The Inbound Lead Generation Kit includes the following how-to videos and an instructional e-book:

• Video: How to Design a Website for Lead Generation and Marketing Results (1 hour)
• Video: How to Generate Leads for Small Business (1 hour)
• Video: Optimizing Landing Pages for Lead Generation and Conversion (1 hour)
• Video: How to Generate Leads On a Budget Using Inbound Marketing (1 hour)
• e-Book: Getting Found Online – Learn how to get found online in the search engines, blogosphere, and social media sites (10 pages)

Online Marketing Strategy – Social Triggers.

Social Triggers is a popular, trending, new blog from Derek Halpern who talks mainly about the mindset of the internet ‘buyer’ and how you can optimise your efforts to influence them to boost your conversions/sales.

I’m not entirely sold on the website as it has appeared very quickly and seems to be based on a lot of theory but none the less, I have taken some tit bits from it and so thought maybe you would to, so head over there and read a few articles.

Find the list here:

WordPress Ping List | Prelovac.com

Just think, when your driving somewhere, you choose the most direct, easiest route. What you don’t do is go the long, slow way round! If you get lost on your journey you get frustrated and angry. That is not the experience you should give your readers/customers.

You can make their journey easy in many different ways. Here ate just a few!

1. Only create minimal pages to surf in your navigation. These should obviously be your key pages.

2. Create 1,2,3 steps on your homepage to explain how to navigate the site.

3. Don’t create pages with loads of text content. People just won’t read it all.

4. Similarly, try not to overload your pages with too many images. It will look messy and slow down your page load time.

5. Break your content down into small readable chunks.

6. Use familiar navigation keywords like ‘about us’, our services, our clients etc. Don’t make your reader guess whats on each page.

7. Please, please don’t use weird fonts that are difficult to read. Verdana is regarded as an industry favourite.

8. Clicktale.com is excellent way to see how people move around your site. It actually records people’s movements while on your website.

Not all of these tips will be relevant to you but implementing just a couple will go a long way to helping you reader improve the time they spend on your site. Just remember less is more.

These are just some tips that we implement when we setup wordpress websites for small businesses. We are available should you need us.

The one task small business face most often is convincing potential clients that you are an expert in your field and are the right person for the job! Nowadays online consumers (including yourself) are wising up to the fact that your site content is one big sales pitch, and we don’t like it do we? We just hate being sold to.

We need to change our approach!

How do we show people we know what we are talking about? The answer is simple! Free information and advise (and lots of it). Your blog is a powerful tool that enables you to give people the most up to date and relevant information, when they search for it. This method of attracting potential customers is increasingly becoming known as inbound marketing. Give information away for free on a specific topic and then slip in the service that you can provide at the end or where most relevant in the article.

For example, write a killer article by stating a difficult problem readers face, offer a brilliant solution and then tell them that you offer solutions like this in more detail in your premium package. Then those who need the service see that you can help and will buy if they want to. If they don’t, they move on but keep coming back for more free info and potentially might buy in the future.

Give it a go but be sure you don’t turn every article into a sales pitch. It’s worth a mention at this point that we at Design Rush can help you integrate a blog into your site or create a site from scratch for you. See easy!

With the mobile era playing a massive part in the way people search, we as small local businesses need to help our potential clients find us and most importantly, contact us. If you use Google regularly then you will notice that typcially, when we do a search for say ‘dry cleaners in croydon’, the top of the natural search listings have a list of dry cleaning companies with a map, and all the contact details right there. Poweful stuff, especially when you are searching on a smart phone that will let you hit one button and call them straight away.

Schedule yourself 30mins one evening and head to Google Places and create your listing, much the same you would would with Yell.com. Be sure to fully complete your page options, leaving nothing out. The more information you provide Google, the better they will rank it. Another tip is, once you are finished is to send a request to all your ‘happy’ clients and ask them to review you online. Boom! Instant social proof.

For more tips like these be sure to connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Right ladies and gentleman. Although the weather in and around Surrey this week is rather appauling, there’s no doubt that spring is right around the corner, and with it comes the need to get back in the garden.

If you provide gardening services of any kind and are needing a website for your business then please do contact us. We are giving a 15% discount for any purchases made before the end of the month. Please use coupon code: ‘garden2012′.

Our basic website package offers a simple 3-5 page site that includes a services, portfolio and contact page.

Maybe if your getting little sales direct from twitter you may wish to use the service as a follower, not to get followers. Try sourcing all the top industry experts in your field and keep up to date with what they’re doing and saying. Then use Twitter to become an industry expert yourself.

If your active within a local community, then follow the local news teams and get that breaking story first.

Tell us what you use Twitter for as a small business?

Don’t forget to follow us for more of these tips.

Introducing Google Alerts. Google Alerts is a free service that allows you to choose certain keywords or phrases that you wish to follow around the web. It gathers instances of these keywords and sends you links to these with either daily, weekly or monthly summaries. Awesome right?

For example. If I wanted to see what people are saying about my business, I would setup a daily summary for the keywords ‘design rush’ or ‘design rush websites’. I would then be able to monitor any comments, reviews or complaints giving me the chance to reply straight away either with a quick thank you, an answer or a solution.

How powerful is that? You couldn’t hire enough people to do this job for you!

You must see the potential this has for your business. If you provide for example a mobile dry cleaning service in Croydon, you should setup a key phrase for ‘dry cleaning in Croydon’ and anyone in asking in forums or writing blog comments asking for this service will be sent to you directly. If you get in first, BOOM!! Easy business!

Head over to Google Alerts and have a go.

If you thought this was useful why not connect via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn

If you are the proud owner of a Facebook page for your business then you are probably already aware of the new profile page layout rolled out by Facebook last month. These new ‘timelines’ provide individuals with great new ways to express themselves and display their individuality and creativity. You may have already uploaded and cropped a new ‘cover photo’ which spreads out across the top of the page.

Well this new exciting feature is now being rolled out to businesses with pages and with it comes the same if not more potential to really set yourself out from the crowd. These changes will roll out for all Facebook pages by 30th March so make sure you get your sorted fast so you can hit the ground running.

Here are some useful links to help you get your Facebook page up and running quickly

http://www.learnfacebookpages.com/

http://www.facebook.com/about/pages

If you’d like to read more about the possibilities of the new Facebook Timeline Brand Pages, Mashable as always have a fantastic article just out

http://mashable.com/2012/02/29/facebook-timeline-brand-pages/