Don’t forget about old networking methods

As you enter into the realm of the social media, you can’t forget about the old ways. Tweeting, posting and sharing are all great ways to get your brand to a lot of people. However, meeting people in person, networking, making phone calls – those methods all still work.

Today I went to a luncheon for business women and they were quite a hoot. As I generally spend my days hunched over my computer tapping away at the keys, getting out and seeing other humanoids was enriching, if nothing else! Just like giving a polar bear at the zoo a giant ice ball with a fish in the center of it, meeting some people in person was my enrichment for the day.

The women I met were from various fields, only one other spends her entire day alone with a computer. While immersed in cyberspace, we tend to forget about how important it is to do networking in person with other business people to help grow our businesses.

Check your community and find a networking organization. Most allow visitors to attend at least one or two meetings without joining the organization. Get a feel for the group and see if it is a good fit for you. You don’t have to meet everyone at once. I felt a little intimidated at the first one I attended. If you just make a few connections, the next time you go, you will know at least one or two people. Then, it becomes much easier.

Always take a big stack of cards, even if you think you will only give out a few. It’s always best to be prepared. If you don’t have cards – shame on you! Get some. There are reasonably priced places online like vistaprint.com where cards are very inexpensive (some are free, you just pay shipping). Vista Print offers designs already made up for a variety of businesses or generic cards. If you need help, get in touch with me. I can design something for you at a reasonable price.

Take advantage of all the ways to connect with others and grow your business. Don’t limit yourself by relying completely on the internet.

Social media: worth the trouble or not so much?

There has been a lot of talk lately about whether or not social media actually works as a method of marketing. Some large companies have over 100 social media accounts. Each division or section of the business has its own complement of social media sites. Obviously, large companies find value in social media.

Are you using LinkedIn? According to SocialMedia B2B, “LinkedIn generates more leads for B2B companies than Facebook, Twitter or blogs. Yet only 47% of B2B marketers say they are actively using LinkedIn vs. 90% on Facebook.”

In other words, if you are not using LinkedIn, you should start! Don’t wait for an engraved invitation. The groups on LinkedIn work wonders in networking. Join as many as you feel are relevant to start networking right away.

Nonprofit organizations and colleges are some of the biggest users of social media. They take advantage because they are always looking for inexpensive ways to do their marketing. Other businesses make the mistake of always they have to spend a lot on marketing in order to get a good return on investment. Entrepreneurs and every business should use social media to the max. Other forms of marketing can be combined with social media to bring the right mix for your business.

A You Tube channel with videos, even if you only have a few, is really helpful in this visual world. Your clients begin to build a bond with you through videos. As they learn more about you and your business, they will begin to like and trust you. Then, hopefully, they will buy from you too.

Keep active and post often or you will be wasting the effort. Posting every now and then does nothing to help promote your brand. The more you post, the more friends, follows and likes you will get and that means you are reaching more people. So, get cracking! Start building your brand and growing your business.

Take advantage of Google+

Did we really need another social network that, at least on the surface, appears to be Facebook’s less attractive little brother? Actually, the answer is a resounding yes. Google+ is not trying to be Facebook. It wants to be its own entity and has charms that are all its own.

While Facebook gives users the ability to decide who sees what posts, people rarely use this option. Mostly, people just like to relate to each other, discuss their day, share interesting stories and/or photos and let people into their lives. Whether it is good or bad, right or wrong, that seems to be the way people use this social medium. Companies get in on the action, posting their information, setting up business pages. That is works great for a lot of people.

But Google+ takes a little different stand on things. The circles allow users to promote one thing to one group of people and another thing to another group. People get involved with their interests on Google+. Many times they find new people, businesses and organizations to follow that they do not interact with on Facebook. When using this social media platform you categorize each friend. You can follow them, classify them as a friend, family, acquaintance, sports or fun & interesting. You can address everyone or just one segment of the people in your circles.

