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How to use your website to generate more phone calls? Create a compelling offer that makes people want to call. Here are some of the things you can use to engage and convince people to contact your business: Free Advice: ask to provide free advice on something people really want and need a solution. Free Coaching: ask to provide free personal or business coaching to set a goal, make a plan and develop a roadmap to achieve major goals. Free Consulting: ask to provide free consulting for those calling to help people find solutions to problems and move their life and business forward. Free Quote: ask to provide a FREE quote for those calling online. Free Discounts for online orders: ask to provide a free discount for all online orders. Free Delivery: ask to provide free delivery for all online orders. Free Installations: ask to provide free installations for all mechanical works. To get these offers to work, you need to generate massive amounts of traffic to a dedicated landing page or service page that educates and enlightens people about a single service. Ensure you provide testimonials, benefits, and reasons to make people want to call your business for help. Need a new website with a phone/WhatsApp integration and dedicated marketing help? Check https://expandgh.com

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The 1st thing to do with your website is to use it as a medium to generate more phone calls. The more phone calls you get, the more leads you generate for more sales. How? Create a crazy, irresistible offer that makes people call. expandgh.com/

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Your website should be woven into every fabric of your campaigns. See your website as a digital office to attract and convert leads online. Need a new website? Get started with a Pay As You Go Website Now: https://www.expandgh.com

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Most businesses build a website for their business and it sits down dormant until the next year, the domain and hosting for the site are renewed. Well, that way of doing things will not produce any result for the company. You need to map out a digital strategy for your business, of which the website must be a critical component. Your website should be woven into every fabric of your offline operation. See your website as a digital office for your online business to operate effectively. Yeah, you may have various social media platforms, but only your website you actually own online. Your social media accounts can be blocked or restricted, but your website remains intact. Make your website work for you to increase more sales Read More: https://www.expandgh.com/p/6600 Need a Website? Get a Pay As You Go Website, Starting at only GHS 350. Learn More: https://www.expandgh.com

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Web Design can be seen as a double edge sword. Done well, your website will become the frontier for your brand promotion and brand building online, enabling you to build thought leadership as a leader in the industry, and a point of reference.

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The Best Website Designers in Ghana—Think Expand Ltd.

Core values are at the cornerstone of our incredible achievement. Think Expand Ltd has been in operation since 2016. The core values and qualities that have empowered the website design and SEO company to become the best in the industry include the following:

Core Values – Think Expand Ltd: Best Website Designers in Ghana - Our Capabilities Blogs - Classified Ads websites - Corporate websites - Industries We Serve

Our Capabilities – Think Expand Ltd: Best Website Designers in Ghana Health: Hospital Websites, Clinic Websites, Healthcare Websites - Travel/Transport: Car Rental Websites, Visa Processing Websites - E-commerce: Niche Online Stores, Multi-Vendor E-Commerce Websites - Education: School Websites, Online Learning Websites - Journalism: News Websites, Blogging Websites - Electricals: Electrical Engineering Websites - Non-Profit: Church Websites, Club Websites, Foundation Websites, NGO Websites For Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Canada, USA, UK & Ghana - https://cozyfurnitureghana.com - http://asfutshop.com - https://solaroriginsltd.com - https://empirementorshipnetwork.org - http://pcsuppliesgh.com - https://mveeclothing.com/ - https://kroncapital.net - https://galaxytechnologyfoundation.org - https://aretecatering.com - https://funcon.org - http://usemeghana.com - https://fixitchale.com - https://agromyx.com - https://steelframehousingghana.com - https://victorudo.com - https://frimprince.com - https://dayson.org - https://sustainabilityinsightsforleaders.com - https://elitejobsghana.com/ - https://ims.edu.gh - We have grown to become one of the leading website designers in Ghana and across Africa because of our integrity, relationships, excellence, delight, swift and affordable pricing. Our customers love us because they know we are trustworthy and we work with most of them for life. Shocking: 21 Incredible Benefits of a Website for Your Business or Non-Profit Custom Email Set-Up - E-Payment Integration - SMS Automation - Our Pricing

Order Web Hosting for Your Domain Name Web Hosting - Local SEO - Web Calling/WhatsApp Integration - We deliver within 2 weeks of payment. Express projects bear extra charges. Projects such as e-commerce marketplace and classified websites might take 3 weeks to completion of the order. Read the full article

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5 Great Ways to Monetize Your Website

There are many reasons for developing a website, but blogs are among the most common. Not only are they easy to design but with quality content, they can be among the most accessed in cyberspace. This is primarily due to effective SEO that is designed with just the right amount of competition in the selective use of keywords and phrases.

Monitize Your Website: Affiliate Marketing Once your website grows in rank, it will be easier for you to accept payment for sponsored content on your site. Marketers are always looking for high ranking sites to post their clients’ articles on so you really can make a tidy profit off articles you post. Then, as they gain rank and bring even more traffic in, you will be able to continue accepting payment for posting content and throughout all of this, your site continues to grow in value as well.

4. Offer Ad Space for Sale

Monetize your Website by Selling Ad Space These have been mentioned briefly above and are one of the oldest ways of monetizing websites still in use today. It all centers, on the payment you receive every time a visitor clicks through to an ad posted on your site. You will get a commission for products sold and this is where a great number of businesses are willing to pay. Read the full article

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How to Use Your Website to Generate More Sales for Your Business

It is evidently clear by now that we are living in the digital age. That means all local mortar-and-brick businesses have to strategize and leverage digital technology for business growth. And one of those digital mediums to use is a website. Instead of seeing your website as a kind of billboard, you can use your website to generate more sales for your business online. Most businesses build a website for their business and it sits down dormant until the next year, the domain and hosting for the site is renewed. Well, that way of doing things will not produce any result for the company. You need to map out a digital strategy for your business, of which the website must be a critical component.

Bring That Dormant Website Back to Live: How to Use Your Website to Increase Sales for Your Business Your website should be woven into every fabric of your offline operation. See your website as a digital office for your online business to operate effectively. Yeah, you may have various social media platforms, but only your website you actually own online. Your social media accounts can be blocked or restricted, but your website remains intact. Make your website work for you to increase more sales.  Need a Website? Get a Low-Cost, Cheap Website for Online GHS 399.00 (Save on Price, not Quality!) So, let’s tackle the question at hand: How do you use your website to generate more sales for your business? How do you optimize your website to increase conversions, generate more leads and then convert those leads into sales? Come with me and let’s explore ten ways of doing that: - Generate more online phone calls The first thing you want to do with your website is to use it as a medium to generate more phone calls for your business. The more phone calls you get, the more leads you can generate to make more sales and grow your business. To start off, you must make sure you have a dedicated phone number those online visitors to your website can call. You should have someone ready to pick and respond to that call when they do call. You also make sure you give people a reason to call. Let’s face it: nobody will just come to your website and pick a phone to call the business. They have to call for a reason. Right? You must drive and generate a sense of urgency in them to want to call you for their need, problem, or want. That requires a little marketing and sales planning.

Create a compelling offer that makes people want to call. Here are some of the things you can use to engage and convince people to contact your business: - Free Advice: ask to provide free advice on something people really want and need a solution. - Free Coaching: ask to provide free personal or business coaching to set a goal, make a plan and develop a roadmap to achieve major goals. - Free Consulting: ask to provide free consulting for those calling to help people find solutions to problems and move their life and business forward. - Free Quote: ask to provide a FREE quote for those calling online. - Free Discounts for online orders: ask to provide a free discount for all online orders. - Free Delivery: ask to provide free delivery for all online orders. - Free Installations: ask to provide free installations for all mechanical works. To get these offers to work, you need to generate massive amounts of traffic to a dedicated landing page or service page that educates and enlightens people about a single service. Ensure you provide testimonials, benefits, and reasons to make people want to call your business for help. How to Use Your Website to Generate More Sales for your Business: Get More Phone Calls You should also consider installing a live call app on your website that allows people to call directly from the website. This makes it easier for people. There will be no need to copy the number or dial the number on their phone. Once they click on the call button, they’re there… calling the company for help or enquiry. https://www.expandgh.com/make-your-website-work-for-you/ - Get More Live Chats We are in the era of chat marketing. If you have not yet integrated chat marketing strategy into your business, then you have to get started. These days, people don’t just want you to send me ongoing emails and woo them to order and get stuff online, they want to chat with the business, ask questions and see how things work. How to Use Your Website to Generate More Sales for your Business: Get More Live Chats If you have a well-developed and effective chat marketing strategy in place, you can leverage chat marketing systems to generate more sales for your business. Your website and social media platforms are the first forms of contact for your business online. Therefore, it is imperative that you drive traffic from your social media to your website and that drive traffic from your website to your chat systems, call systems and email systems. To get your chat marketing system to work, you must consider installing a live chat app on your website.

