March 2015 archive

Get The Success You Want With Your Online Marketing and Sales

This is a extract from Week One of my hugely popular Black Belt Social Media Mastery course. You can find out more about that here.

So here’s the thing, if you want to be successful with your online marketing and sales you need to have these very 3 basic things in place before you go any further.

Something to sell
Somewhere to sell it
An audience

I’m assuming that all of you here have the first one covered, you have something to sell. Whether that is a product or a service, an online course, a “done for you” service, an in person training session or something totally different, in order to be successful with selling on line you need something to sell. Sounds obvious, right?

So lets take a few minutes and write down here all of the things that you sell. What can your customers buy from you? What products and or services do you offer to them?

Seriously, go get a pen or open a new Evernote and write them down!

OK cool, now I’m assuming you have a lovely list up there of all the different ways you can make money from your business, yes? Brilliant.

Now the next part of the equation is do you have somewhere to sell all of those products and services? Do you have a website and are all of your offerings on there? Do you have more than 1 website? Is it easy for your customers to find you and when they are on your website is it obvious to them how they can work with you?

You need to make it as simple as possible for your customers to work with you. Nobody wants to visit a website for the first time and to have to search for your products. They’ll just go somewhere else. Before we look at the third point on the list above - an audience - we need to make sure that you have something to offer them. There is no point in driving lots of highly engaged traffic to your website if there is no easy way for them to buy from you.

So before we start looking at your social media and determining the best way to build you an audience, we need to look at your website.

You don’t have to spend a fortune on a website in order for it to be effective. If nothing else, you can set up a free blog on wordpress.com or somewhere similar. It looks more professional to have your own domain set up but to start with, if you really can’t afford a professional site it is better to have SOMETHING there than nothing. You can’t build an audience and drive traffic to a site if you don’t have a website. If you don’t have somewhere set up and ready to sell your product or service.

If you are looking to get your website set up for you or you want advice on the best way to do this, I personally recommend Chichi from http://www.kansocreative.com - go and talk to her, she’ll make sure you have the right web presence for your needs.

I’m a big believer in keeping things simple. If you spend 2 months worrying about how your website looks and whether its good enough before launching it, then that’s 2 months when you haven’t given yourself a chance to earn any money.

When you haven’t given your perfect customer the chance to find you.

When you haven’t helped anyone.

I don’t know about you but I’m in this to help people, I love being able to share my knowledge and experience and see other people shine after they have worked with me. Well, if you spend all that time worrying about your website then you’re wasting time. Just do it. Even if you think its only 50% good enough, that’s 50% better than nothing.

The 5 most important pages of your website in my opinion are :

Homepage - keep it simple. Make it obvious what you do, don’t be too obscure. Be authentic, be you. People engage with and buy from people.

About - This is not supposed to be just about you, its about what you can do for your customer. How you can help them, what makes you different, why they should work with you. Show some personality here, again - be authentic.

Work with me - You need a big fat shiny work with me page somewhere on your website that lists all of your products and services. Preferably with buttons where people can click and buy from you. You can set up these buttons fairly easily in paypal and Jenny from Webtech Wonder Woman has a great tutorial on how to make your own beautiful buttons. Customers need things to be easy for them, if they have to email you to order you’re making it harder for them to work with you. Make it easy. Make it fun

Blog - you need a blog. Its a huge part of your online marketing puzzle. In order to be totally present online and in social media and to build an audience and grow your customer base and your business you need to be seen as an expert. And the best way to be seen as an expert is to share content, give people interesting content that they will read and say “hey that was great, this person really knows her stuff” You don’t have to blog every day, or even every week. Later on in the course we’ll work out a schedule just for you that will get you blogging the right number of times a month for you and your customers.

Contact - make it easy for your customers to contact you. Give them an email address. I personally don’t like contact me forms but I love to be able to email people. Give a phone number if you like, that’s totally up to you.

So, firstly you need something to sell and secondly you need somewhere to sell it. Lets take a minute and check your website, see if you have everything you need.

If you have anything missing then now is the time to get that shit sorted. Create yourself a blog, put up a work with me page, make sure your about me page is compelling and would encourage your ideal customer to work with you.

ACTION - if you want feedback on any of your website pages post in the Facebook group. (Available as part of the social growth course) A fresh pair of eyes is always helpful and we’re going to be more honest with you than your mum / husband / child / best friend. You’re here to run a business, we’re ALL here to run a business so let us help you to get your groundwork in place.

