How to Choose the Best Social Media Platform for Your Business

In his book Tweet Naked, online marketing expert Scott Levy provides the critical information entrepreneurs need to craft a social media strategy that will boost their brand and their business. In this edited excerpt, the author briefly describes the top social media platforms and their pros and cons.

When it comes to choosing which social media platforms you'll utilize, select those that offer the best potential for reaching your ideal audience and broadcast the type of media you've decided is best suited for your company. Most people and companies can't be amazing on every platform; that takes a huge amount of bandwidth and resources. Instead of having a sub-par representation in a lot of places, be awesome on a few of them.

5 Social Selling Tools that Deliver Real Leads & Closed Business

You can spend all day, every day, wasting an enormous amount of time on the social web.

Or, you can focus your time and energy on tools that deliver measurable value for your business—real, qualified leads, growing sales pipeline and closed deals. Sales & marketing professionals that leverage social selling techniques close more business, and you can too. In fact, InsideView reported that IBM saw a 400% increase in sales in 1 quarter after launching a pilot social selling program.

Your First Email Marketing Campaign

Email is a powerful way to reach prospects, especially when used in combination with cold calling. Your first campaign will be the most difficult one to pull together as you're starting from scratch, but the good news is that once you come up with a campaign that works, you'll be able to recycle the pieces in future successful campaigns.

The first step in launching a campaign is collecting information from your audience. You want your message to be appealing and interesting for your recipients, not something they toss straight into the junk mail folder without reading it. The best source of such information is your existing customers. Pick out a few of your very best customers – the ones who are most like your ideal prospect – and ask them some questions about what they like to see in a marketing email.

How to Discover Your Business Values

For businesses in today’s world, the blind pursuit of profit — at whatever the cost to people and the planet — is no longer a viable option. Most of us now expect businesses to care about their impact on society and the wider world.

We’ve come to a point where people are fed-up of money being the main goal of life. The US might be the richest country in the world, but it’s a long way from being the happiest. It’s time to find another way.

Social Selling: The New Practitioner's Guide

Complex sales involve a number of different people. You will find multiple decision makers, buyers, each having a completely different role and need than the next one. As a sales professional, it is up to you to work within the ranges of expertise and knowledge to present your solution in a compelling manner. This is where social selling helps!

How to Improve Your Closing Ratio

Closing the sale is a crucial and necessary part of any sales process. It's the point where many slam-dunk sales fall through simply because the salesperson fails to close. On the other hand, a sale that's not going well can sometimes be saved by a powerful close. So how can you become a better closer?

Many people don't realize that the close starts at the very beginning of the sales process. That's because the better the rest of the process goes, the easier the close will be. A prospect who's already convinced that your product is exactly what he needs can be closed by a simple “Sign here and we'll get this delivered to you by Tuesday.” So if you improve the rest of your sales skills, you can get by with weaker closing skills.

15 Free Ways to Increase Blog Traffic

Get More Blog Traffic for Free

Generating traffic is the lifeblood of your online business. Without sufficient traffic your site and blog will never accomplish their purpose. And while there are numerous pay options to generate traffic, there are an equal number of effective and free tools and approaches. Here are some great traffic generators:

1. Free Traffic Source: Forum Marketing
Forum Marketing: Share your expertise with people asking questions about your industry. In return, you’ll get a steady flow of traffic to your site. You will be the expert, after all. To ensure that you get traffic from all the time you spend answering questions, be sure to spend time on your forum marketing signature. Your signature tells other forum members who you are and how to read more about you. As you begin in forum marketing, you will want to watch out for (and completely avoid) these 8 Common Forum Marketing Mistakes. 

Powerful Qualifying Questions

The sooner you can narrow down your lead list into a prospect list, the better. Turning a lead into a prospect means determining whether they have a need for your product and are able to buy it. Once you've sorted out your leads and identified the true prospects, you can start moving down the sales process and head for the close.

