Author Archive
Promoting and Marketing Through Social Media
Social media marketing has become the new wave of advertising. Using social networking sites allows a business or individual to reach a worldwide audience. Clients, customers, fans etc. are available using social media sites that expand the reach of the marketing message that you want to present to the world. The advertising can be as simple as posting to the wall of another users account a comment with your ad or website attached as a link.
Social media marketing is available online in endless formats that bring the world to your fingertips. All you have to do to become a part of the newest social networking sites is open an account and start choosing your friends. The more friends you accept the larger your market for your message. Now you can start to post links to your friend’s walls that will take anyone who clicks on the link to your message.
Social media marketing opens many different opportunities for just about anyone with a message. It is a great benefit to businesses or individuals who are just starting out. Networking is not a new form of marketing but with the invention of the Internet and the social networking sites that are widely available it gives a budding business or individual a marketing edge that in the past was not accessible. Mainstream media marketing has discovered the power of the social networking sites and has hitched their wagon to them. Opportunity has come knocking at your door. Will you answer it?
Beer Brewing 101
Social Media Marketing 101 – Weathering the Controversy
Three hundred million. That’s how many people live in the United States alone, and at least half of them – if not more – have some kind of access to the Internet. Getting five people to agree on something is difficult. Getting 150 million people to agree on something is, to put it mildly, impossible.
The point is: if you’re going to spend any time in social media marketing, with blogs, forums and other online communities, it’s not a question of if you’ll run into any controversy. It’s merely a question of when, and how bad it will be.
By the nature of community alone, a topic or blog post will surface that bitterly divides people on which side is in the right. Some people will only add more fuel to the fire, while others will try futilely to put out the flames.
If you want to remain a part of the social media community, you have to learn to weather the good times and the bad. Here are a few tips for handling controversy gracefully.
1) Don’t panic.
People who would have otherwise never heard of you or your site will be showing up to see what the big deal is, which means you’ve just exponentially expanded your audience.
However, that’s not to say there aren’t downsides. If you don’t handle a controversy with professionalism and grace, online social media will eat you alive. While you’ll gain some respect if you handle yourself well, if you botch it too badly, the bad word will spread faster than wildfire in a forest that hasn’t seen rain in 20 years.
2) Don’t respond immediately.
It’s not a difficult scenario to imagine: you’ve made a blog post about something, and you knew when you made it that some people wouldn’t agree with what you have to say. What you didn’t expect was how viciously they would disagree. Not only are they attacking your argument, but they’re attacking you and your business.
You think what they’re saying is wrong, or you know how to disprove it, so you should jump on immediately and do so, right?
Well, probably not. The technology on the Internet makes it extremely easy to post responses in the heat of the moment, which can result in you saying something that you’ll regret later.
As much as it may pain you to do so, wait until you’ve cooled off and had a chance to get the feel of the other side’s point before you make an attempt to post. This lets you see what the other people are saying and consider it logically, not emotionally.
3) Attack the argument, not the person.
Argumentum ad hominem means “argument against the man,” and unfortunately it shows up in these situations more than it should. If somebody makes a comment you disagree with and you say something like, “Well, if you believe that, then you’re an idiot,” you’re attacking them personally, not what they’re saying.
That’s the quickest way to not only anger people, but drive the controversial discussion off-topic. Plus, you’ll come across as petty and inept at defending your own statements.
If you disagree with something somebody said, keep your comments restricted to just attacking what they said. For example: “You said X. I disagree with X because of Y and Z.” By not attacking them, you’ll gain a little more respect in how you’re handling the controversy.
4) Keep your responses simple and professional.
That’s not to say keep them so devoid of emotion that they read like corporate blather. People really hate corporate blather, and they’ll hate it even more if they’re looking for a straight answer in a controversy. But neither should you drive a point into the ground. Find the arguments to which you want to respond, quote exactly what that person said, and nicely point out what is right and what is incorrect.
