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Tips to Get More Email Subscribers

emailmarketing While everyone is focusing on building a strong social media presence, others tend to forget about the importance of email.

Your email list plays a big role in your marketing campaign. It can help you build relationships with your target audience, generate buzz about your business and attract new customers. That said, it makes sense to continuously grow your email contacts.

Interested to grow your email list and grow your subscribers? Then you came to the right place. In this blog post, we’ll be sharing with you some effective strategies on how to get more email subscribers. Follow the tips below to get your first 1,000 subscribers.

Place a subscription box on every page of your website

Most website owners think that people would first access the home page before navigating through the site. But that’s not always the case. They may check your products, scroll through the “about us” section or any other page on your site. In order to get people to subscribe to your newsletters, make sure your sign up box is a prominent feature of your website. The more visible it is, the more subscribers you’ll get.

Content is king

You won’t have a hard time getting people to sign up for email updates if you have great content on your site. As a marketer, it is your responsibility to constantly supply your readers with fresh, relevant and informative content.

Offer an incentive

People love receiving free stuff. If you can give them something like a free trial of one of your products, a free ebook with useful information or access to an exclusive video, you’ll make an impact to your target audience. When done correctly, it can help you build a relationship with your audience and grow your email list.

Your offer should be interesting enough to your ideal customers. Find out more about your target audience and know what’s keeping them up until 3:00 am.

Run a contest

Social media contests are one of the most effective ways to get email addresses from folks who want to hear from you. You are free to hold whatever contest and on any social media channel you want. But since majority of the adult population has a Facebook account, you might want to start there. Also, ask people to enter their email address in order to participate.

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Habits of Successful Internet Marketers

BIMSDo you struggle with getting results from your online marketing campaign? Do you often wonder why some marketers make it big while others continually fall short?

In this blog post, we’ve listed down 4 habits of highly successful marketers. If you take action and execute these habits, you are more likely to succeed.

Continuous learning

Being a successful internet marketer is not just about using the latest tools or following the right systems for generating traffic. Rather, it’s about continuously improving your skills.

Successful internet marketers keep on reading new articles about social media, search engine optimization etc. What worked today may not work next month. That said, you need to stay up-to-date. Otherwise, you’ll be wasting your time, effort and money and still fail to achieve your desired results.

Establish goals and milestones

It is important to define your goals before you start working. This way, you have a clear vision of what you want to achieve and take the necessary steps to reach that goal.

Delegate and collaborate

When you first started your business, you probably filled many different roles – marketer, salesperson, storekeeper, accountant, founder etc. But as your business grows, you can no longer do all these tasks on your own.

Time is of the essence. If you want to get things done, you need to learn to delegate tasks. Surround yourself with highly capable people and get them to do what needs to be done on your behalf.

Never quit

Some of the world’s most successful people have failed at first. Things may not work out fine during your first few attempts. Your posts will not go viral. No one is going to be interested in your first video or blog post. Your first website is going to look ugly. That’s fine.

No one is expecting you to have a perfect website or a viral post. Go ahead, share what you have now and try to improve it along the way.

 

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Tips for Getting Great Photos for Your Blog Posts

bimsImages are important. Adding images to your blog posts can help make it stand out and effectively convey your message. It also helps craft a visually-memorable experience. That’s why all top bloggers make sure they incorporate visuals and try to make them as vibrant as possible.

Here are some tips for getting great photos for your blog.

Use images legally

Before using any image on your blog post, make sure that it’s copyright-free. Legally, you’re not allowed to use any images that you got from the internet. If you do, the owner of the image may file a complaint against you and your post can be removed.

Don’t just go and take any image you like. Check the copyright restrictions of photos and obtain permission before using it on your blog.

Create your own images

There are a lot of sources of ready to use images on the web, but it would be a lot better if you can add original images on your blog. You don’t have to be a professional photographer to capture great photos. Just bring your camera with you wherever you go and capture images you can use for your future content.

Not only does it add a touch of personality and uniqueness to your site, it also increases the likelihood of someone sharing your post. According to studies, people are more likely to share images they haven’t seen before.

Flickr

Flickr is an amazing resource for photo lovers and photographers alike. Here, you can find billions of different photos that you can use for your site. But you have to understand that not all photos from this site can be used.

Only photos with Creative Commons license can be used. Copyrighted images cannot be used. If you really wish to use a copyrighted image, you may try your luck and ask permission from the photographer directly.

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Tips to Improve Your Email Open Rates

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAYou’ve put a lot of work into those emails. You came up with some exciting content and even added a compelling call-to-action. You also ran some email tests in the hopes of getting better results. In spite of all those efforts, your open rates are still not improving.

What can you do to bring that up and get people to actually read your emails? Here are some tips to make sure your emails get delivered, opened and read.

Start with a good subject line

If there is one opportunity to convince recipients to read the email, it is the subject line. After all, it is the first thing they see on any email. Your subject line must be clear and concise. It should tell readers what to expect from the email.

Provide quality content

Offer something of value in every email you send. Subscribers will be eager to read your emails if they know that there is something valuable on the other side of the subject line.

Send your emails at the right time

Timing is everything in marketing. If you send emails too early in the morning or too late at night, they can get lost in the shuffle of other emails. If you send it too late in the afternoon, they may decide to put off reading until the morning since they might be too busy accomplishing some tasks before going home. The best time to send emails is during lunch or after work, when you know they’re reading.

