Author Archives: Connie Ragen Green

Relationship Marketing for Entrepreneurs

Relationship Marketing

I’ve incorporated something called “relationship marketing” into my business since the very beginning, and now many people are doing the same thing. The idea behind this is that it focuses on client and prospect loyalty and long-term engagement rather than shorter-term goals like customer acquisition and individual sales.

A couple of years ago I was having a phone conversation with legendary marketer Marlon Sanders when I mentioned that I had just got off the phone with one of my new customers.

“Stop the presses!” he exclaimed, just loudly enough to make me jump out of my chair while halfway across the country.

Marlon could not believe that I took people offline to connect with them at various points during our relationship. He insisted on knowing more, so I spent the next two hours sharing what was working for me and answering each of his questions in great detail.

I knew that Marlon did this as well. Years ago I had purchased something from him and had difficulty with downloading the file. When I put in a support ticket I was pleasantly surprised to hear from him personally on the phone. He still does that to this day from time to time.

I shared my thoughts on why reaching out to a prospect, new customer, or to an ongoing client by picking up the phone or scheduling a call with them is such as excellent idea.

First, just about no one else is doing this. Second, when you are speaking directly with someone in this way you quickly establish a relationship with them that is unlike anything you can do through emails or even small group calls or webinars. It’s even better than meeting them in person at a live workshop or conference in that you do not have the distraction of the crowd and the event.

Finally, speaking with them on the phone allows you to control the situation and truly listen to what the other person is telling you. Many times I will make them an offer that I wouldn’t have otherwise because now I know more about their situation and what they need.

Marlon asked me how long these calls typically lasted, and if I followed up with people in the future. I told him that the calls were best when limited to thirty minutes. That way we both stayed on topic and took the conversation seriously. And yes, I do follow up with people by email several days or a week later.

Then Marlon asked me if I had a specific funnel or path I would encourage someone to follow. My answer was no, because one size will never fit all. Each person’s goals and needs are different, depending upon a variety of variables. For example, someone could be brand new to online marketing and need more basic and general online marketing training. Or someone could be working on a book and need my Write – Publish – Prosper training program to help them finish writing the book so they could begin marketing and selling it to their target audience.

That day Marlon and I had one of our most productive conversations ever. We discussed the sales process, what’s new in online marketing, and how we could best support each other in the coming year. Then we got back on the topic of relationship marketing and why it is more important than just about anything else.

After that call my head hurt from so much thinking and analyzing, but it was a satisfying pain.

I’m Connie Ragen Green, an Online Marketing Strategist, bestselling author, and international speaker. Let’s connect to find out how we may work together in the future.

Creating Your Sales Offer Funnel

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Why Do You Need A Sales Offer Funnel?

Your job is to create the right information and content to lead your audience from awareness to purchase. A great way to do that is through creating a sales offer funnel. You’ll match each stage of your audience’s buying cycle to the content that helps them become a paying customer or to move through your funnel, buying more expensive products or services.

Planning an Info Product

One of the best ways to get people to sign up for your list and get into your funnel is by creating an information product. The best way to plan any information product is to figure out at least one problem that you can easily solve for your audience. The information product can be a longer report, a short report, a checklist, or something else that is useful for your audience.

Everything starts with knowing who your audience is, where they hang out, what they do, and what they want or need. You could start with a small item as a freebie opt-in, building up to the most expensive products and services. However, there is an even better way to create your entire offer funnel fast.

Once you have done the research about your audience, you know who they are, what their pain points are, and how you can solve their problems then you can actually build your offer funnel backward. Instead of starting with the smallest thing first, start with the biggest most outrageous expensive product or service that you can offer then tiered down to the least expensive item or freebie after the fact.

Identify Your Most Expensive Product First

Depending on your niche, start by writing down what your most expensive product or service will be. It will help to write it all down as if you’re going to create a sales page. Choose what the price point will be for this most expensive product or service and all the benefits of it to your audience.

If you already have a super expensive product or service such as a long-term, one-on-one coaching package, start with that. Because everything you do is designed to get more of your audience into your one-on-one flagship product or service. When you start from there you can easily create the less expensive products and opt-ins that will most fit with this audience.

