Tag: inbound marketing

Uncategorized

WordPress meets Markethive

WordPress meets Markethive

At one point the decision or revelation became the foundation of the Markethive blogging system. Markethive would make WordPress better.

Let me explain. At one time we considered creating a blog software solution, (Blog Press) with templates that would compete with WordPress. I know, stupid. But at the time, there were many who thought it was a good idea.

The argument went like this, “Joomla, Drupal, Blogger, Typepad, etc.” offer others options so we should too. OK, I said, but then the list of competitors grew from WordPress to a much larger list, and not only did it make us another “ME TOO” company instead of an innovative cutting edge customer centric juggernaut.

I made the decision to “not” jump in as yet another standalone (CMS) blog platform like Word Press, but rather to create a powerful system to make Word Press and other CMS far more manageable, with the goal to make them better. Particularly functioning on making the world heavy weight Word Press even better by enhancing the WP platform with a supporting blog platform so multiple content could be constructed with partner contributors, so we could build a Broadcasting system utilizing literaly millions of members social networks, so we could build massive WordPress sites by many members in collaboration producing powerful SEO campaigns.

The whole idea has manifested as one of the most powerful blog collaboration Inbound Marketing systems ever devised, and that is Markethive.

Our roll being to fuse a powerful vertical targeted social network of Entrepreneurs, thereby making the Word Press and other CMS system powerful by the very spirit of the Rise of the Entrepreneur!

The following lists have become our goal to support the top contenders with plugins, widgets and collaborative power and function.

But the video tells it all.

Choosing blogging software can be a scary process, especially if you are new to blogging. There are many different types of engines and content management systems (CMS) that could be used. Picking the software that you’ll need is not an easy task, given the wide variety and types on the Web today.

There are many different aspects to consider when choosing which blogging software to pick. For instance:

Programming language.

Many blog platforms run on either PHP or Rails, but you can find just about any flavor of programming language you are looking for.

What features you’ll need.

The type of software you might choose is very dependent on the type of blog you are going to run. Some blog software is geared more towards new users, while others are more developer and designer-friendly. It’s a matter of finding software based on the features you need.

The size of the software’s community.

If the software community is larger for one blogging system and much smaller and less active than another, the more active community is usually a better choice for software. More active users within the development community means more improvements on the code base, in a faster time frame.

The age of the software.

The age of the software shows the maturity of the blogging platform. Young projects are more unstable, and are more likely to have bugs.

If you are planning on extending the blog.

If you are thinking about adding things like forums, a store, or some other feature to your blog, some blogging software will be more suited to fill that need than others.

The blog software that you choose can have a big impact on your blogging. It’s important to choose the right software in the very beginning, so you can avoid the hassle of migrating to different engine later on. Here are the pros and cons of the 10 most popular blogging systems.

Here is the list of the top 10 blogging CMS solutions:

1.Wordpress
Alexa Rank (276)-45

WordPress is the most famous and widely-used blogging platform. It features a very intuitive web-based installer so anyone from skill level novice to expert can quickly install the software without any hiccups.

The WordPress community is a major asset to the blogging software. It has one of the largest and most passionate communities of developers and users, so one could find just about any theme or plugin imaginable. The possibilities for extending the software are endless, and many web sites and services have used the WordPress code base to build entirely different applications. WordPress also features integration with Akismet, one of the most effective spam protection systems for blogging software.

WordPress makes it easy for new bloggers to not only install the software, but also to download and install automatic upgrades to plugins with only one click. The learning curve for WordPress is fairly minimal, and if a new user runs in to problems, they can always check the extensive documentation. WordPress is perfect for the new blogger who wants to get his feet wet installing their first blog software, or the advanced developer who’s looking to extend the stable code into something entirely different.

If you are wanting to start a multiple-blog site, you can also check out WordPress MU. WordPress MU is the same code base as the mature WordPress single blog code base, with some added functionality.

2. Drupal
Alexa Rank  (2,497)-17

Drupal isn’t your typical blogging software. While it has an incredible community behind the code and many blogs use it for blogging software, it’s not just blogging software. Drupal is community software.

Drupal really shines as blog software for a blogging community. Performancing is a great example of using Drupal as a community of blogs. Whether you are wanting to power one blog to a 100, Drupal is an excellent choice.

Another strong point about Drupal is the versatility of the software. It comes packaged with a robust user system, but also a lot of community-friendly features like forums, books (for creating documents in a “book” structure) and a tracker which allows you to follow updates and content that other users have published recently.

Drupal also comes with a large community of developers and modules. With these modules, one could build any type of site or add nearly any sort of functionality to their Drupal installation. Many top-notch sites use Drupal to publish their multiple blogs and user communities. Performancing, Spread Firefox, The Onion, and Ubuntu and others.

Drupal is the perfect blogging software for anyone wanting to add a community to their blog with forums and extensions.

3. Joomla
Alexa Rank (2,689)-570

Joomla is a CMS that is similar to the community-friendly Drupal, and gaining traction every day. While Drupal is geared more towards developing community-flavored sites and blogs, Joomla seems to be geared more towards ecommerce (you can read more about the comparison between Joomla and Drupal here).

Regardless of their differences, Joomla is very much like Drupal in the fact that it’s easy to get anything from a simple site to a community blog in minutes. Joomla has a vibrant development community which has created many extensions.

Joomla is perfect for anyone wanting to build a blogging community site, or add ecommerce functionality to a blog.

4. ExpressionEngine
Alexa Rank (12,422)-2,466

ExpressionEngine is a very robust blogging platform, but isn’t free. The best feature about ExpressionEngine is the feature to publish multiple websites, either using different subdomains on a single domain, or across multiple domains.

You could use one code base to power multiple sites across multiple domains. The software features an extremely clean and simple backend that shouldn’t confuse the blogger. Designers and developers love ExpressionEngine for the fact that it’s quite easy to hand over a site and have the client update his own blog. It’s a solid all-in-one package.

ExpressionEngine is really geared for people who are trying to start a multi-blog site, but anyone can use the software quite easily thanks to its thoughtful and elegant design. A single license costs $99.95, but if you’re running a personal blog you can download the core version of EE.

5. Liferay
Alexa Rank (26,959)+3,284

Liferay Portal is a free and open source enterprise portal written in Java and distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License. It allows users to set up features common to websites. It is fundamentally constructed of functional units called portlets. Liferay is sometimes described as a content management framework or a web application framework. It comes with certain portlets preinstalled. These comprise the core functionality of the portal system.

The reasons to use Liferay Portal for your website are simple: it provides a robust platform to serve your site to all clients, be they desktop, mobile, or anything in between; it provides all the standard applications you need to run on your site; and it provides an easy to use development framework for new applications or customization. In addition to this, Liferay Portal is developed using an open source methodology, by people from around the world. The code base is solid, and has been proved to be reliable and stable in mission critical deployments in diverse industries.

6. DotNetNuke
Alexa Rank  (32,058)-238

DotNetNuke is an open source platform for building web sites based on Microsoft .NET technology. It is written in VB.NET and distributed under both a Community Edition BSD-style license and a commercial proprietary license. The Community Edition is a popular web content management (WCM) system and application development framework for ASP.NET, with over 6 million downloads and 600,000 production web sites as of October 2010. More than 8,000 DotNetNuke apps are available for purchase on Snowcovered.com. DotNetNuke.com has over 800,000 registered members as of October 2010.

Major Features:

Distinguishes between community (common features) and enterprise (full set of features) editions. 
Various modules, and data providers.
Provides language packs for about 60 languages.
Customizable through skins and templates.

7. MODX
Alexa Rank (32,333)+1482

Modx is not just an open source CMS but also a web application framework. Raymond Irving and Ryan Thrash began the MODx CMS project in 2004 as a fork of Etomite. In 2008 MODx users created a new logo and branding for the project. Now MODx allows for full segregation of content (plain HTML), appearance and behavior (standards compliant CSS and JavaScript) and logic (PHP, snippets).

Major Features:

As with Joomla, modx officially supports only MySQL database.
Not just CMS but a PHP framework for Web.
Freedom to choose jQuery, Mootools, ExtJS, Prototype or any other JavaScript library.
Supports PHP 4.3.11 and above.
Complete control of all metadata and URL structure for SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
Unlimited hierarchical page depth.
Can create custom fields and widgets for templates.
Role-based permissions for the Manager.
Ability to customize the Manager on a per-deployment basis.
Ecommerce integration via Foxy Cart.
Extensions: 622, also known as add-ons.

8. concrete5
Alexa Rank (33,631)-292

Concrete5 is an open source CMS started in 2003 as a rapid-design approach to building the now-defunct LewisAndClark200.org, the official site for the Ad Council's National Council for the Lewis & Clark Bicentennial. Concrete5 is developed in PHP and is distributed under MIT software license.

Concrete5 features in-context editing (the ability to edit website content directly on the page, rather than in an administrative interface or using web editor software). Editable areas are defined in concrete5 templates which allow editors to insert 'blocks' of content. These can contain simple content (text and images) or have more complex functionality, for example image slideshows, comments systems, lists of files, maps etc. Further addons can be installed from the concrete5 Marketplace to extend the range of blocks available for insertion. Websites running concrete5 can be connected to the concrete5 website, allowing automatic upgrading of the core software and of any addons downloaded or purchased from the Marketplace.

