22 Social Marketing Tips Your “Social Media Expert” Won’t Tell You

“Social media experts” are great at tweeting and joining the conversation. But they’re terrible at marketing.

You know, the kind of marketing that actually matters. Like generating leads, increasing sales, improving customer retention, and growing your business.

Social media isn’t an isolated “thing”. It should help you accomplish all of these goals. But if you follow their advice, then you’ll have an “active” Twitter account and little else to show for it.

Here are 22 social marketing tips you can use to help grow your business.

Start Right

1. Start with a Goal: Why are you blogging? What are you doing on Twitter? There are only three acceptable answers: (a) increase brand awareness by growing your reach, (b) build customer loyalty by providing more support, or (c) increase sales by getting more people to purchase, more frequently. Don’t even start unless you can answer this question.
2. Ignore Your Competition: Trying to benchmark other people’s Fans and Followers is a fools game. You’ll start making bad decisions because you’re trying to “keep up”. And when you make bad short-term choices, your long-term success will suffer. The best tactical ideas and campaigns haven’t happened in your industry yet. So use arbitrage marketing to figure out what new, untapped opportunities you can seize and gain an early lead. Look at what people are doing in other industries and try to experiment with similar tactics.
3. Don’t Be on Every Social Network: Community management will deplete all of your resources. Each social network you manage will cost you exponentially more time, money and energy. And contrary to popular belief, social media isn’t free. It takes tremendous resources to do it properly, and has an enormous opportunity cost. Soprioritize one or two networks to see the biggest growth.
   

   Don’t Make Excuses

4. You Do Have Enough Time and Money: People always claim that they don’t have time or money to invest in social media. But the truth of the matter is that you can’t afford not to. If you’re short on time, then hire a virtual assistance and outsource your lowest level tasks. Or invest in resources that will speed up your learning curve. If you’re short on money, then you should have more time to spend on content creation or networking. Set an easy, actionable goal like 2 extra posts each week, or reach out to one blogger a day. And do an informal audit of how you currently spend your time. You’ll be amazed at the time wasted and the opportunity cost your time could be worth.
5. Being Efficient Doesn’t Mean You’re Being Effective: Social media is wonderful, but people confuse busyness with effectiveness. Start with a goal, reverse engineer how you’re going to reach that goal, identify your highest ROI activities, prioritize and set boundaries, be disciplined and accountable to others.
6. Have Relentless Focus: When you’ve identified one main business goal, every online strategy and tactic will need to support it to get the highest ROI. And sooner or later, you’ll have to make a tough decision. You’ll need to divide your limited resources and choose what you’re going to do (and what you’re going to ignore). But you’ll see that this decision is easy when you have a goal. Your social media use will now have a purpose. And you’ll find that you do have enough time for it’s strategic use.
   

   Set Yourself Up for Success

7. Be a Publisher First: Online marketing can’t exist without content. No SEO. No email marketing. No social media. That means you’re in the media business. So you better start learning how to create valuable content. Check out Red Bull, American Express andLowe’s for good examples.
8. Understand What Motivates Your Audience: “Industries” or “businesses” aren’t boring – the people who say that are. Nobody cares about your business (or mine!). People only care about themselves (including you and me!). The way you come up withblog content ideas is to understand your audience, and the benefit your products or services give them.
9. Don’t Overemphasize Tactics: Oprah isn’t good at social media because she’s a Twitter guru or Pinterest expert. She understands (a) what her audience wants, and (b) uses these new tools to create a repoire to get them to trust her more and stick around longer. Once you’ve identified the goal you’re trying to reach, then you need to create marketing objectives and a strategy that will deliver on these promises. Tactics help you accomplish a strategy. But they can’t increase revenue or decrease costs on their own.
10. Crown a Dictator in your Organization: Bureaucracies and politics kill action. Even getting someone to make a decision can take weeks. But be careful of HIPPOs – where the highest paid person’s opinion reigns supreme. Instead, companies need to findchampions with a history of success, and who prefer data-driven decisions over political ones.
    

