DIY Business Tools When You’re Broke!

Hey there I hope all is good! I’m doing awesome in case you’re wondering ; ) What I love most about the internet and technology is there are so many free tools available to build your business. No longer is it required to spend money on an office space, phone system, accounting, business cards or hire your own marketing firm to launch a business. In today’s world anyone can launch a business or grow a business with no start up cost or budget. What is required is passion, time, effort and hard work. These are 7 free tools I use daily to grow my business on little to no budget.

1) Bufferapp

bufferapp.com

I’ve written about buffer before, but I cannot tell you how valuable buffer has been to growing my business via social media. Bufferapp is a social media scheduling application. We all get busy updating our social media posts or it’s just a bunch of random sales pitches hastily created. Buffer is an easy and simple way to schedule a few posts in advance for your social media pages. Take 15-30 minutes to create 10 social media posts. Mix the posts up with your own business content along with interesting, informational or entertaining content your audience will appreciate. Once you’re done schedule the posts to go out at the perfect time for your audience to see right within Buffer. Buffer App’s basic option is FREE to connect up to 4 social media profiles, schedule up to 10 posts in advance, and provides free analytics for social media posts. It’s easy to see what posts are getting link clicks and engagement.

Buffer also has an image sharing tool called Pablo along with a super cool GIF sharing tool. Create beautiful social media image posts for your profiles. ( A Future Blog Post)

2) Mailchimp

mailchimp.com

There are several database and newsletters options available I use Mailchimp because it’s free! Mailchimp’s FREE option allows an import of 2000 contacts in your “List”. List’s can be segmented into groups; prospects, previous customers or e-mail subscribers. Once you have a list create awesome newsletters, promotions or even birthday cards to e-mail to your list! When an e-mail campaign is created and sent out Mailchimp tracks your e-mail opens, link clicks, unsubscribes, and even keeps the e-mails in compliance with SPAM laws. Create your own subscribe form to add on your facebook page or an e-mail sign up on your website. These leads will import directly into your list in Mailchimp. All of this free for under 2000 contacts and if you send under 12,000 E-mails in a month.

3) Join Me Meeting

join.me

Join Me Meeting is a cool way to share your screen quickly with a sales prospect or even a co-worker. When it’s not possible to meet face to face to demonstrate a product or service and not enough time to set up a webinar, Join Me meeting is a great option. Go to http://www.join.me to start a meeting instantly. A link is created that can be instantly shared with up to 8 people to join a meeting. All they have to do is click the link sent to them via e-mail and within moments your prospect or client can easily see your screen! This is a quick easy way to demonstrate your product or service without having to download a program or schedule a webinar. This can be done right on the phone while you are talking to a prospect. Join Me meeting does have paid options to have permanent meeting link and have more people join meetings!

4) Wunderlist

wunderlist.com

Wunderlist is an online to do list on steroids. Wunderlist is an easy and old fashioned way to keep organized daily with To Do Lists. Create a list for whatever you like. A Wunderlist “bucket list” chores for the kids, grocery lists, or hot prospects to follow up with! Our business creates a list for each client. This list includes tasks to be done daily, weekly and monthly on each of their social media profiles. We keep notes within the lists keeping track of content deadlines, networking opportunities, passwords and even content files for each client. Wunderlist To Do Lists can be shared with clients and co-workers. This is a great way to keep everyone in the loop on projects or assign certain tasks to team members to complete. The best part is the notification of accomplishment that Wunderlist makes when you check of a task on your list! “Ding”

5) Headtalker

Headtalker.com or Start a HeadTalker with beNICEmedia

Do you wanna go viral? HeadTalker is a free application to help make your message go viral! HeadTalker shares 1 message with unlimited people at once for free. Create a campaign on HeadTalker and get others to support the campaign. Once supported instead of 1 social media post on your page, hundreds or even thousands are sharing your social media post across multiple platforms. This is a great application for launching a product or crowdfunding campaign. Create a HeadTalker for anything! Start one today and we will help support!

