How To Promote Your Blog Post Using Social Media

How To Promote Your Blog Post Using Social Media

You have a great idea, so you sit down and write a piece about it. You put it out there by publishing it to your blog. Is just posting it on your website enough? The short answer is no. By sharing your blog post the correct way through social media, you will get a steady flow of visitors to your site. Here we will go over a few tips and tricks to get the most eyes on your blog using different social media platforms.

Posting the Blog Link to Facebook

There are a couple of quick steps here you can take that will ensure that you reach more of your followers. First, as you go to post to Facebook, don't just copy and paste the link. Give your readers a tease before they click on the link. You are allowed over 63,000 characters on a Facebook post, but the first 480 characters are what is visible to viewers without clicking to see more. By providing a quote or paragraph from your blog to get the readers interested, you will entice a bigger percentage of viewers to click that link. Another way to get followers interested via Facebook is to include a picture in your post that relates to the content of the blog.

Posting to Twitter

Twitter is a whole different ballgame from Facebook. Twitter takes time and patience to reach a solid audience. It was the first social media platform to use hashtags and @ handles to spread information. While they have stretched out the character limit to 140, it is sill most effective to use the least amount of characters as possible. Using up to 4 hashtags also makes it more searchable for keywords. Also, use @ handles aimed towards specific people or companies to spread a message or give credit where it is due.

The average time a tweet stays relevant is 18 minutes. This is where the time and patience comes in. To keep your blog post relevant, it is best to share your blog post to twitter more than once and on different days of the week and at different times of the day. The best time to share on twitter is between 8-10am, 11am-1pm, and after work at 4pm. Keep in mind that your audience may mostly reside in a different time zone than you when you decide when to post. Posting within these time frames will give your tweet, and hopefully your blog, more eyes. You can post your link weekly and then slow up to monthly depending on what type of promotion you want for the blog.

Posting to LinkedIn

This is a platform that lets you post to a personal profile, to a group, or on a company page. If you're posting to a company page, it works a lot like Facebook, where only the first 150 characters will be seen. So making those characters engaging and enticing to the reader will make people more likely to click on your link. Make sure that you establish a conversation with your readers within your post. An easy way to accomplish this is by asking them questions. When sharing your blog post to LinkedIn (as with Facebook), it's a good idea to attach an image to your link.

The best time frames to post to LinkedIn are between 8-10am and 4-6pm. Make sure you are posting once here for the first promotion of a particular blog. Then post once a week, eventually reducing down to once every 2-3 months. Make sure these reposts are on your profile and not your page.

Pinning On Pinterest

This location of social media promotion is all about image. With thousands of images up to see on Pinterest, you want yours to catch people's attention and hold them long enough to read the description and click on the image. Pinterest gives you up to 500 characters in the description. However, to keep the reader convinced, it is best to keep your pin at 150-300 characters long. Always use a link to your blog in the description here, because clicking on the image takes the reader to your blog location. Share your featured image of the blog post to Pinterest to help the reader connect from Pinterest to the blog, and add a call to action in the description to engage readers to like, repin, buy now, or read more.

To gain a specific audience, you should use the feature of creating boards based on specific topics and pin to those accordingly.

Sharing on Instagram

Instagram is similar to Pinterest in being image-driven. With Instagram, the images are shared in a single stream and lose impact quickly. Most interaction takes place within the first 3 hours of posting. With only the first 155 characters of the maximum 2200 characters allowed in the description of a photo showing, it is key to say what is most important within the first 3 lines. Hashtags are a great way to engage on Instagram, and there are times where the description is all hashtags. This decision is up to you, depending on what you are promoting.

Use your blog's featured image to promote here first. Then post again over the weeks to keep an audience interested. You may want to post other pictures featured in your blog as well. The best time to post on Instagram is in the evening.

Post Based on Social Media Outlet

What all of this should tell you is that you should not go and post the exact same thing to all of these social media platforms. Each platform has a tailored audience and a different method of dispersing information. Look at your audience and your followers, and ask yourself what would make them stop scrolling and look at what you are posting. Tailor your posts to the platform and the readers who are going there. You also may not need to cross post to all of these sites with every post you make, depending on the blog. Each blog is unique, and so is the social media post that will give you the most viewers.

