A Guide to Internet Marketing Podcast: Recent Episodes

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So, you have got a product, your date is set, your sales funnel is ready, and your army of affiliates is standing by. It’s time to launch your product (but first, a quick note on pre-launches).

Pre-launch

One thing you might want to do in the days prior to launch is a pre-launch. Pre-launches are a little less common today than they used to be, but they can be super useful. Generally, a pre-launch just consists of a landing page where people can sign up to be notified of your launch and, ideally, you will incentivize them with a special low price or early access or both. The idea here is that if you can get a significant amount of people interested in advance, get them committed, and get their email addresses, you will be able to mail them and start your launch off with a boom. You will want to ensure you’ve got your pre-launch landing page designated with your affiliate platform in a way that gives affiliates credit for anyone they send to the pre-launch page prior to launch.

Launch week

This is it. This is the moment you’ve been working towards all along. It is launch week. Hopefully, you did a good job of communicating to your affiliates what time you want them to start mailing and hopefully you didn’t make a rookie mistake like forgetting to set your product listing to “allow sales” or something. Now there are several things to keep in mind for launch week.

Firstly, make sure you make a good impression on your customers by keeping an eye on your help desk and answering tickets and fixing issues ASAP. Secondly, keep your affiliates up-to-date and motivated with regular updates about the JV leaderboard and the funnel’s performance. Do this via email, social media, your blog, and so on. Third, it is tempting to stay up all day and all night watching the sales roll in or worrying about customer support issues (especially if there’s something problematic happening with your membership or software) and yes, you’ll likely not get as much sleep during a launch, but don’t wear yourself out too much. Whether things are going badly or really well, remember that life goes on. Make some time to hang out with your loved ones and be sure to get some good rest whenever able.

Post-launch

If you’ve had a particularly taxing launch, it’s tempting to want to put your feet up and disappear for a few days afterwards. Not so fast… You have got important post-launch work to do. Firstly, you need to ensure you send out a big thank you message/post/video to all your affiliates. It is important to make them feel appreciated since you’ll likely be relying on them again on the next launch. Then, ensure you pay out or ship off whatever prizes were won by the JVs on your leaderboard. Also make sure you go in and make any manual commission payments you still owe (e.g., with JVZoo your Stripe transactions do not automatically “split” so you have to manually pay affiliates for those sales). Don’t forget to increase your product price. False scarcity makes people angry and causes a loss of credibility for you and your affiliates. If you said the launch price was going to end at midnight, you need to increase it after that. Finally, ensure you have a robust autoresponder sequence scheduled to kick in for each buyer right after they finish your welcome indoctrination series. Keep in mind, your buyers have a hundred other marketers bombarding their inboxes all day long, if you don’t start your email marketing immediately after their purchase, they’ll forget about you and will wonder who you are and how you got their email.

Evergreen

Just because your launch period has ended does not mean the doors are closed. On the contrary, you want to bring is as much consistent evergreen traffic as possible. Make a note on your JV page that you are now evergreen and encourage existing affiliates and future ones who may happen upon your page to plug your offer into their autoresponders as an evergreen product. Also, consider reaching out to affiliates for private promotion opportunities where you can put a message like “special offer for followers of so and so” at the top of the page and let their audience get the offer at the original launch price.

Everything you have learned here has the potential to get your business off the ground and your buyers list built in no time. But it will have been completely useless if you don't start taking action right away. Put together a plan for how you are going to implement what you’ve read in this book and get started today!

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Why Recruit JVs/Affiliates?

There are plenty of ways to drive traffic today. But generally, when you need to drive large amounts of it for a product launch, you will be using paid methods. In many industries, the standard is, of course, paid advertising - usually pay-per-click or PPC. This is risky because you are paying out money for traffic without a guarantee that those clicks you paid for will convert to sales. So, you’re risking loss and you have little or no control of what your ROI will be.

For example, you might pay $200 for 200 clicks and only make $210 from the handful of sales you made. It is great that you at least broke even, but you had no control over that outcome and in the next campaign you might make back less than you spent. You can still make this model work, obviously, but it requires a lot of testing, tweaking, adjusting, and a ton of “ad spend” just to get to the point where you have optimized and gained better control over your expected ROI.

Compare that to the JV/affiliate model. When you do a JV-driven product launch, you don’t have to worry about ad spend. You’re only paying for successful sales after they happen, and you know in advance what amount you’re paying per sale. You also don’t have to spend any time or money testing and tweaking and targeting. You are handing all that hard work over to JVs with their own lists and audiences that they already know well and know how to pitch and market to.

When you compare the two, clearly the JV/affiliate model holds an advantage, especially if you are an independent entrepreneur and not a business with a huge advertising budget. Bottom line: if you want to launch a digital product, you need JVs sending traffic to your offer or you can kiss your dreams of having a big buyers list goodbye.

What to Pay Them

If a buyers list is your priority, rather than profit – and it should be – then the indisputable best commission rate is 100%. 100% commission launches automatically pop out and appear more attractive when JVs are looking at upcoming launches. Remember, your launch is not the only one out there, vying for affiliates. If an affiliate can make more money with other launches, he or she will ignore yours. So, if your front-end product is less than $20, you should seriously consider 100% commissions (you can always drop it to 50% after the launch). If your front-end product is higher than $20, then it is acceptable to offer something like 50% or 75%. The most common commission rate for the rest of a funnel is 50%.

Where to Recruit

Launch announcement sites are an excellent place to let JVs know about your upcoming launch. The two most popular ones are Muncheye and JV Notify. Both have a free level where you can list your upcoming launch. However, to get an extra edge, you might opt to pay for added exposure on these sites. Both have paid options that will cause your JV recruiting ads to be more prominent and get more views.

Another good place to advertise your launch is on the affiliate marketplaces themselves. JVZoo, ClickBank, and WarriorPlus all have paid advertising options that will allow you to get your launch in front of potential JVs. The success rate and ROI of these advertisements will vary quite a bit.

You can also announce your launch in one of the many Facebook JV/launch announcement groups. These groups tend to be private, so you will have to request to join each of them. There are literally a ton of these groups on Facebook. Many of these groups are like notice boards where everyone posts their launch but very few people read about launches, while others are much more interactive and fruitful. Since it only takes a moment to post in each of these, you might as well post even in the lower quality ones, but just be aware that results will vary.

A Note on Coaches as JVs

Arguably, the quickest and easiest way to get a high-level JV on your team is to join their coaching program. Many IM coaches offer to promote your product as part of their coaching package. However, you should typically do this well in advance of your launch or even in advance of your product creation. This is because these coaches desire to work with active students and do not want their coaching programs to become “affiliate for hire” programs. Coaching programs tend to be expensive, but they are often, ironically, less expensive and more effective than the above-mentioned paid ads that people often spend a lot of money on.

Affiliate Signup Page

A JV signup page is vital to getting affiliates on board and there are a ton of important elements that you should include, starting with a JV invite video. Your JV invite video is most effective if it features you in “talking head” format. You should describe your product thoroughly as well as all the details of your launch. This means you should mention your funnel and commission model, your contest, and prizes, and so on. Ultimately your video should end by thanking JVs for considering your launch and repeating your invitation.

Your sales funnel diagram would typically be the same place you lay out your commission model. Ideally, you should have a graphical representation of each step in your funnel indicating all the upsells and downsells along with the commission percentage for each of those steps and the price of each of those products. Include any different pricing options you have for each of those products. You may specify what each step or product is on this diagram, or it is also acceptable to simply label them as OTO 1, 2, etc., but expect some JVs to contact you and ask what those OTOs are.

Usually, your contest and leaderboard will be together in the same section. You will want to show images of your contest prizes if they are physical items as well as other details (i.e., if you’re offering cash alternatives for people who don’t want the physical prizes). If you have minimum sales requirements for each prize, list those clearly. But be warned, a lot of JVs do not like minimum requirements.

As for the leaderboard, you will want that posted above or below the contest info. You can manually update the leaderboard yourself periodically or you can use an embedding tool that automatically updates it based on the data from JVZoo, W+, etc. It is not necessary to show the number of sales the contestants are making on the leaderboard and most marketers keep this private.

You will be wanting to update your JVs every day on how the launch is going and to encourage them to keep promoting. To do this, you will need their email address. You should have an easily visible opt-in form for JVs to sign up. An added benefit of this is that on later launches you will have a list of JVs that you can email and notify about your launches.

To make life easier on your JVs, encourage them to promote, and help them get higher conversions, you should provide done-for-you bonuses. These can simply be repurposed PLR/MRR content (check the licenses and make sure you can use them as bonuses) that you place into a zip file and provide a download link on the JV page. For a course on how to make these bonuses look gorgeous and appealing, see our Bonus Creation course.

Once you have got your bonuses, you’ll want to go the extra mile and create a bonus template. This simply means creating an html or WP page with those bonuses on them, maybe some images and a few headlines about your product with a CTA stating, “grab these bonuses when you buy [your product] through our link”. You then place this into a zip file and your JVs can simply upload it to their website and drive traffic to that bonus page. You can either hire someone on Fiverr to create a basic page like this or use an easy web builder like OptimizePress 2.0 to build it yourself and export the page as an OP2 template (but keep in mind not all your JVs have OP2).

