Tag: tools

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Social Media Marketing: What it is and Why it’s Important to Entrepreneurs

Social media marketing uses social networks and platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to create awareness about a product, service, or event. Social media marketing is vital for entrepreneurs because it can help get your business or value out to the public.

 

Social media marketing is important to solo entrepreneurs because:

 

It Directly Engages Your Target Audience

Social media is a great way to engage your audience and keep them up to date on what’s happening in your world. It allows you to easily target specific audiences with the information they’re interested in. Using hashtags is a popular way to engage and find your target audience on many platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat.

 

For example, if you have a company called “MOVING COMPANY,” you might choose to use the hashtag “#MovingCompany” at the beginning of your posts. Then tag the company name in the post to ensure that anyone interested in moving their current location to yours will find the information they need to decide.

 

It Reaches More Loyal Customers

Businesses can now reach more loyal customers than ever before by posting content on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. A recent study found that nearly eighty-four percent of consumers would trust a company if they had their social media account or company website listed on their landing page, and seventy-one percent of people would actually follow the company’s social media account if they liked what they saw on the platform.

 

It Helps to Promote Your Products and Services

It is believed that roughly fifty percent of purchases online are influenced by social media. This is because social media provides a connection between customers and businesses. In addition, the use of social media creates a two-way conversation between consumers and marketers, which means that the consumer can also share feedback about how they feel about the product or service being offered.

 

This can be done more personally and directly with social media than with traditional media. For example, a customer might post on social media that they found out they were never offered student discounts at the store because the employees didn’t know what those were, which could lead to better training for employees in the future or discounts for students in store.

 

Social media is a crucial marketing tool you can’t skip as a solo entrepreneur. This tool helps you reach more people and improve your communication to provide better products and services. Over time, social media helps increase your revenue as you have another way to share your products or services with your target audience. So don’t delay. To succeed at online marketing, look for the right social media platform for your business and share your best content regularly.

 

 

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Common Community Building Obstacles that Can Hinder Your Success

Like any business advertising or marketing strategy, there are bound to be obstacles that can hinder your success. For this reason, understanding some of the many common obstacles to community building now will prevent them from destroying your results in the future. In addition, knowing what to watch out for can mitigate the problems and help you be more successful than your wildest dreams.

 

Here are four common community-building obstacles that can hinder your success and tips on how to avoid or improve them:

 

Unique and Valuable Content

 

Continually creating and sharing valuable content is no easy feat. Repurposing content, sharing boring promotions, or expecting your community to do most of the work won’t help you either. Instead, developing and sharing content that is unique to that platform will inspire more engagement.

 

Asking questions and getting to know your audience more by figuring out their needs and frustrations will provide you with endless content ideas. What keeps them up at night? If you know your audience and what makes them who they are, you will know what content to produce. If you’re not sure, ask them.

 

Platform and Tools

 

Not using the right tools or platform for your target audience is the first mistake many make. Just because a platform is easy for you to use doesn’t mean it will translate to your audience. If you use a platform or software not used by the common public, you must add additional content to teach them how to use it and why they should even try. Working with difficult tools or confusing information will only deter them from participating or showing up. Instead, pick a well-known tool, and even if it’s not perfect, stick to it if that is where your audience is.

 

Market Competition

 

Competition is inevitable, and it only gets bigger the more avenues or tools you use for your business. However, doing the right research on your competition and developing superior resources makes it a non-issue. You can always do better.

 

One strategy is to find and join your competitors’ groups within your niche and see what comments and information they receive. Then, watch how they answer their customers or help lead them toward purchasing. Then, as you learn, find ways to make it better with your distinctive touch.

 

Consistency

 

Finally, but certainly not least, consistency is a common struggle to many businesses who start a brand community. Finding the right balance of content to share and working with your members’ schedules is the best way to achieve this. Adopting and learning automation tools will also help perfect consistency. Consistency shows your members that you are there to value them, not use them for money.

 

Knowing these common obstacles should provide you with the tools to build a more successful brand or online community from the start. Consistent materials, schedule, and image with the right tools and education are essential to running a profitable and valuable brand community. Keeping up with your industry and always supplying valuable and powerful content can be a lot of work but is crucial to the success of your community.

 

Harness the Power of Consistency

 

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Six Instagram Story Hacks to Use for Business

Just about everything you do on this platform relies on your use and understanding of the benefits and power stories provide. However, due to Instagram’s popularity, it can be hard to stand out against the competition to make a real impact and keep your audience interested and engaged.

