Internet Marketing - Using the Social Media Strategy

Social media implies that you facilitate a two-way discussion, rather than a one-way bombardment of marketing messages. In short, this means that you stay engaged and in a discussion with visitors.

Social Media sites come and go like the wind. It seems like every 5 seconds some entrepreneur is just around the corner with another Digg or del.icio.us knockoff.

Hoping that whatever maneuver they can bring to the table will make them this week’s hot topic or at least clever enough to catch the eye of whomever might have some money and want to absorb some wicked bit of code or an entire social media community.

Social media (or new media) involves a LOT of things, a lot of tech, and could need a lot of resources (not necessarily money). When you say you do social media, and you want to launch a network of some sort, does that mean the entire process is done in-house?

Social media marketing can bring traffic and links to any website. Too often, marketers overlook the value of social media and tend to stick with traditional methods, while the younger generation of webpreneurs has employed social sites as an every-day strategy.

Social media is gowing at a such a rate that domains, websites and blogsites will increase in value due to the increased demand for webspace. The social aspect is driving the net into new territory and expands exponentially because of its viral nature.

Social media - as understood in a Web 2.0 context and has enabled us to play more effectively than was practical previously, on a global field.

Social Media has released us, freed us: and we won’t go back. Social media has been a great resource for both ideas and traffic for my blog. If you work and get noticed in social media and it gets passed around that’s a great way to promote your work.

Social media seek’s (in theory and in word, at least) a different kind of influence: peer review and approval. The medium and the form of discourse that it supports are wide open.

Social Media is a Branding Exercise - while social media sites can send you a lot of traffic very very quickly they can also be excellent places to do branding. Every time a reader or potential reader comes across you on a social media site the more you reinforce your brand.

Social media marketing is actually becoming necessary but it has to be done right. It is about the weight of numbers and it will bring some honesty, ethics and accountability back to doing business.

Social Media is conversational media in all its interactive forms including text, video and spoken words - whether face to face, over the Internet, over the airwaves or via mobile technologies such as iPods and cell phones.

A Social Media Club is intended to be a place where amateurs and professionals can come together to learn from one another, to understand each other and to work together on the things that make meaning in their lives - their personal passions, their professional endeavours and their noble pursuits.

Social Media, doesn’t even really exist as a subset of media. Everything is social now, we just expect it. Social media companies will race to provide metrics that show impressive results, but that’s not necessarily a good thing, especially given the ways measurement may shape investment and in turn shape the evolution of social mediums.

Social media campaign’s go far beyond the traditional agency model of media planning and buying. So do advertisers they actually get into the game and get their campaign’s out there.

Social media is changing the way online businesses advertise because control of the message is shifting to the consumer.

Social Media Optimization (SMO) is a new term that was recently coined by Rohit Bhargava and has since been taking on life of its own. SMO tactics can drive huge amounts of people to a website and can also determine whether a startup, website or idea will make it or not.

Social media will be the optimal place to market especially with a recession. Social networks are a rich source of HIGHLY niche audiences and therefore are highly target-able.

William Potts:http://www.affiliateperformancesecrets.com

Identifying The Inbound Links That Are Good, Bad Or Useless

Inbound Links are the life blood of a website and the Pathway to Success revolves around these links. In a broad sense these inbound links can be categorized under three groups, Good, Bad and Useless Links.

The good links can indeed sky-rocket your website up the popularity ladder to fame and fortune while on the other hand the bad Links can dump your website out of sight in the internet. The useless Links will be of no help or value to you. So it stands to reason that you cultivate good links if you want to be successful in your online business.

Useful Good Inbound Links:

These links will bring enormous benefits to your website. They can increase your search engine visibility which will indicate the popularity of your site thus increasing your link popularity, page rank, traffic and sales.

If you have unique and useful content in your site other websites will link to your site to provide their website visitors a good website experience. This will give you useful inbound links and valuable targeted traffic.

Listing your website in both paid and free high ranking web directories can give good one way inbound links. Some free directories might insist on reciprocal linking but this should not be of concern to you as they are all useful links.

Writing quality authoritative articles and submitting them to article directories and article distributors with your website URL in the resource box is a smart way of obtaining one way links. This will soon grow viral as webmasters publish them in their articles and ezines bringing you hundreds or even thousands of valuable one way links.

