If you’re not promoting any affiliate products in your blogs, you are missing out on a GREAT way to generate money with your blog.  Think about, you are writing about a subject you are interested in and have knowledge about; your readers visit your blog because they are interested in what you have to say.   Below are 3 tips for incorporating affiliate promotions into your blog:

1)       Put yourself in your visitors’ shoes. Think of which types of products they might be interested in.

2)      Research online to find quality products to promote. You will quickly lose credibility and trust if you’re promoting inferior products.

3)      Use soft sell tactics. Educate readers by explaining a problem and how this product solves it.  Promoting affiliate products in your blog should not sound like you are trying to sell something.  Products should be incorporated as organically and naturally as possible.

Posted March 23rd 2011 to Uncategorized • Comments (1)

We’ve talked about the benefits of inbound marketing in regards to generating leads, but there are several ways to use inbound marketing to retain your leads.  It costs 5-10 times more to obtain a new customer than to retain an existing one.  With that in mind, it is definitely important to explore different ways to keep your existing customers happy!

Below are 4 ways to use inbound marketing to retain customers:

1)      Educate Customers- one of the best ways to keep your customers engaged is to provide them with educational materials to help them learn more about your industry and your product.  You can create educational auto-responders, update your blog, or even host an informational webinar to teach customers about your product.

2)      Use Social Media- Social media is a great way to build and maintain customer relationships.  You can social media platforms answer customer questions and provide a continuous stream of industry and product updates.

3)      Create a Forum- Customer support is crucial in retaining customers, but can undoubtedly be time consuming and expensive.  Letting your customers talk to each other is like having built-in free customer support. Who better to answer customer questions (aside from you) than other customers?   People like sharing their experiences with others and creating a forum is a great way to do that!  IMRC members have good things to say about How to Start a Forum (A- rating, 295 grades).

4)      Ask for Feedback- An often overlooked option, obtaining customer feedback is a great way to stay “in the know” about what your customers like, don’t like, want to see more of, etc.  Simple ways to obtain feedback include surveys, blog posts or via social media platforms.

Posted March 14th 2011 to Blogging,Inbound Marketing,Internet Marketing,Social Media • Comments (1)

Earlier this week we touched upon a few points to keep in mind for optimizing your Facebook page for business.  The last point we made stated that the news feed is one of the most important tools to utilize when promoting your business on Facebook and building up your Facebook presence.

There are only so many posts that make it onto the top news feed, so what determines which posts get displayed?

1) The number of times two people have interacted.   It is important to build up relationships with your followers and post content that people respond to (either via a comment or a “like”).

2) The number of times users have interacted with the content.  So, if you post something that gets a good response from some of your followers, it is more likely to show up on your other followers news feeds as well.

3) How recent the post is.  To keep an engaged audience, it is important to provide regular updates- just don’t bombard people with too many posts!

4) The type of content in the post.  Videos, links and images all draw more attention than standard text-based updates.

Posted March 04th 2011 to Inbound Marketing,Internet Marketing,Social Media • Comments (2)