3 Simple Ways to Measure Your Social Media Results

Are you looking for better ways to measure your social media activities?

Do you know if your social media efforts are worthwhile?

Social media measurement is one of the most frustrating challenges business face.

In this article I’ll show you three simple measurement strategies that can fit into one of your future campaigns.

Why Measure?

In order to measure the effectiveness of your social campaigns, it’s critical that you know your objective.

Ask yourself why you are considering including social media in your overall marketing campaign in the first place. How will your efforts impact your revenue and grow your business?

You’ll want to put a measurable outcome in place along with a timeframe in which to achieve the goal.

Now you can determine which social media platform aligns with your objectives.

For example, if you’re trying to reach a female audience and your business lends well to pictures and images, you might want to consider Pinterest.

If you’re a business-to-business brand marketing an upcoming conference, you’ll want to consider LinkedIn.

#1: Quantify Your Social Media Listening

“What you’re doing [on social media] needs to have impact. It needs to actually have revenue. And often times we try to make it fuzzy about that.” – Frank Eliason, Citi’s Director, Global Social Media (@FrankEliason)

Listening is one of the most often overlooked uses of social media, yet it’s probably the most important. If you’re not listening to your customers, you’re missing the point of social media.

But how do you measure listening and how does it impact your revenue?

In this example, we’re going to look at using Twitter to answer that question.
In Twitter’s search field, enter your business name.

You can then select whether you want to view Twitter’s “top” tweets about your business, “all” tweets containing your business name or tweets that contain your business name from only those people you follow.

As you filter the tweets, look through them and decide whom you’d like to follow. These are likely either potential customers or your current customers.

Monitor their tweets on a daily basis. Engage with them, answering their questions, adding value and helping them whenever possible.

Twitter’s Advanced Search is powerful too, especially if you’re a local business. You can use it to search specific terms related to your business that people who are near your location are talking about.

Twitter is an amazing tool for providing real-time customer service. You can learn things like:

Exactly how many people you’re helping

If you’re growing that number of people

The issues customers are experiencing with your business

What’s broken in your business

At the end of the measurement period, prioritize the problems you identify and use that intelligence to implement fixes and improvements within your business. You can measure the direct impact on your business by looking at the additional revenue or cost savings that these new fixes give you.

#2: Create a Rating System for Your Social Engagement

“Put a [tiered point system] in place rather than looking at how many likes you have.” – Scott Monty, Ford’s global head of social media (@scottmonty)

This is a simple yet effective strategy to use when you’re trying to generate awareness and buzz. It’s a smart way to measure the response to your efforts on Facebook, Twitter or any other social channel you’re using.

Here’s how it works.

Say you’re launching a product or service and want to build buzz about it on Facebook. You post an update to your Page about your launch and you get a bunch of likes on it. The next day, you post a different type of update. You get some likes on it, but you also see that people are engaging more with the second update by sharing the post and commenting on it.

Likes show support and comments indicate a deeper interest but shares are most valuable because they move the update beyond your page.

At the beginning of the campaign, translate your objective to a numeric goal. Then,use a tiered point system to weight different types of engagement according to which is most valuable to you.

Here’s an example of a tiered point system for Facebook:
Likes: 1 point each
Comments: 5 points each
Shares: 10 points each

During the campaign, a quick sum of values will help you determine if your efforts on Facebook are moving you closer towards your goal or not.

You can create similar point systems on any of the social channels you use. For example, on Twitter, 5 points for a reply and 10 points for a retweet.

#3: Add Tons of Value, Then Sell and Measure

“Jab, jab, jab, right hook.” – Gary Vaynerchuk (@garyvee)

This strategy is the concept behind Gary V.’s upcoming book and it’s based on providing great content that adds tons of value for your customers before asking for the sale.

For example, say your restaurant is rolling out a new healthy menu. Your goal is to get 300 customers into your restaurant to try the new menu over an upcoming weekend.

Since your food is visually appealing, you develop a Facebook or Instagram strategy. You post pictures of your food, create content around the importance of healthy eating and curate information on your Facebook Page about farmers’ markets in your area.

Offer this valuable content to build trust with people.

Then offer a coupon for your restaurant on your Facebook Page. The number of people who claim and redeem your coupon is a result you can quantify.

