Category: General Article

Avoid These 5 Twitter Mistakes

I admit it. I’m a Twitter gal and I absolutely love what Twitter can do for small business owners. It produces massive visibility, it’s a top-notch lead generation tool and a powerful networking platform.

Unfortunately, Twitter continues to mystify many small business owners who aren’t quite sure what all the fuss is about.

The good news is that Twitter doesn’t have many rules. It’s by in large all about using common sense, being polite and exercising good judgment. But, that being said, here are five ways to ensure that your Twitter experience is a tragic disaster:

1. Toot your own horn too much.

Obviously, you are passionate about your small business and want to let the world know about its strengths and virtues. However, Twitter is not an advertising platform. It’s a social community. When you constantly shout sales pitch to your followers, they’re going to instantly unfollow you. Instead, try to immerse yourself in the Twitter community and join the conversation.

2. Use the default Twitter profile.

If you’re using Twitter as a marketing tool for your small business, then you need to avoid the default Twitter profile. That cute, little default cloud background is certainly not doing your small business any favors. Take a few minutes and put together a customized Twitter profile and brand your small business by utilizing all of that valuable advertising space. (No excuses, you can even do this for free at )

3. Tweet once a week.

Your followers have hundreds, if not thousands of Tweets flowing through their Twitter stream on a daily basis. If you think that your weekly Tweet is going to get noticed, you need to reset your thinking. Twitter works best when your followers see your Tweets flow through their stream again and again. Repeated exposure is the only way to get noticed on Twitter.

4. Don’t interact with your followers.

There are all sorts of nifty Twitter automation tools that can help manage your time on Twitter. And I’m a big believer in sending out a few automated Tweets. But, if you want Twitter to work, you actually need to personally log into your account and send out Tweets. Answer questions, retweet your followers, make conversation. Your followers want to see a real person in front of your small business. They’re not looking for a bunch of automated, impersonal Tweets.

5. Give up too soon.

This is one of the most common problems of Twitter. In fact, Twitter has one of the highest “drop-out” rates of any social networking platform. And, it’s a shame. Small business owners everywhere, start on Twitter only to drop out a week later. Twitter isn’t an instant fix for your business. It’s a relationship tool and relationships take time to develop. So, give Twitter the time that it deserves and it will reward you.

Whether you’re a Twitter newbie or a seasoned Twitter professional put these five tips into play and make your Twitter experience one that …

Tips For Designers to Survive the Current Market

If you follow the news, you’ll hear that the market is up, the market is down, some design businesses are struggling, some are doing okay. Experts can’t seem to agree, but a lot of designers are worried.

Here is the truth: The current market is more challenging for designers because fear has caused people to spend less or take a longer time making decisions about more expensive purchases. Some see that as bad news. I see it as an exciting challenge to think more creatively, learn new skills, and come out way ahead as the economy gets stronger. Many will throw in the towel. The ones who come through will enjoy incredible – and much easier – success (with a lot less competition).

So what are the things you can do to survive and thrive in the current market?

* Create more online exposure

Despite a slower economy, online retail shopping continues to show growth. But even if you don’t sell products online, you need to have a strong online presence. While local homeowners are searching on the web for products to purchase for their homes (and many more of them are doing this), you want them to come across your information. Post to your blog at least twice a week. Create a profile on sites like , , and . Just a few minutes a day on these sites will drive more traffic to your business.

* Sell updates rather than investments

When people are being more careful with their spending, they are more concerned with VALUE. This doesn’t mean that homeowners are not spending on their homes. In fact, recent research is showing that many homeowners want to “reward” themselves with small purchases to spruce up the look of their homes. They may still be hesitant to invest in an entire room remodel, but they are very eager to update a room with accessories, new tassels, paint, or colorful throw pillows.

Focus on those “update” items, and you’ll find that many more people are willing and excited to do business with you.

* Create multiple streams of income

As designers, most of us have ONE source of income: working with clients. Yes, we do many things for them and sell various products, but THEY are our only way to make money. When clients are spending less on home design, our business suffers.

But it doesn’t have to be that way!

Designers who have added other streams of design income are not feeling the crisis. Let’s face it. If you have income coming in from various sources, you are less likely to suffer when one or two of them is slow. Look into writing, teaching, membership programs, or doing teleseminars.

