Podcasts about clickstarter

Look out, we're talking about the most boring topic that any small business owner can face – cybersecurity – specifically on your website. But it's important. Because some of us seem to think we're impenetrable. This is Clickstarter, the Australian Digital Marketing podcast – I'm Dante St James. It should come as no surprise that a professional hacker can break through any barrier. Zero-day attacks are common these days, so it's critical to harden and protect your site as much as possible. While an SSL certificate is certainly important, it is only one piece of the puzzle. In this epiosde, we'll debunk a few SSL myths, discuss the types of hacks that can still happen, and discuss how you can improve an HTTPS site beyond installing an SSL certificate.

It's hard to figure out what to share from your business on Facebook considering that less than 7% of all content on the feed comes from business pages. But what is cutting through? This is Clickstarter, the Australian Digital Marketing podcast. I'm Dante St James. The type of content that seems to be cutting through the noise, according to Facebook's 2021 Transparency Report, seems to be either: 1.     Memes 2.     Humanitarian content 3.     Cats, dogs & babies Maybe we've been overthinking our content strategies just a little. Let's take a closer look at this.

Write blogs. Get a Google My Business profile. Write good titles. Do up your meta titles and descriptions. Or perhaps don't do that last one. Here's a few things you didn't know about SEO on Google. This is Clickstarter, the Australian Digital Marketing podcast. I'm Dante St James. For all the knowledge that any SEO expert of Google nerd has about what works best for ranking a website on search engines, there's just as much that we don't know. In fact, none of us truly know anything about Google apart from what they've told us. Which means that anyone in the world can become an “expert” on Google by just googling for the wealth of information that is already out there from Google themselves. But there are three things that most SEO experts don't understand and that most business owners would have no idea of when it comes to working with the search giant. -       Often your meta titles and descriptions don't matter -       All your SEO work can often lead no result -       No one outside of those who write the algorithm knows how it truly works

There's only so many hours in the day and most of those are going to be spent on running your business, tending to customers, and doing everything else but social media. So when do you get to do your social media stuff? This is Clickstarter, the Australian Digital Marketing podcast. I'm Dante St James. If you followed every marketing guru's advice and did all the things that they suggest you do on LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest, Mailchimp, Google My Business and Facebook, you'd require two full time staff to do it all. Since you're a small business that probably doesn't have the resources to do that, here's some ways to fit your social media into your week: 1.     Recycle a rotation of posts every 7 weeks that keeps your timeline active 2.     Do just one post a week that is all about what's happening “now” 3.     Bring social media to what you already do, rather than making time for it Let's explore all that a bit more.

Just when you thought that all the action in the Facebook family of apps was on Instagram, one of the biggest Insta features of the last two years is coming to Facebook itself. This is Clickstarter, the Australian Digital Marketing podcast. I'm Dante St James. After the long-awaited ability to post stories on Facebook came the even longer, more awaited feature of being able to schedule and post stories to Instagram from Business Manager, but now Reels are coming to Facebook. And here's what we know about them: 1.     You will be able to share your Insta Reels to Facebook Reels 2.     You won't have quite the same features as you do on Instagram Reels 3.     This is going to be good for businesses Let's dive a little deeper into the limited information that we have so far.

A whole lot of us, me included, thought Clubhouse was going to change everything. But we were wrong. So if Clubhouse isn't the big thing we thought it would be, what's next? This is Clickstarter, the Australian Digital Marketing podcast. I'm Dante St James. Real time conversions via audio in an app that brought together the general public with the likes of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and a swag of celebrities who couldn't wait to get on top of the next big digital thing in the middle of a global pandemic. So what went wrong? 1.     Live audio is a feature, not an app 2.     Marketers ruin everything 3.     Something else was the next big thing Live audio wasn't new, innovative, or even wanted While 30 million people flocked to Clubhouse, today you'd be hard-pressed to find more than a couple of million people on it now. And they're not very active anymore. And one main reason is that what Clubhouse did wasn't anything new. It was essentially talkback radio through your phone. Not exactly ground-breaking. Not that any of us saw it that way at the time. And to be fair, this app was pitched at a generation that hadn't exactly been served by traditional talkback radio that tended to be aimed at angry, ageing, middle class white men who felt marginalised by a changing society. As Clubhouse gained in popularity, other platforms started rolling out their own live audio features. First there were the copycat apps like Fireside and Stereo. Then Twitter added live audio. And Facebook soon announced they would do the same. And then LinkedIn, probably the one network that could really benefit from this, jumped on board.  By this time, Clubhouse fatigue was starting to set in on the early adopters. If you weren't online when something compelling happened, you missed out. If you weren't in the California, New York or London time zones, you missed a lot. By the time sun was shining over Australia, all the best stuff was over and done. At least talkback radio records their highlight for podcasts. Clubhouse was 100% here today at 1pm and gone by 2pm. The features of Clubhouse became obstacles to its mass growth amongst everybody but marketers. And they, I believe became the true downfall of Clubhouse. Marketers ruined Clubhouse (just like we ruin everything) Facebook was a lot of fun back in the early days. Connecting with old friends, playing silly farm games with new friends, and watching funny videos. And then it became a business marketing platform and the ads that appeared felt a little too creepy to those of us who didn't understand remarketing and contextual advertising. While Clubhouse never quite reached the point of monetisation before it began to implode, it became overrun by Bitcoin bros, Influencers seeking fame and marketers trying to build their lists and sales funnels. I hopped into Clubhouse hoping to offer fun chats about business growth challenges, idea collaboration and support for those struggling with some of the things I had skills in. I guess I was hoping to be something of an early small business influencer on the platform. But each time I'd open a room, other marketers, influencers and social media managers hoping to hock their wares would flood in and within a few minutes we'd have thirty experts and two question askers. It wasn't fun for the listeners, the experts or me. After about a month of hopping on and off, looking for an opportunity to turn Clubhouse into something of a channel, I gave up. The land grab for popularity, rooms and clubs had descended into a “Who's That” of get-rich-quick gurus, crystal-waving energy healers and motivational speakers quoting their own books. The interesting conversations seemed too hard to find, the big rooms were too full of American accents and every third room seemed to be about how to make money on Clubhouse. It was a cesspool of spammers and scammers. It turns out that something else was the next big thing Clubhouse was not the next big thing we thought it might be. While it seemed perfectly pitched at a pandemic audience hungry for human connection, it fell from popularity very quickly. The universe hates a vacuum though, and those same people who flooded on to Clubhouse didn't just disappear. If you follow social platforms as closely as I do, you might have noticed that there was suddenly a rush of marketers and wannabe influencers back on to Instagram Reels which was really starting to pick up momentum on the heels of TikTok. And those same people were starting to pick up on the fledgling YouTube Shorts as well. Not that I think they are doing very well yet, but a million marketers who are hungry for something to replace their previous favourite platform must go somewhere and try something. So, it was back to short-form video. And that seems to be where they are staying for now. Which begs the question… what's next? There are some brave marketers who are heading for very niche networks in fandom (like gaming, pop culture and fantasy forums and apps) and while there is no obvious monetisation there just yet, they are trying out some cool stuff that is way out of my pay grade to understand just yet. There's also a lot of moves into the idea of the “metaverse” which translates as something like virtual worlds. For those who remember Second Life, a similar concept called Soul has emerged from China where people are creating avatars and exploring “worlds” full of people with similar interests. It's something that Facebook is exploring as well. What does all this mean to the average Aussie small business? Not a whole lot yet. Things like fandom and metaverses are well beyond all but the most cashed up marketing agencies and big brands for now. But there's still a lot of untapped potential in Instagram Reels, Stories and IGTV, a tonne of space to do creative things on TikTok and heaps of room on YouTube to be doing some very effective small business marketing.

Remember a few years ago when all we talk about in marketing was chatbots? They were going to change everything and automate our whole sales process. Then we saw just how bad they were. Is that the end of it? This is Clickstarter, the Australian Digital Marketing podcast. I'm Dante St James. The hype over chat bots is definitely over. The sudden rush of sudden experts in chatbot marketing has slowed to a trickle. And all because the promise of chatbots simply didn't deliver the better customer service, better lead generation and better sales figures we were promised. So many of us threw it all out and just went back to manually handling all our social media enquiries and website messages. But throwing out the baby with the bathwater isn't wise when there are actually some great uses of automated messaging that can still make a real difference to your workflow. A more sensible approach than stopping all chatbot activity would be to: 1.     Use automated responses and chatbots for the simple stuff 2.     Always give the customer a way to skip the chat and go to a real person 3.     Move to more of a hybrid approach that uses the best of both worlds Let's dig a bit deeper into all that. Chatbots are great for the simple stuff Rather than throwing out all your automations like a Luddite smashing a loom in a factory, use chatbots and automated responses for what they're really good at. So what are their strengths? Automated responses in platforms like Facebook Messenger, Instagram Direct Messages and on website chat support plugins are ideal at: 1.     Welcoming and Reassuring – seeing a chat plugin on a website can really reassure a customer that they'll be able to get answers to their questions, should something come up. That quick welcome message might get shut down more than 80% of the time when someone lands at the home page, but the psychological effect of it is remarkable. I know when I am shopping, knowing that I can chat to someone or something about my enquiry reduces any anxiety I might have about needing to call someone to get something resolved. Facebook, in a recent study, found that over 64% of us prefer to message for help than call for help. And that number waws across all age groups, not just the famously socially anxious Generation Z. 2.     FAQ – opening hours, pricing, location and all those most frequently asked questions are ideal for chatbots and automated responders in social platforms and websites. That's because the answers don't often change, and the questions often represent 80% of the things that people are asking.  This also lends itself to bookings that can be done online. Recently I installed a series of basic autoresponders on a Facebook page for a bar that wanted to take online bookings so that they wouldn't have to spend so much time on the phone, Messenger of Email to take bookings. They started using a table booking system and then let Facebook Messenger lead people to it. In its first week of operation, it reduced the time spent on taking bookings manually by 90%. Want to learn more about being the best small business marketer that you can be? Hit up the learn section or book your own guided session at clickstarter.com. Now go out there and Get Known, Get Found and Stay Known.

Still over six months away from Christmas, which means we're just 4 months away from the shopping season for Christmas. Doesn't feel quite so distant now does it! What can you do now to prepare your online activity for the holiday season?   This is Clickstarter, the Australian Digital Marketing podcast. I'm Dante St James.   What should we be doing now in preparation for the Christmas season?   1.     Looking at what toys, gifts and spending trends are happening right now 2.     Discovering what TV shows, movies, music and online trends are happening now 3.     Doing everything we can now to grow our engagement so we can leverage it from October   Let's start working on our Christmas plans!   The trends that will carry over to Christmas promotions are emerging now   The advertising and marketing world is already locking in licensing for popular music, celebrities and influencers, and creative elements for the holiday season. That's right. In June. It's too late to get on top of the trends just emerging in October when you need ads and things locked in well in advance.   The toys, games and electronics that will be huge this Christmas will be starting to appear on the unboxing influencer videos on YouTube, Facebook and TikTok right now. New gaming controllers, accessories for Playstation and Xbox, mobile phones and TV shows are already hot right now.   What is being talked about constantly on tech reviewer channels right now is going to be a big seller at Christmas. For example, reviewers of mobile phones like my favourite, MrWhoseTheBoss, have gone quiet on the current crop of flagship Samsung and Apple phones lately, and have swung their attention towards the hot stuff that's coming, like the next iPhone, the next Samsung and an interesting flurry or rumours around the next Google Pixel phone. All these phones get their releases from August and September in time for October and November retail rollouts. So all the chatter right now on phones, look for the brand and models that are being mentioned and make mention of them yourself. You'll sound more on-trend and in touch.   The same goes for the TV shows that are hot right now. The Disney Star Wars animation, Bad Batch is huge. Marvel, DC Comics and other superhero franchises are releasing masses of new TV shows and movies now that cinemas are opening up again around the world. Expect there to be huge chatter around the many delayed movie releases like the new James Bond, film the reimagined Dune with Timothe Chalamet and a rash of new megaprojects from Hollywood stars that we had almost forgotten about during the pandemic.   It's time to see what kids, teens and cool people are talking about in June because that's what the bulk of us will be all over from October to Christmas.   This month's engagement will be October's audience   Right now, is the time to be going the hardest on everything that will encourage your followers to comment, like and share your stuff. June is the single most important month for this because it's when your engagement levels for the Christmas shopping season are really starting to be noticed. June also gives you a nice gentle run into October when the shopping starts to take off. You can use June to do your research into what people are responding to, build your plan in late June to build channel engagement, then in July launch your push for lots of content that is aimed at doing one thing only – getting people to respond!   Your plan to get engagement up needs to keep engagement up in July through to November to get the full impact for the Christmas season. Naturally, you want to be doing this kind of thing all year round, but if you've found, like many have, that your social reach has dropped off the last few months, then this is your chance to build a powerful strategy to bring home the bacon for the second half of the year.   By doing this now, you have time to use July as a test for all kinds of ideas, see what works, and then double down on what is working best. Then in August, bring your best ideas forward, add a few more little tests of new styles of content, then repeat the process through to November.   Thankfully the holiday season comes just once per year, but the planning for it begins right now.   To learn more about digital marketing the Australian way, jump into the Learn section at clickstarter.com.au and start on the road to helping your Australian small business to get known, get found and stay known.

More than a few of us have noticed that reach for our posts on the Instagram feed has been dropping over the last few months. So what is happening? What can we do about it? And what does Instagram have to say about it?   This is Clickstarter, the Australian Digital Marketing podcast. I'm Dante St James.   With so many people, businesses and ads on Instagram now, there's more competition than ever for space on the feed. And as we all getting better and more clever at posting content that people love, we are noticing that individual reach for each of our posts is getting harder and harder to maintain. So what can we do to claw back some of that reach?   1.     Understand what Instagram looks at when it sends content to people's feeds 2.     Aim for conversation and interaction rather than just reach 3.     Understand that your old strategy is getting a bit stale   What exactly is Instagram looking for?   The first thing that Instagram is looking for is information about the post that is in the post itself. Some of this is the basic data such as:   -       Who posted it -       When they posted it -       What information can be picked up from the creative -       What information can be picked up from the caption   This means that who you are is important. This because who you are as the poster or business is tied to information such as how popular you are, how on-trend you seem to be at the moment and what level of interaction your profile seems to be attracting.   When you posted is important because it coincides with when your followers are online and looking at their Instagram feed. While it's not vital for you to be posting at a specific time, you will clearly reach more people if you happen to post something new as more of your followers are on the app. Even though Instagram does concede that not all your followers will see what you post, they also explain this by saying that your followers also follow potentially hundreds or thousands of others, so when they are on the app, they're not seeing their entire feed. They're just seeing a part of it which is what Instagram has estimated is the most likely content that you're going to like.   Naturally, your creative and caption contain clear information to base their estimations on. If your creative is full of logos and text then it will provide tonnes of information about what your content is about, however, it will also judge this as being rather low-quality content as Instagram was never made for text – it's made for photos and videos. If you must include text and logos in your graphics, keep it to the must-have stuff. No one is looking for logos and text-laden ads in Insta, so respect your audience before posting yet another spammy piece of content that few people are going to see.   Want reach? Aim for conversation, not reach.   It may sound illogical, but if you want reach, then reach shouldn't be your goal. Instead, aim for conversation and interaction with your followers. When someone comments, that is a signal to Instagram of something interesting to someone. If you respond, then that's another signal. If others join into the comments thread, this keeps throwing it back into their feeds, and the more interaction that happens, the more signals that keep going back along with the thousands of other signals that come from those followers who are interacting with you. And that includes enough data to conclude that there are other like-minded followers who may also enjoy your content, and so they get sent it. The cycle continues as more people who see the content decide to interact with it and you. By aiming for some conversation with one follower at a time, you're causing reach to increase.    So, seeking to have authentic conversations through both comments and direct messages means that you are a more engaging profile, which signals Instagram to send more of your stuff out so that others may be engaged with you. If your reach is crashing on you, it's likely because there's not much engagement going on and your followers are more interested in less boring profiles. Ouch, I know.   This brings me to the last point.   Your strategy is probably a bit stale.   If reach, engagement and perhaps, even conversions are slowing down for you on Instagram, it could be because your approach just isn't working anymore. And that is probably not because of Instagram. It's probably because your followers are a bit bored of you and have moved to profiles that are more entertaining. Ouch again. This isn't the end of the world though. It's just the end of your current strategy. If your Motivational Mondays and Throwback Thursdays just aren't working anymore, it's probably time to drop those and try something new. But don't just throw a few new tactics in the mix. Have a long hard think about why your followers have moved on. Look at your most successful competitors and look at what they are doing. Look at their comments and interactions, not their likes. If they're getting tonnes of comments and threads of conversation going under their posts, then they have focused on what has been working for them lately. If your target audience is similar to theirs, then you have your new strategy in what their patterns seem to be.   It's all too easy, and therefore lazy, to blame algorithms and platforms for your lack of reach. Think about it. If plenty of others are getting amazing reach right now, then it's probably not Instagram, it's you.   To learn more about digital marketing the Australian way, jump into the Learn section at clickstarter.com.au and start on the road to helping your Australian small business to get known, get found and stay known.

Everyone knows a grammar prince or princess. You know, the ones who correct all your spelling and grammar online like it's their divine right? Well, they might be on to something, given a recent update from Google.   This is Clickstarter, the Australian Digital Marketing podcast. I'm Dante St James.   It might feel like our grammar-loving friends may be unintentionally helping us to rank better on Google. In the past week, Google announced that sites that don't meet a new set of professional and editorial standards may be dropped from their merchant program. This comes with the assumption that your site might not rank particularly well in search either.   The move by Google is designed to improve the shopping experience for customers who find products via Google.   So what are the new guidelines that Google is pushing?   1.     Content that is unnecessarily difficult or frustrating to navigate 2.     Sites where shipping, returns and contact info is incomplete or out of date 3.     Spelling and clear use of language   So how can you make sure that your website and online store is not on Google's naughty list?   Clear navigation and non-intrusive elements   The first item that Google mentions is one that annoys the hell out of me. Use of pop-ups that bug you to sign up for newsletters before you've even had a chance to properly view the product or read the features of a service. This is flagged as a particularly strong annoyance to shoppers and Google believes that it's not only bad for customer experience, but the spam-iness of it tends to give the impression that the store or site is not professional and only there to gather email address for spam purposes. Which, let's face it, is what most of these websites are trying to do so that they can relentlessly harass you to buy more stuff.   Google also calls out those sites that make it difficult for people to click on the back button or navigate away from a particular product or service page. Many online stores use all kinds of technical tricks to get you to stay on their page longer with the theory that the longer you are on the page, the more likely you are to buy.   Finally, in this set of guidelines, Google then wants to make sure that you have working links and menu items. If your site has dropped some pages, and you are yet to update all the places where those pages were internally linked, then you're at risk here.   Keeping your policies and contacts up to date   Returns policies, privacy policies, your store contact info. It's all pretty important to the customer and that means it's important to Google as well. So, make sure you have working links to up to date pages for:   1.     Your Privacy Policy – this one is very important now in almost every country. A compliant and up to date privacy policy lets customers and governments know that you are following the rules on data collection. 2.     Returns and exchanges policies – if you don't have one, most social media platforms will stop you from advertising your products. The same goes for Google. You need to make sure that that your returns and exchanges policies are clear, current and true. If you don't have them, you will be kicked off the merchant platform. 3.     Your contact details need to work. Email addresses that are no longer used, phone numbers that are no longer connected and message forms that don't work are prime signs that your website is dodgy. Google agrees, and will boot you if you don't address these issues.   Spelling and grammar matter   Another sign of a dodgy online retailer is the overuse of cute or complicated text that makes a product name or description really hard to read.   Google specifically is calling out there use of numbers replacing letters, spelling errors for common words, overuse of emojis in titles and paragraphs and the use of mixed upper and lower case letters in words that do not need it. Some fo these techniques are used by stores trying to sell to children and teenagers and these formats of writing are often used to try and seem edgy or fresh. But because they essentially just make it hard for everyone to read it, not just the oldies, Google will penalise this.   So it will be helpful if you do these things to:   1.     Reduce the use of emojis in general 2.     Only use uppercase letters where needed 3.     Avoid deliberate misspelling. 4.     Edgy spelling makes it hard to understand you and find you

