I was thinking the other day why I have enjoyed consulting with small business owners for so many years. Talk about reality shows. What is more real than talking to the person who created, owns and operates a business? They have made their dream a reality.

It’s a whole different conversation and level of engagement from talking to a marketing or business development manager working for a small or mid-size company.  I don’t mean to imply that the marketing or business development manager knows less about the company’s business than the owner.

It’s about the level of passion for the business. Passion or entrepreneurial zeal, as we know, doesn’t always translate into being able to run a company successfully but I love to hear their story.

I enjoy the initial phase of a search engine optimization or pay per click management campaign for any new client. We call this the discovery phase where we gather quantitative and qualitative information about a business to lay the groundwork for the project. The more we know about what they do, how they do it, who they are trying to reach and what their goals are the better we can develop and implement a successful online marketing strategy for them.

One big difference I notice almost immediately when talking to an entrepreneur is the desire to talk about their business. You never have to worry about keeping the conversation going that’s for sure. Entrepreneurs love to talk about their business. It’s their passion. That’s why they are doing it. Many businesses, if not most, are built based on the personality of the owner and more often than naught these owners have an outgoing, engaging personality. That is why social media marketing can be so powerful for small business owners.

Social media marketing is not just about creating profiles on facebook, myspace, linkedin and other social media networks to try to create buzz and links to your web site. It’s about being actively engaged in the networks. Let people get to know you. Be real. Tell them about your business, why you do it and how you do it. Not from a sales and marketing stand point so it sounds like every other Tom, Dick and Harry selling the same thing but from your personal stand point – your personality – let it shine through. Just a warning here, if you are a real drone with a negative view point on the world this might not work. :>) Find people with the same interests as yours and participate in their discussions. It has to be a two way network for it to work best.

Are you thinking how in the heck am I supposed to find enough time to do this plus run my business? This is a valid point but if done correctly this can reap big benefits for your business. Millions and millions of people are participating in social media networks every day. Instead of actively participating in 4 or 5 determine which one best fits your desired demographic and focus predominantly on that one. Also, you might really enjoy it. Just talk about your favorite topic – your business.

It is all about the keywords right? Well not really. It is actually all about the demographics each keyword represents. When someone searches Google for “seattle real estate” you have to put yourself in the mindset of the searcher.

Who searches for that phrase? It could be a prospect for a home, a real estate agent checking local properties, or a real estate broker looking for a new recruit. Assuming a keyword will generate a return on investment for the time and budget it takes to have an organic result in the search engine may be a monolithic mistake.

Rather than think entirely “in the box” of search terms and keywords, think demographics. Think target market.

Consider social media a chance to explore your target market. One keyword leads to another, leads to another. Within a few steps you may discover that your best prospect for your business may be two or three levels removed from where you have been trying to reach them.

Example: Real estate professionals always want to show up for “city state real estate” as a term. Yet often they need to reach a person much earlier in the process. A real estate transaction is a relationship based sales process taking one to twelve months. There are indicators online regarding what people do before buying a home. They get married. They find a new job. They get divorced. They have kids. They go to school.

Social Media generates an entirely new set of keywords to compare and look at in the “big picture”
demographics
hobbies and interests
family connections
friend networks

Taking the real estate example: You can look at schools, churches, major employers, lawyers, hospitals and create a niche for themselves in a strong and consistently producing category. For instance Boeing, Idearc, AT&T, Comcast, Amazon, Microsoft, etc are all heavily present in the Seattle area. More importantly, some of those companies have huge employee groups clustered around certain neighborhoods.

How do I find my niche? Think out of the Box
There are a variety of tools out there that will help you with keyword research and drawing some basic conclusions. There are different categories of tools that can be used together or individually, they will help you discover:

the popularity of your keyword

• who is talking about your niche (and the people involved in the conversation)
• keyword synonyms and related terms (One letter may make all the difference)
• niche industry trends and traffic patterns

Keyword Research Tools
-Google AdWords Keyword Suggestions- Use the Keyword Tool to get new keyword ideas. It works with providing keywords based on words or phrases and can also recommend based on site content.

-Google Traffic Estimator- a very simple to use traffic tool. You can dump in a list of hundreds of keywords or phrases and see what choices make sense for your next article.

-WordTracker - Wordtracker is the best non-google system, however it requires you to purchase a membership to get real usage out of the tool (and I am a fan of free/low cost)

Competitive Keyword Tools
-Compete.com Search Analytics - Identifies rival search marketing strategies to take your SEM and SEO efforts to the next level. Also defines traffic patterns on competitor sites.

