When I launched 299 Steps to Website Heaven, I chose to release a tip per day in the run up to the launch of the book, and indeed afterwards, in order to create discussion and sales. It worked (thankfully!) and the ebook sold beyond my expectations.

This year I launched Tweetmentor, a day by day email course aimed at helping you to make the most of Twitter. I priced it at £50, with a prelaunch offer of £20 – so far, so dull

After a while, I started running Friday offers – so one Friday I’d offer it for a tenner, the next I’d pick a random figure out of the air (26 people bought it for 13.o9!), the next I’d let people pay what they thought it was worth.

And then people started tweeting about how helpful they’d found it, how much they liked it, and started recommeding it to others.

So I took what I consider to be a bit of a bold move and decided that for the whole of summer, people can pay what they think it is worth.

That’s right – there’s no fixed fee, people can pay as little as £1 or as much as they like, via the Paypal ‘donate’ system.

Some people said I was mad (I probably am, as it happens, but for far crazier reasons than this!) and that ‘everyone would pay £1′.

Do you know what happened? Over 500 people have bought Tweetmentor. And guess how many have paid £1?

4. (edited) 6

That’s right – 4.(edited) 6 And of those 4 (edited) 6, one came back on the 5th day and donated more as it had ‘proved it’s worth in the first few days’.

On average people pay around £18 – some more, some less. Everyone is treated the same, no matter how much they pay, and I’m on the end of an email for any queries.

Did my ‘gamble’ work? Yes, I think it did – I’m happy with it, people say nice things about Tweetmentor, and people’s worst fears of everyone paying the minimum haven’t materialised.

I like the fact that I’ve used something a little different to promote it, and it encourages people to tell others about it, which is great!

The lesson to be learned here? Think differently and take a chance – you don’t HAVE to use the same channels to market things, or the same ‘incentives’ that others use. Sometimes being a bit different pays off

Drop me a line on Twitter, or comment below, if you’ve taken a marketing gamble that’s paid off.

As anyone who knows me is aware, I’m a MASSIVE fan of using Twitter for Business, and it’s good to see people thinking and talking about it, whether they agree with me or not

It’s easy to forget, with everyone jumping on the bandwagon, that Social Media has been around a while, and it’s not as complicated as it may seem. Not only that, but you don’t necessarily need someone else to do it for you – the tools and help are there for you to do it yourself; and the great thing about Social Media Marketing is that it’s trackable and measurable pretty much immediately, allowing you to see what is and isn’t working, and adjust accordingly.

So, without further ado, here is a quick guide to three of the aspects of Social Media you might be hearing about, with links to places that will help you to ‘do it yourself’ , and details of how we can help you if you need it.

Twitter

Let’s get this one out of the way first – it’s everywhere

What is it?
A ‘Microblogging’ site that alows you to tell the world (or your followers) ‘what you are doing’ in 140 characters or less. Allows you to interact with clients and potential clients, and push your message out to people who choose to folow you, thus reaching a new audience.

Can I do it on my own?
Without a doubt, yes – it costs nothing to sign up to Twitter, and you can be up and running in less than 5 minutes.

Pros?
It’s quick and easy, followers tend to be loyal and pass on (or ‘retweet’) things they like, great for getting traffic to a site or bog

Cons?
Easy to get wrong, time consuming if you let it be, building up ‘followers’ isn’t always easy

Links to look at:

• 10 Irritating Mistakes That People Make With Twitter
• Twitter Checklist for Businesses
• Twitter is easier with Tweetdeck
• What is Twitter? In Plain English

Can you help me?
Yes, if you want to run your Twitter account yourself, then consider our Tweetmentor program, a daily email to help you make the most of Twitter – our current promotion means you can pay as much or as little as you want to sign up.

If you want someone to run your whole Twitter promotion and account for you, then we offer this service too, from £150 per month – contact nikki@nikkipilkington.com for more info.

–oOo–

Article Marketing / Blogging

You can’t fail to have noticed the amount of people talking about blogging and article marketing recently, and that’s because it’s a great way to promote yourself.

