Social Networking Stuff

How to Effectively Use Social Networking For Your Online Business
By Bill Knight

The way we do business online is evolving, and at the forefront of this change is social networking. It was only ever going to be a matter of time before business crept into the realms of Facebook, MySpace and more recently Twitter. And for any self-respecting Internet marketer it has been an obvious move.

It stands to reason that where there’s a crowd, there’s money to be made.

But social network marketing is a brand new concept and many “traditional” marketers are failing to grasp the real opportunities it offers. It’s going to be a case of “back to school” for many of these social misfits and it’s going to be “back to the drawing board” for many of their ill-fated marketing strategies.

So can we mere mortals unravel the mystery of successful social network marketing?

Yes of course we can. Just as long as you can implement the theories relevant to reverse psychology and fully understand the principles of viral and affiliate marketing, then you should have no problems whatsoever.

What does this mean for the typical Internet marketer of today? Well, to a degree it means no more automatic sales machines pumping out cash 24/7. Why? Because you’re going to have to start communicating with people, and that means you’ll have to make yourself available.

People don’t want to be treated like a “prospect” anymore. They don’t want to be seen as just another sales figure. They want to be able to meet their seller, talk to them and befriend them.

They want to know that you are a genuine person. And they want to know that if anything should go wrong with the product or service they have purchased from you, you will respond to their problems in a timely and courteous manner.

They also want to know that they can count on you for help and advice. So if you want to stay in business and grow your business, then you are going to have to learn to talk to your customers. It’s back to basics.

That understood, how then do you create new business through the social network channels?

The answer is, create a formula or a system. Every successful Internet marketer knows that to generate a lot of business you need a system. It’s as well to remember that people don’t make money, systems do.

So, let’s look at what is needed in order to create an effective business generating system.

Obviously you will need a product or service, which you will have already established that your prospects will want. Don’t worry, if they don’t want it you’ll soon find out.

Next, you need to start socialising. For the sake of this demonstration, I recommend you open an account on Facebook and Twitter. Use Twitter to get as many followers as you can and don’t stop getting new followers every day. Build that list!

Make sure that your “Tweets” are interesting. Talk about what you know and try to get people to join you on Facebook, where you can offer more in-depth information about yourself, your business and your products and services.

Start a blog and write about your business, then tell your followers on Twitter and Facebook each time you post to your blog. Offer free advice, free information and even free products.

Now, at no time should you try to convince people that they should visit your website to buy your products, even though this is what you obviously and ultimately want them to do. Instead, offer free and valuable information about your products or services. Your goal is to get people asking where they can buy such a product or service. And of course you will have the answer.

If you can become an “expert” by offering free information and advice, people will fall over themselves just to get to you. They’ll beat a path to your website and they’ll beat your front door down and buy everything you suggest.

Don’t stop giving your customers freebies. For example, create a report, which need only be 10 pages long and include links to your website or affiliate products throughout. Tell your customers that they can give it away for free from their websites, their blogs and their emails.

Encourage them to give it away to as many people as they can. It needs to become viral, so make sure the report contains valuable information or links to free downloads.

Now make sure that your main product or your next product can make money for your customers. As part of your “system” you need to create an army of affiliates. Start an affiliate program and recruit resellers like there’s no tomorrow. Use Clickbank or PayDotCom to handle everything for you.

But don’t ever, ever try to recruit affiliates on your social network circuit unless they have expressed an interest or have bought from you already. You must first nurture your prospects. Give them help, advice, guidance and valuable information so they practically fall in love with you. Then they will buy your products, and tell everyone else how great you are.

Remember, this is SOCIAL network marketing. Make friends first and the sales will follow.

Bill Knight is a highly respected International copywriter based in the UK. He specializes in creating hypnotic online sales letters, ads and email marketing campaigns for clients from all over the world.

Visit his website for more information about the full range of services he offers to individual entrepreneurs, small businesses and corporate clients.

http://www.knight-writer.co.uk

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Bill_Knight
http://EzineArticles.com/?How-to-Effectively-Use-Social-Networking-For-Your-Online-Business&id=2112486

Getting Social With Your Insurance Customers - Social Networking For Marketing
By Laird Rixford

Undoubtedly, you have heard of the various social networking sites currently dominating the Internet. These websites include big names such as MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and Digg. However, you might not be aware to the fact that these sites can help increase your overall Internet marketing exposure and even drive new customers to your agency.

What is a social networking website?

