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Follow Prospective Clients With Feedly

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Everywhere, you hear talk about how marketers need to “use” social media “strategically.” Don’t just blog to be blogging; blog strategically. Don’t just have a Twitter account because everyone else has one; line up your social media marketing with your business development goals. Obviously, those goals include deeper relationships with current clients and establishing and building relationships with new and prospective clients. How can social media help you accomplish this? Here are some tips to get you started:

    • Familiarize yourself with Feedly, a news aggregator application for Web browsers and mobile devices running iOS and Android. (Feedly is also available as a cloud-based service.) Feedly compiles news feeds from various online sources for you to customize and share with others.
    • Create a list of clients, prospective clients, and referral sources.
    • Set up Feedly to receive Google News feeds of articles and posts that mention the persons and companies on your list. You may want to set up feeds that mention a company’s executives by name. Move the feeds into Feedly folders marked “clients” and “prospective clients” respectively (or whatever works best for you).
    • Find out if any of the companies or individuals on your list have blogs. Use Feedly to subscribe to them.
    • Make a Twitter list of these people and companies. Most will have Twitter accounts, and many some will have more than one account to cover various products, divisions, or locations. Also include the executives in these organizations.
    • When you have a reason, blog about the companies you follow, and say good things. Your blog should report and comment on news that’s relevant to your audience. You’ll get noticed as the companies you follow monitor themselves. Share your blog post on Twitter and use the company’s Twitter handle in your Tweet. You may also choose to retweet posts the company shared on Twitter. Everyone loves a little Twitter attention.

Focus on those you’ve recently engaged and those with whom you already have a relationship. Like anything else, your social media marketing will become more effective as you gain experience. Don’t hesitate to hire a social media marketing to help you create content and to help you coordinate your overall internet marketing strategy.

The Need For Consistency

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When we design websites, we more or less assume that visitors will “tour” the site in some kind of orderly way, probably first taking in the home page, then reading the “about” page or company history, and finally pulling out the plastic to order a product or service.

The truth is usually altogether different. Millions of internet users keep three, four or more tabs or windows open to monitor e-mails, tweets, posts, feeds, and subscriptions; they’re also sending and receiving calls and text messages, sometimes listening to a radio or half-watching a television, and usually working in a busy office or at home with the kids. The reality of visiting a website online, in other words, is chaotic, although sites themselves have to be designed with order and organization.

Researchers are finding that visitor expectations are a key element in keeping visitors at your website long enough to read content and order products. Have you ever clicked on a link expecting legal, financial, or real estate advice, but you ended up at a gambling site, or worse? That’s an extreme case, but it’s the kind of incongruity that can make a visitor click away from your website in just moments. Your paid online advertising, your social media accounts, blog, website – all of your marketing – should reflect the same kinds of messages and themes. Your messages and themes are conveyed not just with words; keep your symbols, motifs, colors, fonts, and other elements consistent. Create a brand people know and trust. Meet the expectations.

What does a visitor find when he or she Googles your company and clicks on the link? Is the visitor’s experience what he or she expected? Was the visitor’s experience “consistent” from page-to-page throughout the site? If a visitor links to your site from a social media site, will the visitor’s expectations be met? What about email, blogs, podcasts, and video?

Let every element of your marketing strengthen and reinforce every other element. Nothing drives website visitors away more quickly than failing to meet their expectations, especially if they feel they’ve been misled. And if you’re like most people in business – busy – you might consider hiring a social media marketing company to create consistent web content that keeps bringing visitors back for more.

Great Thumbnails And Titles For A Bigger Youtube Audience

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It’s no secret that bringing new visitors to your YouTube channel can help grow your business online. Yet the overwhelming majority of videos on YouTube get only mediocre results at best. One of the proven ways to draw more visitors to your YouTube videos is to design captivating, intriguing thumbnails and powerful, compelling titles for your videos.

For great YouTube thumbnails, use a good headshot or close-up for a personal touch. Make sure the lighting and colors are right, and look your best. YouTube accurately describes thumbnails as “miniature marketing posters” that should attract viewers and compel them to watch your videos. YouTube thumbnails appear in different sizes (and in surprising places) all across the internet, so have a strong, lively image and a well-framed composition. The foreground should stand out boldly from the background. Use appropriate backgrounds; a rock concert promoter, for example, shouldn’t use the same background that a criminal defense attorney might use.

Your text should immediately tell a viewer what your video is about and why he or she should view it. Make your text brief, powerful, easy-to-read, and to-the-point. Be sure you keep the image on the left and text on the right. Thumbnails, text, and title should all reinforce each other and convey the same theme. If you don’t feel like you can do this well, consider hiring a social media marketing company with experience in creating successful web content.

YouTube now draws over a billion unique visitors every month; its viewing hours (six billion a month) have increased more than 50 percent just since 2012. Uploads to YouTube now total more than 100 hours of video every minute, 24 hours a day. Don’t ignore the possibilities of YouTube. Great thumbnails and titles can help you take full advantage of this website’s almost limitless potential to expand your audience and your profits.

Your Own Website Is The Key To Internet Success

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The Internet is active! New platforms launch weekly. Users are always finding new and innovative approaches. Small business owners and the professionals who work in small firms or as solo practitioners always feel like they’re lagging behind and hustling to get up-to-speed. It’s no game; it’s a serious competition you can easily lose.