6) Crowdfire

crowdfireapp.com

This is a great application to build a targeted Twitter and Instagram following. Sign into Crowdfire with Twitter or Instagram. Once signed in Crowdfire identifies who your Twitter and Instagram followers are. Are you following someone who has not tweeted in months? Crowdfire will find out who and if you choose you can unfollow them. Are you a local business and want to connect with Twitter users in your area? Crowdfire allows you to copy followers of other Twitter accounts. If the local news station has 50K Twitter followers it’s likely a majority of these followers live in the area. These people may buy your product or service if they knew about you. Crowdfire will show you which ones do live in your area, and go for it follow them, they might follow you back. The basic Crowdfire service is free, the app will occasionally tweet out Twitter stats via @crowdfire. Crowdfire paid options will not do this.

7) Paypal for Business
(Kinda Not Free)

paypal.com

Starting a business bank account can be tough especially when you do not have any income yet, money in the bank or even customers. Typically to open a business bank account there are minimum deposit amounts, balance minimums and let’s not forget about monthly fees regardless if the account has money in it or not! Paypal allows you to start receiving and using your funds right away. Easily create invoices with your logo and contact information to e-mail to clients. Clients can pay you via check or immediately via Paypal or credit card. Get a PayPal button on your website to receive payments. Is the client 30 days past due easily e-mail a reminder. Review your income for the month track expenses all online for free. Paypal even has a business debit MasterCard and credit line options for qualified accounts. Easily link your current checking or savings account to receive Paypal funds. Creating invoices, tracking expenses and using your money in your PayPal account is free. What is not free is receiving funds electronically via Paypal when a client pays by credit card. If a client pays you via credit card PayPal does receive a percentage of the payment you received. This varies on the amount of payment. Please review all Paypal information online for your own education. Regardless of the fees associated with receiving credit card payments the service is a good value and convenience. As your business grows there are numerous banking options but PayPal does let you start with nothing!

Are you ready to start growing your business without spending any money? Or get that at home business started? There are hundreds of free tools to increase sales and grow your business. These are some that I use. Which ones are your favorite? What tools and applications do you use? I would really love to hear from you.

If I can help you with any questions or you are interested in getting started with Social Media Marketing let’s chat! Have a wonderful week! Let’s Chat!

Mateo Garcia
President
beNICEmedia
480-386-2122

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Marketing basics for your business

Hi there how is everyone doing? I received an e-mail from a friend of mine the other day who is an Artist. He asked me about getting more visitors to his website and just wanted some quick advice to get his business going. Below is the e-mail I sent him. It helped him, and hopefully it will help you too! I almost forgot check out some of his work HERE

Jared,

Hey there here are a few tips and some tools that I use for my business. There are 4 basic Marketing Tasks that are a must.

Database, Social Media, E-mail, Website/Blog

I’m not sure what you are doing right now for your business so I apologize if you already do some of these things, but if you don’t hopefully this will help.

Database

I use a free site mailchimp.com for my List/Database These are people who know me and may work with me, have worked with me before or have inquired with me in the past. I look for new people to add to my database daily. These are people that may buy from you or tell someone to buy from you. It’s important to stay in touch. If you don’t have a contact list or database start making one now. Add me to your contact list. You can go through your contacts in your e-mail and cell phone and probably come up with a good size contact list. Use your e-mail address book to organize these at first. You can then export them to a CSV format to upload into MailChimp. Mailchimp is free if you have under 2000 contacts. You can use Mailchimp to create e-mail newsletters, campaigns and events to send to these contacts. You can always send a few of these contacts a touch base e-mail first to be sure they want to be on your contact list!

Social Media

You have to be on all of the social media platforms and have a presence. I spend time following others and searching for other people who may be interested in what I do follow them and like some of their stuff and they will follow back. Remember social media is more about being social with others and not selling them anything. Take some time each week to connect with other artists people who have purchased your work before, local galleries. Whoever you think your audience is or other social media accounts that your audience follows. I see that you are selling the Equality Stickers. Post a couple tweets with pics of the stickers with a link to your website. Then on twitter search for example the #hashtag #lovewins then follow all the accounts that have tweeted this. A big amount of people will follow back and who knows maybe a couple more visits to your site.

“Doing this one time is no guarantee that it will automatically get a bunch of sales, but this is a strategy that you can do when you have time”

E-Mail

Start building a contact/database and send these people an e-mail at least once a month. It could be some new art you created a special, holiday e-mail, or a blog post checking in. It doesn’t have to be spammy it could just be some cool info. Use Mailchimp to send this. It will keep track of who opened, who unsubscribed, and who viewed the e-mails. It’s pretty cool.

Blog on Website

The same e-mail you put together to send to your contact list can be posted as a blog on your website.