9. Typo3
Alexa Rank (36,110)-8,334

TYPO3 is a free and open source CMS released under the GNU General Public License oriented to small to mid size enterprise-class users. TemplaVoila is an alternative template engine extension for TYPO3. A graphical mapping tool for creating templates is included, an alternative page module, the ability to create flexible content elements and an API for developers. New content element types can be created without programming. TemplaVoila facilitates more flexibility for maintaining web pages than TYPO3's standard templating, while making it possible to enforce a strict corporate design and allowing editors to work with content more intuitively.

Delivered with a base set of interfaces, functions and modules, TYPO3's functionality spectrum is implemented by extensions. More than 5000 extensions are currently available for TYPO3 for download under the GNU General Public License from a repository called the TYPO3 Extension Repository, or TER.

TYPO3 can run on most HTTP servers such as Apache or IIS on top of Linux, Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X. It uses PHP 5.3 or newer and any relational database supported by the TYPO3 DBAL including MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, and others. Some 3rd-party extensions — not using the database API — support MySQL as the only database engine. The system can be run on any web server with a modern CPU and at least 256 MB RAM. The backend can be displayed in any modern browser with JavaScript. There is no browser restriction for displaying user-oriented content generated by TYPO3.

10. Alfresco
Alexa Rank (36,854)+2,483

Alfresco is an open source enterprise content management system for Microsoft Windows and Unix-like operating systems. Alfresco includes a content repository, an out-of-the-box web portal framework for managing and using standard portal content, a CIFS interface that provides file system compatibility on Microsoft Windows and Unix-like operating systems, a web content management system capable of virtualizing web apps and static sites via Apache Tomcat, Lucene indexing, and jBPM workflow. The Alfresco system is developed using Java technology. John Newton (co-founder of Documentum) and John Powell (a former COO of Business Objects) founded Alfresco Software, Inc. in 2005.

11. b2evolution
Alexa  Rank (80,628)-14,427

b2evolution is another blogging platform that allows for a single installation of a blog, or a whole network of blogs, right out of the box. b2 probably has the weakest developer community behind it, with only a 200+ plugins (compared to Joomla’s 3,400+).

The software features a very easy-to-understand backend, ideal for beginners. b2 also has has a built in stats feature, which is something most blogging platforms don’t have out of the box. The software also features a post editor with a very minimal WYSIWYG editor, which is perfect for a beginning blogger.

While the b2 developer community may not be very large, it has a very promising code base and many people still use b2evolution to power their blogs and blogger communities.

The Irrelevant Others

Plone.org                           
Alexa Rank (102,395)+10,174

cmsmadesimple.org
Alexa Rank (104,671)-32,048

umbraco.com
Alexa Rank  (116,439)-16,212

ez.no
Alexa Rank (154,173)-43,687

movabletype.org
Alexa Rank (174,802)-9,166

textpattern.com
Alexa Rank (187,704)-45,048

Being Irrelevant,

mephistoblog.com
Alexa Rank (8,419,219)-2,169,053

There is no other blogging platform, that integrates support for all Blog CMS systems, engages  social networks so reaches heasd into the stratosphere, nor institute a learning environment so building competent content teams is easily achievedf.

Markethive, It is that easy It is that powerful

Thomas Prendergast
CMO
Markethive, Inc.

 

Alan Zibluk Markethive Founding Member

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Millionaire Mindset: The Way You Think, Wealth or Poverty.

Millionaire Mindset: The Way You Think, Wealth or Poverty.

“Today, you have the opportunity to transcend from a disempowered mindset of existence to an empowered reality of purpose-driven living. Today is a new day that has been handed to you for shaping. You have the tools, now get out there and create a masterpiece.”
― Steve Maraboli, The Power of One

Being a successful entrepreneur is one of your goals; however, before it can be achieved belief in your success begins 6-inches between your ears; otherwise, a few defeats will yield a self-defeating mentality and confirm your inevitable arrival in the MLM Cemetery.  In essence, “The Way You Think” is critical to your ability to generate consistent, predictable and long-term residual income.  More Importantly, your mindset is core to the life you ultimately build and this means no excuses because the outcome is put squarely in your hands so, what do you do now?

Now, winners who think positively and achieve their goals, possess or develop what is commonly known as a Champion or Millionaire Mindset.  Now what role does a Millionaire Mindset play in entrepreneurship, business, home business or life?  Millionaire Mindset is “a way of thinking and acting that invites and maintains an overflow of abundance; a special way of relating to money in a way that attracts it to you”.  I highly recommend the book, Money Is My Friend by Phil Laut.  Yes, people obsess about money but, it’s only a tool and it’s about thought.  So, how does one develop a Millionaire Mindset?  SOLUTION is quite simple and that involves

being trained by a multi-millionaire, who believes in success development.  Okay, don’t have access to your local multi-millionaire then, follow a skill-model who has proven or demonstrated daily habits he/she are on the road to prosperity.  When you think like a winner and execute habits that ensure future success then, the outcome is predictable because you think the way you feel.  So, it’s safe to say, that entrepreneurs and/or successful businessmen like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and countless others don’t embrace self-limiting belief practices nor engage in conduct that would reinforce a destructive mindset that is repeated by the working poor and middle-class on a daily basis (consistently having more bills at the end of the month than money or living pay cheque to pay cheque).  When you set limits to your potential then, “you’re just another ham and egger”…..Bobby “The Brain” Heenan. 

Millionaire Mindset is critical not just to the average Joe and Jane but, especially to business as indicated by the 50% failure rate within the first 5-years of existence.  Believe it or not many CEO’s contribute to the failure of their company due to their resistance to better innovation processes that would enhance the production, efficiency and quality, while driving down costs of a product or service.  Seems anti-capitalist but, this is certainly true in technology/Internet based companies.  Unfortunately, political correctness or just plain FEAR has negatively impacted the greater society and businesses/entrepreneurs are not exempt.  It seems Economic Darwinism will identify the winners and losers in the greatest sport in the World known as business.  Those who make the necessary adjustment in relations to changing market conditions (Inbound Marketing) and more importantly, satisfying their customers increase their odds of success, while those entrenched in old methods of production (Outbound Marketing) despite a changing market and fail to listen will eventually, become another stat.  Keep an open mind or suffer the consequences.               

As consumers become more sophisticated business owners have become or forced to recognise they must cater to the interests of their target market.  This is why Inbound Marketing is rapidly becoming the norm because it’s about connecting with the internal needs of the customer by bringing value and earning the right to occupy their time.  So, are you embracing and internalising inbound marketing in your daily interactions or you more the outbound marketer where it’s more superficial and no real work on the inside?  This question is critical because it circle backs to the way wealthy people think versus those who are working-poor or middle class.  Want real success in anything then, it starts working on the internal you and this is why Inbound Marketing must become your standard method of thinking and execution in business.  Below, I have provided a few examples of how the wealthy are Inbound Thinkers and the related benefits.     

       

The Millionaire Mindset: 6 Mistakes The Rich Never Make:

  • It’s a Matter of Control, "The primary difference between the wealthy and the rest of us is that they're in control of their money — they don't let money control them," says Jaime Tardy, a business coach and author of "The Eventual Millionaire," who has interviewed more than 150 millionaires on how they accumulated their wealth.  “If you approach your finances from a place of fear or ignorance, you'll be like a boat floating around the ocean without a motor."

  • You Refuse to Face Facts, in the immortal words of Foghorn-Leghorn, “figures, don’t lie” and the wealthy know this as gospel, which explains why they invest the time in learning and scrutinizing their financial portfolio.  The attitude is that every financial transaction needs to be recorded and determined by its financial implication.

    You Overspend, credit card debt epitomizes the bad habit of over spending on products/services you cannot afford.  "Millionaires aren't out there buying Lamborghinis," Tardy says. "They make purchasing decisions based on their current financial status and their goals. They're rich because they're good at keeping money — not spending it.

    You Neglect to Adjust Your Finances Following a Big Life Event, when you tie the noose (get married) or suffer the death of a parent then, your finances will be impacted.  "Successful people understand that every transition you go through has a financial implication — and they make sure to build a plan for those turning points," says Pete Bush, a certified financial planner with Horizon Wealth Management in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

    You Waste Cash on Fees, late fees, service fees and miscellaneous costs that can be avoided if, you are diligent in maintaining your bills. 

    You Focus on Saving More — But Not Earning More, Millionaires aren't in the business of wasting money, but they also recognize the greater importance of earning additional income as a way to attain financial goals faster. "[Wealthy people] understand that while there is a limit on how much you can save, there is no limit to how much you can make," Tardy says.          

    You Obsess Over Price- — and Sacrifice Value, "Wealthy people understand that the cheapest route isn't always the most valuable," Bush says. "They are able to take the long view and consider how what they pay today compares with the worth over time."

    I invite you to examine our information.  After all, true Economic Independence begins with a MINDSET that embraces and most importantly, believes in Personal Development and avoids Governmental Dependence because it OFTEN limits Growth.

    Vaurn James

    Contributor

     

Alan Zibluk Markethive Founding Member

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41 Tips that Get Over 10,000 People to your Email Sub List

Of course, not everyone struggles to reach these different stages.  Some people skyrocket to success in a few weeks, other people do well with traffic levels but not with your mailing list.

This particular blog has well over 10,000 people on the mailing list and gets a few thousand visitors per day.

