[00:00:23] You'll learn strategies and tactics, leadership skills, and practical advice from successful women entrepreneurs to help you grow, nurture, and sustain your business.

[00:00:47] Jen McFarland: Welcome to Women Conquer Business. I'm Jen McFarland joined by Shelley Carney. And today we always forget the woo-hoo today. We are talking about the five essential digital marketing strategies, things that you need in order to expand your online presence. But before we get to that, how are you doing Shelley?

[00:01:09] Shelley Carney: I'm doing really well. I'm as you can see and decked out for Valentine's day. Because Valentine's is coming on Monday. And of course the super bowl is on Sunday. So lots of things happening. We had an excellent interview yesterday with Ty Belknap, who we got to talk more about SEO, which was great because I want to put up a new website and.

[00:01:43] Jen McFarland: Yeah. So I am in Boise. For people who've listened to this show for a long time, the early episodes were from the Vandal Lounge, which is actually my basement, but the Vandals are the Idaho Vandals.

[00:02:09] Shelley Carney: I don't know what, what does that.

[00:02:22] So I don't know. Yeah, somehow I feel like maybe I should have gone to Hawaii instead, but that's neither here nor there I'm having a good time. I've been working on courses because we haven't talked about that a lot. I'm launching a second company called epiphany courses and they're really short courses for business leaders.

[00:02:59] So we got that earlier this week and that was awesome. And then yeah, just making courses and hanging out in Boise and that's all that's going on over here. I don't even know if I'll watch the super bowl. I'm not. Super excited, but I'm not super unexcited. I don't know.

[00:03:22] Jen McFarland: That's the thing, it's like an excuse to have chips and watch commercials. Breaking news,

[00:03:30] Jen McFarland: don't know in Idaho. Yeah. There's not a lot of breaking news here. As far as I know I will say that there's breaking news on the LinkedIn front and I dare say on the clubhouse front. As we were talking before the show, I was telling Shelley that, I view this as another signal of a death knell for clubhouse, which has never really figured out how to do advertising and has never really gotten a lot of traction.

[00:04:16] And it has been phenomenal. So I view that as a sign that a clubhouse hasn't been acquired by anybody and all of these really established platforms are adding clubhouse. Platforms without acquiring clubhouse. So I don't, I personally don't know how much longer it will be around. What are your thoughts on this, Shelley?

[00:04:53] You had to have an invitation from somebody you knew in order to get on the platform and all that. Once that wore off, it was just like, it's wastes my time. There's no nothing there. So I don't know, maybe LinkedIn a little be a little better because it's such a business oriented platform already.

[00:05:29] Jen McFarland: Yeah. I, the thing with clubhouse is I think that it's similar to Facebook groups, not all Facebook groups, but many where you get a lot of people who come in and they're really looking for.

[00:06:02] The business space. It's just these speakers and it just goes on and on. And I was like, no, I got too much stuff to do. Yeah, I can't sit here and listen to this stuff. I'm also somebody who can't listen to words and work effectively. It just doesn't work for me.

[00:06:19] Plus for instance, with live streaming that we're doing today, we get to go to a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 platforms. We're on eight platforms all at once, and then it lives there and you can go up and watch it if you missed it. So it's effective, right. Whereas with clubhouse you're using up your time to sit there.

[00:06:56] Jen McFarland: I kept trying to figure out, I know you can do it. I think with a Roadmaster pro or something, there are some ways that you can.

[00:07:13] Shelley Carney: We did do streaming a couple of times and it was just like, yeah, we've done that. So it didn't really do anything for us.

[00:07:45] And I'm already starting to see it. So that's really exciting. So be sure you go there. Women cooker, biz.com/. Live streaming. That's a place to share that super quickly so people can see it.

[00:08:19] Take one piece of content and use it multiple ways, which is, philosophically what you teach to people all the time.

[00:08:37] Did all the beautiful format putting in really cool it up. Yeah.

