Why Social Media?

In an industry where search engine ranking plays a critical role, a strong social media platform can give an affiliate marketer a big boost. Twitter has gained the attention of both Google and Bing, both of which take into consideration how many times an item is re-tweeted in addition to the original tweets themselves when determining search rankings. Similarly, when someone clicks on the “+1” button on a Google results page – or anywhere else the button appears – Google takes that into consideration when ranking as well.

The Power of +1

These recommendations in the forms of +1s and re-tweets are important factors in search rankings and, as a result, are essential for affiliate marketers. “We are strongly looking at using this in our rankings,” said Matt Cutts, one of Google’s head engineers for search. “When someone recommends something, that’s a pretty good indicator of quality.”

Steps to Social Media Success

Social media can be used to build a following, and that following grows from building relationships and trust among followers. As this following grows and evolves, you can position yourself as a leader whose recommendations are trusted and shared. In this way, a strong social media presence directly impacts your search rankings and, in turn, your profits as an affiliate marketer.

Affiliate Marketing Through Social Media

There are several points to keep in mind when creating your social media presence:

•    Brand yourself – but avoid self-promotion.

Having a strong personal brand takes time and effort, but it is well worth it. Create a persona and be consistent with it. Individuals are much more relatable than corporations. However, avoid the temptation to constantly self-promote. If you have something valuable to offer, let that speak for itself. Followers are put off by relentless self-promotion, but they are more than happy to be provided with worthwhile content.

•    Provide quality content.

This is a golden rule not only for affiliate marketers, but for just about anyone anywhere online. Social media may be all about constant communication; however, quality over quantity still holds true. While you may be inclined to run a large number of niche sites, the more sites you have, the more difficult it is to try to establish yourself as an authority at each one. Stick to the one or two you are most passionate about, and that passion will come through in the form of the quality content your followers are looking for.

•    Build your platform with your target audience in mind.

A solid social media marketing platform generally consists of profiles on social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and your own blog. When creating these profiles, not only must you take into consideration the content you’ll be creating for these outlets, but you must also know your target audience. Just because you have thousands of friends doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll have greater success. Selecting friends and followers who are truly interested in what you have to say will result in much better returns on your investment in social media.

•    Unleash your inner blogger.

Blogs are a crucial element in any social media platform, serving multiple purposes. Blogs give you the space to express yourself and share your expertise with your followers. Blogs are also a fantastic opportunity to build a community among your followers. You can communicate with them, and they can communicate with one another all on your blog. Taking the time to reply to comments and even comment on your followers’ blogs is all part of the social networking that will pay off in the long run. You will be building relationships with your followers while enhancing your status as a leader. Not only that, your blog will also help improve your search rankings.

•    Be the student and the master.

While becoming an authority, it is always a good idea to learn as much as you can from other affiliate marketers who have knowledge and experience that you might lack. There is always something new to learn, and you can only benefit from learning it. As you build your reputation as an authority, you can, in turn, gain your own affiliates and thus enhance your opportunities for profit.

While it may seem like building and maintaining a social media platform requires a lot of time and effort, your affiliate marketing business can only improve because of it. Building a reputation as a trusted, respected authority will increase your search engine rankings and your revenue, and that is definitely worth it.

This post was written and provided by Christian Willis. Christian has been making a living from Pay per click programs for the last 3 years and is a freelance writer for Clickbooth.com.

image:linked

Apart from on-page branding, it is really required to have a social media presence to build off-page branding.

The entire world is inside the social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus etc. Hence, for a business, social network stands like a major source to find new customers as well as helps to hold them into your own business network.

It builds your brand and also, drives you lot of visitors for your business site apart from search engines (or SEO traffic).

Creating a social media presence for your online business helps:

• to find new customers for your business
• to keep hold of your visitors under your own network
• to quickly ping your followers to come back to your site
• to show a brand and to build TRUST between your business and customers

Overall, social media presence is required for your online business to grow as well as to survey.

Lets quickly get into the steps on how to create a social media presence for your online business.

I want to keep these steps short and simple to understand….

• Step 1 : First, create a Facebook fan page, Twitter page, Google+ page for your business web site and share your key message.
• Step 2 : Add Facebook box, Twitter widget in your website at the sidebar or bottom.
• Step 3 : Ask every visitor to connect with you on their preferred social account.
• Step 4 : Integrate Facebook Like/Share buttons, Tweet buttons, Google+1 button on your site
• Step 5 : Publish your site updates automatically to Facebook, Twitter, Google+
• Step 6 : Interact with your network every day, provide updates/information about your business.
• Step 7 : Understand social media marketing and utilize it for your business benefits.

