5 Steps to Help You Get Found on the Internet and Convert Visitors into Customers >>>
Brian Halligan is the founder and CEO of HubSpot, an Internet marketing software company that helps small and medium-sized businesses get found on the Internet and converts website visitors into leads and customers. He is also the author of Inbound Marketing: Get Found In Google, Blogs, and Social Media.
It used to be that you could efficiently grow your businesses by interrupting potential customers with outbound marketing methods like cold calls, email spam, and advertising. Today people and businesses are tired of being the targets of so much outbound marketing and they're getting better and better in blocking it out.
At the same time, people and businesses have fundamentally changed the way they shop and learn, turning more and more to Google, social media sites and blogs to find what they want. Inbound marketing helps companies take advantage of these shifts by helping them get found by customers in the natural way in which they shop and learn. The following are Brian’s five steps to help you get “get found.”
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Be remarkable. Ten years ago you needed to spend gobs of money on PR and advertising to spread the word about your idea. Today the friction that marketing must overcome is very low for remarkable ideas such that they can spread on their own. Unremarkable ideas languish unfound regardless of how much PR and advertising you do. So make sure you have a unique, remarkable offering as it will spread like wildfire on the Internet if it's truly different.
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Create content. Once you have your remarkable product or service, start creating lots of content about it—including blog articles, videos, podcasts, and tweets. Remarkable content about your remarkable product gets hyperlinked from other websites. Those links send you traffic, and they also tell Google that you should be higher in the rankings.
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Optimize content. Before publishing your content, you need to “optimize” it for Google and for the people on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc who will spread it. For Google, you should include some of your “keywords” in the title of your content piece so it will be easier for Google to find it. For readers, you should make your titles as irresistible as possible. A good model for this is this blog that uses titles like “The Art of Schmoozing,” “MBA In A Page,” and “The Top 10 Lies of Venture Capitalists.”
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Promote content. Once you have a remarkable piece of content that is optimized, start spreading it. Post it on your blog, email it to your newsletter subscribers, tweet it, update your Facebook fan page and LinkedIn profile with it. If the content is remarkable, others will spread it for you. As that content spreads, you will have more people follow you or subscribe to you, so that the next piece of content you publish will have a wider audience in the future.
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Measure results. You need to measure your results for each channel. For example, you should compare your results for Google organic branded search, Google organic non-branded search, Google paid, blog, email, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn group, and tradeshow campaigns to each other. For each campaign, you need to track visitors, leads, opportunities, and customers over time. Then double down on the campaigns that are working and kill the ones that aren’t.
The fundamental way in which humans shop and learn has changed dramatically the last five years because of the increased power of word-of-mouth and search. Therefore, you need to change the way you market your products to match the way people learn and find out about them. by Guy Kawasaki
Internet Tools Used by the Internet Marketing Pros
Nick Nichollswww.InternetMarketingBestPractices.net
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US Retailers turn to Social Media on ‘Black Friday’ – Social Media Ideas for Your Business >>>
US retailers were on Friday unleashing a traditional barrage of post-Thanksgiving holiday shopping promotions, with the National Retail Federation expecting 134m Americans to head for the stores.
This year, however, the retailers have reinforced their traditional efforts with an array of social-networking weapons including Twitter, the micro-blogging website.
Retailers including discounters Target and Walmart, and department store groups Macy’s, Kohl’s and JC Penney have used Facebook pages to publish the “doorbuster” and “early bird” deals traditionally announced in newspaper advertising inserts on Thanksgiving, the day before “Black Friday” – so called because it was once the day on which retailers’ ledgers for the year moved out of the red and into the black.
Brad Smith, head of social networking at Best Buy, said the electronics retailer had targeted its more than 1m Facebook fans when it decided this year to publish its Black Friday deals early for the first time.
“We released the deals at 2am last Sunday, and even at that time of night we had literally 1,000 responses within an hour or two,” said Mr Smith.
Best Buy is also using Twitter for the first time to publicize its “deal of the day” running on the shopping days leading up to Christmas. “This is the first year in which social media is playing such an important role for all of our marketing,” said Mr Smith.
Other stores planning to use Twitter to pull in shoppers include Target, JC Penney, American Eagle and Nordstrom.
Further, more than a dozen top retailers are launching customised mobile e-commerce sites ahead of the holidays.
