Posted in January 2010 …

Jan 14 2010
Old...

Email marketing and the ’8 second rule.’

If you are not building an email list of targeted users, then you are missing out on a lot of potential profit.

I started building an email list for twi.tter.me only a short time ago. Every day, I receive at least 60 new subscribers; each one a potential customer. This means a user has taken that great leap of faith to trust me with an email address, overcoming the first hurdle to ultimately making a buying decision.

The Eight-Second Rule

Studies have shown the average human attention span to be about 8 seconds.

Continuous attention span, or the amount of time a human can focus on an object without any lapse at all, is very brief and may be as short as 8 seconds. After this amount of time, it is likely that an individual’s eyes will shift focus, or that a stray thought will briefly enter consciousness.

Information courtesy of Wikipedia

So, if your visitors do not find what they are looking for in that span of time, chances are they are going to leave and go elsewhere. Therefore, it is highly important to entice users visiting your pages for the first time to provide their email address. Collecting email addresses is the best way to keep in touch with potential as well as current customers to your site and its products or services.

Serve or Sell?

Once you have your users’ email addresses, you will need to build an email marketing campaign. You then need to decide whether “selling” to your potential or current customers or “serving” them, best serves the interest of your business as well as theirs. Both selling and serving have their pros and cons.

SERVE

Pro – Build a relationship to strengthen the bond between you and your customer. Use opportunities of communication as opportunities to build upon or establish both trust and customer loyalty.

Con – Long-term sales technique or relationship building. Just takes time to make a sale, months usually.

SELL

Pro – Law of averages might work in your favor if you have a big list.

Con – Possibly upset quite a few customers and you may find tens or even hundreds of them unsubscribing from your list.

Jan 14 2010
Social Media

Writing good tweet content

The content is equally important as the timing. You need to create a tweet that will grab the user’s eye for one reason or another and get them to click through to your site. We’re not going to cover making a purchase decision from your site after the click-through, as that’s for another time.

Here are the last three tweets I have been running for my new twi.tter.me site:

The new Craig’s list of Twitter. Find, follow and follow back automatically, people who interest you. http://bit.ly/HkCN2

Showcase yourself to the world and have them follow you! First FREE app of many. Exclusive: http://bit.ly/HkCN2

Unleash the power of Twitter. New, exciting, FREE system. Click here: http://bit.ly/HkCN2

As you can see, I have followed my own three golden rules in each tweet:

ü Attribution – A lot of people know craigslist (http://www.craigslist.org/about/) and we can automatically build on the reputation of it. If you do not know what it is, it is similar to Gumtree (http://www.gumtree.com/) but free for all

ü Give away something free – There is always going to be a segment of the market that is looking for something free. You can always guarantee to add this percentage to the market demographic you already have clicking on your tweets.

ü Shorten the link – Use bit.ly (http://bit.ly) and other services to get that link shortened. Those extra character spaces can allow you to supply the defining characteristics to make a user click on your link.

Keywords

Many sites are appearing that you can sign up to, with your Twitter user name and password and unlock a whole new host of features. One such site is Twollo (http://www.twollo.com). You can research and find users that are discussing a particular set of keywords and follow those users automatically.

You can have as many keywords as you like and the process is completely automated. Many people are using services such as those things (thanks to Bill Crosby’s TTM) showing people the way. Well done to Bill, by the way. His product has completely saturated the market for some months now.

 

TIP:

Remember that if you are discussing something, there is more than likely someone in the background looking to sniper you with Twollo and add you as a follower based on the keywords in the content you are discussing. You can, however, take a more proactive role as a marketer and businessperson and do the legwork yourself, learning to anticipate actions of Twitter users. Stay up to date with discussions online, so you can take part in them and tweet, talking about topics you know about and that will have high search volume.

I personally like to discuss one or two “trending” topics every day. I struck up a conversation with a random Twitter user about the new Star Trek film. I know this has been trending for days and for my time, I received a handful of followers as a result. That’s not bad when you consider that often, trendy subjects are most likely things you would wish to talk with people about anyway. So, sometimes, making money, if you’re doing it right, doesn’t even have to SEEM like you’re working…while every moment, you are and you ARE making a profit.

 

TIP

Count your precious spaces

Keep your tweets under 125 characters so that people can “re-tweet” you easily. Use services like bit.ly and not tinyURL, as you can save on those vital characters tinyURL and some other URL shortener services will eat up with their use on Twitter for your tweet. If you are keeping up with tweets outside the home, on a mobile application, make sure that when retweeting or “RT-ing” an existing tweet, either another person’s or your own, your application doesn’t auto-fill the start of it with “retweet” or that if it does, you can edit the tweet before sending it out. Otherwise, you’re opting to lose 5 precious character spaces into which you could be putting your more interesting tweet.