The Biggest Mistake Businesses Make On Social Media

As a business owner, you’re looking at social media marketing like any other initiative — you’re keen to get involved, but only if it offers clear ROI for your business. And so you go on to make the biggest mistake you could possibly make on social media: you try to cash out too soon.

“But wait a minute,” you say, eyes squinting. “If I’m investing in social media for my business, isn’t the whole point to make my money back?”

Yes! But the worst way to do that is to explicitly sell your products to people before you’ve provided them any value.

People use social media to get news, to follow friends, and to start conversations, so don't be surprised if you find it difficult to fit in with your self-promotional sales content.

A business that uses social media just to shout about their own product or service is like that one kid that won’t stop splashing in the pool, even after they’ve been asked to stop. All the other kids shake their head and share a knowing look, stepping farther and farther away to leave you a wide enough radius to splash by yourself.

You don’t want to splash solo. You may actually get some folks wet, but you also piss a lot of people off.

So how do you effectively engage others on social media and spark some real conversations? How do you build an engaged audience that will want to actually purchase from you long-term?

Many experts will have you believe the answer is pull the attention off yourself and share other peoples’ content. A few examples:

• The Golden Ratio (30/60/10) suggests 30% of the content you share should be content you create, 60% should be curated from elsewhere, and 10% should be promotional with calls to action.
• The Rule of Thirds suggests your social media updates should be evenly split between content that’s A) about or by you B) curated from others and C) personal interactions that build your brand.
• The 4-1-1 Method recommends four pieces of content curated from others, and one retweet for every one self-serving update.

This certainly appears to be an improvement. If the goal is to use social media to provide value to your target audience and spark conversations, then sharing the very best content from experts in the industry would be a sound route to go. (At least the other kids will play with you in the pool, rather than leaving you alone!)

But let’s not forget your whole goal of using social media. You’re looking to get a return on your investment. You want to drive people back to your website as much as possible so you can send them down your sales funnel. How can you do that if you’re mostly sending them to other experts’ sites and other businesses’ content?

In other words, why not create and share your own valuable content and turn your business into the go-to expert?

To build an audience for yourself, you have to provide some sort of unique value. You need to have a compelling reason for others to follow you, engage with you, like your content, and link to your website. As Gary Vaynerchuk says, you need to give, give, give without expectation.

Of course this isn’t something that happens with one article, one video, or one white paper. It’s a frame of mind, a holistic framework that encompasses how you work as a business owner.

If you can create a large enough reservoir of truly valuable content for your target audience, you’ll have plenty of fuel to drive consistent activity across a number of social media channels. You’ll be giving your audience plenty of reason to organically interact with you, share your content, link to your website, and send others down your funnel for you.

In other words, you won’t need to resort to splashing around by yourself to get people wet.

It takes just as much effort to plan an awesome party as it does to splash by yourself all day along. But instead of pissing people off, you get people jazzed to stop by and get wet. And if it’s truly great, those people will talk up your pool party to their friends too.

By providing enough value consistently to your audience, you actually turn your followers into ambassadors. So make your social media feeds the next great pool party. After a few great events and enough thrilled partygoers, you’ll have a line of people our your door eager to make a purchase.

Originally published on Forbes.com.

Stop Delegating Social Media to Your Interns

You know social media can be a valuable tool for your business -- you just haven’t found the time to prioritize it. But then it hits you.

“I’ll just get an intern to help!” After all, it’s a cheap solution and those college kids know everything about that social media thing. It sounds plausible, and yet, it could be one of the worst mistakes you make for your business.

Consider this: after a Google search, social media is often the very next place potential customers, investors and employees look before deciding to work with you.

An effective social media strategy earns you the attention of industry influencers, drives interested visitors back to your website and increases conversions. But an ineffective social media strategy will make your company look uneducated, impersonal or unhelpful. Poorly managed social media channels irritate customers, make employees second-guess their affiliation with your company and get people talking about you for all the wrong reasons.

In short, your social media presence is a digital window into your company and its operations. That’s a lot of responsibility for an intern who A) doesn’t have the experience to manage social media for a business and B) doesn’t know nearly enough about your business to represent you authentically online.

A good social media manager is not just someone who owns a smartphone and happens to enjoy social media in their personal life. Just because you watch TV doesn’t mean you can produce television ad campaigns, and the same is true for social media.

