While few have a clear vision as to what they want to write about, others continue to lurk in confusion. Because it’s very difficult to understand what’s trending and what’s not online.

Writing on a topic you love may not always work

It’s unlikely that what you love would be loved by someone else. Building a successful blog requires making an informed and logical decision. However, it takes time though for which you need immense patience and courage.

Exceptions are there of course. A good example is Martin Lewis, the founder of MoneySavingExpert.com, who started writing newsletter blogs in the year 2003 and sold the entire website to MoneySavingExpert.com for £87m.

Denise Wallin on the other hand, started a travel/childcare blog that she could not make money from successfully. She agrees that brands have become savvier than ever before and that kick starting a blogging website is just not going to work anymore.

In that case, the question we all ask ourselves “how to create a blog and find success overnight?”

Have You Considered writing Niche Blogs?

What are niche blogs? These are blogs that fall under certain specific categories, which have higher search value than the rest. If your customers want to stay up-to-date when it comes to fashion, they will follow fashion blog pages. It’s as simple as that.

Take Neil Patel for instance. When he shares a tip or two on how you can begin your blogging journey, he is actually talking about blogs and blog marketing. That’s a niche and you will find more topics on this written by him as well as many other digital writers.

When reputed business consultant Sam Ovens talks, he is always giving out some of the best tips on how to grow a business and start making money.

These writers, they don’t deviate from their topic of discussion, which always pivots around one center of interest. This is called niche blogging, where you pick a particular genre to start writing.

Niche blogging is an excellent technique to hold on to your customer experience. It narrows down audience reach and helps to build brand identity. When customers know your brand, they will return to your page again and again.

Since you would like to get started earning something while you blog, work on a proper strategy and plan first. Note down all the pros and cons when you choose a topic so that you remain prepared for the advantages and the disadvantages.

Picking the Wrong Niche is a Common Mistake

Choosing the wrong niche happens in either of the two scenarios, which are as follows –

Scenario 1 – Writing something that you love

You may start writing on a topic that you will soon realize will not reap you any gold. People don’t realize this and when they do, it’s already too late.

Scenario 2 – Thinking only about profitability

When bloggers do these, it becomes evident in their writing. Because writing is all about passion and you cannot express in words if you are not born with that labour of love. As a blogger, you may try hiding those things behind your ornamental words, but when lack of drive and motivation kicks in, you will realize that one day it all falls apart.

Tools to Research Your Niche

Deciding on a niche is one thing. Doing some background research on the niche is time-consuming but can be your north star when you someone or something to help you guide through. Here are some tools that can help you out –

SEMrush

The tools helps you not just for researching your niche but you can use it to dig out new blog ideas, learn more about your competitors, how do they rank on the search engine and which keywords do they use for being searched for.

Google Keyword Planner

You can use this Google Adwords to research your niche even when you are on the fly. The tool is completely free and is a good replacement for keyword External Tool.

Long Tail Pro

With the Long Tail Pro tool, you can add many seed keywords and then filter them to pull out the best ones.

Create a Mind Map

You would be surprised to find out what you had never considered before. A mind map will also give you a clear overview as to how you can begin writing your blog. Pick out the ones that you think are more profitable and when you have done that, time to consider the next point –

Where Do You See Your Blog in the Future?

Do you see it being read by people in the next three to five years? Can you see yourself writing over 50 to 200 blogs on the same topic and never find yourself getting bored?

If yes, then you have found yourself something that opens your doors that will keep the presence of your niche visible in the search engine for a long time.

Need More Ideas about Finding the Right Niche? 

There are plenty of other resources that you can try out to find out the right niche. These are as follows –

Ebay Categories

Ebay is an ecommerce site where people consistently visit to purchase products that are 80 percent cheaper. Why not visit the category section for more inspiration

Amazon Best Sellers

From new releases to top-rated and the sub-sections, Amazon Best Sellers covers everything. One of the reasons why people keep on visiting the site to purchase products is that other than being the most trusted retailers’ platform in the world, the site keeps on recommending products that can lead people to purchase them.

It is one of the best places where you can invest your time to find out more about the niche where the products are being sold.

Moral of the Story – A Professional Blogger is not born in a Day

Link to one more from blogging tips

No one is born with a magic pen. But with years of planning and understanding the market, even an ordinary writer can pen down words and convert it into gold.

Want to learn it from the best? Then find someone who is already a pro. Zac Johnson, the founder of Blogging Tips is the perfect example of a person who can inspire and guide you on how to start earning money by writing blogs.

Picking out the right niche can boost up your content’s validity and it can expand for a lifetime.

So what are you waiting for? Cut out all the disappointing blogs that did not succeed and start writing a blog that will set you on the right track.

The post How to Choose the Perfect Niche When Starting a Blog appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Thankfully, you don’t have to spend your entire budget on consolidating this data in one place. Plenty of options now exist for individuals, small teams and big companies, catering to a wide variety of goals and monthly spending limits. Here are some of the best tools out there that you can use for seamless social media management.

Brand24

Brand24 tracks relevant keywords used throughout your community, focusing on what people are saying about you—and how they’re saying it. Brand24’s “Sentiment Analysis” feature uses an algorithm to detect negative, neutral and positive tones around your areas of focus. By displaying interactions and mentions, Brand24 gives you the advantage of listening to your audience’s likes and dislikes, identifying what’s working as well as unmet needs that you can fulfill to keep your crowd engaged.

nTuitive Social

nTuitive takes the unnecessary manual steps out of your workflow and automates the whole process for you. nTuitive can even save you time with customized auto-engagement features that will reply to comments, retweet and like content published by other influencers and audience members. If your team has collaborators, clients or trainees who you want to involve in your process without giving free range to manage your content, nTuitive’s collaborative features also enable project owners to set permissions and limit the number of cooks in your content kitchen.

Klout

Twitter enthusiasts know that a high Klout score can have a big impact on your social status. Klout knows that without authentic engagement, a high number of followers is simply a vanity metric. That’s why they also factor in the performance of content into their score system. Along with seeing your own Klout score, this tool allows you to measure other individuals and brands where their presence really counts. This is especially helpful for those who must identify the social influence of competitors, influencers and potential partners in new markets.

BuzzSumo

You wouldn’t want to be known for only talking about yourself, and neither do brands when it comes to social media. If you’re looking to add more curation into your content strategy, Buzzsumo helps you search for topical content that is quickly going viral or is shared by other influencers. It can be tough to know where to look for shareable, non-competing content that flatters your brand’s presence. BuzzSumo helps you find and share what matters to your audience, identifying the content creators who are churning out gold and the most frequently shared URLs within your community.

