Posts Tagged ‘Marketing’

Entrepreneurs: Leverage Your Products and Services With Social Media

Tuesday, January 22nd, 2013

Since ideas are like elbows (everyone’s got them), finding new and creative ways to connect with a wider audience and target the right demographic will get your brand out there and increase your numbers in sales and client conversion. In a recent article on Clickz.com, CEO of TopRank Online Marketing and author of “Optimize: How to Attract and Engage More Customers by Integrating SEO, Social Media and Content Marketing,” Lee Odden offers several ways in which entrepreneurs can use social media to target the audiences who need their products or services most.

Socia Media MarketingAs a marketing expert, Odden advises new entrepreneurs to use social media to search for the audience that will benefit most from what you are offering, to learn more about what fans are talking about and what terms they use and to also find influencers who will spread the word about your product or service. Creating a Twitter account or Facebook fan page is a good start, but if you want to reach the right crowd of users, read on and learn how you can use social media tools to jumpstart your company’s marketing engine.

Be a Social Listener

Before you reach out to groups and individuals on a social network like Twitter or Facebook, take a moment to see what your competitors are doing and what is working and what isn’t. Odden says being a social listener means researching what your prospective audience is talking about and understanding what is trending in their world and why. If you are planning on building a used car dealership that sells only hybrid and electric vehicles, visit other Facebook fan pages or Twitter pages that belong to local car dealerships. Follow and like their pages and check out what their fans are saying and learn about who their customers are. Researching a Chapman Ford AZ fan page, or following a used car dealerships’ Twitter feed can give you some ideas on how social media works when it’s done well.

Get Connected

Being an entrepreneur is a profession that relies so heavily on sharing ideas and networking. Mashable.com’s Dan Schwabel suggested his top social networks that are made for entrepreneurs, like Cofoundr, PartnerUp, and StartUp Nation. Cofoundr is particularly nice, because it offers exclusive deals and discounts for entrepreneurs and connects them with their niche groups. LinkedIn is a good way to connect with audiences and other entrepreneur professionals, but there are other networks out there. Young Entrepreneur caters to the younger startup crowd and The Funded, a review site that helps entrepreneurs connect with sources for capital to really get the ball rolling.

A Rewarding Experience

Everyone likes a deal or a reward for doing something, even if it’s the gratification of getting a coupon for clicking “like” on a fan page. Startups like Buzz Meditations, an online jewelry store that focuses on selling to the younger crowd of yoga enthusiasts, got off to a good start for their social campaign by offering special gifts and rewards to the first 100 fans of its page. Facebook fan pages go on this model, offering special coupons and offers that only their “fans” will know about if they visit and like their page. The same is true for Twitter followers who can get deals that are exclusive to Twitter followers.

While your fans are grinning ear to ear about the reward they earned for liking or following you, tell them more about why you are the better choice to go with, out of the sea of other services and products out there. Once they’re hooked on your brand, keep growing your services and improving your products, so your base will never stray.

Tags:, , , ,
Posted in Guest Post, small business, Tips & Tricks | 1 Comment »

Why SEOs Fail In Social Media

Friday, October 19th, 2012

Few years ago, website owners who desire quality and consistent traffic of targeted consumers will naturally turn to a professional SEO (Search Engine Optimizer – that is a professional who practices search engine optimization of websites).  Well that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. The trend has suddenly changed because webmasters have noticed that SEOs are not as successful with Web 2.0 media environment as they were with its predecessors. Why are the SEOs failing where they formerly succeeded? What is the implication of this to webmasters and small business owners seeking for customers online.

SEO

The simple answer is that SEOs fail to adapt to the new Web 2.0 media environment and attempt to apply rules of the older Web to the new situation. Human beings are dynamic. What they like today, may not necessarily be what they will like tomorrow. So, a strategy that worked yesterday, may not deliver a good result tomorrow. Let’s look at some reasons why SEOs tend to fail in Web 2.0 media environment.

