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Top 3 Tasks to Outsource for Your Small Business

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.

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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.

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How To Get Better Targeting on Your Organic Traffic

Everyone wants free traffic. Organic traffic is the best traffic. It is free and it is natural – like the food and its good for you. There is a way to further benefit from organic traffic and that is to optimize the targeting on your organic reach on social media. If the targeting is laser focused then there is a much higher chance of converting that free traffic into a paying customer and making money. Savvy marketers are increasing their organic traffic, but optimizing the targeting on their organic social media reach. Retaliate1st provides our guide to growing your organic traffic.

Targeting To Grow Your Organic Traffic

  1. Better Targeting on Organic Social Media Reach

Much like you can target your ideal audience with paid facebook ads, you are now able to do something similar with organic posts.

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This could help you reach much more of your audience through non-paid ads. It’s still not going to reach everyone, but it will expose your messages to many more people than are seeing them now.

Not everyone who follows your page will want to see every post you make, nor will the be interested in all of your news and events. But, when you target your audience for your posts, you can reach those who have:

  • Liked, shared, or commented on similar posts in the past
  • Took action on similar posts in the past
  • Have interests that match your news/event/post
  • Are in the demographic you’re targeting

While it’s important to target the best possible audience, the best part about this is that you can now leave out those who won’t be interested in what you’re saying this particular time. This increases the juice of each post, gaining more engagement with your audience.

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  1. Paid Engagement Posts

These do cost a little money to boost, but for next to noghitn you can boost yoru paid and non paid engagement. First, make sure you use this on your best posts.

Content Is Key For Organic Traffic

A little research will show you clearly that some of your posts or post types are in the top 1 – 5% of yoru best interatcions – likes, shares, clicks, etc.

Forget the stuff that gets very little recognition, stick to only our best content.

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Now, after posting your best stuff, you can reach more people by boosting post-engagement. Yes, it will cost you $5 – 20 per post. But, you help your organic reach as well because you are almost guaranteed that:

  • This top-quality post will get likes, their friends see these likes and can interact with your page
  • This post will be shared. More shares = a ton more organic views (which leads to likes, further shares, etc.), thereby boosting your organic juice for each of these posts
  1. Use More Video

The rise of video content on Youtube, Vine, Snapchat has lead to less text-based posts being viewed on Facebook.

If you want to overcome this hurdle, simply post more video content. Producing video is easier than ever, with the iPhone and top android phones shooting super high quality video. Video, quick edit, post. Use a good Call to Action and your post engagement will soar.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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…

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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.

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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.

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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.

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How to Bootstrap Your Digital Marketing

In the early stages of your business, or during the initial launch of a new product or service, you may not have an unlimited budget to promote your new venture online. But, this doesn’t mean that you have to skimp on your digital marketing efforts. You can bootstrap your digital marketing.

Even if your business is brand new, you’re probably familiar with the concept of Bootstrapping, or using cash flow and profits to fund the next phase of your business. The concept is battle-tested, and it works.

But, do the rules apply to online businesses? How can you best re-invest profits to grow your business by marketing online?

In the early stages of your business, or during the initial launch of a new product or service, you may not have an unlimited budget to promote your new venture online. But, this doesn’t mean that you have to skimp on your digital marketing efforts.

digital-marketing

Even if your business is brand new, you’re probably familiar with the concept of Bootstrapping, or using cash flow and profits to fund the next phase of your business. The concept is battle-tested, and it works.

But, do the rules apply to online businesses? How can you best re-invest profits to grow your business by marketing online?

Bootstrap your Digital Marketing

  1. Start with Social Capital

Using social media to promote your business on a budget is nothing new. In fact, it’s not even very effective when you try the totally cost-free route. If you have an amazing product or service that goes viral, great. But for most businesses, that’s not happening right away.

You start a Facebook page, an Instagram, a Pintrest account and are faced with the social media equivalent of a writer’s blank page fears: there’s no one there. You can promote to friends, like other pages, and go through the litany of low/no cost promotion options. You should do those. But, it’s going to be a long climb if you rely solely on these methods.

The good news is that Facebook ads are great for small or new businesses on a budget.

Promoting your posts and “buying” likes is amazingly cost-effective. If the thought of advertising, and losing your shirt, on Google’s pay per click program, Facebook ads are for you.

First, for a few hundred bucks, you can grow your audience to several thousand people. If you are focusing on ads rather than followers, the cost is largely the same. So, it’s possible to spend under a grand and get the word out to thousands of potential customers.

If your site, landing pages, product pages, and copywriting are on-point, you’ll generate sales and leads. Now you can use these profits to expand your ad campaigns.

Digital Marketing for Beginners

  1. Do Work In-House… for Now

You’ve decided to take to Facebook to run ads.

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Who’s doing your ad writing?

Who’s doing the copy for your landing pages, product pages, and website?

These should be done by copywriting professionals. Great copy equals leads and sales; poorly written ads and web pages cost you leads, sales, and losses in ad revenue.

But, early on, you may not have the budget to hire top copywriters. You may not even have the capital to hire mid-level writers.

You’ll have to either:

  • Write ads yourself – this is a free option, but comes with an enormous challenge: writing great ads is not easy.

However, writing passable ads isn’t impossible. There are dozens of books on how to write good Facebook ads. Pick one up, study it, practice writing ads (on paper), then try a few out online. Testing is the only way to know if ads work, so take mini-budgets and test two versions of the same ad. Pick the winner and run with it. Once it generates a few sales, take the profits and hire someone better than you.

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  • Hire a copywriting intern – there are a lot of talented copywriters still learning their way, or studying marketing in college. One of the easiest ways to land big copywriting gigs is to have a killer portfolio.

Newbies need to build their work, so will be willing to work just to build it up their portfolios. Find a few good writers, have them produce ads and your web copy that generates some capital, then use the profits to hire pros. This method is great because you can continue to utilize up-and-comers to produce content while you funnel profits into getting high-end work done on your sales funnel.

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