Issues on Privacy Concerns on Facebook

It seems that you can barely log into the internet today without finding dire warnings about the privacy of your FaceBook account. Hundreds (and possibly thousands) of users have declared May 31, 2010 as “Leave FaceBook Day”. Since the dawn of the internet, privacy has been a concern. However, if you put a google search in for “Facebook Privacy Concerns” it returns 17,400,000 results while Twitter returns 15,500,000 results and LinkedIn at the bottom of the pile returns 667,000 results.

In a viewpoint, Facebook is approximated to have the largest number of users among the three. And truthfully, the three (although often lumped together) are really different and have different audiences. With that said, how concerned should you be about your FaceBook security?

Well, like anything else that’s on the internet, it’s not hack-proof. Even the strongest privacy policy isn’t going to protect you if someone really wants to get at your information. Changes on the privacy policy on Facebook however seem to be on a craze and they don’t really mind how many protests they receive, it is more like a “woops” to them. Then there is the audacity of Facebook founders to tell you that having multiple “online” identities is displaying unethical behavior? He’s simply letting you know that your account for business and personal account on Facebook must be one and the same or you don’t have the ethics. And the answer to that?

Probably not – most of us tend to like to keep our “personal” and our “business” lives (especially online) separate as much as possible. I mean seriously – do your children really care if the company that you are promoting has already reached 1000 blog readers? Do those people who follows your company really need to know that your grand daughter is a part of a cheerleading tournament? Probably the answer to both of these is “not so much”.

Given the number of issues that have come around you’ll find hundreds of articles including a very interesting one from the New York Times where they referred to FaceBook privacy options as “A Bewildering Tangle of Options”. Unless you are willing to spend the time to verify all of these potential options, you might just want to rethink your FaceBook account. However, keep something else in mind – deleting your FaceBook account borders on amusing and is certainly confusing for most.

- Words of Caution:

* Disabling your Facebook account and deleting it are NOT the same thing!

* Links shared by other users after you posted them don’t get removed

* Photos that you shared who others shared don’t get removed

* There are other restrictions that can still cause you privacy issues.

* If you get through the delete process and don’t stay out of Facebook it negates the entire process!!

With that here are some options to help:

* A 33 slide show on how to lock down your privacy at Facebook

* Video instructions on how to delete your Facebook account

* Make sure you read some of the information and make an informed decision.

Tips to Market at Flickr

Ready to shine on Flickr? Here are some tips on how to go about it:

1. Build up a portfolio of quality photos. Most Flickr users have an eye and taste for quality. Many of them will certainly ignore email marketing efforts based on poor photos. Hire a photographer, buy the best camera, or capture images powered by enchanting concepts. By whatever means possible, half of the email marketing challenge is solved when the photos are there.

2. Tag for searchability. Flickr, like almost all online community sites, rely heavily on search tags to bring results to users. The most appropriate keywords should be used as descriptive tags to bring in the target audience. Further to this, keyword analysis should be conducted, to appropriately modify tags to suit the search patterns of users.

3. Organize photos properly into collections, for ease of access by users, who can click on the photo galleries based on themed groupings descriptive of actual content.

4. Grab attention with attractive thumbnails. From the photo collection, the best images should be selected as thumbnails, those tiny visual teasers that lure users to peruse the rest of the collection.

5. Regular photo updates. As in blogs and websites, frequently refreshing content builds reputation for being a reliable and consistent source of fresh images, with the possibility of being visited more often or linked to by other blogs and websites.

6. Treat Flickr as a social media playground. That means joining relevant groups and sharing tips, news and photos with the community. This builds relationships and reputation, and widens email marketing coverage further.

Summing up how to make email marketing work in Flickr, it takes nice quality photos, the will to keep going by regularly updating fresh content, and socializing with the Flickr community, to really reap the rewards of the email marketing campaign.

List Building In The Age Of Twitter

Andy Warhol got it wrong, he meant to say 15 seconds instead of 15 minutes! That lower number seems much more appropriate in the fast moving world of Twitter, the souped up mass online messaging tool that never quits or takes a breather. But how effective is Twitter as a list building tool?

Recently, one well-known Internet Marketer deleted his Twitter account which had over 25,000 followers, saying his messages or tweets were no longer being read and the response rate was next to nil. While this seems a little drastic, for SEO reasons alone it would be very foolish to delete a Twitter account with that many subscribers.

However, does this marketer have a point? Do your tweets get read or are they lost in the endless flood of other tweets quickly passing through the system. There is probably a lot of unread tweets flowing in our cyberage wasteland and the effectiveness of tweeting has diminished drastically as countless marketers plaster this latest medium with their marketing sales pitches.

So is Twitter an effective list building tool or not? Yes and no, it would all depend on how you approach the situation.

Twitter is a quick and effective way of building a large list of contacts which you can send messages to in a spam-free way. Lists with millions of followers is not unknown – thank Ashton Kutcher. Even for the online marketer and webmaster, Twitter can be an effective way to build a list of contacts very quickly.

However, the real issue remains, are your messages or tweets being read? Sadly, in many cases, because of the transitory nature and the sheer volume of tweets – your messages are probably not getting read or are not seen by as many people as you would like to see them. Therefore, one could argue about the effectiveness of Twitter as a list building tool; what’s the point if your messages are not making contact with your followers?

The key to success here is the same as with any list – you have to build a loyal group of followers who are eager to read your messages. It’s the relationship, stupid.

Besides, many people forget that Twitter is also one of the most popular web sites on the net, so having your messages and more importantly your links on this popular site is a “must-do” for webmasters and marketers. For SEO reasons alone, Twitter is extremely important. Your links are indexed by the search engines, especially if your Twitter profile is seen as an Authority Account with lots of influence.

With this fact in mind, here are some simple Twitter list building tips:

1. Make sure you build an attractive Twitter Profile targeted to your audience.

2. Place links to your Twitter Profile from all web sites and other social media sites/accounts.

3. One effective way is to use a Twitter bookmark on all your relevant content and pages.

4. Attach a link to your profile in all forum posts and email signatures.

5. Use your Twitter account as your main tool for contact with tech/customer support.

6. Add your Twitter Profile to your marketing articles and blog posts.

7. Offer free ebooks, courses and special reports to anyone who re-tweets your messages.

8. Become active within Twitter, link to other related Twitter profiles and build a strong presence.

Having said all that, I haven’t used Twitter much, except for SEO link building purposes. I find most messages or tweets do get lost in the constant flow of tweets. If a tweet falls in cyberspace, and no one reads it, is it really a tweet?

Then again, as an online affiliate marketer I have found other list building methods much more effective than sending a tweet. At the moment, one of my most effective list building techniques is at the opposite end of the spectrum, one that’s totally anonymous and invisible. If you’re into affiliate marketing you’re probably already using this technique; simply promote or pick affiliate products/program which have a cookie attached to them, when someone clicks your link they are “cookied” with your affiliate ID. I like picking affiliate programs which have at least a 90 day cookie, you can quickly build up an invisible list of prospective customers and if they buy within 90 days, you are credited with the commission.

