With the stress of Thanksgiving planning and cooking finally being over; I took the time to think about businesses that have made my life as a freelancer easier, with either their products or blogs and I hope sharing them can make yours as well!
Hubspot
Hubspot is a marketing software company based out of Cambridge, MA. With 3 different levels of their software, they can work seamlessly with any size company. What makes them so awesome is their commitment to their customers. They don’t just build an awesome product; they provide training and support via their passionate inbound marketers. Outside of their normal trainings, they offer hubspot.tv, webinars, an awesome blog full of top tips, quarterly meetups and their inbound marketing university. Hubspot offers a free 30 day trial of their software – why not test it out today and see why they are worth bragging over!
Grasshopper
Another Massachusetts company, Grasshopper is a company that offers virtual phone systems geared towards entrepreneurs. Some of Grasshopper’s features include: 800 numbers, call forwarding, call screening, unlimited extensions, email to voicemail, onhold music. What you can be thankful for is their low monthly price and their commitment to entrepreneurs. Point in case, Co-fouder Siamak Taghaddos is a Founding supporter of National Entrepreneurs' Day. Also worth checking out is Grasshopper's blog, which is a great resource for entrepreneurs.
BizLaunch
Canada’s, BizLaunch provides training and education to entrepreneurs. BizLaunch is excellent resource proving plenty of webinars, excellent advice and tools such as business plans, break even analysis reports, balance sheets and plenty more. The best part about BizLaunch is that all of their resources are free! Whether you’re a seasoned entrepreneur or you’re just starting out and don’t know where to begin, BizLaunch has the resources for you.
Eventbrite
As an entrepreneur, you want to get name out there as much as possible, and that means networking and throwing your own events. Eventbrite is a website that you can place your own events in their database and search for events going. What’s great about Eventbright is the search feature, you can search in your local area, date of event, price (from free to expensive), category and you can further narrow down the events to which town they are in. Most of the networking events I go to, I have found on Eventbright. If you’re thiking about hosting an event, you can take secure payments through Eventbright via their own processing system, pay-pal, authorize.net or Google checkout.
Salesforce
The ultimate CRM Cloud software, Salesforce offers a variety of SaaS and PaaS solutions to help you reach out to your customers and analyze your customer’s behavoirs. Salesforce not only offers sales and marketing data software, it also offers great products and apps such as chatter, radian6, force.com, database.com and Heroku. Like Hubspot, Salesforce pricing ranges per how big your business is and salesforce also offers free trials.
Bonnie Gibson
Ok ok, I know this part is a bit of a stretch/shameless plug! However, I enjoy offering marketing advice and sharing knowledge of print/web design, content writing and SEO via my blog and twitter. Feel free to find me on linkedin, twitter or google+ and follow me. If you need some marketing advice, I offer a free marketing consultation, just drop me an email.
Enjoy the rest of your Holiday Season and 6 cheers to the companies mentioned above!
When
it comes to driving traffic and creating leads, a nice design might be
eye catching, but it’s your content and how your content engages your
visitors that’s going to make your site a success. Consider your content
to be your marketing budget’s best friend.
What makes content so important?
I seriously cannot stress enough the importance of great content.
Content is how your visitors will find out about your brand and what
solutions you can offer to their lives easier. Content is what gives
your company credibility and will set you apart from your competition.
In this economy you need to transparency in your brand and gain trust in order to make it, and your
content is just the thing that will help you do so.
What makes great content you ask?
Great content is finding ways to reach out and engage your customers
by offering ways to make their lives easier. Content isn’t only limited
to images and text on a website, content can be blogs, podcasts,
webinairs, white papers, ebook, etc. The point is to be as useful as you
can to your visitor. Once you are useful to your visitor, you can
start turning your visitor into a prospect.
How can you create content that engages your audience?
Compelling
content is created when you take the time to understand your buyer’s
persona. Who exactly are you trying to reach? Write for them first and
then the search engines. Start by specifically thinking about who would
buy your product or service. For me I am talking to you, the business
owner who needs help with their online marketing. That’s why my blogs
are filled with tips to help you become more marketing savvy. My
website, my blog and my twitter account have you in mind. If you are
having trouble thinking of what to write? Read this ebook by hubspot to
give you some great content ideas.
But what about ranking in the search engines?
Now that you’ve got your reader engaged, time to make sure you content
is optimized for the search engines. The key to optimization is in long tail keywords. Creating a keyphrase will help you gather your leads
attention in search engines and weed out the traffic you don’t want.
The more specific your keyphrases are, the better chance you will have
of driving the type of traffic you would want to your website. For
example, when I moved back to New Hampshire from Rhode Island I was
looking for a salon. Since my favorite hair color brand is Goldwell, I
searched “Goldwell Color Salons in Southern New Hampshire”. Do you see
how specific I got? I knew I needed a salon but I only wanted one that
offered the Goldwell hair color line. The more specific you get in your
keyphrases the more quality traffic you will drive to your site.
Remember to use analytic tools such as Concentrate to track and measure
your success.
While
an esthetically pleasing website is great to look at as a visitor, what
will make or break your business is your content. What will help you
rank in the search engines is your content. What will create sales is
your content. Consider your content your businesses best friend.
