How to Conduct Market Research on a Tight Budget

How to Conduct Market Research on a Tight Budget
by Meghan Keaney Anderson

You can learn a lot from product failures. In 1982, Toothpaste Brand Colgate decided it would expand its brand by launching Colgate Kitchen Entrees, frozen dinners for the busy consumer. In 2000, Heinz debuted a brand new ketchup -- it was purple. In 2005, Pen and Lighter maker Bic entered the market with a new line of disposable underwear for women. Finally, remember the infamous Gap Logo redesign of 2010? Each of these product marketing attempts failed for different reasons, but it's pretty safe to say that all of them could have benefited from better market research before getting rolled out to the public. 

When companies develop an idea, whether it's a new product or a redesigned website, marketing research is often the first thing cut due to time or resource restrictions. It's understandable. Working with marketing research firms can be incredibly expensive and time consuming. If you haven't done research before, it can be tempting to skip it and dive right into the development stage.

But the truth is, there's a lot of research you can do on your own and without much budget or training at all. Here are some low-budget ways to factor a research stage into your next project and give your product, idea, or designs much better footing. 

1) Interview Prospects and Customers

Cost: $0 - $50

Nothing is freer or more valuable than a conversation. We tried this ourselves a few weeks ago -- HubSpot invited four customers into our offices to join us for lunch and tell us what they thought of our software.

We were pleasantly surprised at how willing and forthcoming they were. Prompted by some questions, they gave us priceless insight into what's working for them and what's not in the HubSpot marketing platform. That one conversation spun off a handful of different projects that will make us better as a company.

You can't extrapolate public opinion from four individuals, but you can get a sense of which direction to pursue in future research or your product development. Building an ongoing message-testing program can take some time but it's entirely achievable. 

How to Set It Up:

How you set up your customer interviews will depend on the kind of company you are. If you are a software company with beta tests running, you can tap that beta group for interview subjects. If not, here are a few ways to find people to talk to:

• Take to social media: Ask for volunteers to join a conversation to help you shape the next iteration of your website, product or marketing. Tell them approximately how long the conversation will take and any qualifications you have (customer/non-customer, role or industry, etc). Offer a gift card or other reward as a thank you. You only need a handful of people to get worthwhile insights.
• Ask your customer-facing coworkers: If your company has account managers, support reps, or other staff who work closely with customers, ask them for recommendations of a few who might be willing to give feedback. 
• Include a link in customer communications: Whether it's a newsletter or an invoice, you can include a call-to-action to provide feedback through a short interview. Offer a small gift certificate or reward for participation. 

Questions to Ask:

You can customize your customer interviews however you want, but here's a list of common questions you can ask to help you nail your product positioning and understanding of the market, including ones like:

• What challenges stand in the way of getting your job done?
• What are your top three headaches right now?
• How would you describe this product to a boss or client? How would you describe it to your mother?
• What other types of [product category] have you tried? What were their strengths?
• In what situation would you recommend us over another company and visa versa?

2) Run a Content Strategy Survey

Cost: $0 -$50

Which is better: ebooks or webinars? Is it worth writing a 20-page ebook when a 3-page tip-sheet will suffice? What makes someone download or read a piece of content? Analytics can help you get at answers to some of these questions, but it's good to supplement that with direct feedback from your audience.

Every few quarters, HubSpot will run a content strategy survey to get a sense of what topics and formats interest our audience. What we've found is that our audiences is a living and evolving thing. Your interests change over time and we want to be right there to meet them.

How to Set It Up:

We teamed up with SurveyMonkey to create a content strategy survey that anyone can use. If you want to run a content strategy survey you can use our template to start and add in questions or tailor it to suit your needs.

In addition, if you use both SurveyMonkey and HubSpot you can actually create email segments based on the responses and serve up only the content that matters to each. Regardless of the survey tool you use, below are some of the questions we like to ask about our content strategy.

Questions to Ask:

• How often would you want to receive information from our company?
• When reading content from companies, which tone do you appreciate? (Select all that apply)
• When you share information about companies and the products or services they offer, which of the following do you use? (Select all that apply)
• In what format do you prefer to read your content? 

3) Run User Testing on Your Website

Cost: $0-$50

Whether you're heading into a redesign or maintaining your website through small tweaks, ongoing research into what's working and what's not can help you raise the productivity of your site. You can get a lot of information about your site performance from basic analytics about which pages are converting the best or garnering the most consistent traffic.

