Here are some questions to ask before you begin your social marketing campaign:

1. Who is likely to be most interested in my content?

 

2. Who do I want to communicate with and why?

 

3. What kind of audience does this social community have?

 

4. What are people currently saying about my website or business?

 

5. Which type of person is likely to purchase my product or service?

 

6. What tools or online services do my target audience use?

 

7. Which websites does my target audience frequent on the net?

 

8. What do my target audience have in common with each other?

You can send some of these questions to a few friends or colleagues and compile their answers. Each individual has a unique perspective and different ways of using the web and their answers will give you a good general idea of your potential online customers and their preferences .                                                                                                                                                                                        After determining your social media objectives, you need to define your actual target audience. If your website or business has been around for a while, you should already have a rough idea of who you need to reach.                                                                                                                                                                                  

                                                                                                                                                     In the context of social media marketing, the goals you’ve chosen will partially determine your target audience as well. For instance, if you’re looking to increase overall sales conversions, you want a social media demographic that is profitable and potentially interested in your product or offer.                                                                                                                                                                                                 If you’re trying to build links, your target audience should be people with the ability to link or influence links. (e.g. bloggers, social media users). While your social media goals may partially determine the crowd to target, your business model is also an important factor to consider. What are you selling and who is likely to be interested?                                                                                       

                                                                                                                                                                 Sometimes your target audience crosses many demographic segments. If you run a general technology blog your audience profile may be quite varied. You will have programmers, marketers and both male and female tech enthusiasts of all ages.                                                                            

                                                                                                                                                                           Some business models have in-built audience profile. Women’s magazines have a more defined audience which can be broken down by gender, age or even geographic location. The communities you target should have users of this mold.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 Social media channels can certainly get you traffic, attention and links but keep in mind that a big part of your potential customers/readers may not know about or use these social websites. This is certainly the case for geo-specific small businesses.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  The marketing equation and strategy for small businesses goes something like this: social media visibility = brand awareness + word of mouth = new customer.                                                                          

                                                                                                                                                                   This is an indirect method to increase sales and your customer base. While extremely powerful as a tool to spread brand awareness, social media marketing should be integrated alongside traditional search marketing goals; you should always try to improve the visibility of your website in the search engine result pages.                                                                                                                              

                                                                                                                                                       Done correctly, social media marketing will get you more customers and increased sales. The results will not be immediate but with persistance and a never give up attitude , succes will come sooner than you think.

Blogs grow over time and their accumulated content is a gold-mine for search engines and the targeted traffic they bring. While contextual Ad networks like Adsense are effective, passive ways of earning money from a blog, I think affiliate programs are superior in many aspects, particularly in terms of long-term profit.                                                                                                                                          

 Here are some reasons why.

• Higher earning potential – doesn’t only depend on ad impressions and clicks
• Better integration with a blog’s niche/content- No matter how you blend contextual ads, they won’t fit in completely.
• Earnings do not entirely depend on a blog’s popularity, Page Rank or number of readers
• Variety – There are a large range of products to suit every website niche. 

Blogs with search-engine friendly content can be a effective long-term way to promote specific affiliate programs. An organic site (one that receives most of its traffic from search engines) is accurate because such a site continues to receive highly targeted traffic over time and doesn’t solely depend on ad campaigns for traffic.                                                                                                                

                                                                                                                                                                                        Here are a couple of reasons why organic blogs are an excellent ways to make money from affiliate marketing.                                                                                                                                                                

                                                                                                                                                                                You can only milk so much out of a static squeeze page . Once a consumer has seen and dismissed it, there’s very little chance of them making a repeat visit. On the other hand, blogs can offer a variety of updated information and are a persuasive means that will eventually convert doubtful consumers into willing referrals.                                                                                                  

                                                                                                                                                                             Blogs are like slow-cookers. They work by gradually cajoling a visitor into action, while seeking to diffuse all misconceptions or hesitation surrounding a specific product. Blogs can also be persistent in a non-intrusive way. One page ads hammer the consumer with benefits and testimonials while the well developed blog makes friends with the consumer, saying “Here’s all I know about the product. Let me know if you need more help.”                                                                         

                                                                                                                                                       Some thoughts on the Ideal Affiliate Blog

You can set up some blogs for some specific affiliate programs and these examples may help you:

• The blog should use unique content as much as possible. Good for both search engines and readers.

