001 GID Delegate Your Misery
View full post on Get-It-Done Guy’s Quick and Dirty Tips to Work Less and Do More
The Three E’s of Social Media
According to the Nielsen Company’s recent Social Media Report, social networks and blogs reach nearly 80 percent of active internet users in the U.S. Social media has not only become a medium by which many people have shared their life stories, but more and more businesses are also using social media to share their brand’s message.
Because social media is still a fairly new medium of marketing, businesses have yet to fully understand how to make a deeper, more personal connection with customers or potential customers via these platforms. It’s easy enough to post company news and blast special deals to people, but if you really want to build a powerful community of people who will happily promote your products or services, your social media strategy must include the following Three E’s:
Engage
If you’ve been reading up on social media, you’ve probably seen this buzz word floating around in marketing circles. The word has probably been so overused that it’s lost some meaning, but it remains the No. 1 activity that businesses must do in order to be truly successful in social media.
Engaging with people is the first step in building relationships – whether it’s a personal or business relationship. However, with social media, business is becoming more personal and people are wanting to know more about the people behind a company or brand. What’s the story or message that you would like to share with people?
You can’t build a relationship with your customers unless there is two-way communication. Engaging in social media can include responding to your blog comments, visiting other blogs and making comments, having “conversations” with people on Twitter or Facebook, retweeting posts by people you follow on Twitter, and more. To engage with people means interacting with them and getting to know more about who they are, what they like, and what they do. You invite your customers to share feedback, which in turn promotes trust and well-being.
Explain
For most businesses, one goal is to increase sales and acquire new customers. With social media this certainly is possible, but do customers know exactly what your company does? How can your products or services benefit them? What makes your business unique? Have you taken the time to explain this?
You can explain what your business does without being overly sales-y or sounding like a TV commercial. For example, you could feature clients or customers in a blog post and share what you did for them and the experiences they had with your company. You could also feature employees in blog posts to show what role they play in the business.
Evangelism
When you engage with people via social media, explain what your company is about, build trust, and offer great service, you create loyal customers who are enthusiastic and become evangelists for your brand. This is where the fun part comes in because now you have customers who will do the marketing for you. Well, most of the marketing anyways.
You still need to broadcast your message, but because people like your company so much, they will easily “like” or follow you, in addition to sharing your message with all their friends, followers, or subscribers. What would you rather do? Spend millions of dollars on a TV or newspaper campaign or spend mere thousands to broadcast your message to the same amount of people?
An example of a company who understands the three E’s is Zappos.com. Their blog is consistently updated with fashion tips, company news and employee highlights. They engage with customers via the company’s Facebook page by asking questions, conducting polls and featuring a “Fan of the Week”. Their posts on Facebook sometimes don’t even have anything to do with the company. They just share news that promotes good will within the community.
Combine all of that with exceptional customer service and Zappos has created raving fans who blog, tweet and share with their friends how great the company is.
Keep in mind that the three E’s of social media is just a stepping stone to creating awareness, enthusiasm and trust for your business. As alluded to earlier, you still have to offer excellent customer service or else none of this really matters.
About the author: Maria Palma is a serial entrepreneur and founder of Studio 747 Media, a lifestyle blog network. When she’s not inspiring entrepreneurs on the Studio 747 BlogTalk Radio Show, she’s hosting workshops on social media.
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Daily Search Forum Recap: January 27, 2012
Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web…
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11 Reasons Why My Blog Is Better Than Yours
Those who have visited my site for quite sometime would know that I love to reinvest into my business. The only way your going to build your site bigger and better is to work really hard and put money into it. In this post, I want to run over the things I find most important, things that make my blog stand out from the crowd and the things that help the site run so smoothly.
Here’s a list of 11 things that make my site better than most:
1. Buy The Perfect Domain
A domain name is the first thing people see when they come to your website. Actually they see it before they even come to your site, that’s why it’s so important.
