Social Media: Is Visibility All There Is To It?

Gone are the days when businesses just relied on neon signs, tarpaulins and pamphlets. Since the inception of social networking sites, entrepreneurs harnessed it to maintain business relationships and attract new customers. Marketing has taken on a whole new meaning once social media became prevalent, especially for small businesses.

While it is true that the more people know your business exists, the higher chance you get of being considered to fit consumer’s needs, there is still the matter of being able to establish that you can deliver what you promised you would.

You may be sending hordes of email, tweeting left and right, posting new blogs daily all in the hopes of being noticed by more of your target market but have you measured how much of an improvement your business made since you started marketing online?…

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Optimize Your Marketing Efforts Without Hiring a Team of Know-It-Alls

email marketing One of the keys to success for every small business is a really smart marketing program that keeps existing customers in the fold and continually incites prospects to join. The program should include the most cost-effective ways to raise brand-awareness, leverage your expertise and share deals.

Although many are still hesitant to move away from snail-mail or the telephone, others are rapidly discovering that email marketing is one of the most effective means of generating sales.   Research conducted in 2009 by the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) found that email outperforms all other forms of direct marketing.

If you’re new to email marketing, or want to crank it up a notch, here are three tips to help you build and grow your email marketing list without having to look for additional budget.…

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Getting Into The Foursquare Frenzy

social networking on FoursquareMany business owners are now relying heavily on social media to help market their products and services. You may already have a business account with Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. You may also see that with these sites, your sales went up higher than you expected. But you should not stop there. People regularly think of ways to let them connect with others who share the same interests and you have to be updated so that your business can thrive.

The latest addition to social networking media, which can help promote small businesses, is the Foursquare iPhone app. It is a well-known belief that the best marketing strategy is by word of mouth and Foursquare has it down pat.…

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Building a Perpetual Marketing Machine

email marketingWhen it comes to online marketing, small businesses are staring at a dilemma. Free online marketing tools like social networks have great potential for reaching new customers, but their actual impact on the bottom line is hard to measure. Meanwhile, established tools like email marketing provide valuable metrics on subscribers, and are more suited for retaining and engaging existing customers than acquiring new ones.

Thankfully, online marketing isn’t a zero-sum game – it’s an aggregate one! Positioning email marketing against social media leaves marketers at a loss because they fail to capitalize on the individual strengths of both these channels. Email marketing gives businesses the ability to build a deeper relationship with customers, while social media helps to reach a broader audience.…

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Why Promoting Your Small Business Is So Important

business promotional tacticsIf you think you have achieved success when you saw your business up and running, you are wrong. You are   actually just starting. You are not really considered successful yet if you have just started your business. Your greatest challenge comes when you have to make your business available to the public. You still have to find who is going to buy your products.

This challenge could never be boring. You can be creative and organize fun stuff to promote your business to the public. Well that sounds easy and fun, but the truth is, you have to know something more about promotional campaigns before you can be successful on that end.…

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The Truth About Marketing

marketing truth Gone are the days where marketing can be done by just buying a small ad. Business cards are no longer attracting customers and sending mail or postcards may not get you new clients. These are traditional marketing strategies. We used to witness how these strategies helped entrepreneurs to manage their business. But this is no longer the case.

We may say that all these traditional models of marketing are obsolete. If you are aspiring to get high profits, more clients, or to establish more sales, or generate a lot of money; then it’s time for you to move on to higher levels of marketing.…

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Facebook Strategy For Your Small Business

facebook strategy for small businessesDo you have it backwards when it comes to Facebook?

Here’s what no one in the social media space seems to want to say: Facebook is a difficult place to reach new eyeballs organically if you do not already have good brand awareness.

There I said it. If you are trying to use Facebook to reach a new audience, organically (i.e. without paying for Ads), from scratch – you are facing an uphill battle.

Yes, the stats on how many Facebook users exist are mind-boggling. In reality most of those people will never actually encounter your brand on Facebook, unless you pay good money for them to.…

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How To Get SEO Value From NoFollow Links

seo value from NoFollow linksIncreasingly, it’s getting harder and harder to find sites willing to give you high-quality SEO links. Instead, most web sites today will only give you links that are blocked using a NoFollow tag.

The NoFollow tag tells Google NOT to consider your link in their ranking algorithm. Even though you may get referral traffic from this link, Google will act as if this site had never heard of you at all.

These types of NoFollow links are especially common with large portals, social media sites, blog comments and other sites that allow you to create public profiles.

Let’s take YouTube for example.…

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How To Get Your Proposal Accepted

business proposalsThe commercial cleaning industry is a tough business to get started in. There’s a lot of competition for very few clients, and the work is incredibly hard & unglamorous. But if you stick with it for a long time, you’ll find that it can be a very rewarding career.

Although most of our business now comes from word-of-mouth, it wasn’t always this easy for us to attract new customers.   Early on, we had a lot of trouble getting our proposals accepted.

We’d spend a fortune on advertising… just for the opportunity to bid against 20 other companies.

And bidding often meant taking 2 hours out of my day to drive over to the prospect’s site, talk to them and look over their office.…

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A New Way To Think About Bribery-Based Business Models

bribery based business modelsIt seems like every week, I hear about another start-up with a bribery-based business model. Some genius decided that they can pay people to visit their web site, and that this would somehow evolve into loyalty. But sure enough, a few months later, they all vanish just as quickly as they appeared.

The simple fact is that bribing customers works about as well as paying money for genuine friends.

If you’d asked me to help paint your house this weekend, I’d say yes because you’re my friend. But if you offered me $25 to come help you, I’d probably feel insulted and decline your request.…

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