Today is President John F. Kennedy's birthday. We decided to share one of his best quotes.
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Gone are the days where content means the blog posts your company writes. Instead, content marketing now includes a diverse set of content types and multiple channels to push them through. Chances are that if you’re already using social media, then you are doing content marketing to some extent.
Content marketing is accelerating at a blistering pace. By the year 2020, roughly 1.7 MB of new content will be created every second… for every living person on earth.
It’s easy to hear statistics like that and feel a sense of overwhelm – to feel like there’s no way to make your brand stand out from the crowd. But there is and I am going to show you how with this article.
To begin with, content marketing is taking any type of content (digital or physical) and purposefully sending it out to your audience.
Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.
Instead of pitching your products or services, you are providing truly relevant and useful content to your prospects and customers to help them solve their issues.
Content marketing is used by leading brands. Research shows the vast majority of marketers are using content marketing. In fact, it is used by many prominent organizations in the world, including P&G, Microsoft, Cisco Systems, and John Deere. It’s also developed and executed by small businesses and one-person shops around the globe. Why? Because it works.
Here are some key reasons and benefits for entrepreneurs and companies that use content marketing:
More awareness
Increased sales
Cost savings
Better, more loyal customers
Greater branding and online presence
Go back and read the content marketing definition one more time, but this time remove the “relevant” and “valuable”. That’s the difference between content marketing and the other informational garbage you get from companies trying to sell you “stuff.”
Companies send us information all the time – it’s just that most of the time it’s not very relevant or valuable (can you say spam?). That’s what makes content marketing so intriguing in today’s environment of thousands of marketing messages per person per day.
Regardless of what type of marketing tactics you use, inbound marketing “content” should be part of your process, not something separate. Quality content is part of all forms of marketing:
Social media marketing: Content marketing strategy comes before your social media strategy.
SEO: Search engines reward businesses that publish quality, consistent content.
PR: Successful PR strategies address issues readers care about, not their business.
PPC: For PPC to work, you need great content behind it.
Inbound marketing: Content is key to driving inbound traffic and leads.
Content strategy: Content strategy is part of most content marketing strategies.
What if your customers look forward to receiving your marketing? What if when they received it, via print, email, website, they spent 15, 30, 45 minutes with it? What if they anticipated it and shared it with their peers?
Markethive Blogging platforms broadcast out to huge portfolios of social networks, news sites, forums, and WordPress blogs. Markethive blogs get easily indexed into the search engines, are subscribable by other Markethive members and subscription allows remote posting to their selection of social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin. A content-rich blogging system with a reach into the millions across multiple social media and blogging platforms.
With Inbound Marketing, potential customers find you through channels like blogs, search engines, and social media which is exactly what you get and a whole lot more powerful tools, tutorials, mentoring, all integrated into a social network with selling platforms and exchanges.
Additional benefits include receiving MHV Coin by your readers which adds more value to bloggers who have increased subscriber levels. You are paid by Markethive, the system, for writing and publishing your blogs instantly and continuously. All part of the micropayment faucet system within Markethive thanks to Blockchain Technology.
To be effective at inbound marketing (content marketing), it is essential to have an automated marketing system that embraces and enhances your marketing strategy.
The best part is that it is free with Markethive. The Markethive Inbound Marketing System can be compared with other platforms costing as much as $2,500 per month.
Join Markethive to learn what questions to ask and how to develop your strategy, where we deliver printed, video and live educational seminars to get you acclimated and up to speed.
Deb Williams
Market Manager for Markethive, a global Market Network, and Writer for the Crypto/Blockchain Industry. Also a strong advocate for technology, progress, and freedom of speech. I embrace "Change" with a passion and my purpose in life is to help people understand, accept and move forward with enthusiasm to achieve their goals.
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Multiple Channels
Gone are the days where content means the blog posts your company writes. Instead, content marketing now includes a diverse set of content types and multiple channels to push them through.
Chances are that if you’re already using social media, then you are doing content marketing to some extent. The next step is to get a strategy in place. This guide will walk you through why having a content marketing strategy is important and different ways you can get started on your own.
To begin with, content marketing is taking any type of content (digital or physical) and purposefully sending it out to your audience. Adding a strategy to this means that you’ve thought about your goals, audiences and distribution channels.
