Brand, Sales, and Balance: Are You Including Social Media with Other Online Marketing?

The 1980s are remembered for their developments in business and technology, particularly computing. The 1990s for their advances in technology, particularly the growth of the internet and online business opportunities. If the 2000s are to be remembered for anything, it will be their developments in communications and online communities, particularly the incredible power of social media.

Social media gives major brands and companies as well as small business, some seriously big power, but it is rarely used as it should be. Commitments to quality are sometimes overlooked, and opportunities for branding, direct sales, or indirect marketing are often passed over. These missing opportunities do cost businesses.

Social Media for Branding:

A dollar unearned is a dollar lost. Businesses are often questioning the value of social media for their branding efforts, but few take action when they should. Billions of dollars are being left on the table, particularly as major brands move onto social media services, and the value of a social media-friendly brand still is not being recognized.

An experiment is always worth more than not even trying. Discussion on social media’s branding abilities will only take companies so far. With the low cost of social media efforts, an experiment with social media branding can generate huge returns, all with a relatively minimal level of risk.  Develop a simple plan and test your ability to grow and expand your brand.

Social Media for SEO:

SEO consultancy (and in-house efforts) were once the domain of spammy content and low quality link generation efforts. Poorly planned information was setup on low-cost websites, and marketers shot out as many links as were possible. Despite being somewhat effective, the old world of SEO is packed with inefficient models and outright unethical business models.

However, social media has given SEO new life. The old “SEO is spam” cliche is no more thanks to the development of social media. Each new social media asset is another opportunity for high quality outbound and inbound linking, and every social media conversation is another opportunity to spread links that actually add value.

With Twitter tweets and Youtube videos now regularly appearing in Google’s standard search results, the divide between search and social media is likely to become even smaller. Marketers accustomed to spam-style SEO tactics are in for a new surprise, while businesses that embrace social media receive a well-deserved SEO boost.

Social Media for Sales:

Social media may not always be a good sales platform, but it is a good resource for generating future sales. Social media’s ability to generate prospects is one of the most important aspect to the sales process. Marketers that were once dependent on direct lead generation have a new platform available to them, particularly in open social media platforms like Twitter or LinkedIn.

The greatest news is that social media still has room to grow. Businesses that are built on lead-based sales have good things to look forward to. As social media develops further, sales models will be refined, micro-networks offering great sales potential will grow greater, and marketers can look forward to a platform that is refined, sales-friendly, and willing to be marketed to.

Jeannine Grich, CVA, MVA, EthicsChecked™, provides marketing and social media support, training and consulting to busy entrepreneurs. For information about finding a VA, download her FREE 10-Step Guide to Finding the Right VA, or to learn why Social Media should be an important part of your marketing plan with her FREE Report, Social Media Marketing Benefits, visit: https://accbizsvc.com, or contact her at [email protected]

Can Business Branding Drive Sales?

Why is Business Branding important?  And can it help to increase and drive sales growth?  Business branding is not just a one-time process. Rather, it is something you work on and build up over a period of time. After all, branding reflects your reputation as a business enterprise. Along with your efforts to create and manage your brand is the efforts of trying to build and protect your relationship with your client base.

One of the best ways to establish the prominence of your brand in the market is by remaining consistent with the message that is conveyed by your marketing efforts. Refrain from claiming to produce bold and large scale promises. Your customers will easily remember when you fail to deliver on those promises. You could easily lose that reputation that took you years to build. Therefore, you need to pay attention to exactly what you need to do (and what not to do) if you want to turn that trust you have created amongst your client base into increased sales.

Creating Brand Awareness

Since every brand is distinct, you must also utilize varying approaches in communicating the brand’s message to its target market. This part entails immense creativity and a certain level of sensitivity to the needs of your prospective clients.

If you are not sure how to do this, you can take a hint from other highly successful brands in the market. Study how they utilize their brand and what strategies they employ to get more people drawn into their brand. For instance, you can work on an emotional campaign, which is something that is rather difficult to do. But once you are able to establish that, then you could potentially increase your sales. One important thing to remember when you are using an emotional campaign is to always speak the truth about what your product or service is about and what it can do that will benefit your target market.  What value do you bring to the table?

