Opening and maintaining a commercial real estate blog is not the easiest of tasks.

There are many hoops you need to jump through before achieving success with this type of digital marketing.

But the best thing about a blog is that once you’ve gotten it off the ground, it can only go up!

Why Do I Need a Commercial Real Estate Blog for My Business?

Working in real estate, you probably don’t have a typical day at the office.

One morning you’re scheduling listing appointments for the afternoon. The next day you’re working with your photographer to highlight the furnishings in that new apartment. Maybe you’re about to show off a vacation home in a well-off area, so you need to get it prepared.

With that much work on your hands, do you even have the time to think of what your clients want from you?

These invaluable questions serve as a starting point to find out what you’re doing wrong:

• Is my marketing strategy working out in my best interest?
• Have I gained the trust of my customers and the public?
• How many clients has my current policy brought me this week/month/year?
• How satisfied are my clients with my services?
• Will this strategy work or be relevant one/three/five years from now?

If you don’t keep track of your clients’ needs and feedback on a regular basis, you might find it hard to answer some of these.

Keep track of your clients' needs and their feedback on a regular basis. Click To Tweet

How Do I Keep Track of My Clients’ Needs?

The answer is pretty straightforward: With a commercial real estate blog.

Just think of this: Your office is extremely crowded. You want to get to know who you’re selling to, or who wants to do their listing with you. Are you going to dedicate an extra room for interviewing?

You don’t need to create a new department in your building to keep records. Maintaining a blog in the real estate business might sound counter-intuitive, but hear me out.

Here’s some useful information a blog can tell you about your clientele and your company:

• What your clients need, in their own words
• How satisfied they are with your services
• How likely they are to recommend you to their friends
• How many readers are likely to become leads
• How relevant you (still) are

Do these sound familiar? You’ve guessed it. They’re answers to what you’ve been asking yourself since the beginning of this article.

And that is just scratching the surface of a blog’s capabilities.

Using Your Blog for Problem Solving and Showcasing Expertise

Most people looking to do business in real estate would rather have a quick way of solving an issue. No emails, no calls, just a straight-up answer from a professional.

Have your friends ever had a question about real estate? Do they call you asking for answers? Possibly. What about all the other people who need help, but who don’t have friends in real estate?

That is the moment when you swoop in with relevant information on your commercial real estate blog.

When I was looking for an apartment in my current city, I didn’t know who to turn to. The papers had lots of ads, but somehow they were all booked when I called.

Luckily, a friend pointed me to a gentleman’s blog who had all the right info about where to look. He also happened to post about areas where people were more likely to rent out apartments.

That way, I got to rent an apartment in the quiet zone I’ve always wanted – instead of just settling for a worse deal someplace else, after weeks of searching.

That is how you build a trust-based relationship with your audience. Being helpful goes a long way.

Quality of service doesn't matter if you can't provide relevant information. Click To Tweet

Leverage Social Media Along with Your Blog Posts

If you’re in the business, you probably know that a majority (91%!) of REALTORS® use social media in one way or the other.

Emails are a fine contact method when you have time on your hands. But if you’re on the road a lot, social media can be helpful in keeping in close contact with multiple clients at once.

Or you could showcase the best deals you’ve made, showing people you mean business.

The most important thing you CAN do with social media, however, is to use it to promote your blog. It’s no use having relevant, well-thought out content if it doesn’t reach a larger audience.

And social media these days is all about large audiences:

• Facebook? A total of 1.65 billion users
• Twitter? 310 million users
• Youtube? Over a billion daily users
• LinkedIn? 433 million users

With those numbers, just think of all the marketing potential.

Even if you reach 0.000001% of people on social media, you can still have thousands of viewers. Click To Tweet

Taking Advantage of Google

You might think of making use of Google because of their AdWords service. But you would be wrong.

AdWords is a Pay-Per-Click service that might get you a lot of traffic if you’re really well off. But even then, it’s not organic traffic. That means you have lower chances of actually getting leads.

Now for the best part. Google has a funny way of letting people know if your website is not active.

If you don’t post regularly, you fall in rank. Meaning your blog will be sent to pages 2 and beyond, lowering the chances of being found.

That seems fair enough. Remember the part I mentioned about offering relevant content?

That’s what Google tries to do all the time. If you really think about it, why would they rank your blog higher if you don’t keep it up-to-date? It would be like being offered free hosting for your website!

And that’s just bad business.

Increasing Traffic to Your Website

A beautiful thing to have, website traffic. You increase revenue from online ads AND your chances of getting leads for your business.

That is probably the most obvious advantage of a commercial real estate blog anyone can think of.

But before listing it, I wanted to show you exactly HOW that traffic is created.

Sure, you can post a link and your phone number in an advertisement and call it a day. You’ll get a few calls; your site will see a few clicks. You’ll probably even manage a sale.

But how do you keep people coming back to your website long after they’ve done business with you?

By creating the necessary conditions to rise above the competition. It all comes down to that relevant information I’ve been mentioning.

How Will I Find the Time to Do All This?

It can be hard to take time out of your busy schedule to also maintain a blog. That is true.

You’re out in the field, scanning the neighborhoods for prospects, talking with your current clients about a meeting.

Maybe you’re giving one of them a tour of your latest find, showing them the fine woodwork. The modern appliances somehow work well in the overall décor.

But who wants to come back to the office after driving around town in the hot sun wearing a tight suit? AND work for a few more hours?

You have to create all the social media buzz I’ve talked about. Then you have to write quality content to post on your blog to use in tandem with social media. Next, you have to get your content SEO-ready.

What this means is you optimize your website content so people can find you much easily on Google and other search engines.

SEO can have an enormous impact on your business. All of your competitors are going through this process just to stay on top.

Conclusions

We’ve established that to run a successful business, you have to know your client. You also have to make social media and search engines do the work for you.

Show your customers you mean business with a human face. Show them that you’re up-to-date. That you care.

It’s never pretty when a company has to reevaluate their marketing strategy. The key words here are “has to”. It’s entirely reasonable to change things from time to time, to grow or change with the times.

However, if a company has to reevaluate, that’s because the current strategy isn’t getting results. It goes double for real estate since all the deals are important.

We’ll keep both situations in mind. Before that, I’d like to point out that we wrote an article about creating a strategy in the first place, so if you don’t yet have anything to reevaluate, check it out.

Start with Your Goals

If you’re doing well and it’s time for an upgrade, the first thing you should do is think about your goals.

Otherwise, you’ll see that the business is growing slowly or not at all because the strategy wasn’t efficient. Even worse, you could lose track of what’s important and end up doing more harm than good.

Real estate companies should always make customer service a priority.

There will almost always be several companies competing for the same clients. The one that gains the customers’ trust will win.

When competition is big, gain your clients' trust by providing outstanding customer service. Click To Tweet

Another pitfall is having the wrong expectations.  Maybe the strategy didn’t do much because you didn’t expect much of it. In this case, your lack of faith is actively limiting your results.

Alternatively, the strategy seems ineffective because you expected too much from it. Maybe it doesn’t even need changing, but the standards are too high. You’d be wasting time and resources by reevaluating it.

Make sure that the goals you’ve set are doable. Then, go from there and start changing aspects of the strategy that don’t fit with what you want.

