Tag: social media

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Why Influencer Marketing Works

In 2020, Influencer marketing was worth more than nine billion dollars. It is now expected to grow beyond thirteen billion dollars. Showing you that it is here to stay and only growing stronger. Influencer marketing is a form of worth-of-mouth or online marketing using social media platforms and influencers who share content to promote products or services for companies with similar target audiences.

 

The goal is to influence their audience to increase their conversions, usually in increased sales, traffic, or engagement. Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok are currently the top three social media platforms used by many influencers and companies worldwide to market their products, services, or ideas.

 

Here are the main reasons why influencer marketing works and why it is so beneficial to your brand:

 

Influencers Build Trust and Establish Creditability

 

Not only can influencers help you find your target audience more easily, but they can also help you connect and engage with them. An influencer has an audience because they have similar interests to them and appreciates their opinion.

 

Meaning the influencer already has established trust and credibility. When they partner with a company, that trust and credibility often transfer over. Without these two factors, you can’t expect to make a sale or increase your conversions. Customers need validity in exchange for their time and revenue.

 

Influencers Create Engagement and Long-Lasting Relationships

 

Along with trust comes needed engagement. What kind of engagement you need is up to you and your business goals? For many, that includes more likes, comments, shares, and clicks to their websites to make a sale and increase their revenue or exposure hopefully. Not only do they increase your engagement rate, the relationship is more personal too. Meaning they can form deeper and stronger relationships, further increasing the trust and loyalty to your brand.

 

Influencers Expose You to Larger and More Loyal Audiences

 

Establishing a relationship with several different influencers allows you to get in front of more people with the same target audience as yours, especially when comparing it to traditional online ads. In addition, your target audience is less likely to skip over it when an influencer is involved as it humanizes your brand.

 

As you can see, if you haven’t added influencers to your marketing strategy yet, then you are likely missing out. In fact, according to a Mediakix survey conducted in 2019, nearly 17% of companies use or will use half of their marketing budget on influencers alone. While that is a small percentage, many companies reported in the same year that they want to significantly increase their influencer budgets to keep up with the current demand for social media content. They believe influencer marketing is paramount to their success now and in the future.

 

 

 

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Influencer Marketing and the Pyramid of Influence

The pyramid of influence is a great model or image to categorize your different audiences and the influencers who represent them. It’s designed to quickly show you who and what makes up the most of your engagement to create the right content and materials to develop and run a successful campaign.

 

To put it simply, a pyramid of influence is designed to allow you to quickly understand who makes up your community and how they each influence your audience. This way, you can easily develop content and strategies to reach your target audience more efficiently and ensure you get the right influencer on board.

The pyramid of Influence is made of the following levels:

influencer Pyramid

First Level: Brand Content Creators

 

They are the brand experts and make up most of your content that your influencers can’t wait to use, share with their audience, or use inspiration to make new content. The content is produced by your company, by those you hired, or even mega-influencers.

 

Second Level: Influencers or Leaders

 

This is where digital influencers come in and make up the bulk of the content and engagement. They spark interest within those who want and must get your products. They inspire and influence transactions and engagement. They are the ones that will do anything to get their hands on your product and share it with their audience because they love your products or services. They are the leaders of your content and mission.

 

Third Level: Prosumers or Seed Planters

 

Prosumers are active in the community consistently, usually using third-party platforms such as Facebook or YouTube. They are the ones that build groups and posts questions or spark interest in topics supporting your niche or brand. In other words, they plant the seed of interest and increase engagement and interaction.

 

Quite a few people in this level of the pyramid will eventually move on to the second tier as low level, or nano influencers can also be found in this level as they often plant the seed. They look up to those above them in the tier to help them create content, answer any questions, or sound the alarm to a common problem within the industry.

 

Bottom Level: Consumers or Readers

They consume content but don’t generate it. They are known as consumers and will make up the bulk of your audience and are responsible for revenue. They are the ones that are influenced by the rest of the pyramid and make purchases or other actions that can positively affect your conversions.

How to Drive Traffic to Your Landing Pages

Understanding the pyramid of influence helps you see how your customers, influencers, and content writers can influence different types of people. The ones on the top have the most impact, while those on the bottom make purchases and increase your conversions.

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Putting It All Together And Developing A Routine That Will Keep You On Track

Over the course of the past six blog posts, we’ve talked about the importance of consistency and how it can help you grow your traffic, your subscribers, your customers, your product catalogue, and most importantly your income. Now it’s time to bring it all together and create a daily, weekly, and monthly routine that will keep you on track to continue to grow your business.