Using WhatsApp to Get More Live Chats You can use WhatsApp, Facebook, or any other live chat tool available that your customer will easily love to use. You should be responsible and ready to start chatting when people engage your business online. Consider having customer support available to manage your chat marketing. To engage people, consider asking questions like, “Need help? Let’s chat now!” “How can we help you today?” We’re offering a FREE consulting on XYZ, how about chatting with us to get started?” Develop compelling questions that compel people to want to chat and communicate with your business. - Build an Engaging Email List While phone calls and live chat can offer a faster medium to connect, convert and close deals faster online, email is still one of the most effective ways to use your website to generate more sales for your business online. Everyone with an android, iPhone or Windows phone has an email! It is just impossible to own, operate and run these phones without an email and an inbox. App play stores need to sync all apps users have downloaded, subscribed to and many others to their phone. Therefore, email still reigns when you are dealing with a particular market segment.

How to Use Your Website to Generate More Sales for your Business: Email List Building Generally, email marketing works if you are doing marketing that targets businesses, corporate executives, and government officials. These groups have no option but to open their emails regularly because of the inflow of emails from other organizations that they work with. But flooding their inbox with so many email campaigns will mean that they will unsubscribe from your emails. The key is to be helpful and valuable to them. Always focus on value before asking them to buy or make a purchase. Be value-driven, not money-driven. To get your email marketing going, you first have to generate emails. That means setting up email forms, opt-in and many other tools to collect emails from your website. Just like the case of phone calls and live chats, you need to offer people a reason to subscribe and give you their emails. You can consider offering: - Free eBook - Free guide - Free call scheduling - Free webinar - Free trial   Offer people something for FREE that compels them to provide you with their email. Then, ensure that you have set up email marketing systems that gather the email into an autoresponder, sets up an email communication system that allows you to send a sequential series of emails to educate, inform, build a relationship and eventually make them act by making the order. - Constant Website Traffic Generation Without traffic, you can't use your website to generate traffic. But you really do not need traffic, you need high-targeted traffic of people who are interested in your offering. The more of the right people visiting your website, the higher the conversion rate into sales. Email, phone and live chat are the mediums by which you can connect, convert and close your deals, but before people even step foot on your website, you have to do something.  First, you need a website. Next, you need to drive traffic to your website. A beautifully designed website without traffic will produce ZERO results. You will get no calls, no emails and no live chats! Your website can look stunning, amazing and beautiful but if you don’t find a way to consistently drive traffic to your website, nothing will happen. It will just be like smoke without fire!

Image: Profit Works (More Tips on Driving Sales from Your Website) That means all businesses have to take website traffic generation and traffic acquisition seriously. Just look at this: why would people advertise on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? Traffic! People advertise on this platform because of the amount of traffic of people that they hold. They notice their target market audience congregates on those platforms a lot, therefore they run ads to connect with them. How to Use Your Website to Generate More Sales for your Business: Website Without Taffic Well, the bottom line is that you should also figure ways and meanings to drive targeted traffic to your website. If you are selling to local people in your town, city and country, get more and more of those people to come to your website. Get more local traffic to your website, as they will most likely call your company. Decide on the group of people you want to target. Then, drive that group of people to your website. Develop traffic acquisition campaigns that get more and more people to come over to your website. With people coming to your website, you can get more and more to call your phone, engage in a live chat and subscribe to your emails. Drive Traffic to Your Website or Else It will be Dormant Here are some ways to drive traffic to your website: - Start a blog for your business. - Create high-value content on your blog - Share and distribute that content via social media - Create social posts via your social media that drive traffic to your website. - Create a YouTube Channel to educate and also drive traffic to your website - Optimize your content to get found on Google and other search engines - Optimize your website for a fast page load and pleasant user experience. - Make your blog and website more through well-written content and images. - Connect with users on online forums, groups and platforms and share your website. - Add your website address to local marketing campaigns via billboard, flyers and brochures - Add your website address to your business cards and introductory materials - Run online ads that promote your blog posts and many others - Create industry reports and white papers that your target market may be interested - Offer free training or conference that compels people to visit your site to register. - Create a portfolio page and send people the link to visit to check your portfolio - Link your website to other authority websites via guest posts and sponsored posts. https://www.expandgh.com/how-to-drive-traffic-to-your-real-estate-website-without-breaking-your-bank-account/ Learn More: How to Drive Massive Traffic to Yoru Website for FREE There are other key areas you need to consider in your traffic generation. You can generate traffic to your website, but if these areas are not working well, it might challenge to convert that traffic into leads and sales. Here they are: - Website Visitor Tracking As you drive traffic to your website, check from time to time what is going on with your website. You can use your Google Analytics or Jetpack to get traffic updates from your website. Track your website analytics to know where your website visitors are viewing, scrolling and clicking when they visit your website.

Track & Analyze Your Website Visitors - Website Visitor Analysis With Google Analytics, you can know which pages are getting traffic, the time spent by visitors on that page, actions people are taking on those pages and how you can optimize to get more traffic. With this information, you can structure your pages, connect your pages and optimize your pages to drive more traffic and convert more. - Web Page Design & Load Speed  Get your website to be more appealing and visually captivating for visitors. Also, your web pages should load faster. A good web designer, hosting and website manager can do this miracle for you. You want your website to be up at least 9.99% of the time. If your website loads slowly, always going offline and does not look good, the traffic of people will not come back and you will lose ongoing visitor traffic. - Constant High-Value Content (HVC) Creation In the game of digital marketing, content is what drives everything. Content is the fuel that drives traffic, and content is what drives people to connect and engage with your website. After creating and launching your website, you need to constantly create, upload and publish great content on your website.

How to Use Your Website to Generate More Sales for Your Business: Make Content The Corner Stone of your Digital Marketing It is these contents that will do the magic for your business. - You need to constantly create content for your website. - You need to constantly create content for your blog. - You need to constantly create content for your social media platforms. - You need to constantly create content for your email subscribers. - You need to constantly create content for your webinar subscribers. - You need to constantly create content for all groups and forums. https://www.expandgh.com/21-ways-content-marketing-can-help-your-business-drive-sales-revenue/ It is only high-value content that educates, informs and helps people that will do the magic. Your content must be focused on helping your target audience. When your content educates and helps them, you will catch their attention and they will be willing to buy from you when they need your services or products. But the content must go first.

Create Massive Content Consistently and Constantly Use high-quality images and videos to blend with your high-quality written web copy. Just a little high-value content that engages, educates and connects with your audience is more than a lot of content garbage. Quality content always sells! Need a Website? Get a Low-Cost, Cheap Website for Online GHS 499.00 (Save on Price, not Quality!) Need a website or blog to promote your business online? Or you are looking for someone to help generate leads and increase sales for your business via your website or blog? We’re here to help you turn your website into a money-making machine? Call or WhatsApp our expert on +233 548334499 for a FREE Website Conversion Audit & Report! You can also send a quick email to projects@expandgh.com Read the full article

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How Content Marketing Can Help Business Growth in 2021

There’re countless projections about how content marketing would help business growth in 2021. In fact, several content marketers continue to search for answers to this vital question of how marketing can help business growth in 2021. Honestly, there’re no easy answers. Before the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, some of the earlier projections seemed to be on track. However, the economic fallout of the pandemic seems to have derailed quite a few of these. Despite this, here’re some ways and means you could use content marketing for business growth in 2021 and possibly beyond. Obviously, you’ll have to adapt these trends and techniques to suit your specific business model, location, and target audiences. Learn More>> 21 Ways Content Marketing Can Help Your Business Drive Sales & Revenue In this article, we will explore some of the ways content marketing can help business growth in 2021.

