Selling products at your events? - Google Products, just do it!

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If you are selling products, event tickets or promotional merchandise online; then you should be listed on Google Products. When people search for products online, Google runs a keyword search in Google Products and gets the top searches on the first page (spots 1 or 11). If your products are on Google Products, you’ll get a higher ranking chance, and consequently more traffic. It is generally estimated that almost 10% of a product sites traffic comes through this channel. Which is huge, so if you haven’t listed already, make sure you do so as soon as you can. Nobody wants to miss out on those potential sales just because the target customers couldn’t find you.

Basically, its an interactive shopping service where customers can find and rate your products etc. When you are submitting your products to Google Products, make sure you write the information correctly. Add your feed with the product’s description, pictures, url, price etc. Make sure you use relevant keywords in the title and descriptions. Also, keep in mind that if your prices are good you’ll get a higher ranking - so don’t add exuberant prices without evaluating competitive sellers. The better your price the better your ratings will be and consequently the better the search rankings.

Some people recommend that you should update your feed regularly - keep changing it on a weekly or monthly basis. This brings you back up in the rankings and keeps Google from forgetting about you. When it comes to search phrases which the Google word data base recognize as representing commercial intent, results are displayed relative to recency and relevance, not authority as they are in content search. So, keep it fresh, you can assign this job to someone else if you don’t have time for it yourself.

To get started, just visit this link and follow the process: http://www.google.com/base/help/sellongoogle.html

Event Planning - how to leverage social media to build hype

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Using social media channels to market events is a great strategy for getting attention and building excitement around an event. It is a low-cost way to promote your events to a larger audience and build hype and fans. I tried some pre-launch marketing steps that helped me generate a lot of buzz around a live coffee talk-show at the New Port beach a while ago. I am sharing the steps with you:

Step 1: the social networking pages
It is important to understand and build the brand of your event first. What makes it different and unique? Why should people care to attend? After you have a fair idea about your brand, the first step is to create your event pages using social networking sites, like facebook, myspace, squidoo etc. A great example of this is how Tech Crunch markets their annual conferences on independent specially designed pages for the event. These pages go through a cycle of pre-launch information to live updates during launch to post-launch winner lineups. It’s a place where you can participate in the discussions, see who else is coming, review the startups that are going to pitch, and just get a feel for the buzzing activities around you.

The great thing about social media is that it is offers the flexibility to design the pages in community specific ways. The pages that you build for a official conference can be very different from the ones you make for a club party.

Step 2: building traffic
You can get traffic to your social pages directly or through referrals and links. The more the links your webpage gets, the better the search engine rankings. The better the search engine rankings, the more likely your potential customers or audiences will be able to find you. The traffic coming in from these secondary sources should not be undermined, since it brings in people who are more likely to be inclined towards being interested in what you are offering. Social media traffic can easily be managed through strategic marketing methods.

Step 3: communicating with your audiences
The more you can communicate with your audiences on a one-on-one level, the better your event will be. You will be able to gauge the audience’s expectations from the event, so that you can design and plan the event accordingly. A friend of mine was organizing a concert in Orange County once and realized later that the most active people in the county preferred a different taste in music. The great thing about the internet is that you can quickly and easily find this kind of information by interacting with prospective audiences directly.

Step 4: building hype and excitement
Although this seems like a simple step in the process, it isn’t. Webpages on social networking sites are only successful if they can perpetuate and grow. This can only happen if you have managed to build a large group of supporters or like-minded folks to spread the word about your event. Your brand story plays an important role here. If the story is exciting, “camp on the big bear lake”, “first ever fusion dance party”, “scary Halloween party close to the night safari”, “top ten jazz singers night”; the supporters will more likely spread it. If they can understand and build on your events brand story, they will spread it like it’s their own. That’s just the way it works. So, build hype, get people talking and launch right on the peak of their excitement. Bam.

Planning social marketing is more of a strategic thing, rather than just following best practices that worked for others. While these steps helped me manage a small event well, they may or may not work for all of your events, as is. However the underlying principles of interacting with your audience are things that I would strongly advocate, regardless of what specific steps you take to do so.