How to Increase Your Website Traffic Rankings Using Social Media Marketing

There are plenty of ways you can use social media to market your products or services online. I would stay away from MySpace unless you’re in the entertainment industry. Outside of that, Facebook is the best choice.

Stay away from Twitter unless you are doing multiple promotions or frequent updates. I still can’t figure out all the hype with Twitter, although I’m currently using Twitter – go figure!

Linked In is good for networking with like minded business people. You can answer and ask questions. Answering questions at Linked In will establish credibility, trust, likability and you can be perceived as an expert in your field. Doing this can allow you to build relationships that may lead to joint venture partnerships. So, no matter your market, join Linked In.

Join forums that cater to your market. This is a good way to get you and your product in front of the people who matter most, your target group! Just go to Google and type your “keyword” followed by “forum and message boards” and see what comes up. I can bet your bottom dollar there’s a forum for your target group!

YouTube is good too! Okay the simple way to make videos for YouTube is to write a 300-500 word article. Record your voice as you read the article out load. If you have Microsoft open Movie Maker and add your recording and then add pictures that compliment your recording and you have a video slide show to upload to YouTube. If you use a Mac just open up iMovie to make your YouTube videos.

You can also create Squidoo lenses and HubPages. These sites are good for doing affiliate product reviews, product comparisons or simply doing a tutorial of your own products or even your affiliate products. The reason I like Squidoo and HubPages is because Google loves them! Their pages get indexed quickly in Google.

There are all kinds of other methods like social bookmarketing, RSS feeds, blogging and podcasting just to name a few. Just simply pick which methods will work for you TODAY and stick with your plan.

David & Goliath and Social Media Marketing

The epic tale of the ultimate upset is playing out online with countless small businesses leveraging the marketing power of social media.  How are entrepreneurs doing this?  Well, the challenge with social media lies in quantifying return on investment.  Here, the investment is primarily time and effort since the bulk of social networking applications are free.  The following outlines the factors that support how small businesses can exploit online media to gain a competitive advantage over large companies.

Personally – The voice of the company that filters through to social media is all too often devoid of personally.  Research shows that people connect people, not gray text.

Censorship – There virtually is no censorship when it comes to social media.  Small business owners don’t have to worry about being tied up through layers of social media compliance.  Larger companies, by contrast, can be subject to legal approval concerning every blog post or tweet, making it harder to facilitate real-time conversations.

Local Connection – Small businesses can tap into local events, traditions and communities much more easily due to their shared experience with the people.  Once again, people would rather bond with an actual person present at relevant local events.

Implementation – Online resources today allow for the quickest implementation when breaking news occurs.  Situations like these calls necessitate quick action when timing is everything.  The saying “the early bird gets the worm” holds solid validation as many in the general public desire the fastest reporting of news.  This advantage will convert more followers into customers.

Audience – The small business owner only needs to connect with hundreds or perhaps thousands, not hundreds OF thousands or millions.  Doing this yeah yield significant productivity for the small business who often seeking to zero in on a more focused target market.

As a small business entrepreneur you no longer have to remain puzzled about social media’s distinct value for the small guy out there.  You potentially have the huge advantage to trump larger corporations in reaching your desired customers.

Social Media Marketing Guide. How To Use Twitter, Facebook, YouTube And MySpace To Grow Your Internet Marketing Business

As I mentioned in one of my previous articles, Social Media has became extremely popular in the last few years.

Social Media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and YouTube are growing faster than any other type of social communication.

Social Media is an enormous untapped source of leads, prospects and business partners for YOUR business and best of all it is FREE.

Therefore, in order to benefit from the social media madness, you will have to know how exactly to monetize this ultimate untapped source of potential business partners.

This is exactly what I am going to be covering today. I want to show you exactly what you need to do in order to generate results with social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and MySpace.

However, Before I get into the specific details of how you should be using each one of the mentioned above sites, I would like to point out one thing. The ultimate purpose of every single social media website is Relationship Building. This is the sole purpose you should be driven by when you join a group on Facebook or sending out a Tweet.

Relationship Building is an essential ingredient to a Successful Internet Marketing Business and the sooner you grasp this concept the better.

Let’s get started!

MySpace

Only a year ago, MySpace was the biggest and fastest growing community on the Internet with more than 240 Million registered users. Today MySpace has lost it’s popularity with the users but it hasn’t lost it with the search engines.

