Shares Don’t Equal Successful Content

Whenever you create content, you probably want it to get shared with a lot of people. After all, shares mean that people have engaged and that your content must be amazing. Actually, this isn’t the case.

While, yes, good content gets shared, shares aren’t the only indicator of powerful content and engagement. There are a whole slew of other factors that influence the power of your content on social media.

Ideally, your content gains both shares and links. That makes your content valuable and boosts your authority on search engines and social networks. This is called amplification.

A good amplification strategy makes the difference between a good digital marketer and a great digital marketer. This article will help you develop the tools to create a great amplification strategy to take your content to the next level.

Why have an amplification strategy

Having a good amplification strategy means that your content will be seen by a large number of people who will perform the action you want them to. Social platform shares don’t mean anything unless people are performing the type of engagement with your content that you want.

Now it takes more than just publishing your content to get people to react to it and act on it. You have to have an amplification strategy to take it to the next level. A good amplification strategy will get your content to the right people at the right time who will perform the right action with it.

A social sharing doesn’t equal amplification strategy

If you want to build an amplification strategy, you need to go beyond social shares. Social platforms are powerful discovery tools but their amplification strategy benefits are minimal. There are too many amplification limitations to social sharing to make it a proper amplification strategy.

This is because, more often than not, shared links aren’t clicked, shared content is frequently not read by the sharer, social shares have a short shelf life, and sharing goes down after a few days. This makes social sharing minimally beneficial when it comes to amplification. Sure, it can work sometimes, but it often doesn’t work.

Lots of shares doesn’t mean lots of likes

People share and like content for different reasons. For example, people share content when they find something entertaining, when they want to foster a personal relationship, when they want to show that they support a cause, when they want to share helpful content, and when they want to show that they are part of the tribe.

People like content when they view it as an authority, they support the content, the content is unlikely to change, and/or the content serves as a helpful guide. Something is shared and liked when the content is valuable and helpful. That’s the area you want your content to live.

Getting shares and likes

There are a few ways that you can get your content to get shares and likes:

• Answer a common question that people have regarding your area of expertise
• State strong and/or controversial opinions
• Post original research and data you have collected yourself
• Develop a real amplification strategy

That last point is where you, as a digital marketer, need to focus. You need to develop an amplification strategy and here is how you do it.

Developing an amplification strategy

A good amplification strategy uses five main tactics: manual promotion, target mailings, influencer advocacy, link building and SEO, and paid promotion. Each of these tactics helps you build a real amplification strategy.

Each business uses these differently, so it is best to get together with your web and marketing team and come up with a way to make all those tactics work for you.

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Simple Solutions for Boosting Your Email Subscriber List

Email marketing is the most cost-effective way to promote your business. You can increase sales leads and boost customer retention. Though, this all rests on the size of your subscriber list. You’ll need to build your own subscriber list to maximise the benefits you receive from email marketing.

Generating your own subscriber list isn’t always easy when you’re first starting out. You may find it difficult to get subscribers and keep them. Here are some simple solutions for boosting your email subscriber list in the shortest amount of time.

Include Opt-In Forms On Every Page

Every page of your website should contain an opt-in form of your email list. Your visitors shouldn’t have any problem figuring out how to subscribe. If using a website layout with a sidebar, place the form on your sidebar. Otherwise, you could include it near your footer.

Include a Pop-Up Opt-In Form

In addition to placing an opt-in form on your web pages, you should consider using a pop-up display to ask visitors to subscribe. You find plugins or simple scripts for adding pop-ups. They are quick and easy to setup.

While some may find pop-ups annoying, they really do work. Internet users are familiar with pop-ups. They appear on almost every website. But, the truth is that pop-ups can dramatically increase your subscriber rate.

Keep Your Opt-In Form Simple

The registration form that you use needs to be simple. The more fields that you include on the form, the less likely a visitor is to fill it out. Only ask for their first name and email address. This keeps it simple and quick. If you’d like, you could just ask for their email address – making it even quicker to fill out the form.

Create Supplemental Content

Another solution for boosting your email list is to create supplemental content. Take your most popular blog posts and create more in-depth articles. Expand upon the ideas presented in each blog post. Create a PDF of your in-depth article. You can find many free tools for converting standard word processor files into PDF files.

