I’m going to let you in on a very dirty secret:

There is one question that is being dodged by experts in EVERY market. Answer that question and you’ll corner the market, be worshipped forever and get more customers and sales.

If it was that easy, why aren’t other experts answering these questions?

It’s because they fear an informed audience. That’s outright silly! But, we’re not going to tell them that. While your competitors run scared, you’ll be getting more sales since you’re going to follow the steps I outline in the article below. You will educate your targeted audiences, get more website traffic, teach people how to buy from you and increase your sales.

Now, are you ready?

Step 1: Find the questions that are being dodged by other experts in your industry.

I can’t tell you what these questions are. It will vary from industry to industry. . So, how do you find these golden questions to answer?

• Go to Yahoo Answers and type in your keyword. Examine the questions carefully and see which ones keep popping up. If people are asking the same questions, that means that people have the same questions. There’s a need that’s NOT being fulfilled.
• Go to forums and watch what your audience is discussing
• Survey your clients, customers and list of prospects

Step 2: Answer the questions in as many formats as possible

For each question create a blog post. Do NOT date these blog posts – you will see why later on. Once you create your blog post, expand it into an article. Then, turn your article into a video, special report, podcast and audio interview. You should also create online press releases.

Step 3: Answer the Questions in As Many Places As Possible

• You should submit your blog posts to as many RSS feeds as possible

• You should bookmark your blog posts using Digg, Technorati and De.li.cious

• You should submit your articles to the top websites, ezines and article directories that accept article submissions.

• You should submit your videos to YouTube and Viddler. You may even want to think about investing in the TrafficGeyser.com video submission service

• You should post links to your blog, articles and videos on Twitter, Facebook, Myspace and Linked In.

• You should post your articles on social marketing websites sites like Scribd and Squidoo

• You should submit your press releases through PR Web or Webwire. If you use Webwire.com, all you have to pay is $20. But, I do suggest comparing the two services and see which one matches your needs.

• Videos teaching people how to buy from you or how to use your product should be on your website.

• When people opt-in for your special reports, ebooks or other free offering, you should have an auto-responder series that gets people to go back to your blog or website. If you have lots of blog postings that answers your prospects’ top questions – all you have to do is create a summary for each blog posting and send people back to your blog every day. This way each blog posting will get the visibility it deserves. And, by not showing the date, these postings become evergreen.

Follow these steps and you will increase website traffic and get more sales, because you’ll be educating your prospects, answering their questions and teaching them how to buy from you.

I have to admit I’ve been slow to jump on board with the whole social marketing trend.

After so many years spent in marketing and frequently hearing about the “next big thing”, I’ve come to the decision that all these technologies are simply communication tools for building trusting relationships with prospective customers.

No one tool is going to make you a gazillion dollars.

But used with common sense and an understanding of where your customers hang out and what your customers are most wanting, I think social marketing technology is well worth learning to use.

Specifically, social marketing tools like Facebook, Twitter, and Linked extend your ability to make yourself known to prospective customers as well as people who may refer customers to you.

But it takes time and a focus on providing useful information and resources to others without any requirement for receiving in return.

I’ve always been a resource connector by nature (the one who is always emailing articles and snippets to you prefaced with an fyi”) so social media is a comfortable place for me.

If you are wanting results RIGHT NOW, either stay out of social media or hire someone who has a lighter touch. Social media requires a lower key approach. Hype and in-your-face sales tactics turn most members of Social Marketing Land off.

Success Strategies for Using Social Marketing in Your Business

Some strategies that work for cultivating profitable connections in social media.

Think Conversation; not Presentation

Most people hang out on blogs and social networks because they are engaging with others who have similar interests.

Social networks are informal gatherings, like going to your friend’s BBQ. You might talk business but if you do it will be a casual conversation. Not climbing up on a bench and bellowing, “Hey everyone, let me tell you about this great new service I’m offering.”

It is of course possible that a casual business conversation will lead to a “how about we set up a time to talk more next week?” in which case the result is a meeting in which a presentation is appropriate.

Remember the point is to share information and resources that may be helpful to others in a give and take conversation. 

Expect to reach out first

There’s a funny T-shirt that reads “More People Have Read This Shirt than My Blog.”

That about sums it up if you expect people to swarm to your blog or follow you on Twitter. Unless you’re maybe Ashton Kuchner.

Actions you can take to reach out include:

• Finding others who are doing something that is useful to you and your customers and making a point to comment on their posts in a way that adds to the conversation in progress.
• If you, yourself post to your own blog, include links to articles that support or enhance the points you’re making. Directing people to other blogs is not only helpful to your readers, it is very appreciated by the persons whose blogs you link to.
• They may even link back to you!
• Let people know about useful resources in all social media you participate in. I regularly post links to articles, statistics, and other bits of information my clients and colleagues may appreciate.

Be Yourself

Remember your mom telling you to be yourself when you were worried about being liked by people you didn’t know?

Your mom was right.

In addition to sharing information and resources with real, actionable value to my clients and customers, I also share observations, reviews (books, movies, electronics), and of course the occasional anecdote about my cats.

And I share in my own voice similar to how I might talk with co-workers or people I know casually at a party.

Pick Just One and Try it Out

The first explanation I heard about Twitter was “it’s microblogging.”

I still have trouble explaining blogging to a lot of people let alone microblogging.

“Microblogging” is actually a pretty good description but it’s also, in my opinion, somewhat geeky and intimidating if you’re not a social media buff.

So rather than try to figure it all out, I strongly suggest you get yourself an account with Twitter or Facebook or Linked in.

