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3 Internet Marketing Changes in 2016

When it comes to Internet marketing, change is the most constant thing. It seems like every time you turn around, someone is tweaking something that impacts your workflow. Social-media companies are changing the preferred size of their images, a new network comes into existence (or loses relevance), new workflow startups gain traction. It’s always something. Normally, these changes are minor, and only require a keen eye if you want to stay on top of them — but 2016 has already been a major year in terms of changes. If you manage your own Internet marketing, then here are 3 critical changes you need to factor into your planning.

Internet marketing in 2016

Google AdWords Are Dead

Historically, any good Internet marketing campaign has included at least some amount of paid advertising. The reason is pretty straight forward — although social-media promotion is much more cost effective in the long run, it takes quite a bit of time and energy to build up a good following. So, in the short term, you can get your message out through paid promotion. It’s not as effective as pure social media, but it is much more immediate.

Well, the number one advertising platform that isn’t on social media has just changed the rules of the game. On desktop computers, Google will no longer be showing ads in the sidebar. In addition, there are changes to the ads which will be shown at the top and bottom of the page. The biggest change is that ads will now only be shown for “highly commercial” searches. It’s still unclear exactly how this will develop, and there are a couple of exceptions (as far as we can tell, product listing ad boxes will still appear, and ads in the knowledge panel will still appear), but, generally speaking, it now seems that unless you’re an ecommerce company directly selling product, AdWords won’t work for you.

What You Should Do: take your advertising budget and move it completely to the social-media networks.

Facebook Business Pages Get The Business

It’s been true for a while that it’s harder to get traction directly from posts on pages than it is from personal posts, regardless of the content. Facebook has announced that they’re making that even more true. If you were having a hard time getting views on content you post to your business page before, you’re probably doomed now. To quote from the Facebook announcement:

Overall, we anticipate that this update may cause reach and referral traffic to decline for some Pages…. if a lot of your referral traffic is the result of people sharing your content and their friends liking and commenting on it, there will be less of an impact than if the majority of your traffic comes directly through Page posts.

As usual, the Facebook blog post is a little hard to understand completely. Fortunately, TechCrunch has provided a deeper dive.

What You Should Do: Get you and your staff more personally involved. Posts to your page won’t be showing up well in people’s news feeds; however, if you and your staff then share those posts to your personal networks, they’ll still appear fairly high on the feed.

What You Should Do, #2: Only publish shareable content. Stay away from anything spammy.

The Ghost Is Growing Up

Like it or not, video is the future of the Internet. In fact, Facebook has been saying this for a while, and they’ve been reiterating recently. And they’re putting their money where their mouth is, with Facebook Live. However, if you’re a small business owner, getting traction on Facebook can be hard — you have to compete with all the other global brands that are there. Meanwhile, Snapchat remains a relatively greenfield opportunity for small businesses.

Their recent announcement of Snapchat Memories makes the platform even more powerful — and more accessible to an older audience. SnapChat originally got its growth from a focus on ephemeral content — a place where young users don’t have to worry about their shenanigans coming back to haunt them in the future. This change is particularly appealing to their growing, older (over 25) audience. From a brand perspective, it gives you a powerful new tool for managing your content.

What You Should Do: Start using Snapchat as part of your Internet marketing campaign.

What You Should Do, #2: Start playing around with Facebook Live.

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Some Business Advice; Nothing Good Requires Zero Effort

I’m not normally one to give unsolicited business advice, but I’ve been thinking about this enough lately that it’s almost become a mantra: nothing good requires zero effort. Okay, maybe not quite a mantra, because that sounds a tad obsessive. But, I have been thinking about the phrase quite a bit, and it’s applicable to just about everything. In fact—it may be applicable to absolutely everything. But, for the sake of this post, let’s stick within the boundaries of business.

It’s natural to focus on the things that require immediate attention—problems, concerns, inefficiencies, etc… And, it may feel counter-intuitive to spend any of your attention on the things in your business that are going well, or running smoothly. As many business owners have found out the hard way, you can’t count on things running smoothly forever—not without attention. And even then it can be beyond your control. We can’t just trust that things will remain good forever—it’s simply not true. In order to improve your chances of longevity, growth, and continued success, every facet of your organization requires attention. All the time.

That’s not to say that one should assign a great amount of attention to the things that are running well, but one should assign some attention. The primary goal may be to pay enough attention to never have anything really require your attention. Then you can spend your valuable (and limited) time and energy on things that don’t desperately need attention—because, normally by that point, It’s too late.

