Selling Tee Shirts Through Social Networking

Some of the most visited sites daily on the internet are various social networks. The largest demographic of these sites are the people who purchase the most tee shirts of any other group. There are many tee shirt brands that have launched to success with just a small beginning presence on a social network.

Depending on which network your strategy will differ according to their individual policies. Some networks allow open promotion of your product while others don’t. You can bring in external content to build up your profile on some networks but not others. They all have their own methods of keeping in touch with other people, whether it is through profiles, messaging or a blogging platform. It is impossible to provide a run down on just one way to use all social networking sites. Of course, you can build from a simple starting place that most incorporate:

Set up a profile with information about your brand and develop an authentic personality for the specific social network,

Search out and contact friends and associates you already know who are members of the network.

Explore their friends lists and look for others you may already have in common and invite those people to join you.

Get involved in the networking and keep your profile updated and fresh with new content. Add photos, videos and do blog postings.

Stay active, visit daily to answer any inquiries or requests and put in the effort to make new friends.

Join groups and make comments using a signature line to link back to your website

Network with as many people as you can and identify major players to connect with. Use the site’s tools to search for others who fit into your target market and make contact with them.

Check out any applications or features of the network that can be used for building more contacts and marketing your brand.

Develop strategies to funnel your friends and contacts to your blog or website if you are not allowed to openly market

Even though social networking is a fancy term, exactly like in real life it’s still all about making friends and influencing people.

There is a continually growing number of social networks. Myspace and Facebook may be the largest, other sites can also bring more sales for your brand like Bebo, Friendster, Hi5 and Orkut to name a few. There are also thousands of smaller sites that appeal to different niches and are also worth exploring if your shirt designs target those interests. One example would be if you sold t-shirts targeted towards dog owners then Dogster or Pawspot could be a good place to start a presence.

One of the ways to build a successful network is to constantly stay in touch with people. As your network grows, this task will become harder and harder to do if you belong to a number of social networks. This is where Twitter.com comes in. You can update your contacts and friends on a multiple number of social networking sites about your every activity if you want.

People have used Twitter at times when they were getting fired or laid off, giving minute by minute details of what was happening, and by the power of social networking had a job again or offers almost immediately. How can this happen? The people on the social networking sites found a persons story so compelling it caught the attention of others who wanted to help. Twitter has a way of engaging people with a constant stream of by the minute news, which many find intriguing and compelling.

Successfully using social networks to sell t-shirts isn’t instant and will not happen overnight. If you start now in building your presence, before you know it, you can have viable marketing channels hitting the right demographics that will produce sales for your shirts.

The more time you spend and explore each site, the more successful strategies you will come across that people have used to develop a strong presence. As with everything else you do to increase your tee shirt sales, always be sure to cross link all of your efforts to create a vortex that will eventually pull in customers and make sales.

Anthony Marsh is the owner of Popular Threadz and Crack Smoking Shirts. He runs the online resource TeeBiz.com and the t-shirt community TeeBurb.com.

Engaging Your Visitors Will Sell More Tee Shirts

When someone gets involved they tend to be more committed to something than someone just passing by. When people interact online they may be doing a multitude things like instant messaging while surfing the web. As a web site owner, you really have no idea whether you have a visitors full attention since you are not physically together. What you have to do is come up with something that gets them involved.

To engage you visitors may be easier than you think. Since social networking sites have taken over the web, blogs, discussion groups, surveys and forums are part of most internet users daily activities. These are all ways to get a visitor to stop for a moment and interact with your site on an increasing basis. If you get them to become a regular visitor who wants to interact with your site it will start to fell like a home to them. They will start to take pride in contributing to your site and they will feel the sense of ownership.

Several forms of marketing like direct mail use strategies that include what is called an involvement device to push prospects to become engaged. It is normally something a prospect can feel and touch and designed to get their participation. It might be as simple as a scratch off section of a call to action card or peeling a sticker and pasting it onto an order form to signal an acceptance of an offer.

It might seem like an overly simple approach to try and increase sales, but it does do just that. If a prospect becomes engaged in a sales process they are more likely to devote their attention and follow up with a purchase. A prospect’s resistance to a sales pitch becomes lower if they become involved and commit to an action.

Of course, not just any involvement device can be used and must relate to what you sell. Facebook is an excellent example. There is a growing popularity of applications which engage people in participation. Those are involvement devices and if there is a web site’s address associated with an application, users are engaging with that site.

Probably the most successful example of using involvement devices in the t-shirt industry is Threadless, which has built a strong community from them. Submitting designs, voting for and critiquing designs, communicating with other users and many other methods that Threadless uses are basically involvement devices that keep their members engaged and coming back. Just a quick visit to http://www.threadless.com will demonstrate the strong identification that members have with the company. Threadless has gained the success they have by pushing to the front their many involvement devices almost to the point that t-shirt sales seem to be secondary to the community.

The key for Threadless is that all of the involvement devices that have been employed directly relate to t-shirts. Now while your business model may not go to the lengths of Threadless you can still employ involvement devices. Getting a comment on a blog is getting a person to take an action and involves them with your site. Will you make a sale from that? Probably not, but maybe down the road as the visitor continues to return and their resistance lessens. The best involvement devices will be related to what you are selling and get your visitors engaged.

Anthony Marsh is the owner of Popular Threadz and Crack Smoking Shirts. He runs the online resource TeeBiz.com and the t-shirt community TeeBurb.com.