Easiest Way to Boost Your Social Media Mojo

4-13-three-ways-to-increase-social-engagementTop Social Media Tips – How to Engage with Ease!

Long, long ago in an internet far away (roughly a year ago) it was not too difficult to rank your site’s pages in the search engine results. All you had to do was optimize the pages, have good, original content, and to gather a vast variety of backlinks to your pages.

Ahh, the good ‘ol days.

Google, in their quest to create a more relevant, social collection of search results, has made the game a bit more intricate. In addition to being sure we are still doing most if not all of the above tasks, social signals now are playing a vital part in the Google search results algorithm, the formula used to determine where our pages rank in the search stratosphere.

So exactly how do we create these “social signals”?

So how can we do this without tearing out all of our hair? Listed below are three easy methods for you to quickly increase customer engagement, grow your audience, and boost word of mouth regarding your business.

  1. Utilize visual media – However you slice it, the majority of us now would prefer to watch than read. Regardless of whether we are driven to this by a lack of time or the fact that it’s simply easier, that is the state of society nowadays. Backing that up, Facebook reports that pics and vids attract 53 percent more likes than text alone.
  2. Do it later in the day – Customer engagement by way of likes, shares and follows, are occurring later in the day, according to this infographic. (See, you wanted to check it out, didn’t ya!)
  3. Be quick to respond – Getting visitors to respond to you is hard enough: don’t leave them hanging! Make sure you develop the practice of responding to comments, tweets and status updates as soon as possible. You’re looking to engage, not find a way avoid this!

Don’t be like Freddie!

Professional golfer Freddie Couples was asked once why he never answers the phone. His reply was, “there might be someone on the other end.” Don’t be like Freddie! Engage with your readers!

e-Newsletter (surprising effectiveness)

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How to use an E-newsletter to engage your list!

To a lot of people, the e-newsletter may seem like a relic of a bygone era, a time when we used painfully slow dial-up Internet services like AOL and “surfed” the web using Netscape. In spite of becoming a little long in the tooth (in Internet years), the e-newsletter is still an exceptionally powerful marketing tool your business shouldn’t ignore. E-newsletters remain an excellent medium for engaging customers, building authority and driving sales. The Direct Marketing Association says that every $1 spent on email marketing creates $40 in revenue. Aweber tells us that 77 percent of small business owners report that email helps them increase revenue.

Not your grandmother’s e-newsletters anymore!

Don’t be buffaloed into thinking that your e-newsletter must be as bland and un-sexy as those you’ve made the mistake of opting in for. Here are some eye-catching examples of e-newsletters that rock! Also, ensuring that you’re not just selling, but engaging your readers with useful, compelling content. Kayak, for example, isn’t just about telling you about the latest travel deals, but rather getting you salivating on the thought of travel and fun. Additionally, they go out of the way to engage their readers.

Quick tips for an engaging e-newsletter

Here are some tips for writing an E-newsletter that gets opened and acted upon!

  • Talk as if you’re talking to a friend – Customers are affected by a friendly tone, and are far more likely to engage.
  • Encourage communication – Give them every opportunity to respond and specifically request it!
  • Be specific and don’t ramble – Keep on topic, and don’t be boring!
  • Offer useful content – More than anything, offer content that’s fresh, useful and that resonates with your list.
  • Don’t be afraid to use emotion – Writing with emotion is powerful and is almost certainly going to stir others as well, promoting more engagement.

Don’t settle for simply autoresponder messages! Create a meaningful and useful e-newsletter today!

Reputation Management Tips

4-13-five-reputation-strategies5 Powerful Online Reputation Management Strategies You Can Count On

Think your online reputation doesn’t matter? Think again! According to a study by Erik Qualman of Socialnomics.com, nearly three-quarters of respondents say they trust the info provided by total strangers online. Further, some 80 percent of consumers have changed their minds about buying a product after reading a negative review online, and over 84 percent say they find online product reviews to be a trustworthy source of information.

This leads to one simple reality: when those negative reviews or complaints appear, (and they will!) you need to take them very seriously and take countermeasures to reduce the negative effects!

Let’s look at five proven strategies to do that.

  1. Look at your brand’s search engine results regularly – Check your company’s name in Google at least once a month. Google Alerts is a good idea to tell you when there is any conversation regarding you, your company name or your important keywords. Make sure you look beyond page one, as damaging entries may be lurking there on their way higher.
  2. Deal with negative content ASAP – Do your very best to contact the individual that posted the content in question as soon as possible, especially if they are an unhappy customer. Do your very best to take care of their concerns in a positive manner. Don’t enter into a public tussle with them! You won’t like the outcome.
  3. Optimize your pages with your company name – Ensure that your company’s name is prominent in your optimization, specifically in keywords, tags, and titles. The more of your site’s pages that bear your name, the greater number of chances Google will see your site as the authority for this keyword (your company name) and rank you higher, particularly because most negative content won’t have done any SEO.
  4. Create more content channels with your brand – You can use free blogs like WordPress.com, Blogger.com or even subdomains of your own site for this, along with your social channels such as YouTube, Facebook, and Google , will help keep the company name prominent. Post fresh content to these channels also, so they hold on to their search positions.
  5. Ask for reviews – Your very best choice for an effective online reputation management tool is to ask your best customers for reviews. Don’t be pushy, but encourage and even reward reviews. This is also your best source of social proof!

Follow these tips to keep your good name! Trust us…you’ll be glad you did.

Facebook Advertising Secrets

4-13-five-tips-for-facebook-imagesHow to Use Facebook Ads to Gather Leads and Sales

Facebook ads are among the fastest, easiest and most effective do-it-yourself platforms for getting traffic to your offers, building prospect lists, and for practically any other objective imaginable for your website. Ad campaigns are extremely simple to set up, include excellent targeting tools, and can be online in minutes. There is one factor to understand, however, when it comes to obtaining the best results and return on investment: That is finding the most effective images available. It has been shown that imagery is 70-89 percent of the success or failure of a Facebook ad campaign. Let’s have a look at some useful tips for obtaining the most from your Facebook ad images.

5 Great Image Tips for Facebook Ads

Creating an ad that produces a real impact and statement for your product or services is a matter of standing out from the rest. Listed below are five ways to do just that!

  1. Use very high quality stock images – As your images will end up very small, be sure you’re purchasing from a reputable resource. Fotolia and iStockPhoto are two of our faves. The XS size of available images will undoubtedly be fine, as even these are going to be cut down to the size of a postage stamp (110×80 pixels).
  2. Crop to deliver impact – Crop your photos closely to focus on the key aspect of your ad. Cropping faces from the eyes to mouth is the most impactful technique for riveting people images. Also, be sure that your model’s eyes have life. Whenever using product images, get close!
  3. Choose eye-catching colors – Using bright, visually arresting images is going to do wonders for your click-thru rates. Too many people opt to blend in with the pervasive Facebook blue, and thus consign their ads to a form of “banner blindness”.
  4. Choose attractive images – Unless you are going for a certain statement, choose the most attractive photos you can find. People are attracted to beauty. Period. This is not to say that sometimes beauty can’t be trumped by cute, funny or outrageous.
  5. Use humor whenever you can – All of us love a good laugh. If you have the opportunity to inject humor into your ad, don’t miss it! It will undoubtedly result in a higher clickthrough rate!

For some terrific illustrations of these ad-image principles in action, check out this great article at Search Engine Watch.

Smartphone App For Your Small Business

4-13-smartphone-apps-for-your-small-bizHow do you decide whether or not to develop a mobile app for your business?

Mobile site or mobile app? Thats the real question. Do you require one or the other, or both? Understanding your businesses’ needs goes a long way toward helping you decide if you should invest the time and money necessary to develop and put into play a mobile app for your business. Does a mobile app make sense for your company? What are the costs, both in developing one and in maintaining one? Have you got someone capable of updating it? You need the answers to these and several other questions in order to really come up with a wise decision. Let’s take a peek at a few of the pros and cons.

The Pros and Cons of developing a mobile app for your business

Pros:

  • More than 50 percent of adult Americans are using smartphone technology
  • Keeps your brand prominent in the marketplace
  • Increases customer retention and loyalty, as the app is always in front  of them
  • App users typically spend much more time on apps than on mobile sites
  • Usually load faster than mobile sites
  • Mobile apps are available offline, though users will need to login to perform any actions, such as purchases

Cons:

  • A mobile app needs to be developed for each platform, iPhone, Android, Windows, or any other platform
  • Mobile apps require ongoing care, both as regard fresh content along with technology updates
  • Mobile apps are not as easy to optimize as a mobile website
  • Mobile ads could very well serve the purpose
  • Apps can be quite expensive! If you go the Do It Yourself route, be ready for a lot of headaches, as they frequently break, and need to be updated.

We all know there are as many uses for an app than you’ll be able to imagine, however some are superior to others. Here is an example of how apps were created in the health care market. Making sure your app is useful and not a mere novelty goes a long way toward helping you make your choice. While it’s a given that you require a mobile version of your website, the question of whether or not you should shell out what might be big bucks for an app is one you ought to look at thoroughly. Take your time to weigh the pros and cons for your business before you leap into developing a mobile app!

Green Marketing

4-13-green-marketing-ideasPaint your business green!

Earth day is upon us again, and it’s a great time to think about how Green Marketing can be a useful way to appeal to environmentally conscious consumers. This is not just a smart way to conserve our precious natural resources, but it has developed into a hot political and social topic in our communities. The most obvious reason to embrace Green marketing would be to manage our available resources with an eye toward good stewardship. Nonetheless, you would be smart to keep your business’s public image in mind simultaneously, because the image it projects is often a deciding factor for many people nowadays. Many will opt for an eco-friendly choice over another company that doesn’t exercise Green marketing on principle alone.

How to attract and appeal to socially conscious consumers

Don’t be shy about promoting that your company is adopting a green marketing initiative. Utilizing the media is an important way for many companies to emphasize their green practices, while boosting their public images and generating positive reputation. As per a report by D S Simon Productions, “media initiatives with a corporate social responsibility focus generates 35-50% more positive media coverage on television, radio, web and social media than comparable programs without the CSR hook”. See about developing “green teams” in your company that can get employees fired up to do their part as well. This can help brand your business as one that really cares about conservation and green marketing. Seek out organizations like EarthShare to help with this.

How Arya Cleaners went green and it paid off!

A dry cleaning service in Chula Vista Ca, Arya Cleaners took steps like swapping their natural gas burning water heaters with technology that transfers heat from the boiler to the laundry machines, swapping their company vehicle with a fuel efficient clean burning delivery van, and by using wet-cleaning technology that reduced their usage of PERC (perchloroethylene), a harmful chemical solvent used by dry cleaners, by 90%.

This lead to Arya Cleaners being named a CoolCalifornia.org Small Business Excellence Award Winner, being a Certified Chula Vista Clean Business, and gaining the Mayor’s award for excellence in 2009 for green friendly business practices. Arya has got it. Branding themselves as an eco-friendly business in a business where there are few who are doing so made a huge difference. Take steps to embrace green marketing today, and see if it doesn’t have a positive impact on your bottom line!

SMBs – Smitten with Content Marketing (for good reason..)

4-13-content-marketing-to-boost-salesContent Marketing: What It Is and Why You Need It!

Content marketing might be a term you’ve heard tossed about lately, but still may not know exactly what it means for your small business. To put it simply, content marketing is the practice of creating, collecting, and making available fresh content for one’s readers. This may come in various forms, including blog posts, articles, whitepapers, short reports, videos, podcasts, ebooks, social media and more. We live in an age that treasures information, and the more you can present your readers with the greater authority you will hold in their eyes, which can often bring about better rankings, increased traffic, links, and sales.

Content marketing is getting ever more popular!

According to BusinessBolts.com, this year some 74 percent of businesses plan to do an increased level of content marketing. Only 4 percent are not. Many reasons exist for this, among them cost-effectiveness, near-instant results and control over the medium. With content marketing you can shape your message, control the flow, and utilize many different mediums to get your content to your market. For instance, an article or blog post could be written, posted on your site, excerpted in social media, made into a video or audio and social bookmarked across the web. Repurposing your content for various platforms is the order of the day. In addition, this can happen quite often, and an entire content marketing campaign can be realized quite swiftly.

Want an example of how content marketing made a difference?

The New York Times recently profiled a Northern Virginia company, River Pools and Spas, that was watching as their sales tanked because of the housing recession of 2008. Orders shrank from six per month ($50,000 a pop) to less than two. What had been a $250,000 yearly spend on radio, TV and pay per click advertising, was now out of the question. Instead, owner Marcus Sheridan went on an ambitious content marketing campaign consisting of blog posts and videos, and in just a short time had not only recovered but surpassed pre-recession levels. In fact, Sheridan attributes nearly $2 million in sales to a SINGLE article he wrote on how much a fiberglass pool should cost!

Content marketing can and should be a major part of your online marketing strategy for 2013. The good news is that it’s all within your control!

5 Tips for Good-Looking Mobile Emails

4-13-five-tips-for-good-looking-mobile-emailsDoes Your Email Look Grim on Mobile Devices?

It’s tough enough to make sure your email marketing messages get through without making the task more onerous. Making certain you are optimizing your marketing emails could be the difference in success or failure in your campaigns, particularly as mobile email open rates are increasing rapidly.

Mobile email opens are exploding!

Mobile email is now the most opened email, surpassing desktop with a robust 36 percent, according to Knotice.com. Combine that with the reality that email is the preferred online communication mode of 74 percent of all adults, and you will see why it’s so important. It’s not just phones either. Tablets are starting to take a major share also, as ReturnPath reports that iPhones account for 59 percent, iPads 26 percent, Androids 14 percent and Windows phones bringing up the rear at less than 1 percent.

Some tips for optimizing your marketing emails

So just how do you go about optimizing your marketing emails? Not to fear, we won’t leave you in the lurch! Here are a few must-do tips that help make sure your messaging shows up the way you’ve intended it to!

  • If you want your emails read, especially on a mobile device, keep them short and sweet. Make engaging and enticing headlines and content that keep the reader hooked, as it’s extremely easy to delete an email from a mobile device!
  • Keep your image files small, as large files take far longer to load, which can be a disaster as many won’t wait, and just move on, before they’ve even viewed what you’ve got for them.
  • Keep your font sizes in your main content at least 14, and headlines around 30. Anything below 13 will get automatically changed by the iPhone, and can wreck your formatting.
  • Make sure any calls to action are big enough for easy tapping. The typical adult fingertip measures around 45 pixels, so bear that in mind.
  • Make sure you test your marketing emails on the different mobile platforms before clicking the send button! This really is well worth the couple of minutes it will take!

Optimizing your emails for mobile isn’t a thing you should get to when you can – it’s a big deal you should do today! You can be sure your competition is!

Homepage Sins: 15 Ways to Improve Your Homepage

4-13-fifteen-ways-to-improve-website15 homepage sins that are costing you sales

Sometimes it’s about what you don’t do as much as it is what you do. This can ring extremely true on the subject of your website. There are lots of things that can send visitors screaming into cyberspace to escape these grievous issues. Let‘s find out if some of these sound familiar to you.

  1. No clear objective – According to DinkumInteractive.com you have about 4 seconds to convey what your website is about before they leave.
  2. Your content isn’t scannable – Web viewers read in chunks, and if they can’t scan your page and get it in a few seconds, you’ve probably lost them!
  3. Not being mobile ready – Mobile is no longer an extravagance, as according to Google half of all website traffic is mobile.
  4. Not making use of video on your site – Videos rule, but whatever you decide to do, avoid autoplaying music at all costs!
  5. No updated, quality content – If your content is from Bush’s first term, it’s no surprise they’re fleeing! Also no fancy fonts or extremely long pages.
  6. No contact information – You want to ensure your customers can contact you when they want to!
  7. Not collecting email addresses – Also a necessity. Developing a list is one of the keys to long-term success online.
  8. Not utilizing Meta tags on your website – Especially the title and description tags. These can help you to get indexed and ranked in the search engines.
  9. Lack of social sharing buttons – Like it or not, making your site be shareable on social sites is where the party is, so get over it!
  10. No or poor Calls-to-Action – You want an action from your visitors; ask for it!
  11. No clear site navigation – Don’t use drop down menus, and make sure every page on your website contains a link back to the home page.
  12. Not optimizing your images – Make sure to use the ALT and TITLE tags for any images or videos you are using.
  13. Overuse of Flash – Besides being a pain for the GoogleBot to read, it may be very irritating to your visitors.
  14. No metrics to determine your progress – Do you actually not want to learn the quantity of people are coming around and from where? What do they like, or not like?
  15. “Intro” pages – These are merely an obstacle to your content. You really want to go there? (I’m looking at you, fancy restaurants.)

Get More Client Referrals

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7 top techniques for getting more client referrals

Most small businesses are always looking for ways to obtain more client referrals. However as outlined by GrowThink.com some 58.6% of us don’t even bother to ask for them! This isn’t something that takes place automagically, but rather is the offspring of a clear, focused strategy applied persistently. So that you can catch the idea allow me to share seven easy ways to get more client referrals, faster and easier than you may have thought possible!

  1. Ask your best clients – These can be your best business evangelists. People who are already in love with what you do won’t need much coaxing to sing your praises.
  2. Offer sensible incentives – Offering product savings, select offers, or other rewards which make sense for your business can be a fantastic way of getting people to send you new customers.
  3. Over-deliver on first-time customers – When you get a new customer, a terrific way to get them talking to their circle of contacts is to over-deliver to them. This can come in a number of ways, but make certain they view your company as a cut above the rest.
  4. Engage your customers – Find innovative approaches to engage your clients and perhaps find a way you can benefit each other. The key is to get them talking, and being open to ideas. Create an online neighborhood for your customers, such as a blog or Facebook group.
  5. Be courteous and a giver – Make saying “Thank You” part of your daily lexicon, and be generous when it comes to offering perks. Laying a surprise gift card or thank you note on a customer can be very beneficial.
  6. Enlist your staff – Getting your staff in the game can multiply your efforts. You will usually have to develop a way to reward results, but it can be very much worth the cost!
  7. Create a loyalty program – A customer loyalty program, preferably online, can help you generate enthusiasm and engagement. Reward interaction as well as purchases, because this could lead to more and more people becoming involved.

Consistently working a client referral plan takes some perseverance, but at the end of the day can create great results with a minimal outlay.