 

Any online business can be broken down into three different areas that need your effort and attention. They are traffic, list, and offer. You need visitors to your website. Then you need to convert those visitors into subscribers. Finally, you need to make those subscribers an offer so you can make money. Keep this in mind as you build your routine.

 

Do something every single day to send more traffic your way. This could be content marketing. It could be social media. It could be tweaking your SEO. Or it could be paid ads. Start by making a master list of things you can do to get more traffic. Pick things you can quickly do and rotate through one or more of them on a daily basis. Things that take a bit longer should become part of your weekly and monthly routine. For example, you may choose to learn how to run Facebook ads this month as one of your bigger projects. The most important part is to do things consistently to drive more traffic to your website.

 

Next, think about what you can do to get more subscribers. Adding an opt-in box to your latest blog post is a quick task that could go on your daily to-do list. Setting up a new opt-in funnel with a fresh lead magnet may make a great weekly project. Writing a book to tap into a new market via Amazon would be more of a project that takes a month or more. Come up with a variety of different things you can try, tweak, and do more to grow your list consistently.

6 Things to Include on Your Freebie Opt-in Page

Last but not least, you’ve got to make an offer. This could be something evergreen like crafting a new autoresponder email for your flagship product. It could be a daily task of running and tweaking ads. Or it could be a free SEO and social media campaign that you work on for a few weeks. Make a list of what you can do to get your offers in front of fresh eyeballs and get to work. And don’t forget to set aside some time each week to work on the next paid product as well.

 

Keep chipping away and continuing to build and fine-tune your routine. Your consistent efforts will start to pay off and more importantly, they will begin to compound as you get more traffic, grow your list by leaps and bounds, and add more products each new customer may be interested in. Keep at it. Consistency is the key to long-term profit.

 

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Struggling With Social Media? A Calendar And System Can Help

Do you have a hard time with social media? Either you aren’t finding the time to get around to posting regularly and getting discouraged by a lack of results you’re getting. You know what I’m talking about. You aren’t getting a lot of new followers on your page on Facebook for example and when you post something only a small fraction of those people see the post. It can be discouraging and feel like you have to pay to play by buying ads if you want your content to be seen. Thankfully that’s not true. What is true however is that consistency can help you grow your reach on any social media platform. It can help you with Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and anywhere else where your ideal customers choose to hang out.

 

This brings up an important point. Before you dive in and invest a lot of time and effort on every single platform, take a look around. Where are your people hanging out? What media does your tribe prefer? For example, if you’re running a recipe blog, you have to be on Pinterest, and depending on your particular niche, you may also want a Facebook presence, including a group, and possibly a YouTube channel. If you’re into sourdough, you’ve got to be on Instagram… Do your research and do your best to determine where you want to be before you get started.

 

Once you have that figured it, it’s time to come up with a posting schedule. Remember, consistency is key. You’re better off doing fewer posts and shares more regularly than overdoing it and burning out. Start with a conservative number that you’re comfortable with across all platforms and write it down. For example, you may choose to do 5 tweets per week, 10 pins, 3 Facebook posts, one Facebook Live video, and a new YouTube video every other week.

 

Once you have your schedule, it’s time to schedule the actual content using a calendar. You can use Google Calendar or an old-fashioned paper one. The key is being able to stay organized and having your social media goals in writing to ensure it gets done and posted regularly. How far out should you schedule? That’s up to you. If you like to plan in big batches every few months, go for it. If you prefer to be more spontaneous, do it once a week. Play around with different time frames and see what works best for you. When you know what you’ll be posting about and have the text and images ready ahead of time, it’s quick and easy to keep up with social media.

 

To save even more time and make social media content more hands-off, take a look at some of the scheduling tools available. I like Hootsuite, MeetEdgar, PostPlanner, and Tailwind (for Pinterest). Use them to schedule and loop posts that will go out without you having to log into your social media profiles every single day.  Instead, you can set aside time once every couple of weeks to do the bulk of your work. Then check-in from your phone throughout the week to respond to comments etc. Getting organized and figuring out a system that works for you can be such a game-changer when it comes to being consistent on social media and growing an engaged following. When you have those main posts going out on schedule, you can then pop in and interact & post in real-time as and when time allows.

