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Which Social Media Sites Should You Be Marketing On?

Stephanie Foster — Mon, 11 Jun 2018 12:01:06 +0000

There are a lot of social media websites out there. You could spend hours each day on marketing on them, but which social media sites will give you the best results?

That depends on you and your target market.

Social media websites will rarely do you any good at all if you don’t put some effort into it. If you just sign up and drop your link in, you probably aren’t going to see much benefit from any of them. Occasionally, a business will have some success on a social media site they weren’t even trying for because visitors keep sharing them, but that’s an exception, not the rule.

Which Social Media Sites Have The Right Demographics?

Every social media site attracts a somewhat different demographic, and this is what you need to look at as you figure out which social media sites to use. I’ve pulled some demographic information from Pew Research Center to get you started, but you may decide to look deeper.

To make the most of this information, of course, you need to know what your target market is. How old are they? What gender? What are their interests?

YouTube

YouTube is huge. You may think of it as a video sharing site, but it has its social media side too. 73% of American adults use YouTube. 94% of 18- to 24-year-olds use it, making it a great option if you’re seeking a younger audience.

In other words, video is huge. If you can add video to your marketing mix, you have the chance to reach a lot of people.

Facebook

Facebook is the other big one. 68% of American adults use Facebook. It’s widely used by most demographics, although people are frustrated with Facebook’s privacy issues.

Snapchat

If you’re looking at a younger audience, 78% of 18- to 24-year-olds use Snapchat. That’s a lot. Snapchat offers ways for businesses to advertise on their platform. Snapchat can be extremely effective for advertisers, offering twice the visual attention of Facebook, beating out Instagram and YouTube as well.

You can use Snapchat to build your business free as well, of course. You have to understand the limitations of the platform and tell interesting stories to attract followers.

Twitter

Twitter attracts only 24% of American adults but jumps up to 45% of 18- to 24-year-olds. They increased the maximum tweet length to 280 characters a while ago, which is a huge help to marketers.

Many bloggers love Pinterest. The visual style is highly appealing, and for the right business, the demographics are great. It only gets 29% of American adults overall, but 41% of women. Pinterest is particularly popular for crafting and recipe websites, but many other niches do well there.

LinkedIn is a great choice if you’re targeting college graduates in a professional capacity. 50% of Americans with a college degree use LinkedIn, but only 9% with a high school diploma or less. LinkedIn is very much focused on professional networking, so it’s probably not a good choice if your business doesn’t relate to that. B2B can do well on LinkedIn.

Instagram

Instagram presents special challenges to marketers, as you cannot put live links in your updates. You can have one in your profile, but that’s it. Still, Instagram attracts 35% of American adults and 71% of 18- to 24-year-olds. Some marketers do very well with Instagram.

You can view more details of the demographics from the Pew report through this link.

Where’s Your Target Market?

Demographic information is only helpful if you know enough about your target demographics. They aren’t always what you think they are.

If you know your competition, you can take a bit of a shortcut and see which social media sites they’re having success with. Take a look at their social media buttons. Many sites show how many shares they’ve received on individual posts and pages as a form of social proof. This can help you decide where you want to focus your efforts as well.

Visit their social media pages as well, especially for social media sites such as Instagram, where you can’t otherwise see how well they’re doing.

Using this data from your competition is not the only thing you should do, of course. It’s just a starting place. You can experiment with other social media. You might find a place to focus where your competition is not.

Seek out references to your best keywords on the different social media sites. Don’t do this by just typing your keywords into a search box. Learn how to use hashtags to search them and see how often your keywords are used that way. Take a look at the content you find this way and the accounts it’s attached to. This can give you both inspiration and people to follow on those sites.

How Do You Use Social Media?

How you use a particular social media site depends on which one you’re using. What works well for one may not be the best way to build a network on another.

How often you should post on which social media sites varies tremendously. Some do poorly if you post more than once or twice a day, while others need frequent posts if you’re to do well at all. I’ve pulled data from this Coschedule post on how often to share on social media. I also looked at when social media users are most active through SproutSocial. The best times may vary somewhat by niche as well as by social media site. Don’t forget to consider the time zones of your target market when posting.

On any social media site, being overly promotional is not a good idea. People aren’t there to have things sold to them. They’re networking because they enjoy it, to build their own business, to get good information, that kind of thing. If you do nothing but say “buy, buy, buy,” they’ll unfriend you as fast as they can.

Instead, give quality information to bring people to you. If you sound like an expert and they need what you have to offer, they’ll decide to do business with you.

One thing that is valued by most social media sites is consistency. Don’t keep changing your post frequency. Your fans and followers will come to expect a certain number of posts per day from you, even if it’s more than the usual for that platform.

Most social media platforms love hashtags. They help people find your content. Even Pinterest likes hashtags now.

While you can learn some things just by reading online about the social networks you prefer, you will probably get faster results if you take an in-depth course. Sign up for one only if you have the time to put what you learn into practice. There is absolutely no point in paying for something and then never using it. A good course will help you avoid making too many mistakes with your social media.

These are, of course, affiliate links to the courses, but they are ones I consider to be good choices and have good reviews.

YouTube

The key to YouTube starts with making great videos, but that’s not where it ends. Your videos must be discovered by viewers, or it all means nothing. You need to learn how the YouTube search algorithm works and which techniques will bring your videos to the first page of YouTube so that they’re seen by potential viewers.

Facebook

You have so many options to market your business on Facebook. Starting a Facebook Page for your business is a must, but many businesses find starting a Facebook Group is even more powerful.

Most people suggest posting on your Facebook business page no more than twice a day, with once a day being ideal. This is especially true for promotional posts. If you’re being social and fun, you can probably get away with more, but be extremely careful that you do not post excessively or your reach will decrease and your fans will view your posts as spammy.

