Building Better Social Media Presence

Having a robust social media presence is essential for the survival of any brand nowadays. On average, a single person spends at least two hours scrolling through their social timelines. By developing a strong social media presence, you get to tap into that potential consumer base. Not only are your potential customers there, but they’re also looking for you. When anyone first finds out about a company, they look for its website and social media pages. With an audience that is already interested, if you plan your strategy wisely, you can manage to acquire new customers easily. As a brand, you don’t necessarily need a whole new division or a contract with an agency to boost your business on social media. There are three main steps to take. […]

The Importance of a Social Media Presence

Let’s face it: social media makes the world go round. Whether it’s political news or a simple story about someone’s day at work, social media has the power to make the news spread far wider than it could ever be able to reach on its own. With more than three billion people using social media every month, any business should know that it’s not something to let slip out of their hands. […]

How Social Media Helps SEO: Everything You Need To Know

Social media, and social communication, in general, have dramatically evolved over the years. In its early days, many consider social as a different, separate, element of the ‘traditional’ internet: search engines (including Google) and websites. Nowadays, it’s no longer the case, as the internet itself has evolved to become more social, connecting everyone. […]

Top 5 Ways to Market Your Business With LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the most powerful social networking site to help you grow your business.  It makes Twitter, Facebook and YouTube seem like social networking sites for kids. If you want to hang with the big players—a place where connections are made, leads are generated, and deals go down—then you need to spend more of your time on LinkedIn. Although other sites have their purpose in the business world and many people utilize multiple social networking sites, LinkedIn is still the number-one place to market your business.  Here are ways to use LinkedIn and get results: #1: Use LinkedIn Groups & Receive Tons of New Leads Daily How would you feel if you had a sales funnel that brought in roughly 50 to 100 fresh, highly targeted leads every day? You’d feel pretty confident about putting food on the table next week, right? Well, creating a LinkedIn group gives you the ability to generate an amazing number of leads from high-end decision makers. Here are some great groups to closely examine: Sports Industry Network Inbound Marketers – For marketing professionals Social Media Marketing Tweeple On Startups – A community for entrepreneurs Here’s how to maximize your LinkedIn group: Add keywords in the description of your group to increase your search rankings on LinkedIn’s search section. Add keywords in the title of the group to be found on Google. Add your company website or blog to the group to drive traffic to your site. Add your blog RSS feed to the group so every new article is automatically posted to the home page of every group member. Send a weekly message that adds value for group members and drives traffic back to your site. Connect people in the group by making introductions to those who could potentially do business with one another. All of these points will help you generate more leads for your business.  If your sales funnel is set up correctly, you will have more than enough prospects to grow your business. Make sure you create a group that fills a need for the audience you’re targeting in your business field. This will ensure that every person who joins the group is a qualified lead. #2: Ask Questions & Build Your Credibility I’ve asked a number of questions using LinkedIn Answers because it’s a great way toget the answers you need from some of the top experts in the world. Then, when you see a question pop up that you know the answer to, follow these steps: Research the person who asked the question, and find a way to tie in a personal response with something from their LinkedIn profile. Be as helpful and resourceful as possible when answering the question.  Give tips, website links with additional information, or even recommend someone who is the best expert on that topic. Leave the answer with an open invitation for more communication by asking them to contact you privately if they need any extra help. All of these tips will help you gain the most out of answering questions, and will [...]

5 Reasons Why Landing Pages & Forms are More Valuable than Homepages

A recent post over at Google made an interesting claim: The ROI for improvement is much better for landing pages and forms than it is for homepages. At first this sounds controversial, but it makes sense for many reasons. While the article talks about how to improve forms and landing pages, it doesn’t really explain why they are more valuable than home pages. Here are five reasons landing pages are more valuable than home pages: Landing pages & forms are real interaction points.They are the primary way that visitors enter information or communicate back to you, the web site owner. Most pages are simply one-way communication, but forms and landing pages with forms are two-way…they are the conversation. By “listening” to the conversation on these types of pages, you’ll learn a lot more than you will by trying to figure out what home page traffic is telling you. Landing pages are transactional, and the transactions they enable are the ones crucial to your business. This means they are the most important point in the usage lifecycle of your customers…it’s when visitors are deciding to do business with you or start the process of doing business with you. They contain the most important decision points for your customers. Landing pages are contextual. When designed well, landing pages address a very specific need of a very specific audience. This makes them high value…they are like the sales closer. They come in after someone has shown interest and are the most powerful way you can close the deal. They might have a lot less traffic than the homepage, but that traffic is much more important. Home pages are a catch-all. They act to triage all incoming traffic. They have to handle first-time visitors, returning visitors, the press, friends and family, investors, people who want to sign into your web app, everyone who has any reason at all to visit. Therefore, the messages on homepages are necessarily weakened and can’t speak as strongly to any specific user group…they have to handle everything. They serve a completely different purpose than more focused pages like landing pages or forms. Homepages are notoriously political. Everyone wants a piece of the homepage. The thinking is that because the homepage is the single page with the most traffic, it must be the most important page on the site. But that’s simply not true…the mere fact that it’s the root URL on your domain means that it will inevitably get more traffic. In the end the politics almost always serve to distract…by spending so much time on the homepage design teams often overlook the value of their other, more important pages. As site visitors we don’t often see landing pages unless we come via a specific pathway, such as clicking on an ad on Google Search or Facebook or some other ad provider. This serves to diminish landing pages in our mind…because we don’t see them as often as the venerable homepage. But there are real reasons why it makes sense to [...]