Build Business Profits

Question: What Is The Goal of  Business Growth Marketing?

Answer: Traffic and Conversion!

What this means is that in order to grow your business with new customers,  there  needs to be  a stream of relevant traffic interested in what it is you offer.  Your job is to move this traffic from interested to “I’ll Take It” !

Question: How do you move people from being interested to buyers?

Answer: In my experience, people become buyers when a relationship and trust is established. Also, for professional services and many physical products, people want to talk to a person before making a final decision. Contact information including an email address and phone number is very important.

Building A Relationship On Line

The process that has worked for me has at it’s foundation a blog.  The blog has a contact capture form with a reason for people to give you that information. Their name goes into a autoresponder system for follow- up messages with value added content.  Value added content can be tips, a link to another blog article, examples of what is working and direct educational material. Each follow on email should have a signature with a link for more information and contact information.

The blog is the home for valuable content or articles that offer valuable information. This can be current news and relevant “how to” information. Offering examples of what is working is another terrific way of offering value. Marketing messages can be in the signature and the article itself can be structured so the reader understands how your offer is a solution for their interests.

In summary, the blog and the autoresponder sequence is key to building trust and establishing a relationship. Links in the blog and emails can direct the reader to a direct sales page or a contact page.

With this foundation in place and continually growing, you now have the source of material for valuable updates using social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Social Media is a major tool for helping you build your business.  I recommend you look at your social media network as an asset for your business that will continually become more valuable if it is properly managed.

Twitter

I always recommend using at least two accounts, one personal and one business. Twitter seems to regularly modify how it is enforcing its terms of service. Having multiple accounts reduces the risk of going completely off of Twitter because of an account suspension. However, if you post quality messages to valuable content plus use tweets that have no URL in them that demonstrate you are interacting, they you should not have any problems with account suspension.

Building a Twitter following and managing tweets through that network can be a significant commitment of time. I highly recommend leveraging or outsourcing a lot of this work. My company New Digital Media, Inc. has been established specifically to help you with this.

Facebook

There are three primary channels on Facebook that should be used that do not cost money. One channel is pay per click advertising does cost money. Regarding pay per click on Facebook,  my initial tests are positive. It appears advertising on Facebook is cost effective. More on this in a future article.

The first area that should be built on Facebook is your profile. There are many exceptions to the rule that profiles are to be personal. Currently I do not advise spending time building a business profile as there is a high risk of being deactivated.  Your personal profile can and should have clear links to your business.

My focus has been on building my profile and my friends list is primarily for business purposes. As I approached the 5,000 friends limit on Facebook I created a fan page. While I am not a fan of the label fan page, it is channel for expanding your network and there are no limits to the number of fans. If your goal is to build a fan page for a business (Facebook encourages business fan pages) then I recommend a build strategy that invites friends to a fan page, uses Twitter to promote your profile and fan page and test Facebook ads to build your fan page. I have seen very effective ad campaigns that have built fan pages fast so I know this works. If you build a fan page then you should have a communication strategy for developing the interest of your fans.

Facebook Groups are one of my favorites for building business since once a person joins your group, generally they are very interested in messages related to the topic of the group. For example, I have the group Build Business Profits on Facebook which ties into the theme of this blog as well as my social media blogs.  The feedback I receive from messages sent to this group as well as several other targeted groups I have built is consistently positive.

Other Social Media Sites

I highly recommend using YouTube and I have done  a lot of YouTube work in the past and will be stepping up my YouTube activity again this year. I also recommend LinkedIn  There are many other social media sites and I have some work being done on a handful of other sites. However, with the growth in Facebook and Twitter I continue to concentrate on those two. Up and coming and closely being watched is Google Buzz.

The Number One Key Success Factor

While I am always building my social media network and the network for clients of New Digital Media, Inc. the most valuable asset in social media is the quality of information offered in articles and personal communication.  With my own accounts and those of clients there is always a focus of adding value and blending with personal messages.  I have no automated messages flowing through Facebook and I am paying increasing attention to the balance of non automated messages on Twitter.

