Tag: blogging

“I don’t see the value in Social Media”

Every time I hear that from someone, two things comes to mind.

1. They’re ignorant about the power of Social Media.

2. They’re old.

Yes I said it…you’re old. So let’s look at it this way. Social Media is a very powerful tool for companies to help make them money. If you don’t have it going on for your brand, then you’re missing out on possible sales. I’ll give you an example, I manage the Social Media efforts for one of my clients. Each time I post a product on Facebook/Twitter/Blog they end up selling 15-20 pieces within the first day. Each item ranges from $15-$40. That money generated via Social Media is money you wouldn’t have seen if you don’t see the value in it.

I was talking about it with my college age daughter. I told her that there are so many people that don’t value or believe in the power of social media. You know what said next? “Are they old or something?” Here’s why older folks don’t seem to get it. For starters they think it’s a waste of time to be on Facebook, Instagram and etc. But what they don’t understand is that Social Media is another way of doing “word by mouth” advertising. But makes it easier is that the person is already on the Internet which means they can easily order the item they see being talked about through social media. Make sense right?

I do this all the time. I see a post from one of my favorite brands about a sale they’re having. So what do I do? I end up ordering things online ALL THE TIME!

So there you have it in the shortest of forms…Social Media works. If you don’t value or believe in it, then you’re losing out on money you could make. It’s that simple.

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Why it’s worth paying someone to do the job

Last month I met with a company that was interested in my services. I gave them a layout on what I could do for them. They said they’d think about it. A few days later I noticed that they started becoming more active in their social media. As great as that is, they were doing it all wrong. For one they were using their own personal profile to promote their business, secondly they fizzled out after 2 days.

In my experience, I’ve learned that companies will try and do their own social media after speaking with me because they think it sounds “easy” enough.” Unfortunately, they find out it’s not as easy as they think. It’s more time consuming than they realize, which means they end up abandoning the effort.

Fortunately for them, they did come back and asked me to manage their social media efforts. The moral of the story, I’m a professional. I’m good at what I do, just like how you are good at what you do. Whether you sell doo-dads or nick-nacks, you’re great at it and that’s why you have your business. But for stuff like social media, blogging and email marketing, leave that up to me so you can focus on your own day to day efforts.

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Shirts, Stickers and Signs

A while back I had a friend who was interested in “branding” his new found business idea. Keyword is IDEA. He wanted to sell products to a certain clientele. But he hadn’t lined up his vendors, website and products. But he already wanted to come up with all sorts of marketing collateral such as shirts, stickers and even signs to help gain some exposure for his brand. But when I heard this, one thing came to mind…don’t count your chickens before they hatch.
chickens_hatch

Though I completely understand what he’s trying to do, but I tried to explain to him that there’s stuff he can do that won’t actually cost money. I told him about Blogging and Social Media, but he just couldn’t see the vision for it because he was too focused on wanting to get stuff to pass out to people.

You see, if you start blogging you’re basically building a buzz about your product, services and company. Besides it’s free and it has the best return for your work. If you have good content on your site, search engines will find you and that means when someone is Googling a product or service you offer, your chances of getting found online goes up.

Don’t get me wrong, I think branding is great, but it’s better when you have already established yourself as a company. Besides, all that branding stuff isn’t cheap, shirts can cost as much as $8 a piece with a minimum order of 100. So all that adds up. My suggestion is after you start making sales and have replenished your overhead, any surplus you have can go towards branding.

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What’s the best way to get more readers to my blog?

I recently had a friend ask me that question above since she just started a blog. There’s so many ways to answer it. But in my opinion, fresh content is the best way to get more readers on your blog. What do I mean by FRESH CONTENT? Basically it means articles and more articles.

If your blog is all about cats and kittens, then make sure you publishing out as many cat/kitten articles as often as you can. Oh but there’s a catch to all that. The content you push out has to be substantial, meaning it has to have some sort of value to your readers. That way you’ll retain them as a reader and they keep coming back to see what new stuff you’ve posted.
LOL-Poor-cat
Just think of it for a minute. You find a great blog, you follow it, but the Author doesn’t regularly update it. Maybe they’ll update once or twice a month. What eventually happens is you stop going back to the site and you forget. Well…do you want your readers to forget about you? No? Then make sure you have good articles that keeps them engaged and coming back!

