There is a reason why it is called “social” media and there are rules that you should follow when it comes to employing “social media” to market and brand yourself and your art. Every day I see small businesses that are ruining their brand by abusing social media. Artists are no different, as they are a “small business” too! Here are some quick rules of social media that you should follow:
1. When a social media account is set up make sure that all of the information is complete and well written. Think of this page or your profile as a business brochure. Whenever possible, have links to your website, contact information and alternative ways for people to find you. Always upload an up-to-date “professional” picture of yourself and make sure that you have a pleasant smile on your face too!
2. Set aside some time each day to visit your social media pages and do some housecleaning. Read the posts, messages and any updates. Return your messages and comments promptly. A half hour a day is all you need to devote to this.
3. Always reply back to someone who has sent to you a post or comment and acknowledge it in some form. If someone makes a comment on your art, send them a thank you note. This can be done right on the page or privately back through their email. Either way thank them for their nice comment, thought or interest. It is the right thing to do.
4. If someone tries to engage you in some form of negativity, political, religious, controversial or otherwise. Do not take the bait! Ignore it and move on. If they persist in this behavior, you may have to unfriend them, block them or report them. Whatever you do, do not engage yourself with someone like this as you will not win and you will only waste your time. Being a part of this type of behavior will only hurt your brand.
5. Be helpful to be people. If you read or see something that someone might be interested in, send them a link. Always be responsive if they ask questions or have concerns, get back to them with an answer. If you do not know, say so.
Think twice before you send anything out. Try to imagine that every friend, follower or contact that you have on your social media pages will be reading your reply or post and that they will form an opinion of you by what you have written.
6. Neatness counts. By this I mean, shortcuts, abbreviations and poor spelling may be acceptable in some forms of social media. Here, it is not wise, as again, this is your “company brochure” and it is an important part of your marketing and brand development.
7. Engage your followers with information, content and ideas. Become an expert in your niche and share it with others. No one really cares what you are drinking at Starbucks at that moment. …
Twelve Low Cost Passive Marketing Tips for Retail Stores
Before you go and spend money on an expensive marketing campaign for your retail business, make sure that you are engaging in low cost, smart and passive marketing which leverages your existing traffic.
Too many retail businesses ignore marketing opportunities they have every day. Many are free, all are low cost. They are designed to reinforce your brand and present your business as fresh, innovative and a place to come back to.
Here are twelve simple ideas ready and waiting for your engagement.
Include a marketing message on every sales receipt. Consider a coupon with an offer if the customer returns in a short period of time.
Put a sign on all company vehicles and park them strategically so that your marketing message is seen away from your front door.
Include a flyer, brochure or a letter with an offer in every package you mail from your business.
Record a hold message promoting the business so that people waiting on the telephone get your marketing pitch.
Create an in-store newsletter and slip this into bags which you give customers with goods they have purchased from you. This newsletter should also be sent out with accounts, to suppliers when you pay your bills and placed in a stand in front of your retail store.
Make sure that your shopfront promotes your business outside trading hours. This could be a simple sign through to a compelling display.
Get all retail employees in a t-shirt to promote a season or limited time special offer. The t-shirt ought to contain the details of an offer or special promotion of some sort.
Give out business cards, lots of them. BUT make sure that your business cards contain a marketing message. Give them to friends, colleagues, people on the street. Getting your name out.
Give your retail employees a cap to wear promoting an offer or deal.
If you have products which can be demonstrated, get one of your sales team out from behind the counter and demonstrating the item in your busiest period. Try various team members until you find the most successful. Consider a small commission for sales made.
Seek out opportunities to speak at local community functions. They often want good speakers. Put together a memorable presentation and you and your business will be repembered.
Have fun. If you have fun in your business and customers see and feel this they will have good things to say about you. Word of mouth is the best way to grow a local retail business.
Great marketing in retail is about small steps. Lots of small steps with different start times and different focuses.
Executed with precision and care, these small steps can provide a more consistent growth trajectory for retail businesses than a bigger, more expensive and singular focus marketing campaign.
Use your current traffic and expect to more from these people who already know about your business.
Marketing Automation Software – Customer Segmentation and Campaign Management
Marketing Automation Software – Customer Segmentation and Campaign Management
Marketing Automation Software provides companies with many advantages. It can help reduce the complexity of marketing activities and lower costs. It does this by focusing on two core tasks.