Search Engines do not devalue all reciprocal links. They do appreciate quality, theme related reciprocal links. In addition it will be a great bonus if you can identify sites that the search engines consider as authority sites in the same theme as your site and exchange links with them.

Social Book marking is becoming increasingly popular day by day. Here you can maintain a personal collection of links online and also allow access to any others online. Linking your site or articles to popular social sites is another great way of obtaining useful good links and traffic.

Bad Inbound Links:

These are inbound links that are disliked by search engines especially Google and can do enormous harm to your website. By linking to these websites knowingly or unknowingly, you can be penalized or blacklisted by the search engines.

Avoid linking to sites search engines consider as Link Farms. These are sites that have hundreds of assorted links linking to each other in a page. By linking to them your credibility will be at stake and probably be penalized by the search engines.

Search Engines disapprove Free For All sites also known as FFA sites. Here you can place an advertisement with your link in it. Your advertisement will appear along with thousands of others and would probably get an exposure of an hour or so. It is wise to keep away from these sites.

You should also avoid Bad Neighborhoods because these are websites that have been penalized or banned by the search engines. By linking to them you too risk being penalized by the search engines.

Useless Inbound Links:

Some inbound links are neither good nor bad. They are in fact useless and of no benefit to you.

You should avoid linking to sites that are irrelevant to the theme of your website even if they are of high page rank. Search Engines are not going to give any credit for this and you will hardly get any targeted traffic from them either.

Similarly linking to websites with very low PR even if they are of the same theme will not be of immediate benefit.

Conclusion:

Ultimately the secret of your success will depend on the inbound links you obtain from useful good websites and ignoring all the others. The obvious results will be increase in link popularity, good search engine placement and great traffic.

Copyright © 2008 Kanaga Siva. Kanaga Siva Free Home Based Business Website and Blog.

SEO

Search engine optimization should always be considered long before your website structure, colors, layout, and overall site design. But, the majority of people usually get caught up “in the moment”… thinking of riches instead of “how” they’re going to attract more website visitors. This article is meant to get you back on track, and provide you with 7 winning search engine optimization tactics.

1. Identify Keywords

The single biggest mistake that most business owners make is trying to think of a “cool name” for their website, when they should have chosen a keyword-rich site name like ‘prevent-corporate-bankruptcy.com’ instead of SmithLawOffice.com’ (as an example). Your potential customers search for keyword phrases… not business names… unless you’re already a household name like Wal-Mart, eBay or Apple. Facing reality, many business owners gave up on websites ever helping their business a long time ago… usually because of a poor website name choice. And, it doesn’t have to be this way.

Simply, discover what terms people are searching for. Identify the “action” keywords and phrases that people are actually using when they are searching Google, Yahoo, MSN or any of the other major search engines. I highly recommend looking for keyword phrases that incorporate the following keywords: buy, want, need, order, download, etc. I’m sure you’re getting the idea now. Then, you need to purchase website names that are centered around the most popular keyword phrases. And, redirect these visitors to your current website. And, I promise that you can setup a website redirect in less than one minute… even if computers scare you. You just need to have access to your website hosting interface, with cPanel being the most popular choice.

2. Optimizing Your Web Page

After identifying a minimum of 10 keyword phrases, I recommend optimizing your current website pages’ title tags, meta tags, image “alt” tags. You need to start using these keywords within your webpage content in bold text, underlined text, and as text links. Do not overuse these keywords though. These keywords should only comprise 4-6% of each page. So, if you have 500 words on a webpage, limit your keyword usage to 20-30 words. Most of the major search engines index every word of your page and compare them to your title META description and META keywords. So, you should never hide or add non-related keywords to your webpages: like Anna Kournakova, Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, etc. This is a “black hat” tactic and should never be used, unless your want your website to be permanently banned by the search engine directories.

Most of the major search engines don’t even consider the META keywords anymore, which is why the actual content of your webpages is becoming more and more important. Excessive repeating of keywords is considered as spamming, which will get your website penalized with a lower ranking. And, be sure mix your keywords in different combinations throughout the page and in your ALT tags, instead of using the same phrase over and over again.

3. Link Popularity

One of the most important factors to achieve a high ranking in the search engines is link popularity. The overall number of links to your web site is important, but the quality of the links are even more important. All the search engines are very fond of “on topic” links. Links from sites that contain your same keyword content and are focusing on the same topic as your site, are known as “on topic” links. Three of the best ways to get “on topic” quality backlinks are to comment on other industry-related blogs, make comments in industry-related forums, and to submit articles to article directories. Just make sure that you’re adding comments or articles to high pagerank sites, avoiding low page rank sites.

