Social Marketing: Free and Effective.
The World Wide Web is growing every single second of every minute of an hour everyday in a week for the whole month in 365 days in a year. Websites are sprouting like mushrooms everywhere, and thus, the not so fortunate websites are forced to drown in the abyss of the unknown. Sad, but that is the truth, if you are not a wealthy website owner, it’s really something to be afraid of, unless you learn the basics of social marketing.
Why Social Marketing?
Implementing a successful social marketing campaign should subsist in the law of attraction. You should be a worthy member of a similar minded social community. Demonstrate and contribute your point of view, expertise, and perception. Seek for an opportunity to be able to endorse others in a good way. Let the community know that you have a lot to give, and you’d be surprised to learn that you have more to offer than what you think.
Here are more convincing reasons why you ought to practice social marketing:
1. It is Natural – You acquire natural links without being to pushy. Your website is very much exposed to a huge community of populace in a spur-of-the-moment style. This is different with paid advertising, which is usually littered with commercial partial tone.
2. It is Rock-Solid – Once perfected, social marketing in social communities can and will be a huge source of targeted traffic to a website, aside from the traffic from natural searches through search engines. Although you can’t simply amplify website traffic, the beauty of social marketing in a social community is that it can be controlled by implementing strategical promotion.
3. It Complements Other Marketing Efforts – Social marketing is generally community-based. It does not get in the way of other marketing strategy in acquiring traffic to a website. It works perfectly well with other promotional campaigns, which targets search engines or other websites.
4. It is Free and Effective – If you Do-It-Yourself, social marketing can cost you nothing or conceivably a low one-time cost if you hire a freelancer to handle your campaign. The advantages and benefits will of course justify any cost, if there is any cost at all.
Just think about it, buying links or paying for advertisements will cost you thousand of dollars. Social marketing has the power to give it to you for gratis plus it’s highly efficient. The sites to check out? Facebook.com, LinkedIn.com, and Twitter.com.
With the kind of traffic YouTube gets, it would be crazy not to capitalize on it. It may not provide the most competitive service for video producers, but it certainly rules the popularity contest. If you are looking for a certain online video, you know you have to start with YouTube. If you want to promote a blog, a product, a service, a film, etc. you know you have a good chance of gaining publicity via YouTube. It’s really rather hard to imagine what the internet was like before YouTube happened.
Using YouTube to a marketer’s advantage is pretty simple. It all starts with letting your presence be known. How exactly do you accomplish that? It is simply social networking with videos involved. Having an account means that you have your own channel. This allows you to have your own YouTube URL, create a profile and content that is interesting, supply a link to your actual website, and come up with playlists from both your own and other people’s accounts. Make sure that you choose the appropriate account type to indicate the kind of content visitors can find in your page. You can also design your YouTube page to optimize exposure for your website.
Once you have got your own channel up, it then becomes a matter of judiciously uploading content. With videos involved, brevity is a virtue. Infuse as much quality as you can in your videos in the less than five minutes recommended by experts. Grab your viewer’s attention in the first few seconds of playing. It’s hard to keep people hooked, so make sure that you are aptly convincing about the fascination of your content.
Once your page has content, get organized with your tags and categories. You have to be smart about these features. Remember that YouTube is a network. With tags, the prevailing slogan is “the more, the merrier”. With categories, think “big fish in a small pond”. Include the seemingly obscure categories. Your video just might rule in them. The main thing is that you get your videos recommended in the sidebar as often as possible.
Another thing you can do to draw traffic to your page is to make playlists. Using your own or others’ videos, compile a list that relates to the nature of your website. This is a sort of service provided by your page to the target market of your website. It is better to look for videos with not a lot of previous views so your page can have a comparatively unique offering.
When you have things running smoothly, you can start emailing other YouTube users and posting bulletins. This way, you can let people know about your updates. Remember never to seem like you are spamming. There are ways to feign relevance when your ulterior motive is just drive traffic to your page.
Be as active and social as possible. Leave comments. Join groups and communities. You can even start some yourself. Same goes for chat streams. Take advantage of active sharing. The more activities you participate in, the more exposure you garner.
These are all logical methods of self-promotion on YouTube. However, there is now an outright venue for people who want to transparently advertise on YouTube. Those with brand channels are allowed to customize, produce a unique background image, a distinct color palette, and an attractive header besides being provided a platform for a particular message. YouTube also actively points visitors to these brand channels.
YouTube has certainly established itself as a great venue for advertising. Take advantage of the service and have fun doing it at the same time.
Webmasters need to keep up with the ever-changing tide in the race to have the best search engine rankings. Every website is dependent on the ranking of their site on Google. Usually, users will focus on the top 10 results. Beyond that, your website is left to fate. Here are 10 solid tips to improve your rankings:
1. Submit to Google Directly– You need to submit your website info to Google. Be sure that your website is completely ready to be crawled by Googlebot.
2. Keyword Research – This is very significant in gaining a good ranking in Google search engine. What you should do is conduct a brainstorming meeting, study your customers and the market, use keyword research tools, chart your selection of keywords, and test and analyze their performance to get the best refined selection of keywords.
3. Ease of Access – An accessible website is crucial to the successful delivery of its contents. The pages, server, HTML elements, components and coding should all be valid and running. If these are disregarded, then Google may favor other sites over yours.
