Category Archives: Others
Using Branding and Reputation Management to Get Exposure
written by: Thomas R Coffee
Three things govern any business relationship online and offline. In the online world, the rise and fall of your business can be very fast, so you need to take all the precautions you can, to avoid an unfortunate outcome. When you start, you will need to set up your brand, and once you establish it, you will need to defend it. The second part is what reputation management is all about.
Branding
The first thing you need to know about branding and reputation management is that you need people to succeed. You cannot succeed on your own. You need to make people believe in you so that they can support whatever you are offering. In the simplest sense, branding is all about putting a good show of yourself so that people believe in you. It can be a personal show or a business show, but the bottom line is that you want to get the trust of the people you target.
Reputation Management
Reputation management is a little wider than branding; it involves the care of the relationship that you make with people. It can be your personal reputation or that of your business and it comes after you brand yourself. The essence of reputation management is to align the perception that people have on you with the brand that you project on them. Once the two aspects align, you will have no restrictions in selling your product to your target audience.
The best professionals and businesses make most of their sales through word of mouth referrals. Great lawyers, content makers, sales persons and the like have very strong personal brands and a reputation that matches what they do. As a result, their clients are more than eager to recommend their services to anyone. On their part, the professionals are able to charge premium prices just to keep their workload bearable so that they can satisfy their clients.
Below are practical suggestions that will expose your branding efforts to different types of blogs.
You will need to build your brand first, and this is all about creating content that relates to what you offer. You do not need to have an online business, but an online presence for your business is necessary. A blog is important because it will let you tell others about what you do, as well as the different aspects of your business or profession. Blogs allows you to highlight your talent and services. They let you talk about your clients and your capabilities. Blogs are a great way to reach out to people, when you are not actively working. They are excellent forms of advertisement and they complement word-of-mouth marketing in a great way. Without a blog, it will be difficult for people to refer others to what you do. It will also be difficult for them to give you feedback on the tasks you handle.
How blogs help in branding
Blogs let your connect to other people through your thoughts, solutions and opinions. They let your content travel around the internet when people share it; thus, work as a salesperson on your behalf. With blogs, you increase your abilities of listening, corresponding, and meeting new people who might turn to become your clients.
Why websites are not enough for branding
Many people will say that they or their businesses do not need blogs because they already have websites, but that is far from the truth. Websites offer what you do, but people will not buy from you just because of what you tell them, they need to hear it from others. In the same way other blogs will not feature your business just because you ask them to do so, they need to see what remarkable things you are doing that are worth talking about. People need convincing facts. They need to know that you understand what they want, and they will buy only from people and business they trust. The only way to win the trust of people is by developing a relationship with them. A website is only a signpost of what you offer, but a blog is an invitation to listen, learn and benefit from what you offer. A blog builds your reputation.
What to do when clients are not using blogs and other web 2.0 tools
Even if your target audience does not use blogs and social media, some of their family members and friends use them; besides, the media uses these tools too. It pays to have a presence at a place where people come to search for you or your business.
Finding time for branding and reputation management
You may complain that blogging will take much of your productive time, but that is not the truth. It may seem unproductive if you do it the wrong way, or when you fail to commit enough time. Think of blogging as a way of developing your business services. All the content you put out there helps someone to build trust in you. Your ability to convince people grows as you provide more relevant and helpful content. You can use your money to hire bloggers who understand your business, and they will be happy to manage your reputation.
Using branding and reputation to get exposure
Before you read ahead, you should know that a good reputation only comes when people:
(1) have a reason to trust you/your business
(2) believe what they hear from others about you
This means that you will only get away with verifiable claims and the credibility given to you by others will cast out any feeling of humiliation for making the wrong choice.
Once you have your brand up and your website and blogs running, you need to get in touch with people. The best place to find them is on other blogs in your industry and on discussion forums. Take part in them, comment often and thoughtfully, and when given a chance, always mention what you do. If possible, give them a link to useful content that you have put up on the internet.
Other than you blog posts and website, you can create informative eBooks, podcasts, and tutorial videos or write guest posts on other blogs. Once you come up with any form of content worth sharing, you should distribute it as widely as possible.
