The Importance of Reach

 

Popular social networks, such as Facebook, LinkedIn and twitter are a good way to increase your reach and communicate with others. An increasing numbers of businesses are also using using these social networks to get their messages across to customers. Inbound marketing such as this is on the rise whilst the response to Outbound Marketing, such as cold calling, bulk emailing and leafleting is on a decline.

 

Inbound marketing is permission-based marketing, for example people join interest groups on social media or subscribe to sites or email. They are generally looking for answers or advice to problems rather than a hard sell. Providing useful information is the key to success.

One of the questions often asked is how to increase your social media reach without spending hours and hours working online and this is where MarketHive can help everyone from the work at home mum's, to small and large business, because it provides not only a social/business network, to share success or ask questions but also methods and tools to maximise your reach. In the shortest possible time.

A short while ago my reach was perhaps 500-1,000, however now it is well over 1,000,000 and I am only working one day a week. Potential customers are now starting to contact me, because they are interested, rather than me having to spend time contacting people who may or may not be interested in what I am doing.

 

David Ogden is an Alpha founder at Markethive

Helping people to turn dreams into reality

 

David

Instagram Expands To Over 500 Mil-Can it save Facebook?

Why is this happening? Reason: Most people on the go are highly visual and don't tend to read much anymore. "A Picture Says A Thousand Words" as the old saying goes, so maybe there is something to keeping it short and sweet and visual. 

"Facebook has spread its tentacles into the messaging boom after building the world's most popular social network, buying Instagram for $1 billion in cash and stock in 2012. Facebook also owns two other of the world's most popular apps: WhatsApp, which it bought for billions and has 1 billion users, and its homegrown app, Facebook Messenger, which hit 900 million users in April.

"Facebook itself captures enormous amounts of people’s attention on their mobile devices, and that’s hugely powerful. But there will always be alternatives either in broad use or in use by demographic or geographic segments," said Jan Dawson, chief analyst with Jackdaw Research.

EMarketer forecast for Instagram mobile adverting revenue.

EMarketer forecast for Instagram mobile adverting revenue. (Photo: EMarketer)

Instagram, for example, is popular with teens.

"Facebook has arguably been deploying the candy bar strategy — own as many of the brands on the shelf as possible to maximize your market share," Dawson said.

The exception: Snapchat, the mobile app popular with young people which Facebook tried to buy twice.

"It remains to be seen how important that miss will be, but it’s already clear that it’s a really important competitor to Facebook for people’s time and attention, and for companies’ ad dollars," Dawson said.

SunTrust Robinson Humphrey analyst Robert Peck says Instagram's overall growth is impressive but the numbers suggest growth in the U.S. is slowing as competition from Snapchat escalates.

"We note that most, if not all, of the (monthly active user) growth is coming from international markets. In fact, we estimate the U.S. market likely grew in a range of 0 to 18% on an annualized basis in the most recent 9 month period," Peck wrote in a research report on Tuesday.

Instagram targets small business ad revenue

The jump in Instagram users — and their advertising-pleasing demographics — has helped Facebook bill Instagram as a buy for marketers looking to increase awareness and spur sales. Evidence of its early commercial promise: Instagram already has more than 200,000 advertisers. Analysts say Instagram's nascent advertising business is growing rapidly.

Research firm eMarketer expects Instagram's global mobile ad revenue to reach $1.53 billion this year and more than $5 billion by 2018. Analysts say Instagram's contributions are already being felt in Facebook financial results even though the giant social network does not break those out.

"What is certain is that Instagram has been a big factor in Facebook’s recent repeated blowing out of its financial results, and its impressive rate of revenue growth in particular," Dawson said."

Can Instagram save Facebook? With Facebook trending down and Instagram trending up maybe it will pick up the loss of Facebook. Pretty smart move Facebook! 

Thanks for reading,

David Ogden

PS: David Ogden is a Alpha Founder with Markethive and manages several blogs on the hive. David is a professional Network Marketer. He can be reached through Markethive.

David

Get Found Using Market Hive

Get Found using Inbound Marketing

Advice for building your own Inbound Marketing machine- a requirement for most businesses today.

