Think of yourself as dead.

You may think this is weird advice, but it’s not coming from me. It actually comes from Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius.

In his book “Meditations,” Aurelius says,

“Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what’s left and live it properly.”

I like this idea a lot. So much so that I’m convinced that if you apply it, it will completely change your life.

Why? Because oftentimes we give too much of our time and attention to the things that don’t matter. As a result, we completely ignore the things that do.

And we do this because we think we’re going to live forever.

We never stop to think that we’re going to die one day. When in fact, we could die tomorrow.

At any moment, you could get hit by a car, choke on your food, or trip on a step and hit your head.

Because of this, you need to stop focusing on all the little things that bother you and start making the best use of your time.

This doesn’t mean you should sell everything you own and gamble all the money away at the casino.

This isn’t the best use of your time.

Instead, the best use of your time is working on being a good person, doing your best, constantly improving yourself, and living a life of reason and virtue.

Imagine you died last night and you have now been given a second chance. Then make two lists:

1) What are the most important things in your life?

2) What do you actually spend your time with?

Compare the lists and choose one thing you’ll work on being better at in the next few days.
Doing this will help you focus on what’s truly important so that you don’t waste time on what’s not.

Thanks for your Wisdom Vincent Carlos

It’s not an update you can do yourself; it’s the responsibility of your Host. It could crash your site! Call your Host and ask what version your website is using AND if it’s really old do they have a back-up of your site in case it crashes! There should be no extra charge for this; again, it’s the responsibility of your Host!

One area that many businesses struggle with in online marketing is coming up with a social media strategy. Everything from creating social profiles to social content strategy can be daunting. Fortunately, your business doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel. Chances are, you can gain a good understanding simply by reviewing your competitor’s strategy. In this post, we’re going to look at how you can scope out your competitors and apply their best strategies to your social media campaign.

Selecting Your Competitors
Your first step in competitive social media research is selecting your competitors. You will want to find businesses similar to yours, but not limit your analysis to competitors of a specific size. For example, you may have a small local marketing agency, but you will want to include other small local agencies along with larger ones that offer similar services in your competitive analysis.

Choosing Social Networks
Next, you will need to choose which social networks to analyze. Most businesses will find that they want to start with the main social networks first: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. If you need to confirm whether a social network will be beneficial to your business, you can answer the following questions.

• Are your competitors on that particular network? If they are active and have a good following, then you need to be there.
• Are your target customers on that particular network? You can also create a test advertisement on that social network to see the size of an audience that fits your target customer demographic.

Having the answers to these questions can confirm your need to invest in social media marketing.

Analyzing Competitor Profiles
A great social media campaign starts with solid social profiles and pages. Here are some things you will want to analyze to see how your competitors have set up their social presence.

• What wording does your competitor use in their Twitter profile bio?
• What is their Facebook short description (the one on the front of their Facebook page)?
• What type of pictures do they use on Instagram?

Since you usually have less than 200 characters to describe your business to a first time visitor to your profile or page, you will want it to be great. See what your competitors have to say about their business, particularly noting keywords they include. And regardless of what your competitors do, be sure to squeeze your URL into both descriptions to increase the traffic potential from those networks. Especially on Twitter, as you will only see the URL in your profile in some areas of the site like search results.

Kristi Hines knows what she’s talking about – thanks for your Wisdom!

10 ways that don’t cost you anything and could really help a friend’s business. And be sure to LIKE friend’s Pages and Posts who LIKE your social media – or they may stop LIKING yours!

The post Support a Friend’s Business first appeared on WordPress Websites and Training - Sara Ohara.]]> 19735 https://saraohara.com/happy-thanksgiving/ Thu, 26 Nov 2020 07:00:22 +0000 https://saraohara.com/?p=19832 What a Year!

Yes, these are challenging times but we do hope everyone still has lots to be Thankful for.

In the age of Instagram, TripAdvisor and Yelp, I don’t think I can overstate the importance of photos to local businesses. Even before platforms like these rose up and put the power of visually representing the customer experience firmly in the hands of the consumer, people wanted to see with their own eyes what they’d be getting for their money.

Don’t believe me? Read on for some compelling evidence to convince you to take GMB photos seriously.

