social media marketing

12 Days of Christmas Marketing for Belly Dancers

by Julie

The holidays are so busy, and often the first thing to go out the door is any marketing you had planned for your business this month. Newsletters slide by another week. Blogs don’t get updated. Twitter and Facebook stand idle.  I get it. Really!

So, I thought I’d make a list of marketing quickies. Things you can do fast, perhaps with a cup of cocoa in your hand, that will help keep your business moving forward.

  1. Claim and verify your listing on Places.Google.com (if that’s already done, check it to make sure it’s still there. Sometimes those place pages go on walk-about.)
  2. Schedule a holiday Tweet and Facebook post for Christmas Day, Solstice, Hanukah, and New Years.
  3. Don’t know how to schedule your tweets and posts? Sign up for Hootsuite.com
  4. Set up your own channel on YouTube and “like” a few videos of your favorite dancers.
  5. Subscribe to a few dance channels on YouTube (you might start with BellyDanceTeacherTip or MECDA)
  6. Start a twitter list of dancers you admire and retweet something.
  7. Find your local arts council and Chamber of Commerce on Facebook. “Like” their page and make a comment on some of their posts.
  8. Send your students a holiday card (in the mail!)
  9. Write a holiday greeting to send to your email list. Include your favorite cookie recipe.

10. Ask a few students to post reviews of your classes on your Google Place page.

11. Buy a pretty 2012 calendar just for your marketing plans.

12. Write down the start and end dates for your class sessions on your calendar.

13. Write down any workshops you plan to attend next year (like the MECDA Professional Dance Conference & Retreat in October!)

14. Write down an income goal for next year and break it down into monthly goals.

15. Brainstorm some ways to meet those monthly goals–workshops? Costume sales? More students?

16. Brainstorm some blog posts topics for next year.

17. Take a moment to look back at all you’ve accomplished in the past year. And pat yourself on the back. Maybe treat yourself to a year-end massage.

18. Print out some colorful new fliers for your classes and post them around town while you’re doing your holiday shopping.

19. Add a Paypal button to your classes page so people can sign up right on your website.

20. Set up a survey on SurveyGizmo.com or SurveyMonkey.com. Ask your students what they’d like to learn most next year.

21. Brainstorm some non-dance workshops you could teach. Costume DIY? Hairpieces? Makeup? Henna?

22. Brainstorm three groups of people you could market your classes to.  Corporate wellness programs? Women’s groups? Non-denominational churches? Teens?

23. Find the Facebook pages for those three groups in #22 and “like” their pages. Then make a friendly comment or post. Don’t promote, just say “hi” or say something nice.

24. Write an article or review of a recent show/workshop you attended and send it to your local dance association or favorite belly dance magazine.

 

Okay, so that’s more than 12 days…but I figure you can pick and choose. You’re smart like that.

Happy holidays to all of you – and a very very prosperous 2012!

5.5 Tips to Get Traffic to Your Website Using Social Media

by Julie

If you’ve been in one of my group programs, you may have heard me talk about this very important formula before:

Traffic + Conversion = Profits

The good news is there are only two things you need to focus on when building your business, whether it’s online or offline. Traffic and conversion, that’s it. The bad news is getting lots of traffic and high conversions is challenging for most people. They’ll put up a website or blog and then sit back waiting for the money to roll in. Does that sound familiar?

Fortunately, there are lots of ways to get traffic and increase your conversions. For today, let’s focus on getting you lots of traffic to your website. Now, there are lots of traffic generation models out there, including search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click, local search and more. But for right now, let’s focus on social media. It’s free and it’s easy once you get the hang of it.

1) Make sure you know who you’re talking to. You don’t want just any old traffic, you want targeted traffic that’s likely to be interested in buying what you’re selling. So, if you’re a local teacher–your audience is the general public in your local area. If you’re a workshop teacher–your audience is other belly dancers. If you’re a performer looking for wedding gigs–your audience is brides-to-be. Make sure your content speaks directly to your audience.

2) Write blog posts at least once a week. These don’t have to be long. And they don’t even have to be your content. If you find a great video on YouTube, post a paragraph description and embed the video. If you find a great post written by someone else, write a teaser and post a link. It’s nice to mix it up with your own writing and links to other people’s stuff. Remember, you don’t have to write if you don’t want to. Video or audio blog posts are fun too.