4. Misspellings

Adding misspelled keywords within your META tags can also boost your website traffic, because many people are likely to misspell your keywords when browsing the search engine directories. As an example, here are several popular misspellings I found people making when they searched for a site submission service, as follows: “free search engine submision”, “sumit”, “subit”, “search egnine submission”, “submition”, and “saerchengines”.

5. Add Fresh Content

Adding fresh content to your website on a regular basis is another key factor that plays a critical role in your search engine rankings. Adding new content regularly gives your visitors a reason to come back. Search engine robots will also visit your website more often, once they notice that you update regularly. This is one of the main reasons why WordPress blogs are so popular right now. When visitors leave comments about blog posts you have made, the search engine bots see this as new content. And, it really helps your site rankings when a visitor makes a comment with a permalink back to their high pagerank site. This helps website owners save time, by allowing website visitors to create content for them.

6. Don’t Kill the Search Engine Crawlers

Avoid using flash intro pages where it says “Click Here to Enter Site”, because the search engines have a very difficult time indexing (seeing) anything beyond the intro page… unless you’ve submitted every webpage of your site to the search engine directories manually, which is very time consuming. Even if you use the alt attribute to specify alternate text for flash images, that text will not be anywhere near as important as real text on a main index page.

7. Provide Relevant Title Tags

Making your page titles simple, descriptive, relevant and “keyword rich” makes it easier for search engines to know what each page is about. Keyword rich titles help the search engine directories provide consumers with more relevant search results, helping them determine whether your website contains what they are trying to find. The title description is the most important element of your website design, after you have chosen your website domain name.

About The Author Lee Kendrick - Visit http://get-more-website-traffic.com

Inbound Linking Strategies

Creating inbound links to your website is one of the best ways for you to increase your all important traffic, sales and search engine rankings. Recently the major search engines have begun placing more and more importance on the number and types of inbound links that a website receives, when determining how well they rate a website. Inbound links also help you to reach more customers, more quickly.

One way to dramatically improve the number of inbound links that you are getting is to write informative articles on your area of expertise. These articles will carry a textbox with information about you the author and will also contain a link back to your website. These articles then need to get as many sets of eyes on them as possible.

If you are willing to take the time to write a quality article related to your website and offer some useful information to the reader, you can get this article published in multiple newsletters and ezines. For each article that gets published in an ezine, you can realistically expect that your article and, more importantly, your link can be seen and visited by thousands or tens of thousands of people. The key is what actions you take to get your article to those publishers and thus their readers/customers.

There are a few established and experienced distributors who have been connecting the inbound link articles to the appropriate publishers for a number of years. These established distributors have well-forged relationships with the publishers with whom they work. A distributor will, for a small fee, take your article and review it and send it out to the publishers of the ezines and newsletters. Once the publishers review the article and deem it as appropriate and relevant to their publication, they will send it out to their readers inside of their ezine or newsletter. The number of readers that a publisher has varies from dozens to hundreds of thousands. The publishers agree to post your textbox with a link back to your website, so that the readers of the article can know who gave them this important and quality information about their area of interest. Then a percentage of the readers will click your inbound link and visit your website. As a result, you will be able to increase your traffic and your sales.

If the newsletter publisher archives their ezine or newsletter on their website, then you can also count on the improvement of your search engine rankings as a result of the additional documented inbound links to your website.

If you write an article and submit it for distribution, you could track the percentage increase in the amount of traffic and/or the number of inbound links that you are getting to your website. Depending upon what value you place on web traffic (that converts to buying customers), this can be a very cost effective way for you get that traffic. Let’s suppose that your article goes out to 10,000 readers and of those 10,000 readers 1,000 of them click the inbound link to your site. Now of those 1,000 lets imagine that 100 of those purchase your product or service. How much is 100 new customers worth to you? Is it worth taking the time to write out an informative article to show that you are an expert in your area? Is it worth the nominal fee that the distributor will charge you for this service? Most will answer with a resounding “yes” to these questions.

Now, you can elect to go about the distribution process on your own and save the money that you would pay a distributor, but consider the following.

* Where do you begin to find the targeted publishers and audiences?

* How do you get the publishers convinced that your articles are worth publishing?

* Publishers will not accept poorly written articles or outright advertisements, because they want to keep their readers happy and offer them something of real value.

