If the marketing strategies you’re using are pretty much similar to that of your competitors, you’ll never be able to obtain an unfair advantage over them.

It’s exactly because of this that businesses nowadays are keen on looking for innovative, and unique marketing strategies to give them the competitive edge that they need to get more customers.

If that’s what you’re looking to learn, then you’re definitely on the right page.

Allow me to share with you 3 out-of-the-box marketing tips that I personally use to get more customers, and grow my business.

1) Use cellular phone directories together with Linkedin.

LinkedIn can be a great way to build a list of leads. It allows the users to download a spreadsheet that contains their connections’ available contact information.

You can collect their email addresses, and their phone numbers (among others), which you can log into a Customer Relationship Management System or into your own contact list.

The platform also allows you to create public and private groups which are based around a niche or topic. You can then nurture the group and use it to reach your target market.

Should you decide to start a group, be sure to remember the 80/20 rule. It is advisable that you share only about 20% of promotional and branded content, while sharing about 80% of informational content that provides massive value to your group.

Once you’ve grown your network in LinkedIn, you can then reach out to them using their contact information.

Important note: there will be instances wherein you can’t view your connection’s phone numbers. At this point, you can use an online cell phone directory such as National Cellular Directory’s Happy Hour, so you can obtain their cell phone number (for free) by doing a name and address lookup.

2) Feature your prospects on an expert round-up.

The gist of this strategy is to contact your prospect customers, telling them that you’ll feature them in an expert round-up.

Of course, before you do that, you need to make sure that your prospects are in fact experts in their own field, and that they have a good enough clout. This is to make sure that you’ll benefit from the expert round-up several ways; a) once they share your expert round-up,  they’d have helped you with marketing your business, b) you’d have been able to build a relationship with influencers in your industry, and c) during all of this, you can pitch your services strategically drastically increasing your chances of closing the sale.

Allow me to share with you a 2 things that you need to keep in mind before running an expert round-up:

1. These influencers are usually busy. That said, don’t ask them for anything that requires too much of their time. I usually ask them for their 1 best tip on something. This makes it easier for them to participate since it isn’t THAT time consuming, and they’ll be featured on the same article as other experts.
2. Be sure to have a bait. The thing is, if you don’t give these influencers a good enough reason for participating in your round-up, the chances are good that they’ll just ignore you, or straight-up decline your offer.

Here’s a round-up where I featured 19 influencers that shared their best customer service tips. We’ve gotten several inquiries for our services because of this piece so it’s a classic example of how these powerful this technique can be.

3) Leverage the power of introduction.

Zig Ziglar was spot-on when he said, “You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help enough other people get what they want.”

As you can probably imagine, there are TONS of ways you can help the people in your network.

For a lot of us, the most immediate method of helping our customers would be to sell our services. While that might be OK at first glance, we need to realize that almost everyone is doing that. And if you’ll jump in the bandwagon yourself, you won’t be able to set yourself apart from the rest of the pack.

Instead of offering your services immediately, why don’t you go about this using a different route.

Why don’t you introduce your connections to each other instead, so they can benefit from growing their network and having a wider wiggle-room as far as growing their business?

Businessmen that are worth their salt will almost always appreciate the gesture since the power of having a large network can play a crucial role for a business’ longevity.

However, before you start introducing your connections, you need to make sure that the introduction will make sense for both parties. Otherwise, you’ll just be wasting everyone’s time.

For example. If one of your connections offer content writing services, you can refer him to one of your connections that’s a web developer. That way, once the web developer is done with working on his client’s websites, he can send over his client to your other connection that offers content.

At this point, the content writer can give the web developer a commission for every referral he shares that would end-up ordering content.

It’s a win-win situation for both parties, right?

Now can you imagine how grateful they will be to you since you proactively introduced them to each other?

By introducing your connections to each other, you’ll surely be able to take your relationship with them to the next level, making it easier for you to offer your services and getting them to order from you.

What makes this strategy even more amazing is the fact that people will want to introduce you to their connections whom they feel is a perfect fit for you. All because you helped them to begin with. You can read more about the psychology of reciprocity through Robert Cialdini’s book, “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion”.

Important note: I use a tool called Entro to manage my introductions. What makes this tool so amazing is that it helps me track the introductions, send follow-ups, and use templates (among others). The tool integrates with your Gmail account and it doesn’t look intrusive at all.

What’s next?

If there are other marketing strategies that you feel should be included, please add them in the comments section below.

Lastly, if you found value this post valuable, please take the time to share it. Cheers!

Photo courtesy – © Mark Carrel / Dollar Photo Club

The post Unique Marketing Tips to Get You More Customers appeared first on Guild of Bloggers.

© Nomad_Soul/ Dollar Photo Club

To put the global popularity of social media into proper perspective, allow me to share with you some statistics from wearesocial.net as of August 2015. And mind you, these figures are projected to quickly increase each month.

http://wearesocial.net/blog/2015/08/global-statshot-august-2015/

The figures are quite staggering, aren’t they?

However, if you think these are all the numbers you need to know about social media, check out this additional statistics from thesocial-lights.com.

• 82% of SMBs find social media effective for lead generation.
• 90% find social media to be an effective branding tool.
• 86% of active Twitter users say they plan to purchase regularly from an SMB they follow on the platform.
• 93% of marketers use social media for business.
• 70% of marketers have successfully used Facebook to gain new customers.
• 43% of marketers have successfully used Twitter to gain new customers.

At this point, it becomes clear to all day-to-day business owners why they should jump right in the social media bandwagon.

It does not only have the capability to bring in more direct sales to their businesses, but it also works wonders when it comes to building relationships with their prospect customers (among others).

Social media monitoring.

“Because we can quickly respond to our target audience’s feedback through social media monitoring, our sales have grown drastically, and nurturing our relationship with our  target audience has never been easier.” – Source JoinVIP

One of the best ways that businesses are utilizing social media to further their growth is through  social media monitoring.

If you aren’t quite familiar with the term, it is the process of monitoring/listening to conversations, groups, or products (among others) via the social media platforms in real-time. This keeps businesses updated about the ins-and-outs of what’s happening in their niches.

How does social media monitoring help you with your business,  you  might ask?

1) You can learn from your customers’ feedbacks.

Whether you’re trying to map out your next marketing campaign, or you’re trying to identify areas in your product that you’d like to improve; learning from your customers’ feedback can be such a goldmine for your business.

The sad part is not many of your existing customers take the time to tell you about their two cents about your product. In most cases, they just share their thoughts on other niche-related pages, groups, or they just publish it on their social media profile’s timeline.

If you aren’t using social media monitoring, then you have missed on several of the feedbacks that your customers are sharing about you and your product.

2) You can easily identify who the influencers are in your industry.

Once you’ve identified who the influencers are in your industry, you can now tailor-fit your marketing campaigns to include building a stronger relationship with them.

The thing is, if you can turn these influencers into your brand’s advocates, they can help bring in TONS of leads – let alone sales.

That being said, instead of marketing to hundreds of people one at a time, you can establish a relationship with one person instead (the influencer), so he/she will be the one to market your business to his circle of connections.

3) You can reply to  your customer’s complaints on a timely manner.

Replying to  your customer’s complaints on a timely manner is a crucial element of reputation management.

Before one of the complaints snowball into something that can ruin your brand’s reputation to hundreds (if not thousands) of your customers, you need to address them as soon as you can.

If you aren’t using social media monitoring, a single complain about your company might end up going viral, all without your knowledge. With that, the entire conversion becomes a one-way lane where people are talking trash about your company, when it could have been a two way lane where you can explain your side, and offer solutions to fix the problem.

What’s next?

If you found value in the post, please take the time to click the share button, or comment below. Cheers!

The post Social Media Monitoring is a Must for Your Business. Find Out Why. appeared first on Guild of Bloggers.

According to TopRank, 93% of B2B marketers are now using content marketing.

What this message is telling us is that content marketing is recognized by a lot of marketers as a “must-have” arsenal for their marketing campaigns.

However, while a lot of marketers may be using this marketing method, you can bet that a good number of them aren’t getting any real results out of their marketing efforts.

Why, you might ask? Simple. A lot of them are doing it wrong. So wrong…

As you can probably imagine, no matter how effective a marketing method is, if you aren’t using it correctly, you won’t be able to get any kind of decent results from it.

That being said, allow me to share with you 3 of the most common – let alone critical –  content marketing mistakes that’re causing a lot of marketers to fail miserably.

Not tracking the list of people that you send outreach to.

“I already replied to your message, why are you sending me this message again?”

“We’ve already discussed this. Why are you asking me the same questions?”

Those are just some of the horrid replies that you can get from your audience if you do not track the people you are sending outreach to.

Clearly, not all replies that you’ll receive from your outreach efforts are good. This is especially true if you sent the same outreach message to the same person twice or thrice.

This kind of mistake can be very costly for your business because the chances are good that your audience will think that either you are spamming them, or you and your team are so disorganized at how you run your business.

Of course, when your prospect customers view you as either of the above, it’s going to become almost impossible for you to close them as your customers.

Publishing mediocre content.

Check out the articles published on this website. Giving the page a quick gander will tell you immediately that they are serious about producing quality content. Not only are their articles lengthy, but they are also packed with expert advice, and actionable tips that their audience will surely like.

True. It isn’t right for us to gauge an article’s’ quality based on its length alone, however, we need to remember that the trend shows how most pages that are ranking number 1 on Google’s search results are those that are about 2200+ words in length.

This is a clear indication of how people (and the search engines) are loving lengthy content.

That being said, instead of writing a short (and in most cases, mediocre) 400 – 500 article, bump up your word count to about 2200+ words. While doing so, you also need to make sure that you are providing real value to your readers, and not just increasing your content’s word count.

Using a poorly crafted outreach template.

When it comes to doing outreach, quality and quantity is very important.

Quantity is important because no matter how good your outreach template is, there is still a huge chance that your prospects will decline your message (or flat out ignore you), simply because they are too busy, or your offer isn’t just something that they are looking for right now.

That is why you need to make sure that you’ll send as much outreach messages as you can, so you get a decent amount of people to reply.

However, increasing the quantity of your outreach is only half of the equation. Quality is just as important.

I say that because people online are usually very keen on what they click. This is especially true when they are on their inboxes.

Most internet users have had their fair share of people spamming them, that they have become quite good at sniffing out which messages are spammy, and which are legit.

Of course, you’ll want your outreach message to look like the latter. That is, if you want your audience to read your message and reply.

If you are new to the whole outreach process, allow me to Share with you some of the guiding principles that I almost always consider when crafting my outreach templates:

• Never EVER use “Dear Sir/Ma’am”. Just use “Hi first name” or simply use, “Hi” or “Hello”.
• Make your subject line, and the first sentence of your outreach message as punchy as it can be.
• Always leave a clear call-to-action within your message (preferably at the end).
• Just use 1 call-to-action per email message.
• Emphasize on how they can benefit from helping you. Remember to answer the acid test, “what’s in it for me”. If you fail to do this, you drastically decrease the chances of getting any kind of replies from your audience.

Another good resource to learn about how to create an effective outreach message is an article published by Neil Patel way back in 2012.

Final thoughts.

Whether you’re looking to grow your traffic, generate leads, or straight-up increase your sales, content marketing can surely give you the results that you are looking for. However, you need to make sure that you aren’t just putting in the effort and resources to it; you also need to make sure that you’re doing it right. Otherwise, you’ll end-up with very little results, or, you might end up damaging your brand.

 Photo courtesy  – © Mark Carrel / Dollar Photo Club

The post Content Marketing Done Wrong: How to Fail Miserably at Content Marketing appeared first on Guild of Bloggers.

There is more to creating a business website than just making sure that it looks professional. That is, if your goal for having one is to get more sales online.

Sadly, not many business owners are aware of this.

As far as most of them are concerned; provided that their website looks appealing, then it should be good enough to compel their visitors to buy.

#bigmistake

When it comes to influencing your web visitors to clicking your “buy now” buttons, you need to apply a level of human psychology on your website’s design. The good news is, several tests and studies have already been made to determine certain elements (or concepts) that would help you in accomplishing just that: getting your web visitors to buy.

That’s what I am about to share with you right now.

If you’re looking to improve the sales that you’ve been getting from your website, then I urge you to give these proven and tested tips a try.

Let’s hop right in.

1) Make your contact information easy to find.

There are several ways to go about making your contact info constantly visible to your readers. For one thing, you can add your contact info on floating elements within your website.

What this contact center did is a good benchmark. Notice  how their phone numbers are floating on the upper part of the page? They even took it a step further by adding this floating element across all the pages of the website. This ensures that regardless of which section of the website their visitors are, they’ll be able to see their contact information.

2) Be very selective about the images that you use.

At the base level, the image that you should be using needs to be of good quality (not pixelated). Addition to that, it is important that we realize how people react differently to images.

For example, human photos on landing pages tend to give business owners a better conversion compared to using other images (like their products, etc…).