In this post I’m going to show you a few really cool lessons I’ve learned while building it up to this level — a level that I think it genuinely attainable by any blog.

Let’s do it.

 

How to get to that magic 10,000 email subscribers mark

As always, I’ve probably forgot a lot of really cool things.

1. You need a strategy

Without an overarching strategy you are just blogging blindly. I spend a lot of time working on my blogging strategy because it gives me a laser-focus for what I want to achieve in the short and long term — and I know exactly what outcome I want from every article that I write. If you want more email subscribers you need to make it part of your strategy.

2. Your traffic sources matter

Some niches prefer Google traffic, others prefer referrals. Either way, you need to figure out which one works for you and go after it. Not all traffic is created equal. If you aren’t getting conversions it might be because of the places your visitors are coming from.

3. You need your own host

If your blog is on a free host with a free domain name you are shooting yourself in the foot from the start. It’s time to start a WordPress blog on your own host and make use of all the plugins and extra features that this allows you. Do it early, before it’s too hard to move.

4. A fast blog can make a huge difference

Speed matters not only for Google rankings but also for conversions. This study showed that for every second your blog takes to load you lose a massive amount of conversions. Figure out how to make your blog faster — it might mean a new host, a cache or some tricky coding fun.

5. Making friends will make or break you

The people that you connect with (both blog owners and readers) will make or break your blog. The more genuine connections you can make the more likely you are to grow a blog quickly as they help promote it and give you the right advice.

6. Free eBooks and courses still work well

Offering a free eBook to email subscribers still converts better than offering nothing. People are reading eBooks more than ever thanks to all our new portable devices. If you can give them something good you’ll make an instant impact.

7. You need to use Aweber or similar

Aweber is a service that hosts your email subscribers, lets you send them a free eBook after they subscribe, gives you access to a huge number of stats and also lets you design your own opt-in forms. It’s not hard to use and makes a huge difference to how a professional blog can function.

8. Costs add up

Website hosting, email subscriber hosting, advertising, purchasing images, etc. all adds up. A blog like this one costs around $300+ a month to keep online. Unless you are making a strategic income from it the costs can make it not worth while.

9. Your goals are important but can often change

It’s extremely important to have goals for your blog or website but it’s also important to make sure that they change if they need to. If something isn’t working and you’ve given it a lot of time and effort than it’s sometimes better to be strong and let it go and try something else.

10. You still have to sell the list

Just because you have a mailing list doesn’t mean that people will automatically subscribe. Don’t just stick a form in your sidebar and hope that people will give you their details — sell it. Mention it in posts, develop landing pages, talk about it in your guest posts. You need to let people know what’s going on.

11. Split testing can change your business

Glen wrote a really good post about split testing and how it can literally grow your conversions/income by 1000%+. You can split test your landing pages, your opt-in forms, your mail outs, etc. and see which versions works best. It’s easy to do nowadays so there really isn’t an excuse not to. Just make sure you’re testing things that matter and giving them enough time to show meaningful results.

12. Write on other blogs more than you write on your own

A lot of bloggers just write on their own blog and then wonder why no one is reading it. Well, it’s probably because no one knows it exists! Use guest posts as a starting point to get your name out there. Write more on other blogs than your own until you have a big reader base.

13. Text is great but other media is growing

Writing is, in my opinion, still the most powerful form of content on the net. People read a lot and not everyone can watch videos at work. But things like podcasts, videos, info graphics, etc. can play a huge role in getting you new and improved traffic.

14. SEO is dangerous

Relying on Google for anything is, as I’ve said before, a really stupid idea. They constantly change their algorithm and cause websites to go from fame to misfortune and visa versa. Play around with it and obviously try to do all the right things when it comes to blogging SEO and getting heaps of traffic but don’t ever rely on Google for your main source of income alone.

15. Advertising is a good idea

Dabbling in advertising can produce some really cool results. You don’t have to spend much. Try out Paid Discovery on StumbleUpon to give your posts a bit of a boost. There is nothing wrong with promoting your blog in this way.

16. Colors make a difference to conversions

Things as simple as colours can have a huge impact on how well your product or opt-in form convert. Again, you want to split test this stuff but I’ve noticed big changes in sign ups when switching my sidebar button from green to red and so on.

17. Social proof works in different ways

My friend wrote a really cool post on how different types of social proof can influence people in different ways. He explains it a lot better than I’m going to so have a read of the article and try to test whether social proof statements like subscriber counts are right for your blog.

18. Less is not always more

The idea that less is more is rarely true for a blog. You want more traffic, more subscribers, more sales. Of course, if the traffic isn’t any good it won’t make a difference, but try to to use ideas like “a small number of loyal subscribers” to stop you from growing a mailing list with a HUGE number of loyal subscribers.

19. Research is important

I spend a moderate amount of time researching keywords and competition before I write a blog post. It makes a huge difference about where I rank and how well the post is received. I show you my methods for this in Subscriber Special Ops — but until that opens up you might want to figure out your own ways to research before you write.

20. Pop ups work

I don’t care what anyone says.

😛

21. HelloBar is a great way to divert traffic

The bar at the top of this site is called HelloBar — a website/tool owned by Neil Patel that lets you put a message and a button up top and then split test two different versions. It’s a really cool way to divert traffic to a landing page or a mailing list sign up area. And it works really well.

22. Trying new things can inject a bit of magic

As I wrote in a recent post, sometimes you just need to do and try new things to see huge changes take place on your blog. You might not always know why it’s working but trying new things and failing is better than being stuck at a plateau for months on end.

23. Tracking and stats give you real insights in to what’s working

The statistics that you get in Aweber, Google Analytics and so on give you valuable insights into what is working. You can even use services like Crazy Egg to see where people are looking and clicking on your website. This stuff takes out a lot of guess work and lets you focus on real metrics.

24. You need to be different

Being different is the most important thing you can do online. Find a way to make your brand stand out from the crowd and then push that difference as often as possible.

25. What works on their blog might not work on yours

Sometimes I have “borrowed” ideas from my blogging icons after hearing how well it works for them only to find that it completely tanks for me. It’s a good lesson — what works for one blog doesn’t always work for another. And, yet again, this is why you need to split test different ideas and make sure what you think it the source of a success is actually the true source.

26. Find different reasons to mention your list

At the top of this post I mentioned that SSO was closed but that it would be open again soon and be announced to the mailing list. Moments like that are a very powerful way to get new email subscribers. Find different methods like that to work your mailing list in to your content and you’ll see new and curious subscribers on your mailing list.

27. Explain it in a really simple way

A lot of people who visit your blog will have absolutely no idea what a mailing list is or why they might want to give you, a total stranger, their personal email address. Spell it out for them very clearly, whenever you can.

28. The successful strategies change regularly

Something that I’m really only just learning is that successful strategies change regularly. I used to try to be really conservative with my online stuff because I was worried about compromising a “long term” blog for short term gain. But, what I’m seeing now, is that most of the successful people go after lots of little short term things and push them hard while they are working.

29. Don’t sell too early

Once you get to a certain level of subscribers it can be tempting to sell your blog/website and make a quick dollar (or 20,000). But what I sometimes regret is that I didn’t stick with that blog because I reckon it would probably be pulling in at least $100,000 a year by now. Just because you’ve reached one of those milestones, don’t sell up.

30. The homepage header works

You know those blogs that have the first half of their homepage devoted to an opt-in form? Those things work. I’ve heard of people who have them converting at 10% of all homepage traffic. You can get one of these added to your blog by a good designer and coder probably for a couple of hundred dollars.

31. Don’t forget mobile death windows

Not everyone can afford a beautiful responsive theme and some of us are too lazy to launch their beautiful responsive theme (guilty). But at least make sure your opt-in forms and pop ups work for mobile users. For example, if you use the lightbox version of the pop up you might find that people on iPhones have trouble closing the pop up and thus might exit your site without reading your content.

32. Target your offer in different segments

One thing you can do in AWeber is create different segments. So, you might have one landing page that lets people subscribe to your updates, another landing page that let’s people subscribe to updates only about “watermelons” and so on. By doing this you can target your offers and go after selective sources of traffic to ensure you’re really honing in on what people want.

33. Be consistent in your mail outs

One thing that I have learned the hard way is that inconsistency really gives subscribers the shits. If you tell them that they are going to get updates once a week don’t send them updates three times a week. You’ll lose them very quickly.

34. Email subscribers often hit “spam” first

Related to the last point, often you’ll find that an email subscriber will mark an aggressive or inconsistent email campaign as “spam” as opposed to just unsubscribing or deleting that particular email. Perhaps it makes them feel better but more likely it’s just easier to send it all into the spam folder dungeons.

35. Don’t be afraid to lose lots of subscribers

And now to throw a spanner in the works from the last three points — don’t worry about losing lots of subscribers. Every time we send out an email to the list we lose between 30 and 60 subscribers. That’s good. It means you’re getting rid of people who aren’t interested/aligned to your content.

36. What gets people to open an email might not get them to click through and buy

I ran an email campaign recently where I split test two different subject lines. The first email had an open rate of 41% and the second email had a dismal 26%. The funny thing was that the second email converted better than the first. I think this shows us two things: noise (attention grabbing tactics) doesn’t always lead to conversions, and that split testing is vital.

