Strength In Business with Krisz Rokk

“The most common trouble with advertising is that it tries too hard to impress people.” – James Randolph Adams Are you still focusing on good old TV and radio advertising? What about digital advertising? Do you run any Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube ads? You see, there are quite a few small business owners who think the world would be a better place without Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, you name it. And while some of you continue to be skeptical about experiencing and seeing REAL results using social advertising, others have familiarized themselves with these networks and are incredibly successful. How can you model what these folks are doing and achieve similar results? This is where tools and resources can come in handy. There are a ton of awesome digital and social advertising tools out there and it’s quite difficult to choose the ones that will help you get the most out of your marketing strategy. Related: 5 Top Twitter Tools to Increase Your Productivity To help you pick the right toolkit for your specific business needs, I decided to put together a short list of advertising tools that have helped me: * Quickly analyze how some of the best companies and brands are advertising on Facebook, * Mock-up my ad prior to launching it on Facebook or Twitter, * Increase productivity and * Maximize outcomes. See what these advertising tools can do for you. Essential Digital Advertising Tools 1. Find Out How Your Competitors Are Advertising on Facebook: Adicted.io This tool is awesome. It’s very intuitive and super easy to use. Simply type in the search box the name of the brand, company, influencer, or the web URL you’re looking for and hit the “find ads now” button. You can also search based on some random text or a keyword. Here’s what this tool looks like in action. In the example below, I wanted to know more about the type of ads the footwear brand Nike runs on Facebook. So I typed “Nike” in the search field and here’s what came out…     As you might have noticed, this powerful Facebook advertising tools allows you to filter the results based on several criteria: * Ad Placement: Newsfeed, Sidebar * Ad Objective: Awareness, Content promotion, Lead generation, Event promotion, App install, Page Likes, Sale * By Industry * By Imagetype * By Call-to-Action (CTA): Book Now, Sign Up, Download Now etc. * By Number of Likes * By Number of Shares * By Number of Comments * And When the Ad was Seen: Anytime, Last 24 hours, Last week, Last month Furthermore, Adicted.io provides you with useful case studies that feature “The Top 10 Most Shared Facebook Ads”, “10 Inspiring Facebook Ads to Get People Buying”, or “The Top 10 Facebook Ads that Actually Work”. Absolutely worth having a deeper look into these case studies. You might find some useful tips and hints there. 2. Mock-Up Your Twitter and Facebook Ads Prior to Uploading: AdParlor The second digital advertising tool I’d like to introduce to you is AdParlor. Simply put, it’s a social ad mockup generator. Instead of creating your ad in Facebook’s Power Editor, you can actually head over to Ad Parlor and quick...

“What you’re bad at actually doesn’t interest people, and it certainly shouldn’t interest you.” – Richard Branson How did you get into business? What market did you pick, and more importantly, how did you come up with that particular market? You see, a lot of folks start their own businesses based on interests, passions, hobbies, and stuff they like. However, most of these people never ask themselves whether the market, industry, or niche they’ve picked allows them to play to their strengths. What do I mean by that? Say you love gardening and everything that revolves around planting flowers and growing those sweet, juicy organic vegetables. You buy books on gardening. You invest in the latest gardening tools and equipment. You have the best apps and gadgets for gardening. Heck, you even go to all those fancy gardening workshops, fairs, and trade shows. Does all this imply that you’re good at gardening? No. Of course not. You could be a lousy gardener who loves to spend time and money on this biggest passion of yours. Related: How to Find the Right Prospects and Make Price Irrelevant Maybe you’re an excellent lawyer or dentist who uses gardening as a way of forgetting your day-to-day challenges in the office. Let me delight my sould with some work in the garden. Who knows, right? Obviously, if you’re a really, really good gardener, you can use this *hot* market and launch your first business. What is a Hot Market AKA an Ideal Market? An ideal market is a market you’re really good at. An ideal market is a market you have expertise in. An ideal market is a market you’re familiar with. This is the target market you want to pick for your business. If you’re a great gardener, gardening is your target market. If you’re an excellent tennis player, tennis is your target market. If you excel at sales, there’s where you should focus on. And, what do most people do? The exact opposite. They look for weaknesses and than they put their valuable energy, time and resources into “improving” these weaknesses. Why do you torture yourself? Why do you spend your precious time on your weaknesses instead of getting the most out of your strengths? Turn those weaknesses into strengths by hiring great people who can compensate for them while you focus on your strengths. Remember, the things you’re bad at are always going to outnumber the things you’re good at. So, why waste your valuable life trying to game the system? “I said that it is important to look for one’s strengths – to try to excel at what you’re good at. (…) So don’t let your limits knock your self-confidence. Put them to one side and push yourself towards your strengths.” – Richard Branson, (@richardbranson) There are several paths and ways to find your ideal market. One of the easiest and fastest ways to nail your target market, or pick your hot niche is by providing an answer to the following three questions. Three Mission-Critical Questions You Should Ask Yourself Prior to Launching Your Business Question #1: What’s your biggest strength? Put differently, what’s the specific thing you excel at? Pick a market you’re really good at. If you’re a great chiropractor, build your business around this unique skill you have. Invest time to strengthen and master the skill. Get to know your clients and prospects better.

