Green Apple Sales Blog

Why has e-commerce and online business exploded in the last few years?

The reason is one word:

SCALABILITY.

That’s it: scalability. E-commerce has the potential to grow at unprecedented rates; it can be scaled up virtually higher than any other business out there.

With e-commerce, you can also completely take yourself out of the operations equation and essentially have a business that runs without you lifting a finger. You can literally have a business that runs and makes you money 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with very minimal effort.

That’s why online e-commerce has experienced such a tremendous growth in recent years. It’s not an easy thing to do though, cracking into the e-commerce marketplace. You have to know what you’re doing and what will actually lead to REAL sales and profit.

The first thing you need is a professionally designed website, like the ones we create from the ground up at Green Apple Sales, a Chicago Web Design company. This will help boost ecommerce conversions since your online business will have a professional quality to it and will in turn help people trust your site.

Second, you need an ecommerce shopping cart built into your site. You’ve probably seen these other basic e-commerce packages from sites like Yahoo or eBay, connected to PayPal for checkout. These can definitely work for a time, but eventually in order to grow past a certain point you’re going to want to integrate your own shopping cart software on your own site.

It’s important that when people buy something on your site, they don’t have to leave your site to complete the purchase, which is a huge issue with PayPal or third-party ecommerce websites. On those sites, when you click the BUY button, you’re usually taken to a completely separate page to “check out”, and this can often times lead to confusion and a lost sale.

Don’t make this mistake and invest in the essentials up front.

Next, you need the marketing to get people to your site. This is where it gets fun though. You can completely outsource your marketing and not have to do a single thing. But, your business will continue to grow, and traffic will continue to increase.

If you have a professional website, your own contained, managed shopping cart on that site, and the marketing to drive floods of targeted buyers to your site, you’re going to be rolling in profit.

And, what’s best is that you can break down all the tasks you need to do on a consistent basis and outsource them, which is something we will help you with at Green Apple Sales, so you can profit without busting your wallet and back every day.

Once you do this, by taking yourself out of the equation, you can scale your business up by reinvesting the profits back into the business to grow it even more. This is the sure-fire blueprint to online business success.

Never before has business and entry to online business been easier, and we’d like to help you crack into this industry. If you’d like to explore how you can jump into e-commerce with cost-effective marketing and start a real business that brings in profit every month, call us at 312-569-9420

Talk to you soon!

Green Apple Sales

In this article, I’d like to take a break from the content we normally put out and tell you about the recent goings-on at Green Apple Sales!

Just this past week, our team had the honor and pleasure of attending the special, invite-only Corporate Sponsor Dinner hosted by the Share Your Soles organization. This organization is responsible for donating shoes to impoverished, shoe-less people literally around the world.

All the major sponsors of the organization – those who have financially contributed to it the most and helped make it the success that it is today – were invited to join Mona Purdy, the founder of Share Your Soles, for a private dinner at the Chicago Yacht Club.

It was such a blast! (We have pictures to prove it!)

This was a huge deal for us, after our direct involvement with the organization over the last several months. We’ve been working very closely with Mona to build a website for the organization that would give it a professional yet personal feel, which I think we’ve accomplished. (You can check out the website here).

We’re very excited to have been able to work with Mona and fully support everything that she’s done (and continues to do!). This woman works her tail off and it’s great to see such a noble cause accelerated by the support of both the sponsors and volunteers dedicated to helping her in her mission. We’re extremely glad to have been able to build the website that serves as the central hub of her online efforts.

In addition to the corporate sponsor dinner from Share Your Soles, Dan O’Callaghan announced that Green Apple Sales will be the Title Sponsor of the 18th Annual Herb Didier Memorial Golf Outing. This outing is being hosted by the Lincolnshire Morning Star Rotary Club and Share Your Soles in order to raise money for their charitable organizations.

I don’t know how we’ll shoot on the course, but I do know that we’re grateful to be able to help the cause of these 2 organizations, and will continue to do so in the future.

Green Apple Sales

Right now, even at this very moment, Small Businesses are experiencing a economic climate where they need to adapt in order to thrive. Or, more appropriately, to even keep their doors open.

If you’re one of those business owners that think:

• “My business won’t benefit from being online.”
• “I need to be online, but I don’t know how and I don’t have the time.”
• “These new trends (like Twitter and Facebook) aren’t here to stay; I won’t worry about them.”
• “Who cares about Google? I don’t need to be listed and ranked in there.”
• and so many more…

…Then you need to read every word on this page.

The business environment has shifted and to reach your customers and target audience, you now need to go to where they are: online.

This scares most business owners since they have no idea how that’s done. And that’s what I’d like to talk to you about today.

