The Secret of Successful Selling Through Twitter

Posted by David Whitehouse

A lot of people are using Twitter to try and promote themselves/their services/their products – but mostly with not much luck. I remember hearing a guy talk about Twitter at a seminar in February – he just lectured a group of small business owners on how they should use Twitter to promote their business, but he didn’t seem to have the slightest idea of how to do it.

Well here is how I think it should be done…

Stupidly Unnecessary Disclaimer

Before I go on, I want to make a few points clear:
1. My ideas in no way represent those of my employers, so if you think I am stupid and I sound like a baffoon please don’t go whining to Dave, he won’t appreciate it and I’ll be forced to eat chocolate coated rich teas (which really are nasty by the way). However if I’m a genius, please feel free to tell him on twitter (he’ll love that).

2. The legalities of this technique are still a little sketchy, I guess as time goes on we’ll get a better idea of the legalities behind selling on Twitter. With email your recipient has to opt-in before hand – with Twitter it seems a little different as you can set it so your messages aren’t actually being sent to them, its just a mention.

3. This was written at around midnight, so don’t expect it to make any sense…

With those disclaimers said, here I go…

Successful Selling through Twitter

The only way I can explain this is by example, take Timmy. Timmy sells customised shoes (I made this up, sounds like a good idea though) – they cost £199/$299 each, but they have your initials on them and they fit just perfect. Timmy wants to sell more shoes and he’s heard about Twitter so he thinks he will give it a try.

The Prospects List

Firstly Timmy visits a Twitter app which allows him to continuously search for a keyword/keywords (you can do this on Twitter, but I’d recommend Hoot Suite. So he adds a dashboard called “Prospects” using a keyword search of “needs shoes” – he finds a number of people twittering, some people don’t want shoes, they just happen to have that combination of keywords in one of their Tweets. He finds the following tweet (it’s real, I assure you – it took me all of 30 seconds to find):

The Prospect

@wenyiee OMG. Clothes are not doing it for me anymore, i need SHOES SHOES SHOES! 12:50pm, Aug 10 from web

Now I don’t know about you, but I don’t think we could have found a better prospect for a pair of shoes, do you? On to the approach…

The Approach

So Timmy engages in conversation by doing two things:
1. He follows her (this isn’t necessary, but people like getting more followers, so I wouldn’t worry about p****ng them off).
2. He asks a question, like “What kind of shoes do you like?”

The Sales Pitch?

The result is, she may reply saying that she has a particular pair, or style or something in mind. Timmy simply has to respond with a link to the most targeted product to meet her needs.

Alternatively he doesn’t have to send a link, but instead can say something like:

“I have an amazing pair of pink sandals that would look great with your skin tone, would you be interested in seeing them?” (or something – I don’t sell shoes)

If she says yes, send her a link (that way its definitely legal), if not, just leave her be (she might check out your profile and see your homepage link there).

Thats It!

So there you have it – Twitter provides you instant access into the psyche of consumers across the World – up to the second. There probably isn’t a better direct sales platform to actively engage in conversation aswell as meet a need at the right time. Recommendations are powerful stuff too, so I’m sure the conversion ratios are pretty good for affiliates. There are limitations, like geographical location – but I’m sure you should be able to filter this somehow (if you can tell me how I’ll link to you from this post).

Anyways, if you like this article and fancy trying it out, why not follow me on twitter and subscribe to my RSS feed and in return I promise to blog sporadically, but only about highly useful, or entertaining stuff. Agreed?

How to get Feedburner subscription links at the end of every post

Posted by David Whitehouse

I’ve had a lot of visitors for my site with the keyphrase “feedburner at the end of every post” so I thought I best write a guide on how to do it.

Firstly I want to make it clear that I am using Wordpress, if you are not using Wordpress then I suggest you do so asap.

Once you have Wordpress setup I suggest you install the Add Post Footer Plugin

Once you have this simply add some code in the plugin options and hey presto, you have a call to action to subscribe to your blog at the end of every post!

Feedburner – the answer to my email marketing dreams!

Posted by David Whitehouse

For those of you who know me, you will know that I’ve had a health problem that has prevented me using the net as much as I like over the years – so you’ll understand. For the rest of you, please bare with me if I regurgitate old stuff/ideas – I’m still playing catchup!

I’ve recently discovered the power of Feedburner after seeing that Seth Godin uses a similar service called FeedBlitz. so I thought, if it’s good enough for Seth, it’s good enough for me :)

Anyways, it’s great, I’ve been harping on at Anthony Shapley all week about it. It’s a great way to “save” all those visitors who visit your blog and then bugger off. Blogs have the worst bounce rate of any other type of website, because people tend to be interested in just one post, so it is important to keep them coming back via a feed subscription or an email subscription. It is probably best in encouraging everyone to sign up to Feedburner at the end of every post – with a call to action (I guess I best put this on my list of things to do now I said that)!

You can see on my sidebar that I have my feed link (as per standard) but I’ve also added receive blog updates by email. Now I much prefer this way of receiving blog posts – mainly because I tried Google Reader once and I hated it, plus I can’t be bothered to keep checking back.

Anyways, if you want to follow my blog via feedburner you can do so by clicking here.