Review the Results of the Strategy

To improve anything, you have to know how well the strategy has worked for you up to a certain point. It’s rare that a plan is just faulty. The likelier case is that some aspects are good while others need improvement.

More often than not, the ideas themselves aren’t bad. However, the execution is.

I’m not saying that anything you’ll come up with will work out. Just remember that most companies base their strategies on previous examples and results. The reason it might come out differently for them, though, is because of the execution.

There is software that can help you check the traffic you get. Google Analytics and Hubspot are two examples that come to mind.

The execution of the strategy is just as important as implementing every single detail of it. Click To Tweet

If you do identify an aspect of the strategy that needs changes, take a look at the execution first. If you feel that the implementation went well, the idea itself needs improvement.

Otherwise, it’s much harder to tell where the problem stems from. Remember that digital marketing is pretty different from other tactics. Maybe you’re approaching it the wrong way.

Consider asking an expert to check the strategy you have so far and point out the weak spots. You can talk to our content strategists and see how they can help you with that.

In real estate, most difficulties stem from the way the company interacts with the clients. Maybe they weren’t friendly or invested enough. Maybe they had a slow response time or didn’t offer reliable information. It can take a long time and a lot of attention to detail to work out all the kinks

Think of the Strengths and Weaknesses of Your Real Estate Company

I’m not talking about how good your coffee is. I’m referring to what you and your coworkers excel at in the industry.

If you like talking to people, consider investing more in social media. It’s the easiest and fastest way to interact with clients over the Internet.

Obviously, you want to consider the weaknesses too.

If you’re terrible at writing but can’t do without it, the best solution is to have someone else write for you. Let me tell you; everyone can write, but that doesn’t mean that everyone should write.

The idea is not to waste potential. Use your strengths and avoid weak points or delegate better-suited people to handle them.

An Excellent Strategy Needs a Good Amount of Attention

Some people like this kind of work and some don’t. That’s the way life works.

You have to be invested in reevaluating a marketing strategy. Read reports and studies so that you know what’s ahead of you, and get involved.

There’s nothing wrong with having others come up with the strategy for you. Still, you have to think about it yourself too. There might be better-suited people to come up with ideas for the plan. That doesn’t mean you don’t have to do your part as well.

At the very least, make sure that the new strategy will have the right goals in mind, and that no errors occur.

Keep in mind that marketing is crucial to the success of a company, now more than ever. Since it’s vital, you have to dedicate yourself to the process.

Changes Aren’t Irreversible

It might seem obvious, but a lot of people tend to forget this fact. It’s not the end of the world if the strategy doesn’t end up being perfect. That means you have quite a bit of freedom to experiment, and you shouldn’t let the chance go to waste.

For example, let’s say you have two ideas, and you can only use one. The first is less likely to work, but it could offer a tremendous boost. The second one is more reliable but has a smaller positive effect.

If you have the time and resources, you should try both of them to see which one works best for you. It might take a bit of time to get the results, but once you see them, you’ll know very well which idea to continue using.

When it comes to digital marketing, it’s exceptionally easy to change directions. Since there are so many approaches, you should try to experiment with as many of them as possible.

I hope these guidelines were useful for you, and that they will help you improve your strategy.

We’ve also written an article about how you can enhance your digital marketing strategy. Make sure you check that out as well. It’s full of tips on how to be more efficient

How do you keep up with your social media marketing strategy every single day? We all have days where it feels like there’s just not enough time to get every single thing done.

When these days occur we usually prioritize what needs to be done, hence leaving some things out. One of the biggest things that get pushed to the side is social media.

The number one aspect of your marketing strategy has to be consistency. From writing optimized blog posts to publishing content on social media, this is the key ingredient.

So of all things, it should never be pushed aside. Below is an example of an emergency social media marketing strategy for days when there aren’t enough minutes to get everything done.

This is one of those quick fixes that’s specific for situations where you’re pressed for time.

Putting Your Social Media Marketing Strategy on Steroids

Remember, this isn’t a permanent solution. Use this on days when your time is very limited. Most businesses really should dedicate at least an hour a day just for social media interaction.

This includes marketing and building relationships to become known as an ‘influencer.’ The main point is consistency and 20 minutes is far better than skipping one day just because you’re too busy.

1. Facebook

Choose a high-resolution image. A great place to choose images is Morguefile because there are tons you can copy, use and adapt without showing attribution. Look in the free section and make sure that each photo you copy says this:

“You are allowed to copy, distribute, transmit the work and to adapt the work. Attribution is not required. You are prohibited from using this work in a stand alone manner.”

• Choose the statement or quote you’d like to include in the image and insert it. You can use Canva for this task.
• Write your post out and include a link to an article, product or landing page. Make sure to include curated content as well through your posts.
• Post, or schedule the time you want it posted in software like Buffer.

2. Twitter

Begin by retweeting and thanking those that have acknowledged or mentioned you in the past 24 hours. You can find all these information faster with TweetDeck.

The most important thing, especially on a full day, is not to get distracted. Stick to this rapid social media marketing strategy for today. Keep your focus completely honed in:

• Aim to Tweet 10 links to articles and products for your business.
• If you have a program like Buffer, you can schedule varied times in which the tweets go live.
• Try to use the 80/20 rule with Twitter. Dedicate 80% to others and 20% to your business. Reciprocity is always the cheapest method of advertising on platforms like Twitter.

3. LinkedIn

Make sure you have an active personal and business account. Especially when it comes to business opportunities, LinkedIn is a great place to get connected to the right people.

For your marketing strategy here’s the short list of activities you need to each day:

• Share or post something related to your business or products.
• Share one article you find in your feed.
• Comment and like 3-4 posts in your main feed from connections.
• Comment in at least one group. Since you’re pressed for time today, realize your comment needs to be short and sweet. You’ll get better at this over time.

Turbo Hacks

To not end up relying on this strategy too often here are a few hacks that will make the social media aspects of your marketing strategy work smoothly.

• Find and download images for your Facebook posts once a week.
• Research quotes and links once a week and put them in a spreadsheet or Word document for quick retrieval.
• Optimize the posts for specific Keywords with Squirrly once a week when you write down all the messages.
• Keep your links organized, so it’s easier to share content when needed.
• Use software like Buffer, MeetEdgar or CoSchedule to make sure your accounts are always posting great content. And then focus on the interactions of the accounts manually.

Still Pressed For Time?

It might be necessary to begin delegating some things to outside sources. Consider hiring a content marketing agency to help you with your social media publishing and for writing your articles.

We can also teach you a few tricks to make the most out of your social media time. Just sign-up for free for the 10.000 unique visitors to find out how to leverage social media for traffic.

Content Writing Services Save Your Business

Meetings, clients, emails, social media management, split testing, product development, profit and loss…the list is endless. As a business grows, the ability to maintain focus in so many areas divides. Content most always takes a back seat.

Content is at the heart of every single business. It’s what generates sales and is the framework of making businesses responsive. It’s the foundation of client attraction and it’s most certainly the catalyst for sales funnels.

Here are some signs that you may need to invest in a content writing service:

1)  Moonlighting

If you have another job you work in between building your business, your mental energy is compromised. By the time you meet your regular work obligations, your brain is ready for a reset. Instead, you dive right into your business. This, in turn, cannot help but challenge your creativity and productivity.

