Pinterest has grown to be a major social networking site that has the potential to greatly increase the traffic to any website, allowing the owners an opportunity to achieve their goals. Whether their goal is to increase revenue sales on a business website or spread the word about a certain topic on a blog, Pinterest will can be a major factor in their success. Although there are a great variety of benefits that come along with Pinterest, lets go over a few reasons how using it will increase traffic.

General Idea of How it Works

Posting original content within Pinterest is going to be the key to your success, so make sure you have some good ideas about how to express what it is you’re doing and at the same time make that content interesting enough to attract people and keep them coming back. Design firms, fashion designers, photographers and anything else that can take pictures of their work will have a really easy time using Pinterest since their customers will be interested in the pictures that are taken and posted.

Other businesses will still be able to use Pinterest, but need to come up with ways to post relevant content that will be able to keep people engaged. For example, if you are providing pool cleaning services, you could make a video showing how well your company handles the service, or post interesting pictures about that field of work. There are so many ways to grab the attention of people, and after a short time on Pinterest, you will start to notice what other businesses do to stay successful.

For some good tips at posting content, check out http://diythemes.com/thesis/pinterest-blog-traffic/

After a Decent Size Following, it gets Easier

The hard part is the begging when you have no one following you. Once you have enough people, you will start to see the numbers dramatically increase. Provided that you keep posting good content that people love, your followers will start recommending you to their friends, re posting your content, and the people that stumble across your profile will see that other people really enjoy your stuff, so they will be more interested to see what you’re offering. It is a great cycle that just needs to be fueled by top quality content.

Connecting with your Audience

You audience is much more than just an ATM machine. Once they are loyal followers, they won’t hesitate to give you feedback about anything you might be doing wrong, and they will express what they love. This can be a very big tool for any business, once you find exactly what it is your audience wants, you can create it and continue to thrive on Pinterest. Taking more time to connect with your audience, the more productive your overall experience will be. Also, if your audience feels a good connection with you, they will be more willing to support your cause, whether it’s selling products or trying to help the environment.

For a couple more articles related to increasing traffic and attracting followers, take a look at http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2012/12/29/how-to-increase-pinterest-t… and http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/pinterest-traffic-to-your-blog/

Link your Pinterest page to Everything Else

Linking your profile to other websites, such as your business website, other social networking sites, pages filled with content, or whatever else might be able to help you reach your goal, gives you the opportunity to gain as much exposure as possible, which is what we all want. With them all linked together viewers of your Pinterest profile will have access to any website you would want them to look at, which increases your chances of sales. Also, if you link your Pinterest profile on other sites such as your content pages, readers that enjoyed your content have easy access to more of it on your Pinterest page, exposing them even more to your cause.

This is going to be one of the best benefits of Pinterest because after you aquire a decent size following, your other sites are all put in the spot light for your followers to view as they please. If you have a massive follower base on other social networking sites, try linking them to your Pinterest, and this will really increase traffic to your target website.

Case Studies

As we all know, there have been so many successful businesses that have profited a great deal from marketing on Pinterest. While every business has different ways of attracting new customers, there have been some really good strategies that have been recorded. The first case study you should know about is a contest that a company did which ended up increasing their main website’s traffic by 167 percent. By hosting a contest about who could get the most likes on posted pictures within the companies profile, they were able to get their current followers interested and those followers had an incentive to get as many people to look at the Pinterest profile as possible. The grand prize was 1,000 dollars, and with a 167% increase in traffic, was money well spent. For more information about this particular case study, check it out.

Another good case study, which is actually posted directly on the Pinterest site, is about a company called Petplan. They didn’t do any contests or anything like the last case study we reviewed, but they posted relevant and engaging content to attract more people, which ended up generating an 87% increase in site traffic after the first quarter. Within months, they had a massive increase in traffic which gave them a 12.5% increase in quotes for their service. Check out the case study yourself.

Conclusion

Pinterest will continue to provide traffic to anyone who wants it. It does take some time to get used to and also to master the art of providing quality content, but once you start seeing the traffic increase, you will be glad you did it. There are plenty of other benefits that come along with Pinterest so if you don’t already have a profile, you should really check it out.

Whether you admire him or not, the man certainly knows what he’s doing when it comes to investing.

Coming from the Benjamin Graham style of value investing. The core of Warren Buffett’s value investing strategy is to look for undervalued investments — a subtly different goal than most investors, who look for investments where the price will rise. Buffett doesn’t care what the market will think about the stock he buys. He cares how well the company behind it will do as a business.