In addition to basic analytics though, there are some free and low-cost tools out there to help you run user testing on your website. These tests will get you feedback on more nuanced elements of your site -- things like the design, copy positioning, and/or layout are all great elements to test.

How to Set It Up:

There are a number of tools out there that you can use to get feedback on your designs or positioning. In the past we've used both UsabilityHub and UserTesting.com to help us test out assumptions on our site before a redesign or homepage refresh.

Questions to Ask: 

• What is the first thing you look at on this page?
• Where would you go first if you wanted to take the next step?
• Is this page trustworthy?
• How likely would you be to explore this site (rating scale)?
  

Small investments in market research can go a long way in your marketing. In addition to these basic approaches, there are a few tools you can use to research major shifts in buyer demographics or trends, including: 

1. FedStats: This site publishes government statistics, like statistical profiles of states, cities, and counties.
2. The Census Bureau: This site gives you access to census data.
3. The Census Bureau's Quick Facts: This site gives quick facts about people, businesses, and geography.

The moral of the story here is that market research doesn't have to be expensive or time consuming -- with the right tools, you can have get great insights in a short amount of time.

Thumbtack!

Have you seen this? GO ahead- take a look!

It's a free service that helps link you to your new customers that are just waiting to get at your great service and products!

We're trying them out and giving it a go!

You should too!!

Click the link below to see what it's all about and try your FREE profile today!

Procella Consulting

How to boost your SEO ranking on Google

How to boost your SEO ranking on Google

By Jo Lynn Deal

Nearly ALL consumers search for businesses online (97%). Make sure you are online everywhere!

For any size business, one of the most important marketing goals is to gain a high organic search ranking with search engines. Our primary target is the mother of all search engines: Google. Recently, Search Engine Journal provided an in-depth look at the 200 algorithms Google uses for website ranking. It covers every thing from page load to image optimization to affiliate links. If you would like a warm up, below are key steps to get you started.

1. “Give in” to Google.  If you want to improve your Google search engine ranking, your first step should be to use their products. We’re very fortunate because their products are tailored to our needs and everything has been designed with us in mind. If you’ve been a late adopter of Google Plus, change that mentality. Create your Google Plus business page and begin making connections. Claim your link, set up a page that showcases your business, and verify your website. Add your Google Plus page as a channel on your editorial calendar. Learn why every business needs a Google+ page here.

2.  Claim your Google local page. Many people are concerned that setting up a Google Plus Local page limits them to only appear in searches specific to their local zip code. That’s actually not true. Your content will appear when it is relevant to the search terms, regardless of where you are located. However, if you set up a Google Plus Local page, you gain ranking with local searches.

If you are still worried, clarify your service area in the information on your website. Share about the many businesses and locations you have served in your testimonial page, about us page, contact us page, and website homepage. Add a simple statement like “we serve clients all over the world from beautiful downtown Chicago.” If your business has several locations, you also have the option to list them.  To learn how to set up a Google Plus Local page click here.

3.  Claim Google Authorship. If you or anyone one your team writes for the company blog, create authorship for every contributor and link their Google Plus profile to your website.

4. Optimize your digital channels with industry keywords.  Your website and all of your social media channels should include similar descriptions in the About Us sections, with links back to your primary website. These sections should be written using relevant industry keywords about you and your business. This can be tricky because we want our descriptions to be what we want our customers to know about us, but they also need to include the terms our customers are searching. One of the best tools is of course offered by Google and it is through the Adwords program. Anyone can set up an Adwords account and use the Keyword Planner found in the menu bar under Tools.

5. Write for your audience, edit for search engines. For both your web pages and your business blog, optimize each page for search engines. Here is a FREE SEO guide (excerpt) that you can keep handy on your desk to use when you finish a post or page.

6.  Add your business to local directories.  If you want people to find you, tell them where you are. Hubspot recently shared a listing of 70 local business directories you can submit your website and company information to. Submitting your information to these local directories is key to your local marketing plan.

7. Use channels that offer highly searched content.  Videos and images are the most highly shared content online, therefore, they are also most likely to appear in searches.  Many small businesses may struggle with how to use video with their marketing efforts, but there are many, many creative ways you can use this important channel. Use videos for customer testimonials, customer interviews, company updates, sharing good wishes during the holidays, host a video contest and curate videos from your customers, create a FAQ page with video recordings of the questions and your team answering. Think about every way you communicate through your business and ask yourself if there is a way to use a video. Follow the same process with images.