Content Marketing in 2021 for Businesses

Content marketing is witnessing changes over the last few years. However, there’re no drastic changes or very new technologies that you would need to deploy to use content marketing for business growth in 2021. Instead, all you might require is to adopt some of your existing content marketing methods to suit the “new normal” the Covid-19 forced upon us during 2020 and is expected to continue through 2021. Research-Based Content

Create Research-Based Content (How Content Marketing Can Help Business Growth in 2021) Depending on which sources you believe, between 75 percent and 90 percent of all customers read content, mainly from blogs and websites they trust. That’s because they wish to research into various companies, brands, products, or services before arriving at a final decision to place an order. Actually, this trend isn’t new. However, with the closure of brick-and-mortar stores and offices and the need for social distancing necessitated by the Covid-19 pandemic, an increasing number of buyers now conduct research online rather than visit a physical location to get information about something they require. Therefore, a major part of content marketing for business growth in 2021 is to provide accurate, honest, and maximum possible information to prospective buyers through content. This holds true for both business websites as well as business blogs. The objective of successful content marketing should therefore be to help customers to conduct the research by providing all relevant information that leaves no questions unanswered. Doing so will ensure that a lead or prospective customer will use your content as a reference while looking for similar products and services. This by itself translates as a head-start for every content marketer over competitors. Interactive Content

Create Interactive and Compelling Content- How Content Marketing Can Help Business Growth Interactive content is another important element that content marketers can’t afford to ignore anymore. If we browse the Internet, it will be evident that businesses that provide interactive content usually attract more customers. That’s because the interaction between your business and a potential client often leads to engagement, which can eventually culminate as a confirmed sale if handled rightly. Generally, businesses create a blog and post wonderful content. They allow followers and readers to post comments, ask questions, and have any other form of interaction with customers. This has shown to work wonders for businesses of all sizes. When a prospective customer interacts through your content, it’s a clear indication of their interest in your business. Therefore, your content marketing in 2021 for business growth should aim at fostering such interaction. Furthermore, interaction also facilitates the exchange of ideas between your business and any stakeholder. This, in turn, works to develop loyalty of sorts among clients which can lead to business growth. Content Marketing Strategy

Content Marketing Strategy ( How Content Marketing Can Help Business Growth)- Image (E2M) Any business serious about using content marketing for its growth needs a strong content marketing strategy. Unfortunately, there’re countless businesses that neglect or even aren’t aware of this basic fact. Instead, they resort to creating content and uploading it at random on their websites or blogs. This can prove a futile exercise since content marketing without a proper strategy won’t fetch the desired results. A strong content marketing strategy is essential for business growth in 2021. This means, your business needs to create a content calendar and have the proper content ready beforehand to upload at the right time. It’s worth remembering that content marketing works for business growth only when it’s properly timed to be relevant to readers, engaging enough to engage clients and interesting enough for readers to share with others. Use Multiple Content Platforms

Increase Your Traffic + Get Better Results With This Content Distribution Strategy - Image Credit (CoSchedule) Generally, most businesses are happy to operate through only one platform for content marketing, such as their business website. However, in 2021, that’s not going to be enough. Instead, you’ll have to look at different or multiple content delivery platforms for business growth. Some of these platforms are well known such as Facebook Business. However, for business growth, it’s vital to deliver content through other platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Pinterest, and YouTube. I will discuss more YouTube later in this article. One of the most neglected content delivery channels for content marketing happens to be LinkedIn. In fact, I would rate LinkedIn as the single best platform for content marketing to drive business growth. Though primarily a networking website for professionals, LinkedIn offers content marketers, excellent avenues to upload audio, video, and text content that reaches decision-makers. This is particularly true for Business-to-Business (B2B) trade. YouTube & Webinars

YouTube & Webinars for Content Marketing And finally, YouTube. This popular video-sharing network is expected to emerge as the largest delivery channel for content marketers in 2021 and beyond. It’s well-known that nothing attracts people more than watching real-life stories of real-life people. Additionally, YouTube also allows you to give viewers the real “feel” of your business. Another way to reach customers for business growth through content marketing is through webinars. Most successful companies hold interactive webinars where prospective clients can actually view the content and interact with officials or representatives from the business.

In Conclusion

There’re a couple of more ways to use content marketing for business growth in 2021. One of them is by deploying Artificial Intelligence or AI for some processes. Used rightly, AI can deliver miraculous results for any content marketer at fraction of the cost. The other is app-based ads to deliver content to your clients. These trends and ways for content marketing can help business growth in 2021. Read the full article

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How to Turn a Company Around in a Bad Economy

One of the things that can kill companies faster is –bad economy. When the economy is bad, many things can happen to businesses. Many businesses close, sales goes down, unemployment goes high, the standard of living comes down and there are general economic hardships. Yet, in this terrible and turbulent economy, some companies find a way to turn things around. They find a way to turn their companies around, while some companies collapse. But in general, what we need to learn and find out is: How to Turn A Company Around in a Bad Economy. In my quest of finding the best answer to this question, I decided to read Jim Collins’ book, “Good to Great”. Because, in there, we see companies that were able to survive bad economies and became buoyant, regardless of the recession. So, let’s look at a few things to do to turn a company around in a bad economy. - Understand that you can’t change the external, only the internal. If the economy is bad, what do you do? Cry, cringe or complain? No! You can blame the economy all that you want. But that would not change anything. The fact is that you—have little to do about the economy. But what you can really do is focus on your business. You can’t change the government. You can’t change the directives of Central/Reserved Bank. You can’t force the government to enact certain policies. You can’t deal effectively with the political factors that affect business operations. But what you can do is to focus on your business. Read the full article

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How to Start an Online Clothing Store in Ghana

If you own a clothing store in Ghana, you will know that the days where people flock your store to try various clothes, select what they like and then make purchases are over. Not only has store visits decreased as a result of COVID-19 and social distancing, but many people have also been busier than ever. Which means you have to adopt a new strategy to start an online clothing store in Ghana or you might go out of business. So, what is your plan? Do you want to run out of business or adopt a strategy that will open your business to a different set of the market? Over the last 6 months, many clothing stores, boutique and whatever have closed their operations because people are no longer visiting their shop as at the first. Well, that means you need to change with the trends. To succeed in business, you study consumer trends/behaviour and then adopt a marketing strategy that will leverage those insights to produce exceptional results. So, if you run a local clothing store in Ghana and seems to be struggling due to low-human traffic, there’s a way out. You can start your online clothing store in Ghana, and use it to serve customers in your local, regional, and national area. Unlike your mortar and brick store that operates from 7 am to 9.30 pm, your online store can operate 24/7/365 and generate income even while you are asleep. Your online clothing stays open all the time, so your local, regional and national customers can shop while you handle orders later on. Read the full article

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5 Easy Steps To Start Your Own Online Store

There is no better time to start your own online store than now. Despite the ravaging global pandemic that has caused a lot of businesses to close their stores and operations, e-commerce sales have been growing at a rapid rate. E-commerce sales have grown by more than 18% in 2020 alone with experts projecting that global retail e-commerce will reach 4.9 trillion in 2021. According to Nasdaq,  95% of consumer shopping will be made through e-commerce by 2040. Unlike mortar and brick shops which have an opening and closing time, an online store is different. An online store opens 24/7/365. That means you can keep making money while you sleep, once you’ve set the right systems in place. And the best part? You only need a laptop with an internet connection to get your online store rolling with cash! You don’t need to look for a location, rent a store and spend huge sums of money to set-up and get started. With a few money in your bank account, you can launch and start your own online store, even from the comfort of your bedroom. So how do you get started? 1. Find a Hungry Niche

Find Your E-Commerce Niche: How to Start Your Own Online Store (Image: ThriveGlobal) This is the most important step in starting an online store. If you miss this step, your ability to make more money will be dwarfed and crippled. Choosing the wrong niche, trend or product line reduces your conversion rate and makes it harder to gather sales. When you go for the right niche, it is like moving along with the tides; money flows into your bank account with little effort on your side. So, what is the right niche? It is the product line that people are hungrily looking for. It is a product or even a service line that is in high demand. While e-commerce sales have been booming over the past months, it is not every product line that has been doing very well. Therefore, the first step is to choose a niche that is in high-demand and moving faster. 2. Set-Up Your Online Store

Set Up Your Online Store After you have selected a high-demand niche with a promising long-term future, the next step is to set-up your online store. There are a few steps to install your online store. You can do this by yourself if you’re a developer. But you can also hire a web designer to get your online store created. Here’re a quick step to set-up your online store: Choose your platform. There are two major online store platforms: you can install a Shopify store or use WordPress. For Shopify, everything is all-set with a domain and web hosting, but you will pay monthly fees. Shopify powers more than one million online stores and has processed a whopping $172 billion in e-commerce sales for merchants in over 175 countries.

