Giving Your Online Business An Early Days Boost

Starting an online business can be a scary thing. You’re excited to get started, of course! But you’re also apprehensive about your chances of success, and you know there’s a lot of other websites you’re going to come up against.

This is why you need a boost in these early days. You need a chance to take your business to the next level as soon as possible, and to manage that, you’re going to need some tools on your side. Here are some tips for securing the best the online world has to offer to a small business like yours.

Talk to Those You Already Know

One of the best ways to make a sale, especially in the first month of operating, is to talk to those you know in real life. Your friends and family are your first customers, and depending on how many people you’ve told about your business, that could be upwards of 10 sales that help you to generate a profit baseline, as well as a better sense of confidence for how you’ll approach sales in the future.

Outsource Your Marketing

Marketing is something every company has to do. Unless you’ve already got a big, established presence in the online world, no one is going to find you otherwise! But you don’t have to take on such a task alone. There’s plenty of tools, including free ones like Google Analytics, that can help you build a trail that potential customers can follow.

Indeed, you can also try ‘White Label’ marketing, especially if you offer an SEO service yourself. This is where you get a service such as a white label digital marketing agency to refine your strategy and offer tools for you, and then repackage their work as your own. It’s perfect for a company that’s just starting out, and it’ll save you a lot of time and effort that can be better spent in tracking down those leads that’ll really turn you a profit!

Capitalize On Social Media

Social media can be your best friend when it comes to giving your business a boost because it’s such an accessible and wide-reaching platform. Even just on Facebook, which has nearly 3 billion active users in 2021, you can guarantee that at least 3 quarters of this number is always on the lookout for new and interesting content. This gives you the perfect chance to try and fill that gap.

And most social media platforms allow you to really hone in on a niche. Thanks to the use of dedicated pages, hashtags, and groups, you can bring your perfect customer right to your door. Even if you don’t use any of the ad programs these platforms offer, you still have a strong chance of generating organic traffic.

Your online business needs to have a strong start, and these are the ways to make sure of it! Make good use of the above tips to give your new company the boost it needs.

4 Essential Small Business Tools for Starting an Online Business

Jessica Lauren Vine

If you’re thinking of starting an online business, you’ll need a number of tools that will help your new business run smoothly. Many budding internet entrepreneurs often assume that an online business doesn’t require the use of tools like traditional businesses –and to an extent, that’s true.

Unlike traditional businesses that usually require physical equipment, locations, and inventory, an online business may not need all that. However, there are toolsets that are unique to internet businesses and are used by all successful web-based businesses.

Tax, Legal, and Accounting

Every business relies on its balance sheet to determine if it’s losing money, breaking even, or making profits. As with traditional businesses, the easiest way to do this is by running the numbers. This is usually done using accounting software or by hiring an accountant to do your books.

You’ll also need to file taxes if your business is in profit. If you can’t do this yourself, have a tax expert or consultant handle that part of your business for you. Some people prefer to hire boutique financial consulting services that can handle all these for a fee.

But they can be pricey, given that they’ll be either hiring accountants or assigning your accounts to their in-house talent. If you have the budget, then it’s easier to just let a financial consultant. If not, figure out the tools you need and do all these yourself.

Project Management

Regardless of your online business model –eCommerce, affiliate marketing, digital agency, or SaaS development– you’ll need a way to manage the tasks required to make each project successful and manage your time.

Even if you’re working alone, you still need a project management platform to help coordinate your tasks, identify major milestones, and give you a birds-eye view of the project status. This is where tools like Basecamp, Trello, Asana, and Teamwork can help.

If you’re working with a team, you’ll find that using a project management platform will make your life a lot easier. These platforms or software help make collaboration easier, can track your project status, and project progress.

Virtual Business Address

An online business offers the benefit of being able to work from anywhere. But still, there’s got to be a way to receive regular mails when necessary. For example, Google requires a physical address to send you their verification code.

Virtual business addresses like the one at physicaladdress.com can serve as your business address. They provide you with a reliable physical and mailbox for a monthly affordable fee. Every mail that comes through these addresses, can be forwarded to your physically or digitally anywhere in the world.

