Social media marketing Archives - Page 37 of 60

How do people feel about your business?

By Jim Connolly | April 15, 2012

I heard a guy in my local coffee shop explaining to a friend, why he bought himself an iPhone. “I needed cheering up, so I decided to treat myself to a new iPhone. I had to wait 3 days for the phone to arrive and to be honest, the wait was pretty exciting.”

That’s an example of someone using the purchase of a product, to improve how he was feeling. His feelings about Apple and the iPhone brand are extremely positive and he knew that he’d feel better if he ordered one.

Now, can you imagine someone feeling so strongly about the prospect of working with you, that even the process of waiting was exciting?

Marketing and feelings

Whether you are a service provider or a vendor of products, you need to be aware that feelings have a huge part to play, in the purchasing process. The relationships you forge with prospective clients at the pre sales stage, are extremely important. Equally, the way people feel about the idea of working with you (or buying from you) is a key factor in whether you earn their custom or not.

Here are a few things to consider:

Do you demonstrate how passionate you are about helping your current clients, to your future clients? In other words, do your marketing, networking and social networking interactions suggest you love working with your clients, or are you one of those who finishes work every Friday, by posting ‘TGIF!’ all over Twitter and Facebook, because you can’t wait to get away from them?
Does your reputation showcase you as being friendly and approachable? The balance you are aiming for is professional and human. Business is all about people, so it’s essential to show your human side if you want people to feel good about the prospect of doing business with you.
Is there a feel good factor associated to working with you or buying your products? If not, you are losing more business than you can possibly imagine.
When people arrive at your website, does it look polished and professional or does it look like something that was done on the cheap? If the latter, you need to think about the image you are creating. If a prospective client sees a cheap looking website, it suggests the person behind that site either doesn’t care about presentation or is unable to pay for professional site. Both of these will hurt your business and lose you money.

Success leaves clues

Take time to think about the businesses, which YOU have strong, positive feelings about. Look at what they are doing, in order to earn that positive feeling from you and see what you can learn from them.

Change: Love it or hate it but you can’t avoid it!

By Jim Connolly | April 12, 2012

How do you feel about ‘change’?

Yesterday, Google released an all new look for it’s Google+ project and the reaction from users is exactly what we see, whenever any major change is made to any major project:

Some people embraced the change and quickly adapted their Google+ account to get the best from it. For instance, I changed my cover photo. If you’d like to connect with me on Google+, click here.
Some people were just happy to see Google continue to innovate, rather than allow the project to become stale.
Some people hated it (their words). They either hated the change because of the way it looked or the way it worked (the UI User Interface.)
Others just said they hated it and were leaving the service.

Every person has the right to express what they thought of the new Google+ design and some of that feedback will be acted on to make the Google+ experience better. You usually learn more about how to improve a product from so-called negative feedback, than you do from fans saying they love it.

Change is everywhere and constant

The thing is, we need to learn how to deal with change, because whether we like it or not, the world around us is in a constant state of flux. Everything changes all the time.

Not that long ago:

Google didn’t even exist.
Myspace was massively bigger than Facebook.
The global banking system was seen as reliable.
And until the launch of Apple’s iPad, the market for tablet devices was believed to be dead.

The set of your sail

In our businesses and our lives in general, it pays to keep an open mind regarding the changes around us. It has often been said that what determines our success and happiness is less about what life throws at us, but more how we respond. My mentor, Jim Rohn, used to say it was all about the way we set our sail and in my experience, Jim was right.

Your marketplace is changing. Your competitors are changing. The needs of your clients are changing too. If you want to remain relevant, let alone thrive, it’s better to adjust the set of your sail, than to hope that things just stay the same.

2 Things you need to know, if you want massively better marketing results!

By Jim Connolly | April 9, 2012

Before you send your next piece of marketing to anyone, there are 2 important things you should consider if you want to get the best return on your investment.

Here they are:

1. Do I have permission to contact this person?

A lot of marketing is still based on interrupting people. For example:

They send us email because our address is on some list they bought.
They send us junk mail because they know where we live or work.
They cold call us because they have our phone number.

Yes, you can get people’s attention by interrupting or pestering them, but it’s not the kind of attention they welcome. People repel pests, they don’t embrace them. Walking into a company unannounced and poking the boss in the chest will get their attention, but it’s unlikely to win their willing cooperation or earn their trust.

So, rather than add people to some list and pester the crap out of them, we should earn access to them instead.

A great way to achieve this, is via the type of message you are receiving right now. Everyone reading this blog post, either by email, RSS reader or on jimsmarketingblog.com, has subscribed or searched for the information. It’s seen as useful, not an interruption. I work hard to deliver as much useful, free information as I can and as a result, thousands of prospective clients read my work every day. This blog is what’s called a permission marketing asset.

Permission based marketing delivers the kind of response rates that interruption marketing can’t touch. Newsletters, blogs, YouTube channels, Facebook pages and LinkedIn groups are permission assets that take time to build, but they offer unparalleled potential, for business owners seeking to earn the attention and trust of their marketplace.