Would you benefit from an SEO overhaul or maybe a more glamorous “Makeover” for your website? We offer services that are below budget and above expectations! Click here to request an appointment. 

Is your marketing strategy old school?

Is your Marketing Strategy old school?

By Julie Niehoff, director of education and development at Constant Contact

There you are, with hundreds of Facebook fans, earning tons of retweets, and building an email opt-in subscriber list that’s starting to look like the local phone book. From all outward appearances, you’ve mastered email and social media marketing.

Or have you? Even if you’re just getting familiar with the tools, experts and newbies alike may want to do a reality check on how current their marketing approach is.

If you don’t have enough time to finish your to-do list, are scratching your head for ideas on what to post next, or are deciding which social media channel to nix so you can get your life back, you may be stuck in old-school marketing. And it’s costing you a boatload of time and money. But you’re not alone.

According to a recent survey by Constant Contact, the top two marketing concerns facing entrepreneurs today are making marketing dollars go further (59 percent) and selecting the best marketing campaigns to run (56 percent). While these problems aren’t new, how they’re being solved is. Enter multi-channel marketing.

Multi-channel marketing uses a variety of tools such as email, social media, mobile, and the Web to get your message out to the right audience. Instead of the time-consuming process of promoting a single product or event, you market a campaign and execute it through select channels that allow you to maximize your presence in the most efficient way possible.

For example, let’s say you own a sporting goods store. Your campaign could ask fans to vote on their favorite sport and say why it’s so great. In exchange, they’re entered into a drawing to win new equipment for that sport.

The campaign could include a promotion of the sweepstakes by email and then point subscribers to your Facebook page. If they’re not already fans, they soon will be. When they like your page and cast their vote, their network of friends will also know about your contest. Your tweets can feature the contest, the Top 3 contenders during the voting period, and reminders for followers to enter to win. And great images on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram will attract new followers and inspire more entrants to the contest.

Does multi-channel marketing work? About 82 percent of the survey participants that have adopted multi-channel marketing report an uptick in new customers, stronger engagement with existing customers, and more revenue. Here’s how to do it.

1. Whip up a great campaign

It doesn’t need to be time consuming or involve The Flying Wallendas, though it does need to demonstrate your expertise and show what makes your business unique.

Since your campaign is going to drive all of your content, every message should be about the needs and interests of your customers. Nobody likes a barrage of overt promotions. Remember that customers buy, and buy more, from businesses they know and trust and will actually pay more if they believe they’re getting a greater value from the experience.

2. Go deep, not wide
Find out where your active customers prefer to engage and focus your efforts there. Some like Facebook, others may be strictly email, and others enjoy face-to-face interactions, although it’s likely they’re using a combination of these communications channels. Instead of having a surface presence in a lot of places, focus on two or three channels where you can make an impact.

3. Think big by starting small

At first it’s best to tackle only a few channels, such as sending out an email with a link to the campaign’s Facebook page and then add in more channels when you’re ready. You’ll find that the more proficient you become with each channel, the easier it is to extend your campaign to new ones. Since you’ll be staggering your marketing efforts across various channels on different days, this allows you to keep your day job.

4. Be a mad scientist

Experiment with different ideas, and if they’re not all homeruns, it’s still okay. You’ll learn more about what works through experimentation and failure, so allow yourself a few mulligans along the way.

5. Slice and dice your content

You can save lots of time and reinforce your campaign messages by cleverly re-using your content. Just be sure to always put a fresh twist on them.

6. Use short-cut tools

There are lots of tools available that make it easier for you to manage your various profiles on different social networks, schedule when your messages go live, and manage all of your campaigns in one place. These tools also are a great way to reduce your learning curve, so why not check out Hootsuite for Twitter and the Constant Contact Toolkit for managing your marketing activities?

If you really want to drive business, it’s time to ditch old school marketing and adopt multi-channel. Be sure to email us at procellaconsultants@gmail.com or call us now at 956-454-2851 to set up an appointment! We will pull you out of old school and into the new!

Social Media Giant Spills Secrets

You heard right! The Social Media Strategist of Dell (yes, the big computer giant) is opening his doors this Friday!

Dell is offering a free presentation by their head social media straightest Adam Price on how he does what he does. Afterwards is another great freebie- a tour of their social media command center!