* There have been some who attempted to do their own distribution to the publishers and spent hours or even days getting it done. In the end, they could only reach a small number of publishers.

* An established distributor who already has a list of the major publishers can do the same work for you in a matter of hours.

* An established distributor has also already developed good relationships with the publishers, so that the publishers know that they are getting quality materials from the distributor. This means that the publishers are more likely to use the article that you wrote.

You just have to decide if you want to do it yourself and save a small amount of money and hope that the inbound links come, or if you want to spend a little to have experts distribute for you.

Once your article is distributed and reaches the targeted publishers and targeted audiences, you can do an analysis on how much it cost you to get each new visitor. A simple Return On Investment (ROI) analysis will show you how much you paid for each of the new inbound links that you are receiving.

In addition, remember that quite a few webmasters may pick up your articles as a result of the distribution service sending your article out, and some of the ezine publishers will print your article in their online archives. These additional new inbound links are going to dramatically affect your search engine rankings with major search engines, since the search engine companies have begun to place so much value on inbound links.

Take some time and write a few informative articles, and then contact an experienced distributor to help get your article published. Then, you can watch with glee as the traffic to your website, sales at your website, and inbound links to your website increase dramatically.

About The Author Trey Pennewell is a writer for thePhantomWriters.com Article Distribution Service. If you need software to help track your ROI for your article marketing activities, go to: http://thephantomwriters.com/x.pl/tpw/software/redirecturls.html.

What is Social Media?

So what do we mean by social media? As the Internet has evolved increasing numbers of people have taken to sharing ideas, opinions and experiences through a combination of text, blogs, audio, video and message boards etc. More recently RSS and podcasts have also captured the imagination of many in their lust to get their message out to a wide audience. Social media has lead to a revolution in the way many people now interact and learn about world events. The repercussions are that the views of media giants are no longer taken for granted. Now almost anyone can put forward their perspective on any issue they wish. Some organisations have been quick to catch on and realise how their products or services can be promoted by this phenomenon, a kind of social marketing mix unlike anything which as gone before.

One of the simplest ways to begin social media marketing is by creating your own MySpace page. MySpace offers anyone the option to build a free web page where you can share your ideas or express your views in a particular topic. By inviting friends who share similar interests it’s possible to quickly build a cult like community while covertly linking them to your own website.

The social web revolves around sharing opinions…..be they good or bad. With this in mind, websites that are packed full of content can lever recommendations from readers in the form of bookmarking. Bookmarking has become popular with some web users who’ll share their lists with others who have a common interest. Assuming your website has some decent content, bookmarking sites such as Digg, Technorati, Del.icio.us and Reddit provide downloadable code and links etc that’ll soon get you stated. A wise alternative is to link up to AddThis.com, which will then save you alienating those with a bookmarking preference by giving access to numerous bookmarking sites in one go.

A great method of keeping users up to date with your content is to set up a RSS feed. Otherwise known as Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Syndication, RSS provides a notification to users that new content has been added to your site thereby keeping your visitors up to speed with new developments or product launches and so on.

Enabling people to communicate directly through your website is at the core of social media and forums can be a great way of providing just that. The best forums are well managed but not overly censored. Both good and bad comments should be encouraged. While it’s easy to assume that bad comments are best filtered out, leaving them in gives the forum greater credibility. A well managed forum provides an excellent, not to mention free, means of gathering customer feedback and carrying out market research etc. To give a forum momentum you may need to regularly stimulate discussion by starting new topics and by spending some regular time weeding out the spam and nonsense.

Showing your expertise through video is a clever way of grabbing an audience. Sometimes the only real way to demonstrate something is in a visual form. If you are dealing with something computerised it could be worth considering using screen capture software where you can easily take people through a lifelike demo. Video can be downloaded from your own website or posted on sites like YouTube for instance. Its always good to stamp your video with you website address so people know where it originated from. If your video impresses people they may want to seek you out. In much the same way still photographs, graphics and audio can be posted to websites; again not forgetting some kind of link back to your own website.

Lastly but by no means least you can get social media savvy by creating a blog. In essence blogs are little more than short articles often centred on current affairs, similar to writing a column for a newspaper. If you set up a blog it requires regular updating. Much like running a forum people expect blogs to evolve preferably on a daily basis. The biggest no no is to be lame on updates as any audience you’ve gained will soon be lost.