Building the right type of following

How to build an online following

Building the right type of following

Building The Right Type Of Following

I am often asked, “how do I build my following with the right type of people?”.

ENGAGMENT, ENGAGMENT, ENGAGEMENT! 

That is hands down, the best and most cost-efficient way of growing a really great following and an authentic following.

How do I do this?

By engaging with others. This means going out and reaching out to the type of people who you want to follow you, and engaging with their content. By observing their content, engaging and starting conversations with your perfect audience, that’s ultimately the best way to build your following.  Yes, it does take time. Yes, it’s hard work, but who cares when it comes to the fact that it’s free, it doesn’t cost anything to sit there and make some valuable and fair comments to the sort of people who you’d love to follow you.

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Small business owner researching the difference between sales and marketing

The difference between Sales and Marketing that every business owner needs to know

Understanding Sales and Marketing

Is sales marketing? Is marketing sales? Does sales come after marketing? Does marketing precede sales? Or, does sales precede marketing? How does it all work?

I want to really simplify it and I want to put it in the context. Here is where I believe the value is; that being how it relates to businesses and the size of the businesses, where businesses are at, and how they scale. When you’re a small business and you’re starting out, quite often you’ve got very little funds. Further, you’re self-funding and chances are you’re going to boot-strap everything you have. If that’s the case, nothing, as far as I’m concerned, beats sales.

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is your business on linkedin

Is Your business on LinkedIn?

Is your business on LinkedIn?

In this blog I want to talk a little bit about LinkedIn and I want to preface this conversation by saying if you’re still wondering if LinkedIn is a channel for you, or another platform that you should be using, then the easiest way to answer this question is, you’re mad if you’re not using it.

I still hear of people that are fearful or concerned about putting themselves on LinkedIn. I know people who tried it in the early days and they didn’t like the fact that they’ve were befriended or ‘linked’ by people requesting to connect with them who they didn’t know. If you don’t know them, don’t connect with them. It’s that simple. People are becoming more and more savvy when it comes to the use of LinkedIn and I think that we can all appreciate the benefits LinkedIn presents as a networking platform for businesses.

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What’s The Best Time To Advertise?

What’s the best time to advertise?

I love this question because it actually allows us to dive into our audience and dive into the data to help make better decisions about the choices we make when it comes to our marketing objectives.

Anyone that knows me and has done business with me, and my clients will all attest to the fact that when I talk, I want to use data to make decisions and recommendations. I don’t like assumptions, I don’t like opinions, everybody’s got one of them. What I like is looking at what is actually happening out there, knowing and understanding exactly how my audience behaves so that I can make better decisions and use the data and information to direct and govern what I do when it comes to my marketing, digital and social objectives.

So, when it comes to advertising, and let’s just say your objective is primarily around Facebook and Instagram advertising, the best thing you can do is firstly go into your insights, on Facebook and Instagram and you’ll actually be able to go through and see your audience. Here you are able to see not only the demographics of your audience, but you can actually see when your audience is online.

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how to effectively hashtag

Are Hashtags Out Of Date?

Are #Hashtags Out of Date?

The short answer is no. But I would like to elaborate as this is a trending question that I am constantly being asked. I believe this question has been raised because of the people that seem to abuse hashtags and use 20+ on every post, with tags that aren’t even relevant to their photo, which is ruining the user experience of hashtags all together. 

Hashtags are really important for finding a theme that is trending or creating a way of following your content or allowing users who are primarily on Instagram to follow your content. Hashtags could be used obviously on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook but where we see the most prolific use of them and the best use of them is on Instagram.

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how to set goals

My Guide on Setting Goals and Achieving Them.

How to Set Attainable Goals

Christmas has come and gone, we counted down to 12:00am on December 31st, the holidays have come to an end and we are now starting to go back to work and getting ready for the year ahead. We’ve all heard about New Year’s resolutions, and some of us have given up on making them because we have set unattainable ones in the past. But I think it is important to set a list of clear, attainable goals to guide us on a journey of success for the year ahead.

So, how do we best achieve this without overwhelming ourselves, or setting ourselves up for failure which will ultimately result in feelings of guilt or self-doubt? 

What I believe is so hard about long-term goals is the fact that there are no immediate results, which often leaves us feeling disheartened and beaten. You’ve been eating healthy for weeks, going to the gym 3 times a week… now 2 months on and you can see little to no results. So, you give up and you’re back to your old ways. This is why I came up with a hack to achieving your goals: by listing these goals and pairing them with rewards! 

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Is facebook only for consumers?

For something that is used almost daily by up to 2 billion people the capabilities of Facebook are often misunderstood. There are assumptions made about the platform which mean that the potential for B2B marketing is often overlooked.

People assume that Facebook is only for consumers. They assume the only market available on Facebook is for a business to sell to individuals. This means businesses are only seeing half the story.

Imagine having a washing machine and not realising it had a dryer built in as well. All this time you’ve been hanging your wet clothes on the washing line or a clothes horse when you could have been doing two jobs in one place.

When we stop the myth that Facebook is solely a consumer market and embrace the fact that businesses can use it sell to other business then we can improve our marketing (and profits!) dramatically.

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What is the best marketing strategies to implement for a new business?

What are the best marketing strategies to implement for a new business?

If you were going fishing and wanted to find a new spot, what preparation would you do? Firstly, you would find out if there are any fish to be caught right? You’ll want to find the type of fish and whether they were worth catching.

It’s the same with your new business’s marketing strategy. Firstly, you’ve got to fish where the fish are. Which sounds obvious, but you’ve also got to understand your audience.

Who is your ideal customer? Is it a guy or a girl or is it a business?

What’s the ideal age range? Teenagers? 30-50? Over 50s?

Where do they live? Urban or rural?

What is their behaviour? How to they react? How do they think?

In marketing speak these are called, geographic, socioeconomic, demographic and their psychographic.

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Four lessons I learned from starting a small business aged 14

My childhood was a wonderful time but my family lived on next to nothing. I’d have given anything for the toys I saw in the shop windows. This experience meant I was determined to earn money for myself early and by the time I was 14, I was running between two jobs and unintentionally entered the entrepreneurship world determined to start a successful small business.

I was an electronics geek, learning the ins and outs on secondhand kits from the market. I proved a dab hand at circuitry and I managed to convince my older sister to let me use her car as a testing ground. I managed to figure out how to install a stereo unit and a set of speakers. News spread of my new found talent and so began my first venture. My strategy? To charge 50 per cent less than the professional businesses in the local area.

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How to monetise your Website?

How to monetise your website?

A great question that’s come up a few times in recent weeks is “how do I monetise my website?”

There are a couple of ways to do this. The first and most obvious being to sell through the website. For example, I have one client who has built a website to allocate Real Estate listings on it and to make some money from it.

The other way is for people or businesses to pay you for advertising their products or services on your website.

I want to keep this really simple. It can get overly complicated, but there are 3 different things you want to keep in mind if you’re looking to monetise your website:

  1. Integrity
  2. Value
  3. Integration

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