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5 Tips For Using LinkedIn For Your Business

October 1, 2014 by Marc Guberti 2 Comments

Although LinkedIn is commonly used as a way for someone to find a good job in their area, it has many benefits for businesses as well. There are many businesses that use LinkedIn to get customers and appear on big media outlets. One person I know used LinkedIn to get written about in Forbes. If your business is not on LinkedIn now, you need to get on, and if you are on LinkedIn but don’t know what to do, here are five tips that you can implement so your business does better on LinkedIn.

#1: Build connections with the right people

Although there are many millions of LinkedIn users, there are only two types of connections that are the right ones to have. The first type of connection is a connection with a targeted person. Targeted people are the type of people who would be interested in your business’ message right when they connect with you, and these people could also become customers. If you write books about social media, and the person you connect with wants to learn more about social media, that person will be attracted to your books.

Some businesses, brick-and-mortars in particular, should make sure most of the people they connect with live nearby. If you are have a brick-and-mortar store in California, most of the people you connect with should be from California who would want to buy the products in your store. The great thing about LinkedIn it that you can find and connect with people based on their country, state/province, and city. That means if you are the brick-and-mortar store in California or anywhere else in the world, it is easy to find the connections who live nearby.

If you want to see how likely someone would buy one of your products, take a look at that person’s bio, posts, and some of the people who that person talks to. If you can conclude that the person has an interest in products or businesses similar to yours, these people may be open to your business and buying products from you.

The second person to build a connection with is the person who would give you a business opportunity. If you want to be a public speaker, connect with the people who have hosted public speaking events before.

#2: Interact with those connections

Just because someone connects with you does not mean that person is going to immediately buy your products. That’s because you need to establish a certain level of trust that entices this person to buy your products. Creating a friendship between you and this connection is essential towards building that trust.

It is a universal fact that we like to do things for someone else if we have a great conversation and develop some type of friendship. You are more likely to buy a product from your best friend than someone who you do not know. You want to interact with those connections so you are able to develop friendships.

Regardless of whether you have a few dozen or a few thousand connections, you should make it a point to interact with as many of your connections as possible. Some of these people may buy your products because they enjoy having conversations with you while others will present you with new opportunities. You never know how these friendships will pay off later in your journey.

#3: Promote your blog and products

LinkedIn is a great place to promote your blog and products. LinkedIn allows you to include links to your blog and products in your bio and leave descriptions for them both. Promoting your blog and products gives your connections a place to go after the conversation develops.

The ideal strategy is to promote your blog above all of your products. Then, make sure your blog is optimized to get email addresses and sales. The people who visit your blog long enough may decide to go back to your LinkedIn profile and see what products you have. The more enticing your description is, the more likely someone will be to buy one of your products.

#4: Create a LinkedIn Group

A LinkedIn group is a place where like-minded people are able to talk about a common niche. Like-minded people may buy products from you, and many of them will be great people to interact with. You will be able to learn more about your niche and empower others at the same time!

One of the perks to creating your own LinkedIn Groups is that you are able to make announcements which get sent to everyone’s inboxes. This could be a way for you to tell people about a discount for a product or promote the launch of another product.

However, with great power comes great responsibility. You want all of these like-minded people to stay in your group. That means constantly telling people about your products will make your group seem more like a way for you to do a big sales pitch than anything else. You should only send 1-2 announcements each month that promote one of your products and have other announcements that do not promote your products.

#5: Post status updates often

Let people know what you are doing next so you are able to build buzz for what you are doing. How is your next product going? Do you have any discounts your customers should know about? Did you recently write a blog post and want to share it with everyone? Posting status updates may also spark email conversations which are the best kinds of conversations to have to get more sales and subscribers.

When you post status updates, keep it related to your niche. LinkedIn is a very business savvy social network compared to the others which means most of the people who go on your LinkedIn account will want to learn more things about the niche you are in. Instead of telling people what you ate for breakfast this morning or going off-subject, constantly talk about your niche so your connections know what to expect when they view your LinkedIn posts.

In Conclusion

LinkedIn is a powerful social network that has a variety of possibilities. Using LinkedIn for your business has the potential to boost sales and bring more traffic to your blog. What are your thoughts on using LinkedIn for your business? Do you have any other methods that you use LinkedIn for? Please share your thoughts below.

