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How To Work SMART In 2018

I don’t know about you, but my mind has been consumed with planning for 2018!  Specifically, I have been asking myself “how I can grow my business in the new year?”  The biggest question I have been asking myself is “What are the activities that I need to be involved in to grow the business and how can I tell if those activities will work and are working?”  Almost like kismet, I stumbled over the SMART acronym while surfing social media.  While it is not a new idea, it is definitely a timely one!

If you are not familiar with the SMART acronym, here is how it breaks down as it applies to business and goal setting:

S – Specific (make your goal is clear and not ambiguous) 

M – Measurable (how will you measure your results to ensure you have reached your goal?)

A – Attainable (make sure the goal is something realistic, something you can achieve)

R – Relevant (does the goal make sense for your business and your business plan?)

T – Time-Bound (how long will it take you to achieve your goal or what deadline did you assign to this goal?)

This acronym is a favorite as it reminds me to be laser focused when planning my goals for 2018.  Each goal I set for 2018 will need to be SMART.  Each letter of the acronym will be filled out in order for it to be considered a serious goal for 2018.  To do that, I created a 2018 SMART planner that I am excited to share with you!  You can download the planner and complete SMART for each goal you plan to achieve in 2018.

To get your SMART planner, click HERE.

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How LinkedIn Can Help Your Business

Since LinkedIn went public in 2011, the social media platform has grown to be the center for making connections, developing careers, and many other business related activities. With 2 million new users joining every second, and with 107 million users in the US alone, LinkedIn is continuing to skyrocket in the world of social media. Why should you your start making LinkedIn a priority for your business? It helps to attract new clients and accelerate market opportunities, while also allowing you to create and become a part of online communities and groups, helping your business to generate rewarding leads. LinkedIn has become a power tool for helping to strengthen millions of businesses around the world. Here are some tips on how to use LinkedIn to your business’ advantage:

Using Sponsored Updates:linkedin

Sponsored updates help raise awareness about your brand, build relationships, and drive leads. One of the greatest things about using sponsored updates is that it allows you distribute your content to the right audience, including those outside of your following. Sponsored Updates allow you to target your audience by geography, specific companies, industries, company size, job title, and more. You are also able to determine how effective your updates are with the help of the detailed analytics provided by LinkedIn. But, if not carefully planned, investing in sponsored updates could cost your business instead of benefiting it. To ensure that you’re getting the most out of this investment, make sure you are sponsoring posts that will be perceived as valuable to your target market. Focus your energy towards careful planning and great content, and this tool will help your business gain credibility and become more established in its particular industry.

Optimize Your Personal Profile:

When putting your business out there on LinkedIn, it’s important to make sure you are also building your personal profile. Having an equal focus on your personal profile and your business profile will help put a face to your business, help you gain credibility, and grow your relationships with your consumers. By optimizing your personal profile with related keywords and rich media content such as videos and presentations, this will help your business generate more leads. Make sure your personal profile is professional and not a “business logo”. Steer your focus towards grabbing the attention of your “perfect” audience. Also, remember to make sure your LinkedIn profile links back to your business website and blog.

Develop Relationships:

One of the greatest parts about social media for your business is being able to strengthen your relationships with your consumer. LinkedIn is especially great for this because it allows you to precisely choose who you want to connect with. Instead of worrying about the quantity of your connections, it’s important to focus on the quality of the relationships with your connections. Decide which of your contacts you’d like to know better and start reaching out to them periodically from your personal profile and business page. Share information, ask them questions and learn more about them. The bond with your customer is one of the most crucial aspects of growing your business. When you continuously reach out to your audience on LinkedIn and strengthen your bond over time, you’ll eventually become a go-to source if your customer needs help or has a question.

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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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Customer Service on Social Media

Marketing your business through social media is way more than just attracting new consumers. Having your business out there on social media also means building strong relationships with your consumers. Social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, make it easy to connect with your customers and make sure they are satisfied with your business.

A lack in customer service is an issue that many people have encountered with businesses. Social media platforms give us the opportunity to reach out to our customers’ needs, but it isn’t always that easy. Here are some tips to make sure that you are making sure your consumer’s needs are met:

1. Make Sure Communication Is Immediate

With today’s technology, people no longer have to wait days for a response. Social media enables us to be in contact with our customers at all times. Customers expect immediate responses when posting on social media, so if your response team isn’t prepared, it could cost you. If you can respond within minutes of the post, you’ll be able to make your customer very happy.

