Let’s jump right in and talk about how you can use Twitter to conduct your market research. Every business has a target market, but the simple fact is that many business owners often miss the mark because they don’t know the true needs of their market.

By using Twitter, you can easily listen to the needs of your prospects, the issues they are currently facing and the kind of help that they want.

Whenever you meet someone new on Twitter it’s a good idea to try to establish a good relationship from the start. Think like your customer. You buy from people who you trust and like. Your target market also behaves the same way. It is important, especially in social marketing that you get to know your clients and do your best to win their trust and confidence.

A good rule of thumb is to try and keep ninety percent of your tweets full of helpful content and try to limit your promotional ones.By doing so, you can attract more followers and hopefully customers.

In order to show off your expertise on Twitter you will want to post quality content on your blogs, website and other sites, like article directory EzineArticles.com. Then share them with your followers. As we talked about in the last post there are a wide variety of tools that work with Twitter that will automatically check the blogs you’ve posted and share them instantly on your page.

Offering educational materials, seminars, video training and networking events will also go a long way when you are trying to convert your followers into paying customers.

As a matter of fast I recently came across a great website that allows you to stream live video on your Twitter page and chat real time with your followers, so if you’re not camera shy, plug in your connection for you and your peeps.

You can find out more here: http://twitcam.com

There are so many different techniques that you can use to help the transition from follower to customer by using Twitter. Just remember to keep the value of your content high and the volume of your promotions low and you will begin to see real results from your efforts.

Keep On Tweeting!
~~Dave

Building your readership

Like collecting baseball cards, email marketing gurus collect email addresses and bragging between peers tends towards a comparison of number: 10,000 email address… 11,000… 12,000… each person trying to outdo the other with a greater figure of warm leads.

So how do you get the very first one? Where do you start?

Getting started

The first place you should look is to your current list of customers. It costs less to keep a customer than it does to win a new one and yet e-business owners seem to forget that they have a database of happy customers and spend extraordinary amounts of money on advertising to win new ones.

Gather all of your customer’s emails into one folder and start with them. Send out a special message – perhaps a sale of some kind.

If the product you sell is a one-time purchase and doesn’t lend itself well to repeat purchases from the same customer, send out a referral coupon: if they refer someone to you and that person buys, they will get some kind of discount or money back. Or use the “makes a great gift” idea and talk about how your product could be purchased for someone else.

Either way, you’re doing a few things by sending out this message:

• You’re going to start the process of sending out messages… which is something you’ll have to decide to do if you want to proceed.
• You’re unconsciously announcing to your happy clients that you want to do more business with them.
• You’re testing the waters to get an idea about what a repeat purchase promotion could do for your business.
• You’re testing their email addresses, since people change addresses… they may have changed since they bought from you. (Delete the address if it bounces back to you… but don’t delete your customer. See if there is a land address for them and add them to a direct marketing mailout.
• You’re testing to see the response from your customers on receiving something from you. Some niches are more responsive than others at receiving email marketing. People who spend a lot of time in their email may not mind a short message from you periodically but they won’t want to spend too much time reading and deleting messages that don’t apply.

Once you have sent out a test email, it’s time to start collecting email addresses and putting them into a file.

How do you do that?

Collecting email addresses

One of the easiest ways is simply to put an email capture line on your website.

If you create your own websites, you can easily put an email capture line in… even if you create your website in Microsoft Word. Right click on the menu bar and select from the list “web tools” and a menu of website features will come up that you can insert into your webpage.

Alternatively, if you use templates to do that, you may be able to add it in with your design and hosting service provider. www.godaddy.com, for example, gives you the ability to do that by simply clicking a couple buttons.

You may also consider getting email addresses through a promotion. For example, offer a referral bonus to people who recommend some friends to you who buy.

Each newsletter should also include a link that says “email this to a friend.” Although you won’t collect their email address by doing that, you may find that people who receive the email from a friend might be more inclined to contact you or even subscribe.

Another way to collect email addresses is to build and advertise a site that focuses entirely on collecting email addresses.

Suppose you own a consulting business. Your website advertises your services and has plenty of information about your business. You want to build up your business with email marketing but you can’t seem to get people to come to your site.

One way to do that would be to build another site – and “landing page” – where people arrive and are exposed to JUST a one-page advertisement that focuses on the benefits of your service. Then, at the bottom of the page is an email capture line. The caption might read “subscribe to an newsletter for more information on improving sales” (if that’s what your consultancy is about).

That way, rather than arriving on your company’s site and being overwhelmed with content that may not have anything to do with what they are looking for, the landing page clearly and easily describes what they can get and gives them an easy to get it.

