Published on: 03 August 2016
Last Updated on: 29 May 2021
Have you ever wondered what it is that all successful entrepreneurs have in common?
What is it about them that makes them successful when others fail?
Do they have special tools, knowledge, or something else that the rest of us do not have?
Eight traits of a successful entrepreneur
First, let’s look at the traits of successful entrepreneurs. Most successful entrepreneurs have these traits in common.
It seems most successful entrepreneurs have the determination to withstand the pressures of having to work on several goals at once.
You have to be able to communicate your ideas and wishes well in order to succeed you need to be able to make others see your vision.
You will find that most successful entrepreneurs have a lot of self-confidence. This confidence allows them to see the opportunity and not a challenge that most of us see it also allows them to understand the bigger the challenge the bigger the rewards are.
Continued education. The successful entrepreneurs crave education and never stop learning. That includes lessons when they fail at something; it wasn’t a failure if they learned something about the situation. They are not afraid to fail.
Passion for their field. Whatever their business is they are passionate about it. Passionate enough they can handle the added stress of building the business without it crumbling and collapsing.
Great at networking. They tend to network well and if you do not know networking the basic is to help people who can help you now or in the future. An example you are not ready for marketing but you provide a service or help to a marketing consultant for not cash but help in the near future when you are ready to market. You never know what kind of service or people you will need help from either.
They can easily adapt to the situation. If they need black ink but are out of it, for example, they can adapt and use another color or run to the nearest staples for a black ink. Yes, that is a very simple and basic example.
Understand their money situation. They understand how much money they have and what they can spend for a certain project or goal to get to where they are going. They also know how to get more capital whether it is investors or bank loans.
What tools are needed or used by entrepreneurs?
While traits go a long way in being successful; there are tools that can also help and you will find that most successful entrepreneurs will use them.
Let’s take a look at some of those tools:
Smartphone or tablet so that they can keep appointments, goals, to-do lists, and contacts all in one handy place.
Backups, most successful entrepreneurs will use automated backups. This saves time and headaches if hard-drives get damaged, computers such as tablets get lost or stolen and so on.
Networking both online such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and even Pinterest but also visit your local chamber of commerce where you can meet like-minded people who share your interests.
Online banking allows you to know your finances at all times if your bank does not provide online banking (pretty much most do now) then it may be time to switch your banking.
Access to your money. Using business credit cards has come far since they started. Many will offer you something in return for using them such as cashback, frequent flier miles, etc. Just understand the offer before you accept the card. The companies will also charge minimal fees to get you to use them.
So there are 5 essential tools for even more tools you can use you can check out these.
Business resources for you
We have put together a list of business resources for you.
Your local Chamber of Commerce
Small Business Administration tools including loans to help start and grow your business.
Employment Law Information Network provides information on employment laws.
GoPayment allows you to accept credit and debit card payments on your smartphone.
FedStats helps in your market research with statistics from more than 100 federal government agencies.
You also need to stay abreast of new digital marketing trends and tools that become available every day. Another resource to look at is mobile marketing tips.
Follow the tips and resources, build on your traits and you too can be a successful entrepreneur.
Lucia Patterson is the woman behind TheLegalGuides, a blog solely focused on legal guides, tips, and advice. Lucia loves essay writing and blogs at EssayWritingGuides from her college days.
The digital marketing landscape has become more diversified than ever in 2018 because consumers are generating their own content and marketers are searching for more ways to create product awareness and interest. Since the digital space is highly competitive, marketers are ready to do whatever they can for gaining a competitive advantage. However, instead of dipping your hand in all the pies, it is best if you use marketing strategies that are bound to increase your ROI in the form of more leads, higher traffic, increased conversion, and sales. In a nutshell, you want to use tactics that add something to your bottom line.
Listed below are 7 of those marketing tactics that do exactly that and can be used to boost profits in 2018:
Tactic 1: Instagram Ads
After Facebook, Instagram has become the newest force in social media. Just like Facebook Sponsored Posts and Twitter’s Promoted Tweets have given results, Instagram Ads can also be immensely powerful. They are like digital chameleons because they are able to blend in with the audience’s feed for increasing awareness and driving traffic to your website. While the demographics of the social network is similar to that of Facebook, Instagram has distinguished itself with a greater level of engagement and creativity and gives you exposure to the right audience.
