Luis Chavez, Author at Web Design Los Angeles - San Diego - Bakersfield – Fresno - Sacramento - Chavez Web Design

Top 10 Productivity Tips For 2022

by Luis Chavez | May 28, 2020 | Productivity

Productivity Tips

Productivity is the state or quality of producing an item. When running your own business, the most important daily goal an entrepreneur can have is to utilize as much time during the day to be as productive as possible. Here are 10 simple productivity tips that will give any business owner an increase in productivity as well as efficiency.

1. Create Clarity With Purpose Driven Goals

Create a clear sense of purpose for you to avoid procrastination. Many times, it can be a direct result of not having a clear concise goal. Establishing tangible targets and deadlines that allow you to be focused on your overall goal eliminates room for procrastination. Instead of thinking about what needs to be done next, you can fully immerse yourself on your next task once one has been completed. One of my mentors once said that 80 percent of your results will come from why you want to do something versus how to do something. It can be easy to do a mediocre job when your why isn’t strong enough. Make sure your purpose is strong and clear. Productivity Tips / Goals rural road

2. Work SMARTer and Not Harder

Another hack one can use to stay productive within their business is to always make SMART goals. Remembering this acronym can help an entrepreneur stay productive within their business.

Specific – Make sure your goals are specific and designed around your objective.
Meaningful – Reflect on your goals can ensure that each decision being made is meaningful and is aligned with what you define as important.
Action Oriented – Create a course of action for your goals.
Realistic/Responsible – Make your goals reasonable within your capabilities.
Time-Bound – Create deadlines and time frames for each of your goals.

Following these guidelines to achieve your goals will help you stay on track and make sure their establishment is being as productive as possible. For example, let’s analyze the importance of being specific with your goals. Let’s say your goal is to be rich, then what does that mean exactly? $1? $1 million? $25,000 in residual income? When do you want to achieve this goal? 1 year? 10 years? 100 years? Many new business owners I speak with have a general idea of what they want, but rarely do I meet anybody that has SMART goals. On the other hand, when I meet successful business owners, they can give you specific details of their SMART goals. Productivity Tips Work Smarter, Not Harder

3. Parkinson’s Law

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Parkinson’s Law essentially means work fits into the time in which we give it. If we do not have defined deadlines for goals and objectives, our workload will continue to expand until our final completion deadline. It is important to create “Bright Line Deadlines”, deadlines that are adhered to prior to the completion date. This will not only eliminate procrastination but also allow for the project to fit into the time allotted. If your deadline is within one month, then make it your goal to complete the task within three weeks. You can always count on the unexpected; therefore, it’s always a good idea to try and give yourself a shorter deadline. This way you are not stressing out as you approach your deadline.

4. Focus On Non-Urgent Important Tasks

What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important. Important tasks directly contribute to the success of your long term goal. Urgent tasks need to be taken care of immediately but do not necessarily contribute to your overall goal. Finding a balance between an important task and urgent task will create a system that determines the efficient amount of time you need to spend dealing with both. Establishing this balance will train you to deal with unforeseen occurrences in a calm and collective way as opposed to being reactionary. There are dozens of things that are demanding our attention. Unexpected favors from friends and family, spam e-mail, notifications from social media, telemarketers, and that thing you were supposed to get done last week. Many of these distractions keep us away from the things that will have the biggest impact on our lives. We rarely seem to have enough time to complete a tutorial, read a book, have a morning meeting, go to the gym, or properly train our team. According to Stephen Covey, the author of the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, we are more likely to get better results if we can focus on tasks that are not urgent but important.

5. Give Up On Multi-Tasking

Research has shown that bouncing from activity to activity not only causes stress but doesn’t allow the entrepreneur to give their all when starting each task. Productivity routines are a much more efficient way to handle your daily task. Identify what the most important actions are that need to be worked on daily. Schedule specific times during the day to complete these tasks. Putting an end to multitasking may be difficult in the beginning, but this will bring a significant difference in the level of productivity to your establishment. One of my mentors once said, “Energy flows where focus goes.” If you want to feel like you have accomplished something today, then focus on completing one task at a time. It is often better to have 100 percent of one task complete, then to have one percent of 100 tasks complete.

6. Turn Off Notifications

You may be reading this and believe it is a crazy idea, but yes. Please turn off your notifications. Having too many distractions such as notifications will have you focusing on other people’s agendas as opposed to your own. For example, the goal of social media is to keep you on their platform as long as possible, because it makes them more profitable. Therefore, they are going to consistently show you the most engaging content based on your clicks and browsing history. In fact, according to statista.com, we have been spending more and more time on social media every year. As of this writing, the average social media users spend an average of 135 minutes on social media. Productivity Tips Turn Off Notifications

7. Unsubscribe Regularly

Schedule at least 10 minutes of time to read emails and unsubscribe to useless emails. The general rule of thumb for email subscriptions is if you haven’t benefited from the source after two weeks, then unsubscribe. These emails are filled with agendas that don’t necessarily benefit you. They will normally consume too much of your time and reduce your productivity level. Productivity Tips to Useless Emails

