Tag Archives: online advertising

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Avoid Wasting Time On Social Media By Identifying The Most Helpful Networks For You

There are many among us who started online marketing in a time where social media was still not a requirement of being online, and certainly not of running a business. Now, even the smallest of freelancers know that interacting with and going after clients on social media can mean a huge boon to their bottom line.

That said, it could be really easy to just try and be ‘everywhere’ and then not end up actually getting any traction on the platform we choose. Let’s be honest here, social media platforms come and go, and the ones that are popular are crowded, while the ones that aren’t overcrowded yet are a risk because they never will be. New or old however, all social media platforms have certain types of content, and by extension people, that will do well on them. Further, different audiences tend to be in different places when spending time in the online social world, which is an important consideration. Let’s take a look at how you can break down a social platform’s viability for your business.

First of all, are your target customers even there? If your targets are middle-aged men, Pinterest is probably not going to be that valuable to you. While broad awareness is great, being good at social media takes a lot of time, and you want to be focusing that time in areas where it’s most likely to result in leads (right?). Evaluate the demographics of who spends their time on a platform and make sure there’s overlap with your target market.

Next, evaluate whether you will be good at producing the type of content that does well there. Depending on the platform you’re looking at, you can probably find a way to search for or hunt down posts that are popular and getting lots of engagement. These should give you an idea of what performs well. Take note of the format (picture, video, etc.), and also the content itself (what words are used? Are words used at all? Etc.).

Everyone has different skillsets, and if neither you nor anyone on your team has the skills to create great content of that particular type, it might be a tough journey for you. For example, if you’re not good at framing images or thinking up what makes a potentially mundane picture more interesting, then Instagram might not be a great place to be.

Finally, if you are good at creating the type of content you see as necessary on the channels you want to be on, you need to map out how much time you’ll have to dedicate it. People by and large follow the people who put the most time into creating the most interesting content, so it’s important to evaluate if you’ll be able to compete.

Granted you can meet all of those criteria, well, give yourself the green light and start making moves!

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Building a Business vs. Raising Money

Ten years ago, and certainly 15, this discussion would have been laughable. It’s the ‘debate’ between building a business and just raising money. Of course, anyone raising money will tell you that they’re actually building a business, and much of the time it’s true, but there’s still an important distinction to be made.

These days, everyone has an idea. And, at least up until relatively recently, there were a plethora of investors with money who wanted to eagerly hand it over to any young person they thought had an idea that was going to be the next Facebook or the next Uber. Now, with several years of this madness behind it, purses are being tightened, and we’re face with the need for some evaluation as to what exactly entrepreneurship actually is.

Over the past few years, anyone developing an app has likely at least had the thought pass that they might seek out investment in order to help them grow quicker and build a company much more rapidly than they could do on their own (or at all). That said, there are many of these companies who were never going to reach a point of revenue generation, nor would reach the user volume critical mass that has kept giants like Snapchat alive right up until they finally started generating a few bucks after nearly four years of being on the market.

That kind of run time without making a cent from your company was unheard of just a couple short decades ago, but now it’s commonplace. The problem isn’t that that market dynamic exists, it’s that it’s all many young entrepreneurs are banking on. They want to make something that so many people use that they can make a well-compensated exit, without having to worry about such business-related inconveniences as actually making money.

Soon, however, people will start to realize that everyone’s grandson isn’t Zuckerberg, and we’ll probably see a regression to something a little bit hybrid between how things were and how they are now… what will happen to your business when that occurs?

Answering this question before you have a real, pressing need to do so might be a smart place to start. Much like politicians on their last term with no prospect of reelection, business owners who find themselves in the position of having built a meaningful business that’s bringing in profit in that you are no longer scrambling for the next round, the next investment.

Some of the best business advice now lies in books from the 80’s and 90’s that will go largely untouched for many young entrepreneurs whose mistake is thinking that just because the execution has change, the fundamentals have too. In reality, the people who work the hardest and can make real numbers work, incoming vs outgoing, are the ones who tend to win in the end. Unless of course you really do have the next Facebook under your hat, in which case you and only you can ignore everything here… but still.

