Showing posts with label internet marketing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label internet marketing. Show all posts
Wednesday, 15 April 2015
Monday, 13 April 2015
Sunday, 12 April 2015
Web Marketing For Dummies
You’re marketing your business on the web — of course you are! These days, if you don’t do web marketing, your business doesn’t survive very long. Read on for tips on how to market your product successfully. Find out what to put on your site and which search engines to list it with, how to expand your presence with social media, bring repeat visitors to your web site, and become familiar with web marketing terms.
Tips for Marketing on Your Own Website
As a smart businessperson, you want to make full use of the web to market your goods and services. This includes running your own website. Use these quick tips to optimize your site for marketing effectiveness:
- Attract attention with your home page and headline.
- Maintain interest with text that’s about “you,” not about “me.”
- Build desire with frequently updated content.
- Include many calls to action.
- Make your site easy to use and navigate.
- Post your phone number, street address, and social media links on every page.
- Collect e-mail addresses to communicate with prospects and customers.
- Test your site before launching it.
- Use results of your traffic and sales statistics to improve your site.
Essential Tasks of a Successful Marketing Website
Your website can be your strongest marketing tool. It serves as the face your business presents to the online world. If visitors find that face engaging, you’re on your way to increased sales. You should see those increased sales once your site accomplishes these goals:
- Draws new visitors to your site.
- Keeps them there for several pages.
- Brings them back for repeat visits.
- Answers “What’s in it for me?”
Crucial Search Engines for Web Marketing
To market goods and services successfully on your own website, you must submit your site for free to these three search engines. They cover well over 90 percent of the natural search market:
- Bing
Use Social Media to Enhance Your Web Presence
Use social media to entice visitors to visit or return to your hub web site where they will receive your full message. Double the benefits by optimizing every social media channel to improve your search engine ranking. Remember to listen twice as much as you talk.
- Use Facebook for brand loyalty, customer support, and to solicit opinions and reviews.
- Use Twitter for news, local color, events in progress, and time-dependent offers.
- Use LinkedIn to reach business-to-business clients, qualify prospects, and to find new vendors or employees.
- Use content-sharing sites like YouTube (video), blogs, podcasts, and Flickr (photos) to encourage customer participation.
Market Research Sites to Use for Web Marketing
You want your business website to attract customers — that’s the whole aim of your web marketing strategy after all. Time spent researching your target market, industry news, or competition is never time spent in vain. The websites in this list can help you:
- MarketingSherpa
Wednesday, 8 April 2015
Tuesday, 7 April 2015
Sunday, 5 April 2015
Top 5 Ways to Market Yourself Online
Thanks to the Internet, we’re living in a golden age of communication. A person in the most remote part of the world still has the capacity to reach an audience of millions. At the same time, the need to stand out from the crowd heightens and marketing becomes more critical than ever.
The amount of ways that you can market yourself online is almost immeasurable. Of course, each method of marketing comes with its own set of pros and cons.
While no method is going to work universally, these are the top five ways that we’ve found for self-marketing.
Image Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/rosauraochoa/3256859352/
SEO Through Backlinks
If you’re trying to market yourself online, then you more than likely have a website or some other product that you are trying to promote. The amount of page views that your site gets is a direct result of how well you’ve marketed yourself. When it comes to page views, nothing is more effective than SEO, or search engine optimization. Backlinking refers to inbound links that lead to your website. They boost your site’s overall ranking in major search engines such as Google and Bing.
To put it bluntly, backlinks are a critical part of almost any online and local search marketingcampaign. If you can get other sites to link to your content, you’ll be organically marketing yourself by placing your website right in front of people who are using local search for searching for what you’re offering.
Networking
In real life, one of the most effective ways to market yourself is to know the right people. The same holds true when it comes to online marketing. Knowing the people who can place a valuable link to your website or who can direct traffic through a favorable blog post is critical. Even if you’re not concerned with small business marketing SEO, having a good relationship with people who might review your product can have a tremendous amount of value for your marketing efforts.
Google has built something interesting through its Google+ social network; they’ve built a network that encourages people to share interests and share content with one another. For the self-marketer, though, there’s a hidden value to Google+.
Google has included a button on its network and now in its search results that lets users give a +1 to a page. The more pluses that a site earns, the higher it ranks. Thus, being active on Google+ and gaining pluses there will give you a boost in search engines, making your marketing efforts on Google+ effective in other areas of the web.