3) Post links to your blog post on your Facebook page. This give you fresh content on Facebook and moves people from there to your website (where the sales happen.) You can even schedule it to appear whenever you like with HootSuite or SocialOomph.

4) Post links to your blog post on your Twitter account. Again, fresh content and moves people to your website. People get into a routine with Twitter. If you’re posting at 9 am every day, you’re missing all the people who log in at noon or in the evening. So be sure you’re posting that link at different times during the day.

5) Start a YouTube channel and invite people to be friends there. Did you know you can use YouTube just like Facebook? When someone subscribes to your channel, or becomes your friend, they’ll be notified when you post a new video. That brings people back and helps them remember you. Be sure to have a link to your website prominently placed on your channel.

5.5) Here’s a bonus step: hang out where your target audience hangs out. If you’re a local teacher and want to attract traffic from the general public in your town, find other local business pages on Facebook and “Like” them. Then make it a habit to comment on their posts. People visiting the page will see you and check out your page.

Focus on building traffic to your page first, and then shift over to improving your conversion rate. And don’t get discouraged. It takes time to prime the pump before you get steady streams of traffic coming in.

How to Get the Most Marketing Power From Your Blog Posts

by Julie

There are lots of reasons to keep a blog as a marketing tool. Not the least of which is helping you rank higher in the search engines (that’s a whole ‘nother article.) But I often hear dancers complaining that they just don’t have time to add blogging to their marketing mix. Well, what if your blog could do more than just sit there? What if it actively brought new prospects to your website and got them interested in possibly taking a class or hiring you for a party?

Would that get you to write?

Here’s how to take a short, humble blog post and turn it into a marketing superhero in no time flat.

1) Post a link on Facebook:

Businesses should post content on their Facebook pages about three times a week. When you blog once a week, you’ve got 1/3 of your content done. All you have to do is write a quick description of the article in your status bar and then copy/paste the link to the post. Your Facebook fans will see the link in their feed, and if they’re interested enough, they’ll click through and read the whole thing.

You’ll get more click-throughs if you include a photo of some kind in your post. And you’ll also improve interaction if you ask people to comment. (There’s even a comment plugin for WordPress that combines your blog comments and Facebook comments into one stream.)

2) Post a link on Twitter:

Experts recommend you post new content on Twitter about once a day. The same idea applies here. Post a short description and link to your blog post so your Twitter followers will see it, too.  Make sure you keep your description under 120 characters so your followers can retweet the link easily.

Easy-peasy shortcut:

If you want to make your Facebook and Twitter posting faster and easier, check out HootSuite. It’s a social media dashboard that lets you schedule your posts out in advance. You can also organize your feeds, mentions and run special keyword searches.

If you use lots of smaller social media platforms like Tumblr, Google Buzz and others, you may want to set up a Ping.FM account so you can post links back to your blog on all your platforms with one click.

3) Post it in your email newsletter

Okay, so you know you need to send an email newsletter to your mailing list. But how often do you actually get around to doing it? Most dancers only send email when they’re promoting something–a new class, a workshop, etc. But that means your open rates decline quickly because your list expects only sales messages from you.

When you post a link to your blog in a super-short email, you’re showing your list that you have more to talk to them about than just selling them something. They’ll be much more likely to open all your messages if you give them interesting blog posts on a regular basis.

Don’t overdo this. Once a week is plenty. If you get a lot of unsubscribes, perhaps once or twice a month is a better rate for you. It all depends on your audience and what you’re talking about.

Easy-peasy shortcut:

Yes, there’s an automated tool for sending your blog to your email list. Sweet! It’s called RSS to email and most email providers have this service. Once you set it up, the service will automatically send any new blog posts to your email list. You can also set it up to get your permission first (just in case your whole list doesn’t need to see every single post.)