All of this is Friday May 30th from 11:45 AM until 1:45 PM and this is a one time only event!

The place to be is Dell's Round Rock, Texas location at Building 1 (Dell Inc, 1 Dell Way, Round Rock, TX 78682)

If you want to register for this FREE event just click here and see the official Facebook event here!

WE'RE BACK!!!

Yeah, we took a bit of a long break. But don't worry, it was just so we could grow and move towards bigger and better things!

Now all we have to do is break the big news.....

WE'RE NOW IN AUSTIN TEXAS!

Yup, that's right. We are now based in the new huge bustling capital of Texas! While we settle in and get used to the place, we're going to be updating a lot of new great things!

For one, we have new and better service's to help you, a big new degree to back up our talk, and more partners to work with you!

Get ready Austin, the business revolution is here!

The Three Factors That Determine Affiliate Marketing Success

By Michael Johnston

As affiliate marketing has become a multi-billion dollar industry over the past several years, it’s also become increasingly sophisticated. Across the seemingly endless niches are a variety of strategies for generating revenue. With more merchants, offers, and analytics, there’s a lot to the affiliate marketing business.

But while the details have grown increasingly complex, the big picture remains incredibly simple. Success in affiliate marketing ultimately depends on how well you execute three tasks.

Affiliate Marketing For Dummies

If you’re an affiliate marketer, you have a chance to make money every time someone opens up a Web browser. To the affiliate marketer, below is a diagram of how the flow of every Internet engagement unfolds.

You make money on the path that includes three green boxes; on all others–the vast majority of scenarios–you get nothing. So at its simplest, affiliate marketing success comes to those who maximize the number of positive outcomes down the flow chart above.

Three Key Factors

Put another way, think of affiliate marketing as this formula:

Revenue = Visitors x Click Rate x Conversion Rate x Commission

Improving any one of the variables on the right side of this equation will increase the dollar amount on the left side. So affiliate marketing really boils down to optimizing three factors:

Factor #1: Visitors / Traffic

In order to make money from affiliate marketing, you need to convert a visitor to your site to a paying customer for your merchant partner(s). Obviously, the more visitors you have (i.e., the greater the traffic to your site), the more chances you have to make an affiliate referral.

Building up a large base of traffic is in itself a huge challenge. There’s an overwhelming amount of content on the Web dedicated to attracting visitors to your website, and we won’t go into any detail on the topic here. (Check out SEOmoz or Search Engine Land if you really want to read more).

If your website doesn’t have much traffic to speak of, there’s probably not a big opportunity for you now in affiliate marketing. Focus on producing high quality content, building some links, and getting a recurring stream of visitors to your site. But ff you have a website that is already attracting a significant number of visitors from referring sites, organic search, and direct visits, affiliate marketing could be a logical way to monetize.

Factor #2: Click Rate

This is where we put the “marketing” in affiliate marketing. It’s up to you as the affiliate marketer to make sure that your audience sees the affiliate links and offers you have on your site. You can’t simply throw them into the right sidebar and hope that your audience seeks them out and clicks on them. There’s a great deal that you can do to increase the likelihood that your visitors click on the links and get in front of the affiliate offer.

This topic is extremely broad; there are countless strategies for increasing visibility (and ultimately click rate) on your affiliate links, ranging from incorporating links into your content to sending emails to your newsletter list. Check out some of the affiliate marketing gurus on our Best Monetization Blogs overview for an extensive supply of tips and tricks for boosting the number of clicks your affiliate links receive.

Factor #3: Conversion Rate

Conversion rate refers to the percentage of referrals sent who ultimately complete the desired action (e.g., purchase something from Amazon).

This is one area that is often overlooked as an “out of my hands” part of the affiliate marketing funnel. Once you’ve sent a visitor to the merchant site, all you can do is cross your fingers and hope they ultimately complete whatever action is necessary for you to get your commission. That’s partially true I suppose. But you have more input here than you may realize.

Part of the affiliate marketing game involves picking out merchant partners and products to promote. If you’re promoting a crap product, you can probably send some traffic through the affiliate link by doing a good job of marketing it to your audience. But once they get to the merchant site and are disappointed in what they see, they’re probably going to abandon.

If you’re promoting a quality product that you think delivers great value to your audience, they’re much more likely to complete the purchase once they’ve clicked.

