Small Business Design Resources

Keys to Using YouTube for Your Small Business

YouTube.com is best known for its videos showcasing laughing babies and extreme sports mishaps. Did you ever think that you can use YouTube as part of your small business design to promote your business? From video client testimonials to video podcasts, you can reach a larger demographic when you properly use YouTube to enhance your small business marketing strategies.

Be Real
YouTube lets you share your videos with the world. Why not upload helpful video footage of you doing your job? Take a video of you or your employees in action, offering the services your website talks about. Always ask permission if a customer or customer’s property (house, car..etc) will be featured in the film.

Free Commercials
Maybe your company doesn’t have the funding to buy some television time to broadcast your commercials, but YouTube can do it for free. Ask a few satisfied customers to talk about their experiences with your company. Not only can you upload this video to your YouTube account, but you can also put the video directly on your small business website to show off your happy clients.

Create Video Blogs
Do you have a lot to talk about? Make video podcasts and post them routinely to your YouTube account. Perhaps your company offers carpet cleaning services; why not upload a video once a month showing potential customers how to take care of their rugs between cleanings? Stain removal tips would be a great idea for a video blog. Heath food supplier? Showcase your products with 10 minute recipe ideas. Make sure to post your video links on websites outside of just your business website to increase Search Engine Optimization. This is where Twitter and Facebook pages for your small business come in handy. Cross-posting links are a sure way to drive internet search traffic towards what you’ve got to sell.

A Deeper Look at SEO vs. YouTube
Just as you would apply basic SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques to your website written content, you want to do the same on your YouTube account. You have the ability to name the title of the video and to write a small description of the content. Make it count by using a relevant headline for your video title that is sure to show up in Google. Keep it simple. If you want help on learning how to write attention grabbing SEOed headlines, check out a previous post that discusses it in depth. Basically, give it a title that someone would search for. If you’re a cosmetologist publishing a video on YouTube about makeup techniques, name the title exactly what you’re showing your audience: Tips for Smokey Eye Shadow or At-Home Waxing Techniques. Those terms are realisticly what someone wanting to know more about makeup or waxing will plug into their search engine.

As far as your description goes, make sure to use a keyword/phrase here and there. It’s the same principal as picking a good SEO title, but now you’ve got to weave the search term into your written content. Always make it look natural and do not overstuff your paragraph with key phrases. One paragraph of written content should have no more than 3 keywords/phrases.

YouTube is free and free is good! Take advantage of YouTube to enhance your searchability and profitability for your small business.

Catch Their Eye with Attention Grabbing Headlines

How important are attention grabbing headlines? Believe it or not, they can cost you a sale. If you don’t think you have what it takes to create titles for your blogs or website articles, you’re wrong! Here are a couple great ideas you can use to make sure you have attention grabbing headlines that will produce results.

Speedy Results
People want to read information on topics they’re interested in quickly. If you’ve created a document that fits the description of a quick read, title it as such. Giving your blog post a headline like Learn How to _____ Fast or Quick Way to Fix ______ temps your time-crunched audience to read on.

Personalize
Use phrases in your headline that your target audience can relate to. Incorporate names of famous people or places, or even add a personal touch they can recognize and appreciate. Some examples would be:

• Learn to Knit Like Your Grandmother
• How to Make Authentic Parisian Coffee
• Easy-to-do Red Carpet Hairstyles

Whatever formula you use to develop attention grabbing headlines to use as part of your small business design, you should never assume that a generic title is simply good enough. You need to add a creative twist to make sure your article stands out in a website search engine against pages of other content. Keep your headlines short, clever and true to the article in question. You may think “If I don’t name my article or blog “XYZ” then it won’t show up in search results as well. You can implement plenty of keywords and phrases in the content without making your title suffer a dull name. The Search Engine Optimization of the article has very little to do with just the wording in the headline. If you continue to have difficulties developing attention grabbing headlines for your website, you can always consider the help of a copywriter.

Steer Holiday Shoppers in the Right Direction

With the holiday shopping season in full force, have you prepared your small business website for the upcoming festivities? Now is the time to make sure you’re targeting the holiday market to maximize your company’s profitability this season.

Make sure your website is equipped with the best keywords for the job. Without key-wording your website properly, customers will not have very much luck when searching for the products or services you have to sell this holiday season. It’s perfectly acceptable to change keywords on your website around for the holidays to target those online shoppers. In fact, changing and experimenting with keywords in general is a smart part of small business website design.

