Now that you have a small business or home-based business, how are you going to achieve success. What can you do right now that will give your small business a competitive edge? Keep your eyes on these 6 guidelines!

1.      Website

You do not need an exorbitant amount of money to have a website. As a matter of fact, you are far better off (in my opinion) to not have a website that is too complicated-looking with a surplus of widgets plastered all over. No, having a website that is pleasing to the eye will go much further to bring in clients.

2.      Social Media

Social media has become a useful advertising, networking, and communications resource for small businesses. That includes such sites as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and even Pinterest is starting to catch on.

3.      Search Engine Presence

Small and home-based businesses can create a strong Google presence using the same search engine optimization (SEO) tactics that the big box stores use. There are a variety of methods you can use to do this. One of the best ways is through the use of keywords that relate to your website. Whenever you use article marketing, you want to use your keywords and have those keywords apply to how people will “search” for you in not only Google, but other search engines as well.

Another excellent way to become highly rated in Google specifically is through their Google Adwords Pay Per Click (PPC) internet advertising.  For small businesses that are on a limited budget, this is an ideal way to advertise within the confines of what you can spend. You basically just create your ads with the keywords and content that you want to use, your ads get displayed on Google, and your ad magnetizes customers to your site. Of course, it’s not quite that easy, but it really is an excellent program.

4.      Website Tracking

Knowing who is visiting your website and what they are looking for is all part of successful visitor tracking. Many businesses strictly rely on Google Analytics to gauge the overall success of the marketing campaigns. Twelve Oaks Group, however, prefers to take it two steps further by utilizing additional tracking sites to get a good temperature as to the well-being of our marketing techniques.

5.      Offering Discounts

Offering discounts can be a powerful lure to the customers out on the Internet. If they have clicked on one of your ads and actually ventured over to your site, why not reward them by offering them a discount or premium? For those of you that do eCommerce, offering them a

percentage off an item can encourage those would-be shoppers to actually shop around.

Offering discounts or coupons are gaining increasing popularity in the small business world. Many of those discounts often turn out to be just the enticement customers need to stay on your site awhile — and buy more!

6.      Local Search Marketing

If you are not being active on Yelp, it IS costing you money. It’s not just Yelp either. You should participate in local search marketing in order to increase visibility for your website and your brand. Recently, reports have been seen by the staff at Twelve Oaks Group that indicate that 73% of all internet searches are for local services or goods. To me, that spells out a strong reason for taking advantage of local search marketing while the iron is hot.

What I’ve offered above are just a few guidelines you can use to propel your small business on the road to success. Twelve Oaks Group has many more tips that we’ll be sharing with you in the near future. Are you ready?

Pam

Pam Lokker is a master writer and proficient virtual assistant, as well as being Co-owner of Borlok Virtual Assistants.

In addition, Pam is Customer Service and Content Manager for the Twelve Oaks Group.

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The article offers several helpful hints for getting and maintaining control over your inbox, but perhaps one of the most unknown hints lies within “The Power of the Plus Sign”.

“Say you want to sign up for a social network or need to register your email address to receive a coupon, but you don’t want to receive associated emails or notifications from those sites. Add a plus sign to your email and those messages will skip your inbox altogether.”

                                    -How To Filter Your Gmail Like a Pro

Adding the plus sign and a keyword serves as a sorting mechanism once you’ve set up your Gmail filter tool, e.g. “love.12oaks@gmail.com”, becomes “love.12oaks+shipping.confirmation@gmail.com”. The mail will still make it to you, but will be filtered to its designated spot, allowing you to find it easily if necessary and avoid the hassle of manually managing it yourself.

Efficiency is the name of the game! To see other ways Twelve Oaks Group can help you run your business more efficiently, check out our Web Services page.

Elizabeth

Elizabeth McPhail grew up learning about the trials, tribulations, and perks of small family-owned business. She creates and maintains websites and blogs, and in her spare time can be found on the water boating!

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How often have you been curious as to how a particular topic is doing on the Web, you know, is it being talked about a lot or hardly at all? There are ways to track topics, did you know that? Read on as Twelve Oaks Group shares successful ways to track topics on the Web.

