social media – Michele Christensen

Scheduling Social Media Posts

Ask Me Anything, Segment 19

(Prefer to read instead of watch? Scroll down to below the video player for a written summary.)
In this segment of Ask Me Anything, I answer a question about scheduling social media posts. I share the main tool I use to schedule my posts and give my biggest tip on using scheduled posts.

Summary here:

I use Hootsuite to schedule social media posts ahead of time
Scheduling some posts ahead of time is a good way to have a continuous presence on your social media sites, however it is critical to regularly interact with people in real time.
Be sure to be social when you interact with people. Ask questions, join conversations and contribute useful ideas.
Takeaway: You can use Hootsuite or any of a number of apps to schedule some of your social media posts ahead of time. However, make sure to actually put some time in where you are interacting and engaging people in real time.
If you like this tip, please hit the subscribe button to get notified whenever I publish new videos on YouTube.
Before you leave this page, please use the social sharing buttons to share this tip across your social networks! (This counts as real-time interacting!)

How to handle tasks that tend to expand (To Do List Tip #2)

(Prefer to read instead of watch? Scroll down below the video player for a summary.)
Some tasks can take up as much time as you are willing to give them. This video tip is on how to handle those creeping tasks. Link mentioned in video: www.michelechristensen.com/daily

Summary here:

As a solopreneur, you have to be an excellent time manager and this means not letting your day get eaten up by tasks that take as long as you give them.
For example, it may take a lot of time to keep up with your social media posting and email, or it can take hours to write a script for a short video.
People who work on the internet seem especially vulnerable because so many expanding tasks are right in front of you.
Today’s tip is to put edges on expanding tasks so you will know when they are done.
Some examples you can use right away: Use a timer or checklist for social media, empty your inbox completely on a regular basis, and set a limit on how much time you’ll spend on your writing.
Bonus tip: Don’t use your email inbox as a place to store emails. It’s a holding place for emails you haven’t processed yet.
Takeaway: Keep an eye on tasks that tend to creep or expand and put some edges on them so you know when they are done.
If you like this tip, go to www.michelechristensen.com/daily and download my free report “5 Mistakes Solopreneurs Make in Writing Their Daily To Do List and How to Avoid Them.”
Please use the social sharing buttons on this page to share this tip on your social media sites with any friends or colleagues that would find it useful.

How to handle your infinite to do list (To Do List Tip #1)

(Prefer to read instead of watch? Scroll down for a summary.)

As a one-person business, your to do list is literally infinite. There is an unlimited number of things you could be doing to build your business. This video teaches you how to know what to work on. Link mentioned in video: https://www.michelechristensen.com/daily

Summary here:

As a solopreneur, your to do list is infinite – there is literally always more you could be doing to build and promote your business.
It’s no surprise that so many solopreneurs feel overwhelmed!
Having a solid strategy for your business will help you know what to work on.
With a strategy, you know exactly how to find new prospects and convert them to clients.
You can confidently say yes or no to any opportunity depending on whether it fits into your strategy or not.
Takeaway: Don’t even try to do everything you hear about. Have a strategy so you know exactly what to work on.
If you liked this tip, go to www.michelechristensen.com/daily and get a copy of my free report “The 5 Biggest Mistakes Solopreneurs Make in Writing Their Daily To-Do List and How to Avoid Them.”
Please use the social sharing buttons below this video to share the video with your friends and colleagues who would find it valuable.

Measure your results to improve them

From my book “Use Metrics to Know What Works“…

One of the hallmarks of successful entrepreneurs is that they take action. They don’t wait for the time to be perfect or for some mythical moment when everything lines up, they get busy and get going. This is a hugely important trait for success, but it can also be a curse. The problem is that many entrepreneurs are so action oriented that they go off in random directions with no plan. It’s not enough just to take action – you have to be taking action on the right things.

This is where a lot of entrepreneurs get into trouble. Yes, you do need to be taking consistent action, but if you don’t take some time first to determine what you should be doing there’s a good chance of not getting the results you want. The problem is that it is really hard for an action-oriented entrepreneur whose idea keeps him up at night to take a step back and do some research and planning. Later, the problem becomes taking the time to measure and analyze results when you would rather be doing more.