What Do You Mean By Holiday Keywords?
You may already have valuable keywords present within the pages of your website. When you freshen your content for the holiday season, you want to put in popular words or phrases in that will help the general public locate your website easily in search engine results. Below are some popular holiday targeted keywords and phrasing that you may find will work for what your company’s website has to offer:

• Great Gifts Under $25
• Perfect Gifts for Dad
• Holiday Gift Ideas for 2010
• Affordable Christmas Gifts

As you can see, these are some very popular, yet generic search terms people will be using to locate gifts for their loved ones this year. You may ask “well should I use the word Christmas in my keywords?” That is completely up to you. Using Holiday in place of Christmas will get the same meaning across, but there are quite a few people who will use the term Christmas in search engines when looking to do online shopping. Studies show that businesses that use Christmas as a part of their marketing strategy are not really losing out on sales. Consider not only adding Christmas, but other terms like Hanukah or Kwanza to make your key phrases as well as your website looking well-rounded.

The Differences Between a Proofreader and a Copywriter: Who to Hire and When

Many people do not know the difference between a proofreader and a copywriter. It’s no surprise, because their roles in writing are similar and easy to confuse. If your small business needs assistance with writing in any form, whether it be blogging, newsletters, eBooks and so on, it’s best to know which of the two you should contact. Though similar, they both offer very different skills.

A Copywriter is someone you contact during the early stages of your writing project. Their goals are to help you create. If you were writing an eBook or even a novel, they would help you make it publishable. A copywriter would offer creative advice to help you make the best finished product. Think of them as a mentor to lead you towards your goal of a great piece of writing. If you want to incorporate pictures or other visuals into your writing, a copywriter would be able to tell you the best places to put them, as well as help you choose which pictures would look best. They can also be helpful in telling you what content is best left out of a blog, book, newsletter and so on.  You can work with a copywriter, together creating the finished product you’re looking for or you can opt to let them work their magic and create the entire piece for you.

A Proofreader provides the finishing touches to your writing. Their only intentions are to make the product free of spelling and grammatical errors. They have no interest in the style or the flow. So if you need help in the actual creation process, a proofer is not going to be choice for you. They are very important in the world of words, but the skills needed are less than a copywriter, so it is usually considerably cheaper to hire a proofreader.

Does your website’s blog need the creative touch of a copywriter? Does your eNewsletter require a second set of eyes to proof it before sending it to your clients? Outsourcing to experts is a great way to improve your small business design and achieve positive results with your website writings. It’s okay to be too busy with your business to worry about the finishing touches of your blog, let someone else handle the dirty work for you!

The Wrong Website Can Kill Your Business

First impressions are important – I’m sure you’ll agree. And your website is the first impression that people get about your business. The wrong website design can essentially kill your business by driving your web visitors away, causing them to immediately bounce back and go directly to your competition.

Better make a good first impression! But how? Here are a few small business website design tips.

1. Avoid clutter. A cluttered website is confusing to users, who don’t know where to click or what to do and so they tend to click away. This could be good if your goal is to make money from ads on your site, because the path out of a site is often through clicking on an ad, but if your goal is to encourage your visitors to stay and browse, aim for a clean, simple design and make it easy for your visitors to navigate your site.

2. What is your website about? What do you offer? If a visitor can’t answer this question immediately, they will click away. Ask friends and family members to take an objective look at your website and to tell you if they can tell right away what it’s about.

3. Make it fast. A slow-loading website is painful for users. It’s one of the main reasons users give up on a site. Make sure your website doesn’t contain heavy elements that would slow it down, and use a third-party tool to test load time for your site. The fact that it loads fast for you doesn’t necessarily reflect other users’ experience.

4. Content IS king. Yes, this old cliché is true. Your website content needs to offer value to readers. It needs to be well written, free of typos and engaging. Even if your site loads fast and is clean and professional looking, users WILL bounce off if they discover that your content does not offer them any value.

5. Avoid anything that could be annoying or distracting to users, including flash, auto-loading sound or blinking text. Even if you’re trying to make people click on ads, remember that being assaulted by blinking, moving, loud ads will most likely cause people to close the page rather than click on those annoying ads. Ads actually work best if they blend into your content and offer value to your readers, just like your main content does.

6. Minimize clicking. Make navigating your site and getting to the important pages easy. If people have to click through 6 pages to get to what they were looking for, they will likely just abandon your site.

7. Make it readable. Even if your text is great, people won’t read it unless it’s easy to read. Make sure your font is large enough, web-friendly, and space your lines. It’s also important to keep your lines short and to avoid using dark text on a dark background, or light text on a light background.

8. Link correctly: include internal links whenever they’re relevant, so visitors can discover more parts of your site. Make sure internal links, unlike external links, open in the same browser window – users will resent having several browser windows open, all of them from your site. When you link to other sites, do make sure they open in a new window.

If you’re not sure how user friendly your site is, it’s always a good idea to ask friends and family members to take a look and give you an honest feedback. If you’re planning, or hoping to earn money from your site, using the services of a professional web designer is one of the most important investments you will ever make in your business.