Author Archive
Track Your Tweets
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Twitter has become not only a great site for connecting with people around the world, it’s become a favorite tool of solopreneurs because:
You can offer tidbits of valuable information to a huge audience.
You can connect with prospects and customers on a personal level.
You can glean market and industry information from tweets.
The trick is to know if your tweets are having a direct effect on your profits. The best way to do this is to track your tweets. Fortunately, because developers know how important Twitter is to marketers, they’ve developed several tools to track your tweets. Here are just a few ways to track your tweets:
1. A standard calendar and an analytics program
The most basic way to track tweets is to record when and what you tweet on a calendar. You can of course use a print calendar however, you can also track them on a calendar like Outlook or Google. Once a week, compare your tweets to your analytics data to see which tweets generated traffic. This way you can determine to a reasonable degree, which tweets make the biggest impact and what days or times of the day are more effective. You can also link to unique web pages in your tweets to make sure you’re evaluating the right information.
2. Twistory
Puts your twitter feed into a calendar so you can see your twitter history. It essentially automates what you’re doing in #1.
3. TweetEffect
Tracks what tweets gain followers for you and what tweets essentially cost you followers.
4. Tweetie
An iPhone application that lets you track your tweets. You can view and respond to the tweets you follow, post your own tweets, and search for tweets by keyword just like you would from your computer only better because you can do it on the go.
5. Twitoaster
A service that monitors twitter conversations. It works by simply aggregating the conversations and publishing relevant statistics.
6. Viralheat
Viralheat is a paid service with membership levels based on your needs. Starting at $9.99 a month,“Viralheat allows you to monitor, analyze and glean insights at blazing speeds.”
Of course there are dozens of other twitter tracking services including sites like Social Oomph/TweetLater and HootSuite that let you schedule posts and track mentions and followers.
Finding the service or software that’s right for you may take a little trial and error. Of course, if you’re looking to simply track your tweets and the positive effect they have on your business, the five mentioned above are a good place to start.
Must Haves For Your Blog
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Blogs are a great way to connect and build relationships with your potential clients. Depending on what you talk about, they can help you reach a completely new audience and they give your audience a way to get to know you and your brand, and to participate in your community. All of these are important for both growing your business and growing your blog following. Often, however, even the biggest blogs make little mistakes. They forget or overlook some important features. Here are seven features to implement on your blog:
Subscribe or RSS feed. There’s nothing more frustrating, as a visitor, than finding a blog you enjoy and not being able to subscribe to it. People are busy, too busy to remember to visit your blog on a daily or weekly basis. Cut them a break, and yourself, and offer an option to subscribe to your blog so each new post is delivered via email, sent to a reader or shows up on their iGoogle page.
Contact/About information. Have you ever visited a blog and thought, “I wonder who this blog belongs to? Where are they? Who are they?” Trust me, readers think this and they want to know. If they can’t find out a bit about you, determine your credibility or make some sort of connection, they’ll move along. Retain your visitors by sharing a bit of information about yourself including a means by which they can contact you.
Comments. Some blogs intentionally do not allow comments and while they have their reasons, most people like to be able to leave a comment if they have something to say. If you’re considering not allowing commenting because you want to avoid spam, then check out a few of the spam blockers like Askimet, which is available for WordPress blogs. If you’re avoiding allowing comments because you don’t want to respond to them, consider outsourcing the job and having someone moderate your posts, or just set ten minutes aside at the end of each day to respond. People like the interaction and it draws more readers.
Archives, popular posts, popular comments, tags and other associated identifiers. People search and read blogs differently. Some simply read the most recent post and move on while others search by category or tag. Some people will want to read the most popular posts and others will want to sift through your archives post by post. Provide a number of options for your visitors to search by.
SEO plug-ins. One of the wonderful features about a blog is that it’s welcomed by the search engines due to frequent and easily indexed content. That being said, there are an abundance of quality search engine plug-ins, particularly for WordPress, which make optimizing your posts for the search engines quick and easy.
Social networking and bookmarking features. With Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, and other social networking and bookmarking sites growing in popularity, it pays to include options on your blog. You can ask people to tweet your posts, post or link to them on Facebook, Digg them and so on. It’ll draw traffic and subscribers.
Google Analytics. You want to know how many people are visiting your blog, where they’re coming from, how many posts they read and how long they stay on your site, right? Google analytics will tell you all that and more. To make good decisions about how to grow your blog, it pays to have the kind of information an analytics tool can provide.