A typical content marketing plan will answer the below questions:
Who is your audience? These are usually based on market segments and certain types of content will target specific segments.
What channels will you use?
What metrics will you use to measure success and ROI?
What resources do you have?
What pain points will you solve?
Types of content
There are quite a few types of content out there now with new channels being developed every year. Part of being a good content marketer is being able to learn new types and be open to experimentation. Relatively new to the scene is user-generated social media content that can be used as part of your strategy.
Here’s a non-exhaustive list to help you think about what type of content your company has access to:
Company blog posts
Branded blog posts
User-generated content like an Instagram post
Videos
Podcasts
Whitepapers
Case studies
Infographics
Photos
Webinars
Quizzes
Press releases
News and magazine articles
Types of channels
How will you get the word out about your content? You can publish all the white papers you want but no one will see them if you’re not talking about them. For some channels, the line between content and channel blurs. For example, email newsletters are an excellent way of promoting your branded content. But, some brands also include unique content in the newsletter’s body. There is no right or wrong way to approach this. If you find that mixing it up works for your company, then go ahead and do it.
Some common channels include:
Social media
Pamphlets
Search engine ads
Website
The most common channel is email, with 82% of marketers reporting it as the most effective. This is not-so-closely followed by social media at 54% and website/blog at 51%.
What does this mean for you? If you’re just starting out, use this as a jumping point on where to focus your beginning efforts. Start with one or two channels and expand as you feel more comfortable.
Before you start diving into all of the content possibilities, take a step back and look at what resources you have available to you. Are you a marketing team of one or ten? What skill sets are already on your team? Does your marketing budget have room to hire a professional content creator?
You shouldn’t get into producing videos if you don’t have the available skills nor the budget for a videographer. Keep in mind that time is also a resource. New content types take time to learn, experiment with and create.
Next, think about who can generate this content. Don’t limit it to only the marketing team. Your sales and support teams will know what pains the customer or business goes through, too. All of the departments should have some content ideas that can be developed.
There are many ways to get started in developing your strategy. Here, we’ll offer three ways to get started. It’s possible that you’ve done some of this work already. In that case, repurpose your previous research and put it to use here.
The start of any new strategy begins with knowing what goals you have in mind. In content marketing, multiple goals are common and are often matched with content types and channels. And for each goal, you’ll need to define metrics that are used to measure success.
For example, one of your content marketing goals may be to increase your trial signups. To do this, you’d plan on creating case studies that will be published on your website and shared via social media. The case study includes text, photos, a downloadable PDF and video. Your sales team will use the link to share success studies with potential clients and your social media team will use the different media formats to repeatedly promote the case study.
This content matrix from Ninetyblack provides a graphical guide to where content can fall. The matrix may look different for your business. Quizzes are usually designed to be entertaining and can be a useful way to spread brand awareness.
What’s working for you now? If you already have some branded content, conduct a content audit to help you understand what has and hasn’t been successful. The audit should include the actual content links and distribution channels.
Perhaps you’ve produced a few videos but they’ve only been published to YouTube. You’ve found that the audience is receptive to the videos. At this point, you may notice that a few videos have call-to-action links in the captions that lead back to your website. These videos not only were watched but people clicked on them to learn more. This discovery could potentially lead you to add more links into your captions for more cross-channel promotions.
In a Content Marketing Institute’s 2018 trends report, B2B marketers credited content creation and strategy as the top two factors in their content marketing success. Note that for content creation, it’s specified to be higher quality and more efficient. Low-quality content doesn’t cut it anymore especially if your competition is also focused on content marketing.
If your content was mostly pushed through social media channels, performing a social media audit may be beneficial to you. This way, you can see what type of content performed well and duplicate the similarities.
Certain types of content work best at points of a customer journey. A helpful product troubleshooting video won’t be as interesting to a potential customer in the awareness phase as it is for someone who has already purchased. Being aware that it exists, however, may help move the decision along.
This Boston Interactive checklist shows the various content types that match a customer’s purchase phase.
Remember, though, that a customer’s journey doesn’t end at the purchase. Past the purchase point, there’s still retention and support that need content marketing, too.
Bright Vessel illustrates their version of a customer journey map, indicating where each department plays a role. This exercise makes you reflect on every customer touchpoint.
Mapping this for your brand helps you understand where your content can be best served. Once you have the map down, then your content can be further tweaked and adjusted to reflect your audience and their journey status.
