DIGITAL MARKETING: THE LADDER TO SUCCESS IN CAREER GRAPH

How many of you are satisfied with your career growth? Did you ever thought about the missing ‘X’ factor in your resume? If yes, then you landed at the right place. Everyone is aware of life cycle graph and its 4 stages which are Introduction, Growth, Maturity and Decline. Out of all these four stages, last stage is the one which no one likes to experience. So what can be done to convert it to ‘Renewal’ stage?

Digital Marketing is no more an unknown term. However, most of the time people have a misconception about it. It is mostly considered to be a career option for Marketers. But, there are lot more sectors which are leveraging it. For example, HR professionals uses social media platforms like LinkedIn for recruitment; banking sector leverages digital marketing for contributing more global brand value, etc.

Digital marketing is the need of every industry and thus, learning Digital Marketing is today’s demand. It is that ‘X’ factor which are usually missed by lot of professionals. Digital Marketing comprises all elements like understanding client’s psychology, leveraging analytics platforms for strategy creation, using social media for branding, developing a strong presence through SEO, engaging with right set of clients through email marketing, having strong relationship with clients through inbound marketing, etc.

Digital marketing therefore, covers all key elements to make a company stronger in terms of client relationship, branding and more importantly, it has great scope for an individual who is leveraging it. Some of the major reasons of ‘why one should start using digital marketing’ are:

• It gives direction to every professional.
• It helps him/her to connect with the industry leaders and interact with them.
• It provides a push to everyone’s career and serves to be an add-on for him, as it is the demand of every industry.
• It is a great help for someone who wishes to engage and/or nurture his/her clients but have minimal or no resources.
• It helps individuals to hold a position at senior management level, as trained Digital Marketers understands what clients demand from a company.
• Using right digital marketing strategies helps in leveraging best search engines, which further enhances one’s knowledge about search giants like Google, Bing, YouTube etc.

It is therefore, very much important for professionals to learn insights of digital marketing from experts. So, what are you waiting for? Don’t let ‘Decline’ stage become a hurdle in your career.

Switch it to ‘Renewal’ stage in your career growth through Digital Marketing. The comprehensive course inDigital Marketing shall be of great help to give a head-start to the career. More so, it will of great benefit in terms of enhancing the career prospects for people hailing from different walks of life as well.

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TIPS TO GAIN YOUTUBE SUBSCRIBERS, LIKES AND COMMENTS

YouTube was established in 2005. Currently it is owned by Google. Within a short time YouTube gained popularity among students, Businessman, professionals, educational institutes, etc. Analysis shows that the human brain understands pictures, videos faster than the text. YouTube proved it’s usability to different people from different professions. For example, for students it is the great platform to learn difficult terms in the form of videos, for marketers it is the best medium through which they can show information, demo about their product/service, for educational institutes it is easy to capture students from worldwide and give them lessons through YouTube videos, webinars.  From the business point of view, YouTube videos are the great medium to address millions of people at the same time. You can share your valuable content with the large audience without consuming much time and money. You can add your comments, likes to videos.

The ultimate aim for any business is to grow business by gaining potential customers. We all agree that uploading YouTube videos are one of the best ways of  sharing valuable information about your product or service. But often marketers fails to maintain communication with the audience. They often neglect comments, likes section. Don’t forget answering comments are the best way to set two way communication between you and the audience. It is useful for your next marketing strategy. Your video success is determined by number of subscribers, likes and comments. Here are some simple tips to promote your YouTube Video.

Tip 1 – Ask for Subscribers

For the success of YouTube video it is important to build subscriber community. But why it is important? The subscriber is the someone who has selected your channel for follow, so that they keep updated themselves with the latest information, videos posted by you. In short you can say subscribers are fans who are interested in each of your next online move. Also, Subscribers  are the best source through which your content can be shared with people through their social media channels. But how to get subscribers? Is that so easy? The answer is no it is not easy. But consistent efforts, quality and remarkable content , proper call-to-actions and right marketing approach could definitely inspire people to subscribe to your video.

Never assume that your audience will automatically come and subscribe your video. No, you have to tell them that what to do, why they should subscribe you and how they can subscribe you. You can insert attracting, compelling call-to-action in your video at proper place. This CTA’s can be placed at the end of your video or at the top your video. Make sure that CTA’s should be attracting not distracting. CTA’s are really useful for getting subscribers.