 

Here are six Instagram story hacks to use for your business to provide your target audience maximum value and turn them into repeat visitors and customers:

 

Utilize and understand All Editing Features

 

Take the time to get to know how to use every single editing or other features Instagram has to offer. Instagram wants to keep people on their platform and provide you the tools to keep your customers there through these features. So the more time you take to learn it, the better you can take advantage of their benefits.

 

Create Progression Posts

 

Again, a goal for Instagram and you are to keep people active and engaged. If you want your viewers to stay around, create stories with slides or frames that work together to tell a full story instead of using single posts. In order words, don’t just share one story with a short frame of your product. Include extra details such as how to use it too.

 

Host Live Q&As or Other Events

 

Get your audience involved even more by answering their questions or showing off your products live. Q & As offers a fabulous way to build your community and advance brand awareness while answering many of your viewers’ or customers’ questions.

 

Take Advantage of Instagram Highlights and Shopping Feature

 

These two features are must-haves to get the most benefits from this platform. This is how you can make your stories last longer than twenty-four hours so your viewers can continue to receive the value if they were not there while it was live. It also provides you tools to add your brand colors to increase your brand awareness.

 

Mention Other Accounts

 

Account shoutouts are a professional way to increase your exposure and build the community with your niche or industry. The best trait to have as a business owner is generosity. The more you give and share to others, the more likely you are to receive more back. Additionally, when you post a shoutout, their audience will see your content, while your audience will likely view their content—a win for both businesses.

Use Tools and Pre-Schedule Your Content

 

Tools are important in order to keep up with the constant action required on Instagram. Of course, the amount you post depends on your target audience’s schedule, your niche, and what kind you want to create for your stories. However, the fact is still clear that frequently posting throughout the day is key to staying at the top of the newsfeed and better grab your audience’s attention.

 

As you can see, taking advantage of each and every feature the platform has to offer is the key to creating engaging and interesting content. The more features and tools you use, the more value it provides, keeping you at the top of your audience’s mind and preventing your competition from taking the lead. Add each of these ideas to your social media content plan to add the variety, consistency, and engagement you need to be successful.

 

Four Fun Ways to Use Instagram Stories Polls and Questions

 

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Five Tools to Automate Your Social Media Stories

Due to the high-value social media stories and other content brought to companies, third-party solutions and products emerged. These solutions were designed to make it easier for brands or businesses to take full advantage of the benefits social media marketing brings without breaking the bank or taking up too much time.

 

Many things in social media require constant work and are quite tedious. Not something any one person can do sustainably to see results or achieve your goals with social media – making it that much more important to take advantage of these tools to automate certain portions of your social media content plan or make it easier and faster to produce high-quality content.

 

The following are five tools to help automate your social media stories:

 

Hootsuite

 

Hootsuite offers a thirty-day free trial to get started. With Hootsuite, scheduling all your social media content ahead of time across many different platforms will save you more time and free you from frustration. Then, view what your customers or audience thinks, access image access to make regular posts, or evaluate your personalized insights to see what is working all in one easy-to-use interface.

 

SocialPilot

 

Never run out of content ideas with SocialPilot’s unlimited keyword search tool. Discover trending content, create it and schedule it ahead of time to automate your social media marketing. View all your social media comments, posts, and messages easily from your Facebook pages or groups all in one place organized for better communication. SocialPilot works with many of the popular platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter.

 

CoSchedule

 

A marketing calendar allows you to see all of your projects from different platforms in one area that you can share and work on with a team. It can be easy to get lost in communication and make your social media stories inconsistent or disorganized if you can’t properly work with your team or keep your project all in one place. Don’t let your content projects be scattered between emails, spreadsheets, or cloud storage.

 

Sprout Social

 

Get to know your audience better with Sprout Social, a tool that gives you the knowledge and information you need to create better social media stories or content for your target audience. Real connections make purchases, and that’s what this tool helps you do by understanding their needs and then doing the work to create a plan that meets them. They also provide tools that help you publish content, manage your workflows, influencer engagement, and view analytics.

 

PostPlanner

 

Automatically post your content and keep up with your daily posting schedule with PostPlanner. A tool that allows you to set your posting schedule, republish content with one click, or tailor your post to maximize your reach. It also has a feature that filters through Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit to provide the best or most trendy topics and ideas to create more stories or social media posts that convert.

