In my post last week (Would you pay for Twitter?) I got a comment from a reader who asked:

“Here’s my question, if you are a business and offer a lot of things for free, how do you parley that into appropriate revenue without disengaging your audience?”

That is a very good question, and one that every business (or would-be business) should be asking. I started thinking about this a couple of years ago, posting this article (How Can You Measure the Value of a Conversation?) in October ’08. Here is the heart of the message:

Make money “because of”, not with

The “because of” effect is much more powerful than the “with” effect. One of the commenters on Jason’s post, Mack Collier (The Viral Garden), hits the nail on the head with:

…companies that are NEW to social media, wanting to use metrics and measurements that they are used to when using TRADITIONAL marketing methods to ‘get their message out there’. Their thinking is ‘how do we make money from this?’, whereas companies that have been active in this space for a while, such as Dell, understand that by PARTICIPATING that they will make more money as a BYPRODUCT of their efforts. Dell has been in the game long enough to see the impact that their efforts are making, and as a result have shifted away from the ‘how do we make money with this?’ mentality.

Attempting to DIRECTLY monetize social media efforts is the quickest way to ensure they fail. But companies that aren’t familiar with this space don’t know any better. In a few years, after more companies are more familiar with these tools, I think we’ll see them looking to INdirectly monetize their efforts, while putting the focus on SM as a way to DIRECTLY connect with their customers.

One of the best lessons that I learned from the SOBCon event that I attended in May was that blogging (and Social Media in general) should be treated like a business. That business is the marketing of your products and services & establishing yourself/your business as an authority. The goal of that business is to make money because of your blog (or Social Media efforts), instead of with your blog.

Let me repeat that for you – “by PARTICIPATING [you] will make more money as a BYPRODUCT of [your] efforts”.

Money as a by-product of participation

How exactly does this work? Well, it is both easier and more difficult than it sounds. The very first thing that your business can provide for free to its customers is Value. Something above and beyond the products and services that gives your customers a reason to visit your place of business or website, or follow you on Twitter, or friend you on Facebook (this list goes on and on).

For a real-world example, using a “place of business”, look at Starbucks. The mental images of the starving artist or writer slaving away over a venti latte, or the entrepreneur using Starbucks as an office are so common as to be a cliche. But they are a cliche because Starbucks offers something that places like McDonald’s do not – a welcoming atmosphere with music and ambiance, access to coffee and snacks, and typically like-minded folks to chat with. That is the value. That is what makes people come back.

Now, this example is not representative of what you can do with Social Media, or is it? Imagine that your blog or website is the Starbucks, how do you go about inviting people to come and hang out there? Give away some cool, free stuff. I’m talking about your blog posts, or FAQs on your industry, or whatever it is that draws people to your site in the first place. Give them the answer or information about the solution to the problem that they have, then give them even more. Add value.

Then add an opportunity for your visitors to have a conversation.

If you let them speak they will come

Online communities are exploding in popularity and will continue to grow. As Clay Shirky discusses in his book Cognitive Surplus (review here Thoughts on Cognitive Surplus) people crave community and the online space has the lowest barrier to entry, ever. Letting your customers talk to you and to each other gives you a Starbucks-like place for your potential marketspace to congregate. Then, and only then, can you get involved in the conversation – providing that added value, building your credibility and authority, and finally creating a rapport that invites your community to ask to buy something from you.

Jeffrey Gitomer says “People hate to be sold, but they love to buy”

In his Little Red Book of Selling (which every blogger and business person should read by the way) Gitomer says, “If they like you, and they believe you, and they trust you, and they have confidence in you…then they may buy from you.” That is what you are doing when you build the community and marketspace. Do ask compelling and engaging questions. Don’t sell your product or service.

Ask the community what they think. Talk about profit and productivity. Remember, they are taking the time to be involved in their community, not your community, it all needs to be about them.

I trust that this has given you some ideas for your own business and how to apply this concept to create more sales as  by-product of your Social Media activities. If you still have questions and are interested in being the feature of a case study on this topic (to be published for free on this site), please send me an email and we can talk about your situation.

Jay Ehret has a new post on the effects of discounting your products and services in order to compete:

What Should You do About Discount Pricing?

I’m noticing an increased emphasis on discounting prices, especially with the emergence of mobile couponing and services like Groupon. Then there was this recent discussion on Eric Brown’s Facebook page. So what should you do about price?

My opinion is that you should almost never lower your price. It’s basically a confession that you were charging too much before you lowered your price. If you think price is really the problem, and not value, offer a lower-price alternative. A “lite” package of your product or service. Two benefits here: this pricing strategy actually helps customers make a decision to buy by providing context, and you’re not doing the same amount of work for less money.