Maybe this equation helps to clarify the thought: inattention lends itself to laziness which then lends itself to failure (or to soften that— laziness lends itself to lack of success).

Give a little thought this week to a few of the components of your business that you don’t generally expend any thought on. You may be pleasantly surprised with the outcome.

 

 

 

Photo By Geoff Gallice – , CC BY 2.0

Time Management — Time to Get Your Act Together for 2016

As we sit here at the beginning of 2016, I’m mindful of the fact that last year I spent too much time down in the dirt, and not enough time up in the clouds. To be sure, every executive needs to remain firmly grounded, and have a good understanding of what the business is doing, but you also need to spend enough time up in the clouds to move the business forward in larger leaps and bounds; to decide what risks you’re going to take, what experiments you’re going to run, what strategies you’re going to pursue; to look at your competitors and evaluate exactly how much trouble you’re in (how close on your heels are they?).

We did do a few big things at The Ibis Network in 2016. We expanded the markets we support to include all small businesses, and we introduced a commission sales program for college students. We also did some less strategic, but nevertheless important, big projects — we redesigned our web site, and we migrated our entire infrastructure to AWS. But really, as I look back, that doesn’t feel like nearly enough to me.

If you’re in the same boat — if your business has had some success and done some things in 2015, but you’re sitting there with the nagging feeling that you really should have done much more — then it’s probably time to make some changes.

Get An Assistant

An alchemist hunched over his crucible; an assistant reads h Wellcome V0025531

For me personally, I’m doing two things. First, I went most of 2015 without an executive assistant. My previous assistant moved on to a great new opportunity last April, and I didn’t replace him. I just hired a new assistant in December, and she’s already immeasurably improved my life. As important as time-management is, I’m terrible at it and I know it, and an assistant can be key to helping you achieve maximum productivity. If you’ve never worked with an assistant before, you should definitely try it. Granted, not everyone is in the same position; my life is preposterously complicated, with my recent appointment as CEO of Linius putting me in active management of three companies. But even if your life isn’t as complicated as mine, and even if you’re not in the position to hire someone full-time, you should look into virtual assistants. As a first step, read these two articles:

After you’ve read those articles, to help you work through the pre-flight checklist that Brandon put together, go over and read this article by Alina Dizik, 10 Things to Outsource to A Virtual Assistant. It will help you brainstorm the kind of things you can and should be outsourcing, and you can use that list to figure out what systems you need to put in place to make the VA most effective.

If you’ve read through all of those things, you’ve probably come across several recommendations on where to hire your first VA. Unfortunately, a lot of the links out there are to companies that no longer exist, or are clearly not best-in-show anymore. I haven’t used these guys personally, but after a little poking around, I think your best bet for a first VA is Zirtual. Down the road, you may go with cheaper solution, but all signs point to them being a great starting-point for first-time assistees.

Time Management

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Whether or not you’re ready to hire a personal assistant, and regardless of your personal time-management skills, if you’re running a business and haven’t achieved the bulk of what you desired in 2015, then odds are good you need to focus on time management.

There are nigh-on innumerable ways of managing your time. One of my favorite mentors used what I deem to be a crazy system. Every morning, he came into the office, grabbed a yellow legal pad, and divided it into three columns. In one column he wrote down the things he needed to do that day for work, in another he wrote down what he needed to do for his personal life, and in the third he wrote down his scheduled meetings. It worked for him, and ultimately, that’s all that matters. The key is to find a system that works for you.

It’s also important to realize that the system need not only be right for your personality, but also for your role. Maybe you learned a time-management system a decade ago, and maybe it served you well, but maybe your needs are different now than they were then. Here are three major time-management systems that you should consider. There are many, many others, but these are all very popular (for good reason) and cover a lot of ground in terms of both personal temperament and organizational role:

  • 1510_DT_Hero_5_2000x1200Day-Timer — Day-Timer is the granddaddy of time management. The company began in 1947, and made it until 2012, before it was absorbed into ACCO Brands, which now owns several planning mechanisms. But just because the company isn’t there anymore doesn’t mean that their techniques were no good. This was the first system I learned, early in my management career, and it served me well for years. You can get an introduction to the Daytimer method, PPR, and it is actually probably the best method for most people.
  • Franklin-Covey PlannerFranklin-Covey — A modified version of this system is what I personally use, today. As my life has become more complicated, and as it’s become more and more about delegation, I’ve found this system most effective. FranklinCovey is the result of the 1997 merger of Franklin Quest and Stephen Covey’s Covey Leadership Center. The system merges some techniques from Benjamin Franklin’s original writings with Stephen Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. If you’re a genuine manager, in the sense that most of your tactical efforts are delegated, and you personally engage in more strategic activities, then I strongly encourage you take a look at this system.
  • Getting Things DoneGTD — Getting Things Done is the most recent serious contender in the world of time management. I haven’t personally used it, but it’s extraordinarily popular, particularly amongst the tech crowd. As a result, there are lots and lots of applications and open source tools surrounding it. If you lean more towards the computer than the paper, this might just be the system for you.