Communication Tools

You cannot work in a vacuum. Even the most hands-off online business model –affiliate marketing– still requires you to communicate with people like affiliate managers, content teams, and product owners.

You need a reliable means of getting and staying in touch with and coordinating everyone who is relevant to your business, including your customers. Some examples of good communication tools include Slack, Google Workspace, Skype, Microsoft Teams, and autoresponders like Aweber or GetResponse.

With these tools, building and running your online business will be way easier than trying to do everything manually.

Find Balance In Your Marketing Strategy To Find Success

Jessica Lauren Vine

There is no single marketing strategy that will fit every business. Any team offering a “one size fits all” solution isn’t likely to take into account the needs and specific circumstances of your business or field. However, a lot of businesses make a mistake by not implementing a little balance in their marketing methods.

We’re talking primarily about the balance between organic marketing and interruptive marketing, but there is also a balance in digital and physical to pay attention to, as well.

The Organic Side of Things

One of the biggest mistakes you can make with online marketing is to neglect the organic approach. This is marketing that is designed to target and draw in customers that are already looking for services like yours. Search engine optimization is the most popular (and effective) form of organic marketing, but content marketing, social media posting (not advertising), and setting up landing pages are all good examples of how to organically draw customers into your conversion funnel, as well.

Both on-page and off-page SEO are crucial, and they’re also much more cost-effective. Though SEO services cost money, it’s often a matter of investing only once and then again when you need a major update to your strategy, rather than paying consistently for ad campaigns.

Getting Interruptive

One lesson you should not take from the above point is that you don’t need any advertising. Advertising is also known as interruptive marketing, which also includes things like pop-ups, exit surveys on sites, and more. It is true that it is more jarring than organic marketing, but that’s because you need to be bold to catch the attention of the customer who is ready to convert, but not actively looking for your business.

Smart interruptive marketing is about working with advertising agencies who know where to put your ads, who to target them, and the best ways to win over those customers. Spending money on throwing out ads with no plan isn’t a good approach, but well-targeted ads can be very cost-efficient, as well as being the most effective method of driving a lot of clicks, conversions, and revenue in a short period of time.

Dangers of Going All-Digital

Digital marketing gives you the opportunity to target the broader market of customers that there is. However, you might be missing out on the power of traditional marketing, as well. Because fewer businesses invest in things like direct mail marketing, there are few brands to compete with, allowing you more of your customer’s direct attention.

If your business is locally based, then you should certainly be using methods like billboards or radio advertisements to target your local customers as well, as they will find it much easier to find you in person than amongst noise online. The balance of both digital and traditional marketing is what drives real success.

To ensure that your business isn’t missing any “easy wins,” it’s important to make sure that you have at least some measure of both organic and interruptive marketing, as well as both digital and traditional marketing. Rare is the business that won’t benefit entirely from one of these four categories.

How to Lay Out Your Blog to Boost Views

Jessica Lauren Vine

A great blog layout is essential. It can be a make or break for readers. A good layout can increase blog traffic and work to retain your readers from post to post.

Why Is a Good Layout So Important?

A good layout makes the reading experience more pleasant for readers. However, if your blog is crowded with ads or cluttered, it can be difficult for readers to follow the words in a blog post. Plus, if your blog is difficult to navigate, it can stunt how much readers can read on your blog.

You don’t want someone discovering your blog, wanting to read more, but not being able to work out where to go to get to another great post! So don’t let your excellent words get hidden behind a poor layout.

How Should You Layout Your Blog?

Clear signposting: You want your blog to be easy to navigate so that a single reader can view as many posts as possible. Clear signposting can make this happen. Try to section your blog into categories (and make these categories clear to access) so a reader can find a new post based on the idea they are interested in.

Color design: As well as having an easy-to-use blog, you also want an aesthetically pleasing blog. A reader is more likely to stay reading your blog if it is a pleasant experience for them. Finding a color scheme that echoes the tone of your blog is a great way to combine uniformity of impression and aesthetics. For example, if you are a travel blog, why not use blues and greens to echo the sea? If you run a beauty blog, pinks and pastels can echo this theme.