Buffett seeks, not a capital gain, but ownership in quality companies capable of generating solid earnings.

Buffett’s attitude to his shareholders is similar. The ones he likes most are the shareholders that intend to hold shares of Berkshire Hathaway (Buffett’s company) until they die, and then pass it on. Buffet’s spoken of hoping he’ll get shareholders that buy Berkshire the same way they buy a farm or an apartment house — with no idea of selling it. To him, everything is a partnership.

There are no contracts when Warren Buffett buys a business. He’s said the job of the seller is to forget that they sold it the day after the deal is done, and then keep running the business. The seller should be someone who loves the business for itself, not someone who wants to make some money and get out. In exchange, Buffett gives them considerable freedom, with no bureaucracy to deal with… and a promise that (barring serious cash flow problems and labor disputes) he won’t sell them off.

source: timeinc.com

How Warren Buffett Picks Good People — And What He Expects From Them

Buying a business, Buffett looks for three qualities in the business’ management: integrity, intelligence, and energy. All three. Why? As he put it, “if they don’t have the first, you want them to be dumb and lazy.” And he backs this philosophy up with teeth.

Uncommonly for an empire builder, Buffett maintains a squeaky-clean and surprisingly public profile. He’s publicly told the managers of his many companies to allow nothing they wouldn’t be fine with seeing on the front page of a national newspaper.

The Warren Buffett Valuation Guide

Traditional valuations are based on multiple of earnings whereas buffett takes a different approach.

Value. The cornerstone of Buffett’s strategy is finding companies whose selling at a discount to their real value.

The big challenge here is that the investor has to determine intrinsic value, which is written in no filing and calculated from no metric. To pull this off, he looks at fundamentals — earnings, revenue, and the intangibles — and compare his estimated value to the current market capitalization. Price-book ratio, price-earnings ratio, return on equity, and dividend yield are all key.

Buffett’s Little-Understood Advantage — Avoiding Banks

Insurance is the core of Warren Buffet’s business. It’s not just the likely origin of his very long-term thinking, it contains a unique feature that few people understand. (Even though Buffett mentions it in all his annual reports.) Insurance contains a built-in source of free cash — “float.” There’s a gap between when companies take in money as premiums and pay them out in claims. This means Berkshire Hathaway has a very low cost and low-risk source of leverage compared to other investors. Buffett can borrow from the insurance companies he owns instead of having to take a loan out from a bank like everyone else. This end-run around traditional finance means he can own a lot more than his traditional equity capital would allow.

By comparison, Buffett hates debt. He looks for firms with an excellent debt-to-equity ratio when buying. He and his partner Charlie Munger structured Berkshire to ensure the company will never be in a position to depend on the kindness of strangers. “too big to fail” is not part of their backup plan. They set every deal up so that their cash requirements are much less than their total liquidity. The result? When the financial system crashed, they supplied $15 billion worth of liquidity where it was most needed… and profited handsomely.

source:tamu.edu

No Commodities

You’d be hard-pressed to find a conventional commodities firm in Berkshire’s portfolio. When investing, Buffett looks for companies with unique products and a competitive advantage (“economic moat”) that will keep them at the top of their markets for a long time to come.

Buffett recently made comment about the rising Gold prices and why he sees no intrinsic value in Gold.

Why He Dislikes the Internet

Are you thinking of starting a blog to make you some cash on the side ? Well that isn’t how buffet thinks. Buffett has publicly shunned the internet all throughout his investing career.

He famously invests only in businesses that he understands. Most tech companies are off-limits. As he once put it, the auto, aircraft, and TV industries would have been easy choices for dramatic growth when they were young… but their futures included competitive dynamics that decimated many and left the survivors badly bleeding.

Instead, Buffett looks for companies with a high (and increasing) profit margin that have nevertheless been around for a while (at least 10 years), meaning they’ve stood the test of time.

Victory is Playing the Long Game

Warren Buffett is one of the world’s richest men, and he doesn’t spend it. He seems to be driven just by the love of watching the numbers get bigger and bigger. The man spends his days reading and thinking about making money — a sort of capitalist monk. When he dies, almost his entire fortune will go to charity. Yet his focus (despite his old age) is still very long term.

In 2008 Buffett made one of his largest purchases ever when bought the largest US freight railroad. Railroads are not a conventional high-growth business. Instead, they’re a very efficient way to move things, and much more so than cars. This put the largest artery of the US economy under his control. His other big capital-intensive business is currently investing billions of its earnings in wind and solar energy.

