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Thursday 30 April 2015

Top 7 Time Saving Social Media Tools Every Business Must Have


When it comes to managing social media accounts with better efficiency, it is essential to understand the tools used for successful management. However, you should agree to the fact that proper management of anything requires to do tasks appropriately. But the most important question is how you can manage your social media marketing campaigns effectively as it requires alignment of people in the correct positions, budget, time, and goals for successful completion of these campaigns?
Now these days, presence of small or big businesses on social media is one of the most important factors of its success. But, you have to keep one thing in mind that social media marketing is like a dark tunnel where you have to keep on exploring to make your way towards the success but there are certain social media tools that are not only time saving but are very useful in maintaining your brand’s value clear and valuable among your target customers. Without the exploration techniques, you cannot succeed in this tough competitive marketplace, which required proper learning with good implementation skills.
Here I am quoting the top 7 social media tools that every social media marketer should be use for optimizing their time and enhancing the output of their businesses.
1 Buffer- The Social Media Dashboard for Perfect Management
This is one of the biggest time optimizing social media marketing tool that uses a social media dashboard for managing all types of social media profiles from a single place. Designed with a simple, intuitive, and clean interface, Buffer offers all great options that are required for managing different social media business pages with ease. It means you don’t have to spend time on different platforms separately, but you can do the social media marketing with better convenience through a single interface.
Benefits of Buffer:
  • You can manage everything by logging in for just once.
  • You can easily do multiple tasks from a single spot like scheduling, analyzing and sharing of posts on different social media platforms. It can support all popular social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google+.
Social Hunt- Pulls Out Your Favorite’s People Activity
If you want to save your time spent in managing different social media platforms on individual basis, then you have to pay lesser visits to these platforms that can only be possible if there is some way of getting updates of your followers on regular basis. One of most useful tool for helping you to pull out updates from your favorite accounts is Social Hunt. As it name suggests this tool digests your preferred followers’ activities by connecting with Twitter to provide you the details of the updates performed by them on daily basis.
Benefits of Social Hunt:
  • With this tool, you can never miss an update from your target audiences
  • You can easily monitor a group of profiles with this tool.
BuzzSumo Alerts: Notifies When Your Posts Go Viral
The Alerts tool of BuzzSumo is integrated with some impressive applications that are used for managing various social media accounts easily. It means you don’t have to visit each social site independently to check the notifications, but this new Alerts app of BuzzSumo will send you an email whenever your blog posts or timeline posts go viral or appeared as most-shared blog posts.
Benefits of BuzzSumo Alerts:
  • This application alerts you about your post’s popularity via email.
  • You can easily measure the quantity of your posts as it shows in different social media sites without even visiting those sites.
  • This app supports nearly all important social networks like Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+.
SumAll – Offers Social Media Reports
If you are searching for a social media management tool that can provide you with social media reports regarding all the activities performed on the platforms of your respective social media pages, then SumAll is a great tool. Once, you have integrated all the social media accounts of your brand with this tool, it will start procuring insights and data from these accounts and will display these data into in to its central dashboard where you can check these insights to note down what activities are currently performed on your timelines. Besides, you can also get daily or weekly email with all the important information.
Benefits of SumAll:
  • You are saved from additional searching activities but the reports will be sent to you directly to your email id.
  • You can select the statistics that are of your preferences.
  • This tool can be integrated with all famous social media platforms such as Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and Instagram.
Social Count- Track Down the Social Sharing of Your Posts
If you want to check the social sharing of your blog posts on different social networking sites by your website’s visitors or followers on these platforms, then you simply have to plug in the URL of your website with the Social Count tool and the results will be displayed on its interface. It also provides you with essential information like what are the top sharing content on your website by collecting data from Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
Benefits of Social Count:
  • With this tool, you simply have to enter a single URL and obtain all the results.
  • You can easily get to know which of your posts are most popularly shared on multiple channels without consistently monitoring the various social media platforms.
Social Oomph- Schedule Your Posts in Bulk
This social media management tool comes with some impressive automation features. Social Oomph helps in enhancing the productivity of your business through social media platforms. You can smoothly schedule the updates, search for target audiences to follow your brand, and monitor the activities on your social media profiles through this app. Besides, this tool is updated on regular basis with added functionalities.
Benefits of Social Oomph:
  • This tool helps in scheduling posts for Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
  • You can easily import the RSS feeds.
  • It comes with advanced search tools for targeting your followers on different social sites.
  • You can plan and publish the posts from unlimited blogs.
  • The advanced DM management feature of this tool let you filter out the spam.
Postplanner- Automates Sharing of Posts
A Facebook Management tool, the Postplanner assists in automating the sharing of content on Your Facebook page. It also allows you to determine the most popular blogs in your industry and you can add those blogs in queue for afterward delivery. This tool can easily handle all the content in the queue and posts them based on their pre-established times.
Benefits of Post Planner:
  • This tool helps in automated sharing of content on your Facebook page.
  • You can keep a check on the relevant blog posts for your brand and tool will automatically share those posts.
  • By managing the posts, it helps in optimizing the time required by your in selecting and sharing the posts individually on your Facebook page.
 If you don’t have enough time to spent time in social media marketing, these tools are effective enough to optimize the time required in promoting your social media marketing campaigns. However, if you are aware of any more social media tools that could be useful for the businesses, please do share with us in the comments box below.