 

• The blog must have a very strong niche that relates to the affiliate program in question.

 

• The blog must provide easy access to information that is perceived as authentic or even ‘objective’

 

• The blog should not run too many ads. Consumers tend to see over-monetization as profit > value.

 

• The blog must be up-to-date on the trends surrounding the niche. Outdated news doesn’t reflect well.

 

• The blog should practice invisibility. The consumer should not know that you are doing affiliate marketing, i.e. getting a cut of the product sold. Debatable.

 

• The blog should evolve seamlessly to include other product or market trends.

 

• The blog should have a personality and opinion. In the end, it’s a person-to-person recommendation that does the trick.

While not exhaustive, these points can help to determine the effectiveness of a blog that is solely monetized by affiliate commissions. While traffic is important for contextual programs like Adsense and Page Rank is vital for link selling, affiliate blogs need to focus more on persuasive copy writing, effective search engine optimization and most importantly, issues of trust between the customer and the affiliate.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        Affiliate marketing with blogs is a fascinating topic, because blogs just seem to have so much natural advantage when it comes to building a consistent consumer base for affiliate programs .

Many claim to be social media experts these days, yet most of them are just beginners. They overlook some of the most basic requirements that  inspire the creativity of content, like how people react to what you talk about, and understanding the conversations within online social media communities.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      Social Media Marketing combines the most effective means of Public Relations, Online Marketing, Customer Service, and the state of mind of the social networks that allows them to listen and engage in  conversations with prospective clients.                                                                                            

                                                                                                                                                                           But, they are losing sight of the principles that offer meaningful and rewarding relationships simply because they are captivated by the never-ending cycle of new and popular social tools? Their attention to everything new that comes out sometimes interfers with their ability to see the big picture .                                                                                                                                                                                 They get caught up and sometimes overwhelmed with the cycle . They rush from this to that in an attempt to keep up with their mentors, hoping to become the next leading authority on everything social.                                                                                                                                                                                     

                                                                                                                          It’s the comprehension of information,the following the social networks, drafting strategies for understanding and maintaining their path to become tomorrows leaders.                                                                                                                                                                                                                           My question to you is , Do you have what it takes to become a leader? Are you ready to become a mentor yourself , if not it’s ok , Rome wasn’t built in a day !                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       After reading this post your feedback is welcome and will be replied back asap .

 

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If you are someone that finds it difficult to talk to the masses, you are not alone. Many people start to think that you have to be super comfortable with this in order to make a go of their business venture. Social media is not just about getting up in front of large crowds though. You do not have to be perfect at giving speeches to hundreds of people in order to make your business a success.                                                                                                                                                                                                      One of the best ways to reach the most amount of people with as little work or effort would be through social media tools. At first, you might feel a little lost as though you have no clue where to even begin to look to find such media tools.                                                                                                                             <!–9220bc46663246d4a63606c110d4e74c–>                                                                                                                                                                                                  Have you ever heard of Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, You Tube or Ustream.tv? If you have ever heard of any of these sites or outlets then you are familiar with social media. These are excellent tools to be used when you want to make sure that you are reaching a wide audience.                                         

                                                                                                                                                                                                   By using one, two or ten of these social media outlets you will finally be able to reach the audience that you have never been able to reach before. Maybe it was your lack of public speaking skills that held you back or maybe you simply never had much funds to support a major media campaign. Either way, you will be glad to know that many of the top social media outlets out there are completely free of charge to use. It simply does not get any better than free advertisement.                                                                                                                                                                                                    In order to make sure that you are using the right kinds of social media for the type of business venture that you are running, you may want to do a little research. You will quickly discover that a lot of what you will be doing will be nothing more than a lot of trial and error. Of course, there is always room to learn things before the mistakes happen. In order to do this, you will want to seek out those who have started the same business venture as you, or at least similar in nature, and have made a success of it.                                                                                                                                                                       

                                                                                                                                                                                Ask them what social media outlets they have used and you will be well on your way of following the same path they did. If that paths leads to success then it is the best path for your needs. Obviously, the sooner you get started with taking advantage of these media outlets, the quicker you will start to see a change for the positive. Before you know it you will be a pro at using these outlets and you will not even remember a time before you were using social media for your business needs.