Another example is how viewers usually cannot resist following where arrows point, or the gazes and lines of sight of other people (among others). If you put two and two together, you can create a landing page where:

1. There is a photo of a real person
2. Where the person’s line of sight is pointing towards your call-to-action button.

When you create a landing page with these two elements incorporated in your design, the chances are good that you will have better sales, compared to just using any random design.

3) Add your CTAs (Call-to-action) above the fold.

What do I mean when I say “above the fold”, you might ask?

Simple.

The moment a web page loads, the first thing you see in your screen (or monitor) is what is considered as “above the fold”. In short, it is the upper portion of the web page that you see where you don’t have scroll.

Adding your CTAs above the fold is a common strategy that a lot of companies adapt (especially to those who specialize in conversion optimization) simply because it flat out works when it comes to improving their online sales.

Check-out this website. One of the first things you will see are their call-the-action buttons. Their designers even highlighted one of the buttons by using a different color making it even more prominent. Such is a good example of where you need to add your CTAs, and how you can make your buttons even more visible.

4) Focus on the benefits NOT the features.

The fact is, your visitors don’t really care about what your accomplishments are, or how amazing your product is. All they are concerned about is themselves and how they can benefit from what you have to offer.

The question, “What’s in it for me?”, is a good acid test to consider when adding design elements to your website or writing a copy. The more solid answers you give to that question, the more enticed your visitors will be when they are on your page.

Final thoughts

Designing your business website based only on what looks good is a big mistake most business owners make. They even end up losing hundreds of sales (maybe even thousands) without them ever noticing it.

It is only when they start doing split tests, that they realize how they could have closed more sales, had they added psychological elements to their website’s landing pages like adding a real person’s photo, changing their CTA button’s color, or adding arrows pointing to their CTA (among others).

Don’t make the same mistake.

If you are truly serious about wanting to get more sales, then you can follow the tips that I shared above for starters. Since  there is no one-size-fits-all rule when optimizing a website for sales, you need to make further tests if you feel that you aren’t getting the results that you are looking for.

Photo courtesy  – © Ivan Kruk / Dollar Photo Club

The post Stop Losing Potential Customers: Use These Sales Optimization Tips Now appeared first on Guild of Bloggers.

While content marketing is in fact an amazing tool that you can use to get hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors to your website; not everyone that’s using it are getting real results.

Whether you’ll succeed at growing your traffic or not, has a lot to do with how you’re running your content marketing campaign.

Allow me to share with you the basic checklist that I use. If you’re looking to explode your website’s monthly traffic, then you have got to try these out.

1. Have I re-purposed my content and published them on different outlets?

There are TONS of ways (or places) where you can re-purpose your content.

After publishing your post, you can then start creating different versions of it like video presentations, slideshows, podcasts, and infographics (among others).

When you re-purpose your epic content, you’ll get more mileage from it since other viewers will be able to see it through the different platforms where you will re-purpose them.

2. Do I have a clearly defined strategy on how to market my content?

In most cases, when pro-marketers publish an epic content for the purpose of using it on their content marketing strategy, they publish several posts prior to that in order to help hype things up for the main post.

They also run contests, send several email messages, and maybe even do interviews (among others).

All this can only be accomplished if you have a clearly defined marketing strategy. Besides, when you have a marketing plan in place, you are able to mitigate risks, since you can somehow see in a broader scale whether the various marketing strategies you will employ will mash up or not.

3. Have a clear target audience.

Before you even start writing your content, you need to have a clear idea on who your target audience is.

The more specific your audience is, the better.

For example, instead of targeting “mothers”, you’ll have better results if you’ll target something more specific like, “mothers who just gave birth, and are looking to lose their weight through crossfit”.

The thing is, the more specific your target audience is, the more specific you can craft your content. Thus, making it is easier for you to establish a connection with them.

4. Do I have a clear call-to-action on the content I am promoting?

One of the best places to add a CTA is on your page’s sidebar. Asking your readers to sign up, get a free quote, or to try out your services is a good CTA that you can use.

What this company did on their sidebar is a good example. Not only did they add a clear CTA, but they also took it a step further by adding a catchy heading by asking their readers a question.

Important tip – using questions on your headers is a good way to attract people’s attention.

5. Does my content answer the questions that my target audience are asking about?

At the end of the day, it is all about whether or not your content has value.

No matter how lengthy your content is, or how flashy your marketing efforts are, if your content doesn’t provide any kind of value to your audience, your marketing results will end up in the gutters.

If you want to make sure that your audience will find your content valuable, then all you need to do is to answer as many of your audience’s questions as you can.

A good strategy is to put yourself in their shoes, then list down the questions that you think they’re going to ask.

The more questions you list down (and answer), the more value packed your content becomes.

6. Do I have a call-to-action at the end of my content?

“If you don’t ask, then you won’t receive”

Most marketers who are worth their salt are aware of how true the statement above is. That is why most of them take the time to add a clear call-to-action at the end of their content asking their readers to share, sign-up, or comment (among others).

On the flip side, newbie marketers think that blatantly asking their readers to share or to do some sort of action is shameful.

Don’t make the same mistake.

Do yourself a favor and be sure to add a clear call-to-action within your every post, OK?

7. Do I have sign-up forms so I can capture my readers’ email addresses?

Capturing your reader’s email address isn’t just a good idea, it is common sense.

There is a reason why the statement, “The money is on the list” is overused; and that’s because it is flat-out true.

When you have your reader’s email address, you can easily turn them into recurring visitors by sending them emails which are highly relevant to their needs. Of course, your email message should contain a link that goes directly to your website so they can consume the content there.

8. Does my content have subheadings?

The way people consume content online varies. There are readers, scanners, and there are those who are bottom-line viewers. Kathryn A. from CrazyEgg published something really detailed about it.

Why am I telling you this? That’s because if you want your content marketing campaigns to succeed in getting you TONS of traffic, you need to understand the psychology behind how people consume content.

If you’ll give Kathryn’s post a quick gander, one of the things you’ll realize is how important using subheadings in a post is.

Not only does it make your content scannable, but it can also help you with your SEO, and making your content easier to digest.

9. Have I shared my content several times?

Because your target audience browse the web on different times, it makes perfect sense for you to share your content several times as well, right?

Right.

I know. You’re probably thinking, “but Jim, won’t my audience think that I am spamming them?”

The short answer is… NO!

Several marketers took the time to study what kind of reaction they’ll elicit from their audience; and the good news is, they got zero complaints!

In the rare occasions where they did get complaints, they can easily justify why they are sharing their content several times and their audience would be satisfied with their explanation.

Important tip – a good practices that a lot of marketers do when sharing the same content is that they use different captions on their social updates, while sharing the same link.

10. Have I asked others to share my content?

There are several ways you can go about asking others to share your content. It isn’t as complicated as others would have you think.

You can either contact them via the different social media platforms, through commenting on their blogs, sending them emails, or you can even do ask others to share through forums.

Personally, I like contacting them via email and their social media accounts since it usually gets me better results.

Important tip – when asking others to share your post, make sure that you have something to offer them in return. At the end of the day, the objection that you need to address when contacting them is the question, “what’s in it for me?”

Also, contact as many people as you can (preferably influencers). You will realize that a lot of the people whom you’ll message will ignore you, or just blatantly refuse to help you.

Final thoughts

True. Content marketing is one of the best online marketing methods that you can ever use to grow your monthly traffic. However, depending on how you use it, you might still get very little to no results at all.

While the checklist I shared above is far from being complete, I assure you that you will see a significant boost in your monthly traffic if you’ll take the time to use them.

Have you been getting great results from content marketing? What are some of the tips that you can share which you think would help others get massive traffic through this marketing method?

Photo courtesy  – © treenabeena  / Dollar Photo Club

The post 10 Content Marketing Checklists Proven to Skyrocket Your Monthly Traffic appeared first on Guild of Bloggers.

“The effectiveness of social media comes from its ability to tap into the most intrinsic desire among us — the desire to share.” – Ankit Oberoi

You can read all you want about how to create a shareable content; however, just like learning how to drive a car, you’ll never really learn how to do it unless you get behind the wheels and start driving. In the case of creating a shareable content, you need to start writing and experimenting – right now.

I decided to write about creating a shareable content because of the current trend that seems to be happening nowadays.

I have observed that micro influencers are starting to form their very own mini alliances so they can help each other by sharing their posts.

Seems like an awesome idea if you ask me.

I mean, if 5 – 10 micro influencers will take the time to share your content, it will surely get the traction that it needs to skyrocket itself to the realm of viral content nirvana.

Of course, that doesn’t always work at a 100%, but at least the chances of it happening drastically increases, right?

I myself have 2 – 3 of these groups of micro influencers. And if there’s one thing that struck me, I slowly realized that I shouldn’t be asking them to share my content, if I feel that it isn’t good enough. I would even think twice about sending them a mediocre 1000-word-content that doesn’t pack a punch.

That said, I’ve been doing A LOT of reading lately on how to create a stunning content that’s worth sharing. That way, I can take my content production skill to the next level, and I won’t have even the slightest bit of that icky feeling when I ask the group to share my content.

Alright. Without further ado, here are the tips:

1. Pre-market your content, days before it goes live.

Just recently, I received an email from Neil Patel where he told me that he is about to publish a new content marketing guide.

Just so you have an idea how the industry experts are crafting their outreach messages, allow me to share with you the actual message that he sent me so you can emulate and learn from it.

Pretty interesting, huh?

Not only is his message short and straightforward, but it also isn’t intrusive at all since he wasn’t asking me to share it – he was just asking if I wanted a heads up when it goes live.

Of course, I shared the content.

Here’s where you can find the step-by-step guide to content marketing that he just published.

Important tip – your content doesn’t necessarily have to fall on deaf ears once it goes live. Why leave the virality of your content to chance, when  you can do your homework by pre-marketing your content. Once you have 5 – 10 influencers that are willing to share it, then your content will have a decent amount of shares once it goes live.

2. Use content lockers

Ever heard of content lockers? If you haven’t I don’t blame you at all.

For the life of me, not many webmasters use content lockers despite how powerful it can be when it comes to increasing your content’s share count.

Imagine…

What if you had a high-converting welcome template that your audience can use to get more clients from Linkedin?

You’ll then hype up what the template can do for your audience, and as you tell them that you’ll share the template below, you’ll then add a content locker on it.

What do you think your audience will do?

Will they ignore the content locker and keep scrolling? Or will they click it so they can see your high-converting template which they can use to get more customers? I’m sure you’ll agree that there’s going to be a good chance that the readers will do the latter.

If you had clicked the link above where I mentioned “high-converting welcome template”, then you’d have seen the content locker that I added on my article. If you didn’t click the link, however, and you’d like to see how a content locker looks like, here’s a screenshot:

Important tip –  Be very prudent when adding content lockers. Don’t just added them anywhere you like without carefully analyzing the flow of your content.

A good strategy is to add as much hype as you can on the specific content that you’d like to lock; that way, when your readers are dying to find out what that content is (or how it looks), they won’t even blink an eye when it comes to clicking the share buttons on your content locker.

3. Add data or statistics.

Adding statistics in your content will make it look more credible. Plus, your readers will most likely want to borrow your data, which you can then use as a tool to ask them to link to your content.

Just by adding numbers to your content, your write-up will look very well researched even if you didn’t really do as much research as your readers thought you did.

Of course, DON’T just make up your own figures or statistics out of thin air. Doing so isn’t just misleading, but it’s flat-out unprofessional.

Some of the best places where I look for statistics is Statista.com, ExpandedRamblings.com, or I just simply google them.

Copypress.com published an amazing resource about where you can find data and statistics online that you can use for your copy and infographics.

Another strategy that I use is to store the data shared by other publishers.

If you’re an avid reader, you won’t have a problem using this strategy. Since I take the time to read about 4 – 5 articles daily to learn and be updated about the happenings of the industry I’m in. It is only inevitable that I come across articles that contain data and research that is worth taking note of.

At this point, I take the time to store the data using Evernote. When using this tool, I make sure to add the proper tags so I can easily look up the data when I need them.

Important note – Please take the time to give proper attribution to the publisher (or page) where you obtained the data. You’ll be amazed at how some of these publishers will be kind enough to return the favor by sharing your content (even without you explicitly asking them to), and some  even link to it on some of their posts.

4. Add Tweetable quotes

Since one of your goals for carefully crafting your content is so that others will share it, why not make “sharing your content” dead-easy for your readers, right?

What better way to do that than to use Tweetable quotes.

What makes “tweetable quotes” such an amazing tool to increase your content’s shareability is that they don’t look intrusive at all. In addition to that, you can also use them to add emphasis on a specific phrase/sentence.

The good news is, there are several free WordPress plugins that you can use to add tweetable quotes on your website. That said, before you even think about buying one, I urge you to do a quick search first. What’s more, you can even add tweetable quotes without using a plugin. Jennifer Mattern of allindiewriters.com published a good resource about it.

Important tip – Tweetable quotes are also amazing for content marketing. All you need to do is look for an influencer in your industry, add their one-liner quote in your post, and make it tweetable; from there, you can contact the influencer once your post goes live, telling them that you added their expert advice in your post.