-KeywordSpy - shows terms that competitors are buying or ranking for in the organic search results, including pay per click ad text.

-KeyCompete - shows pay per click words that competitors are buying.

Social Media Specific
-TweetVolume , TweetScan, Summize all give insight to Twitter. They can show you how much a keyword is being talked about and the associated terms that are drawn to it.

-del.icio.us tag page- StumbleUpon tags – - The most popular tags (keywords) can be seen in clusters of information.
-BlogCatalog Directory – MyBlogLog Directory – are both massive directories of sites that have been tagged by a member community. You can quickly search for a term, see associated terms on a site, and popular members on each site that may be influencers.

-IceRocket Trends – Technorati Tags - Useful for seeing keyword trends (Icerocket) and authority value (Technorati- the number of sites linking to another site)

The only difference is that there are certain methods used for social media optimization and this is done in a different manner.

Social media optimization makes use of several processes that help in increasing the linkability of a site. This is the first priority for doing social media optimization for any site on the web. There is a need to constantly change the look and feel of the site. After all, who likes looking and reading the same things over and over gain. So, constant change is must to keep someone hooked to your site and do business with you. The content and anything written for the site has to be simply great and amazing to draw visitors and buyers to your site.

The idea behind optimization is to attract traffic to a site as brining huge traffic is one of the easiest and the best way to make the site popular in the eyes of all the major search engines. Write as many blogs as you can for your site and make it as popular as you can on the web. Putting up the content of your site in a unique way that will facilitate more links to your site is also a good way of doing social media optimization. Making use of all these innovative methods for putting up the content of your site can in fact popularize your site all the more on the web.

You can put up the content of your site in a portable form to facilitate its fast travel on the web. The idea is to reach out to as many people as possible within a short span of time and at the same time give our meaningful information to online visitors who are searching for information. You can put up information regarding your site in a video clip and circulate it on the web to increase the popularity of your site. The more your content will travel on the web, the more number of visitors and links you can get for your site.

How about letting other sites use your content? Site owners can let other people make use of their content if they give a link of their site in the webpage where they use the content. This is a great way of driving to your site and this is what you are aiming to do through optimization. Social media optimization have been found to be very effective for promoting any kind of site on the web and it is up to you to implement this for your site.

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While I was driving today I saw a van with Progressive Auto Insurance painted on it. It was probably a company owned van, but I was also reminded of the Geek Squad Beetles that I see every once in awhile and some other company painted cars. This got me thinking. I noticed that paintings or signs on cars often get noticed. People even look at other people’s car license plates. Basically, these cars get a lot of eyeballs.

Applying my background in Social Media Marketing, I came up with a new marketing idea that is low cost but highly effective. This is how it works: A company creates a program, where they would advertise on the cars of people who commute long distances everyday. They can pay a couple hundred dollars to these people every month to do the exact same things they would be doing anyway. Heck, instead of paying money, this company could just offer to pay all their gas bills.

I include this as social media marketing because the essence of social media is that everyone can be a publisher. Instead of having large budgets to publish on a billboard, everyone has their own little properties (such as blogs) and they can reach their own little niche by publishing or advertising on their little properties.

I seriously think more companies should advertise on blogs because bloggers are easy to satisfy monetarily, and you seriously reach a large crowd who pay attention to you just because “Oh! This blogger found advertisers! I wonder how much is she getting paid. Maybe $50/month” “Oh, it’s the same company ad on this other blog too! They’re all over the place now!” $100 to make 1000 people think you are all over the place. Not a bad deal. So in this case, we’re taking the exact same principles but just applying it to an offline property, specifically one’s car, where we know already has a lot of eyeballs and follows where the customer goes.

Especially in this economy, people are very stripped of cash and a lot of them would signup since it does not make their lives more inconvenient. Gas price is expected to rise again, so a program offering to pay for their gas is a win-win situation because the driver would not be concerned of driving longer distances, while the company would gain more exposure for that. If you have 200 of these cars driving around, with lets say about $200 per car per month. That’s $40,000 a month, which is the price of many billboards. However, it’s convincing that each of these cars will be seen by AT LEAST 20 different people a day(I would say over 100 if the driver spends more than an hour a day commuting), so the total reach would become 20x30x200 = 120,000 per month. What’s even better is that these ads are guaranteed to be at where a lot of people are, since it’s the people themselves that are taking them there.