Identify Lower Priced Products that Work with Your Most Expensive Product

Now look at any lower priced products that you have that fit in with your flagship product or service. If you don’t have any, you’ll need to create them as they fit in with the buying cycle of your audience. For example, your flagship product is a $10,000 dollar a year group coaching with one-on-one coaching options mastermind. What can you find or create that will appeal to and help your coaching clients? Items like checklists, Facebook Groups, webinars, courses, training, information products and more can all fit into your sales offer funnel as long as they make the audience curious about the flagship product.

Identify Free Content/Gifts That Leads to Increasingly Higher Priced Items

Finally, you can fit in freebies that attract people to your flagship product or your lower-priced products too. These might be free webinars, blog posts, infographics, eBooks, small reports, case studies, interviews, and more. As long as it’s of interest to those who would want your main product you can use it. For example, keep in mind you want people to join your flagship coaching program mentioned above, you might offer content that explains why coaching can work using case studies to prove your point.

Forms & Formats of Products & Services

Let’s look at some potential formats of different levels of products and or services to help get your creative juices flowing. Your most expensive product has a format, as do your other offerings. Some products include a combination of formats. This is just a potential example for you to use as a guide.

Most Expensive (Flagship) Product

Offer: Group coaching, with one-on-one coaching possibilities, as well as a membership website that offers a lot of materials and lessons. Your price is $10,000 a year and includes all the bells and whistles. Your exclusive clients get access to all your checklists, mind maps, infographics, lessons, courses, information products, group chat, group discussion board, weekly webinars, weekly Q & A, a one hour one-on-one call each week and daily email access and discounts on live events and other products that might be of interest to the audience.

My Flagship product is my Internet Marketing Six Pack training course, even though I also offer a Mastermind group through the Online Marketing Incubator program.

Mid-Range Product

Now that you have your product, you can easily identify mid-range products that will solve a problem or two for your audience, while also make them want more. A great mid-range item is an information product that solves one of your audience’s problems. For example, if you’re a business coach, you might offer a course on branding, content planning, or social media marketing. Essentially, you can take one small part of your cornerstone product and make it one of the mid-range products you offer. Say that one of the things you help your clients do is choose a business name. You might offer a short course on naming your business.

Intro Product

When you figure which items you’ll offer in the midrange area, then you can identify the intro products to offer your audience as a part of your sales offer funnel. Intro products can be low priced or free products. Anything that requires an email address to opt-in will work great here. Webinars, teleseminars, podcasts, social media posts, Facebook live, YouTube videos, free eBooks or reports, checklists, and so forth all make great intro level products and services as long as they offer a taste of what’s in the flagship or mid-range product or service offerings. Let’s say you have a mid-range product that is a six-week course on branding. You can offer a free branding checklist to collect email addresses and market that mid-range product and the flagship product to the people who signed up.

Free Products

While some of your intro products may be free, there are things that you may not consider free products. Blog posts, social media posts, guest posts, images, and other things can be also being thought of as products. But, if you have a good grasp of what you can do and what is possible, it’s going to be a lot easier to figure out what you need to offer your audience in terms of tools and free information. For example, I offer many Special Reports at no cost whatsoever and these serve me well in my business.

Your product generally will be a combination of all of these types of content and services. One way to figure out what you can offer in every step of your sales offer funnel is to conduct a content audit. When you find out what you have, and what you need, you can fill in the gaps.

I’m Connie Ragen Green, an Online Marketing Strategist, bestselling author of more than a dozen books, international speaker, and Mentor. I would love to connect with you to see how we might work together in the future.

Podcast: Expand Your Product Line

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How to Create and Expand Your “Product Line”

This month’s podcast is a discussion of creating your “product line” of courses and information products for online entrepreneurs. Here are some of the points I explain in great detail during this training call:

The first discussion point is…

What does it means to create and expand your “product line” instead of just creating individual information products? I’ve done this successfully over the past twelve months and you can, too. Let’s discuss this topic in further detail…

So, How Do You Create and Expand Your Product Line?

Make a detailed list of the topics you teach others. Take the time to include everything you can think of, even if you have yet to teach it to others.
Choose your overall topic and begin outlining a Signature training course on this. The idea here is to become known for being an expert and authority in your niche.
Now make a list of everything within your Signature course that could be turned into a “stand alone” training.
Start teaching where you are most comfortable, even if it’s not in your overall area of knowledge, experience, and expertise.
Begin with a regular (weekly, bi-weekly) free teleseminar series and create a unique Study Guide to share with listeners each time.