You are so creative when it comes to designing. Now use that creativity with your business. You can enjoy wild success!…

Marketing Automation

There are instances when people may view marketing automation as a disadvantage rather than an advantage in society. This is because people may be scared of the consequences such as marketing automation being the cause of the loss of their jobs. However, notwithstanding the unemployment problems of many, this automated system is still best implemented. This is because the internet-based business environment calls for more complex techniques in order to go with the flow of its increasingly competitive landscape.

Marketing automation provides a solution to the intricate needs of an increasingly competitive online-based business environment. It makes work both more efficient and effective. For instance, through automation one can have a program that would relay the right outbound message to respond to a lead’s online and inbound responses.

Automation does not actually mean that all the marketing activities would simply be handled by the programs of the computer. In fact an automated system should go hand in hand with the creative insights of the marketing personnel. To increase one’s rank in the search lists, the ideas to promote the site coming from the marketer are still needed to ensure online success.

Online buyers over the years have become more discerning in their buying habits. They go through many websites and utilize social media as well to look for the right products for them. What a marketer could do is to insert marketing automation into the process. For instance if the prospective buyer calls up to inquire about the product, automated answers on frequently asked questions can be prepared. The process may not seem too personalized, but still it has a touch of being professional in the approach as the answers are screened and put together for a professional sounding output.

Marketing automation is actually more than just having an answering machine. This is because automation allows the consideration of the prospect’s response so that the software can in fact offer reconsideration when a buyer declines. Part of automation could also be the ability to show rich content such as visuals for special offers which could help persuade prospects to buy the product. Thus, one should not see the machine for marketing automation as a status symbol that one has “arrived” in the internet business world or as a hindrance to creating more jobs. Instead, it should be seen as a truly helpful tool towards a more efficient and effective business. It is thus best to start mapping out the process of marketing automation for your business. It could do wonders for your productivity as you align yourself with the benefits of technology.…

Why Do Most People Fail at Online Business?

The sad reality is that most businesses linger on at a hobby level for a few months or years before petering out. Relatively few make it to a level of success that provides a full time income.

I’ve watched, consulted for and worked with many people in the online business world, starting back in 1991 when I sold my first piece of software via the old bulletin board system, an early precursor to the internet. Today I’m a full time online entrepreneur.

Here are some of the most common themes I see in failing online businesses:

1. Too much focus on the product or service – New business people spend a lot of time thinking about and developing their product or service, while they spend relatively little time thinking about what their market niche, business model is or how to market their product. Yet niches, business models and promotions are more important to success than the product.

2. Lack of persistence – A large number of people get started, create a web site and then quickly lose interest when their new site does not instantly generate thousands of dollars each month. The hard truth is that it takes time to build an audience, and patience to build a solid foundation for your business. Its not one large thing that suddenly propels a site to success, but often dozens or hundreds of small actions you take over months or years that add up to create a significant profit.

3. No concept of online marketing – In the crowded internet of today, it is hard to get someone’s attention among several billion web pages, much less keep someone’s attention for more than about 15 seconds. Online marketing, copy writing and building an audience is not the same as it is traditional media. I’ve watched clients agonize over fonts and images, but spend zero time on search engine optimization, copy writing, audience building, email list management and other critical online skills.

4. Inability to manage growth – When success does come to an internet business it often comes in large waves. However, the first Tsunami of traffic and orders will frequently wipe out the business and its owner in the process. The success they worked so hard to create becomes a noose around their neck as they are unprepared to hire people or buy equipment and insist on continuing to do everything themselves. A good friend of mine has been stuck in a cycle like this for over a year. Rather than restructuring his business to outsource as much work as possible, he continues to dig a deeper hole for himself.

So if you want to build a solid foundation for your new online business, carefully consider your market niche, your business model, how long you’re willing to stay the course, your online marketing plan and how you will manage growth when it does come. With the right systems in place, many of these issues …

5 Tips to Develop an Effective Marketing Plan

Developing a marketing plan for your business requires time and effort. It is not something that can be done without concentration and proper preparation. Few business owners truly understand what they need to do in order to develop a marketing plan that will work. This is to be expected as few business owners have been educated in marketing. Add this to the fact that the world of marketing seems to change on a daily basis and the task seems rather overwhelming.

Yet, there are a few simple steps that can help business owners develop effective plans that will work consistently over time. Taking the time to complete these steps can be the deciding factor between success and failure.

