Blog – Page 8 – Michele Christensen

Website traffic basics

This post is an introduction to some website traffic basics. If you are already working to generate and measure your traffic, this will be a refresher for you. If you aren’t doing any traffic generation, you’ll learn what you need to do and one place to get started.

First, one of the biggest things to learn about having a website is that you have to work to generate traffic. Before you have your own site, it’s easy to assume that visitors are automatically finding your site. In fact, it’s easy not to think about website traffic at all and just put a site up. However without an active plan to generate traffic, it’s likely that your site will get few if any visitors other than those who you refer. This means that unless people are typing in your site address from a business card or perhaps following a link you posted somewhere like on social media, on a personal blog or in a forum, they probably won’t find your site. You have to take specific steps to get people other than those you refer to find and visit your site. This is called traffic generation. Generating traffic is a big topic, and in fact there are people whose expertise is nothing but traffic generation. You don’t need that level of expertise, but I do recommend that you have a basic understanding of the concept of generating and measuring your website traffic. Some methods of generating traffic include:

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) which is making your site more likely to be displayed by search engines
Social media – you can post links and small bits of information that encourage people to visit your site and work to get those links shared
Paid advertising – you can pay to advertise your site to encourage people to visit

There’s a lot more to be said on the topic of generating traffic, but the main point is that this is something you need to be doing if you want visitors to your site. If you want a simple way to start getting traffic, I recommend Pinterest right now. It’s my single biggest source of referral traffic (i.e. people who have gotten to my site by being referred or clicking a link) and it’s not complicated or time-consuming to use. You do, however, have to use Pinterest correctly to get a good volume of quality traffic. You can’t just randomly post things and expect results. If you want to get started with Pinterest, I recommend you watch this webinar I did with Becky Sangha, creator of Business Marketing with Pinterest, and my personal go-to person for Pinterest questions.

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List-a-palooza 2014 starts tomorrow!

Tomorrow is the beginning of List-a-Palooza, a free listbuilding training that lasts all summer long. This will be my third year participating in it, and if I’m coming back again you know I have to like it!

(Already know you want in? Click here to sign up)

For starters, what is lisbuilding and why should you care? Listbuilding is the collecting and growth of a list of email addresses from people who have said they want to hear from you. It’s arguable the single most valuable activity you can do in your business. Click here for my article “The Top Ten Reasons You Need To Be Email Marketing” for a quick explanation if you are not familiar with listbuilding or email marketing.

List-a-Palooza is for growing your list. It’s a 3-month long event focused solely on the most valuable activity you can do in your business. Best of all, it’s free! Yes, there are paid offers along the way, but the event is free and there is a ton of great information given every week that you can use to keep your list growing.

Here’s what happens each week during the List-a-Palooza:

Weekly accountability check ins for tracking your results so that you accelerate your path to more subscribers
Two training calls each week with some of the world’s top listbuilding experts who share their hottest strategies and tactics with you for growing your list
A weekly “Power Hour” in which we all get online together at the same time to implement ONE specific list-building tactic.

Click here to sign up: List-a-Palooza

This is a great opportunity for you to focus on building your list. By the end of the summer, you could have a lot more subscribers and that opens up many possibilities. Join me and spend some time this summer building your list and your business.

Click here for access: List-a-Palooza

See you there!

Why this solopreneur is focusing on Pinterest this year

Up until this year, I devoted my social media time to multiple sites. For the most part, it worked pretty well. When I first started using social media to promote my business in 2009 it was much easier to stay current on all the “in” sites because there were fewer of them. There was also less to know. The medium wasn’t very mature. Facebook only started in 2004, so a few early, early adopters had been using social media for more than 5 years but the rest of us were 5 years of less.

As social media matured and more sites came into existence, it got harder and harder to stay informed and use it well. Best practices were constantly being studied and revised. There were more things to measure and interpreting your data became more complex. I’m constantly testing and tweaking my business activities, so one of the things I did was cut way back on the sites where I got very little return on my time invested. That left me with a manageable two sites to focus my efforts on – Pinterest and Twitter. In a later post, I’ll talk about why Twitter made the cut but this post is about Pinterest.

Pinterest has several great qualities that make it ideal for solopreneurs. As a one-person business you have to be super efficient with your time and Pinterest fits that criteria. Here are some of the reasons I’m focusing on Pinterest this year.

It sounds cliche, but it really is a traffic driving machine! I made just a few changes to my Pinterest activities and within a week Pinterest was in my top ten referral traffic sources. The following week, it was #4 in referral traffic and #7 overall. Given how little I did and how little I knew at the time, that’s pretty amazing. My Pinterest traffic has continued to grow as I’ve gotten better at using the site.
When you add a pin to Pinterest, it creates a permanent link which can be found forever. Technically, the same is true on other social media sites, but the big difference with Pinterest is that people use the search function more than the feed of most recent pins. This means that it doesn’t matter when you made a pin, it only matters that you use the language that someone searching is using. How often do you read or get retweeted on year-old tweets, Facebook posts or LinkedIn updates?
Pinterest boards are based, ideally, on interests. This means that when someone finds and follows a board of yours they are specifically looking for pins on that topic. You can create multiple, highly-targeted boards which will attract people interested in that topic instead of attracting people to your entire stream the way you would on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. That means you can tightly target your content to the audience of each board, and someone doesn’t have to be interested in everything you do in order to follow some of your boards.
Images are becoming increasingly important on social media, and on Pinterest the link goes with the image. When someone repins your pin, the link to your site usually goes with the new pin.
People share a lot on Pinterest! Repinning, or sharing someone else’s content, represents 80% of pinning activity. Your quality pins have a good chance of being repinned and exposed to entire new audiences.
The traffic that comes from Pinterest is high-quality! In a future post, I’ll talk more about driving traffic to your site with Pinterest but for now suffice it to say that the visitors that come from Pinterest are interested in what you have.

