Marc's Blog

5 Ways That Having A Free Prize Can Help Your Business Grow

June 13, 2014 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

business growth

If you do not have a free prize, your chances of being successful in your niche go down. Free prizes have become more important than ever because more people offer them. Free prizes are not as rare as they used to be. In fact, it seems as if free prizes are expected. The occasional two for one deal is expected. Getting a free product after entering your email address is expected. Free prizes are expected, and therefore, you need to fulfill the expectation. I went more in detail in a previous post about how you can go beyond expectations, but having a free prize is going to set you apart from the people who still do not offer a free prize.

You may be wondering at this point where you would offer your free prize and why you would do so. There are numerous places where offering a free prize would do you good. Here are the big five:

Blog subscribers. This one seems to be the most obvious reason why someone would want to offer a free prize. More people than ever before are offering free prizes to the people who subscribe to their blogs. This is the area where a free prize is almost expected. Visitors aren’t just going to subscribe to your blog so they can get emailed by you every day. They can just visit your blog every day. If you want someone to subscribe to your blog, you need to offer them more than an email every time a new blog post comes out.
Facebook likes. There are not as many free prizes on Facebook, but they do exist. If you get emails from Facebook each time someone likes your Facebook Page, you will be able to reward the people who like your Facebook Page. By telling everyone that they get a free prize when they like your Facebook Page, you will be able to make your Facebook Page look (and become) more popular. Then, you will eventually be able to get hundreds of likes every day. Better yet, you can also offer a free prize when someone likes or shares one of your Facebook posts.
Twitter retweets. Free prizes are a little harder to announce on Twitter which means you will surprise people when you give them the free prize. When one of your followers retweets one of your tweets, send that person a DM with their free prize. If you want more people to know about the free prize, you can pin a tweet announcing the giveaway at the top of your feed. Since a free prize for retweeting a tweet is so rare, some people will retweet you just to get the free prize.
Email newsletter. If your email newsletter promotes a particular product, give away a free prize similar to the product you are promoting. If the product you are promoting is a 50 video series about Twitter for $497, make your free prize a 7 video series about Pinterest. In this case, the free prize is similar to the product that you will be promoting to all of the people who gave you their email addresses.
YouTube subscribers. Offering a free prize to your YouTube subscribers will entice more people to subscribe. In addition, those subscribers will give you the leverage you need to go viral. Most of the videos and channels that go viral on YouTube are also the ones with thousands of subscribers. Offering a free prize may allow you to get thousands of extra YouTube subscribers.

Those are the five places where free prizes will allow your business to grow. When you promote a free prize at these places, you need to make sure that each of these free prizes are unique. Offering the same free prize to everyone does not encourage someone already subscribed to your blog to like your Facebook Page. In addition, by creating multiple free prizes, your potential customers will love you for it.

10 Ways To Get More People To See Your Facebook Posts

June 13, 2014 by Marc Guberti 5 Comments

There are some Facebook Pages that get thousands of likes every day, and over 100,000 people see all of the posts that get published. However, a majority of Facebook Pages are struggling to get noticed. Some of these Facebook Pages only get seen by 10 people every day while others get seen by only 10 people every week. If those numbers were able to grow consistently, then a previously unknown Facebook Page would end up becoming a very successful Facebook Page with over 100,000 likes.

Imagine what your Facebook Page would look like with 100,000 likes. Imagine not just having expert status but being an elite expert in your niche. That would be really cool. No matter what your Facebook Page is about, it is possible for anyone to get 100,000 likes without buying them. You don’t need to contact someone who sells 100,000 Facebook likes for $29 to have the big number. Instead, you need to learn how to get more people to see your Facebook Page. By implementing these tactics, you will get more people to see your Facebook Page, and for the long-term, allow your Facebook Page to eventually surpass 100,000 likes.

