Doesn’t his manly pick-up truck look lovely!?

DIY Car Magnet – Flower Design is a post from: Blogging Magnets

If you want to add a little vintage vitality to your home or office, try making this magnetic mosaic design. Our design reminds me of  the beautiful tile work that you see in countries bordering the Mediterranean sea

Starburst Tile Magnetic Mosaic is a post from: Blogging Magnets

Check out these pictures to see the hot rodding process:

Thumbs up, indeed, to the flaming hot rod Jetta.

How to ‘Hot Rod’ your car with magnets! is a post from: Blogging Magnets

In our previous post, we made a magnetic car sign utilizing scrap magnetic material to support our favorite football team, the Jets. If you are interested in making magnetic mosaic designs, you’re in luck! This post is an in depth tutorial on how to make your own magnetic mosaic sign. For this tutorial, we made the little red Pac Man ghost known as ‘Blinky’. Isn’t it cute?

Here is what you’ll need to get started:

1. Magnetic scrap material, or magnetic strips.

2. Scissors or a paper cuter

3. Magnetic surface (i.e. refrigerator)

Step 1: Take your magnetic strips and cut them into 1 inch squares or whatever size you like.

Step 2: Choose the colors you want to use for the background (aqua), the object (red) and other details such his eyes(black and white).

Step 3: Do the outside border first and move your way in. Like a puzzle

Step 4: Place the magnetic squares as close together as possible. When the image is done, fill in extra spaces with some little strips. The design won’t be perfect so you can fill in the extra spaces with some extra bits and pieces.

Final Result: Voila!  ‘Blinky’ the Pacman ghost is completed and ready to be displayed

Magnetic Mosaic Design Tutorial is a post from: Blogging Magnets

Exceed expectations: This is a no-brainer. Remember when you walked into an establishment and were greeted someone with a happy face who was there to help you when you needed it? Your experience there probably put a smile on your face, didn’t it? Apply the same techniques that made it a memorable experience to your business culture. If you have an online business, make sure you keep your customers updated on their purchase at every step. Confirm payment receipt, thank them for their purchase, provide them with an invoice, and give them tracking information. If something goes wrong during or after a transaction, make sure you help them until their problem is resolved. This doesn’t require any extra money, just some extra time and patience.

Treat your customers like friends: You don’t have to invite your customers to your house to make them feel special, but friendly small talk always makes someone feel remembered. You definitely won’t remember every single detail of every customer that you had a conversation with, but small talk never hurts if you recognize a face. If you own an online business, make sure that every returning customer sees a ‘welcome back’ banner on the landing page of your website.

Keep them in your inner circle: Make sure that you maintain a customer database with their e-mail and mailing address along with their last purchase so that you can keep them updated on various promotions and discounts.  You can also send them e-mails about products, services and special promotions that are related to their last purchase.  Click here to read about e-mail marketing best practices.

Celebrate with them: Take your customers’ birthday information and send them a personalized card or e-card with a special discount or coupon for their birthday. You can be sure that some customers won’t let a perfectly good coupon sent especially for their birthday go to waste.

Encourage feedback:  Invite customers’ criticisms and let them know that you want your products, services, and customer service to meet their needs.  You’ll be surprised of the great advice you get from customers and many of them would be happy to give you their two cents or praise your business.  But don’t just stop there –implement what’s been recommended!

Turn that frown upside down:  Save for utopian societies, not every customer you serve will be completely happy with your products or services. If a customer is upset or disappointed, offer some options to assuage their concern, be it a discount on their next purchase, store credit, a gift certificate, etc.  

Create a loyalty program: Membership, customer loyalty, or point accumulation plans works like a charm.  According to ntouchloyalty.com, “studies show that customers who belong to a loyalty program visit twice as often and spend 4 times as much as those that don’t”.  

With these simple tips, you can easily get many customers to come back time and time again. You don’t need to implement these ideas all at one time.  Rather, just pick a few that fit your business model and try them out! It certainly can’t hurt, right?

How to Retain Customer Loyalty is a post from: Blogging Magnets

Picture this:  XYZ Cosmetics is a new make-up company that wants to quickly gain market share.  Stumbling upon a blogger’s video channel on YouTube chock-full of tutorials, trends, reviews, and tips -with 30,000+ subscribers and 2,554,0888 channel views to boot- the cosmetic company can’t help but see the possibilities! 

Proactively contacting the blog’s owner, the cosmetic company sends free samples to be reviewed on blog’s channel.  Fast forward a week to the actual review, where a significant percentage of viewers visit the cosmetic company’s Web site to learn more their products and even make a purchase.

Sound too good to be true?  Not so.  With these simple tips partnering with bloggers to gain extra exposure and sales can be as easy as pie! 

