Social Media Contests – Easily Run Promotions on Facebook, Twitter & Pinterest

/ , /

Social Media Marketing Contests & Promotions

Why run a Social Media Promotion on Facebook, Twitter & Pinterest

Why bother with a social media promotions? Because they rock for a lot of reasons; they are great for:

  1. Branding – You can get your name, products and logo in front of a lot of people relatively cheap. There are a ton of bloggers who love to post about sweepstakes, contests and giveaways.
  2. SEO / Back-linking / Long-Term Traffic to Your Website – If you embed your promotion in a blog post or page on your website and include your product name or the main related keywords you are trying to rank for, you can get a ton of back-links all at once as bloggers link to your promotion.
  3. Subscribers – Facebook Fans, Twitter Followers or people to join your email list – you can give anyone entering your sweepstakes or contest extra entries to “Like,” “Follow,” or join your email list. Just make sure your prize is one of your products, so you get people who are actually interested in what you have to sell.

How to set-up Social Media Promotions Quickly and Easily on Facebook, Twitter & Pinterest

I just set-up and ran a social media contest and giveaway for a freelance client, PALECEK. It was fun. It had a lot of pieces and at times felt a bit like herding cats, but I think a lot of things can be simplified. Here’s what I recommend on how to set-up a social media contest relatively easily:

  1. Stack your deck before you start
    • Make sure your social media profiles are up-to-date & looking professional on:
      • Facebook
      • Twitter
      • Pinterest
      • Linked-in – if you are selling to businesses or professionals instead of consumers
    • Figure out what product or service you want to give away that helps qualify the leads / subscribers you will be generating. This is the first step of your sales funnel. Don’t give away cash or an iPad. Give away something that only a customer would want or care about.
    • Stet-up a blog or web page on your site for your promotion to live on and back-link. Hook it up to Google Analytics, so you can track your visitor traffic and results as the campaign is in progress.
    • Be prepared to set-up an extra page on your site for back-linking to some of the bigger contest & promotion giveaway sites – during the time your promotion is running.
  2. Use a tool like Rafflecopter. Rafflecopter doesn’t look that great out of the box, but it is great for incentivizing people to share your promotion:
    • To friends via email
    • With their Facebook Fans by posting about your promotion on their wall
    • With Twitter Followers
  3. Have a graphic designer or someone off Elance.com, or CrowdSpring.com make you a few web-optimized 72 res graphics:
    • You need 4:3 aspect ratio images of your prizes for the Rafflecopter widget
    • You want a 600-800 pixel wide graphic you can put up on Pinterest & Facebook to introduce the promotion. It will be a header graphic that you put above the Rafflecopter widget in your blog post. You can re-use it on Pinterest also. See the example I give at the end of this blog post
    • You also want a square graphic about 400 pixels wide you can use on Facebook when you post to your wall about your promotion.
    • You want a small 111×74 pixel graphic for your Rafflecopter Facebook tab where your promotion can live on your Facebook page
    • Do some vertical graphics that read nicely at both 600 pixels wide & 172 pixels wide with your logo, a picture of what you are giving away, and “Pin-it to Win it” in a corner or somewhere in the graphic you can put up on Pinterest
  4. Push your promotion out to Sweepstakes and Giveaway bloggers through a resource like Giveaway Promote and/or Emperola.
  5. Plan to spend a little bit of money promoting your giveaway. Do a press release & definitely do some promoted posts on Facebook.

Here’s the campaign I’m running now as an example:

  1. On Facebook
  2. On Pinterest

And here is how the header graphic and Rafflecopter widget look on a blog post:

Palecek-Chair-800-v2

Want to Win One of PALECEK’s Designer Inspiration ChairsTM?

Here’s Your Chance!

Starting now through April 19th, enter below for your chance to win your favorite PALECEK Designer Inspiration ChairTM. These chairs showcase PALECEK’s strength in empowering interior designers to design and create their own signature fantasy pieces. Five of PALECEK showroom managers (Atlanta, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco) each teamed up with a local designer to design their own PALECEK designer inspiration chair to be showcased at the Spring High Point Market in High Point, North Carolina, April 20-25. Vote for your favorite chair for a chance to win-it and share it with friends in your favorite social media venues for even more chances to win.

Vote for Your Favorite Chair & Enter the Giveaway Below!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

How to Make Money Blogging for Beginners And a 10K Per Month Affiliate Marketing Blog Example

/ , /

How to Make Money Blogging for Beginneers – An Excellent Post on James Martell’s Site from Hanna Hamilton

Here is a link that covers much of what I recommend to friends when they ask about simple ways they can make money with the Internet, where to start or where the money is for bloggers.

http://jamesmartell.com/blog/how-to-make-money-blogging-for-beginners/

The article itself is an excellent example how to do a Guest Blog post for high quality back links using James Martell’s PAD (Proffessional Article Distribution) technique.  I’m guessing Hanna Hamilton is one of James’ affiliate marketing students. Her affiliate marketing website is: JetSetGarmentBags.com.

