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MarketHive Makes WordPress Better

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.

MarketHive is continuing its development of its WordPress plugs and widgets to enable its members to quickly and easily set up WordPress sites, which can then gather and distribute information from fellow entrepreneurs across the Internet .

David Ogden is an Alpha founder at Markethive

Helping people to turn dreams into reality

David

How to Post on my Facebook Profile and my Facebook Groups

Sponsored by Markethive – THE social network for entrepreneurs

What are the rules of etiquette on Facebook and how should I observe them on my Facebook profile and in my Facebook groups? No matter what we do in life, or where we go, there are standards that apply, right? In the workplace, at school, in church, even at a baseball game.

No matter where we are, there are expectations of how we should behave in order to not just get along, but to harmonize with others. The same is true online, but the rules of the game are a little different. Somehow the rules online have changed, and people say things online that they would never dream of saying in front of people they know.

There is widespread political bashing from the left and the right online now, of which you are probably very well aware, but it by no means is it limited to politics. In perhaps a vain attempt to bring a little civility to the online world, and especially to Facebook where the rules of the “Old Wild, Wild West” seem to reign supreme, I would like to talk about Facebook etiquette from the online marketers point of view.

I know, to use a crude analogy, I may be merely spitting into the wind here, but it seems to me someone has to point this out, and I guess I might as well be the one to do it. What does political bashing inside a Facebook group of pro-Trump, or pro-Hillary supporters actually accomplish? This is a real enigma for me.

Who are they going to influence in a group where everyone shares the same political view? If they wanted to try and change someone’ viewpoint, maybe they should all go together and post all over one of the pro-Hillary sites until the owner of the site would just give up in frustration, (or vice versa).

I really don’t want to go here, but it also seems like there is an awful lot of Muslim bashing on Facebook. Where did this come from? I fully understand the frustration with the wars in the Middle East, but especially at the time of the 4th of July when we celebrate the Constitution, isn’t freedom of religion one of the fundamental principles of the pilgrims, to the Founding Fathers and the Revolutionary patriots? Jeesh, give the complaints against Muslims, especially Muslim-Americans a rest already.

OK, now here is the practical side to this post for those who want to promote on Facebook. You may ask “How should I post on my Facebook profile and my Facebook groups”?

One thing that should be said upfront, you should probably develop a thick skin if you don’t have one already, since there is someone, somewhere who will want to beat up on you, (verbally), for one reason or another. If you can’t take the heat, I suggest you get out of the fire and leave Facebook.

There is no rush whatsoever to join any group on Facebook. I have heard that there 8 million groups on Facebook, so there are plenty of groups to join, and they will be waiting for you, so do a little research before you click that join button.

There are a very large number of groups that are nothing but classified ads sites. If you post to these groups, your p ost is just one of thousands of other ads that no one is really paying attention to, so do not waste your time with these groups.

On these groups, there is no interaction, almost no comments, and no intelligent life as far as I can tell. Why would you want to waste a post on this kind of site?

A good sign of a healthy group is the number of new members, as well as your first reaction in viewing the most recent posts. Are there just ads, or are they promoting a discussion of any kind? Is there any discussion at all? If so, then maybe this group is worthwhile. If not, no problem, just move on to another one of the 8 million groups on Facebook. No harm, no foul.

Also do not waste your time posting out the same message to all of your groups. Change it up a little. Obviously there some of the people you want to add as friends and want to connect with that are members of many of the same groups you are. You look like a spammer if you post the same information everywhere.

The one exception to this rule would be a Holiday greeting. I used this method in a non-promotional way to wish my friends and people in my groups Happy Memorial Day, and I did it again, for The 4th of July. I received hundreds of likes,
and comments and they were still coming in several weeks after the Holiday.

This is when I realized that promotional methods on Facebook have a potential to reach tens or even hundreds of thousands of people.

So my advice is as follows:

1) Be polite, don’t push your own agenda all the time.

2) Inspire people with your message and they will follow you and want to be your friend.

3) Join groups with growing membership, and make sure you check the rules of
group and act accordingly.

4) Interact as much as possible on groups, especially with the moderators, influencers, or people active on the group.

