Digital Archives - Page 2 of 5

Insurance Policies for Independent Contractors

First of all, getting sick, hurt, or being sued is something that no one wants to happen. However, in business and life, this stuff does happen. That’s why insurance is a necessity.

Paying your medical bills out of pocket is always a painful job. For employees, this is almost always solved by using company insurance. As an independent contractor, you are the company. This is where finding a solid policy comes into the picture. A good policy can save your business and your health.

There are three policies for the self-employed and independent contractors that are cost-effective and budget friendly:

1. Health Insurance Exchange Plans: This plan was designed to meet with the requirements of the Affordable Care Act. Under this act, individuals, families, small business owners and freelancers can purchase a customized and affordable health package.

The most important part of this plan is the provision of subsidy in cases where the independent contractors’ total taxable income is between 122% to 400% of the federal poverty level. This subsidy will reduce your premium amount up to 10% of your gross income.

And, you are free to cancel or amend this plan at any time without any additional costs or penalty.

2. National Association of Health Underwriters (NAHU): This association employs more than 100,000 agents in the USA. These agents guide you to select the best plan according to your needs and budget. NAHU provides services to everyone from Fortune-500 companies to small business owners and the self-employed. With NAHU, you can enjoy different benefits and savings, personal development & training, user-friendly apps and even wellness programs.

3. eHealth Insurance: eHealth insurance is one of the best health insurance solutions available for independent contractors. On the eHealth Insurance web portal, you can compare prices and benefits of the many different health plans available. There are more than 13,000 health insurance plans available on the site. In addition, more than 200 licensed registered agents are also available. Most noteworthy, this is helpful because researching thousands of plans, all with their details, can be time consuming.

Furthermore, health insurance plans do not cover diseases like cancer, diabetes and in addition, heart attacks. This makes eHealth Insurance a viable option mostly for routine medical checkups.

March 8, 2017/by chris

Culture, Digital, Marketing

Top 3 Tasks to Outsource for Your Small Business

Retaliate1st grew through hard work both internally and externally. We spent most of our first year using freelancers and a team we had to outsource to. We wanted to share some of the critical elements we chose to outsource.

Bookkeeping and Invoicing

Nothing can eat up the time of a small business owner quite like keeping the books, crunching the numbers, and invoicing.

Chances are you started your business because you had a talent or passion for your product or service. Unless that passion was accounting, hand the books to someone else.

As you grow, keeping the books will only become more complicated and time consuming. Instead of letting record keeping eat up a huge percentage of the time you could be putting into pulling the big levers on your business, outsource the task to a CPA. If you need help with the day-to-day numbers, tracking, and invoicing, you can easily find and train an employee or intern to do this for you.

Graphic Design and Your Website

If there’s one area where small business and solo entrepreneurs make a huge mistake it’s in doing their own graphic design and website building.

Learning a “little about SEO and websites” will give your business a site that looks terrible, is extremely time consuming to build, generates no sales, and projects a very unprofessional image.
Free site creators give you a website that looks like it was made for free.

Doing your own HTML or CSS usually looks like an amateur did the site… at best. Remember that designers and developers go to college for 4+ years to learn coding. This is not something you can become an expert in by reading a For Dummies book over the weekend.

Doing your own graphic design in Photoshop or Paint will take time and give your ads, brochures, and other marketing materials an unpolished, unprofessional look.

We’ve all seen these pieces. Someone is trying to sell us a high-end product (like a new car) and their flyer features a blurry, askew image, hovering above a mass of text set in huge block letters in all caps (and in multiple colors).

Do you want your clients and customers to see your business as being a two-bit amateur operation? If you sell services or quality products, hire someone to do your site and your graphic design.

Don’t Outsource To Family

And no, getting your nephew who “knows all that computer stuff” to do your site is not the answer.

Your business website is part of your physical business. It’s no different than building a brick-and-mortar property. Would you hire someone to build a structure simply because they know how to use a shovel?

You can find amazingly high quality designers overseas through outsource sites like Upwork and Elance. They work cheap, they’re fast, they’re incredibly effective.

And, using their services allows you to keep a designer “on staff” without having to pay a full-time employee.

