Category Archives: Small Business Marketing

How To Deal With Social Media When On Holidays

August 15, 2013Blogging, Business Tech, content marketing, guest blogging, Instagram marketing, Small Business Marketing, Social Media MarketingPeter Marino

If you’re a small business owner, you may be going away at some stage over the summer. As wonderful as summer holidays are, they also create a degree of trepidation as regards your business.

Finding the correct balance between escaping work when away and also maintaining some degree of control and ensuring everything is working well can be hard. As you full well know, social media can take hours and needs regular attention. However, you will still want a break of some sort – so how best to partially automate social media when away to ensure things are ticking over – we take a look.

Quality not Quantity

The key to getting some time away from social is down to first deciding on a quality not quantity philosophy. One great piece whether created or shared by you is worth ten average pieces in the social media sphere.

Content

Finding good content for curation and channelling it to one place can be easily achieved with a little organisation prior to you going away. The likes of Feedly and Trap.it among others are great feeds for finding worthy content.

XYDO is also a good app for personal curation and allows you to find personalised content that is relevant to your business and worthy of sharing with your audiences. Set a couple of these apps up before you head for warmer climes and finding content worthy of sharing should be a lot easier.

Automation

There are a number of fantastic tools out there that can make for excellent additions and are fantastic for automation purposes. Our own favourite Bufferapp allows you to line up those sharing prospects for the times that best suit your own specific social media accounts. A few minutes each day or every few days when away topping up your Buffer can work wonders when you’re away. It saves you time, effort and ensure you maintain a good relationship with followers when away from the desk.

Apps such as Hootsuite and Tweetdeck also provide you with plenty of benefits too. These are ideal for more generic tweets and shares and allow you to schedule times that suit you. These shares can be prepared for as far in advance as you like, though they will obviously smell of automation to some degree.

However, we find at mysocialagency that apps like Hootsuite allow you the opportunity to monitor other people’s content, check up on analytics and monitor conversations – also beneficial when away.

Discipline

On a lot of levels, the most important thing is discipline. How many of us begin our social media task, whether at work or at home, and then end up being distracted and performing numerous other tasks? Setting a time limit for how long or how much management you’re going to do each day and sticking to it limits the time and stress involved and ensures you don’t feel bad for not spending more time on task.

It’s nice to get away from it all and these apps will help you almost do so completely by increasing efficiency and lowering time spent in front of the screen. What are your tips for keeping your social media ticking over when away?

Martin Sheen is a lover of technology. He also loves getting away from the screen and traveling the world.

Importance Of Updating Your Website’s Content

August 14, 2013Blogging, content marketing, Copywriting, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketingcontent creation, content marketing, Importance Of Updating Your Website's Content, updating content, website contentPeter Marino

Making a well written, organized and efficient website is a vital element in online marketing and it can make or break a website. It doesn’t matter when a website was created, what matters is how fresh, up to date and accurate the content is.

The Internet plays a very significant role in the lives of many individuals. In the span of 10 years, the internet has gone from being a novelty, to becoming a vital tool in everyone’s life. Some people even use it to order groceries, while others connect with friends and family members. For some it helps to earn cash while others use it to pay bills. It is clear that the Internet is a very dynamic and ever changing and evolving tool. Therefore, it’s imperative that frequent website maintenance must be implemented so your visitors get the best content and user experience.

The Importance of Updating Your Website’s Content

On every website there are about two kinds of content: that is the one that is dynamic and the one that is static. Static content includes some things like, contact pages, FAQ’s, and About Us, whereas dynamic ones include the blog or news section. Dynamic content is supposed to be occasionally updated and therefore should be of high quality every time. The same is true of static content, however it does not require frequent maintenance.

During a website’s content update, it is important to make sure that the content is always fresh and relevant and personally crafted. Most new search algorithms require that content be fairly drafted for someone’s eye instead of search spiders. For this reason more emphasis should be put on original, high quality content that is never limited to ‘keyword’ terms, but rather it should also include infographics, citations as well as videos.

If a webmaster doesn’t make updates for a certain period of time, it will not be able to compete within it’s market. This means lower search visibility, a lower ranking on Google and, thus, less exposure to potential clients.

Therefore, getting multiple people to take care of your blog can be a way to maintain and keep your content fresh on net. You will encounter times that people you hire to write content for you don’t write the best all the time, or they make some errors in judgement, grammar or spelling but you’ll still be seen on the net and being seen and making mistakes once in a while is part of growing and being human. A good client will appreciate that, whereas a neurotic client that thinks you must be perfect all the time is not the one you want anyhow.

This guest post was written by Ludwing a programmer and web developer in New York. Zinzzchat Founder. Application that helps people share their favorite blogs and websites. Follow @LudwingNY.

