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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Building a great landing page should be on top of your priority list if you want your website visitors transformed into customers. While a great looking website  can grab the attention of your visitors, a strong landing page will keep them involved and get them to buy your products/services.

Wikipedia defines a landing page as:

the page that appears when a potential customer clicks on an advertisement or a search-ngine result link. The page will usually display content that is a logical extension of the advertisement or link, and that is optimized to feature specific keywords or phrases for indexing by search engines.

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One of the most common questions I’m getting these days is “how should I measure the value of all the social marketing things we’re doing like Twitter, Linked-in, Facebook, etc.?”

My answer: WHY are you doing them in the first place? If you can’t answer that, you’re wasting your time and the company’s money.

Sounds simple I know, but I’m stunned at how unclear many marketers are about their intentions/expectations/hypotheses for how social media initiatives might actually help their business. In short, if you can’t describe in two sentences or less (no semi-colons) WHAT you hope to gain through use of social media, then WHY are you doing it? Measurement isn’t the problem. If you don’t know where you’re going, any measurement approach will work.

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Forums are a great way of marketing alongside articles, email and blogging – there is no real way to compare all of these, they are just a different way of communicating. The big difference however with forums is that many many more people will see you and get to know you which builds trust as you interact with the community.

Forums have been around in many forms since the dawn of the internet, they provide a means of conversation with like-minded people in a community-driven atmosphere of helping one another with problems. If you don’t know how they work, let me just tell you a bit about them.

First off, you have to find your forum in your niche, the best way to do this is type in subject forums as the keywords (replacing subject with your topic) into a search engine. Once you have found one in the topic you’re interested in, with a nice community going on, registration is the next step.

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Social networking using Twitter seems to be the most popular way to connect today, from celebrity Ashton Kutcher’s challenge to Oprah to reach one million friends first (Ashton won) to a U.S. State Department official contacting the co-founder of Twitter to delay upgrading the Twitter system so as not to interrupt election dialogue in Iran. More and more news agencies are using Twitter to keep their audience up-to-date, and local businesses are also jumping on the Twitter bandwagon as an immediate way to connect with their customers, as well.

How can you make the best use of Twitter in your business? It all starts with having followers in your target market. No doubt you’ve been inundated with email offers of things like “10,000 Twitter followers in 60 seconds for only $19.95!” Trust me — 1000 followers that are members of your target market are much more useful to the growth of your business via social networking than 10,000 followers that come from anywhere.

How do you find members of your target market on Twitter? Here are my top 7 strategies:

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Email marketing is one of the most effective ways for a business to promote themselves and increase sales but it must be done right in order to be effective.
In this article I will touch on the art of email marketing- (What works and what does not) and how you can get more bang for your marketing buck when selecting an email marketing service.

A word about spam.

Unsolicited email or “Junk email” also called “Spam” is living proof that email is a powerful way to reach an online audience.

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The 7 Basics That All Sites Need to Adhere To

Basic #1:

Have a great keyword-loaded URL [Get your domain and hosting at bluehost.com]. Create small uris with: Snipurl.com, Tinyurl.com, ICANN.org is the technical coordination body for the Internet (what to do about domain name disputes).

Basic #2:

Easy to use Site Is your site easy to use and navigate? Does it satisfy its intended purpose? Use techniques that are friendly to your customers and prospects. View compatibility with various browsers: AnyBrowser.com.  Check your graphics efficiency: Optiview.com ’s Quickscan, keep track of your site’s performance: atwatch.com, dotcom-monitor.com, Keynote.com or lnternetSeer.com. Make sure your links work: SevenTwentyFour.com or validator.w3.org

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Google AdSense has been talked about, hyped about and even criticized over the past year. At the same time, WordPress has emerged as one of the leading blogging platforms used by almost all A-list bloggers. What do these two have in common?

I just came across Gobala Krishnan’s “WordPress AdSense System” course that combines the two, showing you how to create “autopilot sites” that make money from AdSense:

Here’s my review of the product, and why you should get yourself a copy.

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How to make $1000 a month online from scratch – Part 4 of 8
One of my friends is a consulting project manager. I hadn’t seen him for a while so asked him what he’d been up to.

He told me how he was contracted as the head project manager for a large train building project. When I asked him how it was going he responded, “Well, it’s a little stressful.”

“Why is that?” I asked.

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How to make $1000 a month online from scratch – Part 3 of 8

By now, your mind should be primed and ready for success after you’ve read “The Mindset” It’s time to take action and get started on building your new online business.

First, a little warning. This chapter, “The Idea”, is going to be fairly long and relatively detailed, so it’s time to turn off all distractions and set aside some time to go over this completely. I would recommend that you read it through from start to finish, then find some time to take the action outlined.

Some of you might be tempted to skim read and think you know it all already. This is a mistake. Something I’ve learned over the years is that the devil is in the details. This outline is a carefully crafted blueprint to create exponential effects. If you miss a step, you’re destined to have dramatically less success. So read through this part carefully.

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How to make $1000 a month online from scratch – Part 2 of 8

Put simply, for most of you, the biggest hurdle you’ll have to earning $1000 a month online is your own mind. This guide provides a blueprint of practical steps to direct you towards success. However, it’s one thing to say and quite another thing to do.

Most of the time, motivation is not the problem. No, it’s the sneaky mental enemies that you have to watch out for. There are two in particular I’m thinking about.

The first enemy of the mind is self doubt. If we have self doubt, it will erode everything we do. There is a saying I live by that says, “You will go where you look.” This means simply, if you expect to fail, you probably will.

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What is pinging?

Pinging is a way of letting search engines know that you’ve created a new post, or updated an existing post on your blog. A ‘ping’ is a message sent to a ‘ping server’ notifying it that the blog has been updated with new content.

What is a ping server?

A ping server is a web-based service that accepts messages in the XML-RPC format. It uses the information in these XML-RPC messages to publish a list of blogs which have updated content. Some of these ping servers run their own blog search engines, and some propagate the information to a number of other ping servers and search engines.

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