Commission $ vs. Conversion %

There’s often a trade-off between the quality of a product and the commission being offered. And it’s tempting to gravitate toward the partners and products that pay you the most per conversion. But if those products are unlikely to convert, they might not be the best fit.

Consider two products:

• Product A: $100 commission to affiliates
• Product B: $25 commission to affiliates

Product A looks like the winner, right? Not necessarily; your expected revenue from promoting this product depends on the likelihood of conversion. Suppose the conversion rates look like this:

• Product A: 1%
• Product B: 5%

For each affiliate click you send to Product A, you can expect $1.00 in revenue. For each sent to Product B, you can expect $1.25 in affiliate revenue.

Don’t get blinded by simply commissions. Finding relevant, quality products to promote is one of the most important parts of the affiliate business.

Bottom Line

Focusing on any one of these areas increases your chances of affiliate marketing success. But optimizing one area when another is sub-optimal won’t deliver the results you want. In other words, the real success and revenue comes when all three are executed successfully.

For example, building up a big base of traffic won’t deliver much of a reward if you’re working with the wrong affiliate offers. Similarly, doing a great job marketing the ideal offers to an extremely small traffic base won’t translate into much revenue. Each of these three points must be implemented and improved together, or else you won’t see results.

There’s obviously a lot of work that goes into each of the three points above; building up substantial traffic takes months (or even years) of effort, and finding the right affiliates involves never-ending research.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

by Andy Hagans

Affiliate marketing has become a massive online industry over the past several years, emerging as both an effective way for marketers to sell their products and services and for publishers to monetize their audiences. Despite the popularity of affiliate marketing, many publishers still aren’t aware of exactly what affiliate marketing is or how it works. In some cases, these publishers are gatekeepers to an audience that could be very effectively monetized through affiliate marketing, meaning that they’re passing up an attractive revenue stream.

What It Is (And What It Isn’t)

At its heart, affiliate marketing is an online version of a sales structure that has been happening offline for decades. In its simplest form, it involves three primary components:

• A merchant, or someone with a product or service to sell
• An affiliate, or individual with the willingness and ability to sell that product to a particular audience
• A product or service

For each product the affiliate sells, they receive a portion of the proceeds from the merchant. It’s effectively an outsourced sales team. At its core, affiliate marketing is just that simple.

Offline Example

When I was a child, my school would have fundraisers that involved us going door-to-door to sell magazine subscriptions (magazines were glossy, soft-cover publications that would be mailed to a subscriber’s house on a weekly or monthly basis). I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was right in the middle of an affiliate marketing scheme. The magazine companies had products they wanted to sell. Schools had the ability to sell these products. And for every subscription sold, the magazine companies gave a slice of the proceeds to the school. (In this example, there’s actually a secondary later of affiliate marketing; the schools effectively outsource the actual selling to the students, in exchange for prizes that come with meeting certain sales figures.)

Online, affiliate marketing works generally the same way–except that the door-to-door sales approach is replaced by strategies more suited to a digital marketplace. In most instances, the affiliate marketing process works as follows:

1. Visitor to a publisher’s website clicks an “affiliate link” that takes them to a third party landing page
2. Visitor makes a purchase
3. Affiliate (publisher) gets a commission based on the value of the products and services purchased at the partner’s site

In other words, affiliate marketing is a kind of cost-per-action (CPA) advertising. The publisher makes nothing for highlighting a partner’s product on their site, and they make nothing for getting a visitor to click through to that site. The commission is only earned when a sale is completed.

Affiliate marketing is facilitated by “affiliate links” that allow merchants to track where their customers originate. In other words, it’s possible (and actually very simple) to know which revenue came from a specific affiliate and to compensate that affiliate accordingly.

Affiliate Marketing Economics

For publishers, the affiliate marketing revenue equation looks something like this (we’ve boldedthe factors that are most within your control in optimization efforts):

Visitors x Click Rate (on Affiliate Links) = Referred Visitors

Referred Visitors x Conversion Rate x Average Purchase Price = Referral Revenue

Referral Revenue x Commission % = Affiliate Marketing Revenue

The success of an affiliate marketing strategy depends on how many referrals you’re able to send to merchant sites and how well these referrals convert (hence the bolding of these factors above). The more relevant and appealing the offers you highlight on your site, the higher both your click and conversion rates will likely be. If you’re running a travel blog, you probably don’t want to be featuring affiliate offers for baby products; replacing them with affiliate links to cruise packages would probably result in a higher referral rate.

