Improving Social Media Skills While Busy With Business Challenges

If you’re an entrepreneur, you are probably aware that in this day and age, not only do you need a Facebook page for your business, you also need strong digital marketing skills. As a blogger specializing in Facebook page management, I am also aware that business owners have a hectic schedule, leaving little time and energy for things such as Facebook management.

If your business is large and established enough to appoint a person (or a social media team) to manage your Facebook page, that’s well and good. Still, you are the ‘big guy’ and they will still need your supervision. If you’re not at that level yet with your business, your most feasible option is to manage your Facebook page yourself.

This may seem like a lot of work to handle – especially with your already busy workload – but don’t worry. With these tips, Facebook management will seem like a breeze to a busy entrepreneur like you!

In this article, I’m going to share with you tips on improving social media skills – even while you’re busy in other areas of your business. Let’s take a look!

Continue reading Improving Social Media Skills While Busy With Business Challenges

20+ Ways to Use Apple Watch for Social Media to Get More Done!

Do you spend a lot of time pulling out your iPhone to check your social media channels?

Maybe you’re managing social media for clients or constantly checking your own channels for new updates.

We’re all guilty of that.

The bottomline is that social media can be time-consuming and interrupt our focus if we let it.

This can lead to a loss in productivity and if you’re a business owner, lost revenue.

What if you could improve the time you spend on social media each day?

For example, spend 60 minutes a day instead of getting lost for hours in your newsfeed?

In this article I’ll show you some ways you can use Apple Watch for social media.

This way you can begin to improve your productivity and accomplish more in your business.

Are you struggling with your social media marketing? Apple Watch can help you stay on-top of your game. Here’s how.Click To Tweet

Let’s take a look at some of the ways you can use Apple Watch for social media.

This way you can stay on-top of conversations, capitalize on new content ideas, and get more done on your social media channels!

20+ Ways to Use Apple Watch for Social Media

Continue reading 20+ Ways to Use Apple Watch for Social Media to Get More Done!

How to Publish to Apple News to Increase Your Blog Readership

Do you have your own blog?

Are you getting regular traffic coming to your site to view your content?

Or maybe you’re creating lots of new content but your audience isn’t engaging with it – even if you’re promoting it to your email list and through your social media channels.

If you find you’re in this situation and you’re not seeing the results you would like, it’s time to look at spreading out your content to other channels to help you do some of the heavy lifting and drive more readers back to your site!

One way to do this is using Apple News Publisher.

If you’re not familiar with Apple News, it’s a news reader similar to Flipboard where you can easily view your favorite news sources, blogs and more from your iOS devices.

With more than 1 billion iOS devices sold, how would you like to bring some of those users over to your site to read your content?

In this article, you’ll learn how to publish to Apple News. This way you can start capitalizing on the large number of iOS users who will be using Apple News to read their favorite content.

Let’s take a look at how to add your blog to Apple News Publisher.

How to Publish to Apple News Continue reading How to Publish to Apple News to Increase Your Blog Readership

My Review of Platform University Membership – Does It Make the Grade?

Are you struggling to get your business off the ground?

Maybe you’re putting in the time but not seeing the results you would like?

Or you have big aspirations but you’re a solopreneur and don’t have a team to run ideas by?

What if you could get help launching your business and developing your personal platform?

Would that help you alleviate some of the stress you experience and propel you towards achieving your goals?

For the past few months, I’ve been using Platform University to help to build my platform.

In this article I wanted to provide a review of Platform University to help you decide it it’s right for you and your business.

What is Platform University?

Platform University is an online community from Michael Hyatt, author of the New York Times best-seller, Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World.

Instead of using Facebook Groups to answer questions and connect with their audience, Platform University takes a different route and goes much deeper. It is a structured online community you can go to for help on many different topics business owners often have questions about.

These include topics such as branding, finding a mentor, general business advice, and so on.

Areas inside Platform University:

  • Members forum
  • Master Classes
  • Member Makeover
  • Backstage Pass
  • Live Q&A Calls
  • And much more

If you’ve tried other online communities before and felt they were underwhelming, let’s put Platform University to the test to see if it earns a passing grade.

A Review of Platform University

Continue reading My Review of Platform University Membership – Does It Make the Grade?

How to Add YouTube Video Cards to Your YouTube Videos

Would you like to drive more traffic to your website from your YouTube videos?

Or maybe you want to raise money for a project you’re working on?

YouTube Video Cards can be a great tool to build engagement and grow your online presence using your YouTube videos.

In this article, you’ll learn how to add YouTube Video Cards to your YouTube videos.

What are YouTube Video Cards?

YouTube Video Cards are a way to make your YouTube videos more interactive.

You do this by adding cards to your videos.

Here’s an example of YouTube Video Cards in a video.

Example of YouTube video cards
Use YouTube Video Cards to deliver a call-to-action to viewers

YouTube Video Cards are similar to annotations.

