3 Important Tips for Effective Social Media Contests

Today i am going to tell you about the Web marketer "Justin Palmer"
g has run dozens of social media contests for his clients, and gaining “likes” and “followers” is something he does with relative ease. So, for any of the company that wants to run a social media contest to gain new business.



                                        Justin has the following advice given below :

1. Have a Goal :

As is the case with nearly of any marketing effort, social media contests must have a clearly defined goal in order to generate any value at all. Most marketers think they know their goals, and it usually follows the formula of, “I want to raise my followers on social by X amounts.” So, Unfortunately, this approach is fundamentally wrong, and few companies seem to be know it.
While it is nice to have a large number of followers on various social channels, it should be almost never be the end goal of a contest. Companies need to delve a layer deeper. As Justin said, followers gained from contests alone are unlikely to have much interest in the business beyond the prize.

So, what do you will ultimately want out of your contests? In most cases the answer is money. That’s why you need to measure your actual ROI in terms of new leads or conversions from the contest. Other goals could include, conducting research, or revealing a new consumer base. The point is to determine what you ultimately want to achieve through your social efforts and measure the direct impact of the contest.

Bullet Point Branding CEO, Bryan Fulton, had a lot of followers on social media, but needed to find out more about his niche customers. In particular, he wanted information on potential leads in the cosmetic field. He offered a free lipstick pen to the 500th follower of a contest. Based on the specific nature of the prize, he was able to determine which clients were interested in the product. He had a clear goal and was ultimately able to meet it.

2. Develop a Target :

Having a defined target is ust as the important as your goal. Many social contests cast a wide net hoping to draw in as many people as possible. This is counterproductive because it forces the business to cater to an audience that either only cares about the prize or doesn’t really care at all. It is more effective to align a target audience to a specific goals and market the contest to them.
For Volusion — an ecommerce platforms — most successful contests were the result of the specific nature of Volusion’s targeting efforts. In this case, the audience was “mompreneurs.” Volusion knew that this was a growing ecommerce audience, and that many of these are the women would appreciate sharing their stories. Part of the contest involved having the women describe themselves and the reason they started their business. Many moms participated in the project just to tell their stories, and one participant even described her entry as “therapeutic.” Because of the Volusion’s successful targeting strategy, they tapped into a rapidly growing market, and gained many faithful clients.

3. Pick the Right Prize :

Most of the contests feature a prize that can best be described as shiny. Think the latest tablets, vacations, or just good old-fashioned money. Marketers assume that a lot of people will be drawn to this, and they are correct. The issue is those people for just want a shiny prize. In general, there are three types of prizes that companies offer in contests: third-party prizes, a product from the business running the contest, or intangibles.
Of the three categories, third-party prizes are the most common, and the most misused. Stephanie Cicarelli, co-founder and chief marketing officer of Voices.com, ran a contest in January 2011 that featured an iPad as the main prize. Normally this would be a dangerous. However, the goal of the contest was to get photographs of singers in their studios or recording environment submitted to Voices.com. The mass appeal of the iPad was reason enough for many contestants to submit photos where they otherwise might have preferred privacy. In this case the appeal of the third-party prize was leveraged for a direct, tangible win.

Prizes that come from the business itself can be just as desirable as a third party product, with the added benefit of less up-front expense and the creation of brand advocates. Also, since the prize comes from the business running the contest, some targeting be already built-in. Powderhorn Mountain Resort featured a contest that asked visitors to upload photos of themselves enjoying the resort for a chance to win a free season pass. This was effective because their target audience already loved the business, and it encouraged winners to return again.

The final will prize category, the intangible prize, requires some creativity to use effectively yet can produce a massive ROI. SpeakSocial a marketing firm that focuses on the innovative use of social media, ran a contest to drum up support for a new sushi restaurant, Roll-On Sushi Diner. The contest allowed participants to submit ideas for the name of a roll that would be served at the restaurants. The winner would have to both the name of their roll and their real name featured on the restaurant menu. The prize cost absolutely nothing, yet opening days was an enormous success.

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7 Social Media Metrics You Should Be Tracking

Social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn provide an opportunity to build your brand and expand your business. Once you’re on them, measuring your success is essential to optimizing your online marketing campaign. Today, most small businesses drop the ball and forget to stay on point with their social media metrics. What they don’t know, is that measuring your social media metrics is a must if you plan to improve your standing on these sites and push things to the next level. Below, you will find 7 social media metrics that you should be tracking.

