Twitter - centis.net

Twitter.

by Traffic
Reading Time: 4 minutes

We are fast-forwarding into the end of March 2022 and I have zero results to show.

At the end of 2021, I sat down with our team and promised I would single-handedly grow Centis to 10,000 customers by the end of 2022. 

Well, it’s been three months since January and here are the results:

Zero new customers.

Zero traffic.

To justify me, I was preoccupied with other stuff, but this is just an excuse. Anyway, after some “housecleaning” I am back in the game and here is what I have “achieved” so far:

Twitter: I cleaned up my personal Twitter profile: from following 1800 people, I went down to 834 people, and 830 people follow me. If you asked me how I did that, I used a tool called PowerTwitter (the free version, although the pro wouldn’t hurt). So I unfollowed 50 people each day (I could have to done this in a day, but then I wasn’t ready for the content I was preparing).

Content planning: As stated above, I also used this time to check influential people in the entrepreneurial life in Europe (we decided to focus on Europe for now due to the time difference in the UK). This helps me understand what topics they discuss, what kind of people follow them and the content they produce.

Facebook groups: I stopped answering questions on Facebook groups. People were asking me what I do for a living and wanted to connect to sell me services. It still amazes how lazy people are – it takes literally one click to see the other person’s profile. Huge waste of time,, very little visibility for a month’s worth of answering questions. 

“Growth Hacking”: this was a favourite subject of mine 5 years back but it is still a way to grow your audience fast. I had to spend time (ok, I prefer “invest: rather than ”spend”, but whatever) to learn 

  1. What I want to achieve with growth hacking:
  2. What tools will help me achieve what I want to achieve 🙂

If you are wondering what I am trying to achieve so as to get ideas, here are my goals:

My Goal: I need to put more people in the “Just My Two Cents” newsletter (at this stage, I am not sure if I will keep this title. I had the idea as it rhymes with centis = cents = just my two cents (get it? No? Bloody hell, why not?)

How will I achieve that?

  1. Advertising: I do not wish to spend a fortune on ads, as our target market aren’t Russian billionaires with money to burn. So I need to figure out creative easy to lower the cost of Facebook ads. One way is with custom audiences, retargeting and 1% lookalike audiences. Adroll and sponsorship newsletters is another.
  2. Cold emailing: scape Facebook groups, Linkedin groups and Yellow Pages and get emails. This is a numbers game. The more you email, someone will have the courtesy to email you back and maybe sign up to the newsletter.
  3. Dominate ONLY ONE medium and grow from there: I have realised that writing content on the blog, plus creating the social feed for Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn takes too much time (I have actually wasted a few Sundays to come up with, write and plan content). Yes, it brought us some traffic but it wasn’t worthwhile, mainly because the existing network of followers is completely unqualified (they come from the previous industry we were active in).

So I have been reading that Twitter has a comeback, and I decided to simply double down on Twitter. As stated before, I intend to dominate and “own” this platform so when I gain traction to move to another platform. 

This is a great lesson by the way, for which I wrote about here. Do not do many things at once, focus only on the ones you think that matter (yes, finding out which things matter take some time, but wouldn’t you rather find out rather than do hundreds of stuff and fail at all?)

So for April the goals are:

  1. Create four more blog posts around a topic.
  2. Promote these on all channels (I use a service called Missinglettr which drips this throughout the year)
  3. Use Hyperfury (my Twitter tool of choice) to post content both on my social profile and also on Centis’ profile. The good news is that it can also post on Facebook profile and Instagram
  4. Find people with large followings and use my strategy from this post to create some traction
  5. Also, I will try to advertise my posts in the majority of EU countries with the objective of increasing my followers.
  6. Create a funnel on Twitter so that people who show interest to be redirected to Centis and check us out.

20th April Update:

I am now a bit obsessed with Twitter, to be honest – and didn’t expect that.

