Building a Social Media Marketing Strategy

October 29, 2015 GDI Corporate Leave a comment

We’ve shared many times that social media is a powerful tool to promote your business. Companies large and small are turning away from more traditional marketing channels and towards social media. This is great, because it further demonstrates that social media is a smart place for you to be, but it also shows that social media is becoming a crowded place, where it’s getting more difficult to get your message seen. To deal with these issues, you need to take a strategic approach to social media marketing to ensure that your efforts are worth their time. Read on for guidelines to build the right social media strategy for you.

Networks

Being strategic with your time and planning means not being on every single network. Identify which social media networks make sense for you to market on. One way to do this is to identify who you are trying to reach and match them with a market. Are you trying to reach domain savvy, younger individuals? Twitter may be the right network for you. Are you trying to reach stay at home parents and middle aged users? Facebook may be the right match. It’s important to follow specific network guidelines and best practices to better identify what networks you should be marketing on.

Skills

Are you an experienced videographer or do you absolutely hate seeing and hearing yourself on screen? That’s an easy question you can ask yourself tied to skills. Your answer will decide whether video should be part of your social media strategy or not. Identify what things you excel at, maybe it’s writing. That would mean blogging should be part of your strategy. Outside of simply using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and more, what special skills do you have? Find a way to work them into a strategy. For example, maybe you’re a whiz in photoshop–use powerful images to help your social media marketing strategy.

Goals

Goals can be the biggest part of your strategy decisions. You need to know what you want to accomplish before you can build a winning strategy. Do you want more followers? That’s great, but why? Many people get caught up in the popularity of social media–trying to gain friends and followers–but don’t go farther than that to ask themselves what they hope to get from these friends and followers. Rather than having such a general goal, consider setting more specific goals tied to your business. For example, set the goal of having a certain number of people clicking the link to your website or set the goal of have x number of followers from your home town, which means they could actually go to your brick and mortar business.

Tools

Free tools can help make your social media marketing a bit easier. Many of us don’t have time to be on Facebook or Twitter all day, but it’s necessary to be aware of what’s going on on these networks to do your best marketing. To combat this, use free services like TweetDeck or HootSuite. These allow you to schedule content on multiple social networks as well as monitor your profiles for you when you’re not around so you can see who is talking about you or posting about you at all hours.

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Affiliate

6 Habits of Successful Affiliate Marketers

October 22, 2015 GDI Corporate Leave a comment

Being a successful affiliate marketer can’t be attributed to just one thing–many attributes and practices need to come together for someone to be a leader in affiliate marketing. While this can be a bit intimidating, the good news is that many of the habits of successful people can be learned. Read on to learn more about the habits of the most successful affiliate marketers.

Support

Successful affiliate marketers offer support to others they’re working with. This support can come in the form of leads, introductions, phone calls or other informational material. Success in affiliate marketing depends on the strength and success of your team and leading marketers understand that. Offering support in many different ways ensures a happy team that is more likely to stick with affiliate marketing and succeed.

Product Knowledge

Successful affiliate marketers know their product inside and out. GDI offers a domain, website building tools and associated services. Successful GDI affiliates know all about these offerings, how they work and who they work best for. When you truly know the product (and use it!) it’s much easier to share with others why it’s so important. Successful affiliate marketers also make sure their team members know all about the product to keep building an educated team and a happy customer base.

Friendliness

Successful affiliate marketers are friendly! Like many occupations, affiliate marketing comes with a bit of customer service and an easy way to give great customer service is to be friendly! Being a friendly affiliate marketer might mean sharing information about your affiliate program and asking questions without being too pushy. It can also mean checking in with a new affiliate to see how they are feeling and what you can help with. Friendliness is especially important when you may not get the chance to have face to face conversations with many of your team members–spread your kindness to your team and customers online as much as possible.

Updates

Successful affiliate marketers know the importance of letting team members and customers know that they are active and engaged. The best way to do this is to keep your website updated or send out email updates. This updates show your team that you’re working hard and interested in your business. Your enthusiasm for your business will be contagious.

Flexibility

Successful affiliate marketers know how to be flexible. They know how to be flexible with their business as well as their team members. As product offerings improve or update, successful affiliates know how to position the new product, share updates and adjust their marketing accordingly. Additionally, successful marketers know how to be flexible with meetings and phone calls with their team members. Not all of your team members will be local or even in your same time zone. Successful affiliates know how to be flexible to accommodate team members and customers all over the world.

Interest in Others

Possibly the most important attribute of successful affiliate marketers is an interest in others. Affiliate marketing is all about networking and building relationships, and a true interest in the success of others is needed to do this. Engage with your team members and invest in their success with your time, and the interest will follow.

These are just some habit of successful affiliates. You may have some we haven’t listed that make you successful! Also, habit can be learned so don’t worry if you don’t have them just yet.

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WebSites

5 Tips for Building a Successful Website

October 15, 2015 GDI Corporate Leave a comment

Your website should be a unique extension of you and showcase your business or affiliate opportunities. While your website should look different than others to stand out, there are some universal design elements to keep in mind when building your site. Read on to learn our tips for building a successful website.

Website Navigation

Getting around your site is very important for visitors. Have you ever visited a website and been unable to find what you need and just left? Don’t let that be your website. Consider putting your most important and relevant information on the main landing page–the page that people get to first when they type in your domain. This way people will be sure to see what they need to without clicking around. However, if people do need to visit several pages on your site, make it easy for them. Use a top navigation so that people can see their available options. Also make sure that people can easily get back to the home page by clicking your logo at the top of any page on your website.

Photos and Web Content

You already know that images are important to website design, so that’s not what we’re discussing here. What you need to think about is what happens when those images fail to load. Slow connections and occasional loading mistakes may make it so those carefully selected images you chose won’t show up for some of your visitors. What will you website look like without them? Will your visitors still be able to understand the story of your company? Use images to supplement your story on your main landing page, not tell the whole thing. Also be sure to name your images well so your visitors will understand what the image is supposed to be even if it doesn’t load.

Mobile Website

A large amount of everyone’s traffic to their website is coming from mobile devices–some estimates say close to 50%! This means people are visiting your site on their tablets, smartphones, and other small devices. You don’t need to be a site building expert to optimize your site for mobile, but you do need to take the time to check what your site looks like on mobile devices and adjust accordingly. WordPress and similar services offer a plugin that you can add to your site that creates a clean mobile version, allowing you to access a website in a simple standard way. If you’re not using any of these services, just be sure to keep content above the fold if possible, meaning your most important content appears on your page without having to scroll. In most cases this will ensure that this same important information will fit onto the screen when viewing your site on a mobile device. Also make sure all your navigation menu options show up on mobile. If not, consider changing the margins so your site is more narrow and apt to fit in a small mobile screen.

GDI Affiliate Blog