Appeal of Affiliate Marketing (to Advertisers)

Advertisers love affiliate marketing because it involves minimal risk. If a sufficient margin is built in as compensation for the affiliate, it becomes impossible to lose money. That’s because affiliates are generally only paid when a sale is completed (i.e., a lead is converted). Advertisers (or “merchants”) pay nothing for leads that don’t convert.

Compare this to a CPM-based advertising campaign, where an advertiser pays a fixed amount to get a fixed number of ad impressions. (E.g., they may pay $10,000 to have 1 million ads shown on a publisher site, or a $10 CPM.) That campaign may be unsuccessful however if the ad impressions don’t convert into clicks and/or eventual sales.

Under most affiliate marketing arrangements, advertisers only pay for converted leads. There is basically no way they can lose money or get a negative ROI with this marketing method. Each new sale generated may have a thin margin after the affiliate payment is made, but it’s possible to structure in such a way that eliminates the possibility of a loss.

Some merchants will pay for actions that do not involve the transfer of money (i.e., something besides a sale of a product or service). For example, many merchants pay affiliates for referred visitors that ultimately sign up for a newsletter or other free product.

Appeal of Affiliate Marketing (to Publishers)

Affiliate marketing is very appealing to some publishers as well, because it can allow them to make considerably more money than they would under an alternative monetization strategy. Though the specifics of payout arrangements can vary a bit, in general affiliate payments will be significantly larger than the revenue generated from a click under a CPC pricing arrangement (or the effective CPC under a CPM arrangement). For high margin products such as e-books, for which there are no material costs, affiliate margins can be as 50% of the total purchase price. So it’s not unheard of for affiliates to generate $100 or much more from each referral.

To explain this a bit further, let’s consider a real life example. Below is a screenshot from AffiliateTip.com, a popular blog run by affiliate marketing guru Shawn Collins. In his right sidebar, he has a number of affiliate links for products such as HootSuite, Dropbox, and Bluehost:

Alternatively, there could be a traditional 160×600 display ad unit here. From a network, that ad unit might earn the published an effective CPM of $3 or $4. If the optimal affiliate marketing links are used instead, the payout can be much higher.

Let’s assume that the aggregate click rate on this affiliate link section is 1%, that 20% of referred visitors convert, and that the average commission is $10. For every 1,000 visitors:

• 10 click through to an affiliate link
• 2 end up purchasing something from a merchant
• $20 in revenue for the publisher is generated

The end result in this hypothetical is $20 in revenue–significantly more than the $3 or $4 that could be earned from traditional display advertising.

Of course, the revenue per visitor is highly dependent on the click and conversion rates. But the hypothetical above should illustrate that if you’re able to find quality, relevant affiliate offers, affiliate marketing can be a very attractive monetization opportunity.

Affiliate Marketing In Action

Affiliate marketers can use a number of strategies to sell to their audience, with different approaches making the most sense for different niches and product lineups. These strategies include:

• Coupons
• Product Reviews
• Product Rankings
• Product Aggregation / Price Comparison

Below are some real life examples of affiliate marketing strategies in action:

• Review: 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. Note the affiliate links to the landing page where this e-book can be purchased. For every referred purchased, this publisher makes 40% of the total purchase price.
• TV Review Site. This site compiles prices for products at various Web retailers, including an affiliate link to all of them. If a visitor to this site ultimately clicks through and makes a purchase, a commission is earned.
• Only Cookware. This is one of several sites run by Amazon “super affiliates” Paula and Wanda. Their reviews feature affiliate links for visitors to purchase the products on Amazon, which nets them a commission in the neighborhood of 8.5%.

Many publishers would be surprised at the depth of the affiliate marketing industry; it’s a lot more than e-books and amazon affiliates. Commission Junction, one of the largest affiliate networks, has an impressive list of advertiser verticals:

Bottom Line

Affiliate marketing is a fairly simple concept that can be implemented in a countless number of ways online. Though it’s not as familiar or easy to set up as display advertising strategies that dominate many publisher monetization strategies, there is the potential for a big payoff if a bit of work is done upfront.

6 Social Media Best Practices & Resources

Having a social media presence is no is no longer optional for small businesses, it's a prerequisite for success. Your customers rely on social media to recommend your business and address customer service needs, and you'll need it to build a strong brand. Let's go over some best practices and recommended resources.