TweetReach

Have you ever looked at Twitter’s topline metrics but weren’t clear on the real reasons behind your numbers? Keeping track of these details can be tough if you’re sifting through notifications. Especially handy for unique campaign names and hashtags, TweetReach identifies the big names mentioning you and retweeting you, with detailed “snapshot” reports showing how your activity contributes to your metrics.

SocialMention

SocialMention’s keyword search sorts through overflowing content from sources like Reddit, putting these topics into context and showing how they’re discussed across the web. At no cost, you can search by specific types of content (blog posts, video, etc.) and view SocialMention’s sentiment analysis along with the measure of a keyword’s strength, frequency and length of discussions happening in real time. Along with the keywords you search for, you can view relevant associated words and what’s trending in the moment.

HootSuite

HootSuite is not new to the social media world, but over the years it has expanded into a full-service destination for teams of all sizes and users of all levels. It is an ideal tool for anyone who wishes that their whole team spoke the language of social media. HootSuite makes this possible by including educational features into monthly plans and helps to take some of the training off your hands. And as sweepstakes and contests are increasingly recognized as a fail-proof way to gain traction on social, HootSuite also offers this as a feature in its plans, with efficient help you through the whole process.

Twitonomy

The Twitterverse is massive—and moves insanely fast. Twitonomy wrangles the real data you need by exporting tweets, mentions, retweets and more to an Excel spreadsheet or PDF so you can search specifics without endless scrolling. Twitonomy also helps with the daunting and lengthy task of sorting through accounts you follow, letting you know who isn’t following you back and giving you insight into your list of followers. If you’re more visual and can’t stand spreadsheets, their dashboards are easy to read with geographic insights on a map and charts consolidating key metrics.

Mention

Mention funnels all chatter about specific topics, competitors and media into one destination. You can also use this tool to monitor content published across websites, acting as a built-in “Google Alerts” that can supplement your social listening. Their interface makes it incredibly easy to prioritize content and view all sources in an inbox-style setting, where you can mark notifications as “read” and flag mentions you don’t want to miss.

Nuvi

Nuvi offers a futuristic experience with compelling visual reports of your channels and audiences. “Whitelabel” reports are one of Nuvi’s key features, pulling out your most appealing metrics so you can craft your best story for new client leads or stakeholders. International brands will also love Nuvi for taking “sentiment analysis” a step further as it translates the tone of audiences in 15 languages.

The post The Top 10 Social Media Listening Tools for Budget Marketers appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

What are the best ways to turn your social channels into customer lifetime value (CLV) boosters, and how do you calculate and track those efforts?

As we all know, social media offers marketers remarkable power. But let’s be honest – In all likelihood, you are not effectively maximizing the customer lifecycle optimization potential that your social efforts can deliver.

In this article, we’ll discuss what CLV is and why it’s critical to identify, calculate, track and increase it. Then we’ll take a look at exactly how to do that via your social channels.  

What CLV is and Why it Matters

Customer lifetime value is the amount of money that your average customer spends with you over the course of his or her lifetime. It’s useful to track, because when you know this, you can project the revenue that future customers will send your way, a figure that you can use as a break-even benchmark when compared with customer acquisition costs (CAC).

Taking CLV into account can completely shift how you think about customer acquisition. Rather than brainstorming ways to acquire customers and figuring out how cheaply you can accomplish this, a CLV calculation helps you reshape your thinking into brainstorming ways to optimize your acquisition spending for maximum sales value – rather than simply more new customers.

Considering it costs five times as much to attract a new customer than it is to keep an existing one, it’s an incredibly valuable metric, as it’s inseparable from your customer retention strategy.

According to a 2014 study from predictive analytics firm Implisit, on average, leads captured on B2B websites take an average of 75 days to convert, peer referrals take 97 days, and social media-driven leads only take 40 days to convert. So at least the nurturing process for selling to new sales leads is shortest when social plays a role in B2B product discovery. The 2016 PwC Total Retail Survey, moreover, strengthens the idea that social plays a key role in building positive brand sentiment, which is pivotal when you’re trying to retain customers.

Image source: http://www.pwc.com/totalretail

Referencing CLV as a metric that you try hard to maximize is vital if you want to increase profitability and retention, because it reveals the true (estimated) ROI on customer acquisition. Segmenting your CLV calculations can likewise help you identify which channels produce the most profitable customers.

It’s all too easy to fall into the trap of measuring ROI based on people’s initial purchases. You should be optimizing your marketing activities in terms of the lifetime value a customer contributes to your business. And you should be using your social channels to drive those CLV metrics up. Here’s how.

Incorporate Social Media Activity into Your Loyalty Rewards Program 

Encourage your customers to engage with you on social media by rewarding them when they do so. Award points to members who follow selected social accounts, redeemable for discounts on the products they already love.

Since 90% of loyalty program members desire communication from the programs in which they participate, give it to them on the channels you want to promote. Empower them to engage with your brand and earn points where they spend their time anyway. The bonus here is that since you’re inevitably already hitting your loyalty program members via email marketing, adding a social touch-point primes your members to build an omnichannel relationship with your brand.

The icing on the proverbial cake here is that once your loyalty program members have followed you on your social channels, your brand will keep popping up in their feeds, keeping it in the forefront of your customers’ minds.

Image source: https://antavo.com/blog/blogthe-definitive-guide-to-creating-a-successful-loyalty-program/

Of course, you can do this all automatically. Antavo, for example, is a loyalty-marketing platform that rewards the social media behaviors you want to encourage. Your customers can complete the action you want them to take, receive points and redeem awards – all in one place. You can even give them choices with stepped levels of reward points for each action, so they can determine what’s comfortable and worthwhile for them.

Offer Discounts to Specific Segments via Social Ads

Creating separate buyer personas and pushing out tailored content which will resonate with each audience and drive them to action has the potential to jack up your sales by 124%.

You’re segmenting your audience, right? Let’s take that concept one (strategic, profitable) step further. With a social selling intelligence tool like Leadfeeder, you can track your site visitors so you know which products, or categories of products, or content topics, they’re most interested in and therefore likely to purchase when targeted.

Anytime someone engages with your website, Leadfeeder does the homework for B2B companies automatically. It integrates with your CRM, empowering you to segment your audience based on their behavior on you website. Then, you can target each segmented audience with social ads and create both upsell and reengagement discount offers on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or LinkedIn.