2)  The Invasion of Crickets on Your Site

When you had more time, you likely posted more often. However, as you’ve grown your business and been forced to wear more hats, content writing is harder to find time for.

3)  The Three B’s

But Syndrome:  You find multiple excuses to procrastinate producing new content.

Burnout:  You’re tired of writing content.

Brain Fried:  You’re tired, bored, brain fried, and can’t focus on creating new posts.

4)  Decrease in Quality

Do your articles have occasional or frequent errors in them? Does your subject matter not always align with your niche?

5)  Site Traffic is in the Slow Lane

Measure your site visits, amount of time spent on the site, and pages viewed. Has it begun to decline instead of increase?

6)  Is Your Ego Under Control, or Does Your Ego Control You?

You know you’re a great writer. It’s your strength. But it’s not your only one. You’re being stretched in too many directions. Content writing is one aspect that you can let go of so that your mind will be clear to take your business to the next level.

7)  Broad Focus

When your time is spread thin and divided into multiple duties, the focus of your niche becomes skewed. A good content writing service has skilled writers who are able to focus on your niche, capture interest in your products, and provide updated information in your specialty.

8)  Less Audience Engagement

Experienced writers are able to draw interest directly to your site, its products, and its services. They know how to evoke emotion, present and then solve a problem using your products, and encourage audience engagement through continued discussions in the comments or through direct inquiries for consults, products, etc.

9)  When SEO is Too Hard and Time Consuming

A good content writing service has 100% optimization, 100% of the time. Where you spend hours trying to optimize, they can structure and write an article that’s 100% search engine optimized in half the time.

10)  Weak or Ineffective Calls to Action

A CTA should do exactly that,  lead the reader into some sort of action, whether it’s to subscribe or purchase. Content writing agencies are experts at writing these and know how to write the article and build upon the CTA, so that readers are more likely to respond.

If one or more of these signs resonates, you should consider investing in content writing services. Face it, you want customers and we can bring them to you with our quality content services. No more staring at a blank screen, no more keyword confusion, no more SEO struggles. End your anxiety and move on taking your business to the next level.

Using Slack for business is becoming the new norm in 2016. The purpose of this review is to get you familiarized with some features, and how they can fit your business needs.

That isn’t to say Slack is not useful for NGOs, hobby projects, chatting with friends and creating communities. But that is a different kettle of fish. We will probably go into that at a different time.

In any case, let’s get down to business, shall we? Team communication is becoming increasingly difficult for growing companies. It’s just not viable to use multiple communication channels such as email, text messages, and chat programs.

The reason for this is that crucial information unwittingly gets lost. Let’s say you’ve sent a text message to three teammates about an important part of your project. Did everyone else get the memo? How do you know they passed the information on to the others?

Besides being an efficient communication tool, Slack offers something for everyone – code sharing, fun apps, flexibility, the works!

1. What’s so Different about Slack?

After all, you could very well use basic chat programs such as Skype or Pidgin to communicate with team members. The key word here is “basic”. If that were good enough, humanity wouldn’t have advanced up to this point.

Slack takes all of your communication methods, packs them up, and offers them to you in one place. Yes, that means everything:

• Basic chat program functions built into Slack. Communicate with your team members on various custom-made channels
• Text messages through apps such as Zapier
• This app (Zapier) also lets you connect your Slack account to multiple messaging services (such as Gmail) – among other things
• Trello integration, so you have notifications about your tasks without using a separate app

No more keeping track of email threads. No more endless scrolling through Skype. No fuss over deleted text messages. 

The best part is that everything you communicate through the app gets saved on their servers, in the Slack Cloud. Oh come on, don’t laugh!

You might know that most apps store chat data on your computer. So, if you don’t access it from there, tough luck.

Slack is a web-based app, so you don’t need to install anything to run it. But the guys who made the app were kind enough to offer you options. You can install it on your PC or Mac. The Linux version is coming soon.

It’s not hard to see why Slack for business is growing at the rate it is right now. It’s barely been out for three years, and it already has three million daily active users.

2. Tired of Looking Everywhere for Info?

Use the Slack Search Function.

You might be thinking: How is Slack for business solving my communication problems? And that would be a valid concern. Gathering every message in one place doesn’t eliminate the need to browse the information.

Were you and your co-worker chatting about a good movie? Maybe you don’t remember which one you were talking about. Or perhaps your boss sent you an article about the best ways to increase website traffic. Now you’ve totally forgotten how it was named.

Fortunately, Slack has a built-in search function for this very purpose. It has a few ways for you to narrow down what you’re looking for:

• Search by username. When you remember who you talked to about that movie, but can’t remember whether or not it was in private or on a public channel.
• Search by channel. You remember you had that discussion but don’t know with whom.
• Slack has a “Star” function. You Star an important message you want to remember for later. Then, you use the search function to find “starred” posts!
• Similarly, you can filter messages by whether or not they had links or reactions.
• Last but not least: Use date filters.

3. Take Slack with You Everywhere

No self-respecting chat program is missing a mobile version. It’s estimated that 86.2% of people in developed countries use mobile broadband to access the Internet.

Who would want to miss out on that? Not Slack, it seems. They’ve already developed versions for iOS and Android. A Windows Phone version is in beta at the moment.

Have a lot of business meetings throughout the day? Slack can help you stay in the loop with what you need to do when you get back to work.

If you’re a company leader, the mobile app lets you communicate your tasks more efficiently. Let’s say you just want parts or the whole company to know what should be done. Slack’s channel function can separate groups as you see fit.

A great thing to mention here is that the iOS app recently received an offline mode. That means you can access your messages at any time without an Internet connection! The Android version is still in the works.

4. It’s Ideal for Programmers Too

How do you share code snippets between members of your team? If you use GitHub or other similar services, you’re in luck!

You’re able to integrate GitHub as part of your Slack team. Besides, it has its own code snippet sharing feature.

You can choose from a ton of programming languages: C, C++, C#, Ruby, Python, Javascript, Lua, and many others.

Besides, you can keep track of your snippets by using the Star feature. You can also pin the snippet to the conversation. It’s good if you want to discuss the finer details of your code without having to switch between tabs.

5. The Fun Parts of Slack for Business

Hey, it’s not named Slack for just any reason! If you Google their app, you’ll notice a sort of company motto they have. “Be less busy”. It sounded catchy to us.

And it sure describes their product well – so many integrations to choose from. So many ways to make your job easier. It frees up time for other activities.

But why name your product “Slack” if you don’t offer a way to … you know … slack? We’re just kidding. Don’t slack at work, folks. Or do. This is getting pretty confusing.

In any case, Slack lets you add a multitude of fun apps to make your day go by easier. Mini-games, Twitter integrations, quiz apps, GIF apps – even an app that lets you share interesting facts about cats.

6. The Drawbacks

No app is without its faults. I’ve talked extensively about how many features Slack has. But if you don’t look online for which one is which, you could miss out on some of them entirely.

The problem is that all the features are hidden behind icons and drop-down menus. Sure, not having a myriad of buttons littering the screen makes Slack look cleaner. But they could be a bit more descriptive.