Social networking sites rely upon the collaborative nature of the Internet. A social networking site allows visitors the ability to contribute content to the website. Since a large group of people supply content, the website becomes a resource of combined knowledge. A good example of this is Wikipedia. Since it’s founding in 2001, volunteers around the world have collaboratively written over twelve million articles in over two-hundred languages.

How can my agency capitalize on social networking sites?

When you create a social page for your agency, the return can be two fold. First, by creating an entry on MySpace, LinkedIn, or Facebook, you provide your agency a secondary website for which people can find and contact you. As you grow your social network, you will open your agency to the vast number of potential customers that use each of those services. Secondly, with every post you make upon your social site, you can place a high-value back link to your agency’s primary site. High value back links can considerably increase your search engine ranking.

List of Popular Social Networking Sites

Each social networking site offers its own specialty and you can tailor your efforts based upon your desired target.

MySpace

MySpace is a great place for people to keep in touch with close friends and family. The younger generation of Internet users dominates MySpace’s pages. You should create a MySpace page if you want to target late teenagers and young adults. Keep your page regularly updated with the latest news and stories as it relates to the 18-25 year old crowd.

Facebook

Facebook is very similar to MySpace except it includes many adults from the ages of 25 through 50. When you create a Facebook page keep this in mind by offering links to current political news, latest viral videos and of course, your agency’s website.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is for professionals. Corporate professionals will search LinkedIn to catch up with old business acquaintances or look up a prospective customer. You can even use LinkedIn to find new likeminded employees.

Digg

Have you ever wanted to declare a link on the Internet cool? If so, Digg is for you. Digg allows you to advertise a link as being beneficial to the web. What better site to “digg” than your own agency’s website or blog? Once you have listed, have your friends and family “digg”-it. To increase your link’s popularity, ask your visitors upon your other social networking sites to “digg” your site even further.

These are just a few of the countless number of social networking sites currently available on the web. Most of these only take an hour or two to setup, so pick a site a week, and tackle it. Once you have completed all of your social sites, link them all together to form a web of sites advertising your agency. Finally, keep your sites up-to-date by placing reminders in your Internet marketing plan.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Laird_Rixford
http://EzineArticles.com/?Getting-Social-With-Your-Insurance-Customers—Social-Networking-For-Marketing&id=2106740

How to Build a Social Network
By Jennifer Kelly

Have you ever wondered how do you create a social network? It’s a valid question, and if you are wondering how to create a social network site, you more than likely know the huge profit potential involved. Sites like MySpace, Facebook, Youtube- these are all social networking sites, and you better believe the owners of the site are raking in a ton of money.

How do you make money with social network sites? The answer is quite simple really. As an owner of one of these sites, you monetize the site however you want. There are so many ways to monetize one of these sites. For example, you could charge a membership fee to join, or you can insert advertisements through out your site. I don’t have to tell you huge potential that is here. Where there are large numbers of people, money will be spent.

So how do you create a social network? You used to have to know html, coding, and scripting. You used to have to know a lot of technical stuff. Until now. I introduce to you a brand new online social networking software called the Niche Socializer.

What is the Niche Socializer? It’s an online social networking software that literally creates your own social network site with just a few clicks of your mouse. It’s a revolutionary software that has taken out the need to know html, coding, and everything else that stood in your way of making your own social networking site. It’s fast and easy to use, and you can customize every single part about your social network so it’s exactly as you want it.

The Niche Socializer is not just a piece of software that will create your own site, it’s way more than that. It’s an entire online business in a box. It shows you not only how to build a social network, but it has built in (easy to use) customization and monetization modules. To put it simply, it has EVERYTHING you need to create your own social network site. It doesn’t stop there, though. The Niche Socializer includes training on how to use the software, and best of all? The training includes finding the right niches (markets) that you will profit from, and how to actually get members to join your social networking site. You can have the absolute best online social network site, but if you have no members joining, you won’t make money. That’s why there’s an entire module dedicated to teaching you how to find profitable markets, and how to market your site.

If you have wanted to start your own online social networking site, the Niche Socializer is your portal to success. With no experience needed, you can join the MySpace, Facebook and Youtube trend and cash in on the profits that are just waiting to be claimed.

To find out more about the Niche Socializer and to get a Niche Socializer Bonus, please visit either links.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jennifer_Kelly
http://EzineArticles.com/?How-to-Build-a-Social-Network&id=2132830

Five Useful Social Networking Tools
By David Strom

In preparation for a keynote speech that I am giving next month, I took some time to look at a variety of social media consolidation and notification services. You might find one or more of them useful for your purposes, even for those of you that still don’t poke, tweet, or know what RSS really stands for.