A few years ago there was a blog that I followed because I loved how he wrote. He was funny, witty and his style was so unique. Then something happened, he just stopped writing. Eventually his blog failed to exist! I was actually pretty bummed out because I felt the guy had some great stuff. So if you didn’t what I’m trying to say, post articles. Preferably your own and not some sort of regurgitated news that other blogs have already posted.

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Content Should be Fresh, Not Duplicated.

We’ve covered Content Marketing and Blogging before. These two things are pretty much similar but different in their own ways. Think of it like milk and chocolate milk. Essentially both are milk, but chocolate milk is pretty darn yummy…

Chocolate_Milk_by_hutchess
Before I get carried away on why chocolate milk is fantastic, let’s go back to content and blogging. You see content can be the stuff you put on static pages on your site. For example, if your website talks about your services, that text you have is content. Then there’s something called a Blog. I’m a huge proponent to this because of the fact search engines love fresh content or in other words, new material. With a blog you can update it as many times as you want, preferably 3 times a week and that triggers the search engines to start crawling your blog for info which then presents it to people looking for those keywords you have on your article.

So here’s where we have to talk about being fresh and not duplicated. There are MANY “content providers” that will sell you articles as cheap as $.03 a word. They’ll include 2 keywords and a 250 word minimum. Sounds like a great deal right? Well no it’s not. What you’re getting could be of two things. 1. Content from overseas writers that don’t speak English and use some sort of translator program. Thus the stuff don’t make sense! 2. Copied or duplicated content. This means the person you bought the article from Googled your competitors and hit copy then paste and emailed it to you. This is bad because Google will see that your content is duplicated and you can face repercussions that will greatly affect your traffic.

The bottom line here is, when you are going to pay for someone to write content for you, make sure you get a guarantee from them that it’s fresh/new and never duplicated.

My service provides content creation as well as editing existing content. All of my materials are guaranteed to be original. You may pay a bit more with RLPolicar.com, but my quality of work will outshine my competitors.

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Why is blogging important to your business?

There’s a few good reasons why. Let’s start off with the most obvious, it gets your message out fast! When I first brought up the idea of blogging to one of my old clients, they really didn’t understand it nor did they think it was beneficial. For one they didn’t understand what it meant. Blogging, Blog or Blogger all stems from the term “Weblog.” But to shorten it, became blog. What it entails is a log of sorts that you fill out much like a diary and the most recent “post” you have sits on top. By the way a “post” is what an article is on a blog.

One of the things I told my old client is this, “Blogging allows you to get information out to your customer base without having to update your website or do any major changes to your existing site.” For the most part you can install WordPress (my preferred blog platform) to an existing website and have it under a sub-directory. For example, one of my current clients now has their blog set up as: blog.piratemfg.com. Others may have it set up as http://www.domainname.com/BLOG. Either way it works.

So now you’re thinking, “Should I be blogging for my business?” The short answer to that is YES. Here’s a why. Let’s say you’re a Personal Trainer who has a successful business. You NEED to be blogging to get more info out to your current customers and potential customers. What kind of information should a personal trainer be blogging about? EVERYTHING! If you’re a personal trainer, you get people asking all the time about the latest supplement, workout equipment and techniques as well as nutrition, right? Why not fill up your blog with useful information that gets people coming back for more?

Now that you have an idea on what kind of things you can post about, how often should you be doing it? My answer to that, as much as possible. Anytime you have a free moment, crank out a post. Why? Because search engines love fresh content. Google, Yahoo, Bing and etc love making new content available to people who use their service. Just think of it this way, let’s say you’re a Butcher at a meat market. Aren’t you more excited to show your customers the freshest cuts to them? Same thing with blogging and search engines. Your article is the meat that the search engines(butcher) wants to show case.

Blogging will also help your site traffic go up. Here’s how, remember the whole thing about search engines? Well what they’re doing is telling searchers that your blog has the keywords (more on that later) that they’re looking for. Then if your keyword is linked to a product or service you’re selling back to your site, then you’ve got direct traffic(more on that later) going to your main site.

I could literally go on for hours why Blogging is awesome, so for now we’ll end it here and I’ll publish a Part 2 on this subject. So stay tuned.

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