First, business owners need to set aside time dedicated solely to the task of marketing their business. Much like a budget, this plan will need to be attended to and monitored. Having set hours to work on marketing allows business owners the opportunity to work regularly on their marketing. Set aside five to ten hours a week for marketing and put it on the calendar. It is best to work in chunks of time such as two or three hours rather than scheduling an hour a day.

Second, business owners need to define their goals. Without goals there is no way to determine if marketing efforts are successful or not.

Third, decide on a budget. How much money is available to dedicate to marketing efforts will be a large factor in determining what can and cannot be done. Don’t worry if there are little to no funds available to support marketing efforts. The internet has created an environment where it is possible to advertise business products and services for free.

Fourth, business owners will research marketing activities that are specific to your industry and fit within the allocated budget. Developing an idea sheet along with approximate costs for each activity during the research process is a great way to keep track of your discoveries.

Fifth, develop a weekly marketing plan. The marketing plan should include marketing activities to be done as well as time to track the results of all marketing efforts. Tracking the results of your marketing efforts is critical to understanding which activities are successfully promoting your business and which ones are not working.…

Big Data Marketing Offers Critical Insight-But a Distributed Marketing Technology Is Key to Success

Marketing technology firms continue to offer credible evidence that the analytical insight gained through Big Data will be a huge factor for organizations in the near future.

Why? Consider this statistic: the amount of data an enterprise collects is expected to grow 650% over the next five years. It’s statistics like this that make it impossible to ignore what “Big Data Marketing” can bring to the bottom line for a business. It’s the key to long-term sales growth.

The growing technological and analytical capability of managing and using this unprecedented amount of enterprise data will continue to explode to all new levels in the coming years. Big Data, as the term is coined, will shift businesses from managing and observing “data transactions” to also managing and observing “data interactions.”

What does this mean? It means that businesses will be able to assess the needed data points that are crucial in understanding when a consumer will buy, and why. This extraordinary shift in technology continues to evolve at fast rates due to rapid advancements in processing power, data storage, and tracking analytics, integrated with newer, robust distribution and communication channels.

In order for companies to truly embrace Big Data and wrap their arms around what this concept can do for their sales teams, a multi-channel distributed marketing platform is needed so that all branding collateral, content, and marketing efforts can be centralized for the organization. More importantly, because of the substantial progression of communication and distribution channels, a distributed marketing technology helps optimize content distribution across varying forms of media including email, mobile, microsites, and social media. Organizations that do not implement this type of technology will struggle to collect the data points that are necessary to achieve profitable success and will be at competitive disadvantage in the near future.

These facts are hard to dispute. The industry is already witnessing a 40% annual increase in marketing technology spends, and leading analysts are also projecting that by the end of 2017 the CMO will spend more on technology than the CIO.

Big Data is still considered a buzz word. It still is not full defined, nor accepted by all marketers or industry professionals. However, the evidence continues to be reported that Big Data isn’t going anywhere. I recently read an article about some additional studies that were released this summer by Lattice Engines on this very topic. Their survey stated that 89% of executives believe sales reps miss opportunities because they cannot keep up with the information about customers and prospects, and also noted that 90% expect there would be great benefits to sales if insight was automated and delivered through one system.

This leads me back to my belief that the formula for success for marketers in the future is going to be quite simple: Bigger, Richer Data Sets + Real Time Analytics + Personalized Multi-Channel Marketing = a Higher ROI.…

Tips For Driving Traffic to Your Website

When it comes to giving your business an online presence, you want to get as many potential customers to look at your website as possible. This means you have to consistently update your content, advertise and backlink as much as possible. You have to make your site seem essential to those who are interested in your business. Let them know that you are at the top of your game in the industry, and if they want to know the latest news and product information, they have to check with your service and with no one else. This all sounds like a great idea, but in practice, driving up your web traffic is actually a tricky business. In this article, you will learn some tips for driving traffic to your website.

First, links are the answer. Make sure that you are linked in as many relevant places as possible. When we talk about link quality, for example, it’s all about making sure that you are reaching the right audience. If you sell garden supplies, which kind of websites do you think you should link on? The answer, of course, is to link on online magazines that specialize in gardening issues. This way, readers of the gardening magazine will see the links for your site again and again and will know that you are a big name in the business.

