The apex of automated marketing blogging platforms and “weight losscoffee” known as Valentus Slim Roast are ready to launch; however, only those who recognize this unique opportunity are really wanted.
Au Naturale, Markethive and Valentus have joined forces to create a symbiotic relationship between two business entities that are fed up with traditional MLM Industry. Yes, Marketing & weight loss Coffee are about “empowering both the little guy and gal” to market and sell a product the World consumes daily only after water. Try going 72-hours without H-2-0 and watch your body breakdown. Guess what, people feel the same way if, they don’t have their “daily fix” and react like they’re going through withdrawal.
The Digital Age is here and entrepreneurship continues to explode thanks to technology and those innovators who embrace risk, while providing a solution to a problem. Guess what you’re one of them because you became a renegade and willing to face the unknown, while incurring the costs in business. Respect is given to you but, not the industry (MLM), due to its dubious reputation and need for change.
Yes, it’s time for a change because MLM doesn’t have the best reputation as indicated by the recent Consent Decree Settlement between Herbalife and FTC . Hey, $200 million dollars isn’t chump-change and sends a message to the industry that “product and consumers” must exist and not “product and distributors”. Yeah, verification will be needed in the future and old business models will no longer be accepted unless, they can prove that their product is being retailed to the masses. Guess what, old methods of marketing like “Outbound Marketing” are increasingly ineffective in generating sales and more importantly, establishing a trusting business relationships between consumers and proprietors. New business models and new marketing methods like “Inbound Marketing” have emerged and increasingly becoming the norm because educated consumers like Millennials, who have purchasing power of $200 Billion dollars are sick and tired of being sold. Yes, these kiddies are tech- savvy and research everything before digging into their debit/credit-cards (nobody uses cash, anymore) and if, your product or service doesn’t address their needs or resolve a problem then, they happily tell you, “hit the bricks”. Well, if you want to avoid the proverbial MLM Cemetery for Dead Dealers who, operate a Non-Profit Agency then, you better embrace “Customer-Centricity”, like the industry leader Amazon.
Yes, in the Digital Age of Technology for a business to succeed then, it must embrace the idea of the customer being the priority and less so, shareholders, which is a revolutionary concept among corporate profiteers. However, Amazon valued at $230 Billion dollars realized that success was centered upon "focus relentlessly on our customers." Needless to say, title of World’s Largest retailor isn’t by chance.
So, do you want to be part of the “customer-centricity’ trend and be at the forefront of a new era of Ecommerce where relationship building is key to creating a WIN-WIN for both owner and customer. To learn more I invite you to rcontact me.
For most small businesses marketing is either a huge expense or a huge burden. If you are trying to run a small business, or if you are an entrepreneur trying to navigate your way online, the word marketing is kind of a scary one.
You envision yourself or your team spending hours and hours blogging, or creating content on social networks with no guarantee that your time investment will pay off. Or you pay someone through the nose to handle your marketing, not really sure if that investment will work out any better than doing it in-house.
This might be a bit of an exaggeration, but unfortunately, it is the reality that far too many start-ups and existing small businesses face. Here are some excellent tools that you probably have not heard of, that can help ease your burden. Do not worry, relief is on the way.
Markethive – this is a totally free social network for entrepreneurs and small businesses. This network can help you, even if you don't have your own website. If you do have your own website, it can work hand in hand for even better results.
It would take an entire blog post to describe everything that Markethive can do for you, but let's just start with their blogging platform. Simply put I get 10X the post views on Markethive compared to the views I get on LinkedIn Pulse.
Markethive is an engaged social network. This is quite a surprising comparison, despite the fact that I have 10k 1st level connections on LinkedIn, and only 500 friends in Markethive. As they say, go figure!
LeadOutcome – you may or may not be aware that LinkedIn is one of the few social networks that allows the export of names and email addresses. Your entire database of 1st level connections on LinkedIn whether you have 500, 2500, or 25,000 1st level connections, can be exported and sent email using automated marketing methods. This is obviously extremely significant for marketers.
I am not a big fan of autoresponders, or email blasters, as I like to call them. Aside from telling you the open rates and clickthrough rates of email, they really do little else.
No autoresponder I know of can tell you who is "hot", and who is not. There are a number of specialized features that CRM software systems like LeadOutcome offer, but the fact that each action a lead takes is "scored" makes a huge difference.
You now know who is "hot", and who is not. There are a number of additional features of LeadOutcome that make it highly desirable, but given that it's monthly cost is less than most autoresponders makes it a relative no-brainer.
Simple Lead Generator for Facebook and Twitter. Without listing all of the features and benefits, (see the video link for details), this powerful software lets you search for and find groups automatically by keyword search.
You can post automatically to groups, and also to your friends on Facebook. You can also auto-follow on Twitter and auto-like tweets in order to encourage people to follow you back. This can save hours and hours of your time if you are active on either Facebook or Twitter.
Group Messenger for LinkedIn. (see the video link for details) This software allows you to market automatically on LinkedIn. No need for manual messages one by one anymore.
You can auto-invite based on keyword searches and auto-invite group members for groups of which you are a member. You can email open networkers over and above the LinkedIn limits for invitations.
Of course, you will find quite a large number of rather expensive systems for inbound marketing that will schedule and organize your content, etc. etc. Despite the advantages of these systems, you will find most of what they do in Markethive at no charge.
An essential component of any inbound marketing strategy, or what I like to call automated marketing is about how to gain access to prospects. There are always restrictions on the manual methods social networks offer to contact, message, and connect with friends and potential prospects.
The above-mentioned automated software systems allow you the access that you need in order to market effectively on these major social networking platforms. You can save yourself hours and hours of manual labor using these systems.
You will not find a more powerful or lower-cost suite of tools for inbound marketing on any other list on the Internet that is current for 2016 than this one.
Please connect with me on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/leadsonline or call 973-259-6055 for more information.
Why is this happening? Reason: Most people on the go are highly visual and don't tend to read much anymore. "A Picture Says A Thousand Words" as the old saying goes, so maybe there is something to keeping it short and sweet and visual.
"Facebook has spread its tentacles into the messaging boom after building the world's most popular social network, buying Instagram for $1 billion in cash and stock in 2012. Facebook also owns two other of the world's most popular apps: WhatsApp, which it bought for billions and has 1 billion users, and its homegrown app, Facebook Messenger, which hit 900 million users in April.
"Facebook itself captures enormous amounts of people’s attention on their mobile devices, and that’s hugely powerful. But there will always be alternatives either in broad use or in use by demographic or geographic segments," said Jan Dawson, chief analyst with Jackdaw Research.
EMarketer forecast for Instagram mobile adverting revenue. (Photo: EMarketer)
Instagram, for example, is popular with teens.
"Facebook has arguably been deploying the candy bar strategy — own as many of the brands on the shelf as possible to maximize your market share," Dawson said.
The exception: Snapchat, the mobile app popular with young people which Facebook tried to buy twice.
"It remains to be seen how important that miss will be, but it’s already clear that it’s a really important competitor to Facebook for people’s time and attention, and for companies’ ad dollars," Dawson said.
SunTrust Robinson Humphrey analyst Robert Peck says Instagram's overall growth is impressive but the numbers suggest growth in the U.S. is slowing as competition from Snapchat escalates.
"We note that most, if not all, of the (monthly active user) growth is coming from international markets. In fact, we estimate the U.S. market likely grew in a range of 0 to 18% on an annualized basis in the most recent 9 month period," Peck wrote in a research report on Tuesday.
The jump in Instagram users — and their advertising-pleasing demographics — has helped Facebook bill Instagram as a buy for marketers looking to increase awareness and spur sales. Evidence of its early commercial promise: Instagram already has more than 200,000 advertisers. Analysts say Instagram's nascent advertising business is growing rapidly.
Research firm eMarketer expects Instagram's global mobile ad revenue to reach $1.53 billion this year and more than $5 billion by 2018. Analysts say Instagram's contributions are already being felt in Facebook financial results even though the giant social network does not break those out.
"What is certain is that Instagram has been a big factor in Facebook’s recent repeated blowing out of its financial results, and its impressive rate of revenue growth in particular," Dawson said."
Can Instagram save Facebook? With Facebook trending down and Instagram trending up maybe it will pick up the loss of Facebook. Pretty smart move Facebook!
Thanks for reading,
David Ogden
PS: David Ogden is a Alpha Founder with Markethive and manages several blogs on the hive. David is a professional Network Marketer. He can be reached through Markethive.
Advice for building your own Inbound Marketing machine- a requirement for most businesses today.
The web has forever changed people’s buying habits. Instead of needing to rely on sales people to send them information, buyers now have Google and other search engines to research products, find competitors, and see how other people rate those products in blogs and reviews. Furthermore they are greatly influenced by individuals that have emerged as experts in particular subject areas who use social media to get their messages across.