What’s the deal with Facebook carousel ads? Why is this format so special, and more importantly, why should you test this type of advertising for your own brands and products too? Facebook ads are powerful. You can use this amazing tool to reach your ideal audience with different messages. You can invite people to like your page, engage with your latest blog post, hop over to your website to register for a webinar, or grab a free eBook. The possibilities are endless. However, running Facebook ads the right way isn’t easy. Many advertisers start their journey on Facebook and get disappointed when their campaigns aren’t performing the way they expected. Just because it’s easy to setup Facebook campaigns doesn’t mean Facebook ads are easy. If it were so easy, we’d have a lot more people and businesses advertising on Facebook, don’t you think? There are more than 50 million Facebook pages but only 2 million active advertisers on Facebook. Now, I’m not saying there’s something magical about Facebook ads. That’s not my point here. While not magical, there are still a lot of different facets to running successful ads on Facebook, or any other platform for that matter: targeting the right people, click-worthy images, good copywriting, strong call-to-action, proper placement, choosing the best ad type, great product / service, appealing landing page / sales page and the willingness to test, test, test. Don’t rely on the general assumptions. Test your assumptions. To help you enhance your ad performance with Facebook ads, I decided to introduce you to the carousel format which lets brands and advertisers showcase up to 5 images and links in one ad. So, let’s see how you can use Facebook carousel ads to drive targeted traffic to your website, increase your click-through rate and reduce your cost per acquisition. How Does the Carousel Format for Facebook Ads Work? The process is the same. You start by setting up your campaign and ad set. Once you reach the creative part AKA the ad, instead of selecting “Ad with an image or video”, you pick “Ad with multiple images in a carousel”. The cool thing about Facebook carousel ads is that it allows you to showcase more images and links in a single ad for the same price! Here are some of the crazy things you can do with carousel ads: * You can link your ad to one landing page or if you use 5 images, up to 5 different landing pages. * You can do multiple promotions on different products and link to the appropriate page. * You can use 5 awesome images and link off to one cohesive landing page. Sounds great? Before we dig deeper, let’s have a look at the following six minute carousel ad documentary provided by Facebook for Business. Watch the video to see how the three world-renown brands Hewlett-Packard, Toyota and Capital One use carousel ads to get people hocked with inspiring creatives. Although you’ll see the teams discuss Instagram carousel ads in this film, the strategies and tactics apply to Facebook carousel ads as well.   How to Optimize Your Facebook Carousel Ads Ready to enchant your audience with a robust and dynamic ad experience? Here are a few tips to optimize the next Facebook carousel ads you run: * Showcase 3-5 different images. * Choose a different URL and copy for each image. * Test different CTAs with a URL description.

Is the eBook revolution just a fad? Are headlines such as “Amazon selling over 1 million Kindles a week” a thing of the past? What category is responsible for the decline of the publishing industry? Still worth joining the Kindle game? Loads of questions… and loads of answers presented as Kindle marketing tidbits coming up to help you better understand the eBook marketplace. The debate is heating up between eBook supporters and those looking forward to seeing people move back to hard and soft covers, or paperback versions. Whether this “war” makes sense or not… well, I’ll leave that question to you. I prefer to focus on the positive side of the story and provide you with some actionable eBook AKA Kindle marketing tips that you can implement right away to become a leading authority in your industry, increase brand awareness and make money at the same time. Sounds good? In today’s article I’ll provide you with a list of seven proven Kindle marketing tips to help you launch your book on the world’s leading eCommerce site Amazon and finally earn some money on the side — at least in the beginning, until you find your sweet spot. Before I share these tips with you, I’d like to point out two things: 1. First of all, I’m sharing my personal experience with you. This is NOT something that I read in some fancy magazine or heard about while attending some weird happy-clappy seminar. I’m sharing with you the real deal here. I’m providing you with solid eBook and Kindle marketing strategies. So far, I have published seventeen books on Amazon — both Kindle and CreateSpace. Furthermore, I’ve helped my clients publish numerous books in the following industries: health and fitness, real estate, brokerage, investment banking, social media, children’s books, physical science and more. Yes, I’ve done a ton of mistakes during the past five years since I launched my very first book, however, I also learned a ton of awesome strategies and techniques. Among the numerous valuable lessons that I learned, is also how to turn a book into a bestseller on Amazon. I accomplished this with my German book “Die Podcasting-Goldgrube”. Feel free to check it out on Kindle or CreateSpace if you speak German. 2. Second, I’d like to share with you a recent Slideshare presentation on “The Changing Mix of What Sells in Print: How eBooks Have Changed the Book Marketplace”. The following charts and graphs published by Nielsen offer some interesting insights. For example, sales of eBooks seem to peak in the first two quarters of the year. Why is that so? The obvious explanation that comes to mind, is that people load content on their Kindles, smartphones and tablets they received as a Christmas gift during the festive season. Quite interesting to see categories such as Religion/Bibles and Juvenile Non-Fiction continue their double-digit growth while Fantasy, General Fiction, Mystery/Detectives, Travel and Craft/Hobbies/Game decrease 33% and more.

