Does your sales funnel feel more like a tornado than a calculated, measured process which ends in meeting goals and making sales? There are so many ways to bring traffic into your funnel, whether paid or organic, and I’ll be working my way through a blogging series of my FAVORITE ways to get more traffic into your funnel.

In the next five posts, I’ll be talking about utilizing the following campaign tools to get more people into your funnel.

1. Facebook ads
2. Organic Facebook traffic
3. Webinars
4. Instagram
5. Video Creation

A few notes before we dive in though:

You have to know what you’re selling and to whom.
You can’t have an optimized funnel if you aren’t crystal clear about what you’re bringing to the market and what your ideal client looks like.

Don’t forget about the people.
I’m all about people to people – forget business to business and/or business to consumer. There are people behind the businesses and people behind your conversion goals. Keep the people in mind when you’re visualizing your campaign funnel.

Be willing to survey “your people”.
You might know your people and know what you’re selling, but do me a favor and read the book Ask by Ryan Levesque, and ask your potential customers what it is they want (not in those exact words of course, because many of your customers may not even know). This can have a huge effect on how you build out your sales funnel… from the verbiage you use to how you package your services and frame your customer interactions.

Don’t get overwhelmed.
Your sales tornado, er.. funnel may behave like the storm it resembles. There are lots of moving pieces ebbing and flowing and that’s okay. As a business owner, marketing can be a roller coaster between viewing it at 10,000 feet and trying to swat your way through the fog at the bottom. We can work through it together, building it out, step-by-step, making it easy, and not-overwhelming.

Do you have questions about building out a sales funnel? Where do you get stuck?

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Online business owners commonly struggle with digital strategies in three areas:

1. Not knowing and understanding your target audience

It is extremely difficult to market yourself online without a complete understanding of your ideal client. Without knowing how they speak, where they search and what their pain points are, it’s nearly impossible to get the attention your business deserves.

Read More about Top Three Digital Marketing Mistakes of Online Business Owners

Keeping a close eye on your competitor’s activities can be helpful for your business, whether it means identifying new opportunities, honing in on your keywords, or getting a better understanding for your industry. You can use online marketing tools to help you with this task.

Here are some of my favorite tools:

1. Google Alerts – a tool that monitors mentions of your competitors online. Reports are sent to your inbox.

2. SocialMention – monitors mentions but is focused on blogging, video, and social platforms. Key in your search term or company name, and the tool will show what’s being said about the term and how often it’s mentioned.

3. Topsy – a Twitter tool that let’s you look up your competitor’s tweets all the way back to 2006, if necessary. See which tweets were most influential and use a filter on the types of information that you need.

4. Marketing Grader – gives you your competitor’s overall score based on social media activity, blogging performance, SEO, and lead generation.

5. Competitive Research & Keyword Research Gadget – Place it directly on your website to get information on your competitors.

6. InfiniGraph – tracks what’s trending on your social media accounts. Use audience info to know what brands are trending.

7. Google Keyword Planner – focuses more on your own website, but can find competitor data.

8. Instapaper – tool that lets you save Web pages on your bookmark bar that you can access later from PC, mobile devices, or Kindle.

9. Monitor Backlinks – a new tool that lets you follow your competitor’s backlinks and send them straight to your inbox. Know which has the highest and lowest domains and also see their earnings.

10. SEMRush – tool to get information on your competitor’s organic keywords and ranking, ad keywords, and graphic.

11. SpyFu – allows you to know which keywords are targeted by competitors. Keyword list is download able.

12. Website Review from WooRank – multifunctional. It lets you track competitor’s data or use it to optimize your own site.

13. SpyOnWeb – a popular easy-to-use tool to find out what resources belong to a particular owner using a URL, Google AdSense, or Google Analytics code. You can also get results using IP addresses.

14. SimilarWeb – a tool for web rankings that gives you traffic insights for any site. Get global, country, and category ranks with a graph that shows weekly visitor counts in the last 6 months. See how many leads come from searches, referrals, social, or ads. You can even view suggestions of similar sites.

15. Compete Digital Marketing Solutions – type in thee domain and immediately see competitive rankings and unique visitors.

