How Do You Market Your Products?
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on May 16, 2012
Today I’m asking the question more than offering suggestions because I think that sometimes we learn from each other, rather than from one person. And trust me, the last thing I should be offering advice on is selling products.
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This is a question specific to products, not services. I mainly provide services but I have some products, as well as belong to some affiliate programs that allow me to offer products. I’m going to tell you what I do and then leave the rest open for you to share with everyone else. And yes, to the right there is one of the products I market, which is also to the left but looking much different than what I shared in 2010. Chick on it to take a look; trust me, it’s not a hard sell. 
Actually, that’s one of the ways I market products on this particular blog. Sometimes the image I have to the right in my posts is actually an advertisement for something. Most of the time no, but if it’s a specific product or even a painting it’s probably a product. Sometimes I probably should mention that it’s a product because putting a painting in is almost like putting an image in, so I should say “selling on Imagekind” or something like that; I’ll need to work on that.
Obviously from my sidebars you know that I market products that way. However, I keep asking myself if it’s really marketing just sitting there. I may write specifically about my products once a year, if that often, and that’s for all my blogs.
Every once in awhile I toss out a product link on Twitter. Those don’t get much traffic but you never know who’s watching, right? I’ve never done it on LinkedIn or Google+, but when I created my business page on Facebook I advertised my products early on; haven’t mentioned any of them since.
I have one website which is mainly geared towards marketing my affiliate programs, which is kind of my version of a directory. It’s called Services and Stuff, and I’ve made few sales over the years from it, but I’ve also not marketed it all that well. It takes a lot of maintenance that I don’t always have time for because you know how affiliates are; here today, gone tomorrow.
Finally, every once in awhile I write a review about something, or a post that mentions something, and I include a link to the product. Most of the time I don’t mention that it’s a link to a product, but long time visitors know that if a link is underlined in blue that leads to a product, whereas most of the time my links are just a burgundy color without a line.
That’s all I do; trust me, it’s not very effective. I don’t have a list because, as I always ask, what the heck would I push to anyone with a list? Now, I do have a newsletter for my business which I guess one could say is an email list, and it has links to my products on it with every issue, so maybe that’s another way I market, ineffectively of course. lol
Your turn; what do you do, and how effective is it?
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 Mitch Mitchell
Real Marketing – Twitter
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Apr 10, 2012
In the continuing series on what I’m calling “real marketing” I’m going to tackle Twitter, but first I’d like to alert you to another brief interview I did on Monique Neeley’s blog where she talks about “social style”, and I guess I have one so I hope you check that out.
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I tell a lot of people that Twitter is my favorite social media platform. I like it because at any time of the day or night I can go there and talk and probably get someone to talk back to me. That doesn’t happen anywhere else, not even on Facebook with its nearly 900 million participants. It’s a lot of fun but can it really be used in a business marketing plan?
The kneejerk response is “yes”. When one puts a bit more thought into it the response modifies itself to “depends”. I tend to think that too many people have the wrong idea on how to use Twitter for business marketing purposes, and even though I don’t use it properly, I do know how to use it and which businesses would benefit most from it.
For instance, if you’re a business that sells products, you could probably do well on Twitter if people like your products. For instance, if you’re a local business that sells jewelry, and you have a following, you can easily market to those people by highlighting new jewelry, posting sales, and responding to comments anyone makes about your store or your products. If you worked in conjunction with Four Square you could probably increase your business by offering special deals to those people who have both that and Twitter.
What I tend to see more often than not, however, are folks that send out link after link after link, sometimes theirs, sometimes links from others, and never really talk to anyone. Sorry, but “thanx for the RT” isn’t communicating with others; it’s just a waste of time and adds to all the blather that many of us hate. Frankly, I don’t think that’s the best business model either, especially for small or independent businesses like mine.
To me, if one is going to market on Twitter, there has to be a mix of marketing and conversation. I think I fail in that I talk a lot, to almost anyone, but rarely is it about business. True, I’ve had some great connections, and I’m ecstatic to be connected to two of my favorite “old skool” babes, those being Mariel Hemingway and Kathy Ireland (both of whom started following me first and actually talk to me; gush!), I know that I’ll probably never do business with them.
Why is that? At a certain point, if you’re marketing on Twitter you have to aim towards a specific audience. My having only one Twitter account leaves a lot to be desired, and as I’ve said before, I’m not about to start splitting everything up now. If I were starting all over again I’d think seriously about it, and I probably would recommend it to people that offer more than one type of thing, which I do.