Image source: https://www.leadfeeder.com/

For example, if Leadfeeder tells you that that customer companies A and B have visited your website six times in the last two months, consistently lingering on Product Q, but have not returned in the last week, it’s time to target them with a Facebook advertisement specifically for Product Q.

Does your CRM tell you that both customers bought Product Q a year ago, and it’s time to restock? Up those click bids! This is a highly focused ad, since you already know who they are, what they want, and how far along in the sales funnel they get before converting. Capitalize on this knowledge.

Provide Top Customer Service Across all Social Channels

We’ve reached the stage where we need to go beyond a 24-hour response promise and a cheery smile. Customer expectations regarding service via social media have skyrocketed: 32% expect a response within 30 minutes and 42% within the hour.

And it gets even more intense: of the survey respondents who have ever attempted to contact a brand, product or company through social media for customer support, 57% expect the same response time at night and on weekends as they do during standard business hours.

Thankfully, the technology is now available to take your customer service to the next level and provide exactly what your customers are seeking. Conversocial is an automated, comprehensive customer service platform that streamlines not only direct customer communication but also internal ticket assignment and escalation procedures. Ultimately, this means you can achieve higher productivity, faster decision making, and the big prize: the opportunity to demonstrate superior customer service in comparison to your competitors.

Image source: http://www.conversocial.com/

In addition, Conversocial offers preventative customer service by automatically finding indirect product or brand mentions on Twitter and Instagram. This way, you can proactively resolve issues before they spin out of control. And of course, it integrates with your CRM so you can track all of your touch-points within a single system and review them at a glance.

Feature Your Customers in Your Social Posts

Everybody wants to feel important. And since 87% of consumers want meaningful interactions with brands, but only 17% believe that brands deliver on those interactions, marketers have some work to do here.

Two-thirds of your audience believes that their relationships with sellers is one-sided – they want more recognition and warm feels from their brands. Give it to them.

Last year, for example, Coca-Cola marketed personalized soda bottles, but they didn’t stop there. The entire world went crazy for them, and Coke – being the marketing geniuses they are – capitalized on the momentum by encouraging people to share pictures of themselves drinking from their personalized bottles. The pictures stormed social media, and Coke pushed them along by featuring, highlighting and promoting them, ultimately making their customers feel like a million bucks, and (bonus alert!) transitioning Coca Cola’s customers into their advertisers.

Image source: https://www.facebook.com/kajabi/

In another example, online course sales platform Kajabi is uber-successful at making their customers feel like superstars by featuring them on their social channels. Their #KajabiHero Facebook campaign highlights their customer successes and explains to potential users how this “hero” utilized the platform to bring in significant profits. This strategy allows Kajabi to simultaneously achieve two goals: “pulling their weight” as far as the brand’s responsibility to engage the customer, and exponentially increasing the traffic to their social channels. Win-win.

Invite High-Value Customers to Join a Group for Superfans

 If you’re in B2B, LinkedIn might be a better host for your VIP fan group than Facebook, but regardless of your ideal channel, a great way to drive engagement from loyal fans is granting them exclusive and/or early access to sales promotions, pre-launch sales or special events.

The women’s fashion brand Zig Zag Stripe did exactly this and sold $6 million worth of products in six months. Their superfan Facebook group boasts 45,000+ members and was established as the antidote to the brand’s diminishing engagement on their main Facebook page.

Image source: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ilovezigzag/

Zig Zag Stripe’s fans feel like they’re part of an exclusive group, and they enjoy giveaways and prizes for recruiting their friends into their “private, closed circle” of discounts and deals. The kicker here is that every brand has the ability to open a (free!) closed Facebook group and sell directly to the group.

Soldsie software allows you to take this strategy to new heights, as it allows you to post your products to Facebook or Instagram, empowering your followers to purchase simply by commenting. Items are then automatically added to the customer’s shopping cart, promoting easy checkout.

Increase CLV by Channeling the Power of All Your Social Channels

Maximizing your customer lifetime value in relation to your cost of customer acquisition is challenging but achievable. Get creative; implement one or all of the methods mentioned above and untap the full power of your social channels to incrementally increase your CLV.

Focus on the lifelong relationship you’re building with loyal customers and reshape your thinking to focus on maximum lifetime sales value of each customer. They will thank you for it, and so will your bottom line.

The post An In-depth Guide to Boosting Customer Lifetime Value Using Social Media appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Chatbot building tools make them easy to try for free.

A Bit of Background

In their simplest form, chatbots help brands deliver intimate, one-to-one engagement, at scale. Bots are all about creating interactions that feel personal instead of transactional. It’s an approach that isn’t lost on discerning millennial and Gen-Z consumers who value uninterrupted, genuine user experiences over those that seem forced or too self-serving. Plus, bots live in mobile messaging apps—the fastest growing online sector within the social landscape over the past five years.

Brands can no longer afford to ignore mobile messaging apps as a viable marketing tool. The race for real estate in the mobile messaging world has intensified even more recently, with Apple teasing the introduction of its iMessage app store. This would put the company on pace to better compete with the likes of WeChat, WhatsApp, Snapchat, and even Facebook Messenger.

ChatBot expert Murray Newlands and founder of bot tool Chattypeople commented that “Where 10 years ago every company needed a website and five  years ago every company needed an app, now every company needs to embrace messaging with AI and chatbots.”

The end game is to turn mobile messaging into an all-encompassing platform that consumers can essentially live in; they’ll soon be able to make payments, access enhanced visual content (e.g., emojis, stickers, GIFs), and even shop or call an Uber. For brands who were reluctant to jump on the Facebook or Twitter marketing bandwagon in 2006, chatbots, specifically, offer a shot at redemption.

In the few weeks since “bots” have become a buzzword, I’ve seen a whole host of different chatbots emerge from publishers and entertainment companies, eCommerce sites, and even makeup brands. There are bots to help you find a job, bots that keep you current on politics, and bots that can help book your next vacation. There’s even a bot to help regulate your dating life.

Everyone wants a chatbot right now, but not everyone knows why or even how. If you fall into that category, read on.

Here are three things every chief marketing officer (CMO) needs to know now, before entering the chatbot space.

1. Have a Broader Mobile (Messaging) Strategy

The way consumers communicate today is much different from the way it was 10 or even 5 years ago. Sharing and interacting is happening in a digital environment, on smaller screens via mobile messaging apps. As a result, companies have had to evolve the way they advertise, moving away from things such as banner ads and interstitials.