It’s far too easy to accidentally make your company look dumb online to delegate social media management to a newbie. Too much automation? You look impersonal. Using social media as a sales megaphone? You come across as spammy. To make matters worse, all it takes is one wrong tweet, one politically incorrect statement, one incorrectly used hashtag, to get your customers shaking their heads in frustration.

When your customers decide to use social media as an outlet to complain or ask questions, will your intern know enough to handle those problems? Will they know when to answer those queries directly and when to direct them to your customer service department? Or will your customers get ignored, and turn, frustrated, to your competitors. (“At least they answer my questions,” they’ll grumble.)

Interns are short term solutions. They work for a few months to get some entry-level experience in your industry. There a real risks having your social media manager just figuring it out along the way.

Perhaps you’ve delegated social media to an intern or are thinking of doing so. You aren’t putting many resources behind your social media presence, and think of it as something you “should be doing” rather than an opportunity to expand your company’s reach online.

Consider this a wake up call. As the business owner, you’re ultimately responsible for the success of your company. You’re responsible for putting the right pieces in place and supporting the initiatives that will help your company thrive.

If you haven’t really bought into the idea of social media for your business, then you’ll have a newbie managing your platforms and you’ll wonder why you can’t get social media to work for you. Instead, take social media seriously, as you would any other communication and marketing initiative.

Give social media the respect it deserves. Accept its pros and cons, its benefits and consequences. Understand its power to market your business, engage with customers, and influence public perception. Realize its opportunity to easily answer client questions and respond to customer complaints...or not. Get excited by the opportunity to rise above the noise and situate yourself as a go-to leader in the industry.

How you choose to use social media will have long-term consequences for your business, either good or bad. That’s not a job to be delegated to a short-term labor solution. There’s certainly nothing wrong with involving your interns in your social media activity, but do yourself a favor and leave management to the experts.

What A 5-Star Review Management Strategy Actually Looks Like

If you're like most business owners, the mere mention of Yelp is enough to spark anger, frustration, or despair. Everyone has a story about that one client or that one review…

Seller beware! Consumers today have an unprecedented amount of power. The popularity of review communities like Yelp has completely changed consumer-facing industries for better and for worse.

Without a strategy in place, you may find a smattering of random complaints on your Yelp profile from a few angry customers that doesn’t at all represent how the majority of your clients feel.

You’re not alone, and it certainly doesn’t have to be that way. With a solid review management strategy in place, you can actually use these review communities to your advantage, building up a reservoir of authentic 4 and 5-star reviews from happy customers that breed trust and generate more business.

Did you know that 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations? Whether or not you find that number surprising, we can probably agree that your online reviews are worth more attention than you're giving them. For companies that are 100% committed to improving their online reviews -- whether you choose to do it yourself or hire external help -- here is a comprehensive, 5-star blueprint.

Claim your business on all review sites

Claiming your business page on review sites gives you some distinct advantages. For example, with a claimed business account on Yelp you can:

• Respond to reviews with a direct message or a public comment
• Track the customer leads Yelp is generating for your business
• Add photos and a link to your website
• Update important information such as your business hours and phone number

There’s really no excuse for an unclaimed profile -- look how obvious Yelp makes it on your unclaimed page:

Yelp.com

So go ahead and claim your business on major platforms like Yelp and Google Reviews, and don’t forget the niche review sites in your industry. Lawyers care about Avvo, doctors worry about ZocDoc and Healthgrades, and the list goes on. To see what you might be missing, do a quick search for top review sites in your industry and Google your competitors to see what review platforms pop up.

If your business has multiple physical locations, you’ll want to claim those as separate pages. And if your business doesn’t show up on a review platform, just add it.

Yelp.com

Find the right software solution

Once you’ve claimed all your business locations on all relevant review platforms, it’s time to set up a review management software to track them.

There are dozens of software solutions out there, and you’ll need to do your own research to determine which one is best for your needs. But no matter what software you choose, you’ll want to make sure it allows you to do a few core things:

• Monitor and track all your top review sites in one consolidated feed or dashboard
• Ask clients for reviews on all the top review sites you care about
• Pre-screen your customers for their level of satisfaction before you ask them to review
• Maintain full control over the messaging and the branding interaction with the customer
• Integrate seamlessly with your CRM so you can send review requests to the right customers at the right times

Make reviewing a cinch for your customers

It may seem obvious, but in order for people to review your business, you need to make it possible for that to happen. And it needs to be as easy as possible. You need to take all the effort out of it.

