Facebook Marketing Is Here

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facebook

What would it mean for your business to attract high quality, loyal, and eager-to-convert prospects to your business’s Facebook Fan Page? If you don’t have a Facebook marketing strategy, this might remain a dream instead of your everyday reality.

Is This Your Facebook Marketing Strategy Now?

You sit down at the computer in the morning, clutching your coffee cup so tight you wonder if it will shatter in your hand.  You’re already behind schedule, and it’s a chaotic scene as you frantically try to get your first update published before starting to work your way through your stuffed e-mail inbox.

If this is you, read on. A Facebook marketing strategy can actually take the stress out of your social media marketing activities and even free up valuable time for you to spend on other, more profitable activities in your business.

5 Facebook Marketing Strategy Hacks You Can Use Today

#1 – Plan your content

I hate to break it to you but throwing together your content on the fly isn’t just robbing you of more time than it needs to, but it also makes it more likely your content isn’t actually doing you as good as it could.

Toward the middle or end of the week, plan out and actually schedule your posts for the following week.  Create a mixture of content – some visual, some audiovisual, some text based, etc. Mix it up – people like variety, and your audience is made up of people with a variety of learning styles.

#2 – Encourage dialogue, not monologue

Do you respond in a heartfelt way when your followers and fans respond to your posts?  If not, make it a point to begin today. The back and forth of dialogue is the beginning of audience engagement, one of the key tools and goals for every online marketer. One of the best things you can do is ask questions to your audience. People’s hard exterior usually melts right away when you ask of their expertise.

#3 – Encourage conversations among your fans

True engagement, as mentioned in the last point, is created when your audience isn’t just talking with you, but also to each other. One way to do this is to take time to highlight the ways that members of your audience create value for their own audiences. Let your fans and followers get to know each other as individuals.

#4 – Let your personality show

Is it hard to imagine your personality as a marketing strategy on social media?  It’s true, though – the most successful companies on Facebook are the ones that have a human touch on their pages. Post like you’re talking to your audience, and include some personal posts as well from time to time. Let people know that you don’t know all the answers. There’s nothing better than a little humble-ness and humility, it’s what makes people grow.

#5 – Use analytics to gauge success

If you don’t have a goal and don’t take the time to evaluate how close you are to it, how are you going to know if you’ve been successful in your marketing?  Track your Facebook marketing strategy and its effectiveness by looking at measures of things like your reach, engagement, number of new likes and/or people who have “unliked” your page, conversion rates, and financial return on investment.

I hope this helps. Another great site helps you double your “Likes” on Facebook. Check it out: http://t.co/pFVziHwnZo

SEO Is King

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SEO

Search Engine Optimization, or more commonly called , SEO, is a technique that is being used to improve the visibility of a website or webpages in a search engine.

When you are looking for something at any search engine such as Google or Bing, what you do is type in the keywords or topic that you are looking for … right?

You are then given the results for the query you made. Those sites listed toward the top have been determined the most relevant to your search and ranked by the search engines being led to several matches although it is quite noticeable as to how certain sites are at the uppermost corner of the search.

Did you ever wonder why this happens? How do these sites manage to be on top of the ranking? The reason behind it is the magic of SEO.

Search Engines collect information about every page and website on the internet. When your page has higher rankings, more people find you.  The key to higher rankings is to make sure you have included the things on your site that the search engines are looking for.

The most popular search engines are Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask and AOL. Search engines keep their methods and ranking algorithms secret, to get credit for finding the most valuable search-results and to deter spam pages from clogging those results.

A search engine may use hundreds of factors while ranking the listings where the factors themselves and the weight each carries may change continually.  Some of the factors that could make up the Search Engine Algorithm are: Keywords, Titles, Links in and out of the site, Keywords in the Links and the Reputation of the site.  You must fine tune the content of your site along with the HTML and Meta tags to help build higher rankings in the search engines.

Search Engine Optimization considers how search engines work, what people search for, the actual search terms or keywords typed into search engines and which search engines are preferred by their targeted audience.

SEO is getting exceedingly trickier to implement properly. The search engines keep changing the rules, so I suggest checking out a few links: http://t.co/PVWMHKTOjH  &  http://tinyurl.com/ckwehlr

Have a great day!