Alongside traditional buy-one-get-one-free deals, more conventional strategies have included stores opening early, with Toys R Us joining a handful of retailers that planned to open at midnight for the first time. Some stores, such as Old Navy and Gap, were even opening at midday on Thanksgiving itself.
Other retailers including Target, the discounter, and Abercrombie & Fitch, the clothing chain, are for the first time offering money-back gift cards on sales.
Toys R Us is also seeking to woo shoppers by guaranteeing the first 100 people in queues outside its stores the chance to buy a $10 Zhu Zhu Pet robotic hamster – the season’s hottest toy.
But the retailers’ promotional activity this year will also reflect less desperation than last year, when the slump in spending after September’s Wall Street slide forced drastic price cuts to clear stock. Clothing retailers in particular have entered the two-month holiday season with inventory levels that are more than 10 per cent below last year.
In spite of the marketing hullabaloo, retail analysts point out that the day is not necessarily an indicator of how retailers will perform over the entire holiday shopping season.
Mike Niemira, chief economist of the International Council of Shopping Centers, said that the day was “typically is not a precursor of the entire holiday season’s sales picture”. by Jonathan Birchall
Development Stage of the Internet come to an End? Social Networking the Last Innovation of the Internet? >>>
After social networks, what next?
Are social networks the internet's last big development? And how much will they change? A star panel in Oxford asks big questions
Openness is important for the future of a company, says Biz Stone, CEO of Twitter
In digital media, as in fortune-telling, the future is pretty much treated as part of the present. "What is the next big thing?" is a question everyone who works with the internet asks continually. But after several years of boom, the question of what comes after social platforms is no longer so remote.
Luckily, some experts just gave us answers. On Monday evening, the Said Business School in Oxford had invited some very bright and successful entrepreneurs who spoke in front of a packed alumni audience as Silicon Valley came to Oxford for the ninth year. The event was chaired by the very lively and assertive Frances Cairncross, rector of Exeter college.
The first expert to confront us with an answer was Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal and made early investments in Facebook and LinkedIn. He reminded us to evaluate first what stage we're at with social networks. "With digital technology there is a tendency to underestimate when things are getting mature, but to understand the financial and technological situation it is really important," he explained.
"If you look back from today, it becomes clear that in 2002 even experts missed that Google had already become the main search engine. If people would have understood back at that time that there was no chance any more to outrun Google, some investments would have been different. But back at these days we didn't discuss Google like this."
He asked the audience: "Where in the history of social network are we? Are we at an early stage, and most of the companies won't be around in a few years' time? Or are we in a late stage, when companies like Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter are really mature and will be in business to stay?"
Then he floated a bigger and more daring possibility – that the development stage of the internet itself has come to an end: "Are we at the end of innovation of social networking? And is social networking the last innovation of the internet?"
"See, we went from the development of telecommunication to the internet and from the internet to social networking. Maybe there is no innovation left any more, and we have to look for it in a completely different direction. Maybe we have to go back to space and science fiction novels."
Being the CEO of Twitter, Biz Stone was quite sure that for him that wasn't the case. After having said to reporters earlier in the day that he was not thinking about selling the company but would rather go to the stock market if necessary, he started to relax the atmosphere, joking that he felt he was on a Seinfeld panel asking: "Social networks, what's the deal?"
Then he shuffled himself out of the responsibility of answering that question, stating that Twitter isn't even a social network. "Twitter never asked anyone to have a permanent relationship among each other. Indeed, we even changed the question we used to asked on Twitter 'What are you doing?' last week in 'What's happening?' because everybody was ignoring it anyway."
"I refer to Twitter as an information network rather then a social network. And here I believe in the trend of openness. Using an open technology, creating an open platform, and being more transparent that is where we are heading."
Stone believes that technology has a political impact that shouldn't be underestimated. Referring to Twitter's involvement in the Iranian election protests, he said: "On a large scale, the open exchange of information can even lead to positive global impact. If people are more informed they are more engaged, and if they are more engaged they are more empathic. They are global citizens, not just a citizen of a nation."
Ram Shriram, a founding board member of Google and one of the search giant's first investors, pointed discussion in a different direction. "Combining social and mobile – there is a new wave of oppportunities coming up, a growth of users, so mobile internet is clearly the next major computing cycle. And this time this didn't start in the US, but in Asia and Europe from where it is going to the US," he said.
