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4 Reasons Why Your Business Needs to be Podcasting

4 Reasons Why Your Business Needs to be Podcasting

Podcasts are a powerful marketing tool. Over the years, it has garnered immense popularity, with more and more businesses discovering how it can benefit their company. If you still haven’t incorporated podcasting into your marketing campaign, then you’re losing out on a lot of business opportunities.

Here are 4 reasons why your business needs to be podcasting.

Brand awareness

As mentioned above, podcasting is a powerful marketing tool. It can help you reach new audience, drive traffic to your site, and even build a community. By broadcasting podcasts regularly, it will help develop your company’s brand to make it a household name.

Simplicity

A lot of people are put off by the seemingly confusing technical aspects of recording a podcast. Producing a podcast is not as complicated as what most people think. You do not need a lot of money either to start a podcast.

To start, all you need is a microphone, a headset, a recording device, and editing software. A good wifi connection is also important for uploading the files.

Easy to consume

Humans have a very short attention span. In fact, an average person has an average attention span of 8 seconds. If you want to get your message across, then you need to make it easier for your audience to consume and understand what you’re trying to say. Podcasts can help you do that.

A 1,500-word article may provide your audience the information they need. However, not everyone will have the patience to read through the entire article. With podcasts, you can convey the message in a more interactive way. Plus, people can listen to podcasts during their commute or while doing other things at work or at home.

Build better relationship with your audience

Podcasts provides a more personal way of getting information. Instead of just reading content on your blog or email, they get to hear your voice through podcasts. This makes your brand more personable. Overtime, people will be more familiar of your voice and presentation style.

Building a relationship with your audience helps in building trust. Once you gain their trust, it would be easier for you to turn them into paying customers. After all, people are more likely to buy something from someone they trust.

4 Reasons Why Your Business Needs to be Podcasting

4 Reasons Why Your Business Needs to be Podcasting4 Reasons Why Your Business Needs to be Podcasting

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4 Common Blogging Mistakes to Avoid (And What to Do Instead)

4 Common Blogging Mistakes to Avoid

Blogging provides several benefits to businesses. Many businesses owners have turned to blogging to reach a wider audience, drive traffic to their site, promote their products and services, and increase conversions. Blogging can help you achieve your business goals, provided that you avoid certain pitfalls.

Here are 4 blogging mistakes you need to avoid, along with some tips to get the results you want.

Inconsistent blogging

Let’s face it. Creating content can be time-consuming. We understand that most of you have a crazy schedule and you’re struggling to find time to write your next blog post. But in order to achieve your goals, you need to stick to a consistent posting schedule. It’s not enough to post content when you have something to say. You should publish new content at least once a week.

Inconsistent blogging is bad enough for your SEO growth; it can also make you look like an amateur. This can sink your blog and can cost your business sales. To make your business blog work, we suggest that you develop a content calendar. Plan your blog topics ahead of time and try to schedule posts in advance.

Your writing is too stiff and technical

A well-written blog is one that strikes a conversation with their readers. Get rid of the jargon and loosen up your writing. It’s okay to be more conversational in your writing. In fact, we encourage you to write like you talk. People want to feel like they’re dealing with people, not robot. The more conversational your writing is, the more people will enjoy reading it.

When you write in a conversational tone, you can convey your message more easily. It also helps you engage with your audience and build a stronger relationship with them. They’ll see you as genuine and human, not as a faceless brand who’s trying to sell to them.

In 2020, Neil Patel ran A/B test on two versions of the same blog post. One was written conversationally, while the other one was written in a formal tone. Here, he discovered that the majority of the readers only spent less than two minutes on the blog post that was written in a formal tone. Whereas, readers spent an average of 4.5 minutes reading the conversational version. Also, 247% more readers consumed the full article when written in a conversational tone.

Being self-centered

A blog is a great platform for giving your audience updates about your business and promoting your products and services. However, not every post in your blog should be about you. Rather, you should focus on who you are writing for.

Create content your audience will find interesting. Be helpful.  Answer all the questions you’ve been asked by customers. Share your expertise. You may also share your opinion on certain topics. Write blog posts that are creative, informative and interesting.

So what’s the key to selecting the best topics for your blog? It’s knowing your target audience. Once you know who you’re writing for, it will easier for you to create a list of blog topics.