Shopify Blog vs WordPress Blog: Selecting Your E-Commerce Platform (Image: Freelancinggig) You can also choose Wordpress which powers over 36% of websites. There are no monthly fees with Wordpress but you will need to set up the e-commerce features by yourself. You need the right e-commerce theme and then customize it to meet your unique taste and preference. Good Domain & Web Hosting: If you decided to use Wordpress for your online store, then choosing a domain name and the best e-commerce web hosting is crucial for success. If your web host is terrible, you’re going to suffer for it as your online store will be going offline and you will lose sales and profits. Slow site speed and performance will kill your e-commerce conversions and sales.

Choose the Right E-Commerce Domain & Web Hosting  E-Commerce Store Plugins: To set-up your store, you can use powerful Wordpress e-commerce plugins such as Woocommerce, Ecwid eCommerce, Wp Commerce, BigCommerce, Cart66 Cloud, or WP Easy Cart. You might also want to get a web designer to help customize and build the online store.  

Install the Right WP E-Commerce Store Plugins: How to Start Your Own Online Store Learn More: E-Commerce Web Design for Online Stores SSL Certificate for Online Payments: As an online store, you will receive payments online. The security of your customers is paramount. To protect their payment details and information from hackers, your online store needs to have an SSL certificate. But don’t worry, if you choose the best e-commerce web hosting provider, an SSL Certificate will come free of charge.

Get an SSL Certificate for Your Online Store E-Commerce Payment Processor: Who are you targeting and what payment mediums will be most convenient for them? Analyze your target audience and decide on payment mediums that will easily help them to pay online.  You can connect your online store to an e-payment gateway that enables you to easily process payments on your e-commerce website. Popular payment mediums include Cash on Delivery/Manual, MasterCard, VisaCard, Mobile Money Payments, and PayPal.

Chose Your E-Commerce Payment Gateway Install a Google Analytics & Online Chat: To know which visitors are coming to your online store, which products they are viewing, what they are clicking, what they are searching, how much time they spend, and their general web behaviour on your online store, you need to install a Google Analytics.  Also, install an online chat which gives you a live preview of user behaviour and a live communication medium to respond to users’ needs in real-time. 

Install Google Analytics for Your Online Store 3. Upload Your Products 

Compelling Product Descriptions for Online Stores What are people going to buy? You need to upload your products unto your online store. If you were to have a mortar and brick store, you might have stocked the shelf with products. In the same way, upload your products on your e-commerce website. How do you do this? Just three simple steps:  Upload the product/service picture, write a compelling product description for it and then optimize the product web page for SEO. Also, categorize your products and use high-quality images along with compelling product descriptions that help to convert visitors into buyers. Product descriptions are essential to increase conversions. Learn More: 10 Shocking Benefits of Product Descriptions for Online Stores

Upload Your Product: How to Start Your Own Online Store 4. Drive Targeted Traffic For a brick and mortar store to succeed, it needs foot traffic. For your online store to succeed, it needs web traffic. Without traffic, your online store will just be a showroom and not make any sale, profit and money. Therefore, you will need to develop a traffic acquisition plan that gets the right people to your online store for online sales to take place.  Dig Deeper: 17 Cost-Effective Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Online Store Take note, you don’t just need traffic, you need targeted traffic. If you get a bunch of traffic to the online store not interested in what you sell and offer, the conversion rate will be low and you will not make any much sale. 

Drive Traffic To Your Online Store (Image Credit: Open Business Council) So, get the right targeted traffic of people to your online store. You can use SEO, content marketing, blogging, social media marketing, Facebook Ads, Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads or Twitter Ads to drive more traffic to your online store.   5. Generate Sales & Profit Once you begin getting the right traffic, the next step is to ensure that the traffic is converting into sales. If the impressions and clicks aren’t leading to sales, you will not make money. With the help of your Google Analytics, you can detect visitor behaviour, abandoned carts and conversions. 

Increase Your E-Commerce Sales: How to Start Your Own Online Store You can also implement abandonment cart emails, email marketing campaigns and retargeting ads to increase conversions and drive more sales.  The average conversion rate for e-commerce website hovers around 3% to 4%. You might get customer service/sales support to help attend to the needs of customers. To deliver goods to customers, a delivery system must be in place. When you optimize conversions and increase orders, you will grow your e-commerce sales, profits and make more money online!   Need help to start your online store? Just Call/WhatsApp Us: +233 548334499 Read the full article

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Expert Guide: How to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy for Your Business

Social media is here to stay! And if you’re a local business who is not using social media to grow your business, you’re falling behind. Over the last decade, many smart companies and organizations have learnt to create a social media marketing strategy for their business and seen the incredible power of social media in growing brands, driving leads and increasing sales. So, you want to take this social media thing very seriously. You want to find a way to use social media to attract customers, build a strong brand and grow your business. You want to find a way to use social media to engage with potential and current customers, find their needs and build a strong relationship with them. To do this, you need to develop a social media marketing strategy. When it comes to social media marketing, what most small businesses owners and marketers do is posting. They like a picture, video or text and feel it is good, and then bum—they post. There is no focus, no direction, no strategy, no KPI—there is absolutely nothing! If you want to get great results from your social media marketing, you have to take it seriously. You have to develop a plan, invest in social media management resources and look for expert social media managers in Ghana if you don’t have the internal expertise to get the job done! Instead of just firing posts now and then with absolutely no focus, you want to develop a strategy to guide and regulate your social media marketing activities. If you create a social media marketing strategy, the next step is to focus and use the strategy as a tool to achieve your online marketing goals. To get started, there are seven steps you have to take to create a social media marketing strategy for your business—whether it is a plumbing business or consulting business, an online business or a mortar & brick business. Conduct a social media audit This is the first step. It is the foundation of a successful social media marketing. What you do here is to research, analyze and find out what is going on in your industry on social media. You want to look at the internal environment of your business and find out what is going on. Run across the major social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter, Tumblr, and all others. Look at the platform, understand the rules and how the platform works. If you are going to do well in social media marketing, you first have to understand the social media you want to use.

Social Media Audit: How to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy for Your Business Which people use social media most? Who is doing well on that social media? Which businesses do they run? What kind of posts do they post? How often do they post? What are funs saying about them? How do they use social media to grow their brand, business and bank accounts?  You see, you want to know everything you can about your target customers and how he/she behaves online. The essence of your social media audit is to know what your customers and competitors are already doing online and then use that information to create your social media objective. Clarify your ideal customer The essence of marketing is not fun. The essence of social media marketing is not to have fun online. You want to connect, engage and convert your target customers. So, if you’re going to do that right, you have to be clear who your target customers are. Most people just create pictures, texts and videos without having a clear idea of their target customers. If you don’t have a clue who you are trying to reach on social media, you can reach millions through social media advertisement and still fail. So, you have to be clear about who your ideal customers are.

