9 Ways to Grow Your Startup With Social Media

I'm sure you are getting tired of hearing it.

Everyone is telling you to proliferate your brand, get out there on social media and grow an audience, develop relationships with your customers and potential customers… The list goes on.

Unfortunately, if you are a startup immersed in the frenzy of just getting your feet on the ground, it is hard to find the time.

But, as Yoda would say, “Find the time you must, or a business no longer will you have.”

Here is your checklist. Don't do it all at once, but keep these 9 strategies in front of you and set aside a block of time each week to work on them.

1. Choose the proper channels for your presence

You cannot support a presence on all social media channels right now. Later, when you are all grown up, you can. So, focus on 2-3 platforms that you know are most popular with your target audience.

Choosing those platforms is not as hard as you think:

• Develop your customer persona. What this means is that you develop a complete profile of your typical customer. Single Grain has designed a great graphic with all that should be included in your persona.

• Once you have a complete profile, you are ready to figure out where this person hangs out on social media. Facebook is a given, but beyond that, you will need to dig a bit. Fortunately, there is a lot of research out there that will tell you where Sally is. Choose 2-3 places where Sally hangs out and focus on those.


• Your profile will also tell you the type of content and posts you should create for Sally, and how you go about developing a relationship with her. If, for example, she is a millennial, then she can smell a sales pitch from far off and hates it; she will ask her friends about their experiences with you; she will want you to entertain her and let her interact with your content; and she will want you to be socially responsible – involved in helping others and the planet.

Case Study: Chipotle

Here is why “Sally” will connect with Chipotle.

First, it is a brand that values fresh ingredients and has the option to “build your own” items like tacos, bowls, and burritos. Both ingredients and the experience will be appealing to her, as a millennial.

But Chipotle has gone further. It has as web series titled “Farmed and Dangerous” in which a millennial farmer who believes in sustainable, chemical-free farming is pitted against a large corporate food company. It is a comedy with its own website, and regular episodes are posted, complete with music and show trivia.

Before this series even began, Chipotle had already developed an iPhone game called “The Scarecrow” in which a scarecrow is searching for natural rather than processed food.

Sally loves Chipotle because it values the planet, natural foods and is critical of corporate agriculture. The restaurant experience certainly helps too.

2. Be consistent and regular

Once you have identified your platforms, you must set up a schedule of posts and stick to it. If you don't stick to your schedule then followers will drop you and move on.

Those posts had better be fresh and engaging. If they strike a chord, they will be shared. For example, if Instagram is a selected platform, put together a bunch of images in advance with great quotes which your persona will enjoy. Stack them up and post one a day. When the supply gets low, take the time to create more.

This goes for your website too. Many businesses have fresh new content regularly posted on their home pages, so that visitors are engaged and entertained right away.

Case Study: Dollar Shave Club

This company pretty much revolutionized the razor industry with its subscription-based shaving club. “Members” pay a really reasonable monthly fee and have razors and other grooming products delivered to their doors.

Their website regularly has new videos, some of them interactive, that visitors love to view and then share. An innovative marketing plan but a method to bring customers and potential customers back regularly to see the new content.

3. Start and stay in the conversation

You can start conversations by asking questions or asking your readers to do something. And when you get answers and comments you keep the conversation going.

Every day, check your social media pages for feedback, comments and questions. Respond quickly. Never let a comment go without a response, whether that comment is positive, neutral, or negative. This is how relationships are built.

Case Study: ModCloth

If you check any of ModCloth's social media platforms, you will not only find new content every day but you will find conversations in which the clothier responds to questions and jumps in with response to customers.

Just looking at its Facebook page, you can also see how strings of conversation just keep on going, with a ModCloth response to each customer.

4. Engage your audience so they want to share your content

There are several things you can do to capture and intrigue your audience.

• Publish quizzes, polls, and surveys. You've seen these on Facebook and you know you have participated. You want the results and then you want to share those results with your friends.


• Hold contests. This totally engages an audience. Jack Daniels does this all the time. They invite followers to submit their strangest bar stories or to submit pictures of the weirdest bar they have ever visited. ModCloth holds contests to name clothing items it has purchased.


• Always use visuals because they are shared more. And explore some of the newer venues for visuals – real time stuff through Meerkat or Periscope.