Years ago James had been recommending doing very long tail SEO optimized affiliate sites with at least 100 pages of content (200 –  1000 words / page) focusing on one particular product line the student / affiliate marketer could honestly recommend.

Now it looks like his best students are doing small blog-based websites with less total content, but heartfelt and very in-depth product reviews of just a few products in their niche, then doing a great deal of back link generation. Only-Cookware.com is an excellent example of a blog that generates over $10K month in affiliate revenue.

 

 

My Favorite Internet Business Models

/ /

Internet Business Models

I love Internet Business. My favorite business models are the following:

  1. Affiliate Sites that focus on authentic product reviews – why because they are great for everyone – the people who created the site and the users who come to visit the site. For the site publisher the site will be a cash cow with very little overhead and can make money from affiliate revenue, AdSense or other ad placements. For the users the site should offer an honest review and ease their search for something they were looking for. Excellent examples using this business model are:
  2. Online SaaS (Software as a Service) Companies or Subscription-based software or publication sites – these companies sell ongoing monthly subscriptions to their publications or software online. Often the software is built with Ruby on Rails or Google Apps. This is a great business model since revenue increases monthly as new subscribers are added. Publications can be sold as a subscription using ClickBank. Software can be created and sold via a subscription model as an iPhone app, Android Marketplace app or over the web. Andriod Apps can be built using Google’s Android App Inventor. Excellent examples using this business model are:
  3. User Generated Content Sites – These sites are blog based and grow based on user generated content. They can be built using WordPress. Excellent examples using this business model are:
  4. Special Interest Information Sites – These sites focus on a subject or user group, aggregate or create content specifically of interest to the user group. An absolutely brilliant execution of this business model is MarketingSherpa.com. Marketing Sherpa specializes in Internet Marketing. They solicit for visitors who are interested in Internet Marketing to join one of their many specialized newsletter lists, then poll those same people when creating their annual best practices publications which they sell back to the same user base. They up the anti even more by producing conferences that cost several thousands of dollars per head to attend. It is a beautiful classical sales funnel. At the bottom of the funnel articles are published for free and readers are asked to join the mailing list to get more similar information for free. They are emailed links to new articles on the blog as they are written, which are free to read online for a limited time or after that time the subscriber can pay to view an individual article or become a paid site subscriber. As a subscriber they are emailed regularly with other special offers or polls on the same topics they have expressed an interest in by subscribing to those specific newsletters. Once the polls are completed “Special Reports” are published ranging from $50-$300 a pop. Those reports are sold on the site and via email. Then subjects and content with a good deal of traction are re-purposed again into a class or conference those same people can attend for $1000 to $3000.
  5. Thought Leadership Social Media (Facebook & Twitter Accounts) linked to an eCommerce Site – These are sites where someone decided to become a lifestyle thought leader promoting an image related to their subject like vintage clothing or how to be a cool auntie. They then post comments, questions, or articles related to their subject. They use Facebook and Twitter to generate traffic,  create a buzz and an opt-in subscription community base they can advertise to for free. They make money selling items or publications that relate to thier subject area. Great examples are:

Internet Marketing – The Most Searched for Marketing Term Online

/ /

Internet Marketing

Internet Marketing is #1 on the list of the Top 20 Marketing Searches. Internet marketing, online marketing, web marketing and digital marketing are all the same thing; these terms refer to things being done online to market products and services. Sometimes digital marketing includes online marketing and marketing to mobile phones or through software as well.

Online Marketing Mix by Cost

The typical national online marketing mix in terms of cost is:

  • 70-90% paid search or SEM (Search Engine Marketing) and ppc (pay-per-click) advertising
  • 1-20% affiliate marketing
  • 1-20% SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
  • 1-20% banner and display advertising
  • 1-20% email marketing
  • 1-20% social media, viral and online promotions
  • 1-20% PR and blogger relations

The above mix is typical for Internet based businesses that advertise nationally. The mix will vary considerably depending on the company’s audience and the temperament of the business owner.