    Be Unconventional

11. Be Lazy: Connecting one-to-one is great. But it doesn’t scale. Instead, you should be lazy and make people come to you. Create content, provide expertise, or use money to put yourself in front of communities of people – and give them the chance to find you.
12. Do Less: Spreading yourself too thin will give you average results. If you want to grow, then get good at creating content (or hire someone to do it). Then contribute articles to top media properties in your industry, or speak in front of organizations (for free!). You’ll get real business leads (first), and build a social media following (second). All with one investment of your time and money. Exactly the way it should be.
13. Ignore Trends: Trends are like waves in the ocean, they come and they go. Pinterestmight work for some businesses. But for others, it’s a waste of time. It has the (a) wrong kind of traffic, (b) not enough users, and a (c) demographic mismatch. Instead, focus and invest in the fundamentals – like your blog and email marketing.
    

    Be Original

14. Have a Voice: People don’t want to connect with faceless corporations. They want to connect with real humans. But a lot of companies still don’t understand this. No one will like, trust or respect your company in the long run if they can’t get straight, honest feedback in a timely manner.
15. Take a Stand: In his TED talk, Simon Sinek said, “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it”. Think about the special companies that you like and admire. They start with “Why”. They tap into a bigger cause than themselves, and that emotionally connects with people. If you only sell “What” you do, then you’re going to be stuck selling commodities and you’ll always compete on price.
16. Declare an Enemy: If you’re going to have a voice and take a stand for something, then by default there has to be examples of people, trends, business philosophies or companies you don’t agree with. Again, you’re not marketing to everyone. You want to attract those who share your worldview. And one of the best ways to get people to commit and emotionally engaged is through sharing a common bond, or defending yourselves against the same threat.
    

    Measure the Right Things

17. Twitter Followers -> Email Subscribers: Twitter is a great communication channel. It helps you contact and stay in touch with anyone you want. But it doesn’t directly make you real money. Email marketing is still the most profitable online marketing channel.
18. Facebook Fans -> People Talking About This: Facebook’s EdgeRank was designed to keep companies from spamming their “fans”. So it only allows you to reach the fans that actively engage with your brand. “People Talking About This” is the closest metric you have to increase your “viral reach”. The higher that number goes, the better chance you have of reaching more people. And the bigger your page will grow because you’ll start reaching more “friends of fans”.
19. Forget about Blog Comments: The 1% rule of the internet is a general rule of thumb that says most people (90%) will consume content, while very few will interact (9%) or create it (1%). This is even more lopsided when you look across different industries. People in these warm and fuzzy industries are extremely active in creating content, and will leave more comments than the rest of the world. So the type of person each industry caters to says more than the actual, real engagement.
20. Klout -> Net Promoter Score: Klout is like the stereotypical pretty girl in high school, she looks good on the outside but lacks substance on the inside. Do you really want to know how satisfied customers and fans are? Then ask them to take the Net Promoter Score. It’s one simple question that will only take a few seconds, and it’s vastly more accurate than Klout.
    

    “How likely are you to recommend to a colleague or friend?”
    Your Net Promoter Score equals the percentage of Promoters (9s and 10s) minus the percentage of Detractors (0 through 6) (7s and 8s are “Passives”, and are left out).

    
    

    Have Perspective

21. Have Realistic Expectations: People are too impatient. You can’t throw a Hail Mary pass in the last minute of the game and expect to win every time. Marketing and sales only work if people trust you. And that process takes time. In the simplest terms possible, there are two ways to market online: (a) use advertising to “rent” attention, or (b) use inbound marketing to “earn” attention. But both are going to cost you something. If you don’t have the time or energy, then you need to spend money on advertising. If you don’t have money to invest, then you need to spend time and energy in creating content, building relationships, and learning how to get people to find you.
22. Go Beyond Facebook and Twitter: Social media (and internet marketing) at larger companies is easy. Extremely easy. It’s easy to build Twitter Followers and get people to engage with you when your company has been around for decades. But it’s extremely difficult to transcend those networks and get the whole organization aligned with how your consumers shop today. Social media success transcends your Facebook page or latest Twitter promotion. It’s a new way of doing business and it starts with your DNA, your product or service, and your people. So if you want to improve your social media presence, then start on the inside of your organization first.

Conclusion

Social media is much more than “engaging in the conversation”.

It’s a new way of doing things, and a new set of tools to help you do it. But the same marketing fundamentals apply.

You need to gain attention, build trust, and keep people engaged longer.

Because in addition to growing your “social media presence”, you’ll also be able to get more traffic, bring in more leads and create more happy customers.

