With countless marketing tools of varying degrees of value and price, it can be difficult to choose which one(s) is right for you. And let’s be honest, not every tool is right for your company.

For instance, some tools might really work well for some companies, drive more relevant traffic, generate leads and all but when you try to use the same tools for your company, the results are disastrous. So, what I’m trying to say here is, getting the RIGHT marketing tool for your business in key.

Sometimes it just takes the right tool to take your business to the next level.

These tools work. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. And their performance is usually excellent if you get the right one. That you can take to the bank.

Here are some useful tools that can help improve your business without necessarily busting your budget.

Facebook

This comes as no surprise at all. Social media has become a force to be reckoned with, particularly Facebook. With over 1.8 billion monthly active users, Facebook is a valuable tool for marketers.

If you want this tool to be effective, choose wisely where you want to spend your money. You can use the money to create Facebook video ads or boost a post for your page that has a video as well as give your (photo) posts an extra boost.

But you should know video ads are more likely to reach audiences according to Socialbakers. In fact, it has a 135% organic reach.

So, it’s a pretty good idea to invest your money on video ads.

Nextiva

Nextiva manages all conversations and engages with your customers and teams with one powerful easy-to-use solution. It offers strong contact center solutions that are small-business friendly and allow them to streamline their customer support and focus on marketing.

Ahrefs

This is one of the most valuable and helpful tool in the world of marketing.  It not only tracks your backlinks, but also, tracks your competitors’ backlinks and alerts you when it’s mentioned online and checks your SEO.

It practically does almost everything relating to backlinks. If you want to improve your SEO, this marketing tool is for you.

GetResponse

This is an email marketing tool that you simply can’t compare it to any other out there. GetResponse is in a league of its own.

It has amazing, easy to use features and it’s super fast. This tool can increase your conversion rates with a drag-and-drop email editor, autoresponders, advanced optimization tools & integrations, automation segmentation and so much more.

Namify

Namify is a branding tool allowing businesses to generate a brand name, find a logo and define their whole brand identity.

Buffer

If you want to keep your social media presence in check, buffer is the way to go. It has this amazing feature that allows you to schedule your posts in advance. This of course helps you get the most value out of your social posts.

And it’s available on all social networks, how cool is that?

Optimizely

Want to improve your customer experience? Try Optimizely and you will not regret. If your company fully recognizes and understands the importance & power of providing a great customer experience, you simply cannot ignore this tool.

Optimizely has ways to get your user WOW’d by the experience which is crucial in customer satisfaction. You can as well create targeted content, keep track of your conversions, split test ideas and a whole lot more.

Crazy Egg

The name sounds quite hilarious, but it’s an effective tool. It distinctly paints a clear picture of what your audience/ visitors are up to. It lets you know where people are clicking from, how many people scroll down your page and how far they go.

It’s so easy to set up and quite affordable compared to other methods. For a good strategy in your SEO presence visit Linked website – Linked.ie.

F. Aldea is definitely a Digital Marketing communications consultant and blog author who loves to explore the hottest trends in business, technological know-how and marketing techniques and creates about a variety of stories.

You have a blog, you have your first posts up, and you are just waiting for the traffic to start rolling in. You share the links on social media sites, get your friends to visit, put the link to your site in signatures… why isn’t your website being launched into internet fame? Where is the glory your genius so richly deserves? You are are your content is high quality, and that is what everyone says it takes to get noticed. Why isn’t your blog generating income? What gives?

Every time I am advising someone on a new blog, I give them one fact that none of the alleged “traffic gurus” will admit: popularity is going to take time. In fact, I tell bloggers not to expect enough traffic to monetize their blog for about a year. Yep, that is a full twelve months. Though you will be steadily growing in the meantime… hopefully.

Why does it take so long? Well, just having good content isn’t enough. You have to have a lot of content, have that content optimized, be working a good marketing strategy and plenty of patience while it all comes together. No one just becomes popular over night. It is going to take time and work.