Of course, one could always combine this affiliate list building method with your Twitter account/followers, which would be extremely effective if anyone ever bothered to read your tweets and click your links. Now if everyone could just spare 15 seconds, you have a very slim possibility of becoming both rich as well as famous.

Can You Afford To Miss Out The Twitter Traffic Train?

Twitter Traffic is an outstanding way to drive targeted traffic to your Website. You shouldn’t forget about other traffic sources but using Twitter is completely free and will definitely get a few more targeted visitors to your Website.

You got me right, I said „free targeted visitors” in the last sentence. A never ending stream of visitors will make your pockets full of money. There are lots of ways for you getting free traffic to your Website. But there is a big difference between free traffic and targeted traffic.

You might have heard about offers sending out thousands of visitors to your Website from several traffic generating Websites. These offers are good to give your traffic stats a push but you won’t actually generate a sale or find a prospect for your product. Visitors sent to you by free traffic Websites will usually leave your Website within seconds.

Targeted visitors instead are interested in the product or information you are offering on your Website, ready to break out their credit card! With my article I show you the Twitter strategy, getting targeted visitors ready to take action. It’s easy to do and is not even time consuming.

First thing you will have to do is to create a twitter account. I recommend not using your personal twitter account. If you have different niche Website create a single twitter account for every niche Website you have. Please don’t leave the default twitter avatar and background, choose an avatar and background image that fits your product or info best, because it will show your followers that you care about your account.

The next thing you will have to do is to deliver content – niche relevant quality content. Most of the content you will provide is created by others and will never include references to your own stuff. This may sound counter productive, but here’s why we will do it.

We want to supply as much quality content as we can to our followers and unless you create lots of crappy content or outsource your content creation you just don’t have the time and money to create all that quality content on your own in a short period of time. You will look like a spammer when you tweet only your own stuff every time. People will stop following you when you act like a spammer. By the way, „The short messages you send out with your Twitter account are called “tweets”.

Second thing of the process is to build a landing page or helpful blog post about your niche. This part will be the most important and you really do need to make sure to provide high quality content. But where do you find your niche relevant content ? Simply google for RSS feeds for your niche content, copy the link of the feed and paste the link of the RSS feed to your landing page or blog post. Make sure to select high quality RSS feed content. That will make your followers trust you. To click your links in the future it’s very important that your visitors trust you. The links you place in your landing page or blog post is the source to monetize the traffic you are getting from Twitter. The MOST IMPORTANT idea behind is that you place links to your products or information you want to share or sell. The text in the displayed link should contain a strong anchor text that will call to action and make them click the link that will lead them to your „money site”. Here you offer your product or information you want to sell or share.

So, the most important thing is to put a link to your money site at the end of your landing page or blog post. Make sure the link contains a strong call to action. The last part of this process will be to collect an email address from your visitors or to get in touch through a contact form or to even make the sale. Because now you are having a targeted visitor on your Website seeking for information. To catch their email address offer a free niche relevant ebook or report through an optin form. Once you have your visitors email address you can add it to your email list and feed them with any information or products of your choice any time you like. Only imagination can make you stop. To automate your info or product emails simply use an autoresponder of your choice. Your email list will be growing and growing.

Every tweet you are posting will be of very high quality and will make your followers to trust you. When people trust you enough they will make your tweets go viral and at this point magic happens.

So, the most important thing is to put a link to your money site at the end of your landing page or blog post. Make sure the link contains a strong call to action.

That pretty much is it. Getting started won’t cost you a dime. Once you get used to the process this shouldn’t take more than about 20 minutes a day. Give it a try, it’s an excellent way to drive targeted traffic to your Website.

Twitter As A Sales Tool: Tweak Your Sales through Tweets

With the advent of Web 2.0, the virtual world took a turn to the best. Yet, when it comes to employing Web 2.0 in internet marketing, nothing can be as effective as social media. However, despite the many options available for e-Marketers, Twitter proves itself to be one of the best solutions to get promotional messages across consumers all over the world.

This is where you, the internet marketer, come in. By tapping into any of these sources, you can easily provide a lot of exposure to your products. However, of these methods, social media, especially Twitter, is the best way to shine the limelight on what you have to offer.

- Why Twitter?

Here are some statistics that will help you understand why Twitter is the tool for you:

* Twitter has more than a 100 million registered users.

* The social media website is growing by 300,000 users per day on average.

* Aside from Twitter’s users, about 180 million unique visitors hit the site on a monthly basis.

These numbers sure do make your mouth water, don’t they? Just picture at least 1% of Twitter’s users heading in your direction i.e. 100,000 users. Of these, even if 1% of that amount (100 users) buys what you are selling, you will be able to have a considerable amount of profits by the end of the month.

Besides that, managing and using twitter is a simple process. All you will need to do is tweet your promotional message whenever you want to. Compare this to writing long blogs and having to put your writing skills to the test – tweets surely take a load off your mind, don’t they? Besides, you won’t need to pay a single dime! You can message the whole world and pay nothing at all!

- How Twitter Can Increase Your Sales

There are so many ways that Twitter can boost your sales. One of the first ways Twitter does that is by providing traffic to your website. Imagine tweeting a message with a link to your website, and then having at least a hundred followers re-tweet it onto their profiles. Your URL will spread online like a rocket ship at take off. In addition, with many people visiting your website, your search engine ranking will increase. Thus, you will be visible to those who aren’t using Twitter. Two birds with one stone!

Another way of increasing your website’s traffic (which in return leads to sales) is by tempting your followers. Everyone loves free things and will do anything to get them. By tweeting a competition or a sale, you will have many users try to fight their way through the online crowd to get to your website before everyone else.

You can also boost your sales by getting feedback from your followers. From time to time, you will have devoted followers provide you with constructive feedback. By using that, you will be able to assess your product’s weaknesses and strengths. Hence, you will be able create a solution to solve the weak points and focus on improving the strong points. This can ensure you of having more people like your product and eventually buy it.

There are also so many other ways such as following other Internet marketers in order to promote one another, and finding people who can help join your network to advertise your product. Regardless of what you choose, you can rest assured that you will have a thick wad of cash enter your pockets in a very short time.

So, if you’re interested in simplifying the already easy process of network marketing, all you will need is a Twitter account and a few effective promotional messages. After getting these, simply let the blue birdie take care of the rest.

How To Get Loads Of Twitter Traffic To Your Website?

Twitter is a brilliant way to drive targeted visitors to your Web site. You should not forget about other traffic sources but using Twitter is totally free and will definitely acquire a few more targeted visitors to your site. You got me right, I said free targeted visitors in the last sentence.

Nothing is better than a never endless stream of visitors. There are lots of ways for you getting free traffic to your Web site. But there is a huge difference between free traffic and targeted traffic. You could have heard about traffic generating websites sending out tons of people to your homepage. These offers are good to give your traffic stats a push but you will not actually generate a sale or find a prospect for your product. Visitors delivered to you by free traffic Websites will usually leave your Internet site within a few moments.

