7 Ways To Be More Productive With Your Time

We have all read books that tell us how important our time is, but most don’t simplify it in one page with vital tips. Well, I have. I teach, praise and live by these techniques.

These tips may not work for everyone, but they are a key to how I got to where I am today.

 

1. Organization: simplify things. Stay organized. Label files using logic that makes sense to you. Keep important, frequently referenced documents in a folder. The less time you spend searching for items, the more time you have to focus on important tasks. We all get inundated with and submerged in work, but we need to remember that by taking the time now to organize, time saved hunting for important information in the future will add up.
2. Multi-tasking: We live in a fast-paced environment where people are continuously taking on more work than they can do. By multitasking, you can accomplish a lot more. Let me be clear – it is very important not to multi-task to the point where you lose focus. If you are on the phone with a client, you probably shouldn’t be typing an email. For instance, I get a lot of work done while at the gym. I get on the elliptical and spend the hour working the lower half of my body and sending emails at the same time. I’m still getting an incredible workout and I feel less stressed after the gym knowing I was able to get work done.
3. Write your to-do list the night before: This tip seems pretty intuitive, yet a surprising number of very successful people share this habit. Knowing what your workload will look like the following day will help you rest more easily. You’ll also be able to refer to it if you realize you’ve forgotten something overnight, and part of you will be thinking about the following day’s activities, helping you feel more prepared to meet unique challenges or new situations.
4. Read this book: Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi. This is one of the most inspirational and informative books I’ve ever read. Ferrazzi details, in an entertaining story fashion, the best tactics to networking effectively, with generosity, and in a way that ensures everyone wins. Our lives, in business and outside, are largely dictated by the health and strength of our connections.
5. Personal time: When you’re done at work, be done with work. An unbalanced life isn’t healthy. Just like our bodies and minds need the rejuvenation that happens during sleep, our “work muscles” need time to rest, recuperate, and ruminate on new information. Remember to commit as much time, effort and love into your non-work relationships as your work relationships (including time with yourself!)
6. Turn off the TV: Invest in yourself. Instead of submitting to the urge to tune out in front of the tube, read. Whether you’re reading something that will directly help you improve your performance, strategy or outreach at work, or you’re reading a book strictly for pleasure, you’ll be doing yourself a great service. Our minds need new information, and from varied sources, to continue growing.
7. Listen to audio CDs driving: There is so much to learn. Audio books are readily available, both on CD and for download (try www.audible.com for a wide, high-quality selection) and that long commute could work in your favor. Start your day with a motivational CD to get you pumped up for work, or listen to an industry specific talk to gain insight and new tools.

http://www.business2community.com/strategy/7-ways-productive-time-01384881#uqeSiajXi3rqeMjP.97

7 Tips for Driving Targeted Traffic With Twitter

Social media has many uses—from making contacts to performing customer service—but driving quality traffic to your site is Twitter’s secret weapon.  The big question is this: How can we get more of that lovely attention we crave?

As my recent poll shows, generating incoming traffic is the number-one need that people have right now, and for good reason. Traffic translates into:

• Attention, engagement, conversation and recognition
• Spreading your message far and wide
• Prospects and subscriber opt-ins
• Customers, increased sales and leads
• Media and interviews, which lead to more attention

… and last but not least, an ego boost.

In a previous article here I mentioned the many benefits of Twitter for your business. Now here are seven key points you need to know if you want to get more targeted traffic from Twitter:

 

#1: Know your audience

Growing your traffic always starts with your audience if you want to do it right. Untargeted, uninterested “hits” are a waste of time and resources at worst, and at best just pure vanity.

• What does your audience want and need?
• How do they like it delivered?
• Which topics are on their minds right now?
• Are there trends that are growing in popularity?
• How do these folks speak? What words and phrases do they use?

This means that driving traffic starts with listening and observing. Get to know your target so you can most efficiently engage them.

Twitter has a tool for this. Use search.twitter.com to find what people in your niche are talking about and follow some of their conversations.

Once you get an idea of what people are interested in, join in those conversations and talk to people.

 

#2: Get the “right” followers

So much rubbish is thrown around about how to grow your follower count that it makes it seem that the number is all that matters. Wrong!