Web Marketing ROI

Internet marketing tends to have a very high ROI (return of investment).  Most online marketing is trackable and can provide almost instant sales and/or feedback. In terms of ROI the above marketing methods pay for themselves in the following order:

  1. SEO – Search Engine Optimization – this doesn’t cost much, but is very time intensive and tedious to do well. Search Engine Optimization is free if you do it yourself through blogging and the way you build and structure your site. It takes a while to get going & needs to be thought about before you build your site, but tends to have staying power and improve with time. This will get you the most bang for your buck – especially if you do it through things like: initial positioning keyword research, your domain name, site design, blogging, and PAD (professional article distribution). See anything James Martell has written on SEO, he’s a big lovable teddy bear of a man, who is a guru on affiliate marketing; most of his methods for site promotion and making money as an affiliate revolve around doing an exceptional job on your SEO. He does an Affiliate Marketing Super Bootcamp for people who want to be power affiliates making a living working from home. Also see the client blogs of compendium blogware.
  2. SEM – Search Engine Marketing – this can get expensive, but can get you customers quickly. This is advertising paid for on a cost-per-click or ppc (pay-per-click) basis, meaning your only paying when prospects are interested enough to click on your ad. Google has the most volume and is the easiest to set-up and test campaigns through. Start there and import your campaigns into Bing after you have them running well. Stick to exact search terms and longer keyword phrases, so you don’t waste money when you are first starting out. Also as you read through Google’s directions on how to set-up and test campaigns keep in mind that Google’s idea of winning may be different than yours. Google will tell you how to get the most clicks to your site as possible. They get paid for each click. You probably care more about sales or leads. Be sure to set-up your conversion tracking before you start spending money; track conversions through both through AdWords and Google Analytics.
  3. Email & Social Media Marketing are both important for building your prospect lists and clientele. Set-up an email subscription list, twitter account, and Facebook page so visitors have some way to get on your email mailing list, friend you or follow you as soon as you set up your site. Email & social media are almost free and easy ways to stay in touch and continue to send new information and offers people who are interested in you, your area of expertise, and your products and services on an on-going basis. You can use aweber to automate communications with an email subscriber list & HootSuite to automate communications on your social media pages. It is wise to keep social media in mind even before you choose your domain name. Twitter limits account user names to 15 characters & it is better for your overall brand if you have the same username everywhere, so if you can find and use a name for your site that is exactly the same as what you use on twitter and Facebook it will make you easier to remember and make your branding more consistent.
  4. PR (Public Relations) and blogger relations helps with SEO as well as providing a nice boost of traffic immediately after a story about your site gets picked up. It is a fickle beast and can get fairly expensive and time consuming. It is a good idea to do press releases on a regular basis. The good free services that used to exist don’t anymore. PRWeb.com has been the standard default press release distribution for years. Blogger relations, setting-up Google Alerts on your topic, compiling lists of journalists that write about your topics, adding them on your twitter feed, & updating them on when you have something new going on or have photos, video content, or contacts directly related to a hot story you can help them with is a good best practice. It is also a good practice to list yourself as an expert who is willing to be interviewed or help answer questions on your area of expertise. Speaking at conferences, especially if you say something controversial, can get you a lot of press.
  5. Affiliate Marketing is where you pay an affiliate, like a blogger, on a CPA (cost per action) basis, meaning you only have to pay when they bring you in a sale or a lead. The best affiliate programs are cj.com, share-a-sale, and Google’s affiliate program. Most affiliate marketing programs have a fairly expensive initial anti-up cost to be included and then charge 30% of the affiliate commissions.  Despite what they charge and tell potential advertisers they usually don’t do much to actually get your program picked up by the power affiliates and you will need to do quite a bit of initial set-up work to start with. To get the power affiliates you should go to one of the big affiliate conferences, actively seek out and court the power affiliates. Best bests to start with are any of the affiliates trained by James Martel and some of the big affiliate discounters like eBates.com or Upromise.com. Linda Wood’s company PartnerCentric is well connected to many of the power affiliates and if I was starting from scratch, I’d use her services to set-up my program. You can also get the software to run your own in-house affiliate program, but a lot of the power affiliates prefer to work through the big affiliate programs where they trust the tracking and payment terms.
  6. Banner and display advertising usually isn’t the most effective. It is mostly sold on a CPM (cost-per-thousand impressions) basis on big advertising networks that will throw your ad up anywhere they have available on their entire network RON (run-of-network) where the most you can expect out of your advertising is branding rather than direct sales.  I recommend using a low cost network like BuySellAds.com or a pay-per-click network like Google’s content network and testing cautiously to figure out the specific placements where your ads perform as well as to test ads vs one another. The best way to advertise with banner and display advertising is through a Google remarketing / retargeting campaign where you add a pixel on your website, then when people who have been to your site go anywhere else on the web that is part of Google’s network, your ads show up. It makes it look like you have a huge marketing budget and really you are just advertising to the few prospects who already know your site. It reinforces your brand, reminds them of your products and services, etc. Facebook is another place that is excellent to do display advertising. They let you target by user area, interests, and a number of specific demographics.