List your eBooks on file sharing sites, pitch your guest posts on blogs that talk about the same topic as your blog, take part in offline meet-ups that let you meet other bloggers in your industry and all these efforts will enhance your exposure, and help build your reputation as a renowned professional or business. In return, many blogs will be happy to feature you in their posts. They will talk about you, together with what you do, and how you do it. They will also link to the materials you provide. As they do so, they will be providing you with the third-party validation that your branding and reputation management efforts needs to grow your business.
Thomas R Coffee is an expert content marketer that specializes in guest blogging; he runs Guest Blogging Tactics and can be hired for your content and guest blogging needs. Contact Thomas here Here
4 Apple Inspired Marketing Ideas
Apple is one of the largest and most successful companies in the world. Not only does it provide some truly amazing products, they have some very great marketing strategies to back them up. Apple doesn’t seem to be going anywhere but up, so they can teach us a lot of how they became successful. Let’s take a look at a few of the many ideas that Apple has mastered.
Design is Everything
No matter what, a product that has a very attractive design will do much better than a product that doesn’t. In any industry, all companies have competition and other businesses that provide similar services and/or products. The people who buy Apple’s products love the innovative and new designs and are big fans of Apple because of them. If Apple just made the exact same products but used a mediocre design that didn’t catch people’s attention, do you think they would still be as successful as they are? Probably not because their customers would have went to a competitors that did offer something that looks better.
First impressions are a large factor in the buyer’s thought process, usually within seconds people know if they like something or not. By designing your products we’ll, you will be able to get them interested right away. Even if you aren’t selling any physical products, you can still introduce the electronic product or service in fashion and grab their attention.
Invest Time into Content Marketing
Content marketing is a general term used to combine a lot of different marketing methods into one category. E-books, blogs, videos, pod casts, search engine optimization, social networking, and more are all considered to be parts of content marketing. Apple and many other companies have proved that this method is very effective. By getting people interested enough about the content Apple provides, the readers feel the need to go to the Apple site on their own terms. Since the potential buyer isn’t being forced to watch an advertisement or look at a pop up, they are more inclined to buy products that interest them.
Content marketing doesn’t have to cost much, and if you really wanted to, could be completely free. Although it does take some time to get started, and if you have never done it before, can take time to learn, it can bring in tremendous amounts of potential customers. Content marketing can also be used to help increase your brand, expand to new audiences, and also learn any feedback that might help you in the long run. If you have a decent size marketing budget, it would be wise to spend some of it into content marketing, the more you put in, the less work you have to do.
Connect with People and Convert them Into Loyal Fans
It isn’t a secret that Apple has a very large fan base that would defend Apple against anyone. Getting involved with your customers can yield some amazing results. It can take some time to finally get a good amount of people, but there are plenty of tools that can help speed up the process and also make it much more effective and easier. Use social networking sites, video networking sites, and other communication sites to get some profiles going and before you know it, you will have plenty of people interested in what you have to say. Before people will become loyal customers, you first have to give them something that is truly worthy of their loyalty. Apple provide their customers with new and innovative technology that is designed beautifully, which makes their customers into loyal fans that worship their products.
Once you get a good amount of people, you will start to notice that it is much easier to get more and more followers. This is because your current followers are recommending your business to their friends and also because people that see how big of a follower base you have, are automatically interested. Now that you are starting to grow, you can throw out special deals and connect with them to have them love your company even more. They will be a great resource of information as well because they will be able to provide feedback with anything they might not see as good, or they will praise you for what you are doing right. Either way, getting a good amount of supporters and connecting with them will help your overall revenue, they will market for you for free, and they will continue buying your products or services.
Give your Products or Services a Catchy Name
Having a catchy name for your services or products will allow your customers to easily remember them and also make them more enticing. Apple really made the names of their products great because everyone knows that if something starts with an I, it’s from Apple. A great example would be if you were shopping for an MP3 player, you wouldn’t call it a MP3 player, you would use the name IPod.
It can take some time to come up with the perfect name for your products, but it will pay off in the long run. Every business should take this into consideration, because it doesn’t matter what industry you are in, catching people’s attention will bring in more sales. If you are having some trouble with coming up with a name or have a few that you can’t decide on which one to use, try using a third party company to help out. They specialize in situations like yours and can even provide a focus group to let you know how well it works with consumers.
We can learn so much from Apple, since they have succeeded at almost every aspect of marketing and promoting their products, there are plenty more tips out there. If you are still interested in learning about other marketing tips from Apple, try checking a few of these links out, they are filled with great stuff.