For example, before writing this article, I had no idea you could share code snippets with the app. I just happened upon it by accident!

Of course, you could use the built-in Slackbot and ask it about features. But most would probably prefer an interactive tutorial to get the gist of things.

Some might also take issues with the message limit (10,000) per team for the free version. But with so many features they offer, it’s understandable there would be some limits.

They can be overridden by switching to the paid version. That might deter some people, but paying for Slack doesn’t just remove a message limit. It would be senseless.

Instead, they offer businesses a way to communicate sensitive information over secure channels. You can go all top secret!

For example, the Standard payment plan ($6,67/month) offers two-factor authentication. Unauthorized users won’t be allowed to see your company secrets.

Besides, you have 10GB of online storage per team member, saving you tons of space on your business’s hard drives. The Plus package ($12,50/month) lets you increase the storage to 20GB, among other things.

They’re also working on an Enterprise package for really large businesses. Those who need to connect multiple sectors will undoubtedly find it useful when it’s launched. You can check out what else they offer for these prices here.

In the end, I guess we could cut the app some slack. (Yes, I went there.) It offers plenty of features for free and gives you the option to upgrade if you feel the need to.

If you want to start using Slack, you can create an account for your organization by clicking here. It’ll guide you through the whole process.

To get you started, you can ask the SlackBot about features. It’ll give you an answer to the best of its abilities. Plus, it’ll link you to the Slack help page for each feature you ask about!

I’d be interested to know what you think of the app. Did you like what you’ve seen? What problems do you think you would encounter while using the app?

Leave your opinions in the comment section below.

Think about a person you admire dearly.

Right away, not only their name popped into your head but also those specific traits and qualities that define them.

If someone asked you more details about this person, you would be able to outline on the spot what recommends them.

That, my dear reader, is called personal branding done right.

So, what do you want people to say about you?

We want to give a helping hand here, that’s why we compiled this article with personal branding tips for beginners.

If you think that this article is not enough, then download our free straightforward guide for fool-proof personal branding.

Why should you invest your time in this? How can it help you? How does it make your blog stand out from the crowd?

Those are some of the questions this article will answer for you.

Let’s get started. 

Personal Branding Tips – Find the Real ‘You’

Every piece of information that exists online about you defines your brand. Personal branding is all about the idea that success comes through self-packaging. Marketing yourself as a brand.

So it is vital to find out what defines you. You need a solid statement.

Every piece of information that exists online about you defines your brand.

Research what others say about you.
Find the positive and the negative. When it comes to personal branding tips, you should know that you don’t really have to create a personal brand from scratch. You already have one

So in order to show the real you, you have to properly manage your brand. What people see online about you should be what you want them to see.

You Get Credibility and Prestige

Personal branding is important because it sends a strong message about who you are. A brand’s message is unambiguous – it clearly states what you have to offer. This gives you a great boost in credibility.

By constantly delivering what your brand statement says, you put yourself in an expert’s position.

If stakeholders see you as being reliable, trustworthy and competent, you’re half way there. All the personal branding tips in the world can’t help you if you don’t own those qualities.

Prestige is something you gain. Having it makes your decisions more meaningful. Personal branding influences prestige as long as it is based on:

• Accomplishments
• Professional position
• Knowledge
• Personal style

You’ll have to be 100% sincere and true to your personal brand. In other words, your real image must match your marketing.

Your personal brand’s message should clearly state what you have to offer

You Attract the Ideal Clients for Your Niche

This is one of the best online personal branding tips. Successful branding is all about finding people who share your views. It might sound a bit weird, but this is how you manage to influence their behavior/decisions.

You can see that the niche is extremely important. You’ll need to find this from the start. Create your personal brand around your niche.

The way you advertise yourself online must match the real you behind closed doors.

Identify what separates you from the rest. What makes you the better choice? What’s the one thing you offer that no one else can? Do you have authority in your field? Use that.”

It Gets You Professional Opportunities

Many experts say that personal branding should be used exclusively to attract business opportunities. A strong personal brand will send a positive message to thought leaders in your niche as well. They will want to work with you.

Some people even managed to score great jobs thanks to their personal brand.

Take into account that 90% of consumers trust recommendations from people. Only 33% of buyers trust messages from a company or brand.

Nielson

Related to personal branding tips – start locally. Concentrate on your community at first. Become an expert in their eyes.

Market yourself as the professional everyone would like to have on their team. Click To Tweet

Then grow and scale your personal brand accordingly.

Action Speaks Louder Than Words

Having a strong personal brand will give you an edge over a regular brand. People trust people more than companies. So the change you are preaching can become a real movement. Led by you.

But to achieve this, you’ll need authority and actions. Real actions. Taking your ideas and making them tangible. You need to make a positive impact in a real way.

Becoming a movement leader means that people see in you an ideal. You become their leader as well.

People trust people more than companies. Personal branding enables you to lead a movement. Click To Tweet

Earn Mindshare with Customers

What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think about soda? Is it coke? Does that make you think about Coca-Cola? That’s mindshare.

When a person says he or she is googling something, you instantly know he/she is searching for something on Google.

Your personal brand can earn mindshare as well. Granted, it is a bit harder to achieve this when compared to big corporations.

Mindshare is the frequency to which your brand is associated with a theme in the minds of your audience.

Your brand name needs to become a synonym for your products and services. Click To Tweet

Here’s an example to help you understand the concept. In popular TV series “How I met your mother”, the main character is Ted Mosby. A couple of seasons in, all the other characters who know him start using the phrase “mosby her”. It means telling a girl you love her on the first date.

Personal Branding: Tips to a Higher Perceived Value

This is another benefit of having a great personal brand. You’ll eventually reach a point when your perceived value as a professional will be greater than your competition’s.

Here are some tips to help you achieve this through personal branding:

• Focus on quality, not price – “best price” sends a different message compared to “lowest price”.

• Useful social proof – get reviews and testimonials about your work.

• Use HARO to your advantage – Help a Reporter Out is a great way to end up with your logo featured on a media site.

• Create an awesome About page – there are tools that can help you get that professional look. You’ll also find useful tips and tricks in this eBook. It teaches you everything you need to know.

• Add a great author box to every article you write – again, use the tools available to get the most out of this. We recommend Starbox because it is easy to install (no coding skills required). Also, it has a clean design yet offers great functionality.

Achieve a higher perceived value of your personal brand by focusing on quality, not price. Click To Tweet

Now You Know

The facts mentioned above are the benefits you get for having a great personal brand. Look at them as reasons to start working on building your personal brand.

Creating a powerful personal brand takes time and work. You can’t achieve this in a few weeks. So be sure to arm yourself with all the patience and hard work it requires.

As long as you stay true to yourself and your audience, you’ll be able to enjoy all the gains mentioned above.

And now that you know the benefits, you can get down to work. We can help with that as well.

Download the complete guide on personal branding. It helps you with everything from A to Z.

Feel free to leave your questions or your comments down below.

How many social media profiles do you or your business have?

Three? Five? Ten?

Even going out on a limb and presuming you only have a Facebook and a Twitter account, they still take some time to manage.

As such, you will need the proper social media management tools for the job.

But with so many to choose from, which ones would you even use?