Customer Segmentation
The first is automated message testing through customer segmentation. Customer segmentation is the process of sub-sectioning your customer database into unique areas based on consumer behavior, preferences or demographics. By focusing on multiple segments, marketers can improve their efficiency. When you provide prospects with a relevant, targeted message, studies show time and time again that consumers are more responsive and likely to take action. Using marketing automation software to properly segment and then test messages to different segments within your database can help companies improve their purchase conversion rates and increase revenue from an existing customer base.
Campaign Management
Secondly, marketing automation software can automate your campaign management and execution. Most systems will allow marketers to design sustained campaigns of content that is delivered to your prospects overtime. Think of an automated campaign in the same way people do an investment account. It is better to continually add small amounts of money overtime. By taking the same approach with your marketing campaigns, you can benefit from multiple consumer touch points, brand building as well as the direct response aspects of digital marketing. An example of a campaign like this would be a multi-week e-mail marketing campaign with a series of marketing messages and content all focused on a single theme.
Most marketing automation software tools focus on e-mail marketing, while more advanced applications are beginning to focus on blogging, social media, SEO and the entire breadth of digital marketing tactics. These new tools will allow marketers to create content once, then share that content across multiple digital channels such as podcasts, presentations, webinars, social media in additional to email. Nearly any digital marketing channel can benefit from automation. Technology constantly changes, however, the process and principles of marketing automation software have been around for decades in the form of direct response systems, direct mail and loyalty programs.
How to get Started
Start using marketing automation software today to increase the value of your existing customers and to distribute unique content and attract new customers. We suggest that you first explore e-mail marketing automation tools such as Constant Contact or Aweber. These software tools are low cost and very user friendly. When dealing in the Social Media sphere, we recommend TweetDeck. TweekDeck provides users with a quick and easy dashboard that shows your messaging from multiple social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Linked In and MySpace. A tool like TweetDeck is essential for managing your Social media presence. If you are focusing deeply on Twitter then you should check out HootSuite or Cotweet. If you are not using it already, your choice for automating your web presence should be WordPress, it is user friendly and has lots of premade templates and plugins available.
When used properly and intelligently, marketing automation …
How to Improve Your Article Marketing Submission By Using Better Automation Methods
How to Improve Your Article Marketing Submission By Using Better Automation Methods
I’m sure you get a lot of emails from marketers who say that article marketing is dead in the water, and they then pitch you some new-fangled technique that they haven’t really tried and tested themselves.
People still love to read articles, whether it’s news, interviews, how tos etc.
Yes, video marketing is growing in stature and can be great to compliment your text- based articles, but you can even combine the two for great results if you do it right.
Let’s put the record straight right now.
Article marketing is NOT dead.
It is living and breathing as I speak.
But here’s the deal.
The reason why so many newbie internet marketers are turned off it or give up are for these reasons.
1) IT’S TIME CONSUMING
2) THEY DON’T POST ENOUGH ARTICLES FOR THEM TO SEE RESULTS
3) THEY TIRE OF HAVING TO MANUALLY POST ARTICLES TO DIRECTORIES, BLOGS OR WEBSITES.
These are the three main reasons why people get turned off article marketing.
However, like anything, you get out what you put in.
It is a business that requires work.
Yes, WORK!
But, if you do it right, and put in some efforts you will get lots out with what you put in!
Now, if you’re a complete newbie to it, or think you are a seasoned pro, these tips will come in handy.
Firstly, for it to be of any use to your marketing efforts, you need to post at least four articles a week.
When you write your articles, you need to remember these key things:
1) Make sure your keyword/s are in the title and in the main content of your article.
2) Make your title snappy and so that people want to click on the link to your article
3) Don’t litter your keyword/s (i.e, keyword stuffing) you will get penalised.
4) Give your article some juice by bookmarking it on bookmarking sites
5) Write 500 words max
6) Remember your resource box is key for people clicking on your website link, so it needs to be snappy and commanding in nature.
If you stick to these and write regularly, like blogging, you will see a steady increase in traffic over time.
Now, the biggest question I read in internet marketing regarding writing articles is this…
How can I save time and have my articles posted to as many directories as possible without having to slave at the computer?