Here’s how to measure your efforts when using this strategy:
Use the tiered point system described in strategy #2 to determine if your content is moving you closer to your goal.
Use coupons that are specific to your social media campaign, thus making the return on your investment easy to track and measure.
Create unique landing pages for each of your campaigns where your customers can download or purchase what you are promoting. Since the landing page is used for one specific campaign, this will allow you to clearly see how successful your campaign is.

I hope this article gives you some ideas for how you can simply measure your social campaigns and shows you that you don’t need expensive measurement tools.

What do you think? Can you improve the effectiveness of your social media campaigns with some of the above strategies? What simple strategies are you using to measure your campaigns? Leave your questions and comments in the box below.
Images from iStockPhoto.

How to Make Money from Your Blog

Interested in how to make money from your blog? Well, making money blogging is DEAD! I’m sure you’ve heard that before, right? Just like we’ve heard that this industry or that industry is dead and it’s time to move on. Well, I can assure you that making money from your blog is getting easier and easier. Today I am going to go over 10 different ways you’re able to make money from your blog, starting today! No need to wait months upon months in order to start generating revenue, you can (and should be) monetizing your blog now.

Monthly Advertisements

One of the main ways blogs start to make money is by selling advertising space on their pages. You know, the 125×125 sidebar ads you see everywhere? Yeah, those are the ones I’m talking about. There’s a reason everyone is using them – because they work and they make you money.


The beauty of it is, with a place like Buy Sell Ads to run your ads through, you can virtually sit back and watch the ads get purchased and run without requiring you to do anything. You could also sell advertising directly on your site with an “advertise here” page letting the visitors know how to pay you for the ads, which works well because you don’t have to pay a % of your profits to Buy Sell Ads, although you’re going to have to do more work (add their advertisement to the page, remember when to remove it, etc).

Pay Per Click Advertising

The next most popular way to make money with your blog (it’s even the most popular for some sites) is with PPC advertising. The most popular way to run PPC ads is through Google Adsense. With Adsense, you’re able to pop some code into your website and let Google pick out the proper ads that match up to the content on your pages.

Then, every time someone clicks on the link in the ad, you get paid. Pretty simple right? Yup, and thats why most people use Google Adsense when starting out.

Digital Downloads

You can see this type of money making method in use on websites that sell ebooks or other digital download products (ie: WordPress themes, premium design resources, textures, etc). This works great because its a more passive way to earn income from your blog. Once you set the link up for people to pay & download, you never have to touch it again and it can make you money over & over again.

To streamline the process of digital downloads, I’d recommend checking out e-junkie. With millions of users and the ability to sell your products for as little as $5.00 per month, e-junkie is the perfect solution to have someone pay (to your PayPal account) and instantly download your files.
Affiliate Promotions

Here’s a method of making cash off of actual products that you can promote on your blog without actually needing to make the products yourself. Becoming an affiliate for someone else allows you to make a cut of the earnings when you send them traffic and sales.

For instance, you can sign up and promote WordPress themes from Elegant Themes, Books at Amazon, Audio files at AudioJungle, etc. It’s a great way to mix up your earnings through your blog and if you’re promoting quality products, your visitors won’t mind a bit.

Donations

Another way to make money from your blog is to push out tons of useful, free content and just ask for donations. You may not get donations from every visitor (in fact, I’d bet that you don’t) but you will get people who feel like you’re providing too much value to just take it and run & they’ll donate to you.

You can do this by setting up a PayPal donate button in your sidebar or at the end of your articles. Let the visitor click the button and then choose what amount they’d like to donate to you. Lost & Taken is a website that provides tons of useful texture downloads for free and has a donate button at the end of each post.

Membership Packages

When you run a blog, you can always set up a membership area with various membership scripts likeamember or wishlist member that allows you to post your regular content for viewers to check out for free and then also offer up that “extra special content” that the user has to pay for. You know, the downloadable source files for tutorials, ebooks, free themes, etc.

Chris over at SpoonGraphics is a perfect example of how you can turn your blog into a membership package machine. Chris regularly posts up “premium” content that is only available to it’s members, while the rest of the blog remains free and open to the public. This generates interest because he always has amazing content, so you just KNOW that the membership package is going to be worth it.

Sell Your Services

If you run a blog and also work as a freelancer, the odds of you being able to make some cash from your blog by offering your services is pretty great. For instance, if you run a blog that teaches people on how to make money from their blog and you also design blogs, why not promote your design services right on your blog? People who are interested in that topic should also be interested in the importance of having a killer design for their own blog.

