Tag Archives: Marketing Tech Coach

A spring cleaning challenge for your marketing – part 2

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Last Friday, I gave you step one of my 2 part Spring Cleaning Challenge for your online marketing. If you didn’t see it, check out Part 1 here:

Hopefully, you’ve taken the time to go through and do that. Not only is it just good practice to look through your site every so often, it may remind you of things you started, but didn’t finish, or ideas you had that are primed for execution now!

Item 2:

Go, right now, and take a look at the analytics or stats for your website and blog. And if you don’t have some sort of analytics set up, we need to fix that.   Pronto!    Please!!

Look closely at what your highest sources of traffic are.  Can you do more with them? For example, if you are getting a high number of visitors from Twitter, maybe you could spend some more time there, and phase out another site that isn’t even showing on your traffic sources right now.

Or, if you’re getting a lot of traffic from a few articles you submitted months ago, maybe now is the time to put a specific article marketing strategy into place, and generate lots more traffic through the regular submission of fresh articles.

Or maybe, you’re getting traffic from a collection of websites and blogs of people you know, work with, or that are affiliates of yours. This is a great one, because it’s quick and easy to deepen the relationship, and generate more traffic from the same sites. You can do this through regularly commenting on their blogs, starting conversations with them in social media, becoming a guest contributor to their blog (you already know their audience is interested in your content!), or simply asking them! A quick email is a great ice-breaker. All you need to say is that you’ve noticed a lot of traffic coming through from their site, and you wanted to thank them for it. You can offer to guest post for them, or suggest that there may be the potential for a Joint Venture between the two of you. And if they’re affiliates of yours already, just ask them what they would like in order to promote you better, and earn more commissions.

Finally, once you know where the highest sources of traffic are, take a good hard look at where you’re spending your time. If you spend hours every week writing articles, but don’t see article directories as a major traffic source, maybe that time would be better spent somewhere else.  This isn’t about creating more tasks for you to do (because almost all of them will probably offer some value to you), it’s about knowing where the biggest return on your time investment is, and focusing your efforts there.

Have you been struggling with figuring out your analytics, creating a
system to automate some of your marketing tasks, or any other  Marketing
Tech headache? Got a question and wish you could just pick the brain of
someone that works with blogs, social media and shopping carts all day
long? Join our next Marketing Tech Q & A call! For only $17, you get
access to our hour-long Q & A call where you can ask all those questions
that have been bubbling around in your brain!
Check it out at www.marketinggeeksinc.com/marketing-tech-qa

Have you been struggling with figuring out your analytics, creating a system to automate some of your marketing tasks, or any other  Marketing Tech headache? Got a question and wish you could just pick the brain of someone that works with blogs, social media and shopping carts all day long? Join our next Marketing Tech Q & A call! For only $17, you get access to our hour-long Q & A call where you can ask all those questions that have been bubbling around in your brain!

A spring cleaning challenge for your marketing – part 1

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This is it, only mine is white!

This is it, only mine is white!

This past weekend, I got super excited when I happened to find the absolutely perfect kitchen “island cart” at one of my favorite stores. My kitchen is on the smaller side, and we don’t have a ton of cabinet space, so I’ve been looking for “just the right” piece of furniture for my kitchen for a long time. So when I found one that was just perfect, you know I snatched it up and raced home with it! I then spent a good portion of my weekend (which was rainy and cold, by the way – spring has left Michigan for the moment!) completely reorganizing my kitchen.

While I didn’t see this particular episode as spring cleaning (it was more excitement!), I think that spring still gets a lot of us in a mood to clean things up and refresh our surroundings.

And if now is a good time to get rid of old winter clothes that no longer fit, it’s also a great time to freshen up your website, your online presence and your marketing.

Just like clothes in your closet, there are probably tasks in your marketing plan that no longer fit and serve your business. And at the same time, there might be a buried treasure hiding under all the junk – something you’ve forgotten about or didn’t know you had in the first place!

You may be spending lots of time on a social networking site that no longer has the audience you’re wanting to connect with. Or maybe your business has evolved, and you’re still getting traffic to your website, but have never checked to see where it’s coming from. And if you don’t know where you’re getting interested visitors from, how in the world can you go out and get more?