If you want to find out more about Pinterest and how it can benefit your business, watch this video training I did with Becky Sangha, the creator of Business Marketing wih Pinterest. It’s the system I use to get all these great results on Pinterest. Even though the site is as great as I describe, you can’t just sign up and fool around and expect to get business-building results by magic. It’s not hard, but you do have to use Pinterest in a strategic, planned way to get good results for your business.

Watch the training at the link below, and please use the social sharing buttons on the video page to tell your friends and colleagues about it!

Pinterest Marketing for Solopreneurs

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Interview with Martina Zorc of Star Brand Studio

I’ve got a new free resource to share with you! I interviewed Martina Zorc of Star Brand Studio, and she shared really useful in-depth information on branding. In the interview, she shares what branding is (and it’s more than colors or a logo), why it’s important to attract ideal clients and not just any clients, and her 12-step system for branding. Grab your free copy by clicking the link below: Martina Zorc Interview

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Product review: Tweet-a-coffee

One of the principles I use a lot in my business is appreciation. I try to say thank you and be genuinely appreciative to people who have helped me in some way. In order to express this, I may write a review or send a social media post acknowledging the person. In March, I found a novel way of publicly thanking someone called Tweet-a-coffee. It allows you to send a $5 Starbucks gift card to someone simply by sending a specially-formatted tweet including the handle @tweetacoffee.

What I love about this service is that it is fun and novel. It’s a great, practical way to thank someone, send them a gift and acknowledge them in front of all your followers in one swoop. I’ve sent coffee gift cards via email before, but this has the added bonus of being a public acknowledgement. This service is perfect for solopreneurs because it leverages your time, i.e. you get multiple benefits out of the time it takes to send the tweet. It’s also easy to do once you have set up your Starbucks account and linked it to your Twitter account.

So, what’s not to love? I tried it twice, and in both cases the recipient thought it was some sort of virtual gift with no monetary value. I had to point out that it was a real gift card. Both of the recipients are intelligent business owners with whom I had collaborated so they weren’t the problem. I think this is just such a new idea that it’s not obvious that you could send a real gift via tweet. One of my recipients had trouble redeeming the gift card so we had to work that out.

The bottom line: Great idea, but things get a little bumpy between my sending a tweet and my recipient having a cup of coffee in hand. I’ll try it again, but I may give it some time and see if things go more smoothly next time. For more information, see the Twitter handle @tweetacoffee.

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Brand new listbuilding training for you!

You’ve probably heard all the sayings about listbuilding. People say things like:

The money (or gold) is in the list

You gotta be building your list

You need to have a list

What is meant by this is specifically an email list, that is a collection of email addresses from people who have specifically said they want to hear from you. This is not to be confused with spam, which everyone hates. Legitimate listbuilding includes sending email only to people who want to hear from you. 5 years into my business, email marketing is one the most important activities I do in my business. It seems inconceivable to me that I didn’t do any listbuilding or email marketing at first.

It’s true however. I didn’t start building my list until I had been in business for over a year because I didn’t understand how email marketing could possibly help my bottom line. As a specialist in business strategy, I make it a point to never do anything unless I understand how it will contribute to my business so until I had a coaching session where it was laid out for me, I didn’t start.

That’s why I’m so excited to share this video training with you. My colleague, Becky Sangha (The Online Video Marketer) has recorded a brand new training laying out exactly how listbuilding works. If I had seen this video in that first year, I might have started my list sooner and I’d be that much further ahead!

Click the link below to watch this free, no opt-in training video. It takes about half an hour, but it is well worth it!

Get Your List Growing Free training

Ten reasons why you need to be email marketing

One of my big strategic shifts this year has been to devote even more time to email marketing. I’ve let go a lot of what I used to do that didn’t work as well. I didn’t start building my list or doing any email marketing until I had been in business for more than a year because I needed convincing that it was a worthwhile tactic for me to use. Let me state that I am now officially convinced that email marketing is one of the most powerful ways for almost any business to market. In this article, I’ll give you 10 reasons why you need to be email marketing.

Less selling. People will want to buy your products and services with less selling by you.
Keep in touch with people who are interested but not yet ready to buy.
Have a warm audience to test new ideas on and get feedback.
Be a better event participant and JV partner. You are much more attractive to collaborators when you have an audience that you’ve already proven yourself to.
Decrease the variability in your business. You’ll be able to make offers to a receptive audience when things are slowing down.
You control when people hear from you instead of depending on them to visit your site at the right time
Earn the trust and respect of your audience over time
Non-monetary support – even people that don’t buy can bring ideas, questions, participation, shares, etc
Better return on time spent because you are talking to a self-selected audience of interested people
Make more money. It may not be the only reason you are in business but it has to be one of the reasons.

Are you convinced you need to be using email marketing? If so, I invite you to join me on this special training They say “The money is in the list…” So where’s mine? I’ll be co-presenting with Becky Sangha, The Online Video Marketer, and we’ll be sharing how you can start your email marketing campaign in just a few weeks. If you aren’t convinced yet, I’d love for you to join me as well so you can get more information on how email marketing can help your business. Click here to sign up.

Are you using email marketing in an original way? Share it in the comments. Please share this article using the Pin It and social sharing buttons below. Thanks!