The Ultimate Guide for How to Use Hashtags

Hashtags are found everywhere in social media these days, and have even permeated into our everyday language. The symbol for hashtags was previously only known as the pound sign (#) on telephones. What does using a hashtag mean? Where does that hashtag go once you put it out on the Internet? Do they really serve a purpose? When used well, they are definitely very useful for spreading and finding information online and reaching out to your audience. This blog will go over how to use hashtags for your business while making them fun to use at the same time!

What is a Hashtag?

A hashtag is a word or phrase with no spaces that has a pound sign in front of it. It is essentially a word, phrase, or sentence fragment that has been smashed together. The ‘hashtag’ has become so widely recognized that the Oxford Dictionary added the word to its dictionary in 2010 and Scrabble added it to their dictionary in 2014.

The hashtag was first introduced and most widely used on Twitter, but has since found its way onto Facebook, Instagram, and countless other sites. Now that so many websites use hashtags, the format links them together so that people using the same kinds of hashtags on one site can easily find more information on the other. All this sounds great, but #HowDoIHashtag? Knowing how to use hashtags well is important. The more specific you are with them, the more you reach out to your target audience.

For some formatting basics, you capitalization doesn’t matter too much when using hashtags for reach purposes. Here, we’ll capitalize each word to make them easier to read, which is a good thing to do for longer hashtags or ones that can be read multiple ways without clarification. Many people only capitalize the first letter, no letters, or whatever they feel like capitalizing in the moment. No capitalization is just fine for shorter hashtags. Also, remove any punctuation from the sentence, including commas and apostrophes.

Be Specific

So you think you are ready to use hashtags to start promoting and marketing your business. Great! First off, you need to know your target audience. Imagine that your service is dog grooming. You could use the hashtag #Dog, but that is way too general. By using something more specific like #DogGrooming, you would get a more targeted audience to what you are actually wanting to sell. If you are trying to promote something other than a specific product, such as a photo, make sure the hashtag is specific to that as well.

Relevant Hashtags

When you are using hashtags for your business, try and come up with ones that have yet to be claimed by another business. This is where it can be tricky. You do not want to use your actual business name as the hashtag, but you want something that is relevant to it. However, tons of hashtags have already been claimed by businesses around the world.

As an example of good branded hashtags, many cities use official hashtags for tourists to use when they are posting pictures from a vacation. This is a great way to promote travel to their city using people who have been there and are posting their own pictures. A few examples of this are:

• South Dakota uses #HiFromSD
• Florida uses #LoveFL
• Disney World uses #DisneyWorld

By doing this and asking audiences to use these branded hashtags when posting to social media, everything from baseball teams to travel destinations to small businesses can reach a target market while creating a good research tool for its viewer base. It also gives them follower-generated content to use on their website and social sites. The initial branding may take some time and research, but will be a powerful tool in the long run.

Short and To The Point

It can be fun to get witty and creative with hashtags, but make sure you do not make them too long. For example: #DontMakeAHashtagAnEntireSentenceLong. Even with capitalization, is that pleasant to read? Sure, a longer hashtag may target a very specific audience and provide lots of information, but it will not trend or search well at all. Pretty much no one would think up the same long sentence in a search. Also, no one wants to type in that many characters, and this hashtag would take up most of the character limit on Twitter.

Being too clever in your hashtags may hurt you as well. You want people to naturally search for your hashtag, not have to be super clever to even find it. Being simple and short with the hashtag will get you more searches and more eyes towards your business.

More Content than Hashtags

When you are posting to social media, no matter which platform, make sure you have more content in your post than you do hashtags. A post crammed full of hashtags overwhelms and annoys many readers. Just because Instagram reportedly lets you use up to 30 hashtags in a single post, does not mean you should actually do that! It is hashtag overload, and often leaves you looking desperate. Sure it will gain you more viewers, but with this many hashtags, the visitors you gain will most likely be spammers rather than real people or people who are not in your target audience. If you like to use many different hashtags, make a list and spread out their use in several different posts over time.

If your post just repeats information and does not add to the general conversation of the topic, it is sometimes best to leave hashtags off entirely. When you are just reposting a breaking news story or a DIY idea you found online, there is no need to hashtag, since you are essentially just repeating something that isn’t your own content that was already out there.

Cater to the Social Media Sites You Use

Each social media site has its own preferred way to use hashtags to get the most out of them while using the platform. Do the research for each site to find the best way. Instagram tends to be more focused on the content description, while Twitter is more focused on the topic of the conversation. Take the time on each social media platform to look into what is the most relevant hashtag for your topic and go from there. If you use LinkedIn, keep in mind that that site does not like hashtags, so using them there can actually hurt your posts.