There is a good chance that that they’ll help share your content. After all, you added them on there, so they can benefit as well from your content going viral.

6. Use case studies.

Just because I wrote “case studies”, I didn’t mean for you to publish a 3000 word content – though it would be nice if you did.

You can use shorter case studies, then lump them up together so it becomes easier for your audience to digest.

Take for example, Kuberventures, a company that provides portfolio management services to investors. By translating their case studies into bit-sized-pieces, they have been able to make their studies more readable and less overwhelming to their audience. As a result, they have gotten an increase in reader engagement, getting them more leads.

Now imagine this… What do you think would happen if you added these short case studies within the long form posts that you were working on?

Supposing you were about to publish a content that talks about the ultimate guide to (insert topic here), then you sprinkled a couple of these short case studies on it? I’m sure you’ll agree with me that the credibility and shareability of your content would surely skyrocket!

Important tip – When inserting these case studies in your content, be sure to label them as such. What I mean by that is that you should add the phrase “Case Study” so it becomes highly visible to your readers.

The mere sight of these two words in your content will already have an impact in itself. Besides, if you didn’t label them, there’s a good chance that your audience won’t know that what you inserted was a case study.

7. Answer as many of your readers’ questions as you can.

The benefits to be had using this strategy is off the charts.

Not only will you be able to avoid experiencing the writer’s block, but your readers will also share the heck out of your content to their community since you’ve pretty much added tons of value to your content.

And if that isn’t enough, the people in your niche will view you as an authority in your industry. You can easily become the “go-to-guy” if they have questions about your niche. Of course, when you’re in that kind of position, it becomes easier for you to establish trust and a better relationship between you and your audience.

Using this strategy is pretty cut and dry:

1. Put yourself in your target audience’s shoes.
2. List down the possible questions that they might have about your industry/product.
3. Answer all of them as comprehensively and as detailed as you can. Try to make your answers as actionable as possible.
4. When answering, be sure to pitch in your services strategically whenever possible, for as long as it makes sense. Make sure that your pitch isn’t forced, even the slightest bit.

If you’re having a hard time looking for the questions, you can try using these strategies to uncover your audience’s possible questions.

1. Use your competitor’s FAQ’s page.
2. Use Q&A sites like Quora.
3. Use niche-related forums. Take special notice of the “Hot Threads” since those are the most viewed and well maintained threads.
4. Use the good ‘ol visualization technique. Just try to put yourself in your audience’s shoes, then start hacking away on the keyboard the list of possible questions that they might have.

Once you’ve already answered all of the questions, you’ll then have to sort out the sequence of the ideas to make sure that they flow smoothly.

You can then add the words, sentences, or paragraphs necessary to polish your content.

Important tip – Answer as many of your audience’s’ questions as you can. The more questions you answer, the more your content becomes valuable to your audience.

8. Use memes.

Don’t underestimate the power of making your audience laugh, or at the very least – making them smile.

Not many people realize the untapped power of laughter when it comes to influencing your prospects to share your content.

The thing with laughter is that it lowers your audience’s’ defenses, it helps them relax (among others).

When your audience are at a relaxed state because of the memes that you added on your post, it becomes easier for you to influencer them to share your content.

I mean, think about it. Whenever you come across something funny in your Facebook feeds, don’t you take the time to click the share button so you can share the laughter with your network?

That’s exactly the kind of effect memes can help you with.

Using memes have become such an effective tool that publishers are even writing about the rules on when to use it, and when not to. The article that Filevine.com published can is a good resource ot learn about when to meme, and when not to meme.

At this point, I hope you’re completely sold at the idea of using memes to increase your content’s shareability.

Now allow me to share with you some of the best places where you can generate memes online. These are my top 3 go to places for memes:

1. Livememe.com
2. Quickmeme.com
3. Imgur.com/memegen

Important tip – A lot of marketers are into expert round-ups, creating skyscraper posts, and even using interviews to generate links. While these are certainly amazing tools to acquire links, you’ll be mind-blown at how publishing meme round-ups can do the same (maybe even better) for you.

What’s next?

I’m not about to tell you that what I shared above is the complete list. I know that there are still tons of other strategies that you could use to increase your content’s shareability.

So this is what I’ll ask  you to do:

1. Using the comments section below, share your 1 best tip for increasing your content’s shareability.

2. Share the 1 thing that you hate the most when creating amazing content?

I look forward to reading your ideas. If you found this post to be valuable, I’ll surely appreciate it if you’ll take the time to share it. Cheers!

—
Photo courtesy – © gustavofrazao / Dollarphotoclub.com (top most image)

The post The Secret Sauce to Creating Shareable Content appeared first on Guild of Bloggers.

In the US alone, social networking is ranked as the top online activity, with one typical American allotting 37 minutes per day on social media websites (according to Go Gulf Dubai Web Design Company). In addition to that, Global Web Index revealed that 28% of the average online users’ time in the general population, is spent in social media.

The numbers are quite staggering, aren’t they?

Of course, since everyone believes in this chain of thought, “where your customers are, there you should also be”, it just makes perfect sense for business owners and marketers to just jump in the social media bandwagon.

However, despite how mouth-watering the prospect of marketing via the different social media channels might seem, not everyone are getting great results from it – mainly because they get distracted.

In fact, according to an article published at Contentbistro, social media is pretty much their number 1 source of distraction for solopreneurs and business owners.

Have you ever gone to Facebook with the hopes of pre-marketing your new product, only to end up getting distracted watching videos of Stephen Curry’s godlike crossover moves? Or you ended up watching on of Gary Vaynerchuk’s motivational videos, perhaps?

Friends, the problem is real.

If you’re struggling with getting things done while on social media and are looking for ways to be more productive while on the platform, then you’re on the right place.

Allow me to share with you 6 tips that can help you with just that.

Let’s hop right in.

1. Understand your goals.

Remember that in any business, you can’t afford to play pin the tail on the donkey.

The reason why most companies succeed at using social media is that they have clear-cut goals of what they want to do. In most cases, every single step was thoroughly planned out before they were executed. By having clear goals in mind, you are taking ambiguity and the role of chances out of the equation.

You can start by answering these questions:

• Who is your target audience?
• What step was thoroughly planned out and what does your target audience want to know and need to know?
• What should your content look like?
• What are the biggest problems they are dealing with?
• How can you give solution to these problems?

These are just some of the many questions that you can ask when crafting your social media marketing gameplan.

Once you have the core steps planned out, all you need to do is just stick to it so you can avoid reacting to every single thing that comes to your social media profile’s news feed.

2. Work on your tasks in batches.

Time is a resource that is highly valued, and if it is exhausted without you yielding any kind of productive results, it would definitely cost you a lot.

When you have tons of things to do on your checklist, you attempt to switch from one task to another in order to get things done the soonest time possible.

Well. Guess what?

Our brains aren’t made for multitasking, and this article will tell you why.

Batching things up means allotting time for a specific cluster or type of goals/agenda first before proceeding to work on other goals. Simply stated, you do things by batch. This technique will help you get your goals in order, eliminate distractions, and schedule ahead of time.

That being said, I suggest that you categorize your tasks and work by following these tips:

• Prepare your draft of posts or a POST BANK so that it‘ll be convenient for you to just pull them out when the time calls for new posts. Thanks to Facebook’s features, you can schedule posts ahead of time or save drafts:

• Follow peak hours. Web users are more active in specific hours of the day. You can learn more about this by checking out Neil Patel’s infographic.

• Understand which posts are timely and which are not. The point here is to make your product relevant to your customers given the seasons or the trends.

3. Create a content calendar.

Some companies stay active for a period of time and the next thing you know, they’re off-the-grid in social media. A content calendar helps  keep you committed. That way, you remain consistent and you won’t have any excuses.

According to Forbes writer Pamela Springer, “For your social media marketing plan to succeed, it’s crucial that you consistently interact online; even if it’s just 10 minutes a day. If you can’t put in the time, it’s best not to start.”

Your content calendar can be as simple or as complicated as you want it to be. The important thing is that you create one and follow it.

It should contain the plot of your posts, the corresponding dates as to when you want to publish them, include  the themes for your posts (among others). Feel free to add other details like specific time of publishing, which social media platform to use and respective purposes of posting.

Important note: If there’s one thing that I really like about using content calendars, it would be that I have a bird’s-eye-view of how my ideas would flow. This helps me polish the message that I am trying to convey on each post giving my updates consistency and more focus.

4. Measure your results.

You can plan all you want, hypothesize all you want, brain storm all you want, but at the end of the day, you’ll never really know how effective your social media marketing efforts are, unless you take the time to measure your results.

Through measuring, you can tell which of your strategies are working, and which ones aren’t.

Once you’ve obtained the hard cold numbers proving to you which of your strategies are bringing you results, you can then scrap the ones that aren’t. Then allocate the budget to those that are working – or to new campaigns that you’d like to try out.

This ensures that your effort isn’t wasted on marketing methods that aren’t working.

If you aren’t used to tracking your results and are  hoping to start now, then I’d like to warn you that there are several pitfalls that you just might fall into. One is focusing on vanity metrics like the number of views on your post, when what you should be focusing on are the number of actions like shares, comments, engagements, etc…

There is more to measuring results than simply crunching or analyzing the numbers, while there are several blog posts that you can read to learn more about it, I urge you to go for several online courses so the kind of learning you’ll acquire is something that is more in depth.

Simply reading one blog post to another can cause confusion since there might be inconsistencies between what the authors are imparting. Let alone the fact that some publishers aren’t as careful with the tips they share compared to those who really take the time to create an in depth course on a certain topic.

5. Automate your tasks.

Just because social media sites run 24/7 doesn’t mean you have to be online 24/7.

You can automate a good number of your social media tasks by simply using plugins or even free apps.

For example, if you have a website and are regularly publishing blog posts, then you don’t have to manually share the article that you published on your website across the different social media platforms. If your website is powered by WordPress, then you can customize your website’s sharing options by going to your dashboard, “settings”, then “sharing”.

Important tip – There are others tasks that you can automate aside from getting your published articles on your website shared on your social media profiles. There are free tools that you can use to pull content from reputable sites like Forbes.com, Entrepreneur.com, and Inc.com (among others), so that everytime these websites publish something, it’ll automatically be shared on your profiles without you doing anything.

What’s next?

Are there social media productivity hacks that you’d like to share?

If you answered the question with a “yes”, then please share your ideas in the comments section below.

Also, if you found the post to be valuable, I’ll surely appreciate it if  you’ll spend 3 seconds of your time to click the share button. Cheers!

—
Photo courtesy – © estherpoon / Dollarphotoclub.com (top most image)

The post 5 Social Media Productivity Tips for Busy Professionals appeared first on Guild of Bloggers.

The eCommerce industry has become a gold mine of opportunity in the modern world. Without leaving your home, you can have access to the tools, connections, and resources that you need to set up shop and start running a business.

If you’re oblivious about how the whole thing works, yet you are determined to open your own eCommerce site, you can simply take courses from reputable websites and be equipped with the knowledge that you need.

According to Knowledgehut, “depending on the number of hours you can allot per day, you can learn the process of developing a solid eCommerce website in a matter of days through signing up on online courses.”

The process has become so attainable and affordable that the competition ballooned into the brutal war zone that it is today.

At such a high level of competition, having an ‘okay’ eCommerce site will no longer cut it. You need every facet of your business to be absolutely exceptional. And no – it’s not just about the storefront. It’s all about creating an outstanding shopping experience.

If you’re looking to learn the elements of what makes an amazing eCommerce site, then this guide is what you need. Allow me to share with you the 10 characteristics of a winning eCommerce site:

1. Winning design

Imagine stepping into a grocery store that is poorly maintained. The walls have cracks, the roof has leaks, the floors are damaged with stains, and there is no clear sense of order with the way the products are displayed; will you seriously have the guts to buy their products?

Probably not. And I don’t blame you.

The thing is, if the store’s management couldn’t even handle things as basic as their store’s maintenance, it would make us doubt if they even did their due diligence to make sure that their products are fresh and fit for consumption?

The same idea applies to eCommerce sites.

If your site looks as if it is poorly maintained, or the design looks straight-up crappy, you can bet your family jewels that it will raise all sorts of red flags to your prospective customers.

Not only will they start to question your product’s quality, but they’ll also start to question your credibility as a seller wondering if you’re really legit or not.

2. Optimized for conversion

While making sure that your website looks fine and dandy is important, sadly, it just isn’t enough to succeed in this industry.

In addition to having a professional looking website, you also need to make sure that the design elements of your eCommerce site are optimized for conversion. And by conversion, I’m talking about sales.

I mean, think about it. Is there even any point of you getting hundreds of thousands of visitors, if not a single one of them would buy from you?

At the end of the day, it all boils down to whether or not you can influence your website visitors to buy.

3. Transparent checkout process

One of the reasons why buyers end up abandoning their shopping cart is because of the eCommerce site’s hidden fees. Several eCommerce site owners have reported this.  Moreover the data gathered in surveys also agree on how hidden fees are the primary reason why people abandon their shopping cart.