Also, I’m coming to believe that one might need to be willing to use more automation, something else I barely used, only using it to send out my first blog post for each of my blogs and that’s that. I’ve always felt like it would be disingenuous to post a link if I wasn’t actually online at the time to respond to someone and I’m starting to rethink that a little bit. I’m fairly available throughout the day, even late into the night, and I’m recognizing that maybe the way to maximize my messages is to get some automated help. One might need to get their own message out multiple times a day; how many is up to them.
One other way of trying to market on Twitter is to follow certain hashtags here and there. You might not find anything to comment on but every once in awhile you do, and sometimes you might even create one in your particular niche. I see so many people abusing hashtags with stupid stuff or things that aren’t within their realm; who wants to see that all day long? It’s rare that I retweet something and keep the hashtag in it; I learned a long time ago after reposting a political tweet that you never know who you’re inviting to contact you and potentially give you grief. Anyway, I temporarily follow hashtags like #healthcare, #seo, #socialmedia, see if there’s any action, and then get out.
There are many other things one can do, and things one shouldn’t do, but I think I got my main point across, which is that for some businesses Twitter would be a great way for them to market themselves, and for others some consideration needs to be taken as to just what they’re trying to do there.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 Mitch Mitchell
Real Marketing – Regular Mail
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Apr 5, 2012
It seems this is turning into a series, and why not. After all, though many of us are trying to make a certain amount of money online, our hopes being that it’s enough to work on, some of us who work for ourselves acknowledge that it’s not always the only way we can go, especially if we have a client audience that’s not quite savvy when it comes to being online.
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Let’s go retrospective first by looking at what I’ve talked about so far. I started by addressing the question of what is real marketing to begin with. Then I went into talking about phone calling, followed by Facebook and the reality that marketing overall is a slow process.
Now it’s time to talk about sending regular mail, and no matter how you look at it, this is one of the most expensive ways of trying to market yourself. Even if all you do it create a letter, put it in an envelope, buy stamps and send it out, it’s not cheap in the long run. Let’s look at why.
Statistics say that per 100 items mailed out, you have a 1% chance that someone will even look at it. After that you have a 16% chance of there being any action taken other than someone throwing it away. I don’t know about you but with numbers like that the odds of my getting much via regular mail don’t look so good.
Some people create flyers. Some people send their information out in one of those special postal envelopes to make things look more official. They probably get opened more often but for what it costs and that 16% chance of action that’s an expensive gamble if you ask me.
What else does it take? It takes time in writing a letter that gets your points across and yet stays under a page. Like almost anything else, people don’t have a lot of time to read long letters. So you want to try to get everything on one page. If you decide to attach a report of some kind to the letter later that’s okay; your first letter has to be one page.
It takes times in finding all the names and addresses of the people you want to send things to. If you’re lucky enough to have a directory at least that will speed things up a lot. In my case there’s a lot of internet research I have to do to find the right names, and sometimes I find that internet information is really only as good at the IT departments of the facilities I’m hoping to reach.
It takes time to print everything out. Actually, it takes me a lot of time printing envelopes because my printer hates envelopes so I have to hand feed them through one at a time; one of these days I’m buying a more expensive printer just for envelopes. Then it takes time to fold, stuff, lick and stamp everything.
Finally it’s all in the mail and you wait, but only so long. Truthfully, you have to try to contact the people you’ve written to within 3-5 days after you’ve sent the letter, and even then, based on the first statistic I mentioned above, most of them won’t even remember that they got a letter from you. And I’ve tried changing things up. I’ve gone with different colors of the envelopes from time to time. I don’t buy the standard stamp,instead going for whatever designer stamp they have at the time to hope catch the eye. The latest stamp I used commemorates the Chinese Lunar New Year; very colorful and shiny.
Truthfully, this is at the same time the most calming and the most frustrating marketing you can do. It’s calming because the process of putting the entire letter together, and then putting it in the mail, gives you a great sense of accomplishment. The anxiety begins the next day because you know the mail most probably isn’t going to be delivered by the next day. You figure that the mail might be there in two days but you really don’t want to call people the same day they get your advertisement unless they’re expecting it, and they probably aren’t expecting it.
Of course if you’re trying affiliate marketing or only marketing online this is a marketing process you’re not going to do. But if you have a product, even if you’re trying to market it online, or provide services, it’s something you might consider one day. Not to be the voice of negativity but don’t get your hopes up too much. Just hope that it at least opens up a line of communication if you then decide to contact that person another way.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 Mitch Mitchell
Real Marketing – A Slow, Steady Process
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Mar 26, 2012
Two weeks ago I started talking about this process of real marketing. I thought it was a good time to give a quick update as to how things are progressing, if they’re progressing. Actually, I tend to believe that any time one is trying to move forward it’s progress, even if one isn’t quite sure that’s what it is.