1) Preference to automation

It is an established fact that SEOs love to automate. On the contrary, social media encourages conversations among people. This tendency of encouraging automation makes SEOs a failure in social media. After all one prefers engaging conversation to an automated conversation. Your website must not place priority on the search-bots over human visitors.

2) Improper marketing strategy

SEOs believe in highlighting their services without caring if the people are listening. This strategy does rarely work as people care only when you ensure that you are caring for their needs. SEOs rarely do market research and instead go about bloating about their services. One converted social media user can do a lot of free marketing for you in his or her social media circles.

3) Materialistic approach

SEOs have become more materialistic with changing times. Their sole interest lies in increasing their brand value and earning more money. They lag behind on promoting social issues and rarely pay attention to social values and issues impacting our daily lives.

On the contrary social media has become a face of youth with a range of options available to showcase concern on issues affecting ones lives. Be it environment, culture or degrading social values, social media has risen to the occasion. SEOs are increasingly busy in minting money and hardly pay attention to this fact, thus making them perform miserably in social media.

4) More attention to keyword stuffing

Keyword stuffing seems to be a mantra of success for those in SEO business. They hardly take pains to ensure that the work becomes an interesting read. This makes their task even more difficult as a common reader only wants engaging content. This is possible only if thorough research has been conducted. Repeating keywords in order to attract search engine bots produce a negative result with human visitors. Someone coming to your site for information on meeting a particular need will simply get irritated when he or she discovers that he was lured to a page that cannot meet such need. Social media scores a point on this account, thus leading to devaluation of SEO when it comes to sharing information when it comes to SEO sharing their information via the social media way.

5) Focus on page rank

SEOs still live in the past. They pay much attention to page rank. Page ranking was an imperative few years ago but changing scenario over the last few years has brought about a radical change in this thinking. A website may be having Page Rank 9, but it might still reflect at 1 position on Google. It’s all about quality content and fulfilling the aspirations of new tech smart generation. SEOs seem to be lagging on this front, thus making their task difficult when it comes to promoting services in social media.

6) Sneaky enough

Instead of building upon their brand through quality content promotion, people in SEO segment believe in quick gains. They fail miserably on social media as the audience is smart enough to smell a rat in this haste.

As webmaster or a small business owner, you need to consider the facts discussed above you part with your hard earned cash engaging the service of a self-acclaimed SEOs. Don’t get someone who will simply splash some keyword rich content on your website to attempt luring the search engine bots to position your website on page 1. Getting to the first page of the search engine result is not the goal, staying there and attracting consistent visitors who will become paying customers is the goal of every business website. So, there is need for your SEOs to understand your target market so that he can know how best to engage and keep their attention with dynamic content on your website.

When SEO tactics are over-used, they may end up harming rather than benefiting. Make sure you use SEO tactfully so as to maintain your readers’ loyalty without compromising quality. Many weary business owners have been burned by SEO firms who promise the world and then never REAL results. It might surprise you but it is a fact that SEOs have failed to make an impact when it comes to adapting to the rapidly evolving world of social media. It is unfortunate that many search engine optimizers still follow SEO 1.0 and have failed to adapt to web 2.0 media environment.

SEOs need to rethink and rework their strategies in order to make a worthy appearance in social media. Times are changing and the one who adapts to changing scenario will emerge victorious.

About The Author: Carol is an internet marketer. She loves writing and marketing. She is a big fan of Latest technology. These days she is thinking about latest technology used in upcoming iPhones.

Tags:, , , , ,
Posted in Blogging, Guest Post, small business, Tips & Tricks | 1 Comment »

Using Articles As Affordable Internet Marketing Tools

Wednesday, May 12th, 2010

How To Use Articles as Online Marketing Tools

Wondering how to promote your website or product with a shoe string budget, then you need to read this article on  using articles as affordable internet marketing tools to the end. It is an established fact that content is King. However, where the content is residing is an important factor that determines whether it will be featured in SERP  (search engine report pages) or not. If your website is new or unknown to the search engine spiders, whatever you write and post on the website may not be discovered by online surfers. So, it is actually content that is of good quality and has been discovered by online users that get crowned king.