[00:08:44] Shelley Carney: The best team ever. I say

[00:09:00] And I think it's just a great way to have more. On that website and get more people involved so we can talk about more topics. It's very exciting. Speaking of topics, yes. Should we talk about our topic?

[00:09:19] Woohoo!

[00:09:32] Shelley Carney: Oh, yeah. So first think about why you need a strong online presence. Now I've been talking to a lot of marketing professionals in the past a couple of months, really in depth.

[00:10:12] And how do I become big online? How do people find me? Why do I need a strong online presence? And that's what we're talking about today. You want to get your brand and business discovered online so that people can start doing business with you and and knowing who you are and what you do and who you have.

[00:10:50] Were, they have to worry a little bit about social media algorithms and things like that. Because if you don't have a platform that you own, it's a little more complicated, but, and that's the way you show up in search as well. Although having a Google business profile helps a lot so you can go in there, describe your business, even add products to it, and it will help you show up in search, but I can't even stress enough.

[00:11:33] If you're using. A branded email like jen@womenconquerbiz.com and it's because it has that staying power. So when we talk about legitimacy as a business, that's a really important piece to look at and to really evaluate when you're looking at your digital online presence.

[00:11:55] If you have a domain name, you can have an email box. It's very simple to set up. So definitely get some help with that. If you don't have one that's a branded email.

[00:12:10] Shelley Carney: To perfect your buyer's journey is to help you under it helps you understand what your buyers are going through.

[00:12:35] I'm just going to go there cause it's that easy.

[00:12:50] People tend to overlook is how important it is to get reviews and to have people engage in and give you testimonials, because everybody's looking for that as part of, should I buy this product? Is this the right thing for me? And they say that most people. Although, this is starting to change with all the people shopping online.

[00:13:28] Then what's, you have to sprinkle that throughout your website, add that to your social media, make sure that it's on those sales pages. If you're selling something, if people love your services, make sure that you have comments at the bottom of any page that describes your services so that people know that others have.

[00:14:08] Jen McFarland: Yeah, how you say it may differ a little bit by the platform. I know people engage differently on LinkedIn and they do on Facebook, but the essence of what you're saying so that people know that it's the same company. You're maybe speaking in a similar tone or at least guiding people on the same journey.

[00:14:42] Oh, the website,

[00:14:58] Jen McFarland: So I, and I acknowledged that's really the case. That's totally true. And it depends on how you're doing it, but I will tell you that, I recently built a website. I was on a team and we were all building a website for somebody who's been in business for about 25 years maybe, and never had a real. Web presence before it was always like a little page here, a little page there, a lot was being done in social media and things like that.

[00:15:45] And I was like, oh yeah, no, he's been in business forever. Don't worry about it. He just hasn't had an online presence. And I think that is really what we're talking about. So among the people who know and trust you, it's okay to not have a website and you can run your business for a long time on referrals and word of mouth.

[00:16:14] Shelley Carney: Yeah. And we have a couple of statistics here for those people listening on the podcast 56% of consumers won't consider a business without a website is a, one of our digital marketing experts was telling me he's if somebody refers me to you, the first place I'm going to go is online to see your website.

[00:16:57] Jen McFarland: Well, and truly if your links aren't working on your, I am laughing because I look at so many websites and I came across one, I've been reading this book and I'm really enjoying the book. And so then I go to. Person's website and they're talking all about sales and advertising and I go to the website and I bring it up on my phone and it's little tiny text because it's not optimized for a cell phone.

[00:17:48] And I don't know how they do it. But then you really have to look if you are a business owner and it doesn't have to be perfect. I work with a ton of people that say. Good enough is good enough. You have, you just have to communicate. It doesn't necessarily have to be the best design, but it does need to be responsive.

[00:18:25] And then they have a place they can go to go they're for real. This makes a lot of sense to me. This is the same person.

[00:18:35] Shelley Carney: number two S E O stands for search engine optimization.

[00:18:50] And we've talked about it before on here, where I said, really getting found on Google really comes down to answering customer questions. Find out if you're answering the questions, using the words that they use. And then that's how you know that your answer you're getting out there on, on search engine optimization.

