The idea caught on and now there are 2 guys (it should be WeWearYourShirt.com).

Then comes a new spin on the idea – at SheWearsYourTee. I really like this one because a model will wear your tee. That means you get some killer product shots you can use on your site.

Another element is how the pricing works to encourage people to act fast and not wait. January 1st the price is $1 and the price goes up every day. It’s the same concept with another one of my favorite businesses using this model called LoveJingles.com.

I figured out the guy who started it made $18k in 5 days and continues to bring in more money and build more value for his customers each day as the word spreads. He signed on Yahoo! to advertise on their anniversary. I also like how he launched it by reaching out to 10 bloggers (I was one of them and didn’t blog about it but wish I had. I’m making up for it now).

Another twist is to make it personal – someone has a birthday or anniversary every day of the year. Someone gets married or engaged every day, has a baby, etc. What could you offer them? People also have news that you could promote in a similar way. You could be their social media billboard. I really like when it’s both online and offline.

Here’s another one with a new spin – product giveaways — AnyLuckyDay.com Now if the guys at Backcountry.com would just use this to market their sites like steepandcheap.com you can see how this idea can apply to businesses. The site has a deal on ski gear and once the item is sold it’s gone and the next deal shows up. Why not promote the current deal on social sites? At least a button to tweet about it.

Could you add this model to your business? Have any other examples for me? Leave them in the comments. Oh, and if you wouldn’t mind, could you tweet this post? Thanks!

Some Burros

As I was searching online for some information to one of my favorite Mexican food joints here in Arizona I ran across several problems with their website and wanted to share them here.  I also came across several areas where I thought they could capitalize on social marketing, increase traffic to their website and interact better (online) with the people who love them.

The Argument:

You walk into one of their locations and they are already packed.  True, but tell me of a business (you know of) that does not want to reach MORE customers, or expand to MORE locations?  If they are speaking the truth, every business wants to grow and expand – and of course, make more money.  So, I feel with a few improvements to their website and nickles worth of free social marketing advice here, I think they could be making vast improvements to their overall bottom line.

Their Website Problems:

The entire thing, besides one html page and some PDFs is built in flash, that means – the entire website is a single flash file, which is NO GOOD for search engine optimization, because even if the flash is crawlable, only be a single page indexed.  They have four valley locations and could be doing a better job with their local marketing and creating pages that target those areas.  When they do this, people searching for them, and those locations get a better experience when they are taken right to the exact information they are looking for.  People hate having to search through an unfriendly website trying to find the information they want.  There are many other things having a site like this will not allow you to capitalize on SEO wise, but for the sake of keeping this post simple – I am not going to go there.

For example:

They have 4 locations here in the valley, so they should at least have four crawlable pages to target the specific locations like so:

• http://www.someburros.com/gilbert-arizona-location
• http://www.someburros.com/tempe-arizona-location
• http://www.someburros.com/san-tan-arizona-location
• http://www.someburros.com/chandler-arizona-location

We will get into how they can capitalize on social marketing with those specific location pages here in a minute, but first lets talk about why doing the above thing is good.  When I go to Google to look for information on “Some Burros San Tan Location” (because they do catering so it’s not out of the question to think that people will be looking information for them online) the result that needs to come up is the http://www.someburros.com/san-tan-arizona-location page because then I do not have to navigate several clicks on their website “trying to find” the information I was looking for.

They also have the opportunity to include a link to their Google Maps listing on that page (for that specific location) and maybe link to their Yelp listing with a link that says: “see what people are saying about us”.  By doing this, you are sealing the deal with being found for not only your specific name searches locally, (when you get crawled) but almost anything GEO targeted in your industry (ie: a search on Google for “Mexican Food restaurant in San Tan Arizona”).  This really is just the beginning of how they can capitalize, but I think that gives them a good start. (if they just so happen to be reading this)

Social opportunities missed (and solutions offered):

You see they have a page on their website talking about coupons and promotions (so you know, they know people are looking for this info online – or they would not have included it).  People do not want to go through the process of clicking on, and sending you an email just to get your offers – they want the easy way of getting your offers and deals: In comes social marketing. 