"In China and India people always used their mobile as their PC; that was the way they accessed data. We face powerful new waves of publishing with YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, and the social sits in the middle of this. There is a creation and production of information. There will be new distribution and consumption patterns which will impact society. This might even make newspapers even more irrelevant."
Then he made a number of predictions: "Facebook will replace email for a new generation. The chat is moving to a multimedia format. Gaming will move from devices directly to the internet. And Apple has a big future because of its strong mobile focus."
Otherwise, the coming mobile business opportunities would be taken by small young companies, because it was easy and cheap to build these applications, which would either fail or succeed at speed. Shriram also believes that advertising will grow less important: "Users tend to pay on the mobile internet for premium services."
LinkedIn-CEO Reid Hoffman believes that there is more to come of the data generated by social networks
LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, who graduated from Stanford University and Oxford with a master's degree in philosophy, tackled Thiel's social-networks-are-the-end thesis head on. "I actually think we are just beginning to see how people launch the eventualities of social networks into their life," he said, reminding the audience of the way that mobile phones had grown from a tool for bankers to a part of everyone's life.
"I think the phenomenon of the online relationship empowers our personal and professional life. You might think 'Who wants to consume all this useless information?', but with some information it is like with ice cream. It is not nutritious, but people still eat it. And to understand what will go on, you will have to switch that to business models."
For Facebook, Last.fm and Flickr applications, he argued, using live data would become much more important. "Today you have everyone generating data.I think these massive amounts of data are perfect for new applications. There will be a lot of new applications come out of it. Obvious ones, like whom you should meet professionally, and some we don't even think about. There will be interesting mash ups liked LinkedIn and Twitter."
An Oxford lecturer, Dr Kate Blackmon put this in a nutshell in saying that the future was not about crowd sourcing but crowd filtering.
So is social media over? There are now enough social networks to fill all the obvious niches; but making use of the stream of information that pours into them is something we've only just started. as reported by Mercedes Bunz
Nick Nicholls
www.InternetMarketingBestPractices.net
Q & A – How do You Use Social Media in Internet Marketing Best Practices >>>
Dan Zarrella is an award-winning social media and viral marketing scientist, writer, and speaker. His new book is The Social Media Marketing Book. In this interview I try to pin him down and tell me when to use specific social media platforms, services and practices to run a business.
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Question: If you could use only one service to market a product, which one would it be?
Answer: It would probably be Facebook because it has a larger user base than other sites like Twitter. For most products a good chunk, if not the majority of your target market, is already on Facebook, and you can easily set up a page to start building and interacting with a community of your fans. For more advanced efforts, Facebook also allows a marketer with some development resources to go a step further and create an application to improve how their target customers interact with each other.
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Question: Backing up, when should a company focus on a website?
Answer: Investing in a site is typically one of the first things a company would do when looking at the web for marketing, and I’d agree that it’s a smart idea to build one early in the process. The cost of building a site is so low that it should be a no-brainer. However, it is possible for a company to only have a Facebook page and a Twitter account, but no website.
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Question: When should a company focus on a blog?
Answer: In many cases a well-developed blog is the most important aspect of a social media marketing effort. The hub of a brand’s social media presence should be their blog since it provides conversational social media content, as well as plenty of opportunities to integrate other social channels.
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Question: When should a company focus on Twitter?
Answer: One of my favorite uses of Twitter is for customer service and support. The example I find myself using a lot is Comcast. I live in South Boston and we have a big St. Patrick’s Day parade where the whole town comes and hangs out. Generally everyone is in a great mood and cheers for every float going by.
One year during the parade I remember a Comcast van rolled by, and everyone booed. It was like this great social catharsis where everyone was expressing their displeasure with Comcast’s notoriously bad customer experience. On Twitter, though, the “ComcastCares” account has engaged customers that end with the customer saying, “I wish every company dealt with their customers like Comcast does.” That’s incredible, a simple Twitter conversation can turn one of the worst customer experiences into one of the best.
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Question: When should a company focus on Facebook?
