SMO or social media optimization is a system in which by using the attributes of
search engine optimizations your web site is optimized amongst the most
happening online communities. This can either be done by strewing links all
across the community website to facilitate backlinking or by strengthening the
interaction podium by writing numerous blogs and constantly updating their
content. This will serve to recreate interest in your blogs amongst your regular
visitors and have them coming back for more; though with additional company.
This therefore is a more effective method of drawing traffic to your website.
So by now it is clear that if you have to popularize your brand you need to
popularize your website. The guidelines below will simply help you a little in that
endeavor.
Join a social media platform, for example---Digg, Delicious, twitter, facebook or
Technorati. Besides the obvious advantage that your website will be looked up
as a very ‘in-thing’ it will also improve the ranking and stature of your page in the
tech community.
Tag your article in the correct way to increase visibility. Don’t be stupid enough,
to tag an article as Acne when it deals with the more specific issue of acne scars.
Make your voice heard and opinion counted, by the tactful use of tagging.
Focus on quantity as much as you would on quality. Keep on adding articles and
white pages so that you give your visitors more than enough to chew on. If you
do not update your website regularly they will soon lose interest to visit your site
in the long run. This tactic therefore assists in adding to the linkability of your
website.
The most significant requirement is to provide for methods that simplify ‘tagging’
and ‘bookmarking’ for your customers. This can be done if you provide easy
quick buttons or ‘add to del.icio.us’. Allow for tag lists and notes for links to
cumulate visibility.
Reward the incoming links as a sort of inducement to make them come back for
more. This will not only bring in the existing customers but also pull in more
traffic, who would want to get rewarded as well.
Offer downloadable files from your website in the forms of downloadable pdf. files
,audio and video files and make them available to your customer either for free or
at a negligible cost. An additional propaganda mechanism can be by sending
their copies to various other websites.
Social media optimization has immense potential of escalating the ranking of
your website to great heights. Let us now move over to the other technique of
social media marketing.
So I hope by now you’re convinced of the power of social media marketing and
also what’s it and how it works. If you’re determined to make it big this 2009, you
must make full use of social media optimization. Indeed there are several social
network sites only but in the next chapters, I have discussed about the top 7
social media namely – Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Myspace, linkedin, Squidoo,
podcasts and how you can use each of these and generate more traffic to your
business.
Facebook
www.facebook.com
A lot of people undermine the power of Facebook as a marketing tool and relateto it as nothing but a time wasting exercise. It might be true of people who use it
for tracing high school classmates or for playing brainless video games. But what
about authors who use it to host virtual release parties? What about the nongovernmental
organizations that are raising massive donations for charitable
causes using the same medium? It just goes on to affirm the old dictum-- it is
what you make of it.
The easiest way to make a Facebook profile work for you is by linking it back to
your main website, online store, or wherever it is from where you desire to
promote your product from. But there are other ways as well.
· A fan page is a page that can be created by anyone to admire absolutely
anything that he feels is very arresting. It is a method of getting feed backs
from other enthusiasts or non-enthusiasts regarding that particular subject.
So you can simply start your own fan page. Book authors do it all the time
to promote a novel they liked or their own novel and invite opinions of
other people. In case you own a business worth promoting, just follow in
their footsteps. Import your weblog with the Notes’ application and keep
your fan page updated.
· Use the ‘GROUPS’ APPLICATION ON THE Facebook and make a group
of interested and like minded visitors. This can also help in marketing your
brand as you can promote yourself as an authority on the product that you
are selling. Say you are in charge of a restaurant and project yourself as a
gourmet and a food critic by hobby. You can then advice your visitors on
which restaurant to check out for a particular cuisine and the details of
new food joints that might have opened in your city. This way you can
build up your reliability with the interactive functionality that this application
offers.
· The bulletin application of the Facebook has an important application. It
serves as an instant message board for all kinds of important
announcements that you may need to make regarding a new product or a
sale, or a new movie; which otherwise you probably had to let people
know by calling them individually. It is also extremely helpful in connecting
with your customers. Just post the details of all points of sale and the
relevant URLs and see the increase in click-through traffic.
The facebook is increasingly being hailed all around the world as an
innovative and effective avenue for business marketing. So don’t let your
business lag behind due to some irrational and baseless fears regarding
the efficacy of the internet.
YouTube www.youtube.com
The Latest Marketing Device: YouTubeIf you have not already started using YouTube as one of your primary marketing
devices then you are lagging behind in the path of the new marketing revolution
that has taken over the online business community.