Targeted visitors instead are interested in the items or information you are offering on your Web site, prepared to break out their credit card! With my Twitter strategy I show you how to get targeted visitors ready to take action. It takes very little while and is simple to do.

What you will need in first place is a twitter account, naturally. I recommend avoid using your own twitter account. If you are having different niche sites create a single twitter account for each niche Web site you have. Please don’t leave the default twitter background and avatar, choose an avatar and background image that fits your product or info best, as it will show your followers that you care about your account.

The next step to do is to deliver content – business relevant good content. The majority of the content you will provide is created by others and will never include references to your own stuff. This may sound strange to you, but here I explain why we will do it.

Make sure to provide best content to your followers and unless you write loads of crappy content or outsource your article writing you just don’t have the cash and time to write all that quality content yourself in a short period of time. When you tweet your own stuff only on every occasion you will seem to be a spammer. Individuals will stop following you when you behave like a spammer. Incidentally, tweets are the short communications called that you send out with your Twitter account.

Second thing of the process is to build a landing page or helpful blog post about your business. This part will be the most significant and you really must ensure to supply good articles. But where will you find all the business relevant content ? Go and google for RSS feeds for your business content, copy the link of the feed and paste the link of the RSS feed to your landing page or blog post. Ensure to pick out high quality RSS feed content. That will make your followers trust you. When they trust whatever you tell them it will encourage them to click your links sooner or later. The links you place in your landing page or blog post is the origin to monetize the traffic you are receiving from Twitter. The MOST IMPORTANT idea behind is that you place links to your products or service you would like to share or sell. The writing in the displayed link should contain a strong anchor text that will call to action and make them click the link that will lead them to your cash site. Here you offer your product or information you want to sell or share.

So, the most important thing is to place a link to your money site at the end of your landing page or blog post. Ensure the link incorporates a strong call to action. The final section of this action will be to build up an email address from your visitors or to get in touch through a contact form or to even make the sale. Because now you are having a targeted visitor on your Web site seeking information. To catch their email address offer a free of charge business relevant ebook or report through an optin form. Once you have your visitors email address you can add it to your email list and feed them with any information or products of your choosing any time you like. Only imagination will make you stop. To automate your information or product emails simply employ an autoresponder of your choosing. Your email list will be growing and growing.

Every tweet you are posting will be of very high quality and will make your followers to believe in you. When people trust you enough they will make your tweets go viral and at this moment in time magic happens.

So, the most significant thing is to place a link to your income site at the end of your landing page or web log post. Make certain the link contains a powerful call to action.

That just about is it. The great thing about this is you will not have to spend tons of dollars to get rolling. As soon as you come to terms with the process this shouldn’t take more than about 20 minutes per day. Give it a try, it’s a superb way to drive targeted traffic to your Website.

How has the Internet Developed into Web 2.0?

The term Web 2.0 was coined in 1999 by Darcy DiNucci, a consultant on electronic information design in her article “Fragmented Future” and became closely associated with Tim O’Reilly who used it in a Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004 to describe the future, as he saw it, of the World Wide Web. The term, seen by many as misleading, stuck. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web, labeled the term “a piece of jargon.” Although the term Web 2.0 implies a new or updated version of the World Wide Web this couldn’t be further from the truth. There were, and have not been, any technical updates to the Web.

So what is Web 2.0? It actually refers to websites and web applications that facilitate interactive information sharing, interoperability and user-centered design.

* What is Interactive information sharing?

A great example of interactive information sharing is Social Media websites. People use websites like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and WordPress – to name but a few, to share information in the form of photos, music, photos – in fact, anything digital. The great thing about these mediums is that once the information has been published it is available around the world. Some of this will be in the public domain, like blogs for example and some will be kept only for confirmed friends and family – like Facebook. This form of sharing falls into one of the four Sharing design patterns: one-to-one sharing, one-to-many sharing, many-to-many sharing, and many-to-one sharing. Technologies that meet all four of these design patterns include blogs, wikis, really simple syndication (RSS Feeds), tagging, and chat.

* What is Interoperability?

Interoperability refers to systems that work together or that inter-operate. James A. O’Brien and George M. Marakas define interoperability as: Being able to accomplish end-user applications using different types of computer systems, operating systems, and application software, interconnected by different types of local and wide area networks. A good example of interoperability is the use of XML or Extensible Mark-up Language. XML is a generic format intended for maximum flexibility to provide information in a wide variety of structural formats. It is not dependent on any particular platform (Windows, Mac, Linux or Unix for example) and is therefore inter-operable. In fact RSS feeds are a very good example of being able to present data in a format that can be interpreted on just about any platform, even mobile phones. This is interoperability.

* What is User-centered design?

User-centered design is a process in which the needs, wants, and limitations of end users of a product are given extensive attention at each stage of the design process.

This is a multi-stage problem solving process that involves testing how users will use a product. It is multi-staged because every interface design has to be tested; this is based on what a first-time user of their design experiences. If a developed and designer of a product do not go through this process, users may not intuitively understand how the product works. To provide true user-centered design, it is necessary for these products to have changeable user interfaces that is appropriate to each user-class. User-centered design of a web site, for instance, seeks to answer the following questions:

- Who are the users of the document?

- What are the users’ tasks and goals?

- What are the users’ experience levels with the document, and documents like it?

- What functions do the users need from the document?

- What information might the users need, and in what form do they need it?

- How do users think the document should work?

So the term Web 2.0 is more about the development of the technologies used on the web rather than the web itself.

These developments are based on user experience and user expectations. The freedom of communicating with friends regardless of time and distance, and the ability to share anything in digital format are the expectations that have led us from Web 1.0 and static web pages to Web 2.0 where we can create our own interfaces for our social websites and share our videos with friends and family on the other side of the world.

Issues on Privacy Concerns on Facebook

It seems that you can barely log into the internet today without finding dire warnings about the privacy of your FaceBook account. Hundreds (and possibly thousands) of users have declared May 31, 2010 as “Leave FaceBook Day”. Since the dawn of the internet, privacy has been a concern. However, if you put a google search in for “Facebook Privacy Concerns” it returns 17,400,000 results while Twitter returns 15,500,000 results and LinkedIn at the bottom of the pile returns 667,000 results.

In a viewpoint, Facebook is approximated to have the largest number of users among the three. And truthfully, the three (although often lumped together) are really different and have different audiences. With that said, how concerned should you be about your FaceBook security?

Well, like anything else that’s on the internet, it’s not hack-proof. Even the strongest privacy policy isn’t going to protect you if someone really wants to get at your information. Changes on the privacy policy on Facebook however seem to be on a craze and they don’t really mind how many protests they receive, it is more like a “woops” to them. Then there is the audacity of Facebook founders to tell you that having multiple “online” identities is displaying unethical behavior? He’s simply letting you know that your account for business and personal account on Facebook must be one and the same or you don’t have the ethics. And the answer to that?

Probably not – most of us tend to like to keep our “personal” and our “business” lives (especially online) separate as much as possible. I mean seriously – do your children really care if the company that you are promoting has already reached 1000 blog readers? Do those people who follows your company really need to know that your grand daughter is a part of a cheerleading tournament? Probably the answer to both of these is “not so much”.