You’ll need to do some research and try different designers before bringing one on to do a big project like your website.

Ask for their portfolio and references
Give them a small task to start (a logo, label for a new product, a one-sheet flyer)
Then, find a back-up designer. Having two designers at your disposal is always a good idea for emergency situations (you have to present something to a new client by tomorrow morning and you just found out about it). If one isn’t available, you have your back up read to roll.

Reception and Appointment Setting

IF you are selling products, you may be able to hire a virtual assistant to hire your phone calls and email responses.

Same goes for appointment setting.

Do you want to have to find the leads, set them yourself, then go sell them?

Do you want to be on the phone all day because your customer’s delivery arrived at 5:15pm when the tracking told them it’d get there at 5:00?

If you’re uncomfortable going virtual, hire someone to do this for you. You may even be ablet o score an intern. There are a lot of talented people looking for work. Put in some effort to find someone competent to handle your appointments, customer service calls, and general reception. This will not only free you up to do more important tasks, but it projects a highly professional image for your business.

January 29, 2017/by chris

Digital, Marketing, SEM, SEO

How to Get Your Site Featured in Google’s Snippet

How Do You Get Your Site Featured in Google’s Snippet?

Getting to the top of Google’s search pages is no longer enough to dominate your completion. While good SEO keeps your site on the first page, and well-written ads keep you atop the PPC results, there is a newcomer in the search world: Snippets

Snippets

Google wants to help searchers. It’s what launched them to become the dominant search engine that they are today. Anyone who remembers the frustrating search results on Yahoo, Lycos, or Dogpile will attest that Google simply delivers better search results.

With mobile and “question” searches rising, Google has changed the game again.

In almost any search you’re now bound to find a snippet of info, often enumerated, in a small box between the final PPC ad and the first organic listing. Below is the snippet that appears for the search “How to Get More Leads:”

Snippets Are Quick Answers

Google puts up snippets with the best info available. This allows users to get the answers they’re looking for without clicking the link. However, since the snippets tend to display only part of the info, the links inside of the snippet box tend to be clicked a lot.

Google can source simple, direct answers from their own knowledge base.
But, most business or product related queries are sourced from third party sites, i.e., your web site.

Imagine the potential traffic that would result in an SEO strategy that lands you in the top 3 of the PPC ads, with a featured snippet, and then the top organic search result.

How to Get a Featured Snippet

The problem is that getting your site featured isn’t easy. But, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. And, with snippet results being so new, we’re not even exactly sure how Google pulls the info. Or, if they will rotate results in the future.

But, we can speculate and improve our business sites so that we have the best possible chance of being featured. At worst, you’ll improve the content of your site and make your customers very happy. An informative, easy-to-read site will almost always bring in more leads, clients, and sales.

Step 1:

SearchEngineLand recommends the following tactic for your first step:

Identify a common, simple question related to your market area. Provide a clear and direct answer to the question. Offer value added info beyond the direct answer. Make it easy for users (and Google) to find the information

The advice is solid. Their answer is actually the featured snippet for the search “how to get a featured snippet.”

Step 2:

Answer Questions

Research the most asked questions about your product, service, or industry. Create pages and blog posts that answer this question.

Be direct

– title pages and blogs with the exact question wording. Then, answer the query with as much info as needed. Use numbered lists and bullet points.

Break up info to make it both easier for your customer to absorb (or skim), and for Google to pull the best bits.

Step 3

Make your snippet-worthy information easy to find

This requires some basic SEO housekeeping:

Giving each article or blog a strong title that uses the question
Using the question and its variation in the content
Adding pictures or video, with proper tagging, as needed
Over deliver on info. Don’t skimp on the answer. You can provide long copy while also using bullets and numbered lists.

January 29, 2017/by chris

Culture, Digital, Marketing, Website

Do You Really Want More Clients and Customers?

If you’re running a small business, or are a solo entrepreneur, you probably spend much of your time thinking about how great life would be if you could only get a few more clients, get a few more customers, or land that one big account.

But, before you go big time, you should take a moment to make sure you’re ready to scale your small business up.

