How to increase YouTube traffic
YouTube is an incredible social media platform that marketers can use to advertise their companies. Now, there are almost 100 hours of videos that are uploaded every minute to the site, meaning that video marketing has become popular. However, the only problem is that the competition is stiff. That being said, it is simple for your animated video to get lost in the gigantic video galaxy in YouTube. But I got news for you: there are some pretty simple but effective organic traffic generation tips to keep in mind.
- Make good first impression
Most people do not know how important those video thumbnails can be. Thumbnails are the first thing people will see whenever they come across your video. So, never underestimate their power. In that regard, the thumbnail should be click worthy. YouTube will automatically create the thumbnail for you and give you three options. You need to include something catchier. Feel free to customize the thumbnail and upload. I recommend trying them out, all of them, one at a time to see which one will perform better.
- Mind your title and video description
Your title and video descriptions are important, very important. They can help in improving your search research results. The first term should be relevant. It is always suggested to include a keyword in your descriptions. The title should also be clear and precise. The video description is where you can tell the audience what the video is about and how it going to solve their problems.
- Background image
You can complement your video content by accompanying them with a clearly designed background image. Apart from color and theme options, YouTube helps users to upload their own background images to stand out from the crowd.
- Feature your best video
Not all videos are the same. Some videos will be more popular than others will. Therefore, you ought to use your best videos to attract traffic for the new or less popular ones. Sometimes it is better to select another video to occupy the space left by the featured video.
- Add tags
It is important to tag your videos with keywords so that you can bring the viewers to yourself. To find these settings options, go to your channel.
- Take care of the comments
Many people make lousy mistakes that cost them thousands of loyal viewers: they fail to respond to the comments left by viewers. Although this might not look important, it is a serious offence when it comes to attracting and retaining viewers. However, you should be wary of spam comments because they are equally toxic to your content.
- Be active
Recent activities shown on your channel help your customers to know that you are active. Video owners who have liked other channels are also more likely to drive more traffic to their sites.
- Create a playlist
Users like playlist and creating one will be a big boost to your channel. Especially if you have a series of videos that have a sequence, it saves your customers the headache of scavenging through the heap.
Ensuring that You Achieve Online Reputation Management
Prudent Online reputation management for your business is very vital for the growth of your business. Your reputation is everything when it comes to growing your business online.
Online reputation management refers to a set of approaches and techniques that are aimed at improving and increasing a particular company’s online reputation. If the online reputation management is handled well, it can make a company successful; otherwise, it can break a company’s chance of further progress and success if it is mismanaged. The thing is that you are not going to leave your brand, business, or personality to chance. Apart from the products, good reputation is what the business really has.
Why Reputation Management is Important
Online Reputation management is very important to individuals and business. Professional reputation is vital, and need to be maintained at all times in order to achieve better results in search engines. The products of good reputation include receiving favorable customer testimonials for your goods and services as well as having high market ratings, compared to your peers. Suppose that your company receives too many negative comments concerning the products you sell, what would be the repercussion? Of course there is no need to go into that, but there is only one thing you will be sure to face-stagnation or decline of your business performance. From the customer perspective, a company what people say about a company is a very significant means of making a purchase decision.
Business entities and individuals should approach their online reputation management from a proactive angle. In other words, they have to actively control how their brand, product and company’s image is painted to the outside world. It involves actively removing negativity by substituting it with positive feedbacks to ensure that the business achieves longevity.
How Can Companies and Individuals Effectively Manage their Online Reputation?
One of the most popular approaches to achieving good reputation is by hiring an online reputation expert, whose work will be to specialize in managing online reputation. This will also include repairing negativity and introducing measures that will ensure that the company’s online reputation is well taken care of. A good example is where you can find a dissatisfied customer or a rogue competitor generating several articles in forums and blogs discrediting your product or services. In such a case, it is the work of the online reputation expert to counter such claims through the most effective means. Figuratively speaking, a good online reputation management involves preventing fires of negativity from being lit, as well as putting off those fires if they have already been lit, through feedback.
Normally, online reputation experts would monitor social sites, forums and blogs to scavenge for any information go around about the company. Generation quality, informative and promotional content is one way of enhancing a reputation of a company. The company should also integrate its website to social sites like Facebook, Linkedln, twitter, and YouTube, among others. A great emphasis should be put on the positive customer testimonials, product reviews and feedback. However, this doesn’t mean that negative feedback from customers should be ignored.