One of the best ways to find out what your audience likes is to check your analytics and identify your top performing posts. You can also reach out to your audience and have a conversation with them. Or you can also do an online survey. Remember that most of a blog’s traffic is driven organically, so choose topics your audience will want to read, not something that will only interest you.

Giving up too soon

If you’ve been writing for several months now and you still haven’t seen a significant increase on your leads and traffic, you’re probably getting frustrated. I understand that it can get frustrating, but you also have to keep in mind that building a successful blog takes time. It requires a lot of hard work, patience, and perseverance.

You’ve spent countless of hours in front of your computer, trying to make boring stuff interesting. Unfortunately, after a few months of blogging, you’re still not seeing the results you want. At this point, you may feel like giving up. That’s understandable. However, please keep in mind that it may take quite a while before you generate positive results. Depending on the online competition and your industry, it may take about 3 to 6 months. Giving up too soon is one of the biggest mistakes you can make.

Keep writing. Focus on creating high-quality posts. Be patient. Soon enough, you’ll get the results you want.

Final thoughts

Anyone can start a blog, but not everyone will be able to build a successful blog. Why? Because most business owners don’t give it the time, effort, and attention it needs.

If you’re struggling to get the results you want from your blog, then we’re here to help. Schedule a free consultation call and we’ll help you get more leads and traffic for your business.

4 Common Blogging Mistakes to Avoid

4 Common Blogging Mistakes to Avoid for Your Yoga Practice4 Common Blogging Mistakes to Avoid for Your Acupuncture Practice

4 Common Blogging Mistakes to Avoid for Your Nutrition Practice

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Behind the Scenes at BIMS

Working from home has its perks. For one, I have the BEST office mates. My girls are with me for part of each day  and I am so lucky to build a walk or run outside into “office” life.

Meet Clover:

Benefits of working from home. You have office mates like this little cutie! #irishwolfhound

Clover is our “little” Irish Wolfhound! She spends every day by my side (in fact, the office is organized so her GIANT bed can fit in front of the window). Clover has spent every day of her life with us working by my side. She’s the perfect sounding board for brainstorming and has always been a motivator to take a walk or jog outside as a midday break.

Then there is this little twerp 🙂

My little mini-me is another staple in the office. Until she could walk, MK came EVERYWHERE with me, including the networking group I run. We count our blessings everyday about how lucky we are that she has such a sweet (though mischievous) disposition.

These two are now best friends and trust me, I’m so excited too “go” to work every day knowing they’ll be popping in to say hello whenever they need a little love from mom!

clover and mk

Now, don’t even get me started on Amber’s clan! I’ll let her write about her two. Just think of the sweetest pup and girl you can… multiply that by 100. You’ll finally be close to how lovely her officemates are 🙂

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6 Best WordPress Themes for Photographers

Top WordPress Photography Themes

We’ve worked with numerous photographers to redesign their website’s. These photographers are looking for websites that are: clean, crisp, responsive, and load quickly. Though sometimes plugins and additional features (or just too many photos per gallery) cause the site to slow down, the following themes are our favorite for Photography Websites.

1. AVADA Responsive Multi-Purpose Theme by ThemeFusion

You’ll find the Avada theme listed as a top theme option on many of our lists. This theme offers flexibility and comes with predefined page layouts for your to customize for your photography business. It is the #1 selling WordPress theme on the market.

$60

avada theme for photography

2. X | The Theme by THEMECO

X is intuitive and allows you to get a site out fast! With 4 different unique designs, this theme is great for photographers looking to set themselves apart!

$65

X Theme for Photographers

3. Enfold – Responsive Theme by Kriesi

This is currently our go-to theme for many of our clients, especially photographers who want a combination of crisp-clean layouts with advanced functionality and ease of use.

$60
Enfold theme for photography

4. Impreza= Retna Responsive by UpSolution

Elegant with functionality for animations and sliders, this beautiful theme is great for photographers looking to showcase their images. It includes the ability to integrate with other top plugins for optimal performance.

$59

Impreza Theme for Photographers

5. Core Minimalist Photography Portfolio by ThemeGoods

This minimalist photography theme is perfect for the photographer who wants their site to stand out. With all the latest WordPress features, we highly recommend this theme to display your portfolio!

$49

Core WordPress theme for photographers

6. Photolux – Photography Portfolio WordPress Theme by pexeto

This theme is powerful and offers tons of options for photographers. You can easily edit any aspect of the theme and offers different slider layouts and unique portfolio template.

