One of the most undervalued marketing channels for entrepreneurs today is email marketing. The main reason for this is that the explosion of social media has made it easier for business owners who juggle marketing along with many other tasks to replace list building efforts with friending and following. This is a big mistake.
Getting website traffic to your blog or company website is one of the toughest things for a bootstrapping entrepreneur to do. So tough that many seemingly honest entrepreneurs stoop to very low borderline levels of integrity just for the sake of getting traffic to their website. Why is this?
When it comes to a successful word-of-mouth advertising campaign, one of the key ingredients is expertise. If you are not viewed as an expert in what you do, nobody will trust to recommend you to their friends and family. I spent some time talking about expertise as well as 4 other ingredients in a previous post titled 5 warning signs that your word-of-mouth strategy will never go viral.
Over the last 30 days, I doubled down on my efforts to improve the visibility of the Nichevertising brand on Twitter. Since creating a profile for my personal brand (@chrismance) on Twitter in 2009, I more or less have been an on again off again Twitter user. However, when I created the Nichevertising profile on Twitter (@nichevertising) I decided I needed to put a concerted effort into mastering the platform.
Everybody wants to know what’s the fastest way to go viral using social media. If not the fastest way, they want to know what’s the easiest way to go viral. The problem with answering these questions is the answer itself: it depends. If you have been keeping up with this blog, you know by now that even though going viral is both an art and a science, we like to focus on the science of it.
Let’s be real with each other. The only reason you write a book is so that other people read it. Sure, there are a handful of people in the world who dream of writing a book so it can collect dust on some bookshelf. Those folks are few and far between.
The vast majority of all of us want to write a book that actually becomes noteworthy within our niche.
How well is your word-of-mouth strategy doing these days? How many new customers, unique visitors, retweets, likes, or comments did you get last week as a result of a conversation between two or more people? Did you get more word-of-mouth referrals this month or last month? Will you be able to meet your revenue growth goals using word-of-mouth advertising alone?
Let me take a guess, you have no clue.
Since Klout was introduced to the world back in the ancient times of social media in 2008, it has been surrounded with controversy. Klout is not controversial in a scammy, sleezy way. It is controversial because it exposes something about you that you would probably prefer to keep private: your popularity.
This week on twitter I came across a motivational quote that immediately connected with my soul. It was from the legendary hall of fame basketball coach John Wooden. The quote goes:
Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.
When it comes to building an email list, remembering this quote is critical. Not obeying the wisdom in this quote is probably the #1 reason all bootstrapping entrepreneurs don’t get started with building an email list so they can use email marketing to grow their business.
For seasoned entrepreneurs and marketers, it is a well known fact that email is still pound for pound the best way to deliver permission-based marketing messages. However, with the rise and dominance of social networking, many new entrepreneurs put building an opt-in email list at the bottom of their things to do list behind building a Facebook page, Twitter and Linkedin account. Although it is a much harder and longer process to build a quality list of opt-in emails, it is well worth your time. Below are some statistics that prove this fact:
