Offline Businesses – Business Networking On Social Networking Sites Online

©2010 Doug Champigny, http://advanced-twitter-marketing.com – All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

Offline businesses have always understood the value of business networking, and often offline business networking is a company’s main source of meeting new suppliers, finding new products and services to promote and getting referrals to new targeted leads. But never before has business networking been as simple or as far-reaching as it is with today’s social networking sites.

To start with, whatever niche or field your offline businesses are in probably has an association, and nowadays few industry associations don’t have websites where members can discuss issues, trade referrals and all the other areas of business networking. If your industry association was helpful to you before, think of how much more valuable they’d be to your offline businesses if they also became a source of contacts and targeted business leads?

Next, professional associations that cross the niche boundaries can be a major boost to the networking efforts of offline businesses too. For example, retail councils, manufacturing associations, wholesaler associations and even consumer advocacy groups all have websites where, with a bit of study and prudence, you can find ways to extend your business networking.

Then there are the actual social networking sites online, designed to cover all areas of business for both offline businesses and online businesses alike. LinkedIn, for example, lets each employee or owner in your company have their own resume-style page where they can list what they do and who they work for, and builds company listing pages as well showing which members of that company have pages there. A quick look at their site will show you it’s a dream come true for offline businesses looking for networking opportunities.

Social media sites like Twitter and FaceBook, and Web 2.0 properties like Google Buzz and Yahoo Buzz aren’t designed specifically for business use, but can still be extremely helpful in your business networking quest. Give your employees some guidance in how best to represent your company on these sites then allow them some time each day to network with people there in an effort to find suppliers and get referrals to targeted leads – there efforts can even help you get more traffic to your company websites and directly through the front doors of your offline businesses.

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Having gone from newspaper advertising manager to founding and operating 2 full-service advertising agencies, Doug Champigny had already mastered the world of offline marketing before turning his attention to online marketing full-time. Now, over a decade later, marketing mentor and speaker Doug Champigny is a world-famous marketer with a major online presence who often appears live onstage at marketing seminars, conferences, conventions and workshops around North America. With more than 35 years of online and offline advertising and marketing experience, Doug Champigny is uniquely qualified to teach you how to succeed in online marketing through his Internet Marketing Coaching and his Affiliate Marketing Coaching programs. Give your online marketing the PowerStart it needs today – enroll now!

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Technorati Tags: business networking, offline businesses, networking sites, social networking sites, social networking

Avoiding The Social Media – Salespage Disconnect In Your Advanced Twitter Marketing

©2010 Doug Champigny, Advanced Twitter Marketing.

There’s a noticeable disconnect between social media sites and salespages, one that a lot more Internet marketers and affiliate marketers should be taking notice of – and it applies to anyone marketing on Twitter as well…

When people, even targeted prospects, are visiting social media sites they are in a headspace that reflects that – social. They are not, generally, in a shopping frame of mind at that point, or they’d be cruising shopping sites and salespages instead. Makes sense, right?

So if that’s so obvious, why is it that so many marketers are complaining these days that marketing on social sites isn’t working for them when they consider posting links to salespages the extent of their necessary social media marketing strategies?

No matter how well written a salespage is, it’s still just that – a salespage. And to be effective it needs to be put in front of targeted prospects when they’re in a mood to buy! Ken Evoy long ago pioneered the concept of pre-selling your prospects before passing them along to your affiliate marketing links, and in most cases that’s just as true for your own Internet marketing activities too.

Common sense tells us that you can’t overcome that disconnect – can’t expect to reframe a potential customer’s mindset – in the 140 characters we have at our disposal in our Twitter marketing efforts… But we can STILL use that ‘headline marketing’ platform to build sales – and our lists – with a slight change in tactics.

Take a lesson from the current affiliate marketing playbook – right now the highest-performing affiliates are building squeeze page systems. They offer a free download aimed at their target market, then followup with an autoresponder course to sell the prospect into the product they’re promoting. Since the prospect signed up for their list to get the download, they know that person is a targeted lead – otherwise the gift wouldn’t appeal to them.

