Applying these strategies and tools won't just you save time and money, it will increase traffic to your website.
You’ve come to the right place if you are seriously committed to saving time and money. Are you keen to learn how to:
- Define your business and website goals to get real results?
- Push your business above the fold on the Google Search Engine Results Page?
- Increase your Website Visitors?
- Increase your Website Conversions?
- Increase your Website Sales?
- Grow your Business?
Just before we begin to explore all the cool tools, I will explain that I’ve structured this article to help step you through the extremely important process of defining what you are trying to achieve with your business website.
Having clarity of purpose enables us to be effective decision makers for the benefit of your business which will help you to save time and money.
The FREE tools are here to help you implement your website goals once you have defined them. I hope you enjoy this process. Let’s begin.
Setting SMART Goals
SMART Goals are SPECIFIC, MEASURABLE, ACHIEVABLE, REALISTIC AND TIMEBOUND.
For example,
“In the next three months I want to increase sales and conversions from my website by 25% by implementing my Digital Marketing Strategy.”
Or,
“By (specified date), I will write two blog posts every Monday, schedule them to publish on Tuesdays and Thursdays and set them up to be posted automatically to Social Media using the FREE version of Buffer once they’re published.”
I’ve always believed that for an idea to become a plan it must be written down. It’s dangerous to start a business or project with just an idea. We all know how scope creep works. Costs lots of $’s and time wasted because it wasn’t planned out, in writing.
It’s the same strategy with your website. You need to think and plan out what you want to achieve with your website from your point of view and then from the users’, your potential customers.
What do you want to achieve from your website and what do you want your customers to be able to achieve when they visit your website?
If you are developing a new website or wanting to improve your results and make an impact, it’s a good idea to define up to 5 SMART Goals that you want to achieve with your website.
Print them out and pin them in an area where you will see them often and be inspired to make decisions that help you, not just meet those goals but hit them for a six!
You will save time and money making business decisions based on your clear goals because you won’t suffer from additional costs occurring due to scope creep or bad planning.
Your Goals will also keep you and your Website Developer or Team on the same page.
Save Time and Money by defining your ideal customer
Creating an “Ideal Customer Avatar” is a fun and important activity to help identify your ideal customer.
Your ideal customer is, basically, someone you think is a pleasure to work with, pays your invoices promptly and loves your product/service so much they refer you to their friends, family, and strangers in the street. Nice!
Identifying your ideal customer will give you valuable insight into what their pain points are and an angle on how to communicate effectively with them through your blog and online marketing strategies to help resolve those pain points.
Effective communication will help to position your business as the “go to” expert that brings huge value to the table for their customers.
The wonderful people over at Optinmonster have written a great article with templates and examples to help you create your Ideal Client Avatar
Avataaars Generator is a fun and easy online avatar generator that is FREE for personal and commercial use.
Print it out and pin it somewhere you will see it every day. Really get to know them as you will be writing to them in your blog and you need to know their pain points and how your business can resolve them.
Why you should spy on your competitors.
Research your competitors’ websites and document design elements like menus, call to actions, page structures and functionality that you like, or don’t like, so that you can design your website to look and function better than theirs!
Are they clearly communicating what you think are your customers’ needs? Identify how you think they could improve.
Documenting what you find and combining it with your Ideal Customer Avatar will provide you with the insight required to laser focus your website content to your Ideal Customers to help solve their pain.
If want to take it a step further there are some cool Competitor Analysis Tools to spy on your competition but they ain’t FREE!
Create Your Basic Website Navigation Map
You will save time and money by preparing a draft Website Navigation Map of your website before you engage a Website Developer.
Gloomaps is a FREE Visual Sitemap Tool that is easy to use.
Your Website Navigation Map may change but it will also help your Website Project move forward towards delivery if you are familiar with the potential structure of your website.
To help you with this, shoot over and read this great blog article, ‘How to Create a Site Structure That Will Enhance SEO’, by Neil Patel, an SEO expert.
To save time and money from delays in providing content, your Website Developer usually won’t start developing your Website Project until they have received all your content for each web page of your website.
It’s important and a great time saver to have all your “launch” content in Word or Google Docs ready to be shared with your Website Developer at the beginning of your Website Project.
It’ll get your website up and live a lot quicker and you’ll get better results from Google then if you were to publish it with only a small amount of content.
Content Is Still KING To Google And Video Is The New Content
Save money by writing or filming your own website content.
Good Copywriters are hard to find and can charge thousands of dollars to write blog articles for you.
If the thought of writing or filming yourself makes you shudder in your boots, I understand, but there are many FREE online tools and tutorials out there to help you succeed and a lot of them are included in this article.
Keep reading! 🙂
Content marketing using Search Engine Optimisation Strategies is valuable to educate your customers, position yourself as the “go to” expert for your industry and improve your Google Search Results.
Content marketing deserves to be allocated as a mandatory task in your business if you want more of your website visitors to become customers.
I believe the most important parts of a blog are:
- Using WordPress.org as your Content Management System (CMS)
- A great heading that captures your reader enough to click through to your article.
- Search Engine Optimised Content that is current, correct, relevant, useful and encourages your website visitors to engage with your company.
- A comments section that allows users to engage with your business and build a community of like-minded people.
- Social media share buttons to encourage users to like and share your great info.
- Great Images and Video
- ALWAYS have a call to action (CTA) at the end of your blog to ask for that engagement, sign up, share, order, sale etc.,
FREE Tools And Tutorials To Help You Write Effective Blog Posts
WordPress Content Management System
WordPress.org is an online, open source website creation tool that powers 30% of all the websites on the internet.