Tactic 2: Reviews
The online reputation of a business can be hugely influenced by customer reviews. Businesses with no reviews, no recent reviews or with negative ones are at a significant disadvantage as opposed to their competition. As a matter of fact, more than 80% of people have stated that their buying decisions are influenced by negative customer reviews. Thus, it is essential for every business to get positive customer reviews and should also respond to them in a timely manner. Positive reviews can be showcased on the website and on social media and negative reviews can be addressed before they go viral. Improving the customer review score boosts SEO ranking and improves online reputation. The best way to get reviews from your customers is by contacting them directly. By using a tool called GMass, you can email all of your customers at one time asking them to write a review of their experience. They would be more likely to write a review if they are already online checking their emails than having to remember to write one after they got home from their shopping trip.
Tactic 3: Evergreen Content
This is content that stays relevant and interesting for a long time, regardless of any cultural change. This can include industry resources, tutorials, tips, and product reviews. While this usually refers to white papers and blog content, evergreen content can also be used for video content, infographics, and email marketing.
Tactic 4: Crowdsourced Content
Yes, the statement ‘content is king’ might be getting old, but it remains true still. Content remains very powerful in today’s competitive market and can turn the tide for a business. The problem is that turning out heaps of creative and useful content requires lots of resources and time. Therefore, it is not surprising to see a new trend emerge; businesses have begun to collaborate and crowdsource because this allows them to get access to meaningful and relevant content. By soliciting ideas from others, a business is able to get the best quality content and save a ton of its valuable time without making any compromises on quality. With crowdsourcing, you leave the idea and word generation to someone else, mostly in your industry. This enables a business to get insights it may not have come up on its own. Also, using this content allows you to reach a greater audience because the ones who created the content will also share it out.
Read also: Improve Your Local SEO Via Content Marketing
Tactic 5: Retargeting Ads
You just checked out an amazing new camera on Amazon and now when you visit Facebook, YouTube or any other website, you can see ads about cameras. This is a feature of Google Adwords and ad serving networks of other search engines, which is called retargeting or remarketing. When you check a business’s website, they can serve you with relevant and interesting ads wherever you go. Marketers are thrilled with this tactic whereas customers feel a bit creeped out. The best part? Your business already knows what the customer is looking for and targeting them with similar products will actually bring them back to you.
Tactic 6: Video Content Marketing
Traditionally, video marketing for dispersing content was termed unfeasible and getting an ROI from the video was quite difficult. However, this is the era of smartphones that have spectacular cameras and video streaming services that show you videos in just a few taps. This means that now the benefits of video content marketing can go beyond its cost. Every business needs to use video for product launches, Vlogs, tutorials, and tips because they provide value to the viewers. Videos allow a business to use humor, appeal to emotion and aid apprehension for relating to your customers in a better way. The same cannot be achieved with a written blog.
Tactic 7: Custom Landing Pages
Simply put, landing pages are webpages describing a piece of content, which require users to enter their information to unlock the said content. It is regarded as a lead capture tool because you want to be able to convert the readers into leads and customers when they go over your content. Otherwise, it is only a waste of time and resources. Landing pages linked from an email or blog should be connected to digital marketing content. Also, the featured content can be an eBook, white paper or anything else, but it has to be valuable enough for people to give their contact info.
Using these 7 proven marketing tactics will help a business in increasing its ROI in 2018 effectively.
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Content marketing has been around for quite a long time, and it is the go-to marketing strategy for many businesses nowadays. But everybody uses it, and the results they get are more or less along the same lines…in terms of the time they take to materialize.
What if you’re looking to get better results from your content marketing endeavors? What if you want to do some smart work rather than hard work?
In this post, let’s take a look at some answers to this question.
What Is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is basically defined as the type of marketing that involves creating and publishing/distributing content to a certain audience. The purpose of distributing this type of content is to increase awareness of the product/services so that they can be sold more. While “content,” in this context, refers to the content of all types, mostly written stuff is utilized for marketing purposes.
This type of marketing takes different shapes and forms.
Some people can engage in content marketing by writing and publishing blogs regularly. Others can utilize their product pages as a medium to engage in marketing, i.e., by making the descriptions and the visuals, etc., appealing and attractive.
Actually, instead of mentioning them here somewhat haphazardly, let’s look at some of the content marketing methods in detail before moving on to the tips.
What Are Some Common Methods Of Content Marketing?
Here are a few of the common ways in which content marketing is employed.