The secret to any online business model is automation. Making your life simpler so you can do the things that really matter in your business, like creating great content!…
Internet Marketing Tips – Give Forum Marketing a Try
If you’re looking for Internet marketing tips that really pay off, you can’t afford to skip forum marketing. This is a style of marketing that far too many would-be marketers pass by without a second glance. Unfortunately for them, it means they are leaving money on the table.
Forum marketing gives you an immediate opportunity to build credibility, foster a sense of community, and-even better-to show your audience what you have to offer via your signature, every single time you offer helpful insight or advice or simply contribute to the conversation. The more you contribute, the more opportunities you have for passive advertising.
Benefits of Forum Marketing
1) Free. Most forums are free. The ones you should utilize for the sake of testing a niche or marketing to a specific niche should be of the free variety. Why? For maximum exposure. Not only are you saving money but you are also marketing to a larger group of people because they aren’t paying for the privilege of participation in these forums. Free advertising is excellent no matter where you are in your Internet marketing career. It is vital when you are just getting started though.
2) It’s evergreen. Most forums archive the information for quite a while. This means that your signature or profile link will be active long after your active participation on the forum ends. As long as the link is live, you will continue to receive some small amount of traffic from your forum contributions.
3) Search engines love forums. It’s true. Forums provide a constant supply of new, varied, and frequently updated content in many keywords. Search engines love them, which means you’re signature will get a lot of exposure by accident if you actively participate in niche related forums with a link to your site in your signature.
4) Easy. We Internet marketers love easy. You don’t need to be able to build a website, design a Squidoo lens, or even write an article to market through forums. You simply share your experience with the product, your love of the product, or your concerns about the product with other people who share the same likes, dislikes, questions, and concerns.
5) Quick. The best thing by far about forum marketing is that it doesn’t require endless hours of planning and executing. You can make a lot of headway by spending a few minutes a day on your forum marketing efforts. The more forums you participate in the better but you can devote as much or as little time to this endeavor as possible. And once you begin seeing results, you can figure out easily which forums deliver the best response and focus your efforts there.…
Internet Marketing Tips – YouTube Marketing Tips For Making Money
If you are looking to make money online and build a business then you are going to need one thing to start off with and that’s a product to sell, and traffic. If you don’t have these things then you will not have a business. These are the key components to a successful online business. Now if your looking to make money one fun way to do that is to create or outsource a product and market it with the power of YouTube.
YouTube is one of if not the largest video sharing sites with millions and millions of video watches a day. So think of it like this. The more videos you have uploaded on YouTube the more traffic you are going to get with more people watching your videos.
When I first started I started out submitting 1 video a day and in just a little bit of time I had over 50 videos on YouTube all pushing to my blogs, product pages, opt in pages and more. This is how I started building my brand in my niche market. This is something that you or anyone can do even if you are new to the game of internet marketing.
If you are shy about putting yourself on screen you can always upload pictures and narrate over it. I use just my basic windows media movie maker and it gets the job done just right and I am very happy with the results.
Start off by writing articles and then reading them and recording. Once this is done go ahead and submit to YouTube with a link back to your website. This is a perfect way to start making money online.
Submit 1-3 videos a day, Link 1 to your blog, 1 to your direct sales page and 1 to your squeeze page. Rinse wash and repeat.…
Great Affiliate Marketing Tips To Boost Your Commissions
It is required of you to spend some of your time to familiarize yourself with the affiliate marketing industry if you are an affiliate marketer. This article discusses some quality affiliate marketing tips to help you boost business and increase your profits.
If you dream of succeeding in this industry, you have to mind about quality. The content you provide has to be outstanding. The main aim for affiliate marketing is to lure your potential clients into viewing your product as one they have to get soonest possible. To successfully do this, content is needed. Content might be in written form, video or literally anything else of relevance. It is only great content that can make you a trustworthy affiliate. Content is pivotal in deciding the direction your marketing campaign is going to take. In short, this is what makes you have that steady income coming from the traffic generated by search engines. Through great content, you are certain to become a favorite of search engines and people, meaning traffic will be constant, and your income better. The main reason why a number of people fail in creating exceptional content is not that they are not good writers, but because the content they provide is of little help to readers. It might be you are creating the simplest ads to help in your campaign. Whatever you do, the content for these has to be relevant and precise. Content is crucial, and it is important to understand that all efforts to come up with unique content must be employed to ensure your prospects are served appropriately.