“What?” you ask. “How hard could it be to leave a review?”

Valid question, but think about your own experience. How often do you leave a restaurant, a bank, a furniture store -- and think about writing a review? Probably never, unless you had a horrible experience and in a fit of rage, you write a novella on their page to warn others.

The bottom line is it takes effort for a customer to even remember to review your business. And once they’ve remembered, your customers still need to open the app or website on their phones and type in their username and password -- that is, if they can even remember their password...

It’s a lot of friction. You can’t blame your customers if they’ve lost their momentary spark of goodwill by the time they get through all those steps.

To make it easy, there are a number of things you can do:

• Claim all your business locations on all major review platforms (see the 1st section.) Your customers may not have a Yelp account, but that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t be interested in reviewing you on a platform they already use, like Google or Facebook.
• Add a link to your business listing in your email signature.
• If you have a physical location, put a ‘Find us on Yelp’ sign in your window. You can do the same for other review platforms.
• Even if you don’t have a physical store, you can still place a Yelp badge on your website. Again, the same goes for other review platforms.

One of the best things you can do, though, is to literally ask your customers to review you. Many review platforms are fine with direct solicitations like this, but others like Yelp have terms and conditions that discourage it.

If you’re worried about the Yelp gods striking down in anger, you can phrase it like this, “If you had a nice experience, please check us out on Yelp!”

And if you feel embarrassed, just be honest and say this Forbes blogger encouraged you to do it, so you thought you’d give it a try. Your customers will chuckle, slap you on the back, and write you the 5-star review you wanted.

Generate reviews from happy customers

You need to actually ask for reviews to get them. Yes, you can do this manually with one-off emails and in-person requests, but do you really have time for that? It’s certainly not a long-term, scalable solution.

This is where your software solution comes into play.

A good review management software will allow you to direct your customers via email to the review platform(s) of your choice. Only a percentage of your customers will review, so this is a pure numbers game. The more you ask, the more you get.

You’re probably wondering, “...but won’t I be encouraging negative reviews too?”

Good question. The best review management softwares pre-screen your customers to gauge their level of satisfaction before sending them off to review. Here is what that may look like in your clients’ inboxes:

Grade.us

If your customers click “I had a good experience,” they’ll be sent to your choice of review platforms. In this case, you can tell I’m prioritizing Yelp but still offering customers other choices in case they don’t have a Yelp account, or just prefer using a different platform.

Grade.us

However, if customers click “I had a bad experience,” they’ll be sent to an internal feedback form so they can air their grievances there. Most upset customers just want to be heard -- they aren’t looking to flame your business online.

Grade.us

The above screenshots come from an email campaign, which is still by far the most popular. (It probably goes without saying, but make sure your emails are mobile-friendly.) You can also ask customers to review via text, but there’s conflicting data out there about their effectiveness.

As I mention above, see if you can connect your review management software with your CRM tool. People are much more likely to review your business shortly after they’ve done business with you, so it can be helpful to send out review requests based on your most recent transactions.

Lastly, consider offering your customers rewards for reviewing. Maybe you offer your customers a coupon for writing a review – and another for sharing it. Or maybe you start some kind of raffle or competition where customers have a chance to win as long as they give you a review.

This isn’t right for every review platform (it's against Yelp's guidelines, e.g.), but some people are more likely to give a review when they get something in return.

Respond to reviews like a pro

Not every customer is going to have a positive experience with your business. No matter how hard you try, you simply cannot control how your customers are going to feel after they do business with you.

It might sound like something your therapist would say, but remember: you can only control your response.

So be sure to respond! Customers who leave negative comments are just people. People who were unhappy with your business and want to feel respected and heard. By responding quickly, you let them know that their input matters! It may be enough for them to change their review or come back to give you a second chance.

Think of positive comments the same way. If you took the time to write a rave review about your favorite company, imagine how thrilled you’d feel when you see the company took the time to personally thank you. It might be the difference between making you a happy customer and a brand evangelist.  

Lastly, remember that your responses to reviews are perhaps even more important for the masses than they are for the individual you’re responding to. Your short, polite response A) shows that you take your feedback seriously and B) reminds the customer that there are human beings behind your company. Both of these are likely to have an impact when potential customers are weighing their options.

Use positive (and negative) reviews to your benefit

An obvious effect of implementing an effective review management strategy is that you’ll start to accumulate dozens, hundreds, or thousands of reviews along the way.