Google Alerts

A popular method, and a very successful way I might add, is through the use of setting up Google Alerts. It’s very easy to set up. Start with going to Google News and put in your topic that you want to search for (like Twelve Oaks Group, for example). Now scroll all the way to the bottom and click on the link that says “Create an email alert for Twelve Oaks Group.” You can do this for any topic you want. The final steps would be to add your email address and make your selections for what’s showing. Voilà, click on Create Alert. Then depending on how often you have chosen to have the email alert delivered, you’ll get an email anytime anything new pops up in Google.

Social Media

If you would be more interested in taking the social approach, then two good options are Google+ and Twitter.

1.      Google+

Google+ is Google’s version of a social network. When you signed up for your Google account, you were automatically set up with Google+. If you were to go there now, you would type in your search topic. If you look over on the top right, you see a red button that allows you to save your search. To check your topics you saved on a regular basis, just go to your Google+ homepage, select the More drop-down list in the sub-menu where you’ll be able to see your Google+ circles, as well as your saved searches.

2.      Twitter

Did you know you can save your searches for topics in Twitter — whether or not you use the hashtag? Yes, that’s right; you can. Just log into your Twitter account, type in your search query in the search box on the top right and click the magnifier. Presto, all the tweets that relate to your search come into view like magic. To save it, click on the search icon at the top of the tweets and choose either Save Search or Advanced Search.

Now finding that topic that you just saved is not so intuitive to find. Remember where you typed in your initial search on the Twitter homepage? Click on that again, and you will see all your search topics that you have previously saved.

3.      Facebook

Some of you may be wondering if you can conduct searches for topics on Facebook. You can by searching a topic but at this point, it’s pretty hit and miss.

Niche Communities or Specialist Services

Depending on what you’re interested in, you may find niche communities or specialist services that you can get good information from. Reddit is a good site for a niche community.

Tracking topics and tracking visitors are just two ways that small businesses can get an edge on their competitors or become aware of emerging trends and technology in the business world. Twelve Oaks Group has many more useful topics planned that will help you become the leader in your industry.

Twelve Oaks Group

Tennessee-based Twelve Oak Group is unique in its approach to its customers. Each team member is committed to helping grow small business, making local government more accessible, and enhancing communities with their web design and consulting services expertise. We will not deviate from this approach!

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According to Wikipedia, “Website visitor tracking (WVT) is the analysis of visitor behavior on a website.” In order to measure that, small businesses should look into which applications going to give you the best results.

What is website visitor tracking?

Visitor tracking (or management) refers to how many people come to your website, what pages they are looking at, what page do they come in on, as well as leave your site on, and much more.

Look at Twelve Oaks Group, for example. By looking at any one of the website tracking tools, we can determine how many visitors checked out our site on any given day, what country they were from and even what city they hail from, how many minutes they stayed on our site, did they access our site from a mobile device, and so much more. Just imagine checking out our content overview and discovering that 69.23% of visitors in the month of June so far entered our website through our Home page.

Why is visitor tracking useful to small businesses?

Visitor tracking is useful to you because the more information you can gain about your visitors, the closer you can get to satisfying their needs and requirements. What are they looking for? Website visitor management can give you a closer look at what their searching for, how many times they are searching for it and what you can do to tell them that you have the solution to what they want. This makes your content more compelling, your mailing list management for campaigns more effective, your products more visible and likely to be purchased, and your return on investment be higher. Wow! How great can that be?

In summary to this section, some questions you should want answers for regarding visitor tracking are:

1. Is your advertising and marketing working?
2. If you’re paying for ads on Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter or Pinterest, you need to know if those dollars are well spent: do visitors from these sources stay on your site? Are they finding what they need?
3. Is your site communicating effectively?
4. By looking at the pages visitors check out, can you determine if they’re finding what they need? What do you need to tweak as far as your content? Do you need to explain further?
5. What is your bounce rate? – A high percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page needs to be addressed. You need to get those visitors to venture deeper into your site.
6. Is your home page (or your most popular entrance pages) capturing the attention of visitors?

