by Ahmed Muzammil | Jul 22, 2017 | Business, Social Media |
There’s a person called Henry who’s a small business owner. Let’s have a virtual look-up into a day of his life.
The alarm clock ticks at 6 a.m. in the morning……Tweeeeeeeet tweeeeeeeeeet tweeeeeeeet….
As usual, he presses the snooze button to 15 minutes and finally manages to wake up at 6.30 am.
Then brushes his teeth, goes out for jogging and stretching out his muscles and while relaxing for 10 minutes, he puts up a mental plan in his mind of what he’s gonna do for his business that day. Feels happy and with a positive mind, he reaches home.
Now the time is 7.30 am. His wife’s ready with a hot cup of coffee and while sipping off his coffee, he gives a quick glance into the newspaper having a casual chat with his partner.
At 8 am, he goes in for a shower and by 8.30 he’s at the dining table for breakfast…finishes it off…goes in and gets ready grooming himself…gives a sweet hug and kiss to his kids and wife…and there he’s all set to greet the day at 9 am!
From 9.30 am, he’s seated up as the boss of his apparel shop with one employee by his side, waiting for customers.
You know what? He’s already invested lots of bucks for marketing his business locally by giving ads in newspapers, giving off pamphlets with seasonal offers and referring to friends…all that he can with his full might to make his shop known to people. And now he’s resting his back on the seat waiting to sell products to customers.
The whole day, with short breaks in the middle, there were a couple of customers who walked into his shop and had a look. And just one sale of a dozen hankies worth $10.
Man, he has invested nearly $1,00,000 in this business and all he has got in one day is mere $10! He returns home pale-faced.
Yes, there are lots of Henrys over the world not knowing where they’re lacking in their start-up and what to do about it.
The main reason why he wasn’t able to get a good number of customers for his shop in this digital era is his marketing strategy. He has done everything manually but nothing online.
Online marketing is the only thing that gives new wings for your business to fly all over and make good customers.
Let’s see how this works.
1.Online Marketing – Your Sales Robot
Marketing is actually communicating with your customers and making them buy your product. In direct marketing, it’s that 5 or 10 minutes of spending time talking to them about your product and handing over your brochure. They may just slip it off and walk away dude.
But online marketing makes you stand in the web platform firmly and becomes your sales robot doing the marketing job very efficiently. It creates brand awareness for your business. All you have to do is
- Create a nice website and sign up on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. Post updates on a daily basis and sit up and watch the number of followers and visitors to your website
- Build up an informative blog providing lots of guidance and tips on what your customers desire. Also, participate in online forums and express your thoughts and views. Let people come to know about you.
- Integrate SEO tactics into your website by seeking help from content writers or SEO professionals; or you can even do this on your own if you do some self-study on the subject.
- Startup e-mail marketing campaigns by sending promotional emails on a frequent basis to your target audience.
With less marketing investments, you can adopt online marketing techniques so that it’ll act as your marketing assistant or robot bringing visibility to your business. Do all these and just forget about your sales. It’ll act as an automated sales machine running round the clock for you.
2.Online Advertising – Your Marketing Guy
Did you know that once you advertise your business online, it’s like having your own marketing guy who’s doing everything for your success?
As a small business owner, you gotta rack your brain a little and adopt a wise marketing strategy that will make you reach your customers within no time. Online Advertising is proven to have given great sales records for most companies all over the world. Just make sure you use the right tools, services and way to implement online advertising for your business.
- Video / commercial production
- Blogging
- Social Media
- Online Paid Ads
With these simple strategies at the start, you can slowly see how your online ads are marketing themselves about your product. It’s more like hiring a marketing professional for free!
Come on, no more of the daunting task of printing hundreds and thousands of flyers and distributing among the streets.
No more of hiring special Marketing professionals to go around publicizing your business.
No more of even taking time visiting tradeshows and showing off your face and products to make people buy your product.
Sit cool and catch up with online advertising!
3.Focus More Towards Your Target Audience via Online Marketing
Long since Marketers and business owners invest their time and money researching on how to market their product and how to attract their target demographic.
Register this in your mind: “Move towards social media and strategize your company’s marketing efforts towards the online consumer behaviors, because this is exactly the place where you can find most of your prospective customers.”