Businesses on Facebook often complain about how algorithm changes make it hard to reach their fans without paying for ads. It’s a legitimate problem. Facebook changes their algorithm often, and that can be a real headache. Paying for ads can be well worth it, however, once you know what you’re doing.

In general, you want to post on Facebook on weekdays from about 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., with Wednesdays and Thursdays performing best. Saturdays, evenings and early mornings have the least engagement.

Course recommended: Facebook Ads & Facebook Marketing MASTERY

Snapchat

I have not used Snapchat myself, and know very little about it. Hubspot recommends posting a Story only once or twice per week on Snapchat. Then spread your Snaps out through the day. You should also consider that not everyone has the sound turned on when they use Snapchat, so including text in your Stories is very helpful.

Course recommended: The Complete Snapchat Marketing Course

Twitter

Twitter is one of those places you can post a lot. 15 times a day is recommended, with several retweets of someone else’s content. Some recommend up to 50 or more tweets a day. Tweets disappear quickly as new tweets appear, giving each tweet a short lifespan if no one retweets it.

Don’t batch all your tweets into a short time frame, of course. Spread them out. Twitter does best on weekdays, with Fridays being the best around 9-10 a.m. Mornings are better than the afternoon in general, and weekends don’t do as well, with some exceptions.

Twitter has recently become more picky about the reuse of content. It used to be that you could use a scheduler to post the same tweet over and over again for as long as you liked. These days, Twitter views that as spam.

They prefer that you either rewrite the tweet in a new way each time you share a link to the same site or retweet your original tweet. Twitter is looking for more original content. This makes using schedulers such as HootSuite more difficult but not impossible. You just have to put a little more time into your individual tweets.

Pinterest marketing can be a lot of fun, so long as you don’t fall for the time sink. Give it half a chance and you’ll probably find an interesting recipe or something to catch your eye.

There are a few key things you must do on Pinterest. The first is to create some keyword rich boards for the content you’ll pin from your own site. Make sure you add them to an appropriate category and give them a good description. You will want to follow relevant pinners and build up your own following.

Make sure your create your account as a business account to make the most of Pinterest. This will give you access to analytics and the ability to make your pins into rich pins.

Joining group boards on Pinterest is an excellent way to get your pins out to a wider audience, but be picky. Niche boards are usually far more powerful than “pin anything” boards, even if the “pin anything” board has a larger following. Pinterest prefers to see your pins categorized properly.

Pin a lot. Recommendations run from about 15-30 a day according to the Coschedule post, but I’ve seen many pinners swear by a higher number.

Recently, Pinterest has stated a preference for a variety of descriptions on pins. This makes scheduling more difficult, as tools such as Tailwind allow you to quickly schedule a bunch of identical pins. You have to do extra work to vary things. Make sure you create multiple pinnable images for each post. You never know which will take off best until you test them. Vertical images with a 2:3 ratio do best.

Pinterest currently gives priority to the first five pins you do each day, starting at midnight UTC. Pinterest activity peaks at about 9 p.m.

If you want to know when your best time to pin is, use Tailwind. Tailwind’s SmartSchedule will post pins at the time that is best for your industry, and by when it sees that you get the most engagement.

LinkedIn is another of those sites that does not tolerate a lot of posting from businesses. Posting once a day is plenty.

If you want to do more, join LinkedIn groups and interact with people there. Be careful how promotional you get. You need to be seen as a quality resource. Be the trusted professional you want to be seen as, not the person who’s only interested in the next sale.

LinkedIn engagement is better Tuesday-Thursday, with Wednesdays from 3-5 p.m. being the best.

Instagram

Even with its disadvantages, I know a lot of marketers love what they can do with Instagram. You should only post once or twice a day on Instagram, although a few people report doing well with more, even 10 times a day. Be careful about how often you post, and see what works for your audience.

Being heavily promotional is not likely to work on Instagram. As always, provide value. You can use Instagram to give a little behind the scenes look at your business as well as to promote.

Weekdays do better than weekends on Instagram, and you should post first thing in the morning. Later posts can do well going into the afternoon.

How Many to Use?

You can’t do a good job of using all social media websites, not even if you only stick to the big ones. There’s too much to do.

You’ll be better off if you can pick a couple to focus on. Get good at marketing on them.

Dividing your efforts dilutes them. There’s a balance between being available on a variety of networks and being unable to keep up.

As with any other sort of marketing you haven’t tried before, start by using just one social media site. Figure out what you’re doing. Get some fans, friends, followers, whatever they’re called. Get comfortable.

Even though each site takes a slightly different approach, you can take some of what you learn from each site and apply it to the next one while continuing with the sites you’re already on. You’re learning how to bring in business with a possibly more personal touch than other forms of marketing may have been for you.

Social media marketing isn’t something that comes naturally for everyone, but it’s a big help for bringing in traffic and business if you use it right. Give yourself some time and really pay attention to the learning process. You might find it a lot of fun as well as profitable.

Should You Automate?

Within reason, automation of your social media efforts is a great idea. It’s too hard to keep up otherwise.

I use HootSuite to automate many of my posts. It works with Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest. Its Pinterest tools are not as powerful as what Tailwind has to offer, so you may want a subscription to that as well.

What you cannot automate is the social side of social media. You need to interact with people appropriately, retweeting interesting tweets, for example, or replying to comments. Spending a few minutes on social media is a great way to handle those parts of your day when you know you have limited time to get something done.

You also need to be aware of current events when you automate. If a big event happens, make sure you don’t have any inappropriate posts going out at that time. A reference that is perfectly innocent at other times may be taken as offensive if something has gone wrong.

