Social Media & Content Marketing Part 11

Posted on December 9, 2016 by ianotr

Social Media & Content Marketing

Social Media opens many new doors instantly

Social media has provided a big boost to content marketing because it allows you to organize audiences that you create into groups. It’s possible to use one social media platform to talk with various groups of followers. Using various platforms to reach various niches is an option, but the more interaction can be consolidated into one place, the easier it is to manage your social media campaigns.

Audience Size

The beauty of content marketing is that it does not have to reach millions of people to have an impact. Crafting niche content that attracts one thousand followers who have the intent to make online purchases is not a difficult goal to reach anymore. Analytics give us a lot of numbers to think about such as page views and number of unique visitors, but as soon as you can attract hundreds of followers, it’s possible to develop a steady stream of online income.

An online audience can essentially be built for free if you take the time to connect with new people one at a time. Finding five new online friends per day is enough to build a base of over 100 followers in a month. All you really have to do is click people after studying their profile. Each of the major social networks has a system for requesting online friendships. Google+ is a social network that encourages new relationships.Facebook puts audience limits on personal profiles but allows professional profiles to have thousands of followers. Audience size is based on how much time you want to invest in building it.

Friends of Friends

The key to building a loyal market that reflects your values, is to build a network one person at a time with individuals who match your target market. This project can take several months, but it simply involves interacting with friends of friends on social networks, leading to a maze of new contacts. You simply study a friend’s profile and look for people who share your views. It’s a good idea to avoid people who don’t share your views so that you can avoid a lot of long time consuming conversations.

As people who like the same things are grouped into networks, it becomes easier for like-minded people to connect more often. It’s important for friends to “like” each other’s posts on Facebook because it tells Facebook the content is important. It gives Facebook a better idea of which content should be displayed on individual news feeds.

Personalized Market Research

One of the most profound ways social media has revolutionized marketing is that it has created a more intense focus on actual individuals rather than treating customers as statistics. You can now find out many things about a customer through social media interactivity that was not known by marketers in the past. Finding out someone’s favorite movies or sports teams might be an ice breaker in a conversation about selling tax preparation services.

Social media has become a barometer for how respected you are as an online entertainer. You can figure out which type of posts get the best reactions. You can study the posts of popular social media superstars. You can also learn who your most loyal supporters are and the content they like the most. Social media lets you learn the emotions and inside stories about your market, giving you a better sense of awareness than raw statistics.

Facebook and other social networks have allowed believers in the same message to find each other easily online. Take the lead in content marketing by joining social network groups devoted to your topic and make new genuine friendships.

Ian Conklin is the President of OTR Web, a web development company creating market ready websites since 2000, with locations in Canada, USA, Europe and South America.

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Repurposing Content

Posted on January 28, 2015 by ianotr

Repurposing Content for Various Media Formats

Multimedia has been a concept developing for decades to empower creative minds by presenting a message through different forms of communication. Computers and the internet have become the vehicles for accomplishing many multimedia dreams. The amazing power of the computer is that it can now combine video, radio, music, books, slide shows and many other types of media into one platform.

Deciding on Formats

Your computer has become your media center for producing content that can be experienced through several different formats such as video files, audio files, news feeds, text files, image files, HTML and many other things. You don’t really need to know the technical side of multimedia other than how to copy and paste a code into web pages. Understanding basic HTML is a good idea even if you never plan to write code. Then again, if all your web-based solutions will be through easy to use cloud platforms, then all you really need to know is how to click a button that says “upload.”

No longer do you need to worry about the technical headaches and bandwidth issues of hosting your own videos, since you can just upload your videos to YouTube and link to them on your site. Images as well as videos are hosted on Flickr. You can create slideshows with SlideShare. Ebooks can be constructed through cloud platforms such as CreateSpace, Lulu or Libiro. Audio can be recorded and stored on SoundCloud. You can also upload original music to ReverbNation. Each of these platforms allows you to build a digital library for multimedia presentations. Let your imagination guide you on the appropriate forms of media to reach your audience.

Hard Copy Formats

The physical world and digital world can work together in an efficient streamlined manner. While digital publishing is more cost efficient and eco-friendly than print, there are certain times when it’s reasonable to use print to expand your market. It’s also true that CDs and DVDs are wise to manufacture if you know there’s a demand for them. It becomes unwise to manufacture thousands of physical discs if you have no way of marketing or distributing them. You may want to create different versions of your content for each type of media format so that it’s not considered duplicate content by search engines.

