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Modern Social Media Marketing Full Training

If you are promoting any kind of website, you probably have heard of the online marketing concept social media marketing. In fact, if you are the typical online entrepreneur or marketing consultant, you probably use that phrase quite frequently.

Unfortunately, social media marketing is one of those concepts that don't get any clearer the more people repeat its name. Just like with the word “love” the more people repeat the word, the more confusion it creates. What can pass for social media marketing to one person may be a complete out and out joke to another person. It really is quite bad and it leads to a tremendous amount of confusion and failed marketing campaigns.

Make no mistake about it. If you want your social media marketing efforts to yield solid results, you have to get out from under common mistakes even pros make. I wish I could have told you these mistakes earlier because you probably would have saved a tremendous amount of time, effort and money.

Well, the good news is by learning these mistakes now, you can go a long way in avoiding them in the future. Here are the 10 most common reasons marketers fail with social media.

It doesn't really matter how big your marketing budget is. Chances are there will always be a person in the executive team who expects your online marketing efforts to go large or go home. The idea is that you need to get out of the gate and take no prisoners.

While there is a lot to commend this strategy, it's too easy to overdo things. It's too easy to just blow through a tremendous amount of money and effort and have very little to show for it. Social media marketing is essentially a long term engagement. It doesn't really fit well with a one shot big shot approach because you don't know all the variables coming in.

Strategic information regarding consumer intelligence, audience insights and audience profiling are things that you discover along the way. You can do some advance research but at best, they are shots in the dark. You will only truly know in a real world campaign scenario once you have already jumped in with both feet and done the marketing. It reveals itself as you try out your approach.

Given this reality, if you adopt a one shot big shot approach, you end up blowing your money only to end up with seriously flawed or partial at best hindsight. Do yourself a big favor and avoid this mindset. Instead, commit to a slow start.

In the beginning, you're just feeling things out and eventually, you will get enough of a clue to take it to the next stage. Once you achieve your initial set of victories, you can then start connecting the dots putting together a more workable strategy and then you can start scaling things up.

A lot of online marketers simply copy and past what their competitors are doing. This extends all the way from the content that they produce to their social media graphical elements all the way to the meaningless campaigns they run.

Now this may seem like it makes a lot of sense, but you have to understand that you can't blindly copy because when you just copy and paste whatever somebody else is doing, there's a good chance you'll be copying their failure. If you don't know what to look for, if you don't know how to cross reference, slice and dice and otherwise numerically analyze what you've copied and pasted, you are wasting your time.

If your competitors are struggling, you're going to struggle even worse because you don't have their built in audience. You have not proven yourself or created solid value. Instead of operating from a strategic advantage, you have actually dug your own grave.

It's no surprise that blindly copying what your competitors are doing can often lead to fatal results. You blow through a lot of cash only to have very little to show for it.

One of the biggest mistakes people make is to go with their gut feelings as far as marketing strategies are concerned. They think that they're on to something that is so hot that they only need to spend money on it and it will pretty much take care of itself.

Maybe they've discovered that people like a particular type of content so they jump in with both feet and invest a tremendous amount of money on a specific type of content and try to promote it all over the place. It turns out that the person behind the idea is very distinct from members of his target audience. It turns out that this person has different values and has a different mindset compared to the typical member of his target audience.

Not surprisingly, content that he finds compelling is a complete waste of time to his intended audience. What do you think happens in that situation? That's right. The company blows a tremendous amount of money and nobody shows up for the content. Talk about a wasted opportunity.

Thankfully, there's an easy solution to this. In fact, it's so easy and obvious that it pretty much jumps out at you. I'll discuss the solution near the end of this book.

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How to Have the Ultimate Productive Day by Supercharging Your Energy Levels

If you read lifestyle, health and tech blogs, then you’ll find that there is really no shortage of advice out there when it comes to increasing your productivity and getting more done in a day. Of course not all of that advice is equally useful but nevertheless, if you know where to look, then you should have not problem finding ideas that can help you out.

The question is then: what nwould happen if you were to take all those most effective tips and strategies and combine them on one single day? Could you create yourself an optimal state of mind and an optimal environment for getting the most work done possible? And what would that look like?

In this short guide, we’re going to look at what happens when you do everything right and when you take all the best advice for boosting your energy levels and improving productivity. At the same time, we’ll be incorporating some slightly more advanced stuff and high-level tips that you won’t come across in your typical productivity blog.

Follow this blueprint for the most productive, focussed and high-energy day ever.

Energy is the Key

Make no mistake though; energy is very much the key here. Your productivity is predicated on you being able to not only increase your energy levels but also anticipate them and work with them in order to ensure that you’re raring to go when you need to be and able to unwind and relax when you need to as well.

And this is a big change of pace for many people, as far too many of us will take energy for granted.

We think an awful lot about time management but very often we completely overlook energy management.

But if you sit down at the desk to work and you feel completely exhausted and overworked from the day before. If you feel like you didn’t get enough sleep, or your body is fighting off the remains of a cold… well then you’re not going to find yourself motivated enough to get productive. So the best tips to follow for that ‘most productive day ever’ are the ones that focus on energy primarily.