You may also want to showcase writing you do for blogs if you’re looking to write blog articles for other websites. This shows that you can write on a variety of topics and also puts your name up their as an authority who knows how to write content that generates traffic.

Reviews

There are a couple of different ways you can go about building a blog that generates money through reviews. First, you can toss in some product reviews of related products to your blog topic and let your readers know that they’re paid reviews. The App Storm websites run by Envato does this pretty well.

Another way to do this is by building an entire blog around product reviews. You see these a lot with web hosting company review blogs and others in that market but there’s no reason you couldn’t venture out into a music review website, movie review website or something completely different.

CPM Advertising

If you’re building a website and relying on lower quality traffic sources like Stumble Upon or other places that generally send visitors who don’t click ads or buy products, then CPM advertising is probably a perfect solution for you. What CPM advertising is, is a payout for every 1,000 ad views you generate. So, if you can get 10,000 visitors to each post from Stumble Upon, but they’re not clicking on any ads, it might be time to switch to a CPM advertiser like Casale Media or Tribal Fusion.

Consulting & Coaching

This is a bit different than the services we mentioned above because here, you’re basically offering up your time instead of a service. When you run a blog and become an authority on the topic, odds are that some of your visitors will turn to you for advice. Instead of giving personalized advice away on a regular basis, why not offer consulting to them for an hourly fee?

Michael over at Remarkablogger turned his blog into a consulting machine and generates income from his website by offering personalized consulting & coaching to his visitors while still regularly pumping out awesome content. Why can’t you? If you’re an authority on your blog topic, you can – and should.

What methods do you use?

Out of the above list, which methods are you currently using on your blog? We’d love to hear from you in the comments section below.

Simple Ways to Use Autoresponders In Blogging

Have you heard about autoresponders. Simply we can define autoresponders as any tool to send emails to your blog’s email subscribers. Depending upon the number of your blog’s subscribers, you can either use Mailchimp or Aweber as your blog’s autoresponders.

Today we will share some simple strategies on how to use autoresponders in blogging to increase your blogging income and increase your blog’s traffic. Autoresponders are one of the best way to promote your affiliate products and make big bucks every month from your blog.Here are the simple ways to use autoresponders in blogging.

• You can giveaway any free mini course regarding your blog’s niche. If your blog is regarding “how to loose weight”, you can simply giveaway any e-book or any short video to your blog’s visitors. Just create any simple landing page and ask your visitors to input their emails and sign up. You can use autoresponders to deliver the e-book or videos one by one included with your affiliated links. Your blog’s subscribers will check their emails and finally you will get a flood of traffic to your blog. Simply more money.
• Another way in which you can use autoresponders is to promote any paid product in your blog. If your visitors found the product useful, they will surely sign up for the product as your blog’s subscribers. You can use autresponders to redirect your visitors to the product download page and make big commissions.
• If your blog has thousands of articles, you can simply redirect your blog’s subscribers to the archives page.You can simply use autoresponders to send one post per week to your blog’s subscribers and get traffic to your blog. If your article contains affiliate links also, then you will surely get big commissions .This is one of the best way to flood your blog with traffic every week.
• As i previously stated, you can promote affiliate products with autoresponders very easily. If you have any product that you want your blog’s subscribers to buy must or surely recommended, then you can simply use autoresponders to redirect your blog’s subscribers to product’s landing page.This is one of the best way to make thousands of dollars every month with your blog readers.
• If your blog is very much popular, or if you are any expert in making new blog’s popular, then you can simply launch any new product in your blog and use autoresponders to let your blog readers notify about the product launch. You can use various tools to get thousands of blog subscribers like WP SUBSCRIBERS OR OPTIN SKIN which works perfectly to boost your subscribers list by 400% This works great to increase your list and finally increase your blogging income overall.
• Discounts works well. If you have any product that you want to promote and you are already getting good sales every day. You can use autoresponders to notify those buyers to buy another products at big discounts. This is one of the best method to increase your income overnight and make big big bucks. People love discounts and it works like charm.
• Don’t only use autoresponder to promote your blog posts or affiliate products. You can also use autoresponders to interact with your blog readers and help them solve their problem if any. Interacting helps to make any business better.You can show your blog readers what you do in spare time, how you get new blogging ideas and anything that you want to share. The more you will interact, the more your readers will trust you.