Here are a few tips to help you to make your blog popular.

Keep At It

It might seem cliche, but you just have to stick with it. No matter how frustrated you get by the numbers, keep writing high quality posts, and do so often. I recommend three or more times per week, but five times a week is better.

That means you will be continuously publishing, and so up your chances of being seen.

MyBlogU

A quick way to get popular is by writing posts for blogs that already are. While it helps to already be friends with these websites, affiliations don’t grow on trees.

Try a platform like MyBlogU, which will allow you to post articles you have written that you would like to see published elsewhere. These can be published on up to ten different sites, with a byline linking back to your site. This is a very easy way to get noticed.

Don’t Forget The SEO

You should be optimizing all content to the very best of your ability. Too many bloggers mistake SEO for spam, which is not at all the same thing. After all, you aren’t injecting keywords into badly written content.

You are providing quality posts that use SEO the way it is meant to be used. You are just utilizing a beneficial tool. If you want guidance, and you have a WordPress blog, pick one of the free WordPress plugins.

Check Out What’s Trending

A good way to attract attention – on a short term basis – is by following trends. For example, an occasional post on a bit of news relevant to your niche can really go far. Try checking out Google Trends, or see what people are posting about on social media.

It won’t work for long, but it will at least get people to your site. The rest of your content will be what keeps them there.

Use Social Media

Your blog should have its own social media profiles…that is pretty much a necessity at this point. Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, they are all useful. Update them regularly, and engage with your followers. Having a more personal touch, and showing your appreciation to readers one on one, will boost your popularity quite a bit.
Interlink Your Posts

Every post should have a footer that gives other relevant or interesting blog posts on your site. You should also link within the text of your post if possible. For example, don’t be afraid to reference something that has been published in the past. A link to another article can bring it back into the limelight.

What are some of your tips for making a blog into a hotspot? Let us know in the comments.

Image by Rudy and Peter Skitterians from Pixabay

Upon getting started in an online marketing campaign one of the first considerations is the targeted audience. What does the business provide a service or a product?

Therefore, we must find out what the keywords are that potential customers use when searching the internet for similar products or services. Four general categories provide some insight.

They are the following, city + service, zip code + service, local terminology + service and local landmarks + service. Naturally, replacing the service with the product gives us similar results.

It All Starts with the Best Keywords

Keyword searches are what drive a search engine to find the items queried by a user. Thus having knowledge of the most common associated with your product or service is pertinent when beginning an online marketing scheme.

Now there are other factors to consider in addition, however, using a technique called “search engine optimization” of SEO is what will enable a search engine to find and index your webpage in the top ten to twenty search results. If you are running a local business, you must understand what and how the competition is going about the same thing online as you are attempting.

Keywords should be used on all stages of your blogging strategy. From domain naming to content ideation, planning and writing.

Make A Successful SEO Campaign

Business blogging can be a success if a creative and focused SEO campaign is part of the design for a marketing strategy. One term to become familiar with is NAP or “name, address, and phone number,” it is essential that whenever this information is entered it is consistent.

The reason is when Google searches it is looking for the NAP listed for other businesses that are relevant to the one queried ranked by popularity.

One way to build popularity is by creating “backlinks” these are having a link to your webpage located on another similar site. This provides the search engine a reference and thus turns your site up in the queries. Using email marketing is another great way to make the most of your business blogging efforts.

Keep Updated

Along with keeping things like the NAP consistent, your other business data needs the same attention to detail when it comes to business blogging. This is important when optimizing for the local search engines like Localeze, Infogroup, D&B, and Acxiom. This is why webpage optimization is an important part of online marketing.

By staying up to date on any changes that occur with your business your webpage will never lose its place. There are services that offer help with SEO, however there are plenty of online articles that offer help in addition. The suggestions presented in these articles turns out to be quite useful and relevant for the purpose of optimization.