Unique to Google+ are the hangouts. A hangout is where you can webchat live with multiple people. Not only that, but you can save the entire conversation to be replayed on You Tube. Today there was a recorded hangout with Conan O’Brian, a host and five fans. They were able to talk with Conan and ask questions live and watch/listen to his answers. People had posted questions earlier on You Tube and the five fans were picked from among those people.

There was a similar Q&A with President Obama. Everyday citizens, including some who did not vote for him, had posted questions on You Tube in advance as well and were picked for a live interview with the president. That’s awesome! While a limited number of people can be directly involved, millions can watch it live or the recorded version later.

The possibilities for your business taking advantage of the hangouts are limitless. A nonprofit could arrange to have public meeting online. Musicians could have fans hang out with them. Small businesses could ask their customers what they can do to make their experience better. An animal behaviorist could promote his business by answering questions from people with problem pets. A jewelry store could teach a people how to tell the quality of a diamond and they could give feedback. A car dealership salesman could talk about the great new features of the 2013 model of a car. You can promote a hangout in your newsletter, ezine or blog.

The best part is that the hangouts are interactive. There is give and take, questions and answers. People become engaged in your business. They learn to know and trust you. You are helping them for free, so the idea is that when they are ready to spend money, they’ll go to the place where they got the free help.

Step right up… have we got a deal for you!

Hurry! Hurry! The contest is about to begin. This is what many businesses say on their social media pages. Offers, contests and special drawings are often featured on pages to attract people to either sign up for a newsletter or get on a mailing list.

As entrepreneurs, we are always thinking up new ways to bring in business. You do not have to re-invent the wheel. There are some tried and true methods that have worked. Of course, you can add your own spin to an old idea and make it your own. When I was in graduate school, I had a professor who said that there is no such thing as a new idea. You just need to take an existing idea and improve it or change it to suit your needs.

Instead of paying a marketing person to get new business, you can put an offer on your Facebook page to entice new people. Offering a free product is one way to attract new clients. Everyone loves something for free. But, you must make sure you are giving them something that has value. You cannot just give people a 10 page ad for your company and call it a book. People see right through that. But, if you give them something worthwhile, they might just become a happy customer.

Businesses often offer contests if people sign up for a newsletter or mailing list. Instead of giving away a lot of small things, they offer one big one. People love contests, and I have come to discover that people love filling out online forms.

For 14 years, I ran an animal rescue with an online adoption form. I often received forms from people who had no intentions of adopting an animal. But, as a result, I had their name, snail mail address and email address. That information came in handy when it was time to promote an event or ask for donations. I took advantage of it many times over the years.

Use your imagination. If you think about it, you know there is something that you can offer to entice people to visit your page, sign up and even become a client for your business. Then, once you have attracted new people, it is up to you to wow them.

Online reviews

Every business tries to get listed on the first page of the search. One of the many criteria in ranking companies is not as obvious as most, and that is to have a lot of reviews for the business. Even if there are a few not-so-great reviews mixed in, it still helps. The more people talk about your business, the better.

Every time you complete a sale or finish a service you should send something to your client. Whether they bought a publication, took a class, purchased some of your inventory or used your service, it is important to thank them. Non-profits use this technique all of the time. When you thank someone for a donation, they are more likely to donate again. The same holds true with your business. When you thank someone, they are more likely to buy again.

When you send the thank you, include a request for a review. This is especially important for your favorite clients or customers. When using Google Places and Yahoo Local, you can write a review for a business. Yelp is a site specifically for writing reviews. If you think people will have a hard time finding out where to put their review – find it for them. They may be willing to write a review, but they are not going to spend a lot of time searching around for the place to do it. Give it to them and make their life easier. All they have to do is click a link and they are right at the review page.

The length of reviews really does not matter. I usually only read the first paragraph or two. Usually after that, I’ve lost interest and it’s on to the next review. You can tell your clients that a brief review is fine. They do not have to write a complete essay about your business.