If you’ve observed, search engines tends to give preference to articles hosted by popular article directories such as Ezinearticles.com and GoArticles.com.  Often, if any of the highly rated article directories has an article for the searched item, it will most likely be displayed on the first page of the search engine report page. Guess what, you can use that to your advantage.

All you need to do is sit down and write a quality article that provides needed information about the product or need your website is focused on. After writing the article, take time to go through it and ensure that your keywords are evenly distributed within the content of the article while maintaining the natural communication tone. Note that some of the popular article directories moderate articles before publishing. If your article is considered as link bait because it has an overdose of particular keywords, it will be rejected and not published.

After writing the article, insert a link to your website in the resource box and give a little information about your website too. Some article directories will permit you to insert one or two links in the body of the article. In that case, I suggest you use your keyword phrase as anchor text to link back to a popular article on your website. This has several advantages which we will talk about later.

So, what is the catch? When keywords related to the articles you submitted are typed on search boxes of search engines, indexed websites containing articles with those keywords will be displayed. Since most of the popular article directories are already having a high pagerank with many of the search engines, you have a good chance of having your article turning up within the first and second page of the search engine report. (Note, this may not happen immediately, sometimes, it takes between three days or more before you start seeing the result.)

How to get your articles listed

Since you are not the only one submitting articles to the article directories, you need to understand that what turns up for a particular article directory will be the best the search engine feels that particular article directory has to offer. You can guess what happens, if there is a better article already submitted to the article directory on the same subject you wrote on, yours may not be presented.

Wondering how to tackle that? This is what I do. I simply search the article directory first before writing any article. When I’ve gotten the best article it has to offer on a particular topic, I take time to read the article and find out all the flaws I can get about the article. After all that I simply sit down and produce an article that is far superior in quality to the existing article on the directory.

After submission and the article is published, I go back and use social media like Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit etc to promote the article. That way, it gets more focus within the article directory and is ranked higher than the existing articles.

When eventually the article turns up in the SERP, it will start generating traffic to your website in two ways. First, some readers will click the link in the resource box to visit your website. Also, some webmaster who are too busy to write articles for their site will post those articles on their website thereby giving you free link-back to your site.

What are the benefits of Using Articles As Internet Marketing Tools?

1. Articles are free promotional tools for internet marketing. The only possible cost you may incur is your time. Well, I took for granted that you already paid your Internet Service Provider. That’s it. All you need is your thoughts, your computer, and your hands. If you have those, nothing will stop you from typing words that will produce a high quality article for your internet marketing. Well, if you’re too busy or too lazy to write an article, then you may need to spend some cash by outsourcing to ghost writers who can do the job for you for some few dollars.

2. Articles are a sure way of making people know that your website exist. If you submit several articles of yours to article directories that get the most web traffic, you can be rest assured that in less than no time your website will get noticed by search engine visitors and visitors from the article directories.

your ranking on the SERP will go up..

3. Articles offers a free way of obtaining one way back links automatically. When you submit your articles to directories, surely, other websites will make use of your articles. If you have inserted links to your website in the resource box or the body of the article, you can be rest assured that this will cause your website to get higher ranking in the SERP thereby increasing search engine traffic to your website.

4. With Articles You Can Make Yourself an Expert In Your Niche. You can easily improve your online reputation by writing quality articles that presents you as an authority in your chosen field. As an Internet marketer, if you plainly display your products on your website, you will not gain much conversion rate. Conversion is when your traffic converts to sales. You have to show that you are knowledgeable on your field. People like listening and buying from people they consider experts. Articles have a way of showing you off as an expert in a chosen field. If your articles meet the need of the readers, they simply assume you know what you’re talking about. They won’t get to discover that you were only using materials freely available online to meet their need until you accept an interview with Oprah or Larry King. As long as you keep your profile low offline, nobody will discover that you were only recycling information.

