Setting up MySpace Campaigns, Part 2
by Brad ParentIntroduction
I have been discussing branding yourself as it relates to campaigns on MySpace and other social networks, and in the first article I discussed setting up your MySpace profile to tell your story and to intrigue the reader to the point where they want to know more about you. The desired outcome is that they eventually, if not immediately, click through to your website. In this article I will discuss setting up a site that will further your objectives in building an intelligent relationship with them, which is, after all the most important outcome of the approach I am describing.
Your Website
One of the most important things to consider in setting up your site is this: you must have your own domain, and it must be either your name or a part of your name that is uniquely recognizable. In this day and age, it is so inexpensive to buy a domain that there really is no excuse not to own YourName.com or the like. The important part about this is that it sets you apart as someone who is serious about online business and is committed as well as established. The benefits of having a site hosted privately with your own domain are actually numerous; it allows you complete control over your content and in most cases gives you valuable tools for analyzing your traffic. My site at http://www.bradparent.com/ is hosted with a company called 1&1 Internet, who have given me ease of use for a very reasonable price. I have bought and hosted several domains with them and now have a Business Package which gives me all of the web space I will ever need and lots and lots of other cool features. You can find them at http://www.1and1.com/?k_id=6794579 .
The content of your home page should not refer to your primary business, but should be a discussion of your objectives and/or values, telling your story in a little more depth than your MySpace profile. This is more or less a good place to discuss your business philosophy or some other ideas that make you stand out from the crowd. I suppose the real thing I'm driving at here is that this is a good place to really show the things you have a passion for, without directly naming or advertising your business. It's a good idea to refer to your business indirectly, however, and provide a link or some other way for people to find out exactly what that is. That way you haven't hit them over the head with it, but you've gotten them interested in what you're all about and what is working for you. Don't be afraid to brag about your successes a little, people want to associate with those who are experiencing success.
It's also a good idea to incorporate a lead capture page into your site with a set of, dare I say it, autoresponder letters for follow up. This should be along the lines of having someone be able to subscribe to your newsletter, where they can get valuable information. If you don't have or don't care for autoresponders, I really wouldn't blame you, but providing a little contact form so you can capture information and follow up with them personally is really an even better idea. Autoresponders can work well to warm up people who are half interested, but only if you have some really carefully written letters. It's really not worth it to try to use just any old advertising copy for your letters, because people are so familiar with this approach that they won't pay any attention to them. Rather, write your own letters, and make sure you write them as though you are talking directly to your reader. You can certainly discuss features and benefits of what you have to offer, after all, that is the point, but don't make it sound like a canned "sales pitch" with a lot of repetition. It's more important to look at your letters as a way of contributing something of value to their life, in other words, you are empowering them to take action with communication based on THEIR needs and not your own. I prefer to have my capture form on a separate page with a little discussion of what they will get, and to have a kind of unobtrusive suggestion referring to that and linking to it on my home page.
Probably the next best thing you can do for your site beyond all of this is to provide as many other pages with relevant content that you can or resources that will attract people to do business with you; training and information resources primarily. One reason is that search engine optimization depends a great deal on relevance and what is known as keyword weight, in other words how well your keywords relate to the topic of your content. Not only that, but everybody loves to run across information that's going to help them upgrade what they are doing on the web, especially content that will give them Skills they don't already have or insider information that they haven't seen before. One of the best examples I've run across of this is some intelligent videos on someone's site teaching MySpace search techniques. A simple how-to video made with a tool like Camtasia can really go a long way towards showing someone what you know and can teach. As one of my mentors always says, "True residual income on the Internet depends not on how many people you can recruit, but how many people you can train."
These are just a few suggestions to get you thinking about how you could build YourName.com to draw visitors even further into a relationship with you without advertising to them. People like to do things of their own volition, and are attracted to those who have something they are interested in. So if you take the approach I am suggesting, you will begin to pique the interest of like-minded individuals, who will be more likely to want to do business with you because you aren't pushing something on them. People do business for one of two reasons, either you have a solution for a problem they have (pain), or because they like you and enjoy doing business with you (pleasure). Their desire to do business with you is relative to the intensity of either of these two emotions, and to capture them on both fronts is the most desirable thing, so you want to do what you can to keep these emotions in mind when you create the content of your site.
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Created on Dec 31st 1969 18:00. Viewed 0 times.
Thanks BRAD for sharing and showing how to do it in the right way.
Mar 1st 2008 02:01