In today’s digital world, creating the right content and attracting the right leads are essential for growing your business. That’s why WeBC is excited to partner with Samantha Vlasceanu to offer a practical and empowering workshop series: “Digital Marketing Tips & Tactics: Turn Leads into Sales.”

This series is specifically designed for busy business owners who may not be professional marketers but still want to harness the power of strategic content and lead generation. We understand that as an entrepreneur, your time is valuable. That’s why our workshops provide simple, actionable strategies that you can implement even as you juggle other tasks. You’ll walk away with tools that help you attract leads and increase sales—without needing to spend countless hours on marketing.

We’ll focus on three key areas:

• Developing Irresistible Lead Magnets – Learn how to design offers that draw in potential customers, helping you grow your email list and build relationships quickly.
• Crafting Engaging Email Sequences – Discover how to nurture your leads with email marketing that converts, making the most out of each interaction with minimal effort.
• Creating Captivating Content in Batches – Master the art of planning and creating content that keeps your audience engaged and your business top of mind all year long, even with a busy schedule.

You’ll learn how to create content that not only grabs attention but also nurtures relationships and guides potential customers through each stage of the buyer’s journey.

Series schedule

All sessions are on Thursdays, from 10am to 11:30am PT.

• May 8 | Creating ‘WOW’ Lead Magnets
• May 15 | Email Sequences: Turning Interest into Engagement
• May 22 | Let’s Build 365 Days of Content – Right Now!

Join us in a supportive and interactive environment where you can unlock the secrets to effective marketing and content creation!

A recording will be available for 30 days after each of the live sessions.

Open to everyone.

Series cost: $80; free for WeBC Loan clients and Vancity Women Entrepreneur Program clients

Register Here >>

The post Digital Marketing Tips & Tactics: Turn Leads into Sales appeared first on WeBC.

In today’s digital world, creating the right content and attracting the right leads are essential for growing your business. That’s why WeBC is excited to partner with Samantha Vlasceanu to offer a practical and empowering workshop series: “Digital Marketing Tips & Tactics: Turn Leads into Sales.”

This series is specifically designed for busy business owners who may not be professional marketers but still want to harness the power of strategic content and lead generation. We understand that as an entrepreneur, your time is valuable. That’s why our workshops provide simple, actionable strategies that you can implement even as you juggle other tasks. You’ll walk away with tools that help you attract leads and increase sales—without needing to spend countless hours on marketing.

We’ll focus on three key areas:

• Developing Irresistible Lead Magnets – Learn how to design offers that draw in potential customers, helping you grow your email list and build relationships quickly.
• Crafting Engaging Email Sequences – Discover how to nurture your leads with email marketing that converts, making the most out of each interaction with minimal effort.
• Creating Captivating Content in Batches – Master the art of planning and creating content that keeps your audience engaged and your business top of mind all year long, even with a busy schedule.

You’ll learn how to create content that not only grabs attention but also nurtures relationships and guides potential customers through each stage of the buyer’s journey.

Series schedule

All sessions are on Thursdays, from 10am to 11:30am PT.

• May 8 | Creating ‘WOW’ Lead Magnets
• May 15 | Email Sequences: Turning Interest into Engagement
• May 22 | Let’s Build 365 Days of Content – Right Now!

Join us in a supportive and interactive environment where you can unlock the secrets to effective marketing and content creation!

A recording will be available for 30 days after each of the live sessions.

Open to everyone.

Series cost: $80; free for WeBC Loan clients and Vancity Women Entrepreneur Program clients

Register Here >>

The post Digital Marketing Tips & Tactics: Turn Leads into Sales appeared first on WeBC.

In today’s digital world, creating the right content and attracting the right leads are essential for growing your business. That’s why WeBC is excited to partner with Samantha Vlasceanu to offer a practical and empowering workshop series: “Digital Marketing Tips & Tactics: Turn Leads into Sales.”

This series is specifically designed for busy business owners who may not be professional marketers but still want to harness the power of strategic content and lead generation. We understand that as an entrepreneur, your time is valuable. That’s why our workshops provide simple, actionable strategies that you can implement even as you juggle other tasks. You’ll walk away with tools that help you attract leads and increase sales—without needing to spend countless hours on marketing.