In short, the lack of transparency can really hurt your eCommerce site.

A good way to combat this is for you to tell your audience early in the checkout process (ideally at the beginning) about the fees. Make sure that the fees are highly visible or highlighted so that they wouldn’t be missed by your audience.

Another strategy is for you to add the fees on your product’s pricing. That way, the first figure (or price) that they see becomes the actual amount that they have to pay.

4. Solid database Security

Whether you are running a small eCommerce site that carries just a few items, or you are operating a large-scale online retailer with thousands of products, all the critical information that you’ll obtain such as customer data and transactions will at some point be stored in your website’s database. In fact, it will likely store the details of every single one of your customers including their addresses, phone numbers, and their complete purchase history as well as the key financial details about your business like your total sales for the last month.

Of course, you wouldn’t want any of these sensitive data to be compromised or hacked.

If your eCommerce site’s data (especially your customer data) is stolen, it’s going to become almost impossible for you to rebuild the relationship and trust that you’ve established with your customers.

That being said, the question becomes:

1. How do you protect your eCommerce database from potential breaches?
2. What do you do if you cannot afford a full-time database security expert, or if you don’t have a full time Database Administrator among your staff?

The good news for eCommerce operators today is that there are companies offering on-demand dba services that can protect their website’s data. These companies usually offer pay-as-you-go options making their services more affordable for their customers.

Successful eCommerce sites understand the value of protecting their assets so they take the time and resources to invest in database security.

5. Short and optimized checkout process

In addition to being transparent, you should make the entire payment process as seamless as possible for your customers.

That is why it is mandatory for you to integrate a payment system that accepts payments globally, and you need to support as many payment gateways as you can. Additionally, you payment process should work without needing more than one page for checkout.

A simple way to fulfill this is to utilize secure payment services such as 2Checkout. Of course, there should be plenty of alternatives depending on your shopping cart platform.

6. Email capture

Remember that there is more to running an eCommerce site than just selling your products, that is, if you want to gain an unfair advantage over your competitors.

In addition to selling, you also need to give ample amount of emphasis in generating leads. A good way of doing this is by capturing your web visitor’s email address.

When you have their email, you can easily nurture your relationship with them so those who haven’t bought from you yet will eventually buy, and those who have already bought from you will end up buying again.

There are several strategies when it comes to building your email list. The idea is to offer something of valuable – like a discount codes or free guides – in exchange for their email address. From there, you can start building your authority in your niche by sending the information your leads are looking for. You can also use your email list to promote any special offers or discounts, which we’ll talk about later.

7. Customer reviews

Incorporating reviews from your past customers is a great way to inspire positive emotions in your prospective buyers. They relate to testimonials and reviews, especially if it’s about how your previous customers were able to solve their problems by using your product.

Moreover, positive reviews help highlight your Unique Selling Points (USP). To stand out from the competition, you need to make your value proposition as obvious as possible, and customer reviews can help you with just that.

8. Good quality product photos

You will need to expose your products in their best light. Use only high-quality images in the highest resolution possible.

Keep in mind that the product image is probably the first thing your customer would see. Make sure it captures their attention. Also, try including additional details such as product dimensions to give them a clearer visualization of your product.

A reliable strategy is to use product photos in a plain background. However, it is also a good idea to use high quality photos of the product in action.

9. Special offers and promos

Everyone loves special offers.

A time-tested strategy to drive in sales is to offer discounts and other promos. Of course, you shouldn’t just offer these with reckless abandon. You should always be cooking up strategies on how you can maximize the benefits of using these marketing tactics.

One such strategy is to integrate automated promotional offers when your visitor tries to close the page. These are called exit offers and there are various tools out there that will help you accomplish this effect.

Also remember that you can always consult the customer data you’ve gathered from the increased sales. Review their purchasing behavior and their needs. This should help you optimize your product and your site for conversions down the road.

With any of the above methods, you can maximize the value you get from offering these special promotions.

10. Speed and navigation

What will a shopping experience be with a sluggish site and poor navigation?

Pay attention to your site’s loading speed if you want an optimal experience for your visitors. In fact, an average online customer is only willing to wait for a maximum of just 2 seconds before their buying mood is disrupted.  

If your files take a painful amount of time to load, then make sure you compress them into smaller formats. If you’re sending your customers PDF files and you’re looking to convert them to different ones test which types of files will load faster, then there are free tools that you can use for that too.

In addition to all these, the delivery of key information should also be your priority when planning your site’s layout.

For example, if it takes more than a few seconds for your visitor to find your value proposition in a landing page, then you’re doing it wrong. Make sure that they find it in an  instant when they open your landing page.

What’s next?

Are there tips or ideas that you feel should be added on the list above? If you answered that with a “yes”, then please share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Photo credit – © vladimirs / Dollar Photo Club

The post The Anatomy of a Successful eCommerce Site appeared first on Guild of Bloggers.

The dreaded blank white page. Joe has been staring at it frustratingly for hours. His fingers are all stretched, eager to start typing, but he can’t even figure out what his topic should be about.

What’s worse? Just minutes ago he was so inspired after having read an amazing blog post about how other writers are cranking out 10 thousand words daily, yet here he is right now, he can’t even get the title down.

Sigh… “The pain is real indeed”, he says to himself.

Are you struggling with the same things that Joe is struggling with right now? Are you running out of topics to write about for your business blog? If you answered those two questions with a “yes”, then you’re in the right place.

With the tips that I’ll share with you in this guide, you’ll never run out of topics to write about on your business blog – ever again.

Let’s hop right in.

1. Head to Q&A sites to look for topics that are getting a decent amount of interaction.

Q&A sites are such a goldmine. Not only will it help you with generating content ideas, but it can also tell you if the content ideas that you have at hand are something that your audience would really like to read about.

When you go to Q&A sites (I’m a huge fan of Quora btw), all you need to do is to type in a keyword that’s closely related to your niche and see what questions or topics are getting the most answers or comments.

Of course, the more interaction there is in a topic (or a specific question), the more ideal it is for you to write about it since it is already somewhat proven that the people love reading about it. Otherwise, why would it receive social validation like shares, likes, and comments (among others), right?

2. Do a quick survey on your community.

Be very careful with how you use this strategy. Otherwise, you just might sound like you’ve ran out of ideas and are looking to get your community to do the heavy lifting for you.

The key here is on how you frame your survey. Don’t run it as if you’re doing the survey because you aren’t sure what to write about. Instead, position your survey in such a way where you’re conducting one to know what kind of problems your audience are facing right now. That way, you can prioritize the blog topics on your content calendar accordingly based on how urgent the topics are to your audience.

This kind of approach will make it sound like you’re running the survey out of concern for your audience, more than anything else.

3. Visit websites offering online courses.

You’ll hit two birds in one stone using this strategy. That’s why almost all of my clients love using this.

First, you’ll be able to uncover TONS of value packed ideas to blog about. Second, you’ll be able to strategically sequence the order of the topics, making it easier for you to pace the transfer of knowledge from your brain, to your audience’s.

After all, it won’t do you any good to share these golden nuggets of knowledge to your audience, if they can’t even absorb the ideas properly because you weren’t using the proper pacing.

That’s where websites offering that are offering online courses come into play.

When visiting these websites, you’ll see their course’s curriculum and see whether or not people are subscribing to it, whether or not others like it (through its ratings), and what others are saying about it (through the comments).

Head to ZeoLearn you’ll have a clearer idea of what I’m talking about. Once on their website, you’ll immediately see their courses, the ratings of the courses, how many comments each course have, and how many users have subscribed to it.

The best part is, when you click any of the courses, it will take you to the curriculum that will be discussed on the specific course.

That right there is the goldmine.

You can blog about the specific topics of the course, and follow how the topics are laid in order.

* Note – be sure to pick the courses with the most number of subscribers, and those with really good feedback. It is social proof that your audience likes the topics being discussed in the course.

4. Peg your article topics against your monthly / weekly themes.

The idea is, if your content ideas aren’t a good fit to the theme that you determined on your content calendar, then you can easily scrap the idea (for now) and focus on the ones that will add consistency to your content calendar’s theme.

As for the ideas that aren’t a good fit for your content calendar, remember to store them someplace else. That way, you’ll have a bank of content ideas that you can draw out from if you’re running out of ideas.

You can also revisit your content bank of ideas when creating your new content calendar. By doing so, you won’t have to start from scratch when thinking about the topics. If you see anything that fits the new theme, then you can just use it.

5. Spy on your competitor.

While there are several tools that you can use to spy on your competitors, I use Ahrefs’ Content Explorer for it.

The tool is quite easy to use, all you need to do is to login at Ahrefs, go to their Content Explorer tab, type in your competitor’s domain name then hit “search”.

The tool will then show you your competitors articles (or webpages) and the statistics of each page. You can see the page’s number of Tweets, Facebook shares, backlinks, etc…

By now, I hope you can see where this strategy is headed. I mean think about it, since you and your competitors have the same target audience, there’s a good chance that whatever they wrote about that has TONS of shares or backlinks will also garner you the same results.

That being said, all you need to do is to write about the things that your competitors wrote about that had great results. Of course, you shouldn’t simply copy their ideas. You can add your own twist to to your articles. You can combine the ideas of 2 – 3 good performing articles so you’ll have an epic post to share to your readers.

6. Use title generators.

You can bet your family jewels that there are several other title generators on the web, however, these 3 are my favorite:

• Hubspot
• Portent
• TweakYourBiz

There isn’t much that I can tell you about these tools except that they get the job done when it comes to helping you with article ideas.

That being said… try them.

What’s next?

Don’t let the frustration of not being able to decide which topic to write about ruin your day. You can use the ideas that I shared above to give you the push that you need to get started.

Once you’ve started cranking out the words, all you’ll need to do is to allow your creative juice to flow and see your word count skyrocket at lightning speed.

If you have any questions, ideas, or tips that you’d like to share, please do so in the comments section below. Cheers!

Photo courtesy – © 4Max / Dollar Photo Club

The post How to Uncover Business Blog Topics Your Audience Are Craving For appeared first on Guild of Bloggers.

Here’s the thing, I’m guessing that by now, you’ve read somewhere on the internet how someone has gotten bajillions of leads or how someone has quadrupled their sales using contests. At this point, you might even already be convinced that running a contest is the silver bullet that you need to achieve the business breakthroughs that you’re looking for.

I’m not going to lie to you, you may actually be right, but only if you know what you’re doing. Only if you’re employing the best practices that most marketers are using to drastically increase the chances of them getting great results from their contest marketing campaigns.

If you’re looking to find out what these “best practices” are, then you’re definitely in the right place.

I’ll be sharing with you 4 tips that seasoned marketers are using to help them get amazing results from their contests.

Let’s hop right in.

1. Offer a prize that you know your audience will love.

As you can probably imagine, this tip is a non-negotiable one if you want your contests to succeed.  Do this wrong, and no one’s going to bother joining your contest. Do this right, and people will come flooding at your doorsteps to join your contest. So then the question becomes, how do you determine the kind of prize that your audience are going to die for?

There are a couple of ways to go about this:

• You can run a survey.
• You can visit Q&A sites to determine what kind of problems your audience are facing, then make sure that your prize solves your audience’s problems.
• You can ask them straight-up through your social media profiles.
• You can visit your competitors to benchmark on their successful contests.

While there are several other ways to finding out the prize that your audience might like, using the 4 points that I shared above should be able to get you the kind of information that you’re looking for.

2. Make it easy for others to join your contest.

I get it. You’re smart. You know how your contests could go viral if you asked your audience to share your contest first, before they can join. You also know how you could leverage on repeat business if you asked your audience to enter their email address as a requirement for them to join your contest – so you can add them on your email list. And if that isn’t enough, you could  also be thinking about having them post pictures on your social media accounts as a requirement for them to join, so you can leverage on user generated content.

If you’re thinking of asking your audience to do all of these since you wanted to get more mileage out of your contest, then you seriously need to hold your horses.

You need to realize that your audience might find it a bit too taxing to join your contest because of all the requirements that you’re asking for them to join. Of course, the moment they find that joining your contest is too much of a hassle, there’s a good chance that they’ll simply ignore your contest.

So what’s the point that I’m trying to drill down here?

I’m telling you to loosen up on your requirements a bit. I’m telling you to make it easier for your audience to join, because if you overwhelm them with your requirements, there’s a good chance that they won’t join your contest because of the sheer hassle of it.

3. Emphasize the benefits.

When you visit Safecar’s homepage, you’ll see a huge headline on their sidebar saying, “WIN $1500 SCHOLARSHIP FOR A 30 SECOND VIDEO!”.

The headline doesn’t say, “Join Our Contest Now” or anything to that effect, doesn’t it?

It immediately talks about the benefit (the $1500 scholarship), which is what entices their audience to take action. And if you’ll go on reading the blurb on the sidebar, the text is all about the different tiers of benefits that they are offering, and an overview of what their audience needs to do to be able to join the contest.

If you have a good grasp on how people behave online, you’ll realize why emphasizing the benefits of your contest first, is something that you shouldn’t overlook.