Include socials: On each page of your blog, you should include your socials. This way, you can increase brand loyalty and keep readers coming back time and time again. Equally important, ensure all your posts are available for social sharing. This way, if someone enjoys a post, they can share it on their Twitter, Facebook, or other social media site. This spreads your blog to new readers without you doing anything, in turn increasing blog traffic.

Use summary boxes: In the same way, a book needs a blurb, your blog posts require a summary box. This gives readers a taste of the post and encourages them to read on. Including these in your layout should increase views, as readers will be tempted to read more than one post.

Consider SEO: SEO is a word you’ll frequently see when trying to increase blog traffic. SEO is great for getting your posts out to be seen by the most people, but did you know SEO can also be applied to layout? On-page SEO services – fine-tune your SEO of the layout, and you will draw more people to your blog. The layout is more than just nice colors and clear signposting.

Centering Your Customers: Why, How and How Much?

Jessica Lauren Vine

It goes without saying that customers are essential to any business – without their spending, you could never run a profit. Without their feedback, you couldn’t hone your products and services, and without their testimonials, you’d find it harder to attract a solid customer base.

In short, it makes sense that any business aiming for a bright future will want to have its customers in mind at all times.

Of course, while the importance of centering your customer is not lost on any business owner, the test can come when you try to balance that against other instincts. You’re in business presumably because you have a skill set, an enthusiasm and a hard-learned set of principles that make you good at what you do. These abilities can sometimes come into conflict with your previously-stated intention to center the customer – so to help you see how to strike a balance, let’s get to the point with a few questions.

Why Is It Essential to Center the Customer?

No matter what aspect of your business you are dealing with – even if it is not an objectively customer-facing one – the final act of having a business that is attractive to customers is still there.

If you’re hiring new staff, the hiring process is an internal thing – but before long they’ll be dealing with customer expectations, so their views on customer service need to be considered. To set it out in terms of thought process, customer satisfaction needs to inform your focus, even if you’re dealing with something not explicitly to do with customers.

How Do You Center the Customer in a Business?

As noted above, your thinking needs to be informed by customer relations, whatever you’re doing at the time. As a more concrete example, your social media approaches have to consider engaging with the customer in a respectful way.

An ill-considered approach on social media could see you upsetting a customer, losing followers and even becoming the center of a social media storm which then unnerves other existing customers. Think about the way you engage and do business every day, and ask if a customer would be happy to see how you operate. If you can answer “yes”, the end results should speak for themselves.

How Much of Your Focus Needs to Be on the Customer?

In truth, this does depend on what part of the business you are engaged in, but you might be surprised with how often customer considerations become relevant to what you are doing.

Destroying old hardware may seem like an exclusively internal process, but how you do it can have repercussions for customer data security. On the other hand, things like honing the delivery process and modifying your product lines affect the customer very directly – and, in actual fact, it may be prudent to directly ask customers what they think about a decision you’re about to make.

Showing them they have a stake in your business will enhance their loyalty—and that’s an underestimated element of modern business.

Marketing Strategy Not Working? Here’s Why

Jessica Lauren Vine

Lack of growth can be super frustrating when you are trying to run a business. If you feel as though your business growth has stunted, then it may be possible for you to turn this around if you utilize the right marketing techniques. Want to find out more about that? Simply look below.

You Don’t Know Who Your Customer Is

Your customer should be at the core of your marketing campaign. If you don’t have them, then you really don’t have a business. If you never take the time to find out who your ideal customer is and if you do not look at their characteristics, then there’s no way you can market to them properly.

Your marketing strategy may well be a series of guesses, and this is the last thing that you need. If you want to avoid relying on luck, then you need to think about all of the words that you can when it comes to describing your target audience.

Think about their age, their demographic, and also their economic status. Remember you can’t target everyone, so make sure that you are targeting one group of customers well. If you market to the wrong person then you will be wasting your time and your money, so this is a crucial step.

You’re Not Listening

In some cases, you may not know who your customer is. You need to try and keep an eye on your open communication channels and you also need to find out what their wants and needs are.