“Will Podcasting Hit It Big? (And What Is It?)” – This was the news headline back in 2005, at the peak of “podcasting”. Since, awareness for this “new” medium has been on the rise. In 2013 Apple announced that the iTunes Store had exceeded market expectations topping one billion podcast subscriptions. OK, so 1 billion is definitely a convincing number, but what about perception? Do people still ask that obnoxious question that causes high blood pressure symptoms amongst podcast freaks? Obviously, I’m referring to the question — “What is a podcast?” I guess the only people who know exactly what podcasting is, are those who produce podcast shows and the ones who consume them. Hm, maybe I wrong… Let’s have a look into the numbers first. The most recent data from Edison Research on the Podcast Consumer reveals some interesting insights. In 2015, 49% of the US population is “aware” of the term “podcasting”, but this percentage has been unchanged for the past six years. Only 33% say they have “ever” listened to a podcast, while 17% say they have listened to a podcast in the past month. No major changes over the last couple of years here either. Check out this Slideshare presentation on The Podcast Consumer 2015. Why Does This Matter? OK, so now you’ve gone through the slide deck with all these amazing charts and graphs, and you’re wondering, “How is this relevant to me? What are the benefits of podcasting after all?” Let me point out three main benefits of podcasting — from a producer point of view. 1. Podcast consumers are Affluent. Three in ten podcast consumers have a household income of $75,000 and more. 2. Podcast consumers are Highly Educated. Great audience to be exposed to. 3. Podcast consumers are Loyal Listeners. They exhibit strong social and brand-following behavior. By now, some of you might be thinking: WOW, nice audience to reach out and market to… Podcasting seems to be a great vehicle to boost brand awareness and attract customers who actually have a high ability to buy. That’s true. Podcasting is a fantastic marketing weapon. If used properly it can help you not only build your brand and a community of loyal fans and followers, but also position yourself as an expert authority while maximizing your influence in the industry. So, for all of you who after reading the above are eager to start their own podcast, I’ve put together a short list of podcasting tools that will help you make the most out of your Podcast strategy while reducing stress and maximizing your outcomes. Obviously, there are a ton of awesome podcasting tools out there and if you like to test several things out for yourself, go for it. However, if you decide to shortcut the learning curve and actually avoid some common podcasting mistakes (yeah, I’m guilty of doing some of these mistakes too…) — these tips will come in handy. Essential Podcasting Tools 1. Spice Up Your Audio Podcast With Professional Quality Sound: Blue Yeti USB Microphone When I first started podcasting, I used the built-in microphone on my Mac. And the quality of my audios was… well,

Social media advertising is going to explode in the years to come. Facebook, Twitter & Co. are powerful players in the digital advertising game and their performance should not be taken lightly. If you’re tired of searching and identifying affordable keywords you can bid on to drive traffic to your website (i.e. landing page, sales funnel) than you should definitely give social media advertising — Facebook advertising in particular, a try. Why Bother With Facebook Advertising? 1. Powerful targeting. Facebook is an amazing place to find quality leads and potential clients by proactively targeting relevant users. You can target based on interests and demographics. You can target people who visited your website in the past say 30 days (Website Custom Audience). You can upload your email list and build a lookalike audience to target those similar to your subscribers, and loads more. 2. Mobile is a powerhouse. According to Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg, “one out of every five minutes spent on a mobile device is spent using Facebook or Instagram”. [Source: CNN Money]. Whether you like Facebook or not, you’re missing out on something big if you’re not paying close attention to what’s going on in the advertising world. Fact is, the 800-pound gorilla of social networking generates more advertising revenue than any other social media marketing channel. Digital Advertising Is Exploding The move from traditional to online advertising accelerates while the overall pie is getting bigger. According to eMarketer’s latest stats, the overall advertising pot in the US in 2015 is going to be nearly $189 billion. Digital will account for roughly 31%, putting it approx. 6 pp behind TV ad spending. However, growing at the current rate, digital will outpace TV ad spending latest by 2018. On top of that, the projected growth in mobile is nearly 300%! Source: eMarketer By 2017, Facebook and Twitter together will account for 33.7% of the digital market. That’s 1/3 of the total net US digital display ad revenue! Today their market share is around 30%.   Source: eMarketer Conclusion: Digital remains the fastest-growing of any category. Still wondering whether to advertise on Facebook or not? The next stats might convince you to change your opinion and adjust your social media strategy accordingly. Amazing Facebook Advertising Facts and Statistics The following 10 facts about Facebook advertising might inspire you to think differently about running ads on the world’s leading social network site. Keep an open mind and reap the rewards of the inevitable change of the digital landscape. 1. There are more than 50 million Facebook pages but only 2 million active advertisers on Facebook. If you think this is big competition, wait until everybody else wakes up (I don’t suggest you do that) and joins the advertising party. What this means is, that there’s still a lot of “space” left for high quality content and relevant ...

