I am going to share a secret with you. When I started working on the first of my earlier project it was meant to be just a blog. A space to share my passion for healthy and luxe lifestyle and love for entrepreneurship. With time I noticed a huge interest and potential to grow it into something that would change my life forever. The blog slowly started becoming my life, my passion, my business and my hunger for knowledge grew with each month. I learnt, I made mistakes, I corrected them and made even more. One of them was not investing enough time into social media. Why was it a mistake – you may ask. With time I realised that majority of my visitors were coming from social media accounts, so I started investing more and more time to increase traffic coming from these sources.
SHARING IS CARING
I love sharing what I learnt along the way with my readers to avoid costly mistakes.
When thinking about content and analysing lots of messages from clients, people who follow me and the market, I realised there are many guides, but none of them tell the truth. So here I am – going against the stream – telling you how it really is. Well… Social media is great, but it can kill your business and your creativity or entrepreneurial spirit very quickly. It can eat your whole day’s time and leave you staring at the screen in an addictive zone. This is also how brands win their customers, their audiences, their market share.
BEWARE OF SOCIAL MEDIA
Our brain is a very clever tool, but it can also be easily tricked. You sit and view all the beautiful images, likes, shares, comments. Every new one that appears after you refresh brings a dopamine (a neurotransmitter that helps control the brain’s reward and pleasure centre) shot. You crave more, so you end up not doing anything productive, being lured into a waiting game. This works in a similar way to craving sweets (aaahhh the narcotic qualities of sugar) and eating more, gambling more, shopping more, wanting more etc. You become an addict! And as an entrepreneur you don’t want to be an addict, don’t you? You want your time used as productively as possible.
FALL IN LOVE WITH SOCIAL MEDIA
Once you do it properly you can create a great following by increasing the traffic from social media. All this in an ethical and effective way. Once you will learn how to work with beneficial tools, save time and grow without sacrificing your life, so you will love social media. Below you will find strategies that will help you organise yourself, so you have time to pursue what really matters.
INCREASE TRAFFIC FROM SOCIAL MEDIA
STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE
1. Promote your new content more than once
This is one of the easiest ways and you don’t need to do it yourself. Promotion is as important as the content itself. The fact you wrote an amazing piece isn’t enough. People spend time on their computers at different times of the day. Even if your typical visitor has time in the evening, life goes on – they may have had a meeting and missed their lunch break. Take all of it into account and let people know about your post a few times a day.
TIPS:
- Don’t post the same message more than once. This helps you be seen as helpful, instead self-promotional. You are grabbing attention of different people. Use: statements, questions, pictures to differentiate the perception and stimulate your audience.
- Use different images to attract various visitors. Different visuals attract different people. They vary for each sex, age and demographic group.
2. Have a posting schedule
I can’t stress this one enough. If you are a casual poster, you will also be seen as a casual hobbyist. If you want others to see you as a pro or a brand leader – act like one. Have a posting schedule instead of playing the guessing game of a beginner blogger. Many of new online entrepreneurs and bloggers are really afraid to step up their game. They think they may upset their followers by posting multiple times a day. The truth is that if your product, service or knowledge can help them, they want to hear from you. By posting more often you are also increasing chances of your content being seen by new people.
TIPS:
- Here is a sample schedule for you (works best for Twitter)
- Same day (morning)
- Same day (afternoon)
- Same day (evening)
- Next day
- Next week
- A month later
- Two months later
- Three months later
- A year later: you can call it ‘a year to date’
3. Use a checklist
Making checklists can seem tedious and boring, but it can save you lots of time, mistakes and improve efficiency. Additionally you have a written, physical form of your own work. It makes you feel responsible and accountable for your actions. In addition it creates a great tool to check back and see patterns, which help with growth strategies.
TIPS:
- Beware of your ego. Checklists may feel like a Big Brother watching and often are dismissed by people that feel they ‘arrived’. They were first introduced by health care, because not too long ago nurses were more aware of surgical mistakes than the doctors wanted to admit. Nurses couldn’t speak up because of the hierarchy, but when checklists were introduced surgeons couldn’t hide any mistakes.
4. Make it easy to share
When people find your content worth reading, they often want to share it with their friends. Not only because they think it is cool, but also because a research found that when we share something interesting we look more intelligent. Who doesn’t want to be seen as the smart guy?
Make it sharable then. If you use WordPress there are several great plugins – we recommend SHARE by SumoMe. It is easy to use for you and easy to share for them. The basic version is free, but you can also use a more expanded Pro version.
TIPS:
- Create a personal challenge, I like to call it ‘game of shares’. Check regularly for changes, so you know what to change and how to improve. I purposely used the word ‘challenge’ and a ‘game of shares’, as it works with your subconscious mind. ‘Game’ is often related to the childhood times when we played games. Therefore it has a naturally positive association. ‘Game Of Shares’ on the other hand reminds movie fans of a great TV series ‘Games Of Thrones’.
5. Automate and cross-promote
Earlier I mentioned checklists and schedules. All this can feel a bit daunting and scary. Don’t worry, be happy! You’re not alone and thousands of entrepreneurs were in the same situation. Some clever developers worked hard on making our life easier and we now have a huge choice of tools that will post it for you, so you can take care of the things that make you fulfilled. Cross promote for a better chance of growing all your chosen channels. You can simply ask people to do it casually or use more subtle ways.
TIPS:
- Did you know that starting a day by greeting your loyal followers is a mood boosting bomb? Schedule your powerful morning message and you will immediately be seen as the optimist.
- It’s easy like bam, bam, bam – follow us on Instagram.
- Have you tried cross-promoting by rhyming?
- Use subtle humour: Are we sexy? No, it’s just our awesome morning hair. Head to our Instagram to check it out.
Have you tried anything amazing on your social media?
Share your thoughts in the comments below, or get in touch on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.
And if you found this article useful please share it with others. I want to reach as many entrepreneurs as possible.