The web has forever changed people’s buying habits. Instead of needing to rely on sales people to send them information, buyers now have Google and other search engines to research products, find competitors, and see how other people rate those products in blogs and reviews. Furthermore they are greatly influenced by individuals that have emerged as experts in particular subject areas who use social media to get their messages across.

This sea change in buying behaviour requires vendors to re-think how they go to market, and optimize to make sure that they will get found by buyers using search engines, blogs, reviews, and social media. The term Inbound Marketing was invented by the crew at MarketHive (When they were Veretekk), when they developed the techniques and technologies that are needed to get found by buyers, and to make sure that the reviews and blogs around your industry segment cover what you are doing. (MarketHive provides great software tools, plus education to help you automate Inbound Marketing. The founder, Thomas Prendergast has written many great  books on these topics (dating back as far as 20 years ago) “Automated Marketing”, Customer Centricity”, Building a Better Website”, “The Power of the Social Network in Search Engines”, Conference Room Advantage”.

 

Many people hates spam emails from vendors, and some go as fare as developing a canned email response to them.

“Please understand that I get dozens of these types of messages a week. I simply do not have time to read them, dig into them, follow-up on them, or reply to them. The most effective solution to this problem is for me to ignore the messages, which is what I usually do. …

… Finally, a small comment. As a customer, I find this type of approach to sales to be largely annoying to me and unproductive for you. We learn far more about what we want to purchase by searching the web, looking for customer references in blogs and forums, word of mouth, and by finding white papers on your site that concretely describe solutions to problems we are having.”

Remarkable Content is King

A key part of getting found is making sure you show up on the first page of a Google search. The lazy marketer’s approach to doing this is to purchase Google Adwords, and pay by the click (referred to as SEM, Search Engine Marketing). However 85% of people ignore the paid ads, so to be really effective, you will need to perfect your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) skills.

SEO requires you to develop great content that your buyers will find sufficiently interesting, different or insightful, that they will want to remark on it. (The authors of Inbound Marketing refer to that as remarkable content.) When your readers remark on your content on-line, using tools like Twitter, Facebook etc., they spread the word virally to other readers and broaden your reach. These comments lead to links back to your site, which lead to ever increasing page ranking in the search engines.

 

To be successful at this, you will need to keep the content fresh.
Traditional web sites don’t work in this regard, as they don’t change frequently enough.
What is needed is a blog that you update regularly.

 

Your blog cannot simply be a sales pitch for your product, but needs to be about topics that your buyers care to read about. The tone could be educational; or humorous; or controversial. But above all it needs to be highly engaging and relevant to them – i.e. remarkable.

When you post a new blog entry, you will see your site traffic surge for a few days, then die back to a level slightly higher than before. The more you post, the faster your traffic will build. But in the end, it is the really great articles that you post that will have the most impact.

And meritocratic blog system like MarketHive (actually only MarketHive) produce all of the above in a simple atmosphere of massive content curation that is immediately reward or rejected, building amazing content is King results, or something like that.

Once you have interesting content, you can use social media like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc. to get the word out, Marketing simplifies this to a level of excruciating results, but then like EST (You remember EST Erhard Seminar Training), you need to experience. No word, even from me, can truly do it justice.). Your goal is to get other bloggers to link to you, and to have people tweet about your content.

An interesting thing about a marketing department that focuses on Inbound Marketing: it will place a high value on people that know how to write and develop content that draws in an audience. A silver lining to the damage that the internet has inflicted on the publishing industry is that there are plenty of very talented journalists seeking employment, and they possess the perfect skills for this job!

SEO versus SEM

Like most of things that are good for us in life, SEO requires work and patience before it will payback. So it can be tempting to take short cuts, and just use SEM (paid search ads). However if it is done right, the results will continue to build, and you will start to build your own audience, and own your own traffic.

We have also seen that the cost of paid search increases as the need to scale the lead volume grows.

