Tips
Five Reasons Your Online Business Needs Social Media
Five Reasons Your Online Business Needs Social Media
As many (if not all) marketer know, online marketing continues to evolve and grow and these days social media tends to take a front seat in most online marketing strategies as supporting the growth of business. The reasons to use social platforms to engage and reach customers are plentiful but here are 5 of the main ones that you need to consider.
1: Organic Reach
Why do social media managers spend countless hours planning, posting, testing, and perfecting their social media presence online? Simply because social media works if you do it right. Here are some facts and figures to prove that social media is worth adding to your business strategy.
- There are 3 billion active Internet users and 2.1 billion of them have social media accounts.
- YouTube has more than 1 billion users, more than a 1/3 of all web users. Each and every day web visitors view hundreds of millions of hours on YouTube that generate billions of views.
- Facebook has nearly 1.4 billion users, that’s 47% of all Internet users. 4.5 billion Likes are generated daily and nearly 75% of Facebook’s revenue comes from mobile advertising. 936 million Facebook users login in at least once daily and 52% of marketers found a customer on Facebook in 2013.
- Twitter has 316 million monthly active users that 500 million tweets each day
- Google+ has 363 million users that hit the +1 button on 5 billion times per day
- Pinterest has 100 million users, 85% of which are women. 47% of Pinterest users purchase a product based on pins, with the average sale being $58.95. 67% of pinned content is from a business site and 82% of Pinterest users would rather follow a brand than a celebrity.
Are you impressed yet?
These stats are just one reason to use social media to market your business that really illustrate the reach that social media can have on your business, be it online and brick and mortar. Here are 4 more reasons to make social media a part of your marketing plan.
2: Building Relationships
Social media allows you to reach people at a more personal level. Many social media marketing experts explain that social media is about relationships building, that as a side effect brings about conversions for calls to action. When you connect with people and they connect with you, they are more likely to follow your brand and all it has to offer.
3: Showcasing Your Best Content
Social media allows you to show off your best content, and highlight all your brand has to offer. Whether you use text, images, video, or all of the above, you can tailor your campaign to present and impress your target audience with the very best content, products, and services that your brand has to offer. Tailoring your campaign through social media allows you to meet many objectives, including, building brand reputation, customer engagement, a better customer experience through valuable information and any other goals that meet your marketing needs.
4: Steady and Reliable Traffic
Who isn’t sick of fighting for organic traffic when Google keeps wiping sites off their SERPS with one after another of their ongoing updates? Social media can bring a steady, long term, reliable and ongoing stream of traffic to your sites and blogs, without having to worry that some entity will come along and wipe you out.
5: Control
One of the greatest benefits of social media is that you have full control of what is presented about your company, brand, and website to your target audience. You can tailor your marketing plan to meet specific goals and not leave anything to chance. The multitude of tracking, and testing tools available, such as, Klout, SumAll, BuzzSumo, and TweetReach, just to name a few allow you to enhance and tweak your campaigns as needed to constantly improve your efforts to boost conversions.
Bottom Line
There is no better time than now to take advantage of all social media has to offer. If you have an online business and do not have a social media presence then you are behind the times, it’s really as simple as that and you need to remedy this as soon as possible.
There are many expert guides online to get you started, and educating yourself on the intricate process that is social media marketing is critical to your overall success.
Of course, there is also the option of hiring a social media marketing expert. Take care to choose a competent professional, it will not be cheap, but may well be worth it when they bring the results your business needs to succeed.
Amazon Affiliate Marketing Guide (7 Tips To Make The Most From Amazon)
Amazon Affiliate Marketing Guide
(7 Tips To Make The Most From Amazon)
Do you want to earn money online with affiliate marketing the right way? It’s not just finding a good product and pasting the affiliate link everywhere. In this post book we’re going to talk about some powerful techniques you could use to make money online with Amazon Affiliate.
Look, I know how difficult affiliate marketing can be if not done right; I’ve been there! But this post will highlight 7 quick and easy tips to maximise your Amazon affiliate marketing efforts.
OK without further ado, lets’ talk about affiliate marketing through Amazon.
Create Value Content
One of the most important pillars for a website is to produce quality content that provides great value and interest to visitors and especially to help them solve a problem. If your content is good and helps people, this can help you keep users interested and get them back to your website.
This quality content will help your website to rank higher in search engines and will also help you convince people to buy.
Creating original content using your own style will help you to differentiate yourself from the competition.
