Sharing testimonials for an online business is a great way to build trust and credibility with potential customers! However, where are the best places to share our customer testimonials?

When it comes to building trust, customer testimonials re-assure potential customers that they are making a good choice by doing business with you. Testimonials are valuable assets to your online business! Once you acquire testimonials, there are multiple effective places to share them with potential customers.

Home & Landing page

Your home and landing pages are often the first point of contact for new customers. Placing customer testimonials on your home and landing pages allows you to establish trust and credibility with new users right away! Afterall, by showing positive customer experiences to newcomers, you can easily demonstrate the quality and effectiveness of your offerings.

Product pages

By the time a customer arrives at a product page, they may start having doubts. Sharing customer testimonials on your product pages is a great way to address common concerns or hesitations. Rather than relying on the potential customer to trust your words personally, letting customer testimonials validate your products and services offers real-life examples of how your offerings deliver on their promises.

Social Media

Social media is a place for old and new customers alike to interact with your business. By sharing customer testimonials on social media, success stories about your products can both bring in new customers and reinforce your products to existing customers. Through social engagement as well, such as likes, comments, and shares, your testimonials can reach even wider audiences, increasing your visibility!

Email

Customer testimonials in emails can help make your emails both engaging and credible! Customer testimonials can often resonate with existing customers, as well as attract potential customers that are on the fence about your products. Higher open rates can lead to more successful conversions from your email campaigns!

Advertisements

When engaging with advertisements, users often carry a level of skepticism since they are created and paid for by the company itself. Sharing customer testimonials in your advertisements provides a separate source validation and credibility. Instead of relying solely on your own words concerning your offerings, sharing the words of satisfied customers is much more effective and overcomes the skepticism surrounding company ads.

Want to learn more?

Want to learn more about customer testimonials? Listen to our latest eCommerce Made Easy podcast where we explain how to acquire customer testimonials, how to use them, and what other options you can consider to promote customer trust!

Ever feel like you aren’t using your work time effectively? Having trouble finishing the tasks you set off to do? Let’s get you back on track! Losing focus or getting distracted can very quickly cause your work week to pile up or worse, fall behind. Lucky for us though, there are a variety of methods we can incorporate into our day-to-day routines to keep us on track for success.

When it comes to setting yourself up for a productive work week, there are a few proven strategies we can use to maintain focus and get our tasks done! One way to prepare yourself for the workweek is to utilize the following routine:

Set clear goals

When it comes to preparing yourself for the word day, work week, or even work year, determining what you want to achieve is important. Having a clear sense of what you need to accomplish helps you stay focused. While thinking about the far future, such as the work year, is a good place to start, it’s important to break your goals up into smaller time frames. Yearly goals can sometimes feel so far away that you may start putting them off without realizing it. Break down your major goals into steps that you can then set as weekly or daily goals to keep you on track.

Prioritize & delegate tasks

It can be easy to feel overwhelmed by the number of tasks and goals we may have set for ourselves. To manage our tasks better, review your tasks often and prioritize them. Which tasks are most important to complete first? While reviewing your tasks, take note of any tasks that may not suit your skill set. Is there someone better for the job? By prioritizing and delegating tasks when you can, your task list will become more focused, making it easier to follow.

Set Deadlines

Setting deadlines is key to creating a sense of accountability in yourself to complete your tasks on time. Many of us have large, daunting tasks lists that contain all sorts of important jobs to complete. By giving each task a deadline, you can better pace yourself as well as clearly see which tasks you need to be working on!

Organize your tasks

Just as having an organize desk can encourage focus at work, keeping your tasks organized can help you quickly and easily process what you need to do. It can be easy to get lost in a large list of tasks, so consider organizing your list in a fashion that makes sense for your workflow. You may prefer organizing your tasks by the day they need done or organizing them by the kind of task they are, such administrative or client tasks. To organize your tasks, you can use a calendar or task planner, which can be physical or digital!

Review and reflect

Whether it be the end of the work year or even the end of work week, its important to review and reflect on your progress and productivity. How much did you get done? Did you complete more than you did last week? What did you do differently? Refining your workflow can take time, so reflecting on your progress routinely can help you find what works for you when it comes to completing your tasks efficiently.