8. Build Motivation To Stay On Track

Understand what causes you to become unmotivated and less productive. More importantly, understand what motivates you. One suggestion would be to start a contract with yourself. Set deadlines and goals and real consequences if you do not meet them. Get the courage to tell other people your goals. This way your peers can hold you accountable for your goals. This will add an additional incentive to staying motivated. Also, change your posture. Anthony Robbins, the author of Awaken the Giant from Within says that our positive physiology is a key ingredient to breaking any negative patterns. The way we carry ourselves can affect our level of motivation. Sit up straight. Speak clearly. Speak aloud. This may seem like a simple and awkward task at first, but it will result in a significant difference in your motivation. If you are motivated and energized you will have an increase in your productivity. person wants to reach target

9. Set Boundaries and Stick To Them

It is extremely important to set forth boundaries for yourself as well as your goals. The first boundary you can set and follow through on can be your working hours. Many people start their day by reading emails immediately after waking up. This does not result in getting more accomplished or getting a head start on any task. If you set forth a standard work schedule ahead of time, you allow yourself to stay organized and to follow through with all major decisions. You should also establish a work area if working from home.

10. Build A Road Map To Success

It would be impossible for you to master all of the information given to increase productivity, but if you can implement these suggestions into a system that is unique to you, then you will notice a large increase in productivity. Some businesses may need to focus on boundaries and motivation while others may need to understand the disadvantages of multitasking. The important thing is to understand who you and your company are and take action on what you need to work on. We are told that knowledge is power; however, that is far from the truth. Knowledge is only potential power. It’s time to act right now! Even if it’s a small action that can lead you in the correct direction. So what action can you take right now that will help you become more productive? business partner working together

11. Bonus Tip

Follow the 4 Ds of efficiency.

Delete – If it’s not important, then delete it
Defer – If it’s not urgent, defer to complete it later.
Delegate – If someone else can do it, then hire someone to do it for you. For example, you can hire someone to help you with your website, graphics, bookkeeping, or marketing. You can get more accomplished by hiring the experts to do the job for you
Do – If nobody else can do it, then train someone. However, if nobody can do it right now, then you have no choice but to do it yourself, but this should be your last option.

www.chavezwebdesign.com Written by Darren James

Best 21 Free Online Marketing and Sales Tools For Your Website

by Luis Chavez | Apr 30, 2020 | Internet Marketing

Online Marketing Tools

Need help getting more qualified traffic to your website? After years of research, trial, and error we are proud to present you with what we believe are the top 21 free online tools that will give your online marketing and sales a massive competitive advantage. Below is a 7 step free online marketing process that we recommend you use to help maximize your online marketing and sales for your business.

online marketing tools 7 step process graphic

If you are numbers, reports, and graphs person like us, then you are going to love this blog post. We have broken down all of these free tools into the following categories:

⦁ Keyword Research
⦁ Answer The Public
⦁ Ubbersuggest
⦁ Google Trends
⦁ Google Keyword Planner
⦁ Keyword Tool
⦁ Keywords Everywhere
⦁ Content Marketing
⦁ Portent
⦁ Buzzsumo
⦁ Technical SEO Tools
⦁ GTMetrix
⦁ SEOptimer
⦁ SEO Yoast
⦁ Link Building
⦁ Ahrefs
⦁ Social Media
⦁ Viral Content Bee
⦁ Later
⦁ Tweetdeck
⦁ Sales Tools
⦁ Drift
⦁ Bitrix 24
⦁ Rank Tracking
⦁ Google Analytics
⦁ Google Webmaster Tools
⦁ Google Tag Manager
⦁ Spyfu

Everybody wants to be on the first page of Google and get more traffic from social media. As a result, you want to give yourself every possible advantage to beat your competition. Are you ready to get started?

The tools that you will find in this category will allow you to find the best keywords for your website. You must find keywords that have low competition and high searches. These are some of the best free tools we found for you:

Answer the Public

Answer the public tool is very useful when trying to find out what people are trying to look for in the search results when using the internet. When using it you just type in your desired keyword or phrase. This way you can get an insight as to what your customers might be searching for. It will also give any type of question that people search for regularly.

Free Online Marketing Tools Answer the public results

You want to pay close attention to the keywords that indicate an intention to buy. It is better to have 100 visitors and have 10 purchases your product or service rather than 1 million visitors and nobody purchases your product or service.

But I want to know more data

This tool does not let you know how many people are searching for this particular keyword or how much competition there is. This is where the next tool comes in handy.

Ubersuggest

This is one of my favorite free SEO tools out there right now. It gives you lots of data for free such as search volume, SEO difficulty, paid difficulty, cost per click, historical data, and even the age groups that are searching for a particular keyword.

Ubersuggest keyword overview

Ubersuggest gives you a chart of how many mobile and desktop searches for the word you type in the search bar to see how many people are interested in searching it.

Ubersuggest Keyword overview list

Afterward, it gives you all the key terms that people search along with the word you had typed in. If you want to unlock more features, then they will want you to sign up for an account. These suggestions are great if you already wanted to cover a certain topic, it helps you if you’re not good at brainstorming a completely new keyword word and content ideas. That is because these keywords are closely on the seed keyword you have entered on the Ubersuggest home screen. Finally, it gives you some trends to review, but if you want to get more details about the trends, then you are going to love the next tool.

Want To See More Details?

Google Trends

By analyzing the trends of your industry, then you can make better business decisions. For example, in the graph below we can see that “Pool Service” searches hit an all-time high during June.

