4 Easy Steps to Start Your Social Media Marketing

First, create a business fan page on Facebook. Your Facebook postings will reach out directly to the kinds of people who are most likely to act on your offerings. Use the page to engage your audience by leveraging your network of friends. Ask friends to “Like” you and help spread the word. Be active on your fan page and let people know what you're all about.

Second, get on Twitter. Start following others who are industry colleagues. Choose to follow the people who you are interested in and re-share (re-tweet) their worthwhile information. On a regular basis, post your own original content to promote your products and services.

Third, start a business blog using Google Blogger. Write about what you do and why. You should be publishing content about your business that is objective, timely, and relevant. Posting often using industry key words helps position you as an expert in your field and gets you noticed. Your objective is to improve your ranking on the Google search engine.

7 Steps To Optimizing Emails For Online Marketing

Here's a few simple things to keep in mind to optimize emails for online marketing. 

1- Grab the readers attention in the title and first few words. The reader will make a decision very early on when reading the email whether it is worth their time. Make it worth their time. Use a call to action right in the beginning. Give them a benefit of what you are trying to sell right away. Use words such as Get, Buy, Go, Use etc. Also, make sure you are writing in an active style rather than a passive style. 

2 - Make sure you link to your website after a few short lines and then throughout the rest of your email. Chances are they are going to opt out rather quickly even if you did grab and keep their attention. Give them a place to go for more information.

3 - Trim the purpose and benefit of what you are selling into a few features, preferably three. Use bullet points to make them clear and noticeable to the reader. Explain to the reader exactly what is being offered to them.

4 - Include a favorable quote from a satisfied customer who has purchase or used the product or service you are offering. It's always good to give the reader some real world experience to back up what you are trying to sell, but keep it short.

A Better Deal

There is little difference in the much-hyped “Daily Deal” coupon distribution methods. It seems hardly a week goes by without a new provider announcing a “Me Too” service.  Merchants that have used these services are now seeing that good deals for consumers aren’t always good deals for businesses. Recent studies show little more than half of participating businesses made money on the deals. Surprisingly, one-fourth lost money and the rest say they broke even.

After discounting products and services and paying for the daily distribution, few merchants ever establish an on-going relationship with the consumer.  Only half of the retailers surveyed said they’d run a deal again.

OnFast recognized the considerable merchant discontent with the daily e-mail deal and produced an innovative coupon distribution service based on social network relationships.  For a low monthly fee, merchants can use OnFast to author their own deals and distribute branded coupons to their social network sites.

4 Steps To A Search Engine Optimized Press Release

The purpose of writing a press release is to tell the world about something newsworthy and important, such as a new product, service or some other item that your company or your company's client is trying to promote. While working toward this goal, why not help that press release perform double duty for your company? You can ensure that your press release is heavily distributed by ranking high in news search engines.  Accomplishing this takes a little time to make sure the press release is keyword-rich and has links back to your company's site.  All it takes is a few easy steps.

1- When you know what your subject is and who the target audience is, take the time to research what keywords are important and relevant to that subject/audience. Related link at: https://adwords.google.com.  OnFast has both a built-in keyword meter tool and a list of the top 100 keywords for each industry we support, but you can also use the adwords tool as well.

2- I have found that if you write a good, informative press release that has compelling content pertaining to the subject, the keywords will already be there. You may still have to tweak it a little later, but make sure you are using keywords as you write. It is very important that keywords are present in your headings and add them as you are writing in strategic places.  Also have keywords in links back to you or your client's site.

OnFast Launches Social Marketing for Real Estate Industry

Cloud-based software as a service company OnFast provides realtors with a simple, timesaving way to reach both buyers and sellers of real estate by leveraging social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and their blogs.  OnFast launched its service for the real estate industry today. The social marketing solution helps realtors with the challenge of marketing to both buyers and sellers of real estate. 

Through their website, http://www.onfast.com, OnFast offers realtors the social marketing tools they need to easily and cost effectively reach their customers."We have done the hard work of creating compelling, real estate specific marketing messages so realtors can focus on their core strengths and not on writing marketing text," said OnFast President Christopher Shepherd. "Growing your social network following is one of the best ways for a realtor to increase their customer base," Shepherd continued.

OnFast's pre-built templates contain search engine optimized keywords for the real estate industry, which greatly reduces the time needed to send out professionally written press releases, blog posts, and frequent social network updates. Central to the OnFast solution is an easy to use Campaign Planning Calendar, that allows realtors to quickly plan their future marketing strategies. Tracking the results of past marketing campaigns is straight-forward as well, helping realtors achieve their visibility goals at a glance. These features allow realtors to efficiently leverage social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, in just a few minutes a day.

Full article at: http://onfa.st/lMjNtq

Posted via OnFast - http://www.OnFast.com

Correctly Formatting A Press Release

I have learned over time as a reader and writer, that all press releases written in the hopes of being noticed and read, follow a pattern. This pattern is the format that all successful press releases conform to.

A press release must start out with all the subjects' contact information in the upper left hand corner. This ensures that if you do get your point across, the audience knows where to go for more info or better yet, where to buy your product or service. Next comes the heading, which is probably the most important part of the whole press release.  The heading is the key to whether your press release gets noticed or falls by the wayside.  It should be as short as possible and compelling to the reader.  It needs to grab their attention and hopefully make them want to read more.

Almost as important as the heading is the subheading.  The subheading can go a long way toward keeping that attention you fought for in the heading.  Expounding on your subject, without giving the whole story away, is the goal here.

New Features Tour added to OnFast

We just added a new features tour to the OnFast website.  Take the tour to find out about how OnFast can help your business grow and drive more revenue at http://www.onfast.com/tour.html

Follow us on twitter @onfast.  Friend us on Facebook at OnFast.

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50% Off Subscription for First 50 Customers

50% Off Subscription for First 50 Customers. http://onfa.st/l0voHb
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