We all have clients who, at one time or another, are not happy with us and post angry reviews. Do not try to counterbalance that and trick the search engines by writing your own reviews! They can tell where the website’s ISP address is registered. In other words, they know it is you. Spooky, isn’t it? You can however, with most search engines, respond to reviews.

Your blog is a whole different ballgame. You can do whatever you want there, and that includes deleting comments you dislike. Some people may get a glimpse of the comment before you delete it. When logged into the blog, it too knows when you are commenting so be careful what you post.

On Facebook, you can remove unwanted comments, but when they are posted, they go out to everyone who likes the page. While it doesn’t stay on the page once you take it down, it has been sent and most likely seen by some people. 

Obviously, the idea is to make all of your customers happy. Remember to always thank them. The happiest will tell their friends. If you can get people to post their favorable reviews on social media as well as write a review for one of the search engines, that is the best result you can imagine.

Affiliate marketing for blogs and websites

What is affiliate marketing?

Have you ever seen ads on the side of someone’s blog? Or, ads on someone’s website? That is usually not paid advertising, but affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is when you put ads on your site and are paid a commission if someone clicks on the ad, goes to the site and then buys something. Much less often, you get paid per click or site visit. If you get paid per click, it is usually pennies rather than dollars.

If you use affiliate marketing on your site, you now have a way to generate income, hopefully at least enough to pay for the site. Most social media, especially Facebook, frowns upon affiliate marketing because they don’t make any money from it – you do!

Here are a couple sites that I recently started with affiliate marketing:

www.PetSaver.info

www.ExtremeCuteness.com

I started them on a whim, just for fun really. I purchased the domains from Namecheap.com, which is – you guessed it – really cheap! Most sites are about $3-10 a year. I know I used to pay at least $35 for each site before I transferred all my names to them. Namecheap also does hosting.

Once I set up the sites, I wanted to get some affiliate marketing on them. ChaCha’s affiliate program offers lots of links, quizzes and other fun things. They pay per click, between 1.5¢ to about 4¢ per click. It depends on what the topic is how much they pay. ChaCha is a website where you type in a question and a real person answers you, like a human Google. You will not get rich with this type of affiliate program unless you get a crazy amount of hits per day on your site. ChaCha’s affiliate program adds several new links every day, so you have to check it on a regular basis. There are links in a lot of different topics.

Amazon is another company that has a really popular affiliate program. They have a variety of ads you can use. Some of them even have a search feature so people can look for what they want to buy. You cannot change the size of their ads, which is one reason they have so many versions available.

Many companies have affiliate programs, but if you want to have several ads from different companies on your blog or site, you should go with a company that serves many affiliates. I went with Commission Junction. There are tons of affiliates listed on this site. There are credit card companies, cell phone companies, dog food, magazines – anything that might interest you. Most of them make you apply to them if you want to put their ads on your site. Some accept right away, others might take a week or two to give you an answer.

The reason that I originally discovered Commission Junction was that I wanted to use Vista Print, the popular online printing company, on my site. When I looked on their site, they sent me to Commission Junction. Unfortunately, they turned me down. But I found a lot of other companies that wanted to work with me. The database is very sophisticated on their site. Each advertiser has lots of ads that are in a bunch of different sizes to fit on just about any website. Most of the time, you have to accept the ad the way it is, although some can be sized to fit.

When someone clicks on the ad, you can set it up so that it opens in a new tab on the user’s browser, which I recommend because that way the browser still has your page on display too. You can also have it just go to the advertiser’s page without opening a new tab.

Clickbank is another affiliate marketing program. They give you a QR code (see below) that can be used as a link to the ad. We’ll save QR codes for another day, but they come in very handy as you can scan it into your smart phone and avoid typing the web address.

With all of the affiliate programs, they hold on to your cash until you reach a certain threshold. For most it is $50. Then you can withdraw the money and have it go to your PayPal account.