You need people to want to hear what you have to say. This means you do NOT want people who auto-follow because they are either:

1. Robots and not real human beings (e.g., spam software, people trying to inflate their follower count, scrapers)
2. Not actually reading your tweets and just following to allow you to DM them

The followers you most want are those who follow you because they are interested and think they will get value from your tweets. These people are most likely to find you via:

• People retweeting your stuff, either within Twitter or using a TweetMeme button
• Referrals from other Twitter users
• Your blog; for example, your articles that say “Follow me on Twitter at @chrisgarrett and tell me what you think,” or your sidebar Follow Me button
• Other people’s blogs, when you guest post or comment
• Clicking your forum signature when you participate in discussions, or your email signature

Unfortunately Twitter closed off a really nice way that people used to get targeted Twitter followers. It used to be that we could “listen in” to conversations that people we followed were having, but now you have to be following both parties. This means we can’t discover new people that way. If someone puts something before they mention your @name it can still work, and I still occasionally get followers through that.

Essentially the advice is, put your Twitter name where it will be seen and encourage people to share it!

 

#3: Build engagement

Talk to people.

Engage your followers. Don’t just see them as a passive list of eyeballs! Treat folks as human beings and you will do much better at this stuff. It is called social media for a reason.

• Ask questions
• Hold conversations
• Dip into others’ conversations
• Encourage feedback

 

#4: Get clicks

So now your followers are seeing you as an interesting person and not a robotic “feed,” which means they are more likely to take notice when you tweet out a link.

Tweet Valuable Links

Whatever you do, don’t just tweet your own stuff. That is both selfish and boring!

Get into the habit of sharing anything cool, regardless of who created it. Retweet good stuff and other people are going to be more willing to retweet yours. Tweet out fun and useful links your friends send you in email or from the news. Be known as a person who tweets good stuff.

 

Timing

Not everyone is online at the same time. There is a whole world outside of your timezone, plus people have a different schedule than you. You know the feeling of confusion when you land in a foreign country. Not only have you got to adjust to local time, but also people seem to have their meals at a different time of day, shops open and close at strange hours, and business meetings seem to be held randomly. Twitter is like that, you can’t just look at a time zone converter and think people will be at their desk at a certain time.

1. Tweet the same thing a few times, a few hours apart, to give your message several chances to be seen.
2. Vary the times of day you tweet and monitor response.
3. Watch for the peaks and troughs of activity in YOUR stream (not just what works for others).

I tend to aim to catch the peak times for Aussies, the EU/Brits, East Coast USA, and West Coast USA, but it is far from an exact science!

Headlines

There are two main driving factors that affect your chances of getting a click:

1. Your reputation
2. The headline

Hopefully at this point #1 is taken care of, but #2 takes some work.

First of all, use my free download 102 Proven Headline Formulas as a starting point. There are 102 fill-in-the-blank templates which ought to give you a head start on writing a compelling caption.

If you use an interesting title and it matches your audience’s wants and needs, then you are going to get clicks.

Split test

You might not get it right the first time, so try another variation:

• Phrase it as a question
• Make it into a “How To” headline
• Use curiosity versus just the facts

A lot of this is about learning what your audience reacts to best.

 

#5: Measure performance

When you use a link-shortener with a built-in click-tracker such as bit.ly, you can see how well any of your links perform. This is useful for improving over time and to see which links get picked up virally.  As they say, what you measure you get more of!

With Twitter it’s not just the link clicks that YOU get, but the retweets and shares that really drive the real traffic. TweetMeme and bit.ly can give you vital reporting about how well you do, as well as your Google Analytics.

 

#6: Do more of what works, but test, test, test

When you find what works for you, do more of that. Keep in mind though that if you only do the same things you will either get the same results and not improve, or you will wear out that technique. Experiment, learn and mix it up.

Trends change, techniques improve, fads go out of fashion. Do not get stuck on rails, move and flow with your audience.

 

#7: Encourage sharing

Once you have your initial click, your job is not done!

Make sure your article has a TweetMeme button so that anyone who likes what you shared can easily share it too.

If you want to get really fancy, give people an incentive to share, such as a random prize drawing for anyone who tweets your message. Of course, the message will contain a link back to you …

Once in a while it doesn’t hurt to actually ask for retweets. Just don’t overdo it, as you will only annoy your followers. This will make them less responsive, rather than more.

Does it really work?

Here is a case study for you. For the last Social Media Success Summit in 2009, Mike Stelzner and I ran a competition on chrisg.com using all the advice mentioned here in this article.

 

The competition post was retweeted over 1,000 times

Using TweetMeme we can see that the competition post was retweeted over 1,000 times before it stopped tracking.

 

Social Media Success Summit 2009 Competition Clicks

Just the cli.gs link alone was clicked 12,753 times.

So yes, it does work.

Bottom line:

• Gather the correct audience
• Be awesome
• Share cool stuff
• Encourage other people to share it too

Does Twitter work to generate traffic for your stuff? Got any tips to share? Anything people do that annoys you? Please share—go ahead and comment below right now!

