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Who Was That Masked Marketing Plan?

Business & Marketing for Massage /
photo credit: ClickFlashPhotos / Nicki Varkevisser via photopin cc
photo credit: ClickFlashPhotos / Nicki Varkevisser via photopin cc

I’ve been reading Isabel Allende’s Zorro the last couple of weeks which is perhaps why it suddenly occurred to me that I could be utilizing my marketing tools a bit better. What a bizarre statement, you’re thinking, but bear with me.

My “marketing plan” consists of word of mouth marketing, local event massage, a Facebook page, Twitter, this WordPress blog, my Pinterest page, and now a monthly Mailchimp newsletter. For quite a while I’ve been using the Facebook page and the blog to advertise upcoming events and keep my clients informed.  Twitter is hooked directly to Facebook so I don’t really mess with it unless it breaks and I add something new to Pinterest occasionally. Recently I added the newsletter, but it feels like it’s just out there floating. Perhaps because the goal right now is a once-a-month update that’s why it feels uncoordinated.

That floatey feeling is what made me think that perhaps I need to coordinate a marketing plan of attack with all my tools. Perhaps I’ve been underutilizing them or maybe I’ve just been letting it happen organically, I don’t know, but it’s something I want to think about  more.

I feel as if I’ve overloaded my arsenal a bit at this point. I need Twitter lessons as I just don’t get what’s happening with it most of the time. I love Pinterest, but I’m struggling to find the right combination of how to use it to sell my services. For now though I’m going to set a new goal of figuring out how to coordinate the social media updates, blog posts and email blasts without getting too far away from my organic, let’s see what happens style.

So what does all this have to do with Zorro? Guerilla warfare, the Spanish attacking the French occupation in a disorganized yet highly effective manner. Perhaps I need to bust out that dog-eared marketing book, Guerilla Marketing for Free. 

So how do you manage it all? What’s your philosophy in the digital marketing age? I’m interested to see how other folks are doing this and not spending so much time at the computer that they don’t have time to actually do business.

♥

Sharon Bryant Harvest Moon Massage is Decatur, Alabama’s Exclusive Provider of Bamboo-Fusion Massage

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Is Your Website Pinteresting?

Business & Marketing for Massage /

If you don’t know about Pinterest yet, I will just apologize up front for introducing you to the crack of the Internet. I am hopelessly addicted to Pinterest and have finally found a way to justify that addiction.

Using Pinterest for Business Purposes

Recently I started a Pinterest board for Massage CEU Central. In creating and adding to that Pinterest board I have noticed I often run into the Pinterest error, “There are no pinnable images,” or find random images that don’t represent the website.

Imagine my horror when I came home to the Harvest Moon Massage Therapy website, mashed the Pin It button and found that I had a pitiful selection of images to choose from in pinning my own website to the Massage CEU Central Pinterest board. So I decided that I would write a blog post about how to improve your “pinnability” to Pinterest.

How to Make Your Website More Pinnable

The simplest answer to making your website more pinnable is to put beautiful images on your site. As a massage therapist who blogs as the main site format (on a WordPress.com platform at that), that means using more images in the posts themselves and making sure there’s an image widget in the sidebar. Apparently images inside other types of widgets don’t get indexed by Pinterest. This might have something to do with iFrames, which I don’t understand, but from what I can understand if you put an image in an iFrame, Pinterest ignores it.

Not having a lot of time to create my own artwork and having less than rudimentary skills with Photoshop, I have chosen initially to begin linking in a thumbnail of my headshot with my signature line for each post. Perhaps in the future as I develop more custom artwork for Harvest Moon Massage, I will begin using those randomly in posts.

A few don’t’s when creating pinnable images on your website/blog, they can’t be smaller than 80 x 80 pixels or Pinterest ignores them. There’s that iFrame thing I was talking about earlier and apparently Pinterest also does not know what to do with background images and therefore again, ignores them.

Have I Been Pinned?

Here’s something interesting. If you want to know if you’ve been pinned on Pinterest, go to “http://pinterest.com/source/yourwebsite.com” I can see from checking http://pinterest.com/source/harvestmoonmassage.com that I have some work to do.

So, I hope you’ve found something helpful here. I’m still formulating a marketing strategy for Pinterest. For now though,
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Sharon BryantHarvest Moon Massage is Decatur, Alabama’s Exclusive Provider of Ashiatsu Oriental Bar Therapy, Ashi-Thai and Bamboo-Fusion Massage

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