For the reviews that are negative, use them to learn what you can be doing better. Nobody wants negative reviews, but the more constructive feedback you get, the more you can improve your services and iron out any wrinkles in your organization.

And hopefully, the majority of your reviews are 4 and 5 stars! You can use those glowing reviews as testimonials in your sales materials, or as a constantly-updated list of “happy customers” on your website’s homepage and landing pages. It’s the kind of social credibility or “social proof” that has been proven to influence people to take positive action and drive more business! Win-win.

Originally published on Forbes.com.

A Formula For Startups: How To Measure The ROI Of Online Reputation Management

As a business owner, you’re looking at online reputation management like any other investment — you’re keen to get involved, but only if it offers clear ROI for your business.

You’ve been pitched on the idea of managing online reviews, publishing digital content, and getting active on social media. Sure, it would be nice to do those things, but what value do they actually provide your business?

There are two sides to the ROI equation and I’m going to walk you through both — the estimated lost revenue from negative articles and Yelp reviews and the potential earned revenue from a positive online presence and increased sales.

Estimating Lost Revenue:

The latest research suggests that businesses risk losing 22% of business when potential customers find one negative article on the first page of your search results. That number increases to 44% lost business with two negative articles, and 59% with three negative articles.

The bottom line is that a negative online reputation leads to lost revenue. If there is a negative result or a bad review showing up on the first page of your Google search results, potential clients are going to stop calling and move on to a competitor.

But just how much revenue are you losing? At what point does an online reputation management campaign make sense for your business?

As long as you know how many clients your company serviced this last year, and how much revenue each client is worth to your company (life time value), it’s actually pretty easy.

Here’s how to figure it out:

STEP 1: Measuring impact of negative results

Do a Google search for your company to see how many negative results show up. If your own name is important for business, then you will want to look yourself up online as well. This is particularly relevant for CEOs, entrepreneurs, real estate agents, lawyers, and doctors.

If you have no negative results, then move onto STEP 2.

Otherwise fill in this formula. We’re taking the percent of average lost customers for businesses in your situation (X), and finding out what percent more of customers you could have had (Y).

It’s WAY easier than it looks, I promise.

Y = X / (100 – X)

Stay with me — I’m already giving you X to plug in!

X = 21.9 if you have 1 negative result on page 1

X = 44.2 if you have 2 negative results

X = 59.2 if you have 3 negative results

X = 69.9 if you have 4 negative results

So if you have 1 negative result on page 1, it would be:

Y = 21.9 / (100 – 21.9)

Y = 21.9 / 78.1

Y = .28

Easy, right? So with 1 negative result on page 1, you could have had 28% more clients than you have right now.

To get your missed clients (MC), simply multiply your current number of clients (C) by .28 or whatever percentage you get in the above formula.

MC = C * Y

Let’s say you still have one negative result, so we’re working with .28 from above. And let’s say your company earned 179 clients this year.

MC = 179 * .28

MC = 50.1

So you missed approximately 50 clients this year. The last step is to determine how much one client is worth to you so you can measure the missed revenue. In other words, what is their lifetime value to your business?

To find your missed revenue ($$), we simply multiply client lifetime value (LTV) by the number of missed clients (MC) from above.

$$ = LTV * MC

Let’s say each client is worth $5,600 in revenue to your company.

Using the 50 missed clients from above, it would be:

$$ = 5,600 * 50

$$ = 280,000

At a 40% profit margin, you missed approximately $108,000 in profit this year thanks to your negative search results.

Armed with this knowledge, it becomes much easier to gauge the value of an online reputation management campaign for your company.

If you’re being quoted a $75,000 ORM campaign, you know you can estimate a 44% ROI if your business stays exactly the same. The ROI will, of course, increase as you attract more clients and as you boost the number of people finding you online — which is exactly what we’re going to figure out next.

But first… let’s measure the impact of your negative Yelp reviews.

STEP 2: Measuring lost revenue from bad Yelp reviews

Bad Yelp reviews can seriously impact revenue. According to a Harvard Business School study, every one star increase in a restaurant’s Yelp rating means a 5-9% increase in revenue. And 92% of people hesitate to do business with companies with less than four out of five stars.

How many stars away from 5 are you?

Here’s a formula to estimate your business’s percentage of lost revenue due to Yelp reviews:

% Lost Revenue = (5 – Star Rating) * .07

Every one-star increase means a 5-9% increase in revenue. So by subtracting your star rating from 5, we determine how many times we should multiply by .07 (in between 5% and 9%).