Google Trends results

Are you thinking of opening a new business, product, or service? It would be important to check if the product or service is going up or down. The last thing you want is to invest a lot of money and time into something that might eventually become obsolete. Moreover, are you still advertising with the yellow pages? You might want to re-think your strategy after looking at the graph below.

Follow The Trends And Ride That Wave

Google Trends graph of interest over time

Google Trends is an online tool that helps users visualize and discover trends. Google Trends later uses Google search, Google News, Google Images, Google Shopping, and YouTube. The data can then be visualized by Google. This way you can analyze the queries of up to 5 different searches at the same time, enabling you to conduct analyses and comparative research.

Google Keyword Planner

Google keyword planner is a free tool for new or experienced advertisers that shows you data historical data, mobile vs desktop, paid search competition, keyword suggestions, and much more.

Google keyword search volume results

Optimize For High Intent To “Let Me Buy It” Keywords

Here it shows a record of the data that shows how many people have searched. Just because people search for something doesn’t mean people will buy from you. You want to pay special attention to keyword phrases like “buy”, “near me”, “hire”, “company”, and more. Some of the tools mentioned above will limit the number of keyword ideas. However, here it will give you a more comprehensive list of the keywords related to your category.

Google Keyword monthly search volume results

Here in Google Keyword Planner, it shows the average of monthly searches that people have done. The only limitations are that unless you have a paid account, it won’t let you look at the raw numbers. Instead, it will give you ranges such as 10K – 100K. However, you can sign up for a paid account and put an extremely low budget. This way you can get access to the tools. What if you want to know the data from other major search engines or websites? This is where keyword tool.io comes in.

Keyword Tool.io

Keyword tool.io results

Keyword Tool.io is another SEO tool that is similar to other SEO tools but different because it also shows you what people search on other sites such as Amazon, Playstore, Twitter, Bing, and Instagram. This keyword SEO tool also shows you how much competition there is for a particular keyword. It ranks the keyword from the top being the most searched, bottom being the least searched.

Keywords Everywhere

Keywords Everywhere is another similar SEO tool to keyword tool.io when it searches different keywords.

Google chrome keywords everywhere extension

Keyword Research For People In A Hurry

The only difference between keywords everywhere and other SEO tools is that keywords everywhere are an extension of chrome that means you research keywords without leaving your search. This saves time from clicking back and forth just to look for related keywords. Also, it gives you the monthly searches for any keyword you might type in the search bar. This helps you take away any unnecessary steps when researching keywords for your website. The only drawback is that you will be limited to so many searches after you use the tool for a while. Eventually, they will want you to purchase some credits.

Online Marketing Tools Step two Content Creation

Portent

Portent is a free title generator that can make a catchy and interesting title so that engine search users will be interested in clicking on your site. This could be helpful for you because if you’re terrible on brainstorming new titles that don’t sound interesting inturn people won’t take the chance to click. If you are barely beginning to write a blog and need a quick way to get a title for your blog. It’ll give you the reason for each section why every part is used in the title. You may want to run some A/B testing and test out two headlines to see which headlines get more clicks. Just ask your friends to form social media and watch the comments roll in.

Potents title results

Buzzsumo

So you have awesome keywords with high searches and low competition, but what content should your website have?

Give them what they want and they will click

with Buzzsumo you can type any keyword or phrase and it will show you some of the most shared content on the web. This will give you an idea of what kind of content to write for your website. Stop trying to write content that nobody cares about and use this tool to brainstorm on the best content to write for your website. This way you can maximize your traffic. Without Buzzsumo you could spend days searching the internet for the information about your competitor, but just by entering your search preferences and criteria into the tool’s input, Buzzsumo analyzes the online content for you and finds the pieces that will work the best for your marketing strategy. Buzzsumo is also connected to Twitter to see who is spreading your competitor’s content to see an influencer that can share your content for better traffic for your website.

Buzzsumo results

GTmetrix

So now you have great keywords, a well-written article, but is your site fast enough or will people want to leave because it takes forever to load? GTmetrix is an online tool to get a more detailed report of how your website’s performance by giving your site a grade on little details about your website. GTMertix performance results

One of the advantages of using the GTmatrix WordPress plugin allows you to run analyses right from your WordPress dashboard. This tool can help anyone to better their site by seeing what is missings by looking at each grade for a certain topic to enhance their websites. GTMetrix is different from other online tools by locating where it operates its test server region. This determines how fast it’ll load your website. The hardware that GTMetrix uses also describes how’ll it will perform the analyses. The hardware that GTMetix uses is HTTP/2 which loads a lot faster than the tools from other competitors that still use the hardware’s outdated version HTTP /1.1. This is a benefit that GTMetrix has against other tools that give detailed reports on the website’s performance.

Online Marketing Tools Step three Technical SEO Tools

SEOptimer

Your website is now fast, but is it optimized for the search engines?

SEOptimer Results

SEOptimer is a website audit and reporting tool that can comprehensively review a website and give a grade based on how fast a page loads, mobile usability, presence on social media, and its security. We use SEOptimer to help you improve your website for potential customers. It gives several recommended improvements that you can do to better the performance of your website.