 

Tools and Tips to Help You Automate Social Media Marketing

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Daily Mindset Habit: Value Your Time Over Everything Else

If you’ve ever been told that you have the same 24 hours as the next person, pay close attention to this post and take this daily mindset habit idea to heart. A mindset of the rich that differs from their non-rich counterparts is that the rich tend to place a high value on their time.

 

Time Not Money is Finite

 

We love acting like money, and certain natural resources are so limited, but the truth is, it’s time and not money that is finite. And due to money, you can actually buy other people’s time, thus placing a higher value on your time than theirs.

 

For example, if you know that your time is worth $100 an hour because that’s how much your boss pays you or how much you bill your clients, why would you wait in a 30-minute line to return a $10 item? Likewise, why would you spend an hour grocery shopping when you can pay someone enabling you to earn more money?

 

Calculate The Worth of Your Time

 

Part of the problem is that most people have never calculated the worth of their time. They know how much their boss pays them, or they know how much they want to bill their clients, but often these numbers are completely arbitrary and are simply the “going rate” that is not based on reality either. In fact, if more people established the worth of their time based on reality, they’d demand a lot more money from their employers.

 

Most HR departments use the number of 2080 yearly hours to designate full-time work. So even if you’re on a salary, they’re going to say that you earn your paycheck by working full time, which is equal to 40 hours a week for 52 weeks a year, for a total of 2080 hours.

 

This HR department magic number ends up on the companies compensation records as part of the benefits of the job and health insurance, paid time off (PTO), and other compensation. This is a great place for you to start figuring how much your time is worth but doesn’t consider the entire picture. After all, if you’re on salary, you don’t work only 40 hours a week.

 

So, to calculate your hourly worth, let’s focus on what you would like your life to be like, not what it currently is. If you want a specific lifestyle, go ahead, and add up what that would really cost. Then add in how much you want to work, not how much you do work, and that is your hourly worth even if you’re not there yet.

 

For example, if you want to earn 120K a year before taxes by working 20 hours a week, that equates to only 1040 hours of work a year, making your hourly worth over $115 an hour. Knowing this, since you don’t love mowing your lawn, you should jump at the chance of paying Billy down the street $50 bucks a week to keep your lawn nice because it’s worth it to you based on how much your time is really worth according to your life design.

 

Some Things Are Priceless

 

One thing the rich have figured out that hasn’t been passed down to the masses is that some things are priceless. Your child’s birth, their first birthday, kindergarten graduation, and anything that takes you away from those types of things – the things that will never happen again – should come at a much higher price and even be considered priceless. When you start to think of your own time as priceless and irreplaceable, productivity becomes almost automatic because you know there is no time to waste.

 

When you truly understand not only the value of your time, but the probability of the length of your life, and how you cannot go back in time, or forward, and that you only have right now – when you really get that – it becomes so much easier to habitually value your time above all else – because your time is the most precious thing you have. You cannot get it back once squandered.

 

How to Create Repeatable Workflows for Better Time Management

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Always Plan First and Last

The thing that marks a good business is planning. A business plan for where they hope to bring their business and daily plans to guide their actions to achieve it.

 

You’ve likely heard the famous quote “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail” many times before, and that is because it is so powerful and accurate. There is no other way to put it. Just because you don’t plan doesn’t mean you don’t know the direction it will go. As statistics prove over again, you are more likely to go down than up.

Business Plan Resources You Can Use

Here are a few tips and tricks to apply for better planning your day and business:

 

Plan First and Last

An often-used productivity hack by many businesses and entrepreneurs includes creating a to-do list at the beginning and end of their workday. This strategy improves your business overall by increasing your time management skills, consistency, and accountability.

 

When you start and end with a to-do list, you allow flexibility and ensure you are always working on your top priorities and staying on topic—enabling you to cut out unnecessary or mundane tasks that only keep you away from your main objective.

 

Not only that, but it can also be a great reminder and motivational factor. Lists enable you to be ready to go and can give you the push to get started sooner.

 

Make It Simple and Fun

Planning doesn’t have to be complicated, and business isn’t always dull. Use colorful pens or fun phone applications to write down your goals. Add fun and small rewards when you accomplish each step. Remember to keep it simple, and to the point, so it doesn’t overwhelm you.

 

Think Small, Medium, and Large

Think about three objectives you want to accomplish for that day but organize them into three separate categories:

 

  • One Large – The task you want to do right away as it’s the hardest to do and makes the most significant impact on your main objective for that month.
  • One Medium – This is the bulk of your day that isn’t too hard to do but likely to use more of your time—for example, a group meeting or coffee with a client.
  • One Small – This is the task you can focus on at the end of your day and relax. Ideally, you want this task to be easy and pretty mindless.

