MelvinBlog

A blog that chronicles my journey on online marketing, blogging, social media, technology and life.

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Word of Mouth Advertising isn’t Dead; Altered Maybe but not Dead

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This is a guest post by Amanda Green.

In the days of the internet and social media, word of mouth advertising has altered a bit. This doesn’t mean it is dead just because it has changed shapes. In fact the opposite is true. Personally, I think it is stronger than ever. There aren’t any statistics to prove this, or at least I haven’t found any. But I am one to pay attention to marketing and the strategies that businesses take and the success each approach offers.

Think about your Facebook or Twitter feeds. How many times do you come across a post that shares a deal or a new item that was recently purchased? Well, my friend, that is word of mouth. Better yet, how often do you see one of your “friends or followers” ranting about a product that just irked them when they tried it? I see it at least a few times a day and between work and play, I don’t spend as much time on social media as most.

Just a few weeks ago I updated my profile picture on Facebook. This new picture wound up with 117 likes and 70 plus comments. I was impressed, thought I must have really looked good. But the truth is that picture was taken by an aspiring photographer. She is a good friend and needs to build her online portfolio. Always one to help I sat through the awkward session and let her snap away.

Through my picture she gained recognition and booked a wedding and a few pregnancy sessions from people that would have never known about her otherwise. This too is a type of word of mouth advertising in our current world.

Giving away free gifts is another twist on word of mouth. No it’s not simply saying, “I love such and such company and I think you should love them too.” But if you are forcing people to share information essentially it falls into the same category.

Another story that comes to mind happened a few months back when I was looking into renting new office space. I was given a pen by a lady who worked in one of the buildings. I love pens. It is maybe somewhat of an obsession. As a writer, I soak in the moments I get to take it back to my roots and put pen to paper. So for me this was the perfect way for me to not only remember them but to talk about them to my friends later.

Today I am working in that space, and while the pen isn’t the sole reason for that… it was definitely a selling point. They made me remember them and now I have an item that I use regularly and has been the start of many conversations.

If you don’t have branded office items that will start random conversations you may want to change that. InkHead is where we purchased our customized pens, apparel, and electronic accessories and they had everything we wanted plus some. All of which came without breaking the bank.

Marketing comes in many forms, but without doing the little things that cause people to talk about you randomly, you will not find the amount of success you are really looking for. Even bad publicity is still publicity. While you are always aiming for positive feedback, just be thankful when people are talking about you.

Foretelling the Future? You Don’t Need ESP

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This is a guest post by Amanda Green.

On the surface, it seems like product launches consist of three steps: think up the product, make the product, and launch it to the public. The truth is that there is a lot more work that goes into it than that, which involves anticipating the future, foretelling how a product will be received on the market. It’s not so mystical as say hiring a psychic to predict market fluctuations, although there are companies that actually do this. Realistic foretelling of the future involves thinking and acting precisely. Here are some of the things that you need to do if you want to set your product up to succeed.

Product Research

Here is the sad truth: chances are high that someone has had the same idea you’ve had before. This is why, as soon as you start to take your idea seriously, you need to go into research mode. You don’t just need to find out whether the product already exists. You need to look up patents, trademarks, copyrights, etc. It’s important to do this for every product that even remotely resembles yours. This isn’t just for your protection. It’s to help you figure out how to make your product the absolute best product on the market.

Product Testing

You need to test your product before you start marketing it to the public or attempting to launch it for sales revenue. There are a few phases to this.

1. Prototype testing

Make several different models of the product you want to launch. These are called prototypes. Bring people to, for lack of better word, play with your prototypes and then ask them what they think. Track their responses to each prototype, positive and negative. Use their feedback to inform the next round of product prototypes. Repeat this cycle until you’ve got a single product that is free of bugs, glitches or problems.

2. Product Honing

Once you’ve got a prototype that is functional and without major bugs, create a few variations of this finalized prototype and run through the testing process again. You can help yourself with this process if you bring in groups both from your original prototype testing sessions and brand new eyes.