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Content is Only as Good as Its Shareability

Most of us can remember a day when the pinnacle of communication revolved around our beeper and a pay phone. This best effort at mass communication was unfortunately tied down to a newspaper, magazine, TV, radio, billboard, and word-of-mouth. Content shareability and “viral” content was strictly reserved for the global enterprises that could afford TV ads and national billboard campaigns. And even if a brand had a great national campaign, it might take weeks or months to attract the majority of their target segment, and by that time, they’ve most likely progressed to something else. In the 1970s, if a very good friend that lived in a different city had a baby, it may take days or weeks for you to even see a picture of this new bundle of joy. Fast forward to today, we see pictures instantaneously of people on different continents just seconds after a photo is taken, thanks to advances in social media. Let’s venture even further into the past, shall we? “Gold was discovered in California in January 1848, but the gold rush did not really start until an article appeared in the New York Herald on August 19, 1848.” (History House) You catch the drift. Good content begs to be shared, and its success is only as good as its shareability.

It’s no secret that inbound marketing has become exceedingly popular over the past several years. “78% of chief marketing officers think custom content is the future of marketing.” (Hanley-Wood Business Media) What makes this so interesting is that the increase in demand for superior content relies on one factor exclusively; social media. Without social media, content marketing would still be in the dark ages, wondering where it should go after it gets published. Twitter? No. Facebook? No. A blog? No. It would just sit in one spot, hoping someone might talk about it. Although, even if they did talk about it, that brand would never have any way of ever knowing. Physical conversation is immeasurable (and should stay that way). Content marketing relies directly on social media. Why? Shareability.

Shareability is the driving force for all content creators and inbound marketing strategies. “B2B companies that blog generate 67% more leads per month than those who do not blog.” (Social Media B2B) Most, if not all, of the readers visiting these blogs didn’t just happen to stumble upon them (unless they were using StumbleUpon). More than likely, readers found the content posted by a trusted friend or follower on a social site, with a link to the blog, which they then converted to. And this behavior is ubiquitous across B2B and B2C platforms. “82% of consumers like reading content from brands when it’s relevant.” (The CMA) People like good content and more importantly, people like to share good content.

So you probably already knew that people like to share good content, but it’s important to understand why they share it. According to psychologists, Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius, every individual has two psychological selves. The first self is the “now” self and the second self is the “possible” self. Assuming these two ideas are clear by definition, we’ll move on. “The illusion of our ‘possible self’ is the main motivation when it comes to sharing online, and it is this narcissism that marketers should attempt to appeal to in order to gain traction with creative campaigns.” (Business2Community) The beauty in people sharing your content is once they share it, they feel an emotional ownership and loyalty to that content, because it has helped enhance others’ illusion of their “possible” self. Their loyalty to a brand’s content generally mirrors their loyalty to that brand. This is the foundational idea that inspires CMO’s to be forward thinking in their content strategy.

Because people have an innate desire to engage, share, and take ownership of a brand’s content, it is imperative to understand the influence that content is having on the user to, not only, engage in the content and recycle it on social media, but to ultimately convert to your brand, and influence others to convert to your brand. Across the board, in all industries of all shapes and sizes, the goal for C-level executives is to define how marketing efforts drive conversions and a return on investment back to the brand. When it comes to defining the value of content marketing and shareability as it relates to conversions for the brand, sign up for SocialRest, a tool that is able to monitor how users engage with your content on social media, how they influence others to engage in the content on social, then track a user’s behavior as they move from your social sites to your website or blog, and ultimately define how a user converted to your brand because of the shared content. This ties the entire package together, from content creation to exact measurement of success.

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The Seven Biggest Online Marketing Mistakes

Something's wrong. There's a widening chasm between buyers and sellers.

I've been traveling more than my fair share recently to supporting our latest book, "Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?" (due out next week). It shouldn't surprise you to learn that no matter whom I talk to, no matter the company, product, or service , whether it's business-to-consumer (B2C) or business-to-business (B2B), online marketers are running into similar challenges. So it goes without saying they're making some of the same mistakes over and over.

Trying to Manufacture Word of Mouth and Viral Effect

To lift brand exposure, marketers are resorting to some of the goofiest and phoniest campaigns. Although typically entertaining and sometimes even viral, these campaigns fall short in one of two areas: they either lack relevance to the customer to move beyond entertainment or lack a significant association with the brand or product. So if you aren't selling more or at least endearing customers to your brand, what's the point?

Does this really help Gillette sell more razors? Certainly not any more than Chihuahuas help sell tacos.

