How to Market a Local Business Online: SEO & Social Tips

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Your prospects and customers are researching and buying online, so you need to focus your marketing to them on digital channels as well. The way to do that is to be specific in who you’re trying to reach, know where they’re hanging out online, prove to them that your brand is trustworthy, and be able to measure your efforts so you’re only spending your time and money on the efforts that are actually working.

The first step is in creating a realistic and specific digital marketing plan. You need to give them valuable content that they can actually use to make their lives easier and that will make them keep coming back to you. It’s building brand awareness and loyalty. In the world of digital marketing it’s quality over quantity, and slow and steady wins the race…and the customers.

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How to Build a Community that Grows Your Business

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Many of us have these grandiose dreams of having it all, the family and the career where we’re our own boss. Well it doesn’t have to be a dream, you can make that a reality if you take the right approach.

The key could lie first in finding your perfect community. This is where you get support, tools, resources, connections, and even collaborations. Some people try to go too hard, too fast, but slow and steady often wins the race. Find your passion, stand for something, give value to others, and defend what you’ve built. In no time, you’ll have a community of like-minded individuals coming along for the ride with you.

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How to Get More Guest Posting Opportunities

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If you’re already creating content for your own business, why would you want to seek out guest posting opportunities for other sites? Well, because guest posting is a creative and important strategy for growing your own blog readership and community.

Guest posting builds relationships, it’s great for search engines, it introduces you to a whole new audience, it associates you with other influencers, it helps build email lists, and the backlinks…oh, the backlinks you’ll get that will make Google so very happy. But you can’t just go into it willy nilly. It takes some research and time to create the perfect pitch that will have influencers interested and anxious to post your content to their sites.

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A Blogger’s Guide to Pinterest Marketing

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If you’re a business owner, chances are you’re already using Facebook ads as part of your marketing strategy. And the last thing you probably want to do – or have time for – is add yet another social platform to your repertoire. But don’t overlook the many benefits of Pinterest and what it can do for your business.

Pinterest offers an abundance of benefits for businesses, and the best part, it doesn’t have to be just content that you’ve created. You have the opportunity to build relationships with influencers, re-pin older content of yours that did really well to keep it alive and get more new eyeballs on it, schedule pins all at once to save time, and don’t forget the benefits of group boards, where you can collaborate with others. A tweet has a limited shelf life, but a pin can last forever.

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How to Get Started with YouTube Advertising

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It’s pretty common these days for businesses to use Facebook ads for business, but have you considered the power of YouTube ads? Everyone knows that video is a powerful way to capture your potential audience’s attention, and even more than Facebook, people turn to YouTube to find answers to problems they’re having. If you have answers to their problems, YouTube is a great place to find your target audience.

Take advantage of YouTube’s high traffic rate to leverage your business’s expertise by creating some creative and entertaining content for your target audience. And like Facebook, YouTube also offers advertisers some easy ways to find your ideal audience as well as tracking which video ads are working well, and how you can do it affordably.

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Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Paid Search…Oh My!

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Really, AI has been around as long as computers have. But over time, AI and machine learning have been able to take over certain functions in more concise, error-proof, and productive ways than humans can.

We have benefitted from this in ways that encompass Netflix being able to recommend the kind of shows we like based on our viewing history, all the way to bidding on PPC ads on our behalf based on certain data it’s picked up from the various platforms.

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How to Set Up Geofencing for Your Business

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Businesses are always looking to find creative ways to target their audience, and geo-fencing fits that role perfectly. By setting up a geo-fence – or a virtual boundary – it allows businesses to access mobile device user’s WiFi/cell date/GPS to trigger push notifications, text messages, alerts, and even targeted advertisements, to deliver location-based marketing data.

Think of the possibilities. As a business you have the ability to potentially reach customers when they enter one of your competitor’s businesses and hit them with an offer they can’t refuse. You can literally aim your ads to customize your audience’s local needs, and this is key for not only sales but for customer retention as well.

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The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Healthy Financials

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Not all entrepreneurs and business owners are also financial wizards. That’s why it’s vital to make sure you have a person on your team that can pick up that task and do it in a way that shares your business growth vision, understands your needs, speaks to you in a way you understand, and doesn’t just throw around fancy accounting jargon.

But where do you start? Do you hire an accountant, a bookkeeper, a CFO? All of these roles perform essentially the same task, but the way they do it may or may not align with the way that’s right for your particular business. Knowing where you’re at, where you want to be, and what you need to do to get there are all part of what makes a good business finance officer.

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How to Put Out That Dumpster Fire of a Pinterest Account

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What happens when you let a Pinterest expert take over your business account? Rich Brooks found out the answer when he let Alisa Meredith do that very thing. The result: she helped him turn his dumpster fire into a well-oiled machine.

If only more businesses saw Pinterest as the search engine that it is, instead of just a social site to pin crafty ideas. Pinterest can help build brand awareness and loyalty. It has its own amazing analytics to help you in your marketing campaigns and strategies. There are incredible opportunities here for content creators. You can use hashtags!

Tune into this special episode (also available on video!), and see how to create a Pinterest business page that will help you direct traffic to your webpage and convert customers.

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The Ins and Outs of Influencer Marketing

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You don’t have to look far to find influencers. They’re the people that have established their own following through their use of tools like blogs and social media to let their followers know when something is good (or less than stellar). It’s amazing what people will do when they get something above and beyond what was expected.

As a business, when you treat those customers in a way that makes them feel special, they are primed to become your biggest advocates, fans and influencers. They’ll give you great reviews, tweet about you, blog about you, recommend you to friends and family. It’s the kind of free marketing every business wants.

When you find a way to intersect with your customer’s lives instead of interrupting them and treating them like they come first, you’re focusing on your influencers instead of just targeting to the general masses.

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