In their place, a new age of advertising tactics has emerged. Chatbots are one such example. And, like any advertising campaign, branded chat campaigns perform best when rooted in strategy—specifically, a mobile messaging strategy. This means ensuring everything from the objectives, key performance indicators (KPIs), key messages, and creative content are aligned and working cohesively.

2. Pick the Right Partner

Once you have prepared a broad mobile strategy, you’ll need to find a partner to help with the execution. As with any good relationship, there are certain “checkmarks” you should look for. First thing—pick a chatbot marketing expert who is platform agnostic; work with them to develop a proposal and strategy that ladders up to your campaign goals and can be deployed across the appropriate messaging apps.

It’s imperative that this partner can also deliver real-time analytics of campaign performance, including message-read rates, average length of conversation, how many people were funneled through to reach the KPIs, etc. These metrics will provide useful insight into user behavior and attention, which you’ll need for continued success and development. And, they will allow you to pivot, invest more in particular areas, and adapt the campaign in real time.

3. Layer Your Engagement Experiences

Like any other branding, marketing, or advertising campaign, chatbot campaigns perform best when wrapped with other engagement experiences. At least for now, bots lack the ability to sustain interest and engagement when deployed solo.

If your bot is going to drive awareness, interest, or traffic, you need to embed other elements into your campaign; you need to issue some sort of call to action, whether you’re driving users to download a new app, visit a web page, or watch a video. The longer you can extend the user experience, the better your chances of keeping your audience engaged and attentive.

Final Thoughts

Now that you’ve been schooled on chatbots 101, what are you waiting for? Take the leap, and get started building a chat bot for your brand today.

The post 3 Things Every CMO Needs To Know About Chat Bots appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

 Moving in

When starting a PBN you need to start with the basics, domains. You can find an expired domain here (https://www.expireddomains.net) You’ll need to find something with a decent domain authority. Check that backlink with Ahrefs, or Open-site Explorer, you don’t want to invest in anything with a toxic link profile. If you want to put on the tinfoil hat you can buy these through different registers. You can also purchase new domains, these won’t be as valuable as authority domains, but they’ll be cheaper and will add a nice variety to your link profile.

Stay Hidden

One of the essential ways to keep your PBN off the map is to keep those domains apart. The best way to do that is to mask your IP. It’s actually pretty easy to blow out an IP, once that happens you’re going to have some problems. Better to avoid that situation altogether.

Fortunately, to mask an IP you can use a CDN and get an IP range. The gist is that these services are secure proxies that mask your origin servers. Not only does this protect you from a DDoS attack and will help your website load much faster, but it also has the added benefit of keeping your PBN on different IPs.

You should probably be using a CDN anyway for the benefit of reducing latency and keeping your sites up and safe from attacks. Setting this up is a relatively simple task and putting in the effort now can stave off a manual penalty that could ding you and potentially destroy your sites. If you need to do a little trickery and mask IPs while using a CDN there are a couple of options and a few things to consider. Leading CDNs like Cloudflare and Incapsula are great options for providing this security.

Who’s Next Door?

Just like in life an unpleasant neighbor can drive down property values. In this case that neighbor could be anything, porn, hate groups, or any number of unsavory characters. It is the internet after all. Think about it, would you want to host your websites in the same IP range of porn, hate and spammy websites? Probably not the best idea. It’s always good to check out the neighborhood before committing. There are a few tools online that will show your IP neighbors if you want to check up on that.

Incapsula is a great tool for ensuring good neighbors. It lists Zillow, Moz and Wix as clients so you’re in good hands in terms of putting your network in a quality neighborhood. You’re also able to do it all under one account to make things a little easier. Unfortunately, companies like Cloudflare don’t have a vetting process and, being in a bad IP neighborhood could be your undoing. If you’re going to go ahead and do the leg work of building a PBN it’s probably because you’re concerned about controlling all parts of your linkbuilding process and have goals of monetizing a site. Having that fall apart because your sites are sharing IP’s with a spam network is a waste of time and resources. Not concerning yourself with IP neighbors can open you up to a manual penalty, burning your sites. Not many CDN services will ensure a healthy IP neighborhood, so make sure you do research before enrolling with a CDN provider.

Best part is that this can all be done for free. There are paid tiers and though pricing the the paid accounts can be a little higher than alternatives like Cloudflare you get what you pay for, potentially spammy neighbors.

Content

You’re going to need some relevant content on these sites if you want to link back to your money site. If your money site is about coffee, then the content in your network is going to need to be about coffee too. You can write this yourself your fine content writers online. Often, though, you get what you pay for and you want this content to be readable and on topic. It’s also great if it can link out to other authority sites besides your own.

Spinning a Web of Links

Here’s where the dangerous art of PBNs come into play. It’s also where the benefit of them becomes apparent. Each domain could link out to your money site, but only once. Now you have control over your backlinks. You’ll still need to vary the anchor texts to appear natural, but that’s now up to you. As stated earlier, these properties should already be linking to authority sites in your industry.

The Conclusion

Can a PBN work for you? Absolutely. Is it risky? Definitely. In some cases building the sites and the cost of content and hosting can be prohibitive. However, there are clear benefits to those links pointing towards a site you’re monetizing. It’s really the only guaranteed way to control your backlinks. But, if you do decide to invest you’ll need to take steps to secure your investment, masking IP and varied hosting platforms are essential to that. At the end of the day remember that white hat is always the best strategy, not buying links and investing is great content.

The post This SEO Tactic Can Still Work in 2017, Here’s How to Get Started appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

1. Neil Patel

If you’ve followed the wonderful blogs from the founder of Crazy Egg, KISSmetrics, and Quick Sprout, you’re sure to be aware of Neil Patel’s keen sense of marketing advice and entrepreneurial wisdom on what’s new and exciting in the world of marketing.

Patel can increase your search traffic, convert online visitors into customers and create Social Media traffic without using ads.  As a regular contributor to Forbes, TechCrunch and Entrepreneur.com, Patel is here to stay on top for the foreseeable future.

2. Gary Vaynerchuk

As CEO of VaynerMedia, Gary Vaynerchuk’s agency specializes in an eclectic vision in social media branding and distribution. The host of #AskGaryVee show (a way of producing top value answers for questions about social media, startups and entrepreneurship) and author of “Crush It!: Why NOW is the Time to Cash in on Your Passion” will answer that very question for you.