Traditional methods of maintain a company’s reputation or brand can still be utilized. Such methods may include billboards, fliers, mass media, press releases, and promotional campaigns.
How to convert your cold leads into hot prospects
No doubt, you have worked hard to get the leads. But the difference between successful marketers and the average is that the successful ones will convert their leads into prospects while the mediocre ones will leave their leads undecided.
However, there is a general misconception among business persons that they should convert every prospect they get caught in the trap of thinking they can while in the real sense, they end up wasting a lot of valuable time in trying to do the impossible. Here are some suggestions on how to turn those cold into hot prospects
Create an email list and add your new lists into your periodic campaigns
If you run a monthly email campaign, you can use it to follow-up on those prospects that have not made up their minds. Some people will be temporarily distracted while others will have their situations change, and the best thing to keep them on track is your periodic email updates.
Simply stay in touch
With so many things happening, your name is more likely to be forgotten as soon as you speak to your lead. Therefore, you must keep in touch to keep your name in their minds. One moment they could think they don’t need to join your business but their situation could change and change their minds. Keep in touch through newsletters, postcards, letters and articles, among other things.
Approach their business executive assistants and learn about their personality
Making use of Executive assistant is important as this will help you to know the person you are dealing with and the best approach to take. They might also be able to give you the reason why you were not successful in making the sale so that you can approach the person differently in the future.
How important is the sale? 
The thing you should ask yourself is how important the sale is going to be. If the sale is important, you need to determine other approaches or actions you are willing to take to make the sale happen. You need to find creative ways of convincing the lead(s) to buy supposing the sale was the most important thing in your career.
As already mentioned there is nothing you can do if your lead suddenly turns cold and proves difficult to convert to prospect despite doing everything possible to convince them. Rather than live in denial, you should gather courage and move on. Remember you need to focus your energy on other opportunities. It is important to bear in mind that you only have a limited time to do your business and you cannot spend long periods on one prospect. Actually knowing when to quit and move on is one of the key strength of entrepreneurs.
Spinning your wheels trying to convince unmotivated prospect to change their mind is a self-defeating approach. Even if you succeed in converting them, you will not get much value from them. Simple question to ask is: “what is the best use of my time right now?” dropping a potential lead may be difficult but it is worth it.
How to Increase Customer Engagement
How to Increase Customer Engagement
Customer engagement is one of the most important keys to running a successful business. Hence, you must create a strong and proper customer acquisition strategy in order to engage the customer. How do you improve your customer engagement?
The best way to improve customer engagement is by turning the business into a customer centered one. However, this can be a challenging undertaking and may take a little time to accomplish. But if you are patient, you can greatly improve on your customer engagement.
Here are 7 ways to increase customer engagement:
1. Put the customer at the center
Without the customer, your business cannot be. The customer is the most important person in your business. So placing the customer at the center of the business is the most logical thing to do. As you do so, you must ensure that you have a very clear focus on where, when and how you will interact with the customer.
2. Be honest with yourself when assessing your failures.
Things may go wrong, and often they will. However, if you are honest when it comes to assessing what is holding you back, you have a better chance of creating a better customer engagement or relationship. Then you need to make a strategy on how to tackle the problems. It is recommended that you start by setting achievable and quick goals before proceeding towards hard and long term goals.
3. Capture customer feedback
Customer feedback is an essential tool when you are in the process of creating great customer engagement. It ensures that you will learn customer behavior and get insights that will help you to fulfill your customer needs.
4. Understand value exchange
Understanding value exchange involves first understanding and then building the information exchange program. Identify which kind of information customers are normally happy to share and understand what your business and the customer can gain in exchange.
5. Take a broader picture
If you want to improve customer engagement, taking a broader picture is important instead of focusing on individual experiences. For instance, all areas in your company have a role to play when it comes to customer engagement and doesn’t apply to marketing or customer service alone; therefore, it is important that you focus on the whole picture.
6. It is not all about marketing
Marketing might be an important component of any successful business, but you have to go beyond marketing. You need to study various customer retention strategies. All successful businesses treat the customer as their most important person and design their strategies around retaining the customer. It involves everyone in the organization, not just those who interact directly with the customer.
7. Empowering business users
It is important to empower business users who keep you updated about your customer experiences instead of leaving all that responsibility to the IT department. You should align all the marketing, sales and customer service department around the customer. In order to achieve this, it is advisable that you develop a complete buy0in from the Chief Executive Officer including all the other executive team members of the organization.