 

This method aims to give you a starting point and organize your day where you are not running out of energy and momentum.

 

Don’t let your days get away from you anymore with these planning tips. Remember, a business without a plan is one that will likely fail. Don’t let that be you when you have the power and control to make it happen with the right strategy and commitment to daily action.

 

How to Be Realistic About Time

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Invest in More Training and Education

When you invest in more training and education, you are investing in yourself and ensuring a successful life for you and your business. Through education, creativity and innovation are born. What you achieve and don’t do in life is a symptom of the knowledge and experiences you have gained.

 

As they commonly say, “You can’t know what you don’t know.” Simple to put, yet complex in nature when you really break it down. In other words, when you lack the knowledge, you can’t make the right decisions. This is why it’s essential to take the time to find and invest in the right education to be sure you do what needs to be done to live your idea of success.

 

The following are four important reasons you should never skip on an opportunity to learn and gain more knowledge:

The Importance of Continued Learning in Life and Business

To Increase Your Reputation and Trustworthiness

To make a sale in a business, you need to form trust with your target audience. This requires your ability to build a favorable reputation for your brand. The more you educate yourself within your industry, the better you can understand how to do this.

 

To Bring About New Opportunities and Experiences

Personal growth, innovation, and creativity are developed through the experiences and opportunities you take. You get a chance to see life from many different perspectives as you meet and interact with more people. Giving you more opportunities to network and to better optimize your business.

 Be More Proactive and Less Reactive to Achieve Higher Success

To Have A Competitive Advantage

The one consistency to life is change. While scary to most, it is actually a beautiful thing. Change has afforded you all the wonderful experiences, people, and possessions you get to enjoy today. Change in business can happen fast, and before you know it, you are no longer relevant. Education can keep you relevant and ahead of your competition as you are proactive to keep up and become more creative.

 

To Improve Strengths and Weaknesses

Finally, but certainly not least, education provides you the ability to improve your weakness and perfect your strengths. Even more so, it can unlock abilities and skills you never know you had. Further increasing your creativity and giving your business a unique and personal advantage.

 

To Improve Empathy and Compassion

Education provides you information and different perspectives about the world. Empathy and compassion help you develop a deep understanding of the world, its challenges, and how people interact. With empathy and compassion, you can create better products, ideas and get through obstacles more efficiently and successfully.

 

Investing in education will always be a gain, even if you can’t see it directly. It can improve the quality of work, increase your revenue, improve your communication and understanding of the world to better plan and be more effective with your time. Increasing your success and happiness in the long run, making it one of, if not, the best investment you can make in business.

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Your Lack of Realism Is Stalling Your Success

Realism allows you to manage your time better to plan more efficiently with improved confidence, clarity, and focus on tackling your goals. Realism ensures positivity and actions that result in creating attainable and relevant pursuits. Realistic people are said to be more independent and practical with their time.

Managing Your Mental State (When Times Are Tough) or (Through Adversity)

They use education, knowledge, and mindfulness to their advantage to make the right decisions. You will rarely see them go with the flow or not take a moment to recognize it for what it truly is. Without realism, you are likely down a rocky path of confusion and low self-confidence as you continue to accomplish goals that don’t lead to happiness or try to go after ones that don’t make sense and are out of reach.

This is a Great Jim Rohn Video that highlights the Steps to setting Realistic Goals. Pure Gold!

 

The following are a few tips to help you be more realistic to improve your business and life:

 

Always Stop to Think and Evaluate

Your parents might have told you this already, but it’s important to reiterate and harder than one might think. However, it’s the first step you should take to being more realistic. If you don’t stop and thoroughly analyze the situation, it could lead to more problems down the road. Miscommunication often stems from reacting right away rather than fully listening and being aware in that moment. It only takes a few minutes to evaluate your situation to be sure the information you are receiving and dissecting is accurate or not.

 

Develop More Awareness

Realism develops through experiences and education. Taking the time to learn about other people and the challenges or different things they go through in life allows you to see a different perspective and really see things for what they are. When you know all sides of the equation, you won’t be shocked at the result.  Join local events, industry conferences and surround yourself with more people that have similar interests and goals.

Ask for Feedback and Advice

Don’t shy away from constructive feedback, advice, or different point of view. The purpose is to provide you more insight and information you can’t see for yourself. Even if their opinions may not be true in the end, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t value you in some way. Now you know what not to do, for example.