If your company is one of the first to do something like this, people will start to talk about you if they see the same promotion on 3-4 different cars while driving to work. The press might even cover you so there’s a lot of added benefits, making it even more cost effective. Even the 200 people who wear your ads will excitingly talk to their friends and their coworkers about it, creating WAY stronger effects than just a billboard ad. Also, what better way to make people’s day better than having them be cheerfully reminded of this everyday in the morning? If you know you are making money off just driving, it makes you feel better about commuting, or even when you are stuck in traffic. (Note: for environmental concerns, please still commute when you can. I am referring to people that are already driving that distance no matter what.)

In terms of practicality concerns, it would probably be difficult have people’s cars painted, because they need something that they can be easily opt out from. However, creating some sort of easily removed stickers and have a few on each side of the car should have the same effects with very low set up costs. Sure, there might be some dishonest people who turn in the gas receipts of their spouses car too etc etc, but even if that is the case, the price of having these mobile ads is still excellent. Obviously it shouldn’t go way out of hand, but that’s easy to detect. You could probably include in the contract that once someone is caught cheating, they need to return all the gas money that was every given to them because there is no way to verify how much did they cheat on. Fear of that and losing this good deal would probably stop most people from cheating. The point is that you are getting a crazy promotion deal with a fraction of what it would cost you otherwise, and it makes the driver happy too. If you refer back to my blogpost How to Impress Everyone by Just Driving Around, driving becomes ultra productive. You increase your level by learning from podcasts, and you get paid doing it!

With social media being the new phenomenon online today it would be ludicrous for any internet marketer to ignore it when it comes to formulating a strategy for an internet marketing campaign. As with most marketing promotions your success or failure is usually determined by your approach. The most important part of a successful socialization plan when it comes to MySpace and Facebook, for example, is the content on your profile page.

Content drives traffic which drives sales when it comes to your Blog as well as your social media profile page. The richer and more varied the content the more people it will attract and the faster word will spread about your page and what it has to offer.

Try to make it entertaining in terms of what’s available for visitors to interact with and adding a touch of humor helps because everyone likes to laugh.
For interactivity you could have your favorite music highlighted for them to click on and sample.

You could add a music video or two as well as some comedy clips or maybe implement a joke of the day feature. One important factor not to ignore is your own personal story. The objective of these sites, after all, is to meet and get to know people, and most everyone likes reading or hearing about someone else’s life experience.

This doesn’t mean you have to reveal all of the sordid details but try to convey your likes and dislikes in your own style. Don’t try to be someone you’re not. People want to get to know the real you. Also try to make your profile informative. Everyone has an expertise in some area, so share this knowledge with your guests and before you know it you’ll have more online friends than you know what to do with.

If you keep giving people what they want they’ll keep coming back for more and the best way to do this is to write about what you know and what you are comfortable with. Pictures are also a great way to attract visitors. You can demonstrate some of your interests through photographs of some of your favorite activities. Pictures also add a more personal element to the page giving the viewer a better chance to get to know you and appreciate what you do.

If you’re an avid reader, for example, you could possibly start a book of the month feature where you discuss or critique a particular book you may be reading. You could ask visitors, who are also readers, to leave comments and maybe start a book of the month club. With any relationship, be it online or in your day-to-day life, the important thing is to maintain contact. On any of these social media websites this means visiting on a regular basis to let people know what’s happening in your life. It also means updating your profile page on a regular basis.

Any Internet Marketer who can follow these simple steps should enjoy great success in the new Web 2.0 or Social Media Market not only professionally but also personally, and always remember the old adage “Content is King.”

The use of social networking sites to connect people has become so widespread today.  But other than those who just want to communicate with friends, old and new, social media is also currently being taken advantage by business oriented people as a way to reach their target clients and improve their businesses.

People involved in small business have found a powerful marketing tool in these social networking sites.

Among the top social media used by business people today are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube. By using these sites, you are able to expose your business to more people, at both a local and international level.

Facebook – Join Andy Phillips
Facebook has become highly popular in recent years attracting millions of users from across the globe. This popularity has, in fact, led the site’s management to offer marketing platforms that encourage people to share their business endeavors and build communities as well.

To use Facebook to your advantage, make sure to create an interesting personal profile page. Include photos and business information that will attract visitors and encourage them to read through your profile.

Update your information regularly so that existing and potential clients know what you’re up to. Discuss recent happenings regarding your business and interact with readers who post comments on your page.

Be friendly at all times and don’t forget to create a “fans” page and invite clients to join.