Given the number of issues that have come around you’ll find hundreds of articles including a very interesting one from the New York Times where they referred to FaceBook privacy options as “A Bewildering Tangle of Options”. Unless you are willing to spend the time to verify all of these potential options, you might just want to rethink your FaceBook account. However, keep something else in mind – deleting your FaceBook account borders on amusing and is certainly confusing for most.

- Words of Caution:

* Disabling your Facebook account and deleting it are NOT the same thing!

* Links shared by other users after you posted them don’t get removed

* Photos that you shared who others shared don’t get removed

* There are other restrictions that can still cause you privacy issues.

* If you get through the delete process and don’t stay out of Facebook it negates the entire process!!

With that here are some options to help:

* A 33 slide show on how to lock down your privacy at Facebook

* Video instructions on how to delete your Facebook account

* Make sure you read some of the information and make an informed decision.


List Building In The Age Of Twitter

Andy Warhol got it wrong, he meant to say 15 seconds instead of 15 minutes! That lower number seems much more appropriate in the fast moving world of Twitter, the souped up mass online messaging tool that never quits or takes a breather. But how effective is Twitter as a list building tool?

Recently, one well-known Internet Marketer deleted his Twitter account which had over 25,000 followers, saying his messages or tweets were no longer being read and the response rate was next to nil. While this seems a little drastic, for SEO reasons alone it would be very foolish to delete a Twitter account with that many subscribers.

However, does this marketer have a point? Do your tweets get read or are they lost in the endless flood of other tweets quickly passing through the system. There is probably a lot of unread tweets flowing in our cyberage wasteland and the effectiveness of tweeting has diminished drastically as countless marketers plaster this latest medium with their marketing sales pitches.

So is Twitter an effective list building tool or not? Yes and no, it would all depend on how you approach the situation.

Twitter is a quick and effective way of building a large list of contacts which you can send messages to in a spam-free way. Lists with millions of followers is not unknown – thank Ashton Kutcher. Even for the online marketer and webmaster, Twitter can be an effective way to build a list of contacts very quickly.

However, the real issue remains, are your messages or tweets being read? Sadly, in many cases, because of the transitory nature and the sheer volume of tweets – your messages are probably not getting read or are not seen by as many people as you would like to see them. Therefore, one could argue about the effectiveness of Twitter as a list building tool; what’s the point if your messages are not making contact with your followers?

The key to success here is the same as with any list – you have to build a loyal group of followers who are eager to read your messages. It’s the relationship, stupid.

Besides, many people forget that Twitter is also one of the most popular web sites on the net, so having your messages and more importantly your links on this popular site is a “must-do” for webmasters and marketers. For SEO reasons alone, Twitter is extremely important. Your links are indexed by the search engines, especially if your Twitter profile is seen as an Authority Account with lots of influence.

With this fact in mind, here are some simple Twitter list building tips:

1. Make sure you build an attractive Twitter Profile targeted to your audience.

2. Place links to your Twitter Profile from all web sites and other social media sites/accounts.

3. One effective way is to use a Twitter bookmark on all your relevant content and pages.

4. Attach a link to your profile in all forum posts and email signatures.

5. Use your Twitter account as your main tool for contact with tech/customer support.

6. Add your Twitter Profile to your marketing articles and blog posts.

7. Offer free ebooks, courses and special reports to anyone who re-tweets your messages.

8. Become active within Twitter, link to other related Twitter profiles and build a strong presence.

Having said all that, I haven’t used Twitter much, except for SEO link building purposes. I find most messages or tweets do get lost in the constant flow of tweets. If a tweet falls in cyberspace, and no one reads it, is it really a tweet?

Then again, as an online affiliate marketer I have found other list building methods much more effective than sending a tweet. At the moment, one of my most effective list building techniques is at the opposite end of the spectrum, one that’s totally anonymous and invisible. If you’re into affiliate marketing you’re probably already using this technique; simply promote or pick affiliate products/program which have a cookie attached to them, when someone clicks your link they are “cookied” with your affiliate ID. I like picking affiliate programs which have at least a 90 day cookie, you can quickly build up an invisible list of prospective customers and if they buy within 90 days, you are credited with the commission.

Of course, one could always combine this affiliate list building method with your Twitter account/followers, which would be extremely effective if anyone ever bothered to read your tweets and click your links. Now if everyone could just spare 15 seconds, you have a very slim possibility of becoming both rich as well as famous.

Beginner’s Guide on Social Media

Social media has been practiced now as a means for small business to establish their brands online without having to spend much. Unluckily, many are also fearful on the tasks that lies ahead. You may learn easily or in a difficult way, that depends on how secure you are in using web and technology generally.

You don’t have to apply a full-fledged method immediately though. It takes time to get momentum going. In the meantime, here are some tips you should keep in mind when starting out:

* Start Small While Thinking Big

It would be foolhardy to jump into every trend you see without looking into its relevance for your business. Try out a couple of social media sites first and create profiles there. Regularly add friends, fans, and followers by contacting both regular customers and prospects. It is important to update your profile regularly with new content and fresh information. If you see results from the first few endeavors, it is time to expand your social media coverage.

* Place a Widget on Your Blog

One of the best ways to get a solid following is to make it easy for people to recommend your site and service. Widgets provide both of those. Get notice to those popular social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Digg among others.

* Test the Effectiveness of Widgets

Different audiences will have varying response and characteristics. For example, there are blogs that may have lots of Facebook fans but receive barely any recommendations on Digg. Just as some blogs may get many Retweets but doesn’t make an impact at all. Identify which tools should be kept and which tools to drop in your blog.

* Don’t Go for the Hard-Sell

It might be tempting to bombard your followers with offers, discounts, and marketing materials on a daily basis but this tactic hardly ever works. People appreciate exclusive offers now and then. But if they think that they are forced too hard by your company to be able to get sales, they will not really like it. It might be more helpful to provide industry news articles and reports. Answering their questions and concerns is also important.

* Look at the Strategy of Others

Are you wondering why a certain company is getting so many regular followers? If so, look at their social media strategy. Through this, you can be able to dig up their secrets, the tool they are using and how were they able to establish a strong following.

Twitter As A Sales Tool: Tweak Your Sales through Tweets

With the advent of Web 2.0, the virtual world took a turn to the best. Yet, when it comes to employing Web 2.0 in internet marketing, nothing can be as effective as social media. However, despite the many options available for e-Marketers, Twitter proves itself to be one of the best solutions to get promotional messages across consumers all over the world.

This is where you, the internet marketer, come in. By tapping into any of these sources, you can easily provide a lot of exposure to your products. However, of these methods, social media, especially Twitter, is the best way to shine the limelight on what you have to offer.

* Why Twitter?

Here are some statistics that will help you understand why Twitter is the tool for you:

- Twitter has more than a 100 million registered users.

- The social media website is growing by 300,000 users per day on average.

- Aside from Twitter’s users, about 180 million unique visitors hit the site on a monthly basis.

