Archive for Marketing
Track Your Tweets
Posted by: | Comments
Twitter has become not only a great site for connecting with people around the world, it’s become a favorite tool of solopreneurs because:
You can offer tidbits of valuable information to a huge audience.
You can connect with prospects and customers on a personal level.
You can glean market and industry information from tweets.
The trick is to know if your tweets are having a direct effect on your profits. The best way to do this is to track your tweets. Fortunately, because developers know how important Twitter is to marketers, they’ve developed several tools to track your tweets. Here are just a few ways to track your tweets:
1. A standard calendar and an analytics program
The most basic way to track tweets is to record when and what you tweet on a calendar. You can of course use a print calendar however, you can also track them on a calendar like Outlook or Google. Once a week, compare your tweets to your analytics data to see which tweets generated traffic. This way you can determine to a reasonable degree, which tweets make the biggest impact and what days or times of the day are more effective. You can also link to unique web pages in your tweets to make sure you’re evaluating the right information.
2. Twistory
Puts your twitter feed into a calendar so you can see your twitter history. It essentially automates what you’re doing in #1.
3. TweetEffect
Tracks what tweets gain followers for you and what tweets essentially cost you followers.
4. Tweetie
An iPhone application that lets you track your tweets. You can view and respond to the tweets you follow, post your own tweets, and search for tweets by keyword just like you would from your computer only better because you can do it on the go.
5. Twitoaster
A service that monitors twitter conversations. It works by simply aggregating the conversations and publishing relevant statistics.
6. Viralheat
Viralheat is a paid service with membership levels based on your needs. Starting at $9.99 a month,“Viralheat allows you to monitor, analyze and glean insights at blazing speeds.”
Of course there are dozens of other twitter tracking services including sites like Social Oomph/TweetLater and HootSuite that let you schedule posts and track mentions and followers.
Finding the service or software that’s right for you may take a little trial and error. Of course, if you’re looking to simply track your tweets and the positive effect they have on your business, the five mentioned above are a good place to start.
Must Haves For Your Blog
Posted by: | Comments
Blogs are a great way to connect and build relationships with your potential clients. Depending on what you talk about, they can help you reach a completely new audience and they give your audience a way to get to know you and your brand, and to participate in your community. All of these are important for both growing your business and growing your blog following. Often, however, even the biggest blogs make little mistakes. They forget or overlook some important features. Here are seven features to implement on your blog:
Subscribe or RSS feed. There’s nothing more frustrating, as a visitor, than finding a blog you enjoy and not being able to subscribe to it. People are busy, too busy to remember to visit your blog on a daily or weekly basis. Cut them a break, and yourself, and offer an option to subscribe to your blog so each new post is delivered via email, sent to a reader or shows up on their iGoogle page.
Contact/About information. Have you ever visited a blog and thought, “I wonder who this blog belongs to? Where are they? Who are they?” Trust me, readers think this and they want to know. If they can’t find out a bit about you, determine your credibility or make some sort of connection, they’ll move along. Retain your visitors by sharing a bit of information about yourself including a means by which they can contact you.
Comments. Some blogs intentionally do not allow comments and while they have their reasons, most people like to be able to leave a comment if they have something to say. If you’re considering not allowing commenting because you want to avoid spam, then check out a few of the spam blockers like Askimet, which is available for WordPress blogs. If you’re avoiding allowing comments because you don’t want to respond to them, consider outsourcing the job and having someone moderate your posts, or just set ten minutes aside at the end of each day to respond. People like the interaction and it draws more readers.
Archives, popular posts, popular comments, tags and other associated identifiers. People search and read blogs differently. Some simply read the most recent post and move on while others search by category or tag. Some people will want to read the most popular posts and others will want to sift through your archives post by post. Provide a number of options for your visitors to search by.
SEO plug-ins. One of the wonderful features about a blog is that it’s welcomed by the search engines due to frequent and easily indexed content. That being said, there are an abundance of quality search engine plug-ins, particularly for WordPress, which make optimizing your posts for the search engines quick and easy.