I mean, considering how almost everyone is so busy, and there are TONS of distractions on the web, you need to be able to get your audience’s attention, and you need to do it fast! Of course, showing them how they can benefit on something is an almost sure-fire way of doing that.

4. Make the prizes to your contests brand-related.

If your business is all about wearable tech, please don’t give away dining tables for your contest’s prize. Doing so just doesn’t make much sense.

Your audience are visiting your website or your social media profiles because they are wearable tech advocates, if you’ll pitch them your contest using dining tables as your bait (as your prize), they’ll just ignore you.

You’ll never be able to stir the appeal that you need from your audience to get them to join your contests. However, if you give away something that’s highly relevant to your niche (like your products), there’s a good chance that they’ll be interested in your prize.

What’s more… If you use your product as your prize, your audience will be able to experience first hand how amazing it is. Depending on how helpful they’ll find your product to be, they may even take the time to share to their network how amazing it is.

Now compare that with the kind of results that you’d get if you gave away a flower pot, when your audience is all about wearable tech.

What’s next?

Have you been using contests to give your business the boost that it needs? What best practices or tips can you share to the audience to help make their contests successful. Please share your ideas in the comments section below.

Photo courtesy – © iQoncept / Dollar Photo Club

The post Contest Marketing: Take Your Business to Greater Heights Using Contests appeared first on Guild of Bloggers.

Are you looking for marketing wisdom bombs that will help you skyrocket your online sales?

I have one for you — use discount coupons.

You’re probably thinking, “Meh. I tried that already… I didn’t get a single sale. Nada. None. Zilch!”

Here’s the thing, using discount coupons is pretty much like using other marketing methods, if you aren’t using it right, then you won’t be able to get anything out of it. If you’re using your discount coupons the “right way”, however, you’ll be able to get a sales explosion like you’ve never had before.

And so the question becomes, “How exactly do I use my discount coupons, so it’ll get me more sales?”

I’m glad you asked!

That’s exactly what we’re going to talk about right now.

If you’ll follow the tips that I’ll share with you right now, your numbers will attain “sales nirvana”.

Let’s hop right in.

1. Capitalize on social commerce.

If you’ve been to high-traffic community-driven sites, you’ll experience an almost immediate “AHA!” moment on how to use your discount coupons.

I mean, considering how everyone in such a platform are passionate about their niche, we as marketers and business owners would all be a bit touched in the head if we didn’t take advantage of the platform.

If you’ll give the discount coupon sites a quick look, you’ll realize that it most of them have a thriving community of users sharing their discount coupons to other users. Because of how active the community is, it becomes a perfect place for you to add your coupons as well.

Can you imagine the kind of value that you can get as business owner (or marketer) from adding your discount coupons on a thriving site like that?

2. Online contests + discount coupons = massive online sales

If you’ve got a decent amount of social media followers, you can run a contest to stir up interest among them.

This is the flow that I usually follow:

Step 1: I do a shout out telling my followers that I’m running a contest, and I mention in detail what the contest’s mechanics are.

Step 2: I tell them that the prize is a discount coupon that they can use throughout the entire month.

Step 3: As a requirement for them to join, I tell them that they need to share the contest across all of their social media profiles, and they need to buy 1 product.

Step 4: Once I get all the entries, I then award the coupon to the lucky winner.

At this point, several of our followers will end up buying just so they can satisfy the requirements to join our contest (we sell low ticket products, btw).

Before you think about using this strategy, however, I need you to consider these points:

1. Make sure that your audience will appreciate your prize — the discount coupon. Try to give as much as you can on the prize. The thing is, if your prize isn’t enticing enough, they won’t even bother to join your contest.
2. Be very clear about the instruction. Otherwise, it might cause problems in your community.
3. Don’t burden them too much on the requirements. I have found that the “share and buy” requirement that I shared above is working quite well for me. At one point, I asked my audience to share the contest to their community, write their positive experience about our brand, and to buy 1 of our products — the results were terrible.

Only a few participants joined. And for those who joined, they somewhat complained that the requirements for them to join was a bit too overwhelming. The only reason why they joined was that they really liked the prize. If not for that, they would never have joined because of how tedious the process was.

You don’t have to follow the way I patterned my contests. You can always tailor your contest’s mechanics based on your business’ dynamics. Just make sure that you follow the 3 points that I shared above, since these 3 would often spell the difference between this marketing strategy succeeding or not.

3. Podcasts + Outreach-based influencer marketing.

Targeting influencers in their respective industries and turning them into brand ambassadors is a solid strategy that most business owners and marketers are adopting nowadays.

When you add your discount coupons into the mix, you’re bound to get amazing results.

Here’s the game-plan. What you need to do is contact the influencers, and tell them that you can give them and their community a special discount coupon, should they decide to buy your products.

However, as you can probably imagine, you need a special hook to make this work. Simply contacting others and telling them that you’ll give them a discount coupon has a very low probability of working.

And so… you can add other elements into the mix — things like podcasts.

You can invite them on a podcast instead, telling them that you’d like to feature them on your website.

To increase the chances of this strategy working, be sure to tell the influencers the benefits that they can get from being featured in your site.

These are some of the benefits that I use:

• More publicity since I’ll be using paid ads to market the podcast.
• I’ll give them the chance to promote their new products.
• I’ll tell my community to sign-up to their newsletters (among others).

Of course, to top all of these off, I’ll tell them that I’ll give them and their community a special discount coupon.

When I create my outreach email, I make sure that my email comes off as friendly and unassuming.

If you’re quite new to writing outreach emails, I urge you to check out Peter Attia’s article at Moz.com. The tips he shared are evergreen — let alone effective. I know. I’ve been using them myself.

What’s next?

If you found this post valuable, please take 3 seconds of your time to click the “Share” button. Cheers!

The post How to Use Coupon Marketing to Skyrocket Your Online Sales appeared first on Guild of Bloggers.

“I’m sorry…”, these are the last two words that your supervisor uttered as he told you to leave the company.

The experience is quite surreal. As you sit in your office chair and stare at the ceiling as you slowly take everything in, you couldn’t tell if what’s happening is real, or if everything is just a joke. You’ve been coming and going into your office for the last 20 years that it’s practically become your life.

Now that you’ve been let go, what exactly are you going to do? How are you going to pay your bills? Will you still be able to find a new job? All of these questions came rushing in your mind.

While you’re quite disappointed about what happened, you then start to realize something: Maybe what happened to you isn’t so bad after all.

I mean, you’ve been thinking about running an online business for quite some time now so you can spend more time with your family. Maybe it’s high time for you to do that.

Considering how you are jobless right now, there’s no better time for you to pull the trigger and take action on your dream.

The changes might be faint, but you can feel the grief and worries that you felt just seconds ago slowly transform into excitement.

Friends, if you’re at a point where you are truly serious about wanting to start an online business and you won’t let anything stop you from doing so, then I’m glad that you’re here reading this post.

I once was in the same boat myself, and it took me a lot of stumbling, studying, and experimenting before I figured out how to start a successful online business — or what its foundations are at least.

Instead of having you fall for the same frustrating, let alone costly mistakes that I fell for before, I’m going to share with you some of the things that I did right, that drastically contributed in helping me establish my online business.

1. Find a problem to solve.

“Taking the time to find out what problems in the world you are passionate about solving is the key. In my view, life is just too short to build things that don’t make the world better.” – Ryan Allis, Co-Founder of Hive.org

I know that a lot of people will tell you to create an online business based on something that you love doing/creating. After all, if you aren’t passionate about your business, you’ll only get burned out in no time since you don’t enjoy what you’re doing.

I totally get where they’re coming from.

However, you need to remember that you are not the buyers of your products, that’s what your customers do. And if your hobby doesn’t have a huge enough customer base that you can sell to, then your business doesn’t have longevity to it.

Why don’t you do this instead? In addition to only doing the things that you love, why don’t you look for problems that you know a lot of people are struggling with as well? You then think of an overlap between the two and create your business off of that.

That way, you’ll have fun running or starting your business, all while having a large and a passionate enough customer base to sell to.

Ryan Allis published an article at StartupGuide.com about “How to Solve Big Problems”. The way he broke down the value and the how-tos of solving problems is a good read for those who want to start an online business.

2. Create a problem-solving product. One that provides real value.

The product creation process doesn’t have to be rocket science. There are strategies that you can follow to ensure (somewhat) that the product you’ll end up developing is something that your audience would love.

The first question I ultimately end up asking myself is, “What are the problems that my audience are facing?” I then use the answers to this question as the guiding compass to my product design. If the features that my team or I am thinking of adding doesn’t directly (or indirectly) answer this question, then we’d think twice about adding the feature.

While there are several methods that you can use to go about uncovering the problems that your audience are facing, I’m a huge fan of using Q&A sites.

Take Quora.com for example.

All you need to do is type in the keywords that are relevant to your industry; Quora will then bring back the questions that their users have been asking about the topic.

I’ll use the keyword phrase, “Make Money Online” as an example.

You will then be taken to this page after you click the “Search” dropdown option.

This is what comes up when you click the “Questions” option.

As you can see, the people in this niche are keen on learning the easiest ways to make money online. We know this to be true because the question has about 7k follows.

Another thing that we can learn is how the audience is interested in finding out whether it’s safe to earn online, and they also want to know about the best courses to learn about how to make money online.

The site is value-packed, isn’t it?

Just from the information that we’ve obtained at this point, we can somehow hypothesize that creating an informational product — like an online course — that talks about the easiest ways to make money online seem like a good product to consider.

3. Create a professionally designed website.

Just last night, my church friend couldn’t stop sharing how amazing the food was at the Thai restaurant that he dined in. He seemed pleased with the place since he kept on telling everyone about it.

The restaurant started to pique my interest because I found my friend’s reaction to be quite something. I mean, he’s a really shy guy, how is it that he’s now approaching whoever he meets telling them about the restaurant?

When the clock struck 8 PM, I started making my way towards the place. It’s just two blocks away from where I was so I should get there in no time.

As I draw near the second block, I couldn’t help but be attracted to the strong, yet mouth-watering smell that’s coming from the restaurant itself.

The excitement I felt started to intensify. I couldn’t wait to see the kind of food that they’re serving, let alone devour it.

As I went to the restaurant, however, I was in for a huge surprise.

Not only were there flies buzzing around, but the whole place looked very poorly maintained. A portion of the walls had water stains, the paint on the tables and chairs looked worn out, and their concrete floor had cracks — huge ones at that.

I was turned off. I figured that if they’re cutting corners on their establishment’s maintenance, they might also be cutting corners on their food’s cleanliness and safety.

Of course, everything ended with me leaving the place without ordering anything.

Why on earth am I talking about my experience with the Thai restaurant, you might ask?

Well, that’s because your online business can be the restaurant that we talked about — or not.

The choice is yours.

Know that if you don’t give your website its due importance and only settle for something that looks crappy, you are bound to lose a lot of customers.

If you want your customers to take you seriously, you need to look the part.

The good news is, you don’t have to spend bazillions of dollars just to have a professional website created for you. There are several highly skilled web developers nowadays who can create your website with an hourly rate of only $30. I say “only” because there are those who will charge you twice or thrice as much.

I know that there are those who charge hourly rates that are way lower than the figure I mentioned, however, most of the people I worked with that were charging such meager rates tend to produce terrible results.

4. Publish copy that sells.

While your website’s aesthetics play a huge part in conveying the message that highly skilled professionals run your business, what ultimately compels your audience to buy your services is your website’s copy.

Imagine the salespeople handing out fliers in malls. When you examine their appearance, you’ll soon find out that they look very professional and clean. Just because they look that way, you’d even feel comfortable walking up to them asking about whatever it is that they are selling.

However, even if you’re open to purchasing whatever they’re offering, there’s a good chance that you’ll walk away without having bought anything if they are not equipped with the skills to influence you to buy their products.

If they talk to you, however, asking about how they can help you, what you’re looking for, or sharing with their suggestions on the best possible product that would fit your circumstances, you’ll most likely end up buying what the salesperson is offering.

The same thing applies to your websites. If they’re on your site yet they don’t see a good enough copy trying to “accommodate” them, then they’ll most likely just click away. After all, you may look credible and all that, but if they aren’t 100% convinced to buy your product (just because you didn’t convince them or you did such a crappy job of doing so), then they’ll never buy from you.

5. Use a reliable hosting company.

You need to realize that having a fantastic product and a professionally designed website is one thing, but making sure that your visitors can see you is another.

Imagine owning a coffee shop and winning over the hearts of thousands of prospect customers in your local area.

As your customers flock to your place to buy your coffee, they are greeted with the sign, “Sorry. We’re Closed for Maintenance.”

How on earth do you think would they feel at that point?

If that happened once, then it might be excusable since they would think that it’s an isolated case. However, if they are greeted with the same sign 4 – 5 times more, then they’ll think of you as unreliable. Your customers will think twice about going to your coffee shop because you might be closed again.

In your online business’ case, you need to have a reliable hosting company that wouldn’t give you downtimes. Period.

