggestions, even as the users type their queries.

Thus, RankBrain is there to benefit the users, so that they get exactly what they want. As long as you are following the standards and avoiding negative SEO techniques, you don’t have to worry about your website’s ranking.

What are the best captions for your Instagram photos?

Instagram is your best bet if you want to transform your normal-person status into that of a celebrity. All you may need is a smartphone, good photos and great captions.

instagram caption tips

Instagram as we all know, is a place where we find great photography, usually done by amateurs. It has the rare capability of making ordinary people into celebrities, by the sheer quality of photos that they share.

However, the quality of photos is not enough to skyrocket your status and make your posts go viral. You need one more ingredient, and that is ‘Great Instagram Titles’ or selfie captions. That way, people will understand what you are trying to say and identify with it. If you are a small business and want to use Instagram to connect with people at a more personal level, then great captions accompanied by good photos are a key to success.

Here are a few tips to write good Instagram captions:

Don’t rush it: Think of several selfie captions and write them down. Ask your co-workers or family members, about what they think it and how it can be improved. Make sure that your caption is great, before posting it. It is true that Instagram postings should be spontaneous and done in real time. However, as per the latest Instagram algorithm update, posts having a higher level of engagement, are the ones which will be shown on your followers’ news feed. The posts which have great titles will obviously generate more engagement and likes besides having a higher chance of going viral.
Comment on your own post: You may use your unique hashtag followed by a short caption.

Although Instagram allows for 2200 characters, don’t fill up the whole space with hashtags. They can either serve as a distraction or as a turnoff. If the hashtag doesn’t fit well with the caption, it can be put at the end. You may use a maximum of 4# hashtags.

call to action copy

Generate a call to action: Users usually respond to verbs that encourage them to take some sort of action. Your picture or posting may be in the form of a quiz question, prompting viewers to enter the right answer in the comments section. You may also ask fans to tag themselves and their friends by taking selfies in your retail outlet and stand a chance of winning a gift hamper. Likewise, there are many ways to encourage users to like, share and comment on your posts.

Make sure your hashtags are not too small: Load these hashtags in such a way that the visible part is enticing enough for the visitor to click on ‘more’. Do not limit yourself by attempting to make the whole Hashtag visible, by keeping it very short.

Don’t use a hashtag with every word that you type: Use relevant hashtags and get the feel of being part of the bigger picture. However, make sure your hashtag is relevant to your subject. For E.g., if you are a restaurant owner in Australia and posting food pictures on Instagram, don’t include the tag #WWE or #SummerSlam as it’s not related to food in any way (although the wrestlers don’t mind eating). You may instead, try a slightly more relevant hashtag like #Breakfast and #Food.

Get the basic grammar and capitalisation right: Avoid spelling mistakes. Good grammar is still in fashion, and my guess is that it will remain so for a 2 – 3 more aeons.

instagram celebrities copy

Photos without captions are OK if you are a celebrity: When you write captions, you are basically competing for attention. Make your pics have an attention grabbing caption! If you are a celebrity, however, you may skip this point.

Have a unique caption style: It should be unlike any other and consistent. Make it short, intriguing, and interesting enough, to draw a response from followers.

Is it necessary to link your photo? Ask yourself this question before linking it. You may do so if necessary. Links may be placed in the website section of your bio description, and your caption may point towards the same. The only drawback with links is that they lead the user away from the Instagram Application.

Tag people in the photograph: If it is the photographer of the picture, you may tag them and give credit; you may also tag relevant people who were part of that photo shoot.

Add Mentions to your Instagram Caption:‘Mentions’ are a way to give back to the Instagram community. You may ‘Mention’ other Instagram users, and showcase each other’s pictures to your audience and thus show your ‘Insta-love’ for each other. Instead of just tagging them, make sure you include their handle in your caption as well. This enables your followers to visit their profile too!

Have some fun, add Emoji’s: Make your posts slightly more colourful by adding Emoji’s; let your posting radiate more emotion. However do it sparingly, and just enough to make things interesting.