So many business operate like this:

Start doing something in hopes of growing your business
Sales don’t come as desired
Add another activity
Repeat

Can you see the problems with this approach? First, you can only repeat this cycle for so long. There is an absolute upper limit to the amount of activity that you can add to your business. At some point, you will run out of hours in the week. Second, if you keep adding new things without taking away anything you’ll end up with a bigger and bigger list of activities to keep up with. Your attention becomes split and you end up expending a lot of energy switching between and managing all your projects. Third and most serious is that you have absolutely no way to improve. There’s no feedback or indication of what’s working or not and how to improve. This is the biggest problem of all because testing, measuring and adapting is the only sure way you have of making sure you are on a path of continual improvement. Continuing to blindly add activities with no clear plan is like trying to get across town on your bicycle by pedaling faster and making random turns. If you don’t stop and consult a map before and during your trip, you won’t know if you are even heading in the right direction. All of that activity may actually be taking you further from your destination.

It’s almost impossible to get things just right on the first try. That’s where being action-oriented is an asset – as an action taker you just get out there and do something. However, the shortest path to success after you take action is to learn from that experience and adapt your next attempt.

When you take action with no planning, there is no way to measure and no way to close the loop. Everything you do will be just random shooting in the dark with no way to adapt and learn. Often the only feedback you get is “that didn’t work.”

For all of these reasons, metrics (i.e. measuring your results) is often one of the first areas I work on with my clients because we really can’t begin coaching and moving forward effectively until they have a feedback loop in place. As much as I wish I could, I simply can’t pull the right answers out of nothing. I need data to work with in the first place and a way to measure results once our ideas are implemented.

If you aren’t doing any metrics, or you want to see how metrics can help you, head over to the Kindle store and grab my book “Use Metrics to Know What Works.” This article is taken from Chapter 1, and the rest of the book teaches you not only the principles of metrics but how to do metrics for specific purposed in your business. Grab your copy here:

Use Metrics to Know What Works

(No Kindle device? No problem! You can download a free Kindle app for your phone or tablet, or install the free Kindle reader for your desktop.)

Use Metrics to Know What Works

Today is an exciting day! My newest Kindle book is now available!

(Can’t wait? Here’s the link!)

This book will teach you how to stop guessing, flying by the seat of your pants and running yourself ragged just to make a living.

In this book, I teach the basics of metrics, or using measurement to know what is and isn’t working. As a one-person operation, you simply cannot afford to be wasting time on things that don’t bring your results. Without a way to know for sure how well your efforts are paying off, how do you know where to spend your time?

This book is written specifically with you, the solopreneur, in mind. After laying out some general concepts on metrics, I show you where to start and exactly what to measure. The book even includes a downloadable starter kit with a tutorial video so you can get started right away.

Click the link below and grab your copy today:

Use Metrics to Know What Works

No Kindle device? No problem! You can get the free Kindle app for your smartphone or tablet or use the free Kindle desktop reader.

Get your book copy here

If you aren’t sure if this is for you, I invite you to imagine how great it would be if you knew you were working on the best thing you could be doing right now. That’s the confidence and clarity that measuring your result can bring. Get started today by downloading your book here.

Product Review – Business Marketing With Pinterest

My first exposure to Pinterest was through Facebook, where I would see some of what my friends posted. I enjoyed what I saw, which was mainly food, pets and fashion. Given what I was experiencing, I couldn’t see how I could use Pinterest for my business. Pinterest is all about beautiful images (or so I thought), and my business doesn’t readily create vivid images. I held out and didn’t jump in because I have a rule in my business:

I don’t add anything new until I know exactly how it will help my business and how to measure if it is working.

So, I waited and watched Pinterest grow. I saw the buzz and began to see case studies of people with businesses similar to my own getting amazing results. By results, I mean sales, leads and exposure to new people. I did some reading up and thought I understood enough to make Pinterest work for me and so I jumped in. I created my account and began pinning away. When I tried to measure my results, well, I couldn’t. You can’t really measure zero.