What I have done so far:

  1. I identified my targets, the people I want to go after their followers, i.e. Richard Branson as you all know owns several businesses, went to space, and is an example of o a successful business person. Chances are that he is followed by millions of people who seek inspiration. Targets include not only business people but also organisations that deal with entrepreneurship, startups and funding.
  2. Created three Twitter lists “VIP Entrepreneurs” ,”Companies” and “Journalists” and added each target to a corresponding list
  3. Then I run Hyperfury. As mentioned above this tool does way mor than sheduling, it also provides templates that you can wrtie on, popular tweets from others and also provided follow up tweets with a link for people to signup to my newsletter. I scheduled a month’s content (it took me an entire day to do so) and let it run.

Here are the live stats from Hyperfury from my personal acocunt:

https://app.hypefury.com/analytics/SalGeorgiou

4. I noticed (obviously) that each time I mention someone, apart of a public “thank you” I get some extra eyeballs. It is too early to see any traction yet.

5. Last month, I only updated my feed with fresh content, did nothing of the above – I only added hashtags and I saw minor results. This time, what I am doing is following my target lists’ followers in an effort to reach 5,000 followers in a couple of months.

Here is the caveat – unless I engage with them, I am just another guy who is posting content. My goal over the next few days is to find a system to send an automatic Direct Message to anyone hwo follows me back, to say thank you, ask them to subscirbe to my newsletter and then:

Find their data (name, email)

Connect with them on Facebook

Connect with them on LinkedIn

Start an engagement & relationship building via email.

I will share in a different post how this will happen:-)

For now, dear reader, if you are reading this please follow @centis and @SalGeorgiou on Twitter and let me know how you are.

You can optionally subscribe to Centis’ “Just My Two Cents” newsletter below:-)

How To Do Keyword Research Before Starting Your Business - centis.net

How To Do Keyword Research Before Starting Your Business & Launching A Website: A Beginner’s Guide

by Marketing TipsTraffic

Reading Time: 8 minutes We have seen it again and again. You have an idea for starting a business, capitalising on your passion or just because you want to make some extra money and leave your dreaded job.
So you start working on how to make things a reality – if you are selling services, you will probably need some space to rent, you are looking for an accountant, create a logo, and try to set up pricing.
But you are overlooking one major thing that can make or break your business early on:
What your (future) customers are looking for.

5 things before you start your business - centis.net

Do These 5 Things Before You Start Your Business To Get It Off To A Great Start

by Business Success TipsMarketing TipsTraffic
Reading Time: 5 minutes

Starting your own business is a lot of work. Not only do you have to take care of all the day-to-day operational tasks, but you also have to nurture your business so that it can grow and thrive. You might be wondering where to even start.

The answer is simple.

Before you start your business, you must create your online presence. 

Why?

Because everything starts from this exact point – and things aren’t going back to where they used to be.

So if we were you, we would start by researching online not only the market, but once we have a clear understanding of what our market would be, keywords that people will search to find us, creating an online presence before we even launch and a powerful domain name that matches the best performing keyword.

This post will give you 5 things that you should absolutely do before starting your new business.

1. Make sure you have done thorough keyword research for your website

2. Make sure you know the kind of customer you want to attract

3. Make sure your domain name includes your keyword

4. Have an estimate of the budget you need to market your business

5. Gather an audience before you launch your website & business.

5 things you should do before you start your business

1. Make sure you have done a thorough keyword research for your website

One of the most important things to do before starting your business is to develop a thorough understanding of the keywords you want to rank for. We can’t stress this enough. Whether you are an accountant, a plumber, a management consultant or even a yoga teacher, it is important that you establish your foundation for people to find you easily.

Ranking for keywords will help you get more traffic and conversions. One way that you can find keywords is by looking at the top-ranking websites in your industry. You should also look into how people are searching online and think about what they might be trying to find with their search queries.

So keywords research on your industry and future business is everything. Spend time researching keywords for your website. This is the foundational aspect of your business. 

You want to make sure that you have a good list of keywords that people are searching for and other competitors of your are using them. 

You will later optimise your website with these keywords and al your blog posts, landing pages and even newsletters!

2. Make sure you know the kind of customer you want to attract

This is one of the most important things you should do before starting your business and your website.