From Barley in Business to Busty to Death

It happens all the time.

A small business is doing ok, but the cash flow isn’t exactly overwhelming. When you run an online or service based business, especially if you’re running the show alone or with a small group, this can be a frustrating time.

Then, all the work, all the banging your head against the wall, and all of the planning takes a turn. You hit the tipping point. Whatever you want to call it, your business goes from scraping by to breaking through.

Now, it doesn’t have to be breaking through to super-stardom. Even if your business grows 20% suddenly, that can translate to a lot of extra income.

And a lot of extra work.

Are You Ready to Grow Your Business?

Take a minute to assess your current work load, productivity, and efficiency.

If you have a few customers or clients and you’re behind on orders or fulfilling service agreements, you’re probably not ready to grow. Getting more contracts might help your bank account, but it will not magically cure your productivity issues.

However, if you are consistently knocking your work load out of the park, you might be ready. If you work with a team, make sure everyone is on board. Having a key employee bail during a growth surge can leave you and your customers frustrated.

Think Big

When you’re ready to grow, start thinking big. If your firm normally handles 10 clients per month, or 20-customers per week, start to think about how it will be to take care of 100 clients a month or 200 customers. Then, think a little bigger.

This isn’t an exercise in daydreaming. It’s actually part of the planning process. If you’ve planned how you’ll handle the extra customers, you’ll be ready when it happens. Sure, no plan is fool-proof, but you’ll be in a much better position if you know where you’re going vs winging it, failing, then losing your new customers.

Find Financing

If you’ve bootstrapped so far, it may be time to consider financing or investors.

If you’re a solo-business, this can be intimidating. But, if you want to jump to the next level (and the levels beyond), finding funding may be necessary.

Before you panic and lose your nerve on this one, understand that funding can mean as little as a few thousand dollars to invest in equipment, marketing, or anything that will help you service more customers.

Concentrate on What You Do Best

The E-Myth by Michael Gerber talks a lot about how most entrepreneurs have one area of expertise, i.e., the baker who opens a bakery. But, most small business owners don’t just do the baking.

They do the baking, the ordering, the marketing, the cash register, the clean-up, and the book.

When you’re ready to scale, you’re ready to hand off some of these jobs. Stick to baking and you’ll have the best baked goods in town. Leave the marketing to a marketer, the books to your accountant (or bookkeeper), and the minutia to your employees.

January 29, 2017/by chris

Content, Digital, Marketing, Social Media

3 Ways to Use Pinterest to Increase Leads and Sales

Studies show that Pinterest is one of the fastest growing social media sites in the world. Almost 3,500 pins are posted every minute. And, not only does Pinterest have a huge, active audience, it also has consumers with a buyer’s mindset:

They’re 10% more likely to buy than users that come from other social media sites
Pinterest drives more than 300% revenue per click than Twitter, and nearly 30% more than Facebook

So, why aren’t more of use utilizing Pinterest as a lead and sale generation source? Usually it is a misunderstanding of the power of Pinterest.

How To Use Pinterest For Lead Generation

Profit from User Generated Content

Some clothing retailers are putting user generated content to great use by utilizing contests. Before and after’s, or “favorite products” for the holidays.

Users take pics, turn them into pins, and share them on their boards along with their email address.

One company saw a 23% increase in re-pins, and that led to an increase of 44% in revenue per click

Pins as Social Proof

Your business can never build too much credibility online. Reviews, testimonials, and awards go a long way to helping your business’ reputation.

But, what’s even more powerful is user generated content.

Many companies are using pins of their customers using or wearing their favorite products. What a beautiful way to use “live action” testimonials of people just like you…

The company then re-pins, using a “shop now” call to action. This has led to click increases of 25% or more.

Encourage your customers to pin pics or videos of themselves using your products or enjoying your services. This is powerful social proof, and allows your product to be displayed in the real world, by real people.

Reward Referrals

Create custom welcome messages for traffic that you drive to your Pinterest home page.

Offer discounts, coupons, free shipping, free estimates, etc. to reward referral traffic.

This gives you a great opportunity to make that new traffic stick, and to increase opt-ins and follows.