Good Online Marketing Deals for Small Local Advertisers

Small local businesses have different needs than large national advertisers. It is important to make sure you show up when people do local searches and to see that you show up in a favorable light. The most important online marketing and advertising venues to look into if you are a small local business are:

  1. Google Maps
  2. Google Search Results (for good measure check MSN & Yahoo also)
  3. Yelp
  4. Groupon, LivingSocial, & any other local online “Deal of the Day” advertising
  5. Email, twitter, and Facebook – discount and event subscription lists

On Google Maps, the Search engines, and Yelp you will want to make sure you show up, hopefully within the top 5 listings, when people are searching for businesses like yours in the local area. Google and Yelp will show reviews – you will want to have at least 10 hopefully as close to 5 stars as possible. If you don’t have enough reviews, start asking your regulars to rate you or put up a sign saying “10% Off Your Next Visit with a Print Out of Your Review of Our Business on Yelp or Google.” Or maybe even give something away for free to people who “check in” at your business from Yelp or Facebook. If you have bad reviews, don’t take it personal; try to fix whatever is bringing your ratings down. Definitely claim your business listings on Google Maps and Yelp. Upload pictures, menus, hours and coupons, etc.

Daily Deal Online Advertising – Groupon & Living Social

Groupon and Living Social advertise your business, essentially selling a gift certificate or coupon for your products and services. They tend to ask you for a promotion you can offer customers at 50% off your regular price then give you 50% of the total revenue they generate from advertising the deal.  It is great for bringing in a lot of new customers, up to thousands within a few weeks. The tough part is making sure the deal you offer is one you can deliver in a timely manner, won’t overload your phones, and won’t do a number on your cash flow.  Groupon and Living Social works out best for small businesses when what they are offering doesn’t cost much to start with – like a class where having more people just fills up the class instead of costing more or $20 worth of food for $10 when the average order at the restaurant is $40, so you can expect on average they will still spend enough that you won’t loose your shirt giving away $20 worth of food for the $5 Groupon paid you. Do keep in mind you are getting free advertising to Groupon & LivingSocial’s entire local email list, the people who buy your offer are most interested in your business, and even of those who buy only about half will use the coupon for your deal, so it will probably be less costly than it appears at face value. It is important to know how you will handle the huge number of phone calls or traffic immediately after your deal runs. It is a good idea to set-up some kind of automatic scheduling system online before you run the deal.

Opt-in Subscription Email, Twitter, and Facebook Lists

Email, Twitter, and Facebook are great ways to let current customers know about discounts and special events. You can advertise your discount lists on your business cards, your store window, a magnetic sign on your car, or inserts in your bag.

Marketing – the Top 20 Marketing Search Terms Online

/ /

Marketing

Marketing  – The Top 20 Marketing Topics people are searching for and what they are all about…

This will be a twenty part series covering the 20 most searched for Marketing terms / topics online; as you can see similar topics will be grouped together and covered as part of the same blog post:

  1. Internet Marketing, Online Marketing, Web Marketing and Digital Marketing
  2. Email Marketing, Email Marketing Software, and Email Marketing Services
  3. Affiliate Marketing
  4. Marketing Plan and Marketing Plan Template
  5. Social Media Marketing and Social Marketing
  6. Marketing Jobs
  7. Marketing Strategies and Marketing Strategy
  8. Network Marketing and Multilevel Marketing
  9. Guerrilla Marketing
  10. Marketing Mix
  11. Mobile Marketing
  12. Viral Marketing
  13. Direct Marketing and Direct Marketing Association
  14. What is Marketing
  15. Marketing Research
  16. Small Business Marketing
  17. Sports Marketing
  18. Business Marketing
  19. Marketing Ideas
  20. Article Marketing, Article Distribution and PAD (Professional Article Distribution)

MarketLikeAGod.com – A Training Blog on Marketing & Internet Business

/ 0 Comments / , /

Welcome to MarketLikeaGod.com – a blog website for training on Marketing and Internet Business models.

I’m Cheryl Smith the Internet Marketing Director at Central Desktop. This blog is meant to serve as a place for me to provide the information and links to examples about the marketing or Internet business models I’m talking with people about all the time.

It is intended to cover the basics on:

  1. The different business models people use on the Internet to make money & which ones I like best
  2. The different types of Internet Marketing businesses use: SEM (Search Engine Marketing), SEO (Search Engine Optimization), email (newsletters, auto-responders, co-reg, etc.), CPA (Cost per acquisition) or Affiliate Marketing, banner display advertising, PPC advertising (Pay per Click), article distribution, blogger relations & Social Media (Twitter, MySpace, Linkedin, Facebook, Digg, Del.icio.us, etc.)
  3. Which VC firms invest in Internet Business start-ups
  4. What tools and technologies exist & work best for starting or running an Internet Business