I’m following on from last week’s focus on inbound marketing tools and looking at freebies that will help you increase engagement with your prospects and customers.
There’s a simple way to describe engagement and that’s conducting a conversation with your audience rather than simply spattering stuff at them in a futile monologue of links and promotions.
On Twitter, for example, it’s good to schedule your tweets so that they reach your target audience at the best time for them, thereby maximising the chance to engage them in that conversation.
One great free tool to help you do this is Tweriod which analyses both your tweets and your followers’ tweets to find the best time to post for maximum exposure. You can find it here:
LinkedIn is a place where people often neglect to really engage and yet it is also an arena that can be more highly targeted than most which means better results.
Here’s a good piece on how to boost your engagement on LinkedIn:
http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/how-to-boost-engagement-on-your-linkedin-company-page/
Ways to optimize your website for engagement include making sure it loads as fast as possible so your visitor does not give up in frustration.
Of course, you want to know that your site loads fast for people all over the net and not just in your home or office and that’s where a site like Pingdom comes in.
Pingdom has a basic free option which will let you use it for one site or server and you can find it here:
You also want your visitors to be able to find what they want on your site quickly and easily. If you don’t have a search function you can either use one of the free WordPress plugins such as Search Everything:
http://wordpress.org/plugins/search-everything/
Or the free Google option:
Another great way to keep your visitors engaged and happy with your content is to offer related post suggestions and this is the plugin I like to use for that:
http://wordpress.org/plugins/contextual-related-posts/
And you will want to measure if your improvements have worked when it comes to increased engagement by using a tool like Google Analytics Goals:
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1032415?hl=en
Writing great copy and content is crucial to grabbing your visitors’ eyeballs and keeping them glued to your site.
This week’s Kindle freebie is a great find for all of you who would like to polish up your copy skills without having to wade through a lot of psychology or jargon:
http://www.amazon.com/Copywriting-For-Rest-Marketing-ebook/dp/B00CSTBZ2S/ref=zg_bs_154821011_f_8
And for our TED talk I’ve chosen one that is an all-time great and enormously popular: Brene Brown on shame, a follow up to her talk on vulnerability.
This is for all of you who are worried about failing so don’t take those leaps you need to make in your business – and that includes just about all of us at one time or another:
