Archive for December, 2008

There’s a popular T-shirt that reads, “Your lips are moving, but all I hear is blah, blah, blah.” When it comes to paying prospects, you have to make sure ‘blah, blah, blah’ isn’t the message they’re hearing from you.

How many people do you know who multitask while being on the computer? I know myself, I have my TV on, my daughter’s Princess TV on, sometimes some music playing in the background, and kids running rampant.

When I land on your site, you’d better grab my eyeballs and pull ‘em through the screen or else I’m moving on!

Ever come across a website where someone was trying hard to sell their product or service? You read and quickly realize that while they’re using fancy pictures and a whole lot of words, they’re not actually saying anything.

How frustrating for a consumer!

The marketer failed by not making their point. You want to scream, “JUST SPIT IT OUT WILL YA!?”

Make sure your content says what you want it to say in a way that’s short and simple. There are too many other marketers vying for their attention. Give your customer what they want – answer the Who, What, When, Where and How (or Why) right up front, and then fill in the details.

And don’t be boring, either! Inject some of your personality into your writing and if you don’t have one, GET one!

Take on a dual personality if you want to – have fun with it. Think Rich Jerk. Be someone you always wanted to be behind the safety of a computer screen – or maybe someone you would never want to be in real life.

Tiff

Mention the economy and many consumers groan. They’ve learned to cut back, think twice before parting with their hard earned dollars. But what if your business depends on consumers and in typical trickle down fashion, you’re beginning to feel the effects of the economy?

Unlike the big boys of advertising (the ones with the equally big advertising budgets), you don’t have to be a millionaire to market your business. But if you want to succeed, you DO have to market.

There’s an old saying - If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? If no one knows about your business, does it exist? Technically, yes, but without some type of marketing to bring in the customers (and keep them!), it might as well not exist because it won’t for long.

Getting the word out effectively doesn’t have to be an option available only to the bigger companies. One way many smart entrepreneurs are finding ways to cut costs is by turning to social media marketing – the wonderful world of web 2.0.

Social marketing is basically the new, improved version of traditional marketing, but it’s much nicer to your wallet.

Unlike traditional advertising, where business owners easily shell out thousands to ten thousands of dollars for an advertisement that may or may not reach their target audience, social media marketing can be used to put you ahead of the game.

You can reach billions of people with your product or services in a more cost effective manner than the old school way of shelling out more.

For example, now that MySpace is international, your advertising can circle the world in the blink of an eye. MySpace has MyAds geared to fit any budget limit. You choose what you want to spend on the advertising.

You can also grab a piece of advertising pie and let others help you distribute it at no cost to you simply by making a video about yourself or your business. When you’re finished with the video, simply upload it to TubeMogul.com. and they’ll take it from there, seeing to it that your video is sent out to the best sites.

In order to survive business-wise, entrepreneurs have to be like a chameleon and learn to adapt to their surroundings, to advertise outside the box. So when economy changes are not in your favor, rather than sticking with the same old, same old like traditional advertising, you learn to change with it in order to achieve what’s best for your business.

Another perk to using web 2.0 sites for your marketing is that most of these social networking sites carry a hefty PageRank (authority in the eyes of Google) and you can ride the coattails of their hard work.

Tiff

Facebook applications (commonly shortened to “apps”) are another way for users with similar interests to connect, share information or challenge one another. Just as the name application implies, these are actually tiny programs that install right on your Facebook profile page and not on your computer - so there’s no danger of downloading a virus because it doesn’t install on your hard drive.

The apps range from fun-quizzes and movies to useful-documents, like stock portfolios that are displayed on the profile.

Facebook has common apps and one often misunderstood application is the Superpoke. Facebook originally had a “poke” button that allowed one user to poke another. A poke means the same as in real life when someone pokes your arm - only this is a virtual poke - a way to say, “Hey you!” As time went on, Superpoke became the “poking” application of choice – just because it meant you were REALLY trying to get their attention.

More common applications are the snowballs, pillow fights and similar games. These applications allow you to have virtual snowball or pillow fights. But they can also clutter up your profile. Most users don’t mind if you don’t accept their invitation for an app, because many applications require that you send a “snowball” to twenty friends at a time.

How can you take advantage of Facebook apps and how are they useful for marketers?