Awesome, so now you have your products and services all defined and you have your website set up and ready to go. Your website may not be perfect but you can add to it, you can change it. You can make it work for you. Nothing stays still in life, if you don’t keep on moving forwards then you are actually slipping backwards. Take action, small action, every day and you’ll make faster progress than you could ever imagine.

The third piece of the puzzle is an audience. There is zero point in having the worlds best products and services and an amazing website if nobody ever sees it. You can’t sit back and wait for your perfect clients to find you, you need to get your butt out there and find them. Be their friends, interact with them, bring them back to your website, show them your stuff, build their trust, work with them and if you take all of these steps and do them well - you’ll have a client for life.

This third piece of the puzzle is what the rest of this course is about. I’m going to show you:

HOW to build that audience.
How to find your customers.
How to engage with them.
How to be seen as an expert.
How to sell to them without being salesy.
How to fall in love with online marketing (OK maybe that’s a bit of a stretch, how about how not to hate online marketing - does that feel more real!?

If you’re ready to grow your business online and you’d like to know more about my Black Belt Social Media Mastery course, you can find out all about it by clicking here now.

What Kind of Content Should You Be Sharing Online?

I talk a lot about HOW and WHEN you should schedule your social media content, but WHAT you should post is of equal, if not greater importance. Content is king – have you heard that saying before? It is very true. If you get yourself a reputation for posting high quality content then people will want to follow you. Content falls into the following broad categories :

YOUR content

A link to your website - you can set up multiple links to each of the pages on your website, a good way to do this is to use some of the copy from the page as a lead in

A link to a blog post you have written - blog posts can be recycled, share them regularly on social media

An infographic that you have created - infographics are brilliant for sharing on social media as they catch peoples eye and are instantly appealing

An image that you have published - images are easy to share, make sure they are branded with your website so that if they are downloaded then they will still carry your branding or logo

Guest blogs that you have written for other sites - guest blogs are a great indication of your expertise

Articles that you have had published - again, a great sign of your expertise is that you have had articles published on other sites

Interviews that people have done with you - if you have been interviewed by anyone either on video or podcast then share these

OTHER PEOPLE’S content

Affiliate schemes
Interesting blog posts you have read
Industry relevant articles and features
Other people’s infographics or images

You should share other people’s content in the same way that you share your own. Maybe not quite as frequently but you need to be seen to be promoting your area of expertise generally rather than just promoting your own work. I would recommend starting off by posting equal amounts from each category until you have a great engaged following and enough killer content of your own to share.

The Top 5 Dos and Don’ts of Social Media

Do

Be consistent

Readers like consistency, social media is all about relationship building. If you post regularly in Facebook, say every day for a month and then don’t go near Facebook again for 3 or 4 weeks, the chances are you would have lost the interest of your followers. Consider before you start how likely you are to be able to continue with your social media strategy. It’s better to start off slowly and build up to a routine that you know you are going to be able to stick with than to rush into something that isn’t sustainable.

Be authentic

Authenticity is key in Social Media. There is a fine line between being authentic and oversharing. Authenticity is not about sharing every detail of your life with your tribe, but being true to who you are. This means that its OK to share some details of your personal life, your family and lifestyle choices all make you who you are – stick to your beliefs and let people see who you truly are.

Share your own amazing content

One of the whole points of Social Media is to drive traffic to your website and generate a tribe of engaged users. If you want to be seen as an expert in your area then you need to share high quality content within your network. This can be blog posts, branded images, surveys, questions or any other way that you can communicate and engage with your audience.

Start conversations

Social Media is about conversations and engagement. Ask people questions, reply to their posts – chat to them. Even if you feel as though the conversations you’re having are not directly related to growing your business, it will all help.

Share other people’s content

Being seen as an expert in your field doesn’t just mean sharing your own content. Sharing other people’s (interesting and relevant) content is just as important. Retweet people, share links to blog posts and podcasts that YOU found interesting. The chances are that if you were interested in the subject then your followers will be interested in it as well.

Don’t

Broadcast without engaging

Broadcasting is the equivalent of walking into a business networking meeting and saying to everyone you meet “Hello, my name’s Kerrie – please buy my services” – its OK once or twice but not every single thing that you say. Broadcasting without engaging is dangerous. Used hand in hand they are a formidable team but on its own broadcasting without also having conversations with people will not win you any followers.

