Marketing

The Secret Ingredients For Local Business Success

Posted on by mike

small businessThere are so many websites advising small business owners how to build their start-up business online. Unfortunately, some of these articles are merely to-do lists. They do not exactly tell you what makes a start-up business successful.

In this article you will findsome suggestions to develop your business and improve the chances of your startup success on the Internet. So read on.

1. Know your goals and the amount of money you are willing to risk.

Establishing a business requires money and time. You have to plan how much cash, checks or loans you are willing to shell out, and how long are you able to work in a day. Many startups require more than 40 hours a week. On top of that, to make sure that your personal life does not get jeopardized, you have to keep your business plans in line with your family goals and resources.

2. Find the right business and the right market for it.

If you are still unsure what kind of business to venture in, you can always find the needs of people that require filling in. The old formula “find a need and fill it” still works in business. This will generate enough income to build a profitable business. For example, if you live in a small town with very little access to certain items, you can start selling and marketing them either in your store or on your website.

3. Research your idea further to make sure there is an existing market for it.

One mistake a startup business can make is to assume that people will want to buy your product or service just because you like the idea, or you have a few friends who like it too. To minimize the risk of loss, research your idea first. If possible, conduct a feasibility study. Talk to real potential prospects to determine if your business idea has potential.

4. Have a clever name and logo.

Since recognition starts with your business name, arranging these two will make your brand more recognizable to people. The name and logo will appear in your marketing campaigns, website, social media channels, promotional material, and print. Alongside your business name, your logo keeps your products inside your target market’s mind. Use a top digital marketing agency to help you with your marketing. You can easily relate this to companies like Google, Target, Apple and even Amazon.

5. Hire the right people.

Another mistake many budding entrepreneurs make is hiring people who duplicate their skills. Although arranging this has its own perks, having a team with skills that compliment one another constitutes a better output. If you are operating an online business on a tight budget, you can outsource your employees to cut costs. For example, the duties of coders, SEO specialists, website creators and marketing supervisors can be outsourced. The salary of a single regular employee can pay two outsourced employees, sometimes even more.

6. Deliver the best value.

Delivering the best value does not automatically mean going for the lowest price. Instead, you can focus on aspects of producing elite products, great operational services, or exceptional customer service. As soon as your business brings in some traction, you can start targeting a combination of these three characteristics. Whenever you think of value, ask yourself what sets you apart from your competitors? How does the value of your products, or services differ from those provided by the rest in the market?

7. Do not fixate on mistakes.

Successful people know how to learn from their mistakes and move on. This is an admirable trait to possess once you get your hands on your business. Do not dwell on failures, pinpoint faults, or blame the economy. If you go through some blocks, find an alternative way. All successful people have gone through many ups and downs. It is their perseverance to move forward and to continue to work that makes them successful to this day.

8. Learn from other people’s successes.

Join groups with like-minded people. Better yet, find a mentor who can train you the ropes of the industry. Find out how they overcame difficulties and how they attained success. You can also join training courses offered by experts in the field. You will spare yourself from the extensive process of trial and error by learning from people who have gone through there before.

Remember, whether you are founding a physical business or an e-commerce website, there are numerous reasons why a product or service is successful. Often times, the brands that are marketed well sold more successfully. So make sure to incorporate the marketing aspects of the business as well. After all, after establishing your business, you should look into marketing your brand and products or services next.

Capture and Measure Success Metrics with Google Analytics

Posted on by mike

Google Analytics is one of the most powerful tools you can use to measure and monitor the success metrics of your website.

It provides the information you need about who visits your site, what they are looking for, how they got there and what search terms they used. Any person who want to monitor their website performance should use this free tool.

Many website owners have already heard about how Google Analytics can be helpful in understanding what they should work on to fulfill the needs of their readers, and at the same time try to capitalize on it to boost sales. The data extracted are extremely important and it might just give you the answer on how to increase the efficiency of your website.

This is a free tool and anybody can use it. As soon as you have set up your account, Google will immediately start to pull in useful data about your website that you can use to your advantage.

What does Google Analytics measure?

  1. Dimensions – These are the attributes of your website data, such as the town or city where the traffic came from, the social media you are evaluating or the page you are measuring.
  2. Metrics – These are the quantitative element of the dimensions. An example would be the number of traffic from New York City or Atlanta, Georgia.

While dimensions and metrics are the building blocks of Google Analytics, below is a list of the important data that Google Analytics can gather for you.

Average Time On Website – Gathering the data on how long visitors stay on your website will give you a small window of what they are looking for and if they have found what they need. This also determines the pages that are popularly visited by users.

Unique Visitors – If you often wonder how many people exactly visit your website daily, Google Analytics can help you determine the exact number of unique visitors everyday. There are parameters that you can set so that you can view the trends over a certain period of time.

Keywords Used – Using relevant and niche-appropriate keywords definitely helps boost traffic. If you want to know the keywords that are pulling traffic for you, Google Analytics can also give you with this data. Having this information at hand will help you understand what the users are looking for and help you strategize your keyword use in the future.

Sources of Traffic – In the event that you want to track or put a return of investment figure on your SEO efforts, you can definitely use Google Analytics to predict the future growth of your business. Using this tool will allow you to see where all of your traffic comes from and you can also visit the referring links used by your visitors.

Conversions – The conversion data from Google Analytics tell you how people convert on your website and which part of it needs some improvement to increase your conversion rate.

Now that you know the importance of installing Google Analytics, there are some pointers you need to work on to proceed to the next step.

  1. Make sure that the tool is implemented properly. If you are using WordPress, you can easily use the analytics plugin to implement the tool correctly.
  2. Once you have determined the performance of your website, you can dive into further information that will help you improve on your weak points. For example, if people cannot find you through organic search, try to check if you can pull up the data you need to learn why.
  3. Outline the dimension and metric that will show the questions you have regarding your website. For example, if you want to know how many of your visitors dropped by to your website through organic search, you can simply look at the organic traffic of one of the pages.

Think of Google Analytics as a handy tool that can resolve problems. But try not to see it as a solution, but rather a place where you can see problems. Once you identify them, you can dive into the cause of the problem by analyzing the data you have gathered and formulate a plan on how to fix them.