Earlier this year when I start ExpertPhotography.com with my brother, I knew we had to get a good domain. The photography niche is very competitive and has a lot of people in it. One thing you will notice with all the top sites is they have great brandable domains. I started just typing domain ideas I like into my web browser and seeing if they had a site. The majority had, however when I got to ExpertPhotography it had a landing page at BuyDomains instead. BuyDomains is basically a brokering company that work on behalf of the owner to sell the domain. I contacted them and after some negotiating I bought the domain.
Great domains are not just the ones people see as an authority but also ones that hold a great brand. One thing I like to do with my domains is to make them describe what the site is about. Let me show you how this works.
- ExpertPhotography.com – It’s about being an expert at photography.
- Retireat21.com – How to retire young.
- AwesomeWeb.com – How to build awesome websites.
Here’s an example from one I came up with for a friend. He wanted to blog about outsourcing and so I came up with SaveTimeOutsource.com – it describes what the site is about in the domain, yet is short and catchy.
2. My Blog Design Is Amazing
Most new bloggers will use a premium WordPress theme, such as one from Woothemes. This is something I recommend, we did it with ExpertPhotography. However, after a while, when you start making money from your site and you want to take it to the next level, that’s when you get creative and design a site.
I’m not a designer, neither are you probably, so I would recommend you hire someone instead of yourself attempting to do it. My top tip for for creating great sites is looking at all your competitors, find out what they all do really well and put all those things together to make one really well done site.
IncomeDiary will always be a work in progress, every time I have a new idea, I get it implemented. Every time I see something isn’t working out, I get it removed.
3. I Have Guest Writers
Before I started getting people to write for me on IncomeDiary, I was publishing a post perhaps once a week, in some months I’d struggle to write just one post!
If you want to dominate in your industry, get other people to write for you. Before you do this though, I highly recommend you set high standards and pay your writers to make sure you deliver the best to your readers. Since applying this approach, we have been able to publish content nearly every day and over the last 6 months, quadrupled our traffic.
4. I Have My Own Product
If you constantly put out great free content, they will always want more. Create and sell your own eBook or course and those who want more will come and buy. This is a must have! I love promoting affiliate products but the one draw back is, your always helping another person out and that person is most likely your competitor. Having your own product means you keep everything and you get to improve your brand.
5. I Have a Mailing List
If your still not building a email list, then your leaving money on the table and your not getting as much traffic as you could get. The great thing about mailing lists is that every time you publish a blog post, you can let all those people who subscribed via email know about that new post. This brings thousands of people to my site every time I publish a post!
Try Popup Domination if you want to play ‘catch up!’
6. I Diversify My Income
If you rely on just one income stream for your website, then your not making as much money as you should! On average, you can make three times more money if you monetize your site in three different ways instead of one. There are only so many people who will pay for an advert on your site and only so much room to display ads. When I went from monetizing Retireat21 with just banner ads to diversifying my income with multiple techniques, I drastically increased my earnings.
Check out these 14 ways you can make money from your website.
7. I Have Great Hosting
I have used over a dozen hosting company’s since I started online. Always read reviews and ask friends before you get a host. The worse thing for me as a website owner is having my site offline. If you have seen The Social Network film about Facebook, your remember the scene when they talk about their server and how it can’t go offline because the second it does, people will start looking else where. The same applies for your blog, if your site is offline, people will look else where.
A few recommendations when choosing a host:
- 24/7 Live Support! This way, if you have problems, you can always reach someone to help fix it.
- A wide range of hosting offered, so as you build your online business, you can increase your hosting with little to no downtime.
- 99.9999999 up time. If they have any track record of their servers going offline, I wouldn’t recommend you use them.
- Have been around for a few years. Don’t ever go for a new company’s, this may sound mean but this is your business and you need to be sure that who you host with, will be responsible and will be sticking around.
I personally use HostGator to host IncomeDiary, I use one of their VPS’s (a type of server). It also hosts ExpertPhotography. So far, I have had very little problems with them, on the rare occasion the server goes offline, it’s always been my fault and my brother has been able to go into the live support and just ask them to reboot it.
The other day, ExpertPhotography was running slow, my brother went on their live support and asked why. They told him two wordpress plugins were slowing down the site. He removed the plugins and it went back to full speed. They help you. Personally, they are worth more to me, than I pay them.
