Business Loan Options Blog

It may be hard to believe, but you can make money on Twitter even if your business has nothing to do with social networking. It gives your business credit for what you do and offers your customers a way to stay in contact with what’s new. If you manage to build a very large followers list, one tweet to thousands of followers can literally reach millions. If you happen to end up going viral, you will have hit marketing gold. Finally, if you decide you can also share your twitter feed with other advertisers, you stand to make money from sponsors who will pay to tweet from accounts with large numbers of followers.

How to Reach Millions

You don’t have to build a list of millions to actually reach millions. The reason for that is that every 140 character tweet you do may only go out to thousands, but those thousands may also have hundreds or thousands of followers. When you tweet a status update, if someone sees something really interesting, they retweet it, which automatically exposes it to their network too. If enough people do that, your list of thousands easily expands to millions.

You Can Put Links In Your Tweets

You can add a hyperlink to your tweet, and unlike Facebook, Twitter doesn’t mind if they go to your business products or promotions. There are some limits on how often you can tweet, but you’re unlikely to reach it for the most part. The links can be commercial, they can be to other content that is not yours, or they can go to carefully crafted advertising that first entertains and educates, and then seeks to bring massive traffic back to a website where it’s converted to orders.  If you link to some content you created on Youtube, for instance, that has a link back to your business and people find it so fascinating the retweet it endlessly, you have the opportunity to go viral and take your business message to the entire world.

You Can Do Limited Time Promotions

Since tweets are real time microblogs that may stay in your profile, but are very time-sensitive, and read at the time they’re published, they make the perfect vehicle for limited time promotions. Maybe you want to advertise your special giveaway at a retail store from 1 pm to 1:30 pm for anyone that shows up at your store and gives them the tweet code “TweetDollars” or some other phrase you choose. This type of promotion creates a sense of urgency and makes people want to drop everything and visit your store just to get in on your special deal.

Sharing Tweets

Many celebrities will get sponsors for their Twitter feeds and be paid per tweet. These people have 10s of thousands of followers, and they’re a very targeted demographic. You probably can’t get the same sweet deals they do, but you might find one or two sponsors who want to share your feed for some ready cash.

Having an active online presence can help drive traffic to your website, but how do you get it to drive actual feet to your door? Business owners should look at integrating their offline activities with their online social media activities, to create buzz before an event, help non-profits attract volunteers, or to direct customers to storefront businesses that rely on foot traffic to make most of their money. It’s not as hard as it sounds, as people are using the Internet like a directory or online phone book these days. You can even just piggy back ride on someone else’s event and save the cost of getting merchant funding to host the event. The key is to start with a particular strategy in mind, and develop useful techniques that will make people want to look up your business and visit you in person, when they’re in town.

Create Online Events To Advertise Offline Events

Are you holding a special event at your place of business, like a wine tasting, or an educational series of speakers? There’s no reason you can’t advertise this online on Facebook and Twitter, long before the event actually takes place. The nice thing about setting up a registration area online in Facebook, is that you can get a good idea of the number of people who might be attending your event, especially if you offer a link to an area where they can get a discount  for registering early. People will be more likely to register ahead of time, if they know they’re getting a discount and/or a freebie, rather than wait until the last minute.

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The contact list is the most important tool in a marketer’s tool box. As a business owner, you probably have an offline contact list of prior customers who you can call and network with to find new work and new sales prospects. The same is true online, but each site can differ on how a list is created and how you can market it, depending on site restrictions. Social networking sites like Facebook, tend to be the most restrictive, as they don’t want anyone spamming their user base with marketing promotions. Twitter has recently added lists to their sites, and they can prove to be beneficial in marketing people there. However, the best way to create a contact list from multiple sites, is to gather the emails you have from various sites, and create master lists within services like Aweber.com that allow you send out automated email campaigns and track the responsiveness of your lists. You can categorize them by building multiple lists in Aweber for customers, subscribers, and even financial business loan contacts.

On Your Business Website

Use a free offer and a double opt-in form to harvest emails from traffic to your website. A double opt-in means that they will sign up and receive an email that asks for verification of that email address. Upon clicking the link in the email, they are verified and allowed to log into your site to retrieve their free offer, or you’ve automatically sent it to that email address upon verification. Either way, you want them to verify the email address to keep spammers and bots out of your lists. Grabbing emails from visitors to your site is a great place to start building your online lists. You do have some autoresponders available from your site, but eventually, you may want to centralize all your lists into a master list outside the website too.