Depending on how large your user base is, you’ll need to do any and all of the following:

• Interact with your audience on several profiles. That includes replying to comments and private messages.
• Schedule quality content on multiple platforms.
• Curate content and share it with your public.
• Research and leverage user and post analytics to create better marketing strategies.

We’ve prepared a list of five essential tools just for these occasions. Here they are, in no particular order.

1. Squirrly Social

Squirrly Social allows you to schedule everything from one place. If you have a handful of social profiles, one of a few things could happen:

• You’re active on all of them and that eats up a lot of your time;
• You’re active on some of them, but feel sad you can’t contribute to the others;
• You quit ahead of the game because you have a dozen social accounts and no way to manage them all;

To avoid a headache or twelve, consider a platform such as Squirrly Social to manage all of your accounts in one place. It supports all the big ones (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn).

But we did mention a handful. So by using the Squirrly Social connections, you can use a free Buffer account that allows you to extend your control to other platforms, including:

• Instagram
• Pinterest
• Facebook Groups
• And more

If you’ve set up a content calendar, you’re going to have a lot of work on your hands, scheduling posts on social media.

Squirrly Social allows you to schedule everything from one place. You can even create categories and repeat each post several times.

On the other hand, you can also let Squirrly Social help you write the best posts for you. It can even automatically add hashtags and emojis to your posts.

#SquirrlySocial can automatically find the best hashtags for your posts. Click To Tweet

You can even use their Social Media Assistant feature to find a list of posts according to what you are searching for, that you can share with your followers. Or you can set it to post things from your RSS feeds as soon as they’re published.

That is very useful if you’re publishing very often and would like your audience to know as soon as you have something fresh out.

If you don’t feel like doing it yourself, you can delegate some social media tasks to your team. You didn’t think you were in this alone, did you? The tool has some excellent team management options.

All in all, Squirrly Social seems like a lifesaver to anyone to wants to master the art of social media management.

2. Instagram Analytics

Instagram marketing could benefit from some great social media management tools.

The way the platform is built guarantees a broad range of content for all sorts of audiences. That can put a hole in some marketers’ plans, however. They would need a way to know who these people are, for better targeting.

And what better way to know your audience than to get an idea about the demographics? 

Get to REALLY know your audience with demographic analytics by #Instagram. Click To Tweet

With the new Instagram Analytics, you can:

• See your followers’ location, either by country or by city. That helps you time your post scheduling.
• Get an idea about your audience’s gender prevalence.
• Divide your followers into age groups.

All of the above are an aside to the integrated post analytics. The whole system is similar to Facebook’s “Insights” feature, even being named as such. Those familiar with it should have no problem adapting.

In fact, all the demographic data is pulled straight from Facebook. That helps give Instagram marketers the best and most accurate graphs about user engagement.

For the rest of you who aren’t that familiar with “Insights,” here are more of Instagram’s newest capabilities:

• Impressions: gives you accurate information about how many times your posts have been viewed.
• Reach: only presents the number of unique accounts that have viewed your content.
• Website Clicks: should be pretty self-explanatory.

The feature also allows you to view “Follower Activity” information. What does that mean? Well, it determines when your followers are most active on Instagram.

That allows you to figure out how to create your posting schedule so it gets the most engagement possible.

#Optimize your content schedule with #Instagram analytics. Click To Tweet

But possibly the most useful aspect of the new Analytics is the “Top Posts” mechanic. Instagram sorts out your posts according to the number of Impressions they have. You can do that for posts created in the last week, or in the last month.

The number of times your posts have been viewed is displayed over the thumbnail of the picture. That allows you to see exactly how successful each post has been, not just by the number of likes it got.

Think of how well you can optimize content for your page‘s audience now. With that much information, it’s not hard to deliver results for your fans.

A problem people might find with the tool is that it’s currently only for Instagram business pages. It might leave some feeling left out.

Let’s Talk about Insights

Now, social media insights are very useful on their respective platforms. But what if you want to track your blog’s performance on social media? What about SEO performance and traffic analytics?

These are also aspects you should consider if you want to know what areas to focus on.

3. ContentLook

ContentLook is more than just a site audit tool. It is a site/blog performance analyzer with built-in team capabilities. It also analyzes your SEO performance and offers helpful information on what you can improve.

Here is what information it can provide:

ContentLook calculates your SEO score based on a variety of factors. You can read about them here if you are interested in the details.

Of course, offering you that information isn’t enough if you can’t put it to good use. Fortunately, ContentLook also provides some team management features to help you out:

This tool is continually being improved for your convenience. Most likely it will see integration with Slack in the near future. Besides other features, that is.

4. Pinterest Scheduler

As we’ve mentioned, Buffer allows you to track the optimal times at which you should post. We can’t stress enough the importance of posting during these online traffic “rush hours” to increase exposure for your posts.

Besides, you don’t want to spam your users with too many posts. For one, they might miss some of them because people don’t frantically refresh the page to check for new posts.

It also doesn’t help that you’re not spreading out your content over a longer period. You’ll soon find out that you’ve burned out and have run out of posts.

Spread your pins over time for better exposure with Pixlee's #Pinterest Scheduler. Click To Tweet

Unfortunately, Pinterest suffers from a lack of a scheduling feature, so people look to other apps to do it for them. If Pinterest is part of your marketing strategy, then Pixlee’s Pinterest Scheduler is just such an app.

It has a content calendar so you can create a great posting strategy over time.

The best part is that it allows you to manage schedules for multiple accounts! If you have more than one page, this must be a godsend.

5. Everypost

Here we have another in the series of social media management tools. At its core, Everypost is a content curation platform. And yet, it is so much more than that.

You can curate content from the following platforms:

• YouTube
• Flickr
• Instagram
• Pinterest
• RSS feeds

Alternatives such as Buffer and HootSuite would only let you curate content from RSS feeds and app extensions.

Everypost is a lot like Buffer in some regards. But at the same time, it offers added functionality.

Besides the usual social media platforms, you have the option of posting to Tumblr, Dropbox, and even by email!

An interesting feature is your ability to save social posts to Dropbox for future reference.

You can also post to WordPress and Evernote through your email account. That’s some all-in-one action Everypost has got going for it.

Another feature worth mentioning is that Everypost allows you to add YouTube videos, video links, and native mp4 files to your posts.

When it comes to music, you can add Grooveshark embeds, links, and native mp3 files.

In both cases, Buffer would only allow you to post links to your media. If you prefer to upload your own files instead of using somebody else’s work, Everypost has your back.

With Everypost, you can customize content for each social platform before cross-posting. Click To Tweet

Everypost also allows you to customize your content for each social platform before you cross-post.

No more thinking up messages that apply universally to all platforms. You can add each social media platform’s particular metadata tag (hashtags, mentions, etc.) and post away.

One thing I have to mention is that you can use Everypost together with your team. When businesses grow, or even when their social media presence grows, one social media manager is not enough.

When your online presence grows, one #socialmedia manager just isn't enough anymore. Click To Tweet

The tool lets you manage your team of social media workers and set access and posting privileges for each of them.

All in all, Everypost has some nifty features that set it apart from similar social media management tools.

Social Media Management Tools: Better than the Real Thing?

You have to wonder why social platforms didn’t think of some of these features beforehand. At least Facebook’s Insights and Instagram Analytics are a step in the right direction for social marketing.

