How do you keep up with all your social networking and blogging? I use Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, digg, Plaxo, Thrive Contact System, Marketing Artfully and Active Rain often. It drives TONS of traffic to my websites, adding more people to my email database which means more people to talk to about my services and speaking gigs!

Here are some of the easy things I do to make all of that a little easier – commonly known as a system!

SOCIAL NETWORKING
It is VERY fun to watch what your friends and business associates are doing and finding new information on social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo and Twitter and I check most of these once or twice a day. BUT if you are using these to lead generate for your business it is also important to be “on purpose” when you are using these sites. Here are some do’s and do not’s that I follow:

• DO – Make sure to post links to your blog posts (see below)
• DO – Update your status with new products and services that you are offering
• DO – Make comments on your friends’ and business partners’ status
• DON’T – Spam them with self-serving updates multiple times a day (putting links to great information is NOT spamming, posting every one of your products or listings over and over is)
• DON’T – Put ANYTHING on there that you would not want your best customer to see – the internet never forgets!

BLOGGING
My goal is to blog on one of each of these everyday. I am not always successful BUT the goal is there and I generally get an email everyday that some kind of lead – either for a marketing consult, a referral to one of my business partners or just someone who wants more information about a service I offer. A lead a day is 365 over the course of the year and helps to feed my pipeline!

• Marketing Artfully – My main site and the one that I spend the most time on. It has all my product offerings, my shopping cart and is where I send the most people. WHAT I DO: When I write a post here I then add it as a link on Facebook, I often write a mini-post over on Active Rain to drive people back here to read the full post, sometimes I digg it and it automatically goes to Twitter and from there to Plaxo.
• Thrive Contact System – This is one of our products and I post info on Database Marketing, Systems and (surprisingly enough) client contacts. I am not as vigilant about this one as I should be BUT it still gets some good organic search traffic and is on the list. WHAT I DO: When I write a post there I then add it as a link on Facebook, sometimes I digg it and it automatically goes to Twitter and from there to Plaxo.
• Taradactyl on Active Rain – This one sends LOTS of people my way. It is full of Realtors, Mortgage Pros and Title people (one of my target markets) and I should be WAY more aggressive about posting there! WHAT I DO: Because it is a feeder for my Marketing Artfully blog I don’t tend to do more than write a post BUT it does automatically feed to Twitter and from there to Plaxo.

Hopefully this will help you get your arms around all this work and you can see that it does not have to be overwhelming AND can help generate more business for your business!

Related posts:

1. Learn how to use Social Networking from Top 10 Internet Tools
2. Building A Community – How it helps your social networking, email list and life!
3. Realtor Marketing – FREE Social Networking Workshop

Small Business Marketers are Selling The Steak Instead Of Selling the Sizzle!

What the heck does that mean? Well it means that as humans it is SO much easier for us to sell the features of a product than to figure out the benefits to our target audience. For myself, it is easier to tell you that with our Small Business Internet Express you get a complete website and social media package than it is to “sell” you on all the benefits like increased sales, more exposure to potential clients and more leads.

I have tried for a couple of months to figure out how to get this message out since I am not great at sizzling, so why am I writing this post? Because I saw a BRILLIANT commercial this weekend. You tell which is steak and which is sizzle…

The carefully selected, high quality ingredients in Purina® Dog Chow® brand Dog Food Complete & Balanced provide 100% of the essential nutrients your dog needs to help stay happy, healthy and satisfied throughout his long, healthy life.

• Contains 23 vitamins and minerals
• Formulated with high quality protein
• Great Taste

HMMMM…VITAMINS AND MINERALS ARE GOOD, PROTEIN IS GOOD

or

A groundbreaking 14-year study by Purina researchers showed that dogs fed to an ideal body condition** throughout their lives had a median life span of 1.8 years longer – and were considerably healthier – than their littermates.* And although the dogs in the study generally developed the same health conditions as they aged, treatment for those conditions was delayed approximately two years for the lean-fed dogs.