2. Am I contacting them with something they need or is it all about me?

Most marketing (and almost all small business marketing) fails because it’s all about the sender and not the recipient. This happens for a number of reasons, but mainly because business owners wrongly assume ALL marketing has to be about pushing a sales message.

That assumption is not only incorrect, it’s toxic!

Successful marketing is about building permission and earning trust among a targeted group of prospective clients. It’s about making you an obvious choice, when they need the type of service you provide.

For example:

The local health food store, which offers advice on the best foods to eat for your unique needs, is building a relationship with you. They are also positioning themselves in your mind as an authority, when it comes to health food.

Their free newsletter offers healthy recipes, the dates of their next subscriber-only, healthy cooking evenings and the latest news on the benefits of certain food types – So, it’s eagerly awaited by its readers. These readers buy the ingredients from the store because they trust it. They are a part of the community and recommend it to their health-conscious friends. People LOVE to be part of a community of like-minded people.

It’s about them

Effective marketing is not just about pushing special offers and new product lines at people. It’s about engaging with them and building a relationship with them. It’s about earning their trust. It’s about being seen as the obvious place to go, when they have a requirement you can fulfil. It’s about them.

Get more targeted traffic from Google with these 5 simple tips

By Jim Connolly | April 6, 2012

If you get less high quality traffic from Google than you would like, here are 5 basic things you should look at.

Here they are, in no particular order:

1. Does your blog link to what Google calls ‘Bad neighborhoods’?

Google are constantly looking for sites that are trying to game or fool its ranking system. When it finds one, it looks for the other sites that link to that site. When it finds them, it will often apply an SEO penalty to them. Here’s what Google has to say:

Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.

I strongly suggest you do not enter into a link exchange deal with people, unless you know them and trust them. Those emails you get from strangers asking for a link exchange are best ignored.

2. Do you publish new posts often enough?

People value frequently updated content and so does Google.

Think of it like this: If someone checks out your site today and reads a great post, then returns in a few days to find nothing new and 2 weeks later there’s still nothing new, they are unlikely to keep returning. Sites that offer frequently updated content and fresh information, remain on our radar because we discover something new on them, regularly.

According to Google, sites that are updated frequently are seen as being a better potential source of up to date information, than sites that are seldom changed. Whilst in reality this is not always the case, (some sites are frequently updated with crap), Google uses frequently updated content as a ranking signal.

So, if you are going to publish 4 posts next month, publish 1 a week, rather than 4 in a day and nothing new for another 30 days, and in my experience, you will see better results.

3. Are there too few links pointing to your blog?

There are a few things that all the top SEO guys agree on and this is one of them. The number of links pointing to your blog, especially from good quality sites, is the single biggest factor in your SEO effectiveness.

As far as Google is concerned, links act like votes. The more links or votes you get, the higher your site will rank over those sites, with fewer links. Great, original content should attract links from people sharing and referencing your posts. If you are not getting a steady supply of links because your work is new, you may want to do some proactive link building. There are lots of ways to do this, from commenting on other great blogs to asking your contacts if they would like to link to your site as a resource for their readers.

The strategy I used here, was to do the best work I could and put it, where people could see it. I used social networking sites, which small business owners were using and thankfully enough of them liked my work to share it and link to it. This got the ball rolling and it has rolled along ever since. As Seth Godin says, if you put your art (work) where people can see it and it is good enough, they will share it.

4. Does your site load too slowly?

In 2010, Google announced that site load speed would be a factor in search engine ranking. This was done to encourage the use of clean code and discourage people from stuffing their sites full of plugins and other software, which slow sites down and damage the reader experience.

You can find out how Google scores your site loading speed by using their speed test tool. Just enter your full site address into the box and press the Analize button.

In addition, you can speed up your blog by ensuring it’s using a fast, premium WordPress blog theme. The only theme I use or endorse, is Headway. It’s fast and very SEO friendly. You can see how Headway works in this video (affiliate link.)

5. Do too few people share your blog on social networking sites?

Google is increasingly taking social sharing into account. It has become a useful way for them to determine content that is likely to be of interest to people using their search engine. So, make sure you share your blog posts with your friends on your social networks, to ensure your work gets the chance to be noticed.

As you may have heard, there is an increasingly common problem with the use of social networking shares as part of the Google search signal. Sadly, many high profile bloggers and social media figures, are regularly sharing low value links to their clients and cronies. This is resulting in a lot of junk getting a high number of reshares and ranking a lot higher than it would.

What would you add to this list?

If you look at these 5 basic points, you will notice that all of them can be achieved by using an SEO friendly blog theme and writing content that people want to read, share and link to. In fact, with Matt Cutts from Google recently announcing a crack down on what he called over SEO’d sites it makes more sense than ever to focus on building great content, which people will value and Google can find easily.

There are literally hundreds of signals that Google use, when ranking a site in it’s search results. What suggestions would you add to this list? I’d love to hear from you!

What is a Thunky?

How it works