Define Your Ideal Customer: How to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy for Your Business (Social Media Manager Ghana) Who are your customers? What are your customers doing on social media? What posts do they like? Which pages do they flock? Which social media groups are they in? Which news media do they follow? Which social media accounts can you find them? At what time do they normally come online?  What is their favourite social media platforms? Who are they following online? Why are they following them? Which brands are already selling to them? What messages are working on them? Which celebrities, influencers or brands do they follow online? Which competing business is already selling to them? Which competing business is winning their hearts? What are the competitors doing well? What are they not doing well? What kind of content are the competitors using to win their hearts?  Create a social media objective You need to have a social media objective. This is your aim, purpose and mission on social media. It is supposed to define and regulate all your social media marketing activities. It will help you stay focused, stay on track and eventually become a market leader in using social media to grow your business. The question you should ask here is: “So, what do you want to use social media for? How can we use social media to grow your brand, business and bank accounts? You need to be clear in this area. Your social media objective will become your mission to guide the types of content you post and share with your audience.

Define your Social Media Marketing Objective & Mission: How to Create a Social Media Strategy for Your Business For example, your social media objective can be: “To connect with customers by creating educative, interesting and engaging content that adds value to their lives!” That is quite a bit general, but you can narrow it down to your industry. We’ve been working with Frimprince Transport Services for a while, their objective is to use social media to create engaging and educative content to make life easier for all local and international tourists in Ghana while offering them the transport, tour and hospitality services they need.  We started working with a health organization recently, LurraLife Africa. Their social media objective is: “To create content that makes people live a healthier and happier life!” It all starts here, if you don’t create a social media objective, it will become very difficult to know what content to create and what to share to your target audience on social media. Determine your Social Media Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) In the end, you’re in business to serve customers and make money. So, the game is to find more customers, serve them with exceptional services and keep them for the long term to grow your business.  To leverage social media marketing to grow your business, you need to define your KPIs. Your KPIs are clear, specific and measurable goals you want to achieve through the company’s investment in social media marketing. While your social media objective regulates your entire social media marketing activities, your social media marketing KPI's gives your direction, focus and energies to growing your business.

Determine your Social Media Marketing KPIs Each business’s social media marketing KPIs will vary. But, ideally, you want to use social media to grow your brand, business and bank account. You need to keep those three words in mind and in that order. On social media, the brand is what sells. People will follow their favourite brand: like their posts, share their posts and promote their posts online.  Brand: Just go on Instagram and look at your favourite celebrities. Check what they have posted and try posting the same thing or similar thing on your page. And then check what happens in 24 hours later. You’ll realize that they will get hundreds of thousands or million likes/shares while your post is still struggling.  What’s the difference? Brand strength! Your brand is weak, so your post gets little attraction. The stronger your brand, the more people react to your posts. Therefore, you want to first focus on growing your brand and getting yourself out there through social media. Business: Once your brand grows, you will recognize that business starts booming. People buy brands, not commodities. Your brand will sell your products and cause your business to boom. The stronger your brand, the easier it is to attract, engage and get customers for your business online. But building your brand takes time, energy, and patience. Bank Account: Imagine what happens when your brand is getting stronger, your products/services are getting traction online? You feel the effect in your bank account. You see cash flowing from social media marketing and other digital marketing efforts to grow your business and cause an increase in sales. Social media drives your leads, sales, and revenue.  In setting your social media marketing KPI, focus on these three key areas: brand, business and bank account. Set goals to achieve using social media to grow your brand, business, and bank account. How many followers, social media mentions, leads, sales and revenue do you want over the month/quarter/years? Create Engaging and Converting Content.  Content is king! If you’re going to do well online, focus on the quality of content you create. You need to create a ton of content. But it’s not just enough to focus on the quantity of content, you also have to focus on quality. Put quality before quantity always. What’s content? It’s the message you share with your target audience—potential and current customers online. It’s the information you get across to your fans online. It is any video, audio, text or graphic used to engage, convert and connect with your potential audience. Consider creating a social media content calendar!

Determine your Content Types (Image Credit: Lyfe Marketing) The mistake many people make is to just create content without a clear social media objective. The content you create for social must be in line with your social media mission and objective. If your mission is to help people live a healthier and happier life, then you ensure that all your content is consistent with your mission. This is how you build the brand.  You create content that is in alignment with your social media mission and objective. You follow pages and people who are consistent with your brand. Your comment on pages and people who are consistent with your brand. Your image has to focus on delivering and fulfilling your mission. In doing that, you have various content formats. The following are some content ideas to consider for your social media marketing: Images Text Blog posts EBooks Videos Infographics Quotes Tips/hacks Advice Quizzes Interviews Live event shows Company news Industry news Products/Services info Promos Discounts You don’t have to use all the content types, you just have to use what will work best on your target audience and grow your business. You also have to look at the skill set of your social media manager Ghana in getting the job done. Analyze and see what types of content your social media manager Ghana can easily create and then outsource the rest for others. Share and distribute the content on social media platforms. It’s one thing to create content and another to distribute that content. No matter how good the content you create, if people don’t see or feel it, there will not be any result. So, what you want to do is to create great content that people will share and then distribute it on all your selected social media platforms. In sharing and distributing your content, you can get your social media manager Ghana to use quick tools to streamline the process. Social media management tools such as Hootsuite to help schedule and send posts to all social media accounts with little effort on your part. 

How to Create a Social Media Strategy for Your Business: Share & Distribute Content The posts can be scheduled and then the system will post at their right time. The key is to check how the software shares and posts online. Consider how many times to post and what times to post? Frequency and timing count when you are promoting your content to increase reach.  Consider sharing to groups and communities on social media platforms. Create a community that will share, promote and distribute the content. Encourage your staff, team, and fans to share the content. The more they share the content, the more other people see it, and the more it goes viral. There are two ways to promote your content on social media: paid media and organic media. When you use organic media, you grow your brand through your sweat, hard work and energy. It can sometimes be slow to grow enough following and page likes for your brand.  To speed up the building of your brand, you can use social media ads such as Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads, Instagram Ads and LinkedIn Ads to increase the reach. This involves some form of cost but it helps to grow your brand and page faster. Planning and budging for monthly social media ads is crucial for growing your page. Track, Measure, Analyze and Report On Monthly Basis Did you remember the Key Performance Indicators? They are not for fun! They help to stay focus on your social media marketing objective. They enable you to avoid losing focus and posting irrelevant information online. They help you to avoid going off track with your social media. So, you have to develop a way to track, measure and analyze your social media marketing activities using the three B’s: Brand, Business & Bank Account. Run monthly, quarterly and annual reports in this area and see how your investment in social media marketing is helping your company or organization to grow. 

How to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy for your Business; Measure & Analyze Success Find and see how your social media marketing is helping your business to grow in these three areas. Analyze the reports and see if you can tweak adjust and reevaluate what you do to get better results for your company/organization. You can develop a simple pie chart to tabulate your social media results in the area of follows, engagement rate, reach, leads, prospects, and sales. Collect the data from the insights session of your social media pages and then use that information to create a well-develop social media report for your business monthly.  Based on your monthly BBB Goals, you can now analyze and track the results to see how best you are performing. See how far social media marketing is helping to grow your brand, increase your business and improve your revenue. As you see progress, invest more time, energy and resources into it.  Conclusion In the beginning, you might not see the value of social media marketing in your business. But as your social media manager in Ghana, you will begin to see results and this experience will change your perspective about social media marketing.  If you play the game right, put in the work and invest the resources required to grow your business through social media marketing, you will surely get the returns. Other businesses and organizations are already doing it and so can you! Need a social media manager to develop a marketing plan, strategy, and manage your social media handles? We’re building a wide network of social media managers, focused on growing your brand, business and bank accounts through result-driven social media marketing packages.  Visit Our Store & Try Our Result-Driven Digital Marketing Packages. Read the full article

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Viral Marketing: 7 Steps to Make Your Brand Go-Viral

No matter the kind of business you run, you can’t stay and remain small! You have to think expand! You have to think of how you can expand your brand to new markets, new audiences, new demographics, new regions, and new places. Grant Cardon said, “If you refuse to expand, you’ll contract.” If you refuse to increase and expand your business, network, and brand, you will contract. You will remain small, stay small, and even become smaller. And what do you get for remaining and staying small?

Download the PDF of this Article Below: Viral Marketing: 7 Steps To Make Your Brand G0-Viral

Mediocrity! So you want to use the new way of marketing called, “Viral Marketing” to expand and promote your brand for increased business dealings. Viral marketing enables you to make your brand go-viral. It enables you to enhance your business operations to new audiences. Viral marketing is not something special or technical.  