These tools allow you more time on your hands to create great content. To recap, by using these tools, you can:

That’s quite the baggage of applications to include into your social media tool-belt. Don’t try them all at once; you might blow a fuse. 🙂

Now, applications are all fine and dandy. If you’re a social media expert, you will know how to put them to good use. But what if you aren’t?

If you’d like to find out more about how to become one of those experts, check out our other blog posts on the subject.

Want to keep up with the info we provide? Subscribe to our newsletter and get all the fresh new articles delivered straight to your inbox!

Meta-tags are an essential part of promoting your content on the web, because they can help you boost your search engine rankings and affect the social media traffic on your site. There are Google’s authorship tags, and Facebook and Twitter have their own social media ones, which increase the amount of traffic you are getting. They are called Facebook OpenGraph and Twitter Cards.

OpenGraph Meta-tags. Introduced by Facebook

They were introduced by Facebook in 2010. Basically, what they do is to allow other websites to become rich “graph” objects and to function as other FB objects. In this way you can share them on FB. So, you control how information travels from a website to FB when you share a page(like it, etc.). The information is sent via OpenGraph meta tags in the <head> part of the website’s code.

How Meta-Tags look like?

You have a meta tag for almost anything:

1. Title:

og:title

This serves the purpose of the meta title tag in your code. It should be appealing, like a good post title. If you don’t provide one, Facebook will use your meta title instead. You should try to keep it between 60 and 90 characters. If your title is longer than 100 characters, Facebook will truncate it to only 88!

Example: <meta property=”og:title” content=”Write your title” />

2. Canonical Url:

og:url

Set the canonical URL for the page you want to share. In other words, you define one page that all your shares will go to. If there is more than one URL for the same content, this comes in handy. Note that the URL provided is not shown on Facebook newsfeed, only the domain is visible.

Example: <meta property=”og:url” content=”http://www.yourpost.com” />

3. Type:

og:type

You can describe the kind of object you are sharing: blog post, video, picture, etc. Examples: Web based:

• website
• article
• blog

Entertainment:

• book
• game
• movie
• food

You can see the full list of types here.

This meta tag is very important for the “Like” button of your page, especially if you have a real-life object: movie, book, etc., because it determines if your content will appear in a user’s interest section of their profile in the event they give you a “Like”.

Whenever you don’t define a type, Facebook will read it as “website” by default. Example: <meta property=”og:type” content=”website” />

4. Description:

og:description

This meta data descriptor is very similar to the meta description tag in HTML. Here you describe your content, but instead of it showing on a search engine results page, it shows below the link title on Facebook.

Unlike a regular meta description tag, it won’t affect your SEO. (So, don’t spend too much time figuring out how to sneak in keywords.) However, it’s a good idea to make it compelling because you want people to click on it. Use about 200 characters.

Example: <meta property=”og:description” content=”Insert your meta description here. Make it interesting and appealing.” />

5. Image:

og:image

Your content becomes more appealing when you join it with an image. This meta tag ensures that a specific thumbnail will be shown when your page is shared. It is helpful to influence click-behavior.

If you are not careful with the og:image, FB may show something irrelevant or an unwanted banner from the page, or nothing at all. The most frequently recommended resolution for an OG image is 1200 pixels x 627 pixels (1.91/1 ratio).

At this size, your thumbnail will be big and stand out from the crowd. Just don’t exceed the 5MB size limit.

Example: <meta property=”og:image” content=”http://www.yourdomain.com/image-name.jpg” />

So, this is what OpenGraph meta-tags look like and how you can add them to your site. Hope you’ve found this useful!

Whether you’re a marketer or an entrepreneur, you’re most likely using tools for marketing automation.

A marketing automation tool is a software platform or technology designed to help you automate repetitive tasks and improve the efficiency of your entire marketing process.

Recent statistics show that 63% of the very successful marketers use these tools on a regular basis.

Why do they use such tools? Because it helps them focus on tasks that require manual work and can’t really be automated.

For marketing automation to be efficient, you need a constant stream of quality leads. Without this vital part, some end up being forced to buy lists of email addresses.

The infographic below is created by Straight North and illustrates the entire lead generation ecosystem and how it all comes together to bring maximum results.

This article will focus on 40 tools every busy marketer should start using. Some of them are free, others require a monthly fee. It’s up to you to decide what fits your needs the best.

Let’s get started.

1. HubSpot – A Complex Inbound Marketing Platform

HubSpot is one of the most well-known inbound marketing platforms. It includes a wide array of features that will help any marketer work efficiently. HubSpot is a tool for marketing automation that mainly enables:

Monitoring of:

• Landing pages
• Leads
• Performance

Building automated workflows for your objectives

There are three different pricing plans available, depending on your needs, the size of your team and, most importantly, budget.

Integration, innovation and automation - HubSpot. Click To Tweet

2. Squirrly Social – One Year of Social Media Posts in a Flash.

Squirrly Social – If you want to have time to interact with your audience but never miss a social post this is the tool you need. From simple kinds of calendars and scheduling to super advanced schedules, profile posting rules,

Squirrly Social has it all and it’s willing to grow as you grow. You’ll only ever get to the advanced stuff once you’re ready and it will be a breeze to set it all up.

Cool Feature: Squirrly Social doesn’t just help you schedule but also helps you find great resources to share and it enhances all your posts. What I mean is that with a click of a button you get automatic hashtags and emoji to any post you find or create. That’s amazing.

3. Sumo – 12 tools in 1

While it’s not a 100% an automation tool, Sumo features a 12 tools suite to help marketers be more efficient. The way it is able to automate marketing tasks is rather simple, and that is a great benefit. Sumo enables every user to automate the email marketing process.

Here is what Sumo allows you to do:

• Find out what your most valuable piece of content actually is
• Get email addresses
• Proper lead segmentation
• Integration with popular email marketing services

There is a free plan but it has limited functionality.

Sumo's List Builder helps you generate more and more leads every day. Click To Tweet

4. Unbounce – Build, Publish & Test

Unbounce enables you to create complex and professional landing pages. There are no coding skills required and the results will look good on mobile as well. After you’ve published them, you can even A/B test to see what works best.

With Unbounce, you can:

• Create landing pages that convert
• Generate more leads
• Integrate with different types of tools for marketing automation (including email)
• A/B test your ideas
• Track and Measure Campaign goals

You get a 30-day free trial, but for further use you’ll have to opt for one of their paid plans.

5. OptimizePress – Sales Pages and Membership Portals Creation

OptimizePress is another useful tool for marketing. It enables you to create sales pages and track results. You can even deploy membership portals to secure your content.

Their LaunchSuite is a great added benefit. It enables you to create product launch funnels.

It’s also 100% compatible with WordPress. You can get it as a theme or as a plugin. Prices start at around $100.

OptimizePress - Real-time building and editing of landing pages that convert. Click To Tweet

6. CrazyEgg -X-Ray Glasses for Your Website

Every good marketer understands the need to know everything about what your visitors do on your website. Well, CrazyEgg does just that. Granted, it’s technically not a marketing automation tool, but it comes in handy.