You can also share that content through social networks to reach more people.
Careful Selection of Products
It is important to take enough time to choose the products you are going to promote. Investigate which products your visitors need or are interested in within your niche. You can test to discover which products that most visitors want, and which convert more. You can change products that don’t give you good results and try others.
Using Email Marketing
The best way to get good sales results is to build a relationship of trust with readers, and the most effective way to do this is through Email Marketing. With Email Marketing you can achieve incredible results, its success lies in the fact that when you use it you can get a person to buy your products more than once.
Landing Page
You can create a high converting landing Page to collect data from your visitors. This landing page should be super-focused, without a navigation bar, with a catchy title, an explanatory subtitle and a super clear call to action that clearly reflects your goal.
Reward
In the landing page you can offer a free reward (like a free Ebook or a free video) with valuable content in exchange for the visitor’s data (mainly name and email) through a subscription form to create a subscribers list.
Subscribers List
The data entered by visitors in exchange for the free reward through the landing page will be stored in a subscribers list handled from email marketing software. This list is really important because all the people there are potential buyers, so it is also important to make it grow.
Email Marketing Software
Using software such as AWeber, GetResponse and Mailchimp you can manage the list of subscribers and send them automated and periodic emails with valuable content and offers.
With these platforms you can divide the lists into smaller lists according to the interests of the subscribers and that way you can send them more targeted offers that can lead to a purchase.
Creating this kind of relationship, the readers will become familiar with you and feel confident to buy what you offer them through your affiliate link.
Purchase-Oriented Content
When people go shopping online, they do more specific searches because they are looking to buy something, not only information about the product, that’s why you should use purchase-oriented keywords. For example, if you sell costumes you can use the phrase “cheap costumes” instead of “costumes” and thus attract quality traffic i.e. people looking to buy and not just people who are looking for general information on costumes.
International Commissions
Amazon allows you to receive commissions only if the buying public is located in the country where you created the affiliate account, for this reason, if you only have an Amazon US account you are losing sales commissions from people in other countries such as the United Kingdom and Canada.
But today there is software that help us solve this problem, such as EasyAzon 4 and Genius Link. These platforms include automatic link location, which means that your affiliate link changes depending on the country where the visitor is located.
In this way, if you have a visitor from Spain make a purchase, you earn that commission.
To achieve this, you must create an account for the Amazon Affiliate program in each country, or at least the countries where the most traffic is provided.
The Amazon Affiliate Program exists in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Spain, Mexico, Brazil, India, Japan, China, France and Italy.
But the software we mentioned above helps you to redirect traffic from other countries to one of the countries where the Amazon Affiliate Program exists.
Make sure you don’t lose any commission.
Best Seller Lists
It is a good idea to include Amazon Best Seller Lists in your website posts. These lists focus on the best-selling products within the category of products you are promoting, so people may be interested in more than one product to buy and in this way you can increase your profits.
Using Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a powerful tool that will help you track visits to your website and the behavior of your visitors.
It allows you to see where your visitors are coming from, what are the most visited pages, how long users remain on each page, what are the hours of the heaviest traffic, used devices, used traffic channels, user retention, age and gender of the users and much more detailed information that will help you analyze your website to know what is working and what is not, to help you make decisions on what should be changed to improve.
If you follow these tips the right way you will find that you can boost your sales. You just have to be constant and patient. Dedication is an important part of growing any project, and if you do it right you will get the best results.
Remember to create a plan that includes your goals and the steps to follow to reach them. After doing all the steps in your plan, analyze the results obtained to decide what to change for better results.
Starting An Online Business At Home (The Two Things You Must Have Before You Do Anything)
Starting An Online Business At Home (The Two Things You Must Have Before You Do Anything)
Did you know you can outsource pretty much everything you need to start an online business? If you don’t like doing it, don’t fret; just pay someone else to do it for you and this frees you up to work on your business and not in your business.
But there are a couple of things that can’t be outsourced and need to come from you and they are crucial to your success or failure. So, what are those 2 things you may be asking?
Well the first one are your ideas.
Your BIG Idea
Your big idea has got to be yours and it should underpin your entire business and should be incorporated throughout your sales processes.
So let’s say you come to me, wanting to start an online business. You’re a blank slate, in that you don’t have a clue where to start or what to do.
You may think that you are at a disadvantage but in fact this is not the case, because someone who is a blank slate actually holds a tremendous advantage over someone who already thinks they know it all, when in fact they don’t really have a clue. A little knowledge can be dangerous!
