Biz Tips Blog: Online Marketing, Visibility and Business Blogging Tips

Build Your List with Twitter

When you think of Twitter, you may not think about list building. You probably think about instant messaging on steroids, building relationships via 140 character "tweets" that connect you to your followers and allow them to get to know you and your business.

And, Twitter can be used as a tool to build your email list as well.

Just like offering an "ethical bribe" to your web/blog visitors if they sign up for your ezine, you can offer Twitter followers a free report or e-course as a thank-you gift for following you. What's the difference? Following you on Twitter is much the same as subscribing to get your ezine.

The reason to get followers on to your list is so you can develop an even deeper relationship with and help move them to engage with you deep by becoming a client or customer.

So, how to you put this in place?

KickStartCart Browser Tip

If you've been reading this blog for any length of time, you know I recommend KickStartCart for your all in one marketing and ecommerce tool. More than a shopping cart, KickStartCart is marketing system.

About a year ago I switched from using Internet Explorer to Firefox as my default web brower. That's where my problems started. Frequently when I tested my product links in KickStartCart, I would get error messages, telling me I needed to enable cookies on my browser. I always have cookies enabled so that wasn't the problem.

It's been so frustrating, not only for me but for prospective customers as well. It wasn't always a problem, just on a random basis. When a customer complained, I'd have to tell them to use Internet Explorer.

That's not an ideal solution and who knows how many people didn't bother to complain but just abandoned the purchase. This just shouldn't be an issue with millions and millions of people using Firefox.

Finally, I found out that there is a bug with Firefox 2.0 that cannot be resolved with KickStartCart. The problem does not occur with Firefox 3.0. So I upgraded. And guess what? No problems.

So, my advice...if you're still using Firefox 2.0, then upgrade to Firefox 3.0 so you will not encounter this problem yourself.  Thousands of merchants use KickStartCart (aka 1Shoppingcart) so you'l save yourself some headaches if you upgrade today.

Related post:

Shopping Cart Systems - Part 1 - 3

Speak Your Way To Wealth Seminar Was Great

Back in the office after 3 1/2 days in my hometown of Manhattan Beach at the Ayres Hotel for the Speak Your Way to Wealth seminar.  My head is full.  Met a lot of great people and learned a lot about the art and science of speaking from the stage and selling from the stage.

Though Patsi and I have done a lot of speaking in the last few years, this was the first time that we had to pitch a product from the stage. After all that's how we get compensated for sharing our time and expertise. (Picture: Patsi on the left, Arvee Robinson, host of SYW2W on the right.)

A lot went into the preparation including a half day of in-person coaching about how to prepare and present an offer when presenting.

Feedback we got was great; the audience enjoyed and learned from our presentation, loved the fact we are two women presenting together and they enjoyed our style. And, we sold product and have new clients!

My twitter experiment didn't really work though.  Not a techy crowd AND the way the room was set up, you couldn't really use a laptop: no tables and poor wifi connection in the room.  You can see the couple of tweets here.

Photos and a few videos are on the way.

Patsi has posted a good recap of some of the speakers on her blog.

Tweeting a Conference

In a few minutes I'm heading out the door to Manhattan Beach (my hometown) to attend Speak Your Way to Wealth, a 3 day seminar on how to use professional speaking to build your business.  Mark Victor Hansen is the opening keynoter on Friday. We're speaking on Blogs and Branding on Saturday morning.

But the point of this post is this: providing there's adequate wifi access at the hotel, I'm going to do updates via Twitter. I know a few others who are going to be there are on Twitter too, so I'm hoping we can all use a common tag for our conference posts.

Why you ask? Because if we tag all tweets with #syw2w then anyone can do a search on http://www.hashtags.org or http://search.twitter.com/ or http://www.twemes.com and follow all the posts.  Pretty cool.

Of course you can also follow speakers like Dave Lakhani, Adam Urbanski and Revvell, as well as me and Patsi, by following us on Twitter.

Follow us. It could be an interesting way to vicariously participate in the high points of the conference.

Are you tuned in to your marketplace?

By way of David Meerman Scott who writes the excellent Web Ink Now blog, I learned about a free online tool that will let you know how tuned in you are to your marketplace. Put another way, you can find out how egocentric you are?

Based on an algorithm, after you submit the feed for your blog you get a rating from 1 to 10 to let you know how much you talk about yourself and your company vs. your clients, customers and prospects. Put another way: are you talking about "me" and "we" or "you" and "yours"?

Here's the link to the Tuned In calculator. This blog got a 9 out of 10! Build a Better Blog got a 10 out of 10!