Nevertheless, business blogging is a full time endeavor and should be part of any marketing scheme for improving visibility and industry credibility. Become the expert in your field and promote your business through networking with other bloggers in similar businesses.

Naturally, becoming familiar with SEO techniques is the wisest choice when beginning a blog. Just like finding your targeted audience, some typical factors for SEO are domain authority, site structure, keyword use and the amount of backlinks in addition, quality of the backlinks.

Image: Pixabay

Like love, the course of running a successful business never did run smoothly.

Chalk it up to the sheer number of variables – on both a macro and a micro level – that a business has to deal with. Regardless of how much time and effort you pour into planning things out, success is never going to be linear. Instead, it’s dotted with peaks and troughs, twists and turns. And those peaks and troughs can seem magnified unless your business is agile and flexible enough to handle change with aplomb.

That flexibility and agility is rarely a happy accident, but rather the result of hiring a freelance risk management consultant and a concerted effort to build a foundation that is able to adapt as circumstances change and your business grows.

Here are three essential skills you’ll need to ensure your foundation is one that can grow as your business does.

Take your brand identity seriously

Your brand is your biggest asset. Creating a recognizable brand identity is key to everything: Rankings, conversions and sales.

The first step is investing time and effort into finding a name that sticks in mind, creates niche associations and is fun to brand. From there create a cool logo, color scheme and design. This company name generator will help with all of that:

Learn how to build the right team

We all know that finding the right talent is a crucial aspect of building a successful business. However, when you’re starting out and don’t have the resources and skills of an immense HR department at your disposal, it can be difficult to know how to find – and retain – the best of the best.

One thing that tends to trip up small or new businesses is the belief that the only way to attract top talent is with top dollars – something that your business just might not have yet. However, a survey by Flexjobs found that, of the 1500 people surveyed, 20% of those would be willing to take a 10% pay cut in favor of flexibility in working conditions, and 22% would be willing to forego health benefits.

Ultimately, building a great team doesn’t mean hiring those with the most prestigious qualifications, or spending big on salaries. Instead, place your energies into two areas: building flexibility into the roles you create so you can be sure to attract great talent, and hiring staff who are a good personality and culture fit. Adopt a virtual phone system to keep your team always connected, even if they are on the move. Use collaboration platforms to foster knowledge exchange.

Learn to compartmentalize

In the early days of your business, you’re probably going to be wearing a lot of hats. Depending on the nature and scope of your business, you may be salesperson, bookkeeper, marketing manager, customer service rep and director, all at once. And when you’re performing multiple roles at once, it can be hard to separate them out once the time comes to hire help.

What you need to do is compartmentalize. For each role you’re performing, determine the core activities and tasks that define that role. As your business grows, you’ll add more and more tasks to that list, which will make writing position descriptions when you’re ready to hire staff infinitely easier.

This advice also comes in handy when you, inevitably, need to work on separating your work and your personal life. If you’re juggling, say, being a parent and running your own business, you may want to take the time to write out the tasks you perform as a parent, and those you perform as a business owner. That way, you can assess whether you’re focusing on the right things at the right time.

Learn to document your processes

In almost all fledgling businesses, there’s a great deal of tacit knowledge – that is, information, processes or procedures that are undocumented. For example, you may know how to update your website, or change the outgoing voicemail message, or which suppliers can deliver at short notice.

Relying on tacit knowledge, however, leaves your business vulnerable. The director of a company I used to work for was inordinately fond of asking his employees, ‘What if you get hit by a bus tomorrow? Will anyone know how to do your job?’

It’s a valid – if morbid – point

Documenting processes, while time-consuming and frankly a little dull, is crucial to the success of your business. Keeping in-depth, up-to-date documentation on processes and procedures (you can find an easy 10-step method for documentation here) makes coping with change and growth a far less stressful experience.

It also means that, when things go wrong, you can easily backtrack and ascertain where things went wrong.

Image: Pixabay

Whether we like it or not, the U.S. Government is hell bent to protect us from the bogeyman. From head to toe, food, drink and other enjoyable vice is under incessant attack from foundations and organizations to keep us safe. Smoking (and you thought it was sex?) is the most prevalent evil of all times, vilified for the last 40 years, and the sustained epitome of warning labels.

Warning labels are thought to be effective, maybe most effective in stopping a perceived well-being transgression, safety hazard or health risk. No matter if this is true or not, labels continue to be the trusted means of halting sin. With this in mind, I find it outrageous that computers and computer related products do not have warning labels.

Consider people who use computers, from the seasoned IT professional to the proverbial one-foot-on-a-banana-peel and the other in the grave, and the range of security knowledge about computers and the Internet. The only people who understand the importance of Internet security and identity theft protection are those who work in the field of Internet security.

If you think your child understands security by virtue of “all kids are de facto techno geniuses”, why do parental controls exist? Kids are less safe on the Internet than many adults. Adults are not safe because, in the words of Ron White, “you can’t fix stupid.”

Internet risks include identity theft, job loss, total loss of privacy, scamming, theft of personal documents and acne on the low end. For the absolute tech-challenged ham-handed dweeb, risks could be stalking, murder, rape, suicide and addiction. There is hardly anything in the real world that cannot be duplicated in the virtual world, in fact exacerbated online.

If this household item was a lawnmower it would be illegal. If it was thought to drive up the cost of your insurance, there would be outrage, and demand for government intervention. Yet priorities are set with little thought to the most dangerous appliance in the home.

Questions:

Like CNN, FOX and The Comedy Channel we want to know what you think. And like them, no particular reason, we just like comments.

1. Should computers have warning labels?
2. Should a license be required to operate a computer?
3. Should a safety class be mandatory before buying a computer?
4. Should safty glasses and hearing protection be required to operate a computer?

Please, practice safe computing. Tweet this, DIGG it, Facebook it, email it to everyone you know. Stop the carnage. Stop ruining my computer experience and costing me money. Call the president of the U.S. The number is 202-456-1414 This is a real phone number for the White House. They will listen to what you have to say. Keep this in mind before you call.

Image source

Things have been serious lately.

But my spidey senses are telling me that there’s a lot of pent up desire for fun, flamboyance, and originality.

If you’re having fun, you attract other people who also want to have fun.

What does this have to do with entrepreneurship, or building a business?

If you’re struggling with getting attention or traction in your business, try injecting some chaos, some fun, some of your own unique personality or life experience into it.

This is one reason TikTok is exploding; it’s a never-ending stream of raw personality. Most TikTok creators don’t do a lot of polishing, in fact, the more raw and real, the better. It’s common to find a business expert doling out tips while putting on their face of makeup.

The new world of marketing and business-building offers a Golden Corral sized buffet of tools and venues to express your mission and brand. Don’t be afraid to experiment with some of them. 

Life is not a dress rehearsal. You should be playing full-out, without worrying about the judgment of others.

Follow the Fun, the Money will Chase You

For example, there’s a friend-group of women who jumped into the wilderness of Clubhouse (the audio-only app) and decided to create a dating-game style “show” on the platform just for kicks. 

When most of the conversations on Clubhouse were boring, “How to Get Rich Today” style, these women started “NYU Girls Roasting Tech Guys.” They’re now contemplating brand deals and sponsorships for a business that invented itself because they were having fun.

If you’re struggling against the voice inside your head that doesn’t want you to have fun because it might be embarrassing, watch this video.

Homework

In the name of realness, I’ll tell you that one reason you haven’t been hearing from me on this blog for a while is that losing Liz Strauss (our fearless founder) really socked me. I needed time to process, time to re-read her book, time to figure out the path forward with my own writing. And I can feel her not-so-gentle nudge to “just do it.”

Thank you for reading, and for being part of this community.

I hope to get back to a regular weekly posting schedule here, so feel free to comment with your questions and thoughts.  And ideas for having fun while making a living.

Photo by Josiah Gardner on Unsplash