On Facebook

Facebook is pretty sneaky about the emails on their site. They are stored as image files and are in the Info tab, not the main Wall area. They are not always visible as the person who owns the profile can hide this information. The emails are shown as an image file, so you can’t just cut and paste it into another file. You actually have to read it and then write it into another file or on a piece of paper, if you wanted to move it to a list off Facebook. Of course, spamming someone who has their email on Facebook is a direct violation of their terms of service and can get your own account banned. The other option is to make lists for different categories of friends in a list. Unfortunately, even when emailing within Facebook, you cannot select more than 20 people at a time to send an email to within the Inbox.
The easiest way to move people off your Facebook account is to offer them something free on your website and then post the offer on your status update for signing up their email on your double opt-in list.

Twitter

Twitter has just started promoting a list function. Right now, emails do not appear on Twitter profiles. You can use the same strategy with Twitter that you use with Facebook, by trying to get people off the site back to your double opt-in page to harvest the email. The list function is so new that there’s no real indication if you will be able to direct message multiple people in the future or not. Right now, you can only send a direct message to one person at a time. However, you can automate a direct message to be sent upon certain actions, like when someone first starts following you.

Aweber.com

This site provides an email marketing service that is affordable and very efficient. Once you have a master list of people who have agreed to let you market them, you can add them to your Aweber.com account and set up an email campaign that stays in contact every few days. You can add offers to those emails and track open rates of the emails too. You can even see who isn’t opening your email, and put those on a different campaign. You can see the clickthrough rates of your links and find out which are more effective than others. This will give you valuable insight into what triggers people in your audience to buy and which links are dead upon arrival. By establishing a professional email marketing campaign and categorized lists, you can generate sales even when you’re not actively online.

Branding your company is important to create an identity that people easily associate with the qualities that make you stand out from the rest of your competition. Online, personal branding becomes even more important as these types of social networks rely on a “face-to-face”connection that is more genuine and less commercial. That means that the same techniques that you use to brand your business offline, may be considered to crass and commercial online. Branding yourself the wrong way online on social networks can actually drive customers away, instead of leading them back to your business. Be careful how you interact with people on your social networks, they need to trust you first as a person, before they will be willing to follow you back to your business website.

Your Profile

All social networks have their users create a personal profile where others can see who you are and what interests you. It’s very important to fill out these profiles as genuinely as possible. Don’t use every area to promote your business, try to project your personal identity that others can relate to, instead of only promoting business opportunities. The reasons for this are simple. No one wants to be marketed on a social network, and if you send out a friend request to someone and they come back to look at your profile and see only business advertisements, you can be sure they will rightly peg you as a business spammer and refuse it. There are other areas within social networks that you can promote your business, but your personal profile should not be one of them. In a sense, online your brand is your personal brand, not your company brand on social networks. That’s what gets your foot in the door.

Take A More Casual Approach

Once you have a profile and you start to get friends, you will have to interact with people to get them interested in you. If you immediately direct message each new friend about your great business opportunity or a product you are trying to sell, they will quickly unfriend you. Instead, take a more casual approach. Join in the fun. Download some applications that relate to your products and services, to give you a jumping off point for talking about your business later. Try to provide value to the community, instead of just seeking to market things. Use the status updates to relay when you post new content on your website, or a press release about your business. You can promote your business and offerings, just add value and content that draws people in and gives them something worthwhile, instead of just a sales pitch. Try to engage new friends in small talk and learn what they are about too. Add them to lists to help you categorize what their interests are and what products and services they might buy later. All in all, it may seem a much more gradual process of selling, and it is! The key is to offer promotions and links back to your website where they might be willing to hand over their email for one of your freebies. Once you’ve engaged them personally, then you can start to look at marketing them a little more.

The Soft Sell

Everyone has asked themselves, how do you sell on a site where people are hyper-sensitive to being marketed outright? It certainly is trickier than doing it on your website, where people expect to get sold on something. The trick is to engage people in a casual way that gets them interested enough to follow you back to your website. One technique is to use an event to help you generate interest. If you’re selling business software, for instance, you can schedule an event where multiple experts will be discussing how they got successful in business. You can then advertise this online event on the social network and be listed as a sponsor, instead of a guest.

Offer them a link back to the free seminar, and give them a reason to register for the event, by either providing a freebie, or not allowing them into the area where it will take place unless they register their email address. Now, you’ve not only got their email address, but you should also have gotten permission to contact them. You can promote your products as a sponsor of the online event to the audience who attends your online seminar, and you can also market them afterwards via email.