Marketing your product through videos made by you on YouTube is one of the
most effective ways of advertising your product to potential customers. More and
more people nowadays are becoming Internet-friendly and have access to a
computer. Therefore, surfing the World Wide Web is no longer a niche enjoyed
by the young and the wild. More and more businessmen are taking to uploading
relevant videos about their products and business to reach out to a wider
consumer base.
If you own a travel agency then make videos of your last family vacation, make it
visually creative with the help of the usual software programs available and post
them on YouTube for everyone to see what they will gain if they come to your
agency for their travel plans.
If you are promoting working individuals from home you should post the video of
your son’s first steps that you were witness to, and had taken a video of. This is
proof enough of the fact that more and more people will be able to experience
such intimate personal moments with their loved ones if they work from home.
Before starting your YouTube promotion post an introductory video. This should
contain convincing and relevant matter about why you decided to use YouTube
as one of your main advertisement mediums. This should be good enough to
convince more people to use YouTube as their marketing medium.
The best part about using YouTube to post videos containing campaign matter
about your product or business is that you can accomplish all this at no cost at
all. You can shoot your own video at your own convenience. You can edit and
post it with the help of your own handy cam, PC and Internet connection without
shedding a single penny for the entire process. And in return for all this you get to
widen your marketing base by reaching out to all those who check out videos on
YouTube.
These videos generate more traffic to the original product website when people
click on them. In this way, your website will also become more popular. You can
upload more than one video on YouTube and check out which one is generating
more traffic among web browsers. Depending on this analysis you can post more
videos or take off the ones that are not as popular as others.
The Basics of Using YouTube:
People use YouTube to advertise their product like they would use any other
marketing medium to do the same. Therefore, the basics of trade remain the
same in this case even if the concept is more dynamic and advantageous. While
posting videos of your product or business you must keep in mind certain things
in order to grab the right attention from browsers.
Make sure that you video is relevant to your product. Do not include useless
information to add fluff to the content. Keep it simple and matter of fact.
Include real life analogies to the use of your product if possible. This makes the
whole appearance real and more convincing.
Do not go by the rules of advertisement that you had learned back in the Bschools.
Most web browsers treat YouTube as a source of information;
something like Wikipedia. Therefore, if your video is about models flashing smiles
at the camera complete with cheesy lines, then this advertisement is no better
than the ones on TV. The whole point of using YouTube as a medium of
marketing is to make it different. And this difference comes out of keeping it real.
Make sure that the sound recording quality is a good one. No one likes muffled
audio while watching a video. And if this is about advertising for your business,
then bad sound quality can be a killer.
Whoever is starring in this video- be it you or someone else of your choiceshould
be convincing in his or her appearance. This is not about looking your
best. This is about making others believe in the best. Therefore, designer clothes
do not matter as much as having a witty script, a comfortable smile and an
excitable look. These social qualities attract more viewers than you know of.
Take care of the lighting of the video. Most of the time amateurs shooting the
videos do not understand the significance of good lighting. A dark setting can
make the viewer lose interest very easily. Therefore, to at least make your video
good enough for someone to sit through you have to make sure that there is
adequate light on the sets.
Talk about your business or your product clearly. Although this is about informing
potential consumers about the product, there is no point in talking in riddles to
them. Therefore, be articulate and sure about what you are conveying to the
viewer.
It is okay to have a less than perfect video for YouTube. The process improves
with practice. And after a few video shoots you will realize that your later videos
are of much better quality than the initial ones. Therefore, don’t worry about
anyone judging your advertisement content based on your video shooting skills.
Twitter
www.twitter.com
What is Twitter?If you want to let others know of your daily activities, Twitter will help to you do
the same in the bets way possible. Although some may wonder about the point of
letting others know of what we do in our personal space, but it is believed to have
the ability to generate market value for your business by finding solutions to that
very same query.
At first Twitter may seem like any other instant messaging gadget. It works the
best for those who have a wide range of interests and activities.
How Does it Work
Twitter is instantly accessible. It connects you to a much wider geographic social
base than your neighborhood or the college cultural community. Due to more and
more people using the Internet to stay in touch with others as well as getting to
know new people, Twitter is the best way to do all of this.
Maybe according to you your interests, activities and habits are only for your
family, friends and colleagues to know. But that is not the case in reality. People
are way better connected today through the Internet than they were a few years
back.
You can interact with those individuals who share a common interest with you but
might be living half way across the world. You would never have known of each
others’ existence had it not been for a device such as Twitter.