How do you use autoresponder in blogging. If you have any better views or ideas about autoresponders, share with us.

SEO Tips to Rank Your Blog @1 In Search Results

You all might have heard about various tips to rank your blog or niche site better in search results. You all might know various techniques to use which helps to rank your blog at number one in search results. Search engine optimization is all what any blog needs to rank and stand out of the crowd of other millions of blogs. The more we optimize our blog better for search engines, the more traffic our blog will get and we will get the most out of it.

Any blog without traffic is nothing. No matter you have quality content, your friends know you are any blogger, you share posts on facebook, twitter, etc. But your blog is totally useless if nobody visits it and leave useful comments. No matter if your blog gets only 100 UV every day, you are on a good start. Every hero was once zero. Today in this article i will share some useful tips which will help to rank your blog at top position in search results.These tips will not only help you rank your blog higher, but also to build quality backlinks and get higher organic traffic from search results.Here we go.

1. One of the best way to rank your blog better in search results is to build high quality backlinks for your blog.The more high quality backlinks you make for your blog, the more your blog will rank higher in search results.You can use social bookmarking websites to boost your backlinks for your blog. You can use the most powerful tool like Magic Submitter used by probloggers to submit their article to thousands of high PR social bookmarking websites and build thousands of backlinks in short time. The more backlinks your article will get, the more quickly it will get indexed and finally more organic traffic. 

2. Another tip to rank your blog better in search results is to short your URL’s . The more short your article’s URL is, the more better it get indexed in search results and finally more organic traffic. Short URL’s gets indexed quickly and search engines loves it.Google makes it easy to crawl short URL’s

3. As i previously said in this article, interlinking your blog posts helps to optimize your blog posts better.This also reduce the bounce rate of your blog and help you increase page views for your blog.Don’t overdo it. You can interlink 1 to 3 links in every post to optimize your blog better for search results.

4. Just interlinking is not enough. Make sure in every article you should leave any outbound link to any source. This source can be any referral link, any affiliate link or any link you want. This helps to optimize your blog post better for search results. Try to make it nofollow. If you make all your outbound links dofollow, you will surely loose your page rank in no time.You can give this outbound link to any other blog sharing your information.Like above, don’t overdo it. The more you overdo it, the lesser you article will be indexed.

5. In point 1 i talked about building backlinks. Backlinks can be made in various ways like

• Blog commenting
• Guest Blogging
• High PR Forums
• Article Marketing

6. Your blog’s theme play any important role in optimizing your blog and rank it at top position in search results.You should go for any premium theme optimized for search engines like genesis, thesis or ant other premium theme. You can choose any design you like for your blog.

7. Keywords works perfectly. Find high paying keywords for your blog for which you want to rank your blog for. You can use Google Adwords Keyword Tool to find keywords with low competition and high CPC. You can use these keywords to rank your blog better in search results and boost organic traffic.

8. Updating your blog daily also helps to get organic traffic and get subscribers for your blog. The more you update your blog daily with fresh content, the more readers your blog will fetch. This way you will be able to index your blog more better and get more organic traffic.

9. Optimize your blog and reduce the loading time of your blog also helps to rank your blog better in search results. You can use various wordpress plugins to reduce the loading time of your blog and optimize it more better and get more organic traffic.

10. Here are some other essential steps that you should do to optimize your blog and rank it better in search results.

• Optimize your images
• Use better Web Hosting
• Submit your sitemap
• Always use Alt tags

These are some simple tips to rank your blog at number one in search results. Don’t forget to share it article if you liked it.

Top 10 Tips To Write An Awesome Blog Post

Writing any high quality article in your blog helps it rank higher in search engines and fetch readers and subscribers.Today we are gonna share some quick tips which might help you write an awesome blog post for your blog and help it gain rankings among your readers and blog subscribers.