Tip 2- Videos should be consistently good in quality and value

Yes, I agree that for business marketing is important. But it will work only if you have a good and quality product or service. Yes, quality matters in all fields. While posting any video make sure that you sharing something really useful and valuable information with the audience. Otherwise, it will be a great disappointment for your subscribers and potential customers. So make sure that you post it regularly with quality content. It is good to follow a certain schedule for posting.

Tip 3- Use Annotations

Annotations are the little, colorful and attractive notes that people can paste on their videos. Few annotations can bring traffic towards your subscribers list and many annotations may take away people from your video. So be careful while pasting annotations. It can be used in different ways as CTA, simple message, on the button or in the form of offers, product releases and so on. You can use different font, colors, styles while designing annotations.  But most widely used annotations are

Call-To-Action Annotation – In this you can add a “speech bubble“ annotation under the Subscribe button to all of your videos.

Click-To-Action Annotation – Insert your CTA into the video. Then add an image, button or graphic to the video and overlay it with spotlight annotations which should link to your channel subscriber page.

Tip 4 – Add a YouTube widget to your blog

If you have already well settled in the digital world then it is the great  opportunity for you to build the number of subscribers for your video. Confused?  Let, me explain. Suppose you have well maintained website or blog and you are draining good traffic towards it, then you can make it easier for others to find your videos and subscribe to future content by just installing the YouTube subscription widget to the sidebar of your blog or website. You can add widget to your website or blog very easily by just inserting simple HTML code into your website’s HTML code.

Tip 5- Consistently interact with your audience

YouTube is just not the place where you can upload your video, it is the community. You cannot expect overnight success in for your video. If you want to increase your subscribers, likes and comments then first you should appreciate the work done by others genuinely and consistently reply to your audience for their comments, queries. I know it is a bit daunting task, but you have to maintain some time for communicating with your current subscribers and future potential subscribers. The simple principle for gaining more followers is ” Give more get more”.

Tip 6 – What is next?

Create the curiosity among your subscribers, audience about your next video. Tell them about your video, launching date, topics covered in that video, etc. You can send emails to your subscribers announcing the release of your next video. Put the information about your next video on social media. This will help to generate buzz about your next release.

Tip 7 – Create a playlist

Daily thousands of videos get uploaded on the internet. Think, how users will find your video? What is the probability? May be very few will able to find it. The simple solution for this problem is “create playlists.” This allows you to divide your videos into categories which makes easy reference for viewers. When a person is watching a particular video that appears in the playlist, it further encourages him to watch more videos and subscribe your channel.

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The Top 20 Valuable Facebook Statistics

Facebook represents a huge potential market for your social media efforts, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to stand out from the crowd. The following statistics highlight some relevant Facebook facts and can ultimately help you to navigate it better, increasing your return on investment (ROI) and leading to greater marketing success. Download our Valuable Facebook Statistics non-branded presentation.