Here is my suggestion to them:  Why not have a place to connect with customers via Twitter and Facebook?  You can tell them to follow you on Twitter, and friend you on Facebook for special deals that only they get by being your friend or by being a follower.  This gives customers a reason to follow your business on Twitter, or friend you on Facebook because they are getting (and know about) deals of the day that are going on. Put the “Follow Us On Twitter” or Facebook “Friend Me” logos/buttons on the specific location pages (as talked about above) where someone (that worsk for that location) can give specific updates and offers (again, for THAT LOCATION), and offer a little insight or blurb on the page why following or friending would be a good thing etc.

This will bring a whole new following of people to your business, and you can connect with them in a way you never thought was possible – the human way.  There are so many other things that this will do for your business that you do not realize, like filling the SERPs up with the content that you want out there – so its great for reputation management.

Being social just helps your business connect with more people too (then the regulars), you will gain new attention, attract new customers and will be keeping up with the marketing techniques of this generation.  I am going to give local businesses a warning – if you are not making your sites more friendly, and doing everything you can to connect with your customers on a social level, you will be left in the dust by a competitor that is doing this, and “gets it”.

I hope other businesses can learn and get some ideas from this post, and that Some Burros can take it as (like I said) a nickles worth of free advice to improving things.  Its funny, I suffer from a problem that most don’t … when I am online doing searches, or looking for something I can’t just “look” and get the info I wanted.  I have to look at everything as if I were doing marketing for them (always a marketer) – it’s a curse I know, but I hope these guys benefit from it this time, and that everyone can learn something!  LOL

How NOT to be a Yelper!

In my opinion reviews like these are about as worthless and annoying as anonymous blog comments (and should be Yelp filtered reviews IMO) from people to scared to really let others know who they are, and what they stand for.  You don’t even have the balls to add a picture?  The other negative side of it, is these kind of reviews or comments leave no value or make people want to believe them.  You have two people that have reviewed with a 4 and 5 star, that use real pictures of themselves and have multiple friends and hundreds of reviews – which makes them 100% more credible.  Also, the review is to suspect, like it could be a competitor because it says “fresh & good flavor” but then goes on to slam the crust and only give 2 stars?  Anyone who truly gets Yelp, understands that this is a bogus review and would not give it any thought when using Yelp to find a place to eat.

The moral of the story here is to make sure and take the time to be real & actually participate in the communities that you are a part of, because if this user is an actual legit user – nobody’s buying what hes trying to sell us, and eventually Yelp will end up removing the listing.

3 Important Tips:

1. First and most important – Add a REAL image of yourself.
2. Leave reviews or comments that don’t seem like a 2 yr. old wrote them.
3. Take the time to add friends, it makes you look more legit too.

I get confused on the social media sites like, Facebook, Twitter, even Skidoo etc. Should I be setting up a profile under my name to follow me specifically or setting up something that tells people to follow my website?

Here are my thoughts:  My answer depends on the specific network, as well as what you are trying to accomplish, but let me first touch on the specific networks you mentioned in this question.

Twitter

Twitter: If you are trying to gain more business, and use Twitter as a platform to attract more customers and get more of the word out then you need to set up a more formal business account.  For example; If my name were John Doe and I had a business called ISellWidgets.com I would set my Twitter account up to be:  Twitter.com/ISellWidgets (or something similar depending on availability) and NOT Twitter.com/JohnDoe.  This way you could do a better job at attracting the right kind of followers, and get the word out to the correct industry.  Reason being – Lets just say you are into fishing, and that is fine, but that would do much better on a personal type account, where you can find, talk and connect with other people who love fishing, but do you see how that would do your business no good?  The business account would be better left to connect with same industry minded people.  Now you can also set up a personal Twitter account if you want to use it for those kind of reasons mentioned above, but hopefully this does a better job showing you the line between the two style of accounts.

Facebook

Facebook: Create a personal page so you can have access to all that Facebook, but once you have a personal page set up, you can also create a FAN page for your business.  Use the personal page for your personal matters, but the fan page to get the word out about your business matters.  If you don’t want to create a Facebook page to connect with people you may not even like from back in the day, that’s fine – just use the FAN page/business portion of it to connect with potential customers.

