Web Site Design Specialists

By Sean Carton

Why should you spend your ad dollars on social media?

That might seem like a silly question, given that everyone seems to be shifting ad budgets to hop on the social media bandwagon. But if you aren’t asking it, you’re asking for disaster. And if you can’t answer the question with a comprehensive, strategic answer, you’re wasting your money.

It might sound harsh, but a recent Center for Media Research report has me worried. After surveying more than 1,000 people with media buying or planning responsibilities, the center found that “having a presence on social networks” is one of the top priorities for media plans in 2010.

Why should that worry me? Because I’ve only rarely encountered people with actual strategies behind their social media push. Sure, plenty of clients (and prospects) I’ve spoken to in the past year or so made vague noises about viral video or being on Facebook or tweeting, but when I’ve pressed them for why they want those things, few can give me an answer.

Not that I blame them: it’s tough to read any of the industry press these days without getting the feeling that everyone’s doing social media better than you are. Ad spending on social media sites keeps going up, the buzz is deafening, and just about every company you encounter asks you to follow them on Twitter, read their blog, or become their friend on Facebook. And like any new thing, it’s got the sheen of new on it that’s hard to resist.

But before you spend money on building a social media presence, take a step back. After all, if you’re spending money there, you’re not spending it somewhere else. If you don’t spend money with a strategy, you’re throwing it away.

Here, then, is my 10-step social media strategy checklist. It’s hardly magical stuff; you could probably apply a lot of these questions to just about any advertising or marketing you do. But going through this checklist as you build a social media strategy will help you develop a strategy based on results, not hype. It may be painful, especially if you like new things (Oooh! Shiny!), but when you get real results instead of making excuses, you’ll be glad you did.

1. What are we trying to accomplish? Are you looking for more leads, more direct sales, greater brand awareness, conversions, or brand engagement? Understanding what you’re trying to actually do with your social media presence should be the first step in developing a social media strategy.

 

2. Why social media? Is your audience there? Do you want to build stronger relationships with customers and prospects? Tap into online word-of-mouth channels? Demonstrate that you’re down with the kids? You have a niche audience that’s difficult to reach otherwise? The best way to avoid recklessly jumping on the bandwagon is to examine why the wagon is the best way to get where you’re going before you hop on. Ask yourself: is spending money on social media going to provide better ROI (define) than other forms of advertising you could be spending money on?

 

3. What kind of social media will help us best achieve our goals? Do you need to utilize social networking sites, blogs, real-time updates (e.g., Twitter), social news sites, media-sharing sites, review/directory sites, virtual worlds, or display ads on social media sites? In some respects, talking about a social media presence is like talking about having an advertising presence: you must specify what you’re doing and where you’re going to place it. Examine the characteristics of the type of social media you want to have a presence on and how those characteristics fit what you’re trying to accomplish to help choose the ones that will work best for you.

 

4. Are we prepared to let go of control of our brand, at least a little? You can’t participate in social media without being…well…social. And that means engaging in a conversation with customers. Once you engage in a conversation, you have to give up control. Is your company willing to do that?

 

5. What will we do to encourage participation? There’s nothing more embarrassing than going to a corporate YouTube channel and seeing that the viral video it spent tons of money making has just 127 views. Ditto for going to a company’s Twitter feed and seeing that it has all of 11 followers. What are you planning to do to drive people to your social media presence? And do you have the money to do it?

 

6. Who will maintain our social media presence? Participating in social media takes a lot of work. You must have something to say and you must have someone (or a team of people) to say it on a regular basis. It won’t happen unless it becomes part of someone’s job. Do you have someone ready to commit a big chunk of time to maintaining your social media presence?

 

7. Do we have the resources to keep this up, or will this be a short campaign? Similarly, unless you specify that what you’re doing has a limited duration (such as a Twitter feed based on a particular conference), people will expect you to keep it up. Have you budgeted the resources to continue your social media presence beyond the fiscal year?

 

8. How does engaging users via social media integrate into our overall marketing/communications strategy? None of this stuff exists in a vacuum. It has to be part of a larger marketing/communications strategy. How does social media fit into what you’re trying to do in all your other channels, and how will you use those channels to support each other?