Just like you need to provide DFY bonuses and bonus pages to them, you also need to provide pre-written emails for them to use. You may find this hard to believe, but if you look closely at the promotional emails in your inbox and then look at the JV pages for those products, you will notice that even famous, high-level marketers often use pre-written swipes from JV pages. Why? Because it takes time to write a good sales email and even more to fill your email marketing schedule with a whole series of them. Providing JVs with email swipes allows them to copy and paste promotional emails and simply tweak them a bit to make them more unique. I am not saying ALL JVs care about email swipes, but for many of them, this definitely makes your launch more attractive. At a minimum, you should have one email for each day of your launch, but 2 per day is better and having 4 or 5 scarcity-based ones for the last 48 hours of launch is even better.

In this same section, you can also add an assortment of graphics and banners for people to use in their blogs, sites, and even paid ad campaigns. These are probably used less often, but it’s still worth having them. If you are not sure what sizes or dimensions to provide, you can simply go to Google’s AdWords advertising site and look at their guidelines for banner ad sizes. This is not because you’re making these for google, but simply because they cover a broad range of shapes and sizes that can be useful anywhere.

To give your affiliates an idea of how attractive your offer will be to their audience, you will want to add a preview of your sales page. This also allows them to read up on the basics of your product so they can understand it better and write more detailed and accurate promotional content about it.

Arguably the most important part, make sure you have a big, bright, prominent button on your page inviting affiliates to request an affiliate link for your product. This should link to your affiliate registration/details page on whichever affiliate platform or marketplace you are using. So now that you have got a launch date set and affiliates recruited, it’s time to get ready for your first digital product launch.

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Before you start recruiting JVs and sending traffic to a hard launch, you will need your actual launch structure in place. Your launch structure includes your sales pages, your sales funnel, your pricing model, as well as the marketplace or payment platform you will use.

Your launch structure also includes the backend infrastructure you will need for delivering your products to buyers and your initial interactions with them after they purchase. This includes setting up a support desk, a member’s area (or product delivery apparatus), and an autoresponder welcome sequence. (Note: many would argue that these last three items are better categorized as CRM rather than part of your launch structure, and that is a valid point, but we’re dealing specifically with the immediate post-purchase interactions that often make the difference between happy customers and angry refunders, so we’ve included them as part of your launch structure). Let’s take a closer look at each of these.

Sales Funnel

Before you start building the pages, you’ll need to establish your funnel flow. Hopefully, you’ve done a good job of splintering your product into multiple stand-alone components or combining your product with other relevant products. The reason you need to do this is so that you will have multiple products to upsell and downsell through a funnel in order to maximize your revenue. If you haven’t done this yet or aren’t sure how, see the guide on Product Creation.

The flow of your sales funnel basically handles what happens after a person buys your front-end product. Ordinarily, they will be offered a relevant, higher-priced product as an upsell. This product should ideally augment or reinforce what the front-end product does. You’ll then need to plan for a “yes or no” scenario. You will (probably) want a second upsell in case the buyer purchases the first upsell, and you’ll need a downsell if they decline it. This can theoretically go on as long as you want, but generally you’ll annoy people if your sales funnel is more than 4, maybe 5 products deep. Depending on what marketplace you will be using (discussed later), you will be able to create product listings and set up your sales funnel before designing your actual sales pages.

Pricing

Finding the perfect pricing strategy for the products in your funnel can make a world of difference. First, you will want to establish what your “normal” price will be after your launch period. In most cases, this will already be lower than your product’s actual assessed value. But then, for your special launch period, you will typically want to offer an even lower price to encourage early adopters. But be careful. This is not a race to the bottom. Often, a price that is too low will kill the perceived value of your product and can drive prospects away. You will want to think long and hard about how to find the perfect “sweet spot” that maintains the perceived value of your product while also making it a no-brainer to snatch it up before the launch ends. Plan on a few different pricing ideas and combinations throughout your funnel so that, if you feel the offer isn’t performing well, you can change it up. Be sure to be taking notes if/when you make changes so you can compare performance at various price points.

Marketplaces

The last component of your structure that needs to be established before moving on to the sales pages themselves is which marketplace or payment platform you will be using. If you are relatively new to product launching and you’re relying heavily on JVs, you’ll want to stick with one of the big affiliate marketplaces rather than your own payment platform. This is because you will have a greater chance of attracting affiliates and many of these marketers are only comfortable with these marketplaces anyway. The reason this decision should come before your actual pages is that some of these marketplaces have specific guidelines and requirements for vendors and their pages. For a long time, ClickBank was the preeminent, go-to affiliate marketplace for digital goods. In recent years, however, JVZoo has emerged as an even more popular marketplace for hard launches. ClickBank has the benefit of being a little easier to use from an affiliate point of view because most products do not require you to wait for the vendor to manually approve you as an affiliate. However, ClickBank is also much stricter in its guidelines for vendors and their pages, and they also seem to be more evergreen oriented than launch oriented. JVZoo, on the other hand, is much more launch oriented and seems to be the preferred affiliate marketplace for both vendors and affiliates when it comes to launching new products. Another marketplace worth mentioning is WarriorPlus. This one is not necessarily “new” but it’s been recently updated and expanded and is making a big comeback. It seems to have more in common with JVZoo than ClickBank and is very much associated with the Warrior Forum community (although the two are not officially or legally the same). Whichever marketplace you choose, be sure to carefully review their vendor guidelines and familiarize yourself with their policies.

Sales Pages

It doesn’t matter if you know you have the most amazing, valuable, life-changing product in the world. If your sales page is not converting, you won’t succeed. Your sales pages act as a sort of bottleneck of your product’s success. There are a lot of different approaches to sales pages and copy. Short-form, long-form, text-only, video-only, and so on. The most common type you’ll see today are hybrid mid- to long-form video sales letters. This means a sales page in which the center of attention is a sales video at the top, under a headline, and then a long or medium length sales letter below it that basically repeats the message of the video. This type of page has the advantage of appealing to people who people who like to learn via video, people who like to learn by reading thoroughly, and people who like to just skim down the page and collect the main ideas. Whatever style you choose, make sure you keep it clean looking, attractive, and have every element and aspect of it point towards your main goal: the buy button. Buy buttons, headlines, and CTAs should be clear and pop-out easily from the background (so ensure you use contrasting colors). The overall look and feel of your sales page should ideally match the theme and colors of your brand image. Ideally, a page like this will have lots of images and sub-headlines to break up the text. Because a sales page is such a vital part of your success, it is something you should really consider outsourcing if you aren’t already good at it.

Product Delivery and Membership

So, once you have collected a payment, you’ll need an automated method to deliver the product to your buyer. Some marketplaces provide product download or delivery within their platform. Alternatively, you can just forward buyers to your own delivery page with download links or the video lessons and so on. But it is best, these days, to take an extra step towards protecting your content and to lock it behind a members’ area. There are several options for this. First, there are the more common WordPress-based options like WishlistMember, MemberMouse, and Digital Access Pass. Then, there are non-WordPress solutions like Kajabi or FreshMember. Whichever you choose, you will need to go through a few steps to integrate it with your payment platform or marketplace so that people can automatically access their purchases after buying. Also, pay close attention to how you’re setting up your membership script and ensure that it’s protecting all the correct pages for all the correct products. Also, test to make sure login details are automatically being sent at the moment of purchase. Another important benefit to membership-based delivery is that it can decrease refund rates. If unscrupulous customers have to login to access materials, they are less likely to request their money back than if they can simply download files to their computer right away.

Customer Support

Customer support will be a permanent part of your relationship with each of your customers. However, for this guide, we are specifically focused on the very first interaction you will be having with each customer. Namely, login headaches and refunds. Prior to your launch, ensure you have picked out and tested a solid support desk software. There are many out there to choose from. The two most popular ones are arguably ZenDesk and FreshDesk. Try a couple out and see which ones work best for you or your agents if you employ support staff. Once you have got your helpdesk setup, you’ll want to establish streamlined workflows and canned statements specifically for dealing with things like refunds and login problems. You can guarantee you’ll have a lot of both of these. Your canned response for refunds can either be to oblige immediately or to offer a “bribe” of some sort first to keep the refund-requester on-board. For login issues, you will want a step-by-step process of immediately looking up a person’s transaction to verify what they bought, then looking up their account information in your membership platform and either resending credentials or creating new ones. Also consider putting important info into your helpdesk’s autoresponder. Rather than “we’ve received your ticket and will review it shortly” consider adding a few things like “if you haven’t received login details, please check your spam folder” and “due to our current product launch, support tickets may take a full 48 hours”.

