I am worn out – but excited too! Tell you why in a moment, but first I have a handy gift for you.
It’s all very well being told that social marketing is a great way of getting your business seen – but where do you find these sites? Sure, everyone has heard of Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter and a few other well known sites. But there’s more to it than that – what about the more focused sites; the niche sites where your target audience hang out; the sites that may fit your business better?
Experts suggest using the search engines to find the sites you need – but the search results are not always as ‘clean’ as you’d like and a lot of time can be wasted looking through the results.
Well, I have found a possible solution for you because (time to get the violins out) whilst most people in the UK were relaxing, and maybe even sunning themselves, over the bank holiday weekend I was slaving over a hot computer (well, not that hot 
) gathering, editing, creating and collating the tools for the Spring Clean Your Marketing Toolbox that is due to launch next Tuesday 12th at 4 p.m. BST (3 p.m. GMT) (yep, I’ve set the date).
And whilst I was working my fingers to the bone (what? I’m laying this on a bit too thick? Oh – OK – but I have been working on this to 1 a.m. every day for the past week! 
)…
Get Your Social Marketing Directory…
Anyway, I discovered this handy PDF guide of social websites. It has a nice clean list of live links to
- 100 networking sites
- 151 bookmarking sites
- 150 video-sharing sites.
Phew! That’s a lot of websites that just might hold the key for your successful online business promoting activity. It’s also got some great links to free resources to help you get started.
Now I could have included it in the Social Marketing section of the toolbox, but then I thought you might like to have it sooner than that.
So you can get your copy at www.scymtoolbox.com by joining the exclusive pre-launch notification group. And – if you’ve already signed up – just pop the same name and email address in and you’ll be taken straight to the directory download page.
Have a good Friday and weekend – I’ll catch up with you next week. I’m off to do a bit more work on the toolbox (it’s great fun really).
~ Carol Bentley
In the blog post this morning I said I’d try to get the sneak preview; an extract from the live workshop that is part of the toolbox, ready for you this afternoon.
Well after a few technical hitches (isn’t it always the way?) it is finally done – you can take a peak at http://www.scymtoolbox.com
You are asked to subscribe to get access to the extracts and to any other pre-release bonuses I decide to give out.
If you’ve been following this blog you’ll know that my original Spring Clean Your Marketing Toolbox launch schedule has slipped a bit (best laid plans, eh?)
At the moment I’m aiming to reschedule the launch for either Friday 8th May or Tuesday 12th. It rather depends upon how quickly I can get the delivery media ready.
Enjoy your weekend, speak soon.
~ Carol Bentley
Yesterday I asked you – and my other readers – to take part in a poll on what sort of media to use for delivering info products.
I only gave two choices: CDs or USB flashdrive.
A few of the direct email replies I received suggested it would be more environmentally friendly – and probably easier for me – to offer either web downloads or online studying.
It is certainly a popular delivery mechanism with many online marketers, but it got me thinking – is it the way to go?
You see if you happen to be in an area that doesn’t have good broadband access; you have dial-up only or you have a limited bandwidth available then downloads or online studying may not be viable. I wouldn’t want to alienate anyone who has that limitation.
Plus – there’s that edge of anticipation when a package arrives; the excitement of opening it up; I know, I’m a kid at heart.. I love getting parcels, even when I know what the contents are
So I’m still pondering on what the best delivery method is – what do you think? Am I being an eco-devil by not going for downloads / online studying?
~ Carol Bentley
P.S. The poll has returned 89.09% in favour of the USB so far…
P.P.S. Re: the marketing toolbox, I’ve decided to include an audio recording (& 130-page workbook) of a 7-hour live workshop in which I went through the whole process of creating a sales letter. Actually the event was 7 hours but a lot of that time was spent writing – and there’s not much fun in ‘listening’ to people quietly working, is there? So the actual workshop audio content is about 3 hours.
I’m just pulling out some extracts from the event for you to have a listen to; if all goes to plan, it should be up by this afternoon – and that will be on a website. So if you have dial-up, I’ll say ‘sorry’ now.
At the end of yesterday’s post I mentioned the great little tool I found that is perfect for anyone who sends plain text emails. This is a great time saver and, initially, I was just going to include it in the Spring Clean Your Marketing Toolbox.
But then I decided it is so handy I didn’t want to wait for the toolbox to be ready (it’s coming along but checking everything is up to my high standards takes time ) and I didn’t want you to miss out if the rest of the toolbox is not right for you at the moment.
Let me explain why I like this little tool.
Many email marketing experts advise sending plain text emails. Although html emails look prettier they don’t always get through – a lot of people only accept plain text email – so where possible we are advised to have a plain text version as well.
If you use an autoresponder to send your marketing messages – such as Aweber – you may have the facility to set up both a plain text and html message.
Now, the problem with plain text is that email clients handle the text differently and in some cases can cause the lines to break up so they look ugly and even alter the sense of the message.
Aweber’s message set up screens offer a word wrap facility. Problem is, their word-wrapping is ignored by Outlook – and for all I know it may be ignored by other email clients. I’ve had my test messages come through where most of the lines break at 60 characters (the recommended line length) because I’ve put in manual line breaks and then you suddenly get a longer line appear, where my manual line break has been ignored.
This utility – I’ve dubbed Emails Made Easy – breaks the text up for you at a simple click of a button and, to my delight, the formatted text comes through OK on my Aweber test message.