SEOptimer Tips

For example, If your social media needs some improving it’ll give a list of what you do have and what you need to add. Social media is an important place that you need to have a presence on especially in today’s world where customers are heavily influenced by it when making purchasing decisions. SEOoptimer will check if you’re connected with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Youtube when grading your website for the presence of it.

But is it enough?

SEO Yoast

No, in this competitive world it’s not enough to do a simple audit. This is where SEO Yoast comes in. It’s one of the most downloaded WordPress plugins. It’s a great plugin that anyone can use to make sure their website meets the highest technical SEO standards. SEO Yoast is helpful to those who aren’t good at technical SEO by guiding you step by to use technical SEO the right way. Yoast is a great plugin but it still requires you to create good content. This way your website’s ranking on the search results will be very great.

Yoast gives a detailed analysis based on the problem that you might have on yours.

Red = Problems that must be fixed

Orange = Strong suggestions to improve your SEO

Green = Congrats you did a good job

Pretty easy so far, but this is where it starts to get tuff

Online Marketing Tools Step four Link Building

Ahrefs

Getting quality backlinks from other websites is one of the most influential factors to your online rankings and the most difficult to achieve in our opinion. However, Ahrefs is an amazing free tool that can help you get started on this competitive journey. Below is a very simplistic explanation of how backlinks work and how they affect the overall domain authority of each website.

Page Ranks- Example

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

A backlink is a link that is on a website that navigates to another and Ahrefs is a website tool that checks another website for those backlinks. You want to get as many high-quality backlinks from authoritative sites as possible. This way you can have a higher domain authority for your website. Your domain authority can vary from 0 – 100. It’s exponentially more difficult to go up a level so don’t worry if you feel stuck at a particular level.

Backlink Profile for nba.com

It is still important to perform a backlink check on a website to see if the search engine user does follow them by clicking them. You will want to check the link to see if it’s coming from a spam website because it can hurt your overall SEO. What’s great about Ahref’s free backlink checker is that you can also review your competitor’s backlinks. This means that you can potentially try to duplicate the same backlink by writing a better article than your competition and requesting a backlink from that website owner.

So what’s next? Promote! Promote! Promote!

Online Marketing tools Step five Social Media Promotion

Viral Content Bee

Viral Content Bee is a free website and an excellent online marketing tool that allows the user to put their content on social media for people to see and also share. This helps you spread the word about your websites to get more traffic. It’s better if an influencer happens to share your content because they have more followers and it will get your blog articles more exposure.

List of Projects from ViralContentBee

It’s easy to use for even for beginners that want to grow their traffic. Viral Content Bee also allows you to manage your content whenever you want.

Online Marketing ViralContentBee Example

You can choose to purchase credits or you can share other people’s content for credits. It’s kinda like saying

You scratch my back and I’ll scratch your back.

You can use the filter settings to see which categories you would like to share to earn credits.

Later

Later is a social media scheduling app that was first developed for Instagram but later was implemented in other social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. Later helps you save a lot of time doing other things by scheduling a week in probably an hour rather than 30 minutes every day.

Post from Later

Even though Later works with other social media platforms its better suited for Instagram when it comes to using stories. Later could also be visually appealing when scheduling posts ahead of time because it is important when trying to gain more followers.

Later Calendar

Are you going on vacation? No problem! Schedule your posts and promote your articles far into the future and let the app handle the rest.

Tweetdeck

Tweetdeck is a tool that permits you to oversee and sort out a boundless number of Twitter accounts, searches, hashtags and the sky is the limit from there. Tweetdeck is completely different from other social medial managers because it is a free tool to use which means that you can focus more on reaching your target audience.

Tweetdeck Homepage

Tweetdeck users can tweet, answer, retweet, favorite, send direct messages, oversee, monitor multiple accounts, and streams all in one user’s interface. The ability to use multiple tasks can help you receive more clicks or potential customers to view your website if they show interest.

Online Marketing tools Step six - Sales Tools

Drift Chat

Congratulations! You are getting visitors! But did they buy it?

The fact is that anywhere from 1 to 3 % of your website visitors will wind up buying something from your website. We now live in a world where people want instant answers. As a result, you are more likely to capture the sale or lead if you can answer their question right on the spot.
The Drift chat tool is a pop-up chat box that appears on your website and asks the visitor a question. This helps your website by giving your potential customers more opportunities to interact with you. Here is your opportunity to book the appointment or capture the sale. You must respond within 5 seconds or they will leave.

Drift chat active

The drift chat helps potential customer that doesn’t want to make a call yet but also have questions about your product or service. Drift takes it to a whole another level by allowing you to also create a playbook that makes it seem like a real person is answering the potential customer’s question. The reason is that you can change the message in context to the customer based on contact data and contextual actions via the website. Drift is optimized for almost any possible scenario that could lead to bad user experience. Also, if no one from your team responds to customer’s questions within a minute a bot from Drift can come in and pick up to cover for you. Drift could help increase your traffic by creating a friendly user environment for your website. You can also download the app so that you can answer live chats on the go.

Your service sounds great, but I need to check with my partner

Bitrix24

We’ve had clients that will ask about our service today but won’t purchase until several months later. This is where you will need a powerful CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software. After researching many CRM software, we found that bitrix24 had the most bells and whistles at no cost.

