Get Clients at a Speaking Gig

If you have the opportunity to speak to a group, take it. Speaking to groups is one of the best ways to get new clients. Your audience gets to experience you first-hand, which helps them get to get to know, like and trust you. People want to do business with someone they know and trust.

Some speaking engagements will not allow you to sell your services from the stage. So how do you get clients when you aren't allowed to offer your services?

I've found four ways around this tricky situation that worked great for me and many of my students.

Make a Suggestion

You can subtly suggest that people can hire you without specifically screaming "Hire me!" Tell a story about work you have done for clients. Talk about their pain points and how you solved their problems. Plant the seeds by providing examples of how you work with clients. Use these stories no more than three times in a one-hour presentation. You audience will be listening and “see” themselves in your stories.

Provide Great Content

Share a lot of wonderful content and show that you are the expert in your field. Impress them with your knowledge.

Collect Contact Information

Capture contact information and email addresses from the audience. Use these to build your list. Let people know you will send them your presentation or put them on your newsletter email list.

Optimize Your Landing Page

Landing pages are simple and easy, right? They're one page with a paragraph or two of copy, a fillable form and a nice image. If you have all these elements, you should be good to go ... right?

For a bare bones landing page, this is enough. But you could lose out on valuable traffic, leads, and customers if you're just using a bare bones landing page.

Here some ideas to improve your landing page.

No Traffic

Improve your SEO (search engine optimization). Make sure that your landing page is about the right topics people are searching for, and is written in the same language your audience uses. Use similar terms to describe the offer behind the form on your landing page that your audience would use when searching for information on the topic.

Promote your landing page through your social media

If you blog (and if you’re not, why not?), you can include some calls-to-action information in blog driving your readers to your landing page. Promote your landing page offer on your Facebook page, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest.  

Create the proper length for your form  

If your form is really long, people may not want to spend the time filling it out. Try using A/B tests to see how short you can get the form so you're still getting quality leads.

Improve your content

It's possible that your landing page content doesn’t completely convinced your visitors that they're going to get anything of value if they give their information to you. You need to create compelling content for your landing page that tells people how they will benefit from your offer.

Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishments. - Jim Rohn

Got Pinterest?

Many small businesses are struggling to use Pinterest correctly. Do you wonder how to use images of your products to express your message? It’s not hard to use Pinterest for your business. You just need to create compelling images. 

Remember, Pinterest is all about the pictures!

Here are two easy tips to help you increase your Pinterest traffic.

Optimize Your Pins for Searches

Create images that will move Pinterest uses to buy what your small business is selling. Use your keywords in the image file name. Fill out the description section. Give details about the content so people will know more about your product. Keep your wording simple and short.

Leverage All Your Social Media

Take advantage of your build-in audience. Tell your Facebook fans that you are on Pinterest. Create posts telling them what you are pinning and let them know how they can connect with you on Pinterest. Add a Pinterest button to your website. This button should take visitors directly to your Pinterest page. 

Mary Sperr of Blue Dog Marketing honored by RPCN

Mary Sperr, president of Blue Dog Marketing, is being honored with the Community Champion Award by the Rochester Professional Consultants Network (RPCN) at their Entrepreneur Wall of Fame Gala on Tuesday, April 21, 2015.

The Community Champion Award is given a person who has provided direction or guidance that resulted in a noteworthy improvement in your community or community service organization. Mary has served as the Program Chair for the Gates Chili Chamber of Commerce since 2008. She brought the organization from four events a year to more than 18 each year. In 2015, Mary was elected President of the Gates Chili Chamber of Commerce for a two-year term. Mary has been an active member of the Hubbard Springs Garden Club for over 20 years and served on the Board of FoodLink for six years. Mary is also sits on the Chili Town Board.

The RPCN Entrepreneur Wall of Fame Gala is being held on April 21 at the Hilton DoubleTree Hotel, 1111 Jefferson Road. Networking and cocktails begin at 6 p.m. and dinner is at 7 p.m. Rachel Barnhardt from Channel 8 New is our emcee and General John Batiste is the keynote speaker.

We hope you can join us as RPCN honors Mary and other great entrepreneurs from our area! Visit www.rochesterconsultants.org for more information and to register for the Gala.