If you don't fully qualify your leads early on, you'll be wasting a lot of time with people who will never buy from you. But on the other hand, if you ask too many private questions right away, they'll be reluctant to answer. So qualifying is a balancing act between leaving enough time to build rapport without waiting so long that you've wasted everyone's time. Many salespeople resolve this problem by asking a few very basic qualifying questions during the cold call – to weed out the obviously unqualified folks – and then finishing the qualification process during a second call or at the beginning of the sales presentation.

Email Prospecting That Gets Results

Cold calling over the phone is still the most common way to reach out to leads, but cold emailing has become increasingly popular (as well as increasingly effective). You probably won't be able to completely replace your phone calls with email prospecting, but once you get the hang of crafting cold emails you'll be able to cut way down on your dialing.

The first major hurdle to overcome is getting your lead to read the email in the first place. Writing an evocative subject line is crucial. When your email arrives in someone's inbox, the first thing he sees is the subject line – and if the subject screams “salesperson” he won't even bother to open it. He doesn't know you, so your email address won't mean anything to him; the only thing he has to judge you on at this point is the email subject.

Are You Only Pretending to Be in the Right Job?

Every day I come across people who are in the wrong job. You do, too. They are sad, unhelpful and may seem incompetent. It's tempting to get mad at them, but the more humane response is compassion. No one feels comfortable doing a job for which they are a bad fit.

These experiences are frustrating, which is why it's so refreshing to come across someone who is in the right job. Glenn O'Neill, for example, is a middle school teacher who has taught social studies to all three of my kids. He is always upbeat, inspiring and insightful; the students love him, and the parents do, too. Most importantly, he seems to love what he does.

Designing an Account Management System

Most sales jobs include both cold selling (selling to brand-new prospects) and account management (selling to existing customers). Often salespeople approach cold selling with a carefully designed process in an attempt to maximize those sales. Yet they pay little attention to existing customers, despite the potential for wallet share growth that goes with those customers.

The trick to managing your existing account well lies in having the same kind of structured approach that you might use for new prospects. With existing customers, you have the advantage that they already like you and your product. That makes them ideal candidates for cross-selling and upselling additional products and services.

The Single Most Important Step to Getting Good Conversion from your Visitors

I have for the past couple of months been posting here about an ongoing MBA class on content marketing called Marketing with Social Media. The class is being taught by me, Bill Belew, at a university in San Jose (Yes, I know the way).

I don’t know of anybody who has been able to gather a lot (73 MBA students) of bloggers and put them in a controlled setting (controlled inasmuch as they do what I tell them to, which they don’t always) in an academic environment. The students pass or fail based on whether they do the work or not. It is an international university and many of the students’ immigration status is dependent on their final grade. In other words, they are motivated. If they fail, they literally get deported.

How To Use Your Content As A Marketing Magnet!

Content Marketing is all about creating content that your audiences will find useful, helpful, educational or entertaining. Hopefully you can achieve all of those things in one shot.

I *think* it goes without saying that each piece of content you create — whether it’s an article, an ebook, or a checklist — should have some sort of quantifiable goal. That’s where the “marketing magnet” comes in. Many times the marketing magnet is used to grow marketing or email lists.

And even if you think you don’t know what a marketing magnet is, I bet you do. In fact, you probably eye these prime pieces of content on a daily basis on some of your favorite Facebook pages, blogs or websites. 

Writing a Powerful Sales Proposal

Receiving a RFP (request for proposal) is both an exciting and a frightening moment. It's exciting because it means you've got a chance to win this sale. But it's frightening because you'll be competing with other bidders, some of whom are probably larger companies with plenty of resources. The solution is to create such a powerful proposal that you'll stand out from the rest of the pack. A strong proposal can get you the sale even if you're against competitors who offer a better deal.

Before You Make Your First Sale

Starting a new career is pretty unsettling. As a salesperson your job is to convince people to buy your company's product or service. That can be daunting, but rest assured you can succeed... and when you do make your first sale it's an incredibly good feeling! Just follow these steps to get started selling as quickly and painlessly as possible.

Get to Know Your Co-Workers