Whether or not you choose any of these, it’s worth noting that they all have at least two things in common, and there’s a reason for that. So, if you do anything else, even if it’s as simple as lists on sticky notes, you should keep these things in mind:

  1. Set time aside every day for time-management; for the actual planning. It doesn’t matter if it’s the last thing you do at night, the first thing you do in the morning, or somewhere in between, but it does matter that you make it a habit and do it every day.
  2. Put everything into your system. And I mean everything. Not just critical things, not just what’s foremost in your mind; neither just personal nor work things. Everything. Really everything. Put time in there for you to sit and reflect on your spirituality. Put time in there to take the trash to the curb. Put Everything into your system.

I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty excited about 2016. And I’m equally excited about putting these practices back in place, and taking The Ibis Network to the next level. Drop a note in the comments below, and let us know what you’re doing to make your 2016 even more successful than your 2015.

We Completely Redesigned The Ibis Network Website. Here’s Why.

Image of The Ibis Network website's homepage, May 2015

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, then you’ve undoubtedly noticed two things: first, we’ve been quiet for a while; and second, things look a little different around here. Actually, a lot different. Rest assured, you’re not imagining things.

You also may have noticed that this is the second time in a year we’ve made a major update. (Here’s how the original website looked, and here was what it looked like in mid 2014).

A lot of planning and strategy went into these changes, and we wanted to take this opportunity to explain both.

Step 1: Some Technical Housekeeping

The old website had served us faithfully for over 5 years. Unfortunately, 5 years is about 3.5 times longer than infinity in Internet time. To use a bit of software engineering slang, the site was suffering from bit-rot. The Internet had moved along, and the site hadn’t stayed current with the technology, and this was causing some problems.

HTML5 Powered

HTML is the base language used for writing web pages. It has a complicated and interesting history, but for our purposes, the key thing to know is that HTML 4 came out in 1998/1999, and stuck. But there were lots of problems with HTML4. HTML5 solves almost all of these problems, but changing the Internet is a slow process. The first working draft for HTML5 came out in 2008, browsers started to add support for it in 2011, and it just became the official standard in October of last year.

The first change, which we made in 2014, was to rearchitect the site in HTML5.

This gave us a lot of things, and turned out to be a very important change — even critical — change. There were 3 main things it gave us:

  • Multi-media support — better handling of audio and video on the web
  • Mobile support / responsive design — a website that works just as well on a TV, a PC, a tablet, or a smartphone
  • Semantic markup — better support for handicap accessibility and simultaneously, better support for SEO

Although all three of those points are important for us and our audience, it’s the middle one that turned out to be critical. For almost 2 years now, Google has been threatening to weight sites which support mobile differently than sites that don’t. A little over a month ago, Google finally took the big plunge, and started penalizing sites in search results if they don’t support mobile devices. That may sound a bit harsh, but now more than 1/2 the views on the Internet happen on mobile devices, and so any site that doesn’t support mobile doesn’t work for more than 1/2 the people who want to see it. Since Google is all about giving people useful results, this change makes sense.

Step 2: A Strategic Change

That first change was just a stepping stone, en route to the web site we have today. You see, over the last 18 months, not only have we been changing our website, we’ve been changing our business.

For the better part of a decade, we were a niche marketing agency, focused on the real estate market (agents, lenders, brokers, etc…) and the elder market (legal, insurance, retirement communities, etc…).

In 2014, we changed our business model — simultaneously making it broader and narrower. Now, we support all small businesses, regardless of industry (broader); and we’re completely focused on content marketing and social media (narrower).

Because of that change in focus, we needed to completely change the design and the content of the website to reflect our new reality. Because we believe in “practice what you preach”, the entirety of our own marketing efforts are now content marketing and social media promotion.

We hope you love what you see, love the direction we’re headed, and find some value in the content we provide here. We’d love to hear what you think, so please leave your comments below!