Research: Target bloggers who are involved in your industry, (i.e. gadget and tech savvy consumers, fashion gurus, etc.) and see if their followers or subscribers fit your customer profile. To penetrate the market even deeper, you might want to research various blogs that have a substantial amount of traffic and subscribers.

Sign Up: Sign up to their blog so that you can contact them about partnership opportunities. Bloggers are usually very open to sharing information about companies’ products and services that are related to their subscribers’ interests.

Join a business and blogger network: Many Web sites such as Business2blogger.com or Tomoson.com allow you to target and connect with thousands ,YES THOUSANDS of bloggers who are eager to partner with businesses for various promotions. It is a one stop shop for marketers and business owners.

Provide Incentives:  Encourage them to write or video blog a review about your product or service by offering some form of compensation. You can provide them with free samples, a  free product or service, a gift certificate, or just some cold hard cash. This is a win-win situation for both the blogger and your business.  Please keep in mind that it is the blogger’s responsibility to fully disclose what their compensation requirements are, if any.

Capitalize the opportunity: Take advantage of all the other things you can do while partnering with a blogger. A partnership with a blogger can give you link building opportunities by having the blogger post multiple links of your company’s Web site on their page. This will allow their followers to go directly to your product pages after reading or watching the bloggers review. In addition, you can use this as an opportunity to expand your social network by having the blogger refer their followers to your Facebook and/or Twitter page.  

Stay true to your word: Don’t try to take advantage of a blogger and try to control what they write or say about your company to their audience. They are entitled to their opinion and will give their followers honest feedback of your product or service. The last thing they want to do is misinform their audience and risk losing followers.

Make sure your product or service is up to par: To ensure good reviews, make sure your product or service is of the highest quality. If you know that something needs tweaking, don’t bother having a blogger review it because their review will be seen by hundreds or even thousands of prospective customers.   A bad review will come back to haunt you sooner rather than later.

Keep in Touch: After doing one promotion or activity with a blogger, make sure you keep them in your network and update them on future promotions and new products/services. They might blog about your business again and you can build and maintain a great relationship as well. This will also make them more likely to recommend you to other bloggers, friends, and their followers. 

Now that you have some insight on how bloggers can help your business, give it a whirl! This can lead to many prosperous relationships. Also, a blogger who is genuinely interested in your company can be a potential brand ambassador.  

Connecting with Bloggers is a post from: Blogging Magnets

Imagine your company’s ad(s) appearing at the top of Google search results pages when prospective customers search for a term relating to your business or company.  Or what about serving ads to local Facebook users who meet your company’s buyer profile? Talk about highly targeted and strategic! 

Used by companies large and small, most of the online advertising tools such as Google Adwords and Facebook Ads are easy to use and highly effective, allowing you to set your own budget and control when and how many times your ads will run.  What’s more, with many sites you only pay when a customer clicks on your ad, landing directly onto your Web site.

Paid online advertising has many advantages:

• You can create, run, and completely manage highly targeted campaigns
• You get more detailed feedback of your audience
• If your Web site is not optimized for organic search (SEO), you can use paid ads to make up the difference and drive traffic and sales to your business

Getting started:

1. Choose which advertiser(s) you’d like to partner with (i.e.:  Google Adwords, Facebook, etc.)
2. Depending on the advertiser chosen, you’ll need to select the keywords under which your ads will be delivered and/or select just who should see your ads (i.e.:  single 18-34 year old males on the East coast)
3. Draft the ad copy!  The best ads always contain an offer and a call to action
4. Create a landing page where the user will be taken to after clicking on your ad.  The best landing pages are clutter free and reiterate the ad’s offer and call to action.
5. Monitor your campaigns’ performance and tweak accordingly (ad copy, the offer, who you’re targeting, when your ads are being run, etc.) to maximize your budget and ROI

Whether your company is large or small or your organic SEO is strong or weak, paid online advertising is yet another revenue generating tool that’s worthy of further investigation. 

Online Advertising is a post from: Blogging Magnets

Step One: Writing a Press Release
Before putting pen to paper, you need to have a newsworthy announcement that merits media attention.  From announcing a new product to the purchase of a competitor, from the hiring of a new senior level staff member to the launch of a new Web site, there are many business comings and goings that warrant a formal announcement.  Which of your company coming and goings are newsworthy?

When ready to announce your event, drafting a press release is the next action of business.  A succinctly written piece detailing the who, what, where, when, why, and how of your announcement, press releases are sent to the media with the goal of giving them the ins and outs of a story.  Make a note to include a savvy title that garner’s the reader’s attention (journalist are notoriously busy, receiving hundreds of releases a day), answer the who, what, where, when, why, and how in the very first sentence, and include relevant quotes.

There really is a blending of art and science when it comes to drafting a solid press release, so much so that it warrants its own blog.  Fret not:  there’s a plethora of sources on the Web to help you along the way.

