I recently saw a story that illustrates the power of social media. Instead of doing some Monday morning quarterbacking–which to me is never a fair type of interaction let’s discuss this objectively.
The first is from At&T wireless and Giorgio G. He had a few complaints about his iPhone wireless service. Most of us would complain to our friends, maybe on Facebook or Twitter but he went to the top. He sent an email to CEO Randall Stephenson, not once but twice. After the second email he received a phone call from AT&T thanking him but also offering if he contacts the CEO again that they would issue a cease and desist letter.
Keeping organized is a major component of promotional marketing. When you’re dealing with thousands of bloggers, figuring out who wrote what, when to send out a product, and how you should rate your bloggers is critical. We developed a control panel that shows all the stats necessary in a simple to follow format.
Promoters Control Panel: Overview of Promotions
When logging into tomoson.com you will first be able to see an overview of your promotions and what’s happening with them. This birds eye view tells everything from how many promotions you have to what products you need to ship out. Each of the promotions on the overview page will have links going directly to the stat or information details. The best part of the overview is you can see the total POTENTIAL traffic, twitter followers, and facebook friends who are part of your promotional network.
WIREFRAME OF PROMOTION OVERVIEW CONTROL PANEL
Promoters Control Panel: Blogger Stats
As a promoter you want to know what each of the bloggers are doing for each promotion. The blogger stats page will show who is writing reviews, if you need to enter a tracking number on a product shipped, and the traffic each blogger has. After each blogger writes a review you can view each review, see the amount of keywords written in the review, and if the blogger created any links tracing back to your website.
Shipping products is also easy with the control panel. From the blogger stats page you can mass upload tracking numbers using an excel csv file. This way you can manage large numbers of products being shipped daily. The system can also export blogger shipping information into the same easy to manage csv file. This can be uploaded to any shipping module like stamps.com for quick shipments.
WIREFRAME BLOGGER STATS
Blogger Control Panel: Overview of Promotions
Bloggers can also see what’s going on with the promotions they’ve applied to. An easy to view display will show if they’ve completed all the steps to apply for a product and when they need to review a product. When a promoter ships a product the blogger he/she gets notified and can log back into the system to see the tracking number. Once the review is written the blogger can verify the review on the system with a few clicks.
WIREFRAME BLOGGER CONTROL PANEL
Next week we will be reviewing the custom message center which allows promoters to answers multiple blogger questions with one message.
Besides selling more products by getting bloggers to write reviews on them, you can increase your search engine ranking from the links created during the review process. As many of you know building links coming back to your website helps increase your websites search engine ranking.
When you send a product to the approved blogger they will write a review and most likely add a link in that review going back to your website. This one-way link is a huge benefit to your websites search engine goals. Most of the time Google gives bloggers higher search engine rankings because they are updating content regularly. Your review will be one of those pages that are weighed heavily, talking about your product, and linking back to your website. These are the three major components to any link building campaign.
How Do I Tell What Links Were Added In A Review?
The power of Tomoson is its reporting features. After a blogger writes a review they need to verify it with a simple piece of code they copy into the review. This piece of code serves two purposes:
1. It will display an icon stating this is a review the blogger got a free product for (Which is now required by law for all bloggers to do)
2. It will capture the review so we can display it in your Tomoson.com control panel.
The second purpose gives you, the promoter all the power to review what was written, how many links are in the review, and where they link. This makes Tomoson.com not only a powerful sales tool but a powerful SEO tool as well.
Next week we’ll review the tomoson.com Control Panel.
Every business wants to rank well in the search engines. But, if your business services a local market, local search engine optimization is crucial to online growth. Local results have been showing up in Google, Yahoo, and Bing in organic search engine results for well over 2 years.
Many companies such as Google, Yahoo, Yelp, CitySearch, JudysBook, Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Better Business Bureau, Chamber Of Commerce, YellowBook, SuperPages, Dex, and more promise to help local businesses obtain new customers. For the most part, all of the sites listed can help companies achieve that goal. But one question always arises, what websites should I spend time & money promoting my business on now?
The simple answer is to register for free accounts on all of them. Then, the next answer is to focus on getting in Google’s Top 10 Local Pack because this listing will drive the most amount of free organic search engine traffic.
But is register on all local search engine directories, internet yellow pages, and local review sites enough to rank well organically in Google? Do companies need to know anything before they start registering on 30+ sites? And better yet, should multiple accounts contain consistent information?
Gib Olander from Localeze spoke at an event on “Local Search” and informed listeners that he recommends a consistent Company Name, Company Address, and Company Phone Number when creating company profiles online. Considering Localeze is responsible for provider the data that appear on Google Maps, Yahoo Local, Bing Local, Superpages.com, Yellowpages.com, Best of the Web Local, OpenList, DexKnows, Addresses.com, Citysquares, GenieKnows.com, YellowBot (reference: http://getlisted.org/resources/local-search-data-providers.aspx) it may be wise to take a closer look at why he recommended business owners to do that.
