Social media marketing is the very effective tool for marketing your products. There is no other alternative marketing strategy for social media marketing. Hence social media marketing is indispensable for any online business. Social media marketing needs a different approach when compared to the other online marketing strategies. For a social media marketing campaign to be successful, it is very much important to understand the tactics that work better. This article is all about the effective social media marketing tips.
1. Creating unique profiles in Social Networks
Social networking sites like myspace and facebook have great importance in business promotion. This part of social media marketing can get lots of traffic to your website along with building credibility among people worldwide. The social networks are now crowded with the online marketers and hence it is important to highlight your profile in the crowd. Though there are lots of customization options available in the social networking sites itself, it is always good to get some professional help for advanced customization. These social media marketing professionals will be able to provide you will very unique profiles which will get noticed by the social media crowd immediately.
2. Don’t try to sell anything in the Social Networks
Many social media marketers just advertise their products through their social media profiles. This is a wrong move. Social networks are for connecting to people and not for advertising the products, Hence your main motive in the social networks should be to connect to as many people as possible. The traffic to your website and the credibility to your services/ products will eventually increase as your networks grow.
3. Don’t leave any social media profiles unattended
Active participation is a basic necessity of any social media marketing campaign. Just creating some profiles in a handful of social media sites doesn’t do any good. You should post some content to the social media profiles frequently and make them look lively. Always remember the fact that Google crawls the profiles that are frequently updated. Moreover, the visitors of your profile will love to see many updates. You should also involve in activities like participating in polls, posting in forums, making comments and connecting with the people of similar interest.
Social Media marketing is a time consuming process and for the moment of truth it is really worth the time you spend. If you don’t have enough time for social media marketing in your tight schedule, there are professional social media marketers who are ready to help you. To the added advantage, these professional social media marketers can analyze your website and create the best marketing strategy. By paying them a nominal fee, you can just sit back and relax, watching your network grow along with the web traffic and business.
Strategic Internet marketing makes earning online profits a breeze. With the multitude of strategic marketing tools readily available on the Internet, there is no way you can miss out on all the profits… and fun. We’re talking about blogs, forums, viral websites and more!
However, this doesn’t mean that you can just recklessly immerse yourself in every Internet marketing application you come across. Not everything works for every person.
Planning
It’s highly important that you create a plan before diving into anything. Even if you don’t have any money at stake, your time, effort, and credibility are all important factors to consider.
Planning is one of the most important first steps in strategic Internet marketing. It’s a basic concept applicable to every situation. Planning decreases your business financial risks drastically. If you’re just a beginner, then there’s more reason for you to be cautious. Make wise investments.
Research also comes with planning. After all, how can you plan if you don’t know what the available options are? Find out what others are saying about certain Internet marketing strategies. Learn from their experiences. Find out the source of each failed or successful marketing method and go from there.
Scaling Up
One great example of strategic Internet marketing is scaling up your business. Knowing how to scale the business up and how to proceed with it is important, because it helps you earn profits with consistency.
You don’t have to rely on beginner’s luck all the time. Know which pattern works best and go with the one that gives you the best results.
If you have a blog and would like to scale it up to another level, you have more than a few alternatives to choose from. A blog that receives over 500 visitors a day (which many marketers online experience on a daily basis) is already ripe for a scale up or expansion.
At this point, many bloggers feel that the time to add a forum has come. A forum gives your “500 visitors a day” more opportunities to interact with you and their fellow readers as well.
The lesson here is recognizing when your blog has received sufficient traffic to consider the option of investing in another opportunity. A message board, also known as a forum today, is an excellent option to scale your blog to the next level.
Even if the blog does not attract that many sales, and even if the blog was done for the purpose of bringing sponsors in and other monetization purposes, a forum has been proven to do well statistically as evidenced by traffic averages.
The magnificent opportunity with scaling the blog is that as far as internet marketing strategic points go, it’s yet another way to provide continuous revenue to your network in time.
However, increased traffic also means increased responsibilities. A forum is not something that can regulate itself. You still have to devise ways to keep track of what is going on in the discussions. It’s your responsibility to know what is going on in your backyard.
Not only does this help you attract more members, it also offers you invaluable insights into what else you can do to improve the blog. There is an adage “Do not bite the hand that feeds you.” The people in your forum sustain the interest in your blog. Don’t blow them off too quickly.
Keywords
Another effective Internet marketing strategy is the right use of keywords to get good search engine rankings. Choosing the right keywords can significantly increase the number of visitors to your blog or website.
There is a distinct difference between the number of searches for the word “dog” than for the word “dogs.” Of course, you don’t have to be that specific; unless of course, you’re a hardcore keyword person. This example just goes to show how using the right keyword can lead to greater or lesser traffic.
Other Strategic Internet Marketing Campaigns
There are many ways to start your strategic marketing campaign with your online business. Having a blog and forum is not the only way you can advance your business to greater heights.
There are many more exciting ways that could help you market your business to your advantage. The current recession poses no hindrance here. Even if many people are ranting about slow sales and stagnant businesses, strategic Internet marketing still has a considerable effect on people.
If you are an Internet marketer who sells how-to information, you can earn money faster if you present concrete proof of your product’s effect.
Presenting success rates and testimonials won’t hurt either. If you feel at a loss for what to do, put yourself in your customers’ shoes. Why should people buy from you? Why should they give your product a second glance, especially with recession knocking on their door?
Overall, strategic Internet marketing has a lot to do with common sense. Always have a plan ready in your head. Don’t forget to make plans B and C just in case you need to regroup. Don’t be afraid to move forward.