Over the past 2 weeks I’ve made a lot of phone calls. Some potential clients I’ve called twice. From my initiating things I haven’t landed anything yet, including anyone who even said “Yes, I’d like to talk more”. I did have a couple that asked me to send more information, and I’m taking that as a positive step. I also had one call that I thought would go better than it did, someone I’ve talked to before, and that one disappointed me so much that I not only didn’t make another call on that day, but was encouraged to write a post on my business blog about the disrespect independent consultants seem to get.
Now, what has happened is that I got a call from a hospital in another state asking me to submit a proposal to provide a couple of the services I do in health care, and that’s a good thing. You might not see these things as related but in my mind, when you start taking positive steps positive things start to come your way. Yes, I do believe in the laws of attraction.
Next, let’s talk about LinkedIn. I mentioned how I had reached out to some folks over there, and I’d only heard from one person. I can’t say that anymore. I did finally hear from another person who said that she’d been looking for someone who provides my services because she’s been asked in the past to find someone who does what I do, and that I’d be kept in her files the next time the request comes up. Good news once again.
See, the thing about real marketing is that you might not land the contract immediately, or make a sale then and there, but you start processes that, in some fashion, will get tings going and hopefully will work out in your favor later on. You may have to be patient, but eventually things will work out in some fashion.
Facebook? Lost cause for now, but that’s okay; I’ll keep plugging away at it. How are your marketing efforts going?
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 Mitch Mitchell
Marketing – Facebook
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Mar 22, 2012
On my SEO blog I wrote a post titled Should You Have A Facebook Business Page? That post talked about the kind of time it might take to keep one of those pages going and the commitment overall it takes to have one. I always believe, just like I do with blogging, that if you’re not going to add new content to it don’t even start.
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Of course the overall question is whether Facebook is a good marketing tool or not. I tend to think “no” overall, and I’m going to tell you why.
First, initially the only people you can invite to your Facebook page are people you know. How many of you have loved ones or close friends that often read your blogs? Very few people do, and it’s the same with a Facebook page, for the most part. I was lucky enough to get 26 people to initially sign up so I could create that little widget over there to the right that I could put up on this blog, a couple other blogs, and one of my websites.
To date, that little widget has driven 3 people to sign up on that page. That’s not all that good when you consider I’ve had that page up over a year, possibly longer; I’m not sure where I created it exactly. I’ve promoted it of course but it’s one of those strange conundrums where you’re asking yourself if you want to drive people to your Facebook page or your blog.
At this point I have 204 people subscribed to the page. Most of the people I’ve invited through Facebook, and I’m happy they’ve signed up. There’s a good number of people who signed up through Empire Avenue, of all things, although I’m not sure if they signed up directly because of that page or because I asked some questions on the Empire Avenue Facebook page. It’s my assumption that anyone else who’s signed up might have seen something in the stream of someone they were following and decided to join, but truthfully I’m not really clear on that one.
What kinds of things do I put there? I post a lot of links from 3 of my blogs, but mainly from my business blog. Occasionally if I find something that pertains to a business issue I’ll post it there as well. I also occasionally ask questions, trying to get a conversation started.
How successful am I? Every once in awhile I’ll get one response; makes me wonder if people even see the content all that often, since Facebook’s timeline moves pretty fast, especially if you’re connected to a lot of people. Frankly, there’s a lot of effort for very little active return.
Is it a good marketing tool for me? I’d have to say no. Can it be a good marketing tool for others? Actually it can, and that’s proven by one of our local TV news stations. They’re pretty big on Facebook. They ask “the question of the day” and will put some of the responses on TV; people love that. They’ve hooked up with their own Groupon-like deals thing that they push through Facebook and people love that. They promote the page often during newscasts, even more than their own website, which has news but isn’t really all that interactive. And one of their top news announcers, a guy named Matt Mulcahy, has fully embraced social media as he’s also on Twitter, writes a blog, and shows up at a lot of local social media events when he doesn’t have to do the news.
For my purposes, it gives me backlinks to my blogs. Other than that there’s no real marketing on my end; nothing I can really do. I’m not sure what others think, but maybe if you have something more to offer you could share it here.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 Mitch Mitchell
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