You can find out which URL is of the most interest to you by using Twitter to get
to the bottom of this. While searching for your most favorite URL remember that
websites contain content, but 2.0 sites don’t. Therefore, you have to use specific
URLs for Twitter to do its work.
If you want to find out what subject interests you the most in any field Twitter will
find this out for you as well. You can also find others who share the same taste
and interact with them to receive updates regarding the topic under discussion as
well as share your information on the topic with them.
If you want to receive and send tweets to those living near you about common
interests and activities, you can do so through Twitter. In this way you can stay
connected with all those who indulge in similar habits as your own both near and
far.
Using Twitter to Make a Difference
If you want to make contact with people who make a difference regarding your
interests and hobbies you can search them out on Twitter.
In order to find someone worthwhile to keep a close watch on you need to see if
they have posted anything that they have created on their own or not. If they are
ones who only re post others’ content then there is no point wasting your time on
these individuals.
Following such people and their posted content can help you in gaining useful
information about various subjects of your interest.
On the flipside, if you are one of those who post useful original content on the
Internet and use Twitter to improve your connections socially then there will be
many followers who will worship you for your content.
Remember that when you are posting content regarding issues that are important
to you, there are others out there who are also following this content regularly.
Therefore, whenever you post such content make sure you send tweets to all
those who are your followers and others who would want to join this list.
Make sure that your content is original and useful for those who are reading it. If
you find something on whatever you are interested in suddenly, then make sure
you let others following the same topic as well, through Twitter.
Your content can be through Facebook, a webpage you may have designed, a
blog you may have written or even videos and pictures that you may taken. The
topics can be varied and the content matter can be as quirky and strange as you
wish them to be.
But always remember that by posting such content on Twitter you are influencing
the thought process and opinions of thousands around you who take an interest
in the same topic. Therefore, be careful of what you post to whom. You want to
let people know that you believe in something and that you are willing to do
something about it instead of just speculating or arguing about it. Therefore, this
will be a sort of inspiration for those who also want to join a cause that they
believe in or a petition for some change that they want.
Be creative with your content. Present it as you want to. Do not conform to any
typical idea. Make the content interesting for those who are following it.
Why Should We Use Twitter?
If you want to know what your contemporaries are thinking about, or what they
are doing about these thoughts to bring about positive changes in the society
then Twitter is one of the most effective media to do this. Not only will you be
exposed to a variety of information on a host of issues, but you will also be able
to interact with those who are posting these things and are acting about these
beliefs and causes.
Not only will this be a way for you to contribute to the cause that you believe in,
but it will also keep you connected with your peers. It is obvious that change can
be brought about only when a community stands united in its front. Twitter
presents itself as a channel for this community to act and interact.
Therefore, do not waste any more time and use all the information, trivia and
notes that you have collected about various issues that may interest others like
you and put them up on Twitter and wait for it to become the topic of discussion
on the forum within moments. In this way you will know what the general opinion
about your topic is. You can work on your issue accordingly or even gather
support of those who are in favor of this in order to bring about a vital change.
Twitter is a medium of communication provided to anyone and everyone who is
involved in issues involving the society, economy, politics, and subjects of every
other kind that one can think of. This is a medium to put one’s word across to
others and make a statement. If you have this opportunity in front of, the best is
to grab it and make full use of it.
Myspace
www.myspace.com
Myspace is an extremely beneficial tool that is increasingly being used tocommunicate with millions of people all over the world to facilitate exchange of
ideas and the formation of newer alliances. It could be long distance friendships,
business partnerships, a forum on shared interests etc.
As such it doesn’t require any further exposition to show how, if employed in the
right way, this social networking tool can draw in colossal amounts of web traffic
to your site and market your product in a scale that you never imagined was
possible even in your most wishful dreams. But for that to become reality you
need to fall in line with certain guidelines. Are you ready? Alright, buckle up-----
Here we go!
· Make loads of friends:
After all that’s what social networking sites are meant for, right? Forging
new bonds and renewing old ones. So when you sign up, include as many
friends in your site as possible. Don’t discriminate on grounds whether
they can convert into potential customers or not. The more crowded your
site remains the more credibility it will garner and the more popular it is
going to be.
· Be active:
Talk, respond, reciprocate. Be alive when people communicate with you.
Leave back your remarks on the pages of your friends who have visited
your page and tried to touch base with you. However silly they may be.