8. I Have Popular Posts
This may sound like a small thing but it’s really important. When you visit a blog and you like what they have to say, the next thing you look for is a collection of all their best posts. You do this because you want more! Popular post widgets make it easy to display those posts.
On IncomeDiary, my popular posts section is custom coded and is not a plugin. On my other site, I use Woothemes and a widget they offer with their themes, allows you to display popular posts. I love that feature! Yet again, another company, going the distance with what they offer their customers.
9. I Have a Great Combination of WordPress Plugins
It’s amazing the difference a bunch of WordPress plugins can do. You can see 20 WordPress Plugins I recommend, by click here.
10. My Site Is Optimized For Search Engines
Traffic is everything, without it, what we do would be pointless. Thanks to my buddy David, we have been able to implement all of his search engine optimization tips to get my site to rank highly in Google, which has meant a 200% increase in search engine traffic, that means I get over a thousand more visitors a day.
Click here to see the blueprint we followed to get my site to rank well.
11. I Publish Great Content
Everyone when they start, they are more concerned about how their site looks. The first thing you need to think about is CONTENT! That’s why people are going to visit your website. Focus all your time on great content, that will bring traffic and then once your sites getting a decent amount of traffic, focus on making money from those visitors.
Don’t make the mistake most people make, don’t focus on monetization at the beginning. People who do that seem to only ever focus on the money and that really comes across in their content. Blog for the love of the subject, that first. The money comes naturally.
Hope you enjoy this article. Let me know what things you think you can implement after reading this post!
View full post on How To Make Money Online
Optimize Your Website through Mobile Internet
TweetMany webmasters, old and new alike, are wondering how they can update their domain websites to function properly with mobile browsers. Generally speaking, this will involve making the website open on smaller screens (such as iPhone or iPads) without having a bunch of distorted images. There are many different methods of how mobile users can [...]
View full post on James Martell
Niche Site Private Advertisement Experiment – Part 1 – Why?
My security guard training niche site currently earns between $1,800 and $2,200 per month – 99% of it coming from Google Adsense alone.
One of my goals in 2012 is to diversify the income streams coming from this site and increase its monthly income to at least $3000 per month by the end of the year.
Diversification is important because:
- It’s safer. It’s not smart to rely on one single income source because the moment it runs dry, you’re done for.
- It gives you more opportunity. The more income sources available, the more options you have to expand and grow. Instead of focusing on growing income source A, you can grow income source A, B & C at the same time.
- It increases the value of the site. Buyers are more likely to be attracted to a site that has several income sources.
My quest to diversify SecurityGuardTrainingHQ.com has been very unsuccessful so far, due in large part to a simple lack of taking action.
This is why I formally announced diversification as a goal for 2012 because I know you’ll hold me accountable to it and at the very least, motivate me to push forward – and you already have.
More on that later in the post…
Will History Repeat Itself?
When I started monetizing my first website back in 2008, GreenExamAcademy.com, I also started with Google Adsense.
It was encouraging to see trickles of income from the ads, however because I was just laid off and was about to start a family, I put a lot of pressure on myself to quickly find another income source.
(Maybe the lack of pressure is why I waited so long this time…something to think about.)
So what was did I do next?
I learned about private advertising, or “renting” out space on your website to advertisers for a fee. The middle-man (Google) is out of the way and typically you can negotiate more than just a cost-per-click payment structure, and have banner ads in place as well.
Private advertising made sense to me because I was already tapping into the visitors who came to the website, but not into the related companies who could benefit from those visitors too.
I immediately did some research to see what companies might be interest in advertising on the site. A simple Google search for a related keyword can show you…just look at the ads that show up next to the results.
I contacted a few of them and within a week had my first advertising contract in place.
It was for one 125 x 125 pixel banner ad in the sidebar and I was so happy and excited that a company was interested, I didn’t even negotiate and took the first offer. A 125 x 125 pixel advertisement to be placed in the sidebar at $50 a month for 3 months.
Big mistake.
Why?