Instagram’s popularity is growing by the day, and it is definitely not a bad idea to use this great platform and get yourself or your small business noticed by a “small chunk” of its 400 million users! Knowing how to write good Instagram captions for your photos, can go a long way into making it a reality.

It’s time to market your business with Pokemon Go

Pokémon Go is redefining the very concept of gaming, and now, it’s time for businesses to jump on the Pokémon Bandwagon!

pokemon go for marketing business 1

Pokémon Go is currently the hottest thing in the world of gaming, and whether or not, its parent company Niantic will invite sponsorship and advertising, is a different question altogether. While it is still ‘red-hot’, many businesses can take advantage and capitalise on this trend right away, before it lessens or dies.

What is Pokémon Go? And why are people going mad over it?

The game has been launched on 6^th July 2016 in Australia, New Zealand, USA and the Europe and still, it is one of the most trending topics on social media worldwide. Pikachu has become the most talked-about character. This game of the 90s has become popular among 20 to 30-year-olds, and in fact, more than 5% of the Android users in the US are playing this game on a regular basis. It has in fact overtaken Twitter and Facebook in terms of daily users.

How is the game played out?

This free mobile game (for iOS and Android), allows you to make an avatar that can capture, trade, train as well as fight Pokémon characters of the game.

What makes this game even more appealing is the fact that it uses your mobile’s camera and GPS to help track a Pokémon centre and catch Pokémon in ‘reality’. This will have gamers taking long walks or perhaps go for a long drive in their respective cities, just to find Pokémon. So when you spot a Pokémon, this augmented reality game displays it with your real life surroundings as background, which makes it all the more interesting!

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Marketing with Pokémon Go

The demographic reach of this game makes it interesting for business marketers. Although there aren’t any advertising or sponsorship opportunities in Pokémon-Go at present, there are still many things which can be done.

If your business is situated close to any designated Pokéstop or a Pokémon centre, then you can offer free goodies. The FREE footfall at your restaurant is always a welcome sign. You may offer free charging points, as Pokémon-Go is a bit more demanding on the battery, since it continually needs internet, GPS and camera access. Pokémon-Go gamers are human after all, and their bodies need re-charging too! To cater to their requirements, then you may need to switch to a Pokémon-Go food theme and ‘make hay while the sun shines’.

You can even have your staff wear Pokémon T-Shirts and accompany the gamers around the Pokémon stop while they search for ‘monsters’. You can give them a discount for screenshots of Pokémon spotted near your restaurant and shared on social media. You can also have Pokémon gamers in for a chat about their game, take a video and post it on social media, thus increasing the visibility of your brand. You can also tag them and encourage them to share it.

pokemon go for marketing business 2

Placing of Lures

A Pokémon stop is usually located near landmarks, heritage buildings, gardens, malls and restaurants. As a restaurant, you may use this opportunity to lure ‘Pokémon Trainers’ into your property, by means of these gaming freebies, and make it a popular Pokémon hub. Lures can be purchased through the App and placed in and around your restaurant.

Setting up your Lures

Start the App and catch the Pokemon. You get a red Pokeball; Click on it at the bottom of your monitor and select “Shop”. You may now scroll down and purchase a Pokecoin pack (the currency of the Pokemon world). You may buy a Lure Module based on this.

Once you have purchased this Lure, you need to go near the Pokestop to access it. Now click the PokeStop and the white oval, select the lure module and deploy it. The PokeStop will rain pink coloured paper to indicate that the lure has been deployed.

The gamers thus stand to gain freebies, while the increased footfall at your restaurant can positively affect your brand image and sales. Meanwhile, you will need to create awareness by means of social media about your new “Pokémon Stop”.

Niantic and what the future holds?

With the entire ongoing buzz about Pokémon, it would be expected of Niantic, to allow businesses to sponsor PokéStops and Pokémon balls, and help gamers collect Pokémons. Because of the geographic nature of the game, it is evident that gamers will go around the city and visit business hub spots. So if one asks ‘What is the right time for Niantic to enter into lucrative partnerships with other business and make the most of this hot trend?’ we would simply say, “NOW IS THE TIME”!!!

