Becoming the kind of a person that others begin to look up to as a leading mind in particular topic and industry is not something that happens overnight, overweek, or overyear. It happens after several years of dedicated practice and dedication towards your craft, which is when you start to develop the kind of habits and insights that experts tend to have, at which point sharing, creating and engaging becomes much more seamless, and rewarding. To become an influencer one must truly understand his craft, his audience, and have enough ideas to keep his source of information (blog) constantly updated with relevant content. If you feel that you're nearing the threshold for becoming an influencer yourself, here we have some example things that successful influencers do on daily basis to ensure that they remain relevant, and in fact to ensure that their success continues to rise.

1. Improving personality of their brand

An influencer's own brand is his signature towards his lifelong dedication in his choice of work. Whether it's writing, programming, food making, blogging, pottering or any other kind of business venture, improving the quality of his own brand through the means of website design, social media, email communication is amongst the many things that successful influencers practice on daily basis.

2. Learning more about their audience

A successful influencer has full understanding of the kind of audience that he is serving, which makes it much more easy for him to go out there in the real world and find more people of the same kind of interests and personalities to continue growing his brand, but also to research the kind of content and resources that would further help him understand his readers and customers. It's all about making that deep connection with your audience, and influencers work hard to try and understand the best ways to do it.

3. Using analytics to their advantage

Nowadays there's a variety of ways to track the analytics of your website and social media channels, and all this information adds up to the process of understanding how your content is performing, why people are following and unfollowing you on social media, who are the most influential promoters in your own network, and how you can use all these little insights and snippets of knowledge to the further improvement of your own brand.

4. Organized way of living

Influencers have no time to waste when it comes to resources and the need to accomplish certain tasks. Sitting there for hours at a time and trying to come up with a new idea is not what influencers are about. A successful influencer will work with his own schedule to create, edit and publish variety of content, to remain on top of things when it comes to social interaction and to always have some sort of an idea of the latest developments and trends in his own industry. Being organized means that there's no time to waste.

5. The value of an influencer

Successful influencers have gone through many clients and business relationships to fully understand the quality of their work, as well as the worth of their work. A successful influencer will not waste time negotiating for scraps, instead he will know down to the last dollar about the worth of his work, especially if he is working in areas like content marketing and content production. What makes an influencer successful is his own confidence and his ability to trust his work and maintain that same attitude with each and every client.

LinkedIn is most commonly known as a social platform for business oriented people, or the kind of people who are looking to explore potential job opportunities. A recent addition to the extensive category of features that LinkedIn offers was the introduction of a long-form content platform that any of the site's users can use to publish content with. All of the published content through LinkedIn's platform is then announced to all of the connections you have, making it very appealing towards cultivating leads and business opportunities. Here are a couple of solid tips and insights on how to become a really good LinkedIn publisher and how to make the most of each content piece that you promote. Please share your own personal tips with us in the comments.

Explore Pulse

The Pulse platform on LinkedIn is where all the content syndication happens. Go straight to the Pulse page and begin exploring the kind of categories and content that is currently trending and begin to brainstorm as to how you could tap into that pool of readers with organic and natural content. Some of the channels, like Social Media and Leadership are home to millions of followers and getting exposed as a featured author in one of these channels could mean a big yield of exposure for you and your business, or whatever else it is that you're trying to promote.

Create tailored content

Although LinkedIn offers a variety of topics to talk about, most of the jargon is oriented towards business talk, and every day thousands of site users share insightful and compact pieces of content that discuss several areas of business, experience reports, case studies and more. In order to stand out from the crowd, your aim should be to create the kind of content that promotes true insight and creativity, but remains within the bounds of business growth and exposure.

Content optimization

In many ways LinkedIn is not so different from a blogging platform like WordPress. The same content creation and content marketing rules still apply when it comes to the actual process of creating content. With that in mind, we should invest some energy into creating and tailoring catchy and insightful headlines that themselves will attract site users attention, and we should compliment our content with research data in the form of visuals, or if possible video and audio formats. Create each piece of content with the idea in mind that it might get featured on the Pulse platform, and who knows -- one day it might.

