Social Media Marketing

I accidentally stumbled across a social media community that I’d never heard of before, Xomba. What is Xomba? It’s a free community that you can write and share stories and ideas with other members and make new friends. Xomba is also another adsense portal to make money. Use your publisher ID number from Google adsense and ads appear on your stories you publish. Members click on them and Xomba will split the adsense revenue 50/50. Doesn’t sound like much, right? Well, write something that will create a buzz or something of interest and the more your traffic increases, the more you might make.
It’s got my interest. It seems a bit more interesting than other social media sites popping up all over the internet. Interested in signing up for a free membership? Click here: http://www.xomba.com/referral/777b92bf.

Want to participate in a social media webinar that is being hosted by Compendium Blogware featuring Chris Baggott? This social media company is hosting a free webinar on January 22, 2009 at 1pm EST. You must register for this free webinar to participate and you can do this by visiting their website for more details.

If webinars is your thing and you have the time,  you can actually come across many free webinars to participate in. These webinars are basically today’s means of online meetings, allowing companies to reach out to their audience and hold these “meetings” free online and reach hundreds and thousands of participants instead of limiting it to the audience that can:

1. Take time off of work to go to a social medai convention or seminar
2. Afford the travel expenses to go to a social media convention or seminar
3. Afford the admission or cost to actually attend

This particular social media webinar by Compendium Blogware featuring Chris Baggot will visit the Top 10 blogging trends for 2009. This should be quite interesting! Personally, I’m looking forward to it. You’ve got to participate in things like this to stay on top of what’s new and what’s working in 2009’s world of SEO.

If you’re not already familiar with Google Blog Search, you should take a minute and give it a look. Google Blog Search is constantly being updated every time someone creates a new blog. Google’s Blog Search is housing all blogs created. Have you experienced writing a post on your blog and then maybe you search for yourself using a keyword you just included in your blog and the search engine may have already found you and ranked you.

For example, let’s take today’s online technology for example. Let’s say I have a website that offers options for virtual classrooms, web conferences and virtual seminars. I decide I’m going to write about unified communications solutions. Given a few hours, I go to search for “unified communications solutions” in Google and in the results, my blog post should be found.

There is also another option to get updates as blogs are posted on the web. You can go in and set up alerts through Google to be notified when new articles/blogs are found online by setting up select keywords that might be of interest to you. This is called Google Alerts.

Save 20% off submission to Best of the Web. BOTW Directory is a reputable online directory and one your company should be listed in. This paid directory has a page rank of 6 and has been around since 1996! Use promo code ZOMBIE now until October 31, 2008 for a 20% discount. You can purchase a submission into BOTW Directory on an annual basis or a one-time fee.

Here’s a quick list I’ve put together for upcoming social media conferences you might want to attend:

• ICWSM 2009 3rd annual conference in San Francisco in May ‘09 http://www.icwsm.org/2009/index.shtml
• Affiliate Summit being held in Las Vegas January 11-13 2009 http://www.affiliatesummit.com/09w_conference.php
• SMX West 2009 by Search Engine Land held February 10-12, ‘09 http://searchmarketingexpo.com/west/. I would highly recommend going to this one!
• Social Networking Conference in Miami, FL Jan. 22-23 ‘09 http://www.socialnetworkingconference.com/conference-miami-2009.php
• Search Engine Strategies in London Feb. 17-20 ‘09 http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/london/

So you don’t know which one you should attend? Which is worth it’s money or not? Yet you know you should attend one to learn more on social media. Here’s just a few tips to keep in mind when registering for a social media conference:

• Register early! You get the biggest discount for doing so.
• Know who’s speaking and what they are speaking about. If you can’t find this information on their web page, see if there’s a contact number or email to communicate with someone who can tell you this information or send you more information on it.
• If there’s a conference in your area that’s close and convenient, it will help save money. Remember, you’ll have the out-of-pocket expenses of a hotel, food for 3 meals a day, drinks, socializing, etc. See if someone at your company or a friend who may be interested in going wants to share expenses.
• If there’s only a single speaker or a few speakers scheduled in the same day, it may be worth you only buying a 1 day pass. A lot of these conventions are more about mingling and socializing, well networking, right?! You’ll meet people from other companies who do what you do or at least know what you’re talking about and you may be lucky enough to get to speak with the guest speaker and get a question or two in.

I was recently introduced to a social media blogging website for moms and find it very resourceful so I thought I’d share it with those reader’s who are mom’s. They call themselves the Mom Bloggers Club. You can create a profile, meet other mommy bloggers, advertise, join message boards, etc. Basically your typical social media site but for moms.

I was recently shopping for web designs and found a few people on this website and they even offer discounts for those who are members. Check it out today! http://www.mombloggersclub.com/

When it comes to link building, it’s important for your website to have a nice mixture of backlinks in your ”link portfolio”. And as we all know, it’s against Google’s webmaster rules to “buy” links so everyone scrambles to find reciprocal links and “do follow” links on any given website, preferably one that is within your own industry.