 

9. How do we measure success? What constitutes failure? Are you measuring views, followers, comments, or subscribers? What’s the threshold for your success metrics that takes them into success territory? What happens if you don’t get there?

 

10. What will we do less of if we’re spending resources on social media? Chances are you have limited dollars (if not, could you contact me immediately?). If you spend more money on social media and other nontraditional forms of marketing, you have to spend less on something else. How will your overall goals be impacted by taking money away from other forms of advertising/marketing and moving it into social media?

By Jason Falls

Social media is starting to take hold with brands, companies and organizations everywhere. While there are still stragglers, and it is probably incorrect to say most companies are getting with the program, a good number of them are. What we’re seeing in these organizations is a maturation process. Brands are done testing the waters, playing with the tools and saying, “We Gotta Facebook Page!” like it’s the corporate equivalent of an iPhone or Kindle. Companies are now approaching social media with communications strategies in mind — How can we effectively use these social tools to reach our audiences?

But therein lies the next challenge for those responsible for the social media planning for organizations. Regardless of the pedigree – public relations, corporate communications, marketing, customer service, research, etc. – today’s social media task masters are probably still operating from the traditional corporate mindset or training. First, you define your audience and your goals and objectives. Then you develop talking points to convince that audience to complete the action that fulfills the goals or objectives. Then you measure, report; rinse, repeat.

The problem is that social media is an environment that scoffs at the traditional. Talking points are about as useful in a social media campaign as a nail gun in a balloon store. You’re just gonna piss everybody off.

Corporate messaging — talking points — are precisely why people have turned to online communities and social networks for information about products and services. Social media exists to provide trusted, third party information to consumers looking for something other than a sales pitch. Thus, diving into a social media effort with your talking points in tow is a great strategy if you’re hoping to fail.

The key to developing a social media strategy is not talking points, but parameters of conversation.

Which conversation can you find a way into?

To develop your parameters of conversation for your social media efforts, answer these questions:

• What types of people do we want to talk to?
• Where do we find them?
• What are they talking about already?
• Is it appropriate for us to join that conversation and, if so, when?
• How do we inject usefulness into the conversation without being overly promotional?
• What value can we provide in terms of knowledge, opinion or content?
• How can we earn their trust?
• When we do earn their trust, how can we best ask for their input into our product or service?
• Under what circumstances can we point the conversation toward considering our product?
• Can we say or do something that invites someone else to point the conversation toward considering our product?
• How shall we apologize and regroup if we overstep their comfort level or accuse us of violating their trust?

Many of the answers cannot be had until you assimilate into the communities and conversations. But thinking of these situations ahead of time is no different than anticipating the hard questions from reporters before a press conference. Prepare yourself with answers, then read and react. It’s not the soup-to-nuts of a social media strategy, but the answers to these questions are at the core of successful ones.

Those are my questions. What are yours? What other ideas can we add to this list to help a company round out parameters of conversation for their social media efforts. The comments are yours.

by Brian Clark

We’ve seen that the real secret to SEO Copywriting 2.0 is creating compelling content that naturally attracts links, rather than begging for links to our keyword-stuffed web page. In other words, SEO copywriting is now all about response-oriented copy concepts and words that ultimately result in a favorable action from the reader.

Since the popularity of our content depends on the reaction to it off-page, it makes sense that we might also need to step outside the confines of the page itself to get the word out. Luckily, the same copywriting skills you use to conceive and create your content apply to promoting it as well.

The way to create compelling content is to focus on “what’s” in it for the reader. Likewise, no one is going to link to you unless doing so gives them a benefit as well.

The key is the same as to understand who you’re talking to and then figure out what will catch their attention and convince them to take action. Here are 5 ways to go about it.

1. Social Media Sites

The quickest way for an exceptional piece of content to get a lot of attention that results in secondary links is to make the home page of Digg or Delicious Popular. There are scores of similar sites that can drive quality traffic as well, such as Reddit, TechMeme, and Magnolia. For more offbeat content, Fark will shake your server. Plus there are dozens of aggregator sites such as PopURLS that also drive traffic based on your inclusion at the primary site.

If you’ve done a great job with your headline, it should magnetically draw people in. However, you need to understand the audience of each social media site. What works as a headline for Digg often won’t work for Reddit. Tweak accordingly, but try to retain your keywords in the title if at all possible, because most of the resulting links will simply regurgitate that title.