Be consistent

Send too frequently and you may end up losing subscribers. Send too infrequently and you may cause your readers to stop interacting with your email. Send your emails at a consistent frequency to build your email reputation. A good rule of thumb is to send no less than 1 email a month and no more than 1 email a week.

Make it personal

Studies show that subject lines that contain the first name of the subscriber boosts open rate every time. This is a subtle trust builder and an instant attention grabber. Make sure you personalize subject lines with first names.

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Reasons Why You Should Edit Old Posts on Your Blog

BIMS_10.13.15Editing your blog posts is probably one of the best advice that could be given to you, but very few of you will actually do it.

This week, we’ll give you a few reasons why you should edit old blog posts on your blog. Let’s go through them.

Ranking

Just like a news article that’s posted on a local news website, blog posts have dates on them. They become old news and fall from top results after a period of time. If you are looking to improve traffic to your site, this reason alone justifies your editing.

Polish writing

Bloggers don’t have the luxury of an editor to go over our writing, so we try to proof-read an article before publishing it. But as we try to revisit our old posts, we find that they are full of silly mistakes.

Typos are a big turn-off to anyone reading your article, but it’s hard to notice the typos and errors when you write a blog post yourself. Try to read your old posts with fresh eyes to make sure that it’s error-free.

Update content

Blog posts that are a year old or more may contain outdated information. It is important to keep all posts up-to-date and relevant. Otherwise, visitors may hit the close button and move on to other websites.

Updating old posts will not only turn a visitor into a subscriber, it also helps improve your site’s ranking. Be sure to update your content to match the latest facts and figures.

Add images

It is important to include images in your blog posts as it makes the post more attractive to most people. But sometimes, it is difficult to find the right image that aligns with the topic. You can change those images later on in case you find something more relevant.

More images are stored in your database as your blog gets older. This may slow down your site. We suggest that you resize the image to reduce the overall size of the post.

 

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Easy Ways to Expand Your Facebook Reach

BIMSFor many businesses, generating lead is one of the biggest advantages of creating and maintaining social presence. You create content that would pique the interest of your target audience and hope that it goes out to as many people as possible. Unfortunately, the days of posting and reaching all of your fans are gone.

The last year has brought many changes to social media. We’ve heard complaints from several businesses about the drop in organic reach for Facebook pages.

Using the right tactics will give you better results. Follow these tips to ensure that your posts can reach the audience you define.

Create awesome content

Like Google, Facebook puts a lot of emphasis on content quality and relevance. Being one of the biggest social network platforms, there’s a lot of competition out there. If you want to capture the attention of your target audience, then you need to provide them with killer content.

Higher engagement can increase your reach. The more people engage with your page, the more likely are they to see your posts. But if your content is not that interesting, you suffer the consequences of losing organic visibility.

Ask questions

One of the best ways to engage your followers is by asking them a question. Your goal is to start a conversation so be sure to start with an interesting question. Now that you got people to air their opinions, it is important to keep the conversation rolling.

Asking questions does not only help increase reach, it also provides answers to questions that may be crucial for your business’ marketing and sales.

Add call-to-action

Call-to-actions are a great way to get people to engage with your posts. Believe it or not, your audience tends to respond better when they are told what to do. However, most marketers and business owners fail to include a call-to action with their status updates.

Use better visuals

We’ve all heard the saying, “a picture is worth a thousand words”. But it’s actually worth more than that in social media.

Videos and images often get more likes, shares and comments as compared to text-based status updates. ForCall  a more powerful post, consider placing your message along with the photo.

 

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Characteristics of a Great Content

office-594132_640There is a surplus of information on the internet today. In fact, about 2 million blog posts are published every day. Along with that, 70,000 hours of Youtube videos are uploaded and about 290 billion emails are sent on a daily basis. The problem is that most of these contents result in a waste of time, energy and resources.

How do you go about creating content that stands out and captures the attention of your target audience?

While there is no specific way in creating great content, there are a few characteristics that most successful content shares. Keep these things in mind when creating contents for your prospects and clients.

Relevant

When starting out with content marketing, most companies create contents that are centered on their products and services. While there is nothing wrong in wanting to showcase your products and services, you first have to focus on content that your customers care about.

Your content has to resonate with your prospects and existing clients. Otherwise, those contents will just get lost among all other noise.

Provides value

Writing great content is a choice. You can produce high quality content or you can take the easy path and produce junk.

People are searching for information that will educate them, inform them and he6lp them solve a problem. If your content is entertaining, informative and interesting enough, people will be happy to share your content. Add to that, it will get the attention of industry stakeholders and position your company as an educator or expert.

Original

Creating original content will get you great results. Google rewards sites with original, high quality content. On the other hand, it penalizes sites with duplicate content. Original content will help your site get more exposure and improve your site’s ranking.

Easily consumed            

When people use a search engine, they’re not just looking for answers – they want fast answers. In fact, one study revealed that 79% of web users scan contents rather than read them in detail.

Make your posts easier to read by keeping each paragraph short, preferably 3-4 sentences each. Bulleted lists are also very helpful. They are easily scannable and make it easier for users to find the information they need.

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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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