Archive for the ‘general tips’ Category

Posted on June 2, 2011 - by Kwame

Online PR: The only mini-guide you will ever need on how to win new customers

It is amazing how some people use smart (cost-effective, efficient, etc.) ways to sell their brands online. Social media has made it more easy to share your brand’s story and also get other people to spread the word about your products and services for free. Unfortunately “the word” people spread about you can be good or bad. It can help you make sales and it can help you lose sales. That is why it is best to master online Public Relations techniques.

Today, I will be sharing with you a short guide about how to do online PR. I’ve listed things you need to be using and doing and I also shared some links to tools you should be using.

Read on and take notes.

Case-Studies:

Case studies are an awesome sales tool since they serve as testimonials and also highlight benefits of your service at the same time. What you need to do first is have some case-study type articles on your business’ blog. When your product or service helps someone solve a problem or do something differently, write a blog post about it.

Share the step-by-step process you used to resolve it and how other people (especially prospective customers) can avoid or solve such problems. You can also share case studies as guest posts on other blogs. This is a powerful way of leveraging some other site’s audience to drive more traffic to your website and sales for your business.

Daily Alerts:

There is no better way to monitor your brand(s) online. Subscribe to daily alerts and respond to questions and rumors about your company. If someone asks a question about your business on Facebook, Twitter, on their blog or any other place on the internet, write blog posts that answers their questions and point them to the article. They might share your answer with their audience.

Some tools for tracking your company online are:

Networking with Journalists and Bloggers:

Contact bloggers and journalists via email, Facebook, Twitter or their LinkedIn profiles and start developing relationships with them. You can start by telling them how you loved or hated one of their recent or old articles and continue from there.

Unless you are going to pay them to do it, develop relationships first with bloggers and journalists before you ask them to write about your product or service.

If you are inexperienced with influencing people, I suggest you read Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People”. Also, you can read the blog articles below:

Some tools for finding and networking with journalists:

I only knew about Muckruck and Help A Reporter Out; I saw the rest on Ben Lang’s post on Mashable here: 10 Ways For Entrepreneurs To Build Brands Online

If you have money and want to save time, write a press release and go to PRWeb to get it distributed to the news media for you.

Online shows:

Find online shows you want to be on and contact the host to have you on it to share your expertise or advice.

Get on webinars as a guest host; You can offer yourself for free and teach someone else’s community for free. You get free publicity in return and you increase the value of you and your company just by hosting a webinar because you are perceived as a consultant/ trainer and that lets people perceive you and your business as value deliverers.
Contact bloggers to interview you on their blogs. Many bloggers do this nowadays. My favorite blogger in this area is Andrew of Mixergy. He does a great job. Ask bloggers in your niche if they will want to interview you and see where it goes.
Get on podcasts relevant to your business area as a guest and offer free advice.

Conclusion:

What you just learned is basically, the essentials of online PR. Use the lessons in this article to grow a powerful online brand. If you also have something to share about online PR, be my teacher and share it in the comments box. I suggest you share and bookmark this article using the social buttons below. Don’t forget to also subscribe to the RSS feed for more.

Post image credit

Posted on April 13, 2011 - by Kwame

How to launch a new blog or website with a bang and virtually no money

Many people are familiar with the common way of launching a blog or website; get a domain name, buy hosting, get a website design, add content and then that’s it. It’s that easy but you can do more with your launches. Know how to use landing pages?

You’ve seen many internet marketers and businesses use landing pages in their product launches. The reason why they do this is that, it gets potential customers in the door for their products. Some of these people order the product when it finally launches. It is a system that works for internet marketers and it can be used in any other industry to start a community for your blog or website before it actually goes live. So how can you do this with your new website launch?

What you will need

You will have to spend some money but not more than what you will spend setting up a new website the common way. So here is a list of what you will need to set up a landing page for your prelaunch:

A domain name: I recommend that you get a .com or .net domain name. You can buy your domain names for $10 or less on Godaddy.