An image is an act of communication. Images play an important role in the presentation of ideas. Worth more than a thousand words, they deliver meaning by both simplifying and visualizing  theories.They make information more appealing, more persuasive. In the realm of art or activism, images reflect the underlying current of collective feeling by demostrating both public awearness and personal goals.                                                                                                                                               

                                                                                                                                                                               Like videos, images can spread very quickly online with little artificial push. Are they inherently more ‘viral‘ than textual content? It is difficult to say with certainty if it indeed has a higher potential for popularity. But images have undeniable value in spreading ideas. Especially when they are elegantly integrated with the use of text to present information.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              Unique, original images can attract an audience. They are not only high quality content for an interested readership but they can be useful promotional tools for anyone interested in gaining more attention. A particular form of image is relevant to this purpose , like an infographic .

You’ve seen infographics everywhere. In books, magazines, newspapers, instruction manuals, maps, public signs and business reports. Visually, they come in many forms as well: charts, graphs, emblems, cartoons, diagrams and illustrations.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Infographics are a form of concentrated information for data consumers where knowledge is condensed into essential components, enough to satisfy your basic informational needs. They give you a general overview, one you can convert into talking points and social currency.

The amount of information they convey and the style used will vary depending on its purpose. Who is the intended audience of this piece? What specific frame or idea angle do you want to emphasize? How much abstraction and simplification is necessary for data to make sense?                                                   

                                                                                                                                                                               Next time when you’re planning on sharing specific ideas or data, consider using infographics. They are a terrific way of making information accessible and a useful primer that will pique the interest of your intended audience. When created and marketed effectively, they can be part of a powerful viral strategy to magnetize attention to your website or business.

Every website has a bunch of web pages which get more search traffic than others. These pages are constantly visited daily by new visitors, people who have never seen the site in question before. I call these ‘money pages’ because they are a reliable source of immediate and future income.       

                                                                                                                                                                                  But they’re not just ‘money’ because they bring in revenue: they are one of the easiest ways to grow your audience without much work. If you learn how to optimize these money pages (its not hard to do), you’ll really improve your website in so many ways. More revenue, more members, more influence and authority.

There are many things you can do to money pages, in order to make them better or more profitable. It’s important to decide the extent of your work according to your goals and resources. How much time do you want to spend and what’s most important to you? Do you want a bigger readership? Or are you just concerned with increasing your daily revenue?                                  

                                                                                                                                                                                    Here are a list of things you can do for your money pages:                              

1. Monetize. The aim here is to get more revenue out of each page. There are various ways to achieve this and they generally involve the placement of ads both around and within content. There is also an indirect future revenue from lead capturing.
2. Capture Leads. The money page is optimized to encourage a visitor to subscribe to your mailing list, site feed or register for your website. The main aim is to find a way to continue to reach your visitors after they leave your money page. This helps to grow your site audience and is also a component of revenue generation.
3. Improve Relevance. This involves revamping the money page in order to provide up-to-date information or better content in order to accommodate visitor needs. This provides  an improved user experience for all and can result a host of benefits like more referral/citation links and greater visitor loyalty/trust. Relevance is also important when your main goal is to capture leads or increase revenue.
4. Make it Rank Better.  Doing on-site and off-site optmization will help specific money pages to rank better on the search engine result pages, hence driving more traffic back to your site. This increases your site reach and revenue at the same time.                                                                                                                                                                                                                              By following the next few steps you can go from owning a so-so website to a more professional looking and game changing website. 

Step 1 Find Your Money Pages -                                                                                                                       Open up the web analytics program you’re using for your website. There should be a section which reveals which pages have the highest unique views per month. Extract the urls for the top 10 pages and put them somewhere for easy access. Or bookmark them on your browser.                                                                                                                                                                                                   How many pages you choose to optimize really depends on your website and preference. If you have a lot of webpages that get solid traffic, you can do more. If you don’t have many pages that get web traffic, then you have a lesser amount to work with. You should  focus on the top 10 because if its a manageable amount of work for an acceptable returns on investment.                                                                                                                                                                                                               Step 2 Improving Content Relevance-                                                                                                               