Begin by taking these steps to discover what your product line could encompass…

Go through your blog posts to see which topics you wrote about and which posts received the most comments and social shares. Those topics are most likely the ones that are resonating with your audience and readers.

Read through the emails you’ve been sending to your list to discover which topics generated the most replies from your list.

Outline a course you could teach during the next thirty days based on these topics that you know so well. Keep it simple!

Use my strategies to create and expand your product line during 2017.

Think about each of these questions, listen to the podcast, and then comment below. I would love to hear your thoughts on these ideas and concepts in regards to how defining and refining your niche and building a responsive list will enable you to be a more successful entrepreneur.

These list building tips online are intended to focus and guide you through the process of building a success online business. If you’d like to download my latest Focus Guide on Repurposing Your Content, click on this link. Feel free to share it with anyone who may benefit from what I am sharing. Also, my Study Guides are available here for many of my recent podcasts. This one is from December 1, 2016, so simply look for that date in the list and download your Study Guide.

Are you ready to be surprised? Recently, I have introduced a new feature during these podcast training calls. I will always have the latest course or program, either one of my own or one offered by someone I highly recommend, at my Surprise! link. Check it out today and see what I am recommending this time. If it’s not my own program, product, course, or live event then it’s always from someone I know, trust, and highly recommend as a great value to you as an online entrepreneur.

My most recent book is now available. It’s entitled Doing What It Takes: The Online Entrepreneur’s Playbook and I’d love to hear your thoughts on it by way of a review on Amazon after you read it and implement my suggestions.

Are you already a part my list community and receiving my daily email updates and training? If not, please give me your first name and primary email address in the form on the right-hand side of this site. If you are brand new to my podcasts, you will be interested to know that this specific training call, as well as all of the calls in my podcast series is intended to teach you and other new online entrepreneurs how to take your business to the next level quickly and effectively, and as a way for me to share my exact methods, techniques, Case Studies, secrets, and advice on creating a profitable and lucrative online business using the ‘multiple income streams’ approach. People on six continents have now discovered that starting an Internet business is the very fastest way to achieve both time and financial freedom, as well as to great success in all areas of your life, and you need help to get there quickly. That’s why I started this online marketing tips podcast for my community.

You will see that each podcast session is first recorded live as a teleseminar, and then repurposed into a podcast to extend my reach to the world. Please join my list (opt in on the right) to be included on these calls, and be sure to introduce yourself and share your site for optimal exposure for years to come! Also, check out my Podcast Show Notes site to see how you can subscribe at no cost to both of my podcasts, and please leave me a review on one or both of them if you are so inclined.

If you would like to get started earning income online right away then I recommend affiliate marketing as the stream of income that will allow you to “earn while you learn” You may now pick up my popular training on winning affiliate contests and other online marketing tips for only seven dollars at Affiliate Contest Secrets. This training regularly sells for $27. Use the discount code CONTEST to bring the price down to $7. This training has been completely updated for 2016 with the latest information, strategies, and Case Studies for you to use in your own business.

Please be sure to leave your comments below so that I may get to know you better and to serve you as you continue your journey as an online entrepreneur. List building tips online is a great place to begin. Getting started with an online business will change your life forever and my reward is your massive success!

Subscribe To My Online Marketing Tips Podcast Today!

Being Thankful for Entrepreneurship

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Being Thankful for Entrepreneurship

As we enter into the holiday season I thought it important to pause and reflect on what I am grateful and thankful for in my life as an entrepreneur. Whether you are a business owner, an entrepreneur, or an employee, see if you resonate with what I am expressing here. And if you do not agree with this summation of business from my perspective, please do not hesitate to contact me so that we may open the conversation about being thankful for discussion.

My online business is now a decade old. Depending on your experience and point of view this might be a relatively short time in comparison to your years as an entrepreneur or small business owner. If you are just starting out, then a decade seems like a fair amount of time. What will never change for me are my daily thoughts of thankfulness and gratitude for being able to choose this lifestyle and make it work.