Related

My focus is having people connect with me on my offers. This is what I always advise clients as well. Consistently there is contact information with articles, contact name and email forms feeding an autoresponder with an email message sequence and published phone information.  This is fundamental internet marketing.  There is always more including search engine optimization,  search engine pay per click, squeeze pages and more. However with a consistent focus on building a relationship with people who are interested in your products and services, you will be able to stay focused on those on line tools most effective for your business.

Then there is off line marketing which is a topic for another article.

Steve Pohlit

Business Consulting, Executive Coach
Turnaround/Crisis Management
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International Business Resources

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New Digital Media, Inc.

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About: Steve Pohlit is a CPA,MBA and has been the CFO of several major domestic and international companies.  Steve is a business owner and an expert business consultant focused on building profits and net asset value. He is very experienced with Internet marketing and social media marketing.  All articles published by Steve unless specifically restricted may be freely published with this resource information.

Carl’s Jr. has over 1100 locations with 772 in California. They have no locations in my current home state of Florida. However, because of my business consulting experience in the restaurant industry along with a controversial video commercial released by Carl’s several years ago, I became aware of this restaurant business. I learned it was  founded with the purchase of one hot dog cart for less than $500  in 1941.

While reviewing a Facebook  application recommended by a friend I noticed an ad on the site for Carl’s.  Of course I remembered the original video that was absolutely outrageous and wondered if they had posted it on Facebook.  (They did not.)  What I did notice was they have almost 68,000 fans, they are promoting a new sandwich, offering an incentive coupon and their fan page wall is extremely active.

I went a little deeper and clicked to their website.  I stayed there maybe 5-8 minutes watching all their video commercials. They are very entertaining. I registered for their newsletter. The visuals, sounds and messages of the videos and the images of the graphics are terrific. If there was a location nearby I would be a customer.  I also feel that the next time I visit the West Coast I will look them up. Their presentation is that good.

Carl’s Jr has links to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flicker on their website.  I am not sure if they have expanded onto other social media sites. If  asked I would  recommend they be on every major social media venue. Clearly the visuals and sound are huge assets for their messages about their food.

Food isn’t the only attraction as evidenced by one YouTube video with Audriana Partridge in a hot gold bikini eating one of Carl’s Jr.’s famous sandwiches. This video has already been viewed over 545 thousand times with most others by Carl’s Jr.  being viewed in the range of 20 thousand.  Think about the value of one YouTube video being viewed over one half million times.

I did a brief review of Facebook to see if key competitors are using social media. Facebook members have activated McDonald’s and Wendy’s fan pages. Neither company seems to have an active Facebook presence.

I am a major advocate for using social media to build business profits. But here is the key as demonstrated by Carl’s Jr.: you have got to have a hook.  Carl’s is kicking butt in their ads for size, quality and price vs. McDonald’s.  Then they add amazing visuals, incentives, and are definitely on top of their game when it comes to strengthening social relationships.  So they are hitting on all cylinders including the use of a well toned body wearing little excited about a huge order of food. What an amazing contrast and Carl’s Jr. pulls it off marvelously just as they did a few years back with a famous celebrity promoting their food wearing near nothing on the hood of a car.  It was amazing.

On video and in pictures, Carl’s Jr. looks like  great tasting food. I assume that is the case with more than 1,100 locations. Of course that is key for sustained growth in same store sales as well as sustained growth in the number of locations. Somehow I suspect the food experience is great and I will confirm that one of these days. If you have eaten at Carl’s Jr. please share your experiences including what you ordered.

Great  example Carl’s Jr. of executing very well on fundamentals.

Sending you energy of health, happiness, prosperity

Steve Pohlit

Business Consulting, Executive Coaching
International Business Resources

Social Media Services
New Digital Media, Inc.

727-587-7871
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The subject matter just said  Test …This Is Not Spam. Take a minute to read this and then my comments.

Here is the rest of the message :

This is not spam!  You signed up from ____________  See end of e-mail for more CANSPAM compliance rules.
Please ignore this message, as it is only a test to see if this autoresponder is back up and running.
We need to notify you that this e-mail may contain advice on money-making methods and other subjects plus may include links to available products and/or from third parties in return for appropriate recompense.

