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How to Market Your Business on a Shoestring Budget

BIMS_7.28Most business owners are too busy running their business that they don’t have time to overlook the marketing side of the business. Because of this, they choose to hire a professional to take care of the job.

If you are running a business and you have enough budget set aside for marketing, then good for you. However, not everyone have the money to hire professionals. The good news is you don’t need to spend a fortune to promote your business, and small steps can bring big rewards.

Here are a few recommendations that can help you market your business on a shoestring budget.

Email marketing

If you are starting a business, begin by sending an email to your family, friends, colleagues and anyone who might be interested in what you offer. Be sure to ask permission before adding their names on your email list.

Build your brand on social media

If you want to build a fan base, then engagement should be on top of your priority list. That said, you need to build your brand on social media.

Social media offers a tremendous opportunity to engage with your target audience. Identify your target audience and find a way to pull them in. If you’re pushing salesy content in the hopes of attracting potential customers, then you’re doing it wrong. Post quality contents that they’ll find valuable and interesting. You can also offer some advice, ask questions or solicit opinions.

Build relationships

It can be a lot more challenging to keep a customer than it is to attract new ones. Because of that, it is important to build a relationship with your existing customers. Keep your lines of communications open. Send newsletters or promotional offers to keep them updated about the events you’re hosting, new products you’re launching and current promotions.

Online contest

Online contests can help create buzz. Yes, you need to prepare some good prizes to get participants, but the number of participants and potential leads will be worth the price.

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5 Ways to Promote Your Blog on Social Media

bims_7.21So you have a great blog. You regularly post relevant and informative content, and that’s great. However, it will do you no good if you don’t have traffic coming your blog’s way. Without readers, your content will never maximize its reach.

For many bloggers, getting the word out about their newest venture can seem like a big challenge. But by promoting your blog on social media, you’re potentially exposing yourself or your business to millions of people from all over the world.

This week, we’re going to shed some light on how to promote your blog on social media. Keep reading for tips on how to drive traffic to your blog.

Add photos

Studies suggest that social media posts that include images get 12% more engagement as compared to those with no photos. So be sure to use full-sized images to get more likes, shares, comments and generate more traffic to your blog.

Share your blog posts on social media

If readers are not coming to your site, go to them instead. Give your fans and followers a taste of your blog by sharing your blog posts on social media.

Include the link to your status post, but be sure to delete it in your text before posting it. Your update will have a clickable image, which will direct users to your blog.

Use the right social channels

Considering that you know your target audience, we’re assuming that you know where they hang out. Concentrate your efforts where you audience spend their time on. If your target audience is foodies, you might want to spend more time on Pinterest. If your audience is the C-suite executives, LinkedIn might be their preferred social platform. Don’t waste your time on social channels that do not appeal to your audience.

Keep it short

Keep your posts short, clear and intriguing. People’s attention spans are short and they won’t be interested to slog through tons of information. Limit your posts to one sentence. If possible, keep it under 140 characters. Remember, short and witty updates generate the most engagement and click throughs.

Use conversation starters

Ask intriguing questions to the readers and direct them to your blog for answers. In order for them to get the answer to this specific question, they’ll need to click the link and read through your blog post. Now that you have captured their attention, write more interesting and informative blog posts to keep them coming back for more.

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Tips for Connecting with Industry Influencers on Social Media

BimsBlog 2.3.15Whether you’re running a small business or a big brand, you can reap great benefits when a highly influential person talks about your business. It can help you drive traffic to your site, increase your SEO and build your online social standing.

You need to be efficient with your time and even more effective with whom you choose to connect with. You want to be able to connect with industry influencers – people who have a success story, speak at conventions, widely published and well respected.

Here are a few tips for connecting with industry influencers on social media. Read on for a simple system you can immediately deploy.

Find your influencers

The first thing you need to do is to find your influencers. Industry influencers are industry experts and thought leaders that have a following that is similar to what you want to achieve. When looking at an influencer, take into account their search engine ranking, Klout score and number of followers.

Interact with them actively

Keep an eye out for influencers for chances to reach out. Interact with them through contents they are sharing. Feel free to ask a question if you think a particular point they’re making requires further explanation, show your appreciation for an article they have written or share their work through social media. Whatever you do, be genuine.

Nurture the relationship

Once you’ve engaged with an influencer, be sure to keep the lines of communication open and reach out to them once in a while. Take the initiative to strike up a conversation. Send them an email to let them know about a campaign you’re running or invite them to events you’re hosting. If you see you can provide assistance, do it. This can help grow your relationship and build trust with the influencer.