What is it?
By writing and distributing articles and bog posts on your area of expertise, you become synonymous with your area of expertise, and gain credibility and referrals.

Can I do it myself?
Absolutely! If you are able to write convincingly on your area of expertise, then setting up a blog and writing regularly costs nothing but your time. Similarly, most article websites charge nothing to list your article, which links back to your website.

Pros:
Costs nothing but time, develops brand and credibility, sets you out as ‘the expert’

Cons:
Can take time, you may not like / be good at writing, ideas hard to come by at times and needs regular upkeep

Links to check out:

• Wordpress.org – set up a blog for no cost
• Become an Expert
• Top 10 Tips To Make Article Marketing Work For You
• Ezine Articles – a great place to submit articles
• What is Article Marketing?

Can you help me?
Yes, we can help in many ways, whether you need a bespoke blog site setting up and / or managing, or just article writing and submissions. See our Article Marketing Packages for more info, and ask about our Blogger Specials.

–oOo–

Facebook

Once seen as a place only for teenagers, this site has come into it’s own in the last 2 years as a great place to promote your products and services.

What is it?
Facebook is a social networking site that allows businesses to connect with customers and potential clients through the use of fan pages, business pages, groups and more.

Can I do it myself?
Yes! It’s free to open up an account, either as a person or as a business, and you can set up fan pages, groups and blog pages without paying too.

Pros:
Huge potential client base, easy to manage / update, for some people easier than updating their own website!

Cons:
Can be time consuming, easy to miss out on opportunities, needs to be ‘kept alive’

Links to check out:

• Facebook
• Creating a Facebook fan page for your business
• Promoting your business on Facebook
• How to promote your business on Facebook
• Nikki Pilkington on Facebook (let’s connect!)

Can you help me?
Yes, we have set up many Facebook pages, groups, fan pages and ad campaigns for clients, and can help you to get the most out of Facebook for your business. Whwther you just need setup and then left to run it yourself, or you need complete management, we can help – drop us an email if you want to know more.

–oOo–

So there you have it, just 3 aspects of Social Media Marketing that you can try yourself, and have up and running in less time than it took you to read this newsletter!

Hopefully this has taken a little of the mystery out of SMM, and given you a few ideas. As always, if we can help, please let us know.

Next time we’ll cover Online Business Networking, talk about Blogging in more detail, and touch on the use of multimedia in promoting your business.

Until then, thanks for reading

All the best

Nikki Pilkington
NikkiPilkington.com

http://www.nikkipilkington.com
nikki@nikkipilkington.com

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/NikkiPilkington
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/nikkipilkington
Skype: nikkipilkington
MSN: nikkipilkington@hotmail.com
ICQ: 9330127

Not sure how it can help your business?

Wondering if you’re doing it ‘right’?

Why not register for this live webchat with TweetMentor creator and Social Media Marketing professional Nikki Pilkington from NikkiPilkington.com?

The event is a live webchat, where you can put your questions to Nikki and have them answered in real time. Simply register to be reminded, or visit the live webchat page on Thursday May 7th 2009 at 1.00pm GMT!

Someone asked me the other day how I became a Social Media Marketing Expert, and when I’d stopped laughing, I told them that I didn’t class myself as an expert as such; all I do is take common sense marketing techniques and transfer them to the Social Media arena. Social Media Marketing as we know it is so new that there really aren’t as many experts out there as you would think.

Of course, there are people who have done well at it, both for themselves and/ or their clients, and there are people that are seen as ‘gurus’ but let’s be honest here, most small businesses are still trying to find their way through the ‘Web 2.0′ maze.

It’s a lot of trial and error in a lot of cases – but the problem with that is that the error is being done very publicly. The GOOD thing about that is that those still feeling their way gently in Social Media can use the public mistakes to learn.

iMedia has published a great post today on 3 social media nightmares

The post focuses on the following:

• A blogger who caused an ethical uproar
• How one man’s tweet became his agency’s nightmare
• What happened when traditional journalism and new media collide

It’s a great read, and if it helps you to avoid some pitfalls and think more about your ’strategy’ then all the better!