Web hosting: Hostgator is the hosting service I recommend. I use them to host my websites and I haven’t had any problem so far. They also have excellent, responsive tech support too. That is rare with other hosting companies. Use coupon code TEXAS to get the first month for 1 cent. You can sign-up here.

Landing page template: You can get one for between $8 and $12 on Themeforest. Click here to see some examples.

Newsletter system: I recommend Mailchimp for this. They allow you to collect up to 2,000 emails before you pay anything for it. That’s the best deal I have ever seen when it comes to newsletter systems. Get it here.

So adding it all up, you can expect to spend less than $25 on everything. After grabbing all these tools, set them up and then build your prelaunch content.

Prelaunch content

Before your prelaunch content, you will need your introductory content; the content that you will send out to anybody who joins your newsletter once it is set up. It can be a welcome message with an introduction of yourself and what your blog will be about. It’s that simple.

The prelaunch content is the content you send after your introductory content. I recommend that it should be a tutorial of some sort or about something you’ve observed in the niche your site will be about. Write 2 or 3 pieces of this content, send them to your subscribers one at a time and then ask them to forward it to a friend. If they do, more eyes will see your content and their friends might actually visit your landing page to join your newsletter too. You can send them one piece/ article each week. You can set this up easily inside most newsletter software. Make sure whatever you teach or show them in your prelaunch content is relevant to what your site or blog will be about. After all, that is why they joined your newsletter.

The next stage is to set up your landing page.

Landing Page set-up

I am going to assume you already know how to set up a website but I have a few tips and recommendations for the landing page.

First of all, make sure you write a catchy headline that showcases the benefit of joining. Your headline is what draws people to join your newsletter. If you need help in this area, Brian Clarke has tons of articles concerning headlines. Just go to Google and put in this query, “site:copyblogger.com headlines” (without the quotation marks) and you will find a goldmine of articles there about headlines.

The second thing you have to look at is your graphic elements. Some experts say that big buttons drive conversions so you want to make sure that your buttons are big. Some also say that arrows also aid in converting visitors to subscribers. Maybe a User Experience expert can explain it further but what I have been told is that, it works so try experimenting with it to see how it goes.

After setting these up, you will now have to promote your landing page.

Landing Page Promotion

In order to get people ready for your launch, you need to send them to your landing page so they can subscribe to your newsletter. I will show you the 2 cheapest and fastest way to get people to your site; it will cost you no money at all.

Here are some tips for landing page promotion:

1) Write guest posts to pre-existing blogs who write about your topic or a similar one. You can use specific keywords you will want your site to rank for as anchor text for the link to your website in your byline. You will need to check with the blog you are writing for to know if they accept this. This will help your site to start ranking for those keywords even before you launch. That’s just one of the SEO benefits of guest blogging. Read my article on 10 Places to Find Blogs to Guest Post On if you need some help finding places to send your guest posts.

2) Turn your prelaunch content into presentation slides and upload them to Slideshare.com and scribd.com and leave a link back to your landing page in the description area and also inside the document itself. You should actually tell people who read this what you want them to do. This will work just fine, “We will be launching a blog soon to teach more of this stuff so you should visit our website at http://www.yourwebsite.com to sign-up for our free newsletter so we can notify you once we launch.”

After collecting some subscribers, you can actually go ahead and launch.

The launch

On your launch day, just email your subscribers and let them know that you’ve launched. If you are launching a blog, I recommend that you have at least 3-5 articles ready to be published on your launch day. Once published, you can send your subscribers to your blog and ask them to interact and discuss the content there.

Set up RSS feeds and social profiles so that you can continue building your community; thereby, expanding your network of fans, followers and subscribers.

Conclusion

I hope I explained this post in the simplest way for you. However, if you have any questions, suggestions or recommendations, I urge you to share them in the comments area below.

