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I ran across an interesting tweet just now…  It read like this:

“Outsource the building of your social networks – just click here!” (isn’t a live link).

Now normally, I don’t pay these sorts of things much attention.  I just scroll right on by them.  But today, I decided to take a look at the page the link was pointing to.

On the page, there was some poorly written copy about outsourcing your Twitter profile building and your Facebook friend getting…  20,000 followers in a month… 1,000 friends in 2 weeks…  All for the measly price of $5,000.

First of all, who would pay that?  And second, what does someone who pays for these services hope to gain from the whole process?  Sure, 20,000 followers is cool.  But none of them will be targeted in any way!  There won’t be any foundation of a relationship that you’ve built with them.  So what good are they?

All ranting aside, it is possible to outsource social media.  In fact, Guy Kawasaki and a few of the top tweeps in the world outsource their stuff.  Generally, they are pretty forthcoming about it though.  There are subtle distinctions in the tweets that tell you who it’s from.

What I wanted to do was put together a quick list of things to do if you decide to outsource your social media marketing efforts.  This is by no means exhaustive, but will serve as a basis for those who are thinking about it!

Make sure your outsourcing agents provide value

Link after link after link to your site is bad.  That’s been covered in numerous posts here and around the Internet.  Make sure that your outsourcers have guidelines about what to tweet and when.  For example, you can only tweet the top stories on Digg between 2-4pm.  This will help make sure that good content is getting put in your feed.

Have a way of ’signing’ each of the tweets and status updates that your social media outsourcing company sends out

By making sure that your outsourcers are signing tweets, you can pinpoint who said what.  Ways I’ve seen this done is by initialing the tweet, such as ending it in ‘^dr’ or ‘!lto’.  So if one of your workers, David Rose, sends out a tweet, they finish it with their initials.

Don’t let them answer any business related replies without your approval

Another hangup can happen when someone replies to you or sends you a direct message.  Unless the outsourcing agent is intimately familiar with your business, are you comfortable letting them answer questions for you?

Summary

When you build a social media network, your following is looking for stuff from you.  Whether you’re actually manning Tweetdeck or not is a different story.  If you do decide to outsource social media, make sure that you lay some ground rules with the team who will be interacting with your community for you.

If there are no rules, you’re going to end up building a following of untargeted people who won’t really provide any value to you at all.  That’s not what social media is about.

Most people, when they get started with social media marketing, have issues with two things – how much time it takes and how to make sense of it all.

Admittedly, when I first started, I was resistant because of time constraints.  I’d ask myself, “Where is my time better spent, on Twitter or trying to get new clients?”

Little did I know that the two can actually work hand in hand.

Just three weeks ago, I had a phone call with a client who understood social media very, very well.  She was into all the different networks and had content going this way and that.  Her one major problem was the time commitment!

She said, “Jason, I know that social media is the way of the future but I just don’t have any time to actually DO any of the work I pick up!  I’m trapped by it!”

So what I did was recommend all sorts of tools to her that she could use to automate her workflow a bit.  Here are some of them:

• TweetDeck
• Twhirl
• SocialOomph
• FutureTweets
• CurdBee (not social media but essential)
• LinkedIn Outlook plugin

Then, I gave her a brief tutorial and showed her how to work with them.

Using SocialOomph and FutureTweets, she was able to schedule tweets.  Then, using the desktop applications, she was able to still participate in social media without having to go back and forth between all the sites.  Finally, CurdBee let her invoice her new clients in a fraction of the time it took her to before!

Just yesterday, she called me back.  She had been able to cut her ’social media addiction down to 47 minutes a day (give or take a few), while doubling her productivity and new leads!

Amazing huh!

If you’d like more information on how you can minimize the time you spend on social media, visit Social Media Marketing Hour.  There’s you’ll be able to get free training and a free DVD taking you through, step by step!

Does your organization have a distribution email list?  Or a newsletter that you send out to prospects and clients?  If not, you’re missing a key ingredient of doing business online.

Right now, the most important skill you could possibly learn is Internet marketing.  More and more people are turning to the Internet for solutions and entertainment.  It doesn’t matter if they’re researching a new car purchase or hanging out with their friends on Facebook – you can get in front of them online cheaper than you can any other way.

Getting in front of your target market isn’t enough though.  You have to get them to take some sort of action.  They have to click your banner.  They have to sign up for your download.  Perhaps, they need to fill out a form or a survey to get a shiny new, free report.  (We covered a few awesome email list services in a previous post.)

Whatever the case may be, it is of utmost importance that you collect at least an email address.

