Help for Haiti - Ideas for Small Businesses
If you are a football fan like I am, you couldn’t miss the American Red Cross ads that ran throughout the games this past weekend.
They were encouraging everyone to text “HAITI” to 90999 to donate $10 to their Disaster Relief Fund.
That’s a great idea. And it’s working.
As of a couple days ago more than 700,000 people had donated money, raising more than $7 million dollars.
There are lots of other places you can donate too. See a few of them at the end of this blog post.
We’re all looking for ways to help.
If you want to do something beyond donating money, this blog post is about ideas you might copy.
I know, it’s not exactly marketing.
But in a way, it is.
If you copy one of these ideas and share it with your customers or your list, you’re showing that you are a good world citizen. Everyone wants to do business with good people.
And you’re getting in front of your audience with a solid message. That has value too.
So check out some of these ideas and see if you think any of them are worth copying…
Give away your products to people who donate money
MJT Net and Perfect Table Plan, both small software companies, will send a free license for their software to anyone who donates money to Haiti Disaster Relief. You could do this with services too. In fact, we’re doing it at JMR. The web page should be up in the next couple of days.
Auction off a product and donate the proceeds
Olivia Wilde, Meryl Streep and others are auctioning off the clothes they wore at the Golden Globes through Artists for Peace and Justice. The auction will be run through eBay, which is handling similar auctions for other organizations, including the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. If you sell products on eBay, this wouldn’t be hard to do.
Donate a percentage of sales
Designate a period of time (maybe one day or one week in January) and donate a percentage of that week’s sales. John Bartlett, owner of a NY mens clothing store did that this past weekend.
Donate products
If you have products that can be used by the people of Haiti, contact a local relief organization to see if anyone is putting together a shipment. See if your customers or partners want to contribute anything along with you.
When you raise the money to donate, here are a few organizations you can feel comfortable sending it to:
American Red Cross
Doctors Without Borders
Plan USA
Save the Children
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3 Ways to Use Interviews on Your Website
Looking for ways to add depth and dimension to your website?
Consider adding some interviews.
If you want to, you can work with someone to do a “real” interview. You can record it and post the link to the audio or video on your website or blog.
Hint: You don’t have to pay $3000 or more to have a news personality do a formal interview. You can have one person in your company interview someone else. For example, you can have your marketing director interview your CEO.
If you decide to do a video, the easiest way to make it more professional is to do the filming yourself and then hire someone to edit it, adding a professional intro and conclusion. We worked with Pixability recently to do this and they did a great job for an affordable price.
You can also do the interview with webcams via Skype, if you want something very informal and inexpensive.
If you want only audio you can use Audio Acrobat (which is what we use) or one of the many similar services. Just do the interview over the phone, record it, and post the link to the recording.
But you can make it even easier…
Here’s how…
Just do a written interview. Write down the questions you want to answer, then answer them. Write it so it looks like a back-and-forth with an interviewer.
Here’s an example from one of our clients (I’m the Judy who did the interview):
Upgrading to iMIS 15: What Associations Need to Know
Can you see how easy that is?
And it has a lot of value. It has useful information, so it has value to web visitors. It’s keyword-rich, so it does well with the search engines, which helps bring people to the website.
Anyone can do interviews like this.
Here are 3 ways to use them:
1. Explain why your product or service matters
Lots of times, websites use formal language. They are written like a brochure, talking about what the company does, what the products do.
But that doesn’t tell you why people actually become customers.
You can explain that in an interview.
You can talk about how people use your products and services in an informal, casual way - what’s really cool about them, what kind of results they get, why they really buy - the way you would explain it to a friend or family member.
It’s a great way to add commentary to your website, to make points you can’t really make any other way, and to tell people what really matters.
2. Share your opinion on a hot topic
If you’ve got thoughts about a hot topic in the industry (and you’re not already blogging - or even if you are), this is a great way to get your opinions out there.
This is also a very useful way to bring traffic to your website, because there are probably a lot of searches on this topic. Just make sure you use the relevant keywords repeatedly throughout the interview.
3. Talk about what’s new
I bet you’ve got a new product or service that you introduced recently.
Do an interview about why you created that product or service. Talk about what’s great about it, why people need it. Share your excitement - let people see how much you care about this.
This is a good way to keep your website up-to-date. It also helps round out a launch and make it more interesting.
And it’s a good way to engage prospects and customers and bring them to your website - you can send them an email with a link to the interview and ask them to check it out.
So find a topic that would work for you and get an interview up on your site this month.
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5 Ideas for Status Updates on Facebook or Twitter
Are you getting started with Twitter? Or thinking about starting a Facebook Fan page, but not sure what to post on it?
Here are 5 ideas for status updates that you can use in either place…
1. Tease upcoming product features
You’re probably working on an upgrade to your current product or developing a new service to offer customers. Talk about one of the cool features in that product or service.
For example… “Working on new training modules that we’re offering online. 10 videos, each 5 min long. First shows how to import data from Quickbooks.”
This is a great way to get people excited about what’s coming next.
2. Share customers’ results
Validate the enthusiasm of your fans by showing that other people are choosing your products and services and getting great results.
One way to do that is by talking about the results clients have achieved. You don’t need to name names - you can just talk about the improvements.
For example… “Just heard one of our clients saved $250,000 over the past 6 months using our software.”
3. Acknowledge achievements
Congratulate clients and business partners on winning awards.
For example… “One of our clients was just named to EContent’s 100 Companies that Matter Most in Digital Content. Congratulations to everyone at adenin!”
You can also congratulate employees on their achievements - best sales performance that month, achieving a development deadline, hitting a quality target, even something personal like completing a marathon.
4. Ask for feedback
Are you having internal debates about something? Post the question and ask for feedback.
For example… “Working on a logo for our new product and can’t decide which we like best. Want to vote? Both are posted at www.tinyurl.xxx”
5. Provide treats
The point of being a follower or fan is that you care about the person or the company. Show that you value their support by giving early information and making offers that are only available for fans.
For example… “We’re going into beta in two weeks. If you’d like to try out the new version, email Joe.”
Or “Just found 20 t-shirts from our last promotion. Really cool - black with our logo on back. Size L. Want one? Email me.”
It’s pretty easy once you get started.
So go ahead…
Get on Twitter or launch that fan page and start sharing your news.
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