The only profitable way to harvest word of mouth is to provide customers with a product or service experience that's worth talking about.

Anything short of that is a cheap gimmick.

Getting the Right Answers, Taking the Wrong Path

We see this more and more. Many marketers are learning what information customers need to gain purchasing resolve. They write the content, create pages (we call these pages points of resolution), but they fail to properly link to that content so customers can actually find it on their natural path through the Web site.

Planning better persuasion scenarios solves this. You just needed to stand over my shoulder watching me try to buy a new lightweight laptop this week to fully understand this. Try finding a 5 pound or lighter laptop with a high-quality video card.

Expecting Customers to Behave Like They Did Before the Internet

It's still unsettling how little some companies have changed their marketing outlook in spite of the new media landscape. They mistake using new media for taking a new marketing approach. They misunderstand the nature of new media vehicles and how customers behave differently because of them.

Prospects have more control than ever: more choices and more information. Yet companies still attempt to spoon-feed the public a flavorless, neutral, old-time ad campaign. Then they're confused when people ignore it or spit it out.

The new marketing world order is about relevance, not about traffic, reach, or message posturing. It's not just getting your message out there. It's about being real and saying something true and meaningful in the most compelling way possible. Laura Reis of "The Origin of Brands Blog" shows us a great example of how Weber grills hit the relevance target.

Lacking Relevant Messaging Across All Customers Segments

Many marketers still seek that silver bullet message, the one message that resonates with the entire audience.

Give up. There is no silver bullet message.

Although you can find a big message that will resonate with a large segment of your customers, you'll always leave a significant portion of prospects cold or indifferent. Some may be perfect customers for you but need to buy and be sold to differently.

One advantage of the new media landscape is customers take different angles as they approach a product category. You can saturate these angles with relevant information for each different type of buyer. Persuading these segments could mean the difference between meeting marketing goals and not.

Unless, of course, you can afford to leave significant customers segments on the table. If you can't, try creating personas.

Approaching Best Practices as a Religion

Beware of best practices. Typically, they're born out of successes gained under very specific circumstances. Many of those circumstances may not apply to you or your marketing situation.

The online channel is still way too young to have established best practices. It's like studying medicine for 10 years then declaring you know all the answers.

Mistaking Traffic for Results

As I've been writing quite a bit recently, companies are still able to buy traffic and, in essence, buy themselves top-line business, but this is quickly becoming too expensive to maintain.

Average conversion rates are going down, and online traffic costs are moving skywards. Businesses must learn how to do more with the traffic they have and find ways to attract even more qualified traffic. The only way to do that is to better understand that each visit and click are a person with real needs and real motivations. How well does your marketing speak to each person? What brand impact does the experience have on these typical customer groups? How concerned are you with persuading them to your product? Or would you rather just have their attention? Why not both?

Settling for Incremental Improvements

Of all the things that frustrate our firm, the biggest is how comfortable the online industry is becoming with tremendously low conversion rates. The most recent Shop.org State of Online Retailing reports that in 2005 the average conversion rate dropped again from 2.6 percent to 2.4 percent. If we were in direct mail marketing, we'd celebrate a 2 percent return, but the online channel is night to direct mail's day.

Online, customers are in control; they're task oriented, and with every search term they type or hyperlink they click, they reveal more about their intent. We can literally watch as they pull themselves through the buying process, yet we're losing conversions.

Something's wrong. There's a widening chasm between buyers and sellers. And in this age of superior technology and unprecedented interconnectivity, that's criminal.

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10 Quick Ways to Increase Your Ads' Clickthrough Rates

In his book Ultimate Guide to Pay-Per-Click Advertising, internet marketing expert Richard Stokes helps you master advanced search engine strategies from top search engine marketers to increase your sales. In this edited excerpt, the author the best tactics you can use for creating ads that get the most clicks from viewers.

Search ads are short. You have only the following to work with:

• Headlines that contain 25 characters
• Two lines of copy that contain 35 characters each (70 characters total)
• A display URL (which doesn't have to match the clickthrough URL).

To succeed, you must be concise. But there are plenty of other rules you can follow to write more effective ads.

In late 2012, AdGooroo analyzed 20 million paid search ads appearing in the United States to identify best practices you should follow when writing your copy. The top 10 findings are below. Please be aware that a specific rule may or may not work in every situation. Always split test when changing your ad copy!