Want to learn more?

Want more tips on staying productive at work? Listen to our latest eCommerce Made Easy podcast where I share my go-to strategies to stay on task!

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a must for online businesses and content creators. However, do you ever feel like your search engine ranking just won’t budge? As search engines become more advanced and the tools available to us evolve, its important to make sure that your SEO strategy is still effective.

In order to stay visible in search engines, your site needs to be optimized for searchability. However, there are common mistakes we can make when creating our SEO strategies:

1. Keyword Stuffing your Content

One easy mistake you can make when trying to optimize your content for SEO is to use too many keywords in your content. In the past, the more keywords you had on your website meant better SEO results, and thus better positions in search queries. Keywords are still important today, but search engines have grown smart enough to tell when you are stuffing your content with keywords for the sake of SEO. Today, if Google finds that you are keyword stuffing your content, your SEO score will be negatively impacted, bringing down your search positions.

How to fix: Use keywords strategically & keep readability in mind

Search engines are now smart enough to judge whether or not your content is easily readable for your users. This means that, if your content is stuffed with keywords, search engines will deem you’re your content hard to read and “spammy,” bringing down your SEO score. When it comes to using keywords on your site, you want to make sure to incorporate keywords where they make sense rather than stuffing them everywhere you can. Your keywords should be logically placed on your site without impacting your content’s readability and value.

2. Not using Meta Descriptions

Meta Descriptions are short snippets of text that tell search engines a summary of what your web page’s content is about. These snippets help search engines understand your content as well as give them a short description to show to users in search queries. Despite being very important, meta descriptions sometimes are not as optimized as they should be or are outright missing. Neglecting meta descriptions can not only negatively impact your SEO score, but are a lost opportunity to share what your online content is about with potential customer’s during search.

How to fix: Go through your pages and make sure they have meta descriptions

For all of your pages, make sure that the meta description field or tags have quality descriptions in them. These descriptions should describe the content of the page succinctly and are also a great place to use some keywords and call-to-actions. Remember that users may see your meta description when searching for your content, so make sure your meta descriptions speak to the needs of your customers.

3. Images don’t have Alternative Text

Oftentimes, it can be easy to forget to add alternative text to your site’s image assets. Alternative text is brief, text descriptions of what your image, video, banner, etc, depicts. From blog banners to homepage featured images, alternative text is very important not only for your SEO score, but for customers with visual disabilities. Without alternative text, search engines will put your site lower in search queries and a pool of people your content could help may be unable to experience your content to its fullest.

How to fix: Add alternative text to all of your images

Alternative text can be added to your images through editing your images in graphical interfaces such as WordPress or through adding the “alt” attribute to your image’s HTML string. One thing to note about alternative text is that its important to be descriptive and concise: What is the image depicting? Is there text in the image? What does it say? Why is it important? Answer these questions as needed in your image’s alternative text.

4. Your Site has Broken Links

As your site grows, so does the number of pages your content is linked to. However, links can become broken if not kept up to date. Link URLs can change, or the page the link led to can be removed, leading to users arriving at dead ends when clicking on them. Search engines take broken links into consideration when ranking your site. Not only do broken links reflect badly on your site to search engines, but it also means that there is potentially valuable content search engines are able to read and serve to customers.

How to fix: Keep an update sitemap of links and monitor for broken links

It can be hard to catch every broken link on your site, but as your do, make sure to update them and note that change on your site’s sitemap. A sitemap is an organized list of all the pages and content your site contains. This includes the links to those pages and content. Make sure to review your sitemap sometimes and consult it during major changes, such as URL updates, page migration, and so forth.

5. Lack of SEO Monitoring

Many SEO efforts can be in vain if there isn’t a way to monitor your SEO changes to your site. What keywords are working? What pages are getting the least visits? What search queries is my content showing up in? How high is my position in search lists? These questions can’t be easily answered without using a monitoring tool of some sort to analyze and report on your SEO strategy’s effectiveness.