The best of both worlds is accomplished when you use an on demand philosophy. If you have 100 requests for your ebook in hard copy form, then it makes sense to print 100 books. You can do the same thing with selling videos as downloads or DVDs or music as downloads or CDs. By interacting with followers on social networks, you will be able to learn the formats in which people want to consume your content. You may want to manufacture a limited number of DVDs and CDs simply to give out free at street fairs and trade shows. Printed flyers are still one of the best ways to get the word out about your business.

Advanced Multimedia

Remember that standing out is always more important than blending in when it comes to content marketing. If your competition isn’t doing anything too amazing with content, then almost any multimedia ideas you come up with will be better. But if your competition presents a lot of videos, photos, audio and ebooks, you might trying taking multimedia to the next level. Creative cutting edge media such as video games, highly attractive colorful infographics and heat maps, animation and interactive technology. Take the lead in content marketing by investing in equipment and software that helps you produce sophisticated, artistic multimedia productions.

Ian Conklin is the President of OTR Web Solutions a web development company building marketing websites since 2000 with offices in Canada, USA, Europe and South America.

OTR Web is a Certified Partner with HubSpot and Google.

For all your Inbound Marketing and Website requirements

Contact OTR Web.

Facebook for Business

Posted on October 23, 2013 by ianotr

Facebook for Business – Top 10 Uses

The age of social media has arrived for the world of business. There are over 1 billion people currently on Facebook alone, for example, so it only stands to reason that this would be a good place to be when you want to gain attention for your enterprise, or organization. But what exactly should you be doing?

Understanding the uses of Facebook for business is something that requires developing a systematic approach for exactly how it can help move you toward the goals you’ve set for growing your company. Let’s look at 10 ways you can leverage the astounding reach of this leader in social media to position your business to take the lead in this new commercial landscape.

1> Increase traffic to your website – getting people to where the action is builds your bottom line. Posting material with a sprinkling of links back to your company website is a great way to use facebook for business growth.

2> Create brand awareness – photos are worth a thousand words, and those showing your products, services, and views of your business operation in action, help establish you as a distinct – and memorable – entity amongst all the choices out there.

3> Build a Community – and as your brand awareness grows, so does the number of people regularly visiting your site to find more of what they enjoyed on their first visit. Your neighborhood is expanding. And since clients want to believe they found you, not that you found them, this is an excellent way to establish such a relationship.

4> Educate your market – the primary reason people go anywhere online is to access actionable information. As the old saying goes – Knowledge is power – and one of the best ways to use facebook for business is to regularly deliver important information that educates your audience about issues related to your business.

5> Staying in focus – people remember where they obtained valuable information, so the more of it you provide, the more you become a focal point of their cyber-world. This has the added advance of building online ‘word of mouth’ as your community informs people in theirs about you as a good source of data.

6> Demonstrate your expertise – a big part of using facebook for business involves making it evident that you are a skilled professional in your field. The cumulative impact of all of your postings, photos, and links is how this is accomplished – and it keeps paying dividends for your operation.

7> Expand your reach – with over a billion set of eyes looking in, getting access to the broadest possible audience is one of the chief advantages of adopting facebook for business and commercial purposes. Suddenly, your reach is worldwide in a manner businesses of the past could only dream about.

8> Developing new affiliations – you never know where cooperative alliances will come from, and adopting facebook for business has been the start of many such partnerships.

9> Provide customer service – with its chat, message, and pinned post features, facebook enables small businesses to expand their customer service while minimizing costs. Always a nice combination.

10> Increase sales – while this feature is certainly uppermost in your mind, it takes all of the features of facebook for business working together to get to this one. But once you grasp how the facebook world works, this is the natural outcome.

The bottom line is that having a presence in this burgeoning new informational universe is essential for any commercial enterprise. Today people want to believe they found you and not that you found them. Facebook is another excellent vehicle for prospective customers to find you and interact with you.

And with the above in-mind, you can see that there is a lot to like about Facebook for business. Our eBook on Facebook can help you Take the Lead with your business.

Ian Conklin is the President of OTR Web Solutions a web development company building marketing websites since 2000 with offices in Canada, USA, Europe and South America.

