Mediaboss Marketing

Often it starts with a passion. And someone wanting to turn that passion into a profession.

For many entrepreneurs the gap in the market that they can see drives them on to set up that business that 'cannot fail'.

But when the initial spurt of enthusiasm gives way to a day-to-day grind, corners start being cut and the slide downwards can begin.

So how can SMEs avoid this? Here's five top tips from Larry Anderson Consultants that can stop this in its tracks.

As Mark Zuckerberg states in movie The Social Network when asked if Facebook is finished, "It won't be finished, the way fashion won't be finished." The same can be said for training.

Most small businesses spend a week training new staff then send them on their way. This is not the way. It is import to ensure all staff has a continuous training plan, allowing them to sharpen existing skills and teach what they know to others.

The biggest challenges to this are time and cost. The easiest way round this is building training into your team's job description. Make it a requirement to learn a new skill every month or every 90 days.

Too much of marketing today is just noise. Marketing is not about broadcasting your specials or telling about all the shiny awards you have won.

The effective marketing strategy should accomplish three things: educate, persuade and cause someone to take action.

Make full use of your website, and have a good grasp on SEO (search engine optimisation) and Social Media. Don't shy away from your traditional media, such as newspapers and radio.

Most importantly, be direct with your customers, but make sure your message is well crafted to avoid it looking like spamming, and be sure to follow-up effectively.

Everyone in your company has a role to play in the sales department.

The issue is how many people look at the role of the sales person, with many imagining your typical used car dealer. The reality is today's successful sales people don't do a lot of selling. Instead, they ask questions, listen well and match solutions to problems.

It is important for your sales rep to be able to engage people in a conversion about needs, usage and expectations. The sales person of today is more of a match maker than a smooth talker.

The real differentiator is the ability to listen. When a customer feels listened to, they feel like they matter. You want your customers to feel welcome, at ease and connected.

Your brand is your soul. It's your essence; the reason you exist. It is the reflection of who you truly are and at the same time, it allows your customers to see something of themselves in your brand.

Every touch point you have with your customers is part of your brand experience. From your advertising, to your website, to your site and to your products.

When you take the time to get clear about who you are, what you want to serve and what experience you deliver, your next step is to make sure everyone in the company is living your brand promise everyday.

You should always encourage mistakes. Sounds crazy right? But we do our best learning just after we've fallen flat on our face.

However, don't confuse sloppiness for mistakes. Sloppy is when we don't do what we know we should do. Mistakes are when we try new ideas, push forward and don't have the information available, or proper skill sets, we don't fully achieve sucess.

There is a big difference! Please make sure you have a culture based on chasing greatness and not living with mediocrity. The learning is in the doing, and so is success.

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Five things every small business owner should know right now - insider.co.uk

As soon as your put your knowledge into an online format, you open it up to a global marketplace. But too many online educators think creating an online course and pressing publish is the end point. Not to be an entrepreneurial party-pooper, but publishing your course is just the beginning.

I have over 40 online courses, have built close to 1,000 courses for other people and have more than 7,000 students enrolled in my online courses in over 130 countries.

Here's some tips I've used to grow my global student base.

Consumers are now in control of their knowledge because they have the power to jump onto a search engine and ask "How to xxx." A great way to rapidly go global is to start providing your audience with those answers.

If your content appears as the result for every "how to" question your audience has, then it is your courses they are going to buy.

Heres what to do: Write down every question your audience has on your topic, write a simple "tip" answer to each question and record that answer as a video.

Keep each video as close to the two- to nine-minute mark as you can. Note it is not wrong to film longer videos than this. Its just the modern day online learner may not watch the entirety of a video that exceeds this length and therefore may not get the full value of your content. Add the video to YouTube, your own blog and social media, ensuring it has a "how to" title that is the most likely to be searched by your audience.

Every video you add increases your chances of being found as the one "who has all of the answers" and your courses become a no-brainer for them to take.

Online course marketplaces are like the supermarkets of online courses. They are big, powerful, have huge reach and big customer numbers. The downsides to them are that you as the course owner do not own the student data, or have full control over your course pricing. However, many of them have millions of users all of whom you can get your course in front of.

Because these marketplaces can highly discount your courses, I advise you to only offer a smaller (quality) "taster" version of your course on these sites and use them as a way to get yourself in front of millions of customers from around the world that otherwise wouldnt know you.

