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/david-ogden/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!

David Ogden – Http://markethive.com/david-ogden

Inbound Marketing Explained and Compared

Veretekk invented Automated Marketing (in 1996), later to become known as Inbound Marketing (MarketHive). Veretekk’s traffic portal offers, auto responders, Broadcasting technology (The Hammer), Conference rooms and sales funnel process became the foundation that today is known as Inbound Marketing.

WATCH THE VIDEO BELOW

But let us digress some. Before the Internet; advertising and marketing were for the most part driven by Outbound Marketing:

Outbound marketing is buying attention, cold- calling,
Direct paper mail, radio, TV, sales flyers, spam,
telemarketing and other forms of traditional advertising.

Inbound marketing is the most effective marketing method for doing business online. Inbound marketing focuses on creating quality content that pulls people toward your company and product, where they naturally want to be. By aligning the content you publish with your customer’s interests, you naturally attract inbound traffic that you can then convert, close, and delight over time.

Simply concept really, execution is the challenge. (Just ask a few of your friends how often they blog) vs posting to Facebook newsfeeds, Skyping or texting back and forth. With a little understanding, some instruction and determination, any entrepreneurial motivated person can make a success with the right tools.

This is why it is important to know your “WHY” as that is what will drive your market base. What you love to do will attract others that share the same passion. And that is the “secret”.

Sharing is caring and inbound is about creating and sharing content with the world. By creating content specifically designed to appeal to your dream customers, inbound attracts qualified prospects to your business and keeps them coming back for more.

By publishing the right content in the right place at the right time, your marketing becomes relevant and helpful to your customers, not interruptive. Now that’s marketing people can love.

Major themes:

Create targeted content that answers prospects' and customers' basic questions and needs, then share that content far and wide. (Broadcasting)

Promoters don’t just materialize out of thin air: they start off as strangers, visitors, contacts, and customers. Specific marketing actions and tools help to transform those strangers into promoters. (Share the revenue “AFFILIATE”)

Tailor your content to the wants and needs of the people who are viewing it. As you learn more about your leads over time, you can better personalize your messages to their specific needs. (Build your sphere of influence)

Inbound marketing is multi-channel by nature because it approaches people where they are, in the channel where they want to interact with you. (Social Network connections)

Content creation, publishing and analytics tools all work together like a well-oiled machine – allowing you to focus on publishing the right content in the right place at the right time. (Tracking and measuring traffic, comments, responsive interaction)

The Four Marketing Actions

Attract

We don’t want just any traffic to our site, we want the right traffic. We want the people who are most likely to become leads, and, ultimately, happy customers. Who are the “right” people? Our ideal customers, also known as our buyer personas. Buyer personas are holistic ideals of what your customers are really like, inside and out. Personas encompass the goals, challenges, pain points, common objections to products and services, as well as personal and demographic information shared among all members of that particular customer type. Your personas are the people around whom your whole business is built.

Some of the most important tools to attract the right users to your site are:

Blogging– Inbound marketing starts with blogging. A blog is the single best way to attract new visitors to your website. In order to get found by the right prospective customers, you must create educational content that speaks to them and answers their questions.

SEO– Your customers begin their buying process online, usually by using a search engine to find something they have questions about. So, you need to make sure you’re appearing prominently when and where they search. To do that, you need to carefully, analytically pick keywords, optimize your pages, create content, and build links around the terms your ideal buyers are searching for.

Pages– Your website pages are your digital storefront. So put your best face forward! Optimize your website to appeal to your ideal buyers and transform your website into a beacon of helpful content to entice the right strangers to visit your pages.

Social Publishing– Successful inbound strategies are all about remarkable content – and social publishing allows you to share that valuable information on the social web, engage with your prospects, and put a human face on your brand. Interact on the networks where your ideal buyers spend their time.

Convert

Once you’ve attracted website visitors, the next step is to convert those visitors into leads by gathering their contact information. At the very least, you’ll need their email addresses. Contact information is the most valuable currency there is to the online marketer. So in order for your visitors to offer up that currency willingly, you need to offer them something in return! That “payment” comes in the form of content, like eBooks, whitepapers, or tip sheets – whatever information would be interesting and valuable to each of your personas.

Some of the most important tools in converting visitors to leads include:

Forms- In order for visitors to become leads, they must fill out a form and submit their information. Optimize your form to make this step of the conversion process as easy as possible.

Calls-to-action are buttons or links that encourage your visitors to take action, like “Download a Whitepaper” or “Attend a Webinar.” If you don’t have enough calls-to-action or your calls-to-action aren’t enticing enough, you won’t generate leads.