1. Use "www" in your domain name. Your domain name is found at the end of every paid search ad. You can use either the long form with a preceding "www" (for instance, "www.adgooroo.com") or a short form that omits the prefix ("adgooroo.com").

The longer version was found to increase clickthrough rate by nearly 16 percent.

2. Avoid numbers. Many paid search ads contain at least one number. For instance:

50th birthday gift ideas
A free service to help you find
creative 50th Birthday Gifts.

Or "buy" ads, like:

Save 45% On Abrasives
Grind & Cut Wheels, Discs, Belts
Quality Same Day Ship on Stock Items

This is a widely recommended practice. However, data suggests that it doesn't work for most advertisers. Ads with no numbers performed nearly 20 percent better than those with them.

3. Avoid exclamation points. Another practice many advertisers follow is to include exclamation points in their ad copy. For instance:

Facilitate this! 
Effective and dynamic meeting
facilitation and skills training

Ads with exclamation points were found to perform nine percent worse than ads without.

4. Avoid overused call-to-action phrases. When writing new ads, it's often a good idea to test a call-to-action, such as "Buy now," "Try now" or "Download now." However, Google frowns on certain terms, so this tactic isn't nearly as effective as it was a few years ago. Ads with the word "now" in them actually underperformed all other ads by seven percent.

Here are some other common call-to-action phrases you might try testing in your ads:

• Get official quote
• Shop and save
• Learn more today
• Get tips
• Order today for quick delivery
• Request info
• Read this

5. Offer something for free.  Including the word "free" still seems to work like a charm. Ads with this word performed nine percent better than ads without.

6. Save space with ampersands. Space is tight with paid search ads, so anytime you can save a character or two, it's welcome news. The ampersand (&) not only works well for this, but it also increases the average advertiser's clickthrough rate by eight percent.

7. Don't include the price. Many search marketers include the price in their ad copy assuming that by doing so, they'll avoid unnecessary clicks from those who are looking for either a higher or lower price offering. While this does work (and will save you money), it will also lower your clickthrough rate by a whopping 17 percent, ensuring you get hit with a quality score penalty.

8. Be the "official" site. Although Google has quietly eliminated most affiliates from its advertiser list, some advertisers are still using "official site" in their ad copy. Take a look at these examples:  

Shop For iPod Nano
Official Site. Free Shipping on orders
$24 & up or pick up in store

Tiffany & Co. (Official)
Shop the Official Tiffany & Co. site
for exclusive Tiffany designs.

Using it seems to make a big difference. On average, "official" ads have a 71 percent higher clickthrough rate.

9. Incorporate trademark symbols. Trademark symbols (™, ©, ®) may be required only for legal reasons, but they can dramatically boost your paid search results. These unusual characters improved clickthrough rates by nearly 90 percent!

10. Use all the space you're allowed. Sometimes you might not need a lot of space to say what you've got to say. Take a look at this pithy ad:

Books 
Buy a book
Read and become smarter
www.books.com

Other advertisers try to be cute with their ads:

Postcards 
No way!
Can't be true?
www.postcardsrus.com

Avoid this tactic, and use as much of the available space in your ad as you can. On average, longer ads have a 64 percent higher clickthrough rate.

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What Does Viral Marketing Really Mean?

Lately, the term "viral marketing" seems to have infected many conversations about Internet marketing. Most of us realize that it's not about cooties. But what does viral marketing really mean? Graham tells you how to create messages that are compelling enough to spread and also firmly support your brand's values and objectives.

What does viral marketing really mean?

Lately, the term "viral marketing" seems to have infected many conversations about Internet marketing. Most of us realize that it's not about cooties. But what does the phrase really mean?

Let's start with some microbiology. A virus is a protein shell that contains genetic material. An attacking virus uses its protein coating to attach to a healthy cell. Once it is securely attached, it injects its genetic material, permanently altering the DNA of the host cell. A particularly effective virus can transform the host cell into a factory that replicates the virus, spreading it to other cells.

Like the mythical Trojan Horse, a virus presents itself as an innocuous visitor, but contains a force that attacks and overcomes its host. It's just that a virus is a Trojan Horse that goes on to create more Trojan Horses, conquering hosts exponentially as it spreads.

Of course, we don't think of marketing in such bellicose terms. Simply put, viral marketing means creating messages that contain concepts within them that are absorbed by the people that come into contact with the messages. And making these messages compelling enough so that people pass them on.