The following facts may help you decide why to choose online marketing to focus more towards your target audience.
- Most of the online consumers are spending 1 out of 6 minutes in social networks. Since they spend a significant amount of time online, your strategic marketing plan should be such that there’s an everyday dose of online marketing via emails and social media posts.
- Content is what really matters. Marketing is all about two-way communication such that your customers would really be attracted towards your products and respond back. Couple your online marketing with good content that will trigger discussions from your target demographic.
- If your goal is to engage your consumers via social networks, then the right place to land is Facebook. Facebook captures almost 14.6% of Internet users’ time when compared to a combined 2% for all other social media sites.
- With the advent of more gadgets like smartphones and ipads, people are getting more engaged in mobile devices. Make sure that your website is mobile-optimized. Frame up a mobile strategy and create content that’d be easy to view and respond for mobile users.
Target marketing is just about attracting customers who will buy what you sell and the easiest way to do this is through online. Once you identify your niche market by researching on who (Demographics), where (Geographics), why (Psychographics) and how (behaviors), you can reach your target audience easily sitting before your PC / Desktop.
4.Website – Your Virtual Shopfront
You would very well know how much important it is to have your own shop where you can display your products. What matters is not just about owning a shop, but the footfalls! Yes, how many customers checked in to your shop and purchased your stuff.
You don’t be surprised by hearing that a good website will be the best virtual shop front for developing your business. When your product/service are easily accessible to customers, automatically there are more chances of sales success with it. Much of the retail world now exists in the internet, and so for a strong footprint of your brand image, your business should enter online, via a website first.
Some key points that justify the website as your virtual shop front are as follows.
- Owning a website is one thing and having a more visible website is another thing. Make sure that online location is everything and build up your website such that your potential customers can each easily reach you through search engines.
- Appearance is the next step of making your brand popular. The color, style, and background of your website speak tons about your brand’s professionalism and credibility.
- Content is the true key for any business website. How well you’ve clearly stated the details about your product makes you stand out of the box and generate leads for your business.
Ensure that your virtual shop front gets good traffic so that users can step into it and become customers.
5.Video – Your Business Salesman
If you’re going door to door knocking to sell your product, it’s not going to work out in this internet era.
People are getting more interested in watching videos online. Short 5 to 6 minutes of video advertising your product would get you more attention from your customers. Videos are proved to be the best salesmen for businesses as they speak for themselves giving both visual entertainment and information.
- 50% people say that they trust video in making purchasing decisions for products.
- 70% of the top results in Google search are videos.
- 92% of B-B customers watch online videos.
Why do you even wait when you have video marketing to use as the perfect salesman for your business?
6.Online Payment Providers – Your Accounts Manager
Business is all about money finally, which is why you’re into it. And it’s a headache for you to manage your accounts, the payment transfers and so on. But when there’s facility for monetary transactions online, why do you have to worry about it much?
When a customer visits your website and likes your products displayed for sale, he/she would immediately place an order (if you have an e-store) and transfer the money. For this, you gotta setup payment gateways like PayPal or WePay or Gumroad by which money automatically comes in and fills up your bank account.
Customers are also more interested in purchasing when there’s an automated payment provider in the website itself rather than going for other options like manually depositing money to your account. So, why not let these online payment providers take control of your accounts and taxes?
Follow all these online marketing options for your business and sit back and relax independently while your business automatically gets visible over the web. Hope now you know where our Henry lagged behind for his business’s failure.
by Ahmed Muzammil | Jul 22, 2017 | Social Media, Startup |
Your business is effective and successful as much as your intensity of online marketing campaigns. Yes, online ads nowadays play an important role in helping you reach potential customers and get you good money from your business. And, Facebook ads have taken their toll on businesses recently making many business owners like you reach their sales targets.
You’ll be having a Facebook page for your business but have you set up a $5 a day advertisement there?
You may ask “Why is it necessary to do that?”
Here’s the answer.
Some of the latest statistics have reported that
- There are 2 million active Facebook advertisers
- 75% of brands promote their Facebook posts
- 1 million small businesses advertise on Facebook
Do you think they are all into Facebook ads without getting enough profits? Time to think up my friend!