Do not try to automate your following of other users. Take some time to find them.

I also do not recommend using software to follow and then unfollow anyone who doesn’t follow you back. I know many bloggers worry about their following/followers ratio, but it’s really not that big of a deal in most ways. Follow people because you want to see what they post. Many social media sites now see a high rate of following and quick unfollowing as a sign of spam.

How Long Does It Take To Know Which Social Media Sites Work?

We all want fast results with social media. That would be nice, wouldn’t it? But that’s often not the way things go.

Social media results take time, just like anything else. Don’t compare yourself to the people who have tens of thousands of followers. Most of those have been at it for years.

Work on improving what you’re doing instead. You can get ideas for what works by watching the people who are successful at social media, but in the end, it’s up to you to stand out. If you’re nothing but a copycat, you’ll never stand out.

The post Which Social Media Sites Should You Be Marketing On? appeared first on Home with the Kids Blog.

How To Use Pinterest To Market Your Blog Or Business

Stephanie Foster — Wed, 18 Apr 2018 12:18:09 +0000

How hard have you tried to use Pinterest to drive traffic to your blog or business? It seems like a lot of people are having amazing success with it, but maybe it isn’t going that well for you. It’s incredibly frustrating. You’d love to use Pinterest to market your blog or business. What does it take?

The first thing I will warn you against is an excessive focus on going viral. If your content is good, and your pins are attractive, viral pins will come in their own time, so long as you’re also working on your Pinterest marketing.

Besides, the traffic from viral pins can peak suddenly, then disappear. You want consistency. You want to build regular traffic. Viral pins can help with that, but they aren’t everything.

Start With The Basics

Whether you’re just starting out with Pinterest or have been pinning for some time, there are some basic things you need to take care of before you do anything else.

If you haven’t created your Pinterest business account, do so now. This will give you access to analytics, which is a huge help in discovering how your pins are doing. It’s free. You can convert your personal account or start a new one to use entirely for business purposes.

Make sure you verify your website with Pinterest. Pinterest will give you a code for this.

A business account can also pay for sponsored pins, which can be a help in bringing attention to your pins. You don’t have to do this, but it’s worth considering.

Next, apply for rich pins. You will need some code on your site. If you’re using WordPress and have the Yoast SEO plugin, this is super easy. If you’re using WordPress and don’t use Yoast, I strongly recommend adding it. It’s helpful in many ways.

In the Yoast SEO section of your WordPress admin, you will see a social section. Select the Facebook tab and enable the Open Graph metadata setting. This will give Pinterest the information it needs as well.

Once this is done, you need to validate one of your URLs with Pinterest. Choose any blog post and put it into Pinterest’s Rich Pins Validator. If everything comes up fine, you can tell Pinterest that you used HTML tags, then click “Apply Now.” If everything has gone right, your pins will now show up as Rich Pins.

Rich pins show more information from your site. They can pull recipe information if you share recipes, or article titles and a bit of text from articles.

Figure Out Your Best Pinterest Keywords

In many ways, Pinterest is more a search engine than a social website. This makes the right keywords in your profile, boards, and pins vital to your success. Take some time early on to figure out your basic Pinterest keywords.

Start out with your best keyword for your business. Put it into the search box on Pinterest and see what comes up. It should look something like this:

See those colored boxes with words in them? Those are words other Pinterest users include in their searches for that term. You want to use these words in your profile, board descriptions, and pins whenever they’re relevant.

Do this often. You may find it worthwhile to check Pinterest keywords for most of your posts, especially when coming up with a description as you pin them.

Make The Most Of Your Profile

How does your Pinterest profile look? Is it clear to people who visit it what your business has to offer?

Take advantage of the space Pinterest offers to create an appealing description of what followers can expect from your Pinterest profile. If you do this well, it may also attract people to visit your website.

Use some of the keywords you discovered in the section above for your profile, but keep it interesting as well.

Pinterest now has a feature where an image of your pins goes diagonally across your profile page. Take advantage of this.

If you don’t have a board that has just pins from your website, create one now. You’re going to use this board to display your pins on your profile.

Click the little edit button on the image of your pins that go across the top of your profile. This will allow you to select which board is used for this image. Select the one that has only your pins. Save your changes.

That’s all it takes. Now you don’t have to worry about which pins show up there. You’ve chosen to make it all yours.

Optimize Your Pinterest Boards

It may not be immediately obvious when you create a board that you can give it a category and description. You can, and it’s helpful to do so. This will give visitors to that board an idea as to what you pin there.

Go to your board and click the edit board button. This will give you a little popup to change the settings.

You can give the board a description. Make sure that you use some of the keywords you researched. This may help it appear in board searches.

You can also give it a category and a board cover. The board cover is a pin that will show as a larger image on the page that shows all of your boards.

If you want a consistent look to your profile page, you need to create board covers for all of your boards. Many bloggers like to create board covers that are consistent with their branding elsewhere. This is not something I have done so far personally, but many recommend it.

You can upload a custom board cover as a pin and link it to a relevant section of your website. You can create one that is at least 600×600 pixels. Board covers are square, but you can use a rectangular image if you want. Just consider which section will show up.

The idea behind branded board covers is that it gives your profile a more cohesive feel.

Finally, decide what you’re going to do with boards that aren’t relevant to your brand. You can delete them or make them into secret boards if you like. If not, at least make sure that they are beneath your business boards. You can drag and drop your boards on your profile to arrange them the way you would like them. Think about what will work best for your visitors.

Optimize Your Pins

Applying for Rich Pins is only the first step to optimizing your pins. There are a few other things you should do.

