Social media marketing Archives - Page 32 of 60

Bloggers: 8 Tips to help you attract more readers, sales and business leads

By Jim Connolly | October 23, 2012

If you write a business blog and would like to see better results from it, I believe you will find the following 8 blogging tips really useful. They are based on my own experiences, having grown Jim’s Marketing Blog from zero, to one of the world’s most popular marketing blogs.

Let’s get started with tip number 1.

1. Write when you have something useful to share. Be useful often

Very few bloggers seem to understand one of the most basic facts of blogging. It’s simply this: You can’t expect people to keep returning to your blog, if you don’t.

For example, if a reader finds a new, useful post on your blog today, then returns in a few days and there’s nothing new, then returns a few days later and still nothing new – you stand a great chance of losing their interest. Conversely, if they find something useful on your blog every few days, they’re extremely likely to keep returning. That’s how you become part of their world. That’s how they start getting to know you.

When you publish posts infrequently, it’s almost like starting from zero each time. There’s little if any momentum: Momentum is essential if you want to grow your readership.

I often hear people claim that they just can’t find useful topics to blog about, on a regular basis. The thing is, these same people have no trouble finding useful things to say to their clients, contacts and friends, every day! Writing is like talking. If you can talk regularly about your topic, there’s no reason why you can’t write about it too. I believe everyone can think of something useful to share at least a couple of times a week.

The next tip takes this one step further.

2. Write as closely as you can, to the way you speak

Have you ever noticed that when you read the best blogs, it almost feels like you can hear the blogger speaking the words to you? That’s because these writers have discovered, that when you write similarly to the way you speak, you make it easier for people to connect with the person behind your posts.

In fact, allowing your personality to shine through your written words, may be one of the best kept secrets of the most successful, prolific bloggers.

3. Avoid writing ‘me too’ blog posts

Some bloggers will only write posts, which agree with what almost everyone else in their space is saying. By adding nothing new, you give people nothing to connect with. You look like a sheep. Always look for a way to add something of your own, something that shows your readers what you think and what you feel about the topic.

4. Aim to be useful

The most widely read blog posts are those, which people find useful in some way. So, give your readers something they can take away from the post and put into action.

Give them an idea, which they can chew over and then draw their own conclusions.

Give them a fresh way to look at an old challenge.

In a nutshell – The more useful you are, the more valuable your blog will be to your readers.

5. Focus on them

Yes, it’s nice occasionally to write about yourself, but if you really want to engage your readers, you need to focus on them. Talk about what’s happening in their world. Offer answers to the problems facing their industry.

There’s a big difference between writing posts that just talk about you, your product and how amazing you are – and writing posts that are all about being useful to the reader, yet contain lessons from your own experiences. In fact, it’s a great idea to share your own experiences, when offering useful examples to help make a point. I’ve done it a few times in this post. Your readers will value learning what happened when you did XYZ – it could save them time and money.

The key is to ensure the focus of the post is on helping them, rather than bragging or pushing sales pitches at them!

6. Don’t try and sell in every post

You write a business blog and the purpose of the blog is to help you build your business. It’s essential to write posts, which promote your products or services, but you need to get the balance right.

In my experience, the vast majority of your posts should be designed to offer independent value to your reader. By independent value, I mean the reader should be able to get something useful from your posts, without having to buy something from you or hire you. I write just a few posts a year, which exclusively promote my marketing services. These are sometimes called conversion posts. All the hundreds of other posts are me offering independent value.

I’m not suggesting you write as few conversion posts as me, but remember that there’s a reason people skip the ads on their TV’s. They watch TV for the programs, not the commercials. Too many conversion posts and you’ll find it extremely hard to build a great readership.

N.B: One of the reasons I write so few posts that promote my marketing services, is that I include a small excerpt at the bottom of my posts. This has a link you can use, if you want to know how I can help you grow your business or build a successful blog. Readers know it’s there and can ignore it, until they want to find out more. It’s out of the way, until it’s needed.

7. Keep it human

If you want your readers to connect with you, you need to be approachable. The reader needs to know that if they email or call you, you will welcome them. This means humanizing the relationship between you and your readers.

Here are a few examples, based on what I do.

I respond to every comment, which needs a reply.
When I reply, I try and always include the name of the person who commented.
If I notice someone commenting here for the first time, I welcome them to the blog. And I genuinely mean it.
Everyone who reads this blog via email, can send me a personal email, by simply replying to it! Your reply goes direct to my inbox, so we can have a more private connection. If it isn’t spam, they get a response and they know I love to hear from them. Many readers exchange emails with me several times a week. It’s wonderful. I love hearing from you. If you’d like that deeper connection with me, you can get all future posts via email, for free, by subscribing here.