How to fix: Analyze your SEO strategy routinely with monitoring tools

Having a way to monitor and collect data on your SEO efforts is key to improving your website’s visibility in searches. Some hosting platforms come with built-in solutions or plugins for SEO monitoring. Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console also come with ways of monitoring your SEO progress, collecting data and creating visual reports. Whichever tool you choose to use, check it routinely so you can stay on top of your SEO strategy.

Want to learn more?

Want to learn more about SEO and how to improve it? Listen to our latest eCommerce Made Easy podcast where we dive into even more SEO mistakes to watch out for!

Email is still one of the most effective ways of communicating with your audience. From sending newsletters to sharing new promotions, consistent email marketing keeps your audience engaged with your content and products. One way to ensure success when it comes to your email marketing strategy is to create a content calendar.

What is a content calendar?

An email marketing content calendar is a way of planning and organizing your emails in advance. Whether it be planning weekly or monthly, having a strategy for what content will be sent and when it will be sent can help create consistency in your communications. Having a content calendar also helps you and your team stay on top of your marketing as well as work ahead, giving you some breathing room for other important tasks. Overall, through a content calendar, you can clearly map out email strategy!

How to create your email marketing content calendar

Establish your goals

When it comes to your email marketing strategy, you need to figure out what it is you want to achieve through it. Increasing sales, growing your subscriber list, boosting engagement, or educating your audience are just a few goals you may consider. By setting a goal, it will be easier to determine what kinds of material you want to create and send out to your audience.

Think about your audience

In any marketing strategy, you need to consider what your audience wants to see in emails. What do they like to read? What do they want to know? Answering these questions can help you and your team create emails that resonate with your audience.

Note: Consider segmenting your audience

Depending on how large your audience is, you may find that you can divide your audience into differ groups. These groups all may want different kinds of emails. If that is the case, consider segmenting your audience and selecting tailor email types for each group. An example of this could be new customers and existing customers. New customers may not know much about your company, so they may need to receive some introductory emails that older customers do not need. By segmenting your audience, you can meet your customers where they are and create better experiences for your variety of customers.

Plan out the kinds of emails you want to send

Before you look at your calendar, you and your marketing team need to determine what kinds of emails you want to send out. Some common types of marketing emails are newsletters, promotional emails, product announcements, event invitations, education content, and so forth. What type you choose will depend on the products & services you sell, as well as your audience. Choosing a handful of email types can help create variety in what your customers see, which can keep your emails fresh and interesting.

Set frequency and timing

One of the most important aspects in your email content calendar is creating consistency. Each email type (for example, let’s say you are doing newsletters and promotions) should have set days and times associated with them. Perhaps your newsletters and promotions are sent biweekly on Tuesdays at 12PM and they go back and forth: one Tuesday you send the newsletter, the next a promotional email, and so forth. Ideally the times and days you send your emails will be determined by the days and times your audience is most engaged, which can take time to figure out. The key though is to make sure that you send consistently so your audience knows when to expect your content!

Note: Identify key dates & events

While establishing your routine emails is important, don’t forget to mark your calendar with other special marketing events! For example, your company’s birthday or a new product don’t happen that often but are valuable marketing opportunities.

Create content & content templates

Email subject lines, image assets, call-to-actions, and the bulk of your message all need careful thought. Your audience receives hundreds of emails a day, so you want your emails to stand out and be remembered as worthwhile reading. For each type of email, you may consider creating a template that you can use for that email every time so that the structure is constant. Templates also make creating future emails easier.

Note: Brainstorm content themes & topics

In the beginning, creating content may come easily, but as time passes, you may find yourself running out of creativity. Create a list of content themes and topics that you want to write about. This list will not only help you when writing future emails, but also can be a way of testing what kind of content your users engage with if you use an email platform that has analytics involved. Depending on what is popular with your audience, your list may change overtime.

Schedule & send

To send your marketing content calendar emails, you can either manually send them, or use automation tools to schedule them to send automatically. At BCSE, we use AWeber*. AWeber is an email marketing software that allows you to create, schedule, and send your emails out to audiences. You can segment your audience through it as well. In terms of creating an effective email marketing content calendar, email management tools such as AWeber help streamline the process!