If they’ve spoken to someone like me, they’ll have probably looked at my Twitter page, realised how confusing it looks and gone away pretty quickly.

“I don’t get it” they say … “It’s all messy” they say…. “It makes no sense” they say – and do you know what? They’re right!

I don’t understand how anyone manages to cope with Twitter – especially if they ‘follow’ more than a handful of people.

But luckily for them (and for me!) there are various bits of kit out there that will help you make some sense of Twitter. Twitterfox, Twhirl and many others.

My tool of choice is Tweetdeck. I especially like the fact that they’re on Twitter themselves, and they listen to criticism as well as praise, and take feedback from their userbase.

Recently Thomas Power of Ecademy.com asked me how I use Tweetdeck, and I’d like to share with you the answer I gave him. Hopefully it will help you to understand how much easier Twitter can be, how little time it needs to take, and how it can help business, social and research alike.

I use it in the same way I guess many people do – it allows me to put people into different groups / columns – so for example some people I follow for social reasons, some are industry experts and some are in a kind of ‘holding’ column which is people that look interesting but I haven’t decided whether to carry on following them yet. Then there’s the column that refreshes every so often and has a search for my name in it to see if people are talking about me

I have a column for a Tweetake.com search too – the Twitter backup service I own along with @alfaguru

A DM column makes sure that I don’t miss a DM – I like the fact that Twitter emails me my DMs, but it’s a pain that I can’t reply to them by replying to the email.

From Tweetdeck I can shorten a URL via various services, post a 12 second video (although I never do) and post pictures via Twitpics.

The Twitscoop button allows me to see trends.

Tweetdeck basically allows me to organise my Twitter ‘life’ – I think the reason that a lot of people don’t ‘get’ Twitter is because they’re trying to make it work for them by only using the website – if you follow people who Tweet a lot then that’s quite difficult. (Not everyone grew up with IRC and non threaded chat rooms!)

So that’s how I use Tweetdeck – if you want to know more about Tweetdeck, there is a great video here — How to use Tweetdeck

And here are some other bits I’ve written about Twitter:

• Who says Twitter is no good for business?
• Getting business on Twitter takes time, dedication and discipline?
• Making sense of Twitter chatter

Follow me on Twitter – Nikki Pilkington on Twitter

Nikki Pilkington

|

The songwriter’s website is here.

Lyrics:

You’re no one if you’re not on Twitter
And if you aren’t there already you’ve missed it
If you haven’t been bookmarked, retweeted and blogged
You might as well not have existed

In the old days it was all about achievements
Collecting all your trophies in a shrine
Then everybody came across the internet
And suddenly you had to be online

A home page was all you really needed
To seem like a success but not a geek
As long as you updated semi-annually
And checked your email once or twice a week

You’re no one if you’re not on Twitter…

Technology was moving rather quickly
And the next thing you needed was a blog
With intimate and detailed press releases
And now and then a photo of your dog

More recently the students brought us Facebook
And everybody has a hundred friends
The parties in the photos look amazing
They’re not so great but everyone pretends

You’re no one if you’re not on Twitter…

Now you need to publish every movement
And every single thought to cross your mind
I’m told the Twitterverse is full of rubbish
But most of us are actually quite refined

We validate each other’s insecurities
And brag about the gadgets that we’ve bought
We laugh out loud at every hint of jolliness
And try to self-promote without being caught

You’re no one if you’re not on Twitter…

Nikki Pilkington

| Perfect Networker

For a long time I used Google Analytics to provide webstats for me and for my clients – and it worked. Great stats, pretty graphs, nice figures – everything I needed.The problem I had was that I couldn’t get real time stats – I had to wait until the next day, by which time in some cases it was too late to react to surges in traffic.

I needed something that showed me what my visitors were doing and where they were coming from NOW, not yesterday!

And then I found GetClicky.

As they say about themselves:

Clicky is a web analyzer that works great with any web site, even Ajax and Flash sites. It was originally targeted towards smaller web sites and blogs because it tracks a high level of detail on every visitor, and these types of sites find this information very interesting.