1. The article you are planning to write or writing should be useful enough to help your readers get what they were searching for.Write useful information which should include some motivation, inspiration and everything like this.
2. Whatever you are writing about, don’t forget to share your opinions about the topic with your blog readers. The more friendly you will write, the more readers your blog will fetch. Sharing your opinions with your readers help increase interaction and build trust.
3. Grammar is very important in blogging.Before you hit the publish button, make sure to read your article at least twice to confirm any spelling mistake so as to make easy for your blog readers to read and understand.Remove anything that doesn’t add value in your article.
4. Before you publish your article, read the article as any reader. Try to improve the article or any mistake no matter if its minor or major to improve your article and writing skills.It will surely help you write better and make a better blogger.
5. Write bullet points in your blog. This is one of the essential step that most of the bloggers fail to take. Your blog’s every reader doesn’t read full article. So instead of writing long paragraphs, you should go for bullet points which simply clarify what your article is all about.
6. Make sure to write a catchy headline for your article. The more better headline you choose, the more readers will attract toward your blog. A catchy headline attract readers for your blog to read full article without any hesitation.
7. You should have a passion in your blogging. If you have no passion, you won’t be able to write any better blog posts and will surely write some fluffy content. So be passionate for what you are doing. Do what you love, Love what you do.
8. Once your readers finish writing you can ask them to share your blog post, give their opinions, or anything else you want. This will help you to get more traffic for your article and get better opinions about your blog post from your blog readers.
9. You can write stories in your blog post which motivate and inspire your readers. Writing stories will make your blog look professional and a tool to motivate and inspire newbie bloggers.
10. Any awesome image can help your article to look better. So don’t forget to add any image related to your blog post’s keyword. This will help your article for better optimization.

These are some simple tips which can help you write a better blog post. Implementing these in your blog will surely help you make a better blogger and write useful content. Share this article if you like it.

Simple Tactics to Turn Your Blog Into a Sales Machine

Turning your blog into any sales machine will not only help you flood your bank account, but it also helps to turn your blog into any brand. In this article we will deal with some simple tactics which will help you learn proper strategies on how you can turn your blog into any sales machine and start making the money you ever desired.

So, here are some tactics which you can start implementing in your blog to get the desired results.

1. Always write keyword enriched blog posts. Always optimize your blog post before publishing it with proper keyword research and proper keyword use. Optimizing will help search engines to crawl and index your site more quickly and better way.The more you optimize your blog posts with keywords, the more better results you will get.
2. Write about latest and exclusive happenings of your niche. This will not only help you to fetch traffic to your blog but also to increase your affiliate sales commission and help you make more money from your blog. This is one of the best tactic to turn your blog into any sales machine.
3. Another big tactic which can help you turn your blog into any ATM is you need not to write daily for your blog.Writing once or twice per week is enough for your blog for update. This will help your blog for proper search engine optimization and will help you fetch more daily readers for your blog.
4. Add links to every post you write in your blog. The link can be redirected to any affiliate page link or any internal link to other reference article.This will help you get more pageviews for your blog and increase website traffic and sales.
5. Write review for every new upcoming product in the market related to your niche.This is one of the best working tactic to turn your blog into any sales machine and make lots of money daily from your blog.

These are some simple tricks which can help you make lots of money from your blog through various ways. If you have any question or better idea in your mind, share with us.

Common Mistakes that Violate Google Adsense TOS

A short article describing some basic mistakes which doesn’t only violate Google adsenseT.O.S but also lead to banning of your adsense account.You might would have heard about these common mistakes before, yet i am gonna review them once again in this article.

• Never click your adsense ads. Never every try to click your adsense ads from your own computer or from any other computer. This is one of the most common reason that violate adsense TOS and lead to your account banning.
• Never try to change or modify the adsense ads that you implement in your blog. Modifying your adsense code lead to adsense TOS violation and account banning.
• Never place more than 3 ad units, 3 link ad unites or 2 search boxes in your blog. Placing more than this lead to adsense TOS violation and account banning.
• You can run adsense with ad networks like infolinks or kontera, but not with other ad networks which show same banner ads as adsense.This can lead to account banning.Yahoo ads and chitika ads can be shown with adsense ads.
• Never disclose your adsense earnings, CTR, CPC with your blog visitors. This can lead to your adsense account banning and adsense terms violation.
• Never label your google ads as Click Here or anything which force your visitors to click your google ads. You can label your adsense ads as Advertisements or sponsored links only.
• You can use a single account for as much websites you own. You don’t need to have 6 adsense accounts if you have 6 websites. Only one account will works perfectly.
• Don’t try to send your ads via HTML formatted emails.This way you are not very far away from getting a account disabled email.

Although there are many other common mistakes which leads to adsense account banning and lead to violate TOS. Share your views with us in comments.