Archive for August, 2009

Fifth Lesson – Viral Marketing Crash Course

Monday, August 31st, 2009

Good day

Today, I want to share with you how you can use online forums as a part of your viral marketing campaign.

Forum marketing has been touted as a kind of free, organic, viralmarketing. But because so many marketers go into forums purelywith the intention of marketing products or services, their actionsand attitude unwittingly causes the exact opposite of the desired effect.

Forums aren’t marketplaces, but when used as such, the marketers’ actions become offensive and will only inspire the wrath of fellow members and marketers, not tomention moderators who can ban them from the site with the click of their mouse.

In order to be effective, this kind of marketing carries a certain degree of commitment, responsibility and respect.

The first requirement is to take a personal interest in the main topic of the forum. Not only does that mean visiting it regularly, but it also means developing a good relationship with both other members and the moderators, as well as taking an active interest in helping others. Of course, it also means abiding by and all rules that exist.

By doing this, you can develop a reputation and, since it is human nature to work with a trusted colleague, business will naturally develop from this.

This type of marketing has already suffered some abuse and because of this, many forums have recently developed stringent rules designed to protect their members from abusive or overly-aggressive marketing tactics. One forum grants .sig files only after a member has created one hundred valid posts and another has disallowed ads in sig files altogether.

Marketers must respect that the purpose of a forum is to be a platform to exchange ideas on a given topic. It is not there to advertise products and services. By focusing on the topic and posting questions and answers, your reputation will grow and this creates the potential for sales naturally.

That’s it for today’s lesson. In The Next lesson we will talk about taking your viral marketing campaign mobile.

See you then.

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Design Tab & Twitter Client Applications!

Monday, August 31st, 2009

Design Tab

Here you can change the background of your Twitter page from the default. Twitter provides a number of alternatives that you can select or you can upload your own background. You can also change all the colors if you wish. Again, whatever you do, just change it so you are not running the default. It shows you have taken some time setting up your account.

A note here worth mentioning is that with the plethora of Twitter client applications out there, many people don’t even look at your web page anymore. Still, it is one component of your presence on Twitter and is worth doing well. Later on I will show you places where you can get a more professional background than those offered here.

Well, that’s it for the setup. The last thing to do now is to click on Home at the top of the screen and send your first Tweet. Something like, Hi, I’ve just joined Twitter and am looking forward to meeting interesting people is a good first one to send. Just type it in and click the Update button.

Twitter Client Applications

The biggest problem with the standard Twitter web application is that you have to keep an eagle eye on your replies and Direct Messages as you only see the main Tweetstream on the screen. It is also limited in that it only displays about the last 20 tweets, so if you want to see older ones, you have to keep going back pages. So what to do?

Easy, download Tweetdeck from

Tweetdeck is brilliant in that it displays the Tweetstream, your replies and your direct messages all on the one screen. The message columns allow for 500 tweets as a default, so scrolling down allows you to go back a fair way or search for tweets you may want to refer back to.

The screen has a continuous right hand scroll, so you can set up different groups and their tweets will appear in that column. You might have a group called best friends and another for gardeners for instance. That way you don’t miss important tweets from people who are more important to you than others. At the time of writing, Tweetdeck is probably the most widely used application for Twitter and I would highly recommend it to you.

http://www.tweetdeck.com The first thing you will probably notice is that you will need to change the settings as the default is white text on a black screen. Makes it hard to read I’ve found, but each to their own.Your Tweets

Start getting some tweets into the system now. On the Twitter home page, it asks What You Are Doing. Quite frankly many people don’t care until you have built a relationship with them as a result of following. But there are some good ways to get started. Follow some blogs that you are interested in via an RSS feed to a feed reader such as Google. (Search these on Google if you are not familiar with the terms. There is heaps of information on there and could occupy an ebook of its own.) Start by posting links to interesting posts on Twitter about them with a link to the blog post. For example: Interesting post on pest control in tomatos. Link. Make sure you always include http:// in the link and not just www so the link is clickable in the Tweetstream. If it’s a long link, Tweetdeck has a facility to shorten it to a small url.