What is the BEST Time to Post on Social Media?

I recently read a blog by TrackMaven that had some great data about the best times to post on social media. I thought I would share!

Facebook

A recent study found that most businesses post during the week and the peak time for posts is 12 p.m.-1 p.m. Engagement is huge on weekends with posts on Sundays getting the most interaction.

Posts published at night get the more interaction during the week because engagement increases after 9 p.m. Believe it or not, posts between 12 a.m. and 1 a.m. are the most effective.

Takeaway: Though most companies post during the week, much of the interaction occurs at night and on weekends.

Twitter

Companies tweet most during the work week and most tweets go out on Thursdays. The peak time to tweet is between noon and 1 p.m. Companies tweet a lot less frequently on weekends.

Most retweets happen at night and on Sundays.

Takeaway: Tweet in the evening and late at night.

Blogging

Most companies publish blogs during the work week. Tuesdays and Wednesday are the most popular days to post. Saturdays see the fewest posts. Most companies post between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. with the peak time to post being between 11 a.m. and 12 p.m.

How does this publishing schedule correlate with the number of social shares? Weekend posts get the most social shares with blogs posted on Saturdays seeing the greatest number of shares. Blog posts published between 10 p.m. and 11 p.m. get the most interaction.

Takeaway: Blog posts published on weekends received the most Likes, comments and shares.

It looks like a trend is happening here. Posting outside normal business hours might get more fans interacting with your content. 

5 Tips for Choosing Keywords to Increase Your Website SEO

As a small business owner, you have a great website but are you getting found online? You need to optimize your website by including correct keywords to boost your search

engine optimization (SEO). How do you create a list of the keywords and terms you should use so your potential customers can find you? Here are six ways to research keywords to increase your website’s SEO.

Make a list of pertinent topics

Think about the topics applicable to your business. You can use these topics to help you come up with specific keywords.

If your business has a blog, you can use the topics you blog about often. Other ways to find relevant topics is to take note of topics that come up in your sales conversations.

Use your list of topics to pick your keywords

You now have a list of topics relevant to your business. Using those topics, you can identify keywords that are part of the topics. These are keywords and phrases you think your target customer will probably use when conducting a search for a business like yours.

Research related search terms

Fill out your topic keyword list with related search terms. An easy way to find related search terms is to go to Google.com and take a look at all the related search terms that appear when you type one of your keywords. After you type in your keyword or phrase, scroll to the bottom of Google's results and you will see a list of suggested searches related to your original input. Use these keywords to spark ideas for other keywords.

See how competitors are ranking for these keywords

It is always helpful to see what your competitors are doing. If your competitor ranks high for certain keywords that are on your list, it makes sense for you to use these works too. A great opportunity for you to own market share on important search terms is to use keyword and phrases that your competitor is not using.

Use Google AdWords Keyword Planner to narrow down your keyword list

Now that you've found a great list of keywords, you need to narrow down your list. Google AdWords Keyword Planner is a great tool to use. You can get search volume and traffic estimates for the keywords you are contemplating in Keyword Planner.

You now have a list of keywords and phrases that will help increase your website’s SEO. 

Entrepreneur is someone who has a vision for something and a want to create. - David Karp, founder of Tumblr

Happy Easter from Blue Dog Marketing!

Happy Passover from Blue Dog Marketing!

Blue Dog Marketing speaking at RPCN Small Business Success Conference

Rochester Professional Consultants Network (RPCN) is holding the Small Business Success Conference on Tuesday, April 7, 2015. This all-day conference is being held at Monroe Community College and Blue Dog Marketing is presenting two workshops.

Laurie Enos is presenting “Marketing Essentials” which covers all the basic marketing a small business needs to know about to be successful. She will talk about basics such as having a stand out logo to establishing yourself as an expert in your field by blogging. This is a great workshop for marketing challenged small business owners.

If your business needs to submit proposals, join Mary Sperr for “Highly Effective Proposals and How to Write Them.” In this session, you will learn all the steps necessary to create your own winning proposals. You will walk away with a template that you can customize for your business that looks professional and polished.

 Join Blue Dog Marketing at the RPCN Small Business Success Conference on Tuesday, April 7. To register or for more information, visit www.rochesterconsultants.org.