For example complement someone on the new puppy that she got or on a
more reasonable note, congratulate someone on their new job. Show your
appreciation to a poetry that someone may have posted on your page. Do
anything but convince your friends that your are not a log of wood.
· Make your page your personal signature:
Be very cautious about not styling your page in a clichéd layout. Offer
newer, fresher designs that your visitors had not seen before. Such
personal customizing is done by companies like Cybertrack
Marketing.com. And it also comes with the additional advantage that these
companies are also going to market your page adding to your page’s
popularity. Just keep the outline neat and well scripted and yet retain the
element of delight and see the traffic thong your site.
· Concentrate on targeting your niche audience: yes you started off by
opening the door to all and sundry but now, that you have created a
respectable customer base it is time for locating prospective customers.
So start researching. Sort your friends’ list according to any of the given
classifications -age, gender, city or state. Having sieved through the
particular group you were targeting, get into a personal bonding with them.
Show that you are interested in knowing them.
Restrain from being an aggressive sales person as that might result in
their shunning you away. Be attentive to their interests and encourage the
same in them towards you. It is only when they start feeling comfortable in
your company that they are going to consider looking at your
merchandise.
LinkedIn
www.linkedin.com
Another excellent but very occasionally used social networking tool, LinkedIn hasbeen unable to replicate the success of many of its contemporaries. So there is
no uniformity of purpose to which it is put.
Some use it for finding friends who share their common interest, while some
professionals use it as a podium to recruit people. Small and medium business
ventures use it for searching others who are in the same practice. But again,
used properly it has fantabulous prospects of promoting your venture.
Very much like Facebook, the only point of difference that LinkedIn displays is
that it is more serious in its approach towards your life. Just as in Facebook you
would be involved in a lot of frivolous chilling out like beating a celebrity hollow
log; in LinkedIn you take a more serious look at life. It serves as a strong runway
for your life’s ambitions to take off from. Three of its most cardinal benefits are:
· BRAND CREATION:
The phrase is an extremely loaded one that speaks volumes about you
and also acts as a memento for your acquaintances to remember you by.
So what is it? It is that latent quality in you that never changes. Say, your
gait, or the way you dress or the unmistakable swishing of your hair when
you talk; the way you stay quiet when you become very thoughtful-------- in
short your brand is a mélange of all your idiosyncrasies that sets you
apart, and makes you who you are.
So when you provide your photograph in the LinkedIn column, ensure that
it expresses your goals in life. It can be a formal photo if you desire to
project yourself as a hot-shot pro; it can even be a clip of a picture that
you think best goes with the cause you are promoting (think about the
rooster on the Kellogg’s Corn Flakes overleaf.)
The column that expects you to draft a summary about yourself can be a
veritable goldmine if written carefully; and the same goldmine can collapse
and choke your reputation if you try to misuse it. There are two cardinal
rules when dealing with this section. Don’t fake who you are and be
concise, to the point. If you are promoting acne creams, no one wants to
know whether you love pets or not.
Provide relevant data relating to your nature, whether—you are the
gregarious one, or a leftist in your political ideology or simply whether you
are a workaholic or not. These are the prized links that people associate
with you. Detail what is it that you would like to change n your life and also
your preferred mode of going about it.
And last but not the least; provide just as much information about yourself
that is a direct linkage to the aims that you have set for yourself. Don’t
irritate people with useless information that are not associated in any way.
· LIKE MINDS TO LIKE MINDS EVER TEND, AN UNIVERSAL LAW:
LinkedIn is an amazing platform to discover loads of people who may
share an interest of yours that you thought was strange. You can find
groups of almost anything at LinkedIn; they can as varied as bird
watchers, knitting and crocheting addicts, food critics, travel maniacs,
book worm, PTA groups, almost anything under the sun.
Socializing with a group that you are in the same intellectual parallel with
has immense benefits when it comes to promoting your product with all
the new people. All that you do, is to go to the upper left corner of your
home page and click on the section ‘group’ and then you can happily
browse through the list of ‘fraternities’ who share very strange interests
and decide what suits you most.
Initially simply reply to their enquiries about your whereabouts or hobbies
or whatever question they pose for you; you can also simply complement
an aspect you found interesting in them. Slowly as confidence builds up,
you can get down interacting more freely.
· PUBLICITY:
Remember the underlying objective of joining LinkedIn is to promote
yourself or the services that you have to offer and find takers for the same.
So don’t leave any stones unturned in your efforts to make your profile
look interesting and engaging.
