How Can Facebook Be Used For Marketing?

Using Facebook for marketing your business is honestly a no-brainer. You can do so much on Facebook, mostly free, that you just can't pass it up as a great marketing opportunity for your business.

Set Up a Business Page

In order to set up a business page on Facebook, you first need a personal page. But once you do have that, you can set up your business page. The business page enables you to promote your business actively while a personal page is not supposed to be used for that.

Set Up a Community

A Facebook community is very useful in terms of being able to discuss things with your customers, or potential future customers. You can easily set up a community in the same way you set up the business page - just choose "community." A community has more communication ability between your likes and followers than a business page.

Set Up a Private Group

A private group is a great way to run a small mastermind group without having to invest in the technology to have one of your own hosted on your website. You can make them private and even secret. If you have a secret group, you'll have to actively recruit people to join and you can even charge people money to join.

Promote a Post

On your business pages you'll have the capability to post things and you'll get a button that offers you to "boost" the post. You can bid a certain amount and choose your audience too. The capability to narrow down who you want to see your promoted post is genius and will enable you to truly target your audience with posts you want them to see.

Run a PPC Advertisement

Even without a business page you can create advertisements via your personal page on Facebook. You can narrow down your target audience in ways that you may not have realized that you could. You can target with age, sex, location, groups and affiliations. It doesn't get much more niched down than that.

Join Groups and Communities

A great way to market your business on Facebook is to join other groups that consist of your target audience. Then, simply help others without an agenda. Do not market yourself or break any rules of the page owners. Instead, just be helpful, and share when requested to do so. Let your reputation speak for you.

Comment on Pages, Groups and Communities

When it comes to marketing on Facebook, a good use of your time is to make smart, intelligent and useful comments on posts that the owner of the page or group post, as well as being helpful to others who post.

Share and Like

If you want people to share what you are doing, be sure to share and like what they are doing. When it comes to online marketing, people like helping others when they are helped too.

Facebook wants you to succeed using their advertising platform. This just makes sense. If you achieve your business goals while spending money on Facebook advertising, you're likely to use that marketing practice again in the future.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/10313587

3 Things All Successful Bloggers Do

Blogging is a great way to earn income and promote your business, or just have as a place to discuss your passion.

If you do at least these three things, you can have a super successful blog. You can have a blog that attracts an audience who wants to read what you have to say and take your advice, and who comes back for more on a regular basis.

All successful bloggers have three things in common:

They post blogs regularly

They post unique content

They post audience-focused content

One way to keep up with blogging is to create a blog publication calendar. A blog publication calendar will take into consideration important upcoming events, product launches, and other issues, helping you work in advance to keep your blog full of interesting and relevant content.

In order to make a blog publication calendar, you need to first make a few determinations such as:

How Often You Will Blog?

First determine how often you plan to publish a blog post. This could be daily, weekly or whatever your choice. This helps you know how often you'll need to write blog posts, and when you'll need to publish them or schedule them.

Who Are You Blogging For?

Write down a few different personas for your audience so that you can know to whom you're writing the blog posts. It can help you keep focused better if you can look at these personas when you are ready to write.

Which Blogging Categories Will You Use?

Depending upon your niche, you'll need to choose some categories that a post will go under when you blog. Spreading out the categories can help you come up with more interesting content. For example, if you have a blog about Labrador Retrievers, some categories might be Rescued Labs, Feeding, Exercising, Training, Chocolate Labs and so forth.

Are There Any Upcoming Events or Product Launches?

Are there any upcoming events related to your niche? For example, is there a conference coming up, or are you launching (or someone else) a new product that is perfect for your niche? Keeping up with these dates can help you create content that will entice readers to buy the item at launch.

Once you have determined this information, you can start brainstorming content ideas to match upcoming events, product launches, and industry news. In between those types of blog posts, you can put other types of posts up such as educational, informational, interesting and fun blog posts.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/10288543

More on Blogging - How to Scale Up Your Content

During your overall content creation strategy, do you ask yourself before spending time on any piece of content whether or not it is scalable?

It's a good idea to consider this issue. This doesn't mean you shouldn't create some content that can only exist in one format, but it does mean that you might want to spend less time and effort on content that can't be repurposed.

Look at Your Content Goals

During every stage of content creation it's important to keep tabs on whether the content you're producing is working or not. First, take a look at your content goals and then check your metrics to ensure that the content you're creating is getting you closer to meeting those goals. Plus, evaluate whether the content you have already can benefit from scaling.

Repurpose

Can you repurpose old blog posts? Can you create infographics out of stats that you've collected? Can you create a slide share off an old report? How about a YouTube video? If you can create anything you have already made into a different format with added flavor based on the place it will be distributed, then you will make the most of your content.