Welcome Sequence

A full post-launch email autoresponder sequence will be covered later. Right now, we want to focus on the welcome sequence. Also called an indoctrination sequence, what you want to do is immediately greet and welcome the new customer with an email message. In this message you will want to foot stomp a few things such as asking them to whitelist your email address (include a link to a whitelisting tutorial), reminding them to check their spam for important product access information, a little introduction about your business and what they can expect to hear from you in the future, and finally, a cliff-hanger. The cliffhanger is a promise of something, relevant to what they just bought, that will be sent to them the following day. The next day you can send out a relevant email with info about how to use their product or tips and tricks, and so on. The day after that, you can introduce them to your most popular blog content or something. It doesn’t really matter what you cover in these first few emails, as long as you’re providing value and establishing a relationship. But there is one specific thing you will want to consider doing for each of these welcome sequence emails. You’ll want to include an invitation to purchase other products in the funnel, on the off chance the buyer declined your upsells. This can be a main point, emphasizing that the special launch price will soon expire, or it can be more subtle and simply added in the P.S. area.

Now that your sales structure itself is up and running, it’s time to go get some affiliates and convince them to send their traffic to your offer.

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Why Launch a Product? (The Super List)

So, what does every guru online tell you to do if you want to grow your internet marketing business? Give away lead magnets to freebie-seekers. Build your list. Market affiliate products to them. Make commissions. We have all heard it, right? And you know what? That strategy worked. Back in 2012...

Problem is, it doesn’t work anymore. Nowadays, freebie-seekers have secondary “junk” email accounts that they reserve for collecting lead magnets but otherwise they never log in to them. Your emails are going to inboxes where they are left untouched, floating in a sea of thousands of other marketing emails. This, combined with the fact that many people even use fake email addresses, is what has led to such severely low email open rates throughout the industry. And not only does a list of freebie-seekers almost never open your emails, but the few of them that do will almost never buy anything. Why? Because they are freebie-seekers!

So, what is it that successful internet marketers are doing differently? They are each building a “super list”. A super list (phrase coined by the great Alex Jeffreys) is a list of real people, with real email addresses that they check, who actually habitually take out their credit cards and buy things online. In other words, it is a buyers list. The difference between a buyers list and a freebie-seeker list is night and day. One makes you money and the other makes you angry.

So how do you get a buyers list? Easy. You launch a product, and you get affiliates to send traffic to it. Then you simply integrate your payment platform with your autoresponder service so that buyers get added as subscribers automatically. Don’t worry. It’s not as crazy as it sounds and, more importantly, it’s the only way you’ll move forward in internet marketing.

Now we should note that this guide assumes you have already got a core product created. It’s okay if you don’t have a sales structure set up yet, such as sales pages, a funnel, or a member’s area, because we’ll cover all that next. But at a minimum we are assuming you’ve already got a product created, whether it be an eBook, a video course, or a software tool. If you have not created a product yet, just grab our Product Creation guide which will have you cranking out digital products in no time.

How Do You Launch a Product?

There are a few ways to launch a digital product. One way is to do a “soft launch”. A soft launch is a low-key opening of the doors, so to speak. You set up a product, have it ready to accept sales, and instead of having a major announced launch period with special promotions, you simply start sending traffic to it.

On the other hand, there is a “hard launch”. A hard launch is a publicized launch period with a specific beginning and end date. The idea here is to drive large amounts of traffic to your new product in a short period of time. In most cases, there is a special discount during this short period which encourages people to adopt the product early. Ultimately, the goal of a hard launch is to bring in a large number of new customers (and revenue) and to make a very visible splash in the marketplace.

Since the goal of this guide is to get you, a buyers list as quickly as possible, we will be focusing on how to accomplish a hard launch.

The most important “how” of your product, however, is traffic. Where will you get it? You certainly COULD drive your own traffic with paid ads and hope that you make a profit, but the most popular approach is to recruit affiliates (also called “JVs”). If you can convince and incentivize several affiliate marketers who already have their own audiences and email lists to promote your product, you are basically handing off the problem of traffic generation to someone else. It’s also great because you don’t have to worry about spending your own money in advance. You are simply paying commissions using money from sales that were already made by the affiliates. You also have the benefit of not having to worry about targeting and tweaking and other stuff you must mess with when you pay for your own traffic. All the people on these affiliate marketers’ lists are already interested in your niche and are likely already habitual buyers of products like yours. So, for the purposes of this guide, we will be focusing on getting a bunch of JVs/affiliates to promote a hard launch. But before we start recruiting JVs and sending traffic, you will need to set up your launch structure and that’s what we’ll be covering next.

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Now that you have got your goals established, it’s time to start cranking out some quality marketing content. Let’s look at some of the types of content you can create, curate, and leverage in your social marketing.

Basic Posts

So much emphasis has been placed on visual media like photos, memes, and videos in recent years that many people have forgotten the power of good old-fashioned text. A basic textual post can accomplish a lot and, in fact, can stand out a lot today in people’s feeds that are often filled with non-stop cliché viral images and videos. A standard textual post can be an excellent pattern interrupt in these cases. A textual post, whether it be from your personal profile, a business page, or a group, can be about anything you want. It might be a piece of content in and of itself, like an informative blog post. It could be a link back to some other content elsewhere such as your blog or website or your YouTube channel. Other great ideas for content are questions, stories, and jokes. These can be great for boosting engagement and getting conversations started.

Also, a poll is a great way to boost engagement in your textual posts as well. Asking questions is already something that boosts engagement and people love voting on things, so naturally when you pair the two together, you’re likely to get some great social traction. HINT: For polls, always say something like “tell us ‘why’ in the comments below” so people can talk about their opinions and get some conversations and extra engagement going.

Image Posts and Memes

It has been almost a decade, and we’re STILL seeing images Boromir from Lord of the Rings looking at us in our newsfeeds and telling us about how “One does not simply… [insert funny variable here]”. Why? Because it gets people’s attention, gets your point across, and usually still results in a few likes, shares, or comments. Whether it’s Sean Bean saying, “One does not simply run Facebook ads without a using a tracking pixel” or the Dos Equis guy sipping on a beer and saying, “I don’t usually try to lose 5 pounds in one week, but when I do, I use High Intensity Interval Training”, the fact is memes work in almost any niche. In fact, it is precisely their goofy and ironic application to unexpected niches that causes them to be so funny and get a rise out of people. So, it is settled, if you can find a few minutes per week to make a funny meme for your niche, it’s definitely worth your time.

Other images can be beneficial as well. If you are working an “authority” angle, try posting images of you on stage at events. If you are promoting a free report or free digital offer, you can use an image of the eCover itself or even a generic stock image Adobe Stock. Make sure the images are relevant to your offer and audience. So, if you are targeting restaurant owners, a smiling business owner standing outside of their restaurant might work. If you are doing a weight loss product, a stock photo of a woman stretching or a man running might be the ticket. If you are selling physical products, use an image of the product itself or of a person using the product. And remember, these are organic posts, not paid ads, so you’re not bound by some of the usual restrictions like the “text to image” space ratio and so on (although there are still some ToS that apply to all content, so be sure to familiarize yourself with those).

Videos

Video. The uncontested king of engaging content. This still has not changed. In fact, if anything, it is becoming even more of a norm than ever. If you are not using videos in your social marketing, you’re missing out big time. While it used to be common to use YouTube for hosting your videos and simply embed/link to them on other social platforms, many platforms like Facebook and Twitter have since then started to beef up their own video hosting functionality. For example, today, Facebook is giving YouTube a run for its money and many people are now beginning to lean toward using Facebook as their primary video sharing venue. This is beneficial not only to Facebook, but also to marketers because Facebook has made its videos super engaging by making them autoplay, with no sound, while people are scrolling/swiping past them in their newsfeeds. This results in a ton of views and engagement. This same trend is being seen on other platforms as well.

So, video content is a must. But what types of videos should you incorporate into your marketing? There are several options. Regular vlogs, talking head videos, selfie videos, screen capture videos, instructions, tutorials, tips & tricks, funny videos, motivational videos, animated explainer videos, short “ad” videos, inspirational videos, slideshow videos… the list goes on and on. Anyway, you are able to convey content or messages via videos is great. More recently, some social sites like Facebook have introduced live streaming videos. You can literally host a live video feed or a show and even invite others on for split-screen interviews/discussions from just about any device.

Curated and Repurposed Content

Not all content needs to be created by you or your team from scratch. One exceedingly popular form of content marketing is content curation. This means finding existing content from someone else and simply re-sharing it yourself. This can be done simply by using the Share button to share other interesting or entertaining posts and adding your own comment or commentary.

Another way to curate content is to manually republish it. This can mean copying excerpts from someone’s blog, a news article, a book, and so on. Just ensure you always attribute it to the author (e.g., “Here’s some great tips from the folks at [blog name]”) and try to always put your own comments at the beginning or end and/or ask your audience for their thoughts on it. This is a mutually beneficial form of content marketing because you’re spreading the exposure of the other entity’s brand name (which they’ll appreciate) while also posting content with almost no work required on your part.