1 – Level of engagement

It’s very important to increase your presence on social media networks by interacting with your fans and followers. Your level of engagement refers to how active you are on your pages. This includes replying to mentions of your business, updating your status with company announcements, and how often you reach out to customers and communicate with them. Having an engaging presence on social media networks is big aspect to branding and it’s very important to your success. This is the number one social media metric that you should be tracking because it’s essential to everything else.

2 – Number of fans and followers

Keeping track of how many fans and followers you have on social media networks is very important. Your fans and follower speak to the success of your efforts. The more fans you have, the more interest there is in your profiles. Additionally, more fans means more exposure for your business because every fan you have can see your status updates and announcements. Keeping track of how quickly new fans are coming in tells you whether or not you are marketing your brand correctly.

3 -Reach

What size audience are you advertising yourself to on your social networks? Is this audience getting larger, or is it shrinking? The reach that you have on social networks absolutely must be tracked. This will give you a clear representation on how you’re doing and what the future could entail. Knowing how many people are potentially going to see your content is very important to knowing if what you’re doing is even worth the time that you are investing.

4 – Referrals

The traffic that your website receives will often come from search engines, but when it comes from another website, this is called referral traffic. In fact, Google Analytics refers to it as such as well. If your social media campaigns are successful, then you will be getting referral traffic. Analyzing your referral traffic and studying the bounce rate is vital. Referrals help you understand which social media networks are producing the best traffic and how your efforts are paying off.

5 – Number of mentions

Do other social users Tweet about you or mention you in their status updates? Are you ever discussed in the public eye by people other than your own employees? Knowing how often you’re mentioned and who’s mentioning you are very important factors. These are social media metrics that you should be tracking because it shows you how well branded you are as a business.

6 – Influence

When your brand has been promoted and recognized on social media networks, what influence does it have on those who see it? Does it encourage them to take action and promote your products and services themselves, or does your name slip into the back of their mind? This is metric that you should be tracking if you want to increase your referrals and reach.

7 – Success of promotions

Do you ever use social media networks to promote a coupon or promotional code for your website? If you don’t, you probably should be. Social media sites can provide a lot of traffic and promotions can improve the influence that you have over your readers. However, you still need to track this metric and produce statistics that can tell you how well your promotional efforts are paying off. How many people use the coupons that you promote and how many referrals does each coupon result in? These are important things to consider.

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Social Media Marketing

In today's marketing world social media is no longer a nice addition but rather a must. Gone are the days when someone could create a Facebook page and update it weekly then call it a night. There are three major aspects to social media marketing and when done right can lead to great rewards for your brand.

Engaging Your Audience

Today social media is about connecting with your current and potential clients and interacting with them via several social platforms. If your band is not engaging via social media you are well behind the times. Generic posting about your company or brand can get old and causes your audience to get bored. Studies show if you engage your audience they become fans and are more likely to share your content, which will help you reach new customers.

Compelling Content

Engaging is only half the battle when it comes to social. Creating compelling content whether it's articles, videos or graphs can help get your band more attention online. No one will share a video with their friends if the video is bad. In fact they might not even watch the entire video. This is the same for inforgraphs and articles. You have to get their attention and keep it. Social media works best when something goes viral and only compelling content goes viral.

Content Promotion

You can create the most compelling content but if nobody sees it, you will have wasted your time and money. Most content does not get attention useless an influencer gets a hold of it. Someone with relationships on social media platforms. We have a case study on our blog about a video that almost didn't get the attention it deserved. Content promotion is the most time consuming and expensive part of social media marketing.

Social Media Marketing Services

We offer a full services of social media marketing services from engaging, content creation and promotion. Our services our tailored to your business and can include; Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Youtube, Stumbleupon, Digg, Reddit, and Linkedin.

Social Media Consulting

Want to handle your own social media marketing? No problem, we love to discuss and train the best social media strategies. We offer our consulting on an hourly basis. This is a great service for a business just getting into the social space. We can provide pre-implementation and post implementation consulting and anywhere in between.

Optimization Overseas

Social media marketing is complex and is ideally targeted specifically to the culture of another country. Our friends at the Web Showroom are keen to assist companies that target solely the Australian residents. Aside from social marketing they also provide search engine optimisation for Google Australia. However, as mentioned they cater solely to Australian companies.