Implement & review your content marketing strategy
Now that you have three ways to brainstorm your strategy, the next steps are to document and implement it. With documentation, you’ll have a way to reference and steer your future content. If your strategy was to promote your blog posts on both social media and email newsletters but you find that newsletters are receiving a lot of engagement, you may look into increasing the send frequency or creating a subscriber list for only the blog.
Many content marketing calendars are overviews of content that’s planned for the year. They’ll often list the content, type, audience, customer phase and distribution channel(s), along with the publishing dates. This all-in-one calendar type is helpful for big picture planning.
Once you’ve drawn up the calendar, you’ll still need to listen and distribute it, and this is where social media plays a big role. A social media-minded content marketing strategy incorporates both social monitoring and publishing.
Markethive helps with both of these objectives. Through the Google calendar features, you can see when content is distributed and across which channels. For well-performing posts, Markethive makes it easy to republish the content with just a few clicks.
To monitor the topics your audience cares about, you use branded keywords and search options to see who’s talking about you and to curate content for redistribution. Content marketing doesn’t have to only include branded content. It also includes content that’s published about you or industry-adjacent news. Searching for topics in your industry in Advanced Google Search helps you easily identify & curate the content that your audience cares about.
Setup Google Alerts to keep you aware when others talk about your business and industry. Like Markethive and “Inbound Marketing”. Make sure you have a Disqus account, so you can engage blogs utilizing Disqus alerts and search for industries and blogs and articles that mention you.
In the end, content marketing strategies vary from business to business. The advice given here is meant to be a framework to begin your content marketing strategy, not as set-in-stone rules. As you begin this journey, you’ll find that some strategies or content don’t work for you and that’s okay. Having both defined goals and a plan in hand will go a long way in starting your strategy.
Thomas Prendergast
CEO Founder
Here is an easy way to think of the website bounce rate. Think of a ‘bounce’ as someone landing on your website, not clicking on any other pages and then leaving. The bounce rate is, therefore, the percentage of people that do this, rather than stay and take a look around your website. You want your bounce rate to be as low as possible, get them to engage and take the next step down your sales funnel.
There are some key factors to consider that determine your website bounce rate…
Are the visitors to your website specifically looking for your company, or are they looking for information? People who are familiar with you will bounce less than those who are in information-gathering mode. If you have an eCommerce store, does your traffic have high ‘commercial intent’? Are they ready to buy or simply researching for future purchases?
Writing really awesome blog posts can bring you lots of traffic, but this tends to be more information-seeking traffic as opposed to visitors with high commercial intent. Consequently, traffic to blog posts tends to have a higher bounce rate than traffic to your home page even if the average session duration is longer.
This shows the blogs are good quality and all that may be needed is a prominent call to action. Another way to keep them on longer is to have lots of relevant internal links so the visitors can delve deeper into a topic that interests them.
Websites are frequently crawled by bots. Some are friendly and used to decide where to rank the website. Other bots are nasty and evil and are looking for content to scrape and load to spammy sites. Therefore the bounce rate is skewed because they are not real visitors.
Visitors that come from Google search results tend to ‘bounce’ much less than visitors from Facebook, for example. People are in very different frames of mind when they’re in work or play modes. Paid traffic sites can have an effect on your bounce rate due to the fact they are not organic or perhaps targeting the wrong audience pulling in unqualified traffic.
Sending the wrong people to your landing page will definitely result in a higher bounce rate. The right traffic is visitors that are primed to convert because they are in your target audience.
CEO and CMO of Markethive, Thomas Prendergast has done some excellent research on the target market for Markethive. Given the company is on blockchain and crypto-based, it makes sense to target people using the platforms illustrated in this research
Sites that are difficult to navigate, confusing, or look old-fashioned all tend to have higher bounce rates than new clean, easy-to-use, mobile-friendly websites. Intrusive advertisements will not only have a negative effect but will also reduce the reputation of your landing pages. Also, auto-play videos are a strict no-no. Most people don’t like surprises or be bombarded as soon as they hit the site.
Headlines and subheadings are helpful to visitors to scan blocks of text quickly. If they cannot spot the content by scanning the headline or subheadings, they most likely will not take the time to search your site.