First, we'd like to point you to a list of 103 compelling social media statistics that Business 2 Community, an outlet focused on marketing strategy, put out in November. If you don't have a chance to look at the whole list, here are a few that are particularly relevant to small businesses:

• 97% of all consumer search for local businesses online
• 72% of adult Internet users in the US are active on at least on social network
• 68% of consumers check out companies on social networking sites before buying

Read More:

We're quickly moving away from the attention economy, where businesses try to find out what customers are thinking by flooding them with advertisements, and into the intention economy. In the intention economy, where customers tell businesses what they want and let them compete, social media is the most important tool for listening to what they'''re saying.

If you're not familiar with the different social networks, here is a fun bacon chart that will help you understand them.

Best Practices

Pick Your Voice

To ensure a consistent brand voice, it's best to pick one person or a small team to handle all social media responsibilities. Then decide what kind of voice is best for your business. If you're a personal trainer, maybe you want to position yourself as a motivator and create a profile full of inspirational materials.

Create a Schedule

And stick to it! Inactive accounts show a lack of commitment and are far too common. Make sure you're posting at least 2-3 times a week. If you really want to get organized, consider using this free social media publishing schedule template from HubSpot.

Interact With Followers

They followed you because they like your product or service. Show them that you care too by taking time to thoughtfully interact with them. In addition to simply responding to questions and comments, be proactive and find out what they're interested in!

Don't Be Overly Self-serving

Remember the attention and intention economies we talked about earlier? You'll gain a larger and more loyal audience by helping your followers better themselves rather than perpetually promoting your brand to them. For every post about your company, share three non-promotional posts.

Shareable Content is Key

One of the goals of social media, regardless of the platform you're on, is having the content you share be shared by others. Lists ("Top Ten Best...", "8 Ways to...", etc.) and other forms of easily digestible information are much more likely to be shared.

Use Images

According to a HubSpot post last year, updates that include an image on Facebook get 53% more likes. The same goes for Twitter, and Pinterest is by nature a visual platform.

Best Social Networks for Small Businesses

Not only is the chart funny, it demonstrates an important point: not all social networks should be used in the same way. Content must be tailored to fit the channel it's being distributed over. Your business should definitely be on Facebook and Twitter. There's a good chance you should also be on Pinterest. Depending on your business, some of the other networks might also be relevant.

Facebook

With over 1.15 billion monthly users, Facebook is the world's biggest social network. Most small businesses should create a free business page on Facebook (step by step process in previous newsletter).

Twitter

On Twitter, members share posts that are limited to 140 characters. They can either be directed at other users or meant for your followers to read. Anyone who's interested in what you're saying can "follow" you. Everything you post will show up on their wall. As a business, the more followers you have, the better. You can also gauge the quality of your followers by looking at their profiles and seeing how relevant they are. The #hashtag (this is how it's used) is one of the things that made Twitter famous. Hashtags are added before words or phrases to categorize a post. Once posted, the word or phrase becomes a hyperlink that will tell you who else in the Twitterverse is talking about the same thing.

This cheat sheet from Elliot Design might be helpful for small business owners who are new to Twitter and want to get off to a fast start.

Pinterest

A network for users to share similar interests, Pinterest allows you to "pin" images, videos and other objects to your wall, or pinboard. Here is some basic information about how Pinterest works and some brands that are crushing it on Pinterest!

Don't know when or what to post about? Pinerly put together a nice infographic that explains just that.

Resources

With social media comes social media experts, and there are a lot of them out there. If all of this is new to you, don't get overwhelmed. If you don't want to spend time on social media every day, here are some great resources to schedule your posts in advance!

Buffer

Buffer is another great tool. It also allows you to write several posts at once to be distributed throughout the day at the best times to reach your target audience. In addition to analytics Facebook and Twitter provide (numbers of likes, shares, favorites and retweets), Buffer provides in-depth analysis, such as the exact number of people who click on links you share.

HootSuite

Both Buffer and HootSuite offer a free option

HootSuite is the most popular tool for scheduling posts on social media. It tracks your brand mentions and analyzes social media traffic for you. It's not only for small businesses that don't have time to spend on social media. Some of the biggest brands in the world use HootSuite, including PepsiCo, Sony, CBS and Virgin.

We hope you've found this information useful! If there are any other topics you'd like to see us cover, please don't hesitate toreach out. Once you implement them, we'd love to hear how the social media best practices have affected your business.

- The Acuity TeamSocial Media Best Practices Infographic