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?

Winston Meets the Blender

Posted by David Whitehouse

I’m sorry to say that my demands were not met – I got a total of 10 extra followers on Twitter (well short of the 100 I asked for), so I’m afraid I had to put Winston in the blender.

I was hoping Winston would be immediately pulsed into a load of fluff – unfortunately it didn’t work out the way I hoped (hardly worth the money I spent on a liquidisor – but I suppose I could do with one anyways). So if your going to blend something in the future, I suggest not using a soft toy…

Don’t try this at home kids.

Follow me on Twitter or the teddy bear gets it

Posted by David Whitehouse

I’m not joking – I will blend my 2 year old niece’s teddy bear if I don’t get 100 more followers by the end of the week, Midnight GMT Friday 26th June 2009 (I currently have 65 followers at the time of writing).

So follow me on Twitter – or the teddy bear gets it.

The 5 Most Common Google Analytics Mistakes

Posted by David Whitehouse

Ok, so you lazy people out there, I know what your like, you just slap your Google Analytics code on the site and think that its done. Well your wrong, and your messing up valuable data right now! Here are the most common mistakes:

1. Failing to Exclude URL Query Parameters
Nobody ever seems to use this, its great though, it gets rid of all the crap out of the content reports. Every time a page loads with a query string (e.g. http://www.david-whitehouse.org/index.php?SirDickonTwitter=boring), Google Analytics treats it as a separate url to index.php. In order to prevent this, you simply put the variable name (e.g. ‘SirDickonTwitter’) in the handy little box (edit profile, edit main website profile information).

2. Failing to Setup Site Search
Again this is a similar problem to the one above. If you don’t state what your variable name is for the site search then url’s like: http://www.david-whitehouse.org/search.php?q=wanker and http://www.david-whitehouse.org/search.php?q=bagels will both be treated as separate content. Instead you just put ‘q’ in the site search query box and then get it to strip the url of parameters.

3. Goal Conversion Setup
I rarely see this one setup right, people often repeat the final step twice, as they don’t realise Google puts the final one in at the end. Most people don’t even bother setting this up, but the ones who do, tend to do it wrongly.

4. Ecommerce Script Setup
When your setting this up, you have to put your ecommerce code after your tracking code, or it won’t work. Most people just paste it in and adapt it, not realising they need the tracking script before hand and an if statement in their footer to prevent the tracking script showing there.

5. IP Exclusion Filters
If you are going to be working on a site, whether you are the developer/designer or the marketing agency, perhaps even the business owner – you need to be adding your ip address to the exclude filter on the profile (make sure you have an unfiltered profile as a backup though).

How to setup Twitter to promote your Wordpress blog

Posted by David Whitehouse

I’ve been looking into all the difference Twitter related plugins for Wordpress, all the different services starting up for Twitter and thinking about how you can promote yourself through Twitter. As a result of this I’ve come up with what I think is the perfect setup for promoting your Wordpress blog through Twitter. Basically, here is my setup:

1. I use Tweetmeme (the little icon top right of this post) to try and encourage to re-tweet my blog post.
2. I have TwitterUpdater, so that when I write a post and publish straight away, it announces it on my twitter feed.
3. When I do scheduled posts, TwitterUpdater won’t notify twitter, in order to do this you need to use TweetLater – which can also allow you to follow people who follow you, automatically.
4. I am using Twollow to follow other people, based on keywords.
5. I am also using TweetLater to keep an eye on keywords on Twitter, such as my name, domain name etc.

And that’s how you can maximise the amount of traffic you get from Twitter. If you have any more suggestions, please let me know. (P.S. This is a scheduled post – so it’s also a kind of a test to see if TweetLater and my Wordpress plugin can get it right. It might go horrible wrong because my Wordpress is an hour behind!)

Do you separate your social (network) life from work?

Posted by David Whitehouse

That title probably sounds a bit weird – let me explain.

I use Facebook for friends and Twitter mainly for professional contacts. I like to keep the two separate, which is why you won’t see a Facebook link on my website.

So am I missing out on untold amounts of targeted traffic? Or am I right in keeping the two separate? Facebook for social networking, Twitter/LinkedIn for professional networking?

Does anyone else do this, or is it just me?