by Nick Throlson | Apr 26, 2017 | Business, Marketing
Every good company needs to market themselves. But what if you?re on a tight budget and can?t afford to hire a marketing company to take care of your needs? Fortunately, there are lots of simple tricks largely using the internet that can allow you to market your business effectively for next to nothing.
Photo Credit: image from HTSABO
Build up your reputation with online reviewsOnline reviews have more power than ever before and are becoming increasingly harder to avoid. Stop hiding from them and start embracing them. Get all your satisfied past clients to leave reviews on Google or Trip Advisor (you can even get your friends and family to leave a few positive reviews ? no-one will know). You can also collect positive testimonials and put them on your website. Occasionally you may get negative reviews ? respond to these politely or report them if you genuinely believe they are spam.Outsource on a budgetYou may be able to outsource some tasks without shelling out thousands on a marketing campaign. Sites such as Fiverr are full of freelancers offering their services for cheap. These services could involve SEO, product reviews, Facebook banner building, Press release writing and even advanced analytics. Check that freelancers have a website or testimonials to back up what they say they can do so that you know you?re getting a reliable service.
by Nick Throlson | Apr 15, 2017 | Guest Post
Investing in stocks or trading Forex can build your future in any direction in which you choose to go. Many investors have different ideas on how to truly get started, but the one piece of advice you should listen to is, learn all you can about the market.Start out small and build your portfolio as you learn about stocks and the Forex market, and how to play the market to your advantage. You can start with as little as a few hundred dollars.First of all, learn to put away some money each month. It can be as little as $10 a week. Put it in a shoebox or the bank, but do it faithfully each week. At the end of the year that would add up to 0 for the year which might be enough to start trading at a professional online discount brokerage.You need to set your goals and learn what your risk tolerance is for the market. Know why you want to invest. Is it for retirement, a new home, or financial stability?Analyze ... and Then Analyze Some More!
Investing is just putting your money to work for you. It is not gambling. You will learn how to watch a stock and follow the trends of the market. Picking stocks to watch based on a certain set of criteria will be your first lesson. Your aim will be to pick stocks that will give you a greater return than the average stock on the market. This is especially important when trading with low capital.There is no sure fire set of rules to follow for picking stocks to guarantee that the stock will go up. With knowledge and watching the stocks you like, you can see patterns of ups and downs for any stock. When you become a good stock picker, your wealth with grow.Learning the fundamental analysis of a company is a good beginning. The whole theory is to learn as much about the company and how the stock is trading on the market. Intrinsic value of a company?s stock is what you or analysis think the stock is worth and not what it is selling for on the market.If the stock is trading at a lower price than what the intrinsic value of the stock is, then it is a buy signal. The basis theory of intrinsic value is simple, it is the company?s revenue minus expenses. The value of the company is, what the company?s worth is, after all expenses, salaries and reinvestments.Many investors do not look at the discounted cash flows to trade. Investors also work on what is called a technical analysis to help them find the trend of any given stock. Stocks all have charts that can be followed to see their ups and downs of the trading prices. These charts are followed by the technical analysis as well as those individuals who are trading with online brokers.Fundamental trading is mostly thought of as long-term strategies and technical trading is thought of as short-term trading strategies.Value Investing vs Growth Investing
One of the oldest and best known stock-picking strategies is the value investing method.Value investing is finding companies that are trading well below their intrinsic worth. Investors would look for strong earning and fundamentals, book value, cash flow and earnings of the companies they are interested in buying.These stocks usually are selling at a lower price than what their quality shows them to be trading. These are called undervalued stocks and have a great potential of moving upwards in their trading price.Valued stocks are not to be confused with junk stocks. Junk stocks are stocks that have lost their value in trading. These stocks might have been trading at $20 at one time, but are now only trading at $5 on the market. The company may be having fundamental problems and the price of the stock must be compared to the intrinsic value and not the historic prices. Growth investors look for the future trading price of a stock. These investors are not as concerned with today?s market trading price.Growth investors are trading stocks of companies that are valued higher than their intrinsic worth. These investors strongly believe that the company will exceed their current values and their intrinsic worth will grow. Usually young or new companies are looked at for growth. These companies will grow faster than others and therefore grow in value. Their earnings and revenues will grow bringing the trading price of the stock upwards. Growth companies gain their profits through capital gains and usually do not pay out dividends. They reinvest their earnings.Price/Earnings Ratio Matters
New investors should also learn about the price/earnings to growth about the stocks in which they are interested in investing. This ratio will give the investor a bigger picture of the valuation of their stock and is more in depth than just the price-earnings ratio. Past Earnings are compared by knowing the P/E ratio over a given time. Usually a 12 month period is used.One of the largest factors that determines the growth and earnings of a company is the rate in which the company is growing. This growth will also have a lot to do with the intrinsic value of the company.Learning the stock market can be fun and extremely interesting as you learn all the ways to make money. New investors should not invest with money they cannot afford to lose.Invest wisely, learn all you can and build your future in the market. Start out by investing on paper first until you learn the volatility of the market and what stocks you have picked that came out to be winners.