Hashtags on Twitter

For Twitter, the hashtag is used widely to tie everyone together in an ongoing conversation. For example, if you use #2016PresidentialDebate and click on the hashtag in Twitter, it will pull up all posts for that hashtag. This connects people who are not actually friends and allows them to all be a part of the bigger conversation. There is a hashtag stream that Twitter uses that allows you to connect with people in several ways within the same hashtag. It goes something like this:

• Top: This is the stream of tweets that have seen the most engagement, usually those that have the most recent followers.
• Latest: This is the live stream of those tweeting out a hashtag at that very moment.
• People: This is a list of the top Twitter accounts that you can follow relating to the current popular hashtags.
• Photos: This a collage of photos that are included in the tweets that use the trending hashtags.

Knowing this system for Twitter can help you find your best target audience and help you in figuring out the best hashtags to use. You can see what kinds of hashtags become the most popular and formulate your own hashtags in a similar way.

Hashtags on Facebook

Hashtags on Facebook are much like Twitter, where they tie together people who do not know each other. Unlike Twitter, Facebook profiles can be private, so when the hashtag is clicked on, the person’s information and posts may not be visible. Most hashtags used on Facebook are by brands, publishers, and influencers rather than individuals using them to connect to strangers.

Hashtags on Instagram

Hashtags have the same effect on Instagram as they do on Twitter and Facebook, but the search for a hashtag is much easier. Just go to the search bar in Instagram and type in the hashtag you are looking for to find results including that word or phrase.

Hashtags in the Offline World

Can you use hashtags outside of the Internet for your marketing? Sure! They can be great on fliers to help with a promotion or fundraiser drive you might have. They are also great for weddings, since guests don’t all know each other but will all be posting photos. Having a unique hashtag will create an album of sorts for all customers, guests, or clients. The research may take awhile, but your business will reap the benefits of a good hashtag in the long run. #ExploreHashtags

Hopefully this blog helps you develop your strategy for how to use hashtags for your business or event. If you want more information about social media, check out Virtual Market Advantage’s other blogs. This one goes over how to use social media to promote your blog posts!

Content Marketing and Return on Investment

It can be difficult to calculate how much return on investment (ROI) your business is getting from your content marketing strategy. If done well, content marketing has a higher-than-average marketing ROI. This Forbes article contains an interview with Julie Fleischer, former Director of Content Strategy and Integration at Kraft Foods. Fleischer claims that Kraft’s content marketing gives the company a ROI that is, “among the highest of all of our marketing efforts.” So where do you start to improve your business’s content marketing strategy?

The first step is to determine your current content marketing ROI with these 3 components:

Cost

First you need to determine how much money is being spent on your current content marketing strategy. Depending on the size of your company and the amount of content it produces, you will either need a full audit or a smaller sample of the total content. Use average costs to get a rough estimate of content spending.

Utilization

You also need to figure out how much of the content that’s made is actually being used. Any created content that goes unused is a complete waste. Calculated a rough percentage of content utilization.

Performance

For the content that is created and used, you also need to determine how well it is performing. There are many factors to check, such as page views, likes, social shares, etc. But you also have to link these results back to the business’s content history. See which types of content marketing worked best for your company and review how the strategy developed over time as groundwork for moving forward. It’s important to continue checking performance regularly as you change your strategy.

Make sure your business holds marketing accountable for their ROI. Often a company will send out employees to produce content without fully keeping track of the investment. Request verified results that are measured and reported. Don’t let your content marketing go unsupervised.

How to Improve Your Content Marketing

Now that you know more about how your content marketing has worked up until now, it’s time to start improving it.

Reach Out to Early-Stage Buyers

Much of the marketing we see around us is overly promotional. For buyers who are not yet familiar with your brand, pushy advertisements tend to get tuned out. You need to find a way to make your brand noticeable, likable, and trusted enough that people will want to buy your product or use your services. Here are some things to take into account when setting up your online marketing:

Branded Conversations

Search the online conversations about your product category. What percentage of them mentions a specific brand? What percentage mentions your brand? If that percentage is much different than your market share in your category, it means your competitors are taking away potential prospects right from the beginning.

Unbranded Search Traffic

How many people are searching for your product category online? What percentage of these prospects end up at your website rather than a competitor’s? You can’t only promote your brand within your own website. You must branch out to other sources in order to draw people in.

Website Traffic

Be aware of the quality and quantity of traffic that flows through the websites you use for advertising and the cost of using them. High-traffic sites are great for spreading your brand quickly, but may come with a hefty price. Smaller sites with less traffic can be much cheaper for advertisement fees. Keep track of these costs as you determine where to show your ads.

Organic vs. Paid Traffic

Many companies pay for fake traffic in order to make their sites look more trustworthy and popular. Organic content marketing allows you to reach out to potential and existing customers, start conversations, spread the word about your brand, and gain additional reach without paying for fake viewers. In the long run, it’s always better to earn your customer’s trust and attention rather than buying it.

Unused Content

Again, any content that is created for your company that goes unused is a complete waste of resources. Keep a close eye on the percentage of content that goes unused and reduce that number as much as possible.

Banner Advertisements

You see banner advertisements everywhere you go online, but how effective are they really? Banner ads are actually shown to underperform when compared to almost any other kind of content marketing. Make sure that they are part of a broader marketing strategy. Think carefully about where you place them in order to get the most out of the investment.