We’ll focus on three key areas:

• Developing Irresistible Lead Magnets – Learn how to design offers that draw in potential customers, helping you grow your email list and build relationships quickly.
• Crafting Engaging Email Sequences – Discover how to nurture your leads with email marketing that converts, making the most out of each interaction with minimal effort.
• Creating Captivating Content in Batches – Master the art of planning and creating content that keeps your audience engaged and your business top of mind all year long, even with a busy schedule.

You’ll learn how to create content that not only grabs attention but also nurtures relationships and guides potential customers through each stage of the buyer’s journey.

Series schedule

All sessions are on Thursdays, from 10am to 11:30am PT.

• May 8 | Creating ‘WOW’ Lead Magnets
• May 15 | Email Sequences: Turning Interest into Engagement
• May 22 | Let’s Build 365 Days of Content – Right Now!

Join us in a supportive and interactive environment where you can unlock the secrets to effective marketing and content creation!

A recording will be available for 30 days after each of the live sessions.

Open to everyone.

Series cost: $80; free for WeBC Loan clients and Vancity Women Entrepreneur Program clients

Register Here >>

The post Digital Marketing Tips & Tactics: Turn Leads into Sales appeared first on WeBC.

Here are three mistakes you can avoid so more of your happy users become happy customers.

#1. Driving traffic to sources other than your website.

You’re always going share tips, tricks, photos and posts with your followers on your social media platforms. However, it’s important that your larger, original content lives on your website. Use snippets as teasers on social media to drive users to your website for the whole enchilada.

Keeping content on your website first is not only a great way to keep people coming to your website (and one step closer to becoming a happy customer,) but it’s also helpful for your page rank in search engines. The more time users spend on your website reading articles or watching videos will demonstrate to Google that your website has content that users find valuable. This is gold for search engines, as they only want to serve up the best content to their searchers.

#2. Not putting the needs of your visitors first.

In the same way that having a phone number doesn’t guarantee people are going to call it, just having a website doesn’t mean you will get traffic, nor that it will mean instant sales.

The way consumers buy has changed. The majority of people want to do their pre-purchase research online and only want to reach out when they’re ready to buy. If your website doesn’t give users the information they need to make a purchase decision, they’ll happily click that big ol’ BACK button and visit your competition instead.

People come to your website because they are looking for somebody to solve a problem they’re having. In reality, you have built your website for your potential customers, so it makes sense to put their needs first.

#3. Spending money on ads and SEO without doing an analysis of your website first.

Google, Facebook and other platforms that sell ad space are more than happy to charge your credit card regardless of whether you’re seeing any kind of return on that investment.

Many website owners—unhappy with the conversions they’re getting—pay for ads or search engine optimization. However, for many websites, traffic isn’t the issue. It’s the website itself.

Before you budget for any kind of activity that will drive traffic to your website, it’s so important to ensure that your website has what users need to make a purchase decision. Take some time to review your website and maybe run a small focus group before making that investment.

In addition to the mistakes you want to avoid to improve your users’ experiences, there are also many simple changes you can make to your website to make it even more compelling. A better user experience reduces user friction and breeds trust which motivates your visitors to pick up the phone, download that pdf or put that product in the cart.

Join Kris’ upcoming workshop, Supercharge your website: How to turn more traffic into leads or sales on November 25^th at the WECafe. Sign up for this free seminar today and get some great tips on making your website more enticing to users.

The post Supercharge Your Website: 3 Mistakes to Avoid appeared first on WeBC.

It’s a representation of your brand online that will be referenced in everything you do, from digital advertisements, to social media posts, business cards and car decals.

Getting a top-notch domain name is one of the best marketing investments you will ever make – and understanding this at the start of your business journey will help your brand set itself apart online.

Over the 20-years since Webnames was founded, we’ve helped register more than a million domains and yet, the fundamental best practices around searching for a domain name haven’t changed that much. What has changed is there are now more than one thousand different domain extensions (the part after the “dot”) to choose from, a thriving secondary market of registered domains available for sale, and a much busier, louder, more competitive world wide web for businesses.  

To help you navigate today’s domain landscape and choose a perfect domain name for your business, we recommend following these tips.

10 Tips for Finding a Memorable and Effective Business Domain Name

1. Begin with a good old fashioned brainstorm

With nearly 400 million domains already registered, the more creative ideas you can throw up on a whiteboard, the more options you have to play with in a domain search. Get a group of your favourite creatives together and start bouncing ideas, jotting down the names that make an impression.