Re-Capturing your Online Visitors with Website Push Notifications

You may have noticed recently, how many websites have started displaying push notifications. This is a new trend which is enabling sites to capture visitors without asking them to sign up.

web push notification

As soon as users visit some popular websites, an opt-in dialogue box pops up. They are given the choice of allowing or blocking push notifications of that particular website. Many websites like FaceBook, Pinterest, News portals and even many local sites now use website push notifications, which resemble dialogue boxes, asking for permission to install software updates. The only difference is that they will be used, to re-target the customers. This is a new way of capturing and tracking visitors without formally asking them to sign up for your services. It is a new addition to a list of online marketing tactics that have already utilised Newsletter signups, Ad Retargeting and Exit popup boxes.

What exactly is Push Notification Service?

Push notifications pop-up on the desktop or mobile of the subscribers of a particular website. The visitors who opt for it, start getting these notifications. When they are clicked, they lead to special offers, product pages, online polls, or valuable content.

Applications of Push Notifications

Push Notification Service is in its heyday, and marketers want to make the most of it. There are many ways in which website push notifications may be applied. They can also be applied on Android mobiles, for the subscribers who have already downloaded your App.

1. Send limited period offers.

Push-notifications instil a sense of urgency in web visitors, as they appear in real-time and prompt them to act faster than they do on any other media. These can be used to display limited-time discount offers to visitors, and get a fast response.

2. User specific offers, depending on the time spent on your website.

Selling products based on website behaviour is a sure-fire way to gain back lost customers.

When users visit a shopping site and show interest in a particular product, they are immediately ‘captured’. Within a span of 15 minutes, they are targeted using specific offers depending on their web-interests. This is done while the buying intent still remains in the user and there is good chance of a sale.

web push notification 2

3. Automated push notifications upon publishing a new blog.

One may be familiar with the RSS to email notifications, where a subscriber gets an email when a new blog is published. Similarly, with RSS to push notifications; your subscribers immediately get push notifications when a new blog post is out. Studies have revealed that a push-notification has 3 times more click through rate when compared to an email notification.

4. Instant Communication with your Audience

If your audience is notified about your new blog post via popular social media, they may feel it is ‘old wine being packaged in a new bottle’. However, if you notify them via web push notifications, they will get the impression that it is ‘fresh off the oven’, and most probably will click through it, ‘to grab a bite’ and check it out.

5. Push notifications to verify abandoned shopping carts

If visitors are on your website, suddenly abandon the shopping cart, then you may send a push notification after a few minutes, with an appropriate message reminding them like for e.g., “You have 4 items in your cart” or something similar. Thus, if the users had really forgotten about it while navigating away from your site, they can be made to come back and complete the order.

6. Re-targeting and Upselling.

As discussed earlier, users will be targeted with ads based on their interests. Thus, we will be categorising our visitors into different segments, and send them offers according to their behavioural data. Thus you may target those using notifications along the lines of, “People who purchased <product name> also purchased this”. Thus you will be curating content for your visitors, who will feel that they don’t have to keep browsing the web for similar products as they can trust you to provide them with curated content tailored to their requirements.

7. Getting Feedback

Studies have revealed that push notification subscribers have an opt-in rate of 40% when compared to your email subscribers. You may have noticed in the recent times, that you get push notifications when you exit certain sites, with a message along the lines of, “Are you sure you want to leave this website?” This can also be used to gather true feedback from visitors exiting your site so that they can rectify issues in the best interests of the users.

Writing Push Notification Text (with a 40 – 120 chars limit) and best practices

The only limitation with push notifications is the text size, which varies from 40-120 characters on various platforms. It is imperative that the services of a good copywriter are sought to make the best use of the limited space and convey your message in an effective way.

However, the visitors may still be bombarded by several similar website push notifications. So how do you stand out? You may choose to stand above the crowd by giving out a limited time offer or 24-hour discount notification. However, make sure that the notification contains brief and enticing text, which will prompt users to click on it.