When you customers think about visiting your business website, they should feel confident that you are there, waiting to service them. They should never have to ask themselves, “I wonder if thenameofyourbusiness.com is up right now, or if it’s under maintenance?”

With how cutthroat the competition is nowadays, you’ll never stand a chance against your competitors if your website keeps on going down for maintenance.

While there are several hosting companies claiming to be the best in what they do, I need you to be very careful with who to go for as your hosting provider. I remember doing my due diligence in the past by checking out several online reviews to learn which hosting companies are giving the best service. The review that HostingFacts.com published is particularly useful for me because they didn’t just sign-up with 27 hosting providers to have a clear idea of what each has to offer, they even took the time to monitor each provider’s performance actively.

6. Formulate a client acquisition method that you think would work best for your industry, and stick to it.

There are going to be naysayers who will stop you from running an online business because the industry is already too crowded.

Don’t let them get to you.The last thing you want to do is to let someone who hasn’t even tried their hand in the industry dictate whether you’ll be a success or a failure.

The last thing you want to do is to let someone who hasn’t even tried their hand in the industry dictate whether you’ll be a success or a failure.

Look. You are different from them, OK? You’re the kind of guy (or girl) who isn’t scared to make your dreams happen no matter how others try to discourage you.

You have a conqueror’s blood in you that not many people possess.

Most people just want to be on the safe side and be bystanders. These are the kind of people who live mediocre lives and live a life of regret. These are also the same people who will try to keep you from achieving your dreams — don’t let them.

Instead of getting overwhelmed by the thought dealing with the fierce competition, why don’t you try to map out a client acquisition strategy that would best fit your business dynamics, then give your plan a go?

Remember that you’ll never really know if your plan will work unless you don’t give it a shot.

In my case, I usually give my client acquisition strategy 1 – 2 months to see if it’d work. Within that duration, I keep on improving and optimizing the strategy to increase the chances of it working.

If at the end of 2 months I still feel that the results aren’t satisfying enough, I go back to the drawing board to map out a new strategy.

Remember, don’t ever give up. Keep on persevering while being very smart with how you go about your every action.

What’s next?

Have you been running your own online business for quite some time now?

If you answered the question with a “yes,” what are some tips that you can share with our audience of soon-to-be online business owners to help make their transition smoother?

Please share your ideas in the comments section below. Cheers!

The post Are You Starting an Online Business? Read this First. appeared first on Guild of Bloggers.

It stinks to high heavens whenever you compete against a brand with an established online presence.

These uphill battles are often time-consuming, expensive, tedious, and frustrating. This is especially true if you don’t have a clearly defined Internet marketing strategy, let alone a high-impacting one that’s going to give you an edge over your competitors.

If you’re looking for internet marketing shortcuts that you can use to overtake your competitors as the leading brand in your industry, then allow me to share these three marketing tips.

The tips that I’ll share with you will help you get more traffic, better brand recognition, generate leads or even build relationships with strategic individuals on the internet — all of which you can use to explode your business’s growth, and be seen as the number 1 authority in your industry.

Does that sound good to you? Let’s hop right in, then.

1. Collate and Improve. Build a skyscraper.

To be very specific, I’m talking about collating your competitors’ best content, improving it, and making it an ultimate guide.

Think along the lines of Brian Dean’s Skyscraper technique.

The game plan is for you to create one epic content that houses boatloads of information that your audience might need. That way, instead of them having to read 3 – 5 different resources on the web to get all the information that they need, they can simply go to your content and have everything in one place.

There are a lot of good things that can come out of this strategy:

1. These type of content are usually lengthy because they are comprehensive. Google loves lengthy content. In fact, some data suggests that the average word count of the page’s ranking number 1 in Google’s SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) often exceeds 1800+ words.
2. Your audience will love you for taking the time and effort to publish something so epic, that they no longer need to do further research. This helps them save time and the headache of looking for other sites.
3. You’ll become the go-to guy whenever you audience needs help, or if they have questions about your niche. This opens up a lot of opportunities for you to sell them your products since you can position your products as the solution to their problem.

Of course, I’m just scratching the surface with the points that I mentioned above. As you can probably imagine, there are a plethora of benefits that you can get from using this strategy.

Here’s a bird’s-eye view of how to execute this strategy:

Step 1: Type in your keywords in Google’s search box. Use multiple variations of the search phrase so you can see the guides that have been published about the topic.

Step 2: Get the top 5 articles on the SERPs. Open each guide then take note of all the topics covered on each post.

* Note – Don’t just get the first five results of the SERPs. Some of these are just homepages or ads. What you want are actual posts or articles.

Step 3: Open a new word processing file like Google documents. Add all the topics that you took note of as an outline to your word processor. Trim your outline to make sure that your guide doesn’t become fluffy. Only include the topics/subtopics that you think add real value to your audience.

Step 4: Start writing the content based on the outline that you created.

Step 5: Publish your content then market it strategically like your life depended on it. This bit is important because no matter how epic your content is, no one’s going to be able to see it considering how noisy the internet has become.

If you follow the steps that I outlined, you should be able to create a massive content that your audience will love, which in turn will help you rank on the SERPs, get more traffic, and more leads and sales.

2. Use discount coupons strategically.

Hold your horses.

Trust me. You need to read this.

I know that you’ve probably used coupons on your website at one point. After all, the discount coupon strategy is so mainstream, that even your neighbor’s 4th grader probably knows about it.

Even having said that, however, I was surprised to see how most business owners limit the way they’re using their discount coupons by only publishing them on their websites.

Instead of doing just that, you can add your coupons on discount coupon websites as well.

This strategy works like magic because those who visit popular discount coupon websites are often easy to sell because they’ve already made the decision to buy a product. They’re just looking for the biggest bang for their buck by looking for discount offers. Not only that, these types of websites often have millions of monthly traffic, and are a good place to get more engagement and shares.

To solidify my point, let’s take a look at Dealspotr. If you run the website through Similarweb, you’ll quickly realize that the website has an estimated monthly traffic of 1 million, and the majority of the visitors are from the United States.

Another benefit that you can get from these types of platform is how their users often love to engage with other users. You’ll see people sharing, voting, or commenting on the discount coupons posted.

Can you see how powerful this platform can be when it comes to marketing your discount coupons? When you’re using this strategy, the most obvious benefit you can get from it is you having an increase in sales. You’d want that, don’t you?

3. Epic customer support + upselling your products =  $$$

You might not have noticed it, but when you’re doing customer support, you are also marketing to your customers.

It’s interesting how a lot of business owners fail to see this. They tend to take customer support as something that’s entirely separate from marketing or sales.

I think that’s a big mistake.

When you think about it, customer support, marketing, and sales, have a huge overlap between them. Because as your customer support team addresses the problems that your customers are facing, they need to sell their solutions, and as they sell they do that, they can strategically pitch or upsell your products (which is what marketers do).

When business owners and marketers fail to see this overlap, they end up leaving a lot of money on the table.

To make this strategy work; however, two crucial elements needs to be in place:

1. Your team needs to be able to provide incredible customer support.

I’ve reached out to 19 industry experts in the past asking them about their one best tip to providing stellar customer support. If your customer service agents aren’t as effective in providing customer support, then you can have them check out the guide.

Remember that providing amazing customer support is the foundation of this strategy. Without it, this method of marketing is bound to fail.

2. Your team needs to be able to upsell your products strategically.

This bit requires skill. A decent amount of it, I might add.

Your customer support team needs to be able to transition smoothly from answering their callers’ questions, to upselling your products as the solution to their problems.

If they can pull this off the right way, their callers’ won’t feel sold at. The only thing they’ll see is the agent trying to solve their problems.

What I like the most about this strategy is you no longer need to employ any new tactics, or set up new assets like websites, etc.

This strategy is more of an idea or a principle. You just need to integrate it into your existing team that handles customer support, and you should be good to go.

What’s next?

Are there ideas, strategies, or suggestions that you’d like to add? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below. Cheers!

The post Skyrocket Your Business Growth Using These Killer Marketing Strategies appeared first on Guild of Bloggers.

One of the best possible marketing strategies that you can use to grow your business’s bottom line is coupon marketing, and I’m not just hypothesizing here. In fact, there are several data, and statistics gathered all over the web that would back this idea — some of which I’ll share with you below.

If you’re about to make the decision of using coupon marketing but are still thinking twice about the value that you can get from it, then allow me to share with you the five hard-to-resist benefits of using this method of marketing.

1. It can help you win over your competitor’s customers.

“53% of adults living in high-income households (earning $200,000 a year or more) are willing to switch brands for the sake of using a coupon” – GfK

If you’re into using coupon marketing, then you don’t always have to view your competitors as someone whom you need to contend with, you can view them as a place where you can fish for more customers.

Think about it. If you’ll run a Facebook paid ad campaign where you’ll target the Facebook users that “Liked” or interacted with your competitor’s fan page, then you can somewhat ascertain that you’re marketing to the right set of people.

When you integrate your discount coupons to your Facebook ad’s creative design, then you’ll have two things going for you: a) you are marketing to the right audience, and b) you are leveraging the power of using discount coupons. Considering the figure that GFK discovered in their research, the synergism that you’ll get from both elements can surely help propel your business to greater heights.

2. It encourages your customers to take action on your offers.

“The results we get from using coupon marketing is often remarkable. Through using discount coupons, we are able to double our website traffic, get more leads, and we even get a spike in our sales.” – Jerry Hsieh, Moneylend.net

Convincing your customers that your product is worth their money is one thing, influencing them to take action on your offer is another.

As business owners, it’s important that we realize how our customers will tend to forget about us if they do not take immediate action on our offers. The more your customers delay in making the decision to buy, the higher the chances of you missing the sale.

Sure, the word “immediate” may vary from one industry to the other. As you can probably imagine, there is a huge difference in the meaning of the word “immediate” when we’re talking about the real estate industry, versus selling shoes. For the people involved in real estate, a couple of months can still be considered “immediate” considering how massive the dollar amount is involved in the transaction. However, when you’re selling shoes, anything past 1 – 2 months (maybe even weeks) can no longer be considered “immediate.”

Whatever the meaning is of the word “immediate” in your industry, you need to target that. And coupon marketing can help you with just that.

3. It increases your sales dramatically.

“315 billion coupons were issued in the U.S. in 2013, 2.8 billion were redeemed” – NCH

The figure is a clear giveaway of how potent of a tool discount coupons can be when it comes to growing your sales.

Even if you get only 1% of the entire 2.8 billion “pie”, you’ll still see a massive leap in your sales like you’ve never seen before.

A strategy that most business owners are using nowadays is to add their coupons on reputable high-traffic discount coupon websites like Dealspotr.com. A quick look at Dealspotr will give you an idea of why the site is such a goldmine. The site’s users are usually eager to share, upvote, or leave their feedback (mostly positive ones) to the people who are sharing the coupons. This drastically increases the chances of the discount offers going viral. It is for this reason that businesses (no matter what the size) are into using discount coupon websites.

4. It encourages brand loyalty.

“68% of consumers state that coupons generate loyalty” – RetailMeNot

There are a handful of reasons why you need to gun for brand loyalty, not only does it bring you long-term profits, but it also has the ability to influence your audience to market your business through word-of-mouth marketing among other things.

When we think about companies like Apple Inc. and how their customers react when they’re about to release a new phone, we are reminded of how powerful brand loyalty is. Their customers usually end up flocking in droves waiting for the stores to open so they’ll be one of the firsts to ever have the new phone. This kind of passion just doesn’t happen to other companies like Samsung.

When you have a passionate and a loyal customer base that are supporting your brand just like Apple Inc’s, then you’ll be able to reach a level of business stability that not many business owners will ever experience.

If you’re looking to influence your audience into becoming loyal customers, then you can use discount coupons to help you with just that.

5. It gives your customers’ a better shopping experience.

“80% of shoppers say that using coupons makes them feel smarter” – Inmar

When your customers feel good about themselves while shopping, there is a good chance that they’ll end up buying more since they can associate buying with a positive experience.

Here’s the thing, when your customers are using your discount coupons, they will end up praising themselves (even if secretly) since they were able to buy the things that they wanted at such an affordable rate — because they were smart enough to use your discount coupons.

This kind of feel-good experience can lower down your customers’ defenses making it easier for you to influence them to buy more from you.

What’s next?

At this point, the question you should be asking yourself is not whether you should be using discount coupons, you should be way past that by now. The question you need to be asking is how you’ll run you coupon marketing campaigns to get the best results. If there are questions or ideas that you’d like to share with us, please do so in the comments section below. Cheers!

The post The Coupon Effect: Why Your Business Needs it Now More than Ever appeared first on Guild of Bloggers.

Let me guess: You are sick and tired of seeing the same number of email subscribers on your web dashboard, aren’t you?

You keep hearing from the experts that the money is on the list, yet as you endeavor to grow your email subscribers, you barely get any results.

At this point, you’re just about ready to hang your gloves.

Sigh…

Friends, don’t give up just yet, will you? Allow me to share with you this simple-to-implement, yet highly effective list building strategies that can help you with growing your subscribers.