Bitrix24 is a collaboration software tool for management, collaboration, and communication. It can help you manage your business when working from home. You can use it to plan out your project and tasks for your team to see and finish tasks on time. Bitrix can also contact your team using the internet to chat with your team from far away.

Rinse and Repeat

Online Marketing Tools Step seven Track Your Tools

Google Analytics

You’ve done a great job so far. Now you need to ask yourself the following questions:
What happened here?
What can we do better?
What actions will I take next?
The best way to come up with answers to those questions is to review your data.

Google Analytics Home

Google Analytics is a free online marketing tool that uses tracking and statistics software that can help you get insights based on how visitors found your website. Moreover, it will show you what those visitors did while visiting your website as well as showing you important information based on the success of your website. Google Analytics will also work with any other tool and platform such as your smartphone, laptop, and tablet. It’ll also show what potential customers are looking for on your website by measuring it’s internal site searches to improve on opportunities your site might have been missing.

Google Webmaster Tool

Another great tool for ensuring that website stays successful is Google Webmaster. Google Webmaster is a free service that can help you evaluate and maintain your website’s performance in the search results. Moreover, it will inform you if your website has issues such as being hacked.

Online Marketing Tools Google Webmaster Performance Results Example

Here are some ways that Google webmaster tools help you maintain the performance of your website.
1.) It verifies that Google has access to the content on your website.

2.) It makes it possible to submit new pages and posts for Google to navigate and remove unwanted content to be discovered by search engine users.

3.) It helps you deliver and evaluate the content on your website to offer users a more pleasant visual experience.

4.) You could also maintain your website without disrupting its presence in the search results so that users can still see your website.

5.) It also helps you detect and remove malware or spam problems that couldn’t have been seen otherwise.
You don’t need to use Google webmaster tools for your website to appear in the search results but it a really good tool that offers you valuable information that can help with your marketing efforts.

Google Tag Manager

There are hundreds of pieces of codes you can install on your websites such as Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, Google ads, remarketing codes, customizable codes, and many more! Installing all of these codes can make your website heavy and make you lose customers due to a slow website.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you can install only one code and that’s it?

Online Marketing Tools Google Tag Manager Overview Example

Google tag manager could also be very helpful because changes are made at a rapid rate without requiring to change some of the code on your website. The only drawback is that it can be a little difficult to use. Nonetheless, you can call a Google representative, and normally they are more than willing to help as long you have a Google Ads ID.

What about your competitor’s analytics?

SpyFu

SpyFu is a user-friendly marketing evaluation tool that allows you to search any website to view it’s ranking history. The purpose of SpyFu is to help you spy on your competition. This way you can do some research on their rankings and what keywords they’re using and who’s linking to their website. SpyFu is a better option when it comes to being a marking evaluation tool because they have 10 years of competitor data to where other tools such as SEMrush only has 8 years. SpyFu could be of great use to you when you are deciding on your content strategy.

Online Marketing Tools Spyfu Monthly Overview Example

SpyFu only gives you limited data with their free search option, but it’s valuable data that can help you understand your competitors. If you want to get more data, then you can sign up for their paid options.

You Are Amazing!

I think you are awesome! Yes! You! Why? Because you made it through the entire article. You have a real desire to learn to improve your online marketing and sales. You might be wondering where am I going to find the time to do all of this? Well, the good news is that we can help you with your sales and online marketing. We’ve been doing this since 2008 and actively help over 500 businesses like yours. Call us today at 559-553-5000 or do a live chat with us now to get started.

Written by Efrain Rivera Aguilera and Luis Chavez

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5 Great Things You Can Do When You Automate Your Social Networks

by Luis Chavez | May 9, 2019 | Social Media

Automate Your Social Networks

Social media automation is the perfect tool to have a social media presence without spending all your time sitting on a computer. Keeping a solid social media presence can be an excruciating task. With other important tasks for the business, like attending phones, making sales, finding new clients, and many others, it seems impossible to have the time to also post original content on several different platforms and accounts. This is made easier when you automate your social networks.

What is Social Media Automation?

In today’s world, businesses need to have an online presence to get in touch with clients and potential customers and to remain on people’s minds.

Having a website, an email, and even a mailing list are great ideas to enhance your business and keep connected with leads and clients, but something that is vital — whether you like it or not — is a social media network presence.

Why Should Your Business Have Social Media Presence?

According to statista.com, by 2017 the total number of social network users was more than 2 billion worldwide, and this number could increase to over 3 billion by 2021. This represents at least one-third of the entire world’s population, and businesses know it.

For that reason, they create business social media accounts, to keep in touch with customers and leads in a more relaxed, informal way. Through pictures, short stories, quizzes, and other entertaining and informative content, they keep people engaged with their brands.

On these platforms, companies can also inform about sales, promotions, events, and more, thus increasing their clients, sales, and of course, profit.

As a matter of fact, according to entrepreneur.com, 95% of adults follow a company through social media networks, which means visibility can be achieved through these channels.

And if you are not sure about why it is important to be on social media networks, we mention some reasons given by an entrepreneur:

Increase your search engine presence in a natural way
Make people talk about you and pass the information around
Help you build trust because customers prefer brands with social media profiles
Increase your ability to compete in your niche
Allow you to connect and bond with customers and leads
Help you generate leads
Help you drive sales

So now that you know the importance it has for your business to have a social media network presence, you may be thinking about how to do it. How can you be able to post engaging, informative, and entertaining content every day on all your platforms?