This sea change in buying behaviour requires vendors to re-think how they go to market, and optimize to make sure that they will get found by buyers using search engines, blogs, reviews, and social media. The term Inbound Marketing was invented by the crew at MarketHive (When they were Veretekk), when they developed the techniques and technologies that are needed to get found by buyers, and to make sure that the reviews and blogs around your industry segment cover what you are doing. (MarketHive provides great software tools, plus education to help you automate Inbound Marketing. The founder, Thomas Prendergast has written many great books on these topics (dating back as far as 20 years ago) “Automated Marketing”, Customer Centricity”, Building a Better Website”, “The Power of the Social Network in Search Engines”, Conference Room Advantage”.
Many people hates spam emails from vendors, and some go as fare as developing a canned email response to them.
“Please understand that I get dozens of these types of messages a week. I simply do not have time to read them, dig into them, follow-up on them, or reply to them. The most effective solution to this problem is for me to ignore the messages, which is what I usually do. …
… Finally, a small comment. As a customer, I find this type of approach to sales to be largely annoying to me and unproductive for you. We learn far more about what we want to purchase by searching the web, looking for customer references in blogs and forums, word of mouth, and by finding white papers on your site that concretely describe solutions to problems we are having.”
Remarkable Content is King
A key part of getting found is making sure you show up on the first page of a Google search. The lazy marketer’s approach to doing this is to purchase Google Adwords, and pay by the click (referred to as SEM, Search Engine Marketing). However 85% of people ignore the paid ads, so to be really effective, you will need to perfect your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) skills.
SEO requires you to develop great content that your buyers will find sufficiently interesting, different or insightful, that they will want to remark on it. (The authors of Inbound Marketing refer to that as remarkable content.) When your readers remark on your content on-line, using tools like Twitter, Facebook etc., they spread the word virally to other readers and broaden your reach. These comments lead to links back to your site, which lead to ever increasing page ranking in the search engines.
To be successful at this, you will need to keep the content fresh.
Traditional web sites don’t work in this regard, as they don’t change frequently enough.
What is needed is a blog that you update regularly.
Your blog cannot simply be a sales pitch for your product, but needs to be about topics that your buyers care to read about. The tone could be educational; or humorous; or controversial. But above all it needs to be highly engaging and relevant to them – i.e. remarkable.
When you post a new blog entry, you will see your site traffic surge for a few days, then die back to a level slightly higher than before. The more you post, the faster your traffic will build. But in the end, it is the really great articles that you post that will have the most impact.
And meritocratic blog system like MarketHive (actually only MarketHive) produce all of the above in a simple atmosphere of massive content curation that is immediately reward or rejected, building amazing content is King results, or something like that.
Once you have interesting content, you can use social media like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc. to get the word out, Marketing simplifies this to a level of excruciating results, but then like EST (You remember EST Erhard Seminar Training), you need to experience. No word, even from me, can truly do it justice.). Your goal is to get other bloggers to link to you, and to have people tweet about your content.
An interesting thing about a marketing department that focuses on Inbound Marketing: it will place a high value on people that know how to write and develop content that draws in an audience. A silver lining to the damage that the internet has inflicted on the publishing industry is that there are plenty of very talented journalists seeking employment, and they possess the perfect skills for this job!
SEO versus SEM
Like most of things that are good for us in life, SEO requires work and patience before it will payback. So it can be tempting to take short cuts, and just use SEM (paid search ads). However if it is done right, the results will continue to build, and you will start to build your own audience, and own your own traffic.
We have also seen that the cost of paid search increases as the need to scale the lead volume grows.
The Power of Free
Another extremely powerful way to create inbound traffic and qualified leads is to use a free product or service. A great example of this is the The entire Inbound Marketing Platform (Valued in excess of up to $10,000 per month) service from MarketHive. (If you haven’t tried this, I recommend giving it a try now. It will only take a few minutes to join.) MarketHive has a couple of interesting attributes that are worth studying:
It is free of charge.
It takes very little work by the customer to get some very valuable results
It provides its results in the form of a score out of 100. Human beings are very competitive, and when they don’t get a good score, they want to find out how to improve their score. That leads them to wanting to find out more about MarketHive which can help them improve their score.
It allows them to compare themselves to their competitors. All businesses care about how they are doing relative to their competition. If they are doing worse, this is a powerful motivator to drive them to change.
Think hard about your audience and whether there is an opportunity to build a similar free web service that would draw them in, and provide great value.
If you are interested in learning more about how Free products and services can help your marketing, please refer to this section: The Power of Free.