Social Media Tools

In the past few years many companies and individuals are starting to get their feet wet in social media marketing. It can be difficult to manage and keep up with the all the tweets, diggs, posts, updates and shouts.

To help monitor and stay connected with your social media efforts, we've compiled this list of seven great tools that can help you do more with social media in less time. Most of these tools are also a good way to stay organized and will ultimately make you a better friend to your social media buddies.

BackType

URL: http://www.backtype.com/

BackType is a conversational search engine that indexes and connects millions of conversations from blogs, social networks and other social media so people can find, follow and share comments. One of the most useful features is BackType Subscriptions sends you e-mail updates whenever someone comments on a post you specify.

Flock

URL: http://www.flock.com/

The Flock browser is designed to complement exciting social services. It utilizes their People Sidebar, allowing you to instantly interact with your friends on Digg, AOL, Gmail, Picasa, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Del.icio.us, Truveo, MySpace and many others.

Social Mention

URL: http://www.socialmention.com/

Social Mention is a social media search engine that searches user-generated content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos, and microblogging services. They also provide a feed API for developers to access search results in several different formats.

Social Media for Firefox

URL: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7888

Social Media for Firefox shows the number of Diggs, Reddit Votes, Stumble Thumbs and or Reviews, and Del.icio.us tags, Tweets, Sphinns, Mixx, and Tip'd votes so you can quickly see how popular certain content is. It can also scan said social sites to show you what content hasn't been submitted to other social news sites so you can be the first to add it. This can be a great tool and help you save time on Digg and Reddit.

TwitterFox

URL: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5081

This FireFox extension adds a tiny icon on the status bar that notifies you when your friends update their status. Also it has a small text input field to update your status.

PostRank

URL: http://www.postrank.com/

PostRank provides detailed information on Tweets, stumbles, diggs, and FriendFeed all in a convenient single place. It can help by continuously monitoring RSS feeds, finding the good stuff, and then creating a PostRank Score for each item to help filter the information

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Why Your Social Media Marketing Efforts Aren't Working

If you’re frustrated with the results you’re getting from your social media marketing efforts, you are not alone. Following are some of the top reasons your strategy isn’t working, and how you can turn that around to achieve better results.

1. Lack of Clear Goals: If you’re sharing content on social media networks without a clearly defined end goal, then your efforts are likely being wasted. With social media—or any marketing that you do for your business—you need to choose an intended outcome. Do you want to increase website traffic? Encourage people to sign up for your mailing list? Get exposure for your book? Improve brand recognition? Your goals become the target that you aim for. Without a goal, you might as well shoot arrows up into the sky and hope they land somewhere near the target.

2. Unrealistic Expectations: While clearly defined goals are important, it’s equally as important to make sure that your expectations are realistic. Social media is not a magic wand. It’s unlikely to attract truckloads of customers immediately. It is, however, a long-term marketing strategy for building brand recognition, getting repeat exposure with clients, attracting leads, promoting events, and eventually generating sales. Incidentally, social media should not be your sole marketing strategy; it should work in concert with your other marketing tactics such as print advertising, PR, referrals, etc. Every business should always run multiple marketing campaigns concurrently.

3.  Disconnected from Your Audience: Before you can begin to connect with people via social media, you have to first understand who those people are. You should know your audience intimately and understand who they are, what motivates them, what frustrates them, and what their needs are. These key elements will help you develop and share content that appeals to them.

4. Not Blogging Enough:  At the heart of a solid social media marketing strategy is your blog. You need great content to share, and a reason to bring people back to your site to read more and engage with you. Ideally you should update your blog a minimum of two to three times per week, and then share each new post with your networks.

Also, your content should clearly convey what your brand is about and should appeal to the needs and interests of your target audience. If your content isn’t connecting with your audience, then reconsider your strategy. Perhaps your blog posts need more enticing titles or you need to write more prescriptive content to help your target audience deal with their pain points. Maybe your content is boring! Inject some personality into your efforts, write really great titles, and strive to deliver value.

5. Treat it as an Obligation: If social media is just another item you feel you have to do each day and you resent it, that’s going to come across with your audience. The people and companies that are doing well with social media are the ones who embrace it and enjoy it. Imagine if you treated your clients like they were simply an obligation—they would certainly notice. Find a way to see the value and the fun in social media and allow that to shine through.