So here is a little Spring Cleaning Challenge for you:

Item 1:

Go through your website carefully, and make sure it’s up to date. While things like copyrights, email addresses and phone numbers may seem obvious (and please get at least those right!), look at things like

  • Is your pricing current?
  • Do you have events listed that are way old?
  • For those events that are over, do you have recordings? If so, are they available? If not, now’s a great time to make those available for download – either free or paid. Look, we just created a fresh new freebie or product!
  • Do your newsletter/autoresponder signups and website contact forms work?
  • Is your bio current? Check your website, as well as your social media profiles, article directory sites, and anywhere else you have yourself listed.

On Monday, I’ll give you part 2. But over the weekend, take a look at your website and get that current!

How to add snazzy social media icons to your site

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Do you have your social media profiles on your website? Hopefully so, because just like offering a freebie or free-taste on your website, it’s a great way to encourage readers to connect with you in a casual, non-salesy way. This lets them get to know you and your expertise without any pressure to immediately become a client. And it helps you build that KLT (Know, Like and Trust) factor that is so important online.

So today’s post is going to show you how to add those snazzy Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn buttons you’ve seen around, to make it easy for readers to find your social media presences, and connect with you there too!

To start with, you need to find some icons you like! Now a word of warning – just because you find an image online doesn’t necessarily mean you can grab it and use it on your site – things like that can get you in trouble! So you want to start with a source that you know offers the right to reuse on your website. My particular favorite is www.iconspedia.com, or you can visit www.twitter.com/goodies to generate the html code AND link and save yourself one step. You can also do a search on Google for free social networking icons.

Once you find icons you like, go ahead and download to your computer.

The next step is to generate html code for the image, as well as the link to your profile. If you’re not familiar with writing html code, the easiest way to do this is to go into your Edit Post screen on WordPress, and Upload the image.

upload

Once you have the icon in your post, select it by clicking on it, then use the Insert Link button to add a link to your profile – should like something like this  http://www.facebook.com/rebeccazwar?ref=profile or this http://www.twitter.com/rebeccazwar

Now, all you need to do is switch to the HTML tab, and copy ALL the html code you see!

It should look like this:

The very last step is to go into Appearances –> Widgets, and drag a new Text Widget onto your sidebar. You can name it something like “Connect With Me”, then you just paste your html code into the box, click Save, and VOILA! You can check out your new icons!

Making sense of your Google Analytics

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Knowing what people are looking at on your site, and what sites and keywords are bringing them to you is very important in being able to improve and increase your traffic. But how do you spy on your visitors? Install an Analytics service like Google Analytics. Having some sort of tracking and analytics system on your blog makes it easy to…

  • see what posts are most popular, so you can write more on the same topic
  • see where a lot of your traffic comes from, so you can focus more time there (for example, you may find you get lots more traffic from Facebook than from Twitter, so you would know that your time is better spent interacting and posting on Facebook since more people click through to visit your site)
  • see what keywords are bringing people to your site. You can then focus more on the good keywords that are showing a lot of interest, and you might even get ideas for keywords you hadn’t thought of!

Here’s a quick video on installing Analytics on your WordPress blog, and what some of the different terms that you’ll see mean.

7 tips for knowing what social media tasks to outsource, and when

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Too many small business owners wait until they’re overwhelmed to start outsourcing, either because they feel they’re the only one who can do the job right, or because they fear it’s simply out of their budget.

The truth is that there are many tasks you’ll come across in your web-based business that do not fall within your area of expertise. The right virtual assistant will get you set up, going and be on to the next task in the time it will take you to read the FAQ’s! Think of them as your virtual help-desk for developing, implementing and marketing your internet presence

1. Take a look at your current time spent on certain social media marketing related tasks? Do you find yourself losing hours on Facebook a day? While you may enjoy it, this could be a great first step to outsourcing, as you’ll immediately be more productive.

2. What parts of your online marketing strategy do you dislike? If there are things you know you should be doing, like looking at your analytics, but find you’re always putting them off, outsource them. You’re feeling guilt over a task you don’t like, instead of feeling positive about all the tasks in your business you do enjoy. This can immediately affect your perceived happiness/stress levels.

3. Or, if you find that you really enjoy social marketing, and aren’t getting your business must-do’s done (like bookkeeping, billing, scheduling, etc.) find a VA that can assist with those annoying tasks so you’re free to do the tasks you enjoy.