By knowing the heat maps on your website, you gain valuable information. You’ll know where to place the CTAs, for example. These insights will help you make high-ROI changes. In the end, you’ll get more conversions and engagement.

You get a 30-day free trial, but to continue using it you’ll have to choose one of their paid plans.

7. ContentLook – Comprehensive Insights about Your Content

Creating great marketing campaigns rely heavily on tracking the results. You can’t measure success in a different way.

So, ContentLook is that type of tool marketers can’t live without – especially the ones in charge of social media marketing or blog content creation.

What ContentLook does in a very efficient way is tracking how your content performs on social media and SERP. If the results are dissatisfying, you can always assign tasks to your team members so they can accomplish the desired goals.

This tool is in Beta at the moment, meaning you can start using it right away for free!

8. TweetDeck – Manage Multiple Accounts

When managing multiple social media accounts, time is a resource you can’t waste. 60% of your followers expect an answer within the hour.

TweetDeck enables social media marketers to track more than one account from the same place. That is a great way to keep track of everything, reply as soon as possible, and schedule upcoming posts. The more you get done, the more efficient you are.

The best thing about it? It’s free.

TweetDeck - A notification system that works great and saves you time. Click To Tweet

 9. Buffer – Social Media Posts Scheduling and More

If you’re managing multiple social media networks accounts, Buffer is the app that will automate everything and save you time.

They have built a cool platform to make your life easier. You can schedule Tweets, Facebook posts and more from just one place. If you’re really creative, you can schedule everything for up to a few days and focus on other tasks.

The difference between TweetDeck and Buffer is that the latter knows the best posting hours for you, and it will schedule them automatically based on this.

A limited functionality Buffer can be used for free. However, their full features plans start at just $10.

10. Pingdom – Monitoring and Real-Time Performance Management

Pingdom is another one of those tools for marketing automation people couldn’t live without. What it does – and very well indeed – is making it easy for you to monitor the uptime and performance for your website or app.

Another great feature is giving you useful insights about how your website performs for each user – based on country, browser or so.

You can use it for free for the first 14 days but you’ll have to pick a paid plan afterwards if you want to continue using it.

11. Kerboo – A Platform for Digital Marketing

Kerboo is another great suite that can help any marketer with a variety of tasks. At its core, the tool enables you to do backlink analysis. But the solutions don’t end here. Kerboo also offers:

• Prospect gathering – reveal the influencer behind highly successful content
• Outreach to influencers by email, contact form or social accounts.

You can pick either a monthly paid plan or an annual one.

Kerboo's like your personal detective investigating what should matter the most. Click To Tweet

12. Noble Samurai – Cutting Useless Keywords out of the Way

The Noble Samurai wields two swords. The first one helps marketers find and target profitable niches with high accuracy. This keyword research tool helps you filter useless keywords that you’d be wasting money on.

This keyword research tool helps you filter useless keywords that you’d be wasting money on.

The second sword is a content creation tool. It helps you create professionally-looking videos for your business.

There is a free plan you can use but is somewhat limited in terms of features.

13. PowToon – Get Video Presentations Done in a Few Minutes

Getting video presentations for your products can often be time-consuming and expensive. PowToon gives you a viable alternative to a designer team.

It enables you to create stunningly good-looking video presentations in just a few minutes.

You can use their templates and their easy drag-and-drop system to meet the deadline. It saves you time and allows you to achieve more.

They also have a completely free plan.

14. Canva – Their Templates Save Your Time

Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and even a WordPress blog require different things when it comes to the images you use. This is where Canva is a life-saver.

You get incredibly good-looking and useful templates to help you edit images. They’re created with the right size in mind – perfect for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and so forth. The faster you get it done, the more time you have for other tasks.

Don’t have the budget to hire a designer? Then Canva is the tool you need. Best of all: It’s free!

Canva is a life-saver for short-on-time social media marketers. Click To Tweet

15. Google Analytics

There is no tool that can provide so many insights about your audience like Google Analytics. This free tool gives you tons of information – as long as you know how to properly use it.

If you want to check traffic from different social media networks head to Acquisition – Social – Network Referrals. If you want to see how many users are on your website right now click on Real-Time – Overview.

It may take you a while to learn how to use Google Analytics but it’s definitely worth it. Especially since it’s free and anyone can try it.

16. SEO by Squirrly – Live Assistant

SEO by Squirrly is a plugin for WordPress. It helps you write content that ranks well, enabling you to optimize it while actually writing it.

That is possible thanks to the Live Assistant feature. It works together with you, so the end result will be as search engine-friendly as possible while being readable for humans as well.

You get a free version that is perfect for bloggers and small publishers, but there are Premium paid plans as well.

17. Visme – Create Professional Infographics and Presentations

Visme enables you to be a professional designer without requiring you to have coding skills or advanced image editing superpowers.

You get an intuitive and easy-to-use interface together with tons of templates you can use.

The creation process is as simple as it can be – it’s basically a drag-and-drop tool. The result can either be embedded, downloaded or shared on social media.

You get 3 projects for free each month and to go further you’ll only have to pay $7/month.

Visme is considered by @eamillikin to be 'the New Swiss Army Knife of Graphic Design.' Click To Tweet

18. Thinglink – Interactive Extra-Dimension Images

What you can do with Thinglink is add extra dimensions to an image or video. By doing this, they become interactive and provide a rich experience to the user. Each dimension can be customized to lead to a link or show a text.

You don’t need coding skills or a tutorial. Users can also interact with the results. The best aspect about this tool is how easy it is to use and how much time it saves you.

They also provide a free, limited-functionality version that anyone can use.

19. IFTTT – If This Then That

IFTTT is one of those tools for busy marketers that really enables you to automate your work for free.

What this tool for busy marketers does is connect two services together. You then write different “recipes” so that if the first service does one thing, the second should do another.

Simple and pretty straightforward, yet a real time-saver.

For example, you can choose to send an automated message that will say “thank you” to every new follower you get on Twitter.

20. Quuu.co

How does the idea of putting your social media strategy on autopilot sound to you? That’s what Quuu.co was designed to do.

You’ll need a Buffer account, though. What this tool does is it curates content based on your choices of topics and sends it to Buffer for posting on social media. Yes, it’s a great way to get a constant stream of Tweets, for example. For free!

21. UberSuggest – Keyword Research Made Easy

Finding new keywords to write content for is a time-consuming task. Your average go-to tool for this job is Google’s Keyword Planner. Sadly, the results aren’t always what you need. Google helps you generate keywords for advertising.

UberSuggest, on the other hand, is a great tool to complete this task easier. It is ludicrously easy to use and you can even grab the keywords as a .csv list. Plus, the tool is free.

UberSuggest is ludicrously easy to use and extremely efficient. Click To Tweet

22. MailChimp -Email Marketing Campaigns and Automated Responses

Email marketing is still one of the best ways to get offers to your clients. MailChimp excels at making that an easy task. The way it saves time for marketers is by allowing them to set up automated emails.

You can send an email to users as soon as they subscribe – another one follows after a few hours or days and so forth. It’s a great way to automate, create funnels and send your customers/users educational materials.

You get access to a free plan, but as you grow you’ll most likely have to pay for one of their subscription plans.

23. Tweakyourbiz.com – Title Generator

Sometimes you simply can’t come up with a great title for your next post. You know what you’ll be writing about but can’t seem to be satisfied with the headline.