What does your marketing mix look like? Where do you invest most of your marketing budget? Is it all sorts of marketing campaigns that take money out of your pocket, or do you focus on building modern marketing assets? A couple of days ago I bumped into this short interview with HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan on “Why Right Now Is the Best Time to Start Your Business”. The title of the video didn’t particularly grab my attention, instead what made me have a closer look into it was the guest — business advisor Brian Halligan. What I like most about Brian Halligan is that he often has a different approach to marketing. He doesn’t go with the crowd. When it comes to marketing he definitely has some interesting thinking patterns. This being said, I turned the speakers on and listened to his tips. Before we dive deeper into the marketing mix topic, let me share with you this YouTube video provided by SUCCESS Magazine. Pay close attention to the tips on how to make the most of your marketing efforts.   Kudos to host Bryan Elliott and his show “Behind the Brand”. Great interview sessions with a lot of high-caliber guests. How to Use Your Marketing Mix Intelligently Clever businesses use their marketing budget wisely! They don’t pour most of their money into buying liabilities. Instead they focus on building marketing assets. Remember, it’s better to own stuff (implying it’s the right stuff) than to rent stuff. “Most companies when they look at their marketing budget, 90% of it is on campaigns: PPC, radio, television, you name it. 10% is on their people. Mine’s flipped. I want 90% on the people creating assets, maybe 10% on campaigns, where you can get that math to work. When I say people and assets, its sort of what we were talking about before… Each piece of content you create is this modern marketing asset that pulls customers in through Google, from social media and from blogs, and from other sites. And so I want to build those assets up over time. It’s people who create those assets. I don’t wanna rent stuff, I wanna own stuff. That’s what I advise people. Its the exact opposite of the way marketing has been done forever but I think a proper marketing department actually has a lot of people and a very little advertising budget. – Brian Halligan, CEO HubSpot Let’s say you like the concept of using your marketing mix strategically and putting your efforts into creating sustainable marketing assets. The next question you should be asking yourself is: What can I add to my marketing asset bucket to boost the pulling power of my marketing mix while increasing ROI and onboarding more of the right clients? ***Quick Sidenote: Clever marketing is never about more clients; it’s always about more of the right clients.*** Let’s split the answer to this question into two parts: online and offline. We want to activate both distribution AKA marketing channels and combine the power of the two. 1. ONline Marketing Assets. Start a blog and make sure you own the content. Don’t publish all your valuable articles on LinkedIn, Tumblr, or Blogger. Set up WordPress for example and use your website to create high-quality content. Once you’re done with that, use LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter & Co. to promote your content. If you don’t want to mess around with WordPress, fine.