1.) You can build brand recognition

2.) Update users on new features/changes to your company, website or products

3.) Target your clients by age, gender or location

4.) Create a fan page for your product where clients can interact and share feedback

Which applications on Facebook are the most useful to marketers?

Groups. Groups allow marketers a way to communicate with their customers. By communicating with their customers through groups, marketers can enable discussions, post quizzes, photos of events or products and more.

Events. Are you attending a conference? Or perhaps you’re holding a book signing? Use events to let your customers know where you’ll be and when. This gives you a chance to meet your audience face to face and allows you the possibility of turning casual followers into paying customers.

Marketplace. This handy little app lets you post products for sale, advertise your business, and search for employees.

Notes. Savvy marketers can use RSS feed to post their notes.

The trick is knowing and using the applications that will benefit you the most. Don’t download every single app out there – you’ll get overwhelmed with all the drinks people send you and you’ll feel obligated to send them one back, whittling away at your work time.

Tiff

People always ask me about selling Squidoo lenses. Is it still something that can be done? Yes!

In Flip That Lens, I teach that you should begin building a list of buyers. I have a small list – about 300 people right now.

I flip lenses whenever I have time to build some extra ones. But if I wanted to, I could make more at it. Take this weekend for example. I wanted to take some time off from other projects so I whipped up a few lenses.

I made 7 lenses so far (still working on it today) and sold every one of them for $100 each. For each one, I wrote a 250-word introduction, and two additional 250-word text modules. I put a poll or Amazon Spotlight module in between the text and a guestbook at the bottom.

I write about 4-5 pages an hour and each lens equals 1.5 pages. If I use my DragonNaturally Speaking tool I create even more content per hour! So for about 25-30 minutes of work total (including building the lens), I made $100.

Here’s a screen shot of my PayPal account from this weekend:

http://www.tiffanydow.com/images/lensflips.JPG

I circled the lens sales. A couple of customers bought two at once.

$700 for 3.5 hours of work so far – not bad, right?

And I did it from home in between baking brownies with my kids and relaxing by a fire! This work at home stuff really pays off if you learn the right strategies.

You can flip lenses, too. All you have to do is build the niche lens topics like I did (This weekend I sold lenses on dieting, relationships, stress and the law of attraction).

I check out the Google AdWords tool for niche keywords and ensure those are in my lens URL and module titles and content.

Then I list them for sale to my target audience!

By the way – this is a neat tip for lens flippers: If you’re using Aweber to blast your list, check the option that lets you syndicate it. That way it gets blasted to Twitter, too! I have over 2,000 followers on Twitter so they ALSO get the lens alert notifications in addition to my list of 300.

Social marketing is very powerful. It can help you broaden your lens flipping business.

Tiff

People often wonder if social marketing is really all that vital to Internet marketing success. The simple answer is yes! Social marketing is one method of getting the word out about you and your business that shouldn’t and can’t be overlooked, and here’s why:

Effective social marketing puts you in the spotlight like no sales page can. It helps you build a strong circle of online friends and associates who are interested in what you’re doing. It gives you several ways to communicate. It offers many different avenues for developing your personal brand – something that is absolutely essential for success!

Social marketing brings traffic to your websites. That’s what you want. You need to get your target niche audience to come to you and look at what you’re offering, which is yourself as a brand, along with your product or service.

True, some of the traffic you get will be tire-kickers, but you’ll also get people who will be intrigued and will stick around to learn from you long-term.

Besides bringing basic traffic to your site, social marketing is excellent for spreading your word like an octopus spreads its tentacles. Social marketing is far reaching and provides you with links and more traffic from those links, and traffic from tagging and bookmarking as well.

If you’re producing really great content that spreads virally through the marketplace, you’ll get even more traffic.

You can see that social marketing is all about creating traffic and making a real name for yourself on the Internet (branding). And it’s a very reciprocal type of marketing. You get plenty of chances to help others, just like people have helped you by tagging or bookmarking your article, blog or site.

You get to build more relationships and the cycle perpetuates itself.

Someone recently said they liked social media but not social marketing. Well I believe it’s because they’re doing it wrong. They’re still in the mindset of talking TO their prospects instead of having a two-way conversation with them.

They still don’t get it.

Some of the best lessons I’ve learned, the best resources I’ve found, and the greatest customers I’ve acquired are from reaching out and being interactive with others on social networking sites. You can’t go around being a social snob and expect the get good results in the future.

Tiff