Note: Consider testing different content methods to better serve your audience

When sending your emails, you may want to experiment with certain aspects of your emails. For example, figuring out what subject lines or Call-to-Actions resonates with your audience can take time, but with the help of an email management software, you can “A/B” test them on a certain percentage of your audience and see how well they do!

Analyze & Revise

When your emails are finally sent, it’s time to track how well they do. Having a way to report and analyze your email marketing strategy is important to improving it overtime! Through an email management tool like AWeber, you can keep track of important metrics, such as Open Rates (how much of your audience opened your email) or Click Rates (How much of your audience clicked a link). Through such metrics, you can gain a better understanding of what works for your audience and what doesn’t.

Want to Learn More?

Want to learn more about how you can up your email marketing game? Listen to our latest eCommerce Made Easy podcast where we interview Tracy Beavers. Tracy is an expert in marketing, sales, and business growth and has helped hundreds of entrepreneurs gain business visibility through organic marketing strategies. Tune in to learn why email marketing is not just a good-to-have but a must-have component of your business strategy.

* Contains Affiliate Link.

Is your site feeling slow? When it comes to your website’s performance, there are many variables that can cause your site to load & react slowly. One common (and easy to fix) cause could be your banner or hero images.

Banner images are the large images that appear as the background or above the fold of your page. When it comes to performance drops on your website, it’s important to reflect on any new images you may have uploaded to your banner recently. While images are a key part of making our websites attractive, unoptimized banner can easily slow down your site.

Unoptimized banner images tend to be images that are much too large for your site to load quickly. While you may think that your images need to be large to maintain their visual appeal, most images can be both smaller and compressed and still look good! In order to tell if your banner images are too big, you need to take a look at your banner’s dimensions, file size, and image format type.

Banner Dimensions

Banner dimensions are the physical size of your banner image. In most cases, banner dimensions are measured in pixels since your banner will be appearing on a screen. Take a look at the banner image you uploaded and analyze its properties: how big is it? While there isn’t a set dimension that works for all websites, the largest size your banner appears as on a screen is the largest dimension it needs to be. Open your website on a desktop screen and use the Inspector Tool to measure how large it is in pixels. If your original banner image is much bigger than the max dimensions your banner appears on your site, your banner is too big.

Banner File Size

Your banner’s file size is the amount of space your image takes up on your server. File sizes are measured in Bytes (B), Kilobytes (KB), Megabytes (MB), Gigabytes (GB), and so forth. When it comes to your banner images, it is best to keep your banner images under 1 MB, if not closer to 150 KB. The larger your image file size is, the harder it is for your server to send it over to a customer’s screen. If you look at the properties of your banner image and find that it is well over a few Megabytes, your banner image is much too big.

Banner Image Format

The image type of your banner images can play a large role in how big it is in terms of its file size. Popular image formats you may see banners exported in are PNG, JPEG, GIF, and WebP. Each image type has its advantages and disadvantages. PNGs and GIFs, for example, tend to be much larger than JPEGs and WebPs. JPEGs, however, can’t be used to create transparent images while PNGs can. In the past, WebPs were not supported by certain browsers, which made it risky to use. It is important to consider what your banner image looks like & where it will appear when determining its image format. Overall, when in doubt, the JPEG image format is a small, but quality image format to use for your banner images.

Want to Learn More?

Optimizing your banner images can require using image editing tools. Download our free Banner Optimization Guide to learn how you can make your banner images smaller with Photoshop or GIMP!

Some of the largest shopping holidays are coming up in the next few months! From Black Friday to Christmas, now is the time to make sure your online shop is ready to handle the rush. Are you prepared?

Promotional events can be stressful, but proper preparation can make all the difference. When it comes to promotional events, prep can start months in advance. Where do you start?

Set clear goals & objectives

The first step to getting ready for promotional events is to set your conversion goals. What do you want to achieve? Increasing sales, acquiring new customers, and enhancing brand visibility are just a few goals you may consider. Whatever your goals may be, they should be clear and at times specific. If you want to increase sales, how many sales do you want your promotional event to make? Determining a number to aim for can help you track the progress of your goals better.