For an online business to grow, you have to create a social media presence and you must utilize it well. This helps to diversify your online business dependencies especially the traffic source.

For example: Search engines are so dynamic and it may or may not send you visitors every day because of constant algorithm changes which affects your business a lot. In that case, social media helps to diversify the traffic source and it helps to balance the business risks. Make use of it…

Go back to course page.

image: sb

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Creating a strong business influence begins with the right niche. You should creatively choose your niche or else everything you do won’t yield the desired results. Some niches are super competitive while others are evergreen and easy to dominate. One of such niches is the coupon and discount niche.

When I first launched my coupon blog, that features 6pm discount codes and sittercity coupon deals, social media was my target marketing system. If you approach sites like Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin with open radar, your overall success would be visible for others to follow.

Below are five easy steps to build a profitable coupon blog that makes you money, without all the hassles of building thousands of backlinks. With a proper keyword strategy, you could dominate Google top 10 within two month.

1. Research your Market

Knowing to whom you want to sell could make the journey smooth and interesting. A lot of bloggers and internet marketers have missed out on knowing who their prospects are. The problem isn’t targeting but knowing!

You may be in the right market, but if you don’t know that one prospect your products won’t convert well. Participating on discussion boards and social groups could reveal some amazing characters of your prospect. Once this is extracted, you can now deliver the right products and services in the right format. Once you’ve done your research, read the next line…

2. Pick The Right Products/Services

This is why market research is mandatory.
Without a proper grasp of your potential buyer, you won’t deliver the right products and services that meet their needs. When picking your product offers, ensure the product has an up-sell and backend products.

This way, you would solve similar problems that they experience and also make some cool cash doing what you love. Fortunately, there are thousands of great offers for your coupon blog and Amazon would make selection easier.

3. Show Benefits Not Features

Online shoppers who search for coupon codes and discount deals are already presold on that particular offer. You role is to highlight the benefits of any given offer, and further strengthen their buying decisions.

TV Commercials, Infomercial and viral marketing are diverse ways in which prospects get pre-sold. You’re not even a product reviewer, the aim of a coupon blog is to share the benefits and encourage the buyer to place order out of their free will.

What is the benefit of using Kindle E-reader? List as many benefits as possible and if you want to write more, share a few of the features e.g. light weight, screen resizing etc.

4. Promote Your Coupon Blog

Web traffic is the live-wire of every online business. 95% of your entire concentration should be on promoting and converting potential buyers. On a serious note, the sole purpose of every blog, website, sales page, and ecommerce site is to make money.

And before you can make money, buyers have to come and that wouldn’t be possible until you drive targeted traffic.

Several ways I promote my coupon blog includes: guest posting, search engine optimization, social media marketing via Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook. You too can use these traffic systems to grow your business.

5. Focus On Building Relationships

Online shoppers want to know who they are buying from. For you to make any significant income online from your coupon and affiliate blogs, you need to connect with people in their own level.

Instead of asking strangers to grab your coupon codes and place order, get to know them first. How? You could give them a free report that shares interesting information about finding awesome deals. In exchange for your report, they have to give you their names and email addresses.

With this personal information, you could follow up, build strong rapport and tell them who you’re before asking for their hard earned money. I’ve discovered during the course of my blog promotion that sales go up when a buyer feels secured with you.

Take The Right Action!

Building a profitable coupon blog isn’t a new concept. For affiliate marketers and bloggers, we are used to product research and blog hosting. What you need most is to take the right action. It could be registering your first coupon domain name or researching your target market.

All in all, ensure your blog is filled with quality content that people would enjoy. The latest Google updates shows that keyword stuffing will no longer get you anywhere (well, it has never). Remember, Google and other search engines do not buy products; it’s the people who will – see you ahead!

image:gegey

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In fact, having a huge network around your business shows the real strength.

As of today more than 600 million people are using Facebook which is one of the largest social network and almost you could find any one inside Facebook. Interestingly, people are classified/categorized there and you could utilize it as a best marketing tool than anything – by means of demographic targeting.

• When the marketing trend goes like this, as an Internet Marketer – i am getting a question in mind: do forums are dead ? and is it worth still today to use forums as a marketing tool/platform ?

In this article, i will discuss this topic shortly and in the end, i want to conclude the effectiveness of forums in today’s business trend.

Right Forum – Targeted Visitors.

Being part of right forum (related to your business) still adds value to your business, not only today and also, for the long term.

Forums are completely different from a social network site.

Because, forums are market specific or niche defined and hence you could find 100% targeted people. Plus, you could find the real expertise there because forums are active with hot discussions happening related to the market or topic.