Create a call to action at the bottom of the relevant blog post for readers to subscribe to your email list to receive additional information. Once they sign up to your email list, they’ll receive your free in-depth PDF.

Include Social Proof of Your Brand Presence

Consumers are more likely to make a purchase if a business has a lot of positive attention. Include social proof that your business is gaining popularity. You don’t need to wait until you have thousands of subscribers. If you’ve gathered Facebook and Twitter followers, total your entire follower base.

Total the number of users that have subscribed to your email list with your total social media followers. Display this total on your website under your opt-in form.

Make Sure Your Email Marketing Campaign is Effective

While these steps will help you build your subscriber list, you’ll also need to ensure you’re using an effective email marketing campaign. Once you gain subscribers, you need to keep them. Create a consistent schedule of sending out your newsletter or promotions. Offer incentives and deals to your subscribers.

By having an effective email marketing campaign, you can expect to hold on to your subscriber base, while gaining new subscribers. Also, don’t forget to take advantage of A/B split testing to increase open rates and click-through rates.

Hopefully, you can use these tips to begin building your subscriber list. These are easy suggestions to implement. Building an email list is an integral part of promoting a business. Email marketing also provides the best ROI compared to other marketing channels.

Start using these tips to increase your subscriber list. If you’d like additional internet marketing solutions, including lead generation, then click here to learn more about my done-for-you system.

How to Build a Community to Increase Customer Retention

There are many different strategies for driving traffic to your site and increasing customer retention. While you could spend large sums of money on advertising and marketing, there are other solutions available. Building your own website community is a great method of building loyalty and repeat traffic.

What’s an online community? Basically, a community is a group of regular visitors that frequently discuss topics and regularly interact with each other. Instead of just randomly commenting on blog posts, these visitors are actively engaged in what’s going on.

Here are some tips to help you begin to build an online community in order to boost customer retention and keep visitors coming back for more.

Create a Community on Your Website

The first step is to create a community on your website. This can be done by adding a forum to your site. If you use WordPress, this is relatively easy. You can create a sub-domain and install a forum theme on the sub-domain. For those without WordPress, there are many great forum templates that you can use.

You should build a forum that is relevant to the product or services that you carry. Promote the forum as you would any other website. Use proper SEO to help drive traffic to the forum. Include links from your main site to the forum and discuss your forum on social media.

Respond to Every Blog Comment

Along with creating a forum, you should respond to every blog comment on your blog posts. Again, if you’re using WordPress, this is easy. You choose to receive an email notification every time a new comment is left on your site. This also applies to your forum.

Every time someone leaves a comment, if it’s worthy of a response, then respond to the comment. Try to respond as quickly as possible. When a visitor sees that you actively respond to comments, they’re more likely to come back and leave other comments.

Create a Subscriber List

You can include an opt-in form on your forum for users that wish to register. In fact, you might want to think about requiring user subscription in order to post a comment on your forum. If you have quality content, users will want to subscribe.

Don’t bombard your subscribers with useless emails. You should keep this subscriber list separate from existing email lists. Have one list that is exclusively for your community subscribers. The emails that you send should be relevant to the forum and the community.

Integrate Social Media with Your Community

Combining the best of both worlds, you can integrate your social media business profile with your online community. How does this work? Through your business profile, create a social media community. Make this a mirror reflection of your online website community. Follow the same principles—responding to comments promptly and encouraging people to leave comments.

Create Exclusive Content for Your Community

Creating exclusive content that you only share with your community members will help increase loyalty. Your members will appreciate receiving content that’s not available elsewhere. Make sure the exclusive content is valuable and informative. You still need to focus on quality when creating this content.

Building a community can be a lot of work, but it’ll pay off in the end. You’ll find that you have a large number of regular visitors and steady traffic to your site. This can help you boost sales, increase customer retention, and compete with major players in your industry.

You don’t need to necessarily be at the top of the search engine rankings to remain competitive. Use these suggestions to begin building a community. For even more internet marketing tips, click on this link to learn about my beneficial done-for-you lead generation system.