• Incorporate humor – this can be done by a “joke of the day” on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook. Use memes.


• Support a charitable cause – show photos of your team involved and ask followers to get involved and to share your call to action. Headbands of Hope does this well. For every headband purchased, one is donated to a little girl with cancer, along with $1 toward cancer research. The founder may have gotten the idea from Tom's Shoes. Check them out.


• Feature customers in your posts. Most of ModCloth's Facebook page is devoted to customers wearing clothing they have bought.

Case Study: Headbands of Hope

And a few shots from the “Giving Gallery”

5. Stay on top of social media changes

Here are just a few recent changes that platforms have implemented in an effort to keep their populations with them.

• Twitter allows media and more characters


• Instagram has implemented the carousel so that more than one image can be posted at a time


• Facebook now has groups


• Most content marketing websites will keep you informed of changes as they occur. Keep up.

6. Use the 80/20 rule

No one wants a pushy sales pitch – ever. Just don't do it.

80% of what you post should not be related to your product or service. It should be related to developing trust and relationships and getting your brand known. 20% of what you post can relate to your products or services – advertised sales or discounts, new product launches, free trials, etc.

7. Use amazing headlines

Check out some of the master's at this. You've probably been intrigued or compelled by many yourself. For some headline examples see Upworthy's Facebook post titles – always a photo and always a headline you cannot resist.

Headlines are tough to create – there are some good headline generator tools available, though, so find one you like and use it, even if you have to pay a bit for their upgrade.

Here are a couple of outrageous titles courtesy of BoostBlogTraffic.com;

How Spending $162,301.42 on Clothes Made Me $692,500 – Neil Patel

Caution: Stop Masturbating With Your Money – Ashley Ambirge

It's unlikely that many will pass up these posts!

8. Know when to post

Remember that persona you developed in #1?

Well, you know where she is; now you need to know when she is there. Fortunately, others have done this research for you. Not only will you find out when best to post but you will also learn how many times a day, week, or month you should re-post.

You can even set up these re-posts automatically.

9. Have a crisis plan

Figure out in advance what your strategy will be if someone “bashes” you on social media. It may be an angry customer or it may be someone who was offended by something you posted. You have to fix this and fix it immediately. Letting it hang out there with no positive and helpful or contrite response is a “killer.”

Google “complaints about _______(your company name)” often and see if there is anything bad out there. Handle it immediately.

This looks like a lot to do, and you may be pretty tired just reading about it all. Take heart. You don't have to do everything at once.

Pick a couple of things from this list and see how they work for you (give them some time); then add as you can. Your business isn't going to grow overnight and neither is your return on social media efforts. Be patient, but be steady.

Guest Author: Daniela McVicker is an author, freelance blogger and educator. She believes that success depends on knowing the ideas that allow you to manage and master the universe of information.Currently works as an editor for content creation service. You can get in touch with her on Facebook or Twitter.

The post 9 Ways to Grow Your Startup With Social Media appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog.

How to Maximize Your Content Exposure on LinkedIn

Are you taking advantage of all of LinkedIn's content marketing features? Do you know what types of content work best on LinkedIn? With a few tweaks to what you post on LinkedIn, you can build brand awareness, generate leads, and drive more revenue. In this article you'll discover how to maximize your LinkedIn content exposure. [...]

This post How to Maximize Your Content Exposure on LinkedIn first appeared on .

- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle

Boost Your Web Traffic with These 5 Proven Tips

No matter how much Web traffic you get, you always want more. After all, the more traffic your website receives, the more customers you have, at least in theory.

But maybe you've struggled to get even 100 visitors a month to your website. How do other small businesses manage to attract hundreds of thousands of visitors? Below are five tips to boost your Web traffic as well as your sales.

1. Be Unlike the Competition

When you search for your type of product or service, how many search results come up? Now, consider for a moment: what do you deliver on your site that no other competitor does? It's a challenging question, but one you need to be able to answer to drive traffic.

Here's an example: River Pools might not be a household name, but they are a stand out in the pool industry. Several years ago the business launched a detailed, useful blog, and now it is the most trafficked pool website in the world, with 500,000 visitors a month. Its content is what makes the website and the business stand out. Does yours?