When you’re pointing out something that’s incorrect, make sure that you’re only fixing facts, not opinions. For example, say somebody paraphrased something you put in your blog post, and paraphrased it wrongly. Quote their paraphrase and say why they’ve misunderstood you. Back it up with the exact quote from your original post, along with clarification of what you meant. Consider an apology if the original wording was unclear.
Remember: everything you say online, be it in a blog post or forum comment, will reflect on you and your business. Keeping your responses professional and to-the-point will let people know that even in the most controversial storm, you know better than to resort to emotional and petty attacks.
If you want to read a good article on dealing with social media controversy, check out this article at Search Engine Guide.
Totally FREE Website content
Social Marketing Basics
What is Social Media Marketing?
I share 4 key components of social marketing below. Learning the basic principles of social marketing and how it works will go a long way in helping you with not only your marketing efforts, but your notoriety and reader retention.
Blogging is Crucial in Social Marketing
Your blog is naturally a social marketing tool. By using good posting strategies, linkbait, clip marks, utility posts, commenting, growing your audience, setting up social widgets, content exchanges or blog carnivals, and social media optimization you will have set a powerful base for your website. The building blocks of social marketing success are one of the critical components to making your online business not only visited more, but critical to your monetary success.
Using Social Sites Properly
Learning the common social site features will enable you to grasp how to use these communities to their highest potential. Creating a powerful profile is very important. Making friends on social sites is just one power networking strategy, along with having others submit respond to, and vote on your content. You also want to understand the rules for each social site so that you don’t get your account banned. Tagging is another critical aspect to your social marketing, and being able to measure your marketing results.
It’s a Conversation, Not a Sales Pitch
Starting conversations is a power strategy. Knowing the Golden Rules of Social Networking will enable you to get maximum views for your social networking, forum activity, and on how to find social networks in your niche. Learning Social Power Linking Strategies will enable you to drive organic traffic to your site, and will provide you with continuous streams of repeat visitors. People who are searching for information in your niche will find you because of the social marketing strategies. Social marketing does many things, it not only puts you in front of those who are in those specific social sites, but because you are creating links, regular followers will come simply because the search engines will notice all your efforts and all the organic traffic that you are creating. This in turn will help you with your search engine rankings.
A System Is Critical To Being Efficient
In order to incorporate these strategies you need a system, a guide, on how to do this effectively and a place where you can share your findings and questions with others. There are several communities where bloggers band together and where social marketing tactics of all kinds are shared and discussed in great detail.
Great free communities to get involved are MyBlogLog.com, BlogCatalog.com, and SocialAuthority.Ning.com. People interested in social marketing and better blogging tactics are working out new social marketing tactics and helping each other progress in busy communities such as these.
Country Wine
Social Marketing Means Higher Sales Conversions!
In this new frontier of SOCIAL MARKETING, you can spike your traffic FAST, and if you do it right, you get LONG TERM search engine traffic too. It’s really the best of both worlds. Free traffic and higher search engine rankings!
Plus! Higher Conversions
Here’s the final key ingredient… and that’s the fact that social marketing means that the huge flood of EXTRA traffic you are going to get on your site is already PRE-SOLD. You already have a relationship with them… and they are going to convert into customers at a rate you haven’t seen since your grandmother visited your lemonade stand when you were a kid.
It’s this simple… people like to buy from people that they already know, like, and trust. And your social marketing campaign will give you the kind of presence so that people already KNOW you, LIKE you, and TRUST you before they even hit your web site. It’s not rocket science.
In a recent test performed by a well respected marketing analysis firm MarketingExperiments.com, a site that runs online tests and records the results in their newsletters. They recently concluded a 12-month test where they measured the results of social marketing versus buying paid traffic to a series of 4 sites.
Here is what they found
Using social marketing, they were able to generate over 93,000 visitors to their sites, paying an employee to do the social marketing work for a total of $3600 during that time, resulting in a total cost per visitor of 4 cents.
Then they ran a one month test driving traffic from Google AdWords. Using that strategy, they obtained 2,057 visitors after investing $1,250 in click costs, resulting in a cost per visitor of 61 cents. Four 4 cents versus 61 cents – social marketing yielded a 1,427% better return on their investment. Not bad!
