small business – Online Marketing Juice

Striking the Balance: When Good is Better than Great in Business and Marketing

We all have an innate desire to be the best at everything we do. It’s natural to strive for greatness in our personal and professional lives. However, there comes a point when we must ask ourselves: when is it enough just to be good and not great? Are there instances where “good” may be preferable to “great”? I’ll explore these questions in this blog post and provide examples from business websites and social media marketing.

Business Websites: The Case for Good Over Great

When creating a business website, going for greatness might mean having the most innovative design, cutting-edge functionality, and an extensive list of features. While these elements may sound appealing, a good website that focuses on user experience, with a clean design and fast loading time, can often outperform a great one bogged down by excessive features.

For example, a small business owner may want to create a great website with all the bells and whistles, but doing so can lead to higher development costs, slower loading times, and increased complexity. A good website, on the other hand, prioritizes the user experience, making it easier for potential customers to navigate and find the information they need. In this case, a good website can yield a higher return on investment and a better overall experience for the end user.

Social Media Marketing: When Good Content Prevails

In social media marketing, being great often means consistently creating top-notch content that captures your audience’s attention. However, this can be a time-consuming and exhausting endeavor that may lead to burnout. In contrast, a good social media strategy focuses on regular, engaging posts that achieve your marketing goals without draining your resources.

Consider a small business owner who wants to maintain a great presence on multiple social media platforms. They may spend countless hours crafting the perfect posts, leaving little time for other important tasks. By creating good content instead, they can strike a balance that allows for sustainable success in their marketing efforts.

Finding the Right Balance

The key takeaway is that context matters when determining if being good or great is the right choice. It’s crucial to evaluate each situation and consider the needs of your audience, your available resources, and your long-term goals. Striving for greatness can sometimes lead to unnecessary expenses and decreased efficiency while focusing on delivering good quality can be more effective and sustainable.

In conclusion, while wanting to be great at everything is natural, sometimes being good is enough or even better. Recognize when to prioritize and when to give yourself a break, and enjoy the journey to success. You can achieve sustainable success in business and marketing by finding the right balance between good and great.

Revolutionize Your Small Business with These Discord Tips: Increase Productivity, Enhance Communication, and Boost Your Bottom Line

Small business owners today are always on the lookout for tools and platforms that can help them manage their operations effectively. Discord, the popular chat and voice communication app, has quickly become one of the best tools for small business owners. Here’s how you can use Discord to its full potential for your small business.

Create a server for your business: The first step is to create a server for your business. You can invite your employees and customers to this server, and use it as the main platform for communication and collaboration. You can also create different channels for different departments, projects, or discussions. If you sell content online, you can use a private Discord server to reward your customers. This gives your fans an incentive to subscribe. And unlike one-off subscription rewards, access to a Discord server encourages fans not to let their subscription lapse.
Use Discord for team collaboration: Discord allows for real-time communication, which makes it ideal for team collaboration. You can use it for regular team meetings, discussions, and even for video conferencing.
Share files and documents: Discord also allows you to share files and documents with your team. You can upload important files, such as presentations, spreadsheets, and reports, directly to the server, and your team members can access them anytime.
Customer support: Discord can also be used for customer support. You can create a separate channel for customer support, and your team can use it to answer customer questions, resolve issues, and provide support in real-time. Do you sell something that takes skill to use? Host classes or workshops about how to use your product.
Marketing and promotion: Discord can also be used for marketing and promotion. You can create a channel for promotions and announcements, and share news and updates with your customers. Livestream a raffle for a product giveaway to increase excitement. Announce contest winners over a Livestream.
Stay organized with Discord Bots: Discord has a wide range of bots that can help you automate different tasks, such as scheduling reminders, tracking time, and even creating polls.

Most features on Discord are free. It doesn’t cost anything to join and create servers. But there are some services that cost money. Running a Discord server is free and comes with basically all features. Individual users can pay for Nitro and unlock a few goodies, like more custom emoji and bigger upload sizes. Individual users can also opt to give boosts to servers, which unlocks more emoji slots and animated server icons. To unlock all the features for your server, you need to spend Server Boosts on it. Higher boost levels give your server benefits like higher audio quality and more customization options.

Discord is a versatile platform that can be used for a variety of purposes. Whether you need it for team collaboration, customer support, marketing and promotion, or organization, Discord has you covered. By using Discord to its full potential, small business owners can streamline their operations, increase efficiency, and improve communication with their employees and customers.

