Online Marketing Frustrations - 5 Reasons Why Small Business ...

Video Transcription

Hey guys, John here for Bring the Donuts, and today I'm going to be talking about ?online business for small business owners.?

Now over the past week or so, I've been interacting with a lot of small business owners who run traditional offline businesses. These business owners also have an online presence, and they've been asking me a number of different questions, about how they can go about improving the online aspect of their businesses, and there's been something that's trending through out each enquiry and email that I receive, and it's something that I find really really frustrating. So I thought I want to cover 5 of the biggest mistakes that small business owners make online.

Obsessing about keywords and rankings

Without a doubt, the biggest mistake that small business owners make, and I see this all the time, with just about every small business owner that I deal with, and that is, they put absolutely everything into SEO. Now as we all know, Google is the biggest referral of traffic on the planet, and that's all well and good. But the problem that small business owners are faced with when they obsess about rankings and Google, is that they're essentially making the mistake of putting all of their efforts into something that can be lost, overnight.

There's no diversifying of their efforts whatsoever. I've spoken about this issue in the past, its a mistake that I've made, and when I see small business owners just obsessing about Google, and rankings, and keywords, I just cant help but shake my head and wonder how many other traffic sources they're potentially missing out on.

Okay so if small business owners shouldn't be fussing just about SEO, what should they be doing? Well some other examples of some really great and powerful traffic sources, that I would suggest for a lot of small business owners would be, video, podcasts, email marketing, networking, guest blogging. All of these things can essentially drive really targeted traffic to your website.

Taking advice from anyone

This one is just as bad as number 1 when it comes to obsessing about SEO, and that is small business owners listening to the wrong people, and by this I mean taking advice from the wrong people. For examples sake, just this week I received two emails. The first business owner said to me, ?Jenny the girl that works on the front counter at reception, she knows a little bit about computers, and she said the best thing to do to rank in Google to just put the keywords in all the titles and all throughout the articles as much as possible...?

Another email I received was ?Oh, one of the guys that drives the forklift, his brother builds websites, and he said the best thing to do to get rankings in Google...?

Okay, small business owners, please, think about who you're asking for advice, or who you're taking advice from. Think about their level of expertise in that area. It doesn't make sense to go to your local butchers and ask them how to fit a flange gasket on a 67 volkswagon.

Emotionally driven decision making

Decisions aren't based on factual data. This is another common mistake I see a lot of small business owners making online. Everything is emotionally driven - ?I think we should change the background colour from blue to yellow?, or ?I think we should put more menus across the top?, or ?This optin box here, that's taking up too much room, let's get rid of it?. It doesn't make sense to make decisions without referring to factual data.

Now by factual data I'm referring to your analytics, I'm referring to doing some sort of heatmap tracking, or user behaviour analysis. There are two great tools for this, in conjunction with Google Analytics. They are Clicktale, and Crazy Egg. Now of course once you've got factual data, this will help you to make better decisions, rather than just guessing or going with what might look nice.

Not measuring

They don't measure anything. This is one of the biggest kicks up the arse I got in the last 12 months, because I was doing a lot of this myself. I was making the mistake of doing all of this stuff and not measuring anything. There's nothing more empowering than knowing exactly what keywords are converting, where your traffic is coming from, which source of traffic is converting. Once you have this information, then you can ditch the stuff that's not working, and ramp up the stuff that is.

Unfortunately a lot of small business owners are flat out actually publishing content to their website, let alone tracking anything, and apart from obsessing about Google rankings....but that aside, there are two tools that you should be using, infact, I'll mention three here. One is Google Analytics firstly, the second one is the Google URL tool which allows you to create trackable url's, so when you start publishing ?.sorry, syndicating content and driving that traffic to your site, you know which property is the most effective. The third one that I'll mention here in this video is run by a friend of mine ? Dan Norris, and it's over at inform.ly

Many just couldn't be bothered

Fifth and final point, and this by no means applies to all business owners, or small business owners, but there are a large majority of small business owners that want to get absolutely everything out of their online presence and they want to put nothing in. James Schramko used this analogy once ...?You want this huge raging fire, but you don't want to put any logs on it?. It doesn't make sense. You cant make a million dollars if you only want to spend $5.

The simple message that I'm trying to make in this final point is that you cant afford to be lazy. If you've gone to the trouble of having a website developed, you need to put some effort in to get those returns.

Okay that's it for today's video and remember....

• When it comes to small business diversify your traffic efforts
• Don't listen to the wrong people, don't take advice from people who don't work in the industry and don't have a level of expertise with proven results, that can say, ?This works, do this?, instead of just basing your actions upon opinions from people that have absolutely no idea
• Base your decisions upon factual data
• Make sure you measure everything
• Don't be lazy!

Okay that's it for today's video, I hope you've enjoyed this one. If you have any questions or comments please post them below, if you haven't yet already, please subscribe. If you'd like to see me cover something in particular, please get in touch, and I'll shoot a video for you, just like this one, and if you've found this video useful, please share it with your friends.

Thanks so much for watching, take care.

Source: http://www.bringthedonuts.com/articles_view_article.php?articleID=90

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