Building your reach
Once you have great content and possibly a free product/service, you will want to find ways to drive the maximum traffic to that content. In the last couple of years we have seen some powerful new tools emerge to help with this process in the social media space. Get yourself accounts on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, and join in the conversation. Start by listening. Watch what people are talking about in your topic areas, and take note of their interests. Once you have an idea of how the conversation works join in. Be careful not to take a sales stance to promote your products, as that will rapidly lose you your audience. However you can draw your audience in with short url’s (Another one of MarketHive’s great free services) that link to your blog posts and other non-sales oriented content.
This short paragraph is not going to be enough to fully educate you on the ins and outs of using social media to build your audience, so if the topic interests you, I recommend going here to learn more:
Internet Marketing Webinars (see the calendar in MarketHive after you join for free of course).
Influencer Campaigns
In every product area, there are usually already influencers that write the most about that area, and have the largest audience that follows them. To conduct a successful social media campaign, you will want to identify those influencers, and reach out to them to get them to write about your product/service.
To get them to pay attention to you, you will first need to understand what they care about. Read their blog posts and tweets, and try to get inside their minds. Try to determine what appeals to them, and what has clearly turned them off. Then prepare your pitch, and use social media to engage with them.
You will then want to monitor the results by tracking their blog posts, links to the articles, tweets, etc.
For more information…
Inbound marketing is a rich topic area that would take more than a single article like this to describe. For more information, consider yourself a friend of MarketHive:
Inbound marketing is now a trending topic in business, but it has actually been around for quite a while. It has been used by savvy marketers to effectively attract and keep their audience. This is the opposite from traditional media such as TV where everyone used to have to watch the same show at the same time.
The trend towards personalization and inbound marketing which allows anyone to choose which video to watch, which blog post to read, and which content they choose to subscribe is not going away anytime soon, and is here to stay. Would anyone trade in their smart tv with recording capability and on demand media for their old tv with the rabbit ears? Not a chance. Would anyone turn in their state-of-the-art smart phone for a land-line phone, never?
It is not just about having the latest technology. It is the availabilility of the content and the way it is delivered that is truly revolutionary. The days of smoky back rooms filled with admen deciding what content to deliver are long gone.
Now with the development of social media, it seems as though the content factories have gone into overdrive. Companies are scrambling now to put out content that can lure their prospects and customers into liking and sharing any kind of mediocre dribble the company wants to push out there. Well, how long can people show interest in boring, uninteresting stuff? Content may be king, but if you only produce junk, unfortunately you will become the king of junk.
Suppose you had a plaftorm that could connect all of your social networks together, that would be something desirable, right? In addition imagine you were part of a group of people with like-minded interests, and you could share each others content on your blog, sort of like guest posting, but automatically. You could lessen your own burden of content creation, right? And suppose you could automatically connect groups on your social networks with content that you create on your own blog, that would also be a way to extend the reach of your content, right? If you start to get the picture of how content can spread in this way, then you are beginning to get the idea of Markethive. You can investigate this unique new soclal network for entrepreneurs with this invitation link. http://markethive.com/jonlomb
Did you know that you no longer need to allocate a large budget for keyword research, that there are a wide range of free keyword tools out there for you to choose from? Read on to learn more about the 11 free keyword tools you should be using.
1. Google Webmasters Tool When you need to boost SEO, why not go straight to the source? With Google's webmasters tool, you can see what keywords your website is ranking for and learn more about potential keywords that you have yet to target.
2. Bing Webmasters Tool Bing's webmaster tool provides information about keywords that are related to their search engine. This tool shows users all of the keywords that are related to their seed keyword, as well as the search volume data.
3. SeoChat's Keyword Suggestion Tool This tool allows users to generate keywords from Amazon, YouTube, Bing and Google. The alphabet is used to modify the original keyword and generate a plethora of suggestions.
4. Soovle Soovle is more limited than some of the other choices, but remains effective, providing up to ten suggestions for each seed keyword.
5. Ubersuggest This tool appeals to the more simplistic user, generating keywords from Google. It has been around for several years and is already quite popular. Ubersuggest can generate a whopping 300 to 400 suggestions for each keyword and the resulting keyword can also be expanded for further information.
6. Hypersuggest Much like Ubersuggest, Hypersuggest offers keywords from Google, in addition to suggestions from YouTube, as well. Since Hypersuggest users can add modifiers, it is able to produce keywords at a greater rate than Ubersuggest.
7. Google Keyword Planner One of the premier keyword research tools, Google Keyword Planner provides search volume data and keyword ideas by using a seed keyword. Users are also able to add their own keywords that have been generated in other places and receive CPC data/search volume information.
