Archive for the ‘Small Business Ideas’ Category
July 9th, 2010 | 
Author: I am proud to be one of the organizers of a local networking group here in Lawrenceville, GA. We have events a couple of times each month. This past event we were lucky to have George Robbins there from Your 1 Minute. He creates videos for business owners to help promote themselves and their company. Here is one he did as a gift for our networking group. Thanks again George, it looks fantastic!
Find more videos like this on YOUR1MINUTE – GLOBAL BUSINESS NETWORKING -VIRAL MARKETING -
Posted in Services, Small Business Ideas | 
Tags: Ideas, Lawrenceville, Local News, Networking | 
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If you are a small business owner, you have probably heard of Kudzu. Maybe even posted a review of your own on there for a fellow small business owner. We know how important they are and what a vital part of keeping new business coming in. Without reviews, no one knows about our good name, and there is no better advertisement for us than a satisfied customer.
So, how about telling people about all the good referrals you have? Share the reviews online. You can choose to simply link back to your Kudzu business page, or create a widget to do this. We talked about widgets on Tuesday with creating a Twitter Widget, and you can do exactly the same with Kudzu.
The first thing you need is a Kudzu account, and also, some reviews! Click on the following link to get started: https://register.kudzu.com/login.do If you already have an account, simply go ahead and log in. If this is all totally new to you, click the link to actually set up your business on the site. Once you have this done, go to the Promote your profile section, and click on the Create Reviews Widget.
Next, select the layout and appearance of the widget. You can only return up to a maximum of 5 reviews, so I say go for that one! Would be nice if you could pull in more, but it is what it is. You can select what the minimum review rating is. Then change colors of borders, headline and text along with changing the size. Finally, click to generate the HTML code of the widget.
Once you have done this, now comes the fun part. Adding this to your website. As I said with the Twitter widget, you have a few options for this.
- Send the code to your web designer and tell them where you would like it on your website.
- If you have access to your own pages and are comfortable modifying the code, paste it in directly where you would like to see the Kudzu widget
- If you have WordPress, simply log in, go to Appearance on the left navigation, click on Widgets, and use a Text Widget and simply paste the code in there.
And finally, here is the finished widget! Yes, they are lovely reviews, I agree! 
Don’t be afraid to ask your clients to take time and leave one for work you have done. Although people will say yes, often they don’t quite get round to it. Those that do, thank them!
Once in a while, a video, blog post or news story will spread online like wildfire with unstoppable speed. At times it’s information that’s pretty pointless (a YouTube video of someone dancing or singing), or it could be a “news” story reported by some bystander through a Tweet (the landing of the plane in the Hudson River). Often we have no way of knowing how or why something is so big, but to get your information to spread viral is huge. Although hitting it big can be chance, there are still great marketing tactics you can use to induce a viral attack!
1. E-mail Signatures
You have huge power at your finger tips in your own e-mail client! Use your e-mail signature effectively to spread your message. Have a conference coming up you want people to sign up for? Add a link to a website with more information. Want people to know about a new product? Perhaps add an image or photo to the bottom. A well constructed signature can spread the word. Each e-mail you send will keep the marketing word flowing. Get on an e-mail thread that includes many recipients, even better!
2. Newsletters
It’s your newsletter, it’s your news! Add information that helps you market in the right way. Get people to sign up through your website, offering something in return. Perhaps a useful article that is free to those who register? Use case studies, white papers and fun contests to get people to read it, including info about your products throughout.
3. Twitter
Although this one might be fairly obvious, many companies have avoided ‘tweeting’ for fear of the unknown. Use this medium to generate new relationships and nurture and grow current ones. Although having a decent number of followers means a lot of immediate readers, it’s those well written tweets that are likely to be retweeted by your followers, which is were taking it viral happens! Consider someone on topic, funny or thought provoking for maximum impact.
4. Facebook
Similar to Twitter, the more friends you have the better. BUT, a carefully thought out status, or post can help generate interest. You can also use Facebook to upload photos and videos along with your posts. Consider a photo album full of product screenshots, or a launch party you just had. Everyone loves an image of people having a great time, what better marketing angle than that?
5. LinkedIn
Sometimes the forgotten younger sister of Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn can be just as powerful. It’s viewed as perhaps the more professional networking site of the three but can still be used to add posts, comments and feedback to others. Use all three together and feed your tweets and Facebook updates directly into your LinkedIn profile. Makes your marketing plan easier to execute when you can minimize your work efforts.
