0:14 – Setting up your business profile on the main social media platforms

2:16 – Some most-wanted tips on how to use opt-in forms at their fullest

3:31 – How you can increase conversions on your opt-in forms

5:09 – A simple yet underutilised way to bring traffic to your site, engage your readers and get

them to share

7:53 – A quick recap

Hi, Fiona Lewis here from Super Savvy Business with this week’s SEO & Traffic news update.

0:14 – Setting up your business profile on the main social media platforms

One thing a lot of business owners don’t realise is that Social Media can be set up specifically for your business. A lot of people are familiar with personal accounts but they are not so familiar with how you can actually use social media to really build your brand and your market leadership.

So for instance, there are Facebook pages that you can have for your business – specifically for your business, not your personal profile pages. A lot of people already have this set up but what they don’t realise that even in places like LinkedIn where people have personal accounts, you can also set up company pages.

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Basics You Should Know About Opt-In Forms & Ways To Have Your

Content Shared As Crazy On Social Media

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Similarly, you can do the same for Pinterest, which is one of the newest Social Media waves that is really going through the internet world as an incredible craze. It’s only just recently that Pinterest have launched these business pages. Up until recently it was just personal pages that you could have. So I do recommend that you go ahead and have this business page set up on Pinterest.

The other place that you can go and set up a business page is on Google+. Especially if you are a local business, make sure that you have a Google Local page claimed and set up because if you are bricks and mortar business and people do a search for a particular area and they go to the map, when they click on that it’s actually going to go to a Google Local page, not your website. So please make sure you have your profile set up, and set up properly.

If you are a Twitter user or a YouTube user as well I do suggest that you set up a brand page. Set it up under your brand name, not under your personal name. They don’t have business pages specifically as such, but you can set up a separate account and switch between your personal account and your business account. And this is what we have done in Super Savvy Business. If you go and have a search you’ll see that we have our business pages set up across all of the different social media platforms.

2:16 – Basic things you should consider about using opt-in forms

Next, I’d love to talk to you about using opt-in forms to build your database. Now, a lot of people spend a lot of time and energy sending people to their website and then they don’t have any way of collecting the details of the people that arrive on the website. They are letting people come and go. So please, think about having what we call an ‘opt-in form’ on your website.

So now that you decided you want to collect people’s details when they come to your website, there are few crucial decisions you need to make.

If you are going to have an opt-in form, then it is highly recommended to increase

conversions that you have some sort of free offer to give in return for the person giving you their personal details. That might be a free report or some sort of free training or a coupon towards one of your services – you are only limited by your imagination. But that opt-in offer should be something that is going to solve the problem or the frustration of your target market.

Think about the sort of people that are coming to your website and think ‘What do they

really want?’ and then give it to them and give it to them freely, with the expectation that they will give you their details.

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3:31 – How many fields in an opt-in form should you use?

Now in regards to the details, you are going to need to make decisions about which fields you

have on your form. Studies have shown that the less details you ask on that form, the higher

your conversions are going to be. So, for example, you might just ask for a first name and an e-mail address. However, I have seen websites that only ask for an e-mail address. But you’ll need to make that decision and perhaps test and measure what works best for you.

Now, once someone has given you their name and the e-mail address you have to decide where they are taken next. For example, are they sent to a ‘Thank you!’ page? And once they have gone to that ‘Thank you!’ page, what are they actually delivered? And how are you going to deliver it?

Generally speaking, you can use a service such as an auto-responder to automatically deliver this content to them. That would generally be delivered in a digital format. Some of the autoresponders I recommend are:

Aweber - which is what will suit most people;

if you are a larger business or you have a large database you might want to consider something like Office Autopilot as well.

So you need to think about the e-mail people will get once they opted in to your form, and then what is going to happen in the coming days, weeks and months after that; how are you going to use that person’s details to build a relationship with them and to develop that ‘like-know-trust’ factor that I’ve been thinking about. These are all things you should be taking into consideration when you are thinking about building your database and list through your website.

5:09 – A simple yet underutilised way to bring traffic to your site, engage your readers and get them to share

Finally for today’s video I’d like to talk about the ways you can use images to increase traffic to your website, how to use images to keep people on your website for longer, but also to share your content.

For example, don’t forget to use the images’ alt-tags. This works in a couple of ways. The alt-tags are the tags that show underneath an image if it doesn’t display on a website , or you have a Title Tag which when you hover over, it will actually pop up and the person can read it.

Now, these tags are read by the search engines as well as by people. If you have keywords that are within your alt-tags then that helps the search engines to perhaps show those images in search results that are relevant to a person’s search and also it helps to engage the user from a point of view of if they are on your page and they are hovering over they see the image is relevant to them. But only ever optimize images for people, not just for search engines; it needs to make sense and it needs to be readable.

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Some other things you’ll need to take into consideration is:

the size of your image – making sure that it’s a large enough size to engage the user and not be too small for it to be out of focus;

the quality of the image – making sure that it doesn’t become pixelated when you enlarge it;

but also an image that is going to be staying in the memory of the person.

And when speaking of staying in the memory of the person, when we talk about good quality images that have an impression, these are the sorts of images that are likely to be shared on social media. So keep this in mind: use images that are funny, or engaging, or unique to you.

So, for example, with Super Savvy Business we actually have an illustrator working with us to create our own, unique images that are only relevant to our content. And these are branded with a watermark for Super Savvy Business, so if they are shared, people know where they came from – that’s part of the whole market leadership and branding our logo and our business, and what we’re all about.

So if you can create engaging images that are good quality, that people actually want to share, then you are going to be able to really ride on the viral nature of social media; not just Facebook, but some of the image-based social media platforms such as FlickR, Photobucket and Pinterest (which is just growing at a phenomenal rate). Your images should be there, on your content on your website. They break up your content, makes it look more engaging but can definitely be used to be spread across other platforms (as I just mentioned, social media).

7:53 – A quick recap

That pretty much brings us to the end of our news update for SEO & Traffic for the week. We’ve covered:

1. Creating business pages on your social media platforms – because people will go and search for you. They will go online even if you’re an offline bricks and mortar business, people will still go and check you out and see who you are and what your business is all about. So have those profiles set up as business profiles.

2. We’ve also covered using opt-in forms and how to use them to collect names and e-mail

addresses of people that come to your website 3. And finally, we’ve also talked about how you can use images to not only draw traffic to

your site, but to use it to engage people whilst they are there and then for them to want to share your content.

I hope you found this SEO and Traffic news update useful! If you like what you see on a weekly basis from us, please comment – we’d love to hear your feedback!

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My name is Fiona Lewis, I’m from Super Savvy Business and I will look forward to seeing you in our next business news update!