Today we’re taking a ride on the information superhighway to talk to Quirky’s Tech Team about the fixes, updates and new features they’ve been working on.

You’ve probably noticed by now that Quirky’s Terms & Conditions have changed. Now that the new Ts&Cs are live, Tech has been able to begin working on getting our new presales process up and running.

In the past few weeks there have been several important fixes and updates made to Social Sales and the Earnings Dashboard that Quirky Community members use to track their income. The issues with Social Sales have been resolved and Tech is now working on a way to reward sales that might have been missed. Tech also fixed a bug that was affecting the Earnings Dashboard, and paid out all of the fractions of cents that we have been keeping track of.

Another payment related update: after the last bulk payout took nearly 24 hours to complete, Tech has decided to rewrite the system that they use to process files from the Finance Department so future payouts will be completed in a much more timely fashion. Tech is also working on an update for Potential Earnings, that will break down the numbers into different types of earnings, including commitments, retail orders, and shipped products.

There’s also a couple of new features for Evaluation that Tech is plugging away on. The first is a way to recover drafts of submissions. This way if you can’t complete your submission in one sitting, you’ll be able to take a break and come back without having to start over. Additionally, Tech is working on a way to allow community members to sort submissions by category, so if you just want to look at kitchen gadgets and lawn products you’ll have a much easier way to filter out everything else.

Finally, we have a quick update on the hotly anticipated Quirky iPhone app. This app is going to be focused on the Quirky Process, including idea submission and project participation with an awesome new user interface. There won’t be any e-commerce functionality built in. While we don’t have an exact launch date, the app should be ready to launch at some point in the near future.

That’s all for this week. We’ll have another update from our Tech Team next month.

When not racking up the referrals, Stephen runs the popular iPad blog iPad Accessories and is a professional marketer and marketing consultant. He’s also a recovering artist, amateur rock climber, and self styled globe trotting hippie.

Try out his affiliate marketing tips below, and you could be raking in the referral dough too! And don’t forget to give him props for this great guest post.

As a professional marketer one of the most attractive things about Quirky to me is the potential to make money as an affiliate through their social sales feature. Affiliate marketing can be a great thing — you don’t have a great idea for a product, you don’t have to ship anything, you don’t even have to invest a single cent to make money! All you have to invest is your time. However, time is a commodity many of us are very short on these days. If you are trying make it as an affiliate marketer, how you spend your time is going to mean the difference between success and failure.

There is an Islamic story about a giant ship engine that failed. The ship’s owners tried one expert after another, but none of them could figure but how to fix the engine. Then they brought in an old man who had been fixing ships since he was a youngster. He carried a large bag of tools with him, and when he arrived, he immediately went to work. He inspected the engine very carefully, top to bottom.

Two of the ship’s owners were there, watching this man, hoping he would know what to do. After looking things over, the old man reached into his bag and pulled out a small hammer. He gently tapped something. Instantly, the engine lurched into life He carefully put his hammer away. The engine was fixed! A week later, the owners received a bill from the old man for ten thousand dollars.

“What?!” the owners exclaimed. “He hardly did anything!”

So they wrote the old man a note saying, “Please send us an itemized bill.”

The man sent a bill that read:

Tapping with a hammer: $2.00

Knowing where to tap: $9998.00

Effort is important, but knowing where to make an effort in your life makes all the difference. Now, that proverb is applicable in so many aspects in one’s life. When it comes to making social sales at Quirky as an affiliate marketer, how and where you direct your efforts will largely dictate whether or not you make any money. Affiliate marketing is all about finding the buyers — uniting a shopper with the product they want.

Twitter and Facebook: As has already been stated, Twitter and Facebook are two excellent places to go to find people searching for advice on products to buy. Search.twitter.com can be an excellent tool to find people searching for advice in real time. For example a quick search there for the word “compost” reveals a number of individuals wanting to learn about composting, but complaining about not having space to do it! How nice of you to suggest the Keiro to them! You may even get a thank you once you tell them they can make money themselves by committing to buy it in pre-sale! Rinse. Wash. Repeat.

Niche Communities: Thanks to the wonders of the interwebs, no matter what your interest is you can find a group, community, or forum full of like-minded individuals. These small niche communities are perfect places to make social sales. Look at a Quirky product for sale and ask yourself, “What kinds of people would find this useful?” Make a list. For example, look at the HydraDuo. This is one invention I can’t wait to see go into production (second only to the Waffler!) Who would find this useful? Runners, weight lifters, travelers, the list goes on. Next you go out and find some of the major communities, forums, and blogs for these kinds of people. A quick search for running forums reveals a number of great communities to start with.