So you come to me and ask what you should do. And I stuff a pad of paper and a pen in your hand, and I tell you to go somewhere quiet and think because you’re going to brainstorm like you’ve never brainstormed before. You’re going to write down every idea you get. Good ones, bad ones, stupid ones – even the ones you KNOW for a FACT you cannot possibly pull off.
You’re going to write them all down.
“I want to teach a cooking course to people who currently can’t boil water.”
“I want to build an app that tells people where the vacant parking spots are in New York City.”
“I want to build a community gardening site for people who live in southern Florida.”
And so forth. Be vague or get specific. The key is to just brainstorm your heart out and get all these ideas out of your head. Speaking of which, watch for those items that feel especially near and dear to you, and put a little star by those. And then keep writing.
You’re going to start your business on YOUR idea – not on what’s necessarily gone before or what other people are doing. Lose all preconception of what will and what won’t work for now. That comes later.
By generating your own business model without worrying about what anyone else is doing, you’re freeing yourself up from comparisons, crappy advice and self-doubts. Let your imagination run wild and remember that your business model can be anything you can imagine.
Naturally once you’ve narrowed your choices down to a handful, you’re going to do some research to make sure there is indeed a market for what you’re proposing. But I’m going to discourage you from spending a lot of time looking at any potential competitors. Ignore what they’re marketing, how they’re marketing it, how they’re advertising and so forth.
And this leads us into the second thing that you must have and that is overcoming fear. Only you can do that.
Fearlessness
Because what tends to happen when people over analyse is that they learn to fear their own idea.
“This is already being done, so I’m too late!”
“This company is already doing a good job of covering this market, there’s no room for me.”
“Their idea is different from mine, so theirs must be the right one and mine must be wrong.”
And so forth. So, by not over analysing things you’re eliminating one type of fear that plagues all new marketers. But you’re not done yet as there is a second fear you’ll need to overcome – the one that creeps up on you when your friends say, “What, YOU’RE going to start a business? HAHAHA!”
Or maybe your friends are supportive, but you lack confidence. “What if people hate my product?”
Yup. There’s a real heart stopper. And you cannot outsource overcoming those fears. So how do you deal with them?
For me, I just acknowledge them rather than fight them. Yes, I’m afraid. No, I’m not going to let it stop me. So Mr. Fear, you go sit in that chair over there while I work. And if you get bored, feel free to fly out the window.
Believe it or not, this attitude works. When you stop letting fear take a hold of you, when you stop feeling like you’re trapped in its icy grip, when you just acknowledge it and do the work anyway, then fear tends to get real quiet. It takes a seat and watches for an opening. And if you don’t give it one, eventually it just leaves the way it came.
Ignore what’s going on around you. Put blinders on, manage your fear and above all else, stick to your idea.
And remember these acronyms for F.E.A.R.
False Evidence Appearing Real and Face Everything And Rise
And in the immortal words of Susan Jeffers Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway. This is a great book by the way and you really should check it out here for US readers or here for UK readers.
If you are ready to get started on your online business you may feel a little confused with all the technical jargon around setting up domains, hosting etc. Well, I have a report which can help with that so don’t let this stop you.
Lead Magnet Ideas (5 Steps To Double Your Opt-in Rate And Make Some Sales In The Process)
Lead Magnet Ideas (5 Steps To Double Your Opt-in Rate And Make Some Sales In The Process)
If you’ve been around the internet and internet marketing in particular, I am sure that you’re familiar with how lead magnets usually work – you offer your website visitors a free report or some other incentive in exchange for their name and email address and joining your list. Depending on your traffic source and the relevancy and strength of your offer, your opt-in rate could be anything from almost non-existent to 30% or more.
BUT unfortunately, there’s a problem with this approach – EVERYONE and their uncle is offering some type of incentive to get people to join their lists. And because of this, visitors have become more and more cautious about giving away their email address. Think about it; when you come across a squeeze page, do you instantly fill in your details or do you take a few seconds to weigh up the benefits that the report is offering as outweighing the loss of privacy (and signing up to receive more emails/offers) that entering your email address will bring?
So, what can you do to increase and possibly even DOUBLE your opt-in rate?
Well you need to change things up a bit and here are 5 steps to do just that:
Step 1:
Create a dynamite lead magnet with great information on how to do something. For example, maybe it’s a case study: “How Janis Smythe made $4,294 in 12 days using XXX technique.”
