Archive for January, 2009

If you want to know where to get reliable social networking instructions, go to the experts - those who have been there, done that. And here’s the key – they’re still there, doing that.

They’re not a flash in the pan marketer who tossed out a few lenses or created a few HubPages and then vanished from the face of the social map.

You want social networking instructions from the people who understand the entire concept of social networking with an emphasis on how you can achieve your marketing goals.
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I love it when another blogger pipes up with a slam against Squidoo - my inbox fills with emails from people going, “Did you hear what so-and-so said about Squidoo? What are your thoughts?” It’s like a fight on the playground - people want to see a battle. Last time, someone came right out and said it - he wanted to see two marketers arguing over the point. LOL (Hey at least he was honest).

So today or yesterday another marketer came out with an anti-Squidoo blog post. I won’t name names here. Why spread false information and help him with more branding? But here’s what I want to say about this (or any topic where you have a he said, she said):
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What do AT&T, Avon and Coca-Cola all have in common? They all have a web presence using social marketing. But social marketing isn’t just for the million dollar businesses to use to promote their company.

Social marketing is for anyone and can be used successfully with just minimal amount of time and effort. Many real estate agents have turned to social marketing. Since a great deal of their potential clients have started hanging out online in social sites, those are the areas smart real estate agents as well as real estate companies are targeting.
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If you want to be a successful Internet marketer and reach your marketing objectives, then you need a good Web 2.0 marketing plan. Throwing a few random ideas or thoughts together and charging out of the gate without any concrete goals makes as much sense as climbing Mt. Everest in January while wearing shorts and flip-flops.

In order to be successful, an Internet marketer will have a plan that incorporates both short term and long term goals. If you want a good Web 2.0 marketing plan that will work for you, then you have to know what’s going on with the social media around you.

A successful Internet marketer is someone who uses today’s technology to interact with potential consumers and offer them products or services. The marketer stays up to date with what the latest and greatest form of dialoguing is. Since today’s number one form of interacting with others is from a social networking aspect, it stands to reason the marketing plan would include using Web 2.0 sites.

So let’s get started on your Web 2.0 marketing plan:

Step 1: Let’s say one of your sites is one where you offer women’s cosmetics for sale. You decide you want to drive traffic to your site, so you create a Squidoo Lens. In that lens, you could talk specifically about one item in your cosmetic line and you write about it. Say it was lipstick. You create a lens about that, then another lens about the mascara and yet another telling about the benefits of the foundation.

You use the lenses by writing good content and having links pointing to your cosmetic site. Add pictures or images of whichever relevant product you’re writing about. You want to make sure the topics you’ve written with search engine optimization in mind are consistent. Not staying consistent in your niche could set off alarms with Google and once that happens, it could drop your ranking.

Step 2: Get the information out there. You can send traffic to your Squidoo pages and ultimately your business site by blogging about it as well. If you use Wordpress, make sure you get the plug in ‘SEO Friendly Images’ that can be a real timesaver for you. Now, take what you just did on Squidoo and repeat the process on sites like Twitter, Hubpages, Google Knol, and other networks to maximize your SEO potential.

Step 3: Tweak and tweak again. If your copy suffers, so will your business. Visitors don’t stay on sites that are too hard to follow, too much hype and not enough of a call to action. Be sure to tweak your links - meaning check your articles, your headlines, even your bio if you have one. Don’t have links that are broken. Remember - it’s the content that’s most important.

I saw an interesting tiny little tidbit in my Women’s World magazine last night. It was talking about self esteem and one of the ways it said to raise it was by logging into Facebook (or other social networking sites) and befriending people. It was said to raise your “social capital” and make you feel more connected with others.

But it’s not just good for raising your self esteem - it’s good for helping you connect to your customers, too. You can create a whole brand and image just on web 2.0 sites alone! In fact, it’s rare that I trust anyone anymore unless they have a web 2.0 presence I can evaluate.

You have to be very careful on these social networking sites. Watch what you say about religion, politics, and other inflammatory topics. You may think it doesn’t matter, but it does. You might go off on a rant about how you “can’t stand the US” and in your mind, you’re thinking US policies. In my mind, as a US citizen and reader, you just said you hated my country, and I’m a part of that.

Think of your social capital when you participate online in the world of web 2.0. Are you devaluing your “stock” or making it worth more by providing true value and insight? In every post or page that you create, ask yourself if it helps or hurts you social capital - your net worth int he eyes of the community.

Some things will be neutral and that’s okay, too. Just make sure it’s heavily weighted on the “value” side so that people don’t become bored and start to ignore you.

Tiff

Social networking sites are great for a lot of things. We use them to connect with friends new and old and we use them to build relationships with potential customers and even business partners. Many of us use social networking sites for promoting our products.

This is common and as long as it’s done right, can be a wonderful way to increase sales and income.

What do you promote on the social networking sites you participate in? Do you promote your own info products in digital form? Do you use your social networking pages to promote affiliate products? Maybe you promote tangibles such as books from Amazon.
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Having your Squidoo lens maxed out for the best SEO possibilities ever is important. You want to use every nook and cranny you have to show relevance to your niche. Someone asked me how to make your intro pic in Squidoo a tag, so let me tell you how.

If you go to my lens located here http://www.squidoo.com/policeexam you’ll see my “intro pic” in my bio box is a police badge. Now let’s say I want a tag associated with this image.

Normally, I would just use the upload a picture option and be done with it. If you go to it now and hover you’ll see it’s just hyperlinked to the lens itself.

But there’s another way. If I wanted to, I could host that image elsewhere and upload the code into my Bio instead of the My Picture section. The code you’ll use is this:

[a href="http://www.url.com"][img src="http://www.imageurl.gif" alt="police exam" align="left" hspace="5" /][/a] Note: I have changed the <> to [] so when and if you use this code, change them back!

What this does is it inserts your image into your lens, hyperlinks it to the place you want it to go (in this case it’s a ClickBank product), and it notifies those who search the page for SEO purposes that it’s relevant to police exam.

The alt code allows you to do this.
Tiff