When you first make the decision to market your business online, there'll always be people who will tell you it won't work and who'll be very negative about it and even make fun of you. This sometimes derails you, especially when you don't see results 30, 60, 90 days after you launched it. But we tell you, don't give up. Remember, Rome wasn’t built in a day!
In this episode of the Social Media Marketing Happy Hour, Dawn and Traci share how consistency in the daily activities you do will lead to a successful business long after you do them. Also, if you want to speed things up, the best way to do that is to add some paid traffic to the mix.
Here are a few valuable tips we’ve lined up for you if you’re planning to start or if you’ve been struggling so far:
Be Consistent
Many entrepreneurs fall into this cycle where they try something new, and after doing it for a short time and seeing less desirable or no results at all, they stop the process and give up. Soon after, they start following someone or some other strategy and, same thing, they still don't see it to completion. That kind of inconsistency will get you nowhere.
Evaluate
You should constantly evaluate what you are doing and see if it is effective or not. If there's a need to change things, change them. For example, if you are doing your 30-day blogging challenge and you're not getting traffic, you should ask yourself:
- Is it because you're not blogging enough?
- Is it because you're not doing things to syndicate your content?
- Is it because you haven't put it out on Social Media enough?
- Is it because maybe you haven't tried advertising and using paid traffic?
Put Content in Front of People
Sometimes when you blog, tweet and post, most people (even those that are close to you like family and friends) are not going to see it. You actually have to take steps to put it in front of people. In some cases, the problem isn't necessarily that you're not making enough awesome content, it could be that you haven't made it visible to your target audience.
Have an Audience Growth Strategy
Let's say that you are tweeting a hundred times a day, posting on Facebook 20 times a day, and putting 7 Instagram posts a day yet nothing's happening. Why aren’t you getting traffic? Well, you can't just have a social media marketing strategy and not have an audience growth strategy as well. You have to be going after the right people by finding ways to draw them in and making sure the content you put out is appealing and valuable to them.
How do you do this?
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Increase Traffic
You can use any social media platform that's best suited for your business. For Happy Hour, one of the platforms we use as a free traffic strategy is Twitter. We've consistently been doing the same things day after day and because of that, we've been averaging 40+ followers a day and it keeps on growing. We might not have 100,000 followers, but we have a very engaged audience.
By the way, if you haven't taken advantage of our Twitter Traffic Workshop that we talked about, go to https://happyhourhangouts.com/tw. It’s only $7, if you follow it carefully and consistently, is proven to give you positive results!
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Invest on Paid Advertising
When you are grinding constantly trying to put out content with free strategies, it's going to take you a long time, just like Traci and Dawn when they both started in their respective businesses. So often, people want to have a lot of results but they're not willing to treat their business like a business and make investments to grow their audience. So they end up posting to nobody and wondering why it didn’t work.
What you might want to consider, especially if you're new is to set aside an advertising budget. Get your mind dialed in to what your audience wants. If you start putting out content about that and pour on the advertising on top of that, you'll eventually have success in that.
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Have a Budget Before Starting
Another valuable advice especially for people who are starting out is having a budget before even beginning. First of all, stay at your job or take the finances from your current financial situation so you can have a big advertising budget. Don’t dive into online marketing without sufficient funds.
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Have Awesome Content
You should also create good content and be brave and bold in your advertising strategy. You don't have to have tons of content. You can have 2 or 3 solid blog posts to start to create some paid traffic.
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Consider Outsourcing
You should also think of outsourcing. Back then, we didn’t see the value in this, but now we've seen how amazingly effective it is and how it makes everything so much easier for you. Don't think you can do everything yourself. If you do that, you'll burn out really quickly. For example, it would take you a lot longer to write 50 blog posts than it would to hire 5 people to do 10 blog posts each.
If this is a subject that you feel you need help with, Dawn and Traci take a couple of people a week where they do some diagnostic coaching sessions with. See if you qualify for this by going to https://happyhourhangouts.com/coaching.
