Jazzing Up Your Social Networking

• Category: Content, Social media
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Starting a business buzz is ultimately the goal of any successful marketing campaign and with the advent and popularity of sites like Facebook and Twitter, it can be relatively easy to get attention if you put the work into it.

Creating a successful social network campaign involves a lot more than just setting up a nice looking page and entering some facts about your company. It also involves dedication to social interaction with your target customers and potential clients.

There are some simple ways to shed a little more light on your social networking pages. Here are 4 tips to energize your social campaigns and have the work pay off in profits:

Create Your Strategy

There is an art to establishing a strong social network. You don’t set it up and forget about it. Instead, you need to take a time out and plan your strategies. Identify the business objectives you hope to conquer on your social pages and then list ways to meet those objectives. Some business goals to consider include:

• Connecting with existing clients and customers to develop another channel of feedback and communication

• Start discussions about product enhancement, new ideas, or to generate feedback about current inventory or services.

• Connect with other industry-relevant individuals and use your pages as a networking tool in the industry

• Start a distribution list to send press releases, announcements, and sales events.

• Once you have started to identify your business goals and steps to achieve these goals, start talking.

Understand Your Customers/Clients

You will have a great opportunity to see where your target audience hangs out on the Internet when they are not buying your products. You can see what other interests they have and understand your customer base better than ever possible without social networking. Once you understand preferences and dislikes, you can focus your efforts on what your customers and clientele are looking for from your company.

Be Who You Are

As a consumer, it is likely you aren’t attracted to fluff. Your potential customers likely feel the same way. They want to deal with real. Be yourself, create the voice of the business and keep honesty in your program. If you fluff up all of your posts, people will begin to see right through you. Since you have to sum up big issues in small posts, you’ll need to be direct with what you say and ensure everything you say is projecting a positive, professional image.

Interact and Monitor

There is absolutely no point in setting up a social network campaign if you do not intend to interact socially on a regular basis. It takes time to grow a business relationship and your consistency in posts and interactions will benefit your efforts. Be sure to check on all comments and feedback information. Be sure to make your own comments and answer people’s questions and concerns. The more engaging you are, the more likely you will be able to not only develop quite a following but also be able to measure your success in profits.

Increase Traffic With Free Samples

• Category: Blogging, Content
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You’ve got a website and/or blog. You’ve got your product. You’ve got your business plan mapped out. What you don’t have is traffic to your site that will help you to increase your profit margin. So what now? Ever hear the saying ‘If it’s free, it’s for me’?

There is a reason it’s a popular saying simply because it is true. Even those companies that are advertising on other mediums besides the internet may have difficulty convincing the public at large to buy their products because people who can not see, smell, touch, or handle a product (especially a new one) may be reluctant to shell out the cash to buy it.

So what now?

Give away a free sample product to get attention. It may cost you a bit of an investment in the beginning to give away free product but it can certainly reap benefits down the line. As word of mouth is usually the biggest advertising tactic a business can use, getting your product into the hands of the target audience is essentially.

Here are some tips for giving free samples in the online world:

Blog About Your Giveaway

Write your own article about your giveaway by describing what consumers need to do to have access to a free sample. Host a contest or have fun with trivia. There are number of ways to promote your own free samples on your own blog.

Call on Other Bloggers

Find bloggers that are relevant to your industry or product. Approach them to inquire about their ability to help promote your contest or sample giveaway. Not everyone will oblige but many will take an interest in the idea, especially if they also get a sample. Not only can they promote your giveaway, you can ask bloggers to review the product for their own website if your product is ‘reviewable’.

Get Social

After you post a blog about your sample product giveaway, be sure to add a link to all your social media sites. Refer to the link often but do not overwhelm your audience with the same tired post. Add a condition to a contest that to be eligible to win, contestants must also add links to their social media pages.

Research Contest Sites

There are several popular websites online that deal solely in promoting other people’s contests. Register your site and contest/giveaway with these promotional sites to help spread the word.

Be Consistent

If you are going to set up a contest for your free giveaway, stay on top of it and follow through. People who are signing up and following instructions are counting on a fair deal. If you fail to live up to your promises, you will likely turn any press into negative word of mouth advertisement.

Deliver On Promises

Pick a winner on the day you stated and be sure to mail out the free sample(s) as promised. Delaying the mail out of the prizes can also hurt you. People are prone to complain online about such incidents and again you can be subjected to negative press and a lack of traffic to your site.

How To Promote a New Blog

• Category: Blogging, Content, Marketing, SEO
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Blogging is a successful part of company marketing because it’s relatively easy and it works. Thousands of companies start a new blog every day that can be a perfect springboard for reaching their target audience. However, many of these blogs often languish because once the blog is set up and launched management fails to promote it correctly.

Businesses and individuals alike can use blogs successfully to prove their expertise and knowledge about a particular subject but without the proper promotional avenues, their experience is a moot point. Here are some important tips to help a new blog stand out and reach the right people:

Write Constant Content

New and relevant content is key to generating traffic. Provide fresh material at least weekly if not daily so your audience will become more dependant on what you have to say.

Link to the Blog

Companies with already established websites should immediately provide a direct link to the blog on the main navigation page and subsequent pages to help attract attention.

Blog Link in Every Email

If you have composed your signature on outgoing emails, edit it to add a link to the blog. For every email that goes out to colleague or customer, you are continually promoting the blog.

