Is Your Web Copy Lame?

Posted on May 25, 2009 by Linnea

Many small business websites fall woefully short in web copy that attracts and converts their visitors to stick around, learn more, and hopefully buy their product or service.

This is how it usually works…you decide to put up (or revamp) your website, and hire a web designer to do all the work…or so you think!  You and your web designer strategize on a site architecture and look and feel of the site, and you heave a sigh of relief that now the work is in the hands of a professional and you can get back to what you do best, right?  Wrong!  Before you know it, your web designer wants content from you for all your pages, because he is not an expert about your industry…he’s the tech wizard.  So many of us try to work in the time to write some stuff that “fits” for each page, and then try to forget about it.

That’s why so many businesses end up with lame copy on their websites.  You’re lucky if it is even SEO optimized for the page, let alone being interesting and convincing to the reader!

Here are a few things you can do now to improve your conversion rate with your website visitors:
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What is Twitter? (And why should I care?)

Posted on April 27, 2009 by Linnea

Twitter is the fastest growing social media site and is designed around the concept of “What are you doing?” so that people could keep up to date on what their friends were doing throughout the day, and likewise let their friends know what they were up to.

Twitter is now being widely used as a marketing tool.  But can it be beneficial to your business as a painting contractor?  Maybe.

First of all, with the growing popularity of social media as a business marketing and relationship building tool, I don’t believe you can afford to ignore Twitter as a potential place for your business to get involved.

My advice is to set up an account and get started exploring the site and start using it at least slowly at first until you feel more comfortable with it and decide how you want you and your business to “show up”.

Following are some things to be aware of when getting started with Twitter:

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Does Your Website Have Hidden Problems?

Posted on April 20, 2009 by Linnea

As business owners, sometimes it is easy to ignore your website once you have it “done”.  More progressive businesses know that a website needs constant tweaking and may be doing a number of things to optimize their website to increase their ranking in the search engines.  Even so, there can be some hidden problems that accumulate and hurt your ranking.

Here are two common problems that you can take some easy actions to fix:

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What are you willing to do to get better results online?

Posted on April 16, 2009 by Linnea

If you are like many painting contractors, when it comes allocating your precious time to marketing activities, your website and online marketing efforts get put on the back burner.

The small business owners who are getting great results online are the ones who are willing to put more effort into the process with their own participation and/or spending the money to have an employee or outsourced internet professional handle certain aspects of their online marketing.

This is an area where you can get some serious results if you are willing to make commitments to taking actions that your competitors don’t make the time to do.

Here are three actions you can take now to get started:

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Successful Email Marketing

Posted on April 6, 2009 by Linnea

Should your business use email marketing?  For starters, I am a big believer in relationship marketing, and this means communicating with your customers and prospects.  Certainly you can send out paper newsletters quarterly or monthly to your customers, though that can be expensive.  Email newsletters or Email blasts can put you in front of your target market much more easily for a fraction of the cost.

But will your customers actually open and read your newsletter, and hopefully call, click or otherwise take the actions you want them to next?

Here are some tips for successful email newsletters:
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