Making up your mind to create ads on Facebook and promote them simply is of no use. Rather, before getting into it, you need to know how to create effective ads that will get a good number of click-through rates. You can measure the effectiveness of your ad through click-through rates which indicate the number of clicks on the ads (the number of users who have clicked your ad link).
- Make up your ad with a good Value Proposition that will make the audience know why they should choose you over other competitors. It can be an offer or any other promise of value that would attract potential customers.
An example of a Facebook ad with a good value proposition
In this example, has announced how to get your first 1,000 fans on twitter. This will attract many clients towards them.
- Your ad should provide perfect relevance to the users’ targeted search from the Ad to the landing page. Most of the time we type certain keywords, for example, black western wear and we may get search results in a landing page showing all colors of western wear. No brother, this should never be the case in your ad. Create your ad relevant to the product you offer which will be the right target of the user’s query.
- Voice up your ad with a powerful Call-To-Action that would excite the users and make them click your ad right then.
Example of a Facebook Ad with a compelling Call – To – Action
In the above example, the company has given a motivating call – to –action with the ‘Learn More’ button providing free marketing consultation.
Now let’s go into the steps of how to create your first Facebook advertisement.
- Go to facebook.com/advertising. Select “Create your Ad” from the right side at the top of the page. Choose the objective of your campaign as “Send people to your website”. Next, type your website URL in the box.
- Next step is to select your target audience ideally such that your ad appears to your targeted users. There are four main sections for selecting your targeted customers and they are:
- Location – where you can enter one or more states, countries, regions and zip codes where you wanted your ads to appear.
- Demographics – where you can select age range, gender and languages related to your target audience. For more specific targeting on demographics, even work titles and education can be included.
- Interests – where you can select specific interests that are suitable to your audience. This is mostly determined by what pages and apps are people more interested in. You can enter a maximum of three interests per target.
You can also select behaviours based upon the users’ purchase behaviour and device usage. This is also determined by what people are connected to in Facebook, such as pages and apps.
- However you make choice in selecting your targeted audience, next setup your audience size to be atleast 5000. Your audience size will be shown on the right panel of the page (as shown by the arrow above).
- Now you can choose the right budget and bid for your first Facebook advertisement. The best idea is to always first go with the minimum budget of $5 a day ad and allow it to run. Next select “Advanced options”. With this you can select your preferred bidding method. Select “Optimize for clicks”.When you select “CPC” you would see suggested Cost Per Clicks (CPC). A good task is to put up a bid that is at least $0.10 higher than the suggested highest bid. This is to ensure that your ad gets displayed so often.
- You’re all set up and ready to create your first ad now. Upload your ad image by clicking “Upload”.
You can select “Turn off News feeds ads” to make sure that your ad appears only at the right hand side of Facebook.
Next, you can enter other necessary description details such as the body and headline copy.
You can view the final preview of your created ad at the right.
When you’re done click on “Place order” button at the bottom. After this your ad will be reviewed by facebook, and you’ll see a popup message on the screen like this.
Hey buddy you’re done! You’ve created your first ad and now all you have to do is, manage your ads and optimize them for the lowest possible cost per click.
- After setting up the Facebook Ads campaign, you’ll be brought to the Ad Dashboard.
A short explanation of each of the terms in the Ad dashboard is given below for you to understand.
- Reach – shows the number of people who saw your ad
- Frequency – shows the number of times a user sees your ad
- Total spent – shows how much of your budget is spent till now
- Average cost per website click – shows how much you are paying for every click on average Click – Through Rate (CTR). To be clearer, it’s the number of clicks over the number of times the ad was set out.
- Relevance Score – shows how relevant your ad is to your target audience. High relevance score decreases your cost per click.
- Spent today – shows how much you have spent so far from the start of the day till now
- Total spent – shows the total amount spent
- Max bid – shows the highest amount you are willing to spend with each bid
- Average price – shows how much actually you are paying for each bid
- How to lower your cost per click? You’ve got into this effort of advertising on facebook for just one simple reason, right? That is to get more leads by getting many clicks to your website but at the lowest possible cost.
The right metric for this case is “Average Cost per Website Click.”
Now your goal is to lower the overall cost per click (CPC) of your ad. The first and the best way for this is to increase your Click – Through Rate (CTR).
You know how to do that?