I am thankful to be living in a country where small business is recognized for the contribution it makes to society as a whole. Without waxing political, just be aware that most countries have a much more stringent set of requirements and barrier to entry for those wishing to start their own business. And we are in one of fewer than thirty countries in the world where online business can supplement a brick and mortar business or stand alone as a business model.

In addition, I am thankful for Internet connections that many take for granted. In the United States we are able to obtain some of the fastest data transfer rates on the planet, enabling our businesses to run faster and with fewer interruptions day in and day out. The speed at which I am able to run a business from my home is faster than that available to many governments around the world.

I am also thankful to the people I have met as a result of becoming an entrepreneur. More than ninety percent of the people I interact with regularly are ones I would not have come to know if I were still a classroom teacher and working pert-time in real estate. They are members of service organizations, networking groups, and charities that exist to serve those less fortunate, both locally and abroad. These people have opened my eyes to a perspective of hope and joy I had only previously imagined, and for that I am truly grateful.

For a period of over thirty years, from when I was a teenager until the age of fifty I was primarily an employee. I did have a real estate business for many years, but that was a service business where I followed the rules and regulations of the industry. I had very little say over the day to day operations and simply did my best work in exchange for additional assignments. It wasn’t until I started my online business in 2006 that I understood what a gift this truly is for people like me who want and need to work from home.

I am thankful for the motivation, inspiration, and work ethic that has become my “new normal”. And these days I find that I have more respect for what I experienced during my years as an employee than I did during those thirty plus years. We are all at liberty to recreate any scenario that worked for us in the past. I used to leave very early each morning to beat the traffic while I was teaching school, and I regularly parked in front of the post office to read and think before driving two more block to the school. Once I arrived in that parking lot I was no longer my own person. Now I read from the comfort of home, or from wherever I happen to be each morning. These daily hours of study and reflection have become a ritual for me and yet another way that being thankful has affected my life.

In short, owning and running a business of any kind is a valuable gift. No matter what type of products or services you are engaged in, you are giving back to the world in a number of ways. What are you being thankful and grateful for in regards to your working life right now?

Planning Your Sales Offer Funnel

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Planning Your Offer Funnel

If you want to be successful in your business and marketing, it’s important to learn about offer funnels so that you can automate the process by which you create awareness, gather leads, and follow up with prospects so that you can seamlessly increase sales. The offer funnel is what you pull people through as they go through the buying cycle.

It works like this: You give away a lot of content given away freely such as blog posts, social media updates and so forth, which will lead people to sign up for a free or low-cost product which requires the customer to opt-in providing their email address.

Once the potential customer signs up, then your email messages will lead them through the funnel until they get to your highest cost products and programs such as continuity programs and high-level one-on-one services.

Parts of the Offer Funnel

Let’s take a closer look at the offer funnel. But first, you need to understand your audience’s buying-cycle, which your offer funnel should closely match. The general buying cycle goes right along with the offer funnel. The customer first needs to realize they have a problem, start searching for information about the problem, and then they’ll identify some solutions and then choose between them.

Awareness

At the top of the offer funnel is awareness. Your leads will come in via the free content you put out online. You’ll work on branding efforts through blogging, social media, advertisements, organic search, and SEO to attract potential leads to your website. These things will bring your audience to you. All you have to do is describe their problems, educate them about them, and yourself, and the solutions you can provide to them while maintaining a consistent brand using different types of content.

Leads

At some point during the awareness phase of buying your audience will potentially take some of your offers that will get them on your list. These people are considered leads. At this point, you can offer checklists, eBooks, short reports, and helpful solutions that solve one problem for the audience member. This may occur with opt-in offers and sales pages. You will start sending information to your leads to get them to become prospects. The types of content you might use to get people on your list are webinars, checklists, and anything that your audience will use and trade their email address for.

Prospects

A prospect is someone who has already proven to want what you have to offer because they signed up for your opt-in above. Now, depending on what opt-in they signed up for because you may have many entry points, you’ll send them email follow-ups and higher tier offerings including upsells, down sells, and cross-sells. You’ll send content to them that nurtures the prospect so that they become a paying customer. Content that can nurture prospects and encourage sales includes small reports, case studies, how-to articles, videos, and webinars. This is where segmentation comes in. You’ll need to send the right content to them at the right time.