[00:19:27] How fast is it? If it's terminally slow, like I'm setting my phone down, walking away, coming back and it still hasn't loaded. Not only are you. Like basically telling customers you don't care. You're also going to get penalized by Google for that. And that's why it is on the search engine optimization spectrum.

[00:19:52] Shelley Carney: Yeah. And some, and you've got to think about what is slowing it down. He said, do I'm in my trying to show a video? Am I, have too many images? What is it? That's slowing things down and how can I. I replaced that with something faster.

[00:20:51] Are your links working or do they, are they not? And then there are technical errors on the back that a developer can tell you and give you if you're doing this on your own, I highly recommend that you install something called Google search console, and then that will actually send you messages about any errors that are on your website.

[00:21:32] Shelley Carney: Okay. And then we have domain authority and blog.

[00:21:56] So if you don't have really a blog and you're using your website is more of like a digital business card, you might not ever have to worry about your domain authority. You're just using it as a landing place for people to go. But there are a lot of different factors that go into domain authority. It's a little bit of a black box.

[00:22:32] That's one thing you can do. Another thing you can do is keep the content updated. That's also signaling to Google that you care about it and you're doing it. And then a lot of domain authority is about the quality of the links. So if you're writing blogs, doing podcasting, you want to have high quality.

[00:23:06] A big thing. The longer your website is around the higher the domain authority. I think that the women conquer biz website, is it like, has a domain authority of 31, which is pretty good for how long it's been around. It's only been around, I don't know, a couple of years because my business was called something else before.

[00:23:34] Shelley Carney: I have a blog. Populate my blog every week. And it helps a lot to be able to get found by new people who are looking for those key words.

[00:24:03] Jen McFarland: So here's my take on a blog. If you like to blog or create content on a weekly basis, and you are able to do that and still run your business, or you have somebody helping you with that, then absolutely have a blog.

[00:24:57] Shelley Carney: You want to be mobile friendly because everybody's going to be looking at you first, most likely on their phone. Yeah, especially those, let me just touch that button and see what pops up.

[00:25:19] So if you go You can get a plugin for that and it'll just generate it so people can go and find it. And then if you use tools, so if you have a Squarespace website or Shopify, they're generating a site map, an XML, one for you. And then if you're using WordPress, you can use Yoast or. Rank math.

[00:25:57] Shelley Carney: And in this case, crawling spiders is a good thing.

[00:26:04] Shelley Carney: We're going to talk a little bit about email because email is something that we have some control over, and sometimes we just need to be reminded, Hey, you have this email, you have this list, you can do stuff with it. And people sometimes forget to do stuff with their email list.

[00:26:41] Jen McFarland: Wow. I check my email a lot. I don't enjoy it and I do get behind. I wish I could say I clear my inbox out every day. That would be a good, that's a good goal for me. But yes, email marketing is essential, even when you're just getting started. You want to have a way for people to opt in and then understand that people want to hear from you and you should email them.

[00:27:15] Shelley Carney: Of course you have your lead magnet, so you can get people on your list to begin with because you want to have a list that is directed at people who you want to speak to about the topics you want to speak about.

[00:27:45] And TOMA is top of mind awareness. You want to continue to be top of mind with these people. So you want to reach out to them once a week. That's what I do. If you can. I send out a newsletter once a week, which I include all of the links for all of the things that I'm doing. Here's my live stream. Here's my podcast, here's my blog. And here's what we talked about. Here's the people we worked with and here's what we're up to. And then, happy Valentine's day. And. 'cause, sometimes people don't have people in their lives who are going to appreciate them and tell them happy Valentine's day.

[00:28:40] Here's our Amazon link just, it just keeps us in touch with them. And we have a pretty high open rate we're in the forties, usually a 40% open rate because people know us and like us and they just want to see what we're up to. So they'll open it up.

[00:29:07] And when I work with people there, I can't tell you how many people I talked to who are scared to send out email marketing. And I'm like, but this is your captive audience. These are the people who've opted in. They want to hear from you. So you need to send something. And what I say to people who are just getting started is.