Ask readers to do something

Being a business network, LinkedIn users tend to finish articles from the start until the end, mostly because you never know what kind of insights you might come across, or what the article/post has to offer that no one else has brought to the table yet. At the end of each post that you publish using LinkedIn -- add a call-to-action to either visit your site, to share it on social media, to leave a comment on your post, or to reach out to you in order to get more insights -- which is also a way to begin forming relationships in specific ways.

Criticism and feedback are an organic part of business growth. Dealing with negative reviews is something that every business owner will have to learn how to cope with. Things can get quite hectic when we start to take customer feedback personally, without considering the fact that perhaps the customer is just dissatisfied with their own understanding of the product, or are confusing one feature for another. We can learn to deal with negative feedback in an effective manner, and this post will discuss six simple ways to achieve a more balanced view of reviews and the way they affect our business. Many people find businesses thanks to reviews and what other people have said, it goes without saying that many people have avoided your business because of the kind of reviews you have received, but in order to battle this, we should stay on top of our support game and try to respond to each negative review in constructive and thorough manner.

1. Where Are They Coming From?

The most important thing in managing negative reviews is knowing where they originate from, which involves setting up things like Alerts, Social Media mentions, and using popular review services like Yelp and TripAdvisor to setup notifications as soon as reviews are being left about your business. No negative review should go unnoticed, and letting them sit for days at a time can seem even worse in front of potential new customers.

2. Take The Chill Pill

The initial response to a bad review can be quite emotional, and dissatisfied. It makes perfect sense, especially in the situations where you know that the customer is totally wrong and has misunderstood a part of your business. It's just how it is. Take a chill pill -- preferably a moment to yourself where you just take some deep breaths -- and think about what you are going to be writing back, and whether it is going to be helpful or spiteful, because there is nothing worse than adding more gasoline to an already existing fire.

3. Let Customers Speak For You

Trying to counter each point in a negative review is going to make you look incompetent, instead let your own customers speak on behalf of your business and the services you provide. The only thing you can do is point out the mistake if there is any, and offer the customer to have a better experience the next time.

4. A Sincere Apology

One of the best ways to deal with negative reviews without getting infuriated is by making a simple apology to the customer who feels like he had a bad experience, and offer them to come back with a promise that you will make up for whatever it was that caused them problems in the first place. Sometimes it's good to acknowledge our own mistakes and let others see that we are humble enough to let things go, even while the storm is still happening.

5. How To Make It Better

Don't get too carried away with writing long essays and explanation letters to your negative customer reviews, instead keep it nice, short, and sweet, and ask the customer himself what could be done to improve thing the next time around. And if necessary make a more private connection by reaching out to the dissatisfied customer personally.

6. The Value of Reviews

There's definitely a lot of good in negative reviews. It lets you portray yourself as a company that takes customer support seriously, and the kind of company that isn't afraid to respond to negative reviews and try to solve matters from the place they originated from. Other customers, upon seeing the kind of care you give to your existing customers (good and bad), will naturally feel attracted to your services because of your honesty. And not to mention that sometimes we can learn a lot about the way we do things, and the way things are working out for us when we start to notice reviews of similar nature; there's always room for improvement. Do you have any tips for handling negative reviews? Please share in the comments! Would love to know what you're doing.

Marketing is all about connections, and the best way to establish a business partnership with someone is to actually do it in person, and what better way to meet a lot of physical connections than by attending conferences and industry talks. It’s important to remember that spending potentially thousands of dollars on event tickets without any understanding of how to market yourself at conferences is going to be devastating towards your budget, and your experience. To help with this, here are some simple tips that will help you better market your business at conferences, and create the kind of connections that will last and bring about fruitful results.

1. Multi-day Events

There is a huge variety of conferences, and the ones where we are usually going to attract the most customers and attention to our business are the ones that last for several days at a time. The provides you more time to connect, share, and explore ideas with your peers. You have to be careful, however, when it comes to attending conferences at the other end of the world, only to realize that this particular conference is focusing strictly on the latest industry developments and doesn’t leave much time to network at all.

2. Know The Audience

It's possible to make any event a good one, for your business at least, but first we must conduct some research and look into things like who are the key players attending the conference, and what is the best way to reach out to these key players beforehand. It's nice to give others heads up about your plans, like the plan to approach them at the conference, and this usually boosts your chances of being able to share a few minutes of their time. Some conferences will happily provide you with a list of people who are planning to attend, really maximizing your chances of making new connections.