Now you’ve found your target audience, next comes selling to them. Selling is an art unto itself, and would be a blog post (or two!) all of its own. It is essential that you don’t come off as a marketer, spamming the forums with links and pushing products. Instead, make yourself a valuable contributing member of their community. Perhaps you could create a forum topic “What’s the best water bottle for running?” and list a few water bottles including the Hydra Duo in some of your favorites. Or once you have built up some trust on the forum, you could post a review of the Hydra Duo, mention how amazing it is, and how it needs to be made, and how buyers can make money by committing to buy it in pre-sale! Use your imagination, be creative, and try different things.

These communities come in many shapes and sizes, and a creative marketer will find ways to reach the individuals there and show them how awesome Quirky products are. If you can’t find a community for a product, then you could always create using free services like Ning.

Find the places where people are asking questions and seeking advice, look for ways you can unite a searcher with a product, think outside the box and avoid the herd at all costs… and you just may find that your social sales start going up!

Got any tips of your own to share? Head to the forum to continue the discussion!

Remember our Town Meeting and the sad social sales stats that when along with it? Well, don’t look at community member Stephen Markas. Kudos to him for being Quirky’s highest social seller and quite appropriately, this week’s Quirk of the Week! The social media extraordinaire has apparently been singing our praises with referral numbers nearing 25,000. And he’s certainly got the social sales revenue to prove it. Thank you spreading the Quirky love, Stephen, we think you’re pretty stellar too.

Pleased to meet the lot of you! My name’s Matt, and I’m the first wave of Quirky.com’s newly invigorated sales push.

I’ve been brought in to the illustrious Quirky team to lead our direct sales efforts from our online store. In short, I’m here to bring more people into the site, and to encourage those more people to buy more things. In shorter, I’m here to turn your hard-earned influence into checks in your mailbox!

A few of the things I’ll be looking at in the near future are improving the site’s presence in organic search (SEO, for those in the know), managing paid search and other direct marketing campaigns, and tirelessly working on tweaking the Quirky.com store into the sleekest ecommerce engine it can be.

I’ll be getting into all of this in more detail on later posts. But there’s one thing I’d like to get into as soon as possible with all of you:

We want your help!

I’ve been really inspired by the strength of the Quirky community in getting out the word about this site. This includes, but is not limited to, the enthusiasm that you have all shown for Quirky’s Social Sales Links. We really want to expand that program, as well as make some more like it, so you Quirks can control your own sales destiny as much as possible.

We’ve been kicking some ideas around over here, but I was wondering what’s floating around out there! Great ideas are the Quirky community’s stock in trade, right? Any great ideas for marketing projects out there that the community can participate in? What would you want to do to earn more money while promoting your Quirky products?

My ears are always open to any suggestions you have for community marketing projects, as well as any other ideas you’d care to kick around involving the Quirky community cashing in through the site.

Take care, Quirks! Looking forward to hearing your suggestions and working together to make Quirky.com the greatest success of the information age.

-Matt

P.S. One piece of unsolicited advice for all you out there. When you start a new job, never, ever be the first person to use the brand new drip coffee maker in your office. If you must, certainly don’t let your new boss taste it. The first pot in a new machine always tastes like the elephant house at the zoo smells, and you will never live it down.

When we rolled out our new payments system at the beginning of the week, we also included a nifty new feature called Facebook Connect.

Facebook Connect lets you log in to both your Quirky and Facebook accounts with a single click, making it easier to stay connected on both networks without fussing with multiple passwords.

To get started with Facebook Connect, you first have to grant Quirky the necessary privacy permissions, which you can do by clicking on the Facebook link in your My Account page. When you’re done, refresh that page to set your Facebook notifications preferences. Note that your preference selections will not be valid until you have granted Quirky the appropriate permissions.

Once you have completed this step, you will be able to select which of the following notifications will be published on your Facebook feed:

When you post a comment

When you submit an idea

When you win a project

When you buy a product

When you earn money

Publicizing these actions allows you to utilize your existing network to drum up support for submitted ideas, generate social sales, earn money from registration referrals, and more. All clicks to the site through your Facebook page are attributed to your unique referral link, which means that you get credit when one of your friends takes action… without lifting a finger! When you think about it, there’s really no reason not to Facebook Connect.

Sling Back (Quirky’s first-ever product!): 569 out of 625 –> 91% –>  56 to go

Wrapster: 642 out of 720 –> 89% –> 78 to go

MugStir: 514 out of 630 –> 82% –> 116 to go

Let’s blog, Facebook, Tweet… whatever it takes to round up some more sales! I know you all can do it.