Viral-Marketing: Make Your Brand Go-Viral Viral marketing has been with us for ages. In the olden days, when someone is dead, they use Word-of-Mouth to spread and circulate the message rapidly until all the families, friends, love ones and all related people hear the news of the bereaved. What they are doing is called, “viral messaging.” They are using “word-of-mouth’ to make the message of the bereaved go-viral. They are using the strategy of “word-of-mouth” to spread the message rapidly to many people within a short period of time. Then TV, radio and newspapers emerged! This even made messages go-viral within a short span of time. But now, we live in the digital age—not the electronic age. The TV, radio and print ads are rather competing with the digital communication channel like social media to make messages go viral. But the most important thing is to make your brand go-viral using both digital and traditional channels. If you promote your brand, your brand will attract to it a group of loyal fans who will eventually be nurtured and developed by your business development department to grow your sales and revenue. You have to develop a strategy for brand promotion and a strategy to leverage your brand awareness for increased business—if not you’ll be popular and be poor! Well, here are 7 key steps to make your brand go-viral through viral marketing. The Right Audience The most important thing to make your brand go-viral through viral marketing is your audience. In its simplest sense, viral marketing is the art and science of making your audience do your marketing for you. So if you don’t know your audience you can’t connect with them.

Make Your Brand Go -Viral: Identify the Right Audience To go-viral, you have to know your target audience. You have to know their problems, their challenges, their constraints, their pain points, and many more! You must be clear about their feelings and know how you can connect with them in a deep, emotional way so that they will be very interested and share your content for you! The Right Content Once you know your audience and understand them very well, the next step is to create the right content to connect with them. The content can be a video, audio, article, photo, blog post, infographic, PDF download, e-book, or any good content format.

Make Your Brand Go-Viral: Content Is King The right content must have the following seven core qualities: Valuable Very Helpful Very Interesting Attention-Grabbing Appealing Worth Sharing Concise Comprehensive Your contents must add value, be interesting, worth sharing and be something that will be well appealing to people. If you want to make your brand go-viral, then the quality of your content is very important. Remember, you are what you share! The Right Channel It is not enough to have the right content, you must also use the right channels to disseminate your content. There’s a lot of competition these days and people are busy like never before. So you have to focus on using a channel where your target audience can find your post.

Make Your Brand Go-Viral: Chose the Right Promotional Channels Check out our amazing business blogging services for small businesses, companies and organizations. It is not even enough to use Facebook, you have to focus on communities on Facebook. Share your content on channels where the target audience can see it and relate to it. You must use a varied section of promotion channels where your target market can find your audience can see your post: You-Tube Web Pages Blogs Guest Blogs Twitter Instagram Pinterest Facebook Groups Facebook Pages LinkedIn Groups LinkedIn Pages WhatsApp Groups Publishing Sites TV Radio Newspapers Print Ads Bill Boards Magazine The Right Trigger There are a lot of triggers that can be used to make content go-viral. You have to be careful in selecting and choosing triggers. You have to know that the purpose of triggers is to make people do your marketing for you. So what you do here is to give them an incentive to promote your content!

Make Your Brand Go-Viral: Viral Triggers You can use triggers such as “Sharing is Caring”. You can also use high incentive triggers such as gifts, gift cards, e-books, free reports, and many others promote more shares. You can also leverage influencers to trigger more shares. The Right Timing Timing is very important. You have found the best time that your target market can relate with your content. If you share your content at the wrong time—the time when your target markets are not available online or offline (if you are promoting offline on radio or TV)—you will miss more triggers and sharing.

Make YOur Brand Go-Viral: Viral timing (Image: Coach James Houghtaling) So you have to share and share at the right time. Study your target market. Look at the timing structure and share your content online at the time when your target audience comes online. This is the only way you can get more of them to relate to your content. The Right Associations If you want to make your brand to go viral, you have to build networks with people with large networks. You have to form associations and build relationships with people with a large following and audience base. When you do this, you can leverage their audience to make your content go viral. And the more your content goes viral, the more your brand goes viral!

Make Your Brand Go-Viral: People People to Share The key is to look for influencers and popular brands and build associations with them. Use the system of influencer marketing to make the influencers share your content with their audience for free. You can interview them or do something valuable that is worth sharing with their brand! Once you do this, they’ll share the content you create to their audience and this will widen your network and make your brand go-viral through their network of audience. Share & Promote Like Crazy You want your content to go viral. Right? You have to share and promote your content like crazy. You want to make your brand go-viral through viral marketing. Right? You have to share and promote your content like crazy. If you don’t share and promote your content, it will not go-viral!!! You have to take the initial step! You have started the sharing process. Leverage the channels above and share your content like crazy on them. Then add a tagline that tells people to share for “A, B, C” incentive! Give people an incentive to share your content!

Make Your Brand Go-Viral: Share Like Crazy The more you share your content, the more it spreads. The more people also share it, the more it goes viral. To speed up the process, you can boost the content by paying for ads. Use Facebook, Adwords, TV, radio, Newspapers, Magazine, or any medium that your target market uses—to advertise for more visibility!!! In a null shell, just think expand! Develop ways and means of marketing and promoting your business every day. Remember that the strength of your marketing and advertising, will determine the quality and quantity of leads you generate! More marketing will reduce your physical selling efforts and build your business rapidly! So be consistent and persistent and your brand will go-viral!!! DOWNLOAD THE PDF VERSION OF THE POST Please kindly fill in the field to download the PDF of this post Visit Our Online Store & Try Our Result-Driven Digital Healthcare Marketing Packages Read the full article

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The 3 Financial Problems that Kill Small Businesses

No matter the kind of business you run, you can't do away with finance. Business is basically a mixture of finance, marketing and operations. When you market, you get customers. When you serve your customers through operations you get money, the next step is to manage the money so that the business can continuously run effectively. But the finance level is the level that hits small businesses a lot. When you go to school, you receive a report card that shows your academic performance. In business, your accounts department sends you a financial statement—basically your profit & loss statement and your balance sheet—which shows the financial health/performance of the business. The mission of Think Expand is to promote business growth through digital technologies. So we want to leverage digital marketing to promote the growth of small and medium-sized businesses which we serve. But then we’ve realized that business growth cuts across several angles one of those is finance! Cash is king! In reading Peter Drucker’s book on the essentials of business management, he clarified the three financial problems that kill small businesses. From experience, I can personally confirm these financial afflictions: Lack of CashFlow Inability to Raise Capital for Expansion Loss of Control with Expenses, Inventories and Receivables Lack of Cash Flow Nothing dries up a small business like cash flow. It’s very hard when your business is recording profit in your books but you don’t have cash in the bank. You have a high level of account receivables which is a record in your asset column but not enough liquid cash to run the business.

Lack of Cash Flow-Problems that Kill Small Businesses This is the first financial affliction that endangers the health of small businesses. And the problem is that many entrepreneurs focus on making profits instead of generating consistent cash flow. And you know “cash flow” is different from “profit”. Bad cash flow is when it takes a long time for you to receive cash from your customers. This makes the business to suffer cash crises in the temporal. External cash must be required to run operations or else the business will run off the ball. Good Cash Flow is when it takes relatively nothing to less time to collect cash from your businesses once service has been delivered. This ensures that your business has cash available to take care of the expenses and keep the business afloat. It is also necessary to put in financial policies and structures such as cash flow analysis, cash flow forecasting, cash flow recording and proper cash management in place to ensure that the small business takes control of its cash positions! Inability to Raise Capital for Expansion One of the problems of small businesses is that they fail to grow. There’s nothing wrong with having a small business, but there’s something wrong with having the small business stay small. The small business must be expanding, growing and flourishing continuously. That means focus on expansion.