Author Bio:
Tom writes for www.valuator.com.au – click here to learn more about what your website may be worth and what it may fetch when selling.
Why Advanced Online Shopping Cart is Most Profitable to E-Businesses
Nowadays, more and more rising businesses and entrepreneurs are getting into the E-Commerce industry. It allows them to be connected to a whole lot of potential customers in a much larger scale. May it be small or big establishment, engaging in online business offers greater opportunities for expansion and profit especially with the use of the online shopping carts. Maintaining a stable E-Business is important, and here are some of the little things to consider.
Choosing an Online Cart with the Best Product Portfolio: As the name suggests, online carts provide features a person would have with it when he/she is doing a real-world shopping. Customers can place several items in the online shopping cart as they go around your site looking for items to possibly buy. Using an magento platform performs website design for an online cart that has more features than most shopping carts combined would help increase the possibility of the customers actually buying products from your site.
Shopping carts that have integrated credit card processing capabilities that also accepts online payment in a few seconds are just examples of a good online cart you can use to your website. It is therefore ideal to use a shopping cart that not just do the basics, but does extra little things that would make online shopping for your customers much easier.
Avoiding Shopping Cart Abandonment: As mentioned above, an advanced online shopping cart increases your profitability. But on the other hand, it also prevents shoppers from abandoning their shopping cart. Why so? One reason why some people abandon their shopping carts just before making the payment is that the checking out process was too convoluted. Some shoppers must have to go through loops just to get the payment process done. A good shopping cart like the one mentioned above can prevent it from happening thus increasing the likelihood of making a sale.
Carts with Coupons at Checkout Feature: Another feature that can be added to the web design of your E-Commerce site is the integration of a custom solution called Coupons at Checkout that automatically finds coupons available for customer’s purchase during checkout of items. With one click, discount coupons attached with the items becomes readily available to the customers without the hassle of searching for the coupons elsewhere. Shopping cart abandonment is also lessened with the use of this innovative feature.
Choose from Personalized Settings: Customization of your online store not only adds a personal and unique touch in your web design but also it increases profitability. With over a hundred templates to choose from, you can give you website a refreshed look in less than a minute.
Customization of web design may not be only for the aesthetic feature, but it can also be used for your shopping cart as well. Choosing the best customization addition to your shopping cart can be very beneficial for your E-Business. An online shopping cart that has connections to a vast database and can manage multiple products is very useful. You can also choose to add security features to your shopping cart to provide safety for your customers; as well as invoicing and e-mailing system to confirm your shopper’s recent purchases can be a great addition as well.
Having a very reliable and advanced online shopping cart can give a lot of positive effects both to you, the owner and to the customer as well. A custom solution packed with the latest features for your online shop can be a great help in having a profitable business.
Author Bio:
Forix magento is a New York based web development and magento mobile development company specializing in all things Magento.Looking for Magento developers who will make sure your eCommerce store runs hassle free? visit website for more details, Forix has it all covered. You can follow him more on Google+
Why You Need To Have A Social Business Strategy
When you hear the word ‘social’ in the business context, the first
thing that you will probably think about is the social media and
social media marketing. These are widely used by SEOs and businesses
in general to improve their scores and profits, and to reach their
customers more easily. Customers are everything in today’s world, and
showing them your inner workings and getting personal with them will
significantly improve the chances of them choosing your product.
However, social business strategy is something that you might call
completely different. Being in Australia, where the social aspects of
running a business are blooming exponentially year after year, I have
seen many people confuse these two. Social business strategy has
nothing to do with customers. It is primarily concerned with your
employees and their behavior on social networks. So, let’s answer the
first question that is on your mind.
What is social business strategy?
Social business strategy is, to say it plainly and in one sentence, a
strategy that helps your company and corporate thinking evolve,
improves the internal preparedness of your organization, bridges the
internal and the external social initiatives and creates a company
that is more collaborative and values that are shared by everyone
involved in the company (partners, customers and employees).
So, it is obvious that this strategy is concerned with the internal
workings of the company, instead of the external workings that are a
part of the social media marketing. Its primary concern is regulating
the way your employees use social media in order to promote the
company. It also regulates their training in social media
responsibilities and instructs them how to share knowledge and culture
that is related to your company. One of the major impacts that a
social business strategy has is that it helps minimize the mistakes
that your employees might make when engaging in social media for your
company.