3. Andy Crestodina

Andy Crestodina is the founder of Orbit Media and has been in the digital space since 2000. Specializing in web design and content, but knowledgeable on all topics digital from search to analytics, Andy is as much a Chicago evangelist as he is a digital evangelist. Andy is a content king and has published hundreds of articles on the topic of digital marketing and has written a book to boot “Content Chemistry”- in it’s third printing.  He is a national speaker and founder of Content Jam. In addition to repping the Windy City, Orbit Media helps its clients produce beautiful sites and content marketing pieces that lead to sustainable growth and jealousy from competitors.

4. Lisa Song Sutton

Lisa Song Sutton is a former Miss Las Vegas who has become a full fledge entrepreneur with her Sin City Cupcakes Company as well as Liquid & Lace, Fundamental Elements, and Elite Homes Us.  She also writes about Women in Business and Entrepreneurship for Forbes as well as hosts “Live With Lisa,” a TV show that gives business tips and tricks based on her own experiences.

5. Ian Cleary 

Ian Cleary is an award-winning Tech Blogger on RazorSocial who can help increase your blog traffic on any given occasion. If you’re looking for help to market your business more effectively, look no further.  Ian can help give you a better system for your social media content exposure that can save time with better results.

6. Sujan Patel

Sujan Patel is the co-founder of Web Profits and is one of the leading experts in digital marketing.  His agency helps companies leverage the latest marketing strategies to propel their businesses.  With over 13 years of Internet marketing experience, Sujan has led a comprehensive digital marketing strategy for many Fortune 500 companies.

7. Vincenzo M. Landino 

Vincenzo M. Landino is a Creative Director, Public Speaker and Brand Correspondent who also hosts the Brand Boost Podcast.

He is also the co-founder of Aftermarq, video content consultants who specialize in digital storytelling and brand amplification.  Vincenzo has worked on campaigns for Mazda, Kia Motors, Tinder and Zoomph.

8. Brian Fanzo

As founder/CEO of iSocialFanz LLC, Brian Fanzo’s social strategy consulting agency offers the #ThinkLikeAFan philosophy which enables storytelling campaigns for plenty of Fortune 50 companies.  Brian co-hosts a weekly show #Cloudtalk, as well as a SMACtalk Podcast.

9. Josh Steimle 

Speaker, writer, and Entrepreneur Josh Steimle has been published in Forbes, Entrepreneur, Inc, and Time -just to name a few- and has helmed the digital agency MWI since 1999. In addition to numerous publications Josh has held positions consulting with government on issues of tech and startups as well as working with non-profits in an array of fields. His role as a speaker focuses on the role of CMOs as well as digital marketing. His agency, MWI, has offices around the world and specializes in all things digital, from design to SEO.

10. Regan Anne Hillyer

Looking to unlock greatness? Regan Anne Hillyer is an entrepreneur, philanthropist and Mindset Coach who can help with that potential. As a founder of Regan Hillyer International, her company is dedicated to providing personal development and business training for all men and women looking to unlock their true potential.

Whether your business is just starting up, just taking off or well into its prime, the latest digital marketing techniques can always give you the added boost to push your work into the cutting edge of tomorrow.  These are some of the Social Marketing influencers who could quite possibly do just that.  As we approach 2017, these industry experts should prove themselves to be true leaders at the top of their game

The post The Top 10 Social Marketing Influencers to Keep An Eye on in 2017 appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

1. Dan Fowler

Dan Fowler has over two decades of experience as a coach and trainer in media, production, TV, film, and personal development. He helps entrepreneurs use their internal and external resources to develop as better leaders and advance their business successfully.

2. Murray Newlands

Murray is at vet media training, motivational speaker and one of the 50 most influential marketers in the world, according to Entrepreneur Magazine. He can motivate your company and make a corporate event a huge success with his speeches, and teach you how to use all opportunities media offers to promote your brand with his comprehensive media coaching course.

3. Patty Farmer

For those in need of some insight into new business strategies that work, Patty Farmer will help using her marketing expertise and experience as a public speaker and social media strategist. Effective networking, influencing, and empowerment for women entrepreneurs are her focal points.

4. Elizabeth Bachman

Elizabeth Bachman has a background as a coach to stars such as Luciano Pavarotti and is using these years of experience to teach entrepreneurs and public speaking hopefuls what she knows. Public speaking is one of the most effective ways to promote a brand or a business and presentations skills are essential in the business and media world.

5. T. Allen Hanes

A quick way to celebrity status is what T. Allen Hanes offers. He says he can help you become not just an authority on something but an undisputed authority, the leader of the pack. Hanes is not just a speaker, he is also a bestselling book author and a media coach, too.

6. Tony Wilkins

If you have a small business and are just starting your journey in the big world of business, Tony Wilkins is the go-to authority. Author of three books on how small businesses can make it big, Wilkins also hosts a very popular radio show, on which successful entrepreneurs share small business tips, and he also does motivational speeches and lectures across the country.

7. Scott Shilling

A 30-year vet in sales, marketing, and business training, Scott Shilling has a lot of experience and insight to share with new businesses, assisting them with the navigation of today’s challenging environment and helping them leverage their advantages by providing consulting, coaching, and speaking services.

8. Bea Baylor

The founder of Baylor Business Consulting, Bea Baylor offers a comprehensive set of services to companies and non-profits, ranging from speeches to individual coaching sessions with small business and charity owners to help them find the right direction for their business. Empowerment of women entrepreneurs is a separate priority for Baylor Business Consulting.

9. Katrina Sawa

Business strategy, consulting, training, these are some of the things Katrina Sawa offers startups and individual entrepreneurs. Anything from practical everyday tips to developing a full business strategy and media coaching is available from Sawa.

10. Nicky Kriel

For those who want to focus exclusively – or predominantly – on social media exposure, here is Nicky Kriel, a social media coach and speaker. Her course can help you navigate the often seemingly chaotic world of social networks and her speeches can help spread enthusiasm about Twitter, Linkedin and the rest of them.

The post Top 10 Media Training Speakers You Need to Know appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Here are five accounts you should be following for entertaining snaps and for a closer look into the lives of artists.

Blake Jamieson

@blakejsnap

An ex-digital marketer turned full-time artist, Blake Jamieson’s background gives him a unique skill set that many artists don’t have. Blake is no novice in cultivating an audience online and understands how to put content front and center where it counts. He is the author of “Tinder Hacks,” a guide to getting more messages and matches on the dating app, and started TwitterWorkshop.com, offering training on how to master the art of Twitter. He recently completed a “90 Days to MOMA,” a 90-day vlog series leading to his ultimate goal of getting his paintings into San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). Through Snapchat, Blake delivers daily stories giving followers a look behind the scenes of his projects.