 

Give each of these tools a try to see which one provides the most value to your brand and overall objective. The idea is to free up your time so you can use it where it matters most. For example, create engaging, interactive, and highly valuable and beneficial content for your followers or paying customers. In addition, using these tools can help you automate the process and plan ahead to get the most impact from your social media stories and other content.

 

Schedule Your Daily Activities Based on Your Goals

 

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The Facebook Story Strategies to Follow for Business

Facebook stories are short clips, pictures, videos, audio clippings, or other animations shared at the top of followers’ Facebook or Messenger app and to the top right above the newsfeed of the desktop version. All a follower needs to do is tap on the profile picture of the story content they want to watch to view the content.

 

A blue ring will appear around the profile picture of Facebook users who have new stories for you to watch. These stories give businesses a more fun and attractive way to market to their target audience, increasing their success on the platform and as a sustainable and functioning business.

 

Here are five Facebook story strategies to follow to further grow and market your business on this platform:

 

Completely Fill in Your Facebook Page

 

Don’t leave any information out that Facebook asks for when you create your new page for your business. The most active pages have the most information for their audience. You’ll want to link them to your website, your other relevant content on the net and provide any answers they need to make a buying choice.

 

Enhance Your Facebook Stories with Creative Tools and Music

 

The tools Facebook offers to upgrade your stories are filters, graphics, words, and also music. You can replace any background sounds on videos captured for Facebook Stories using your Smartphone simply by using Facebook’s own editor in your phone. It’s not hard to do at all. Click around and give it a try so you can learn your systems and tools.

 

Keep Track and Up to Date with Facebook Stories Analytics

 

Use your analytics to do better. Don’t trust your own opinions about how your stories or posts are doing. Trust the metrics captured instead. This way, you can improve with each content update by doing what your audience wants most instead of what you happen to like.

 

Link Your Account with Instagram

 

The same company owns Facebook and Instagram, so you must go ahead and connect your Facebook account with Instagram to make use of both and double your views.

 

Use Facebook Story Highlights

 

The stories you create are automatically saved in your private story archives, which you can make live again whenever you want to. In addition, you can use these stories that were captured and shared to build a highlights reel so that your audience can learn more about you easily.

 

If you want to gain the most reward out of your Facebook story content, you must implement these strategies for your business. These tips ensure you use the platform and its features correctly and wisely to gain your audience’s attention and keep them interested and active with your brand. The more interested and engaged they are with the value you provide, the more likely they will purchase your products or services.

 

Struggling With Social Media? A Calendar And System Can Help

 

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Tips to Using E-mail to Work with Influencers

One of the best ways to contact influencers is through e-mail. Unfortunately, when it comes to content creation and content marketing, lines can often be blurred and disorganized due to all the information and different people required to run successfully. Here are a few tips for using e-mail to work with influencers and streamline the influencer marketing process.

 

Use and Create Templates

 

Don’t start over every single time you start a campaign. Instead, start using and creating templates for each type of action you take. Then, simply fill in the blanks to get it done much faster while not forgetting to include some information.

 

Make Goals and Intentions Clear

Email Marketing: What You Need to Make It All Work

When you communicate with anyone, remember that it’s your job as the sender of the message to ensure understanding by the receiver. To ensure that you do this, be very clear about your goals and intentions in each e-mail message you send. Even if it feels redundant, explain everything. E-mail doesn’t offer the ability of the reader to decipher your tone or body language, so clarity is a must.

 

Create Innovative E-mail Headlines

 

Creating subject lines or e-mail headlines takes practice and persistence. Instead of using the first one, you create, try creating 50 every single time you need a headline. Do it very quickly, within about 15 minutes, just writing down all the headlines that come to mind. This type of brainstorming will improve innovation and get more results.

 

Highlight Their Compensation

 

When you communicate with an influencer, make sure you highlight the compensation you’re giving them because that will help motivate them more. In addition, your campaign can be even more effective if you’re offering them affiliate marketing deals in addition to their flat influencer fee.

 

Keep it Personal

 

Don’t act too business-like. Influencers are all about building relationships, but, at the same time, you want to keep your e-mails and messages personal, so they don’t feel too spammy to the receiver. For example, mention something you like about them or point out a particular video or post they did to make them stand out to you.