by Nick Throlson | Mar 29, 2017 | Guest Post, Social Media
When it comes to social media marketing, it is really easy to get lost in this bottomless ocean of shares, likes, tweets, and news feeds. It seems like opportunities are everywhere, and young entrepreneurs try to get the most out of every single one of them. Facebook and Instagram are the first and the second most popular social network in the United States as of November 2016 (according to Statista). So, it's no wonder almost every brand plunges headlong into this Facebook/Instagram marketing battle for customers.However, what is the difference between these two social networks and which one should you use for your business?
Facebook is clearly a winner here. It can boast almost 2 billion active users of any gender, age, and nationality, and it looks like this number is only going to grow with time. This is why chances are high that you already have a Facebook business page and are actively using it to promote your brand. This is, definitely, not a mistake. Whether you sell socks or provide accounting services, Facebook won't let you down when it comes to exposure. Instagram, on the other hand, is being used by 600 million users monthly, and its demographics is not so diverse.
Since Facebook is a place where people of all ages, professions, and income levels hang out, it is a universal platform with an extensive pool of potential customers for literary every business. However, according to Pixel Vulture, teenage use of Facebook decreased 45% in 2014. So, if you are trying to market your product to youngsters, better try Snapchat or YouTube. At the same time, Facebook is still effective when it comes to 30+ professionals, teachers, moms, entrepreneurs, etc.Instagram, on the other hand, is a social network with the prevailing number of female users (38% vs 26% of male ones) aged under 34.
This makes Instagram a perfect place to market fashion, design, travel, entertainment, and other things that make up ?Instagram lifestyle?.
Surprisingly, Facebook with all its billions of users lost this battle to relatively tiny Instagram, with the latter giving you up to 10 times more engagement (according to Jenn Herman's study). She put one and same post on both Instagram and Facebook in order to see how many likes each of them will collect. The study proved that though Instagram's audience is smaller, it is more willing to engage with brands. The post on Instagram won with almost 10 times more likes and comments within the same period of time.It happened because Facebook is perfect for private use, while we use Instagram mainly for following celebrities, getting inspired, and keeping up with the latest trends. It means that when we are on Instagram, we are subconsciously prepared to like or comment on posts (since that's pretty much all we can do on Instagram). When we are on Facebook, we simply want to text out friends or read the latest news on Donald Trump.
In essence, Instagram is a photo/video sharing platform with a?simple interface and a?limited number of sophisticated distracting options. It makes it really easy for businesses to bond with customers through sharing personalized, inviting?pictures that reflect the philosophy of the brand. Such an approach allows brands to appear?closer to customers. The lifespan of your Instagram post is short, however, so make sure to post regularly. Apart from that, choose only high-quality pictures in order to keep up with the competition.If your products are more complex or highly specialized, Facebook is, undoubtedly, a better fit. You would probably want to write longer and more informative posts, join groups, create events, share valuable videos or blog articles. You should also focus on Facebook if you are doing content marketing, since, as we remember, Facebook is a place most turn to in order to satisfy their information hunger.Facebook or Instagram?