Step into the World of Blogging and Skyrocket Your Business Success: How to Quickly and Easily Setup and Create a Business Blog with WordPress!

Starting a business blog can be a great way to showcase your expertise, connect with potential customers, and establish your brand as an industry leader. If you’re looking to create a business blog using WordPress, the good news is that it’s relatively simple to set up and get started. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you get your business blog up and running:

Choose a domain name and hosting provider: The first step in setting up a business blog is to choose a domain name, which is essentially the web address for your blog (e.g., www.yourbusiness.com). You’ll also need to choose a hosting provider, which is a company that will store your blog’s files and makes them accessible to visitors. There are many options for hosting providers, and it’s important to do your research and choose one that offers the features and support you need.
Install WordPress: Once you’ve chosen a domain name and hosting provider, the next step is to install WordPress. This is a free, open-source content management system (CMS) that makes it easy to create and manage a blog or website. Most hosting providers offer one-click WordPress installation, so it’s usually a simple process.
Choose a theme: WordPress comes with a variety of pre-designed themes that you can use to customize the look and feel of your blog. You can choose a theme that matches your business’s branding, or you can customize the colors, fonts, and other design elements to suit your needs.
Add content: Now that you’ve got the basic framework for your business blog set up, it’s time to start adding content. You can create blog posts, pages, and other types of content using the WordPress editor. You can also add media like images and videos to enhance your blog’s visual appeal.
Promote your blog: Once you’ve got a few posts up and running, it’s important to start promoting your blog to attract visitors. You can do this through social media, email marketing, and other tactics. It’s also a good idea to optimize your blog for search engines by using relevant keywords and tags, and by linking to other reputable websites.

Blog Setup

Setting up and creating a business blog using WordPress is a straightforward process that can help you establish your brand, reach new customers or services like Financial Advisors for example, and showcase your expertise. With a little bit of planning and effort, you can have a professional-looking business blog up and running in no time.

Unleash the Power of Discord: How to Take Your Business to the Next Level with the ‘Boosted Server’ Feature and Proven Strategies for Marketing on Discord

If you’re a business owner, you know how important it is to promote and market your business in order to attract new customers and retain your existing ones. One platform that you may not have considered for marketing your business is Discord.

For those who aren’t familiar with it, Discord is a popular chat and voice communication platform that is often used by gamers, but it has also gained a following among other communities, such as artists, content creators, and even businesses.

Here are some tips on how to promote and market your business on Discord:

Create a Discord server for your business. This will give you a dedicated space on the platform to interact with your customers and potential customers. You can use this space to share updates about your business, offer support, and even host events or promotions.
Use the server to provide customer support. Many businesses use Discord as a way to provide customer support, as it allows for real-time communication and the ability to quickly respond to customer inquiries. You can set up different channels on your server for different types of support, such as sales, technical, or general inquiries.
Offer exclusive discounts and promotions. One way to attract customers to your Discord server is to offer them exclusive discounts and promotions that are only available to members of your server. This could be a discount code that they can use on your website or a special deal that is only available to members of your Discord server.
Host events and contests on your server. Another way to engage with your customers on Discord is to host events and contests. This could be a Q&A session with your team, a trivia contest, or even a virtual event where you offer special deals or giveaways.
Use Discord’s advertising features. In addition to organic promotion on your server, Discord also offers advertising features that can help you reach a wider audience. For example, you can use Discord’s “Boosted Server” feature to promote your server to a wider audience and increase its visibility on the platform.
Server Boosting in discord means a way to upgrade your Discord Server. This allows the user with added benefits and perks of improved streaming qualities and a pool of emojis. This boosting has three stages to it-

- Level 1 with 2 server boosts
- Level 2 with 15 server boosts
- Level 3 with 30 server boosts

Here are the steps listed below steps to boost your Discord server:

Open the Discord app.
Select your server from the sidebar.
Click on your server name to access the Server Settings drop-down menu.
Click on Server Boost.
Make sure everything looks OK, then click Boost This Server.
Select the number of boosts you would like to purchase.
Enter your payment information.
Confirm your purchase.
Your boost is now active.

Server boosting enhances the performance speed and quality but it is entirely up to the user if they want to buy the Server Boost.

