In a recent article on Site Pro News, they discuss word of mouth marketing, and how it can affect your business.

As a mother, a woman, a consumer, and a blogger, I know all too well the saying above, “A happy customer tells one friend, and unhappy customer tells everybody.”
Many times when I’ve gone and purchased from a brick and mortar store or from an on-line retailer, if I’ve had a bad experience, I’ve told everyone I know and posted it to my blog letting even more people know about it.
I get close to 60,000 visitors a month on my blog, so when I’m unhappy, believe me, people know about it.
When I have a great experience, I’m even more likely to rave about it and the product.

One of the greatest word of mouth marketing ideas, is to give a blogger your product and ask them to review it and write about it.
Go above and beyond to make sure they get the product quickly and in great shape, make sure they are happy it arrived quickly.
There is nothing worse than ordering something on-line, and having to wait weeks to get it.

In the last year, I’ve had the opportunity to receive quite a few products from companies on-line, and give my honest review of them.
I have been pleased with every single one for many reasons.
First, staying in touch with me.
Giving me shipping and tracking information so I can know when it will arrive.
Making sure the product is packaged securely so it doesn’t end up damaged in transit.
Including a thank you for taking the time to test out their products. (this is huge to me)
And lastly, letting me know after I’ve completed my review, what they thought of it, and what they would have liked to see my review cover if they were unhappy with it, or what ways they could have made my experience better.
Feedback from your consumers should be taken seriously.
They are the keys to making your business even more successful.

Just in the month of February 2008, I’ve been contacted by 3 book publishers in my niche.
What is my niche?
I’m a single parent first, a mom of teenagers, a woman, a health and beauty nut, a movie and music lover, an avid reader, and a consumer with a big mouth, or should I say, a blog that holds nothing back.
I call it like I see it, and if the book is great, I’m going to tell every single one of my readers how awesome it was.
If it was bad, my readers will know exactly why it was bad, and to avoid spending their money on it.
One of the other things I’ve done to help spread the word of products, is to give it away in a contest on my blog when I’m done with it.
My blog readers love contests where they can win an actual product to try out.
I’ve given away books, health and beauty products, and movies, cds, video games and more.

Blogs are the new medium, the new word of mouth, because of how many people we can reach.
If your company can afford to send just 10 bloggers in your niche, one single product to try absolutely free, then you should do it.
You can gain buyers from all over the world if those bloggers love your product.
If you can afford to send one product to a blogger and one for them to give away to a reader, you will gain even more sales and reviews because most blog readers, are bloggers themselves.
You get a second review seen by even more consumers.
If they don’t have a blog, they will still tell everyone they know about your product.
Word of mouth marketing is huge.
A happy blogging consumer, tells literally thousands of people, which translates into thousands of potential consumers.

One of the ways to drum up more business, is by way of your RSS feed.
You can add your affiliate links in the bottom, you can use partial feeds to make readers come to your blog so all links in the sidebar are seen, and you can use your affiliate links inside your posts to create extra sales.

Every time I watch a new movie, I link to it with an affiliate account inside one of my posts.
It sends readers to that affiliate link, and even if they don’t buy that DVD, they usually end up buying something else within a few hours, or even sometimes a full week later, depending on the affiliate cookie hold.

Using images inside your entries is a great way to hold your readers attention. A post with a picture tends to keep your readers on your blog longer than just text.
People like to look at things, especially items that you are reviewing, so they can really see it’s value.
The average consumer believes word of mouth marketing more than just the products description page telling you how great it is.
Real people doing honest reviews, makes people believe it more, and therefore, more willing to go out and buy the item themselves.

So if you are looking for a great way to boost affiliate sales, use pictures of the product you are reviewing, review it honestly, the good, the bad, and the downright awful.
People want to know it isn’t very good so they don’t waste money.
But if it’s great, talk up it’s awesome points, and watch those sales go up.

TDM will be speaking at the E-Retailer Summit coming up in March 2008.

We will be part of the Session Entitled:

CREATE A SUCCESSFUL BLOG MARKETING PROGRAM: SAFELY AND EFFECTIVELY Monday, March 3, 2:00pm – 3:00pm

Featuring:

Below is the official Description from their site:

“Blogs, social networking sites, and otherWeb 2.0 tools have significantly changed the consumer online experience. This session will focus on the pros and cons of online blog communities, legal considerations and how to reach and engage the consumer.This forum includes moderator Rick Petry, writer, and panelists Scott Allen- author of “The Virtual Handshake”;Tony Feriozzi - president,Triangle Direct Media; Jeffrey Greenbaum - partner, Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz, PC; Kathy Greif - director of content, HSN.”

