5 Tips for Small Businesses to help make 2011 their best year ever online!
At the end of each year or at the beginning of the new year, it’s a good idea to sit down and take a couple hours or even a couple days and map out what you want to accomplish for the new year.
What’s worked well and what didn’t work from last year? In this case, we are going to focus on your website and internet marketing endeavors. So here’s a few things to keep in mind that might help your business do even better online for 2011:
- Review your end of year Analytics data. Assuming you are using something like Google Analytics to collect data about things like keywords, traffic, content, bounce rates, etc. (and if you are aren’t then that’s your first priority for the new year). Change the time frame on your Analytics data to look at the entire last year. And look for peaks and dips. Checkout your bounce rate. Which pages were the most visited? Which sites sent you the most traffic? When was your best month?
Reviewing your data can give you ideas on how to improve areas / pages on your site that need work so you’ll be better prepared for 2011.
- Re-assess the goals for your website and business. Depending on your overall success of your site last year, you might have to make some changes or improve some things. Setting goals, like I want to add 25 more pages by the spring can help you stay on track. And then take a moment and really be honest and assess which areas need work in your business. And then make those a priority.
Come up with an action plan and specific steps you can take to make your business online better.
- Get better organized for 2011 – One of the biggest changes I did in 2010 was I got better organized. I started using Microsoft’s OneNote and it’s been unbelievably helpful. Another tool is an online calendar program (like Google Calendar) that you can use to help you create time frames for projects and reminders about certain products.
How well is your email inbox setup? Do you need more specific folders? Or maybe even less folders? Take a moment to look at your email processes. Do you spend too much time being interrupted by email when your working? If so, change it.
- Improve your connections with your customers – How’s your newsletter doing? Do you even have a newsletter? Are you gathering potential customers email addresses? Is there a way you can do that better?How’s your facebook and twitter pages? Do you even have a business page for facebook? Did having a twitter account even help your business or was it another distraction?
How often are keeping in touch with your former customers? Often times they are your best customers for new products and / or word of mouth marketing.
If you’re not doing email marketing or any form of social marketing or you’re not giving it enough attention, then make a plan to do more of that. The web seems to be heading more and more into the social world.
- Take a look at your internet marketing methods for the last year. Were you using PPC? Do you have a mobile marketing campaign? Are you tracking your positioning for keywords in the search engines? Are there other areas that you can expand to, like video marketing? If you have a brick and mortar, are you on Google Maps?
The key to long term success is learning from the past by creating honest assessments of where you are right now and by measuring your progress. Then using those to help create a strategic plan for accomplishing the major goals for your business moving forward.
There is so much information out there, that’s it’s easy to get side tracked. But taking the time to create a overall plan of what you want to do over the next year and then taking action to achieve those goals can truly help. And the more specific you can get with your action steps, the better.
Good luck in the new year!