 

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/driving-targetted-twitter-traffic/

25 Simple Ways to Grow Your Email List

                                        

 

I have some bad news: Your email marketing database degrades by about 22.5% every year. Your contacts' email addresses change as they move from one company to another, opt-out of your email communication, or abandon that old AOL address they only use to fill out forms on websites.

As a marketer, it's your job to make sure you're constantly adding fresh contacts to your email marketing campaigns so you can keep your numbers moving up and to the right.

How to Drive More Facebook Traffic to Your Website in 5 Easy Steps

By Andrea Vahl

Published February 4, 2014 

Would you like to drive more Facebook traffic to your website?

Is quality Facebook traffic important to your business?

Getting Facebook fans to your website (and then hopefully onto your email list) is even more critical with Facebook’s recent announcement of decreased organic reach for pages.

Use these five steps to help you get more traffic Facebook to your website.

#1: Make Sure You Have a Steady Stream of Shareable Content on Your Website

If you have a website that never changes, you’re going to struggle to get much traffic to it. Posting links to the same page on your site over and over is as futile as Sisyphus rolling the boulder up the hill.

These days, the name of the game is content marketing and you had better figure out how your business can participate.

The fresh, new content you post on your site is important—not only for social media marketing, but also for search engine optimization. Google rewards sites featuring fresh content with higher ranking. But you don’t have to post epic blog articles three times a week to win at the content marketing game. Posting something new and helpful once a week or even once a month can benefit your website traffic.

Here are some ideas that can help you brainstorm how you can add new content to your website:

• Post a weekly tip about your niche. It doesn’t have to be long; a paragraph or two with a nice photo will do just fine. Start with the frequently asked questions that come in from your customers.
• Post a weekly news bite with a photo about what is happening in your business. This works well for businesses that have events.
• Curate a list of top 10 helpful articles from around the web that you found that week. Add a short sentence about why you liked them.
• Interview someone in your office or in your industry. The interview doesn’t have to be live or with video (but that makes it even better). You could send the interviewee a list of 5-10 questions beforehand.

Roth Heating & Cooling posts quick tips that benefit their audience.

Not only will you increase the keywords on your site (which benefits you on search engines), you can use this material for social media postings and in your email newsletter. A win-win-win!

#2: Make it Easy to Share Your Content to Facebook on Your Website

Once you have fresh content, you need to make it shareable. Your first step is to add a social share plugin and/or Facebook Share buttons.

I like using the Digg Digg plugin because it has all of the buttons I want to display and it floats along the side of the post as the reader scrolls through the article. But you may also want to consider adding static share buttons at the beginning and end of the post that are inline with the article. You can also do this with the Digg Digg plugin.

The Digg Digg plugin has the floating sidebar and inline sharing buttons.

Don’t ignore share buttons on the individual pages of your websites. While people may not be sharing your “Contact me” page, you may have good content on a resource page of your website that you want to allow people to share easily.

Also consider asking for a Facebook share if you feel you have a particularly helpful blog post. Remind readers at the end of your article by saying something like, “Did you find this article helpful? Feel free to share it on Facebook by using the buttons below.” Remember that people are mostly going to share something that is useful to them. When you’re creating content, always keep your customer’s benefit in mind.

#3: Optimize Your Facebook Posts

The next thing you want to do is make sure to optimize the way you post. There are basically three different ways you can post a link to your website, and depending on your audience (and how Facebook’s algorithm happens to be working at the moment), you can get different results.

The traditional way to post a link is just to cut and paste the link into the status section and allow the link to pull in the photo and metadata. The issue with this method is the photo that is pulled in can show up smaller if it isn’t a 1.91:1 ratio, as mentioned in our recent Facebook Hacks article.

If the photo on your website is not sized optimally, the link won’t pull in a large photo.

When you have a photo that has the 1:91:1 ratio on your website, it appears larger in the news feed.

And when you have no photo or description at all on your article, the fields are blank.

Another way to post a link is to post a photo and then add the link into the status update with a little blurb about the link. The nice thing about this is that the description travels with the photo when it’s shared so you’re then controlling the message a bit more. The other nice thing is that photos can show up larger in the news feed.

Post an image with the link in a status update.

One technique that has been popular in the past to get greater reach is to post your link in the status section and then “X-out” the link data that is pulled in to change the post to “text only,” even though it has a link in it. The benefit of this in the past has been that text-only posts were getting more reach.