There’s a lot to be said about pricing and discounts, so I asked for some insight from my Twitter network. The responses contain plenty of wisdom and ideas…

There are some excellent comments that he received via Twitter, read the whole thing.

Adding Value Instead of Discounting

My own philosophy is to add value to your product or service, and enhance your relationship with your client rather than offer a discount. Enhance your customer service levels, provide something extra – something unexpected and delightful. At the restaurant that I manage we have created a loyalty program called The General’s Club that now has 700 members. Members that come in time and time again to build their benefits.

What can you do with your business to enhance loyalty and build repeat business? Discuss in the comments.

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Justin McCullough at Leader 4 Hire shares a recent experience with a newsletter and a sales push: A Failed Sales Push by Chris Brogan and How You Can Do Better.

This is a detailed look at trust, marketing, and execution on an online sales push from some of the biggest names in Social Media – the good and the bad and how you can learn and apply this to your sales and marketing efforts.

Follow every bit of this through (except the last part) and you will succeed in your next email sales push. The sections I call “What’s Happening Here” should provide the key elements for you to model in your online campaign and sales efforts.

Nearly everything here is actually a success story other than the fifth area below.
First – Chris Brogan eNewsletter

Subject line of email from Chris: “Email marketing and the folks at Blue Sky Factory”

This is a great little sales piece from Chris. It clearly identifies his role in the email, why I (we) received it and who it benefits and why. On top of that, a nice bit of positioning and display of influence by offering an exclusive ebook download and discount to use Blue Sky Factory as a benefit to loyalty with Chris. Well done. This is the right sort of email marketing and who would expect less from Chris?

McCullough goes on to analyze the components of the newsletter, the links and sales pages, and the offers that are made. Pay attention to his description of how “marketing information” is captured when he has an opportunity to download a free e-book.

The big lesson in e-mail marketing

The email marketing campaign that McCullough details is a good one, executed well, until the the final part – where Sales and Customer Service fail mightily. I urge you to read the entire post, and the comments – they are a textbook example of how to manage a situation like this. Before you go, however, consider this:

Read the whole thing here: A Failed Sales Push by Chris Brogan and How You Can Do Better.

As you may well know I am a big fan of notebooks. All kinds of notebooks. Big ones, small ones, whatever. A while back I came across the Field Notes Brand of notebooks, and they had a pretty cool story:

INSPIRED BY the vanishing subgenre of agricultural memo books, ornate pocket ledgers and the simple, unassuming beauty of a well-crafted grocery list, the Draplin Design Company, Portland, Oregon in conjunction with Coudal Partners of Chicago, Illinois bring you “FIELD NOTES” in hopes of offering, “An honest memo book, worth fillin’ up with GOOD INFORMATION.”

This is the latest offering:

I just love these little notebooks! They are a little bigger than a 3″ x 5″ notecard and are simply bound in heavy cardstock, but the paper is good quality and they fit right in your pants pocket. They make an excellent Capture Device for your GTD practice. The motto of the Field Notes Brand is “I’m not writing it down to remember it later, I’m writing it down to remember it now“.

Brilliant.

At $9.95 for a 3-pack, these notebooks are a little on the expensive side. You can get something similar at Target for about $4.00. But what you don’t get from Target are the goodies that come with your order. The first time I ordered a set from Field Notes, they threw in pencil and one of the “General-purpose bands of rubber”. And a 1-inch button. LOL. It doesn’t seem like much, but it was a treat to me, and got me hooked.

As you can see, this shipment had some more goodies. I ordered a 6-pack of pencils this time too, since I fell in love with the free one they sent last time (Good, dark lead, smooth barrel, firm eraser).

Another band of rubber, a sticker, another button (!) and a little calendar. The package also created some more drama and suspense – the notebooks were packed in another envelope. With a string closure! Cool, very cool.

When I opened the smaller package to remove the notebooks themselves there was another surprise: a packet of Marigold seeds!

Now I am hardly what you would call a gardener, but I thought that this was a nice touch for spring. Especially here in New Hampshire, we had a cold and snowy winter but the snow is gone now and we all have Spring Fever so bad that you can smell it in the air.

Once again, Field Notes proves that it is not just the price of a product, or the perceived value, but the end-user experience that makes a product remarkable. I had the best time this afternoon unwrapping and opening this package.

Now I can spend some time thinking about what I want to do with the notebooks, and whether or not I should plant these marigold seeds…

You can see what others are up to with their Field Notes Brand notebooks on Flickr. People get really creative!

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from by Tara Rodden Robinson

When it comes right down to it, marketing is really simple: it’s the process of getting people to know, like, and trust you on the way to buying or hiring. If you’re a small business owner and wearing every single hat in your business (not to mention a bunch from home, too) then marketing isn’t simple at all. It’s a complex set of strategies and tactics that you have to design and implement, make time for and keep up with, and monitor in a way that allows you to know whether or not it’s working.