Why a Consistent NAP?
can Google keep track of how many times your company is listed if you are not consistent with your company name? If you are trying to rank well for the keyword “Minneapolis Divorce Lawyer,” but enter “Anderson’s & Sons Minneapolis Divorce Lawyer” into Google’s Company/Organization field, you are telling Google to look for references to “Anderson’s & Sons Minneapolis Divorce Lawyer” online.
Is your company listed everywhere online as “Anderson’s & Sons Minneapolis Divorce Lawyer?” Or is your company name clearly published on your website as “Anderson’s & Sons Law Firm.” When you registered on Yelp, Twitter, CitySearch, Facebook, etc… what company name do you use?
Local search engines look for references & citations of your company when determining your local search engine placements. If your company does not have a consistent NAP, your rankings will be poor.
Tomoson.com will have two types of users, bloggers and promoters. The promoters will be the users giving away a product and the bloggers will be the ones writing the reviews on those products. The One of the reasons Tomoson is being made is to bring these two users together on one website.
Blogger Accounts: 100% FREE
Bloggers will be able to register on Tomoson.com for FREE and browse all the products available for review. If a blogger sees a product he/she likes, they can ask questions to the promoter directly or apply to review the product. If they pass the promoters criteria then the promoter will mail the product to the blogger for FREE to write a review and keep. The promoter’s criteria will be things like the amount of twitter followers, website traffic, and number of facebook fans. If the promoter sends a product to the blogger and he/she does not write the review and verify it was written, the blogger will be banned from tomoson.com.
Promoters can allow blogger contests as ways for bloggers to have contests on their own website and give away a product they reviewed. If the promoter allows the product to be used in blogger contests then after the blogger verifies the review. The blogger can promote on their own blog a contest giveaway the product their just reviewed to their readers. The obvious benefit is the promoter get’s exposure on the blog twice and the blogger gains more readers.
Promoter Accounts:FREE 30 Day Trail
The promoter is the person who truly benefits from the power of Tomoson.com and that’s why we give them a free 30 day trial to test the software. After the 30 day trial they can cancel the membership or continue and pay a small monthly fee. The promoter will be able to create promotions, set their criteria, and manage what bloggers are writing reviews.
The advantage to the promoter is getting access to thousands and hopefully millions of bloggers who are willing to write reviews about their products, translating into millions of buyers who read and purchase that product. Here are some quick numbers for you to think about. If your product costs $40/item with a 30% markup and you give away 10 products to ten bloggers who each have 10,000 unique visitors, 500 twitter followers, and 500 facebook fans. You have just got your product in front of 110,000 people PER MONTH for $400. Even if only 1% of those people bought from you (1100 people) that still equates to $12,800.00 in pure profit in that first month. This is the power of tomoson.com and why we wanted to make a piece of software to bring bloggers and promoters together.
Please stay tuned for the next blog update on why Tomoson.com will help your search engine rankings (coming next week)
To all the promotional marketers and bloggers out there this is for you. WebBizIdeas has been marketing websites that sell products for over 8 years now. During this time we’ve found a very effective means of increasing sales and search engine rankings simultaneously, PRODUCT GIVEAWAYS. Since bloggers control a large portion on content found online we started giving products to bloggers to review for FREE. These bloggers wrote HONEST reviews and posted them online for their readers. Some of the reviews were good and some bad, but we made sure they wrote them and posted something to link back to the website we were promoting. The result was a large number of back links, higher search engine rankings, and more products sold.
All the bloggers needed to disclose they were reviewing the product in exchange for a free product but that didn’t detour potential customers. They appreciated the honesty and bought more products because more creditability in the company was created. Obviously this was a win win situation, the bloggers got free stuff and the promoters sold more products.
The major downfall to all of this was the management side of things. It was extremely time consuming to monitor all the bloggers, make sure they wrote the review, make sure the product was shipped, and make sure the bloggers were keeping everything legal.
This management dilemma is what brings us here today. We are in the process of making a new piece of software to manage all of this. Users will be able to go from 40 hours/month of management time to 2 hours/month of management time. The software is called Tomoson.com and we are looking to launch in the next 4-8 weeks.
If this sounds interesting to you please go to www.tomoson.com to sign up free updates and promotins on the project.
Microsoft’s new advertisement features Jerry Seinfeld. The 10 million dollar contract is to help the Vista brand improve their “coolness.”
The majority of critics have been fast to bash the new ads. “Bill Gates is old,” “just as stupid as the software,” and of course “the ad never mentioned the product” are among the most common remarks.
But if you look beyond the text you see a subtle, gentle comedy, commercial that puts Bill Gates in Jerry Seinfeld’s world. Whether the ad agency is trying humanizing Bill Gates or humanizing Microsoft Vista the underling point of the ad were missed by many.
The ad may not have made much sense but did the early Seinfeld’s make any sense? It took a while for the ‘Zen’ of Jerry to be found by the rest of the word. Look for 3-4 similar commercials to come out that will hook, line, and sinker Microsoft into the minds of….some.
Look for the “Vista Helps Connect” promotion to be thrown in eventually.