16. What Runs Where – track a list of your competitors and get an alert when they launch a new ad or publish new content.

17. Open Site Explorer – one of the most popular tools that allows you to follow competitor’s link building patterns. See who links back to them in terms of page rank, domain, and anchor text.

18. Ahrefs – shows you the top pages, IPs, and external links about your competitors.

19. Alexa – an advanced Web ranking tool that does linking, traffic, keywords, and more. It is an excellent tool for spying on international competitors.

20. Simply Measured – offers a bit of all on your competitor’s info including trends, traffic and conversions, analysis, social media, etc. With up to 35 reports.

21. Majestic SEO – lets you download link profiles of competitor sites and explore, and use the info as you wish.

22. The Search Monitor – focuses on competitor data. Monitor affiliates and trademarks, as wells as results from Google, Bing, Yahoo!, YouTube, and other platforms like blogs, forums, news, mobile, and shopping.

23. iSpionage – a keyword monitoring tool that shows the best performing keywords and how much the competitor pays for search optimization.

24. Ontolo – a backlinks tool that also focuses on content marketing. Use it to prioritize your content lineup and how to promote chosen contents.

25. Link Prospector – offers many link building features. Choose a report and type in your key phrases to generate link building opportunities that suit you.

Read More about Online Tools and Gadgets to Help You Spy on Your Competitors

The realm of web-based marketing has a number of very important benefits that cannot be found in other marketing mediums. One of the most helpful of these benefits is the ability to analyze the success of a your marketing campaigns with a variety of tools available on the web, the most prevalent of which is Google Analytics. However, while Google Analytics are easy to view, many businesses struggle with taking action on the results.

For example, a business might find that a particular blog post or landing page is attracting a lot of traffic, but it can be difficult to use that information to help grow your site traffic on a broader level. So, many businesses looking to improve their online presence are raising the question: how can analytics be used to write good content for the right audience? Take a look at our tips on the three things you can learn about your website’s visitors from Google Analytics!

1. Gender & Age of Visitors

Any good marketer will tell you that one of the first steps in getting to know your audience is researching their age and gender. Google Analytics provides you with both of these statistics, which can prove very useful when trying to attract more traffic. For example, if you were writing content about planning a wedding your audience would likely (and hopefully) be from a younger demographic. Similarly, if you were writing content about men’s fashion, you would hope to see the demographics skewed towards a male audience.

2. Interests

Just gaining an idea of the demographic of your audience is often times not enough. A more crucial question to be asking is what are the interests of my audience? Google Analytics also provides this information to you. While this is very helpful in creating advertisements, it can also be used to gauge the effectiveness of the content you are writing. If you are a manufacturing company, you would like to see statistics that suggest your audience is interested in your product or services, rather than something completely unrelated.

3. Geographic Location

The final piece to the puzzle of getting to know your audience is geographic location, another statistic that is provided in Google Analytics. This insight is helpful in two primary ways. The first way this information can be helpful is in seeing if you are reaching the right geographic location for the possibility of gaining new clients. A cleaning service in Brainerd, for example, would find little value in attracting readers from Asia. The second way this information can be helpful applies primarily to businesses operating on a larger (regional, national, or world-wide) scale. The ability to see the geographic location of your audience gives you insight on the culture to which your business should be marketing. If the majority of your audience is from outside of the United States, you would not get very far by posting content that applies only to Americans.

At the end of the day, Google Analytics is a very helpful tool, and can be utilized by businesses of all types to improve their content as well as their overall web presence.

Read More about The Top 3 Ways to Write Better Content Using Google Analytics

Consider the process of Googling a topic, product, service, etc. You type in the words you’re thinking (whether they form a coherent sentence or not), hit the enter key, and trust that the most reliable information appears within the first page. After all, who has the time to search beyond that, right? But what exactly determines what the search engines like and don’t like? How does it weed through thousands of pages on one topic in order to present you with the highest quality content? This is where search engine optimization, or SEO, becomes crucial within internet marketing.

Keywords and SEO go hand in hand. However, this doesn’t mean pick a couple of commonly searched-for words or phrases and incorporate them into your site content everywhere you can. Search engines are smarter than that and will identify attempts to cheat the system.

