Mark Blomeley

If you’re anything like I was, then social media is something that you’re interested in investigating or using as a traffic source for your internet marketing. If that is the case you’ve probably done a bit of research into “how to” use this media, and you’re probably even coming across plenty of people who are attempting to utilise this media.

One aspect that is not addressed or studied by many people is the art of pre-selling, particularly in terms of social media. Instead a majority of people are over-selling, in other words, they are just coming smack bang at you with their message, their opportunity, product or service and if you’re anything like me then you’re over it big time!

Facebook groups are becoming nothing more than a chain of posts for different opportunities, programs and products and status updates are becoming nothing more than a way to scream your message. I’m not saying to never do this but more than anything you have to earn the right to do this and do it strategically.

The way you really grab someone’s attention isn’t by spamming your message out there it is in the pre-sell. As you’ve heard me say previously, (in fact I’m getting tired of saying it, LOL), is that people do business with people they know, like and trust. Pre-selling is setting up a process to enable your prospects to get to know you and to see you as the expert to go to and therefore purchase from.

It’s very important that you’re spending your time on pre-selling and not selling in social media. In other words you should not be promoting your business but you should be building relationships and within those relationships your primary goal should be to help people, not to prospect them.

It is easy to see how people go wrong, the problem is that people get in social media and simply go like a bull at a gate and sell, sell, sell. The issue there is that your not gaining credibility in fact you are actually gaining a bad reputation. Social media is about not only having a good presence but having the right reputation, because ultimately the better you build the reputation the more valuable you will be.

The science to social media is quite simple, talk to people, ask people questions and provide answers to problems that you find people are encountering. Your presence, value and results won’t be instantaneous; however your growth will be exponential. What do I mean? I mean that you can get some but very limited initial success from overselling on social media, however at the expense of your credibility.

If you concentrate on actually helping people and spending the time to provide value to your followers, you won’t have massive initial success, however the more value you provide and the more valuable you become your success won’t be double, it will increase exponentially.

Social media is really about investing time now, in building your reputation, value and one on one relationships so that you gain more and more credibility, so that the time you spend in the future is a lot less because everything you then do on social media gets exposure and is therefore worth more to you financially.

I have perhaps simplified this quite a bit and try to address quite a few concepts here but I hope that you understand there theme here. I’m more than happy to discuss and assist you more with this. If you want to chat about it feel free to leave a message on my blog. Additionally feel free to check out my 7 step sales system, which goes into this process in more detail.

Continue Reading

I just received a question and have gotten this question in the past as well, “How do I get more followers on social media”. To be honest it’s very, very easy to get followers/friends on any form of social media, that’s really the easy part, but I’ll explain that first, then I’ll talk about how you get their attention, because that is ultimately how you are going to monetize your list.

Getting More Followers

Really you should consider your social media accounts as extensions of your “list” at all times. As I said above it’s easy to grow your friend base but your friends need to be specific to your target market, not just a bunch of randoms put together to make you look like a massive friend base. Get rid of the ego, it’s not about how many you have but the quality, in other words the number of people that are listening to you.

Ultimately you can find people you want to market to by going to a leader or a reputable person’s profile within the industry, groups that are specific to the industry or fan pages of gurus of the industry and begin to add the people that are friends/followers/members of these people/groups. The probability of adding someone that is going to be within your target market in these circumstances is very high.

Don’t know who the gurus are? Get creative and start googling, start doing your research, find some blogs/forums etc and begin to submerge yourself within your chosen field and actually speaking and communicating to your target market.

Establishing Rapport with Your List

Recently I had a break from internet marketing to concentrate on building an offline business and I can honestly say I’m better for it. Why? Through the first year and a half of beginning internet marketing I spent A LOT of time studying, doing intensive courses however my own internet marketing had limited success. I’m the typical entrepreneur and believe that the sky is the limit and that’s the way I approached internet marketing.

The problem was that it’s VERY easy to make internet marketing more complicated than it really is.  I was running my internet business previously with 3 staff, 3 blogs and a whole lot of headaches. Now, I’ve taken it the Keep It Simple Stupid approach. That being I don’t care how many people are on my friends list (actually I unfriend people more so than I friend people these days), it’s more about the quality of relationships that I develop. In other words I actually don’t care about my own success as much but I care about the people that I speak with and actually helping them.

If I was writing this article 12 months ago it would have been to get it submitted to 27 different article directories so I could get some back links to my website. From my perspective now, that just isn’t sincere and it’s not about providing value to people who need it. The reason I write this now is because someone asked me a question and I wanted to provide value, and if one person is asking this question then there are likely many more that are thinking the same thing.

 Ok, so I’ve gone off on a bit of a tangent, but my point is that social media honestly isn’t a numbers game; it’s about being valuable to people and to potentially reaching more people with your value. Don’t approach internet marketing as a numbers game; approach it with a networking attitude so that you can potentially enrich the lives of others as you would in real life. Just remember these are REAL people you are speaking to online.   

If you can use the two strategies that I have shared with you today then you can’t help but be successful within social media. Be genuine, don’t spam, have fun and be positive and you’ll do well : ).

Suck at Sales and Marketing? Sign up for your Free 7 Step Sales System for Explosive Growth by filling out the form on the right of the page.

Continue Reading

Well, I’m sure you’ll agree that social media marketing is one of the key phrases been thrown around at the moment and there are many people out there that claim to be marketing through social media. The problem is that there are people that are awesome at using social media effectively, however unfortunately like everything else there are people that are using it the wrong way as well.

Whenever I’m using social media I like to ask myself is this how I would network in real life? Ultimately that’s all that social media is, its building relationships through networking, albeit it on a large scale.

For some reason this principle is often forgotten when it comes to building their business through social media. People often see thousands upon thousands of potential customers, JV partners and referers, which there are however they get all excited and started posting crap that no one cares about. Excuse my bluntness but if I don’t know you I’m not going to care about what company you’re with or what great product that you have to offer me. However if I know, like and trust you its a different story.

If you are going to commit to social media then guess what, you’re going to have to commit to spending the time to do it properly. You can easily choose a different traffic generation strategy that involves writing or spending money or making information. With social media it comes down to the fact that you have to spend your time cultivating relationships and providing value for people in your networks.

You can’t tell me that throwing your link into a facebook group is adding value. You need to get beyond the spam and start creating value and developing strong relationships. When you begin to do this and to help others as well you will begin to start to see success.

For more information on social media marketing and to get coached personally by me on how to set up your social media marketing campaigns go to http://www.markblomeley.com/kickstart.php.

Continue Reading