Another key element for success on Digg is the summary description, because many people will vote for content based soley on the headline and the brief copy that describes it. Sometimes this may simply be your existing opening paragraph, but you might craft a specialized description that best appeals to the culture of the site.

Submitting your own content to social media sites is looked down upon (at least with your real name), so it makes sense to have a friend submit for you. When specifically targeting a social news site, you want to control the headline and summary copy, because the exact same content submitted with poor headline and description copy may go absolutely nowhere.

2. Linking Out

Linking out to attract links? Yep.

Engaging in dialogue with the relevant blogs in your niche is a great way to get noticed, and it can lead to links back. Bloggers definitely watch who is linking to them thanks to Technorati, and you can take the initiative by linking out first before looking for one in return.

Simply linking out for the sake of linking won’t accomplish much, especially with bloggers who gets lots of links. The key is to be strategic about how you link and what your say.

It’s just like any other conversation. Join in and add your two cents, but make sure you’ve got something substantive to say that will reflect well on you. Use a great headline to make sure you are noticed, and then deliver the goods. And since your cornerstone content is the foundation of what the conversation is likely about, finding a way to mention it in the context of the dialogue will naturally bring it to the attention of influencers in your field.

3. Networking Emails

The days of flat out link begging are fading, but you can still reach out to other bloggers as a way to raise your own profile. Again, can you figure out what’s in it for them?

More than one-off link requests, networking via email and instant messaging is about establishing and growing relationships with others in the social media space. These are the linkeratis prominent bloggers in your niche, top Digg users, web journalists, and prominent web forum contributors.

Write your introductory emails from a copywriting perspective. Catch attention, gain interest, and create a desire to help you in the future by offering something that benefits them first.

4. Guest Appearances

Another benefit of networking within your niche is that it creates opportunities to make a guest writing appearance. You can contribute content that not only allows you to raise your profile, but allows for links back to your own site. Once again, creating killer original content will open doors for you, especially when it’s created for the benefit of someone else. And you can use that killer cornerstone content you’ve already produced as an example of the quality you can deliver.

Depending on your relationship with the site owner, you may be able to link to your cornerstone content from within the body of the content itself, but only if the citation is extremely relevant to the content and beneficial to the reader. Otherwise, your link will need to appear in your byline.

Most people tend to link to their site or blog URL in the byline of contributed content. Turn it around by focusing the byline on the reader instead of yourself, and feature your cornerstone content instead of your home page.

For example, if I were to guest blog somewhere about strategies for attracting links, which byline is more attractive to the reader when finishing my article?

NO: Brian Clark writes about online copywriting at Copyblogger.

YES: Check out Brian Clark’s free SEO Copywriting 2.0 tutorial, which is all about the new style of online writing that helps your web site rank well in search engines.

5. Article Directories

At one point in time, submitting about 20 articles to a directory like Ezine Articles with the right anchor text would get you a really good ranking for some search terms, at least in Yahoo and MSN. However, because the engines discount duplicate content, having dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of sites republish your article (and linked byline) no longer does the trick by itself.

However, a site like Ezine Articles is still excellent for creating exposure to your cornerstone content. Having a link to your multi-part tutorial displayed on hundreds of web pages drives direct traffic, and can lead to your content being referenced in other posts and articles that do pass on link authority.

The strategy is much the same as with guest posting on a blog. Write original content that does not appear on your site, and submit to one or more reputable directories. Repeat until you get results.

Conclusion

The words you put on a web page have no life of their own until they get read. And those same words will not gain prominence in search engines until the words are linked to by relevant, authoritative sources.

Search engines can still be gamed, just like offline real-world systems can be exploited. However, the goals of the search engines are similar to society at large, and they are getting very good at finding rule breakers and dispensing punishment. Creating compelling content and beneficial relationships are strategies that won’t get you banned or penalized, and add value to your overall goal of converting site visits into revenue.

By Jennifer Kyrnin

One of the most common complaints that new writers have about weblogs or blogs is that they are too personal or informal. But it is very possible to have a business and still use a weblog to get more promotion, more pageviews, and more customers.