Essentially, search engines like Google use software that “crawls” each and every landing page included in a website, sorting out high quality and relevant content from spam and unoriginal or irrelevant content. So what exactly is it looking for?

1. Page titles

These can be found at the very top of your browser. Each page is saved according to its page title. The pages on your site should be titled consistently with relevant keywords found within content on your website. A common misconception is that the name, logo, or other signature component of a business should be included in the page title. However, think about what users are searching for because it’s probably the product or service you’re providing rather than your company itself.

2. Meta tags and meta descriptions

This component tells the search engine which words and terms are the most important to your site. They should be identical to keywords found within the content on your site. Meta descriptions are typically 50-60 words and include the targeted terms within your content.

3. Content

High quality, user-friendly, and original content is the best thing you can do for your site in terms of traffic and valuable SEO. You will be rewarded by search engines for giving adequate attention to blogs, updates, and other content sources through higher rankings and penalized for copying the content of other sites through much lower search rankings.

There are no shortcuts when it comes to SEO, so don’t expect to get results overnight with one blog post stuffed with one keyword. It’s time-consuming and often times tedious work, that requires a very particular strategy. It can be difficult to set aside the time and energy to learn the ins and outs of proper and effective SEO when you have many other aspects of your company to grow and monitor, which is one of the reasons why hiring an outside source to improve this area can be extremely beneficial. Hiring a digital strategist that specializes in SEO techniques and practices not only takes some of the pressure off of doing it all yourself, but it also provides you with a knowledgeable team member that will help you understand exactly how SEO works and some of the strategies involved with optimizing your web content. In the long run, you may find that you’ve acquired the skills and knowledge to correctly manage SEO on your own, growing your business in ways that you never could have imagined. It’s hard to put a price on that.

Read More about How SEO Works

We know that social media and a solid content strategy is important in today’s SEO ranking metrics, but there’s much more to it. While content might be the gasoline that lights the fire, the on-site SEO should be the structure on which the fire burns. If you’re missing one of these key components of SEO, your site likely isn’t rankings as well as it could be.

The seven areas I review when performing a website audit include:

1. Visibility
   When I look at the visibility of your site, I’m checking for page errors. These page errors generally indicate a problem with your website’s hosting provider. I also look for robots.txt files that might be restricting search engine robot access to your website. The final visibility issues that may occur on your site are redirects. Do you have the proper redirects (if any) in place?
2. Meta Details
   When performing a meta tag audit, I review your page titles, descriptions and Google Analytics installation. Your site needs to have unique page titles on each page, a unique meta description, and your Google Analytics code installed on each page of your site. An audit should make sure there are no duplicated titles or descriptions, and that no pages on the site are missing the GA code.
3. Content
   Weak content is a major downfall for top rankings. I look at the word count of each page, review for duplicated content, canonical URLs and internal and external links.
4. Links
   It’s important to make sure you don’t have any broken links on your site and also that you’re using appropriate link text to optimize your site for your targeted keywords. When is the last time you looked at your site’s links thoroughly?
5. Images
   Each image on your site should be saved with keywords in the name of the image and then be assigned appropriate alt text. When performing an audit, I’ll look for any broken images, image file names, optimized ALT text, title text and image size. We’ll cover this later, but large images may be the culprit if you’re experiencing a slow performing site.
6. Semantics
   When I look at the semantics of a site, I’m reviewing the site for headings and schema.org data. The headings H1, H2, H3, and so on, are one of the first places the search engine bots screen for keywords. It’s important to make sure this area is well-optimized. The schema.org data helps give the search engines more information about the goals of your site, and may change the way they display the micro data of your site.
7. Site Speed
   Site speed is critical. When I perform a search engine audit for clients, I am looking for site speed performance on the desktop site AND mobile version. After “mobilegeddon”, site performance on a mobile device became vastly important. What type of things slow down your site? I also provide a list of actionable items you can complete to increase your site speed immediately. These action items include tasks like optimizing (shrinking) images file sizes, eliminating render-blocking JavaScript and CSS, leveraging browser caching and more.

Curious how your site measures up in these core areas of onsite SEO? Learn what you can do to improve RIGHT NOW to increase your rankings and sell online.

