This month’s column is very different from most of my topical social media columns and I will apologies in advance for being a bit on the technical side at times.
The reason for discussion your website’s speed has a direct link to your social media marketing. It’s like this, all the effort you do online with your social media marketing is meaningless if your website visitors come to a site that loads slowly. It’s a known fact that visitors will wait for at the most 5 seconds when visiting a site before moving on to another when doing a random search.
The other day I was with a client who is very social savvy. He's one of my students from a social media course from RACC and credits his continued knowledge from our frequent conversations. These are his nuggets of knowledge. That's what he calls them. I found it interesting that he was so observant to see that Google had changed their platform from Google+ to Get Your Business Online. Yes, they made a very good change.
One of the biggest issues I hear from business owners about being involved with social media and marketing as a whole is, “I don’t have time.” My answer is to take time to plan — which is three quarters of the work.
It’s all about planning.
This year, in an effort to help our clients focus on planning, we created a Marketing Calendar. It includes marketing ideas for a variety of focus areas: marketing with your clients or employees; marketing through social media, your website, through print and outdoor signage; and finally through networking.
Search Engine Optimization or SEO for short is one of those mystifying marketing pieces for business owners. In fact, one of the interesting emails I receive from clients is when they forward me an email that says, “We have noticed that your website needs help in being found when searched on Google.” They wonder if they need to do anything. I always ask them this question, “With the millions of websites online, how did they find your website?” There is usually dead silence on the other end while that question computes.
What is all this hype about Big Data and how can our businesses capitalize on Big Data?
As I was doing some research for a presentation about the trends for 2017, this was mentioned more than once. I was curious as to what it was all about.
Over the past few weeks I've been hosting workshops on Planning Your Marketing and have found the workshops very informative not only for those attending as well as myself. In an effort to extend the reach of our Aha Moments at the workshops, I've included three of the ideas discussed in hopes that you can take advantage of these in building your client base to market your business.
One of the biggest issues I hear from business owners about being involved with social media and marketing as a whole is, “I don’t have time.” My answer is to take time to plan — which is three quarters of the work.
It’s all about planning.
This year, in an effort to help our clients focus on planning, we created a Marketing Calendar. It includes marketing ideas for a variety of focus areas: marketing with your clients or employees; marketing through social media, your website, through print and outdoor signage; and finally through networking.
It’s that time again. Time to take a look at your marketing program for 2016 and create a plan for 2017. One of the things we do with our Pick Your Own Marketing Plan clients is meet with them in November or December to look at any change they may want to do for 2017. We discussed their goals and plans for growth? We review what is currently working and tweak what may not be working or needs improvement.
We have had the opportunity to work with a team of people who wrote a book called The Art Of The Nudge. Their leadership communication framework, TATN, is used in a variety of ways to help inspire business executives and their business associates to actions that deliver results in a variety of ways. While working with them, I have seen a difference in my own business by making small changes or better described as nudges.
When Paul Fair, with Paul Fair Associates LLC, met with me the first time, he had an adequate website but it wasn’t producing the traffic he was looking to reach. He also had an email engagement in place but was lacking in the engagement part of it. His social media presence was nonexistent.
With out a doubt, every time I teach a class, there is always someone in the class who asks me, “What is a hashtag?” I then explain what it is and does to fine tune searches for your specific event, product, phrase, or business. Let's look at how it works.
We’ve all visited eCommerce sites. But what are scommerce sites? Believe it or not, some of the largest scommerce sites are Amazon and Groupon. Now, all sizes of companies can sell through these means, but if you've ever worked with them you know there is a very small margin of profitability.
What if a business wants to take their own ecommerce site and control their own scommerce on the Internet, and not lose a piece of their profit margin to the goliaths like Amazon and Groupon?
We have a client who has been on YouTube for more than two years with a YouTube channel complete with playlists. Along with his monthly market updates, he uses it to share news about other local businesses.
The interest to visiting his channel has been, well, pathetic. Oh, we've received views by sharing links from Facebook to YouTube, but certainly not what we hope to have.
Most people would think a person who teaches Social Media Mastery and provides businesses with daily posting to their business page would be on social networks all day. That is not the case at all. If all my clients were located in other states, yes, then you would find me online for hours at a time but that, too, is not the case.
Having experienced a cold harsh winter like we just experienced, I welcome spring and the opportunity to work in my garden and dig in the dirt. I find it amazing to think what you can yield from one, single seed. With the proper planning, planting, watering, and harvesting, one seedling from a green bean can provide a meal, maybe two, for a family of four. Plant a whole row of seeds and you'll be canning and freezing beans to eat well into 2016.
If video is the wave of the future on Social Networks, how do you go about creating a quality video with your smartphone? Well, first and foremost, there is no replacement to working with a professional videographer to create a quality profile for your company. Yet, there will be those times when you are in a setting where you need to react in the moment and want to take advantage of the opportunity to create a brief video to upload on YouTube, Vimeo or directly to Facebook.
As I was preparing for this month's column, I thought it would be a great idea to share what is being said by other Social Media Experts throughout the cybersphere.
When teaching Social Media Mastery to my classes, I have a few rules I share with them that have been my practice in building and maintaining LinkedIn. It's also important to note, if your clients are businesses and not consumers, you want to concentrate on LinkedIn as your social network of choice. With that said, these are four rules to build and manage a successful LinkedIn network.