Landing Pages– When a website visitor clicks on a call-to-action, they should then be sent to a landing page. A landing page is where the offer in the call-to-action is fulfilled, and where the prospect submits information that your sales team can use to begin a conversation with them. When website visitors fill out a form on a landing page for the first time, that visitor becomes a contact.

Contacts– Keep track of the leads you're converting in a centralized marketing database. Having all your data in one place helps you make sense out of every interaction you’ve had with your contacts – be it through email, a landing page, social media, or otherwise – and how to optimize your future interactions to more effectively attract, convert, close, and delight your buyer personas.

Close

You’re on the right track. You’ve attracted the right visitors and converted the right leads, but now you need to transform those leads into customers. How can you most effectively accomplish this feat? Certain marketing tools can be used at this stage to make sure you’re closing the right leads at the right times.

Closing tools include:

CRM– Keep track of the details about all the contacts, companies, and deals in your pipeline, and easily get in touch with the right prospects at the right time. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems facilitate sales by making sure you have the right information at your fingertips to better engage with prospects across every channel.

Closed-loop Reporting– How do you know which marketing efforts are bringing in the best leads? Is your sales system effectively closing those best leads into customers? Integration with your CRM system allows you to analyze just how well your marketing and sales teams are playing together.

Email– What do you do if a visitor clicks on your call-to-action, fills out a landing page, or downloads your whitepaper, but still isn’t ready to become a customer? A series of emails focused on useful, relevant content can build trust with a prospect and help them become more ready to buy.

Marketing Automation– This process involves creating email marketing and lead nurturing tailored to the needs and lifecycle stage of each lead. For example, if a visitor downloaded a whitepaper on a certain topic from you in the past, you might want to send that lead a series of related emails. But if they follow you on Twitter and visited certain pages on your website, you might want to change the messaging to reflect those different interests.

Delight

The Inbound way is all about providing remarkable content to our users, whether they be visitors, leads, or existing customers. Just because someone has already written you a check doesn’t mean you can forget about them! Inbound companies continue to engage with, delight, and (hopefully) upsell their current customer base into happy promoters of the organizations and products they love.

Tools used to delight customers include:

Surveys– The best way to figure out what your users want is by asking them. Use feedback and surveys to ensure you’re providing customers with what they’re looking for.

Smart Calls-to-Action– These present different users with offers that change based on buyer persona and lifecycle stage.

Smart Text– Provide your existing customers with remarkable content tailored to their interests and challenges. Help them achieve their own goals, as well as introduce new products and features that might be of interest to them.

Social Monitoring- Keep track of the social conversations that matter to you most. Listen out for your customers’ questions, comments, likes, and dislikes – and reach out to them with relevant content.

The New Methodology

The Inbound Methodology covers each and every step taken, tool used, and lifecycle stage traveled through on the road from stranger to customer. It empowers marketers to attract visitors, convert leads, close customers, and delight promoters. The new methodology acknowledges that inbound marketing doesn’t just happen, you do it. And you do it using tools and applications that help you create and deliver content that will appeal to precisely the right people (your buyer personas) in the right places (channels) at just the right times (lifecycle stages).

Want to learn more about inbound marketing?

An Entrepreneurial Social Network integrated with an advanced Inbound Marketing platform is genius on steroids. Sharing up to 50% of the potential revenue with you is very generous and the potential of this combination is atomic!

David Ogden – Http://markethive.com/david-ogden

Entrepreneurial Social Networks

Top 5 Social Networks Entrepreneur Strategy

There are hundreds of social networks out there. You can’t be everywhere and we all need to focus our efforts and time on the most effective social networking sites. Here are the social networks I would recommend most for entrepreneurs.

Looking for a job? Consider creating your own. There are a number of social resources to help you connect with other entrepreneurs and get your business ideas off the ground.

Here are the top 5 social networks for entrepreneurs. Each helps entrepreneurs succeed by providing them with the guidance, tools and resources they need to setup their company and gain exposure.

Nothing compares with the brute force horsepower Inbound Marketing engine that comes free with Markethive, but we need to build alliances among our peers and this list is the top 10 of other Entrepreneurial social nets we recommend you frequent as well.

1. Markethive

I am putting Markethive as number one for many reasons, including a serious case of bias. I built it, aside from that. Markethive is a traditional easily navigated and profile oriented network similar to Facebook, oriented like LinkedIn but unique in that it's engine is a multimillion dollar Inbound Marketing platform. As entrepreneurs, we invest (spend) millions on autoresponder systems, capture page systems, blogging platforms, broadcasting technologies, known as Inbound Marketing today. Markethive's founder is the same man the developed Veretekk and invented Automated Marketing, auto responders, capture pages basically what has become today known as Inbound Marketing. There is no other Inbound Marketing solution on the Internet that comes close, has the level of integration found on the Internet at any price and the other systems cost upwards of $10,000 per month. Markethive's Inbound Marketing platform is free included and built into the social network.