Is this totally over your head? If you are not well versed in web design, you might want to pass along the affiliate marketing information to your designer. You need to cut and paste code and that can be confusing for some people who are used to the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) type of designing – where there is no code knowledge needed.

Trending topics for marketing

As a trending topic becomes more popular, so can your page.

When you visit your Twitter page there is a list on the left hand side of the page with trending topics. Google and Yahoo also have trending topics. Wikipedia jumped on the bandwagon with its own site. So, what are they and what is their significance?

Trending topics are what people are talking about right now. They change as people search for different things. Obviously, as events unfold, people begin to discuss them in blogs, webpages and social media. When Michael Phelps broke the record for the most medals in the Olympics, he was a trending topic all over the internet. When there is a mass shooting, like recently in Colorado, that becomes a trending topic. It does not matter if the subject is positive or negative. It can be a coup in a foreign country or someone winning an election. Some sites have local, national and international trends so it can be broken down to where you are.

How does this help with marketing?

You can write your great content either using the trending topic as an example or somehow weaving it into the subject of your article, blog or web content. By using keywords that are trending, you are automatically getting more attention and page views. The search engine bots will be trolling for those keywords and when you use words that are trending, they know. The more your comments are up to the minute, hot button items, buzzwords, trending – whatever name you give it – you will see an upswing in your activity.

Another way to use trending topics in your blog is to give your own take on a trending topic. Let people know how you feel about it. Almost always you can find something that relates to your business that happens to be trending.

When using Twitter and a hashtag, for example #olympics, it becomes searchable. Someone who is interested in finding out about the Olympics can search that hashtag and see a real time list of people’s tweets on that subject. If you are using that hashtag in your tweet, it will appear in the list. People will be reading it. Hopefully people will click on your link or retweet your statement because it is worth repeating.

Certain trending topics can be predicted like elections, back to school, holidays and the World Series. You can always write something ahead of time, knowing that your topic will be trending. Football season is beginning now. While a football related topic might not be trending right this second, you know football is something that will be happening for the next several months and will be on the minds of a lot of sports fans around the country. People will be predicting what certain players will do, how teams will do and then there will be actual news stories about players, teams, owners, stadiums, fans, mascots, and much more.

As with everything else, you need good, clean copy in your content. The internet is a popularity contest and you need to join in the fun. Put some thought into your content and then tell it to the world.

Add pizzazz to social media pages

As more businesses jockey for position to be the best, they use their social media pages to gain popularity. Some have one time offers, others contests and still more have funny pictures. No matter what strategy you employ, you must do something to attract new clients.

Lots of web pages have “suggest a caption” contests. Those are fun because people think of the most outrageous things you would never think of on your own. Viewers often share these funny photos. Come up with something that is thought provoking. Remember that you either need permission to use a photo or have taken it yourself to avoid copyright infringements.

You can do a lot with videos. They do not have to be professionally done. Many people use their laptop’s webcam to create video content for their site. People love watching videos and looking at photos. It is so much more interesting than straight text. Even if your website is devoted to something very serious, you can always find some tasteful artwork to go with it.

There are programs like Picasa and Instagram that will help you manipulate photos you take and make them look a little better. By using your own photos, you know no one else will be using the same image. If you don’t have the skills to take photos worthy of your blog or Facebook page, subscribe to a graphics service in order to get copyright free material to use on your site. Companies like istockphoto.com will sell rights for individual photos. Sites like graphicsfactory.com offer a year-long subscription and rights to use any graphics or photos on the site. Both are reasonably priced.

Even creating a meme, some having no artwork at all, are gaining in popularity. A lot of times they are old fashioned looking photos or artwork with a catchy phrase. In the case of I Can Has Cheeseburger, and the LOL cats seriously lacking in their knowledge of grammar, the text is often misspelled. I am told it is because cats can’t spell. Many times, unfortunately, I believe there are misspellings not done on purpose.