8. Never aim for perfect

If you do, you’ll seldom publish anything. The perfectionist mindset places the bar impossibly high. It tells us that we have to cover every point, counter every possible argument and do all this, in an engaging way. I’ve written thousands of blog posts and not only are none of them perfect, none of them would ever have been published had I been aiming for perfect.

That’s the thing about the perfectionist mindset. It stops us from even getting started.

Here’s what we know about your marketplace: None of them are expecting perfection from you. Not one. As I mentioned earlier, what people want is something that’s useful, something of value. Something they can quickly read and get at least one insight, answer or nugget of information from.

In closing

A business blog can either be a waste of time or an enormously valuable business asset, depending on what you do with it. I hope you find something here, which helps your blog join the latter of those two groups.

To your success!

What every business owner needs to know about respect

By Jim Connolly | October 14, 2012

Today, I’d like to share a simple, yet powerful idea with you from the 1936 classic book; How to win friends and influence people.

The book’s author, Dale Carnegie, said; ‘Show respect for the other person’s opinion. Never say, “you’re wrong!” to them.’

You’re right and they may be too!

If we fully believe that our opinion is correct, we need to be mindful that it is still just an opinion. Our view. It’s possible that both their opinion and our own is correct, even when we see things differently.

For example: I dislike the taste of almonds, so my opinion is that they taste horrible. You may love the taste of almonds, so have the opinion that they taste delicious. If we sat a lie detector test, we’d both be proven to be telling the truth – yet our answers would have been completely different. We would both be right.

That’s the thing about opinions. There can be many different, yet equally valid opinions on the same subject.

Winning the argument or winning the client?

I often see small business owners arguing with their customers, clients and contacts; insisting they are right and the other person is wrong. They insist on winning the argument (imposing their opinion as the only valid one) rather than winning the client. That mindset is toxic to our business and toxic to our minds, creating stress and bad feeling.

It’s also completely unnecessary.

We simply need to respect what others have to say, then if necessary, explain how we see the situation and welcome their feedback. I have learned a great deal from using this approach over the years. Interestingly, it’s also far more effective at helping others see things your way, than attacking their opinion and arguing with them.

Respect never gets old

The technologies we use today are very different from those, which were used when Carnegie wrote that amazing book. However, business is still all about people. Showing respect for others and their opinions, is just as important today as it was in 1936. In fact, I believe it’s even more important today, now that we connect with so many more people, thanks to social media and social networks.

Are you missing out on this free, powerful marketing asset?

By Jim Connolly | August 31, 2012

What kind of atmosphere do you present to prospective clients?

One of the keys to effective marketing is that people need to feel comfortable about approaching you. They need to feel that you will warmly welcome them if they visit you or email / call you. This means the personality you project through your marketing in general and your social media marketing in particular, needs to be attractive and approachable.

Honey or vinegar?

As you know, some business owners can be confrontational or rude when using social networks or responding to comments on blogs. This is their prerogative. The thing is, prospective clients regularly check out potential service providers before deciding to get in touch. There’s an old saying, which goes like this: ‘You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.’ In other words, we attract people with honey (kindness) and not vinegar (bitterness).

The small Tea Room pictured in today’s post, is a place we used several times on a recent family holiday to Corbridge, in North East England. The coffee, tea and snacks were delicious, but it was the warmth of the welcome that saw us return there and recommend it. Had the drinks and food been just as good, but with a poor atmosphere, I wouldn’t have returned or recommended it.

The honey approach makes sound business sense – after all, business is all about people, so it pays to be personable.

What do people see when they research you online?

Why not take some time out today and look at what people see, when they research you or your business. Look at your social networking accounts and also the search engine results that come up when people search for you by name or business name. If using Google, sign out of your Google accounts before you do any research. This will help you see less biased results, as will using a proxy service like Hide My Ass. When signed into Google and doing a search, Google presents you with tailored results and you could miss things, which prospective clients or customers can see.

Do you prefer to hire people, if you know in advance that they will be approachable? Does the welcome you receive from a business have much of an impact on your decision to use them, return to them or recommend them?

Photo: Jim Connolly

Social Media: How to build a large, valuable network

By Jim Connolly | August 28, 2012

This post is all about how to build a bigger, more valuable social network.