There is an urban legend going around that claims that if you hold your phone up to your mouth and say “Hawaii, Hawaii, Hawaii” that you will start getting ads for holidays in Hawaii within an hour on Facebook. It's tinfoil hat time!   This is Clickstarter, the Australian Digital Marketing podcast. I'm Dante St James.   There are three main reasons why I can guarantee that your social media platforms are not listening to what you are saying:   1.     Turning on your microphone without permission isn't allowed by Apple or Android 2.     Listening to audio and transmitting it would use up a huge amount of data every day 3.     Storing audio from billions of phones all day, every day would take up more data storage space than current exists   While logic is not going to undo the opinion of an avowed conspiracy theorist, let's break these down anyway.   You must give permission to an app to use your microphone   You ultimately have the power to turn on and turn off access to your microphone in the settings of your phone. iPhones will prompt you if something wants to use your microphone, camera or location beyond the use of a particular app at the time you are using it.   If you really do think your phone is listening to you, you can turn off the ability for apps to use your microphone at all. It's in your settings. And it's not just Apple that gives you that ability. It's also Android. When you install an app that, at various times, needs access to location, camera or microphone, it has to ask your permission to have access to them. And just like Apple, Android phones allow you to revote that permission whenever you like.   Both systems will prompt you if there are apps that are using any phone resources like the camera, location services or a microphone when you're not using the app. It's then up to you if you want to restrict access to different parts of your phone hardware to not being able to use those features at all, only use them when the app is in use, or to allow them access all the time.   While there is no reason for any app to use the camera and microphone while you're not using the app, if you're worried about someone listening, then turn off this permission. Problem solved.   Audio needs a lot of power and data   Perhaps the most compelling reason why Facebook and other apps don't want to listen to your conversations is that it takes a lot of power and a lot of data to do this. Even with the best compression and the biggest battery, it's just like being on a WIFI phone call, Facebook audio call or a Messenger audio call for 24 hours straight. You just can't do that on a phone without running your battery down in less than a couple of hours – and using Gigabytes of data. You'd be out of data and battery so quick that you'd know that something was going on.   It's a tell-tale sign that something is wrong when you have a battery that runs out way quicker than it should. It's either a rogue app draining your power or a process running that is using a lot of your phone's processor time.   Frankly, Facebook, TikTok and any other app don't use enough bandwidth or power to be doing this. If they did, both Google and Apple would kick them off their phones.   There's not enough data storage in the world to store your conversations Social media, search and other online platforms store the minimum amount of data about you that they possibly can. And that is usually in the form of generalised bundling of interests and behaviours such as frequent travel, whether you appear to be a business owner or if you're someone who likes to shop online often. This data is kept as small and lean as possible because space on servers for this kind of thing is expensive, and there's only so much space on all their servers to hold this kind of thing.   As more and more people come on to these platforms, Facebook, Google, TikTok and everyone else can't just simply build endless data centres to store whether you're a Coalition or Labor voter. In fact, the information about us that we're often most sensitive about, such as what TV shows we watch, the alcohol we drink, whether we like guns, what drugs we take and whether we like to watch adult videos online, etc; none of it is of any use to these platforms, but none of these products or services are allowed to advertise on their platforms anyway.   Between your browsing habits and what you do while on Facebook and Instagram or TikTok and Pinterest or whatever you are using, there is more than enough information about you to help them to target ads at you.   You're not as unique as you think you are.   The cold hard truth is that you are not as special, unique, or one-of-a-kind as you may think you are. When there is 7.5 billion of us on the planet and we tend to stick around the cultures we are part of, there's not a lot of variety in the patterns that emerge about us all.   It's easy to tell who is interested in baby items because just about all parents-to-be behave in predictable patterns and have predictable interests. It's much the same for those who are considering getting married. Even with a multicultural society, there are patterns that we are not even aware of that we fall into when we're engaged. No one has to spy on your conversations to know that you are heading through a certain stage of your life. And it's not hard to guess that you are about to go to a music festival when you've been to it for three years in a row at this time of the year and display a predictable pattern of interest in certain bands and artists as that festival approaches.   To learn more about digital marketing the Australian way, jump into the Learn section at clickstarter.com.au and start on the road to helping your Australian small business to get known, get found and stay known.

You sell bananas. A guy down the road sells bananas. In the next town over another guy sells bananas. You've heard that a girl a few streets over has decided to sell bananas as well. You already had competitors long before any of them appeared.   This is Clickstarter, the Australian Digital Marketing podcast. I'm Dante St James.   Competition is a complex concept. You may assume that your main competitor is the woman who sells what you sell from her home is the same way as you do. But competitors are always popping up. And there's probably a whole set of them that were already in place long before you came along.   So, what kind of competitors are there?   -       Direct product competitors -       Direct vertical competitors -       Online competitors -       Expanded competitors -       Disposable income competitors   Who are your direct product competitors?   These are the people and businesses that sell the exact same product as you do. If you're selling Thermomix, then every other person in your world who sells Thermomix is your competitor. You sell it. They sell it. They're likely to bump into the same people as you, so if someone you know is going to buy a Thermomix, it's either going to go in your pocket or theirs.   Who are your direct vertical competitors?   These are the people and businesses that are selling similar kinds of things to Thermomix machines. While you are selling the Thermomix, they might be selling blenders, food processors, soup makers and air fryers. None of them does everything that a Thermomix does, but they each do a bit of what a Thermomix does. This means that someone who is considering buying a Thermomix, who then decides to buy a blender and an air fryer, they have bought those things from one of your vertical competitors.   Online competitors   Let's give the kitchen appliances a rest for now and look at someone who sells life coaching services in their town. You have grown a small clientele of other women in your town who have been seeking services like the ones you provide. It's been nice. Then one day you lose one of those clients. When you ask why they're leaving, they reply that they have decided to work with a coach online. While you were aware of several in-person coaches in your town, you have never heard of this online coach before.   The online commerce world is highly disruptive to local services. That's because the internet offers limitless choices, price points, personalities, and variations. You can only offer as much as you can offer.   The impact of Expanded Competitors   An expanded competitor is competition that comes from an existing business that didn't happen to sell what you sell but suddenly does now. When I was part of a business networking group some years back, I was the person who sold social media services and training. There was already someone in that network who sold websites. We were able to comfortably refer work to each other when someone was seeking to do what the other person had expertise in.   Then one day the website business started selling social media campaigns and training as well. Which now meant that any referrals I was getting from them came to an abrupt halt. As I was getting no referrals from them, I responded by more openly letting it be known that I happened to build websites.   The other business expanded into my market to become a competitor. So, I expanded into their market to also become a competitor to them. Of course, that had a big impact on our working relationship which went from friendly referral source to hostile competitor.   The vast number of competitors for your income   Returning to the Thermomix, there are a lot of air fryers, blenders and benchtop appliances vying for your attention. But at over $2000 for a Thermomix, there are a lot of other things that are vying for that $2000 that have nothing to do with cooking dinner.   At $2000, you have travel and airlines hunting for that money. Harvey Norman would love to sell you a $2000 TV. Apple would prefer that you gave them that two grant for a new iPad. Even the local private school would love you to give them that 2K in exchange for educating your kids.   The point is that every product, service and business is hunting for the disposable income in every household to flow to them. So when you appeal to someone to buy from you, you're asking them to spend that money on you. Not just instead of other businesses that do what you do. But also instead of every single other business that wants that money coming to them.   To learn more about digital marketing the Australian way, jump in to the Learn section at clickstarter.com.au and start on the road to helping your Australian small business to get known, get found and stay known.

Fake news, misinformation and disinformation have been the bane of Facebook for a decade. As soon as we knew how to share memes and articles, we did it en masse. If you're doing that as a business, you're about to get slapped.   This is Clickstarter, the Australian Digital Marketing podcast. I'm Dante St James.   Sharing those inspirational stories of people overcoming great adversity, of smarter than average children who are changing the world and incredibly prophetic words of wisdom from 19th Century futurists might be about to do some damage. Especially if any of those quotes and “facts” are found to be not true.   Facebook continues its war on fake news   In the past week, Facebook has indicated that it is about to do more than it ever has before to fight fake news, conspiracy theories and unsubstantiated reports on world happenings and quoting of original sources incorrectly.   For individuals, it just means that if you share anything flagged by Google as not being able to be verified by trusted fact-checking organisations and sites, then your place on people's feeds will be reduced. The thought here is that it will slow down the spread of misinformation. A minor impact on personal feeds, but a potentially huge issue for business pages.   If your business page is in the habit of sharing news articles on current affairs, politics, inspirational quotes from people who are on the edge of the health or medical establishment like David “Avocado” Wolfe and other vegan or alt health activists, then you're going to come up against the big blue giant.   Let's just say that you share an inspirational post from another health page that claims that eating peach kernels has a range of health benefits, but this is shown to be not supported by any credible science, Google flags this as being an issue, and you share it anyway, your already decimated reach on the feed will be throttled back yet again. And there are some indications that this may affect your ad reach too. While I don't have confirmation that sharing disputed content will affect your ad account quality, there are some whispers that this could well be the case. I guess we just have to wait to see if this is the case or not.   What can you do to avoid being throttled?   There are several things you can do to avoid this. And they're all easy to implement.   1.     Reduce your dependence on sharing of news articles from sources that are not considered to be reliable 2.     Create more of your own inhouse content, rather than using material from outside 3.     If you want to share other people's articles and news, do a quick check on something like Snopes and other fact-checking sites, even Wikipedia. 4.     Check your own unconscious bias when it comes to science, news, politics and even gender. Make sure that what you post that is contrarian, isn't being posted blindly out of a bias you already hold towards that thought. 5.     Remember that you're a business seeking customers, not a personality seeking applause. Your posts can be hurting your wallet.   To learn more about digital marketing the Australian way, jump into the Learn section at clickstarter.com.au and start on the road to helping your Australian small business to get known, get found and stay known.

If you're an early adopter kind of person, you might have hopped on the Google Analytics 4 bandwagon. The warnings were clear. Do not remove your existing analytics code. Several months later I can see why!   This is Clickstarter, the Australian Digital Marketing podcast. I'm Dante St James.   Google Analytics 4 is the update that gets Google ready for a world where there are no cookies to tell us what's happening on our websites. It's a frightening prospect. No real way of measuring our website visitors. No real way to know what's happening on our sites through Google Analytics. But Google reckons their machine learning knows enough about what happens out there to base some pretty tight estimates on.   At least that's the theory. And judging by what GA4 is doing on my sites right now, I'm not entirely sure that this is going to work.   For those new to the GA4 game, one of the main things that it can do is understand different events on your website. So instead of treating everything like a pageview, it's made to read activities across lots of different device and property types. Not just websites. So that means that it will eventually read different kinds of actions on your website and link together traffic between your websites, web apps and mobile apps to give you a bit more room info on how people move around your online properties.   But it has a long way to go. And Google agrees on that.   My own experience with GA4   I have both Google's Universal Analytics and GA 4 installed on all my sites. I'm an early adopter and I like to provide feedback to Google and other companies to help them build better products for us all. That sometimes means that you're going to find some funky little issues along the way.   On one site, I am seeing drastic differences on the number of visits and unique visitors. In this site, where Universal Analytics is telling me that I am getting 1,400 visits from some 1200 unique visitors each week, GA4 is telling me that I'm getting 485 visits from 400 unique visitors. That's not a small difference. That is a massive discrepancy. In that same website I am getting around 800 visits a week from Indonesia in UA Analytics. But in GA4, they're showing absolutely none from that country. This site also shows a big difference between views on specific pages. One particularly popular page is showing 1700 views on UA, but less than 800 on GA4. Clearly one is more correct than the other.   The mystery deepens even further when WordPress' Jetpack analytics is showing that I am actually getting twice as many visitors as Universal Analytics is reporting, and 8 times more than GA4 is showing. So who is right?   Google has long been known to do some algorithmic massaging to the numbers they show.  Ever since they bought Urchin statistics, took it off your web server and put it in the cloud, the numbers that your web server showed were completely divorced from the numbers that Google was showing. Google Analytics 4 is then an even deeper algorithmic interpretation than Google's Universal Analytics. It's trying to make an estimate based on behaviour patterns that  may have a little to do with your website, but can have a whole lot of input from other websites and generalised trends that only Google knows. Which means that I am left, as a site owner, unsure of what numbers to trust.   So, which numbers can be trusted?   Google's Universal Analytics numbers have been the default way to share your stats since 2013. When someone asks for your site numbers, they're asking you to show them your Google Analytics numbers. Any other numbers are considered untrustworthy and subject to interpretation. And I suppose this works. If everyone is showing numbers from the same ecosystem that uses the same algorithmic massaging for every site, then it's a fair comparison, even if the numbers aren't 100% accurate.   It goes without saying that I do not and will not trust the numbers from Google Analytics 4 for at least another 2 years. Google has plans to start phasing out UA in late 2022 and they're already forcing all new analytics accounts to default to the new GA4 standard.   But honestly, I would much rather trust what WordPress is saying. While Google is having its tracking blocked almost by default from all iPhones and iPads right now, and almost all browsers apart from Chrome are defaulting to block third-party tracking (which is what that Google Analytics code is), WordPress own internal code on your website is first-party tracking. So it's the closest thing to accurate numbers that they may be. That's if you have a WordPress website of course. This means that the most accurate numbers for Wix and Squarespace are probably also coming from internally on their sites. And given my own experience that shows that even the long-established Universal Analytics is showing half the numbers of Jetpack on WordPress, I am inclined to believe that Google can't see half of my traffic and isn't yet smart enough to give it an educated guess, either.   So while I am forced to share my Universal Analytics with the world, because that's what we all do, in the privacy of my own ego, I know that I'm actually getting twice that audience.   To learn more about digital marketing the Australian way, jump into the Learn section at clickstarter.com.au and start on the road to helping your Australian small business to get known, get found and stay known.

Businesses are typically painted as these entities that take, take and take some more. And we’ve really earned that reputation over time. So it might be useful to have a formula to offset that, and be that business that gives a little more. This is Clickstarter, the Australian Digital Marketing podcast. I’m Dante St James. The Pareto Principle is a widely known ratio used to describe many things in life, where 20% of the people in any workplace end up doing 80% of the work. And likewise there’s that 80% of people who end up only handling 20% of the work. The same goes when it comes to the content you’re making for use online. It works a little like this: ·      80% of the time your content should be giving value in the form of something that people find interesting, find educational or find exciting·      20% of the time you can then do something a bit more salesy, like mentioning a promotion, sale, price or product that you are selling This 80/20 rule has slowly become the major way that businesses present themselves on social media. What can I do in the 80% of my content? This could just as easily be asked as, “If I’m not selling, what the heck am I allowed to do?” Glad you asked. Your content is in the 80% of giving value when it’s providing something of value that someone can take into their life and action straight away. So you’ll find that social media professionals will show their followers lots of tips and tricks on how to use social media. People selling skin care products will produce videos of how to best use their products Or perhaps how to prepare your skin for a better use of moisturiser. Someone selling homewares might make videos of how to place their items in the best spot in your home, or how to choose what else will match with those items in your home. The key here is to show something that isn’t asking them to buy something. You’re providing something entertaining, interesting or that teaches them something. What works in the 20% of content? Your 20% then is the stuff that you want to move as a business. That last few bits of stock that you need to clear out of the warehouse. Maybe that new range of items that people might be interested in buying. The sale you are running until midnight Saturday.  Or introducing a new product or service to your mix of offerings. In his book, Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook, Gary Vaynerchuk introduces a concept of Give, Give, Give, Ask. You earn the right to ask someone to buy something, or book you in, only by first providing something of value 3 times beforehand. He often operates well over the 3:1 that his method suggests. Often he’ll g o 100:1 and produce so much helpful content that it’s hard to see what. He’s actually selling. I even had this question myself the other day after providing a series of free workshops interstate. “What does your business actually to do make money?” said one woman in my workshop. The fact is that I don’t make much on my interstate workshops. Especially the free ones. Once I factor in the flights from Darwin to Townsville, add in accommodation in both Cairns and Townsville, the car hire to get me between Townsville and Cairns, and then things like eating out, paying for things that I don’t have because I’m away from home and extra fuel and occasional things I forgot to bring from home, the little bit that I make from government programs or ticket sales usually sees me lose around $600 per workshop trip. I consider my workshops to be a “give.” I may mention my services towards the end of a workshop, but that isn’t the point of the workshop. I really like working with new, small businesses. The trouble is that they can’t afford to pay the $150 each that it would take for me to cover the costs and come away with enough profit to make it a revenue item. But what it does do is show my expertise and give those little new businesses a person to point the other businesses that they deal with towards. To learn more about digital marketing the Australian way, jump in to the Learn section at clickstarter.com.au and start on the road to helping your Australian small business to get known, get found and stay known.

There are over one hundred different ways for a business in any market to advertise themselves. From the more traditional methods like newspapers and phone books to the latest digital platforms it can be hard to know what to choose. This is Clickstarter, the Australian Digital Marketing podcast. I’m Dante St James. When choosing a method of advertising as a small business, there are a few things to consider: ·      Where am I most likely to encounter my target audience?·      What can I realistically afford to use? The default answer isn’t always Facebook ads, by the way, even if it might be the answer to many small businesses these days. Where is your most likely customer most likely to be found? This is question number 1. And it sits first because it is the most important question. You could find the cheapest method of advertising and commit to it, only to find that no one is there. Which is probably why it’s so cheap. You may assume that, with its millions of people watching entertaining, funny and interesting videos, that advertising on TikTok would be a great idea. Yet, if you’re selling sheepskin car seat covers, you’re not going to find an audience of buyers there. That’s because the audience there is mostly young (but getting older) and doesn’t have a large disposable income for something that could cost them hundreds of dollars, and they are very trendy and fashion-conscious. This means that something that hasn’t been popular since the 1980s is unlikely to be popular now. And of course, the minimum cost of advertising on TikTok is $3000 a month, so you’ll need to sell a lot of covers to make that back. Do some research first on where your most likely buyer is. If they’re over 55, they’re watching commercial broadcast TV and listening to talkback radio. Online, they are most likely to be on Facebook. If your target is young first-time parents, they’re going to be on Instagram, Pinterest and in blogs of other young parents. Finding a network of Mum bloggers could work. Or scheduling something to young parents as an ad campaign on Facebook and Instagram might be more likely to work than advertising on a radio station. The important thing is to know who your best potential customer is, and know where they hang out. How much does it cost? Advertising on TV and radio is notoriously expensive and generally out of the realm of possibility for most smaller businesses. You’ll be looking at $1000 upwards per month on them. To be fair, the cost of running a TV or radio station is also expensive, so they have big overheads. Most smaller businesses will head towards Facebook and Google where they can control costs a bit more. You can start around the $150 a month on both of them, but you don’t really get any great impact until you reach above the $350 a month mark. The advantage to them is that you can target your audience much more precisely than you can on traditional media like TV, radio and print. Once you’re certain of where your audience is, you can decide whether you can actually afford to reach them there. To learn more about digital marketing the Australian way, jump into the Learn section at clickstarter.com.au and start on the road to helping your Australian small business to get known, get found and stay known.

Doing a stunt, making a funny video or using a famous celebrity to help you to “go viral” may seem like it’s an effective way to grow a business fast. But going viral can actually prove to be detrimental to your long term success. This is Clickstarter, the Australian Digital Marketing podcast. I’m Dante St James. Do you remember Rebecca Black? Her wealthy parents paid to make her dream come true, to record, produce and release a hit song. Her song, “Friday” was so bad that it went viral. The song was, in any measure, a success, but not because people loved it. It got famous because of how bad it was. The terrible lyrics, Rebecca’s singing voice and the cringe-worthy music video was parodied, slammed and shamed from one end of the internet to the other. Rebecca got famous, but not quite in the way she wanted. And today, she isn’t famous, isn’t a successful singer or performer, and is largely forgotten, even though, for just a moment, she was the most well-known teenager on the planet. Going viral isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. ·      Producing an expensive video doesn’t guarantee success·      Buying a famous person to share your stuff doesn’t guarantee success·      Building posts to appeal to millions may mean that you don’t appeal to anyone in your actual target demographic Over the last 20 years of memes, themes and viral dreams, one thing has been consistent. Most viral ideas started as low-budget, low-quality posts. In fact, the vast majority of them never set out to go viral. They just kind of fluked it. And that’s part of the charm of things that go viral. It’s the sweet ignorance or innocence of the original poster that made it so relatable or so likeable. This is what makes me shake my head when a radio station or local business tries to mimic a meme or attempt to recreate the conditions where something might “blow up” on TikTok or Instagram. For a start, radio stations are awful at trying to go viral. The joke of “walking naked down the main street of town” has been repeated so many times by so many radio stations that it only makes us cringe. Spoiler alert, the goofy, cringey radio host walks a dog on a leash down the main street of town. The dog’s name is apparently, “Naked.” This is the problem with most businesses trying to go viral. They are trying to manufacture the viral effect. But going viral isn’t a foolproof process. You could follow the exact Rebecca Black formula but get no attention at all. You could try to be a Cherlyn Barnes, a Kim Kardashian or a “Charlie bit my finger” kid but you’ll almost definitely not go viral. There is no set level of artistic irony, dad-joke cringe worthiness, or template in Canva that is going to make you go viral. Sometimes things go viral. Usually they don’t. And this is why it is such a bad strategy to follow. If you  do go viral, it won’t be due to people laughing along with you or admiring your ability to tell a story. It’ll most likely be that everyone is mocking you. And if you don’t go viral, all that energy is wasted. Strategies for growth online are best done with a long runway. Not with a short leap into the stratosphere. Growth happens when one person likes you and tells others about you. They then like what you do and pass on the admiration to others. That’s exponential growth that is impressive, even if it isn’t viral enough to reach for the stars. The beauty of a controlled ascent is that you can grow steadily along with the growth of interest in your business. When you go suddenly viral, even for good reasons, you probably can’t serve all those new customers effectively, so you go from overwhelmed to disliked by people really quickly. Steady growth is the key, not sudden, meteoric growth that isn’t sustainable. To learn more about digital marketing the Australian way, jump in to the Learn section at clickstarter.com.au and start on the road to helping your Australian small business to get known, get found and stay known.

