I am at the beginning of a hopefully long journey to build a brand online and I invite you to join me as I take steps along the road.You will be able to witness my triumphs and disasters alike as the project comes to life . This is a real life launch , not a text book exercise.
My target is a simple one , I wish to increase the number of users of the ProfileTrader CRM software we have created. We have spent 10 months designing , developing and with the help of friends testing , the time is right to market the system.
I am not going to do this all by myself though , there are a team of professionals who have become good friends over the years and I will highlight their contributions as they happen (I am hoping for some guest blog posts from them too , but do not tell them yet)
My main streams of marketing will be via Twitter , Facebook , blogging , Empire Avenue and of course a ProfileTrader website. In addition I opened accounts on Scoop.it and Pinterest (everyone else seems to there ).
Lessons learnt No 1
Start all of these streams months before you start marketing , they need to be ready to use. First comes preparation , if you try to do everything from scratch on the day you launch the product or service you are making a rod for your own back and your project is off to a bad start
ProfileTrader Twitter – create a new Twitter account , you do not want to mix personal tweeting with corporate tweeting unless you are the brand. I will give an explanation of my reasoning later.
ProfileTrader Facebook – create a corporate Facebook page and attract followers , in this I had professional help as I will explain in a future instalment.
In order to build a following on Twitter , there are two free applications which I utilised heavily
SocialBro is my favourite application for managing who I follow on Twitter and who follows me . The unfollow function is very handy when building an audience from scratch.
Pluggio is the easiest way to build up a following . Simply enter your keywords and Pluggio will provide a never ending stream of people whom you can decide to follow or not.
Whilst I am writing the next thrilling instalment , why not take a moment to check out my suggestions.
I am sure you have your own ideas , please share .
If you would like to write a guest blog post which I can publish in this Build Your Brand Online series – let me know .
Steven
You can contact me on any of the 30+ sites in my Xeeme