You have to be on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Flickr, LinkedIn, YouTube, and somewhere new next week. In the panic to be all over the Internet with plenty of hyperlinks, one simple basic is sometimes overlooked. You really must have your own multi-page website, and it needs to carry pertinent, appealing content that’s updated at least weekly if not daily.

Listed here are some tips and reasons to keep and maintain your own website:

  • Keep the ownership of your domain’s name and website. Avoid any contracts that leave your domain and website under the control of another party. You can let someone else manage and run your site, but do not let them own it.
  • Do not redirect your website’s visitors to other sites. Sure, use Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks aggressively to generate traffic to your site, but not from it. Redirecting visitors to another site is giving your customers to someone else.
  • Your domain and website is your brand; you control it. You decide how you will be presented. Facebook and every other site is someone else’s brand, under their control.
  • Remember when AOL was “the Internet”? Or more recently, MySpace? Don’t tie your future to any site that you don’t direct. Don’t split your profits; other sites will either forbid sales or grab a percentage. And at your own site, you keep full control over your SEO, how search engines find you, and what your keywords are.
  • You, and not some other website’s attorneys, want to define Terms of Service. Especially if your work touches on anything that might be considered controversy, you might log in one morning to find that your account’s been deleted. Don’t let that happen.
  • At your own website you can test new technologies as they emerge. You can decide on whether to have a blog, real-time streaming video, or podcasting. Your website, not another’s, should be the headquarters of your online operations.

With these tips in mind, you’ll be in control of your online future, and there’s no time like the present to review your site or to start building it. If you’re starting from scratch, you may need to hire a webmaster or a social marketing firm that offers full website construction, maintenance, and marketing help. Plenty of help is available, but the time to act is now.

Attracting And Keeping Your Audience

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It goes without saying that your blog posts should cover the topics that your audience finds the most interesting. If you’re looking for ideas and you’re unsure what topics are popular, or if you’re unsure about how to find out, here are some tips for keeping your current readers and for attracting new ones:

Follow the Leaders – What are people reading? Find the blog posts that are achieving high readerships for the leaders in your field or industry. Scan through their Twitter and Facebook feeds for the posts and topics that draw the most readers and receive the most likes.

Just Ask Your Readers – Solicit feedback. Ask readers what topics interest them the most, but be specific. Compile a short list of topics and ask your readers to pick from the list. Solicit their comments too; find out why readers are more concerned with some topics than with others.

Determine What’s Already Working – Facebook Insights can tell you how well your individual Facebook posts perform. When you find your most successful posts scan over them. What elements do your successful posts have in common? What distinguishes your successful posts from the unsuccessful ones? For Twitter, Sprout Social is a useful tool for determining which of your tweets have the most success.

Keep narrowing your focus – When you’ve determined what topics interest your readers, write extensively on those topics. Then determine which of those posts have drawn the most readers, and write more about the specific topics that those posts discuss.

Grammar and spelling count – Probably no blog is perfect. Occasionally a misspelled word or a typographical error will slide past even the best writers, editors, proofreaders, and webmasters. But consistently poor writing and multiple spelling mistakes will drive away your readers. Many professionals and small business owners hire a ghostwriter or a social marketing firm to provide their blog’s readers with high-quality writing and attention-grabbing ideas and topics.

Bringing Readers To Your Blog And Keeping Them

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When the first blogs appeared on the internet, their marketing value wasn’t immediately evident. The first blogs were more like public personal journals or diaries, or else they functioned as forums for writers to express opinions on politics, sports, religion, and pop culture.

However, it quickly became apparent that the blog format was a perfect vehicle for businesses to stay in touch with their customers and keep them informed about new products, industry developments, and associated topics. But with so many blogs on the internet, how do you attract readers? Here are some tips for driving traffic to your blog.

  • Make your blog attractive and easy to navigate. Choose a visual theme that’s clean and easy on the eye. Avoid having too many colors, too much content jammed together on a page, and animated GIFs that aggravate and distract readers. Use a side column to organize content by date and by topic so that readers can quickly find what they’re seeking. Use keywords and phrases to boost your search engine traffic.
  • Carefully consider who your audience is and what they want to read. Meet their expectations. Don’t suddenly go off-topic. Take advantage of analytics to determine who your readers are.
  • Make sure everything’s working properly. Nothing’s more aggravating than a page of broken hyperlinks or a page that takes too much time to load. You may need to find a more reliable web host or a social media marketing company to keep everything in working order. If your page loads too slowly, you’ll find yourself dropping in the search engine rankings.
  • Advertise, market, and promote. Be sure that people can get to your blog from Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, and Pinterest. If you opt to pay for advertising, be smart; buy ads on websites that cover similar or related topics. If you sell handcrafted jewelry, an ad on a NASCAR-related site is probably a waste of your money.
  • Boldly grab the attention of readers. Write irresistible headlines. Take an unconventional approach. Write in a unique, personal style. Don’t rely on Microsoft Word for spelling and grammar checks. If you aren’t confident as a writer, you may want to consider hiring a free-lancer or a social media marketing company that provides content. And don’t write “off the top of your head.” Make sure your facts are verifiable; don’t flinch from doing a little research. Your readers will appreciate consistent reliability, and if they can’t depend on you, you’ll lose them.
  • Finally, keep it fresh and up-to-date. If your last post was four months ago, no one will be interested. Some bloggers update daily, others weekly. Monthly just isn’t enough. You also keep your blog fresh by occasionally changing and updating your visual theme. The occasional re-design keeps readers attracted and wondering what’s coming next.<