Sometimes it might feel like social media is a bit of a wild wild west where you can do whatever you like. But it’s not. Those platforms have rules. And those rules are tightest when it comes to running ads. This is Clickstarter, the Australian Digital Marketing podcast. I’m Dante St James. Sometimes I look at an ad on Facebook and wonder how they ever got it approved. The biggest offender to me is Wish. The online retailer is actually Facebook’s biggest advertiser. Yet how they can show products like crack pipes, adult toys and even plant seeds that illegal to have in Australia is beyond me. Maybe money speaks louder than rules? Whatever the reason, at some point you will come up against Facebook’s advertising rules. It might be an outright violation in one of your campaigns. It might be a rejection based on something completely nonsensical. But it happens to all of us. So here’s a few ways you might strike up a problem with the big blue app’s rules in the future. Discriminating based on age is actually a problem. And not in the obvious ways. For example, I ran a campaign in 2018 for a quad bike tour for older teens during the school holidays. The laws of the state these tours were held in stated that no one under 12 could go on these tours. The client only wanted kids from 12-17 to ride at a discounted rate. The ads I ran stated the age range in the written copy. The landing page also showed these rules. When I created the campaign it got approved and started running. Then about 2 hours in, they stopped. The campaign was flagged as a violation, the ad account was banned from doing any more ads and my whole profile was banned from ever advertising again on Facebook and Instagram. Why? My “business model” was described as being incompatible with Facebook. What I did wrong was make the offer in the ad only available to a certain age range of children. Not to all children. This was judged as being discrimination by age. Even though the laws of the land forced us to discriminate based on age. The answer from Facebook when I appealed this and asked for the decision to be reversed? “Your business model is not supported by Facebook. There is no further avenue of appeal and no further way for you to seek a reversal of this.” That profile, my main profile, the Business Manager, Ads Account – all of it has been banned from advertising ever since. And while I am obviously advertising now, I had to create a new profile, new ad accounts and new business managers to do it. Yet even now I can come perilously close to getting banned again when I don’t intentionally go and re-read the ad polices on Facebook before every campaign to make sure that I am not violating anything that I had forgotten or missed. When it comes to the kinds of things that could get your ads rejected or your ad accounts banned it seems to depend on the person reviewing it. While I’ve seen other people not get banned to the same degree that I did whilst doing almost exactly the same thing, I can only assume that sometimes you get a person at the other end who is having a bad day. I would only advise that when you do appeal a decision that you do it in a respectful and humble tone. If you go in there like a wrecking ball demanding a reversal, making threats and screaming bloody murder you’re going to be screaming against a brick wall. The person at the other end is actually a person, after all. No one likes being yelled at or abused. Facebook’s staff are the same, so be a good human when something like this happens to you. To learn more about digital marketing the Australian way, jump into the Learn section at clickstarter.com.au and start on the road to helping your Australian small business to get known, get found and stay known.

It might feel like it’s impossible to keep coming up with new ideas of things to write about, make graphics about or film videos about. After all, hasn’t everything already been done before? It sounds you like need to start repurposing. This is Clickstarter, the Australian Digital Marketing podcast. I’m Dante St James. Anyone these days who advises you to produce new content every single day for your business on social media is probably following a very old piece of advice that they heard many years ago. The reality is that frequency of posting is no guarantee of whether people will see you and want to engage with what you do post. In fact, continuing to post 3 times a day to no audience is madness. Apart from wasting your time, you’re just confirming to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or TikTok that you are not even trying to reach people. You’re behaving a little bit like a bot. These days social media is less about going viral and more about: ·      Posting things that engage people enough to react to your post·      Educate people enough to become curious about your business·      Excite people enough to want to go and find out more about you Unfortunately, we tend to forget all this and try to find an automated, predictable flow of posts that fit into our busy day. Businesses constantly tell me that Facebook is holding them back from being seen. The reality is that they are posting rubbish that no one has an interest in seeing. But let’s not let logic get in the way of a good old whinge, right? At some point in your business’ journey through the world of social media, you may have had one thing that actually worked. Why not repost that? Or give it an update and repost it? Why not go a step further? What was it about that post that got people to respond? Can you replicate that with a new topic or idea? You can search through your page insights to find what is working best, then take what it was that worked and do it again. Likewise, there’s stuff that isn’t working. So it makes sense to stop doing that. Yet most of us just keep repeating the same stuff over and over again. Remember that quote about repeating the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result? That definitely applies here. Another kind of repurposing is where you take things you’ve already done and you try to get more out of them. For example, you write regular blog posts. They go on your website and that’s that, right? What if you could take that blog and make it into 30 different other pieces of content? You could repost that blog entry into LinkedIn, Medium, Blogger and even Facebook. That’s 4. Then turn the key points in your blog into graphical quotes on Canva that you can then post on to Facebook, LinkedIn, GoogleMyBusiness and Twitter. If you had 3 key points, that’s another 12. Or 16 so far. Now you can use a video template on a tool like InVideo, Canva, Wave Video or Lumen5 to turn each of those points into a musical, moving, animated set of posts.   That’s another 12. We’re already up to 28. Convert each of those into vertically oriented stories to place on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube shorts. That’s another 12. We’re now at 40.  And I haven’t even talked about turning the blog into a podcast episode or a longer-format YouTube video, a live Facebook or Instagram video. You can see how suddenly that boring old blog post can turn into something much bigger, very quickly. What could an extra 43 pieces of content do to lift your presence online? To learn more about digital marketing the Australian way, jump into the Learn section at clickstarter.com.au and start on the road to helping your Australian small business to get known, get found and stay known.

There’s hundreds of options when it comes to marketing your business. Some are standard like TV, radio, Google and Facebook. But some are not immediately obvious, like hosting webinars, classes and workshops. This is Clickstarter, the Australian Digital Marketing podcast. I’m Dante St James. As traditional marketing channels remain unaffordable and the newer ones like Google, Facebook and other social networks get cluttered with your competitors, it might feel like there aren’t many more options left that are relatively affordable for a small business. This is where it might be worthwhile looking at running events. And more specifically small events like classes, webinars and workshops. Classes and workshops were wildly popular before the pandemic. They were a great way to take time out of the business and learn something new. You’d decide what your topic of expertise was, write a presentation and learning materials around it, book a room and promote your event. This is pretty much how I started. I wasn’t in a position to spend $1000 a month on advertising to even a regional market. So I took the path of holding events instead. I offered a local hotel to do their social media in exchange for the use of their function room. It didn’t take me much to do their socials as most of the material I used was based on the photos that guests would take of the property. So that meant all I needed to do was promote my events to get people to turn up. I used the events on Facebook, Eventbrite and then got my friends in the market to help me share my events. And because no one else was doing them at the time, I had over 50 people turn up to my first free event. From there I gained three new clients. The total cost of the event? Zero dollars. Total revenue gained from the event? $22,000 over four years. You can see why I like doing free classes even now. When the pandemic hit, webinars became the way we held classes like these. And while I’m fortunate to get paid by a government program to host 5 webinars a week these days, that wasn’t always the case. Early on I tested out an online version of the classes I was holding in-person in my town. They were hard to get people to and most of the time no one showed up. But I kept going. Eventually, a couple of people would join me. Then it was 10 people. Then 50. Sometimes now I’ll have over 300 people on a single webinar. That only came because I was determined to keep doing it regardless of whether people turn up. Even now I can sometimes have a webinar where I get no one to show up. So I used the recording of those webinars to put content on my YouTube channel, IGTV, DTube, Facebook and other places online. But that’s just the free version of these things. I run most of mine for free because they are good marketing and a great way to position myself as the expert I am at what I do. But I also run paid webinars as well. In these, I will be very specific about a skill that someone can learn that isn’t commonly found online for free. Or it will be a topic that is super specific to a single market or industry. This way you can ask people to pay a fee, even a small one, for your more singular expertise in a particular area. And that is stuff worth paying for. After all you’re a business, not just a free information service. Best of all, you can run paid live events on systems like Zoom and even Facebook Live. If you are an expert at something in your life, classes, workshops and webinars are a great way to confirm your expertise to your potential customers and maybe even bring you in some extra revenue as well. To learn more about digital marketing the Australian way, jump into the Learn section at clickstarter.com.au and start on the road to helping your Australian small business to get known, get found and stay known.

Microsoft 365 is the gold standard of email and office productivity software. And in more recent years, it’s collaboration tools have improved greatly. But they didn’t improve until Google kinda pushed them to. This is Clickstarter, the Australian Digital Marketing podcast. I’m Dante St James. You may have assumed that there was no option. There was either Microsoft Office or there was nothing. These days it’s called Microsoft 365 and it’s very impressive. But Google has its own equivalent productivity suite and it’s equally impressive. Google Workspace was previously called GSuite. The most simple way to describe it as the Pro version of Gmail. It starts with Google’s own business version of Gmail for your emails. It doesn’t matter what Microsoft does with Outlook, there is absolutely nothing that comes close to Google’s ability to filter out spam and junk email. It’s seriously good. I am hammered with hundreds of emails every week and it will only miss a junk email maybe once a week. Likewise, it will only tend to junk out an email maybe once a fortnight for me. And while I’ve been using paid Gmail for a decade, it’s always been like this. Once you move beyond the basics of email, Google’s productivity apps are really simple to use and do a great job of replicating what the Microsoft versions do. Docs is the Word equivalent. It’s like a scaled-back version of Word. It does everything you need 99% of the time and just skips the more advanced stuff. If all you do is write letters, make documents and like me, write scripts and eBooks, then Google Docs is more than adequate. And being an online tool it also makes it simple to share with other people who can actually work on the same document at the same time with you. The few things you miss out on in features from MS Word you make up for in ease of use and ease of sharing and collaboration. Sheets is the Excel of the Google world. And like Docs, it’s a scaled-back version of Excel really. You can do all the same calculations and formulas, formatting, charts and cross-sheet connections as Excel, so there only a few little things that only highly advanced Excel users will miss. Slides is the PowerPoint clone. And while the themes and templates might not be as amazing as Microsoft’s out of the box, there’s a huge gallery of themes used by other peoples that are free to use or have a low cost to add to your presentations. And you’ll notice an ongoing theme here, unless you are a super-advanced user of PowerPoint, you’re not going to miss anything in here. On top of the basic apps, Google Workspace includes Google Forms so you can run surveys internally and eternally of your business. There’s Google Sites which lets you build your own private or public websites or even an Intranet. And then there’s Google Drive which is where you can store and organise all your files while only allowing certain people – or everyone if you like – access to those files and folders. Price-wise, Google Workspace is a little less expensive than Microsoft 365. But it is made mostly for those who work with a constant internet connection as everything works in and stays in the cloud. That said, you can make some documents and files available offline using Google’s Chrome browser. It caches the things you want to work on in the browser, so you can do your updates without internet, and when you get a connection again, it will sync with the online version. To learn more about digital marketing the Australian way, jump into the Learn section at clickstarter.com.au and start on the road to helping your Australian small business to get known, get found and stay known.

After a while of building your small business, things get busy. That time you were spending on doing your social media, working on your SEO and writing your blogs has slipped away into a black hole of work. It’s time to bring someone on. This is Clickstarter, the Australian Digital Marketing podcast. I’m Dante St James. It happens to us all. I’ve had to bring on people to help me schedule and plan my social media out. I get an AI program to help me choose my blog and podcast topics. And sometimes I even have to pay someone to make my videos and graphics. We all get busy doing the stuff in our business, so taking the time to work on the ongoing marketing is hard. That’s when you need to start looking at who you can get in to help you with all this stuff. And you inevitably have to ask yourself whether you should employ someone, contract them or outsource it offshore. While it may seem noble to invest in someone as a full time or even part-time or casual employee, it’s not really the best place to start when you’re still in the earlier stages of growing your business. People are almost always going to be the most expensive thing in your business. Over a long period of time, they cost more than property and machinery. So if you’re still making less than 4 times what you need to live on, bringing on an employee is going to take a huge chunk out of your profits. As a rule, I don’t take on an employee until I know that I have 6 months of their wages, superannuation and tax saved aside. This is so I can afford to take a 6-month loss on them before they start to be a profit centre for me. This takes into account training, reduced productivity as they’re learning, and the inevitable unexpected downturns in sales that happen to all of us. It will likely be more realistic in the earlier years to contract people to help you out. This is because there are no award wage rules or set rates when you contract someone. They quote their rate, you accept it and you get underway. If you have lots of work for them, you’ll pay more. If there’s less work, you’ll pay less. But understand that the lack of commitment from you comes with a lack of commitment from the contractor too. They can take on other work while they are working for you as well. And that could very well be with your competitors. Most contractors have a personal code of ethics and would either not take on work that comes with a conflict of interest, or would ask your permission first. Bear in mind too, that you will almost always pay more per hour to a contractor than an employee, however, you will also avoid all the added tax and super admin that comes with taking on an employee. Finally, there’s the offshore outsourcing model. You’ll pay way less per hour – often up to 80% less, you’ll have the same low maintenance approach that you’ll have with contractors, but there are some downsides. Communication can be an issue and so can the misunderstanding of expectations. While you might be tempted to outsource your stuff to someone on Fiverr or Airtasker, there’s always a risk that the work will be substandard or they will completely miss the brief. There is a long training and learning curve before the offshore staff will be making a good return for you. But once they do, it’s so worth it. To learn more about digital marketing the Australian way, jump into the Learn section at clickstarter.com.au and start on the road to helping your Australian small business to get known, get found and stay known.

You’ve got your social media profiles, you’ve got your eCommerce website, you’ve even set up all your payment systems. Now if only you could sell your stuff directly on the two biggest social networks. This is Clickstarter, the Australian Digital Marketing podcast. I’m Dante St James. Some people like to sell on eBay. Others prefer Amazon. And then there’s always Etsy. But if you’re not too keen to be giving away a chunk of your takings to a marketplace, you’re probably selling your products oh your own eCommerce website. But you can have your own shop on Facebook and Instagram as well. Facebook and Instagram Shops are run through Facebook’s Commerce Manager. It’s a way of linking your own online store with Facebook’s platform. And while there are super simpl integrations between the bigger shopping platforms like Shopify, Big Commerce and WooCommerce on WordPress, it’s also possible to connect almost any shopping site you already have to it. Before you do go ahead and create your Facebook and Instagram Shops, there are a few rules you should know about. First, this feature is only made for stores selling physical items. Think, essential oils, clothing, homewares, gifts, electronics and stuff you can hold in your hand. Actually, even better, think of it as things you need to send to people by mail or courier. If you’re selling virtual items like downloads, consultation time, gift vouchers, subscriptions, etc, you may not be approved when your Shop goes in for review.Second, there some things you simply can’t sell. CBD oils, drugs, some kinds of supplements and the obvious things like live animals, firearms, fireworks, etc. While you may be be legally allowed to sell those things on your website or from your shop in the town or state you’re in, you won’t be allowed to sell them on Facebook or Instagram. Third, there are some categories of products that may be automatically rejected, but which could also then be appealed against so that you may be able to sell them. Common things that get rejected at the first pass are products like pet foods that have photos of animals on them, health and dietary supplements that make very big claims about their effects, and some food items that are fresh and perishable. While there’s nothing necessarily wrong with the products, sometimes the seller makes some pretty wild and unprovable claims about them, so you may need to adjust your titles and descriptions a little, not just in Facebook, but on your website as well. It makes sense to be able to sell your stuff where people are spending most of their online times. With a little planning, thought and good read of Facebook’s Community Standards, Advertising Policies and Commerce Policies, you’ll be on the way in no time. To learn more about digital marketing the Australian way, jump in to the Learn section at clickstarter.com.au and start on the road to helping your Australian small business to get known, get found and stay known.

Last year taught us one powerful lesson. You can’t trust a fulltime job or a single source of revenue to get you through a crisis. So now the pandemic is easing in Australia, why are we all just going back to our old habits? This is Clickstarter, the Australian Digital Marketing Podcast. I’m Dante St James. Like addicts running back towards our habit, we’re all running back towards the safety of a single source of income or a full-time job again. But when you’re a small business owner and a digital marketer, focusing on just one thing could be very dangerous. So how do you diversify? ·      First, consider diversifying your marketing beyond just one channel·      Second, consider diversifying your income from just one source·      Third, consider one of the five ways you can look for extra revenue Let’s dig down on that. Marketing through one digital channel is dangerous If you’re a small business, chances are you’ve spent most of your marketing money on Facebook over the last 5 years. It’s the obvious choice because it’s inexpensive, gets good reach and is easy to use. But if that’s your only source of marketing, you’re putting a lot of trust in just one platform. 2020 showed us that relying on any one thing can be dangerous. In fact, 2021 showed us that trusting any one platform, even Facebook can have ramifications that you could never expect. Ask anyone who had their ads account banned this year. Or any news-related website that completely lost its Facebook presence for more than a week. Or anyone who had their Facebook account hacked and lost not only money but any possibility of ever marketing on the platform ever again. Consider looking at splitting your marketing money between Facebook and other channels like YouTube, Google or even Twitter. And while we’re on the topic of vulnerability, One source of revenue is a risky way to fly through business While the side hustle is a great way to add some extra coin to your full-time job, if you own a business, a side hustle isn’t really suitable when you’re already working god-awful piles of hours on your existing business. This is when you may need to consider looking at other things that are close to what you do that let you draw more money out of the stuff you already do. Let’s say you’re a web designer. You can diversify into graphics and social media management. Or if you’re a copywriter, you could look into developing yourself as a voiceover or proofreader. If you’re selling cosmetics, then consider selling accessories alongside your main line of business. The aim here is to find something really close by to what you’re doing now that doesn’t cannibalise what you’re already doing. Finally, what kind of strategies are there for the business that wants to diversify its revenue streams? It might be as simple as running workshops and classes to teach others what you do. Or you could run live events online or offline to get people to see you perform or speak. But if you really want to get strategic about it, here are the five ways you can really explore what it takes to find that extra source of revenue. 1.     Explore whether a new business model could be helpful. This could be via expanding into a new type of customer, by solving new problems or even just updating the solution that you offer your customers.2.     You could always take advantage of the fact that you have existing customers and find new things to sell them. This is the smartest way because you already have a relationship with them.3.     Use technology to make things run faster, smoother or more efficiently. The time savings can translate to cost savings that can either be passed on or used to fund other items on this list.4.     If you’re an expert in your field, it’s time to use that expertise to innovate in your industry rather than simply just repeating the same stuff over and over again.5.     Expanding into new markets can grow your revenue opportunities by a lot. But it can also cost a lot to get into those new markets. And remember, not every market is the same as yours. Learn more about digital marketing the Australian way at clickstarter.com.au and help your business to Get Known, Get Found and Stay Known.

Google ranks websites based on what they do on a mobile phone. Desktop performance isn’t even a consideration anymore. And while you’ve been using a responsive design for years, is your website actually made for the mobile user? This is Clickstarter, the Australian digital marketing podcast. I’m Dante St James. It’s no longer good enough to simply have a mobile-friendly design. You need to make sure that your website is a superstar performer on mobiles.  Since mobile use of most websites is now running at between 70 and 90% of all traffic, how do you make sure you’re hitting the mark on mobiles? You need to: -       Concentrate more on the information you’re sharing than on the design of the site-       Cut down the clutter, and-       Get to the point quickly Let’s look at that a bit more closely.  1.     Concentrate on information rather than design  Your mobile website viewers are not there to marvel at your beautiful design, worship at the altar of your logo or be dazzled by the video of a drone fly-through of your warehouse. The intent of a mobile visitor to your site is driven by what they need to get from your site when they get to you. And in 6 out of 10 cases that is information on your products and services. The other 4 out of 10 cases are just about always going to be about getting your contact or location information. So when you put barriers in front of that information, like big slideshows, hero images and autoplay videos, you’re turning the whole experience into an annoying mess. To begin with, the following elements have no place on a mobile-first website: -       Slideshows-       Image galleries in grid layouts-       Background videos-       Long About Us descriptions on home pages-       Big chunky social media icons-       Embedded social media content and like boxes Every one of these things stands in the way of getting your prospective customer to where they want to get to. And pushes them further away from a sale with you. 2.     Write for an easy reference, rather than an impressive wordcount Another way that we tend to get in the way of our customer’s needs is by throwing lots of words in the way. If you’re writing blogs and content pages on your website to attract Google results, remember too, that Google is just reflecting what people do when they come to your articles and pages. If it takes too long for someone to get the information they need from your page, they leave. So does Google. So get to the point really early in the article or page. Try presenting the info high up on the page in the form of one-line dot points, then later, expanding on those points in paragraphs. This lets people skim to find what they need, which makes your website more useful to more people, more efficiently. The important thing across all these ideas is getting the design and words out of the way of the most important thing of all on your website, easily consumed information about your products and services.I’m Dante St James. You can learn more about digital marketing the Australian way at clickstarter.com.au, and give your business all the tools it needs to get known, get found and stay known.

