For those of you that regularly follow my blog, you will certainly know that I am passionate about Social Media and the huge marketing potential it has for any Internet business today. I have written tons of posts on the topic and have been the feature author on Social Media topics in some major publications such as SiteProNews.

Over the last year, we have seen a shift in thinking among Internet Businesses pertaining to Social Media. In 2007, business were asking the question (with skepticism): "Can Social Media Marketing really be profitable for my business? Is there really any value in hanging out in Facebook Groups, commenting on blogs, networking in Linkedin and sharing videos through YouTube?"

I think these questions have been effectively answered by many of the industry experts who have openly endorsed Social Media Marketing as a powerful business building channel.The real question Internet Businesses are asking in 2008 is: "Okay, we see that Social Media Marketing is a good thing, but how do we actually find the hours in the day to carry out these time-intensive Social Media Marketing activities?

The answer is: You won’t, but a Virtual Assistant can!

Presently, there are endless opportunities for Virtual Assistants to carve out an "in-demand niche in the Social Media realm.  With the right Social Media "know-how", Virtual Assistants can win more clients and grow their income opportunities as a Social Media Marketing VA!

Our sister site, VAClassroom is offering a FREE 1 hour Live tele-seminar on Monday May 19th, to discuss how Virtual Assistants can truly profit from the Social Media Movement in 2008. For more details and to sign-up, go to: 

http://www.vaclassroom.com/special/teleseminar.aspx

Apparently, the spots are filling up quickly, so be sure to sign-up to claim one of the 250 spots for the call -  it should be a good one! 

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

In my post on the "The SImple Truth of SEO", I had mentioned that producing highly targeted content on your site and through other powerful content sharing and distribution channels was the cornerstone for SEO Success. I had also said that I would run a short series on the best channels on the Internet for sharing and syndicating your content. Well, here it is! Over the next few days, I will feature 4-5 of the best websites that you NEED to be sharing and syndicating your content through. Although, content creation and syndication can be a time consuming task, it will have a profound impact on your link-building efforts and Search Engine Listings and rankings..

The first one on my list is Scribd.com

Scribd.com  is a collaborative document (and file) sharing  and syndication site that has huge potential to drive serious targeted traffic while significantly improving your Search listings and rankings. Scribd currently sees about 10 million unique users per month visting, posting and sharing documents. Scribd is a social community with some key distinguishing features from that of popular article directories like ezinearticles.com:

• Allows you to upload pretty much any type of document or file including PDFs, Excel Spreadsheets, Word Documents, Power Point Presentations and even image files like JPG and GIF files. This flexibility allows users to syndicate their content in ALL shapes, sizes and formats!
• Enables you to embed your uploaded documents in a blog, Facebook Profile and another external website.
• Unlimited storage space - can upload as many documents as you want.
• Quickly indexed by Google and the major SEs thus further increasing your search traffic and rankings
• Able to share documents with a private group of friends or make it completely public
• Collaborate and share feedback on each other’s documents

Scribd is a great channel for connecting with targeted groups that are relevant to your products and services. By providing awesome targeted content to your groups and across applicable categories in Scribd, this will build your reputation and ultimately increase the traffic to your respective site. Like other social media sites, Scribd allows you to tag your documents with your keywords in order to be found by the right audience.

Scribd definitely makes my top 5 list for the best content sharing and syndication channels on the net at this point. As mentioned, over the next few days,  I will feature my other top 4 content-sharing sites that you must include to your link-building strategies!

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Yes, I am not finished with Twitter yet!! As you know from my recent post, I was initially a little skeptical about the value of "Twittering", but then kind of convinced myself to activate my dormant account and see what Twitter has to offer. Well, I was probably still not understanding the full potential of Twitter, until I came across this great Twitter guide by Caroline Middlebrook, titled, "The Big Juicy Twitter Guide". Caroline provides a user-friendly 7 part series on how to understand twitter and it’s potential for conversational marketing.

One thing she emphasizes in her guide is that Twitter, like other Social Media vehicles, requires, dialogue, relationship-building and collaboration. If you simply use to just plug your product initially, then the twitter community will "smell a rat" and not be impressed.  I particularly liked Part 3 in the Twitter Guide, where she featured a short YouTube video by Internet Marketer, Ed Dale. He provides a good foundation for the marketing potential of Twitter.