Charles Gitnick

@charlesgitnick

LA-based artist Charles Gitnick is only 14 and knows no other way of being other than social; so it follows that he has amassed a deeply engaged following of fans who know him as much as a fellow social kid as they do as a painter with amazing messages to share. In one year, 2015, as a 13-year old, Charles toured and brought his fans along via social media, through Zurich, Switzerland; Monaco and France; Bogota, Colombia; and Vancouver, Canada: exhibiting his works in each city and gorgeously decrying gun violence in the world. Influenced heavily by His favorite artists: Jackson Pollock, Charles use splatter, incorporates symbolic references and clashes expectations in his widely popular cool aesthetics incorporating 3-D replica guns onto his canvases and aluminum or diamond-plate steel backgrounds.

His followers enjoy the creation of his works and enter into his studio through the time lapse videos he frequently posts and they connect with Charles personally through his frequent daily snaps and his regular live interactive broadcasts via YouNow online. Charles also sells his works via social media to dozens of collectors around the world and gifts them as well to handfuls of his very young peers many of whom have discovered art through Charles.

Morgan

@mothepanda

When you found this post, you probably thought everyone was going to be Snapchat artists: as in individuals creating art on their snaps themselves with doodles and emojis. While that’s not the case for the other four on this list, MoThePanda fills this niche. He has legitimized Snapchat as an art medium, using snaps as a canvas to create colorful pieces that only exist within our devices. MoThePanda’s work makes our own finger-drawn Snapchat doodles feel like a kindergartener’s finger paintings. His intricate Snapchat drawings of superheroes, comic book characters, and figures of pop culture come often and consistently.

Matty Mo AKA The Most Famous Artist

@Mostfamousartist

Matty Mo started The Most Famous Artist with a Silicon Valley background, previously attending Stanford where he studied Advertising Technology. His art ties in our cultural obsession with building our own persona through social media and its viral nature. Matty Mo began with murals, which doubled as a calling card as Instagrammers began using his work as a backdrop for their photos, like his Selfie Wall in Venice, CA. He told

He told LA Magazine, that the “idea that you could become this masked Robin Hood-type character and have a digital footprint, but not have it attributed to you, was fascinating” and used street murals as a way to create a buzz around his work along with influencer marketing. His most recent stunt, where he wrapped bundles of cash in plastic wrap, has received tremendous attention and press in the art world. His Snapchat account combines his art, social commentary, and entertaining daily shenanigans.

“In the past we learned about famous artists in textbooks and at school, but now in a connected world with information democracy, whoever’s best at propagating their story will become the most famous artist.” -Matty Mo

Heather Day

@heatherdayart

Bay area artist Heather Day is a Hawaii native and Maryland Institute of Art graduate. Influenced by nature and her experiences of traveling, Heather uses colorful mixes of acrylic, graphite, spray paint and more to tell her stories. Heather has built a loyal following on social media, where she showcases her abstract paintings and her process.

Like her contemporaries, Heather has gained exposure through multiple platforms on Facebook, blog interviews and podcasts. Building relationships with other content creators extends her reach and allows her to attract a wider audience who can learn about her background and artistic vision. Heather currently holds a residency in Joshua Tree, California, where she snapchats her art process and musings in the desert.

A photo posted by heather day (@heatherdayart) on Nov 1, 2016 at 2:31pm PDT

The post 5 Must Follow Artists On SnapChat appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

1. Choose Your Subject

What topic are you most passionate about and find yourself talking about endlessly? Is there a particular field you are an official (or unofficial) expert on and can offer valuable insight? Your answer to either question can be your theme. A clear topic and focused content will help readers recognize and return to your blog, identifying you as a knowledgeable resource.

Discovering your niche also comes into play when you want to start monetizing your blog. If you love cooking, you may have a library of recipes to prepare and share with the rest of the world. You could also be starting a new business and want to discuss important updates and industry-related topics to enhance your brand. As you write your blog posts, keeping your audience in mind will help you to develop your voice and how you want to speak to your readers. It’s crucial to both learn and speak their language, start reading influential blogs within your selected niche now.

2. Set Hard Goals

Even if you’re blogging for fun, identifying your long-term and short-term goals will help you with the upkeep involved. A short-term goal could be as simple as daily blog posting or watching one new tutorial per week to learn more about your topic. Try creating a schedule, plotting out days of the week to write, edit and publish. Attending local events to network and write about afterward will also help you brainstorm new topics to discuss with others who share your passion. Your goals can be more technical, such as a new design or template on your site. Sticking to these goals will help you to see results from your time and effort.

“A good blog name is one that’s as memorable as it is simple.”

For longer-term goals, think about what you’d like to accomplish with your blog over the next year. An attainable and worthy goal is to gradually build an audience across multiple platforms where you can promote content. Gaining engaged and valuable followers takes quite a bit of time, but will give you a quality community that will be your core source of traffic for years. Make a solid decision on if you want to monetize your blog now from the onset. This will influence all future decisions from the ground up.

3. Choose A Name

A good blog name is one that’s as memorable as it is simple. If you don’t already have a name in mind, aim for a title that lets others know what your topic is about or which audience it’s intended for. You may need to come up with a few options or stay flexible with your name choice, depending on whether the domain is available or not. Take a look on WhoIs.net or InstantDomainSearch to see if your domain can be purchased.

Your blog’s title and domain should be short so that readers can manually type it in without having to search their browser history. Use a keyword of your topic, avoid numbers and hyphens. Your domain extension should also be chosen based on your content. A .co extension is generally used to abbreviate a company or community site. Domains with .me can let people know that this site is a personal site used for an electronic resume or portfolio. Using .net is most common for technical or Internet-focused sites. Simplicity is key to make your blog easily recognizable. Take SocialMediaExplorer.com for example, the reader knows instantly upon reading what the blog is all about.

4. Find The Right Platform 

Now that you know your topic, audience and domain, you can choose the right platform to use for your content. Beginners and writers will love the intuitive interface and layouts of WordPress. Bloggers who are writing time-sensitive content may prefer Ghost, where they can preview posts on their blog while writing them. Github users will want to use TinyPress, and a big business may opt for Drupal to allow easy media sharing across departments. If CSS or HTML language is foreign or intimidating to you, Weebly or Wix have interfaces that allow easy performance without any coding required. And if you’re all about style, we have to recommend SquareSpace as an elegant and classy option. They have templates premade and optimize for simplicity. For more details on these platforms, along with some additional suggestions for effective web builders, checkout this guide from .

