Ning blog

Although the content is undoubtedly the most valuable asset of your Ning network, the design is something to be taken very seriously as well. No matter how relevant and engaging your content is, no one would be particularly excited to browse an ugly website, right? The truth is, 38% of people give up engaging with a website if they find it unattractive. Obviously, as a network creator, you don’t want to lose this much audience. On the contrary, you want users to be happy about every single aspect of your creation.

From a trendy platform where teenagers used to show off their fancy photos, Instagram has grown into the most popular social network for sharing visual content. With 800 million active users worldwide, no wonder it is now considered as one of the most effective means of public outreach. Brands of all scales don’t spare time and resources to enhance their presence on Instagram and connect with their target audience. However, only 30% of all Instagram posts actually get seen. The rest 70% simply don’t serve their intended purpose.

With 150 million monthly users, Pinterest is not only an extremely popular image-sharing social network, it is also one of the most powerful online marketing tools. It is widely known that social media help brands build influence and promote their products and services. But Pinterest shows statistics that often surpass those of other social platforms. It was estimated that Pinterest users tend to spend much more money on products they find on the platform than Facebook users. Furthermore, visitors coming to company websites from Pinterest usually stay for much longer than those arriving from other social networks. These two facts alone are enough to ask yourself a question: how to make money on Pinterest? This brief guide is to shed some light on the issue.

Gone are the times when email was the only way to communicate online. Sending electronic letters the good old fashioned way is being gradually replaced by instant personal messaging and posting on social media.

Remember when people were grumbling about the lack of personal touch and intimacy in emails as opposed to traditional hand-written letters? Well, as ironic as it may sound, today emailing seems to be the most personal and intimate way of online correspondence.

How to catch people’s attention and make them stay longer on your website or blog? This is the age when so much information is surrounding us that it is almost impossible to keep focus for a long time, let alone remembering stuff you’ve come across on the Internet. Just enter the web and you will be immediately engulfed by endless flows of data rushing at you from all sides.

Social networking has become so deeply enrooted in our lives, that for many of us it is hard to imagine a day lived without checking out a Facebook or Instagram feed. We use social media to stay connected with the world, keep up with the latest news, communicate with our friends and relatives. For many, online networking is also a way to express themselves, get a message out, and find fellow-thinkers.

Starting up a business takes both creativity and patience – Rome wasn’t built in a day, was it? Figuring out what exactly you’re going to do is only the beginning of the journey. What comes next is creating a brand, building its image, and designing a logo that will catch the eye of potential customers.

Building a brand is crucial for every startup and must be taken with utmost care and responsibility as the image you are going to create will accompany your business through the entire cycle of its existence.

When you start a website, you have very specific goals in mind. What are yours? Do you want to promote your business, expand your customer base, sell products online, make money from ads? Maybe you don’t even pursue any business goals and just use your website for personal development and communication. Anyway, if you own a website, you’ll want to know how successful it is, how many people know about it, and who are the visitors. But what is the best way to find out? Without a shadow of a doubt, it’s an online tool you’ve probably heard about – Google Analytics.

Content marketing is becoming one of the most popular ways to attract customers and increase sales for all kinds of businesses. It appears that 89% of B2B marketers and 86% of B2C marketers are actively using content as the essential tool for their promotion strategies. Surprising? Not really. According to the recent surveys, 82% of people actually enjoy consuming content from companies and 73% of buyers prefer to get acquainted with brands namely through articles rather than ads.

The Instagram community has grown to 800 million monthly active users, and 500 million of them use it on a daily basis. If you’re dealing with e-commerce, numbers like these just don’t leave you any other choice but to put Instagram on the list of your sales channels.

Article was provided by Ning’s friend Georgi Todorov. He is a digital marketer. Georgi recently started his NGO DigitalNovas.
His passion is to help startups grow and thrive in a competitive environment.

Social media outreach is a relatively new concept. In the past, marketers used to rely on strategies which were quite far from being targeted. The logic was very simple: create a product and try to get in front of as many eyes as possible by means of TV advertisements, billboards, newspaper ads, etc. The more people are aware of your product, the more chances you get to sell it. In this sense, those marketing tactics took quantitative approach instead of qualitative. What is more, to be able to promote your brand, you inevitably had to pay for the exposure.