Update: Don’t submit an article you have already published on your website to any article directory. Such action is counter productive, as you may get Penalized by some of the search engine for duplicate content.

Start Your Internet Marketing Campaign Now

There is no better time to start using articles for your online marketing campaign. Get into action now, make your creative juices flow as you start producing articles for your internet marketing campaign. I perceive you are already having some ideas popping into your heart as you read this, jot down those ideas quickly to jumpstart your article writing momentum. With those benefits listed above, I believe I’ve been able to motivate you to start using articles as your affordable internet marketing tools. I’ll love to hear your views in the comment section. Cheers.

Tags:, , , , , , , ,
Posted in Blogging, Entrepreneur, small business | 30 Comments »

5 Tips For Business Growth

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

How Can I Achieve Steady Business Growth?

Sustaining business growth in a down economy is not a simple feat to achieve. But believe it or not, that is exactly what some businessmen in Nigeria are doing. While some Nigerian businessmen are busy lamenting the poor manner the government is handling the current economic crisis (they do have a valid point though), some wise entrepreneurs are making steady business progress and getting fantastic returns on their various investment in the different sector sof the economy.

Truly, one man’s misfortune can be another’s fortune. If you doubt ask the undertaker, the more people die as a result of epidemic or natural disaster, the more his business booms. So, it is actually possible to be celebrating while others are lamenting, it simply depends on where you position yourself.

Every entrepreneur desire that his or her business should grow. Nobody wants to have the same turnover at the end of each financial year. However, just like most things in life, it is not about wishing for result, it is about taking the right steps to achieve the desired result. So how can an entrepreneur sustain business growth during an economic crisis? I’ll share with you five proven tips for steady business growth.

5 Proven Tips For Business Growth

1. Keep Your Current Customers Happy – A bird in hand is worth more than 1million that you are dreaming of getting with your marketing gimmicks. Keep your current customers. Do everything feasible to keep them happy and loyal to you. Don’t neglect complains or ignore their suggestion. If you’ve not been doing that, it is time to overhaul your customer care service such that it truly portray that you believe that the customer is king.

Get creative and devise ways to make it seem difficult and uneconomical for your customers to switch to  your competitors. Add value to your products and services at no extra cost to your customers. Some of those addons can actually be done without you eating into your profit. It just require a little brainstorming with your team to bring out ideas you never thought possible.

Give personalized services to each customer making him or her feel that he or she is the most important client you’ve got. Everyone appreciate being treated as a VIP. Give your customers that special touch of royalty. It won’t cost a dime to insist that your staff should treat each customer like a king. Just remind your team that it is the customer that pays the bills.

2. Increase Your Market Share –  There is an adage that the best form of defense is attack. Go after the customers of your competitors. Woo them with better offers and customized packages. Give them sufficient reason to consider ditching your rival and pitching their tent with you.

It is business war out there, so map out strategies on how you will gain more market share at the expense of your competitors. Go brainstorming with your team on how to provide higher quality product/service at the same price or lower than your competitors.

Don’t say it can’t be done. Keep working at it and soon, you and your team will figure a way out. Then you can go full swing into raiding your competitors of their loyal customers. Be tactical though, especially when dealing with competitors that have financial muscle.  If they get wind of your strategy, they may launch a counter-attack that you are not prepared for.

3. Be Proactive, Keep Current on Market Events –  Knowledge is power. It is your business to know what is happening and what is likely to happen soon in the market you belong. You need to keep tap on developments in the market that can affect your position.

