Here are a few tips to increase "Likes" on FB.
Giveaways don't attract users who stay.
1. Ask a question...
Builds community.
-What should I do? Preferences?
Wondering How..? Want To..?
2. Share your life...
People like to know about you.
-Who are you?
Share something unrelated to your business.
-Insert Instagram posted photo into FB.
3. Share complimentary products...
-Share a photo of a product and link to it, but not in direct competition.
-Let person know that you shared their work.
4. Behind the scenes...
-Take photos while working.
-Post to Instagram and then FB.
Shows people your process and hard work that goes into your business.
Can combine with a question.
5. Facebook Fan Special...
-Offer 5-10% off a particular item or range of items
24 Hour Special, short term with nice payoff
-Promote around other social networks to drive to FB page.
5 Ways to Increase Facebook Traffic
7 Unbelievable Mobile Marketing Success Stories
Have you thought about how your company can leverage mobile marketing to increase sales?
When the sky is the limit and the opportunities seem endless, it can be difficult to develop an initial strategy. Reading blog posts and reaching out to thought-leaders is a good way to gain knowledge, but how will you use that knowledge to craft a killer mobile strategy? Learning by example can help get you started.
Here are 7 mobile marketing success stories that will inspire your own mobile marketing efforts.
Why Short Videos Are Wildly Popular Over Social Media
BY Michael Miller
When it comes to marketing your brand or business online, can you tell your story in 15 seconds? How about six?
That's all the time you have when you use one of the new short-video sharing apps available for iOS and Android devices. Vine was the first of these video apps, enabling you to shoot and upload videos no more than six seconds long and loop over and over. Not to be left behind, Instagram recently added video sharing to its digital photo app, and upped the time limit to a whopping 15 seconds per video. Instagram videos don't loop.
Then there's MixBit, which lets you shoot short videos but also enables editing of multiple clips into longer one- and two-minute videos.
All of these services are mobile-only, with videos shot and shared from iPhones and other mobile devices. Vine and Instagram video, especially, are proving to be immensely popular. Vine, which is owned by Twitter, amassed 13 million users in its first four months on the market. Instagram Video was immediately available to the service's 130 million users, who uploaded more than five million videos in the service's first 24 hours.
But, let's be serious: What is up with the short videos? Are six seconds and 15 seconds arbitrary amounts of time? Or is there some method to this madness?
The short-video approach is designed to offer viewers a much different viewing experience than with traditional longer-form videos. Case in point are Vine's six-second videos, which are immediate and without pretense. They're also short enough to upload and view quickly, even on slower mobile connections. Instagram went for slightly longer videos that enable companies to upload new or existing 15-second commercials.
In practical use, Vine's shorter videos tend to inspire more creativity.
Since you can start and stop recording for multiple shots, many companies are creating interesting stop-motion animations that showcase their products. The looping nature of Vine videos can also result in interesting effects as videos circle back into and through themselves. The "summer up" roller coaster video from Target is a perfect example of Vine's stop-motion and looping in action.
Instagram, on the other hand, is attracting more traditional promotional videos.
You don't have to be as inventive to fit your message into a 15-second container and many companies appreciate the extra time to tell their stories and showcase their products. For example, a Starbucks video gives a short tour of the company's original Pike Place store.
Since both Vine and Instagram encourage social sharing, the most interesting videos can quickly go viral. It's not unusual to see popular Vine and Instagram videos popping up in Twitter and Facebook feeds. The sharing nature of both services offer the potential for significant customer engagement.
If you want to see how the different services require different approaches, search for Gap's stop-motion videos on Vine and Gap's more traditional customer testimonials on Instagram.
Higher Conversion Rate on Product Price Comparison shared on your Sites
BY Chris Guthrie
I just heard about a new plugin that is designed to help you get a much higher conversion rate on products you share on your websites.
It's called Azon Conversion Pro and the way this software works is that as a website owner you set the products to check a price on from sources like Amazon (and even Commission Junction or
Linkshare) and then the plugin does an automatic search for the best price to display for the user. The best part is that this search for the best price is visually represented so users can see that they're going to be served up the best price.