Customer feedback is invaluable if you run a business because you will be hearing from the exact people who are going to be using your service or buying your product. When you know who your customers are, you can then find out how they interact with your brand so you can hear back from them.

Using the Improper Channels

Your marketing strategy is built on all of the choices you make. You may build your strategy based on what your competitors are doing, but that being said, you have to remember that what works for someone else may not work for you. If you are trying to target an audience who are averse to tech then you may want to focus more on traditional tactics.

This can include direct mail. If you suspect that there is a gap between what you are able to do and your customer needs, then try and pick up some new skills or even ask someone to do it for you. Lack of knowledge should never ever deter you from being able to reach your customers in the right way.

You Aren’t Telling your Story Well Enough

You may have a great product or a service but that isn’t who your brand is. The people and the story behind your brand are so important. A lot of businesses lose sight of this, and they instead focus on whatever product or service they provide.

You have to make sure that your marketing strategy showcases your brand personality and you also need to make sure that it reflects your overall message. If you build this up, then marketing will become much easier, and it will also help you to reach your business goals much better too.

You’re Not Using a Professional

If you want to be successful with your marketing, then you have to make sure that you hire a professional agency. If you are trying to DIY your own marketing, then you may find that this ends up working against you. Sure, you may think that it is a good way for you to save money but it’s not if you aren’t getting the results you need. In fact, you may well end up wasting your money and this is the last thing that you need.

If you want to make sure that you get the best result out of your campaign then it may be that you need to hire an agency. If you want a good agency to hire, then it may be wise for you to look into unrulyagency.com or other companies like them. When you do, you’ll soon find that you are able to get a great result out of your campaign without having to worry about a thing.

Tailwind for Instagram and Pinterest Pricing

With over 1 billion monthly active users on Instagram and 250 million monthly active users on Pinterest, your business can grab plenty of attention from these audiences even without spending money on ads.

You may have come across Tailwind as a way to use in both your Instagram and Pinterest marketing methods. Continue reading to find out exact pricing for Tailwind for Instagram and Pinterest.

Tailwind Pricing: How Much Does Tailwind for Instagram and Pinterest Cost?

After writing articles on Tailwind for Instagram and how to grow get traffic using Pinterest, everyone has been asking how much Tailwind costs to use per month or how much Tailwind costs to use if you pay annually. This post is going to answer all of your Tailwind pricing questions down to the nitty-gritty!

<<< So you know, I have some affiliate links in this post. If you click a link, I may get some cashola for telling you about this awesome product but at no cost to you. B-) Enjoy! Full Disclosure here. >>>

Ok, so here’s the good news! You can totally get a FREE Trial of Tailwind. Click here to get your free account. <—- No credit card required.

Now that you have your free account, let’s talk about what you get with that free trial.

20 posts per month on Pinterest & Instagram
20 Tailwind Create posts
5 Tailwind communities

For small business owners or solopreneurs like me, let’s focus on the paid plans and see which one might be the best option for you.

Let’s look at some of the important differences in these plans:

Pro Plan:

1 Pinterest profile
1 Instagram profile
100 posts/mo
200 social posts/mo
5 Tailwind communities

Advanced Plan:

2 Pinterest profiles
2 Instagram profiles
1,000 posts/mo
Unlimited social post designs
Unlimited Tailwind communities

Max Plan:

3 Pinterest profiles
3 Instagram profiles
Unlimited posts/mo
Unlimited Tailwind communities

To get the free account of Tailwind, you have to use your Pinterest or Instagram account to sign up. Your accounts will be linked and you can see limited analytics if you only have the free plan or PLUS plan.

What Else Do You Have to Pay for With Tailwind for Pinterest?

There are some pretty cool things you add to your Pinterest Tailwind account.

There is a cool feature within Tailwind called Tribes. These tribes are other Tailwind users that are committed to helping each other build their Pinterest followings.

Tailwind tribes are pretty neat.

Different Tailwind tribes have different rules but most require you to repin 2 other pins for every 1 pin that you add. Using Tailwind tribes allow you to reach audiences outside of your own so you can get more traffic and people that didn’t know about you or your product before can learn about you.

You get 5 tribes included in your Tailwind PLUS membership and you can post up in Tribes per month. (Do not get this confused with how many pins you can post through Tailwind scheduler – that’s unlimited!)

You can get access to additional tribes, additional tribe submissions and you can even get unlimited tribes. These PowerUps cost anywhere from $59/yr to $359/yr.

You can also get everything for Pinterest (including the Smartloops that allows you a more set and forget strategy for Pinterest marketing) for $39.98/mo billed annually. I just found out about that option. Say what! UNLIMITED!? hahah.. yes, please!

Time to check it out for yourself. Click here to get your free Tailwind account now. No credit card required.

How Much Does Tailwind Cost? And Is Tailwind Worth It?

If you’re asking, “Is Tailwind worth it?” …

…It’s FREE—to get started. Don’t delay because the power of Tailwind can finally help you start getting traction with your blog. SEO can take some time but you need blog traffic now.

Pinterest and Instagram are a great way to start getting a flow of traffic even before your SEO strategies start working. Take 5 seconds and get your free account today.

The Top 3 Off-Page SEO Techniques This Year

Jessica Lauren Vine

SEO is more important than it has ever been. After the recent months of strife, local SEO has really been the shining light in many businesses’ marketing campaigns. However, off-page SEO is really taking off as better trends have been coming to the fore and really helping small businesses to grow.

SEO marketing is great for organic growth. Bringing new customers and clients to your website, showing them what you’re all about with your SEO content and superb product descriptions that capture great keywords, is all part and parcel of its effectiveness. Off-page SEO is the best of this, so let’s explore the top 3 trends in this area.

Content Worth Sharing

Shareable content is going to make local, regional, and possibly even national media outlets take notice of your brand. So you need to do a few things.

Know your audience. The younger generation do not use Facebook as much as the older generation. They use Instagram mainly, as well as TikTok so you should encourage sharing on the right platform of your content.

The content should be about personal connections. The consumer has rapidly shifted to no longer caring about things and brands. They want to be connected to people and stories.
Do a lot of competitor research. If a type of content is doing really well on a rival’s website, could you take that style or idea and make it work for your brand?

Hashtag and Groups

There are some customers of brands that only like some products. Making hashtags and groups for subsets of customers is a brilliant way to encourage off-site links. These are called ‘do-follow’ forums, which can be linked to at the end of SEO content or as part of the content.

Media outlets can link back to these groups, for certain articles that are for specific products. Say, for example, customers like your summer collection of clothes, but not any of the other seasons. You can use #Summer’*brand name*’ that link to every similar article, social media post, photo gallery, etc; of that type.

Reliable Information

Media outlets don’t want to be caught out posting an off-page link back to you if the information is not correct. Working with an SEO agency that is an expert in off-page linking, can help you to write and publish content that will make media brands feel comfortable linking to your page.

If you click here you can see a range of SEO services this particular company provides, one of them being off-page link-building. Search engines also want trustworthy content to link highly in their SERPs. This drives more traffic to your product pages, SEO content, and social media posts. Use off-page link-building for weekly marketing initiatives, but also, for product launches and special purposes.

Off-page linking is all about building up trust with media sources, welcoming customers from different parts of the internet, and boosting traffic to boost potential sales. Working with an SEO agency that can take charge of this side of your marketing needs, is a great way to make this year a success.

Why You Should Hire an Agency to Support Your Digital Marketing

Jessica Lauren Vine

The success or failure of a business can be placed directly on a series of choices and steps that each builds upon the last. Digital campaigns are full of variables that can be tough to manage all at once. Particularly when you have more than one to manage at any given time.

Unless you want to hire somebody for the specific role of marketing with your business, it’s worth hiring a digital marketing agency such as Pro Motion to help to add value to your brand.

Using a marketing agency will help businesses produce the results they desire by fine-tuning them while keeping the workload reasonably light for business owners.

Here are some other reasons to consider using a marketing agency for your latest marketing schemes in 2021 and beyond.

They Can Help to Freshen Up Your Strategy

When you’re confident about what your business provides, but find it difficult to be able to reach the people who will benefit from it, then it will be useful to rethink your marketing strategy.

Working alongside a marketing agency will give you access to experts who have the perspective to create a rock-solid foundation for your marketing campaign. They will work to give you consistency across a range of channels according to what your business needs.

You Have More Time to Focus on What You Need to Do

No matter the emerging business, business owners need to take the time to establish their own role in the overall operations.

If writing engaging copy or creating visually appealing graphics isn’t their forte, then handing over that responsibility to another agent will help them to focus on the other important aspects of running a business, rather than spending the time trying to learn the skills.

Effective marketing is not just something that takes an afternoon- it can take hours of dedication and upkeep to manage an effective marketing campaign. It’s best to leave that part to professional marketers rather than business owners who have enough to do to keep themselves afloat.

Outsourcing is Easier and Cheaper

Business owners know that hiring new employees can be an expensive process- even without taking a whole new salary on payroll into consideration. The costs include the fees needed to advertise, recruit, onboard, and training new staff members.

While hiring a marketing agency comes at a premium cost, it is not going to cost business owners as much to work alongside marketing experts as it would be to hire a full-time member of staff.

It will also reduce business downtime as the specialist marketing agency will be available to help as and when you need them.

Marketing Agencies Want You to Succeed

Marketing agencies are businesses themselves and understand the struggle of managing a small business. This means they know how to optimize strategies for growth and success.

Due to their experiences and understanding, they will do anything that they can to help the people they work with to achieve. When businesses hire marketing agencies, they should see it not as an added expense, but as an investment.

5 Key Pointers That Will Lead You To Post-Pandemic Marketing Success

Jessica Lauren Vine

The pandemic has changed our lives in almost every imaginable facet, not least when it comes to business. Consumer mindsets have changed while companies around the world have had to adapt their strategies too. Learning how to master your marketing campaigns is now more important than ever.

So, what are the best ways to ensure that your marketing strategies help your business recover from a difficult 18 months? Here’s all you need to know.

Be More Visible

The majority of marketing execs agree that brand awareness is a more important metric than conversions. After all, you cannot achieve anything if nobody knows of your existence.

The pandemic has resulted in an even larger customer base now shopping and conducting their research online. A digital marketing agency can help your brand stand out in an increasingly crowded marketplace. Crucially a combination of unique content and appreciating the latest trends allows you to reach audiences in a powerful way.

Show Responsibility

Consumers increasingly want to use businesses that have a positive impact on society. Therefore, going green or supporting worthy causes can become a central focus of the company’s ethos.

It also impresses employees, which should be overlooked. As well as social responsibility, though, you must prove your trustworthy nature. Therefore, clear returns policies and contact details are crucial. Customer reviews can play an integral role in removing consumer fears too. Especially in this modern era.

Build a Strong Team

Whether it’s face-to-face interactions or via digital connections, most issues are handled by your staff. This could include permanent on-site staff or outsourced client care teams.

Either way, the value of good sales teams cannot be emphasized enough. Sales scripts and regular training are great tools for improving the overall conversion rates. Ultimately, though, if you have found strong candidates, let them show their value. Financial incentives and other perks can be used. A motivated team will deliver better results.

Don’t Forget Offline Marketing

Some companies will survive through digital marketing alone. For many, though, supplementing those efforts with offline marketing will make all the difference. Trade show events# are a particularly good option, especially for B2B. Meanwhile, pop-up stores, traditional print media, and promotional days can all work wonders.

Consumers are likely to appreciate the experience of shopping once more. This makes it the perfect time to capitalize on meaningful offline strategies. It could be the key to long-term loyalty.

Add Value

Consumers want more than just products. They want to feel valued by brands. One of the easiest ways to achieve this is by adding value through content. Videos and blogs provide insight into the people behind the brand.

Moreover, they offer something for free, which improves the relationship between consumer and brand. How to videos and explainer content will additionally enable them to get more from the products and services. In turn, this increased happiness is likely to keep them coming back to your company.

Marketing should focus on the needs of your target audience to maximize the impact. If that means alienating outside demographics, that’s just fine.

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