6. Lack of Direction: Yes, strategy matters with social media and you have to find one that works for your business. Pay attention to what is working for you and what isn’t, and do more of what works! Or hire an expert to help you craft an effective plan.

7. Missing Cross-Promotion: Let your existing clients and website visitors know about your social media presence and invite them to participate. Feature links to your social media profiles from the header of your website and across all web pages. You can also promote your links in your email signature, print advertisements, electronic newsletter, and other marketing collateral. Most of the major blog platforms have plug-ins that can feature recent Twitter posts on your website sidebar or view your Facebook followers. And don’t forget to add social sharing buttons to your blog and make it easy for readers to share your content with their networks.

8. Not Engaged: If you aren’t responding to your audience, appreciating them, and responding to their questions, then they will go elsewhere. Also, it’s not just about broadcasting your message. You will see far more results when you like and share other people’s content, mention them in your posts, and even recommend their products and services. Imagine if everyone in social media sent a shout out to recommend just one small business each day!

9. Failure to Build Your Audience: With social media, you have to actively recruit followers and fans. For Twitter, I believe in following back the people who follow you. This is good social etiquette, while also letting your audience know that you’re paying attention to them too. For Facebook, you can invest in ads to help get more “Likes” on your page. For LinkedIn, import contacts from your database and proactively send connection requests to people you know. For Google+, add people to your circles. The point is that you need to be proactive in building your audience and not just sit back and wait for them to find you.

10. Partial Effort: One of the biggest complaints I hear about social media is that it takes too much time, which leaves a lot of people either ignoring it altogether or trying to work it into their schedules when convenient. But an inconsistent effort leads to inconsistent results. If you were to commit to engaging with your social media networks on a consistent basis, you could discover a tremendous return on your time investment, and you’d realize it should be a top priority.

Nothing you do in life will produce great results if you aren’t fully committed. And the truth is that social media can be managed for most small businesses in under an hour per day. If you set realistic goals, develop content that appeals to your target audience, and consistently engage with your networks, you will begin to understand the real value that social media can bring to your business.

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How to Increase Your Social Network

Social networking is one of the biggest things to come about in many years. The more people that someone has on their social network, the more popular that they are in and the more contacts that they have to rely on. Therefore, several users of these networks are always looking for several ways in which they can increase their social network size. It is relatively easy to do and those that are serious about this will find that after putting in the time that they can get their social network to the size that they need.

One of the first ways in which someone can increase their social network is through joining groups that are going to be of interest to them. When a person joins a social network site they will find that there are several groups. These groups can relate to interests or hobbies, or even the type of work that the person does. These are all groups in which the person can find people that have similar interests and would be interested in being included in someone\'s social network.

Another method that is used to create a bigger social network is through including those that the person has a relationship in everyday life. They will find that through including their friends, relatives and the like that they can open up new ways in which to meet new people. It is all about connections when looking at social networking. For example, a friend of a friend could find the person and realize that this is someone that they want as a friend due to the same interests that are present. Thus, the network has been increased through a friend that the person already had.

The idea of building a social network is going to take time and effort and realizing what it is that you want in contacts. You will find that in most cases, you can make contacts rather easily through those that you already have on your contact list. The goal is to get a network that is strong and resilient. The more contacts that someone has, the bigger the chance that they will be able to use these contacts in order to get ahead professionally or when looking for helpful and friendly advice.

It is advised that no one turn a contact away, as you never know when this person could be someone that you need in the future. Thus, dedicate some time to keeping contacts and talking with them regularly to cultivate strong relationships.

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Mistakes That People Make With Social Media Marketing

The social media has become not only the best places of hanging out online but the social media websites are also great mediums for online marketing. Almost every modern business has social media presence and uses the websites for marketing. There are many reasons why the social media is a great marketing tool and the number of targeted customers is one of the best reasons. You can reach millions of people within a minute. However, there are many different kinds of mistakes, which people often commit, with social media marketing. You have to be sure that you are avoiding these mistakes sincerely.

People often think that having a social media page is enough and they don't need a business website of their company. The truth is that the social media sites are doors to your original website and you must treat them like that. The social media pages have many restrictions and they can never work as an entire website that you own. Having your own business website should be your first step to create an online presence.