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5 Reasons to Consider Direct Messaging

Engagement is probably the most important word in marketing today. It’s also overused and poorly understood on a lot of levels. How do you measure engagement and interest? Even Facebook questions the metrics designed to answer these questions. Nate Elliott, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, published a report called Stop Measuring Engagement. The argument is that the engagement levels are only part of the answer. True value from engagement comes when your target audience gets your message and acts on your message.

Text message marketing, also known as SMS Marketing, is the next evolution of marketing directly to the people who want to hear from you. SMS Marketing is a way to communicate directly with the people who are interested in your products and services via text messages directly to their mobile phones.

1. SMS Marketing is permission based – The core reason that SMS marketing messages are opened is that SMS marketing is permission-based. Yes, that means the recipient needs to give you permission to get texts, so you need to keep your traditional approaches alive and healthy to build your SMS marketing campaigns. And when they do give you the ok, you can bet they’re listening to what you’re saying, or in this case, reading what you’re texting.

2. SMS marketing is really affordable. No, REALLY affordable – A small business can plan and execute an SMS marketing campaign for far less than other campaigns. It’s cost effective, and unlike other media marketing campaigns, the return on a well targeted SMS marketing campaign can be very attractive. SMS marketing can cost about 50% less than email, and leads to conversion rates at 8.2%, with email around 1.7%.

3. SMS marketing is really easy. No, REALLY easy – Small businesses can launch mobile campaigns quickly and easily. With the right tools and a bit of small business marketing savvy, anyone can launch an effective SMS campaign.

4. It’s a 2 way street – Questions, polls, or even requesting advice on a what-if can get your audience active and replying to issues they find interesting. Linking to external content like images and videos also continues the engagement. With the increase in bandwidth and unlimited data plans, marketing with images and video is opening up the messaging canvas to all sorts of possibilities.

5. People open text messages – In a recent article, Mobile Marketing Watch indicates that marketing messages sent by SMS had an open rate of 98 percent. 90% of texts are opened in the first 3 minutes. Compare that to marketing emails, opened at about 22% percent. If people don’t read your message, they can’t engage with you. That’s not a problem with SMS marketing.

Getting in touch with the people that want to know about your services and products is the goal of marketing. Driving them to your sales network by engaging their attention and their interest is key. And reaching more people who are qualified and likely to engage while limiting cost is a formula for success.

In today’s marketing environment, businesses big and small are equipped with an array of impressive tools to get that done. Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram, and a multitude of other social networks all compete for attention. So where can you get your target market, all in one place, all focused on your message? By texting it.

Are you using direct messaging in your marketing?
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4 Mortgage CRM Systems (+1)

A good CRM system (Customer Relationship Management) is probably one of the most valuable systems that any small business can implement. It is a central repository for the company’s data input from the front lines, and in many cases can have more influence on the company and its organization than any other system, person or team.

An effective CRM system not only increases sales (in some studies by up to 29% over companies without), but also has a positive effect on customer retention, engagement, loyalty, payments, cash flow and more. The list is related to every conceivable facet of the business.

In the mortgage industry specifically, deep personal relationships are the foundation for success. It doesn’t really matter whether you are independent, a small office or a large firm, every mortgage professional relies on customer referrals and word of mouth. A CRM that can keep you informed, organized and efficient will allow you to keep your head in the game of selling and make your efforts more personal and productive.

Reasons to get CRM

Your excel is 100+ rows and columns – Lots of people start with excel.  Lots of people use it far longer than they should.  You might have started swimming with water wings, but you don’t use them any more… excel is the same way.

You are not updating your current organizer each and every time you gather a piece of data – If you are not gathering all the important bits of data into a searchable system, you are losing that information and the time it took to gather it.

You have hired an employee or will soon – Where you store your information and how you access it is key to teaching new people to work as you do.

You are reaching your limit – It happens, and better to make a change before you hit your limit…

You are plateaued in terms of sales – You only have so much time in a day, how you use it is important.

 

What a great CRM has going for it:

It’s simple – If it’s not, you won’t use it, nor will anyone else.

Integrates well with your current systems – Connects to your email, information can be imported/exported into easily used formats.

The system is intuitive and trainable – See reason 1

It has easy data backup and security against theft – If it doesn’t, then you run into resistance to back ups, and that will hurt some day, yes it will.

It has reporting capabilities that match your needs and desires – Reporting functions that answer your needs are a big reason to choose one system over the other.