Subscribe to our RSS feed and like us on Facebook to receive free future updates. Also, if you loved this post, share it with your friends and colleagues using the social buttons below.

Posted on August 26, 2010 - by Kwame

New Digg copied Facebook and Twitter Too Much!

Yesterday, I went to Digg’s website and saw a beautiful new look. The design however, looks and “feels” like Facebook’s design. I logged in to my account and found also that the features there closely resembled Twitter. All of this is what they call Digg 4.

The service now has a “follow” and “unfollow” feature. I thought that was cool. I also noticed that when you log in to your account, you are taken to a page where you see all the submissions and diggs of the people you follow.

It also has a suggestion page that shows you a list of people and brands to follow. Just like Twitter.

Before I could say “Jack”, this page came up:

Has Twitter bought Digg or Digg is just copying Twitter? If it’s an act of copying, then Digg overdid it. Twitter has a fail whale and now, Digg is flaunting their “broken axle” page.

I’m still checking it out. I think they did too much copying this time. Have you found any features similar to Twitter’s on the new Digg? It’s like the company has Twitter’s blueprint.

Posted on July 26, 2010 - by Kwame

Understanding Social Media: The LIFE of Social Media Marketing

Do you have an easy means of reminding yourself of what social media is about? There are so many posts on this subject.

I’ve decided to summarize it so you can easily remember it for your business purposes.

Social media is about L.I.F.E. with your prospects on social sites.

Now, let’s define what L.I.F.E. means in social media. I’ll show you what each letter means; of course, starting with L and ending with E.

‘L’ is for Listening: Your prospects are out there. Are you listening to them? You can use these any of these social media listening tools: 10 tools for listening in social media.

‘I’ is for Innovating: What’s your unique feature? Have you blended that into your social media strategy? Innovation sparks interest. Here is a resource article for innovation: Using social media to drive business innovation: insights from Guy Kawasaki and Target’s Michael Axelin

‘F’ is for Friending: Friending means building relationships. You’ve earned some prospects (fans or followers) so the next thing to do is invest in them. Chris Brogan shared some tips on this: Deepen Your Networks.

‘E’ is for Engaging: Start conversations about your brand. Join conversations concerning your brand. Be present wherever your brand is being talked about. Kyle Lacy wrote a great article about how to engage: 20 Ways to Engage Contacts in Social Media.

In summary, social media is about Listening, Innovating, Friending and Engaging with your prospects.

Next time you want to remember what social media is all about, think, L.I.F.E. The meaning will let you draft a better social media strategy.

Posted on July 20, 2010 - by Kwame

10 Ways to Generate Leads With Social Media

How many leads do you generate every month with social media? If you’re not getting enough leads, today is your lucky day.

After reading this article, you’ll have 10 ideas you can use to increase your website traffic and leads. You may already know some of the ideas but trust me; there will be some you don’t know. So make sure to read through all the ideas and let me know if you’re already using any.

Let’s begin.

1. Create a digital product, write guest posts and offer your product for free in your byline. The product could be an eBook, infographic, themes or any other digital product. Make sure you have your website links in the document. You can also encourage people to share it and put a link back to your site. Tip: A little bird told me that Infographics spread like wildfire .

2. Search Twitter for discussions related to your niche. If there are any questions, answer them with an @ reply and provide a link back to your blog post or any relevant page on your site. This tip doesn’t necessarily grow your traffic but it sure will give you quality leads if done right.

3. Turn your blog posts into slide presentations and upload them to slideshare and scribd. Put your website and social media profile URLs in there so people who view your slides can pay you a visit. This is a cool way of repurposing your blog posts and regaining some value back.

4. Plan a series of Videos and use Tubemogul to post them to the various video sites. Make the videos as interesting as possible. By interesting, I mean enlightening, funny, … something people will remember. At the end of each video, ask people to go to your site and sign up for your newsletter in order to receive new video alerts and other updates from you.