Tuesday 28 April 2015

Make Money Blogging for Real: 3 Must-Know Factors


Most people have heard of the success of Perez Hilton’s blog and that he makes somewhere between $200,000 to $400,000 each month blogging about the latest celebrity gossip.
Success stories like Hilton’s might make the prospect of earning a fortune blogging seem real, but the truth is that it is hard work and not very many crack that six figure per month mark. Still, you can make a decent living from blogging, if you know how to go about it.
Every now and then, I’m pulled aside at a family gathering or am emailed by someone who wants to know if it’s possible to make money blogging.
Some of the common questions include:
  • How do you make money online?
  • How does AdSense work?
  • Should I attend this “make money online” course?
The answer is an absolute yes. You can make money blogging.
While not in the six figures, Matthew Woodward, for example, made approximately $20,000 in December of 2014. That’s a pretty nice paycheck for blogging.
Even a simple idea like Michael Malice’s Overheard in New York, where people submit posts of things they’ve heard somewhere in New York, earns about $9,000 a month from private advertising revenue, such as banner ads placed on the site.
Personally, I have been making money online since 2004. I quit my day job as a rubber dam engineer in 2006, and never looked back.
So, again, the answer is: Yes, you can start a blog easily and make some money.
There are a lot of different online business opportunities, too.
The only question left is: Do you have the writing quality and blogging know-how to get it done? It’s not something easy, but I promise you it’s worth it.

5 ways of making money from your blog without having your own product

When you think of making money from a blog, you might think about Google ads, but there are a few different ways you can make money from your blog:
  • AdSense – People make hundreds of thousands from Google AdSense ads. AdSense makes up about one-third of Google’s revenue. Pay is good, but you will need to play by Google’s rules. There are reports where Google AdSensers get bumped out of the program without warning.
  • Affiliate marketing – This is simply a way to sell related items without the cost of developing a unique product. This is mainly how I make my living online, so this is a viable way to earn money from your blog.
  • Banner ads – Another way to make money from your blog is to sell banner ads on third party sites such as BuySellAds.com. My experience is that this is fairly low pay, but better than nothing. All the different areas of your income can pool together to make a difference in your overall blog earnings.
  • Selling ads directly on your blog – You can earn good money by selling banner ads directly on your blog. However, your blog must first have a good amount of traffic to attract the higher paying advertisers. At first, it might be better to focus on building that traffic and then you can more easily attract the big players.
  • Product reviewer – This might not pay you monetarily, other than the amount you’re earning from blogging, but it can help you try out the newest products in your niche. Merchants send you their products for trial, and you write an honest review. The key to becoming a product reviewer is that you need to be an influencer in your niche. Personally I get free hosting accounts to test at WHSR so I can write a review on it.

3 key factors: What makes my blog work and why yours doesn’t?

