People are tired of sales pitches. I recently had a friend unfollow and vow to never support a brand because of retargeting ads, as she found them invasive. We are all inundated with marketing messages constantly and consumers are sick of it. How then, as a small business, can you get your message heard? Influencer marketing has become the big buzz word in the last year or two, and the reason is simple: it may be the only real way to get your brand’s message out there!

What exactly is influencer marketing and how can a small business participate? First, let me be clear: many people are jumping on the influencer marketing bandwagon like it is something new. It is not – influencer marketing has been around since Eve convinced Adam to eat the apple. Despite what many people are promoting, influencer marketing is not simply Instagram models with lots of follwers posting photos wearing the latest fashions in exotic places. Influencer marketing instead is about getting someone to take action!

Influencer marketing is about getting someone to take action! Click To Tweet

Consumers may have stopped trusting brands and ad campaigns to tell them about useful new products and inform them how well something works, but they haven’t stopped needing those things to make their lives better. So, where did they turn? To each other! Influencer marketing used to simply be called word-of-mouth. The problem is that word-of-mouth wasn’t very scalable, it was hard to track, and unreliable. What changed? Technology.

We all carry around little computers in our pocket that have more computing power than what NASA used to send man to the moon.  This allows ordinary people to develop their superpowers and become an influencer.  And smart businesses are tapping into this effect.

The strongest influencers out there are people just like you and me. Ordinary people who are authentic and  relatable make the best influencers – not celebrities! The power of the ordinary person is so great today that […]

I was talking to someone the other day who was only making about $200 per month from their website. Do you ever wonder how some businesses flourish online, while others struggle to make even a few hundred dollars a year from their website? The answer is actually very simple: be the best answer on the internet. Notice, I didn’t say it was easy, just simple. Regardless of what you are selling, if you provide the best answer on the internet, you will win. You will not only get the best search engine placements, but you will have other people sharing your content, referring you, writing positive reviews about you, and you will sell more. So, just how do you become the best answer on the internet?

The first thing you must decide is what is the question? Who is your primary audience? Once you identify who that person is, what is the question they want answered? This may seem like a bunch of rhetoric, but it really is a necessary step. Let’s say you sell paint. Who is the person that usually makes a decision about what paint to buy? Is it the contractor or the homeowner? If it is the homeowner, is it the husband or the wife? My guess is that it is the wife who makes the decision about how a home is painted, but that information would of course have to be verified. Assuming it is the wife though, what specifically is she looking for? Color? Durability? Cost? Washability or maintenance? Guarantee? Ease of application? Ability to match the exact paint 5 years from now?

It is your job to provide the best answer on the internet. Not just any answer, but the BEST answer. Click To Tweet

Now that you know who your buyer persona or avatar is and what questions they are asking, it is your job to provide the best answer on the internet. Not just any answer, but the BEST answer. Sticking with the paint store example, this means that you do not simply want to use the manufacturer’s photos and description of the paint, you want to provide your own information. This is critical, as information is what your buyer persona is looking for. You are the expert in what you are selling, so talk to your customer as if they walked into your store and were asking you those exact same questions. Specifically, here is my recommendation: […]

Long-time customers and followers of my marketing know that I have always advocated that “if you do all of your other marketing right, the search engines will take care of themselves.” Still, there is something very alluring about SEO (search enginge optimization) and getting listed on page one of Google. This seems to be the Holy Grail of internet marketing. In the recent survey I conducted, it continued to be the most requested item that people wanted to know about. SEO is much like dieting – most people just want to take a magic pill to lose weight, but for it to be really effective, you have to put in the work.
SEO is much like dieting - most people just want to take a magic pill to lose weight, but for it to be really effective, you have to put in the work. Click To Tweet

How can you get to the coveted number one spot on Google?

Start by Taking Our Free SEO Audit

The dream of every business owner is to get their website listed on page one of Google. In order to do this, you must understand a few things about website traffic. The first is that almost 52 percent of all traffic to a website comes from bots – electronic spiders that are crawling your site either for the purpose of indexing your pages or trying to hack into the site. Clearly, security and optimizing your page for the bots to understand your site (and thus list you on page one for a specific term) are critical. The second thing to understand is that Google doesn’t just index your website, but it indexes individual pages within your website (that is why the bots are crawling your site). Your goal should be […]

