A dear friend recently setup a shop on eBay to sell brass statues/idols – here. So that was a good trigger to think of some free ways to promote products using Social Media. Here goes – will love to get more thoughts:
- Setup a shop on eBay. Of course!
- Make sure the tagging for your products is appropriate. Think like a buyer. If you were to go on eBay looking for similar products what will be the search terms that you’ll type. What category will you look under?
- Setup a blog, preferably on your own domain. Keep posting information about your products there. It will serve as a catalog, and another channel for your shop. You could download the Wordpress API and deploy it on your domain in <20mins.
- Submit your blog (as created in Step 3) on blogging aggregation sites – like IndiBlogger.in.
- Setup communities for your shop on Facebook and Orkut. Send invitations to your communities to your friends on the respective sites. Don’t just setup the communities and sit idle. Keep posting offers. Make sure you post at regular frequency so that people can notice your offers on their walls.
- Create a twitter account. Make sure you tweet often. The tweets will be about your products, special offers etc.
- Syndicate your blog feed, communities feeds, twitter feed on your personal Facebook and Orkut profiles. Also make sure that the various social media assets you create are inter-linked. E.g., your blog should syndicate your Twitter, Facebook and Orkut feeds
- Add your blog address with a catchy tagline on your mail signatures – Gmail, and whatever other mail services you use
- Keep posting offers on your status messages – Facebook, Orkut, IMs (GTalk/Yahoo etc)
- Create a promotional electronic direct mailer (EDM) with links to your blog, facebook community, orkut community, twitter account (with options for people to ‘follow’ you or become ‘fans’) and send it to your friends. Request them to forward it to their friends.
- Try SMS campaign. Sites like Way2SMS.com and 160by2.com may come handy. Send the text messages to your friends/contacts initially. Remember, charity begins at home! There are agencies providing databases for SMS marketing – but remember this is an intrusive medium. So exercise caution.
- Create a video of your products with information on how to buy them. If appropriate, post videos on how to use the products. Post the video(s) on YouTube. Embed the video on your blog
Well these are some. I’m sure there are a zillion others. Will love to hear!
on Aug 27th, 2009 at 5:00 pm
I disagree on using Facebook friend feed to post offers – that is people’s personal space where the do not want to get hit by blatant sales pitches…..that type of behavior is the fastest way to get removed from someone’s Facebook feed.
Facebook is about relationships – create the realatiuonship on Facebook and then use that to drive people to your twitter or website where they offers are presented.
on Aug 27th, 2009 at 7:17 pm
@Mike – fair point
on Sep 12th, 2009 at 1:47 am
Lovely post! Dropping by…
p/s: We would like to invite all of you to join our blogging community which helps you to get more visitors to your blogs. It’s totally free and you get the chance to meet other celebrity bloggers. Visit us at IMCurtain
on Oct 28th, 2009 at 6:57 pm
Hi,
Hope you are doing well! This is Anamika Tiwari from Webneetech.com. At present we are interviewing entrepreneurs and now we are starting another section to feature (interview) bloggers and their blog on webneetech.com
We find your blog bit interesting and would like to feature your interview on our website.
I was not able to find any contact details of yours so using this comment box. Please let me know your email id or else contact us on i.webneetech@gmail.com, so that we can send you the questionnaire and feature you on webneetech.com Please visit http://www.webneetech.com to know more about us.
Regards,
Anamika
Webneetech.com