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Social Media Marketing Tactics You’re Wasting Your Time On

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A few years ago, social media was considered as a new and unchartered territory. But with the popularity of social media platforms such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, business owners knew that they needed to cope up in order to stay relevant.

If you want your business to stay afloat and thrive, be sure to avoid these social media marketing tactics.

Buying Facebook fans

Having thousands of followers may help validate your business’ social proof, but you also have to understand that social media sites have algorithms that are designed to track and analyze interaction and engagement. Buying fans will reduce the amount of organic reach you do get.

Instead of paying for fake followers, you might want to focus on building genuine relationship with your target audience.

Spamming your audience

Posting one content after another is a great strategy if you want to turn off your followers. Create a regular posting schedule and space out posts and tweets for optimal sharing times. Also, make sure you have a solid content strategy each time you post.

You are always selling

The best content tells stories – stories that tell how you help your customers, what you can offer them and what it’s like to do business your company. But if all you write about is how awesome your products are, it’s not story telling. You call it advertising. We guarantee you your fans and followers won’t like it.

Creating accounts on too many platforms

If you think it’s wise to be everywhere; you’re wrong. Many companies create accounts on different social media platforms, despite their ability to engage with their followers and post quality content.

When users visit your profile and only finds 10 status posts or tweets within the past year, they may think that you don’t care or you’re disorganized. Don’t spread yourself too thin. Keep your focus on one platform at a time, and then branch out from there.

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Simple Ways to Grow Your Email List


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A mailing list is the preferred method of communication and cultivating long-term relationships with customers of smart and creative business owners. In fact, it is one of the most heavily used channels of communication to date.

As a marketer, it is your job to add fresh contacts to your email list on a regular basis. How exactly do you do that? We have heaps of ideas that can help you grow your email list. Read on to grow your audience, generate more leads and bring more business.

Make it easy to subscribe

Keep your offers upfront and be sure to include call-to-action buttons on about every page of your website. Don’t make people dig around your site. Put those sign up forms where visitors can easily see them.

Collect email addresses at in-person events

Collect email address at events such as educational panels, hackathons, conferences, meet ups etc. Just having a sign up form at events isn’t enough. You should train your people to collect email addresses at registration. Be sure to send them a welcome email that confirms their opt-in to your list.

Use social media

Promote an offer that requires an email submission on your Facebook page. Make it easy for people to join your list by adding a sign up form to your Facebook page. You can also create twitter campaign to promote one of your lead generation offers to your followers.

Give away something valuable

Think of building your email list as an exchange. Potential customers give you their email address, and in return, you provide them with something that is of value to them.

Everyone likes free stuff. So be sure to attach something valuable to your email sign up form. It can be an ebook, early access to new features, private blog content, video, cheat sheet etc. This is a surefire way to pique people’s interest and get them to sign the form.

 

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How to Create a Great First Impression Online

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Most of you know that first impressions are a big deal. You only get one chance to make a good impression so you have to make it right.

Living in the digital world, our first encounters with other people are often via social media, blog posts or email. And once you capture the attention of the public, the first thing they’re going to do is to run a Google search on you. The pressure is on. So where do you start?

Here are 4 simple ways to make a good first impression online.

Know your audience

Successful brands start out by getting to know their audience before they try to appeal to them. Consider the interest and needs of your target audience. Focus on people who are most likely to buy your products instead of appealing to the masses. This will yield better results and end up saving a lot of money in the process.

Be informational rather than promotional

A lot of business owner think that they need to do something flashy just to capture the attention of their target audience. But in order to stand out, you need to provide them with quality content, content that will appeal to your target audience. Let’s take Wikipedia as an example. Wikipedia is one of the least flashy sites on the Web, but it is also one of the most trusted. So, if you really want to stand out, provide people with informative and quality content rather than just showcasing your products on a regular basis.

Get your personal life out of the public eye

We often use social media channels to communicate with our family and friends. But now that you’re running a business, be sure to use a separate account when talking to potential clients and customers. Remember, people will be watching you. So you might as well get your personal life out of the public eye.

Don’t forget to clean up your social media profile once in a while. While it’s normal to have fun sometimes, you don’t want people to have a negative perception of you.

Your website

Apparently, you only have 3 seconds to grab a visitor’s attention. If you want them to stay, you need to take into account the design and usability of your website. Mind you, people are going to close the window or start looking at other sites if they don’t like what they see or don’t know what to do. Make sure that your content is easy to access and your site is easy to navigate.

 

 

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How to Maximize Your Content Shareability

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While it is impossible to tell whether or not your post will go viral, there are things you can do to increase its shareability and engagement factor. Here are some of them.

Write more in-depth posts

Not only is great content an important foundation of your website, it is the driving force for online engagement.

Useful and informative content gets the most number of shares. Another factor to consider is the uniqueness of your content. People are more likely to share your content if they find it interesting and fresh. Share your knowledge by offering how-tos FAQs, tutorials and user guides.

Make content easy to share

In order to increase the shareability of your content, you need to make it easy for your audience to share it. If there is a share button, things are as easy as clicking it. Plus, it is a subtle way of telling your visitors to share the content. It’s as if you’re saying, “Hey, did you like what you just read? Why not pass it along?”

Use images

Visual content is a fantastic marketing weapon. A great image can capture the attention of people and increase clickthroughs to your content. That said, you need to put extra care into choosing images for your blog content.

Keep in mind that images that look good on your site will not necessarily look good on social media. So be sure to determine the best image dimensions for every social network.

Captivating headline

We all know the importance of a great headline in getting people’s attention. Research shows that most people do not only scan the content’s body, they also scan the headline. If you want to increase the chances of your article getting read, it is best to limit your headline to 6 words.

When writing titles and headlines, it is also important to keep keywords in mind. This will not only help you stay visible in the feed, but to users who are interested on the said topic as well.

 

 

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Reasons Why Visitors Leave Your Website

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Increasing web traffic is hard enough. Capturing their attention and enticing them to stay longer, not to mention subscribe, sign up for your newsletters or buy, is even more difficult. According to the Nielsen Norman Group, most users stick around for less than 59 seconds. That means if you don’t get their attention and provide them what they want fast, you lose them permanently.

The question is, what makes them press the back button shortly after visiting your website? Let’s take a look at some of major reasons why users leave a website and what you can do about it.

Poor first impression

Your website is the house of your business. People visit it if they want to learn more about your products and services or want to have an idea about what your business is all about.

If the impression is good, then you might be welcoming a new set of loyal customers. But if you have a crappy site, people might not consider doing business with your company even if you have great products.

Slow loading

The attention span of the modern web surfer is limited. They don’t have time to wait for a slow website to finish loading.

If they are interested or really need to visit your site, they might wait. But if they have just clicked the link on impulse and they’re just curious to see what the site is all about, they are more likely to leave.

Too much distraction

Your website should guide your visitors step-by-step until such time that they are ready to buy. Having lots of information on your homepage will just confuse visitors. Do not bombard your visitors with too many options.  You’re just making it difficult for them to know how to proceed.

Too many ads

Suffocating your visitors with ads that flash, pop or fill the entire screen will only serve to enrage them. They are annoying and can drive users into leaving a website and never return. Ads can also kill webpage load time because of all the extra JavaScript files they have to call.

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How to Improve the Visibility of Your LinkedIn Profile

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In today’s corporate world, you’re not somebody until you can be found in LinkedIn. As more and more professionals and business owners create an account on this site, getting noticed requires a deep well of connections and some site-specific SEO magic.

If you have already created a profile on LinkedIn, you might want to revisit it and refresh your presence. Here are some tips to improve your visibility and get the most out of the world’s largest professional networking site.

Fill out your profile completely

When other users land on your page, they’ll see a box that displays your profile highlights. If you are a business owner or a professional, you wouldn’t want to miss out on the opportunity to build a relationship with potential clients, customers and partners. This is your chance to make a great impression. So, make sure that the information in your profile box is complete, up-to-date and optimized.

Include relevant search keywords

If you want people to find you, you need to apply effective SEO techniques. This is especially important on the “Headline” field. Instead of just describing your current position, it would be best if you could optimize your job title slightly and include relevant keywords.

Expand your network

LinkedIn is the perfect platform for connecting with colleagues. So go ahead and connect with people, especially those who share your professional interests and qualifications. It’s also a good idea to connect with your past clients, managers, co-workers and other colleagues. You can further improve your LinkedIn search presence by doing this step.

Be an active participant

Like major search engines, LinkedIn rewards users who actively engage with others. Joining and participating in groups is beneficial as it not only helps in expanding your network, it also improves your profile’s SEO.

LinkedIn allows users to join up to 50 groups, but if you do, you’ll have a difficult time keeping up with all the conversations. Focus on 3 to 5 groups and make it a point to participate in group discussions. Otherwise, you’ll be missing out on opportunities to build influence.

 

 

 

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