7 Things You Can Do Now To Cash in On Social Marketing

By Jonathan Jay (c) 2009

Seven is a magic number. Why? Because there are seven simple strategies every small business can employ to jump on the social marketing bandwagon. The best part: most require only a moderate investment of time and/or money.

1. Start Blogging - Blogging is old news to many. Not quite the distant past, but still not the future... sort of a Web 1.5. Is blogging what's 'hot' at the moment? Well, no. It certainly doesn't compare with chasing a link from the front page of Digg. But blogging is alive and well! It continues to be a great way to get interactively connected with your customers. 'Dialoguing' is the reason social marketing exists. How much time you invest in your blog is up to you, but you'll get out what you put in. You don't have to drive yourself crazy putting in daily entries, but you should establish a regular schedule for your blog updates. Otherwise, when people check your blog they'll see the same-old/same-old so often that they'll stop visiting your site... which is the whole reason you started the blog! So don't shoot yourself in the foot by creating a blog that's a visitor-repellent rather than a visitor-magnet.

Blogging is not a monologue. Your blog is not the electronic equivalent of Hamlet's soliloquy. Just the opposite! Blogging is about creating conversations and joining others in progress. Take time to read what others in your industry are saying. Get in on the discussion (and get your name out there) by posting your comments on other blogs. It's free, and again, the amount of time you invest can bring some very big returns. The beauty of blog posts is that you'll almost always be encouraged to supply your name and URL when leaving a comment. This is a great way to build visibility and create a springboard to catapult traffic from other blogs to yours.

2. Take and Share Digital Photos - Flickr can be a tremendous marketing tool thanks to its incredibly active photo groups. The time and cost investment are minimal, and you can use Flickr to reach thousands of highly targeted prospects with compelling images of your product.

3. Be The Answer Man (or Woman) at Yahoo Answers - There's one thing you have to provide that no one else does - your expertise. If you're a service-based business, your knowledge is your #1 marketing tool. Yahoo Answers is a great place for you to hammer away at prospects. Imagine being the go-to person that people seek out. That's who you'll be at Yahoo Answers.

There's no better way to share your expertise and make an instant and direct connection with potential customers. I know dozens of marketing pros like me who spent as little as an hour or two each week answering SEO and promotíon-oriented questions there. They tell me that they've been able to track big results from even that small investment of time.

4. Get Into the Movie Business - Pictures may be worth a thousand words, but moving pictures are worth their weight in solid gold marketing. Fortunately, good video cameras are cheap these days, and a short video needs little editing/production work in today's "everyone's a filmmaker" environment. And if you've got the creative "chops" to add some sizzle to a video, go for it! Be the next Scorsese, if you can. Fortunately, the software you need to add special effects won't break the bank. The most "viral" videos are usually spontaneous and unproduced... merely "captured" by a videographer. For marketing purposes, however, a produced video is the way to go... and a how-to video featuring your product is a good choice. If the look or location of your business is a selling point, "tour" videos - of a workplace, a restaurant, the homes you sell, the real estate you landscape, etc. - are your best bet.

Marketing videos are finding a home on local search portals like CitySearch. The find-it-in-your-town site announced that local video ads will be added to its listings. YellowPages.com is also exploring the idea of video opportunities.

Upload your videos to a unique page on your website or add them to your blog page. But don't stop there! YouTube is the most obvious - and the most active - sharing destination. And there are so many others. Just nose around the web and you'll find 'em.

5. Don't Wait To Visit StumbleUpon.com - There are many so-called 'discovery' type sites in social marketing. The best-known are Digg, Reddit, and Netscape, but they're also a bit complicated. StumbleUpon requires the lowest time investment. The site's functionality makes it much quicker and easier to join groups related to your industry and add friends from those groups.

Once you've joined and created your lists, you can start to upload "sticky" (appealing to visitors) content and before you know it, other users will "stumble upon" what you've added. That's when the "magic begins". When visitors give your pages good feedback, your content is shown to even more users.

You can't sell your product or service on StumbleUpon. The benefit it offers is increased traffic, which can lead to increased profíts. Those profíts are just a click away because your site is just a click away. Think of StumbleUpon as a way to raise awareness, Blog readership, grow subscribers, etc... all of which ultimately feed into your profit stream.

6. Join Up - A HUGE part of social marketing is detective work. You need to find your customers where they like to hang out. Well, if your customers are like most people on the planet, it's pretty likely that they hang out at Yahoo Groups or Google Groups to share interests and opinions.

Fetch, Marketer! Go get those prospects.

Like Flickr, the groups at Yahoo and Google are organised into interest-based lists. When you join the lists and discussions, you can provide your expertise (there's that word again) and become a trusted member of the community... the person that other people will want to do business with. There's no better outcome to marketing than that!