Build an Email List
This is one of the oldest marketing methods on the Internet, but it’s still effective even with email supposedly on the downswing. Having a person’s email address is the 2012 equivalent of having their name and home address a decade ago.
With an email address, you can communicate on an ongoing basis and consistently market towards a base audience. By offering some sort of newsletter or other offer that entices users who visit your site to give you their email address, you’ll be able to build a repeating customer base.
Understand the Power of Social Media
At this point in the Web 2.0 game, social media is known by everybody. It is still worth repeating, however, just how much social networks have become the backbone of the Internet. Facebook has hundreds of millions of active users. Twitter sees users publish one billion tweets per month. There is no doubt that social media is at the core of the Internet now, and if you’re marketing online at all, you need to understand how to use it to your advantage.
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Friday, 3 April 2015
Eight Steps For Successfully Marketing Yourself Online
Now that the Internet is the new "black" and everyone is hopping online in the hopes of finding their gold online, there are a few things that need to be considered before jumping headlong into an online campaign.
We've been doing "online" for a long while now and we've seen many changes, but one thing has remained consistent: regardless of where you go or how you pitch, you must know your market and understand how to effectively reach them and abide by the rules of the online road. Here are a few to consider:
Image credit: http://www.markmontoya.com/OnlinePersonalBrandingSpecialist/2013/01/top-5-ways-to-market-yourself-online/
1) The importance of research: when it comes to marketing online, there's a term I am often reminded of: "spray and pray." What this means essentially is that you spray a whole bunch of stuff out there and hope that it works. Guess what? It doesn't. The Internet is big, there's no argument there. But just throwing stuff out online and hoping it'll work will only waste your time and probably upset a few bloggers you actually don't want to tick off. Do your research. Find the sites appropriate to your market and then get to know what they review, what they don't review and how to pitch them. Most sites have targeted guidelines for submitting pitches and review copies. Abide by them.
2) It's all about relationships: remember that much like offline promotion the Internet is all about relationships. Make them, hone them, and keep them for the life of your career. So how do you go about making and creating relationships? By networking. Online networking or cyber-schmoozing is a way of getting to know who's out there and who you could help with your message. Getting to know topic-related blogs, e-zines and websites and engaging with them is important. Follow your market on Twitter, follow other authors in your genre, follow the trendsetters. Make sure that you're reading their blogs, commenting on their blog entries and offering helpful advice. Which leads me to point #3:
3) Networking online: Want to know the difference between networking online vs. in person? Online you can be in your bathrobe and slippers and no one will know the difference. Lead with helpful information, don't lead with your book. No one (but your mom) cares that you wrote a book. Your audience, whether it's your reader or a blog dedicated to your market, wants to know what the book can do for them. Be helpful. You'd never go to a live networking event, walk up to a group of people and say: "Hi, please read my fabulous book." You shouldn't do it online, either.
4) Understanding page rank: Page rank is important, more so than most people realize. Whether you're marketing yourself online or you've hired a company to do this for you, make sure that you are targeting sites with decent page rank. So, what's page rank? Well, it's a number between 1-10 that Google assigns a site to indicate its "importance" online. By importance I mean sites that have a lot of (quality) sites linking to them and sites that are getting a significant amount of traffic. If you or the company you hired is pitching you to smallish page rank sites (i.e. 0, 1, 2) you should consider it a wasted effort. Generally speaking we won't go after sites that are below a 3 page rank unless it's a niche topic/smaller market. Our company website sits between a 5 and a 6. The lower the site's page rank, the less exposure you're going to get. It's that simple.
5) How to manage the prize vault: to some book bloggers books are boring. Well, not boring exactly, but if you're giving away a prize you might want to consider pairing your book with someone else. Consider the partnerships you have and see what you can pair with your book. We recently paired a title we worked on with a Brita water pitcher because the author had a relationship with the company. When I called Brita to arrange this they jumped all over it and sent us more pitchers than we knew what to do with. Prize packs are a great idea if you can pull together some fun giveaways. But don't bribe bloggers to review your book. Offer them the prize packs for their readers. Bribing and reviews aren't kosher, especially online (yes, we've seen it done, it's not pretty).