5. Answer relevant questions on Q&A sites like Yahoo Answers, Yedda and Answers.com. Ask people to Google “your business name or any keyword you rank #1 for” and click on the first result. You can post your website URL straight away but do that less often so you’re not seen as a spammy contributor to these sites. One more thing, answer the latest, freshest questions if you want to see any relevant increase in traffic.

6. Post short useful articles on forum sites relevant to your niche and leave a link back to your site.

7. Create an eBook. Take a sample out and make a PDF out of it. Share it on Lulu and Docstoc. At the beginning and end of the sample, provide a link to a page where people can put in their email addresses to receive the full book/report. Encourage people to share it with their friends and colleagues.

8. If you want to rank high for any keyword or phrase, make that phrase your anchor text in your guest post bylines. For example, say you want to rank high for the key phrase, “brand communication”, you use that as your anchor text and put your website link there. The higher the PR of the blog you are posting on, the better your chances of ranking higher. Do this consistently for all guest posts you write and use the same key phrase until you are on page 1 of Google’s search. I am on page 2 of Google right now for the key phrase, “brand communication” and I only used that as my anchor text in just one guest post. When I use it again on a top PR (page rank) blog, I will rank even higher. Try it for yourself. By the way, this is a neat trick I learnt from Brian Clark’s “How to Create Compelling Content That Ranks Well in Search Engines”. Download a copy on this page: SEO Copywriting Made Simple.

9. Answer Questions on LinkedIn. Connect with other professionals. Ask your past customers for recommendations. Jason Falls wrote an article on how to make LinkedIn answers part of your routine so head towards his blog to read about it.

10. Run a survey on your blog, Twitter and Facebook and share the results with other people. Explain the methodology and findings of your survey and publish the results in PDF format and share it on your site and other sites. Send a message @ everybody who participated in the survey on Twitter with a link to the results. You can also contact bloggers in your niche and ask them to share your findings. Tamar Weinberg shows you how to pitch superstar bloggers here: How to Get an Influencer’s Attention.

Phew! That was a short ride . Okay, seriously, you should apply these tips. You don’t have to implement all at once. Bookmark this page, start with 2 or 3 strategies and come back later to try out the other ones. Some may work for you and some may not.

Remember, social media is a lead generation tool and newsletters are your lead collection and sales tools so have your newsletter signup boxes ready to collect email addresses. Prepare some bait for the stubborn ones .

What strategy do you use to build more leads, links and traffic?

Image Source

SEO Copywriting Made Simple

Posted on July 12, 2010 - by Kwame

5 Misconceptions That Confuses Businesses About Social Media

Do you really understand social media? Understanding social media is not a difficult thing at all. However, some businesses still can’t figure it out. They can’t figure it out because misconceptions are spread all over the internet concerning social media.

Getting more involved in social media now is better than waiting until later because it will get to a time that it will seem more confusing and even more difficult for businesses.

If you hold any of the beliefs below, do away with it and jump on board before you miss the train.

Misconception #1: Blogging is a tool: Blogging is a business strategy, not a tool. A blog is rather the tool used for blogging. A blog also helps you integrate your other strategies like social media marketing by linking to other strategy enhancing tools like social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Youtube. Yes, social media marketing too is strategy. All the strategies you use in your blogging and social media strategies are just sub-strategies of blogging and social media which are your main strategies for success in achieving this or that.

Misconception #2: Social Media is about numbers: Is it of essence to build 40,000 Twitter followers and 20,000 Facebook fans who don’t buy from you? Social media is about relationship building and influence. Sorry, but having a large number of followers doesn’t mean you are influential. One-to-one relationships build influence. Good relationships later lead on to influence. If you have 200 Twitter followers who listen and engage with you, you stand a better chance to get a sale from them than from 40,000 people who don’t send you @ messages about anything of your business’ interest. It’s best to follow the people you want to talk or listen to (a.k.a. your target audience) than follow just anybody.