$49

Photolux for photographers

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Pinterest Tips to Help Strengthen Your Business

pinterestSocial media platforms have been the go-to business strategy for sharing content over the past couple of years. Recently, the main focus has shifted more towards visual content, which is why Pinterest has been on the rise for businesses. Pinterest has grown immensely over the past few years, with the latest statistics revealing that 70 million people use it daily, while 9% of all Fortune 500 brands are active on the platform as well.

Now is the time to get your business on board with Pinterest! Here is a variety of ways to help maximize your efforts:

1. Using Rich Pins

Rich pins are a new edition to Pinterest that add extra details to Pins from your website. There are six types are rich pins which include app, movie, recipe, article, product, and place. There are many advantages to using Rich Pins including real-time pricing and stock availability. They also help improve CTR and discoverability of pins by making them eligible for Pinterest’s own curated feeds.

 2. Focus on Pinning

Pin every new product, engage frequently, and keep it fresh. Knowing what types of images work best on Pinterest is extremely important. There are many tips and tricks to making your images high-quality and pinnable. Using colors wisely, keeping your mages anonymous, paying attention to size, timing, and your analytics through various Pinterest tools will ensure that you’re grasping your consumer’s attention and using Pinterest to the best of your ability.

3. Inspire

Rather than just creating boards that promote your product, create them around a particular lifestyle that appeals to your audience. Understanding your customer, knowing what they seek for, and exerting that through a Pinterest lifestyle board will help keep them interested and inspired by your brand. Many major brands use this strategy to promote what they stand for and to reach out to their consumer.

4. Running Contests

Increasing engagement is important on every social media platform, but not too many people use it to their advantage on Pinterest(and they should!). If done properly through following the Pinterest contest guidelines, contests can drive sales and help reach a wider audience. Be creative, make it worth it for your consumer, and look to other brands for contest ideas. Also, there are a variety of apps that can help organize your contest and host it on your site including Gleam.io, Wishpond, and Woobox.

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Benefits of Social Media Marketing

There are a lot of blog posts and articles which stresses the importance of
integrating social media into your marketing strategies. Most people believe that
social media platforms provide a great impact on a business’ lead generation and
sales.
Listed below are some of the benefits of social media marketing. Keep in mind,
though, that these benefits may not be seen overnight. You have to put in a great
deal of effort and wait for a few months in order to see significant results.

Communication
Social media platforms are created in order to share information and interact with
other people. To maximize your marketing efforts, it is best to develop a social
media marketing strategy that would encourage your followers to interact with you.
This has to be a two-way communication.

Networking
Social media does not only help you extend your reach and build new relationships.
It’s also a great place where you can deepen and maintain the existing ones.

Build a reputation
As a business owner, you know that having a good reputation is one of the most
important ingredients to success. While your marketing efforts are focused on
maintaining what has been created, social media marketing makes these benefits
more pronounced.

Drive traffic
While driving traffic to your site is the main reason why you decided to create a
social media account, this comes as a great bonus. You can post a link to your
newest post and see people click the link and visit your site.

Promotion
Social media platforms are also a great avenue for promotion. Promote your brand
or your newest products, provide information about them and increase awareness
about your brand. You can also use social media to promote your events. Capture
people’s attention, create buzz and invite them to attend your event.

Extend reach

There are millions of users who access their social media accounts on a daily basis.
With this, it would be easier to reach as much people within a single post.
With over 150 million registered users, Twitter has been named as the 9th most
popular website on the Internet as of May 2011

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What’s Next for Content Marketing and SEO?

What’s Next for Content Marketing and SEO?

Increased focus on content will provide new challenges as more businesses invest in the area. Competition for those lucrative top spots in organic search results, is likely to increase further as more and more businesses adopt a content focused strategy. More competition in paid search too, means that budgets will need to increase in order to support the higher bids necessary to maintain visibility.

As social media reaches full maturity, so the techniques being used to
build and grow communities will need to be revised and sharpened in
order to rise above the hubbub

When it comes to social media, in order to rise above the high level of noise generated by increased adoption, boosting visibility will become even more crucial. Paid advertising, for example promoted posts and Facebook ads, will become increasingly necessary in order to reach customers. This means that companies who choose not to invest in this area and SMEs who simply don’t have the resources, will gradually loose out to competitors with deeper pockets.

Branding will become ever more important as businesses need to stand out from the competition. Smaller businesses whose activities are not currently strategically driven, will need to up their game in terms of both understanding and conveying their USPs and they will also need to get smart about how they measure their success and how they devise actionable insights.