Sales

Eventually, a percentage of your prospects will move all the way through your offer funnel buying your continuity plan, higher priced products and services and more. The content you provide to your audience needs to be designed to encourage them to buy more of what you offer due to the solutions you provide. This content will make your customers feel loyal, part of the group, and special.

As you can see, an offer funnel is a very powerful way to weed out unqualified leads, get the attention of your ideal audience, and gently encourage your prospects to become customers. It doesn’t need to be pushy, or even sales like. You can simply use content, and solutions, to help your audience achieve their goals.

Taking Risks for Entrepreneurs

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Taking Risks in Life and in Business

When I worked actively in real estate over a twenty year span during the eighties and nineties I developed a reputation for being a risk taker. Always one to have a positive outlook on life, it was not unusual for me to purchase the ugliest and most run down house in the neighborhood, or the smallest, non-conforming property in a questionable neighborhood. I believed that I could overcome the shortcomings of the property or the location by making up for them in other ways.

These strategies proved quite lucrative to me over the years. It also made me a popular speaker within my group of real estate friends who wanted to do something similar but considered themselves to be much more risk-averse. They were reluctant to take on projects that were not “sure things” for fear of losing some, if not all of their initial investment. That gave me access to even more of these deals, as my friends were more than happy to pass on the information to me and then watch to see what happened. Even back then, I had the confidence to move forward with opportunities others, much more experienced than myself would pass up.

This is not to say that I didn’t lose some money at times, but overall I was always on top and loving every minute of the process.

When I decided to resign from the classroom in 2005 and come online as an entrepreneur, the risks were similar. I would be leaving behind my guaranteed salary as a teacher and venturing into the unknown on the Internet. Yet somehow I was not fearful, as this situation seemed to me to be very similar to what I had done in real estate for more than two decades.

As you read this you are more than likely making judgments and coming to your own conclusions regarding your ability and willingness to take risks in life and business. That is perfectly natural and something you must experience internally before you take action. And there are many things to consider before doing so as well.

Often I will say that when I made the conscious decision to leave my job and also give away my real estate clients I was more confident because I no longer had children living at home. I also knew that I was someone who had always been willing to do whatever it took to make sure a situation would work out favorable for me. These two factors made my decision much easier, and I would make it in exactly the same way in the future.

You must decide for yourself how much risk you can afford to take in your life and business. If you’re considering the life of an entrepreneur, be willing to ask yourself some hard questions and answer them honestly regarding taking risks.

Who are you financially responsible for at this time?
Do you have a history of sticking with something over time?
Have you done any research into the area you would like to be a part of?
Are your immediate family members supportive of you?
What steps must you take right away to get this into motion?

There is an excellent article from Julie Zeilinger on “7 Reasons Why Risk-Taking Leads to Success” I would also recommending reading. Being willing and able to include taking risks in your life experience is a choice only you can make. Doing so from a place of personal reflection will make it all worthwhile and with a much better outcome.

Connecting With Influencers to Grow Your Business

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Are You Connecting With Influencers For Your Business?

I’m not sure when I was first introduced to the concept of “influencers” but it was quite intriguing to me at the time. The concept included the ideas that certain people, whether they are in your local community, somewhere else in the world you spend time in frequently, or in your online community have the connections and the ability to help others in achieving their business or personal goals.

These goals range in diversity from being introduced to someone you’d like to meet with for coffee, someone you would like to have an a client, or even someone you would like to interview for your podcast. When I was first online I dreamed of meeting these influencers and even of becoming one myself in the future.

The first step with this strategy is to make a list of the people you would most like to connect with, and the reason why this would be of value to them and to you. I was somewhat reluctant to even start such a list at first, but after having a mentor who required us to make a list of people we wanted to collaborate or joint venture with I understood the value of this type of thought process and list.

Never one to pass up an opportunity, I began by adding the biggest names to my list, along with the reason why I wanted to connect with them. It didn’t matter if these people seemed far out of my circle of influence, or if the reason I wanted to connect with them was more out of curiosity than solid business, I still added their names. I was on a quest to begin connecting with influencers to build my business!