But no mater if your business is profitable right now or not, you need to be focusing on building your email list NOW as that is a real asset for your business that can pay you for many years to come.

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Using Customer Feedback Surveys

Collecting customer feedback can provide you with invaluable insight into the customer process. These are insights that you can assume or guess out on your own, and can go a long way toward shaping your business in a way that sets it up to be more successful in the future. Unfortunately, information on how to gather feedback so that it is accurate, unbiased, and actionable, that is, leading to actual tangible steps you can take to improve, is sparse. Many who go the DIY route with their customer satisfaction surveys fall into common pitfalls of question writing and end up with data that doesn’t do them a lot of good.

Tip #1) Know what you want to know Seriously, before you start writing your customer feedback survey, narrow down what exactly it is you hope to come out more knowledgeable about. For example, it’s not super helpful to gauge overall “satisfaction.” Instead, think of a specific question like “What is stopping customers who have items in their cart but don’t proceed to checkout?” or “How can I improve my support options to make customers happier?” Having a guiding topic like this will help you make sure you have a consistent purpose through your questions.

Tip #2) Share where your customers are Sometimes, sharing a survey with your customers or trying to reach them in the wrong place can make it difficult to get a high response rate. For example, you could email your survey out to those on your customer email list, but what if you embedded the survey right on your website, on crucial pages, as well? Or if you have a physical store, maybe you setup an ipad with a survey to catch people as they leave the store instead. Try to get creative and reach your customers where they are actually most likely to actually be and respond.

Tip #3) Keep your brand voice in mind Remember, when you’re asking your customers to give you their feedback, your survey acts as a branch of communication for your brand. If the language or phrasing or tone of your survey seem to deviate too extremely from your brand tone of voice, it could come off as odd. Worse yet, customers could assume that you care so little about their feedback that you’ve hired someone externally to do your satisfaction research. Remember, that survey itself is a brand touchpoint, so treat it as such!

Tip #4) Avoid words and phrases that could push responses toward a certain bias Too often, surveys word their questions in a way that leads respondents toward offering up a certain opinion. While it’s nice to hear that you’re doing well or that customers love a certain feature, it’s better to make sure that your feedback is genuine and honest. Avoid framing questions in any way that hints at something being good or bad before you ask the respondent for an opinion of it.

Below we’ll take a look at some more advanced techniques for guaranteeing your surveys yield actionable results.

Advanced Tip #1) Avoid agree or disagree type questions When surveys give a statement and then ask respondents whether they agree or disagree with it, they may intentionally be biasing their responses. According to Harvard University’s own guidelines for sharing surveys, these questions often result in a bias toward more people choosing ‘agree’ than actually would rate themselves as being aligned with the statement.

Advanced Tip #2) Keep your survey to 10 questions, max When people bother to give you the time it takes to fill out your customer survey, you should appreciate that decision, not disrespect it by keeping them on the hook for longer than necessary. Plus, keeping your survey short is actually to your benefit as well. Research has shown that the longer a survey gets, the less time people spend on each question, because they get frustrated with the survey dragging on and speed up their responses on the later questions. It’s best to keep things more manageable and get to the point quickly both for your sake and for that of your customers.

Advanced Tip #3) Use question logic In the survey industry, question logic refers to the ability of a survey software to change which questions a respondent gets asked depending on how they’ve answered something previously. For example, if a customer answers that they have never purchased a teddy bear from your store, it makes little sense to ask them followup questions about the quality of the bear they purchased. Question logic lets you have the people who tell you they’ve never purchased a teddy bear skip right over the questions that pertain to that product. This can help you keep your questions as relevant as possible, which will also increase the chances that your respondents stick around.

Advanced Tip #4) Limit your use of open-ended questions. When it comes right down to it, it’s great to offer your respondents open-ended text fields that let them give a detailed opinion on a topic. That said, relying on these types of questions too much over more quantitative, measurable rating scales, etc. can make it hard to get data that’s easy to pick apart. Being able to tie comments and explicit suggestions to your business is great, but so is the ability to see where average highs and lows lie with your customer group as a whole. It’s a good idea to mix in quantitative and qualitative questions as your survey progresses, to get a nice balance of information coming in.