By now I’m sure that you’re foaming at the mouth, wanting to dive in and take advantage of the huge opportunity that Social Marketing presents.
My newest product devoted to applying the techniques of getting traffic from social networking, involves three sites that will get your social marketing off to a great start. They are MySpace, Facebook and Twitter. In my videos I show you why they work and how to set them up to get the fastest results.
There are no secrets! It’s all about creating a presence on each one, developing friends and a relationship with your friends! The rest (traffic) comes naturally when you use social networking the right way!
7 Social Media Marketing Tips
You know how important social media optimization is but, admittedly, it can be a daunting task trying to keep up with it all. So I thought I’d give you seven simple social media marketing tips you can do regularly to help build your social media network.
1. Contacts. Add 5 new contacts on Facebook or LinkedIn each week. This should take you less than an hour. Fortunately, Facebook and LinkedIn make this easy for you by recommending friends with similar interests. Or you can simply visit the pages of your other Facebook friends and find new friends there to invite. When you send an invitation, include a personal message, such as, “Hi, we are both friends with Jim Miller and have some similar interests and hope you will accept my invitation.”
2. Forum posting. Concentrate on one active forum in your niche and build up your profile and make 3-5 posts per week. Use the PM (Private Message) feature to communicate with other members behind the scenes. But don’t sell to them!
3. Prune your RSS Feeds. Go through your feed reader (Google Reader, Bloglines, etc.) and ruthlessly prune. You’ll find that you don’t read all the blogs you have subscribed to and you should eliminate this clutter so that you aren’t as distracted from your work. Make a list of the top 5 blogs in your niche and read those posts every day and leave at least one comment per week on those five blogs.
4. Yahoo Answers. This isn’t effective for all niches because Yahoo Answers readers tend to be young, but answer 5 Yahoo Answers questions per day in your niche, if appropriate. You’ll quickly notice that most of the people who answer questions aren’t very articulate or don’t provide quality information, so it will be easy for your answers to stand out and get selected as the best answer.
5. Digg away. Spend 15 minutes on Digg each day and try to befriend some of the top Diggers there. Instant message is the best way to keep in touch with them and they usually post that info on their profiles.
6. Focus, focus, focus. Just because there’s a lot of hype about a particular social media site doesn’t mean you should devote time to it. Focus only one the sites that will help you grow your business and don’t get caught up in drama and hype.
7. Be on alert. Check your Google Alerts for your name once a day. If someone has mentioned you in a blog or other website, go and leave a comment or respond in some way.
By following this tips, you should be able to use social media more efficiently and see your business grow as a result.
Beer Crafting
Small Business Opportunity Under Your Nose!
There are many small business opportunities right under your nose. But you have to look at the world around you with fresh eyes and listen with newly tuned ears. New local ordinances may help you come up with an unheard of business. Where others see trouble, look for opportunity to start a new service or to make an innovation in an old business model.
A small business opportunity may be waiting in the talent of your hands. Do you garden, fix your car, or do bead work? Whatever you know how to do there’s a market for it, especially if you add a new twist to your idea. You can sell those plants at auction sites like a friend of mine. How about starting an emergency car repair service and bring your shop with you. Expand that bead work talent into making and selling art jewelry. There are sites where you can sell your jewelry art.
As a small business entrepreneur the world is yours. The green industry is wide open. Do they have recycling where you live? If not, consider starting a recycling business. Or if there is a private one already, then start a pickup and delivery service for people’s recyclables. Are you inventive? Your invention could make a mint. A friend of mine has invented new tools for her craft and sells them online.
To help yourself with finding the small business opportunity that’s right for you think about these personality traits and see which is like you.
Are you concerned with improving the things around you? Maybe you can modify some type of business to make it better.
Do you like to give advice? Perhaps you can teach people to do something and sell your e-book. It could be a small business advice book.
Do you have a dynamic personality? Then as a small business entrepreneur, you’re business will be branded by your charisma.
Are you creative? Your small business opportunities are available on the internet at sites where you can sell, photography, music, screen savers, and your writing skills.
