Once You Have Social Network Followers, Then What?

This is a short post, but one that’s important for anyone who is purposefully using social media. What I mean by ‘purposefully’ is using social media to promote and sell your services or products.

One of my email subscribers asked me about Staged. It’s a social media engagement service that gets you Twitter Followers. But, unless you have the budget, it can get expensive since there’s a monthly fee.

I’ll call the subscriber John Doe for this article.

The other part of John’s question was that although the service did get him a lot of Followers on Twitter, how could he monetize them?

The first thing I asked John was if the Followers the service got him were targeted. In other words, were those Twitter users interested in what he had to offer? Were they potential customers?

On my own social media marketing, I’m picky about who I Follow. I only Follow targeted users. I do this because I want potential leads / clients. I also want Followers who can add to the targeted conversation in my niche.

So what do you do with those Followers?
Whether John gets Followers on his own or through a paid service, he still has to produce quality content that will lead those Followers back to his website. And, just as important, where ever he brings that traffic to must be monetized or optimized.

So, if John brings the website traffic to his blog posts, those posts must have a CTA (call-to-action). It might be a prompt to join his mailing list or to get a free consultation.

The same holds true for sales pages or product pages. If you’re bringing traffic to those pages, they must be effective enough to motivate the reader to take the desired action you want.

Bottom line, the size of your Followers isn’t as important as the quality of those Followers. It goes back to the blogging strategy of quality over quantity.

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3 Marketing Strategies Geared to Motivate People to Buy

The buying process produces potential customer anxiety. This is a fact.

Just about all CTAs (call-to-actions) generate stress.

Something as simple as the wording in your CTA, can increase that stress and it’s your job to take steps to reduce the potential customer’s anxiety. This in turn will increase your conversions.

Conversions in this case relates to getting visitors to actually buy what you’re offering, getting visitors to say YES to your CTA.

Here are 3 Powerful Strategies to Reduce Buyer Anxiety:

1. The CTA Wording

As mentioned, the wording you use in your CTA can increase or decrease buyer anxiety. According to Marketing Experiments, it’s all about the expectation of what your wording produces.

In testing conducted by the marketing group, two CTAs were put to the test. The first was “Start Free Trial.” The second was “Get Started Now.”

Which do you think converted better?

It was “Get Started Now” and the reason is it produced less anxiety because there is NO implied cost. To many, ‘starting a free trial’ conveys an implied cost.

2. Timing of the CTA

Timing is when and where to introduce the CTA on the sales page. In other words, do you put the CTA at the beginning of the conversation, in the middle, or at the end?

For the average marketer, it’s usually a good idea to provide the visitor with focused and persuasive content (information) before introducing the CTA. This will help develop interest and motivation. The information explaining how the product or service will solve the visitor’s problem will encourage him to buy what’s being offered.

3. Offering a Guarantee

For the buyer, one of the most stressful things in the buying process is to think he’ll lose money.

Questions your visitor may think of:

- Is the product high quality?
- Is the cost reasonable for what’s being offered?
- Will the product meet the promises made?
- Will the perceived value meet expectations?
- Is the money I’m going to spend worth it?
- What if it doesn’t help me or I don't like it?

One of the best ways to reduce most of the anxiety related to the buying process is to offer a money-back guarantee, a risk-free guarantee.

The guarantee must be clearly worded. The visitor will need to know exactly what he has to do to get the refund, when he’ll receive the refund, and any other information that will make him feel more comfortable in his decision.

There are five primary elements to a knock-it-out-of-the-park guarantee:

1. The length – you can offer a 5 day, a 7 day, a 30 day, or other refund time limit.

2. The conditions – the refund policy can be conditional. For example, “If you complete Lesson One, including the assignment, and decide this course isn’t for you, I’ll give you a complete refund.”

3. The coverage – you need to make it clear as to exactly what’s covered in the refund. For example, is it just the cost of the product or does it include shipping, handling, and/or other fees.

4. The placement – place the guarantee just below the price and then again after more persuasive content. You might head the additional motivation as, “Still Not Sure?”

5. The process – make it very clear what the customer needs to do to initiate the refund process. For example, she may need to contact your support team or you directly by email.

The article, “How to Craft a Guarantee,” at Digital Marketer provides more information on the first four elements mentioned above.

Using these tips will help you create powerful CTAs that will reduce buyer anxiety.

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Blogging Smart

By Karen Cioffi

It’s a give-in that you need to blog to make connections, to gain readers, to increase visibility, to increase your authority, to increase ranking, and to become the go-to person in your niche.

But, did you know that as of early September 2015, there are 1 BILLION websites online. That's a lot of noise . . . and competition. So, blogging smart is even more important than ever.

But, how do you blog effectively and smart? What does that mean?

To blog smart, you want to ‘prove’ to your visitors and subscribers that what you’re writing about or doing actually works.