Twitter – Follow Andy Phillips on Twitter
In just a few years, Twitter has attracted a steady following that is increasing rapidly as the “buzz” around Twitter spreads.  This is the power of social networking sites – they are viral. One advantage of Twitter over the others is that it lifts the lid on the activities and conversations of other people. What we are seeing today is news being reported on Twitter before the media even has a chance to tell us.

For business people who want to maximize the vast communication potential of this social networking site, it is best to be consistent when tweeting (telling people what you are doing). This means not only providing information to your followers about what you are up to with your business, but also adding value.  You need to share tools, tips and strategies and make your updates interesting and engaging.

LinkedIn – Follow Andy Phillips at LinkedIn
LinkedIn is an ideal site for entrepreneurs because it gives you the opportunity to grow your business using less of your own money.  How?  LinkedIn is used by many professionals to search for potential employees and also as a means to expand their business contacts. Providing a detailed profile (business information and photos) is the best way to expand your network of contacts through LinkedIn. You can include a link to your website or blog for those people looking to access more information about you and your business. Interaction is key and you can do this by answering questions that provide valuable and interesting information.

YouTube
YouTube is a phenomenal success in terms of video sharing on the internet. This social networking site has become the Number 2 search engine, behind Google. If you have not tried live video streaming as a marketing tool for your business yet, it is time to jump in front of the camera.  Videos are very powerful tools in drawing online traffic.

Create a short but clear video featuring yourself talking about your business and how you started out.  Tell them about your journey, provide them with success stories and share your passion about your business.

Create several short videos (perhaps video seminars you conduct, presentations you make, or other business projects) and upload them on YouTube.  Make sure that you post your videos in the category relevant to your business to draw the right target audience.

In using social media to market and improve your business, building trust with your audience is essential. You can only do this by being honest and providing consistently interesting, useful and valuable information. What matters most is that you share your experiences and knowledge.  Doing so can influence people’s lives and encourage them to take action.

By Wendy Moore Copyright 2009 Savvy Web Women Pty Ltd

Web 2.0 has evolved the web based technologies to such an extent that interactivity between people from around the globe becomes a pretty natural process. It revolutionalize the communication scenario and streamline the connectivities through internet. That’s where the social media sites tends to get the much higher traffic from all over the world and become a great source to promote your products and websites. An effective strategy can help one attain maximum attention from relevant audiences and massive traffic.

It is a potential method where implementation of effective marketing strategy makes your site profitable by many folds. The things now become lot more easier as when you like something online and want to share it with your friends then you can simply send e-mails to your buddies through these social networking channels. It helps you expand your friendly circle by adding people who have the same taste as you. Social media sites are all about communication with likeminded people and sharing ideas and thoughts with ease.

Through social media/ social application sites as Stumble upon, Digg, My Space, You tube, Orkut etc one can get natural links from relevant niche and his site got exposed to large groups of people in a spontaneous fashion without having to spend a penny. It’s through that participation and interactivity that your site is distributed around, and that’s what brings traffic to your web site.

One must have to become familiar with the communities in social networks and participate actively to get enough attention. Soon your brand product will automatically start recognizing among the community members. Our seo company recommends you to avoid the ideas of adding keywords or tweaking meta tags. It’s better to focus on something which members would love to appreciate e.g. add stories that are relevant your business, productivity estimation for the next quarter or current market trends in your industrial region.

Social media marketing now become such an evolved marketing tool that every company (how big or small) want to exploit its resources to get the maximum traffic out of it. So it’s always good to get started with building trust among people. Get involved in all kind of activities relevant to your niche and extract maximum fruits out of this interactive cyber revolution.

In the earlier days SEO was all about optimizing the various pages of a site. However today with the advent of Web 2.0 things have changed dramatically. The very structure of sites has changed and social media sites seem to be the norm these days. That is one reason why social media optimization is a whole new form of optimization these days.Sharing and spreading the word

The Internet is all about sharing information and enhancing interactivity with users. Social media sites have taken this concept to a whole new level. The way social media optimization works is that it helps propagate a website more effectively. It helps in added important elements and aspects to a particular website and also improves the overall quality of a site dramatically. Improved link ability

One of the good things about SMO is that it allows your site as well as others to link back and to each other. However the good thing is that instead of the linkages happening on a random basis it is on a necessity basis. So if you feel the need to link to another site or vice versa then you can proceed with linking otherwise no. Useful information

This new form of search engine optimization is all about helping a website gain prominence naturally amongst search engine listings. The idea is to get as many sites to link back to your site as possible. Therefore the natural deduction would be that in order to get more linkages you would need to improve on your site’s content so that it is useful to other websites. Methods employed in this tactic

The main focus of such social book marking methods is to use tools and techniques like white papers, writing blogs, churning out interesting articles with appropriate keyword density and creating an increasing number of RSS feeds as well as press releases. Thus these are the various methods used in enhancing the social media influence of your website online.Target audience

One of the main aspects to gain success in social book marking is to make your content appropriate to your target audience. In order to do this you will firstly need to define and identify the demographics of your target audience. Then you need to establish the preferences of this target set and finally create a business plan around this. Even your optimization efforts should revolve around this plan. The more niche your content and offerings are the more are your chances to quickly get listed on popular search engines. Plus it will make other social sites seem more interested in your site and link back too!