Social networking and bookmarking features. With Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, and other social networking and bookmarking sites growing in popularity, it pays to include options on your blog. You can ask people to tweet your posts, post or link to them on Facebook, Digg them and so on. It’ll draw traffic and subscribers.
Google Analytics. You want to know how many people are visiting your blog, where they’re coming from, how many posts they read and how long they stay on your site, right? Google analytics will tell you all that and more. To make good decisions about how to grow your blog, it pays to have the kind of information an analytics tool can provide.
Blogging is extremely popular and useful, and along with this popularity comes a bevy of useful tools. Take advantage of these tools and resources to grow your subscribers, profits and business.
Get More Sales By Using Audio
Posted by: | Comments
When it comes to adding content to your website, consider using audio as an additional content and communication strategy. Audio not only broadens your product offerings and marketing tools, it can also motivate purchases.
How Audio Motivates Purchases
One of your biggest assets as the owner of a small business is your personality, and audio makes it extremely easy to communicate that personality to your audience. If people like you, and we’re assuming they do, then they’re more likely to purchase from you. You can use audio messages to connect with your audience and influence liking. Even a simple welcome message is a great start.
People buy from people or companies they consider to be an authority in their industry. Audio is an exceptional tool for you to use to demonstrate your authority on your niche topic. How to audio messages, interviews and lessons are all tools to demonstrate authority.
We often make purchasing decisions based on the opinions of others, particularly if those “others” are people we respect, admire, or want to be like. You can tap into this social proof trigger by interviewing an expert or posting audio testimonials on your website.
How to Use Audio on Your Website
We’ve already touched on a few ways you can use audio on your website to influence buying triggers. There are essentially two paths you can take – you can use audio as a product in your catalog or as a marketing tool.
Product Creation – Audio lends itself to many profitable products which you can sell or give away as a thank you or bonus, for example:
- Email training courses, workshops, and seminars
- Tutorials
- Podcasts
- Guest interviews
Marketing Tools – Many of the above items, which are mentioned as products, can also be used as marketing tools when they’re given away as freebies or thank yous. In addition to the above, here are some other possibilities for using audio in your marketing strategy:
- Product reviews
- Personal message
- Sales content
- Viral marketing
- Testimonials
Audio lends itself to a whole new audience which of course is good for you because the more followers you have, the better. When creating your content strategy or looking to the future, begin using audio in your product catalog and to market your business. Then watch your business grow.
Promoting Your Products
Posted by: | Comments
When it comes to promoting a product there are definitely tools and tactics that work best. Much of the success of these tools will depend on when in the promotion cycle they’re implemented, the type of product and of course your target audience. Assuming you’re marketing to an opt-in list, here are a few suggestions for perfect product promotion strategies.
Make sure you’re not over promoting in your email communications
Email communications, like ezines and newsletters, are meant to be informative first and promotional second. That doesn’t mean you can’t promote in them, but it’s important to keep it to a minimum. A general rule of thumb, and this is by no means a hard and fast rule, is to make sure at least 80% of your content is valuable and informative.
How to articles, reviews, case studies and so on are great ways to provide value to your opt-in list. The other 20% can be promotional content. This can be an advertisement, links within your content, banner advertisements, promotional message at the bottom of your content and so on. Test and track to find the best mix and strategy for your audience.
Make sure your content is valuable and beneficial
One excellent strategy to provide 100% valuable content to your audience without any hard sell is to provide a review of the product you’re promoting. Reviews, particularly if they’re written in an unbiased tone, give your reader insight to a product. A well-written review will summarize the product’s purpose, highlight the strong points, perhaps tell a story about your experience with the product and then list a drawback or two.
The drawbacks can be written to sound benign or like strengths – much like you would do in an interview when the interviewer asks for you to tell them about your weaknesses. You turn your weaknesses into strengths. Then a quick sentence or two summary and of course a link to the product and voila, you have a great review (and promotional material for your product).
