ALYSSA GREGORY

The Small Business Owner's Digital Marketing

• Website

• Represent your brand: Your website should communicate your brand message consistently with a logo, colors and even the tone of your website copy.

• Write a powerful about page: While the specific pages you have on your website will vary, a solid About page can do a lot to attract customers. Make sure you take time to make your About page interesting.

• Start a blog: Consider adding a business blog to your website to boost traffic and build credibility.

• Be mobile-friendly: Your website should be responsive, which means it adjusts to the screen size of different devices such as desktop, tablet, smartphone for a consistent experience.

• Enable social sharing: Let visitors to share your website easily by having social sharing buttons displayed prominently. 

• Content Marketing

• Create a content calendar: Executing a content marketing strategy without a plan is likely to waste a great deal of time. Create a monthly calendar that outlines what content you will create and how you will distribute it.

• Share via social: Your content will be wasted unless you can get the eyes of your target audience on it consistently. Have a plan for how you will share your content on your social media platforms.

• Leverage your content: You can use (and reuse) your content in many different ways in order to get more mileage out of each piece of content. For example, create a series of blog posts on related topics, then combine them together to create an ebook. 

• Consider guest posting: Two-way guest posting—allowing guest posts on your blog and writing for other blogs yourself—is a great way to expand your audience and get more traffic to your website. 

• Social Media

• Choose one to start: Don\'t try to create a presence on every social platform at one time. Explore the benefits of each, then choose one or two that are best for your company and focus your time there.

• Claim your brand on all platforms: While you don\'t need to be active on every social platform there is, you should register your brand name on each network in order to prevent someone else from using it. While you\'re at it, claim your business on Google. 

• Be consistent: When setting up your social profiles, use the same profile image, bio, banners and colors to strengthen your brand presence.  

• Focus on conversation and engagement: Remember that social media is about the conversation, not blasting content and promotions to your audience. Aim to create a thriving community on each social site. 

• Create a social post calendar: You can incorporate your social post schedule into the content calendar you already created, or create a new one that outlines what you will be sharing, where and when.  

• Email Marketing

• Choose the right platform: There are many email marketing platforms to choose from. Pick the one that has the features you need at the price point that works for your business. 

• Create a newsletter template: Most email marketing platforms provide ready-to-use templates that you can easily customize with your logo and company information. Take the time to do this initially and you can reuse the template every time you send a newsletter.

• Go beyond newsletters: While newsletters are a good option, there are many other types of email messages you can use to communicate with your audience. Try a few and see how your email list responds.  

• Actively encourage sign ups: Promote your newsletter in multiple places (website, email signature, social media) to grow your email list. You may also want to offer an incentive for signing up, like a free download or discount, in order to encourage sign ups. 

• Collect and review metrics: Use the analytics tools available in the email marketing platform you chose to see how many people opened your message and clicked on a specific link. 05 Search Engine Optimization 

• Search Engine Optimization 

• Do your research: Get to know how your website and your competitors\' websites are performing first. Use Google and other search engines to see where you rank. 

• Choose the right keywords: Based on your research, choose the most appropriate keywords for your website, blog posts and all of the other content you create. 

• Use SEO tools: There are many free SEO tools available that will help you optimize your content. Pick the tools that are more relevant for your business. 

• Collect and review metrics: Use Google Analytics and the other SEO tools you\'ve selected to watch how your optimized content performs so you can improve it over time.