At Green Apple Sales, we KNOW how it’s done and have helped numerous businesses capitalize on this potentially exponential growth by tapping into the digital marketing strategies that are making and breaking businesses right now.

I’m going to be breaking down several different strategies in the next few posts, so you’re going to want to revisit this very frequently (or, to make it easier, just subscribe to my RSS Feed). But, the first digital marketing strategy I need to tell you about is your web presence.

Solid Web Presence

You know how in a mall, for example, people come there to walk around and look at stores and if they like the look of one they stop in? The idea behind this is that stores in malls are positioning themselves to be exposed to all that “mall traffic”… They’re putting themselves in front of people who may be interested in what they have. Sure, not everyone that goes to the mall stops at every store, but each store will attract a target crowd.

Essentially, that hasn’t changed with the rise of the digital business marketplace; however, how you position yourself to your target crowd has become more difficult.

To have an effective web presence, you first need to optimize your site so it’s one of the first sites that’s displayed when your customers search for you in Google (or the other major search engines). This is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which I’ll be covering very in-depth in a later post.

Digital Marketing Strategy

After you’ve established your site and have it ranked in the search engines using SEO, you then need to focus on other methods of driving visitors to your site.

There are so many ways to do this, and each one strategy – if applied correctly – can be a lead-generating powerhouse for your business. You can get a glimpse of some of the methods on the main page of our site. I’ll be expanding on each of these in the upcoming posts as well.

At this point, what I’d like to do is talk to you about your business; see where you’re at and what you’re doing with your digital marketing strategy. I’d like to schedule a free, no-strings-attached 1-hour phone consultation to blueprint exactly what you need to do to get from where you are to where you need to be.

Please, don’t hesitate to call me. My number is 312-569-9420. I’d love to talk to you and see how we can help. It will be more than worth your time.

Thanks and talk soon,

312-569-9420

Digital Marketing Firm

PS- Don’t forget to subscribe to my RSS Feed so you don’t miss any of the upcoming posts! And I’m serious… Call me if you have any questions on any of the content or would like to see how we can rock your business. We’re here to help.

The #1 thing small businesses struggle with is Search Engine Optimization. That is, having your website show up at the top of Google whenever someone searches for your business, or is looking for a business in your industry.

You NEED to be at the top, there’s no doubt about it. The businesses that are there right now, if they’re ranking for the right keyword, are crushing it right now. As a trained SEO expert (in addition to having an even better one at Green Apple Sales), I’m going to share a few of the top strategies small businesses can use to get to the top of Google. But first…

These some interesting items to note:

• For any search, on average, the #2 result gets about 40% less views than the #1 result
• The #5 result gets an average of 60% less views than the #1 result
• Each result after the #5 result gets an average of 20% less views than the one before it

What does this tell you?

1. If you’re not #1, you’re missing the boat and your traffic is suffering because of it.
2. If you’re not #1, then one of your competitors IS. And they’re probably taking the majority of your internet-driven business
3. If you get to the #1 position, you’re going to see a very positive increase in traffic, leads, business, sales, etc.

I hope those are good enough reasons for you. More business and more sales? Of course that’s a good deal!

So now the big question… How do you climb to the top of the search engines? How does the mysterious “Search Engine Optimization for Small Businesses” really work?

Here are some tips for you that you need to be implementing yesterday:

1. Target the Right Keywords!

So many times business owners can’t seem to rank because they are targeting the totally wrong keywords.You need to choose the keywords that are:

1. Less popular (less searched-for)
2. Local-related

Here’s an example: let’s say you have an auto repair shop in Joliet, IL. If you tried to rank for “Auto Repair” or “Auto Repair Shop” in Google, not only is there ridiculous competition for it that would take tons of money and time to rank for, but it’s completely untargeted!

That’s a general, nation-wide search we’re talking about, so yeah you might be at the top of Google for “Auto Repair Shop”, but what if 60% of the searches came from Orange County, CA? What if only a handful of people that searched for that phrase were even in Illinois? You wouldn’t be able to service those customers and you’d have wasted tons of time and money!

So instead of going “wide” as they call it, you want to target keywords that are highly relevant to your business. Instead of choosing “Auto Repair Shop”, you’d want to target “Auto Repair Shop in Joliet IL” or “Auto Repair Joliet IL”. Those searches only get a fraction of what a general search gets, but it’s infinitely more targeted. If someone searched for Auto Repair Shop Joliet IL, you know 3 things:

1. The person is most likely in Joliet, IL.
2. They have an automobile that they need to repair.
3. They’re looking for a local business that can do it.