OTR Web is a Value Added Partner with HubSpot.

For all your Inbound Marketing and Website requirements Contact OTR Web.

Content Marketing : Crafting Cross Promotional Content

Posted on October 7, 2013 by ianotr

Content Marketing : Crafting Cross Promotional Content

Teamwork is how entrepreneurs with shared visions can make big things happen. You don’t necessarily need to partner with businesses in your same industry. As long as your content connects with their content in some way that is relevant to users, you can create cross promotional campaigns that expand the exposure for both businesses.

Link Sharing

At one time search engines considered link sharing to be a measure of site importance and popularity. Over time they realized that many sites swap links with each other to improve search rank even though the links don’t really help users. Search engines in recent years have placed less emphasis on link sharing unless both sites offer high quality content and they relate to each other. You need to be careful who you link to now because Google penalizes sites that link to low quality sites.

If you choose your link partners carefully and only exchange links with quality sites that make sense for your site, then it can improve your search rankings. Let’s say you offer a photography service and you write several blogs about weddings and each one links to a catering service that also writes blogs about weddings. The cross promotion makes sense for users and search engines because a bride and groom can conceivably hire both a photographer and a caterer for their wedding.

Interviews

One way to create cross promotional content that potentially doubles the impact of exposure is to interview other bloggers with followings for your blog. Everyone in the online world needs to be talked about by others online, so they will naturally want to link to your blog. It becomes part of their press kit portfolio. If you can do a video interview on YouTube you can help your cause even more because then you’ll generate traffic on a third site in addition to being indexed in another search engine.

Interviews make excellent content because they are original and personable. A conversation between two people creates extra energy on video and more variety in print. You don’t have to have special interviewing skills like a news reporter. The old rules of last century’s media no longer apply to the online culture. Human conversations are now acceptable and effective ways to share information. Relaxed interviews come off as more genuine than trying to sound like a scripted journalist.

Multiple References

There’s no rule that says one blog can only cross promote one other blogger. You may want to write a story that surveys several bloggers about their opinions of products or trends. You may even want to build a panel of bloggers that you frequently interact with as each of you cross promote each other. It wouldn’t be that difficult to accomplish since it can all be done through email. The possibilities are endless when it comes to creating alliances on the internet.

Cross promotion of content, of course, doesn’t have to be limited to just blogs. You can share your cross promotional blog on social media, which can snowball into more sharing. Creating a big circle of alliances that all cross promote each other can generate active conversations that attract attention. The more you can develop a scene with a familiar cast of characters, the more you can build a cross promotional empire that brings an online crowd together. Familiarity is important for building any community.

If you find partners who share your visions of the world, your cross promotional content will make sense and be easier to produce.

Take the lead in content marketing by building bridges with friends online who you can cross promote.

Ian Conklin is the President of OTR Web Solutions a web development company building marketing websites since 2000 with offices in Canada, USA, Europe and South America.

OTR Web is a Value Added Partner with HubSpot.

For all your Inbound Marketing and Website requirements Contact OTR Web.

Content Marketing Integrating Visuals

Posted on October 2, 2013 by ianotr

Content Marketing : Integrating Visuals

Videos, images, infographics and other creative visual displays help make storytelling more exciting and memorable. You definitely need some form of visuals to stand out from competitors. If you take your own pictures, even with a smart phone, you will be combining originality with personality, which are two essential ingredients of content marketing.

Colorful Images

Adding images to your online content works beautifully because they can present multiple colors, which most people naturally love. Black text on a white background is fine, but pictures add more variety and can help make a page come to life. Color feeds the brain with emotion, intellect and ambition. Not every picture is attractive, which is why you need to avoid dull pictures and gravitate toward those that convey the most warmth and appeal.

Colorful images that stand out have become an important part of sharing on social networks. Whether the image is a photograph, video or chart, the colors can make posts stand out on Facebook news feeds, in which users do not have time to read every post. People are more likely to read the posts with the most eye-catching images. One of your investments in content marketing should be photo editing software such as Photoshop, which allows you to create logos and combine text with images.

Visual Statements

Sometimes pictures are more worth more than a thousand words. If you want to know what the Golden Gate Bridge looked like when it was first being built, you might find that a photograph is more important than reading a long description. Sometimes pictures reveal more than text, especially with shots of people who we are curious about. Some of the most informative pictures are those that combine graphics with text.