Video Is Essential For Your Website

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youtube

Viral video marketing is becoming a more important and effective online marketing tactic. Various researches have suggested that immediately after viewing a company’s video, consumers are far more likely to visit the company website, or contact the company via phone or email.

Entrepreneurs who are staying ahead of the evolving online marketing space now use video for many of their promotional campaigns alongside traditional online marketing strategies. They have learned to take the cue from large companies who are now embracing video marketing as a critical tool for increased traffic and accelerated revenue growth.

Adding video marketing to your marketing strategies can be fun and easy. However, with everything small business owners have on their plate, it’s probably difficult to imagine finding the time to produce and post videos online. But there are some compelling reasons to do it:

1. It’s cheap: You can do it yourself with a digital video camera or even a cellphone that has a video camera built in.

2. It attracts visual learners: As we’ve all learned in recent years, different people learn in different ways. Some people learn best by seeing things demonstrated rather than reading or listening to someone talk about it. Adding video allows you to better reach visually-oriented customers.

3. It builds your search results: Search engines such a Bing and Google have recently added content such as blogs, videos and images to what their engine indexes and returns in search.

4. It promotes your products or services: For retailers, what’s more likely to make a sale – a static picture on your website of your mobile app, or a video that shows how the app adds value to the user’s smartphone experience? If you’re a service business, video allows you to interest prospects by offering free samples of your trainings or seminars.

5. It gives good customer service: Instead of handing them a lengthy installation manual, customers can play a video on your site and learn how to set up your product.

6. It’s personal: When you speak on a video and post it online, you are directly engaging to hordes of prospective customers. It feels friendly and makes customers feel more comfortable contacting you.

Cleverly crafted videos with elements of humour, shock, entertainment and controversy will make it easy for your audience to recall not only what your video is about, but also your brand when it comes time to make a purchasing decision.

When planning your video marketing campaign, remember that, on average, it takes about seven exposures before a consumer will act upon something. So don’t produce one video and call it good; produce as many as possible and distribute them far and wide.

The time is ripe to start coming up with video marketing campaigns for your business. You’ll thank yourself when you see your business’ website traffic and revenue improve. http://t.co/wEJpZGtpYA

P.S. There is a hot new site called TubeLaunch. You can earn great money just by uploading videos onto YouTube: http://t.co/P8VTh9r7dW

How To Start A Blog

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blog

It’s pretty easy to start your own blog — even if you think you’re not tech-savvy and don’t know the first thing about what you’re getting yourself into.

First you need to choose which blog host you’re going to use. There are a few that are similarly good and only about $4 bucks a month. I use iPage, but Host Gator and Blue Host are good also. When you sign up with one of these hosts, I recommend that you already have bought a domain name, your website name, through a company like Name.com. You then transfer your name over to the host. The host will have different platforms you can use to create your website. This is when you choose WordPress. WordPress is a script, but you can join WordPress.com to try the platform out. If you aren’t sure how committed you’ll be to blogging and just want to try it out, I suggest that you start with a free host like WordPress.com.

WordPress is easy to start using. You’ll begin by creating an account, naming your blog (they’ll let you know if the name you want is already taken), and choosing a template.

Choosing a Name for Your Blog

This can be daunting. In fact, I think I went through three name changes before I settled on Don’t Try This at Home for my (now defunct) personal blog. There are many things to consider:

What do you want your blog to be about?

What words reflect that idea or content?

What graphics would you like to use?

What audience to you want to reach?

Think about how these things all come together and what they say.

Consider staying away from generic words like ramblings, writings, blog, journey, journal, musings, etc. These words won’t set you apart from the thousands of others who are also using them in their titles.

Choosing a Template

Just about every blog host out there offers generic templates for you to use as you start your blog. If you know a little HTML you can quickly change a few key elements (like your banner and link colors) and make the template reflect the tone of your blog. The basic WordPress 2012 theme works fine.

My advice is to stick with your generic template for a while. Let yourself become used to blogging and allow yourself to evolve. As you do, you’ll have a better idea of what you want your site to look like. Besides, if you’re spending all your effort in the looks department, you’re probably slacking in the writing department. Don’t let your blogging project fall apart because you’re trying to do too many things at once.