Distribution Email List Basics

In my world, there are basically two kinds of email lists: clients and prospects.  I imagine this holds true for your business too.  There are those you’ve done business with and those you hope to do business with.

Obviously, the client list is the most precious.  Your existing clients have already demonstrated that they WANT and ARE ABLE to do business with you.

The prospect list is a bit more tricky though.

Sometimes, if you give away something for free – a prospect will sign up for the download and will get pissed when you try to sell them something later.  That’s unfortunate because they have to realize that you’re just trying to pay the bills too.

Other times, you’re going to get people who hang out on your distribution list and suck up all the free information they can.  That’s cool if they are the sorts of people who take action and just need that last little bit of information to get their own project started.  (Hell, that’s how I am.  I buy my fair share of training and courses, but I’m on all kinds of people’s lists – some that I’ll never buy from but I think they’re brilliant marketers!)

And the third category is buyers.  Your buyers are going to read the stuff you send out, analyze it, study it, weigh it and measure it.  If you pass all those tests, they’ll buy from you – either now or in the future.  Those people will prove to be the future of your business!

The Bottom Line

At the end of the day, the success of your Internet marketing initiatives depends largely on how qualified your distribution email list is.  If you work relentlessly to build your list and offer value each and every day, you’ll be fine.

Once you have a list, there really is no shortage of offers you can send out.  There are affiliate programs, your own products, your friends services…  The list goes on and on.  Just make sure you survey the people on your list to find out what they want!

Email Marketing Management can be a pain sometimes.  If you’ve got lots of products or websites, you’ve inevitably got quite a few lists that are segmented a million different ways and have lots autoresponder sequences all set up.

The good thing is that your list is probably your company’s most valuable asset!

Now, I know there are countless experts around the web trying to convince you that you need to build your list.  But once you have it, what should you do?  Email them once a week?  Make the emails long?  Keep the content formal?  Should you hire an outside firm to manage the lists?

There’s so many variables!

The first thing I want to get out in the open is that you shouldn’t hire an outside company to email your list on your behalf.  You should be managing your database as best you can in-house.  And if you don’t have time, bring someone in who is a good copywriter!

What I want to do is give you 3 email marketing management tips that have literally tripled my business in the last three months.  Two of these are going to sound excessive, but I guarantee you they work.

1) Email Your List Often

The first time I heard this, I almost laughed.  If I email my list everyday, people will unsubscribe!  They’ll report my emails as spam.  I worked so hard to get them on – I don’t want to piss them off!

What I can tell you is that the people who unsubscribe would have done so anyway, sooner or later.  There’s no way you can continue to give away content week after week without asking them to take action in some way.  Maybe that’s through an affiliate link or by selling your own products.

The point is, you’re in business to make money, right?  That’s what keeps the lights on and a roof over your head.  Your true prospects, friends and customers will understand that.

2) The emails have to be personal

Emails that are too salesy or corporate hardly ever get read (unless they’re Newegg Deals or Tiffany’s catalog emails).  You want to do your best to write your email as you would write to a friend.

Every time I sit down to write something up for one of my lists, I think about what I would write to my buddy Frank.  When I send Frank an email, it’s usually a couple quick sentences and a link.  (If I close the email) I usually close it with something like ‘jd’ or ‘Jason.’

That’s it!  Make it personal!

3) Keep Things Current

If you don’t plan on writing to your list every day or every couple days, set up an autoresponder series that does it for you.  The worst thing you can do is let people forget who you are.

Actually, just this morning, I got two emails – one from Tony Robbins with a direct link to a video and one from another email marketer with a opt-in which forwarded you to the video.

Keep in mind, this is the first email I got from the marketer and I was a bit skeptical.  I didn’t remember signing up for anything of his.  I didn’t recognize his name at first.  And I was a bit weirded out because he was making me signup for something I already had a link to.  I thought maybe he was trying to grow his list off of Tony’s video.

So, after twenty minutes of checking nameservers and digging, I finally remembered who this guy was (an it’s cool…).  I just didn’t remember what I was doing on his list!

Email Marketing Management Best Practices

There are lots and lots of best practices out there – but the only way for you to find out what works in your niche, for your clients, is to test things out.  If you try to email your prospects every day and get some unsubscribers, don’t worry.  They were traveling down that road anyway.

But if you find something that doubles your income overnight – keep doing it!  That’s how fortunes are made.

My buddy Brian Clark just sent me an email saying he’s reopening Teaching Sells today!

Now, you might have heard about Teaching Sells.  It was heavily promoted when it first launched.  But I don’t ever like mentioning anything that I’m not intimately familiar with.  I actually am a charter member, having signed up for the course a couple years ago.