4. Meta Tags, Title Tags and URLs’ – These give information and a description of your website to search engines. Keeping them pertinent, convincing, and precise are your keys to ranking well in search engines. You can also utilize these areas for your keywords.
5. Information Structure – The document and link configuration of a site is beneficial to search ranking, especially when done correctly. The key to an effective structure is in its usability to its users:
Sitemap – This is the page that links all the other pages in a website.
Category Structure – Begin with a broad topic category, and then you can expand it to deeper pages of definite topics. This will convey a message to Google that your website is appropriate and includes thorough topics.
6. Duplicate Content – Probably the most universal problem a website can encounter, especially those who have huge, high-capacity websites powered by a database. If your website has several pages with similar contents, then you are causing those pages to lose valuable ranking in the search engine result pages (SERPs). The answer to this problem is to identify all pages with duplicate content and use a 301 Redirect.
7. Penning First-Rate Content – The true potential of a website is shown through the quality of content that it contains. If your website delivers content that a majority of users need, then that will constitute a high ranking on Google.
8. Public Relation and Press Release – If you can influence the mainstream press to feature your website, that can get you attention. There are a lot of press release websites that can be your starting ground for getting traffic and links, and what’s better is that these sites feed major news search engines such as Google News.
9. Assess Your Success – Do not rely on good faith alone that what you are doing is right. It is imperative that you check statistics, which will greatly help analyze and improve your SEO campaign.
10. An SEO Strategy that Works – You may have a killer website that everybody will envy, but if it will not show up in the top SERPs, it’s worthless. Patience is a virtue when planning your SEO. Google can be very slow – but let’s face it, SEO is a very long and tedious process. To ensure that you succeed in the end, you must seriously consider these guidelines: Uniqueness and quality of content, access to communities, links that are format friendly, budget planning, and market knowledge.
In business, it’s a fundamental truth that it pays to advertise. However, it does not necessarily follow that businesses have to pay to advertise. In the case of running a website, it is certainly much easier to promote your business online and there are several ways to do so without paying a single cent. This is especially advantageous for start-ups in that stage of venture when all the money involved is outbound. It’s always a good rule of thumb that, even with an ample operational expense budget, if there are things you can get for free, you wisely go for them. Once money starts coming in, then you can begin to consider paid methods.
What exactly are these little tricks that you can employ to promote your site and generate more traffic?
There are other free ways to go about promoting your website. Just commit to doing the brunt work yourself, get creative, and keep in mind that exposure is key.
Marketing a product traditionally has always had much to do with creating publicity for it. In the age of internet marketing a website works on the same premise. Exposure is a proven effective method in promotion. In the real world, social media marketing can be expensive and taxing; not so in cyberspace. Online social media marketing is basically comprised of two processes: social bookmarking and social networking. Both allow individuals with similar interests to find each other and share their recommendations.
Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking is a method that involves the storing and organizing of a user’s preferred web pages. Social bookmarking sites allow users to publicly share their lists, limit viewers to certain individuals, or keep them completely private. Marketing enters the setup in a variety of ways. Users are encouraged to employ tags to organize their bookmarks. The use of tags helps determine the popularity of bookmarked pages as they usually also bear information such as the number of users who have likewise bookmarked them. Bookmarking services also offer web feeds for their bookmark lists, which then allow subscribers to learn about fresh bookmarks made by other users. The process has certainly become more social as features such as comments and ratings are added to it.
Marketing your website using social bookmarking entails listing your pages. Using keywords in your tags enables other users to find links to your pages. Some online marketing services have people creating multiple accounts with different social bookmarking sites in which to bookmark their clients’ sites. There’s no reason why individuals cannot do the same for their own sites. It would take several emails, knowing the different bookmarking services, and a little bit of your time to set up accounts, but the process is free and can be very effective bringing visible results in less than an hour.
Social Networking
There has been an influx of social networking sites of late. While most users get into social networking purely for social ends, it can be a promotional tool as well. Social networking as a means of marketing online involves opening an account under your website’s name, establishing a network by adding contacts and joining groups, and keeping your account fresh with interesting updates and lively participation in all the social activities (leaving comments, chatting, sharing, etc.). This works as a viable marketing method because of the exposure you can garner. You can get exposure by letting your own contacts learn about your site, and because it’s a network, your contacts’ contacts’ contacts (and so on and so forth) can get to your account. The multiplication of traffic opens infinite possibilities about your web visibility in search engines too. Then, if you use keyword tagging for your account, any searcher can get to your account and discover your site as well. Before you know it you’ll have a fan base.
The beauty in social media marketing is that it is not as personality-influenced as traditional social media marketing. Even people who are socially awkward can build a successful online social network without too much effort.
Both social bookmarking and social media marketing can prove to be incredibly effective in promoting your website. However, the true success of each social media marketing endeavor, which is sometimes only evident in the long run, largely depends on the nature of your website. It has to be a website that is constantly worthwhile to visit. It always has to be relevant, useful, and dynamic.
Social media marketing is really the fun part of website promotion. You get quick results and as it boosts exposure to your site, it also positively influences your ranking with search engines. As fun and effective as social media marketing is, the really great thing about it is that it is absolutely free.