Another option for quick content publishing is to repurpose your existing content. Do you have ebooks, reports, or guides of your own? Why not take a chapter from one of your ebooks, tweak the beginning and end a bit, and publish it as a Facebook post? Heck, you could turn an ebook or report into a whole series of social posts covering a whole week. Have a blog on your website with interesting articles and posts? Why not post a teaser/excerpt from each blog post (old or new) and a link to the post in question? Same goes for videos, podcasts, interviews, and so on. If you have been online long enough, there’s a good chance you’ll be able to repurpose a lot of content into social posts.

Content Planning

Planning out your marketing strategy is super important. The last thing you want is for your social presence to turn into one of those where you set up an account, post a few things and then becomes lifeless for months at a time (this happens a lot). When people see this, you instantly lose credibility. That’s why it's important for you or your team to have a robust content posting schedule and strategy. Ideally, you should be posting almost every day at least. However, this need not always be content designed from scratch. Instead, you can set aside two days of the week that are for original created-from-scratch posts or videos, while all the days in between only require a re-shared post from elsewhere or a quick meme/image. Set aside another day of each week for a video post and maybe another day for a community poll. If you have a regularly updated blog or YouTube channel, you can also simply add a new step to your blog posting or YouTube uploading workflow in which after each post or upload, a link should to the new content should be shared/teased via social channels. There are several ways to easily incorporate daily social posting into your weekly routine. It would also be a good idea to establish a daily or at least weekly routine for you or a team member to go through all your posts and reply/interact with your audience if they commented or asked questions.

Tools, Services, and Help

Maintaining a regular and active social presence can be a little difficult if your business is already busy as it is. If it becomes too overwhelming for you there are several options for lightening the load or at least making it easier to manage. Firstly, there are tools like HootSuite and OnlyWire that make social media posting, scheduling, and planning much easier. If you’d like to have your content created for you, there are a handful of paid third-party services out there that will literally create and post content for you on a daily basis. $99 Dollar Social would be one example of this. You would simply fill out a profile of what type of content you want and what industry/niche you’re in and let them take care of the rest. Finally, it might be worth it to hire a new team member specifically to handle your social media marketing (or delegate the responsibility to an existing team member who has time available to do it). This individual would oversee posting, commenting, replying, moderating, and so on.

So, social marketing is clearly an incredibly valuable, and arguably critical part of any online business today. As you have learned in this guide, it can be a lot easier to establish a social marketing strategy and routine than you may have previously thought. But none of it will count for anything if you don’t start applying what you’ve learned right away.

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Establishing marketing goals is critical to the success of your social marketing. Countless entrepreneurs and businesses have setup a social presence, made a few posts, and then let it sit untouched for months or even years. This is usually due to a lack or absence of goals. So, before you even begin establishing any sort of social presence or strategy, you need to establish clear marketing goals.

Your goals should be specific, measurable, and attainable. They can be long term, short term, or a mix of both. Deadlines and milestones can be helpful as well. “I want to increase my social following” would be an example of a bad goal that will likely result in your marketing efforts petering out after a while because there are no specific milestones. “I want to gain 1,000 likes by Christmas” is an example of a good goal. It’s specific, measurable, and certainly attainable. Below are some examples of the various goal categories you might be interested in.

Traffic to Website (Sales, Leads, Content)

Probably one of the most popular goals of Social Marketing is to funnel your traffic back to your own web properties. After all, most businesses don’t to business “on” social media, per se. You are leveraging social media to obtain traffic and convert that social traffic into brand-followers, leads, prospects, and customers. So maybe your goal is to get people to a landing page with a free offer where they can subscribe to your list and become a lead. Maybe they are being sent to a sales page or an eCommerce store. Maybe you just want to do some content marketing and send them to your blog. Whatever the case, the end goal for a lot of businesses will likely be bringing social traffic AWAY from social platforms and over to their own web properties.

Social Following

In this goal category, your aim is to build a large number of followers. This usually means “likes or followers” in the case of a business/brand page or it could mean “friends” if you are focusing on your personal profile. The main sought-after benefit here is to increase the number of people who will see your posts or tweets in their feeds. In this sense, your social posts become like sending out email broadcasts via your autoresponder. It should be noted that some social networks have recently adjusted their algorithms in such a way that people tend to see less posts from businesses they have followed. This means a much smaller percentage of your followers will see your posts in their feeds today than did in the past. Still, if you grow a large enough community, this can still be greatly beneficial and if your content is engaging enough to get a lot of traction in the form of likes, comments, and shares, you can significantly increase the range of your organic reach into people’s feeds.

Passive Presence

Some businesses might have purely passive goals. Simply being present and discoverable inside social platforms is a benefit that has wider appeal and greater utility than you may think. In many cases, a company’s social presence might supersede or even totally replace what was once the role of a website or blog. Your business’ phone number, address, directions, hours of operation, mission statement and so on can often be put on your social accounts and, depending on your audience, that might be where most people seek you out, rather than your website. The ease of posting announcements, updates, photos, and other content without relying on a web developer or having to use a web-building platform also makes social presence an attractive alternative to the traditional website model. This same approach can also be used for events, communities, and brands.

Brand Awareness

Another goal that is less thought about might be spreading brand awareness and recognition. If you are just starting out, there is a good chance your brand might need a jumpstart. If nobody has ever heard of you, a great way to increase recognition is to simply create and share unique, helpful, or entertaining content and get your name, logo, and overall brand identity in front of as many people as possible as many times as possible. If this is your goal, you want to avoid being salesy in the beginning. Ensure you’re focused almost entirely on posting helpful, relevant, or entertaining content.

Expand Existing Audiences

If you have already got an audience, your goal might be to make it bigger. This can be done via several social marketing methods. Sharing viral content, either curated or created yourself, can lead to a huge increase in your social audience. Recently, a restaurant in Southern California released a 60 second video with shots of people enjoying their signature menu item, an enormous T-bone steak topped with melted cheese, and it went viral in one day. They had already garnered a respectable audience prior to the video, but after the video, their Facebook audience and engagement skyrocketed (and so did their foot traffic). Although creating your own viral content like that can be great, if you don’t have the time or means to do so, you can simply leverage existing content that’s already proven itself to be viral by curating/re-sharing it with your own comments or angle added to it. Also, a few humorous images and memes cannot hurt either.

Other ways to expand existing audiences can include contests, sweepstakes, and gamification. Assuming your offers/prizes are compelling enough, incentivized sharing can be highly effective. Just ensure your methods are permitted by each social platform’s Terms of Service.

Enhancing or Repairing Public Relations

Do you want to set your company apart in the public eye? Do you want to associate your brand with feelings of good will and community involvement? Did you accidentally spill a ton of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico and kill a bunch of fish? If any of these apply to you, then enhancing or repairing public relations could certainly be a good social marketing goal for your business.

You can bet that when a certain major energy giant had an oil spill on its hands a few years ago and became public enemy number one, they went into PR repair overdrive. They were literally hated by almost everybody and their business could easily have disappeared off the face of the earth. But instead, they handled it masterfully and began pouring millions, if not billions, of dollars into massive PR campaigns to improve their image and highlight their commitment not only to fixing the mess, but to the environment in general. This PR campaign lasted years and you can bet they leveraged social media platforms like Facebook as well.

But it does not take a humiliating public catastrophe to make PR enhancement a good idea. This is a goal that any business can engage in. Non-sales related campaigns can include photos or videos that foster positive values and goodwill or even involvement in social movements (be careful not alienate half your prospects) and noble causes. Did your business recently donate to a charity, build a school in a third world country, serve food at a local pantry? These are all things to post about. These do not necessarily need to be about things that your business participated in. They can be content about general things like a heart-warming video about helping the poor or caring for the elderly. Special holidays like Christmas, Thanksgiving, or Mother’s Day also present opportunities to leverage emotions, foster goodwill, and enhance your PR.

Market Research

A hugely beneficial goal of social marketing is market research. If you are just starting your business or going down a new path, social media can be an excellent place to learn more about your audience and your market. This can be done in a structured way with things like surveys and questionnaires, or in a less structured way by simply engaging with your audience, commenting, asking questions, and so on. Also, lurking or conversing in social groups related to your industry can teach you a ton about what your customers want and who they are. Beyond that, you can monitor your competitors’ pages and groups to see what their customers like and what they are complaining about so you can adjust your business accordingly. Creating your own group and engaging within it is another great way to get a constant stream of market/audience data flowing into your business. Ultimately, your goal should be to come up with one or two ideal customer avatars that you can then base your marketing and product development on.

All the goals you’ve learned about in this section require some sort of overall social strategy. So that’s what we’ll be covering next.

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Social media marketing has come a long way in the last several years and has changed the way many businesses think about marketing in general. For some marketers, social followers have replaced email addresses, posts and tweets have replaced promotional emails, and likes have replaced email opens. Virtually every successful business today has not only a social media presence, but a clearly defined social media strategy.