To those of us who use social networks frequently, or are familiar with the way the social web works, this post will seem self-evident. However, in conversations with a couple clients and individuals lately who are unfamiliar with social media marketing, this question has consistently cropped up.

The main problem people have is reconciling making friends with possible ROI.

What you need to know is that by adding friends or accepting friend requests, you are taking one more step to building your authority and visibility in your industry, which WILL lead to ROI (in the form of traffic, sales conversions or whatever your goal) as people recognize you as a leader in your field and choose you over possible competitors for services and products they need.

Here are 5 general, point-by-point reasons friends matter on social networks:

1. Relationship building.
The whole reason social networking is successful is because its very foundation is built on creating and maintaining relationships with people. Start conversations, introduce yourself, do everything you can to put yourself out there and meet as many people as possible.
If you like the person or company you’ve built a relationship with, you’ll probably recommend them to your friends, and vice versa.
If you make friends with someone in a related industry, you’ll benefit from recommending their services to your clients, and they’ll benefit from recommending you to theirs (e.g. a web designer recommends a social media marketer they like, a Realtor recommends a mortgage provider they know is honest and effective, and vice versa).

2. Referrals and recommendations.
You matter to me, and I matter to you, because if I like that really cool video you sent me, I’ll visit the site its from to look for more.
If I digg that awesome article and send it to my friends, or they see I dugg it, they might check it out too. If I get an awesome deal on this website’s service, I’m going to send you there. Or if I hear from you about it, I’m going to go there. If I find a fan page for a product I love, I might stop by, create a profile, and add myself as a fan, then tell all my friends about it. - You do the calculations.

3. Access to more user info.
Many sites hide people’s profiles until you add them as a friend. Thus, adding someone as a friend is a good way to communicate with them in a more personal setting.

4. UGC, or User-Generated Content.
The more friends you have and interact with, the more content is produced on your site or page, and the more visible it becomes.
If you have a ton of people talking on your Facebook fan page, for example, all that content is adding to your area’s ability to be ranked on the search engines AND attract more users.

5. A large social community.
The more people you add as friends and the more you get to know them, and they you, the more popular you or your social networking profile becomes. Soon, you have a large community of supporters that further reinforces your authority and leader status in your industry. What better way to brand your company and communicate a specific message to a mass of people?

Social media marketing is a very effective way to get your message out about your business because it allows you to interact with your visitor when they visit your website or blog. Some people are afraid of social media marketing because they are unsure how to go about getting involved with it.

There are many different forms of social media marketing including Internet forums, blogging, video, audio, pictures, graphics, podcasts, and on and on we could go. Let me make a couple suggestions to you of how you can get involved very quickly with social media marketing.

1. Internet forums are a fantastic way to market your business on the Internet today. This doesn’t take any particular skill because you do not have to record a video, or tape an audio and try to put it online. You also don’t have to do anything special like upload pictures or download graphics and try to get them online. Internet forums really only require that you be able to type. As a matter of fact there’s a software called Dragon Naturally which is a speak and write program that allows you to just talk and it types of words for you. This would make it just about as easy as it can be.

The key to forum marketing as a form of social media is that you get involved in forums that relate to the theme of your business. You then take the time to get involved in the discussions going on within the forums.
You contribute worthwhile information without expecting anything in return. And you do it on a consistent enough basis that people began to know who you are.

The marketing side of this comes in when you create your profile and your signature file. This is where you can tell little bit about yourself and your business and you will passively drive traffic to your website and blog from this.

2. If you do not have a blog of your own it is something you should look at doing. For example, you can go to blogger.com and set up a blog in three easy steps. Then again, all you have to do is type your thoughts about a specific topic and you are blogging.
Granted, there is more to this in terms of getting traffic to your blog, and these are things you will learn how to do. But making a blog post is something anybody striving to be an Internet marketer can do and is a great form of social media marketing.