Kick-ass social media advice for the real entrepreneur
Every blogger knows it, the most important counter is the one that’s not publicly disclosed, the number of email subscribers.
Email subscribers is the highest form of engagement in inbound marketing, it also represents more commitment than a Like, a Tweet and even an RSS subscription.
Your reader is basically giving you permission to enter the only method of online communications that’s still private.
And this, my friends, is one of the reasons SocialMouths has been completely redesigned.
One of the first thing I quickly realized when I started my first business was this: I do NOT want to chase business.
I’m not that old by the way, that was 12 years ago. The landscape was completely different even though it wasn’t that long ago. I think I shared this with you before, I got started by doing some small print ads on local magazines and ended up producing my own TV spots and running them on national networks. I had to learn everything from writing to casting, producing and even doing my own media buys and running all kinds of reports.
I did all that just to avoid chasing business. The end result was about 600 incoming daily calls.
I did learn how to generate a lead through Inbound Marketing. But there was something I figured out besides making the phone ring 600 times in a day. The quality of the lead generated through inbound is much much higher than outbound, where you are pretty much trying to convince a person about something they did not ask for.
This is a guestpost by Ana Hoffman from Traffic Generation Cafe.
I am asked over and over again how I manage to get over a hundred tweets per post on a regular basis.
The answer is actually quite simple and, in many ways, very obvious: it’s all about networking and collaboration.
Here are my 7 ways to get an impressive number of retweets nearly on autopilot.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again – quantity of your Twitter followers does matter.
Of course, I am not discounting quality either. As a matter of fact, we will talk about it a little later.
If you have a teen at home, I’m sure you have noticed the usage of email accounts is completely different than previous generations.
My daughter the other day had to check her email address because she didn’t remember it. I’ll tell you more, when she’s done watching Netflix movies she puts them back in the envelope and leaves them right there in the living room. Maybe she thinks the Netflix guy comes in our living room once a week to pick up our movies. Maybe she doesn’t know about the Postal office either…
But that is old conversation, right? Here is what I’m interested in today:
While a headline like “Online Marketing is NOT a do-it-yourself thing, it’s not automatic and it’s not free” seems to be carrying a little frustation on my part, I actually want the content of this post to be a service to companies starting to take their business online.
Despite the economy, I think launching a business idea is easier than ever. We have the opportunity to test them at a low cost, we can measure results faster than ever and we can fail and move on to the next idea easier than ever. At the same time, this does NOT mean we can just throw anything out there with the hopes it sticks. Competition is brutal and the consumer is more educated and more demanding than ever.
Another aspect I love to point out to my clients is the fact that today, thanks to the internet, we have awesome technology opportunities that are no longer reserved for big companies. Small business also have access to them. On the flip side, there is a “Free” culture out there that is very easily confused by these small companies, as guerilla-style entrepreneurs with very limited budgets sometimes we tend to take on this kind of tools or services that are not necessarily the best option if we intend to… gee, I don’t know, HAVE A RETURN ON INVESTMENT!
When you blog for business, one of the most important aspects is to grow your email list, if not the most important one…
Remember all those people saying that you should not pay attention at how many Twitter followers you have? Well, when it comes to your email subscribers you will want to count and focus on its grow because this is going to become the heart of your online business. This list is the start of what we call “Email Marketing“.
In this post we’ll review some of the methods you can use in order to increase that number of subscribers rather than focusing on the reasons why you need to grow your list. We’ll leave that for another post.
So here we go…
The Opt-in Box on the sidebar is probably the most basic form of subscribing and while I suggest you follow some conventional practices so that people recognizes what it is, I also encourage you to be creative in order to make it stand out.
Turning your blog into a profit center. It sound like a dream, right?
We’ll continue to talk more about these things here on SocialMouths, hopefully you can benefit from them.
In this post we’ll take a closer look at what I call a perfect setup for your online income powerhouse, in other words, the tools you need to run your blog as a business.
Notice that I don’t include advertising or affiliate programs as ways of blog revenue, it’s because I talk about blogging as part of a marketing strategy for business rather than becoming a full-time blogger.
One thing I will mention before diving into the list is that while none of these applications are free, they are very affordable. And since we’re already in the subject, I will also say that I do love the whole “Free” concept BUT (uuuh… the big “but”!), when we’re talking about our business, and I will assume we want to be successful at it, we should be open to invest.
So I’ll include the cost of each service and at the end of the post we’ll add it to see how much we need to spend in order to turn your blog into a true profit center.
Hey, my name is Francisco Rosales and I'm the author of SocialMouths. I help entrepreneurs and small businesses turn their vanilla online presence into a profit powerhouse. Read more...