4. Find a VA by referral – the beauty of social networking is that it allows you easy access to all sorts of people that may be using similar tools as you. You can go to them for recommendations on programs, services and people. And this gives you more peace of mind as you start outsourcing projects.

5. If you’re so overwhelmed that you don’t even know where to start with outsourcing, find one tasks that stands alone (something like getting out your newsletter). You can send over your template, article, and site logins and know the task will get finished. That alone can help you see the forest for the trees and start to delegate more.

6. Know that sometimes you just have to stop and take the time to delegate, even if you feel too busy. It’s better for your peace of mind now, and you’ll never get to it later. So just do it!

7. Finally, remember that having a more objective perspective on your business can do wonders as well. A VA with good business sense can help streamline systems, suggest areas for improvement, strategize your marketing and generally provide you balance when things get crazy.

Can you connect email and social media marketing?

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connect-emailWhile social media is a buzzword, most businesses are still using email marketing for a large portion of their online audience, and it is still quite effective. But can you combine the two? While “old school” email marketing is 1-to-many and “new school” social media marketing is 1-to-1, the two can actually work together very well.

The best way to approach this is as an opportunity for you to learn more about your customers and for them to learn more about you and your brand.

Here are several great tips for doing so, from Jason Baer, at Connect and Convert:

1. Collect Profile Data in Subscription Forms

Offer your email subscribers the option of including their Twitter name on your subscription form. Something like:

“We care about our customers. Can we follow you on Twitter?” Please provide your Twitter name, and we’ll follow you ASAP. (We’re at @companyname, by the way)

2. Promote Social Media Outposts in Welcome Messages

When you send your welcome message after initial subscription (you ARE sending welcome messages, aren’t you?), include links to your various social media outposts. Carefully track which links get clicked, as it will give you an indication of which are most popular among your customers.

3. Social Media-Only Offers

If you really want to get a handle on which social media venues your customers prefer, and in what intensity, create an email that includes links to special offers or promotion codes that are shown only on your social media profile pages. Something like: “We’ve got incredible offers available on items we think you’d love. For details and promotion codes, visit us online on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter”

Turn your Gmail account into a Social Media Managing Monster

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If you’d like to be more active on your social media sites daily, but find that opening a multitude of windows and programs just gets overwhelming and so you miss out, check out these great add-on’s and widgets that can help you do more and be a social media monster, all from within your Gmail inbox.

1. Twitter is one of the most active social media sites, and it can be easy to spend lots of time there during the day. But if you run one of the many (great!) Twitter clients like TweetDeck or Twhirl, you might notice that it’s distracting, as well as possibly slowing down your computer a bit. For quick updates, try installing the Twitter Gadget for Gmail. While it may not have all the functionality of other Twitter clients, it lets you reply, retweet, or post an update quickly, and get back to business, all without leaving your email inbox.

2. Sharing Content – Looking for some content to share quickly through your Twitter Gadget? Try installing the Delicious Gadget. Essentially, you see a list of current links you’ve bookmarked, which make for easy reference for your social media efforts or to send via email.  Or, for Firefox users, you can install Google Reader as a sidebar in your Firefox window. Then, you can quickly grab a link to an article to share on Twitter, or you can share through Google, and again spread valuable content quickly without getting distracted by a new window.

3. is the definitely one of the most popular social networking sites, and I imagine many Gmail users have a account in Facebook. The Facebook Gadget for Gmail will allow you to see your friend requests, friend updates, photo updates and more within the comfort of your Gmail inbox

4. FriendFeed is a social networking aggregator that combines data from various social networking sites into a single place, allowing you to keep an eye on everyone you follow without having to visit individual sites. If you are a Friendfeed user, you can easily view your update streams in the Gmail sidebar with the Friendfeed Gadget.

4. Want more? – There are even gadgets for Digg and Flickr.

These widgets and gadgets are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to increasing your productivity within Gmail. If you’re looking for more, beyond just social networking and social media, check out these great resources:

14 Add-On’s that make Gmail more awesomely productive

How to make Gmail your ultimate productivity center

Don’t have the time or know-how to get these set up on your Gmail account? This is a great task for a social media virtual assistant to work on for you!