10 Steps For Starting a Social Marketing Campaign

1. Schedule a bit of time each day to do some new things. Don't just say you are going to do them. Write the time into your day and follow through.

2. Sign up for the major social news sites: Digg.com, Propeller.com, Mixx.com. Don't submit anything to these sites until you have filled out your profile completely and submitted news from elsewhere on the web to generate a real presence and avoid being labeled as a spammer.

In fact, BE a real presence and don't try to push your own content onto the networks you belong to. It should feel and be natural and you will know what "natural is on each network by participating, commenting, voting and getting a general sense of what members think is good and bad content. Watch their comments and votes and you will know how to proceed with your own site's content from there.

3. If you don't have a blog, you must install one immediately. This is not an option. It is an absolute necessity on today's web. I recommend Wordpress which can be downloaded and installed by you or your webmaster. Wordpress download

Option #2: Check with your web host to see if they have Fantastico available to you and, if so, that it installs the latest version of Wordpress. If so you are very lucky because the software can be installed by you very easily in just a few steps with Fantastico.

4. Once you have your blog set up, join the following networks. (These are blog communities that will help you generate visitors, authority, and links and most bloggers belong to them.) MyBlogLog.com (install the widget on your Wordpress blog), and BlogCatalog.com. (they also have a widget to install)

5. Join groups, make friends, and interact with other bloggers on these networks. Especially the people who would be most likely to link to your blog and send you traffic who write about similar things or have an audience similar to yours who'd benefit by knowing you. You can even start your own group, promote it in the network, and send "shouts" to the group when you have announcements or need attention to a new post.

6. Once you have established yourself on all the sites above, meaning you have a decent profile in each that shows you've been active and involved, move on and search for networks that are geared toward your particular market niche. There are a lot of new "vertical" social sites popping up that focus on much more narrow markets and their membership is far warmer to your kind of information than on the bigger, more general networks above.

Add a new site to the mix as often as you can and repeat the steps for becoming established there as mentioned in Step 2 above.

7. Join a group dedicated to social marketing to pick up tips from other social marketers and find new places you can sign up with to continue building your social authority. New sites pop up every single day. Follow places like Go2Web20.net to find new opportunities to connect with your market.

8. Remote blog. Join blogger.com and put content there that is good, just not good enough to go on your main blog. This serves two purposes: 1) you get to use more of the great content you find as you travel through all the social news sites and 2) it gives you another place to link back to your main site and pass on traffic and link popularity over time.

9. Track your progress diligently. If something you are trying on a social network isn't working, you need to know that in order to save time and move on to something more fruitful. MyBlogLog.com (above) has a tracking system which will show you where your traffic is coming from so you can avoid time wasting efforts and focus more on the sites that are really pulling in good traffic for you.

10. Don't freak out! This is only overwhelming if you act like someone at an all-you-can-eat buffet with no self control. You have other things to do and this needs to fit into, not dominate, your current business and marketing.

Social marketing, once you've established some authority, will replace some things you are currently doing to promote your site. Many people completely drop their paid advertising or PPC campaigns once they see the organic, natural traffic and search engine rankings pile up from social marketing.

Until then, just take it one step at a time and do some social marketing. A little goes a long way and before you know it, you will reach a point where a lot of traffic and lots of search engine rankings are piling up because you simply started doing something each day.

There's a lot you can learn about social marketing. And not all of it can be found on free blogs.

By Jack Humphrey (c) 2008

The Critical Components to Great Search Engine Rankings

When people with websites find out I'm an Internet Marketing Consultant, the first question I'm often asked is: "why isn't my website ranking in the search engines?" There seems to be this assumption that "if you build it, they will come". Many website owners are often disappointed once their site is up that the site is ranking poorly or not at all. They question me why it isn't and what they can do about improving the site rankings.

If you want to improve your, or your clients', website rankings in the search engine results of the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN, you must learn what makes a site rank well. Not knowing what makes a page rank well is why your competitor's website is at the top of the search engine results and yours is not. Search engine optimization or SEO strategies are the critical components that help your site rank well. If you want your site to rank well in search engine results, your page must have these 4 essential factors of search engine optimization:

1. The first element to search engine optimization is the web page copy and content. Search engines look for good quality, relevant pages with the keywords your audience uses when they search online. Each of your website pages should have the keywords and phrases your clients are searching for on each particular page. If your site is about "Internet Marketing Strategies", then you should have those keywords in the web copy of that page. The more relevant your copy is to the targeted keywords your audience uses, the better the relevancy of the site in the rankings for those search terms.

2. The second critical factor to help your search engine optimization tactics are meta tags. Meta tags, often overlooked and misunderstood, are elements of HTML coding on a website. Search engines use these meta tags to help them determine what the site is about and assist with indexing a website. Most meta tags are included within the 'header' code of a website. The most important tags are the title tag, description tag and the keywords tag. Different search engines have different rules about how these tags are used and how many characters they should contain. Of importance to the process is if you know how the big three - Google, Yahoo and MSN - review the tags, then you'll be targeting 90% of potential web surfers.

