5 Facebook Marketing Tactics That Help You Lose Fans
Engaging your Facebook Fans and growing your community is really important to a small business marketing plan. Many blog posts review all the good things to do to promote your Facebook page and grow your fan base, but there are tactics that can cause a major reduction. According to a study by ExactTarget and CoTweet, “More Than 90% of Consumers Unsubscribe, Unfan or Unfollow Because of Too Frequent, Irrelevant or Boring Communications”.
So if you want to reduce the number of Facebook fans for your page, try to do some of the following Facebook marketing tactics more often than those that can increase your fan base. Read more »
8 Marketing Benefits of Blogging for Small Businesses
Blogging is hard and a lot of work. I realize that some people make it look easy, but not all of us are naturally talented writers. If we were, we’d be writing the next bestseller. But with all the marketing benefits of blogging, we need to overcome the objections and add regular blogging to our marketing activities.
One myth about blogging is you have to blog daily or it isn’t worth it. I totally disagree with those who say that blogging less than 2-3 times a week is “most appropriate for bloggers who maintain blogs as a hobby with no strategic plans for growth”. This may be true for large companies with many resources, but small businesses need to balance their time between working on your business verses working in your business. Client work comes first, life gets in the way and sometimes you just need a break. And in this case, your blogging frequency will depend on what works for you. Read more »
Three WordPress Plugins for More Effective Online Marketing
Most small business marketing is done online where first impressions, relevant content and social media integration are key requirements for achieving visibility, which ultimately should result in quality inbound leads. Your website, which is the hub of your online presence, needs to be created on a platform that makes it easy for you to maintain, add new content and keep it fresh for your ideal clients. WordPress is the website platform of choice because it enables small businesses to achieve a quality, professional web presence that is easy and cost-effective to update and maintain.
What makes WordPress easy to use and maintain is the inclusion of WordPress plugins, created by a network of developers, that extend the basic WordPress platform with complex functionality without custom development. The following are three WordPress plugins that extend the platform to include features critical to your online marketing:
What do these plugins have to do with marketing?
- You need to optimize your site to be found
- You need a strong call-to-action on each page of your site with an associated form to encourage people to contact you (inbound leads are the best)
- You want prospects to see reviews from your very happy customers on your website (and other review sites too)
Let’s take a look at them in a bit more detail. Read more »
8 Step Process for Gaining Local Search Engine Visibility
For many of my clients, being found by those searching for local businesses can make a huge difference in the number of inbound leads they receive. If you are a local business (i.e. you service clients within a specific geography or have a store front) and haven’t implemented a local search strategy, your missing a huge opportunity to grow your business.
Google has made many changes to how businesses get ranked in the past 6 months so if you are getting advice from blog posts before October 2010 about the important factors that help you get found on the Google Map, it is out of date and you may be mislead on what works and what doesn’t.
First let’s start with a video by Google product manager Jeremy Sussman explaining some of the new features implemented recently and the three primary factors that help you get ranked higher for local searches: relevance, prominence and distance. He also explains some of the new products – Google Tags and Boost for the advertiser and Google Hotpot (whose name is disappearing and replaced with Places) for the searcher.
If you take the steps necessary to be found prominently in the Google local search results, you will also rank well on Yahoo and Bing. Read more »
Tags: local online marketing, local search, SEO
MailChimp – Email Marketing & List Management
For the small business owner, it is always a pleasure to find useful tools that help you better market your business. It’s even more of a pleasure to find one that offers a robust free option.
MailChimp is an email marketing and list management service that is simple to use and supports many powerful features. Its mascot is a cartoon chimp that delivers humorous comments as you use the product. The “Forever Free” plan includes up to 2000 subscribers and 12,000 emails per month. For most small business owners, this is more than adequate to help you incorporate email marketing into your marketing activities.
There are many reviews written about MailChimp that go in to much more detail than I will, but I wanted to highlight the main reasons why I’m a convert to MailChimp and why I recommend this service to my clients. Read more »
10 Ways to Drive Qualified Visitors to Your Website
Just Because You’ve Built It, Doesn’t Mean They Will Come
You finally have a powerful website and blog that you are proud to show off, with messages that clearly explain how you help your clients and the value you provide. Now, how do you drive your target audience to your site and generate qualified leads? The following 10 tips create an inbound marketing plan that will drive traffic to and turn your website into a powerful hub for your web presence.
1. Optimize your site around your top keywords
Understanding how people search for your products or services enables you to develop a keyword list that you use for all of your marketing activities. Then optimize each page of your website around one keyword phrase, making sure you use it in your web page title, the meta description tag and appropriately throughout your content. Read more »
Tags: article marketing, content syndication, search engine optimization, SEO, web presence
Email Marketing: Getting Permission is Only the Beginning
Continuing with the theme of email marketing, now that you have started to build a great opt-in email list, what are you going to do with it? How will you engage your readers so they form a community of people interested in what you have to say?
A consistent, well-organized, informative or entertaining email newsletter extends your reach while helping you build strong relationships with your readers. Email marketing is a component of your online and social media marketing effort and they work together to:
- Increase your visibility
- Deepen the level of trust your readers have in you, and
- Develop your reputation as an expert in your field.
For email marketing to be effective, you need to determine your goal for the campaign and build a plan to define what you want to say, how often and the resulting benefits to the reader. People on your email list may not need what you offer right now, but they have some challenge that they feel you can help them with or they wouldn’t have opted in. Read more »
Email List Building: 9 Tips to Increase Subscribers
Building your email list should be one of your top marketing goals. Having great content that would attract your ideal client is a major component of this email list building process, but even with the best content, some businesses still haven’t built an email list of subscribers that can help them with their long term marketing efforts. Read more »
Tags: email list building, email marketing service, MailChimp, permission marketing
Facebook Business Page – Recent Updates
On February 10th, Facebook introduced the new Business Page layout that has included many new and often asked for features. Facebook gives you the ability to tour the new design before you have to upgrade, but all pages will be upgraded to the new design by March 10th. If you want to see what the new page design looks like, visit the Masterful Marketing Facebook page or view this video tutorial by Jason Keath of Social Fresh.
I chose to upgrade immediately because I liked what I saw from a clean design and some new features that have been asked for for quite some time.
Tags: facebook features, facebook marketing, facebook updates
Google Places – Best Practices for Local Search Engine Optimization
Last October, Google rolled out Google Place Search, a new user interface for local search that organizes information around location. These changes merged the Google Map listings and organic results in a new way that makes it critical to pay attention to your online presence. Gone are the pack of 7 or 3 results at the top with a map, replaced by blended results that incorporate pieces of your website, your Google places listing, citations about your business from other sources and reviews from sites such as CitySearch, Yelp, Yahoo, Merchant Circle, InsiderPages and other Internet Yellow Pages sites and directories. The major objective of the change is to cluster search results around specific locations so you can more easily compare results and select the business that best meets your needs.
Google Places Blended Results
After 3 months, the effects of this change has become very apparent. In some ways this change created new challenges for those of us who succeed in getting our client’s websites on the first page of Google’s organic search results. Prior to this update, those organic results would be very visible below the Google Map and associated businesses. Now, to be listed prominently, you need to create a quality Places page that provides greater information to those who are interested in what you have to offer and continue to work your website SEO for organic results. Those businesses that do both very well will reap the benefits of this change. Read more »
Tags: local business listings, local search, online local marketing