3. Run the Numbers

Trying to pick a price point can be difficult, particularly with markets being as volatile as they are. You need to do more than just a simple Excel sheet projection to figure out how your product is likely to sell given what you know about your market, the current economy, etc. Profit Stars asset liability management team recommends running a variety of different scenarios to help you get the fullest picture of your product’s projected success…which, unless you’re a mathematician is probably something you’ll want to hire a professional to help you do.

Get It Out There

It’s okay to do a soft launch of a product to get an idea of how it will perform within the real world. Soft launches are a great way to get independent feedback and to test market response. You can also use this time to properly market the product for a “real” and “hard” launch on a future date. This is another area where it is helpful to hire professionals. A marketing firm can help you pick a date and make sure that a good amount of buzz and anticipation is built up for your product so that, when it hard launches, it will bring in a large sum of money. Even better, professional marketers will know how to help you sustain the buzz surrounding your product launch long after the launch has actually taken place.

Unfortunately, as far as we know, nobody is able to accurately predict the future, though as stated before, some companies do test the waters with psychics. The real way to foretell the future is to do your research and testing correctly. If you do, there’s no reason to believe that the product you dream up can’t be launched successfully and profitably.

Making the Most Out of Google+ Business Page

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This is a guest post by Amanda Green.

It’s a fact that Google+ is evolving with time and is slowly becoming an integral part of any business’s online reputation and subsequent sales. It makes your Google+ business page really important, since it reflects the online reputation of your brand.

If you’re not making the most out of your Google+ page, then you’re definitely leaving money on the table – money that you could put in the highest interest rate savings account and increase your overall earnings.

Advantages of a Google+ Business Page

  1. Your Customers Are On It: Whether you believe it or not, your target customers are already on Google+ socializing and consuming information. So instead of interrupting them with your advertising, you can use Google+ to connect to them and engage with them.
  2. Create More Direct Relationships: One of the plus points of using Google+ is that the social network gives utmost value to quality content. Content that you can create to establish more direct, personal relationships with your target audience.
  3. Use Video Chat: Google+ Hangouts, the video chat feature is great to hold video talk sessions with your prospects/customers. Getting them involved will help you generate more feedback.

How to Market Your Business with Google+

Creating a Google+ business page is one thing, but marketing your business effectively using it is something else. Unless and until you’re doing your best to market it well, you won’t see results. Here are some ideas to go with:

  1. Create a “Suggested Circles” List: One of the easiest ways to market with Google+ is to create a list of suggested circles, sorted out by priority, which is placed on the top of your profile page’s About tab.
  2. Leverage Google+ Search: When you’re there on Google+, then make some noise. Show the world that you’re there by searching Google+ search for industry keywords, and mentions of your brands. Save these searches and monitor them daily to respond to mentions, reply to comments, etc.
  3. Join Others’ Hangouts: While it’s totally up to you if you want to start your own Google+ hangout, you should definitely participate in others’ to understand how to effectively use it.  This helps you make your own hangouts much more successful when you hold them.

Promoting Your Google+ Page

  • Focus on getting more followers
  • Make use of Google+ badges
  • Add your page to your sitelinks
  • Share really valuable information
  • Use Ripples to connect to Influencers
  • Host hangouts for customers
  • Promote on other social media platforms
  • Enable social extensions in Adwords

Remember, Google+ is not just another social network. It’s a revolution in itself, which is lead by search engine giant. So if you want your business to grow online, then see to it that you’re taking full advantage of Google Plus.

Getting Your Business to Have a Good Online Reputation from the Start

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This is a guest post by Amanda Green

If you’ve just started a new business, building your online reputation is very important. There are many consumers who now research companies they’re thinking of doing business with before they buy any of their products. Having positive comments posted about your business and its products will help convince many of these consumers that they’re making the right choice by doing business with you.

The key to building a good reputation from the beginning is to start out on the right foot. Ensure that all of your products are of high quality and that your business policies are not only fair, but also clearly posted on your website. This will reduce the likelihood of someone posting complaints about your company because they were dissatisfied with the products and services they’ve received.