Plus, giving things away for free is still one of the most powerful ways to create trust and loyalty in your customer base.

October 22, 2016/by chris

Creative, Digital, Marketing, Mobile, Social Media

How To Use Instagram For Lead Generation

Instagram is still considered by many in the pay-per-click marketing word, to be the new kid on the block. With newness comes a bit of fear, so many small and medium businesses have been hesitant to stray from using only Google and Facebook PPC.

But, it can be a huge lead booster if utilized properly. Here’s why?

Using Instagram To Create Leads For Your Business

Visual Marketing is a Dominant Force

Content marketing rules, and will continue to be the most useful form of marketing for years to come. As the internet becomes more available in non-PC forms, phones, tablets, watches, etc., the need to turn to non-text content will be essential.

You can do this with visual content, and Instagram is the perfect place to put your best visuals to work.

Simply, visual attractiveness in an ad or in any piece of content that has the goal of increasing conversions, leads to more opt-ins, engagement, leads, and sales.

It will also get you more shares, and that increases each campaign’s reach exponentially at no cost to you.

Using high-quality, bright pictures, you draw the attention of your followers, and can help lead them on the path to purchase.

Instagram Videos

Now with videos in the Instagram feed, you can really skyrocket your leads and sales through the social media site. Video content on Instagram gets more views, shares, and likes. It stops scrollers in their path. Once you become known for putting out good video, you’ll be well on your wall to dominating your market online.

Young, Money-Spending Graphics

In Television, for years the most coveted demographic was 18 – 54 year old males.

Now, it’s men and women 18 – 34 (with 18 – 54 being not far behind). Instagram is custom made, literally, for those in that demographic. Build a strong Instagram following, and you’ll be tapping into the most lucrative market in the world.

Build Brand Awareness

Instagram allows you to use visual content to reach more customers. Facebook is similar in this respect, but Instagram actually gets more shares.

Post a good video or picture, and promote it. Your target audience sees the cool content, wants to show their friends, so they like and share it. Now, for the price to reach your target audience, you’ve reached them plus the friends they’ve shared with. It extends the life of your ads, exposes your products, services, and your brand to a large, warm-audience. This is key for growing your business, especially if you don’t have an unlimited ad-buy budget.

October 22, 2016/by chris

Creative, Digital, Marketing, SEM, SEO, Website

The 6 Best Extensions for Your Site’s SEO and Adwords

SEO is the perfect tactic to optimize to drive free traffic to your website. While organic traffic is fantastic and can be created through optimizing web pages, this organic traffic can be amplified by using SEO extensions. Here Retaliate1st list our favorite SEO extensions to boost your organic traffic.

The 6 Best Extensions for Your Site’s SEO and Adwords

Google Tag Assistant

IF you are running your company’s SEO without help from a professional firm, or if you just want to check up on your SEO investment, Tag Assistant can help you verity that Adwords and Analytics are up and running properly. The best part about this extension is that with one click it lays out everything you need to see without digging around in the minuteau of Adwords (and it’s oft-lugubrious interface) or analytics.

Builtwith

Builtwith works with Google Chrome, and Is an excellent way to see what your competitors are up to by letting you know what they’re using to build their site. You can see

PageRank for Firefox

This is a great tool for evaluating other sites when it comes to building links, guest posting, forming joint ventures, etc. The best part is, you don’t have to dig at all – the site’s Page Rank is displayed right in the toolbar at the top of your browser.

Further SEO Extensions

Majestic SEO Backlink Analyizer

If linking building is part of your SEO strategy, you need to make sure those links are not coming from bad neighborhoods. Further, you want the best quality links possible to your site. You can check out anchor text, site reputation, as well as Page Rank and a few other key indicators.

Boomerang

This isn’t so much for SEO as it is a productivity tool. Boomerang for Gmail allows you to schedule emails to be sent later, schedule follow ups. IF you are dealing with multiple clients, and working with people in different time zones, this tool is a life saver. No more worrying that you’re emailing your Japanese clients at 4am Tokyo time… just schedule the emails to hit their offices during work hours. This can cut down on a lot of back and forth.

For any sales pro, follow ups are essential. Boomerang will do all of these for you.

