Social Media
Social Media Marketing can bring you tons of new prospects and leads that are searching for you personally. The one thing that I really love about SEM is that you get to know your customer prior to them being a business associate or a client.
I have learned with the 12 years of working online the best way to get referrals is by engaging with your market place. Join groups that are in direct relationship to what you are offering and use social media as a tool to not only market but to build an online relationship with others in your field or newcomers to the industry. I have had exceptional results with social media using video marketing and SEO.
The power of the Internet will give you 300% more leverage than any magazine article will hands down. With Social Media these days you can write a post, blast it out to your ezine list and then tweet it, digg it and post it to your facebook wall, all driving traffic back to your original sales funnel, your website. When someone likes you posts and what you have to say they send it out through social bookmarking. Here are some top Social Media sites and some background information on them for you.
Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg and currently has more than 400 million active users worldwide. The best thing about Facebook is that anyone can join and that it’s not just for college and university students anymore. Want to get your name out there? Create a Facebook profile and invite people related to your business, whether customers or clients. Need to do some marketing? Create a Facebook Page and use it as a great outlet to reach people who are specifically interested in your company.
Twitter is a social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read messages up to 140 characters known as tweets. Twitter can be used for rapid and short communication, much like SMS/text messaging on a phone. Creating a company or business Twitter can help you hone in on people who interested in what you’re selling.
LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking site. Different from Facebook in that it’s almost exclusively for professional networking, LinkedIn can be great tool to connect with experts and other entrepreneurs and also share information with professionals with similar interests.
StumbleUpon is an Internet community that allows its users to discover and rate Web pages, photos, and videos. It is a personalized recommendation engine which uses peer and social-networking principles. Users can rate or choose not to rate any Web page and clicking the Stumble button resembles “channel-surfing” the Web. StumbleUpon also allows their users to indicate their interests from a list of nearly 500 topics to produce relevant content for the user.
MySpace is a community based social networking site that allows you to create and customize a profile and connect to the wider community. The profiles are extremely customizable and knowledge of web design can come in handy.
Yelp, Inc. is a Web 2.0 company that operates a social networking, user review, and local search web site of the same name. Over 31 million people access Yelp’s website each month, putting it in the top 150 of U.S. Internet web sites. The site also has a Canadian site, Yelp.ca as well as mobile applications for Blackberry, iPhone and Android.
Google Buzz is a social networking and messaging tool from Google, designed to integrate into the company’s web-based email program, Gmail. Users can share links, photos, videos, status messages and comments organized in “conversations” and visible in the user’s inbox.
Digg is a social news website. The site’s cornerstone function consists of letting people vote stories up or down, called digging and burying, respectively. Many stories get submitted every day, but only the most Dugg stories appear on the front page. Adding a DIgg button to your blog or website is a great way of attracting traffic from other parts of the internet.
YouTube is a video-sharing website on which users can upload, share, and view videos. Most of the content on YouTube has been uploaded by individuals, although many entrepreneurs have learned to use the richness of video to reach a huge number of people. Check out the Skye King YouTube channel here.
WordPress is a web-blogging platform that allows you to create a free and fully customizable website or blog. If you already have a domain name then install the WordPress setup files available on WordPress.org and get started. If you’d rather start a blog, check out WordPress.com to start a free one.