Every online course is essentially a collection of tips, advice and strategies for something. Pull out every single tip and strategy from your course and for each one write a short blog post. Not only will your own website be more discoverable in search engine results due to the keyword content and data, but you can also repurpose those blogs as articles to send to industry relevant magazines.

Webinars are the global classroom. There are endless webinar tools out there that are free or very cheap. Select a small handful of tips from your online course the ones that people want to know are the best ones to pick, and create a free webinar where you share sensational value. At the end of the webinar, reveal there are X more tips just like those that you have to share in your course give them a discount coupon and expect to see some significant enrollments if you wowed them.

Just like the deli lets you taste a little square of cheese before you buy a block of it, allow your prospective customers to nibble on a piece of your training for free too. This will allow them to be assured you are the expert you say you are by seeing for themselves.

Create a mini version of your online course and give it away as a lead magnet opt-in on your website. Ensure you let them know they can upgrade to the full course at the end of the freebie.

Make sure the search engines can find your course. Write down at least 20 words and phrases people might type into Google to find a course like yours. Then go back through all of your course description, lecture titles and module titles as well as the course name itself to make sure they are optimized for search ranking by including the keywords you have selected.

Then go into the back end of your website and your online school and ensure you list all of your keywords and phrases into the SEO areas on your site to increase the opportunity for it to be found on Google.

Facebook groups are a fantastic opportunity for you to build strong relationships with your customers. They go way beyond the power of a Facebook page which these days have very little reach without paying. A Facebook group is a way to make your audience feel like they belong to something. If you can create this in your own global community you will create loyal fans from around the world forever.

Books are another fantastic way to reach your audience at a global level, and these days it's really easy to self-publish. Send your online course videos to a transcriber, do some heavy re-writing, filling, editing and formatting, upload your book on to the Amazon platform and youll immediately have your content open to over 63 million people.

I only started podcasting at the end of 2016 and the first thing I asked myself when I released my first episode is why I hadn't done it sooner. Create a podcast delivery plan around the content in your online course.

The more you can repurpose your content into every different medium possible the more your global student base will grow.

Sarah Cordiner is an international best-selling author, educator and professional speaker and one of Huffington Posts' "Top 50 Must-Follow Female Entrepreneurs." Reach her at sarahcordiner.com/services.

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11 ways to make your online course go global | Expert column - Virginian-Pilot

If you're looking to make big money doing internet marketing, then you'll definitely want to read this article. I'm going to show you the importance of finding a profitable niche, how to create value to make profits, and how to get tons of visitors to your website daily.

So first off ..

Finding A Profitable Niche

If you're new to internet marketing, a "niche" simply means target market. These are the people who would be interested in purchasing whatever you have to offer.

But first you'll want to find a niche that will make you a ton of money. Many new internet marketers, hastily, jump in and pick the wrong niche. They do not end up making money and wonder if internet marketing is a scam.

Not you though. I'm going to show you how you can easily find a profitable niche. A good place to start is your passions. IF you can market offers, products, services around the passions you have, that's really the best.

Maybe you have passions of:

Losing weight Making money Starting a small business Dating and relationships Home gardening Dog Breeding World Travel Wine Tasting

Anything Really!

Like the saying goes, "Passions Equals Profits". But there is something very CRUCIAL about using your passions, that you should know first. You have to make sure that other people deeply share your passion!

They have to be so deeply passionate about it that they will spend money to make it happen for them. You can do this by ..

CHECKING THE COMPETITION

If you check on GOOGLE, type in your passion, and see other people marketing your passion That means your passion is likely to be profitable.

Nobody in their right mind would spend time and money marketing a website if it was not bringing them a profit. That's means if you see other people making money from your passion, there is no reason why you can not make any money either. You just have to go out there and get it.

Here's how: Become an Expert

The easiest and quickest way to make big money doing internet marketing is by being known as the Expert. You want to be the Go-To-Expert that everyone wants a piece of.

This critical aspect about finding a profitable a niche is very critical to your success. So crucial that I've written a separate article for it on my website. You can check out my website at the conclusion of this article.

So after you've found a profitable niche, the next step is to ..

Create Value To Make Huge Profits

Here's the deal. You're not going to make money if you do not have something of value to exchange for it. That means if you want to make big money you need to create Big value. First you need to set up your own website. Then on your website you should have one or more of the following:

1. Products and Services

If you have a business, product, or service you can get insane amount of leads doing internet marketing. If you're new to marketing then you'll either have to create or get a product / service to sell.

One of the easiest, and most profitable products you can make are called information products. You can discover more about how to create highly profitable products by checking out my website below.

