Dear macaonghus,
What a charming name for site. And you've already got a solid base
for your business.
How about some ideas to get people to come back to your site every day,
to generate excitement, to become personally involved, so they feel
this is their site?
1) Start two weekly contests with the prize being some special tea or
accessory each week.
a) My Best Tea Tale - have people submit their stories about any experience
involving tea that they think is interesting.
If you can't afford the software, or don't have a webmaster, just
pick up some free blog tools.
http://weblogs.about.com/od/weblogsoftwareandhosts/a/topfreeblogs.htm
You can even create two Blogger sites (free) and paste their RSS feed
into pages in your site.
b) Great Things to do With Tea - have people submit recipes, beauty tips,
health tips, fashion tips, art tips (you already have art history)
Instead of you having to read each entry to select the winner,
have people vote on it. In fact, Will Bontrager offers a free rating tool:
http://bontragerconnection.com/library/pro.rate.shtml
2) Syndicate the contest or other site features using the various RSS or XML
tools - or if you don't understand any of that, just pick up a copy of
Master Syndicator. (This has a price tag - but only once - not monthly.)
http://willmaster.com/master/contentsyndication.shtml
I had Will install this for me on my site (since I am definitely not a techie),
and after my first set of questions, it was a breeze to use. In fact, I could
have figured it out without asking. But I like to ask.
The Gateway package lets you know where your articles are appearing and
you can turn off the feed to specific sites without affecting your good sites.
3) Have online teas - or classes - regularly. For about $25-$45 per month
you can pick up 1-5 online conference rooms at HotConference.com . You can
see (if you have a camera) and hear people (your computer speakers) and
speak with them (a $10 microphone works fine). You can have unlimited
people attending. And you can hold meetings every day; several times a day;
all day - for the one price.
The HotConference folks just held a meeting with over 500 people.
I conduct live, online classes for 2-4 hours at a time with students
in 6 time zones and instructors from California to Portugal.
It will work in the UK - or anywhere on the planet.
I also have a monthly breakfast roundtable for tax professionals
who drop by to ask questions or chat. You can do the same kind of thing
over tea.
There are other online conference services, but they cost much more
or are less reliable. Since we spend about 100 hours per month in there,
and people pay a lot of money for my classes, I can't afford it for the
system not be working during my scheduled class times. (I've had some
bad experiences with other services.) These guys are accessible and
respond quickly.
4)Leave one of the rooms open for your site's members to hold
'club' meetings and talk tea with each anytime they like. You
can customise the conference room so it always has your ad or logo
and links to your site. And the opening screen will always be your shop.
I leave one or two rooms open for my students to study together.
For instance, one study team is a woman in Indiana with a woman in Hawaii.
(About 5,000 miles and 5 time zones apart.)
These are just a few ways to bring people to your site daily, to
make them totally loyal to you, to tell everyone they know about you,
and to buy from you. If you do ALL these things, they will take you
less than a day to set up and structure all of them - and just watch
the buzz you start to get!
If you have questions, please feel free to ask.
best wishes,
Your TaxMama-ga |
