28 February 2010 ~ 0 Comments

The Art of Pre-selling: Selling vs Pre-selling

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.

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30 August 2009 ~ 1 Comment

What is social media marketing all about?

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.

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