Don't use same tweets

If you are using Twitter as a social media marketing tool then you have to make sure that you are not tweeting the same thing over and over again. If people are checking your Twitter account and see the same post repetition then they will soon lost interest in you. The important thing is to make sure that they find your tweets interesting. Even if you are marketing about the same product, use your tweets and style of writing.

Spelling and grammar mistakes hurt

You must check all your posts at least three times on the social media pages to make sure that they are error free. If you constantly make spelling or grammar mistakes then you will loose your trustworthiness soon. People don't believe someone if they don't find him or her worthy enough. You have to have an image of someone neat and responsible. Having spelling and grammar mistakes will make you look exactly the opposite of what you should be.

Having a professional image

Image is everything for the goodwill of a business. The social media pages are public places. You should share some of your private information but make sure that they are used to give you a clear image. If the customers find anything about you that is not good for your image then you will loose some business fast. Be aware of what you are posting online.

Never spam

Having your social media presence clean is a very important task for you. if you ever spam, or let anyone else spam on your page, that that will hurt your business. Keep your social media page clean of spasm and post valuable things that can actually attract people.

Revise your page

Just having a social media page for your business will never help you if you don't keep an eye on it and keep updating it. Make sure to check the page often, reply instantly if a customer asks something and keep the page updated with new posts. Organize your page well and measure your progress regularly.

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3 reasons why social traffic is worth it

“I came, I shared, I left.” – in many cases, this is the pattern that forms from traffic arriving from social platforms to many sites on the web today. Take a snapshot of the traffic to your website from social bookmarking sites, Twitter, Facebook et al, and you’ll see high bounce rates, low time on site, and generally low engagement. The upshot, for many site owners, is that social traffic is harder to monetise and indeed to convert to sales, or to advertising clicks.

So why the fuss?

This is the very question someone from a traditional business background asked me recently. Is social media really all hype, considering it offers low quality traffic? My response, was firmly no. There are a number of advantages to obtaining social traffic at any volume to your site, which aren’t immediately obvious, and justify why it requires attention from business owners regardless of their industry. Here’s why it should be ignored as a traffic source.

Social media traffic increases brand recognition.

To anyone with basic knowledge of economics, business works like this.

Revenue  - (Advertising Cost +Production Cost) = Income.

When it comes to quantifying social media ROI, it looks like the online advertising cost in this case really hasn’t paid off, particularly when compared against say, cost per click.You have to think about the brand reinforcement and recognition that will somewhere down the line convert to business, to treat it as a way of solely generating direct business is a flawed approach. Think about the long game.

Social media traffic powers your SEO.

Here’s the kicker that many people don’t get. Social traffic, and a social presence generally is massively important for organic SEO. Directly, AND Indirectly.

It is a massive driver in delivering links, and exposure. Here’s a breakdown of how it works for the unconvinced. Lets take two fictional website case studies, one using social media marketing (website X), the other not (website Y).

Website X

Website ‘X’ regularly create new content on their blog. Although similar to many other pieces of content found on competitors websites, it is well written, and is seen by 10% of the existing customers to the website for that day. However these visitors are concentrating more on buying, and haven’t got much time to read Website X’s blog. It is tweeted and shared a few times by those existing customers that see it, but it doesn’t get much traction. It is picked up by Google, and due to the websites current popularity and incoming links, ranks poorly on Google for it’s chosen keyword terms.

Website Y

Website Y begins a social campaign that concentrates on building an existing audience to market to on a variety of channels.  Prior to the content creation process, they have implemented RSS (subscriptions), an email marketing database, a Facebook page with over 1000 subscribers, and are engaged on Twitter with another 1000 followers.

Whilst these audiences don’t match the profile of their customers who normally buy widgets from Website Y, they have managed to accumulate over 4000 people on these channels who enjoy the content that they share on a daily basis. Website Y spends on average about 2-3 hours every day sharing useful content from other websites and their own to create a loyal following.

Website Y decide to publish an exceptional blog post related to the widgets that they sell. It’s completely unique in its approach, and can’t be found anywhere else online. They know that they can’t rely solely on the existing visitors to the website to gain traction and get it seen, so publish it on all the channels that they have available to them. They engage in an outreach program with other Widget bloggers to see if they would be interested in linking to it. They promote the content on other channels around the web with more traffic than them.