2. StartupNation

Most social networks neglect the content aspect that makes StartupNation so useful. With articles, forums, blogs, on-demand seminars, and podcasts, entrepreneurs will be better prepared for their ventures and have the resources required to make better business decisions.

There are a wide range of topics being discussed on StartupNation right now, including business planning, marketing and web-based business. The site also offers a series of competitions, such as a dorm-based 20 contest and an elevator pitch competition. If you're an entrepreneur or hope to become one, this site is definitely one you can’t miss out on.

3. LinkedIn

It’s difficult to leave LinkedIn off of any social networking list because it’s so useful for anyone who's either searching for a job, is trying to network with like-minded individuals, or building a company. LinkedIn offers many resources for entrepreneurs, such as groups, including the very popular “On Startups” group that has over 54,000 members.

Entrepreneurs on LinkedIn should brand themselves properly so they can attract the right kind of business opportunities, and perform searches to find service providers or partners. As an entrepreneur, you should also be looking to participate in LinkedIn Answers, events and applications to spruce up your profile and become a valuable member to your community.

4. Perfect Business

If you want to meet thousands of serious entrepreneurs, experts and investors from a variety of industries, then Perfect Business might be the perfect social network for you. The type of people you’ll find are potential business partners, potential clients and advisers. Additionally, the site has leading business partners like Entrepreneur and Virgin Money.

From business networking to a video center where you can learn from successful entrepreneurs, a business plan builder and even an investor center, you’ll have most of the resources you need to create or regenerate your business. There is a free basic membership and a gold membership that costs $29.99 per month.

5. The Funded

The Funded is an online community of entrepreneurs who research, rate and review funding sources. Entrepreneurs can view and share terms sheets to assist each other in finding good investors, as well as discuss the inner workings of operating a business. General benefits of this site include viewing facts, reviews and commentary on funding resources, and accessing RSS feeds of the most recent public comments by members.

By joining the site, you have access to detailed fund profiles with specialty, reference investments, and investment criteria, in addition to accessing partner vCards that have full contact information of all partners at venture funds. In order to get any value out of this social network, you pretty much have to become a member.

David Ogden – Http://markethive.com/david-ogden

Market-Network: A New Type of Business Model

Social network. Marketplace. SaaS. These buzzwords are no longer synonyms of massive business opportunities.

The gold rush has already happened.

But a new business model has emerged.

Market-networks are hybrid animals: part social network, part marketplace, part SaaS. [1]

It’s a social network. Professionals use profile pages to showcase their work and demonstrate their credibility. They also connect with each other and build relationships.

It’s a marketplace. Professionals come online together to find other parties with whom they can do business.

It’s a SaaS tool. Professionals use the tools on the top of the marketplace to negotiate, do the job, or manage the paperwork.

Social networks are designed to connect people. Marketplaces are built to sell simple products and services at scale. SaaS tools are here to make your job easier.

Market-networks focus on more complex services; the types of services that are not easily scalable and require more human collaboration. [1]

So get your pick-axe and prepare yourself for the next gold rush.

Think about the number of opportunities in M&A, scientific research, construction, management consulting, marketing, media production…

[1] Thanks to James Currier for sharing his thoughts on this emerging business model.

[2] Here are a couple of examples:

AngelList is a market-network.

It’s a social network for startups and investors. It’s a marketplace where business angels can find startups to invest in and startups can post job openings. It’s a SaaS tool that helps business angels create syndicates and startups get introduced to business angels.

Contently is a market-network.

It’s a social network for freelance writers. It’s a marketplace where companies can find writers to create content—articles, eBooks, and other kinds of marketing collateral. It’s a SaaS tool that helps content marketers organize their editorial calendar, manage the writers’ work, and track the performance with analytics.

Article originated here:
https://boostcompanies.com/market-network/

Meet Writer Guerric

Guerric de Ternay is an entrepreneur
and digital & marketing strategist. A large
chunk of his work focuses on behavioral
science, customer experience, and digital
strategy. His passion?
Helping people and businesses level up.

David Ogden – Http://markethive.com/david-ogden

Markethive Vision Statement

Markethive is Inbound Marketing combined with a dynamic vertical social network funded by advertising. Not only makes the entire Inbound Marketing system cost free, it also allows you to leverage huge results when you build groups to facilitate the platforms via the social network.

Markethive is next generation technology from a 20 year old Inbound Marketing platform called Veretekk. Built by the same entrepreneurs, innovation is our DNA.

