Blog posts
Nothing gained popularity in the last couple of years like blogging. Within a short time, great bloggers with the perfect sense of time emerged. These word jugglers describe a current topic or issue, understandably, critically and excitingly.
Trust with blog
Surely you also read a blog from time to time and thus inform yourself about different topics. With each post you build a certain trust with the blogger and also believe his words, after all, you read the posts. So you see that you can also use blogs as a trust-building measure.
Structure and planning
For your project, you should think about how the basic structure of your blog should look like and create a list of possible topics that you want to describe. Thus, the foundation for your contribution planning is set.
Search engines and bots in the preparation
Create your own blog and prepare your posts so that you are ready for your readers on your launch date. During the preparation phase, I recommend that you disallow search engine crawling bots. Just set the indexing to Nofollow / Noindex so that your posts can’t be found on Google before your launch. However, plan enough time (about 2 – 3 weeks) to release your posts to the bots again so that you are ready when you launch.
I recommend anyone who wants to start a blog to do so with WordPress, as this content management system (CMS) is very well equipped for such projects. Building the site doesn’t take much time and can also be done cheaply. Besides the easy handling, WordPress offers many free and useful plugins (add-ons), which make your blog unique.
Social Media
Since the emergence of social media, information has been shared with friends and acquaintances faster than ever before. All I have to do is search my social platforms for ten minutes and I’m already overwhelmed with information that would probably take me fifty times as long to research on my own. Within ten minutes, I can find out who’s having a birthday, who’s on vacation, who’s caught which Pokemon, what kind of fitness exercises someone’s been doing, who had to jump into the water, and whatever else is happening in the world.
In short, social media, are the perfect platforms to get a business or project growing quickly. You can promote this differently through the different platforms.
However, let me tell you one thing up front: You should forget the illusion that you can sell your products or services through social media. Although the awareness effect is very strong on social media platforms, users still prefer to visit the website to buy the product.
Everyone has a profile and also countless friends – most of them you don’t even know personally, but you use it every day. Whether as a source of information about what’s happening in the world, as a gossip platform, or simply as a way to pass the time, Facebook accompanies us at every turn and you usually know more than you even want to know.
The art of Facebook is to create something worth liking (showing interest), commenting (participating and shaping) and sharing (sharing opinion) in an information overloaded digital world. When this happens, the full potential of Facebook and viral distribution is realized. One thus reaches a maximum of potential participants. That means – the higher the interactions, the more people are reached with it.
Therefore, use Facebook for your project to gain viral spread as an advertising medium. Again, think about what your goal should be and how you want to achieve it.
Company profile
In addition to your private profile, you can create a company profile for your project and share all your events, happenings, actions, stories, pictures and videos with your friends and fans. For your company profile I recommend you to create a promotion plan, where you plan your posts exactly.
To do this, create a new company profile on Facebook. You can register it at www.facebook.com. You must not be logged in during the creation process, otherwise you will not be able to access the main Facebook page. You can find the registration button in the footer.
I recommend planning 80% of the posts and reserving 20% for spontaneous actions. You can think of stories, create great contests or share interesting content with your fans.
You need to consider the following points:
- Do not use Facebook as a sales platform
- Respond to customer inquiries via Facebook in a timely manner
- Do not delete comments that are considered to be criticism (unless they are not very nice).
- Always think twice about what you post or comment on Facebook
- On Facebook it is allowed to be not only business (posts about the latest news from the world are welcome)
- The more interesting the post, the more interactions you will get
- Ask questions to get your fans to comment
- You will learn a lot about your customers if you include them in your post
- Your page gets a relevance score depending on interactions, the higher it is, the more fans see your posts
Facebook Ads
Most of the time you don’t have the brightest idea that creates an enormous viral effect. With a little bit of money, Facebook offers a suitable solution for this as well. With Facebook Ads, advertisements or even posts can be promoted and, depending on the budget, receive a much higher reach. In addition, you can run Facebook Ads to attract new fans.
Thanks to the data collected by Facebook, you can define the target group very precisely and thus also hit the potential target group.
The following attributes can be defined, among others:
- Gender: man, woman or indifferent
- Age: age groups can be defined by yourself
- Interests: What does the target group like – example: car, tuning, racing, formula 1, also fans of competitor websites can be defined as a potential target group.
- Geotargeting: Narrow down the target group by locality
- Language: All languages
- Fan status: fans, friends of fans, no fans
You can even load your newsletter database and define a Look-Like target group that resembles your database. For this, Facebook matches the email addresses with the profiles and creates an automatic target group definition, which can be used for the advertising measures.