Evaluate New Content for Scalability

Going forward, evaluate each potential new piece of content for scalability in advance of creating it. That way you won't waste as much time or money on content that can't be used in other ways. Once you have decided what content can be repurposed and used in different ways, craft a plan to get it done.

Make Use of Technology

The other issue about content scalability is the technology available to deliver your content. Is your website responsive? If not, then it will be difficult for some of your users to view your content in any form. Make use of the technology that is available and upgrade your technology quickly to become responsive.

It's important to deliver the right content to the right people using the right channels at the right time. To do this you need to research your audience, plan the content you will deliver and know what technology you need to deliver it.

Plus, you need to know when your audience is ingesting the content and through what mediums. This takes a lot of research and time spent on understanding how everything works in concert together.

Once you understand how everything works together, you'll be able to ensure that you create mostly scalable content that will enable you to get more bang for your content buck.

If you can reach more people with the same amount of content but distributed through different technology in different formats, you'll essentially unleash a multiplier effect that will explode your reach exponentially.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/10291381

How To Create A Compelling Brand

Everything You Need to Know About Landing Pages

What Is a Landing Page?

A landing page, simply put, is an attractive, elegant, and clean page that immediately gets the attention of visitors to your site.

When built innovatively, a landing page can act as the cornerstone of a successful online marketing websites campaign.

Why So Much Fuss About Them?

"Landing pages are the new direct marketing, and everyone with a website is a direct marketer." -Seth Godin

The landing page is a place where conversions happen. Having an effective landing page can turn your website into a money-making machine. According to Marketing Sherpa, 68% of B2B businesses use those pages to get new leads for conversions in the future.

A business that makes $1000/day could be losing over $25K per annum if the landing page responds slowly, says internet marketing guru, Neil Patel.

Here is an example that is old by now, but which still demonstrates the importance of building a landing page well. In the year 2010, President Obama was able to raise an additional $60 million JUST by A/B testing the page that was created for a particular campaign.

Remember: you have just a couple of seconds to make or break the deal. So... give it all you have!

What makes a landing page function as a converting machine? What are the best elements to be incorporated into your lead capture page so that even the most reluctant visitor to your site votes in your favor?

To answer these questions, let's take a look at seven of the top elements you need to consider when designing your landing page.

7 Ways to Captivate Users with Landing Pages

1. Create Compelling Headlines

The headline of your page is the first thing that your visitors will see and read. So, it makes sense to craft a killer headline that will impact them instantly. Years ago, Basecamp switched up its standard software benefit/feature driven landing page for a picture of a real customer. Basecamp made the headline a quote that summarized the major advantages that the customer's company received. The result was a massive increase in the conversion rate by 102.5%.

Here are some pointers on creating killer headlines.

• Be useful

When writing your landing page headline, remember to connect with the fears and wants of your visitors. According to Kissmetrics, Carelogger boosted its conversion rate by 31% when its headline focused on the fear and desire of its target audience.

• Be Urgent

Encourage users to act right now by providing a deadline or giving out some useful offers. This strategy can easily grow your reader base and compel them to act.

• Command Attention

Your words should trigger emotion among your users. It's always wise to pick up vivid adjectives for this purpose.

Some powerful words you can use are:

• Astonishing

• Never seen before

• High costs

• Power

2. Use Videos to Tell Your Story

Landing pages with videos can up the conversion rate by almost 80%, according to EyeView Digital. Also, recent statistics reveal that 95% of users retain the messages in videos.

Videos provide passive engagement. With minimum effort, visitors can discover exactly what you want to convey.

Many marketers don't know what a heatmap is. So CrazyEgg hired the Demo Duck crew to point out the reasons why small businesses need more than Google Analytics to improve their conversions.

Do you think visitors will abandon this page?

Never.

Some important pointers to note while creating video on a landing page are:

Use a tempting thumbnail to engage and convert your audience.

Put your video above the fold.

Keep your video meaty enough to be interesting for your target audience.

Try to include a transcript of the video. Some people might want to watch the video, some might want to read it, and some would love the idea of doing both.

What's the secret?

According to Entrepreneur, if an image is worth a thousand words, a great video is equivalent to 24k words per second. People love videos. The Guardian even claims videos will be the future of content marketing. Cisco states that videos will account for roughly 79% of consumer traffic on the internet by 2020.

3. Create a 3D Effect Using Parallax Scrolling

With the help of parallax scrolling, the background of your landing page moves at a reduced rate compared to the foreground. This feature results in a 3D effect as visitors scroll down the page.

What's so great about the scrolling effect?

