You never can think of a business without a proper strategy and a business website. Same is the case when you plan your marketing via Social networking. While considering Social sites for marketing you must have an exact Social Media Strategy that fits best as per the site you have for your business.

Social Media Strategy is actually about the changes which are capable of a massive contribution towards the optimization of the concerned site to bring more traffic/users/leads/prospects. It is rather a modern skill which needs to be adapted to strengthen one’s business. The following would provide you with tips for the better usability of the social sites to optimize your business website. The first step towards improving your business website is to provide it a better link ability. There are many sites that are regarded as static, in the sense that they are rarely updated. Here comes the role of Social sites which are being updated almost every fraction of second by its large user base. So, a word promoted with these sites can hit the high graph of traffic.

The three important requirements:

1st: In order to provide the website a better link ability it is better to add a blog to it. This is the first step towards making your website a popular one. One must ensure the easy tagging or bookmarking of the website as per the applications of the social sites. Adding quick buttons to the website may also help and adding suitable links to social sites like YouTube, digg, facebook, Twitter, word press, blogger, MySpace, LinkedIn would also be of a great help.

2nd: It is essential to give good amount of importance to the content and it is also desirable to have the content in the form of pdf, video etc wherever possible. They would simply enable content travel. One need not spend lots of money for re-inventing the same concept! Social networking in 2010 has a great scope.

3rd: Moderation of sites are available free of cost as Ning and similar sites give the freedom of moderating a website with ease. The website which is Ajax enable simply improves the response time of the site! So using these free services to implement a strategy that promotes your site through social networking site is a good idea. There is a strategy called the associative media marketing which would combine the concept of social networking and social media marketing.

Social Media Strategy concentrates around user driven sites of good repute and related communities used to build reciprocal links to other sites & blogs. They really can create good volume traffic and a healthy ranking of search in search engines. Blame it on the competition that there is an immense need to improve the uniqueness of the business websites & blogs to get higher amounts of traffic. Maintaining a website with a proper Social networking promotion strategy in place would definitely do a magnificent job in promoting the business.

Generating a buzz to get massive amounts of traffic to your website is best done using social media websites?

The easiest way to accomplish this is to leverage the clout of influencers within the social media community.

Influencers are people within a social network that are respected and liked by others in that community and are able to popularize discussions on topics of interst in that community. 

Influencers stimulate the conversations, connect people to ideas and can capture the mindshare or opinion of an audience within a social sphere. All social media websites have a few select individuals who stand out for their activity within the community and their expertise has gained the trust and support of the social media users.

These are the people you are are looking for and the ones you want to influence.

There are so many social media sites and the points we make in this article can be applied to any of them. We’ll be studying how to develope your own strategy for targeting the influencers of these sites to engage  their social network with your content.

Let’s look at a social news site like Digg for example. Digg and other sites like it allow the audience to vote on the value of content with a simple thumbs up and thumbs down vote. By actively participating in the community you can develope a following and become and authority and with that comes influence.

Over time supporters will share your content with friends or add it to their websites and blogs. Social media users can be pitched just like a blogger or writer can be pitched with a simple introduction at first gradually building a relationship that’s mutually benefitial. The goal is to leverage their brand of influence by influencing them to promote your website content within their community.

The main steps are Targeting, Networking and then Pitching the influencer in question.

1.Targeting
Finding a social media influencer that shares your point of view about your content and is relevent to their website or sphere of influence is most important. Making your content in-line or coherent with the influencers interests makes it much easier to get them to promote or agree with your content.

Go to the public user ranking list of the social media site in question, in this case Digg, and visit each profile on the listed looking for who has influence and also who resonates with what you’re promoting. Get a feel for what interests them. You can also do a keyword search on the social media site looking for content based on your keywords and find the users that rank high within the site on those keywords. If they have consistently submitted content around those keywords they are likely to be open to suggestions of simular content. You can also do a URL search of your keywords to find people that may be open to more content of that type.