That’s right, zero. I got no new customers or leads, and very little traffic from Pinterest at first. I chalked it up as a failed experiment and moved on but kept my account so I could gaze at puppies, recipes I would never make and beautiful home ideas that I would never use. Fast forward a few months and one of my most trusted colleagues starts getting great results (traffic, leads and INCOME) from Pinterest and creates a training to help other people duplicate her success. Ok, now I’m intrigued. What did I miss?

I purchased Business Marketing with Pinterest by Becky Sangha, and committed to watching the entire thing and implementing every step of it. That last part is really important – as with any training, for it to do any good you have to consume it (watch, read, listen, etc) AND implement what you are learning. No training will help you if it sits on your hard drive or bookshelf and you don’t act on it. The same is true with this training.

What I learned was that Pinterest is a traffic driving machine! The very first week I checked my traffic stats after starting this training, Pinterest was in my top ten sources of referral traffic! Keep in mind that I had only just gotten started and hadn’t even done that much. By week two, Pinterest was my #4 source of referral traffic and my #7 source overall, and I still hadn’t implemented the entire system! After using the system for about a year, Pinterest is consistently in my top ten traffic sources every week.

What’s really great about Pinterest traffic is that these visitors are interested in what you have to offer! The very name of the site is a combination of “Pin” and “interest,” and you create pinboards based on interest. A person wouldn’t be following your boards or clicking your pins if they weren’t interested by what they saw. I find that Pinterest traffic tends to stay on my site for longer and look at more pages while they are there.

So the verdict on this training is a big thumbs up! Not only does it deliver great results, it’s laid out in a systematic way that makes it easy to follow and implement. Becky has a great teaching style and does something I think is really important – she explains the reasons behind everything she tells you to do. She also gives you everything you need to get completely up to speed. Even if you have no idea what subjects you could create pins about, she has you covered!

I suggest you grab this product if:

You want to use Pinterest for your business (don’t try to figure it out yourself!)
You have a website that you want more interested traffic for
You have a business that isn’t particularly visual and want to know how you can use Pinterest anyway
You already know how great Pinterest is, but don’t know what kind of pins to create for your business
You enjoy Pinterest for personal use but aren’t sure how to make the leap to using it for business

Check out Business Marketing with Pinterest and let me know what you think!

I’m a proud affiliate for this program, and the above links are affiliate links.

How to Profit on YouTube – New Training

One of the easiest, and most profitable way to provide value to your prospects, leads and customers is through YouTube videos.

The more value you provide, the more valuable you are, priming your audience to become eager buyers of your products and services.

Have you started creating YouTube videos? I confess, I’m under-using YouTube. That’s why I’ve signed up for this training.

Maybe you have a few videos, but you are frustrated because they aren’t generating the interest you had anticipated and you aren’t sure how you can create YouTube videos that will drive high quality traffic to your sign-ups, website, and sales pages.

If you would like to make yourself more valuable to your prospects and clients while getting unlimited, highly targeted traffic to your website, hen I know you’ll want to join in this new training offered by my friend and colleague, Becky Sangha (a.k.a. The Online Video Marketer).

How To Create YouTube Content Fast For More Traffic, Sign-ups And Sales

This is a workshop training course where you will learn everything you need to know to use YouTube videos to generate value, and increase traffic, and your profits. There is no selling in this workshop, it’s pure training. She’s even going to have me on the workshop live as one of her examples! I honestly have no idea what she is going to tell me, but I can’t wait to find out!

Because it is a workshop, Becky wants to ensure that each participant gets maximum value, and she’s limited the number of people who can register. So click on the link now before it fills up and she pulls the page down.

How To Create YouTube Content Fast For More Traffic, Sign-ups And Sales

Becky’s just opened this up to the public, and it’s already generating quite a buzz, so don’t wait to sign-up, or you might be too late.

PS – I’ve worked closely with Becky for almost 3 years, and I am proud to be an affiliate for this training. If you decide to register, I’ll make a small commission.

Website Traffic Basics, Part 2

This post is the second in a series on website traffic basics. If you want to read part 1, click here. In the first post, I explained the concept of generating traffic to a website. Many new website owners assume that if they create a website that people will visit that site automatically and that’s not the case. In this post, I’ll expand on the concept of website traffic by talking about what you can learn by how long your visitors stay on your site. Not all visitors to your site are equally interested in what you have to sell, and not all visitors will behave the same way on your site.

