Archive for March, 2010

Using Unbounce to Get Leads from Twitter

Posted by Trevor On March - 30 - 20103 COMMENTS

CrowdTamers does its fair share of social media marketing, it’s true, but I do a fair amount of social media training as well, and there are few tools that I can get as enthusiastically behind as I can for Unbounce. A simple platform where you can create customized landing pages in a dead-simple WYSIWYG editor? Sign me up. More importantly, sign my clients up, because as often as I say that landing pages are crucial to making your campaigns convert, they frequently can’t spend the extra money to get a professionally-designed landing page created and hosted somewhere. Unbounce registration is free (for the moment) so go run over there right now and sign up with an account. If you need more eloquent reasons why you should sign up, they’ve already given you 6 great features here.

When I train on how to use social media, I always emphasize the lead. Social media is a huge lead-generation tool, and when you’re doing it correctly you will find that it’s easy to use the reach of social media to get the leads that your business needs to increase its income.  Social media by itself doesn’t make any money for a business, so figure out what your business can sell online (even if it’s just your expertise in a specific field so that they’ll call you and have you install cabinets or write a will) and use social media to get the attention of your audience. I advocate using targeted different looks and feels for incoming leads from each social media source, so let’s make a test case for a lead generation campaign on Twitter.

First, you need to give ‘em something:

If your landing page doesn’t give your visitor something in exchange for their information, they will most likely bounce away (unbounce or not) to find a better offer elsewhere.  One of the classic free giveaways to offer someone is a free ebook or other informational piece that they can learn something from.  I’ll give away a PDF pamphlet from OvernightPR on how to follow up on a press release  to increase the likelihood of being carried in a press outlet (also known as “pitching a release,” for any of my readers who work in PR).  Note that this isn’t the best offer for me to be making over Twitter (I’d be better served with something like, “How to Get Journalists’ Attention Through Twitter” as a free download on Twitter) but I’ll work with what I have.

Let me interrupt here and say that offering a “free consultation” is not a good choice for a free giveaway on an initial social media campaign. Consultations are what you’d call a “late-process” decision-making tool for most buyers. Before a buyer wants a free consultation, he or she is going to want to know what it is that he or she doesn’t even know to ask about.  When you’re buying a car, you don’t generally start by running off to the dealer for a test drive. First you poke around online, seeing what models of cars and prices fit your needs and budget. The “free consultation” of a test drive happens once you’ve got most of your decision making already done.

So think about what it is that you can give away to visitors, and then let’s get started!

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Education & Training, Tutorial

4 Gifts to Give to Make Your Readers Love You

Posted by Trevor On March - 16 - 20101 COMMENT
Photo by Fel Ilya, license Creative Commons 2.0. Image links to original.
Do you ever find yourself saying things like, “I’ve built a slick-looking site, but I haven’t seen sales go up since launch.” or “Right after I launched my new sites, sales were up, but now they’re back where they used to be”?  Despite the old saying, if you build it, no one’s necessarily going to stop by. If you want your site to increase sales and keep them up, then you need to do give your visitors 4 things:
  • Give them your message: either through traditional advertising, online advertising, or word of mouth, bring traffic to your site. CrowdTamers is a social media consultancy, so I’ll go on about how social media can be the way you spread your message, but in reality any platform with reach will suffice, as long as you have the time or money to use it.
  • Give them what they want: through whatever form of advertising you use, you should also make specific URLs that your advertising leads come to that speaks directly to the ad you ran. This means landing pages, created either in your site CMS (like WordPress) or else through a service like Unbounce.
  • Give them a reason to stay: Everyone says content is king, but there are different kinds of content. You can create compelling, well-written articles in a blog, in-depth and insightful whitepapers, or you can use your pocketbook to give your visitors a reason to hang out. As an example: chance to win promotions, according to eMarketer, increase the liklihood of someone handing over personal data. Put exciting chance to win or guaranteed prize promotions on your website and throughout your messaging to drive higher clicks and more targeted traffic.
  • Give them a reson to come back: Using a system that lets you easily add content to your website, put new content up regularly, whether it’s blog posts,  This will give anyone who has found your brand a reason to keep coming back. The old saw is true: it’s easiest to sell to people who are already a customer. Use your tools to capture their info and keep giving them reasons to come back, whether it’s more great content, features, sales, or chances to win something cool.
If you do all that, you can increase leads & sales without fail. Need help? You can reach CrowdTamers at (407) 374-9079 or by emailing tlongino@crowdtamers.com.
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Keep Your Website Up to Date Without That Pain in Your Neck