Inability to Raise Capital: Problems that Kill Small Businesses But you can’t expand a small business without additional capital. Grant Cardon said, “You need new revenue for funding.” And Peter Drucker said, “ Growth has to be fed. It requires new cash and capital.” That means a small business must devise ways and means to fund the expansion and growth of the business. Ideally, there are three main ways to expand and grow a small business: Get more customers Get existing customers to buy more by providing more values Get into a new market with new products lines Getting more customers requires you to invest in salespeople, advertising, promotion and marketing campaigns. Getting existing customers to increase purchases means you have to add more value to your products and services which requires some level of capital. Getting into a new market with a new product means investing in product design and development! Whichever way you choose, you need to invest in growth. The financial problems that kill small businesses starve their funding and prevent them from raising additional capital for funding. A small business must seek credit lines like long term debt for growth, look for financing partners for funding, increase sales to raise capital, save existing funds for funding and use other means to raise capital. Raising capital means the small business must become credible, ethical, creditworthy and financeable! Loss of Control with Expenses, Inventories and Receivables The last financial affliction that endangers the health of small businesses is a loss of control over expenses, inventories and receivables. This is a very critical area that requires very serious observation. If the business loses control over expenses, excessive spending will drain the business!

Inability to Control Expenses, Inventories and Receivables Inventories need to be sold to generate cash and fund the growing business. But if the inventories are not sold and lie down on the shelf, it will result in a cash drain. When your goods are not moving fast and selling quickly it will affect your bottom line—your cash position! One of the critical controls is control over receivables. How I wish to run a business with no account receivables. But this will often come along as you run your business. So it is very important to find a way to manage the account receivable by putting systems and policies in place that keeps track on the account receivables of the business. So to keep the business afloat, it is very important to handle the three financial problems that kill small businesses. You have to manage the cash flow of the business very well, plan for funding and find new ways to raise capital for expansion and then you control expenses, inventories and account receivables well so that the business can stay afloat. Once these things have been put in place and you add our digital marketing into your operations, this should skyrocket your business!!! Take your business to the next level through the Advanced Digital Marketing Program. The Advanced Marketing Program is marketing, sales and brand development solution designed to market and promote your business growth by leveraging web design, web analytics, blogging, social media, SEO and copywriting. Visit Our Store & Try Our Result-Driven Digital Marketing Packages. Read the full article

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Expert Guide: How to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy for Your Business

Social media is here to stay! And if you’re a local business who is not using social media to grow your business, you’re falling behind. Over the last decade, many smart companies and organizations have learnt to create a social media marketing strategy for their business and seen the incredible power of social media in growing brands, driving leads and increasing sales. So, you want to take this social media thing very seriously. You want to find a way to use social media to attract customers, build a strong brand and grow your business. You want to find a way to use social media to engage with potential and current customers, find their needs and build a strong relationship with them. To do this, you need to develop a social media marketing strategy. When it comes to social media marketing, what most small businesses owners and marketers do is posting. They like a picture, video or text and feel it is good, and then bum—they post. There is no focus, no direction, no strategy, no KPI—there is absolutely nothing! If you want to get great results from your social media marketing, you have to take it seriously. You have to develop a plan, invest in social media management resources and look for expert social media managers in Ghana if you don’t have the internal expertise to get the job done! Instead of just firing posts now and then with absolutely no focus, you want to develop a strategy to guide and regulate your social media marketing activities. If you create a social media marketing strategy, the next step is to focus and use the strategy as a tool to achieve your online marketing goals. To get started, there are seven steps you have to take to create a social media marketing strategy for your business—whether it is a plumbing business or consulting business, an online business or a mortar & brick business. Conduct a social media audit This is the first step. It is the foundation of a successful social media marketing. What you do here is to research, analyze and find out what is going on in your industry on social media. You want to look at the internal environment of your business and find out what is going on. Run across the major social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter, Tumblr, and all others. Look at the platform, understand the rules and how the platform works. If you are going to do well in social media marketing, you first have to understand the social media you want to use.

Social Media Audit: How to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy for Your Business Which people use social media most? Who is doing well on that social media? Which businesses do they run? What kind of posts do they post? How often do they post? What are funs saying about them? How do they use social media to grow their brand, business and bank accounts?  You see, you want to know everything you can about your target customers and how he/she behaves online. The essence of your social media audit is to know what your customers and competitors are already doing online and then use that information to create your social media objective. Clarify your ideal customer The essence of marketing is not fun. The essence of social media marketing is not to have fun online. You want to connect, engage and convert your target customers. So, if you’re going to do that right, you have to be clear who your target customers are. Most people just create pictures, texts and videos without having a clear idea of their target customers. If you don’t have a clue who you are trying to reach on social media, you can reach millions through social media advertisement and still fail. So, you have to be clear about who your ideal customers are.

Define Your Ideal Customer: How to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy for Your Business (Social Media Manager Ghana) Who are your customers? What are your customers doing on social media? What posts do they like? Which pages do they flock? Which social media groups are they in? Which news media do they follow? Which social media accounts can you find them? At what time do they normally come online?  What is their favourite social media platforms? Who are they following online? Why are they following them? Which brands are already selling to them? What messages are working on them? Which celebrities, influencers or brands do they follow online? Which competing business is already selling to them? Which competing business is winning their hearts? What are the competitors doing well? What are they not doing well? What kind of content are the competitors using to win their hearts?  Create a social media objective You need to have a social media objective. This is your aim, purpose and mission on social media. It is supposed to define and regulate all your social media marketing activities. It will help you stay focused, stay on track and eventually become a market leader in using social media to grow your business. The question you should ask here is: “So, what do you want to use social media for? How can we use social media to grow your brand, business and bank accounts? You need to be clear in this area. Your social media objective will become your mission to guide the types of content you post and share with your audience.

Define your Social Media Marketing Objective & Mission: How to Create a Social Media Strategy for Your Business For example, your social media objective can be: “To connect with customers by creating educative, interesting and engaging content that adds value to their lives!” That is quite a bit general, but you can narrow it down to your industry. We’ve been working with Frimprince Transport Services for a while, their objective is to use social media to create engaging and educative content to make life easier for all local and international tourists in Ghana while offering them the transport, tour and hospitality services they need.  We started working with a health organization recently, LurraLife Africa. Their social media objective is: “To create content that makes people live a healthier and happier life!” It all starts here, if you don’t create a social media objective, it will become very difficult to know what content to create and what to share to your target audience on social media. Determine your Social Media Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) In the end, you’re in business to serve customers and make money. So, the game is to find more customers, serve them with exceptional services and keep them for the long term to grow your business.  To leverage social media marketing to grow your business, you need to define your KPIs. Your KPIs are clear, specific and measurable goals you want to achieve through the company’s investment in social media marketing. While your social media objective regulates your entire social media marketing activities, your social media marketing KPI's gives your direction, focus and energies to growing your business.

Determine your Social Media Marketing KPIs Each business’s social media marketing KPIs will vary. But, ideally, you want to use social media to grow your brand, business and bank account. You need to keep those three words in mind and in that order. On social media, the brand is what sells. People will follow their favourite brand: like their posts, share their posts and promote their posts online.  Brand: Just go on Instagram and look at your favourite celebrities. Check what they have posted and try posting the same thing or similar thing on your page. And then check what happens in 24 hours later. You’ll realize that they will get hundreds of thousands or million likes/shares while your post is still struggling.  What’s the difference? Brand strength! Your brand is weak, so your post gets little attraction. The stronger your brand, the more people react to your posts. Therefore, you want to first focus on growing your brand and getting yourself out there through social media. Business: Once your brand grows, you will recognize that business starts booming. People buy brands, not commodities. Your brand will sell your products and cause your business to boom. The stronger your brand, the easier it is to attract, engage and get customers for your business online. But building your brand takes time, energy, and patience. Bank Account: Imagine what happens when your brand is getting stronger, your products/services are getting traction online? You feel the effect in your bank account. You see cash flowing from social media marketing and other digital marketing efforts to grow your business and cause an increase in sales. Social media drives your leads, sales, and revenue.  In setting your social media marketing KPI, focus on these three key areas: brand, business and bank account. Set goals to achieve using social media to grow your brand, business, and bank account. How many followers, social media mentions, leads, sales and revenue do you want over the month/quarter/years? Create Engaging and Converting Content.  Content is king! If you’re going to do well online, focus on the quality of content you create. You need to create a ton of content. But it’s not just enough to focus on the quantity of content, you also have to focus on quality. Put quality before quantity always. What’s content? It’s the message you share with your target audience—potential and current customers online. It’s the information you get across to your fans online. It is any video, audio, text or graphic used to engage, convert and connect with your potential audience. Consider creating a social media content calendar!