Post content that people would want to like and share. This content needs to be related to your niche and be something valuable at the same time. All of your posts need to have a combination of those two components.
Post at least 4 times every day throughout the day. Schedule your Facebook posts to appear at certain times of the day so most of your audience sees the posts. The best times to send out posts vary for everyone. If you are using a Facebook Page, you will be able to gain access to Facebook’s analytics which tell you when a majority of the people who liked your page are logged in.
Post meaningful content. In addition to posting about something worth sharing, the content in your posts needs to encourage people to share your content. Including a link to your blog post with that blog post’s title may be good enough for Twitter, but it is not good enough for Facebook.
Track your results. You need to send out posts that are similar to your most popular posts. By tracking your results, you will be able to identify the ideal times to send out your posts and what color the pictures in your post need to be.
Promote your Facebook Page on your blog. Your biggest source of organic fans is the visitors that you already get on your blog. Your blog is your own home on the web. People who visit your blog and like what they see will be more likely to like your Facebook Page.
Use your social networks to promote your Facebook Page the right way. Instead of begging people to like your Facebook Page or do a like exchange, send out tweets and pins containing your Facebook posts every day. Sharing the posts on your Facebook Page will generate more awareness for that page and also result in more likes.
Use Facebook Advertising to spread the word about your Facebook Page. Most of the successful Facebook Pages either currently use Facebook Advertising to market themselves or used Facebook Advertising at a certain point in time. Facebook Advertising allows you to find very targeted people based on state, city, country, age, interests, and more.
Offer a free prize in exchange for a like. More people will like your Facebook Page if they get a reward (the free prize) for doing so. It’s only logical. In addition, you can also offer a bonus free prize if people like specific posts on your Facebook Page. That will boost the number of likes, shares, and engagement as well.
Have a giveaway that requires people to share the post. If one of your posts goes viral on Facebook, then your entire Facebook Page goes viral. Having a giveaway is a great way to encourage sharing. The more compelling the giveaway prize is, the more people are going to share the post. Have a $25 Amazon Gift Card giveaway and watch how quickly it spreads all across Facebook. More people will see your post for sure.
Promote your Facebook Page in your YouTube videos. Videos have become very important over the years, and YouTube is a great way to promote your Facebook Page. YouTube gets over 1 billion visitors every month, and some videos end up going viral. If your video goes viral, then your Facebook Page will go viral too.

As more people see your Facebook posts, the number of people who see your posts will grow exponentially. If 1,000 people share your Facebook post, that means at least 10,000 people saw the post. When someone shares a post, some of their friends get to see the post that they shared. The immediate result of this is that more people get to see your post and hear your message.

What are your thoughts of using a Facebook Page and getting more people to see your Facebook posts? Do you have any additional tips about getting more exposure on Facebook? Please share your thoughts and advice below.

How To Create The Best Free Prize Possible

June 12, 2014 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Giving away a free prize will encourage people to subscribe to your blog, like you on Facebook, and do other things as well. While the free prize encourages these actions to be performed, it is the best free prize possible that makes people take you seriously and buy your products. If you do a good job with the free prize, your potential customers will buy your products primarily because they believe that your products are much better than your free prizes.

Although it is important to create a free prize that would be worth something, many people only create a free prize just for the sake of saying that they have a free prize. These people create a bad free prize that does encourage more subscribers and Facebook likes, but the bad free prize does not encourage anything after that. Potential sales never happen, and some people go as far as unsubscribing or unliking if the free prize is really bad.

A free prize is just that. It is free, but it is also a prize worth winning. In order to make your free prize worth winning, you first need to decide what your free prize will be. If you want to provide a digital prize (so you don’t have to pay for shipping), you can offer an eBook, Power Point, video, or audio. Those are the options that most people use for their free products. For this blog, the free prize is a video about Pinterest.

Your free prize needs to be a lengthy one. The longer your free prize is, the longer you will be able to keep someone’s attention. A free eBook with 10 pages can be read in under 5 minutes while a free 50 page eBook takes 10 minutes to read. Free 30 minute videos get more attention than free 10 minute videos because the person can watch the free 30 minute video for an additional 20 minutes. By keeping someone’s attention longer with a lengthier prize, that person will think more and more that they need to buy some of your products.

Offering a lengthier prize also shows people that you went the extra mile to provide more free content. People love it when others go the extra mile to help them. Some of the people who get your free prize will eventually return the favor by buying one of your products.

While length is a big factor towards how good your free prize is, the quality of the free prize also determines how much attention it gets. If the free prize is a 50 page eBook with low quality content, then most people will “x out” of the book without saving it or bothering to read it any further. In addition, a poorly performed 30 minute video will lose attention as the seconds go by.

Your free prize needs to be lengthy and contain quality content. It is the job of your free prize to answer all of the readers’ questions about a particular area in your niche. That is all you need to do to create a free prize that entices people to buy your products.

What are your thoughts on the free prize? Do you have any tips on creating a free prize? Please share your thoughts and advice below.

One Of The Most Underrated WordPress Stats

June 12, 2014 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

WordPress Statistics

After achieving a big goal for this blog (getting 100,000 annual visitors), I decided to raise the bar higher with a new goal: get 100,000 visitors every month. I want to have a traffic rate that would allow me to get over 1 million annual visitors. It sounds like a lot of work, but what sounds even more challenging is that I plan on accomplishing this goal by the end of 2014. In order to get the extra 900,000 annual visitors (and at that rate, 100,000 monthly visitors wouldn’t be far behind), I have been doing more digging than usual to find out how I can grow my blog’s traffic. Although 100,000 annual visitors is a big milestone, I want to turn it into 100,000 monthly visitors.

One of the areas that I did more digging in was my blog’s stats. I use WordPress for my blog which means I get various statistics about visitors, views, clicks, and subscriptions. I used this statistics to guide me through the process of going from 30 visitors every month to over 100,000 visitors every year. However, throughout all of my searching and analyzing, there was a powerful WordPress statistic that I kept on missing…that is…until now.

