Importance of Social Networking

Greetings to all. It's pouring rain down here in Tulsa, and
I'm soaking wet. Been running errands all over town and it
was impossible to stay dry, even with a large umbrella.

Today I want to continue our discussion about the biggest
mistakes businesses make with their web sites and also extend
a special offer to you, my loyal subscriber.

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If none of this floats your boat, Steven, go to
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OK, now back to our regularly scheduled program.

Last time we talk about major online mistakes businesses
make, we covered the importance of including a form to
collect the first name and email address of every visitor.

Today I want to talk about the importance of leveraging
social media to promote your web site.

Personally, I use two blogs to cross-promote my services to
different audiences. One blog is focused on the small to
mid-sized businesses and may be found here:

http://marketingcowboy.blogspot.com/

If you browse through the blog, you'll find it contains
almost every newsletter I've written over the past few
years.

There's another blog for my friends who are magicians here:

http://steveschneiderman.blogspot.com/

Magic is a hobby of mine, but I also build sites for
magicians, so this blog serves two purposes.

On some of the sites we design, we integrate a blog like we
did for my magician friend, Eric DeCamps:

http://www.ericdecamps.com/

If you look at the navigation, you'll notice the last
button is Blog. This is integrated into our own content
management system and allows Eric to delete, edit, or
publish blog comments from his visitors.

For another client, we integrated both a Word Press blog as
well as a forum for their members:

http://www.insidepm.net

For EbookoMatic.com, we integrated a forum, to encourage
authors to share tips and advice about the publishing
world.

Using these tools helps build a sense of community among
people with common interests. Just about the best thing you
can have are a bunch of people getting together to sing your
praises.

Additionally, by encouraging visitors/members to
participate in your forums and to comment on your blog
entries, you are receiving fresh new content for free. This
also helps to spread the word virally about you and your
service and site.

Forums are also a great place to spread the word and gain a
following. Rather than join a bunch of forums and blatantly
promote your stuff, you will be far better served by
participating in a bunch of related forums for a while.
Once you are perceived as a friend to the forum, people
will react more kindly to your promotions.

As an experiment, several years ago, I joined about 6
marketing forums and participated in discussions for a few
weeks. Then I started offering my products at a discounted
rate for selected forums. Over four months time, my little
experiment generated over $2600.00 and with very minimal
effort.

Based upon my experiment, I realized that tracking all my
special offers for each forum was a bear, so I developed a
piece of software to track it all and generate reports on
my marketing efforts -- kind of like Quicken. It's very
cool and you can read about it here:

http://www.forummarketingmanager.com/

If you want to learn more about the fine art of using
forums to market yourself more effectively, then you can
purchase the ebook here:

http://www.forummarketingzombie.com/

Now there are also a number of other ways to use social
media. Most of you have already read about the power of
YouTube (really more viral video than social networking but
can be used for social networking purposes) as well as
Twitter, FaceBook, and LinkedIn.com.

I have accounts on all of these and a few more like
Affluence.org among others. Of all of these, I find
LinkedIn.com to be the most useful for connecting to other
businesses -- it's great for sharing information with close
friends as well as prospecting and promoting yourself.

When I first started consulting full-time again in 2006,
the first thing I did was to get on LinkedIn.com and start
re-connecting with old clients, peers, employers, and
friends to get as many testimonials as possible. This
helped me gain credibility quickly, and I still send people
to my personal page whenever they want to know everything
about me.

I find FaceBook to be a total waste of time unless you are
interested in hooking up with old girlfriends or school
mates. I may be off base here because I hear about a lot of
people who milk Facebook for big bucks and to build their
mailing list.

Now a friend and client of mine will soon be announcing a
cool tool for FaceBook that will blow you away, but more
about that later.

Twitter is interesting. I started an account, followed a
few interesting people and friends, and have left it alone.
Without any promotion whatsoever I have a few dozen people
following me.

I found Twitter very helpful last week when I was looking
for an intellectual property attorney to help me in my
fight against Amazon.com. Someone referred a friend to me,
and we're off to the faces.

Some Twitter friends have tweeted about my daughter's
fundraiser to go to D.C. this summer. Others just like to
stay in touch this way. I find it awkward and wonder if
people really want to know I'm at Starbucks having coffee.
I laugh when I see folks making entries every 15 minutes. I
say, "Get a life!" but they would probably tell me that they
have thousands of followers who care about their coffee breaks.

Anyway, at the end of the day, you want to look at the most
appropriate ways to leverage social media to raise your
visibility online. So if you've been ignoring this stuff,
it's probably time to re-evaluate it all and pick a few
tactics to implement ASAP.

Hope this is helpful to you. Drop me a line and please
don't forget to take advantage of my special pricing for
services. Steve-o has to pay for new office furniture.

All my best,

Steven