Getting Your Customers to Promote Your Business

One of the best ways to create buzz about your business is to get your customers to do it for you. There are many ways in which you can encourage this behavior from your loyal customers. First, provide excellent service and products to your current customers so that when you do encourage them to promote your business they will be proud to do so.

1. Have a Contest – Get your customers to make a video testimonial of why they love your business. Tell them that the person who gets the most votes on their video promotion will get something free from you that is designed only for your audience and current customers.

2. Give Referral Credit – Let your customers know that you want them to tell others about you by sending them encouragement to do so in the form of credits against the work you do for them.

3. Start an Affiliate Program – You don’t have to open affiliate programs to everyone; they can be members’ only affiliate programs. If you have exclusive deals only for your customers to promote you, they will be more likely to do so.

4. Ask for Referrals via LinkedIn – Don’t send out the generic request offered by LinkedIn to get referrals. Instead, take the time to send a special request to each person that you want to refer you.

5. Ask for Testimonials for Your Website – Within the first 30 to 45 days of doing business with a new customer, send them a form to put a testimonial on your website. If you use WordPress, there are great testimonial plugins that you can use to make this process simple for you and the client.

Testimonial plugin link - http://wordpress.org/plugins/testimonials-widget/

6. Ask for Feedback – When you send an invoice, that’s a great time to ask for feedback from your client. Freshbooks.com now offers this as a service automatically when you send an invoice to any client. If they send good feedback, tell them you’re accepting new clients or about your customer only affiliate program.

7. Celebrate – If someone has been a customer for a period of time, call them out on your blog about how awesome they are. You can even ask them to write the blog post for you by sending them a questionnaire to explain why they enjoy being your customer.

8. Social Media Sharing – Give customers the opportunity to share on social media what you’ve done for them or what you’ve sold to them. Amazon has a great system set up for this where, when you make a purchase, you’re given the opportunity to share your purchase with your friends.

Getting customers to promote your products and services for you is good old-fashioned word-of-mouth marketing. It’s the best marketing money can and cannot buy. As they say, birds of a feather flock together, so it’s more than likely that your customer knows other people who fit in with the demographics of your target audience. If they share your awesomeness with others, they’re likely to buy.

How to Boost your Website Traffic in Just One Hour a Day: 60 Ways

Even if all you have is one hour a day, you can do a lot to increase traffic to your website. The best way to get more traffic to your website quickly is to add more targeted content, promote that content, and keep repeating that.

Many things on this list will not even take you an hour. If you start at the top of the list and work your way down the list over a day or two, spending one hour each day, you can dramatically increase your website traffic.

1. Add “alt” tags to images on your website

2. Add a plugin like Inline Tweet Sharer
   Link - https://wordpress.org/plugins/inline-tweet-sharer/

3. Add an online forum

4. Add deep links to more content on blog posts

5. Add links to your website to all autoresponder series

6. Add one email to your autoresponder series

7. Add one resource to your website

8. Add to the FAQ on your website

9. Add Your blog to iTunes and Amazon

10. Answer comments on your blog

11. Ask for shares, tweets and likes

12. Build a sitemap

13. Comment on other people’s blog posts

14. Create and run a Facebook advertisement

15. Create a cheat sheet for your audience to use

16. Create a Gravatar account
    Link - https://en.gravatar.com/
 
17. Create a poll on Facebook

18. Create a SlideShow.net out of an old blog post

19. Create and send out a press release

20. Create your own blogging network

21. Curate other people’s content on a topic of interest

22. Curate someone else’s content surrounding one topic

23. Develop a blog tour

24. Ensure that your site is responsive

25. Highlight and organize old blog posts surrounding a particular topic

26. Host a teleseminar

27. Host a webinar

28. Improve META descriptions on your website

29. Interview a client or customer

30. Interview an important person in your niche

31. Join a syndication network

32. Offer a free eBook to your audience

33. Open up comments on your blog

34. Organize a targeted pin board on Pinterest

35. Participate in online forums

36. Personalize your 404 error page

37. Promote your content on social media

38. Publish your RSS feed

39. Send out a breaking news story

40. Send out a newsletter

41. Share influencers’ content with your audience

42. Share, tweet, like

43. Start a sponsored content feed on LinkedIn

44. Start an expert panel series

45. Submit a guest blog post for publication

46. Tie a holiday into your promotions

47. Transcribe interviews to text

48. Turn a fact-based data driven blog post into an infographic

49. Turn an old blog post into a short video

50. Update an old blog post with new information

51. Update any social media site profile

52. Update images on your website

53. Update your Facebook page profile

54. Update your Google Plus profile

55. Update your Pinterest profile

56. Update your profile on LinkedIn

57. Use Canva.com to grab a quote to share on social media

58. Use screenshots to make a how to guide

59. Write and publish a new blog post on your website

60. Write one page of your next book

When it comes down to it, you will need to promote and distribute all the content that you create in order to make the most of it. Getting more traffic to your website is as easy as increasing the amount of content that you produce, as well as the amount of promoting that you do for that content. Create, distribute, promote and repeat should be your mantra.

How to Turn Affiliates into Marketing Powerhouses

One of the very best ways to market online is to create a legion of loyal cheerleaders and fans, who at your command tell everyone they know about your products, services, sales, and information. Word-of-mouth marketing has always been the very best form of marketing and creates better and longer-term relationships with customers. Keeping customers long term saves money. Here's how to get affiliates to help you with your marketing.

* Use Well-Known Affiliate Tracking Software - If you use unknown affiliate management software, you may have trouble getting strong affiliates to sign up to promote your products and services. Currently aMember.com and 1ShoppingCart.com are very popular systems. Don’t try to get by with a free program because you won’t be taken seriously.

* Provide an Excellent Product – Super affiliates aren’t going to promote a poor product because they are marketing things to people that trust them. They are seen as experts in their niche and promoting a problematic product will make them look bad.

* Give at Least 50% Commission – This is especially important if your product is low cost. It takes work to promote products so it needs to be worth their time. It needs to earn them enough to entice them to promote your product. Also, ditch the minimum sales; pay your affiliates for every sale in a reasonable amount of time.

* Offer True Lifetime Cookies – One poor habit of those who want affiliates is not offering true lifetime cookies. That means that once they attract the lead to click through, they will always get the credit for sales from that lead.

* Provide Top-Notch Tools – Graphics, content, reviews, and more should be available to your affiliates so that they can promote your products as quickly as possible. They shouldn’t be charged with creating graphics as well as promoting. Give them all the tools they need and they’ll work harder for you.

* Have Contests with Prizes – Encourage your affiliates to make more sales by offering prizes and having contents where you share the leaderboard and who is doing best during the time of the contest. Offering prizes like iPads if the market is right is a good incentive to most affiliates.

* Provide Excellent Customer Service – If someone buys the product and has issues, it’s important to address those issues right away. Word gets around if you have a bad reputation about not taking care of your customers.

* Provide Product Information and Training – You can use videos, PDF files and more to provide product information and training to affiliates so that they can use the information to market to their audience better.

* Offer Affiliate-Only Webinars and Calls – Affiliates really appreciate the opportunity to talk to product creators. What’s really great is that you can get more feedback about the product and what their customers think about their recommendations.  Plus you can use the feedback to help you make your affiliate program more effective.

Finally, be sure to pay your affiliates on a regular basis. It’s reasonable to wait to pay until after potential returns go through, but it’s not reasonable to hold a certain amount of money to require payments. Affiliates will work harder when they’re seeing results. If you want your affiliate marketers to be marketing powerhouses, treat them well.