Facebook and Instagram are two social media giants that are currently being owned by Mark Zuckerberg. They both allow targeting specific groups of people (e.g people of specific language or gender) and offer paid ads that can help to promote your business.However, remember that if your customers would prefer?to see your product, not read about it, Instagram will do a better job getting your message across. Fashion, style, travel?and hospitality are industries that would definitely benefit from Instagram marketing.If you target older audiences, however, or have very specific products and services that a picture cannot explain, then Facebook is your guy. It is also better for marketing more expensive products (since, again, the audience is more mature and solvent).Author bio:Jenna Brandon is a blogger, copywriter, and digital marketer at Writology.com.When she?s not busy writing articles and studying modern marketing trends, she cooks pizza or goes hiking with her friends. Jenna is also an avid traveler, and she is secretly Italian at heart.
by Nick Throlson | Mar 14, 2017 | Off Topic
When marketing your small online business, sometimes the sheer amount of SEO, content, social media and link building strategies that you read about can be overwhelming to say the least. It becomes very easy to say to yourself that you just don?t have a chance because the resources available to you are tiny compared to your competitors.But you have a distinct advantage. You can be nimble. You can change strategies at the drop of a hat and you can explore things that cumbersome competitors take too long to do.There are many ways that you can be innovative and fill the gaps that competitors leave behind. And as you fill those gaps, you become a much stronger force over time, eventually being seen by competitors and Google as a company of value.I?ve listed here some innovative ways that you can create a buzz about your business without breaking the bank. They require some work, but if you were afraid of hard work, you wouldn?t have started your business in the first place.Publish written content on your site. You have heard it a thousand times, but, if done correctly, it really does help your site to start to get a footing with search engines and then visitors. I have yet to see a site that writes large amounts of content not be successful in its industry in all my years on the web. A top tip, if you can manage it, is to write ?longform? content on topics that relate to your product or service, which typically means anything over 3,000 words.Become helpful on Reddit and industry forums. There will undoubtedly be a ?subreddit? about the business that you are in. Join that subreddit and genuinely help people out, giving answers to questions, pointing people in the right direction, and once you are a settled user in that community, and seen as someone who is helpful, you can start to (gently) promote your own content and services. If you tie that in with the content you publish (as mentioned in the previous point), then you can start to gain a following and make many more people aware of what you do. The same goes for any industry forums that may exist. But remember, your number one priority is to be helpful and of value before you mention your own business.Be a valuable social media person. Until you have a steady stream of business coming in, much of your time should not be spent on social media, unless it is absolutely vital to what you offer. However, there is a way, when you start out to be a valuable member of your community on Twitter and Facebook and that is by sharing recent, useful articles and news items about your industry. This is so much more simple than people think. Use Google News to find recent articles about your industry, then share them, perhaps @mentioning the person that wrote the post and the company that it may be about. Do this several times per week and you?ll soon be seen as someone that offers value and will be followed and liked by important people within the sector.Write a report about data or information in your industry. The larger companies in your industry do this and there is a reason. It works. They use these reports in many different ways to gain business. They build brand awareness, they gain email addresses when people swap an email address in exchange for downloading a report. They also work in ways such as mail posting (yes, remember that) reports to prospects and then calling them about it a few days later. These reports, if done correctly, are useful in so many ways. If you know your product, and can use the internet to find things, then you should be able to put together a 4-25 page report that is non-salesy and useful to potential buyers of your product/service. Big companies do it because it works, smaller companies don?t because they think it?s too much hard work - so do it while you have the chance and are nimble enough to do so.Use freelance sites to build useful tools for your site. Have a look around sites in your sector. Some will have useful web tools that visitors fill in or interact with to gain a useful conclusion - such as calculators etc. You may wish to emulate one or some of these tools, or indeed have your own ideas having used other tools on competitor sites. You can post projects on freelance websites like freelancer.com or fiverr.com asking for tools to be created, but crucially, you pay nothing until you are satisfied that the freelancers bidding on your project are capable of doing what you require within your budget. You can drastically improve the stickability of your website by adding one or more tools and then sharing them with the correct audience.Summary
As you can see, whether it be longform content pieces about your industry, web tools that are helpful to potential buyers, the sharing of useful industry news stories and articles, or answering questions on the appropriate subreddit for your business, content is important, especially at the early stages of a small online business. Use content to become a valued resource in your sector and you'll be well on your way to building an audience and an income stream.