Start out by knowing the currently preferred image sizes. These change occasionally. As of this writing, Pinterest recommends pin images be no more than 600 pixels wide and will cut off pins longer than 2.1 times the width, which is to say longer than 1260 pixels long. Their preferred size is 600×900, but there are plenty of times when a longer image makes sense.

Longer pins will still show the full length when clicked. Many bloggers find that they perform better than other pins.

Create great descriptions for your pins. These will help them be found in searches. Remember to research your Pinterest keywords when creating your descriptions, and keep them accurate to the post they’re linked to. Don’t mislead your visitors – people hate that.

You can even have your preferred description show up when visitors to your site pin that image. In your blog post, use the Text editor tab rather than the Visual tab.

In this tab, the code for your image will be something along the lines of:

You want to add a Pinterest description. This is done by adding data-pin-description=”your description here” so that it looks like

Once you’ve done this, the description you put in the data-pin-description section will show up if someone clicks the image to pin it.

This won’t guarantee that your description will be used by everyone, as visitors can change the text as they like, but many will leave it as is.

You can go further by using data-pin-url=”URL you want the pin to lead to. Usually the URL of your post” data-pin-media=”URL of a different image you want pinned rather than the visible one. Very useful if you want smaller images in your post” and data-pin-id=”ID number of the post on Pinterest after you have pinned it.” These give you still more control over your pins. You can also control which images in your posts can be pinned to Pinterest.

Should You Brand Your Pins?

Many people strongly recommend keeping your images similar, so that they are all clearly a part of your brand. This makes it easier for people to recognize one of your pins when they come across them.

This can be as simple as using the same colors or fonts on all of your pins. Some people use very similar images on all of their pins as well.

The problem is that this gets very repetitive. Your pins are easily identified, but are they easy to tell apart?

This is where it becomes a good idea to make multiple pins for each post. You can have your strongly branded pins and have your pins that stand out.

It’s also easier to test pin styles when you have multiple pins for each post. You can compare and see which performs the best. If you find a new style performs better, you might even decide to change your branding to be closer to that style.

Pin And Pin And Pin Some More

If you aren’t pinning a lot, and pinning regularly, your pins aren’t likely to be discovered.

This also means you should pin content from other sites. You will see all kinds of advice – people telling you that the best results come from pinning 80% your own content and 20% of others, 50/50 yours vs others, or even 20% yours and 80% others. You’ll also hear that you should post 20 pins a day, 30-50 a day, or even over 100 pins a day. The advice varies widely.

I’ve never stressed about numbers. I pin a lot of my own, but also share pins from the various group boards I belong to. Most group boards require that you repin at least one other pin when you pin something of yours to the board. That ensures that I have a mix.

Group boards are a huge help in getting your pins out there. Request to join as many relevant ones as you can find, so long as they have a good number of followers. You won’t get much exposure if the board only has 100 followers, after all.

As much as possible, pin to relevant boards. Your pins will rank better if they are regularly pinned to relevant boards, rather than to general boards.

You will find a number of group boards that accept all niches. Some of these have excellent followings. You may find it worthwhile to try a few general boards, but don’t pin to many of them. Keep that focus so that Pinterest knows what your pins are about.

Manual Pins Or Scheduled Pins?

I’ve seen a lot of debate over whether manual pinning or scheduled pinning works better. There are some great tools out there. Tailwind is the most popular, I think, followed by Board Booster. Their features are slightly different, but each one allows you to schedule your pins, which can be a huge time saver.

Many people say they have seen huge traffic boosts from using these tools. At the very least, they make it much easier to be consistent with your pinning.

However, some people think you get more traffic if you pin manually. This is the method I currently use. It is often difficult to be consistent, but I keep working at it.

I track my pins using a spreadsheet. My boards are grouped by category, one sheet per category of board. This allows me to date when I do each pin. I mark when I’m using more than one image per blog post, as I don’t want to pin the same post on a board too close together, even if the images are different.

I indicate group boards by putting their names in bold. This way I know which require repinning, and how many. Most only require a single repin, but some expect two or three for each pin placed on their boards. I always do at least a single repin – the more active the board is, the more attention pins on it will get.

Take a Pinterest Marketing Course

You may want to learn a lot more about pinning than I’ve shared here. A Pinterest marketing course can help you learn more than the basics. They’ll all start with the basics, to make sure that you aren’t missing obvious things, but go into more advanced techniques from there.

I recommend this Pinterest marketing course on Udemy. It’s well rated and has been updated recently. Read the reviews to see if it’s the course for you. You will learn a lot more about how to use Pinterest to market your blog if you take a good course.

The post How To Use Pinterest To Market Your Blog Or Business appeared first on Home with the Kids Blog.

16 Vital Tips to Get Your Social Media Marketing on Track

Stephanie Foster — Wed, 05 Oct 2016 14:39:08 +0000

A solid social media presence is a big help to an online home business. It helps you connect with your audience and drives traffic to your website. While mastering social media takes a lot of work, there are some basics that will help you get started.

1. Get Started

This is the big one if you haven’t done so already. Pick at least one social media site you think will go well with your target audience, and make an account for your business. Start sharing. Follow others. If you don’t start, you’ll never figure out how it works.

2. Keep Trying

Most people quickly become frustrated with social media because it takes so long to get results. Viral doesn’t come easy. Neither do followers. You’ll see others who make it look easy and wonder why it isn’t so simple for you. Don’t focus on them, other than to see if you can get ideas to build off of.

3. Interact

The key word in social media is “social.” If you want things to go well, be social. Ask questions. Reply to people. Be helpful.

4. Follow Others

With many forms of social media, one of the best ways to build your following is to follow others. Find the big names in your industry and follow them. Find interesting people and follow them. Find people who might be interested in your business and follow them. Many will follow you in return – if not, you may still have a chance to interact with them by replying to things they’ve posted.