Engaging Your Customers

There are several ways that you can monitor how well you are engaging your customers online. Resources such as Google Analytics allow you to easily keep track of various aspects of website viewership.

Bounce Rate

How many people who visit your site stay there for an extended period of time and click on several different pages within the site? The percentage of viewers who leave your site after viewing only one page is known as the bounce rate. As you alter your content marketing strategy, pay close attention to how each change affects the bounce rate, so you can focus on the changes that are beneficial.

Repeat Visits

Pay attention to repeat visits and extended time spent with your brand. By looking at repeat visits, you can measure the value of brand awareness and track how your content marketing affects loyal customers.

Subscribers

Calculate the value per subscriber. Determine the cost and payoff of bringing customers into the brand fold, and learn how to market towards these customers.

In summary, keep track of your content marketing strategy. Pay attention to where the money is going. Pay close attention to the cost of your content, and make sure that the content actually being used. Check on the performance of each type of content and constantly try to improve. Use a resource such as Google Analytics to help see what’s going on with your website traffic as you make changes.

Try to draw in organic traffic by starting conversations, spreading your brand name, and instilling loyalty in your customers. When trying to develop your business’s content marketing strategy, keep these factors in mind, and make improvements wherever possible for a greater ROI.

If you want more suggestions for developing your website, check out VMA’s other blogs. This one goes over how to keep your content fresh and up-to-date, or “evergreen.”

What is Good Copywriting?

We’ve all seen spammy, boring advertisements that make us just want to hit “next” and get on with what we're doing. But there are also advertisements out there that will draw you in and make you interested in learning more about the product. What’s the difference? Often, it comes down to the Copy!

What is Copy?

Copywriting is when someone comes up with text content for the purposes of advertisement and marketing. Copy is the content that the copywriter creates. Glance at a billboard next time you go down a highway, or flip through a magazine at your next doctor’s appointment. All of those words were written by a copywriter. Open up any website page and the text you see is also copy.

Good Copywriting

So what distinguishes good copywriting from bad? The majority of advertisements fly past us, day after day, without making us stop to think about them. Good copywriting stops people from passing by, draws them in, and makes them care about the product or service being sold.

As a copywriter, you don’t have to come up with constant brilliant advertising, like the “Budweiser Frogs” or Apple’s “1984.” You just need to learn how to engage with your targeted audience. Here are three major tenets of good copywriting:

1. Get your audience to want to engage with you. Don’t spam your viewers.
2. Offer something valuable to your audience. Don’t just ask for their money.
3. Make your customers want to buy from you because they like your content.

Unfortunately there’s no one single trick to achieving these objectives. Everything depends on your business, your product, your target audience, and the goals you are trying to attain.

Pay close attention to number 2 on the list. It’s easier to draw people in if you have something to offer to them. This doesn’t just mean using coupons, though that’s a place to start. If you want more ideas about how to use pricing strategies to draw in more customers, check out VMA’s blog on the subject here. It goes over more details on ways to draw in new customers and bring back old ones with offers from your company.

Modern Age Copywriting

One result of the Internet is that there are new kinds of copywriting specifically geared towards that medium. What works in a magazine, newspaper, or billboard won’t necessarily work for a website. How you set up the back end of your website is crucial to ensure that your pages are seen in the first place.

SEO Copywriting

SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization.” You use SEO to make it so that when people search for topics related to your business on a search engine such as Google, your pages are included in the top results. There are 3 major parts to setting up SEO copywriting:

1. Finding the right keywords. The ones that other people are using the most to search for your product.
2. Writing articles on subjects that people want to learn more about to draw them in.
3. Use the important keywords and the content you create around them to try to rank in the top results for those keywords.

The simplest way to see what people are searching for when it comes to your product is to see what Google automatically fills in when you perform a search yourself. Although this can give you a basic idea of keyword searches, it’s much better to use another resource. Programs such as Google Analytics allow you to look in-depth at your audience and what they are searching for. This is an incredibly useful tool to have on your belt for keeping track of how your website is performing. It can also help with determining what to do to make it better.

When Internet search engines first began, getting your site to the top of the search was a simpler process. You could get away with spamming the audience and throwing a ton of junk articles on the page. These days, search engines are getting incredibly smart. They do their best to weed out spammy, junk sites for ones that people want to see.

When you write an article now, it’s important to make it as interesting as possible to draw in more people and keep them on your site for longer. How many people can find your site through searches, how many different people click on your site, how long viewers stay on your pages, and many other factors determine how well your website is performing. Again, tools such as Google Analytics can help you keep track of this kind of information. You can then use that to see which articles are working and which are not, to help improve your future copy.

Also keep in mind that search engine optimization is changing all the time. Google and other companies are constantly working to improve their algorithms. Sometimes they make small tweaks and other times they completely overhaul the system. Staying up-to-date is crucial.

In the end, making good copywriting comes down to the same things that almost any skill requires. Practice and a willingness to constantly learn new techniques will get you far. Being able to keep up with the newest trends is what the Internet is all about. If you get out there and engage with your customers, you will quickly learn what they are interested in and what kind of information will appeal to them. Use their questions as article topics, and start a discussion. One of the best (and sometimes worst!) aspects of modern marketing is the ability to get instant feedback and conversations with your viewers.