Managing a Successful Emotional Campaign

If you decide that you want to appeal to your client’s emotion as your business branding strategy, then you need to consider various aspects that’ll make it work. One way to effectively do that is to share a story. This story could be fictional or not, but it should have some relation to the brand you are trying to campaign on. The idea here is to be able to produce some sort of personal improvement or progress by using the product or service.

If possible, base the emotional campaign on the brand itself, not just on the product. That way, you’d be able to produce a distinct campaign that will easily set you apart from competing companies. Then, whatever this message is that you use in your campaign, try remaining consistent with it. You can use different methods and campaign variations, but the message must remain the same in all of your brands.

After you have finalized your campaign, verify every bit of detail that is included in it, whether you are using it for Online or print advertising.

Preserving Your Business Reputation

The brand recognition phase is over and now you have to utilize ways to preserve your company’s reputation. It must involve analyzing your company’s actions and how clients perceive those actions, in relation to their satisfaction about your brand’s performance and some other related factors.

Sensitivity to your client’s needs and using your brand to address them is one of the most effective measures toward business branding. As you go forward in your business efforts, try to learn more about effective business branding strategies to expand the reach of your brand in the market.

Jeannine Grich, CVA, MVA, EthicsChecked™, provides marketing and social media support, training and consulting to busy entrepreneurs. For information about finding a VA, download her FREE 10-Step Guide to Finding the Right VA, or to learn why Social Media should be an important part of your marketing plan with her FREE Report, Social Media Marketing Benefits, visit: https://accbizsvc.com, or contact her at [email protected]

Search Engine Optimization And Why It’s So Important

E-commerce can be a cut throat business. You have to arm yourself with the proper know-how and the tools to make your site a cut above the rest. Every day, more and more sites are clamoring to optimize their website rankings and if you let your guard down, you may just get trampled on and be left behind.

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is a term widely used today by many business and  e-commerce sites.  For the past few years and the next ten years or so, search engines would be the most widely used internet tool  people will use to find the sites that they need to get the product or information they desire.

Most people that use search engines use only the ten top search results on the first page. Making it to the first page, more so to the top three is a barometer of a site’s success in search engine optimization. You will get a higher ratio of prospects clicking through to your site when you rank high. The more traffic to your site, the more business you rake in.

This makes it essential to do everything possible to grab a hold of that spot or make your ranking as high as possible. As outlined above, each day brings a new opportunity for business and e-commerce sites to make themselves rank higher using search engine optimization. It is imperative to make your site better and better every day.

So just what is search engine optimization and do you have to use it? The answer to why you have to use it is an easy one. You need search engine optimization to draw attention to your site and generate a good income from the traffic you drive there.

With search engine optimization you can get the benefit of generating a high volume of traffic. Statistics indicate you get successful business conversion from about 10 to 20 percent of your traffic. If you get a hundred hits or more a day, you should get a good conversion into sales. If you get only twenty to ten hits a day, you only get one or two opportunities to convert, if any at all.

Search engine optimization is utilizing tools and methods in making your site top ranking in the results of searches done by your target market. Getting yourself on the first page and better yet in the top half of the page will ensure that your site will generate good and positive awareness of your site’s existence and subsequently generate more traffic, traffic that could lead to potential income and business.

Search engine optimization requires a lot of work to be fully realized. There are many aspects you have to change on your site or add, to get search engine optimization. These will include getting lots of information about the keyword phrases that are popular in relation to your site’s niche or theme.

You may also need to rewrite some of your content so that you focus on the right keyword phrases on your pages without making it too commercial, but light and informative. There are certain rules and guidelines to be considered to make your site’s content applicable and conducive to search engine optimization.

You could also collaborate with other sites so that you could get link exchanges and page transfers. The more inbound and outbound links generated by sites among others are one of the components search engines use to rank you.

Try to search the internet for many useful help. There are lots of tips, guidelines and methods for search engine optimization that can be found on the internet. Research as much as possible to help you optimize your site in search engine results. The more knowledge and information you gather the better. This will all help you in getting those high rankings. This may require a little time and effort on your part but the benefits will be astounding.

