HOW TO BOOK MORE CLIENTS & SKYROCKET YOUR TRAFFIC
Branding is not your logo. Sure, it includes your logo, but in reality, “branding” is the personality, the style, and the human element behind your business that helps you book clients.
Great branding gets you customers, not because your business “looks pretty”, but because your message and your reputation make people actually want to work with you.
Think about it this way….(we’re about to have a “choose your own adventure moment here). Imagine walking into a coffee shop. As you’re standing in line waiting for your Venti double shot espresso with skim, a woman walks up and gets in line behind you.
Which of the following scenarios would probably make her strike up a conversation with you and stay to chat after the coffee has been delivered?
A. Stand there quietly, checking your phone.
B. Turn around and say “Hello” and start talking about your business.
C. Comment on her super cool marble phone case and ask her if she follows XYZ blogger who just did a whole trend report on marble accessories.
The answer is probably C.
To make connections and earn sales you’ve got to communicate. But no one wants to be sold while their standing in line for coffee. And, If you’re using social media as a sales channel, your audience could very well be standing in line for coffee.
The point I’m trying to make here, is that most people don’t hop on social media intending to be sold on a product or service. We use Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram as forms of entertainment and when someone hijacks that entertainment for a sale, it usually feels uncomfortable and forced. #Unfollow.
THE SUCCESS HACK
Great branding includes your approach to customers and should be the foundations for your “C” scenario.
I’ve had the wonderful opportunity to work with quite a few bloggers and business owners who have all had the same set of issues. “How to I generate traffic?” “How do I make more sales?” “How can I get more referrals from clients?”
The best answer to these questions, with the highest probability of success? Invest in a branding coach.
I think a lot of new business owners are shaken by the term, and dive head first into their businesses with a DIY mindset.
DIY is great, and I’m all about the hustle, but the reality is, a really good branding coach will save you a ton of time, a ton of money, and a ton of frustration while you get your business rolling.
I’m all about the hustle, but the reality is, a good branding coach will save you a ton of time, a ton of money, & a ton of frustration.
— Olivia Derby (@OliviaRDerby) April 28, 2016
When you’re going it alone, you can still make a lot of progress. Don’t be discouraged if you’re not in a position to invest back into your business just yet.
If you’re goal is to build traffic and make sales (um, who’s isn’t?) you’re going to need to break your efforts down into 3 categories.
1. Find more readers
2. Inspire those readers and get them coming back to your blog for more information and ultimately, to purchase products.
3. Setting yourself up to repeat the cycle and grow your business.
Are you ready to make some progress?
Start implementing these tried and true strategies to drive up page traffic and start making more sales right now.
BOOST YOUR PAGE TRAFFIC
1. FIND THE RIGHT AUDIENCE
You can sell your little heart out, but you aren’t going to start making sales if your messages are going to the wrong people.
Take a look at your current customers and your best web traffic to find out what identifies them from everybody else.
Take a look at these 2 graphs of people that visit my Facebook page.
For me, Facebook is one of my best traffic drivers. I get a ton of people that find my site through Facebook groups, and I know from experience, that the people who follow me on Facebook have a really high likelihood of becoming my customers.
The first graph shows people who have seen my posts, and the second shows people that engage with my posts. According to the first graph, my target market is men and women between ages 25-34.
This is TOTALLY wrong. And, it just goes to show you that you gotta do your homework as a business owner if you’re going to get the results you’re hoping for.
In reality, the people who actually enjoy my content and ultimately turn into customers are better represented by the second graph, which shows the demographics of users that have engaged with my posts.
This paints a much better picture. Women between 25 and 44.
Take a few minutes and browse through the analytics available to you with Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google Analytics, or whatever else you’ve got installed on your pages.
To make it easy to identify who exactly is engaging with your content, I created this nice little worksheet that guides you through the process of building a target market profile.
Get The Free Worksheet Here
Who is actually engaging with your content? If it’s not who you expected, refresh your content to start talking to those people specifically.
Include references to lifestyle markers in your content. If your audience is married, reference the ups and downs of married life. If your audience has children, get real about the impact of babies on productivity. If your audience speaks a different first language, start translating your posts.
Talk to the right people, and more of the right people will find you.
2. FOCUS YOUR EFFORTS ON THE RIGHT CHANNELS TO BOOK CLIENTS
Now that you know WHO you should be talking to, stop wasting your time on the platforms where they don’t hang out.
Use the tools at your disposal to find out where your readers live on the web. Check out which Facebook groups they’re in, which hashtags they’re watching, and what boards they follow.
If your audience is on Instagram BIG TIME and your Facebook page looks like a wasteland, knock that Facebook shit off your to-do list and put your time into Instagram.
Part of being a business owner is figuring out how to use the hours that you have to your biggest advantage.
I once had a boss who would offer up the saying “work smarter, not harder” almost every day. He was right. Figure out how to outsmart the limits on your 24 hour day.
Check out this post for a quick tutorial on how to find out where your target market hangs out.
3. STAND OUT FROM THE CROWD
Humans are visual. A clean, well designed logo and brand style will attract people to your site and stand out from the noise on social media.
Update your blog and branding with something that invites users into your content, and promises a high quality experience right from the first impression.
I’m sure you know why you should have a gorgeous logo and all that, so I’m going to skip the preachy lesson.
What you might not realize though, is that your audience uses their eyes to make decisions. Pinterest is a huge HUGE HUGGEEEE traffic opportunity for most bloggers, and if your pins are “just ok” they’re going to get lost in the shuffle of the millions of images that are posted every day.
Pinterest will give good images and good pins better treatment over bad ones, and you’re actively giving up traffic by producing content with less than stellar style.
You can check out this post on building an awesome style or
you can hire me to build your brand. Click here to check out the options for working with me.
4. USE THE RIGHT KEYWORDS IN YOUR MESSAGING & GET FOUND ON GOOGLE AND PINTEREST
The acronym “SEO” seriously scares a lot of people. Scary or not, if you want to start attracting big traffic, you’ve got to make friends with the Google bots.
In reality, Search Engine Optimization is not all that hard. If you’re producing awesome content search engines will be good to you. Epic content should be your first priority.
Get a handle on your organic search traffic by infusing keywords into your messaging in both your blog content, and your social media posts.
If you haven’t already, download the Yoast SEO plug-in for wordpress and start using it.
Go through each one of your posts and work through the content analysis so that you are stacking up the green lights.
Once that is done, head on over to the Google Keyword Planner and make a list of the top 10 keywords you should be using throughout your marketing.
Include your keywords in a conversational way in each of your blog articles and social media posts. Especially, in the descriptions of your Pins on Pinterest.
Pinterest, like Google, is a search engine. When you support your Pins with great, highly searched for keywords, you will start showing up on more feeds, and collecting the traffic that comes with more exposure.
You already know that you need to be creating stellar content. So go create some incredible, life changing content, and then start driving traffic to it with these tips that you can implement right now.