These numbers sure do make your mouth water, don’t they? Just picture at least 1% of Twitter’s users heading in your direction i.e. 100,000 users. Of these, even if 1% of that amount (100 users) buys what you are selling, you will be able to have a considerable amount of profits by the end of the month.

Besides that, managing and using twitter is a simple process. All you will need to do is tweet your promotional message whenever you want to. Compare this to writing long blogs and having to put your writing skills to the test – tweets surely take a load off your mind, don’t they? Besides, you won’t need to pay a single dime! You can message the whole world and pay nothing at all!

* How Twitter Can Increase Your Sales

There are so many ways that Twitter can boost your sales. One of the first ways Twitter does that is by providing traffic to your website. Imagine tweeting a message with a link to your website, and then having at least a hundred followers re-tweet it onto their profiles. Your URL will spread online like a rocket ship at take off. In addition, with many people visiting your website, your search engine ranking will increase. Thus, you will be visible to those who aren’t using Twitter. Two birds with one stone!

Another way of increasing your website’s traffic (which in return leads to sales) is by tempting your followers. Everyone loves free things and will do anything to get them. By tweeting a competition or a sale, you will have many users try to fight their way through the online crowd to get to your website before everyone else.

You can also boost your sales by getting feedback from your followers. From time to time, you will have devoted followers provide you with constructive feedback. By using that, you will be able to assess your product’s weaknesses and strengths. Hence, you will be able create a solution to solve the weak points and focus on improving the strong points. This can ensure you of having more people like your product and eventually buy it.

There are also so many other ways such as following other Internet marketers in order to promote one another, and finding people who can help join your network to advertise your product. Regardless of what you choose, you can rest assured that you will have a thick wad of cash enter your pockets in a very short time.

So, if you’re interested in simplifying the already easy process of network marketing, all you will need is a Twitter account and a few effective promotional messages. After getting these, simply let the blue birdie take care of the rest.

How To Get Loads Of Twitter Traffic To Your Website

Twitter is a brilliant way to drive targeted visitors to your Web site. You should not forget about other traffic sources but using Twitter is totally free and will definitely acquire a few more targeted visitors to your site. You got me right, I said free targeted visitors in the last sentence.

Nothing is better than a never endless stream of visitors. There are lots of ways for you getting free traffic to your Web site. But there is a huge difference between free traffic and targeted traffic. You could have heard about traffic generating websites sending out tons of people to your homepage. These offers are good to give your traffic stats a push but you will not actually generate a sale or find a prospect for your product. Visitors delivered to you by free traffic Websites will usually leave your Internet site within a few moments.

Targeted visitors instead are interested in the items or information you are offering on your Web site, prepared to break out their credit card! With my Twitter strategy I show you how to get targeted visitors ready to take action. It takes very little while and is simple to do.

What you will need in first place is a twitter account, naturally. I recommend avoid using your own twitter account. If you are having different niche sites create a single twitter account for each niche Web site you have. Please don’t leave the default twitter background and avatar, choose an avatar and background image that fits your product or info best, as it will show your followers that you care about your account.

The next step to do is to deliver content – business relevant good content. The majority of the content you will provide is created by others and will never include references to your own stuff. This may sound strange to you, but here I explain why we will do it.

Make sure to provide best content to your followers and unless you write loads of crappy content or outsource your article writing you just don’t have the cash and time to write all that quality content yourself in a short period of time. When you tweet your own stuff only on every occasion you will seem to be a spammer. Individuals will stop following you when you behave like a spammer. Incidentally, tweets are the short communications called that you send out with your Twitter account.

Second thing of the process is to build a landing page or helpful blog post about your business. This part will be the most significant and you really must ensure to supply good articles. But where will you find all the business relevant content ? Go and google for RSS feeds for your business content, copy the link of the feed and paste the link of the RSS feed to your landing page or blog post. Ensure to pick out high quality RSS feed content. That will make your followers trust you. When they trust whatever you tell them it will encourage them to click your links sooner or later. The links you place in your landing page or blog post is the origin to monetize the traffic you are receiving from Twitter. The Most Important idea behind is that you place links to your products or service you would like to share or sell. The writing in the displayed link should contain a strong anchor text that will call to action and make them click the link that will lead them to your cash site. Here you offer your product or information you want to sell or share.

So, the most important thing is to place a link to your money site at the end of your landing page or blog post. Ensure the link incorporates a strong call to action. The final section of this action will be to build up an email address from your visitors or to get in touch through a contact form or to even make the sale. Because now you are having a targeted visitor on your Web site seeking information. To catch their email address offer a free of charge business relevant ebook or report through an optin form. Once you have your visitors email address you can add it to your email list and feed them with any information or products of your choosing any time you like. Only imagination will make you stop. To automate your information or product emails simply employ an autoresponder of your choosing. Your email list will be growing and growing.

Every tweet you are posting will be of very high quality and will make your followers to believe in you. When people trust you enough they will make your tweets go viral and at this moment in time magic happens.

So, the most significant thing is to place a link to your income site at the end of your landing page or web log post. Make certain the link contains a powerful call to action.

That just about is it. The great thing about this is you will not have to spend tons of dollars to get rolling. As soon as you come to terms with the process this shouldn’t take more than about 20 minutes per day. Give it a try, it’s a superb way to drive targeted traffic to your Website.

Social Networking Sites List

· www.twitter.com

· www.twellow.com (Find new people for Twitter)

· www.myspace.com

· www.sharenow.com

· www.del.icio.us

· www.ireport.com

· www.comscore.com

· www.alexa.com

· www.dmoz.com

· www.yahoo.com (Yahoo! Directory)

· www.reddit.com

· www.furl.net

· www.blinklist.com

· www.netvouz.com

· www.digg.com

· www.stumbleupon.com

· www.hi5.com

· www.flickr.com

· www.blip.tv

· www.reunion.com

· www.linkedin.com

· www.meetup.com

· www.webshots.com

· Blip TV

· External Blogs

· Auto Cross-posting

· Show Players

· Show Player Rules

· iTunes

· Internet Archive

· del.icio.us

· Flickr

· Adobe Media Player

· Slide

· Sidebar

· FeedBurner

· MySpace

· Twitter

· Facebook

· Yahoo! Video

· AOL Video

· Lycos Mix

· Mefeedia

· Blinkx

· blip.tv Channels

· Pando

Directories:

· http://www.toomuchlinks.com

Blog Directories:

· http://webdevvote.com/webdir/directories

Xbox 360 leverages social networking

Facebook and MySpace have made the Internet obsessed with popularity. Sites are adopting social networking features as quickly as we can find and friend each other. It seems only natural, then, that services should adopt social networking features, too.

You can argue that Xbox Live has always been a game-centric social network. Every connected Xbox owner maintains a list of friends with whom they hop into “Halo 3″ multiplayer bouts. But Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT – news – people ) is trying to make social networking the linchpin of its effort to attract an expanded gaming audience to the platform. Shane Kim, a vice president at Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business, says the New Xbox Experience that launches Wednesday is “a big part of [Live's] transformation from a multiplayer matchmaking service to a social and entertainment network.”