Finally, you should be striving to follow-up personally with every person who bothers responding to your survey. First, you should thank them, then you should dig into the specific answers you got and make sure you understand what actions you should take next to improve – this applies to those who had both positive and negative input for you!

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Is Online Marketing Your 7pm to 2am Job? How To Make A Full Transition

Often, people begin their online marketing efforts as a part time gig, with the transition of moving as soon as possible to fulltime self-employment. Unfortunately, as time goes on, far too many people find themselves exactly where they started out: Coming home from a necessary day job they don’t particularly enjoy, and working on their online marketing for a few hours for a little “extra income.”

While this is a happy medium for some people, many others will become frustrated. Here are a few ways you can change your approach to your online marketing entrepreneurship efforts in order to finally make the transition into working for yourself full time.

1) ‘A few hours’ won’t cut it: Let’s face it, if you went to work for ‘a few hours’ each day, your boss would have a talk with you before long. Think of how long it would take for a business to reach profitability if every employee cut down their 8 or 9 hours to 2 or 3 each day. Somehow, people expect this approach to work in building their own businesses from home. At best, they underestimate the amount of time it will take to compound the effects of a few hours per day into a fulltime income. The people who will break away from this mode don’t shy away from the hustle, and know that they need to essentially be working fulltime hours on their marketing efforts to quickly get them to a livable scale.

2) Get serious about your customers. Many online marketers like to talk about their ‘clients’ or their ‘projects’ but remember that, at its core, the success of your business is a direct result of how well you interact with your customers. ‘The customer is always right’ should apply, because you’re a small business. People find it too easy to get caught up in ‘working for themselves’ and don’t take the time to be respectful and appreciative of everyone who is kind enough to hand them over money for a service or product. Stay humble, even when you’re kicking butt.

3) Get outside of the norm. In your communication channels, consider working on some new angles that are less crowded and also less expensive to engage with (if you go the route of paid advertising). For example, properly working your content into reddit or Stumbleupon can offer a massive return on your time if done correctly. While most marketers are chasing burnt out and overvalued approaches, you’ll be sitting on the secret sauce.

4) Finally, get disciplined. Have a routine for everything. If you’ve got just your evenings to grow a business with, you need to be efficient. This means making a schedule for your tasks and sticking to it. It means working to ensure that tasks don’t drag into others (checking and responding to emails is a big one!). And, above all else, it means testing and drilling down into the actions that are driving the most results, and focusing your time on those.

Remember, if you want to have a business, don’t work on a side project.

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How To Land a Guest Blog Post and Increase Your Visibility

When people decide they want to start off blogging or creating any kind of content for their business, they’re likely to come across guest blogging as a strategy fairly quickly. Guest blogging involves getting a guest spot on someone else’s website and creating a blog post that not only relieves them from having to fill a content slot, but gives you some exposure to their audience. Plus, if you have built up a following, you’ll be able to direct some of that attention toward the other person’s blog. In short, they’re a win-win.

Unfortunately, the way that most people approach a guest posting opportunity usually boils down to barely more than cold emailing people and hoping someone A) sees their email, B) bothers to open it, and C) actually reads it and does something about the message inside.

Instead, here’s a quick and easy checklist you can use to increase your chances of being accepted as a guest blogger on another site and using that siphoned exposure to help your own blog in return.

1) Identify a blog with audience crossover to your own. You don’t need to find someone writing about the exact same topic as you, but you do want to be able to identify some crossover between your audiences. For example, if someone runs a fitness blog that focuses on exercise and your blog focuses on diet, their readers might be interested in what you have to say.

2) Read a few posts. Get a feel for the blog by reading more than just one or two of their posts. Note the tone of voice and ‘angle’ they seem to have.

3) Comment. Leave some thoughtful comments on their post. If you’re the guy or gal leaving “wow. Nice post!” type comments, you will be ignored. If, however, you leave something genuinely thoughtful and which shows you were interested in and are interacting with their content.