 

4 Options for Loan Officers

1. Whiteboard Mortgage – Whiteboard is a scalable CRM designed specifically for the Mortgage professional. You can be up and running in about 15 minutes, use preloaded ‘Playbooks’ for marketing and it can scale from the independent loan originator, to team, to company and enterprise levels too.

2. Velocify – Velocify is widely recognized in the mortgage industry. Velocify offers mortgage professionals an industry-specific CRM, lead management and a dialer solution that supports refis and home purchase loans.

3. BNTouch – BNTouch Mortgage CRM gives loan originators and companies the tools to market and manage leads and the mortgage sales process. It features automated lead distribution, automated lead marketing and reporting tools that provide transparency and encourage growth.

4. Cimmaron – Cimmaron Mortgage Manager features robust CRM features, lead distribution, and automated mortgage marketing software solution created specifically for the loan industry.

And a wild card:

(+1) Zoho – Zoho does a lot of things really well. The system is configurable and easy to use. There are specific mortgage features that many users will find useful and an answer to their needs. Zoho has a very attractive price point, is easy to set up, is customizable, works great on mobile phones, and is very intuitive.

CRM systems that help you grow, stay on top of your leads and improve your closing rates are key to success in every industry. The mortgage industry has unique challenges and hurdles that many CRMs are not equipped to handle. These 5 systems may be the answer for you.  Let us know what you think!

What CRM are you using in your mortgage office?

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Google+, +Post = Good Google Advertising

Google+ has 2.2 billion users. That’s a pretty big base from which to operate. It’s run by arguably the biggest tech company in the world, and as such, is connected to a virtual galaxy of content, services and apps. Just having a Google+ account can increase exposure and prominence for the authors of content. (they do this by adding a snippet of content to search results, “…rich snippets help users recognize when your site is relevant to their search” increasing the chances you get noticed.)

With all that going for it, getting on the Google advertising train might make some sense. There are primarily 2 paths to the world of Google ads.

Ad Words

AdWords is the main online advertising program from Google. Google promotes AdWords as a way to reach new customers and grow your business. Using AdWords, you can choose where your ads appear, set your own budget, and measure the effectiveness of your campaign. They don’t have a minimum commitment so you can stop any campaign, any time. Basically, AdWords works on a cost per click (CPC) basis, so you only pay when someone clicks on your ad up to your budget.

Advertising with AdWords is focused too. Your ad shows up on the screens of people already searching for the products and services you offer. You choose where your ad appears, like on specific websites, and in what geographic areas. And because you set a budget, you can’t be overcharged. AdWords also provides detailed reports and analytics on how your ad is performing, so you can test and compare to ensure you are hitting the best segment with the best message.

Setting up your Adwords account is, as you would expect, pretty intuitive with videos and helpful instructions.

+Post ads

+Post Ads have been around since 2013. They are a little different from other advertising channels in that they crisscross the entire web. The aim, in common with other channels, is to drive traffic to you, your content and your web presence. Promoting from your google+ page can also amplify the effect, allowing people to follow you and your presence, give you +1’s, and enjoy your hangouts with the aim to engage and communicate.

In order to engage with +Post advertising, you have to jump a few hurdles though.

  • Your Google+ page must have at least 1,000 followers.
  • Your post should contain content that’s relevant to your audience.
  • You have opted in to shared endorsements

With +Post ads, Google gives you plenty of firepower to analyze and understand your efforts too. The Google display network provides “demographics, affinity segments, and contextual targeting” making your content work on desktops, tablets, and smartphones when you promote your Google+ posts.

Best practices include:

  • Keeping your ad text sharp with your actionable words at the front (for example, “Watch now,” “Join us,” “Check out,” etc…)
  • previewing your ad
  • monitoring your ad for comments, and
  • Adding high res images (but not stock photos so much…ok?) with an aspect ration of 16:9

With that last point, remember to keep text off the bottom of the image as it might get clipped in some formats.

Google is one of the biggest populations on earth, and as such, you’d be doing yourself a disservice if you didn’t consider what they offer. Engaging with Google, and choosing the route that is best for you, is key to making your ad dollars do as much work as possible.

Are you advertising on Google?

**UPDATE: while I was publishing this, some news came through my feed regarding mobile advertising and GooglePlay:

“Google announced this morning the launch of a pilot program which will allow mobile application developers the ability to advertise their apps directly within the Google Play store. These ads, which will initially be made available to advertisers already running search ads on Google.com, will also only be shown against Google Play search results. That is, they won’t just randomly appear in other sections of Google Play, like category pages or stuffed in the middle of Google Play’s Top Charts.