7. Make Friends, Not Noise - As you explore social marketing opportunities across the web, be sensitive to the rules and regulations posted on various websites. As a member of a social community, it's your obligation to play by the rules... so make sure you know them and follow them! But here's one general rule for using these sites as marketing tools: Don't spam the system. Flickr doesn't want your entire product inventory posted, and they have rules against doing so. But a few high-quality photo submissions that add to the community are fine.

Whatever social marketing you do, make a contribution to the community. Try to add content and comments of value, not an endless spew of "Buy my product" messages. In other words, don't be a leech that's merely there to suck up prospects. Give back a little. Or, better yet, give back a lot! When you do that, you're on the road to social marketing success. (Translation: more money than you'll know what to do with!)

And remember, with social marketing we're not talking about any old traffic. We're talk about platinum, USDA Prime, pre-qualified, eager to do business, trusting, ready and willing prospects who don't think of you as a business... they think of you as a friend.

So be a good friend. Deliver on the promise of quality and service. If you do that, social marketing will make you rích beyond your wildest dreams.

So stop dreaming and start marketing... socially.

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Improve Every Aspect of Your Business With Twitter!

By Abe Cherian (c) 2009

You've seen countless articles and e-books written about it, but do you know how to market online with Twitter? If you don't, you're not alone. Most marketers are still boggled when it comes to using Twitter in their promotíon efforts. The main reason is because marketers don't realize the sheer ingenuity of our favorite microblog's 140-character limit communication. The reality is that the internet is information overload for most people. The genius of Twitter is that communication is forced into small chunks of information which most people can willingly digest. Presented with the option, people are more inclined to read a sentence or two as opposed to a long, involved blog entry or email! In this article, I will demonstrate how Twitter can not only be used by your business for marketing purposes, but also for customer service, product development, free publicity, and valuable access to experts!

Twitter for Marketing

If marketing entails everything you do to place your product or service in the hands of potential customers, including all communication, relationship building, and brand recognition - Twitter makes it instant.

For this reason, it is the perfect social networking platform for announcing sales, specials, and promotions. Many larger companies, such as Dell, have a Twitter account to announce sales as soon as they become available. As a small business owner, you can harness the power of Twitter this way too!

If you can get hundreds, or even thousands of people interested in your niche to follow your company's tweets, you have a targeted líst of prospects at your fingertips. Simply tweet a brief detail or two about the special, and include your link. It's that simple!

A líst of businesses on Twitter:

http://www.twibs.com

As a marketer, you know that the speed at which you can get your message out to your potential clients before your competition can reach them essentially determines your success. Twitter affords marketers the advantage of communicating with thousands of new prospects at the speed of light, and allows them to see your offer in real time.

Twitter for Customer Service

Many companies are designating human resources and time exclusively to enhance their customer service via social networking. Companies can find out the challenges, questions, and troubles that their clients are facing by reading their tweets to others.

Customer service representatives or public relations liaisons can immediately resolve any problems by engaging themselves in the conversation. Customer service representatives who engage their clientele via Twitter improve their company's transparency, and show that they not only are concerned about their customers, but they also care about their brand.

Twitter for Product Development

Twitter can be used as an instant survey tool for product development. You can simply ask the likes and dislikes of others with a simple tweet and can incorporate or improve your current products or services.

It's catching on. In fact, software development corporation Eclipse is working on a Twitter plug-in called Twitterclipse, which will tweet announcements, findings and questions within their development team. It is faster and more convenient than email, and also avails an RSS feed for posting their development updates within the Eclipse website.

Twitter for Free Publicity and Brand Awareness

As you know, free publicity is priceless - and it can be difficult for a small business to get access to the media. Companies regularly pay millions of dollars to imprint their brand in the minds of prospective clients.

With Twitter's personalization features you can place your brand or company logo on your Twitter page. Because of the viral nature of Twitter, traffic and publicity comes for free.

People will associate your Tweets with your company, and their trust will grow in your products and services.

Twitter Gives You Access to Important People

No other media gives you direct access to leaders in your market like the internet does. Twitter gives you personal access to leaders and mentors that you have only ever dreamt of connecting with.

I bet you didn't think you would ever get the chance to be 1-on-1 with Brian Tracy on Twitter, right?

http://twitter.com/BrianTracy_

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Editor's Note: Several Twitter related sites provide a means to identify Twitter users in your geographical area or relevant to your business:

http://mrtweet.net
http://www.twellow.com
http://justtweetit.com
http://www.twitterlocal.net
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Simply follow them, and open up the channels of communication with your tweets! The leaders of your field impart valuable knowledge that you can apply to your online business, and can be a great source of free marketing tips.