Buckle Down on Website optimization

When it comes to promotional events that will bring an influx of traffic to your site, it’s important that your site runs smoothly. Optimizing your site can involve checking many moving parts. Speed and performance optimization are key to ensuring your site can handle the increased traffic. Other important aspects to consider are mobile optimization, user experience, navigation, and your site’s checkout process. Depending on what kind of promotional event you are running, take into consideration the visual appeal of your promotional content as well. Overall, promotional events are great opportunities to bring in new and old customers, so crafting the best experience is key. Test your website thoroughly!

Schedule and Create Marketing content

When creating your marketing content for social media, email, and so forth, make sure to schedule it ahead of time. Promotional events can get hectic once started, but with the use of social media or email management tools, you can prepare and schedule the majority of your marketing material ahead of time, giving you room to breathe. Note that it is important to carefully choose how often and at what times you want your marketing material to go out. Analyze existing marketing efforts and identify any times or days that your users are more engaged with your content. With those times and days in mind, create your promotional marketing schedule!

Monitor & maintain analytics

No matter how prepared you are, issues and surprises can sneak up on you, so it’s important to be watching your site for the unexpected. From website crashes to sales performance, analytics tools like Google Analytics 4 can help you fix issues as quickly while also giving you an overview on how well your promotional event is performing so far. Analytics can help you better measure how successfully you have reached your promotional event goals, as well as give insight into what works and what doesn’t work.

Take Time for Post-holiday analysis

When your promotional event is over, preparation for your next promotional event starts! Take some time to look at your analytics and think over the results of your work. Did you reach your goals? Did the results fall flat, or far exceed them? Identify areas where your promotional strategy was strong and other areas that were underwhelming. By taking all of this into consideration, you can create new goals to reach as well as tweak your strategy for your next promotional event.

Want to Learn More?

Promotional events are great opportunities to increase sales and to engage with new and old customers! To learn more about how you can prepare for upcoming promotional events, listen to our podcast where we dive further into how you can prepare!

When it comes to your site’s Core Web Vitals, it can be frustrating trying to figure out how to improve your site’s score. There are so many areas that could be causing problems, where do you even start? Lucky for us, there are some common mistakes that negatively impact your site’s Core Web Vitals that we can fix first!

What are Core Web Vitals?

Core Web Vitals are a collection of metrics created and tracked by Google. These metrics measure multiple aspects of the user experience on websites, measuring things like speed, accessibility, best practices, and Search Engine Optimization (SEO.) Think of it like a health checkup for your site!

Why are Core Web Vitals Important?

Measuring and improving your site’s Core Web Vitals not only helps your site perform better, but also can increase your rank in Google search queries. Google includes these metrics into the search query criteria with the goal of showing quality sites first.

Common Website Mistakes to Avoid

When it comes to your Core Web Vital scores, there are many things that can bring your score down. However, there are a few common mistakes that, if fixed, can increase your Core Web Vitals scores all around!

Using too many Plugins & Add-Ons

While plugins, add-ons, and analytics tools can enhance the functionality of your website, they can also negatively impact your Core Web Vitals in multiple ways. Each plugin and add-on you incorporate to your site needs resources to run. If you have too many plugins and add-ons, your site’s loading times will be slowed down, decreasing your site’s performance score. Certain kinds of plugins can also cause your page to shift around if your loading times are heavily impacted. Overall, it is best to use only the plugins and add-ons you need and to make sure that those they are loaded after the visible aspects of your page have appeared.

Not Optimizing your Images

Having large images and too many images on a page can heavily impact the speed of your site. Large images take more resources and time to load. One of the most common places we find large images is on the front page of a website. The banner image can often slow websites down a lot, negatively impacting not only your site’s performance, but user experience as well. Having multiple images can lead to the same scenario. To avoid this issue, make sure to size your images based on what you need. Many images can be resized and exported at less than perfect quality and still look great!

Using too many Fonts

Fonts are an important aspect of your website. Depending on the types of fonts you use and how many you incorporate into your website, both performance and accessibility can be negatively impacted. Custom fonts with large, unoptimized font files can affect load times as your site tries to unpack and illustrate them to your users. The same situation can happen when requiring your site to unpack multiple fonts at once. Best practice wise, keep your fonts simple and avoid using too many fonts on your site. Simple fonts not only are better optimized, but are easier for all of your customers to read.