2.  Give People a More Personal Brand Experience

Social media helps your business reach out to customers on a more personal level. People hate to be waiting on the phone with an operator and feeling like a robot is answering their questions. Social media platforms help us to be available whenever you may receive a question or complaint from a customer. This is something that people immediately recognize. Being available through platforms such as Twitter and Instagram help build strong personal bonds with your consumer ad making them feel like their problems actually matter to you.

3.  Have Social Users Spread the Word

If your customers are satisfied with your business, they are most likely to share their experience with others. Usually, if your customer is using social media to ask questions about your business, this means that they are avid users of social media. This also means that they are likely to spread the word about their positive experience with your business. This is a huge advantage to getting a good rep in the social media world, leading to more customers.

Making sure your customer’s needs are met should always be your priority in making sure your business succeeds. Social media enables us to easily reach out to our customers, strengthen bonds, and make sure they have a positive experience with your business. Following these crucial tips will ensure that your customers are happy.

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Tips For Your Mobile-Marketing Strategy

Did you know that half of all internet searches now take place on mobile devices? This calls for businesses to take action when it comes to updating their mobile strategy. The past two years have taken more of a simple approach to the design of mobile devices, but that is all changing in 2015. For businesses, having a site that renders across a wide variety of mobile devices is critical for doing business. untitled

Understanding your audience’s mobile habits is one of the most crucial steps in creating your own mobile strategy. Are they using tablets or smartphones? What activities are they doing on your site? What content are they accessing? Studying how your audience uses their mobile devices is the first step to bettering your mobile strategy. This will help you make content that is specifically focused on what your audience is looking for which will make them coming back to your site. Putting yourself in the shoes of your consumer will also help you to create headlines that will grasp their attention. When it comes to writing a headline for your mobile users, ask yourself whether it is highly relevant to your audience, whether it has a powerful hook, and whether it evokes an image or an emotional response to whoever is reading it.

After you’ve sparked your audience’s attention with the headline, now it’s time to lure them in with a good “lead-in”. The lead-in is what occurs in the first paragraph and is what keeps your reader eager to read on. This is your first paragraph and the most crucial. There is nothing wrong with delivering the most value early on because this is what will keep readers engaged. The readers with a screen that’s too small to read 2000 words on still get the value of a positive brand contact and are likely to come back for more.

Introducing video and visual content is another aspect of mobile strategy that is on the rise. Now is the time to make sure your mobile site has videos, infographics, images, and other visual content that reaches out to your audience. Video marketing is a great strategy when it comes to growing your business, and now with micro-video services like Vine, it is easy to compile your message in to 6 seconds. This may seem like a short amount of time to get your message across, but this can actually be more efficient for your users’ time.

In the past couple of years, we have seen tremendous growth for mobile devices. Our smart phones are becoming smarter than we have ever imagined. As the use of the internet on mobile devices continues to grow, this is giving businesses more opportunities in internet marketing. it is important to think more about our presence on mobile devices and developing a strategy that will help us become more efficient mobile marketers.

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SEO Practices For 2015

SEO has been changing rapidly over the past couple of years and Google and other search engines are getting smarter. For 2015, it is important to stay on top of knowing what search engines want and how to optimize your quality of the content and overall experience of your site to better your business. Here are some of the SEO essentials for 2015:Search Engine Optimization - Magnifying Glass

Considering the goals of Search Engine companies is a good place to start when thinking about your SEO strategy. The two most important things to consider are making sure that your site has the best quality content for keywords relevant to your site and making sure that Google and other search engines are aware of this. Over the past few years, Google and other search engines have become smarter in understanding both website content and user experience.

Making sure your site is free of spam, malware, and other problems is crucial to making sure that your site is reputable. Excessive ads, pages filled with nothing but links, and any deceptive practices are signs that your site is not reputable. If you sign up for notifications in Google Webmaster tools they will tell you if they detect any issues on your site. The fastness of your site is also a huge factor in ensuring quality experience for your users. Studies have shown that just a one-second delay in page load time results in a 7% decline in sales. Alexa Site Audit is a tool that can help detect your sites slowest pages to make sure your performance is optimized. Alexa Site Audit also helps monitor your site for broken links.

