Social media has proven itself to be one of the best venues for
marketing products in a hurry. In the past, Internet marketers have held
contests to see how much they can make in one day, one week, or one month by
creating a new product and selling it through a social marketing medium.
When it comes to this type of project, there are two things to ask
yourself: 1) what type of product should you sell? And 2) what medium should
you sell it in? In this section, I will cover how to sell on Myspace forums. In
the next section, we’ll consider Twitter. Let’s start with the types of
products you might want to sell on Myspace.
What
Product to Sell
You might immediately assume that you should sell one of your flagship
products, but in fact, social media sites are not always the best place to do
this. For this reason, you will want to answer this question by doing market
research, rather than simply picking a product and running with it.
One way you can approach this is to begin browsing through a variety
of Myspace member forums. Do this for various categories; and make an attempt
to gauge how large the forum following is. Are there hundreds of people who
post regularly? thousands? What is it that they’re talking about; and what
information could they possibly need to help them in their endeavors?
Once you find a group that strikes you, begin reading up on their
topic of choice; and then participate in the forum discussions. Try to make
friends and be helpful.
This will benefit you in the long run, since they are unlikely to
respond well to you if they perceive you as a green-eyed infiltrator whose only
interest is in selling them stuff.’
After you have a feel for the forum and the topic, commission a
writer through a site like Elance to create a powerful, but brief, “how to”
manual on some specific facet of their topic. For instance, you might follow a
jewelry group; and decide to create a guide on how to purchase high quality
beads online at a steep discount.
Whatever you do, make sure that this topic is something you hear
about on the forum frequently. Your goal should be to provide a product that
solves a problem that seems to be common among forum members.
Once you have this guide in hand, create a mini-site with a short
copy salespage; and a PayPal checkout button, so that you can receive payment
immediately. On the salesletter, highlight the following benefits of your
guide:
#1.
Explain
how it will tangibly improve the lives of your target demographic group (i.e.
after you read my guide, you will be able to do task x twice as fast) in
general.
#2. Highlight the specific benefits of certain chapters (i.e. chapter 8
alone will save you $100 per month). Also, consider selling your guide for a
very, very low price. Your goal here should be to make the decision to purchase
a no-brainer. At least initially, you shouldn’t bludgeon your new customers
with high-end products. Introduce them to your work with something that costs
around $3-7. If you do a good job with everything else, you could easily make
around $500 in a matter of days.
The final step is market your product by creating a signature that
references it.
Beyond that, all you can do is post frequently; and hope that people
see it and buy.
If you used read the above information, you now have an inexpensive,
entry-level product, a sales page, and a check-out system. All you need to do
now is direct additional traffic to it. While posting on Myspace Forums was a
good way to start, there are still a lot of options available for traffic
generation.
One such option is Twitter. If you’re unfamiliar with Twitter, it’s
a social networking service that allows you to add and remove friend as you
would on Myspace or Facebook. The difference is that the main purpose of
Twitter is to send out 140-character “tweets” to your friends; and, in return,
to read what they are tweeting about.
Of course, this network can also be used to make money. To do this,
you’ll need to start by creating an account if you do not already have one.
After that, you will want to begin adding people who might be good targets for
your sales campaign.
You can do this by searching to see who is tweeting about topics
related to your product. You can then add them. After a week or so, if you
worked diligently, you will have hundreds of followers. What you should do next
is begin making tweets that do not directly pitch your product. Instead, they
should simply communicate interesting and useful information about your product
niche.
Your goal in this whole process is to spur some interest in your
twitter profile, which is where you will place a link to your sales page.
That’s right: instead of using your profile to conduct a massive pitch fest,
you will use it to draw people in naturally, so that they view your profile on
their own terms—and then decide whether to buy.