Because I eventually learned that I had enough targeted traffic to charged up to $300 a month, which is what I eventually did with new companies that came on board to advertise on the site.
For the LEED exam niche it was particularly easy to sell ad space because I was one of the only websites online talking about the LEED exam who had a significant amount of traffic.
At this time, according to my analytics, I was getting between 500 and 900 visitors per day (on the weekdays):
Here were the issues I had when I first tackled private advertising:
- Setting the right price, which I already mentioned.
- Manually placing the ads on the website. Sometimes I would spend hours just messing with CSS and html trying to figure it out. You know that guy who never asks for directions when he’s lost? That was me back then.
- Keeping track of the number of clicks per ad.
- Remembering when to take ads down after the various contracts expired.
But you know what? I just rolled with it and made it happen – and that was a success.
I just did it and that’s what I have to do again.
Private Advertising on Security Guard Training Headquarters
Private advertising may not work for all niches, but you definitely need some traffic in order to convince potential advertisers to work with you directly.
How much traffic exactly?
Well, that depends on a number of things such as the niche itself, how much money a potential lead is worth to a company, how much you’re charging, how good of a salesperson or copywriter you are, etc.
As far as traffic for SecurityGuardTrainingHQ.com, check out the numbers – they are eerily similar to GreenExamAcademy.com when I started private advertising on the site (between 400 and 800 visitors per day):
Lost Opportunities
Since the middle of last year I had an Advertising Page setup on securityguardtraininghq.com that simply said:
“Thank you for your interest in advertising on Security Guard Training Headquarters. For advertising options, please contact advertising@securityguardtraininghq.com”.
…and that’s it.
This page was setup in anticipation of some type of advertising opportunity that I knew was eventually going to happen, and I included the email to collect potential leads just in case.
And guess what?
I did get emails – at least once or twice a month, but I had nothing to offer in return.
Although this was a good litmus test as far as demand for advertising on the site, I failed in having something readily available.
I didn’t follow through, which is very unlike me.
The last straw happened last week when two separate advertising inquiries came on the same exact day! Again, with nothing to offer them in return.
The first thing I did was the same thing I always do when I realize I have failed: I don’t think about what I did to fail, I think about what I have done in the past to succeed.
A negative attitude does nothing but waste time. Having a positive attitude based on past positive experiences is always the first step to getting back on track.
So what did I think about?
- I thought about how most of my past successes didn’t come from me waiting for things to be perfect or the timing just to be right. I just dove right in and worried about perfection later.
- I thought about how even the toughest of tasks were always much easier after just getting started. An object at rest is a lot harder to move than one that’s already in motion.
- I thought about how sharing what I was doing had always motivated me to start something and keep going with it.
- I purchased some advertising software that would allow me to automate the advertising process on the website. I read some reviews and just pulled the trigger and bought it.
- I started reading the manual for the software and started to set everything up.
- I started it with the intention of sharing my process and results publicly here on the blog, like I always do – hence, this post.
Two days after I received those two advertising inquiries the architecture for advertising is now setup on the site and ready to accept advertisers.
Now I have something to offer, and even though the copy on the advertising page isn’t perfect, the ad kit could be better, and even though I could probably explore more options for potential advertisers – it’s up, and I’m proud. I can tweak things as I go along.
I’ll soon be contacting everyone who had previously sent an email about advertising on the site, and we’ll see what happens.
Next week, in the next Private Advertisement Experiment post, I’ll talk more about the specific software I’m using (and other options that are available), setup, pricing, placement, and all the technical stuff that needs to happen before you can start looking for advertisers.
Cheers!
———————
Thanks for reading!
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Niche Site Private Advertisement Experiment – Part 1 – Why?
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Related posts:
- Niche Site Duel 013: CPA Promotions, Private Advertising, Job Board and Income Report
- Niche Site Duel 012: An Experiment and Income Update
- Niche Site Duel 003 – How to Setup a Niche Site: Before You Add Content
- Niche Site Duel 002 – Finding a Profitable Niche: My Process Revealed
- Private Policy
View full post on The Smart Passive Income Blog