One of the first things to look at when analyzing your web traffic is how long people stay on your site. In general, the longer people stay the more likely they are to take action (e.g. opt in to your email list, sign up for something free or buy something). When people stay on your site for a long time, it’s a good sign that they are interested in what they find there. After all, why would someone stay on a site that they weren’t interested in? Google Analytics can give you statistics on your website visitors in great detail including how long they stay.

A second figure to look at is bounce rates. In Google Analytics, a bounce is when someone clicks on you page and leaves quickly. It’s a good indication that they didn’t find what they were looking for. This is a good figure to compare for various traffic sources and keywords. If people land on your site after doing a search on a certain key word or phrase and then many of them bounce, that means that people searching on that key word or phrase are not finding what they wanted on your page. There could be a great opportunity for you here – fine tune the content of your page to better match what people want. You may also find that traffic from various sources tends to stay on your site for more or less time.

A third figure to look at is what actions people take when on your site. You might want them to opt-in for your email list, sign up for a free event or make a purchase. This is also a way to compare your traffic – you can look at what actions they tend to take while on your site.

In the first post I wrote, I talked about Pinterest and how it is great at driving site visitors. That post focused mainly on how Pinterest was good for driving a good volume of referral traffic. However, Pinterest is also good at driving high-quality traffic. My own experience is that the visitors I get to my site from Pinterest tend to stay longer than visitors from other sources. There is also some great data to support the idea that Pinterest users have a higher tendency to buy than visitors from other sites. In order to learn more about Pinterest and website traffic, you can watch this training I did with Becky Sangha, the creator of Business Marketing with Pinterest. She shares some great tips for using Pinterest and actually accomplishing something, and she also gives her strategy for using Pinterest in just 10 minutes per week! You can get a lot of traffic and followers in that time, which is a great return on investment. Check it out at the link below:

Pinterest Training for Solopreneurs

Like this post? Please use the Pin It and social sharing buttons below. Thanks!

3 Myths about Pinterest

This year, I’ve narrowed the number of social media sites I’m on so I can spend more time on each one and get better results. One of the two sites I’m focusing on is Pinterest. I was slow to get onto Pinterest, and one of the reasons is that I didn’t think it was appropriate for my business. I didn’t see how puppy pictures, wedding shoes and gorgeous food pictures could possibly fit into my business. However, it turns out I was wrong. I believed some common myths about Pinterest which have turned out not to be true. Here’s what I thought, and what’s right.

Pinterest Myth #1: It’s only for women

Yes, I am a woman and I do love to work with women, however my niche is solopreneurs, and I work with both men and women. I didn’t think being part of something that is primarily used by women would get me connected to people I might be able to work with.

The reality: Pinterest is still has more female users, but men are starting to use it a faster rate. There are some very specific interest areas in which men tend to post including sports, travel, home repair, SEO and social media.

Pinterest Myth #2: It’s for hobbyists

Before I knew better, the only people I knew who were using Pinterest were using it for their hobbies. They were sharing pictures of their favorite foods, clothes, animals, equipment, makeup and other hobby items. My business isn’t particularly picture-worthy, so I didn’t see how sharing pictures could possibly help me.

The reality: Pinterest is great for business, and there are a lot of businesses using it with great success. Pinterest is a great way to drive interested people to your site and Pinterest users tend to make purchases once they visit a site from Pinterest.

Pinterest Myth #3: It’s only for visual businesses

Take one look at Pinterest and you’ll see that it is indeed great for visual businesses such as photographers, designers, people in the fashion industry, artists, craftspeople, etc. However, you can have a non-visual and even a visually “boring” business and still use Pinterest. Yes, you will need to create some graphic to go with whatever you want to pin but you can use really simple graphics and even just a quote graphic can be pinned and shared.

Are you using Pinterest for your business? If not, why not? Jump in before Pinterest gets saturated with your competitors and start reaping the benefits.

Need a place to start? Watch this webinar for a great introduction to Pinterest for Solopreneurs. I hosted Pinterest expert and creator of “Business Marketing with Pinterest” Becky Sangha for a video training on getting started with Pinterest. Oh, and please use the Pin it and social sharing buttons below the video to share this with your friends and colleagues.