Why Blog for Promotion?
Blogging is very popular right now. And having a business weblog that provides good information for your customers while being timely and fun can add a new dimension to your Web site.

Blogs are a powerful tool for marketing and promotion. Because the entries are short, and often full of links, they are more keyword heavy than standard articles often are. Plus, being short, they are easy for your customers to read (and you to write), so they are more likely to come back daily to see what you might have to say on that day.

If your company is very formal, a blog is a place to show your customers that it is made up of people just like them. You can do this without becoming too personal or diary-like.

Using a Blog for Business
There are lots of ways you could use a blog in a business:

• Frequently Asked Questions
  If you get a lot of mail to your webmaster account, you can post the common questions up on a blog. This will provide your customers a place to go to see questions and answers, and as new questions come in, you can post them to help more people.
• Promotions
  If you do promotions every week or few days, you can use a blog to highlight them.
• Contests
  Daily contests and games are a great promo in a blog. They are fun, and bring your customers back.
• What’s New Pages
  If you add lots of new articles, information, or products regularly, sometimes it can be difficult for your customers to find out what’s new. A quick blog entry can show them what’s updated on your site.
• What’s Coming
  You can use a blog to peak interest in future products or projects. It’s also a great way to keep notes about what you’re planning for your customers, the entries are archived so nothing is lost either for you or your customers. Plus, if your blog tool has a comments feature, you can use that to judge interest before it goes live.
• Photo Blog
  Rather than writing, you could put up a daily photo for your customers. A photo and a short description can be very compelling.
• Developer Notes
  If you’re a software company, this can often be fascinating for your customers, to see what the software developers are doing and how new projects might be moving forward.
• News
  The most common use for business blogs is news, usually about the specific topic relevant to the company.

Why bother exploring social media as a marketing channel for your website or business? After all, you could stick to link exchanges, search advertising or the purchase of banner and editorial ads on relevant sites.

Here are some reasons why you should consider using social media:

1. It’s natural. Not only do you get natural links without any discernible pattern, your website is exposed to large groups of people in a spontaneous fashion. This differs from paid advertising which has overt commercial overtones.
2. It’s defensible. Once successfully mastered, social communities can be a great source of web traffic on top of any traffic you are already receiving from search engines. While you can’t easily increase your search engine traffic, social media traffic can be very easily controlled through strategic marketing.
3. It’s low-cost/high returns. If done by yourself, costs are limited to only time and perhaps the expenses involved in hiring a freelance programmer/designer. The benefits will often exceed the cost. It would take you thousands of dollars to buy many links; social media has the ability to give you that for free.
4. It complements other efforts. Social media optimization and marketing is usually community-specific. It doesn’t interfere with any other methods of getting traffic to your website. It can and will fit perfectly with an advertising campaign targeting other websites or search engines.

For those who don’t understand or see the value of social media websites, let’s take a look at the benefits of creating viral content and effectively promoting them through social media channels.

Developing link baits and successfully getting it popular on various social media websites like Digg and StumbleUpon will lead to multiple benefits for any website:

• Primary and Secondary Traffic. Primary traffic is the large amount of visitors who come directly from social media websites. Secondary traffic is referral traffic from websites which link to and send you visitors, after they come across your content through the social sites.
• High Quality Links. Becoming popular on social news websites like Digg or Reddit will get you a large number of links, some of which may be topically relevant, some not. A good story can realistically acquire a large number of high quality editorial links, most of which cannot be easily bought.

Now let’s translate this into tangible benefits for your website:

1. Links = Better Search Engine Rankings.

When a website receives a large number of natural, permanent links from trusted domains, it develops authority. Search engines trust it. If you optimize your linkbait and website structure properly, you can easily start ranking for competitive keywords, which will in turn bring in search engine visitors.

Do this often enough and your search traffic will undoubtedly increase. In a sense, you are obtaining these quality links through borrowed trust. Many bloggers and webmaster still think that if an article is on the Digg or del.icio.us homepage, then it’s probably worth checking out and referencing through a citation link.

A new website may find it difficult to gain links from a critical mass that is not familiar with it but a trusted social news resource makes it easier for links to come in, because the community and buzz has somewhat certified the value of the site. Note that the actual strength of the article is still of utmost importance for all.

