by tradesmeninsights | Jul 2, 2012 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing, Traditional Marketing
For those of us who write blogs, we do it with the sole purpose of sharing insights and tips that hopefully make your job easier. Our biggest challenge once the killer content is written is to make sure as many eyes as possible see it. Professional tradesmen are always on the go, and I want to make sure they get what they want in short concise bits of information.
It’s true optimization is usually associated with search, but you can insure that your content performs well on social media platforms. I recently read a post by Heidi Cohen, 11 Tactics to Optimize Your Blog that I found very interesting and wanted to share some of the points she makes:
- Focus on just a few keyword phrases – prioritize them by the words you want to cover.
- Create great headlines – you need to catch their attention so they stop and smell the roses.
- Use good photos/graphics – It’s true a picture is worth a thousand words and it attracts readers.
- Make your posts easy to read – use headings and bullet points. It also helps search engines.
- Make content spreadable – RSS feeds, emails or social media.
Those are some thoughts. Care to add to the list?
by tradesmeninsights | Dec 6, 2011 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing
Twitter isn’t about you, it’s about sharing relevant information with those that follow you.
The more relevant the content, the better chance of you building your base of loyal followers. I use Twitter strictly for business, so everything I put out has something to do with issues that I think affect my followers. In turn, my hope is that they will agree that the info is useful and RT to their followers. Twitter, along with LinkedIn, are my two biggest sources of page views to my blog.
So if you use it for business, then you should have some ground rules to help you make the most out of Twitter. I recently read a post by Heidi Cohen that outlines 11 Tips to Get Your Best Results with Twitter. Among them, here are my favorites:
- Do your research – see what people are saying about you and your brands.
- Thanking people – for those that follow and especially for those who retweet your messages, it’s a great way to build loyalty.
- Be that “go to” person – with the content you supply, you should be considered a thought leader and thus an “expert” in your field.
- Integrate Twitter with your content marketing strategy – not only use Twitter to distribute your content, use Twitter slurp to augment it on your website and blog.
What are you doing to make sure you’re getting the most out of Twitter?
I recently did a post on how to How Do You Thank Someone For a Retweet and it was one of my most popular posts this year. This post also may be of interest to you.
by tradesmeninsights | Jul 26, 2011 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing
I’m amazed by people who say social media is free! Obviously they haven’t dove into it or they don’t value their time or the time that others invest. While outside costs are minimal usually compared to traditional marketing campaigns, what it lacks in outside costs, it makes up with internal costs.
I recently read a post by Heidi Cohen, How to Calculate Social Media Costs, that I thought was worth sharing. Highlights include:
- People – The most obvious and often the most overlooked because they are already in the budget. Your staff monitors, creates, manages and responds to social media.
- Content – This drives everything in social and you need to constantly create new stuff. Who’s doing it and if you’re not doing it in your own department and get sales or engineering involved, how do you calculate their time?
- Support media – What are you doing to promote and drive traffic? E-blast, landing pages, creative and paid advertising.
- Brand monitoring – Software and tracking fees to keep up to speed on what’s being said about you and your competitors.
- Technology – You need support which normally comes from your IT department or creative to support your website, blog and server capacity issues.
What are some other costs that you’ve identified?