4) Follow them on twitter. Next, find a social platform they’re on, usually twitter, and follow them. Share out a couple of their posts on your own feed over the next few days. Tag them in one of your tweets to make sure they know you’re giving them credit and to alert them that you’re sharing their content.

5) Send them a DM asking for permission. Before you pitch via email, ask for permission to do so. Send them a message on twitter letting them know that you have an idea you’d like to run by them, and if they have an email you can shoot it over to.

6) Craft an effective email pitch. An effective email pitch for a guest blog post gets to the point quickly. More importantly, however, a guest blog pitch focuses on much value and utility you can bring the person you’re pitching. Focus on what you can do for them, not on why they should help you out or how badly you need it.

Following these six steps, and having the patience to execute them over a few days, will put you miles ahead of every other pitch your target blogger is probably getting, and that’s definitely something.

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Go Above And Beyond For Your Customers

When entrepreneurs and small businesses are starting out, they’re relying almost completely on the quality of their product and word of mouth. In the beginning, most people simply don’t have the monetary backing to bring in massive, scalable social media and search PPC campaigns. For some, this is discouraging. For others, however, this tiny, tiny scale is actually their greatest strength.

Today’s let’s take a look at how you can scale using, well, the unscalable. Specifically, the strategies that aren’t practical when your audience or customer base reaches into the tens of thousands are exactly the types of tasks that can help you reach that volume. Let’s take a closer look:

If you ordered something from a website online, say, a competitor to Amazon but who had a certain product you wanted that Amazon didn’t, you’d probably expect that that interaction ended when you pressed the confirmation button. You expect to receive a package with your item in it, and then, aside from perhaps a marketing communication or two, you’ll likely never hear from that company again.

Imagine for a second, however, that two weeks after receiving your item and having some time to use it, you get a letter in the mail with the same return address. It’s from the company you previously bought from, and it’s a handwritten card. In it, the CEO personally has written you a note saying how much it means that you ordered from them, and asking that you get in touch any time if you need help with your order, or have any questions, free of charge.

Doesn’t that make some impression? If you had to order something similar again, don’t you think at that point you’d know exactly where you were going to order it from? Might you even tell a friend or two about the experience?

These types of above and beyond actions may not be standard, but the companies who end up getting ahead often understand the value of ‘scaling the unscalable’. In your own business, whether it’s with 4 employees, 40 employees, or just you, make sure you are taking so-called unscalable tasks to their breaking point. The average person will get lazy, which means outsourcing a task as soon as they’re able to, or automating a process that used to be done manually and in a personal fashion. The brands that people truly remember, however, will work longer hours and put in the extra mile until there is literally not enough time in the day before they give up on an action that puts a smile on customers’ faces and turns them into brand ambassadors.

You don’t have to handwrite thank you cards, you don’t have to mail anything at all, but find your own special unscalable actions and make them a part of your routine. while everyone else if trying to offload tasks and take the easy way out as soon as they have the cash to do so, be the one who makes so much of an effort that working with you or buying from you simply becomes a given for your customers.

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Facebook And Google Are Not Your Only Advertising Options

Marketers, we need to have a talk. For the past few years, the cost per click of Google Adwords, and now Facebook’s newsfeed ads and promoted posts, have been climbing. It makes sense that as platforms have become more and more known to marketers and the public in general, more people have tried to take advantage of them, and they’re become more competitive. For some markets, certain keywords and audience targeting may still be viable on these networks, but many small businesses and entrepreneurs will find themselves boxed out of these networks by costs of per click sometimes into the double digit dollars. Ouch.

Instead, here are a few networks that are off the beaten path but can offer a great ROI for those willing to take the time to explore them.

Bing: Bing has been laughed off as a search engine in lieu of Google’s massive marketshare when it comes to search traffic. That said, their ad product can actually offer a decent volume of traffic at a fraction of the cost. This is partly because they’ve partnered up with other smaller search engines (like Yahoo), and ads run through the Bing ad manager will also show up on those networks. In general, you can secure the same keywords for less by using Bing if Adwords is pricing you out. Plus, their support is excellent, especially when compared with the sped of Google’s, and livechat means you can always get clarity on ad performance, no matter where you are in the world or what time it is.