Your ability to spot opportunities before competitors will give you an added advantage. Don’t wait until the news is spread on the print or electronic media before taking action. Successful businessmen sniff out information before it is made public. You need to watch industry shifts, changes in buying trends, seasonal changes, technological changes etc. The world is dynamic, what worked yesterday, may be obsolete today, so keep yourself up to date on market trends.

4. Strive to Enter New Markets – Don’t be a local champion in your present market. Look for opportunity to make profitable entry into other markets. Study markets that have potential for your business and plan how you will enter without loosing money to fierce competition in such market. Identify areas where you have an advantage over an existing competitor and ensure you can match the standards of quality and value being provided.

5. Diversify Your Business – Never put all your egg in one basket. Study businesses that are related to yours. Plan on diversifying into some of the simple ones such that you are not tied to a particular channel of income. Dangote Group is a good example of a Nigerian Business that has diversified successfully.

Business Growth don’t just happen. Successful Businessmen set goals, plan and work towards realizing their dream of steady business growth. If you don’t work it out, it won’t happen by accident. So, quit complaining and whining about the poor state of the nation’s economy. It is time to take advantage of the opportunities that have been made available by the economic crises. If you’re determined to experience Business Growth, nobody can stop you, because nobody have a blueprint for stopping you. Cheers 😉

Tags:, , , , , , ,
Posted in Entrepreneur, small business | 11 Comments »

5 Tips For Ensuring Consistent Customer Patronage

Thursday, December 4th, 2008

How Do I Ensure Consistent Customer Patronage?

An entrepreneur is consider successful when he has gotten a good number of customers who consistently patronize his products or services. It is the dream of every business man to have satisfied customers returning time and time again to make more purchases. Here are five tips that many successful entrepreneurs use to build such customer patronage.

1. Build Good Personal Relationship With Your Customers

Don’t just aim at your customer’s purse or pocket! Render quality services that will truly satisfy their need and then back that up with a personal touch that shows you are genuinely interested in their welfare. When you do this, they will come to consider you as a friend instead of a salesman that is after their money.

Remember that everyone craves for attention and recognition. Don’t wait for them to ask for it. Give them attention, make them feel special. Treat them as friends! Research has shown that about 80% of customers who complain are just seeking for attention, not that they actually have a serious issue with the product or service they are complaining about.

Don’t wait for such customer to ask for attention, give it to them cheerfully. You can be assured they will return for more.

2. Be Courteous To Customers

Treat each client as a king. Believe it or not, without their patronage, your business is as good as dead. Also note that an unsatisfied customer can cost you so much in terms of bad publicity. He or she can make you loose potential income by discouraging others from doing business with you. Unfortunately, you may not be given an opportunity to defend yourself before such potential customer pass a vote of no confidence on you and your business. Do all within your power to treat each customer with respect, kindness and offer extras as much as you can afford.

3. Business Integrity

This is your greatest asset as a business owner. Deal with clients honestly and insist that your employees do likewise. Never make a promise that you cannot keep. Always keep your promise even if it requires a sacrifice to keep your word. This will win your customers trust and make them have confidence in you.

4. Reward Clients Patronage

Devise a means of compensating clients who patronize your business often. Make them feel they are special because indeed they are special to you. They are the ones that gives your business stability. Give discount and if possible render some additional services to such consistent customer without demanding for payment. This will enshrine you to their hearts.

5. Add Value To The Society

In all your dealings, always seek for a way to add value to the society. This pay huge dividend on the long run. Human beings are intelligent, they know the difference between a business man who adds value and the one that seeks for profit.

Summary

If you make up your mind to render quality services and products, beyond what you are paid for, in due time, clients will be eager to pay you for more than you offer. Many successful businesses have built such goodwill that people are willing to pay more for their brand of product even when it is the same quality with that of a competitor. You can get future updates to this post 5 Tips For Ensuring Consistent Customer Patronage by subscribing to Nigerian Entrepreneur RSS, cheers.

Tags:, , ,
Posted in Entrepreneur | 1 Comment »