As I have stated that I will provide some benefits of the social
business strategy, here are a few things that should make you think
about implementing a certain social strategy in your office.
Better content
Social content is the number one challenge for SEOs and brand managers
all around the globe. It is considered to be the most important thing
in marketing today among many people who are into marketing, myself
included. The main problem for SEOs is the quality and originality of
the content that is being put forward. It is getting harder to find
new sources and new ideas for original posts. Social business strategy
can solve this problem, because it will help locate better content
sources that are not available to everyone, such as the sources that
come from your employees, partners and customers who love the brand
and want to promote it further. Also, it will help streamline the said
content and unite it into a single, flowing story that will be told by
your company.
Customer relationships
Today, with the development of the Internet and social media,
relationship with your customers has been brought onto a whole new
level. You can now get more personal with them and should they have
any complaints, they will be able to access you at anytime. So, having
a social business strategy will help you form a better connection with
your customers, because there will be people who are assigned to do
just that, work in social media customer relations. As I said,
interaction with the customers is always something that you should
strive forward, and creating a strategy will allow the brand managers
and people working in customer service to get feedback and, generally,
interact with the customers in real-time. Responding to your
customer’s problems in real-time (immediately) will help increase
their loyalty and enables you to advocate your brand.
Better analytics
Because I’m working with social media marketing and search engine
optimization, analytics is something that interests me very much.
However, there are two problems with analytics in most social
businesses, and that is that either no one is paying attention to the
analytics, or everyone is paying attention to it, but according to
different standards. There is no unified standard for analyzing social
media activity and accomplishment, and everyone has their own theory.
With social business strategy, this is eliminated. The strategy will
create its own standards that everyone in the company will have to
use, while making it obligatory to analyze what is already done. This
is especially useful when a CMO of a company that works with a lot of
brands asks for a report on what is done, because it will highlight
all the engagement, community growth and share of voice achievement.
So, I can conclude that using a social business strategy is something
that is highly recommended for businesses that operate with brands. It
will help the SEOs and social media marketers to do their job better,
because they will have the help of all employees. Since SEO is the
primary form of marketing in Australia now, I can really say that
there is no time to waste in implementing such a strategy.
Victor Daily is a tech blogger with years of experience in contributing
valuable tips and latest news with his readers. His articles have been
published on a number of industry blogs. Useful info for this article
has kindly been shared by Ninefold from Australia.
5 Unique Sales Tactics That Everyone Should Know and Use
Sales are the foundation of every successful business, and knowing how to take care of this process effectively is crucial to keeping your company afloat. Quite simply, you cannot afford to get lazy or sloppy when it comes to selling your company’s brand and product.
What this means is experimentation, innovation and constant testing to find new methods that sell even better than older ones. Here are some helpful tips that revolve around just that sort of experimentation and innovation.
1. Blog Marketing
Blog marketing is essentially a large part of content marketing, and as a sales strategy, it is an often unheralded marvel! Nothing sells better than trust, and trust that leads to firmly loyal customers is one of the most powerful sales tools you can have on your side.
One of the only ways to gain this sort of customer confidence is through the development of a powerful base of rich content that shows your expertise in the niche you’re selling through. A blog is the ideal way to go with this content, and its impact can be augmented even more if the blog posts are also shared through a series of social media accounts where still more fans are slowly developed. Another strong aspect of content marketing could also include guest blogging in other sites and linking back to your main sales site or its blog where the rest of your content is.
The key to selling through content is not only one of building trust amongst your growing list of content loving fans; it’s also to create a built in call to action within the content, which forcefully but not pushily guides readers from simply reading into actually buying because you’ve convinced them.
2. Sales Outsourcing
The selling process, it’s mechanics that is, can be quite tedious, complicated and time consuming. If you’re running a small company, it might not be the easiest thing in the world to run your sales structure in a way that’s completely professional and responsive; failing to do this could hurt future buying from your customers.
One extremely useful solution that can not only save you lots of time, but also create a much more professional management image for your company, is to outsource your sales to a third party company that’s dedicated specifically to this task and everything that surrounds it.