Images relating to the content make it easier to read. Text without images can be overwhelming and needs to be optimized for online reading. Writing on the web is very different than writing for written publications. Images break up the copy making it easier on the eyes.
Note: Images need to be relevant, inspiring and entertaining but not too many or too distracting. Avoid oversized images also. Combining images with great content simply reinforces what you want to say with the visual.
Within the first few seconds of arriving at a website, visitors will automatically scan for content and design elements that communicate Credibility and Safety. The perceived safety of the site relates to the quality of the content and the appearance of the pages. If your site communicates safety, the visitor will be encouraged to stay, explore and may even take the next step.
Grammar and spelling errors on a site are very often perceived as not credible. It’s an absolute turn off for me when visiting sites. But the credibility and safety go well beyond grammar and spelling. The quality of content must quickly communicate that…
The next step is a clear call to action. Having a clear call to action means the visitor knows at a glance what their next step should be and where it is on the page. Making it easy and not asking for too much information will definitely work in your favor. Even asking for full name, phone number and email can result in a bounce or maybe even a false lead. A simple widget connected to their email account is a one-click verified lead that most people accept and is an easy, unobtrusive way to capture them.
If the visitor is not convinced that the site is credible, reliable and safe for any reason, they will bounce from the page within the first few seconds after arriving.
Slow-loading websites have high bounce rates and low conversion rates. It’s that simple. The golden rule is that people do leave a website if it takes more than 4 seconds to load.
These following factors tend to slow page load times:
As a very broad rule of thumb, you’re aiming for a website bounce rate of under 40%. Between 40% and 55% is usually okay, whilst 55-65% shows significant room for improvement. This is a very simple and broad rule of thumb. There are certain circumstances like paid and social traffic, traffic hitting blog posts and also mobile traffic tends to bounce more. This is where it might be perfectly okay to have a bounce rate higher than these figures.
For Markethive Associates, You can find your bounce rate under Statistics either on your Profile Page or in Pages for your Widget and Capture Page stats. Markethive has made it very easy to read the analytics and keep on top of critical information that can help you improve where need to reach your end goals.
This service is available to all Associates, Free, and Upgraded. I find the capture pages and websites at Markethive fare very well with bounce rates and conversions.
Page layouts that are simple can communicate a lot of information in a short period of time. Focus on what you really want the visitor to do on your landing page. Be sure to make all the content, images and call to action buttons are gently nudging people in that direction.
Think of each landing page as a social contact. This is where you create a first impression that encourages the visitor to get to know you better, thereby improving your bounce rate, time on site and overall conversions.
Deb Williams
Market Manager for Markethive, a global Market Network, and Writer for the Crypto/Blockchain Industry. Also a strong advocate for technology, progress, and freedom of speech. I embrace "Change" with a passion and my purpose in life is to help people understand, accept and move forward with enthusiasm to achieve their goals.
Website: https://markethive.com
Token Site: http://markethive.io/
Telegram: https://t.me/markethive_support
Twitter: https://twitter.com/markethive/
Github: https://github.com/markethive /
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/markethive/
Crunchbase: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/markethive
Medium: https://www.medium.com/@markethive
Bitcointalk: https://bitcointalk.org/
Telegram News: t.me/Markethive
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/Markethive
Facebook: https://facebook.com/MarketHive
Youtube: https://youtube.com/Markethive
The recently published YouGov survey found just under 50% of millennials were interested in using cryptocurrencies as a primary form of payment as opposed to using the U.S. dollar.
Found little to any direct research of surveys on the demographics of members who engage in faucets. However, I did find that Reddit members discuss in great detail and frequency about faucets. And faucets seem to be discussed the most on Reddit.
The Reddit results
https://reddit.com
Pulling from the Pew Research poll
69% of Reddit members are male.
64% of Reddit members are between the ages of 22 to 37 (millennials)
29% of Reddit members are between the ages of 38 to 53 (generation X)
6% of Reddit members are between the ages of 54 and 72 (boomers)
1% of Reddit members are 73 or older (silent)
Looking at Alexa the top 5 countries that access Reddit are
United States 53%
United Kingdom 8%
Canada 6.5%
Australia 3.5%
Germany 2.5%
Income
30% make less than $30,000 per year
34% make between $30,000 to $74,000
35% make $75,000 or above
Device Type
Windows Desktop 36%
Android 31%
Apple IOS %17
MacOS 11%
Linux 3%
The Take away from this? Advertise Markethive on Reddit. But we can safely assume a similar demographic is found in the membership and visitors of the popular traditional faucet systems.