Reddit: Reddit is an odd duck. Many people have been scared off from using this platform because they’ve offended a deeply defensive community. Reddit avoids promotion as much as possible, and people catch on quick when it becomes apparent that someone is posting their specialty forum or ‘subreddit’ with the express intention of promoting their brand or hawking a product. That said, reddit gives marketers the ability to pay for a link to remain at the top of a subreddit for as much time as you’re willing to pay for – and lucky for marketers that value is grossly underestimated right now, meaning you can get impressions and clicks dirt cheap. We’re talking advertisements that get 15,000 impressions for $10. If you’re writing effective ads that get even a few clicks, you’re already getting a lower cost per click than just about any platform available for mainstream marketing.

Other honorable mentions include things like Stumbleupon, where promoted content can go viral for no additional cost, and retargeting using the Bing display ad network. These are far from your only choices, but they’re a good starting point to get the wheels turning about how you might be able to leverage networks outside of the ones that grace headlines every other day. Of course, the same principles apply when keeping careful track of your ROI and split testing your ad creative to make sure you’re getting the best return possible.

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It’s Not 2003, Time To Improve Your Landing Page

It happens all too often: You stumble upon a product to promote, or someone’s personal website and it looks like it was created in 1999. You cringe and move on, and you know what sucks for that person? Their potential buyers and leads do as well. Everyone may think that their site is the special snowflake exception, and that it has a sort of old fashioned charm, but then everyone would be mistaken.

Landing pages change in effectiveness with consumer trends and buying habits, so it’s important to make changes to your own pages to reflect these. Here are a couple of major changes that have happened in the last 5-10 years, which affect how people buy online:

 

1. People are more sensitive to BS. Every landing page used to begin with a giant claim:

“WHO ELSE WANTS TO BE ABLE TO DO X IN ONLY Y HOURS… WITHOUT LEAVING YOUR BED!”

In short, headlines were sensational. They sounded exciting, but people have been let down enough to times to want to avoid them. In general, as customers got more comfortable online, they realized that anyone could say anything they wanted about themselves, and that they often did. While this increased aversion to sensationalism may or may not have affected your target market to a large degree yet, it’s coming, so make changes accordingly: Honesty beats sensationalism in many markets now.

 

2. People expect more of design.

Websites now generally look a lot better than they did even just a few years ago. Design software that’s suable by just about anyone has meant that it’s become increasingly easy to not have a sucky page, and people have come to expect this.

If someone lands on a page with the standard sales letter formatting with non-flat elements and giant, multicolored text everywhere, they’re going to bounce and never come back. Often times, seeing on of these pages makes people think that it has been abandoned or is no longer relevant – why else would the owner have left it looking so poorly?

 

3. Text isn’t your only option.

Remember when everyone started using video landing pages? The buzz of their effectiveness would soon spread like wildfire. The reality is that using different types of media on your site helps to engage different kinds of users, and accommodating all of them can help you achieve higher conversions. While you want one intended path through a page to be clear, it’s a good idea to still give users who want to learn about your product or offering in a different way the option to go somewhere and do so.

Finally, let’s stress something that hasn’t changed: Benefits vs features. Yes, the old adage holds true, people are much more likely to respond to specifics about how their life will be changed by making a purchase decision than they are to hearing about all of the bells and whistles your product has.

Of course, it’s a good idea to avoid that sensationalist trap here as well. Honesty and value win in 2016.

Think your site is a bit outdated? – then get in touch as we can help!

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Small Things You Can Do To Make Your Clients Go Wild

So you’ve got your business up and running, whether that means freelance consulting, promoting affiliate products, or running a monetized online community, things are on the up and up. However, you know there’s lots of other, more established competitors in your space… so how do you stand out and convince customers that switching to you is a no-brainer? Well, here are a few proven ways to overdeliver in the digital age.