by Nick Throlson | Mar 3, 2017 | Off Topic
There are areas of your business that you think you do by internally. It is like the areas of your home you convince yourself don?t need professional help because a little bit of DIY will do the trick. The thing is, you?re wrong. Just like at home, your business needs as much help as possible even if it isn?t apparent. A website is a perfect example. Thanks to advances like WordPress, it is easy to build a site and never hire an expert. Here are five reasons to avoid this scenario like the plague.The Cost?Isn?t WordPress free? So it doesn't cost a penny?!? Yes, WordPress and other similar sites are free, which is a positive. The negative is you pay for what you get. And, because you don?t pay anything, you don?t receive much in return. Sure, they are a few styles you can use that look quite professional, but thousands of other people use them, too. Good sites cost money because the money pays for the bespoke themes that make your site unique. 
The TimeThe same mentality goes for the amount of time it takes to build a quality site. Excellent websites don?t sprout up overnight. Ok, the bare bones might be easy to put together, but it takes months of hard work to get it almost perfect. Any website that only takes an hour to create won?t be able to mix it with the big boys. AppearanceDue to the lack of themes at your disposal, a site from a free vendor will look like it is free. That doesn?t mean it won?t look the part, but it won?t stand out from the crowd. It might be perfectly passable, yet you shouldn?t settle for acceptable. An excellent site is a site that wows people when they land. The only way to do that is to make it as aesthetically pleasing as possible. You might think people are shallow, but it is human nature. The secret to a top site is making a good impression, and you do that by looking the part.The SupportSometimes, a simple question can put the most complex problems into perspective. By asking, ?who is going to maintain and look after the site?? you will realise you need help. Let?s face it ? it?s much better to go online at WebFullCircle.com and use their expertise to save time and energy. Apart from time, it will also save you money. Good hosts can tackle any problem and fix them before they escalate out of control. Being online 24/7 is imperative in this age because going offline leads your customers to your competitors. PerformanceRemember the phrase, ?you get what you pay for?? Good, because nothing could be truer when it comes to websites. Forget about the aesthetics for a minute as this isn?t what performance means. Performance means how well your site handles an influx of traffic or how well the software works. Poorly constructed sites crash as soon as they run into trouble, whereas good sites thrive under pressure. And guess what? The best sites come from the professionals. 
Every good company needs to market themselves. But what if you?re on a tight budget and can?t afford to hire a marketing company to take care of your needs? Fortunately, there are lots of simple tricks largely using the internet that can allow you to market your business effectively for next to nothing.
Build up your reputation with online reviewsOnline reviews have more power than ever before and are becoming increasingly harder to avoid. Stop hiding from them and start embracing them. Get all your satisfied past clients to leave reviews on Google or Trip Advisor (you can even get your friends and family to leave a few positive reviews ? no-one will know). You can also collect positive testimonials and put them on your website. Occasionally you may get negative reviews ? respond to these politely or report them if you genuinely believe they are spam.Outsource on a budgetYou may be able to outsource some tasks without shelling out thousands on a marketing campaign. Sites such as Fiverr are full of freelancers offering their services for cheap. These services could involve SEO, product reviews, Facebook banner building, Press release writing and even advanced analytics. Check that freelancers have a website or testimonials to back up what they say they can do so that you know you?re getting a reliable service.
There are areas of your business that you think you do by internally. It is like the areas of your home you convince yourself don?t need professional help because a little bit of DIY will do the trick. The thing is, you?re wrong. Just like at home, your business needs as much help as possible even if it isn?t apparent. A website is a perfect example. Thanks to advances like 
The Time
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