The Power of Free

Another extremely powerful way to create inbound traffic and qualified leads is to use a free product or service. A great example of this is the The entire Inbound Marketing Platform (Valued in excess of up to $10,000 per month) service from MarketHive. (If you haven’t tried this, I recommend giving it a try now. It will only take a few minutes to join.) MarketHive has a couple of interesting attributes that are worth studying:

 

It is free of charge.
It takes very little work by the customer to get some very valuable results

 

It provides its results in the form of a score out of 100. Human beings are very competitive, and when they don’t get a good score, they want to find out how to improve their score. That leads them to wanting to find out more about MarketHive which can help them improve their score.

It allows them to compare themselves to their competitors. All businesses care about how they are doing relative to their competition. If they are doing worse, this is a powerful motivator to drive them to change.

Think hard about your audience and whether there is an opportunity to build a similar free web service that would draw them in, and provide great value.

If you are interested in learning more about how Free products and services can help your marketing, please refer to this section: The Power of Free.

Building your reach

Once you have great content and possibly a free product/service, you will want to find ways to drive the maximum traffic to that content. In the last couple of years we have seen some powerful new tools emerge to help with this process in the social media space. Get yourself accounts on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, and join in the conversation. Start by listening. Watch what people are talking about in your topic areas, and take note of their interests. Once you have an idea of how the conversation works join in. Be careful not to take a sales stance to promote your products, as that will rapidly lose you your audience. However you can draw your audience in with short url’s (Another one of MarketHive’s great free services) that link to your blog posts and other non-sales oriented content.

This short paragraph is not going to be enough to fully educate you on the ins and outs of using social media to build your audience, so if the topic interests you, I recommend going here to learn more:

Internet Marketing Webinars (see the calendar in MarketHive after you join for free of course).

Influencer Campaigns

In every product area, there are usually already influencers that write the most about that area, and have the largest audience that follows them. To conduct a successful social media campaign, you will want to identify those influencers, and reach out to them to get them to write about your product/service.

To get them to pay attention to you, you will first need to understand what they care about. Read their blog posts and tweets, and try to get inside their minds. Try to determine what appeals to them, and what has clearly turned them off. Then prepare your pitch, and use social media to engage with them.

You will then want to monitor the results by tracking their blog posts, links to the articles, tweets, etc.

For more information…

Inbound marketing is a rich topic area that would take more than a single article like this to describe. For more information, consider yourself a friend of MarketHive:

Markethive

 

 

David

Innovative Marketing Solution

markethive marketing solution 

Every business involved with selling, whether its a multinational conglomeration, work at home mum, crowd funding project needs to be marketed. Small businesses, charities and home workers often struggle with this area, due to lack of funds ,resources and knowledge of what they need to do.

 

Marketing costs can run at thousands per month, but do you need this amount of funds and will it guarantee success. Searching online you will find free marketing solutions, so how can a free system provide you with similar results,with a system that costs you money.

 

In this day and age very few if any people are prepared to work for nothing, so one way of raising money is to offer a share in the future profits , this is often refereed to as crowd funding.

 

I am involved with a marketing system which is developed in this way by a small team of developers, supported by fellow marketers who have a financial share of the advertising profits, they both test and use the system, The system is free for users, who also have options to share in the profits.

 

Marketing is about spreading the word and with the exponential expansion of social media, MarketHive is offering not only a social media base for business, but also all the free tools for business, such as blogs, auto-responders, capture pages, videos, WordPress apps and the like which are essentials for business.

 

I invite you to take a look at this innovative marketing solution

 

David Ogden

David

The changing Internet

The Changing Internet

The changing Internet

I am at present in the middle of break in my Internet Marketing, the first in some 15 years and plan to return later in the year. I have been keeping a watching brief on the development of MarketHive which has been under way for more than two years.

I am impressed with the progress and the attention to detail in the design which makes it easy to use and understand. Tom Prendergast and his small team are creating a system which will become the envy of the world. Many are asking when the system will be launched, well it is available now but there are still parts of the system which need refining due to the ever changing nature of marketing on the Internet.

One area I am happy with is the intuitive way the system has been designed and seamlessly integrates together to the benefit of users. This became apparent to me when I attended a couple of workshops last week about adding a third party plug-in to WordPress in order to post to social media sites. A number of users had difficulty understanding, the instructions for setting up the plug in due to the poor non user friendly design. Needless to say the essential workshop provided by Tom worked through most of the problem area.