How do you do this?

Simple. Show them.

For example:

A blog post at Karen Cioffi Writing and Marketing (site has since been deleted) on email marketing and spam got over 3700 views in just a couple of days. 

This is blogging smart.

The image below is a screen-shot of that particular post's views in less than 24 hours - a couple of days later it was over 3700. A little after that it was at 3841. I haven't checked since then to see how far it has gone.

Okay, I’ll admit that sometimes it’s the ‘luck of the draw’ or the ‘right content at the right time,’ but if you’re not blogging smart to start, it’s unlikely you’ll get that far.

So, some things you should be including in your posts are:

•    Screenshots to aid in comprehension and prove what you’re saying
•    Links to relevant content bringing the reader deeper into your web pages, further demonstrating your knowledge in the niche
•    Links to other useful information that will further benefit the reader
•    Tips on what you should and shouldn’t do and why
•    Strategies that work for you and proof
•    Problems you’ve overcome and how
•    Doable step-by-step guides
•    Personality (a bit of personal tidbits)
•    Videos
•    Audio
•    Images
•    Call-to-action (CTA)

These are the elements you should be including in your blog posts, obviously not all at the same time - mix it up. This is blogging effectively and blogging smart. And, this strategy will motivate the reader to model your processes. This is one of the best compliments.

Even more important, it will motivate the visitor/reader to say YES to your CTA and SHARE your content.

Note: Images and CTAs should be included in everyone of your blog posts.  And, in regard to images, at least one image should be at the top of the content. It's this image sites like Pinterest will pick up when you share the post.

Another part of blogging smart is to optimize your blog posts. Part of this includes using:

• Grabbing titles
• Keywords
• Tags
• Categories
• Descriptions
• Sharing your posts to your social media networks

Get started today and watch your website traffic increase.

~~~~~

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5 Marketing Reminders: Simple and Basic

Having yearly, monthly, and/or weekly marketing goals are crucial to achieving success. With goals, you know where you’re heading and can work toward that end.

Marketing goals can be considered a marketing plan, and it will have a number of steps or objectives that must be set in motion and accomplished.

Whether you’re trying to sell a product or services, five of the bare basic marketing strategies are:

1. Create a presence and platform

Creating an online presence and platform can be initiated by creating a website or blog. First though, you’ll need to be sure of your niche because the site name and content should reflect your area of expertise is.

Remember, plan first. Choose a site name that will grow with you. Using an author as an example, if you choose a site name, Picture Books with [Your Name], you’ve limited yourself. What if your next book is for young adults?

Some authors create sites with the name of their book. This is a good strategy for pure focus on that one book, but again, what happens when more books become available. Will you create a site for each of your books?

While you can do this, you will be stretching yourself thin and diluting your main focus: you as the author of multiple books.

Leave room to grow; it’s always advisable to use your name as the site’s name.

In addition, with today’s gone-in-a-second attention span, it’s a good idea to keep your site simple. Sites that take a few seconds or more to load may cause you to lose potential buyers.

2. Increase visibility

Writing content for your readers/visitors is the way to increase visibility. The word is: Content is King. Provide interesting, informative, and/or entertaining content that will prompt the reader to come back.

Also, be sure your content is pertinent to your site, and keep your site and content focused on your platform.

3 Draw traffic to your site

To draw traffic to your site, promote your posts by using social media. You can also do article marketing through sites like Medium and LinkedIn which will increase your visibility reach.

Another strategy is to offer your readers free gifts, such as an ebook relevant to your niche. This will help to increase your usefulness to the reader.

This is considered organic inbound marketing; it funnels traffic back to your site with valuable content and free offers.

4 Have effective call-to-actions

Your site must have call-to-action keywords that will motivate readers to visit and click on your links. Keywords to use include:

• Get your Free gift now for subscribing
• Subscribe to our Newsletter
• Free e-book to offer on your own site
• Buy Now
• Sign up
• Don’t hesitate, take advantage of our expert services
• Be sure to Bookmark this site

You get the idea, motivate the reader to want what you’re offering and give him/her a CLEAR and VISIBLE call-to-action. Make it as simple as possible for the visitor to buy what you’re offering.

5. Develop a relationship with your readers

It’s been noted that only 1% of first time visitors will buy a product. Usually, only after developing a relationship through your newsletter, information, and offers will your potential customer or client click on the BUY NOW button.

While it will take some time and effort to implement and maintain these strategies, it will be worth it in the long run. Think of it as a long-term investment.

Happy marketing!

Karen Cioffi is an award-winning children’s author and children’s ghostwriter / rewriter. She is also the founder and editor-in-chief of Writers on the Move and author online platform instructor with WOW! Women on Writing.

If you need help with your author platform, check out Karen's e-class through WOW:
http://www.articlewritingdoctor.com/content-marketing-tools/

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