2. Your domain doesn’t need to match your business name

Finding an exact match domain to your business name can be extremely difficult  – and it’s also not necessary (although it is preferable). Tesla, for example, used the domain telsamotors.com from 2003 to 2017, when it finally acquired tesla.com.

Make a list of prefixes and suffixes that you could append to your business name to increase the available options just like Tesla did with the word “motors”.

3. Prioritize brand impact over being literal

When it comes to your domain, aim for something distinctive. What exactly do we mean by that?  A brandable name makes an impression, whereas descriptive names typically do not.

A great example is Triangle.com, Canadian Tire’s reward program. They could have gone for CanadianTireRewards.com, or something similar, but it’s not nearly as evocative in terms of marketing, not to mention that it’s a mouthful to say and a lot more to type.

4. Tread lightly when it comes to keywords

Using keywords in domain names used to be a go-to SEO tactic years ago, but over the last decade, Google has made algorithmic changes to deprioritize websites that feature keyword rich domains but aren’t otherwise high-quality in terms of their content.

Today, the prevailing wisdom is to use keywords only where it makes sense to do so. Remember that point above about appending a relevant prefix or suffix to your domain for more options? This can be a good opportunity to insert a relevant keyword.

Are you targeting a Canadian, or international audience? If you’re doing business in Canada, .CA is preferred by Canadian shoppers.

Are your services local in nature? If so, consider optimizing for local searches by adding in a placename, like your city or province.

5. Shorter is better

The average length of a domain is about 13 characters – that’s 1 character shorter than “canadiantire,” 6 shorter than “womensenterprise”, and 5 characters longer than “webnames” by way of example.

Shorter is desirable for good reason. Not only are short names easier to type, spell and remember, but they’re also more likely to be shared in their entirety as links without being shortened. This helps to increase your brand’s visibility.

It’s also important to note that shorter domains are easier to navigate to directly on mobile – which comprises nearly 40% of all web traffic in Canada. We’d suggest aiming for something shorter than 15-characters before the “dot.”

6. Make it easy to pronounce, spell and type

Easy to say names create positive associations and enhance memorability. Before you register anything, always say it aloud. Does it roll off the tongue? Would you remember it if someone said it to you? Would you know how to spell it?

And speaking of spelling, what does it look like typed out as a domain name? Many seemingly great names fall flat when they get compacted into a single string with no spaces.

Regency Technologies is a perfect example: their original domain name years ago was itscrap.com (aka IT scrap) and it still forwards to their website regencytechnologies.com today, so they don’t miss out on any of that original type-in traffic.

Other things best to avoid are doubled-up letters and hyphens, which can be tricky to type correctly and read. If you decide to embrace some creative spelling, a la Fiverr.com or Flickr.com, be prepared to spell it each and every time you say it.

7. Choose the right extension(s)

All domain extensions are more or less equal when it comes to their innate SEO worth – and that’s because what really matters is the content and optimization of your website.

That said, most SEO and marketing experts still favour extensions that are trusted, recognizable and intuitive to your audience like .COM, or in Canada a .CA domain as its’ preferred by Canadians. The challenge is that long established extensions – .COM in particular – have far less availability, so it can be challenging to find a great domain that is available for registration, rather than listed for sale by its owner.

We also recommend exploring new and less well known TLDs that align with your business, for example .app, .eco, .store, .site, .realty and .quebec – just to name a few. Not only are these extensions increasing in popularity and familiarity, you’re more likely to find a short and highly relevant name in them. 

8. Consider buying a domain in the aftermarket instead

Don’t underestimate a domain’s value as a business and brand asset – and be open to spending some money to acquire something great. 

If you resign yourself to a second-rate domain that’s available instead of the one that you really want, you will feel that disconnect in all of your branding and marketing efforts – and if your business doesn’t work out, you can always resell a high quality domain.

When you do a search for a domain, you’ll typically see variations related to your search listed for sale in the results. There are also domain name marketplaces and auctions that you can browse.

For a few thousand dollars or sometimes much less, you can acquire a domain with great branding potential. It’s an  investment on par with a digital ad campaign or a no-frills direct mail campaign to a couple thousand homes, but one with far greater long term impact.