Apparently, no one is using business cards anymore. Someone forgot to send that memo to everyone at the networking events I go to. And business cards aren’t the only old-school marketing tactic that can still move the needle. This is Clickstarter, the Australian digital marketing podcast. I’m Dante St James. Now that everyone has a Facebook Page, an Instagram profile, a LinkedIn presence and an email address, it’s a race to see who can use them all the most effectively to grow their businesses. But with everyone on all the same platforms and using all the same apps, there’s an undervalued part of marketing that can really help you to cut through. Maybe it’s time to consider going old-school. Don’t get me wrong, I am a digital cheerleader all the way, but sometimes you forget just how much a simple, and proven tactic can make the difference between you and everyone else who is running Facebook Ads. 1.     Grab your business cards and hand them out When you’re in the right situation for them, business cards are still expected. If you’re at a networking function, honestly, no one is impressed by your “tap to save” contact dot or your very own branded near-field tap card. And if you’ve got these things, the first thing you’ll notice is that you’re in a tiny minority, despite what the ads for those gadgets on Facebook seem to indicate. You may think that you’re coming across as disruptive, progressive and environmentally responsible, but the reality is that you’re just going to end up another unknown contact in their phone, rather than a physical presence in their pocket with the others when they take time at the end of the day to review their new contacts. There is a routine when it comes to networking and conferences.  You don’t go back to you hotel room afterwards to try and remember who the people were whose contacts you put in your phone. You go back to your room and shuffle through your business cards and pick out the people you want to follow up with. So go old school. Take along some business cards. Collect some business cards. Follow up the contacts and do some business. 2.     Write a book and give it out If you’re one of those people who likes to be a bit extra, then a book can be the best business card there is. And I am talking about an actual, physical, printed on paper book. If you’ve been toying around with the idea of writing a book on your area of expertise, the chances are that very few people are ever going to buy it. It probably won’t be a “bestseller” – whatever that actually means these days – and you won’t likely be retiring on the royalties like Stephen King or Stephen Covey. A book in the business world these days is like a compendium holding a big long, set of reasons why someone should hire you to what you’re good at. While everyone else is scheduling meetings with potential clients, you’re on the coffee table after being read for 12 hours over the last month. I know which mind share I’d rather have. Don’t think of a book as a money-maker, think of it as a marketing tool. I’m Dante St James. You can learn more about digital marketing the Australian way at clickstarter.com.au, and give your business all the tools it needs to get known, get found and stay known.

64% of people covering all ages – not just the kiddos – would rather message you than call you. Have a business and hate messaging? It’s time to take a teaspoon of cement and harden up, sunshine. They’re leaving you behind. This is Clickstarter, the Australian digital marketing podcast. I’m Dante St James. The world has gone message crazy. The 2 billion people on WhatsApp and the 1.3 billion people on Facebook Messenger, and even the other 800 million on WeChat don’t care what your attitude is about texting instead of talking, they’ve already voted with their dollars and started using your competitors that ARE using text messaging to communicate with customers. Want to get on board the messaging revolution? Here’s what to do.  1.     Start with your Facebook Page  This is the most basic place to start. Your customers are on there, you should be too. By pointing customers to your Page’s Inbox you can give them a place to enquire about what you’re selling, what your pricing is, whether you’re open or closed at certain times, or if you’re actually still open at all. If that sounds like a headache, then automate the most basic questions. You can use automated replies to the most common questions such as trading hours, directions, menus and product lists. In fact, you can go a lot further and plug-in tools like ActiveChat and ManyChat to add even more smarts to answering the questions that people ask without you having to be there at the time.  2.     Activate Messaging on Google My Business  You might not have realised that there is a messaging feature that works with Google My Business. You need to activate it within your Google My Business profile through the Google My Business app. What this does is allow someone to send you a message via your profile on Google and answer it via your mobile phone. You can answer those messages with text, send links and even add in a photo if you need to. But you do have to make sure that you answer those messages within 2 hours otherwise the feature will be taken away from you. So if you’re a bit slack on replying to people, this could be a way to train yourself into being more responsive.   3.     Give WhatsApp a try  While it’s not the primary messaging app that people are using in Australia, it’s growing pretty fast here. It’s also the messaging app with the most active daily users. Over 2 billion people use it each and every day. That’s a staggering number. If your business is in the business of dealing with customers overseas, especially in Asia, India, Europe, Africa or South America, WhatsApp is the app you should be working with. Even if your customers are mostly in Australia, New Zealand, America, the UK or Japan, where Facebook Messenger is dominant, it makes sense to add the WhatsApp option anyway as people in these countries become more privacy-oriented and new features like shopping, ads and payments start to be rolled out in Australia in the future.  4.     What about the other messaging apps?  While you might have heard of other apps like Signal, Telegram, Viber and Kik, they are very niche and not used by enough people to be worth you dedicating resources to in your small business. If you head towards where people overwhelmingly are, you’ll pick up users of those apps anyway, as they will also be using Messenger, WhatsApp and Google in addition to their more niche apps that they tend to use for more private communications with friends and some of the more shady segments of the population. I’m Dante St James. You can learn more about digital marketing the Australian way at clickstarter.com.au, and give your business all the tools it needs to get known, get found and stay known.

Marketing isn’t an exact science, so all the well-intentioned advice, tips and tricks in the world won’t work for every business, every time. Sometimes ads fail to deliver. When they do, what do you do next? This is Clickstarter, the Australian digital marketing podcast. I’m Dante St James. Facebook Ads opened up the world of online advertising for the mug punter. Before it came along we had banner ad networks to insert flashing, gaudy graphics at the top of web pages; a tactic that hasn’t worked for 15 years now, and Google’s incredibly complex and confusing AdWords product that got too expensive and too hard to use for many small businesses by around 2012. Back when you could only do those cute little sidebar ads with a tiny image and a tiny amount of text, the potential was massive. When those ads migrated from the sidebar to the feed, the world completely shifted. Now you could run a campaign in your local town or suburb for as little as $1 a day, target those ads specifically at people in your local area, who are probably already interested in your stuff, and who might even be frequent online shoppers, and you’d watch the cash roll in. Of course, things are a little more expensive and complex these days as the platform matured and we went from around 150 advertisers in Australia to over 100,000 of them. And one thing that has shifted, is the fact that sometimes our ads don’t hit the mark, don’t reach our intended audience, and just don’t convert to a successful enquiry, click or sale. So what can you do about it? You need to take an honest look at your ad When you thumb your way through your Facebook or Instagram feed, you have to concede that most of the ads are just plain dumb. They’ve either retargeted you to buy something that you earlier went to a website to look at, or they are desperately trying to sell you something you probably wouldn’t buy on impulse. They don’t match where you’re at in the process of buying. They’re just pointing an arrow at you and shooting in the hope that they’ll snag you into a sales funnel. Sound familiar? If it does, then chances are that is exactly what you've been trying to do. Writing words and using images and videos that are designed to somehow magically transform someone who is not the slightest bit interested in your stuff to reconsider their life choices, do a 180-degree turn and buy your stuff. And that’s not how sales works. If your ad was made to sell something to someone who has never had any prior relationship with you, is trying to sell something very new and innovative, or is going straight for the quick sale, it will probably fail to do anything you want it to do. Take a look at the words and imagery of your ad and ask yourself, “If I was a person just walking down the street and someone jumped out and asked me to buy this, would I do it?” The answer is almost always No. Try changing your approach from “Sell” to “Educate.” This way you are bringing someone information, rather than a sales spiel. And out naturally curious nature tends to welcome education and new information, but our BS-radar tends to filter out attempts to take our money. Especially on people and things we don’t know. Sometimes your target is a little too tight. It’s tempting when you’re given the option to target particular types of people, to go in tight and precise. Remember though, that a lot of these targets are estimates of what people like, behave like or do regularly. The most accurate targeting of people on Facebook is by their location, their gender, age and the kind of device they’re using. So sometimes you need to have a very large number of people to even that out and get enough people interested from that estimate to make it work for you. Especially outside big cities where the data gets hazy because the populations are much lower. In towns under about 100,000 people, it’s almost useless to target interests because the numbers are too low for the system to identify enough of them. I’m Dante St James. You can learn more about digital marketing the Australian way at clickstarter.com.au, and give your business all the tools it needs to get known, get found and stay known.

Email newsletters are a funny thing. Half the time we don’t remember subscribing to them, the other half of the time we subscribe to them and never see them. If it feels like nobody is opening your emails, here’s perhaps why. This is Clickstarter, the Australian digital marketing podcast. I’m Dante St James. Every sales funnel, sales trainer, digital advisor and business consultant wants you to grow that email list. The main reasons they want you to is because you own your email list. Not Facebook. Not Google. You do. So you have control over what’s on it, what goes out through it and the tone of voice that’s going to be used. The trouble is that you might have trouble getting anyone to see what you’re sending. Problem 1: Spam filters are cutting you off at the knee Ever since Gmail arrived, email marketing was living on borrowed time. Some estimate that the reach of email newsletters dropped almost 60% after use of Gmail became commonplace. When Hotmail, Outlook and other email systems picked up on the trend of spam blocking that took us to the point where we now see just under 20% of newsletter emails ever being read by a human. That’s a massive fall from grace. Some of that is the fault of relentless spam. After all some 90% of all email sent now is spam. Just peek in your junk or spam folder to see how much rubbish skips your inbox in one day to see how bad this is. And that’s just the stuff that gets past the email provider’s own firewalls that weed out the very worst stuff before it even gets sorted as spam. Then some of it is our own fault. After all, spam is made by people. People who tend to be marketers. People who are using email to relentlessly sell things to people. Problem 2: Email newsletters are pretty awful. A lot of the trouble with email newsletter is that they are a bit of an after-thought by most companies. They’re poorly planned out, poorly laid out, poorly written and they make the biggest mistake in marketing: they’re all about the business sending them, and not about the person reading them. We tried to overcome that last point by adding pretend personalisation in them. “Hello Susan” was supposed to sound better than, “Hello Customer.” But was anyone really tricked into thinking that this email was written just for them, simply because the subject line said, “Susan, you won’t believe what just arrived!” Email newsletters are full of boasting, inside stories about staff, obligations to program and supply partners, logos and what wonderful things your business is doing. Which is exactly why no one really seems to read them anymore. Instead of starting from a point of “what’s in this for you” it goes straight for “here’s what’s important about us.” And think about it. The newsletters that you will read the most often are those that are not about the company itself, but about news, educational information, local alerts and things to do. Not “who’s new at our Hervey Bay branch” or “a message from our CEO.” Nobody cares about your CEO, the new staff member or the award you just won. They care about themselves and how you can help them feel safe, solve a problem or have a more comfortable life. So if your newsletter doesn’t have any of that in it, then you probably shouldn’t bother sending it at all. And don’t hide that stuff as a “tip” at the end of the email. Lead with it. That way you have a fighting chance that someone will bother to read past it to your very important corporate communications that no one asked to receive. I’m Dante St James. You can learn more about digital marketing the Australian way at clickstarter.com.au, and give your business all the tools it needs to get known, get found and stay known.

For a long time, we figured that we knew how to game the Facebook algorithm. Be controversial. Be topical. Hop on trends. After all, the ones who grab the most eyeballs win, right? Well, that is all about to change. This is Clickstarter, the Australian digital marketing podcast. I’m Dante St James. The new way forward for ranking on Facebook is going to be more about being inspirational and attracting positive reactions. This is a big change to the volume or “engagement” metric in Facebook’s feed delivery algorithm which always seemed to be based upon two things: 1.     What’s getting the most eyeballs and reactions through positive and negative reactions, sharing and commenting.2.     And whatever feature Facebook was pushing the use of at the time, like live video was a few years ago, for example. This big change is being tested right now by Facebook in the form of mini-surveys being held on both mobile and desktop versions. The survey will simply ask you how you feel about particular posts that you’ve reacted to, and whether you want to see more or fewer posts like it. It’s just like the “hide this post” feature, but this time, it’s asking for your choice between a positive or negative piece of feedback. This is all around the pivot from Facebook being that place where arguments are conducted and tribes are formed about differing political positions, to a place where we go to be connected with family, friends and those who share our interests, as well as being a place to be inspired and to feel good about our interactions and engagements.So what does this mean to Australian businesses who want to get ahead of these changes? 1.     Engagement-baiting will probably be discouraged If you’re one of those marketers who like to bait people for engagement by posting opinion pieces that you know get people fired-up, like manufactured outrage over whether it’s called a chicken parmy or a chicken parma (and I’m look at you, every newspaper and radio station in the country) then it’s time to swing away from that stuff because it’s probably going to stop working soon. This goes for those traditionally viral stories like the blue or gold dress meme, anything pitting one group of people against another – and pretty much anything involving a story from Sky News Australia who are the undisputed kings of outrage baiting in this country right now. 2.     Inspirational and feel-good content will be encouraged This is the secret behind the success of pages like The Dodo, who has built an entire business model around fundraising for animal rescue organisations worldwide through awareness videos showing the rescue of stray and abandoned dogs, cats and other domestic animals.  Inspirational content isn’t just about cute heart-warming videos, it can be about educational content that helps people to overcome problems or improve their lives. For example, Life Hacks, Tips and Tricks, Cooking demonstrations and How-To content generally aims to improve people’s lives and attracts positive reactions, which is what the next point is about. 3.     Anything that attracts positive reactions and avoids negative reactions This is where outrage and engagement baiting will fall flat. This new tweak to the feed algorithm that Facebook is testing is designed specifically to encourage positive reactions. Likes, Hearts, Cares and Wow will be rewarded, while the number of Angry reactions will be a determining factor towards the success of your posts’ reach in the feed. This is a big turnaround from the previous “all reactions are equal” approach. This means that if you are in the habit of posting stories and information that is designed to inform people of things that you think they should be aware of that can also lead to them leaving an angry reaction, then you’re in danger of losing feed prominence. You can prepare this by posting good news stories, your positive approach to a challenging event, and informative ways for people to take action on issues they care about. You can do this by leading with the most important thing first – the positive things that people can do in the face of a challenge, leading to the hope of a positive result. Rather than leading with outrage and then switching to a call to action. This is important. Outrage leads to angry reactions. Solutions can lead to positive reactions. The lesson for everyone is that the time for outrage baiting, raising a rabble and causing controversy on Facebook is coming to an end. It’s time to work together as humans, rather than driving us apart into our echo chambers and tribes. I’m Dante St James. You can learn more about digital marketing the Australian way at clickstarter.com.au, and give your business all the tools it needs to get known, get found and stay known. 

It’s almost the default SEO plugin to add on to WordPress websites. Millions of websites are using it and it’s being developed and updated all the time. But does adding Yoast actually do anything? This is Clickstarter, the Australian digital marketing podcast. I’m Dante St James. Yoast is a plugin used on WordPress that claims to assist you to rank better on search engines by making you choose a range of key words to focus in on, then mark your blog posts and pages against those key words to see how well you have matched your content to your desire to rank on search for that topic. It then goes a bit further by adding a site map XML file to your website which Google then picks up to check on what you have on your site, and where to check next time for updates. And finally it will mark your pages and articles on how readable it is for the average page viewer and give you a list of things you can do to improve your chances of ranking better. That all seems pretty good on paper. A more readable article will be read for longer, meaning that the viewer will dwell for longer on your website. Makes sense, right? And if your titles and opening paragraphs are chock full of mentions of the things you want to be found for on Google, even better, right? The trouble with Yoast and SEO plugins The main problem with SEO plugins like Yoast, All In One SEO and SmartCrawler, is that they tend only look at one slice of the Search Engine Optimisation pie. And that is what we call On Page SEO. This is also probably the easiest part of SEO to address on a website, because you don’t really need any technical knowledge, server access or even CPanel access to make it happen. Search Engine Optimisation as a discipline involves technical changes, mobile optimisation, efficient code use, popularity of your website, and a strange term called Domain Authority which Google denies is a thing, but everyone kinda assumes is a thing because more trusted websites seem to rank better in search. Yoast doesn’t really address any of this. The biggest factors of SEO are Trust and Popularity, followed then by Backlinks, which are the number of relevant places online that are linking back to your page, article or website address. Yoast can’t do anything about any of these things. So plugins like it can lull you into a false sense of comfort that you have “done your SEO.” You’ve ticked that box, so now you can move on. What Yoast does well I’ll give Yoast and these other similar plugins some credit. They actually do the On Page SEO stuff pretty well. The readability scores and recommendations on how to use your target keywords better in your titles and paragraphs does help you to become a better writer for humans, which in turn helps to make you’re a better writer for search engines. It puts all this at the bottom of your page or posts backend view so you can see a live look at how your changes are helping you get a better score. The trouble is that none of this will help you if your website is slow to load, full of half a dozen different kinds of tracking code, full of large images that take a while to load or full of dishonest information that doesn’t match what your Yoast settings are saying that your page contains. Yoast does perhaps make you a better writer, but it won’t make you a better Google Search Ranker. And doing some work on your pages and posts with Yoast doesn’t mean that you web developer has “done your SEO.” I’m Dante St James. You can learn more about digital marketing the Australian way at clickstarter.com.au, and give your business all the tools it needs to get known, get found and stay known.

Lots of text, lots of emojis, long lists of reasons for people to buy your stuff. There are tonnes of techniques for business owners trying to work their way into the eyes and brains of viewers. Do they work though? This is Clickstarter, the Australian digital marketing podcast. I’m Dante St James. There is a science to writing great posts and ads that helps engage, educate and excite those who are seeing them. Though the gurus and sales trainers and network marketers seem to ignore all those and have a very overused and instantly scam-alerting way to try to trick people into their sales funnels. You’ll instantly recognise it. They’ll open with a triggering statement about how bad your life is. They’ll tell you how much better your life can be. Then they will list all the amazing things you could do, marking each line with an emoji.  And then they’ll move on to some secret “product” or “weird idea” that they won’t directly name or own up to. Then they’ll drag out the emojis again to lighten the mood and mark out another list of the things that their product or process will bring to your life. Then there will be a typical statement to trigger your fear of missing out, ask you what are you waiting for (or “what have you got to lose?) then provide a link to a website somewhere that will ask you for your email address. And that’s where their magic begins. In your inbox. Until you report them as spam of course. If it takes long posts full of text and emojis to trick you into something by being cute and full of promises and too-good-to-be-true claims, then it’s probably spammy, scammy and expensive. So what’s the alternative for honest, everyday businesses like yours? Describe, then call to action The biggest platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest advise businesses to not overload posts and ads with tonnes of text. And they almost universally advise us not to overload text with emojis. They do, however, say that light emoji use can be fun and whimsical. The most recommended format for text posts and ads generally lands around the following. 1.     Say the most important thing about the product or service you are promoting first.2.     Then include a call to action on how to get that product or service. No rules about long blocks of text. No overuse of emojis. No manipulative language. No dodgy use of Neuro Linguistic Programming to trick people into buying something that they don’t actually want or need in their life. For example, if you are selling a particular style of kids clothing, you could show a video of that clothing in use, or have a great photo of it, then include text that does the above. It might end up something like this: Kids t-shirts that are made to last until they outgrow them. See the range at our website. No long claims. No massive stories about where the cotton comes from. No painting of pictures in the mind. No manipulative language. Just the important point first about the t-shirts being made to last, then a quick point in the right direction on where to get them. Simple. Easy. And not coming across as the slightest bit dodgy. Another example could be a consulting service. A better organised day so you can get more done. Book a free chat below. That says everything that needs to be said in just one sentence. No long descriptions of scenarios. No lists of advantages. No hypnotising people into booking you without knowing what they are booking you for.  So why do people still use those long, emoji-filled posts and ads? Generally, because their digital coach or the upline in their network marketing scheme or someone in a “Secrets of Social Media Revealed” course said so. The trouble with this advice is that the only people who seemed to get great results from these kinds of posts are the people who got into the game years ago and scooped the market that way. None of the people they are teaching are getting any success with this stuff anymore. The Facebook algorithm understands what these kinds of posts and ads are really about and doesn’t give them as much airtime as those that are not trying to manipulate people in some way beyond simply presenting an idea and a way to get it. It’s similar to MLMs and network marketing. The only people who did really well from Isagenix, the crazy wrap thing, Amway or any of those schemes are the people who got on board really early are the ones who got all the value. Join now and you’re in a saturated market where everyone has already seen all the tricks and marketing techniques and has already learned to ignore them. So try the easy, quick and proven way of making your ads and posts work better on Facebook. And keep doing it over time with engaging videos, compelling photos and a little bit of your own creative flair.  I’m Dante St James. You can learn more about digital marketing the Australian way at clickstarter.com.au, and give your business all the tools it needs to get known, get found and stay known.