Just by changing your ad image or copy. Select “Create Similar Ad” and upload a new image or ad copy.
The next way to do this is by lowering your max bid. But this technique can be applied only when your ad has already got an adequate reach and number of likes.
For instance, if your present CPC is $0.65, you can lower it by $0.05 for every hour, and keep constantly checking whether this change has affected your increase in reach. If you get to see that your reach is getting lowered due to this action, then it’s better to go back to the previous bid value.
That’s it! And here you are into your first facebook advertisement for your business which is going to get you better ROI.
Happy Facebook Advertising!
by Ahmed Muzammil | Jul 21, 2017 | Marketing, Social Media |
You’ve started up your business with so many goals in mind, the topmost being your marketing plan. That’s the one which is going to get you potential customers and sales too, right?
You’d have also setup your social media business profiles as a part of Social Media Marketing. As a part of your everyday tasks or to-do-lists, have you set aside a section to concentrate on Social Media Marketing and boost it?
You may now ask ‘Buy Why?’
The answer is here dude. Latest statistical reports state that there are 1.82 billion social network users over the globe. And you know what? This number is expected to increase to nearly 2.33 by 2017. So, social media Marketing is one of the best ways to reach and engage your audience and gain more popularity than your competitors.
But it’s no big deal at all investing time or money to boost your social media marketing.
Yes, all it takes is a few minutes everyday to promote social media marketing and get good returns out of it.
Here are some of the ways by which you can boost up your Social Media Marketing strategies and see the changes taking place around in your business.
1.Increase Your Social Media Viewers
Your audience should be your main target while coming into the Social Media platform. This is because they’re the ones who’ll automatically get transformed into potential customers if you do your marketing and promotion in the right way.
In social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, check on a daily basis and you’d find that there are lots of people who have either shared your post or liked it or commented on it. Don’t just leave them, but grab them.
Once your eye notices that they’ve given importance to your post, return them with an indication of ‘Thanks’ by following them or ‘favorite’ ing them (in case of Twitter).
This will surely help you get more audience for your business and eventually get you good profits out of it.
2.Give A New Social Media Look To Your E–Mail Signature
Did you know that you can even catch up with your e-mail subscribers via Social media networking tactics?
It’s a way too simple man! Instead of just typing out your name with designation and company name in your e-mail signature, also add up links to the Social Media business profiles that you own. People who’re interested in your business would automatically click up on that link and start following you and get more info on a daily basis from your social media sites.
An Example E-Mail signature with Social Media Buttons (links)
This looks pretty cool and you can configure one like this for you too.
All you gotta do is, go to your Settings part in the e-mail you’re using and select ‘Signature’ and edit it and set it with your own preferable colors, background, text and so on.
3.Frame Up Your Name Board In All Social Networks
It’s very commonly known that business owners tend to sign up and own profiles in Social Media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, Instagram and the like. But there are more and number of Social Media sites like these where you can register your brand and keep, even if you think it’s not much important for your brand’s promotion.
You know why? There are people who search you throughout the web platform to get to know your company’s presence and when you’re present in almost every social network, it gives a good impression for them about your visibility and credibility.
Knowem is a site which helps you in this. It assists business owners to register and set up profiles for their product in many social media sites. It charges somewhere near $25 to make you sign up into 25 social media networks with profile names, email, photos, bio and details.
You can even type up your brand name in the search box and find out which Social networking sites you’re already into. Depending upon that, you could decide to sign up into more Social Media platforms with Knowem’s facility.
4.Build Up Your Posts With Visual Content
Text and links are of course important in communicating what’s in your mind with your social media viewers. But instead of putting them up alone, it’s a great idea to cover them up with images or any other form of visual content such as Infographics, block quotes, short ordered lists, charts, and many others.
Recently researchers have found out that images can result in 85% interaction rate in Facebook and increased retweets by 35%. That’s why it’s better to take up social media and visual content go hand in hand.
Some variety of options of how you can include visual content into your social media posts are:
- A screenshot of your product or any other useful information about your service.
- Uploading an image and asking followers to caption it.
- Conducting a photo contest
- Sharing images of your team members or any events that you’ve participated in.
- Creating collages through tools like Photovisi, Picasa, Fotor or Canva.
