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

Are you getting new clients from social sites? Do you know?

When I talk with clients and colleagues about social marketing, one of the big frustrations that gets expressed is that they don't know if the time they spend blogging and on social networks is really paying off and netting new business.

I ask how they would know or if they even track that information. Most don't.

I do. I see a very direct connection between sales processed through my shopping cart and my marketing time spent blogging and connecting with people on sites like Facebook and twitter. I see it because I ask.

KickStartCart is my ecommerce/database management system. There is an option to set up custom fields on the order from people fill out when they make a purchase. I have one called "how did you hear about us" which gives them several options to choose from to let me know how they found me.

In prepping for my new program, From Platform to Profit, I ran a report to see who had signed up so I would have a class list. After reviewing the names, many of which were new to me, I then checked to see how they found me.

25% of the participants stated that they found me through my blog (!), several mentioned Facebook, many are repeat clients/students and a few said they met me at an event. 

Does it pay to blog? You bet.

Does it pay to have an active presence on Facebook? Yes.

Does it pay to attend live events? Yes! (Note the people who said them met me at events were at event where I was a participant, not a speaker.)

Maintaining a very visible presence, both on and offline is necessary to attract more of the right people to your business. 

My questions then, for you are: do you know where your clients/customer/patients are coming from? Do you have a system in place to find out? If so, what is it?

ATTENTION: If Your Subscribers Use Gmail Read This

If you have an email list then I'm willing to bet you have at least one subscriber who uses Gmail. Probably a whole lot more since millions of people use it as their primary email system world-wide. I do.

In the past couple of weeks I noticed in some of the emails I received, some URLs were clickable and others were not. I didn't spend enough trying to figure it out but it perplexed me, especially on the emails I sent out that had links to register for programs or product specials.

Thanks to a post on Alex Mandossian's Productivity Strategies Facebook page, I learned this is a bug, or maybe it's deliberate, that cropped up in February. Alex directed his readers to Frank Bauer's blog with a video explaining the problem and what to do about it.

Essentially, any URL that has a capital letter after the http:// is not an active, clickable link in Gmail. I sent myself an email to test it out:

You can see that the top URL is not active whereas the others are. The other variations are all active. So either use a lowercase letter or www right after the http://

I usually omit the www and I almost always capitalize words since the URLs read better and are better for branding purposes. I'll probably add the www. now so I can keep on capitalizing.

What does this mean? Take a look at the autoresponders you have set up. Until this is resolved by Google, you better make sure all your promotional links are clickable which means reviewing all your email messages. What a pain! Seems like a good task for a VA.

I have dozens of autoresponders each with multiple messages. But if those links are promoting programs or services or resources, then they sure better be clickable because most people will not take the time to copy and paste a link in to their browser address bar and you could be leaving money on the table.

Posterous and Ping.fm: please use wisely

A few days ago I had a conversation with a colleague about what I was noticing on her Posterous updates: every post said Untitled in the post title. Not only that, all the posts were like status updates...a couple of words and a link to something. Then I realized other people whose Posterous sites I'm following often had similar types of posts.

On closer inspection and questioning, it became clear my colleague's VA was using Ping.fm to post content.

While Ping.fm is a great tool and I use it as well, you have to understand HOW to use it with different sites.

Managing Social Media Marketing Sites

One of the most frequent questions I get when I do interviews and teleseminars is: how do I manage all the social sites and my blog; how do I determine what's most important?

I've written a couple of posts about this

• How to Use Your Blog To Develop Your Online Brand
• Online Marketing Needs to Be Consistent and Constant
• Are you willing to do what it takes to create visibility on the Web?
• Business Blogging Tip: You have to MAKE Time to Blog (video)

Today I read two posts that may also bring some relief in how to manage your online persona and tools to do it.

Five Social Media Marketing Mistakes Companies Make

Recently I was interviewed about social media marketing mistakes for an article on Newsday.com. The article is now published online and a couple of my comments are included:

Companies need to get more out of social web sites

I like to prep for interviews so I don't come off sounding hesitant or inarticulate. Here are five mistakes I identified that some companies make when it comes to social media marketing.

1. No blog. Many people have been asking why they need a blog if Facebook and twitter are so popular. Well, your blog is YOUR real estate on the web and Facebook and twitter belong to those companies. You are at the mercy of the powers beyond your control. What if a platform gets hacked, goes down, is sold and shut down? It's important to a presence on diverse social platforms so if one site goes down, you still have other avenues of communication. Your blog is your home base and that's where ultimately, you want to funnel your friends and followers.
2. Mixing business and personal. While revealing your human side is critical to building trust and relationships, it can be confusing for your followers when you mix business and personal content on social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn. One way around this on Facebook, for example, is to keep your personal profile personal for friends and family, and set up a Fan Page to connect with clients, customers, vendors, colleagues and prospects.
3. Lack of integration. To be efficient with your time and energy, it's important to link your social sites together. You're attracting different people on different platforms and you can increase engagement when you let them know how they can connect with you on other platforms. And, of course, you want to make sure your blog posts - your most valuable content - is being pulled into all sites where it's allowed so you can draw people back to your home base.
4. No consistent image. For the purpose of developing your online persona , you want all your sites to have a consistent image and that includes the picture you use as an avatar. When someone finds you on LinkedIn and follows a link to your blog, you want them to feel confident they've landed in the right place and you're giving them a congruent experience.
5. Continually pushing your message without participating and conversing. Give before you get, as my colleague Kathleen Gage often says. It's about the conversation and in the end the conversation builds the relationship, the trust and the confidence to do business with you.

What mistakes would you add to this list? This is an evolving environment and we're all learning best practices for using blogs and other social networking sites for business. Would love to hear your ideas for best practices and mistakes to avoid.

UPDATE: follow up post on How Personal Should You Get in Social Media?

Related Post:
Fast Company Interview on Business Blogging - I finally hit the big time!