We invented Inbound Marketing back in 1996.

Social Network

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Members Only Root Domain

David Ogden – Http://markethive.com/david-ogden

Weight Loss Coffee Review Valentus Slim Roast Coffee

Weight Loss Coffee Review

Valentus Slim Roast Coffee

So you have heard about this new concept in weight loss…Valentus SlimRoast weight loss coffee. Is it real? Does it work? How does it work? Well I’m going to break it down for you and tell you where to get it.

Weight Loss Coffee Review of Valentus SlimRoast

Company: Valentus

Location: Sparks, NV

Cost: $59.95 (for 24 servings or $2.50 per serving) Volume discounts available to reduce cost per box.

Efficacy: High. Well over 90% of customers get results from this product.

My first exposure to this coffee was about three months ago. Before I had never heard of such a product but apparently there have been other attempts from other companies that didn’t do so well.

A good indication that a weight loss product is not effective is when you are encouraged to eat and exercise differently. Not that there is anything wrong with that advice but you will lose weight anyway doing that.

So when I found out this coffee had no extra suggestions for its use other than drink it everyday I must say I was intrigued. So I tried it and I found it to be very effective at assisting you to lose weight. I say assisting because this product doesn’t contain any unknown magical ingredients it’s just formulated very well.

The main ingredient that gets results in the coffee is garcinia Cambogia. A supplement derived from a fruit called tamarind. It effectively kills your appetite especially if you have it first thing before eating anything else.

So my results went like this. I lost weight on average every week for four weeks at about 5 lbs per week. I plateaued at 185 in about six weeks and began to think the ride was over. But I think maybe because I do some exercise (I attend Krav Maga classes once a week) I may have been gaining muscle mass while I was slimming down. I also noticed my waist shrunk down about three inches.

You will find in testimonials that different people will have different results. I think the body has its set point where it just won’t lose weight anymore and me being 5’9 perhaps healthy for me is around 185 lbs. The point is my waist is smaller and I don’t mind being in public with my shirt off now because I shed most of the fat that made me feel uncomfortable.

So I still use this coffee daily just to maintain my current weight and it is very effective. I have seen testimonials of people losing up to 55 lbs! My guess is they were pretty obese. I was not terribly overweight I just needed something to keep me comfortable.

What To Expect With Slim Roast

The box comes in a pack of 24 servings at a cost of around $60 plus shipping. If you break that down it is about $2.50 per serving. If you use this product every day you will actually save money because you will pass the fast food chains with no problem.

Valentus offers a considerable savings incentive when you buy more than one box. For example, if you buy a years supply of 16 boxes the cost is $499.95 which before shipping is equal to $31.25 per box! They also have smaller packages of 3 and 6 box orders so do consider these options if you intend to order the product.

It also has quite a caffeine kick and ginseng so you will be very alert and ready to get whatever it is you need to do. Eat whatever you desire. The fact is your own body is going to tell you when you’re really hungry and not carb cravings.

Not only that your stomach is going to shrink so even when you do eat you won’t be able to get as much in as you used to.

In Summation: Score 10/10

At the end of the day, Valentus Slim Roast simply works. I give it a 10 out of 10 because they not only formulated the product well to get fast results but they over deliver with extra ingredients that promote health and wellness. The cost of the product is higher than some of its competitors (if you’re buying one box at a time) but it’s my belief that the quality speaks for itself.

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor

David Ogden – Http://markethive.com/david-ogden

Emerging Markets merge into record shattering success for seasoned entrepreneur

New Markets merge into record shattering success for seasoned entrepreneur

“With the advent of a real Market Network (Markethive) and a real emerging Customer Centric network marketing giant (Valentus) even I was surprised with the ease of building a new empire in this industry”. Explained Thomas Prendergast, Entrepreneur, Internet Innovator and CEO and founder of Markethive.

“I have been an advocate for ending the business practices of buying and selling leads. And calling for an end to spam email, spam faxes, telemarketing, ending popup ads, bill board ads, you know, the practice called outbound marketing”. He continued to explain. “It was heavily relied upon in the days before the Internet a long time ago and has suffered a long painful death since the Internet was released to the public in 1991, I know, I was there and have continued to ride this journey called the Internet.” Mr Prendergast emphasized.

10 years before the Internet Thomas Prendergast ran an Ad agency in the Silicon Valley and was very aware of tech and the emerging Internet. “Which is why I was on the Internet almost the moment it was available to the public in 1991” Mr. Prendergast revealed.

Within years of immersing himself into the Internet, he became aware of Network Marketing. He found it fascinating that anyone with some skill and determination could reasonably build a living income. This idea supported his empathetic support of struggling prodigies, up and coming entrepreneurs and anyone who had greater dreams than the typical job afforded them.