Instead, advertisers will be able to bid on ads that match a particular search query, like “hotel apps” or “coupon app,” for example.”
Read more here at Techcrunch

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Blogging Ideas: Select The Best Topic for Your Business Blog

Welcome to part 2(b) of our practical, real-life, down-in-the-weeds Getting Started Guide to building your own business blog!

The Guide is broken down into four parts:

  1. Understanding Your Business and Your Customers
  2. Picking A Topic for Your Blog (A Good One!)
  3. Creating (and Maintaining) A Publishing Schedule
  4. Creating A Promotion Plan

Part 2(a) was back here.

We’re going to pick up where we left off on Wednesday — at this point, you should have completed your homework, and have a reasonably long list of potentially good blog concepts. Now, the hard part — filtering the list down to those that are likely to actually work in the real world.

The blog-o-sphere is an extraordinarily crowded space. The most recent stats I can easily find are from late 2013. At that point in time, there were over 150 million blogs on the Internet, and a new one was created every 0.5 seconds — 172,800 new blogs per day. This is why selecting good blogging ideas is so challenging. Now, the good news is that 99.999% of those blogs are quickly abandoned, and even of the ones that aren’t, few are high quality. Still, it takes some effort to cut through that amount of noise, and good, up-front planning is going to be critical to your success.

Pick A Topic

Step 2b: Filter The List of Blogging Ideas

Filter on Preference and Media Friendliness

Once you have your list of potential topics, there are two criteria you should use to go back and filter the list.

The first filter is, are you interested in the topic? This is absolutely critical. If you’re not interested in the topic, then there’s no way you’re going to be motivated to keep up with the production schedule required to make your blog a success. Instead of being a fun part of growing your business, maintaining your blog will become a chore. And once it’s a chore, it will quickly fall by the wayside. This will be a sad state of affairs, because content marketing is one of the most effective ways that exist to drive business. So, make sure you pick a topic in which you (or better, multiple people on your team) can maintain long-term interest.

The second filter isn’t strictly speaking a requirement, but it is highly recommended — is the blog topic multi-media friendly? Is this something where you’re going to consistently be able to generate both images, videos, or at least audio? Again, think to the Betty Crocker cookbook. Did you know that Betty Crocker started off as a radio program? So, audio clearly worked. Video of making the recipes would be a natural extension, and it would be trivial to include photos of the finished products. This multi-media support for your blog is going to go a very long way in helping its growth (again, more on this, later).

Do Keyword Research

Here’s where we get to the reason that you needed a list of potential topics. Unless you get very, very lucky, you’re going to find that most items on your list are not really suitable for creating a blog. In order to be suitable for a blog, you really want two things to happen:

  • you want it to be a topic that a large number of people are actively investigating, and
  • you want it to be a topic for which there’s minimal competition.

This is where Google AdWords is your friend. Even if you’re not actively advertising on Google, go get an account. It will be unbelievably valuable to you as a research tool, both now and as you go forward with your blog.

When using the tool, your goal is to get one of the topics from your list to be generating “enough” volume to drive a meaningful amount of traffic to your site and to have the Competition ranking as low.

First, a word on the Competition ranking. What this measures is the number of advertisers for each keyword, relative to all keywords across Google. Now, we’re not talking about advertising (yet), but this is still very important for you. The reason is, it’s a good proxy for how difficult it will be to achieve a high, natural (organic) search ranking for the keyword. If the Competition is high, then there are lots of businesses advertising for that keyword in your specified location, and presumably some of them are also writing a blog; and maybe their blogs are good and already rank highly. Remember that discussion about cutting through the noise? Finding a low-competition family of keywords is going to be important in achieving that goal.

Second, how many searches is “enough”?

This isn’t an exact science, for lots of different reasons. For some searches, you’ll have multiple blog posts show up on the first page, and for some searches, you won’t have any blog posts show up until page 10. But, let’s make some assumptions. You’re going to do a good job of creating content that is interesting to potential readers of your blog, and you’re going to do a good job promoting the blog. Over time, you’ll create many blog posts. Over time, people will search for you with many different phrases. For different searches, different blog posts will appear in different positions. And let’s just say that for your chosen package of keywords, your average result nets out to being the equivalent of always showing up as the 10th result. For that position, across all types of searches on all devices, the average click-through rate is 3.53%. If you want to delve more deeply into CTR by position, check out this post by Moz.