1. Collect feedback. With the amount of survey tools out there, or the ability to, you know, send an email message, it’s incredibly important that you start listening to what your customers are saying. Early on, this can be as simple as asking them in a post-sale or ideally post-service email what they thought of your service, and if they have anything they would improve.

This serves two purposes: First, it’s going to help you identify people who are really keen on your brand or product, and who might be good candidates to become your affiliates, etc. Starting out, you might just let them know that if they enjoyed working with you, you’d love to send some kind of reward their way if they find a few people to refer to you. These gifts don’t have to be anything expensive, but the gesture is often appreciated and the potential to help you grow is huge.

2. Have a personality. Seriously, for the same reason people vote for political candidates based on how they look, or how they generally “feel” about them, interactions and perception go a long way in purchase decisions. Plus, this is actually something you have a huge advantage at over your larger rivals: When a company has 37 different support agents to help with their massive customerbase, they can’t offer the same kind of repeat interactions or treatment that you can as an individual. Smart companies on the rise use the technique of overdelivering in the personalization and customer support department to win clients from their competitors. It’s not a bad strategy for entrepreneurs and online marketers, etiher.

3. Connect with them via social media as a person, not a brand. This is an interesting one. Now more than ever, people like to know who they’re doing business with, because they can. Social media has greatly raised expectations of interaction and transparency, to the point that even massive brands make sure they have a presence actively chat with those who mention them.

As an individual entrepreneur, you have the unique opportunity to let people know the person who wants to do business with them. This goes hand in hand with point number two about having a personality. Let people Snapchat with you in your off-hours, post Instagram pictures of your work days as they progress. The Facebook page for your freelancing or brand can be a place that people not only get to know you better through written posts, but when you can foster community through asking discussion questions and special offers.

Remember that your biggest weakness, being small and up against long-standing competition, is also your biggest asset, because it makes you more agile than anyone else (and your clients will remember that).

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Productivity Rituals

More often than not, the only strategy ever discussed when it comes to working and running a business from home is the outward facing work. You can find countless guides on advertising,. Marketing, SEO, blogging, and more, but your own personal productivity ritual is still a bit fringe.

Let me explain: It’s not that you can’t find people out there writing about morning affirmations and habits you can develop that will make you more productive, the emphasis put on them is completely different from the more ‘businessy’ topics.

Well, guess what: Your frame of mind, and by extension how you work, is much more important than you might think, even when compared with what you’re working on. In fact, nothing exemplifies this more than the runaway success of relatively recent startup Brain.fm

If you haven’t seen it yet, Brain.fm is a website that uses scientifically backed engineering to create audio tracks to help people become more productive. Going a step further, the service also allows you to tailor the music to individual tasks and intensity levels of working. One track might help you with coding, another with writing and editing tasks, etc. Don’t believe it? They have a free trial, so at the very least you can try it out for yourself and see if you feel anything… you might just be surprised.

Of course, trying to alter your brainwaves with sound isn’t the only way to go, and a number of factors often contribute to our productivity and how we engage with our work. For starters, healthy sleep, exercise, and regular snacking habits can all boost your alertness and your ability to focus in on complex tasks. So often, we get caught up in how much work we need to get done that we actually place ourselves in a state of mind that is counterproductive.

One of the best things any budding self-employed individual can get into is setting time limits on activities, and breaks, in order to start to build a schedule. This is especially useful for those of us who are prone to skipping from task to task, rather than staying on any one thing for an extended period of time. A good starting point is the 25/5 setup. Under this scheme, you set a timer for 25 minutes and focus on one single task for that time. When the timer goes off, set it for 5 minutes and take a break; do anything but work during this time!

When the timer goes off again, it’s back to work for 25 minutes. A couple of things generally happen when people adopt this strategy. First of all, their productivity on a single task goes up. Second, because 25 minutes doesn’t feel like a long time, and break time is built in, many people simultaneously feel like they are working less, while they’re in fact getting more done.

Pretty neat, right? Ultimately, what works for everybody is different, but this might be a good jumping off point if you aren’t quite synced up with the productivity you want from an entrepreneurial lifestyle just yet.