To this day, MySpace is one of the first sources Google turns to when in need of information. What this means is that you can use it for your benefit by creating different MySpace profiles to generate more Search Engine Traffic for your particular business/opportunity.

Don’t get me wrong here, it doesn’t mean that you must use it only for that. You still have the opportunity to socialize on MySpace quite effectively, but right now, the main benefit of MySpace in my eyes is the SEO juice that you can squeeze out of it.

Twitter

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read updates known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length, which are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have subscribed to them also known as followers.

Twitter is an amazing social network, which really qualifies for the expression “Social Media Madness”. If you don’t know what I mean, just get yourself over four thousand followers, as I did, and you will see exactly what I mean. My Twitter home page is pure madness and socializing on Twitter without a client is not an option anymore.

Nevertheless, what makes Twitter unique besides the 140 character limit is the ability to Drive Massive Viral Traffic to Your Website.

Twitter is the easiest tool to drive traffic with especially if you are running a blog or a newsletter, it has an insane Viral Power Potential to it.

If you ever heard an expression “Word of Mouth Marketing” and did not know what it mean, than Twitter explains it very well. Just imagine if your Tweet with a link back to your site goes viral. Imagine the tweet being ReTweeted about 300 times. Imagine if each of those ReTweets only generated 3-4 clicks at a time, how much traffic would you get?

That’s right-A LOT!

YouTube

YouTube is a video sharing website where users can upload, view and share video clips. Three former PayPal employees created YouTube in February 2005. In November 2006, YouTube was bought by Google for US$1.65 billion, and is now operated as a subsidiary of Google.

YouTube, being the biggest video sharing network online, is a great place to do some video marketing. But Why is Video Marketing so damn important? Why is it so Crucial that you do it? Yes, that’s right! Relationship Building.

Can you think of a better way of establishing a relationship with a complete stranger? What can be more powerful when it comes down to building trust with another person on the internet than video? What can make more impact on that person than watching You move, listen to You talk and hearing Your thoughts coming out of Your mouth instead of reading them on his 15” laptop screen?

If you can think of a better way of doing it(besides live conversation with a web cam, of course) than please, be my guest and reveal it to me, because to this day, I haven’t found something better then Video Marketing.

Facebook

A Harvard University student originally founded Facebook with couple of his roommates in order to create a virtual community exclusive to the Harvard University attendees. Website membership was initially limited but later expended to other colleagues until later on Facebook became available to anyone aged 13 and over.

Right now Facebook is one of the biggest social communities with over 200 million active users. However, what makes it different from MySpace, Twitter and YouTube than? Why is it so essential for your Social Media Domination plan?

Well, personally, I can’t answer that question with a specific benefit. Facebook is just a great place to Build STRONG, BULLETPROOF, ROCK SOLID Relationships. I haven’t yet found a community where people are more open and ready to socialize with complete strangers all over the planet.

To me, Facebook is like another huge family. I truly admire and respect every single one of my Facebook friends. It is so easy to get to know people and connect with them on Facebook. It is so easy to get lost in endless chats and conversations there.

I have many of my friends, simply leading another Life there! Facebook is very easy to fall in love with and it definitely leaves other Social Networks in the dust when it comes down to building a strong long lasting relationship with a complete stranger.

Having shared these insight with you, I only wish to point out one more time that your main goal on any single social media site and in every single social community should be first to Build Relationships while driving traffic and generating leads second.