If you have a 2.5 star rating, you’re 2.5 stars away from 5. You would multiply 2.5 * .07 = .175.

That’s 17.5% of lost revenue. If your total revenue for the year was $1,000,000, you would do:

.175 * 1,000,000 = $175,000 in lost revenue

At a 40% profit margin, you missed approximately $70,000 in profit from negative yelp reviews.

Adding that $70,000 to the $108,000 in missed profit from your negative search results gives us a $178,000 return, or a 137% ROI on a $75,000 ORM campaign if your business stays exactly the same.

Before we can finalize our ROI estimate, we need to also take into consideration the positive effects online branding will have on your business.

Estimating Potential Earned Revenue

Your business’s biggest problem is not money. It’s not the economy, and it’s definitely not your pricing. The answer is almost always lack of attention.

If clients have never heard of you, you’ve automatically lost their business. How can they buy your products if they don’t know who you are? It won’t happen.

That’s why sales reps who use social media as part of their sales techniques outsell 78 percent of their peers. And it’s the same reason marketers who prioritize blogging are 13 times more likely to enjoy positive ROI. By getting useful content in front of potential clients, you’re able to broaden your sales funnel and fill up your pipeline.

But just how much revenue do you stand to gain? There are two ways to estimate your potential earned revenue from an online branding campaign, depending on what data you have.

Option 1. If you have outbound marketing data

For this, you’ll need to know 1) your annual outbound marketing budget 2) how many leads you get per year through those efforts and 3) the percentage of leads you turn into sales.

Marketing Budget / Leads = Cost Per Lead

Let’s say your annual marketing budget is $75,000 and your traditional marketing efforts bring you 500 leads per year. That’s $150 per lead.

Inbound Marketing yields 3 times more leads per dollar than traditional methods.

So for the same $75,000 budget, you’d earn 1,500 leads per year. That’s $50 per lead.

To determine your ROI, you have to determine what percentage of your leads turn into sales, and what each customer is worth to your company.

Sales = Leads * Close Rate

Let’s say you have a 10% close rate. With outbound marketing, you’re getting 500 * .10 = 50 sales. With inbound, you’d be getting 1,500 * .10 = 150 sales.

Revenue = LTV * Sales

If your customer lifetime value (LTV) is $5,600, you’re earning $5,600 x 50 sales = $280,000 per year in revenue with traditional outbound marketing. With the same budget spent on inbound marketing, you instead earn $5,600 x 150 = $840,000 in revenue.

At the same 40% profit margin, that’s $112,000 in profit for outbound compared to $336,000 in profit for inbound (a difference of $224,000). For a $75,000 marketing spend, that’s a 49% ROI with outbound marketing compared to a 348% ROI with inbound marketing. That’s a huge opportunity cost for your business.

Option 2. If you have in-house Inbound Marketing data

$0.25 of every dollar spent on content marketing in the average mid-to-large B2B firm is wasted on inefficient content operations. It’s no surprise, given that the average B2B firm spends an extra $120,000/year on headcount to produce the same volume of content as a firm that invested in content efficiency.

The bottom line is that B2B firms lose when they try to do content marketing in-house. It’s like a law firm trying to build its own website instead of outsourcing to web development experts. The inefficiency cost is enormous.

For this measurement, you’ll need to know your current in-house inbound marketing budget, and how much money you’re spending on salaried marketing employees.

Wasted Money = Budget * .25

Let’s say you currently have a $20,000 inbound marketing budget, and you’re spending $50,000/year for 2 marketing employees — a social media manager and a content writer.

Your employee cost is $100,000 + inbound marketing budget of $20,000 = $120,000.

Wasted Money = $120,000 * .25

Wasted Money = $40,000

That’s $40,000 wasted purely on inefficiencies. That means you’re actually only getting $80,000 of work for $120,000.

ROI = Wasted Money / Budget

ROI = $40,000 / $120,000

ROI = .33

So you’re getting a 33% return on investment, simply by switching your in-house marketing operations to a professional firm. You can think of it two ways: either you spend the same amount and get an extra 33% of work or you get to cut your budget by 33% and get the same amount of work done as you’re doing in-house.

Putting it all together.

To estimate the complete ROI of an online reputation management campaign, you’ll need to combine the answers you get from estimated lost revenue from negative articles and potential earned revenue from a positive presence and increased leads.  