Not all of them, pick just one.

Then give yourself some time to poke around and get a sense of what’s going on.
 

Start with people you already know, trust and like

Once you get an account, invite people you know, trust, and like to join your network. Or follow them on Twitter. Or subscribe to their blog.

This way you start in a small box with others you may already be connected with. You can feel fairly confident that you’ll be interested in engaged in the conversations they’re having.

As you begin to feel more comfortable you can begin to check out their contacts or look for people interested in a particular topic you love to talk about.

Bottom Line

Once I began reaching out more and focused on hanging out with like- minded people, I got used to and even began to enjoy social marketing.

The most important thing to remember is social media is about connection and conversation. If people like what they’re hearing and find value in what you offer, you will begin picking up business and business-related opportunities.

But like any online strategy, it takes time and effort on your end to reach out and contribute first.

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A savvy and free way to increase your business sales is through blog marketing. No matter what business you’re in, you can increase your business with a focused blog marketing campaign. You may shy away from blog marketing because you feel that you might not be a good writer, or simply don’t like to write. This is understandable. But the truth is that many blog marketers nowadays don’t even write their own content. They pay someone else to do it.

In fact, you can pay someone else to write dozens of articles to keep your blog going. You can come up with ideas if you want to, but you can just as easily give your writers a broad general topic idea and have them come up with streamlined topics for blog entries. The best course of action is truly up to you, but paying writers to craft your blog entries is not expensive and may save you trouble in the long run.

Once you’ve determined how your blog will be written, the next thing you must do is focus on the keywords that your blog will include. There is a lot of information out there on keyword research and niche marketing but, in essence, what you want to do is find keywords that are searched highly and don’t have a lot of competition. Competition means that there are a lot of other pages that come up when you search under that keyword.

You want to have less than 30,000 pages of competition in the Google search results in order to determine that a keyword is viable. And you want to use a keyword tool like the one on Wordtracker to determine how many searches the term receives per day. Go for keywords that get close to or over 100,000 searches with very little competition. This way, you have a really good chance to get to the top of the search engines with your blog.

The reason blog marketing is so effective is because blog marketing allows you to provide the ultimate content that the search engine spiders are looking for when they crawl webpages. The search engine spiders are looking for pages that provide content which contains a fair number of the keywords that the Internet user is looking for, along with information that the user might find useful.

The search engines know that readers don’t just want a blatant sales pitch all the time. They want the reader to get the most accurate information for his or her needs.

Blogs provide information about products and services that customers might enjoy. Some of them contain reviews, opinions or instructions. There are no hard and fast rules for blogging.

Blogs are not ecommerce sites and are, therefore, viewed favorably by many of the search engines. You want to make sure, however, that you don’t have too much keyword-density and too little real content filling up your blog. You want to have truly useful articles that people will find interesting.

One of the wonderful things about the Internet is that it can provide people with informative content that makes an interesting read. If you can become an information resource in your field, people will be more likely to buy from you. Why? Because they will trust you. They might not buy from you right away, but they will probably patronize you at some point in time.

The audience you build with your blog can help you in a number of ways. Some people will, of course, purchase from you. Others may help build your business by telling a friend, mentioning you on their website, or promoting your products or services on their blog.

Another important step in blog marketing is determining where you want to host your blog. There are many options and some of them are free. If you like, you can also build your blog within your website, but then you won’t be taking advantage of an external link that your blog could provide to your website.

After you set up your blog, make sure your blog meta tags and titles are optimized to the best of your ability, just like your website. You may also want to add media, like videos. This can make your content more diverse and interesting to the search engines, as well.

Submit your blog to social marketing sites every day and submit unique keyword optimized articles to some of the most popular article directories every week. Eventually people will begin to read your blog and if they find the information useful, they will want to know more about your business.

Blog marketing, used in conjunction with many of the other online marketing strategies, is a valuable way to increase the public’s view of your brand, and hopefully your sales.

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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.

Here’s a framework for thinking about social measurement:

1.       Fill in the blanks: “Adding or swapping-in social media initiatives will impact ____________ by __________
extent over _____________ timeframe. And when that happens, the added value for the business will be $_____________, which will give me an ROI of ______________. ” This forms your hypotheses about what you might achieve, and why the rest of the business should care.

2.       Identify all the assumptions implicit in your hypotheses and “flex” each assumption up/down by 50% to 100% to see under which circumstances your assumptions become unprofitable.

3.       Identify the most sensitive assumption variables — those that tend to dramatically change the hypothesized payback by the greatest degree based on small changes in the assumption. These are your key uncertainties.

4.       Enhance your understanding of the sensitive assumptions through small-scale experiments constructed across broad ranges of the sensitive variables. Plan your experiments in ways you can safely FAIL, but mostly in ways to help you understand clearly what it would take to SUCCEED — even if that turns out to be unprofitable upon further analysis. That way, you will at least know what won’t work, and change your hypotheses in #1 above accordingly.

5.       Repeat steps 1 thru 4 until you have a model that seems to work.

6.       In the process, the drivers of program success will become very obvious. Those become your key metrics to monitor.

In short, measuring the payback on social media requires a sound initial business case that lays out all the assumptions and uncertainties, then methodically iterates through tests to find the model(s) that work best. Plan to fail in small scale, but most important, plan to LEARN quickly.

Measure social media as you should any other marketing investment: How did it perform versus your expectations of how it should have? If those expectations are rooted in principles of profit-generation, your measurement will be relevant and insightful.