Category Archives: Social Media

February 2, 2016

Are you using Facebook ads to grow your email list?

By Lisa Nelson | Marketing, Social Media

Yes, you can use Facebook ads for lead generation. Are you?

I’ve started utilizing Facebook ads as a means to grow my email list and generate more sales.

This is for a heart health branch of my business. I’ve sorely neglected the Facebook page for this business. Created the page probably 2 years ago and it achieved a whopping 30 likes over 2 years. Yes, pathetic.

Well, I set my business goals for this year and I’m on a mission to more than double my annual sales from one home study program.

Bing ads flop

Played with Bing ads for a few weeks. Even spent time consulting with their support team to get everything set up just right on two ads I was running and it still wouldn’t track results. If you can’t track…you are wasting time and dollars! Nixed that avenue, purchased a Facebook training course and I like where I’m headed.

Facebook ads success

Implemented my first like ad a few days ago and I’m already up to 500 likes! Now that’s what I’m talking about.

Each like is costing only $0.18. Here’s a screenshot of the ad:
Continue Reading…

October 2, 2014

2 Tools to Discover Relevant Content to Share with Your Fans and Followers

By Lisa Nelson | Content Marketing, Marketing, Social Media

After (or even before) you set up your social media profiles you need to develop a strategy for how you will utilize social media to grow your business. Part of the strategy is to implement content marketing where you are consistently and regularly sharing your knowledge, highlighting your area of expertise so when they need the service you provide they know exactly who to contact… you.

One overwhelming piece that goes with managing social media profiles is the amount of content you must produce. For example, the Twitter platform moves quickly. Some recommend you share one or more tweets every hour. Facebook and Google+ are more reasonable at around two updates daily, with LinkedIn being once a day… BUT this is day after day, week after week, month after month…. It can get to be overwhelming.

You can share great content with your fans and followers that is not always your own. You will still become recognized as an expert in your area, but you will also be recognized as a valuable resource.

So, how do you find great, engaging content that is quick and easy to share with your fans and followers?

#1 ContentGems

I’ve been using ContentGems for several months now and it has worked well for what I need. ContentGems monitors online sources, including news sources, blogs, and social media accounts, and will filter results based on keywords you set. You can then scroll the results and schedule the updates to send directly from ContentGems or using a third party platform, such as Hootsuite.

In case it’s useful, I’ve recorded a quick video showing how I use it:

August 27, 2014

Are Your Blog Posts Fully Optimized?

By Lisa Nelson | Content Marketing, Marketing, Social Media

Content marketing is an effective technique for driving traffic to your website. This technique involves the creation and consistent distribution of valuable, relevant content to attract a specific audience (i.e. your target market).

The foundation of content market is, well, the content. The blog posts you write.

Are your blog posts fully optimized?

Here are 10 tips for optimizing your blog post BEFORE you publish it and begin content marketing.

Enticing Headline
Your headline should include your keyword(s) for the blog post, so it is very clear to search engines the information contained within the post. Plus you want it to contain the actual words and phrases that people enter into google when they do a search on the particular topic.
URL Contains Keywords
The URL for the web page (blog post) is one of the first pieces “crawled” by search engines to determine page content. Make sure it includes your keyword for the article. If you are implementing #1 above, then it’s an easy rule of thumb to make sure your url is always the title of your blog post.
Keywords in Copy
Do not “stuff” your article with keywords. You do want to include keywords, but they should naturally flow within your copy.
Keywords in meta-description
A meta description is an HTML attribute providing a concise summary of the blog post content. It is most often used by search engines and displayed in search results. See the below image. Continue Reading…

June 24, 2014

5 Steps To Effectively Use Content Marketing to Grow Your Business

By Lisa Nelson | Marketing, Social Media

1. Know Who You Want to Attract
Before you can create content that appeals to your target market (and potential clients), you need to know what they are struggling with, what they want to know, and how they want it. Do they want to read, listen, watch, etc? (Always good to simply ask your current clients and subscribers to learn the answer.) Once you know what they want and how they want it…deliver. If you seek clients dealing with food allergies, provide content relevant to this audience. Don’t be all over the place in your content generation…one day food allergies, the next about dieting, and a third about foods to reduce stress. Your target audience is dealing with food allergies, be consistent in what you right about to highlight yourself as someone who specializing in this area.