1. You need to be in a profitable niche!

One of the first things you want to think about is your niche and whether it is profitable. Some experts advise being a big fish in a small pond, but I think the exact opposite. You should try the big pond because that is where the money is.
While your great Aunt Mary’s unique recycled dress quilts might be amazing, not that many people are as interested in reading about them as about quilting in general. Don’t limit your topic too much.
When I first got started, I created a site selling inflatable boats online. Can you imagine how many people might buy inflatable boats online? That’s right, not many.
What’s worse, this product is a seasonal product and only sells during the summer, so I was further limited in my sales. Having that said, I did make some money from the site – averaging not more than two sales per year. My inflatable boat business didn’t even take off enough to launch it onto the small pond, much less a big pond.
So, how do you find a profitable niche? Personally, I use SpyFu to check out what advertisers are spending on a niche that I think I might like to tackle. If advertisers, or merchants, are spending big money on that industry, then it means there is money to be made.
spyfu-cpc
There must be a reason why these people can afford $8 – $17/click on these keywords.
If you do not have a SpyFu membership, you can simply do a Google universe search (search at .com, add &pws=0 at the end of your search strings) on the niche you are interested in. Are there any advertisers in the search results? If so, then there may be money in this niche.
Use Google keyword planner to guesstimate the average price of a click in your industry – with that you can predict roughly how much you can earn per Google AdSense click. The higher the pay per click, the more potential there is to earn.
Login to CJ.com and search merchants – use Network Earnings (the green bar) as a potential earning indicator. See image below to understand how I interpret the numbers at CJ.
cj-adv
Network Earnings = How much the advertisers are paying compare to overall. Higher Network Earnings = more affiliates in the program;. 3 month EPC = Average earning per 100 Clicks = How profitable is this affiliate program in long term; 7 day EPC = Average earning per 100 clicks = Is this a seasonal product?

2. Are you getting sufficient targeted traffic?

Another thing you need to keep in mind is the targeted traffic possibilities for a given niche. To be able to make decent money, your blog must have sufficient targeted traffic possibilities. This is where your SEO and social media marketing (SMM) kick in.
When people search for info relevant to your niche topic, they become your target audience. The more people who search for that topic, the bigger your potential audience.
Also, if someone follows your competitors on Facebook, those people are your targeted audience. If you are thinking about jumping into a niche and you see that your closest competitor has a couple million page likes on Facebook, then that is a good sign that there is a big target audience.

More targeted traffics = more money

However, to win the attention of this target audience, you have to gain skills in both SEO and SMM. It is simple math. The more targeted traffic your blog gets, the more money you’ll make.
Here’s how it works: Let’s say you are selling a web hosting service as an affiliate and the average conversion rate is 3%. On average, every 100 visitors that you refer to the web hosting provider, you’ll manage to get three sales. If you manage to refer 200 visitors, then theoretically there will be six sales down the road.

We want all tails keywords

longshorttail Image credit: Bytelaunch
You’ll want to be sure that you figure for both primary and secondary (short-tail and long-tail) keywords to get the best idea of overall traffic possibilities.
Owen Powis, the CEO of Wordtracker, advises that:
“A clear, well-organized site structure helps Google find your content and makes the navigation of your site easier for your customers.”
Being aware of the different target keywords (both primary and secondary) and the advertising basics aimed at those keywords will make your blog more successful.

3. Are you building a List?

You’ve probably heard multiple gurus saying that building an email list is of ultimate importance when driving traffic to your site. If you want to make money blogging, you’ll want to capture your site visitor’s emails and send them emails that will drive them to visit your site over and over again.
Why is an email list so important? An email list is your greatest asset online because those signed up are trusted leads who have visited your blog. Your email subscribers already trust you and your authority on this topic.
If you were going to buy something online, you would probably look at products based on the recommendation of someone you trust. If you wanted to buy a guide to read, you would first look at guides written by or recommended by someone you trust.
If you were following Adam Connell (from Blogging Wizard) new venture WP Super Stars from the beginning, you should note of is that he started collecting email subscribers ahead of time. That’s right -You can start collecting subscribers before you even have a blog. Reach out to family, friends and acquaintances to get started.