Read More about Seven Reasons Your Site Isn't Ranking

I’m a social media expert. And I say that loosely. Anyone taking the time to pay attention to the right “thought leaders”, “influencers” and current social media blog updates can call themselves an expert. Anyone trying to sell you on their services might call themselves an expert. Their bios usually read something like #mogul, #socialmedia #7figureincome. Am I right? Who in their right, humble mind would admit “Well… yes, I have a good understanding of social media and it’s interworkings, but I’m just not sure I’d call myself an ‘expert’.”. You are. Be humble, but trust yourself. That’s half the battle.

To some extent, we’re all fumbling around, waiting for Facebook’s algorithm to magically show our posts again (for free), or competing with someone who is buying their followers on Twitter, but preaching that the right followers will come organically. We’re all waiting and wanting to become early adopters of the next big thing so that we can figure out how to use it to sell our products.

But who is leading the pack? One well-known expert could post a blog saying “Periscope is the new Snapchat”. (Which, for businesses, it could be.) How many people will turn around and rewrite the same thing, or share the same thought with their own customers. While someone else could write an opposing blog, and perhaps THAT opinion would spread like wildfire. There sits the entrepreneur, head in their hands, wondering what on Earth to do with their social media since they certainly can’t figure it out. You can. Just don’t place the weight of the world on the opinion of one “expert”.

The point I’m trying to make, is that no single “expert” opinion should be taken as the end all and be all of social-media-correct-usage. If somewhere along the line, someone tells you to only post once a day on Instagram, are you going to only post once a day until the end of Instagram’s existence? How will you know if posting 2-3 times a day might actually drive 30% more sales? The best way to find your groove in social media is to test, test, test. Every business has a different personality, so each niche, while similar, still needs a unique approach.

I’m certainly not saying don’t ever hire someone to professionally manage your social media. (I’d be out of a job if that was the case.) If that’s a ball in your court that should bounce out and relieve some of your stress, then yes, hire away. Professional social media-ers know A LOT of the right tools. They have the right connections to get your content out there. If you’re looking to hire a social media consultant, look for one whom understands the best practices, but is willing to step out of comfort zones and try new things for your business. Or, Mr. or Mrs. business owner, read the blogs, of all differentiating opinions, and trust yourself as a human, who understands other humans, and just be real.

Read More about The Truth About Social Media Experts

A question that has been piquing my curiosity since Pinterest came to the social media scene is: How will this benefit those small businesses looking to market locally? I thought I would dive into a bit of research to help my customers understand the pros and cons of marketing on Pinterest if they aren’t looking to reach a national audience.

We all know that Pinterest is great for recipes, e-commerce, parenting advice, and decorating tips, but how can small businesses on Pinterest “do more” to help market to their local area?

Here are some of the top ways.

1. Add your location. 

And this means your actual location. This is not a place to be clever by posting that you are “Locally Owned” or to refer to your location as “Hot Deals, USA”. You want to be helpful by adding your city and state. This also will help your users to understand quickly if they’ve reached the right profile or not.

2. Verify your website.
Verifying your website is a relatively simple action to help users know they’ve landed on the right account, similar to adding your location. Once you’ve verified your site, you’ll gain access to a lot of fun and informative tools, like Pinterest Analytics. Verifying your website is as simple as clicking the pencil in the bottom right of your profile information, Although verifying your website might seem like a daunting task, Pinterest makes it easy. Simply click on the pencil in the bottom right of your profile information box, scroll to the bottom to type in your web address, and click “Verify website”. From there, you will be asked to download either a META or HTML file, depending on how your site is set up. After adding the snippet of code to your site, go back to your Pinterest page and see your new “verified” checkmark!

3. Start Promoting your Pinterest page.

If you’re already active on other social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, use them to promote your Pinterest page! The people following those pages are already interested in your business, so they’ll likely be interested to follow your pins. If you want a more aggressive (and paid) approach, you can use the geo-targeted ad capabilities within Facebook and Twitter and promote your Pinterest page there, since you know those users are a close match to your ideal target market.