A meme is defined by Bing:

meme

 [ meem ]   

1. cultural characteristic passed down generations: any characteristic of a culture, e.g. its language, that can be transmitted from one generation to the next in a way analogous to the transmission of genetic information.

Making your social media pages look more interesting will help get page views, likes and retweets. When you have that kind of interest, your business will grow. The more people who view your information, the better the odds are for you to get new business.

Don’t be afraid to add some zip to your Facebook or other social media pages. Jump in, and build up the page with artwork and maybe even video. You will quickly discover how much new attention you will get.

Grow and nurture your Facebook audience

Once your business has a social media presence, it is now time to grow your audience. Sounds simple, right? Well, maybe it sounds easier than it is.

Growing your audience doesn’t happen overnight. It takes a lot of posting, tweeting, forwarding, sharing of your information. Maybe it is something that you need to hire someone to do for you, wink, wink, hint, hint…

I spoke to someone who owns a pest control company the other day. I asked him if he had a Facebook page. “Of course!” he answered, like he was shocked that I would ask such a ridiculous question.

I looked at the page. It literally had three likes and had not been updated since 2011. Seriously? This is not a Facebook page. It is a sorry little, shriveled up plant that no one ever waters. This page is doing nothing to help his company build a brand, have recognition in the community or anything else. It is just a placeholder. There were no photos. It contained absolutely no information other than a location and phone number. Yes, he might get one call a year from that – although I think I’m being generous.

This pest control guy could do so much with that Facebook page. He could increase interest by adding photos, maybe showing the difference between a flying ant and a termite. That is content people can use. Posting a photo that would give useful information to his audience would be fantastic. This guy does nothing, except complain about a lack of business. Adding posts that discuss flea control, roaches, ants, mice or other pests would help people. And more than that, it would attract new customers. The saddest thing is, the person knows this information like the back of his hand and would take him no time to put on his page.

It costs nothing but your time, to set up and use a Facebook page. Every business can benefit from having one.

But, and this is big, you must keep the momentum going. As people like the page, you have to post on it. A page that has no activity is not going to be popular. A page with no information is not even going to get likes.

If you spend just a few minutes each day nourishing your Facebook page, you will see amazing growth. Post on the page. Keep it active. Many businesses put special offers on their Facebook page that are found nowhere else. The offers encourage people to check back with the page to see if there is a new discount.

Use the Facebook address on any communication, whether it is snail mail, videos, newsletters – absolutely everything. It will attract likes to the page. Add it to your email signature line. Then, every email you send, may result in a new like on the page. For sure, if no one knows your page exists, they will not visit it.

Sometimes the Facebook page address is a very long list of random numbers and letters. If the address is to long for people to easily remember or type, check out tinyurl.com and shorten the web address. It is a free service that comes in handy with those long URLs. You can let the site pick a shorter address or you can customize it. If you want to tweet the address, this will leave a lot more of the 140 characters allowed by Twitter, to punch up your message.

Make your mark

In today’s business world, everyone has to use social networking in order to grow a business. Whether you are a freelancer working out of a spare bedroom or a brick and mortar business, the internet is extremely important in today’s market. Creating a brand that is all your own, is the best way to make your mark.

Social marketing helps get your brand out to the masses.

What makes your business stand out among all of the others in your field? There must be some reason that you are unique. It’s the thing that attracts a client to you, rather than someone else. You need to bank on that one thing, that uniqueness that is all your own. Build on it and let people know that you are the one person who can help them with your products or services.

It does not matter whether you own a restaurant, create artwork or own a law firm. You have something special. As an entrepreneur, you have already set yourself apart from the majority of people in this world. You are brave. You take risks. You stand at the edge of the cliff as pebbles tumble down into the great abyss. You look beyond it, toward your goals. You might be afraid, but you will never let anyone else know about it. Business owners face their fears every day.

The way to start social networking is to get your business known to as many people as possible and as fast as the internet will carry you. There is help available, you need only look for it.