37. WWSGD?

There is a really cool plugin called WWSGD which stands for What Would Seth Godin Do that puts a little dialogue box at the top of your post and welcomes people based on cookies — new visitors get a message that old users don’t. But you can take this further. For example, if you came from Twitter you might get a message like “Hey there Twitter user! Check out our posts on getting the most out of Twitter”. These types of WordPress plugins are an amazing and easy way to attract more email subscribers by getting people deeper in to your content.

38. Tell me why I don’t like Mondays (but Sunday is okay…)

I’ve also found out that Monday is terrible for new posts, even though some people say it’s the best day. For me the best days are Tuesday and Wednesday but test for yourself.

39. Always be tired

Generally I find that the best traffic is around 9am East Coast time which tends to be around midnight in Australia — unless it’s daylight savings. Sure, I could set an automatic scheduler but I find that readers really love chatting to me in the comments section and if I’m in bed I get a lot less interaction. So — always be tired.

40. Redirect those comments

One of the coolest things I ever did on this blog (and one of the most popular and widely copied posts on my site) was redirecting comments to a “thank you” page using a simple plugin. As soon as someone leaves a comment for the first time they’ll get redirected to a little page that thanks them for their interaction and shows them the mailing list and some other cool content. It converts at around 7%.

41. Be genuine

Unless you can make all of this come together in a genuine way you’ll find that your readers will know. People are looking for a place/person to connect with — offer them genuine friendship through quality content and you’ll grow in leaps and bounds.

What has worked for you?

Growing an email list is one of the most important aspects of a successful blog. It is your mailing list that allows you to promote your content, sell products and launch new projects. So, what has worked for you? Leave a comment and let me know if I’ve missed anything obvious.

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor

Alan Zibluk Markethive Founding Member

Business Building, Markethive

Markethive, The rise of the Entrepreneur

Basic Orientation and the Legacy Alpha Founder special.

How are these two related? Well, they are and they are not.  In the orientation as I take you through a new Markethive account, we cannot avoid the Alpha default promotion and subsequent video and disruptions. So let me digress:

As we discover how the system works, how we set up our picture, our profile page, videos, blogging etc and how all that is centralized via our profile page, it becomes important to understand the current Alpha program and how that effects a major benefit the profile page has.

The Alpha program makes the profile page into a powerful advertising platform that connects all subscription registrants into your field of children.

The children: We are using the term “Children” and “Parent” to illustrate the relationships you will build advanced towards becoming an Alpha Voyager up to Alpha Founder.

You the “parent” sponsor a new subscriber “child” via your Alpha-powered profile page. This relationship never breaks. The “child” can de-friend you, go their own way, join different groups than you, basically become lost to ever connecting with you again, or they can remain your friend, become a strategic partner in your agendas, campaigns and strategies and belong to the same groups you do, join your coop programs. Either way, as your “child” and as long as you are an active Alpha Leader, every purchase they make in Markethive (ads, boosts, calendar displays, Blog promotions, Alpha upgrades) pays you up to 50% of their purchase as a direct commission.

Markethive is built upon the foundation of a free social network empowered by the culture adhesiveness of entrepreneurs and a powerful platform of inbound marketing technology and an advanced broadcasting platform not found anywhere else. The platform itself is priceless and would cost over $3000 per month to acquire anything like it.

The orientation part of this video is produced so you understand the basic nature of Markethive, it’s platforms of incredible marketing power, the culture, your engagement within that culture and how your Profile page becomes a serious tool to build a powerful  sphere of influence, a lifelong network and a source of a long term sustainable living income.

And this is at the core of the building of Markethive. Building a social network of entrepreneurs, in a social network system easy to navigate, with a clear to follow program to engage and indoctrinate entrepreneurs into becoming Alpha Entrepreneurs, alpha like the lead Dog in a pack.

Alpha Entrepreneur:
a) ability to protect oneself (rarely senselessly endangering oneself)
b) leading others
c) being a successful speaker that can persuade people with logic
d) not being afraid of confrontations such as arguments
e) high social intelligence
f) very high work ethic and drive to succeed; a strong desire to produce, earn, and excel 
g) a strong desire to shape one's environment rather than be shaped by it.
h) being the exact opposite of a loser (one who justifies quitting and rejects personal responsibility)
 i) promoting survival and inspiring others with good ethics.

Legacy Alpha Founder (Alpha Legacy)

Originally launched as the first version of the affiliate program, the “Legacy” Alpha Founders was designed to raise money to fund the “pending” marketing campaign as 2015 came into play. However, events being as they were, the system was not ready to promote or capable of broadcasting and as of July 2015, new engineering was required and major changes have occurred.  I am pleased to announce Markethive has a brand new Chief Engineer, Stephen Hodgkiss. We have also moved to Amazon servers, have rebuilt 90% of the previous code, have all brand new mail servers which are 100% approved through Amazon which means email delivers over 90% of the recipients.

Which leads us to a whole new level of an affiliate plan called the BeTheAlpha affiliate program. This program has replaced and added a whole new level of titles, rewards and achievements, through single level multi rank; step by step process with a progressive path to achieve top ranks. Those titles and ranks are as follows:

  1. “Free Member” (this is the new signup that has just discovered MarketHive) and will be consistently navigated to the Alpha presentation page until action to join a level occurs
     
  2. “Trail Blazer” is the first step of a series of growing your “business”, getting orientated with “Markethive” and customizing and configuring your “profile” page.  It is this step that prepares you to become a “parent” as well as understand the concept.
     
  3. “Voyager” activates the “profile” page to start gathering the “children” It is at this option another tool appears (Invite Contacts) allowing the member to invite everyone from their Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, and Lycos accounts to the profile page. The system also begins orientation into advanced functions like the Blog Widgets, Plugins and Leads capture page widgets and broadcasting.
     
  4. “Navigator” orientates and motivates to take leadership in organizing teams with Groups, Skype screen sharing and Web conference rooms. Also continues with tips and techniques using Markethive. This is the first level that also pays commissions from all the “children” the “parent” has gathered to date.
     
  5. “Commander” almost doubles commissions and comes with greater advertising benefits. Also includes weekly seminars with CEO and other company “Founders” regarding the power of and vision of Markethive.
     
  6. “Odyssey” like Commander gives a greater leverage in advertising advantages and greater commissions.
     
  7. “Founder” is the top of the chain of command, advertising credits and commissions plus a profit pool.

Thus being the coming Alpha Affiliate Program in 2016

The new Alpha Founder position @ $5000.00 in the new affiliate program will offer the following:

  1. One time deposit of $10,000 in ad credits
  2. $200 per month ad credits for life
  3. 50% commissions on all financial transactions by your children
  4. 1 share of 5% of the company’s revenue pool shared with unlimited Founder members.

The current 2015 Alpha Founder, now referred as Alpha Legacy @ $1200.00 offers the following:

  1. One time deposit of $3000 in ad credits
  2. $200 per month ad credits for life
  3. 50% commissions on all financial transactions by your children
  4. 1 share of 5% of the company’s pool (limited to 250 shares; members)
  5. Share of new children (customers) from corporate marketing and advertising campaigns
     

Alpha Legacy Year End 50% off sale. There are a limited number left and we are selling the contracts for $600 each. You can use these contracts to apply the terms to any number of Markethive Accounts, yours or someone you transfer the contract to or sell it to.

Our goal is to raise $100,000 to further fund engineering, and empower you to become serious entrepreneurs.  We all own this thing together.

See you at the meetings

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor

 

Al Zibluk

Uncategorized

Top 5 Most Effective Online Lead Generation Ideas According to Experts

Top 5 Most Effective Online Lead Generation Ideas According to Experts

lead generation

The 2014 Global Digital Statistics, Stats & Facts report indicate that there are approximately 2.5 billion people online. Just imagine tapping into this incredibly large market. Capturing merely a fraction of such a tremendous source of customers could lead to considerable profits for your brand, products or services.

global digital marketing snapshot 2014 

How can you tap into this very huge global market? The answer to that is Online Lead Generation. This is now the age where cold sales calling and elaborate sales team efforts are slowly ebbing away into the past. What business owners need now to tap into this bountiful market are effective digital marketing tools specifically designed for maximum lead generation results. There are many tools of these kinds available for businesses to use, however it would be best for business owners to select which lead generation technique will cater to their unique business needs and environment.

Digital Marketing Philippines takes you into this journey of exploring lead generation ideas that were specifically tested and proven to deliver results. These ideas were intended to guide you in making your ultimate goal of increasing sales and revenues through effective online lead generation techniques. In no particular order, here are the top 5 most effective online lead generation ideas as recommended by experts in the field of Digital and Internet Marketing.

The infographic (click to zoom):

Top 5 Most Effective Online Lead Generation Ideas According to Experts

 1. Online Lead Generation by Website Optimization

Your website and/or landing page lie at the central hub for conducting an online business and is where most of the sales transactions will like take action. The results of a LinkedIn B2B Technology Community survey conducted among more than 800 B2B marketers indicate that website optimization for better lead acquisition is among the top 3 effective lead generation ideas.