 

As you can see, using e-mail can make the process of communication with different influencers easier.  Using e-mail to communicate with your influencers can ensure that organization and communication are clear before the campaign starts. It also streamlines the process and makes it easier to understand as it can be pretty tedious to outreach to many different influencers.

 

 

 

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Top 7 Productivity Tools to Try

If you haven’t started automating some part of your business yet, then you are already behind. Tools and technology make business more accessible and ultimately increase your productivity so you can earn more money or crush more goals. Technology keeps you organized and consistent, allowing you to keep up with your competition.

 

Give these seven tools a try today to increase your business productivity:

 

#1:Trello

Trello is an online, cloud-based project management system that allows you to work anywhere with an internet connection. Create message boards, lists, cards and organize or delegate tasks to different team members.

 

#2:Dropbox

Cloud-based software that allows you to save and share files from any location. Dropbox is an excellent option for businesses that need to share, transfer, or save large files like video production.

 

#3:Zapier

Connect all your different applications to automate your workflow instantly. This application moves information from different social media platforms, email applications, and more. Choose your medium and trigger and watch Zapier do the work for you. For example, anytime someone signs up for your Facebook event, you can tell Zapier to send them a message automatically.

 

#4:Wave

Every business requires accounting, and that’s precisely what the Wave app makes a little bit easier. Create professional invoices, track your business expenses, incoming revenue, pay employees and instantly generate essential business reports.

 

#5:Evernote

Evernote is more than just a notepad. It saves your text, images, files, to-do lists, and more all in the same place to keep track of new business ideas or important events and information.

 

#6:Pushbullet

If you feel like you are juggling with too many devices, smartphone, tablet, desktop, and laptop, then Pushbullet is right for you. It connects all your devices making them easier to use and seem as though you only have one. Get notifications, check your emails, send links, text messages, or files, chat with friends, family, or co-workers all from one device.

 

#7:Todoist

Keep all your to-do lists, and never forget an appointment or important assignment again with Todoist. Todoist provides features that allow you to easily organize and prioritize your most important tasks, from creating the family budget or weekly grocery list to updating important business routines and strategies or instantly share your lists or delegate tasks to your team.

 Tools and Tips to Help You Automate Email Marketing

Don’t be behind anything longer. Find the right tools and technology for your business to be more productive. Start by adding just one of these productivity tools to your daily routine. Remember, technology will only go as far as you allow it. Learn how to use it right and give it time to see the rewards and benefits.

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What Resources Do I Need to Live the Good Life?

As you plan your future business and get ready to create your business plan, you need to understand what resources you need to live the good life you want. You don’t want your business to interfere with it. In fact, you want your business to provide the good life you want. It’s not an either-or choice if you think about all this in advance.

believe

What is a resource? A resource can be either internal or external. For example, you have internal resources such as your own knowledge, skills, qualities, habits, techniques, your own funds, and things you’ve learned over time. External sources may include your access to people in the know, books, software, funds, and so forth.

 

When you look at your vision board and the goals you’ve set for each of the eight areas of life, what resources do you really need? Some resources you come across will be required, and some will be desired but not out and out required.

 

Let’s remember the eight areas of life and show an example of the possible resources you need for each area. I included some ideas for you to get you started. This is not comprehensive because it’s hard to know what any one person may have or need as this is very individual, so try to answer this for yourself using the example.

 

Career and Business

 

Resources I have:

  • Coaching Certification
  • Time Management Skills
  • Networking Skills
  • Writing Skills
  • Computer
  • Coaching Software
  • Online Communities
  • Mastermind Group
  • $5000 Start-Up Funding

 

Resources I need:

  • Programming Skills
  • Email Marketing Software
  • A Website
  • An Office Space
  • Clients

 

Health and Fitness

 

Resources I have:

  • A Good Mindset
  • Gym Membership
  • Good Shoes
  • My Best Friend (Motivation)
  • $400 Monthly Budget

 

Resources I need:

  • Medical Insurance
  • Regular Dental Care
  • Healthy Grocery Budget
  • Full House Water Filter

 

Relationships and Social Life

 

Resources I have:

  • A supportive spouse
  • Three great kids
  • Backyard Pool
  • A Healthy Outlook
  • Good Communication Skills

 

Resources I need:

  • Bigger Dining Room Table
  • A Vacation Home
  • Time

 

Finances

 

Resources I have:

  • $5000 Startup Cash
  • A Business Idea
  • A Personal Budget

 

Resources I need:

  • Bookkeeping Software
  • A CPA
  • A Business Plan
  • A Retirement Plan

 

Personal and Spiritual Development

 

Resources I have:

  • My church
  • My book club group
  • My community
  • My health

 

Resources I need:

  • Books
  • Counselor
  • Like-Minded People

 

Hobbies and Fun

 

Add what you have and what you need to ensure you can do your hobbies and have fun.