Blogs: Blogs, especially when created by a professional writing service, have a key role that goes beyond just advertising products or services. Their main goal is to educate and engage readers. This approach helps grow a brand's readership and audience. By providing valuable and informative content, the brand naturally attracts more people. This isn't just a marketing strategy; it's about genuinely helping readers. As more people find the blogs helpful, they start to trust and follow the brand, leading to increased business opportunities. With the help of a blog writing agency such as Compose.ly, brands can consistently deliver high-quality content that connects with their audience.
Emails: Email marketing is technically a marketing strategy on its own, but since it almost always utilizes content of some sort, it can also be mentioned in content marketing. In an email marketing campaign, individuals are reached out separately by the brand. These emails can either inform the recipient about some sort of new product release, a sale or a special discount, etc.
Newsletters: Newsletters are technically emails, but they are not like other messages that are typically used and sent in an email marketing campaign. While the latter, for the most part, directly promote the offerings of a brand, newsletters are geared toward educating the readers. You can think about them to be a type of hybrid between a blog and a typical email marketing message.
E-books: While this one is a more elaborate step than what brands usually do, it is a good way to engage in content marketing.
Now, with all that out of the way, let’s take a look at some tips that you can follow to get better results from your content marketing endeavors.
Tips For Getting Better Results From Content Marketing
As we mentioned earlier, while content of all types can be employed in content marketing, written content is the most common…and perhaps the toughest to create. That is why our tips will be geared towards it in particular.
Don’t Write Like A Robot, And Don’t Write For Robots
In that rather wordsmith-is line, we’ve summed up one of the most important principles of writing online content.
Firstly, when you write content for marketing purposes, be it of whatever type and kind, you should make sure that your tone is friendly, communicative, and human-like. Mind you, there are exceptional cases where a totally opposite tone would be more suitable, but we are talking about the common cases here.
This is what we mean by not writing like a robot.
Here is what you can do to make your writing tone fall into this criterion. Of course, depending on the situation at hand, some of these tips may not be very applicable.
Try and refer to the reader as “you” and yourself as “I” or “we.” This is one of the basic and simplest ways to make your tone look more natural and human-like.
Since you have to make your written content look more like a conversation than a piece of written text, you should reduce your overall use of passive voice. People hardly use passive voice when they speak. I mean, I could have just said, “The passive voice is hardly used by people when they speak,” but I did just make my point.
Keep sentences short. Keeping your sentences short can also give a natural touch to your writing and make it more reader-friendly.
The second part of our tip was Don’t write for robots.
We should actually clear this up a little before moving on.
Nowadays, a lot of content marketing is done via search engines. When people write blogs, they channel them to their readers via search engines. The same goes for a lot of other types of content, like product descriptions and e-books, etc.
Now, in a bid to make their content look nice to the search engines, a lot of people can end up making it look too mechanical, erratic, and awkward for human taste.
Consider the following example:
We offer the best ramen in Tokyo. Our quality ramen store in Tokyo is very good. Buy quality ramen near me in Tokyo. (Note the atrocious keyword usage)
Good content? For the search engine, maybe. For the reader? It’s just gibberish.
You have to avoid doing this sort of stuff when writing content for your audience. You should strike a balance between making the content appealing for SEs as well as your human readers.
Do Proper Research…And Use It
When it comes to content marketing materials such as blogs and newsletters, your aim should be to provide reliable and educative content to your audience. This can only be done if you do proper research and then utilize it when writing the content itself.
In this part, let’s look at how you can do research properly and what benefits you can get from it.
Here are some things that you can do for effective research:
Look for popular and reliable sources on the internet. Before you start gleaning information from anywhere, you should establish its reliability first.
Once done, be sure to find out relevant facts and figures to add to your content. This tip is, of course, subjective. In some types of content, adding facts and figures may not be very suitable. However, it can be a good idea in things like blog posts, emails, and the like.
If you find yourself in a situation where you have to use some material from a source verbatim in its actual form.
(More important than implementing theoretical and conceptual information is the utilization of the data you get from audience research. In other words, you should conduct audience research and then use the details that you find to adjust your content as per the needs of the audience. When we say “audience research,” we basically refer to using analytical tools to find out necessary information and details about your audience, such as the details about their age, gender, location, and so on.)
Now let’s look at what benefits you can get by doing and incorporating research into your work.
Authority: When your content is backed with research, it comes off as authoritative. For example, when you present a stat for a certain situation or occurrence, it looks more grounded as compared to an opinionated guess.
Up-to-date information: Conducting research can also get you in touch with up-to-date information. By not researching your material before writing it, you can get stuck with old, outdated information that can neither help you nor your readers.