Tweakyourbiz.com is a great tool to help you avoid wasting time with the title. Just type in your keyword and let it run. The results won’t make sense sometimes, but it will definitely give you some ideas. It is also free.

24. Outbrain – Getting Your Content Out There

Big media websites usually have a section where they recommend content from around the web. Some of this content is totally unrelated and might even seem spammy. But if it’s done the right way, it can bring you quality traffic.

This is what Outbrain enables you to do. It works a bit like Google’s Display Network PPC campaigns. You pay a small sum per click and your content gets promoted on some of the biggest websites out there.

25. KissMetrics -Track Customer’s Journey

Google Analytics gives you details about page views, the number of visitors and so on. But KissMetrics gives you the chance to see your customers’ journey. That enables you to see how your visitors behave on your website.

It’s a great way to track real humans from where they come from until they purchase. Doing this gives you valuable insights on whether your website is aligned with your audiences’ behavior or not.

They have multiple paid plans to choose from.

KissMetrics tells you which roads on your website people actually follow. Click To Tweet

26. Google Content Experiments – A/B Testing for Free

You’ve created more than just one landing page for a new product. Which of them converts better? Use Google Content Experiments to test them.

You’ll need each page on a different URL, but the rest of the setup is easy and generates useful results.

27. BuzzStream – Link Building Automated Research

If you’re short on time for research and you need link building insights, BuzzStream is a web-based tool that can help you.

BuzzStream helps you save time on working with spreadsheets filled with outreach prospects. Using this tool will let you focus your valuable time on other important tasks.

If you like the tool, you can choose from four different paid plans and a custom one.

28. Tagboard – Hashtags Analytics

Granted, Tagboard is more than just a simple hashtag analytics tool. You can learn where your hashtags are used and the sentiment surrounding them.

It also enables you to create tagboards featuring posts including your hashtags that update periodically.

It’s definitely a must-use kind of tool, especially for Twitter and Instagram. However, you’ll have to opt for one of their paid plans.

29. Notifier – Reach Out to Influencers

Notifier is a simple yet useful tool. Whenever you’re writing content in which you mention other thought leaders, you’ll have to spend time reaching out to them. But Notifier does that for you.

Connect it to your Buffer and the tool will pull out all of the people you mentioned in your article. Then, you can reach out to them with a simple click.

Their cheapest plan starts at $9.

30. Social Oomph – Social Media Automation for Evergreen Content

Evergreen content will never go out of date. So you can share it constantly, especially since you keep on increasing your fan and followers base.

Social Oomph allows you to save time on this task. It lets you automate the process by submitting it to a queue. Next, you select how often you want your content shared, save, and focus on other important tasks.

You get a limited-functionality free plan but taking it one step further will require a paid one.

Automate your evergreen content's promotion with Social Oomph! Click To Tweet

31. PostPlanner – Automate the Sharing of Content for Your Facebook Page

PostPlanner is basically a content discovery engine that enables you to queue up viral content for later delivery.

Based on your pre-configured times, PostPlanner will manage the actual posts. You get a constant stream of high-engaging posts for your Facebook page with no fuss – and that’s great! Prices start at just $7.

32. Dlvr.it – Automate Social Sharing

When you’re done writing a great post, you want to share it on all your social media networks. Dlvr.it helps you save time on this task.

You select the source of the content – your feed, for example – and the destination. It supports Twitter, Facebook, Google , LinkedIn, App.net, and Delicious. You also get useful analytics.

To share to three different social networks from up to five sources is free.

33. Momentum – Beautiful Productivity

If you’re having a hard time remembering all your daily tasks, a productivity tool might come in handy. Momentum is a Chrome extension that lets you set up your to-do’s.

They will appear every time you open a new tab and feature a beautiful and inspiring background.

34. Trendspottr – Follow Social Media Emerging Trends

Social media success usually revolves around trendy topics. Trendspottr enables you to detect emerging social media trends, hot topics, hashtags, and important influencers.

You also get useful insights about audience sentiment surrounding those topics. You’ll learn what conversation you can join in no time. You can test the tool for free for a limited period of time.

35. Apester – Generate Dynamic Content in No Time

Having dynamic content is a great way to engage with your audience. This is what Apester enables you to do.

Using this tool will allow you to create quizzes, polls, and personality tests in no time. The tool is super easy to use and free.

36. Feedly – All That’s New in One Place

Feedly lets you gather all your favorite websites, blogs, and news publications under one roof. Instead of visiting all of their websites and wasting time, you simply get what’s new.

It’s a great way to keep yourself informed throughout the day with ease without paying a dime.

37. Openr – Add Calls to Action to Your Shares

Wouldn’t it be great to get traffic to your website when sharing others’ content? This is what Openr allows you to do.

This tool displays a CTA on the website the link you shared takes the user to. The platform offers you useful analytics as well, so you are able to keep track of everything. You can try it out for free.

38. UberFlip – Tailor Content Experiences

UberFlip is one of the coolest tools out there. It lets you add powerful CTAs that show up throughout your articles, taking the reader towards the next stage of the funnel.

It provides a great way of linking your blogs, eBooks, or white papers into one lead generation process. You can request a demo before you opt for one of their paid plans.

39. FullContact – Know More about Your Leads

If marketing is about creating relationships, not knowing something about one of your leads may damage that potential. FullContact is a nifty tool that displays details about your users.

Find out about their social media profiles, and you’ll be able to engage on a more meaningful level. It also saves you time, by not having to research these aspects by yourself. You also get a free plan.

40. ReferralRock – Referral Marketing Software

What this tool does in a highly efficient way is enable you to create your own referral program. You don’t even need a website for this – you can run such a program on their servers.

RefferalRock‘s setup is even easier than you can imagine – because time is of the essence. You can test it for free but then you’ll have to pick one of their paid plans.

What Tools for Marketing Automation Do You Use?

These aren’t the only tools out there, but rather the most well-known ones. Granted, using all of them won’t help you save time. This is where your personal marketer filter needs to step in.

I’d love to learn more from you guys. What tools for marketing automation are you using? Do you have any recommendations?

If you’ve enjoyed this article make sure to share it with your friends on social media.

Who doesn’t like to go to events? I personally love to go out and meet new and interesting people. A startup event is definitely something you don’t want to miss, if you’re an entrepreneur or you already have your own start up.

I am sure that you’ve already went to plenty conferences, and somehow you couldn’t manage to be satisfied with your networking skills. You may have been wondering what you’re doing wrong. To clear that up, I made a fun infographic (everybody loves infographics) about how you can maximize your networking skills.

Don’t worry. I am sure you can do this. You just need a little bit of practice and some planning, too. Oh, and some confidence to go, please. If you’re having trouble with basic networking, first check out this article I wrote about how to avoid being awkward at a startup event [insert link]. Also, try to go to as many events as you can, so you get used to this type of environment.

How to maximize your networking skills at a StartUp Event:

Now that you have the theory, it’s time to put it in practice. There are a lot of events that are coming up. You don’t want to miss them. Let me know how you handle your networking skills, and also if you have any tips and tricks on how to maximize them, leave a comment. Remember: networking at a startup event should be fun.