5) Reply to messages in a timely manner. (same day if possible)

6) Have something inspiring to say with short test messages and images. Ideally do not promote directly through your text message, but you can link to another page with useful information and links to your offers. This indirect method of promotion will be more effective in the long run than just splashing your ad everywhere like most people do.

7) Have fun and keep your sense of humor. Don’t forget that Facebook started as a fun place for people to connect. In growing so big, Facebook has lost quite a bit of that “fun” spirit, but use your creativity to keep trying new things, and experimenting to see what works and what doesn’t. By following these guidelines your experience on Facebook will be more enjoyable, AND more profitable.

Sponsored by Markethive – – THE social network for entrepreneurs

John Lombaerde – Goldfinch Digital Publishing

David

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. (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

Making Your Blog Stand Out and Look Professional

blogging

Making Your Blog Stand Out and Look Professional

If you are attempting to create a successful blog for personal or business reasons, you should know that looks do count. Many bloggers make the mistake of thinking that looks are not as important as content, since readers are essentially reading your blog for the words, not the way it looks.

This is true to some degree. The fact is however that people will not take your words seriously if your blog looks less than attractive. To have a successful blog you have to have it all. You must have interesting content as well as a great look. If you want to update the look of your blog, consider the following areas of importance.

Easy To Scan

The way your blog reads on a page is an extremely important part of your blog’s look. You should always remember to keep your blog posts short and to the point.

If you are treating your blog as a personal diary, your posts may be a little longer than normal. But, if you are trying to get more traffic to your blog, then you really want to focus your attention on short posts that offer the main point easily.

Most blog readers will only scan your posts, not read them word for word. So keep this in mind when you are writing. The shorter the post, the more likely they will be read. If your blog is easy to scan because the posts are short and the breaks are clear, you will have a great looking blog.

Professional Edge

When designing or redesigning your blog, try to make it as professional looking as possible. Even if the blog is not for a business, the more professional it looks, the more seriously people will take it. Not everyone knows a lot about programming, so you may need to research it a bit. If you have the extra funds, you might even want to get a professional to program it for you. No matter what you have to do, just keep a level of professionalism in your mind throughout the designing process.

Friendly Colors

Most people don’t think twice about what colors they choose for their blog. The facts are that some colors come across better on the web than others. Blue and black are easy to see, so they are always great choices to use.

Sea-green, beige, or purple are also great soothing colors to use for a blog. You should stay away from using colors like pink, yellow, or any neon varieties. They are extremely hard on the eyes when reading them online and can deter people from reading your blog. Keep these color tips in mind when you design your blog to get the best results.

Appropriate Graphics

It has been noted that the use of pictures on your blog is a great way to boost traffic. Blogs that offer pictures that correlate with their content are fantastic.

Readers love to connect with the content further through pictures. With most blogging software offering ways to easily add pictures, it should not be a problem for most publishers to add them right into the blog. If you do have trouble, consider checking the “help” area in your blogging software for more information.

The information there should provide you with step by step instructions to help you get on your way.

Successful Layout

Most people who design blogs and websites will tell you that the layout does matter as well. The way a blog looks to the reader in important in terms of layout.

The layout should be clear and defined. If the reader is confused by the layout, they will likely not stick around to explore. They will most likely go right on to the next blog available. If you are letting a professional design your blog, you will likely not need to worry much about the layout. However, if you are doing it yourself, take a look at other successful sites to get ideas about what works and what doesn’t.

Lastly, simply test different layouts on your friends and family to see which ones they find the most suitable for your blog.

Ida Mae Boyd
Developer

David

Designing Your Own Lead Capture Pages

lead capture pages

Designing Your Own Lead Capture Pages

Designing and building your own lead capture page(s) is not as difficult as you may think. There are many advantages to learning this simple skill. In fact, most people are unaware that they can learn how to create lead capture pages in less than eight hours of proper training, or sometimes less.

To start learning how to build a lead capture page, you need to have the flowing.

An HTML editor to build your lead captures page with. This is a program very similar to a word processor. Believe it or not, if you can use Microsoft Word, you can use an HTML editor.

HTML editors are slightly more complicated than word programs. However, with proper training you can master using one fairly easily. There is a good chance that you already have one that came with your basic operation system.

Web hosting is the next step. This is simply a place to up-load your lead capture page to on the Internet. Be aware that not all web-hosting services are equal. Make sure you know what you are getting before you buy. If the service does not offer a quality auto-responder (which we will discuss in a moment) avoid it. Cheap web hosting is not worth your time.