By outsourcing your sales system to companies like Acquirent or other sales outsourcing companies, you can focus on seeking new customers and simply funneling through to a selling procedure that you know is being run well without having to actually manage it yourself. Furthermore, thanks to the outsourcing process, you can substitute all the often large sales software setup expenses and the costs of scaling up as you grow with a simple series of periodic fees to someone else who handles all of these things for you much more cheaply thanks to the economy of scale that comes with specialization.
3. Make your Focus the Customer
This isn’t just a semantic point about creating good sales PR; it’s also a very real, actionable selling strategy that can win you many more trusting customers and happy followers.
In essence, instead of simply pushing to make those bucks by hustling your product across to your customers (even if the product isn’t all that bad at all), work to impress upon them your overriding concern for their needs before anything else.
You can do this in the form of helpful free advice, honestly failing to recommend a sale if something you’re offering doesn’t address their problems or making sure that any problems they have are quickly addressed with genuine dedication. Of course, focusing on customer has its reasonable limits, especially for buyers who deliberately take advantage of your flexibility, but you should at the very least make sure that you convey to your customers that you really want to deliver value to them, not just reach into their wallet.
4. Create Hooks to the Future
This is one of the most important customer collection strategies and also a valuable tactic for creating long term revenue streams. As far as the primary step of gaining attention goes, always do your best to create a gentle motivation for further communication. For example: if people are visiting your site, offer something in exchange for an email address, thus establishing longer term contact; or, if someone attends a sales webinar, get them to commit to a more personalized session afterwards.
The key idea is to extend the communication time and thus give yourself more opportunities for creating a convincing pitch.
5. Focus on Long Term, Repeat Sales Structures
One of the best sales strategies you can implement in your company is to narrow your main focus on long term repeat sales. Finding new clients can be hard, tiresome and subject to some serious ups and downs; while developing a way of selling your products or services as repeat payment offers can lead to a more slowly developed but much more stable base of constant revenue.
This may not be easy under many kinds of business models, but wherever you can creatively change something you’re offering into a long-term service, don’t miss the chance to do so. It’s much easier to run a business where each customer only needs to be marketed to once before repeatedly buying from you than it is to pitch to fresh faces on a daily basis.
Author Bio:
Stephan Jukic is a freelance writer and covers subjects relating to SEO, technology, marketing and digital security. He also loves to write about location-free business, business management and finance. When he’s not writing or consulting, you can find him enjoying life’s adventures either in Canada or Mexico, where he spends part of the year. Connect with Stephan on LinkedIn.
Reasons to Outsource in 2013
The business playing field has changed and companies need to be more responsive to a rapidly changing business landscape in order to stay competitive. More and more businesses are turning to call center service outsourcing as a way to stay ahead of the pack.
Success is not easy or guaranteed as anyone will tell you. We all look for ways to improve our chances in not only in our personal lives but in business. All businesses have one thing in common, customers. New customer, existing customers and potential customers, call them clients, patients or patrons, it’s all the same thing. They are the people who keep us in business!
Keeping customers happy is the number one job of every business and doing that can be time consuming, costly and challenging especially when you consider that customer service is not the reason most people go into business. Whether you manufacture a product, provide a service or sell something chances are your expertise is not in building and maintaining a quality customer service platform.
Fortunately there is an alternative to stumbling around and hoping that you can find, train and retain the right people to man your phones, respond emails and social media not to mention keeping up with the latest changes in the customer service landscape. The solution more and more savvy businesses are turning to are call center outsourcing services.
Call center outsourcing services enable business to concentrate on doing to their core competencies rather than being a jack of all trades. Unlike most businesses a call center’s business is customer service, from making appointments to taking orders and from providing pre-sale information to after purchase product support call centers are in the business of helping your business keep your customers happy.
A quality call center will work with you to develop a custom program that matches your current needs and has the expertise to evolve and accommodate you as you grow. Call centers take the risk out of hiring the wrong people to respond customer inquiries because that is their expertise. Finding, hiring, training and retaining the best customer service agents is what call centers do and their success is hinged to your success.
Call centers are also better equipped to stay on top of the latest advances and trends in customer service technology. Their expertise in building and maintaining state of the art communications facilities means that your business can leverage the most cutting edge technologies at a small fraction of the cost of researching and implementing them yourself.