Right now, cards are not replacing annotations (yet). I would think of them as an evolution of annotations.

Unlike annotations that didn’t work on mobile devices, video cards will!

One other nice feature about video cards is that you can add up to five cards to each of your YouTube videos at a time.

This way you can include a different call-to-action based on the part of the video someone is viewing.

Types of YouTube Video Cards

Adding YouTube Video Cards
Some video cards might need to be enabled

There are six types of YouTube Video Cards you can use with your videos.

1. Associated website

If you have your website setup in your YouTube account, you can use this card to link off to it.

If you need to setup your website on your channel, you can do that here.

2. Fundraising

Encourage users to contribute to your projects or supported fundraising sites.

In order to use the fundraising card, your project needs to be on a white-listed fundraising site.

Approved fundraising sites for YouTube Video Cards include:

  • Indiegogo
  • Patreon
  • Subbable
  • Kickstarter

3. Merchandise

Feature a licensed product on supported merchandise sites from a YouTube Video Card.

Examples of approved merchandising sites include:

  • Google Play
  • iTunes
  • Spreadshirt
  • District Lines
  • Topspin
  • Cafepress
  • Jinx
  • Shopify
  • Songkick

4. Video

If you want to promote another YouTube video, you can use the video card option.

In order to link to a video, it has to be a public YouTube video.

If you link to an individual video in a playlist, your YouTube Video Card will default to the playlist.

5. Playlist

If you want to promote a specific playlist using video cards, you can do that as well.

To do that, go to your playlists on YouTube and copy the URL.

YouTube video playlists
Add single videos or an entire playlist to YouTube Video Cards

5. Fan Funding

Allow fans to show their appreciation for the videos you create my making a monetary contribution.

In order to use the fan funding card, you need to enable this option in the YouTube status and features section.

Fan funding in YouTube Video Cards
Add the fan funding card to let fans back your YouTube videos

To learn more about approved retailers and fundraisers on the whitelisted external URLs page.

Now that you know about the types of cards, let’s take a look at how to add YouTube Video Cards to your own videos.

How to Add YouTube Video Cards to Your Videos

Continue reading How to Add YouTube Video Cards to Your YouTube Videos

5 Tools to Create Images for Social Media People Love

Would you like to create better images for social media?

Studies have shown that we favor visual learning.

Even Facebook posts with a photo accounted for 87% of total interactions.

But what do you do if you’re not a graphic designer and you want to create visually stunning images for your social media posts?

This article is going to teach you about tools you can use to create images for social media.

Not only will they be high quality and look professional, you can do them yourself!

Why is it so difficult to create images?

In order to create great visuals to go along with your content, you used to have a background in graphic design.

This meant knowing how to use a complex program such as Adobe Photoshop or another graphics program.

Today, modern marketing has evolved.

You no longer need to rely on a designer.

But you’re now expected to be able to create these visuals yourself.

In most cases, most most social media managers are given dimensions to use on social media or a Facebook image size cheat sheet to work with.

But how do you create images that look great without a background in graphic design?    

Fortunately, there are a lot of great tools available to help you create images for social media.

In no particular order, here are five of my favorite tools for creating graphics.

Tool to create images for social media Continue reading 5 Tools to Create Images for Social Media People Love

85+ Time-Saving Social Media Keyboard Shortcuts – Infographic

Are you looking to become more efficient with your social media management?

This way you can spend less time managing your channels and more time creating content to grow your business.

One of the fastest ways is to learn social media keyboard shortcuts.

What are keyboard shortcuts?

For those of you not familiar with keyboard shortcuts, they’re a faster way to access features within a program without the need to access a menu.

Instead, you can press a combination of keys to perform the same function.

My favorite keyboard shortcut is Command + Shift + 4 to take a screenshot.

This particular shortcut has saved me lots of time when creating blog posts or writing articles because I can quickly take a screenshot using just my keyboard.

Why are social media shortcuts important?

Today, we aren’t just using keyboard shortcuts on the computer.

We’re also spending more of our time on social networks.

Because we don’t have a lot of time to waste, we need to be aware of the many social media shortcuts that are available.

This way we can work faster because of the demands on our time.

This article is going to take a look at social media keyboard shortcuts for Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google Plus and Tumblr.

Social media keyboard shortcuts

Continue reading 85+ Time-Saving Social Media Keyboard Shortcuts – Infographic

How to Download Facebook Videos In Four Easy Steps!

Have you ever come across a video on Facebook that you wanted to download to view later on?

One way that you can save a copy of the video on Facebook is to use the save on Facebook feature.

But that only let’s you bookmark the video to view later on.

What if you lost your original video file and you want to upload it to another social network such as Instagram or YouTube?

Instead of spending hours re-creating your video, you can download a copy from Facebook.

This article is going to teach you how to download Facebook videos in just a few steps.

How to download Facebook videos

How to download Facebook videos

Continue reading How to Download Facebook Videos In Four Easy Steps!