Unlock the Secret to Boosting Your Online Marketing on a Budget with Evan Carmichael!

Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another video. This is the first video that I'm doing for Intuit, and they've got a new contest going where they're going to be giving away $5,000 every day for 15 days in December. All you have to do is go to loveourlocalbusiness.com and enter in a reason why you deserve to win the $5,000, what you're going to spend it on, and you have your chance to win. So in today's video, I'm going to share some of my top secrets and tools that I like to use and if I had $5,000 and I was a budget-conscious entrepreneur, how I would spend it. So I hope you enjoy the video, and I'd love to hear what you have to think after you watch it. Number 1: Improve your online marketing. One of the most cost-effective ways to market your business is online. It's never been cheaper or easier to acquire customers, and with the right tools and strategies, you can get a significant return on any investment you make. Here are a few ideas to help you get started. Boost your search engine optimization, or SEO. SEO traffic converts well because they are usually people who are looking for an answer to a problem. They have a pain, and if you can help them solve it, they'll sign up with you. Take a look at HubSpot's Marketing Grader, which is free, for a quick list of suggestions on what you can do. If you wanna go more in depth, check out SEOmoz. They tell you specifically what's wrong on your website, give you weekly rankings reports for your important keywords, and even teach you step-by-step about SEO if you're interested in learning more. There's a free trial for 30 days then pricing starts at $99 a month. Get, or use, a newsletter. A newsletter is one of the most powerful tools that you can have in your online marketing arsenal. Not many people will come to your website and buy immediately. They'll want to learn more about you and your business, browse around, and then make a decision. If you don't capture their information when they visit your website, you're relying on them to remember to come back to your site, and most people won't. Use a newsletter to turn a browser into a prospect and a prospect into a customer. Give them a reason to sign up. For example, a free bonus, a white paper, a download, some discounts, and then give them value-add content on a regular and consistent basis. My tool of choice here is AWeber. I have over 65,000 subscribers, and every week I send a value-add email to them that helps position me as an expert at what I do. My favorite feature is that they tell you the likelihood of your emails going to someone's spam folder, and they give you suggestions for what to do to score better. They have a $1 trial and affordable pricing depending on the size of your list. Get some design help. Having a professional image online can go a long way to making people trust you and want to work with you. Make your website look respectable and your marketing materials don't scream out "amateur." A great resource for entrepreneurs is 99designs. If you need any kind of design help, think logos, website, business cards, banners, mobile app, brochures, etc., I'd start here. You put in your project and your budget and people from around the world will start submitting designs. With most graphic designers, you have to look at their previous work and hope that they'll do a good job on your project. With 99designs, you get to see the final product itself and only pay if you choose a winning design. Designs start at a couple hundred dollars and are typically very cost-effective. Number 2: Bring on some help. As entrepreneurs, we wear too many hats and our list of to-dos never seems to end. To grow your business, at some point you need to build beyond yourself. It also doesn't have to cost you a lot of money to get going. The first person I hired was for 1 hour a day just to free up my time to focus on higher priority projects. Here are 2 of my favorite resources to help you bring on some help without draining your bank account. ODesk. ODesk is the world's largest and fastest growing place to outsource your work to online. Hundreds of thousands of talented people from around the world bid on your project, which can range from a one-off deal to a full-time position. I've hired people on ODesk to do admin work, video editing, writing, transcription, graphic design, telemarketing, and be a personal assistant. Assistant. The rates are extremely competitive, and you can see how well they've done from other employers and their ratings on previous jobs. If you're looking for, for part-time work or full-time help and you don't physically need someone in your office, i.e., almost every job, oDesk should be your first stop. Fiverr. Fiverr is a website where people list what they will do for you for $5. They are usually very simple tasks, which for them is easy, but for you might cause a lot of frustrations. Need a video transcribed? Need to install a new WordPress blog? Need help with an Excel function? Need to translate some text? There's someone on Fiverr who will do it for you for $5. Make sure to look out for people who have positive ratings and are experienced sellers. If you need something specific done that you can't find anyone for, you can also post a request and people will bid on that project as well. Be careful though, the fun and bizarre category can get addictive and kill your productive time as you explore the depths of things people will do for $5. Number 3: Improve your productivity. There are never enough hours in a day to get everything we need done. Fortunately, there are a number of great tools that can help us do the things we need to do more efficiently. Here are some of my favorites. Accounting software. This might seem a little self-serving as it's on Intuit's blog, but I don't do work for Intuit. I'm an entrepreneur. If you don't have accounting software like QuickBooks for your business yet, it'll dramatically improve your productivity. Every quarter I download my Visa statements into my accounting software, and in 20 minutes I'm done my bookkeeping. Invoicing, managing