The Day Before…

To be highly productive tomorrow, you need to start getting things into place today. This is very important to recognize as your energy levels and focus on any given day are very often the result of cumulative results from the days that preceded it.

The first thing you need to do today in order to be more productive tomorrow then, is to leave a bit of work unfinished.

This might come as a big surprise and seem counterintuitive; but actually, leaving work incomplete is a great way to encourage yourself to work harder tomorrow. The simple reason for this is that we don’t like leaving things unfinished. You’ll be driven by an unconscious urge to complete the task you half-finished tomorrow and this will help you to dive back into ‘work mode’.

And of course the other thing you need to do is to get the best possible night’s sleep. This is going to help you to wake up feeling as good as you possibly can tomorrow and it’s actually far more important than any other aspect of your routine. If you want to perform your best, then getting better sleep is the single best upgrade that you can possibly benefit from.

So how are you going to make sure you get the best night’s sleep?

First: make sure that you take a good half-an-hour-to-an-hour of downtime before you hit the sack. The big mistake that too many of us make, is to work incredibly hard all day, then to come home and watch loud TV or play computer games while checking our phone.

This is devastating for our ability to sleep. All that action on the screen stresses out the brain and makes it more active and alert. Meanwhile, the light is interpreted by our limbic system as being daylight, meaning that we feel more awake and our brain will be flooded with cortisol.

But if you take half an hour to unwind and settle down, then the low-light that comes from outside or from a small, orange, desk-lamp, will help your brain to realize it’s bed time. Meanwhile, concentrating on something to read for example, will prevent your mind from wandering and help you to get into an almost meditative, restful state. Reading also has the considerable advantage of making our eyes tired as we strain to read the text. This causes them to feel heavy and eventually it will be hard to keep them open!

Doing all this will ensure you get to sleep much faster and when you do sleep, you’ll sleep more deeply. At the very least, try to avoid keeping your phone in the room with you when you sleep.

Second: make sure your environment is dark, comfy and quiet. This should go without saying but it’s something that many people don’t take seriously enough. If your room is flooded with light from a nearby streetlamp or if you can hear the neighbors entertaining their guests, then you won’t sleep as well and you’ll feel it tomorrow. At the very least, you should try to cover up bright LEDs (another reason to charge your phone in another room!).

Finally: get your temperature right! Your room should be slightly cool when you’re sleeping so you have to stay under the covers for warmth. And while you’re at it, consider taking a nice warm bath before bed. This will relax your muscles and help you to regulate your body temperature throughout the night.

Wakey, Wakey…

Here’s one more tip for sleeping, this time dealing with the way you wake up: get yourself a ‘daylight lamp’. These are lamps that are designed to create a wavelength that is purposefully similar to that of the sun. Better yet, they will get brighter gradually in the morning before the alarm sounds. What this does is to gently stir you out of deep sleep by making the environment seem to get slowly brighter. This means that when the alarm does sound, you will be in REM sleep rather than SWS (Slow Wave Sleep). That in turn means you’ll feel much less groggy.

Better yet, you’ll be waking up into a bright room – which makes a huge psychological difference and makes it much easier to get up and get going!

To Coffee or Not to Coffee

So if we’re trying to do everything right and boost our energy levels as much as possible for the day ahead, the next question is whether or not we should drink coffee.

And the answer? Kind of.

When you drink caffeein, this helps the brain to feel more awake by blocking the effects of adenosine. Adenosine is a by-product of the energy process in the brain. When the cells utilize glucose and ATP to help us go about our daily activities, they create adenosine as a by-product. Unfortunately, this by-product then dampens activity of the cells, making us feel groggy and sleepy. This is why we get tireder and tireder throughout the day, until we eventually fall asleep and the brain is able to flush itself of the substance.

Except it isn’t all gone in the morning and this is one of the reasons that you’ll often experience sleep-inertia and still feel tired when you first wake up.

Caffeine mimicks adenosine and this means that the brain ‘mistakes’ it for that by-product. Caffeine therefore is able to bind to the adenosine receptors, which prevents adenosine from working.

Hence, you wake up.

So that’s a good thing right?

Sure, but it’s not the only factor to consider.

For one, blocking adenosine and waking the brain up artificially causes a surprising amount of activity across the brain. Our body finds this unusual and so it responds by releasing more stress hormones – thinking that we must be doing something very important, or that we might even be under attack!

Hence we produce adrenaline (norepinephrine), cortisol and more. Caffeine in that regard is ‘stress in a cup’ and stress is not good for our energy levels.

The other issue with caffeine is that the brain can adapt to it. When you have low adenosine activity in your brain for long enough, it can respond by trying to upregulate it. That means it will increase the number of adenosine receptors, meaning that you now need more caffeine in order to block them. It also means that when you don’t get caffeine, you can feel even more tired – which is why caffeine is addictive. This can even cause headaches via caffeine withdrawal.

So should you drink caffeine or not?

A good compromise is to drink a little caffeine and to time it right throughout the day. Morning is a good option, especially if you take weekends off.