Marketing

As much as I would love to turn this into a full blown multimedia, several day several thousand dollar marketing seminar, but you don’t really want to sit through that I don’t really want to write that, and at the moment the blog is free so, it seems like we are all coming out ahead here! Instead let’s try and open some minds and maybe even some wallets to some folks who may not have experience with some alternate, or cheap, marketing ideas. Please don’t think that these are ‘theories’ that I came up during the research phase of one of my books, these are in fact ideas that have been tested and proven themselves out many times over and over.

Remember last time we talked about finding your niche and using your survey, well this time were going to modify that slightly and use it in our marketing as well. To find our niche ( and this is a quick brief summary) we developed a survey asking folks the top 5 questions we could develop about guitars, and although we didn’t theorize the answers lets go ahead and do that now. The first thing most ‘new’ players wanted to know was HOW to safely buy a guitar over the net. Next was once they received a guitar HOW could they make it play as well as it could? Now if you look you see this was aimed at NEW players, again narrowing your niche, saying you’re going to market to everyone interested in buying or playing a guitar is probably too broad. Plus this can include parents, friends and others who may want to buy for their loved ones.

Now, when you go to design your survey you narrow your questions down to target THAT market, but you offer the respondents something in return. For example, we talked about promoting your survey in the signature line of your emails and forum posts, now it will read: For a free Guide on the top 5 ways to make your guitar play better for FREE, click HERE! When they click they get to your survey page and the FIRST question is what your email address is? Your second question is your first name. Why are THESE 1st 2 questions? Why so you can email them your FREE guide of course! But this also allows you to build a marketing list. Your next 3 or 5 questions are helping you develop your product, for example, IF I could show you how to adjust the neck on your guitar would you rather watch an online video? Download a PDF with pictures or listen to an audio file? Keep doing this with each of your questions, and then when you’re done you tell them thanks for their input and that you will be emailing them you 10 quick tips, or what have you, and also quarterly updates (or however often you will be sending them out. The real important part is to SEND THEM OUT! You can also set up an auto responder to do this, but that’s beyond the scope here so ask your ISP.

Now, you have one simple method of building your email list. Your next 3 methods are all tied together, but technology has sufficiently advanced that once you perform one, you have performed all three! You may have some or all of these 3 items I’m going to talk about, however my advice, in short is to get NEW ones. Ones that you can devote JUST to business. Take one of my writing classes I’ll explain why, but here’s what you need:

1)     a blog, preferably with its OWN address, preferably an address that is somehow related to your business or your product

2)     A facebook page, or at the very least a facebook FAN page dedicated to your business, again if you can get a link that relates your ahead of the game.

3)     A new Twitter account

Again, you may already have one or more of these, but please let me as you to do us all a favor and get a set of these just for your new marketing efforts. Now you have these 3 new accounts what do you do with then? It’s pretty simple really, start your Blog by explaining what the idea is and what you’re going to be doing there. I suggest you use WordPress since it has the highest flexibility of any of the blog packages that I have seen. Create 3 static pages, the first is your home or opening page, the second is your survey page and finally the last is your “media” page. I can hear the questions now…

“But J, I thought that a blog was supposed to have the latest and greatest ideas freshly minted as new blog posts and that they would be you internal pages?” and Your right, but because we want a business and not a social commentary, were going to do things a little differently. Across the top will be your toolbar that will link to your static pages AND the blog. On the face of each static page you place some simple text explanations of what’s going to happen on each page, and what its purpose is in relation to the site as a whole.

On the home page, as we discussed you simply outline what the whole idea is, in our case, “From this point we are going to launch you into several different areas on Selecting, buying and then making that new guitar sounds awesome (There’s 3 different ideas there. Then on the media page, “This is our home base or static photos as well as audio and video files, of how to perform some of these maneuvers. Finally on the survey page let your folks know that you will be periodically be asking them, your readers what it is that they specifically want to see/hear/learn.

So now you have your static pages set up, you can choose the theme of your choice, there are some very creative ones out there but my suggestion is keep it simple, some of the fancy ones make it hard to read. Now you need to go after some specific plug-in, WP has 2 kinds, paid and free, with the primary difference being functionality, right now, out of all the blogs I run I only have one paid plug-in, and that was my first site. Essentially you are looking for plug-in that will do 4 things.

1)        Filter spam.

2)        Streamline for SEO

3)        Cross post to your twitter account

4)        Cross post to your facebook/fanpage

In the realm of free plug-in these are all available and pretty easy to find. Setting them up does take a few minutes, but can really pay off. For example, since Twitter limits your character count, so what I do is read my most recent Blog post find the most intriguing thing that I wrote (especially if read OUT of context), and use that for Twitter. For FB I will search through for something that will give just a taste of the body and cross post that!

So, how does all this come under Marketing? Simple, you got folks to give you their names and email addresses for your surveys, you’re now going to email them about your blogs. By streamlining those for SEO your blogs will show up higher in the Google searches a LOT faster. They come for the blogs, they stay for the video’s audios and PDF’s that you will be offering, each time confirming the link between their name and their email address. Of course if he wants FULL access to your site, then you want to offer a ‘membership’ that we can cover later. But are you seeing how this works? With one simple post, all the while generating more and more followers. One of the greatest things is getting those emails saying “Bob@gmail follows you on Twitter or Jane@aol.dom just subscribed to your blog!

Understand this is a really brief introduction to a REALLY great set of promotional tools, and once you get this rolling you’ll want to learn more, so watch here or head on over to WriteYourBookin21Days.com where you’ll see this exact model played out to its utmost.

 

So please come back next time, and if you don’t pick an excuse, ANY excuse, just stick with it!