5. Concept A Content Plan

Bring your readers back again and again with consistency. Stick to a strict schedule and be sure to capitalize on high traffic periods. To avoid burning out on one subject, think about how you can break down your subject into several topics and mix them up each week in different formats.

What would you want to know if you were visiting your site? For example, The Financial Diet, a money blog for millennial women has a menu including: Money Talk (investing, living with debt), Career (negotiating, finding a job), College (living on a student budget), Living (DIY tutorials, health, essays), In the Kitchen (recipes, grocery shopping tips), Travel (within a budget) and #TFD (interactive, ask the author). Each category is highly specialized and relevant to their target audience. As you establish your categories be sure to research each one and understand if they’ll resonate with your target audience.

6. Share Baby Share

Don’t be afraid to collaborate with other authors or influencers! Try a content marketing platform like ClearVoice to connect and interact with influencers and making your content more viral. This can help to put your blog in front of more eyes and will help you to build a reliable network of others in your field. Create a list of subscribers on GetResponse, keeping readers updated with exclusive offers or perks for incentive. Set up social media accounts to take your blog farther, as new readers can discover you through Facebook shares, retweets or reblogs. You can engage with your audience members, promote your posts and build your voice through regular social posts in addition to your blog.

The post 6 Core Steps for Starting a Revolutionary New Blog appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Having a well-planned content strategy is one of the most important things you can do to drive traffic via SEO and social media. Without content, your social media profiles will remain flat and, in all likelihood, so will your site traffic. When formulating your content strategy, however, it’s best to keep in mind that you have the opportunity to benefit both in terms of Google rankings and social media engagement.

This may come as a surprise to many marketers since conventional wisdom has it that social media has zero, or close to zero, impact on SEO. I find it very frustrating when people sharing this misguided impression. Of course, social signals influence SEO. If factors like site speed, time on site, links and content structure can all impact search, then why wouldn’t something that can sway all of those things count as well?

I have listed below a few ways that social media can help when you are trying to get Google to index your website, build your local listings, get eyes on your most engaging content and connect with influencers.

1. Build Branded Local Citations With Social Profiles

This is possibly the most obvious and most common fail among local businesses. Many social media sites are now asking businesses to add their locations to their pages. Facebook, Google+, Foursquare, Pinterest, Yelp, LinkedIn and others all have local business pages. Why is this important? Because if your local business does not claim its local page from these social sites, someone else will claim it instead of you.

Businesses that leave their local business pages up to the whims of social media algorithms are asking for trouble. Social media sites will pull information (address, business name, business type, phone number, etc.) from other places on the web and create a profile to the best of their ability for you. These pages are then available for people to check-in at, claim and review.

Anyone searching for that business or for a business similar to yours within the area will be shown links to these pages in their search results. The bummer? The pages created for you are often wrong. So claim all of your pages. It’s better to know that you can access and even post on them when you need to, and leaving your local search fate up to the algorithm gods is never a good idea.

2. Use Shares From Influencers as Bot Bait

Google has admitted to “working towards assessing authority of individuals” as a ranking signal. This means that they are grading people on influence and the content that those people share may be used as a ranking factor. We saw this first with Google Authorship, and now we are seeing it with tweets appearing in search results.

What’s more, Google has been increasing Twitter content’s indexing and appearance in search results. More telling is that Google has been prioritizing the indexing of tweets posted by people with certain authority rank thresholds. That’s right – not all tweets are equal.

@LiamNolan90 Totally cool; thanks for the mention!

— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) May 9, 2016

So how do you influence the influencers to share, comment on or engage with your content? Create content that mentions them, ask them for guest posts or share their content. This is the age of people-based marketing, and there is no better way to get people involved than by engaging with them. Try compiling and publishing expert quote roundups on your blog, newsletters, and social presences. You can find quality content and relevant influencers by using tools like Buzzsumo or Nuvi.

3. Curate Content for Stickier Referrals

As mentioned in the previous section, influencer relationships should ideally influence your content strategy. This concept does not only go one way. You can curate content from influencers within your niche and share it. Using tools like Start A Fire even allow you to take your content from a third-party site and add a badge with your own content recommendations to the page.

Let’s be real. Curated content on social media gets much more engagement than promotional content, but marketers often hold back on sharing third-party content for fear of sending their audience to someone else’s site. You no longer have to worry about. Start A Fire will allow you to share curated content and use it to drive traffic back to your website. This is a huge advantage for marketers who are trying to increase engagement and also impact the bottom line.

Why does this matter? It’s prequalified traffic. The people who see your badge are already interested enough in the content you share that they want to see more of it. In this sense, this type of tool will not only put your mind at ease that you won’t lose your audience when you post links to third-party content, but it will also increase qualified click-throughs, thereby lowering bounce rates, which ultimately help improve your search rankings.

4. Optimize for YouTube Search 

Although it’s more of a social network and a user-generated content platform than anything else, YouTube is also the second largest search engine in the world. Need another reason to take it seriously for SEO purposes? YouTube is owned by the largest search engine in the world, Google.

While solutions for proprietary video streaming do offer some compelling features, many search experts believe it is imperative that the video content on your website be powered by YouTube. Connect your account to your Google Business page, complete your video tags (appropriately), fill out the content description and add CTAs to your videos.

Too many marketers miss out on huge SEO opportunities by ignoring YouTube. Don’t be this person.

Rethinking the Wheel

Instead of discrediting social media’s ability to impact overall marketing and business strategies in the short term, we need to start looking for the ways that social activity can already improve our rankings. Instead of focusing on what we believe that social media can’t do, it’s time to focus on what it can do.

Social media can improve many factors that have an impact on search rankings. This is a fact. Do yourself and your company a favor and rethink the way you use social media, find where it may have the greatest impact for your business, and test those theories.

The post 4 Unexpected Ways Social Media Can Impact SEO appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

For those aiming to join the ranks of the social media elite, there are two sides to the trade that need to be understood; the creative and the scientific. We need to be able to answer why and how, and then be able to provide data to support our decision-making. This sounds simple, however, many (if not most) are not doing this.

Marketing legends such as Dennis Yu; CFO/Founder at BlitzMetrics, Brian Swichkow; CEO/Founder at Ghost Influence, Blake Jamieson; CEO/Founder at TinderHacks, and a few others are perfect examples of what a professional, data driven, social media professional should do. I have had the pleasure of working with and learning from all three of them and here is what they have to say. 