It is also important to be aware of the “freshness factor” when it comes to the quality of your site. A site that hasn’t been updated in months or years is most likely lower quality. With out of date content, this also probably means the site hasn’t earned any new inbound links. Without fresh content on your site, search engines will most likely pass over your site for newer, more current content.

Quality content that is original, clearly written, and relevant is integral for your website and business overall. Making sure that your content is effective in making the connection between what people are searching for and the pages of your website is crucial. The pages of your site should be more focused on individual topics rather than individual keywords. But, choosing the right keywords for your content is one of the most important parts of SEO. When choosing keyword phrases for your content, it is important to keep track of which ones drive traffic to your site, which ones drive traffic to your competitors sites, and how often people search for certain keyword phrases. The Alexa keyword tool, which is part of the Alexa Advanced subscription, can help you find keywords driving traffic to your competitors’ sites.

SEO has grown tremendously over the past couple of years and Google and other search engines are getting smarter and smarter. Staying on top of the current changes and changes in SEO is crucial in deepening our understanding of how to use it to our advantage. I the world of internet marketing, SEO is the key to understanding our customers’ needs and making sure you’ve got it.

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How to Optimize Your LinkedIn Presence

LinkedIn, being one of the oldest social media sites, still proves to be one of the most valuable and important among the social channels today. Regarded as the world’s largest professional networking site, LinkedIn aims to connect you to the business world and other professionals from all over the world.

Experts suggest that LinkedIn makes 20 times more revenue per person as compared with Facebook. While connecting people with other professionals is the ultimate goal of LinkedIn, users don’t communicate a lot on the platform. Rather, the value for users lies in searchability.

With that in mind, here are a few tips on how to optimize your LinkedIn profile and increase your chances of being found.

Make your Profile SEO Friendly

There are more than 1 billion searches on LinkedIn each year. While most users are searching for companies and individuals, keep in mind that they are also using keywords. Making your profile SEO and keyword friendly is beneficial since LinkedIn search results are sorted by relevance.

Since there’s no way to predict what someone is looking for, it would be best to use keywords that ranges from broad to very targeted. Remember, where you put these keywords matter.

Headlines Matter

When checking your profile, your headline is the first thing other users will see about you. Make it as specific as possible and make it catchy. Mind you, your headline will be your selling point. So, lure them with your headline and wow them with your expertise.

Profile Image

Your photo is important as it would give other members a good representation of you. It shows who you are and that you are real.

Since this is a professional networking site, it would be best to stay away from party shots or group shots. It doesn’t have to be a professional photo either. Just choose a photo that is clear and most importantly, depicts who you really are.

Showcase your Achievements

LinkedIn gives you the option to add documents, test scores, certifications, honors and award, some of your previous projects etc. This will add a lot of value to your profile.

If you are a writer, feel free to add a chapter of your book to your profile. If you are a graphic designer, adding your portfolio would be a great idea. If you are a public speaker, adding a video of your most recent speaking engagement might be advantageous. If you think these things will put you ahead of your competition, add it here.

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How to Use Video Marketing to Boost Your Business

According to a survey done by comScore Inc.,a global digital marketing service, the average Internet user watches about 185 videos each month. This includes advertising videos, personal videos, entertainment and news clips, etc.

Videos are a great way of engaging your audience in a way images and texts alone cannot. By adding video to your marketing campaign, you can give heart and personality to your business, while demonstrating your authenticity. Additionally, video is capable of providing as much as 50% conversion rate.

If you have no idea what type of video you should create, here are a few tips that will help you produce informative and entertaining clips that will also reveal the human side of your business.

Use customer testimonials

Nothing is more compelling than hearing your clients explain how your products or services helped solve their problems or improved their lives. Use this video to help prospective customers see themselves in the stories of these people.

Demonstrate your products or services

Instead of telling your current and potential customers how your business works, it would be best to show them. In other words, take your how-to guides to the next level and bring it to life. Mind you, educated buyers are more likely to make purchases.

Product reviews

The best products reviews usually come from trusted third-party reviewers. These types of videos can be found from various business portals to YouTube. Feel free to partner with reliable third parties and ask them to create products review for your business.

Corporate overview

These videos are mostly considered as the equivalent of company brochures.  Corporate overviews are usually intended to provide your audience a better idea about your company. These types of videos often include the executives, owners, key products and company history.

Visual stories

Visual stories usually include motion graphics, animations and illustrations with a voice-over. Videos of this kind are intended to explain complex products in a simpler and more compelling manner.

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