Employ the requisite links that LinkedIn provides you with to promote
these ends. Upload a U-Tube video that you have shot of yourself, where
you elaborate on the goals of your life, or explain what kind of a job you
are looking for and what qualities do you have to suit such a job profile.
LinkedIn is all about you, so you better ensure that whatever picture you
have drawn of yourself over there is extremely riveting.
You could also use the application that allows you to make slide
presentations that act as a flowchart to educate your visitor about who you
are, what your aims are and what are your short time goals. This forms for
extremely interesting viewing when contrasted with mundane scripting of
paragraphs on your home page. You can also use graphics and pictures
to add to the charm factor. Bullet points are also effective in keeping the
attention of your reader alive.
Squidoo
www.squidoo.com
Squidoo is another social networking site that is finding a lot of favor with themajority of web traffic. Every web page in Squidoo is called a lens--as in the lens
of a camera that focuses on one single topic and elucidates upon its various
characteristics and illuminates the hitherto unknown attributes.
As much it is no surprise that squidoo can prove very effective in promoting your
product only if you can pull in considerable web traffic. Since Google shows a
marked bias for squidoo web pages, they have a very high ranking on the results
generated by the former search engine.
As such, if you have a blog or website with squidoo, you can very easily market
them with minimum effort. What you can do is that you can attract traffic and
popularize your product with the masses using squidoo and then you can redirect
the same mass of enthusiast to external web pages. Squidoo also comes with a
couple of additional perks as well. First of all, creating an account with squidoo
comes for free; and second squidoo allows you to sell or affiliate products,
something other networking sites hardly permit.
Squidoo lenses are extremely informative and full of fresh content. So make sure
that you do a lot of research before you post your webpage for public viewing.
And once your page is on squidoo lens you can rest assured that it is going to
fetch the top rankings in major search engine results. But for freshly created
lenses a bit o optimization always helps to increase its visibility.
So here are some ways in which a Squidoo lens can help to increase the visibility
of your website…
· It is a powerful podium that penetrates newer customer bases, every day.
The secret is that a squidoo lens features so high in search result rankings
that a constant stream of fresh web traffic is never a problem.
· Setting up a squidoo lens doesn’t require any complex knowledge of
quantum physics. It is simple and can be established in some extremely
simple steps. It is user friendly and extremely helpful. It even helps you in
developing your content and making it more engaging. It has features like
RSS feed importer, the U-tube tools, etc, all of which helps in uploading
content from a variety of sources. But for increasing the visibility of your
web page, you might have to spend a bit of time on optimising it.
· The biggest advantage of squidoo is that once it starts generating
considerable web traffic, you can redirect them to external web sites that
you may own with other networking sites; or say your independent blog.
This is what makes squidoo an obvious choice with marketing
professionals.
· Search engine optimization is another feather in the crown of this efficient
social networking organ. Squidoo is a safe bet when it comes to marketing
your website, both on the internet as well as search engines. A factor that
critically determines the popularity of a website is the ease with which
back links can be created from them to other websites.
Squidoo excels at this. Squidoo allows you to establish back links with any
other websites of your choice with the minimum difficulty. This has the net
result that you can jam the bulk of this traffic to your alternative websites
that might be promoting other goods or services.
· Affiliate marketing - another of Squidoo’s unique advantage. Affiliate
marketing requires its affiliate marketers to promote other people’s
products. What happens is this - when you sign up for an affiliate
marketing program - by choosing from the list of best affiliate programs
that are available online - you enter into a contract with a merchant, to
publish advertisement links of his products on your website.
When the visitors of your website, click on that ad link they are lead to the
merchant site and if there they make a final purchase, you get a
commission on sales. So where does squidoo come in?
Squidoo is one of the few social networking sites that allow affiliate links, as most
social networking sites don’t. So on one hand it draws in traffic and on the other it
retraces their course and leads them straight back to your merchant’s home
pages.
And imagine the amount you would make in commissions, even if half of this bulk
is convinced enough to buy your retailer’s product. And if that’s not enough
incentive, for starting your affiliate business ad doing it on Squidoo, let me furnish
another small piece of information. Some merchant sites give you as high a
commission rate as 90% of the total cost of the product.
Squidoo offers you so many varied kinds of benefits that you cannot afford miss
it. All you need to do is, spend some quality time optimizing your lens. Even here
squidoo is right at your service. Use the website marketing lens on squidoo that
provides for better methods of promoting your websites.
So put in that little bit of extra effort and take advantage of the state of the art
online marketing innovations and take your websites to colossal heights of
popularity.
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