http://www.trendhunter.com/trends/quirky-cloak-ipad
http://www.thegadgetguycolumn.com/index.php/ipad-accessories/cloak-ipad-case-by-quirky/
http://www.ipadcoversblog.com/2010/03/09/unique-crowd-sourced-ipad-case-code-name-cloak-is-finally-available-for-pre-order
http://www.gadgetvenue.com/quirky-cloak-apple-ipad-case-03105422/
http://nexus404.com/Blog/2010/03/11/quirky-cloak-ipad-case-protects-displays-ipad-ipad-folder-style-case-supports-portrait-landscape-orientations/
http://www.techfresh.net/quirky-cloak-ipad-case/
http://the-gadgeteer.com/2010/03/09/quirky-cloak-ipad-casestand-available-for-pre-order/
http://www.slipperybrick.com/2010/03/quirky-cloak-apple-ipad-case/
http://www.itechnews.net/2010/03/10/quirky-cloak-undercover-for-apple-ipad/
http://technology.automated.it/2010/03/10/quirky-cloak-ipad-case/
http://techblips.dailyradar.com/story/apple-ipad-with-quirky-s-cloak/
http://digitalorchard.ie/2010/03/15/quirky-cloak-apple-ipad-case/

And that’s just the first page of Google search results! Have you found any other great blogs about Cloak? Post ‘em here!

What does that mean for us?

1. We have the incredible opportunity to cash in on iPad hype with the release of the Quirky Cloak, our sleek, functional iPad case, now available for pre-sale in Quirky’s online store.

2. We need to hustle to push Cloak out of pre-sales and into manufacturing so that we can get the product into consumers’ hands quickly.

3. We need YOUR help to push those social sales!

I’ve created a bit of a toolkit  for promoting the Quirky Cloak on social media sites. Use your social sales link, pictured below on the bottom right of the product page, to refer potential Cloak buyers to Quirky, and you’ll cash in too!

ON FACEBOOK…

- Post your social sales link to your Facebook status, with an update like:

Jessica can’t wait to buy the iPad, but she’s even more excited to buy the Quirky Cloak iPad case.

ON TWITTER…

- Use a link shortener like Bit.ly to shorten your social sales link and post it with a provocative/cheeky/intriguing teaser. For example:

I’m going undercover with Cloak. [link]

ON BLOGS…

- Hit up tech blogs (Google “top tech blogs” for good lists) and leave comments on articles/posts pertaining to the iPad. Feel free to cut and paste the following text:

The Quirky Cloak is BY FAR the sleekest, sexiest iPad case on the market… plus, it’s mad functional! Check it out on Quirky.com — [YOUR SOCIAL SALES LINK]

You can also embed the following graphic banners in comments, on your personal blog… wherever your heart desires! Don’t forget to change the “YOUR SOCIAL SALES LINK” text to your own social sales link.

<a href=”YOUR SOCIAL SALES LINK” target=”_blank”> <img src=”Http://aquirkyblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/cloak-banner.jpg” border=”0″> </a>

<a href=”YOUR SOCIAL SALES LINK” target=”_blank”> <img src=”Http://aquirkyblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/cloak-banner-2.jpg” border=”0″> </a>

Now that you have everything you need, let’s go out and push those social sales!!!

Can I get a HELL YES?

Many of you have jumped on the Twitter bandwagon to promote Quirky using your social sales links. Kudos! We encourage all of you to leverage your social networks to attract new Quirks. This, in turn, can earn you cold, hard cash if your referrals purchase products in pre-sales or submit product ideas. Everyone wins!

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the Twitter machine, I’ve compiled some helpful links to help you get started:

A Newbie’s Guide to Twitter – a helpful beginner’s guide, from C-Net News.

How To Twitter – one reporter’s foray into the Twitter world, from the Wall Street Journal.

How to Get More Twitter Followers – useful advice for gaining followers, from DoshDosh.

Using Twitter to Promote Products – a video describing how Dell used Twitter to promote products, WhoPopsYourPopcorn.com.

Once you’re on board, don’t forget to follow us @QuirkyInc.

Sandra Lehr wrote: I would love to know what our most active quirks are doing with respect to social sales. How are they reaching the right people? I think those who aren’t big into the social media aspect might find this type of info helpful.

Matthew Toghill responded: Currently standing on >9000 referrals (hits on my links); 112 registrations; 119 orders. Admittedly the majority of this is due to some luck with the big gadget blogs using my referral link (and others copying the link or sourcing such sites), this was before they probably realised what the whole link meant and since then they seem to all shorten links to just the standard store page/ quirky home page.

Sandra responded: I have nearly 2400 referrals and 18 orders. So lookout — I’m catching up to you! I do twitter a couple of times a day links to the site. I’m trying to hit different people without being super annoying so that they unfollow me. I think if I can continue to get the right folks to follow me (through Mr. Tweet or even Twellow) and get noticed on some of the other boards I’m on, it could pay off.

Michael Mattox responded: 1285 Referrals, 6 Registrations, 1 Order  Many of my friends have gone to the site with my original link, but never registered at that time. They would simply go to Quirky days or weeks later without using the link, then register and order.

Do you have any super tips for social sales? Hit up the forum and share your expertise with the rest of the community!