5. Self Promote

Promote your business in your social media accounts. That’s why you’re there, isn’t it? So long as you don’t overdo it, people won’t be offended.

I use Revive Old Post to keep a stream of my old posts going on Facebook and Twitter. You can also choose to share old posts on LinkedIn, Xing or Tumblr. The pro version gives a lot more control for scheduling purposes and other features. You can exclude categories, tags and even individual posts, which is handy when some things you post are only relevant to when you posted them, and not later.

6. Promote Useful Information From Others

Do not only post about your stuff. Share things that might interest your followers from other sources. This will make your account far more interesting to people than if you just post about your business.

7. Pick Your Social Media Channels

You do not have to use Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, Vine, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, Tumblr,… you get the idea. Use the ones that make sense for your business. Trying to use everything will only make it harder to do well at any of them.

8. Be Personal

Another part of being social is being a real person. You don’t have to post every bad moment you have, pictures of meals or anything like that. Be you. An appropriately professional you, but still you. You can joke around if that’s a part of who you are in your professional online presence; just keep in mind who you want people to see as the person behind your business.

9. Be Open to Dialogue

You may have to deal with criticism or questions at times on social media. Hopefully most of it will be easily dealt with, but sometimes you may have to deal with problems you wish could have been kept off social media. Whatever it is you have to discuss on social media, do your best to keep it professional and respectful.

10. Give It Time

It takes time for most people to build a social media following. The people who get a huge following quickly most often have fans from somewhere else or have something go viral. The rest of us have to build a following over time by posting quality information on our social media accounts and hoping for shares.

11. Don’t Stress About Going Viral

Having a post go viral is a goal for many businesses. It can drive a lot of traffic. It’s a nice goal.

It’s not something you should stress over, however. It is very hard to predict what will go viral. Create interesting content for your audience and keep your real goals in mind. It’s not traffic. Sales, subscribers and anything to do with income are much better goals than mere traffic. Viral posts aren’t necessarily good at that part.

12. Don’t Get Addicted

Social media can be a lot of fun. That means many people use it too heavily, to the detriment of their business. Social media should be a tool for your business, not a focus. If it’s taking up too much of your work day, you need to reassess how you’re using social media.

13. Pick Your Controversies

It can be good to get involved in controversies. People love a good argument. But when you’re representing your business, pick which controversies you get involved in. There’s no point in offending potential customers unnecessarily.

14. Use Scheduling Tools

There are a lot of tools available to make scheduling your social media posts easier. I use Hootsuite. You could also consider Buffer, Everypost, SocialOomph, Sprout Social or other tools. New ones come out regularly.

Pick the tool based on the social networks you use and the features the tool has. With most you’ll need a paid account, but the time you save will be worth the money. The convenience is well worth the money, and most give you a free trial, so you can test it out before spending anything.

Don’t overdo the scheduling thing. You still need to be personal, and sometimes you will need to post in real time. Sometimes you will want to rethink things you had previously scheduled due to events in the real world.

15. Link to Your Social Media Accounts on Your Website

You want people to find your social media accounts and follow them. Make it easy by prominently linking to them on your website.

People who visit your website and then follow you on social media are more likely to come back. Your presence and your posts on social media will remind them about your website and what you offer.

On this site, I have links to my social media accounts on the right sidebar. They’re highly visible, yet not in the way.

16. Make It Easy for People to Share Your Content

Have links near your content that simplify social sharing of your content. Visitors may do some of you marketing work for you by sharing content they found interesting. There are plenty of WordPress plugins, such as Shareaholic, which will do this for you automatically. I have mine at the bottom of my posts, but others prefer the top or side of their content.

The post 16 Vital Tips to Get Your Social Media Marketing on Track appeared first on Home with the Kids Blog.

What Changes Am I Making for the New Year?

Stephanie Foster — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 15:43:42 +0000

I’m not really a New Year’s Resolution kind of person, but I do think over what I’m doing at this time of year, as well as at other times. Mostly it’s that December is a slow month for this site usually, as people are doing more shopping and less time looking for ways to earn money from home and so I spend more time reviewing things. By January I have a pretty good idea of changes I’d like to make.

Mostly, I had some notions already. I’m making a real effort to put more images into posts, so things are more Pinterest-friendly. I have a post in mind about how to do that as well.

I’m also working on posting more frequently and remembering to use social bookmarks more, here and elsewhere.

In other words, a lot of time consuming stuff, but very worthwhile. Takes a lot of planning to get enough done each day with three kids in the house – thank goodness they’re pretty good at playing together without me! That’s the secret, for those who keep asking me how I find the time to work with kids in the house. Once they can play without your immediate supervision, your available work at home time can go way, way up. Barring massive arguments, injuries, etc.

I’m also considering a weekend discussion post, which would be intended to discuss topics on parenting, working at home, and so forth. I need to generate some ideas for that one yet, so that I have a variety ready to go, as there won’t always be hot topics just begging for discussion in any particular week.

As with the past few years, I’m trying to talk myself into doing more with podcasting and/or video marketing. That’s a tough one, as I’m really camera shy, awkward about anything remotely resembling public speaking (and podcasting is close enough to that for me!), and kids playing together still mean too much background noise much of the time. It’s one of those things I really think I ought to try out, but can always come up with excuses not to. One of these days, I’ll break through that.

And as always, I look at how my marketing is going. It’s always tough figuring out what I should be focusing on. Social media is a help, but it’s not the only thing. I’m figuring that I should work more on getting some good guest posts out there – it’s just a matter of deciding where, and what sort of post would do best.

