How to plan an Online competition 
How to plan an Online competition.
There are a lot of competitions available each day online and it is easy to run one for your own company but it might not necessarily be a great success. You need to make sure to plan your competition well before you launch it to make sure that you get the desired response, feedback and success.
Goals
The first thing that you must do is to make a list of goals for the competition. For each competition that you run you must have a reason why you are running it and certain objectives that you would like to accomplish. Whether your goal is to gain more followers on your social media channels or to promote a new product or service, without goals your competition and the results you get from it will be meaningless.
Strategy
After defining your goals you will need a strategy to accomplish your goals. You need to get a decent prize, something that people want, you must make it worth it for them to enter in your competition. The bigger and beter the reward is the beter your response will be. You will definitely also have to market your competition, otherwise no one will know about it. Make sure that you plan your strategy for each of your channels of advertising. Later this week we will discuss different ways to help promote your online competition, such as PPC, SEO and Social media. We will also discuss ways to optimize your website that will make it easier for the participants to achieve the desired goals on the website, eg newsletter signup or following your Social pages.
Measurement
Make sure to implement all the necessary tracking methods to measure the success of your competition through all your advertising channels. Whether your competition is a success or not, it would be a good idea to measure the performance in order to ascertain what you did wrong or right, so that you can optimize it for your next run.
By having these points in place you will be on your way to running a good online competition, check back the rest of this week to get more information on making sure people know about your competition and getting your website ready for it.
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Common mistakes in Social Media Marketing
You know what you’re supposed to do in social media. You’ve read the guides, the blog posts, the articles. But here’s a list of what you don’t want to do. They’re the common social media mistakes that others have made so you don’t have to.
Using the same strategy on every site: Facebook is not MySpace. Twitter is not Wordpress. Every social networking site is different and you need to create a different strategy for each site you decide to engage in — one that is customized to that site’s specific rules and code of conduct. Trying to run a one-size-fits-all approach will limit your ability to be successful anywhere.
Not measuring it: If you’re not going to come up with ways to measure your social media efforts, don’t jump in. Before you get into social media, know why you’re there and what you plan to get out of it. What are you looking for? Increased buzz over a product? Better brand awareness? Blog subscribers? Traffic? How are you going to measure these goals? Whatever your metrics are, make sure you’ve identified them before you throw money into programs you’re not tracking. Otherwise you’re fishing in the dark
Losing potential conversation through inactivity. A social media presence requires constant attention. The reason so many businesses fail on social media platforms is not because they put too much in, but that they fail to give enough to feed their audience. A social media presence is only as valuable as the amount of effort put into it — a lazy profile is worth less than no profile at all.
Affecting your relationship with current clients .There is such a thing as having too much information, at least when you are running a business. While platforms like Twitter are great for running promotions, when used as a personal blog they can be devastating to your business’ image. Think about it this way — would you want every action of your day reflecting on your business?
There is a simple solution for this; tweet less and do more. Instead of tweeting about anything and everything, limit your social media output to things that can really help your business. When it comes to sustainable social media marketing, less is more.
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Why isn’t online marketing working for my company
If you are reading this then you probably already figured out how important it is to have an website and you have been smart enough to go ahead and have one developed for your company.
But now that your website is up and running it just doesn’t seem to be turning into the gold mine that other people rant and rave about. You probably now feel like you where cheated out of your hard earned money but maybe you need to just have a closer look. Have you set out your online goals and created a strategy to reach them?
Having a website is definitely not where you should stop. No website will ever reach it’s potential if you don’t develop an online strategy for your website. You need to ensure you set out your goals and your marketing plan to make sure you enable people to find you.
An online marketing strategy needs to include the following SEO, PPC, social media and email marketing. If you haven’t ever looked at this then you need to get cracking. Your website will never be effective if you are not putting it in front of your customers when they have a need for it.