Companies who already knew the importance of social media networks faced the same problem as you are right now. Thankfully, the task is not as daunting as you might think.

Social Media Automation – A Solution For Social Media Marketing

When you hear or read the term “Social Media Automation”, people are referring to a group of software, apps, or websites that help you to automate some of your social media marketing activities. This is what articulate marketing tells us in their article, where they also state that there are two groups when it comes to social media automation.

There are people in favor of and against these kinds of tools. People against it call it unnatural, while people in favor say it makes you gain efficiency. But whether you think it is good or bad, the truth is that social media automation has gained more and more users among people who need to increase their productivity.

So, social media automation is a tool that allows you to post content, send messages, and more at any scheduled time or circumstance.

How to Use Social Media Automation?

Using social media automation is very simple. With online apps such as Buffer, Hoot Suite, CoSchedule, Hub Spot, or IFTTT, you can configure your personal or business social media accounts within minutes to schedule posts, send messages, and more.

It will all depend on what you wish to automatize in your social media networks. Always keep in mind that you will still need to manually enter and interact on your social networks to avoid being seen as a bot.

Some of the things that you can do when you automate your social media marketing are:

1. Schedule Posts

When you have a brand and you want to stay current on social media networks, it is very important to constantly post content that engages your audience and keeps you on their mind. With social media marketing automation, all you have to do is upload all your posts for a week, schedule them for a time and date, and wait for the magic to happen.

There are several options to do this, whether you are posting original texts or photos, sharing your blog’s content, or even sharing other people’s content.

The best advantage of this is that you can make sure to always post on times and dates your target market actually check their social media profiles, so it gives you a higher chance to be seen by your audience.

Automate Social Networks Social Media Calendar

2. Share Content

An important part of social media marketing is to keep consistency. This means that it is important to constantly post new content on your social media networks. A strategy lots of companies use is to share engaging, interesting content from other websites.

Jeff Bullas.com mentions the importance of posting on a regular basis to keep the audience engaged and aware of your existence.

You can target content to share from other websites such as articles, photos, infographics, and more, and save it to have easy access to all of it when you want to share content.

Obviously, you can share your content from your website. Blog posts, photos, and articles can be in the queue and ready to deliver whenever you schedule it.

3. Make Users Take Action

With the use of social media marketing automation tools, you will have the chance to make your website and social media networks more visible by adding a call to action button to every shared content you post.

This means that whenever you share a link when the person opens it to see the website, they will also see a call to action button linking back to your website. In this way, you will have a higher chance of people visiting your site, increasing your ability to make sales.

Make users take action when you Automate Social Networks

3. Create Custom Responses

If you are getting more followers and connections on your social networks, you may want to show your appreciation to your new subscribers by sending them a welcome and “Thank you” a message.

But doing this task manually can be long and difficult to do, especially when as an entrepreneur you have a lot on your plate.

When you automate custom responses for your contacts, you will be able to automatically send a note every time a person likes, subscribes, shares, or interacts in any way with you. This way they will feel welcomed when they interact with you.

There are many benefits of using auto-responders on your social media networks, like turning visitors into subscribers, following up on visitors at a faster pace, and saving money on the price it would cost to hire a person for this job.

As general advice, automated responses should be used for messages such as a welcoming, showing gratitude for subscribing or a weekly newsletter. Make sure you still schedule some time to manually and personally interact with others on social media as well.

Create custom responses when you Automate Social Networks

5. Articulate your Social Media Accounts

This is something you already can do with some social media networks such as Facebook or Instagram.

By automating your social networks with tools such as IFTTT, you can interconnect 2 or more social media accounts to inform one when you post something to the other one.

This is great for information such as promotions, discounts, contests, and quizzes that are meant to be socialized through all possible sources. This can lead to concrete actions from leads and clients because you will have to post the information on only one social media network to have the information posted on all your profiles.

Some useful advice on this aspect is to use this function only to post information like the mentioned above. It is important to remember that each social media platform was created with a purpose; therefore, make sure to post content especially designed for each platform.

5. Get Statistics and Important Info

This is one great feature you can get when you automate because all these apps and websites can collect important info for your brand, such as whenever your brand is mentioned on social media, or when the keyword you are tracking is mentioned on any post.

Always be aware of the state of your competitor’s demographics in order to get more leads or even capitalize on unhappy customers.

If you enjoyed reading this blog article, the make sure to How to Make Your Website More Persuasive

Conclusion

When you start a business you do not know how much time you will have to invest in branding your company. With today’s technology and the importance of the Internet, there are plenty of fields open for you to market your brand, get new followers, and increase your sales.

But having entrepreneurship is not an easy task all the time and the effort you can save is monumental. With this in mind, social media marketing automation can help you complete tasks that would take hours and with just a few moments you will have most of your next week’s content ready to be instantly posted at times and dates you need.

Some people say automation makes social network marketing lose its social nature. But if you make sure to automate only the content that is uniform for all your platforms, and if you make sure to keep interacting manually and personally on social media networks, you will be able to make your time more efficient and grow your business.