- Making cool and easy-to-understand infographics via Piktochart.
If in case you’re opting out to screengrab an image for your post, this is how you do it.
- PC users – Press the ‘Print Screen’ key and the screengrab goes to your clipboard
- Mac users – Press Cmd + Shift + 4 and the screengrab goes to your desktop
5.Complete Your Social Media Profiles
It can be widely seen that most business profiles, though listed in all social media networks, lack a completely filled up profile. Always keep in mind that unless you have a fully completed professional profile, your audience are not going to take you much important.
Be it Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn, make sure that you’ve filled up all the blanks including location and e-mail because even the meanest details may be useful for your customers to reach you. Also, only a complete profile would get good visibility in search engines too.
- Facebook : Go to your Page’s settings -> Info
- Google+: Go to the ‘About’ tab and click ‘Edit’ on whichever fields you need to fill up.
- Twitter : Go to Settings -> Profile
- LinkedIn : Go to your profile and click ‘Complete your profile’ button to complete filling up your details
You can even consider the option of connecting your Facebook and Twitter accounts so that your post appears automatically in Facebook once you post it in Twitter and this saves your time.
Setting up Profile in Twitter
6.Customize Your Images Using Fiverr
One of the best tactics that you can adapt for your business to gain much traffic online is to add a personalized touch to whatever you post in Social Media, even if its images. It’s always best to create your own customized images and share it via Pinterest or Facebook or Twitter.
Fiverr is a new crowdsourced service community found online that helps you do this with just 5 bucks in hand. They offer many services for creating your own graphics and design elements like images, logo designs, and reports and so on.
It’s also been heard from many business professionals that traffic to their website has doubled or tripled when making using of custom images.
All you have to do is give your idea and render life to it by sketching it into a unique image.
7.Validate Your Blog Post Ideas by Using Twitter’s Help
You’ve got an idea for your next blog post?
Wanna know how much it will be successful in reaching your audience after posting it?
Or need to get more valid points to be included in the post?
Will the post serves to be an aid to boost up your business?
So many questions running in your mind and the best platform to get your doubts clarified is the same platform where you’re gonna post it.
Just quickly share a post on Twitter that you’re researching for more points under your next topic “blah blah blah” and wait and see how many comments you’re getting from the interested audience.
With this, you’ll easily know how much effective or not your post will be; what people are expecting from you and accordingly you can frame it up and post it. It just costs you a few minutes of researching into your Twitter followers’ opinions via Tweets.
8.Make Use Of Hashtags
Now, this is another social media trend that’s gaining good visibility for businesses. Try adding a couple of hashtags in each of your posts to reach your potential customers.
Effect of Hashtags’ usage in Twitter
Given above is how hastags’ usage increases the number of retweets in Twitter. Similar to this, in all other social networking platforms too, addition of hashtags has increased the visibility of the posts shared.
Putting it in simple words: Hashtag your posts and more people get to see it!
9.Shake Hands Of Promotion Between Your Profiles
It’s normal that you may have your own Social media profile as well as your business profile. Why are you drawing lines between personal and professional usage? After all, it’s your company and you.
A great idea to boost up social media marketing is to always cross-promote your content or post between profiles. You can add up a reference in your bio section of your personal LinkedIn profile to your company’s LinkedIn profile. Doing so, even people in your network will come to know about your business and click and view the profile and its contents. You’ll get more clicks as well as more followers for your social media accounts.
Who knows, they may become your regular customers too……
Sample LinkedIn account linked with Twitter Profile
10.Link Up Your Social Updates With Your Landing Pages
All the online marketing strategies that you’re undertaking are to increase traffic to landing pages of your website, right? To get more leads, try including links to your landing pages along with your social media post. It can be even like a call-to-action, say for example, for more information on this offer, click https://www.xcompany.com/
Example of a promotional post with a link to the Landing page
by Ahmed Muzammil | Jul 21, 2017 | Social Media, Startup |
OMG (Oh My God)! FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), YOLO (You Only Live Once); all these are ‘trending’ world over. ‘Crowdfunding’,’ Cyberbullying’, ‘Selfie’ etc. Turn to any corner of cyberspace, and you will find new and funky words that get your attention. It’s all exciting! But, where do they come from? Who thinks these words? How do they become the happening thing everyone uses. Are these in the dictionary?