Lastly, you just need a little training so you can learn how to use the following items. This is the part that is hard, but certainly not impossible to find.

Unfortunately, there are many people selling lead capture pages that don’t want you to know how simple it is to design them. In a moment, I will offer a solution to that problem.

There are many companies where you can buy lead capture pages from on the Internet. There are a multitude of disadvantages involved with having a lead capture page built for you.

What are the disadvantages?

The page you buy is drastically overpriced. Most companies offering lead capture pages are charging between $50 – $200 for only one page.

Why would you want to spend such an absorbent amount on a lead capture page that you could learn how to design yourself in only an hour or two?

You cannot alter the lead capture page’s text or “Ad Copy”. So, you have no way to test what results would come from alterations to the page. Often, changing only a few words on your page will increase your information request rates radically.

You cannot create more than one page. So you can only find out what limited results you will have from the lead capture page you buy. It’s always to your advantage to have different pages to test against each other. Then you can see which designs and text work best to attract customers to your business. After all, who knows your business better than you do? So, who is best qualified to design your pages? The answer is you.

What are the advantages to designing your own lead capture pages?

You will save a lot. Let’s say that you only design 10 pages in your life. If you were to buy them at roughly $100 each, that’s $1,000. A steep price to pay.

When you become proficient at building your own lead capture pages, you can literally have one completed and up-loaded to your server in 30 minutes.

When you host you site, you can build as many pages as you want. Then you can test them to see which pages pull the most leads and even rotate site visitors to then. It’s like going to an arcade and beating the high score on a video game. The main difference is, you always win.

You can tie your “Information request box” to an auto-responder. An auto-responder is a sequential e-mail system that delivers messages to your prospects. This will allows you to follow up with your prospects indefinitely and radically increase your closing ratio. Most people don’t purchase at first glance, but many do when you keep their attention through time using an auto-responder.

You can personalize you lead capture pages with you own audio greetings. This often increases you response rates by 20 – 50%. When people actually hear your voice, it often makes them feel more comfortable giving you their contact information.

You can build a list! This is the most important thing anyone marketing on the Internet can have. Your list is your fortune. The people on your list are always potential customers for any offer you have.

Ida Mae Boyd
Developer

David

Become a Guest Post Champion Promoter

For the most part, guest posting is sort of like begging, right? You have a blog that you are trying to promote, and you are hoping to increase traffic to it, By guest posting on a blog that has more traffic than your blog, you are hoping to trickle away some of the traffic on the larger blog to your smaller blog.

That pretty much sums it up, right? The larger more popular blog doesn't mind so much, as long as you provide useful content to the blog owners readers. It is one less blog post the owner has to write after all.

In conclusion then, guest posters are like either beggars or leeches, and blog owners who allow guest posting are a little lazy. This is sort of a cynical way of looking at guest posting, I know, but it is to illustrate a point.

Suppose you could promise that you would not only write a blog post, but you would post the link out to tens of thousands of your social media connections, and millions of members of Facebook, and LinkedIn groups to which you belong. Would that make your guest post seem more attractive to the blog owner? You better believe it would!

You move from the position as a guest post beggar to a guest post promoter, and even a champion.

Listen to these comments from a blog owner on whose blog I recently promoted a guest post at:

10 Ways to get more views on your LinkedIn Pulse Blog Posts

"Hi John, thats awesome! I see that your post is most viewed post of the site and is trending. Also, I see that it is performing well on Twitter and LinkedIn. Thank you so much for sharing. Great Synergy"! Max Angel – Cofounder at ThatsJournal.

I suggested that he might want to join Markethive, or that he might be interested in some of the automation tools I use.

Max responded. "You are very welcome, John. Thanks a lot for the marketing inputs. I will check it out. Thanks again for the post contribution. Please feel free to let me know if you or your friends want to share anything related to marketing. We will be happy to help. Thanks!" I would say that is a pleased blog owner, right?

If we work together, we can help each other find these kinds of guest blog post opportunities, and spread the message about Markethive. Feel free to contact Max about guest posting on his blog.

John Lombaerde

PS – did I mention that this promotion also brought in at least 5 or more new Markethive subscribers?

