CheapTweet Blog

In case you missed any of them, here’s a recap of the (hopefully) interesting links we’ve posted on Twitter the past two weeks.

A comparison of credit cards vs. debit cards from @bargainr [hint: he likes credit cards better]

How to take better baby photos: Expert tips on taking better pictures of little subjects from the NY Times

An article from Retail TouchPoints discussing various social media campaigns by retailers, mentions @wholefoods and @cotweet

Some useful tips on how to deal with difficult customers from @JCKMagazine

Here’s a guide to using Twitter #hashtags from @mashable

Have you checked out CheapTweet Stores yet? CheapTweet Stores combine deal tweets and other tweets from a brand with what everyone else on Twitter is saying about them, all in one convenient shopping destination on CheapTweet.

Since we launched CheapTweet Stores two weeks ago, we’ve added some great new brands!  We started things off with these three awesome Stores:

DealTaker – all kinds of coupons and deals

Overstock – discounts on everything from bedding to electronics to clothing

VacationRentals – cheap vacation rentals all over the world

Since then, we’ve added several more great new Stores:

American Musical Supply – deals on musical instruments and deals

Football Fanatics – lots of sports team merchandise

Mack’s Prairie Wings – waterfowl decoys, hunting gear and accessories

Perpetual Kid – fun toys and gifts for grownups

There’s really something for everyone! And there are lots more on the way. We’ll have more Stores to announce in the next few weeks, so stay tuned.

If you’re a retailer and you use Twitter, we’d love to open a CheapTweet Store for your store or brand.  Read more about Stores and request your own CheapTweet Store.  Contact us at sponsors [at] cheaptweet [dot] com if you have any questions.

This week, we talked to Karine Large (@saronti), a director at Saronti Books, a unique personalized book seller based in London.  Karine says Saronti is all about making families giggle.  They take photos from your family, your school or even your favorite football players, cut out the faces and stick them on storybook illustrations. Their books make thoughtful and unique gifts. In addition to their online store, you can find them on Twitter, Facebook and MySpace.

How did you get started making personalized children’s books?

Saronti Books began in 2002, when Sandie’s youngest son yelled “Mum, make me a book”.  Having been writing her own stories for a couple of years, Sandie (Saronti books’ author) adapted one to include him and his brother. This grew to include all the family. He took the book into school and the next day she was mobbed by people wanting to know where they could get one. She thought, “Mmm, I might be onto something here.” It’s now some years later and here we are. We get enormous pleasure from seeing children, parents, and grandchildren enjoying seeing themselves in one of our books. There really is no better gift.

Tell us a little bit more about your work.  Do you make items other than children’s books?

As far as we know we are the only company in the world making books personalized with faces of a whole family (or preschool). There are other companies making books with a child’s face in it, but not the whole family. We are working on games and other great products with the same concept, but can’t tell you yet!

Where do you get your inspiration?

It’s easy. Sandie can write on demand! I think she gets up at night with some new story ideas.

How do you market or promote your business?

We try everything. We have a very limited budget so we tend to focus on social media, mass mailing, link exchanges, reviews, etc…

As a bit of viral marketing, we recently created a Family Fun section on our site with kid’s online games, music, recipes, kid’s jokes, printable coloring, funny videos, mum’s gossip and more!  Customers seem to love it!

We have profiles on the usual MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, BT Tradespace and of course, best of all, Twitter.

We’re constantly looking to grow our list of resellers and to create partnership with new photographers.

How do you use Twitter to help with your business?

We started Twitter thinking we’d increase sales, but we were wrong. But the amount of people we met has been an absolute delight. We met really interesting people from different areas, exchanged ideas, learned a lot! Twitter is also fab when it comes to asking customers’ opinion. When I make a change on the website, for example, I just tweet to ask what they think. It’s amazing to get such a close connection with potential customers. Tweeting regularly about fun stuff, making people giggle and promoting the “Family Fun” section on our site has increased traffic dramatically! Twitter is such a powerful tool.