Enable the Jetpack Stats that come with your WordPress Installation

If you are familiar with WordPress.com’s dashboard, then this is very similar. This is a great Dashboard that shows you a world map and the countries turn different colors when you get visitors from that country. You also can see who is referring people to your site. Ideally, you want to see the search engines bringing people to your site.

Generating Traffic

There are so many ways to generate blog traffic. You can claim your blog with Technorati or come up with great weekly post ideas. You can also make use of Twitter (send out a tweet with your new post link) or Facebook (use an application like Networked Blogs to include your blog’s RSS feed in your FB updates).

The best way to generate traffic, though, is simply to write well and write often.

John Chow is a master blogger, watch his video and see if he can help you: http://t.co/Mozj6LDe

My First Date With Profit

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erik

Man it’s been rough, as it has for anybody who has taken a risk, battled an uphill battle, defied the odds, and conquered the small-minded perceptions of the small-minded. I just know that after many many nights writing, creating music & ringtones, dropping out of college, art school, commercial truck driving school and a eighty or so restaurants jobs, I would have learned a thing or two. . .Yeah, not work old school physical jobs anymore.

Now that I have learned my lesson, certain parts of my body don’t work the same anymore, sore back, weak knees, social anxiety, alcohol abuse, fights with girlfriends, it all added up to my debut into the internet marketing stratosphere, where I discovered web page after web page of flashy fonts, fade in and out Flash intros, and large font squeeze and landing pages. It was here that nobody saw my face, asked me to cook a burger medium rare and dig a ditch. It was here that I could push social media to the limits and not be lectured by a boss, yelled at by “coked-up” waitresses, and bullied by older deadbeats who never got anywhere. Yeah, I was happy, very happy to sit down at my dark red mahogany desk, sitting in my black leather office chair, pushing feather-touch keys on a keyboard and netting in some small profits.

My first date with profit was with MyLikes. I had around 40K followers on Twitter at the time, and I was looking for ways to monetize my Twitter. MyLikes entered my life as fast as it took to add my name, address, Paypal account name and Avatar. I joined as a “Publisher”, meaning I would tweet other people’s products. If you are selling a product on MyLikes you would be a Vendor.

After I tweeted my first tweet, through MyLikes, I went to my Dashboard, which is really easy to use, and I saw that I had earned 15 cents from one tweet! I waited thirty minutes and tweeted another one, which made 10 cents! It seemed like a small amount to get excited about, but after years of no sales with my online music, I was elated. After my first week, I had $20 bucks in my account, and like clockwork, I got the money in my Paypal account every Friday. It was brillaint, not enough to live on, but it was the catalyst for me to want to do whatever it took to stay home and make money online.

erik2

Bravo. Bravo. Now, get out there!

Arriving Home

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151

You know, I’ve been working for other people too long. It started at sixteen, too young to justify, contemplate, mitigate, rebel, or pontificate; and the world went by as I slaved away indoors, unknowing of anything, except knowing blisters hurt more when they popped. We all work too much, blah blah. We all get underpaid, blah blah. The same scenarios of co-worker drama, late nights drinking to forget work, a drink in the morning to start work; But, that was in the Eighties & Nineties, when it was partially cool to use substances to justify a harsh reality.

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Credit: The New Slavery

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#1

It’s not rocket science to know that America is riding on a free fall of bad credit. We owe everybody, and we as individuals are like little Americas. We go around and shop with our eyes and must need this and that, sign the line on the bottom of a credit contract, and off we go. If only consumerism didn’t stink the morning after. We could sit alongside the news channel and watch the decline of consumerism, and the rise of the national debt. We could go buy cake on credit to celebrate.

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This Is Not Me, Yet.

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I want to share with you my journey through the confusing world of Internet Marketing. Along the way, I will rant and be bluntly honest, insecure & weird. Hopefully this is refreshing in a place where everybody is an “expert”.

My previous experiences into “breaking” onto the web, like breaking the charts in music, was disastrous, starting with creating a music album created under the name Erik Narcissist. I had a $300 recording studio and it apparently showed. I made about $5 off of my songs in 2010.

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