2. Primary + Secondary Traffic = Community/Supporters.

Some people claim that social news websites only send useless traffic, visitors that will often just view a specific webpage and click away. Yes, that’s usually the case. Sites like Digg are notorious for their poor bounce rates: many visitors drop in for the article and then leave after reading it. StumbleUpon is much better in this aspect.

But don’t mistake this with a lack of interest. Your subscriber figures will often take big jump up and then stabilize after a few days. If your entire site is relevant to the general interests of the social media website, there will always be a handful of social users who will start to track your site in order to submit future content.

Detractors also ignore the power of ultra targeted secondary traffic. General sites or blogs in the same niche will link to a story that’s popular on social sites, because it adds value for their readers or users. This is done naturally on a daily basis for many.

While primary traffic usually comes in a larger volume, I would argue that secondary traffic is more valuable. Why? Because links from other websites bring visitors who are very likely to be interested in your content. These citation links demonstrate recognition of your site in the eyes of others. It builds your brand.

Think of the social news site as a platform or a soapbox. As something that gives you a chance to be heard or read, even for a brief moment of a few hours. The people who are drawn to your message will visit your site and recommend it to others.

by Jason Stewart

Wrapping up a thwirlwind (if you’re on Twitter or saw Tim Ferriss’s presentation, you’ll get it) two days of the Inbound Marketing Summit. Holy cow! What a great conference! Chris Brogan, president of New Marketing Labs organized a breakneck-paced non-stop buffet of new marketing information and best practices and general “deep thoughts.” Easily one of the most informative and exhilarating conferences ever. Even the sponsor presentations were worth watching! Here are some highlights, followed by today’s best tweets and a list of really cool links I heard about at the show…

1. Build detailed buyer personas for your social marketing efforts, then decide on appropriate messaging for those personas.Speak to them in their language, not yours.
2. Nobody cares about your product except you. They care about their problems. Don’t worry about what your product does, worry about how it can help your buyers solve those problems.
3. Don’t be afraid to relinquish control of your content or message. Think about how it helped The Grateful Dead.
4. The overwhelming fear regarding starting a community is: if I build it, will they come?
5. When you are building a community, focus on small groups and then expand outward.
6. Anybody can complain, but if the complaint is backed by constructive suggestions on how to make things better don’t you want to hear them?
7. Make sure the things you measure match the goals you set.
8. Regarding your website…how do people find it, and how do they find what they are looking for when they get there?
9. My landing pages have too much “friction”
10. Outbound Marketing is not dead, it just needs to be really, really, really targeted and specific.
11. TweetDeck is not all that different from my Outlook inbox, when you think about it.
12. If you “suck” then people tell everyone. If you don’t they will tell two people. You need to be there and be aware of people who say you “suck.”
13. Simple recipe for driving organic web traffic: create unique content, make sure it is valuable, create it often, and make it available to people for free
14. Listen to your customers and feature requests, but always keep a few product innovations up your sleeve to be a “surprise”
15. Chris Brogan enjoys beer, scotch and Canadian Club.He also knows a TON about inbound marketing.
16. Not the end of the world if a blogger or user posts something negative, it’s an opportunity!
17. The first step in building a social marketing strategy is deciding who you are as a company. Businesses need to find their humanity if they want to do social media properly.
18. Social media is big on tactics, short on strategy.
19. Jeans and a jacket are the official uniform of inbound marketing.

Using social media to market your business is a good idea. Just don’t plan on getting your whiz-kid nephew to do it for free.

By B.L. Ochman

For companies, resistance to social media is futile. Millions of people are creating content for the social Web. Your competitors are already there. Your customers have been there for a long time. If your business isn’t putting itself out there, it ought to be.

But before you take the plunge, bear in mind the many myths that surround social media.

1. Social media is cheap, if not free. Yes, many of the tools that can be employed in social media marketing are free to use. These include Google’s (GOOG) video-sharing site YouTube, Yahoo’s (YHOO) photo-sharing site Flickr, the social-network building tool Ning, and content aggregators such as Digg and eBay’s (EBAY) StumbleUpon. Free blogging tools abound too; among them are WordPress, Twitter, and FriendFeed.

However, integrating these tools into a corporate marketing program requires skill, time, and money. The budget for an effective social media marketing campaign begins at $50,000 for two to three months. I’m sure companies have spent less, and I know they’ve spent more.

