Many people think that building a huge following on social media is all it takes to become a successful influencer. There is actually a lot more to this than you may realize.
While it may be easy for you to create a new Facebook fan page and build a following of thousands of fans, what you need is active followers. An active follower or fan is someone who takes the time to comment and share your content. It is this activity that the major sites like Klout and Kred take into consideration when measuring your influence.
It is possible to get your fans and followers to engage with you by following some simple steps. First remember that social media is about sharing content. While your main goal may be to have others share your content, this will not happen unless you share theirs first.
Another aspect that you want to master is the one of listening. Listen and read the comments that your fans post and then take action on them. By doing this you are actually showing them that you are interested in what they have to say. This will help you build trust and respect amongst your followers and in turn this will improve your power of influence.
Always remember to be yourself when using social media and don’t try to come over as you think people want you to. You should know what your brand is and what message you are trying to convey to people. This places you in an honest light and again helps to build trust with your customers. After all you want to be someone who your customers can happily do business with.
When it comes to adding content to your social media sites then always aim for quality content first. When having any type of social media conversation it is best to have one great conversation with one person than to try and have a mediocre one with ten or twenty people at one time.
Social media is meant to be fun so don’t forget to include this in your business. You don’t always have to be serious. Exposing a fun side will not hurt your business at all. Instead it will make you look more human and friendly to your followers and more approachable.
So instead of worrying about how to become the next best social influencer, just get out there and inject your personality into your sites. You may be surprised by what happens. And remember to have fun!
If you are your looking for assistance with your social media influence please feel free to reach out to me. I understand what it’s like to struggle with the constant changes that happen in our fast paced business world and I’d be glad to be your guide.
Free search engine traffic is an amazing thing. It can grow your targeted traffic, bring you new subscribers and, best of all, increase your sales. But the thing is, you have to work at it. If you want to improve your search engine rankings, bookmark this practical SEO checklist to steadily grow traffic.
For Your Off-Page SEO
These are things that will affect your search engine rankings from outside of your web page. These are very important for growing the overall popularity of your site and make it easier for you to rank well for your chosen keyword phrases.
Create excellent content because it affects the following:
How much your content is shared on social media…this provides important clues to search engines about the quality of your content.
How long a search engine user stays on your site. If searches on a search engine and finds your site, but clicks back right away, it will tell the search engine that you may not be very relevant for that phrase.
How often your content is linked to. If you have good stuff, people will link to it…but beware, search engines can detect quality links.
Ways to ensure you’ve got quality engaging content that attracts users and search engines:
Each page should be on one unique topic.
Your navigation is clear and all your content is easily found by humans and search engines.
Use attention-getting headlines to grab your visitors’ attention and so they know they’re in the right place.
Make your content easy to read by using short sentences and paragraphs. Keep your words simple.
Break up your copy with subheads and bullet points, so viewers can scan it easily…instead of having them click away.
Use images to draw the eye in and tell a story with your content. Humans are visual creatures and photos and other images can help retain their attention. If you need help with this check our free opt-in offer on the side bar.
Don’t forget to connect with other website owners in your niche. Friends tend to share the content of others, so this is just a win-win for all of you.
For Your On-Page SEO
In addition to the big overall picture of creating great content that makes its way around the web, there things you can do on each page you post to your website. Here is a list of quite a few things that can affect your rankings, but remember…don’t overdo it. Keep your optimization natural and make sure it makes sense. Otherwise you might alienate your visitors and search engines can sniff out attempts to game the system.
Some experts recommend you make sure your content is at least 300 words long. I would actually increase that to at least 500 words. People like meaty content.
Conduct keyword research to find a highly targeted phrase that gets decent traffic, but doesn’t have too much competition. Try a tool like WordTracker.com.
Use your keyword phrase in the title of your post and in the title tag, but make sure it will be appealing to website visitors.
Use your keyword phrase in the description tag for your post. Make sure the description not only includes the keyword phrase, but is interesting enough to make people want to click.
Incorporate the keyword phrase into the URL of your page. For example: fun-family-vacations.html
Add the keyword phrase and other useful description to your images with the use of ALT tags.
Employ the use of H2 and H3 tags. They make your content easier to scan and are also a good place to include your keyword phrase and variations of it.
Include the keyword phrase and variations of it in a few places in the body of your content. Try to include it in the first paragraph as well.
Show you are a hub of useful information and link out to a related page on another website.
I hope you found this practical SEO checklist handy. Remember to keep track of your rankings and tweak things as you go along. Just remember, it can take a bit of time before search engines update their listings, so give your changes time to come into effect.
If you found this checklist helpful please be sure to share it on your social media so that your friends can also benefit from this blog post.
One of the best things about online marketing is the advent of social media. Social media lets you promote your content, expand awareness of your brand, and engage with your clients and potential customers. But you can’t just send blind updates without doing just a bit more to ensure that your audience wants to engage with you. Getting your audience to respond to your calls to action is all about engagement. After all, social media is supposed to be social, right?