Kim says Microsoft will be “investing more in social networking capabilities.” What the company is trying to “tap into is the growth of social networking and the disruption in the media industry,” he adds. With the New Xbox Experience, players will connect with such “networking elements” as avatars that will enhance self-expression–just like decking out their MySpace pages. They will share photos or voice chat with friends, and they can even form their own groups for game playing.

The more social connections folks have on Xbox Live, the more time they’ll spend on the service and, in theory, the more money they’ll spend in Xbox Live’s Marketplace downloading new games or movies. That’s the same philosophy Facebook game developers use to drive “engagement” on its social networking site. Games, developers say, are more fun when you play together.

Finally, the console makers are catching on that they, too, need to build “engagement” among their customers so they don’t lose them to other services. This is why Sony (nyse: SNE – news – people ) is building its Second Life look-alike Home. Social networking is also responsible for the Wii’s success–although its social Web is defined by your living room.

And all this focus on social networking suggests that some day consumers will make their console purchasing decisions based not on the power or tech specs of the console, but on its social capabilities. We’re already seeing that trend with the runaway success of the Wii. And it’s no doubt why the Xbox 360 needed to create a new experience.

Best and Worst Practices Social Media Marketing
by Lee Odden

Social media is hot, just take a look at Google Trends and to see the comparison between topics like “search marketing” being eclipsed by “social media” in terms of search volume and news references – at least according to Google. Along with all that “hotness”, there’s good and bad when it comes to the way companies are beginning to engage social media channels.

On Twitter, the difference between mentions of  ”search marketing” and “social media” are even more pronounced. Of course this is by no means a formal assessement, but it gives you an idea of what people on the web are paying attention to and in some cases, what they expect.

Most people learn about new things in terms of what they already know. Any number of companies have taken this approach to heart and entered the social media world oblivious to the formal and unwritten community rules and treating social channels simply as another dumping ground for current advertising assets.  Don’t get me wrong, there’s some amazing digital creative that’s being produced (TV commercials and ads) that are well received on sites like YouTube, Digg and StumbleUpon.

But for the most part, many marketers are not exactly sure about the difference between best and worst practices when it comes to participation with the social web where intentions are commercially motivated. Identifying best and worst practics is a work in progress of course, as communities develop, grow and change.  It’s best to start out with the basics that will hold true regardless of these changes:

Social Media Best Practices:
Start with a plan, not tactics.  Research and build a Social Media Roadmap involving:  Audience, Objectives, Strategy, Tactics, Tools/Technology and Metrics.  [Insert plug here: TopRank offers a 2 day workshop on how to do this]
“Give to get” – Successful social media marketing programs involve listening and participation. That participation centers around giving value before expecting anything in return. This is not “sales” as you know it. But companies can definitely increase sales as a result.
Commit resources & time to be successful or you may very well fail. It’s important to forecast labor hours, who, what, when, how and where with the intention of succeeding, not just experimenting. If a social media effort is successful, scalability will be an even bigger issue if you don’t plan for it.  Hiring a community manager for example, may not be justified when a social media monitoring program is started or with a new company, but a job req and understanding of the role should be ready in case it’s called for.
Be transparent with intentions & your identity or you may alienate the very audiences you’re trying to connect with.  Objectives, strategy and doing your homework about a community should make it pretty obvious what types of commercial messages are appropriate.  Being transparent about intentions might come in the form of stating a purpose:  ”Brand XYZ has created this Facebook page to help consumers make better choices about Topic XYZ”.  It’s fine if goals are to increase sales, but participation should be focused on providing the kind of value that facilitates sales – not attempting to make sales directly. When is the last time you purchased something other than a virtual cupcake on Facebook?
Understand, you do not control the message.  Old habits die hard and there’s a tendency to want to treat social media participation like advertising where the ability to control messaging is the norm. Once information or media is available on the social web, people will inevitably mash it up, stretch it, pull it and reshape it according to their interests. Brands need to protect their identities, copyright and intellectual property for sure, but rather than “controlling the message” marketers should encourage the mashup and creativity.
Welcome participation, feedback and co-creation. As comfort levels rise with social web participation, companies will see opportunties to encourage participation with communications, especially with brand evangelists. Developing relationships and community within social communities on the web can facilitate buy in, provide invaluable feedback and crowdsourcing opportunities.
Metrics should roll up to objectives and objectives should be relevant to the channel.  More than a few companies see evidence of other social media efforts ranging from Superbowl commercials on YouTube to social participation during and after President Obama’s campaign, and “want that too”.  Direct marketing is the lens through which many social media efforts are first viewed, with a tendency to focus on action “A” resulting in “B” outcome. Social media marketing is more like public relations than direct marketing. It’s more like providing resource “A” results in “action “B” that influences outcome “C”. Metrics for success need to consider the pre-goal performance indicators like number of “friends”, comments, links, etc as well as commercial outcomes influenced by social media participation.
Social Media Worst Practices:
Being fake in any way isn’t good for anyone on the social web. Early on, companies like Walmart and Sony (via their PR firms) tried to fake their way into making consumers believe sites like the Sony PSP blog or the Walmarting Across America blog were authored by impartial brand evangelists, when it wasn’t that at all. Both Sony and Walmart have learned from those mistakes and now have social media sites that follow many of the best practices above. Some say failure with social media is a sort of “rite of passage”.
Not listening. How can you learn anything if information is only flowing one way? Listening is really the most important step in learning about social communities on the web. It’s important just starting out and even more so on an ongoing basis to monitor conversations, sentiment about brands and identifying influentials to engage. Lucky for companies, there are abundant social media monitoring tools to choose from.
Being oblivious to formal & unwritten social rules. It pays to lurk a bit before participation with social communities, especially when you have commercial intentions.  Aspire to “speak like a native” when embarking on social media journey to improve your brand visibility and to encourage relationships. Social networking, news and media sharing sites all have Terms of Service guidelines, but the community itself will have guidelines for behavior that can only be understood by observing and participating.  Ignoring these guidelines risks alienation by the community.
Being pushy or overtly salesy in messaging and communications and expecting traditional marketing outcomes are common behaviors by companies that see social media communities simply as content distribution channels for existing marketing programs.  Overt commercial messages, especially sales solicitations are outright tabu in most social communties. A social environment amongst “friends” and likeminded individuals isn’t going to accept interruptive messaging. Think of barging into a conversation at a party trying to sell something to people who are talking about their favorite movies and sharing baby pictures – and the disdain that behavior would encourage. Provide the kind of information that facilitates choices that lead to sales, and you’ll go a lot further.
Approaching social media channels as silos – Many companies approach social media via individual web sites rather than as a collaborative effort. An example would be a company that starts a blog within one division and another that starts something on Facebook and yet another creates a group on LinkedIn or Ning. Not working together is inefficient and can create mixed messages for consumers that participate in more than one social media destination for the brand.
Learning from companies what they think of social media as a topic and opportunity over the past few years has been enlightening.  Our digital marketing and public relations agency gets to talk to a substantial number of companies each month that need help making sense of where social media might fit within overall marketing and PR efforts. Those conversations vary, but an increasing number of client side marketers clearly aware of the social media marketing fundamentals.