Experts from the Brainrider Knowledge Marketing Group showcase some websites that were already optimized for lead generation. Don’t expect to have good lead generation if your website has not yet been updated or optimized for the last 3 years according to Brainrider who recommends the following best practices for optimizing your websites and landing for better lead generation:

  • Customer-focused website navigation for ease in understanding your content
  • Highly targeted customer-focused content that helps your audience in the purchase decision making process
  • Set multiple calls-to-action that entices your audiences to subscribe, download, contact you or make a purchase — together with good visuals like large action buttons
  • Help your prospects in their budgeting process by making it easy for them to understand your pricing schemes with products clearly categorized according to price ranges
  • Access to lead generation forms should be present in both your main content and sidebars

2. Online Lead Generation by Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization is still the primary lead generation strategy used by top digital marketers according to several reports including the State of Digital Marketing Report from online marketing expert Webmarketing123. This survey included more than 500 online marketers in the US, with SEO garnering the biggest impact on lead generation for both B2B and B2C markets.

lead generation survey b2b and b2c 

 

SEO is ideal for generating leads particularly through organic web searches that consumers use everyday. Good ranking in search results means higher visibility for websites or landing pages, generating a lot of leads in the process. There are several SEO techniques that you can choose from but content marketing should be your primary focus in SEO.

The 2014 B2B Content Marketing Research by the Content Marketing Institute highlighted that 93% of digital marketers will make use of SEO and content marketing as a primary tool for 2014. Running SEO together with content marketing is a good strategy according to these experts in preparation for future changes in search engine algorithms that may occur. For these experts, the link building strategies done in the past won’t cut it anymore and 92% percent believe that creating really good content is the way for generating better leads through SEO in 2014 and beyond.

3. Online Lead Generation through Pay-per-Click (PPC) Advertising

Pay-Per-Click advertising is still alive and strong, helping businesses generate a great deal of highly targeted traffic that has the most probability for lead conversion. If your business is just new in the Digital Marketing arena, then PPC would be your ideal launching point, quickly generating good results and the quickest possible time. The 2013 State of Paid Search Report highlighted that up to 72% of digital marketers find PPC advertising very effective in lead generation and plans to increase their budget in 2014 for PPC ads.

 ppc marketing growth 2014

 PPC spending survey 

Google Adwords still stand at the forefront for PPC advertising as indicated in the diagram above from the 2013 State of Paid Search Report. While many frown on paid advertising as a digital marketing tool, these experts believe that PPC ads is still a very viable and high quality resource for generating valuable leads and will most likely continue on this thread for years to come. New businesses can quickly generate their much needed leads using PPC ads, and veteran digital marketers will continue to make use of this important tool for generating good results that will push them towards their goals.

4. Online Lead Generation through Social Media

Social media is undoubtedly one of the most effective sources for lead generation and the 1.8 billion users of social networks definitely won’t lie, as reported by the 2014 Global Digital Statistics, Stats and Facts. The report also indicated that more than 135 million users of the top social networks were added in 2012, with Facebook jumping to an astounding 1.184 billion active users.

 Activer users by social platform survey

 Social media is a very important channel not only in engaging or connecting with your targeted audiences, but it has evolved into a new digital marketing culture that has a strong influence on consumers’ buying behavior. Studies from industry experts like Forbes indicate that up to two-thirds of the top sales experts in the world categorize social media as an important lead generation and sales channel.

Chadwick Martin Bailey, another expert market research firm, reported that up to 51 percent of Facebook users and 67 percent of Twitter fanatics will most like purchase recommendations from brands they are a fan or a follower of. Such is the impact of Social Media on lead generation and sales that revenues are expected to go up exponentially in the coming years according to experts like eMarketer in their report on the US Social Network Ad Revenues 2012-2015.

us social network ad revenue 

 5. Online Lead Generation by Email Marketing

Email marketing is not dead and is definitely one of the most effective lead generation tool according to Digital Marketing experts. iContact reported that even though email is an old internet marketing tool, many still use email heavily on a daily basis as indicated in the graph below. The report states that email marketing still delivers a good deal for your investments, averaging a $44 ROI for every dollar spent if proper email marketing techniques are used and executed.

 current state of email

The report also indicated that email can still influence consumers’ buying behavior in a world where too many information are flooding every available online channel they can have their hands on. According to the report, up to 83% of consumers will most likely spend more during their shopping or purchases if they get good information about brands, products or services through email. From this list of consumers, order were actually 44% larger while others would make online purchases 28% more often.

 How effective is email marketing

Lead generation is still at the heart and soul of doing business and this fact applies both to online or traditional methods of generating prospects that eventually can be converted into paying customers. There are so many ways available for generating valuable leads online but making use of these time-proven and expert-recommended ways of generating leads online should put your business at the forefront of making headway and generating favorable results from your digital marketing efforts.

Digital Marketing Philippines, in its commitment for providing you with valuable tools for Internet Marketing success, have outlined the Top 5 most effective channels among these myriad ways for online lead generation. It is still up to the business owner or digital marketer to choose, test, and validate which of these tools will fit perfectly well with their business niche or nature. The key here is start using these tools now, generate more leads that you can handle — and reach your Digital Marketing goals for 2014 and beyond.

Thank you to author: Jomer Gregorio

Stephen Hodgkiss
Markethive

Al Zibluk

Uncategorized

The Blogging Power of Markethive

Markethive.Video.PlayerThe Blogging Power of Markethive

The moment you join Markethive you have instant setup of your own “Viral Blog” ready for you to begin posting content and marketing your business, product, service, or even personal content. You’ll be up and running the moment you set up your account!



1. Multiple BLOG accounts (platforms)


You will have the ability to create many blog accounts (via groups), mix up different contributors and published multiple blog contents for multiple WordPress accounts. That has been specifically created to include powerfully effective sales psychology built into them. This will ensure you convert visitors to your site into PAYING customers at the highest levels.




This multiple blog capability can also create additional unique content to spread further into the Internet. With Groups your reach expands exponentially.




Individual friends and groups can be combined to create unique content that can easily be published to your WordPress, Joomla, blogger.com, etc. blogs with Markethive Widgets and Plug Ins.




With a group of 100 members, aside from the massive shared content, with a Group membership of 100 where we will assume each member has about 5000 social net friends and contacts in their respective Social accounts like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+.


These are huge numbers as we estimate just the Social reach of 500,000 add to that each members back links via their social networks but assuming each member has 2-3 WordPress blogs the legitimate white hat back links occurring also reach astronomical numbers.


Now add to that a small coop to publish a real paid for Press release and you start to understand the startling advantage Markethive has just regarding Markethive’s blog platform and link manifestation.




2. Built in “Viral Broadcasting” 




Other members of Markethive have the option to “follow” your blog(s) and options as to how. They can choose to be alerted in the social network alerts in their Markethive Dashboard




They can choose to have your post published to their Markethive News Feed.


They can choose to have your new posts broadcasted to their Facebook news feed(s) both their personal feed or their many Facebook pages.


They can choose to have your posts broadcasted to their Twitter feed.


They can choose to have your post published to their share an update on their LinkedIn account


They can choose to have your post broadcasted to their Markethive Blog (Groups or Personal)


This guarantees you get the most exposure from every post you make, and compels readers to quickly share your content with ease and excitement. This means even MORE traffic to your blog, and MORE potential for sales or exposure.


3. Advanced “Viral Commenting” System


Your blog comments will show up in real time and inspire even more “digital” conversations on your site. Remember, rave reviews, lively comments, and more helpful content are what people crave on your blog. There is NOTHING more powerful than the “social proof” coming from other people commenting on your blog, and we’ll help you to easily get LOTS of it every time you post.




Combined with the commenting system is the broadcasting ability as well. When commenting, you can also choose the option for your comment to push to your Markethive Newsfeed, Facebook, Twitter and LinkediN, includes the link back to your profile page and the blog.


4.SEO Tool 




Keyword management for better search engine results.

Research and analysis tracking allows for continuous improvement.


When it comes to search engine optimization (SEO) campaigns, choosing the right keywords is the most important step. Selecting the wrong keywords will lead to bad results so it pays to learn how to perform a strategic keyword analysis so you pick the right ones. Generally speaking your goal is to identify keywords with:


A) The highest search volume possible.


B) The lowest competition.


C) Those that accurately relate to your business.


High search volumes and high competition often go together (but not always… look for sweet spots!) Typically you're looking for low competition keywords that still have good search volumes. So long as the keyword relates to the content on your website your "bounce rate" will be low and the traffic will stick.


The Keyword Analysis tool is designed to help you keep track of your research results as you perform your strategic analysis. There are a variety of external tools and systems that are helpful in evaluating keywords, however the statistics tracked by this system are found using Alexa and the Google Keyword Planner.


This will multiply how many people actually FIND your blog! (Marketers pay from hundreds, to thousands of dollars every month for this service—you get it for FREE!)




Peace of Mind For You!


You’ll never have to worry about installing anything, setting anything up, or “customizing” anything, unless you want to add your own header and company logo to your blog. We’ll handle all of the rest for you! Our skilled programmers work around the clock to ensure your blog is always viewable and available for your customers.


 


5. WordPress Plugins by Markethive




When we set out to build Markethive, we recognized WordPress to be the world leader in Blogging platforms. We will never dispute that nor attempt to overcome or replace WordPress.


Our goal is to make WordPress better with our blogging platform and CMS enhancements. Case in point is our WordPress (Markethive) plugin(s). We have several but this plugin is designed to import and manage your content you produce on Markethive into your one or multiple WordPress blog(s). Without Markethive, to manage a (blog cloud) portfolio of many WordPress on multiple domains with unique content on each of them for different agendas and markets, especially with a moderate to large team of content producers becomes a literal nightmare.