If you have any funds in your marketing budget, there are many sites on the internet that can help you with search engine optimization, including us! There are many sites that help in tracking keyword phrases that can help your site. There are also some content writers that have lots of experience in making good keyword laden content for your sites that have good quality.

Act now and see the benefits you will gain with search engine optimization. All of these will result in better traffic and more business for your company.

Jeannine Grich, CVA, MVA, EthicsChecked™, provides marketing and social media support, training and consulting to busy entrepreneurs. For information about finding a VA, download her FREE 10-Step Guide to Finding the Right VA, or to learn why Social Media should be an important part of your marketing plan with her FREE Report, Social Media Marketing Benefits, visit: https://accbizsvc.com, or contact her at [email protected]

3 High-Impact Fixes For Your Marketing Woes

How many times have you lost business to a competitor because your marketing strategy was lacking or even overwhelming?  Some of my clients feel they simply can’t compete or they don’t have the money to afford marketing support. May times the problem is that we often feel that we’ve got to come up with some grand plan in order to get our business skyrocketing again.  Don’t be fooled!  Getting back on top of the market isn’t as tough as it seems if you try these high-impact, easy-to-use fixes.

1.The Magic Number – 1

Implement a “promote 1 item at a time” motto for your marketing strategy.  Does that mean you can’t SELL more than one item at a time?  No… but sometimes it may be best to wait until AFTER the sale is over.

When a customer sees more than one product or service offered at a discount, they may get confused.  Which one is the better deal?  Which one do they prefer?  These questions encourage procrastination – one of marketing’s greatest thieves.  Instead, offer the customer a product that compliments their business, helps them achieve their goals, or helps them expand and grow their business.  Instead of losing a sale, you’ll add value to your relationship with your clientele, and add more profit to your bottom line.

2. Outsmart Your Competitors

Your competition is looking for you in all of the usual places, and using all the usual marketing methods.  Don’t be like everyone else.  Quietly look for new methods of promoting your products and services and new markets to target. 

Niche markets provide the perfect sneak tactic for reaching new clients.  Here’s they key… sub-divide your current market into smaller, more specific niche markets.  Familiarize yourself with the needs and concerns of the niche, then present yourself as the solution to their challenges and problems.  Leave your competition in the dust with the intensity of new prospects that will come your way.

Modernize an old marketing technique that still carries a wallop – postcards.  Yeah, these small, inexpensive marketing tools still carry a personal message that is quick and easy to read, but with new high-impact colors and designs that capture the attention of clients.  With the inexpensive marketing opportunities of the Internet and social media, most of your competitors no longer use the US Mail as an option to reach clients.  Postcards are still an affordable option to reaching your clients and prospects and give them something to hold onto for when the need arises. Your competition won’t even know that you’re using them! 

3. Encourage Communication

Communication is crucial to understanding your clients.  Encourage questions before the sale, during the sale and after the sale.  Make it easy and comfortable.

Provide convenient contact information on all of your sales materials, including Websites and social media platforms.  If you find yourself overloaded with questions, create a frequently asked question page where clients can get the answers they need without claiming as much of your time.

Confused customers, tough competitors and communication mishaps won’t steal profits from your business when you fix things up with these 3 quick tips.

Jeannine Grich, CVA, MVA, EthicsChecked™, provides marketing and social media support, training and consulting to busy entrepreneurs. For information about finding a VA, download her FREE 10-Step Guide to Finding the Right VA, or to learn why Social Media should be an important part of your marketing plan with her FREE Report, Social Media Marketing Benefits, visit: https://accbizsvc.com, or contact her at [email protected]

Use YouTube to Improve Online Brand Awareness and SEO

How to Use YouTube to Improve Online Brand Awareness and SEO

Online entrepreneurs and marketers have much to gain from creating a YouTube channel and launching a video marketing campaign. Once a YouTube channel has been created, the following steps should be followed in order to improve brand awareness amongst internet users as well as enhance a brand’s visibility not only in video sharing communities but also among search engine users:

1) Select a Topic

Choosing a topic for video marketing need not be a difficult task as there are many options to choose from. It could be focused on better or unconventional ways by which a product can be used for best results or simply demonstrate the expertise of an entrepreneur on a given topic. It could also include testimonials from loyal customers or even made just for pure entertainment. When it comes to selecting video marketing topics, entrepreneurs are only limited by their creativity.