MailChimp is one of the most popular email newsletter services because it’s free and reliable. Here’s a tutorial on how to set up RSS to email on MailChimp.

http://blog.mailchimp.com/rss-to-email-tutorial/

Hardcore marketing ideas:

So, you want to really squeeeezze every last drop of marketing power from your blog posts? Well, depending on what your post is about, you can try one of these techniques:

  • Make a powerpoint video and put on YouTube and SlideShare.
  • Change the wording a bit, add a news angle and post a free press release for backlink credit.
  • Rewrite it a tad and send it to your local media as a press release.
  • Send it as a submission to a local arts blog.

There you have it. One blog post, lots of marketing channels covered. What are you waiting for? Go write something.

What’s your favorite/most effective blog post on your site? We’d love to see it. Post a link to it in the comments.

 

How to Make the Most of the New Facebook Fan Page Changes

by Julie
belly dance marketing Facebook changes

New Facebook layout helps your business page stand out from the crowd

A few days ago, Facebook announced some major changes in the layout and performance of all business pages on the platform. I’ve had a chance to look over the changes and start using them, and I’m thrilled. Promoting your belly dance business is about to get a whole lot easier. If you already have a business page (or “fan page”), you have the option of switching to this new format now or waiting until March 10 when Facebook will do it for you. (You will get a tour of all the new features and the new layout, so you know where everything is when you switch.) But since you’re going to have to change to the new layout sooner or later, I suggest you take advantage of all the great things this can do for your business and start using the new format now.

If you don’t have a business page on Facebook, now is the time to get it done. For a long time now, it’s been easy to dismiss social media as a waste of time for businesses. But the larger platforms like Facebook and Twitter are working hard to make it a no-brainer to use their sites for marketing. It’s easy; it’s free; and these latest changes mean if you’re not on Facebook, you’re missing out on a ton of great marketing opportunities.

The biggest change, which is a great one in my opinion, is that businesses can now use Facebook more like a person can. Your business page can “like” other pages and join groups and more. Which means you’re no longer forced to mix your business and personal profiles. And if you have multiple business pages, they don’t have to mix either. Here’s how to use these changes to improve your business, get more students and fill your performance schedule.

1) Load a great photo of you or your logo onto your business page

People want to see people, but you also want to make it clear what you do. It’s difficult to communicate that with a postage stamp sized avatar. Most people don’t realize you can load a large banner-size profile image on business pages. You have up to 600×200 pixels to play with, so make use of all that space. Put a photo of you as well as your logo, website or a bulleted list of what you offer in that banner space. So visitors will know in a glance exactly who you are and what you do.

2) Strategically join groups and “like” other pages — As Your Page.

This is the best part about all the recent changes. Before now, you could only join groups and like pages as “yourself”. Which meant you had to have a personal account and a business page, and it was difficult to get people to realize that “you” and “your business” were linked. That’s all changed now. By simply going to your accounts page, you can click “use Facebook as page” and you can join groups, like other pages AS your business. Which is awesome because now when you join your local arts council group, visitors will see “XYZ belly dance studio” for all your comments and interactions.

Don’t just join belly dance groups and pages. Be strategic. Where are your customers hanging out? Where are your potential new students? Keep it local. Keep it relevant.

  • College pages
  • Arts organizations
  • Local news media (papers, radio and TV stations, indie websites)
  • Musicians and venues
  • Restaurants and clubs
  • Tattoo shop pages
  • Wedding planners
  • Women’s groups
  • Festival pages
  • Divorce groups (I know this sounds weird, but divorced women are great prospects because they are eager to try new things and make new friends.)

3) Don’t just “like”–interact.

The more you add value to groups and other business pages, the more likely people will click on your profile to see who you are and what you do. Post on their wall. Comment on their status updates. Just don’t do any blatant selling or call attention to your services. You’re providing useful information here, not selling. What kind of useful information? How about a great recipe, favorite music, review of a recent performance or DVD? It all depends on the group of people you’re talking to. Be extremely relevant to the topic of the page you’re posting on. The owner of the page will welcome your input, and who knows? You might even end up with a cross-promotion partner or a new performance gig.

Do you love or hate the new format?  Do you have any additional ideas for how to interact with prospects on Facebook? Please post a comment below and let us know what you think.

PS–For you advanced Facebook users…you have until March 11th to use FBML for your tabs. After that, they’re changing to iFrames. (If you have no idea what that means, stay tuned…)