Make an Announcement

A new blog is a great reason to prepare a national/international press release. Let the press know what the blog contains in order to attract a new audience.

Promote In Newsletters

If your company produces a newsletter whether online or in print, make a special announcement about the establishment of the blog and include the link in every newsletter.

Make It Social

If you are already working with social media tools to promote your company, product and services, be sure to let everyone know about the new blog.

Share Links

Get in with other bloggers and have them recognize you by linking their blogs to yours. You can make friends with other bloggers and add them to your blog roll. Request they do the same.

Write Content for Others

Whatever your niche and experience is, you can write content and provide relevant content to other bloggers free of charge. Contact other bloggers whose core audience is related to your target market and ask if you can guest post for free in exchange for a brief bio and link back to your site.

Promote a Giveaway

A quick way to bring attention to a new site is to host a giveaway. Donate a free product or service to the winner but make sure the gift is something worthwhile to others. Sometimes a big ticket item is worth the cost for the attention it will bring but only give away what you can afford. Send out press releases and announcements about your giveaway contests.

How Fresh Is Your Expertise?

• Category: Content, Marketing, SEO
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You establish an online blog or website to sell product. You use those sites as a springboard to getting your audience to rely on your knowledge and expertise. You then generate sales from repeat customers who feel they can trust what you have to say. That is the basic principles behind online marketing. You make yourself available to a target audience and provide answers and solutions to their problems so they will turn to you when they need help. To master this technique, you constantly provide your readers with information you have gleaned from your own experience in the form of blog posts and articles. However, if you have been at this for a long period of time, it may seem you have already covered all your bases. When that happens, you can easily make the mistake of allowing your content to get stale. Readers who come back searching for news and up-to-the-minute article posts can quickly become dissuaded by your lack of new information.

How To Stay Fresh

If you have written all of the content yourself over the months or years since you have established your site, even topics you love can become old. The key to getting and sustaining interest from readers and search engines alike it to always provide something new. This may be the right time to go back over and review all of your posts to date. Are there any new angles you can use to expand on old information? Have you been following industry news and events? Brainstorm ideas based off old posts. Look to your own audience for feedback to find out what information they really want to know that you have not yet provided.

Depending on your niche, it can be difficult to keep current without rehashing what you have already put out there. It can also be difficult to keep up with the writing of a single site, let alone several. Many business site owners are reluctant to outsource the content portion of their website because they are concerned about a writers’ lack of experience in the industry. They also have stayed away due to the difficulty of navigating or keeping up with bidding sites freelancer writers use to acquire jobs. In the end, rather than look for help, many site owners simply fail to keep up with the writing and posting that is vital to their website.

How to Outsource Successfully

Freelance writers do work out of popular bidding sites but there are also many content writers who are experienced in web writing that look to establish long-term relationships with small and medium sized business. A new trend that is gaining speed is the use of write-on-demand sites, such as ReliableWriters.com where customers can enter specifics about articles or blog posts like word counts and topic guidelines and have completed posts emailed within 24-48 hours. Establishing a relationship with a content provider can be instrumental to a busy site owner who is also working to shore up the sales end of the business. Write-on-demand sites also eliminate contracts or other obligations associated with hiring employees to write site content.

Site content is an essential part of any online marketing plan. From white papers to full length articles and even social media posts, website owners need to invest time, money, and a lot of effort into their online marketing if they are looking for success. The bottom line is if you can’t do the writing yourself, invest in someone who can.

Do You Repurpose Your Content?

• Category: Content, Marketing, SEO
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If content is king- and we are quite certain it is- then how do you make sure you have the best content all the time? After all, creating content is time consuming, brain consuming and just plain hard work. Is it necessary to spend eight to ten hours a day creating fresh content in order to have enough information to keep things fresh? And what about the different methods of supplying content- audio, video, mp3, DVD, cd, YouTube, Ustream – the list is endless. How on earth are you supposed to create fresh content in all these types of formats and still have time to sleep? There is an answer- it’s called repurposing your content.

Repurposing your content saves you time, energy and money. Think about it- you invested a lot of time and intellectual energy into that blog series you did about article marketing, right? You provided excellent information, useful tips and tricks and even an idea or two that are different from the standard fare everyone else is posting. You used your proprietary technique for creating articles that regularly rank in the top ten on Google for your keywords. You explained everything in a simple straightforward fashion, that anyone could understand, but certainly wasn’t boring or monotonous. So why not find a way to make some money off all your hard work – or at least use it to drive some extra traffic to your site or to build your list.

Everyone learns information in a certain way. Some learn best by listening, some by watching, some by reading, some by doing. Why not take your expert information and package it in several different ways so you can give everyone the same opportunity to learn from you? Record it onto mp3 recordings and/or CD and then sell the series or use it as a bonus when someone buys your flagship product. Breakout your webcam and make a series of videos and upload them to YouTube for the opportunity to be noticed by hundreds or thousands or even millions of people. You can also record them on DVD and sell them for $97 or whatever price you think your audience will pay for them.

You can sell the information on the cheap and sell PLR rights to it -let others rewrite it and put their name on it in exchange for a slight fee. You can offer it as a bonus or a free download in exchange for a prospect giving you their email address. You can break it up into autoresponder messages and call it a mini course.

The point is, if you have valuable content you’ve put your time and energy into creating, you don’t have to use it once and then forget it. You can repackage and repurpose the information in a number of different ways and either give it away or sell it over and over again. If it’s worth saying, it’s worth repeating. What can you repurpose today?