8. SeoStack Chrome extension This tool is totally free and generates hundreds of keyword suggestions from Google and YouTube. Alphabets and numbers are tacked onto the original keyword and the tool also supports the use of multiple seed keywords.
9. Google Trends Google Trends is the premier tool to find out more about the current trends and determine the popularity of certain keywords. When you want to know about certain keywords that your competition hasn't discovered yet, Google Trends can help.
10. AnswerThePublic This is a simple tool that generates keywords from Google's autocomplete function. Much like the SeoStack extension from chrome, alphabets and numbers are added to the seed keyword to generate hundreds of suggestions.
Profile Pages: “Online Branding and Building Authority”
What is the difference between online branding and building authority? Some would consider it the same thing, but in reality it can be two completely different processes. Online branding is a way to get more exposure for your brand on all levels of online marketing, especially search and social.
Building authority takes online branding to the next level by making each online presence for a brand authoritative. It goes beyond just about creating a blog or social media account. The following are ways you can build your online brand as well as your authority.
Blogs are beneficial for brands for three reasons. First of all, blogs help you rank well in search engines – Google loves fresh, unique content on websites that are constantly updated. If you’re looking to meet this goal, be sure to use Markethive’s blog platform and build a blog team in a Markethive group to assist in greater content and curation.
RE: WordPress Markethive’s technology super charges WordPress campaigns.
Next, blogs provide for great content to share on social media networks. It’s hard to get traction if your just sharing product and sales pages. But if you’re sharing informative blog posts about your industry, you’re likely to get a lot of traffic and social shares.
Markethive provides plugins and widgets and tech that allows visitors to subscribe to your blog from their Social Networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, thereby allowing your new Markethive posts to publish to their news feed automatically.
Finally, great blogs can help your brand build authority in your niche. This is where you go above and beyond cookie cutter posts that talk about your product to creating awesome content in the form of:
Tutorials
Infographics
Videos
Industry Interviews
Awesome content will show fans of your industry that you know your stuff and therefore are the brand to go with for their business needs. A great example of this is the blog you are reading right now – Markethive has Inbound Marketing technologies, the go to Social Network and infographics that have been tweeted and liked over 10,000 times and posts that have been viewed on Facebook, LinkedIn and Stumbleupon over 100,000 times.
There are two great fears that brands have when it comes to blogging. One is that they won’t have anything to blog about, and this is a complete myth. Everyone can find something to blog about. You just have to expand your definition of the target audience. Imagine you had a body shop. You probably won’t get a lot of attention if you’re writing about paint booths and sanding tools all the time, but you will if you think about broader topics that would interest the people likely to visit an auto body shop. You can blog about the latest coolest Hot Rods at the coming Hot Rod Nationals show or the latest NASCAR winner to grab fans of those programs. Or you can blog about environmental issues and the Prious to grab environmentalists. Just think bigger!
The other fear is that they will be giving away “trade secrets” and lose their business. This one is especially common within industries like SEO, where a brand might feel like giving out ten steps to link building will give their customers the info they need to just do it themselves. But this just isn’t true. I have found that most of the time, if you give a complex, in-depth tutorial, a potential customer will see that your brand has the knowledge to do the service, but they won’t have the time or resources to do it for themselves. Hence, they’ll go with you because they feel confident that your brand has the expertise demonstrated in the content provided on the blog.
The key with your brand’s blog is to make sure that it is apparent who is behind the content. Whether you have your blog on your domain (yourbrand.com/blog), as a subdomain (blog.yourbrand.com), or as a separate site (yourbrandblog.com), be sure that it is matched to your brand. Check out Markethive’s site, blog, and subscribers profile pages, logged in dashboard and display variances on hand held devices. All are unique yet all are well branded and follow a conventional identity protocol (all on separate domains and different devices) as an example of great branding.
Guest Blog for Others (This is a major component in Markethive)
When it comes to blogging, you don’t want to keep the good stuff all to yourself. Guest blogging (join a Markethive Group to share content is that easy) is a great way to build your online brand presence and authority. The basic goal is to find a (GROUP) blog whose audience will be interested in your brand, and create a great piece of content for that blog.
Notice I said great piece of content. I would go so far as to say that the content you create for another (GROUP) site’s blog should be even better than the content you create for your own site. You want the content you create for another blog (GROUP) to rock. You want that content to generate additional social shares, comments, and traffic for the blog owner.
As you create GROUP posts for others, be sure to save the links to those guest posts for future reference. As you approach new GROUPs that you would like to guest post upon, you will want to include those links as examples of your successful guest posts in other Markethive GROUPS. If you can convince the GROUP owner that your post will be a perfect fit for their audience and will drive significant traffic and response, the GROUP blog owner will have a hard time resisting.