 

Take Responsibility

Commit to being more mindful and responsible for your actions and inactions. This means being proactive with your life and gaining the knowledge required to form the success you want. Recognize your mistakes and find ways to improve, and always strive to be and do better.

 

Remember, the key to realism is to slow down, experience more, take in as much information as possible to create the right action steps to achieve your dreams and aspirations.

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Get Your Goals into Your Calendar

Accomplishing your goals requires action. Stop waiting for the perfect time. You can create the perfect time. Pick a time relatively soon and realistic to your goal needs and put that goal into your calendar.

 

This means you need to:

  • Pick a start date and time for your ultimate goal
  • Set proper and realistic deadlines
  • Fully understand the tasks needed to reach your goal
  • Then schedule times and deadlines for each task required to reach your ultimate goal.

 

Adding your goals to your calendar forms a sense of commitment and re-establishes your sense of purpose or direction. It develops healthy routines and habits that inspire you to stay on track and keep you working towards your goals. It’s a great way to create instant motivation. When you can see it, you are more likely to want to get it done.

 

Essential Things to Keep in Mind When Goal Setting:

  • What is the end or ultimate goal?
  • How much time do you need? Have you timed yourself doing these tasks before? What if you don’t get as much sleep?
  • Are there things that could protentional go wrong or get in your way?
  • Who needs to do it? Can you complete each task or do some things that require help from others?
  • Group similar tasks and utilize technology to work more productively and save you time.
  • Get the most crucial items out of your way but keep in mind that little tasks add up over time.
  • Once you set a time, stick to it and don’t permit yourself to change it.

 

These are important questions and tips to keep in mind so you can pick the right deadline for your goal. You don’t want to create the opposite reaction and turn your goal into a nightmare because you took on too much work too fast. Slower is better than rushing it and pushing out shoddy quality work or products.

 

Research shows that more time is better for creativity anyways; however, just like too little time can have the opposite reaction, so can too much time. You must be realistic and take the time to evaluate. On the other hand, get going. Don’t wait or sabotage yourself any longer.

What Methods Work Best to Ensure You Make Your Goals?

The most productive and successful people utilize their calendar any moment they can.

Overall, the number one tip to achieving your goals and improving your time management skill and productivity is setting deadlines, adding them to your calendar, and then sticking to them. The more you schedule, the more you will achieve.

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The Importance Of “Why”

Before you start any business or goal in life, you should get to know and truly understand your “why” first. Knowing why you’re doing anything in life is a crucial step as it can easily make or break your business or goal before you even get started. When you know why you want to do something, you can better understand the actions and resources needed to get there.

 

Your why is the determination, focus, inspiration, and motivation you need to keep working towards your goals each and every day. As uncomfortable as it may feel to accept your daily actions are the direct results of what you want in life and have already achieved.

 

If you don’t achieve something even if you want it, it’s likely because you didn’t take the necessary action to get there. Your “why” to get there either wasn’t clear enough, or you simply weren’t true to yourself.

 

The following tips and tricks help discover your true “why” and how to use it to your advantage:

 

List Your Values and Aspirations

Start by listing your values and aspirations for all areas of life. List the most important thing you would like to achieve. The first value or aspiration that comes to mind is likely the one that you value the most.

 

Are There Consequences to Not Getting There?

Ask, “What will happen if I never do it?” Take notice of your emotions and write down precisely what you are thinking and feeling. Then evaluate what you wrote down—your true why is likely within these words.

 

Be Sure It’s for The Right Reasons

Why do you want to achieve what you want in your life? Whether it’s money, fame, or happiness, make sure it aligns with you, your values, and your morals; no one else’s. Even if everyone else is doing it, it may not be for you, and that’s okay.

 

Passion Doesn’t Always Equal Business Success

While this may be hard to hear, it can also be a great and beautiful thing. Just because you love something or are very passionate about it doesn’t mean it can be a viable business opportunity. You must make this realization before you get started and fail. Use it as a hobby and a great way to de-stress instead.

 

Be Aware: Money Won’t Ever Be Enough

While money unlocks some freedoms and can reduce stress, money by itself won’t be enough. If you didn’t need money, would you still want to do it? If the answer is no, then start somewhere else.

the purpose

As you can see, your “why” is what empowers you to get things done. Your “why” helps you become successful. If it’s not realistic, you likely won’t get there no matter why you do what you do.