Building a site that incorporates interactivity, allows user-generated content, and perhaps also includes e-commerce doesn’t come cheap from anyone who knows what they are doing. Even taking free software like WordPress and making it function as an effective interactive site, incorporating e-commerce, creating style sheets that integrate with the company’s branding, takes more than time. That takes skill, experience, and money.

As a rule, a $50,000 to $100,000 budget can cover the creation of a simple multimedia microsite that becomes the center of an online community. Add in some widgets to help distribute the content and form a credible group on Flickr, Twitter, or Facebook and other networking groups to enhance the community aspect of the campaign. Complex functions add to programming and design costs.

A high-yield, highly targeted blog advertising campaign to kick off and support the program will cost an additional $25,000 to $100,000 a month. Advertising through Google’s AdWords, e-mail support, co-registration, and other tools that drive traffic would be additional costs.

2. Anyone can do it. A surfeit of whiz kids and more experienced marketers are claiming to be social media experts and even social media gurus. Search the bios of Robert Scoble’s 56,838 Twitter followers using Tweepsearch (www.tweepsearch.com), an index of the bios of Twitter users, and you’ll find:

4,273 Internet marketers

1,652 social media marketers

513 social media consultants

272 social media strategists

180 social media experts

98 social media gurus

58 Internet marketing gurus

How many of them have actually created a successful campaign for clients using social media tools? I bet you’d be hard-pressed to find half a dozen with real track records.

A successful social media campaign integrates social media into the many elements of marketing, including advertising, digital, and PR. Opinion and theory are no match for experience, and the best social media marketers now have more than 10 years of experience incorporating interactivity, blogs, forums, user-generated content, and contests into online marketing.

Video contests by companies hoping for viral buzz and Google juice are as plentiful as mosquitoes on a humid summer night. But, like their insect counterparts, most video contests suck.

It’s the rare video contest that gets as many as 2,000 entries. Many, like Denny’s (DENM) recent disastrous effort, get fewer than 10 entries. Apparently, 48 Denny’s breakfasts over four years wasn’t a big motivator.

3. You can make a big splash in a short time. Sure, sometimes a social media campaign can produce substantial and measurable results quickly.

Social media is great if you’re already a star, but that doesn’t happen overnight. Amid the recent launch of my T-shirt design business, Pawfun.com, I have relied heavily on my 4,000-plus Twitter followers and 120,000 readers of my What’s Next Blog, which I’ve updated as often as five times a day since 2003. Because that network already exists, with not one dollar spent on advertising, we were able to generate more traffic in our first three days than some major companies get after years online.

Zappos Chief Executive Tony Hsieh, whose company has millions of customers who are evangelists for the great service that built the brand, quickly became a Twitter star, with more than 32,000 followers. When Dell (DELL), JetBlue Airways (JBLU), the Chicago Bulls, and other love-’em-or-hate-’em brands joined Twitter, they immediately developed huge followings.

Tweets can be used to drive traffic to articles, Web sites, contests, videos, and so on—if people already care about your brand, or if you have a truly original idea that people will want to share with their followers.

One recent example of a Twitter-generated success is Savvy Auntie, a community for aunts, godmothers, and “other women who love kids” that was launched six months ago by Melanie Notkin. She has counted on Twitter to drive traffic, help her find suppliers, products, and even investors. She developed a Twitter following before launching her business, then tapped into it for help when she launched.

4. You can do it all in-house. Wrong! You need strategy, contacts, tools, and experience—a combination not generally found in in-house teams, who often reinvent the wheel or use the wrong tools.

It is rare indeed to find an in-house team that can not only conceive and execute a social media campaign but also drive traffic to it with effective e-mail segmentation, search optimization, blogger outreach, blog advertising, Google ads, and more.

5. If you do something great, people will find it. Quite simply, that never was true. Until you can drive traffic to your social media effort, you’ve got a tree falling in the forest, heard only by those standing nearby. A great number of tools can drive traffic, including StumbleUpon, Digg, and Twitter, but nothing works better than word of mouse—one friend telling another, “Hey look at this!”