The following media is used primarily and almost exclusively on faucet, bounty and airdrop sites and has been researched and found legitimate for your ad campaigns.
Folks I DO NOT recommend these systems. These are here for your awareness and comparison. You are welcomed to join them and report how effective (or ineffective) they are building awareness, reach, quality associates, etc. I have tested 4 of them and none of those four produced anything of value. I spent $500 and ran several banner ads simultaneously in IBO and received 12 visits (according to Markthive tracking) and received zero registrations. However, IBO reported I had a grand total of 70,000 views and 5,000 click throughs. I also put the same Widget in my IBO profile page. I spent over $1000 with Apsense and got 2 registrations over the span of a month. I got similar stats as IBO, with Markethive showing a handful of connections and Apsense reporting 10s of thousands of click throughs.
The following are considered winners because the results I got were stellar with incredible returns for the money invested. For instance with a $20 Bitter.io campaign I received over 20 registration over the 3 days it ran, and their stats were nearly identical to our (Markethive) stats.
Bitter.io
Trafficly
Hashing Ad Space
adBTC
The Losers
The following gave practically no results, engaged in deceptive robots and falsified tracking clicks reports. All are from the MLM markets.
Apsense
MLMGateway
IBOToolbox
PowerLeadsSystem
As we at Markethive engage this list in advertising, we will report the results.
Thomas Prendergast
Hive Keep Advertising and Marketing
Coke vs Pepsi – McDonald's vs Burger King
The age-old argument: did you have it with your friends when you were a kid? Which one tastes better Pepsi or Coca Cola? Each of us fosters our own opinion on the matter, but in more recent years the field has been further muddied with other “colas” from the mainstream stores and niche brands. Does Virgin Cola still exist? (I’m not actually quite sure). Here in NJ we used to have Jolt cola. It advertised it had twice the caffeine of regular Cola. I don't know if it is still around.
But whichever your preference, I’m sure at one time or another in your life you have debated which is better with your friends. In many instances, you’ll stubbornly stand beside your personal preference and fight that corner for far longer than is necessary. Let’s be honest, whether you had this argument in the playground or in the pub, we all know that it didn’t get resolved. You each kept your own opinions, someone probably raised the issue that if you put a filthy penny into a glass of Coca Cola, it’ll come out pristinely clean and what would that be doing to your insides? It’s always specifically “Coca Cola” in that argument, but the truth is Pepsi is just as effective a cleaning agent. All colas are basically the same.
The same argument takes place around McDonald's and Burger King. Personally, I think you should avoid them both for health reasons, but that is another issue.
At the end of the day, it’s all about marketing and in many ways your parent’s preference or the lineage of that brand. You’ll often choose one or the other because it was their choice too, or it may be peer pressure from your first school that made you favor one over the other.
The same is true in many other areas, from foodstuffs to politics, to technology. For example, you’ll vote for the same political party that your parents did, and in most cases, you won’t really understand why. If you actually sat down and thought about it, you probably wouldn’t want to vote for any of them, but again your logic says you have to vote for somebody, so you pick what you know.
A similar debate exists around social media platforms. Facebook and LinkedIn dominate the discussion around which is more effective, but there is plenty of competition in this space. Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Quora, Reddit, Meetup, and a newcomer, Tiktok, they each have their followers and detractors, but any debate over which is the best really depends on your purpose for joining the social network in the first place. Is it for personal or professional reasons? If it for personal reasons, everyone has their favorite for one reason or another.
If you joined a social network for business reasons, I think it is worth pointing out the differences because it makes a difference where you spend your time, or where you invest your precious advertising dollars.
Simply put, in terms of business relationships, LinkedIn is hands down the best place to develop your connections, post, form groups, share, etc. of any of the social networks. I do not advertise on social networks, so you may have advertising favorites, but so far as doing the typical social networking things, aside from advertising, I believe LinkedIn is far and away the best social network to be on, and where you can gain the best results for your time investment, based on my experience.