The old model of sending batch email to a list is no longer effective — no matter how awesome that list is. And due to the huge success of this “oh so great model”, certain things changed. Gmail for example, has made unsubscribing from annoying emails a lot easier and other email providers followed… Fast forward… Email marketing has evolved. Blogging has evolved, social media has evolved, so why shouldn’t email evolve? Today, your emails must truly engage your prospects and customers. More importantly, your emails need to fulfill the following five criteria: * Your emails need to be trustworthy. * Your emails need to be relevant. * Your emails need to be integrated across channels (cross-channel communication). * Your emails need to be conversational. * Your emails need to be strategic. Sounds exhausting? Well, here’s the deal: If you want engaged customers, you’d better think of ways to include all these attributes into your next email marketing campaign. If not, simply disregard all of the above and continue to invest in “hope marketing”. Unlike Facebook, Twitter, Instagram & Co., good old email is a static form of communication. And yes, its reputation has been destroyed by all kinds of spam and phishing attempts. BTW did you ever get one or more of those “Hi, I’m the Prince of Nigeria and I’m reaching out to you to let you know that you’re the lucky one to get $1 million as soon as I receive your bank details”…. Sounds familiar? Annoying? You bet. Email marketing had to endure quite a lot during the past years. Check out this short video by comedic duo Trip and Tyler, and you’ll understand exactly what I mean… Email Marketing in Real Life OK, so evolution is on the way… and most marketers have adapted their email marketing strategies to meet the new requirements of savvy users. Time to dig deeper and have a look at the latest stats and numbers… Six Eye-Opening Email Marketing Stats And Facts That Will Get You Thinking 1. For every $1 invested in email marketing, the average return is $43. [Source: Direct Marketing Association] 2. 91% of consumers use email at least once a day. [Source: ExactTarget] 3. Email is almost 40 times more effective at acquiring customers than Facebook and Twitter combined. [Source: McKinsey & Company] 4. Email conversion rates are at least 3 times higher than social media. The average order value is 17% higher. [Source: eMarketer] 5. When asked which medium consumers would like to receive updates from: 90% opted for email newsletter, while only 10% chose Facebook. [Source: Nielsen Norman Group] 6. 48% of consumers cite email as their preferred channel of communication with brands. [Source: Kentico Software]

Why do you blog? What’s your goal? Simply writing and publishing a blog post won’t get you very far. If you want traction and are looking to go beyond providing informational and educational material to your blog audience, you’ll need to change some things. To be able to get the results you want — provided you know exactly what it is that you’re aiming for — you’ll have to improve your current blogging strategy. You might be a superstar when it comes to creating amazing content and you might even be great at getting traffic, however, if your ultimate goal is to elevate your brand while generating sales and profits, something else needs to come into play. In this article I’ll share with you four actionable steps to building your blog audience and achieving success with blog marketing. 1. Distribute And Promote Your Content. This one might seem like a no-brainer, however, I’d like you to focus on the first word in the headline for a second longer. DISTRIBUTE… Distribution doesn’t equal social media. It’s way more than social media. Yes, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn & Co. are awesome distribution and promotion channels, however, if you want to maximize your blogging impact, you need to look beyond social media. And this includes making your content available across the following distribution channels: * Owned Media Channels: Email and newsletter marketing, SlideShare marketing, podcasting, video marketing, social media marketing, webinars, seminars, workshops, live events, Word-of-Mouth marketing, Face-to-Face marketing * Earned Media Channels: Leading media publications such as magazines, articles, newspapers, blogs * Paid Media Channels: Native advertising (social ads, sponsored content), paid placement, content discovery platforms Do you want to know how to take your blog marketing to the next level and achieve even better results? Integrate the distribution and marketing channels I mentioned above. Separate, individual silos in marketing can get you to a certain level. However, if you want to leverage your marketing efforts and finally boost your results, you need an integrated approach. 2. Write Quality Content And Publish Consistently. Ready to delight your blog audience even more? Provide quality content and do it on a regular basis. Be consistent. Set up a blogging schedule and stop random acts of marketing. Now, you don’t need to write and publish a blog post every single day — unless you want to, obviously. You can do it on a weekly, bi-weekly or monthly basis. What works best for your particular blog audience? To find the answer to this critical question, you’ll need to dig deeper and identify the needs, wants, frustrations, fears, and desires of your ideal visitors, prospects and future clients. Let’s say your blog audience loves and expects to be greeted with new content every week on Wednesday. If that’s the case, do whatever it takes to publish a new blog post every Wednesday. This will keep your loyal fans and followers engaged and on the lookout for it. 3. Offer Your Blog Audience The Possibility To Join A Community Of Like-Minded Individuals. I guess you’re already familiar with the slogans