Improve Every Aspect Of Your Business With Twitter!

Twitter is extremely simple, but this fact also adds to its versatility. You may not realize the effect of Twitter on your business when your followers are at a single digit - but just imagine the scope of your business reaching tens of thousands of followers! Many online businesses are using Twitter now... what are you waitíng for?

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How to Cut Marketing Costs without Endangering Business Growth

As business owners and/or marketers, we're all under pressure to cut costs. Unfortunately, many business owners get so intent on reducing costs, they lose sight of what it's going to do to the business. It's hard to grow - or even survive - if you don't have any customers.

Reducing marketing costs without screwing up your ability to grow is easier than you might think.

Here are five ways to do that.

1. Eliminate waste

Over the years I've looked at hundreds of marketing programs, and I can tell you honestly that nearly all of them have some kind of hole that either drains money directly or allows leads to be lost.

Before you cut anything, take a good hard look at what you're doing. Are there programs that aren't delivering the results you anticipated? Fix them or get rid of them.

Is there anything that can't be traced to increasing sales opportunities? Unless you have a pile of extra money, now is not the time to be spending money on marketing efforts that don't generate more leads or develop the ones you have.

2. Make fewer mistakes

Another way to say this is: turn to people who know what they're doing.

Marketing - which has never been exactly simple - has changed a lot in the past few years. Customers and prospects are in charge now, and they're looking for you online. If you're not on the internet, you're not in the game.

While I admire business owners who try to figure marketing out for themselves, it wastes a lot of time and it leads to mistakes that could be avoided with some experience.

You may not need a proven marketing pro on staff, but if you don't have one somewhere on your team you're probably wasting money.

3. Nurture what you've got

Successful lead generation programs bring in people in different stages of the buying process. Some are ready to commit more to you than others are. Some are ready to talk to a sales person and some aren't.

Think of any lead generation activity you've ever done: search marketing, email, advertising, telemarketing, networking, trade shows - it doesn't matter. Were all of the people who responded ready to schedule a two-hour demo of your product? Of course not.

But that doesn't make those people any less likely to buy from you in the future as long as you maintain a relationship with them.

If you're one of those businesses that has a bunch of inactive prospects sitting in a database (or on your desk), you may be better off nurturing those people than paying to find new ones. And nurturing leads can be a lot less expensive than generating them in the first place.

4. Increase conversions - not just inbound leads or traffic

This point is similar to the one above it, but it's important enough to look at from a different angle.

Let's say you have 2000 visitors a month going to your website and 60% of them leave your homepage without going anywhere else. Which do you think would be cheaper, changing your website so that an additional 20% (400 visitors) stay on your site or doubling traffic to the site? The results are the same.

(Hint: if you picked the first option, you're right).

Complex purchases - such as technology, high ticket goods, and on-going services - are made up of many different conversion points where the buyer decides whether or not to spend any more time with you. Each of those conversion points can be tweaked to pass more prospects through and provide a better return on your investment.

5. Consider outsourcing

To have a successful marketing program today requires skills in multiple disciplines - some of which didn't even exist a decade or so ago. For example, you need:

Website strategy and development, search engine optimization, paid search marketing, prospect conversion optimization, lead nurturing and web marketing - just to name a few.

Staffing an in-house team with all of this expertise would cost more than most small to mid-sized businesses are willing or able to invest. Yet you can easily - and cost effectively - get this expertise from an outside firm or group of individuals.

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10 Things That You Must Do This Year To Stay In Business

With all the scare-mongering that is going on in the media at the moment surrounding the downturn, recession, depression or basically badly blown out economy (or at least as they would have you believe), you could be forgiven for pulling down your blinds and hanging up the 'out of business' sign in your shop front. That is if you've even managed to hang on to your premises for this long or even have a physical store front since the advent of the internet. But just like when I am running a business or marketing consult session with a client, I tend to encourage people to stop focusing on the negative or problems at hand and start coming up with possible solutions....

With all the scare-mongering that is going on in the media at the moment surrounding the downturn, recession, depression or basically badly blown out economy (or at least as they would have you believe), you could be forgiven for pulling down your blinds and hanging up the ‘out of business’ sign in your shop front. That is if you’ve even managed to hang on to your premises for this long or even have a physical store front since the advent of the internet.

But just like when I am running a business or marketing consult session with a client, I tend to encourage people to stop focusing on the negative or problems at hand and start coming up with possible solutions. A simple brain storm BEFORE the pressure really hits or even in the midst of a crisis is a good way to remain optimistic about the year ahead (and to bring out my inner hippie, a little positive energy all around never hurt anyone).

By focusing on some specific tasks that will put you in a better position, or give you a position in the first place if you are a new businesss on the block, you should begin to see real results.