Furthermore, online entrepreneurs and marketers need not limit themselves to developing just one video. In most cases, publishing a video marketing series works best and increases the potential of a brand to gain loyal viewership.

2) Record Your Video

Upon selecting a topic and planning out all scenes and important communication points, entrepreneurs should be ready to record. The technology used for this is not as important the concept of the video as there are marketers who have shot videos with mobile phone cameras have seen the same success as those who have recorded in HD or other more sophisticated devices.

Recorded videos should be focused, direct to the point, and kept below 2 minutes. Upon recording, simple editing software can be used to fix the transition between scenes, remove unnecessary takes, and finalize the video for public viewing.

3) Implement Video SEO Tactics

When a video is ready for the public, it should be uploaded to a YouTube channel and optimized for proper video SEO. To do this, marketers should include pertinent keywords when entering a title, a description, and tags. Furthermore, a link to the brand’s website should be added towards the end of the video and in it’s description. Doing so does not only generate backlinks for a site but also directs viewers to a place where they can learn more about the brand featured in the video.

4) Generate Video Views

Apart from making a video available in a YouTube channel, entrepreneurs should look for other videos with related content and post their own videos as replies. Doing so increases the potential of views and enhances a video’s relevance to certain keywords. More views and backlinks can also be generated by promoting videos on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Once a video has gained enough views and backlinks, it starts appearing in Google search results for targeted keywords and phrases.

Video marketing is definitely much more difficult to pursue than content marketing. However, the results an entrepreneur can gain from this strategy makes it worthwhile. With a proper video marketing campaign working entrepreneurs and marketers can easily improve online brand awareness, visibility, and SEO.

Jeannine Grich, CVA, MVA, EthicsChecked™, provides marketing and social media support, training and consulting to busy entrepreneurs. For information about finding a VA, download her FREE 10-Step Guide to Finding the Right VA, or to learn why Social Media should be an important part of your marketing plan with her FREE Report, Social Media Marketing Benefits, visit: https://accbizsvc.com, or contact her at [email protected]

Three High-Impact Fixes for Your Marketing Woes

3 High-Impact Fixes For Your Marketing Woes

How many times have you lost business to a competitor because your marketing strategy was lacking or even overwhelming?  Some of my clients feel they simply can’t compete or they don’t have the money to afford marketing support. May times the problem is that we often feel that we’ve got to come up with some grand plan in order to get our business skyrocketing again.  Don’t be fooled!  Getting back on top of the market isn’t as tough as it seems if you try these high-impact, easy-to-use fixes.

1.The Magic Number – 1

Implement a “promote 1 item at a time” motto for your marketing strategy.  Does that mean you can’t SELL more than one item at a time?  No… but sometimes it may be best to wait until AFTER the sale is over.

When a customer sees more than one product or service offered at a discount, they may get confused.  Which one is the better deal?  Which one do they prefer?  These questions encourage procrastination – one of marketing’s greatest thieves.  Instead, offer the customer a product that compliments their business, helps them achieve their goals, or helps them expand and grow their business.  Instead of losing a sale, you’ll add value to your relationship with your clientele, and add more profit to your bottom line.

2. Outsmart Your Competitors

Your competition is looking for you in all of the usual places, and using all the usual marketing methods.  Don’t be like everyone else.  Quietly look for new methods of promoting your products and services and new markets to target. 

Niche markets provide the perfect sneak tactic for reaching new clients.  Here’s they key… sub-divide your current market into smaller, more specific niche markets.  Familiarize yourself with the needs and concerns of the niche, then present yourself as the solution to their challenges and problems.  Leave your competition in the dust with the intensity of new prospects that will come your way.