View Zephoria’s Social Media Infographic

1. Worldwide, there are over 1.39 billion monthly active Facebook users (MAUs) which is a 13 percent increase year over year. (Source: Facebook as of 1/28/15) What this means for you: In case you had any lingering doubts, statistically, Facebook is too big to ignore.
2. 4.5 billion likes generated daily as of May 2013 which is a 67 percent increase from August 2012 (Source: Facebook)
3. 890 million people log onto Facebook daily (DAU) for December 2014, which represents a 18% increase year over year (Source: Facebook as 1/28/15) The Implication: A huge and vastly growing number of Facebook users are active and consistent in their visits to the site, making them a promising audience for your marketing efforts.
4. There are 1.9 billion mobile active users (MAU) (Source: Facebook as of 1/28/15) an increase of 26 percent year-over-year.
5. In Europe, over 223 million people are on Facebook.(Source: Search Engine Journal) The Takeaway: This isn’t just a U.S. phenomenon – a worldwide market is available via Facebook.
6. Age 25 to 34, at 29.7% of users, is the most common age demographic. (Source:Emarketer 2012) What this means for you: This is the prime target demographic for many businesses’ marketing efforts, and you have the change to engage these key consumers on Facebook.
7. Five new profiles are created every second. (Source: ALLFacebook 2012) The Implication: Your potential audience on Facebook is growing exponentially.
8. Facebook users are 53% female and 47% male. (Source: Emarketer) The Takeaway: Since this isn’t a large statistical difference, you should be able to effectively reach both genders on Facebook.
9. Highest traffic occurs mid-week between 1 to 3 pm. (Source: Bit.ly blog) How this can help you: Since you have the potential to reach more consumers and drive higher traffic to your site during peak usage times, consider this statistic in determining when todo more frequent or important status updates, offers and other posts.
10. On Thursdays and Fridays, engagement is 18% higher. (Source: Bit.ly blog) The Implication: Again, use this information to determine when to post in order to optimize your social media marketing efforts.
11. There are 83 million fake profiles. (Source: CNN) The Takeaway: Nothing is perfect, so always remain thoughtful and strategic in your efforts. Also, fake or not, these are still potential consumers. There are various reasons for fake profiles, including professionals doing testing and research, and people who want to segment their Facebook use more than is possible with one account.
    
12. Photo uploads total 300 million per day. (Source: Gizmodo) The Implication: Again, this is an indication of engaged users; also, it is an indication that there are a lot of photos, as well as other information, competing for users’ attention, so target your efforts strategically.
13. Average time spent per Facebook visit is 20 minutes. (Source: Infodocket) What this means for you: You could have a short time period to make your impression, so use it wisely with relevant, interesting and unique posts and offers in order to get the most return on your efforts.
14. Every 60 seconds on Facebook: 510 comments are posted, 293,000 statuses are updated, and 136,000 photos are uploaded. (Source: The Social Skinny) The Implication: Again, there are a lot of engaged and active users, but also a huge amount of information competing for their attention, so quality and strategy on your part matter.
15. 4.75 billion pieces of content shared daily as of May 2013 which is a 94 percent increase from August 2012. (Source: Facebook)
16. 50% of 18-24 year-olds go on Facebook when they wake up. (Source: The Social Skinny) What this means for you: Facebook is important to these users, and potentially, if done correctly, so is the content you post on it.
17. One in five page views in the United States occurs on Facebook. (Source: Infodocket 2012) How this helps you: This is a huge market on the web; if you use social media marketing efforts on Facebook well, you could have huge returns to show for it.
18. 42% of marketers report that Facebook is critical or important to their business. (Source: State of Inbound Marketing 2012 The Takeaway: This is a crowded marketplace, but you can’t afford to sit it out, because odds are fairly high that your competition is there. The key is to use Facebook marketing correctly and make sure that your efforts stand out from the crowd.
19. 16 Million local business pages have been created as of May 2013 which is a 100 percent increase from 8 million in June 2012. (Source: Facebook)
20. 7.5 million promoted posts have been made from June 2012 to May 2013. (Source: Facebook)

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Why Internet Marketing can Solve them?

Every Startup has its own marketing challenges that must be understood immediately & necessary actions should be taken before it is too late. Most of the small business fails not because of their idea but because they fail to communicate their marketing message to the right audience properly.

Below are some most common marketing problems that can be solved effectively by learning internet marketing skills.

Problem 01 – Running under Limited Resources

Being a startup, we have to play with limited resources & the majority of our

investment is spent on initial branding and marketing. Conventional modes of promotion are becoming costly day by day & as a starting business it is always hard to include various marketing channels in our marketing strategy.
After identifying your target market and audience, you need to approach them & this is where marketing plan starts. The problem arises with choosing right advertising media within our limited budget. Most of the running capital of a starting business burns into marketing and promotion.

According to Wikipedia, top advantages of small business - “Small business is well suited to internet marketing because it can easily serve specialized niches, something that would have been more difficult prior to the internet revolution which began in the late 1990s.”

Internet marketing practices such as SEO, PPC, Social Media Activities, Content Marketing, Email outreach etc. can help startups to raise their voice with a little budget.

Internet Marketing is less expensive than any other media, also its easy to change marketing message at any stage.

