Archive for the ‘Social Marketing’ Category

Got these questions in a follow up to the ones below:

1.) Do you see any serious inefficiencies in implementing marketing efforts in a serial, rather than parallel, fashion?

2.) What would be your suggested first, second and third marketing things to do?

There are so many tasks associated with being an Internet marketer – blog posts, web 2.0 page creation, viral reports to release, video marketing, forum postings, article marketing, etc.  It can get overwhelming.

If you go to my YouTube channel you’ll be able to see all of my video creations that I’ve put up. One set of videos is called Organic Website Traffic (parts 1-8 so far). Start there. Whether you do your tasks one after another (the serial method) or parallel to one another will be a personal preference. But here’s how I do it:

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Hey everyone!

Thanks for all the supportive emails, PMs, and blog comments for my diet journey – I feel so good about that even though I had a moment of panic last night after realizing I’d put myself in a swimsuit on my blog! Ack!

Anyway, yesterday amid my diet madness, I ordered this: Social Marketing Package from a great guy named Alan Paterson.

For the $97, you get:

1 Squidoo lens
1 Weebly site
1 Ning site
1 Wordpress blog hosted on wordpress
1 Blogger blog
1 Article sent to ezine articles

…All with original content. How do I know Alan? He’s one of the people who came to me during my massive lens flipping mania and I bought many of his lenses and flipped them myself. (So if I bought them, you know they were good).

Anyway, I ordered and should ghet my package shortly, but I figured I’d let you all in on it since it’s a great deal – the content alone would cost you way more, but he’s setting it all up for you so you don’t have to mess with plugging it in (a real timesaver).

Check it out!

Oh, and for those who are interested – you can follow my weight loss progress at http://www.diydietplan.com/blog – let’s cheer each other on if you have pounds to shed, too!

Tiff

I have a niche where I have about 5 or so pages on web 2.0 sites and it’s making money about every day. Want to know what it is?

Click here to find out!

Hope you get some good ideas…

Tiff

You probably belong to one or more forums. Some might be Internet Marketing forums like Warrior Forum, and others might be niche-specific. If you’re just posting and taking away information, you’re not using the forum to the max.

I didn’t even realize that I was participating in forum marketing at first. I had plugged in my URL into my sig file (a sig file is your signature that appears below your post where you can include a link back to your domain, depending on the rules of the forum).

Then I started checking my stats. Traffic was pouring in from my forum participation!  Whether I was asking a relevant question or responding to something I felt I could help with, people were seeing my links and clicking through, then converting into sales.

If you want to make the most of your forum participation, make sure you do the following:

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When Lewis Smile and I wanted to find a way to help promote our customers lenses, we (okay he) came up with the idea to create our own lens link directory, but not just any link directory – one that’s exclusive and hard to get into, helping Google see that we only provide links to quality pages.

We know that the lenses we create are top notch – not only in design and aesthetics, but in regards to relevant, well-written content. It would never have dawned on me to do this (thank God I’m partnered with someone who has a tech-savvy mind).

I would have just thought it enough to continue with social bookmarking and the other pinging and things our service provides. But it’s not enough, not when you find even more ways to provide something amazing.

So Lewis created www.Every-Expert.com – a lens directory exclusive to our Build My Lens customers as an extra perk. They don’t have to pay extra for it – we just do it upon completion of the lens.

It gives our customers extra backlinks to their lenses, from what we hope will eventually grow into an authority site.

Instead of going through and adding all of our past customers lenses all at once (since there are hundreds), Lewis is adding 6-7 a day, so that Google sees natural growth instead of one big chunk that sets off alarms that it might be a spam site.

The primary tags link all of the lenses together by category. So Google associates high quality lenses both on Squidoo and off. So go to www.Every-Expert.com and click on one of the categories on the right side.

You’ll see the primary tags of the lenses in that category at the top of the page and then some recently added lenses with their images on the bottom half of the page.

If you click on one of the tags, you’ll see the Primary Tag Page in that category. So the lenses are not only linked together on the tag page for that word or phrase, but they’re also linked together on our lens directory.

Whenever he adds another lens, the directory automatically pings the search engines to alert them that a new lens was added.

Oh, and Lewis and I don’t have ANY of our lenses on here either – this is strictly a perk for our customers – it’s not self-serving. So if you want in, you’ll need to order a custom built lens or niche VIP 4-pack from BuildMyLens.com and we’ll get you through the velvet gates.

Tiff

I have been getting an onslaught of phone consultation requests. I know how my customers regard it – as a method of asking a “couple of quick questions,” but it never turns out that way. What happens is, I call, they go into a long back-story about their business, about their trials and failures, and then eventually … their questions.

After the quick consult is finished, I’ve spent 1-2 hours on the phone answering 1-2 questions that could have been taken care of in 5 minutes via email. I’m not rude. I don’t dislike my customers. In fact, I don’t know many marketers who do what I do – invite my customers to contact me any time about their issues and ask questions for free. I visit lenses, give specific advice about eBook creation – stuff you’d have to pay a mentor to provide for you.

But I feel GUILTY. Should I? When a customer asks me to call them for a few…or a potential customer threatens, “If you want my business, you’ll call.” (oh yes he did), I have started saying No. I turned away business because of the threat to not do business with me unless I called.