If small businesses can remain both creative and agile, they will be able to grow their communities and more importantly, they’ll be able to leverage the power of those communities to their advantage. I’m pretty certain then that in 2014 we will see more investment into not just content marketing and relationship building, but into branding too.

Whilst opportunities will continue exist for those of us not lucky enough to have an internationally recognizable brand or large budgets, It’s not going to be easy. As 2014 progresses, small businesses will learn that investing in content marketing and developing their brand isn’t optional, it’s something they have to do in order to maintain their online visibility.

Marketing Insights for 2014

  1. Greater competition as the volume of content being published and promoted online continues to increase, making paid search more necessary
  2. Increased need to differentiate, making branding all important
  3. Increasingly necessary to pay for social media advertising alongside existing organic activities
  4. Social media continues to be an important communications with Increased adoption of Pinterest, particularly for online retailers and increased business adoption of  YouTube
  5. Responsive design will become even more widespread as the use of mobile devices for browsing the internet continues to increase
  6. Greater use of location based marketing, primarily Google Places/Google+ local
  7. Smarter metrics necessary in order to obtain clearer insights and more accurately measure ROI
  8. Strategically driven activities will become ever more widespread as social media reaches maturity
  9. Creativity, agility and innovation will become more important in helping marketers to grab and hold the attention of their audiences
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Instagram Video: What You Need to Know

Instagram has rolled out its brand new video sharing feature, the next logical step for the photo sharing service. Some moments,need more than a static image to come to life. Here is what the company had to say about it’s latest feature:

“We’re thrilled to introduce Video on Instagram and bring you another way to share your stories. When you go to take a photo on Instagram, you’ll now see a movie camera icon. Tap it to enter video mode, where you can take up to fifteen seconds of video through the Instagram camera.

You’ll also find that we’ve added thirteen filters built specifically for video so you can keep sharing beautiful content on Instagram. When you post a video, you’ll also be able to select your favorite scene from what you’ve recorded as your cover image so your videos are beautiful even when they’re not playing.

We’re excited to see what the community will bring to video, whether it’s your local cafe showing you just how they made your latte art this morning or an Instagrammer on the other side of the world taking you on a tour of their city, a mother sharing her joys in parenting as her children laugh and play or your favorite athlete taking you behind the scenes.

So what does this mean for your content? Nothing’s different from photos. We’re still committed to making sure you have control over all of your content. Only the people who you let see your photos will be able to see your videos. And as with photos, you own your videos. You can learn more about Video on Instagram—including our new Cinema feature—by visiting the Instagram Help Center.”

What do you think? How could companies use this new feature to attract new customers?

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What’s your priority on Facebook? The biggest mistake companies can make.

What’s your priority on Facebook? Think about your personal use of Facebook for a moment. Now ask yourself this question: When was the last time you opened up Facebook to: Make a purchase or a donation? Find out the latest news from a brand? Connect with your friends? If you’re like most people, you’ve never done No. 1 or No. 2, and you always do No. 3.

(Source: http://www.socialbrite.org/2013/10/02/the-one-simple-facebook-mistake-most-nonprofits-make/)

So Facebook is about friends connecting with friends, as shown above in this graph from the Atlantic. The biggest mistake that companies make is forgetting that for most, Facebook is all about connecting with friends . So the next time you make a Facebook post or launch a Facebook campaign, think about how you can make it about your community rather than about you.

 

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The Wild and Crazy Career Paths of 5 Self-Made Billionaires (Infographic)

Just starting your business and feeling lost? From their humble beginnings, all of these self-made billionaires have changed course scores of times. Let these stories serve as inspiration for you!

Virgin Empire founder Richard Branson’s first job was selling Christmas trees. NBA Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban’s first job was selling garbage bags. Las Vegas Sands Corporation CEO Sheldon Adelson’s first job was selling newspapers. Groupon co-founder Eric Lefkofsky’s first job was selling carpets. And Elon Musk, the founder of Telsa Motors and PayPal, started his working life writing video games.

The infographic below, generated by San Francisco-based startup organization Funders and Founders, shows just how many different businesses these legendary entrepreneurs launched.

Funders and Founders also analyzed all 1,426 billionaires in the world. From there, the company segmented out the 960 that are self made and determined that 830 of them earned their wealth from more than one business.

Source: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/228067

 

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