How do you get people to that landing page? Advertising it is much easier than advertising your site. And when people arrive at it, they are presented with a single, clear message rather than to the many mixed messages your site might give them. (You may sell only one thing, but your FAQs, your different delivery methods, your product descriptions and sample downloads all are messages that can confuse a prospect).

This method of sales is very popular and works well for the sale of ebooks through providers like clickbank.com and it can work for your business, too.

Summary

You probably have already mastered your sales cycle, along with your niche and marketing ideas. Now, as you branch into email marketing, it’s time to master another aspect of e-business. Rather than selling your services, sell your prospects on the idea of subscribing to a free newsletter that they’re interested in. It’s a great way to get in their faces on a regular basis to tell them about your products or services. And it all starts by capturing their interest and their email address.

You are Awesome!
~~Dave

Getting started

One of the challenges faced by business owners (both online and offline) is the challenge of jumping into something with both feet. That is, aggressively pursuing an idea or action that you’ve just thought of and haven’t weighed through.

Jumping in with both feet is okay to do on something that doesn’t require a lot of time or expense or commitment. However, email marketing is not something you want to jump into.

Email marketing may not cost a lot – even a paid subscription to a month email marketing service provider doesn’t cost a lot and is quite valuable – but there is a time commitment as well as an energy commitment that you have to be willing to make before you can expect to enjoy success. And if you can’t make those commitments, then email marketing may not be right for you… right now.

Go/No Go

NASA scientists use something called a “go/no-go” check before launching a space shuttle. They go through a series of checklists and if there is something wrong in the checklist, they say “no-go” and the rocket ship stays on earth. If everything in the checklist is fine, they willingly launch the ship.

You need to do your own go/no-go system to make sure that you’re ready to commit to an email marketing campaign.

1. Estimate how many names you have on your database right now.
2. Estimate the amount of time it will take you to write a newsletter. Don’t worry so much about the design of the newsletter, since you can find templates to help you and once you have it designed you won’t have to worry about it, but writing the newsletter requires commitment and dedication on your part… and since most people aren’t interested in writing large amounts of text, it may be difficult for you.
3. Estimate the total amount of time in a year that you will end up spending on your email marketing campaign. For example, if you estimate (in step 2) that it will take you one hour to write a newsletter, and you want to send out a newsletter every month, then multiply that hour by 12 to get your total annual time estimate.
4. Estimate how much money it will cost you to manage your email marketing system. Factor in the value of your time (because you could spend it doing other things) and factor in any monthly costs associated with any email marketing system you want to use. You should have a total annual cost of managing your email marketing system.
5. Estimate how much profit you earn on an average sale.
6. Estimate how many MORE sales you need to make in order to earn your first dollar of profit with this increased expense. (To do this, simply divide the number in step 4 by the number in step 5). For example, if your email marketing campaign is going to cost you $1000, and the profit you earn from each sale is $10, you’re going to have to make an extra 100 sales in order to earn an additional profit.

This exercise is NOT meant to scare you away from email marketing. It is a highly effective way of doing business. However, you need to be realistic in terms of the cost associated with your business. Before completely scrapping the entire system, try to decide if there is a way to do it more profitably. For example, instead of writing the newsletters yourself, can you find a writer who can do it for you more cheaply? There are writers at www.guru.com who bid on projects and you might be able to find one who costs you less than if you wrote the articles yourself. And if you find a system that is free, there’s even less work for you to do! As well, if you decide to use an occasional marketing campaign – more like a sales update – you don’t have to commit much time to it.

If you want, start small and work your way up to a larger, more dedicated plan.

Publishing plan

Once you have decided on the email marketing campaign that will be most cost-effective for you, it’s time to develop a publishing plan. This sounds more complicated than it really is.

Magazine publishers call it a publishing schedule but it’s just a list of important dates and topics for you to make sure you stay on track.

Although an occasional sales update may not require a publishing plan, the more popular (and more effective) newsletter should.

Your publishing plan should include a list of the topics that you want to write about, any sales that may correspond with the topics or calendar dates, and the dates that are important to you.

Here’s an example of a newsletter that is intended to go out on the 21st of each month for a cleaning company:

As you can see, they have included the month, the article topic, as well as dates they need the article complete, the date they want to have the newsletter assembled and edited, and dates to have the newsletter sent out.

Now it’s your turn: Write down all the topics you can think of when it comes to things you think your audience might be interested in reading about. If you want just one article per newsletter (some have more but one is a great place to start) select 12 and assign months to them… as some are more appropriate at some times of the year than others.

Make notes as you go since these ideas may help you write the articles more quickly when it comes time to write them.

Summary

Getting started is about counting the cost and being prepared. It’s not glamorous work but developing this foundation will help to ensure that you are more successful. Sometimes these regular jobs can become a grind and a burden so having a plan in place can help you to overcome that feeling.

Keep Moving Forward!

–Dave