Better relevance = better conversions. It’s that simple. By making your website as relevant as possible to search queries, you’re making visitors more likely to stick around, opt-in or buy. Users are going to click away if they find that your web page doesn’t fulfill their info needs. So the first step is closely examine your money pages in relation to search traffic terms.                                                                                                                                                                                                                           Step 3 Monetizing Your Money Page -                                                                                                              Money pages need to be treated differently from the other pages on your website. They’re the ones that bring a lot of visitors (big sample size) so you can really use this opportunity to test the profitability of specific ad schemes. You can even remove the default ads specifically for this page so you have more room to experiment.                                                                                                              

                                                                                                                                                                                        A well placed Adsense unit can really increase your overall daily income. I’ve seen a jump of more than $20 a day for a site that I own when I took the time to test and optimize a few money pages. While you may have default ads already on every page of your site (sidebars, header etc), these may not be truly optimized for a money page.This is easy if you’re using ad networks like Google Adsense. Go to your money page and insert an additional ad unit, blend it well with your content and make sure that its quite visible while not being too obtrusive.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      Step 4 Optimizing To Capture Leads –                                                                                                                                                                                                            To optimize a money page to capture leads, you’ll need to do some offer customization. Look at what content/product is on the page and create a specific offer that’s relevant to it. Provide an incentive for someone to sign up: perhaps a free digital product with related or more in-depth information. Or simply the promise of future discounts or special product offers.                                                                                                                                                                                                                             Step 5 Sending Traffic To Your Money Pages -                                                                                           

Now that you’ve optimized your money pages for maximum conversions, you can also send over visitors from other pages of your site. You’ve already done the work to make the pages incredibly relevant and usable, they shouldn’t just be seen by search engine visitors.               

                                                                                                                                                                                        If your money pages are related, by sure to interlink each one so that each visitor is funneled to another optimized page. This not only improves your bounce rate but makes sure that each visitor is given two opportunities to convert if they aren’t persuaded the first time around.                         

                                                                                                                                                                                      Another method is to use a script to autolink specific anchor keywords or phrases on your entire site to the specific web page. This helps with SEO and is very easy way to get more eyes on your money page. If you’re using WordPress, try the Internal Link Building plugin or the SEO Smart Links plugin. Both help to auto-link keywords on every page of your blog.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       Step 6 Improve Your Search Engine Ranking -                                                                                             

This is the final step in the process and should always come after you’ve optimized your money pages for maximum results and set up a method to promote it internally on your site. After you’ve done all that, it’s time to look at boosting a major factor for earning more money: your website’s ranking on the search engine results pages (SERPs).                                                                                     

                                                                                                                                                                               This is an optional step because if you’re getting a lot of visitors, you’re should already be ranking quite well. But if you’re on the second page of Google or not yet in the top 3 queries for a keyword/phrase that is sending you a good amount of traffic, why not bump it up and get even more visitors per day?

You’ve already got your list of top money pages based on search queries.                                                                                                                                                                                                Now you should find what these pages are ranking for, which is something you can easily discover through your stats trackers. If you’re already using it,  Google Webmaster Central is a free tool that shows you the top 20 search queries visitors use to reach your site.                                                                                                                                                                                                                       There are a couple different ways for acheiving SEO rankings 1) Off-site SEO ,  2) On-site SEO , 

 Article directories. Blog/web directories. Social bookmarking websites. Social news sites. Social media communities (Flickr, Youtube etc). Contests. Link exchanges. Blog comments and carnivals. Donations/sponsorships. Forums. Press Releases. These are few others that you can choose at your fingertips .                                                                                                                                                      

                                                                                                                                                                                   On-site optimization isn’t a difficult process, as long as you have a good site architecture set up from the start and follow search-engine guidelines. The hard part is really the task of getting people with relevant/quality websites to link to your money pages.

Information rarely organizes itself into something coherent, usable or enriching. It usually goes through a series of filters before it reaches you: for example an algorithm developed to automatically sort data or a writer who took the time to translate the complex into the actionable.

These filters are there to make information relevant, to allow you to utilize data into a different form, perhaps a blog post or a mental footnote to be retrieved when needed. However, sometimes there’s just too much information and too little time.

If you’re a blogger or web worker, you might be subscribing a large amount of blogs in order to find content ideas or acquire knowledge. When you’re plugged into the information stream for many hours a day, it is not uncommon to feel fatigued. The end result of is that you either procrastinate on reading/learning or dive too fast through information to absorb it fully.