Thankfully the efforts pay off.

Website Y’s content gets infront of an influential twitter user who in turn retweets to his collection of over 1 million followers. The retweets explode, and the content begins to get shared all over the web, and saved in people’s bookmarks. It hits the Delicious hotlist. This in turn results in new links back to Website Y, all with the valuable link text that drives SEO positions. In a few weeks, the article’s popularity results in a first page position on Google due to the number of links from around the web that it generated, and a new fresh collection of targeted, relevant customers. Website Y adds a few links to the bottom of the article to push traffic through to its main ecommerce offering, further increasing sales.

Which of these scenarios looks more like your marketing? Website X have identified that content brings visitors, yet continue to develop it on mass, hoping something sticks, and attempting to build traffic a dribble at a time. Website Y have identified that firing a more direct shot, with a more tailored approach to their marketing AND content brings the kind of results that drive both sales and traffic. You can have your cake and eat it.

Google have also mentioned that they are tracking social mentions in their algorithms now as well, so the benefits are two fold. Links + Social mentions are now driving SEO positions. Matt says so too.

Social media traffic grows traffic.

Social traffic doesn’t provide direct sales. What it does provide however, is volume, and we there is inherent value in that. That volume of traffic is useful for ad impressions. It’s also useful for building relationships with people who ordinarily wouldn’t have visited your site. You may not be able to convert it to sales; but are you measuring how many RSS subscribers you gained, or how many additional followers on Twitter, or how many new Facebook fans you’ve received?

You should be.

All of these pull marketing platforms make a difference for the next time you’ve got something to broadcast, and increase the likelihood that you’ll be able to get your message to stick. That’s the real value. It increases your reach exponentially, and increases the chances that your future content will see the light of day, and indeed generate the links that make the difference between being first on Google, or on page ten for your chosen terms.

I think social traffic is a must for any website, in any industry. Hopefully I’ve convinced those of you who don’t already believe, that it is too.

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WEBSITE CONTENT AND SOCIAL SHARING

Business owners and marketers use Content Marketing to build their business, but in many cases a great blog article or website page falls flat and does not generate enough traffic for the amount of time invested into the article. This article will explain how to avoid this mistake in website marketing.

BLOGGING AND CONTENT MARKETING

Imagine that you have invested all your energy in an amazing piece of content that you plan on posting to your company's website or blog. You post it, and then–nothing. Absolutely nothing happens.

So how do you socialize your most valuable content? Assuming that you have truly valuable educational content that people are going to love and share and that is free of hype, this is going to work.

Why is it that great content is not shared with people? Because we are lazy. Yes, it is as simple as that. Unless it is made effortless, people are not going to share your content on their social networks. You need to embed social sharing in key strategic locations in your content. Make it so that people can click one button with one action and share your content on networks like Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and Linkedin.

Social sharing can be embedded in a blog post, an e-mail and even a .pdf file. But if people have to craft their own headline and create their own tweet, people are not going to do it. Just imagine if only ten people shared your content with their friends. If your content is really good people are going to want to share your content with other people. This results in enormous amounts of free traffic.

Social share buttons with a graphic that represents the four major social media networks—Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+, which make it so all that is needed is 'one' click, make your content's visibility grow exponentially. If people can easily share your great content, they will. "Easily" is the key word.

CONTENT MARKETING AND THE POWER OF BLOGS

What do you say to people that say blogging is dead? The problem is that we are defining article marketing the wrong way. A blog is just a way to format information. One company can have four or five different blogs. So, when someone says that blogging is dead, it is absolutely not true. What could be a more accurate description of the evolution of content marketing is that the old strategy of blogging has moved into a new era—social sharing, and blogging can be a vehicle at which great content is shared on the four major social media networks—Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Linkedin.

If your singular goal is to teach people better than anyone else in the world, and you put that information into blog format, you will be successful. It happens in every industry. Good teaching will never be dead.

WEBSITE OR BLOG AS A DESTINATION

Social media is not in your control. All it takes is for Facebook to make one change, and everything you have invested in your social media campaign can be potentially no longer profitable. Your investment can be wasted and go down the drain. So, in order to protect your business from this, keep your website or blog as your "destination" at which you channel your visitors. Yes, it is great if visitors visit your Facebook Page, but in the long run, your business will benefit more if the final destination is your company's website or blog. Because from there, you can channel visitors to your call-to-action.