What are some WVT tools that Twelve Oaks Group uses?

We’re only going to mention 3 website visitor tracking tools right now — and these are used by Twelve Oaks Group now — yes, it’s okay to have more than one tool to get the answers to what you need to know.

Google Analytics

Invariably, the most well-known and most widely-used of the website tracking applications is Google Analytics. Offered by Google as a free service, Google Analytics (GA) provides a wide assortment of statistics that will tell you all your need to know about your website traffic. You can also upgrade to a premium version for a fee.

Get Clicky

Clicky is a real time web analytics service. That means that once you login, you can see what’s happening on your site — right now. Google Analytics has Real-Time also with the number of visitors on the site currently, the number of pageviews during each of the most recent 30 minutes, and the number of pageviews during each of the most recent 60 seconds.

Twelve Oaks uses Clicky as well for several options that GA does not have. Since Get Clicky only focuses on real time data as a default. There is access to comprehensive history; you just need to dig a little deeper on their site in order to pull out that information.

Lucky Orange

Lucky Orange records your visitor’s every click, mouse movement, scroll, and keypress.

Lucky Orange is unique in that it provides you real time analytics like GA and Get Clicky. In addition, there are three more features that you may want to know about. I’m only going to give you 3 bullet points per feature, so for sure you’ll want to go check everything out.

Live Chat Software

• Chat box stays on the page and follows visitor as they browse your site for a seamless experience.
• Can watch visitors screen while chatting with them
• Add Customized Pre Chat Questions

Visitor Recordings & Live Sessions

• Watch in real time or automatically records visitor browsing sessions
• Watch every mouse movement, keypress, scroll, screen resize
• Ability to chat with visitor while you watch them browse.

Heat Maps

• Aggregate lots of click data to form beautiful heatmaps
• Click heat maps
• Mouse movement heat maps

Live Visitor Map

• Watch a real time visitor map of all your website visitors
• Animated with custom effects
• Plot line between points for neat effect

So as a refresher, why do small businesses need to set up visitor tracking for their websites? It’s all for the better to see your visitors, my friends.  You need to get a good overview of what they need, get feedback on your site’s performance and services and be able to be flexible so you can adapt quickly.

Do you need help setting up one or more analytic sites? The Twelve Oaks Group web services and consulting team can help you. Why not give us a call at (731) 337-4330.

Twelve Oaks Group

Tennessee-based Twelve Oak Group is unique in its approach to its customers. Each team member is committed to helping grow small business, making local government more accessible, and enhancing communities with their web design and consulting services expertise. We will not deviate from this approach!

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Or do they find your web page?

People Judge You Based on Your Web Presence

When searching for a vendor to do business with, potential customers make “snap” judgements about your business based on what pops up about you on Google, Yahoo, Bing or some of the other search engines that are popular today.

Does your business even show up? If not, you have a problem obviously. If a search engine’s results aren’t accurate, a customer may never make that all-important call to YOU.

Is your website up-to-date? Does it accurately reflect what your business has to offer? If your website is out of date, has an old copyright notice, or has links that don’t work, potential customers may wonder if you’re even still in business. They will definitely feel as though you don’t care about them — a potential customer who’s searching for a company to do business with .

People Judge You Based on Your Website

Imagine a customer is comparing your website to that of one of your competitors, or even worse, a “big box” store. Take a moment right now and visit one of your competitor’s websites.

How does your site compare?

Does your website look professional, or does it look like something from the late 90s?
Are the graphics professionally done, or are they clip art you grabbed from another website?

What can a business do to improve its online image?

• Fewer, but higher quality pages might be easier to manage.
• Make certain you have *text* on your page — including your business name, address, telephone number, and most definitely information about the products and services your business offers.
• Contact Twelve Oaks Group for a Free Consultation — Twelve Oaks will evaluate your current website and provide easy-to-follow recommendations, along with a proposal to re-design your current website quickly and affordably.

Nathan

Nathan Reed is a spastic online entrepreneur. Since 1997, Nathan has developed online solutions for non-profits, small business, and local governments. Nathan is the owner and founder of the Twelve Oaks Group.

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