If you cannot unsubscribe, you can always send a letter asking to be unsubscribed to:

P O Box 1078
Stanley, ND 58784

Don’t Know Why, But If You Wish To Leave:
http://amazingautoresponse.com/cgi-bin/r.cgi?s=10438&a=117&k=mEYboFVf9JM

To report sp*m by this member:
Please forward this email to abuse@amazingautoresponse.com or follow the above link for immediate removal.

—————————————————————-

Lessons:

I am not advocating doing this at all even though this email did get through to my main address.  Notice the reverse psychology here. …Please ignore.  Come on that always works (Note to Self)  Then the warning “This may contain advice on making money…”  I mean.. how cool is that?

Then there is the humor:

Unsubscribe – Send a Letter.  …

Don’t know why, but if you wish to leave

My view is I learn a lot from paying attention to spam. First spam mail may have some of the best subject lines.  Then there is formatting and other hooks  spam uses.

There is another thing I have learned and that is there a lot of people who use blogs like this to teach, who sell programs that teach you how.  Have you ever noticed how few promote “do it for you”?   Do you know why that is?  Well I have my views but what is important is that one of my new services does “do it for you” What is it?

Click over to New Digital Media You will understand what this is doing in about 3 minutes.

Sharing with all my readers the energy of peace, happiness and abundance

Steve Pohlit, Expert Business Consulting

Email Me, Steve Pohlit to schedule A No Obligation Consultation On Building Your Business Profits.Need more customers? Let’s discuss how to use cutting edge Social Media Marketing in the revenue building cycle of your business to drive your profits sky high. If  your company is not growing revenue and profits,  if your company is not cash flow positive Click Here for more information about Turnaround Consulting Services for Business In Crisis

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About: Steve Pohlit is a CPA,MBA and has been the CFO of several major domestic and international companies.  Steve is business owner and an expert business consultant, direct response and social media marketing  and social networking security expert . Steve is  focused on helping companies improve their business performance. All articles published by Steve unless specifically restricted may be freely published with this resource information.

Social Media In Plain Terms

Social media as an umbrella phrase includes sites and services that facilitate interactivity and community. In that regard blogs and email marketing are included. In fact both are an integral part of the marketing funnel. 

This series is focused on using the newer and emerging services for business development. The big three are YouTube, Facebook and  MySpace in that order. Fast risers are  Twitter and LinkedIn. Currently if you placed your social media marketing attention just on those, there still  would not be enough time in a  day to manually optimize the benefit of these sites. To develop and implement a business development campaign in most cases requires  an effective system that includes automation and leverage of very specifically defined tasks.

Which Site Is Best For Finding Your Target Audience?

All of them!  Look at the numbers.  Twitter which has moved into the 47th highest traffic spot according to Alexa as of the date if this article has an estimated 6 million users. If you have a business then your target audience is there.  Your audience is also on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, YouTube and many more sites. 

I suggest stop analyzing this until the cows come home and get to work.  The key is knowing how to properly use each account and attracting your target audience to your landing page, blog or website.  How you use Facebook is going to be different than how you use Twitter etc. All most likely are going to be linked and you will be using one of several applications to update multiple social media accounts through one interface. http://ping.fm is a popular one that works very well. 

Twitter

Twitter is particularly unique since each person has 160 characters for a profile biography and is limited to 140 characters per message.  It is also unique since according to Alexa most people stay on the first page of tweet flow (message displays).  This is a message ticker tape system. The newest message is posted at the top of the page and that pushes the last message on the page off.  

Many people focus on growing a large number of followers. The key is followers who are your target audience.  So how do you know that?  Start with Internet marketing 101 principles which is a clear definition of your target market.  Then what are the primary keywords related to your target audience?  Using the search function find out who is tweeting about those topic and follow them. You can expand this by following their followers. 

Balance Twitter followers and following by going to your View All Following screen and then looking for those people that do not have a direct message link. You can only direct message people if they follow you.  If after a few days someone has not followed you and you are attempting to balance the ratio, click delete.  There are some people and services that do not follow much at all but their content is valuable.  That is your choice.