With Internet marketing, I believe that many assume the person on the other end has a regular home office – mostly men, while the kids are in school. I’m a work at home mom of 3 kids. I’ve had phone consults where my 3 year old toddler had a meltdown on the phone or ran up and screamed that she “needed to go poopie” – can you feel me when I say it’s kind of embarrassing to have that happen on a professional hone call?

I don’t abhor phone in all situations. I conduct interviews about Squidoo. I just finished one with Mike Antoni of the BOA Method. But it’s scheduled at a time late in the evening when my husband can take over and I can remove myself from the noise.

And no, I won’t ask him to do this every night. He’s worked hard all day, too – he doesn’t want to babysit while I go and talk to customers when an email would work on my schedule just as well.

So if you feel offended that I said no, please don’t take it personally. I’m here. I’m willing to help. But work with me on this. I know it’s a drag to type for some of you, but the only other option is for me to start charging for my phone time. And to tell you the truth, that’s not what I’m all about.

Tiff

PS – I’m not alone. When I asked in the Warrior Forum about this, the overwhelming response was the same as mine! Read it here: http://www.warriorforum.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=199446

If you’re like me, you don’t have a lot of time to spend rubbing elbows on the ‘net with your customers. Marketers lead busy lives
and it’s hard enough to find time to spend with your own family, much less court customers on a regular basis.

It’s a double edged sword because social networks are so popular and vital to marketing right now, but they take massive amounts of time. I started looking for ways to automate the process and it looks like I found one.

Bookmarking is something many marketers aren’t doing, or aren’t doing right. I went to one site, StumbleUpon, and bookmarked
my links. I started seeing a lot of traffic stream in from it, and what happened is other people are sharing the link.

So instead of socializing and exposing your link continually, day after day, as your spouse sits glaring at you from across the room, you set it up once, share it, and let the link get spread by other people. It’s actually kind of sneaky, making them work for no pay!

If you’re not bookmarking yet, you ought to give it a try. I personally used Craig Desorcy’s Ebook called Bookmark Traffic Secrets to teach me, but you can take the do-it-yourself route if you have time to figure it all out on your own. Let me know how it works for you!
Tiff

When I first heard about web 2.0 and peer to peer marketing, I was confident that my experience as a writer would serve me well in being able to reach out to my target audience.

I could already convey my thoughts well and generate an endless mound of ideas. My first foray into web 2.0 marketing was in using Squidoo to build exposure for my ghostwriting business, Write Consultants, Inc.

For years I have worked behind the scenes, creating products for major marketing gurus like John Reese, Rich Schefren, Janet Wilson of Empowerism, Jimmy Brown, and more.

I forged friendships with these people and as I worked on their product creation, I asked questions and got a good grasp of what the marketing industry was all about. It was that knowledge that I turned into a free 5-part course on Squidoo, linking one lens to another to give me more links and more opportunities to promote both my services and affiliate products (since I didn’t have my own at that time).

My course, The Art of Becoming an Information Entrepreneur, resulted in my lens having one of the biggest guestbooks on Squidoo. I had dozens of new clients find me through the site and it earned me thousands of dollars in revenue the first year.

My focus was all about proving to the prospects that I could create valuable content, because when they saw my course, they would see my talent and decide whether or not my style fit their needs.

Then I hit a stumbling block. After my Squidoo eBook launched (Social Networking on Squidoo), I began hosting monthly challenges for people wanting to test their LensMaster skills out against one another and see who could claim the highest LensRank position on the site.

During this time, I became more tech-savvy about the mechanical workings of Squidoo, and my focus was now consumed with HTML code, iFrames, and tricks to make my lens more aesthetically pleasing for an added “Wow factor.”

My new lenses started to rank lower even though I was following proper protocol in amping up the technical side of things. I still added content, but instead of focusing on creating a highly valuable lens, I was playing to search engine spiders and robotic elements my actual visitors weren’t interested in.

With web 2.0, you have to achieve balance between applying the mechanics that will boost your findability on the ‘net with a healthy dose of peer-influenced content. Your target audience isn’t interested in the fact that you have a snazzy new button to bookmark your site on Technorati. They’re more interested in whether or not you’ve given them something worthy of reading and sharing with others.

My goal now (regardless of what web 2.0 site I’m using), is to first create for my audience and then go back and harness the technical aspects of the site to my advantage. Yes, it takes longer to break it up into two parts, but the results are proving that a delicate balance of power means everyone wins.

Forgive me if I’m excited. Nobody in my house can understand because they don’t know Internet Marketing. But last night, John Reese emailed me his November 2006 Reese Report, which had a full page dedicated to my Squidoo lens and eBook, located at www.SocialMarketing101.com.

Anyone who knows marketing knows that this is like getting Dick Clark to endorse your New Year’s Even party, or God to put his seal of approval on your church! John is not only an impressive marketer, but it’s his kindness that blows me away.
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Well I’m getting a lot of demand for my Squidoo eBook – interviews, customer requests, etc. So I’m revamping it, giving it an up-to-date facelift, with even more of a powerful punch, and am going to launch it this coming week on ClickBank as a full-on eBook product!

Since I wrote the original, Squidoo has updated their look and options, so I want my readers to get a thorough accounting of everything they can do within Squidoo. I’m very excited about it because as web 2.0 takes root, Squidoo will become more and more popular – and I get a lot of traffic to this blog and other domains from people searching for “Squidoo Report.”
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