Remain strong in the face of adversity

As business owners, we all understand the feast or famine times. Some days we’re crazy busy and others it’s like crickets.

If you’re finding extra time in your schedule, don’t waste it. Here are a few things to help your business stay productive.

Add more products to your site

People get bored and look for ways to pass the time. What can you offer them?

If foot traffic is down at your brick and mortar or you’re wondering how to light a fire on your e-commerce store, add more products that weren’t previously on your site to encourage more online purchases.

This can also help generate more content for you as well. You’ll be able to talk about the new products on your site across social media platforms as well as your new blog that you’ve put off for too long!

Write or start a new blog

Blogging is not dead! I personally prefer the name article over blog because an article, to me, is something you’ll reference in the future. But perhaps that’s just semantics.

If you’re stuck on what to write about, focus on answering questions from your customers. Do some research and answer questions that solve their problem or bust objections.

Remember that Google ranks based on the quality of information on your website page. You want your post to answer the questions that people type into Google.

Work on SEO

If I had to guess, I’d say many merchants don’t spend enough time on SEO for one of two reasons.

1. They don’t know what to do.
2. They don’t have the time.

If you don’t know what to do, when times are slow, learn! Spend time understanding how SEO works and the settings on your theme.

If you never have the time, guess what, now you do!

I really like Screaming Frog https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider. Basically, they crawl your websites’ URLs and you can see pages that are missing meta tags, 404 redirects, HTML header tags, page titles and so much more. The free version, at the time of this article, allows for 500 pages to be crawled but it does give you a fairly good idea of where you can improve your site.

Add alt text to all images

The number one reason I hear as to why folks don’t add alt text to their images is that its tedious work. If you’ve got time though, now’s the time to power through and get it done.

Screaming Frog can also show you which images are missing alt text.

The trick with alt text that many misses, however, is what exactly do you put in the alt text field. Don’t try to stuff your alt text with keywords thinking that’s going to help you. It won’t.

Instead, use alt text to DESCRIBE what’s in the photo. Pretend you’re on a phone call and need to describe to a customer what’s in the photo.

Offer gift cards

Gift cards are a great way to keep revenue coming in now, especially if times are rough. You also get the added benefit where folks often purchase more than the amount of the gift card. Ideally, that means you’ll get revenue now and revenue when they redeem.

Consider providing a coupon for 20% off when customers purchase a gift card.

It’s also a great opportunity for building customer engagement. Meaning someone who doesn’t know exactly what they want now will likely subscribe to your newsletter or social feeds. This allows you to teach them more about who you are, your offerings and why they need your product. When the time is right, they’ll spend the gift card! And if they don’t redeem, you still got the money when they purchased the card.

Start to prep for your busy season

Things feel the darkest when we’re in our slow period. So why not spend that time ramping up for your busy season instead of waiting until the last minute.

Start to plan out your sales, your communications, and changes to your website now.

In fact, changes to your site can take up to 6 months or longer before you see the benefits of SEO.

I’m not always able to choose my battles… but effective immediately, I’m going to make an effort to choose the battles that matter.

Captain America