That’s how it is when you run a business, of course. There are always a million and one things you should be doing. The trick is picking what you can get done, what you should get done, and knowing when to leave the rest alone.

The post What Changes Am I Making for the New Year? appeared first on Home with the Kids Blog.

Does Promoting Products Make You Feel Like a Scammer?

Stephanie Foster — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 15:29:27 +0000

For many website owners who provide information more than they promote products, it can feel awkward to keep mentioning products your website visitors can buy. Some even feel as though they’re being somehow dishonest by mentioning products available for purchase. Why is it some website owners feel as though they’re scammers when they recommend products that they’ll get a commission for selling?

You’re Unsure of Yourself

One reason why people feel dishonest when recommending a product is a lack of confidence in themselves. Perhaps you feel that in some way you lack the authority to suggest a product, even if you’ve found it useful personally.

There can also be a guilt for recommending a product for sale when you offer a lot for free. It’s hard to go from offering free information to saying “buy this.”

The key is to remember that when you offer quality for free, people trust you. If you think something is worth paying for, say so. Many of your readers will appreciate it.

You Aren’t Reviewing Products Carefully Before Recommending Them

If you promote just about any product you hear about without really reviewing it, it’s natural to feel awkward about it. Some products are better than others, and you can’t know which ones are good if you haven’t checked them out thoroughly.

This isn’t just an online marketing product thing, although it’s a huge issue for internet marketers. If you subscribe to a lot of internet marketing newsletters, you’ve probably encountered many list owners who promote just about any product that comes out, just using the sales text recommended by the product creator, and little apparent care for quality.

It can happen in other niches too. You can look really bad if you promote any product, whether digital or physical, that turns out to be poor quality. While it’s hard to tell if a new product is going to be as good as the company says it is, a careful look and some consideration before you promote anything.

You don’t have to personally review every product you mention on your site, but do be careful about how you do actual reviews and keep within FTC guidelines.

Someone Has Given You a Hard Time About Promoting Products

I’ve gotten this one myself. Back in the fairly early days of my newsletter for this site, I promoted a product in it. I got a furious email back from one subscriber, demanding to know if I was turning into that kind of newsletter that did nothing but promote products all the time, because if so, she was unsubscribing immediately.

Being rather new to it all, I was apologetic to her, and reassured her that it would be an occasional thing, not a regular thing. I was frankly taken aback by how very offended she was that I dared promote something, anything to my list, and I spent a lot of time wondering if I had gone about it the wrong way.

These days, I wouldn’t be so apologetic. I’d still be polite, but I wouldn’t consider it something I needed to apologize for. It’s my list, I don’t overdo the promotions or promote just any product, and if I want to mention something I find worthwhile, it’s my subscribers’ choice whether they stick with me or unsubscribe, and whether they buy or not. So long as I promote good quality products, there’s really little for them to be offended about.

It took me a while to get to that point, however. It’s easy to take that kind of criticism too much to heart. If you want a healthy business, however, you need people to buy products from you. If you can’t say what you’ve found worthwhile, you’re making it much harder on yourself and your readers will lose out because they aren’t hearing about things they might find useful too.

Most of all, remember that honestly recommending useful products never makes you a scammer. How often you promote products doesn’t matter as much as making sure you promote quality, relevant products rather than junk. Do that while keeping up with the expectations your list has for you, and you should be fine.

The post Does Promoting Products Make You Feel Like a Scammer? appeared first on Home with the Kids Blog.

5 Tips to Sell More on Your Websites

Stephanie Foster — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 16:00:34 +0000

Online selling is very different from selling in person. You’re convincing someone to make the purchase on their own time. Bore them, fail to make the case, and they’re gone, off your site. You may be able to slow them down with a popup window, but you can’t stop them, and you don’t even know for certain what their objection was. How do you improve your websites so that you make more sales?

1. Make it easy to buy from your site.

Sometimes the problem is as simple as people can’t figure out how to buy from your site. The “buy now” button may be difficult to find or it takes to long to go from cart to finished order.

If people have to struggle to buy from your website, they aren’t going to. The internet is a big place, and even if other sites won’t have exactly what they were after, there will probably be something close enough elsewhere.

Links to add a product to your site’s shopping cart or to buy the product through your affiliate link should be easily found. Even if your copywriting still needs work, a clear and simple path to making a purchase will improve the chances that people will buy from you.

2. Make your site easy to read.

An easy to read website is a combination of good copywriting and good layout. A poor job on either of these factors will cut down on your website’s conversion rates.

Most people do better with short paragraphs and bullet points when reading online. You can use longer blocks of text if that’s what it takes to get your point across, but remember that many people skim more than they read online. Make it easy for them, and provide greater detail a little further along for those who want it.

Keep your writing simple too. There’s probably a lot of jargon specific to your niche, and while you may be comfortable with it, others may not be. The same goes for showing off your vocabulary in general. Use simple words everyone understands.

3. Use appropriate graphics.

The right graphics are a big help in making sales. People can’t touch your product when they’re online, so if you’re selling a physical product, graphics are the one way you have to show them what they’re shopping for.

Make sure your graphics look good. If you’re selling a product as an affiliate, there are often good images available for your use – just check with the program you’re associated with. If it’s your own product, make sure you take a good picture. A photo taken with a cluttered background or with several other of your products won’t be nearly as appealing as a clean one showing just the product in question.

4. Establish trust.

If your website gives people a bad feeling, they aren’t going to buy from you. Do your best to make your website look reputable.

In part, this means avoiding hype in your descriptions. Be clear and honest about what the product is and what it is not. People like to know what the advantages and the disadvantages are when they’re shopping.

This also means avoid spelling and grammatical errors. We all make them, but if they’re all over your website, people won’t trust you as much.