Next, make sure that you are networking online. You can use Facebook, for example, to spread the name of your website by word of mouth. You can start a profile and a group of which fans can become a member. This is a great way to get people looking for your website so they can see what’s new, which products are for sale, and which kinds of sales you are offering. This is a great way to make your website seem essential to those in the know.

Finally, driving traffic to your website is all about making your website seem important. Perhaps it really is important. You need to let people know this. Spread your message, but make sure the right people are seeing your message. You need to reach out and get customers interested in your web page because of what you have to offer. Your business will grow and your website will take on a life of its own. The future of your business is on the Internet. Learn how to use this valuable tool.…

Benefits of Article Marketing Automation Tools

Today, more and more people are resorting to the internet in order to have financial stability and be remedied from the recent economic turmoil. While the internet is an effective avenue for entrepreneurs and business owners to get money quickly and easily, there is one problem: how can you make sure that your online business is doing well without being tied to your chair and your computer?

Perhaps one of the greatest online inventions these days is the amazing automation tools that online marketers and online business owners can use so that they are able to monitor their businesses while they sleep or when they are on a vacation. And because article marketing is one of the most effective, it is but right for online marketers and business owners to have at least one reliable article automation tool that will help them manage their content.

Article marketing is the process of writing content to promote a certain product or service and then publish the articles to online article directories and hope that your articles come first in the search engine results. Almost all online marketers today are using article marketing to promote their business because it is totally free, easy to learn, and guaranteed to deliver the results you desire.

However, there could be a slight problem with article marketing: writing and submitting articles on a regular basis can be tedious and time consuming especially when the volume of articles you need to write for your products or services continue to rise. Article marketing can be easy during the first few steps of building your business – when you have more time than money to spend – but as your business grows, the demands grow as well.

Should you come to that point where you do not have as much time as before to do the article marketing endeavors yourself, there are some things that you can do. If you have the budget for it, you can consider enlisting a help of a content provider company or get an article marketing automation tool to help you with the load.

When you hire a content provider company, all you have to do is provide them with the topics and the other details of the project and they will write the optimized articles for you. Automated article software programs on the other hand will take care of the distribution of the articles for you.

Going for article marketing automation tools such as these can be a real time saver for you and for your business, instead of spending time writing articles you can now ask someone to do the work for you while you focus on watching over your business. On top of that, article automation tools will also provide backlinks for your website in the process.…

Using Blogs For Small Business Seo

Blogs are probably one of the easiest, cheapest and most effective marketing tools out there for small businesses today. They have so many benefits, especially in terms of search engine optimisation (SEO).

Google, and the other search engines love fresh content; same as humans, we don’t want to read out of date content, and neither do the search engines (not that they actually ‘read’ the content, but they don’t want to present old content to searchers). Because of this, Google will prioritise fresh content over old content in their results. So imagine you have recently created a blog post all about the benefits of your product – such as your particular brand of easy clean paint brushes. When someone searches for ‘easy to clean paint brushes’ in Google, there’s a good chance that your blog post on your super easy to clean paint brushes will show up high in the search results. Your result is likely to be higher than some of your competitors who just have a product page featuring their brushes, that they’ve not updated in six or more months. In terms of search engine optimisation, you must remember that search engines don’t rank websites, they rank pages – and they love brand spanking new pages! Having a site with regularly updated content and regular new pages also means that overall your site gets more ‘trust’ from the search engines. So some of the benefit from the new content will roll over to other pages as well, even if they haven’t been updated in a while.

Another benefit of adding fresh content to your site on a regular basis is that the search engine bots will crawl your site on a more regular basis – meaning that any crucial updates you’ve made to your site/content will be refreshed in the search engine results a lot quicker. Have you ever wondered what the ‘cached’ link means when you look at search results in Google? Clicking on this will show you the last time Google crawled that web page – so you can see exactly what Google is seeing. If you have updated your website with some new product pages, Google will not know about it until the next time it comes to crawl your site. So if you hardly ever update your site, Google will be in the habbit of only crawling your site on a monthly (or so) basis. This means that none of your new product pages will appear in the search engines results during this month – not until Google crawls your site again. However, if you constantly add new content to your site, Google will get into the habit of crawling your site a lot more often – the ideal crawl amount is daily, but realistically, weekly will do. Having your site crawled on a regular basis, means your brand new product pages will show up in the search engine results a lot quicker.

So we’ve established that the …