Instigator Blog

Heading into my final week of the 3-Week Buzz Marketing Challenge and I’m doing OK, but not good enough. There’s more buzz to generate!

One of the most underrated ways of generating buzz is through doing interviews.

And they’re easy to do! Everyone wants to be interviewed - from A-listers to small business owners to people just starting out. You might not have access to the biggest CEOs in your industry or worldwide leaders, but you won’t know until you try. And you’d be surprised how willing people are to be interviewed (people you think are unreachable.)

Interviews work to generate buzz because:

1. The person you’re interviewing has a vested interest in getting the word out, so you’ve instantly created at least one big-time evangelist.
2. You’re presenting the views of someone who is hopefully of significant interest to others. Interviewing your cat might be fun, but it won’t generate buzz. Josh Hinds is a master at this. His blog Business Networking Advice is a collection of interviews he does with a range of bloggers, business people and entrepreneurs. His latest interview is with Anna Farmery, and he even interviewed me!
3. When you promote an interview to your audience, community and others, you’re not just promoting yourself. This makes it easier to promote and generate buzz.
4. The public likes interviews, particularly if you can ask some pointed and instigating questions. Get the interviewee to reveal something interesting, break some news, or debate a hot issue and people will flock to the interview.

The best thing about doing interviews is building relationships with the people after. It might not always work, but if you can develop relationships beyond the interviews you’ll be creating lifetime buzz agents and supporters.

Ron McDaniel smartly points out that you could do an interview per week and that would exponentially increase your contact list, networking capabilities and buzz marketing. He’s 100% correct.

On Startup Spark, my blog focused exclusively on entrepreneurship, I’ve been doing interviews since the beginning. Last week I interviewed Ian Landsman who runs his own software company, UserScape. Some previous interviewees include Paul English, CTO of Kayak.com and Jim Estill, CEO of SYNNEX, a billion-dollar computer company.

I use email to connect with people, and we exchange questions and answers back and forth. The process is easy and fun, and I’ve stayed in regular contact with most of the people I’ve interviewed.

Finding people to interview is easy too! Use your existing network to ask for suggestions, or to target specific interviewees. Or, just go to the person directly and ask. Do so politely, explain the reasoning for the interview, and do something creative with it (some people get interviewed a lot!) and you’ll get your chance.

Interviews are great for generating buzz. Give ‘Em a try.

One of Ron McDaniel’s 57 buzz challenges is to Join/Participate in an Online Group.

Like social networking sites there are plenty of online groups through Yahoo, Google, MSN, etc. that offer ways of connecting with peers and people who share your interests. Typically these groups are fairly small (a few hundred members), but if they’re active you can gain a lot from them - using them as a resource, feeding them news and success stories and answering other people’s questions and requests. Oftentimes people will be looking for contacts in other industries, etc. and playing matchmaker in online groups is a ticket to success.

The other day I came across Marketing Gorilla by Greg Hoffman thanks to blogtipping by Easton Ellsworth. Greg had a post about a Yahoo Group called Internet Marketing Super Group. They were looking for a few additional members.

So I decided to sign-up. It’s only been a couple of days - but looking through the archives of posts I can tell the group is quite active and discusses many topics I’m interested in — social networking, affiliate marketing, blogging, business blogging, etc.

The best way of finding groups is through others - getting referrals or reading other people’s blogs. If you search randomly you’ll find too much and it’ll take too long to judge quality. Better to have a close friend or contact recommend a group to you.

It’s always a good idea to include images on your site, landing page or online sales letter. I’ve seen studies done on the effectiveness of landing pages (although I don’t have a reference to point you to right now) that indicate the use of images is very important.

I think this is even more critical when selling a non-tangible item, something people won’t touch and feel.

For example - you might be selling software that’s dowloaded or hosted, so the client never gets any actual software box. Or e-books, white papers, audio books, etc. — all great examples of items that might not have a physical component to them, but benefit from the use of an image.

People like to see what they’re buying.

I wanted to create a 3-D Product Box for my business blogging site precisely for that reason. To give people a more tangible feeling, to show them that my services include documentation. I think it adds a more comfortable feeling to the site and my approach.

Creating the 3-D Product Box is quite easy using Photoshop, and I found a very helpful guide: Create a Product Box in Photoshop.

If you’ve got a bit of experience with Photoshop this should be very straightforward. I did have to fiddle around with the final steps regarding the shadow behind the box, otherwise they were spot on.

Admittedly, my example above isn’t great - the text isn’t ultra-clear and the URL is totally lost. But I did it quickly as a demonstration - work a bit more with the colors, layout, fonts, etc. - and you can produce a 3-D Product Box that is extremely clear, easy to read and effective at giving people an image of what you’re selling.

Even before blogging became extremely popular for businesses (and there’s still work to be done in that regard!) people were publishing articles online in article directories.

This is one of Ron’s buzz challenges from his book and part my 3-Week Buzz Marketing Challenge.

Ron points out that you can get some amazing buzz by publishing content in newspapers or magazines. But that’s still pretty much a “black box” for most of us, and few of us have the right connections to do it. Still, I’d encourage this wholeheartedly and would love to do some writing for prominent magazines/newspapers (hint, hint.)

Publishing articles online is much easier.

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Quite a few of Ron’s buzz challenges are related to Web marketing and promotion, including his challenge to create a Squidoo Lens.

What is Squidoo?

It’s the creation of Seth Godin - a site that allows anyone to create a web page of content. It uses a widget-style interface to let you add text, RSS feeds, Amazon links and a ton of other things.

In Seth Godin’s book, Small Is The New Big, he talks about Squidoo:

Squidoo is an all-purpose platform for user-generated content. It’s designed to make it easy for each member of your fan club to build a page that highlights the best of what you have to offer.

Godin envisions people creating lenses about you, in turn creating a huge, content-rich and viral network of people buzzing about your business. But I suspect most of the time people are creating lenses about themselves, much more like MySpace pages.

So Squidoo is another way of advertising and promoting your business. Fair enough.

You can make money off Squidoo - Google ads are placed on your lens, and there are a couple other ways of doing it as well. Or you can donate the money to charity.

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