With all the social media activity available today, whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, your Blog or any of the many others, here are a few tips to keep them all running smoothly.

Construction – a plan

If you know where you want to be, what you are aiming for, your strategy for all your social media marketing can be formulated with this in mind. If you have no idea where you are heading or just what you are trying to achieve, all your efforts may well be in vain. You may well have opened up all the channels but wander around not knowing what to do next when all your work results in no interaction with others.

There are such a vast number of people using social media, it’s an incredible opportunity to reach a worldwide audience, bringing your service or product to them with ease and speed.

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Getting your message across to your clients past and present and communicating with prospective customers, email is still a relatively inexpensive and effective marketing tool. Requests for information can be answered swiftly, keeping all customers well informed about your products or services. Invitations to visit your website, advertise seminars, webinars, product launch and special events can all be sent via email.

You are not the only one using this form of communication and people’s Inboxes are full of emails all trying to do the same thing, gain your attention,make you open it, read it and take action. (Surveys show low open rates with a general decrease in the market but B2B rates being 10-20% higher)

To start a conversation,create brand awareness, educate or sell your business via your emails they first have to be opened. If your open rate is nil, your emails are not read then you are never going to be able to inform customers of how good your product/service is. Monitoring your email campaigns can give you useful feedback on open rates, so if there are problems they are highlighted and you can take action to rectify them. The various email / newsletter programs use differing ways to obtain these percentages, so it’s maybe a good idea to stay with one to get a clear picture.

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Entrepreneurs quickly jumped on to the fact that email is a fast and effective way of marketing a business. But we’ve all become tired of endless spam interruptions, newsletters and various forms of email communications. So you need to become more savvy with your email marketing before you even get started.

1. Be Human and be You: This might be the virtual world, but don’t distance yourself from your subscribers. People buy from people, as the saying goes. So a good email campaign is based on the same principles as any other sales and marketing drive. Study your audience and what appeals to them. What do they want to read about? What are their concerns and interests? How much time do they have to read and digest your message?
2. Check Your Data: have a close look at your customer relationship management (CRM) information, and any other relevant data. Make sure that what you are saying is relevant, timely and interesting to the market you are sending to. Are the people you are contacting really the ones you need to be targeting? Is email the most appropriate means of reaching them? Weed out old or inactive accounts from time to time, to stop wasting your efforts and be loved by anti-spam regulators.

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Database marketing is the gathering of specific information about your prospects or customers. The information stored in such system can then be used to market and advertise as well as to increase awareness about your products or services. The specific information you collect will depend upon the product or service you are selling. Basic information needs to contain contact details and purchase history.

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If you decided to start selling information products from your website you need to decide on how you are going to automate the delivery of purchases to your customers. Information products offer a good way of converting your knowledge and expertise into products that can be sold online and offline regardless of the amount of hours you work every day. If you are trying to implement the 4-hours-working-week concept – you know that’s something that you need to do as soon as possible. You can then use social media marketing to promote your products.

One option would be to integrate PayPal into your HTML/CSS website. It’s easy and cheap to do. Your payments will be securely processed by PayPal so you don’t need to worry about handling someone else’s card details. However the downside is that every time someone places an order for an ebook or a mp3 recording – you have to go online and send the customer the file or a link to download it. This will take time. And by no means the income, generated from such sales, can be called “passive”.

The other option is to use a shopping cart. Whichever system you are using at the moment to manage your website – WordPress, Joomla, HTML – there is a way to integrate a shopping cart solution. Some are free (like ZenCart), for some you need to pay a regular monthly free (like 1shoppingcart). However the system will handle the whole purchasing process on your behalf – from listing the products to sending a Thank You message.

The main benefits of a shopping cart over basic PayPal:

• Easier to update – you can add products & categories via an online control panel, image resizing is done for you, download links are automatically created for each product;
• Access it from anywhere – all you need is a web browser;
• Multiple payment methods already integrated – you may be able to use PayPal, Worldpay etc.;
• Automatic email notifications – you get notified of all new orders, your customers receive an automatic thank you message;
• Statistics available online, all in one place;
• You don’t need to have any technical knowledge of how to build a website;
• You can create discounts, multiple purchase offers, use affiliate schemes, send promotional emails to get customers to return and buy again;
• The purchase will get delivered automatically;
• You can create content pages to fully integrate the shopping cart into your site (or make your site as a shopping cart);
• The system will collate customers’ emails, so you can keep in touch and follow up;
• In most systems you can send a newsletter to your customers or integrate it with e-newsletter systems like Aweber, MailChimp or Constant Contact.

So very quickly you will be able to set up and manage your online store. All you need now is to finish off that e-book you were working on for a while.