Work Better, Not Harder

It happened again today. I am blown away by how often I see this particular mistake. I received an email newsletter from a business I wasn't familiar with. That's OK but I wanted to go to their website to investigate more. And there was not one link in that newsletter that went to their website! Granted, there are times when you may not want to distract readers from another goal for your email. But a newsletter is definitely a place where you want to encourage click-throughs to your website. There's a very direct correlation between the amount of text, the number of links available to click, and your click-rate - the more links, the more clicks . There are many ways to insert links to your website into your small business newsletter. Here are a few suggestions. Insert links behind images. ☺ Always insert a link to your Home page behind every iteration of your logo. ☺ If your photo appears in your newsletter, link it to your About page. ☺ Behind product/ser...

One of the best things I ever did was to take Anita Kirkbride 's advice when she told me I should post daily enewsletter tips on social media. It was a very specific and fairly easy task to do. I ended up with an Excel spreadsheet with about 350 short tips... all prefaced with #enewsletter. I joked that when I got to 365 tips, I'd make a calendar. Now I didn't sit down and spend several days making up this list - ugh! But I started it and then every time I wrote a blog post that included a tip, I copied it into my spreadsheet along with the post link. This started back when Twitter allowed only 140 characters so I finagled words a lot. You can see in the graph below that it had an almost immediate effect on blog traffic - note the big jump in readership SEPT 2012. This was tedious work. I spent many hours copy/pasting and scheduling individual messages in Hootsuite, a month at a time, for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+. Eventually, I started uploading...

Marketing analytics can be confusing. You need to learn how to use the software to get data. Then you need to figure out what information you want from the data. Then you need to figure out what actions to take now that you're wiser. Here's a simple statistic for you to discover and use to your advantage - most read blog posts. Regardless of which platform you use, you should be able to access some basic info. Here is a screenshot from this blog: screenshot Now that I know which post is the most read on my blog, what actions will I take? I can use it for marketing by adding calls-to-action for current promotions to the footer. I continue to share it on social media because it's obviously still relevant. I know I need to maintain it , to make sure it has no broken links and to keep it relevant. I have clues about other blog post topics that may have similar success. (I can use Answer the Public to research more .) You're working hard to create ...

Why do we want our blogs to be more interactive? I googled that question and didn't find any kind of consensus or a clear answer to share. This seems a little odd with everyone talking about engagement (and lead magnets and sales funnels ). As soon as a reader takes some action (often a click), they are much more inclined to take a second action, and a third, and so on. It's exponential, and it's what engagement is. If we know we want our readers to keep taking actions, we need to give them encouragement to do so... but not all at the same time. Here are a few ways to make your business blog more interactive. #1. Use a link strategy within your posts to move readers along to more relevant content. #2. Conduct a one question poll . Link to your poll in an app like SurveyMonkey which allows you to show results after someone answers. This poll could be legitimate research or a fun distraction. You can even publish the results in a future blog post. #3. Includ...

Sometimes we surprise ourselves. I didn’t imagine there would one day be 500 posts on Work Better, Not Harder when it started back in 2010. I wasn’t thinking beyond the stress of getting that first post published. Yet here we are and I’m feeling a little emotional… in a good way. It’s not easy to pinpoint one or two blogging success factors so I settled on eleven - down from a much longer list. 1. Give value to your current/potential customers plus referrers. People who know me are surely tired of hearing me say this: figure out what would be useful or interesting to your target market and give them that. Writing for your current customers is a great way to get started. 2. Watch your stats frequently. Pay attention to what readers are interested in and do more of what gives you the best results. If something isn’t working, ditch it and start something new. If you aren’t watching your stats at least weekly, you won’t know what’s working. 3. Just start. Don’t let t...