Real Web Marketing Blog

Leveraging Your Time in Website Marketing

by John Eberhard

There are many things you can do to market yourself or your business online. The thing is that many of these things can be quite time consuming. So it’s smart to find ways to better leverage your time – in other words, to get more done in a given amount of time. I want to discuss a couple ways to do this in this article.

Microblogging from One Source

Microblogging is a term that has sprung up recently to describe social media web sites like Twitter and Facebook where people are posting short little updates on what they are doing. You can also do this on other sites like LinkedIn, MySpace, Plaxo, Plurk, and many others.

First of all, you should get on a few of these sites and see what types of things people post in their “status updates.” As I have stated before, you should not be pitching your stuff all day long because people will just “unfriend” you, or on some sites like Facebook they can hide your posts so they never appear even though you are still a Facebook “friend.” So first observe how other handle this (or mishandle it) before you start posting tons of stuff. My personal experience has been that it’s OK to post stuff about your business as long as it is not always a pitch, and as long as you also sprinkle in posts on other aspects of your life.

So a problem that comes up when you start microblogging, i.e. posting status updates about your life and business, is: how do you do this without spending all day on it? How do you get around logging into eight different sites and posting things on each one?

The answer is to use a site that allows you to connect up to all your social media accounts, and send out one message from one place that goes out to all of them. I use a site called Ping.fm, and I currently have it set up so that when I type something in the status update box and hit submit, it goes out to Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Plurk, Mashable, FriendFeed, Xanga, Delicious, and Vox.

There are other sites that do this as well, such as FriendFeed and Posterous.com. However, I just learned this week that FriendFeed was bought by Facebook and there are rumors that that site may be going away soon. And I will be recommending another use for Posterous.com in the next section. so I recommend Ping.fm. Once you have your accounts set up on these other sites, it’s easy to set up a Ping.fm account and hook up your other accounts to it.

Of course, bear in mind that you still have to log in to each of these sites at least occasionally, add friends, see what other people are doing, and interact with them.

Blogging on Steroids

Now I’m going to talk about regular blogging, i.e. with longer articles or press releases. There are a number of blogging sites. The most common ways to make a blog are with Wordpress or Typepad. But there are also some free blog sites where you can sign up and put up a free blog, such as Wordpress.com, Blogger.com (which is affiliated with Google), Tumblr.com and more.

So you set up your multiple blog accounts on these various blog sites. Then you set up an account on a site called Posterous.com, and hook it up to all your blog sites. Now you can post an article or release within your Posterous.com account, and it will be posted to all those blogs at the same time. In fact, you can even send an email to an address they give you (after you set up all this stuff) and it will go out to all your blog sites and be posted there. I prefer to do it through the online interface because it allows me to put in links and pictures.

You can also use Posterous.com to post to Twitter, Facebook and other “micro” blogging sites. But I am separating these out and using Posterous.com for the regular blogs, and using Ping.fm for the micro blogging because you can’t really send a whole long article via Ping.fm.

By the way, I found out about Posterous.com through the Thirty Day Challenge, a terrific online free training program being run by Australian Ed Dale.

I believe these two tools are a great way to maximize your time spent on website marketing.

Posted via web from Realwebmarketing's posterous

An Outflow State of Mind

by John Eberhard

I was counseling a client recently on developing an outflow state of mind. And by “outflow” I mean sending out promotional messages to your target public.

It is more vital than ever for small business owners these days to get into a state of mind where you are continually and regularly outflowing to your public. You have to be continually sending out messages to your public to remind them that you are there, to tell them about your latest offerings, to let them know about your latest sale, and to give them compelling reasons why they should buy your products or use your services.

I find that too many business owners never send out much in the way of promotion at all, or if they do, they send out one big push and think that they are done. Outflow and promotion have to be a continual and continuing process. You should be thinking every week about how you can get out some type of promotional outflow.

I think it is better to have a regular flow going out every week, even if it is a smaller flow, then one single large promotion. For one thing, when you continue sending out promotion all the time, you are not only continually reminding the public that you are there, you are also demonstrating your ongoing survival and unkillability. For another thing, one single large promotion is soon forgotten, but if someone keeps seeing your communications, they remember you and will tend to think of you when they need your product or service.

Here are some tips on developing this outflow state of mind:

1. If you have a blog, write something and post it once a week or more. This takes a little creativity to get going, but it is vital and besides that, it is free! You can of course post an article (300-700 words) about your business or industry, but you can also post short comments of 100 words about something you noticed in your industry like a current trend. You can post a link to some other web site where you saw something interesting. You can put up a video in your blog, using the embed code that appears to the right of any YouTube video (use the HTML editing mode on your blog to do this).

I find that I can write an article once a week for my newsletter and blog, often just based on something that happened in the prior week with some client (like I’m doing now).

And don’t forget that every time you post something to your blog, you should go to www.pingomatic.com and send a “ping” (a notification) to all the blog search engines, which is what brings traffic to your blog to read your new article or post. Writing a regular blog post and then pinging the search engines is a great way to get out promotion, and it’s free.

2. Compile a list of customers and/or prospects if you don’t already have one, and send them formletters or postcards. Ask them for more business, ask them for referrals, comment on something in your industry, give some tips, remind them that you exist.

3. Compile a list of email addresses of customers and prospects, and compile an email newsletter to them. Get on one of the online email services like Aweber.com and they have templates for HTML newsletters that you can use that look great. Once again, ask them for more business, ask them for referrals, comment on something in your industry, give some tips, remind them that you exist.

4. Get on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Post updates on what you are doing with your business. These don’t have to be “Buy my new _____ now, click here” type messages, but can be more subtle, like “I am consulting with a new client today on how to expand his business.” On most of these sites it is wise to also sprinkle in some personal stuff, such as “Just got back from a great weekend in Arizona.” Observe what other people do on the site. Of course it also helps on these sites to have lots of friends or followers, so you have to spend some time developing that too.

Remember, promoting your business regularly is more important than one big blast. Your frame of mind should be “What can I send out to promote my business this week?”