Your tour’s success depends a great deal on you. Even if you have help with organizing your tour, it is important to remember that it is YOU the people will want to get to know. This is why the first thing you need to do once your tour starts is to be present.

It is easy to have someone post content for you to their blog with your bio and picture at the end and forget to visit throughout the day. You want to be sure that you interact with the readers and those who comment during the tour. Take about 5 to 10 minutes to reply to comments, answer any questions that may come up and create a buzz among folks leaving comment.

Sitting back and tooting your horn because people are reading or listening to the comment will not work.

If you are going to be a guest on a podcast that is featured on a network like Blog Talk Radio make sure that you take a moment to visit the chat room if it is not too much of distraction.

The goal here is to share you in a genuine manner and not to appear phony.

You also want to be sure to promote during your tour as well.

• Remind your list and send them a copy of your itinerary.
• Tweet it, Facebook it, and talk about it every chance you get.
• Write about your stops on your blog. Highlight special points, comments you found interesting, etc.

I wrote about promoting your tour here in this post.

The bottom line here is not to do a disappearing act, expecting results. If you disappear so will your opportunity to increase your bottom line.

Have fun on your tour, be focused and most of all be PRESENT!

This is the end of this series. I hope that you enjoyed the tips I shared to help you organize your virtual blog tour. Remember this is a great free to low cost way to market your business, spread your message, and meet another segment of your market.

If you are ready to set up your virtual blog tour and would like to read more about how to organize one, I cannot stop recommending Nicole Dean’s Blog World Tour Guide. It is filled with valuable information that you can use along with the tips I share here to organize a dynamic virtual blog tour event.

If you are ready to set up your virtual blog tour but know that you can’t do it alone, Social Savvy Online Business Solutions offers packages that will help you spread the word effectively.

Simply put – It is just nice to be nice!

With that said, when you are conducting your tour, it is important that you provide some sort of incentive for your new audience. I remember when I was young it is customary for people to bring something when they were invited to someone’s home. Be it a bottle of wine, some fresh homemade bread, or a batch of cookies, you seldom went empty handed.

The same is true for your virtual blog tour. You want to make sure that you give the host something by giving their readers something. Even if your tour includes podcast and radio, offer something.

It is also a good idea to be very grateful to the host by sending them a thank you card, gift card, or something  like that.

When it comes to trying to decide what to giveaway on your virtual tour, the first thing you want to consider is the theme of your tour. Whatever it is about you want the giveaway to match.

Something ideas for giveaways are…

• Exclusive reports for blog tour participants only.
• Audio versions of the content you provide for the blog tour.
• Access to your membership site for a limited time.
• Cheat sheets
• Access to your information product vault. You can set one up just for the participants and provide products that fit the theme of the tour.
• A recipe book
• Free marketing graphics
• Free templates
• Grand prize for one participant of  the entire tour or you can choose on from each blog you visit along the way. The grand prize can be a lifetime membership, coaching, a free blog design, or something really cool like that.

How you run the giveaway is up to you. You can choose to give something away each day or to do one big grand prize at the end of the tour.

Whatever you decide make it worth the effort people will put in to participate.

Day 11 will be about what to do the day before your virtual tour.

Have you missed any of the virtual tour tips. You can catch up here.

Believe it or not, adults have a short attention span just like children. While theirs may be a little longer than the typical child, they have one nonetheless. When you are thinking about what is needed for you tour, you just may want to consider adding graphics to your list.

A word of caution here. While your the graphics for your tour do not have to be  fancy, they do need to be eye catching and appealing. If you have never created a button your self and do not have an eye for design, hire someone to do one for you.

You will pay anywhere from $20 up to get a good graphic created. Two people I highly recommend for graphics are Stitchblade Designs and DPK Graphic Design. I have use both of these ladies and they are good with graphic design.

Your graphic needs to have a few things on it in order to speak the message clearly:

• Coordinated colors. Don’t deviate to far from the colors of the product or site your are leading people too.
• The Tour Information. This can be as simple as just the title or it can include the dates as well. Just don’t crowd it.
• Relevant image. If you choose to have an image in your graphic, make sure it fits the message.

Here is a look at the graphic I did for the Dr. Mommy’s Healthy for the Holidays Tour.

As you can see, I created it to stay with Dr. Mommy’s signature color which is read. I also chose a background image that fit the theme. Because the image was festive, I chose to stick with a simple yet elegant a script font and I did not include the dates. That would have been too much!

Creating a relevant graphic for your tour will help stir up the buzz you want to create!

Day 7 will be about Creating A Press Release.

Are you missing any days of the Organizing Your Virtual Tour series? You can catch up here.

How many products do you have available at this very minute that could be a part of your income stream? What does your product tree look like? Is it ready to be harvested and enjoyed?

I ask these questions because I watch many people pump out product after product and grow branches that are ripe for the picking. However their promotional efforts still need a lot of nourishing.

I have had clients approach me and ask why they aren’t making money. The first thing I ask them is how are they marketing and promoting so that their market knows what they offer. The answers often throw me for a loop:

• I have a few buttons placed on some sites.
• I don’t enjoy writing.
• I am not good with talking to people.
• I have a website. Isn’t that enough?
• Well you are my social media/marketing VA! What are you doing to promote me?
• What exactly is promoting?

Trust me the list goes on.

If you are pushing out report after report, e-book after e-book, internet marketing product after internet marketing product, but you are not going forth with your promotional efforts; then you are going nowhere fast. Been there, done that, wrote the book… wanna read it?

This was one of the many reasons I decided to start my VA business. I was watching too many people make the same mistakes I did when it comes to marketing and promoting- a lot of production but very little return due to poor promotional efforts.

Think of where companies like Coca-Cola or McDonald’s would be if all they did was push out products and did no promoting.

It makes little sense to pump out all the products if you have no marketing plan. Marketing includes the promotional part as well and  it is not as hard as it seems. It just takes time. If you invest and your product is good, then the money will come. It may trickle at first but then you will start to watch it grow and grow.

Promoting is a very important part of marketing and there are many ways to promote yourself.

• Content marketing: Content is King
• Video marketing…GOT FLIP!
• Teleseminars/Webinars: People love to hear you talk if you know what you are talking about
• Virtual Blog Tour/Guest Blogging: Strategic guest blogging is a great way to find your market and share your message
• Your own blog with great SEO in place and regular quality posting will keep your market coming back for more
• Podcasting: There is likely an audience who needs your expertise
• Talk it up: Using your social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Ning is a great way to share your message. Just don’t be spammy and remember to offer your help where you can. Be a value and not a nag
• Business cards: Every business needs them because you need to promote online and off.
• Speaking engagements: Trust me the more you do them the easier they get.
• Freebies: Are you giving away stuff to entice your market to want more
• A List: Opt-in lists are a great way to promote because the people who sign up are usually interested in what you have to say

These are only a few ways that you can promote yourself and your products. There are many more creative ways to get your message to the masses.

Have a good support team is a great way to outsource some of your promoting efforts. It saves you time and helps you to spread the word in a more efficient manner.

It makes not sense to have a full branch if no one is around to taste the fruit of your labor. It will just get old and rot!