Holiday Promotion Idea – Create a Gift-Giving Guide

Create a gift-giving idea to boost holiday sales

A good friend and fellow mastermind team member of mine has just created a powerful tool for building trust, credibility and relationships with his audience.

Plus it might just result in a few affiliate dollars in his pocket!

It’s a holiday gift-giving guide, and I recommend that you creating one yourself!

Here’s how it works – Tim’s business is called AskTheBuilder.com and focuses on helping people repair and remodel (or get someone else to do the remodeling) their homes. He’s got tons of great how-to content, video and a killer newsletter on his site (which, if you’re at all handy, or need some work done on your home by someone else, I recommend signing up to read!)

A side effect of being handy is that people need tools. So, in a recent mastermind someone suggested that Tim create a Holiday Gift-Giving Guide, recommending great handy gifts, with affiliate links for each product to Amazon or another site.

Tim, being my kind of a “just go do this stuff” guy, went and did exactly that. He produced a well-designed, fun piece with will help many find the perfect gift for someone they love.

Even if you’re not handy, I suggest that you go grab a copy of The AskTheBuilder Holiday Gift Guide so you can see how it’s structured and get ideas for your own business.

One of the best things Tim did was to lead off with stocking stuffers – inexpensive gifts that almosts anyone can afford. That gets his readers interested and going right off the bat.

Another great thing – notice how Tim weaves mini stories into the copy. Powerful!

Best of all, a project like this takes only takes a few hours to complete, but it can result in great relationship building, trust and sales for your business.

My only suggestions for Tim – he needs to add an optin form and incentive into the guide so that those who get it passed along to them can easily join his list, a coupon for savings on some of his products and he should send people to a page to optin and download his guide rather than sending them directly to the pdf.

Application To Your Business

How can YOU use this idea to build your business?

And here’s another one that you may enjoy, ironically, from Tim’s very talented daughter, which is more of a generic gift-giving guide:
http://www.meghancarter.com/giftguide.html

I won’t belabor the obvious applications, let’s think a bit deeper.

Let’s say that you’re a Social Media Consultant, selling local and social media marketing to small businesses in your local area. Your holiday gift giving guide could include some books on social media and local marketing, the DVD for The Social Network (the Facebook movie) an iPod and Smart phone recommendations so that people can get involved themselves, a list of links to sign up for Twitter, Facebook and more, a gift certificate for a free consultation and a coupon for savings on a consulting package.

What if you sell information products? You could do something similar, with low cost books from Amazon on your topic, some affiliate links to clickbank products on the subject, your own information products and a free offer from you plus a coupon for your high-end coaching product.

The key is creative thinking – what will someone who is a potential user of yours want to own? Great, put it into a gift-giving guide!

What do you think? Are you going to create one of these yourself? How will you do so and what will you offer? Please let us know by leaving a comment below and don’t forget to Like and Tweet this post!

Filed Under: Business, Marketing Tagged With: holiday, Marketing, promotions

In the world of social media – women now rule even more!

In October 2009, in a post called In the World of Social Media, Women Rule, Brian Solis
reported that there are more women than men on most social media sites.

It’s been 6 months since then – what does the male/female ratio look like now?

To find out the answer, I recreated Brian’s data, using Google’s Ad Manager as he did, to compare apples to apples, and found that…

Women now dominate social media even more than they did 6 months ago!

And the shift is significant!

Here’s the raw data:

The Percentage Of Women On Most Social Media Sites Has Increased Significantly Over The Last 6 Months

10/2009 10/2009 4/2010 4/2010 Unique

Site Men % Women % Men % Women % Visitors (Mil's)

Facebook 43% 57% 40% 60% 1.1 Billion

MySpace 36 64 34 66 210 Million

Twitter 43 57 40 60 150

Flickr 45 55 45 55 110

YouTube 50 50 50 50 82

hi5 46 54 43 57 50

Ning 41 59 36 64 37

Tagged 36 64 36 64 28

digg 64 36 57 43 25

Yelp 43 57 40 60 23

Classmates 36 64 34 66 19

Docstoc 41 59 38 62 16

Bebo 32 68 34 66 15

ustream 34 66 48 52 13

Del.icio.us 48 52 45 55 8.2

friendfeed 45 55 43 57 3.8

foursquare 43 57 3.5

I find it interesting that:

In almost every case, the percentage of women visiting each site increased over the last 6 months.
This raises the question: are women being drawn to these sites even more heavily than they were before, OR are men not finding what they want on these sites and frequenting them less often?
Note: this data comes from people actually visiting the sites, as measured by Google. So, the numbers probably can’t be explained as sploggers using women’s names and risque pictures in their profiles. This data should be fairly clean.
The sites where the percentage of visitors either increased or remained flat were ustream, YouTube, Flickr and Bebo. Could it be that men are more attracted to watching video and viewing pictures online than women, so these sites are better filling their needs?
And no, I’m clueless about the Bebo shift.
I included the unique visitors (as measured by Google as estimated cookies) to show the differences in impact across the sites.

What can marketers learn from this data?

The impact of women is rapidly growing in social media. Why, we can only guess (and I’d love to hear your guesses in the comments below.) If you market to women or have a product where women are the decision makers/gatekeepers, you need to have an active, participatory presence in social media.
How you interact on social media is also vital. Women are more active on a daily basis; actively publish, post to and read blogs, and are more likely to make purchase decisions based on blogs and social media recommendations (source: blogher study.) They also tend to be more interactive, and less likely to respond to “brochure-ware” sites and non-interactive social media placeholders.
If you market to men, you may want to consider revising your approach to better meet the needs of your audience. Video should definitely play a role.

What else can we learn from this data? How do you explain this shift? What will you do differently as a result? Let us know by posting a comment below.

Filed Under: Business, Posts, Social Media How-To, Social Media Strategy | Social Media Marketing Plan for Business | Social Media Marketing Training at DonCrowther.com Tagged With: Marketing, men, Social Media Strategy | Social Media Marketing Plan for Business | Social Media Marketing Training at DonCrowther.com, study, women

The odd relationship between hunting night crawlers and social media

You haven’t lived yet until you’ve hunted night crawlers.

Never hunted night crawlers? Here’s how to do it:

Requirements:
1 Warm summer evening
1 lawn (owned, rented or borrowed)
1 or more 8-12 year old kids eager to catch some crawlers tonight and some huge trout tomorrow
Firm plans to actually go fishing tomorrow (never disappoint a young fisherman!)
1 flashlight for each hunter
Several buckets to put the crawlers into once caught
A spirit of laughter and adventure

Step 1: Water your lawn
Correction, soak your lawn.You can’t just water it. You have to drown it, for several hours. You’re trying to flood the little night crawler tunnels so they’ll come to the surface.

Step 2: Wait until nightfall.
Not dusk, real nightfall. Think dark.

Step 3: Turn off your sprinklers
This step seems to make for happier hunters

Step 4: Do some serious hunting
This is where you get stealthy. Night crawlers can feel vibrations in the ground and can hear noises (at least that’s what I was taught.) So you’ve got to be sneaky to succeed.

Shine your flashlights across the lawn. Look for little brown nightcrawlerish-looking bodies lying on the ground. Be aware, however, that by light of flashlight, many things, like small sticks, toys, and doggy dodos take on the appearance of night crawlers, so be careful what you grab.

When you see one, carefully creep up on it. Bend over really slowly, then grab it fast.

Yes, you have to be fast, because the favorite position of a night crawler whose home is temporarily flooded out is halfway out of its hole, keeping its tail (you do know that night crawlers have tails, right?) in its hole in case someone successfully sneaks up on it and tries to grab it. And not only is its tail in the hole, but it expands the end of its tail to anchor it in the hole and stretches its body out extra far to allow for…

When it senses danger, the night crawler uses its tail anchor as leverage and sucks its body back into the hole, in a fraction of a second. So you’ve got to be fast, really fast.

You’re going to miss the first 5 or so you try, but once you get your hands around your first night crawler, the real battle begins. The crawler’s tail anchor is tenacious, and he’s not about to release it just so the he can become trout-bait. Basically what happens is a tug of war – you pull, he pulls back, and it keeps going like that until he either slips out of your hand, you pull him out of the hole, or he breaks in half. That’s why it’s such a great adventure, and why its almost a must to have a few 8-12 year olds around just to watch their faces the first time they actually win the battle and place a whole crawler into the bucket! They won, it was a hard-fought, slimy battle, but they won, and their faces will show it! (Remember they can’t shout, or you’ll lose your entire night of hunting!)