[00:29:43] So you can be, like you said, top of mind, get that top of mind awareness.

[00:30:02] That's going to save you a lot of time, but definitely stay in touch with people. Don't be afraid that they're going to unsubscribe. If they unsubscribe, then that's actually a good thing because they didn't want your emails. They weren't your target audience. I go through my email list probably every quarter and I prune out anybody who has not been opening my emails because I figure they're bringing my ratings.

[00:30:35] Jen McFarland: That's right. That's right. So make sure that you're, you are getting those names and email addresses and set up a plan for getting out there so that people hear from you at least on a periodic basis.

[00:30:51] Shelley Carney: Now let's talk social media marketing. Ooh. So after following a brand on social media, say you find somebody, you like them, you like what they talk about. You're interested in the products that they have or their services or whatever it is that they're talking about after you follow them, you are 91% more likely to visit their website, 89% more likely to buy from them and 85% more likely to recommend that brand. When you have started following them on social media, you're seeing their content. You're getting to know them and

[00:31:30] And also bear in mind that social media is increasingly it's difficult to get a lot of reach. That's why the website and email marketing. Are so critical, but it's also a channel that a lot of people use for customer service. So you want to be sure that people can reach you on there and that you're responsive.

[00:32:04] If you're small, unless you have a staff and you have people who are going to help you, but yes, absolutely. You want to really focus on the platforms where it's more likely that your audience and your customers are there and then, encourage them to visit your website. Talk about community, talk about other things that you're doing and it's a wonderful channel for sure.

[00:32:47] People. To keep up with what I'm doing. Just me as a person, a personal brand. But there are a lot of choices. And so you do want to narrow that down to what is where your audience is most likely to be. I know a lot of people are talking about, oh, I got to get on TikTok this year. This year is about TikTok. Cause like really? Now let's think. Is your target audience aged 18 to 20, 30 years old? Because that's, who's on, TikTok mostly. There are occasionally older people on there, but not very often. Just really focus on who are you aiming your message at and are they on that platform?

[00:33:49] So one of the things is you don't have to be everywhere. You just have to be where the customers are. And if you like doing short form videos, You can still get a lot of reach on Instagram. You don't have to go out on Tik TOK yet. It's very popular. I get it. And you don't have time to be everywhere.

[00:34:29] When you make one long video and then cut it into pieces, and sometimes you want to segment your video just so that you can do that. And we have a video which is podcasting and audio grams. So podcasts, of course, the long form audio gram, the short form, a text, blah. You can turn that text into blogs, articles, quotes, and PDFs that you can have as a free download to get people on your email list.

[00:35:06] Jen McFarland: Oh, behind the scenes they're so big. And I think that the thing about the content marketing cycle, like I look at that chart and where it says, listen, decide on themes, decide on topics, create, promote, measure, evaluate, and repurpose. I think that really in the beginning for people it's about just make sense.

[00:35:41] And then. You just keep at it and keep at it, and you can continue to add new things to it. Shelley has a whole system and it works really well, but you might need help with that, and so get some help with that. If you're interested in going through like the whole cycle and doing that. Because you can take one video and make it into a podcast and do a blog. And then you can generate images or audio grams from that to really bring people in. And that's really the beauty of content marketing is you can use everything for something or something for everything I guess.

[00:36:38] Jen McFarland: Absolutely. And the thing about content, that's so interesting that people forget. And I know that in the beginning, I did it to where I would just share a blog post once. You have to share it over and over again because not everybody's seeing it and you have to work on getting everything out there. And I think that's one of the things that is so important in the content marketing sphere is you do it. But then if you're like nobody's reading it, nobody's seeing it. And it's did you share it? Can you tell people about it? And that's why, what Shelley just said is so important. Like getting it up on social media platforms on your website, all of these different places, it really is what makes it worthwhile to do it.

[00:37:25] Shelley Carney: So those are our top five digital marketing strategies that are going to help you expand your online presence. And this, and this is for any level of business, you could be just starting out in just doing the the, those little steps or you could be in business for five years and need to take a look at it again.

