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It’s no secret that social marketing is the fastest growing segment of all marketing today. A recent study noted that only television still outranks the internet in terms of audience reach. That, in large part is due to the popularity of social sites such as Facebook and Twitter. For marketers it’s great because through social networking and word-of-mouth (or viral) advertising, your customers are more likely to come to you instead of you having to go out and find them. It knocks down advertising costs, and breaks down barriers to entry allowing small business and solo entrepreneurs a more level playing field to compete against the “big boys” (and girls, of course).

There are a few rules to remember before you start trying to make money via social marketing.

1.There’s a good reason that “social marketing” is called that. The whole idea is to be social – to interact with your friends and contacts – not to always be pitching your latest product or idea.

To be most effective within social media sites, take the time to build a relationship with your contacts. Get to know who they are, and more importantly, allow them to get to know you. There’s a common saying that people do business with those they “know, like, and trust” and you have to give your contacts time to get to know, like, and trust you. Marketing to them the minute you meet is a sure way to turn them off and make them not like you.

2. Remember that old saying, “the money is in thelist”? Most people think e-mail list when they hear that, but if you think in terms of social media then your Facebook friends are a list, your Twitter followers are a list, your Google Plus circles are lists, and your YouTube subscribers are a list. When it comes to social marketing, it pays to see your contacts as a part of your lists, and treat them with the same care and courtesy that you would treat your e-mail list.

3. Don’t let social media become a time-suck for you. It’s easy to spend hours getting lost in one site, never mind that you may be developing a following on more than one. Most marketers are active on at least three social media sites, and there are five “big ones” that you should be active on.

Your effectiveness as a social marketer depends on your ability to plan your time and your social marketing strategy so that it doesn’t consume your entire day. Fortunately there are now tools such as Hoot Suite that allow you to schedule your posts and status updates, saving you valuable time.

Social marketing is a popular way to get your goods and services in front of potential customers. By following the rules – taking time to build relationships, treating your followers like you would your e-mail list, and taking the time to create a strategy that focuses on your goals and values your time you will be well on the way to success as a social marketer.

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Content marketing is one of the most effective and affordable ways to get the attention of potential clients and customers. But there’s a catch… Your content has to be well written and created with the customer in mind. Anything else could have the exact opposite effect, and end up driving your clients and customers straight to the waiting websites of your competitors.

Here are three common mistakes many content marketers make and how you can avoid them.

Mistake #1 – Stale Content

When you start a new website, it’s common to load it up with ten or twenty articles right at the beginning, and then leave it alone for awhile. While it’s a great idea in theory, and makes it look to your visitors like you have lots to share and know what you are talking about, it’s really not that great if you don’t come back and add new content on a regular basis.

And it’s not just the customers who will notice. Freshness of content is an important factor in where your site ranks on the search engines. It may seem a bit counter-intuitive, but you get more ranking points for how new your content is, rather than how old it is.

Fix #1 – Regular Updates

To avoid having stale content, what you need to do is develop a posting schedule. It doesn’t matter if you post once a day or once a week (but at least once a day is best), as long as you are consistent. If the search robots visit your site and there’s nothing new for them to see, then they will take longer to come back and when you do post new content it will take longer to get indexed.

You can still write your posts and articles in batches (I do mine six at a time), and pre-post them so that they will show up on your blog on the date and time that you specify.

Mistake #2 – It’s All About You

Another very common mistake is to make your content all about you, your products, and your services. Your customer doesn’t really care about you. I realize that may sound harsh, but it’s true. They don’t care about you, only what you and your products/services are going to do for them. If you only write from your perspective you will not engage your customers. If you do manage to capture their attention, you won’t hold it more than a minute or two at most.

Fix #2 – Make It All About Your Customers

It may take a little practice, but learning how to write with your customer in mind is well worth the effort. When you can tap in to your audience’s wants and needs, then you can create content that makes it all about them and not about you.

Mistake #3 – Using Content as a Sales Pitch

The third mistake we’ll talk about here is another one that could have you rushing to rewrite your content — using your content to hard sell your visitors. There are several different types of content that you will use in the course of marketing to your visitors, and contrary to what you may think the actual sales pitch plays a very small part. If your content is nothing but a sales pitch, you will turn your visitors off. People want to be educated and informed, not sold to (even when they land on your site looking to buy).