So, definitely take a read of Caroline’s informative guide and start "Twittering"!

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Over the past few months, I have become a student of Social Media Marketing and reading everything I can get my hands on regarding the growing role Social Media is playing in many companies’ marketing efforts.

I compiled my thoughts into an article I wrote that was published at SiteProNews.com yesterday. Check out this article titled: "Is Social Media Marketing Really Worth Your Time and Effort?"

Enjoy!

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Prior to my to career in the Online Industry, I worked with the Federal Government and was always amazed at the copious amount of acronyms that government people would use for virtually anything. Now, after working in the Online space for a few years, I would have to say Internet Marketers would certainly be able to  easily compete for the greatest amount of acronyms used on a daily basis:)

Just, if you are wondering, what the heck SMO and SMM stands for, let me enlighten you….

(SMO) Social Media Optimization and (SMM) Social Media Marketing and are two Web 2.0 marketing tactics I have been studying and implementing over the last few months in my own businesses.

While, there are some different definitions on these two tactics, this is the easiest way I can think of to explain them…

SMO is all ON-SITE activities employed to make your site more social search friendly. Whereas, SMM are all OFF-SITE activities used to leverage your business reach and exposure through social media channels. Rather then jumping to theoretical mumbo jumbo, let me give you some practical examples of the activities that could be employed for both SMO and SMM:

Social Media Optimization:

• Social Bookmark Tools - I would recommend utilizing a social bookmark tool like Addthis.com so that you can make your pages easily bookmarked and saved in such sites as Delicious, Digg and Stumbleupon.
• RSS Feeds - Implementing RSS Feed capabilities in order to quickly syndicate your dynamic content (Articles, Newsletter etc…)
• Blogs - Building a Business Blog with fresh "keyword targeted" content.
• Wikis and Social Networks - Creating targeted Wikis and Social Networks for your user audience to interact and contribute to your site content.

Social Media Marketing:

Imp note: I can’t emphasize enough that incorporating a "Hard Sell" approach with your SMM strategies could potentially back fire and cause negative brand exposure for your business. SMM is  simply about engaging your targeted audience in a natural (non-salesy) way, dialoguing with your community at large and providing a relevant and appropriate contribution. Through those activities, you will find natural ways to talk about your business or service in a way that doesn’t bring a "hard sell" tactic.

• Interacting with targeted blogs and forums - One of the best way to see targeted traffic to your site is to regularly dialogue and provide comments on blogs and forums in your specific industry. It is important to build relationship, provide relevant insights and look for natural ways to talk about your own business. While this approach is not a "quick fix", it can definitely provide a nice targeted stream of traffic over the long term and ultimately improve your link popularity. Quite often, I will provide a comment for a blog I regularly read and just insert my URL under my name. Other times, I will actually reference my business if I feel it is appropriate and fits with the conversation. You might check out Google/Blog Search and Board Reader to help you identify the types of blogs and forums you would like to dialogue with.

• Wiki Contributor - You might consider perusing some relevant topics in Wikipedia (and other industry specific wikis) and contribute some content and look for ways to submit a link for your business.
• Blog Syndication - Recently, I have been using a great new tool, Web2submitter, to quickly syndicate my blog posts to top Social News sites (ie. Digg, Reddit), which has resulted in a nice new stream of traffic.
• Other Social Media - There are cool user generated sites like Squidoo, where you can build a "Lens" on a particular topic you are well versed in. This topic will likely relate to your business, providing yet another targeted stream of traffic.
• Podcast and Viral Video Syndication - This will require a bit more work, but to creating a relevant and interesting podcast and syndicating it through itunes or such networks as podfeed can be a great SMM tactic. Viral VIdeos certainly take some thought and discretion in order to make sure that your video gets passed around for the right reasons:) That is the slippery slope of SMM - the potential for bad publicity.

So, Just a few ideas on how you might use SMO or SMM in your own business endeavors… Until next time!!

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

I want to "enlighten" you for a moment to a new wave of Outsourcing I see happening presently and moving into the future. A week or so ago, I listened to a great webinar on "Harnessing Social Media" by Marketing Experiments and it confirmed a few things that had been percolating in my mind!