“Although I was aware of buying mailing lists for my ad agency in the 80s I was not aware of the pushing of buying names and phone numbers for MLMers to call on people supposedly interested in a business opportunity”, Thomas Prendergast said. As he become more aware of the MLM industry, he also found that most leaders who had working spheres of influence, would tell those they recruited into these pyramid schemes (the majority of these people did not have large spheres of influence) to buy these leads and cold call them.

Mr. Prendergast continued, “My instincts told me this was a bad idea and a serious mistake. But these “leaders” promoted this technique because they had no real option, ability or intentions on helping these people that just enrolled into one of their pyramid schemes “that really was just another “Hopes and Dreams” pitch, and that is another story”.

This became painfully clear when Thomas was witness to such a salesman, we will call him David, who had a talk show, had published many books, had a strong following, had joined a newly launched MLM deal, was conducting a teleconference call with all the people David had recently recruited into this new opportunity MLM. On that call, David told all the 1000s of listeners to go to his friend John and buy the leads they had allegedly pre interviewed at about $100 per 10 leads.

“This was mid-1990s. I bought 100 of them costing me $1000 and called them all (another article) and the results were 80% insults, 15% hang ups and the rest no answers. Not one was aware of any interview and the rejection level was as high as it gets. This was a process that would eliminate anyone new to the MLM process from continuing on in any business. Rejection is a process only boiler room telemarketers and well-seasoned sales people can withstand. It is death to the average Mom and Pop trying their hand at MLM”, Mr. Prendergast revealed.

Emerging Markets, Paradigm Shifts, Trends and all the other annoying clichés.

There are two firmly entrenched trends that have been born in the Internet, because of the technology, the reach of technology and the emersion of the masses into the technology, primarily due to the Social Networks, that Customer Centricity and Inbound Marketing emerged. Think of them as brother and sister.

Customer Centricity (Think Amazon):

Thomas Prendergast has been advocating Customer Centricity for the Network Marketing industry for over 10 years now. Mr. Prendergast explained, “Less than 1% of said industry understands it, the rest uninterested, and continue to promote the failed process of selling “Hopes and Dreams” of thinly veiled pyramid schemes with over priced products that rarely accomplish what they claim they do”.

However there have been a few that moved towards the “customer centric”, but not fully; with one in particular, abandoning the entire concept, only to find that decision is destroying the company as we speak, with commissions being cut consistently for the past 3 years, causing a drastic end to growth and a company in disarray. The other company built a customer option with infomercials, as a reward for their peak performers to acquire said such infomercial leads, which has dwindled due to current trends away from traditional Cable TV and Dish TV. Those 2 companies are Trivita and Beach Body.

Here is the summary of Thomas Prendergast’s Customer Centric proposal for this industry.

First and foremost the company’s focus must be to “Serve the Needs of the Customer” not the distributors!
Products that cost the distributors less than they sell them for on the open markets (like Ebay auctions, Amazon stores, Craig’s list)
A virtual warehouse that supports the distributor allowing purchasing in bulk, at lower wholesale prices, keeping the inventory at the company, allowing for drop shipping.
Offering co-op Advertising partnerships, to the distributors, allowing distributors to receive smaller shares of that traffic, that being customers and distributors from the results of mass marketing on the Internet. This has been done by a few other companies to great success. In other words, it works.
Other mass marketing technology that now comes to full force are, 800 number platforms, self-replicated Amazon, Ebay, etc. accounts, shopping cart widgets for 3^rd level distributors domains, and Social Marketing aps allowing purchase within Social Markets.

Summary:

With the accelerated market place awash in innovation and technology, technology that puts the human element right into the center of the equation, you can understand why you see the MLM industry sluggish and many companies dying on the vine and others falling flat on their faces with their much heralded launches. Entrepreneurs (distributors) that once upon a time, a flashy video, a charming pitch man, and a compelling comp plan, worked to explode the next greatest MLM launch. Not anymore!

Not today.

It is only a matter of time a young bold, innovative entrepreneur launches the first true customer centric MLM similar to the framework Mr. Prendergast has discussed here. And when they do, the world will quake, the swamps will empty and the first multi trillion MLM enterprise will rise to stand head to toe with the great innovations today like Facebook, Google, PayPal etc.

Inbound Marketing:

Inbound Marketing is the most effective marketing method for doing business online. Inbound marketing focuses on creating quality content that pulls people toward your company and product, where they naturally want to be. By aligning the content you publish with your customer’s interests, you naturally attract inbound traffic that you can then convert, close, and delight quickly.