Answer: Investing in a Facebook presence should come early in any social media marketing efforts. It costs very little in terms of time, and nothing in terms of money to set up a Facebook page for your brand. Plus, you can leverage existing blog, Twitter and YouTube content to keep it updated with fresh content. When one of my friends becomes a fan of a company’s page, news of that action shows up in their news feed, and I see it, too. The validation of that company’s brand resulting from that action is invaluable and doesn’t come quite as easily on other social media platforms.
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Question: What companies would you hold up as excellent examples of marketing use of a website? Blog? Twitter? Facebook? YouTube?
Answer: The earlier Comcast example is one of my favorites. Blendtec’s series of “Will it Blend” videos is a great example of “outsmarting, not outspending” the competition, and I love the story about how Coke handled a fan-created Facebook group that became extremely popular.
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Question: What’s more powerful: a “Digg” or a “retweet?”
Answer: When you’re looking at one Digg versus one retweet, I’d say a retweet is far more valuable. If I Digg something, there’s very little chance that many of my friends will notice. On the other hand, if I retweet it, most of them will. However, in the aggregate, a few hundred Diggs can add up to a front-page story and tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of views and links.
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Question: What do you think of repeating a tweet multiple times during a day to reach different audiences?
Answer: I’ve seen some popular accounts do this, and it’s particularly off-putting. But it’s a tactic to be approached with care. If you have some content that you think is really awesome, and it got a few retweets the first time you shared it, don’t be afraid to post it again at a different time of day. But watch for people complaining about this and be ready to respond to feedback and tweak your approach. And don’t do it for every tweet.
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Question: What are the key elements that make people retweet a tweet?
Answer: Most retweets contain a link, and many contain a direct “call to action” in the form of “please retweet.” Idle chitchat doesn’t get retweeted very often, but noun-heavy headline style posts do. Breaking news often does very well, too.
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Question: What do you think of Apple’s absence from any social media marketing whatsoever?
Answer: It’s hard to find fault in Apple’s marketing strategy because they’ve done so well with it. They’ve done a great job at motivating their fans to do their social media marketing for them. Steve Jobs and the whole organization have really dug into the “us vs. them” angle and have made it work.
One of my favorite lessons from studying urban legends and gossip is the “Goliath Effect.” This is where people tend to side with the underdog when they’re pitted against, or being picked on, by a larger organization, and it is very prevalent in social media marketing. Microsoft was the best thing to happen to Apple’s brand.
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Question: If you could invest in Twitter, Facebook, or Digg, which would you choose and why?
Answer: If I had more faith in Digg’s ability to get acquired or turn big profits, I’d pick them since I have the feeling they have less dilution at this point. If this was a few years ago, Facebook would be the obvious choice, but in reality I’d pick Twitter right now.
I feel like Twitter has the chance to become a dominant communication platform like email, rather than “just another” social media site like Facebook or YouTube. If they can figure out a way to let third parties continue to innovate using their platform while monetizing it, they’re going to be one of the most successful businesses in the history of computing. by Guy Kawasaki
Nick Nicholls
www.InternetMarketingBestPractices.net
Study: Inc. 500 CEOs Aggressively Use Social Media for Business – 91% Use Social Media Tool >>>
Fast-growing companies are particularly visible on social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook, according to a new study.
For the third consecutive year, the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth has conducted a study that looks at the usage of social media among Inc. 500 companies. The 2009 results confirm that America's fastest growing private companies adopt social media marketing initiatives at much higher rates than other companies, and that interest in social media has grown since the first study was conducted in 2007.
Conducted by researchers Nora Ganim Barnes and Eric Mattson, this year's study looked at 148 of the 500 companies on the 2009 list. As was the case in each of the past two years, respondents were asked about their usage and familiarity with six types of social media tools, including blogging, podcasting, online video, social networking, message boards, and wikis. According to the study, social media usage by companies on the Inc. 500 has grown in the past year, with 91 percent of companies reporting that they use at least one social media tool, compared with 77 percent of companies surveyed in 2008. Of the six social media categories covered in the survey, the one that continues to be the most familiar to Inc. 500 companies is social networking, with 75 percent saying that they are "very familiar with it." To account for the rise in popularity of newer types of social media, the researchers also asked managers at these fast-growing companies about their interaction on sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and MySpace. Not surprisingly, many of these entrepreneurs have already embraced these sites as part of their business strategy, with Twitter being the most widely used among them, drawing activity from 52 percent of the respondents.While Twitter and other social networking sites have seen significant growth in comparison to previous years, interest in some older social media tools such as message boards and podcasting has declined. But despite a decline in interest in some tools in 2009, many companies that have not yet incorporated social media in their business operations say they intend to do so in the future. For example, 44 percent of companies without a company blog say they plan to start one, and 36 percent intend to use some form of online video.
