Smoking is bad for you. It destroys your lungs, makes you stink of smoke and constantly steals your hard earned cash, but in reality it can effect more than your body. It can ruin your business.
Bear with us.
On average it takes about 8 minutes to smoke a cigarette. 8 minutes might not seem like a lot of time, but 8 minutes a day is all you need to push your website to the next level.
8 minutes a day, 5 days a week x 50 weeks a year (minus a couple weeks for holidays) equals 2000 minutes. 38 hours all told. That sounds like a full work week to us and every cigarette you smoke puts you and your company one foot closer to the grave. And that’s if you only smoke one cigarette a day!
Our response? Quit smoking and start to optimize. There are countless small tasks that can all be done in 8 minutes or less which, over time, will improve your web presence.
Here’s a helpful list of simple 8-minute tasks to get you started towards success.
Tweet and Follow: Twitter can be a powerful marketing tool. Writing a quick Tweet to tell people what’s new and exciting with your business takes a lot less than 8 minutes.
But, since we’re already signed in to Twitter and we have 5 of our 8 minutes left there’s no reason we can’t grow our audience as well. Take the time to follow 5 new people and directly message one person who has interest in your product, service or information. A quick hashtag search reveals who’s interested and who’s a dead lead.
Answer Some Questions: Answering questions is one of the best ways to establish trust with potential customers, especially when those answers won’t benefit you right away.
Linkedin’s questions and answers service allows users to search for queries related to their business, and answer queries as well. The more answers you provide, the more trusted you become in the community at large. Before long people are asking you directly for answers and if that isn’t a potential customer we don’t know what is.
Write a Blog Post: What have you been up to? No one knows unless you’re telling the online community. Word of mouth isn’t as effective as it used to be but the same principals still apply to information online.
People gossip and share all the time, it’s our nature as a species. If you aren’t telling stories, people simply don’t have anything to say about you. Give ‘em something to talk about. Take 8 minutes and tell the world what’s up!
Communicate: Building a solid backlinking structure from other sites to prove your business is for real goes a long way towards showing Google you’re serious about what you do. Those backlinks won’t make themselves.
Writing good content makes it more likely that material will be shared but a few emails and backlink requests can’t hurt either. Talk to people. They tend to talk back.
Facebook and Google+: New information and online material keep people coming back to your blog or website on a regular basis. Pages on Google+ and Facebook take mere minutes to setup and grow in volume over time.
In addition to general messages, every single blog post can be pushed through your social media walls and message boards, letting all your follows know that ‘soup is on’. After all, we can’t read something we never see with our own eyes.
Get Listed: Just last week Canopy Media was contacted through a business directory. It’s safe to say that we don’t get many bites from these directory websites but a lead is a lead, no matter where it comes from. If we weren’t listed that person or lead would have gone to the next business on the site. Simple as that.
Processing your info into a new directory takes a few minutes, or even less if you save your directory info in a template file. Copy and pasting business details is much faster than writing it out each time you register your business details and for every listing you create your lead funnel gets bigger.
Resubmit Old Material: You took the time to write those articles, so take the time to make sure you get the maximum benefit. Resubmitting your material to article submission sites is a quick and easy way to increase the reach and exposure of your message.
If you get signed in to the right article directories your inbound links will remain intact, increasing both traffic and site authority. We re-post articles at the exact rate of one every 8 minutes. Once your account is created, which also takes about 8 minutes, your business profile is increased one post at a time.
Website Edits, One Page at a Time: Not every page you build for your website is a perfect gem. It’s better to have something rather than nothing but, something worth doing is worth doing right. After building web pages and posts take the time to revisit them at and re-optimize for more effect.
Adding keywords, photos and videos to your posts make them more interactive and possibly more appealing than the websites in front of you in Google searches. A post is good. A post with all the bells and whistles is better and any search engine would tend to agree.
Google Local: Showing up in a local search is the main determining factor for some businesses success. We’ve all seen the results before. Any time you add a city or geographical location to your Google search you invariably see a listing of local options, which contains up to 7 visible listings called the 7 pack.
Creating and completing your Google Local listing makes sure you can be found by people in your neighbourhood. Having good foot traffic to support your online efforts is a great business model.
It’s important to note that we aren’t singling out the smokers of the world. Smoking is a choice like any other but just because you choose to step out for a puff doesn’t mean you can’t take part in these simple recommended tasks.
Smart phones and tablet devices can be easily outfitted to give remote access to many of those same social media accounts. Indoors, outdoors or on the move, using your spare minutes effectively adds hours of productivity to your business.
Start turning those nic-fits into marketing minutes and watch your web presence grow.
Canopy Media knows how to build websites that work. For more information on how to optimize and online marketing visit our online marketing blog or contact us directly.
Joseph Anthony is a team member of Canopy Media, an industry leader specializing in online lead generation and professional website design. Joseph Anthony also produces content for the Canopy Media online marketing blog. Contact Canopy Media at info@CanopyMedia.ca