The days of writing blogs that nobody but Google will ever read are over. You can’t trick your way up the search rankings now that machine learning is pre-empting every little trick you want to try. So what content works? This is Clickstarter, the Australian digital marketing podcast. I’m Dante St James. There was a time when you write a diary entry, or what we later called a blog post, and people would come and read it in their hundreds and thousands. That was back when there were only a few hundred thousand blogs in the world. We now have some 300 million blogs, with around 3 million of them being updated every single day. It’s no wonder that you struggle to get any eyeballs on what you’re writing. But there is content that really makes Google take notice. It comes down to relevance to the other stuff on your website, uniqueness of the content that you are producing and your ability to produce this content consistently over a long period of time. So even if tens of thousands of content creators are already doing this, how do you cut through the noise with your content? Google loves a FAQ We don’t use Google quite the same way we used to. We trained ourselves to type in “key words” in the past. Now we ask actual questions… increasingly with our voices. So instead of typing in “plumber in Rockhampton” we are asking “who is a reliable plumber in Rockhampton. In those old days we just had to make sure that we marked ourselves clearly in our website as being a plumber in Rockhampton. And repeat that we are plumber in Rockhampton many times over. Now Google is looking at the intent of the searcher, and the best possible match between that search and what can be found online that matches the search. This means that you need to be clear that you are a plumber in Rockhampton, claim to be a reliable plumber in Rockhampton, provide evidence through testimonials from clients that you are reliable, and then have that backed up by reviews on Google, Facebook and other places where people do ratings and reviews about plumbers in Rockhampton. It’s a much more complex set of factors that you need to be across now. Which is actually a good thing, because the chances are that your competitors are not paying attention to that complexity so you have a real chance to leapfrog over them. Google loves a list. Top Ten lists are some of the most viewed videos on YouTube. They are also some of the most lingered-upon articles on websites. A list helps someone to scan over a range of options and land on the one that feels right to them. Lists also help people compare features and benefits, pricing and availability, even recommendations and reviews from the author of the list. I know I use them all the time when I am looking at specific kinds of software that I need to solve the problems I come up against. What kind of lists can you start putting together? How about the Top 10 Questions Clients Ask Us? Or the Top 10 ways to use our essential oils? The Three Hidden Benefits of regular massage? The celebrities you didn’t know were using our products? The lists you can write about what you do are endless. For inspiration, just search Top 10 and then the product or service you provide and see what comes up. You’ll get a tonne of ideas from those sources. You can also be inspired by the things that your clients or customers talk about with regard to what you sell them. I’m talking about lists like, “The 5 surprising things that our clients tell us about their new bathroom design.” They are specific to you and to bathroom design, but they are also things that people may search for. And because Google finds lists really easy to scan, index and rank, it’s better than just writing a page about why you’re so great. And it reads better for that potential customer who lands on your site. Want to rank better over time on Google? Work with the formats and content that Google and people love to read. Then keep doing it again and again.

In a perfect world, you’d only work with the clients that make you feel good, inspired, reassured and confident. Trouble is, that all those things are what friends do for you, not clients. Clients are a whole other beast. This is Clickstarter, the Australian digital marketing podcast. I’m Dante St James. When you start a business or start a new job, chances are that you’ll be facing customers or clients at some point. Unless you’re hiding in a giant corporation or government department, clients, customers, guests, whatever you call them in your world, are part of the game. And not every client is going to be in the business of making you feel good about yourself. In fact, no client is hanging around to do that. That doesn’t mean that every client is a nasty piece of work. But you’re going to come across a difficult one here and there. Is the client the problem? Or are you? Probably the most common complaint that comes from clients is a lack of communication or poor communication from a business. Especially those that they contract to perform a service. And even more so with a service that the client doesn’t really understand very well. This has certainly been the case in my world. There have been times, even recently, that I was overwhelmed with work and didn’t keep in tight communication with my client. Which made them feel forgotten and a little ripped off. And rightly so. This client got quite aggressive. Which made me not want to communicate with her. Which exacerbated her aggression. Which caused the problem to deepen. And naturally, I lost that client. For all the clients I’ve worked with over the many years that I’ve done what I do, even I don’t get it quite right sometimes. In this case, I was the problem. The client amplified the problem. I amplified it even further. Then it became unsalvageable. Sometimes you need to be honest with yourself about what the problem was. An aggressive client, or an uncommunicative contractor. The client who likes to push the scope Having a tight quote, a well-written scope or work and a very strong brief from a client is worth its weight in gold. That’s because there’s always a client who can’t help but ask for more and more stuff that you never agreed to provide. “Oh it’s just a quick thing to do isn’t it?” Those are the words of a client who has never worked on what you work on in their life and has no idea how one “little change” can derail a whole project. And how much extra time is required to do those “teeny-tiny adjustments” to the scope. Once a scope is signed off and the quote accepted, that is the end of the changes. Unless the client is willing to sign off on a new scope and a new quote. That’s because you shouldn’t be delivering stuff for free to clients. You are not their family. You are not their friend. You are not a charity. You need to be able to plan your projects out so that you can deliver a service and make enough money to reach your goals. A client who continually makes changes to the scope or wants extra stuff outside of the agreed quote is a client who doesn’t respect you, your time or your business. Nip it in the bud early. Never give away free work even for a “tiny little change.” They never stay “tiny.” I’m Dante St James. You can learn more about digital marketing the Australian way at clickstarter.com.au, and give your business all the tools it needs to get known, get found and stay known.

By now you’ve been blasted with news and opinions about Clubhouse, the hit invite-only audio app that’s been taking the business and marketing world by storm. But did you know that there’s a tonne of clones on the way as well? This is Clickstarter, the Australian digital marketing podcast. I’m Dante St James. Clubhouse is worth $1 billion dollars now. It’s got some 50 million people connected to it (that’s about the same as what MySpace was at its peak before Facebook happened. Those who love it, love it, but it’s been slowing down considerably due to how long it’s been taking them to bring out an Android app, and open the app up to everyone, not just the lucky few who have been invited. And it’s this slowness to scale up that’s meant there is an opening for every other player. Enter Twitter, Facebook, venture capitalist Mark Cuban and Stereo. Twitter takes on Clubhouse and appears to be doing a great jobWith it’s hundreds of millions of users, it makes sense for Twitter to move in on Clubhouse’s turf. Twitter calls their Clubhouse clone, Spaces. And really it’s nothing all that new. It’s a rebrand and de-videoing of their live video function, Periscope. It was a big deal back when a similar app called Meerkat was about. Periscope pretty much killed Meerkat. Then Facebook Live made Periscope redundant. Now Periscope is back, but this time as a audio-only app called Spaces within Twitter. Just like Clubhouse it has rooms, hand raising, invitations to speak and moderation of rooms. The only difference is that it’s tied to your Twitter account, so if you’ve got Twitter, you’re going to have spaces very soon once it moved out of Beta testing. Facebook does it a little differentlyIt was only a matter of time before the big blue giant made a move into audio chat. Facebook is trialling an app called Hotline. It’s not strictly a Clubhouse clone as it’s built around the concept of the Q&A or Questions and Answers. You join a hotline being hosted by one of more people and you ask a question that is sent to the hosts who then answer your question. It’s a little like an interactive version of the Q&A website, Quora, or even like Q&A within Zoom webinars. Facebook isn’t making a huge amount of noise about this yet though, so don’t get too excited. I honestly expected this kind of function to be more useful over at LinkedIn, but I guess only time will tell. What would Venture Capital do?Given that Clubhouse is a Silicon Valley start-up built upon tens of millions of dollars in venture capital, it was only a matter of a hot second before a famous venture capitalist would break ranks and start their own version of Clubhouse. Mark Cuban is kinda one of the original gangsters of the California start-up funding scene and has put his many millions into investments with big winners and big losers. His red hot go at an audio app is called Fireside. It’s meant to replicate the feel of the typical corporate and jetsetter “fireside chat” where an influential rich person would be interviewed by a crackling fireplace by some famous interviewer or news anchor and it would be considered to be an exclusive event where people would see a different and more human side of the rich or famous. Fireside isn’t really taking off right now though, so I don’t expect it to last much longer. Stereo: The first clone to duplicate ClubhouseThis year, if you’ve been on an app store and searched for Clubhouse you’ve probably been served an ad for another app called Stereo. And just like you, everyone else has been skipping over it to get to the app that they actually want. The one way into the market for Stereo has been Android. At the time of writing, Clubhouse still isn’t on Android, is still invite-only and has no published date of arrival beyond iPhones.  So you’d think that this would be a great opening for Stereo. But not so. It’s still failing to get downloads because it’s not Clubhouse, even if it does all the same stuff as Clubhouse does. And that’s because no one is there. I installed Stereo and gave it a try. There were no Australian rooms on there at all, and only a scattering of American ones which were 50% about bitcoin trading and 50% about making six figures through working only 2 days a week or something like that. If you’re on Android and still waiting, keep waiting because this is not an alternative. And ultimately, I’m expecting the Clubhouse bubble to burst at some point this year, even after it launches on Android, simply because it ignores the basic trend in content consumption that has been reducing network television and radio to rubble over the last decade, you have to listen live. There is no recorded option to listen to later. So if the best stuff is happening in Pacific Standard Time in the US, you’re going to be sleeping like a log and you’ll miss it all. I’m Dante St James. You can learn more about digital marketing the Australian way at clickstarter.com.au, and give your business all the tools it needs to get known, get found and stay known.

Messaging isn’t messaging. Not when there are so many messaging apps to choose from. WhatsApp, Messenger, good old SMS and Instagram Direct are just a few. So what do you choose and why? This is Clickstarter, the Australian digital marketing podcast. I’m Dante St James. Once upon a time there was SMS. It was a great way to avoid to talking to people on the phone with all the small talk and social graces involved. I know I welcomed this one more than most. I still recall people saying, “Why not just call me? Wouldn’t it take less time than typing out a message on a phone?” I didn’t have the heart to tell them that I just didn’t want to talk to them beyond the one question I had to ask them. So that was yesterday, how about today? Facebook MessengerThis is now the world’s biggest messaging system, being just slightly bigger than WhatsApp. It’s the messenger service of choice in Australia, New Zealand, the USA and Canada. It’s got a lot of use in the UK as well. Facebook Messenger is pretty much the tool of choice for the English speaking world. It’s got the same features as pretty much every other app on today’s list, but it does tie directly into your Facebook account, so who you can message is tied to who you are connected to on Facebook. You can attempt to message others, but your message needs to be approved for connection by the person at the other end before you can chat with them – and it’s not always obvious if the person isn’t online at the time of you messaging them, so you may never actually connect with them. WhatsAppThis is one super popular with people in non-English speaking countries. Head to Bali, Singapore, India, South America, Africa or most of Europe and this is the chat app they’re using. A lot of this has to do with the reputation that WhatsApp has as being a full end-to-end encrypted messaging app. It’s been especially popular in those countries with more authoritarian regimes and those where trust is low in the privacy of online communications. It’s actually this security and encryption that saw it banned early on in China. It has much the same power as Facebook Messenger but doesn’t require a Facebook account because you can register just using your phone number. In fact, you have to register with your phone number. You can WhatsApp someone as long as they are in your phone contacts, or at least you have their phone number. SMSIt’s the oldie and the goodie. And it’s going through a rejuvenation, albeit it a little too late. RTS is the new format of SMS that allows you to send emojis, video, audio and most of the same stuff you can send via other messaging apps as it’s moving beyond the simple text only format, skipping over the awful MMS standard and going straight to the kind of messaging we are used to from apps. The only problem? It’s about 10 years late to the game, so it’s not really doing so well anywhere. In America it’s been picked up by one of the four national carriers. In Australia, Telstra has picked it up. But no one really seemed to notice. Instagram DirectThis one doesn’t seem like such an obvious one, but since over 11 million Aussies are on Instagram and it’s the messaging platform of choice for those who are using Clubhouse, Instagram Direct Messaging has been given a bit of a boost thanks to Facebook integrating it into the Inbox features in Business Suite. If you Facebook Business Page is linked to your Instagram Business or Creator profile, you can access your Insta messages on Facebook. There’s not a lot of features in Instagram direct messaging, but it’s nice to have it if that’s where a lot of your marketing happens. Which one are you using? And should you be using another one? My attitude is that you use the messaging app where your customers and audiences are. If they’re on them all, so are you. I’m Dante St James. You can learn more about digital marketing the Australian way at clickstarter.com.au, and give your business all the tools it needs to get known, get found and stay known.

You’re stuck on a plane for a couple of hours. You could catch up one some sleep, or catch up on a few episodes of whatever you’re watching on Netflix. Or, you could use the time up there to get some work done. This is Clickstarter, the Australian digital marketing podcast. I’m Dante St James. Working on flights isn’t what it used to be. In the days before the internet, working on a flight was more about reading reams of paper and writing notes in notepads to hand to someone to transcribe and type for you when you got to your destination. These days there’s in-flight WIFI depending on who you’re flying, and a tray table that can comfortably fit a laptop computer without too much yoga positioning in your seat. When you’ve got internet on your flight At the time of writing this, only Qantas is offering inflight WIFI. Virgin Australia is working to restore their service since they were resurrected from insolvency. Rex is still getting started on non-regional routes and Jetstar has no intention of ever adding anything that they don’t have to. But if you do get inflight WIFI there are some things that it’s great for and some things that’s it not so great for. For example, Zoom calls… forget it. Inflight WIFI is using satellite internet, which means that you may get a semi-decent amount of bandwidth to download, but you’re not getting enough pipe going back up to space to give you a decent connection. The lag is terrible and even if you turn off your video, it’s still not going to work. Inflight WIFI just isn’t made for this kind of thing. It’s made for simple stuff, and inbound streaming. So while you might get an ok connection for YouTube and watching something on Disney+, you’re not going to be able to handle a Clubhouse room or a Zoom video call any time soon. No WIFI? No worries. While the more enlightened and Zen amongst us may preach that time in the air is a chance to connect with the earth goddess or the universal consciousness or something like that, the rest of us still have work to do. While you’re in the air and unable to connect, you can do a whole lot of other work. I personally use my Virgin and Jetstar flights to write my blogs and podcast scripts. I don’t need to research anything as I’m writing from my own experience and knowledge. So there is no need to Google anything, or refer to any sources elsewhere on the internet to put together what I’m doing. In fact, over a 2 hour flight, I get time to write about four days-worth of podcasts and blog content. But what about you? If you’re running Microsoft Outlook for your email, then you can answer emails, compose new ones and read through your archive for information on reports. It’s only when you want to get new email or send an email that you need the internet. And all those new emails are sitting in the cloud waiting to download when you land. The same applies for those that you are wanting to send.  And you don’t need the internet to write a report, a blog, a memo or an instructional presentation on Powerpoint. Even if you’re not using Microsoft’s office suite, Google’s Workspace lets you work offline in the Chrome browser so you can write documents, make presentations and calculate formulas in spreadsheets without needing an internet connection at the time. So without the internet, you can still do plenty of stuff on the laptop while you’re flying so you can keep that working ticking over while you’re up in the sky screaming across the heavens on your way to wherever you’re going. So why not take advantage of the downtime and… well… not take any downtime at all? I’m Dante St James. You can learn more about digital marketing the Australian way at clickstarter.com.au, and give your business all the tools it needs to get known, get found and stay known.

You’ve been told again and again that you need to start producing video for your business. You’ve finally got over your anxiety about it, now you just have to start. What do you do first? This is Clickstarter, the Australian digital marketing podcast. I’m Dante St James. Video is, without doubt, the most powerful medium of communication. From television in the 50s to early 2000s to YouTube in the naughties and now short format video from TikTok, Instagram Reels and even live video on Facebook, there are a tonne of places to start. Which should you start with? Live Video on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube You can go live from mobile apps and desktop tools to Facebook, Instagram and YouTube these days. Depending on where you audience is more active, going live on these channels can be a great way to build familiarity with who you are by potential clients.  We’ve all seen the abundance of talking head videos from professional coaches and influencers who have something to say and either tuned in or ignored it. But you can’t ignore the fact that it works. And not because there’s huge audiences watching. It’s because you don’t need a huge audience to make a big impact using Live Video. All you have to do is be relevant, relatable and regular. You may start off with no one watching at all, but if you keep doing it, you’ll eventually build a small audience who will make you a regular part of their day. Especially if you are bringing some great educational or inspirational content and ideas for them to consume.  It’s easy, quick and available on so many platforms right now. Not sure whether it will work for your target audience? Try it and see. Even if you do it for a month and no one watches or comments, it’s ok, you now have a month of video content living on your profile for people to watch later. Especially on YouTube where content tends to stick around and be seen long after it was originally posted. Short format Stories video Want something a little shorter and sweeter that goes away faster? Shorter format videos using channels like Instagram Stories, YouTube Shorts, LinkedIn Stories, TikToks and Facebook Stories might be for you. They only last a limited amount of time, in most cases, 24 hours, so even if it’s not your best work, it goes away so there’s a minimum of embarrassment if you’re not completely happy with what you posted. Being short format, you get your video over and done with in no time. By short, I’m talking 15 to 60 seconds. You literally get in, get your point across and get out. And these platforms have lots of creative tools like stickers, music, filters and text that you can add a whole lot more personality to your video, even when you feel like you don’t have much personality to offer in the video yourself.You may not be able to polish a flat personality, but you can roll it in glitter after all! What you choose to run your short format video on isn’t as important as simply giving it a go. So jump in, make some glorious mistakes and laugh at yourself, after all, it’s usually gone in 24 hours, so the red face won’t last long. I’m Dante St James. You can learn more about digital marketing the Australian way at clickstarter.com.au, and give your business all the tools it needs to get known, get found and stay known.

You need a reliable and easy way to share documents and instructions with your team. But you’re not quite ready for a big Learning Management System or teamwork system quite yet. What can you use? This is Clickstarter, the Australian digital marketing podcast. I’m Dante St James. When it comes to working with your team, your contractors or even just your virtual assistant, working out things like how to collaborate on a spreadsheet or how to communicate things that need to be done can be a bit of a nightmare when it comes to emails and Messenger chat. Thankfully there are some great and free tools that make it easier for you. Google’s free tools for collaboration If you’ve got a Gmail account, you have access to Google’s excellent collaborative tools called Docs, Sheets and Slides. They are the same as Office 365’s Word, Excel and Powerpoint. The big difference here is that these have been built from the ground up to be easily shared and for collaboration on these documents to be super easy with your team. If two or more of your team are in a spreadsheet and updating it at the same time, you can actually see what they are doing as they are doing it. This way you’re not working over the top of each other, and you’re seeing a real-time version of the spreadsheet, document or slide. This makes it great for getting real-time editing, proofreading and sharing the process of tidying up documents, proposals and presentations before they are released out in the public or to clients. Trello – To Do, Doing & Done A free tool called Trello acts as a great little pinboard. You can create a card that contains instructions about something that needs to be done and put it in a column called To Do. Then when you or someone else is starting to work on it, they drag it over to the Doing column. Finally, when it’s done, they drag it across to Done. And all the while they can leave notes, update status, add and tick off checklists and even load up files and attachments to the card so that everything you need to know about that piece of work is right there where everyone working on it can get it. It’s free to start, and you get a lot of power as a free user. As you grow up in your business or as you need more powerful integrations, you can upgrade your account to something higher and get more features. Whatever you choose it’s going to be better than trying to manage your work, your social posts, your household chores or almost anything, than just sending emails and messages. I’m Dante St James. You can learn more about digital marketing the Australian way at clickstarter.com.au, and give your business all the tools it needs to get known, get found and stay known.

You may have played around with LinkedIn a little and while you’re enjoying the content on there, you haven’t got around to creating your own. Why should you do it and what should you do? This is Clickstarter, the Australian digital marketing podcast. I’m Dante St James. LinkedIn is quite unique in that the difference between those post and those who are part of the network but don’t do posts is vast. We’re talking about there being less than 3% of all people on LinkedIn who actually post anything to it. Compare that with Facebook where it’s more like 70%. While that might seem like a crazy low number, it actually makes sense. After all, LinkedIn is our professional profile. It’s like a resume. Our employer, potential employer and clients are seeing what we’re up to there. And for most of us, our presence on LinkedIn isn’t a Company page, it’s our own personal profile. So, everything we do there reflects on us as a professional.  Yet, if you do start posting, you have this incredible opportunity that doesn’t exist on the bigger networks like Facebook, Instagram and even Twitter. Because there is so few people on the platform that are posting regularly, anything you do post is that much more likely to reach more people. Think about it. When you’re on LinkedIn you see a LOT of content being posted. But that content tends to be from the people you’re connected to or follow. Which means that you have a limited number of things you can see. LinkedIn then pumps up your feed by adding in the stuff that your contacts are commenting on and liking, so that your feed doesn’t get too empty. This means that you have an opportunity to reach well beyond just the people you follow or are connected to. So what do you post? You can start by sharing news stories of significance in your industry and adding your own opinion or comments. Try running a quick poll to seek other people’s opinions on an issue or question that is related to the work you do. Interesting quotes from real people like yourself, or someone you admire always do pretty well – especially if they’re related to your work or industry. If you’re feeling more daring, you can write an article. LinkedIn has a great tool for posting articles, like a blog, in your profile and once it’s posted it lets you share that article to your network. From time-to-time LinkedIn will feature these articles on the right hand column, especially if you’re posting something that people are really interested in right now. With so few of LinkedIn’s hundreds of millions of people actually posting, you really do have a big chance of having your content reach a lot of people. I’m Dante St James. You can learn more about digital marketing the Australian way at clickstarter.com.au, and give your business all the tools it needs to get known, get found and stay known.