Experimenting with quite a number of products and markets too is another way to get successful as far as affiliate marketing is concerned.
The best approach towards accomplishing this is putting some of your money and dedicating enough time to a given product, that you are going to work with for a short time duration with the aim of testing it. The moment you discover that you are making a significant amount of money from it, you can take it more seriously. If it’s not doing well, forget about it and try another. This is important especially if you have dreams to fill your business venture with only those products that make money. Working blindly on products is not advisable, because you do not know what brings in money and what doesn’t. In short, you are trying to establish a business that has a potential to expand and bring in money as time goes by, and this can only be done if the products in question sells well.
Understand that your prospects should not feel like you are pressuring them to purchase the product. You simply have to sound like you are just giving an opinion as to why they should buy the product. It never works that way to people, simply recommend these products and they are going to accept them. Promote your products in a normal way, and avoid aggression. This makes prospects …
2 Ways To Make Money With Your Opt-In Email List
Do you know how to make your email marketing campaigns profitable? This is something that I struggled with for a long time until I finally got the hang of it. I realized that short emails are best, and getting straight to the point is something that is the difference between sales, and non-sales.
To make a profitable email list, a few things need to be in order. In today’s lesson, we’re going to look at the most common ways to monetize your email list. All of these techniques are simple and easy to do, and it’s something that you will want to implement in your business today.
If you’re currently not using email marketing, you could be missing out on a lot of sales in your business. It’s just so integral in your business that not using it could mean a lot of loss sales for you.
But let’s get right into it. Here’s the first way to make money with your email list starting immediately:
1) Use confirmed opt-in
There is much debate about this, and some people have said that this has increased their conversion rates, while others say that there is no difference in terms of results when using confirmed opt-in. If you’re stuck in limbo about whether or not to use confirmed opt-in, I think you should test to see which one is more profitable for you.
But do you know what confirmed opt-in is? It’s simply having your new email subscriber confirm that they want to be on your list. After they sign up to your website, they will get an email that says “please confirm your subscription”. Then they will have to click a link to confirm that they want to be on your list.
To be honest with you, you will get a lot less subscribers using this technique, but it can potentially increase your conversion rates. This is something that is worth testing in your business today. Here’s another email marketing technique you will want to use.
2) Build a large list
With a large list, you can create your own meal ticket. If you can build up a list of like 5,000 subscribers, you’ll start to see sales coming in on a daily basis. This is something that you should be excited about. All of your hard work would finally pay off, and you can land yourself in the land of profitability.
Now building a large list isn’t easy. Well, I take that back… if you have the funds to advertise, building a large is incredibly easy. But if you’re operating with no funds, then you will have to build up a large list the old grunt work way. This is via free advertising. It works, but it’s just slow. Doesn’t mean that it doesn’t work… it just takes a lot of time.
These 2 tips for making your email marketing campaign a success are things that can put you into the profit zone. Success won’t come overnight, but with a …
3 Actions to Avoid With Article Marketing
So why do you suppose that people go on the internet and do a search for a specific subject?
People do a search for many things on the internet. Sometimes they are just surfing for fun or curiosity. But mostly it is because there is something they desire, they are seeking a solution to their problem. They are seeking one of two different objectives. They are seeking a problem solver, which can be pleasure, enjoyment, gain or profit, understanding or enlightenment, etc. or pain avoidance: seeking to prevent sickness, loss, pain, problems, costs, etc.
O.K. then, listed below are those 3 points you want to avoid:
First of all, avoid using any Private Label Rights content. Private Label Rights. A Private Label Rights article is content that someone else wrote and already published it on the internet.
Second, submit your content to one category and not multiple categories. This is considered spamming and could lead to you being banned from the directory..
Third and finally, be mindful of where you place your URL. Some directories will allow you to place them in the body. Most of them will allow you to insert them in the bio resource box. Read the guidelines to the directory to learn their policies..
Writing original content and focusing on one niche will get your articles published much faster and improve your time management. Bad habits will get your articles rejected by the article directories or worse banned.
Eliminate the negatives by avoiding these three possible problems. That gives you a better opportunity to get your article to be published and driving traffic to your sites.…