First is Ping.fm that can post to multiple social networks at once. You sign up, give them your login credentials at Facebook, Plaxo, LinkedIn, Flickr, Twitter, WordPress and many others. When you want to update your social networking universe, you send one message to your Ping.fm account via an email, a text message, or a Web form, and it goes out to everyone. This can be a big time-saver if you post across different networks and don’t mind sending the same information to all these places. I haven’t used it as much because I tend to post different things to LinkedIn vs. Facebook, as an example.

Friendfeed.com works in reverse. It consolidates your entire social network “feeds” together in one place, so that your network can follow your posts across your blogs, your social networks, and other sites. You set everything up using the various RSS feeds that these services create, which is pretty clever when you think about it. The downside to Friendfeed is that your adoring public has to sign up separately for this service, which means Yet Another Social Network Request to fulfill. Still, I have been surprised at how many people are following me in this fashion, and how many of them are the A-list blogger types that you want to engage and be at top of mind in any event. Clearly, this is one service to pay attention to if you are trying to get the word out about your products and services.

Twitter is certainly all the rage these days, and a number of services have taken some of the best notification-style pieces out of it in interesting ways. If you like the way Twitter works but don’t want to share your updates with the public, such as just with your work colleagues or a special task force, then take a look at Presentlyapp.com. You can use the free Web service or pay to install it behind your own firewall for the ultimate private group. They even make use of the same kind of scrolling interface that Twitter has made popular.

Another take on private discussion forums is from Yammer.com. They cost $1 a person a month. Think of this as one of those old-school BBS’s that has been updated for the Gen-T and Web 2.0. I think if you want something quick and dirty and need to have a group discussion to knit your project team together, this is worth a closer look.

Buzzable.com can be used to create groups of Twitter users if you want to send out notifications to all of your partners or customers at once. LinkedIn is finally implementing this feature on their groups, but that is probably too much work to get the initial group assembled, given their still draconian triple opt-in rules.

So these are just five services that I have found that have something going for them. Whether any of these companies will be around next year is hard to tell. And I can guarantee that none of them have received any TARP funds from the US Government. If you have other suggestions, email them or post a comment on my strominator.com blog.

David Strom is a noted speaker, author, podcaster and consultant who has written two books and thousands of magazine articles for dozens of IT publications such as Computerworld, eWeek, Baseline Magazine, Information Week, PC World and Information Security magazine. His blog can be found at http://strominator.com, and he can be reached at david@strom.com.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=David_Strom
http://EzineArticles.com/?Five-Useful-Social-Networking-Tools&id=2138593

Social Networking - Building Relationships With Customers
By Jeffrey Lant

Social Networking Sites are hugely popular but how does the average business owner use these sites?

Anyone over 40 (common age among business owners) tends to see social networking sites like FaceBook and MySpace and Twitter as a waste of time. After all anyone running a business doesn’t have time to be posting on walls, checking out photos online, tweeting, writing on someone’s wall etc. But wait! Don’t be so quick to write off these sites as powerful tools for your business and for helping your customers.

Take some time to get familiar with these sites, get a free account it takes only a few seconds to get started. Watch what other people are saying, how other people or businesses are using the site to get traffic, generate buzz, or help customers. You can also places advertising at sites like FaceBook, and MySpace but there are many other smaller networking sites on a variety of topics. Do a search at Google for sites related to your business and interests. This will help you find targeted customers, prospective customers and other tools and services that can help you build your online presence.

You can also consider creating your own Social Networking site for your company or service so that you can interact with your customers. Having your own site allows you to connect with your customers, control content, build relationships, establish trust, respond to customer concerns, make product or service announcements, and improve on your service delivery from customer feedback.

Give Social Networking sites your attention, they are a powerful online tool that you might as well get familiar with now as they aren’t going away.

You can see an example of our company’s own Social Networking site here:
http://community.worldprofit.com

Happy Networking!

Dr. Jeffrey Lant is well known to millions of people worldwide from his 16 books, hundreds of articles, international media appearances and regular online webcasts, Dr. Lant is an internationally recognized author, trainer, and consultant. He is the holder of 4 university degrees, including the PhD from Harvard University. Current CEO of Worldprofit Inc., an innovative website development company specializing in webcast applications, website design, database development and e-commerce.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jeffrey_Lant
http://EzineArticles.com/?Social-Networking—Building-Relationships-With-Customers&id=2098041