1. Update Your About Pages & Social Media Profiles
First things first – start updating your “About” pages on your websites, and all your social media profiles. You want there to be no mistake what your brand stands for, and who you are. In addition, every change you make is a chance to cross-promote on other social media. Your About pages, Contact pages and Social Media profiles are great places to cross promote.
2. Provide a Blurb of What’s to Come When Promoting Content
When you share any content, whether yours or someone else’s, always provide a little blurb to help pique interest and make your audience curious. For instance, if you’re sharing a Top 10 Ways that You Can Engage Your Clients thru Social Media article, you might say something like “Pay special attention to tip number 2” in your promotions. This will make your audience want to click through to read the blog post or article. In addition, ask them “What’s your favorite tip? Come back and share here in the comments.”
3. Use Multiple Types & Forms of Content to Keep Your Audience’s Interest
Don’t only share one type or form of content. There are so many forms of content to choose from, such as images, text, eBooks, articles, blog posts, infographics, memes, videos and so forth. There are also many types of content (such as evergreen content) that will be current for a long time, and then there is newsworthy timely content that you will want to share as soon as it occurs. Keep your audience interested by being exciting and different.
4. Never Forget Your Call To Action (CTA)
When you share anything on social media, always remember to put a CTA. It’s also important to vary the CTA. For instance, sometimes you might say, “share this with your friends” another time you might say “comment if you disagree, like if you agree” or you might say “buy now” as your CTA. Whatever you choose as your CTA, don’t overwhelm your audience with too many choices. But always include one, and make it different than the last time.
5. Show Off Your Personality (Let Your Helpers Do So Too)
Consumers want to feel as if they’re engaging with real people. Since you’re a real person that should be easy. But, we often get so tied up with automation (which is wonderful and useful) that we forget to engage with people. If you outsource to anyone who is handling your social media, they don’t need to act like robots. Let them show their personality too. Keep your business’s mission statement handy not only for yourself but for those who represent your brand. As long as you stay on message, it’s okay to let your personality show through.
6. Use Your Metrics To Improve Your Efforts
What posts, updates, and sorts of shares are your fans currently interacting with the most? By knowing what the numbers say, you can use that information to increase your efforts in a smart way so that you avoid doing what isn’t working, and do more of what is working. Not every audience will respond the same to every type of content that you share. But it’s impossible to know without looking at the analytics. When is your audience online? What types of content do they like, share, respond to the most? Never rely on guesses; rely on the facts and figures that you can obtain.
7. Use Apps & Technology to Improve Your Connections
There are so many apps that you can use to schedule, study, and interact with your audience. Did you know that there are custom apps that you can use for Facebook that will help you run contests, encourage email sign ups, add a storefront and more? Try Heyo to create mobile optimized campaigns for Facebook. Want to create useful Facebook Tabs, awesome cover photos, scheduled posts and more? Try Pagemodo.com. There are apps that can do so much, the best thing for you to do is ask your colleagues what they use, or simply do a Google search.
8. Keep Conversing With Your Audience
Speaking of apps, you can put apps on your smartphone that enable you to speak with your audience at all times. You want to talk to them at “off” times as much as “on” times. You might seem too robotic if you only post on Monday through Friday during business hours. It’s also great to post from different locations; it shows that you’re a busy person who nevertheless cares about your audience. Be sure to use some automation for this, such as using apps to schedule weekend updates.
9. Add the Right Metadata to Your Websites & Pages
Metadata is information that essentially summarizes data on your site, like the title, description, author, date and other things such as identifying images and more. The thing to remember is which metadata is important to include on your website so that when you share a link on social media the right information is presented in an attractive way. This will make your audience want to click through.
a. Titles – This is the keyword rich title of your article or blog post. On Facebook, it will show up in bold above the link.
b. Description – This shows up under the link and is usually the first words of your article or blog post that are NOT header text.
c. Image – You can use the code of your page to specify the images that are allowed to show up in the thumbnail.
d. Canonical URL – Within the code of the site you can ensure that everyone goes to the same home page when clicking through to your site.
It’s important to consider these factors when creating your WebPages and blogs so that when you or others share articles or blog posts they find interesting on their social media sites, it looks good and gets the message across that you want.
10. Ask Your Fans What They Want
Finally, never forget to ask your current fans, connections, and followers what they want from you. You can send out a survey, answer questions, and more to find out what your connections what. The more you give them what they want, the more they’re likely to engage with you in social media.
Use social media to communicate the story of your brand. As you use these top ten ways to engage your audience in social media, try to remember what your business core values are, what the benefits of your products and services are to your clients, and your point of being on social media.
Let us help you brand your business. Visit our services area on our site to find out how we can make YOUR BUSINESS more visible and unique. If you don’t see a service that you need let us know how we can help you GROW your business.
While it may be easy for you to create a new Facebook fan page and build a following of thousands of fans, what you need is active followers. An active follower or fan is someone who takes the time to comment and share your content. It is this activity that the major sites like Klout and Kred take into consideration when measuring your influence. 
is and what message you are trying to convey to people. This places you in an honest light and again helps to build trust with your customers. After all you want to be someone who your customers can happily do business with. 