It’s the high level of detail, combined with the fact that I can see what visitors are doing RIGHT NOW that makes GetClicky the perfect stats tool for me.

So what do you get?

The Dashboard:

The dashboard is an overview of the traffic to your site – telling you how mny visitors you’ve had (and showing you trends in a nifty little graph), how many actions those vistors have taken (eg where have they gone in your site), where your visitors have come from, what search phrases they have used and which pages they have visited.As an overview of your traffic, it’s very useful, but it’s in the nitty gritty that getClicky excels, and that’s what’s more exciting to me.

Visitors

The Visitors tab gives you a list of all your recent visitors, and tells you where they came to your site from.You’ll know what time they visited, what their IP address is, how many actions they took on your site, and if the referrer was a search engine, what search phrases they used.

This can be filtered in a number of ways and is very useful information.

Actions

I love the Actions tab as it shows me what each and every visitor has doen on my sites. I can see that one visitor has come to the site from an article that was Stumbled on Stumbleupon, and has not only read that article, but has clicked on the links in it to go to external sites, returned to my site and read some more articles, and even whether they have clicked on an email link to email me. By the time I receive the email I probably already know who they are and what they’ve been looking at and can tailor my reply accordingly – how cool is THAT?

Content

The content tab shows me which pages of my site are being visited, which are the entrance pages, exit pages, which of my files are being downloaded (in my main site, www.nikkipilkington.com, I have PDF versions of my internet marketing articles – this view tells me how many downloads they get every day) and more.

Links

Like most other traffic stats, this tells me where my visitors are coming from. But unlike most other traffic stats, it also shows me which links a visitor is clicking on to LEAVE my site.

This is great – I know whether links in my articles are being visited, recommendations are being followed, links to other sites I own are being clicked – even down to whether someoneclicks on an email link. I can also track visitors that leave to read something I have recommended and then come back! This to me is vital information and one of my favourite GetClicky features.

Searches

The searches tab shows me the latest search phrases I am being fond for on search engines – it’s always interesting to see the searches that bring people to my various sites – intended and unintentional

Spy

This is my favourite GetClicky tab of all.

I can see, in REAL TIME, visitors on my site. I can see which pages they are clicking on, which files they are downloading, external links they are following, and more.

It allows me to react to visitors almost instantly – if I can see that lots of people are on Using Twitter for Business part one on my Business on twitter site, I can quickly amend the page to add a link to other more recent articles I may have written, in order to drive traffic there. If I see that lots of people are clicking on an external link to someone else’s blog, I can make sure I let the blog writer know, and investigate any synergy we may have to exploit the large amounts of traffic.

The spy tab has a multitude of uses – but I warn you, it’s very addictive

All in all I think GetClicky is as close to perfect as a real time web stats tool can get.

Pricing?

There is a free service, which doesn’t include the Spy tab, and if you sign up now you’ll get a free 21 day trial of the Premium service, which is what I use. It’s only $60 for the year and you can pay monthly – it’s well worth the investment to have your traffic stats NOW instead of tomorrow.

So, why not given it a go? Sign up now at Get Clicky and let me know how you get on!

50 Ways Marketers Can use Social Media to Improve Their Marketing

1. Add social bookmark links to your most important web pages and/or blog posts to improve sharing.
2. Build blogs and teach conversational marketing and business relationship building techniques.
3. For every video project purchased, ensure there’s an embeddable web version for improved sharing.
4. Learn how tagging and other metadata improve your ability to search and measure the spread of information.
5. Create informational podcasts about a product’s overall space, not just the product.
6. Build community platforms around real communities of shared interest.
7. Help companies participate in existing social networks, and build relationships on their turf.
8. Check out Twitter as a way to show a company’s personality. (Don’t fabricate this).
9. Couple your email newsletter content with additional website content on a blog for improved commenting.
10. Build sentiment measurements, and listen to the larger web for how people are talking about your customer.

Read more on Chris Brogan’s blog –>

To create your own pre-populated tweet link just format a link as follows:

http://twitter.com/home?status=Putyourmessagehere

Like this – tell people about 299 Steps to Website Heaven being FREE for one day by clicking this Twitter link