David

Innovative 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

So What Is A Social Media Network?

Basically, a social media network is made up of individuals or organizations that are connected through various social contacts ranging from casual acquaintances to family members. Social networks are established to encourage connections and communication to occur on a wide variety of levels.

A basis for the theory of social networking was a study performed by Stanley Milgram in 1967 that established that any two random United States citizens are connected to one another by a series of six intermediaries, on the average. This idea was made more popular by the play and subsequent movie, “Six Degrees of Separation”, as well as the television show “Six Degrees”. Current Internet experiments continue to explore this concept, such as the Ohio State Electronic Small World Project and Columbia's Small World Project.

These experiments currently confirm that five to seven degrees of separation are sufficient to connect two people through the Internet. This also serves to confirm the potential effectiveness of Internet social networks to build new connections between people.

The first Internet social network began in 1995 and has 12.9 million visitors today. This makes it difficult to comprehend the rule of 150, also known as the Dunbar number that states that the size of a genuine social network is limited to about 150 members. Over 200 Internet social networking sites exist and the number of members that belong to most them steadily increases.

In an Internet social networking site, a group of founders sends messages to invite members to join the site. Those members then invite additional members and the links continue to grow. Some social networking sites offer viewable profiles for members, address books and online social connections on a social or business level. Many Internet social networks are open to the public.

Internet social networks are a convenient way to link with new people, both personally and professionally. Consider that the senior director of Nielson/NetRatings, Jon Gibs, states that Internet “…social networking is not a fad that will disappear. If anything, it will become more ingrained in mainstream sites.”

The following are 20 of the most Popular Social Media Sites Right Now published by Antony Maina

Facebook

This is the biggest social media network on the Internet, both in terms of total number of users and name recognition. Founded on February 4, 2004, Facebook has within 12 years managed to accumulate more than 1.59 billion monthly active users and this automatically makes it one of the best mediums for connecting people from all over the world with your business. It is estimated that more than 1 million small and medium-sized businesses use the platform to advertise their business.

Twitter

You might be thinking that limiting your posts to 140 characters is no way to advertise your business, but you will be shocked to know that this social media platform has more than 320 million active monthly users who make use of the 140 character limit to pass on information. Businesses can use Twitter to interact with prospective clients, answer questions, release latest news and at the same time use the targeted ads with specific audiences. Twitter was founded on March 21, 2006, and has its headquarters in San Francisco, California.

LinkedIn

Founded on December 14, 2002, and launched 0n May 5, 2003, LinkedIn is hands-down the most popular social media site for professional networking. The website is available in 24 languages and has over 400 million registered users. LinkedIn is great for people looking to connect with people in similar industries, networking with local professionals and displaying business related information and statistics.

Google+

While it’s no Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, Google+ has its place among the popular social media sites. Its SEO value alone makes it a must-use tool for any small business. Launched on December 15, 2011, Google+ has joined the big leagues registering 418 active million users as of December 2015.

YouTube

YouTube — the largest and most popular video-based social media website — was founded on February 14, 2005, by three former PayPal employees. It was later bought by Google in November 2006 for $1.65 billion. YouTube has over 1 billion website visitors per month and is the second most popular search engine behind Google.

Pinterest

Launched in March 2010, Pinterest is a relatively newcomer in the social media arena. This platform consists of digital bulletin boards where businesses can pin their content. Pinterest announced September 2015 that it had acquired 100 million users. Small businesses whose target audience is mostly made up of women should definitely invest in Pinterest as more than half of its visitors are women.

Instagram

Like Pinterest, Instagram is a visual social media platform. The site, launched on October 6, 2010, has more than 400 million active users and is owned by Facebook. Many of its users use it to post information about travel, fashion, food, art and similar subjects. The platform is also distinguished by its unique filters together with video and photo editing features. Almost 95 percent of Instagram users also use Facebook.

Tumblr

Tumblr is one of the most difficult to use social networking platforms, but it’s also one of the most interesting sites. The platform allows several different post formats, including quote posts, chat posts, video and photo posts as well as audio posts, so you are never limited in the type of content that you can share. Like Twitter, reblogging, which is more like retweeting, is quick and easy. The social networking website was founded by David Karp in February 2007 and currently hosts more than 200 million blogs.