1. Never Make Assumptions

We have access to more data than ever before which means we no longer have to guess on what our audiences actually want to see! Rather, we can use cold hard data to inform our decisions. There is nothing worse than seeing an entire content or social media marketing campaign go out without the crucial research in place. Tools like BlitzMetric, Nuvi, and BuzzSumo are just a few of the many social media data tools that are absolutely crucial to properly inform a campaign.

2. Expect & Prepare for Overload

No one can predict how viral a social media campaign will be so we should always have a plan for overload. A lot of social media campaigns fail and as a result many social media-marketers forget to prepare for when they are actually successful. It’s so important to consider the way your content is being delivered. This includes load time, caching your site via mobile so that the user’s mobile device doesn’t have to request the page over and over again leading to possibly crashing your server!

To avoid these things from happening and to optimize your content your campaign, you can use Content Delivery Networks (CDNs). Understanding and paying attention to small details like this are what divide the pro’s from the noobs. Remember that for any area in life, success always lives in the details.

3. Track Everything

Tracking is the only way we will be able to know if and why our campaigns did well. Google Analytics, Twitter Cards, Facebook and Google Tags are all key components to tracking the success of your campaigns. Another thing to keep in mind is something called “Dark Social.” Dark social is a term for the social media site traffic that comes in as “direct” traffic. This happens when someone texts, emails or clicks on a click from a non-secure network. The referral source in theses cases would not be passed.

“Success always lives in the details”

How do we fix this? To track dark social media traffic we need to use URL builders and URL shorteners, such as Bit.ly and Google URL builder. These link tracking tools allow us to see the social media link that has come in as direct traffic, and from there we can separate it out and attribute it appropriately.

4. Always A/B Test your Campaigns

Considering the amount of time, effort and resources we put into social media campaigns, it seems crazy to think that some companies are not A/B testing their campaigns. Remember when your mom always told you to never put all of our eggs in one basket? Testing the language, the media, the audiences and the delivery network to optimize the return on your campaigns is essential. We must test, evaluate, consider and try again and again until we get it right.

To A/B test a campaign it’s recommended you create three variations of copy and three variations of images. Cross test each variation until one ‘pops out’ as a clear winner. When you have that winner chosen, first study every aspect of it and take note. What resonated with the viewer? What did your audience connect with? After asking questions, optimize again with your new learnings. It’s a constant process of elimination leading to the perfect campaign for your specific audience. Tools like Spokal can help with more advanced A/B testing tactics on social. This particular tool can actually allow you to A/B test blog titles right on site!

The post Staying Ahead with Sophisticated Social Media Marketing appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

In his years as an entrepreneur, investor, speaker, and writer, Murray Newlands has encountered many influential entrepreneurs and is a highly influential entrepreneur in his own right. Co-founder of Due.com, Newlands has earned his influence every single day in a labor of love — 500k Twitter followers and 341k Vine followers didn’t come overnight. “In my interviews with entrepreneurs, I have seen that they possess a focused, habitual pursuit of excellence that I think anyone can achieve,” Newlands explains. “With enough confidence, anyone can learn the habits they need to be highly influential.”

Here, with Murray Newland’s guidance, are the top nine habits that every influential entrepreneur possesses.

1 . They’re independent thinkers

Those who are the most influential do not let other’s opinions sway their own. They gather information, are critical in their analysis, and then form their opinions. They don’t follow trends or common beliefs, but are happy to listen thoughtfully to all the information they hear.

2. They add value to their relationships.

Influential entrepreneurs are the best at creating meaningful relationships. They have large networks and make it a point to get to know the connections of their connections. But beyond knowing everyone, they add value to as many of their relationships as possible. “Add value to your relationships by connecting people who you think should know each other, collaborate with others for mutual benefit, and share your wisdom and experience freely,” says Newlands.

3. They welcome healthy debate

A dissenting opinion or a disagreement does not bother the influential entrepreneur. They encourage and even welcome dispute, as it allows them to see all sides of an issue. Newlands says, “If you truly want to be influential, respond with inquisitive humility to a dissenting opinion. The first step to getting more people to listen to you is to listen deeply to others.”

4. They are grateful

Without gratitude, even the most powerful entrepreneur won’t have much influence. “People don’t want to spend their lives being belittled or dismissed, and won’t listen to or respect a person that isn’t grateful for their time,” says Newlands. “If you aren’t creating relationships based in a humble gratitude, you aren’t creating much of influence at all.”

5. They are proactive

“Influential entrepreneurs do not wait for the latest and greatest to come to them; they are the ones inventing it,” says Newlands. “They know what’s coming next because they are out there looking for it, soaking up knowledge and spreading the word.” Sitting back and seeing what happens is not in the influential entrepreneur’s vocabulary.

6. They keep the faith

“Influential entrepreneurs know that everyone around them is capable of greatness” says Newlands. “They have faith in their own ability to reach their goals and dreams, and they know beyond a doubt that others have that ability, as well.” Their belief in other’s abilities inspires the people around them to work harder to manifest their own dreams. Even in failure, influential entrepreneurs know that each failure is one step closer to success.

7. They respond thoughtfully

Influential entrepreneurs know how important relationships are to their business, so they are never hotheaded. They do not react without thinking, because to do so would destroy relationships and often, the respect of others. Entrepreneurs that influence others maintain their cool and respond with consideration, extending to others the respect that they deserve.

8. They read

By now you’ve probably heard that Mark Cuban reads a book a day. It’s true, and as Newlands says, “If you aren’t reading, you’re missing a vast realm of knowledge that you will need to be an influential entrepreneur.”

The benefits of reading books are countless. “Voracious book readers are smarter, more interesting conversationalists, have deeper concentration, and learn from the wisdom of the most brilliant people in the world,” explains Newlands. “Without books, you’re probably re-inventing the wheel instead of spending your time influencing on the leading edge.”

9. They focus on leaving the planet better than they found it

Though entrepreneurs are not always concerned with altruism, many of the entrepreneurs who have made a lasting impact on our world have used their success as a vehicle to make the world a more peaceful, humane and just place.

For example, Warren Buffet, along with Bill and Melinda Gates, started a philanthropic organization for the wealthy to donate the bulk of their fortune to charity. “Thinking only of capital and nothing else can only lead to an empty existence,” expounds Newlands. “Lasting influence that creates a legacy is founded in selflessness that expands the scope of human understanding.”

The post 9 Simple Habits Of The Most Influential Entrepreneurs appeared first on Social Media Explorer.