Content

It’s cool to post recycled content in my opinion on Social Media. So if you have a few popular posts from a couple months ago. Post them again. Bufferapp helps with this. You can load some post into bufferapp to go out at a later time. You can also post other peoples content, not as your own, but if there is an artist you like or some cool pic that you think others will like share and post some of that stuff to. As a business you want to buy brain cells on social so if your social media profiles are always posting cool shit original, curated, and others then they will check out your profile and see what you do and hopefully go to your website too!

A Cool Viral App www.headtalker.com free to use. Check out it out. Its a cool Social Reach Campaign to get more visitors to your website. Start a campaign and I will help get it supported.

Ok man I think I took up to much of your time. There are so many things that can be done, but these are a few that I focus on. If I can ever help with anything or offer any advice let me know.

Mateo

5 Awesome Twitter Tips

Hi it’s me Mateo How’s it going? Are you on twitter? If you are let’s connect @mateomedia, if not here are a few tips that can help you get started. Let’s get to it.

This one is simple that I’m not even including in my 5 Tips. Take time and complete your twitter profile. Be sure to include complete bio information, profile, cover photo and if you are a business indicate what you do and how you can help. Take a look at a few other twitter profiles for inspiration. Don’t worry about getting fancy or over thinking it, but it does have to be complete. If you are a business you can make the profile picture your logo, but in my opinion make it a personal picture this way twitter followers can put a face with the twitter handle. Twitter also has an option to upload a cover photo go ahead and do this as well. This information can always be changed and updated later, even your twitter user name. Be concerned with being complete, not perfect.

1) Compose a few tweets.

Twitter has a “This is my first tweet” that can be sent when your account is first set up. Go ahead and send this. Compose 2-3 tweets of your own like “Just setting up my twitter” or “How does all of this work?”. Don’t be afraid, especially if it’s a new twitter account only your followers will see your tweets. If you don’t have any followers nobody will see the tweets anyway except you. Having a few tweets on your timeline will show other twitter users that you are trying to be active and want to be on twitter.

2) Start following some Twitter Peeps.

Identify what your goal is for twitter, Fun?, Business? Both? If you are on twitter to grow your business and connect with others start following some twitter accounts of people you want to do business with and connect with. Take my business for example, Social Media Management and Marketing. I look to follow and network with small businesses, start ups, and crowd funding campaigns. The reason? These are people I want to network with and these are the businesses that need social media and marketing help. If there is a need in the future to use our services or if they might know someone that may need our services we are connected and interact on twitter. I’m always sure to check in with these connections on twitter and offer any marketing and social media advice. Twitter does not have to be all about business. I follow celebrity accounts, local news accounts and sport accounts, my guilty is pleasure account is @TMZ for all of my celebrity news and gossip. ; )

3) Tweet often

It’s up to you on how often to tweet but twitter is not like Facebook. People on twitter will not always see your tweets in their timeline. Your tweets happen live so if your followers are not scrolling through their timeline when you tweet they will not see it. A follower can go to your twitter account and see what you have been tweeting today, but they will have to search for your account. It’s a good idea to spread out your tweets throughout the day to reach your followers. There is a lot of back and forth on how much is too many tweets and how often you should tweet. I typically send at least 10 tweets a day that show up in my followers timeline. I will also RT (Re-Tweet) content I find interesting, entertaining, educational or informative that I believe my followers might like as well. Additionally I’m sending direct tweets to new followers to thank them and tweets to followers that I’m interacting with. These tweets do not show up in anyone else’s twitter timeline. If you start a tweet with the @ (twitter name) that tweet will just go to the person you are tweeting to. If you start a tweet with a sentence like “ Hey @ (twitter handle) how are you today?” this tweet will show up in your timeline as a tweet. Your followers will see this tweet, the twitter user that you mentioned will see this tweet and the twitter followers of the person you @ mentioned will also see this tweet. In some cases you want to do this if you want others to see your tweet and conversation. If you compose 8-10 tweets throughout the day that is providing value to your twitter followers in my opinion that is not too much. Others may disagree, but that is up to your followers to decide. If a follower does not like your tweets they can simply un-follow you. To summarize, if you tweet often and are active you will gain more twitter followers compared to sending a tweet one or twice a week.