One thing I have learnt is that if you stop using the Internet, when you return, its not the same, companies make so called improvement, one of my hosting companies changed it C-panel set up and I keep getting stymied when trying to update information, and they this progress.

David Ogden

Your Invitation To Take a look At Market Hive

David

Never Give Up

Never Give Up

Life can be very challenging at times, following our move to the UK from tropical climes we have had to to face up to higher prices and colder weather. Lucky for us this winter has been milder than normal. We realised from the start that we needed extra income. Jasmin my wife found some cleaning jobs to build an additional income stream , however it was at a cost. Lots of driving early morning and late nights for minimum wages. I spent six months applying for many jobs, filling in many forms and hearing nothing. What has happened to the country, it does not take much effort to send out a reply say sorry you have not been successful in this technological age.

Go Ape Zipline

The next problem is the zero contract hours usually run by agencies where you are registered on the books of an agency, you then rely on the agency to find you work. Both my wife and myself spent a few hundred pounds getting certified documentation such as Disclosure and Barring Services (DBS) checks for working with vulnerable people. Jasmin attended a week of care work training at her own expense and then never heard any thing more. My own teaching agency rarely contacts me and has never offered me work.

No replies to job applications are one thing but, if you are lucky enough to be selected for interview there are employers who still fail to advise you if you are unsuccessful.

With this kind of scenarios it is no wonder that people become disolutioned.

As last year drew to a close, we took stock of our situation and wrote out our new year resolution, publishing on a group page for anyone to see, this simple action help focussing on goals and from time to down when spirits are low, we have found it refocussed our minds and effort.

I decided that in view of the poor response to job applications, due possibly to my age, although Agism is banned in the UK, I would stop applying for jobs and would instead concentrate on building my own online business with MarketHive at the end of February.

The middle of February approached and my thoughts and actions started to change as I prepared to return to full-time online marketing and then the breakthrough on 17th February:-

Do you feel as strongly as we do about living life adventurously? Then Go Ape could be for you!

I Just love adventure it been in my blood for the past 15 years and is the reason I took early retirement and became an adventure racer!, my last job in my favoured sport was teaching sailing 8 months previously and this one although land based offered the chance to help people to enjoy outdoor challenges in safety.

This is my calling, my prayers have been answered.

Four days later I was requested to attend an interview/practical assessment. 7 fellow applicants on the half day assessment aged 17-30 all younger than my own children.

To start off we had to introduce ourselves speaking for two minutes and I was surprised that most found this hard, this was where their age was against them. As I got onto adventure racing, I asked them to stop me when they had heard enough.

We split into two groups for a team task, the result was our group would probably survive the other would probable not survive

The stakes were high on the physical test a climb UP a zipline, I was in the last two the youngest and the oldest, all our predecessors had completed the task. Being the gentleman I took the the slightly higher line which reduced my starting run up and we were off. My feet left the ground early and as the momentum from my run slowed it was hand over hand with my arms keeping a steady rhythm I pulled past the girl and as angel steepened approach the landing platform arms started to fail, I turn around to see if going forward was better, not really so turned backwards once again, so near I am not giving up, Stop hold on rest a little regain composure, climb again, burn in arms platform there, not quite last effort. Clip on safety lines . Success. The final task disconnect the pulley system, now the higher line presented a problem as I was already standing on tip tow and needed to jump to be able to release the karibeener. A few attempts were required with a little help from an instructor, a bang in the face, I was off. Time to encourage the girl who was now on the steepest part and was stalled ready to give up and no amount of encouragement would change her mind she gave up and returned down the zip. Final task attach to zip line and return to start, pleased to complete in style landing on my feet.

Final task one on one interview, felt confident, a very good company to work for even thuogh I had never heard of them

Was a little surprised but happy the following day to be accepted, and immediately set about raising my fitness level after an inactive winter.

This is why I will never give up 

be prepared to do whatever it takes and more

David Ogden
Helping people to help themselves

David

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

David

A Different Job Interview

I spent an interesting morning yesterday at the National Water sports Centre Holme Pierrepont. I had applied for work there and I was invited for a practical assessment. Unfortunately the weather system which resulted in the snow storm which shut down the East coast of the USA, was  passing
over the UK, so the winds were high with rain in the north.