In those cases, companies simply want help from someone that has the experience to guide them in creating a social media strategy, specific supporting tactics and dealing with measurement issues. Other companies really have no idea how to proceed and need a focus on education and an audit that will help them create a social media roadmap before getting into specific programs.

What’s encouraging is that more companies are looking more seriously at the challenges and opportunities of social media participation. Others understand that social media is not a destination, but rather an indication of consumer behaviors aided by technology. Successful social media marketing isn’t about the tools, it’s about the people.

If nothing else, remember that social media is about the C’s:  Conversation, Connections, Community, Consumer, Control, Creative, Collaboration and Content.  Do: listen, be transparent about your intentions, “Give to Get” and have a plan. Don’t: Be fake, interruptive and focus only on short term sales.

To keep your site at the top of the search engines, it is increasingly important to your success in an online world, a savvy web site owner learns to keep his or her content fresh. The simple task of regularly updating the information on your web site crosses several must-dos off of your SEO list. Here are three things to remember. If your content is fresh and new, search engines are more likely to keep your page at the top of their lists. That is because current content is indexed. A search engine that delivers out-of-date information isn’t going to be as popular as the search engines who can respond to the most recent data available. If you want to be at the top of a fast-moving search engine, you have to keep your web site moving fast, too. Additionally, this is a great opportunity for you to keep your friends and customers informed of what’s new with you.

Reciprocal linking makes for the world to go round, give a little get a lot. If there’s a complimentary resource for you to send your visitors to, or if you and your business partners have an affiliate relationship, link to them on a page on your site, and ask them to link to you. Search engines are always adjusting their procedures to keep ahead of the curve, and they like to know that you’re networking just as hard as they are. The more bona fide links you can get, the more they’ll notice you. Cross this off of your guerrilla marketing list at the same time: cross-promotions are loyal, friendly, trustworthy, and FREE! What helps build your customer base like some networking?

Blogging about your passion is a fast, easy way to keep the content of your site updated as often as you want. If your not certain about your passion, try to summarize something you recently learned. It’s a chance to write about what you know and how well you know it. Recount stories from your day. Give advice and say why you’re the best. Describing the love you have for the work you do is a great way to work in those keywords automatically, provide links to the information that pertains to your customers, and give those search engines a reasons to move you to the top. It makes you more approachable, gives your business a personality, and builds trust and loyalty not only with your audience, but with the search engines as well. Just remember to use that spell check.

Give your readers something new to do when they return, they are interested in your site, make it interesting to them.

More than 5,000 years ago, in the ancient mystery schools of Egypt, the mental and spiritual laws and principles of success were taught to students who dedicated their entire lives to learning the “Esoteric Arts.”

One of these “secrets” was the Law of Attraction, which said that your mind is a magnet and that you invariably attract into your life people and circumstances in harmony with your dominant thoughts, especially those that are emotionalized.

Today we say, “Like attracts like” and “Birds of a feather flock together.” From ancient times, it was known that your mind sends out vibrations, like radio waves, that are picked up by the minds of other people who are tuned into the same rate of vibration.

The force that determines the sending power of your mental vibrations is the amount of emotion, positive or negative, that you put behind a thought.

If there is something that you intensely desire, something that excites you, you will send out powerful, high-frequency vibrations that can travel long distances in split seconds and cause your phone to ring from someone you have not heard from for months or even years.

Because your mind is so powerful, especially when backed by emotionalized thoughts, you must handle it carefully, like a child handling a gun. The Law of Attraction is neutral. It works on both positive and negative thoughts. It brings into your life whatever you are thinking about on a regular basis with either fear or desire.

When the book The Secret came out, along with the movie, I was surprised to see that the first half of the movie comes from an audio program I heard “The Psychology of Achievement,” by Brian Tracy, which was produced initially in 1981.

The weakness of The Secret is that it is “necessary but not complete.” Of course, it is important that you think positive thoughts and that, by so doing, you will attract positive people and circumstances into your life. But it is not enough.

Actions speak louder than word and faith without works is dead. I believe life is like a long distance flight. When the plane takes off, it will be off course 99 percent of the time. Nonetheless, the plane will eventually arrive at its destination, even thought it was off course most of the time.

So “How does this apply to me”, you ask? In reaching your destination, a plane and you, and you have to have 3 things.
1. Clarity of Destination. Know where you are going.
2. Get into action. You must have the courage to step out in faith with no guarantee of success.
3. You must resolve in advance to persist in the face of any difficulty or problem that you experience.

The very best days of your life lie ahead of you. The highest income of your life is still to come. The greatest experiences of your life are still to be experienced.

There is very little that you cannot accomplish if you will be clear about where you are going, start heading in that direction, and keep going until you get there.

I watched the movie “Charlie’s War” in it, the main character, Charlie told the story of how he became elected. He picked up voters who couldn’t get to the polls and actually drove them there. Why don’t you do the same? People may want to find you, but could use a little help.

Help people discover more of your web pages. I came across a great solution, Google Sitemaps is an easy way for you to help improve your site’s representation in the Google index. It’s a collaborative crawling system that enables you to communicate directly with Google. You get a smarter crawl because you can provide Google with specific information about all your web pages, such as when a page was last modified or how frequently it changes.

Recognize traffic trends with Google Analytics
Get easy access to intuitive graphs that show exactly what’s happening on your site. You can pinpoint exactly which links and pages on your site are popular with your readership and which aren’t. Or see exactly where your readers are coming from – which website, country, state and city.

Drive traffic to your site with Google AdWords
With Google AdWords you create your own ads, choose keywords to help us match your ads to your audience and pay only when someone clicks on them. That is, you only pay when your advertising works.

Make it easier for users to find your content with Google Base
Google Base is a place where you can easily submit all types of content, which we’ll make searchable on Google properties. You can describe any item you post with attributes, which will help people find if when they do related searches.

Harness the power of Google search to create a free Custom Search Engine
Create a highly specialized search engine that reflects your knowledge and interests. Place it on your website, and using our AdSense for Search TM program, make money from the resulting traffic.

Keep your readers up-to-date on your content with the Add to Google button
Google’s personalized homepage, iGoogle, has millions of users. With the ‘Add to Google’ button your readers can easily add your feed or gadget to their iGoogle page, reminding them to come back to your site every time they visit iGoogle. Simply fill out some basic information, insert a small snippet of HTML into your site, and you’re ready to go.

Be careful when converting your company name / brand name into an (available) domain name; it can have embarrassing repercussions. Imagine seeing a web address like, arsecommerce.com. This domain name may appear rather ordinary to us Americans. But to those who speak “the Queen’s English” – including those in the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand – I bet they get a chuckle when they see it. You can imagine them thinking to themselves “Is this the company that put the “arse” in commerce?”. The company is ARS Ecommerce, not Arse Commerce.