My main tips for GROUP blogging for your brand include:
1. Find the best GROUPs to guest post on.
When it comes to blogs you want to get a guest post on, your goal is to find those whose audience would be interested in your brand. The blog should get a significant amount of traffic and social shares as well – there’s no reason to post on a blog that has no visitors just because it has high PageRank or any other criteria – you want to get some brand exposure out of this! Use the Markethive GROUPs directory to start your search for blogs in your niche or industry.
2. Find the GROUPs blogging policy.
If you see that a GROUP allows guest bloggers or outside contributors, the GROUP should have some page or post posted that describes their post policy. If they do have a policy page or post, then be sure to note any and all criteria.
3. Start building a relationship with the GROUP owner first. (Markethive Groups is excellent for this)
Now that you’ve found the blog you want to pitch an idea to, don’t just jump in and pitch them yet. Start by getting to know the GROUP owner first by following their Markethive blog posts, their Twitter and their Facebook fan page. Comment on some of their latest posts – make those comments valuable to enhance discussion and demonstrate your writing skills and expertise in the industry. CoPromote their posts using Broadcasting tools and widgets. Do this for at least a week or two before pitching content to them.
4. Research and pitch great topic ideas. (Join others in our live Markethive Work Shops)
Don’t create the content first and then try to find it a home. Once you’ve found the right blogs and started engaging with the blogs themselves, you’ll get a feel for the type of content they publish.
To get an even better idea of what content is successful for each blog, subscribe to them in your Markethive back office blog platform. Then you will be able to see the site’s latest traffic scores. The higher score, the more comments, tweets, Facebook likes, and other social shares the post received. Use these high-scoring posts as an indicator as to what content does well on each blog.
Now you can message via the Markethive message system or request to join their group saying that you have recently enjoyed reading their blog (as evidenced by your commenting & social sharing) and would like to contribute to their site as a GROUP member. After reading their guidelines, you would like to see if they would be interested in the following topics. Then add three to four great post ideas that you believe will fit their audience to choose from. And of course, if you’ve done guest posts elsewhere, include some of your best links. If not, just include some great links from your own brand’s blog.
5. Create Awesome Content.
Once you get approval from a GROUP, your next job is to create an awesome piece of content. Make sure it fits the theme of that blogging GROUP and that it has the overall feel / tone of the GROUP blog you are submitting to. Also be sure to add in relevant links throughout your blog post – not to your own properties, but internal links to the blog itself. This shows the blog owner you’re really giving it 100% for them and their audience and not just trying to promote yourself.
The self-promotion piece should come at the end with your guest bio. Check out other author bios on the blogs and create yours to match. This is where you can say you are John Smith, an industry enthusiast from ABC Company.
Again, be sure to consider the blog’s guidelines and previous guest author bios when deciding to add one or more links back to your brand. The blog owner ultimately reserves the right to edit it as they feel is necessary.
6. Support your GROUP post once it goes live.
It’s not over yet. After that guest post goes live, you should give it your unconditional love in the form of social sharing with your brand’s audience on Twitter, Facebook, etc. as well as coming by to respond to comments. That kind of response on your guest post will further boost your brand’s reputation as a great guest blogger as well as a confident authority in your niche.
Don’t Forget Blog Commenting
Blog commenting is a great branding and authority building exercise you can do on any blog in your niche. I would suggest subscribing to the top blogs in your industry in Google Reader, and each time there is a new post, be sure to read it thoroughly and add a valuable comment. Remember this isn’t about link building – this is about building your brand’s presence online as an authority in your industry.
Get a Disqus account as well as it is a sort of social network of people that comment.
You can use the blog’s previous comments as a guide as to how you should format yours. Some blogs require you to only use your real name, while others are a little more lenient in using your name – your company. I would suggest linking your comments to your blog as people are more willing to click through to a brand’s blog than their main website.
Your Online Branding & Authority Building Strategy Using Blogs
What is your brand’s strategy when it comes to building your brand’s authority using blogs? Be sure to share what you find brings your brand the best results in the comments!
Create a Consistent Brand Image for Each Profile
Have you ever visited a company’s social profile, and you were not sure that it belonged to the company? One of the most important parts of branding is keeping a consistent image across all of your online properties so that no matter what path a person takes from one property to the next, they will always know it is your brand. For example, someone might:
Find your fan page through a friend’s activity stream and then follow it to your blog, then website
See a tweet from someone they are following, visit your Twitter profile, and then continue onto your website.