Using the site yourself will help you discover little details about the user you’re targeting that can help you reach them and develope rapport. For example, while top Digg user MrBabyMan submits a great amount of stories, most active Diggers are familiar with his avid interest in Cracked.com, a popular pop culture/men’s portal/magazine.

2. Networking
After you’re done targeting a specific social media website you need to contact them and develpoe a relationship. You can get in touch with them from their contact info in their user profile and join the site as a registered user. If contact info is not available Google them by their name and user name to see if you can find it elsewhere. Look for their blog or other profiles they may have listed on other sites.

Once you have their contact details initiate a conversation by just send them a note and thank them for their contributions. Trying to pitch to promote your content right away is very bad etiquette and annoying. You can stand out from the crowd of self-interested crowd by genuinely showing your appreciation for their contributions.

Take a genuine interest in them and engage them in a dialog of common interests and do so continuously until you have a good idea what material they would support and do favors for the user by giving them publicity or links to free resources and interesting content (not your own).

Real social media users are always interested in buzz-worthy news or opinions that can boost their own authority within the social media community. Your content or anything else you offer should not only meet the integrity of their personal brand, but it should improve it and the reputation of the user within the community.

Offer them free invites to unrelated websites, give away exclusive information on certain topics. Share some links to excellent websites. Do little favors without asking for anything in return at all. Give them a reason to be interested in you.

Networking is really just about making friends. It’s that simple. This will gradually lead you into the third and final stage: Pitching the influencer.

3.Pitching
So now that you’ve built a rapport with this person what next?

A. Ask Casually. Do your pitching in a light hearted and casual manner and do not
aggressively push the user to promote your content. This is a huge turnoff and
you should understand that the user has a perfect right to refuse you.

B. Disclose Your affiliation. I would recommend letting the user know that you
are affiliated with the specific website, particularly if you plan to have a long
working relationship with the user. He or she will appreciate your honesty and it
will also make it easier for you to ask the second time round.

C. Space out your pitches. The biggest mistake you can make is to ask the influencer
to promote every single piece of content that comes out on your site. This is a major
irritant so only offer the user your best work, while pitching your material only once
per week or every two weeks.

Continue to keep aclose contact after they are promoting your site. Building a long-term relationship will have longterm results and targeted in-bound links to your website for years to come.

Good Luck!

Talk soon, 

Frank Tocco–Marketing Mentor

The internet has become the medium of choice for people to come together to socialize and network. It is an easy method for people from different parts of the country and even different continents to connect with one another and because so many people are becoming a part of this internet community, webmasters have had to reformulate the direction of how they market their businesses in order to take advantage of this.

People enjoy sharing their opinions with one another. Whether it is to learn different viewpoints, to show off individual expertise on certain subjects, or to engage in lively debate, people just like to talk. By marketing in these places where socializing occurs, you provide something to talk about.

Social media optimization or SMO for short, is all about gathering people within these internet socializing spots to talk about your company’s website and what your company offers. This is what you need as a webmaster. Not just to get larger numbers of people visiting your website. You also want those larger numbers to come to your website pretty much convinced to buy from you because they have heard many positive remarks about your company in the social places they frequent and trust. People talking about your company in various internet socializing websites can be likened to the publicity that surrounds celebrities as they are talked about by a variety of media outlets.

Celebrities need lots of publicity to maintain their star status. Likewise, you want star status for your website. This is why you have painstakingly worked on the search engine optimization and search engine marketing of your website in order to achieve the top search page ranking, but your work has really just begun. You need lots of publicity for your website to bring people to it, or all your hard work will have been for naught.

This is where many webmasters have not been focusing on as much as they should, and why so many are now scratching their heads and wondering what went wrong. There is plenty of information made available about how essential search engine optimization for your website is and how marketing them to the search engines to obtain high page ranking is for driving traffic to your website.

However many informational resources for SEO leave out, or only briefly touch upon such critical components as creating connection points with traffic even as you are endeavoring to drive them to your website with increased sales and profits. So when searching for an SEO website to help you optimize your own weibsite do your research, make sure that they know what they are talking about. How successful are they? How many websites have they optimized and how successful are those websites?