You can start building your reputation simply by using your own website. Allow your customers to leave ratings and comments about products they’ve bought from you. Include a discussion forum on your site where people can ask questions, as well as share feedback and tips about the products you have available for sale. These are all things that are used by some of the top online retailers. It will also allow you to catch on to any customer dissatisfaction and resolve the issue proactively before the customer goes and posts negative comments about you on other websites.

As for comments about your business on review sites, personal blogs and industry related discussion forums, these will come naturally as your business grows. If people are satisfied with what you have to offer and found your products to be useful or very well priced, they’re more likely to write about it online to share their opinion with others.

Remember that internet reputation management is an ongoing task. Once you get going, you should monitor review sites, related discussion forums, blogs and social networking groups for any mention of your company. If there are any negative comments posted, you should quickly address the issue to show that you care about your customer satisfaction levels and are willing to correct any problems rapidly.

Remember that building a positive reputation online first involves giving your customers something to be happy about. If they like your business, many of them will leave comments about it online. As your sales numbers grow, so will the amount of positive information about your business, thus helping you build a solid reputation online.

You Still Trying to Make Money Blogging? That’s Old School!

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Well, its really not! 🙂 But blogging has changed a lot over the past 10 years that a lot of bloggers were left (in the dust) because they’re still doing blogging the same way they’re doing it 5-10 years ago. I gotta admit that I sort of consider myself one of those who have not been doing what I’m supposed to be doing different than what I was doing before.

A couple of days ago, I read a post from one of my favorite blogs entitled ‘The Future of Blogging‘. Now I know you’re probably thinking that this is one of those cheesy posts where the author just puts something together about how blogging will still change the world, whatever, but trust me its not. The post is the longest post I’ve read in a while, and more importantly it tackles the reality of blogging and where its really heading in the future. Here’s a pretty long excerpt:

This is an important blog post, because it makes a prediction. A prediction about the future of blogging; a platform actively used by over 181 million people (Nielsen data for October 2011). Not only will you learn why I think most blogging advice is dated and ineffective, but I’ll also reveal where I believe this entire industry is heading, so you can stay ahead of the competition.

This is not only an important post, but also the longest I have ever written. It’s more like a mini-eBook, without the price tag. Don’t let its lack of cost make you doubt the value here though. I will at least sell you on what you’re about to learn:

  • A weird tip I personally received from Google’s Matt Cutts which increased my ViperChill search rankings
  • What Gawker does once per week to double their traffic figures. That’s going from two million to four million uniques per day
  • Why the Daily Mail recently surpassed the New York Times as the number #1 newspaper website in the world
  • How Mashable crushed TechCrunch on traffic numbers (even though they used to be the underdog)
  • Why the successful ‘make money online’ blogs of the past have now faded into obscurity
  • The number one reason Leo Babauta dominated the personal development industry in two months
  • What Steve Kamb did to build a six-figure blog in the overly saturated health niche
  • Why feed counts mean absolutely nothing (and never really have)
  • Which Huffington Post articles attract 3X more clicks than any other
  • Why the Verge was one of the fastest growing blog launches in history

…and most importantly, how this all helps me to make a prediction about what it now takes to build highly profitable blogs.

What I love about the post aside from that it covers a lot of different interesting subtopics is the fact that Glen backed up everything with numbers and proofs. I know research is overrated but the amount of effort that was done here is just phenomenal. I rarely print blog posts (not sure I ever did before) but when I read the first 60% of it, I was convinced that I should.

Again, give it a real read and I can guarantee that this post will benefit you.

Facebook Timeline and Small Business Brands

Facebook Timeline and Small Business Brands

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This is a guest post by Jess Wagner

The new Facebook Timeline is drawing all sorts of privacy concerns with users. When the social media network begins to make all users switch over to the new design no one will have as much privacy as they want. People will be able to see photos, status updates, videos, and oddball posts that you might have made as far back as 2004. While privacy concerns might hinder the website’s use for the average user, brands and businesses are salivating at the new possibilities the Timeline will afford them.