Start at your website, then go to check out your social profiles to see if your company is engaging with fans. Engaging is fuel and grows awareness, authority and respect. Comment, recommend. Just drive by liking and endorsing does no one any good and makes you look like a tire kicking couch potato.
Just like you wouldn’t want pages on your website to be different themes, you will want your social profiles to do the same. Markethive also leads the way in doing it right as well:
MARKETHIVE
Markethive probably does the best with branding between their website, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube accounts as shown above. All five are branded with the honey comb logo, color theme and climbers ascending Mt. Everest in representation of the entrepreneurial social community of entrepreneurs helping each other achieve their agendas, so you can feel the consistency moving from one property to the next.
BMW
The above shows BMW’s branding between their website, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube profiles. Each online property uses the same color scheme and is currently focused on automotive technology. The logos are all consistent, and the auto focused in the pages is different perspectives, the coloring and themes are consistent as well
BOLTHOUSE
Bolthouse’s (organic farm fresh juices) branding between their website, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube profiles as shown above uses the same color scheme, logo, and focus on their primary product, carrots and selections of juices. Excellent example of branding and consistency!
Help People Find Your Profiles
I do a lot of competitive analysis in my line of work, and one of the most frustrating things I have to do is search for a brand’s social profiles. Don’t hide your social media presence – flaunt them! Be sure to:
Put Social Icons on Your Website – Let visitors to your website know that you are engaging with your audience on social media as well by adding social icons to your website design. The most common places to place them include the header / menu bar, sidebar, and footer. They don’t have to be large and in charge – BMW’s are none existent on their main page and Bolthouse are right up top left of center where they should be and get the job done..
Put Social Links in Your Communications – Do you send emails regularly? Add social links to your email signature. Do you send newsletters? Add social icons to them.
Make Your Profiles Search Friendly – If I Google your brand name + Twitter, I should get your Twitter handle in the search results. To make this happen, be sure that the name of your social profile (and the username if possible) matches your brand name. You might be tempted to keyword optimize your profiles instead of optimizing them for your brand name – this is something you need to resist. You can learn more about social media SEO on how to optimize for both effectively for search engines.
Another frustration is the direct sales industry.
Even though the size of this industry is huge by any comparison with a market measured in the trillions, even the top 100 fail miserable branding with social media. Do not be like them, rather show them a good example with your efforts. After several days of research I was able to find one such company that at least had the top 5 Social Medias registered with a similar array (not the same name) of usernames. The super majorities only have a token Facebook page, even less with Youtube and Twitter and nearly nonexistent with a Google+ and for that almost none of them are engaged.
BEACHBODY
Team Beach Body with a yearly market of 250 million, struggles with social media but has managed to set up the top 5 social medias, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Linkedin and Google+, albeit, the account usernames vary, and across the media branding is seriously lacking. It becomes painfully clear this industry needs Markethive or at least their distributors seriously do.
Get Engaged with Your Followers, Fans, and Subscribers
You probably know that it is important to maintain an active account by posting lots of updates, and that it is best to do something other than blasting advertisements non-stop about your brand. So the question is, what should you be doing to stay active in your social networks? Get engaged with your audience, of course. Here are the top networks to get socially engaged in for your brand.
Twitter Engagement
If you’re goal is to build a strong presence on Twitter and demonstrate your brand’s authority in your industry, you need get involved with your following. Some ways to do so include:
Monitoring Brand Mentions – If you use Twitter itself, just do a search for your brand and save the search for future reference. If you use a Twitter management tool like HootSuite, create a keyword search column that will constantly update you with brand mentions. Anytime someone says something about your brand, whether it is good or bad, you should be responding to it if at all possible. This may mean adding some extra team members to your social media GROUP as a response staff. But over time, if people see that you are always on top of any discussion of your brand, you will gain trust and receive lots of great word of mouth marketing. People will tell their followers what a great response they’ve received from you and likely recommend you based on their satisfaction level.
Monitoring Industry Conversation – One of the best parts of Twitter is that you can jump into any conversation, anytime. So if you are a company providing Inbound Marketing services and technologies like Markethive, you can monitor anyone who talks about Inbound Marketing, SEO, linking, Entrepreneurial interests, and other related topics and just answer simple questions that anyone asks about those topics demonstrating your expertise.
Curate the Best Content – Even if you are the best content creator in your industry, people often like to see a second opinion. Find out who other authorities are in your industry and share their opinion on industry topics with your following. You will gain more relevant followers simply for sharing the best news.