Versatility is hallmark of a call center, inbound calls, outbound calls and digital communications via email, chat and social media can all be professionally handled with by a single resource, the outsourced call center. Today’s call centers are more than answering services, although that is a part of what they do, they are really communication hubs, a place where your customers can interact with your company or brand and receive the type of attentive service the builds and maintains loyalty.
The savings that are realized from partnering with an outsourced call center extend beyond the reducing or eliminating costly technology upgrades but are reaching into operational budgets because call center clients only pay for services rendered not for hours available. That means that a slow day or week doesn’t mean money out the window.
Paul is a freelance writer for AnSer Business Support Center which provides call center services. For more information about how call center outsourcing services help your in real estate business visit the Anser.com website or call 1-800-723-0000.
3 Marketing Practices to Expand Your Business
Larger companies can easily allocate resources to accomplish strategic growth objectives. The smaller business owner may find it more challenging to identify the most affordable ways to grow the business. With fewer resources and a limited amount of time available, a company may have a harder time finding the funds to do all that needs to be done to expand the business on the restrictive budget. Preparing a business for growth can be done in the following ways.
Tips for Marketing on a Budget
Finding ways to market the business on a budget is critical to the success of a company operating on with a limited budget. Cost-effective ways can include taking advantage of the less expensive ways to market online. Press releases and email marketing are some of the most affordable ways to market the brand. Software programs like apple dentist software offered on Dental Marketing.net can streamline the company’s online marketing efforts. Classifieds and directory listings are additional ways for a brand to expand its online presence. A company that may not want to invest in media advertisements may find press releases, email marketing and the use of free Internet resources as more cost-effective.
Constant Networking Creates Opportunities to Generate Leads
Networking is critical to expanding a business. Participating in networking groups, trade associations and the local chambers are all ways to connect with other businesses in the immediate area. Networking makes it possible for a business to identify leads and create referrals for peers in their respective industries. Companies can grow their marketing lists and uncover opportunities if they are constantly growing their list of contacts. Offline networking efforts should be supplemented by online networking as well. Social networking sites have made it easy for professionals to remain in contact with each other online.
Successful Businesses Set Goals
Creating actionable and measurable goals is important to business growth. It is much easier for businesses to position themselves for growth when there are goals in place for all areas of a business. Marketing should have its on individual set of goals that differ completely from those designed with sales objectives in mind. In order to fully understand how well a business is doing, goals should be broken down into milestones and benchmarks.
Growing a business takes discipline. A disciplined approach to consistent marketing online, networking and goal setting are all important for driving growth for a business. Following these three rules will help a business get to where it desires to be in terms of sales and growth. These three organizational practices will prepare businesses for growth and expansion when implemented.d
Creating Stickiness – An Internet Addicts View
Stickiness: It’s a word that website owners dream of either pleasantly or in nightmares. The aim of any good site is to get traffic in and then convert those surfing by in to a community of regular users. For someone with an internet addiction (I think I may well fall in this category) then the presence of stickiness can also be a problem.
I work as a copywriter for online retailer The Watch Hut, so trying to attract repeated viewings of sections of the site is my stock in trade. However, in spite of my line of work, I’m a borderline internet addict. It’s not hyperbole; it genuinely has become a dependency. I check the BBC News site from my phone before I even get out of bed in a morning and I check Facebook before I sleep. So what do these sites have in common, and how can their underlying stickiness be replicated?
The common thread running through these is that they have content that creates a connection with the reader by providing them with information of interest. In the case of the BBC, this is a mix of customisable news and human interest stories. Facebook reverses this formula.
Whilst many of the news organizations will post content and many people will follow this, the core of the content is the information from family and friends and people who you wish were your friends such as the celebrities, causes and brands that you follow. Facebook in particular has become successful through this and has kept its costs low. After all, it isn’t paying journalists to write this great content. It is relying on your friends to be interesting enough to attract advertisers. Your work is making Mark Zuckerberg a very rich man
It’s not just the content that we crave in stickiness, what we are really addicted to is the update. Newspapers and social media have an inbuilt advantage here in that they able to use information that is happening in the world around them to update their readers.
Let’s use a non web analogy to illustrate this. Say you are watching Sky News or its American sister station, Fox News. The stickiness is generated in large part by the “Breaking News” banners that scroll across the screen for even quite unimportant stories. You are drawn in by the immediacy of the content, not by the content itself.