Bottom Line – You can do this!

When it comes to making money from blogging, you have to be creative and keep an eye out for new opportunities and changes in how search engine algorithms and advertising work. However, with a bit of foresight sprinkled with hard work and consistency, you too can make a living from blogging.

Sunday 26 April 2015

How to Grow Your Facebook Audience: 8 Success Tips


Do you want a bigger Facebook audience?
Are you looking for ways to bring attention to your business on Facebook?
If you’re sharing good content but aren’t seeing Facebook audience growth, keep reading.
In this article I’ll share the eight ways to grow your Facebook audience, both organically and with advertising.

#1: Add a Facebook Like Button or Box to Your Website

People who visit your website are highly likely to become fans of your Facebook page. But how to move them from just visiting your website to liking your page on Facebook?
The easiest way to get a like from your website visitors is to include a Facebook Like button on your website. Using the button allows visitors to like your page without leaving your website. What could be easier than that?
To configure your Like button, simply follow the link above and enter the URL of your Facebook page. Then add the code to your website in the appropriate place.
facebook like button creation
Create a Like button for your Facebook page.
You can place the button wherever you like on your website—perhaps in the sidebar, header or footer.
You can also add the Facebook Like button to thank-you pages that appear after someone signs up for your mailing list, submits a lead form or makes a purchase. Since those visitors have already connected with your business in one manner, they will likely connect with you on Facebook as well.

#2: Include Your Facebook Page in Guest Author Bios

If you publish content on other websites, use your author bio to promote your Facebook page.
author bio like button
Some blogs offer a Facebook Like button for your page with your author bio.
When filling out your author bio or profile on a website where you contribute content, look for a place to add your Facebook page link. If there’s more than one field to enter a link to your Facebook page, enter it multiple times. Some sites use plugins that will only pull from one field or another.

#3: Connect Profiles With Pages

Here’s a simple thing you (and every company employee) can do to promote your Facebook page: Add your company as your current employer in your personal profile’s Work section. When you do, you’ll be linking directly to the company page so others can click over at will.
It’s easy to add the link. Go to your personal About page and edit your Work and Education informationClick Add a Workplace and select your Facebook page as the company.
editing profile work and education
Choose your Facebook page as the company.
After you enter details about your position, check the “I currently work here” box and choose the dates as applicableMake sure the visibility is set to Public and click Save Changes.
What this does is ensure that there’s a link to your Facebook page everywhere your profile appears on Facebook.
company showing in personal profile comment bio
Pages are linked to social profiles throughout Facebook.
An additional perk of connecting your page and profile is that when you leave a comment on a website that uses the Facebook comments platform, your page is linked within that comment as well. 
company showing in personal profile comment bio
Facebook pages are linked to people on the Facebook comments platform.
When you connect your page and profile and then participate in industry-related Facebook groups and comment on industry blogs that use the Facebook comment platform, you’ll build a lot of exposure for your Facebook page that could lead to more fans.

#4: Provide a Link in Signatures

Whenever you send emails to your customers, colleagues, vendors and other contacts, add your Facebook page link in your email signature along with your website link.
facebook page link in email signature
Use your email signature to promote your Facebook page.
WiseStamp lets you create a professional email signature, like the one shown above, that links to your website and social media accounts. Alternatively, you can just create a simple email signature within your email service that says “Like us on Facebook” and links to your page.
For those that regularly post on forums, include your Facebook page link on your profile and signature for each forum.
facebook page link in forum bio
Add a link to your Facebook page in forum and community profiles.
Anyone who finds your posts helpful will either click on the link from your signature or go to your profile to learn more about you and connect that way.

#5: Share on Other Social Media Platforms

It never hurts to casually ask your audiences on other social networks like Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn or Google+ to like your Facebook page.
facebook page link in tweets
Cross-promote your Facebook page to other social audiences.
On Twitter and LinkedIn, you can create promoted tweets or sponsored updates(respectively) to reach people beyond your followers and target the specific audiences you want to convert to Facebook fans.

