It’s a new year and I’m assuming you have some new business goals. I’m even willing to bet that some of those goals have something to do with your website. Am I right? If so, here are 5 ideas to get your online marketing off to a great start.

Audit your calls-to-action - What do you want your website visitors to do? Contact you right? Are you making it easy for visitors to do this? If you have to think about it chances are they could be improved. Every page on your site should have a prominent call-to-action. This should include your telephone number as well as some sort of contact form or at least a link to a form. Don’t just have a contact page on your site and think that is all you need. You only have a short period of time to convert your visitors and if they have to look for a way to contact you, many will not.

Add a sitemap - Not only do you want to make it easy for your visitors to navigate through your website, but it is important the search engines can easily crawl your site as well. One of the easiest ways to address this is with a sitemap.

Start a blog - The two biggest things from an SEO standpoint are content and inbound links. A blog can help with both of these if you work it right. Try to get yourself on a blogging schedule of at least one new post a week. Be sure to share your content out through social media to attract new inbound links.

Start link building - As mentioned above, content and links are what will carry you the most in the search engines. Try to be conscious of your inbound links and find ways to attract more new links. It is best to get relevant industry links when possible.

Employ lead nurturing - Every industry will have a different sales cycle. For those that have a longer sales cycle, lead nurturing is essential. There are many things you can do to keep your brand in front of your prospects. One easy way is through marketing drip automation. Drip campaigns are a great way to keep communication open without necessarily eating-up a lot of time.

Now you have a short list of things that can have a huge impact on your online marketing. So, what are you waiting for? Go start the new year off right and complete what is on this list. Good luck!

Let’s face it, as much as us marketing folks preach ongoing content creation for various promotions, not everyone has the time. So how can a company pump out a blog post, press release and an e-newsletter all in one week? I think you might be seeing where I’m going with this.

The need to repurpose

Companies are busy and often understaffed, many want to be everywhere and do everything, but simply do not have the time. A great way to maximize the content you do produce is to repurpose. Now, this might not be appropriate in every occasion, but it is great when you can pull it off. One example is big company news. Let’s say you just released a new or improved product and you want to let everyone know about it. A good plan would be to announce the news in a press release, in a blog post and through an e-newsletter.

Think ahead when developing content

If you put a little thought into your content ahead of time, you can think of a a way to write it so it will be appropriate across several mediums.

5 Ideas to get you started

Below are some ideas of content that you might be creating and how you can maximize it by repurposing:

• A good place to start for company news is with the press release. Once this copy is finalized, you can add it as a new blog post and add it into your email as well. This gives you three opportunities to broadcast your news to different audiences from only writing once.
• If you recently hosted a webinar, you can take your slides and add them to your blog, send out an email with the link to the blog and even add the slides to Slideshare and Flickr.
• Break-up a recent long article, ebook or whitepaper into blog posts.
• On the flip side, you can take a series of current blog posts and turn them into an ebook.
• Take snippets out of any pre-existing content and share them on Twitter and Facebook. This should supply you with a list of updates!

As everyone knows, savvy marketers and businesses don’t work harder, they work smarter!