Make money online with Jerry McVictor » social networking

Use Social Networking Sites to Make Money Online

McVictor — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 21:09:05 +0000

One of the major problems that people have with social networking is that they try to spread themselves too thin. They join a half-dozen networking sites and then cannot devote enough time to adequately network on any of them. The result is that they have a half-professional appearance all over the net.

Narrowing your focus to just a few sites and then building from there is the best way to approach social networking, especially if you want to make money. A strategic plan will help you build traffic in a measurable way without scattering your time and energy in many different directions.

At the core of your social networking plan is your “launch pad,” the site to which you will drive all of your online traffic. This can be a blog, a website, or a squeeze page. For the purposes of this plan, we’re going to make it a blog.

There are several reasons why using a blog for your launch pad is a good idea. Blogs have a higher level of interactivity with the audience. The content on a blog is constantly changing, so it always stays fresh and therefore ranks higher in search engine results. A blog will help you build a relationship with your niche and become a more trusted advisor.

You should use either Blogger or Wordpress to set up your blog. Do some keyword research in your niche and find a blog title that incorporates a popular keyword. This way you will get some automatic traffic from the title of the blog itself.

In fact, you should develop a short list of keywords that you will use to tag your content later on in the other social networking sites. When you focus your keyword choices around a short list, you will be able to rise in the rankings for those keywords pretty quickly.

When you start your blog, you will need to focus on creating interesting, compelling content. Map out five to ten blog posts and add them before you start promoting your blog through social networking sites.

For example, let’s say you are in the wedding niche. You have an affiliate relationship with a company that sells wedding favors. You decide that you want to develop a social networking plan to promote this particular company’s products.

Looking at some keyword results, there are many different types of wedding favors to choose from and many are the focus of lots of searches each day. You could use a URL that is general like www.weddingfavorinfo.com and then offer information on the many different types of wedding favors. On your blog, you can use banner ads or small graphic ads to link back to the affiliate site. You can also provide text links within your blog posts for visitors to click on as they read your suggestions.

Once you have your blog up and running, then it is time to create some Squidoo lenses (www.squidoo.com) and Hubpages (www.hubpages.com). To start, you should create three lenses and three Hubpages on similar keywords, all pointing back to your blog. With our wedding favor example, you could start with the three most popular types of favors and build pages around them (golf wedding favors, cheap wedding favors, unique wedding favors).

After you have built your lenses and pages, you can network within each site with people who are interested in what you have to offer. You can post comments on other people’s lenses or pages, and link to their sites. Look for people who have similar sites and network with them.

You can add your blog’s RSS feed to your lenses and pages. This way they will be constantly updated with the fresh content from your blog. In addition to the links back to your blog, you can also have links to the affiliate program within your lenses and pages.

Over a period of time, you can begin to add to the network of lenses and pages until you have criss-crossed all of your major keywords. Stumble Upon is a terrific tool for adding more power to your blog, lenses, and pages. When you sign up for Stumble Upon and download the toolbar, you will be able to check “I like it” as you visit your own sites and sites that are within your niche. Over time, you develop a list of your favorite sites which becomes a catalog of popular sites within your niche.

It is important, as you use Stumble Upon, that you not limit yourself to just

bookmarking your own sites. Your Stumble Upon profile will have much more impact and draw if it covers a wide breadth of sites within your niche. What makes Stumble Upon a great social networking tool (better than many social bookmarking tools out there), is that you can find users who have similar interests. On the main site, you can search the community for keywords and then make contact with people interested in your niche.

When you add someone as a friend on Stumble Upon, they will very likely look over your list of sites and bookmark them. Then your links will spread throughout the community, bring you traffic and make you more money.

These simple steps will create a broad network of backlinks and some

great Web 2.0 traffic. It will help you establish your site as an authority in

your niche market, and bring you targeted, interested traffic. The type of traffic that makes you money online!

If you found this information useful consider joining my free membership with over $500 worth of bonuses inside.

Facebook Marketing Explained

McVictor — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 21:21:04 +0000

Facebook is a great social network. Although it originally started out as a hangout for college students, it’s evolved into much more than that. These days it’s also a great place for adults to network and share common interests.

The concept of the site is simple. You sign up for an account and then fill out a profile. You can make a list of your interests, add photos of yourself, and even include fun add-ons to your profile. Then you can look for other people you’d like to network with and add them to your list of friends.

Most people use these friends lists just to meet like-minded individuals and make friends, but marketers also use the site to get in touch with potential customers. It can be a great way to find traffic if you know what you’re doing.

Marketing on Facebook is a complex system that may take a while to master. You see, unlike most other social networks, Facebook has no problem with people using the site to network for business purposes and even do a little marketing. But they don’t like certain kinds of marketing, so you have to be very careful about the type of marketing you use.

You don’t want to get banned. You may spend a lot of time building lists of friends and developing relationships with them so you can market to them. If your account is banned, you’ll lose all of the friends you’ve built up and thus lose all of the work you’ve put into building the list in the first place!