6) Touring on blogs: there are a lot of blog "tours" that will take you on a tour online for two weeks, then you're done. Guess what? Another waste of time. Online marketing isn't done lickety split, it's done over a long (or at least longer than two weeks) period of time. A short two-week tour is fine and fun, but trust me, you'll need more to create a buzz online - which leads me to #7
7) Slow growth over time: despite all the hype, the Internet doesn't respond well to quickie, instant success, in fact most online folks really dislike this type of marketing. The key to a really successful campaign that has legs (meaning buzz) is a slow growth. Now, I don't mean years of growing an online campaign, but definitely longer than 48 hours as some online companies may want you to believe. The objective is to create a presence online and to dig into your market. Relationships, whether offline or on, take time. Grow them, nurture them, and they will repay you back over months and years to come. So how do you grow slowly? Well dig into Facebook, start a Fan Page and add friends, network, engage. Start a Twitter page and really work the Twitter-sphere. Engage, entertain, enlighten and always, always, always be helpful.
8) The big Internet secret: Understanding backlinks: I will write a separate blog on this topic, but for now understand that the importance of backlinks is significant. So what's a backlink? Well, it's a link going from a site appropriate to your topic back to your site. And how many of these do you want? As many as you can get. The biggest and best push with online marketing is the link building, but again, this needs to be grown slowly over time. Adding thousands of links in a week or a month will only get you in trouble with the governing body of the Internet: Google. I mean let's face it, 78% of us use Google as our default search engine and if Google pulls your site for overly aggressive link building, your online marketing campaign will come to a screeching halt.
9) Your website: I'm really surprised at how many Internet marketers overlook this important point, but many do. Your website, the place your online world calls "home", is very important. If you're working so hard online via networking and link building and then sending your readers to a site that's sending them into "surf shock" (i.e. the kind of shock you go into when you land on a ghastly site), then what's the point of marketing yourself online? Sending readers/buyers/fans to a website that is repelling them instead of attracting them is like advertising and bringing visitors to your beautiful store then locking the doors and not letting them in. I will address the importance of a good website in a separate blog post in the coming weeks, but for now know this: if your site isn't converting the traffic you're sending it then what's the point in sending people there? By converting, I mean getting readers/fans to do something, whether it's sign up for your ezine, your blog RSS Feed or follow you on Twitter. Studies have shown that less than 7% of web visitors are prompted to buy the first time they land on a site so don't expect immediate sales to correlate with your traffic. Getting them to come back is the key to making the sale. And how do you get them to come back? By getting them to sign up for something (permission-based marketing) and then keeping them in your loop or inner circle.
Wondering why I said eight tips in the article title and offered nine? Well, that's another piece of advice: always, always, always over-deliver online. There are too many people short selling their consumer with faulty or misrepresented ads, low quality product or promises they don't deliver on. While it may sometimes seem tempting, don't subscribe to shortcuts. Not only will they not get you anywhere, but they can damage your reputation. Often permanently.
Wednesday, 1 April 2015
MAKING MONEY THROUGH INSTAGRAM: INSIGHT AND TIPS
18 Year Old Instagram Entrepreneur
Recently, we had the chance to catch up with an 18 year old college student, Noah, from Maine, USA. Noah has over 30 Instagram accounts that reach over 5 million users. As you can imagine, Noah is able to make a living from Instagram and he has kindly shared some of his wisdom to help encourage young people to follow in his footsteps. Noah has seen so much success through Instagram that he represents his school’s work programme, as a young entrepreneur with his own business. He has also created opportunities for his friends by sharing his knowledge with them and by helping them start their own pages.
Noah’s story began when he joined Instagram and created a personal page as most people do. He also has a wholesale business in high-end watches and decided to create a page for it to gain some worldwide exposure. He followed lots of accounts with over 100,000 followers and asked them for their help. He then realised that they were making money off advertising and this inspired Noah to purchase his first account, which already had 96,000 followers. As mentioned previously, he now has over 30 accounts and these are his top 5 by following:
- Boss_homes – 737k followers
- Speed_class – 563k followers
- Automotivegramm – 429k followers
- Ferrari.automobili – 312k followers
- Thecarreport – 269k followers
Even though Noah acquired a large sized account, he still had to grow it further. Accounts can grow naturally if you don’t do anything to them, but the rate will be extremely slow. We’ll discuss his recommendations for growth a little later. His key advice is that you should only start a page that is based around an interest. For example, if you’re into watches, you could very well start up a page full of pictures of different types of watches, including those from less known brands. You’ll notice that 4 out of the 5 pages listed above are car accounts; Noah has a passion for cars and therefore posting on these accounts is literally just a hobby… That results in money!