There’s good news, though: you can harness the power of GTD to move your marketing forward and grow your business. Here’s how.

Marketing is a project that is never completed

The first thing to remember is that marketing is never done. It’s a role or an area of focus (which puts in at the 20K horizon of focus). There will be next-actions, projects, and goals that you complete, yes. But as long as you’re in business, you’ll need some marketing to keep the leads–and the cash–flowing.

Get clear on your vision of success. In this case, ask yourself what successful marketing looks like to you. Harken back to the idea of know, like, and trust on the way to a decision about buying or hiring. When leads are moving along the path from first introduction to you or your products, what are the signs of success at each step along the way?

Don’t censor your vision on your thoughts about what’s likely, possible, or feasible. Don’t worry about how. Just create a rich, compelling vision of success.

Once you’ve got your vision of success pinned down (you did that step, right?), look at your current process and find one aspect of what’s happening now that you want more of. For example, let’s say you’re getting some leads from Twitter. You’d like more of those. So focus your attention on those leads–how can you serve those leads even better? Poll them–ask what enticed them to want to learn more. And then do that.

Finally, choose a handful of tactics that you can implement consistently. If it’s blogging, then set your writing schedule and post–come what may. If it’s Twitter, then tweet regularly. Put those tasks into your trusted system, just like you do any other next-action, and plow through them. Or create a checklist. Either way, use your GTD skills to get your marketing done. Every day.

—

About the Author
Known as The Productivity Maven, Tara Rodden Robinson is an author, coach, and educator. You can learn more about her here: Tara Robinson.com.

I have a new post up at the SOBEvent blog: Concrete Steps Toward Integrated Virtual Marketing

The old cliche about marketing used to be that a business knew that part of the money and effort spent on marketing was wasted, they just didn’t know which part. A recent survey mentioned in the WSJ shows that this perception is still true in the days of Social Media:

…a separate survey of 500 U.S. small-business owners from the same sponsors found that just 22% made a profit last year from promoting their firms on social media, while 53% said they broke even. What’s more, 19% said they actually lost money due to their social-media initiatives.

Susan L. Reid has an article for Financially Preparing Small Business Owners for 2010 at the American Express OPEN Forum.

The first two ideas are to hire a business coach and focus on the near-term. I believe that both of these are fantastic ideas. I use a local free service via the University of New Hampshire Business School for business coaching and I have found their assistance to be invaluable.

Focusing your efforts and thinking on the near-term is also very good advice. The important thing is going to be to get to the end of the year “in the black”. The results of the 2010 mid-term elections in the US are going to be anybody’s guess right up until November, so small business owners need to focus on being prepared for just about anything.

The third idea, I believe, warrants even more discussion.

3. Reinvent your business.

2010 will be the year when you will have to reinvent yourself and your business. The world is not the same world you inhabited just a few years ago. Don’t get caught up in thinking that, once the economy settles, we’ll all be returning to the way things were. There is no going backward. And, honestly, even if you could, would you?

To respond to events, do something new and innovative. Something other people would not expect you to do. The old way of doing things doesn’t apply any more. So be brave and try something new in your life and business.

While the next 12 months will bring new challenges, look forward to more signs of recovery in the upcoming months while, at the same time, putting into place a plan for your business that will weather a double-dip if and when one should occur.

How can you re-invent your business? I can think of at least two examples:

Turn a service into a product

If your small business is a service of some sort, turn part of it into a resource that your customers can purchase. For example, perhaps an bookkeeper manages the accounts of some specialty firms and has created spreadsheets with all sorts of custom templates and macros. One of these may be applicable to other businesses. These potential customers may not be able to afford your ongoing bookkeeping services, but they may be interested in purchasing the accounting tool and doing it themselves.

In addition, you now have the opportunity to market to these customers with other products that you develop, or possibly add services in the future. Make the product once, sell it multiple times. Sell upgrades. Sell customization.

Turn a product or service into a training course

Once again we are looking at something that you can do once, convert it into a digital format, and sell it multiple times. Whatever your business I am sure that you have a set of frequently asked questions or frequently recurring situations that you must handle for your clients or customers.

Turn this FAQ resource into a training tool, using PDF or audio or video format. That is what Brad Shorr and I did with the Writing for the Web course, to teach our own clients the basic tools of do-it-yourself SEO (Search Engine Optimization). By adding this training course to our website packages we were able to cut down the amount of time spent coaching our clients on the same information over and over.

What type of small business do you have, and how can you re-invent part of it for 2010? Share in the comments.

Seth’s Blog: The difference between a bonus and free

In the old days, gifts like these would cost money to create and be hard to share. Today, the opposite is true. The goal of something that’s free is to spread the idea.