20 Awesome Twitter Statistics That You Need To Know

September 30, 2014 by Marc Guberti 2 Comments

There are a wide variety of statistics that people are using to make decisions for their brands. Some bloggers look at their traffic statistics to determine what to do next while Twitter users look at their individual statistics on TwitterCounter. Another group of statistics that are at times overlooked are the statistics on entire social networks such as Twitter. Here are the statistics you need to know:

23% of Twitter accounts are in the United States.
Twitter users are three times as likely to follow a brand as Facebook users are.
42% of users learn about products and services via Twitter.
19% of users seek customer support on Twitter.
78% of Twitter users are active on mobile.
49% of Twitter users have an iPod.
Over 500 million tweets are sent out every day.
There are 271 million monthly active users on Twitter.
There are over 100 million users who are active on Twitter daily.
The average user spends 170 minutes on Twitter every month.
29% of millennials (ages 15-34) use Twitter.
29% of Twitter users check the social network multiple times every day.
There are approximately 20 million fake Twitter users
50% of Twitter users are male and 50% of Twitter users are female.
11% of Americans tweet every month.
In Q2 2014, Twitter timelines got 173 billion views.
81% of millennials on Twitter check the social network daily.
50% of UK users have tried a new restaurant based on Twitter recommendations.
The average number of tweets per Twitter user is 307.
There is also a cool website that allows you to see how many tweets are sent out in real time. You can get to this website here.

Those are the 20 Twitter statistics that you can use to make decisions for your business and identify how your target audience uses Twitter. What were your thoughts on the statistics? Did one of these statistics catch your eye? Do you have another Twitter statistic that you know of? Please share your thoughts and statistics below.

A Cool Headline Tool To Write Better Blog Post Headlines

September 28, 2014 by Marc Guberti 8 Comments

I recently had the privilege of doing some digging within my own niche. Sometimes, we think we know absolutely everything in our niche inside-out. However, it is amazing how much valuable information related to our niches is on the web. When Social Media Examiner posted the Top 10 Social Media Blogs, I was all over all of them and learned a lot from the research.

There is no way I could write one blog post about all of the things I learned. I must have been on all of those blogs for hours. One of the things I did learn about is a cool tool that allows people to create powerful headlines. The headlines of your blog posts are the attention grabbers which means the better a headline is, the more clicks and readers it gets.

This cool tool is the Aminstitute Headline Analyzer, and it measures how emotionally grabbing your headlines are. The more emotionally grabbing a headline is, the more attention it gets. Some emotionally grabbing headlines encourage people to perform actions such as subscribing to your blog or buying one of your products.

This tool also gives you a percentage, and the higher that percentage is, the more emotionally grabbing your blog post is. I decided to test it out and was quickly amazed by the results.

Going in, the headlines for one of my blog posts was “5 Things About Blogging That Most People Forget.” I thought the headline looked good, but when I ran it into the Aminstitue Headline Analyzer, I got a 12.50%. Initially confused about the low score, I realized this was a negative title. The words “Most People Forget” are not exactly the positive words that people want to hear.

This motivated me to plug in different words to create a better headline. It would have been the same blog post either way, but the only thing different would be the headline. After tinkering with the tool, I finally came up with, “5 Blogging Tips You Absolutely Positively Need To Know Immediately.” This title creates a call to action and emphasizes how important those blogging tips are. This headline scored an 80% on the Aminstitute Headline Analyzer.

Would you rather read a blog post called 5 Thing About Blogging That Most People Forget or a blog post called 5 Blogging Tips You Absolutely Positively Need To Know Immediately? I know which one I would pick.

How did you like this blog post? Are you going to use the Aminstitute Headline Analyzer? Have you used it already? Be sure to share your thoughts below.

3 Easy Ways To Wake Up Very Motivated Every Day

September 27, 2014 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Wake Up Earlier

Zig Ziglar was onto something when he said that motivation and bathing don’t last which is why they need to be practiced daily. Just because you are motivated today does not mean you are going to be motivated tomorrow. We have all had the sequence when we feel incredibly happy on one day and then horrified on the other day, or the opposite. That is because many people do not see the reason to practice motivation every day. As a result, this motivation does not last.

