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How To Make Money Online
Making money online is surely the Holy Grail of employment, and there are no shortage of e-books on the subject. But can you really sit at your computer and watch the pounds roll in? Seth Godin has written a 21-point blog offering a fresh window on online opportunities. Some of the key themes are gaining trust and grabbing valuable attention rather than focusing on fads and quick wins. Creating value and building up from a small base is also important, according to his blog. Perhaps the best tip: ‘make money offline’: the same principles apply to both online and offline entrepreneurship. Click here to read more. -
The Best and Worst Times to Share on Facebook, Twitter
Capturing social media traffic is trickier than it sounds, particularly on weekdays when Twitter streams move fast. It can be hard to get your message heard among the noise, but careful timing of tweets and updates can help you to attract the most traffic. New research from bit.ly suggests that 1pm and 3pm Eastern Time are the best timezones to post if you have a global or US-centric audience. Over time we may find those social windows becoming ever more congested by opportunistic marketing tweets, so this is certainly a topic worth revisiting every few months. Click here to read more. -
This $20 Trillion Rock Could Turn a Startup Into Earth’s Richest Company
As natural resources show signs of running out, entrepreneurs and investors are literally looking to the stars for the next start-up opportunity. Last week, fabulously wealthy staff from Microsoft, Google and other companies invested in a new asteroid mining company, Planetary Resources. In time, they hope to develop the equipment to literally harness and dismantle asteroids, mining them for precious metals like platinum. If the company capture a single rock, they’ll easily become the most valuable company on the planet. But there’s one small snag in their business plan: the equipment needed for the job hasn’t yet been invented. -
5 Tools to Take Your SEO to the Next Level
Optimising your website is a complex process, and relying on one tool is not always the best way to approach it. Aj Kumar rounds up five tools that can help with optimisation, pay-per-click, keyword research, social media activity and backlinks. Many of the packages covered in this post are paid, but most have trial periods so you can give them a go before you part with any cash. The last option in Aj’s list, Traffic Travis, is entirely free and has plenty of features, but it’s only available for Windows users; there’s no cloud version or app to go with it. Click here to read more. -
The One-Two Marketing Punch: How to Combine Traditional and Online Media
When you’re struggling to be heard among the social media noise, it can pay to reconsider your approach. This post discusses ways to blend digital marketing with traditional marketing to give your business the best chance of success. Using other channels, such as printed QR codes or email newsletters, you can capture a different type of traffic from a slightly different demographic. But you don’t have to print thousands of leaflets and push them through doors to get results. It all comes down to brand exposure, and reinforcing your brand offline can boost the response you get online as well. Click Here to read more. -
8 Tactful Ways to use your Personal Facebook Account as a Marketing Tool
Here’s a $64,000 question for freelancers and start-up entrepreneurs. How do you promote what you do on your personal Facebook page without turning it into a business website? This post goes through some strategic and technical tips around engaging people on Facebook, allowing people to subscribe to your posts and promoting your business at the same time. Using these steps, you can also tweak your profile to show your professional details publicly without giving away too much of your personal data, such as photos. A little diligence is still needed to ensure you don’t accidentally share your innermost thoughts with your business contacts. Click here to read more. -
7 Reasons Marketing & Customer Service Need to Work Together
With social media comes social sharing of praise and criticism, and the way companies react to those messages can become an infinite feedback loop. This can be positive or negative, depending on the way it’s handled. Pamela Vaughan’s article uses the analogy of milk and cookies to describe the way marketing departments and customer service teams should work together to ensure clients are happy. Building relationships over social media may not be easy, but it’s vital if you’re to ensure your company is seen to be helpful, honest and fair. The feedback you get can also steer your marketing efforts in the future. Click here to read more. -
How to Steal Killer Sales Copy Straight from Your Prospects’ Mouths
Joanna Wiebe has penned this quirky piece for Kissmetrics on how to recycle customer reviews to enhance your own copy. By drawing on customer feedback, you can tap into the kind of language you should be using. She argues that the real gold - and the fundamental clues behind buying decisions - are in customer reviews, not expert analysis. She also says dedicated review sites are best avoided when you’re looking for inspiration for copywriting, since the polarised opinions on those sites can lead you down the wrong path. If you’re not a copywriter by trade, this could help you get inside the head of your clients. Click here to read more. -
The 5 Easy Steps To Measure Your Social Media Campaigns
Social media is a time consuming matter for any business, and it’s vital that your investment of time isn’t wasted. This Kissmetrics blog walks us through analytics and metrics, explains the difference between the two, and offers suggestions for measuring your goals and progress. There’s a really useful tip about a service called SocDir that taps into all available social media tools and tells you exactly what sites to use to generate the results you’re looking for. Also, try running reports on competitors to see what they’re doing right - and wrong. Click here to read more. -
How to use Pinterest for business: 7 handy tips
Pinterest is the newest social media buzz site, and marketing companies are eager to figure out how to harness the unique user base the site can offer. A very high proportion of users on Pinterest are women, and visually representing your company is key: there’s no content writing needed here. Cara Pring picks out some basics, such as pinning your own products among classic products from other sources, or pinning pictures of your staff and logos. More advanced Pinterest ideas, such as games and contests, aren’t covered, but this post should trigger a few brainstorming sessions in the office nonetheless. Click here to read more.