Hence it benefits your business a lot from driving targeted visitors and in getting touch with like minded EXPERTS.

More important, you could solve your own problems on a forum as well you could give your solution – in order to prove that you are an expert in the industry.

This makes sense and i would say, participating in forums related to your business definitely has the “value add”.

Big Boards is a directory of great forums in the Internet which helps you to quickly search/find related forums, have a look.

For What You Are Using Forums ? The Purpose.

Being part of a forum is great and when you participate without any purpose – its useless. Forums are beneficial to you own business ONLY when you participate with a purpose or goal. It is not just you get into a forum and add your reply to all of the threads. That’s not a better strategy, instead define the purpose.

Fix your goals and decide, why you want to participate in a forum ? For example, to sell a product or find new customers to your business etc.

This way, you could better utilize forums by participating on relevant topics which benefits your business. Simply, define the purpose of participation and get involved in relevant conversion ONLY….

If you are able to meet your purpose then definitely, Forums are Not Dead !

Facebook’s Recent Partnership With StackOverFlow – An Example.

The recent partnership between Facebook and Stackoverflow forum is a great example of utilizing forums. As a social network site, Facebook partners with SO to facilitate their developers with a developer forum. Facebook were not able to fully support the developers with their social interface and hence this move benefits them a lot.

Because SO has the support/design for developer community in mind and there are millions of developers already using it, it is a developer platform. This is one of the best strategy taken by Facebook towards enhancing their developer network.

This is a good example which shows that “Forums are not dead”, it really benefits a community of people or business who are serious.

The official site says:

Facebook and Stack Exchange are now working together to support the Facebook developer community.

This collaboratively edited question and answer site is where Facebook engineers participate along with the best Facebook developers in the world. If you have a technical question about Facebook, this is the best place to ask – and you can also log in using Facebook.

The Conclusion…

Forums are one of the best marketing tool for your online business and they still adds value to your marketing effort.

Though social network tools are more or less similar to forums – it lacks the bonding of an expert community.

I would say, social tools are more personal tool and forums are more of specific tool which has the real benefits to every business marketer.

Finally, it all depends on how well you are utilizing the forums effectively for the benefit of your business – one of my article on forum marketing tips may help you further. Also, check this forum marketing mistakes neatly published by about.com long back.

Do you still use forums to promote your business ?

image: fred

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Aim To Increase Followers.

For growing blogs, its definitely a tough job to get more twitter followers. Because many people will follow, only if you have many followers or simply saying, your twitter account should look matured. For beginners, many people don’t believe in following you (because your account is not matured). This was the case i realized when i have less than 200 followers.

Finally, i took a resolution and aimed to get 500 followers within a month. To frankly tell, i spend only 10 minutes per day. Even i don’t find much time for writing a blog post, for me its tough to spend time. So i decided to spend 10 minutes per day for Twitter, only to increase my followers.

How I Increased Followers ?

I used a tool (don’t worry i am not selling any products) which helped to find more followers. More interestingly, i am able to find more followers who are related to my niche. The end result, i gained targeted followers who are interested in my topic. That’s Buzzom, an online tool which helps you to organize/manage your twitter account. I felt, its very simple to operate buzzom and you could simply login with your existing Twitter account (you don’t need to register).

It has the option to Follow your followers, Grow your followers, Reciprocate follow and much more. I am more interested with Growing followers.

What I did ?

As mentioned, i spent only 10 minutes per day by doing the following:

• Click the Grow button.
• Buzzom lists the followers who are related to your niche/market.
• Manually select followers who have good profile.
• Follow them.
• Repeat the steps…

So every day, i followed many people (say 20-100+) and i found at least 50% of them are following back. Every day i gained followers and once in a week, i will clean my list (i will delete those who are not following me). So in a month time, i increased my twitter followers from 200 to 600+ by just spending 10 minutes per day.

Proof On Twitter Followers.

To make this post valid/true, i have shared the proof which shows, how the number of twitter followers had grown in a month ? From the day, i started doing this, you could see spikes in number of followers. If you see the graph, on 10th of July i have gained +123 followers (in one day itself).

Proof: Increase in Twitter Followers

I am planning to repeat these step again. Now I am aiming to increase my Twitter followers by 1000+ within a month (i will try to spend more than 10 minutes per day). Also, i found there are sites which sells twitter followers but i don’t believe in them and i don’t want to spend money for this too.

• Interestingly, the traffic coming from Twitter had increased to this blog when compared to last month.
• And more interesting, Twitter traffic spends more time on this blog, (avg: 4+ minutes more than Search traffic) that means Quality traffic.

What Next ? Follow Me On Twitter ! and Subscribe to my RSS to get more experimental tips in future.