Try and sell to people

Social Media is marketing. Not sales. Generally speaking, people need to be aware of your company name and have “touched” you at least 5 times before they will consider buying from you. A touch can be a conversation on twitter, seeing your advert in the local paper, hearing a friend talk about you, receiving an email or phone call from you. Selling and broadcasting are similar in my mind. Obviously the whole point of social media MARKETING is to drive traffic to your website which will eventually turn into sales but direct selling on social media does not work.

Try and be something you are not

This kind of goes hand in hand with be authentic, but it bears repeating. Pretending to be something you are not on social media is a sure way to fail. It is always tempting to make things up to join conversations but if you are following the right people you won’t need to do this. Pretending that you are happy to design websites when really you work in print is not a good plan. Be honest, tell them that you don’t do that but you can recommend someone who does. Don’t start off your social media journey by pretending to be something you are not . Be yourself because you are awesome.

Ignore negative comments

As tempting as it is to ignore any negative comments that are made about you or your brand on social media, this really isn’t the right thing to do. Reply to any comments that are made but react sensibly. Offer a method of contact for the person to get in touch and sort out whatever issue they have. Be polite, give them a solution but don’t ignore.

Get involved in fights

Seriously, its not very grown up or clever to get involved with fights on social media. By all means retweet causes which are close to your heart such as greenpeace or save the planet – but don’t dive full on into the company hating, fighting type conversations that you will come across. Even if you agree, if your comments won’t do any good then don’t add them. Just stay clear.

My Favourite 4 Social Media Scheduling Tools

There is no getting away from the fact that social media (if not done properly) can be a timesuck. But it doesn’t have to be like that, there are lots of ways to maximise your social media time and to make sure that you are getting the best results from every spare minute that you have.

There are so many apps out there that you could use to schedule and organise your social media, these are the ones that I use on a regular basis.

Socialoomph

I use Socialoomph primarily for scheduling content that can be repeated on a regular basis.

It has a number of other features that are incredibly useful such as analytics, keyword tracking and viewing your mentions. You can have up to 5 accounts on it without upgrading although the pro version is reasonably priced and also allows you to manage your Linked in and blogs as well as to post to your social media accounts through email.

It is not one of the most intuitive social media tools to use so expect to spend a little time finding your way around it., but once you have mastered it, you’ll find it well worth the effort.

http://www.socialoomph.com

From USD14 per month if you choose the upgrade.

Hootsuite

I use hootsuite for managing my clients proactive twitter engagement. I use a combination of Socialoomph and Buffer to schedule posts in twitter but for managing multiple twitter accounts you cannot beat Hootsuite. Even if you only have 1 account to keep tabs on the way that you view your data is amazing.

You can choose what to see for each one of your accounts, for twitter I always choose to see your home feed (what people you are FOLLOWING are tweeting) your mentions (whenever someone MENTIONS you on twitter) your sent tweets (what you are saying) and your DM inbox. You can also add a view of your followers, sent DMs and much more.

Hootsuite is free for up to 5 accounts which is more than enough for most people. I think it is easy to use and while I don’t rate the analytics that are part of it I love the way you can see everything in one place at one time.

http://www.hootsuite.com

SocialBro

As a mum of 4 I know ALL about how you shouldn’t have favourites. So I’m only going to say that hypothetically, if you FORCED me to have a favourite social media tool it might be (perhaps) this one. But I’d deny it if Hootsuite or Buffer ever asked me, OK?

SocialBro is awesome. The pro version for just $14 a month gives you some of the best reporting and stats I’ve ever seen. I use it for all of my customers and love the way you can dig down and find out the best time of day for you to tweet based on who is following you, look at pretty graphs and really understand the metrics behind your social media presence.

I believe that for most single accounts, you couldn’t beat Socialbro for reports. Get it, you won’t regret it. (that rhymes so it must be true…..)

http://www.socialbro.com

Buffer

Buffer is another great way to schedule all of your social media updates. It is more user friendly than Socialoomph. You can add your rss feeds in and choose to schedule and share these update along with ones that you add yourself or choose from their suggested content to share.

http://www.bufferapp.com

Should You Be Scheduling Your Social Media?