It’s, in my opinion, the easiest and most powerful blogging and website content management system (CMS) in existence today and I use it to build all my websites.
If you’re using WordPress.org you get a gold star * and a great tutorial by the guys at www.wpbeginner.com on How to add a new post in WordPress and utilize all the features
WordPress Plugins
There are over 50,000 WordPress Plugins that add features and benefits to your website and a great deal of them are FREE. There’s more information about Plugins further on in this article but first you will need to know how to install them on your WordPress Website.
Here’s a great tutorial on how to install a WordPress Plugin from www.WPBeginner.com.
I hope you find it helpful.
Just a cautionary note before you go crazy installing every plugin known to man. They will slow your site loading time if you use too many and, in a worse case scenario, there may be conflicting code that could break your site.
It is best practice to only use the minimum amount of plugins that you require to achieve what you want to achieve.
So choose wisely, keep them updated for security reasons and delete any that no longer serve you.
Ok, onwards we go…
Awesome Blog Post Headline Generator Tool
Check out this great article, ‘How to Write The Perfect Headline’ and then head over to their Headline Generator Tool and start testing great headlines!
Create Search Engine Optimised Content
You want your website to be found “above the fold” in the Organic Google Search Results for the Keywords used in your Content.
Search Engine Optimisation does takes some effort and commitment these days to push your website close to the top if you don’t want to pay for Google Ads.
The article, “SEO made simple: A Step-by-Step Guide”, by SEO legend, Neil Patel is a large read but packed full of excellent SEO strategies and links to more helpful information and tools.
You can also check out, “The Ultimate Guide to SEO in 2018” which I’m sure the lovely people at HubSpot will update to 2019 soon.
I highly recommend that you signup and download HubSpot’s, “Complete SEO Starter Pack”, as well because it’s got heaps of helpful goodies.
To help you with identifying keywords or long tail keyword phrases AnswerThePublic provide a Keyword Tool and results for FREE or you could use Ubersuggest 3.0 from Neil Patel.
Grammarly
If you are not a confident writer check out Grammarly.
Grammarly is a FREE writing app that ensures your writing is, “clear, mistake-free and effective”.
Comment Section - Engage Your Audience And Build A Community
The businesses that find a way to engage their audience with helpful information and bring value to their potential customers are going to be well on their way to having a successful business website.
Strive towards creating a community of like-minded people by allowing comments on your blog posts.
Create posts and Call to Actions that evoke a response and promote engagement by asking questions of your audience and responding with helpful information.
To ensure your Blog security is strong, reduce spam comments and have control over which comments get published, please install Akismet Anti Spam Plugin.
They have a FREE version that is for personal blogs or a basic USD $5 per month (paid yearly) subscription for businesses. .
Sharing your Blog Posts
Help your website visitors share your posts to their Social Media by installing the FREE AddToAny Social Sharing WordPress Plugin.
Here’s a Tutorial on how to install it and set it up.
Images - How to Source, Compress, Resize and Optimize Website Images using these FREE tools and tutorials
FREE image sources
There are heaps of FREE stock image photos sites you can subscribe to like Unsplash.com that supply high-quality images for your website.
Make sure to read the licenses to ensure you are using them correctly.
Resize images
This article, “The Ultimate Guide to Using Images within Divi”, by Elegant Themes has excellent infographics that show you the different sizes you will need your images to be depending on how you want to display them regardless of what theme or page builder you use.
You can also follow the instructions to upload your images to Landscape by Sprout Social and choose which social media platform you want the image for or choose custom size for your WordPress website.
Compress images
Landscape by Sprout Social is an easy tool to resize your images to suit different Social Media platforms.
To keep website load times fast we want to upload images that have been compressed.
Upload your resized images to Compress JPEG & PNG by TinyPNG.
Optimize images
Upload your resized and compressed images to your WordPress Media Library and optimize your images for SEO by providing relevant information in the alt tag and title tag of your image. Follow this tutorial from Yoast called, “Image SEO: alt tag and title tag optimization”.
Schedule And Automate Your Blog Posts To Save Time And Streamline Your Workflow
WordPress to Buffer Plugin allows you to automatically post your blog articles to your Social Media Networks.
You will need to create a FREE account with Buffer.
Follow the prompts to authorise WP to Buffer with your new Buffer account and connect to your Social Media Networks before you can start sending posts.
Backing up your website will save you time and money
To lose all your data and content because your website crashed would be devastating to you and your business so you’d better implement a good Backup Procedure immediately!
It is best practice to:
- Schedule your backups as often as you think is required depending on how much content is being uploaded on a daily or weekly basis.
- Backup before any updates are performed
- Keep at least two backups on file
- Keep those two backups two different locations.
I have the FREE UpDraftPlus Backups Plugin set up to store copies of my backups on my Google Drive account and I also copy them to my external drive for extra backup.
You will be glad you did.
Conclusion
Do yourself a huge favour (I sound like Molly Meldrum!) and make the commitment to implement these website and business strategies using the FREE tools you now have.
You may have to squeeze setting them up into your work day to start with but I’m confident that you will see good results. Before long you will realise the benefits of the commitment you made to improving your website.
I hope you have found this article on how to keep your costs down and save time while improving your website extremely helpful.
If you did, please share it on your Social Media by clicking on the icons below. I’d really appreciate it. 🙂
By adding these tasks to your workflow you should see an increase in your website traffic, an increase in good leads, improved engagement with potential customers and more sales.
That’s what we all want, isn’t it?
Let me know if I’ve missed anything or you can ask me a question in the comments below.
Cheers!
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