• NOTE: Recently, Buzzom stopped Twitter service and now the alternative is Twellow.

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Apart from the long term methods to get more blog traffic using search engines, your new blog shall drive visitors from social tools also. Lets see those methods in simple steps.

Social Tools To Use.

There are many social tools available in the market. But the most utilized ones are Twitter and Facebook. Facebook is growing very fast, see this statistics which says there are 400 million active users as of now. At the same time, Twitter had a great growth in the past and now there are slowness in Twitter growth.

But it is true that, Facebook and Twitter are having the major population of social network users. As a blogger, we should not avoid these 2 tools. If you don’t have an account, Sign up for Twitter here and for Facebook here.

Networking To Get Blog Traffic.

Blogging is not only sharing information, its about networking too. Networking with similar people. And its one of the important factor to create visibility to your new blog. Its tough to get networked with other bloggers or peoples who are in your industry. But with Twitter, Facebook you could easily build that network.

• What you have to do is grow the number of your followers/fans and interact with them. This creates an opportunity to link with many like minded people.
• In actual, your blog gets around a network which is more targeted. You could pull your blog visitors to follow you and hence you get socially networked with them.
• The advantage is that you will be sharing your own articles with all your followers and this gets more traffic to your blog. Also, you could share other articles in Internet too and this way, interaction, relationship with your network builds.
• Not only sharing, you could ask questions or clear doubts for others in your network.
• Being active with social networking tools helps you to grow your blog network consistently.

Tips To Grow Your Social Network.

Lets see few simpler yet powerful tips to grow the size of your social network which inturn helps to get more traffic to your blog.

• Use tools to enlarge your account. Recently, i tried Buzzom for Twitter which helps me to instantly Increase the Twitter followers from 200 to 600+ with a month. Looks, it has Facebook support too.
• Manually, search keywords in Twitter search and Facebook Search,  find people who are similar to your industry and connect with them. Do this every day and over a period of time, you networks will be big.
• Other option, buy the network. There are many social network services to instantly buy the network for money. But i am not sure how far you will get true/active followers.
• Be active with these tools. Interact with people.
• Ask questions, clear doubts.
• Share only useful information to others.
• Learn how to keep good social media relation ?
• Follow Me on Twitter.

Final words, social tools are helping blogs to get more targeted traffic provided you built the right network. It actually takes time to grow your network and to see the results. At any cost, don’t avoid social tools for getting traffic to your blog.

image: respres

The interesting feature provided by Twitter is that you could send and receive Tweets from your mobile phones. Tweets are by SMS. So if you want to send a tweet then you have to send an SMS formatted based on the Twitter Text Commands.

In general, Twitter works with the mobile service provider to enable this feature. Check this Twitter Mobile support page to know the list of supported countries and the list of supported service providers. Whenever you are away from your PC, you could send tweets through mobile phones. SMS Charges are applicable as per the rates fixed by your provider and no charge for receiving tweets.

To frankly say, today only i came to know this feature from Twitter’s blog. So i am adding few more points in this post on how to better utilize Twitters SMS feature for your business.

(only for those who care about their MOBILE BILL…)

• First of all, for every tweet you send, it will be charged per SMS rate. So if you have free SMS’s available then you use this feature.

• Use SMS tweeting only in case of urgency. Say for example, if one of your customer needs your reply immediately then use it. Try to avoid using SMS tweeting feature as much as possible to reduce the extra cost to your mobile bill.

• Use SMS tweeting feature to post a single question. For example, on a day you may want to just ask a question to your followers then you could use this feature. You will get all the replies to your mobile (no charge for incoming tweets) to read. On that case, you don’t need to reply them.

Also, learn the Twitter Text Commands here or just take a print out for instant future reference !  Here is the news from Twitter.

Also, if you don’t know how to configure Twitter to use with your mobile phone then check out this helpful video.

Generally, whenever a tweet is made the byline holds the user name. For business accounts, there may be multiple persons operating a single Twitter account. Say, for example a business firm may do customer support through Twitter and they have multiple persons working on the support team. In that scenario, multiple users are added as “Contributors” to a single account. Every individual has the right to tweet using one single account. Also, the byline contains the username of the Contributor which tells the exact name of the one who tweets that message. For sure this kind of feature may help business firms who are willing to operate their twitter account with multiple resources.

For example, if the @bizmanager calls @bizsupport1 to make a Tweet then at the bottom of the tweet message (byline) will have the username as @bizsupport1 instead of @bizmanager. That’s more of adding personal to your business support right ?