2. Guest Blog on Quality Channels

All of your marketing efforts should drive traffic to your website, but few do it as well as guest blogging. When you write valuable content and publish it on sites that target your audience, two things happen:

1. You have a quality link from a well-respected website back to your site


2. People can click your link in your bio to learn more about you and your brand

Now, not all sites that accept guest blogs are created equal, so be picky about where you publish. You want a site that your audience frequents, and one that boosts promotions of its guest blog posts.

3. Keep SEO in Mind, But Don't Obsess

Knowing the right keywords and SEO is key to online success, but the problem is that Google changes the game every year or so, which means what works now will change. You're better off naturally using keywords that make sense for your site. If you sell hand painted dog bowls, you'll use “hand painted dog bowls” in your copy. It's intuitive. But don't force it in. Use them where they make sense, and include your city name if you're a local retail business.

4. Create Compelling Offers

Another way to drive traffic to your site is to create email opt-in offers people can't resist. That might be a coupon for your products or a free ebook on a topic people are interested in. If you are a realtor, you could create an ebook on “7 Ways to Have Better Curb Appeal.” Set up a landing page for this offer and require an email to get access to your offer. Then, promote your offer and landing page on all your marketing channels.

5. Hold a Contest

Every December, I hold a 12 Days of Giveaways contest. Not only is it a fun way to give back to my small business community, but it also sends a lot of new traffic to my website. My contest draws in people who have not come across my site before, so this is their opportunity to learn more about what I do, and sign up to stay in touch. If you hold a contest, make sure there's value for participants, and always require them to click to a link on your site to get the details or enter the contest.

Attracting high numbers of visitors to your website is an ongoing effort. Try one new thing at a time to boost your Web traffic so you can properly measure it, then add in a new tactic.

Republished by permission. Original here.

Traffic Photo via Shutterstock

This article, "Boost Your Web Traffic with These 5 Proven Tips" was first published on Small Business Trends

How to Use Trello to Manage Your Facebook Group Posts

Are you active in Facebook groups? Looking for a better way to organize the content you share in those groups? Managing your content in Trello lets you spend less time figuring out what to share in Facebook groups and more time engaging with fellow members. In this article you'll discover how to use Trello to [...]

This post How to Use Trello to Manage Your Facebook Group Posts first appeared on .

- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle

Boost Your Web Traffic with These 5 Proven Tips

No matter how much Web traffic you get, you always want more. After all, the more traffic your website receives, the more customers you have, at least in theory.

But maybe you've struggled to get even 100 visitors a month to your website. How do other small businesses manage to attract hundreds of thousands of visitors? Below are five tips to boost your Web traffic as well as your sales.

1. Be Unlike the Competition

When you search for your type of product or service, how many search results come up? Now, consider for a moment: what do you deliver on your site that no other competitor does? It's a challenging question, but one you need to be able to answer to drive traffic.

Here's an example: River Pools might not be a household name, but they are a stand out in the pool industry. Several years ago the business launched a detailed, useful blog, and now it is the most trafficked pool website in the world, with 500,000 visitors a month. Its content is what makes the website and the business stand out. Does yours?

2. Guest Blog on Quality Channels

All of your marketing efforts should drive traffic to your website, but few do it as well as guest blogging. When you write valuable content and publish it on sites that target your audience, two things happen:

1. You have a quality link from a well-respected website back to your site


2. People can click your link in your bio to learn more about you and your brand

Now, not all sites that accept guest blogs are created equal, so be picky about where you publish. You want a site that your audience frequents, and one that boosts promotions of its guest blog posts.

3. Keep SEO in Mind, But Don't Obsess

Knowing the right keywords and SEO is key to online success, but the problem is that Google changes the game every year or so, which means what works now will change. You're better off naturally using keywords that make sense for your site. If you sell hand painted dog bowls, you'll use “hand painted dog bowls” in your copy. It's intuitive. But don't force it in. Use them where they make sense, and include your city name if you're a local retail business.

4. Create Compelling Offers

Another way to drive traffic to your site is to create email opt-in offers people can't resist. That might be a coupon for your products or a free ebook on a topic people are interested in. If you are a realtor, you could create an ebook on “7 Ways to Have Better Curb Appeal.” Set up a landing page for this offer and require an email to get access to your offer. Then, promote your offer and landing page on all your marketing channels.