Once upon a time you had to buy a third-party system to handle posting to multiple social media networks, but if you’re only posting to Facebook and Instagram you have a more in-house option. This is Clickstarter, the Australian digital marketing podcast. I’m Dante St James. A couple of years ago Facebook released their Creator Studio. A tool within Facebook itself that allows you to post to Facebook and Instagram, including Facebook stories from the desktop. And while you can’t post to Instagram stories just yet, it’s expected that this function will be coming before too long. So what does Creator Studio do? Your content libraryThink of it as a library of all your posts and stories that you can measure, review and bring back again to reuse whenever you want. Let’s say you had this one amazing Instagram post that went crazy with likes and comments in October. You can look it up and bring it back top repost again in May if you like. Creative toolsCreator Studio is also a great creative tool for getting more out of each post. You might load up a great photo to the system, but that’s not the end of the story. You can then add text, effects, filters and stickers to bring more interaction or fun to it before you post. Go live with extra powerMy personal favourite feature is the full-fat, full-sugar set of tools to go live on Facebook and Instagram. You can schedule a live video from here, add details to the post, connect the API to third party programs and do things like commenting and interacting while you’re live on Facebook and Instagram. All from the desktop. If you’re a bit of dinosaur like me and you like the idea of going live from your laptop rather than your phone in your shaky hand, then this is perfect for that bit of extra control. If you’ve got Facebook, you’ve got Facebook Creator Studio. You can access it through your Business Suite or just Google Creator Studio and click through to it. It’s a great way to manage posts on Facebook as well as Instagram without having to buy an extra system to create and schedule your posts. I’m Dante St James. You can learn more about digital marketing the Australian way at clickstarter.com.au, and give your business all the tools it needs to get known, get found and stay known.

Take your time? Or get on the spam wagon? There seem to be two very different ways to marketing yourself on LinkedIn. How do you do it? How can stand out? And how do you avoid being “that guy.” This is Clickstarter, the Australian digital marketing podcast, I’m Dante St James. You can generate leads for your business on LinkedIn quite easily, particularly if you're working in a service-based industry or are offering your expertise as a consultant. You may be concerned that approaching LinkedIn with a lead-generation mindset will turn you into one of those bot-like offshore marketers who start their messages with, "I noticed we have a few contacts in common and that you work in..." We all know the type.  So how do you start the process of generating leads on LinkedIn?  First, you start by making relevant connections and developing relevant relationships. Next, you interact with the content of those connections you've made. Finally, when your connections approach you, have a clear outline of what you do, ready to present to them.Why LinkedIn is a great place to generate leadsLinkedIn is a great place to build networks and nurture relationships. Most businesses create professional profiles and keep those profiles updated and in sync with their brand, their type of work or the place they work for. Connecting with people on LinkedIn is great for two reasons: It provides an opportunity to establish yourself as an expert in the eyes of your connections. This has a lot of value because there's a good chance that, if you're providing good value in your content, these connections will introduce you to someone else who may be interested in what you have to say. And it's this network effect that grows your reputation way beyond just the people who know you in real life. How to make connections with a lead-generation mindset When you're on LinkedIn, you want to make connections with people who are interested in what you're interested in or at least, who have an interest in learning what you're in the business of teaching. In my opinion, that's the basis for networking. You may only spend 10 minutes a day on LinkedIn, but that time can easily be the cornerstone of your lead-generating efforts. But when it comes to getting in contact with someone, you want to Keep your LinkedIn messaging short and sweet. When you write a long, wordy LinkedIn InMail message it produces the same effect of a longwinded version of your website, your lead-generation efforts will have already fallen over before they even began. Keep your direct messages to under two sentences and give the other person a chance to respond to this short message. It makes it much more of a conversation than just a monologue from a person who is copying and pasting the same over-the-top pitch for business to everyone they connect with. Of course, LinkedIn is a place to do business, so your message should go to the heart of what you do. But sometimes it's actually nice to go in with a bit of empathy and ask your new connection a bit about what they do. That's certainly how I do it. How to interact with new connections When you first connect with someone, especially if you're first making a contact, remember that you need to check and see what they're doing. If they've been on LinkedIn for a while and aren't showing any of their recent activity, have no work history to show, few connections and no profile photo, you may want to close the door on that connection. It's likely that they are a scammer or someone in a spam farm somewhere offshore. What you're looking for in a connection is either someone who has a completed profile that seems to resonate with you as being someone you'd like to know more about or you're after someone who is actively expressing a desire for something that you do. Once you approach them (or they approach you) don't go straight for the kill. Chances are that they didn't want to connect with you just to be immediately pitched an idea or a proposal to do business. Think of this as a chance to build some rapport, get to know each other and get a better idea of whether this connection is a customer for you, or if you're a potential customer for them.When I'm approached by a new connection I like to accept that connection and then send a quick video message to thank them for the connection and offer to open a dialogue about the stuff that I've been posting lately - and ask them to tell you a bit about themselves. They honestly get surprised when I do it. Mind you, these videos are not planned and very off-the-cuff. I don't rehearse it, I just go for it and sent a real live unedited greeting. Conclusion If you have any experience with LinkedIn, you're aware that the majority of the information found there is not meant for the average Facebook user. This isn't a personal connection or family fun site. There's a lot of great stuff in there to explore, but it's pretty much about the business world. If you want to generate leads for business from LinkedIn, you do need to get a little manual and a little personal. Especially if what you're selling is your own time at a premium rate. Few, if any people on there are going to sign up for a high-end service based on a spammy introduction from some random guy who is spamming everyone he possibly can.

Facebook is flooded. Instagram is overrun. TikTok is too hard. And you don't even know where to start with Clubhouse. Have you thought about doing something on YouTube? This is Clickstarter, the Australian Digital Marketing Podcast. I'm Dante St James. With all the attention on social media marketing, sometimes it’s hard to find a solid marketing channel that’s equally effective as it is affordable. If your business is looking to increase awareness, then Youtube might just be your channel of choice. How many businesses are taking advantage of YouTube? According to numbers from Nielsen the number is only 23% of US business. That's around 18% in Australia. So there's a lot of room for you to enter the fray without worrying too much about your competitors already being there. And even if they are, chances are that they're not paying much attention to it. So let's look at a few tips on how you can use YouTube to gain organic views and build your business. Here are several successful ways to use YouTube to grow your business online. 1. Create tutorials to help your customers This may be the most popular form of YouTube marketing there is. How To Videos dominate rankings on YouTube. Whether it's how to build an app, ride a bike, speak Japanese or cook lasagna, you can find a video on how to do almost anything on YouTube. So why wait for someone else to create a video of how to use your products or services? Your video doesn't have to be super high-end. Just have a decent microphone, your computer webcam and a bright area to record in. Then off you go. You might want to start with a script to work from as well. 2. Create short explainer videos Explainer videos are one of the most successful ways to market a business. These videos help your customers understand what your business does and how your products and services can successfully solve their problem. This video also gives your company a human element for customers to relate to. On top of all that, your explainer video can also be embedded into your website so that you can use it there - or even share it on other social media channels to make sure that there is no confusion about who you are and what you do. 3. Create a product review Generating views by reviewing products and providing information is a great way to increase organic views on YouTu be. For example, by creating a product review on a comparison of iPhones and Androids you can tailor your video to help your customers find the product that suits their needs. This is also a great way to get search engines to start to index your video. And while there are tonnes of product review channels on YouTube already, and most topics are already covered, you could consider being the Australian voice of your reviews. An Aussie reviewing phones, computers, food, recipes, products and services, will always resonate well with Australian viewers who may find that they can't relate to the usual American and British accents - or the details are not relevant to Australian consumers. 4. Comment on other videos YouTube allows you to comment on other videos and build off of previously created content. This is a great way to increase the ranking of your video by commenting on videos that are similar to your own. Commenting also allows you to connect with other users who may be interested in your video. Depending on the content rating of the video you are commenting on, this can be a great way to gain organic views on your video. Just link back to your video in the comments, and even make your video a reply video to the other videos in your niche. That way you are creating conversations and positioning yourself as something of an expert in the field alongside other experts. 5. Create unique content Creating unique content is what will keep people coming back for more. It is crucial to create content that your viewers will find useful. Creating useful video content will continue to build trust, which will ultimately lead to organic views and higher ranking videos. And all that will lead to more customers who trust you, and want to buy from you. What is unique content? It isn't just funny fails, comedic monologues or science experiments. It could just be your own spin on something that someone else is doing. As long as you aren't just directly ripping off someone else's stuff, your content is going to be unique. 6. Provide a Q&A forum for your customers If you're an expert, a coach, a teacher, a trainer or anyone who has knowledge that people seek out, a Q&A or AMA (which stands for Ask Me Anything) can be a great way to put a video out that really showcases your expertise in a given topic. The questions aren't necessarily coming in live (though you can use YouTube Live to do this as well) so it can be handled by collecting questions before the video is published by promoting your video through Facebook Events, Instagram, Google My Business, your social media posts or your website's blog. It's usually a good idea to collect enough questions that give you enough answering time to fill around 10-15 minutes. This is YouTube's sweet spot for content that gets more promoted and ranked. So, roughly ten questions should give you at least 1 minute to read and answer each question. And seeing that some answers will run over-time, that should get you easily to 15-20 minutes. YouTube is this big, awesome, dynamic place for promoting yourself or your business as a brand, by demonstrating what you do, what you know and how you can answer the questions and problems that customers out there have. Best still, so few Aussie businesses are doing anything on it. So what are you waiting for? Get on YouTube this week and help your business to get known, get found and stay known.

When it comes to reaching people beyond a fraction of those who follow you, organic reach is almost dead on Facebook. And I say almost, because it can be resurrected. And it’s not dead for everyone. So what does it take to get your organic reach moving in a positive direction? It’s about producing content that: Engages your audience and prompts them to interact Educates your audience and prompts them to want to learn more And excites your audience into doing something Content That EngagesThe first kind of content that we’ll look at is the kind that gets people engaging with you. And by engaging, we’re talking about reactions, comments and shares. Now think about it. What kind of content makes you react, comment of share? It’s generally something that you’re interested in, or that someone you know would be interested in. Now think about your business. What happens at your business, or with your product that would be interesting enough for someone to tap on the like, or even comment on what you’ve posted?Engaging content is only engaging when you know who your target audience is, and what about your products or services, is actually interesting to them. Given that people are largely self-interested, you need to work out what is in it for them. And beyond that, what is the feeling that someone wants from having bought you stuff or engaged your services.Is it status? Is it a feeling of wellbeing? Do people feel safe when they buy your products? Or does it make them feel more attractive? When you can tap into what feeling someone gets when they buy your products or engage your services, you’re on the way to writing posts that really get noticed.Content That EducatesThere are certain types of businesses that nail this one. Software companies, coaches, personal trainers and food-related businesses really understand that education is the key to sales. This is because showing people how to use your product or how your service makes their life better, brings them one step closer to buying from you. This is what we could call a “middle of the funnel” activity because if you’ve already got them engaging with you, then they know who you are and a primed to learn more about you. Which is where the educational post comes in.When you educate someone further on how your services answer a core problem that they need solved - or how to use your product to make their lives easier, you are putting a picture in their head of how they can bring your business into their life. And if they are already rehearsing their dealings with you in their head, they are only a very short step away from becoming your customer.Educational content can be a how-to video or an infographic that shows how your service leads to a desirable outcome in their life, It could be a photo showing an example of how your thing can be used, or even a step by step written post on the many things that your training or coaching brings into their life. Again, the whole point of listing all this good stuff is to create a picture in their head of them using your product or service. Because the brain can’t tell the difference between imagination or reality, you’re laying down a new neural pathway that is ready to be reinforced with more of your educational posts down the track.Content that ExcitesExciting content isn’t exciting because it makes someone go “wow!” It’s about the original definition of excitement, which is about prompting someone to take action. And in your case, that action is usually booking a call with you or buying something from you. But excitement can also be used to do other things, like take action for a cause you are promoting. Or take action to check-in on a neighbour over the holidays. In fact, it pays to vary around your calls to action so that you’re not always saying the same thing. When your call to action is always “Book me!” Or “Shop Now” the excitement is harder to replicate because calls to action, when repeated, get ignored. If you’ve ever read the story of The Boy Who Cried Wolf, then you’ll know what I’m saying here. Eventually, your high-impact statements are not so high impact. In much the same way that we all now know that Harvey Norman isn’t really having a different sale every weekend. You can do most of the same deals with their staff any weekend of the year.Content that excites action can be a sale, a new product, a new way to use your product, a promotion, or a community cause that you're raising funds or attention for. The key to excitement is that you’re bringing something NEW to the mix when you post. Not just repeating the same “exciting” opportunity to book a free discovery call with you.A Consistent Approach Wins Over TimeNow that you know what to post, the hardest part to get right is the consistency. Anyone who has built a big community of followers knows that when they don’t keep up the regular content that engages, educates or excites, the engagement and sales drop right off. So you’ll need to stick at this for a while. And I’m not just talking about a month here. I’m talking 3-6 months minimum, but 12 months is ideal. It takes time for you to build up a habit. But it takes your followers even longer to build up a habit of engaging with you.Want to know more, hit the Learn tab at Clickstarter.com.au and start on the road to helping your Aussie business to get known, get found and stay known.

Mobile friendly. It's a term that gets thrown around a lot in web design circles, but beyond the talk of responsive and adaptive design and breakpoints and whatever, what does it actually mean? This is Clickstarter, the Australian Digital Marketing Podcast. I'm Dante St James. Being mobile-friendly is a big thing now for a lot of website owners. Well, to be honest, it's been a big thing since around 2012 when we noticed that more people were accessing the web from their phones than ever before. Fast forward to the 2020s and mobile is by far the most used device with anything to do with the internet. So what exactly is mobile-friendliness? Basically, if a website is ‘mobile friendly’ it means it is optimised for readers using phones and tablets to access the content. These devices typically don’t have a large screen for reading like a laptop or desktop computer has and so there are times when you want to provide a way for your readers to access your post without scrolling endlessly past decorative images, logos, ads and forms to get to the actual content. So what do you need to make sure your website is ‘mobile friendly’? Typically there are two things. Firstly you should make sure there is a menu with links to all your most important pages. Just like you have on a desktop site. But it's a little different on mobile because the menu is presented vertically, so submenu items make a menu really long and quite unusable. So you have to reduce the depth of your menus, especially if you have a lot of pages. Secondly, you should have a ‘mobile optimised’ version of each post or article. This mobile optimised version of a post of the article is, in short, shorter. You get to the point faster. You cover your points using short, sharp dot points, and you get your reader into your page, informed and out quickly. There's no point trying to make them linger, because it's mobile. They're not going to do that. If you're not comfortable making super-short mobile styled articles, then do both a long-form and short-form version of the post. From the short form, link to the long version for those who might want to read more deeply into the topic. The advantage here is that you get twice the content on each topic, so you're giving Google even more SEO juice. And ultimately, that is what you're writing a blog for, true? Want to learn more about digital marketing? Hit the LEARN tab at clickstarter.com.au. And together we'll help your business to get known, get found and stay known.

Networking comes easy to some of us, but for others it’s like going through hell every time someone asks, “why do you do?” To be good at it takes practice in these areas: Knowing how to introduce yourself and your business Knowing how to actively listen to others Following-up with new contacts after the event For a digital marketer, I do a lot of networking in person. That’s because it’s still the most effective way I’ve found to secure high-value clients who want to stick around for the long haul. If you sell low-cost products and services in high volumes, digital marketing can be a great way to get bigger scale and reach more people for impulsive purchases. But being in a room with people who are interested in what you do, is by far the best way to connect, build rapport and start a great relationship with a new client.Knowing how to introduce yourself and your businessThis is probably the part that feels the hardest to those who consider themselves to be introverts. You are probably even saying to yourself right now, “what the heck am I meant to say to someone who I don’t know without sounding like an idiot?”There are a few formulas for introducing yourself and lightly pitching your business that doesn’t sound too salesy.I like to use the elevator pitch method. First, you introduce your name and the name of your business, then you mention a common problem that people have that your business solves. Finally, you tell them what kind of client or customer that you’re after.Let’s say that your name is Carolyn and you have a catering business. Your introduction could be like this:I’m Carolyn, my business is called Eating Joy. You know how getting someone into cater an event can feel a bit like you have no idea what you’re gonna get or how much it’s gonna cost until you go through a long sales pitch from a caterer? I solve that by making sure that all my packages and pricing is clear and easy to understand on my website, and you can book catering without even having to speak to anyone. And that tends to suit personal assistants who just want to get the job done and even wedding planners who are way too busy organising everything else to be obsessing about every bread roll from a catering company.See how simple that seemed? The formula is:1. My name is…2. My business is called…3. You know how…4. I solve this by…5. My ideal client is…You can express each of these differently, but keeping that order makes sense and leaves a great first impression of a business owner who really knows their market. And even if the person you’re introducing yourself to doesn’t need your services, they’re already imagining the people they know who could use your services.Knowing how to actively listen to othersYou might have heard of the term, “active listening.” But what exactly is it? It’s most easily described as listening and letting the other person know you are listening. So you might listen to what someone is saying and repeat back some of what they said to confirm that you heard it correctly.  Nodding your head at the same time as you’re listening also expresses to the other person that you are taking in what they’re saying. The idea is to let the other person know you haven’t drifted off, and that you’re understanding them clearly.My own experience has shown me that I have better relationships and conversion of sales from discovery calls when I show active listening. Not only because the client feels listened to. But also because my quote later contains everything that they wanted, meaning that they also feel a level of trust when it comes to dealing with me. After all, if I’ve listened to them before they are more likely to trust me to listen to them again if something goes wrong in the future.Following-up with new contacts after the eventFew clients are ever going to sign on the dotted line at a networking event. That’s not really what the event is for. Presenting a solution and furthering the relationship is what happened after the event. The best time to do that is the very next business day. Why? Because that first impression you made is still fresh in their minds. Your pitch is fresh in their memory. And they actually expect it. After all, if they are a business owner, they are probably there for the same reason as you - to find new business opportunities. So what does your follow-up contain? And how do you do it?I’ve personally found that a phone call is too pushy and feels like you’re taking a wrecking ball to someone’s day and forcing your way through the door. None of us enjoys having our day interrupted by some guy desperate to grab a coffee so that they can hard sell you their next big thing. But an email or instant message on LinkedIn or even Instagram can come as a surprise, or even delight someone who wasn’t even expecting you to follow up with them (because let’s face it, this is probably the one part of the formula that gets forgotten the most!)In your email, layout the following:1. A mention of it being a pleasure to meet them at the event.2. Mention something personal that might have been discussed3. Mention something about their business that you’d like to know more about4. Mention something that they may have shown interest in about your business during your conversation5. Suggest a time and day to meet up for a chat, and a length of time to meet for6. Again mention that it was a pleasure to meet them and that you look forward to catching up.Here’s an example:Hi Paul,Was great to meet you at the Networking Drinks last night. I hope you managed to get back in time to watch that new episode of Wandavision with the kids.I was interested in what you were saying about how your business helps train not for profits in software packages as I have worked with a few not for profits myself and it would be good to know exactly the kind of organisations I could refer to you.I noticed you were also interested in the stuff I’m doing with the health sector, so thought there might be a chance to cross-refer some work to each other.Let’s grab a coffee before work on Thursday. I work in the city as well, so how about we make it at 8 am for a quick 20-minute chat at George’s Cafe on Smith Street? You mentioned that you often go there, so thought it would be a good place to meet.Again, it was great to meet you. Hope to catch you on Thursday morning.Of course, Paul is under no obligation to meet you before work at George’s Cafe. But by putting the schedule and location out there, Paul doesn’t have to arrange anything. And it also gives him space to perhaps suggest another time of day. He’ll be more willing to work with you because you let him know to only expect a short 20-minute chat, so he’s not too worried about how it might mess with his day.Be that personI know that I admire those people who seem to be able to network with ease, make new contacts quickly and have a system in place that means that they follow up with everyone they met. And honestly, when they follow up with me, I tend to feel quite special. It’s like they’re telling me that I’m a nice guy who made a great first impression. And who doesn’t like their ego stroked a bit? So imagine the impression you will leave if you be that person at your next networking event?Want to know more about how to do better a small business? Hit the Learn tab at Clickstarter.com.au and start on the road to helping your business to get known, get found and stay known.