Why WordPress Is The Best Website Platform


There are many different ways of creating a website, you can purchase industry standard software like Dreamweaver and take courses to understand how to use it, or you can use content management software such as WordPress that allows you to quickly and easily get a website live within minutes. This is one of the many reasons why WordPress is the best website platform for beginners and professionals alike.


With WordPress, you are getting a system that takes minutes to install on your server, and then access to thousands of free and paid themes. Your website will look professional from the moment you start. Furthermore, there’s a wide range of plugins and widgets that can easily be applied to the site to make it more user friendly and interactive.


And the only skills you need are the ability to write, click the mouse button and add this stuff in. It really is easy to add content, it’s just like posting on a forum really, and has a very low learning curve. But, because of its flexibility, you can be as basic or advanced as you feel, and as you grow to learn more about it, so to will your site grow and utilize new concepts and designs being created for WordPress.


Here’s some other great aspects about the WordPress system:


WordPress is Open Source:


This means it is free, other people can easily create themes, plugins and so on for you to use with it, and it is completely flexible.


WordPress is Quick to Setup:


This means you can focus on having several websites and easily be able to maintain them all without having to create them all from scratch. This is particularly useful if you are getting into internet marketing for example. You can have many websites set up for different products you are selling.


WordPress Gives Multi User Functionality:


Are you a small business or organization that requires more than one person to add content to the site? Again, WordPress can help. It enables the site owner to set up users for them to post to the site. What’s more, certain privileges can be applied to these users so they only have access to posting content, and therefore not be able to mess around with the functional side of the site.


Website and Blog All-in-One:


Although WordPress is set up more as a blogging platform, it is still very easy to configure it to be a standalone site, with a blog attached. There are many plugins which make this even easier to do, and so any small business or organization can have a website and blog created in a couple of hours that looks great, and is ready to go.


Backing Up and Security:


WordPress is very easy to back up, and there are many secure plugins to choose from to make it more secure than it already is.


These are just a few of the most important reasons why WordPress is the best website platform, but there are many more. It’s major advantages are the low learning curve, and speed of having a site up and running. If you are a person who needs a website, but has little time and money to set one up, then WordPress is your friend. It’s a fantastic system used by millions of people across the globe.


6. MH Blog Swipe 





Markethive blog system allows you to make your content available to the entire public population within Markethive, or Just to your friends or just to members in all the Groups you belong or a selection of them or just one (your choice) or private so no one can Swipe your blog.


Why? There are many sound reasons for this.


    

  • Curating: Content curation is the process of sorting through the vast amounts of content on the web and presenting it in a meaningful and organized way around a specific theme. The work involves sifting, sorting, arranging, and publishing information. Markethive offers features to it’s groups you create. Groups are platforms for blogging.Simple set up a Curating Group for yourself and Swipe the blogs in Markethive as a collection of content you may want to use in your publications.
    • 

  • Proofing: You may have a group of members that want to edit and rewrite your content. Trust me,this is an active phenomena in Markethive. Produce a blog and you will get many critiques so I just offer to them to swipe it, edit and change it as they see fit then let me know. If I like it, I swipe it back. Another option is to actually have a proof reader on staff and do the same procedure.
    • 

  • Cocktails: With Markethive’s ability (feature) to create unlimited Groups each with a different cocktail of content curated, aggregated or from multiple Group memberships, the options to produce unique content for unlimited WordPress blogs controlled from within Markethive is unlimited.
    • 

  • Then there is the learning curve. I have personally mentored newbie bloggers who just couldn’t or wouldn’t take the first step. In many a live webinar, I would quickly assemble a viable blog article, the instruct the students to Swipe my blog post, then in the webinar they would edit, alter, upload and download images, creating an altered blog result of their own.

    I have witnessed new bloggers after this type of training go from poorly and rarely produced blog posts, to 1-2 dynamic and excellent on topic blog posts daily. In other words, Markethive is now churning out a new breed of excellent and dynamic bloggers.
    • 



Website Widget




The widget can appear on your blogs, sites, social networks to promote a simple easy registration into the Markethive via your account, by passing your Profile page. Sets off your selection of autoresponders via the Authorized email of record, totally avoiding spam.


Markethive Blog platform


Markethive’s Inbound Marketing platform delivers a blogging system built for the beginner, sophisticated for the intermediate and an extremely powerful platform that advanced professional bloggers will appreciate. The system is designed for the easy development of a complete blog system, yet advanced and easily set up to be the engine that powers your WordPress blogs. The email system also creates subscribe accounts for your blogs and capture pages and simplifies the email notifications of a new blog publication via email, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Goggle+ and Markethive news feeds.


Easily grow your social reach into the millions! It’s that Powerful, It’s that  Simple, That’s Markethive.


Dominate with Inbound Marketing


Entrepreneurs always work hard to create an innovative product or service, but often count on standard seller marketing for sales. But the reality is that sellers are no longer in charge of the customer buying process. Recent reports suggest that 90% of today’s shoppers skip marketing pitches, to research online before they buy, and over 50% check user reviews before making a decision.


Markethive is the first and only social network integrated with a powerful intuitive inbound marketing (automated marketing) platform. Built for the entrepreneur, small business, and network marketers. Markethive is totally free and generates it's revenue through advertising like Facebook and Linkedin. Markethive even returns up to half the advertising revenue back to the subscribers that join the affiliate program.


If tools like email auto responders (better than Aweber), blog platforms (makes WordPress even better), press release co-ops (Real PR.org professional releases) capture page widgets (plug ins for WordPress, simpleleadcapture.com,etc., plugins and pages, broadcasting tools (like Hootsuit), live conference rooms (like GoToMeeting), traffic portals (like Veretekk had) and additional arrays of powerful tools, workshops and mentoring webinars, interest you, then you need this platform!




This is Inbound Marketing, This is Markethive. Easy! Powerful! Free!


Thomas Prendergast

CMO Markethive Inc.




Al Zibluk











Uncategorized



Viral Marketing



 






Viral marketingViral Marketing is the most responsive marketing on the planet.


Think about it…


Most advertising is all about you the advertiser 'tooting your own horn'

•    People don't care.

•    They tune you out.

•    They might even assume you're lying.


You're just another stranger trying to peddle your stuff along with everyone else.

Traditional advertising is like yelling in a stadium full of 50,000 screaming people with no one listening. No one can hear you over the roar of the crowd.

No one cares.


Now imagine if you were in this same roaring stadium, and you showed a handful of people something really cool like a video.

•    Something that connected with them.

•    Maybe something that entertained them.

•    Made them laugh or even offended them.


These people then started sharing your video with the people sitting around them. Those folks then share it with the people around them too. And pretty soon it's like a wave, with your content rippling through the whole stadium…


That's when you realize the crowd isn't just randomly roaring anymore. Now they're positively buzzing about YOUR content.

•    They can't stop talking about it.

•    They're sharing it like crazy.

•    And they're clicking through to your links.


That's what a good viral campaign is like.


Home

Contains the Newsfeed of newsworthy activities in MarketHive.


Friends — Friends of yours who have joined MarketHive.


Groups — Your sales or marketing group arena.


Companies — A Direct Selling Association — The Direct Selling Association (DSA) is the national trade association of the leading firms that manufacture and distribute goods and services sold directly to consumers. Approximately 200 companies are members of the association, including many well-known brand names.


Blogs — A complete blogging system for your posts.


Videos — A video system integrated into YouTube.




Leads — The area where you control your Prospecting Tools, Manage Leads, Manage Lead Groups, setup your Email Auto Responder, Prospecting Assets and Lead Capture Pages.


This is Powerful, flexible, and fully customizable lead generation technology including:


Powerful Pre-Built Lead Capture Pages!


Having a properly designed lead capture page can mean the difference between a big response rate and ZERO sign ups at all. After spending so much time and effort on lead generation… and then actually marketing your message to your prospects… it's critical to drive them to a page that will produce the greatest possible conversion rate.


The components of an effective lead capture page are fairly basic: a strong headline, a compelling video, brief but motivating body copy (text), and a form to capture their information. The whole idea is to provide prospects with just enough information for them to sign up… but nothing more! The entire goal is capturing their data so you can call them up and/or continue marketing to them through future emails, etc. If you spill too much information, then they have no motivation to fill out the form… and you lose them forever.


Lead Capture pages are pre-built based on proven results. However, they are fully customizable so you can configure the content optimally for your particular marketing campaign. After you do so, simply click the button to download the file and you can then place it on your own website and the leads generated will be automatically captured by your system.


Campaigns — Sophisticated marketing management and campaign execution. A Powerfully integrated systems providing streamlined functionality and control.


With access to powerful marketing tools you can execute marketing campaigns that produce real results.


Almost as important as the tools themselves though, is the ability to keep all of your information and activities organized. The features in this area allow you to accomplish everything you need to launch and manage professional level marketing campaigns.


There are different types of campaigns for different purposes and goals. As a result there are a range of tools at your disposal:


•    Manage advertising vendor records.

•    Create advertising co-op's with groups of members.

•    Establish tiny URLs for specialized use.

•    Define sophisticated website rotators to distribute leads.

•    Track websites on your asset map.

•    Monitor and evaluate keyword terms.

•    Manage and verify backlinks to your websites.


Regardless of the type of marketing you wish to engage in, these tools will help you expand the reach and effectiveness of your efforts and ultimately increase results.