Flickr

Flickr, pronounced “Flicker,” is an online image and video hosting platform that was created by the then Vancouver-based Ludicorp on February 10, 2004, and later acquired by Yahoo in 2005. The platform is popular with users who share and embed photographs. As of October last year, Flickr had more than 112 million users and had its footprint in more than 63 countries. An average of a million photos are shared daily on Flickr.

Reddit

This is a social news and entertainment networking website where registered users can submit content such as direct links and text posts. Users are also able to organize and determine their position on the site’s pages by voting submissions up or down. Submissions with the most positive votes appear in the top category or main page. Reddit was founded by University of Virginia roommates Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman on June 23, 2005. A decade later, the site boasts more than 36 million registered accounts and 231 million monthly visitors.

Snapchat

Snapchat is an image messaging application software product that was created by Reggie Brown, Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy when they were students at Stanford University. The app was officially released in September 2011, and within a short span of time they have grown immensely registering an average of 100 million daily active users as of May 2015. More than 18 percent of all social media users use Snapchat.

WhatsApp

WhatsApp Messenger is a cross-platform instant messaging client for smartphones, PCs and tablets. The app relies on the Internet to send images, texts, documents, audio and video messages to other users that have the app installed on their devices. Launched in January 2010, WhatsApp Inc. was acquired by Facebook on February 19, 2004, for about $19.3 billion. Today, more than 1 billion people use the service to communicate with their friends, loved ones and even customers.

Quora

Capitalizing upon human curiosity is an ingenious idea that would lead to the creation and launch of Quora in June, 2009. The website, co-founded by two former Facebook employees, Charlie Cheever and Adam D’Angelo now claims that it received more than 80 million monthly unique visitors, with half of them coming from the U.S. So far, the question-and-answer website has managed to raise $141 in venture capital funds and while it doesn’t look ready to go public yet, it’s definitely a company to watch.

Vine

With over 40 million users, Vine is a rapidly growing video sharing social media app that allows users to share 6-second video clips with their followers. While this looks like a really short time for a video, businesses of all sizes are having tremendous success using the service. Vine was founded in June 2012 and later acquired by Twitter in October 2012, just before its official launch.

Periscope

Periscope is a live video streaming mobile app that was developed by Joe Bernstein and Kayvon Beykpour. The two started the company in February 2014 and later sold it to Twitter for $100 million in March 2015. Four months after its March 2015 relaunch, Periscope said that it had surpassed 10 million accounts and in December the same year, Apple announced Periscope as the app of the year.

BizSugar

BizSugar is a social networking platform and niche resource for small business owners, entrepreneurs and managers. The site was created in 2007 by DBH Communications, Inc., a provider of award-winning business publications, and later acquired by Small Business Trends LLC, in 2009. The platform allows users to share videos, articles, blog posts, podcast among other content. It also allows users to view and vote on submissions by other members.

StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is a discovery engine that finds and recommends content for its users. More than 25 million people use StumbleUpon for entertainment and information. In addition, more than 80,000 publishers, brands, and other marketers have used StumbleUpon’s Paid Discovery platform to promote their businesses. StumbleUpon was owned by eBay from May 2007 to April 2009, when Garrett Camp, Geoff Smith and several investors bought it back. It is now an independent, investor-backed startup once again.

Delicious

This is a social bookmarking web service for discovering, storing and sharing web bookmarks. The site was founded by Peter Gadjokov and Joshua Schachter in 2003 and acquired in 2005 by Yahoo. By the end of 2008, Delicious claimed that it had bookmarked 180 million URLs and acquired more than 5.3 million users. The service was later sold to AVOS Systems in April 2011 who later sold it to Science Inc. In January this year, Delicious Media said that it had acquired the service.

Digg

Founded more than a decade ago (November 2004), Digg is a news aggregator with a curated front page that selects stories specifically for the Internet audience, The topics vary widely from trending political issues to science to viral Internet issues and anything in between. Digg supports sharing of content to other social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. In 2015, the company claimed that it had about 11 million active monthly users.

Viber

Viber is a Voice over IP (VoIP) and instant messaging app for mobile devices that was developed and released by Viber Media on December 2, 2010. The app also allows for the exchange of audio, video and images between users. As of April 2014, Viber had accrued close to 600 million registered users and 230 monthly active users.

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