But Facebook recently announced that the new Facebook algorithm will show fewer text posts from pages. So we will have to watch how the effectiveness of this strategy changes.

Changing the post to a text-only post with a link may not work as well in the future.

With all of these approaches, you need to test which one gets the most engagement and drives the most traffic for you.

Once you post the content, you may want to consider boosting it with some advertising. See #5 for more information on advertising on Facebook.

#4: Optimize Other Places on Facebook to Add Links to Your Website

To drive more traffic to your website, make sure you have links in other parts of your Facebook page that people may be visiting.

Use your About page to direct people to different areas of your website.

Add links to your About page to direct people to different areas of your website.

Add links to your milestones.

Milestones stay on your About page and can have links in them.

Add links in your photo descriptions.

When someone clicks on your photo, they will see the photo description.

Use links in your photo descriptions—especially your cover photo, which will be clicked on more often.

Use custom tabs with links to your website.

Consider using an application like NetworkedBlogs to bring in links to your blog posts into the tab automatically.

People can easily access your most recent blog posts.

Optimize your personal profile.

Don’t neglect your own personal profile when considering how you can drive more traffic to your website. Make sure you’re sharing your blog posts to your personal profile and optimize your own About section with links.

Add links to your personal profile About section.

Editor’s Note: This section originally mentioned the Woobox redirect feature which is in violation of Facebook’s guidelines as listed in #11 here.

#5: Advertise

Advertising on Facebook can be a great option to get targeted traffic if you have a budget. And with Facebook’s recent announcements about decreased organic reach, advertising is going to be even more critical for marketers.

To drive traffic to your website, you can either create an ad from scratch with a link to your website, or boost content that you’ve already posted. When you boost content, remember to post something that doesn’t have a photo that has more than 20% text in it or it won’t get approved by Facebook. You can use Facebook’s text overlay tool to measure the amount of text.

Boosting a post with a link in it can be a good idea.

One issue that I’ve found with boosting a post is that it doesn’t usually result in a lot of link clicks. You typically get more likes and comments on the post, which boosts the engagement of the post itself. However, if you truly want clicks to your website, you’re better off using the Ads Manager and choosing that objective.

For a better click-through rate to your website, use the Ads Manager.

Remember to use the news feed ads to help you improve your click-through rate even more because the ads in the right column do not get clicked as much.

Guide your website traffic to achieve your goals.

Finally, make sure you know why you’re driving more traffic to your website. If your website isn’t giving a call to action once your visitors get there, you’re missing the point.

Each piece of content on your website should do something to escort your potential customer further along your sales funnel. You might ask for people to comment on your blog post to engage with them, or tell people to sign up for a freebie so you can get them on your email newsletter list or even pick up the phone to give you a call.

What do you think? Have you found a technique that works well for driving more traffic to your website? Please share your thoughts and comments below.

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/drive-more-facebook-traffic/

Marketing Strategy to Improve Social Media Presence

Social media is becoming an important part of online marketing as it enables you to promote your brand and connect with the audience but you should keep in mind the following points while promoting your brand over social media.

1. Social media is a medium for people to connect with each other. It is not designed to directly promote your products or services. That's why you should use such platform wisely in order to make strong brand reputation online.

2. Focus on posting useful information that provides value to the customer. Try to engage customers in reading content and also communicate with your followers.

Here are some tips that help to improve social media presence -

Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram are the most common social media channels today. These sites provide a network where everyone can actively participate. Business are also using it commercially to spread their business online.

Determine Objectives and Goals

Determine your goals and objectives for growing your business presence on social media. It will help you to make the strategy accordingly before you start posting. Make sure about the platform you are using is going in an efficient way to spread your business online.

Understand Their Needs

Find out the things that your audience is looking for. Understand what topics they want to read about. After knowing their requirements and needs provide them useful things they want to see.

Add Social Profile links on Your Website

People who visit your website also check the social profile of a specific company or business to find out what quality of services/ products they offering to the end users and it affects the website ranking also. Nowadays, people check the company reviews at different websites prior to seek the services. This way by linking your profile links on the website will help the visitors to like or follow the verified page of your company and it makes the site more trustworthy.

Try to Engage With Every One

Whenever someone comment, favorite or retweet on your pages try thanks them in a usual manner. Reply to those users who post something on the page and let the audience know that you are reading.

Use Hashtags to Spread Information

You can use hashtags to improve the visibility of a particular topic. Your page's post may get noticed by more people but don't insert unrelated hashtags.

Building a strong social network will help you to increase leads towards your business.

http://ezinearticles.com/?Marketing-Strategy-to-Improve-Social-Media-Presence&id=9209300