Facebook Fan Page Engagement
There are several different ways you can engage with your fans using your fan page that will keep your current fans active and bring new fans to your brand. These include:
Updating Your Fan Page on Facebook – It’s tempting to use HootSuite and other automated programs to update your fan page. But it’s becoming more and more obvious that if you want your updates to show up in fan’s news feeds that the updates must be organic, or originating from your fan page itself. So take the extra time to disable all of your autofeeds and start updating your fan page manually on Facebook. And when people start engaging with your posts or posting directly on your wall, be sure to respond to them. If they know they’re getting response, they’re more likely to return. No one likes a one-way broadcast.
Try Out Different Types of Updates – Don’t just post links or ask questions. Spice it up – add some video updates and photos. Different types of people like different types of content – be sure to try to cater to everyone by mixing your content up!
Thanks to the last major update to Facebook fan pages, you are able to use Facebook as your fan page. This means you can like pages as your fan page instead of your personal profile and then comment on them as your fan page. If you can find pages that are not direct competitors but whose audience will be interested in your brand, you will want to get active on them. For example, social media consultants should be living on Social Media Examiner’s fan page to connect with other individuals and businesses looking for social media help.
LinkedIn Engagement
If your brand isn’t on LinkedIn, you are missing out. LinkedIn allows you to add a company page where you can post your products, services, job openings, and even send status updates to your company followers including your latest blog posts. But some of the best branding and authority building activities for this network lie in the activity of the professional profiles including:
Participating in Groups – There are lots of great, active groups on LinkedIn in a wide variety of industries. Find the groups that have your potential client base within them and start getting active in discussions and posting useful content. Just be sure not to do anything that the group moderator would consider as spamming!
Answering Questions – The next best area to build a great professional reputation and strong authority in your industry is in LinkedIn Answers. There are questions asked every day in topics ranging from administration to technology. The people who answer the most questions are also featured on the answers’ home page as the week’s top experts!
Gaining Recommendations – Last, but not least, is recommendations. You can get recommendations on both the company pages and the professional profiles of your employees. Imagine if someone is browsing your company’s page and sees that the top employees have a ton of recommendations. It will show that you have a lot of experts in the industry which will make potential clients even more confident in your brand!
Do you know that if you have a inbound marketing system it virtually guarantees success of your business, provided you pay attention to how you use it. There are so many ways to communicate with potential clients these days, you will always find something that will work for you. A lot of inbound marketing systems are automated, but you must never forget that your leads will respond better if you speak with them. Human Intervention is important for success.
I am a member of MarketHive which is a free for life marketing system offering a suite of essential tools fully integrated into a social media site, designed from the bottom to get your message across to potential clients.
I believe in the system which has been enhanced so as to offer serious marketers the opportunity not only to promote their own business but also a way of sharing in the advertising revenue of the system, with a pathway of optional upgrades levels marking levels of achievement and providing additional affiliate income.
Some people who own marketing systems tend to be attracted to the idea of passive marketing, it sounds good. Money for doing nothing. But to be honest, a lot more money can be earnt by taking an active role, encouraging and demonstrating to your leads, how to set-up the system to suit what they want to do.
Your leads need to be nurtured just like a parent nurture their children as they develop and learn about life and it is the same with MarketHive. The members you personally introduce are referred to as your children and you should support them. Additional support is provided from other members, plus a support team.
According to Jake Newfield Vice President of Business Development at Alumnify, Author of A Cloud in the Sky, Writer for Elite Daily & Tech.co
2016 signifies a new era of marketing. Customers are changing, and as marketers we need to change along with them. Traditional outbound marketing campaigns like cold emails, cold calls, snail mail, and trade shows are not as effective as they once were several years ago. Consumers are now bombarded constantly by ads, information, and other messages from marketers trying to sell them, and they have become jaded. An outbound campaign no longer packs the same level of effectiveness as it once did. Thus, to reach our consumers it will require a strategic, well-planned inbound campaign to stand out from the competition and get noticed. If we embrace it, this change can be good; it can create more opportunities and expand out client base. Inbound marketing offers a refreshing variety of new, effective techniques that can enable us to see unprecedented growth. However, if we fail to embrace this adjustment of customer acquisition, our business' growth can be stunted. Inbound marketing will be king in 2016, and success will largely be dependent on a company's ability to perform with it.
Now you know that inbound marketing is going to be important for success, you need to consider your options. What is going to work for you and how much are you prepared to pay. Prices vary from free to thousands of pounds a month, if you need help I suggest you watch this 30 minute video.
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