(Lost Rev + Potential Earned Rev) / Campaign Cost = Full ROI

Let’s say you missed an estimated $178,000 profit this year due to one negative result on page 1 from STEP 1 and the 2.5 star review on Yelp from STEP 2. If you were the business with outbound marketing data above in Option 1, you’re likely missing another $224,000 in profit by not hiring a professional branding and ORM firm. So for a $75,000 branding campaign, you would estimate a $403,000 increase in profit, or a 437% ROI.

You’ll need to work with your online reputation management firm to find a custom campaign that accommodates everything you’re looking to achieve. Once you’ve figured that out and determined the cost of the campaign, you’ll be armed with the data to stop the guesswork and start estimating the real ROI of your online branding campaign.

Originally published on Forbes.com.

A 5-Step Checklist to Maximize Press Coverage for Your Business

In 2012, Mashable published an article titled, "Who Googled You? This Website Knows." The pieced trended on Mashable’s front page for two full days and famously brought the team at BrandYourself 60,000 signups in 60 hours.

As you might imagine, a trending article is worth its weight in gold. Once the story was “hot,” other major publications -- Huffington Post, Yahoo Finance and Tech Crunch, among them -- began picking up the story and linking back to the original piece.

New users began signing up to use our product, sharing their experiences on social media and their personal blogs. This compounded the effect even further. Thousands upon thousands of people recommended the service and bragged about their Search Score. 

One of BrandYourself's key takeaways from all this exposure underscored the importance of getting traction in the first few days. The more engagement with an article or other piece of content early on, the better. And when it comes to maximizing press, time is of the essence. An article’s lifespan is short -- roughly 48 to 72 hours before it goes big or gets buried.

With that in mind, we're constantly looking for ways to get the most buzz for an article in the shortest period of time. We’ve learned since then that there are a few crucial steps to amplify reach through the press, get information in front of the right people and give a message its best chance of trending on social media and top-tier publications.

1. Share on social media.

As soon as press hits, it’s time to open the social media floodgates. Now is not the time for modesty.

Share your article across social media channels throughout the day and week. Try several variations on the copy, hashtag and image so you can capitalize on different audiences and keep the message fresh. After all, nobody likes to see the same update 10 times in a row. Pin that tweet to the top of your Twitter feed. Tag the author, the publication and other companies or individuals mentioned in the article so they can re-share with their audiences, too.

In short, do everything in your power to get that piece in front of as many people as possible in the initial two- to three-day span.

2. Implement digital ads.

Hitting new press with those early engagement levels can trigger an article to trend on social media or on the publication itself. Even individually, these outcomes exponentially increase your reach and the piece's chance to rank well in Google search results. Paid campaigns are one of the best ways accomplish all those objectives.

Digital ads allow you to reach a much larger audience than otherwise would be possible. More important, the demographic choices available on today's ad platforms enable you to reach the right audience.

Social networks are perfect for finding your ideal viewer. So are content suggestion platforms such as Outbrain, Stumbleupon and Taboola. No matter the platform, the key is making your audience want to click and share. Think about their wants and desires. What's in it for them?

• Bad: Mashable just wrote a great article about our product's latest feature -- check it out.
• Good: Ever wonder who's Googling you? Find out with our free product.

3. Tap your email network.

Email remains the No. 1 most effective platform to reach people online. That's right: It ranks ahead of Facebook. If you’re not using email tactics to broaden the reach of your press, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity.

Once your article goes live, send an email blast to everyone on your company’s contact list. I recommend using an email marketing platform such as Mailchimp so you can track your open rate. This also frees you from manually sending out batches of emails.

Here's a neat trick to capture email addresses from your LinkedIn connections:

• Go to your LinkedIn homepage and click on the "My Network" tab. Then click "Connections" 
• Click the "Settings" gear symbol in the top right corner.
• Click "Export LinkedIn Connections" in the right column.
• Choose "Microsoft Outlook (.CSV file)" and then click "Export."

If you’re using Mailchimp, you easily can import your .CSV file before you send your email.

I suggest two important tips for your email blasts. First, send yourself a test before it goes out to the masses. There’s nothing worse than finding a typo after 1,500 people already have seen it. Second, include a call to action above the fold. All it takes is a simple ask: “Please share this with family and friends!”

4. Share with clients.

Don’t lump your clients in with the rest of your email network. Instead, send them a separate message that acknowledges their role in your success.

