Good morning! Do you have one minute to read and one hour to do? If so, you can improve your small business’ marketing in a big way. Each week, we will provide new ideas. Grab your morning beverage and let’s get started:
This Week: Learn How to Update Your Website
Yes, you can do this! You can save lots of time and money when you decide editing your website is a task worth taking on yourself instead of hiring out.
Learn to make basic changes to your website in four easy steps:
STEP ONE
Take a free, online web course.
Do a good search for Introduction to WordPress class (or whatever type of website you use). Make sure it includes basic WordPress keystrokes. There should be a number of free-to-under-$100 options. Spend one to two hours taking the tutorial.
STEP TWO
Reach out to your web developer.
Hopefully you have an ongoing relationship with the person who created your website. Ask them for a 30-minute session where they will walk you through logging in and give you a tour around the dashboard parts that relate to the outward facing parts of your website (pages, blog posts). Have them show you how to edit and then guide you as you do a basic edit.
STEP THREE
Start making basic edits.
If you’re like me, every time you look at your website you see minor changes you would like to make. Start doing this right away and continuously. It’s good for your website and will reinforce the skills you learned in your tutorial. It’s amazing how much more satisfied you will be with your website with this step and the next one.
STEP FOUR
Start making sure your messages are still up to date.
In a small business, your messaging changes quickly. Be sure your website reflects the latest and best information about your business. This may require whole paragraphs to change, but as long as you stay within the boundaries of your current structure (replacing titles with titles, paragraphs with paragraphs) you should be fine to edit. (If anything does go wrong, just remember not to save.)
Big changes that involve altered site structure, website refreshes, new photos, etc. will still require a web developer. So get in the habit of sorting changes between small to medium edits versus hire-out projects.
Payoff: Not only will self editing let you save lots of time and money, it will make your website a living document. This will help greatly with your SEO, as the search engines like to see authentic, dynamic content that can only be achieved through frequent changes and updates to your site.
It will also help your marketing. The messages your business is currently putting out on social, emails, and ads today will start to match what your target audience finds when they arrive at your website. All your communications will sync up! Voilá!
Want a new bit of marketing each week? Subscribe to the Morning Mark. Like our simple-but-proactive approach to marketing? Visit us at smallbizbrands.com.
