How To Get More Customers | Heaviside Group - Heaviside Group

How To Get More Customers

Here we are going to discuss 12 proven ideas for attracting more customers to your site.

The popularity of the latest viral videos and content in social media may be short-lived, but some strategies in attracting new customers to a website are something that never goes out of style.

Ultimately you want to make your site speak to your target customers and build value in your products and services to turn them into loyal customers.

Read this entry as we are going to share 12 proven ideas for attracting new clients to your site and capitalize on these approaches as they will be as effective in 5 years\' time as they are now.

Focus On Creating Irresistible Content

Do bear in mind that your efforts of promoting your site in the hopes of building a thriving customer base will be useless if your content is uninviting. After all, incredible content can serve as one of the best marketing tools in promoting your site as well as the products and/or services you are offering. So don\'t underestimate the power of compelling content.

Here are some tips that we can share so you can create gripping content:

  1. If you\'re promoting a product for your small business, have to courage to say what others might not want to say. Chances are, other people may also be thinking about it and just waiting for someone who is brave enough to share their similar thoughts and opinions. And as a result, online users will love you for doing this and are more inclined to become your customers in your new business.
  2. Write epic content all the time. This content marketing strategy can be done by doing thorough research about the topic you are going to write and putting yourself in the shoes of your target market so you can write something that they want to read about.
  3. Don\'t forget to emphasize the fact why your content is relevant. In short, make a case why your audience, or even the whole world for the matter, will even bother to take time and hear your thoughts.
  4. Don\'t just use words, be creative and make use of other media like images, infographics, audio, and video to stress out the main idea that you want to share to your audience.
  5. Write something of VALUE or something that your audience can learn from regardless if they are new customers or online business owners like you.
  6. And don\'t just write something valuable for you also have to make sure that it will be interesting enough to be noticed by top search engine sites like Google and good enough to persuade your readers to share it with other people through word-of-mouth.
  7. Interview some famous and interesting personalities (in relation to your niche) as this will also build on your site\'s popularity and authority.

Make A Clear Case Of What You Are Trying To Communicate

When writing content, be sure that it answers this specific question quickly and compellingly: \"Why should someone spend time visiting my site and read my content instead of other sites from my niche?\"

Focus on creating a unique selling point in emphasizing your case. If you do not have a USP, then start learning more about this in detail.

Leverage Other Channels For Exposure

Writing compelling content isn\'t enough, you have to be everywhere! So try to learn more about how you can make use of social media platforms to promote your site\'s content. Likewise, try to reach out to other sites with similar niche and ask if you write guest post articles for these online business owners. This is one of the most underused strategies for attracting more customers into your site.

In addition, you can also make online videos about your content and publish them on social sites like YouTube and create a podcast to strengthen your site\'s authority. You can also use digital marketing to help get your content out there.

Make Them Come Back For More

The ideal client is the one who is always engaged. So another way for attracting more potential customers and increase conversions is by getting these people to subscribe to your site and explain to them the benefits they will get for hitting the \"subscribe\" button. This way, they will receive follow up updates for recently published contents. Not only that, but you also have to create a special \"subscriber-only\" content which can only be accessed by those people who have subscribed to create an element of excitement and to encourage others to subscribe as well. Local businesses might offer coupons or free samples of new products.

Be sure to combine this strategy along with your social media efforts for better results.

Work On A Prettier And More Functional Design For Your Website

Apart from having great content, website design matters too! After all, online users are more inclined to visit a superb-looking site rather than spending time on a crappy-looking one. So make it a point to work also on the overall design and function to reduce the bounce rate.

And speaking about function, be sure to design with function. Be helpful and know more about what your target audience needs and implement this in your web design.

Moreover, make it easy for your customer base to share your content to other people by using a plugin such as Digg Digg, a WordPress sharing plugin that allows users to share blog contents and any other contents to online users.

Use Social Proof

New customers are always looking for some sort of validation from other people before visiting a website and trying out the products or services that you offer. In short, these potential customers are looking for more clues IF your site is worth visiting or not. So make sure to use social proof to verify your site\'s legitimacy and value by:

  1. Making a logo - This is necessary since a logo helps reveal your site\'s identity, it distinguishes your site from the competition, it can be easily recognized everywhere even at first glance, it facilitates brand loyalty, and most importantly it helps in attracting more customers into your site.
  2. Posting testimonials of your past customers - Testimonials are always recommended because they promote your website without having the usual strong sales pitch, but rather on the unbiased opinions of both the positive and negative kind to establish trust. In other words, you are using real people to establish online credibility and to promote your products and/or services to potential customers.
  3. Using terms like \"as seen in\" - And lastly, having similar terms like this in your website (specifically at the home page) can also boost your site\'s credibility because it only shows that you have what it takes to be noticed by other authoritative websites like Google, Yahoo!, Youtube, and etc.

Practice Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Surely you may have heard about this over and over again, but in case you\'re not really familiar about what SEO is it\'s the process of optimizing website contents so it will gain good rankings on top search engines like Google.

SEO involves an intricate process. And your efforts in optimizing your content should also be constantly updated in order to adhere to the current ranking metrics set by Google. Here are some tips we can share just to make sure you are following the correct SEO guidelines as set by Google analytics:

Using the right keywords - As a small business owner who is running an online website, you must be able to recognize the fact that online contents are ranked based on the specific keywords used. Sure you may be able to write amazing articles, but how will it be able to reach your target market they won\'t be able to find it using Google just because you failed to use the right keywords?