4) Twitter Lists

Twitter can get overwhelming quickly once you start following others and others begin to follow you. One easy way to keep track of your twitter followers and who you are following is to create lists. When you follow someone or they follow you can add them to a list. You can create lists on twitter and name the list whatever you want. I have a few lists that identify who the twitter profiles are; such as Arizona Peeps, Potential Leads, Friends/Family, Influencers etc. This is an easy way to keep up with what is happening with your twitter community. Your twitter timeline shows all the tweets of who you are following. This can get overwhelming if you are following a few hundred people or more. Simply add your twitter followers and who you are following to a list to help keep track of who you are following into categories. Once you go to this list on twitter you will see the tweets of that list only. This is a great way to stay up to date with your important connections on twitter, stay in touch with your friends and family or even localize a list to your favorite restaurants on twitter. Lists can be named whatever you want. These lists can be private or public.

5) Thank, RT, and Mention.

When someone follower you on twitter you can send them a tweet thanking them for the connection. ” @______ thank you for following me, looking forward to connecting more” is an example. Re-Tweeting information from your followers or people you are following or tweets you believe your audience will like will gain you more followers. If you come across a tweet you enjoy RT it to your followers. The person that you RT will get a notification that you Re-tweeted them. This is a great way to get an influencer or potential lead to notice you. Mention or include others in your tweets as well. If you send a tweet that you want someone else to notice or possibly see, you can mention them in the tweet by adding @ (their twitter name) in your tweet. When this happens they will get a notification that you mentioned them on Twitter. Here is an example; “Hey @mateomedia I think you would like this story on benicemedia.com“

There are so many cool things that you can do via twitter to network and grow your business. The above examples are just a few things. What do you do on twitter to network and grow your business? I would love to know some of your tips. I hope you have an awesome day, and as always feel free to ask me a question or let’s connect online.

Mateo on Twitter

Optimize Your Personal Facebook Page

Be Sure to Link up your personal Facebook Page with your Business Facebook Page, Join Groups and Add your Website Links to your Personal Page.

benicemedia1@gmail.com

Hi there how is everyone doing? Mateo here with some quick social media tips. Do you have more than one social media profile or platform you are sharing and posting content on? How about using automated tools to share content? Are you sharing the same exact content post on several social pages? If you answered yes to any of these questions here are some tips to keep in mind. Each social media platform is different, and the way a post is created and how often you post is going to vary for each social media platform. That perfect Facebook post with a great photo a few brilliant words about the post, and a perfect link or call to action may be great for Facebook, but sharing the same exact content post to Twitter or LinkedIN may look different on the platform. There are several automated scheduling tools that have made social media sharing easier such as bufferapp but even with these tools its important to watch how each content post comes across on your social media platforms. Facebook content can be shared on Twitter. Instagram can be shared to Twitter but how the content post is created will have to be different for each site. Twitter will be shorter wording of the post maybe even add a photo or link shortener to get the same content message across. Twitter is very fast moving with a lot of content being shared, so posting once a week on Twitter will not work. The content may not even be seen. On Instagram the post content will have to be a picture or image rather than a link and a description about the content since it’s a photo sharing platform.

It’s very important with social media to be sure content is shared properly on each platform so there is maximum impact from your social media posts. Facebook is the most common and easiest platform we are all familiar with, and it does offer a share to Twitter option when you post on your Facebook page. Have you looked at how that post is shared on Twitter? In some cases it may not give the same impact you want with the content post. One item to keep in mind as well is if your audience is on Facebook, LinkedIN, Instagram or Twitter these are different types of connections and platforms. If someone is on Twitter they want to stay on Twitter, they do not want to leave Twitter to go to Facebook to see what the actual picture or post is all about. If your audience loves Google+ then they do not want to leave Google+ to go to Facebook or Twitter to see your content post. When posting content it’s important the content posted is targeted for the specific audience on the platform. It’s okay to post the same content you want to share on several social media profiles, but the content will have to be shared differently. The length of the post the link, photos, #hashtags, frequency and time. These are several things to keep in mind when posting to different platforms, not all are the same.