Make sure you’re not promoting all of the time
While your opt-in list expects and accepts that you will be promoting your business products and services, they don’t want to be inundated with promotions all the time. Time your promotional content right so that it coincides with launches, special promotions and even the holidays.
Your subscribers have come to expect the best from you, and product promotions are going to be held up to the same high standards. Treat them with respect, continually offer value and time your promotions well, and you’ll be on the road to more profits and a growing subscriber list.
5 Twitter Tools Every Social Media Marketing Campaign Should Use!
Posted by: | Comments
John Panico of Social Media Dudes shares his Twitter expertise in this guest post. To hear more of John and his Twitter secrets, join the free teleseminar on February 23rd. Register here.
Twitter is one of the fastest growing social networking sites on the planet. It truly is one of the game changers that if not already a part of your social media marketing campaign, change that today (see my article on Twitter for Business Done Right for proper setup).
If you are looking to either be a Twitter Ninja or perhaps haven’t participated because you were concerned about the time it takes to manage, I am endowing you with what I consider five essential tools that will make you more efficient, save you time, get you the followers that you want and fortify your social media presence. As a bonus, all of these are free (although you may decide to upgrade to take advantage of some additional feature that some of these tools afford you.
Here they are (as they say on DWTS in no particular order):
- Social Oomph – You may remember this site formally going by Tweetlater.com (which personally I thought was more appropriate). Nevertheless, I find this tool to be invaluable in how to be efficient on twitter.
One of your objectives with your social media marketing campaign is to appear to be everywhere 24/7. Let’s get real. If all you did was tweet all day, you wouldn’t have time to focus on your business. One of the best features that Social Oomph allows is for you to schedule your tweets. I set aside 1 hour every Sunday morning and plan out 6-8 tweets a day. Some of them are going to push people to my site because of posts I have scheduled. Others are RT’s (ReTweets) that will bring a lot of love (and followers) back to you.
The other thing that I have found most useful is the Auto DM’s (Direct Message) feature that Social Oomph provides. Like them or not, as long as you are not selling back in your first response back to a follower, these can be very effective. You can have rotating DM’s.
- TweetDeck – Twitter is constantly doing things that make it compelling to use their homepage for all of your tweeting. But if you are like me, I currently have 6 Internet Explorer browsers open along with several other applications. If I want to quickly and effortlessly take a quick look to see if someone that I am following (or a phrase/keyword) has just tweeted something, it takes a while to do that.
Having to go to the twitter homepage to do that just takes up too much time, so I prefer an application that is sitting there in the background doing all of the work for me. Some will argue that other applications such as HootSuite or Twirl or just as good. I am not saying I haven’t used them. I just have found TweetDeck to do it better and cleaner.
TweetDeck allows me to use my Twitter lists or to make groups on my own based on keywords. How cool is that? And while it works easily on my desktop or laptop, it also performs just as well on my iPhone or Blackberry. In my opinion, it is the must-have twitter tool.
- PollDaddy – Part of being involved in social media marketing is well…being involved. You not only want, but you need engagement with your audience. If you are shy about getting into the mix, creating a poll not only provides involvement, but can also supply good market research for your product or service. It allows you to get answers about things much quicker and obviously cheaper (since it is free) than using a marketing firm to do it for you.
With PollDaddy, you can create a poll and send it to your Twitter followers in seconds. No account necessary!
- Twellow – Known as the Yellow Pages for Twitter, this tool can do some amazing and fun things. Did you ever wonder just how many users in your city were actually on twitter? Twellow can tell you. But the best feature by far is geo-targeted followers. What’s that you say?
If you are a business professional or a local service business, it probably doesn’t do you any good to have followers in Boston if you are located in California. Number of followers is nice, but targeted followers are a better option. When you get to the home page, click on the TwellowHood tab and then enter your location (and other search terms you are looking for). From there it is easy to follow people that fit your parameters.