MarketHive — A One Stop Shop


Article by:

Brian Walters SEO


Skype: tuneup_bj


Brian Walters MarketHive


Markethive


Markethive Promotion


http://brian-walters-online.com/




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Profile Pages: Online Branding and Building Authority



 






Profile Pages: “Online Branding and Building Authority”




What is the difference between online branding and building authority? Some would consider it the same thing, but in reality it can be two completely different processes. Online branding is a way to get more exposure for your brand on all levels of online marketing, especially search and social.


Building authority takes online branding to the next level by making each online presence for a brand authoritative. It goes beyond just about creating a blog or social media account. The following are ways you can build your online brand as well as your authority.


Everyone wants to be an authority.  READ: How to be an authority (Know Your Why First)

https://markethive.com/group/marketingdept/blog/how-to-be-an-authority


Start a Blog with Awesome Content


Blogs are beneficial for brands for three reasons. First of all, blogs help you rank well in search engines — Google loves fresh, unique content on websites that are constantly updated. If you’re looking to meet this goal, be sure to use Markethive’s blog platform and build a blog team in a Markethive group to assist in greater content and curation.


RE: WordPress Markethive’s technology super charges WordPress campaigns.


Next, blogs provide for great content to share on social media networks. It’s hard to get traction if your just sharing product and sales pages. But if you’re sharing informative blog posts about your industry, you’re likely to get a lot of traffic and social shares.


Markethive provides plugins and widgets and tech that allows visitors to subscribe to your blog from their Social Networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, thereby allowing your new Markethive posts to publish to their news feed automatically.


Finally, great blogs can help your brand build authority in your niche. This is where you go above and beyond cookie cutter posts that talk about your product to creating awesome content in the form of:


    

  •     Tutorials
    • 

  •     Infographics
    • 

  •     Videos
    • 

  •     Industry Interviews
    • 



Awesome content will show fans of your industry that you know your stuff and therefore are the brand to go with for their business needs. A great example of this is the blog you are reading right now — Markethive has Inbound Marketing technologies, the go to Social Network and infographics  that have been tweeted and liked over 10,000 times and posts that have been viewed on Facebook, LinkedIn and Stumbleupon over 100,000 times.


There are two great fears that brands have when it comes to blogging. One is that they won’t have anything to blog about, and this is a complete myth. Everyone can find something to blog about. You just have to expand your definition of the target audience. Imagine you had a body shop. You probably won’t get a lot of attention if you’re writing about paint booths and sanding tools all the time, but you will if you think about broader topics that would interest the people likely to visit an auto body shop. You can blog about the latest coolest Hot Rods at the coming Hot Rod Nationals show or the latest NASCAR winner to grab fans of those programs. Or you can blog about environmental issues and the Prious to grab environmentalists. Just think bigger!




The other fear is that they will be giving away “trade secrets” and lose their business. This one is especially common within industries like SEO, where a brand might feel like giving out ten steps to link building will give their customers the info they need to just do it themselves. But this just isn’t true. I have found that most of the time, if you give a complex, in-depth tutorial, a potential customer will see that your brand has the knowledge to do the service, but they won’t have the time or resources to do it for themselves. Hence, they’ll go with you because they feel confident that your brand has the expertise demonstrated in the content provided on the blog.


The key with your brand’s blog is to make sure that it is apparent who is behind the content. Whether you have your blog on your domain (yourbrand.com/blog), as a subdomain (blog.yourbrand.com), or as a separate site (yourbrandblog.com), be sure that it is matched to your brand. Check out Markethive’s site, blog, and subscribers profile pages, logged in dashboard and display variances on hand held devices. All are unique yet all are well branded and follow a conventional identity protocol (all on separate domains and different devices) as an example of great branding.




Guest Blog for Others (This is a major component in Markethive)


When it comes to blogging, you don’t want to keep the good stuff all to yourself. Guest blogging (join a Markethive Group to share content is that easy) is a great way to build your online brand presence and authority. The basic goal is to find a (GROUP) blog whose audience will be interested in your brand, and create a great piece of content for that blog.


Notice I said great piece of content. I would go so far as to say that the content you create for another (GROUP) site’s blog should be even better than the content you create for your own site. You want the content you create for another blog (GROUP) to rock. You want that content to generate additional social shares, comments, and traffic for the blog owner.


As you create GROUP posts for others, be sure to save the links to those guest posts for future reference. As you approach new GROUPs that you would like to guest post upon, you will want to include those links as examples of your successful guest posts in other Markethive GROUPS. If you can convince the GROUP owner that your post will be a perfect fit for their audience and will drive significant traffic and response, the GROUP blog owner will have a hard time resisting.


My main tips for GROUP blogging for your brand include:


1. Find the best GROUPs to guest post on.


When it comes to blogs you want to get a guest post on, your goal is to find those whose audience would be interested in your brand. The blog should get a significant amount of traffic and social shares as well — there’s no reason to post on a blog that has no visitors just because it has high PageRank or any other criteria — you want to get some brand exposure out of this! Use the Markethive GROUPs directory to start your search for blogs in your niche or industry.


2. Find the GROUPs blogging policy.


If you see that a GROUP allows guest bloggers or outside contributors, the GROUP should have some page or post posted that describes their post policy. If they do have a policy page or post, then be sure to note any and all criteria.


3. Start building a relationship with the GROUP owner first. (Markethive Groups is excellent for this)


Now that you’ve found the blog you want to pitch an idea to, don’t just jump in and pitch them yet. Start by getting to know the GROUP owner first by following their Markethive blog posts, their Twitter and their Facebook fan page. Comment on some of their latest posts — make those comments valuable to enhance discussion and demonstrate your writing skills and expertise in the industry. CoPromote their posts using Broadcasting tools and widgets. Do this for at least a week or two before pitching content to them.


4. Research and pitch great topic ideas. (Join others in our live Markethive Work Shops)


Don’t create the content first and then try to find it a home. Once you’ve found the right blogs and started engaging with the blogs themselves, you’ll get a feel for the type of content they publish.


To get an even better idea of what content is successful for each blog, subscribe to them in your Markethive back office blog platform. Then you will be able to see the site’s latest traffic scores. The higher score, the more comments, tweets, Facebook likes, and other social shares the post received. Use these high-scoring posts as an indicator as to what content does well on each blog.




Now you can message via the Markethive message system or request to join their group saying that you have recently enjoyed reading their blog (as evidenced by your commenting & social sharing) and would like to contribute to their site as a GROUP member. After reading their guidelines, you would like to see if they would be interested in the following topics. Then add three to four great post ideas that you believe will fit their audience to choose from. And of course, if you’ve done guest posts elsewhere, include some of your best links. If not, just include some great links from your own brand’s blog.


5. Create Awesome Content.


Once you get approval from a GROUP, your next job is to create an awesome piece of content. Make sure it fits the theme of that blogging GROUP and that it has the overall feel / tone of the GROUP blog you are submitting to. Also be sure to add in relevant links throughout your blog post — not to your own properties, but internal links to the blog itself. This shows the blog owner you’re really giving it 100% for them and their audience and not just trying to promote yourself.


The self-promotion piece should come at the end with your guest bio. Check out other author bios on the blogs and create yours to match. This is where you can say you are John Smith, an industry enthusiast from ABC Company.


Again, be sure to consider the blog’s guidelines and previous guest author bios when deciding to add one or more links back to your brand. The blog owner ultimately reserves the right to edit it as they feel is necessary.


6. Support your GROUP post once it goes live. 


It’s not over yet. After that guest post goes live, you should give it your unconditional love in the form of social sharing with your brand’s audience on Twitter, Facebook, etc. as well as coming by to respond to comments. That kind of response on your guest post will further boost your brand’s reputation as a great guest blogger as well as a confident authority in your niche.


Don’t Forget Blog Commenting


Blog commenting is a great branding and authority building exercise you can do on any blog in your niche. I would suggest subscribing to the top blogs in your industry in Google Reader, and each time there is a new post, be sure to read it thoroughly and add a valuable comment. Remember this isn’t about link building — this is about building your brand’s presence online as an authority in your industry.


Get a Disqus account as well as it is a sort of social network of people that comment.


You can use the blog’s previous comments as a guide as to how you should format yours. Some blogs require you to only use your real name, while others are a little more lenient in using your name — your company. I would suggest linking your comments to your blog as people are more willing to click through to a brand’s blog than their main website.


Your Online Branding & Authority Building Strategy Using Blogs


What is your brand’s strategy when it comes to building your brand’s authority using blogs? Be sure to share what you find brings your brand the best results in the comments!


Create a Consistent Brand Image for Each Profile


Have you ever visited a company’s social profile, and you were not sure that it belonged to the company? One of the most important parts of branding is keeping a consistent image across all of your online properties so that no matter what path a person takes from one property to the next, they will always know it is your brand. For example, someone might:


Find your fan page through a friend’s activity stream and then follow it to your blog, then website


See a tweet from someone they are following, visit your Twitter profile, and then continue onto your website.


Start at your website, then go to check out your social profiles to see if your company is engaging with fans. Engaging is fuel and grows awareness, authority and respect. Comment, recommend. Just drive by liking and endorsing does no one any good and makes you look like a tire kicking couch potato.


Just like you wouldn’t want pages on your website to be different themes, you will want your social profiles to do the same. Markethive also leads the way in doing it right as well:


MARKETHIVE




Markethive probably does the best with branding between their website, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube accounts as shown above. All five are branded with the honey comb logo, color theme and climbers ascending Mt. Everest in representation of the entrepreneurial social community of entrepreneurs helping each other achieve their agendas, so you can feel the consistency moving from one property to the next.


