Yellow Dog Consulting

Sales & Marketing Consulting for solo-preneurs.

Social Media: Stop Doing it All

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engage with your networkI just had a call with someone this morning who was feeling over whelmed with social media. The first thing I heard? “I know I should…”

Stop That!

  • Where’s your target market?
  • Where do you enjoy engaging with your clients and demographic?
  • How much time to do you have to commit?
  • What works for you?

Social media is great, my philosophy is that small business owners needs to manage their own social media (it’s why someone didn’t hire me last week!) You know your business better than any consultant does, and YOU need to know what people are asking and saying.

Make sure your blog posts are getting posted to social media, and as I mentioned last week, make sure your newsletters get posted to social media as well. Make sure you ENGAGE. Follow people on Twitter you meet, connect with them on LinkedIn, like/fan their Facebook page, follow them on Instagram, pin the crap out of their Pinterest pages. Where ever YOU are online, connect with your network and your target market there too.

Don’t Forget you can repopulate with old content

You may have notice recently on the blog some posts that are from a ways back – and that’s correct. I’m cleaning up my content and bringing it back from 4 years ago. Take older content on a topic you’ve recently talked about and share that with your network.

The more you can be active, engage, and educate your network (instead of selling them on HOW to work with you) the easier it is for folks to hire you.

Newsletters Work.

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IMG_2992I tell all of my clients and anyone I may potentially work with that I treat each client differently and I don’t put anyone into a box. That being said, one of the first things I recommend to every client or prospect is a consistent newsletter. While monthly is ideal, every other month or so is OK too.

Over the past two weeks I have had two people contact me and it was “I’ve been getting your newsletter for the past year and I think I need some marketing help, can we talk?” YES. YES we can.

This is why you have a newsletter folks! Write good content, give ideas away for free, and get in their inbox without asking them to spend thousands of dollars on your latest or greatest thing. Just help them. Sure the real goal is to be overwhelming enough that they hire you to do it for them, or with them, but give them easy to manage ideas.

My newsletter is pretty straight forward. Every month I give you 3 things to do on one topic. 10 out of 12 months networking is one of those 3 things. But it can be whatever. Your newsletter doesn’t have to be long. It can be re-purposed blog posts or a tip sheet, or your speaking schedule and a couple quick tips.

Keep your newsletter simple. Make sure that everyone who knows you is getting your newsletter or has the chance to check it out. I’m not out hunting for clients, they’re coming to me. And they’ve always been around. I didn’t have to sell them, I just had to educate them. I have two great new clients this month from my newsletter alone and it was all because I’ve been consistent. How about you?

Increasing Your Content Traffic

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Screen Shot 2015-09-03 at 10.51.33 AMI’ve talked with a few clients lately about increasing blog and newsletter traffic. One of my favorite things about Mail Chimp is that I can easily automatically tweet my newsletter when it goes live, and if I were a sellout on Facebook – I would post to both my business & personal pages (and for most of my clients, we do this). And that’s great. What’s not great is that’s where it stops with Mail Chimp. So, in my newsletter (and my client’s) you’ll always see the Social Share buttons – this is so if you find my newsletter compelling and you want to share with others – you easily can. AND it’s also for me – to remind me to tweet the newsletter again later, make sure to post it to my G+ pages (business & personal) and share it on LinkedIn.

Something else I’ve been doing is about a week later, I take that newsletter top 3 list (because my newsletter always has 3 things)  and I write it up as a post on LinkedIn. It gets great traffic from LinkedIn and since I don’t post my newsletter to my blog (which I know some people do) this is a good way to get somewhat original content out there.

I also really like this blog post and social media sharing timeline. Frequency is the key to success with content sharing – once is not enough – if your blog traffic is low, this may just help you. Don’t bombard me with your blog posts but don’t think I caught your one tweet about it either.