Ann Smarty quotes: tips, tactics, and best practices for marketing online.
“Be passionate and hungry.”
“Social media allows us to behave in ways that we are hardwired for in the first place, as humans. We can get frank recommendations from other humans instead of from faceless companies.”
“Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society, they are a challenge to it.”
“Be patient. ‘Build it and they will come’ really works if you keep building it for months and don’t expect fast results. To get a strong voice in your niche, you need to deserve that.”
“Don’t try to be like someone else. There’s the difference between watching what your competitors are doing and trying to do the same. What makes you different is your own perspective.”
“Many very successful bloggers don’t make any money from their blogs. Let that never discourage you. You are successful as long as you are hungry.”
“Never stop learning. I’ve been suffering a lot when, at some point, I got so busy that I couldn’t afford to actually read. I felt I was getting dumb. Now I freed myself from a lot of duties exactly for that: to be able to learn new things again and I enjoy it thoroughly. The moment you stop learning new things you stop being a good blogger. If you feel tired, switch to something else. When I feel inspired, I just do it outright! That lets me stop working on a current project and explore something new!”
“Being helpful in various ways is probably the most efficient way to build a community. Answer customers’ questions, provide real-time support and try to avoid selling but focus on being out there.”
“Create effective landing pages encouraging users to join your community (and/or opt in to your list).”
“Guest post (or find people among your employees who are willing to guest post) on prominent niche sites (or, better yet, set up regular guest posting columns) and engage with every guest post, answering comments and promoting content. Commenting and guest posting drive very engaged audience members to your site.”
“Be helpful and participate in discussions. Participate in expert interviews.”
“No matter how many projects I start, I am always overwhelmed by how much should be done at the beginning. From basic but important things (name, domain and logo) to huge undertakings (like setting up a blog and publishing the first batch of content so as not to launch it empty).”
“I am a strong believer that one cannot be successful without a talented and motivated team, and I am most grateful for those who have helped me create a successful project.”
“SEO is not really rocket science. In many cases, it can be handled in-house with a one-man team managing different angles of it. Unless you have a huge site, SEO comes down to common-sense things: create good content that describes what you do and answers frequent questions in your niche. Make sure Google can access your site (Google’s Search Console will help you do that). Start working on building connections to put your content out there and have some links come in.”
“Always start with keyword and competition research and spend a lot of time brainstorming and creating content that would be better than anything that already exists. This is the best way to develop an effective SEO strategy.”
“Don’t be intimidated. You will most likely only need help if your website is huge and complicated (or already in trouble with Google and its filters). Otherwise, just spend some time slowly getting into it and you’ll save a lot of money by handling it in-house.”
“When I started blogging, the most common piece of advice was to publish a 500-word-long article with some keywords in it. When I used some screenshots and charts, everyone was amazed at how creative I was. These days, content has become much more in-depth and visual. It’s a welcome change. We recommend focusing on quality, referencing niche experts and creating original images.”
“On the other hand, it was easier for small businesses when I started. These days, content is getting much more expensive, so corporations with huge marketing budgets start winning. It’s a sad trend. I’d say, the web is still a place where anyone can get heard by being diligent and creative. You just need to put much more effort into it than you would have needed 10 years ago.”
“As for mistakes, focusing on the wrong campaign performance metrics (number of social media shares, direct social media traffic, etc.) is the biggest mistake businesses often make. If you focus mainly on those metrics, you’ll start spending a lot of time and effort pursuing immediately visible milestones and miss the bigger picture (trust and community building, authority, alternative traffic sources, etc.).”
“Whether you realize it or not, competition is a good thing. It pushes you to expand and become better. But, competition is a business catalyst only if you know how to approach competitive research properly.”
“Blogger reviews will give you loads of competitive data to go through and compare details you might not think of. Remember, comparisons come in all forms, including videos and infographics.”