Modernize an old marketing technique that still carries a wallop – postcards.  Yeah, these small, inexpensive marketing tools still carry a personal message that is quick and easy to read, but with new high-impact colors and designs that capture the attention of clients.  With the inexpensive marketing opportunities of the Internet and social media, most of your competitors no longer use the US Mail as an option to reach clients.  Postcards are still an affordable option to reaching your clients and prospects and give them something to hold onto for when the need arises.Your competition won’t even know that you’re using them! 

3. Encourage Communication

Communication is crucial to understanding your clients.  Encourage questions before the sale, during the sale and after the sale.  Make it easy and comfortable.

Provide convenient contact information on all of your sales materials, including Websites and social media platforms.  If you find yourself overloaded with questions, create a frequently asked question page where clients can get the answers they need without claiming as much of your time.

Confused customers, tough competitors and communication mishaps won’t steal profits from your business when you fix things up with the 3 quick tips.

Jeannine Grich, CVA, MVA, EthicsChecked™, provides marketing and social media support, training and consulting to busy entrepreneurs. For information about finding a VA, download her FREE 10-Step Guide to Finding the Right VA, or to learn why Social Media should be an important part of your marketing plan with her FREE Report, Social Media Marketing Benefits, visit: https://accbizsvc.com, or contact her at [email protected]

Four SEO Tips for Blogs

Four SEO Tips for Your WordPress Blog

WordPress has become the most popular self-hosted blogging platform around, with over ten million different users utilizing the technology as their blog back-end of choice. Offering a huge range of features, customization options, widgets, plug-ins and controls, it is no wonder the platform has achieved such immense popularity amongst bloggers, web developers, and serious Internet professionals.

Marketers are especially fond of WordPress, for a number of reasons. It is easy to customize, giving marketers the power to create text-heavy sales pages, multimedia website intros, and call-to-action service pages on a single platform. Alongside the customization is another powerful marketing aspect, its incredible search engine optimization (SEO) benefits.

As blogging platforms go, WordPress is the reigning champion of SEO. From extended page URLs to pingback links and header tags, these four tips can help you turn your WordPress blog into a powerful SEO resource.

1) Enable comments.

Comments add great things to your website: fresh content, and outbound links. The first is a godsend in the eyes of search engines. While other marketers slave to produce fresh content for their websites manually, a relatively popular WordPress blog can live off the SEO-friendly content produced by the comments it receives.

2) Be visible.

Sometimes the most basic mistakes are also the most devastating. Almost all modern versions of WordPress include a range of visibility options. Users can select to make their blog visible to all, block it from any viewing, or simply block search engines from indexing the content.

Of course, no marketer would want to block their blog from search engines. However, some automated WordPress installers — particularly Fantastico and cPanel installers — block WordPress from search engines by default. To reverse this, simply use your WordPress dashboard to change privacy options back to “visible by anyone”.

3) Use the All-in-One WordPress SEO plug-in.

Simply put, no other WordPress plug-in is as valuable to online marketers as the All-in-One SEO Pack. Offering a buffet of SEO options for marketers, this plug-in allows its users to optimize their post URLs and categories for maximum SEO power, override default meta and title tags, and even highlight potential keywords to target. Simple, quick, and powerful — this plug-in is a must for internet marketers using WordPress.

4) Use keyword-heavy titles.

Keyword density was once thought of as the ultimate measure of a website’s search potential. Marketers would stuff their content with keywords, often until the point where it resembled machine-style nonsense.

Now, most marketers know that keyword density is not the ultimate measure of SEO value. Websites that rank typically do not use keyword-heavy content, but keyword-heavy post titles. Whenever you are writing a blog post, research keywords first to get an idea of what your market is searching for to help make the connection far easier for your reader.

Try these four search engine optimization tips on your WordPress blog and watch your analytics to see how well you’ve done.  What other challenges are you facing with your blog platform?  Leave your comments and/or questions below!

Jeannine Clontz, IVAA CVA, MVA, EthicsChecked™, provides marketing and social media support, training and consulting to busy entrepreneurs. For information about finding a VA, download her FREE 10-Step Guide to Finding the Right VA, or to learn why Social Media should be an important part of your marketing plan with her FREE Report, Social Media Marketing Benefits, visit: https://accbizsvc.com, or contact her at [email protected]