Note: the following section was posted in my Original LinkedIn group. https://markethive.com/group/linkedin
My suggestion to set up a group on LinkedIn is working moderately well. I think one of the keys to being successful here on Markethive is making small efforts on a consistent basis. That is one reason that I have managed to accumulate over 200,000 Markethive coins, mostly from inviting new associates to Markethive.
I do post and share on the newsfeed on a regular basis, not because of the faucet micropayments, but it is something I enjoy. Bringing associates into Markethive in an of itself is a profitable business. Even if the Markethive coin is only worth 0.10 at the moment, I have managed to accumulate $20,000.00, right? I am planning to hold these coins until the Markethive coin is worth $ 1.00. Now that is something even more substantial, right?
I am bringing one new associate into Markethive on a regular daily basis. This is nothing to brag about, I know, but it is something substantial, if you look at it over the course of a year, as I have calculated above.
After just a few weeks, I now have over 150 members in my group on LinkedIn. Many of these have joined Markethive. Here is the link if you would like to visit.
https://www.linkedin.com/groups/12308041/
You can see that there is a clear invitation to join Markethive on my group home page. I am using every method I can think of to invite members to this group.
Remember these LinkedIn guidelines to avoid having problems.
Do not send more than 50 invitations per day.
Do not visit more than 300 profiles per day.
Join up to 100 groups in your niche. Test group invitations by sending an invitation to your group to someone who is not one of your 1st level connections. If it works you can send up to 300 group invitations per day. Currently, I am not able to message anyone that is not one of my 1st level connections, and I am still getting one new associate per day. If you have the ability to group message, go for it.
Also, try to avoid using links in your messaging. Especially in your invitations, your only link should be to your profile. When you send a group invitation, use only the link to your group. Anything else may look spammy and will get you in trouble with LinkedIn if someone complains to LinkedIn about it. Once you are 1st connections, you can freely send links, an invitation to Markethive, for example. Also in your own group, you can have links to Markethinve, as you saw in my group.
Any questions you may have about this, please ask.
Thank you.
John Lombaerde
Prepare for Markethive Sucess – The New Vison
I love the technology industry, it’s always in motion just like our oceans, and often if you look away for a second, you’ll see that the scene has completely changed, and you may never see the same scene twice.
Within this industry there is the need to always be moving forward, there is a huge pressure to provide something new, customers expect a new version almost every year.
But where does that lead us? Is it possible to maintain high quality and a high degree of innovation at that level? Or is the latest and greatest innovation just an increase in the version number on the box?
For example, if you’re a mobile app software house writing apps for mobile devices, how do you keep up not only with the needs and wants of your customers but also with the constantly changing landscape that is your device base? What worked on last year’s device might not work as well on the new generation. But your customers will expect their “favorite apps” to work just as before when they upgrade their device.
That is both the greatest strength and weakness of the technology industry: the pace of change. Fortunes are found and lost, companies rise and fall, or get gobbled up, in what seems like minutes.
In many ways it’s like a gamblers addiction, it’s exciting and hard to resist, but with some hard work and a lot of good fortune, your well-built little app or game could be the next goldmine or the next productivity app that brings the platform provider to your door to buy you out and embed that functionality in their system.
If you have your own product you need to acutely aware of all of these factors in your development.
We are incredibly fortunate to have Markethive and the long term vision of our CEO, CTO, and the development team. There are so many substantial new additions and features to Markethive that have already been envisioned. In addition to those enhancements already projected, I'm sure that there are many more to come, and some of these may even come from ideas of some of the Markethive members. At the very least our feedback and input are invaluable, as we can already see from the suggestions made for BIX, and it is not even released yet.
I hope many of you take the viewpoint that Markethive is "our" product. If you do you will actively promote Markethive on a daily basis. (Which I pointed out in one of my recent posts can be a profitable business in and of itself. You will participate in the News Feed with your comments, your posts, and shares. I recommend also that you find a way to blog on a regular basis. In this way, you will find your "voice" here on Markethive. If you have not yet tried the blogging system here in Markethive, it is super simple and quite powerful. You really do not know what you are missing, I highly recommend to write and post often.
Bix is much more than a simple banner exchange. It is a way to bring huge numbers of new business people and entrepreneurs into Markethive. Make sure you listen to this new video on BIX from Tom Prendergast and you will catch the vision for BIX.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=LNBW_GeNR7A&feature=emb_logo
We all need to prepare for the time of success that lies close at hand.