The following is the note mentioned on this blog post – feature test with businesses,

The feature we are beta testing is called ‘Contributors’ – it enables users to engage in more authentic conversations with businesses by allowing those organizations to manage multiple contributors to their account.

Initially, this feature will be released to their Ecosystem partners & business user. Based on the feedback and after doing additional improvements (if any) they will launch this feature to every business users.

Showing Involvement and Participation.

First of all, you must show involvement and participate in using the social media tools. Your interaction should not happen at the keyboard or typing level, it should happen from your skills. Because social media tools, if used for business its a great marketing tool. Involvement drives you to produce more valuable content and hence you will become an expert in your network. So involve, involve more, involve even more…

Preach More Information.

Think like you are a preacher in your network and keep that thought going. I mean you should spread the right and valuable words to your followers. Don’t limit your relation as far as you know your network boundry. Your preaching should happen to the right peoples and to those who are tightly coupled or nearly coupled to your business. At the same time, don’t be rude, it hurts everyone quickly.

Listen To Others Voice.

Not only behave like a preacher, you should be a good listener. A good listener is the one who gains more knowledge and respect. So listen to others and understand what they are trying to tell. Don’t dominate others directly, sure you will be downgraded from your network. At the same time, don’t keep you silent. You have to spread your words at the right time after listening. Simply saying, listen and react nicely.

Behave Professional.

How do you behave professional in using social media tools ? There are two key terms, one is WORDS and the second is CONTEXT. Combining these two WORDS + CONTEXT may frame you as a professional. What words ? & Where (the context) ? decides your nature of communication. How you communicate decides your professionalism. Always behave professional & be professional, you will be appraised by others.

Being Solution Provider.

Addressing a problem and providing a solution keeps your social media network in good shape. That shows the level of your expertness in a business domain. Your voice goes high only when you are making solutions. Always spend your time to show that you are an expert in your network, definitely you will get great results sooner. Otherwise, try to ask more questions

Keep Your Network Under Scope.

You must define the scope of your social media usage. Answer this first, “for what purpose I am using social media tools ?” Answering this question may help you to define your scope. Because its not like you could expand your network hardly, you have to build a targeted network (adding targeted or related members to your network). If you have not understood your social media scope, define it first !

Though there are numerous things you should consider in keeping a good social media relation, if you follow these 6 points for sure your business grows towards success around a strongly built social network.

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42 Top Social Media Tips And Tools.

Explains about the various tools available for working with social media from blogging to social bookmarking. Organized the tips and tools on social media under different categories. This is a must to bookmark article that you could refer any time to quickly access the tools.

Social Media Marketing Tips.

This is a great article that carries the proven social media marketing tips from gaints like HP, Comcast, Dell, Intel etc. Everyone is sharing their marketing strategies applied for promoting their business inheriting the power of social media. An inspiring article that you should go through to adhere the social media benefits.

35+ Social Media Tools.

This is collection of social media tools, some of the tools are we never heard and found that from this article. This is a wonderful list of tools that you should go through once to find out the one that may help you to make your work simpler.

How to Find Statistics on Social Media ?

It is always required to track the progress of your business maintaining a statistics. Your social media traffic and conversion needs to be tracked. This article speaks about how to find out the statistics of your visitors from the geographic details to much more. It has good links to resources that may improve your knowledge on social media tracking.

Today's Social Media !

image: Spenser E Holtaway

Social Media Business Benefits.

An article published recently on the benefits of social media for your online business. The usage of social media strategies from branding to traffic generation. A must read article that tells you the real benefits of using social media services for your online business.

Punching Tips on Social Media.

This is collection of 21 tips on social media speaks about marketing and optimization of social media for your business. It also speaks about Digg, Stumbleupon to increase your web site traffic. More related articles are referred from this page and definitely you will find useful.

Developing a Social Media Strategy.

If you looking to develop your social media strategies then you should read this guide. It tells like you should interact with more number of peoples using social media and you should define your goals, objectives, plan all your activites in using social media. We could say, this is a worth read for beginners that helps to understand the basics of social media and its usage.

Some more articles related to Social Media.

• Ideas For Social Media And Business.
• Social Media Dos & Don’ts.
• 50 Ways Marketers Can use Social Media to Improve Their Marketing.
• Wikipedia’s definition of Social Media for beginners.

Articles on Twitter.

• 13 Twitter Tips and Tutorials for Beginners.
• Nine Twitter tips for business.
• 137 Small Business Twitter Tips.
• Twenty-One Top Twitter Tips.

Articles on Social Bookmarking.

• Tips from a Top 10 Digg user on how to get to the Frontpage.
• 4 Tips To Digg Success.
• Easy Tips For Improving The Potency of Your StumbleUpon Account.