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online marketing

Is Small Business Finding Good Results In Social Media? [Infographic]

Small business in social mediaWe can discuss how successful companies are using social media but it will be better to hear it from them, specially when it comes to small business.

I’m always concerned about small business because there is a huge difference in what it takes to be successful. When brands run online campaigns they’re usually backed up by a juicy number of ad impressions or other kind of support. Just a few days ago a friend asked me how we were able to get 100k Likes on a Facebook page so fast, I responded “they have a huge TV campaign”. His face filled with disappointment…

Point is, small business goes out there to fight with a stick. Guerrilla style. Most small businesses have pretty depressing stories when it comes to finding any success online. They don’t have the budget, the resources or the knowledge.

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Are You Really Talking To Your Prospect?

Are you talking to your audience or to the industry?Blogging and online marketing is hard work as it is. There is a combination of elements that need to work together such as design, technology, content, sales strategy and the list goes on and on.

But there is one thing that will determine if your online business is successful or not, it doesn’t matter if you have mad eye candy on your website, all the latest technology or a great sales strategy ready to ship products out the door. It’s a very simple concept and yet, probably one of the hardest to nail down…

You need to know your audience.

But in this case let’s assume you know who your audience or your target market is.

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The 3 Phases Of Social Media Strategy

The 3 Phases of Social MediaThis is a guest post by Srini Rao from The Skool of Life

A few days ago I was at work crafting a high level social strategy that will go beyond the Flightster blog and really enable us to take advantage of social media in a way that really allows us to understand our customers. I’ve come up with literally hundreds of ideas over the course of the last year, some of which have been implemented and others which have been put on hold.

Over the last week I’ve been able to condense my work into 3 core ideas for an effective social media strategy, both on a personal level and a corporate level.

Phase 1: Build

Let’s consider the social media presence of an individual or company as a blank canvas which we intend to turn into a masterpiece. Before any social media efforts will have an impact it’s essential to build your personal or company assets. Assets can be built across multiple social media platforms.

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Win A FREE Review Of Your Blog And Social Media

Review Of Your Blog And Social Media by SocialMouthsYes, it’s that time again. Time to give away stuff here at SocialMouths. Time to accumulate some good Karma credits.

If you have been reading SocialMouths for a while, you probably noticed that I like giving stuff away from time to time. Today I’ll take the opportunity to promote one of my new services, a Review Of Your Blog And Social Media. Even tough this was not listed as a service before, I’m often asked to review blogs, Facebook Pages and social media strategies in general so, I decided to officially offer it to my readers.

This is also a good way to thank you all because SocialMouths just finished October with an all-time high in traffic, double its subscriptions, had the lowest bounce rate in the history of humanity and for the first time in one year, the number one source of traffic was “Google Organic” (not sure what that means yet since I don’t pay much attention to SEO in this blog).

Anyways, back to you. Let’s go over what the prize includes, how the contest works and the requirements…

The point of this type of review is that we sometimes get stuck in one way of doing things, we put in the hard work over long hours trying to be successful in our social media and blogging efforts and we can’t seem to get ahead in the game. Those are the times when we need an outsider to come in and give us a good reality check, a constructive one of course. Getting somebody else’s perspective can help us unstuck and adjust our strategy. Even better if we get somebody with experience, with a share of success as well as failure under his belt to point out specifics.

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Your Own Product: How Much Value Do You Need To Deliver?

How much value do you need to deliver?

I’m a big observer of the internet, not the usual trends, but how online marketing moves. What’s working and what is not good enough anymore…

And I have one thing to tell you: The bar has been raised. Again.

If you have been crafting a kick-ass product for the last 6 months and you’re about to launch with a big splash, I recommend you take one last hard look at what’s going on out there. Stuff that use to be premium is now free, in exchange of a simple email address.

So, here is my question for the online marketer: Exactly how much value does your product needs to deliver in exchange for how much cash value?

For a second this thought will go through your mind: Shouldn’t we measure what we deliver? Aren’t we giving everything away for too little?

Well, what else are you going to think, the internet is already way too competitive, too fast and now you need to kick it up a notch. Again…

I wanted to write a post that will let you visualize how much value is being delivered out there, something that will give you an idea of how much creativity and hard work you need to put into the content you publish, free and paid. At the same time, look at the return on investment. So I took the weekend to think about it and try to land a meaningful post.

Staples Gives Me Half The Answer

I stopped by Staples this afternoon looking for a graph paper notebook, I wanted to get something kind of nice. Turns out they don’t have anything “kind of nice”. I got the impression that everything there revolved around how cheap can we build stuff and how cheap can we sell it for. Walked out empty handed, not the first time, but this time I felt like not going back in there ever again.

As a consumer (that tries to consume less everyday) I noticed that have also raised the bar, my expectations are different. Bottom line is that I want to feel good about myself when I give you my cash.

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Online Marketing is NOT a do-it-yourself thing, it’s not automatic and it’s not free

Online Marketing is NOT a do-it-yourself thing, it’s not automatic and it’s not freeWhile 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!

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Email Marketing: 8 Ways To Grow Your List

Email Marketing: How To Grow Your List by SocialMouthsWhen 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…

Sidebar Opt-in Box

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.

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15 Blogs To Follow If You Want To Kick Ass Online

20 Blogs to follow if you want to succeed onlineBeing successful online requires that you beat a pretty long learning curve and while I try to contribute with my 2 cents, there are amazing bloggers out there that you should be reading on a regular basis.

These people put their amazing talent and knowledge into blog content and deliver it to their online communities week after week.

I have to advise you that if you see that I’m not going with the obvious is for 2 reasons, one because I like helping you discover stuff that you might have missed (there is just too much content out there…) and two, not that I don’t occasionally read the usual suspects, but this is the stuff I visit frequently. Also let me say that this is not a ranking so don’t pay attention to the order.

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