Well, I came across a list of ”do follow” links while I was reading a friend’s blog and I thought I’d share this site too with you. Click here to see this massive list of ”do follow” links. The list was published from a Tucson, AZ SEO company.

Squidoo is a social media website that allows users to basically create a free web page for their business or to promote their website. Knowing how to make the most of your Squidoo lens can make your lens out perform other lenses about the same topics. Squidoo is one of my personal favorites of social media websites.

 Here’s just a few tips on how to “optimize” your lens for search engines and to target the right audience you’re looking for.

• When creating the path for your lens, incorporate an important keyword as a part of the URL.
• Play around with the various modules the lens allows you to have appear on your page. Put the most eye catching and most informative modules to the top.
• Be sure to use anchor texts within the lens. Basically this means create a hyperlink on important keywords throughout the lens and direct that traffic into your main website and always direct them to the most relevant page on your site for that keyword. If your site is optimized, be sure you’re bringing the traffic in on the page that is being focused on for that keyword.
• Add pictures! Be sure your pictures are optimized as well. When naming the picture, incorporate keywords into the file name of the picture. Instead of the picture file being called pic1 call it what it is. If it’s a picture of a Carly Coach Handbag then name your picture when you save it “Carly Coach Handbag”. (Tip - this will help you optimize your pictures for image search)
• Be sure you have signed up for an Adsense account. If you haven’t, you can do that here. It’s free to have an account and you’ll make some money off of the ads that appear on your lens, not much but it’s something. In fact, my girlfriend makes about $100/mo. off of her Squidoo lens. When you create your Squidoo account initially it has a place where it will ask you for your Adsense account number. Be sure to enter that so you can get paid.
• Add a lot of content that is relevant and interesting. You can also link a YouTube video that may be relevant to your lens. Things like pictures and videos help capture and keep your audiences attention.
• Promote your lens. Let your friends and family know about your lens. Show it off!
• Check this page out. It’s basic HTML for Squidoo.

Be careful, these lenses are addicting to create. No matter what your reason is for creating a lens, have fun with it!

There are things you should be doing to promote your site and become a recognized authority site within your industry or niche. I talk about this kind of stuff all day long to my clients. Social media, social media, social media - You HAVE to participate! Here are some things you should absolutely be doing to network:

• Participate! Search for forums, blogs, etc. and join in the discussions. Reply to a post offering information that will come across as credible and knowledgeable. DON’T just go in to leave a link to your site. Leave a comment that might have the other members wanting to find out more.
• Network! Get to know others within your industry. Reach out to them. Ask their oppinions, compliment an article you may have seen of theirs. Ask advice.
• If you want to participate in blogs, try to search for industry or niche relevant blogs. Post comments there.
• Create your own niche blog. Get a following going. How? Be sure you’re writing good quality posts that are informative and helpful. Leave out the technical terms. Speak as if you’re explaining it to someone who doesn’t know anything about the business or industry/product.
• Do a guest post to attract attention to yourself. Expand on what someone has already written but compliment their knowledge as well so you don’t come off as a “know-it-all”.

Remeber, your site isn’t going to promote itself and it may as well not even be on the internet if you’re not going to promote it and market it. After all, would you open a store and not use a sign for your business? Would you go on word of mouth to attract business? Would you not participate in any type of marketing whatsoever and hope the flocks of customers come? NO!

It will take time. This won’t happen overnight. Hire someone (an intern or a p/t student) to do this legwork for you if you don’t have the time.

On Monday, Yahoo launched it’s newest website targeted at women ages 25-54 called Shine by Yahoo! The website targets the female audience with topics of interest to women like love, beauty secrets, parenting, etc. This is opens up new opportunities for the advertising aimed at women. Yet, another social media site targeted at a woman based audience. Sweet!

I personally tried clicking through yesterday from a link in an article I was reading. It was obvious there was some sort of glich because it brought me to flickr sign in. So I attempted again this morning when I got in to work. It’s pretty neat. There is a log in (using your Yahoo! login information). It then brings you to what I refer to as like a “home page” where I was exposed to articles on entertainment gossip (which I have to admit am a fan of) along with multiple categories displayed clean and neat on the page and my mail feature is available for me to retrieve my Yahoo! mail as well as my horoscope.

The main feature that I really liked is that you can create a blog on Shine to share with other members. Of course you can also click on others and read theirs as well. This is a great outlet to discuss what you want to with other members and of course my first and most important thought to utilize this as another way to promote my websites. I haven’t gotten that far yet to submit my first post however I will and I’ll report back on their linking, although I would think it’s safe to say they have “no follows” in place but that’s ok. It’s good to have “no follows” and there are some benefits out of those types of links.

If you haven’t  yet checked out Shine, you may want to go there after reading this post.