MY DOG WILL LIVE 2 YEARS LONGER? I LOVE MY DOG – I WANT THAT!!!!

Make sure you take a look at your small business marketing, are you selling steak or sizzle? Have a non-industry friend look at your marketing, see if they would be excited to buy you product if they didn’t know you! Post your link on Facebook and ask your online friends if they would buy it. DO NOT be sad if you get criticism – just take that and fix it!

If you would like me and my readers to take a peek at your info and be blatantly honest, add a link here and we will all help (beat up on you)!

Related posts:

1. Small Business Marketing Say EXACTLY What You Are Selling
2. Small Business Marketing – Telling The What But Selling The How
3. Small Business Marketing Naming Concepts

So I am on a mission this morning to analyze our stats, see what we are doing right and what we could be doing better. I am going to check Marketing Artfully and see how that traffic is, check our Thrive Client Contact System website, and see how I can generate more hard leads for our websites. I am NOT going to do this in any organized fashion as I am a free spirit who can’t be constrained by logic or orderly-ness (even though that would make life SO much easier!)

The Thrive Contact System is a partnership between Mary Dado of Business Writing, Ink. and myself. We send out monthly marketing information for small businesses to send out to their clients, generating new business, increasing their name recognition and encouraging repeat sales and referrals. This great material includes newsletters, call scripts and emails. We have been managing the Thrive Client Contact Program for Realtors for about 6 months but expanded our offerings and branded the program Thrive just last month. The Thrive site has been live since November 16, 2008 (less than 30 days). 

 Let’s start with some overall statistics. On November 20th we had our best day ever with 26 visitors. There are some days that we have had none due to the utter lack of initiative on the part of the chief marketing officer (sigh). I will review what was so special about November 20th later. We have had 116 total visitors (I screen my IP address out) and they have had 436 pageviews with 3.76 pages per visit.

What does that mean?

The content we have is great! They are looking around once I get them there. This activity has translated into about 3 leads and 2 sales to date. Because we have an affordable entry level price and reoccurring billing, that translates to estimate of about $600 of income over the course of the next year. I am okay with that for now! Let’s see what the good, the bad and the ugly things are!

The good

On November 20th we sent out an email to 195 people from our database, had 99 people open it and 19 people came to the site as a result of that. WOW – over 50% open response and about a 20% click through rate, I am pleased with that! How did that happen? I sent a really good message, with interesting content to targeted group of our clients, sphere and prospects. If I had used a bought list those numbers would have been very different. We also provide great content EVERY time we send an email to our database so they are more apt to open something we send. I think this a problem many marketers have, they want to get SOMETHING out so they are willing to just send anything instead of making sure each communication is valuable in itself.

The bad

So why so few actual leads? Using analytic tools, we will try and infer what the problem might be and how we may be able to fix it!

If we look our pageviews, you can see that we have had 29 people go to the sign up now page. 29 people and only 3 leads – arggg. So what to do – I added a line to the top of the page that they could sign up OR request more information. It could be that they are worried that by filling out the form that they are going to be obligated to pay. While I would like them to be ready to pull the trigger, I am also happy with someone to add to my database as a prospect and then set them up on a drip campaign that we have to tell more about the Thrive program. Hopefully this will increase the number of leads that we receive!

I DO have to say that we have a flaw in our system – neither Mary or I like to call people so we tend to answer by email. I sometimes wonder if we called those people whether our conversion rate would be better (you think?) We have two fabulous women who we are going to have coming on as sales people so that should help with the whole non-communicating thing!!!

Finally, back to the good things – we are number one on google for Client Contact Program AND got click through from it already!!! We are on page 2 for “small business lead generating” due to a post that I wrote about (ironically enough) “Small Business Lead Generating – Why you can’t do it!“.

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s exciting episode – “Generate more website traffic – how the heck do I do THAT?”

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