Keywords Everywhere

This Chome extension can cut down on your keyword research time dramatically. When you search something in Google, it will display the volume of searches for this term and gives you the average cost per click for that keyword or phrase. This will help you cut out a lot of groundwork when searching for perfect keywords and phrases, and you’ll get a quick idea of what you’ll need to invest in Adwords to make them work for you.

October 15, 2016/by chris

Creative, Digital, Marketing, SEM, Social Media, Website

Buying Facebook Ads Directly

Facebook is the great advertising platform of our time. Were once television ads and billboard ads were the go to platforms for advertisers, they have now lost ground to Facebook ads. Retaliate1st discuss the reasons why you should focus on this platform for your advertising.

Customers Can Buy from You Without Leaving Facebook

This is huge for both your business, where can sell directly to a warm audience that you’ve built a strong relationship with, and for Facebook, which can help businesses sell more products, buy more ads, and have the whole thing take place on Facebook’s platform, without having users click away from the social media giant.

It works by giving your customers the option to buy products in Facebook messenger. If they’ve already filled in their Name, address, phone number, etc. for their profile, all they have to do is click “pay.” If not, they can do so at point of purchase.

Payments will go through PayPal or Stripe. At this point, these are the only two usable payment platforms, and you can only sell in the U.S. However, both of these rules will likely change as the program grows.

If you’ve ever fretted about the transition your customers make between Facebook and your landing or sales pages, now you don’t have to worry. If you crafted a great ad or promoted post, your customer can now buy with one click.

How to Sell In Messenger

This will take some finesse. Facebook is allowing click from ads in the newsfeed to be sent directly to messenger now. This is a slow roll-out, but it will take off soon enough. Obviously, some customers will be put off by having their messenger blow up with ads, but it seems Facebook will allow consumers the ability to choose who they receive ad messages from.

Once there, your customer can chat with a “sales bot” or they can buy direct. And, in a further move toward utilizing similar buy-sharing options as Amazon, Facebook will allow your customer to send the ad copy to their friends if they need help deciding between multiple products. So, if your customer can’t decide between the wing-tips and the quarter-brogues, they can now share it with their friends.

This helps them take the plunge and make the purchase, and it exposed your products to an even larger pool of warm prospects.

October 15, 2016/by chris

Creative, Digital, Marketing, Social Media

Boosting Leads Through Twitter Ads

Facebook and Instagram get the most attention when it comes to social media pay per click advertising. But, don’t neglect Twitter; it can be a great source of new leads and sales.

If, you do it the right way…

What’s a Twitter Follower Worth

The first thing to figure out is what is a follower worth to you? “Follower” campaigns are the most popular, and cheapest ads to run on Twitter.

But, don’t blow your budget attracting followers until you run the numbers and figure out what a follower is worth. This can be tricky, as the metrics are not as helpful as they are on Facebook or Google. So, you’ll need to figure out the best method to track sales and legitimate leads that came directly from your followers.

This will look a lot like figuring out the lifetime value of a client, because that’s exactly what you’re doing. Try to plan for the long term when running follower campaigns, and not focusing so much on cost per click and trading clicks for dollars. In this case, the dollars will come later. If you can figure how many, you’ll know how much to invest.

Advantages to Twitter follower campaigns? Like Facebook, Twitter allows you to be very specific in your targeting – age, location, sex, interests, etc.

Disadvantages – if you don’t do the math first, you can end up overspending for followers that don’t buy from you.

Traditional Twitter Ads

You can also use Twitter ads to drive traffic and conversions.

The interface for ads is much like Facebook, so if you’ve used Facebook ads, you’ll have an advantage here. IF not, the program is not difficult to master. It’s a matter of targeting a very specific audience according to the parameters that bring you leads. Usually this is age, location, and interests.

You develop your creative, add a photo, and send users to yoru landing pages.

Alternatively, you can create a Lead Generation Card where users can sign up (opt-in) directly on their Twitter feed. This again comes down to choosing a stellar picture, and strong, benefit-rich headlines. This can be a more simple lead generation effort as well, since this is a one-step process.