I recommend you to start your project with a bigger budget using Facebook Ads. You can quickly and easily advertise special promotions or contests and with a little luck achieve a viral effect. To do this, promote a post in which you describe your promotion and additionally promote your company page to increase the number of fans. I recommend you to promote the post to friends of fans and non-fans to expand the target group again. The combination of these advertising options increases the chance of achieving the desired effect.
Buy Facebook fans (real ones)
With Facebook you have a strong platform to run your project, with a little creativity and diligence, successfully from the beginning. For this, you need to think about how you want to pick up your clientele in social media and motivate them to action.
Since you don’t have the viral reach to promote your posts from the start, you can highlight your business page and fund the reach. Also, posts k
However, there are also providers who offer Facebook fans for purchase. For the start, I recommend to choose a combination between Facebook Ads (highlight pages) and purchased fans from providers. With the purchased fans from other providers, you have to make sure that they are fans from the DACH region (Germany / Austria and Switzerland). It doesn’t look good if 90% of your fans are not from your own country.
Therefore, start both campaigns at the same time and generate a large fan base for your promotions.
Twitter is a platform that is considered more of a microblogging platform. This means that posts are kept very short and get to the point quickly.
On Twitter, you can post and also re-post, so your followers, can always follow your movements. So it can be that your interesting post is re-posted by a person who has a hundred thousand followers. They will also see your post and follow you.
Think about some posts for your release, which have an added value and are interesting for your target group. Try to avoid advertising statements. The follower will immediately notice if you are trying to sell something.
With Xing you are more in the “serious” social environment. This platform offers business contacts and can therefore quickly lead to a new opportunity or a new cooperation partner.
If you don’t have a profile on Xing yet, create one and start looking for partners who can help you. You might find an old acquaintance who is currently working as a journalist at a newspaper and can write a PR article about your new startup.
I also recommend you to include your project in your profile, as this will already add value to your CV and your “business partners” will also see your new activity and will surely like to stop by to check it out.
Instagram works on the principle of “pictures say more than a thousand words” and thus offers a platform only for pictures and videos. Similar to Pinterest, but here the target group is not only mainly focused on women, but is used by both sexes, young to old.
I recommend you, if you offer products or services, which can be represented well pictorially, to create a “Business-Insta-Profile”. It’s quick and easy to set up and managing the profile is even fun.
Try to label your pictures with “hashtags (“#”)”. to label your pictures. You’ll quickly see what it means if you don’t know Instagram yet.
Google Plus
With the launch of Google Plus, Google wanted to herald a new era in social media on June 28, 2011. At the beginning, you could only sign up if you could get hold of a personal invitation from an existing member. Just under three months later, it was also possible to sign up without an invitation.
Google Plus is similar to Facebook and the like in that you can exchange pictures, videos and thoughts with your friends. However, you quickly realize that the privacy of the users is a big issue and not every second person shows up drunk and topless.
The target group on Google Plus was already older and business-related at the beginning. But time showed that Google’s concept did not achieve the desired effect as planned.
Today Google sets new signs and takes the business profiles of the individual companies into the evaluation list for the ranking. Thus, in addition to the meta descriptions, the number of Google Plus fans, as well as individual ratings are listed for a search query.
For your project, I recommend you to already prepare your profile, post pictures and posts and from the start date, invite your friends. The more interactions and friends your profile has, the more your website will benefit from ranking.
Gekaufte Fans
I am touching on a topic here that is often looked at very critically and that is the topic of purchased fans. Whether it’s fans, followers, likes, comments or shares, you can buy anything online these days. Providers for such offers have mushroomed in recent months. Certain providers are for the “cat” others, however, offer qualitative “goods”. The views on this could not be more different. You will have to form your own opinion after this chapter, with the help of my experiences.
I have already visited some social media profiles, which had several thousand fans and followers and still had five or less likes on the posts. Here, it’s hard to assume that this profile bought the fans or launched a contest with expensive prizes.
However, how can you make this work best for you? I have already found providers of fans who advertise a page and thus generate “real-bought fans”. This means that you pay for the fans, but they are really interested in your page and voluntarily like your page. Others offer fake profiles, as fans, which actually brings you no benefit. So look for such a “serious provider” and plan a campaign for your “One Million Night”, which will be published exactly then. This is supportive of the rest of your advertising campaigns on social media and could, in the best case, spread your page and your posts virally.