Such an email goes a long way toward strengthening your relationship and making them feel good about doing business with you. A little confirmation bias never hurt anyone.

If they're proud enough to be associated with your brand after a big release, they may take it upon themselves to share the good news among those in their personal networks -- without your needing to ask. Who knows? You could be nurturing your next big brand ambassador!

5. Circulate internally.

This step is an absolute must. Share the news release internally, get your company excited, and encourage employees to share the information with their own networks.

Brand messages shared by employees on social media report 561 percent more reach than the same messages shared by the brand’s social media channels. That’s because employees have 10 times more followers than their company’s social media accounts. What's more, their content typically receives eight times more engagement than content shared by brand channels.

The bottom line: We trust people more than we trust brands, and we engage with people more than we engage with brands. If you don’t get your employees involved on social, you’re absolutely losing out to companies that do.

When a positive piece of press gets published, your level of activity could be the difference between a complete flop and a remarkable sales funnel. Take promotion and circulation into your own hands. Even if your article would do well on its own, there's no reason not to give it that extra nudge.

Once you've followed these steps, don't forget to shoot the reporter a quick email, too. Let him or her know the work you're doing to drive traffic and engagement to the piece. They’ll be thrilled to have your support in boosting their readership and will be more likely to work with you again in the future.

Originally published on Entrepreneur.com.

The 10 Biggest Mistakes in Personal Branding

When it comes to personal branding, we’ve certainly seen some crazy things lately. We learned hilarious branding lessons from Mexican drug lords and uncovered a trend of using fake names while internet dating. We learned the troubling truth about Louise Delage and watched Trump and Clinton stab each other on social media as their fans rallied behind them.

If one thing is clear, it’s that personal branding has become less of a competitive advantage and more of a requirement. It’s become a reality for the political process, for enacting social change, for taking advantage of business opportunities, and even for helping (or hurting) us in our dating lives.

As we all look to take advantage of this important reality of the online world, I encourage you to be smart about your personal brand. Take stock of these classic personal branding errors before you trip and make the same blunders yourself.

Here are the top 10 personal branding mistakes:

1. Thinking it doesn’t pertain to you.

Whether you’re a high school senior, a c-suite executive, or somewhere in between, personal branding has a place in helping you take your career to the next level.

Personal branding is all about marketing and distinguishing yourself -- and showcasing that online. It’s about taking control of your online narrative to help you achieve your goals.

If you’re a high school senior, your goal may be to earn acceptances from competitive colleges. If you’re a college student, you need to showcase your skills to land an internship or a summer job. If you’re a c-suite executive, then you might be looking to grow your business, earn more clients, or switch into a new industry altogether.

Whichever path you’re on, your online presence can either help you or hurt you along the way. Don’t make the mistake of thinking personal branding doesn’t pertain to you.

2. Pretending to be someone you’re not.

When we’re first dating someone new, we often try to show the best side of ourselves. Maybe our apartments looks a little cleaner than they normally do. Or perhaps our jobs suddenly become more interesting and impressive than they were last week.

In small amounts, this practice can help you gain someone’s attention and forge a deeper connection. Taken too far, you risk becoming someone you’re not for the sake of continuing a relationship.

Now, think of personal branding like dating. If you selectively showcase your positive side online, you give yourself the best chance of getting the attention of colleges, companies, and new clients.

But if you take it too far, you risk it backfiring. Nobody wants to date, hire, or employ a fraud. Authenticity is key, both for relationships and personal brands. Don’t make the mistake of pretending to be someone you’re not.

3. Waiting until something bad happens.

Dentists recommend brushing your teeth twice a day, every day. Can you imagine what would happen if you only brushed your teeth once they started turning brown and funky? You’d probably get gum disease, have some pretty brutal tooth aches, and your smile would leave a lot to be desired.

Once you get to this point, it’s usually too late to fix everything. At the very least, there is a lot of ground to make up. Brushing your teeth on an ongoing basis is a far more effective way to maintain a winning smile and good oral hygiene.

Personal branding works in much the same way. It’s harder to take control of your online narrative once there is something bad that you need to contend with.

Many folks only realize how important their online presence is once they have a problem. But that’s a classic mistake. Personal branding can be even more effective, and less of a headache, when it’s done preventatively. A little work now can make things a lot easier later.