In an earlier blog post, I mentioned how the first hour you wake up controls the rest of your day. This means on a typical day if you motivate yourself early in the day, you will remain motivated for the rest of that day. Then, you have to repeat the process again tomorrow. Instead of going through day by day trying to motivate yourself, you need to set up a plan for yourself so you start the day right and stay motivated every day. Here are the three ways to get motivated early so you stay motivated for the rest of the day.

Realize that you are a miracle. There are some days when the journey gets rough, and these are the points when we look for a miracle. We look for quadruple the sales in 1 month or a way to get hundreds of thousands of followers in a short amount of time. What discourages people from putting in the work is that many of these miracles take a long period of time to pull off. Few people realize that getting born is a miracle. The way microscopic parts of the body work is that there are millions of possibilities, but you were the possibility that was brought forth to the world. Your birth was a miracle, and that means you are hear for a reason. To make a difference.
Write down 1-3 motivational quote and read it/them when you wake up. Few people think of writing motivational quotes down, and when people write motivational quotes down, they write too many. In this case, less is better because you will have a stronger appreciation of the motivational quotes you have in front of you. I use angel cards to determine what motivational quotes I get. One of them says “Think Global.” I got this card when I had a little under 30,000 Twitter followers and a mediocre strategy to gain a targeted following. The second card is a motivational quote that I read daily that says, “Keep charing ahead, and don’t take no for an answer. Expect miraculous solutions to appear.” It may be easy to imagine how reading that type of motivational quote can charge someone up every day.
Just get out of bed. We all know that sleeping too little is bad for our health and causes symptoms like depression and anxiety. Plot twist: sleeping too much causes the same symptoms. Depending on what time I get to bed, I sleep between 6.5 to 8 hours. I never sleep for more than 8.5 hours at anytime simply because the human body does not need as much sleep as advertised. The people at Buffer have a lot of data on the amount of sleep we really need. Most of the time, I only sleep for 7.5 hours on a given day. The next question you may be wondering is how I always get out of bed at that time. I’ll say that I do not have an internal alarm clock, and I use a devious trick with the alarm clock that wakes me up every day. For some, the trick may be too devious to even attempt, but it is definitely worth it, and it will get you out of bed for sure

Motivation does not last daily which is why it is important to constantly practice these three motivational tips so you have an empowering day. What were your thoughts on the list? Do you have any additional advice on having a motivating day? Please share your thoughts and advice below.

5 Reasons Why I Decided To Use iContact Instead Of WordPress To Send Emails

September 26, 2014 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

I recently made the switch from WordPress’ free emailing service to iContact. I knew that if I wanted to reach tens of thousands of subscribers, something needed to change. Now I am wondering why I did not make the switch before. iContact has proven to be a more powerful option than WordPress’ free emailing service, and here’s why:

iContact allows me to customize the emails I send out. Instead of being linked to an RSS Feed and sending out an email each time I come out with a new blog post, iContact gives me the power to craft my own emails and include links to blog posts. This allows me to send one email every week containing links to all of the blog posts that I published that week.
iContact allows you to create autoresponders. Autoresponders are a series of emails that everyone gets when they subscribe to your blog. You can space out how long it takes for people to receive an email from the autoresponder and use it to promote one of your products in a way that people would want to buy it. WordPress’ emailing service did not provide this option.
iContact allows me to interact with my subscribers in a better way. No matter which service you use, there is a certain degree of automation. iContact allows you to schedule messages while WordPress would just send a message each time you came out with a new blog post. However, iContact allows me to craft my own message which allows me to interact with my subscribers in a better way. I get to ask subscribers how their day was, what they want to do differently, and anything else I want to ask them all in one email.
I have more control over the confirmation and welcome messages. Not only do I get to write anything I want for these two messages, but I also get to change the way these messages look. I decide what the backgrounds for these messages look like, the size of the font, and everything else as well.
More plugin capabilities. There are more WordPress plugin capabilities associated with iContact that WordPress’ free emailing service. Switching over to iContact has allowed me to do numerous things with my blog such as include a subscription form at the end of every blog post. This was previously not possible with WordPress’ emailing service, and now this form at the bottom at every blog post has been responsible for a majority of my subscribers.

There are some costs associated with making it as a full-time blogger. Buying access to an emailing service is one of the best investments any blogger can make to grow their email list. What are your thoughts on iContact and using paid email service options to get access to more features? Please share your thoughts below.