A chat with The Tea Lady about………..
Marketing your social networking site
You take the red pill — you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.”
All of the little darlings here know that line and where it comes from.
This is just like marketing your social network community, you can take the blue pill and go the easy way with getting people to join your community, or you can take the red pill and do some real challenging things.
If you want to hear what I’ve got to say about this you can sit over there out of the way and have a cuppa while I do these dishes.
Some of the little sods dunk their chocolate cookies into the cuppas and it leaves a real mess, you know how that is, chocolate that was once all over the cookie is now smeared around the cup rim.
And it was first thing this morning that they did it too, so the chocolate has gone hard now, they use such cheap cups here it sometimes stains them.
Never mind, let’s get back on track again.
If you want to take the blue pill then listen to this.
Email all of your friends and ask them to do the same, then tell everyone you come into contact with who you might want in your community.
This will get your community out there and people will join.
But if you want to take the red pill, these are some of the things you can start to do.
You might want to freshen your cup as this will take a little while.
I’ve got some bacon and egg pot pies coming out of the oven shortly and you will just love to eat a couple so you better stay I think.
Ok, listen up…thank you.
I will work on a scenario here to better show you what I know you can accomplish when you get serious about marketing your community.
Let’s say you are starting a community about people who love to exchange recipes and ideas and also try and create new ones.
One of the first things you would do is get all those you have wanting to join to a meeting and get a plan underway.
Find out what everyone’s attributes are and then build your plan involving as many of them as possible.
One thing for sure is everyone will know how to bake and cook so have a little bake day and then setting out around the neighborhood or where you work offering sample size portions of your creations, along with a flyer of what you are doing of course.
Just think if you do some cupcakes you can have your community website address written in frosting LOL.
You can sell your kitchen creations in the community mall as well and offer a discount program as a way of attracting more people.
Using the community credits feature you offer discounts for a number of reasons, when they register for your community, if they complete a basic survey when they register for you to use in advertising purposes or if they get a friend to join.
You might know people or even people who know people that have websites or you can make contact with as many as you can offering them a way of growing their customer base by growing your community.
The website owners are rewarded by gaining the email addresses of those who use them to get their community credit discount points or be directed to the community to register.
How many websites wouldn’t want new email contacts, they obtain them by offering community members a set amount of community credits for performing various activities on their sites.
Let’s say they had to answer a 1 or 5 question survey and for this they got 10c or 50c worth of community credits to spend in the mall.
Each item in the community mall has the amount of credits that can be applied to the price shown along with how much cash is required to make the purchase.
You know, some of the little darlings here have me bring them special requests from my oven to take home, usually on Fridays and they get credits to pay me back.
When a work areas cups and saucers are returned properly to the trolley every day for a week they all get some credits, so whenever they want a special treat they get a slightly bigger one for the same charge, as for the little sods upstairs, they have a lot of catching up to do before they get anything except a surcharge ha ha ha.
Ok, something to think about are these websites who allow your members to earn community credits, they can also be charged for these credits they give out.
An email address is valuable these days and even if they only get to send 1 “thank you for using me to earn some community credits” email to the member, they at least get a shot at trying to sell or tell them something.
Now look again at what your community is all about, baking, cooking and creating food.
How many kids and adults going to school love to get into the kitchen and try out the things they are learning, so why not have bake days with your local schools and work with the teachers in offering extra cooking and baking activities.
You need to get people of all ages into a community based around recipes and you know how much food brings everyone together.
It’s funny you know, after all the mouth watering baking I do and the ketchup craving pies I make that just leave you dead in the water after your first bite because they are just so so good, I don’t get into much fancy cooking at home.
Funny thing that, ha ha ha, oh well.
Of course you would email all of the people you know telling them about the community and ask them to send the email on as well, standard issue stuff really just like making frosting.
What if you got a radio station to offer community credits to the people who are listening to them, just the same as mentioned above with getting websites to offer community credit discounts to use in the mall, only this way the radio station is benefiting by knowing there are people listening to them and the ads.
The radio station can charge the advertiser a fee and give the community a commission, when you think about it, at the end of a radio advertisement if they said go to the advertisers website and click on the recipe communities credits button, they would know if people are interested in their stuff or not plus they get to send a thank you email.
What I want you to do now is start thinking about how these ideas or variations of them can be used in anyway to help grown your community.
So, when you get to here, don’t be crazy for thinking, isn’t there supposed to be more written here.
You are right, there is, but you have to either wait for it or ask me something specific.
I’ve got to get cracking sorry, the bacon and egg pot pies are cooling down and this is the best time to eat them.
Kindest regards,
The tea lady
Bye bye.
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