Today I present another written interview with Martin Russell. Martin brings solutions to business owners and entrepreneurs who present him (& his highly trained team of coaches, consultants and specialists) with their marketing, advertising and low to no return on investments dilemmas. Russell and his dedicated staff are known around the globe by the way they take business owners and entrepreneurs ‘by the hand’, transforming their ongoing struggles to bring quality leads into their business consistently, into exciting breakthroughs.
Overall business owners and entrepreneurs are often confused about how to effectively promote their businesses, or struggle with where to best focus their marketing and advertising efforts for the best ROI (return on investment).
Check out the interview:
1. What got you interested in helping other entrepreneurs learn more about WordPress? Share your story.
I’ve loved WordPress ever since I started blogging online back in 2007. I’ve used it for each of my businesses and many side projects as well, because it is not only free, simple to use, endlessly flexible, and yet incredibly powerful for showing up in the search engines as well.
Entire online businesses have been started and built upon WordPress. It has almost 20% of the top 10 million websites using it, and over 60 million websites altogether.
Because it is so popular and so many people are experienced with it, getting support for it is incredibly easy too.
Most small business owners will find WordPress more than enough to handle their website presence.
Did I also mention that WordPress itself is totally free? Amazing.
2. What types of challenges do you find most people face while trying to grow their business or brand using WordPress?
Fortunately WordPress itself causes very few challenges for the business owner.
It will scale to fit any size a business can need, and the generic ‘look and feel’ of WordPress can be changed to fit any brand required. You won’t even know it is a WordPress site underneath.
The biggest challenge is to get very clear why you want a website.
– Do you just want an ‘online business card’?
– Do you want people to find you in when they search online (a website alone won’t do this)?
– Do you want to take orders or bookings off the website directly?
– Do you want people to take the next step eg call you, email you, or come in to your brick-and-mortar business?
3. If you could share 1-2 tips to help entrepreneurs succeed today with WordPress, what tips would you share and why?
First of all make sure you have someone set up your WordPress properly from the start, and give it regular ‘under the hood’ check-ups.
This includes basic steps like checking that links work, having a sitemap, installing tracking analytics, making sure Contact forms and search toolbars work, ensuring pages aren’t blank, ‘Under Construction’ or just badly outdated, comments are correctly filtered, and of course, getting it regularly and automatically backed up.
Your website must work smoothly for your customers, viewers, and search engines too.
Second, build an opt-in list! An auto responder this is one http://www.trafficwave.net/members/martinrussell I personally use.
Yes you need to make sure you have your phone number prominently displayed all over your site, a Contact page for people to send you an email etc. etc. But even so, most people who visit your website will not contact you.
Always take the opportunity to get their name and email address so you can follow-up with them (if you have no idea how to do this, do not fear. It’s easy, and automated.) And yes, it’s great if you can offer you can offer an incentive to make it even easier for them too.
You have put all that effort into getting them to your website, make sure you don’t have to repeat all that effort on them in future.
Finally, your website is your online “sales person”.
Like any sales person it must “look good” and be dressed up appropriately. However, getting design awards or impressing your Mum is not enough. It must be effective for your marketing.
It represents you and your business just as much as your front counter staff, or your shop front window, or the person who answers incoming calls.
No one visits your website with the goal of stopping there. Customers are coming to your website as a first step in doing business with you, and it needs to help them do this. One of the fastest ways I help small businesses get results is by making sure their website is up to scratch for turning browsers into buyers
4. How do you go about finding clients to work with you? What types of promotional methods are you using to draw in those new clients?
Most organically find my website http://www.3WaysToBackupWordPress.com and others are word of mouth
5. What are your future plans for 2014 and beyond?
Continuing to learn, Building upon what I have there and consulting others that are striving to master WordPress