The reason why this tactic is so effective is because most people online are always looking for a deal, so in the past without this software they might visit your website and several other websites checking prices before making a decision on where to buy. But by bringing this functionality onto your website and showing users that your website is searching for the best price they're much more likely to end their search once they reach your blog and go through one of your affiliate links (which in turn will give you the commission)
This is a great pre-sell tactic and will be an awesome way to increase conversion rates.
Cleaning Up Your Marketing
by Charlie Cook
Has your once well-organized marketing plan come
to resemble the jumble of stuff in your closet
(not to mention the garage and the attic)? If you
are like most people, each time you come across a
new marketing idea you try to adopt it and add it
to your existing approach.
Strategies and tactics tend to accumulate and
linger even when they may not be working as well
as you'd like. Like the ill-fitting clothes that
accumulate in your closet or the broken tools
still in the garage, they are hard to get rid of,
whether because of habit, emotional attachment or
just plain not getting around to cleaning them out.
To improve your marketing, you'll need to clean out
some old ways of working. While I don't want to get
anywhere near your closet, and in fact I could use
some help with mine, I can show you how to clean
up your marketing plan so you're ready to take
advantage of the New Year to grow your business.
Cleaning Up Your Marketing Plan Every morning my
friend Michael Angier of SuccessNet.org sits down
at his desk and asks himself the following three
quëstions about his business.
1. What's working?
2. What's not working?
3. What can I improve?
You may not want to review your marketing plan
five times a week, but it is a good idea to do
it at least once a year. So take out your pencil
or fire up your computer and assess your
marketing plan:
Your Marketing Plan
1. Is your plan working?
2. Do you have a well defined marketing strategy
that helps you achieve the
three phases of marketing:
Getting Attention,
Positioning, and
Selling?
3. Do you need to write or rewrite
your marketing plan?
4. Do you need additional information
or coaching to complete your marketing plan?
5. What are you going to do to
improve your marketing plan?
Getting Attention
6. Does your marketing message
prompt prospects to contact you?
7. Do your ads, letters, and
web site motivate prospects to contact you?
8. What are your conversion rates?
9. What steps can you take
to improve them?
Positioning
10. What are you doing to establish your
credibility with prospects, to help them
know and trust you?
11. Is it working as well as you'd like?
12. What could you improve?
13. Is the value of your products and
services clear to your prospects or
do they quëstion you about merits and price?
14. Want to learn how to ensure that
your prospects understand the value of
your products and services?
Selling
15. How successful are you in selling,
that is, in getting commitments for
everything from appointments to orders?
16. What's your conversion rate of
prospects contacted to clients
and customers?
17. Do initial sales generate repeat
sales and referrals for years to come?
18. Want to learn how to generate
more sales from each client?
Evaluating Your Marketing Plan
Use three quëstions to summarize
your comments about your marketing plan and
your success in getting attention, positioning
and selling.
1. What's working?
2. What's not?
3. What do you want to improve?
The hardest part about cleaning out your
closet, attic, garage or your marketing is
getting started. It may be time to straighten
up or throw out some of your old marketing
strategies and tactics and replace them with
new more effective ones.
Start with a well organized marketing plan,
one that helps you get attention,
position your products and services and
sell and you'll find your business growing
in leaps and bounds in the coming year.
The author
Charlie Cook, helps service
professionals and small business owners
attract more clients and be more successful.
2004 © In Mind Communications,
LLC. All rights reserved.
Promotional Article Writing, Six Points You Must Know!
by Zachary Elwood
I’m sure most of you are aware of the marketing
power of a well-written promotional article about
your industry or business. A compelling and
educational article on your audience’s topic of
interest will drive traffic to your website and
increase customer confidence in your expertise.
Best of all, it requires no investment aside from
your time and effort.
But where do you start? The following quick tips
(presented in chronological order) should serve
you well in starting out upon this method of
online advertising. All of these points could be
several pages in themselves, but this should give
you a good overview of the process.
Think of an Article Topic
Write what you know about, first and foremost.
Brainstorm topics of which you have specific
knowledge. It doesn’t have to be something
obvious either. Write about a recent challenge
your company faced and how you overcame it. Write
about an interesting situation that you know is
a common problem in your industry but that is not
often addressed. Don’t be afraid to present
yourself or your company as imperfect, or as
facing challenges. You will come across as
genuine, conscientious and as a striver for
perfection in your field.
For instance, one of the articles I plan to
write in the next few weeks will be about our
video production company’s work on a forklift
training video. It was the first industrial
training video our company had done, and I plan
on laying out our specific challenges and what
we learned from the process. Of course I will
include the fact that the customer was very happy
with the finished product, but I will also express
the worries and difficulties we had along the way.
(Also make sure you get permission from your
clients if you plan to mention them specifically
in the article.)
Keyword Research
If you’ve done any work on doing search engine
optimization for your website, producing an
effective web article is quite similar. Because
you want your article to be relevant in searches,
you need to put a lot of focused keywords in your
content. First make a list of all the keywords
and phrases that you want your article to be
relevant for.
For instance, in preparing for this article, I
thought about who I wanted to read it. I did
internet searches to research what kind of
language was being used in the industry, and I
used a thesaurus to find similar terms. I came
up with a list of keyword phrases that included:
‘writing promotional articles’ ‘how to write
online articles’ ‘writing web articles’ ‘how to
write articles that advertise’ ‘tips for
promotional internet writing’, amongst many
others. Research will give you a good idea of
the kinds of search terms that are relevant,
and this will allow you to use these synonyms
and phrases in the body of your article.
Article Writing Strategies
Blatant self-promotion won’t often work in the
web article format. Your audience doesn’t want an
obvious advertisement; they want to be educated
and/or entertained, and that’s what you should be
striving to do.
Be concise. Use short paragraphs. If you find
yourself writing more than 1,000 words, think about
splitting your content into two articles. You’re
writing for an often impatient audience, used to
immediate gratification, so don’t get literary
or meander. Of course, this isn’t always the case;
if you’re writing for potential customers in your
industry and you know they like to read dense,
jargon-y content, you should cater to them.
Multiple Titles
Put specific effort into coming up with several good
titles for your article. They should be as
straightforward and as keyword-rich as you can make
them, as the title is the major thing that search
engines will be noticing, and because a good title
will make relevant potential customers want to click
on it. You will want to alternate these titles when
you post your article on different article
database sites.
For example, the first internet article I wrote I
titled ‘Tips for Effective Website Video’. Some
alternate titles I posted it under were ‘Producing
Effective Website Videos’, ‘Tips for Making Company
Website Video’, and ‘Pointers for Avoiding Bad Website
Video’. You get the idea; the more good titles you
give your article, the more likely it will come up for
these different combinations of keywords.
Posting Your Internet Article
Research good article-posting databases, particularly
ones that focus on your industry. No two sites are
formatted exactly the same. Some require you to break
your article into bullet-points with headings above
each paragraph. Some require you to know some basic
html code for putting in your website link or making
your title bold or in italics. Some will require you
to enter in a short synopsis of your article. Some
will require unformatted basic html code, so you
should save your article in a basic text format
as well.
I would advice you to post your article on as
many sites as you can; at least ten. Don’t
forget to alternate the titles you have chosen.
The more you post it, the more likely it is to
get read.
Article Resource Box
The resource box is the section, usually at the
bottom of the article, where you can put in a
short bio and a link to your company website
(the format varies from site to site.) Some of
the sites will require you to know a tiny bit
of html coding to put in your link manually.
You can find this easy enough by doing a search
for ‘basic html code’.
If your article has done its job pretty well, a
very small fraction of the people who read your
article will click on the link and check out
your website. A very small fraction of the
people that check out your website will think,
‘Hey, I’d like to do business with these guys’.
That’s if everything goes well. The first
article I wrote I posted on only six websites. I
did it mainly as an experiment, not expecting
anything much to happen. That article resulted
in two phone calls from companies asking about
our services, and one phone call from a
journalist wanting to interview me for a story
about online advertising she was writing.
Needless to say, I was very encouraged with the
potential of this medium.
About the Author
Zachary Elwood is a Producer/Writer for
Engaging Media, Inc. in Portland, Oregon
TOP AUCTION TOOLS
HOW TO DRIVE BIDDERS FROM EBAY TO YOUR WEB SITE
by Skip McGrath
Awhile ago, eBay implemented a new policy to keep sellers from linking from
the auction description to a web site or shopping portal where they could sell an
item directly without waiting for the auction to end.
Shortly after, eBay introduced eBay Stores, which would seem to accomplish the same
thing. Still, sellers wanted to get visitors to their web site in the hopes of selling them something else or making an immediate sale. The advantages are obvious. First you can sell to many people who just won't bother placing a bid and waiting for an auction to end. Secondly, you avoid paying the eBay listing and selling (final value) fees.
As to the second item, fee avoidance, I can see eBay's point. They are in business
to make money. But so are we. After all, we are paying eBay a listing fee (and
feature fees). This is no more than an advertising fee. eBay isn't really losing any money. If the website links work (and they do) eBay will miss some small final
value fees, but they will make up for this in listing fees because sellers will place
more listings.
Here is eBay's current links policy: "The eBay item page can only be used to
describe, promote and facilitate the sale of the listed eBay item - it cannot refer
to or promote the seller's individual website, off eBay sales or other businesses.
The eBay About Me page is a place where the seller can promote their individual
website or business. The eBay Sell Your Item page can not contain URLs or links to,
or promotional information about, any off eBay webpage, including websites of the
seller or any third party."
There are 2 basic exceptions to this general rule - the Sell Your Item page may
contain a link to information related specifically to that item that:
"Gives acknowledgement to a company that provided services related to that listing
(such as counters, auction management tools, or payment and mediation services).
This acknowledgement may contain both a logo (88 x 33 pixels) and up to 10 words of text (HTML font size 3) but only one of those may be clickable.
Points interested buyers to another Internet page that contains only more
information (such as pictures, product specifications or detailed terms and
conditions) about eBay items listed by that seller.
Links from the eBay Item page that interfere in any way with the eBay bidding
process, or solicit any eBay user information, are not allowed. Links from the eBay
Item page to pages that promote off eBay sales in any way are forbidden, though
such pages may generally themselves contain discrete links to other commercial web
pages."
So how do we work with these rules? Here are some ideas.
Notice the sections. The first one states: "The eBay About Me page is a place where
the seller can promote their individual web site or business."
The second reference says: "Links from the eBay Item page to pages that promote off
eBay sales in any way are forbidden, though such pages may generally themselves
contain discrete links to other commercial web pages."
The key words in this section are "discrete links."
If you have an AboutMe Page there will be a "ME" symbol next to you user name.
Some people do click on this to read about you.
A better way is to invite them to view your AboutMe Page right in the text of your
item description.
Make sure to create a hyperlink to make it easy.
Here is an example with the HTML code:
http://cgi3.ebay.com/ ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewUserPage&userid=xxxxxx
Just replace the XXXXXXX with your eBay username to create the link.
I have been collecting and selling Beatles memorabilia for over 20 years. Please
visit my AboutMe page to learn more about Beatles collectibles and our business.
Once readers arrive at your AboutMe page you can then direct them to your website
with a live hyperlink.
eBay also allows you to provide links to purely informational pages with information
(including more photos) about the item you are selling.
We used to sell amber jewelry. Each of our auctions contained a link to a free
article entitled "All About Amber." That page contained an interesting article about
amber, how it was formed, where it came from, and so on. However, that page also
contained a link to our storefront web site where people could purchase amber
jewelry items directly.
The trick to driving bidders from eBay to your web site is to:
1. Follow the rules
2. Use the rules to your advantage by finding
clever loopholes.
The AboutMe Page is still your best bet for promoting your website. The best
strategy is to point sellers to your AboutMe page in your auction description and
give them a reason for visiting it.
Good luck on eBay!
eBay AboutMe Overview
eBay Links Policy