Eager to find out? Relax, you will get to know everything. Before that, let’s learn some trivia from the world of words. Did you know that during the seventies ‘social network’ referred to the activity of networking in a pleasant social atmosphere which involved human presence?
But during the nineties, it had been appropriated to mean networking virtually via the internet.
Acronyms appropriated words and words that have been stretched in parts than intended originally, become slang with popularity with widespread usage. Over time, with persistence, they earn their spot in the Dictionary; psst… The Big Book!
Don’t Blame the Internet! It’s Us
Words have been originating from slangs for a long time. Always propelled by technology. Before the internet, we were captivated by radio, television and telephones. “Doh!” you might have heard beloved, wacky Homer Simpson utter these words repeatedly as he screwed things up on a daily basis.
Go back a few decades to the forties, good folks of those days might tell you this, ‘TTFN’ (Ta Ta For Now) made popular by the radio show, ‘It’s that Man Again’.
Always, technology has been the driver behind the slang wagon. We are spending more and more time on the internet. The Internet has invaded our lives in the form of phones. We have little or no time for television and radio these days. As a result, our interactions over the internet; our day to day lives get influenced by it.
The process of formation of words hasn’t changed. It’s the same. Language changes slowly, imbibing new words over time. But, the internet is fast. Giving you the impression that the language you know is changing at an alarming rate. Don’t fret! It’s the same old process; hastened several times over. Imagine, without internet; how long it would take a slang to become a word? Too long!
How Slangs Spread Over the Internet?
The question has occupied linguists and Anthropologists as to how slangs spread among people. Until recently they weren’t able to answer it. With the technology of the present time, they can understand how it happens. With the advent of social media, it became easy for them to track and identify words in use by the masses. Thanks to microblogging sites like Twitter that allow linguists to do more accurate searches of words across tweets.
Jacob Einstein and his colleagues from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta conducted a study in which they monitored 30,000,000 tweets send across the US from Dec 2009 to May 2011.
The study concluded with the understanding that social media aided in the acceleration of propagation of new words across the world within weeks or months as opposed to several years before it’s inception.
Julie Coleman, the author of ‘The Life of Slang’ appropriately said, “It’s not necessarily that language is changing more quickly, but technologies have developed, and they allow the transmission of slang terms to pass from one group to another much more quickly.”
Around The World With Internet Slang
Just like a language is native to a particular geographical location. Internet slangs are also becoming increasingly native based on locations. Acronyms like ‘OMG’, ‘LOL’ etc. have been customised to various locales usually within the geographical influence of the language governing the said locale. Take France for example. The French use ‘MDR’ which stands for ‘Mort De Rire’, meaning ‘dying of laughter’. The Swedish people use the acronym ‘ASG’ for referring to the word Asgarv which means deep laughter. The Thai people use ‘555’ to convey ‘hahaha’, as the number ‘5’ signifies the Thai letter ‘h’, ‘555’ (‘hhh’) = ‘hahaha’. Are you getting it?
The Ukrainians are fast adapting to computer slang, and they have created their own set. Remember the three key combinations (Ctrl + Alt + Del) that are used for closing a process.
The Ukrainian term for this operation is Dulya (Дуля) and is symbolically displayed by a clenched fist with the thumb protruding between the index finger and the middle finger. This gesture is the Ukrainian variant of the proverbial middle finger. So, it’s like telling whomever it’s referred to, to get lost.
So, How Do These Slangs Get Into Dictionary?
According to Fiona McPherson, who is a senior editor in the New Words Group at the Oxford English Dictionary, only the longevity of a word, i.e. prolonged usage of a word by the masses will get it into the Big Book. She claims that’s how ‘Lol’ the most widely used acronym got in the Book.
Some words get in; some don’t. For example, consider ‘wurfing’ which means surfing the internet while at work, didn’t make it. But, it’s not game over for ‘wurfing’. With time and widespread usage, even ‘wurfing’ can get into the book. The same goes for other words which didn’t make it in the dictionary and for new ones who will eventually get in.
Linguist Stephen Pinker says, “The time the academy finishes their dictionary, it will already be well out of date.” She also says, “We see it in the constant appearance of slang and jargon. Language is not so much a creator and shaper of human nature so much as a window onto human nature.”
