I had to take a hiatus from blogging in order to finish the manuscript to my upcoming book “SHiFT! Harness The Trigger Events That TURN PROSPECTS INTO CUSTOMERS,” in time in for the publisher keep his May 15^th release date. Now that it’s finished let’s get back to the Top Seven Ways to Sell More by Using Social Media. Remember, the person with the most popular answer to my question at the bottom of this blog post wins $3,000 in Trigger Event Selling services. The #3 way to sell more by using social media is to harness word of mouth by using a content sharing tool like AddThis or ShareThis. The reason you want to use one of these tools is because your content is more likely to be shared when you give readers the convenience of sharing without having to leave your web site. The more convenient you make it for people to take action, right now, the more likely they are to, not get distracted by something else and, finish what they started doing. I started out using ShareThis but readers had to click on the button in order to activate it and my experience with e-Commerce in the late 90′s told me that requiring people to take just that one extra mouse click reduced the likelihood of action – The statistic was that you lose people at the rate of 50% for every click you force them to make. I moved to AddThis when the Trigger Event of noticing a competitor using something that did not require the initial mouse click caught my attention. I moved to AddThis right away and in my first week I had twice as many people use the AddThis functionality – via mouse over – than I had with ShareThis. About a week later I received an email from ShareThis validating my perceptions and my experience. The email said “After conducting extensive tests with select partners, the findings indicate that allowing the button to open on-hover increases sharing activity by 50% per page view compared to the current no-hover option” Once I started using AddThis I went through the process of customizing the button so the most important sharing options (email, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Digg, and Facebook) were shown on the left – in order of importance – putting the next most important ones (Favorites, WordPress, Delicious, Reddit, and PDF Online) on the right side, and customized the header. I selected the order based up on a report on how people share content and what Active Conversion (my marketing automation and sales optimization service provider) told me about which sites generated the most inbound traffic. The interesting thing is that a few weeks after I switched to Add This, ShareThis came out with the same functionality. But at that point I had already switched and had made the investment of customizing the AddThis button and I was no longer motivated to spend time on the problem. So this month’s question is what other sharing tools can be used, or how can they be used, to maximize social word of mouth? Win $3,000 worth of Trigger Event services by submitting either a great example of, or great idea on, how to use a word or mouth tool like AddThis or ShareThis to maximize the sharing of web site content. To win the $3,000 prize you must get the most votes for your answer. This month there is also a second prize of $1,500 to the person who gets the second most votes for their answer. Answers are submitted by commenting on this blog post. Answers are voted on by clicking on the button that appears at the end of each answer/comment. Winners are announced the last Tuesday of the month – February 23^rd – so voting ends at Midnight (MST) on Monday February 22^nd. Answers/comments need to be approved – to avoid spam – which typically takes just a few minutes. Contact me by phone (+1.403.874.2998), Skype (Craig.Elias), or this contact form, if you don’t see your comment approved within a few minutes of posting it. Use the AddThis button below to Tweet , Stumble!, Digg, and email your friends so you get the most votes, because the voting system I use does not allow you to vote for your own answers. Good luck & have an EVENTFUL week! Craig

In my last post The #6 Way to Sell More by Using Social Media I showed how you can sell more by using WordPress and FeedBlitz.

In that post I offered $1,500 worth of Trigger Event Selling services to the person who provided either the most popular example of ,or idea on, how to sell more by using WordPress or FeedBlitz.It appears that everyone was either stumped or too busy selling to provide an answer.

I’m going to up the ante by adding this months $1,500 to next months and give the person who gets the most votes for their answer to next month’s question $2,000 worth of services and the person who gets the second most votes $1,000 worth of my services.

Stay tuned as next week I announce the #5 Way to Sell More by Using Social Media.

In the mean time take a look at Andrew Sobel’s article called “Winning a New Client When There Is an Incumbent“. The article shows the 9 principles that can help guide you in trying to win business from a new client which already has strong, existing relationships with the competition. Guess what principle #1 one is… you guessed it, “Look for Trigger Events“.

Have an EVENTFUL week!

Craig

In last month’s post on the #7 Way to Sell More by Using Social Media I talked about the importance of validating that your social marketing efforts are reaching your primary target market.

Once that has been validated, you need to reach them within a week or so of experiencing a Trigger Event and entering the Window of Dissatisfaction.

So the #6 Way to Sell More by Using Social media is to reach your target market often enough that you either:

• Reach them a few days before they experience a Trigger Event, or
• Reach them a few days after they experience a Trigger Event

From a Trigger Event Selling perspective the best way, I have found, to do this is…

AND

Yes WordPress and FeedBlitz and here is why:

1. FeedBlitz automatically emails your subscribers a preview of the content from your newest post and allows you to include links to a number of previous posts – in case they missed or did not read some of your previous blog posts. E.g. The image at the top of this blog post comes directly from the content that I have configured FeedBlitz to deliver. I do this so someone who only reads every few email updates can see the titles of my last five blog posts. This way when a subscriber experiences a Trigger Event they now notice content that they would not previously have noticed.
2. WordPress makes it easy for readers to find the additional content on the same or similar topic that is now of interest to them. This is done by tagging and categorizing blog posts to create aggregated pages of blog posts on the same or similar topic. E.g. If you wanted to see the complete list of the top seven mistakes that sales people make you would find all seven blog posts by following either the generic tag “sales mistakes” or the specific category “top seven sales mistakes”.

Win $1,500 worth of Trigger Event services by submitting either a great example of, or great idea on, how to use WordPress and/or FeedBlitz to harness Trigger Events and turn prospects into customers. To win you must get the most votes for your answer.

Answers are submitted by commenting on this blog post. Answers are voted on by clicking on the button that appears at the end of each answer/comment and voting ends on Monday October 26^th.

Answers/Comments need to be approved – to avoid spam – which typically takes just a few minutes. Contact me by phone (+1.403.874.2998), Skype (Craig.Elias), or this contact form, if you don’t see your comment approved within a few minutes of posting it.

Tweet , Stumble!, Digg, and email your friends so you get the most votes, because the voting system I use does not allow you to vote for your own answers.

Call my cell phone (+1.403.874.2998), Skype me (Craig.Elias) or use this contact form if you have ANY questions.

Good Luck & have an EVENTFUL week!

Craig

P.S. If you know anyone who would like sales training or coaching but does not have the budget , tell them to get members of their sales team to submit ideas and then get votes for their submissions.