5. Hold a Contest

Every December, I hold a 12 Days of Giveaways contest. Not only is it a fun way to give back to my small business community, but it also sends a lot of new traffic to my website. My contest draws in people who have not come across my site before, so this is their opportunity to learn more about what I do, and sign up to stay in touch. If you hold a contest, make sure there's value for participants, and always require them to click to a link on your site to get the details or enter the contest.

Attracting high numbers of visitors to your website is an ongoing effort. Try one new thing at a time to boost your Web traffic so you can properly measure it, then add in a new tactic.

Republished by permission. Original here.

Traffic Photo via Shutterstock

This article, "Boost Your Web Traffic with These 5 Proven Tips" was first published on Small Business Trends

How to Use Trello to Manage Your Facebook Group Posts

Are you active in Facebook groups? Looking for a better way to organize the content you share in those groups? Managing your content in Trello lets you spend less time figuring out what to share in Facebook groups and more time engaging with fellow members. In this article you'll discover how to use Trello to [...]

This post How to Use Trello to Manage Your Facebook Group Posts first appeared on .

- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle

13 Super-Easy Ways to Immediately Improve Your SEO

What comes to mind when you see the term “SEO“? Where do you focus all your energy when you’re trying to improve your search rankings?

Most people focus a large proportion of their time on “keywords” and not much else.

However, if you’ve been working diligently on keyword optimization but are still not getting the results you want, you may need to consider other factors that affect search engine ranking.

Search engine algorithms not only rate the relevance of your keywords on pages, and in the meta data, in relation to a user’s search terms, but they also evaluate information such as the duration visitors stay on your site, bounce rate, broken links, pages viewed, inbound and outbound links and so on…

Getting users to stay on your website and interact with your content can boost your website’s ranking, and you can do so by improving the user experience and usability of your website.

Using keywords to get visitors to click through to your site is only half the story. If you approach SEO as “optimizing your website for people who use search engines,” the notion of user-friendliness becomes an important factor.

In this article, I’ll look at the various aspects of website usability that impact SEO, how to improve website usability to boost SEO ranking and what to do when there seems to be conflict between usability and SEO “best practice.”

What is website usability?

Website usability encompasses many elements of website design, most of which are also tied to conversion.

Here are a few that can affect search engine ranking:

• Effectiveness: can users achieve their objectives when they land on your website? e.g. Can they find the information they need, order the products they desire, or contact the company for customer service?


• Efficiency: adding to effectiveness is efficiency. Besides being able to achieve an objective, how quickly can a user complete a task? If visitors cannot find what they need effectively and efficiently on your website, they’re more likely to navigate away. The shorter time they spend on your website may have a negative impact on the SEO ranking.


• Learnability: can users learn to navigate your website quickly? Are the calls-to-action that are clickable consistent so visitors know how to interact? When visitors spend too much time trying to figure out how to use your website, they’re spending less time consuming your information or looking at your products. Plus, when they can’t find what they need, it’s likely that they will get frustrated, navigate away and never come back.


• Memorability: can users re-find your website next time they go onto a search engine? Repeat traffic can help you get a Google ranking boost. Visitors may find your website and then navigate away for a number of reasons. They may remember it later and try to search for it again. Is the keyword associated with that particular search memorable enough so they can find your site again?


• Error Prevention: certain errors on a website can affect not only user experience but also SEO ranking. e.g. A 404 Page Not Found error, a link that says one thing but displays something else, or a broken link that is no longer valid.

(Image Source)

Why is website usability important to SEO?

Search engines reward sites that are user friendly, which means they have high usability. Google favors sites that are not only rich in keywords, but also demonstrate user engagement.

SEO ranking improves when visitors stay on your site longer, view more pages, and repeat their visits. The more user-friendly your site is, the more likely this is going to happen.

Let’s have a look at 13 elements that not only improve usability on your site, but also help increase your SEO ranking:

1. Useful, high quality, relevant content

“Dwell time” is the amount of time visitors spend on your website and it can affect SEO ranking.

When you provide useful content, visitors tend to stay longer on your website to consume the information and therefore increase the dwell time.