This is exactly what Markethive is but more. Markethive is the first newly discovered Market Network

What Is A Market Network?

“Marketplaces” provide transactions among multiple buyers and multiple sellers — like eBay, Etsy, Uber and LendingClub.

“Networks” provide profiles that project a person’s identity, then, lets them communicate in a 360-degree pattern with other people in the network. Think Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

What’s unique about market networks is that they:

Combine the main elements of both networks and marketplaces
Use SaaS workflow software to focus action around longer-term projects, not just a quick transaction
Promote the service provider as a differentiated individual, helping to build long-term relationships

Mr. Prendergast enthusiastically continued, “The amazing timing of this entire process is the emerging of the first Market Network; “Markethive” and my friend “David Jordan’s” company Valentus the first real Customer Centric Company”.

Thomas Prendergast summarizes it by saying, “Valentus is experiencing record growth and record time and by all indications is about to enter into “Momentum”. I credit all of this to the fact that Valentus has the foundational product that the markets support the retail priced organically where distributors buy the product well below the market retail”.

Thomas continued saying, “I know this all seems so complex, but in reality it is quite simple. Valentus’ explosive growth is because it is a real business based on Economics 101. Buy low sell High!”

Mr. Prendergast adds credit to the story saying, “With the fusion of these two huge trends found in Markethive and Valentus, I give credit to this phenomena as to my ease in exploding the growth of my little “distributorship” in Valentus, breaking records in the first month and the meteoric growth of this organization because Inbound Marketing (Markethive) has found Customer Centricity (Valentus) and the rest will be historic”.

If this article finds you the least bit excited, curious or at least amused, we invite you to find out yourself more about these two incredible trends and how they complement each other. Your curiosity will cost you nothing. Sign up for these two companies at the below addresses (If you have not already):

Markethive (sign up or let’s be friends):
http://markethive.com/david-ogden

Valentus:
http://www.ValentusTour.com/program Entering a phone number will assure that I will call you to enjoy a 5-10 minute chat with you. I look forward to that, BTW.

David Ogden

Helping People Help Themselves

David Ogden – Http://markethive.com/david-ogden

Markethive Groups

Markethive Groups The Champion of the Cottage Industry

cot·tage in·dus·try
noun
noun: cottage industry; plural noun: cottage industries
a business or manufacturing activity carried on in a person's home.

Like Facebook, Groups is a more focused culture gathering to have topic discussions based on the Groups theme.

Unlike Facebook, Groups is the center of all the tools of the system. Let’s start with the blogging platform.

The Group blogging platform is a unique platform published to from the group members who choose to publish to that platform. The Markethive blog system also utilizes plugins so that content can be directed to one or more WordPress blogs.
This allows you to build a team of marketers all working together for a common cause contributing content for the Markethive blog platforms and WordPress distribution (reach).
SEO Backlinks management is another group function where the group organization utilizes the Backlinks system to build white hat links for specific campaigns.
Co-op Advertising Campaigns Financing: Press releases, Youtube video ads, Facebook Ads, Google ads can easily be financed with an internal co-op campaign.
Membership Management Reports: As Admin, you can review activity reports for the members in your group. Login activity, blogging in the group, Backlink activity, Massaging responsiveness, etc. Allow decisions based on activity to determine ejecting non responsive members.
Rotators: Used to distribute traffic coming to the Group blogs, or Co-op traffic to designated sites or capture pages. Or distributed traffic for any reason. Similar to the Co-op campaign is the ability to acquire leads, customers or distributor in a co-op function and distribute the leads, customers, etc. accordingly.
Asset Map: A management system whereas displays the relational connections between, capture pages, profile pages, blogs, social networks, press releases etc.
Group Messaging: Communication with your group members is well managed with the group function messaging system.
Replicating PDF documents:

A Markethive group is like a Cottage Industry. You can use Groups to build a startup business, a professional service, a power network marketing team, nothing like it before, like building a startup service with no overhead. This is the promise of the new Market Network (contrasted to the old Social Networks) That is exactly what Markethive is.

Case in point: Chris Corey, Annette Schwindt, Stephen Hodgkiss and I have formed a new corporation called Wavefour Inc. This corporation is negotiating a marketing campaign with a new client that is hiring us to run an agent acquisition, reach, Craigslist, capture page campaign, having the potential to create over $500k for us when we reach target. This is exactly why we built Markethive, a market environment designed to incubate, support and enable small, moderate and large business.

And Markethive Groups is the epicenter of all of this. Welcome to the new Market Network of the future. Markethive!

David Ogden

Helping people help themselves

David Ogden – Http://markethive.com/david-ogden

The spy in your inbox

Technology Lab —

The spy in your inbox

One PR company—and its tracking program—creep out an Ars writer.