your cash flow, budgeting is all so much easier to do with software like QuickBooks. As entrepreneurs, we need to spend time focused on where we add the most value to our business. Unless you love sitting down every month with your shoebox of receipts and Excel spreadsheet, pick up a copy of QuickBooks and make better use of your time to grow your company. Other tools. There are so many tools that I use to boost my productivity that I can't go into details on each one right now, but if you have any specific questions, just let me know. Most of them are either free or very reasonably priced. Here's a quick list of some of what I use. For buying domain names, I use GoDaddy. For hosting my website, I use BounceWeb. For syncing, sharing, and backing up my files, I use Dropbox. For coordinating with my team and running surveys, I use Google Drive. For automating my scheduling, I use Timetrade. For going paperless, I use ScanSnap and Evernote. To save time by creating a homepage dashboard, I use Notepad. Never forget any of your passwords again by using LastPass. Quickly learn about your contacts by using Rapportive and Xopni. Get desktop reminders for Google Calendar using Gminder. Productively stay on top of the news using Google Reader, Instapaper, and Zeit. Stay on top of news for your clients, use Google News Alerts. Manage your social media accounts using Hootsuite. Create Google Sitemaps and find internal broken links, I use GSiteCrawler. To schedule and space out my tweets, I use Buffer. And for analytics on my Twitter account, I use CrowdBooster. That's a partial list of my favorite tools, but it should hopefully give you a few ideas to dig deeper into. Again, if you have any questions about these tools or other tools, Just leave a comment below and I'll answer it for you. Number 4: Give your marketing a boost. We've already talked about the importance of online marketing, see point number 1. Don't forget about traditional marketing too. It doesn't have to cost a lot of money, and for creative entrepreneurs, it can be an easy way to get more attention for your company and drive more business. Here are 2 quick, low-cost ways that I market my business and how you can do the same. Get in the media. When you read a newspaper, are you paying attention to the ads or the story? Advertising can work, but it's expensive and takes time. Getting a story written about you, however, can have an immediate impact, and the only cost is your time. When I first started out, I built my own media list of reporters I wanted to reach out to, and every week emailed them a new story idea. Every week at least one of them said yes, and it helped me get a lot of media attention early on. Now I use PRLeads as my tool of choice. Every day they send you stories that reporters are actually working on and are looking for expert help with. If your background matches up with the reporter's story, you contact them and have the chance to be featured in the article. PRLeads has gotten me into the New York Times, Forbes, and countless other publications. The cost for the service is $99 a month. Recognize your clients. Who doesn't love it when companies recognize them? Even sending something as simple as a card to someone can help improve their loyalty and cause them to buy more and refer new clients to your business. It's basic marketing. But unfortunately not something that people do enough of, especially in this digital age. My favorite tool to help me here is SendOutCards. They have a wide variety of cards to choose from, and all you have to do is type in a message, include the address, and they'll print it, seal it, stamp it, and mail it for you. How simple is that? You can also attach gifts to the card if you want to go the extra mile. Try sending out the brownies. We always get a great reaction when we send them to our clients. It really works. Try it. Number 5: Invest in yourself. If you stop learning, your company will stop growing. Your business will always be limited by how much you know, so the more you know, the better. Here are two ideas to help you invest back into yourself without spending a lot of money. Mastermind groups. I run two mastermind groups in Toronto for entrepreneurs, and whether you are joining an existing group or creating your own, it's an extremely valuable tool. The format we use, which you are free to adopt, is to meet once per month at a set time and place. Everyone then has 20 minutes to talk about the challenges that they've been facing and get input from the group. The goal isn't to talk for 20 minutes, but to introduce a problem and let the group help you out. It works best when you have members in a group who are in different industries and have different skills from what you're good at. You not only get ideas to help you solve your challenge, there's also something about being around other entrepreneurs that can help you Stay motivated and realize that you're not alone. Again, this post is just an intro into a lot of topics, so if you have any questions about mastermind groups, feel free to leave it in the comments below and I'll answer it for you. Training. Whatever you're interested in learning, there's training out there for you. It might be online, it might be in person, it might be from a book. Set a goal to learn something new every quarter and go out and execute. The more you make improvements, the more your business will grow. I've created my own line of worksheets for entrepreneurs that might help if you're just getting started. I'd also recommend checking out Last Minute Training. They are Canada's largest training marketplace and sell access to training classes at discounted rates across the country. Thank you for joining me for another video. If you guys like the video, you want to see more, please give it a thumbs up below. I'd also love to hear what you have to think if you want to leave a comment. I always check those out. It makes me want to do more of these videos for you guys when I see them. And don't forget, if you want your chance to win the $5,000 every day for 15 days in December, Just go to loveourlocalbusiness.com and enter for your chance to win. We'll see you soon.