6. You Tube
If you have a product or service you are trying to market, many buyers feel happier making a commitment to buy if they can see the end result, rather than read a press release just ‘telling’ them all about it. Film other clients giving testimonials, go out and do a survey on the streets, or film a demonstration. Anything that will show you and your company in the best and quickest way. Again, combine this with numbers 2-4 and link back to the video from those avenues.
7. Social Bookmarking
There are many sites out there that allow you to repost or ’bookmark’ your articles and information you have posted online. Using tools like Share This on your blog will enable your readers to simply click and send the content to sites like Digg, Stumble Upon and Reddit. This is a very quick way for a blog post to go viral. As always, unique, genuine and well written content will be the first to find its way to those sites!
8. Affiliate Programs
An Affiliate Program allows people to sign up and earn rewards if they can refer visitors from their own website, back to your site, and the end result be that a purchase was made by the visitor. This is a legitimate way to have others help spread your word and generate interest in your product. Companies like GoDaddy and Amazon have affiliate programs which a pretty popular, you just need to come up with what reward you will bestow on those that help you in your quest for helping with your marketing!
9. Groups and Forums
Being the member of an online group (think Yahoo, LinkedIn, Industry related groups) can bring a lot of value to your company. Having the opportunity to build and grow relationships is the primary reason. Building relationships builds trust. Trust can equal a sale. Although going in there spamming the message boards will get you kicked out fast, you can use the signature of your profile to link back to marketing information. Also, if your product is relevant to the discussions going on, share the info with the rest of the group.
10. Microsoft Tags
This last way is pretty new, and you can read more information about it in a previous blog post, but adding a tag to your product brochures, cards and website can be a fun new way to spread the news!
Can you think of any more? Feel free to share so we can all learn more!
I have used Twitter for a few years, both personally and professionally. If you think about a Twitter page, you see all of the tweets that someone has posted, and also get to see a short profile about them on the top right corner. With my personal account, I don’t have a web link, just my name and bio. However, with my Purple Star Consulting Twitter page, I initially set the web link to my blog page. That way, all those clicking on the link would go directly to my blog and hopefully hang around for a while.
What I noticed recently was that many of the links for other Twitter users that I was clicking on took me to a landing page of some kind. The content of the page detailed more about the Twitter user and exactly what they may potentially Tweet about. Some also listed rules of conduct, or rather, their own list of who they may or may not follow. I liked this approach more than just taking someone directly to my blog page. If someone is interested enough to click on your link from the Twitter profile, then they are probably interested in hearing more about you and why you are on Twitter. So, I created a fairly short list with my Rules of Engagement, and a little information about who was Tweeting under @psconsulting. You can read the information below or click here to go to the actual page. What do you think? Is it a good idea? Will you be implementing a page of your own? Let me know your thoughts in the comments section below.
Ok, so I think this is pretty cool. Microsoft introduced a Beta (in testing) project back in January 2009. They created new technology using barcodes, similar to those you might find on products in the grocery store. These bar-codes can be placed on fliers, on the back of business cards, on the back of packaging or in your store somewhere. You can create them to hold data that when snapped with your camera on your smart phone, you can be taken to a website, see an advert, view a video, or download your online business card directly to the phone!
The first step, in order to actually click on these bar-codes is to download the tag reader from the Microsoft website. Or, download it from your phone browser using this link: http://gettag.mobi This will download the application to your smart phone (which must have a camera). Next, you need a tag to snap! Using the Tag Reader application you downloaded, you will simply click a picture of the bar-code tag in the image below. My BlackBerry phone needed a bit of patience and practice when snapping the image. My husbands Sprint HTC Touch Pro 2 phone didn’t even need me to click the camera, it zoomed in and found the image on it’s own, pretty cool!
Creating the tags is pretty easy. You must create an account, or you can use your MSN Live account and log in with that if you already have one. Once you are logged in, you can start creating tags. It allows you determine what will happen when someone snaps your tag. Do you want it to go out to a website (as the one above will), dial a number that you can set up with some kind of advertisement or 1-800 number with information, or even download your business card to their address book!
As you can see on the tag above, you can customize the tags with your own images and include them in the bar-code. Clicking on the tag above will download my vCard (business card) directly to your address book! The possibilities are endless! Although this is relatively new, companies are catching on to the technology. Microsofts website shows Pilsbury and General Mills using tags on some of their fliers, and Xbox and Best Buy have used them also. They can be used to send information about new products, generate hype about up coming events, or send information to customers in a fun and unique way.
How could you envision incorporating this into your business? Can you see it catching on, or a need for this method of distributing data? Let us know what you think in the comments below.