6. You can’t measure social media marketing results. You can use a variety of methods, including mentions on blogs and in media; comments on the content; real-time blog advertising results, and click-throughs to your company Web site. You can get very precise statistics from a variety of sites, including Google Trends, Twitter search, Google Analytics, BackType, and Compete.

The tools are there. The gurus who know how to use and interpret them—not so much.

Although blogging has been around for years, it’s only in the last year or so that it’s really become big, especially in business. Some of the top corporations now have blogs, and you can read about these corporations, as well as get news.

The main reason blogs are so popular is because they’re personal. It gives the author an opportunity to inject his/her personality into his/her writing.

How does this apply to your business? There are many ways, but here are six:

1. You can brand your business.
Branding isn’t just for big business. You can brand yourself too. By creating your own niche and writing about it, you can create your brand. By branding yourself, others will associate your product with you.

It’s not enough to get traffic to your site. You need targeted traffic, and the more targeted your traffic is, and the more traffic you get, the more opportunities you have to make sales.

Blogging is not just an effective branding tool. It’s also an effective public relations tool, allowing you to further build your image and brand.

2. You can become an expert.
When you share what you know on a topic, it gives you the opportunity to be perceived as an expert. You are providing additional value to your product.

When you are perceived as an expert, people are more likely to listen to what you have to say.

By establishing yourself as an expert on a topic, you are offering value to potential customers that your competition isn’t. Not only that, you can drastically cut your marketing expenses because your potential customers are coming to you.

This is called pull marketing. Pull marketing is much more effective than push marketing because you are drawing customers to you, and they already want what you have to sell.

3. You can establish credibility.
Credibility is a difficult thing to establish on the internet. You need to gain your potential customer’s trust before he/she will buy from you.

Although there are certain things you can do that can help with trust and credibility, like adding your phone number to your site, a blog is more effective. It will help you get your potential customer to see you as a real person, not just someone behind a computer.

4. You can create a new marketing channel. 
Email marketing isn’t as effective as it used to be. Too many problems exist now with spam and filters. It can be nearly impossible for you to get your marketing message through.

With blogs, you can use RSS, as well as other forms of communication, like podcasting, to get your marketing message through.

Blogging opens up technology for you in a way that email doesn’t. It gives you a variety of ways to distribute your marketing message and increases your chances of your marketing message being effective.

5. Creates a communications channel with your potential customers.
Blogs are interactive. You can allow your potential customer to leave messages for you in your comments. He/she can ask you questions, and you can respond more quickly.

This will also save you time in the future because others may have the same questions. You’ll already have the answer easily available.

Blogs are also more responsive in that you can write about the latest trends in your topic and give your potential customers the latest information.

6. Solves your search engine optimization problems.
Blogs are search engine friendly, and you can get your blog spidered faster and easier than you can a traditional site.

This can help you get traffic from the search engines quicker and easier, and the beauty of it is that it’s targeted traffic.

Although blogs may have started out as personal journals, their business application is far more reaching. Blogs can help you explode your business marketing efforts in a way that no other internet marketing method can. Blogging, although not required, is something you should consider if you want to increase your business and increase your profits.

Social Media Marketing is the ongoing process of engaging users within the online communities to generate organic exposure, build brand awareness, opportunity and sales for your business.

The following list is a sample of the social media web sites currently available.

Social Networking

1. www.Myspace.com
2. www.Facebook.com
3. www.Bebo.com
4. www.Blackplanet.com
5. www.Xanga.com
6. www.Imeem.com
7. www.360.yahoo.com
8. www.Classmates.com
9. www.Hi5.com
10. www.Tagged.com

Social Bookmarking

1. www.Digg.com
2. www.Netscape.com
3. www.Technorati.com
4. www.Del.icio.us
5. www.Fark.com
6. www.Stumbleupon.com
7. www.Mybloglog.com
8. www.Reddit.com
9. www.Kaboodle.com
10. www.Slashdot.com

Professional Networking

1. www.Linkedin.com
2. www.Spoke.com
3. www.Xing.com

Classified Ads

1. www.Ebay.com
2. www.Craigslist.com
3. www.Kijiji.com

Q & A Sites

1. www.Ideaspit.com
2. Answers.yahoo.com
3. www.Quimble.com

Other Sites

1. www.Squidoo.com
2. www.Kingofthelist.com
3. www.listdump.com