If you enjoyed reading this blog article, the make sure to How to become a networking superstar (in 11 simple steps)

How to Make Your Website More Persuasive With These Tips

by Luis Chavez | Feb 15, 2019 | Offline Marketing

Make Your Website More Persuasive

Making your website more persuasive can be achieved when you focus on the main goal of your website. Here are a couple of key questions that one should keep in mind: What are we selling? What message are we sending? How can we be the solution? How does our solution benefit our target audience? By addressing these questions you will be able to construct a persuasive message.

Who Is Your Target Market?

Knowing the audience to whom you are selling your product or services is very important. This will make your selling point extremely successful. Ask yourself, “Should I aim for quantity or quality? Am I speaking to an individualistic mentality or is it a collectivist mentality?” Individualism thinking is when you care about how it affects the person themselves.

How can your product or service impact them? This is different from collectivism thinking, which focuses more on the bigger picture. For instance, how is this going to benefit them as a group, team, community, or even their family?

Moreover, you’ll want to know the demographics of your customers. Income level, single or married, children or no children, location, gender, interest, and etc. Who is your ideal customer? As you will see in the next section researching your type of audience is key to having a more persuasive website.

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What Is Your Message

The message that you send to the targeted audience is the next quest. So having more than one message and several different approaches are important because there will always be more than one audience type. I often see customers try to sell all of their services under one web page instead of creating one dedicated web page per category.

For example, let’s say you have an auto mechanic shop and you have a web page named “Services” and on that page, you list tire service, engine repair, oil change, and brake repair service. The problem with this is that it’s too much information under one web page. Therefore, Google and other search engines will not rank you on the first page because it is too vague.

The better option would be to create separate dedicated web pages that talk about a specific category. Similar to what we did here with RJ Automotive website. If you look at their web page, you will notice that under services each category has its own dedicated web page.

This means that if you have a brake problem, then you will get the information you need on that brake problem on that web page without having to weed out all of the information that is not relevant to your problem.

Once you have categorized all of your services on your website, then you will want to take advice from the famous philosopher Aristotle by applying pathos and logos. By using pathos, you are using the emotional appeal that will target people with a high sense of value, integrity, and respect — people who want to know how this will benefit them personally.

For this approach, you can start by saying something like “Imagine what it would be like to ______” and then show an illustration that depicts the positive results of purchasing your product or service. You can also show a picture of the consequences of not buying your product or service.

When using logos you are using the logical approach. This approach focuses on what their concern is, how I am going to benefit from this, and is it going to help me make money or succeed in my business.

Finding out what type of people you are talking to works best in my point of view. When people are focused on what you are saying, you can slow down and concentrate on what message you are trying to get across.

This means less is more; the quality of information is going to make the difference. If your audience can’t focus on your message, then you will lose them.

I always laugh when I see billboards on the freeway that have way too much information because people simply don’t have the time to read them. The same applies to your website. If you have a banner or slideshow on your website then it needs to be clear and to the point, because you only have one to two seconds.

If your audience wants to learn more about your proposition, then there should be a call to action button like “Apply Now” or “Get Started Today!” or something to that effect. Moreover, people respond better when they feel a sense of connection.

Another form of sending a message would be to bring up problems that could be an issue for them. This brings us the question of how I can solve your problem.

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How can we be your solution?

One of my mentors used to say, “We get paid to solve people’s problems.” The more I thought about this, the more I realized it applied to my life every time I made a purchase.

It is important that we open up those questions. But make sure that you have put in the time to research what you are marketing and that you are prepared for foreseeable problems and solutions.

This will put you in advantage to direct the conversation as if you are a hero. You might even just start off your marketing effort with “Are you having these problems?” and then state that you can resolve them. Be sure that you come across as “The Problem Solver”. This gives the audience a sense of confidence in giving their time to listen to what is being offered.

Being specific, setting a vision, or a resolution is helpful in opening up their perspective to view in a different set of eyes that are not ready to shut you down.

How our solutions benefit them?

Building trust towards the audience is mutually beneficial for both the audience and the marketing effort.

People want to interact with people they trust and have similarities with. When you are offering solutions you get to know where they live, what they like, and what inspires them. This will give you and the audience a sense of connection that will allow them to receive your message without resistance.

People like to feel as if they have made a good choice.

The audience always wants to know that they can trust you and that you can get things done. Most importantly assure them that your customers are important to you. I always recommend that you get your clients to write reviews on Google local listings, Yelp local listings, or Facebook. For example, on this website you can see that the reviews are being sourced; therefore, it gives the review more authenticity.

The other benefit of doing this is that you create social proof. In other words, if all of these people can highly recommend this business, then they must have good service. In fact, according to Yext.com, a leading online directory service says that even a one-star increase in your reviews can increase your revenue by 9%.

Are you ready to start converting more of your existing visitors into paying clients? Knowing something is half the battle, but taking action on what you learned to make all the difference. What action will you take to help your website become more persuasive? If you don’t have the time or prefer to have an expert marketing agency like us help you, then please reach out to us today at 559-553-5000.

www.chavezwebdesign.com
Written by Noemi Chavez

If you enjoyed reading this blog article, then make sure to read How To Go Viral On LinkedIn

How to Become a Networking Superstar in 11 steps

by Luis Chavez | Jan 29, 2019 | Social Media

Become a Networking Superstar

Networking is defined as connecting and communicating with others to exchange information and develop professional or social contacts. In business, networking is one of the most essential keys to increasing the awareness of a newly developed establishment. It is important to know how to network, where to network, and how to plan out your course of action. Here are 10 tips any busy owner can easily use to become better at networking their business to new clients.

