It seems as though everywhere I turn I’m bombarded with information about some aspect of social networking — Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, Ryze, Fast Pitch…the list goes on and on. I’ve been quite slow to jump on the social networking bandwagon. I did create a MySpace profile about a year ago, and recently gave up on doing anything with it, as I wasn’t seeing any results.  My new choice in the social networking arena is Facebook, which is where my target market appears to be hanging out.

Based on my use and evaluation of several of these platforms over the last few years, here’s my synopsis of the 3 primary social networking sites important for online business owners:  Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn:

Facebook:  This one is the current fad, with many people conducting teleclasses and coaching programs on how to best use it.  I do like its clean interface and easy-to-read profiles.  Many people, from all demographics, seem to be on Facebook.  The service offers the ability to add friends by searching for high school/college classmates and by searching former/current colleagues in the workplace.  The downside to the application is that you must have a Facebook account in order to view anyone’s profile. More and more plug-ins (small applications) are being added to Facebook every day that tweak how this application functions.  If you’re an author or a business owner, Facebook permit you to add stand-alone pages about your business(es) or book(s) to your profile.  Lastly, if you blog, you can plug your blog feed into your profile to update your friends from your blog every time you make a new post.

LinkedIn:  This has been the steady, reliable, social networking platform that’s very career and job focused.  Your profile consists primarily of your job history, without much flexibility to promote your business.  If your target market consists of corporate types, this is probably the social networking platform for you.  You have the ability to add connections in the same way that Facebook provides, and your connections have the ability to submit a recommendation about you if they wish.

MySpace:  I still find MySpace the most annoying of all the social networking sites, and hear too many horror stories of MySpace stalkers and of people having to close accounts due to harassment by other users.  This is still the domain of teen set, although most musicians and many artists successfully create followings here for themselves.  MySpace offers many options to personalize and customize your profile, which renders many profiles virtually impossible to read.  If your target market leans toward teens or creative types, this is the social networking site for you.

Here’s what I have learned along the way to make social networking a successful marketing strategy for your business:

1.  Pick one platform.  So many business owners spread themselves too thin by participating in several social networking sites.  I’ve discovered that you could easily devote your entire day to this endeavor and never accomplish anything else.  Pick the best platform that will get you in front of your target market and stick to it.

2.  Determine your objective.  How does this social networking task fit into your overall marketing strategy?  What’s your objective — to sell more info products, to grow your list, to develop joint venture or strategic alliance partners?  Determine your goal and remain focused on that goal in all that you do when spending your time to work your platform.

3.  Work the platform.  No marketing strategy will succeed unless you pay attention to it.  In order to successfully use social networking, you need to work your platform every single day.  Ideally, this means devoting 30-60 minutes each day on activities like seeking new friends/connections/, commenting on other people’s profiles, updating your own profile, and notifying your connections about your current activities.

4.  Be patient.  Rome wasn’t built in a day, and you won’t see results of your efforts in a day, either.  This is a slow and steady process, much the same way that face-to-face networking is.  You’ve got to be out there building relationships and helping others before you’re going to see your social networking goals realized.

5.  Invite others.  Don’t hide the fact that you’re playing in the social networking arena — invite your contacts to play along with you.  Most platforms offer you the ability to send out these invitations from your contact database. Let your ezine subscribers and blog readers know as well — never pass up an opportunity to get to know your contacts.

Like it or not, social networking is here to stay.  Follow these five tips to make social networking a marketing strategy that works for your online business.

By Donna Gunter
Online Business Resource Queen (TM) and Online Business Coach Donna Gunter helps independent service professionals learn how to automate their businesses, leverage their expertise on the Internet, and get more clients online. To claim your FREE gift, TurboCharge Your Online Marketing Toolkit, visit her site at http://www.OnlineBizU.com . Ask Donna an Internet Marketing question at http://www.AskDonnaGunter.com

“I rarely encourage clients to sell via one-step, because leads; people who’ve raised their hands can have so much value worked well over time.” - Dan Kennedy.

There’s an absolute wealth of marketing wisdom in Dan’s statement. It’s impossible to do justice to all of it in this short space. So lets get into it and give you some important food for thought…

You’ll decide to either market to a list, or not. And I know that some marketers just don’t want to be bothered with list generation, for a variety of reasons. That’s fine. So if you’re sitting on the fence about it… just understand that you can be walking away from a LOT of money if you don’t have a list.

If you take your business seriously, then you already know the life-time value of your customers. How much revenue the average customer will bring to you over the time they’re doing business with you.

Armed with that knowledge, you’re able to know exactly how much you can spend to acquire new leads. The smartest marketers know how to break-even to build their lists. And they also know how much that new lead will be worth over time.

Notice how Dan worded his statement; ’so much value worked well over time.’

The key phrase there is, ‘worked well.’ I’ll tell you something. Many businesses flat out do not get it in that area. When their lists either die from attrition, or become unresponsive, it becomes the business kiss of death. And then they wonder what happened.

Simply no excuse for it because it’s SO easy to prevent. You just need to know how to do that.

I’m sure many of you know about the Law of Reciprocity. Simply stated, giving someone something… or doing something for another person, will compel them to feel obligated to do something for you. Of course, that ’something’ for you is giving you business.

But stop and think about this for a moment…

People online have come to expect the freebie. The free report, white paper, short ebook… whatever, in exchange for contact information and your continued marketing efforts. It has become a standard for doing business online. Unfortunately this expectation has only served to dilute, if not eliminate, the power of reciprocity. And if your freebie is poor, then you can almost forget any compelling feelings to give you something in return. You’ll immediately become bland and boring because you’ll be lumped in that vague group of online businesses that all look the same. Or worse…

People will label you as a scam, or just someone who wants to make a fast buck. But…

All is certainly not lost… IF you provide good quality information. And you can still harness reciprocity’s power in your marketing. How?