Based on this research, content between 2,000 – 2,500 words seems to rank the highest in search engine results.

Although word count doesn’t rule the SEO world – nobody will read your stuff if it’s not helpful to them – longer content does give you the opportunity to provide more value, include more keywords, incorporate more outbound links, and of course, get people to spend more time reading to increase dwell time.

Another reason to create highly useful content is that when visitors bookmark your content on Chrome, it will boost your Google ranking.

Content around 2,500 words gets the most Google juice.

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2. Page load speed

Both Google and Bing take page-loading speed into account in their ranking algorithm.

Users may leave your site if they have to wait even just an extra few seconds for each page to load. That would hurt your dwell time, increase your bounce rate and reduce the number of pages viewed – all of which could hurt your SEO ranking.

There are many ways to increase page load speed, some of which include using a caching plug-in, making sure the code is clean and streamlined, optimizing image sizes, reducing the number of plug-ins, and minimizing redirects.

Properly optimizing images can help reduce file size and improve load speed.

(Image Source)

Research has shown that using good quality images can increase conversion rate. Properly optimizing your images can help you take advantage of using photos to generate empathy, increase trust, and improve a visitor’s experience without hampering load time which could affect your SEO ranking.

3. Image optimization

Besides image file format and sizing, there are other ways to make sure your images are working hard for you on the SEO front.

You can signal relevancy of your content to search engines by using keywords for your image file name, alt tag, title, description and caption.

4. Header tags

Nobody likes running into a wall of text.

Good formatting of your content helps improve the user experience of your website tremendously. It makes readers more willing to spend time to read your content and come back for more, which will ultimately signal your relevancy to search engines.

Proper use of header tags can help break up your content into sections that are easier to read and utilize.

It’s easy to insert header tags in WordPress to improve user experience and boost your SEO ranking.

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Search engines also rate keywords in header tags more heavily. By including relevant terms in your header tags, you are also boosting your SEO ranking against those keywords.

5. Outbound links

To make your content more useful and relevant, you can link out to authority sites for more in-depth information your readers can use.

Linking out to well-respected authority sites will not only increase the relevancy of your content and time readers spend on your site, but it is also believed to send trust signals to Google and improve SEO ranking.

However, more is not necessarily better. Too many outbound links can be distracting and make the content hard to get through.

6. Different multimedia

Images, videos, slideshows and audio can help enrich the user experience and allow you to deliver information in a way that is most suited to your ideal site visitors.

They also act as a signal of quality content to search engines… after all, you have put in the work to make your content look good and interactive!

Video marketing has become an increasingly integral element in driving user engagement and conversion. It’s found that websites using videos can achieve a 4.8% higher conversion rate, compared to a 2.9% average on websites that don’t use videos.

Videos get visitors to spend more time on a website and retain more information.

(Image Source)

7. Broken links

Who wants to get a 404 page after clicking on a link? Broken links make for bad usability.

Not only that, search engines consider a large number of broken links as a signal of an old, neglected site and this can impact your SEO ranking.

Thankfully, you don’t have to go through every single page on your website and test the links manually. There are many tools and apps to help ensure that your site is free of broken links, such as:

• Screaming Frog SEO Spider


• Google Webmaster Tool


• W3C Link Checker

 8. Readability

Even if you have a well-educated audience, they probably don’t want to be deciphering a PhD dissertation every time they visit your website and read your content. You don’t want them to give up reading your content and click away because it’s too difficult to digest.

Making your content easy to read and understand helps make it useful to your readers. Some experts also believe that Google takes readability into account when ranking webpages.

You can use a variety of tools to test your content’s readability, including:

• Readability-Score.com


• The Readability Test Tool


• Readability statistics in MS Word 

9. Layout and formatting

Proper formatting and a user-friendly layout can help improve user experience and make your content easy to scan and digest, so your readers will stay on your site longer and consume your website’s information.

Formatting can help dramatically improve a webpage’s usability by making the content easy to read:

• Use font size and typography that are easy to read.


• Use bold type and colors – sparingly and strategically – to call out important information and make the content easy to scan.


• Use short paragraphs and ample line spacing in between – nobody likes a wall of text.


• Use bulleted or numbered lists for clarity.