4. Use “Place Pins” to show off your local board.

A few years ago, Pinterest revealed “Place Pins”, for “the explorer in all of us”. This essentially turns regular Pinterest boards into which turns a regular Pinterest board into a fun, interactive map. Some cool features of the “place pins” include being able to create a board either by yourself or with friends, making Pinterest more actionable, and giving yourself a place to plan your vacations. Here are some really great examples curated by Pinterest themselves: Pinterest Place Examples. For local marketing, it can be a great place to add pins related to your own area, and encourage your customers to pin to your boards. Ask your customers to take photos at your business, then add the images to their own map board while tagging your business in the post.Another idea, is to invite other local businesses to share a board with you.

In hopes that other businesses will return the favor, you should also seek out other local businesses and interact with their Pins. You can like, repin and comment to promote their businesses on your local boards.

5. Don’t forget the keywords.

By choosing the keywords that only locals would understand, you’re more likely to bring in those types of followers. For example, in Minnesota, Minneapolis and St. Paul and called “The Cities”, and essentially anything northern of the cities is referred to as “Up North”. If you’re looking to target a specific area, it’s important to be in touch with the local nicknames, and use them in your pins.

6. Speaking of keywords, don’t forget SEO.
Pinterest pins are showing up in search engine results. Google is always looking for ways to index the most relevant results, using social signals such as likes and repins. Pinterest images, and Pinterest boards are showing up in the search results, so an active Pinterest account may help your search rankings as well.

Despite pins to your site acting as “no-follow” (meaning they don’t help with your SEO link score) links, more of your links out there means more click-throughs to your site – any website’s ultimate goal, right?

The important places to use your location and other keywords include:

• Account Names
• Bios
• Board Titles
• Board Descriptions
• Pin Descriptions, and even
• Image titles and alternate text

Another important step for anyone hoping to market their business, local or not, is to include a link back to your website in all of your pins. It can be shortened with a tool like bit.ly if it appears too long in your description. If you’d like to take it a step further, you can link to specific landing page for that pin, so that customers are entering your site on a topic they’re already interested in.

Do you follow any great local businesses on Pinterest? What are they doing well?

Follow me on Pinterest.

Read More about Pinterest for Local Marketing

A picture may be worth one thousand words, but nothing can provide a more stunning narrative than online video content.

As multimedia consumers, we crave visual content. Look at the popularity of social media platforms like YouTube, Instagram and Pinterest.

Corporate brands have discovered our affinity for visual content, but even small businesses can build their own audiences by developing visual content that customers want to see.

Here are some secrets to the success of the big brands on social media platforms:

Instagram

Use your fans to sell your products. Some of the best audience engagement on Instagram is using your loyal fans to help sell your products. By posting photos of real fans using your products, you’re boosting visibility of your product and gaining brand loyalty while also increasing your sales.

Sponsor online contests and giveaways. If you want people to get excited about your products, then feature contests and giveaways that require your customers to engage with your brand via your brand’s Instagram profile. Choose winners through likes, comments, reposts or photo challenges.

Take advantage of #hashtags. Like Tumblr and Twitter, Instagram uses hashtags to increase user engagement. Keep your hashtags short, easy to remember and make sure they are tied in with your product.

Pinterest

Create high-quality and beautiful content. On Pinterest, your visual content must be beautiful. By offering quality content, you’re more likely to draw more people to your brand.

Be creative with your brand. On Pinterest, visitors can create different boards to showcase the many facets of your brand. This will give your customers a more in-depth look at your company, and showcase the things that make your company and your products unique and interesting.

Be the source of inspiration. Pinterest is about inspiring people to be better, whether it’s cooking, decorating or keeping up with the hottest trends. Provide motivation for your audience through your Pinterest account. This is how you’ll convert potential customers into dedicated fans.

YouTube

Actively engage and participate with your audience. YouTube’s comment sections are where your audience members have the opportunity to connect and communicate with you. Show your fans how authentic your business is by providing helpful and authentic responses.

Understand what your audience wants to see. Make content for your audience in mind. Audience members who enjoy your content will naturally react positively to your brand not only in other multimedia channels, but also in the marketplace.