3. The next component in your site search engine optimization strategy is internal linking. By optimizing your linking structure, you'll be creating a rich web of interlinking within your site. Whenever possible include links to related products, articles, and information. The navigation menu plays a key role in passing deep link gain into your site. This will help pass on your page ranking. To help out your internal page ranking, create a site map that can help search engine crawlers find all the rich content and related pages on your site. You should also use anchor text when internally linking within your site. Instead of using "click here", use keywords or phrases like "Search Engine Optimization" as a text link.

4. The fourth factor to good search engine ranking is off page tactics. The most common tactic is obtaining quality back links or inbound links to your site from relevant websites. Initiating and maintaining linking strategies is a core factor to getting your site in Google search results. Google expresses the quality and quantity of these back links as PageRank or PR. PageRank is a function of the quantity and strength of inbound links. PageRank estimates the likelihood that a given page will be reached by a web user who randomly surfs the web, and follows links from one page to another. In effect, this means that some links are stronger than others, since a higher PageRank page is more likely to be reached by the random surfer.

Some great ways to get quality inbound links include: Links from your industry peers, business partners and associations. There are also industry directories, such as web designer directories and more general SEO directories where you can submit a link to the appropriate category. You may want to consider writing and submitting topic relevant articles to article directories like ezinearticles.com. With every article submission, you are allowed to include your resource box. Your resource box can contain a link to your website. Press releases are perhaps the most underrated tools to acquire one way links. All you have to do is to write an objective, newsworthy press release announcing your website, and thereafter, submit the same to press release wires throughout the internet, such as www.prweb.com. Press releases are also an excellent way to gain direct visitors.

With these 4 essential tactics, you'll be accelerating your search engine optimization strategies and on the path to higher search engine ranking. SEO is not about tricking search engines, but making it easier for them to spider your site or client sites to determine the relevancy of the site. With just a few SEO adjustments to your website and content, in no time you could soon find your site at the top of search engine results for your targeted keyword

Keith Raymond

Top 10 Ways To Raise Your Site In Google

No matter how much some people claim the SEO industry is a den of snake-oil salesmen, there are still definite ways webmasters can improve their rankings, and thus their visibility in Google's search results.

This isn't a manipulation game—Google absolutely hates that game and will punish you for it—which is perhaps what the darker element of the SEO world sells. Good, in-bounds SEO is made up of smart, user-and-search-engine friendly techniques. Think of SEO as a performance-enhancing drug—one that won't get you kicked out of baseball.

That being said, there are tons of things webmasters can do to help their sites perform better in search, so this list is not by a long shot finished. It is, though, what we think are the top ten strategies for better search engine—and by "search engine" I mean "Google" – placement.

1. Title tags

Listed by others as one of the Big Three (tags, links, and text), we're putting title tags at the top. The words in the title tag appear in the link that pops up in the search result. This is where you tell the search engine (and the would-be visitor) as succinctly as possible what needs to be known: company or publication name; relevant, targeted keyword or keyword phrase taken from the text of the page. Each page should have a title tag as Google ranks each page individually, not the site in its entirety.

2. Content

The order of the Big Three is very debatable, but really they work as parts of the whole; not one of them can be left out if the machine is to work properly. In this case, you probably understand that content should be quality, however that is defined, but it should also be rich in the keywords you are targeting to drive search traffic. That doesn't mean just throwing them in there like you're cooking up a pot of SEO gumbo, though. Keyword use and keyword variation should natural and not overstuffed. For the visual text part of the page, focus on working in the relevant words and phrases you want people to find you for.

3. Quality Links

Or more specifically, backlinks, links to your site from outside sources. Links are your letters of recommendation. If nobody's recommending you, or the recommendations seem phony, then it won't work. Authority links are weighted most heavily, of course, so try to get industry-related authority sites to link to your site.

4. Quantity Links

Authority (high quality) links are by nature more difficult to get, so you'll have to start somewhere else unless you already have the brand recognition you need from square one. Many SEOers propose "link-swaps" to each other and it used to be common trade to buy and sell links. But as Google demonstrated last Fall, you can't buy Google's love that way. In fact, you'll get the opposite of love. So, try to get as many links as you can from industry peers the good old-fashioned way – by promoting. Submit links to respected directories like DMOZ and Yahoo, as well. A large burst of low-quality, non-authoritative, or bad-neighborhood links, though, can do a lot more harm than good; so keep things natural.

5. URL

The importance of the URL is often debated, but one argument seems to make more sense than the others. Search engines don't like too many parameters in the URL (easy to confuse the spiders with & and ?) and people can't read those long URLs and tell what they mean at a glance either. The people aspect here is especially important, because they're the ones clicking and they need to understand where a link leads them at a millisecond glance. Lesson: keywords in the URL are a good idea.

