Rapid Business Growth’s Blog

Have you spent money on a website but aren’t seeing the benefits?  Do you need more visitors to your online shopfront?

The key to getting on traffic to your website is having your website on the front page of search engines.  Studies show that surfers are notorious impatient and while they are highly motivated, they have a very short attention span.  If their interest is not grabbed immediately by you, they will wander off to whatever topic shouts the loudest at them.  

So how do you get high up the rankings?  Well the first step is see where you sit right now.  There are various services to check your page ranking and while you are there try a few of your competitors websites also.  So where do you sit? Best in class?  Midway? or Tailend Charlie?  Store these results and check back often until you get a decent feeling for how you are perceived.  If you are number 1 and stay there - congratulations.  You are winning the a big share of business that comes via the web. 

For everybody else you now have a target to beat.  One very important element in Search Engine Rankings is the number and quality of the inbound links to your website.  The more and better links you have the higher your page ranking.  So the second step is to look at your own inbound links and your top competitor.   Check it out and take note of who is linking to your top competitor and not to you.  Repeat this for all your competitors who have a higher Page ranking than you.  

Now you have a readymade list of websites to contact to seek reciprocal links! Just send them an e-mail and ask for a link.  What is the worst thing that can happen, they say no?  Why do they link to your competitor and not to you?  Perhaps you should seek links from their competitors? In other cases you will see that links are from directories who will all have a subscribe mechanism, which you can also use. 

In this way you can start pushing yourself up the page rankings and getting to the top of the search engines.  There are a few other tricks such as articles like this one, blogging, social book marking that will be the subject of future articles.

For help and assistance with this or for any of your marketing needs, please give me a call. I’m very happy to discuss how we could help you further.
Best wishes
Mike Spratt

www.rapidbusinessgrowth.ie
Phone: +353 1 491 3328

In this time of economic uncertainty in Dublin, many business will go under.  That is regrettable but an essential part of the capitalist system.  Capital and other resources need to be recycled into newer and more viable ventures.  So much for the big sanctimonious picture, you are probably thinking how do I keep my business from being yet another statistic?

The answer is to innovate!  Pure and simple.  People are still buying products and services and if you can make your offer standout you will get business.  You can innovate on quality or cost or a host of other factors to appeal to any specific target market.  Just follow these 4 steps:

1              Study your target market, their behaviours, attitudes, like dislikes etc ask questions!

2              Decide how you can match one or more of their wants or needs

3              Test Market it to them

4              Return to step 1 and REFINE

You need to constantly refine your offering because customers now have the whip hand.  They aren’t begging for your product or service anymore!  You need to convince them to buy your offering from a host of “me to” offerings.

For help and assistance with this or for any of your marketing needs, please give me a call. I’m very happy to discuss how we could help you further.
Best wishes
Mike Spratt

www.rapidbusinessgrowth.ie
+353 1 491 3328

Have you ever wondered what amount you should set aside for marketing each year to grow your business?

How do you know what the optimum amount is? As an Marketing specialist, I’m often asked this question by startup and small business owners.

So what’s the answer? Whilst many business owners are looking for an answer such as €5000 or 10% of sales, I think this completely misses the point.

I believe the answer is…

You should not put a limit on your marketing budget

Let me explain. Whenever you undertake any marketing activity, you need to know whether you make a profit or not on that activity. The only way to do that is to measure the results of the marketing.

To do this you need to undertake direct response marketing as opposed to purely brand marketing. For small business especially it is crucial to ensure money spent on marketing is not wasted. The best way to do this is to record the results of any marketing activity, whether that be direct sales letters, advertising, telemarketing, email marketing, pay per click campaigns, seminars or whatever.

As a minimum, you need to know…

•             The cost of the marketing activity

•             The sales generated from that marketing activity

•             The profit made from those sales

And if you make more from the marketing than it costs you, it makes sense to continue spending on that marketing activity until it stops making you a profit. You’ll of course know when this is because you are measuring your results.

By testing on a small scale to start with, you’ll never lose too much money if it doesn’t work, but when it does work, if you gradually increase your spend on this particular activity, you should continue to do so until it no longer makes you a profit. It doesn’t matter how much you spend, as long as you make a profit, it makes sense to continue to invest in the marketing.

And don’t stop at just one marketing activity. Test another marketing activity and if that makes a profit continue with that in the same way. Eventually, the aim is to have multiple marketing activities. This is the key to exponential business growth. Not being reliant on one activity, means you continue to grow even when one stops working.

For help and assistance with this or for any of your marketing needs, please give me a call. I’m very happy to discuss with you how we could help you further.without charge!
Best wishes

Mike Spratt

www.rapidbusinessgrowth.ie
+353 1 491 3328