Eric Mattson, CEO of a research firm named Financial Insite and one of the head researchers in the study, believes that the high reception to social media among Inc. 500 companies is significant for several reasons. "Inc. 500 companies are focused on doing anything they can to grow faster and social media is an innovative tool that may give them an edge over their competition," he says.Additionally, he thinks it is meaningful that the sample group consisted entirely of private companies. "There is less implication for private companies using social media – they don't have to worry about the stock market going up or down based on someone's Tweet," Mattson explains. "And often in smaller organizations, there is more room for innovation because it requires less processes to adopt."
The specific ways in which the businesses surveyed use social media tools has also evolved. As in years past, respondents were asked if they were monitoring mentions of their company name or their brands on social media sites, and 68 percent said yes, compared with 50 percent just two years ago. Lastly, 34 percent of companies reported that they were using social media to communicate with vendors and suppliers; 26 percent cited Twitter in particular as an important vehicle for communication with outside partners. "From a big picture trend standpoint, these results show how prevalent and widespread social media is becoming in every aspect of business now," says Mattson. by Tamara SchweitzerNick Nicholls
www.InternetMarketingBestPractices.net
4 Way to Use Twitter for Marketing Your Business – Twitter Lists SMB Marketing Helps >>>
Ok, so maybe you have a Twitter account set up and have started checking out the site, or maybe you’re still among the ranks of small business owners who haven’t found that compelling reason to get off the sidelines and start trying to use the site. Recently, Twitter launched a new feature that allows users to create lists of people on Twitter … making the site infinitely more useful for users who need some help navigating the flood of information that comes from the site.
1. Improve your PR “hit rate.” For several years now, there have been people who you might consider “influencers” in just about any industry creating content online. In your industry, that might be online reviewers, or bloggers, or key contributors to online communities. The problem for some time has been that it is increasingly difficult to capture their attention. As more large businesses launch “blogger outreach” campaigns, the attention of these influencers (bloggers or otherwise) is becoming more and more difficult the capture. Luckily, getting “coverage” on Twitter is often a much more simple ask. As a result, if you focus on asking to be mentioned through a Twitter stream, you can make it much more likely that someone will share their experience with you, or a useful message more readily through Twitter.
2. Get listed. The way Twitter lists work is that anyone can create a grouping of people or organizations on Twitter and put them into categories. These lists can be followed in bulk, which answers one of the biggest questions about Twitter … how can anyone find new people to follow, and how you can get new followers. With a search, you can now find lists of Twitter users that relate to the category your business is in. In many cases, you can approach the creator of the list with a request to add your business to the list if it is relevant. With a few hours of effort, this means you could connect with the most visible list creators online and dramatically improve the chances that people will find and follow your Twitter account.
3. Create your own collection. If there is any lesson that social media can teach you, it is that demonstrating your business as have expertise in a particular space can have big benefits, whether it is a services based business, or you have a product to sell. One of the ways to demonstrate that expertise that doesn’t require you to write new content or create multimedia such as videos is simply using the Twitter lists feature to create a new list on any topic. For example, if you have an interior design business – go out and find the 25 best Twitter accounts talking about interior design and create a list. Then you can email this list to people in your industry, share it through Twitter. Anyone who sees the list and its creator (you and your business), will immediately begin to perceive you as a thought leader and expert … if they don’t already.
4. Monitor for moments to respond. One of the best things about Twitter is that in the stream of real time dialogue are always questions from people seeking a response. With every post having a time and date stamp, it is very easy to dip into Twitter at any time to see who is having a particular question that relates to your business and exactly when they asked it. Taking this information, you can start to answer questions directly to people and share your point of view and expertise. Doing so can not only give you a chance to connect with potential customers directly, but also to have a “viral conversation” … in other words, a conversation with an individual that could easily be shared by others and passed around the web. Robit Bhargava
www.InternetMarketingBestPractices.net
16 Steps to Building Online Trust – Your Website is the Core of Your Social Proof (this is Right-On!!!) >>>
So you have done the work to get people to your website, now you need to convert them into buyers. If they have made it to your website they already have a need. If you can convince them your product fulfills their need and they are not going to get ripped off, the chance of buying is good.
