by Jerry Hobby on May 15, 2012
The DIY Social Death Spiral What is the number one question on your mind about boosting your online business? Lately, the biggest topic that people ask me about is, “What do I need to do on Facebook, Twitter, etc?” In fact, Facebook is probably the biggest story in the news and may continue to be the biggest story for a while to come. Social media sites and the culture of social media is evolving from some “thing” you [...]
by Jerry Hobby on May 8, 2012
Boost Sales With Transformation Stories Testimonials are a critical part of building credibility for your products and services. Let’s take that a step further and turn those testimonials into powerful stories. Instead of thinking about what you CAN do for your clients – think of what you HAVE done for your clients. Think of it from the client’s perspective. Perhaps an accountant could claim he did a great job of helping a customer get a tax problem solved. [...]
by Jerry Hobby on April 24, 2012
Search Engines versus Social Media Sites Optimizing your website for search engines, otherwise known as SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a tried and true strategy for improving your rankings on Google and other search engines. What does it take to be successful with this strategy? A lot of work, unfortunately. The pay-off can take some time as well. Typically, an SEO campaign starts with putting the correct keywords on your website, some revisions of the content to be more [...]
by Jerry Hobby on April 17, 2012
Winning and Losing at Facebook Marketing Recent studies show that people are as quick to un-like you as they are to like you. People prefer to have a strong loyal relationship with companies, but as in real life, they must feel an attachment and loyalty to you. This is frequently missing from most social media campaigns. It’s common to use social media to post a series of messages to Facebook, twitter, or other networks. Is this effective? Does this [...]
by Jerry Hobby on April 10, 2012
Let’s Invent a New Business How many times have you looked at some business or invention and said, “I wish I had thought of that!”? Let’s try a new angle and see if we can create a brand new idea from scratch. Sound fun? It’s not easy, but there is a mindset that can help you think creatively and possibly come up with some new ideas. Most new ideas come from making improvements to an old idea. The iPhone was [...]
by Jerry Hobby on April 3, 2012
The Large Corporate Approach to Social Media Have you noticed that TV commercials, product packaging, and other branding efforts from major corporations are all mentioning Facebook? If not, pay attention. Facebook and twitter are showing up on more marketing materials than ever. It’s funny because it is a “one toe in the water” approach to it. In other words, they don’t have any idea how to make socail media work at their level. But they all got one [...]
by Jerry Hobby on March 27, 2012
What’s The Difference? I meet a lot of people who are starting a new business or at least contemplating it. There are two very common challenges facing most of these startups. Both of them are really just two angles on the same dilemma. Maybe it’s a left-brain or right-brain thing. I don’t know. One crowd seems to be looking to start a business that doesn’t exist already. They want to have an original product and whatever ideas they come up with, [...]
by Jerry Hobby on March 20, 2012
Private Communities in Social Media Social media is becoming more essential than ever and we expect to see the highest growth in social media during 2012. This growth is impressive because it demonstrates the outstanding capabilities social media has brought to personal and professional communications. One popular trend has been to become friends with as many people as possible and accept as many friend requests that come your way. The more people in your network, the more activity, and that’s [...]
by Jerry Hobby on March 13, 2012
Social Media Marketing Mishaps Have you started your social media marketing yet? Many large companies have been launching social media experiments and some are “epic fails”. To understand these stories, you need to understand one detail. In Twitter, hashtags are used to define keywords for search. If you put the keyword #houston in your twitter message, then anyone searching for #houston can follow those messages even if they don’t follow that user. Following hashtag keywords is extremely popular. Try [...]
by Jerry Hobby on March 3, 2012
Make Your Customers Happy to Buy From You There are many ways to make a website more effective. But the most important of them all is probably the “copy”. The words on the page help to capture attention and help to convert a visitor into a customer. The key is to be sure the copy on your website appeals at the decision-making part of your visitor’s brain. You know who your potential customers are. You know what service you provide [...]