Posted by Trevor On March - 10 - 2010ADD COMMENTS
Image background from Pacific Northwest Coastguard on flickr. License: Creative Commons. Click for original.
One of the trusisms that I’ve heard floating around the ‘Net is that there is “no such thing as a final draft on the web.”  This can be very liberating, as your site’s pages can always be updated, revised, changed, and improved as you learn more about how to get your audience’s attention and convert it into business. It can also be a giant pain in the neck if you don’t plan a few of your strategies in advance to make your living documents easier to maintain, so here are a few tips on building your site as a living document:
  1. Use a Content Management System (CMS): This is especially crucial if you have multiple people working on your website. If you’ve poked around my website, you’ve probably noticed that I’m running a WordPress blog; I happen to love WP for everything from blogging to content management, but there are cases when you’ll want something more like Joomla or Drupal for your website.  Which is most appropriate for your site? Well, since we just met I couldn’t say. Feel free to drop me a line if you’d like to talk further, though.
  2. Build your stylesheet correctly: If you’re new at HTML and CSS, the tendency is definitely to make small changes that you need directly in the document itself. What’s the harm of tossing in a quick <span> tag with some styles, right? Resist that urge, because after a few years of that, upgrading your site’s look and feel will be the kind of thing that makes you want to pull your hair out in clumps.
  3. Measure: Put analytics on your website. If you don’t have something on your site right now, drop what you’re doing at this moment and get it installed. I’ll still be here when you get back, and we’ll have articles about GA in a few weeks in case you want to learn more here. In the mean time, get measuring.
  4. Budget time every week: If your site is more than a blog, you should take some time every week to think about what it is that you’ve been doing and what it is that you want to change. Look at those analytics and see what it is that gets you clicks & conversions. If your site is a blog, you should already be budgeting time every week to new articles anyway.
  5. Push your comfort zone: Always be in the process of learning and trying something new on your site.  Have you ever shot video? Maybe you should give that a try. Are you a fan of podcasts? Maybe you should start one of your own! You get the idea, I’m sure.
If you prepare for it adequately, keeping your site up to date and well-maintained can be quite a hassle. This is especially true if you’re using a site that was built as a quick, cheap job by someone who’s a friend of the family or who you found cheaply through a freelancing arbitraging website such as Elance.com or Odesk.com. If you need a site that’s simple to maintain (and don’t we all?) CrowdTamers can help by recreating your website so that you can maintain and create the content yourself. If you can use a word processing program, you can keep your site up to date without paying a webmaster to make the changes for you.
Give us a call at (407) 374-9079 or email us at tlongino@crowdtamers.com and we’ll be happy to show you how.
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5 Ways to Make Your Email Newsletter Pop

Posted by Trevor On March - 2 - 2010ADD COMMENTS

Image used through Creative Commons License. By http://www.flickr.com/photos/debaird/

Today I was sent an email newsletter from a buddy and was halfway through writing up a few tips for him when I realized, “Hey, this would make an excellent blog post!”

Illustrated with posts from the excellent Campaign Monitor Gallery, here are 5 Ways to Make Your Email Newsletter Pop:

  1. K.I.S.S. (Not the band, that is): People live fast lives today. In an era where people would rather tweet than email, you need to make sure that your newsletter is short, sweet, and simple. So Keep It Sweet and Simple, buddy, and hone your email down to 800 words. Or less, preferably. If you’re running long, make a blog post out of it and link to the post in your email.
  2. K.I.S.S. (The band, that is):  I’m not necessarily a fan of metal, but you have to give the KISS guys credit: they know how to make a visual punch. Design your newsletter so that it wows your readers visually–keeping in mind that it needs to succeed without images, since most email clients default to “images off”.
  3. Don’t Start in the Middle: Anyone who’s taken creative writing knows that in modern lit, you’re supposed to start in media res when you begin writing. In email writing, don’t. Pick a subject line that sums the whole thrust of your newsletter up from start to finish. Don’t try a cute line or one that’s obliquely referring to something your reader may remember from a year ago: put value for the reader in the subject line and they’ll read on from there.
  4. Hi, My Name Is: If you have the personal information of the subscriber (which you should if you’ve collected the information legitimately), put it in your newsletter, somewhere in the subject or in the first 8 lines of text, or else the work that you put into getting that info is all for naught.
  5. Higher. Faster. Better: The higher a link is on your email, the better it will perform, on average. So, the most important links in your email? Yeah, put them up near the top of the page.  Your sales button, or the link to the main article that you’re promoting that month or…well, whatever it is…aim higher for faster and better results. What, you thought I was going to make a joke that tied into the Olympics?

There are actually about 20 best practices tips I could load in here, but then it would hardly be a “Quick Tips” article, would it?  More tips later, then!

Quick Tips

Getting More Attention Online

Posted by Trevor On March - 1 - 2010ADD COMMENTS

CrowdTamers gives you tips on getting more social media followers

Attracting followers is always a challenge in social media.  Start with good content, of course, but before you can write good content you need to know what it is that your social media users want from you. Are they following you looking for great deals on your products? Are you a source of creative inspiration for your followers? Do you just post the zany things that happen at your job?  Determine which it is that you’re doing that gets you retweeted or linked to (or whatever the social metric is for the channel you’re using) and do more of that.
An easy way to see what links are being passed around the net is via a link trimming service (such as perennial favorite bit.ly, although any link trimmer with analytics will do). See which links of yours get clicks and think seriously about writing more content in the same vein.
While providing good content is key for keeping and maintaining an active following, there are also proven techniques for getting followers quickly.
  • Give away a hot prize (like #moontweet did in 2009) and you’ll find that your social media presence will grow tremendously.
  • Guest post on other writers’ blogs (with attribution, of course) to get their followers to come and visit you.
  • Write posts on controversial topics (hopefully ones that relate to your business) in order to encourage linking.
  • Learn how to write good headlines and tweets to encourage clickthroughs.
Want more fans on Facebook? More followers on Twitter? Give us a call at (407) 374-9079 or email us at tlongino@crowdtamers.com and we’ll be happy to help. We have all of the tools necessary to get social media channels buzzing about you!
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