6. Spider Food

Search spiders eat HTML, not Flash. They eat text, not pictures. Make the spiders happy with HTML and lots of text to eat.

7. Site Architecture

There's a lot to consider here, but the goal is creating a site spiders can easily access, a site that tells them where to go and what to index. Sitemaps are vital for this purpose, as is proper use of Robots.txt. Just this week, Google's Webmaster Trends Analyst Susan Moskwa posted 7 must-read Webmaster Central blog posts about these very topics.

8. Frequently Updated Content

You could start a site, slap some content on it, and let it sit there in cyber space. It'll be indexed, most likely. But you really expand your credibility as a devoted, relevant source if you update regularly. In addition to spiders, it gives people a reason to come back, too.

9. Start a Blog

A great way to establish yourself as an authority voice on the Internet is to start a blog about the industry you're in. Maintaining a blog means another entry point with regularly updated content that eventually with some authority helps pull up the main site via targeted links to the site, or specific pages within the site. It's not a spam blog, which will be zapped eventually, if there's useful content on it and legitimate linking.

10. Don't Forget Humans

This is so important, it probably should be higher up on the list. There's an art to designing a site that is friendly to both Google crawlers and the people you ultimately want to convert. Without people, what's the point? So first design for them, and then tweak to please the spiders, not the other way around. Jakob Nielsen is a usability guru you'll want to check out. He's been telling people how make user-centric websites since web directories were still phonebooks—you know, on paper.

source: webpronews@ientrynetwork.net

Blog Marketing Strategies

1. Directory Submission

There are so many link directories where you can submit your blog. They also allow you to submit other websites which are not blogs. The newer directories would be blog directories and rss directories. They allow you so submit the links of your blog and the links of your rss feeds. For link directories, blog directories and rss directories, most of them are free but some of them charge a fee when you submit your blog to them.

2. Do not neglect article directories.

In this case you need to get some articles written before you can submit them to article directories. At the end of the directories, you can add a link back to your blog.

3. Press release submission

There are many free press release sites available unfortunately most of them are really not that good. PRWeb is the best place for you to submit your press release but it cost you a small fee.

I must say that it is one of the best investment for your blog, especially when it is new. The exposure you get from there is much more than you can imagine. Also since PRWeb is an authority site, they will link to you when you submit your press release. You just got a one-way incoming link from an authority site. This alone will boost your search engine rankings & page rank. (credits to Samuel Ng)

Increasing your traffic

Increase Visitors to Your Blog for Free

For bloggers who wish to gain more readers, there can never be enough ways to promote one's blog. One way that blog owners market and promote their blogs is through taking part in blog traffic exchange communities like BlogExplosion (http://www.blogexplosion.com/index.php?ref=blogfortraffic�)

If you are a blog owner who wishes to try this route, it's easy (and free) to join these blog traffic exchange communities: Just visit the site, sign up, confirm your account, add your blog to the member directory/registry and then start visiting other members' blogs.

Often, you can add more than just one blog per account.

In order for you to maximize your membership, it's good to understand the general idea of how these communities work. Basically, you need to earn 'credits' in order to get blog traffic exposure. These credits are often gained by visiting other members' blogs. Some communities also offer 'credits' for a fee. However, when testing out a new blog traffic exchange community, it's probably best not to pay for 'credits' in the beginning. It's good to begin by visiting other blogs first. Then, when you're happy with that community, you can show support by buying credits and/or purchasing advertising space.

When you have enough credits, your blog becomes eligible for promotion. Usually, a link and/or graphic to your blog will be shown on the main site and/or in fellow members' blogs. This is how other people find your blog.

Of course, the more members there are in the community, the more potential visitors. So, if you are part of a blog traffic community, it's good to promote the communities you belong to as well. Besides, when you promote the community through a referral system, you get more credits too.

Just remember that even though people may visit your blog through these traffic exchange communities, it doesn't mean that they will always do so. That's why it's important to make sure that every visitor to your blog must find reasons to return.

About.com

Basic Techniques of SEO

Search engine optimization may be defined as a technique of making your web site optimized so that it easier for the search engines to find it. Promotion via SEO perceives what Internet visitors may look for, to assist them with sites giving what they are engrossed in finding. Search engine optimization is the best way to drive traffic to your web site. Search Engine Optimization does not have to be complex. The basic point is to keep in mind that each and every page of your web site is an exclusive unit and has to be treated aptly for search engine optimization.

Search engine optimization can be easily applied to any web site. Search engine optimization is to make proper changes in your web site such as adding noticeable text so that the search engines are able to see them. In the last few years, the web sites are using latest technologies such as flash, java etc that hides the content from the search engines. Search engine optimization makes sure that the search engines do not overlook your web site.

A quality search engine optimization is a mix of good design, proper content and user friendliness. Using a content that is rich in keywords, using keywords in the page titles as well as title tags are some of the few basics to make a web site search engine optimized. Search engine optimization is the best way to improve your rankings on search engine results pages and boost traffic to a web site.

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