“Catering to all existing marketing channels is next to impossible. There’s too much to do and too much to promote. A possible (yet not easy) workaround is being an early adopter. Early adoption is more important than ever thanks to the over-saturation of marketing channels: look for emerging marketing channels that are still unsaturated.”
“Influencer marketing is on the rise and is such a fantastic form of engagement, and a way to increase your visibility on social platforms.”
“I’d say influencer-powered content is the most efficient in terms of building awareness, traffic and leads. Invite influencers to participate in webinars, online events and podcasts. This will likely turn your business around if you do it consistently and put a lot of effort into promoting that content and building connections with influencers.”
“I consider the most profitable marketing strategy [to be] creating good content. There’s no way around it. If you could get away without any other thing under the sun (SEO, social media, community building, PPC), without digital content you won’t get anywhere. Every other marketing tactic starts with content. You cannot generate links without content and you cannot build community without it. So I’d say investing in solid content is the most important and profitable strategy.”
“Content curation helps relationship building big time, and many curators seem to miss that component. Simply linking to a good article is not enough—reinforce that with following the author, tagging him or her properly in your social media updates, crafting tweet quotes and much more. This is where the strongest relationships are built!”
“Engage your audience with effective visual content.”
“Content marketing is becoming more diverse and more expensive. More and more businesses will want to get into video content. Video streaming and video storytelling will become part of marketing strategy.”
“I remember reading a news article about how a study found that people who post inspiration quotes on their social media page were more likely to be unintelligent. Unsurprisingly, these claims were false, but I still found it funny and shared the article to all of my friends. I am an avid quotes sharer, and so are many of them, and we all had a good laugh at our own expense.”
“Whatever the original intentions of that flawed study, there is no denying that experts’ quotes are insanely popular on social media, especially on Twitter, where a single quote will be passed around thousands of times.”
“Occasionally you will come across a great quote from one of your favorite blogs, or a video interview, and you should feel free to share those. But when you are actually going hunting for quotes, it is good to have a couple of sources on hand.”
“Visual quotes are even more shareable than text ones, and as a rule you should try and create more of them. Luckily they aren’t that hard to make, especially if you have a little know-how on tools like Photoshop or GIMP.”
“Have you seen those posts floating around that show Albert Einstein quoting Lil Wayne lyrics, or George Washington telling you not to believe everything you see on the internet? Fake quotes can be a lot of fun, and they get shared on social media quite a bit.”
“Technically, you don’t need any resources for this one. You can make up your own (taking care to make it obvious that it is fake), and post them—making you the original source, and increasing your visibility.”
“Quotes are always re-shared like crazy. This is one of those things that’s almost sure to work no matter how many times you do it. Quotes never get old. The fun thing about sharing quotes is that it will get more re-shares than comments. But any interaction works while it’s improving your Klout Score, right?”
“Visual quotes work great for expanding your reach beyond your niche. Visual quotes are great because they can be used in multiple channels and hugely increase your reach. Another great thing about visual quotes is that you can use them in your content to beautify your posts. You can also use them as the basis to create more content types, i.e. repackage.”
“My favorite method of getting expert quotes to use on social media is also the most beneficial to you: through expert interviews. You are probably always looking for new content, and by interviewing an expert you will get plenty. You will also build yourself as an authority and source for the original quote, which you can use to promote the content you have just published. Win-win!”
“I try and conduct an interview at least once a month, and I have loved the results.”
“Social media is the next SEO already. SEOs cannot ignore social any longer, no matter how obvious that now sounds.”
“I define my job… to people around me… well, I hardly even try. When I say that I ‘make money online’ I feel that even my closest friends feel suspicious. So I ended up saying I am into internet marketing that is like ‘promoting products on TV’ but doing that over the internet. That at least stopped the weird glances.”
“Start your own personal site and play with it. The best way to understand SEO is to play with tools and immediately apply tactics you’ve just learned. It also makes it much more fun. Good luck!”
