Jim's Marketing Blog

Marketing tips and ideas to help you grow your business

How to get word of mouth working for you

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Word of mouth is powerful. A prospective client, for example, will expect YOU to say how great your product or service is, but when Bob or Sue tells their buddy how brilliant you are, that REALLY has an impact!

With websites and blogs, word of mouth can also be an extremely powerful way to get your message to a wider audience. However, to benefit from it, you need to do 2 things:

1. Avoid generic content

Thanks to “Social Media Guru’s” telling bloggers they need to blog as often as possible, there’s a lot of generic content ‘out there’.

However, when you think of the articles, websites or blogs that YOU have recently shared with people, they will be the ones that stood out in some way.  That was what made them worth sharing!  Maybe it was an article that made you laugh out loud or a blog post that made you think about something in a different way. Maybe it was a powerful piece of advice or some information that gave you an answer you had been searching for.

What it probably wasn’t, was one of those awful, generic posts that get written when someone follows their Social Media Guru’s list of “50 things to blog about!”

Focus on quality, not frequency. I often blog just once or twice a week, because I will only write when I have something to share, which I believe is of value.  I refuse to blog just to feed Google or fill someones RSS reader with crap.

As a direct result, this blog already has over 11,000 inbound links and an amazingly high number of readers / comments for a 4 month old blog!

2. Make it easy to share your work

You need to make it as easy as possible for people to share your content. If you look at the bottom of this post, you will see the ‘sharethis‘ link. With one click of that link, you can share this post with your friends via all the major social bookmarking websites. You can also ‘tweet‘ this post from there and even email it to a friend. I now get a stack of new readers from social bookmarking sites, often over 2,000 a day.  By the way, I have no connection with the people who make sharethis, I just use it and like it.

I hope you found this useful – if you did, share it!

More traffic to your site in 2 easy steps!

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If you own a website or blog and you want to dramatically increase the number and quality of visitors you get, you need to encourage people who visit your site, to share what they find with their friends.

Thankfully, we know that when people find material on a website, which they believe will be of interest to their friends and contacts, they are more than happy to forward it to them.  This is why websites like FriendFeed, StumbleUpon, YouTube, Twitter and Digg have become so popular. They allow people to easily share things with their friends.

In order for you to benefit from the viral power of the Internet, there are two things you should consider.

1. Content

Firstly, you need to have content on your site, which is worth sharing.  This means your content has to be better and more valuable than the typical material, which people find on your kind of site or blog.  Many blog owners feel compelled to write ‘something’ every day; indeed many so-called “social marketing gurus” even write posts telling people to do this.  The challenge this presents, is that very few businesspeople have the time required to write new, valuable content every day.

Post only when you have something worth sharing and focus on quality, not quantity.

2. Make it easy to share

Secondly, you need to make it super-easy for people to share your material with their friends.  I use a free plugin for this blog called Sexy Bookmarks, (see below), which allows people to share what they find here, on most popular networksg – quickly and easily.  Just a few mouse clicks and that’s it!

As a result of focusing on what I believe to be valuable content AND making it as easy as possible for people to share it, I get thousands of new visitors from sharing / bookmarking websites every week.

A quick tip!

Take a moment to look at the last few websites, articles, videos, blog posts or whatever; which YOU have passed on to your friends.  Now ask yourself this question: “What was it that motivated you to share that material and how can YOU use that same kind of motivation, to get others to share YOUR content?”

Your answer to that question is a good starting point!

Content worth sharing

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I received a newsletter earlier today. However, I have no idea who the sender was or why he decided to send it to me. I have no recollection of ever subscribing to it, so I decided to un-subscribe.

That’s when I noticed that there was no un-subscribe option!

Newsletter marketing

Yes, it’s possible someone subscribed to this newsletter using my email address and that the newsletter’s sender doesn’t send confirmation emails.

However, to send anyone a newsletter or any piece of email marketing, with no option to un-subscribe, is a mistake. People hate to feel trapped and to use this kind of approach with one’s marketing is a massive mistake and totally counter productive.

I can’t see anyone recommending a newsletter – even a great one – if they know you can’t get off the subscriber’s list, once you are on it.  Equally, I can’t see anyone wanting to do business with a company, which attempts to trap people with its marketing.

If you want to develop a successful newsletter, make the content worth sharing and make it super-easy for people to share it, subscribe to it and un-subscribe from it.

People love to share great content with their friends and they will remain loyal readers and advocates of your newsletter, for as long as they believe it offers them outstanding value.