Measuring Push Notification Performance

The last, but most significant step is to analyse the push notifications’ performance. You need to ascertain the below:

The number of clicks for the push notification
Forms filled by visitors
Trial downloads
Product Purchases

Once you check out the analytics report for all the above activities, you can have an idea as to whether or not, push notifications are paying dividends. Accordingly, you may plan to continue or discontinue push notification services.

5 Surefire ways to chase away your Web-Customers

A website helps in marketing our product or services, to the world. However, if we do it wrong, then it may serve to drive away prospective customers.

surefire ways to

Website landing pages are the best means of attracting customers to do business with you. They must be appealing to the users. Sometimes the opposite may be true, and a website may start driving away prospective customers. So, how do we figure it out in order to rectify the situation?

Problem with Content

The content must be easy to understand. It should not be so technical, that a layman can make nothing out of it. All Caps must be avoided at all costs. The practice of having huge blocks of text must also be avoided, as nobody has the time to go through an encyclopedia of information; so let it be brief. Let not the landing or index page content speak only about your company. Allow subject to be centered on what the customer wants.

In fact, the content must be planned much in advance, rather than ‘filling in the blanks’, after the web design has been completed. Great content is a means of establishing your credibility in your given field by providing value to your online audience. It is also the means of establishing a social media presence and extending your superiority over competition across these channels. It must therefore be well planned.

Bad Navigation and unpredictable Structure

Let your web page design have an intuitive structure. When visitors come to your site, they must not feel like they are stranded on a lonely island. They must be directed, either to click on the query form, search, and shop for your product, check out tutorials, or do any other task which they planned to do on the site. A search box is definitely necessary; it can help the visitor get what they want.

Non usage of Common Terms

The page titles, menu items, and product names must adhere to common terminology. For example, if you are selling home products and a visitor is searching for pillows, then do not name it as ‘Bolster’. Let it not look like “Buy 2 Bolsters and get a Bed Sheet FREE”. The visitor must not start opening the dictionary to check out the meaning of bolster. Instead, you can just use the word ‘Pillow’ to make things easier for the user. The menu items, page titles and other content must also follow the same principle and use simple terms.

Slow Loading Pages

A slow loading page is a great turn-off. Howsoever attractive and responsive your web page design maybe, if it loads slowly, then the whole effort goes in vain. It is important to optimize your text, images and videos to meet the above demand. A page must follow the 5-second rule, i.e., it should load within five seconds. If optimisation is not done and the site loads slowly, then it will obviously be ignored by visitors who will obviously switch over to another site, thanks to the bad website design.

slow pages

No Mobile Optimisation

Ever since the advent of smartphones, more than half of the global users browse the internet with their mobiles. If your site is not mobile optimized, then it will be penalized by Google with respect to its ranking. A website which is not optimized for mobile performs poorly when accessed by using smartphones. This is a perfect example of bad website design. As a result, nobody will bother to return to your site again.

These are a few pointers to help businesses stop turning off their customers, due to slow loading websites.

10 Steps to improve your Profile and Business-presence on LinkedIn

When clients want to do business with you, they not only visit your website, but also check your LinkedIn business page and professional profile.

Your potential clients and employees would like to know more about you, before they think about working or doing business with you. Therefore, after they visit your company website, they will most certainly look for your LinkedIn profile as well as your business page. It is therefore very important to have a great professional profile apart from a professional-looking LinkedIn company page. So here is how you do it.

(I) Enhance your profile

Your profile is one of the most important features on LinkedIn. It must be filled up in a professional way. Make sure you have the details of at least two or three previous positions written down in the “Summary and experience”, section. Make use of different keywords, upload relevant images and SlideShare presentations.

Have a good quality photograph of the dimensions 400 x 400 pixels uploaded as your LinkedIn profile picture. Make sure it’s not the one taken at your college graduation, birthday party, or marriage; it must be a head shot, you should preferably be wearing formal business attire. Also give a good title to your profile, which reflects your field of work. Think of it as your punch-line.

You may also have a great cover theme, which throws more light on your professional background. For e.g. if you are an art director or graphic designer, then the LinkedIn cover must reflect your design samples arranged in an aesthetic way, so that it adds more value to your profile.

You may also choose to have a LinkedIn vanity URL to your profile. This gives your profile, a sleeker looking custom name and a higher Google ranking.

(2) Make essential connections

Building contacts are essential for any professional or business. Start with your close connections like school and college mates, as well as your former colleagues. You may also introduce yourself to relevant people in your industry and send them contact requests. The quality of connections can definitely cast a positive effect on your whole profile. You may in fact, set aside some free time for sending polite and personalised contact requests for building your connections. “I read your blog on marketing tactics, and liked the content”. The person will most probably accept your contact request. However, for some strange reason, you will discover that not everyone on the planet happens to be a blogger. So you may tweak your contact requests, depending on the person you are dealing with.

(3) Broadcast great content

Establish your credibility by posting regular content. People seek useful content related to their field. Your blog should be in-depth and original. Once that is done, you may publish it on LinkedIn. You may even join related LinkedIn groups and post the content for the world to see. You will notice that there is a substantial increase in your profile views as well. By becoming a source of useful information, you catch the world’s attention and open up the possibility of making important professional connections, and even get some business leads.

(4) Follow industry leaders and bloggers of relevant fields

Your news feed, can provide you with the latest updates and events of your relevant field. You may follow industry leaders and bloggers relevant to you. That way, you will get to know the latest trends, events, tips and tricks in your field of work. Following your feed religiously, will upgrade your knowledge and understanding of your field of work and give you new insights.

To clean up your news feed, you need to follow the below steps:

Check out your newsfeed.
Run a LinkedIn search and seek out the influencers in your respected field.
Click on “Follow”
Scan the other news updates from the people you are already following.
On top of an individual newsfeed, you find three dots on the right side.
Click on the three dots and choose “Un-follow <profile-name>” to clean up your news feed.

(5) Start a SlideShare Account

Once you register for a LinkedIn SlideShare account, you can post your latest blogs in the form of slide-share presentations. SlideShare has a large and targeted viewership, and you can get a lot of exposure on this platform as well. Your SlideShare presentations can also be linked to your LinkedIn profile as it carries more weight.

6) Create your Business Page

Once you are done “Turbo Charging” your LinkedIn profile, you can move on to the next step i.e., to create a great looking LinkedIn company page. So here is how you do it.

Login to your profile on
On the menu bar, click on “Interests” and choose “Companies”, from the sub-menu.
Stay on the same page and click on the “Create” button, which is visible on the right.
Follow the next steps to create your company page, by entering the company name, email address, uploading the logo, adding a banner image and typing the company message, when prompted to do so, by the website.

(7) Regular Postings

Once your company page is setup, you can start off with your company updates and postings. However, make sure that you don’t use this as an advertising space for your company. Use this space to post industry updates, events, and useful – industry knowledge. Keep your postings on LinkedIn limited to one per day; this is because, you do not want to bombard the professional timelines of LinkedIn.

You may do the postings at a proper time in order to generate maximum impact. You may either do it in the morning (7:30 am to 8:30am) or evenings (5:00pm to 6:30pm).

(8) Get your Followers

Once your company page is all set, it is time to get followers. You may as well add your LinkedIn page

URL to your email signature. Also, ask your employees to follow your company page and update their profiles with the new page link.

(9) LinkedIn Showcase Pages

You may have individual products advertised on LinkedIn Showcase pages. These are an extension of your company page and contain specific brands or products. Your customers can, in turn, follow these pages as they are more specific to the product they are interested in. You may this tailor your updates to brand or product specific community, thus resulting in more engagement.

You can also use LinkedIn Sponsored Content, in order to get your message in front of the world’s business community, by comprehensive targeting of the precise audience.

These are the 10 steps to prep-up your LinkedIn company page and profile, in order to showcase them to the relevant audience and open up the possibility of getting more business leads.