Dictionary editors, the folks who are responsible for maintaining the Big Book look to us while they are updating the book. Anne Curzan, Language Historian, points out that we change the language and it’s the Dictionary editor’s jot to make sure the book is kept up to date by updating it periodically and determine what is going to stay and what’s not getting in.
Dictionary is a living entity, like us. No edition is finite, as long as we are around, the Big Book will keep on breathing, and the newer version will come out.
We are shaping the language either actively or passively. Creating new slangs, reusing it over an extended period. Repurposing old words and injecting new meaning into them. It’s all us. Our actions, as a collective conscience shapes languages. Together with technology and a fast adapting culture we are shaping the style of the English language slightly quicker than olden times.
by Ahmed Muzammil | Jul 21, 2017 | Marketing, Social Media |
Ah, List Posts! Readers love them. Writers hate them. Blog owners crave for them as list posts bring in a lot of eager visitors. Especially websites that churn out celebrity blog posts filled with images from paparazzi. Oh, this attracts a butt load of prying eyes.
The internet is swarming with lots and lots of over and underbaked list posts. As writers who prioritize quality above all, you would have decided already to avoid them. But it’s bad for business. Here is how you write proper list posts without compromising your quality.
List Posts are psychological drivers. They appeal to the human psyche. In most cases, they passively tempt us into clicking on them. This is what Mr. Robert Cialdini a retired prominent Psychologist calls the ‘Click, Whirr’ response. It is caused by the influential effect of numbers on us. Seeing them in a headline tempts us at a subconscious level to click on them.
Now you might have started to wonder whether including numbers in your headlines will increase exposure of your work. It may, but ultimately there is no substitute for proper, grammatically well-structured content. If you rely solely on flashy, junk data, your readers will let go of you. OMG! You don’t want that.
Having said that, you are here, to understand how to make great list posts.
#1. If it’s List Post, Don’t Start With Numbers!
You enter the sanctity of your workspace and look forward to manufacturing some hot content that literally burns the keys on your keyboard. But when you see your job sheet, terror strikes! All hell breaks loose when you realize that you have been tasked with the creation of list posts.
You may be feeling an immense desire to log into your favorite internet hangout and express your misfortune. But you have to move on. You have to embrace list posts and accept the grim reality that ‘listicles’ or list posts are now part of your life.
After getting your bearings straight. You might open your favorite word processing app and start filling it with numbers from 1 to 10 and hope to fill it to complete your task. It’s the worst possible way to start out to write a great list post.
You have found the fiery topic which you can fuel with your words. The topic you choose should be like an itch to the audience you are writing for. An itch that requires the much-deserved scratching. Seeds of such topics can only come from your audience. Surprised!?
You cannot hope to successfully sell a killer post on aeronautical engineering to Hello Kitty cosplay enthusiasts. You got to target your niche.
You will realize your best work only after it’s written and afterward, you can reorganize it into a killer list post.
#2. Understand What You Are to Create Solve
To write a killer content, you will have to solve a problem that has been a pain point for your reader. Even if the problem is pure boredom caused by the zillions of entertainment sites out there.
You are a creator. It’s your responsibility to be aware of the likes and dislikes of your audience.
What makes them cheerful? What saddens them? What they like to gain and what they like to lose? Master all these and you will make the perfect concoction to please your readers.
Wherever man is, problems aren’t far away. The same holds true for your audience. So, for you to come up with killer list posts. Research over your audience and their problems. Find solutions to those problems.
Master this and you will end up churning amazing, awe-striking list posts.
#3. Make It Fascinating
Make it useful and interesting. Achieving the first one without the later equals to ‘Wikipedia’ and that’s already out there.
Boring content doesn’t equal a killer list post even though it’s well researched and solves problems.
For example, if your audience is people with diabetes, providing them with posts on how to manage diabetes and informing them about the latest technological breakthroughs in diabetic research will make them come to you.
Make a post about the medical issues they face. Provide solutions, well-researched ones and repeat the process over and over again. You will have a dedicated following of diabetic people.
Fantastic headlines coupled with boring content will keep your audience at bay from your site over time. This is counterproductive especially when you are desiring a following for your posts.