Many colleges offer a small business advice service so be sure to check out what is offered locally. These are usually free of charge. The internet offers a variety of advice that may help you. These cover areas like startup plans and marketing, forums, proposal writing, branding, various ways to use the internet to advertise and grow your business.
The Small Business Administration is chock full of help for the small business entrepreneur including a plan tutorial and outline, financial assistance, local resources, and a lot more. There are many ways on the internet to promote your small business online. You can post ads, talk in forums, join social marketing sites, use traffic exchanges, and banner exchanges, add your signature to all of your emails and so forth. Linking is a good way to get traffic to your site whether you’re promoting your internet business or using a site to promote your brick and mortar business. This small business advice should get you rolling and building your entrepreneurial future.
Social Media Marketing Success – Three Steps on How to Maximize Your Home Business Efforts
Social Media.
Social Media Marketing.
THOSE 2 things has been written and talked about the last 2 years a LOT. But believe it or not, not a lot of small businesses or home businesses are using this powerful business and marketing “Zone” yet. Many people, because it is on the internet, shy away for it as if it were the plague.
“I am not a geek” people tell me. Well, we have “ungeeked the geek” for many small and home business owners, and made social media make sense to them
But there are exceptions.
I was talking with a business owner the other day and she made the comment, “I don’t go to those kind of sites. I don’t have time to do that as my business is struggling and I need to go and find more customers.”
That says it all.
That shows a total lack of understanding of what social media/web 2.0 is really about, and what it can do for the average small business and home business -even on a local basis. If people really “got it” about social media marketing, they would be running to the social media zone and staying there.
There is a lot of talk that it is not “proven” as it is too new and the jury is still out on it being a viable marketing process.
I totally disagree. The social media marketer is paving a path for those to follow through a jungle that has never been explored, nor walked. People like proof. People like results. But it is the social media marketer that will create the way that will birth new millionaires with business folks who do “get” the Web 2.0 world. It is not that hard to understand either.
If you can send an email, you can “do” social media marketing. You can master twitter, facebook, myspace, blogs, wikis, podcasts, article marketing, and all the other parts of the new media, if you can send an email. Yes, there is a learning curve, and yes, it does take a little effort-but what doesn’t? We have expanded our business tremendously with social media tactics, and everyday, we wake up with dozens of new leads for our training and consulting business in our email box. How would you like to have that happen to you?
You can. You can tap into an endless pool of leads that will just keep increasing, if you decide to jump into the Social Media zone. And we will be glad to teach you how to maximize for maximum Success with your Social Media efforts.
All you need to do is make a decision that you will take the time and study and learn social media a little at a time, and learn the culture, and the processes of each website.
Here are 7 websites that you must register with to get started in social media if you have a small or home business. Each have “help” tutorials or videos about how to use them properly, and also there is a LOT of information on the web as well on “how to”:
1) facebook.com
2) twitter.com
3) stumbleupon.com
4) digg.com
5) youtube.com
And then do three things after learning how the site works:
1) CONNECT.
2) COMFORTABLE.
3) CONSTRUCT.
1) CONNECT.
The main thing you need to do is connect with people on these sites, and become a friend with them. Most of these sites have a process to befriend folks. Follow their process. Sound easy enough? But there is a type of friend that we teach that you must become. An “Addition Friend.” This is simply a friend that ADDS to people’s lives, not takes.
On the social media scene, most people are looking to Add, Enhance, Increase, and Enlarge a part of their life. YOU must help them do that with connecting with them and showing them new information about what you do, and how what you do can help them and change them for the better. It MUST not ever be a sales pitch, but simply information that will impact them enough that they may want to connect with you further about that in their life.
If you are a real estate agent, give them info on the 5 Biggest mistakes made while buying a home. If you are a CPA, give them some info on the 3 biggest mistakes made on tax returns. If you are in skin care, give them the 7 best ways to keep your skin healthy. You get the idea. You can find this type of information all over the web. Just send them the web address (url) to the article or blog post with a short note saying you thought of them when you ran across this.
We call it “Connection Marketing” and it WORKS when you allow it to.
CONNECT with the person –> CONNECT with their goals –> then CONNECT them to valuable information that will help them achieve them. Then most of the people Will then connect with your interests and be willing to help you with yours.
2) COMFORTABLE.
You must get the people on the social media sites COMFORTABLE with you.
How?
Talk about them, and how you can help them reach their goals and dreams- either with what you do, or with what you know. We call it “Comfortable Conversation(TM).” You must hold online “conversations” with people and get them comfortable with you, and comfortable with staying connected with you. You do this by talking about what THEY are interested in, and then you PROVE to them you are serious about adding value to their life.
It is ALL about Value in the social media arena. People expect Value in your messages and communication, and if you give them things that will help them in their endeavors, (blog posts on their industry, articles on doing what they do better, etc,) they will get very comfortable with you, and even helping you with YOUR endeavors. They will be moving towards you quickly if you practice that focus in your social media efforts.
3) CONSTRUCT.
Simply, in Social media Marketing, you must Construct a bridge between you and the person that eventually leads OFFLINE and onto the telephone.
THAT is the secret to Success in social media marketing. We call it the “TIO Factor.” Take It Offline and let the personalization begin.
You have connected with the person- in person-at least in voice.
You have gotten them comfortable with you by your interest in helping them achieve their goals.
Now you must construct a path that allows you to say, “What is your contact number? I would love to chat with you for real over the phone.” Then just do that. It may take a few days or a couple of weeks. But if you could pick up 10 new customers with this conversation would it be worth it?
Of course it would be. And how would you do that?
Ahhh–That is another article on Social Media Marketing Success.
blessings…doug
social media marketing
Relationships and Social Media Marketing
Relationship marketing is the process of attracting, maintaining, and developing the best relationship with targeted people. Relationship marketing is in trend, the new, increasingly efficient ways that companies have of understanding and responding to customers’ needs and preferences seemingly allow them to build more meaningful connections with consumers than ever before.
These connections promise to benefit the bottom line by reducing costs and increasing revenue. Unfortunately, a close look suggests that the relationships between companies and customers are troubled ones, at best.
Successful relationship marketing requires relationship commitments and trusts.
Social Media Marketing is a place for establishing long term relationship marketing.
Social media marketing can bring tremendous value to those who know how to leverage it. Social media marketing is fast growing internet community collaboration, especially after Web 2.0 application revolution (Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin) where million of people make relationship-some for just communication reasons but the majority for marketing purposes.
Business owners are little bit skeptic about loosing privacy or misunderstanding that they have to be experts in order to use social media websites. On another hand, online marketers are growing their businesses pretty successfully.
You want to expand your business to the next level? You better start marketing and building relationship right now. If you don’t, your competition will. If you don’t have a time for business visibility and finding new clients, than what kind of business you are running?
Whispering about your business is not an option but loud talking and demonstrating, buzzing, branding. Before you become loud talker you have to be prepared to offer something valuable, real value even if it is a “little secret”. This “little secret” will build a trust and relationship.
Country Wine
Social Media Marketing – 7 Tips For Providing Customer Service That Proves You Truly Care
Social Media Marketing is built on the foundation of first creating a relationship with people and then transitioning those people into clients after they learn to know like and trust you. If problems arise it is very important to remember that the relationship must always come first or the customer will feel duped.
When someone becomes upset about a product or service you provided and they call you to discuss the problem you have 2 choices. You can honor your refund policy with grace, dignity and respect and thus maintain the relationship between you and your customer or you can make the customer squirm and feel like they have done something wrong because they are dissatisfied and then honor the refund policy.
It is amazing to me that anyone would pick the second choice when they are only shooting themselves in the foot but after interviewing many people I have found out it happens all the time. Why would you try to make them feel like a failure? Everyone HATES to feel like a failure and once they do they NEVER want to put in that position again so that means they won’t ever be calling you again.
Now you might say good riddance if you feel like they were unreasonable but the fact of the matter is, you have a lot more to lose than one client. You have all their friends and family to lose as well and remember because of the Internet they have a lot more friends than they used to. Potentially thousands on Facebook and Twitter.
These are my recommendations for handling these sticky situations with grace and integrity. Maybe when it happens to you, you will be able to turn this potentially difficult situation into a positive one for your company.
Respond as quickly as humanly possible to any complaints. Sometimes that’s all that it takes to prevent the need for a refund. Even if you feel like you have provided the best possibly service maybe your systems failed for this client. Always assume they are right.
Do what you say you will do – If you promise to be available for a call BE AVAILABLE, if you make an appointment to talk KEEP THE APPOINTMENT. In other words treat the client with the same respect that you would like to receive.
Apologize for the problems and accept complete responsibility. Trust me your client will be able to tell when you are faking the concern so you must truly believe what you are saying.
Offer to make it right. Do what is necessary to alleviate the problem and ask the all important question, what can I do to make you feel good about this? Can I fix the problem?
If the answer is no, accept the fact that trust has been irreparably damaged and don’t blame the client for their feelings. Accept their decision with gracefully and quickly offer the promised refund.
If appropriate, you might ask the client to tell you what they might have done differently so that this problem would not be an issue for future clients. Again your attitude is so important here. They will feel your intention so if you can’t do this without tying to transfer blame to the client skip this step because you will do more harm than good.
Follow through immediately and process the refund ASAP If you follow all the steps outlined above there is a very good chance that the client will continue to feel good about you and your products or services and they still might refer others to you in the future. Later they might actually acknowledge that the reason this did not work out was really no one’s fault but only because the timing was off for both of you.
Social Media has given everyone an equal voice in the market and it has made our huge world small again. Word does get around at the speed of light so how you respond to complaints is more important than ever.
Totally FREE Website content
Internet Marketing And Personality Infusion
Websites develop with the personality of the business owner. So, how can you take your personal interests and use them to intensify the effect of marketing? This includes both the marketing of the site and the products or services you are making available.
If your personality has a bent toward humor perhaps your website may include humorous bits of trivia that deal with your industry. You might solicit humorous stories from customers (this strategies could also work to improve list building endeavors).
If your personality is one that enjoys art you might consider a site that has a bent toward the artistic. Perhaps the listing of personally selected art shows or concerts may provide the personal touch you are looking for.
If you are a car enthusiast you might find a tasteful way to incorporate design based on your automobile of choice with personal links to a forum dedicated to serving fans of a variety of car buffs. This approach, as with most, may be best linked to products you are selling that have something in common with the automobile you feature or cars in general.
Hopefully you get the idea that personality doesn’t have to be put on the backburner in every case when it comes to Internet marketing.
For instance many sites are incorporating an interest in social issues as a site design feature. Some sites may do this by promoting affiliate products that share a portion of the proceeds with a charity of choice. They may also highlight a social issues site that focuses on the issue closest to the personal interests of the site owner.
This doesn’t have to be (and shouldn’t be) obtrusive, but it can help your customers understand a little bit more about your personality and passion to help others in need.
Imagine a business that took on the idea of assisting in feeding the hungry. They choose a well-respected charity and set aside a portion of their sale proceeds to help feed the hungry.
The website benefits because they may have individuals with similar interests who will make a purchase simply because they identify with the motivation and view this as a way to help. Others will buy because they love your product, and the charity you are interested in receives publicity to help others take notice of what they are doing and how site visitors can help.
You can’t rely on social marketing to be the only way you improve site visitation so make sure you work on other means of getting the word out about your business, but infusing your personal interests can be a positive way to connect in an emotional way with some site visitors.
The key part to this idea is that because most individuals form an emotional connection with a product this approach could be the means of developing that connection for a segment of site visitors.
The growth of your website can happen in numerous ways, but the idea of personality marketing may not be something you have considered before, but should.
Remember I used the word ‘tasteful’. What that means is not overpowering the visitor with your personal interest while negating the marketing effect of the product you are trying to sell. If you’ve made your business site into a fan site of something you really love you might have gone too far. On the other hand if you enjoy something that much consider creating a secondary site and then include links to that site from your primary business site.