3. What's The Catch?

What is your ultimate plan at the conference? What are you looking to promote, and how are you going to do it? Entering a hall full of people blindly, in hopes that you will land new clients, is nothing but a one way street towards failure. Before meeting any of your potential new clients, practice your story and how you are going to hook others on the idea that your business could somehow help theirs. Don't expect anyone else to do all the talking for you, and come prepared; those who do are the ones who walk away with new clients, simple.

4. Double Check Your Resources

What's more embarrassing than handing out business cards to your new potential clients, only to realize that the email on the business card is printed wrong? Small things like this can completely break and devastate your conference experience, and this applies to everything: your actual product, the website you operate, your contact details. Make sure that everything is intact and in accordance with what you are currently using to manage your business operations. Create solid Press Kits, insightful and self-explanatory Feature and FAQ pages that will help others to get a good grasp of your business without having you talk about it for hours at a time.

5. Plan In Advance

As previously stated, reach out to the people you plan on speaking to at the conference beforehand, invite them to have a cup of coffee with you at a well-known location in the city. Start the conference journey before you actual reach it, as this will add to the excitement, and will certainly help you to get to know the other person much better, which in turn could be in big favor to you. Have you attended any conferences in the past? What are your best tips? Share them with us in the comments!

When it comes to building traffic, understanding your visitor behaviors, and generally being on top of your search engine rankings, website analytics and ranking platforms are usually the thing you want to explore more since it provides direct insight in the way your website is performing, and in many ways that can provide a way to optimize, learn more about, and understand your website's performance in general. Google is the biggest search engine on the planet, providing webmasters with an opportunity to tap into a nearly infinite pool of visitors that can bring about leads, sales and success, yet the road towards this point of success can be lengthy, and not everyone has the patience to actually make it. To help ourselves speed up the process, we can begin by monitoring our website rankings and learning more what helps our rankings go up, and what makes them fall back down. The following WordPress plugins will give you a chance to explore your performance on a much larger scale, hopefully giving you an idea or two as to how you can improve your rankings.

Wincher Rank Tracker

Wincher will let you track any amount of keywords for their performance on both the desktop web as well as mobile web, you can even setup a competitor monitoring campaign for up to five of your closest competitors, you can monitor your rankings performance history and see what has made a huge impact on your rankings in the past, setup email notifications about sudden changes to your rankings and always remain in full control over your content performance, all reports can exported in either PDF or CSV format for your convenience.

RankScanner

RankScanner will automatically crawl your rankings on Google, and report back to you with updates and changes in your search engine positions, to let you know if you blog has improved or dropped on a weekly basis. All positions will be checked either every day, week or month depending on which plan you have selected for your blog's domain. The main features of RankScanner include the ability to monitor your blog's performance within Google, to collect suggested keywords that are all based on the kind of content you have published so far, as well as to be able to use visual features for analyzing and understanding your overall organic Google performance, and then learn from this data to improve in the future.

Alexa Widget

Alexa is definitely a household name amongst those webmasters who are self-conscious about improving their web rankings in multiple ways. Alexa analyzes all of the World's websites to rank them accordingly to their performance on the web, much of the data that Alexa reports is a rough estimate (unless you start using the premium features on your own website), but even then the data is usually very accurate and can provide a good idea of how far ahead, or how far behind, you are from your closest competitors.

ARC (Advanced Rank Checker)

Keywords are what makes Google's search engine stay alive. The ARC plugin will allow you to monitor your keywords for their performance, letting you always be on top of the latest ranking reports and how you can improve them. Happened to notice that your rankings dropped a few places? Find out who took your place and optimize your content to reflect the kind of insights and ideas that others are sharing, though with your own twist to ensure its authenticity.

ITslum Tracker

This plugin will combine both Alexa rankings, and also Google PageRank (which in many ways has been discontinued, by some webmasters are still taking the idea of PageRank seriously...), to allow you to display specific widgets on your site, advertising your overall website performance on the global web, either for attracting new sponsors, or to simply help these platforms gather more accurate data about your website. Do you have any other plugins you would suggest? Let us know in the comments!