If you want more information about blogging, SEO, social media, website development, and more, check out Virtual Market Advantage's other blogs here. This one goes into the history of Vine, and why it dissolved even though short videos are a huge content powerhouse right now.

10 Ways to Use Social Media to Boost Online Sales

10 Ways to Use Social Media to Boost Online Sales

Social media has become a necessity for helping businesses flourish, especially if you rely on online sales. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, and many other sites are great platforms from which you can spread information about your business. The unique thing about advertising on social media is that you can easily start a discussion with your customers. You can also get immediate feedback, answer questions, ask your own questions…the possibilities are endless! Another great aspect of social media is the fact that once you create content for one site, you can easily share it to your accounts on the other sites.

Whether you’re just starting out with promoting your business on social media or need a few tips for expanding your reach, here are several ways you can use social media to boost online sales:

Twitter

Using Twitter is incredibly simple. There’s a small limit to the number of characters you can use within your message, forcing you to keep it short and to the point. Because of its popularity and simplicity, Twitter is a great resource to use to start a conversation with your customers and spread news about your business.

Twitter is the site that created the use of hashtags (#) in social media. By putting a hashtag in front of a short key word or phrase, it groups your message in with similar hashtags. This makes it so that you can search for related posts and other people can similarly find your post. Use this tool to see what people are saying about your product and to interact with them. Get people talking about your product, answer questions, and make connections.

Facebook

Although Facebook started as an exclusive site for connecting college students together, it has grown to be one of the biggest and most influential social media sites. As such, it’s important to use Facebook to your advantage for your online business. Make a page for your store that other people can visit and follow. Reach out and share information with status updates. Interact with other groups and pages that have to do with your business.

Pinterest

and

Instagram

Pinterest and Instagram are both amazing resources for online businesses trying to get more traffic. They are lumped together here because they are both used to spread more visual media than many other sites. Engage with your audience by sharing photographs, infographics, and other pictures. Take pictures of your product, show the manufacturing process, tell a story, and develop your brand image. Some businesses will have an easier time coming up with interesting visuals than others, but if you are creative enough, you can gain a loyal and growing following with these sites.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a more business-oriented, professional social media platform. It’s purpose is to connect professionals from all kinds of industries together. It allows you to easily network with people from all around the world. Set up an e-commerce business profile and look around for connections with other companies, suppliers, potential employees, and other websites. Use it to find other businesses that might want to carry your product. This site is less for advertising or sales and more for connecting professionally and improving your reach in other ways.

YouTube

YouTube isn’t just for finding music videos, movie clips, and other entertainment. It can be a powerful tool to use for your business. People love to watch videos, and if you can make interesting content in video form, you can draw in tons of viewers. Create a YouTube channel for your business and post videos related to your product. Try behind the scenes manufacturing videos, tutorials, maintenance and repair tips, interesting ways to use a product, and any other type of video that works well for you.

Tumblr

Tumblr and other blogging sites are a great way to spread information about your product and business. Design your page around your business and provide content that is engaging, informative, funny, or otherwise interesting. Reinforce your brand by talking about it and providing more information. Make sure that you connect these posts to your other social media pages and vice versa. You don’t have to make completely different content for Tumblr and for Facebook!

Reddit

Reddit is a site used mostly for news and entertainment. However, if used properly, it can also be a great resource for your business and draw in dedicated followers. The tricky part is knowing which subreddits (indicated by r/topic) you should post on. r/entrepreneur is a great place to start. Also look for subreddits directly related to your business or product, if it’s popular enough. As with other sites, try to engage with the audience by showing behind-the-scenes processes, reveal struggles you have faced, and other unique information about your business in particular.

Craigslist

and

Etsy

Online marketplaces can be a great place to start selling your products before you set up your own sales website. General sites such as eBay and Craigslist have been around since 1995, and allow you to sell pretty much anything to pretty much anyone in the world. More recently, sites have created more specialized sales environments. For example, Etsy is a marketplace for artistic and handmade creations.

Forums

Before the big social media explosion, forums were the major way people connected online over various topics. Although they have been shoved out of the spotlight, forums are still thriving and are great places to make connections. Find forum websites that specialize in your product or niche and start a conversation. Forums tend to be great resources to use to find answers to questions that people have already asked. You might find some great blog, post, or video ideas deep in the online forums!