On the other hand, some bonus things we built for Linchpin:

Oh, wait, I can’t show them to you because you have to buy something first.

Anyway, what we did was collect:

* Zen Unicorn, an ebook of the last few years of this blog (it sells on the Kindle for $9)
* Membership to the invite-only online Triiibe community that I started a while ago (limited supply of these)
* Ten minutes of excerpts from the audio version of my book
* Some other bonuses, below

To get them, you need to answer a simple question to demonstrate that you’ve ordered the new book. That’s because they are bonuses, not free. And yes, you qualify even if you got the book as a gift or received it a month ago. The bonus material will only be available for a few weeks.

[...]

Whatever you sell, whatever idea you want to spread, it’s now possible to create both freebies and bonuses. One spreads, the other induces.

I am working on my own little productivity book, and I have been thinking about this sort of “goodie-bag” approach to marketing and selling it. Almost everything in the book is available here, on the blog, in a less-polished and un-collated manner. The book will also include answers to questions that people have asked me, in person or by email, about how to get over the stumbling blocks in their own workflow.

What would you like to see as a bonus or freebie in conjunction with this book? Share with us in the comments.

GTD, Marketing, e-book

I recently watched a video presentation by Seth Godin at Benjamin Hysell’s blog, and it got me to thinking. The video is from 2008, and is about Godin’s then most recent book, Meatball Sundae (aff link) and contains a preview of his next book, Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us (aff link).

Creating a remarkable product

Godin uses this time with some software engineers to exhort them to create something remarkable, that is, something that people want to talk about, because “ideas that spread, win.” In fact, if your product is remarkable, people will talk about it, especially if talking about the product (or service) makes it better.

This is something that Godin has been talking about since he released Unleashing the Ideavirus (aff link) as a free, 200+ page PDF.

All of the concepts from Godin’s previous books that applied to businesses and products and services have been leading up to the single most important thing that Linchpin represents…you can and should apply these very same principles to yourself and to the people that you lead.

Personal Development = Business Development

Watch this video (it’s about an hour long) with a pencil and paper handy, and jot down notes for yourself as you watch – keeping in mind that you are looking for ways that you can apply these creativity and marketing principles to your own personal development and the professional development of your team.

This is a great video for anyone who makes anything, software or otherwise.

Please to enjoy Seth Godin at the Business of Software 2008.

BTW, tomorrow we start talking about our Groundhog Day Resolutions.

Chris Garrett, writing at Social Media Examiner, discusses some ideas for getting more out of your investment of time on Twitter:

We programmers have a saying: “Garbage In – Garbage Out.” This essentially means you get out what you put in. If you put in chit-chat, don’t be surprised if that’s all you see in return!

Here are nine benefits I’ve personally seen through my couple of years of Twitter usage.

1. Networking connections

Because of my Twitter network, I’ve had real conversations with people I never would have been able to reach otherwise. Also I’ve been able to form deeper connections with people in real life because of our first meeting on Twitter.

I agree with this 100%. Twitter is a quick and easy way to touch base with people in your network, and add more people to your network as well. I have the Twidroid app on my Samsung phone, and I log in from time to time during the day, when I am away from my computer, to catch up on what is happening and to ask or answer questions.

2. Traffic

How much traffic you can generate with Twitter depends on a number of factors, not least how many engaged followers you have. “Engaged” being a key point; they have to want to hear from you, otherwise they might as well not be following.

Indeed. This site gets quite a bit of traffic from Twitter, partially because I tweet about new posts, but also because people that I tweet with or follow visit as part of their research, whether or not to follow back.

3. Leads

Twitter is fast becoming an instant referral system for business leads. Someone will ask if anyone knows a consultant/freelancer/vendor/etc. with a certain skill set or experience, and others will reply with suggestions.

If you build a strong network, you will get a good share of those referrals. I have seen it happen repeatedly, from design and programming through where to stay on vacation!

This has been one of the most profitable ways that I have found to use Twitter. The “Search” function is invaluable for finding people that are looking for help in your field.

I like to find people that are tweeting for help and assist any way that I can. Sometimes it is a referral to one of my other colleagues on Twitter, sometimes it is something easy that I can do quickly and for free, other times it leads to a paying client relationship.

If you do this consistently and transparently, you can turn this network of “People that I have helped” into a Twitter List and have an instant Word-of-Mouth referral & reference resource.

4. Direct sales

Obviously the end result of all those referrals is you get sales, but also sales of products and other services too. Dell is making millions of additional dollars this way.

Keep in mind that if all you do is promote your products, people will stop listening, so keep up the good content too. Make an offer and see what happens.

There are 5 more at SME, read the whole thing – 9 Ways to Get More From Twitter