4. Not asking the hard questions first.

Would you ever sit down to market a business when you’re still unsure what the product is? Of course not.

The same is true for personal branding. You need to ask some important questions first before you write a blog post or send out that first tweet. And the reason is simple. It may not be an easy or comfortable process, but figuring out what makes you “you” is a necessary first step to making your brand realistic and relatable -- and getting in front of the people who matter most.

The people who skip this step and jump immediately to packaging themselves are the ones who end up with forced brands that they can’t relate to and ditch after a week.

Personal branding requires a lot of time, with a focus on website design, content marketing, social media activity. With all of that online activity, it would be foolish to not determine your unique value proposition or your target audience. Otherwise you’re just spinning your wheels.

5. Ignoring others in the brand discovery process.

When creating a personal brand, you cannot overestimate the importance of external consulting from friends, family, or a professional branding firm. After all, you're not creating a brand to impress yourself, you're creating a brand to impress others. And it is very difficult to see yourself clearly from your own perspective.

Talking your brand out with someone else can help you get a little distance from the narrative you already hold in your own head. It’s the same reason we pay psychotherapists and marriage counselors -- and branding firms -- for their advice and perspective.

And the consequences of making a branding mistake are pretty scary. You can run with a “great idea,” only to find out afterward that it is extremely offensive to a core group of your audience. A little outside perspective goes a long way.

6. Underestimating time to develop a great brand.

Building and maintaining an effective personal brand is a lot more than just having a website and a few social media channels. It’s about providing people with real value, again and again. It’s about distinguishing yourself from your competition and making yourself memorable for the people you want to impress and interact with most.

That’s no easy feat, especially in a noisy digital world. It takes five to seven impressions for someone to remember a brand on average, so imagine the work you need to put in to get in front of the right people over and over again.

And along the same lines...

7. Ignoring influencers.

Publishing content without doing any outreach is usually a waste of time. Imagine a new business owner that opens up a shop on a quiet street. He has an amazing product but does absolutely nothing to bring in new business. He turns on the lights and sits in his swivel chair, swiveling around waiting for people to come in.

Of course, nobody arrives. Personal branding works in much the same way -- if you don’t do the work to get yourself seen by the people who matter, then you won’t get the reach you desire.

The most efficient way to do this is through influencers. They might be colleagues and family in your existing network, your friends from way back when, or complete strangers in your industry who would be happy to collaborate. Do yourself a favor and find these influencers first so you can get the traffic and engagement you desire.

8. Not generating your own content.

If you exclusively share content published by other people, then you’re a content DJ.

Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with being a content DJ. It’s great to give shout outs to other thought leaders and businesses in your industry. And sure, people may find you have an exceptional taste in shared content.

But the problem is that, when it comes down to it, you’re convincing your fans to go elsewhere for industry knowledge.

So rather than relying only on shared content, make an effort to generate your own. Develop your own voice, express your own opinions, and publish content that your audience will care about. Once you start doing that, there’s no reason you can’t supplement it with other content from around the web. The more the merrier!

9. Convincing yourself to post less.

Sure, it is possible to overdo the online activity and become spammy. But chances are that you’re not posting nearly enough. Not even close. You’re probably publishing way too little content, you’re not engaging with your audience enough, and you’re definitely not active enough on social media.

Remember, when drafting a social media posting schedule, you’re not looking to check off boxes, you’re looking to get attention for yourself and your brand.

If you post a video once a week or once a day, you’re going to get a lot more attention than if you post once a month or once a quarter. You can’t spend a lifetime on one post or one tweet and simply hope that it goes viral.

Remember, consistency is key. The likelihood of your audience seeing your content in a noisy digital space is already tiny. The last thing you need is to lower that probability even more. Get active, and get active now!

10. Getting followers for the sake of followers.

Getting followers for the sake of simply growing your follower count is a rookie mistake. If you have 500,000 followers and get no engagement on your updates, what’s the point? Your content is still getting ignored and nobody new is thinking about your business. You’re not fooling anyone.

What is more valuable to you? 500,000 fake followers or two dozen die hard fans that engage with your content every week? I’ll go with the engaged followers every time. They’re much more likely to tell their friends and share your content-- and to buy from you -- than the 1-cent followers you bought from that dude on Craigslist.

If you’re keen on growing your following quickly, then my suggestion is to use a tool like Crowdfire, where you can customize the people you want to follow based on keywords, hashtags, and specific audiences.

Originally published on Entrepreneur.com.