Within a few weeks I found myself at my first Rotary Club meeting in my community, and wouldn’t you know it that three of the names on my list were there in the flesh! One was the new Mayor, another was a man who had been named to the “Forty Under 40” group that summer, and the third was a woman who wrote a type of “society page” column for the local newspaper. I was dumbstruck at first but soon found my voice and introduced myself to each of them. In that moment I realized that connecting with people, whether I thought of them as influencers or not, was something I would benefit from implementing on a regular basis. Something inside of me shifted and I went from the feeling of “me” and “them” to “us” when it came to connecting with others for mutual benefit.

My recommendation to you is that you start your list right away. And remember to include the reason why you would like to connect with each person so that you may more easily prioritize your actions later on. Then go about the process of reaching out to each person in a personal and professional way. This has become much easier to do because of social media, but don’t be surprised if you still run into gatekeepers for certain people you want to connect with further. Be polite, professional, and persistent and see where that takes you. As you begin to connect, ask people for an introduction to someone else on your list. Your reputation will grow and your life will change as a result of connecting with influencers.

I’m Connie Ragen Green, an author, international speaker, and online marketing strategist for entrepreneurship. Connect with me at ConnieRagenGreen.com and let’s discover how we can work together.

Content Marketing vs. Social Media Marketing

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Content Marketing vs. Social Media Marketing

Are you interested in knowing the difference between content marketing vs. social media marketing in order to provide these services for small businesses and entrepreneurs? In order to start and run a profitable content and social media management business, it’s important to understand how content marketing and social media marketing work together as well as how they are different. The best way to understand this is to look at the content marketing cycle.

Content Marketing Cycle

If you do a search on the net for “content marketing cycle” you’ll likely get several definitions about what it is. But essentially, it’s the entire cycle from start to finish involving content from its reason for existing to the results you get. Each part of this cycle gives you as the content and social media manager different options for earning a profit in your business while creating a profitable business for your clients, too.

Research

A lot of research needs to happen for each business that you work with. You’ll need to understand their audience, who their customers are, what customers they want to attract, and how to create useful and relevant content for that audience. This will take knowledge of how keywords work, and how search engines work to help drive traffic.

Many content and social media managers start with creating audience personas for their customers based on the research. They use that information along with product knowledge to create a publication and marketing plan for their clients. This plan will include titles of articles, and plans for videos and more for the client, depending on what type of content the client wants to go with. A mixture is best.

Create

Once they have the information garnered through research and a plan of action, the content and social media manager may create the content themselves or they may outsource it. Once you have a good plan and a content calendar created, it’s easy to outsource. You’ll provide the writer or other creative person, such as audio, video and graphic designers with the information and a deadline, and then you’ll get back the end product that you’ll then use for your client.

As a manager, consider outsourcing a lot of this, because you’ll be able to take on more clients if you outsource the creative parts of the work. Otherwise, you will need to ensure that you have enough time to create the amount of content each business owner needs you to create. Price yourself accordingly.

Optimize

It used to be that content optimization was all about keywords. Today, it’s much more focused on ensuring that the content is created for a specific audience because you want to ensure that trust is built between the audience and the business. That means that you’ll want to ensure that titles have keywords but aren’t clickbait. In other words, every headline you create should not trick the audience into clicking. Understating the intent of the audience helps.

In addition, you want all the content created to be well-made, using proper grammar, spelling, formatting and so forth. You want it to be easily digestible so that the consumer can stay focused and understand the information you’re trying to relay while establishing authority for your client, the business owner you’re working for, all the while ensuring that you create a call to action for every piece of content whether that’s read more, sign up now, buy now or something else entirely. Finally, today a highly optimized piece of content also includes important visual elements such as images that help explain your story.

Publish

Once the content is created, you’ll need to have a plan for publishing it. Most of the content that you create for your client should be published on your client’s online real-estate. The owned assets are most important, such as their blog and website. But, some content will also be published in other places such as Amazon Kindle, or YouTube, Slideshare.net, LinkedIn and as guest blog posts on other people’s sites.

You will also want to establish a good mixture with the most important pieces always being published first on the client’s blog or website that they own. Outside of the blog you’ll need informational pages on the website, newsworthy pieces, sharable social media content, video content, infographics, eBooks, and more that all start with being promoted on your client’s website or blog.