• Use techniques such as sliders, tabs, progressive layouts, structured grids, modal windows, rollover elements, accordions and mega drop-down-menus to organize content and add interactivity.


• Break up content into sections with subheads. Proper use of header tags that include keywords also helps boost SEO ranking.

10. Contact us page

According to this Google document (p.98), websites that have sufficient contact information are considered to be more trust-worthy and therefore may rank higher by search engines.

Including a Contact Us page on your website and putting the link in the navigation not only makes for good user experience (especially if you have an ecommerce site) but can also potentially earn you some Google juice.

It’s found that a well-designed contact form increases user participation in a company’s online presence. It also helps generate new business opportunities, capture new leads, improve customer service, and more.

Example of a Contact Us page.

11. Site architecture and navigation

When visitors can’t find what they need on a website right away, they most likely leave the site and this contributes to high bounce rate, low dwell time and low number of pages viewed.

A well-thought-out site architecture reflected in clear navigation is critical in helping visitors find what they want on your site, accomplish their goals and come back repeatedly (repeated visits can improve SEO ranking.)

A “flat” site architecture not only makes content easier to find, it can also help improve SEO ranking as it surfaces links of all critical pages making it easier for search engines to crawl the entire site.

(Image Source)

Example of a clear concise website navigation.

12. Mobile optimization

As of April 2015, Google has started to penalize sites that are not mobile optimized by bumping down their search engine ranking.

More and more users are consuming content on mobile devices, and not being mobile optimized is going to affect user experience and conversion.

It is particularly important for B2B marketers. Research has shown that 77 percent of executives use their smartphone to research a product or service for their business.

Business executives use mobile devices to research products and services for their businesses.

(Image Source)

It’s not just for B2B websites either. Companies like Yelp that act as search directories connecting consumers to businesses found that 55% of all searches comes from mobile devices.

If your website has been around for a while, it’s time to test it to make sure it’s compliant.

Number of users accessing the Internet via mobile devices has surpassed the number using desktop.

(Image Source)

13. Social sharing

The number of Facebook shares, Tweets, Pinterest pins and other social media mentions can influence SEO rankings.

Installing social sharing buttons on your website not only makes it easy for users to share your content, and thereby improve user experience, it can also help you rank higher on searches.

Social sharing also helps drive purchasing behavior: Nearly 4 in 10 Facebook users report they have gone from liking, sharing or commenting on an item to actually buying it, while 43% of social media users have purchased a product after sharing or liking it on Pinterest, Facebook or Twitter.

In this case study, a pest control company boosted organic traffic by 15% in just 2 weeks after running a campaign aimed to increase social sharing.

Peep Laja managed to get over 40,000 unique visits to his site in month number one, having most of the traffic generated through social media sharing.

To get you started, here are a few social share button plug-ins to try:

• SumoMe


• Shareaholic


• WP Social Sharing

Resolving the conflict between usability and SEO “best practice”

In most cases, elements that contribute to good usability also result in good search engine rankings. However, there are instances when conflict my occur:

• Many content creators “stuff” keywords onto a page to get SEO juice, but that could undermine the readability and user experience of the content.


• The attempt to get keywords into an article can affect the vocabulary choice of the writer, sometimes making content hard to comprehend.


• Outbound links can be good for SEO, but too many of them can be distracting and if they are not directly related to the topic at hand, it can impact the reader’s experience.


• Overloading footers that contain every single page on the site may help with SEO, but it also creates confusion when a visitor is trying to look for certain key pages.

Sometimes, particularly in the short term, you may have to make a trade-off between more traffic from SEO and optimal user experience.

Don’t get lured into just comparing numbers – such as visitor numbers and page views. Traffic from SEO may give you higher numbers in the short term, but better user experience can often result in higher conversions.

In the long run, with an eye on conversion and ultimately revenue, it’s often a smart move to prioritize user experience instead of milking every last SEO trick.

Guest Author: Daniel Louis is the Chief Marketing Officer at TruConversion.com Experience with both startups and enterprise clients have given him unique perspective and ability to connect the dots for brands of all sizes. He loves writing on content strategy, marketing, and optimization initiatives.

The post 13 Super-Easy Ways to Immediately Improve Your SEO appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog.