Social networking sites originally became popular as a way for friends to stay in touch with one another and to keep up-to-date with what was happening in their lives, but they quickly became a place for business owners to grow their networks too. These days you can use these sites as a business building tool, but, more importantly, you can get to know your prospects, clients, and colleagues in a more relaxed and friendly environment.

This means that if you’re active on these sites and regularly contributing and seeking out new connections you can very quickly build your network and have a ready audience of contacts who are interested in what you have to say, your services, programs, and products.

However, I hear of many solopreneurs saying that they’re spending hours of time on their social networking activities, whether that’s on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, or one of the other popular social networking sites, but are not seeing any benefits as a result of their time i.e. the amount of time they put into social networking is not comparable to the returns they are seeing. And so they lose interest and wonder what all the fuss is about.

As with any of the list building strategies that I teach, the real key to success is consistency. If you decide that social networking is one of the lead generation strategies that you want to implement then you need to be consistent in your approach to make it successful. You need to be spending time each week (several times a week) visiting each of your social networks, contributing, and building relationships.

Even though there are many, many advantages to this latest marketing strategy, there are several pitfalls that can easily be avoided if you’re aware of what they are.

Today I’d like to share with you my top four social networking pitfalls so that you can avoid making these mistakes and so utilize this strategy to grow your network:

1. 1. Not updating regularly. If you’re a beginner in this area, then you may believe that all you have to do is sign up for an account at one of the more popular sites, add your details, and you’re all set. In order for this strategy to be effective, you need to be a regular contributor to the network, actively seek out new connections, and participate and post regularly.
2. 2. Your profile is lacking in information. Add pictures; make yourself sound interesting and fun! People want to know about you, what your interests are, and see you. Always include a photo, and, the beauty with social networking is that because it’s informal, you don’t always need your photo to be a professional head shot – a more informal photo works just as well; let your contacts see the ‘real’ you.
3. 3. Not thinking relationships first! Social networking is all about building relationships with those people in your network – it’s not about getting new clients. Although you’ve probably heard of colleagues getting new clients via social networking, it really is about creating and building relationships with those people in your network. Remember… relationships first!
4. 4. It’s not about sell, sell, sell! If all you’re doing when you visit the various sites and post your updates is pitch your latest program, product or service then it’s no wonder you’re not seeing results. Share information with your network, whether that’s your own information or you’re passing along information from clients and colleagues. The more you share, the greater your results will be.

Whichever social networking arena you’re active in (and it may be more than one) remember the “social” in social networking – it’s to build relationships, make new contacts, and socialize. Inform your network, not sell to them.

Some website owners are more frustrated about Google optimization than for other search engines. They feel it is harder to perform search engine optimization for Google.

Whether you are making direct sales from your website or sales lead generation (or both), optimizing for Google doesn’t need to be that hard.

In fact, in time you may find it easier to perform SEO for Google than for other search engines.

Remember That Google Is Much Smarter Than The Other Search Engines

Since Google is more intelligent, you have to treat them differently.

If you’re trying to spam them, their intelligence is going to be a problem for you. If you’re playing by the rules and providing valuable content for searchers, then you should have no problem.

What Google wants is valuable content that satisfies their users’ search queries. They want searchers to find what they’re looking for, not clicking the back button quickly, but who stay on the sites they visit.

There are some in the SEO community who believe time your visitors spent on your site is one of the calculations Google uses right now in their algorithm to assign organic rankings.

Whether this is the case or not is really irrelevant: we should all want to deliver quality content that meets our searchers query, keeps them on our sites and that leads to a conversion, a sale or sales lead generation.

Are You Optimizing For Yahoo! Search And Bing, Too?

With Yahoo! Search and Bing (formerly Live Search and previously MSN) you need to have the keyword phrase you optimize for on the page. There may be some exceptions, but this is a solid rule to follow.

The order of the keywords makes a difference with them, too.

As an example, with Google, Blue Widget and Widget Blue are treated the same way. Not so with Yahoo! and Live, they are treated as completely different search phrases.

Given the very high market share that Google has, you may want to just optimize for Google and not Yahoo! or Live. After all, depending on whose numbers you’re looking at, Google’s market share is basically 60% to 70% of all U.S. searches!

(And there are hundreds of other much smaller search engines, with such small market shares that they aren’t normally worth worrying about.)

But if you decide to also optimize for Yahoo! Search and for Live Search, then you will likely have to create more pages, to cover all your keyword phrases.

So, as you create more pages for your keywords, you clutter up the Internet, unless those pages are really unique, valuable content.

And then there is that duplicate content filter that Google has…you don’t want to run afoul of that.

If you do optimize for the other engines, unless the additional content is very unique, you might be advised to keep Google out of those pages (using your robots.txt file).

Knowing That Google Is More Intelligent, How Do We Optimize Differently For Google?

With Google’s use of LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing), your pages do NOT actually have to contain the keyword phrase(s) you’re optimizing for. But your pages had better contain words strongly related to your chosen keyword phrases.

In fact, it is common to see high ranking pages where the keyword phrase isn’t in any of the HTML tags and where it also isn’t in the page text, either. Common keyword density numbers for top ranking pages in Google range from 30% all the way down to 0% keyword density.

Why is this and how do we benefit performing Google optimization?

Google is smart enough to understand similar words and phrases (now is when we get to use that word Synonym from English class). Thus, the actual keyword phrase doesn’t have to be on the page. But words related to the same theme as your keyword phrases need to be on the page.

But if our keywords don’t actually have to be on the page for Google to understand the page is about our subject (our keyword phrases), how does Google make that determination?

Off-Page SEO Is The Key To Your Google Optimization And To Your Sales Lead Generation

The links from other websites to your Web pages and what these links say about your pages is the KEY to optimizing for Google. Remember, links need to be pointed towards your interior pages, not just to your home page.

And those links need anchor text.

Anchor text is the wording that people click on to go to your Web page, when the actual link doesn’t show your website url (and file name, if going to an interior page).

Anchor text tells Google (and to a lesser degree, other search engines) what your Web page is about.

Even if the actual keyword phrases aren’t used on your page, the theme of the page text should match the anchor text pointed to that page. You want the wording to be compatible and complimentary.

You don’t want to confuse Google as to your pages’ themes. That can cause real problems.

Quantity Versus Quality

When considering links to your Web pages, quantity is important. You will have to research your competition to give you an idea as to the number of links you may need.

Two tools you can look into are SEO Elite and OptiLink.

But MUCH more important is the quality of your links. The better quality your links, the fewer you will need versus your competition.

Part of how you can evaluate quality of potential links to your site is that site’s home page Google Page Rank.

Now, Google Page Rank is on a page-basis, not a site-wide basis. But the home page Page Rank can tell you if Google considers that site to be an “authority site”.

You can install the free Google toolbar if you haven’t already and activate the Page Rank feature. While the information is literally months old, it’s the easiest way to view a page’s Page Rank.

You want some links to your site from websites with a home page Google Page Rank of at least 5.

One thing you do want to watch: Don’t have to high a percentage of your links containing the same anchor text. Aim for no more than 50% of your anchor text to any page being the same exact anchor text.

Wrapping It Up

For effective Google optimization, start by pointing enough quality links to your Web pages. One-way links are much more effective than reciprocal links, where you link back to the site that has linked to you.

Stay away from triangulated or 3-way links schemes. This is where site A links to site B which in turn links to site C. This is a “no-no” which Google can catch and will penalize for.

Use your keywords as anchor text for your links. Hold down the percentage…don’t have 70% of your links to one page using the same exact anchor text!

Even if you don’t have the keyword phrases on your page, you can still have top rankings, as long as your links’ theme matches your Web page content those links are aimed at.

Following this strategy, you can also optimize your pages for more than one keyword phrase. And without creating dozens and dozens of junk pages, just to cover all your keywords.

You’ll be able to increase your online sales and your sales lead generation, more easily

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You know how often I get asked about how effective social networking is for someone’s business, from my clients or when I’m out networking from random business owners?? Hundreds a month.

It’s amazing. It’s amazing how many of us are on the social sites but also how many are not!

I think if you’re an entrepreneur, no matter whether you do business locally or globally, you should be doing some amount of social networking as ONE source of lead generation in your business.

Of course there are hundreds of other ways to get leads too and I’m only talking about ONE right now (and it’s not always the most effective depending on how you utilize your time but it’s certainly affordable).

Lead generation is ONE goal to have when you network online but it can also do the following for you:

- solidify long lasting relationships – either personal or professional

- provide an easy way to connect faster with target prospects, referral sources or mentors

- establish yourself as an expert in your field by answering discussion questions, posting tips and articles or even inviting ‘friends’ to live events like teleclasses and webinars

- drive more traffic back to your site for special promotions, downloads or interaction

- provides a central place to share photos, videos and basically get more publicity than you could ever pay (or pray) for

Is it worth it to spend my time on the forums or having profiles on these sites?

I say definitely yes.

- You want to ask and answer questions on forums and blogs

- Post comments, articles, events, information, tips, surveys and polls, anything to get the visitors attention

- Record and post interesting or business related videos (nothing too embarrassing!)

- Send people requests to join your ‘network’, ‘fan page’ or ‘group’

- Pursue those in related groups for interaction, advice, joint ventures, etc.

- Dig deeper into the websites of those you’re really interested in working with or those you want to pay attention to you and relate to them on a deeper level if you can – this is the way to make the most of your time I think.

- And so much more….

Whew! I know this can seem daunting and more sites pop up every day right?

I mean, you can even start YOUR OWN social network these days (not that you want to).

So, what should your ROI (Return on Investment) be you ask?

Well, granted this stuff sucks up a ton of time! So, if you’re delegating some of the initial connecting and basic weekly/daily posts and then you’re only in there mostly to dig deeper, get personal and maximize your time; then you can really build a great following. One that’s loyal and interested in new things you send out. A following that clicks and interacts with your profile, your videos and your website.

This is how then you get them on your list over time, get them to attend teleclasses or join your programs or even refer you!

I can tell you that the hardest part of figuring out whether your time/money invested in social networking is paying off though is that it’s not that easy to track results.

So, if you want to really find out if it’s working for you, you have to set up systems that allow for really detailed tracking – tracking your traffic, conversions, customers and more.