Now let’s go back to Facebook. Internet addicts like me can pass time commenting on the mix of pictures and status updates. We have a similar reaction to the flashing of the notification banner that we do to the breaking news strap. We click it and look at the “breaking news” from our friends
The behavior is hard wired in to our psyche. Back when we were smart chimps, knowing where predators where, was the exact information we needed. We may have evolved a little, but the ability to profit, either financially or socially from being the first person to know is still with us.
So how can you use these techniques in building your site? After all, you are unlikely to have huge resources.
1.) Harness what you do know:
In the case of the company I work for, retailer The Watch Hut, we have a significant following of people who are interested in elements of the watches we sell. Our customers tend to be interested in fashion, or see a designer watch as a status symbol. We use our connections with our suppliers to update customers on celebrities who have been seen wearing the items, or in the case of the more male oriented ranges, the sports with which the watchmaker is associated.
We also report the latest trends from trade and fashion shows to our clients, particularly if something unusual is coming on sale shortly.
Unusual items also encourage sharing, which is a particularly important technique in creating identity online. Again, this is wired to our culture. If we are making friends, then an introduction from a existing friend is more likely to be successful in joining a group than simply walking up to them and saying hi.
2.) Encourage feedback:
Seeking to improve social signals we built our Facebook page as a means of encouraging and welcoming comments from customers past, present and future. By creating this space we are effectively carving out a little path of neurons that can be used to retarget those who we regularly interact and subsequently their friends in to regarding us as a company they would like to do business with. Whilst it would be uneconomic to take the bricks and mortar real estate we can buy the “mental real estate” of our customer base. These frequent visitors are often amongst the stickiest and our greatest promoters.
The future will probably bring with it more video. Video is great for creating sticky content as it engages the viewer on a more passive level. People are usually in a “lean back” relaxed position when watching video. This relaxation makes it easier for content to be accepted. If nothing else, the dwell time on each page will typically increase – great for marketing, but likely to bring even more pain to myself and fellow internet addicts.
Getting the Most Out of Blog Promotion Techniques
The tremendous craze of blogging reflects in the way the businesses are using it now-a-days. The number of blogs in the gigantic internet arena is rising tremendously where without blog promotion; you cannot get the desired results out of it. Useful and engaging content is what visitors want, and the best way to connect to them is through blog marketing. Being a marketer, your job doesn’t end at creating blogs; promoting them has become equally vital to stand out from competitors. A majority of net surfers refers the content online to understand things and make purchase decisions, which eventually may improve your website ranking and sales. This is where you need to put efforts in driving that traffic to your blogs or website with the use of blog promotion techniques. Below are some blog marketing tips to improve your internet marketing strategy.
Use Long Keyword Phrases and Create Unique Blog Content
Knowledge about the current trending topics can help you understand what the audience wants. This is where you can come up with suitable content ideas and provide them with keyword phrases. For niche keyword research, you can utilize Google Adwords tool, which will provide you with relevant keywords and knowledge about the competition. Choosing potentially long keyword phrases will do a lot of good in enhancing search engine visibility and rankings of your website. You should place the chosen keywords in your titles, sub-headings and body of your blogs. Even the way you present your blog pages can create a lot of difference. Make sure that the design of your blog pages is simple, user-friendly and appealing.
Besides this, your blog content should be engaging and relevant enough to create some interest in the visitors’ minds. Visitors are intelligent enough to make out whether or not your blogs will prove useful to them in the long run. Thus be original and always provide correct information. Your blogs are more likely to lure the readers always if you can come up with blogs on the topics that they find interesting regularly.
Build Quality Links
There are ample of ways you can go about building quality links – with article submission, guest posting and forum posting being the favorites. All these link building methods have tremendous potential to build your profile and reputation online. Write guest posts on popular sites or blogs. You can get tremendous traffic out of it after the acceptance of your submitted article especially if it is fresh and engaging. Same goes with the article submission – submitting different and fresh blog content to article directories with good page ranks will help you a lot in getting a good amount of traffic through the links built.
Share
You should leave no chance in getting tremendous share count of your well-written blogs. For this, you should set up sharing buttons on your posts. This will enable readers to share your content on different social networking sites including Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Even including RSS subscription options and offering email subscriptions can help enhance the efficacy of your blog promotion initiative. Social media are the easiest route to get a quality link where, simply sharing the link along with an excerpt of your blog posts with your followers will work wonders.