Have you ever received a funny or obscene email that was forwarded to you through a friend? Chances are, a lot of people you know saw that same email. It's because the Internet, with its email lists, web sites, chat rooms and bulletin boards, is an organism in which message viruses thrive.

Creating them can be tricky -- a lot trickier than traditional advertising messages. Unlike biological viruses, the hosts on the Internet, consumers, have control. Marketing viruses can backfire.

But if you can create a message, be it an ad unit, a newsletter or a web site, that is both compelling enough to spread but that also firmly supports a brand's values and objectives, you might have a winner on your hands.

Blue Marble's marketing for Scope mouthwash, which won the CASIE award last year, was a prototypical marketing virus.

We created advertising units that allowed consumers to send a customized, animated, email "kiss" to their friends. The message reinforced the branding premise that Scope brought people "Kissably close."

When people received a kiss, they had the option to send an email themselves. Our tracking technology confirmed that a good percentage did. Soon people were sending Scope kisses all over the world, and we observed a measurable increase in brand awareness and purchase intent among our target market.

Traditional advertising fit the mold of one-to-many model of broadcast technology. But the Internet is different. It is a chaotic network. Marketers not only need to understand that, they need to develop strategies that thrive in the new communication environment.

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How to Succeed on Internet Promotion the Easy Way

With a struggling economy and so many people out of work, there are thousands of people online right now looking up terms like "work from home" and "internet promotion." Internet promotion is a huge business, and one that can bring you a lot of money if done correctly. Check out some solid advice on the genre.

Admit your shortfalls. Don't attempt to deny that your website does not have its own pitfalls, because every website does. Take note when someone complains to you about an issue, acknowledge the problem and make steps to fix it. Allowing the customer to know you understand them, without getting defensive, is a good way to not only fix site issue, but also, to gain visitor trust.

Many small businesses can tremendously increase their revenue by taking their advertising campaigns online. Because more traditional venues of advertisements are slowly becoming less profitable, as newspapers see declining subscriptions, small businesses, which start advertising online are often able to reach a much more broad customer base and see an increase in profit.

Keep the background on your site very light and manageable. The darker the background on the site, the harder it will be for your visitors to view your products. Also, a dark background can create a morose and gloomy atmosphere, which could alter a customer's mood when they visit your site.

If you'd like to get involved with online marketing but don't have a product of your own to sell, you can still have an online presence by selling someone else's product. Buying the rights to an established product, will give you a way to capitalize on sales without spending the time to develop your own product.

Make sure you read a lot of informative resources online and work up a list of your top-10 tips and pieces of advice. After you figure out the top-10 things you want to try or follow, go down the list and do them all systematically. This is like receiving an assist to your overall business plan, and it can pay off in a big way.

Know your goal. Obviously, the overall goal of web marketing is to get more business, but there are many ways to do this. Without a strategy, you can easily become overwhelmed. Start with one small, but specific, goal - such as increasing your site's number of unique hits, and expand from there.

When writing web marketing copy, consider giving customers some kind of prize that proves they have read the entire piece. For example, you can hide a link somewhere in the text that nets them a free gift if they can find it. More people reading the entirety of your ad copy will translate into more buyers.

After you have set up your site and it has begun to make money, it would be wise to expand. Using your knowledge from your first site, go ahead and create another site. This way you can take your expertise and use it to become well known and make money from another site.

In important tip regarding Internet marketing is to try to be as original as possible. This is important because if you are able to focus your originality correctly, then you will create an extremely memorable marketing campaign. This is best utilized by taking something well known and molding it to appear as though it is something brand new and original.

If you have been sending newsletters to your customers and potential customers, it is a savvy internet promotion strategy to convert those newsletters into website content. Some visitors who would never think of subscribing to a newsletter may nevertheless eagerly devour the same material on your site. And since you are reusing preexisting content, the effort involved is minimal.

If you have any well-known people that have purchased your product it would be nice if you got permission from them to let everyone know that they did that. People are more likely to purchase things when they know that well-known people have bought them.

Now that you've read some expert advice on marketing, you can put this information to use and hopefully grow an effective business. Things are going to go slowly at first, but soon, with the help of these tips. You will begin to see some real results and begin making some serious money working online.