Gear Up Your Site For Social Media Marketing

The year 2006 saw the emergence of social media. If you are engaged in operating a website, you must realign your site to exploit the popular social media sites for increased traffic.
You should also introduce social media components to your site because web users are experiencing these new form of interactions in more and more sites and they may have an expectation of the same from your site also.
If you want to attract repeat visitors and want them to stay longer, your focus this year should be on the social aspects of your site.
Social media use technologies like RSS, blogging, podcasting, tagging, etc. and offer social networking (MySpace, Facebook), social video and picture sharing (YouTube, Flickr), and community-based content ranking (Digg, MiniClip) features.
The central theme of these sites is user generated contents used for sharing among the end-users. The social aspects of these sites are to allow users to setup social communities, invite friends and share common interests.
You don’t have to change your site completely within a month or so to take advantages of these new technologies. Introduce small changes incrementally through out the year and you will be on your way to meet these new challenges.
The first step is to declare who you are to the online community. People should be able to relate to you. Unless they know more about you, you will be just an unknown identity and most people don’t like to deal with unknowns. Create an About Us page and list your achievements and skills.
Create a MySpace page and link your bio in the About Us page to the MySpace page. Also provide a link back from the MySpace page to your website. Spend an hour every week to develop your online social network in MySpace. Invite a few of these new friends to write blog articles at your site about your products or services.
Install a free blog software and start publishing at least one article in your blog. Provide an easy bookmarking feature to social bookmarking sites like delicious. This is done by providing an action button for each article in your site. The action button takes users to the submission page of the bookmarking site.
Also, provide an action button for direct posting of blog articles to digg. Digg is a popular news ranking site. A well dugg article will bring thousands of visitors to your site.
Provide a forum at your site for users to discuss your products and services. Don’t delete negative comments because they provide insights into the improvements needed to serve your visitors better. However, censor hate speeches and meaningless bantering. Register your forum at BoardTracker. BoardTracker is a forum search engine.
If you are offering products, allow users to review and rate your products. This will help you in inventory management because you may want to discontinue low rated products.
Provide RSS feeds for your new products, blogs, forum postings, etc. An RSS feed provides teasers of your contents. Users will use RSS readers to scan your teasers and visit your site for more information if the teasers draw their attentions.
Publish all your feeds at feedburner. Feedburner provides media distribution and audience engagement services for RSS feeds. They also provide an advertising network for your feeds. If you have quality contents, you will be able to monetize your contents using their services.
Create short how-to or new product videos and post these videos in social video sharing sites like YouTube, Google video. Provide a few start and end frames in these videos to introduce your site with your site url. Post these videos using catchy titles, teasing descriptions, and appropriate tags to make them discoverable.
Provide embedded links to your posted videos in your site. This will save your bandwidth and storage space because the videos reside in the video sharing sites.
Besides videos, use social photo sharing sites like Flickr to share pictures related to contents in your site. Use the same title, description and tag techniques discussed earlier for social video sites.
Provide a Send to Friend feature for all products and services you offer. This feature is a link that sends the article, product description, etc. to a recipient via e-mail.
For starter, Yahoo provides a service called Action Buttons (search for Yahoo Action Buttons) that add links to your website for users to share, save, and blog about your website. The Yahoo action buttons use delicious for social bookmarking, and Yahoo blog site for blogging. It also has a print feature.
The social media is not a fad. It is here to stay and bring in profound changes to web surfers’ experiences. It is the right time for implementing features that will make your site social media friendly. Also, using marketing techniques that utilize popular social media sites, you will be able to bring traffic to your site.

Social Media Marketing: Five Simple Steps to Getting Started on Facebook

Social Media Marketing for business using Facebook can build relationships and provide value to those within your Facebook network. Facebook allows you to be real, get to know other people with similar interests while building credibility and trust. In this article, we’ll discuss five simple steps to getting started on Facebook.

1. Create a profile in your real name

2. Connect with others

3. Communicate to others by wall posts

4. Update your status

5. Join and participate in FB groups

Create A Profile

When creating the perfect Facebook profile for social media marketing there are several things to keep in mind; like posting a great recent picture of you with a smile. People want to put a face with a name and posting a picture that does not include the whole current you doesn’t build credibility. Choose a tagline that grabs the readers’ attention while it explains who you are and what you do. Complete your profile by filing in personal information such as hobbies, favorite music, and maybe your goals and aspirations. Including personal information helps others want to get to know you better because you may have similar personal or business interests. Remember to be real, when you are fake, people can see right through you.

Connect With Others

Connecting with others is the reason Facebook was created in the first place. To get started, import your address book or search Facebook for people you may know or have done business with. You can also connect with new friends by viewing the friend list of your connections, you may find others that you would like to get to know better. Unlike Twitter where you can follow anyone, Facebook requires a friend to accept your friend request. When sending a friend request, send a personalized message with your request. There’s nothing like someone you do not know requesting to be your friend and not even introducing themselves. Include who you are and why you want to get to know the person, your chances of getting accepted will be much higher. Once accepted, you can view your new friends profile and they can view yours.

Communicate To Friends By A Wall Post

Start communicating with your friends by posting an interesting quote, asking a simple question or providing valuable information about your interests. You can post on a friends wall to say hello, give good wishes, or help friends find solutions to their business problems.