It’s no secret that posts to your Facebook page are reaching practically no one these days. Just about all social networks have grown to the point where you have to boost and pay for ads. So with this in mind, where do Groups fit in? This is Clickstarter, I’m Dante St James. This is episode 47… Making Facebook Groups work for you. It’s only in the last 6 months that I’ve finally stopped hearing from marketers and small businesses complaining about the death of organic reach on Facebook - in English, that’s the death of simply posting to your Facebook page and seeing tonnes of people respond to you. The real fact is that organic reach on Facebook died it’s death way back in 2015. So, those days where you could start a brand new at-home business and simply grow it via your Facebook page without paying a cent are well and truly over. But there is another part of Facebook that is getting remarkable levels of engagement and action - and that’s Groups. Last year, Facebook Groups membership grew by 40%. And by October 2018, more than half of Facebook’s 2 billion-strong community were part of Facebook Groups. And if you’re part of some particularly active groups, you’ll notice that a lot of your feed on Facebook is now taken up by posts in those groups, rather than posts from Business pages and news stories. And given that you tend only to join groups that are of similar interests to yourself, it means that you’ll see more from them, because you’re more interested in what they are saying than that random business page you happened to follow unwittingly 7 years ago. The other reason why you’ll see a lot of posts showing up from the groups you’re active in, is because… you’re active in them. If you were active on the Adidas sportswear business page, commenting and liking everything they did, you’d see a lot more Adidas on your feed. Likewise, you see a lot of your best friend’s stuff on your feed because you interact with their stuff a lot. The common key to what you see lots of when you’re on Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn for that matter, is that you see more of what you like, comment and interact with the most. Facebook isn’t manipulating your feed, your choices are. Once you understand this, then you start to understand how to make this fact can work for your business on Facebook. And while it might be tempting to try and increase your influence via your page, you’re going to do it faster via Groups. For example, if your business is a plant nursery and your Facebook page isn’t getting a lot of traction, it’s probably because everything you’re posting is promotional. Buy this. Save on that. We’re open then. We’re closed until. The kind of stuff that, to you seems informational and beneficial. But to your audience it’s just more spam about you, you, you. Not them, them, them. And if there’s one thing we’ve learned about social media, it’s that no one cares about you. They just care about what benefit you bring to them. And your opening hours and sales are not a benefit to them. They are just expected from you. Where Groups come in for this nursery, is in the realm of expertise and advice. You don’t add value to your relationship with a nursery customer by sending more advertising at them. You add value by helping them with service, advice and expertise with the plants you’ve already sold them. But not every plant is the same. People are quite parochial about their plants. Rose people aren’t Azalea people, Azalea people aren’t palm people. Palm people aren’t perennial people. You get the idea. With a country as big as Australia with so many climatic zones, chances are that the usual plant forums online don’t really cover much info on how to grow things in the tropics. So places like Darwin, Broome, Cairns, Townsville and Mackay aren’t really served by Sydney and Melbourne-centric advice and forums. This is where a local nursery can kick in real advice and ideas for their local region. That local nursery can moderate and ru...

So you figure you’re an entrepreneur. You have an idea. So you start building it out. Great! But then there’s all these other people doing all these other things. And you know you can do them better. So... what do you do This is Clickstarter, I’m Dante St James. This is episode 46… Stay in your own lane. It’s tempting when you start up a new business, to try and cover everything. After all, you need the money. So if you’re a plumber, you might try your hand at tiling, bricklaying, painting or even gardening if it helps pay the bills. After all, new business is hard! It doesn’t work from Day 1, and often takes years to stabilise. The danger of staying this way for too long is that you risk swimming outside your lane and being no good at any of the things you’re doing. Especially if you are a sole trader doing it all yourself. You might have a certificate. You might have a bit of expertise and experience. But if you’re spending sixty percent of your time being a tiler, you’re not gonna be much of a plumber after a while. There is a particular kind of business owner who does suit the idea of swimming outside their lane and mixing it with the training squad instead of splashing about with the kids and their kickboards. That’s the entrepreneur. In fact, it’s almost a mandatory sign of being an entrepreneur to diversify their portfolio of skills and try new stuff all the time. Or even throw the proverbial spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. That’s because the entrepreneur isn’t necessarily doing the work themselves. They do all the hustling, the selling, the research, the travel, the organising of offshore staff and the high level work of workflow and systems to manage everything at a peak efficiency. But they aren’t doing the plumbing and tiling themselves. They’re back in the office sending the plumbers and tilers out to work and looking for a way to get more plumbing and tiling done for less cost without reducing their prices. But, let’s say you’re not that entrepreneur. You’re more the sole trader plumber barely paying their bills. Or you’re just making enough from doing bookkeeping and admin work from home to cover the rent and power. Should you suddenly start doing tiling or picking up some babysitting jobs to get some extra coin? Well… maybe. But that extra stuff shouldn’t eat in to your core work. It becomes your side-gig. Or to continue with the swimming analogy, you’re hopping out of the pool and heading in to the gym. As someone who is side-gigging for a consulting firm, Google and Facebook right now, let me tell you it’s hard. Really hard. Because all the things I do, from running a digital agency, to being a digital business advisor , itinerant social media trainer and search engine marketing consultant, are related. Really closely related. So jumping from one gig to the other often doesn’t feel like you’re doing that at all. You’re just switching focus from one task to another, but where each task has a different boss attached to it. But I have it relatively easy compared to someone who is working full time at a job, and then coming home to do something completely unrelated to their core work. Or where you are doing that whole plumber by day, tiler by night thing. You’re not quite sure whether you’re a plumber, a tiler, or some abomination of a hybrid of both. This is why I tend to advise that those who are starting to gain some real momentum, stick to their lane. Stick to their plan. Stick to what is working. If you recall my previous words on how long small business can take to settle down, you’d know that you can’t expect everything to work straight away. And you can’t simply change direction based on a month of working at it. So, if you’ve got enough cash to last until things can start working right, stick to the plan. But if you’re a year in, and things aren’t even beginning to get anywhere near moving, then it might be time to see a business advisor and see if there’s something else at play that’s ...

Receipts everywhere. Bank statements flying in to your post office box. Bills mounting. And you have no idea where your business stands until after tax time when the accountant gives you the all clear. There is a better way. This is Clickstarter, I’m Dante St James. This is episode 43, and Day 9 of my daily series, April Foolproof Your Business. Today… It’s time to move your invoicing to the cloud. The time of writing your invoices out with a carbon copy book is over. It was actually over 20 years ago. But we won’t squabble over that small detail. If your invoicing and payments for invoices are out of control, it’s probably because you’re still trying to do it all manually on paper, or in an Excel spreadsheet. As you’d suspect, accounting and bookkeeping has come a long way in the last 20 years. You’ll probably be familiar with programs like Quicken or MYOB. They’ve been around a long time and have tended to dominate the accounts landscape of most established businesses. But they really do feel clunky and over-the-top for the average small business to use. This is where the current crop of Cloud Accounts systems come in. The top of the pile in terms of popularity is Quickbooks. With over 12 million users worldwide and huge fan base of both businesses and bookkeepers it’s miles ahead of the others. And with a solid 4.5 out of 5 on most review sites, it’s performing well in terms of the opinion of the people who use it most. The biggest pros about it are that it has pretty much everything you’ll ever need in a bookkeeping or accounts system and plenty of pro accountants and bookkeepers know and use it. The cons are that it’s often described as being a little hard to navigate with a design that isn’t very intuitive to move around for those who are used to using the web instead of using software that has been converted to work on the web. Next on the popularity pile is Accounting by Wave, also known as Wave Apps. It’s simple, free and used mostly by sole traders and home business users. Probably because it’s free. I personally have an issue with using a free app to handle my money because it just feels like your money handling is the one thing you should probably not be skimping on when it comes to cost and quality. That said, it’s got close to 9 million worldwide users and does a stellar job of handling your invoices, receipts, and gives handy notifications when things are read, paid or completed. But it is limited. If you want to process payments or do payroll on it, you’ll need to pay. Then there is Xero. Spelt with an X. I get a bit funny about Xero because I am instantly suspicious about any system that higher level users rave about, but whom lower level users complain about not being able to get decent support with. The way that Xero grows is by Accountants and Bookkeepers selling it to their clients. So it’s a little like network marketing. Or affiliate marketing. No that there’s anything wrong with that. I’d be nastier about it, but honestly, it’s not bad at all. It’s easier to use than Quickbooks. It’s more fully-featured than Wave and has integrations with almost everything. It’s a seriously good accounting package, handles payroll, handles payment processing, and has around 1.2 million customers. But it seems to rate overall way less than Quickbooks. Average ratings run from 75 to 80 out of 100 on most review sites, where Quickbooks rates over 90% on just about all of them. And while Quickbooks users don’t usually have anything bad to say about Xero, Xero users seem to be quick to badmouth Quickbooks. I’ve looked at both, I’m all… meh… it does invoices. And they both do solid jobs. Price wise they are similar, so I’m not sure why the hate on either of them. They’re both great products. I’m just not a fan of having my accountant or bookkeeper selling me software. My favourite of the lot of them is Freshbooks. To me, it’s easy, has plenty of power and does the job. That said, I’m about to outgrow it as I move...

The SEO guy says that SEO is everything. The Google Ads guy says that you shouldn’t bother with SEO and just go straight to ads. So who’s right? Well… to be honest… they kinda both are! This is Clickstarter, I’m Dante St James. This is episode 42, and Day 8 of my daily series, April Foolproof Your Business. Today… SEO or Google Ads. A while ago I wrote a blog titled, The SEO Scam. It was all about how companies and backyard self-styled SEO experts were screwing over businesses all over the country by selling them the SEO dream… you know… that one that says, “I don’t care that I am 10 years behind everyone else and made a cheap website with some DIY page builder, this really convincing person in a call centre says that they’ll make me number 1 on Google.” I stand by my opinion that most SEO work is a scam. When someone says that they will get you from zero to hero by putting your website on the first page of Google or even at the very top of the rankings, they are either going to take your money and run, or they are going to use a technique to trick Google’s algorithm that will last may be a week or two before you’re caught out and you’re pushed down lower than you ever were before. So that must mean that Google Ads are the way to go, right? Well, not necessarily. For a lot of small businesses, attempting to advertise on Google is a complete waste of time! For example, in a regional town where a large infrastructure or resources project has recently ended, like Darwin, Gladstone, Port Hedland or Karratha, then trying to advertise yourself as an electrician, plumber or any trade that was in short supply during that economic bump is either going to cost you a fortune every time someone clicks on your ad, or you will be so far behind the biggest payers, that your ad won’t even show. So where do these two things work? Let’s look at an example of a company called Bynoe Drilling, a small business in the rural outskirts of Darwin in the Northern Territory. Despite being around for over 30 years, Gary from Bynoe Plumbing had no idea about online stuff. But he had a website built for him at a reasonable price thinking that the work would come. The problem is that most web designers are not search engine optimisers. In fact, very few are - even those that say they are. What they generally do, is, install a Wordpress website with a drag and drop page builder that they have used on dozens of other websites before you, go and install a plugin called Yoast, write in some pretty words about the page it’s installed on, and call it a day. This is pretty much what had happened with Gary’s site. It looked good. It ran ok. But none of the pre-work was ever done to connect the site to Google via Analytics and Search Console. No technical checking was done to see if the site was actually built in a way that Google could read properly. So when the European travellers who build the site were contacted to ask to help with his Google ranking, their answer was along the lines of “Oh - no we don’t do SEO. You’ll need to pay someone else to do that.” The trouble with SEO is that there are at least 47 major factors to consider when doing it. Everything from the structure of headings on the page, to whether a separate delivery network is used for images and even whether all that code has been rearranged to deliver it as fast as possible. And then, beneath that layer, there are at least 250 factors that Google takes into account each time you type in a search query to it. All this is way too much for Gary to deal with. He just wants more customers to get him to drill for bore water on their properties. He’s not a marketer or a web developer. So when we were approached to help him out with SEO, we took a serious look at the state of his website, his competitors already online, and did a serious and honest side by side comparison on whether it was worth him spending money on optimising for search results on Google - or just going and paying for ad...

I used to marvel at Star Trek episodes where the captain would talk to an-present computer, ask it questions and get answers in return. If only I could bring this technology in to my business. Well… turns out I can! This is Clickstarter, I’m Dante St James. This is episode 41, and Day 7 of my daily series, April Foolproof Your Business where this month, I’ll cover a bunch of quick, useful tools, strategies, marketing methods and ideas to give your small business a shot in the arm. Today… create Trello cards using your voice and Google Assistant. Google’s Assistant is available on almost every phone on the planet. It comes packaged with Android phones, and has, since around mid 2017, also been available on the iPhone. And while most of the time we use it to get the Big G to set timers, reminders and alarms to wake us up in the morning, thanks to the power of tools like If This Then That (or IFTTT) you can take it a whole lot further. You can log notes in a Google Drive spreadsheet, add songs to Spotify playlists, start playing podcasts, send a Tweet and even dictate notes to a document on your phone, computer or via a home device. And now, you can also get it to create you a new task in your Trello board with your voice. All thanks to the power of If This Then That and it’s access to the Google Assistant platform. If you have a Google account as well as a Trello account with an active board, you can use a free applet on IFTTT to hook the two up. In fact, go to https://ifttt.com/trello and you’ll see a range of actions you can take by voice on Trello to free up your hands and take the druge work out of constantly having to note things down in Trello - or even some other systems. The applet I am using all the time is Quickly Add A New Card to a Trello Board. And as it says, I can very quickly talk to Google Assistant and tell it to create a new card on my Trello board of choice, and tell it what to write on the card. I don’t need to set any advanced options on the card yet. I just need to tell it to put that card on my board to the To Do column and there it is. A task is there waiting for me when I log in and action my tasks online in Trello. I also have automated tasks using IFTTT that fill out a line in a spreadsheet every time that I finish a task on Trello, so I have a monthly report ready to go with the tasks that were completed for specific clients that need them. And if you have a task that happens every week that needs to be on your Trello board to remind you to do it each week, then you can set a recurring Trello card through IFTTT so that, say, that task each week you have to create a backup of your podcasts, gets put back in your To Do list each and every Monday even if you’ve completed it previously. Handy huh? But hands-down, the ability to talk to my home, my phone or my computer and put in a to-do task, has to be my favourite little trick to save a lot of typing and time. Got a topic this month to cover in these shorter, daily versions of the podcast? Email darwin@clickstarter.com.au or drop a message via facebook.com/clickstarter I’ll catch you tomorrow as we continue to help your small business to get known, get found and stay known.

If your business finances are out of control, customers keep complaining, staff keep leaving and things aren’t getting done, perhaps you’ve got a bad manager in charge. But what if that bad manager if also you? This is Clickstarter, I’m Dante St James. This is episode 40, and Day 6 of my daily series, April Foolproof Your Business where this month, I’ll cover a bunch of quick, useful tools, strategies, marketing methods and ideas to give your small business a shot in the arm. Today… you might be a crap manager. My business now is running ok. It’s growing and the work is getting done. But I’ve just been through the most awful period of work and rework since it began. I am awesome at selling my product. I am great at marketing myself and my business. I have some very successful funnels of clients that are constantly feeding me with new business. I can build websites, transform social media pages, run high-performance digital marketing campaigns and make cool online video. I can train hundreds of people, write and deliver workshops and then meet a dozen new businesses every week and get them on the road to success. But I am a crap manager. I forget to send invoices. I forget to pay invoices. I forget to pay contractors. I forget that some of my clients exist. Seriously. I actually forget ever meeting some of them, so that when I see them again I introduce myself as if I’ve never sat with them for an hour in a meeting and discussed their business before. I sleep in sometimes from being so tired. I miss meetings because my calendar is a mess. I sometimes deliver a project two months after the due date. And why? Am I incompetent? Am I not able? Am I a bad person? Not at all. I’m very capable and motivated. I’m just a terrible manager of my own time, my workflow and all the things that can make or break a business. I am not a good businessman. I am a great salesman, visionary and worker. But those things on their own do not make a business. You need to be able to deliver what you promise. And that’s why I have just employed an operations manager to sort the mess out. I’m a crap manager, but he seems to be far better at identifying holes in my processes and having solutions for them. He’s also far more focused on the delivery end of the business while I’m far better at the acquisition end. Which is a good match because I can now concentrate on the things I like and am good at, and he can pick up the stuff he likes and is good at. That’s because we don’t know everything, can’t be effective at everything and eventually need sleep. Got a topic this month to cover in these shorter, daily versions of the podcast? Email darwin@clickstarter.com.au or drop a message via facebook.com/clickstarter I’ll catch you tomorrow as we continue to help your small business to get known, get found and stay known.

Be everywhere. On every platform. Make more content. And then double the amount of content you’re making. You’re a media business now. Act like it. Be the authority! Be the expert! Sounds bloody exhausting to me! This is Clickstarter, I’m Dante St James. This is episode 39, and Day 5 of my daily series, April Foolproof Your Business where this month, I’ll cover a bunch of quick, useful tools, strategies, marketing methods and ideas to give your small business a shot in the arm. Today… you can’t be everywhere. I will admit that I look up to Gary Vaynerchuck. While I’m not always a fan of his delivery or his language, I love his attitude. That hard-work, hustle, patience message he pushes really works for me. And I’ve always loved his approach to creating content to make yourself the expert in the room when it comes to what you do. Ask him how to get more customers, he’ll answer, “make more content.” Ask him how to grow your business so that it can create more wealth for your future, he’ll answer, “create more content.”  And while his team of 60 people source, create, distribute and continue to produce more and more content on every imaginable platform for him, that’s not realistic for a sole-trader plumber in Palmerston or Bentley Park, Gulliver, Bundaberg or Karratha. So perhaps instead of trying to be everywhere with everything, you could start on one platform. The platform where your potential customers are. If they are young and love their quick, short, sharp, fun content, make Instagram and Facebook stories. If they are lovers of listening to longer-form audio, then podcasting is the way to go. Are they constantly trawling YouTube for instructional videos and motivation? Be there, if they are the people you want. Even though Facebook is dominant when paired up with Instagram, if your audience isn’t there, then don’t use it. But pick a place that has your target audience on it, and do stuff there. And keep doing it. And be consistent until it’s super easy and fast - then do the same on another place where they are. And do that until it’s fast and easy to do. Then expand again until you reach your capacity without ruining the other work you have to get done. You don’t have to be everywhere - though it kinda feels good to try to be. But the reality is that you are a small business with very limited time and resources. So be smart and get on the platform with the best bang for your buck. And if you don’t know what that is, then get in touch and I’ll show you how to work it out. Got a topic this month to cover in these shorter, daily versions of the podcast? Email darwin@clickstarter.com.au or drop a message via facebook.com/clickstarter I’ll catch you tomorrow as we continue to help your small business to get known, get found and stay known.

Business is doing well. You’re growing it. It’s making money. Clients are happy. So you figure it’s time to start looking more pro. So you look into renting an office so you appear more legit. Wait. There is another way. This is Clickstarter, I’m Dante St James. This is episode 38, and Day 4 of my daily series, April Foolproof Your Business where this month, I’ll cover a bunch of quick, useful tools, strategies, marketing methods and ideas to give your small business a shot in the arm. Today… don’t rent that office! It can be so tempting when you have a service-based business to rent an office space, fit it out, fill it up and put fancy art and impressive signage everywhere. But do you even need it? This was what I asked myself late last year when it finally came time to take Clickstarter full time and get serious about building a real business. I initially looked at opening a shop front. After all, the foot traffic would be great, being amongst the people I wanted to serve in retail and hospitality would be convenient, and I’d finally have space to hold meetings, workshops and get on with the day to day running of this fledgling enterprise, Unfortunately having a shopfront in a shopping centre means you can’t close when the centre is open. You have to be open when they are - and close when they are. No weeknight workshops. No working late on a Sunday night. And no popping out for meetings because I was the only person holding the fort - so I was stuck there. Still not sure what I could have done if I needed a toilet break! Fast forward 6 months and I’m in a shared office space with a media company. They had spare room, I needed a space with air conditioning, lights and a meeting room. They had all three. So instead of renting out a space too big for my needs, I have just enough room to work, a meeting room to use and easy access to things like printers, a kitchen and visitor parking. And the difference in cost is huge. I pay less than one quarter of what I’d be paying if I rented my own office. But sharing with an existing company is only one option. Even in a place like Darwin we have share workspaces like the Darwin Innovation Hub, Rust 490 for creative businesses, Wirraway at the Airport, national office space sharing company Regus has a location in the big Paspaley building in the CBD and there’s Thinklab on NIghtcliff Road at Rapid Creek. They vary wildly with cost with Darwin Innovation Hub and Regus towards the top end of the market and Rust 490 towards the bottom end of the market. They also vary in their offerings of what you get. Some offer a clean meeting room. Others a shared desk space. Others again, offer business lounges for hosting small functions. Some you subscribe to, others you can use casually from visit to visit. Another option may be to enquire on Gumtree and the various business groups on Facebook, on who has space room in their home or workplace that is available to use casually. This can be a smart way to have access to a meeting room without needing to commit to monthly rent. It can also be a great way to casually use a space every now and then. There are some small businesses in Darwin that do have space to share and are willing to share it, but they don’t realise that they can. So reach out and ask - there’s bound to be someone who has a desk or some space they wouldn’t mind sharing for a small charge with another local small business. Got a topic this month to cover in these shorter, daily versions of the podcast? Email darwin@clickstarter.com.au or drop a message via facebook.com/clickstarter I’ll catch you tomorrow as we continue to help your small business to get known, get found and stay known.