[00:37:58] Jen McFarland: Absolutely. And it's so valuable to really come up with a plan. If you're like, okay, these are the five strategies I'm going to work on, and then you just do it and you do it over and over again.

[00:38:29] And so that's the thing, whatever it is that you're doing, stick with it and get feedback from people about it and see. If there are things that you can do to adjust and change and shift, but these are the five fundamental digital marketing steps that anybody should be taking. What is it that you're doing?

[00:39:16] Shelley Carney: We definitely want to hear from you because that helps us to hone in on the topics that you're most interested in.

[00:39:33] Shelley Carney: It's true.

[00:39:45] Shelley Carney: Tweak of the week! Okay.

[00:39:54] Shelley Carney: What are you doing with these Descript? I love it because I've cloned my voice and when maybe, I don't say the exact right words to put into an audio gram that match up with the cap, the thing that I want from the other person has a really great answer, but my question was all wordy and weird.

[00:40:31] Jen McFarland: What I'm doing right now I'm in, deep in, course creation. I'm getting ready to release a course about how to find the right marketing tools for your small business. And so what I've been doing is I pull in each video segment, I used a script to clean up basically what would be a transcript if you had a podcast, I use that then for closed captioning before I, as I uploaded into teachable and then what we're going to be doing with it now is we're going to use the text from descript and create little descriptions of each of those videos that we're also going to put into teachable. So what I really like about Descript is you can do so many different things. And then I think that Caitlin will probably go in and make a few audio grams out of that, out of the lessons so that we can then post them on Instagram and other platforms to get people excited about the courses that we're offering.

[00:41:45] And I was like that's good enough for me. And that was all I needed to see. They have over time, with the overdub, which is the cloning of the voice piece that has been a really big improvement. And it used to be when they would go in and take out the filler words, there would be, it would be choppy. And now they've fixed it so that, if you have a podcast, you can just say remove filler words and you go through and make sure that it makes sense to get rid of it and it will delete it and smooth it out now so that you can't even tell that all of those ums and yeahs and, those were even in there in the first place.

[00:42:25] Shelley Carney: Yeah. And, if you are transcribed, it's funny because I talked to my son last weekend and I said, you know what? You and your girlfriend should start a podcast. And then. I told them I can walk you through the process. It won't cost you anything. I have all the software already. I know I was really pushing him into it because I'm like, this would really be great for you. And then I talked to him about it. Then I have the Descript which you can transcribe your podcast in like a couple of minutes.

[00:43:12] Jen McFarland: Oh, that's takes forever.

[00:43:41] Jen McFarland: And video editing is great. So for those of you who don't know, you can pull in a video and it's as simple editing, a video is as simple as going in and deleting out the text and it'll edit the video for you. It's hi, fast, fast producing video.

[00:44:23] Shelley Carney: Excellent. All right. Do you have any inspirational nuggets for us? As you're getting all the Zen there in Idaho,

[00:44:51] And it's really been working for me. And I would just like to inspire others to think about what their life would be like, what that would be like. Yeah.

[00:45:17] And most people will say I want money or I want a new car or something external. But if you keep asking them, but why do you want that? What's that going to give you? What feeling are you after? Until they get to an internal feeling, most of the time it's going to be, you want to feel loved. Start off with, I want a new car. Why? To feel successful. Why? To feel worthy. Why? To feel loved. If we start off with I feel loved, I have a great support system. My husband loves me. My family loves me. I have so much love in my life. I feel loved. Then everything else is just, sprinkles on the cupcake of life. It's all good stuff, so get down to that deep feeling that you're really after. When you say you want, X, Y, or Z, and it's external, what is it that you're really after? When you can identify that feeling you can have that right away. You don't have to wait to get that new car or whatever it is.

[00:46:40] Shelley Carney: Yes. Yes. The presence is a gift. That's why the present.

[00:46:56] Shelley Carney: That's right. We'll be here next week and we hope that you are too and have a great Valentine's day.