#6: Promote to the Right Audiences

Instead of using the Promote Page option on your Facebook page itself, go to the Facebook Ads Manager and create an ad to promote your pageFacebook adsallow you to target your page promotion ads to the specific audiences you want as Facebook fans.
facebook page like ad creation
Use the Facebook ad dashboard to set up an ad to promote your page.
By using Facebook ads, you have the opportunity to tap into Facebook’s powerful audience targeting options. For example, you can target your promote page ad to CEOs who live in New York City who like pizza. Or target female dog owners in the United States. You can even target your ad to homeowners in Nebraska who also own a motorcycle. The options are endless.
facebook ad targeting
Use targeting options to get the fans who are most relevant to your business.
With custom audiences, you can also target page ads to your email list subscribers, leads, customer database and website visitors who don’t already like your page. As I mentioned previously, people who are already familiar with your company are apt to like your page, so it makes sense to seek them out.
You can also use the Ads Manager to promote updates from your page and links to your website to your target audiences. Those ads will include a Like button that people can click on to like your page.
facebook page like ad example
Use other ad types to encourage people to like your page.
Even if people familiar with your business aren’t interested in your post or website link, they’ll be reminded that they haven’t liked your page yet and may do so when they see the ad.

#7: Interact as Your Page

Most users peruse Facebook as themselves (using their personal profile), but if you’re looking to grow your page’s audience, consider using Facebook as your page.
Use the drop-down at the top right of your Facebook dashboard, and choose to use Facebook as your page instead of as your personal profile.
dropdown menu options
Use Facebook as your page to garner more attention.
Once you’ve chosen to use Facebook as your page, you can go to other related pages in your industry (but not competitors, preferably) and comment on those pages’ posts as your page. This way, you’re bringing attention to your page, not your personal profile.
Those who enjoy your comment can visit your page or like it directly by hovering over the page name by the comment.
page comment on facebook update
Comment as your page on other Facebook pages.
You can also use your Facebook page to comment on some event pages, as well as public posts that your page has been tagged in (even if the original post is from a personal profile).

#8: Create Facebook Groups

Facebook groups have several benefits. For example, most groups on Facebook get a higher organic reach than pages do. That’s partly because when people join a group, notifications are already set and they’ll know when new posts are added in the group (fans have to set up page notifications manually). Other perks include sharing files with your group members and tagging other members for conversational purposes.
In groups you’re interacting with others through your personal profile, but you can focus on your business, industry and related subjects.
You can take the approach of creating a group specifically about your business or you could create general groups based on a particular industry, interest or location.
For example, Post Planner has their own experts group where they discuss Facebook and the Post Planner app, as well as share content from the Post Planner blog.
facebook group example
Create groups focused on your business or related subjects.
If you’d like to be more general, you can do that. Let’s say you’re a search marketing agency. You could create a general group about search marketing and as members join and ask questions, employees of your company can jump in and answer them.
As group members recognize the value of the answers, they’ll hover over the names of the people to learn more about them and realize that they all work for the same search marketing agency. When they decide they want to hire a search marketing agency for their business, guess who will be top of mind?
Start with great content.
If you haven’t posted to your Facebook page in a while, or you only have posts that are promoting your products, update your Facebook content before trying to grow your audience.
Why? Because if someone comes to your Facebook page and sees that it’s been months since you last posted, or that every post is a push to buy something, then they will leave without liking your page.
If you’re not sure what types of updates get the most response in your niche, try out tools like Rival IQ and analyze other businesses in your industry to see their top content on Facebook based on engagement.
If your page has a good mixture of content and isn’t overly promotional, visitors are more likely to convert to fans.
Some Final Thoughts
Posting and promoting engaging content is key to growing your Facebook audience.Share interesting news about your industry, start discussions on topics pertaining to your niche, tell special stories about your business and pose questions to get to know your audience.
But don’t just rely on your page updates for reach and leads—pull out all the stops and promote everywhere. Including a link to your Facebook presence in everything from personal profiles to signatures to ads impacts your growth.
What do you think? How do you grow your Facebook audience? What other tips do you have? Please share in the comments below!