Update Your Status

Updating your status is similar to a wall post except it is where you post what you are up to, how your day is going and to encourage interaction between friends. This is how you develop and grow your credibility and contribute to your social media marketing. Friends will get to know and trust you. By contributing to the conversation and posting valuable information relevant to your niche or industry you will raise your trustworthiness and become a know expert.

Join And Participate In Facebook Groups

Joining and participating in Facebook Groups is a great way to expand your social media marketing and get in touch with others with similar interests. Simply type groups in the Facebook search and you will see a list that includes the groups that your friends belong to. You can also browse groups and sort them according to your interests. There are many groups to choose from and you can even start your own. Once you have joined a group, participate by adding to the conversation; this is the way you will make additional contacts. Don’t be shy, contribute to the conversation and introduce yourself.

Looking forward to connecting with you on Facebook!

 

Social Media Marketing: Five Steps to Getting Started with LinkedIn

Social Media Marketing using LinkedIn is made easy by following five simple steps.  LinkedIn is the perfect site to build your professional networks, keep in touch with connections, discover opportunities, develop relationships, build authority in your industry and also find leads and opportunities for you and your business.  Keep it simple and check out these easy methods to getting started with LinkedIn.

1. Create your account2. Complete and update your profile3. Create a summary4. Get connected5. Engage with others

Creating an account

Go to http://www.linkedin.com and fill in your name, email and create a password and click the green join now button.

Complete your profile

Your LinkedIn profile is an important part of your social media marketing strategy. Upload a current, professional looking photo of yourself. You’ll want to complete your entire profile, and include previous work experience that you’ve had. Remember your profile is a representation of you. The little details are important to your profile; it should have substance, be grammatically correct and have no spelling errors. Include your chosen keywords liberally throughout your profile whenever you can so that others searching for those keywords can find you. Don’t forget your email addresses, new and old, to increase the opportunity for connections.

Summary tips

A summary should give a good snap shot of who you are and what you do. Use two to four sentences in your summary that incorporate your specialties or expertise. These sentences should include your keywords and add what you enjoy doing to help others to connect and get to know you.

Connecting on LinkedIn

Connecting with others on LinkedIn is controlled. In order to connect with someone on LinkedIn, you must show how you know them.  Getting recommended by LinkedIn members who know you and what you are all about is a wonderful way to connect to with others.

Engage with others

Joining LinkedIn groups gives you the opportunity to maximize your networking and social media marketing efforts while connecting you with great people with similar interests. Start by joining employer alumni groups, were you will have connections with people you have something in common with. And finally, enhance your LinkedIn social media marketing experience by participating and interacting with others through posting, responding to posts and networking with other group members.

 

Social Media Marketing: A Great Way to Build Your Online Business

Social media marketing is all the rage these days. By actively using tools like Twitter, Facebook, or MySpace, you can create traffic for your online business, which is vital to increasing sales of your product or service. You will also get to interact with lots of folks who share common goals and interests, which can lead to forming profitable business relationships as well as making important personal contacts. But as with any form of marketing, there are some general guidelines that you need to follow in order to be successful.

First of all, you need to make a strong declaration of your identity. You need to let potential customers know who you are and what you’re about. Some great ways to accomplish this are through “About Us” pages on your website or blog, and by creating an engaging profile on one of the social media sites. Next comes association-based interaction, which is where you begin to interact with customers. By using tools such as “Friends” on MySpace or social bookmarking, your customers will, in effect, be promoting your website or company, which is where social media marketing begins to pull in more customers for you.

At this point in the social media marketing process, user-initiated conversation allows your customers to ask you questions or make their own declarations, allowing you the opportunity to respond. In this way, you will have a chance to serve your customer and show them that you can take care of their needs. Their feedback is valuable, since it will let you know what you’re doing right, as well as where there might be opportunities for improvement. The best way to engage in these conversations is through the use of message boards and online forums relating to your topic, like the ones that can be found on sites like Google Groups.

Then, by making use of provider-based conversations, you will ask your customers in a polite but direct way what they think about your product or service. This will allow you to take your business relationship a step further by building honest, direct dialogue. Finally, there is in-person interaction. If possible, go out and meet as many customers as you can whether by going to their place of business or by meeting them at a conference or trade show. By doing so, you will be cementing your relationship and possibly paving the way for new opportunities.

Next Page »