Do you have any tips or advice for someone just starting her/his own business?

Get a site up – even if it’s simple. Don’t spend too long on it – no point having a good site if no one knows it’s there. Loads of hosting companies will give you a site builder (even e-commerce) for free. Spend your time and effort on PR, viral marketing, social media and advertising if you can afford it. Let the world know you exist! If that works, then spend some more money into redoing a more professional website perhaps.

For this week, we picked out some of the most fun and most patriotic deals we could find, in honor of July 4th. Happy Independence Day!

July 4th cupcake onesie for $10 from @BSB_Etsy

Deluxe Uncle Sam costume on sale for 20% off from @NightmareFactor

Patriotic lampwork bracelet on sale for $31 from @sendinglovegems

Red, white and blue jewelry up to 50% off from @aljdesigns

Reusable Kate lunch tote for 40% off with code July40 from @savvysassymoms

A recap of the interesting stories and articles we tweeted about in the past week.

Here’s a very useful article with helpful tips for selling crafts online from @interspire.

This week’s seller interview is with jewelry designer @getglam. Vera is amazingly talented – don’t miss this interview!

We got some insight into how to pay as little as possible to insure your jalopy from The Consumerist.

Mashable posted a list of their top 10 Twitter SEO tips. Some of these are very important considerations.

And since CheapTweet is already indexed by the major search engines, we want to make sure your tweets are being found. So we wrote up a few Twitter tips for online retailers.

A recent ReadWriteWeb article about Twitter traffic revealed that Twitter only sends a small amount of traffic to online retailers. According to Hitwise data from the UK, about 5% of Twitter’s downstream traffic goes to retailers. A lot of that is due to the fact that retailers are just starting to figure out how to best utilize Twitter, a generally social (and not commercial) channel, to drive traffic to their e-commerce sites.

So, what’s a retailer to do? Is Twitter worth the time? And if it is, how should you use it? At CheapTweet, we certainly believe Twitter is worth most online retailers’ time, provided it’s used effectively. Here are a few Twitter tips for retailers.

Your Profile

• Always include a link to your store. Give your followers something to click on!
• Write a brief bio. Be sure to describe what you sell or do so new followers will know what to expect.  Don’t leave this area blank, no matter how self-explanatory your Twitter name might be.
• Include a picture or logo. Many people will not follow Twitter accounts with no picture. Include something visual for people to remember.
• Take advantage of the background. You can upload an image to the background of your Twitter profile. Consider something with your company’s colors or include an logo, photo or more text to describe your store.

Your Tweets

• Call your followers to action. Encourage your followers to do something. Be descriptive and active in your tweet language.
• Tweet diversely. Yes, you want to post links to your store, your blog, or your website, but include tweets about other stuff, as well. Post links to other interesting articles or sites, post some tweets without links, reply to others – just mix it up. Most people don’t want to follow a boring or spammy feed.
• Use keywords. Make sure your tweets include keywords that will help you be found in search. Not only do people use Twitter search to find other Twitterers, but tweets are also indexed by other sites (like CheapTweet, which is indexed by Google), so keyword-rich tweets will help people find your profile, both on Twitter and off.
• Be succinct and retweetable. Just because you have 140 characters doesn’t mean you should use all of them. Try to keep your tweets to around 120 characters so your followers have room to easily retweet you.
• Include unique links. Don’t just tweet the same link over and over. Use a URL shortening service like bit.ly to shorten unique links for each new tweet. This is especially important if you’re tweeting about different products or pages.

Promotions and Interaction

• Provide special Twitter-only offers. Your followers are a dedicated group of customers; reward them with special offers. Tweet coupon codes, limited-time deals, contests and giveaways.
• Tweet about promotions a few times. Twitter is a fast-moving medium. Don’t expect that your followers will see a tweet the first time you post it. Don’t post it three times right in a row, though; post it at different times over a few hours or days to be sure different groups of followers will see it.
• Engage followers. Think about unique and interactive promotions you can do on Twitter. Be engaged with your followers – ask questions, start conversations, answer inquiries.
• Post links to sales and news. Make sure you tweet about any sales or discounts your store is running, even if they’re not Twitter-only specials. And let your followers know what’s going on with your store and your company.
• Monitor your brand. Set up an RSS feed of the Twitter search for your company and product names. This way, you can keep track of what people are saying about it and respond quickly (and helpfully).
• Experiment! The best part of Twitter is that we’re all still figuring out how to best use it. Don’t be afraid to try new promotions and ideas, see what works and use that knowledge for next time.