Introducing your company into the mix for discussion or creating an RSS feed on your website, in blogs, via YouTube, and in other online locations where people meet to socialize will create a connection point for traffic before they are led to your website. This point of connection will generate a lot of talk, creating more publicity for your website and your company.

As more people talk about your website, curiosity will be intensified for those who have yet to visit your website. No one wants to be left out of a good thing or to be outed for not being in the know. Therefore many visitors will peruse your website so that they can be knowledgeable participants in discussions about your website and company. The leaders in these social groups will likely be the first to do business with your company, given that you provide a needed service or product. The experiences they have with dealing with your company will then be related to the social group as a whole.

This is really good if you have an exceptional product or service and equally good customer care policies in place. Alternatively it can be really bad if your product or services are inferior or your company seriously lacks good customer service policies. The ensuing discussions about your company including experiences influential members of the social group have had, holds a great influence on whether other members will choose to do business with you or not.

Get into the various online socializing spots and introduce your company and website into the mix today. Doing this increases the probability that the traffic that does make its way to your website is traffic that is looking for just what you offer and traffic that is ready to do business. Two things you want very much from the traffic being driven to your website to do.

Here are the updated website performance numbers for clients launched in 2009!  Many of you are making MAJOR progress online!

www.jenniferbagley.com – 90/100 -Traffic Rank: Top 6.43 %
www.businessbuildersuite.com – 94/100 in Traffic Rank: Top 4.74 %
www.complimentsconnection.com – 88/100 -Traffic Rank: Top 2.37 %
www.businessblitz.net – 86/100  -Traffic Rank: Top 2.49 %
www.thecomplimentscard.com – 68/100 -Traffic Rank: Top 2.51 %

FLASH SITE – www.complimentsinternational.com Grade – 32/100 Traffic Rank: Top 13.04%

Facebook Sending More Traffic Than Google to Some Sites

Will Search-Marketing Dollars Also Shift to Social Media?

by Michael Learmonth

Published: March 09, 2009

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Marketers spend billions to attract search traffic from Google, but late last year Facebook started becoming a bigger source of traffic for some large websites, according to analytics firm Hitwise.

It seems inevitable that, given Facebook’s sheer scale (180 million registered users and counting), it would at some point start referring a lot of users to some sites, but the development is surprising. Web users go to Google to figure out where to go next; they go to Facebook to, well, hang out.

Facebook gets a little more than a third of Google’s unique visitors in the U.S. (50 million vs. 149 million in January, per ComScore); since last summer, registered users have been growing at a double-digit rate.

Where they’re going
But since the beginning of the year, Facebook has become a bigger referring site than Google to a number of sites, including gossip sites PerezHilton.com and Dlisted, mom site CafeMom, Evite, video site Tagged.com, and, yes, Twitter.

There are good reasons for some of this: CafeMom has a Facebook fan page, which no doubt helps drive traffic, and users can synchronize updates with Facebook and Twitter.

It’s hard to know why two gossip sites are on the list, aside from the fact that they tend to be places people spend a lot of time. Since the beginning of 2009, gossip site PerezHilton.com has received 8.7% of its visitors from Facebook, compared with 7.6% from Google, according to Hitwise. The same didn’t hold true, however, for gossip site TMZ, which got 12.2% of its traffic from Google, compared with 3.8% from Facebook.

Big source for video sites
As NewTeeVee points out, Facebook has also become a big source of referrals for video sites as users post and share clips. Traffic from Facebook accounted for 3.3% of visits to video sites in February, according to Hitwise, up from less than 2% in February of last year.

It all points to the growing power of content sharing; the question is how to harness that and what it means for the future of “search” marketing. Companies spent $12.2 billion in 2008 on search optimization and marketing to get traffic from Google, according to eMarketer.

But Peter Yared, CEO of marketing firm iWidgets, said he thinks some of that spending is going to shift to where the viewers, and the traffic, increasingly are. “Soon the [search-engine marketing and search-engine optimization] spend will start to follow the eyeballs and transition from Google to social media,” he said.