Advantages – decent analytics, highly-targeted demographics are available for your ads.

Disadvantages – the main disadvantage is figuring out conversion rates and long-term value of followers, clicks, and leads. This will take tracking, but if you can figure out the sweet spot for your business, Twitter can provide a steady stream of leads and sales.

October 15, 2016/by chris

Content, Digital, SEM, SEO, Uncategorized, Website

3 Steps To Designing a Landing Page That Converts

Running adwords, Facebook ads, or even pouring time and effort into SEO campaigns only to drive traffic to a landing page that doesn’t convert is maddening. It’s also a waste of resources. Even if you craft a fantastic ad, your landing page must walk the visitor from curious clicker to lead. This is an art and a science, and its why designers and marketers charge so much to develop high-converting landing pages.

If you have the budget for it, get a pro to build your landing page. If you don’t, learn how to do it yourself until you can raise the capital to hire someone.

Follow these – tips and you’ll build a landing page that converts visitors into leads, and leads into sales. Even if you do have the budget to go pro, you can use these tips to evaluate what the marketer has designed for you.

3 Steps To Designing a Landing Page That Converts

Every Page Must Have a Clear, Powerful Headline

Many businesses make one of two mistakes when developing landing pages:

Their headline is weak and does nothing to inspire visitors to take the step of buying/signing up/calling.
Their headline is well-written, but is confusing or doesn’t mesh with the test of the ad and landing page

Writing great headlines has been the subject of countless books and sales courses, so it’s beyond the scope of this article to explain it fully, but if you lead with benefits, ask a question or create interest, you’ll be head-and-shoulders above your competition.

If you manage to create a great headline, don’t waste it by matching it to a landing page with text that doesn’t quite fit the main message. Also, keep your headline in form with your ad text. The headlines of your ad and landing page can be very similar, or at least close enough so that your visitor knows they’re in the right place.

Bullets are Weapons

The current fashion is to build a great headline, then follow it up with a few bullet points worth of text, then ask for the sale or sign-up.

Great idea. But choose your bullets wisely.

Bullet Points

In reality, bullets are just sub-headlines, and should be bursting with benefits. Not features! Don’t waste a bullet telling me your product is blue unless that somehow benefits me. Now, you can say

Our Widget Only Weighs .5oz, So it Fits in Your Pocket (and we now offer it in blue!)

That statement pairs benefit with feature, which is common practice on landing pages and sales letters because it’s proven to work. In this case, it’s a good idea to follow the bold benefit, and italicized parenthetical feature.

Pick your strongest 3 – 5 benefits and turn them into your bullet points. Put your strongest first and last, since your last bullet point will be just above, or to the left of the call to action.

Call to Action Better Call Them to Action

Your call to action is vital. Weak CTAs lose leads.

Online, most companies turn to the simple, and ineffective, “Submit” to get the customer’s info. Submit is a terrible, boring, and is loaded with subversive subtext. No one wants to submit to anything, especially when giving their info to strangers online.

Use strong CTAs on web forms:

Click Here (basic but proven to work)
Click Here + Benefit (Click Here to Get Your 10% Discount/Free E-book/Free Estimate)
Yes! Give Me My Benefit (discount/info/estimate)

Match the benefit in the CTA with the major benefit promised in your headline for maximum conversions. For more tips on converting using inbound methods check out our optimization page.

October 15, 2016/by chris

Insurance Policies for Independent Contractors

Top 3 Tasks to Outsource for Your Small Business

Top 3 Tasks to Outsource for Your Small Business

Bookkeeping and Invoicing

Graphic Design and Your Website

Don’t Outsource To Family

How to Get Your Site Featured in Google’s Snippet

Snippets

Snippets Are Quick Answers

How to Get a Featured Snippet

Step 2:

Be direct

Step 3

Do You Really Want More Clients and Customers?

The 6 Best Extensions for Your Site’s SEO and Adwords

The 6 Best Extensions for Your Site’s SEO and Adwords

Further SEO Extensions

3 Steps To Designing a Landing Page That Converts

3 Steps To Designing a Landing Page That Converts

Bullet Points

Contact

Get in touch

Address

Get in touch

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