Misconception #3: Automation Means Using Tools: No, measurement rather means using tools. Automation means your fans and followers will do your work for you. They will be your evangelists and will recruit more fans and followers for you. The number one quality required here is patience. If you rely on tools to build your fans and followers, you will most likely recruit web robots who also want you to buy something from them. Would you rather waste time gathering status update spectators or you want to utilize your time to build a more targeted following?

Misconception #4: Be present everywhere: So you’ve been told to have a Twitter profile, a Facebook fan page, a Youtube channel, a LinkedIn group, Digg profile, etc. Well, are your customers gathered there? Do you have the resources to manage your business on every social media and networking site? Before you put your business on any social networking site, be sure of what you want to achieve with that profile; customer service, more leads or maybe sales. After setting your goal, stick to it. If at any point you find any trouble getting the results you want, perform a social media audit.

Misconception #5: There is no ROI: If you are not getting any ROI, then you are either doing something wrong or you’re not measuring things right. Dell has been able to make over $6.5 million on Twitter alone. Avaya also made a $250,000 sale using Twitter. Small businesses are also using Twitter to bring in some ROI using social media. To make social media marketing work for you, you need to communicate your intentions well with your followers. Dell’s @delloutlet clearly tells everyone they will be selling. We all know what an outlet means. If all you are going to do with one of your Twitter accounts is to just give discount coupons, tell your customers about it. So anybody who follows you knows you’ll be tweeting coupons from time to time. Secondly, ROI is not just about money or profits. If your aim is to get leads or newsletter subscriptions, your ROI will be the number of leads you collect. Then your ROI on those leads will be the number of leads you convert to sales. Social media can be a channel for both lead collection and direct selling. You need to communicate it well. Plan your campaign well. Remember, the most important thing in marketing is communication so don’t forget to plan about what you want to communicate to your followers.

Now that we have gotten these wrong ideas taken care of, where are you headed to with your social media marketing campaign? In your experience, what other misconceptions have you found?

Posted on June 3, 2010 - by Kwame

25 Characteristics of Highly Effective Social Media Campaigns

There is so much rock and roll going on involving businesses running social media campaigns. However, there are not many social media rockstars. Their guitars vary. Some rock hard and some… not so hard. Some even have broken guitar strings. We don’t notice the size of their guitars though. What we notice is the kind of music they produce.

There are certain characteristics that differentiate the effective social media campaigns from the boring ones. You need to learn these characteristics if you also want to be effective with your campaigns.

Don’t worry if your ‘strings’ are broken. You can fix it.

Here are 25 characteristics of highly effective social media campaigns (from the rockstars) and some tips to help you rock like them.

1) They spread like wildfire. Effective social media campaigns spread very fast. If your campaign is not spreading, it is not effective. Test the waters with micro campaigns. Learn to swim before attempting to ride the big waves.

2) They are not spammy. Don’t just promote your site links; share something insightful about your company or product. Don’t send out the same message to your community. It is spam…and it is very annoying to them. Even to you. Admit it.

3) They provide value. Value can come in the both physical and mental forms. Effective campaigns provide value in any or both of these regards.

4) They are well branded. Clothe your campaign from head to toe with your company’s identity. Use your logo, your USP or slogans, your colors, and any other thing that defines your business’s identity. Add your brand to every video you produce; don’t add just your website address.

5) They are measured. You need to track your social media marketing efforts. Whether you install Google Analytics on your Facebook fan page or you use Post rank to measure your effectiveness, make sure you work with the data.

6) They have excellent copy. Leave a positive impression in just a few words. Using big vocabulary is not the way to go; making sense is what matters.

7) They don’t ‘sell’. Instead of selling, you should work at generating leads with your social media campaign. Sell to those leads later on.

8 ) They build relationships. Don’t just broadcast. Interact. Building relationships helps build even more relationships. It also increases the perception of value and builds loyalty.

