In honor of the Independence Day holiday last week, I have a special way for you to work one-on-one with me that I’ve never offered before! There’s no contract, no long-term commitment and no complicated package. It’s simple and can help you make a big leap forward in your business quickly!
You have a huge degree of flexibility in how you use your sessions, and I’ve given you ideas to think about on the information page. I’ve coached solopreneurs since 2010, so there are a lot of areas I can help with. Click the link below to get inspired about how we can work together!
The offer is only good until Thursday, so click here to get details and book your sessions!
PS – This offer was opened for my email subscribers last week. If you want priority notification of upcoming special offers and useful content to help you grow your solopreneur business, fill out the box at the top of the right sidebar to join my email subscriber list.
It’s the week of Independence Day here in the US, and while it’s become known as “The 4th of July,” I prefer to call the holiday by the formal name in order to acknowledge the meaning of the day. I grew up in Philadelphia where much of the founding of the US took place, so I have a special place in my heart for this holiday.
In honor of Independence Day, I’m participating in a special independence-themed giveaway event. Myself and 12 other business owners have gotten together and created a page where you can download gifts from all of us to help you grow your business, achieve greater visibility, have a bigger impact and yes, make more money. Grab your gifts here: 13 Gifts for Business Freedom Giveaway I encourage you to visit the page as soon as you can – the giveaway only goes until the 9th.
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.
Like this article? Please use the Pin it and social sharing buttons to tell your friends about it. Thanks!
This book contains complete instructions for automating 9 key areas of your business as well as 3 automation-related bonus strategies. Some of the areas covered include:
Social media
Appointment scheduling
Email processing
Monitoring your industry
Backing up your computer
Head over to the Kindle store today and grab your copy! You don’t need a Kindle device to read this book – you can get a free app for your smartphone or tablet and you can also use the free Kindle desktop reader. I’d love it if you would help me share the news! Use the Pin it and social sharing buttons below to share this with your friends and connections. Thanks!
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!
I admit, I’m late in jumping on the Foursquare bandwagon. As with any new undertaking, I have to have a definitive reason for getting involved with something and I have to know what I expect to get from it and have a way to measure that result. I’ve checked out Foursquare several times, but never felt like it was a good fit for my business until now. In this article, I’ll share why I decided to start using it, what I’m using it for and how I keep myself safe.
In case you don’t know, Foursquare is a social media site and smartphone app that uses your phone’s gps system to let you “check in” to physical locations. As a work-at-home solopreneur, I don’t actually have a physical location so it never seemed like something that would work for me. I was also concerned about announcing to the world where I am and that my house is empty.
The reason I finally decided to jump is to spice up my Twitter feed with some more interesting personal information. Several people I follow on Twitter have their check ins included in their Twitter feed and I found I really enjoyed it, especially when they included a picture. It’s important to share some information about yourself, your personality and life in your marketing so people have a sense of just who they are considering doing business with. As with any sharing of personal information, don’t overdo it.
So, the main reason I’m using Foursquare is to add some variety to my Twitter feed. I’m definitely accomplishing that, but there are a few added benefits I hadn’t considered. It’s actually a fun service to use. There’s elements of gaming in it such as the ability to earn badges, which often come as a surprise. I also find it tends to get me out of the house more because I don’t like to see a whole day with no check ins.
The big question is safety. When the practice of revealing your physical location became popular, there was a lot of stories about people being burglarized while they were out and of people being stalked at the places they go regularly. I protect myself from burglary by never checking in unless someone is home at my house. I also have two large, very loud dogs that show up all the time in my social media postings for any would-be burglar to see. If this isn’t an option for you, consider only checking in when you will be home shortly.
As far as discouraging stalkers, I only check in when I’m leaving a place. If someone tries to find me, I won’t be there anymore. I also never check in at any of my regular stops, i.e. places where there is a pattern to my visiting or places I go often. There’s no way to figure out where I go regularly by looking at Foursquare.
Do you see any way to use Foursquare in your solopreneur business? Tell me about it in the comments.
I had an article published this month by emPower Magazine, which is “an online magazine that offers in-depth articles, commentary and video programming on social, educational, socio-economic, health, political and environmental issues facing people of African descent” (Source)
The article is on Twitter strategies that solopreneurs should avoid. Check it out here, and I’d love to see your comments!
As solopreneurs, we are often asking people to take action in some way. The most obvious way is to make a purchase, but there are other things we want people
How solopreneurs can create a compelling call to action
to do such as enter an email, download a report, answer a question or take a survey. How do you get people to respond to a non-sales call to action?
First, make it obvious what you want them to do and why they should do it. I cringe when I see someone I’ve never heard of saying “Like my Facebook page.” They got the first part right – it’s very clear what they want. But why would I do that? If I’ve never heard of the person why would I waste even a few seconds checking their page out without more information? A better choice might be something like “Like my Facebook page for daily tips on training your rescue dog.” Now I know what they offer on the page and can make a quick decision as to whether it’s for me. The only exception to this would be celebrities, sports figures, politicians, etc who are innately interesting to their fans.
Second, make it easy. People don’t have the time or attention span to read complex instructions on your calls to action. What you are asking them to do should be easy – click a button, enter an email, fill out a survey, etc. The most difficult request I’ve seen was someone asking for 5 questions to be submitted via Twitter direct message. The person was gathering information, so other than helping him or her there was no incentive to the reader. They didn’t ask for only 1 question, they wanted 5. Twitter direct messages are one of the more inconvenient way to submit questions as well. If you’re asking for help or feedback, make it really easy for people to jump in and do it.
Third, offer a thank you for their help. Don’t make it too enticing or you may get people doing what you ask just for the reward. If you are trying to survey your market, this might skew the results or you might get people just slopping their way through whatever you ask for just to get the reward. For ideas, you could offer a free downloadable product or one of my favorites, offer to mention them in a tweet. I was thrilled to complete a survey for someone who offered to thank you in a tweet to her tens of thousands of Twitter followers.
Don’t be afraid to ask people to help you or to do something. Just make it obvious, easy and rewarding for them to do so.
Have you ever had a successful call to action? What made it a success?
I’m really excited to share a brand new tool I’ve created to help you build your solopreneur business faster and with more ease!
I often get into conversations where people ask me what tools I use in my business. It’s one of my favorite things to talk about, and often people are surprised that there are free or paid tools to do the very thing they need to do.
I’ve compiled a list of the tools I use to run my business into a handy document called the Soloprneur Success Rolodex. It has 32 of my tops picks for services and products that are integral to my success.
In honor of the Independence Day holiday last week, I have a special way for you to work one-on-one with me that I’ve never offered before! There’s no contract, no long-term commitment and no complicated package. It’s simple and can help you make a big leap forward in your business quickly!