Blogging is extremely popular and useful, and along with this popularity comes a bevy of useful tools. Take advantage of these tools and resources to grow your subscribers, profits and business.
Get More Sales By Using Audio
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When it comes to adding content to your website, consider using audio as an additional content and communication strategy. Audio not only broadens your product offerings and marketing tools, it can also motivate purchases.
How Audio Motivates Purchases
One of your biggest assets as the owner of a small business is your personality, and audio makes it extremely easy to communicate that personality to your audience. If people like you, and we’re assuming they do, then they’re more likely to purchase from you. You can use audio messages to connect with your audience and influence liking. Even a simple welcome message is a great start.
People buy from people or companies they consider to be an authority in their industry. Audio is an exceptional tool for you to use to demonstrate your authority on your niche topic. How to audio messages, interviews and lessons are all tools to demonstrate authority.
We often make purchasing decisions based on the opinions of others, particularly if those “others” are people we respect, admire, or want to be like. You can tap into this social proof trigger by interviewing an expert or posting audio testimonials on your website.
How to Use Audio on Your Website
We’ve already touched on a few ways you can use audio on your website to influence buying triggers. There are essentially two paths you can take – you can use audio as a product in your catalog or as a marketing tool.
Product Creation – Audio lends itself to many profitable products which you can sell or give away as a thank you or bonus, for example:
- Email training courses, workshops, and seminars
- Tutorials
- Podcasts
- Guest interviews
Marketing Tools – Many of the above items, which are mentioned as products, can also be used as marketing tools when they’re given away as freebies or thank yous. In addition to the above, here are some other possibilities for using audio in your marketing strategy:
- Product reviews
- Personal message
- Sales content
- Viral marketing
- Testimonials
Audio lends itself to a whole new audience which of course is good for you because the more followers you have, the better. When creating your content strategy or looking to the future, begin using audio in your product catalog and to market your business. Then watch your business grow.
Get Your Articles and Blog Posts Read
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Writing and creating content for your website is perhaps the single most important marketing and business-building strategy available to online business owners. However, in addition to simply creating content, you want to have your articles and content read. Articles that are compelling pull the visitor into your website where they’ll continue to search for more valuable content. They will begin to not only remember your website as a source of good content but also as a reliable business.
Here are five tips to get your articles and blog posts read:
Compelling Headlines
Your headline is the first thing that your visitor or reader will notice. It must grab their attention by appealing to their emotions, making a promise, offering a benefit, inciting controversy, arousing curiosity or stating something newsworthy.
Layout
How you present your content may very well be the next most important factor in getting your article read, right behind your headline. Articles that are heavy with long paragraphs are often skipped. Not because the reader isn’t interested in the content, they’re just not interested enough to spend the time reading the article for value.
In general, people tend to skim when they read online, and an article that is difficult or cumbersome to read won’t be read. Instead, use shorter paragraphs, short sentences and formatting like bold type, bullets or numbers, and subheadings to help your reader make a decision to read your article.
Intro Paragraph
Your intro paragraph is next in line in importance to getting your article read. It should be short and to the point, yet still compelling. Your intro paragraph is used to set the stage for the rest of the article. It’s where you let your potential reader know what you’re going to tell them.
Use Images
Photos, graphics and illustrations come next. For some reason we’re attracted to content with images. Maybe it’s because it breaks up the content or maybe it’s because a few good images can help you tell your story. If you can include relevant images in your content, it will draw the eye of readers.
Compelling Bio
Credentials is the last tip. Sometimes a website visitor does two things: they read the headline and then they scan down to see who wrote the article and if they’re qualified to talk on the subject. This is particularly important if you’re publishing articles on websites, blogs and ezines that are not affiliated with your business website. Create a bio paragraph that puts you in a good light and boosts your credibility and authority.
Getting your content written is half the job, getting it read is the other half. And in addition to these top tips, it is of course essential that you market your content with a variety of marketing and traffic generation strategies.
Promoting Your Products
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When it comes to promoting a product there are definitely tools and tactics that work best. Much of the success of these tools will depend on when in the promotion cycle they’re implemented, the type of product and of course your target audience. Assuming you’re marketing to an opt-in list, here are a few suggestions for perfect product promotion strategies.
Make sure you’re not over promoting in your email communications
Email communications, like ezines and newsletters, are meant to be informative first and promotional second. That doesn’t mean you can’t promote in them, but it’s important to keep it to a minimum. A general rule of thumb, and this is by no means a hard and fast rule, is to make sure at least 80% of your content is valuable and informative.
How to articles, reviews, case studies and so on are great ways to provide value to your opt-in list. The other 20% can be promotional content. This can be an advertisement, links within your content, banner advertisements, promotional message at the bottom of your content and so on. Test and track to find the best mix and strategy for your audience.
Make sure your content is valuable and beneficial
One excellent strategy to provide 100% valuable content to your audience without any hard sell is to provide a review of the product you’re promoting. Reviews, particularly if they’re written in an unbiased tone, give your reader insight to a product. A well-written review will summarize the product’s purpose, highlight the strong points, perhaps tell a story about your experience with the product and then list a drawback or two.
The drawbacks can be written to sound benign or like strengths – much like you would do in an interview when the interviewer asks for you to tell them about your weaknesses. You turn your weaknesses into strengths. Then a quick sentence or two summary and of course a link to the product and voila, you have a great review (and promotional material for your product).
Make sure you’re not promoting all of the time
While your opt-in list expects and accepts that you will be promoting your business products and services, they don’t want to be inundated with promotions all the time. Time your promotional content right so that it coincides with launches, special promotions and even the holidays.
Your subscribers have come to expect the best from you, and product promotions are going to be held up to the same high standards. Treat them with respect, continually offer value and time your promotions well, and you’ll be on the road to more profits and a growing subscriber list.
Converting Online Visitors to Clients/Customers
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Smart business owners know that high conversion rates are essential. In order to sell products and services, website traffic needs to convert to customers. So what are the key tactics to improve conversion rates? Here are three smart ways to convert online visitors to customers.
If you’re using a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign then make sure you’re sending each advertisement through to a unique sales page designed with those keywords in mind. That way each sales page can be fine tuned to convert that particular prospect.
Test and track everything. Testing and tracking results is a business owner’s single biggest conversion tool. You may have a perfect textbook sales page, but if it isn’t converting then it doesn’t matter how pretty it is. Test your headline, test your call to action, test your testimonials, your price, the colors you use, your font and size. Test everything and fine tune your page until it’s receiving the conversion rate you want.
Build a relationship with your prospects. The best way to convert visitors to customers is to make them an offer they can’t refuse. Give them something, or many things, for free. Give them books, audios, videos, monthly access to new content limited to members; give them an online workshop, seminar or course. Giveaways are an exceptional way to get your customers to do one thing – sign up for your opt-in list.
Why is your opt-in list so important? Because it gives you the opportunity to build a relationship with your prospects and turn them into customers. It gives you the permission and the opportunity to connect with them weekly (or more frequently) and provide them with valuable content, promotions and maybe even more giveaways.
Your opt-in list is a list of pre-qualified prospects. By signing up they’ve already told you they’re interested in what you have to offer. This makes your opt-in list process critical to your conversions and increasing your conversions. Take the time to craft advertisements that send people to a custom landing/opt-in page, just like we suggested in #1. And as mentioned in #2, take the time to test and track your results. Sometimes changing a few words in your opt-in offer can make all the difference between a list of 1000 and a list of 10,000.
Increasing your conversion rate can make all the difference in your business. It’s a strategy worth paying attention to, right? With the average customer making two to three purchases annually, a conversion increase of only a few percentage points can equal a better business for you.
Strategies For Website Traffic
Posted by: | CommentsWebsite traffic is a good thing. In fact for many business owners, driving traffic to their website is their primary avenue for business-building. And while traffic may be all well and good, what you really want is targeted website traffic. You want the people visiting your website to be potential prospects. Your goal should be to turn them into future customers.
Here are 6 effective strategies to guarantee targeted website traffic.
#1 PPC ads.
Of course, not all Pay Per Click ad campaigns generate targeted traffic. You have to study your prospects and design keyword-specific ads that send traffic to a web page related to the ad. If you have a website about foods for people with Celiac Disease and your potential customers have to dig to find information about bread alternatives, you’re not sending the right kind of targeted website traffic to the right place. Send them directly to your bread products page.
#2 A squeeze page, opt-in list and targeted email messages.
A squeeze page is essentially a way to capture the email addresses of people who are actually interested in receiving your information. True, they may be after your giveaway but that’s okay – they’re still a qualified prospect. Once you have their email address, you can begin sending them informative, entertaining and slightly romotional messages, all of which are designed to send them directly to your website – targeted website traffic.
#3 Article marketing.
Article marketing is one of the most effective ways to generate targeted website traffic. When you publish quality content, and it gets published online in article directories and republished on other websites, you’re reaching a wider audience. The link(s) in your article and in your bio box can all send targeted traffic right back to your website. The more articles you publish, the more targeted traffic you generate.
#4 Blog and guest blog.
Use the advice and strategy described above for article marketing to generate traffic with your blog.
#5 Social networking.
Social networking can send tons of traffic to your website simply because people are curious about you and your business. However, if you’re strategic about your social networking use you will occasionally include links to your website with attention-grabbing posts or headlines. If the idea of social networking is like “Greek” to you, I offer a powerful webinar program called Social Media Made Easy. You can find out more about this amazing program by clicking here.
#6 Comment on blogs and forums.
On most forums and blogs when you participate and comment you can post a link to your website in your signature. This does generate curious folks who just want to know “who said that?!” When you participate in forums and blogs that are relevant to your website and industry niche, you’re sending targeted traffic to your website. You can also try unique approaches like posting reviews on websites and directories for products related to your industry and include a link to your website in your review profile, for example reviewing on Amazon.com. You can post answers on Yahoo! Answers and you can post videos or podcasts on directories and drive traffic to your site much like you would with article marketing.
There are a number of creative ways to drive targeted traffic to your website. Analyze your traffic-generating strategies and tactics to ensure you’re sending the right kind of traffic to your website.
Content Marketing for Solopreneurs: Solve writer's block with an idea catcher
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Linda Dessau of You Talk, I’ll Write shares her knowledge about how to keep track of all your inspirations in this guest post. We all need help with our writing – blogs, newsletters, email and more – Linda is the expert. Don’t miss signing up for her video – 7 Secrets of Content Marketing Success.
For solopreneurs who have decided to implement a content marketing strategy, there’s nothing more disheartening than writer’s block. After all, content marketing is no quick fix—it requires consistent effort to deliver the high-quality content that you will get you noticed and remembered by the people who will use and refer your services. The pressure is on!
One of my favourite tools to help with writer’s block is the idea catcher. An idea catcher is—literally—a place to catch your ideas as you think of them, so that even if you don’t have time to develop them in that moment, they’re not lost. When you’re sitting at your computer, an idea catcher might be a file, an online journal or mind mapping program, or a “draft” post saved in your blogging account.
When you’re away from your desk, carry a small notebook or audio recorder with you at all times, and have somewhere to store your notes, such as a folder or an “idea inbox” on your desk.
Key benefits of the idea catcher include:
- Awareness. You’ll start noticing ideas more when you have a mechanism in place for capturing them (result: more creativity)
- Choice. With a pile of ideas to choose from at any time, you can select the one that has the most juice for you in that moment (result: higher quality articles)
- Abundance. Ideas tend to multiply, with one idea sparking another, so that even if you don’t develop them all, you will have thought of more topics than you would have otherwise (result: you have more fun, get better results, and stick with it)
Aside from always having an idea catcher at the ready (and I mean always—I even have a waterproof pencil and notepad in my shower) here are three other things you can do to generate more ideas every day:
- Feed your mind with information—not just about your area of expertise, but whatever interests you. You’ll be amazed at the connections you can make and the articles that can come out of it.
- Get out and experience more from life. Try new things, meet interesting people, travel and support the arts. You will have more to offer and share when you get home.
- Fuel your body for creativity by getting enough sleep, rest and water. When you are rested your brain functions at a higher level and tasks flow more easily. Drinking water will hydrate your body and your mind, essential for creative work, but just being near flowing water can also inspire creativity.
Once you have multiple idea catchers in place and implement these feeding techniques, your writing will take on a new rhythm and sense of ease. Leave the struggle behind and start filling your idea catcher—you’ll be thankful for those gems the next time you’re staring at a blank screen.
Linda Dessau is the founder of You Talk, I’ll Write and the Idea Generator blog. She ghostwrites and edits content for newsletters, blogs and social media. Her clients are coaches and others who want to build trust, relationships and credibility while growing a service-based business. Feeding your idea catcher every day is only one of her 7 Secrets of Content Marketing Success—you can discover them all when you sign up for the free video.
5 Twitter Tools Every Social Media Marketing Campaign Should Use!
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John Panico of Social Media Dudes shares his Twitter expertise in this guest post. To hear more of John and his Twitter secrets, join the free teleseminar on February 23rd. Register here.