Determine your Content Types (Image Credit: Lyfe Marketing) The mistake many people make is to just create content without a clear social media objective. The content you create for social must be in line with your social media mission and objective. If your mission is to help people live a healthier and happier life, then you ensure that all your content is consistent with your mission. This is how you build the brand.  You create content that is in alignment with your social media mission and objective. You follow pages and people who are consistent with your brand. Your comment on pages and people who are consistent with your brand. Your image has to focus on delivering and fulfilling your mission. In doing that, you have various content formats. The following are some content ideas to consider for your social media marketing: Images Text Blog posts EBooks Videos Infographics Quotes Tips/hacks Advice Quizzes Interviews Live event shows Company news Industry news Products/Services info Promos Discounts You don’t have to use all the content types, you just have to use what will work best on your target audience and grow your business. You also have to look at the skill set of your social media manager Ghana in getting the job done. Analyze and see what types of content your social media manager Ghana can easily create and then outsource the rest for others. Share and distribute the content on social media platforms. It’s one thing to create content and another to distribute that content. No matter how good the content you create, if people don’t see or feel it, there will not be any result. So, what you want to do is to create great content that people will share and then distribute it on all your selected social media platforms. In sharing and distributing your content, you can get your social media manager Ghana to use quick tools to streamline the process. Social media management tools such as Hootsuite to help schedule and send posts to all social media accounts with little effort on your part. 

How to Create a Social Media Strategy for Your Business: Share & Distribute Content The posts can be scheduled and then the system will post at their right time. The key is to check how the software shares and posts online. Consider how many times to post and what times to post? Frequency and timing count when you are promoting your content to increase reach.  Consider sharing to groups and communities on social media platforms. Create a community that will share, promote and distribute the content. Encourage your staff, team, and fans to share the content. The more they share the content, the more other people see it, and the more it goes viral. There are two ways to promote your content on social media: paid media and organic media. When you use organic media, you grow your brand through your sweat, hard work and energy. It can sometimes be slow to grow enough following and page likes for your brand.  To speed up the building of your brand, you can use social media ads such as Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads, Instagram Ads and LinkedIn Ads to increase the reach. This involves some form of cost but it helps to grow your brand and page faster. Planning and budging for monthly social media ads is crucial for growing your page. Track, Measure, Analyze and Report On Monthly Basis Did you remember the Key Performance Indicators? They are not for fun! They help to stay focus on your social media marketing objective. They enable you to avoid losing focus and posting irrelevant information online. They help you to avoid going off track with your social media. So, you have to develop a way to track, measure and analyze your social media marketing activities using the three B’s: Brand, Business & Bank Account. Run monthly, quarterly and annual reports in this area and see how your investment in social media marketing is helping your company or organization to grow. 

How to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy for your Business; Measure & Analyze Success Find and see how your social media marketing is helping your business to grow in these three areas. Analyze the reports and see if you can tweak adjust and reevaluate what you do to get better results for your company/organization. You can develop a simple pie chart to tabulate your social media results in the area of follows, engagement rate, reach, leads, prospects, and sales. Collect the data from the insights session of your social media pages and then use that information to create a well-develop social media report for your business monthly.  Based on your monthly BBB Goals, you can now analyze and track the results to see how best you are performing. See how far social media marketing is helping to grow your brand, increase your business and improve your revenue. As you see progress, invest more time, energy and resources into it.  Conclusion In the beginning, you might not see the value of social media marketing in your business. But as your social media manager in Ghana, you will begin to see results and this experience will change your perspective about social media marketing.  If you play the game right, put in the work and invest the resources required to grow your business through social media marketing, you will surely get the returns. Other businesses and organizations are already doing it and so can you! Need a social media manager to develop a marketing plan, strategy, and manage your social media handles? We’re building a wide network of social media managers, focused on growing your brand, business and bank accounts through result-driven social media marketing packages.  Visit Our Store & Try Our Result-Driven Digital Marketing Packages. Read the full article

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How to Drive Traffic to Your Real Estate Website Without Breaking Your Bank Account

You did it! Hooray! Congratulations! You’ve been told that to build a successful real estate agency, you need a website. So, you built one. You listed all the houses/apartments you are currently renting and selling. Then, you waited to get people visiting the site to check your deals. But here is the opps! Website traffic has been very low. Well, if what you are thinking about right now is, “How do I drive traffic to my real estate website?”, then you are in the right place. In the next few minutes, you will learn the same process the top real estate firms are using to drive more traffic to their real estate website. 1. Real Estate Website Tweaking

How to Drive Traffic to Your Real Estate Website: Tweaking Your Site If your real estate website sucks, you shouldn’t expect visitors to stay on it. If you want to drive traffic to your real estate website, you need to make sure your website has been well-designed. A professional real estate website provides. Good user experience Mobile responsiveness Fast website loading speed Attractive coloring and interface Nice and catchy theme and home page Nice and attractive pictures of listed houses. 2. Local Search Engine Optimization

How to Drive Traffic to Your Real Estate Website: Use Local SEO (Image: Mainstreet ROI) Are you selling or leasing real estate in your local area? Then you have to optimize your website to rank for that keyword. That should be part of your real estate SEO. You can start optimizing your real estate website to rank for, “Best real estate agency Ghana.” This will involve your Google My Business and Local Citation Strategy. Dig Deeper: The Basics of SEO for Business Another key way to help local renters and house buyers to find your real estate website is to optimize the house listings to appear on Google. If you are using the right keywords to list the houses, you will eventually rank high on Google. To optimize your house listings: Search the right keywords used by the local people. Use the keywords in your Alt talks and image descriptions. Write a short description of each house and put the keyword there. Use the keywords in the meta box and headings of each house/room listing. Use guest posting to build backlinks from authority real estate sites to your site. 3. Invest in Content Marketing

How to Drive Traffic to Your Real Estate Website: Using Content Marketing If you don’t want to pay to drive traffic to your real estate website, then content marketing must become a key part of your traffic generation strategy. You need high-quality content that will help to market your agency and drive more awareness about what you do. Visit Our Online Store & Try Our Result-Driven Real Estate Content Marketing Packages Some of the types of content you can create for your real estate website include: Articles Blogs E-books Case studies White papers Infographics Videos Podcasts To avoid wasting time and resources in real estate content marketing, ensure you are creating the right type of content. The right content solves problems for your target audience. It answers their questions and deals with their pain points. It helps them to get inform and make the right real estate decision. This also helps build your real estate brand. 4. Use social media to promote your content

Use Social Media for Real Estate Website Marketing The best content will still need some marketing. Therefore, consider having accounts on all major social media platforms and sharing content there. Create the best content and give it out for free. The more you create content, optimize them, and share them with your local audience, the more traffic you will drive to your site. Dig Deeper: Expert Guide: How to Develop a Social Media Strategy for Your Business Using the right content that solves problems for people, your real estate website will become a great education center that will attract people like bees to a honeycomb. You should be consistent with pushing and promoting your content to social media platforms. 5. Join forums/groups, and answer industry-related questions and links back to your site

Real Estate Marketing: Join Real Estate Forums & Groups and Add Value If you have already created your content, then you have content solutions. You will use those content to provide the answer to questions people are already asking in local real estate groups and forums. You can easily find these groups on LinkedIn and Facebook. Join the groups, listen to people’s questions, and start answering them using the already created content. Always link back to your site. The best place to answer questions is Quora. The more industry-related questions and problems you deal with, the more you tell your local community that you know your stuff and you’re ready to do business with them, providing the best houses/apartments they are looking for. Bonus Tips: You can also drive traffic to your real estate website through your the following tactics: Email Signature Real Estate Flyers Real Estate Office Signboard/Billboard Real Estate Business Cards Real Estate Contract Documents Visit Our Online Store & Try Our Result-Driven Real Estate Marketing Packages Read the full article