5. Encourage newsletter or autoresponder signups.

People don’t always buy on the first visit. It’s often said that it can take seven exposures to convince someone to make a purchase. Having a newsletter or autoresponder for people who want more information about your products can have a big impact on your sales.

Provide solid, relevant information in your newsletter, plus sales links as appropriate. Don’t go overboard on trying to make sales on your newsletter unless you understand that you will get a lot of people unsubscribing quickly. Some people can make that work, but others lose more than they gain that way.

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When Was the Last Time You Experimented with Your Online Business?

Stephanie Foster — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 14:36:52 +0000

There’s something nice about getting into a good routine with your online business. You know what needs to be done and how to do it. You know about what response you’ll get for the work you do. But are you still taking new risks? Are you experimenting with new ideas to bring people to your online business?

Running any business is a risk, of course. Keeping with a single routine is even a risk in business, as you don’t know if something else will do better. That’s why you should be experimenting with new ideas regularly.

I don’t mean take constant big risks, making major changes and so forth. Going too wild with how you run your online business can take you in the wrong direction with it, and it may be difficult to recover.

More appropriate experiments, on the other hand, can help you figure which directions to take your business. They’re not only appropriate – they’re necessary.

From Beginner to Pro

Experimenting is a big part of how you go from being a beginner with your business to an experienced professional. You learn what works, what doesn’t and get some idea as to why things happen they way they do for you.

Just think about it. How much would you trust the expertise of someone who has always run their business one way and only that way? Would you consider them as much of an expert as one who had tried a lot of different things?

I don’t mean that you aren’t an expert in your business if you choose one way to do everything and stick with it. You could choose to have your expertise in article marketing, for example, and only ever work with that kind of marketing for your business. But if you only choose to market by submitting your articles to the same list of directories all of the time, never trying any other article marketing tactics, are you really an expert on the subject overall? Do you even know if what you’re doing works as well as it should?

Being an expert doesn’t mean you’re safe from making mistakes with your business, of course. We all make mistakes. It does mean you can choose the things you try more carefully. It also means you probably have the things you know work running well as you experiment.

Which Experiments Should You Try?

There are plenty of ways to experiment with your online business. Here are a few ideas to get you started.

1. Offer a new product.

Have you been offering the same products for a long time? Try something new.

Think about your niche and why people come to your site. You should have a pretty good idea of what your visitors are after. Now think about what might improve the experience they have with your business. Is there something that really goes well with what you’re offering that you aren’t recommending yet?

This doesn’t have to be a product you own, of course. That’s what affiliate programs are for. Find a related product you can offer as an affiliate, and you don’t have to create something new of your own.

2. Change how you offer products.

There are a lot of ways to offer products for sale online. You can have an online store, post product reviews, link to products within blog posts, video reviews and so on. However you make it work, it can be worth your time to try a different way, just to see what happens.

3. Try a new link building strategy.

How are you getting links to your website? Is it working for you? Are the links good only for search engine traffic or do they bring traffic to your site on their own merit?

If most of your current linking strategy is mostly search engine food, look at techniques that are more about getting traffic from higher traffic websites. Try building a reputation through YouTube videos, and put your links into the video description. Get active on a relevant forum that allows signature links.

4. Try paid traffic sources.

If you’ve been avoiding pay per click advertising, buying ads in relevant newsletters and so forth, take a look at this option. Paid methods have the advantage of giving fast results and the disadvantage of costing money, which can add up fast. When you make them work, they’re well worth the money.

5. Do more networking.

How much networking do you do, online and otherwise? Is it more than putting up a Facebook page or doing a few tweets here and there about your business? Just a touch of blog commenting once in a while? Are you a real person when you do these things, or just a business with little personality?

Networking is more than announcing what your business has to offer. That’s certainly a part of it if you’re trying to promote your online business, but it’s not all there is to it. If you want to be taken seriously and really make the most of the time you spend networking, you have to be a real person and share advice, relevant links to other sites and be a bit social.

It’s all too easy to go overboard on networking, of course. You shouldn’t be checking your Facebook page or Twitter every few minutes. Many people find it helpful to set up a schedule. This keeps things under better control, so you keep working on your business in other ways as you network.

6. Attend industry events.

Going to an industry event can be a bit pricey, but as an opportunity the right event can be priceless. It’s a chance to get some great information from some of the top people in your industry and to network with others.

You probably won’t know what to do when you first go to an event. They can be pretty overwhelming. My recommendation is to pick the parts you really want to see and don’t go overboard looking for swag. There’s neat stuff to be had at most events, but really, they shouldn’t be the focus of your day. Learning to improve your business is much more important.

What experiments have you done to improve your online business? Any you’d care to share?

The post When Was the Last Time You Experimented with Your Online Business? appeared first on Home with the Kids Blog.

Are You Using Hype or Honesty to Make Sales?

Stephanie Foster — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 16:05:16 +0000

If you’ve worked online long at all, you’ve seen plenty of hype. It probably made deciding what you wanted to do to earn a living online that much more difficult. All those images of wealth, all the people claiming their massive success was a matter of months from poverty, or just a few hours a week of work. It sounds nice, but most people know with a little thought that it’s usually not that way.

That doesn’t keep people from wanting to use hype in their own sales process. It doesn’t matter if it’s a business product, a health product, a parenting technique or whatever else. It’s more fun to sell to the dream than to the reality.

That doesn’t make it a better idea, especially if you want to build a relationship with your customers.

There are many good reasons to avoid hype in your sales process. Perhaps the most important is that in the United States the FTC is clamping down on the claims you can make about your products. You have to be able to prove what you say, and you have to know typical results.