Continue until you’ve got enough to catch a full creel of trout the next day, plus a couple of buckets more for the kids to sell to other anglers on the banks – which makes for great (and essential) sales training for a 10-year old!

Why this exhaustive write up about night crawlers? Because the process of hunting crawlers is a great example of what not to do when hunting customers.

Many people pursue online marketing in a way that reminds me a great deal of night crawler hunting. They carefully flood the environment where their customers hang out, basically drowning them into revealing themselves. They they sneak up on them, grab them and start a tug of war, basically brow-beating their customers into buying.

Yes, a few do end up in the proverbial bucket. But why would you ever want to create a marketing plan based on cajoling unwilling customers into buying? Wouldn’t you rather have a situation where they willingly come, practically begging you to sell them something?

That’s part of what social media does. When properly done, it helps you create a relationship of trust and familiarity with your customers. At that point they’re less like night crawlers, dug into their lairs and holding on (and holding onto their wallets) for dear life, and more like a puppy, eager to learn a trick so he can be rewarded with another dog biscuit and an enthusiastic pat on the head.

What kind of seller are you? What kind do you want to be?

Social media’s your answer!

Like this analogy? Hate it? Know a trick to crawler hunting that I don’t know about? Share it by making a comment below.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/peculiarmomma/508391174/

Filed Under: Business, Posts, Social Media How-To, Social Media Strategy | Social Media Marketing Plan for Business | Social Media Marketing Training at DonCrowther.com Tagged With: customers, fishing, Marketing, night crawlers, nightcrawlers, sales, selling, Social Media Strategy | Social Media Marketing Plan for Business | Social Media Marketing Training at DonCrowther.com

How To Reduce Video Skips and Buffering

There are few things more frustrating than having to wait while a video pauses in mid-view to buffer.

While most people intuitively recognize that the process of delivering video to your browser is a complex one, most are totally unaware that these factors change drastically from one second to the next, taking you literally from a snail’s pace to lightning fast from one second to the next. For example, in the last 10 seconds my video viewing speed has ranged from a turtle can beat 371 kbps (kilobytes per second)to a nice 2003 kbps with an average number in the 600-900 range.

Want to see your speed right now? Go to http://www.youtube.com/my_speed#, drop down below the graphs (which we’ll talk about in another post), and click the Show Test Video link.

There you’ll see a graph showing a series of numbers on top of a video. The key numbers to watch are the ones labeled Streaming HTTP and XXX dropped. Those two numbers show the variability of your video streaming process. Watch those numbers for a minute or two.

Surprised? Most people are.

So, how can you improve your ability to watch streaming videos without having them pause to buffer?

Some factors, like distance to the computer where the video is located, aren’t under your control, but other factors are.

Here are some things you can do to improve your download speeds:

Remove multi-tasking on your internet line – if three other people in your house are trying to download music, watch videos and talk on their VOIP phones while you’re trying to watch a video, everyone’s speed will be significantly reduced.
Turn off auto-pinging of internet services, like email, chat services, and other services that automatically access online data.
Remove VOIP and move your phone to cell or landline services because VOIP services utilize your Internet bandwidth to operate.
Upgrade your bandwidth with your ISP. Many ISP’s are now offering tiered service levels, allowing you to pay more for higher bandwidth, rather than just upgrading their entire network. It’s amazing how much faster speed you can buy for just a few extra dollars per month. You also may find that you can get significantly better bandwidth by shifting to a totally different ISP for your service.
Shift your video viewing to less popular times. Weekends are horrible, nights are oftentimes not much better, because millions of other people are off work, watching video and gamining online. If you can shift your video viewing times to less popular hours (during normal working hours, during the late-night hours, etc.) you’re likely to see cleaner lines and have a better viewing experience.
When given an option, choose to access videos from a server that is closer to you than farther away. As much as I admire the technical infrastructure in some foreign countries, when faced with a choice, I’ll watch a video hosted in Omaha versus one hosted from Oslo any day.
If online speed is mission critical to your work, consider getting an additional Internet line just for your mission-critical tasks. The relatively small increase in costs may well be justified in higher productivity and decreased frustration.
Finally, if online speed is mission critical to your work, you may even want to consider moving to a different location that gets you closer to the backbone of the Internet, or at least one that gives you multiple different internet access options. Trust me, I ran an Internet marketing business for 6 years on a 19.2 baud line, and faster is definitely better!