John Lombaerde
It’s New York City, it could be Manhatten – midtown, or it could be Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Two men walk together. I am not near enough to hear their conversation. It could be one of a hundred different things, family, business, Talmud, or maybe just the weather. Their suits are black, and they probably were costly at one time, but now they are showing their years, just as the edge of their top hats are showing bit of a frayed edge. Their hats are not Borsalino's. They save those for the Sabbath and High Holy Days, not for everyday wear.
But as they walk they have a certain dignity. Mutual respect, harmony, friendship, many other things as well. Everything about them says, we represent tradition, family. We are people who follow the rules and with that comes decency, civility, and tradition. Other pedestrians move aside to let them pass. There is a significant misunderstanding, mostly based on a lack of information about their Hasidic way of life and traditions. Mostly, they do not socialize outside of their group, and most people would not be able to say they had a Hasidic friend. That does not seem to matter to them at all. As long as they have each other, everything is right with the world so far as they are concerned. No one is curious about them, and so far as they are concerned that is fine with them.
I care about the Jewish people because I have known many Jewish people, here in the US, and Israelis as well. They are a proud people, but there single-mindedness when confronted with a problem is impressive. Their tenacity is quite amazing. After all, these are God's chosen people. It makes me very sad to think that they were the ones who were prepared to receive The Messiah. The foundation to receive Jesus was not as strong as God would have liked, and in fact despite the incredible historical sacrifices made, largely crumbled in Jesus's family and those surrounding his family.
Consider this. What would be an ideal environment in which Jesus could grow up? Would God have preferred Jesus to grow up in the house of the Jewish high priest Zachariah, or would it be better to have Jesus born in a manger? Because of the squabbles between Mary and her sister Elizabeth, Mary was forced to flee and endure a suffering path. This disunity also foretold the failure of John the Baptist to support Jesus later in life despite his revelation at the river Jordan. If John the Baptist had claimed that he was indeed Elijah as Jesus said he was, who in Israel would have disputed his claim, and who would have doubted the Jesus was the Messiah?
Unfortunately, there are millions of Jews in the spiritual world shaking their heads trying to understand why their ancestors missed the coming of Jesus as the Messiah. This is deeply troubling to many, many Jews, all the way from the regular guy to the most astute Rabbi. How much has Jesus suffered not to have been able to embrace his own people and have them receive Him? The suffering of God and Jesus on this issue just goes on and on.
Back to the men on top hats. No one sees where they come from and no one sees where they go, they probably make this trip often, but the start and endpoints are always in the shadows, invisible to the naked eye.
In lots of ways, this mirrors the daily routines of our businesses, customers walk into and out of our field of vision, some stop and buy things, some browse a while, and some just walk straight past. In the quiet moments each day, you possibly sometimes consider those visitors as you would the elusive man, what are they doing? Where are they going? If they were paying customers, you might be wondering, how they are getting on with your product? Or what they were planning to do with it?
And this is the lesson, you never know your customer’s story, where they have come from or where they are going. Even with repeat or long-standing customers, you have only a short glance into the window of their lives and business that you are exposed to when they are giving you details about their purchase of your product. So what details do you need to help you keep in touch with them and get as good an idea of their needs in the shortest possible time?
Some customers could simply be looking for a solution to a tiny problem, they may buy your product or service, thinking it will help them, but they may never actually make use of it. Others may be planning for your products or services to be the cornerstone of their own business. But how will you know when all you get is that brief window?
It’s tempting to just treat online customers as disposable assets, after all, you never actually meet them, and the thought is that the Internet is vast so there is always another customer. There are mechanisms that allow you to build an online rapport with your customers, blogs, forums, chat rooms, etc. that allow you to personalize and expand the relationship you have with that footfall.
If you can engage with them via these methods, you will often find out the destination they are working towards, and discover that you have more to offer them. And that’s a win-win. A better service for them and more repeat sales for you.
But in our story, no one ever engages with the men in the top hats, they only ever see them as they pass through the street. Who are they? What do they do every day? All unexplored mysteries that you as a business owner must make it your goal to find out and not let that visitor pass you by.
Markethive facilitates that connection in so many ways. We have a newsfeed for communication. You have detailed information on every one of your associates, it is only up to you to reach out.
Thank you for the read.
John Lombaerde