Problem 02 – Spending Without Focus

Conventional Marketing is not focused and it is hard to target the right prospect and spend money for customer acquisition. Suppose, you plan to target a specific region or group of users for the product or service you offer, how would you do that? Most of your marketing money gets wasted since you pay for huge circulation, not for your target audience (e.g. Newspaper Marketing or Radio Commercials). Can you ask them to show your ad to your target audience only and you would pay accordingly? Never!

Thanks to internet technology where we can spend every single coin wisely to reach and acquire your target market as per their location, demographics, interests, behavior etc.

Internet Marketing is focused & can be more personalized.

Problem 03 – Short Life Span

Do you know your advertising expenditure life? How long your marketing money works? Does it accumulate or dies every time?

Conventional Advertising has very short life span, you pay for one edition or one day (even sometimes for one hour), if that works then OK, Either get ready to write another cheque.

On the other hand if, internet marketing is done properly with planning it can last for years, sending you regular prospects.

Internet Marketing – It Never Dies

Problem 04 – Interrupting Others Life

Conventional Marketing is also ‘Interruption Marketing’, or ‘outbound marketing’ since you need to interrupt people to promote your product or services & your audience is not interested to see your ad any more. We also call it ‘Push Marketing’, where you try to push your product forcefully.

Modern Internet marketing approaches can help you to engage your target audience and promoting your products or services in a way that people love to see it again and again.

This 6:25 min video by Pepsi is a fantastic example of it, jump to 2:00 if you’re impatient –

Internet Marketing can be engaging & leads to interactive advertising – Inbound Marketing Model

Problem 05 – No Measurement Stick

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” – This popular statement was given by John Wanamaker – Father of modern advertising.

[message type=”simple”]Conventional marketing still have the same question unanswered even after 92 years of Wanamaker.[/message]

Suppose you publish your ad in your local newspaper, do you have any data to calculate the effectiveness of that ad? How would you decide, whether to repeat it or not?

Thanks to era of internet marketing, now we can measure the effectiveness of every penny spent.

Internet Marketing Tools have stronger tracking and analysis capabilities.

You might have some more interesting points to share, let us know your thoughts on this topic in the below comment section. I would highly appreciate your participation.

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5 Ways to Increase Blog Viewership -Ncame Promotion

Are You a Blog Owner?

Blog owners keep hunting for better and faster tricks to attract as many viewers as possible. You can find hundreds of tips on the internet regarding, ‘how to promote your blog’ or ‘how to increase blog traffic’, most of which are fad techniques, evolving means that either do no work out right or involve a surge in viewership for a few days, but no lasting & sustainable traffic.

If you’re new to blogging you should first learn, ‘How to write a blog post to rank high in Google‘ and ‘24 blog post ideas for next 24 days‘.

Broadly speaking, there are two actions to make your blog popular with stable viewership and income. The first is to make a first-time reader take interest in your blog through engaging and genuine content. And the second is to make existing viewers comeback for more, through subscriptions or simply arousing interest.

Here are 5 fail proof tips that would help you to achieve your traffic goal in no time.

[Disclaimer – Personally, I don’t run any blog currently but mentoring many successfully running blogs of my online marketing training students.]

1. Get Your Readers to Subscribe

A blog subscription is a vital objective of every successful blog out there. It is, getting your reader to enter his email id to join your newsletter and allowing you to send the newest posts of your blog directly to them as soon as the post is published.

Studies have widely proven that the blog subscribers increase the viewership of your blog by several folds as well as its good to increase website traffic. The problem then is to make the viewer take their time and make an effort to subscribe. Here are few ways to getting there.

a. Include a blog-subscription dialogue box

This may be simply a translucent dialogue box that would pop-up when your blog loads on a viewer’s computer for the first time or it can be included in the sidebar or at the end of each post. It would contain a form for the entry of viewer’s details.

Using this box would prompt the viewer to subscribe to your blog, especially if they are coming back for the second time.

b. Choose Your subscription words carefully

Instead of saying, “Enter your email below to subscribe to this blog”, say a much more promotional thing such as “Enter your email to get Free stuff/latest news” or “Get the latest content first, Join the winner’s team” etc. to attract visitors. How you market your subscription options goes a long way to increase your number of subscribers.

