New Year’s resolutions can be good for us both in our personal lives and in business. And a lot of created is created around this topic every year. There are so many articles to read right at the start of the year sharing tips and strategies you can use to grow your small business website – increase customers and sales.
And yes this is one of those articles – only coming up in June, in the middle of the year, when most people have forgotten what resolutions they even had in the first place. It is more of a reminder of some things small business owners can do to take their growth trajectory to another level before the year comes to a close.
So, as a user of both WordPress and the MonsterInsights analytics plugin, here are some things you can do to drum up more business for yourself before 2021 is gone and we usher in 2022.
Create a lead magnet – a giveaway in the form of a PDF to subscribers
This one is always an easy win for business owners trying to generate more leads from the traffic they are already receiving on their sites.
You don’t have to grow your website traffic or start increasing your ad spend on Facebook, Google Ads or similar ad platforms.
Just find a piece of content you have published that resonates well with readers / prospects already visiting your site and give a free PDF version of the post.
Now, it doesn’t have to be an exact copy.
If it is a listicle with five items, you can share a PDF with 2 – 5 more items. All a person has to do to get the PDF is to enter in their name and email address before they can download it.
If you don’t want to do the above, you can create something brand new totally from scratch and give it away as a free download to subscribers. You can make it available site wide, on certain categories or just on certain pages or blog posts.
Want ideas for a lead magnet? Just look at your analytics dashboard to see the search terms your site gets from visitors coming from Google or other search engines. You will find some that can be easily turned into lead magnets that can:
- help your prospects get an even deeper understanding of how your product / service aligns with their needs.
- help your customers get more out of your products / services – especially of you make changes to said products from time to time.
What if you don’t have time to create PDF downloads or you just don’t like them yourself? You can create a free email course and send a sequence of emails to your subscribers for 5 to 7 days:
- to help them with something that can be tied to whatever you are selling. You can offer good tips on a subject or tutorials and find ways to introduce your product in non-intrusive ways.
- to share more about what they will get as a free user of your product and as a paid customer for the different plans you have.
Write four guest posts a month every month till year end
Links are good, especially if they are coming from other reputable sites in your niche. They can lift your site’s pages up search engine ranking pages bringing you even more readers, sales and data (which you can use to up your content marketing efforts).
Often though, it is hard to do a guest posting campaign successfully because most assume it is this one huge undertaking (that may or may not work) and then of course there is impatience (as one waits for their traffic / sales to grow after publishing some guest posts).
So, how about you just write four guest posts every month till the year ends? That is just one a week. And you can send all the links to just one article on your site that comes above the rest when it comes to turning first time visitors into warm leads ready to buy from you. Or you can send all the links to your homepage.
Tips? Use Google Search to find reputable sites you can write for. You don’t have to throw in lots of links in your guest posts back to different pages on your site. Moderation is key. Even just one link back to your site from a guest post can do wonders.
Take a pen and paper and come up with 5 to 10 articles to write and pitch these to sites you want to write for. Once you decide which articles you write should be used as guest posts, don’t start second guessing yourself and wonder if it would be better keeping them for yourself – on your site. Send them out.
Turn some blog posts into YouTube videos
This is simple and straightforward – and can yield great results a few weeks / months down the road.
Your videos need not even be fancy before you can start creating more awareness for your brand on the YouTube search engine.
Just grab the title and subtitles in your articles, throw them in PowerPoint slides, do a little bit of editing and then add audio (your voice) to make a video.
Use one of the many free screen recording apps for smartphones and PC (like Snagit or Loom) to add your voice when scrolling through the slides to make your video. Mention your site and what you help people do in the video and tell them how to connect with you.
Once you upload a video to YouTube, make sure to also add a link back to the blog post that inspired the video in the first place somewhere in the description area.
Cold pitch more / cold call more – as an experiment
Why would you pick a phone and make calls? To drum up business of course.
That is usually the objective when you reach out to prospects as a small business owner anyways.
But what if you decided to just increase the number of calls you make? Or what if you started making cold calls if you have never done it before (for example if you primarily rely on email pitches and outreach via social media platforms)?
You would get a lot of advantages from such an experiment:
- You could learn more about trends you could tap into from the responses you get from people you call.
- You could grow your network.
- You could grow more confident talking about your business and service offering.
- You could learn more about various objections prospects have when it comes to buying your own products or similar products from other providers.
- You could use some of the things you hear in your content marketing: in your sales copy, in your blog posts or even ads.
There is a lot of actual benefit that can come out from this. So, try I before the year ends.
You will probably like it so much you will want to keep the experiment going indefinitely.
Talk to prospects. Talk to peers in the same market / industry – find them on Yelp and similar directories. Call your customers. Try it. See how it goes.
Create beautiful landing pages on your website …
… that load fast using themes like Generatepress or Astra and page builders such as Elementor or Beaver Builder.
Fancy pages, even from your magazine reading days pre-internet, have a way to keep people glued, reading. Such visual stimulation (from well designed pages) can be taken advantage by you to keep visitors on your site longer as they read more about what they can get for themselves from your business.
So, if you have been afraid of enlisting the help of a web designer before because of high fees / bad experiences , you can say bye to bland pages and start customizing some of your pages with the page builders mentioned above.
Add a live chat tool to your website
Like LiveChat, Zendesk Chat, Talk.to, HubSpot Chat, Messenger or Intercom.
Why add such services to your site? To start your journey increasing your conversions by chatting with people who come to your site in real-time.
If you already have a customer support team in place, you may not have to do this yourself, so it is even more appealing as an idea that you can start exploring this week until the year ends.
Then you can decide to stop or keep going. Most people who implement a live chat app on their site usually keep using them.
So this is one of those things you must give a try even if you are not comfortable with the idea of chatting with readers / prospecting clients coming to your site. If you don’t like it, you can just easily get rid of it later down the road.
Note that you can also add a Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp chat window on your site using various plugins if you are not interested in using the other services I have listed.
Write more articles on the blog answering more customer queries
If you use all or some of the tips above, you will gather so much data:
- about your industry / market
- about players with similar services / products / customer base
- about your website’s pages and blog posts – generally how people find you on the web and interact with you
- about your users / readers via your Google Analytics / MonsterInsights dashboard
And the next best thing you can do with this data is to advantageously use it in whatever marketing campaign you launch in the future.
The best bang for your money would be in creating even more new resources of higher quality and publishing them on your blog – with a view to educate your readers while mentioning your products / services wherever it makes sense and showing them how working together can enrich their lives – or just plain get rid of problems you are an expert in eradicating (for profit).
There you go!