Business Beginner

LinkedIn is one of the biggest social networks out there with over 400 million users, including the upper echelon of the business community. You'll find more CEO's, CMO's, Investors, and Decision-Makers on LinkedIn than another other social network. LinkedIn is for big business and it can be incredibly beneficial for your career. Regardless of your industry or business goals, you should be utilizing LinkedIn to enhance your own personal brand and grow your  online reputation .  I've been active on LinkedIn since 2009 and I've always been in the Top 1% for Recommendations, Profile Views, Primary Connections, Article / Update Followers, and even SlideShare Business views (a LinkedIn company). I've gotten a great deal of website traffic, recommendations, sales, clients, and jobs from LinkedIn and I want you to benefit just as much. Here are some tips based on business lessons I've learned to fully leverage this invaluable social networking resource.  1)  Optim...

Fellow bootstrapping business professionals: Snapchat is all the rage these days. A younger generation has transitioned away from "boring" Twitter and even "old people" social media leader Facebook (now that their parents and grandparents use it daily). All of the ads on these platforms certainly haven't helped either. Snapchat on the other hand is simple, fun, less commercialized, and has far less text to get in your way. A picture is worth a thousand words after all... so a Snapchat video might be worth 10,000! And like social media platform Pinterest , it's most likely heading for a multi-billion dollar IPO this year! ( Update : It's recent IPO values the company at around a staggering $25 Billion ). That means it's here to stay so you need to stop ignoring it and get on board.  Despite the incredible business potential available on a free platform with millions of users, chances are you aren't a Snapchat marketing superstar... yet. You mos...

Pinterest has been a popular social media platform for many years now and it has been successfully adopted by hundreds of thousands of businesses and entrepreneurs during this time. But not all marketers have gotten on board or fully utilized this versatile medium.  In fact, Pinterest seems to be one of the platforms that many companies choose to skip in favor of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn , YouTube, and even our mediocre friend Google Plus! I'm not saying you should ditch any of these tried and true platforms (except perhaps the lowly Google+ ... even though I personally use it almost daily to cover my bases), but you should give Pinterest a fair shot and maximize its potential. When most people think of Pinterest they usually think of DIY projects, design ideas, weddings, fashion, and fitness... but that's kind of like thinking  YouTube is just for cat videos, or that Instagram is just for Selfies (wait it's not?). Don't let this close-minded perspective...

Email marketing has been around for two decades now and it's changed the game. As a descendant of direct marketing in the snail mail world, email marketing has become the method of choice for those looking to boost sales of their product or service. It is a super-fast and easy way to reach out to people quickly and effectively. And there are some great free or affordable email marketing platforms out there to use like Mailchimp, Constant Contact, and iContact. Email marketing might not be new, but it has been proven to be effective time and time again. Stick the following 5 tips in your digital tool belt to make this workhorse perform better than ever.  1. Incentivize  Successful inbound marketers already know that the secret to the click lies in the subject line. You’ve read the long vs short argument, but here’s something that might be even more important. Offer a brazen incentive to encourage the click. Something as simple as offering free shipping might increase the open...

Instagram can be a daunting place; there's a huge amount of competition meaning it's easy to put hours of work in with minimal results. However, there are a great variety of tools that can be used to optimize your Instagram strategy , both saving time and leading to quicker growth. Here we outline our favorite 4 tools to supercharge your Instagram page. 1)  Later.com  A huge difficulty with managing an Instagram account in maintaining a regular posting schedule. Creating content is hard enough in itself, but remembering exactly when to post, as well as writing out descriptions and adding tags, can be a real drain on your productivity.  Later.com is an Instagram scheduler that allows you to overcome this problem. You can upload all of your content at a single point in time and set the exact date and time for it to be posted. This also helps with optimizing your posting times as you can see stats on when a picture was posted and how much engagement it received, allowing y...

Pinterest is on a mission to pump new lifeblood into Social Commerce! Born in 2010, Pinterest has today over 100 million of subscribers, 55% in the United States. As we all know, Pinterest is a social platform based on images. Pins can instantly get the attention of users and drive them to check out their links. Thanks to this, users can connect with commercial intent, not only to watch to the photos their friends and family pinned. In fact, people often browse Pinterest for ideas, like what to wear in a particular occasion or how to plate food. And when they find stimulating inspiration, many times it leads them to something they would like to buy. That is why Pinterest is the ideal social media to advertise products and services with a strong visual impact such as clothing, crafts or tourism.  According to the results of a study Pinterest conducted with its partner Oracle Data Cloud , 93% of active pinners use this social media to plan for purchases and another 87% have made a ...