- TweetSpinner – How do you know who has the same interests/concerns that you do? You could do a search on twitter, but once again, that is time consuming. Perhaps this application is a better and albeit more efficient tool for you to use.
If you aren’t as interested in followers that are geographically in a particular area, this application allows you to automatically follow those who tweet keywords of your design. The value to that is that those people are going to see the value in your tweets and follow you back. (You are providing tweets that have value regularly aren’t you? You should NOT be trying to sell something every tweet…mix it up.) Then you can engage them to see if you can forge an alliance or if after you have shown yourself to be a good twitizen, they will want the goods or services you provide.
All right, off you go and on your way to becoming a Twitter Ninja. I can tell you from personal experience that when my clients have used these tools effectively, they have told me thank you countless times for giving them more time in their day to work on their businesses and also for the opportunities that have come their way as a result of finding/using these tools.
Are you interested in how to use social media in your business? Don’t know where to start or which sites you should be using for your business?
Believe it or not, not doing social media right can actually harm your business.
If you are looking for free tips or advice on how to approach your social media, go to Social Media Dudes.
Or follow our tweets on Twitter at twitter.com/johnpanico
Finally, those are my thoughts from high atop my 2nd floor office above my garage. What I want to hear are YOUR comments. Let Janet know if this post was of help or what other topics you would like to hear about by leaving your comments here.
Twitter Secrets Revealed by Social Media Dude
Posted by: | Comments
Entrepreneurs report over & over that they know Twitter should help their businesses, but they just aren’t getting anywhere with it or they are too intimidated to begin.
“Twitter Frustration” is happening all too much – and it’s time to pull in an expert so everyone knows how to use Twitter right.
Everyone knows Twitter is a great marketing tool…. It connects you to people who would never have found your business otherwise. It gives you an audience that wants to hear what you have to say. It’s free marketing.
And it isn’t easy to turn that into amazing business growth without the secrets of those with big Twitter success stories.
John Panico of the Social Media Dudes has the answer for you. He’ll be sharing all his best secrets in a 60 minute teleseminar – Twitter Strategies for Your Business – you’ll be studying with the master. Learn the Twitter strategies that have earned him more than 16,000 targeted followers in 6 months & grown his business dramatically.
You’ll learn –
- 3 best strategies for growing your Twitter following
- How to turn followers to customers & cash
- Ways to use Twitter to be an expert in your field
- 5 Tools so Twitter doesn’t waste your time
- Strategies to get the most from the viral nature of Twitter
Teleseminar details:
Date: Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Time: 1:00- 2:00pm ET (New York time)
Registration: Click here.
Recording: Available to all registrants.
About John Panico – John has spent his career working with small business owners & he excels in helping entrepreneurs market their new & growing enterprises. He runs several online businesses, but is probably best known around the net as one of the Social Media Dudes. John started out his marketing efforts with just a hope & a dream but through the use of social media, he has become known as the “authority guru” of the internet. He writes extensively about marketing, social media & how to become an authority in your niche. Follow him on Twitter.
BlogTalk Radio – Business Success 101
Posted by: | CommentsRegular readers of this blog know that I was recently at the NAMS internet marketing training. While there, I met John Panico, also known as one of the Social Media Dudes. That lead to an interview on BlogTalk Radio with John and his partner, Dennis Lynn. Both these guys were curious! 
Our conversation turned out to be a probing inquiry into what it really takes to be in business these days. I expected to talk a lot about social media – all 3 of us agree on the value of that. But what we really focused on is what I would call Business Success 101 – who you really must be to succeed as a solopreneur, traits to cultivate, steps to take to get your business started, what it takes for small business growth and more. John and Dennis really were interested in the two areas that I think most solopreneurs struggle with – entrepreneurial mindset and marketing. I even outlined for them what it takes to have a great marketing plan. I hope you’ll stop by BlogTalk Radio and listen in on the recording of our conversation. You may be glad you did!
