I created a free marketing plan recently for a plastic surgeon based in Harley street.

Currently, he is not using any form of social media other than a Facebook page and he was really taken aback when I managed to find his top competitors are already very influential on Twitter, and he hasn’t even tweeted yet.

I think it can be very demoralising when you see your competitor has thousands of followers and you seem to be following 500 with only 50 following you back! But there ARE ways to get ahead of the competition, it requires consistency and determination.

Follow your competitors feeds

Rather than see competitors as a threat, I followed most of my competitors in the London area and made a Twitter list for them. This way I can get ideas about what promotions they are offering, which potential customers I can engage with and who to follow.

Most of my competitors have been in the freelance marketing scene for a number of years which makes them the PERFECT candidates to learn from. I check which of their posts received the most engagement, which blog posts had the most shares and look to recreate that using my own products – then I follow all THEIR followers and engage with them. 

Blogging

I’ve spent hours, weeks, months trying to source the best blogging templates, the best marketing bloggers, HOW to add calls to action in a blog post, you name it, and last year, a business blog I created literally blew up and we doubled our traffic within 6 months without paid ads – it took A LOT of marketing though!

The issue with paying for ads is that the moment you stop the paid ad, you lose your potential customer where as blogging is free and in the long term can really increase your organic traffic. In fact, I doubled my last clients traffic by creating 2-3 blog posts a week all under 500 words and you can do it too, it just takes time and effort.

No time? Try outsourcing it to a freelancer on people per hour.

Not sure how to blog? Simply take a look at my tips below

• • Create Emotion –  The most shareable content on Pinterest ignites one of the following emotions. Surprise, fear, joy, sadness, anger, or disgust.

• • Useful – Why is this blog post so valuable? Ultimately how will your service /product make my life easier?

• • A Catchy Title –  Titles simply sell the content. ‘How to ‘ posts are very popular for example, another example would be ’10 reasons why you shouldn’t ………..’. Need ideas? Then think about using a title generator. 

• • SEO – Try to be as specific as possible with your keywords. If you need assistance with SEO, then look to download a wordpress Plug in such as Yoast. 

• • Informative – Add a fact here, for example, if I were to write a blog post about why a customer should buy my photos, I would add an interesting fact. ‘Did you know that 90% of the transmitted information in the human brain is visual’ 

• • Images – Taking the above fact, we can see how a great image can be a large factor in closing that sale. It also helps to break up the monotony of long paragraphs. Try taking a look at Canva, a fantastic platform with templates specifically for Twitter, Pinterest and the added option to add text to your image.

Making Twitter Lists Of Your Influencers

I think Twitter lists are VERY underrated. It’s vital a business finds influencers in their niche, so they can easily retweet appropriate content to their followers.

If you wish to follow influences outside your niche, then use your personal Twitter account, not your business one. Interested in influential marketers? Check out this Forbes list!

Sharing On 1 Platform Only

I hate to tell you this, but when I started creating 3 blog posts a week for my last client, I had to SHARE them on multiple social media platforms, NOT just my clients Twitter and Facebook pages. You have spent a whole morning creating a masterpiece. Don’t you want people to actually SEE it?

Take Action – Here are my top Facebook groups and Google Plus groups for business. This is where I share all my content. I also use Triberr where other Twitter users in my niche SHARE my content to their followers for FREE. You can find more about that here.

Triberr

Triberr is a social network for bloggers. The idea is to find other bloggers who write about the same topics. These writers group up in a tribe.

Whenever one blogger writes a post, the others read, comment and share it with their social networks.

The best part is, you pool together all your followers giving yourself a larger reach. So the more tribes you join, the larger your social media reach.