Take a look at the psychology involved – the free e-book, report or video demonstrated their expertise in the niche, the squeeze page got the prospect to trust them enough to provide their e-mail address, and now the followup will provide more helpful information on the topic and ‘warm up’ the prospects – many of whom could eventually end up buying the product through the affiliate’s link.

So as an online marketer, use that system for your own products. Write a complimentary report on a related sub-niche and set up your squeeze page funnel. Once it’s in place you simply drive targeted traffic to it – the site, download and followup all run on autopilot so the system itself doesn’t require any ongoing effort on your part once it’s in place. And now it’s not a salespage you’re directing traffic to, but instead to a free report full of good info for those interested in the niche you serve.

Next, write a blog post about the same topic as the report and link to your squeeze page from it – tweet the blog link too! Think not so much of your Twitter marketing experience, but of your usage of Twitter yourself – how much more likely are you to click through to a free download or a blog post than to a salespage?

And the same is true of any of the other social media and social networking sites too – you’ll do much better offering free downloads and linking to helpful blog posts than you will by linking directly to salespages – and you’ll be building your opt-in list along the way for the future benefits a larger list brings.

So if you’ve got a lot of experience online and know all the ins-and-outs of reports, squeeze page systems, autoresponders and the like, start with your current or best-selling product and get the funnel online for it – then send it traffic while you focus on the funnel for your next product. Rinse and repeat til all your products have funnels specific to them, then open up those funnels to your affiliates as well!

If you’re not up to speed on those technologies and/or aren’t that well versed at driving large amounts of targeted traffic, I suggest you consider enrolling in our PowerStart Internet Marketing coaching classes, a 4-week crash course that teaches all of the above and a lot more. Weekly webinars and over 1.5 gigs of custom step-by-step training videos are combined to ensure your success, no matter how new you are to marketing online. Classes start the first Monday night of each month, so start by checking out the video testimonials sent to us by some of our Internet marketing coaching program graduates – see you after you enroll!

Technorati Tags: Twitter marketing, marketing on Twitter, social media marketing, Internet marketing, affiliate marketing, tweets, Twitter, PowerStart Internet marketing, Internet marketing coaching classes

Google Buzz has launched, and marketers and prospects have flocked to it en masse to set up their new profiles on the site – as examples, see Doug Champigny on Google Buzz and Teri Champigny on Google Buzz.

So what does that mean for you and your Advanced Marketing on Twitter efforts? Now, in addition to LinkedIn, Facebook, etc, your Twitter posts, or tweets, will also show up in your Google Buzz – and the Buzz of the people following you on Google’s new Web 2.0 property.

Will this help you get tweets indexed sooner on Google? Not likely – they try to bend over backwards not to give favor to their own properties in their search engine, it seems. But it DOES mean that much more exposure to your tweets and links you have in them, and as we all know, the wider the audience, especially a targeted audience, the greater the opportunity for sales and list building!

And like Twitter itself, the only people seeing your Google Buzz stream are those who choose to follow you or those who go to view your profile there, so you’re not spamming anyone by adding in your Twitter feed, no matter how much you’re marketing on Twitter.

Should you set up your own Google Buzz profile and add your Twitter feed to it? If you’re marketing on Twitter – especially if you’re following the steps in my Advanced Marketing On Twitter guide – of course you should! It’s free, takes about an hour to set up and fully optimize, and can help you get your messages out to a wider potential buying audience – why would you pass that up?

Get your Google Buzz on right now, add your Twitter ID and stream and give your advanced Twitter marketing one more shot of adrenaline!

See you at the bank!

About The Author…

Doug Champigny is a world-famous Internet marketing coach, mentor, speaker and the creator of the PowerStart Marketing 4-week Internet Marketing Crash Course. To learn more about Doug or to book him to speak at your next event, contact him through his blog at http://DougChampigny.com.

Technorati Tags: Google Buzz, advanced twitter marketing, Advanced Marketing On Twitter, twitter and google buzz, google buzz twitter, Doug Champigny

For the longest time, large offline corporations of a certain ilk have used lawsuits and the threat of them to silence their critics. Even when in the right, most individuals don’t have the financial wherewithal to mount a legal defense against a battery of hard-nosed lawyers protecting corporate sharks from exposure. Not many would disagree that this is an immoral use of power and wealth, but since when did those with power & wealth exhibit any interest in society’s morals?