So, back to the question at hand. What search volume is sufficient? Well, now you can guess at how many visitors will get to your website from organic search (you’ll get more than this if you’re doing social media promotion, advertising, or other things to generate traffic, but we’ll use this as a baseline). Ten thousand searches per month would average 353 visits per month, whereas 50 searches would average just under 2 visits per month. It almost doesn’t matter what your business is, we can say that 353 visits per month is worth your blogging time, and 2 per month isn’t. Bu the reality is, for almost all of you, your best case scenario is going to be somewhere between the 50 and 10,000 searches per month.

To really analyze this, you’d need to then make some guesses as to how many visitors become customers, how often they’re repeat customers, and what your profit margin on your average sale is. If you’re a scrap metal dealer and almost no one searches for you online, but 80% of the people who visit your website ultimately become customers, then maybe you can get by with a lot fewer searches. If you’re a craftsman that makes custom tables, and you can only make 10 per year, then maybe you only need a few buyers, but you want a lot more visitors because you want to build your brand so you can charge more for each of those 10 tables. Further, if you’re really target a local niche with your blog, then maybe you can get much higher than an average rank of 10th. If you can get to 7th, the CTR goes to 5.59%, and if you can get to 5th it jumps to 7.82%. This should be possible for a sufficiently local blog. Maybe even better. But all of that is significantly beyond the scope of this article. So, let’s put some stakes in the ground.

For local businesses, you want at least a few hundred, and the closer you can get to 1,000 the better. For national or global businesses, you should be aiming for at least 3,000, and the closer you can get to 10,000, the better.

If you’re unfamiliar with how to use AdWords to do this research, come back on Monday, and we’ll cover it in depth. If you already know how, then go do it! Then come back on Wednesday, and we’ll cover creating a publishing schedule you will actually follow. Either way, don’t forget to subscribe below to make sure you get notified of your future posts!

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Credits

By Frank G. Carpenter(?) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Is LinkedIn Advertising Right For You?

Virtually every professional search involving business will eventually lead to LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the premier B2B network, and probably the most effective way to market to other businesses and business people. LinkedIn has 332 million members globally with 107 million of those members in the United States. LinkedIn members are all about business. This is not a cat videos and cake pictures kind of network.

Advertising on LinkedIn reaches “the most affluent, influential and educated audience on social media”. But LinkedIn ads are not for every situation; they can be tricky for some businesses and valuable to others.

Overlooking LinkedIn

If you have never advertised on LinkedIn, you’re not alone. LinkedIn ads are often overlooked as a valuable ad spend. It might be attributed to the impressions that LinkedIn is not a ‘social’ social network, it’s primarily focused on B2B and it’s got a smaller audience than Facebook. Also, LinkedIn advertising is a very different model compared to other social networks.

LinkedIn offers a number of interesting advantages for people and businesses when the alignment of what LinkedIn represents matches what the advertiser needs. Its targeting features are fantastic for reaching business customers, ads can be pinpointed to qualified traffic, and when you align your offer with the right audience LinkedIn can be the best value for your time and money.

Get Going

To get started, you need a LinkedIn account. Assuming you are reading this, you already have that. But if you want to advertise for a business, you may want to establish a LinkedIn free business account so you can share your data. Here are some FAQs about business accounts for ads.

What Kind of Ad?

LinkedIn offers text ads and sponsored content. You’ll want to test both to see which works better. The good thing is, the cost is about the same.
Text Ads have an image and are shown on the right side of internal pages. They have a headline and a description and they are shown to desktop users only.
Sponsored Updates are shown in the newsfeed directly. They have an intro line, title line, and a description section. These ads display on all devices.

Build your campaign

Name your campaign so you can identify it against other ads you will create. The key is to run concurrent ads to guage the success each one brings. You can set up 15 ads per campaign, so naming your ad something like, “Spring Home Improvement offer men 18-30,” is much better than, “Spring Ad 1”.

Find Your Audience

If you are considering advertising, you already have a basic understanding of who your audience is. LinkedIn allows you to target your audience with distinct targeting options. As you select the criteria, LinkedIn will show you the audience size you’ll reach. The more specific you get, the fewer people will see your ads, and that’s a good thing. These options include

  • Location
  • Company – company name, industry, company size
  • Job Title – specific job title and function
  • Schools
  • Degree
  • Field of Study
  • Skills (e.g., HTML or Project Management)
  • LinkedIn Groups – up to 100 active groups
  • Gender
  • Age

Name your budget

This part can be confusing for some people just starting out with a campaign. LinkedIn gives you a choice of paying for the number of clicks your ad receives or by impressions. The first option is cost-per-click or CPC.  The second is how many times your ad is shown, whether action is taken or not.

