Under My Wing
Since our inception as a company 1986 and since inetUSA began in 1997, we have always taken great pride in the work we have done FOR our customers. Our flagship product, the One Click Website, has always been focused on creating and enhancing the tools that enable YOU to more easily do the work of developing and maintaining your website instead of DOING IT FOR YOU. Of course, we're very proud of what we have accomplished in the creation of those tools and we continue to work diligently to improve them every day. However, we are also well aware that many of our customers require significant hands-on assistance to create a website that is not only unique, but one that is also professional and delivers the performance that is so vital in today’s highly competitive world. We also know that all too often, if they don't receive this assistance at some point in their website ownership experience, they will simply accept what they have and progress will cease.
Now, as you can see from the color of the hair that I have left in the picture above, I am not a "Johnny-Come-Lately" to this business. In fact, I'm probably one those people who might be called a pioneer since I've been in the computer business - writing software; assembling and selling computers; selling and managing sales teams in technology companies since 1977. Also, since 1991, I have been the owner and proprietor of a significant family of companies - one of which is inetUSA. That's almost 35 years of working hard (and smart) to stay in front of the rising tides of technology.
We have come to the conclusion that it's time we did this differently and instead of just trying to enable you to do it yourself, we need to do some (most ... all ???) of it for you. That's what this program's all about - doing what's necessary as part of your marketing efforts so that you can focus on what you do best - and it's likely that's NOT become a web wizard.
Social Networking is HOT!
Lately it's gotten even more challenging to keep up because of the all the "Social Networking" Buzz and the requirements for playing in that arena. Of course it even heated up more with the release of the movie of the same name about the creation of (or ripping off of – depending on who you believe) Facebook. Social media is simply SMOKING!Beware of the NuRus
Speaking of being ripped off, the rise of social media has given birth to a truly stunning array of ripoff artists. These are the same people that last month were guaranteeing you first page listings on Google and hundreds of thousands of email recipients for all your "offers". Now these "Instant Gurus" (or NuRus as my friend Dennis Quattlebaum calls them) are guaranteeing you hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers and Facebook friends and instant online success. Yeah ... RIGHT!Even if they actually do deliver a few new followers and friends, doing so via shortcut methods will only fill your lists with wasted entries since none of these new additions are likely to be any value whatsoever to your endeavors. Often, many of them aren't even located in your own country - not very helpful if you're seeking to grow your local business.
There is a special survey at the end of this page that could be your gateway into acceptance into a new group (or flight) as we call them as part of "Under My Wing". This is a unique "done for you" program that literally handles everything necessary for you to prepare your online world for success.
This is not some big hype sales letter - I simply don't beieve in doing that. But, if you'll read it to the end, you can complete the simple survey to see if you qualify to participate.
Still A Do-It-Yourselfer?
OK, well i that's the case, here’s a few tips about implementing a Social Media strategy using this very current “art form”.The biggest challenge in any social network marketing strategy is that social media is, by definition, always growing, changing and evolving. It is redefined every day by the content posted online by the people who use key social media outlets as a part of their ongoing communication strategy.
Some of these techniques are pretty obvious and basically just simple common sense. They will probably continue to be applicable as long as social media is popular and that’s likely to be a long time.
Join In And Add To The Dialog
Start as a spectator and then become a friendly, “no-agenda” participant in the conversation. Offer observations and opinions as a “member” of the masses. Look around and find people who are involved in the community of interest you are looking to serve and market to. Follow the leaders and other members of this group on Twitter and ask them to be your friend on Facebook.Important Note: Don’t annoy the “big players” about following you on Twitter or posting to your wall on Facebook. They won’t do so until you rise from the muck and become either VERY interesting or in some way their peer.
Success in social media requires that you be crystal clear on specifically what message or messages you want to use social networking to deliver. This decision should be based on your products or services and (more importantly) on what problems you can solve for those who see your messages and interact with you. Once you’re clear on your objectives, your goal should be to go where the people you want to reach hang out and get into the game.
Hot Tip #1: A couple of great tools to use for Twitter to help you find and interact with your target market are http://www.wefollow.com and http://search.twitter.com.
Start Out With Conversation - Not Selling
You have to establish credibility before anything meaningful can occur in social media. One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to immediately start “barking” about your product or service as soon as you possibly can. That is like meeting someone for the very first time and saying, “Hello, my name is Billy Bob … let’s get married … immediately!” No one is likely to respond well to that. Most people use social media to build trusted relationships and interact over time.Of course, letting others know what's happening in your business is OK occasionally, but it needs to be part of the dialog, not the only thing you ever say. Think of social media like a conversation and treat it that way. Make sure your Tweets and Facebook updates frequently feature two-way conversations, not just “broadcasts” of your latest sales info. That will get you noticed and accepted as opposed to ignored and shunned.
Important Note: Retweeting (repeating a tweet of interest you’ve read elsewhere) is very flattering to the original “Tweeter” and is likely to get you a mention elsewhere.
Use Facebook Personal Profile and Business Pages … Together!