If you don’t know who your target audience is, chances are you’ll have a hard time getting new customers. 

Before you start, identify your niche and research what kind of customer it attracts. This can help shape your marketing campaigns to attract more people like this. 

Who do you sell to? Sure, as an accountant you sell to everybody. After all, everyone needs accounting. Or if you are a plumber, you service all kinds of plumbing, right?

Not quite.

You see, within each industry, there are sub-divisions of that industry. For example, in accountancy, there are cost accounting, accounting for HR, accounting for aviation etc. Can you service all of them? No.

So think in terms of who you serve – who would be ideal for you to work with. It is definitely not everyone.

Another example is if you’re opening an ice cream shop, you may want to focus on attracting families. That way, when they come across your ad or see you in person, they will be more likely to buy from you because they’re attracted to the same thing as your customer base.

Think about the kind of customer you want to attract. Do you want to target a specific demographic or geographic area? Maybe focus on a niche? Knowing who your customers are will help you market better.

3. Make sure your domain name includes your keyword

One of the most important things you can do before starting your own business is to make sure your domain name includes your keyword. This way, people searching for your website may find it before they find one with a similar but different domain. The more leads and customers you have coming to your website, the better!

I had a friend who sold coffee. He went on and registered his name in a domain name but not anything that resembles that he sells coffee. 

In the end, he found out that marketing his business comes at a greater cost when people cannot associate what you sell with your brand.

He finally realise that and after a while, he changed his domain name (and logo) to include the word “coffee roasters” in it.

Make sure that your domain name includes keywords related to what you offer in order to make it easier for people to find your business online.

4. Have an estimate of the budget you need to market your business

One of the most important things to do before starting your business is to have an idea of how much you’ll need to market it. This can be a challenge, as marketing budgets vary depending on the size of the business and its goals. 

It’s a good idea to start by getting a ballpark figure in order to be able to plan ahead.

There are many different approaches you can take with your marketing budget, but one that has shown success for other businesses is digital marketing.  

With digital marketing, you can target your audience more precisely than traditional methods. You can input important information about your audience and use that information to shape your digital marketing campaigns. It makes it easy for you to reach the right people! 

Let’s say your ideal customers are African-American men between 23-35 years old who make at least $35,000 a year. You’re trying to reach this ideal customer on social media to get them to follow your business. 

If you wanted to precisely target those characteristics, you could easily set those perimeters for your social media ad campaign. This would ensure that only the relevant people specified would see your ad and become interested in what you have to offer!

This helps you project how much you will need to spend each month on advertising, blogging, social media, influencer marketing and graphic design and how many units of products or services you will need to sell to make these costs back.

Planning this BEFORE you even incorporate, shows you also what level of effort you need to undertake in order to make a sale.

5. Gather an audience before you launch

One of the most important things you can do before you launch your website and business is to gather an audience. This might sound strange, but it’s actually one of the most important things you can do. Without an audience, it will be very difficult for anyone to find your site and company.

What are some ways to get a following? You can start by running ads and building a list with Facebook ads or other social media ads. 

You could also create content that is relevant or interesting to your desired audience and share it on social media or with an email list. 

There are many ways that you could build an audience, but whatever way you choose make sure that it aligns with the theme of your company!

Gathering an audience before launching your website & business is tough, but it pays big when you finally launch your business. You will immediately make sales.

Compare the two:

Jennifer launches her yoga class but has no audience. She incorporated a month ago, so now she has to pay her accountant monthly, to buy a web hosting service, to pay for a web design agency, and pay for email marketing, leaflets and even the rent for her office – you name it –

On the other hand, Laura gathered already an audience and has email lists ready to sell to. By the time she launches, she already has to paying clients and she can finance her website, rent or anything else she wants – she is profitable from day one.

Start early in promoting your new and upcoming business, by participating in forums, social media groups, and creating a blog or newsletter list where people can sign up for updates from you or offers from your future company.

So now you know – the question is how many of the above will you do before you start your business?