BY: Sean Gallagher – 11/6/2012

Everything on the Internet is monitored in some way. Companies track what you do at work through deep packet inspection to make sure you don't wander into territory forbidden by company policy, or dump corporate data to a remote server just before you give notice. The Web pages you visit and the HTML-based mass e-mails you open are logged and tracked by advertisers and marketers. And your boss can tell if you've ever opened that urgent message or not.

But people usually don't throw it in your face and shatter whatever remaining illusions of privacy you might have, as someone did to my colleague Andrew Cunningham today."Oh, man, a PR person was just totally creepy at me," he interjected over IRC this morning.

The "creepy" was an e-mail that a media representative for a company called ContactMonkey sent on the heels of another one Cunningham had just opened. The second message included information about his location, the e-mail client he had used to open it, and the exact time it had been opened.

The message and the data were a demonstration of Bridge, a $5-a-month service that installs a plugin for Microsoft's Outlook 2010 mail client and for Google's Chrome browser for use with GMail. Bridge gives anyone the power to know those details for any message they send—or at least any message that lands in the inbox of someone who trustingly opens e-mails without blocking HTML-embedded images.

Invisible sprites

That's because Bridge uses an embedded graphic with a unique Web address to track each message. That Web address includes calls to ContactMonkey's tracker API, which include a message identifier and the e-mail address of the sender. When the recipient opens a tracked e-mail, it sends a secure Web request back to ContactMonkey's server identifying the message, and the server records the IP address that the message was opened from and the date and time. Then it pushes back data to the sender, including how many times the message was viewed, the geographic location it was viewed at (based on the IP address), and the type of client it was viewed from (based on what the mail client reports as its type when it makes the HTML request).

Using graphics to collect metrics is an old hack, going back to the "sprites" used on many early personal Web pages to track page views. Web request based tracking is also heavily used by both legitimate large-scale e-mailers and spam factories to collect information such as when and where e-mails are opened, and to test the "hit rate" for various subject lines and offer teases.

But ContactMonkey gets even more personal about it, because it identifies each recipient explicitly, and reports back directly on them. It's a technique akin to those used by some "spear-phishing" attacks to inject code into e-mails—no, it doesn't execute code on the client. But it does create a way to collect information that might be useful for stalking someone.

Sweeping for bugs

There's an easy way to block this sort of tracking with most mail clients. Microsoft Outlook, for example, will allow users to block embedded graphics in e-mails from all sources, or only display them in e-mails from sources in the user's contact list. Most companies will set their mail systems to block HTML-embedded objects in messages for security purposes.

Users of Apple's Mail app have a little less fine-grain control—unchecking "Display remote images in HTML messages" in Mail's "Viewing" preferences blocks all HTML-embedded images from loading when you open a message. But that's not the case with some mobile and Web-based mail clients—the iOS Mail app and Android 4's built-in mail client, for example, both open HTML enclosures by default. That means if you open a bugged e-mail from a mobile device, the sender will be able to get information on where you are based on whatever IP address gets associated with your phone or tablet, whether it's via Wi-Fi or your cellular provider.

If you do get tracked and discover it, however, there are some interesting ways to disrupt the tracking. For example, you could clip the tracking tag from the email and post it as a graphic or link on a website.

But that something like Bridge can be so easily blocked, and that it takes advantage of technologies that most business users may consider to be a security threat, should be enough to discourage most legitimate users from trying to use the service. After all, it's really just a sneaky way of doing the same thing that a Return-Receipt-To e-mail header does, without giving the recipient a choice. And very few legitimate mass-mailers generate their e-mails from Outlook or GMail.

So that makes Bridge the provenance of a very narrow strip of users, one that includes stalkers, private investigators, ex-spouses and high-pressure salespeople—and the occasional public relations consultant.

Article originated from: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/the-spy-in-your-inbox/

P.S. Email tracking (spying) is done right in your face with almost all the commercial email providers.

Marketing Department

P.S.S. Markethive does not employ spying techniques.

David Ogden – Http://markethive.com/david-ogden

Inbound Marketing For Dummies

Inbound Marketing For Dummies "or"

When Out Bound Marketing and I separated our ways for good!

In 1996 or there about, I was approached by a well-known marketer, David D’Arcangelo. We were associates at that time in the Network Marketing business and we both lived in San Diego. He pitched me on a new deal he felt was a considerable advantage in the industry, had an organization begun (He has a large sphere of influence from his radio shows). He was proposing he run major ads in papers like USA Today, etc. and round robin the incoming leads to the new distributors. He felt that he and I could work together on this and build a sound solution for the ‘rank and file” recruits. With his name and advertising and the advantage I had because I owned a big marketing system (which came to be known as Veretekk).