Squidoo

Squidoo: Wow, do I even touch this one with a 10 ft. pole, or make a joke after all the attention it’s got this week? Ha Ha -  My thoughts are to create a page for your brand/company on Squidoo, but don’t pay Seth 400$ a month for it.  I mean, Squidoo is free (as far as I’ve ever used it), and if you even have any (even) small ability as an SEO or Internet marketer, you can get the page you create to rank pretty easily for your brand.

I think there are other networks out there that you can use as personal accounts that would also serve your purpose as a business owner, but you have to get in and really understand what that specific network is about, and how to best use it.  If your main goal is to drum up business, and that is THE ONLY REASON you are using social networks, then the answer is simple – always create it for your business.  Create the domain/ID name/profile/brand whatever centered around your business.  I think this is what you are really asking with this question because it does not seem like you are the person that is wanting to set up these accounts to keep in contact with friends or find a long lost love?  Am I right?

I wrote a press release and even though no one came to the classes, people found him.

Here’s a bit from the conversation:

Client: We’ve developed a second class following the success of the first one so I want to announce it.

Me: Was the first class successful?

Client: YES!

Me: tell me about it…what made it so good?

Client: 70K worth of business

Me: and how did they find out about the class?

Client: They found out via OUR press release!

I was a bit surprised! My new press release book is out and it has the techniques I’ve used to help clients like this. I’m especially loving 247-pressrelease and as always PRWeb (depending on the level of service you want/need).

I quote Dream Systems Media’s own Mat Siltala on the book cover (he’s a famous speaker and social media ninja :

“When you finally understand the power of press, and what it does for branding, reputation, link building, traffic and conversions for your business, it will be all you think about. Gaining links to your site via a press release is one of the most powerful forms of link building today. SEO is all about content and links. The more trust and authority you have, the more links. How do you get more trust and authority when you are brand new? You create it yourself, by getting the word out about yourself (via press of course). But it’s not just for new web sites. I have been marketing online businesses for over a decade, and marketing with press is still one of the main strategies I still use after all these years!”

I’m now a Kindle addict and if you are too, you can also get the press release book on the Kindle. Stay tuned for a book contest.

My Old Town ... Seriously WTF??

The reason I started thinking about this is because I was trying to compare it to what kind of a neighbor I am in life, and especially online.  It begs the question: What kind of a neighbor are you? I had some fun responses on Twitter about bad neighbors too, that I wanted to share:  Thanks @Rhea, @MollerMarketing and @ArnieK for your responses!

The Rattlesnake Neighbor

I shared a story on Twitter about how the worst neighbor my family had growing up would always put dead rattlesnakes on our doorstep to try and scare us.  Many many times it worked, but the shock factor eventually wore off and it became annoying and we paid no attention (and never became good friends).  Can you see where I am taking this?

To make online communities work for you, you have to get noticed yes, but are you taking the wrong approach?? (aka my neighbors rattlesnake approach?)  Here is the problem with taking the rattlesnake approach – you can do things for “shock” factor to get yourself noticed, but how long is that shock factor going to last?  The sad thing is you could eventually end up being a good friend, but if all you do is put rattlesnakes on my door step then eventually I am going to get bored and stop being your friend.

It also gets me thinking about what might have happened if a LIVE rattlesnake ever ended up on my doorstep and caught me off guard because I was so use to the prank (and didn’t pay attention).  I would have missed something important, and that would have been BAD!  What if these same people online share something amazing, but you never notice it because of their past history of being idiots?  It might actually be something worth checking out, but you would never give them the time of day, and that content would never get viewed.

Learn how to be a real neighbor

Learn how to play nice with others!

Don’t be annoying: Treat people how you want to be treated.   Like the golden rule is “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”, the Platinum rule would be “do unto others as you would want them to do unto you!” If you want people to share your content, link to you, talk about you, ask you for help – then you better be doing that as well!  You can’t just offer up something shocking, and hope that people continue to follow you in all your communities – you have to be real and engage with people.  Let people know your likes, dislikes; help them get to know the real you!  You don’t have to agree with everything that everyone does all the time, but find some common ground and build on it!

I have had some of the best neighbors (offline) these last two years that were NOTHING like me, but we have found common ground, we listen to each other, let each other share whats on their mind, and we help out wherever we can.  Its amazing to me that more don’t get this simple rule to being social, but then again I guess there will forever be those “rattlesnake neighbors” around!!