Each post you make is a mini advertisement for your business, you want it to come across to have maximum impact. Creating content and finding content to share for your business takes time, you might as well make sure you get the most out of each content post. When we print our business cards or create flyers for our business, we take the time to proof read it look it over several times to be sure it looks good and gets our message across. Our Social Media platforms should be treated the same way. We all want more business from our social media pages, but they have to be treated that way. Every post or link is a representation of our business. We would not let a half complete postcard mailed out or business card missing our phone number or e-mail. Just as we treat each customer differently and the way we communicate to them, Social Media works the same way. There are clients that prefer e-mail or text messages over a phone call and we learn to adapt and communicate our message via e-mail or text. Social Media platforms give us the opportunity to communicate, network and deliver our message to previous, current, and future clients. It’s the cheapest most affordable way to network and market our business. When it’s done with the same care we treat our offline business we can easily get our business known by more potential customers. Getting leads and making connections with Social Media is not easy, but when done with the same care as other marketing and communicating it will have a larger impact on your bottom line than all other forms of marketing.

If you have some tips to share or have any questions send me a tweet or leave a comment.

Much success to you!

Mateo Garcia, President of beNICEmedia

Thanks for reading you’re coolness! benicemedia1@gmail.com

480-386-2122 @mateomedia

Scheduling Posts on Social Media

Don’t go days without a post. Schedule your posts!

Content for Social Media

We all struggle with what content to post. Remember to post content that others may find interesting. We all love our business, but we need to give others a reason to love our business also. #engage #create #content #like #follow #comment.

Twitter is for Real

Hi there. How’s it going? As I have been speaking with businesses and sales professionals about social media and all the different platforms, I’ve come to find out that Twitter is one of the most misunderstood and avoided social media avenues out there. I’ve heard things such as “people on Twitter are fake, there are not any real people on Twitter, my business works with adults not kids.” There have been others who do not even take me seriously anytime Twitter is mentioned for business and have told me to leave. I get it, I understand. Anything that is different is avoided and doing what you have always done is easier. It’s just hard to ignore the facts regarding Twitter as a Social Media Platform. With 271 million monthly active users, 500 million Tweets are sent per day, and 78% of Twitter active users are on mobile. You personally may not be on Twitter, or your business, but your customers are. They are using Twitter daily with the device we all carry around every day, our mobile phones. As a business we are looking for a way to get more business, build lifelong relationships, and find the best way to be noticed. Believe it or not Twitter can do this for your business on a local level, and identify customers who may be looking for your product or service. Here are 5 tips that you can begin using immediately to start building your Twitter Account and stop ignoring this as a real way to connect with potential clients and build your business.

1) First of all if you don’t have an account, sign up. Spend some time completing your profile, add information about your business, and include your picture. No one follows an Egg on Twitter.

2) Follow others. Twitter requires you to follow a few accounts to begin. Do this, once you do you will start getting a few followers as well.

3) Twitter has a search option just like Google, Bing or Yahoo. Search some keywords related to your business. If you are here in Arizona, like I am, try Arizona, Tempe, Phoenix or whatever your local market may be. Once you do this you will see Tweets, and people who have mentioned the search item either in their profile or a tweet they sent. Check out the tweets, look at their profile, is this someone you may want to follow? If so, go for it. Most likely they will check out your profile and follow back.

4) Send some Tweets. Twitter limits each tweet to 140 characters. It’s not like Facebook, LinkedIN, or Google + where you can write a novel and the entire post shows up on your page. You can include images or links that can be clicked where the user can see your entire message or more information about your business. If your business is focusing on a particular area, product or service be sure to include a keyword relating to that product or service in your Tweet. When you do this, other Twitter users can find you and know your tweets relate to something they may be interested in as well. They may even follow you back.

5) Invest some time. Even if it’s a few minutes a day on Twitter, this is a great way to learn how it works and see what other businesses are doing with their Twitter Account. Follow these businesses. Duplicate what they are doing. Every major brand and business you can think of is on Twitter. Follow what they are doing, you can use Twitter to build your brand and audience on a local level with real people.

This is just a brief start to using Twitter, but if you are on other social media platforms, Twitter needs to be included. There are endless opportunities to grow your network on Twitter. ReTweet others, respond directly via @ a follower, or with a direct message. Create a #hashtag related to your business. Twitter lets you create lists of your favorite accounts you are following, or even better a list of leads just like your e-mail list or database. Find local customers in your area already tweeting and discussing the product or service you offer. Making relationships with other professionals across the country and build a referral network. Twitter has millions of users that may be your next client or buyer of your product. Why ignore these people?

If you are interested in learning more and adding Twitter as a real avenue to build relationships, engage with your clients and grow your business. Contact me or better yet send me a Tweet @mateomedia