KEEP YOUR DESTINY IN YOUR OWN CONTROL

What is the the best way to protect your company from wasting investments of content on social media? One word—control.

Companies go out of business every day because they invest everything in their social media campaigns instead of investing in quality content in a blog of website. Your ultimate destination that you want to drive your visitors towards should be your blog or website. So, instead of putting all your eggs into social media, invest in great content that is posted on your website or your blog. The articles that you write, you will use forever and your content will always help in your ability to communicate with your prospects and existing clients. You can use that content on a blog, in an e-mail marketing campaign, or you can use that content to share on your social media platforms. That content is yours and you can use it forever. Use and build upon your library of great content because there is power behind producing content. The effect it has—on a business and the employees, a brand and their call center is affected in the long run with quality articles that are written by a business owner (or a quality ghost writer) who strives to teach and be the best teacher in their field.

CONTENT MARKETING, YOUR ARTICLES, AND YOUR BUSINESS WEBSITE

What is content marketing exactly? Content marketing is teaching people through text, audio or video about whatever it is you do. Content marketing is a the theme of your quality, originally written articles and the basis of which your online marketing campaign will build upon. We have a name for great teaching and whether it is a blog, a YouTube video, or an e-mail marketing campaign—all this includes content that we are producing and pushing out the masses. Content marketing is huge and a strong part of building businesses on the Internet today.

BLOG AND WEBSITE TRAFFIC

A lot of people believe that if you build it they will come. This is not always the case.

By using content marketing, many companies have saved their business after the recession started. Radio, TV, print, and Google Adwords are expensive advertising tools, so smart companies have taken every single question that they have heard from a customer or prospective customer, and turned that question into a title of a blog post. A great content marketer or blogger says "If they ask, I am going to answer". A great business owner knows the value of content marketing and blogging. By providing this quality content that was asked, it should be on your website or blog somewhere. Within a matter of hours or days, your website can benefit from one single, quality well-written article. This can be achieved by just writing an article about something that a customer or prospect has asked. In sales, you often answer the same questions over and over again. Great content can shorten the sales cycle and increase profit. By shortening the sales cycle, you are able to save time on sales calls and, sometimes even close a deal over the phone rather than traveling to a prospect's home or business. Believe it or not, people read about a product or service in huge quantitates, well in advance before making a large purchase. With quality content on your website or blog, visitors will explode, leads will explode, and more people spend more time on your site so that your prospects are more prepared when your sale representatives start the sales cycle. Content is the most powerful sales tool in the world (when used properly). Shortening the sales cycle is the goal.

Service based businesses, and any business in any industry can benefit from this sales and marketing technique. You can reach price agreements with shoppers in a faster amount of time just by teaching your prospects through great content that answers questions that people ask. By becoming the best teacher in your industry or in your city or town, the principle of communication and great teaching, two parties will fall in love with you—Google and search, which means your website or blog will have a huge increase in traffic! And real people will be more interested in your product or service because you have taken the time to generate great content that answers their questions. Your prospects will appreciate you for being sincere and transparent. By providing the type of content that people in the past were not able to get, you gain trust and sales prospects.

WHAT IS GREAT CONTENT?

You must acknowledge that all content is not created equally.

What is great content? Great content is written like a person's speaks. Talk to the reader like they don't know what you are talking about. Acronyms and words that no one has ever heard of can hurt your content. Talk to your readers like they have no idea what you are talking about. And answer questions that on one else does. Talk about things that no one in your industry talks about. For example, many companies shy away from listing prices on their website or blog, so they just avoid the subject. Instead, embrace the subjects that no one else has the courage to embrace. Write about the tabu subjects. For example, you don't have to list exact prices. You can be vague with prices, while at the same time addressing the question that people looking for your product or service are interested in. By doing so, you make your company stand out from your competitors.

OSTRICH MARKETING

Some people think that a common problem or question will go away or not come up and that people will not notice if your company just doesn't mention it. This could not be further from the truth. People do notice! That is why this is called the Information Age. People know everything about you so you should not hide anything. Be open and transparent in your marketing and your clients will appreciate you for it. When you meet with a client for the first time, you want that prospect to feel like they have known you for a long time because they have read your articles or listened to your podcasts. Speak in everyday, conversational language. One way to do that is to pick up your smart phone and record yourself speaking out an entire article, then transcribe it yourself. Eliminate the marketing message from your content and answer questions, and your content will go further. It's called a blog, not brag. You can brag on your website, but on your blog—don't brag, but instead teach. Yes, include a call-to-action, but in the long run, an article on your blog is a teaching instrument.