Noah isn’t just using Instagram to make money off ads, he also has a long-term vision. He is using it to build his brand called Boss Collection; a high-end boutique with over $300,000 in products thus far. He wants to make it into the next super brand!
Tips
Using the information that Noah and several other users have shared with us, along with our own experiences, we have put together some tips you can use to make money through Instagram. We’ve listed these tips as steps:
1. Create or buy an account
Some people like to buy accounts as they see this as an investment. Instagram is actually a powerful marketing tool for your own business, as well as for others. You can easily make the money back by posting ads, or promoting your own business and influencing sales or leads.
If you’re making a general page around a niche, make sure the name is catchy and illustrates what your page represents. Shorter names are better as they are easier to remember and type out. For example, a page named “yummypix” is probably going to be associated with food and will encourage food lovers to check it out.
If you’re creating a page for your brand or business, stick to the name of the company. If the name is already taken, get something as close as possible to the name.
Whatever it is that you choose, make sure you do it because you are passionate about it. Remember you are not only representing your page, but the whole industry that you’re posting about. If you have your own brand of watches for example, post about watches in general, not just about your products. This doesn’t mean that you should advertise other watch brands, but rather that you demonstrate your knowledge about watches through your content. This builds trust, so that when you do post about your products (or other products if you’re not a company), your followers are more likely to be open to your suggestions.
2. Make the page look good
As simple as this is, many don’t do it. Have a logo that’s easy on the eye and make sure you fill out your bio with key details. Include a short description of what the page is about and leave contact information so people can send you business enquiries, unless you don’t want this option available. This also makes the page look much more professional.
3. Post good content
By good we mean original or engaging content. Clear pictures that are rich in colour usually work well. Also remember that if you’re posting the same pictures as every other account, or accounts bigger than you, how will you stand out? Finding unique content or posting your own pictures is great in this sense. However if you do use other people’s pictures, don’t forget to give them credit. Instagram have a 0% tolerance to copyright infringement. After a certain amount of flags, your account can be deleted immediately. We’ve seen pages with over a million followers get shut down due to this. Give credit where you can.
People are more likely to follow a page that is very active on Instagram; posting at least twice a day. Work out what your best times are to post by either observation or by using free tools such as Iconsquare. Use this information to make your posts around these times.
4. Engage with followers
You can engage with followers in numerous ways. A lot of the time, people like knowing that there’s a human-being behind a page. They also feel special when you get back to them, so every now and again reply to some of your comments.
Also try and encourage people to tag their friends into your posts – this of course increases exposure by bringing more attention to it, and is likely to get you new followers. You can do this by saying things in your captions such as“Tag someone you love.” Make sure it relates to the post though. You wouldn’t ask this question under a picture of a doughnut that had no relation to love whatsoever!
5. Grow your page
The more people that follow your page, the more engagement you’ll get. Now we mentioned earlier that Noah bought his first big page which made things a bit easier for him. However, not everyone has money to invest in buying pages. Alternatively you can buy shouts from bigger pages by contacting them for their rates. This will help attract new followers and will be cheaper. It’s also a faster method than natural growth.
Natural growth can occur but it’s usually much slower. We feel that hash-tags are less effective than most claim they are. Usually they attract people using bots and spam followers; this won’t give real engagement at all and thus has little value. What Noah has suggested, and what we suggest is that you do shouts with other pages in your niche, of the same size. You can approach bigger pages but they are less likely to do shouts with significantly smaller pages. Shouts will help you attract another page’s followers. It’s the best way to grow organically, and it’s also free. Keep these shouts consistent so you gain constant exposure.
You can use bots which automatically follow and comment other people’s accounts. You can also manually follow people so they follow back, and then unfollow them. However these methods are not advised. Instagram have recently changed their algorithms to detect pages that are using bots to increase their followers. As a result pages are experiencing bans and are even being deleted. When you follow people to get followers back, it’s not only time consuming, if you eventually unfollow some users, they may also unfollow you back. Also, they might not actually be interested in what you have to offer, they might just be following you back for the sake of it – thus they won’t engage much. The whole point is to have followers that are engaging. There’s no value in quantity without quality.