My first posting this year is therefore 10 possible ‘solutions’ or suggested marketing activities/strategies that will suit most businesses that I encourage you to consider implementing in the interest of battening down the hatches.

And whilst it is certainly better to do something rather than nothing, I would strongly encourage you to employ multiple strategies so that if you find one doesn’t work, you can put more into the strategies that you are finding ARE working for you. Like everything in marketing, to some degree it’s a little bit of test, measure, refine then repeat.

So without further adieu, here’s what I recommend you get busy with in 2009:

1. Have a website that has been created post 2005, which you can quickly and easily updates yourself and that is search engine friendly. If your site is all of these things but has not yet been search engine optimized, get this into play pronto too.

2. Have a blog that syndicates content in multiple locations every time you make a new posting be it audio, video or word content. There are whispers that audio and video will increase in their level of importance when it comes to performance online in 2009.

3. Have a company Facebook page and depending on what you do, be exploring the capability of running demographically targeted ad campaigns through Facebook.

4. Get key company documents i.e. templates, forms, contacts, procedures and policies ONLINE utilizing technology such as wikis, Google Docs or otherwise where you can share and collaborate online and mobilize your business. If things are quieter than usual, there is no better time to get this key documentation for your business in place.

5.Explore other social media realms and possibilities i.e. digg, LinkedIn, twitter, You Tube etc

6. Make sure that in all your marketing material it is explicitly clear what you offer and what action you want them to take. If it’s not, change your marketing to something that is powerful and effective

7. Know down to the lead and the last dollar what marketing activities out there are generating you in terms of inquiries and sales and stop or decrease all marketing activities that are not providing you with a good return on your investment.

8. Have a bullet proof data capture system for all incoming inquiries be they walk ins, fax, phone, email or otherwise whereby you ask for their name, contact number, email and how they heard about you. Ensure you have a system in place that you follow them up systematically until they convert into a paying customer.

9. Revive your de-activated clients – that is people who have not spent money with you in some time. Most businesses are sitting on a gold mine of information and ‘warm’ leads from people who have done business with them in the past, but who they have never since contacted to see if they can get an upsell or cross-sell from a re-contact or even a referral.

10. Set up a Google Alert so you are the first to know when mentions of your company, product or service are made online, be it good or bad coverage. You may also like to careful eye on your competitors through Google Alerts and other tools online to see how they are weathering the potentially rocky economic storm.

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Marketing Tips

Using email is a great way to market and promote your e-commerce business. With people being so busy and getting junk mail, how do you make your email stand out? Here are some helpful tips to get you the most benefits from this effective marketing tool. It is important to do some research and attempt to get your marketing sent to a target market that will likely be interested in the products or services you are offering.


Some companies randomly send emails to people who have absolutely no interest in what is being advertised. You will get a very low response from such marketing methods.

If your website asks for consumer information including an email address, but respectful. Ask if they are interested in receiving e-mail advertisements and promotions. If they choose not to then don’t add them to your data base for marketing by email. Make sure you have the permission of the consumer to send them such materials. You are required by law to include an opt out link in the event
the consumer no longer wants to receive such emails from you.

Statistics show Tuesday and Wednesday are the most effective days to send out marketing emails. Send them out in the morning
so that individuals have time to read them during breaks, lunch hours, and in the early evening. You might have a lot of information to pass on to the target market, but keep your email short and to the point. Most internet users like to go through
their emails quickly.

If yours is lengthy it may get deleted or saved to be read later. You want the consumer to be able to read it as soon as they click on it and get all the information. Make sure you have hyperlinks that take consumers immediately to your website if they are interested. Internet users are not patient. Most will not wait longer than five seconds for your website to appear.


It is important to test your marketing email in the various email programs including Yahoo, MSN, Hotmail, and AOL because
they all work differently. Your graphics and pictures may be distorted in particular email programs.

This will result in all those consumers not being able to use your marketing email as it was intended. Taking the time to conduct these tests can make the difference between an effective email marketing campaign and one that is a flop.


How often do you want to send an email to your consumers? This can be tricky to determine. It really depends on your products
or services and your target market. You want to keep your business name fresh in the mind of the consumers but they will stop reading the emails from you if they become too frequent.

Some businesses do them weekly or monthly. Others choose to only send an email when there is a huge promotion going on. A business newsletter is a great way to contact the consumer monthly with fresh information. You also want to give consumers a very simple way to change their email address as it is very common to change email service providers.


You need to have an effective system set up to answer any questions emailed to you from customers within 24 hours. This will show your business is serious about keeping them satisfied before, during, and after they make a purchase. Issues come up and most consumers will give your business the opportunity to help resolve the situation. This is your opportunity to prove the integrity of your business.

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