A blog might have a huge impact on your visitors, but a blog with a forum opens up more opportunities for growth and sales! Use every element to your advantage. The keywords you use obviously have an impact on the number of people who stumble across your blog or website. Choose your keywords wisely. Do not turn away advice from strangers. Consider them and think through each more than twice.
Sticky blog? I am sure you pretty much know what a sticky blog is, but just in case you are not entirely sure, let’s take a moment to describe one. Let us say that you enjoy a sudden surge of visitors due to one reason or another. Certainly, you would be ecstatic the entire day. But what about the day after? And the next? Would those people still be visiting your blog?
That is the idea of a sticky blog – you get to entice people to keep coming back for more. Getting exposure is only the start. What you want are repeat visitors.
So how do you make your blog sticky? Here are some practical tips which you can employ NOW.
Create your visual design with “sticky” in mind.
And how do you do this? Put yourself in the shoes of a visitor. What will make you keep coming back? For sure, one element would be easy navigation. Make sure that your archives are easy to access. Use relatively large fonts. Stay away from a combination of colors that hurt the eyes. You follow?
Highlight recent posts and most popular posts.
What you want is for your readers to be able to find your posts easily. While your archives can help a lot, especially for the recent posts, it would be much easier for readers to find a section devoted entirely to these. As for the most popular posts, why not make them even more popular by creating links to them as well? More so, you want new visitors to sample the best of what you have to offer, and your most popular posts give them exactly that.
You may have gotten into the habit of thinking of your article marketing as just one article here and another article there, but it really helps to approach your article submissions with a big picture view.
Submit just a few articles, and you probably won't see drastic results, but submit a handful of articles every month for 12 months and you will see what marketing momentum can do for your site!
Consistency is key with submitting articles as with any online marketing tool, and creating and implementing an article marketing strategy can inspire that consistency.
I use an article marketing strategy myself that is comprised of a series of simple steps.
Last time I told you about Step 1: Establish your baseline.
Today we're moving on to Step 2, which is: Establish the baseline of your competitors.
Why in the world would you want to look closely at how your main competitors are doing?
1) Well, for one thing, trying to get to the top of the search engines is not something you do in a vacuum–your success depends on how other sites are doing in relation to you.
If you're at number 50 in the rankings for your keyword in Google, and the site that is ranked #1 is also working hard to market their site and building links each month and gaining PR, then you will have a clear idea as to what you're up against.
2) Competition will spur you on. Think of article marketing and SEO as a race–you do best when you have competition. If you're just running by yourself and someone is timing you, you probably won't make your best time.
But, if you're embedded in a flock of speedsters running their hearts out, you will most likely run harder too.
Keeping track of your main competitor's status helps remind you that you're in competition with other sites, and how well they perform with SEO influences how well you perform.
3) Keeping track of your competitors can give you insights and be consoling when the road gets bumpy.
Ask anyone who is consciously and consistently staying on top of their website's progress–it's not always uphill every single month. Sometimes your site may take a dive in an area for completely unexplainable reasons. When this happens, the tendency can be to overreact and think, "What did I do to deserve this?" and then not knowing if the sudden change had anything to do with you at all, you start making changes out of desperation.
But when you keep track of your competitor's progress every month, it's like you're running with a pack.
What affects you may very likely be affecting them as well, and that can ease your mind that whatever the reason for the unexplainable change in your site's backlinks, ranking or whatever, that it was across the board and not just affecting you, and that with some patience things will go back to normal.
4) Why not learn from your competitors? If a site is sitting at #1 in Google, they are there for a very good reason. You may find that your competitors are doing some things that are benefiting them greatly that you may be able to incorporate into your own marketing plan.
Those are the reasons why I track my main competitors and why I advise others to do so as well.
Let's go over the steps on how to do this:
How do you know who your main competitor's are?
It's simple enough to tell–type each of your keywords into Google, and see what site comes up at #1. The site at #1 is your main competitor.
When I started my article marketing strategy last year, I focused in on 3 keywords, so for each of those keywords I have a main competitor.
What info should you track for your competition?
Mostly the same info that you are tracking for yourself as we discussed in Step 1: How To Create An Article Marketing Strategy
*The search engine ranking for the keyword. (And of course for at least the first month, that search engine ranking will be #1, since that is how you determined that they were your main competitor.)
*Number of backlinks. Here's a tutorial on how to do a back link check.
*The Google PageRank–you can find the PageRank (PR) by installing the Google Toolbar and looking at the PageRank indicator. Remember, the web page that you will be keeping track of is the web page that is at #1 for your keyword term. Sometimes this is not the top level domain of the site (http://www.theirwebsite.com), but rather an inner page (http://www.theirwebsite.com/page2). When you're doing your checks each month, just be sure that you're consistently checking the same web page for your competitor. It helps to write down on your spreadsheet the exact web page that you're checking so that you can remember each month.
And that's it–on the same day that you do your stats check for your own site, also do the stats check for your main competitors.Some months you'll notice that they did increase their backlinks, some months you'll see that they lost backlinks, and other months you'll see that they just stayed the same.
This info will give the stats for your own site a whole new dimension. It will be encouraging to you to see your site making advancements in backlinks or PR or search engine ranking, and you can sort of see yourself on a horse galloping up from behind getting closer and closer to overtaking the person out in front–at least that's how I like to think of it!
If you're aiming for being #1 for a keyword and you're way back in the rankings, you can still see how you're making progress each month. Really galloping up the search engine rankings is not something that happens overnight, and sometimes it can be one step forward two steps back, but over time you will see a trend of steady improvement.