Value: When your content is based on research, it provides value to your readers. For problems, it can provide solutions. For choices, it can provide expert opinions.
This sort of content is a lot more potent in building a better readership and for growing your brand.
Aim For Content Perfection
Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection, we can catch excellence.
Vince Lombardi
It’s a bit of a dramatic way to start off this heading, but it does make the point that we want.
No content is perfect because perfection (least of all in written content) is not achievable. But if you aim for the bullseye, you can land somewhere close to it.
That is why you should make all the effort possible to remove all types of imperfections from your content.
Grammar errors: Grammar errors are by far the most common and most harmful errors that you can make in your content. You should be proactive about avoiding such errors during the writing phase. And once you do write the content, you should take steps like proofreading the content and using an online grammar checker to weed out the remaining ones.
Clunky readability issues: Readability issues, such as confusing words, long-winded sentences, and weird phrase choices, can also adversely affect the quality of content. you can remove these types of imperfections from your content by using an online AI-driven paraphrasing tool. A good AI paraphraser can improve the readability of the provided content during the rephrasing process.
Plagiarism: Plagiarism is like the diamondback of content imperfections. You can’t spot it quickly enough, and it can kill the quality of your write-up without you realizing it. Removing this imperfection is necessary and tricky at the same time. The best way to go about it is to use an online plagiarism checker and then analyze the results to take the steps you need.
Conclusion
A lot of brands do content marketing nowadays. But, to bring yourself a cut above the others, you have to follow some best practices. We’ve outlined a few of those in the post above.
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Content is the lifeblood of digital marketing. It’s your single best source for attracting prospects, educating them, and moving them down the conversion funnel. But the way content works has changed—and so have the content marketing challenges. Content marketing becomes more complex every year and requires a lot of effort to keep it fresh and interesting. Let’s take a deep dive into our list with the key content marketing challenges for the upcoming year.
1. Maintaining brand consistency
People want to know that they are getting the same quality of content from your company, no matter where they are looking. This includes your blog, social media channels, print collateral, ads, etc. It's critical to create a consistent brand through all of your channels so that your customers can easily find you. By having a consistent brand across multiple platforms, you're telling customers they can trust you, and you're also building up their loyalty towards your brand.
2. Boosting brand authority
Another challenge will be your authority in relation to content creation. You want to make sure that what you're sharing with your audience is valuable and worth their time. Brands will have to work harder than ever before to maintain their authority over the market. Make sure you get your name out there and keep your company with customers and prospects top of mind. Also, make sure your brand's voice is unique and listen to feedback from your audience so you can become more authoritative on topics people care about.
3. Establishing an omnichannel marketing strategy
Creating content for each of the social media platforms can be overwhelming. However, the right headless CMS platform can help you deliver content across various devices. What is a Headless CMS, you wonder? This type of content management system not only delivers your content to your website but also powers other channels and devices. It gives you the freedom to manage your content without writing code, making it easy to publish across screens like websites, blogs, or mobile apps.
4. Generating high-quality leads
Content is king, but the king will die without loyal subjects. There is no magic recipe for generating leads through content marketing. Existing tools provide only basic targeting options, and they are often too broad to reach your specific audience. The lack of targeted leads means that many companies cannot meet their goals and scale their businesses, despite creating high-quality content regularly. You'll have to start testing different types of content and lead generation strategies if you want to see results and improve your conversion rates.
5. Creating engaging content
Today's readers prefer engaging content because it helps readers to learn something new from them. Instead of selling products directly through your blog posts, you have to find an indirect way to do it by providing valuable information and solutions for your readers' needs. This will help you build trust and credibility with your readers, which is essential for a successful online business.
6. Keeping up with Google’s algorithms
Google's algorithms are constantly changing. In order to ensure optimal search rankings, SEO experts say that companies must diversify their strategies by adding engaging video content that is optimized with keywords that relate to the company's brand. Video content also has the advantage of being easily shared across all social media channels. A Google algorithm update can have enormous implications for your business. To keep up, you need consistent content that builds brand awareness, customer loyalty, and ultimately, profits.
7. Using interactive content
In 2022, brands will have to come up with new ways to engage their audience and add interactivity to their content to stand out from the crowd. All these factors will contribute to a major shift in where content is consumed and how it's consumed. This evolution will be fueled by the rapid adoption of mobile devices, increased bandwidth, and the growing popularity of voice search. The main challenge for marketers will be providing content that is easy to digest on all these platforms.
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