So where do you start when building trust into your Website? The good news is most of the actions you need to do are small, the bad news is there are a lot of them. The more you do, the greater the comfort level and chance for a conversion to a sale.
So here are some simple steps to building trust into your website:
- Make sure your first impression is a good one. Have a professional and relevant website with intuitive navigation. If they can’t find what they are looking for quickly they will move on to another website. Make sure you are using good grammar and spelling. Avoid the impression of sloppiness or carelessness.
- Use language that is appropriate to the audience. Do not talk over the buyers head. Remember you do this for a living, they do not. Unless you are selling to a technician, avoid technical terms, abbreviations and acronyms. Keep the text at a high school level or lower.
- Seriously consider creating a short video with you or someone else talking about your product or service. This will go a long way in making a personal connection with the buyer and really give you a chance to sell the great benefits or your product or service.
- Never talk bad about a competitor. If your product has legitimate advantages or beneficial features talk about them in a positive way. Bad mouthing a competitor is a sure way to look petty and scare away customers even if what you are saying is true.
- Publish real testimonials, case studies and third party endorsements. Typed text is great, but a 30 second video from several people would be significantly better. Let them know how your product has helped people just like them.
- If there are recognized trade associations or certifications then join them or get them and proudly display them.
- Focus on building your long-term reputation, not on making a quick sale. Reputations can take years to build and seconds to destroy. Never lie or stretch the truth to make money. It will come back in the long run. Keep your promises.
- Write and publish a Privacy Policy, Security Policy, Return Policy, Refund Policy and any Guarantees. Use the statements “Secure Website” and “We take your privacy and security very seriously”
- If you are selling a subscription or something that requires repeat billing, offer a low cost or free trial period. This is a great way to reduce the buyers feeling of risk.
- Make pricing transparent. If additional fees are going to add significantly to the price, make sure you are disclosing this up front. A $10 item should not cost $20 after tax, shipping and handling.
- If you take credit cards put images of the cards accepted on each page of the order process. Never send Credit Card information over the internet unencrypted. Tell your customer that their data will be encrypted.
- Have a forum on your site and respond quickly to questions. Have the attitude that you are happy to help others without receiving immediate reward. As the old saying goes, ‘Givers always gain.’ Allow people to comment on articles. Interactivity and an exchange of views build community and a sense of involvement. If people provide constructive criticism or comments in the forum, don’t delete them, but respond with your point of view.
- Make your ‘About Us’ page personal and comprehensive. Publish photos or you and your staff and their roles. Clearly identify who is behind the site. Make sure they know they are dealing with real people.
- On the ‘Contact Us’ page make sure you provide make sure you provide phone number, fax, and company address. Make sure the phone number is a number people can call and speak with a real person.
- Stay in touch with your customers. After a sale, follow-up within 24-48 hours to thank them for their business and see if they have any questions. Ask their permission to stay in touch with them long term. If they like your product let them know you will give a discount on the next purchase if they will provide a testimonial about your product.
- Regularly add new, relevant content to the website or blog. This shows the business is alive and kicking (it helps with search engines as well !!!).
Building trust into your website is about giving your buyer or customer a sense of honesty, legitimacy and stability. People have needs, if you get them to feel safe on your website the chance for a transaction goes up dramatically. >>> Darren Squires
Nick Nicholls
www.InternetMarketingBestPractices.net
5 Ways to Use Social Media Activity Offline for Your Business – Make It Pay-Off >>>
Social media participation has proven a great way to cast a wider net, create exposure for your expertise and initiate relationships with partners, supplies, prospects and customers.
But, few things build the trust necessary to take a surface relationship made in a LinkedIn Group or Facebook Fan Page to the deeper levels often required for someone to whip out the checkbook, like face-to-face interaction.
The buzz right now is all about social media. Most small businesses, however, will get the greatest bang for their social media buck when they think in terms of merging their online and offline networking and marketing.
Here are five ways to maximize what your doing online to make it pay offline.