1. Figure out where to network.

Understanding your target market is important in order to find out where you need to network. Whether you do business locally or outside of your immediate area, you can find out who they are, what they like, and more importantly, the best way to give them information about your business. A business owner could figure out what industries are aligned or work directly with his industry, and start from there. Figuring out what other industries your product or business works with and going to their events is a quick and easy way you can begin networking with others.

Figure out where to network to become a networking superstar

2. Contact the Chamber of Commerce

Joining the Chamber of Commerce in your local community will put you in environments where you can meet potential clients. The Chamber of Commerce was tailormade specifically for local business owners so they can communicate with each other and establish business relationships. You may want to e-mail your local chamber and be asked to be put on their mailing list. This way you can receive regular notifications on where the next event is going to occur.

3. Join a Leads Group

A lead group is a business association in which members regularly communicate with each other for the purpose of giving and getting potential clients. There are many lead groups, and some do charge a fee, so it is important to do research on all lead groups before joining. You are more likely to get leads if you give leads to the group because they will likely feel the need to reciprocate.

Join a Leads Group to become a Network Superstar

4. Plan Your Work And Work Your Plan

One of my mentors once said, “Plan your work, and work your plan.” You are more likely to achieve your desired goal if you have a game plan. Why are you there? Who do you want to meet? What do you hope to accomplish? These are questions a business owner should be asking themselves before going to any networking event. Creating a clear and concise plan within your mind helps you understand what your goals are. Find some of the other attendees and try to establish a relationship with them prior to the event. This way you can begin to pre-plan any other questions you may have prior to professional interactions.

5. Sum yourself up in 30 seconds or less.

Do you have an elevator pitch? The difficulty of networking is figuring out the best way to sell yourself within a limited amount of time. If your introduction is too short, you may leave out vital information. If it is too long, you may initially grab their interest but lose potential clients when your message is too long. The key to communicating when trying to create business relationships is to create a concise monologue that gives a clear answer to who you are, what you do, and who you do it for. Remember to practice, practice, and practice some more until it becomes second nature.

6. The Only Thing To Fear is Fear Itself

You won’t create any new leads or potential clients by not communicating. Remember this is a gathering specifically for business. It is important to introduce yourself and try to find people to talk to. Get to know the person you are talking to. Ask questions and let them lead the conversation. Not every conversation is going to turn into a business opportunity, but it does allow you to explain who you are and what you do to another business owner. Become genuinely interested in other people’s business and you’ll be surprised how the floodgates of information open up. After hearing them talk about themselves and their business, then they will want to reciprocate and talk about your business.

7. Bring Business Cards and Magnets

With social media websites and emails, we sometimes forget that being able to hand someone something physically still draws attention. Business cards are still a classic way to give potential clients all of your information. It is still a virtually inexpensive way to make it easy for clients to contact you. Include your name, website, email, and phone number. However, if you want to take your networking up a notch, invest in some business card magnets. People are more likely to keep your magnet and put it on their refrigerator, than a business card.

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8. Follow up is the key to real networking.

Around 95 percent of people do not follow up with potential clients after networking. This is why following up with any potential client you meet can immediately set you apart from any of the other business owners they may have met the day of the event. A business owner should follow up with a potential client within 48 hours of the initial meeting. You may want to consider using a CRM (Customer Relationship Management Software). One that comes with a lot of bells and whistles and is free to use is bitrix24.

9. Grow Your LinkedIn Connections

Unlike Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram the sole purpose of LinkedIn is to establish professional relationships and to network. There are groups that exist within LinkedIn that make it possible to communicate with other people who specifically deal with businesses within your industry. Take time out to personalize your messages. It lets the potential lead know you are specifically interested in their business as opposed to appearing as if you are sending messages to every profile you encounter. Commenting on their post would also help to personalize your interactions.

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10. Be Patient and Think Long Term.

I don’t believe that every relationship you establish will lead to sales or new business. But it is still important to work on each of those relationships individually. We as business owners are eager to sell our product or service as soon as we develop our relationship, but it is important to remember that people will buy when they want to, not when we want them to. You never know when a potential client will be ready to work with you. Even if after several meetings your leads may not be interested in doing business with you, they still have the potential to introduce you to other potential leads. Touch bases with your networking business connections every 30 days as to not lose your influence.

11. Wear A Name Tag

Most people forget a person’s name within the first 30 seconds of an introduction. However, many networking experts agree that you are more likely to be remembered if you wear a name tag to an event. This is why it’s important to invest a few dollars into a professional name tag and wear it to every event.
If you want more business you need to network, communicate, and meet new people. Introduce yourself at any opportunity. As stated before, every interaction you have won’t lead to new business, but creating those relationships will let more people know about your business. Contact your Chamber of Commerce, join a lead group, and become an active member on LinkedIn. Harness those communication skills, pass out business cards, and your other marketing material. Get ready to introduce yourself (and more importantly your business) to the world!

www.chavezwebdesign.com
Written by Noemi Chavez

If you enjoyed reading this blog article, then make sure to read How to create viral content for Twitter

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