By using these tips, you can effectively promote and market your business on Discord and engage with your customers in a new and exciting way. Give it a try and see how it can benefit your business.

Small Business: Instagram Should Not Be Ignored in 2022

I shared the above graph way back in 2017. Instagram has become a critical platform for product marketing, particularly small business. The Instagram platform is evolving and raising the bar. Forward to today and the 2023 forecast below:

Instagram is a great way to tell a story and find customers. Once you’ve got a story going, an audience will grow organically (as pictured above). A key ingredient with Instagram is using # Hashtags to get your business found by customers. Hashtag marketing makes your posts searchable and gets your business found by local & national customers (especially relevant on Instagram where you can post 10+ Hashtags per post). Growing a dedicated following on Instagram won’t happen overnight. But the bright side is that Instagram users are very active and love to engage. The option to switch to an Instagram business account and use Instagram tools for checking insights and running advertisements has been life changing for small business (SMB).

With Instagram ads, you can reach new customers and extend your reach with customizable, trackable advertisements. You can target specific demographics, link to your website and collect valuable user data that can help inform your other social media marketing campaigns. Instagram is the ideal choice for SMB‘s. You can engage with your customers, advertise your products and build awareness for your brand of service!

Pinterest Marketing for Small Business in 2022

Pinterest has seen a huge growth of users in 2020-2021. Pinterest can help certain small business increase their referral traffic from visually rich content which gets published on the site. With the launch of Pinterest for Business Pages, small business brands must take advantage of the platform. Pinterest for Business Pages is essentially its version of Facebook Pages for business. It’s important to note there are personal and business accounts on Pinterest.

The Pinterest business account gives you access to Pinterest’s Built-In Analytics Dashboard as well as the ability to advertise: Promoted Pins, Buyable Pins. Your Pins are optimized for business: Rich Pins and Pin Statistics for each Pin and a business account will get access to new features before a personal account. A Pinterest personal account is ideal if you want to find things. With a personal account, you can still upload your own pins, but you won’t be able to see the statistics on the things you pin.

The good news is that Pinterest is offering the option to either create a new business profile, or convert your existing personal one. This is done through the Pinterest Business Center, where you simply create a new account or click to convert your existing one.

Pinning strategies include “Repinning”, which is a great way of building up new followers, but to be truly influential, you need to pin your own content regularly and before everyone else. Pinterest is a very visual site, but there’s nothing to say that you can’t pin videos on your boards. It’s good to mix up your content a little and provide these links, just to see how exactly your followers react to it.

While your descriptions can go up to 500 characters, the chances of people reading the entire description (unless it’s a competition) is slim. This is especially true when you consider that only a small portion of that description will be visible when you’re browsing boards. It’s best to keep descriptions short and sweet so that both the image and text is easily visible.

Why is Pinterest getting so popular amongst small business brands and Marketing SEO?

According to data released by SimilarWeb also found that Pinterest receives 58.78% of direct desktop traffic and 37.98% from the organic search. They also got 1.4% traffic from referring sites like Amazon and Etsy. Most consumers using Pinterest head straight to the site when looking for inspiration or products to buy, with few visitors from Social, Mail, or Display Advertising.

Finally, and very important! Make sure to verify your website with Pinterest which enables you to become visible in search results (SERPs). To do this, simply add a HTML tag from Pinterest to the header of your website. You have to add an HTML tag to your website’s source code so Pinterest can confirm that you own the website you want to claim. By claiming your website, you get access to analytics for the Pins you publish from your site, the analytics on Pins that other people create from your site and let people know where they can find more of your content. Simple.

Why Small Businesses Need a Mobile Optimized Website ASAP

Yodle and Research Now polled 400 US small businesses. What’s shocking (according to this poll) is that 40% of small businesses have not implemented either a mobile optimized website nor mobile optimized emails or SMS marketing.

There is so much opportunity out there with a mobile optimized website. More traffic, more leads, more product sales, etc. Everyone is mobile (has a smartphone and/or tablet). Over half of web traffic is mobile. Mobile users buy more (according to one Adobe report).

Google favors mobile responsiveness (think search engine placement ranking). If you use Social Media such as Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest in your small business marketing strategy, referral links off your social media posts mean that incoming website traffic will be accessed via mobile devices. NOT having a mobile optimized website is just leaving money on the table.