Yes — one of Buffett’s largest ever purchases happened as the market was about to crash. The man likes to bet on things going down. “When the market plummets… it’s good news for Berkshire,” as he put it. Explaining his investment in IBM to his shareholders, he pointed out that the best thing that could happen was that IBM’s stock tanks in the years before the company buys-back its stock. Why? That way, the company could buy-back more and the remaining shareholders (Berkshire) would find themselves owning a greater percentage of the firm. The whole point of Buffett’s strategy is to hope his purchases happen when things are below market value.

Investing for Troubled Times — Buffett Style

When it looks like things are just getting worse, Buffett doesn’t recommend the usual safe havens of cash securities (like bonds) or gold. To him, they’re sterile. Instead, he believes in owning businesses like farms, real estate, or universally popular manufacturers (like Coke). Because they produce something of value, they’re both much safer and much more likely to outperform cash- and scarcity-based investments like gold.
Most people see risk as the odds that the price will tank. Buffett takes a more nuanced view — his idea of risk is the probability that a given investment will cause its owner to lose purchasing power over the given holding period. This comes from Warren Buffett’s definition of investing — forgoing consumption now in order to get the ability to consume more later.

Homes are a great example of the man’s troubled-times strategy. His one investment in housing is a manufactured-home company, which makes a point of getting people in houses they can afford and often writing the mortgages too. It’s essentially a bet that two things will stay constant: people not having a lot of money for real estate, and regular lenders not being willing to take care of even those meager needs. Buffett made this bet long before the current situation.

Given that buying or selling a website may be the most important business decision you have made thus ar in your career, you need to make sure that you are making the right choices.

Seller Tips

If you have defiantly decided that you want to sell your website, then consider the following questions that you may want to ask before deciding on who to choose as your website broker. These tips are taken from the following resources, ultimate website selling guide, general business valuation and the website broker guide.

What is your experience?

When interviewing a website broker ask them the following questions

• Do you run websites yourself?
• Have you sold one of your own websites?
• How long have you served as a website broker?
• Do you work full time or part time as a website broker?
• How many sites have you sold in the past

What is their web presence?

Visit the website brokers website to see how fast it loads, how easy it is to use, what the design is like and what other businesses it has for sale. Do a website search for terms like “sell your website” and “website broker” and see what results come up.

Ask them:

• How much traffic they get per month?
• What is the bounce rate?
• Where do the visitors come from

What is their track record?

You can find a lot about a broker by looking at their track record:

Make sure you ask the following:

• How many website similar to mine did you sell last year?
• How long was each listing on the market for on average?
• How many listings did you have in total last year

How do they sell your website?

The major USP of a website broker is how they sell your website. You need to figure out if they can find you a buyer that is going to pay you a premium for your website. Apart from posting a for sale ad on their website, ask you broker what else they will do to sell your website.

Also ask them if they can show you a sample memorandum that they have prepared for another client. This is the selling document that a broker uses to show to buyers to present your website for sale.

Look for details in the memorandum and if it is a persuasive document or not. Check out this article on more tips on how to sell a website.

Can they give referrals?

Finding out what other webmasters say about a particular broker will give you a good idea on how they will be to work with. Have a chat to them about two things. Firstly their level of professionalism, do they answer emails promptly, treat you well as a customer. Secondly ask them how long it took them to sell your website and if they got an offer higher that the offer that you originally asked for originally for the website

How do you value websites? 

Considering the following:

• What valuation methods are used to value your website
• What range do they apply to your website for a value
• How often do they receive the asking price for the website

You may also want to look at normal business valuers to get an idea of the value of your website as well.

What do they charge?

Good brokers will generally charge 15% for smaller sites and 10% for larger sites.

Do you have an exclusive period?

Find out how long the exclusive agreement is with your website broker. A good broker will generally ask for an exclusive period because they want to be certain that you are committed to the process.

The Content Marketing Era

Content marketing is the new SEO. The team at www.make-a-web-site.com believe that high quality content marketing is going to drive the web in the future. The recent Google updates, especially panda, have weeded out low quality content and placed an emphasis on the reader, effectively sending a message to all webmasters saying “stop doing SEO” start making exceptional quality content and the links will come.

What we believe it is going to be central to that is Google +.

Google Plus Overview

Google Plus is a social networking service launched by Google Inc. in June, 2011. With more than 500 million registered users, this platform has become a major part of the virtual social space. Google Plus comes with a host of unique features that allow you to categorize your contacts and interact with groups of people. Here are some features of Google Plus that are extremely useful for content marketing.