9) They build trust. Be as honest in your campaign as possible. Trust is very hard to earn back once lost. Your campaign should build and maintain trust in your build.

10) They are innovative. Regular campaigns mostly go unnoticed. Innovation adds ‘flavor’ to your campaign. It is the aroma of your campaign and the one thing that will convince most people to take action.

11) They have ears. Your campaign will not be successful unless you listen for feedback. People may have something to say so listen and show appreciation or let them know you are working on it. Never delete a negative feedback.

12) They are well organized. Your campaign needs to be well planned. It should have a first step and an nth step (where n is the number of the last step). Follow through from step 1 through to step n. Don’t go from step one to step 3 to step 2. Plan your steps well so it is easy to follow through step 1 to the last step.

13) They are maintained by humans. Don’t rely on automation when it comes to marketing on the social web. It just won’t work. Besides, it destroys trust. Put a human being in front of, in-between and behind all your social media campaigns. I want to talk to a human being not a robot.

14) They are consistent. You need to be consistent with your update (or broadcast) schedules and interact with people who leave replies and comments. If you broadcast once a week and change to 5 times a day, people will begin to question your actions. Unless you give them good reason why you have changed your schedule.

15) They have bait. You need to have some sort of bait to convert visitors into leads. Try eBooks, free products, white papers, discount codes, samples, free vouchers, et cetera. Bait them to get them .

16) They use leverage. They leverage the subscriber bases of their communities and other people’s communities. They also leverage their company strengths.

17) They include a blog. I suggest you have a business blog before you start your campaign. Your blog should be the hub of your social media campaign efforts. Make you install social media sharing buttons to make it easier for others to share your blog’s content.

18) They engage other blogs. You can do this too. Apply as a guest writer for blogs in your target market. Read blogs in your niche and leave thoughtful comments (not just a “thank you”).

19) They are not everywhere. If you want your campaigns to be successful, don’t register for an account on every social media site. That will only burn you out and your campaigns will be fruitless.

20) They have humor. Adding humor to marketing is a cool way of saying “we are a friendly business”. It makes your marketing memorable. A priceless result.

21) They share company events. If your company is being bad mouthed, tell your customers about it. Tell them the truth in it and the lies. Don’t give them the chance to second guess your company. If your company is nominated for an award, tell your community about it. If your company wins the award, tell them. If you lose the award, tell them.

22) They integrate offline marketing. Print some T-Shirts, with your logo, Twitter handle, Facebook fan page URL and your slogan on it and give them out to your customers. Send out paper printed catalogs to your online leads. Add your Twitter and Facebook URLs to your contact address. Integrate offline with online.

23) They use the right networks. Even though Facebook supports videos, video campaigns will do better on Youtube than on Facebook.

24) They use photos and videos. Photos and videos leave a lasting impression on peoples’ minds. The best photo you can use is your logo. When you make a video, put your logo on it.

25) They have a call to action. What is the essence of a marketing campaign without having a call to action of some sort? I suggest you use your social marketing campaigns to generate leads before trying to sell anything. By the way, “signup below” and “call us now” are not the only call to action examples. “Click to view our portfolio” is an example of call to action. Your call to actions must follow a sequence; from your homepage to the last page.

Tanaa, tanaa, yay,yay, yay! Sorry, couldn’t help it.

Here are 3 other useful resources:

1. Is Your Social Media Clap-on, Clap-off?

2. Understanding Social Media Using Honey Bees As A Standard Model

3. How to Be in the Right 50% of Social Media Marketing Campaigns

There are lots of valuable tips in this article you could use. I suggest you print it out and use it as a reference when you are running your campaigns. I also encourage you to bookmark it online and share it with your friends and colleagues.

Let me know if you are a social media rockstar. Share any tips, questions or comments you have in the comments area.

Thumbnail photo by Silvertje.