1) Build local networks
Cruise the social networks like Twitter and LinkedIn to find people to connect with and follow locally. The chances of you having the opportunity to meet for coffee or at a Chamber event are far greater if the distance is smaller.
Tools like Twellow and Tweepsearch can help locate locals that might share your interest in social media.
2) Create and attend social media aided events
Sites like Biznik and MeetUp allow you to create and promote local, in person events. This is a great way to start putting together local workshops and mastermind groups and tap into the network and resources these sites make available. In some communities the membership in these kinds of networks is so strong they can fill your events for you through their promotion tools.
The flip side is to use these tools to locate events that other locals are putting on and attend appropriate ones as networking events.
3) Let offline folks know how to connect
Plaster your social media participation and connecting profiles on business cards and stationary, phone directory ads, print ads, marketing materials and email signature.
You can probably do a better job of spreading this kind of thing to your online assets and profiles as well.
4) Network offline, connect online
If you attend trade shows, Chamber mixers and referral groups, collect those business cards and do your normal “great to meet you at last night’s event” email or handwritten note, but then track your new contacts down and connect with them on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn as well.
You will find it much easier to communicate and build trust when you are connected on and offline.
Check out ACT! 2010 and BatchBook CRM software too. These two offerings make it very easy to add the social media activity for your prospects into their contact record. This way, the next time to plan to reach out to them you can easily scan what they’ve been up to.
5) Teach your offline networks
If you’ve got even the tiniest handle on this social media stuff you’re probably ahead of many of your customers, suppliers and strategic partners.
Why not offer some free social media training sessions. It doesn’t matter if you’re an attorney or a contractor, social media education is one of the hottest topics going at the moment. Even if you approach it as a way for you and your customers to learn together, the bonds you can build while you learn will be invaluable.
Imagine getting a group of current and potential strategic partners together to teach them a confusing and changing topic? Who do you think they’re going to think of next time they make a referral?
>>> John Jantsch
Nick Nicholls
www.InternetMarketingBestPractices.net
5 Ways to ‘Generate’ Word-of-Mouth – that’s right, Word-of-Mouth is Made Not Born >>>
Effective Word-of-Mouth is Made Not Born
If you’re shaking your head back and forth, wondering what that title means – because, everyone knows that word-of-mouth is organic, not manufactured – let me share a secret with you: word-of-mouth is as much a creation by you and your brand, as it is an organic component of your fabulous marketing plan.
Anyone not aware of the studies proving that consumers trust is placed in “people like me,” may leave the room. Personally, I didn’t need a study to tell me that my family and friends value my opinion more than the local TV critic, or the latest press release from Big Brand Box. As I value theirs. People being people, they will talk and discuss and share with each other and the resulting word-of-mouth is stronger and more powerful than talking lizards, fancy swooshes, or come-hither glances bathed in pink lingerie.
Here are 5 effective ways you can create positive, actionable word-of-mouth for your company, product, or brand.
1. Be where your customers are. Hang out where they hang out. Bring your best smile and something “free” for them to take away. If you’re mainly online, be on Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and sites like Ezine.com, where you can offer educational content which directs people back to your site to see your “stuff.” Case studies and PDF Top Tips articles show expertise and give people something to talk about.
2. Have a twitter party. Engage a group of tweeps (people who twitter), establish a host (the tweep who will be in charge of the event), and have at it. Use a tool such as Tweetchat to keep the party focused. The goal is to have the tweeps talk about you (or a product launch or a new service), while using a hashtag (the # symbol) to identify the twitter party and its topic. The bigger the party, the more likely it will become a trend on the Twitter tending list. Visit these links to learn how some others are doing this, and don’t forget the prize. (Awarding prizes can be a random drawing or by number of tweets, or any other criteria you establish – but make sure you are obvious about how the prize will be awarded.)
3. Create a Facebook Fan Page that engages your fans. Don’t create a page just to have a page. Make it worth their while – add content daily (more than once a day, if you can), host contests, invite fans to discuss their company or blog, and have a reason for them to visit regularly. This Blogger’s Guide to Facebook explains fan pages in more detail.