Your business definitely should have a Facebook page, but by its very nature, your business should not be commenting on other people’s profiles, writing on their walls or appearing on their pages as a posting entity.Think of it this way - how would you perceive a message that was posted by “Apex Food and Mining” versus an update from Bill Smith, Apex’s VP of Support on his Facebook page. You might assume that anything you say to Bill had some chance of eliciting some direct dialog as opposed to directing a useless rant towards some faceless company. The keyword is faceless in that situation. It’s called Facebook, not FaceLESSbook!
Your personal profile gives you an online “face” and allows you to interact directly with other “faces” far more easily. Remember, the true “one to many” magic that can occur when Facebook is used properly comes from that ability to interact. Just remember that you need to build rapport and a more personal relationship before trying to separate your ne friends from the content of their wallets.
Bait Your Hook In Multiple Streams
When you embrace social media as part of your overall marketing strategy, you have to learn to share your efforts “religiously”. Don’t keep your various sites a secret from each other and remember that cross promotion is critical. You want your Twitter followers to know about your BLOG and your Facebook friends to know about your Website. You also want your LinkedIn buddies to know about the article you just published and your email list to be aware of the press release you just issued.Hot Tip #2: One of the most basic ways of spreading the word is to add links to all your platforms and sites on your email “signature”. That way, every email you send is also a subtle advertisement for your various social media customer funnels.
Is It Really All Free? … Well, Not Exactly
While access to social networks is basically free, that does not mean there’s no cost to use them. In fact, using social networks requires you to part with your most valuable asset ... your time. Too often, the social network “gurus” fail to mention that doing all of this “free” social networking takes time – and lots of it.If you are the proverbial “one man band”, your most precious commodity is your time and if you spend a substantial portion of yours online posting to social media sites, your blog, writing articles, issuing press releases and sending emails, you will not be likely achieve the results you are seeking.
To make this work and still have lots of time to do your actual business, you need to work smarter. There are basically two options available to you. One is to have someone do it all for you for a fee and if you have some spare dollars around, that’s the best way to not use up your time. However, if you want to at least get started on your own, you need to use good tools to help.
One of the coolest tools I have seen to handle mass simultaneous updates to your networks and monitor your results is HootSuite. It’s all web-based and located at: http://www.hootsuite.com.
This product does many different things very well. You can use it to update lots of social networks at once, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Ping.FM and your Blog. You can also use it to pre-schedule your tweets, network status updates and it monitors your results, hits, visitors, mentions, etc. plus lots more. It also offers both an iPhone and Android mobile platform application, so you can do all this on the go.
Hot Tip #3: Hootsuite offers a free version or a 30 day trial of the $5.99 a month Pro version. Take the trial of the paid version. $5.99 a month is a staggering value when compared to the value of the time you’ll save. Also, try out a tool called Posterous that updates even more places and lets you wrap in Video, Audio and features a URL shortener all in one place. Visit http://www.posterous.com and it’s FREE! … and there’s an iPhone and an Android version.
Ask Permission To Speak To Them Directly
People generally don’t actually purchase from social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Your social media focus should be on bringing your followers, friend, etc. into your personal “community” and continuing to strengthen those bonds with good information, great conversations and interaction whenever possible.However, you still need to be able to “ask for the order” (whatever that means in your business) at some point. In order to do that best, your website (or websites) come into play and they need to do several things extremely well. The first is to showcase whatever you want people to know regarding whatever it is you are selling and to see that in the best possible manner. Add as much detail and information as you feel is appropriate and err on the side of over-communication.
Your website also needs to ask for personal contact information from your visitors so that you are able to speak with them directly via phone, Mail, FedEx, UPS and email. Finally, your web presence needs to add credibility to your social media efforts. It must be well done, crisp, pleasing to the eye and professionally delivered. This shows that you and your corporate “face” are substantial and real.
Measuring Success
Measuring specific results and the exact return on your investment of both time and money using social media is an inexact science. Since it’s often difficult to say that a specific part of your social media funnel is the one that delivered a customer, especially if you are aggressively cross-promoting, you have to look at the overall results in unique ways.
Some measurements can be via the social media networks themselves. How many new Facebook friends and Twitter followers did you add last week? How about Blog subscribers or members of your LinkedIn network? Growth in these “potential customer” counts represents another measurement of success.
Hot Tip #4: By using your website and keyword landing pages, you can see what social media platform is working best and for which messages. As an example, if you used http://www.yourwebsite.com/happy1 as the link you posted for your product or service in Facebook and http://www.yourwebsite.com/happy2 as your posted link via Twitter, then you could easily see, based on website traffic, which one delivered best. Each of these links could take your visitor seamlessly to the same ultimate page, but along the way, you can track which source they came from.
If You Don’t – “They” Will
Keep this in mind – regardless of who or what your target market is, rest assured that your competition is using social media to reach into it and that’s because it simply works. While you may not be able to tie immediate revenue to your social media efforts today, you are cultivating a social media garden that will yield an ever-increasing bounty over time … if (and only if) you diligently work the fields.While you are working smarter, not harder, just be mindful of the fact that it takes the passage of time, plus fertilizer, water and sunlight for the crop to mature. Most of us have an abundance of fertilizer so work on the other ingredients.