So after you have created an online strategy you need to ensure that you track your progress. You can use software such as Google Analytics but you need to take an active role in tracking it. Just stats on it’s own won’t tell you much, you need to determine what goals you want to reach and how you will track these. Tracking your progress is vitally important to ensure you don’t veer of course.
To figure out what common mistakes are causing you’re online marketing not to work for your company needs can differ quite a lot for every company for this reason we decided to evaluate all the aspects of Online Marketing so you can see if your company is maybe making mistakes that could be holding you back.
So come back tomorrow for our post about how you could maybe not be reaching your SEO potential.
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How Social media marketing can help you with your online presence.
The internet is a great place to get rich. It is a worldwide marketplace that is open 24 hours per day, 7 days per week.
As you enter the world of Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc. and establish your own blog it becomes evident that building your reputation as an expert and one who is willing to give value is paramount.
Social media marketing is very focused on engagement, community and authority.
It is marketing without the hard sell. Rather than trying to force your one-way message down the throats of passersby, with social media marketing you attempt to offer valuable content, suggestions, contributions to conversations and engagement, spreading your offerings as far and wide as is possible.
Even if you already own a business, creating an online presence around your products and services is the most cost effective way to expand your current business as it levels the playing field allowing you an equal opportunity to compete with big boxers and other megastores.
How to do you create online presence with social media marketing?
You can start by writing useful articles and getting them published as widely as possible over the web, the subject of which can assist others in their daily lives or in their own endeavors. For example: If you just started a new business, you can write about the journey of starting your business. You can create a Facebook page and invite people to become a fan. People share photos, info, and video’s ext. on Facebook. People will also tell their friends on Facebook about your products and services. If handled correctly Facebook, twitter etc is an effective tool for generating awareness for your brand.
With social media sites like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook at your disposal, you can keep your pages updated, put promotions, sales, new information, interesting news etc on your social pages.
Using Social media can drive large amounts of traffic and backlinks for your company website.
Given time and effort on your part, an effective social media strategy will, without a doubt, build your standing, bring you more traffic to your website and establish your presence on the web.
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Using SEO to create an online presence for your business
People are now online more often than they where a few years ago. This can probably be attributed to the fact that they can now do so much more then a few years back. People online can now socially share everything from videos to photos and even look at where their friends are right now. This means they have more reason to be online which in turn also makes them savvier Internet users.
People don’t only go online for social reasons though but a lot of time online is also spend either doing research on their next holiday or the next camera they want to purchase. This trend will only increase as users end up spending more and more time online as they discover what all they can do online.
This is why it is vitally important for you to have an website these days even if you are a little guest house located in the middle of nowhere. In all likelihood people still need your service there and your clients will love you if you make it easier for them to find you by having a website.
Now that I have hopefully convinced you to go get your business a website you can’t stop there. You need to make sure you create an online presence for your website. Now there are a few ways to do this, which work the best when done together, but I will only discuss SEO.
Most users make use of search engines to find what they are looking for be it by typing in what they are looking for in the address bar and their default search engine answering them or them visiting a search engine like Google and searching for it there. SEO is the process of ensuring when visitor search for something that relates to your website that they will find you as an option to fulfil their need.
Thus SEO creates a presence online by offering your company, as an option to fulfil your visitors needs. Now you can’t be everywhere at the same time in real life neither can your website thus it’s important that you ensure you create your online presence with this in mind. You need to target users that are actually looking for your services and not everything related to your company or products. For this reason it is vitally important to ensure you create the right online presence with SEO.
Now to evaluate if you have created the right online presence is not that easy it will take constant monitoring and understanding of what users are actually doing on your website. Examples would be that if you see that you have a high bounce rate your visitors aren’t finding your content relevant to what they where searching for or your online presence is targeting the wrong users. My best advice for this would be to constantly monitor it and make deductions based on your evaluations of what is happening on your website.
I want to end by rehashing the fact that SEO only forms part of a strategy to create an online presence. You will need to make sure you cover all aspects as the way people are finding what they need is changing as the internet changes so make sure your business stays up to date.
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