 

Home and Environment

 

What do you have already that makes your home environment the way you want it, and what do you need to improve it based on your lifestyle goals?

 

Community Involvement

 

The same thing goes here, list all the resources you have and that you need to achieve the results you desire.

 

Some of the resources you need you may not have yet, or you may not even be sure what they are yet, but as you move along, you’ll discover what is needed, and you can add those to the list of resources you need. Make sure you create your resource list based on what you have available first and then what you need to acquire for each of the areas of life you want to design and improve.

 

Understanding exactly what you need for success in each of the eight areas of life will help you ensure that you are working toward your goal in a way that makes it possible to succeed. If you don’t have the resource yet, you can use the information you’re gathering to set up a plan to get those resources.

How To Build A Wildly Profitable Income Stream From Home Without Lies, Hype, Manipulation or Pressure…

https://flawlessfreedom.com

 

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Develop a Realistic Business Plan

One reason for burnout is incongruency between the life you want and the life you’re living. Most of that problem is due to a lack of planning.

Entrepreneur Burnout

Many small business owners think that if their business is a home business or a small business that they don’t need a real business plan. After all, they think I am not going to get a business loan, so why do I need to do all that planning?

 

The truth is if you want to succeed, and you want it to be repeatable, and you want to avoid the potential for burnout, you must develop a business plan. A business plan will help you structure, run, and grow your business realistically and sustainably. Plus, creating a business plan isn’t even hard to do. Let’s learn how to make a one-page business plan for your home business right now.

 

Your one-page business plan should include the following. However, keep in mind it doesn’t literally have to live on only one page. You should include as much information as you need in your business plan to help you develop a guiding document for your business. If one page works for you, that’s fabulous!

 

Describe the Problem

 

You’ll want to write a well thought out description of the problem that your customers have that you can solve along with any relevant data that describes how you can do that to show proof.

 

Your Product or Service

 

This is the solution to the problem above, so you’ll want to go through each product or service you offer and describe the solution in terms of how it solves the problem that the customer has. If you have more than one solution, this is the area that might end up taking more than one page. However, going through this can help you with marketing later.

 

How You Make Money

 

This is considered your business model. How will you make the money, how much will it cost you to make the money, and what is the price the customer will pay for the solution and how will they pay it?

 

Do you Know your Freedom Number?

You Have To Know Where You’re At Right Now To Measure Growth & Figure Out What You Should Be Working On?  Click Here

Know your number

Describe Your Customer(s)

 

Understanding your target market is an essential component of your business plan and your business planning needs. Include a customer avatar through the buying journey. Talk about how many customers there are, and how much you can earn from each customer throughout their customer life cycle.

 

Describe How You’re Different

 

It can help to describe how you’re going to differentiate yourself from your competition. This is called your “competitive advantage” in business. It’s how you use your differences to stand out from the competition and create customer loyalty.

 

Describe Your Team

 

Even if it’s just you, it helps to write down all the tasks and roles that need to be accomplished to make this business work. However, even if it is just you, it’s not just you due to the technology you can use, such as email marketing software, funnel software, and other automation.

 

Also, if you plan to outsource anything, write that down too. Maybe the first year you’re doing it all yourself but include financial metrics that trigger outsourcing or major software purchases.

 

Include Key Financial Metrics

Do you Know your Numbers?

You need to know what your budget is for marketing, software, outsourcing, and so forth. This is often called a Financial Summary in a business plan. You’ll want to include figures for now, and your future as you forecast potential sales. Finally, you’ll want to add what funding you need right now to get started or to move forward with your business.

 

As you go through this, just focus right now on writing a summary of each section so that you see what needs to be done in one easy to read page. As you move forward, you can add more information to the plan, which may make it grow past the one page, but it will be a helpful exercise to help keep on moving toward your goals.

 

As you move toward your goals, you’ll be a lot less likely to experience burnout when you’ve set up your business realistically in balance with your entire life. Writing down the business plan helps you see it more clearly and plainly, thus allowing you to really accomplish what you set out to do rather than keeping it as a dream.