If you want more information about SEO, marketing, and other topics, check out Virtual Market Advantage’s other blogs!

9 Ways to Use Content Marketing to Boost Online Sales

Content marketing has become a very important method for businesses to reach out to their target audiences. It involves providing content online that your customers might find interesting and/or helpful. Valuable content will help you engage potential customers and bring in new business. Here are 10 types of content marketing you can use to boost online sales. Whether your business already has a content marketing plan or you’re just starting out, hopefully you’ll find something useful in this list for your online business.

Blog Posts

Blogging is one of the most potent content marketing tools at your disposal. Blogs allow you to provide as much useful and interesting content as you can and easily spread the information to lots of people. If you’re not sure where to start with your blog, try to provide general information about your product or think of questions that customers have asked in the past and give the answers. You can also look and see what other similar businesses are talking about on their websites for inspiration.

Guest Blog Posts

Once you get comfortable writing your own blogs, you can expand your reach by writing guest blog posts. These are blog posts that you write for other websites that are relevant to your business to try to expand your reach to new people. You need to build a relationship with the owner of the site to get permission. You might offer a trade of guest posts so both of your websites receive more traffic.

Email Lists

Having a list of emails for current and potential clients is an amazing resource for spreading content. Posts to social media sites such as Facebook may only reach a small amount of your followers. Emails are guaranteed to at least go through to everyone on the list (though whether or not they read it is up to them!) Start your email list ASAP by adding an email subscription form to your website. Then you can send content as a regular newsletter containing whatever information you want. If you add incentives, such as a chance to win free products, you’ll get even more people interested.

Videos

Videos are a great way to provide content, and people love watching them. Since they are more visual than regular text, you can express yourself in many ways that don’t work as well in a blog. You can supplement your blog with similar information or provide completely different content. Set up a YouTube channel for your business, create videos, and link them to your website.

Images and Infographics

Images are a powerful tool and can relay a large amount of information to your audience. Use photographs, illustrations, or other types of images to spice up your content. Link them to your website, blogs, and social media posts. Infographics can be even more useful since they can combine the visuals of pictures with informative text. However, when choosing pictures to use for your content marketing, make sure that they are ones you made yourself or that you have permission to use. Otherwise you can get in some legal trouble.

Podcasts

The popularity of podcasts has exploded in recent years. People listen to them in the car, at work, while doing chores, or while hanging out pretty much anywhere thanks to smart phones and laptops. Record interviews, stories, or other information about your business and post them as podcasts for your customers to download.

Ebooks

Anyone can make an ebook to either sell or give away online. You just need to combine enough information about your business into one package for distribution. After you’re done writing and putting together the information, provide a download of it on your website.

Surveys and Interviews

Your content doesn’t always have to come from your own mouth: ask around for information from your audience or other people in your profession or niche. Surveys and interviews are both great ways to get information to your customers in a smooth and easy-to-understand way. Use them to bring more interest to the topics related to your business.

Testimonials

Similar to surveys and interviews, testimonials also allow you to get content about your business from the points of view of other people. Testimonials are endorsements from customers that provide proof of the value of your business. New customers tend to feel more comfortable with a business if they can see that other people have already tried the product and support it. Urge your customers to provide feedback about their experiences and put them on your website or social media.

Content marketing is a great way to boost sales for your online business. Use these methods as a starting point and get the content flowing on your website! You can also check out more ways to spice up your website and boost online sales with VMA's blog here.

Social Media and the Unfiltered Internet

Do you remember The Dress? The one that no one could decide whether it was gold and white or blue and black. The one that was being talked about all over the place in 2015. Did you know that the original post for the dress was a Facebook post that got fewer than 20 likes? It was only later, when it was posted to Tumblr and Twitter, that the dress picture because the phenomenon of The Dress.

Filtered Internet Content

The Internet is a huge place that’s expanding every day. In fact, we can only see a tiny portion of it. And that portion is further shrunken by the social media platforms that we use to browse for entertainment or work. The general population adds to these sites constantly, providing an ever-expanding source of content. The question arises though: is there too much content?

Even if you browse social media sites all day every day, you won’t be able to see even a small fraction of their content. This poses a problem for the companies running these sites. They want people to stick around and continue to browse the site, because the more viewers they have, the more money they get from advertising. If a viewer’s feed is too bogged down by uninteresting or irrelevant content, they are more likely to stop going to that site altogether.

This problem has caused most social media sites to start filtering content in one way or another. For example, Facebook decides what to show on your feed based on many underlying factors, such as your sex, age, marital status, and the types of websites and links you tend to visit. In general this is a good thing, since it makes our feeds more interesting and pertinent to us. However, it also causes a sizable underlying layer of social media that gets lost and unseen in the shuffle.