You might want to try click-through pricing when you start. It allows you to test the effectiveness of ads. When you find the combination of location/image/ad copy that produces good results, you can switch to impression based payments.  The difference in pricing is that you pay a fixed amount for impressions, and you bid a price for click throughs. With impression-based pricing, you pay a fixed amount for every 1,000 displays.

LinkedIn’s Social Navigator

LinkedIn Social Navigator might be another option when thinking about engaging on the network.  LinkedIn Social Navigator, according to Mike Derezin, VP Sales Solutions, makes it easy for sales professionals to stay updated about key accounts, focus on the right people, and build trusted relationships. It aligns itself with the key concepts of social selling: establishing a presence on social networks, finding the right people, engaging, and building trust.

LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator is a premium service that costs around $80-$90 per month. What Navigator does for you is focuses your efforts to find the right person. When you are researching a person or a potential, you can filter the list of contacts (or contact’s contacts) using keywords like occupation, company and more. By focusing your search to the key people, you filter out the non-key people.  That can be a valuable use of money to save time, indeed.

 

If LinkedIn talks to your target audience, there are few networks that can match the focus and opportunity of a successful LinkedIn campaign.

 

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Blog Ideas: Picking A Topic for Your Blog (A Good One!)

Welcome to part 2(a) of our practical, real-life, down-in-the-weeds Getting Started Guide to building your own business blog. Unlike the many, cursory articles out there on how to start a blog, our intent is a little different. We’re diving deep to give you a real step-by-step guide to get you to success.

The Guide is broken down into four parts:

  1. Understanding Your Business and Your Customers
  2. Picking A Topic for Your Blog (A Good One!)
  3. Creating (and Maintaining) A Publishing Schedule
  4. Creating A Promotion Plan

If you haven’t already done so, you should go back and follow the steps in part 1. You’ll need the information you put together there, in order to be successful with this part. And so, with no further ado…

Pick A Topic

Step 2a: Brainstorming a good list of topics

Your blog needs a consistent topic. It can be fairly broad, like Tim Ferris’ experiments in lifestyle design, but it needs to be consistent. The reason for this is fairly straightforward — blogs that focus on a single topic are orders of magnitude more successful than those which are more random. But it can’t be just anything; your business blog is only useful if it generates business. You can think of it this way: your blog is your primary platform for content marketing.

That said, this is brainstorming, so you don’t want to artificially limit your ideas — feel free to go a little crazy, but balance that with a little focus. Go back to the list you created in the previous section, and use it as inspiration, then start writing down any blog ideas which would qualify as good content marketing. To qualify, the topic needs to meet the following criteria:

  • It needs to be ancillary to, but supportive of, your business
  • It needs to be appealing to your target audience
  • It needs to be broad enough to enable long-term, regular addition of new content

The example you’re striving for is the Betty Crocker cookbook, mentioned in the article on content marketing. Recipes are ancillary to General Mills’ overall business, but clearly supportive of it: if you make more recipes, you’re likely to use more of their products. They’re broadly appealing to the same people who are likely to buy their products. And it’s easy to consistently and regularly add and update new recipes (i.e., add new content).

Another example is the Michelin Guide. The Michelin Guide rates restaurants from 1–3 stars. The original meaning of the stars were

  • Worth eating here
    • Worth going out of your way to eat here
      • Worth a trip specifically to eat here

Again, the Guide was ancillary to Michelin’s core business (tires), but supportive of it (if you go driving to these restaurants, you’ll use your tires and need to buy more); it was broadly appealing to the same audience — there were only 3,000 cars in France at the time of the original guides publication, and the people who owned them were absolutely restaurant goers, and rich enough to take extended trips just to eat somewhere particularly amazing; and adding regular content was easy (there are always new restaurants to review).

Hopefully, it should be fairly easy to come up with at least a handful of ideas that meet these criteria (we’ll explain why you need more than one in a minute).

If you’re having trouble coming up with any ideas that work, reach out and contact us — The Ibis Network help you with the brainstorming, no charge.

Spend a fair amount of time on this. I’d recommend at least 20 minutes a day for a week. You want to let your mind wander and come up with as long of a list as you can (that meets the above criteria). You’ll need a long list because, unless you get very lucky, the next step will make it much shorter. Once you have your list of potential topics, come back here and move on to Step 2: Picking A Topic for Your Blog (A Good One!), Part B — Filtering The List.

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