See how that’s so much better? Sure, “Auto Repair Joliet IL” may only get 100 searches a month, as opposed to the 800,000/month searches “Auto Repair Shop” gets, but if none of the people searching for that are anywhere near Joliet, IL, it doesn’t matter.

Final note on this: choose the right keywords. Target the keywords that highly correlate to your business, and preferably use a local keyword (such as Joliet, Plainfield, or whatever town/city you’re in).

2. Get Relevant, One-Way Links Back To Your Site

I wanted to mention this simply because there’s so much information out there, in addition to expensive services based around that information, that just isn’t accurate.

One very popular way to get backlinks in the past (as in the last 4-5 years) was to enter your website in tons of different directories and participate in link exchanges.

Newsflash: link directories and link exchanges are almost useless anymore.

There are still services out there that actually charge upwards of $300 to “enter” your website in thousands of directories, but these links mean next to nothing to the search engines.

You need relevant, one-way links; that’s the key. If you “exchange” links with another site or company, you’re essentially just zeroing out that link, so that’s useless. As an SEO specialist, I’ll dominate any site that does link exchanges or only has links from directories. Hands down, every time.

The interesting thing is that most small business owners, those trying to rank for keywords on a local level and small-scale, don’t know how to get the quantity of relevant, one-way backlinks to their site, so when I step in there I can make sure your site gets to the #1 position.

And finally, the last tip I want to share with you:

3. Do Your Research; Keep Up-To-Date on the Search Engines!

The best thing you can ever do to compete in the search engines is to do your own research! I can’t stress this enough. The search engines are always changing, always updating to make damn sure they provide people with the most relevant search results.

By the time any given book makes it to publication, there’s usually things in it that are either different or entirely obsolete. Often times, the internet changes so quickly that even former “specialists” or “experts” are out-dated.

At Green Apple Sales, we have people dedicated researching, testing, and tweaking SEO concepts on a daily basis, so we’re always up to date with how the search engines are ranking websites. It’s that kind of knowledge and power we bring to the plate when we rank YOUR website at the top of Google.

But it all starts with doing your own research, discovering things for yourself that others might charge you hundreds for that don’t even work any more.

That concludes today’s article on SEO For Small Businesses. I hope you learned something. If you have ANY questions at all, DO NOT hesitate to call us at 312-569-9420. I’d be more than happy to go over anything and help in any way I can.

See you in the next post!

312-569-9420

Digital Marketing Firm

As of right now, YouTube is the 2nd most visited website on the internet.

That’s some serious traffic! It also means that video is a HUGE deal. Translated to your business, it means that you need to be capitalizing on using video to connect with your target market.

The key phrase here is “dynamic marketing”. The revolutionary concept behind video marketing is that it lets you connect to your market and future clients/customers in a totally new and personal way.

Sure, you can write professional articles, record audios for podcasts or syndicate press releases for online publicity. But, those aren’t really dynamic marketing strategies. What video does is put a face behind the words or behind the voice.

When you use video , people watch it and see you and your business. They see your face and establishment and associate both with being real, not some random author of an article or business behind a static website.

You’re a person, and expert. Your business is established and an authority.

Now imagine how this can effect your brand and your sales. Go to Google right now and search for keywords that YOU would want to be found by. If you’re not ranking in the search engines, then your competition is. I hope you find them, because now I’d like you to visit their websites. See if they’re using video.

They most likely are NOT. That’s a huge thing, since when you implement video into your marketing, which in turn creates a dynamic marketing campaign, you’re differentiating yourself from everyone else.

Now let’s dig into a couple selling points of small business video marketing…

1. Instant Credibility

When you see people on TV or watch a video of them or their business online, you tend to associate them with being an expert in that particular industry.

That’s what video marketing does; it gives you and your business that expert status.

2. Stand Out From the Crowd

Because your competitors probably aren’t using video in their marketing, it instantly makes you stand out! A person searches for a business in your industry or field, comes to your site, sees your video of YOU or your business, and visually connects you as being THE expert. Even if they leave your site and go to your competitor’s sites, just by using that medium to connect with them you’ve already separated yourself and are ahead of them by miles.

3. It Pre-Sells Your Customer

This is the best point of all. Using videos in your marketing and on your website lets you actually show people what you and your business is about. It pre-sells them on your products or services. By the time they take action and call you, chances are they’re already sold on what you have to offer because they’ve seen it in the video.

How powerful do you think this is in your marketing campaigns?

Hopefully now you see the potential of small business video marketing. At Green Apple Sales, we can help you utilize video in your marketing to connect with your customers on that next level.

Call us today at 312-569-9420 for a free, no-strings-attached consultation on how we can rock your sales using video and the internet. It’s going to be more than worth your time.

312-569-9420

Digital Marketing Firm