There has been a groundbreaking marketing study in which Chris Spooner included a small free give away with every subscription witnessed an overnight doubling of their subscription list. Chris mentions “Subscribe and Get a Free Resource Bundle, Download Now!” As You can see, your words matter more than you think.

c. Strategically Place Your Subscription Boxes

As I mentioned above, you can place your subscription box immediately below your blog content. This helps, because only those users will reach these boxes who have read the entire of your blog post.

Or, you can use a light box to pop-up your subscription box on the screen after a certain amount of time.

If a visitor has read the whole of even a single post on your blog or stayed on your site, then it is clear that he is interested in your content and more likely to subscribe.

Placing a strategic subscription box guide & remind visitors to join your blog.

2. Publish Attractive Content and Keep Bribing Your Visitors

No doubt, new and fresh content attracts visitors even from Google’s organic search results. Most importantly, you ought to remember that viewers will not take a second look at your blog if you do not post content that they like to read.

Therefore, it’s important for you to pay special attention to, not only how often you post, but to what you post.

Bribing for subscription, this depends on the kind of blog you’re running. If you run a blog as a parallel initiative to your business and there are products that you’re selling, it might be a good idea to include a small gift packages to keep coming back. If you sell tangible goods or products, you can include coupon codes or promo codes for free in various position of your blog. If you’re running ‘information only’ blog you can offer eBook or ‘7day email course’ etc. similar against subscription.

3. Run a parallel Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube page

Running a page for your blog on social networking website or video sharing website would go a long way to increase the popularity of your blog. This is a commonly practiced tactic and is coined as SMM (Social Media Marketing). Social Networks allow you to showcase your best of products on a website featuring billions of people.

It’s a common fact that people who are less likely to subscribe to your blog are still more likely to connect you on Facebook or Twitter.

While in general, I tend to discourage buying popularity, I concede that buying you initial popularity on these social media websites would serve as a good kick-starting tactic.

It’s however, important that you keep updating your Social Media Pages frequently and with pictorial and/or other forms of interesting content to keep the followers coming back for more. Social media is now an excellent source to increase website traffic for free.

4. Use the Right Site Structure

The structure of your blog determines how easily users can find your past posts and your most popular posts. In general WordPress and other blogging platforms offer you with several choices of blog structure templates for Free. I suggest using a structure that would have all post records listed by category on the right sidebar of your blog so that anyone interested in reading more would be able to fish out similar posts with ease. You could also go as far as introducing an extra tab on your blog for your most popular posts.

Furthermore, the categories for blog sorting should be chosen at par with SEO techniques to make sure that people get exactly the phrase that they think of when looking for a category.

Include more similar posts at the end of each post to let your blog reader dig more content. Remember, here your prime objective is to achieve multi-page views per user. Keep doing experiment to gain the most possible engagement of your reader.

5. Links, Reviews and Information

Linking up your blog to other blogs, links to reviews and specifications of products, and general information regarding the purchase, usage and maintenance of products help e-commerce blogs. Similarly, coming up with content and sources on the internet that further aid a reader’s knowledge horizon would help blogs which serve typically as a knowledge base.

Give the reader openly and abundantly anything that they will get in other places through their online research anyway. Remember that your objective is to make people read your blog since you share the useful and interesting information with them which they might be hunting through Google.

Now here’s what I want You to Do:

If You found this post helpful, share it with your friends.

I wish to help as many people as possible, and I need You to help spread the word. So, thank you in advance.

And now, I’ve more homework for you…

1. Check your daily New visitors from Google Analytics & your no. of subscribers. If you’re running with 2-5% conversion rate you’re doing good, but if not, do some experiments with language, color, placement & offering in your subscription box.
2. Do you have some interesting offer for your visitors? If not, think of one & start promoting it.
3. You might already be running a Facebook page, try Facebook paid marketing to increase your reach & study the effects for next 7 days.
4. Take help of your social network (friends & fans) to collect inputs about your blog structure, ask for some suggestions of improvement and implement them immediately.
5. Be generous and helpful, start sharing and linking expert posts in your articles in favor of your loyal of readers.

And You’re done!!

I hope, You would love to share your thoughts and experiences by leaving a comment, so that I could learn more from you.

Happy blogging 

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