Twitter is one of the fastest growing social networking sites on the planet. It truly is one of the game changers that if not already a part of your social media marketing campaign, change that today (see my article on Twitter for Business Done Right for proper setup).
If you are looking to either be a Twitter Ninja or perhaps haven’t participated because you were concerned about the time it takes to manage, I am endowing you with what I consider five essential tools that will make you more efficient, save you time, get you the followers that you want and fortify your social media presence. As a bonus, all of these are free (although you may decide to upgrade to take advantage of some additional feature that some of these tools afford you.
Here they are (as they say on DWTS in no particular order):
- Social Oomph – You may remember this site formally going by Tweetlater.com (which personally I thought was more appropriate). Nevertheless, I find this tool to be invaluable in how to be efficient on twitter.
One of your objectives with your social media marketing campaign is to appear to be everywhere 24/7. Let’s get real. If all you did was tweet all day, you wouldn’t have time to focus on your business. One of the best features that Social Oomph allows is for you to schedule your tweets. I set aside 1 hour every Sunday morning and plan out 6-8 tweets a day. Some of them are going to push people to my site because of posts I have scheduled. Others are RT’s (ReTweets) that will bring a lot of love (and followers) back to you.
The other thing that I have found most useful is the Auto DM’s (Direct Message) feature that Social Oomph provides. Like them or not, as long as you are not selling back in your first response back to a follower, these can be very effective. You can have rotating DM’s.
- TweetDeck – Twitter is constantly doing things that make it compelling to use their homepage for all of your tweeting. But if you are like me, I currently have 6 Internet Explorer browsers open along with several other applications. If I want to quickly and effortlessly take a quick look to see if someone that I am following (or a phrase/keyword) has just tweeted something, it takes a while to do that.
Having to go to the twitter homepage to do that just takes up too much time, so I prefer an application that is sitting there in the background doing all of the work for me. Some will argue that other applications such as HootSuite or Twirl or just as good. I am not saying I haven’t used them. I just have found TweetDeck to do it better and cleaner.
TweetDeck allows me to use my Twitter lists or to make groups on my own based on keywords. How cool is that? And while it works easily on my desktop or laptop, it also performs just as well on my iPhone or Blackberry. In my opinion, it is the must-have twitter tool.
- PollDaddy – Part of being involved in social media marketing is well…being involved. You not only want, but you need engagement with your audience. If you are shy about getting into the mix, creating a poll not only provides involvement, but can also supply good market research for your product or service. It allows you to get answers about things much quicker and obviously cheaper (since it is free) than using a marketing firm to do it for you.
With PollDaddy, you can create a poll and send it to your Twitter followers in seconds. No account necessary!
- Twellow – Known as the Yellow Pages for Twitter, this tool can do some amazing and fun things. Did you ever wonder just how many users in your city were actually on twitter? Twellow can tell you. But the best feature by far is geo-targeted followers. What’s that you say?
If you are a business professional or a local service business, it probably doesn’t do you any good to have followers in Boston if you are located in California. Number of followers is nice, but targeted followers are a better option. When you get to the home page, click on the TwellowHood tab and then enter your location (and other search terms you are looking for). From there it is easy to follow people that fit your parameters.
- TweetSpinner – How do you know who has the same interests/concerns that you do? You could do a search on twitter, but once again, that is time consuming. Perhaps this application is a better and albeit more efficient tool for you to use.
If you aren’t as interested in followers that are geographically in a particular area, this application allows you to automatically follow those who tweet keywords of your design. The value to that is that those people are going to see the value in your tweets and follow you back. (You are providing tweets that have value regularly aren’t you? You should NOT be trying to sell something every tweet…mix it up.) Then you can engage them to see if you can forge an alliance or if after you have shown yourself to be a good twitizen, they will want the goods or services you provide.
All right, off you go and on your way to becoming a Twitter Ninja. I can tell you from personal experience that when my clients have used these tools effectively, they have told me thank you countless times for giving them more time in their day to work on their businesses and also for the opportunities that have come their way as a result of finding/using these tools.
Are you interested in how to use social media in your business? Don’t know where to start or which sites you should be using for your business?
Believe it or not, not doing social media right can actually harm your business.
If you are looking for free tips or advice on how to approach your social media, go to Social Media Dudes.
Or follow our tweets on Twitter at twitter.com/johnpanico
Finally, those are my thoughts from high atop my 2nd floor office above my garage. What I want to hear are YOUR comments. Let Janet know if this post was of help or what other topics you would like to hear about by leaving your comments here.