Unless you keep at it, it won’t work because being out of sight is truly being out of mind and that’s never been more accurate than it is today. Everyone is vying for your customers’ attention and if you stop doing so, someone else will almost immediately win their fleeting and fickle loyalty.
So ... that's a quick update on becoming a social butterfly. There's a lot to it all and if you're ready to invest the time and energy, the world is waiting. However, you may find that this great info represents just one more thing you don't have timne to deal with.?
Introducing "Under My Wing"
Over the years, our awesome tech support team has worked tirelessly with customers individually to help with certain aspects of their websites and pomotional tasks, patiently explaining how to accomplish necessary tasks. We’ve also DONE SOME OF THE WORK for our customers via our MANAGED CARE program, but most of what we have done has still been to more to support and augment the efforts of our customers as opposed to creating a completely DONE FOR YOU program.Even though our past efforts have always helped our customers achieve good results, I know that many of you simply don't have the time nor the desire to add ANY web-mastering to your daily workload. Many of you are working at your daily job and your website is just “one more thing” you don’t have time to work on, let alone perfect.
Also, despite our best efforts, many of our customers still find the Internet in general and even our simplified arsenal of powerful One Click Website tools to be confusing and just too time consuming. Also, even though some people actually do have both the time and the skills to use the tools we provide, they wisely choose to focus their energies more appropriately on the aspects of their business that represent the best and most appropriate use of their time, such as selling, buying, building, cooking, fixing, writing, speaking, dancing, painting, wallpapering, racing, walking, planning parties, decorating or the thousands of other activities that inetUSA customers perform everyday to feed themselves and their loved ones.
Here's What Needs To Be Done
Just to make you aware of at least a few of the things that should be done consistently as part of a coordinated website development and support program, consider the list shown below. A mix of these tasks (and more) is necessary for optimum Internet performance:- Creating and then keeping the content of the website updated and fresh
- Tweaking the website technically to keep up with the lastest search engine techniques
- Writing compelling conversion copy
- Creating “squeeze pages” to build a list of prospects
- Editing and uploading images
- Working on auto-responders to auto-pilot your conversion funnel
- Planning, executing and monitoring your online marketing efforts and expenditures
- Making major and minor cosmetic changes
- Responding to contact emails
- Building a social network with FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare & Others
- Posting to your Blog or Blogs
- Creating newsletters and Articles
Like most of our customers, you are probably keenly aware that using the Internet effectively is a very critical part of the marketing efforts of some of your most successful competitors. These competitors continue to improve their online presence, while your own efforts (or lack thereof) may be continuing to languish in relative obscurity. Your website may even look pretty, but more often than not, it simply isn’t delivering the stellar performance of which it’s capable.
Well … I am really tired of continuing to watch you suffer like this, so I decided to do something about it. That’s what this program, "Under My Wing" is all about – DOING IT ALL FOR YOU. It’s actually a rather old-fashioned approach to the latest and greatest in technology implementation programs. It works like this:
- Take a few moments to complete the questionnaire below. Less than a minute ought to take care of it.
- Once I personally have read through your responses, I will call you to further discuss your objectives and an immediate implementation program that we will need to create to achieve these results.
- Following that call, assuming we come to a mutual agreement regarding expectations and finances, I will assign the best and most appropriate of my talented WingMasters to personally assist me in meeting your objectives.
Note: I truly do mean that the Wingmaster will assist me, but rest assured that I will be committing a significant portion of my personal time to your efforts and be directly involved at every critical decision and implementation point. Just be aware that there is only one of me and to make a program like this work and still continue to execute my other considerable responsibilities, I have to leverage my time effectively.
- On our next call, the three of us will meet to finalize our plans and implementation schedules.
- From that date forward, you will receive a weekly report of our activities on your behalf as well as a progress report regarding the achievement of the objectives we agreed upon.
- Each week, I and/or my WingMaster will also be in direct contact with you just to stay on top of not only what you are doing, but to update you on any new matters we need to consider together.
I imagine you have lots of questions such as exactly what we will do; what does this program cover; what are the costs, etc. and I'll be happy to answer your questions, but not until you make at least the small time commitment to complete the questionnaire. The reason I am requiring this is simple. You are unique and your objectives are equally unique - therefore, this is not a "one size fits all" program. What we will design for you will be different than what we will do for anyone else. Just know this - there’s almost nothing we won’t (or can’t) do to make you successful online.
So, now it’s up to you. Just complete the questionnaire below. There’s no obligation whatsoever to proceed, but you’d be foolish not to find out what we could do for you … plus you’ll actually get to hear from me personally if you take the time to do so. What a treat, eh? :-)
Anyway ... regardless of any skepticism you may have, just invest a few moments of your time in your own future and answer these simple questions and I’ll get back to you within two business days.
Final Important Note: Be aware that since there's only one of me, I can only work with a small number of people who are really committed to succeeding online in each Under My Wing “Flight”. Therefore, time is of the essence and now is the time to complete the simple one minute, no-obligation questionnaire.
Let’s go soaring together!
Tim Yandell
Thank you for completing this first step.