Customized Design

Facebook is the second most visited website on the Internet after Google. With people spending so much time on the social media network, it is almost as important to build an incredibly designed Facebook page as it acts as a secondary home page. If a brand hires an interactive agency for web design, they will want to carry elements of their site over to the new cover photo that sits on top of the new Timeline layout which is 840 x 310 pixels. This photo can contain important information or just be consistent with the overall marketing strategy.

The Big Picture

With photo blog websites like Tumblr and Instagram becoming more popular, people are getting most of their information from photos instead of the written word. The Facebook Timeline design lets photos stand out much better in profiles than the old layout did. Instead of brands relying on having conversations with their customers, they can post pictures and view the comments that are coming in. Instead of writing a detailed status update, brands can create an infographic which will rest beautifully in the Timeline profile.

Brand History

Because it is so much easier to access information previously posted, Facebook Timeline will take the pressure off brands to get featured in the News Feed. According to Zeny Huang of Mashable, the new Facebook design will rely more on content than on immediately grabbing the viewer’s attention. Brands can stick to their story instead of relying on shock tactics in order to get more people to view their profile.

Subscription Features

Users who have had a Facebook account for a long time probably have a bloated friend list filled with college acquaintances, forgettable encounters, and even some old enemies. People are beginning to filter out their profiles and delete people they do not know. With the subscribe feature, brands can get featured in the News Feed without cluttering up any friend counts, groups, or interests users might be worried about.

While the average user might be complaining about the constant changes and privacy abuse Facebook deals to its users, there is no doubt brands are going to be able to adapt to the new layout with ease. Small businesses will also be able to document the history they have with the community with the easily accessible Timeline feature. Whatever opinions users might have of the changes, Facebook has adapted to compete with other social media websites.

A Guide on Doing Blog Marketing

A Guide on Doing Blog Marketing

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It’s been a while since I created a guide on blog marketing/driving traffic to a blog and obviously the need to update the material has occurred to me. Especially with the fact that I got lots of feedback based on the old one that I created and those feedback that I received were really good.

Now if you haven’t been reading my blog since last year, then the book that I’m referring to is the one entitled ‘Blog Marketing for Fame’. This free guide generally received positive feedback from most of my readers and I was happy with how it turned out. There were a couple of good suggestions that I put into work with regards to the new one.

So there I upgraded the guide and it has been rebranded as …

‘Blog Marketing Guide’

Aside from the old one having a long flimsy name, another reason for the renaming of the book is the fact that there’s really no guide on blog marketing in general available. And perhaps, ‘Blog Marketing Guide‘ as a name is pretty good and something easy to remember. It may not really be the perfect name for now but its something that’s good to start with.

The book just like most of my guides are free if you subscribe to my newsletter which is totally a no-brainer if you ask me. :p. The book has 5 general sections on how and where you can get traffic plus a detailed explanation/elaboration of the different things that I do that has worked extremely well for myself and hopefully can also work for you.

But the book isn’t really just the cool stuff here as the newsletter is the one that I would say I’m pretty proud of. Over the past few years I haven’t really had gotten a huge amount of people on my list. I have a couple of hundreds to be honest but I’m very proud to say that the community in my newsletter is a tightly-knit interactive group. Lastly, I usually put out lots of great advice and tips that I normally don’t publish here. And hey there were a couple of times that I even gave free goodies there. 🙂

Why Blog Marketing?

Pretty simple. Just like in my old post about most bloggers failing at marketing, the reason I created this thing is to be able to help out lots of bloggers on how they can market their blogs competitively.

Not much has really changed. Most bloggers aren’t still good at marketing their stuff and its pretty understandable. When I was getting started I looked at blogging as just writing and I believe this is how most bloggers trying to carve their niche look at blogging as well. Obviously its the wrong way to look at it.

We, bloggers have to be somehow in the middle of ‘writers’ and internet marketers (salesmen). We need to write out our usual selves while being good enough to promote it and get enough  people in our community. But we don’t need to sound like those marketers right? Nor do we need to push out one product after the other just to get affiliate sales. In short, we don’t want any part of being salesy yet we want to know how to market.

Hopefully that’s what the Blog Marketing Guide brings to the table.

So that’s my reason. Again, your feedback is highly appreciated and feel free to get this guide across the blogosphere.