Infographics have become very popular because they can summarize a wealth of information in one image or post, saving the viewer lots of time on research. Sometimes people just want quick information and don’t want to take a week to read a book to find out a certain set of facts, which can be presented visually in one place. Infographics take many forms, such as charts, cartoons and merged images. You can create your own infographics at Picktochart.com or Visual.ly.

Heat Maps

Similar in concept to infographics are heat maps, which are specifically designed to show statistical relationships. Like cluster analysis, heat maps present comprehensive data in picture form to show how groups of data differ from each other. The best example of a heat map is a typical weather map of the United States that shows all the various temperatures around the nation. The climate conditions can be represented by colors. A heat map can also be used to show the geography of political differences of states during elections with red and blue colors.

Crime and economic statistics can be shown on heat maps that help home buyers map out desired home locations. Sometimes a gray scale heat map can be just as effective as colorful heat maps to show differences in opinions. Heat maps do not have to be geographical. Rainbow schemes can be used in chemistry for the Periodic Table of Elements, in history to show how events or trends have evolved over a timeline and in web analytics for showing various data related to online audience behavior.

Use Your Imagination

Pay attention to interesting visuals that get your attention online and ask yourself what you like about them. Incorporate the best ideas into your creative work and don’t be afraid to experiment with new unconventional ideas.

Take the lead in content marketing by adding visuals that create curiosity. Download our eBook on the 10 Commandments of Marketing Automation

Ian Conklin is the President of OTR Web Solutions a web development company building marketing websites since 2000 with offices in Canada, USA, Europe and South America.

OTR Web is a Value Added Partner with HubSpot.

For all your Inbound Marketing and Website requirements Contact OTR Web.

Brand Strategy Inbound Marketing

Posted on September 13, 2013 by ianotr

Brand Strategy Inbound Marketing

Brand Positioning Strategy

Today’s marketing world is much different than last century’s invasive marketing. At one time a brand positioning strategy was shaped through mass marketing campaigns and whatever it took to generate leads, even if it meant buying them and then attacking them with aggression and repetition. But two profound developments have presented historic challenges to traditional marketing: the internet and consumer awareness. Today’s clients want to believe they found you … not that you found them.

Internet Empowerment

The internet has turned individuals into multi-dimensional messengers of products, services and even non-business interests. Online pioneers who helped redefine the consumer landscape were Amazon, Craigslist, Google and eBay. These companies not only survived the dotcom bubble crash of the late 1990s/early 2000s, they each paved the way for successful online business models. Wikipedia also set a tone, since they emerged as leaders in search engine rankings for a wide range of topics. Apple’s iTunes also played a part in the online revolution by ushering in the first profitable model of the seamless digital download.

Amazon became the world’s number one retailer by letting consumers learn about products before buying them. Google empowered businesses with pay per click advertising while Craigslist and eBay, like Amazon, brought buyers and sellers together to find the best deals. How did these tech leaders alter the course of brand positioning strategy? They changed marketing by maximizing a concept called “the long tail,” popularized by author Chris Anderson. The long tail represents a long list of niche products that don’t sell as well as the most popular products, but the cumulative sales of several niche products can add up to huge revenue. The internet allows consumers to find the niche products they are looking for better than a flea market or a garage sale. The long tail empowers consumers to find bargains that cater to their needs as individuals.

Smarter Consumers

As a result of long tail resources such as Google, which lets people find specialty businesses quicker than phone books, consumers can learn about solutions to their needs at an accelerated rate compared with consumers of last century. So no matter how you measure intelligence, today’s consumers have much more research and answers at their fingertips than ever before. Consumers no longer have to surrender to the pressures of top brands controlling product selection at stores with limited shelf space. Consumers now have the green light to explore online as much as they want until they find what they want.

Traditional advertising still helps sell units, but it’s mostly an expensive gamble that doesn’t always pay off. There are many stories of companies that went bankrupt because expensive media advertising drained their budgets and didn’t generate a return on investment. Consumers can be fooled if they are bombarded with the same exaggerated messages over time, but the internet has also taught many buyers to become smarter shoppers by replacing impulsive spending with online bargain hunting.

The New Definition of Winning

The old definition of winning in business was a matter of accounting. Whoever scored the most dollars from market saturation of big but often vague promises in advertising became the market leader. The new definition of winning in business is successfully nurturing online followings that breed long-term loyal buyers. This revolutionary direction is particularly useful to small and medium businesses who do not have the budget to buy expensive repetitious broadcast time or print space. In this sense, websites, blogging and social media level the playing field for all businesses.

As you carve your own corner in this amazing new business landscape, remember that your brand positioning strategy to acquire followers is now closer to honest artistic leadership than ever before.

Take the Lead – Download our 10 Step Checklist to Website Redesign

Ian Conklin is the President of OTR Web Solutions a web development company building marketing websites since 2000 with offices in Canada, USA, Europe and South America.

OTR Web is a Value Added Partner with HubSpot.

For all your Inbound Marketing and Website requirements Contact OTR Web.

Brand Strategy :Testing Your Brand

Posted on September 6, 2013 by ianotr

Brand Strategy : Testing Your Brand

Test Your Brand Against Your Competitors

Your brand needs to outshine the competition, maybe not in every way, but in enough ways to connect with the people you target with your narrative. A winning branding strategy includes studying your competition and figuring out why your brand is better and in what ways it can be better. Keep in mind that consumer reviews keep everything in check, so part of your research needs to include finding out how consumers compare your brand with competitors.

Brand Strategy : Comparing Brands

Even though you may not have access to your competitors’ Analytics for every metric, you can still look at your own statistics and make estimates about your competitors. Sometimes you can get access to their data when they brag about it in the media. Your Analytics will tell you where your traffic is coming from, how much you are getting and what people do when they visit your website and social media profile. One thing competitors may not be able to hide from is how they rank in audience measurement sites such as Alexa and Quantcast. Both sites reveal interesting statistics about traffic for websites.
You can create your own estimates about your competitors’ social media activity by being friends with them and seeing how their users respond to them. You can also check their website to see if they publish online reviews. Another way to compare brands is to see who has higher rankings for keywords in various search engines. An element of your branding strategy should be to prioritize your most important keywords and phrases and then see if you’re winning those battles in online search.
You can also find out who is getting the most media coverage by going to Google and searching for news articles on your competitors.

Brand Strategy : Declaring Leadership

Once you have compiled a comparative analysis report of your brand versus competitors, create a list of goals that allow you to beat competitors. You can declare leadership in many areas, just like you will inevitably do with keywords if you use enough imagination and determination. The art of declaring leadership in anything is more up to you than your competitors. Don’t bother attacking them in areas that you cannot win. If they have a much larger budget, for example, don’t waste time imagining that you can beat them in an outbound marketing campaign.

But when it comes to inbound marketing, the playing field is much more level and you have many opportunities to overshadow the weaknesses of your competitors. The fact that you will be different from them in many ways will allow you be a leader in many areas. By monitoring their weaknesses you can assess where you can develop strengths and whether or not imaginative ideas alone can help you achieve leadership. Your best bet for developing an edge in competition will be in how strong you are with social media. If you enjoy interacting with people and mixing information with entertainment, then that element of your branding strategy will be tough to beat because most companies still do not invest enough time in social media.

Brand Strategy : Study Your Own Weaknesses

Never over-estimate your market position because the market is constantly changing. You never know when a new competitor will come into the market after studying everything you’re doing and mapping out market holes caused by your weaknesses. Instead, beat them to it by knowing your market weaknesses and what you can do to improve them. The most common weakness of small business is budget size. But that’s where imagination can be the key to overcoming money issues. Imaginative campaigns are what drives your brand strategy.

Take the Lead – read our free eBook on Creating Remarkable Web Content

Ian Conklin is the President of OTR Web Solutions a web development company building marketing websites since 2000 with offices in Canada, USA, Europe and South America.

OTR Web is a Value Added Partner with HubSpot.

For all your Inbound Marketing and Website requirements Contact OTR Web.

Brand Strategy Developing a Narrative

Posted on September 5, 2013 by ianotr

Brand Strategy Developing a Narrative

A crucial component to your brand marketing strategy is developing a voice in your communication with followers that becomes recognizable. That voice, also known as narrative, can be in the form of a speaking voice or a writing style. It’s OK to hire different bloggers to create the volumes of content necessary for inbound marketing to be effective, but make sure they are all on the same page as far as delivering a consistent narrative. The narrative is the voice that tells your brand’s story.

Every Niche Tells a Story

If you can’t think of stories to tell about each of your brand’s niches, it’s time to fine tune those niches or find better ones. A marketable niche is one that tells a story about how people got very frustrated with products that didn’t deliver what they promised, then one day they found your solution and life became so much better. The narrative is the personality that offers tone and perspective to that story. It can be subjective and emotional or objective and rational. It can even be a mix of both approaches.

You can shape your narrative by brainstorming with colleagues to develop a list of keywords and concepts that are central to your brand. Fill up a page with words by thinking on two levels: general themes and specific details. Imagine you are writing a book and that the general themes are the chapters and the specific details are the text in those chapters. Then start building sentences around those words. Your passion about your unique products and the people who you want to use them will help drive the narrative.

Natural Voices

Your brand marketing strategy will have a huge advantage by embracing a quality that innovative businesses are already catching onto, which is a humanistic attitude, whether objective or subjective. As long as consumers know you care about their needs and aren’t just in business to make a quick buck, they will likely choose your narrative over an old fashioned approach that spoke at them as statistics instead of to them as individuals. Part of the reason radio has struggled to adjust to the new economy is that the internet offers more trustworthy narratives. People are now more likely to base purchases on Amazon reviews than radio commercials or something an announcer said between songs.

Let the narrative be defined not by what everyone else in your field is doing, but by the story you want to tell. The point is that you want your narrative, like your niche, to stand out from a crowd of competitors. One way to do that is just be yourself. We are rapidly departing from the “one size fits all” attitude about marketing and the idea that certain formulas must dictate how we interact with customers. In radio’s heyday, commercials that conformed to slick formulas were the rule. Radio professionals used to say “it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.” But they took that mantra too far and listeners grew tired of hearing similar voices from station to station. These days consumers are more likely to trust voices that sound more like everyday people.

Narrative Elements

In literature narrative elements are the components of storytelling that point to the big picture, such as introduction, setting, characters, foreshadowing, storyline and climax. The writer is the voice that ties all those narrative elements together. As you read through the story, pieces of the big picture start to come into view and you feel smarter the more you put those pieces together. A brand marketing strategy shares the same process.

Take the Lead eBook on the 10 Commandments of Marketing Automation.

Ian Conklin is the President of OTR Web Solutions a web development company building marketing websites since 2000 with offices in Canada, USA, Europe and South America.
OTR Web is a Value Added Partner with HubSpot.

For all your Inbound Marketing and Website requirements Contact OTR Web.

Brand Strategy Creating an Online Community

Posted on September 4, 2013 by ianotr

Brand Strategy : Creating an Online Community

Your brand positioning strategy should include a determined effort to create a loyal online community. Building this interactive audience takes time and requires that you offer quality content, which will pay off when Google and other search engines index your content. No matter what the latest SEO techniques are, they have always pointed toward a refinement of search engines weeding out weak content sites and giving high rankings to quality content sites.

Web Content Development

The web content you create will determine who visits your website. Like minded followers will eventually find your site if you feed the search engines with web pages full of original and in depth content. Pages with useless content flooded with ads are what search engines are trying to avoid, so don’t fall into that trap. If you fill your product pages with lots of description and customer reviews, then you’re on the right track. Other types of web pages that help search engines bring you traffic are reports about the history of your product, industry reports, interviews, product demonstrations and any type of meaningful analysis.

Sitemaps are very important to search engines, so be sure to include one on your site that can clearly be accessed from the home page. The sitemap is the directory to the main pages of your website and serves as a quick summary and navigation tool. Adding a contact page or link can help start a dialogue with your users through email. It can also help you build your marketing list and establish communication with possible future customers. Once you have a substantial marketing list, you can strengthen your brand positioning strategy by starting a newsletter that you can email to your users regularly. The newsletter can help develop a sales funnel by providing links to your product pages.

Blogging Your Brand

A blog is almost like having a regular TV talk show or newspaper column. It only needs to be a series of articles, but adding video or audio pod casts can help attract a bigger audience. Many newbies to the web still aren’t clear what a blog is, although they write one anyway. Try not to follow the herd that thinks blogging is a superficial trendy art form. Focus more on bloggers who are thought leaders in your industry and can prove they have huge followings. Avoid copying them or anyone else, but let their success inspire you.

Blogging is storytelling about your niche expertise, whatever it may be. The goal of blogging is to become somewhat of a cult leader in your field by sharing deep information that cannot be found elsewhere. By giving your brand a narrative through blogging and providing a contact link, you can enter people’s minds and correspond with them. Over time you can learn which followers are worth spending time with. If you consistently share fresh unique content, you can develop a following that relies on your information for their empowerment.

Social Media Content

The easiest way to build a quick following is through social networks such as Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest. All you do is open an account, build a profile and start adding friends. Google+ is particularly designed to add new friends who share your interests. By interacting with social media friends, you can learn a lot about your market in a short time.

One of the things that social media lets you do better than old media channels, is share a multi-dimensional personality. This dynamic allows you to build bridges with people beyond your brand positioning strategy and opens the door to developing a wide array of relationships.

Ian Conklin is the President of OTR Web Solutions a web development company building marketing websites since 2000 with offices in Canada, USA, Europe and South America.

OTR Web is a Value Added Partner with HubSpot.

For all your Inbound Marketing and Website requirements Contact OTR Web.

How to Use Pinterest for Business

Posted on September 3, 2013 by ianotr

How to Use Pinterest for Business

Pinterest is the relatively new kid on the block of social networks that is all about driving traffic. Pinterest not only drives, but it transforms your customers into evangelists who are responsible for engaging other users 70% of the time.Your presence and activity on Pinterest is substantiated by the 70% of Pinterest users who are on the network for inspiration on what to buy. As a traffic-driving and evangelist-creating social network, Pinterest offers your business the type of targeted exposure that is exponentially beneficial. To get you started, the following information briefly explains how to use Pinterest for Business.

Understanding Pinterest for Business Key Terms

A Pin is when an image is added to Pinterest

Pinning is the actual act of sharing content.

A Pinboard is a group of pins that share the same theme.

A Repin is like reposting or sharing another person’s pin.

The Pin It Button is placed on different websites to promote sharing .

Pinners are the individuals who are sharing the images or videos.

How to Use Pinterest for Business

Pinnable Images

Simply put, every page of your website should have images that are pinnable and interesting to your target audience, which will result in increased traffic.

Pin It Button

Although the real Pinterest users will pin images without any help, some Pinterest users need serious direction, which is provided by the Pin it Button. By enabling the Pin It Button on your website, you will be reminding users about their Pinterest account and their ability to share images with their friends. The biggest benefit of the Pin It Button is that it makes sharing and pinning images a simple step.

Riched Pins

Rich pins include an added bonus to search results by including your business logo. In addition, rich pins simplify the process for visitors to get back to your website with one click.

Setting up Pinterest for Business

To get started, visit the Pinterest Business Section and choose the option for businesses.

You can even convert your personal Pinterest account into a business account with ease.

After the account has been set up, you will want to add boards that will allow you to group the photos that you pin and share with different customer groups.

Sharing Images

Using Pinterest to share images is parallel to the highly effective inbound marketing strategy. In either case, the object is to offer your audience what they desire, which on Pinterest is shopping ideas. However, you shouldn’t only pin images of your products. Instead, you should pin images of items that your customer base would genuinely love to purchase. Achieving the goal of providing your audience with valuable content will directly lead to an expanding audience and more traffic to your site.

The most efficient way to share images is with the Pin It Button extension on your web browser.

Open the Lines of Communication

Like most social networks, Pinterest for business allows you to engage the visitors and customers who have pinned images on your website.
To do so, simply visit http://pinterest.com/source/domain.com , but you will replace “domain” with your actual business website’s address. Once you do this, you can review the images that people have pinned.

Pinterest for Business is Important Because…

People are on Pinterest to make purchases or get ideas about what to purchase. As a business, this environment is exactly where you want to be. While other social networks focus on staying in touch, Pinterest is all about making relationships based on common interests, which undoubtedly includes your line of business.

Ian Conklin is the President of OTR Web Solutions a web development company building marketing websites since 2000 with offices in Canada, USA, Europe and South America.
OTR Web is a Value Added Partner with HubSpot.

For all your Inbound Marketing and Website requirements Contact OTR Web.