5 Tips For Successful Email Marketing

August 13, 2013content marketing, Copywriting, email marketing, Small Business MarketingPeter Marino

Email marketing can be a powerful social tool. Many online marketers conceptualize email marketing in a somewhat strange way: If you send enough emails to enough people, it will get your name out there. Other common recommendations promote quantity and consistency over quality. The downfall with many of these email marketing campaigns is the “good enough” philosophy regarding the content quality. Make subscribers excited to see your emails instead of spamming your subscriber base by following some of the email best practices listed below:

1. Keep specific goal in mind

Sooner or later, your subscriber base will catch on that your exciting blowout sales actually refer to the discount section of your online store. Another aspect of making email marketing seem more like spam than quality marketing occurs when when subscribers are somehow coerced into subscribing. Offering fiscal incentives can build positive public perception for a short time even if the email marketing campaign is not a hit. However, making subscription mandatory to view a website is often counterproductive. First, prerequisite subscription can dissuade viewers from browsing your site. Second, you are more apt to get an email address meant for spam. Subscribers often have a difficult time getting excited about a business when they are not exactly sure what the business is.

2. Put a strong social element in email marketing

Think about the types of emails your target audience typically gets from their peers, family, and friends. Try to replicate the tone, length, and lingo typically used. Be the brand that your audience can identify with and connect with on a person-to-person level. Don’t worry about responding to every email from your subscriber base within the hour. Sporadic responses can be part of the allure for effectively building a community around email as shown in this case study.

3. Encourage conversation

Email has a very social element that is often overlooked. Encourage your audience to actively participate in discussions, contests, polls, etc. Keep the data flowing, and build a community around your brand. Try to keep almost everything relevant to the persona that initially attracted your audience to your brand. There is nothing wrong with sending an individual email to a single subscriber for a tactful, personal touch. Be the voice behind your brand.

4. Make sure everything works

Send an email to your personal account to double-check that everything works as it should. All clickable links should go to the correct website; all images should show up on your smartphone; and reading a mass email just one more time can help you make it perfect.

5. Write engaging content

It is important to recognize that engaging content does not have to be verbose. The content in an email marketing campaign can be as simple as an effort to reach out to your audience on a more personal level. Send industry-related jokes, factoids, or other items you might share via email in a personal context. Remember that email marketing campaigns should give people a chance to connect with the voice behind the brand. Be personable, but do not focus on your personal life per se.

Takeaway points

Do not settle for an email marketing campaign that is only OK. Strive to build a community around an engaged and excited subscriber base. Also, stop spamming people. It gets old.

Our guest post, by Dorian, is a Search Analyst at digital marketing firm, Wpromote and has always had a particular interest in content marketing and coming up with creative ways to help businesses grow.

Outside The Box Creative Marketing Tips

August 12, 2013Blogging, content marketing, Copywriting, SEO, SEO video, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Video marketing, Viral marketingPeter Marino

Business people should all know the importance of online marketing. Furthermore, from SEO to social media, we should all know the tactics, ways and methods of advertising and promoting a business, service or product online. However, there is also a plethora of online marketing tactics that aren’t as known or thought of as much. Here are a few online marketing tips and strategies that will require a bit of thinking outside of the box.

Video is a Content King

When it comes to optimizing and creating online presence through content, a lot of SEOs and online marketers choose to go for written content as the surest means. Now written content is king, and blogs and articles are vital for online marketing, however video is also a content king that cannot be ignored.

Google love videos, as do most internet users. YouTube, along with a host of other video sharing websites should therefore be utilized to the maximum in order to draw more interest in for a brand.

Start Up a Blog

Starting up a blog in order to draw attention around your business is such a basic internet marketing idea that it should not even be defined as creative, or ‘outside of the box’. However, there are surprisingly still plenty of businesses without an online blog, which suffer because of this limitation.

The internet has revived humanity’s love for reading, and while most aren’t quite on Shakespeare’s level of literature, blogs fulfill our need to read. Build a blog around the field you’re marketing within and ensure that your opinions are intelligent, original and insightful. Make sure that your blog is identifiably linked with your business. If this is done correctly, readers will begin to align their positive thoughts on your blog to your business and products.

For example, if people think your fashion blog is a trustworthy authority on fashion, then they will trust your authority on the clothes you sell.

Online Press

Marketing online through literature isn’t all about self-blogging however. You should find online magazines, blogs and online newspapers and try to get other sources to write articles on your business or products.

Conduct an outreach campaign using Outreachr, and find as many potential blogs or magazines that will want to write about your business, or write an article that is hyperlinked to your business.

Make sure that these websites have customers reading their articles and a high domain authority.

A website with a low domain authority, won’t be worth very much as Google only really values websites with a strong online presence when ranking.

It is also important to ensure that these blogs have a fair amount of readers (which usually correlates with their domain authority).

The written content should not be duplicated either and last but not least, the articles written on your business should be of high quality. After all, you will of course want people to read these articles and no one will waste their time with material that isn’t engaging or content that is poorly written.