My employers used Outlook. My universities have used Office. Most of my clients still use a combination of Windows, Outlook and Office to get them through their day. Meanwhile I use none of these. So, how does that work? This is Clickstarter, I’m Dante St James. This is episode 37, and Day 3 of my daily series, April Foolproof Your Business where this month, I’ll cover a bunch of quick, useful tools, strategies, marketing methods and ideas to give your small business a shot in the arm. Today, why I use a Mac, GSuite and Android in a world of Windows, Outlook and iPhones. This one is bound to fire up fanboys of all persuasions. I admit it. I’m a Mac guy. Not because of the fancy aluminium case. Not because of the Apple logo. After all it doesn't even light up anymore. I use my Mac because it’s just easier to do what I do on one. Back some years ago when I was still a determined Windows user and something of a Mac hater, I made a decision that anyone who knew me then thought was crazy. I was building a new team of digital content people. And I decided that we were all going to use Macs. My reasons were simple. Yes they cost more, but on average, at the time, you’d get 3-4 years of solid use from a Mac. Windows machines seemed to start running out of puff after 12 months of use, and were practically useless after 2 years of daily use. No one in the company wanted to support Macs, so to avoid their ridiculous antivirus installations, admin rights lockdowns and controls that don’t work for a digital environment, I ordered Macs so I could work around the IT department instead of being held back by them. And finally, the time saved on wrestling with Windows updates breaking things, taking forever to download and install and the myriad of configuration options and endless problems with software compatibility, we opened our Macs and just got to work. It wasn’t about brand. It was about efficiency. It was about saving time. And I’m still a Mac guy to this day. I opened my new Macbook Pro recently, set off a copy of my old one onto it and was working on it within an hour. A colleague bought a high end Windows notebook the other day. So far, we’ve spend parts of 3 days unloading the bloatware from it, updating the operating system, downloading software, reissuing licenses - and we’re still a good week away from it all being usable enough to simply open up and get started. Secondly, I’m a GSuite user. That’s the business version of Gmail for those of you who are saying “huh?” My last employer forced me to use Outlook. Every day, it was a process of digging through spam and junk mail and phishing attempts and scam email to get to the stuff I actually needed. Colleagues were getting viruses on their computers. People were handing over credit card details to Indian “support reps.” It was a nightmare. With GSuite I think I have only seen two spam emails in about 3 months. I don’t know what it is they do over at Google, but it works. And because it’s a cloud system, I don’t use WeTransfer or Dropbox or any of those annoying third party systems to load up and send big files. I just load to them up to my email, GSuite puts this in my account’s storage and sends a link for people to download it. No memberships or subscriptions required. Not bad huh? My Outlook mates are still waiting for approval to upgrade their Dropbox to a paid version so they can open some file another colleague sent them. I’m also, despite being a Mac guy, an Android user when it comes to my phone. I used to be afraid of Android because my iPhone let me send text messages from my Mac. So I held on for years while my friends on Android leapt ahead with bigger screens, more options, better cameras and more ways to integrate with more systems. Then one day a little feature called Android Messages popped up in my Chrome browser and I’ve never looked at an iPhone since. Once I could send SMS from my computer without picking up my Google Pixel 2 and 3XL phone, the iPhone w...

I deserve this. I’ve worked hard. I’ve done my time. I’ve paid my dues. After all the hard yakka, I deserve the jet ski, Audi, Ranger Raptor, $5000 computer or new iPhone. So goes the downfall of a small business. This is Clickstarter, I’m Dante St James. This is episode 36, and Day 2 of my daily series, April Foolproof Your Business where this month, I’ll cover a bunch of quick, useful tools, strategies, marketing methods and ideas to give your small business a shot in the arm. Today, the Fancy Trap. My uncle, who passed a few years back had a home construction business in the 80s. At the height of it, he employed over 150 people, had built some 500 homes, had offices in various parts of New South Wales, and had built a palatial mansion with a Sydney northern beaches outlook that was just magnificent. He drove an oversized Ford Bronco and he and my aunt lived a life of luxury travel, luxury cars, luxury food and a tendency to be showy and overly generous with gifts to those they loved. They were at the top of their game. What wasn’t obvious to everyone around them, was the state of the accounts. While there was plenty of cashflow coming in, my aunt and uncle were workers, not business people. They didn’t understand much about accounting, tax, planning for retirement or macro-economic indicators in the finance pages of the newspaper that were warning of an impending recession that would have a devastating effect on the building industry. And of course, not knowing this, they expanded their business, took on more debt to finance more projects and continued to upgrade their lifestyle to match the extra revenue that came in. When Paul Keating’s “recession we had to have” took hold, 150 people lost their jobs, dozens of projects stalled, payments faltered and within just one month, this family home builder had gone under. In just one month, a life of luxury had been reduced to rubble. There was no safety net, no savings and nothing left once the liquidator had finished distributing money from the asset sales to the creditors. My uncle, he never recovered. He lived the rest of his life a broken recluse. It had lasting effects on his wife, his children and a whole generation of we cousins, nieces and nephews who became used to the cautionary tale of the uncle who got too big, too bold, too fancy, too fast. That lesson certainly stopped me from attempting to start a business as an adult. All I recall is that, the one relative I knew who had a business, had failed. And not only failed, but ended up a shell of a man with lifelong mental demons that never left him until his dying day. Talking with my parents and my cousins about this many years later in a new century, I get a more clear picture of what happened. It’s not so much a story of a recession, or an industry in flux or even uncontrolled business growth. From their perspective, they noticed an out of control personal spending habit. All fuelled by a desire to be liked by people. It meant that employees were being paid almost 80% more than anyone else in their industry. It meant that, for the sake of ease, contractors were engaged who weren’t anywhere near reasonably priced. Site foremen were gifted $50,000 cars (a lot of money in the early 90s!) and lavish parties were thrown for staff several times a year. There was expensive food, premium alcohol, strippers, gold watches, three and four international holidays every year and high-ranking executives who were skimming the books. By the time the recession hit and building slowed down, the company was $22 million in debt with no invoices being paid for work done and no way to meet its financial obligations. Even once the assets were sold, they were sold at a time when there was no money around to waste on fancy stuff. Assets valued at nearly $8 million sold for less than $700,000. Including the cars, mansion and two holiday homes. It was truly a fire sale. The desire to be fancy is almost bred in to us. Status is shown...

Facebook Groups. They’re fast-paced, they’re full of people buying, selling, coaching, communicating and more. But people with businesses are ruining them. So here’s what NOT to do on a Facebook Group. This is Clickstarter, I’m Dante St James. This is episode 35, but also Day 1 of my daily series, April Foolproof Your Business where this month, I’ll cover a bunch of quick, useful tools, strategies, marketing methods and ideas to give your small business a pre-Dry Season tidy-up (if you’re up in the north of Australia) or a Autumn clean if you’re down south. Today, Facebook Groups. Have you been in one of those Buy, Sell & Swap groups or perhaps one of those Local Business groups on Facebook where you’re happily browsing the memorabilia and cast-off furniture only to be assaulted by a bunch of posts from people trying to sell their Scentsy wax melts, or their PHATT meal plan or their personal training that is gonna strip fat and build muscle or some Make $10,000 in 30 Days work from home scam? While network marketing rogues are quickly wiped from the groups fairly quickly, it doesn’t take long for the local businesses and digital marketers to fill the gap with their special website packages and mindset coaching plans… or even their super special on Greek sweets! But is pitching your business a big no no on Facebook Groups? Well, not necessarily. An example of where it has worked, is with a particular local pest controller who posts his service offering once a week into the Darwin Buy, Sell & Swap groups. The result has been additional likes to his page, additional jobs being booked directly due to those posts, and the creation of an effective new sales channel for him. Similarly, a client of mine, another pest controller, but this time on the Gold Coast, has been posting little bits of info about various pests that are found in their neighbourhood to their local neighbourhood info page on Facebook. They too, as a local in the neighbourhood, have seen significant take-up of their services as a result. And while their ads haven’t been ads, their presence and participation in that group on other things aside from their business, have made them the go-to pest controller in their suburb. But examples of where this doesn’t work, is where you are grabbing some graphics from the network marketing company you’re a part of, posting them 2, 4 or 6 at a time with a copy and paste job full of emojis and extraordinary claims about how much weight you’ll lose, how much more energy you’ll feel, how much money you’ll make or how some herb or supplement will cure cancer, alkalise your blood or some other physiological claim that isn’t backed by any kind of science apart from a flyer from the network marketing company. Or where it’s the kind of group that is about community, conversation and specific topics, rather than buying, selling and swapping. Those who can tell the difference, like my examples earlier, seem to be doing pretty well. Got a topic this month to cover in these shorter, daily versions of the podcast? Email darwin@clickstarter.com.au or drop a message via facebook.com/clickstarter I’ll catch you tomorrow as we continue to help your small business to get known, get found and stay known.

These days, everyone is a social media expert. Or a web designer. Or a digital coach There seems to be as many digital marketing experts as there are personal trainers. So should you start a digital agency? Absolutely yes. This is episode 34 of Clickstarter, the regional Australian Marketing Podcast.

On Monday I shared Charlotte’s dilemma with ads on Facebook. That 20% rule was killing her ads. There was a way around it that involved using video, but it doesn’t solve the bigger issue… that people just don’t trust ads anymore. This is episode 33 of Clickstarter, the regional Australian Marketing Podcast. I’m Dante St James. If you were following along last episode you’ll remember Charlotte, who was struggling to come up with new ways to work around the Facebook Ads platform’s dislike of ads that contained too much text - or rather, that contained text ib more than 20% of the graphic space of the ad. One way around this was to use video instead of a photo. The initial thumbnail would then be compliant with the 20% rule, but the rest of the ad playing could then have as much text as you like. But the problem is that an ad that looks like an ad, acts like an ad and actually IS an ad, is going to be ignored by a big chunk of your target audience because they’re not on Facebook or Instagram or even Google for the ads. They’re there for their own reasons. And ads are that rude guest at dinner who only showed up to introduce their new sales scheme to you. So what is the alternative to advertising. Is there such a thing as advertising without advertising?

Most of us who advertise on Facebook have been here. We put a graphic together with words superimposed on it only to be told by the Facebook ads platform that there’s too much text and the ad won’t run. How do you work around this? This is episode 32 of Clickstarter, the regional Australian Marketing Podcast. I’m Dante St James. This is the question that one of my consultation clients asked this week. In Charlotte’s case (and I’m taking a punt that Charlotte doesn’t mind that I reference her name and business for illustrative purposes) she has a business dealing in the English language. Whether that’s in proofreading for academics, assisting visa-applicants with their English language proficiency tests or providing one-to-one tutoring in the speaking of conversational English, Charlotte’s business is all about words. Both spoken and written. It’s a very common problem that we, as marketers of our businesses, often encounter. It’s what is known as the 20% rule.

You see all those amazing posts on social media where it looks like some graphic designer has put together a masterpiece. Meanwhile you’re struggling to stick words on top of a photo. How in the heck do they pull this stuff off? This is episode 31 of Clickstarter, the regional Australian Marketing Podcast.

Instagram. It’s always been the home of the selfies, the wealthies, the foodies and the healthies. Flexing muscles, unboxing parcels, luxury travels and perfectly-plated food. But a change is coming and small business needs to be ready. This is episode 30 of Clickstarter, the regional Australian Marketing Podcast.

Our buddy, Danté from Clickstarter in the Top End returns to give us the low down on the latest tips from the horse’s mouth to help you optimise your Facebook Ads to get the best from your social campaigns. OK. So it was technically not camping per se. Nor was it called Facebook camp. Its official name was the Facebook […] The post #051 – Optimise your Facebook Ads in 3 steps appeared first on A Digital Marketing Podcast - Destroy Digital.

In Darwin, it’s another day, another long-time retail business closing down. It’s not fun to watch. It’s not fun for those going through it. You may be surprised to know that this is not just happening in Darwin. It’s happening everywhere. This is episode 29 of Clickstarter, the regional Australian Marketing Podcast.

They pout. They bare their flesh. They filter their photos to the outer limits of reality. Their entire business model is based around you giving them products or money in exchange for their influence. But it is worth it? This is episode 28 of Clickstarter, the regional Australian Marketing Podcast.

Just when you think you know it all, along comes an opportunity to completely throw out your playbook and accept that neither you, nor anyone else - knows everything there is to know about Facebook. This is episode 27 of Clickstarter, the regional Australian Marketing Podcast.

Way back in 1624, John Donne wrote that “No man is an Island, entire of it self; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main.” Why am I quoting long-dead poets in a podcast about marketing, technology and business? Because there’s a lesson in there for all of us working on our own businesses. None of us can do it all on our own. A lesson that I’m going through right now at Clickstarter.

Our final episode of 2018 on the final day on 2018, which was entirely by chance that it worked out this way… and ending a three-part series on the three pillars of Marketing we hold at Clickstarter. We started by explaining the idea of Getting Known, then last episode is was all about Getting Found on Google and this episode, we’re looking at how to Stay Known. And the topic of staying known tends to go hand in hand with the idea of customer retention.

As I mentioned last episode, as the year wraps up, I’m looking at the Three Marketing Pillars that we have built Clickstarter around. This week, it’s Get Found. And this is basically all about Google. Which is a combination of increasing your search rank on Google, buying ads on Google Ads and being present on Google My Business.

Clickstarter is built around 3 pillars of marketing. The first is "Get Known." This is the part of marketing where you need to reach people, often for the first time. We look at some of the methods of doing that, and how effective or ineffective they are.

In the retail world, product placement is everything. In Woolworths and Coles supermarkets you’ll always see Coca Cola in the soft drinks aisle before you see Pepsi. Coke knows the value of being the first thing you see. In the TV show Sex & The City, the sight of a constantly upside down lit-up Apple logo led annoyed designers at the tech giant to turn the logo around so that it was showing correctly to those who saw it lit up and open, rather than to those who only ever see it dark and closed. Apple understood, eventually the power of placing that logo in a place and a position that optimised the ability for it to be seen by an audience. Likewise, as I look around any airport, I see strategically placed advertising for liquor brands, chocolate brands and perfume brands. The companies that pay the most have their product, logos and posters in the most prominent position. They know the power of being not only seen, but being seen above all others in that location. In small business it may seem impossible to get that kind of placement or exposure on the street front, in a shopping centre or on any form of advertising. Big business and franchises dominate streetscapes, TV, radio and even Google search results. So how can you compete. Small business is at it’s best when it finds a niche to serve. Likewise, small business advertises at it’s best when it finds an undersold space to advertise in. Here’s three spaces to check out that big business tends to either ignore or play poorly in. Facebook - big business is really bad at Facebook Ads. That’s because their advertising is usually managed by agencies who either don’t know how to use Facebook Ads effectively, or they are stuck in a 1990s mentality where budgets go to TV, outdoor and print because that’s who throws the biggest parties and gives them kickbacks. That’s why you rarely see any ads in regional Australia for. Big brands. It’s a realm that they simply have no idea how to behave in. Late night and weekend radio and TV. While prime time is TV gold, and radio is crowded out by big business during breakfast and drive-home commuter periods, late night and weekend daytimes have much lower audiences and your can often pick up much cheaper advertising rates at those times. That means you can dominate those times with your message at a time when the big guys have no focus,. Sport and kids clubs sponsorship. While I am never a massive fan of this medium as a form of advertising, there are some niches where sponsoring strategically can really pay off. While sponsoring the Under 8s G grade footy team probability won’t win you too much in the way of exposure or recognition, sponsoring space in club newsletters, end of season books and club calendars buys you attention in a space where big business never goes, because the audience is too small. Just as long as you recognise that you are not reaching lots of people, but reaching people who will be looking deeply in to that’s publication, you can expect a small, but dedicated crowd to notice you. I’d love to hear your ways of reaching an audience that’s a little out of the box. Email darwin@clickstarter.com.au or following Clickstarter on Facebook. And remember that if you’re not doing something this week to get known, get found or stay know, your business is standing still.

Jargon and buzzwords are the killler of attention span. When you have a message to deliver to the masses and it contains a steady stream of marketing jargon, digital buzzwords and corporate-styled sayings, you will lose your crowd faster than Greg Norman losing a golf round at his peak after leading all the way. And for that matter sport-themed metaphors are just as bad, if not worse, because despite the number of people in to sport, there are actually even more people NOT into sport. Especially when that sport is quite niche, like spectator golf. We get it. You have a message. You have a lot to say. You have a mission. And all those things are important. But you are responsible for putting all that passion and knowledge in to a neat bundle that people can understand, otherwise you’re wasting your time. No one is hearing you, because the only people listening are already your dedicated fans. This goes especially for small business. You are up against competitors in big concrete boxes with millions in sales and millions in advertising budgets. So when you get stuck in a rut of conversation with your clients and customers where you are constantly talking about what you are interested in, you are squandering a chance to get to know what THEY are interested in. And we all like to deal with a friend. Not a ranting politician. Achieving this comes down to a very important first piece of research you should do before you embark on a journey to speak to your customers either online, in person or in a conference or workshop setting. Know who your audience is. And there’s three great ways you can learn that. Look at the topic of your conference, podcast, Facebook page or community. Chances are if that topic is the reason for people being there, then that’s what you should be speaking on. Despite your mission, passion or motivation for that day, you are the one that needs to meet your audience where they are at - not they having to meet you where you are at. Read a bit from the people who have written before you, or if it’s a speaking occasion, then check out those who are speaking before you. If people are moving from their content to yours quickly, it can be helpful to provide a kind of gentle ramp between what they were presenting and what you’re presenting. Listen to the conversations around you. Read the interactions online. You can learn a remarkable amount from just reading and listening. So many speakers and social media influencers want to walk in to a room or a forum and just launch in to a Shakespearean rant. The key to being better able to hold attention, is spending some time before you speak or write, simply turning up and shutting up. I’d love to hear your thoughts on how you manage to better maintain and foster attention in your business. Email darwin@clickstarter.com.au or follow Clickstarter on Facebook. And remember, if you’re not doing something to get known, get found or stay known this week, your business is standing still.

Karin Høgh er i studiet og Brian Brandt her cohost. Han ejer ClickStarter, hvor han hjælper virksomheder med at komme i gang med ehandel og drive flere kunder ind i deres shop. Cooltool: http://findenvinder.dk/ Har du brug for at finde en tilfældig vinder i en konkurrence. Fx på Facebook eller i dit kommentarspor på bloggen - ELLER til et event, så skriv antallet af deltagere og du får et tilfældigt nummer. Med en flot grafik koblet på. Brian råder til, at du spiller på flere heste, nor det gælder annoncering af din webshop.  Jo større spredning, jo mindre sårbar er du. Adwords stopper dig måske. Facebook smider dig ud. Hvad så ? Der sker også nogle ting på Googles søgemaskine, som betyder, at vi ryger måske om på de næste sider til fordel for betalte reklamer.  Brian skriver også om det i sit nyhedsbrev her.  Så du skal overveje at gøre brug af nogle flere kanaler, eks.  dba.dk forums Trendsales Pricerunner, Kelkoo Shopping Bing Ads Nyhedsbreve Postkort når andre shops sender pakker ud.  Hvor meget skal du give dig selv i løn?  Hvis man som Karin har en enkeltmandsvirksomhed, så er hun ikke på fast løn. Hun overfører bare penge til sin private konto. Derimod, hvis man som Brian Brandt har et ApS, så skal man sætte et beløb af i løn til sig selv og eventuelle ansatte.   Øverst på siden kan du se, hvordan du kan abonnere på Solopreneurcast via smartphone og tablet, eks.  Men der er en ny mulighed: Få mail om nye episoder * skal udfyldes   Email  *   Fornavn *   Efternavn  

Karin Høgh podcaster hver uge og inviteter hver gang en anden soloselvstændig til en snak om det at være alene i sin virksomhed og at drive sin virksomhed på nye måder.  Solopreneurcast episode 61 gik lidt ud over de sædvanlige 30 minutter - for vi kom rigtig godt ind i en snak om webshops.  Brian Brandt fra er jyden som kalder en spade for en spade - sådan lyder hans tagline. Han har virksomheden  Clickstarter   hvor han rådgiver andre webshopejere. Han er også manden bag Shopcamp som er et todages intensivt kursus, hvor deltagerne arbejder konkret med deres egne shops.    Brian er far til tre børn og hans ægtefælle Camilla har http://sovedyret.dk/ som sælger tilbehør til at putte småbørn. En webshop, som Brian prøver mange nye ting af på og som nyder godt af hans store viden om ehandel.  Cooltool denne gang er også for webshopejere - men også for andre. EN chatfunktion, som man kan slå til, hvis man har lyst til at give kunderne direkte hjælp via websitet.  Keyreply.com/chat http://www.buzzfeed.com/americanexpress/10-tools-every-entrepreneur-should-be-using-right-now?b=1#.jf8vNrP36

Vidste du at Brian Brandt kodede sine første hjemmesider i Notepad og at han næsten kaster op hvis han skal lave Cold Calling? Jeg har inviteret min gode ven Brian Brandt i studiet for at tale om salget af sin virksomhed WPDK til Ørskovgruppen og hvordan de sammen startede den nye virksomhed ClickStarter. Brian var ellers glad for sit liv som selvstændig, men så alligevel nogle muligheder der var for gode at sige nej til.... Læs mere The post Hvordan sælger du din virksomhed og hvad skal du tænke over i processen? appeared first on Online Markedsføring - Mikael Rieck om Effektiv Internet Marketing.