Smart marketers know that time and money should never be wasted, so it pays to follow the rules. Why spend weeks building a large list of friends, only to destroy what you’ve built with a few big mistakes? It’s much better to play it straight and make money from your list of friends for the long term.

The basic premise of social marketing is to build a list of friends orfollowers, then network with them in order to build name recognition and get your links seen. In order for social marketing to be truly effective, you’re going to have to actually network with people. It’s not called a “friends list” for nothing!

You’ll need to actually talk to people, build relationships, and build trust. Basically, you want people to remember your name and trust you enough to buy whatever it is you are selling or recommending. This is true for any niche, not just marketing to other marketers.

Let’s say you’re building a list of friends in the golf niche. You’ll want to specifically seek out golfers to comprise the majority of your list, of course. Then you’ll need to actually talk to them about golf. Imagine for a moment that you’re not there to make money – you’re actually just a regular golf fan who wants to talk to other golfers about your passion.

This is the frame of mind you need to be in. You need to build a presence as if you’re just there to discuss your passion for the market you’re targeting, whatever that market may be. It helps if you’re really interested in the niche, because it will make it easier for you to interact and become trusted by the people you want to market to.

Pouring your heart into your interactions with people will get you friends who are loyal and trusting. They’ll feel the passion you have for the topic, and they’ll start to respect you as someone who really knows what they’re talking about.

This is key. If you want people to trust you and buy from you, they need to believe you’re really an authority on the topic. Most people are smart enough to know they should only take advice from someone who actually appears to have expert knowledge and experience on a particular topic

The point is, people buy from people they know, like, and trust, and they take advice from people they believe are knowledgeable about the topic. It makes little sense to do otherwise, because taking advice from someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about can potentially cause problems, and at the very least be frustrating.

One very good way to market on Facebook is to start groups. A group is filled with people who share a common interest. For example, if you’re in the golf niche you could start a group specifically for golfers.

You could even further focus the niche by building a group specifically for female golfers or professional golfers. The more tightly-focused the niche group is, the more effective it’s likely to be in selling products to that target audience.

Groups are great, because you can do almost anything you want with them. You can invite anyone on your friends list to join your group. They have no obligation to join, of course, but those who do are fair game for marketing.

As long as you don’t use the group to constantly spam members and you actually make the group a fun and educational activity, you’ll have a list of people who are proven to be interested in a topic and you’ll have permission to market to them. And, voila, you have the perfect seller/buyer scenario!

You’re also free to place links to your own websites and products on your Facebook profile page. Anyone who becomes your friend and looks at your profile can see those links, and they can follow them to visit your websites. Just don’t add affiliate links to your profile. Facebook doesn’t want people using their site to spam affiliate links.

One thing you should not do is spam your friends’ “walls.” A wall is the section on a profile where peoplecan leave comments. Some people will write on other people’s walls and drop links in. This is not only considered bad form, but it could get you banned.

If you want to make use of walls, you can just leave interesting comments regarding your niche, and people can become your friend if they like the post you made. This is a great place to show off your knowledge of your niche.

You can post interesting tidbits of information or answer people’s questions this way. To make money online through Facebook may seem a bit complex, but it’s actually very easy. The traffic potential is great, so it’s worth taking the time to learn how to do it the right way!

Marketing on Social Networks

McVictor — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 21:50:58 +0000

Social networking is powerful because it allows you to target specific groups of people at their level. Instead of creating a site and distancing yourself from the public, you’re interacting with them on a new level.

This level of interaction is more personal and therefore puts you and your message in a different perspective. People don’t want to be “sold to” – period. But they love to get advice, take recommendations, and follow the crowd.

Social networking allows you to interact with your target market on a friendly, more casual level. This lowers their resistance to your marketing message since it isn’t presented as a sales pitch. What you’re offering is perceived as friendly advice or a recommendation.

For example, imagine the difference in acceptance between a direct mail postcard advertising a new model cell phone and a friend telling about their new cell phone and why they like it better than their previous phone. You’ll trust and respond better to your friend’s information and testimonial because you have a relationship with them.

When you present yourself as a reliable and trustworthy dispenser of accurate and valuable information, not only will you receive more traffic toyour sites, but it will be targeted and receptive traffic. Your audience will be ready to interact with your site or buy, depending on the type of site you have. They are interested in your niche topic, and they’ve made a connection with you somehow by interacting with you on the social networking site.

The other big benefit of using social networking is that it allows you tap into small niche markets with very little effort. These platforms can help you brand yourself and distribute information that relates to your business.

The best part is that once you get your platforms established (like your blog, your favorites list, or your profile) other people will start doing promotion for you, boosting your popularity. The audiences on Web 2.0 sites are very eager to interact and share. If you just concentrate on making your content interesting and buzz-worthy, then you’ll have no problem getting attention.

There are lots and lots of social networking sites, so many that you’d make yourself crazy if you tried to develop a presence on them all. To review some of your options, visit www.go2web20.net. This site catalogs lots of different Web 2.0 sites and allows you to search them by their purpose and function.