Promote Your Business With Podcasts, Online Radio Shows and Videocasts
Posted by: | Comments
Part of promoting your online business is getting in front of as many people as possible. While you are there, give them something interesting to read, listen to or watch that will direct them to your website through a link. One of the ways that people like to hear about new sites is through podcasts.
What is a Podcast?
A podcast is a multimedia tool that people can follow. Think of it as audio or video information that you can listen to or view on your computer, iPod, mp3 player or any other multimedia enabled device. It’s like having your own radio show on your website.
Podcasts can be syndicated using RSS (really simple syndication). This is the same process that people use to keep up with blogs and websites. The RSS feed allows them to receive updates when changes are made on the site so they don’t have to visit every day.
Creating your Podcast
There is software available to help you create your audio and video files. You can embed code for them on your website so others can view them.
Beyond the technical aspects, the purpose of the podcast is to present interesting information to your readers in a new and unique way. People browse the Internet to find useful items. They like to read, but would admittedly like to watch or listen as it is a more convenient way to get the same information.
So what will make your podcast stand out? Use engaging dialogue, present relevant topics and use visually appealing props and sets for video casts.
Going Viral
For one, don’t forget the keywords. You want people to be able to find your podcasts when they use their search engines. Even if you are using mainly audio, include keyword optimized titles, tags and links in your podcasts.
Submit your podcasts to directories. Use every avenue to get yourself in front of the public. That includes creating press releases to announce your podcasts if you are introducing them for the first time. Optimizing your press releases and submitting them to free press release sites keeps people finding them even after you are through using them.
Let your existing customers in on the new podcast. Use your email list to keep them in the loop as you unroll your podcast project. Give them links directly to the podcast so they can view it and hopefully pass the link on to others.
Your podcast can be turned into a radio show with regular guest spots. Interview other business owners in your niche and notable online personalities who would be of interest to your readers. A recurring show can increase your traffic and your following.
Want to get people to your website? Create a podcast. Turn it into a radio show or recurring video cast to create a following and gain more traffic to your business.
Use Affiliate Programs To Get Your Business Noticed
Posted by: | CommentsWebsite promotion gets the word out about your online business. If you are already making sales, using other, more advanced promotion methods can increase your targeted list of potential buyers and hopefully sales too. Affiliate programs are designed to do just that.
The idea behind affiliate programs is simple. You use other businesses and websites to promote your products on their website. They are doing the legwork while you reap the benefits. But, they also get a commission when people click on their link and head on over to your website.
For the business owner looking to increase their visibility among their target market, starting an affiliate program is a win-win situation. For one, your affiliates (those are your promotion partners) are not paid unless they fulfill your agreement. Some affiliate programs pay per lead, click or per sale. Each link is coded so that you know which affiliate link has been used to access your website.
Secondly, when you achieve those leads, clicks and sales through affiliate promotion, your business is getting exactly what it needs. Here’s an example: Let’s say that you are trying to build your list. If five affiliates each have ten people click and sign up on your website – that is fifty more names for your list. But, these are not just any names. They are people from your target market who are already interested in your type of product since they accessed you through a related site.
To get the desired results from your affiliate program, you have to put in some work. It all begins with choosing the right businesses to advertise your products for you. In reality, if you choose poorly, then you haven’t lost any money but you have lost time and energy and most of us don’t have that to spare when we are trying to grow a business.
Look for businesses that have at least two things in common:
• Lots of traffic
• Great reputation in your niche industry
What you want is to put your product in front of people who have made their business a success. It is a smart choice to get companies with similar interests involved in your venture. You don’t want them to be in direct competition, but if they operate within the same niche, you can be pretty sure your products will interest their visitors too.
Offering top notch tools in your affiliate center will attract just the kind of people you want to promote your website. Include graphics, website content, brandable reports and eBooks, banners and other nifty items to help them to help you make your business an even bigger success.
Affiliate programs are one way to promote your website and leverage the power of others to do it. By working with your affiliates and giving them the tools and knowledge necessary to be successful, you’ll not only promote your business more, but also increase sales.