Lets talk about scheduling. Its one area of social media management that will make your life so much easier, BUT it is not a replacement for organic, proactive engagement. Sorry, there is no such thing as a free lunch – right?

You cannot schedule every single one of your social media interactions and expect to be successful. Fact. However, good social media is a mixture of broadcasting and engagement so lets schedule up the broadcasting if we can.

Twitter is the best place to look at scheduling. If you are using Socialoomph, Buffer or Hootsuite you can schedule your tweets with ease. You are not penalized for schedule tweets on twitter and as long as you consider the amount of tweets you are sending and the content of them carefully then this is a good strategy to use.

I advise that you sit down once a week (or once a month depending on the size of your social media campaign) and fill in the content calendar attached here. You can then schedule all of you tweets in one go, it shouldn’t take more than 5 – 10 minutes once a week.

If your twitter account has less than 200 followers and you are not very active on there I would recommend no more than 2 broadcast tweets a day. At the very most, if your twitter account has more than 1000 followers I would go for 7/8 broadcast tweets a day. Experiment, see what feels right for you.

Lets talk for a minute about how to write the perfect tweet for broadcasting.

Your aim here is:

to tell people about your business
to generate traffic to your website
to encourage followers to engage with you, to reply or retweet your message

Research has shown that the best tweets are 120 characters and include an image and a link to your website. That doesn’t leave you many characters for text does it! So you need to be clever.

Use the link shortening option that comes with your scheduling tool to cut down your website link.
Don’t abbreviate words. Nobody wants to read ur instead of your.
Consider your message carefully.
Use hashtags.

Here are some of the scheduled tweets I use :

Do you need help managing your #Facebook, #twitter, #linkedin, #pinterest profiles? Ask me how I can help socialmediayourway.co.uk

Coming soon - brand new course showing you how to get a ROI from your #socialmediain just 30 minutes a day.socialmediayourway.co.uk

Do you need help in finding where your customers are online? I can show you how to engage with them using Social Media http://dld.bz/ds6Rc

Scheduling on Facebook is a little more tricky. It can still be done through Hootsuite, Buffer, Socialoomph or Facebook itself but if you can avoid scheduling Facebook posts then you should.

Facebook penalizes you heavily for scheduling through third party apps. Their algorithms for deciding who sees your content are complex at the best of times but if you schedule all your posts outside of Facebook you will see your reach decrease drastically. Scheduling through Facebook is not as damaging but your posts will perform better if you can post them live.

I would advise 1 Facebook post a day to start with, moving up to 2-3 once you have a few hundred engaged followers.

I think there is no getting away from the fact that to start with you will have to post these updates live, but if you find that this is taking too much time then experiment with scheduling them and see what impact it has on your stats.

Twitter Lists - What’s All The Fuss About?

Twitter is my all time favourite social media channel, bar NONE. I love it. Even though I adore it and spend a lot of time on there, I know there is tonnes more that I could be doing with it. Twitter has so much to offer that will really enhance your time on there and help you to make sure you are engaging with the right people for your business, in a way that doesn’t feel stressy or out of control.

One of these awesome underused facilities is lists.

Hands up how many of you are actively using twitter lists?

When you start out on twitter it is tempting to follow as many people as you can in the first few days, you are not necessarily being careful about following your ideal customer and making sure that you are going for quality rather than quantity. This is how most people find themselves suddenly following hundreds of people, with only a few following them and suddenly your new twitter experience can feel frustrating. Why are so few people following you? Why can’t you start good conversations and engage with the people you are following?

Its highly likely you’ve followed too many of the wrong kind of people if you are struggling to start or join in with conversations in your timeline. But this isn’t always the case, sometimes you may just be following a LOT of people and its hard to keep up with them all. This is where lists come in - trust me on this one.

Setting up a list in twitter is a great way to organise and segment the people whose content you are interested in. You can have a list of anything you like, people who are based in the UK, tweeters who talk about politics, friends who you know in real life, people who belong to your networking groups. You don’t have to be following someone in order to add them to a list. When you have your list set up you can go and check out all the tweets of that list in one place, they are organised and together and this is much easier than looking at your whole timeline.

1. To set up a list in twitter simply go to your profile pic in the top right hand corner, click on it and select lists.

2. Then click on where it says new list on the right hand side.

3. Give your list a name, a description and if you are using the list for business I’d recommend making it public.

4. There you have your new list set up. You’ll see this screen which allows you to search for people and add them to your list.