Most of these strategies revolve around posting consistent content. But it’s more than just posting promotions and offers. A successful social strategy will include various types of nonpromotional content for various types of goals. Posting about a charitable cause associates your brand with feelings of goodwill. Posting about trendy topics makes your brand seem relevant. Posting useful tips without a sales pitch makes your business come off as genuinely helpful. Posting humorous or “feel-good” content associates your business with positive emotions, and so on. But more importantly, these types of non-promotional posts are accomplishing two other goals. First, they are encouraging social sharing, which grows your following even more. Secondly, they are creating top-of-mind awareness for your brand. People will get used to seeing your content and your business name, logo, and USP. As a result, when they have a problem that your business fixes, they will be more likely to think of you first.

All those social media concepts revolve around organic activity. However, the major social media platforms today have also developed robust paid advertising systems. The most game-changing of these has been the concept of social “native advertising”. Native advertising refers to advertisements that have the appearance of organic content except for a tiny one-word disclaimer somewhere designating it as “sponsored” or an “advertisement”. This new form of paid social media advertising has proven to be remarkably effective because social media consumers are already in the habit of looking at, consuming, and engaging with anything that looks like an organic post in their social feeds. In addition to this, the line between organic posts and paid native ads have become increasingly blurred as these native ads act and function just like organic content (they can be shared, liked, etc.) and businesses now can pay to promote an organic post to give it further reach.

Now that we have discussed social marketing in general, let’s have a closer look at each of the top social media platforms in more detail.

Facebook

One could argue that there has truly never been anything like Facebook. The undeniable king of social networks took the web by storm several years ago and has since become a household name. Almost everyone has a Facebook account (and about 3/4 of all U.S. adults check it regularly). There is simply no other platform so consistently and universally used all around the globe.

For many businesses and organizations, their Facebook presence has replaced their actual website (at least in importance) because people are more likely to interact and receive updates there. Is there a blackout in your city or an emergency in your local area? There is a good chance the power company or news agencies will be posting updates on Facebook more quickly and consistently than their own websites. Why? Because that is where everybody is. And you need to be where your audience is.

Facebook has done an excellent job of developing an environment where people stay inside the platform. Although links to the outside are easy to create, it’s now just as easy and perhaps more beneficial to keep things inside Facebook. For example, until a couple years ago, most people who wanted to share videos did so by linking to a Youtube video. Today, however, Facebook has made it both quick and easy to upload videos within the platform and has even made it the best option by allowing Facebook videos to autoplay as people are scrolling through their newsfeeds, making this option the most beneficial for people doing the sharing and the most pleasing for those doing the consuming. The result? After years of this sort of structuring and positioning, Facebook users now actually feel more comfortable when they remain inside Facebook. People trust and feel safe with the Facebook interface and prefer to consume content inside of it. Hence the enormous success of Facebook Native Ads.

The point is, if you want to market your business or brand in the place where your audience spends most of their time and in a context in which they feel most comfortable (hint: you do), then you need to be marketing on Facebook.

To fully get the point across, here are some for statistics that will give you a fuller appreciation of Facebook’s size, reach, and importance. Almost 40% of the entire world’s online population is on Facebook. Of the remainder who do not use Facebook, half of them live with someone who does. There are currently almost 1.8 billion monthly active users and that is growing by 500,000 new users per day. Almost 1.2 billion daily logins occur, and 6 new profiles are created every second. More than 1,000,000 hours of video viewing time takes place on Facebook. Over 250 billion images have been uploaded, which boils down to about 350,000,000 per day.

And just in case you were wondering about the level of engagement, Facebook users generate 4 million Likes, 510,000 comments, and 293,000 status updates… per minute. With a growing and engaged user base like that, it is no wonder more than 40% of marketers report that Facebook is a critical part of their business. The question is, how do you make it work for you?

Paid Vs Organic Marketing

A quick note on paid vs organic Facebook marketing. Ideally, a solid Facebook marketing strategy should include a mix of both. Organic marketing is an excellent and critical way to provide content and value, keep your audience engaged, gain brand exposure, grow loyal followers, and establish rapport. Paid ads are a great way to boost those efforts as well as to accomplish a variety of “off-Facebook” goals such as website visitors, lead generation, and sales. Facebook’s masterfully established “native” ad style has made paid ads even more effective than anyone could have imagined.

Twitter

Twitter is an incredibly powerful online news and social networking service. It’s in a unique league of its own due to several features that set it apart from other social networking platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and GooglePlus.

Firstly, one of the main functions and uses of Twitter is as a news/events broadcasting channel. In many ways it is more like a news ticker than a social networking platform (albeit a news ticker where you get to choose what news you want to hear about by choosing who you follow). In fact, it has become a must-have resource for news networks and journalists who want to stay in the know about anything newsworthy in their areas. Journalists make up almost 25% of all verified Twitter accounts.

Secondly, Twitter is all about short burst broadcasts. All posts consist of tiny bite sized messages, called Tweets, of 140 characters or less, or some combination of video/images and text. Users can broadcast and receive these messages via SMS, Mobile App, and the Twitter website interface.

Interaction with these posts can take the form of replies, likes, and retweets, with the latter being the ultimate sign of a successful tweet. For businesses and organizations, Twitter is used not only as a place to network and broadcast news, but also to keep audiences updated about content published elsewhere. For example, some businesses primarily use Twitter as the “hey look” step in their content marketing plan, in which they simply Tweet every time they publish a new blog post on their website or a new video to their YouTube channel.

Bottom line: Twitter is a powerful, “short & sweet” social broadcasting platform that can play a significant and positive role in any business’ online marketing strategy.

Advertising on Twitter could be one of the most impactful decisions you make in your business’ online marketing strategy. Why? Because of the sheer numbers, for starters. There are well over 300 million active users on Twitter (nope, not a typo) and that is nothing compared to the total created accounts which is sitting at over 1.3 billion (yes, with a “b”). Of that gargantuan amount, around half, 550 million, ever Tweet and another 500 million visit the site each month to read tweets and news without logging into their accounts. One-third of all US social media users are on Twitter and 80% of active users access the site via mobile. These days, anyone who is anyone is on Twitter, including over 80% of the world’s leaders.

So that’s all well and good from a purely personal perspective. Clearly the numbers are there. But what about business? Why should you market and advertise there? Well, if it is any indication, 65.8% of US businesses with 100+ employees are marketing on Twitter. 58% of the world’s top brands have built and maintained enormous Twitter followings (100K or more). And how active are all these businesses on Twitter? 92% of them Tweet more than once per day, nearly half of them (42%) Tweet up to 5 times per day, and 20% of them go crazy and Tweet up to 10 times each day. Yeah, there is a good bet that these companies have a very good reason for putting so much marketing energy into Twitter.

So, the businesses and companies are clearly on board. But what do consumers think? Well, the average Twitter user follows 5 companies and 80% of them have mentioned a brand or business in a Tweet. 54% of consumers on Twitter reported that they have acted in response to seeing brands mentioned in Tweets (e.g., Retweeting, going to the brand’s website, searching for the brand, etc.). To finally drive the point home, Twitter revealed in 2016 that total paid ad engagements had grown a whopping 208% year-on-year. Yikes.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn isn’t just for helping you recruit top talent or finding your dream job. It is a powerful means of organic B2B marketing. You can of course leverage paid marketing on LinkedIn, but even with paid marketing every business needs to invest in building their organic presence. Just as with other social media platforms, LinkedIn is a global site—which is an effective means of growing your business well beyond your local service area. While B2B marketing is the most effective, do not discount LinkedIn for B2C.

LinkedIn is a site dedicated to professionals so the mindset when joining, posting, searching, and networking is quite unique when compared to Facebook or Twitter. While the site may not be as saturated, that is something you can use to your advantage. Users join and log in for professional purposes, meaning you have a built-in captive audience. Just take a look at some of the stats.

There are over 467 million users in over 200 countries around the world. The US has the largest number of users, followed by India, Brazil, Great Britain, and Canada. LinkedIn is available in over 24 languages. There are 1.5 million professional LinkedIn Groups in hundreds of industries. 57% of users are male and 44% are female. 41% of millionaires use LinkedIn. 13% of users are between the ages of 15 and 34—including over 40 million students and recent college grads. 94% of online marketers use LinkedIn to distribute content. 71% of professionals believe LinkedIn is a credible source for professional content. 80% of B2B leads come from LinkedIn. 46% of B2B social media traffic comes from LinkedIn. So obviously, LinkedIn is the perfect place to market your business.

Instagram

Instagram is a powerful photo sharing app. When it comes to leveraging this social platform for business, it’s all about visualizing your brand. While you can certainly post photos to all of your other social platforms, Instagram differentiates itself (even from Pinterest) with filters which empower absolutely anyone to turn their photos into engaging and brand-building works of art. When it comes to deciding which social platforms to add to your website, and post to regularly—Instagram certainly cannot be ignored.

One of the most noteworthy differences between Instagram and some of the other sites you might be considering for your brand or business, is that Instagram is a mobile app. While you can head to Instagram.com after you have created an account and perform limited functions, most of the functions must be used within the app. Downloading the app is free for both Android and Apple. If you are using Instagram for your business, set up your Facebook account first. Even if you are not yet active on Facebook, you will need to link your Instagram account to its parent company (Facebook) to transition it from a regular account to a business account.