• The “Circles” function allows you to group your contacts into customized groups. This makes it easy for business to group their customers into specific circles and share content targeted at specific customer groups.
• The “Hangout” feature allows business to hold video conferences and group chats within the members of a circle.
• The “+1″ feature allows users to recommend and share content. And the “Ripples” function provided statistics for public posts, like number of +1′s and average chain length.
• The Google Plus Brand Page will allows you to position your business using Google Plus. This function allows business to connect their Google Plus Brand Page with the company website. This Brand Page have a higher probability of appearing in Google searches.

The following article provides a comprehensive guide to setting up a Google Plus Brand Page.

Jumping onto the Google Plus Bandwagon

Google Plus is often overlooked by social media marketing professionals. One of the main reasons for this is that Google Plus is considered to be the new kid in town. Many people make the mistake of looking at it as just another social media profile that needs to be created and maintained.

Content marketing strategists with foresight are already beginning to incorporate Google Plus into their campaigns. H&M, a global fashion retail firm, has used Google Plus to engage with more than one million users. The firm makes daily posts with trendy fashion-related photographs and videos that are tailored to interest its audience.

The most interesting aspect of the H&M campaign is that the firm has linked its AdWords account with its Google Plus page leading to greater visibility of their Google Plus page as well as improved effectiveness on their AdWords campaigns. You can read a detailed case study of the H&M Google Plus content marketing strategy.

Why Google Plus?

Content marketing campaigns are time and resource consuming; however, if they are not well-planned than the impact can be very low. Because of this, many businesses are unsure whether launching a Google Plus content marketing campaign will be worth the effort.

The answer to this yes, it is worth the effort. In fact, given that Google Plus is closely linked to Google Search, it is huge disadvantage if you don’t have a Google Plus profile. Creating a Google Plus account has the following advantages:

• It increases your ranking on Google’s search engine results.
• It can be integrated with all your other Google applications, such as Google Calendar, Gmail, and Google Voice.
• It ensures that your business shows up on Google Local and Google Map. This improves the online visibility of your brand and facilitates user reviews.
• It allows you to use Google Analytics to monitor how your content is being viewed and shared.
Since Google Plus is a new frontier that is constantly expanding and improving, joining this platform now will enable you to reap the early-adopter benefits.

Incorporating Google Plus into a Framework for Content Marketing

More than 90 million people use Google, and the company is currently channeling all its energy into Google Plus. Once you are convinced that Google Plus can improve your social marketing, you need to create a strategy to optimize your business’s Google Plus account.

Here are some tips on how to maximize the effectiveness your Google Plus Page.

1. Make Your Page More Appealing
Business’s often fail to use search optimized content while creating their Google Plus pages. Make sure the your provide a brief summary of your organization in your About Page. In addition, you can use your business-specific images and graphics to make your page more attractive.

2. Be Active on Google Plus
The more effort you put in into posting regular media-rich content, the more effective is your Google Plus page in drawing customers. Visit the Google Plus pages of brands like Pepsi to get an idea of the post frequency and content that works best.

3. Create Communities
You can use the Google Plus Circles and Hangout features to create communities of users based on common preferences. For example, Cadbury groups its fans according to the candy they prefer the most. The firm asked their fans to leave a comment on the Cadbury Brand Paging stating their favourite candy to get added to a specific candy circle. Read this article for some great tips on using the Hangout feature for promoting your business:

4. Connect using Hashtags and +Mentions
Using hashtags around keywords in your posts will help search engines to locate your content more easily. Also, when you mention other brands, business, or people, you can type a “+” symbol before their name to tag them. These practices will not only increase your internet presence but also encourage others to follow you on Google Plus.

5. Use Google Authorship
Google authorship feature allows you to claim authorship for all the content you publish on the web. This is done by linking your Google Plus page with the content you publish. If you have used Google authorship to mark your online articles and posts, those posts come up in a search results along with your profile picture and a “More by Author” link. This makes the content look more authentic and personalized, it improves the visibility of both the author and the business, and leads to improved SEO.

You can get started on using Google authorship here: https://plus.google.com/authorship. You can also read this comprehensive article on using Google authorship

Make Your Site More Valuable

A solid content marketing strategy will boost your sites value to Google. Neil Patel recently posted search results about high quality long content pieces and how they rank better in the search engines. It may also make your site more valuable when you want to sell.

So what are you waiting for get writing now!