WEBSITE ARTICLES AND YOUR BUSINESS REVENUE

Connect an article to revenue. How does a company connect its blog to business results?

On your website people can fill out forms and analytics track where the people that filled out the form or placed an order came from. With analytics, you will know where those people originated. HubSpot is one popular analytics tool. Google Analytics is a great one and it is free. When your sales team is aware of the content that you as a business owner have produced, it provides your sales team with another tool in their arsenal and gives them the vehicle of which they can teach. By following up with a sales lead, you can reach out and follow up with a prospect and answer a question that they had previously raised. Follow up with leads with an e-mail that includes a link to an article or video that answers their question, wait a few days—then follow up again. Every sales representative should be an active participant in the company blog because the sales team knows which questions are asked and the blog is the vehicle at which those questions can be answered.

TEACHING AS A SALES TECHNIQUE

Each employee can be a teacher.

Content marketing is a culture and we can all be teachers. In many companies, one silo is the sales department and one silo is the marketing department. They don't communicate and the content marketing cycle is broken. By including the sales team in the generation of your blog content, you merge the two departments. Your brand and blog will benefit and the culture of the company with merge into one environment that has a common theme. By making each employee a teacher, everyone in the company merges together into a common culture rather than separate silos.

WHAT IS A TIPPING POINT?

A tipping point is the magic number of page views that are required for a visitor to stay on your site. If you really study your analytics, you can learn your tipping point and learn how to make your closing rates go up. If visitors read the pages above that magic number, you are able to increase your closing rate. Conversely, if the visitor reads fewer than that magic number, then the closing rate reduces. Every industry has a tipping point and every service industry has it too. This principle applies to marketing online. If someone spends enough time on your site, they will eventually become a customer.

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Top Eight Social Trading Tips

Social trading makes it easy to share information and achieve investment success by viewing, following and even copying trades made by expert traders.  The massive volumes of data that social trading provides can sometimes make it difficult to know which traders to trust, and how to find the relevant information inside the ocean of live trading action.  The following tips will help you identify the traders that can provide the expertise you need to improve your trading performance.

1.    Sort traders by risk levels - This will enable you identify expert traders that have a trading style similar to yours, and whose trading actions will be more relevant to your own portfolio .

2.    Check out the trader’s following–By browsing through the guru's personal profile you can check out the number, diversity, and success of the gurus' followers. This will show you how profitable it is to follow a particular trader.

3.    Evaluate the trader's portfolio – A long-term trader with low risk levels and consistent profits may seem like a safe bet, but if this trader only trades one currency or commodity,his/her portfolio is more vulnerable to sudden market swings.  

4.    See how your guru compares with others–When checking out your guru’s portfolio, it’s a good idea to see how your guru stacks up against other traders who make similar investments and have similar trading styles. If there’s someone better out there, why settle for second best?

5.    Analyze your guru's performance – Current statistics don’t always show the full picture, so you should always see how your guru has performed over time. Has your guru been constantly improving? Or is his P/L curve full of peaks and valleys?

6.    Stick close to home –A guru that lives in your time zone and speaks your language is more likely to be open to communication.  Or if you follow a certain currency in particular, you may want to pick a guru with a local connection to this currency.   For example,a Canada based trader may be more aware of local public policy that can affect the value of the loonie.

7.    Evaluate sociability- A guru that interacts with his/ her followers can be much more helpful to you than someone who prefers to keep quiet. You can also evaluate the quantity and quality of their feedback from the followers’ responses provided. This will show you of how likely the expert is to share tips and tricks.

8.    Bring diversity to your people portfolio –Just as you’re advised to diversify your investment portfolio, it is best to minimize risk by following a wide range of traders. It is recommended that your portfolio contain a minimum of five experts so that no one trader can sink your balance.

These are just some of the basic tips you can apply to social trading. The best part of social trading is that it gives you access to an unlimited database of trader generated information 24/7.  Who you follow, how you interact, and how you invest is entirely up to you.

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