Let’s hop right in.

1. Turn your blog commenters into subscribers.

As you can probably imagine, the concept behind this strategy is quite simple; when your blog readers add their comments on your posts, redirect them to a “Thank you” page then add a call-to-action within the page asking them to subscribe to your email list.

Here’s an example “Thank you” page from SEO Yoast that follows the same strategy.

When using this strategy, I urge you to treat your “Thank You” page’s copy the way you’d treat a sale page’s copy.

Don’t just say, “Thank you for commenting. Sign up now to get your blah blah blah…” If you do this, your conversion rate won’t be as high when compared to using the tricks of the trade that copywriters use to increase the conversion rate of the sales pages they are working on.

Related article: Unique Marketing Tips to Get You More Customers

2. Value-packed welcome message.

Let me ask you this: When someone connects with you through your social media profiles, do you merely accept their connection request and leave them be? Or do you take the time to say “Hi”?

Or…

Do you take the time to say “Hi,” offer them something valuable, and lead them to your sign up form so they can avail of what you are offering?

I hope you’ve been doing the latter. Otherwise, you’d have missed the opportunity of growing your email list when all you needed to do was to tweak your welcome template a bit, then copy and paste it into your message box.

(Ouch!)

I mean, think about it. How many connections do you have in your social media accounts? How many of them signed up to your email list? If you answered “none,” then maybe that’s because you didn’t offer them something value when you both got connected, and you didn’t ask them to sign up to your list either.

3. Youtube + Clear CTA + Landing Page = Email Signups

According to Youtube.com, they have over a billion users. When you check out their website’s stats in Similarweb.com, you’ll find that they have about 20.50 billion monthly visitors.

I don’t know about you, but seeing all these numbers tells me one thing — YouTube is awesome!

You probably agree with me, don’t you?

With how active the community is on the platform, it becomes one of the best places where you can fish for email subscribers.

Now that we’re past how amazing YouTube is, let’s talk about how exactly you can get YouTube’s website visitors to sign up to your email list.

Here’s the gist of the strategy:

1. At the end of your video, add a clear call-to-action telling the users to click the link on your video’s “Description” section.
2. Add a link to your landing page in your video’s description.
3. Add a clear call-to-action on your landing page telling your visitors to sign up.

I have to tell you that this strategy is so effective, that even James Wedmore himself — a seasoned video marketer that’s helped thousands of business owners — is using the strategy.

Before one of James’ videos in YouTube ended, here’s how he added his call-to-action.

After his viewers click the link in his video’s description, the viewers are then taken to his landing page.

With this strategy, you can funnel your YouTube viewers into your website, and into signing up to your email list.

Related article: Skyrocket Your Business Growth Using These Killer Marketing Strategies

What’s next?

Did you find the list building strategies helpful? If you answered with a “yes,” then please take three seconds of your time to share the post with your community. Cheers!

The post 3 List Building Strategies that Still Works Like Magic! appeared first on Guild of Bloggers.

Like every year prior, 2017 is your year!

You are going to lose 15 pounds, clean out your garage, be a better spouse, and make a gazillion dollars from your business.

Maybe your business has plateaued, maybe it’s not where it should be, maybe you just launched, or maybe it is on the brink of success. Ultimately, you are committed to the success of your business. It is your baby.No matter the maturity of your business, some simple yet impactful effective measures can be taken to lead you to the path of success.

No matter the maturity of your business, some simple yet impactful effective measures can be taken to lead you to the path of success.

1. Set measurable goals.

Goals that aren’t measurable are pretty much useless. I wish you good luck if your goal is to “cut costs” or “generate more revenue.” These are arbitrary goals and can’t cannot be held accountable by a quantified figure.

Set measurable goals that you can track. Be specific in setting your goals!

For example, “I want to increase revenue by 15% by the end of Q2.” Or “I want 5,000 users by the end of the year.” Both goals are reasonable and measurable goals that you can set.

Boom. Write it out on your bathroom mirror or your intern’s forehead and get going!

2. Get a Coach.

It is extremely difficult, if not damn near impossible to succeed on your own.

Everyone needs a support system. Every world-class athlete has a coach. Michael Jordan, Peyton Manning, and Albert Pujols didn’t get to their level of success by themselves. They had coaches helping them along the way.

Whether you need a drill sergeant, someone to keep you accountable, or someone to nicely encourage you, having a coach is a great way to help make your business a success.

I must stress the importance of a third-party coach. What I mean by “third-party” is a person that is not a friend or relative. A friend or relative may be bias or emotionally vested.

Use a hired gun. This coach will have an objective perspective. They’ll have fresh ideas and a different point-of-view on how to get you where you need to be.

Wouldn’t you like your name to be used in the same sentence as the leaders in your space? A coach will help you get there.

3. Remove Time-Consumers From Your Routine

It’s time to cut out the fat.

Refuse meetings that aren’t vital to your business goals. What is it that can’t be relayed in a call or email? It’s time to say “no.” This is tough especially if you are a people pleaser or genuinely trying to help someone. It’s time to ask yourself what is at stake if you don’t focus on the important things. Think about your business. Think about your life!

Minimize the amount of time you are in your inbox. Ladies and gentlemen, inbox zero is a delusional goal! You’re only going to get more emails. Just be one with the fact that your inbox will always accumulate messages. The best thing you can do is focus on the emails that are aligned with helping you achieve your goals.

Meetings and spending time in your inbox are two of the biggest time-consumers.

Ever open your inbox or browser with the intent to do one thing, only to realize 30 minutes later you started doing something else? Yup, been there. I’ve opened my inbox to send an email numerous times only to get sucked into Twitter and other mindless activities.

Focus Start by focusing on the important things. If the activity is a part of accomplishing your measurable goals then keep doing it. If not, then move on. No matter what the task is, ask yourself, “Is this where I should be spending my time? Will this contribute to the overall success of my business?” If not, then it’s time for you to move on to the next thing.

4. Delegate

As I mentioned earlier, its is very difficult to succeed on your own. The power of delegation is extremely under-utilised and yet is one of the most effective things to implement.

Are you doing tasks you aren’t proficient at or passionate about? Personally, I am bad at organizing my inbox and calendar. As a result, I have someone else do it for me. This has allowed me to focus on doing things related to my strengths.

Part of being a great leader is helping your team to improve. Give them tasks you know they’ll be good at or will challenge them to improve. Challenging your team will keep them happy, keep them on the team, and help accomplish company goals.

I’m not saying to give them busy work. This will not help them grow nor will it help drive company growth. If necessary, outsource the busy work which is what I did with my inbox and calendar.

5. Expect the unexpected.

Life will always throw lemons at you. Nothing will 100% go your way. People quit and servers crash. things change.

How you react is much more important than the event itself. You have to roll with the punches. Having this in the back of your mind will allow you to calmly react to situations when the proverbial “shit” hits the proverbial “fan.”

While people are freaking out, you, your cool self will be taking care of business.

6. Give your customers what they want.

Are you solving a problem for the customer?

Do you have some type of offering that will improve the customer’s life?

Your customers are gold. Lay rose petals at their feet as they walk. Listen to them. Get feedback from your customers. What do they like? What do they dislike? What do they want more of? One powerful thing to do is call them. It’s easy in the digital age to send emails and surveys. They’ll appreciate the time you take to give them a personal phone call. Take a few moments of their time, ask good questions, then shut up and listen.

Too many businesses fail because they are not building something for the customer. Founders and CEO’s are instead building things they want—like it’s some after-school project.

No one cares what you want. It’s about what the customers want. Give it to them!

In the end, the market will determine your destiny.

7. Take care of yourself.

Above anything, take care of the most important thing in your life . . . You! Make sure your mind, body, and soul are balanced.

• Exercise regularly.
• Have a well-balanced, nutritious diet consisting of whole foods.
• Get your 7-8 hours of sleep.
• Meditate. Go to church. Practice whatever spiritual beliefs you have.
• Spend time with your friends and family. Put away your phone during this time!
• Pursue hobbies outside of work. Creative outlets outside of work can spark creativity while at work.

In 1st Corinthians 6:20 Christians are charged to honor God with their bodies. If someone gave you a beautiful and rare piece of religious art and asked you to take care of it, you would do so would you not?

Being good stewards of the physical vessel means we must not only be mindful of what we put into our bodies as both food and drink but must make the conscious effort to bring glory to God with whatever we eat or drink.

Regular, moderate, and intense physical activity – such as walking or running, has significant benefits for health, as does refraining from smoking and excess alcohol consumption.

You are your company’s biggest asset. If you are not taking good care of yourself then your business will feel the aftermath.

8. Find ways to add more value.

Exceed the customer’s expectations. Add packages to your current offering. Add an extra unit to their order, provide free customer service, free trials, or an e-book. “Wow” the customer with your generosity.

Creating a brand of delivering value will create loyalty. Loyalty creates a following. Loyalty adds more $$$ money in your bank account.

The bare minimum does not increase loyalty and will make you easily forgotten by the customer. Amazon, Nordstrom, and Costco’s customer-obsessed attitude have fueled its ridiculous loyalty, growth, and success.

9. Experiment

Try a different approach. If sales have peaked or marketing has stagnated, try another angle. Just take some action. You won’t know everything beforehand. You might not be prepared and there’ll never be a perfect time. Don’t underestimate the power of trial and error.

Throw a hail mary if necessary. Don’t be afraid to try something risky. That’s what George Washington did when he crossed the Delaware. Things seemed to work out for him . . . and us. Thanks, George.

10. Be a storyteller.

Who doesn’t like a story? The Odyssey, The Godfather, Wizard of Oz. Humans are obsessed with stories. It’s ingrained in our DNA. Ancient Egyptians used hieroglyphics to tell a story. Modern humans are now using those same hieroglyphics to recite (attempt to, at least) that same story.

People don’t buy features, fancy designs, or buttons. They buy the emotions behind what you are offering.

For example, BMW gives you the ultimate driving experience. Who doesn’t want the ultimate driving experience!?

Create a story behind your product or service that compels the user to buy. Create an emotion that makes the customer say, “I want to feel that way.”

So . . . what is your story?

Find ways to constantly move forward. Success is only an overnight result after months or years of incremental growth. Nobody launches a business and becomes a hit the next day. It takes blood, sweat, and tears. Small actions taken daily will lead to greater results.

Guest post: Rana Tarakji is an entrepreneur and a lifestyle writer at Stylerail.

The post 10 Ways to Make Your Business a Success in 2017 appeared first on Guild of Bloggers.

Social media has become much more visual over the years, and it should come as no surprise that photos have taken center stage.

For businesses, that means they need to be able to come up with photos that look good, stand out, and are able to grab the attention of their audience — or risk being left behind.

While larger businesses may be able to hire professional photographers, smaller businesses often can’t afford to do so. The good news is that there are ways that you can come up with better photos for social media yourself – you just need to know how.

Rule of Thirds

To use the rule of thirds you’ll have to divide your frame into a 3×3 grid – and most modern cameras or smartphones have an option to enable it.

That grid can then be used to position the elements in your photo, by placing them in specific thirds, on intersections, or in alignment with the gridlines.

The idea behind the rule of thirds is to create more interesting photo compositions that are able to stand out and look better.

Remove Noise

Aside from these tips it is important that the quality of the photos that you publish on social media are up to scratch – and you could use Movavi Photo DeNoise to help in that regard. It will let you fix grainy photos with photo noise reduction and make them look crisp and clear.

Using Movavi Photo DeNoise to reduce and eliminate noise from your photos is easy, and just takes a few clicks. By the time you’re done your photos should look much better, and will be ready to be published on social media.

Right Dimensions

Before you snap a photo for social media, think about where it is going to be published and the dimensions it will appear in.

Different social media platforms display photos in different dimensions and aspect ratios, and you should try to frame your photo accordingly.

By making sure you use the right dimensions according to the platform it will be published, you can ensure that it isn’t cropped or resized in a way that alters how it looks.

Different Perspectives

Most photos are snapped from eye-level because that is the natural pose for taking photos. However if you want your social media photos to look more interesting, you should shift their perspective.

Try snapping photos from below or above eye level, or by getting up close and filling the frame with the subject.

Think outside the box, and show a different and unusual perspective to make your photos stand out.

Conclusion

The more you learn about the dynamics of creating a winning social media photo, the higher your chances are of getting better engagements (even conversions) to your social media posts (or ads).

If you’re going to create the social media photos yourself, then be sure to implement the tips that I’ve shared.

If you’re busy and you don’t have the time (and the skill) to create the social media photos, however, then you can hire an online freelancer to help you with the photo.

What’s Next?

Are there strategies that you can share on how to create better photos? If you answered with a “yes,” then be sure to share your ideas in the comments section below. Cheers!

The post 3 Ways to Come Up with Better Photos for Social Media appeared first on Guild of Bloggers.

Job recruiting can be tricky these days, especially now that everyone knows the types of perks that companies like Google have to offer new hires. Even if your company isn’t in the tech field, you still need to compete to get the best employees.

Some companies are taking their inspiration from those in Scandinavia, which boasts about having the best work culture possible. Their employees are dedicated, yet managed to have personal lives. They’re happier all around. Here are some of these Scandinavian methods that you can use to recruit new employees.

Just keep in mind that you need to follow through on your promises.

1. Offer perks packages that are above and beyond the norm.

Many companies offer their new hires the standard package of one week of vacation, health insurance and paid sick days after 90 days, and so on. This doesn’t help them stand out from the crowd. If you really want your company to bring in the best and the brightest new hires, you need to think outside of the box.

Consider offering your new hires those perks after the first 30 or 45 days. You can also raise the amounts of sick/personal and vacation days that new hires receive. There’s no need to stay with the old tried-and-true packages when you’re competing to bring in the best talent.

Of course, you may not be able to offer the perks packages that come with jobs in Scandinavia, but as long as you throw more on the proverbial table than most American companies, you’re ahead of the game.

2) Point out what your standard work days are like.

An 8-hour work day is what everyone aspires to.

In Scandinavia, this actually happens. People go to work, spend their days being very productive, and then get to leave on time to be with their families. This isn’t always the case over here in the U.S. – but it could be at your company.

If you have a structured work day that needs to be strictly adhered to, then you can use it to lure in new hires. Put something in the new hire paperwork or employee contract stating that employees only work eight hours each and every weekday.

This ensures that your employees, especially the new ones, will be happier and more productive. You’ll also be able to recruit some good talent.

3) Make sure that your new hires realize that they aren’t expected to be on the job 24/7.

Work/life balance is the new trend. People have realized that their smartphones and constant connectivity are ruining their home lives and personal time. If you don’t expect your employees to be on the job when they’re off of work, create an official policy that says so. And then make sure to inform all potential recruits about this policy.

Of course, you might work in a field that does require this type of connectivity, in which case this is a moot point.

4) Tell new hires that every employee is expected to use their vacation time.

This is one of the main differences between work culture in Scandinavia and work culture in the United States.

In Europe, those employees receive a lot of vacation days – and actually use them. They have a set amount of mandated time off that they take advantage of. In the U.S., it’s the opposite.

Employees receive little vacation time (in comparison anyway) and don’t always get to use that time. Your company needs to ensure that your employees can properly get away and enjoy their time off. Mandating vacation days is the main piece of this puzzle. As long as you have an enforced policy regarding the need to use this time off, you can tell any future employees about it.

5) Conduct interviews as if they aren’t really interviews.

Everyone has been to a formal job interview where the recruiter or H.R. employee asks a series of standard questions and the potential employee answers them. In between, the two kind of stare at each other nervously. This isn’t a good way to bring in talented recruits. Instead, you need to make the interviews into something resembling discussions which also help in reducing your time to hire.

You can set up these discussions so that all of your questions are answered, but the entire process is less formal. The people that you’re “interviewing” are more likely to be at ease. How does this help your recruitment process? Well, it makes your company look less formal, and thus more enticing. Few people want to work at a very formal, highly structured company. Instead, they want one where things seem less strict. The levels of productivity may be the same, but the atmosphere is not.

6) Let employees from various departments interview potential employees.

Tradition states that the only employees doing the recruitment interviews are those who work in human resources. This doesn’t need to be the case anymore. Employees from various departments can do the interviewing as well. Why? Well, this ensures that all of the employees mesh well together. No matter the size of the company, those employees are no doubt going to have to work together at one point or another.

For example, if you have employees in a design department and you’re interviewing copywriters, then it makes sense for them to interact at some point during the hiring process. You don’t want to find out later on (after the person has been hired) that there are major personality conflicts. That doesn’t bode well for future projects.

7) Be completely honest about what the job entails.

While you don’t want to deter potential employees by telling them how awful this potential job is, you do need to be honest about what will be expected of them. Are parts of the job tedious? Are there a lot of expectations that will need to be managed? Do some of your clients have extremely high expectations?

These are all things that should be disclosed during the interview process. You don’t want to simply complain how bad things are, as that will scare off just about everyone. (In fact, that’s the first sign of a bad company to work for.) However, you should be completely honest about the tougher parts of the job. Your potential employees will thank you and think more positively about your company. The ones that are cheerful about everything (and gloss over the bad parts) are the ones who will lose out.

8) Realize that potential employees have bad days.

Everyone has an “off day” now and then. It’s even worse when that person shows up in your office for their job interview on that “off day.” You need to look for these signs so that you can schedule a follow-up interview with those people. After all, you might overlook a great new employee who just interviewed badly because they spilled coffee on themselves that morning or missed the bus.

Some signs to look for include those of nervousness (shaky legs, constant hand motions, actual shaking), frustration (a look of sheer exasperation in their eyes), and general unease. Since you’re a seasoned recruiter, you’ll be able to tell. Instead of discounting these employees outright, you should offer a follow-up interview in a more informal location.

While the discussion method mentioned below is also a good way to deterring nervousness, it doesn’t work in all cases. Instead, if you set up an interview in a coffee shop or the office cafeteria the next time around, your interviewees will be more relaxed. And once they’re having a good day, you’ll be able to see if they’re a better fit for your company.

By taking the Scandinavian approach to running your business and recruiting new employees, you’ll find that you have a better pool of applicants to choose from. People want to work for a company that truly offers them a good work/life balance, an excellent perks package, and a standard eight-hour day.

The fact that they have to take vacations where they unplug from work is just icing on the cake. Yes, in some of these cases your whole company has to be on board, especially where the work days and vacation policies are concerned. However, you’ll find that these policies will make even your existing employees happier.

Yes, there’s a reason why people turn to Scandinavia for company inspiration. These are just eight inspirations from those countries that can make your recruitment process easier and your current employees happier.

Author Bio –

Sameer Panjwani is the Founder & CEO of Mondovo, an online marketing toolset that helps you track your rankings, monitor your site stats, and research your competitors. A man of many talents, Sameer is currently on a mission to help 1 million businesses grow organically through his products and services. Follow Sameer on Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn | YouTube | Google+

The post 8 Innovative Techniques Used by Companies to Recruit New Hires appeared first on Guild of Bloggers.

This Similarweb review will help you determine if the platform is the ideal competitor research tool and analysis for your business.

What are your competitors up to?

Does that question often cross your mind?

Wouldn’t it be great if you had an idea of where your competitors are getting their traffic, the kind of traffic they’re getting (paid or organic), or from which sites their web visitors are mostly coming from (among other things)?

If you’ve been drooling over the thought of obtaining these crucial details about your competitors, then you’re in the right place!

The review we’re sharing with you right about the ins and outs of Similarweb will help you with just that — obtain pertinent info about your competitors.

Do you like what you’re reading so far? Then let’s get to learning more about Similarweb.

What is SimilarWeb?

SimilarWeb is an online tool that offers market intelligence insights to business owners and marketers through the data that the platform gathers from hundreds of sources.

Among its many uses, Similarweb is used for competitive research and analysis.

Because of the crucial insights it produces, the platform has become a must-have tool for marketers and business owners.

Simply enter your competitor’s website in SimilarWeb’s search box, and you’ll start seeing various data points. (More on this below.)

Now that you have a high-level view of what Similarweb is (and what it does), let’s dive into the tool’s key features.

Overview section

SimilarWeb begins by showing you a brief profile of the website or app that you searched for (in this case, msn.com).

It tells you what the site is about, the year it began, and its main office.

It further tells you where that site stands globally (and nationally) according to the industry it belongs to.

One of the crucial things you need to know is how much traffic your competitors are generating. After all, that bit of information gives you an idea of how your [potential] customers behave and interact with companies offering the same services as you do.

While you can use Google Analytics as most webmasters use, it’s worth pointing out that GA can be very overwhelming to look at — especially for users who are new to the online scene.

Similarweb, however, isn’t overwhelming at all.

Just by adding the site’s domain name in Similarweb’s search box, you’d be able to view the site’s estimated monthly traffic, pages per visit, and bounce rate, among other things.

In case you’re wondering how your website’s numbers stack against your competitor’s, Similarweb allows you to view both of your website’s traffic figures alongside each other.

Here’s how it looks when you run the comparison.

The data above will help you compare your desktop and mobile traffic figures with your competitor in the last 6 months.

It’s also easy to view the sources of your competitor’s desktop traffic.

You’d be able to determine who’s getting more traffic through referral, direct, search engines, or social media, etc.

Search

SimilarWeb also shows figures on traffic for organic versus paid searches, and the keywords that generated the traffic. The top 5 are displayed.

With this data, you’ll gain insights to possible keywords you ought to be targeting.

Social

SimilarWeb also displays the top 5 social media networks that garnered the most traffic, as well as the percentage it makes up of overall traffic statistics.

Because social media networks have become a trendy gateway for companies to further their customer interaction, promotion and sales, knowing the highest social media traffic drivers is vital.

For example, if your competitor has more social media traffic, you would want to find out the types and quality of content they post, how often they post, and how they interact with their customers.

Audience interests

In addition to the already crucial details that you’ve learned from the people who visited a website, you can also learn about the categories they are interested in, the other websites they visited, and their topics of interest.

Other Features

SimilarWeb also features data and insights on referring sites, display advertisements, website content, and related mobile apps.

Of course, while you may have a general idea of who your competitors are, there may be some you have missed. SimilarWeb can reveal who your other possible competitors might be by looking into their Competitor or Similar Sites section.

Personalized Pricing Packages

Looking at the value that Similarweb can bring to the table, a question that anyone that’s thinking of using the tool would ask is, “How much will it cost me?”

Similarweb has two pricing models. The Essentials package (which costs $499 per month), and the Premium package where you’d have to chat with their team so they can offer a customized rate based on your needs.

Conclusion

As the “ultimate market intelligence platform,” SimilarWeb ensures you’ll have the insights you need to dominate your industry and be the go-to brand of your audience.

Have you been using Similarweb as one of your go-to platform for competitor research and analysis? Feel free to share your comments about the platform below. Cheers!

The post Similarweb Review: The Perfect Competitor Research Tool appeared first on Guild of Bloggers.

There are a lot of emotions involved in being a business owner, but uncertainty seems to be the most pervasive of them all.

Will your customers respond to your product or service? Will that new marketing initiative be effective? Are you making the right hire? Will your business ultimately be successful?

When you’re charting so many new territories, maintaining your confidence can be challenging. However, recent research reveals that there’s one area where small business owners feel extra uncertain.

What exactly is it that’s undermining their self-assuredness so severely? Sales tax.

Small business owners doubt their abilities to manage sales tax

The Sales Tax team at QuickBooks conducted a study of 600 American small business owners, and it revealed what most people already know to be true: Navigating sales taxes can be a major stressor. For many business owners, it resembles a big, complex guessing game.

43.5% of study participants state that the process of managing their small business sales tax is only somewhat clear, while 9.3% say that it’s not clear at all.

But beyond the ins and outs of actually collecting and managing this type of tax, small business owners also have serious doubts about the math involved. 8.2% of respondents said that they are not at all confident in their sales tax calculations.

That level of uncertainty is nerve-racking, especially since screwing up these numbers can mean needing to owe a large sum to the government when you realize you didn’t actually collect enough sales tax from your customers (which is likely going to come out of your own pocket).

Small business owners are unaware of important sales tax changes

This lack of confidence in their ability to appropriately manage sales tax inspires most business owners to distance themselves from the topic. However, that only means that they miss out on important updates and changes that could have major consequences for their businesses.

One of many is the case of South Dakota vs. Wayfair, in which the Supreme Court ruled in favor of South Dakota on June 21, 2018. This decision meant that any seller outside of South Dakota must collect sales tax from purchasers located in the state if:

• They deliver more than $100,000 of goods or services within South Dakota on an annual basis

or

• They have 200 or more transactions within South Dakota on an annual basis

This ruling overturned the long-standing physical presence rule that many business owners had become familiar with, and it also set the stage for other states to establish similar laws (if they haven’t already).

Such decisions can (and will) impact the amount of sales tax that businesses need to collect from customers depending on where they’re located. That introduces a new layer of complexity in regards to tax collection, which is why the same QuickBooks study revealed that one in five business owners feel “very concerned” about the decision.

But despite the fact that this type of change has direct impacts and warrants that level of worry, a surprising number of business owners were actually completely unaware of the ruling. Only seven in 10 respondents even knew that such a decision had been made, leaving 29% clueless about the changes that will undoubtedly impact their businesses.

Increase your sales tax confidence (and compliance)

Without a doubt, sales taxes can feel like a maze for most business owners. And, when you’re already spinning so many plates, the last thing you want to obsess over is whether or not you’re maintaining sales tax compliance or collecting the right amount.

Fortunately, there are tools and resources available to help. The QuickBooks Sales Tax Calculator helps you say “goodbye” to that dreaded guessing game by helping you identify your custom sales tax rate with just the click of a button.

Simply enter your address, and the calculator will immediately generate the rate that you should be collecting. There—consider it one less thing you need to feel uncertain about.

This is a guest post from Kat Boogaard.

The post How to feel more confident about collecting sales tax appeared first on Guild of Bloggers.