Promote

In some ways, this part of the content marketing cycle should be all in bold because it is one, if not the most, important aspect of being a content and social media manager for another business. This is what is going to get you the most bangs for your buck. Every single piece of content that is ever created and published on behalf of your client must be promoted. The days of just publishing and sitting back to wait for traffic are over.

The way in which you promote content starts with creating content that is specifically made for your client’s audience, is optimized with appropriate keywords, images, and titles, but then is also made available for them to read by promoting across all online channels using social media marketing. If a blog post goes up on the blog, it should then be shared on every social network with a blurb and an image to go along with it to make the audience want to click through it to consume the content.

Measure

One job of a content and social media manager is to keep tabs on the metrics. You’ll use various products to do this, but it usually starts with Google Analytics and native analytics in your social networks. Each time you publish anything, check at least quarterly for the results. You’ll start seeing a pattern after time with content that is getting better results than the others. Promote the content that gets higher results more.

For example, if you discover that your audience engages more with video, start doing more videos. This is the perfect time to understand the 80/20 rule, which states that 20 percent of the work you do gets 80 percent of the results. When you identify that 20 percent that’s getting the results, you will want to do more of that and less of the other things to improve your statistics even more.

Reuse/ Repurpose / Repeat

All this content creation can become overwhelming at times. But the more you learn about content marketing and social media marketing, the more you will realize that you can reuse and repurpose content across all channels. For example, if you have a blog post that is getting a lot of attention why not repurpose it into a YouTube video and vice versa?

When you remember to reuse content in a new format, and repeat what is working, you’ll find that you will become invaluable to your clients because of the results you’re going to get with the work you do.

If you work this hard to create the right type of content, and market it for your clients, you’ll soon become very sought after because you’re going to be getting huge results for your clients. Not only will you feel good about what you’re doing, but your clients are going to come to depend on you for your skills. Understand the similarities and differences with content marketing vs. social media marketing can be a key to building a rewarding and lucrative home business. Learn more about my Really Simple Content Marketing training course.

Connie Ragen Green is an online marketing strategist. Connect with her at ConnieRagenGreen.com

Live Streaming for Business: 5 Ways to Get Started

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Live Streaming for Business: 5 Ways to Get Started

You may already know that live streaming is a new and potentially powerful form of content. It provides an engagement and interaction that until now was limited to face to face conversations. Now, instead of having to host a live event, you can stream live online. The possibilities of how to leverage this content form are endless. To help you get your creative wheels turning, let’s talk about five general ways to use live streaming for business regularly.

Interviews

Interviews are a great way to help boost your own credibility and authority while providing value to your audience. Imagine a crafting blogger being able to live stream an interview with Martha Stewart or a self-help marketer interviewing Oprah. Instant credibility and notoriety, right?

You can also leverage the audience of a relevant business owner to help grow your following. For example, a personal trainer might interview a health food expert. The health food expert gets exposure to your audience and vice versa.

Interviewing customers is another option. You can do a sort of live case study to show how your product or service solves problems.

Live Events

It’s entirely possible to host a live webinar via a live streaming application. You can create a webinar format for the show and use the time to solve a problem, provide information, and drive viewers to take a specific action. This is a fun way to launch new products or services. It’s also a great way to build your email list and make sales.

Demonstrate Products

Live streaming is a prime opportunity to demonstrate how to use your products. Whether you sell one product or dozens, you can show people in real time how to use it and answer their questions as you go. Don’t forget to include a “buy” link and call to action.

Question and Answer

Consider hosting the occasional question and answer broadcast. Announce the broadcast and then start collecting questions. It’s a good idea to start the show with a few questions to get the ball rolling. You can then take questions from the audience. Keep a few additional questions aside just in case you experience a lull and want to keep providing information.

Trainings

Remember that Periscope allows you to host private broadcasts, right? This is a great opportunity to host trainings and use live streaming for business. You can train staff members, you can hold meetings, or you can train new customers on how to use their product. The latter is particularly helpful if you sell or market technology.

These five ideas are really the beginning of what’s possible. Start brainstorming options today. Who could you interview? Who might you partner with to host a live stream together? What questions can you answer via live streaming and how can you provide entertaining and informative content with this technology?

Live streaming for business just makes sense, and I hope these five ways will help you to launch this medium into your business quickly.

Connie Ragen Green is an online marketing strategist. Connect with her at ConnieRagenGreen.com