PROVIDERS OF INTERNET MARKETING & SOCIAL NETWORKING TOOLS, TUTORIALS AND CONSULTATION.
10 Ways a Start-Up Can Use Social Media to Market Itself
1. Craft a brand position rooted in a customer benefit.
An awful lot of young companies do a good job of describing a product's features rather than synthesizing them into a single benefit. A simple handle, either expressing what a brand stands for or declaring its point of difference, will serve you well in everything from appearing in search results to being remembered.
2. Take your message and content to your consumer. Engineer your presence.
You may want a website where you fill orders, capture data, or simply demonstrate your product, but you shouldn't assume your customer will instantly come to you. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube are all basically free tools. You need to go where your consumer lives online. If your customers, prospects, and influencers are there, you should be there: listening, engaging, sharing, and helping them.
3. Find inventive ways to create or gather content.
For starters, make your website into a blog. Fresh content, the ability to post comments, and pages that get linked to will add to your online visibility. No doubt it’s challenging and time consuming to generate enough content to populate your network and blog, but there are smart ways to go about it.
First, whatever you’re doing, write about it. Report on your progress. Second, come up with a daily question you'd want someone to ask and respond to it in a blog post or video. Third, save time by collecting content from others. Place your product or service, even in beta form, in front of people willing to blog, make videos, and tell stories about it. Aggregate this content to your blog or video channel. Fourth, conduct polls or ask questions about a related topic and turn these results into future posts as well as “news” you can release to both bloggers and press.
4. Get on Twitter and use it actively.
It takes time to build a large Twitter following, but it’s a quick way to connect with industry influencers, bloggers, and press that might matter to you.
No matter what you sell, someone on Twitter is having a conversation about it. It's your chance to listen, respond, and engage with potential enthusiasts. More importantly, on Twitter there’s a willingness to help each other that you just won’t find anywhere else. Perhaps it’s because re-tweeting information is virtually effortless, or that people practically vie to share new finds, or that users feel a sense of obligation to those who follow and promote them, but for whatever reason, you’re likely to find people who are willing to help promote your brand on Twitter, presuming you learn Twitter protocols and give more than you take.
5. Connect your customers and prospects to each other.
One of the best things you can do as a young company is to foster word-of-mouth conversations among your earliest customers. Whether you do it on Facebook or on your own site, it's important to invite your customers to talk to each other and share ideas. Allow them to guide one another on how they use your product or service. Not only will you have the opportunity to learn what people like and don't like about your product, you may end up with a bunch of people you can ask to help you.
6. Develop relationships with the right bloggers.
Every start-up in the world wants that article in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. But the fact is, the right bloggers might be more influential for a number of reasons. They have loyal readers. Their references or links to your site will drive up your search rankings. And these days, it’s more likely that ideas will bubble up from the blogosphere to the mainstream press than vice versa.
7. Start Crowdsourcing.
There is no shortage of services - companies like crowdSpring (design) or Tongal (video) -- to help you source affordable content from designers, videographers, writers, and others. But there's an even better reason to crowdsource. You allow your customers to participate in the creation of your brand. If you want a great example, take a look at how HBO seeded True Blood. Instead of advertising, HBO shipped samples of synthetic blood to popular videographers and bloggers, who, of course, couldn't resist making videos or posting pieces about the mysterious liquid. You may not have anything as cool as fake blood, but you can still learn to think this way.
8. Read Brian Halligan’s Inbound Marketing Book.
Even if you have a product with enough mainstream appeal to justify paid advertising, consumers today spend more time searching than watching. You want to be found. Inbound Marketing covers all of the basics you’ll need to know to make your content Google friendly.
9. Give stuff away for free.
Take a look at what HubSpot does: free tools (Twitter Grader and Website Grader); free webinars (Science of Social Media, 7 Simple Ways to Get Leads from LinkedIn); free eBooks (The Essential Step-by-Step Guide to Internet Marketing, An Introductory Guide to Building Landing Pages). If you sell food, give away recipes. If you’ve invented a sleep monitor, offer free tips on better sleeping. Free content generates awareness, builds loyalty, creates newsworthy topics, and spreads word-of-mouth. Remember, in this day and age, what a brand does is far more important than what a brand says.
10. Make the time, build in the role, or hire the right partner.
As folks like Chris Brogan and Gary Vaynerchuk have proven, you can do all this yourself if you have the right time, energy and commitment. If you can’t muster that, give this role to one of your first hires. If you’re less than comfortable identifying that person within your own company, (hint: it’s not an intern or a kid right out of school; Digital Natives may know all the technology, but they often lack the strategic chops and the ability to create truly compelling content) retain the services of a public relations agency with real experience in social influence. Make sure that if you go this route, you ask for case studies as evidence that the PR team assigned to your business actually practices what it preaches.
Getting Free Traffic With Facebook – Using Articles
Getting free traffic using facebook might seem like a waste of time – we all know that facebook has a NOFOLLOW backlink so putting your links on facebook can drive traffic but you cant get a really good backlink, so sometimes its not worth the effort right?
Well Did you know you can really drive free traffic from facebook using articles !
Sounds a bit strange but listen to this cool little tactic that can really drive people to your site though facebook.
If you have ever used facebook you will probery know about “Fan Pages” Fan pages are a great place to promote any service or products and a lot of people use them to sell all kinds of affiliate programmes. But using fan pages to promote your website or blog is a great tactic and it will drive free traffic to your site 24/7
When i first started online marketing i was very keen to use these fan pages – They are free – so why not use them. After a few weeks trying to sell all kinds of money makers with these pages it soon became boring, and i lost interest. But if your have a blog you will properly already write articles so why not post them to your fan pages.?
"Free Traffic Posting Articles to Facebook"
By posting your articles and blog posts to your fan pages you are giving your fan members great content and value, then when they want more info they will visit your blog, the amount of free traffic will increase the more fan members you have.
This is a very powerful way to drive traffic from facebook to your site, and its not hard work. You are already working hard posting blog content and writing articles so the work load is done, you just post some of them to your facebook fan page.
A fan page can just be an extension of your blog or site yes you will need to get facebook members to your fan page but after the first few hundred join your pages it should more or less run its self. Its not much work and can really increase your free traffic.
New To Fan Pages ?
If you are new to using facebook pages here is how to get started. First thing to do is to sign up to facebook - next on the bottom left hand side of the home page you will see a button called ”fan Pages” Click on that and you will have to fill in a little information – about what your page is going to be about – weather its business - charity and so on. After you fill in this short amount of info you will be asked to name your fan page with a title, make sure your name is related to your blog. Next fill in all the info about your fan page – your websites address, whats it about, your personal details, and then post a few points of great information to share with your soon to be members – always remember to give value value value.
The last step is to invite your facebook friends to become members ”fans” of your new page. Once you start getting a few hundred members it should start building viral. But just to be sure build on it daily if you have time – adding as many members as you can!
How to Use Twitter for Business: An Introductory Guide
People are in more control over how they consume media and what messages they care to hear…
This changing nature of consumers‘ shopping habits means that instead of continuing to push marketing messages out, effective marketers must adapt to consumers‘ new behavior by creating marketing campaigns that pull people in to their business. This strategy is called inbound marketing. Inbound marketers offer useful information, tools, and resources to attract people to their business and its website, while also interacting and developing relationships with consumers on the web. The three key inbound marketing tools are blogging and content creation, search engine optimization, and social media marketing.
Twitter is one of the most powerful social networks for your business…
Twitter is a relationship-building and relationship maintenance tool; the most obvious business use of Twitter is to meet potential customers and leads the same way you would at networking event or tradeshow.
However, You Can Also Use it To:
*Develop and promote your brand
*Interact with your customer base
*Track what people are saying about your company and brand
*Create buzz around upcoming events
*Help individual employees act as liaisons to the public
*Promote other content you‘ve created, including webinars, blog posts or podcasts
*Develop direct relationships with bloggers and journalists for potential PR placement
Internet Marketing Tips For Beginners No.1: Find A Niche
The first and most important step to Internet marketing is to find a niche. This needs to be something within a market that people are already searching for online but where the need is greater than the resources available. This may sound complicated but this simply means to find something in high demand with low competition. This can be done by researching keywords within your market using tools such as the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. This will give you variations of your keywords and phrases along with average monthly searches and a level of competition. Research is key as there is no point going into a niche that does not have people searching for it. No matter how good an idea may seem to you, if the numbers don’t stack up then forget it and move on.
Internet Marketing Tips For Beginners No.2: Find A Product
Once you have researched and found a good niche to begin marketing in you will obviously need a product to sell. You can of course create your own product within that niche and begin marketing it online however as a beginner I imagine you’re thinking ‘how do I do that?’. No problem, because you do not have to create you own product. I would recommend that you become an affiliate to an already proven product. This simply means that you will be marketing someone else’s product for them and taking a commission for you troubles. This way you do not need to worry about creating a product, packaging, shipping, refunds, customer services etc. Your job simply is to drive traffic to the product using your internet marketing skills and knowledge and collect your commission. Affiliate programs can pay anything from 10-70%, sometimes more so it is a great way to start earning money online. Again though I would advise thorough research in the product as you do not want to be selling something that people will be unhappy with as this could damage your reputation as a marketer.
Internet Marketing Tips For Beginners No.3: Become An Authority
Becoming an authority within your niche is crucial. People are far more likely to buy from you if you are displaying good valuable content and seen as an authority. It is important to add personality and to build a relationship with your leads and prospects. This way they are more likely to come back to you and buy your products. The best way to become an authority is to create your own authority website or blog site. This is where you can give reports or reviews of the products you are marketing. You can do this through your blog using articles or video reviews.
Internet Marketing Tips For Beginners No.4: Build A List
You may have already heard the term ‘The money is in the list’, well this is very true. Building an email list of targeted subscribers will make it far easier to build a good relationship with your prospects. The best way to do this is to include an opt-in form on your website. This is often followed up with a free gift or offer to provide value to your subscribers immediately. Once you have built a list of targeted followers within your niche you will be able to continue to provide value to your prospects by broadcasting regularly with your latest blogs, videos and reviews and more importantly your products. Another great way to build your list is to use lead capture pages or squeeze pages. This is basically a single page website delivering your free offer or gift and clearly displaying your opt-in form. There are various ways to drive traffic to this page for free such as using social media marketing, video marketing and article marketing.
Internet Marketing Tips For Beginners No.5: Be Consistent
Once you have your website set up, you are getting a constant flow of traffic and your list is building it is important to be consistent with your content, particularly in the beginning. It is extremely rare for someone to buy from you the very first time they visit your site so if you can keep them coming back to fresh new content that will give value to that person then you are far more likely to generate a regular income and be a far more successful Internet marketer.
