Improving the design of your site or blog doesn’t mean that you have to start from scratch. While a complete redesign may be the best option in some cases, many designs simply need some tweaks. This is especially true for some of the most common design elements. Examples of what you can easily improve include:

Social Sharing Buttons

People like to share content through social networks. As a result, many sites incorporate buttons that make it easy to share. Unfortunately, the most common trend for these buttons has become to cram in as many as possible.

If you currently have these buttons on your site, you may want to rethink their usage. First, look at your analytics to find out which social networks your visitors are actually using. There’s no reason to provide shortcuts to a dozen different sites when your visitors are actually only using 2 or 3.

Copywriting isn’t a skill that’s only useful to professional writers. In fact, you don’t even need a blog to benefit from copywriting. Every business owner can benefit from sharpening their copywriting skills and then applying those skills to their business website. While many of the changes you will eventually make to your website may not seem like that big of a deal, they can actually have a significant impact on your overall conversion rate.

Most businesses invest a lot of resources into acquiring new customers. While avenues like search engine marketing can be cost effective ways to bring in new customers, many customer acquisition methods are quite expensive. Because of their focus on this task, a lot of businesses forget that they already have a great source of customers.

This source is the clients or customers they’ve already served in the past. One of the hardest parts of getting prospects to actually pull out their wallet and do business with you is reassuring them that they’re going to get great value for the money the spend. But with past customers, they already know that they can count on you to do a good job. Since this hurdle is eliminated, all you have to do is give them a compelling reason to place another order from you.

If you like the idea of focusing more on your past customers but don’t know how to pique their interest, there are a couple of methods that are quite effective:

To the average person, the world of fashion can seem quite strange. However, despite the eccentric nature of this industry, it’s huge. The fashion industry in the UK alone is worth over £20 billion a year. Because of its size and influence, there are some valuable tips that marketers in any space can learn from fashion:

Trends Come and Go

Trends are one of the first things most people associate with fashion. Every year, it seems like there’s something new that makes its way from the runways and catches on with mainstream consumers. While it may seem like the biggest trend ever at the time, chances are by the same time next year, something else will have already replaced it.

Developing a content strategy, building an email list and engaging in social media marketing are all ways that you can bring more visitors to your website during 2012. While all of these options are very effective when done correctly, there's one more step that you have to focus on if you want these visitors to become actual customers. Conversion is the key to actually increasing your bottom line. Although it may not be a topic that the tech press hypes on a regular basis, optimizing your conversion rate can have a major impact on your overall business.

While you will probably have prior steps in your sales funnel, once you're ready to actually make a sale, a landing page is generally the most effective way to maximize your conversion rate. The reason a good landing page works so well is because it gives a visitor all the information and reassurance they need to become a customer by actually pulling out their credit card and making a purchase.

It's safe to say that social media is past the phase of being a fad. Although new social sites will be launched and some existing sites may decline in popularity, using the Internet for this type of communication is here to stay. Since people aren't going to suddenly stop communicating through social media platforms, it's worth investing some of your marketing efforts into these channels during 2012.

The biggest issue with social media marketing is it can be hard to directly measure results. A big reason why this can be so difficult is while multiple studies have confirmed the benefits that social media can offer to businesses, many of them are a "bigger picture" result. This means that it's hard to directly correlate the impact of using social media.

More business owners are realizing just how much they can gain by creating a strong online presence for their business. However, email is one area that many business owners in both the new and experienced with online marketing categories still overlook. One of the reasons that many don't emphasize this aspect of online marketing is because they think it's a dated practice. While email marketing may not be a topic that the tech press is buzzing about, it's still extremely effective. In fact, since spam filters have eliminated a significant amount of unwanted commercial email, targeted emails may be even more effective than they were a few years ago.

Since the New Year is less than a month away, the next few posts are going to focus on ramping up for a successful 2012. Today, we're going to discuss how to get your content strategy in line.

What Does Google Want?

During 2011, Google made several changes that had a significant impact on the way they view content. While many Internet marketers were left scratching their heads throughout the year, two things were made very clear by these changes. The first is that quality is of utmost importance to Google. Although quality can be a somewhat subjective issue, the important thing to remember is Google uses general signals and guidelines to determine the quality of content.

Although it's been over a decade since website "hits" had their heyday, you can still find plenty of website owners who obsess over how many daily visits their site receives. While it's easy to get caught up in refreshing your stats, this isn't an activity that's going to help your bottom line.

Many businesses want to attract visitors to their website and convert them directly into customers. While it’s great if you can convince visitors to pull out their credit card within a few minutes of visiting your website, this isn’t always a realistic option. It can be especially difficult for businesses who sell higher priced items to convert visitors directly into customers.

If you’re frustrated that your conversion rate is much lower than you’d like, the good news is there’s a simple way to convert more of the people who visit your website into potential customers. An email newsletter may be exactly what you need to get better results from your online marketing efforts. Although a newsletter may seem like an old school marketing tool, there are several reasons why it can be extremely effective:

Whether you want your website visitors to submit their email address or pull out their credit card and make a purchase, before a visitor will take any action, they need to trust your website. If visitors are concerned that your website isn't legitimate, they're unlikely to submit their email address to you, and they're definitely not going to make a purchase through your website.

If a lack of trust is hurting your conversion rate, the good news is there are some simple steps you can take to ensure visitors know that there is a legitimate business behind your website:

Add Testimonials with Pictures: Even the best copywriters will admit that nothing they write is as compelling as testimonials from customers. When a visitor is about to take action on your website, there is a little part of their brain that asks "are you about to do something you're going to regret?" Because no one wants to answer yes to this question, adding testimonials to your website will reassure visitors that other real people have taken the same action and were very happy with the outcome.

Everyone and their mom has a Facebook account these days. And Twitter isn’t far behind. Then you have YouTube videos popping up left and right that go viral and get seen by millions of people. And here you are, a small to mid-sized business owner, wondering how you can harness the potential you see. Is it possible that such Social Media outlets can be used to expand your business.

You bet. But you have to know how.

Whether you've just started a blog to help promote your business or your employer has been speaking with you about launching a company blog, it’s absolutely true that a blog can help a business grow. Otherwise, I wouldn't be writing this post right now!

While blogs have long since passed their stage of being nothing more than personal journals, there's still a lot of confusion about how to blog the right way. This is especially true for businesses who want to get on board with blogging. To get the most out of the time you spend blogging, make sure you avoid these common business blogging mistakes:

You know what press releases are, but if you’re like most small business owners—you don’t know how to use them. Sure everyone would love getting press for their business, but is it really possible? And can you create a press release that will do it for you? In this week’s post, I aim to open your eyes to the world of press releases.

The Purpose of Press Releases

First of all, you need to know what exactly they’re used for. And really it can be broken into two categories:

So now you’re bringing in good leads. Great! But what’s happening with them? You can have a million people a day look at your site, but are you converting them into paying customers?

Enter the landing page, your secret weapon for conversion.