In home business products, I suspect typical results is the ebook gets read (well, partially, anyhow) and little to no action is taken. It’s probably similar in other areas.

Certainly there are people who go for hype. There’s a reason why people use it. It’s fun to brag about the more exceptional results people can get from what you’re selling, so long as you keep it honest.

But if you want to build a good relationship with your customers and don’t want to get in trouble for overstating the benefits or possibilities of the things you sell, don’t rely on hype. Go for honesty.

The single greatest thing about being honest about what you’re selling is that you aren’t likely to get in trouble with it. Not from the FTC and not with your customers. Give them more realistic expectations, and they won’t wonder why the miracles aren’t happening.

Ok, so that’s a little hype right there. You’ll always get customers who don’t understand why something isn’t working for them the way it does for others. Nothing works exactly the same for everyone. Still, you should have fewer problems when people know what to expect from what they’re buying from you.

The other great part about honesty is that it brings people back to you. If you tell them straight up what’s good and bad about what you’re trying to sell, they’re more likely to trust you. That gives you more chances to sell to them. Customers who come back are quite valuable.

This also means don’t use many of the common online sales tricks. Do you really need to use a bunch of exclamation points? Do you need to pretend that quantities are limited when they really aren’t? Keep it real and make the benefits of your product make the sale.

Yes, you can use a good sales page to manipulate people into wanting your product, whether or not it’s what they need. That will make you sales. It won’t build your reputation as an ethical marketer. If you want the long term trust of your customers, don’t dazzle them with b.s. Dazzle them with your upfront techniques that help them to buy exactly what they need.

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Don’t Think of It as Marketing

Stephanie Foster — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 14:29:12 +0000

Marketing is a major part of any business. If you don’t market, you don’t make sales. But calling it marketing may keep you in the wrong frame of mind.

The word “marketing” puts you in the frame of mind of bringing customers to your business. More of a sales-y feeling. That’s not a bad thing, but a little switch might help you to think of what you’re doing in a way that’s more helpful to your customers and your business.

You aren’t marketing. You’re finding solutions.

You’re finding solutions your customers need. This encourages you to think of what your customers need, rather than just what you want to offer them. You need to think more from their perspective. Don’t market them. Find a solution they want and offer it to them.

There are many ways to think of the problems potential customers are facing. It can be a problem of image. It can be a problem around the house. It can be a problem with their career.

Whatever the problem is, don’t think strictly of what will make the sale for you. Think of what will make the purchase right for the customer.

You’re also finding solutions for your business. What brings in the most money? What works? What doesn’t? What has the best return for your efforts?

When you’re solving problem, you test. That’s something you should always be doing in your marketing, testing. Test sales copy. Test landing pages. Test prices. Test traffic sources. Keep testing.

There are a few things that will tell you if you’ve solved a particular marketing problem, but money is a favorite way for most to know. We’re pretty much in business for the money, with loving what we do as a wonderful benefit that’s almost as important. But few of us can run any sort of business purely for the love of it. A decent income is needed to keep the passion alive.

Not every solution you create will work out. Sometimes you’ll lose money.

But you’ll always learn something, even if it’s “Wow. That really, really didn’t work like I thought it would!”

Most failures have something more to teach, however. There may have been some money earned, and if you can separate that part out, you can find out what part of the failure worked. That’s valuable information you may be able to use on its own or combine with a new solution. Or maybe it brought in traffic but poor to no sales. It’s up to you to figure out if it was purely low quality traffic or another problem.

Don’t fool yourself and think that any business can get away without marketing. Instead, treat your marketing as a chance to find solutions to the problems you and your potential customers face.

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Do You Focus on the Parts of Your Home Business You Can’t Control?

Stephanie Foster — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 15:18:33 +0000

Making a home business successful is hard. There are some things you can control, mostly what you do yourself or hire someone to do for you, and other things that you cannot control. It’s really easy to focus on the parts you can’t directly control, forgetting that the things you can control can help the parts you don’t directly control.

Visitors to Your Site

You don’t directly control whether or not your website gets visitors. You can do everything possible to make it attractive to visitors and search engines, but sometimes that doesn’t bring in traffic.

You can control your link building activities. You can control your spending on pay per click advertising. You control whether or not you make videos or podcasts to bring in traffic.

You don’t know for certain if any of these will work or if any will suddenly quit working. But you can learn what makes them more likely to work for you.

With search engine traffic, expect that changes will happen sometimes. Your rankings go up, your rankings go down, your rankings fall into a deep, dark, dank pit leaving you wondering if you’ll ever see them again.

You can’t control that. You can try to influence with link building, but you can’t control it.

Even pay per click traffic you can’t control completely. You may get a new competitor or the algorithm that decides which ads get what space can change and you now have to rework your campaigns to go along with it. That’s online business for you.

Buyers

You can’t control whether or not people will buy from you. You can have the best copywriting, the most useful products and the best price, and still a certain percentage will not buy from you.

You can use what information you have to improve the odds that people will buy from you. You can test ads, ad placement, the copy describing the product, and if it’s your own product, your shopping cart, the checkout process, everything to do with how people buy from you or through your links that you control.

Work on these factors that you do have control over to make the most of the visitors who might turn into buyers. Thats’ the control you have.

Life and Chaos

No one has complete control over how their life goes. Sometimes it’s easy. Other times obstacles throw themselves enthusiastically into your way and make it hard to run your online business the way you used to.

You can control how you meet these challenges. You can hire someone to help you so that even when things get a little rough parts of your business will keep on going with less input from you. You can ask for guest posts on your blog. You can plan for problems.

You can’t be ready for every contingency, but you can cut down the ways that you can be caught unprepared. Think of where you want your business to go and take steps to help it move in that direction.

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