We know that you only have so much time in the day, so you might be in search of some quantifiable facts as to why Instagram is where you should be investing your time and resources. Here are some statistics that businesses across every industry simply cannot ignore. Instagram has over 700 million active users (yup, you heard that right), 400 million of whom use the app every single day. 80% of these users are outside of the U.S. Over 80% of Instagram users follow and engage with multiple businesses, products, or services. Over 250 million Instagram users engage with the Instagram stories (paid advertising) each day which makes it a dream come true if paid ads are your focus. Users share over 95 million photos and videos each day. Most Instagrammers are between 18 to 29 years old. 38% of women use Instagram and 26% of men. Over 8 million registered businesses use Instagram. Over 120 million Instagrammers engage with brands directly after their Instagram engagement—visit their website or profile URL, direct message in Instagram, email, call, visit other social platforms, or get directions. By the end of 2017, 70% of brands will be on Instagram. Over 60% of users have learned about a new product, services, business, or brand after finding them on Instagram. Instagram posts with hashtags receive over 12% more likes, comments, tags, and shares. The average business or brand posts 5 times per week.

So, clearly Instagram is where you should be marketing, based on audience size, usage and engagement, and demographics – not to mention that every other business is marketing there, which should tell you something.

Pinterest

There are so many social media platforms to choose from, that most business owners focus their time and attention on one or two. When deciding which sites are the best to brand and market your business, you must not forget the visually engaging Pins and Boards found on Pinterest.

There are a few standout ways in which Pinterest varies from other social media sites. While you can “follow” users, and they can “follow” you—it is not about friends and followers. Instead, it is about generating instant access to engaging visual imagery and informative Pins regarding any and every area of interest. These Pins can then be added to a user’s personal boards for future reference. Anyone can access any other users Pins by the category or keywords related to the Pin. While each Pin can have a bit of text or even a URL, the goal is not the “here’s where I am or what I’m doing” topic of most social media platforms. Instead, a relevant comment regarding the post, and what it represents is standard. Most importantly, unlike Facebook and Twitter where your posts peak engagement is rarely more than 5 days (or a few hours) Pins can continue to show up in search results indefinitely.

If you're inclined to stick with the major players, like Facebook and Twitter, don’t write off Pinterest until you take a closer look at the statistics. First off, let’s talk about the sheer size of your potential audience. Pinterest boasts an insane 150 million active users. Yeah, you heard that right. 70 million of those are in the US, with 80 million outside the US. As can be expected, Pinterest activity is proportionately astronomical. There are over 75 billion Pins, which have been posted to over 1 billion public and private user boards. Over 2 billion shopping pins are posted daily. 87% of users make purchases after seeing products or services on Pinterest and 93% use it with an eventual purchase (online or offline) as their primary goal, which makes Pinterest a no-brainer platform for those seeking to sell goods and services to a shopping-minded audience. And 72% of users make offline purchasing decisions based on Pinterest content. So, it’s not just a goldmine for online businesses.

The average Pinterest user session is just over 14 minutes, which is very impressive when you compare that to most other social media platforms. 14 million rich pin articles are posted every day and a whopping 5% of all web traffic comes from Pinterest. 80% of Pinterest users access the site from a mobile device, so mobile marketing and mobile-friendly content is especially important here, and 2 out of 3 pins are posted by businesses or brands, so you’ve got some competition. Oh, and if you happen to be in the culinary niche, guess what: there are over 1.7 billion recipes on Pinterest.

As for your audience make-up, 81 percent of Pinterest users are women, so the “Pinterest is for girls” stereotype clearly has some truth to it, at least from a market research perspective. But don’t worry, if your target audience is males, the percentage of men on the site is increasing rapidly, making up about 40% of new users recently. In case you were wondering, the most popular categories for these new male Pinterest users are technology, food, and drink (big surprise, right?). As for age, millennials are using Pinterest just as much as Instagram. The median age of users is 40 years old, but the most active “pinners” are under the age of 40.

So, now that we have established that social media is an absolute must-have marketing channel for your business, it’s time to establish some social marketing goals, which we’ll do in the next section.

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Coming up with ideas for blog posts can seem difficult if you are not used to creating content on a regular basis. However, once you get started, you can expand on your existing writing with more detail and update posts with new information. Here are some post ideas to get you started:

• Current trends or news in your industry

• Interview an expert (could be someone on your team)

• Point out common mistakes that users make

• How-to posts

• Guest posts from industry leaders

• Guides to buying the right product

• Answer frequently asked questions

• Beginner’s guides for products

• Comparison of similar products

• Feature a customer success story

Each of these topics can be built upon and turned into a suite of posts that all reference one another. For example, a good post about frequently asked questions that is shared on social media will invite more questions in the comments- when you have enough questions, create a second post! Customers love to interact with content that relates to them, so make sure to encourage that by asking for their thoughts at the end of each blog.

Blogging can be intensive, particularly if you want to post multiple times a week. There are many organizational tools such as Trello and Asana that can be used to keep you on a regular schedule. Some people like to write their posts one at a time according to their posting schedule, whereas others prefer to spend one or two days a month writing all their posts and then publishing from their cache. Some people just find that they don’t have the time to blog on top of everything else they’re doing within the business.

This can lead to some businesses not creating a blog at all, but blogs are such powerful resources that this should be avoided if possible. If you don’t have the time to blog yourself, consider outsourcing to a freelance writer. Many companies do this with great results, and if you find the right freelancer, you can get all your content done without needing to hire a new person every time. Freelance writers will have the writing skills you may not have, as well as the time to do the work to a high standard.

If you are interested in earning money through your blog, there are a number of advertising styles you can implement on your site. Most options display ads on your site and the amount you earn is decided on the amount of views or clicks it receives. These options work best for high-traffic sites, and it’s important that you consider how they will affect your readers’ enjoyment.

A more subtle way to advertise is the use of affiliate links, which also allows you to only endorse brands that are relevant to your industry and that you believe in. To create an affiliate link, you need to reach out to a company and join their partner program, if they have one. Joining this program gives you a unique link ID that you include in your ads or blog posts. When a user clicks this link and buys the product, you receive a commission. Affiliate links and other advertising methods work best for large blogs, so this might be something you do in the future rather than right now, but don’t be afraid to consider it if you’re writing posts about specific products.

Blogging can be time-consuming and requires you to think creatively about the link between you and your customers. These might feel like large obstacles to some people, but the rewards of blogging for your business are so great that they will outweigh the negatives you face in that initial learning curve. Regular blogging can double or even triple your website traffic, and informational pieces about your industry will create a strong brand voice that customers trust. The key is to blog early and blog often, so use these tips and get started today!

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It can be difficult to decide where to post your blog when there are so many options, so in this chapter, we’re going to go through some of the best and most popular blogging platforms available.

Your website

If your company already has a website, the best place to have your blog will be alongside the rest of your content. Your website may be built on one of the other platforms in this list, so you will see the benefits of those platforms in more detail.

Wordpress.org

Wordpress.org is the world’s most popular blogging software. It’s incredibly customizable, allowing you to add extra features like forums, online stores, and membership options. Many people use Wordpress to build sites other than blogs, so this is a great option if you plan to grow your blog into a full website later. It’s free to use but you’ll need to buy a domain name and web hosting. This software has a bit of a learning curve but overall is quite easy to use, with thousands of plug-ins and themes available so you don’t need to do any coding. When signing up, make sure you are on Wordpress.org and not Wordpress.com, which is a site for smaller blogs with more limited options.

Wix

Wix is very easy to use with no coding experience, allowing you to design your blog with drag-and-drop tools. However, its free account is quite limited, and it is not completely customizable with issues such as limited third-party apps and not being able to change a design template once you’ve chosen it.

Blogger

Blogger is a free service that is owned by Google, meaning you get the advantage of Google’s robust security and reliability. It’s easy to use without technical knowledge, but it’s quite limited in terms of design and you can’t expand it into a multi-featured website if your business grows.

Squarespace

Squarespace is a paid platform that is quite easy to use and has a great range of professionally designed templates, but not many feature and integration options. Their Personal plan starts at $16/month and their business plan starts at $26/month. Many bloggers end up switching from Squarespace to Wordpress to minimize their expenses and add more features to their website.

When you have chosen a platform and set up your blog, make sure to post regularly! Studies have shown that blogs that post every two or three days see the biggest increase in traffic. Companies that publish 16 or more blog posts per month get almost three and a half times more traffic than those who post four or less times a month. In companies of every size, posting 11 or more blog posts a month created at least double the traffic of those who rarely posted. If this seems daunting, don’t worry; we’ll discuss how to create this much content in the next chapter.

To get all these great blog posts to your audience, you need to use social media, email lists, and search engines to your advantage. Blog content is perfect for sharing on your existing social media accounts, as well as sending to your email lists. Use these opportunities to share your blog with your existing audience through media that allows them to share it with their friends.

