All posts by GDI Corporate

Affiliate Marketing Success without Face to Face Meetings

August 27, 2015 GDI Corporate Leave a comment

Working in affiliate marketing, it may be rare that you see your customers, clients, or team members face to face. Connections can be harder to establish and harder to keep when your customers are far away. While this can be daunting for some businesses, affiliate marketing can still thrive even if you’re not meeting with people in-person. Here are tips to manage and leverage long distance communications for affiliate marketing success.

Frequent Communication

Frequent communication is an important way to nurture business relationships from far away. Thanks to all the options available for instant communication these days, frequent communication doesn’t have to be a scheduled phone call. Consider reaching out with weekly personalized emails. Schedule a monthly conference call with your team using free conference call services. Depending on your relationship, texting may also be a good option to stay connected with some of your clients and team members. Also consider a Facebook or LinkedIn group to connect with many people at once. Well-timed posting on these social media sites and groups lets your customers and team members know you’re there for them and engaged with the business.

On-Call Availability

Communication is a two way street and that means that you won’t always be the one putting out messaging, sometimes your client needs to talk to you. A good way to make sure you’re available for your client is to set up on-call hours. These are blocks of time where you will be near your phone and available to take a call from clients or customers about anything. These on-call hours ensure you can give your client or customer the time they need and promises to them that you’ll be there. You can offer these hours once a week, or daily, but do try to offer them more frequently than once a month.

Video

Video is a powerful way to build connections when you can be in the same place as someone. Consider using video from the start of your interaction with a new customer. Do this by creating videos that share more about your product or offer tutorials on how to use it. Once you’ve established a relationship, consider video chatting tools like FaceTime or Google Hangouts. These can easily replace phone calls and allow for a more authentic feel for interactions. This can also be helpful to show a client or customer how to use a product in real time.

Strong Product

A strong product always makes building connections that much easier. If you sell a strong product or rely on it for referrals, people will have a great sense of trust in you right away. This also means your interactions are usually positive as opposed to negative phone calls complaining about the product. Choose the right company with the right offerings to ensure a strong product helps you build a strong relationship.

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Social Media, Uncategorized

How to Build Your Network Using LinkedIn

August 20, 2015 GDI Corporate Leave a comment

LinkedIn is a great choice if you’re interested in using social media to build your business. LinkedIn is designed for business and for networking, so if you want to talk business or connect with someone, you won’t be shut out or hidden like on more friendship-based social sites like Facebook. LinkedIn is easy to use, but there are some tricks to ensure you’re getting the most out of the networking site. Read on to learn how to use LinkedIn to seamlessly build your network, business, and connections.

Fill Out Your Profile…Completely!

Your presence on LinkedIn is like your online resume. When applying for a job, you wouldn’t submit a resume with important information missing, so don’t leave your LinkedIn profile only partially complete. LinkedIn offers a handy percentage bar for your profile that lets you know how close you are to having a complete profile. Having a complete profile not only makes this progress meter go away (yay!) but it makes sure you look as professional as possible when your name comes up in a search or you request a connection. If someone sees that you haven’t filled out your profile, they may think you’re not active and reconsider reaching out to connect or to tell you about a new opportunity. A complete profile can lead to many more connections.

Personalize Connect Requests

When you send an invitation to connect on LinkedIn, LinkedIn auto-populates a little message with the invite. This message is nice, but totally impersonal and does nothing to increase the likelihood of someone connecting with you. Take the time to personalize each connection request. The space for text is small, so no need to go overboard. Just write a quick note about why you want to connect and perhaps what you can offer your new connection. This step is crucial when you want to build your network using LinkedIn.

Connect with People Only When It Makes Sense

LinkedIn will constantly show you previews of profiles that you might want to connect with, but don’t take all of these suggestions to heart. The most powerful networks on LinkedIn are carefully curated and connecting with just anyone doesn’t allow you to build this kind of network. Only connect with people if you know them or you can find a mutual connection to do an introduction. Also consider sticking to your industry when building your network. It may be nice to connect with your hairdresser, but if you don’t work in that industry (or have any intention to) it can be confusing to have so many connections not relevant to your work.

Update Your Status and Share Content

LinkedIn allows you to share status updates or write and load full user-created posts to the site. Consider sharing articles related to your business for your status updates, or, if you have time, regularly write a blog post that will go on LinkedIn as well as your own personal site. People will see that you’re active and engaged and blog posts will make you seem like thought leader in your industry.

Keep Your Profile Up to Date

Don’t let you profile get out of date! People are constantly searching LinkedIn for new connections or to suggest jobs. If your profile has your job title from two companies ago, the people that reach out to you won’t be the right ones because they will have old information. Keep your profile up to date and add new accomplishments as they happen to ensure the most beneficial connections.

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Social Media

How to Use Instagram for Marketing

August 13, 2015 GDI Corporate Leave a comment

Social media is a powerful and most often used free tool for marketing. Social networks allow you to connect with new people and build on relationships with those you already know. Some social networks are better for marketing than others. One social network that offers some unique marketing opportunities that you may not have thought of is Instagram. Instagram is a visual medium that lets you quickly connect with people you know and others you don’t. Like open social networks such as Twitter, Instagram is a discoverable network, which means you don’t have to be connected with someone to see their posts.

Here are a few ways to use successfully use Instagram for marketing:

Show Proof

How can you prove that your product works, or that you’re as successful in your affiliate program as you say you are? A photo. Photos offer great proof or a sort of testament for your business. Proof can be a photo of a meeting with excited new members of your team. Proof can be a photo of the pizza special you’re offering at your restaurant. Proof can be a shot of your commission check (with all personal information blacked out) to show you’re earning income. All this proof demonstrates the legitimacy of your business and the opportunities for others. What else could you use for proof?

Use Relevant Quotes

Quotes are very popular on Instagram. How often have you scrolled through your Instagram feed and liked a photo of a powerful, inspirational quote? Quotes get likes and shares. You can easily find quotes to share online by searching or just make your own. One tip to make sure your quote gets you the right attention? Spell check! Go one step farther to encourage engagement on your quote photos by adding text such as “Double tap if you agree.” The double tap is a shortcut to liking the photo, and when someone likes your photos, others can see this under the “Following Activity.” Many users click on “Following Activity” to see what posts their friends have liked, giving your content more reach.

Inspire People

Inspiration and motivation are great for business. Instagram is an easy way to share inspiration for your business and your team. Inspiration you share on Instagram might be a post of what you’d like your office or future business to look like. It can also be from other succeeding in an affiliate program and showing what they have achieved as a way to inspire yourself and your team.

Make Use of Hashtags

We explained in the introduction that Instagram is a highly discoverable social network. One thing that makes it discoverable is hashtags. Much like Twitter, users on Instagram use hashtags to identify their photos as well as find new ones. When posting, use lots of hashtags to ensure people find your content. Use hashtags relevant to your image as well as to your business. While hashtags often appear in the main text of the tweet on Twitter, hashtags should always come after your caption on Instagram. Follow this format: Here is my photo. #hashtag #business #affiliate #income.

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