2. Be consistent with your publishing.
Certain pieces of content imply different levels of consistency when it comes to creating and delivering content. How often you want to publish may impact the form of content marketing that will work best for you. For example, consistency is expected with blogs, newsletters, magazines, and podcasting. Consistency is wise, but not required when it comes to videos, ebooks, webinars, and infographics. If you know you will be inconsistent, go with content where consistency does not hinder results, such as guest blog posting.

3. Leverage audiences of others.
Guest blog posting is a great example of how to leverage someone else’s audience. Someone else has taken the time to grow a following. If you provide a guest post/article that includes where to learn more about you, this is one strategy to grow your own following. Keep in mind, whatever content you provide to someone else needs to be of value to their audience…they are not going to accept just anything. Another example would be to teach a class hosted by someone else and to someone else’s audience.

August 22, 2013

3 Title Tips to Entice Readers to Sign Up for Your Freebie

By Lisa Nelson | Social Media

An important piece of being successful online is the ability to “grow your list”. Most people on the web do not make a purchase the first time they see you or come across your website. They need to hear from you repeatedly so they get to “know, like, and trust” you. Then they’ll be ready to buy.

However, if all you have is a web page with no way to bring people back….how are you going to contact someone more than once?

So, you need a landing page that offers an enticing “freebie” in exchange for their name and email. Then, you can follow up with them on a regular basis, continue to showcase your expertise, and the services you provide.

If you are not familiar with landing pages, please review this information:

What is a landing page?

One decision you have to make with a landing page is what to offer. Will it be a free report (pdf download), audio education (mp3 file), video training, combination of one of these three? You have many options and need to decide the format.

However, the format is not necessarily what is going to make the biggest impact on whether or not you get people taking you up on your offer.

You need an enticing freebie title! Continue Reading…

March 30, 2012

Do you understand how to use Twitter Hashtags (#’s)?

By Lisa Nelson | Social Media

Twitter uses hashtags to organize tweets, which allows Twitter users to search hashtags to find the content the seek. Not only do they find the content, but they can connect with experts in the area they are searching.

Let’s say if someone is looking for information on weight loss they have the ability to search Twitter using the weight loss hashtag. This is may be #weightloss. So, if you are tweeting about how to lose weight, you’ll want to include the hashtag #weightloss or #loseweight within that particular update to ensure it is searchable via hashtags.

There are probably thousands (dare I say millions?) of hashtags. For example, #loseweight, #weight, and #weightloss are all hashtags. You want to select the one that is used most often.

Here’s a link to information on hashtags – http://support.twitter.com/articles/49309-what-are-hashtags-symbols#

Hashtags can be searched at http://hashtags.org. It will also display a “trend” report so you can see how often a particular hashtag is used. For example, it looks like #loseweight is trending better than #weightloss at this time.

January 18, 2012

5 Options to Update Your Facebook Page Status

By Lisa Nelson | Social Media

Do you have a Facebook business page, but not sure what you should be posting?

The goal with Facebook is to be active on a regular basis so you stay in your “fans” newsfeed. This means they will see you frequently, be reminder of the services you offer and remain aware of your area of expertise.

But what do you share?

Here are 5 options you could alternate to update your Facebook page status regularly so you stay in your “fans” newsfeed:

1. Current events/information

If you read an article you like and think your target market would like, share a comment and post a link to it on Facebook.

2. Link to articles you write yourself and post on your blog

We do this for you as part of the content marketing package.

3. Post an occasional question

August 24, 2011

5 Changes to Grow Your List and Increase Conversion Rates

By Lisa Nelson | Email Marketing, Social Media, Website

Do you get a decent amount of traffic to your website everyday, but your list size continues to grow at a snails pace? If so, here are some suggestions I encourage you to analyze and tweak if need be.

1. Are you asking people to ‘Join Our Mailing list’?

Just about all online sites are now trying to collect names and email addresses of their visitors. That’s why just having a ‘Join Our Mailing’ list box doesn’t cut it anymore. You need to entice people to give you their name and email address and this requires more than just a subscription to your newsletter. Examples of enticements would be a free report, ecourse, or audio file that focuses on the reason they came to your site in the first place. For example, if your ideal client is trying to lose weight your free report may be geared toward ‘The Top 10 Steps for Lasting Weight Loss’. Whatever your ‘freebie’ is you want it to be something they just can’t pass up.

Tip: If you have a freebie and it’s not converting well you may not need to change the content of your freebie, just do some trial and error with the title to increase conversion rates.

2. Are you leading traffic to an opt-in page or your website home page?

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