Should be a fun and educational show for anyone interested in Social Media Marketing and how to use it to sell more products online.

When a large company approaches us we always do whatever it takes to help them build their brand. Blog Branding is an essential ingredient to further develop who you are as a company in the blogosphere. However, large company marketing divisions that may consider blogging to further brand themselves is another individuals decision. I’ve been in that position before and know it can be extremely frustrating to be excited about a new venture ie..blog marketing, and not have the ability to make a decision. If branding is the most important aspect to your company, you need to unlock the handcuffs and embrace blogging. If your reputation means a lot to your company, there’s no other alternative.

It staggers me that at this time of the year, when consumers are in a virtual shopping frenzy thinking about what on earth to buy uncle Jim in Nebraska for the holidays, that for the most part, retailers are still not using video to promote their products. Here is a simple test. Go to YouTube, search for your company name and your top products. If you don’t find your company represented in the first page of results, then you have a problem. You are missing business and it is not all that difficult to fix. Triangle Direct can optimize and submit your video to the top engines in a matter of days. If you make a good and interesting video it could reach millions of consumers who are looking to buy your products. That is what viral marketing is all about, and you still have time to make an in your holiday sales tallies.

It’s that time of year again. The kids are going back to school, the summer is winding down and retailers are looking at the looming fourth quarter and wondering how to increase market share to get a bigger slice of the holiday sales pie. You could increase paid advertising, or try and improve natural search positioning in the major engines.  Why not try to generate some buzz in the blogosphere? We know that over 60 million people read blogs. We also know that information on message boards and forums can lead to increased sales. Why not reach this powerful demographic with our network of established professional bloggers? We have been running very successful product reviews and conversation marketing campaigns for our clients for months, and anticipate doing a lot more for fourth quarter 2007. So if you’re looking to cash in on holiday sales this year, contact Triangle Direct Media and we will put together a customized campaign.

I read the other day about the methods you should use for optimizing your site for Google universal search. The advice offered surprised me in its simplicity. Apparently you need to create multimedia content such as blogs, videos and podcasts and then make sure that this content is listed on niche search engines like Technorati. This sounds like what we have been doing for clients for the last 18 months. Except that we have taken it several steps further. We are seeing exponential increases in clients’ traffic, positioning and exposure. We are also seeing tremendous gains in the blogosphere with our site and product review services. Not to mention our highly effective conversation marketing services.

More in a series of articles about the “new Google”….

It has been widely acknowledged for quite some time that due to the vast size of Google, and the fact that it handles such a huge volume of information, that it has a problem returning relevant results. In 2005, Jupiter Research noted that engines needed to be split into verticals, such as blog, images, video etc, in order to return results that actually helped users make buying decisions. Outsell also noted that almost one third of searches resulted in failure by the search engines.

Google and the other engines obviously had to do something to clean up the results. The natural result of this is the new universal search. The big question for retailers is how do you get your site to confirm to the new criteria of relevancy?

Every one has probably heard about efforts by Google, the kings of search to incorporate all of its information from images, videos, blogs etc into one set of universal search results. The official explanation from Google VP of search products is “a seamless integrated experience to get users the best answers”. Sounds great, but what does it mean to retailers who are trying to position their sites for the holidays? Stay tuned to find out what you can do to stay ahead of the competition for this upcoming shopping season.

In a recent report from Media-screen, it appears that broadband internet surfers spend up to 48% of their down time online. This translates to a little over an hour and a half of actual online activity with 27% of that time being devoted to entertainment, 27% to communication such as email,  around 12% for  shopping, and 9% to searches for information.  That is not too surprising, but when the study turned to younger users, an interesting trend came out.

Of those polled, 48% said they learned about new entertainment from social media networks, review and video sites and blogs. In the not so distant future, that figure will also translate to new products. If a retailer is ignoring blogs, video and social media, they are passing up an opportunity to influence an entire generation. The study also mentioned that sending email and using websites for personal reasons is more popular than watching TV.

Time to reallocate your marketing budget.