To this day, I have to say Teaching Sells is one of my most valuable assets.  Between the video training, and niche content creation tutorials and the private label rights content library – it’s awesome.

If you head to Teaching Sells, you’ll be able to download a free PDF report (or audio version) called “Forget Everything You Know About Making Money Online (And Start Making Some).”

You’ll discover why you need to forget all the “get rich quick” crap and start building a real online business… just like all the real “gurus” have been doing (and telling you to do) all along.

Plus, they’ve got 3 case studies that demonstrate 3 different ways people have taken advantage of the Teaching Sells training.  You’ll also see why being an “expert” at the training you sell is completely optional.

Plus, you’ll get all kinds of free bonus reports, process maps, and quick start guides!

The free report actually has so much info in it you might be able to implement the Teaching Sells program without having to go through the course.  If that’s the case, that’s awesome!  It just means you’ll be getting into the game that much sooner!

But definitely check Teaching Sells.  The home page video is awesome!

Email marketing goes in waves.  Every now and then, we read reports and blogs posts telling us that email is dead and building a solid list is a waste of time.

I have to wholeheartedly disagree.  It doesn’t matter what niche or business you’re in, your prospect and client database is one of your most valuable assets.  In the online world, that database is your list.

After talking to clients over the years, there’s lots of confusion over what’s the best way to build a list, store a list and market to a list.  So, over the next 5 or so days, I’m going to do a post series on building recession-proof lists.

To start, let’s talk about email list services.

An email list service or an email marketing provider is the company that stores and allows you to maintain your list.  They provide you with all the double opt-in protection, autoresponders and the ability to do broadcast messages.

In short, the list service is your one location for email marketing.

Now, some services are dedicated to email lists only.  Others tie in services like CRM software, merchant gateways and shopping carts.

I have three favorite platforms that I have my clients set up on:

Constant Contact

Constant Contact is my first recommendation for people looking to do monthly email newsletters/information bulletins for their clients.  This might be something as simple as event announcements or sales and promotions.

For instance, I’ve done a lot of work with a sewing shop in the last few years.  Things like bringing them online, helping them through social marketing and list building, etc.  i pointed them to Constant Contact because it’s dead simple to use and they really just needed to send out monthly bulletins.  They weren’t doing any hard-core marketing through it.

Aweber

Aweber is my favorite out of the email list services because it’s cheap, allows autoresponders, and has great deliverability rates.

Besides doing all the normal broadcast type stuff, Aweber lets you set up a sequential series of emails that go out at a predetermined time.  For instant, the MarketingHackz Social Media Quick Start Guide is an autoresponder.  Starting the day you sign up, and for the next 9 days, you get a new social marketing lesson in your inbox.  Then, as we add to them, you get them all in succession!

It really does rock.

Deliverability is another factor.  If you were to email your 200 clients out of Outlook, chances are your server will shut you down for a little while.  They do that to avoid spam.  If you email those same clients from Aweber, your emails are almost guaranteed to get there!

If you’re just getting started with email marketing, head over to Aweber and grab an account.  Put the web form in your sidebar with a free download and you’re golden.

InfusionSoft

Now to the big boys.  I love InfusionSoft.  They’re by far my favorite of the email list services.  It has been built from the ground up for serious businesses only.  Up until a short time ago, you had to pay a setup fee to even get an account with them – I think it was $5,000.  Now, there’s no setup.  It’s just the monthly fee.

Infusionsoft has a couple different packages.  Their primary package is email marketing plus CRM integration so you can combine all your customer relationship activites with bulletproof email marketing.

Their next major tier is emai marketing + CRM + shopping carts + merchant gateways.  I’ve used this system for clients and am rolling it out for my own stuff now.

They basically offer all the great things like autoresponders, great deliverability rates, broadcasts, nice templates and all that stuff – but they tie it to CRM software which lets you really get an awesome idea of who your customer really is.  It isn’t just an email address and a name.

Plus their shopping carts rock and can be customized beyond belief.

If you’re serious about building lists and doing good business online – check out Infusionsoft’s free demo.  They’re my choice for high end businesses and projects.

Summary

There are losts of email list services out there.  These are the three that are widely regarded as being the best ones and the ones I’ve used/use.

The main point is that if you haven’t started building your list – you should (as in right now).  It’s the only way your business will truly be recession proof because there are virtually hundreds of ways you can make money if you can get in someone’s email inbox.

Tell me about who your email list is through.  Do you use GetResponse or iContact or one of the other ones?