Employ strong writing voice and your audience will follow through your post with enthusiasm. Throwing a few metaphors here and there along with storytelling makes them listen to your posts in their subconscious rather than having the feeling of reading them. These are pretty powerful stuff when it comes to content creation.
Impeccable writing ability and poetic influence make the content top of the shelf, fascinating kind.
#4. Your Strategic Goal
Being a content writer whose sole purpose is to make your advertisers happy by increasing the traffic is one of the hardest livelihoods. Marketing is a highly competitive arena.
You have to attract new visitors, keep them occupied on the site. So that you are able to feed them more and more information about the advantages of the product or service you are gunning for and aiming to sell by nurturing your clientele. So that they buy the product or service you are intending to sell to them.
Content exist for different purposes. Some are there to attract new visitors. Some are there to sustain the relationship with your existing audience and some to advocate why you are the best choice out there.
So, understand what you are aiming to achieve and attain it. Set the crosshairs on your target and gun straight for it.
#5. Make It Worthwhile To Spend Time On
Once you have something worth reading and problem solving for your audience expressed in an interesting way, add some poetic tune to it. You still have to wrap it up in a way that is pleasurable to consume.
Content as long as the Great Wall of China and audiovisual content with poor sound quality are big crowd thinners than a smoke screen. Over time, they tend to keep your readers away from you. The same thing goes for mediocre content wrapped in colorful words.
But when good content is presented with a mixture of poetry and strong narrative. It becomes unforgettable. Making it more appealing to your audience. Something worth spending time on.
#6. You Still Got To Promote
As you accomplish manufacturing content worth your audience’s time, you have to think of promoting it. This is huge. Nothing sells on its own. You have to take it seriously when it comes to promoting your content.
Social media helps in a big way. But it’s imperative to have a lot of eyes on your content. Promoting your content among targeted audience achieves desirable results.
Remember, if you have amazing content and if you don’t have anyone to read it and cherish its useful insights. It a giant waste of your time.
#7. Your Next Move?
Execute the first six perfectly. Then you have to have a plan for your audience, for afterward. You have captivated them with your writing. Feed them more engaging, informative content which helps them solve many other problems they are facing.
Target your loyal readers with ‘Call to Action’ buttons. Have your readers enroll by email for more informative and worthwhile content from you. It may be more content or product/service promotional emails. Informing your loyal subjects of the latest updates in your sphere of influence in the web.
Before you publish and promote, have your next step worked out and ready to be executed. To be a professional copywriter, master straightforward calls of action and attract more audience to you.
That’s all, good luck.
by Ahmed Muzammil | Jun 18, 2014 | Marketing, Social Media |
Was doing research whether to get a premium subscription from Buffer or HootSuite for managing my social networks all at once. Finally after the recent buffer release decided to go with Buffer itself.
What makes Buffer so attractive:
- The company itself. Believe me, I believe in the team more than their product. Read more here: https://bit.ly/buffrcltr.
- The simplicity. Their user interface is one of the most intuitive out there. I’m a firm believer in keeping things simple. It will only end up being more productive
- Buffer Mobile App
- More integrations throughout the web than others. Many websites have Buffer icons integrated.
- Bit.ly integration. I can track my links from bit.ly itself.
- Buffer’s Analytics Screen
- Suggested Posts – I love this. This allows me to post frequently and not starve for content.
- Daily iOS app – Tinder for content! I love it!
What Buffer lacks:
- WordPress Integration
- Pinterest Integration
- Tumblr Integration
- Content Approval Queue – Not for business but for curated content that arrives from channels like IFTTT for personal/awesome accounts
BTW, I’m working on a solution for #4. Is anyone interested? Comment down here.
What features HootSuite has over Buffer?:
- Multiple Tabs for Social Media monitoring. Monitor as many feeds as you want. – In buffer, this is a premium feature while in HootSuite it’s there for free
- HootSuite has keyword tracking feature to keep yourself updated on the trends
- More useful to plan posts/tweets for the long term.
What could be better in HootSuite:
- Mobile App User Experience
- Overall user experience. When I read across the web, people always talk about how easy was it to understand the Buffer’s interface than HootSuite’s interface.
What are your favorites in Buffer, do you think that HootSuite is better than Buffer or anything else? Please comment.