If you’re just starting out and you need a case study to use, start by using good old Google. Don’t forget to let the person know you’re doing a case study on them, if appropriate, because in this case you really should get permission first.
Or you could omit any names and fictionalize the personal details. That works, too as long as it is a legitimate case study and not made up!
Or if you can find a case study that has already been published in an article on the web, then you can use that to back up what your lead magnet is teaching (don’t forget to add a link back to the original article/case study to attribute the author if doing this).
Step 2:
Write an excellent squeeze page. Yes, you’re giving the report away, but you still need to entice people into wanting it. Focus on the benefits that the report will give to the reader and make it a no-brainer.
Step 3:
At the bottom of the page, and perhaps to the right as well, put a download button. That’s right – no opt-in form at this point, just a ‘download it now’ button.
Step 4:
Split your report into two sections. The first section is the introduction and overview. What they’ll need to do this, how much money they can make and the success they can have, and so forth. Don’t make direct promises, of course. Make sure that you follow FTC guidelines at all times and also include an earnings disclaimer on your page.
This is the “sneaky” part. The second half of the report is the payoff, the actual technique and how to do it step by step.
On the bottom of the first section, tell the readers that the step by step blueprint is in Part 2.
That is sneaky, right?
But it gets even better!
I love this part; place TWO links on the last page of the first section – one where they pay $17 to buy the second half of the report…
And a second link where they get the report for FREE in exchange for their email address.
Both links go to the same webpage.
Step 5:
Create the webpage for the second half of the report. Give them the option to pay $17 and the option to get it in exchange for their email address.
You should get extremely high opt-ins using this method and having the payment button there makes it look like they are getting an extremely good deal by giving you their email address. Psychology in action!
And oddly enough, once in a while someone will actually pay for the second half of the report. Don’t ask me why, but they do. And that’s okay too. Any revenue generated is a tidy bonus for you.
Try these 5 steps when creating your next lead magnet and see what this can do for your opt-in rate and please let me know how it goes.
The Single Biggest Mistake Many Email Marketers Make And Don’t Even Realise It!
The Single Biggest Mistake Many Email Marketers Make And Don’t Even Realise It!
Hi Jason here and in this post you are going to learn the single biggest mistake email marketers make!
Are you making this same mistake? I know I have been guilty of it so don’t be embarrassed if you have too!
And I know how difficult email marketing can be if not done right; I’ve been there!
But this post will highlight the single biggest mistake many marketers make so you can avoid it! And when you discover it, it may appear to be so obvious but don’t discount it because of that!
OK without further ado, let’s talk email marketing!
If you asked a group of marketers this question:
“When you send an email to your list, what’s your #1 goal?”
What answer do you think you’d get?
Here are a few that come to my mind:
- To get readers to open it
- To get readers to READ it
- To give some useful info
- To build rapport
- To sell a product
Those are all good answers…
But they’re also all WRONG answers
Of course, you want them to open the email, read the email, build some rapport, maybe give some useful info, but none of these are your primary objective
So what is?
The primary goal of email marketing is to get the CLICK; That’s it!
Everything else is simply in support of that #1 goal
Ideally, you want to train your list to click your links like mind-numb robots! You want them to click automatically – without thinking – because it’s what they always do when they open your emails
You don’t need to sell the product – the sales page or video you send them to should do that for you.
You don’t need to tell them everything about the blog post you’re sending them to – the post will do that for you.
So how can you improve your click-through rate?
Give great information.
People will like you and TRUST you if you give them great info that helps them. Clicking the link is just a natural extension of that.
Show them the ‘what’ but not the ‘how.’
You might give them a really useful tip on what drives super targeted traffic, but to learn how to do it they need to click the link.
Don’t always send them to sales letters;
send them to fun stuff, too. Show them your blogposts, your videos and even other people’s stuff now and then.
Now and then surprise them with a free product. For example your email tells them a method to list build using Facebook. Then you send them to a link that will give them 5 more list building methods and when they click the link, they see a very short sales page offering the product for FREE.
How much do you think they love you right now?
And what are the odds they will click more of your links in the future just in case there’s another free product on the other side?
Of course, your list and your niche may call for slightly different methods but bottom line, your primary goal of email marketing is ALWAYS to get the click because the more trained your list is to click, the more money you will make in the long run.
I hope you found this post useful. Please leave a comment about whether you agree or disagree about the importance of the click and don’t forget to subscribe to my blog for more posts helping you to grow your online business.