 

How To Get Hundreds Of Subscribers To Your Blog & Newsletter In As Little As Hours - centis.net

How To Get Hundreds Of Subscribers To Your Blog & Newsletter In As Little As Hours

by Business Success TipsTraffic
Reading Time: 4 minutes

Back when Centis was addressing the nutraceuticals market we had no interest in having an email list because, whilst we got plenty of followers on LinkedIn, people emailing us every day and our blog had a great readership, no one was actually subscribing to the newsletter. We later realised that the nutraceuticals industry is just this way – people in that circle were the least interested in marketing tactics and it was all about science, manufacturing and applauding each other.

So essentially, in my 12-Month Growth Strategy Plan post and the post on how to get traffic to your blog: a step by step plan I explain a our complete plan for total domination 🙂 Here is what I have left out (unintentionally of course):

Growing our email list and blog subscribers.

At the moment we have (some) content but not readers. I mean literally, we get 170 users from all over the world (see screenshot below from Google Analytics):

Here are the exact steps we plan to take to bring in more blog readers, increase our email list and blog subscribers

First things first, some internal analysis.

We just exited the nutraceuticals industry on December 31st 2021. We decided to niche down by product, not by industry, so that means we only sell three things to many and not 100 things (as we did before) to just a few.

I hope you can understand this concept, yes?

(Assuming you understood) Cool.

So I mentioned hundreds of times in my two other blog posts we have no audience (yet). Nothing. Ziltch. Nada.

Having said that, we also have no authority, no acquaintances and no powerful friends to help us.

Do you resonate?

Great.

So, my first priority here is to grow meaningful relationships with people that have an audience, can act as mentors, and my blog posts can add value to their readers.

I do hope you understood the term “meaningful relationships”. So at this moment I do not want to promote the blog to these people, but only to build relationships. If they want ,they can do it later.

Having said that let’s see how to do just that:

Step 1: Find and create a list of (European) Influencers

No, no Instagrammers that do the duck face or advertise clothes – I mean serious business people who are influential in the startup, business, finance and other markets.

Hence, relaunching my personal Twitter account.

So since yesterday, I started gathering a list of people who started companies in Europe, advise startups and somehow made it on their own (without their parent’s money, that is)

To make sure my targeting is not off, I set a few parameters:

  1. These people are based in Europe
  2. They started a business either several years ago or a few years back and they succeded
  3. They managed to attract a big following either on Twitter, their blog or (lastly) their Instagram accounts – and they do not do the duck face!)
  4. They are communicating their thoughts online – they advise others or they have some thought leadership.
  5. All the above should and must get some or more than seom value out of what I write, which will be either beneficial to them personbally or to their audience.

Your takeaways: if you are still thinking about simply finding influencers and promoting your crappy content without any value to them, stop right here. Your objective is to hang out with the influencers in your space and help them reach their goals.

Step 2: Start Engaging With them

The objective with Centis blog is to provide tremendous value to people who wan tto start and grow a business. At the same time, I want them to share the blog with other people, who will also gain knowledge. Get some feedback by commenting – so that I will know that I am doing the right thing.

So, my objective is to find these influencers, create a list and then dive deep into their content and make meaning full comments. Engage with them. Do you remember my last post where I comment every day on Facebook groups? I do not post any links – anyone who is interested can find what I do from my profile. Same here. All I want to do is engage with these influencers, provide value and eventually, people will take notice.

At the same time promote their content into my miniscule list which it will grow day by day.

If you would like to know the plan of engagement it is the following:

  • Follow them on Twitter
  • Retweet them 5-10 times and Like their content
  • If they have a blog, share any article that reasonates to my Twitter account and make comments on their blog
  • After a month (yes, I know its quite long time, but you can’t really rush things) I will reach out to them via email

Step 3: Get Their Approval

So by March 2022, I will reach out to all these people and “pitch” them my idea of getting 10,000 clients by the end of 2022 – and how I plan on doing so.

My email pitch will not essential be a pitch but rather a request to a friend – after all I will be building a relationship with someone that we may cooperate in the future.

I will be asking for feedback on my blog posts and then for a retweet or a tweet to a link.

What will the future hold? Let’s see – I will share my experience soon!