How important are Google My Business photos to local search performance?

As part of BrightLocal (my company)’s recent Google My Business Insights Study, we analyzed the GMB Insights of 45,000 businesses in 36 industries across four countries, in order to learn how this data has changed over time and, crucially, to see if there are any correlations.

Here’s a look at the correlations between the quantities of images visible on a GMB profile and other GMB performance metrics such as website clicks, calls, views on search and more.

Businesses with more GMB photos get more clicks, calls and direction requests

There is a consistent correlation between the number of images on a GMB profile and the numbers of website visits, phone calls and direction requestions that came through Google My Business. The more photos you have on your Google My Business listing, the better your chances of leading customers from discovery to conversion.

We also looked at deviation from the median to get an understanding of exactly how much getting more images on your profile can affect customer actions. Here’s what we found:

• Businesses with more than 100 images get 520% more calls than the average business, while those with just one image get 71% fewer.
• Businesses with more than 100 images get 2,717% more direction requests than the average business, while those with just one get 75% fewer.
• Businesses with more than 100 images get 1,065% more website clicks than the average business, while those with just one get 65% fewer.

Businesses with more GMB photos get more views on search and views on maps

In case you’re fairly new to GMB Insights, here are Google’s own definitions of these metrics:

Views on Search: A customer found the business via Google Search, including local pack results from search.

Views on Maps: A customer found the business via Google Maps.

Looking at deviations from the median, we see that:

• Businesses with more than 100 images get 960% more search views than the average business, while those with just one get 62% fewer.
• Businesses with more than 100 images get 3459% more maps views than the average business, while those with just one get 71% fewer.

Businesses with more GMB photos appear in more direct and discovery searches

Direct search: A customer directly searched for your business name or address.

Discovery search: A customer searched for a category, product, or service that you offer, and your listing appeared.

Here are the key findings from analyzing deviations from the median:

• Businesses with more than 100 images get 713% more discovery searches than the average business, while those with just one get 65% fewer.
• Businesses with more than 100 images get 1038% more direct searches than the average business, while those with just one get 71% fewer.

How to get more photos on your Google My Business profile

Post them yourself

Seems obvious, right? But as the original GMB Insights Study shows, 6% of businesses with photos have just one photo on their GMB profile, and a shocking 24% have just 2 to 5 photos!

This is very easily remedied with some creative thinking, but you need to remember that to qualify as a legitimate business photo on GMB, it needs to reflect the customer experience, so I’m afraid photos of your staff every day isn’t going to cut it.

If you can, hold events and invite your customers along. This is a great opportunity to take some snaps (ideally with customer consent, of course). Take photos of interesting parts of your office interior, too, and you can definitely get away with multiple photos of the outside of your location building, provided you have one.

Get customers to post them

It’s very possible that upon leaving your business, any Google-using customers will receive a request for a review from Google

To make the most of this, try to encourage your customers to take photos of their customer experience during it, rather than after the fact. Car dealers are performing exceptionally well in GMB, so look to see what their photo-generation strategies are.

For example, if they’ve bought a luxury item, get your salespeople to ask if the customer would like a photo taken of them with it. To the customer, you’ve just done them a favor but for your business, you’ve just put a brand-building bullet in the chamber of their smartphone.

If you’re a service-area business without a physical location like a plumber, decorator or builder, ask to take photos of your handiwork once it’s complete. Get the happy customer in the shot and you’ve done even better!

Contact us if you’d like some assistance in setting up or updating your Google my Business page.

Thanks for your Wisdom Jamie Pitman

1. Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently…they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.
2. In your life you only get to do so many things and right now we’ve chosen to do this, so let’s make it great.
3. I’m not dismissing the value of higher education; I’m simply saying it comes at the expense of experience.
4. We’ve got to make the small things unforgettable.
5. Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you, and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.
6. I would rather gamble on our vision than make a ‘me, too’ product.
7. It [what you choose to do] has got to be something that you’re passionate about because otherwise you won’t have the perseverance to see it through.
8. The greatest artists like Dylan, Picasso and Newton risked failure. And if we want to be great, we’ve got to risk it too.