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SECRETS OF INTERNET MARKETING MILLIONAIRES! ~WHAT 97% OF MARKETERS DON'T DO

Everyone wants to know the secrets of Internet marketing millionaires to be successful. Some of the secrets of Internet marketing millionaires you may already know, but are just not taking action on or have not realized how important it really is. Not long ago when I was a struggling Internet marketer, I ignored some of the things I thought was small and I didn't start getting results until I realized how important those things I though were small, really were. So the first secret of Internet marketing millionaires is your mindset and controlling your thoughts. Your mindset and thoughts are important because it controls what you believe, what you believe controls your work ethic and what you produce, and what your produce controls your results. That is why you must work on yourself everyday. This is the first secret you must understand and take action on. 

Internet marketing millionaires also surround themselves with other successful people. This was so important and a big key to my success online. You must surround yourself with other successful people because this will keep you creative and keep you continuously stretching to reach higher goals. The people you surround yourself with also affects your behavior and the way your think which has an enormous influence on your success. If you have no other like minded people to surround yourself with, then reading books written by successful people is what you should do. Doing this is like sitting down with these great minds in person. This is something that Internet marketing millionaires do and something you must do if you want to be successful online. 

I want to keep this article about secrets of Internet marketing millionaires short. I just wanted share some of the most important, but most ignored secrets that may be the reason you may not be getting results in your business. Both of the steps explained in this article is exactly what you must do everyday to be successful online. I sincerely hope you received value from this article. Take care and take action. 

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Starting An Online Business: 4 Things To Keep In Mind

When you start an online business if you make use of the Internet in as many ways as possible you can make it much easier on yourself. Here we discuss four important things to keep in mind when you start an online home business.

1. Choose your products carefully. A lot of people have trouble deciding on what products to choose to sell in their business.

This is the reason why many Internet marketers nowadays have now turned their focus to niche marketing. This includes using affiliate products in as many ways as possible in their business.

This means that you are able to then focus on a specific niche as opposed to a broad theme. A popular idea is to find something you're interested in or have a passion for or use a product that you currently have purchased, that you could build your business around.

Obviously you will be looking for something you can make money with. To this end if you decide to go into affiliate marketing then be sure to look for products that pay high commissions, so that you are well compensated for your time.

2. Internet marketing education is really important. If you spent time on this in the beginning can save yourself a lot of time in the future. Also it can save you a lot of money that you may waste trying things that will not work.

To learn about Internet marketing you can join discussion forums such as the Warrior Forum. Another popular option is to join a membership site where you can get personal attention from full-time Internet marketers.

You can also purchase a training course and there are many of those available online. Hiring a business coach is something you may want to consider and view the money it will cost you as though you were going to college to become educated in Internet marketing.

3. It is important to get your own domain name and host your own site when you first start out. This gives you full control of your business and enables you to grow your business however you want in the future.

Having control is a very important issue for building a successful online home business. This is because if you use replicated websites provided by some business models such as affiliate marketing or network marketing, you will not be able to customize those sites. You need to have your own website that you can add content to as well as add or delete products whenever the need arises.

4. Be sure to stick to the 90/10 rule. This means that you should spend 90% of your time promoting your new business. The other 10% of your time should be spent on making changes to your site, locating new products to sell, etc.

If you are not spending the majority of your time getting website traffic You stand a good chance of failing in your online business if you do not spend the majority of your time generating traffic to your website. When you start an online business this may be the most important thing to keep in mind.

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Truth about online businesses

Push button millionaire programs do not exist - there is no such thing as get rich quick, unless it is a scam or you are lucky enough to win the lottery.
You CAN make money on the internet and a lot of it - but it will not be overnight - you must treat your online business as just that - A BUSINESS!!
It does not have to cost you a fortune, but you do have to invest a lot of time, or you invest more money to save you the time (i.e. outsourcing)
Certain software can help you , but again, it costs money.
The customers you gain online, MUST be treated the same as if you were face to face with them.
Form a business relationship, based on reliability, trust and honesty.
If you want to sell something, make sure you have checked it out thoroughly first - if you just sell something on its' owners recommendation and it falls short of what is expected - you look bad to your customers, and they will not rely on you the next time they need something.
Many years ago, I worked in a mobile phone shop - then the local supermarket started selling cheaper than we could - but people came to me as I knew what I was talking about, I was friendly and helpful, and they were confident that if they did have a problem, I could sort it out for them.
I treat my online customers the same way - and you should too.
Think of the standards you expect from other people, and show the same respect to your customers.