The powerful WordPress statistic that too many people overlook is the number of views your individual blog posts get. This blog post is my 928th blog post, and if all of my blog posts generated 3 visitors every day, then this problem would be over. I would already be getting over 1 million visitors every year. However, that is not the case.

By identifying how many views your individual blog posts are getting, you will be able to identify your most popular blog posts. Those are the topics that you need to continue writing blog posts about. If one of your blog posts is getting 50 daily views, and you write a Part 2 for that blog post, chances are the Part 2 for that blog post is going to get close to 50 daily views. That’s 50 daily views that you would have never had.

When most people look at blog traffic, they look at the final number. The final number may be 10 daily visitors, or that final number may be 100 daily visitors. Regardless of the final number, that’s what most people focus on. Few people look at the statistics of the individual blog posts that contribute to the final number. By looking at what makes the final number happen, you will be able to identify what you need to write about in the future to make that final number larger.

What are your thoughts on this WordPress statistic? Do you plan to use this statistic? Is there another underrated WordPress statistic that most people are missing out on? Please share your thoughts and advice below.

A New Way To Look At Obstacles

June 11, 2014 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

When we think of obstacles, we think of something that is scary. We think of how unlikely it is for our ideas to work and ultimately get consumed in fear. Obstacles are the barriers to success, but most people prefer to sacrifice success in order to avoid the obstacles.

Instead of looking at an obstacle as a necessary evil, you need to look at an obstacle as a benefactor. Obstacles allow you to get more experience and learn from your mistakes. Everyone who has ever become successful faced obstacles at some point in their journeys. Even the billionaires have faced obstacles before. Traf-O-Data was a bust while Virgin Vodka didn’t go far either.

Obstacles are tough to get through. However, overcoming the obstacles makes winning so much better. Success feels so much better after you are able to jump over all of the hurdles and keep on going forward past those obstacles. Obstacles are a part of your journey. Enjoy them for what they are while knowing that with persistence and dedication, you will be able to conquer all of the obstacles in front of you.

What are your thoughts on obstacles? Do you have any tips about overcoming obstacles or have any obstacles to share? Please share your thoughts and advice below.

How To Wake Up Earlier

June 11, 2014 by Marc Guberti 8 Comments

Morning Roaster

Did you know that your morning is a strong indicator of how productive you are throughout the day? Waking up earlier in the morning may be the difference between an unproductive day and a day when you are able to write 10,000 words. The logic behind it is that when you wake up, you have more willpower. When you wake up, there are less excuses. You have less to do at 7 am than you have to do at 7 pm. If you are wondering how you can increase your productivity, you should also wonder how you can wake up earlier.

Before I continue, it is still important to get the right amount of sleep. Based on scientific studies, 6.5 to 7.5 hours of sleep every day will lead to a longer, healthier, and more productive life. If you are sleeping below 6.5 hours, then you are not getting enough sleep. However, if you are sleeping for 8 hours, then you are getting too much sleep (yes, there is such a thing). That means you only want to sleep in between the 6.5 to 7.5 hour range. This is where waking up earlier comes in.

The first thing you need to do to wake up earlier is to create a schedule that you are committed to implement. If you get to bed at 11 pm, then you need to commit yourself to waking up in between 5:30 am and 6:30 am. That does not sound like a lot of sleep, but that is because most people sleep longer than the recommended amount of sleep.

Now that you have the schedule in place, you need to have motives. How are you going to benefit by waking up earlier? If you can’t think of a benefit, then you will continue sleeping for 10 hours. We need to have a reason to get up every day, but having a strong motive will make you want to get up quicker every single day. Some strong motives could be getting work done faster, publishing more books in a shorter amount of time, doing the work now so you can spend more time with your family later in the day when everyone wakes up, and so on. Those are the types of motives that get you out of bed faster and allow you to be more productive throughout the day.

One of the easiest ways to wake up earlier is a two step strategy. Most people get the first step right, but almost everyone messes up the second part. The first part is setting an alarm clock. Everyone seems to do that. The second part which almost everyone messes up is leaving the alarm clock out of reach. If you can click the snooze button on your alarm clock while in bed, then the alarm clock is too close to your bed. Keeping it further away will force you to get up in order to turn off the alarm clock (which gets very annoying after a while).

If you want to be productive, what you do when you wake up will play a big role in how productive you are for the day. If you wake up and go straight to TV, then your day is not going to be very productive one. However, if you wake up and start the day off by writing some blog posts, then you are going to have a very productive day.

You have more control over your productivity than you think. What you do in the morning sets the tone for the rest of the day. By setting a good tone in the beginning of the day, you will be able to get more work done throughout the rest of the day. What are your thoughts on waking up earlier, and do you have any other advice about sleep? Please share your thoughts and advice below.