At a recent Social Media-themed breakfast event for New Hampshire’s Greater Manchester Chamber of Commerce, one speaker (Leslie Poston, co-author of Twitter for Dummies) told the assembled audience there were 537 different social networking sites online. 537! And that doesn’t even count all the networks on Ning and other services like it, which allow you to build your own social network using their templates, or custom-made communities like “Greenopolis,” or “Equestrian Life.”

So when it comes to deciding which social media platforms make the most sense to use, the options can be overwhelming – if you let them. However, with a little focus, guidance, and strategic thinking, you can just as easily simplify your choices.

What follows draws from our 6-week “Social Media Kick Start” Virtual Boot Camp, which expands on these topics with self-paced learning modules.

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Of all the article marketing tips I could give you, writing articles for free advertising online is likely the most beneficial to you if you currently spend money on advertising your website. There are several reasons for this, but the major reasons why article writing can bring you better results than expensive pay per click (PPC) adverts or taking a chance with reciprocal links are detailed below.

Keep in mind that Google is not keen on reciprocal links unless the page you are reciprocating with relates to the page on your website that the link points to, and the link is no good to you in any case if it is one of many others on a ‘links’ or ‘partners’ page created predominantly for such links. You only get a share of the PR of the page your link is on, not that of the ’site’, and even that is shared between all the other links on the page.

Being one of 5 links on a page with a PR of 1 is better than one of 50 on a page with a PR of 8. If you take these article marketing tips, writing articles can offer you a form of free advertising online that Google itself provides willingly, and that can work for you for many years to come. Here is how to go about writing articles to get you the benefits that free online advertising has to offer: Read the rest of this entry

Social media optimization is a way for organizations and individuals to generate publicity through social networking tools like Twitter and LinkedIn, online communities like Facebook, and automated tools like TwitterFeed and Ping.fm. The term “social media optimization” was originally coined by SEO consultant extraordinaire, Rohit Bhargava, the senior vice president of Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence and author of the Influential Marketing Blog. (Bhargava’s work was so groundbreaking, Jeremiah Owyang, another social media optimization expert, even dovetailed a few of his own rules to the original work.)

Social media optimization is basically a way to promote your blog, website, or even your company’s brand, through social media, without being obnoxious or overtly commercial. Sure, you can blanket sites like Twitter with “Want to lose weight? Download my free report, ‘19 Ways to Lose Weight Fast’” repeatedly, or brag about your latest affiliate paycheck, but that’s not going to get you any followers. At least none worth talking to.

Bhargava terms these people”Twankers” (people who use Twitter for one-way broadcasts about their own greatness) and “Twidiots” (people who only tweet insignificant things like their latest press release or what they had for breakfast). If you’re just having one-way conversations and telling people about the minor, mundane details of your company, you’re not providing any value, and your SMO efforts will be wasted.

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With today’s website tracking software and services you can find out a lot about the people who visit your website. You can learn where they’re from, what kind of browser they’re using, how long they stayed on your site, and a whole lot more. But what all this high tech intelligence won’t tell you is what kind of people they are, and how likely they are to be transformed by your Web presentation from viewers to customers.

Your ability to convert website visitors into clients depends on your ability to find the soft underbelly of their subconscious desire. After all, if someone is happy with what they’ve already got, they don’t need you, but if they were truly one hundred percent happy, they wouldn’t bother coming to your website. Therefore every visitor that comes to your site is a potential client whether they know it or not.

The Setup’s The Thing

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In SEO, link building is the practice of accumulating relevant links in order to build up site authority, and rank for certain keyword phrases on search engines. However, link building is often associated with questionable practices like link buying and link spamming. Too many businesses focus on buying sitewide static links, and building a specific number of links. Once they achieve that goal, they tend to forget about their link building efforts. What they have failed to discover is that a successful link building strategy is one that is natural, builds your web presence, and strengthens your brand.

In this day and age in the online world, there are a variety of effective ways to build your brand and links such as using video sharing websites, blogging, and participating in social media. The types of online brands with the most successful online strategies utilize all of these methods of brand building and link building. Sitewide links, or links that are placed on all pages of a website, have lost a lot of their value for the simple fact that they are unnatural. Sitewide links are the links in a template or sidebar under a section such as “friends,” “links,” or “resources.” Many websites get the majority of their inbound links from sitewide linking, but they must build a strong web presence first in order for those sitewide links to be credible and effective.

Tips for Building Your Web Presence

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In our technologically expanding world, where the Internet is the most available form of media, Viral Marketing is an extremely effective form of advertising. Before the Web explosion, this form of advertising would have been referred to simply as “word of mouth” or getting your message out by having your customer base spread the word.

Why Use Viral Marketing?

There are several studies that state that if someone has a good experience, chances are they will tell a few close friends. However, with a bad experience people will repeat it to anyone who will listen. Since the pace of the Internet is so much faster than that of word of mouth, you will want to be careful with the messages you put out there. The message you put forth can spread, and spread quickly, whether that message is good or bad.

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Wake Up – Your Clients Are Looking for You!

If you’re going to use the power of the Internet to try to find clients, you have to first understand how prospective clients are going to find you. You need to drop your preconceived notions about how you see your business, and start thinking about how potential clients are going to see your business. To do that, you need to try to put yourself in their shoes.

Understanding Web Searches

Let’s suppose, for example, your business is centered around providing consulting to customers who need help with back pain in New York. When you sit down to start designing your web strategy, you might hire a copywriter to create content with the keywords, “back pain consultant,” or “pain coaching.” However, those terms won’t likely bring you much in the way of good, solid traffic from potential clients.

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If you want to learn how to make money online the right way, with no hype and no false promises, then you will have to make the effort to ignore all these seemingly unbelievable offers that are being made to you. If you have recently lost your job, then you are vulnerable, and prey to every shark in the internet waters – and there are lots of them.

I know what it is like because I was like you. I lost my job, and tried to make it online but found it very hard. I spent a lot of money trying to learn how to make money online: one lump sum of $6,500 to be taught what I now know was elementary stuff. I was taken for a ride, and when I eventually found out that the Corey Rudl that I paid for this was one of the most well respected internet millionaires online, I was disillusioned.

These guys have no shame. They are still at it. I have just been offered an unbelievable opportunity, only about 40 slots left, to learn how to make $300 a day that can expand to many times that. The guy selling his ideas that made him so much money is doing it because he wants to ‘give something back’. Why do I find it difficult to believe that?

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Many people who are trying to dream up a domain name for their business discover just how common a unique idea might be. Welcome to the web! Trying to find a domain name that has not been taken is classic needle in a haystack. You can short-cut the process by doing your keyword research first.

If you know what search terms people are using to find your products and services you can back your way into a domain name that gets more credit in those searches. And that’s just the beginning of understanding how to take an idea online.

What I have also come to discover is that there is a proliferation of people out there with great ideas and many of them may even have an idea similar to yours. EXECUTION is what turns an idea into an enterprise. And that is what separates the men from the boys (and the girls from the women).

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Do you feel like you are spending a lot of money on PPC but that you are getting little in return? For small business owners and internet entrepreneurs, spending even a couple thousand dollars on PPC can feel like an incredible amount of money. To ensure that your ads actually bring your business results and to make the most out of your PPC investment, implement some of these money-saving tips.

1. Make sure your ads are geographically targeted. If you are a dry cleaner in Brooklyn, only place ads for people in your local area. This will help to lower ad impression, raise CTR, and give you better ROI and a higher quality score.
2. Use the negative keywords match feature to your advantage. When you use the negative keywords match feature, you can filter out keywords for which you do not want your ads to show. The words “free” and “cheap” are common elements of negative keyword phrases. For example, if you sell web templates, surely you don’t want people searching for “free web templates” to click on your ad. You will have to pay for those extra clicks and all of those unwanted impressions will lower your CTR. Use the negative keywords match feature to filter out such negative keywords. However, you may find that some negative keywords would be of benefit to your campaign. Go to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, choose “negative” in the drop down menu under Match Type, and determine which negative keywords may serve you.
3. Create separate ad groups, ads, and landing pages. Rather than targeting a slew of keywords with one ad and one landing page, group similar keywords in individual ad groups, create individual ads for them, and then point them to your designated landing pages. By doing so, you can improve your CTR and conversion rates because the landing pages will be more relevant to the terms that users are searching for.
4. Use ad scheduling. Ad scheduling allows you to control the day and time that your ads appear. For example, if your business offers a special Tuesday deal, you can schedule your ad campaign so that your ads promoting the Tuesday deal only show on Tuesdays. Or if you are running your ads 24 hours a day, you might find that by running them only during a certain time frame of the day instead, you get better conversions. Let’s say you have a health website. You will probably get more clicks and conversions in the morning for keywords like, “morning after pill,” “morning sickness,” “morning headache,” and “hangover.”

Don’t use broad match. Many people are simply unaware of the different keyword match features that are available in Adwords. By default in an Adwords campaign, your keywords are set as a “broad match.” The problem with broad match is that your ads will show up when people search for different variations of your keywords, even if they are not on your keyword list. Google is likely to consider many words as relevant when they are really not. Use the “phrase” keyword match type to ensure that your ads only show up when people search for the exact keywords on your list.

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NOTE:  The following is a guest post from one of my favorite internet marketing mentors.

Why I Love Affiliate Marketing – Part 5
By Jimmy D. Brown of “Affiliatenaire”

The word “overhead” is not a favorite among those who run businesses of any kind.  Nobody likes the expenses of operating a business.  And nobody really talks about them much when it comes to promoting all of the “money-making” products and services online.

But, don’t kid yourself, there’s a lot of overhead.

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NOTE:  The following is a guest post from one of my favorite internet marketing mentors.

Why I Love Affiliate Marketing – Part 4
By Jimmy D. Brown of “Affiliatenaire”

I’m sure by now you are well aware that there are those who have reported HUGE amounts of money being made with their online businesses.  What you may not be aware of is the amount of work involved in generating those “sales” (not always net profit, mind you … this isn’t “spendable”
income in a lot of cases.)

That brings me to the fourth reason why I love affiliate marketing…

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