Well, the tide may be about to change, as they say. Apparantly offended by a tweet on Twitter recently, one company launched a lawsuit against the tweet’s author. I know neither the person nor anyone from the company involved, so this is neither a rant or a veiled mission – simply a caveat to offline businesses about the power of the new Social Networking world.

Twitter is set up so that only your own followers see your tweets, although some are later indexed by the search engines, where they may or may not be seen by others. In this instance it appears the author of the tweet had 20 followers – extremely limited exposure. And with hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of tweets flowing through for most Twitter users, one can assume a large percentage of followers miss any given tweet.

As a social media expert, I can tell you that left alone, that tweet would have had negligible impact. But it wasn’t left alone…

The company launched a lawsuit purportedly demanding $50,000US in damages, and the story was picked up by the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper. The marketer in me shuddered as I read the comments from a company spokesperson, but it was still a mostly-local issue…

Enter the Social Media… (anyone have the Jaws theme music? )

Pete Cashmore, one of the world’s best and most-respected bloggers, posted the story on his Mashable blog, arguably the top Social Media Guide blog in the world. He treated the issue fairly in my humble opinion, reporting the tweet and quoting the company as published in the Sun-Times story.

So what’s the effect of Pete’s post – after all, it’s just one blog right? First, in Technorati’s list of the Top 100 Blogs in the world, Mashable ranks 3rd as I write this. So popular, in fact, that ranking service Alexa shows over 15,000 incoming links to Mashable from other sites!

Suddenly this tweet is now being seen by thousands or tens of thousands of people – a far cry from those original 15 or 20 viewers. And it doesn’t stop there…

As I write this, there are 15 ‘trackbacks’ shown on the post – other bloggers covering the story who have provided a link to the Mashable post – bringing the attention to their audiences as well. Mot impressively, 1,950 – Yes, ONE-THOUSAND, NINE HUNDRED AND FIFTY – viewers have sent a tweet from the site to bring the blog post to the attention of the combined Twitter following, an audience potentially in the millions!

All this – and Pete just posted the information THIS MORNING… Already a search for the headline, “Woman Sued for $50,000 Over a Tweet”, shows how viral this type of issue is: searching at Google shows 5,000 references to the article, searching at Yahoo! shows 6 results, and searching at Bing shows 34 results.

And those are just the search engine results within 12 hours of the article being posted, so it’s fairly safe to assume those will continue to grow for a while yet as new sources are found, new tweets are made, and more bloggers take up the case…

Ignoring the post might have meant 15 or 20 people might develop a bad impression of the company concerned – by making it an issue, how many of the millions will feel that way? What does damage control cost on this new scale – and can it be implemented successfully by a company whose reps would make this type of move?

Face it – for offline businesses, the game has changed. Instant access and instant response has put the consumer in a position so powerful as to (almost) match the power of the big business legal front.

Ignoring Social Media is a major mistake for offline businesses – using it wrong or being ignorant of it’s power is far worse, and an offline business might soon sink or swim based on it’s online reputation. Just as offline businesses search Twitter, MySpace, FaceBook and the big search engines for background on employees, potential hires and suppliers, so now do consumers and potential corporate clients before making buying decisions. Can lenders and legislators be far behind?

Using Social Media correctly, however, can be a major boon to offline businesses, from little corner stores and home-based entrepreneurs to the largest global corporations. If your budget allows, hire a professional social media consultant to guide you through the potential minefields to the profitable pastures beyond – and be amongst the first of offline businesses to use Social Media to increase your bottom line while enhancing your company’s reputation world-wide or in your own backyard!

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About The Author:

Doug Champigny is a world-famous Internet marketing coach, mentor and speaker and author of the Advanced Twitter Marketing System. A recognized Social Media expert, Doug Champigny was the featured Web 2.0 speaker at the Internet Marketing SuperConference in Las Vegas, Nevada.
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Technorati Tags: social media, social media expert, social media consultant, Doug Champigny, offline businesses, offline corporations, offline business, twitter, facebook, myspace