Find their profile and click on the little wheel cog icon on the right hand side and choose add to lists. Tick the list you want and its as easy as that!

Do you already use twitter lists?

Let me know what lists you use that really help your twitter time.

Three Things You Must Do Daily For Big Success on Social Media

Every business knows that they need to be using online marketing and social media to grow their sales, customer base, reputation and business - right? But does every business know how to do this? One of the biggest frustrations that I hear from a lot of businesses is that social media is a time suck, its a waste of time, its annoying and they spend hours on facebook with no results.

What you need to remember is that social media for business sis different from social media for fun. If you are trying to build a business brand you need to have a plan and you need to stick to it. Here are three things you need to be doing every day on social media if you are serious about growing your business.

No. 1 - Engage with your ideal clients

This is massively important, it doesn’t matter how or where you do it but you need to be engaging with those people who are not yet your clients, but who you know you can help. There are lots of different ways that you can engage with them, and we’ll look at these in more detail but make sure you are carving out some time each day for this. Whether its 10 minutes to go into twitter and chat to people, or whether its offering help in one of the Linkedin groups you are part of. The HOW will depend on your target market and your industry. The WHY is because this builds your reputation as an expert and keeps you in your ideal clients mind.

No. 2 - Promote your own work

Whether you are sharing a link to a blog post, a work with me page, a special offer or a testimonial from one of your existing clients, you need to be promoting your own work every day across your social media channels. This doesn’t have to be done in a sleazy, salesy, BUY MY STUFF NOW kind of way - it can be offering value at the same time. If you are blogging regularly then you will always have content to share and this is a great way to build your brand without feeling like you have to be all hard sales. If you’ve written a guest blog for someone else, share that. Just remind your audience that they can work with you, and that you are awesome.

No. 3 - Sharing other relevant content

This is the single best way to position yourself as an expert. I dont recommend you share work from your direct competitors but there is nothing to stop you from sharing other industry relevant articles or pictures that your target audience will be interested in. So if you are a food coach share recipes or articles from Mind Body Green or the Huffington post. If you are a life coach share news stories you find online relating to stress or happiness. Give your readers extra value and content.

If you can make time to do these three actions every day on some or all of your social media channels I promise you’ll soon start to see results.

Best Social Media Contest Apps

A good social media contest can help you get more fans and followers, more traffic to your website, and more engagement. But the best part of all is that it takes minimal effort to set up and you can get your social media contest up and running in a matter of minutes. Here are some of the best tried-and-tested social media contest apps:

Wishpond

Wishpond is a big favorite when it comes to social media contest apps. Not only is it easy to set up, but it also works with several different major social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest…).

Votigo

Votigo is both a social media management tool as well as a tool for creating contests and sweepstakes. Votigo can help create promotions for most popular social networks (Facebook, Twitter and Vine, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest), as well as web and mobile promotions.

Woobox

Woobox have a great array of very useful social media apps – my personal favorite being the Quizzes app, that allows you to create quizzes with custom results for your participants. When it comes to promotional apps, they have several great ones to choose from, such as sweepstakes, photo and video contests, and Pin to Win for Pinterest.

SocialAppsHQ

SocialAppsHQ have an amazing collection of both free and paid apps for Twitter and Facebook. They have all kinds of tabs you can think of, starting with contest tabs (such as video contest, sweepstakes and even an essay contest tab) and ending with…well, more types of tabs that you can think of.

Strutta

Strutta is a really good app, although it doesn’t work on as many social platforms as some of the other tools in the list. It can be used for running contests and sweepstakes across Facebook, Instagram, microsites and iframes.

Offerpop

Offerpop have loads of cool contest apps, although most of them are for Facebook. However there are some other interesting apps for Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram that are definitely worth checking out.

Shortstack

Shortstack allows you to build the perfect social media campaign, whether you want a contest, a promotion of some kind, or a sweepstakes. One cool feature is that you can embed your campaign anywhere – website, blog or wherever else you want to, so as to reach as many people as possible. And even better, you can get started on your first campaign for free.

Heyo

Heyo allows you to create promotions and contests by using one of their best templates, or you can take back creative control and create the perfect promotion for you and your business.

What are your favourite social media contest tools on the market? Which ones have you tried so far?