Step Two:  Creating a Media List
Just as you wouldn’t advertise a vegetarian restaurant to a group of hungry carnivores, you shouldn’t send your press release to everyone and everybody.  Rather, create a list of relevant journalists and editors from publications near and far that relate to your business and service.  If, for example, you want to announce a charitable donation to a local charity, your story has a plus or minus 10 mile radius angel –research local publications and create a list of relevant journalists and editors.  Include at a minimum their name, publication they work for, phone number, and e-mail address.

Step Three:  Pitch Away
E-mail your press release to each contact on your media list.  Things to keep in mind:

• Though it may sound redundant, copy and paste your press release into the body of your e-mail, and also make a note to also attach a soft copy.
• Nobody likes group e-mail, journalists alike.  Each contact on your media list should get their own personalized e-mail (i.e.:  Dear <contact name>,).
• Include an e-card at the bottom of your message so reporters don’t have to dig around for your contact information, should they have a question.
• Be polite and professional!

Depending on the press release in question, it may behoove you to call down your media list to ensure it was received, if and only if a few days pass with no correspondence.  At the end of the day, media relations is all about, well, creating relationships with the media, and there’s no better way to do so than picking up the phone.

Step Four:  Other Stuff
Although these considerations don’t fit into a neat little category per se, they certainly do add value to your efforts:

• You spent the time drafting a great press release –get a bit more mileage by adding it to your Web site under a ‘news’ section.
• To bring closure and see the fruit of your labors, bookmark and/or cut out any articles your company is mentioned in.
• Add hyperlinks (pointing to your Web site, of course) to your press release and send it out with a service like PR Newswire.  SEO gold.

Indeed, there’s no need to spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on a PR firm that over promises and under delivers.  With a fine tuned strategy, a strong press release, and a well researched media list you’re on your way to the PR jackpot.

Getting your Small Business Written Up in the Media is a post from: Blogging Magnets

Learn it and Embrace it
To start off, create a profile for yourself so that you can see how it works from a consumer’s point-of-view. Check out how your favorite companies and businesses are using social media, and take notes on how they engage customers and prospects. For example, many companies like to conduct referral contests to increase their fan base to help gain awareness, credibility, and additional sales. Similarly, if you own a restaurant you can post your special promotions and events on your page and draw people in with contests or information they are sure to seek out.

Social media 101: do not ‘sell’ your products or services via social media. Rather, the goal is to ‘engage’ and provide information your audience will find useful as relates to your company. For example, if you own a hair salon you can give tips on hair styles for various face shapes and sizes. You are not selling your haircutting service, but rather providing valuable information that, in turn, might get interested parties to your salon. Given that people love to watch informative videos, you can create videos and post them on YouTube to reach a greater market.

Social Media and SEO
Having social media profiles for your business greatly helps with SEO. At the surface each social media platform will have a link pointed to your Web site and, as written in a prior post on SEO , links are the most important SEO factor.
Digging a bit deeper, given a recent change in the Bing Search engine, Facebook friends who liked your page are now showing up within relevant search results. Having user’s friends populate search results helps to establish a level of trustworthiness and provide greater real estate for your company or brand in the search engines. Likewise, having videos on YouTube also helps increase the chances that your brand appears in relevant search results.

Keep your competitors close
Bookmarking your competitors and their social media sites will help you understand just how they’re marketing and using social media —all in the name of beating them at their own game. Likewise, do the same with companies that you like and/or admire, whether or not they are in the same industry. After all, copying is the sincerest form of flattery.

Maintain persistence
Make sure that you add at least 3-4 posts per week with sites such as Facebook and Twitter. In addition, make sure you reply to anyone who posts comments on your page –be it positive or negative. People like knowing that someone is there and ready to talk and interact with them. Most importantly, NEVER delete negative comments –something that is guaranteed to bite you down the road. Rather, respond accordingly and embrace it as free feedback.

Promote with exclusive offers
To grow your fan base, offer some exclusive offers to your fans or followers. For example, a restaurant owner can offer people a free appetizer if they recruit five friends to your Facebook page. This is a fantastic way to gain a greater fan base as well as drive additional paying customers to your business.

Tag -your it!
On blogging Web sites such as YouTube or WordPress, make a note to tag categories that relate to everything you post. A simple way of helping users finding relevant content, tags will greatly increase the likelihood of your content appearing when searched for. In addition, when people are watching videos that are similar to yours on someone else’s channel, your video will appear on screen as a ‘related video’.
Social Media is a fun and flexible way to promote and grow your business –and it will only continue to expand in importance and scope. All said and done, don’t forget to have fun and continuously revamp your strategies to help grow your business and bottom line.

Utilizing Social Media to Grow your Small Business (Part II) is a post from: Blogging Magnets