When creating content, use search engine optimization to your advantage by including keywords and backlinks in every post. That way, you will come up top when a potential customer searches for the solution to a problem or question they have.

The best content for search engines and social media is to provide answers to questions customers are searching. You will pick up customers on search engines with your SEO content and entice social media users with answers to questions they’ve been wondering for a while.

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A blog is the best way to create custom content for your current and future customers. Chapter one of this book looks at how a blog can help your business, how to find good examples of business blogs, and how to decide what kind of content your blog should feature. Chapter two examines the platform options for blogging, how often you should post content, and the best ways to get your content to an audience. Chapter three tells you how to come up with content ideas, stick to a posting schedule, and earn some money through your blog. Whether you are thinking of starting a blog or want to grow an existing one, this guide will teach you all you need to know.

What is your most important source of customer interaction? For many businesses, it’s their blog. If your business does not have a blog yet, you’re missing out on a crucial stream of new customers, as well as increased revenue from existing customers. Let’s look at a few statistics:

● Nearly 20 million people have blogs, taking up 23% of all internet usage.

● 81% of U.S. online consumers trust information and advice from blogs.

● 61% have made a purchase based on a blog recommendation.

● Small businesses that blog get 126% more lead growth, and B2B marketers who blog get 67% more lead growth than those who do not.

Whether your company is brand new or becoming established in the industry, a blog is an excellent resource. The sooner you set it up, the more time it will have to build credibility and an audience. A blog allows you to craft your brand’s voice, improve SEO and reach more people by giving you content to share on social media.

By using your blog regularly, you can create timely and relevant posts and build a reputation as an industry thought leader. Blogs are easy to use and completely customizable, so you can create one that perfectly suits your business’ needs.

Blogging is not something you need to figure out on your own. Because of the popularity of the platform, there are millions of blogs that you can read and draw inspiration from when creating your content. It might feel like a fine line between being inspired and stealing, but the key is to learn from the writing style and come up with your own stuff, not copy the content topics word for word. Just reading other business’ blogs will improve your understanding of blogging, and you’ll learn what does and doesn’t work over time.

The best way to find helpful blogs is to think about why you’re looking for them. If you need to learn more about developing a tone of voice, search for leading business blogs. If you want to see what blogging is like in your industry, search for industry leaders. If you want to figure out what kind of blogging you should be producing at this point in your company, search for your competitors’ blogs. You will find that one blog will lead to another and pretty soon, you’ll have a whole list of blogs you can read and use to inspire your content.

Deciding what kind of blog, you want to create can be difficult for a lot of people starting out. They wonder what topics they should and should not write about, how broad or narrow they should be in terms of their niche, and how they should form the voice of their brand. The best way to figure out all these things is to look at your target audience. You may think that what you blog about should be decided by your product, but it should be decided by your customers.

Look at your target audience and the kind of blog posts they are reading within your industry. Are they looking for product recommendations? Are they reading about current trends in your industry? When you learn what is being read, you will learn what kind of content will drive traffic to your site. You can use tools like BuzzSumo and Alltop to discover the kind of topics that are doing well in your industry.

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Regardless of which method of lead generation you focus on, your business will need a host of tools to generate leads. For email list building, you will require a minimum of two tools: an autoresponder and a landing page builder. Your autoresponder will be the platform where your email list is sent, stored, and communicated with. Your landing page builder, on the other hand, will be where you place your opt-in forms and collect your leads.

Popular autoresponders include:

GetResponse

Aweber

SendReach

Constant Contact

Active Campaign

MailChimp

Popular landing page builders include:

InstaPage

LeadPages

OptimizePress

InstaBuilder

Thrive Themes

For businesses that require more robust lead generation data, this can usually be done with the above-mentioned autoresponders and landing page builders. However, for more flexible and wide-ranging forms, a business might find that a service like FormSite.com, Wufoo, or Formstack will fill their needs better.

There are a variety of potential tools for SMS list building including:

TextDeliver

Twilio

Trumpia

Push-notifications can be accomplished with multiple tools including:

PushCrew

Push Connect Notify

OneSignal

Retargeting can be accomplished via various platforms such as:

Facebook

Twitter

Google AdWords

AdRoll

Perfect Audience

Finally, social media marketing can easily be done via the various social platforms themselves. However, many marketers prefer to rely on social media management tools such as:

HootSuite

OnlyWire

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Most of the above marketing methods have the same immediate goal in mind: getting traffic to a web page. This web page could be either a sales/order page or a lead generation page. Since sales is a relatively straightforward topic and lead generation is at the forefront of immediate internet marketing goals, we’ll be focusing on all the variations of lead generation.

Email List Building

At the top of the lead generation list is email list building. They say “the money is in the list” and it’s true. The most common method of email list building is to send traffic to a lead generation page of some sort. Typically, this is a landing page pitching some sort of free offer or “lead magnet” in exchange for a person typing their email into an opt-in form. This opt-in form might also ask for a name, since personalized subject lines are known to increase open rates by around 30%. In addition to a traditional opt-in form which often sadly leads to low quality email addresses that are rarely checked or even fake names and emails, there is a newer development that has allowed marketers to increase the quality of the contact info they collect.

The first of these developments is the “lead ad” or “lead card” concept available on Facebook and Twitter’s advertising platforms. This newer type of ad pre-fills Facebook and Twitter users’ name and email in the opt-in form and requires them only to tap the submit button. This is beneficial because the emails and names associated with a person’s social media account are more likely to be real and regularly checked

Robust Lead Generation

For businesses that require a bit more lead data, a more robust lead collection approach may be necessary. This simply entails adding more fields to an opt-in form. Depending on a business’ needs, this may include items such as phone numbers, mailing addresses, business names, industries, income levels, family size, and so on.

SMS List Building

Text Message Marketing has become increasingly popular in recent years. Initially, the main use of SMS list building was for major retailers to send out special coupons and promotional messages. However, more recently, many online businesses have been leveraging SMS messaging for things such as webinar reminders and sales promotions. There are various ways of conducting this type of list building, including having people input their mobile numbers or having them send a text message to a special number.

Push Notifications

An even more recent trend has been to have people opt in to push notifications. This involves a pop-up on your website requesting permission to send people future updates directly via their browsers. When a person consents to this, you are then able to send notifications that pop up in a box on the bottom right of their screen at any time in the future.

Retargeting

Building a retargeting audience can be considered another form of list building and is relatively easy to do. Various platforms including AdRoll, Facebook, Twitter, and many others have a retargeting pixel that you can paste onto your web properties. Once this is done, all traffic to these pages will be cookied and added to your retargeting list. From that point forward, you will have the ability to place your ads in front of these people almost anywhere on the web. This includes on social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, video sites like YouTube, and virtually any website, news site, blog, or forum that participates in any of the major online ad networks. This is an unbelievably valuable form of lead generation because retargeted traffic has been shown to convert at a 70% higher rate than cold traffic.

Social Followers

Finally, building a social following can be considered another form of lead generation. With a large enough social following, a business can post to one of the major social networks and have their content and promotions seen in the social feeds of countless potential customers. The possibility of these followers sharing these posts gives businesses yet another way to expand their list even further. Some social networks, like Facebook, have recently decreased the percentage of a business’ audience that will see organic posts in their news feeds. However, if an audience is large enough, social posting remains a powerful form of marketing today.

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Regardless of whether your intended destination for traffic is a sales page, a lead page, or simply a piece of content, the potential internet marketing methods are manifold. We’ll cover the most common ones here.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is unique in this list for an obvious reason: you already have their email address. In other words, the main goal of email marketing is sales, whereas the other methods in this list can have both sales and lead generation as a goal. Email marketing basically consists of sending promotional email messages to a list of leads, typically using an autoresponder service like GetResponse or Aweber. Email marketing can be done on a completely manual basis, in which a business sends out newsletters or offers at their respective times, or on an automatic basis, in which a list of leads is put through a sequence of pre-planned auto-responder messages.

More recently, the concept of marketing automation has become popular. This is where leads are put through a unique series of autoresponder sequences that change and adapt based on the actions of the lead and various “if this then that” (IFTTT) conditions established by the marketer. For example, if a lead does not open an email, they might be automatically sent a follow-up email asking why they had not opened the previous one, or if a lead clicks on a certain link in an email which indicates they have a particular interest, they might be segmented into a separate list or new sequence that caters to that specific interest.

SEM

Search Engine Marketing consists of leveraging a search engine’s paid advertising platform to position your business as a “sponsored” search result in a prominent, visible place on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). The most popular search engines for SEM at the moment are Google and Bing. A business can setup their ad to target a group of keywords that they’d like to “rank” for, as well as selecting other variables such as demographics and location. These ads will then appear at the top or bottom of the SERPs (depending on various factors such as budget and bidding) and will have the appearance of a typical search result, with the one exception of a small word like “ad” or “sponsored” somewhere on it (this varies among search engines).

SEO

Search Engine Optimization is the use of various on-site and off-site practices and factors to make your web properties rank higher in search results. These practices include methods like keyword usage, original content, frequent updating/posting, backlinking, social sharing, bounce rates (how many people leave after viewing just one page), visitors’ average time on site, and the use of images and videos. Until around 2012, SEO was arguably considered the most vital internet marketing method around and, depending on your industry, it might still be.