More Twitter Tips in future additions. For now this will get you started and will help experienced users.  Again this is written with the goal of building business revenue and profits using social media. 

Marketing 

There have been no fundamental changes in the principles of successful marketing.  In order to convert targeted traffic into sales there must value and you must effectively communicate the value.  Start with your funnel and using Twitter as example.  You are forming  a relationship with your target audience.  Your tweets should have value. If they constantly scream buy this or that, your efforts will be futile and are likely to get you banned. 

Next

In the next article in this series I will take a closer look at some of the features, benefits and pitfalls of specific social media sites. In the meantime, every day you spend thinking about this or trying to figure it out on your own, is a day where you are not optimizing your sales that are possible using traffic from  social media. I  suggest you get started now by emailing me.

Email Me, Steve Pohlit to schedule A No Obligation Consultation On Building Your Business Profits.  Need more customers?  Let’s discuss how to use cutting edge Social Media Marketing in the revenue building cycle of your business to drive your profits sky high.

Link To Part 1 of  This Series

Sharing with all my readers the energy of peace, happiness and abundance

Steve Pohlit, The Profit Expert

FREE Report:

How To Increase Business Profits by 30% or More in 90 Days or Less

If you are in a for profit business you must have a continual stream of customers that buy what you offer. If you don’t have that working nothing else matters. Given that, what is your priority?  Correct…Marketing!!

There are only three ways to increase revenue:

1. Sell more products or services to an existing customer

2. Sell the same amount of products or services to a customer at a higher price

3. Add more customers

When anyone visits your business that is traffic.  When anyone who visits buys your offer that is conversion.

Recently, article posted here have been highlighting social media marketing for business. That arena is increasingly being used to generate traffic. I have helped many companies implement marketing programs that use a combination of tools including: a blog, a website, pay per click advertising, email marketing and more. These are all tools that work when used properly.

The landscape is changing with droves of people pouring into sites like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and more.  There are many people who claim to know why social media sites have become so popular but the reasons don’t matter. The facts are that there are huge numbers of people entering these sites and others like them for the first time each week.

Open up a Twitter account at Twitter.com and use the search feature at the bottom of the page and type in the keyword phrase social media.  Then begin to click on profiles and discover how many people are referring to themselves as a social media expert.

Key Point: If your primary intent is to do business, having a growing network of connected people on Twitter or anywhere else for that matter means nothing if they are not buying your offer. You have traffic but they are moving on by and the conversion piece of the formula is missing. So when someone calls themselves an expert ask them to show you the profitable business they have developed using social media. Don’t be surprised at the lack of response.

We started from scratch and developed two businesses that are profitable and cash flow positive using only social media. Social media we used  includes a blog for each business, and  a network we grew on several of the larger social media sites.

There was a lot of work involved in doing this. I know because I did a lot of it and so did my business partner.  Brian Campbell is the strategist on the detailed steps needed for this to work. Does this mean we are experts?  It means we really have a lot of skills, and now systems, for building meaningful market share in important niche markets.

My Top Two Recommendations for Businesses Wanting To Improve The Effectiveness of Their Marketing

1. Building a contact data base is key. Effectively communicate with that list. This is not new and remains a foundation principle. It is still an alien concept for most companies.

2. Have a find tuned marketing plan, budget and return on investment monitoring in place and reviewed weekly and for some actions, daily. All activity must be focused on building traffic and converting that traffic.

Closing Comments:

The social media landscape is hot and getting hotter. But there are also other proven business development tools including pay per click, email marketing, print media, electronic advertising, trade shows  and more. Each must be evaluated and tested in terms of benefit to your business. You can invest your time and that of your employees or outsource a lot of this. If you want fast results, outsource.  If you do, again migrate based on priorities and test.

Sharing with all my readers the energy of peace, happiness and abundance

Steve Pohlit
The Profit Expert

Email Steve to schedule A No Obligation Consultation On Building Your Business Profits.  Let’s discuss how to use cutting edge Social Media Marketing, Internet Marketing and Direct Response Marketing in the revenue building cycle of your business to drive your profits sky high.