Another good way of starting out tweeting is with quotes. Do a search for some quotes of interest and tweet these. Personal development ones are great and also quotes by famous people. Here’s one I just found in the Tweetstream as an example: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” Aristotle. There are thousands of these all over the internet that you can use.

Whatever you do, at no stage of your Twitter career start posting sales tweet after sales tweet. Your career will be shortlived if you do and people will unfollow you very quickly. Twitter is about engagement, value and a social experience. A constant flow of sales links is just not on. By all means post links to your products or sites, but keep them to around 5% of your total tweets at the most.

Another good idea with your tweeting is to keep religion and politics out of them. These subjects can only alienate followers and you can lose them.

 

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Fourth Lesson – Viral Marketing Crash Course..

Sunday, August 2nd, 2009
Today let’s talk about using ebooks to really go viral!

An ebook that includes your marketing message and a link to

your website is a proven technique in viral marketing. This method

uses the multiplication effect to “explode” the distribution of your

message by willing participants.

This is the same basic principle that was used by Hotmail to get

established and grow into a house hold name. When the two

founders set up their free email system, all the messages that

were sent by subscribers had a text message at the bottom which

identified Hotmail as the origin. People who sent emails to their

friends advertised the free email site.

One of the best reasons for using viral ebooks as a marketing

method is because is cheap. It doesn’t take long to set up and it’s

even quicker if you use rebrandable ebooks that have been written

by others.

Finding ready to go viral ebooks is pretty easy. Just use your

favorite search engine and do a search. You will find more than

enough rebrandable ebooks that are available on whatever

subject you are interested in and that apply to your e-business.

One method of distributing the ebook is to offer it to visitors in

exchange for subscribing to your newsletter. If they pass it on to

their friends and family it will promote your business for you.

Ebooks are capable of reaching a large audience and are limited

only by the enthusiasm of the participants.

Ebooks are fairly easy to create. It’s possible to produce your

own ebooks by combining articles that you have written or have

gotten from public domain sources, such as directories.

A common approach is to use material that has private label

rights, including articles and reports that have been written

specifically for that purpose, for that niche. Using a portion of a

larger work that you have prepared such as the first three chapters

of a large ebook could also be used as a viral ebook.

Using ebooks as a part of your viral marketing campaign is one

of many techniques that will have a cumulative effect on your

business, by attracting more customers, subscribers and targeted

visitors to your website. Start using them and you will soon find out

that this is an excellent way to increase sales and awareness too!

Look for another lesson soon! We will be talking about how you

can use online forums as a part of your viral marketing

campaign.

We’d love to hear from you! Please let us know what you think.

RAUL BENITEZ ALVARADO

http://raulbenitezalvarado.com

 

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Devices!

Sunday, August 2nd, 2009
You can enter your mobile phone number here if you want Twitter updates to your phone. Personally, I can’t think of anything worse, particularly if you have a couple of thousand followers.

Notices

You can have Twitter nudge you with a text to your mobile phone if you haven’t updated in 24 hours. What a pain!

The Replies function is an interesting one and will determine what tweets you see that are prefixed with the @ symbol. This is how you direct a tweet to a particular individual. There is a great help screen explanation on this, so go there to make your decision.

The rest of the notices are self explanatory. It is worth noting that the Direct Messages possibly needs a bit of explanation though as to what they are if you are new to Twitter. If you are following someone and they are following you, Direct Messages can be sent that won’t appear in the Twitter timeline. They are essentially private messages between two people. If you are an infrequent user of Twitter, it may be worthwhile to switch on receiving notifications by email so you can respond. Otherwise leave it off as it will just fill up your mail box with more clutter.

Likewise, the notifications that you have a new follower just adds to your email and I would leave it off unless you like the buzz of being told someone new has followed you.

Picture Tab

This is really important. When you open this page you will see the small avatar on the screen which is the default for Twitter. If you want new followers, putting a photo of yourself here is imperative. If you are running the Twitter account for your company or business, then your logo is ideal. But just put something so you can be identified in the Tweetstream by your followers. The graphic is often more important than your name when people are scanning Tweets and you will stand out for yours.

 

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