However, in recent years the growing number of competing web properties in the online space have made ranking exceedingly difficult and expensive for many businesses. This, along with constant changes to some of the top search engines’ algorithms have led many businesses to conclude that paid SEM is more cost-effective than SEO. SEO still maintains its importance in many cases, however, such as in the case of local “brick and mortar” businesses whose search rankings are positively affected using nearby city names in the search terms as well as the various search engines’ use of locational data.

Ad Networks

Ad networks are an excellent way to get your brand or offer in front of your target audience on a broad range of web properties. The most discussed ad network is Google’s AdWords network but there are several other out there. Using these networks will allow you to place banner image ads, video ads, or simple textual ads in front of web traffic on a variety of websites. This approach can be especially powerful when combined with retargeting. This entails placing retargeting pixels on your web properties and then specifically targeting your site visitors via ad networks so that the offer they initially looked at (and are presumably interested in) starts following them around the internet wherever they go. This may sound creepy, but statistics indicate that people who are retargeted are 70% more likely to convert!

Individual Sites

Some marketers might prefer to do their advertising on a case-by-case basis by personally approaching individual, relevant websites, forums, or blogs in their niche or industry. When using this manual method, marketers should be sure to research the metrics of the given site, blog, or forum. Naturally, you’ll want to display your ad in places with a reasonable level of traffic and a positive reputation to ensure your advertising dollars are spent well. You can learn a lot about websites by researching them on Alexa. That said, many businesses tend to find the use of ad networks to be a more cost-effective way of advertising.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing has come a long way in the last several years and has changed the way many businesses think about marketing in general. For some marketers, social followers have replaced email addresses, posts and tweets have replaced promotional emails, and likes have replaced email opens. Virtually every successful business today has not only a social media presence, but a clearly defined social media strategy. Most of these strategies revolve around posting consistent content.

But it’s more than just posting promotions and offers. A successful social strategy will include various types of non-promotional content for various types of goals. Posting about a charitable cause associates your brand with feelings of goodwill. Posting about trendy topics makes your brand seem relevant. Posting useful tips without a sales pitch makes your business come off as genuinely helpful. Posting humorous or “feel-good” content associates your business with positive emotions, and so on. But more importantly, these types of non-promotional posts are accomplishing two other goals. First, they’re encouraging social sharing, which grows your following even more. Secondly, they’re creating top-of-mind awareness for your brand. People will get used to seeing your content and your business name, logo, and USP. As a result, when they have a problem that your business fixes, they’ll be more likely to think of you first.

All those social media concepts revolve around organic activity. However, the major social media platforms today have also developed robust paid advertising systems. The most game-changing of these has been the concept of social “native advertising”. Native advertising refers to advertisements that have the appearance of organic content except for a tiny one-word disclaimer somewhere designating it as “sponsored” or an “advertisement”. This new form of paid social media advertising has proven to be remarkably effective because social media consumers are already in the habit of looking at, consuming, and engaging with anything that looks like an organic post in their social feeds. In addition to this, the line between organic posts and paid native ads have become increasingly blurred as these native ads act and function just like organic content (they can be shared, liked, etc.) and businesses now can pay to promote an organic post to give it further reach.

Video Marketing

If there is one thing that has been well established in marketing today, it’s the tremendous power of video. Nothing else compares. Understandably then, marketers have seized on video and are leveraging it in numerous ways. Video marketing is often executed as social media marketing. Businesses are publishing video content on multiple video sites such as YouTube, DailyMotion, and Vimeo just as they would publish non-video content to Facebook or Twitter.

As with the social media strategy described earlier, a successful video content strategy includes a good mix of useful, helpful, trending, humorous, and “feel-good” video content, with “salesy” videos being in the minority. Once published, video content should be cross promoted on other social media platforms to increase exposure. Another recent development is that major social networks like Facebook and Twitter have added their own video uploading and streaming functions, increasing the overlap between video marketing and social media marketing.

One further angle on video marketing is paid video advertising. Presently, the most popular version of this is YouTube/AdWords video ads which appear at the beginning of videos on both YouTube as well as other video-playing properties around the web. These video ads can typically be skipped after several seconds. In addition to the YouTube/AdWords video ad network, businesses also often pay for video ads on an individual basis on other websites, news sites, and so on.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is largely included in the other marketing methods mentioned thus far, but it’s also worth discussing by itself. The most common forms of content marketing are blog posts, news articles, and social posting, but content marketing can also include video and image publishing. The goals of content marketing are manifold. Firstly, it builds goodwill with followers who associate your brand with helpful content. Secondly, content marketing provides an opportunity to hide a “soft pitch” within “non-salesy” content which can lead to sales while at the same time providing useful content. Thirdly, content marketing can be an excellent way to “pixel” an audience for later retargeting which has proven to be a devastatingly effective tactic. Finally, content is the primary driver in most search engines’ algorithms which can result in higher rankings. There are many benefits beyond these four, but these can be considered the most relevant and directly impactful ones.

Old School Methods

The following methods have largely become less common, if not altogether abandoned, because of negative connotations or even penalties that have been attached to them in the past. Bit since it’s theoretically possible to engage in these in a non-spammy manner, it’s worth mentioning them briefly. Blog commenting and video commenting can often be an effective way to get your brand in front of relevant audiences. Just make sure that your comments are relevant, useful, and not spammy and do not mass-post comments for the sake of backlinking as that will likely kill your SEO thanks to recent search engine algorithms designed to penalize abusers of this tactic.

Forum posting is another marketing method that has become less popular today. However, this was less due to abuses (although there certainly were some) and more towards a drifting away towards social media platforms. It simply become more cost-effective and fruitful to focus on social media. However, it is often the case that most of the serious devotees of a certain niche may be more likely to be found on niche-related forums, which means it can still be beneficial to market your brand in the signature section of your posts and interact on relevant forums periodically. Just make sure you are making genuine and sincere contributions to the conversation.

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The term “internet marketing” has become associated with a broad range of topics in recent years. For many, it literally means only what it says: “marketing on the internet”, in which case it is seen as synonymous with “digital marketing” and “online marketing”. For others, however, it has come to be associated more specifically with the worlds of affiliate marketing, information products, and the “make money online” niche. For our purposes, we’ll lean more towards the former and will settle on the following definition:

Internet marketing is the use of internet properties and traffic to generate leads, sales, or brand awareness. This is typically done via search engine visibility, social media marketing, email marketing, and various forms of paid advertising.

One of the best ways to begin understanding internet marketing is to break down the various goals a business can seek to accomplish with it. The ultimate end goal of marketing is, of course, revenue. With that in mind, we can certainly classify sales as a primary goal of internet marketing and many businesses do focus on sending traffic directly to paid offers, whether digital product sales pages or physical product pages in an eCommerce store. However, for many businesses, sales remain a distant, long term goal. A more common immediate or short-term goal of internet marketing, however, is lead generation. By using the internet to affordably collect leads rather than make individual sales, a business can then use their lead list to continue marketing for free (or close to free) to potential customers from that point forward with the expectation that multiple future sales will increase the average lifetime value of each lead and result in a greater long-term ROI from each dollar spent on marketing.

Lead generation for an online business might consist simply of building an email list, perhaps with customer names associated as well. Lead generation for an eCommerce business or local “offline” business might also include physical mailing addresses and phone numbers so they can follow up in other ways such as telemarketing or mailing out catalogues and special offers. Other businesses might pursue even more robust lead data such as business information like industry categories or number of employees in the case of B2B marketing, or income ranges and family size in the case of higher-ticket B2C models like insurance sales or real-estate. Since lead generation is often seen as the most common and multi-faceted immediate goal of internet marketing, the entirety of chapter three will be devoted to the various methods and forms of lead generation.

Finally, another immediate goal of internet marketing is growing brand awareness and familiarity. For many businesses, this might consist of spending large amounts on banner advertisements or video ads primarily for the purpose of getting their brand name, logo, or unique selling proposition (USP) in front of as many eyes as possible as many times as possible. The idea here is to increase top-of-mind awareness so that the potential customer will think of the brand in future situations when they need that specific need fulfilled. For example, when a fast-food chain airs ads on television, it’s not because they expect people to immediately hop in the car and go buy a burger because of it. It’s because they want you to think of their restaurant next time you clock-out for your lunch break and are deciding what to eat. The internet marketing equivalent of this might be an online tax service heavily investing in banner ads and video ads in December and January, not because they think people will suddenly start doing their taxes early, but because in April when 90% of Americans do their taxes at the last minute, their brand will be the first one they remember. Other forms of brand awareness might simply consist of frequent social media posting. Companies know that constantly seeing their brand image in their followers’ newsfeeds or Twitter feeds accomplishes that same top-of-mind awareness as well as other emotional associations with their brand such as loyalty, pride, good will, and humor (covered in more detail in Chapter two).

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