The pressure is always there to make use of whatever content is out there. You need to read fast and use a piece of news to write a blog post. You need to keep up with what’s happening in the industry in order to make yourself competitively attractive as a freelancer/business. How do you make sure that information is consistently useful without tiring yourself out?

We all want as little noise as possible. We want to consume information in a way which enriches our understanding of a topic while allowing us to easily utilize it for our personal or professional life. We want information to be helpful, not a burden on the mind or a chore to plow through. The solution is simple: we need to prioritize.                                                                                                                                                     The definition of prioritization is the action of arranging and dealing with things in order of importance. Vital information should be consumed first, while less important content should be processed later. You can organize your RSS feed reader into two folders ” Breaking News ” and ” Must Read ” .                                                                                                                                                           The “Breaking News” folder is designed to be a stream of information you can check very frequently for news. The feeds here are timely, very active and consistently fast in reporting news on current events. This is a river of data that you can dive into and scan every half an hour. You do not have to read each article in full but scan for relevant content you can use for your blogs or social media sharing like on twitter or facebook .                                                                                                                                                                            The ” Must Read ” folder consists of the feeds that you must read by the end of the day regardless of how much time you have. They are also the ones you should read first when you open your feed reader.                                                                                                                                                           This prioritization of content within your feed reader makes what you have to do exceedingly clear. To get a fast recap of what has happened concerning a topic, you only need to do a quick scan of the ‘Breaking News’ folder and nothing else. On the other hand, if you do not have enough time in a day, you can opt to ignore every feed subscription except the ones in the ‘Must Read’ folder.

I’m sure some of you are already prioritizing the content that you view everyday. You trust some news sources more than others and regularly visit a handful of blogs which produce articles that you like to read. Mental prioritization of this sort is important but actual changes to how you receive information is equally crucial on a daily basis.

Don’t just prioritize in your head, make sure you use all the tools available to structure how content is served up to you. Do some research on browser addons or other applications you can use to segment and filter raw data. You want to manage information flow as much as possible initially. Once you have a workable system, you’ll only need to tweak it every now and then to ensure that it’s operating at maximum efficiency.

Experts have talked about this before. How many times have you read about the importance of ‘adding value’ for your audience? How many times have you read about ‘building trust’ with your readers/prospects? 

Many, many times. You know it well. Every marketing guru has spoken about this topic. I’m sick of hearing it. But it STILL bears repeating.

Because some people still don’t get it. What’s the underlying principle for successful online marketing, selling or networking? The art of giving before you try to get. Before you get something from someone, you need to first give them a reason for them to give it to you.

It makes sense, doesn’t it? Don’t you know that everyone has walls around them? Don’t you see them at all? They don’t like to be scammed out of their money. That’s why they’re cautious and won’t just click to buy immediately. They don’t like to waste their hard earned salary on crappy products or services. That’s why they do a thorough research online. 

They don’t want to be lied to. That’s why they are hesitant to believe what you say or claim. They don’t want their feelings to be exploited. That’s why they are wary about trusting you with their true thoughts. They have been fooled before and no one wants to feel stupid again.

It’s a defense mechanism designed for self-preservation in a life that is nasty, brutish and short. Living ain’t easy. People are fed-up with hard-sells and sledge-hammer pitches. They’re sick of hustlers always running game on them. Their walls grow stronger, reinforced by the plaster of bad experiences. Once they pigeon-hole you as a ’spammer/scammer’, it’s all over. Don’t bother with getting them to take out their wallets. Won’t happen.

There is a fool-proof way to get people to lower their defenses and commit. You just need to manage their impressions of you. You need to change what they think about what you’re doing. You’re not spamming, you’re offering a product that is designed to fulfill needs. You’re not a money-hungry marketer, you’re a passionate individual who loves to help people achieve their goals. Reframing and re-adjusting the prospect’s image of your brand.

So here it comes. Here’s the part when I tell you to ‘always add value’ and ‘build trust’. But let’s refashion this proverbial tip on selling. Let’s put a spin on value or trust and combine them into a single actionable guideline: Always focus on giving before trying to get.

Give them helpful free content. Give them answers to their questions. Give them a freebie. Point them to tools they need and things they should know. Give them tips they can instantly use in their lives/business. Give them pleasant surprises. Give them interaction. Give them promises you can keep. Develop a history of giving. Be known as a giver.