Not Prioritizing Above the Fold Content

Above the Fold Content is the content your user sees first when arriving at your webpage. For many, you may think of your site’s home page when you think of above the fold content. The first things your user may see are a banner, site menu, call to actions, and some information about your site in. However, what loads first? You have to be careful when it comes to loading your front page and make sure that the content your user sees first loads first. Plugins, large banner images, resizing, and loading other elements first can slow down your site, negatively impacting your site’s performance. Make sure to optimize your above the fold content with fast loading elements while having the rest of your font page load after.

Using a Heavy Theme for your Site

When designing your website, choose your site theme wisely. Themes include all sorts of assets to make your site stand out but can be too heavy to load quickly. Assets such as images, videos, CSS styles, and JavaScript libraries all make up a theme, and if many of these assets are large, they can significantly slow down the loading speed of your web page. Use simpler themes when possible and try to optimize your theme if needed through compressing and optimizing some of the large assets it contains. “Lazy Loading” non-critical parts of your themes can also help!

Want to Learn More?

When it comes to improving and maintaining your site’s Core Web Vitals, we highly suggest making a routine out of checking them! Download our free Core Web Vitals Checklist to learn how you can measure your Core Web Vitals, understand the metrics, and improve your them!

Ever wanted your business to make money passively, even on your off days? It’s a dream many share, and the good news is that it’s entirely possible with the right passive income strategies!

What is Passive Income?

Passive income is the process of earning profit over time with minimal effort or activity involved. There may be effort and time involved in the initial set up of passive income strategies, but once complete, they need minimal tweaks & maintenance to run.

How can I make Passive Income?

When it comes to passive income, there are multiple strategies to choose from.  A successful passive income strategy is one that aligns with your business’ strengths and target audience. However, there are a handful of strategies that can be effective for all sorts of businesses:

1. Automated Marketing

One of the easiest passive methods of income you can implement into your business is automated marketing. Automating marketing interactions through event-based emails and a constant stream of social media content can bring both new and old customers back to your site with minimal effort!

With automated marketing, you can create collections of content that are sent automatically to customers that meet them where they are in the customer journey. With the help of an email management system such as AWeber, you can do things like send a “Welcome” email sequence to a new subscriber of your email as well as “post-purchase” emails for those who have purchased from you. Automating social media through a social media management system such as MeetEdgar helps introduce and remind customers of your products and services, giving your business continuous visibility. Overall, automated marketing allow you to nurture your customers passively, deepen your connection with your customers, and encouraging repeat customers.

2. Loyalty Programs

Customer Loyalty Programs encourage repeat customers by giving more incentives for customers to purchase your products through rewards, point systems, personalized content, and so forth. From offering exclusive discounts to sending free products, loyalty programs can be automated through customer loyalty software incorporated into your site and assisted with automated email marketing. A point system could be used that adds points to a user’s account depending on their purchases. Once they reach a certain number of points, they can receive a reward. Email marketing can help in reminding them about their point count as well as what rewards are available. Through both of these, you can streamline loyalty operations and provide perks for your repeat customers!

3. Digital Products

If you want to bring more value to your customers, digital products are a great place to start! Digital products are products that are distributed electronically either by being downloaded, streamed, or accessed online.

Digital products are things like e-books, online courses, templates, workshops, and so forth. When it comes to creating a digital product that can make passive income, you need to think of two things: first, what do your customers want to know? And second, how do they want to receive it? As a business owner, you have a lot of valuable information to share. If you sell garden equipment, for example, you could create a garden planner cheat sheet for your customers that has a list of plants and what months to plant them in. For a small amount of money, your customers can download this cheat sheet and use it to better optimize their garden plans. Despite the sheet being cheap, it’s a form of automated income that can add up if it resonates well with your customer’s needs! Through digital products, you can give value to your customers while also making income passively.

Want to learn more?

Passive income is just one method we can use to grow our businesses! To explore other options for passive income and learn more about how it works, listen to our podcast where we dive into our own experiences with passive income strategies!