BMW




The above shows BMW’s branding between their website, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube profiles. Each online property uses the same color scheme and is currently focused on automotive technology. The logos are all consistent, and the auto focused in the pages is different perspectives, the coloring and themes are consistent as well


BOLTHOUSE




Bolthouse’s (organic farm fresh juices) branding between their website, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube profiles as shown above uses the same color scheme, logo, and focus on their primary product, carrots and selections of juices. Excellent example of branding and consistency!


Help People Find Your Profiles 


I do a lot of competitive analysis in my line of work, and one of the most frustrating things I have to do is search for a brand’s social profiles. Don’t hide your social media presence — flaunt them! Be sure to:


    

  • Put Social Icons on Your Website — Let visitors to your website know that you are engaging with your audience on social media as well by adding social icons to your website design. The most common places to place them include the header / menu bar, sidebar, and footer. They don’t have to be large and in charge — BMW’s are none existent on their main page and Bolthouse are right up top left of center where they should be and get the job done..
    
 
    • 

  • Put Social Links in Your Communications — Do you send emails regularly? Add social links to your email signature. Do you send newsletters? Add social icons to them.
    
 
    • 

  • Make Your Profiles Search Friendly — If I Google your brand name + Twitter, I should get your Twitter handle in the search results. To make this happen, be sure that the name of your social profile (and the username if possible) matches your brand name. You might be tempted to keyword optimize your profiles instead of optimizing them for your brand name — this is something you need to resist. You can learn more about social media SEO on how to optimize for both effectively for search engines.
    • 



Another frustration is the direct sales industry. 


Even though the size of this industry is huge by any comparison with a market measured in the trillions, even the top 100 fail miserable branding with social media. Do not be like them, rather show them a good example with your efforts. After several days of research I was able to find one such company that at least had the top 5 Social Medias registered with a similar array (not the same name) of usernames.  The super majorities only have a token Facebook page, even less with Youtube and Twitter and nearly nonexistent with a Google+ and for that almost none of them are engaged.


BEACHBODY




Team Beach Body with a yearly market of 250 million, struggles with social media but has managed to set up the top 5 social medias, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Linkedin and Google+, albeit, the account usernames vary, and across the media branding is seriously lacking. It becomes painfully clear this industry needs Markethive or at least their distributors seriously do.


Get Engaged with Your Followers, Fans, and Subscribers


You probably know that it is important to maintain an active account by posting lots of updates, and that it is best to do something other than blasting advertisements non-stop about your brand. So the question is, what should you be doing to stay active in your social networks? Get engaged with your audience, of course. Here are the top networks to get socially engaged in for your brand.


Twitter Engagement


If you’re goal is to build a strong presence on Twitter and demonstrate your brand’s authority in your industry, you need get involved with your following. Some ways to do so include:


Monitoring Brand Mentions — If you use Twitter itself, just do a search for your brand and save the search for future reference. If you use a Twitter management tool like HootSuite, create a keyword search column that will constantly update you with brand mentions. Anytime someone says something about your brand, whether it is good or bad, you should be responding to it if at all possible. This may mean adding some extra team members to your social media GROUP as a response staff. But over time, if people see that you are always on top of any discussion of your brand, you will gain trust and receive lots of great word of mouth marketing. People will tell their followers what a great response they’ve received from you and likely recommend you based on their satisfaction level.


Monitoring Industry Conversation — One of the best parts of Twitter is that you can jump into any conversation, anytime. So if you are a company providing Inbound Marketing services and technologies like Markethive, you can monitor anyone who talks about Inbound Marketing, SEO, linking, Entrepreneurial interests, and other related topics and just answer simple questions that anyone asks about those topics demonstrating your expertise.


Curate the Best Content – Even if you are the best content creator in your industry, people often like to see a second opinion. Find out who other authorities are in your industry and share their opinion on industry topics with your following. You will gain more relevant followers simply for sharing the best news.


Facebook Fan Page Engagement


There are several different ways you can engage with your fans using your fan page that will keep your current fans active and bring new fans to your brand. These include:


Updating Your Fan Page on Facebook — It’s tempting to use HootSuite and other automated programs to update your fan page. But it’s becoming more and more obvious that if you want your updates to show up in fan’s news feeds that the updates must be organic, or originating from your fan page itself. So take the extra time to disable all of your autofeeds and start updating your fan page manually on Facebook. And when people start engaging with your posts or posting directly on your wall, be sure to respond to them. If they know they’re getting response, they’re more likely to return. No one likes a one-way broadcast.


Try Out Different Types of Updates — Don’t just post links or ask questions. Spice it up — add some video updates and photos. Different types of people like different types of content — be sure to try to cater to everyone by mixing your content up!


Thanks to the last major update to Facebook fan pages, you are able to use Facebook as your fan page. This means you can like pages as your fan page instead of your personal profile and then comment on them as your fan page. If you can find pages that are not direct competitors but whose audience will be interested in your brand, you will want to get active on them. For example, social media consultants should be living on Social Media Examiner’s fan page to connect with other individuals and businesses looking for social media help.


LinkedIn Engagement


If your brand isn’t on LinkedIn, you are missing out. LinkedIn allows you to add a company page where you can post your products, services, job openings, and even send status updates to your company followers including your latest blog posts. But some of the best branding and authority building activities for this network lie in the activity of the professional profiles including:


Participating in Groups — There are lots of great, active groups on LinkedIn in a wide variety of industries. Find the groups that have your potential client base within them and start getting active in discussions and posting useful content. Just be sure not to do anything that the group moderator would consider as spamming!


Answering Questions — The next best area to build a great professional reputation and strong authority in your industry is in LinkedIn Answers. There are questions asked every day in topics ranging from administration to technology. The people who answer the most questions are also featured on the answers’ home page as the week’s top experts!


Gaining Recommendations — Last, but not least, is recommendations. You can get recommendations on both the company pages and the professional profiles of your employees. Imagine if someone is browsing your company’s page and sees that the top employees have a ton of recommendations. It will show that you have a lot of experts in the industry which will make potential clients even more confident in your brand!




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Inbound Marketing Systems Compared



 








The MarketHive Inbound Marketing is priced at a reasonable price (free) as compared to other Inbound Platforms for medium to large businesses that cost around $72,000 per year on average.


Unlike any of the other Inbound Marketing (automated marketing) platforms, MarketHive is a vertical Social Network design for and by Entrepreneurs.


Free trial by invite only.


The following 31 minute video will give you a cost comparison between some of the top Inbound Marketing systems.


Free trial by invite only




Click here if you would like to register for a Free MarketHive System


Thank you,


Ida Mae Boyd

MarketHive Alpha Founder

Skype me at imboyd681

Please include in the Skype Contact message “Market Hive”


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Uncategorized



Inbound Marketing



 






    Inbound Marketing


Do you know that if you have  a inbound marketing system it virtually guarantees success of your business, provided you pay attention to how you use it. There are so many ways to communicate with potential clients these days, you will always find something that will work for you. A lot of inbound marketing systems are automated, but you must never forget that your leads will respond better if you speak with them. Human Intervention is important for success.


Inbound Marketin


I am a member of MarketHive which is a free for life marketing system offering a suite of essential tools fully integrated into a social media site, designed from the bottom to get your message across to potential clients.


I believe in the system which has been enhanced so as to offer serious marketers the opportunity not only to promote their own business but also a way of sharing in the advertising revenue of the system, with a pathway of optional upgrades levels marking levels of achievement  and providing  additional affiliate income.


Some people who own marketing systems tend to be attracted to the idea of passive marketing, it sounds good. Money for doing nothing. But to be honest, a lot more money can be earnt by taking an active role,  encouraging and demonstrating to your leads, how to set-up the system to suit what they want to do.


Your leads need to be nurtured just like a parent nurture their children as they develop and learn about life and it is the same with MarketHive. The members you personally introduce  are referred to as your children and you should support them. Additional support is provided from other members, plus a support team.


According to Jake Newfield Vice President of Business Development at Alumnify, Author of A Cloud in the Sky, Writer for Elite Daily & Tech.co

2016 signifies a new era of marketing. Customers are changing, and as marketers we need to change along with them. Traditional outbound marketing campaigns like cold emails, cold calls, snail mail, and trade shows are not as effective as they once were several years ago. Consumers are now bombarded constantly by ads, information, and other messages from marketers trying to sell them, and they have become jaded. An outbound campaign no longer packs the same level of effectiveness as it once did. Thus, to reach our consumers it will require a strategic, well-planned inbound campaign to stand out from the competition and get noticed. If we embrace it, this change can be good; it can create more opportunities and expand out client base. Inbound marketing offers a refreshing variety of new, effective techniques that can enable us to see unprecedented growth. However, if we fail to embrace this adjustment of customer acquisition, our business' growth can be stunted. Inbound marketing will be king in 2016, and success will largely be dependent on a company's ability to perform with it.


Now you know that inbound marketing is going to be important for success, you need to consider your options. What is going to work for you and how much are you prepared to pay. Prices vary from  free to thousands of pounds a month, if you need help I suggest you watch this 30 minute video.




David Ogden

http://markethive.com/david-ogden

Helping people to  help themselves




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