The Internet is a great space — it allows individuals from all walks of life, as well as entrepreneurs and small businesses to compete with big budget companies and win. Actually, the less budget you have, the more you have to rely on your creative juices and a systematized process to manage information, leverage your efforts and achieve the results you want. Writing random content and inserting keywords willy-nilly won’t get you very far. Writing the right type of content for your dream prospects and clients is a whole different game. Now, there’s a lot more to content marketing than simply writing blog posts. However, there are still a lot of folks who associate content marketing with blogging. So, what else is considered content marketing? Let’s have a look at what Wikipedia has to say: “Content marketing is any marketing that involves the creation and sharing of media and publishing content in order to acquire and retain customers. This information can be presented in a variety of formats, including news, video, white papers, e-books, infographics, case studies, how-to guides, question and answer articles, photos, etc.” Gosh, how could they leave podcasting out of the list? OK, so podcasts are also a form of content marketing. In today’s blog post, I’m going to share with you seven content marketing tips to help you create great content faster, to WOW and engage your readers, and more importantly, to mesmerize potential clients so that they choose working with you over all others in your industry. Sounds good? BTW, you don’t need a corporate budget to drive awareness, generate leads and make sales. Just to get that out of the way… Actionable Content Marketing Tips To Build Trust And Yield Sales 1. Repurpose To The Max. This one might seem like a no-brainer to you, however, you should be aware of the fact that only a few apply this marketing strategy — AKA, they do it the right way. Why not use that amazing blog post you created and turn it into a video or podcast show? Why not create a few slides and upload the presentation to SlideShare? You don’t need gazillions of dollars to do this. If your budget is a whopping zero, do it. It will cost you nothing… well, not quite true: it will cost you time, however, it won’t cost you any money. So here are a few guerrilla hacks to get more done and have more fun: * Turn your blog posts into emails and vice versa. * Turn your videos into blog posts and embed the video. Add a transcript. * Turn your blog posts into podcast episodes. Add a Q&A session and you’re good to go. Here’s my latest example of taking content marketing to the next level — this is pure ROI. * Take the PowerPoint presentation from your latest live event, conference, or seminar and upload it to SlideShare. From there, go ahead and create a SlideShare post and embed it on your website. * You love creative stuff and you love to do it yourself? Ever thought of designing an infographic? Infographics are amazing marketing weapons. People love to consume visual content; that’s why infographics go viral so quickly and easily. Do you see how all these marketing tactics tie together? Everything is intertwined. What you do, is you create a process, a marketing system, a recipe for success you can model and repl...

WHO is buying from you matters more than WHAT they’re buying. This insight was a game changer for me. It shaped the way I do marketing and how I onboard my own clients. Fortunately, I learned this important marketing lesson early on thus enabling me to focus on building strong pillars for future growth and not fall into the many traps that are easily encountered. A lot of businesses get trapped into all kinds of fancy marketing strategies… They pour a ton of money into advertising, waste numerous hours on different social media channels, attend workshops and seminars to learn new marketing techniques and acquire further skills but they seldom put time aside to sit down and really think about the needs, wants, desires, fears and frustrations of their clients and prospects. And then, they wonder why all their efforts lead to little AKA poor, or no results at all. Isn’t that kind of insane? Here are three tips to help you find and get in front of the right prospects, and more importantly, to stop marketing insanity once and for all. Get In Touch With The Right Prospects At The Right Time 1. Uncover their deepest fears and secret desires. First, you have to KNOW whom you’re dealing with. Before you create your marketing campaign or hop on to Facebook, Twitter, or any other social media to share your message, you have to “make friends” with your avatar. Better yet, you have to get into the hearts and minds of your perfect audience. How can you accomplish that? Answer the following two questions: * DEEPEST FEAR: What keeps my prospect awake at night? * SECRET DESIRE: What does my prospect secretly desire most? Here’s an example to help you get the most out of this exercise and ultimately, understand the psychology of marketing to the right prospects AKA group of people. Example #Deepest Fear: If I fail to close the next five deals, I’ll be forced to close my business. I see no way out. And as a result of that, my family will be devastated and all those naysayers will prove right. I won’t be able to send my oldest daughter to college and my wife will probably leave me as this is the second time I’m not delivering on my promises. Example #Secret Desire: I want to prove all those naysayers and above all, my two poker-buddies Tom and Nick who didn’t believe in me, that I can do it. I can be successful. I want to make my wife and children proud of me. I want Martha to tell me, she’s proud of me and happy to be married to me. I made the examples sound a bit dramatic, however, don’t let the above portrayed keep you from answering the questions. Often times “reality” is not what it appears to be. 2. Learn to reach top decision makers quickly and connect with them on a deeper level. This task can be pretty daunting especially when you’re dealing with corporates and bigger organizations. It’s not so much of a challenge when you’re targeting small businesses. So, what techniques can you apply to reach key decision makers? If you have a blog or podcast show for example, you can invite them to do a short 15 minutes interview and share their valuable message with your community. This is a fantastic way to establish a direct connection, see whether they’re open for a business opportunity and sell your expertise without being salesy. Ever thought of leveraging your network? When a relevant person (keyword: relevant!) introduces you to a key decision maker, your chances of getting attention are very high. Therefore, build a strong network of relevant people. Are you bold enough to reach out directly? You should. If you keep it simple,

Paid tools are great… but “what if I’m just starting out and I don’t have the money to invest into all those fancy tools”? This is the “BUT” – question I received from one of our amazing readers after publishing the last blog post. It’s true, at least two of the Twitter tools I mentioned in my recent article are paid tools. Obviously, SocialBro and Sprout Social are both awesome resources to use if you’re not exactly on a restricted budget. So, I took this input seriously and I decided to share with you a set of content marketing tools that you can use for free. On top of that, you’ll be able to utilize these tools in your day-to-day work thus being able to reach your goals faster, with less efforts and in less time. Let’s dive into it, shall we? Put These Content Marketing Tools To Work For You 1. Looking For The Latest Trends, News, And Hot Issues? Google Trends If you want to know whether the movie “The Wolf of Wall Street” gets more searches than “Transformers”, have a quick look at Google Trends. This is the best place to go and search for that kind of information. Seriously tough. Google Trends is a fantastic content marketing tool to look at trends of various keywords. Furthermore, you can compare different search terms, find related searches and evaluate regional interest for a specific keyword (TIP: Do a search for long tail keywords!).     2. Get Thousands Of Keyword Ideas With A Single Click: Übersuggest Lacking inspiration as to what to write about in your next blog post? Checkout Übersuggest – the Google suggest tool on steroids. You might also want to have a look at the following free keyword suggestion tools: * Google Keyword Planner * keywordtool.io * Keyword Finder Use these free content marketing tools to compile a list of highly relevant keywords. 3. Spy On Your Competitors And See How They Are Ranking On Google: SEMrush SEMrush is a great tool to help you analyze your competitors. Simply enter the URL of your competitor’s website and hit the search button. SEMrush will than show you the top 10 keywords driving traffic to your competitor’s site. Bare in mind the following: You get 10 free queries before you’re asked to pay. So, use these queries wisely. Say you’ve used your ten free shots and now you’re wondering how to get further analysis without signing up for a paid account. Here’s another free research software tool to help you accomplish your objectives: KeywordSpy. Use KeywordSpy to quickly unveil your competitors’ most profitable ad copies and keywords. 4. Use A Robust Yet Highly Customizable Platform To Share Your Valuable Content: WordPress First off, I’m referring to WordPress.org in this article (NOT WordPress.com!). WordPress gives you full control over your content. It’s free and easy to use. You can customize your web layout, pick the fonts and colors you want. On top of that,

Yes, 140 characters can help you achieve unbelievable things. Twitter enables you to use shortcuts, omit needless characters and bylines, turn words into numbers, shorten links and show you’re a hashtag king / queen. On top of that, if you want to access relevant information FAST, Twitter is definitely the place to go. Well, all that sounds great. BUT… …How can you actually cut through the gazillions of tweets, find what’s most enticing to your audience and ultimately, improve your social media marketing efforts? This is where tools and resources can come in handy. There are a ton of awesome Twitter tools out there and it’s quite difficult to choose the ones that will help you get the most out of your Twitter marketing strategy. To help you pick the right toolkit for your specific business needs, I decided to put together a list of Twitter tools that have helped me effectively filter relevant tweets, closely monitor performance, increase productivity and maximize outcomes. See what these tools can do for you. Essential Twitter Tools 1. Put Your CRM To Work For You: SocialBro When it comes to digging into demographics, identifying key influencers, analyzing competitors, tracking interaction and monitoring performance, SocialBro is my very first stop. This tool is hands-down one of the most powerful Twitter tools available; a game changer. SocialBro has an intuitive and robust interface with great features. You can check your latest stats and manage your followers within just a few clicks. No more guessing around. SocialBro puts an end to all that!     2. Take Your Project Management To The Next Level: Sprout Social If you have a team, this Twitter tool will make it easier to collaborate, respond to customers and publish across multiple social profiles. On top of that, Sprout Social lets you: * Cover the entire publishing process * Plan your content calendar and view scheduled tweets across the team * Assign tasks to the appropriate teammate and manage tasks * Track your results to better understand brand and team performance As a side note: Combining SocialBro and Sprout Social has helped my team and I cut the time we spend on Twitter by more than 70%!     3. Do You Want Premium Services For Free? – Hootsuite When I started my journey on Twitter, Hootsuite was amongst the very first social media marketing tools I used. And to this day, I still use Hootsuite due to its easy to use browser interface and clear overview. If you’re new to Twitter and you don’t want to spend money on all kinds of fancy tools and resources without first testing out whether this social media platform is worth your time and efforts, sign up for a free Hootsuite account and give this comprehensive management tool a go.     4. Analyze Your Relationships: Commun.it Are you a community manager? Do you love to keep track of all the people you’re influenced by and the ones you’re influencing? Commun.it will help you accomplish just that. This Twitter tool is great for engagement and identifying key industry influencers you’ve lost track of due to all the noise in your stream.     5. Extend Your Network, Flush Unfollowers:

Facebook ads are a powerful marketing weapon when it comes to expanding your reach to highly relevant audiences. Provided you haven’t purchased your Facebook fans or email list using some scam tactics, and instead you’ve invested your valuable time and resources into getting to know the pain points, needs and wants of your target audience better so that you’re able to provide help and support long-term – suppose the latter applies, you’ll now have the power to setup Facebook ads and target a super relevant audience to you and your business. So, you’ve built an engaging email list and now you’re wondering how to provide even more value to your most loyal supporters and customers. Here’s how. In this blog post you’ll discover three powerful ways to target your most relevant audience using Facebook ads. 1. Custom Audience based on Customer List When a visitor comes to your website and opts in, he or she should be added to your email list. When someone buys a particular product from you, they should also be added to your list. This is where segmentation becomes your savior. Those who opted in but haven’t purchased from you, should be automatically added to a segment “optin” for example. Those who opted in and purchased product X from you, should be added to the segment “optin + product X” of your email list. Here’s where it gets really interesting. Say you want to target the people in your email list who have opted in but haven’t purchased anything from you thus far. Prepare this particular segment in an Excel spreadsheet (turn it into .txt or .csv file) and follow the instructions below. Go to Facebook’s Power Editor and choose Audiences. Next, click on “Create Audience” and pick “Custom Audience“. You’ll be given 3 types of audiences to choose from. Go ahead and click on “Customer List”. Facebook will now give you several options to choose from. The easiest option – in case you’re not using MailChimp as an Email provider, is to upload a file in .csv or .txt format. The beauty of this custom audience among other things, lies in the ability to upload specific segments of your email list thus ensuring you’re targeting the people who are most relevant to your specific offer. 2. Website Custom Audience AKA Custom Audience based on Website Traffic Website Custom Audiences (WCA) allows you to retarget those who have visited your website in the past 180 days – that’s the maximum length of time Facebook enables you to use. In the screenshot below, I decided to create a WCA that includes people who have visited any of my pages that contain the URL www.strengthinbusiness.com in the last 30 days. How can you use this audience when setting up your next Facebook ads? First off, this tends to be one of the most relevant and powerful options currently available. You can use this 30 Days WCA to promote your blog posts or to drive traffic to your landing page and increase optin rates. 3. Lookalike Audience The third option I’m going to share with you today is Lookalike Audience. If you don’t have a lot of website traffic and your email list is still “in the making & baking” this is definitely a powerful way to leverage these smaller audiences. Allow Facebook to do the job for you – that is, to find people similar to your website visitors and email subscribers. Facebook Ads Tip Take your Lookalike Audience to the next level by layer...

More than 60 million new posts are being published on WordPress.com each month. Wait a second, that’s just WordPress. Let’s not forget the other blogging platforms such as Blogger, Tumblr, TypePad, and Posterous. That’s overwhelming, right? This is where smart content curation can go a long way. Let me explain the concept quickly. The world is changing fast. Offline, we’re no longer willing to go to the butcher to buy fresh meat, than drive the car to Mr. Pete’s “tech store” to purchase some batteries for the remote control and on the way home stop at Emma’s to get milk. Nowadays, we are more interested in the Walmart or Tesco model. The game is called: one-stop shop. The same applies to the online world. We no longer want to visit all kinds of websites that provide content specific to a niche; we prefer to bookmark one or two killer websites that do all the work for us — that is, they filter killer posts and provide us with the best stuff in one place. This is content curation. It’s basically the online version of the Walmart and Tesco offline concept. Mike Kaput of PR 20/20 describes the evolution of content curation as follows: In a world of nearly infinite content, consumers are looking to one-stop shop. Human Content Curation: Humans vs. Robots Never underestimate the importance of the human element. Robots, machines, and algorithms can do a great job in terms of searching for blog posts that meet your criteria, however, nothing can beat handpicked content curation. Giving your articles that human touch makes your writing stand out. No machine or algorithm knows the pain points of your prospects and clients better than you do, and no robot can draft content that speaks directly to the heart of your audience. Here are three significant benefits of content curation for your website: * Build trust and gain credibility. Whenever you link back to another website you give your readers the opportunity to learn and discover something new while increasing your credibility. * You delight your readers with quality content. Provided your content curation is top-notch, you can become the go-to resource in your industry. * You save time. Finding quality content and adding your unique style to the piece is often times more effective than writing a story from scratch. To wrap this up, I’d like to cite Mark Sherbin who wrote an interesting article about content curation on Content Marketing Institute: Content curation features handpicked content, often introduced with a snippet of copy from the curator. Performed correctly, content curation can create a big value addition. What’s the 911 Rule? A couple of weeks ago I was in San Diego at the mega-conference Social Media World 2015 (#SMMW15) organized by Social Media Examiner. It’s one of those conferences where: * you get to rub shoulders with the biggest names and brands in social media * and you also get the opportunity to attend some amazing sessions where you can soak up the latest content marketing and social media marketing strategies and techniques. One of the best sessions I attended was “How to Create Y...