Advertising

Besides providing content, there are other ways you can use some of these sites: paid advertising. Facebook, Google AdWords, YouTube ads, and banner ads reach all over the Internet. Carefully consider where your money would be best spent when deciding how to use paid advertising on social media sites. Do you have a lot of followers on Facebook? Are people watching your YouTube videos? When you design these ads, spread the word about your other social media pages so people can easily connect.

Try using these sites and others to help spread the word about your business and boost online sales. Compared to other advertising methods, these sites require you to show a bit more of your company’s unique personality. Try to engage with your customers, listen to what they have to say, and adjust your content to fit their needs and wants. Using social media for your business can seem like a daunting task, but once you get used to it, it can be really fun!

If you want more tips for promoting your online business, check out Virtual Market Advantage’s other blogs. Here we discuss ways to use content marketing to boost online sales.

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!

Online Business Pricing Strategies

For most businesses that sell a product, a significant portion of sales come from repeat customers. After you put in the effort to get customers to visit your website and make an online purchase, it’s time to start working towards bringing them back. One major way you can accomplish this is by using smart online business pricing strategies for your products.

The Benefits of Repeat Customers

In 2015, RJMetrics posted a study on eCommerce buying behavior. They found that 32% of customers who make an online purchase are likely to come back and make another purchase within a year. Although this doesn’t seem like much, repeat customers tend to also come back again. If someone makes a second purchase, they jump to a 50% chance of making a third purchase. This continues incrementally, leading to a statistic that shows that return customers can be very loyal. If you make an effort to develop customer loyalty, you can increase your sales greatly and make everyone happy!

Use Smart Online Business Pricing Strategies

Smart online business pricing strategies can be a powerful tool in helping you bring back repeat customers. These methods reward customers for choosing your store again and again. There’s more to it than simply passing out coupons. Here are some simple pricing strategies to try for your online business:

Delayed Rewards

People love rewards and will go out of their way to obtain them. Although you may draw in many first customers by simply distributing coupons and offering a reduced price on a first purchase, this method doesn’t necessarily bring people back for a second buy. In fact, the customer might feel upset when they realize that they now have to pay more for the same thing they purchased before.

Instead, give a reward for a purchase by offering a discount on the next purchase. Rather than handing out $5 coupons for a first purchase, offer a $10 discount on a second purchase. This has two major benefits. First, it brings more people back for a second purchase, which can snowball into customer loyalty. Second, the offer doesn’t have to be limited to first-time customers only. This makes your business look really good to repeat customers, and may even bring back buyers who weren’t originally planning to make another purchase.

Instant gratification is great, but delaying the reward can be even better for your business by drawing in repeat customers.

Reward Certain Actions

You can make customers feel more involved and recognized by giving out rewards for doing certain things that benefit your business. You can reward many types of actions, such as:

• Coming back to make a set number of different purchases.
• Purchasing the same product repeatedly.
• Purchasing several different items at once.
• Spending specific amounts of money.
• Joining a monthly subscription.

A good example of this method is Target’s Cartwheel app. When you are checking out at Target, you can use the app on your phone to scan the items you’re buying to earn extra savings. It also includes a badge system, letting the customer feel like they are progressing towards extra rewards on top of saving money.

This kind of reward system makes the customer feel good while shopping at your store. The rewards don’t even have to always give discounted prices. Many people will return to a store that makes them feel good and have fun while shopping.

Membership Pricing

Other common and beneficial pricing strategies include memberships. Having a key ring full of membership cards is a hassle, but these days you can easily handle memberships online. Grocery stores often use memberships to bring in repeat customers, and the system works well. If a person can buy a product in one place cheaper than another with a simple membership, they are much more likely to return there.

Keep your members feeling special by setting up great exclusive rewards. If you regularly change which items are discounted to members, they will keep coming back to see if the items they want are currently on sale. This will also entice new customers into membership if they see something they want at a cheaper price. You can also set up different membership tiers that offer greater discounts at higher levels. Another great option that combines the previous two methods is to have members unlock higher tiers of savings by making repeat purchases.

Not all of these methods will work for every business. Consider which pricing strategies would work best for your online business before setting up a lot of discounts. If in doubt, you can try several methods over a period of time and see which work best for you. If you want to learn more about improving your online business, check out VMA’s other blogs such as this one that goes over different ways to use content marketing to boost online sales.