4. Support a charitable event. This week was National Animal Shelter Appreciation Week and bloggers all over the net covered it. They covered it by visiting shelters and blogging/twittering about them. They covered it by donating time or money or supplies. They got news coverage in their hometown by showing support for abandoned animals. When you actively support a charitable event, you create attention to the cause and the fact that you’re looking out for others. The key is to be vocal about it, online and offline. And the key to that is to keep the focus on the event, not on you. The resultant word-of-mouth is worth more than your weight in gold.
5. Be notable. Be like Scott Ginsberg, who wears a nametag on his chest, everywhere he goes. In fact, he can honestly and openly announce that he wears a nametag everywhere he goes because he had a nametag, with his name in it, tattooed on his chest. Scott lives word-of-mouth. In his blog post “How to Show Up Without Showing Off” he says, “Don’t just DO differently – BE differently.”
I have this quote on my desk and read it daily, “We are remembered not by what we take with us, but by what we leave behind.” Leave behind tangible when you can, but when you can’t – leave behind the memory of your personality, your bright red tie or blouse, your fantastic advice on how to get ahead in a down economy, and your invitation to pass out other people’s business cards at your next networking event. When you show people it’s about them, not about you, they start telling the world how smart and talented you are. (After all, you gushed over them, so you must be terribly talented and smart, right?) by Yvonne DiVita
Nick Nicholls
www.InternetMarketingBestPractices.net
www.NickNicholls.com
Every year consumers turn to the web to scour for the best holiday shopping deals. Black Friday has practically become a holiday of its own, with retailers jumping on the bandwagon earlier than ever to satisfy deal-hungry consumers.
This holiday season you have an opportunity to leverage social media channels for trackable giveaways and discounts that can not only boost your holiday sales but improve your social media presence.
1. Direct Message Discounts
If you're looking for fun and innovative ways to drum up your follower count on Twitter, or create more engagement between you and your customers, consider offering direct message-only holiday discounts.
Here's how this could work. Come up with a holiday deal that is significantly better than any of your existing promotions and make sure to share it with your entire team. Then use your social media channels to send out shareable clues about the promotion. You could tweet something like, "exclusive holiday Twitter deals on X,Y,Z, DM us for details."
For this type of promotion to work, it's all about the details. First, make sure you follow new followers back so that they can send you a direct message. Also, determine whether or not you want this to stay underground, or whether you're open to having the deal spread online. The benefit of the former approach is that select customers feel privileged, but the downside is that you'll need to generate a new discount/offer code or "password" for each person.
On the flip side, if you have one password/coupon/discount code, then anyone can get it via direct message and share it with their friends, which means you could get more mileage and buzz, but fewer followers. Figure out what your goal is and go with it, full steam ahead.
You might even get more mileage out of the deal if you offer a double deal (double whatever the original deal was) when you hit X amount of followers before a certain date. That could give deal-seeking customers the incentive to promote you in the hopes of saving even more.
2. Facebook Freebies
We're seeing more and more brands use their Facebook Fan Pages for fan-only deals, discounts, and coupons, and there's no reason why you can't use the holiday season to do the same for your small business.
This works for both online and offline retailers, but should you have a physical store, using your Facebook Fan Page to create a holiday coupon for an extra X% off already discounted merchandise would be an instant way to gain more fans and please holiday shoppers on the hunt for a bargain.
Since Facebook is so ubiquitous, if you go this route, make sure to inform your team members to tell customers about the deal while they're shopping. You can even teach employees how to show customers how to become your fan on Facebook from their mobile phones, thereby making them eligible for the extra savings instantly as well as getting a new fan on the spot.
3. Social Media Sharing
Whatever your sales goals are this holiday season, chances are you want to sell more of your products and services, but usually it's your customers and super fans who do all the real selling for you. Here's where social media can help. Use your email newsletter, Twitter account, Facebook Fan Page, and website to encourage your customers to share what they love most about your small business online. Encourage them to upload a photo, create a video, or pen a blog post about the products or services they love most. Also make sure to instruct them to tag the content with a predetermined tag. You can make the incentive whatever you want it to be, but offering each participant an X% discount off existing sale prices would be well received. This approach works best if you make the announcement on your own blog and request that participants include a link to their shared media in the comments section of the post. Also, remember that due to new FTC guidelines, you should encourage participants to disclose the deal or discount. by Jennifer Van Grove
Nick Nichollswww.InternetMarketingBestPractices.net