If you do decide to buy your domain, we recommend using Webnames’ domain broker service. For a modest fee you’ll receive a detailed report about that domain’s history, an expert assessment of the asking price or an accurate valuation of the domain if it’s not listed for sale, and of course expert, confidential negotiation to help you acquire it.

9. Avoid using names trademarked by others

Conduct some due diligence to make sure that the name you register as a domain is not under trademark or copyright by another party. If you’re doing business in Canada, a good place to start is by searching the Canadian Trademarks Database.

Also, keep in mind that owning a trademark does not entitle you to the matching domain if it’s already registered.

10. Act swiftly when domains are available

We’ve had a lot of customers over the years come back after a few days of mulling over different domain names to find the one they wanted registered by somebody else.

Most domains are inexpensive, so if you like something, but are not 100% sure about it, you should consider registering it anyways. It’s a low cost insurance policy and you don’t have to renew next year if you don’t want to.

We hope that these tips help you to zero-in on and acquire a domain name that helps your brand stand-out and your business thrive!

The post How to Choose the Perfect Domain Name for a Business appeared first on WeBC.

All those other businesses that relied on “traditional” marketing (flyers, newspapers, ads…etc) will fall behind right now with everyone practicing social distancing. I mean just think about what everyone doing while they’re self-isolating at home. They’re on social media. They’re taking online courses. Many are taking this opportunity to educate themselves and look for local and small businesses they can support.

Today, I’m going to talk specifically about using blogging to build your “know, like, and trust factor.” Once they know you exist, like you, and eventually trust you they will buy from you. Right now is the perfect time to work on getting people to know and like you!

So, here are 4 reasons blogging is best for your business:

1. Showcase your expertise

You are an expert in what you do, but you need to let the world know because if the world doesn’t know that you are a good essential oils rep, that you are an amazing travel agent, or that you’re a good Life Coach, why would they buy from you? The world is already filled with essential oil reps, travel agents, and life coaches. What will set YOU apart?

Showing your expertise through writing articles about your niche is one way to stand out and show people that you really know your stuff.

2. It’s fun!

Blogging is way more fun than putting out a Facebook ad. It’s way easier than figuring out Google ads. And it’s a little more engaging than just putting a flyer up in Starbucks and hoping that someone reads and responds to it.

When you’re blogging, you have the amazing opportunity to tell a story and storytelling in marketing is a HUGE trend that’s here to stay. It’s a way to share more about you as a person and teach others about your business.  

And, unlike posting a brochure or a flyer, blog articles can be a little more relaxed and conversational. No one wants to read an 800-word blog post that sounds like it was pulled word-for-word from somebody’s brochure. That’s a big no-no! Don’t fill your articles with marketing- or sales-speak. Focus on having fun with it, making it a more conversational way.

3. Blogging can go viral. A flyer will NOT.

The third reason why blogging is best for your business is that blogs are very easy to share, and have the potential to go viral (in a non-coronavirus way of course).

No one is going to go share your Google or Facebook ad. No one is going to take a copy of your flyer and Starbucks and post it in the front window of their house. People bookmark and save blog articles, not sales content.

When people read something that they like, they share it with their friends on social media. It’s a great opportunity to expand your reach to friends of friends.

4. Blogs are easy to repurpose

In your business, you want to get the biggest bang for your buck. Blogs are part of an effective Content Repurposing Strategy. Repurposing or recycling content is how you can turn 1 piece of juicy content (a blog article for example) into 5, 10, 20, or more additional pieces of content in different formats.

You probably spend a lot of time writing (or paying someone to write), posting, and promoting your blog content. Now it’s time to consider what other formats and mediums you can create from it. As learners, we all learn in different ways. Some of us want to read a blog article, while others couldn’t be bothered and would rather just listen to you a podcast, watch a video, or look at an infographic.

Think about how you can turn the content in that blog post into at least one different piece of content for each time of learner (auditory, visual, the readers…etc). Maybe you can pull some quotes from your article and use them in a few social media posts. Does the content lend well to an infographic? Can you record a podcast or create a quick video based on the content?

Content Repurposing is the main content marketing strategy that I teach my clients to do because I believe in it that much.

I believe blogging can be as effective, if not more so, than paid ads. Just focus on writing content of value that can teach and show off your expertise, and you’ll be golden!

The post 4 Compelling Reasons Blogging is BEST for Business appeared first on WeBC.