Posted on May 27, 2010 - by Kwame

Understanding Social Media Using Honey Bees As A Standard Model

The honey bee is a social insect. By studying honey bees, humans have been able to solve problems in electronics and science in general. I know it is unbelievable but it is actually a fact. Some people have even asked us (humans) to use honey bees as a standard model for our social lives. Read this wiki if you need confirmation: Bee Colony Optimization.

What can the honey bee teach us when it comes to social media? Well, they can teach us a lot. In fact, a honey bee’s social life could be likened to that of a good social media marketer.

Before we delve into this topic more, let’s look at the picture below: It explains how honey bees communicate: Now let’s explain the picture.

There are certain worker bees whose primary work is to forage for food. They focus on gathering nectar and pollen.

If a foraging honey bee finds a source of high quality nectar and pollen, it returns to the hive to communicate it to other worker bees in the hive.

They perform a dance to communicate the location of the food to other worker bees. After performing the dance, a swarm of bees fly to the food source.

Honey bees are master communicators and they are very good at bringing a “buzz” to an orchard or source of food for them.

Now, let’s replace the honey bee’s story with our own human story in terms of bringing buzz to our business. Do you already see where this is going?

So let’s think of the honey bee as a regular internet surfer who has a social profile on Facebook, Twitter, or any other social media site. Regular internet surfers visit many websites and blogs a day looking for different kinds of information.

They normally like to share websites with their friends but one thing is that, they normally share websites that offer a lot of quality information or has a lot of goodies.

So in order for you to grab a web surfer’s attention, first you will need a good website design (flower petals?).

Now they land on your page and start ‘foraging’ for information. Now, your content will be the pollen and the offer or value your website promises will be the nectar.

If the web surfer finds your design to be cool, your content (or pollen) to be awesome and your offer (or nectar) to be excellent, they will be tempted to share your sweet stuff with their friends in the hive (ie, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, et cetera) so that they too can come and enjoy the value you provide.

When their friends also land on your site and find it useful, they might also share it with their friends and that may lead to a lot of buzz (if they were honey bees, you’ll here a “buzzzzzzz” from their wings ) for your business and it will also lead to pollination (profits). This graphic below makes it easier to understand:

The differences between our social web lives and a bee’s social web life are:

Everyone of us forage for information on the web and then we share it. With bees, there are specific workers who do the foraging.
When we are in the position of people in stage number 4, we may do what’s stated in stage 2 or choose to share our own findings starting at stage 1.

I know some of you are saying, “ point number 3, we are humans and they are insects.” Well, that’s not the point we want to make .

Clarifications:

Your products need to be worthy to be shared to other members of the ‘hive’. You can establish a presence in the hive yourself and let the ‘worker bees’ do all the talking and recruiting for you.

You don’t need to hard sell to them inside the hive because if they become your fan or follower, they already know your value and are going to do the selling for you. Remember that they may have seen many other fine petals but came to you because your pollen and nectar (content and offer) was more valuable.

Inside the hive, you need to continue to produce blooming petals and provide nectar and pollen regularly.

When you dull out, there will be no use for you inside the hive and the people who follow you will start unfollowing you.

So how do you continue to bloom? Just make it easy for people to spread the word about your business by interacting with them.

When it is Christmas, wish them a Merry Christmas,
When there is a discount sale on your website, tell them there is a sale on your website.
Create a Facebook fans only or Twitter followers only offer and let them have it.
Give them ideas on how to use your product.
Don’t spam. Spam is annoying and it makes you look desperate.
Share your business’ life or activities with them like “we are removing ginger from our ingredients, do you think this is cool?”, “we made a donation to Oxfam. Buying from us made this possible”, “Which of our products do you want to see more of?”

Again, interact, don’t sell. Get their ideas, use it and they will feel attached to your business.

Coca Cola does an excellent job with their Facebook fan page. They once shared a status showing fans the best temperature to drink a coke.

How do you interact with your customers inside and outside the hives?

If you loved this article, share it with your friends, family and work colleagues. Thanks.

Sociatic