This is what the screen looks like:
You can see how the text expands across the box. At the bottom you get stats of number of characters, words, sentences, lines and paragraphs.
After clicking on the Format button the text is formatted to the selected line length of 60 characters:
For me, it certainly beats the time consuming frustration of manually splitting the lines.
This is free to download and you can pass it on to anyone you think will find it useful.
Right click the link below and choose Save Target As or Save Link As
Emails Made Easy Download
The zip file is just over 1 Mbyte and contains a file called eme.exe. Extract the file and double-click it to install the utility on your system. It comes with an uninstall script if you decide you don’t want to use it any longer.
Lots more to come…
~ Carol Bentley
It’s tough on the high street for retailers at the moment. We’ve already seen the demise of many well known names, like Woolworths, as well as seeing numerous smaller shops being boarded up.
Now, I don’t profess to be a retail marketing expert, but I can’t help wondering if those shop owners were missing a few marketing opportunities.
So you can imagine how chuffed I was to have some of my suspicions confirmed when I met Danny Wrigglesworth at Jonathan Jay’s seminar earlier this month. Danny’s is a retail success story.
Danny owns a hairdressing salon in Farnham, Surrey – Remington-Harrow – which he opened on July 9th 2007.
And, in spite of the recession, he has bucked the apparent trend.
How?
His approach to marketing is alien to his profession. And it’s working – to the amazement of his accountant.
It all comes from experience. You see, Danny was a consultant to hairdressers before he started his salon. He helped many hairdressers turn their business around with his marketing savvy and he has used the same principles to build his own business.
One experience he shared reminded me of the Land’s End guarantee – they claim it was so good it was ‘banned in Germany’.
Rapport, communication and building relationships are the foundations to Danny’s success – all achievable using the techniques my Spring Clean Your Marketing Toolbox will contain when it is released shortly (see my previous post).
You can listen to Danny’s story (including the memory he shared) in the 14.5 minute MP3 recording below and, if you are in the Farnham area, pop in to say “Hello!” and mention you heard him on this blog. He’ll be delighted to meet you and I’m sure you’ll find him as charming as I did.
Click to play the MP3
~ Carol Bentley
P.S. Whilst gathering all the material for the toolbox I found a great little utility – ideal for anyone who creates a lot of email marketing messages.
Although it is a great tool to go with the Email Marketing advice in the toolbox, I decided I couldn’t wait to let you have this – even if you don’t go for the toolbox itself -so I’ll tell you more about it in tomorrow’s post when you can download it for free.
Just a quick post about a little utility I use called QckTwit. I started using it some time ago because it made adding a tweet direct from the desktop to Twitter extremely easy.
It sits on the Windows taskbar. A simple right click & selecting Show opens it up:
Then it stopped working – I kept getting (417) Expectation error – whatever that was!! So I stopped using it.
But, because I’m preparing the goodies for the Spring Clean Your Marketing Toolbox and this was an extremely handy little twitter tool, I decided to see if it had been sorted.
And it has (the picture above is the updated version). It is a free utility and you can get it at QckTwit
So now I’m back in business and I can start Twittering more seriously
In tomorrow’s post I’m sharing the business success story of someone I met recently and, refreshingly, it is not an internet business!
~ Carol Bentley
The Spring Clean Your Marketing survey is now closed – thank you if you took part.
My first question asked where you conduct your business and the answers highlighted the fact that although many business owners actively use the web – for research and keeping in touch – 39% reported they conduct their business solely off line.
Of the others 17% were purely online businesses. If you are one of the latter then the 80-page Social Marketing report (which will be a free download) and the material I’m currently preparing for the optional toolbox are specifically relevant for you.
If your business is mainly offline, then there is exciting potential for expanding your marketing reach in ways you may not have thought of.
The challenge we all face is finding out what those exciting possibilities are and, more importantly, how to exploit them to our greatest advantage.
That’s why I asked what you believe the Spring Clean Your Marketing Toolbox should contain. And – thanks to the feedback from people like you – I now know what I need to gather together for the toolbox.
Apart from the stalwarts of copywriting – for both on and off line marketing – I plan to give you insights to blogging, ezines and social marketing activities – like twittering – as well as other useful marketing know-how.
My intention is to help you freshen up your marketing approach and give you food for thought on marketing activities you may not have considered.
I’ll let you know when I expect to have more info about the toolbox content as soon as I’ve finalised what I’m going to cram in. The only thing is I may have to limit the number of toolboxes I release because I’m thinking of including some valuable 1-to-1 consultation time with me. If I do that then obviously I can only handle a finite number.
Want Advance Notice?
People who completed the survey were given the option to go on an advance notice list giving them a private version of the website 4 hours before it goes publicly live.
If you want to get on that favoured list then pop your name and email address in below. Once the toolbox is released and your notice is sent the list will be deleted – so you are not going to be inundated with messages afterwards.
~ Carol Bentley
Wedding planner: The recommendations you discussed here are really useful. It abso...
Samantha: That is kind of hard of a bargain when monetizing online. That wa...
Lynkez: Dear customer, to effect reliability and a sustainable flow we he...
Nancyshanice: handling your customers well is something very nice, because you ...
Carol Bentley: Hi Brian, (sorry for the delay in replying, your comment got bloc...
Brian Moseley: When I open your RSS feed it puts up a whole lot of strange chara...