The Marketing Way

We put a telescope on the intersection of marketing and small business.

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  Add the power of visual marketing to your toolbox with Slideshare
  Like social media platforms Pinterest and Instagram, Slideshare’s success is due to the power of visuals. Ah, slide presentations. You want to view one of these as much as you want a hole in the head or a severe case of COVID-19. Right? Maybe not. Incredible as it may sound, they are an effective way to reach prospects via LinkedIn’s sister company and platform, Slideshare. Surprisingly, SlideShare has five times more traffic from business owners than Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn.
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  The Essentials of a LinkedIn Marketing Strategy
  LinkedIn can be a valuable social media platform for your business. If you are in the B2B sector, having an effective LinkedIn marketing strategy a must. Is LinkedIn more than “Connecting the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful”? That’s their slogan and there is a lot to it. It’s a social media platform that has benefited greatly from its acquisition by Microsoft. How can you profit from LinkedIn as a small business? If used appropriately and strategically, there are two general ways a LinkedIn marketing strategy can benefit your company.
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  The Essentials of Facebook Marketing
  Facebook can be a valuable social media platform for personal service/products oriented businesses. But only if you use it strategically. I have to admit that I hate Facebook, its fake news, its business practices, and most everything it represents. I dislike the type of people that are obsessed with it. Like nicotine and heroin, it is an addictive product. However, in business, you are not necessarily out to do what you like to do. You are out to help your customers and fellow man.
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  The Essentials of a Twitter Marketing Strategy
  Twitter is a fantastic tool for learning and sharing knowledge that benefits both you and your customers. Like several social media platforms, the content on Twitter contains a fair amount of nonsense. A large part of its traffic involves commenting on television during live broadcasts and streaming. Politicians and “celebrities” can vaingloriously spout off about themselves. And it’s not immune from mean-spirited trolls. Yet, it is still a valuable tool for small businesses like yours.
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  Why Social Selling is the best selling
  Social media platforms are the third pillar of your content marketing strategy. And they are a fluid pillar, changing daily. The social platforms your business should use will depend on your industry, your business, and most importantly your customers. You will need to go where your customers and prospects are engaging with social media. A common thing you will do with all of them is engage in social selling. It is the tactic that can make your sales team into Rainmakers.
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  How to write effective marketing emails
  For any email to be effective, it must have a specific goal and capitalize on establishing trust with your audience. Before we look at how to write effective emails, let’s start with a few quick points. As human beings, we crave interaction. Emails are an opportunity to interact with your audience on a one-to-one basis. As I have mentioned before it is the only communication medium that remains private. If your emails are useful and engaging, they can be incredibly effective.
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  Battle of the WordPress Platforms. WordPress.com vs WordPress.org vs Rainmaker
  Do you ever feel like being in business is a fight for your life? We both know the marketplace is an arena for competition. And to win this battle you need to be at the top of your game. Having better marketing than your opponents is essential to success. Your website and blog are two of your most precious business assets. In my opinion, you should only trust them with WordPress.
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  Marketing Essentials for a Successful Social Media Strategy
  Social media platforms help you understand your prospects and convert them into loyal customers. This post provides you with the resources for developing a successful social media strategy. Read it now and bookmark it so you can reference it anytime your business needs some social media success. The posts linked to here can help you make those determinations. They contain detailed resources for learning about social media platforms and what they can do for your marketing efforts.
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  Web analytics drive decisions that lead to conversion
  Let’s start learning how to use analytics to make decisions that lead to conversions. After you start benefiting from visits to your site, blog posts and landing pages you want to increase that traffic. You want to make sure more of it leads to subscribers to your email list, sign-ups for your free content and most importantly eventual customers. For that to happen, your content must convert. And the only way for you to know if it does is to analyze your site’s traffic.
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  Search Engine Optimization Brings the Eyeballs to your site
  A well-planned search optimization strategy will maximize visits to your site and blog. If you have read my earlier posts, you have learned how to drive the actions you want visitors to take on your WordPress site and blog. But if no one gets a chance to see your media content you will not see any results. There are many ways to drive traffic to your site. The way most prospects who are not familiar with your business will find you is via search engine results (serps).
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  It’s closing time. Use landing pages to ask for the sale.
  Well planned and executed landing pages turn your email, social media, and blog content into sales. Let’s start learning how to use landing pages to ask for the sale. As we saw in my earlier post, copywriting is essential to any business’s marketing success. It becomes a high art form on landing pages. Landing pages are ones where you want the viewer to take a single, particular action after viewing them. They drive the second A in your AIDA sales process. Attention, Interest, Desire, Action.
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  Why your small business should use WordPress and nothing less
  Your website/blog is your most valuable online asset. It should be on WordPress. More than 35 percent of the world’s websites are built and run on WordPress. WordPress itself says, “over 409 million people view more than 21.1 billion pages each month” on the platform. If you are smart enough to invest in a blog, WordPress is the only platform you should use. Your blog houses the heart of your content marketing. It is an asset that will always be there for you. Consequently, it is your most valuable online asset. It should be a WordPress blog.
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  Use copywriting to turn your website into a money-maker
  Copywriting gets your audience to take the action you want them to after consuming your media. It is what moves your potential customers through the sales cycle. You must use it on your web pages, blog posts, email marketing, and social media communications. It is the most important part of any individual item of content on your website. It involves every word you see anywhere on your site. Copywriting even applies to what is called micro-copy. That is your website’s title, tagline, menus, forms, additional site navigation, and call to action buttons.
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  How to make sure your blog posts are seen and read
  If your site is your online salesperson, its posts are the subtle tools of its trade. And if your blog is the heart of your content marketing world, your blog posts are its lifeblood. They are what will move visitors from being prospects to becoming customers. They are what you will share with social media to draw people to your site so you can convert them into customers. And they are what you will promote in your email marketing to current customers in order to deepen loyalty and gain a larger share of their wallets. Blog posts are the most important form of your marketing media.
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  The ABCs of dealing with everyday stress
  This is from Hope for Today Psychotherapy and Counseling’s Linda Mesing Cook. It is great advice for everyone but especially us entrepreneurs. I had to share it. Be sure to follow these stress reduction strategies. Need less stress? Here’s what to do. In this post, I would like to provide you a challenge.  Trying a few simple behaviors each day will greatly reduce your everyday stress. We will call these the ABCs of stress reduction. I am sure that if you commit to doing A, B and C for 21 days in a row you will see your stress significantly reduced.
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  Use Storytelling and Emotional Branding in your Web Video Productions
  For epic results with your web videos use storytelling and emotional branding. Congratulations. You made one of the best marketing decisions of your career. You’re producing a video to promote your company or product. That means you are going to sell more goods and services. There is one thing that has the most impact on your video’s success. It is storytelling.
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  Why learn coding? It will make you profitable.
  You’re a business owner. Why would you want to know anything about software coding? Because every single aspect of your business strategy requires tools to execute it. These tools now run on code. If entrepreneurs are the engines of the economy, technology is the fuel. Do you want to make smart investment decisions and understand the ROI on your accounting, CRM, sales tools, cloud computing, and operating software?
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  Why using two monitors is better for your marketing
  For a few more years at least we will continue to use desktop and laptop computers in the workplace. That means we will continue staring at a monitor for hours each day while tweeting, writing, posting, designing, retargeting, etc, etc, etc.. If we are going to slowly degrade our eye site we should at least be as productive as possible while doing so. How do you do that? By using two monitors rather than one.
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  Power tools you need in your content marketing toolbox
  There are many marketing mediums requiring strategic and creative tools in order to be used successfully.  Most businesses are small businesses. And yours is probably no different. Unfairly or not you have to compete with larger and better-funded opponents. Content Marketing is a weapon that your David can use against their Goliath. But to do it right you have to have the right tools. This post lists many that can help you attract visitors to your website and convert them into customers.
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  Can social selling make you a rainmaker?
  Learn how to use social media platforms as social selling tools in order to succeed in today’s sales environment. Explore these useful resources. The profession of sales is quickly changing, but the role of social media in sales is changing even faster. These new communication methods are vital tools that will play a big role in your future sales success. The concept of social selling involves using them in a strategic manner in order to strengthen relationships with your clients and customers.
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  The Essentials of Pinterest Marketing
  Images and video are driving engagement on the web and social media. Pinterest helps you with both. You’ve no doubt heard of Pinterest, a virtual and quite shareable bulletin board of a social media platform. Like Instagram and Tumblr, it’s a visually-oriented one. Pinterest is more focused on emotions than some of its counterparts. It’s current demographics lean toward women, but more and more men are using it. With Pinterest, you create a variety of boards based around topics.