I enrolled about 10 people based on this agreement and we scheduled our first tele bridged conference call. My wife Annette (my girlfriend at the time) and I were excited before the call began. On the call nothing was said about a Co-op distribution round robin. What did transpire, was David took control of the call from me, then quickly introduced his friend John Green and pitched the leads John Green was selling from CuttingEdgeMedia (This is my recollection). John Green and David claimed they were awesome pre interviewed leads and cost $20 each.

Annette immediately expressed her anger that we had been baited and switched, and the call was a disaster. I was also angered as I have always found buying leads a foolish pursuit. Ho9wever, this time< I wanted to use these leads to conduct a real survey.

I paid for 100 leads, about $2000 for the 100 super hot, pre interviewed hot ready to join my business leads. I also bought the USA Today white pages on CD Rom as a control subject.

I spent 4 weeks and tracked the results in an Excel Spread sheet. I called every lead in that database. I called everyday of the week. At 3 different times for each lead at 10am, 2pm, and 6pm. I also called Saturdays at 12 noon and 8 pm in their time zone until I actually talked to someone.

Of the John Greene leads 80% of the list was contacted. 20% never answered or numbers were disconnected or wrong numbers. Of the remaining 80% I was able to talk to 80% said very nasty profanity at me, demanded I remove them from the list, and were extremely angered and some threatened me with legal action. Even when I explained I was doing “lead” research, told them who sold them and that they were supposedly interviewed.

Not one was interviewed. Either they called me a liar or the provider a liar or said they had no recollection of being interviewed. There were 2 out of the 100 who expressed some interest in the business, but further calls were never answered and nothing ever came from these halfhearted interests.

USA Today leads

In sharp contrast I must report on the 100 names and phones numbers I pulled from the USA Today white pages disk as a control to the research. Of the 100 I called on the same routine, 97% connected. Not one of them expressed anger, called me names or hung up on me. Most of them were still not interested, but I did get 12 very interested to join and 3 actually did join.

This is Outbound Marketing

This technique to cold call is a daunting process even back in the days, even for professionals. Today it is virtually a total waste of time. When people do answer and don’t know who you are 96% just hang up. The others usually take some time to insult you. It is over. Outbound marketing is now a total waste of time and money.

It is time to understand Inbound Marketing

So I have produced this blog and video for the Dummies out there. It is Inbound Marketing for Dummies. If you are ever going to find success, you are going to have to embrace, understand and intitiate the process called Inbound Marketing.

You are in luck, because Markethive is one of the top state of the art, “Inbound Marketing” platforms in the world and it is the only one that is free!

Inbound Marketing For Dummies

By now you probably heard some of the buzz about inbound marketing. But just what exactly is it?

Inbound marketing is like marketing with a magnet vs. a megaphone. Its marketing based on quality content, that attracts a steady stream of qualified leads.

At this point and time outbound marketing has completely lost it edge. Did you know that the average person sees anywhere from 3000 to 20,000 outbound advertisements per day? No wonder no one is paying any attention.

Shouting at your audience with a megaphone is no longer the most cost-effective or productive way of marketing your business, Inbound Marketing is. The cool part is that inbound marketing methods are almost always less time-consuming and less expensive than traditional lead generation methods.

Not only are they cheaper but they are more effective. Inbound leads are eight times more likely to become customers, and close at a much higher rate. In fact while outbound marketing has an average closing rate of 1.7%, inbound marketing has an astounding closing rate of 14.6%.

All that savings means the companies that Focus primarily on inbound marketing, typically spend 62% less per lead than companies that don't. So how does it work?

Think of it like a giant funnel, prospects come in at the top, happy customers come out the bottom. Today 88% of consumers are conducting their own product research online before making a purchase.

Therefore the key to being found and trusted on the web is generating relevant content to what people are searching for. This is the first part of our inbound marketing funnel. Once you have their attention we need to capture their information.

Generally this is done with more awesome content in the form of digital media such as free offers, articles, case studies, videos, free services and more. The next part of our marketing funnel is where we create an automated system, by which we turn these qualified leads which came in from our offers into Happy paying customers, who refer more new customers because of all the awesome content you're putting up.

At Markethive we deliver inbound marketing methods such as SEO, Broadcasting, Capture Pages, Social Media, massive reach, Work Groups, Co-op Advertising videos, and so much more, to establish you as the authority in your industry, and create a client magnet that will generate a constant stream of qualified leads just for you. Let us help you to establish an online presence, attract new leads, and convert prospects all on autopilot.

Marketing Manager Staff

David Ogden – Http://markethive.com/david-ogden