Just like other channels, using Twitter effectively means providing relevant and interesting content and participating in the conversation. If you have other tips for retailers on Twitter, we’d love to hear them in the comments!

Here’s a very helpful CheapTweet how-to for retailers from @SusanDickenson of Home Accents Today.

If you’ve ever wondered why you can’t find yourself in Twitter search, this explanation from Twitter might help.

Check out our latest seller interview. This week we talked with Jenifer Bryan (also known as @lucybluestudio), an artist and designer in Austin, TX.

As always, Mashable comes up with a useful list of social media resources. This one is about five ways Twitter can save you money.

And, in case you missed it, we’re extremely excited to announce the launch of CheapTweet Stores with @Overstock, @DealTaker and @VRdeals!

Today we’re pleased to announce that we’ve partnered with some of the biggest brands on the web including Overstock.com, VacationRentals.com and DealTaker.com to launch a new feature called CheapTweet Stores. So what are CheapTweet Stores? They’re the world’s first online stores devoted to items being sold on Twitter. Each of our launch partners now has their own store on CheapTweet where we showcase their best Twitter deals. So what does that mean for you?

• Never miss a great deal. Twitter moves in real-time. That means if you follow a brand, you’ll probably miss some of their great money-saving deals. We make it easy to keep up and keep saving money. Not only can you get all their latest deals in one right place but you can grab an RSS feed and stay up to date. You can even search directly within their deals. Why not check out Dealtaker’s store, get their RSS feed and search for that last minute Father’s Day deal?
• Get special offers and enter contests. Each CheapTweet Store has a sidebar filled with constantly changing special offers directly from the store owner. Right now you can win a celebrity weekend from VacationRentals or get your own family bailout to the tune of $10,000 by Overstock.
• Find out what people are saying. We all want to stay informed about the stores we buy from and see what other people think. Each store has a Mentions tab that shows you everything being said on Twitter about them. See what people are saying about DealTaker right now.
• Get all the deals from a brand in one place. Did you know that Overstock.com shares deals from @overstock and @OAuctions on Twitter? Or that DealTaker has lots of content coordinators sharing the great stuff they find on their site? A CheapTweet store brings all the great offers from different Twitter accounts run by a brand into a single searchable stream.

Over the coming weeks we’ll be adding new stores and new features so stay tuned!

Interested in getting a CheapTweet Store for your brand?
We’ve got plenty of information for brand owners on our site. We’d love to have you, so go ahead and request a store from us and we’ll get you set up. It’s quick and easy to get started.

A recap of the interesting stories and articles we tweeted about in the past week.

First, a bit about what’s new with CheapTweet. Better search, deals in your city, new blog features and more!

Here are some very handy tips from @wisebread on how to keep summer electric bills low.

We discussed a somewhat controversial Slate article about how Etsy might be peddling “a false feminist fantasy”

@SavvyAuntie will be live-tweeting for TNT  during their new show Saving Grace. There’s a good writeup of her sponsored tweeting on Mashable.

We’re trying to learn a bit more about our followers. If you haven’t done it yet, would you mind answering a few brief questions?  It’ll take 30 seconds.

At CheapTweet, we want to make sure we’re tweeting about deals our followers find relevant and interesting. So, in order to get to know you a little better, we wrote up a short survey.

Would you mind answering a few quick questions? It’ll take 30 seconds, I promise.

This survey is completely anonymous and all questions are optional. And we’re not going to sell this info to anyone; we just want to make sure we’re being useful.

Thank you for your help!