I recall reading a blog post once, where someone asked, ‘How can I get more followers on social networking sites?’

The blogger replied, ‘Do something worth following!’

This is where your story comes in!

That advice may sound a bit harsh, but it’s absolutely correct. As regular users of social networks already know, the Internet is filled with business owners, talking in an average way about average sounding businesses. As a result, they make very little progress with their social media marketing.

Their challenge is that they tend to focus on looking for strategies or software, which they can use in order to attract more followers – when they should be looking at the story they are expecting people to follow and share.

It’s their story that’s broken!

What’s the story?

Every business and business owner has a story. Your story is built around things like:

The product you provide.
The quality of your customer service.
The attitude of your team.
The unique value you bring to your marketplace.
My story looks like this.

When we look at the social networking accounts of 99% of businesses in the same niche, we find them saying the same things, to the same people about a service that sounds the same as their competitors. It’s dull. It’s an uninspiring, uninteresting story, which people will not want to embrace or share. People are attracted to (and share) the remarkable, not the bland.

No matter what social media marketing strategy we use, unless we have a compelling story we will be wasting our time.

If our social networking updates are just like most other small business owners, we blend into the background. We render ourselves invisible, by simply adding to all the noise on Twitter and Facebook, etc.

So, what’s the answer?

In my experience, the business owners who build the most valuable social networks are those who have something different to say. They have a story or message, which people want to share. They get people talking about them, because they’re worthy of people’s attention. They stand out, because they are not just like the others in their niche. They tell people about what matters to them, knowing it will resonate with the kind of people they want to connect with.

As you know, most business owners on social networks do the opposite. They try to build a large, valuable network by pushing more and more messages out there. They focus on volume not value. They hope that by being busy, their predictable story will spread. Many of them schedule uninspiring messages to go out whilst they are asleep – as if it’s the number of tweets and updates, which is causing the problem.

If you are not seeing the social media marketing results you want, check how compelling your story is. Is it attractive enough to get people talking about you and telling their friends? Are you mirroring what others are doing or are you standing out?

In short: Give your business a story, which people will connect with, embrace and share with their friends.

How to make your business more visible online and offline

By Jim Connolly | August 23, 2012

One of the best ways to increase the number of clients, customers or sales leads you get, is to make sure you are as visible as possible to the right people.

That’s what today’s post is all about. It contains tips and ideas on how to be more visible online and offline!

Where are you?

As regular readers will know, I live in a small village in South Yorkshire, England. We get a lot of tourists all year round, who usually come for a boating or walking holiday. I see tourists pretty much every day at home – yet for the past week, I have been a tourist myself. My family and I have been exploring North East England and South Eastern Scotland.

As a tourist, you see a location very differently. You have little if any local knowledge, so you rely on maps and road signs in order to navigate yourself around. You quickly learn that some places are better signposted than others and that many areas would do a lot more business, if they only realised that they were really hard for tourists to locate.

As business owners, we need to ensure that OUR businesses are easy to find.

If your business relies on people visiting your premises

Start by making sure that your marketing material contains crystal clear directions on how to locate you.
Assure people that they are welcome to call you, if they need directions. Very few businesses make a point of saying this in their marketing material, even though almost all of them would happily do it – so be one of the few who actually says it!
Tip: Test your directions! A great way to see how effective your directions are is to ask someone, who has never previously visited your location, if they can find you using just the directions you send them. Always try and use someone, who matches your client or customer profile.

If your business relies on people being able to find your website

Start by making sure all your online accounts (Facebook, Twitter, Google+ etc) point to your site. Don’t make any of those social networking sites the focal point of your online presence. Those accounts can be suspended, deleted or rendered useless with a change to their terms and conditions. Build your primary Internet presence on a site you own and control.
Make sure your emails all contain a link to your website in your email signature.
Use SEO software, so that your website or blog can have all the core on-site Search Engine Optimisation in place, easily. I use Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin. A well optimised website or blog will help people find your site, when looking for your specific type of product or service.
Make your site easy to share. Once someone finds your website, make it easy for them to share it with their friends. Add social sharing buttons like those below this blog post. They allow people to link to your site from their favourite social networks, with just the click of a mouse. If enough people link to your site, you will get the additional benefit of improved SEO.

Don’t take visibility for granted

It’s easy for us to forget how difficult it can be for people to find us. Take the tourists view of finding your business and ensure it’s as visible as possible.