Publish content frequently. The most successful brands on YouTube publish about 78 videos per month, according to one study, rather than publishing a few videos a month and hoping they go viral. Create content that keeps your audience engaged, entertained and updated on the latest news about your business and products.

The big brands have learned that the most effective social media marketing strategies are not by marketing head-on, but by marketing sideways. Social media success is more about helping, then a hard sell.

The good news is that even small businesses can find success on these social media platforms, even without the brand recognition that a multibillion dollar corporation may have. With realistic goals and a plan, you’ll see a return on your investment.

Read More about The Secret to Success through Visual Marketing on YouTube, Pinterest and Instagram

Business owners realize that a company blog is a great way to engage customers online, but setting up a new blog may seem like a daunting task.

There are many designs and functionality options to choose from, and what should you write about to drive traffic to your website? If you’re going to create a blog, you want it done right – right from the start.

Here are several key elements you will need to build a successful business blog:

Choose a well-designed layout
There are three layouts that are most often used for business blogs:
• One column, featuring only the main content
• Two columns, featuring one sidebar and a main content column
• Three columns, featuring two sidebars and the main content column

As with any editorial web design, there are pros and cons to each of these blog layouts. You must pick the one that functions best for your business. If you think you’ll have a great deal of content that you’ll want to promote, in addition to the posts on your blog, the three-column layout may be your best option.

The three-column layout can also distract your readers from focusing on your main story. But the greater the content, the more likely they’ll remain on your website the longest since they’ll have pages of related content to read and click through.

A two-column layout is a bit cleaner to read, keeping readers more focused on the main blog post while providing a sidebar for other things, such as promoting your products, providing additional content and links to social media profiles and email newsletter opt-in forms.

The one-column layout is your best bet if you want readers to focus their attention solely on your main content. The drawback is that you don’t have any room for other promotional content, except perhaps within or at the end of your blog posts.

The most popular option is the two-column layout, giving you a main column plus sidebar. The best way to leverage this layout for your business is to focus your sidebar on topics that boost your business goals, with the most important material at the top of the page.

Choose a responsive design
If you want higher rankings with Google, you’ve got to be mobile-friendly, no matter what layout you decide to go with for your blog. A responsive design is one that will resize itself, based on the device the reader is using, whether it be a laptop, mobile phone or mobile tablet.

It shouldn’t be difficult to find a responsive design or theme for your blog, no matter what blogging platform you decide to use. There also are blog plug-ins for WordPress that can make any blog mobile-friendly.

Add several opt-in forms
You don’t want your blog readers to remain anonymous. You want to convert them into email subscribers as a way to promote the products and services that your business provides. There are several options on how to build opt-in forms into your blog. An opt-in form could be added at the top of your website, or you could decide to go with a scroll box that would appear at the bottom right of your website. Some businesses have gone with pop-ups that appear over the website after your page loads. The options for opt-in forms are endless. You can add them anywhere, including slide-ins, floating bars, after each blog post, at sidebars or footers. It’s important that opt-in forms don’t overlap or end up next to one another, but they are helpful for business blogs, providing opportunities for readers to subscribe whenever they want.

Optimize your SEO fields
As you build pages and add blog posts, it’s important to remember to fill in the SEO title and meta description, using these fields to optimize them for specific keywords. This will give your blog posts greater visibility during internet searches.

Don’t forget your Social Media sharing buttons
Social media sharing buttons are critical for your blog content. They make it easy for readers to click and share your content on social media networks like Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter, and more. If you use a social sharing platform, rather than manually installing the social media buttons, you’ll be able to access analytics that allow you to learn more about who is sharing your content and how they’re using it.

Install analytics to see how well your content is performing
There are many analytic tools you can install to provide you with critical information on the traffic being driven to your website. Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools will allow you to optimize your digital marketing strategy and help you tweak your content to make sure you’re continuing to get better results from your blog content.

Create custom user accounts for your bloggers
If you hire popular bloggers to write for your blog, this will allow you to gain additional visibility during web searches and drive more traffic to your blog.

Business blogs are a valuable tool that businesses can create to engage with potential customers, while also building relationships with their existing clientele. If you’re not blogging, you should be.

Let’s get started now.

Read More about The Seven Must-Haves for a Successful Business Blog