It allows you to tell your story on your landing page. It allows your visitors to know more about your services or products. When you use effective copy with parallax scrolling, the result will be a very persuasive and professional page.

4. Trust Signals

The best landing pages make adequate use of trust signals.

Why do they use this tactic?

Trust signals indicate to visitors that your brand and offers are credible. These signals can take a number of forms, such as testimonials, endorsements from past clients, etc.

FiveStars has done a fantastic job of providing trust indicators on its landing page. The company showcases "proven results" and customer testimonials, as well as some personal information on website activity.

Another robust tool that acts as a trust signal is trust badges. These are nothing but logos of well-known companies with whom you've worked in the past.

When utilizing trust signals, always include the following:

• Customer testimonials

• Third-party seals

• Trust badges

• Privacy policy

5. Use Gifs to Demonstrate Your Products

Demonstrating the way your product works is extremely important. Gifs explain how your product can be used in a faster and more persuasive way compared to videos. Marketers are now realizing the importance of Gifs. They have become the go-to feature for companies seeking better engagement on social media.

With Facebook allowing brands to post Gifs and Twitter rolling out the auto-play videos as well, they definitely deserve a place on your landing page. Gifs are the best substitutes for videos on landing pages. In fact, they are much more cost-effective compared to videos when it comes to demonstrating a service or product visually. Gifs are also gaining popularity, particularly in this year's mobile marketing trends, so you should keep an eye on them. PineGrow uses a Gif on its landing page to explain how users can build responsible websites faster.

6. Give Out Offers

An offer is something you give to your visitors in return for getting them to do what you want.

Offers can include discounts, coupons, a free version of your product, a free trial, a matching gift, or a whitepaper.

There are a few strategies you can use.

A website that pays bills can offer users $10 for the maiden bill they pay. Users would have to sign up for the service and link their accounts to it.

A consulting firm might offer a free consultation of 60 minutes, which could be a meeting to describe how the agency can help people.

7. Put the Headline and Form into Two Columns

By breaking up the screen into two columns, you can show multiple page elements with an equal degree of prominence.

Do you think that the form on your landing page deserves the same attention as your headline or sub-headline? Can they have a cumulative impact on your visitors?

Even though there is no exact formula to creating an ideal landing page, there are some common rules of the thumb to improve your chances of making one that stands out.

Are you looking to achieve a high percentage of conversions this year?

Then don't forget to follow the steps above when creating your landing pages.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/10311700

How to Write a Blog Post From Start to Finish from Online Marketing Guru Neil Patel

This is the best blogging formula out there.

It works for a B2B, B2C, a personal or corporate blog.

This method helps online marketing Guru Neil Patel generate around 37 thousand visitors per blog post.

8 Email Newsletter Tweaks for Better Results

Newsletters are still great ways to engage your list subscribers, bring them back to your blog, cross-promote social networks, and so much more. But, if you're not getting good results from your newsletters, these are some tweaks you should consider.

1. Use the Right "From" Name

When you send a newsletter (or any email to your list), don't use a "no reply" email address or a generic name. You want them to know this is from you and something they want to open. You'll get more opens and more engagement when you use your name in the email than if you use a generic name or even your business name.

2. Determine Format Base

Do a test to determine whether your audience responds better to HTML newsletters or text-based. It would be a shame to spend a lot of time creating a wonderful template for your newsletter only to find that most of your audience prefers text-based emails. You can also give your audience the choice when signing up depending on your email autoresponder platform.

3. Craft an Appropriate Headline

Your newsletter should have a headline that is somewhat the same each time so that they know it's your newsletter. Name your newsletter something appropriate and use that in your headline with personalization and the date if you have enough room.

4. Create Chunky Content

When people read online content (whether email, phone, or PC), they don't read it from left to right like they do paper. They often scan the message and look at the main points and headings. If you make chunky content with appropriate sub-headlines that grab attention and point to calls to action, you'll get more response.

5. Segment Your List

If you have a large list, it's important to segment it and then send each segment their own specialized newsletter. Often it can be the same newsletter but with different items highlighted and placed up front, and a different CTA depending on their place in the list.

6. Use Compelling Visuals

If you do choose to send an HTML newsletter, use compelling visuals that get attention and make your audience members want to click through. Also, offer them the ability to click through and read the newsletter online on your site and not just via email.

7. Focus on Benefits Over Features

When you do mention any products, services, or information that require a response from your audience, it's imperative to focus on benefits over features. If you do mention a feature, always follow up with the benefits of that feature.

8. Always Include a Call To Action

It's important to always include a CTA in your email newsletter by announcing products, services, and events that they can buy or participate in, and why they should.

When you write and manage your newsletter content correctly, it will make your life easier and your business grow.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/10191538