Having brick and mortar stores can have their challenges and advantages. It’s great to have a place where customers can physically come inside and shop, but you are limited to a regional space where customers can reach you.

Mabel and Zora is a clothing boutique, having two stores in the Portland Metro area.  They offer ladies’ clothing, jewelry, luggage, art and accessories from new and established designers, including local Portland designers. I got a chance to interview them about their use of social media and how it’s affected their business:

m_adf685a19f60c55f70ef2e5b6fd6ecfa1

What has worked for you?
Twitter and Facebook have both been very successful for us and we know we still have a lot to learn about it! But so far, so good! I don’t know if people are seeing our blog or not but we keep writing just in case. We redid our website last August and spent a lot on it and nothing really sells on it, so we are trying to get more people to it, so far no luck, but they are coming to our stores! I know I need to do more with the website, but just haven’t got the patience for it!

What hasn’t?
Like I said above, the web sales haven’t really worked out, but the website does drive people to the store, which is great, I would just like it to pay for itself!

What do you hope to achieve with these tools in the next 6 months?
I guess I’d like to just keep learning, and figure out how to simplify. I’d also like to get the website selling more. I’ve read lots of things in magazines about things I can download to simplify the twittering and facebooking, I just need to take the time to put them into action!

Related Posts:

• Sock it to Marketing: Interview with Carrie Atkinson

If you are gonna pick a email newsletter service, get the chimp.

I’ve worked with a bunch of different email newsletter systems, some having nifty features, but my favorite is Mail Chimp.

It might be how friendly and easy it is to use. It might be the cute Monkey who greets you every time you login. Here’s just a few of the awesome features:

new-mailchimp-logo1

-it has tons of tutorials to help you get started
-when you first sign up, you can try using it for free if you have under 100 subscribers
-they have free live chat and email support
-they promote best practices for your email lists which includes building an organic list and ALWAYS getting permission to use anyone’s email address
-lots of great tracking tools to see who opened your newsletter
-helps you test what your newsletter will look like with other email software such as Outlook, AOL, and many more

Read about more reasons to check them out (if you weren’t already convinced). I was sold after using it for a client and will continue to suggest it as a great tool for freelancers and small businesses. Be consistent and start an awesome Mail Chimp newsletter today!

Related Posts:

• Are your bookmarks wireless?

Squidoo is one of those marketing tools you don’t hear too much about in all the social meda hype. It’s almost a secret to some, but I’ve been curious about it for a while.

Basically Squidoo is made up of single lens (a free web page) that you can edit and draw people to (for example, linking it through your Twitter account).

For example, I created a lens labeled “Why Portland, Oregon is so great” inserting my own text and Portland photos from Flickr.

picture-3

The main modules that make up your page are:

-Text ( basically chunks of text created by you)
-RSS (just like a blog)
-Photo (bring in photos from Flickr and other photo sharing sites)
-Guestbook (get feedback from others or turn it into a Q&A)
-Amazon (choose products and make $ when products are purchased through you)

There are other modules as well, but these can get you on your feet.

You are encouraged to write about your passions, hobbies, yourself, etc. These lens are just another great way to generate traffic to places you like to funnel followers and customers.

How does Squidoo stay afloat? When a money changes hands through your lends -  you receive 50%, 5% goes to charity and the rest to Squidoo.

Squidoo provides tons of suggestions on ideas, ways to improve your lenses, a newsletter for tips/tricks, and much more. Overall, it looks like a great tool to take advantage of amongst all the social media tools.

I also have the option to add modules such as Amazon products (one of the ways to make money through Squidoo). Other modules include guestbook, other text inserts, and linking to other lens. Squidoo provides complete stats about who is coming to your lens, etc.

Related Posts:

• Connect with Colleagues and Clients Today