Posts Tagged ‘marketing’

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.

You don’t have to look very hard to find a plethora of free tools online to use in your marketing efforts. From free keyword tools, to market research, to free photos and more, you can find almost anything you need at no cost to you. The problem is, many of the better, but still free, tools aren’t very easy to find. There may even be some right under your nose that you never realized were there!

For example, you may or may not have heard of Project Gutenberg. It’s a free database of public domain content. Public domain books are publications that have had their copyrights expire. These publications can be used freely in any way you wish! Most people know they can go download these books and sell them, but did you think of using them as web content?

You can take these books and use the content directly on your web pages for free – and you can alter them any way you wish, adding to it so that it captures your own marketing voice perfectly. Visit www.gutenberg.org for more information.

Wikipedia is widely known, but did you know they make their content available without copyright? Wikipedia offers all of their content through creative commons licensing, which means you can take it and use it on your site, in your blog, or in your web 2.0 marketing efforts. Also, most of the photos on the site are public domain or licensed under creative commons, so if you need a photo for a project, this is a great first place to look. Visit www.Wikipedia.org to find out more.

Morgue File is a free online repository of pictures that you can freely use (don’t worry – it has  nothing to do with an actual morgue). Although some of the photos there are protected, the vast majority are available through creative commons, so you can use them on your sites for free. Visit www.morguefile.com to take a look at their images whenever you need pictures for your marketing use.

WordTracker is a great keyword program, but it can be very expensive. And sometimes the results it shows  aren’t really in line with the numbers you can expect to see from Google. But WordTracker has a free version of its program that allows you to search up to 100 keywords at a time for free. Not only that, but they have a version that uses Google Trends to help determine approximate Google search volume. Visit http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/gtrends to check out this remarkable free tool.

Google has a great tool that can help you keep on top of the latest news in your niche. It’s called Google Alerts, and it can send you an email alert whenever something new pops up on the ‘net that is related to the keywords you give it (even your ownname if you want to know when people are talking about you). Go to http://google.com/alerts to set up your alerts to be delivered as they happen, or less often in digest mode.

If you want to quickly and easily find out the link popularity of a site, you can do this for all three of the top search engines for free. Visit http://mikes-marketing-tools.com/linkpopularity/ and you can do a quick search over all three major search engines.

If you want to find out where a particular page ranks in the search engines, you can use http://mikesmarketing-tools.com/ranking-reports/.
This page lets you search the eight most popular search engines for a particular URL and gives you its page rank.

Need to quickly find out the keyword density of your content? Visit http://webuildpages.com/seotools/keyword-density/ and you can analyze any page for free.

KWBrowse is a remarkable online tool that will let you find related terms
to use on your pages for LSI purposes. If you are using LSI on your pages for SEO purposes, take a look at www.kwbrowse.com to find keywords for your niche.