Be Regular at Posting
Coming up with regular blog updates is necessary, but what should be the count depends on the topic of your blog. If your blog is a general one, two or three updates a week or fortnight will do. However, if you are into providing current news events daily, posting the related information many a times a day becomes crucial. You need to get consistent at posting. Right balance is crucial; posting a lot of blogs in a single day will cause more trouble than good. Try at least to post once or twice a week. Regular posting always keep the readers’ interest intact in your blogs.
Comment on Blogs of your Niche
This trend is mounting where if your comments are useful to the blogger or readers in some way, it may entice them to enter your website or blog link, situated beneath your comment. Valuable comments are always more likely to get some quality traffic than mindless rambling. Thus make sure that your comments reflect your expertise about the thing you have mentioned over there.
Be Interactive
This aspect can give a tremendous boost to your blog promotional strategy since the internet marketing world has become an interactive hub. You must let your readers comment on your blogs where it is also necessary to respond back to their comments. There may be instances where you may come across someone who disagrees with you. In such a case, respond politely without getting aggressive. It is all right if the argument is healthy.
Thus following all these aspects of blog marketing will help you build your business in terms of visibility and search engine rankings. Apart from doing all this, make sure that you track all the happenings and performance. This will help you mold your blog promotional strategy as per latest trends. Thus put efforts towards it, and then you will be able to build a strong online presence and reputation with blog promotion in the long run.
Author Bio:
Alexander Vesia works at Numero Uno Web Solutions, which is an internet marketing company in Toronto that provides SEM, SEO, SMO and web design services to its clients in Toronto and over the globe.
Why B2B doesn’t have to be afraid of social media
From the beginning, the idea of social media and B2B marketing working together in blissful harmony has been a distant dream of marketers everywhere. It was originally thought that mixing B2B and social media would only leave companies with a lot of hard work and empty results… and that has been the decided fate of B2B social media marketing for many misguided B2B marketers.
The idea that social media and B2B marketing are unable to work together originated from the idea that social media marketing was strictly about conversions amongst consumers. However, no one truly converts from social media – not even in B2C markets. Social media is a tool that allows marketers to create conversations with the public, and those conversations lead to conversions. Using social media as a tool for better communication can work in any market, and B2B markets are no exception.
With the understanding that the sales cycle in a B2B market is becoming more significant in size, B2B markets shouldn’t be planning to convert through social media. However, evidence shows that social media might have the capability of speeding up sales.
Tips for using better B2B social media marketing
- Determine the right social platforms for the target industry – Social networks span the globe and business industries alike with their diverse fan-bases. Research popular social networks to determine which networks would be best for specific industries. For example, Pinterest probably won’t draw the same crowd as Linkedin would for the IT industry. Learn about what marketing methods work best for each social network (photos, personal stories, trending topics, group discussions) and develop a marketing plan from there.
- Talk with your industry – Now that the best social networks have been selected, content must be created to get people talking. Use social media to understand what followers are looking for and create content based on their needs. Quora is a great tool to quickly find what people are asking about in any industry. Once the content is created, promote the content on social media platforms to generate traffic. If you primarily use Linkedin, post your content to a group and promote the post via Twitter, Facebook, Quora or any other appropriate network. Remember to educate your readers with valuable content to ease them into the lengthy sales process.
- Measure social media by conversations, not conversions – B2B marketers should look at using social media like they would a trade show or a meeting. Social media is a place to learn about prospects and have a conversation with them with a goal to convert later on. Social media should not be measured by conversions alone.
Why influencers should be targeted
Having a conversation with people in a specific industry is just one part of a B2B social media strategy. Influencers in the target industry are just as important because of their large following. The only way they have developed a large following is by producing cutting-edge content and educating readers through their own knowledge base.
B2B businesses should make it a priority to track influencers and understand where they are based around the Internet. A powerful content delivery team should provide content based on targeting influencers for significant results in their target industry.
B2B businesses should be involved on social media platforms regardless of any excuse. B2B marketers might argue that social media is simply for a consumer-based market, but they fail to realize the people running B2B companies are consumers themselves. Appearing to businesses on an even-ground such as social networks will make a world of difference in a B2B marketing strategy.
This post is contributed by Dawn Altnam.