2. Advertising Revenue

Maybe you probably do not sell a product or service. That's OK. There are more ways to market a website and make money. One of those ways is getting paid for advertising.

If you create a website that gets a ton of unique visitors daily, you can offer to advertise other people products and services on your website. I'm sure you've been seen a popular website with advertising around it. And guess what?

Each time someone clicks through through that ad, the owner of the website is making money from either pay per clicks, pay per leads, or pay per sale programs.

You can literally create hundreds of websites that generate huge daily income just form advertising revenue. If you'd like to discover more you can check out more at my website below.

So now that you know some ways to create value for big profits, I'm going to reveal how you get a ton of visitors to your website

Web Traffic Generation Strategies

If you do not know how to get web traffic to your website, you might as well end your career as an internet marketer here. You will not survive without knowing how to generate traffic. Here's how you can do it:

1. Writing Articles

By writing this article, I believe you're going to be eager enough to want to check out my website. And that is how other internet marketers get tons of daily visitors to their site By writing articles that are informative and compelling.

These articles can get picked up by other site owners and soon enough your content is all over the web. Imagine having people all over the world reading your article and want to check out your website.

Here's a easy plan to start out with:

Just write and submit 3 articles a day and you should have visits to your website in no time!

2. Search Engine Optimization

Another great way to get daily traffic is by having high rankings in the search engines. The majority of people who use the internet start out at the search engines. If you can get listed in the top 10, you'll have people flooding your website every day.

All you really need to do is place targeted keywords within your website. And build backlinks to your website using your targeted keywords.

Source by Sam N Mlambo

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Internet Marketing Key Points to Victory - JOSIC - Digital Intelligence

Everybody in the internet marketing world knows how important of a role SMS Marketing plays in a promotional campaign for any business on the internet, unless you are a complete novice to it. SMS Marketing Services services can be found alongside other internet marketing tools such as social media, link building, SEO and such other internet marketing methods.

SMS which usually refers to a Short Messaging Service is meant for businesses wishing to expand their business traffic by sending short advertising marketing messages to their prospects that have the potential to turn into their customers. Businesses use this method of internet marketing, for varied types of methods that include promoting about a new product or service introduction into the market, or to create awareness to their customers about a discount offer on any particular product or service that they offer. However, these SMS Marketing messages can only be received by those who accept to receive such promotional messages when signing up.

Bulk SMS Marketing campaigns help your businesses to reach more traffic in order to promote your products and services to more customers in the market. This significantly helps your businesses to expand your diversified customer potential and thereby grab a major portion of the market share than your competitors in the market, and making your business the industry leader.

In order to attain such a success through implementing a Bulk SMS Marketing campaign, a well thought out strategy is what is required, and to have such a successful campaign the following mentioned points needs to be implemented:

Thus, in order to attain increased website traffic to your businesses, the above mentioned points has to be followed and you will realise the potential in the SMS Marketing service that can build a trusted relationship with your prospective customers. A well planned approach of SMS Marketing not only brings you more customers, but also helps in building positive relationships with your existing customers.

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Increase Website Traffic with Bulk SMS Marketing - TG Daily (blog)

Recently, Manta surveyed small businesses about their participation in social media. Among the more interesting findings is that 51% of those surveyed don't have a Facebook page for their business. This, despite research from the Pew Research Center which finds that more than two-thirds (68%) of US adults have a Facebook page.

Why are SMBs holding off on Facebook?

"The top reason many small business owners don't have a Facebook business page is because they don't think they need one. However, from our experience, a Facebook page is an invaluable asset for small businesses. According to the Pew Research Center, 68% of all U.S. adults are Facebook users, which makes it a great place to reach more customers, especially considering the bulk of consumers do truly seek out local businesses online," said John Swanciger, CEO, Manta.

Manta's research also found that, of those SMBs with a Facebook page, most believe the time invested in Facebook pays off for their business. The top reasons for continuing to build a Facebook presence for these SMB owners is to increase their brand awareness, and find new customers. Swanciger agrees with this.

"Let's take a plumber for example," said Swanciger. "A plumber may think that because they don't have a storefront, they don't need a business page on Facebook. However, as more consumers turn to their smartphones to find and research local businesses, Facebook has become the new yellow pages and word-of-mouth rolled into one. And those are vital marketing tactics for local service providers like a plumber."

Tags: facebook marketing, Manta, SMB trends, social marketing

Originally posted here:
Expert: Why Facebook business pages are important for SMBs - BizReport