I messed up. Each week, I write a blog post, which becomes the basis of my newsletter. The newsletter is generated automatically, assuming I check the category box “newsletter.” Last week I forgot to check that box, so the newsletter didn’t go out. I also updated my email program, which meant you didn’t hear from me, so I’m trying again. In case you missed it, here is the link:

https://webstoresltd.com/2018/03/14/top-podcasts/

That blog post was all about the most recent top podcast episodes I’ve done. This week, I could easily add another: my interview with Mitch Russo, the past CEO of Tony Robbins. Check that one out here: 20 Minutes of Influence

What does this have to do with Instagram? Simple – I did post this to Instagram, as I do daily. Instagram has become the social media platform of choice for influencer marketing. While well established (and owned by Facebook), growing a following for your business on Instagram is perhaps easier than other social media platforms. The reason is people follow hashtags, and Instagram is the master of hastags. You can include up to 30 hastags with each post. A hashtag is simply the # symbol, followed by a word or phrase (as a single word). For example, #influencerbusiness.

When building your Instagram account, is is a good idea to […]

In a recent podcast interview, I discussed with my guest, Michelle Hoglan, about the importance of reviews. You can find this episode at https://gregjameson.com/michelle-hoglan/. (While your there, hop on over to iTunes and leave a review!) As business owners, we’d all like to get a ton of positive reviews, whether it be on Google, Facebook, Yelp, our own websites, or any number of othwer places where customers might be looking to see if they should do business with us.

I was recently asked to create a “leave-behind” for a service company, where the customer could write a review on Google. As it turns out, this process isn’t intutitve, so I thought I’d lay out the instructions for some of the more popular places to leave reviews. Let’s start with Google, where we want to create a direct link, rather than making our customers follow multiple steps when we ask them to review us.

To create a link, you’ll need to get the Place ID for your business. To get your Place ID:

1. Go to the PlaceID Lookup Tool.
2. Enter your business name in the “Enter a location” field at the top of the map.
3. Click your business name in the list that appears.
4. Your Place ID will appear on the map, beneath your business name.

Add your Place ID to the following URL to create your link:

• https://search.google.com/local/writereview?placeid=<place_id>

Using the example above, the URL with the Place ID added would be:

• https://search.google.com/local/writereview?placeid=ChIJyV7CRWiVbIcRa2D-rd_Sn5Y

You can now use this link to leave a review, or shorten it with a URL shortnerlike bit.ly. For example:

http://bit.ly/ReviewWebStoresOnGoogle

If you like the content I provide each week on this blog, please go ahead and follow the link above and leave me a positive review!

Facebook

Another place you want your customers to leave reviews is on […]

Having been in the ecommerce business for a couple of decades, I still have clients ask me why they are not selling more online. Most people mistakingly believe that once they put up a website that they can sit back and watch the orders roll in. Nothing could be further from the truth – your work is just getting started! Now you have to let people know that your site exists. You need to get everyone you know to share your site, leave reviews, and start talking about it. Getting others to promote your website is not just what my book, The Influencer Effect is all about, it is CRITICAL for the success of your website. You’ll notice for example that I’ve been promoting other products and websites as part of being an influencer. Here is an example:

As a part of Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Team, I’ve got a real cool freebie for you…
Jeff just released his Product Launch Blueprint… it’s a downloadable, 18-page PDF, plus a full-length training video that walks you through the Blueprint step-by-step.
Go and grab it right now here: http://bit.ly/PLF3PDF
This is part of his larger Product Launch Workshop series but this is seriously the best section of his whole training so if you do nothing else, grab this pdf and print it out.

OK, back to what online shoppers want from your website, here is a simple infographic that explains some of the more important features of an ecommerce website. […]

Several years ago, facebookhad the ability for your business fan page to act and behave like a website. You could actually show different content to people who had liked your page than to those who didn’t. You could create dirrent pages that brought up different “apps”, such as signing up for your emails. Then they took it all away, making every page look just like every other page. You had to conform. resistance was futile.

Some apps, especially ecommerce apps, allowed you to still build other pages into your page. For example, you can shop directly inside of Facebook at the Cyberbase Tradng Post page (https://www.facebook.com/CyberbaseTradingPost/app/251458316228/). And, with a little persistence, you can add new “tabs” to you your page. But what if you could actually make your Facebook Fan Page be a website? Now since more people are on Facebook than on your current website, that would be cool.

There is a Facebook-approved app that will allow you to do exactly that. It’s called 22Social and they create what they call “Promo Pages”. Here is an example:

Notice that the menu selections (tabs) on the left can contain whatever items you want. The page itself doesn’t look like your typical Facebook page. […]