Chapter 2: Effective Online Marketing Plans Include SocialMedia

Chapter 15: Digging Even Deeper: Finding Your Audience Through Search....................................................................................................................78

Use the Search function to find your audience..............................................78 Search (auto feed)...............................................................................................................78 Search (specific)....................................................................................................................80 Searching for specific accounts.................................................................................80 Searching for specific topics.........................................................................................81 Searching for hashtags....................................................................................................82 Following hashtags............................................................................................................83 Using the sort functions within Instagram search.......................................84 Sorting options when searching for hashtags................................................85

Chapter 16: Making Use of Comments and Views to Grow Your Audience..............................................................................................................87

Comments are a great way to filter your audience.....................................87 Clicking on views to find your audience members......................................89

Chapter 17: Using Aggregate Accounts to Find Like Minded People90

Aggregate accounts and the ‘@’ credit................................................................90

Chapter 18: Even Ads Can Help You Build Your Audience.................92

Letting Instagram ads lead you to your audience.........................................92 Liking an ad..............................................................................................................................92 Hiding ads that don’t appeal to you........................................................................93 Finding like minded people through an ad......................................................94

Chapter 19: Engaging With Your Audience.............................................95

Get personal............................................................................................................................96 Be authentic............................................................................................................................96 Stay positive.............................................................................................................................96 Make it meaningful............................................................................................................97 Go direct.....................................................................................................................................97

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Chapter 20: Summary......................................................................................98 CONTACT ME......................................................................................................99 BIO........................................................................................................................100

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| Going the Social Distance: Building a Sustainable Audience on Social Media

GOING THE SOCIAL DISTANCE: BUILDING A SUSTAINABLE AUDIENCE ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Introduction

We are living in an era of great transition, poised at the edge of so many unknowns. People are reinventing their lives and re-deciding what they want to do with their careers. Business owners are restructuring how they do business and more people are working from home.

While businesses find ways to adapt to a constantly shifting environment, building effective marketing campaigns is more crucial than ever. That also means that knowing how to market your business online is more important now than it’s ever been.

This book will cover essential and powerful, yet practical and simple steps you can begin incorporating into your daily online use that will help you grow your audience and expand your business.

In fact, these steps are so simple that you may wonder why you haven’t been doing them all along. Yet most professionals aren’t aware of just how easy it is to market their businesses online.

A quick word about why you want this book

This book is not about building a huge following in the blink of any eye. It’s not about popularity contests or “get rich quick” tactics.

It’s about building a sustainable audience of likeminded people who will remain with you and help you grow.

Rapid expansion tricks don’t work. You’ll gain a lot of “followers” quickly, but they will be gone just as quickly. Followers that you acquire through tricks are using the same tactics. These people follow you just long enough to get the follow-back. Then they unfollow you because the name of that game is to have tens of thousands more following you than you follow yourself.

If you apply the principles and guidelines laid out in this book you will grow your audience quickly, but that audience will be made up of people who want to see what you have to share.

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| Going the Social Distance: Building a Sustainable Audience on Social Media

It’s easy to build an audience on social media platforms if you know how.

Social media accounts are free and if you’re not making use of them as a business owner, you’re leaving behind a valuable set of tools that could be working for you— expanding your audience and increasing your revenue.

In this book, we’re going to focus on highly effective ways to grow a sustainable audience on Instagram. These techniques can be used on just about any social media platform, This book is like Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube and TikTok, for instance. There about building are also a wide variety of other an audience of online venues you may not be like-minded aware of, that you can make people who will use of to market your business. remain with Download from my website, a you and help free PDF “Seeding the Internet” you grow. for more on that topic.

Each platform has a slightly different way of guiding account users through the interactionprocess, but if you understand the generalprinciples I’m going to teach you in these chapters, you’ll be able to transfer your marketing skills anywhere that people congregate on the Internet.

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GOING THE SOCIAL DISTANCE

BUILDING A SUSTAINABLE AUDIENCE ON SOCIAL MEDIA

GOING THE SOCIAL DISTANCE: HOW TO BUILD A SUSTAINABLE AUDIENCE ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Chapter 1: How I Learned Social Media Marketing

Building an audience of 26,000 in less than 3 months.

I discovered the techniques I’m about to teach you unintentionally. In fact, building a large audience was a by-product of simply being myself, living by my own set of values. Some of you will remember MySpace. In 2006, I was one of many artists sharing music on what was then a ragingly popular social media platform. Within the first three months of uploading my first few songs, I gained an audience of over 25,000 ‘friends’.

I wasn’t talking about my music and never asked another person to come visit my profile. I simply answered my inbox messages, made comments on other people’s content, and voiced my appreciation for what they were doing. That’s it. I was engaging in comment spreading in other places around the Internet as well; a process I later coined (and taught) as“Seeding the Internet.” However, the majority of my activity was within the MySpace platform.

I lost access to my profile twice—because MySpace was ripe with opportunity for hackers, phishing artists and virus spreaders, and PCs were notoriously vulnerable to attack. Each time I lost my account, I had to start all over again. Each time I started over, my account grew to25,000+ ‘friends’ in less than three months. (Looking back, I’m sensing a ceiling theme there.) Before MySpace started losing people to Facebook, I had over 26,000 again.

Now, my music wasn’t very good then, so it wasn’t a big draw for people. What is it that got people’s attention and made them decide to give me the gift of friendship?

Anyone can find and use a cute profile picture. Minewas accompanied with a lot of joyful, enthusiastic and genuinely positive comments. I made it a point to connect with people in a personable way.

I had some things going for me. I had natural commenting techniques that I will share with you a bit later on, some values about how I engaged with people (which I will also share with you), and a friendly personality. Ok. I also had an attractive “girl next door” profile pic.

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Going the Social Distance: Building a Sustainable Audience on Social Media

Three things that were going in my favor:

Attractive profile image Interesting content Genuinely appreciative and engaging comments

In chapter 4 we’ll take a closer look at my own personal ethics about how I engage online with other people. These techniques work for me, and they can work for you too.

Chapter 1: How I Learned Social Media Marketing

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GOING THE SOCIAL DISTANCE: HOW TO BUILD A SUSTAINABLE AUDIENCE ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Chapter2: Effective Online Marketing Plans Include Social Media

Before we dig into how you can build your sustainable audience on social media, let’s take a look at the bigger picture. To effectively market your products and services online, you need to be doing more than just social media.

The whole purpose forusing social media as a business, is to let people know that your products or services exist—or, if you’re an established business—to build relationships and keep your brand in front of potential and current consumers. But social media is only one crucial piece.

If your offerings are available online, you most likely have a number of tools at your disposal for driving traffic to your website. Once you get people to your website, you still need to keep them engaged. If your marketing plan makes use of a full set of marketing and customer engagement tools, it’s much more likely to result in sales.

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Going the Social Distance: Building a Sustainable Audience on Social Media