There were a number of no shows so what had been planned to last a day only covered the morning as only one other person attended. We ended up only doing one practical test of building a raft and assembled a raft using four barrels, two long poles as six short and thinner poles and numerous ropes. We took our time and after 30 minutes built a passable raft, capable of carry four people. We were then made aware of possible safety issues where  limbs could become trapped. Three instructors them demonstrated a different design using four Barrels, the two long poles and just four ropes built in 5mins and once again pointing out areas to watch when assembling and using rafts.

The winds were still strong, above the limits of normal operations so no further tests were possible  but we were taken on a tour around the site viewing the Rowing course, Assault course challenge, E-combat, Sky trail, mini golf, Laser Tag and Segways. I was impressed with the Sky trail from a  safety point of view as users are permanently attached  to a track from start to finish and even toddlers can use a mini version, We also viewed the extensive sailing and canoeing equipment, safety boats, White Water area and Wake boarding set-up.

We finished up with checking our certificates and discussing work opportunities. One question  came to light was my lack of formal certification  versus years of experience. Which has the most value, ideally you need both. Rules and regulations in the UK require valid certificates, however no training can cover all eventualities and this  is where experience comes into play. The question for potential employers is it worth to spend time and money in training up experienced people or do they accept only those with certification.

I now have to wait a few weeks, as they have another weekend assessment to complete, before they will invite selected candidates for a more formal interview.

This afternoon, I continue my School Governor training, having been elected in December, I need to learn  more about how the education system works in the UK.

 

David Ogden
Helping Peaple Help themselves
Markethive,com/david-ogden

David

Essentials of Marketing

Essentials of Marketing

Many people are puzzled when it comes to marketing, what is it you need to do. Marketing involves getting your message across to you potential customers, usually in the form of words, audio, pictures or video or combinations of the foregoing.

The tools you use can be in the form of email, circulars, advertisements, recorded messages, blogs, social media and radio or television. The changes in technology combined with the rise of social media, puts more emphasis on videos and shorter blogs due to screen sizes of mobile devices, however email and blogs remain important when it comes to the written word.

Not everyone has access recording studios to produce videos, however anyone with a bit of practice can produce a blog. The written word has been around for thousands of years and has stood the test of time, so if you are a marketer it is an essential skill you need to develop.

Where do you start you might ask. The first step is to gather information on the subject you plan to write about. Quite often this can be a challenge, if you for example,have just joined an existing online business, because you are also learning yourself. One way would be to write a kind of online diary of your experience to share with others. Another way is to read other members blogs and then rewrite them in your own words to reflect your opinion. One thing to avoid is cutting and pasting large sections of text and claiming them as your own. If you do copy text verbatim always acknowledge the source.

The first few blog posts are the most difficult and you should aim to write at least 200-300 words. About a year ago I carried out some research that blogs containing 600- 1000 words were the most effective, and whilst this might be true I am beginning to have some doubts, because it can depend on the screen sizes of your potential customers devices. I for one do not like reading emails on an I-phone in portrait mode.

David Ogden
Helping People Help Themselves
Http://markethive.com/david-ogden

 

David

Preparing for a New Start

The New year is now only days away and if you New year's resolution was to set about improving your financial situation by starting up an online business, then there is no time like the present to get started.

Many people find it useful to find a mentor, I did myself many years ago and it was money well spent. A mentor will guide you and help you avoid the pitfalls which will trap the unwary. So where do you find a mentor? Well you can search online using Google, however most mentors charge to help you and how do you know that you are going to get along with their method of mentoring.

MarketHive can provide a solution for you, the site has been developed over the past few year by a group of entrepreneurs many of whom will guide you with free advice on how to become successful online. The advantage of using MarketHive is you are not limited to just one mentor and the chances are you will discover other people with similar interests to yourself.

MarketHive is an intuitive site with a FaceBook like look and feel, however it has been built from the bottom up to support budding entrepreneurs with a range of essential tools to maximise your marketing efforts.

David Ogden
Helping People Help Themselves
Http://markethive.com/david-ogden

David