Fix #3 – Use Content to Educate and Inform

Even when they are ready to whip out their credit card and buy, most people use the Internet to research their choices first. Use your content to educate and inform your customers about how your products and services could solve their problems. Answer their questions, overcome their objections, and allow them to get to know you. You’ll find that if you let your visitors get to know, like, and trust you they will buy without you having to worry about the hard sales pitch.

When it comes right down to it, content marketing can make or break your business. When you create fresh, well-written content that puts your customers’ wants and needs above everything else, you will find that not only will your online reputation improve, your sales and profits will too.

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Using WordPress gets a little easier every time there is an upgrade. What used to take several hours of uploading, downloading and configuring now can be done in only minutes. That doesn’t mean that WordPress will run itself completely… at least not yet! Here are five WordPress maintenance tasks that you still need to do on a regular basis to get the most out of your site.

1. Update Regularly

If you never do anything else to maintain your blog, make sure you do regular updates of the core WordPress files and any plugins. The crew at WordPress release updates on a regular basis, and it’s usually because they have found a security flaw that needs to be fixed.

Updating your blog is easy. When there is an update to be done, a button will appear at the top of your dashboard letting you know. All you have to do is click the link, and the update is automatically taken care of for you. The only thing you need to do is back up your files before you start.

And that brings me to the second most important task…

2. Back Up Your Files on a Regular Basis

I learned this lesson the hard way. I never backed up my files until I got hacked. And I lost over two years of posts all in one fell swoop. Lesson learned!

Backing up your files is easy to do and gives you peace of mind. If you back up on a regular basis, you will always have a recent copy of your posts and other data in case something goes wrong. I’m not saying you will get hacked, but you are most likely relying on a third party hosting company, and servers can (and do) crash. Not often, but it does happen.

When it comes to backing up your blog, there are two steps to take. The first is backing up your database. Don’t let this scare you. There are some really good plug-ins that make doing a database backup a breeze. The one I use is called WP-DB-Backup and with a couple of clicks you can set it up to automatically email you a database backup every week.

Step two in backing up your WordPress site is making sure you have all of your theme changes, images, and uploaded media saved on your hard drive. The easiest way to do this is to use an FTP program to access your hosting account. Find the folder that WordPress is installed in, and then download the “wp-content” folder to your hard drive.

That’s all there is to it. Taking these two steps will give you peace of mind that you will always have a recent copy of your blog if the worst should happen.

3. Check for Broken Links

The internet is a fast-changing place. Websites come and websites go, and people put up and take down pages on a regular basis. When you are linking to outside content, the last thing you want to do is send your visitors to a site that no longer exists. Even worse is sending them to a site that is under new ownership, only to find the content has completely changed. Having broken links makes your site look unprofessional and like you don’t care enough to keep it updated.

An easy way to keep on top of broken links is with a plugin such as Broken Link Checker. It will tell you which links are no longer working, and give you options for how you want to deal with them.

4. Keep Your Plugins Organized

WordPress makes it very easy now to keep your plugins all up-to-date. You will notice that as the WordPress core files are updated, plugin developers often must make changes to keep current as well. Using the same one-click upgrade process as you did to update your version of WordPress, you can also keep your plugins updated. Again, remember to backup your files before you update any files.

You should also review your plugins every once in awhile and deactivate or delete any that you are no longer using. Having inactive plugins on your site is an open invitation to hackers to come in and play. By only having the latest versions of the plugins you are actually using on your site, you will not only keep your site running smoothly for your visitors, it will also be more secure for you too.

5. Take Extra Security Precautions

WordPress developers work very hard to make sure that the script is the most secure it can be. However, there are still a few basic security measures you can take as well.

First off, make sure you use a unique password. Never use a password that you’ve already used somewhere else, and change your username to something other than the default “admin”.

Another thing you can do is use a free plugin like Secure WordPress to make several changes in the back end of your blog in order to protect against hackers.

WordPress maintenance, when done on a regular basis, will keep your blog secure from hackers and provide a more pleasant experience for your readers. These are the type of tasks that are included in a WordPress maintenance package from Ritchie Media. While it’s true that most can be done quickly and easily with the help of the free plugins mentioned here, if you’d rather spend your time doing what you do best, and leave the back-end chores to a WordPress expert, feel free to request a consultation and see if what Helena offers will suit your needs.

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