It is evident that in this new Web 2.0 (and 3.0) frontier, many web companies have yet to fully tap the potential of Social Media for maximizing their exposure and enhancing brand recognition and awareness. I would highly recommend taking some time out of your busy schedule to listen to the "Harnessing Social Media" as it speaks to an experiment that was done using standard Pay Per Click Methods and some new social media strategies. In a nutshell, the folks at MarketingExperiment.com hired a "Community Development Coordinator" to tap into a variety of social media channels over a month period to see how much traffic and repeat traffic would be generated for their particular test site. In tandem, they ran a Pay Per Click campaign to compare cost and volume of visitors.

What they discovered at the end of the test was that the cost and site volume was basically about the same to run a PPC campaign and hire a "Community Dev Coordinator" to leverage social media channels. But, the interesting thing they found was that with the Social Media Campaign, they saw a greater degree of "Repeat Traffic" of users returning to the site then for the PPC campaign. In addition, it was evident that the Social Media Campaign further ignited their SEO potency which would inevitably lead to a more longer term and steady-stream of traffic, even after the experiment was completed.

Now, I don’t do justice to communicating the whole experiment, so do listen the webinar, but here are a couple points I would like to glean as it pertains to Outsourcing:

Web Companies that do not actively join the "Online Conversation" and leverage social media will be seriously missing out on a great stream of consistent targeted traffic that will develop through natural means. Now, depending on the size of your company, you may not have anyone in house with either the expertise or time to invest in running a Social Media experiment of your own, so I might suggest you consider Outsourcing a "Social Media Coordinator" for a set period of time to perform some of these types of social media tasks:

1. Monitor and Review a targeted list of RSS Feeds from particular blogs based on particular topics or custom keyword searches.  You can create custom feed searches through such sites as Technorati, Feedster, and Google.com/blogsearch.  You might also sign up for alerts using desired keywords through Alerts.yahoo.com and Google.com/alerts. The bottom line is you want to look for opportunities to share comments and join the conversation.
2. Review other discussion boards, Forums and social networks where your target audience might be talking. Use such tools at Boardreader.com and forumfind.com to help in your efforts
3. Provide regular contributions to targeted Wikis

Essentialy the Social Media Coordinator would get engaged with the target audience you are trying to reach to learn more about them, dialogue with them and ultimately look for natural opportunities to promote your company. Now, as much as I try to keep up with reading all my favorites blogs and participate in social networking sites, other priority items keep getting in the way. So, I have plans shortly to look at hiring a Social Media Coordinator on a pilot project basis to evaluate the potential of leveraging various social media channels.  There is certainly no shortage of cool and innovative ways to bolster your web exposure through social media channels. The reality is that few companies are maximizing the potential - I am one of them, which is why I am going to be doing a pilot project shortly to compare the performance of this channel versus other mainstream avenues (PPC, Affiliate, Email etcc…)

In our Internet Marketing Services Portal, we have a category for Social Media Services. I anticipate this category to be a very popular outsourcing channel as more and more companies begin to really understand the great potential Social Media has for their businesses moving forward!

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

One of the things I love about the Internet Marketing Industry is the rapidly evolving lingo we use like wikis, swickis, vlogs, podcasts and our topic at hand, SMO (Social Media Optimization). I know if I try throw around these terms in my social circles, they might think I am really smart, or just kind of wierd!

As you know from my last few posts, I have been closely watching the new trends that are set to take off in 2007 and we have touched on social media topics in the past couple months such as The power of social bookmarking in your Internet Marketing endeavors.

Well, I would like to delve further in the social media movement and discuss the rapidly growing area of Social Media Optimization. In a nutshell, Social Media Optimization (SMO) has been defined as a “way to optimize websites so they can be more easily connected or interlaced with online communities and community web-sites. For example; allowing RSS Feeds, easier linking and incorporation of 3rd party functionalities like Flickr photo slides or You Tube Videos.

Rohit Bhargava, who operates one of the largest global PR agencies in the world, actually coined the term Social Media Optimization and is definitely an expert on this new movement in the Internet Marketing Space.  A couple posts from Rohit’s Blog really helped me understand the power of Social Media Optimization and the where it will be headed in 2007 and beyond. Take a read of these two informative posts:

5 Rules of Social Media Optimization

3 Reason SMO is Taking Off 

SMO is definitely one strategy that you should considering incorporating (if you have not already) into your Internet Marketing strategies for 2007.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!