There are many kinds of website marketing techniques that are being recommended today, and some of them don’t
require much of your time while others require quite a bit of your time. However first thing is first… don’t confuse marketing techniques with a marketing strategy. A properly designed online marketing strategy incorporates a number of techniques which work together to reach an overall goal. The reason I want to emphasize this point is that some people take one technique like Social Media Marketing and think that it is their marketing strategy. No, Social Media Marketing is just one technique that should fit into an overall plan that is designed to bring an overall goal into fruition, such as an increase in the number of leads you get from your web presence.
Now that you know that your social media activity is only a part of your entire online strategy and that it doesn’t replace you online marketing strategy, how can you add another marketing component to your Internet business strategy without getting overwhelmed? The answer is simple. Using appropriate automation techniques will allow you to do more with less effort.
Below are some marketing automation techniques that will save you a lot of time in your marketing efforts.
1) Automated Blog & Social Media (SM) Integration
One technique that does bring more traffic to your website is to publish your blog postings to all of your social media sites. This can obviously be done automatically by the typical cut and paste method, however there are many tools out there that will allow you to do this automatically as well. The easiest way is to allow your social media profiles to read your feed and post your latest posts into your SM accounts. Most social media sites allow you to do this, however there are a few, like twitter, that require you to use other tools like Hootsuite, or Twitterfeed to read your latest feeds into your social media accounts. Hootsuites feed reader is very finicky and the support for getting the feed to work is almost non existent however, so you may need to be prepared to find another solution.
There are some WordPress blog plug-ins that work with other services like LinksAlpha to automatically submit your blog postings to your Social Media accounts. There are fewer social media posting plug-in solutions now than there were a few years ago, but you can find some paid solutions like Paged Rankings that will post a status update of your latest blog entries to accounts like Twitter, Facebook and Google+ among others.
2) Automated Blog and Email List Service Integration.
If you have the right email marketing service, your latest blog post can be sent out automatically to your mailing list. This is a great automated way to keep your mailing list up to date on what you are doing as well as keep your business in the top of their mind. This one technique alone can really cut down on the stress and management of maintaing your email list. Many of the beginning or entry level email services like Constant Contact don’t have this feature (in fact, these programs are missing a lot of features that most experienced marketers use to generate revenue with their mailing list). If you want to really take your marketing up to the next step, you should really evaluate your email marketing service.
Aweber is one email list service that allows you to create a template that will automatically fill in the newsletter content with your blog posting, via your blog’s RSS feed. This is a powerful concept because basically, you can create a newsletter from any source that has an RSS feed!
Both of these automation techniques can significantly reduce the amount of time required to put into your online marketing. It allows you to spend more time on strategizing and creating the content needed to bring the right type of traffic to your website. Putting more action into automating your marketing process where it makes sense, will reduce errors, increase consistency and increase creativity because more time and energy can be spent where it truly makes the difference in getting results.