Promoting your business via social media

Using social media, you can start building up an audience right away. The beauty of social media lies in the fact that you can make a lot of personal connections via it and if you want to get a list of followers for your business quickly, all you have to do is build up this audience. It's the easiest way to go about promoting your business and here's how you can go about it.

Add social media icons to your site

It's all about ease of accessibility. You don't need to force anyone to share your content or details about your business, but you should make it easier for anyone that wants to help you in promoting your business. I can't begin to tell you the number of times I’ve stumbled on a page and realized that the only thing stopping me from sharing the page is the fact that I can't find anything that will help me share it. Similarly, your mailing list sign-up should be visible on each page and these should all link back to the social media accounts you hold. Mind you, this holds as true for businesses as it does for bloggers. Make everything part of a giant networking platform and you will begin to reap the benefits of it all. Give people the option of sharing something via their favorite social media account and you will gain in the short and long term. There are plenty of free icons out there, so pick out whatever you want to.

Use your audience to your advantage

The best way of building an audience is to use your current audience to help you do exactly that. Invite people to connect with others by requesting them to do so in a blog post or in a newsletter. If you've got people already connected on one platform, ask them to connect with other platforms as well, they're likely to be more than receptive. And don't forget to touch up your bio while you're at it; you can build these links into your bio as well. But should you link to a bio on each of the sites you have (if you run multiple blogs, for instance)? I don't believe you should, because that would be information overload. Just link back to the one account that you feel best or most active on. It goes a long way towards helping you put your best foot forward and create a strong relationship with your readers or users.

Draw attention to your social media presence

Don't get a bunch of flamenco dancers doing their thing, but do try and draw attention to your social presence every now and again. Doing this regularly will help you have top of the mind awareness and it will help you build your site up to a level where you won't need to tell your readers/users to help you because they'll be doing it themselves. Go out there and get this done now. Stopping reading, start doing. Go.

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Influencing people and affecting viewpoints

Influence in itself is nothing more than exertion of power to change the mindset and behavior of others. It is the power of persuasion, plain and simple. And in order to be better at influencing people, you need to be able to understand what makes people tick in the first place. If you are to influence the way people think, it is important that you have some kind of leverage and and understanding of their motivation is certainly one kind of leverage. But there is a very basic problem with that assumption; you won't get to know everyone you ever come across. There is a certain amount of time that is taken in understanding people's likes and dislikes and sometimes it's a luxury we can't afford.

And this is particularly true of the online world. People are like ghosts, statistics that are recorded and played back later but how do you get to know these people that visit your website? Who are these digital ghosts? Why are they visiting your site? You need to understand this if you are to be effective at influencing people. Here's the thing though; people will always have general patterns of behavior and thought that you can point out and work with. And by working with that, you have the perfect tools you need to influence them. It always helps to know someone personally, but you don't have to know someone personally to understand what they love or hate.


Simply put, our online behavior is a mix of conscious and unconscious thought and behavioral patterns. For instance, some people just like community based review and recommendation systems, and this could be either a conscious or an unconscious preference. Perhaps your visitors just like creating an online persona, so allow them to key in their details and get recommendations and results tailored to that. Like this, there are many techniques that you can use to improve your website either as a marketer or as a blogger. Explore all of them and you will be able to make visiting your site a more fulfilling, happier experience for everyone that knowingly or unknowingly visits your online presence.

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Content ideas need to constantly be fresh

As bloggers, I think the one thing people struggle for more than anything else are great content ideas. Content creattion is just such a slippery, tricky slope that everyone inevitably ends up sliding on it. I write for a living and I still struggle to come up with great content ideas that are fresh and unique. After some time, tiredness sets in and there's nothing you can do about it. Running an active blog can make it a must to constantly come up with angles and posts that pique your readers interest. Make no mistake about it, having fresh content all the time can be difficult but it is a must. So just what do you do when you run out of content ideas? After all, you need it to rake in more readers, rank higher across search results and yes, rake in more advertising dollars as well. All of that is only possible if you constantly blog and create quality content as much as possible.

If you're like me, the only real problem is to find the inspiration to come up with something of real quality. Content ideas can flow as freely as drinks sometimes, and at other times inspiration just runs dry. I have however come up with my own ways to always have ideas close at hand.

Schedule things

One of the best ways for me to keep my eye on the ball is to have a calendar of sorts. You don't need anything fancy, a simple everyday calendar will do nicely. Sometimes you just have ideas and you have to make a note of things on the spot before you forget about it. Sometimes I just want to dedicate certain topics to certain days. For example, a Christmas themed post just before Christmas, or a New Years themed post prior to the New Year. It's a very basic and very useful tracking system that allows you to keep track of post types as well. That way even if you don't what to write, at least you have a format to stick to! All it takes is a bit of foresight.

Work smart

Coming up with ideas for writing can be difficult, but writing in itself is only one part of the whole process. The biggest problem when it comes to writing is...well, writing itself. Sometimes you just don't fee like putting the words down on the page and this happens to the best of us. thankfully, there are several ways for you to get content without doing any work yourself. Ghostwriters are one way to get the job done (for a fee) and while I myself have never used, I know of people who do so. And so do you. Do you really think George “Dubya”Bush wrote his autobiography? I rest my case. Most of these content writers will cost you money but if you don't feel like writing for a day but need quality content, this is your best option.

A better idea (and one I like) is to get guest bloggers to write for your website. That's all the quality of ghostwriters with none of the money paid out. It's a win-win situation. All you have to do is pay these guest bloggers back with links to their website. It's a very popular option among bloggers, and with good reason too! The last option I’d turn to is to use free articles. Some articles are freely available for reprint, and most of them are listed out in article directories. Think of a niche, and you can find free articles on it. The problem is quality. It's just so hard to find something reasonably useful and of reasonable quality. I for one gave up after having to trawl through 100's of articles only to find two or three that were reasonably alright. I don't think it's worth the time, which again makes it all the more important to come up with quality content ideas of your own.

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