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 May 1, 2012
Getting Great Testimonials Testimonials are one of the best tools you can use to demonstrate your credibility for your products and/or services. In fact, you can use testimonials to draw attention to less obvious characteristics of your unique values for your company. Imagine you sell fresh produce. You can promise everywhere on your website you have the highest quality and freshest produce available. Every competitor says the same thing. How do you reinforce this to your clients? Include testimonials from [...]
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 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 [...]
by Jerry Hobby on February 28, 2012
NOT Legal Advice about Internet Copyrights A group of web designers were discussing how they should be able to use content from other websites. Then they started discussing the logic behind that thought. One guy figured that it is okay as long as he is not making money from it. Another person suggested that certain types of content can be used under copyright Fair Use laws. But if you read those laws, you will quickly see they are subject to interpretation [...]