Hidden Content

This hidden content is public and recognized by search engines, but it only reaches a tiny audience and is difficult to find if you’re looking for it. To give you an idea of how much content is hidden, here’s a study from 2009 that showed that 53% of YouTube videos had under 500 views!

Hidden content (besides the spam) often feels more honest, since it doesn’t contain the repetitive formulas of mainstream traffic that keeps those posts more visible to search engines. It also tends to be more amateurish, of low quality, be too short or too long, and have titles that are difficult to find in a search. In general, the hidden content feels more candid, intimate, and human.

If you’re interested in sifting through this forgotten content, several resources have popped up to help you. These include Oviews for unwatched YouTube videos, SadTweets for unseen Twitter tweets, and Forgotify for unheard songs on Spotify.

Using the Unfiltered Internet

As with every resource, some people have actually found a way to get money from the underbelly content of the unfiltered Internet. Some companies search through public photos that people post online looking for recognizable brands. They then sell the photos to the brand’s company for demographic information or advertisement.

Some of the unpopular content is eventually discovered and becomes extremely popular for a time. When content goes viral like this, the original poster very rarely profits from their fame, and sometimes it can even cause them harm. Imagine having a video you posted go viral to the point where you get hundreds of notifications per hour. It would get old quickly and make it impossible to actually find the notifications that you want to see. This is what happened to the girl who originally posted about The Dress. Her phone kept crashing from the influx of notifications. In the aftermath, BuzzFeed posted about a party they were throwing to celebrate The Dress as their largest post ever. It’s impossible to know exactly how much money BuzzFeed made off of that post, but it is known that the original poster didn’t really benefit.

What is interesting (and disconcerting) is that the biggest post on one of the most popular social media sites was taken from another site, which was also taken from another site, without the permission or knowledge of the act from the original poster. No one was compensated for this string of events, and the post was eventually taken down due to copyright infringement.

The Internet is becoming more and more centralized and controlled by corporations trying to subsist on other people’s content. Some of these companies last a long time, while others disappear and are quickly replaced by something else. The future of these companies and social media in general is unclear. It’s similarly hard to tell what will happen to the enormous amount of unseen content that makes up the majority of the unfiltered Internet as it continues to expand every second.

Check out Virtual Market Advantage’s other blogs here for more posts about SEO, social media, and various other topics!

Get your links indexed Fast!

If you want to know how to get your links indexed fast, you probably know a thing or two already about Search Engine Optimization. To make sure we are all on the same page, here are a few things you should have already done:

Indexed your website in Google's Webmaster Tools
Built a link pointing back to your website

If you've made it this far, Congratulations! If not, go back and do those two things.

Now, when you log in to your Google Webmaster Tools Search Console, you can click on the "Links to Your Site" menu option on the left in order to view the links pointing back to your site.

When you click on Links to Your Site, if your link building has been a success, you will see something like this:

That's a bunch of links - And it really is easy to get tons more quickly!

What's the secret?

HIRE AN INDEXING SERVICE!

Spend money on my business? Never! I know I know...I used to be just like you. I would work all day making backlinks that would not show up in Webmaster Tools. So Frustrating! I used to feel like I was on some wild goose chase. I could easily build dofollow links, but for some reason they never showed up as pointing back to my site. I grew even more frustrated as I employed more advanced link building techniques such as Scrapebox and GSA Ser. Why was I failing?!

Mainly because Indexing is a difficult and complicated process. It is a completely different level of SEO tasks. If you're like me, then you barely have time to make links, let alone spend your time pinging and sending social signals. So if you want to get your links indexed fast, you should use who I use:

INDEXIFICATION

HERE'S EXACTLY WHAT YOU GET

Add Unlimited Campaigns & Unlimited URLs per Campaign
Add 1.5 Million Links a month = 50K Links daily
Auto Shorten and Rewrite Links using a 301 redirect
Schedule Links for up to 30 days ahead
100% Guaranteed Links Crawling Rate
High Links Indexing Rate
Realtime Live Crawl Tracking & Stats on All Your Links
100% Automation - Submit Your Links and Forget!
Full Remote API Access for even more Automation
3rd Party Linkbuilding Services Integration
Automated Link Checking & Reporting Dead Links
Free Lifetime 24/7 Customer Service & Support

VMA has been using Indexification for the last couple years. The price is excellent - starting at $17.97 (which gives you more then enough links for any beginner to novice), and we thoroughly recommend it. Best of all, Indexification integrates with all of these 3rd party software applications:

• Scrapebox
• GSA Search Engine Ranker
• SEnuke XCr
• No Hands SEO
• Magic Submitter
• Ultimate Demon
• Backlink Monitor
• AIO Wiki Poster
• SE Demon
• Article Kevo
• Licorne AIO
• Wiki Robot
• Sweet Submitter
• SB Bomber 2
• 301 Nuke
• 301 Redirector
• Ultimate BookmarkR

If you are creating thousands of Profile Links, Wiki Links, Social Bookmarks, Article Links, Forum Links, Blog Comments, Web 2.0 Properties, and so on and so forth...you really need to index these links! You can make as many backlinks as you want, but if you don't index your links, you will never get them to show up in Webmasters Tools.

Adding new Links for Indexing is incredibly easy - you just paste them in a form. By default, the links are set to Drip Feed within 7 days, but you can customize that as well. Indexification specializes in providing 100% crawling rate and high indexing rate of your backlinks!

If you are serious about Link Building, Indexification is a must. We use it for every link we create. Have you ever tried Indexification? Let us know how it worked for you!

Digital Sharecropping: Why You Can’t Just Rely on One Website

What is Digital Sharecropping?

Sharecropping is a system where tenants farm on land owned by another person and give a portion of their crops to the landowner. In 2006, writer Nicholas Carr coined the term “Digital Sharecropping” to describe a phenomenon that has arisen among online businesses. It happens when a website relies on other users to provide the majority of its content.

According to Carr, “One of the fundamental economic characteristics of Web 2.0 is the distribution of production into the hands of the many and the concentration of the economic rewards into the hands of the few.”

While in traditional sharecropping, the landowner is in charge, online “landlords” are the websites: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.

What’s the Problem?

Anyone can create content on these websites. However, the content ends up belonging to the website, not the creator. The more content we create for them for free, the richer and more valuable the landlord becomes.

With any kind of sharecropping, the landlord is in control. The landlord receives the majority of the profits. The landlord can dismantle the system at any time. Even trustworthy websites can suddenly go under or become obsolete. This leaves all of their users suddenly without their services. Most importantly, the landlord doesn’t really care about its individual underlings. Facebook doesn’t care if a single business page gets deleted.

Let’s take a closer look at this Facebook example. Most businesses these days decide to make a Facebook page and update its content regularly. This is a good thing and provides many benefits. It brings in new viewers and customers, raises awareness of their product, and opens a channel of conversation between the business and its clientele. But what if Facebook suddenly decides that you’ve violated its terms and conditions? What if your account gets deleted and you lose your one way to talk to your customers? Facebook is fast-paced and constantly changing. This can come back to haunt you if you rely too much on its services to run your business.

What Should I Do?

There are several ways you can go about making your online business presence stronger. The great news is that by taking these steps, you not only protect yourself from the hazards of digital sharecropping, you also make your business stronger now.

The first step you should take to protect your business online is to have a well designed website that you host yourself. This should be your most crucial business asset online, since it doesn’t rely on other sites. When you use other websites, make sure you link back to your own site constantly to bring in viewers to your own property.

Diversification is your strongest weapon against the downfalls of digital sharecropping. Use many platforms and systems. Provide content on many social media sites. By using a variety of tools, you protect yourself when one of them lets you down.

Another useful tip is to create an opt-in email list on your website. By providing content through an email newsletter directly to your customers, you cut out the middleman in the conversation.

A crucial aspect of building an online presence is to develop a reputation of trustworthiness and value. Provide high quality content, take Internet security seriously, and avoid spammy practices. If your customers trust your business and value your content, they’ll continue making purchases and spread the word about your product.

Following the most recent social media trends is a great way to bring in new business and keep the interest of your customers, new and old. However, you should never build your entire online platform on an asset that you don’t own. By diversifying and talking as directly to your customers as possible, you can create a strong online presence that doesn’t rely on a company that you can’t control.

If you want more tips about SEO, content marketing, and other topics, check out Virtual Market Advantage’s other blogs here!

15 Ways to Boost Your Online Sales Using Old Fashioned Methods

Even if you have an online business, there are many old fashioned methods that can greatly benefit your company. Check out these tips to boost your online sales. Even using a couple of them could greatly improve your presence and bring in new customers!

Sell a Unique Product

Having a unique and newsworthy product is important if you have a lot of competition. Try to stand out from the crowd so you don’t get lost in the huge amount of Internet businesses.

Build the Right Relationships

Whether it’s online or offline, building the right relationships is one of the best ways to develop your business. Ideally you want to establish such relationships with people who complement your business without being direct competition. Keep an eye out for bloggers, suppliers, and others who could help out your business, and make a connection with them.

Set up a Cartel

Small online cartels can be a great way to get support for your business. Find a small group of complementary businesses and agree to promote each other. Just make sure you don’t group up with competing companies!

Sell Wholesale to Other Retailers

Especially if you’re having trouble selling your product to enough customers, consider selling wholesale to other retailers. Even though you’re selling at a lower price per unit, you’ll get the cash flowing by moving more products at once. It will also get your product to more people, spreading the word about your business. You can also reach out to local businesses to see if anyone is willing to put your products on their shelves.

Send Free Samples

The Internet is full of people who influence many others, such as bloggers, journalists, and entrepreneurs. By sending free samples to people who can spread the word about your product, you can form a mutually beneficial relationship that helps advertise your business.

Offer a Contest or Giveaway

Contests and giveaways are great ways to spread the word about your business while also establishing trust in your products. It takes very little time and effort to set them up, and can bring in lots of new potential clients.

Sponsor an Event

Sponsoring an event can be a great way to bring in business, but it can also be waste of time and resources. Make sure you choose an event that will host people who will have interest in your business. Take into consideration how many people will be there, where it’s located, and how it will reflect upon your company.

Make a Pop-Up Store

Even if you sell online and don’t have a store, creating a pop-up store can help supplement your online presence. Pop-up stores are much cheaper than owning an actual building, and allow you to move to the locations that seem best at the time, such as farmer’s markets, fairs, or shopping malls. They help with marketing and bringing in new business.

Write a Press Release

A press release can be a great way to spread the word about your business. However, it can be tricky to write a press release that’s interesting enough for news outlets to actually distribute it. Besides being interesting, the press release should be concise, professional, and have a killer title to draw people in.

Pull a PR Stunt

Think about how fast videos that go viral can spread. If you’re feeling creative, utilizing a PR stunt can propel your business to fame by word of mouth (and keyboard). PR stunts don’t require a lot of money to pull off, but they aren’t guaranteed to grab your audience, so don’t rely solely on such tactics to get the word out.

Advertise Offline

Even in the current world of Internet advertising, it can still be useful to use more physical forms. This includes resources such as billboards, flyers, and newspaper or magazine ads.

Deploy a Sales Team

As your business grows, eventually you won’t be able to handle all of the sales yourself. Setting up a sales team will allow for sustained growth, especially if your product requires a bit of convincing to get people to buy.

Delegate

Starting your own business can be overwhelming, especially when you’re just starting out. As your business develops and grows, you need to learn how best to delegate so that each task gets done quickly and effectively to maximize sales.

Start Word of Mouth

Family and friends can provide a great network when you’re just starting out. If they’re willing to help, they can help spread the word about your budding business.

Demonstrate Trust, Security, and Reliability

A small budding business needs to demonstrate reliability to its customers in order to grow. If potential customers don’t trust you, they are much less likely to make an online purchase. Make sure your website looks safe and trustworthy. Make an effort to follow through with promises. If problems arise, do your best to solve them (or delegate someone else to solve them) quickly and courteously. The more people trust your company, the more they’ll be willing to put money into it!

Looking for more ways to improve your business? Check out Virtual Market Advantage’s other blog that goes over ways to use your new website to boost sales.

How to Create Evergreen Content

Technology changes constantly, and the Internet is being updated and expanded every second. With ever-changing social media, it’s hard to keep up and know what’s most important for keeping your business’s online presence strong. It’s relatively easy to pay attention to the latest trends, but it’s possible to make a more lasting impact by providing evergreen content.

Evergreen trees are a symbol of sturdy, long-lasting life. Evergreen content marketing seeks to imitate this stability by producing content that will remain relevant and important over long periods of time. Some of the most influential websites rely on providing such content. For example, Wikipedia and IMDb are used daily by thousands of people to get pertinent information. This is achieved by constant updates and awareness of what people will want to know for years to come. You too can provide evergreen content of your own and make a lasting impact on the Internet.

Timeless or Sustainable

There are two major types of evergreen content: timeless and sustainable. Timeless content remains pertinent through long periods of time and changing trends. Sustainable content requires periodic updating to ensure that it’s still relevant to current trends and technology.

An example of evergreen content is “how to” guides, which can be either timeless or sustainable. Timeless guides instruct the viewer on tasks that won’t change much over the years, such as “how to cook chicken over the grill” or “how to braid your daughter’s hair.” On the other hand, sustainable “how to” guides, such as “how to transfer photos from my iPhone to Facebook” require updates to stay useful, since these technologies are changing all the time.

Blogging is an amazing tool for providing both timeless and sustainable evergreen content on your website. They allow you to provide tons of information about your product or field of interest and keep your site relevant, up-to-date, and interesting to your audience. By producing evergreen content (whether it’s timeless, sustainable, or a mix of both), you will constantly bring in new viewers and potential clients.

Evergreen Social Media

Sometimes it feels impossible to keep up with all of the constant changes, but some aspects of social media marketing remain the same over time. Social media allows you to establish a strong online presence, form new social channels, and engage and converse with your audience. All of these aspects contribute to your evergreen social marketing.

By utilizing social media, you can help reveal the human aspect of your business while also prolonging the shelf life of your social media content. Evergreen content will continue to pull in more views, and thus more potential customers, for a longer period of time than regular content.

Also keep in mind that every social media campaign has a target audience. This audience might be big or small. For example, Wikipedia can be used and enjoyed by almost anyone, but a specialized online store that sells face paint has a much more specific audience. Social media evergreen content can help in either case by drawing in the people who want to use that website the most.

Creativity goes a long way in social media marketing. Even if your product isn’t the most exciting, a fresh and enthusiastic social media campaign can be interesting and enticing. Feel free to use your imagination and go zany with your marketing to get those extra shares and likes. Focusing on evergreen content will ensure that people keep coming back for more. Remember to have fun with your social media!

Focus Your Content

Even if you come up with the most amazing evergreen post for your website, it won’t do much good if people can’t find it! Make sure that you don’t bury your evergreen content under your other kinds of posts.

You can set up your website to help solve this problem by directing people towards the evergreen content. This can be done in several ways, including “Where to Start” or “Top Posts” pages or a training section.

You can also focus attention to your forgotten evergreen content through your newer posts. As part of your regular audit, make sure to go through your old posts, update them if necessary, and re-share the most popular and/or pertinent ones. Unless it’s a news article, you can even remove the date stamp from an old post and re-post it if it’s still accurate and relevant.

Another great trick is to provide links to your older evergreen content from within newer posts. This will bring new viewers back to older content, and works especially well if there is a topic connection between the two posts.

Evergreen Content Examples

Here are a few more examples of types of evergreen content that you can try. If you don’t have some of these on your site already, this is a great place to start growing more evergreen. Keep in mind that these don’t necessarily have to be in the form of blog posts; they can be images, videos, infographics, or any other form you want!

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Glossaries
“History of” Articles
“How to” Guides
Industry Resource Connections
Testimonials
Tutorials
Providing evergreen content is a great way to make sure that your website stays relevant and brings in new viewers regularly. However, don’t take this to mean that you need to only provide evergreen content. A good mix of timeless and current content is the best way to keep people engaged and willing to come back time after time.

If you want more information on social media, blogging, or other content topics, check out Virtual Market Advantage’s other blogs here. For example, here is a blog that helps you determine how to properly size your pics for various social media sites.

Facebook Organic Reach

Improving Your Facebook Organic Reach

Organic reach is your ability to reach people for free on social media sites through posts on your business page. Over the past couple of years, it has become increasingly difficult to develop a good amount of organic reach, especially on Facebook. This guide will help you combat the decline in organic reach so that you can improve communication with your followers.

The Decline in Facebook Organic Reach

There are several reasons for the recent decrease in Facebook organic reach. The major reason is content overload, which affects all social media sites. More content is being put onto social media sites than ever before. In the past, it was a hassle to share content with other people over the Internet, and not everyone knew how to do it. Smart phones and increasing interconnectivity between websites now allow people to easily share thoughts, links, photos, or anything else they want with the click of a button. Also, people are collecting more friends and becoming fans of more pages now than ever before.

Now that there is more content available than anyone can ever hope to see, each person is limited in what they can look at on their social media sites. Facebook states that the average person has over 1,500 to 15,000 posts that could appear on their feed each time they log into the site. As the news feed increases, the likelihood that a single post will make it to a viewer’s front page declines drastically.

Facebook attempts to show each person the information that is most relevant to their interests. Out of over 1500 possible posts, Facebook only shows you about 300. How the site determines these posts is complex. It has ever-changing algorithms that try to distinguish between high quality content and spam and determine what interests each user specifically. Not all social media sites work exactly like Facebook, but all of them are being affected by content overload, making it harder to reach out to people across the board.

What You Can Do to Improve Facebook Organic Reach

There are a few things you can do to improve your Facebook organic reach. Since each social media site is different in how they approach their news feed, what works for one site might not be as effective on another. However, these tips will help your organic reach on Facebook, which is the biggest and most researched site for organic reach, and other sites that also attempt to provide quality news feeds instead of showing you every single post.

Track Your Reach. Facebook allows you to track your organic traffic with Facebook Insights. Under the Posts tab, you can check the performance of your posts over the past month. You can click “See More” to check out older posts. You can also compare organic versus paid reach using a drop-down menu.

Publish Content that Remains Fresh. If you post content that will only remain relevant for a short period of time, it is less likely to spread and be seen by more people. You want content that will be be spread over a long period of time and continue to engage people days, weeks, or even months after the initial post.

Quality Over Quantity. You don’t need to spam posts all the time in order to be seen. In fact, this works against you. Instead, try to create quality content that will engage your fans. Exactly how many times you post depends on your business, but a general starting place is 2 or 3 posts per day. Also try a variety of post types such as text, links, videos, images, etc.

Target Your Posts. You should use post targeting when available, and Facebook offers several options. These options allow you to focus your reach to specific audiences using categories such as gender, age, location, interests, and more. On Facebook, if you target certain fans using these options, more of your total amount of fans will actually see the post on their feed.

Choose Post Time Carefully. The chance that fans will see your posts increases if you post during off-peak times of the day for business posts. If you are trying to compete with the majority of other posts, yours will probably be buried. Around 3pm is a good time when other businesses aren’t posting as much, but you might find a time that works better for you. You can also use Facebook Insights to see when most of your fans are logged in and plan accordingly.

Speak to Your Audience. According to Facebook, videos and links perform better than other types of posts, but other types might resonate more with your particular audience. You can check and see what your fans like the most using Facebook Insights. The easiest way to do that is to slowly introduce different types of posts and see how each performs over time.

Because of Facebook Insights, Facebook is probably the easiest site to use to track your fans and determine what kinds of posts they prefer, when they are online during the day, and how well your posts are reaching your target audience. If you want to improve your social media organic reach, try out some of these tips and see what works best for your business. Keep in mind that social media sites are changing all the time, and you need to stay on your toes to keep up with the latest trends.