So the best way of solving this is by doing keyword research and use Google Keyword Tool. This way, you will be able to see a list of keywords which are recommended to use.

In case you are still in a blur of how this works, here\'s a trick that we can share to you: first, find a keyword that has something to do with your niche. Then, determine its popularity, keyword density (how frequently it\'s being used by other sites - the less the better) and search volume (how often it\'s being searched in Google). Once all of these details are evaluated, write content based on the keyword you have selected. Follow this standard in inserting keywords in a content:

  • The keyword must be included at the title preferably, at the first portion of the title.
  • The keyword must be inserted in the first paragraph.
  • The keyword must also be inserted in the first heading (optional).
  • The primary keyword should be mentioned at least 2-3 times and secondary keyword (if any) should be mentioned at least 3-5 times for every 500-word content.
    Trust us when we say you\'ll have a better chance of getting good rankings in Google if you follow this technique.

Make sure your website is Google-friendly by inserting a sitemap on one of your web pages and installing an SEO plugin such as All In One SEO Pack, Yoast SEO, and the likes to help you in your SEO marketing efforts.

Aside from that, be sure to register to Google Webmaster Tools to so you can gain access to tools that provide helpful data such as links, keywords, crawl errors, and more, as well as configuration features to help optimize your entire website and its contents. GWT also allows you to detect any threats that might infect and compromise the security of your website.

Link-building is also necessary for attracting more customers into your site, but focus more on optimized content - Having a robust link-building strategy is also crucial for success. And by link-building, we mean:

  • Having 2-3 internal links (links going to other pages in your site) for every 500-700 word content.
  • Having 2-3 external links (links going to other relevant websites or sources) for every 500-700 word content.
  • Externally linking to authoritative sites such as Wikipedia to build reputation and authority.
    And while having this tactic is also crucial for your marketing efforts, you must focus more on creating optimized content at all times to have long-term success.

Optimize by working on your site\'s speed - The speed of your website particularly, the loading time is also a key factor in getting into the first place of the search results. As per Google Analytics, a site\'s load speed must be under 3 seconds to prevent bound rate or the rate in which a user will leave the site immediately due to slow page load speed.

We recommend that you do these things to make your website load quickly:

  • Avoid using large sized images.
  • Installing plugins that will help your site to load faster.
  • Installing a caching plugin to clear the cache immediately.
  • Consider moving to a much quicker web host.

Be mindful of the latest updates- This is to ensure that your SEO efforts with coincide with the search engine metrics at all times. And most importantly, avoid having duplicate contents in your website and NEVER publish plagiarized articles because you will be penalized by Google if you don\'t include these in your SEO strategy for attracting more customers into your site, which can affect your search rankings.

Borrow What Works

As previously mentioned, plagiarizing contents from other sources is a big \"no-no\", but that doesn\'t mean you can\'t check out your competition and \"replicate\" the things that worked for them and use it to your own advantage.

Though this may seem unethical, this is how the game works especially when lots of sites are battling to get that ever coveted spot in the first page of the search rankings. If professional basketball teams are constantly scouting their opponents to look for ways to beat them, then you should do the same to stay ahead of the competition.

Yes, innovation is important. But making use of proven formulas from established sites is always clever and effective. So don\'t shy out from borrowing strategies that you\'ve seen work. To be specific:

  • Try to determine the way your competition are bringing visitors into their website and come up with a similar idea in attracting more customers into your site.
  • Learn more about the way their content is optimized.
  • Know more about the kind of marketing strategies they are using to promote their products and services.
  • Determine other proven techniques that worked for them.
    Remember, you don\'t have to copy directly. Just learn from them and tweak things a bit to accommodate your current customers as well as your needs.

Likewise, try to look into your previous successes by checking out some old contents that were able to get noticed and think about the strategies you\'ve used why you end up having that result. Don\'t be afraid to use tactics that work until something new comes up.

Furthermore, determine past content behaviors and use it to forecast future results.

Organize Your Team\'s Duties

Small business owners like you must know how to properly delegate duties to your employees. If you have a team of bloggers, you can organize a project where each writer will write on a central theme and each article will be linked to form a content series.

Aside from that, you can also start a social media promotion by inviting reputable individuals from your field of interest and invite them to submit content about your product or service so that subscribers can like, share, tweet, etc. You can do this using Google Groups for free.

Launch Your Product/Service

Launching products or services that you are offering can actually create a buzz that will resonate to the entire online community and pave a way in attracting more customers into your site. This is because product or service launching can lead to interview requests, partnership inquiries, link requests from blogs of a similar niche, and most importantly earning the respect of your colleagues. And since this is an income-generating strategy, we recommend that you consider this as a top priority.

Consider Offering An Affiliate Program

Try to come up with an affiliate program where you can pay for commissions to those who will refer potential customers to your product/service. Set up a meeting with these affiliates before your launch your product/service and see what you can do to help them with content, webinars, interviews, and other tactics that will generate sales.

Make Friends With Influential People

And lastly, try to connect with other great business owners and see if they can link to your site. Likewise, tap into some social influencers that are related to your niche and see if they can make a review out of the product or service that you are offering. These are some of the best ways to get noticed because influential people will always have the power to drive interest.

Final Thoughts

And that\'s about it. Hopefully, you have learned something from the 12 proven ideas for attracting more customers into your website that we have shared here and implement these techniques from this day forward. Act fast and take action. After all, this is all you need to do to achieve the kind of success you wish to have to for your business.