By continuing to provide information of high perceived value in your follow-up emails. But do it with a twist and some common sense. Just think about human nature and it’ll become clear.

First… spark intrigue. Create some suspense and the desire for more. One way to do that is by NOT revealing everything. Don’t give the farm away in your free reports and ebooks. Now this isn’t anything new. But I’ll tell you something I’ve seen a lot.

I’ve seen free reports and ebooks that offered lots of good information. But they failed to create any burning desire. There was no sense of intrigue. No sense of, “I gotta know more about this NOW!”

Let me ask you… when you see a newspaper ad selling whatever, and there’s a picture of an attractive woman wearing a bikini… does that picture make you want to buy?

NO! Probably doesn’t. You see that so much people become blind to it… for the most part. It has no selling value. Or, for lots of guys maybe it might catch their attention. They might check out the hot girl and then move on.

You can be regarded as a respectful, professional marketer simply by treating your list with respect. That means NOT bombarding with a constant stream of, “You Gotta Check This Out NOW!” Don’t beat them up with constant, hard selling.

Keep a continuous rapport with them. Talk to them. Give them substance and good information while sparking an intense desire to know more. Share your self with them and they’ll come to think of you as something more than a marketer.

I’ve been marketing to lists for many years. And I’ve had subscribers stay with me for almost as long. It’s a skill you can learn and develop. And done right, with the right backend offers… you’ll take your bottom line to whole new levels.

By Dan Lok
A former college dropout, Dan “The Man” Lok transformed himself from a grocery bagger in a local supermarket to an internet multi-millionaire. Discover how you can maximize your website profits in minimum time. For a limited time, you can test-drive Dan’s Insiders Club for 30-days Risk-Free and get $1,165 dollars worth of bonus gifts. Rush cover to:

http://www.websiteconversionexpert.com/testdrive.html

Since no two people think or search alike it pays to think unique. For those unfamiliar with the terms “exact match” or “unique” in contention to search engines, one (exact match) is like a laser beam, precise and concentrated, while the other (unique) is like a flash light, nebulous and all encompassing.

In a nutshell, exact match is when you are targeting a very specific or narrow group of keywords or phrases and unique phrases or unique search modifiers are when people type in something that has (a) never been searched for before or (b) has some of the keywords along with other contextually descriptive terms.

So essentially you have two facets of keyword optimization:

1) “Exact match” – targets a very specific (two three or four word) key phrase.
2) Optimization for “Unique keywords”, a combination of phrases containing optimized words fall into the category of the long-tail.

If our client were a bank (for example), we would research and optimize all phrases that could be used to reference banking, finance as well as local references to augment positioning (local and national positioning), as well as focus on words with high usage as descriptors or modifiers in context to a search query.

“FREE Checking” is exact match, however a unique search with the same root phrases may look something like “I need an account with free checking” which would require that the words “account” in addition to “free checking” are optimized in order to return this as a relevant search result.

Based on (a) the content and proximity or the keywords and phrases and (2) the links used to reference the content, you can essentially increase saturation across a wide array of supporting modifiers and appear consistently as a high ranking, relevant search result.

Long-tail optimization is when the site or pages has amassed enough authority (as a by-product of content, links and popularity) that it ranks frequently in search engines anytime two or more overlapping phrases are combined in a search query.

This can be particularly useful if you have a high percentage of topical pages in your site. Instead of 3 keywords per page (using the laser beam approach), you can rank for hundreds of search results per page (as each word can potentially become a keyword) like a flashlight using the same amount of energy. The only distinction is the optimization method and the link building tactic employed.

Understanding this, it is more important to have an increasing amount of traffic to your pages. So, even though you may use a keyword research tool that states that a search term receives 2000 searches per month. Even if you have a #1 position for the term, you may only see 10-20 searches per day that actually land on your pages as a result of that phrase.

In reference to keyword research, we have found that dividing the number or estimated searches by 100 is a fair assessment when attempting to gauge traffic. This is due to the fact that you are only extrapolating US based traffic from those numbers (not global search volume across every Google in every country, Yahoo or MSN respectively) which is a default for most keyword research tools.

So in conclusion, is it better to (1) receive 1000 searches per month from exact match keywords or (2) receive 10,000 searches per month from a variety of keywords? It depends on your positioning strategy. We prefer to target both with our optimization methods and then check the stats to see which has the highest user engagement and conversion.

For example, not everyone is looking for the same thing, ranking above the fold (in the top 5 positions) in search engines has an intrinsically higher click through rate than those below the fold, but click behavior is changing and truly depends on the individual.

The point is, you may receive 100 visits per month from the exact match two or three word combination, but you may receive 10 times the search volume from secondary keywords that contain modifiers that yield a high percentage of relevant traffic to your pages.

So, just because the searcher did not use the exact phrase and used additional modifiers (like “SEO Services” vs. “SEO Services Company”) doesn’t mean they were any less interested in your content or value proposition, it just goes to show that we all function differently, in the way our cognitive skills formulate and communicate data.

However, this should not limit you in your scope of targeting keywords, only enhance your range. In some instances, you only need a dozen of the right phrases to hone conversion. In addition to unique searches being sparse, the upside is, they are oftentimes wide open for optimization as a void in organic search has often overlooked them which makes them low hanging fruit for the picking.

By Jeffrey Smith
Jeffrey Smith is an active internet marketing optimization strategist, consultant and the founder of Seo Design Solutions Seo Company http://www.seodesignsolutions.com. He has actively been involved in internet marketing since 1995 and brings a wealth of collective experiences and fresh marketing strategies to individuals involved in online business.