6. Advertise
If you’re a business or brand, this will be less applicable to you as you’re probably going to be self-promoting. However, for pages that post content around a niche, you’ll probably start to gain interest from advertisers as your page gets bigger. Don’t out-price yourself straight away, be reasonable. If you’re completely unsure about what to charge, try and speak to other pages and see if they are willing to share their pricing structure.
One thing we should mention with ads is that if you post content that’s unrelated to your page, it can come across as spam and you may lose followers as a result. Most people dislike adverts, especially ones that are blatant adverts and will be of no interest to your followers. Keep this in mind.
“With a community of over 300 million, Instagram is one of the world’s largest mobile ads platforms.” – Instagram
We hope this post has helped you gain some inspiration and insight into making money through Instagram. We’re not suggesting that you all go and start pages to make money. Nevertheless, if you do have a passion for using Instagram, or are considering using it to market your brand or business, Instagram can prove to be a really powerful tool. It doesn’t matter what age you are either, as we’ve demonstrated above, you can start turning your passion into a business!
Tuesday, 31 March 2015
Using Social Media For Marketing
Social media has become a cornerstone of Internet marketing. It is a method of reaching an endless amount of people quickly, efficiently, and using direct engagement. Never before has it been so easy to reach your target audience, no matter where in the world they are, or what your industry may be.
The only downside is that it is a very quickly evolving form of marketing, where tactics don’t always have a very long shelf life.
Likewise, the number of platforms and their usefulness expand all the time. We now have half a dozen regulars, and they don’t even count the many niche social networks, the content curation sites, or even blogs, which count as a form of social marketing themselves.
This post is going to be focusing on some of the latest tips, and some of the classics that are still relevant.
Understand the Difference…
Decide what your goals are, and then pick the platform that best encompasses it. A good rule of thumb to begin with:
- Twitter for connecting to influencers
- Facebook for running contests and engaging customers
- Pinterest for pushing visual content
- StumbleUpon for generating traffic
- Google Plus for generating authority
- LinkedIn for connecting with industry leaders, etc
Tag, Tag, Tag, Then Tag Some More
I have seen a tactic used through the years that randomly tags followers when a new piece of content has come out, in order to get their attention. Especially if those users are influencers with a large follower base.
This is the wrong way to use tagging.
Instead, you should tag people only when it is relevant. Say that you are posting a link to an article you read and really enjoyed. You would tag the blogger’s account it came from, then the name of the author. It gets the attention of both, without seeming as though you are pitching anything to them.
Social Media Isn’t a Dumping Pile For Links
Yes, you want to share links on your social profile. But social media isn’t there to be a dumping ground for your content. You should be sharing links in between engaging with people directly. Ask questions, post other people’s work, answer tweets and statuses, and just be social.
Not only does this bring in more results on the marketing front, but it gives a face to the brand you are promoting.
Start Getting Visual
Visual content gets shared more than anything else across all social networks. So you should be spending a fair amount of your time posting images, videos, comics, infographics, etc. If you are on a site like Twitter, you can post up to four at a time. If you are on Facebook, create a gallery, or even post a Slideshare presentation.
You want something that catches the skimmer’s eye, and visuals do that much better than text alone.
Remain Consistent, Or You Will Be Forgotten
The most important sure of social marketing? Be consistent. You should be posting regularly, and with enthusiasm. If you slip up, you are going to start losing followers very quickly. It is amazing how quickly your social media credibility can go down.
It is just like posting content on your site. The more often you do it, and the higher the quality, the better.
Build Relationships With Influential Users… Off Social Media
If you are going to a conference, make it a point to have a list of people you know would be attending, and to make plans to meet up. It is easy, with so many people using hashtags related to events. Just send them a quick message asking if they would like to grab coffee, or even dinner or a drink after the day’s sessions.
Meeting in person is always more affective than just being a social media avatar. Try and make the most of every industry event: Meet as many people as you can!
Conclusion
Running a social marketing campaign doesn’t require any tricks, just some solid advice. The tips above will help you grow a strong social presence over time, which promoting your brand. The sooner you get started, the better!
Do you have any advice on how to build a social marketing campaign in 2015? Any predictions on trends in the coming months? We would love to hear them, so leave them in the comments!
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