Company names that work well in one context may not work so well in another. A classic example of this from a hilarious piece in Business 2.0 magazine (circa 2001), Here’s the money quote:

In October 1998, an e-commerce software vendor launches with the name Accompany, which, when said aloud, sounds exactly like “a company.” As in “Hi, I’m calling from Accompany.” “Which company?” “Accompany.” And so forth. It changes its name to MobShop in March 2000.

Here’s another classic example of a domain name faux pas: therapistfinder.com. No, it’s a site for finding therapists, not rapists.

You also have to consider whether your choice of domain name will get you inadvertently blocked by email firewalls or the search engines’ adult filters.

Take for example this parts store – partsexpress.com – hyphenating the two words would have been a good idea. Ditto for whorepresents.com, an agency that represents celebrities.

Here are a few other examples of domain names gone horribly wrong:

• cumstore.co.uk for Cumbria Storage Systems, Ltd.
• choosespain.com to travel in Spain, pain-free!
• mammotherection.com deals with modern architecture and engineering
• cummingfirst.com is for a church in Cumming, Georgia

While these are pretty funny (and/or disturbing, depending upon your point-of-view), these are reputation management nightmares. Sadly, they were all preventable — usually with merely a well-placed hyphen or change in keywords. NYCanal.com could have saved themselves a lot of embarrassment by choosing ny-canal.com or newyorkcanal.com instead.

Depending on what’s happening in your business, you probably feel the same way too. Everyone is squeezed and it’s not a good feeling. You need to take specific steps if your business is hard hit by this economic downturn. It is only natural to revisit your overall business strategy when market conditions change so now is time to consider growing your business during times of turbulence in the economy. What steps are you taking to minimize the economic impact to your business?

Maintain your fees and pricing: Remember, you are trying to attract great clients not chase them. By lowering your price, prospective customers tend to start focusing on your cost rather than your worth; such an approach can come off as projecting a reactive, and even desperate vibe to the marketplace. You don’t want to ask clients to buy something, you want them to buy into something – a mutually beneficial, long term relationship.

Turn your clients into advocates: If your clients cannot describe you to you, they cannot describe you to a friend. Make sure that your clients know and like what you do for them.

Convert your existing clients into referral-generating advocates: As a business, you are at your highest level of refer-ability during times of uncertainty in the marketplace. The best way to convince new prospects to utilize your services, is to spend more time with the people who are already convinced. In times of uncertainty in the market, many of your competitors are neglecting their clients as they attempt to actively recruit new business. If a client truly believes in your services, the likelihood that he/she will recommend you to his/her friend is extremely high.

Launch a simple call rotation campaign to the 20 percent of your clients who generate 80 percent of your business to touch base with them and ask how they are doing: You aren’t trying to sell anything or be the bearer of any profound news, just placing a courtesy call. As the conversation is winding down, simply remind your clients that as a value added service, you make yourself available to answer any questions that their friends or family members might have regarding your type of services. Simply planting the seed and opening up the option gets the concept of referrals imbedded in your clients’ minds so that they may respond when the opportunity presents itself, without making you appear needy or putting them on the spot.

Explain how your services are especially beneficial during times uncertainty in the economy: People are generally reluctant to enlist outside services during tough times especially when there is a cost involved. Outline the short and long-term benefits of your services to make yourself indispensable.

Your clients have the best business advice. If you want to improve your levels of service, ask the people who currently receive it. One of the most popular and beneficial concepts you can implement is the Client Advisory Council. As a business professional, few activities are as revealing and rewarding as simply surrounding yourself with a group of your favorite clients and probing them for ideas and insights.

Just about every business on the planet does this. And it’s not bad… until you realize how much money you’re leaving on the table. The fact is, for every deal you close using this common process, there’s another 2 – 3 deals (or more!) you COULD close. Most small businesses market their products and services like this:

Step 1: Buy a bunch of leads or generate leads with a mailer or other campaign
Step 2: Distribute leads to sales reps
Step 3: Reps call on the leads to find the “hot” ones who are ready now
Step 4: Reps work with hot leads to close a quick deal
Step 5: Throw away, postpone or neglect the leads that aren’t “hot”
Step 6: Repeat the process

So, how do you do that? Well, that’s what Secret #6 is all about–How to properly follow up using EDUCATION, REPETITION AND VARIETY.

You see, over 99% of small businesses don’t properly follow up. Why? Because they don’t have a system, they don’t have time, they don’t know how valuable it is, and the truth is, they don’t know how to follow up! But…a few simple secrets could make you a “follow-up master.”

Effective follow-up must take a combined approach that incorporates these three elements:

1) EDUCATION. Your follow-ups must inform your prospects. You need to provide valuable information. They WANT to trust you. Give them the information they need and you’ll earn their trust.

2) REPETITION. It’s a proven fact that human beings have to hear the same thing over and over before it sinks in. Marketing and Sales is no different. YOU know your products and services like the back of your hand, but your customers don’t “get it” the first time they hear the message. Tell them again, and again and again.

3) VARIETY. This doesn’t mean you vary your message!!! You need to consistently tell your message, but your follow-up DELIVERY needs variety. To maximize your sales, you must use multi-step follow-up sequences that incorporate direct mail, phone, e-mail, fax, voice broadcasts, and other media! There is serious power that comes when you contact your prospects using multiple methods.

However, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard the argument that this kind of follow up is tedious, it’s time-consuming, it’s overkill, it’s belittling to the customer, it’s… whatever.

Guess what? It might be all of those things. But it works. Period. When you begin to properly follow up with your leads and customers using Education, Repetition and Variety, your numbers will absolutely shoot through the roof. You will be completely amazed!

So, you might be saying that this is just too much work for any human. You know what? I agree with you 100%!! I can’t imagine trying to do all of this manually. You need an automated system to handle all of this for you.

Send me an e-mail or give me a call and I’ll tell you how you can put an automated system in place that will do all of this and more for you. Once you get that system, you will flat out make more money. Your capacity to handle more deals will increase, your customer acquisition costs will go down and you will get the freedom you’ve always wanted your business to provide you.

I recently posted an article and reviewd how to find a need for the online shoppers. I even showed how there is a lot of ball-dropping. Fortunately, it can all be corrected to give yourself a leg up on the competition. Here are some more tips:

• Search is fundamental. Be there at every entry point possible.
• The landing page is crucial. You should have a landing page relevant to the search term.

Yes, this is going to take some time to develop. But it doesn’t take any time for a potential customer to abandon you. In fact, it takes half a blink to form an impression, and if that page isn’t loaded in under four seconds, it takes less than half a blink to hit the back button. Just remember, information seekers scan from left to right, top to bottom, so keep those keywords, beginning with the search link, to the right and not buried in chunks of text. Make sure it’s clear where links lead, especially if navigating a customer away from a landing page.
• Product information should be complete, answering all the customer’s question. A survey found 77 percent said “buying from a particular merchant is ‘very to somewhat’ influenced by the quality of content (descriptions, copy, images and tools) on a particular website.
• Images are vital. One day, when smell-o-vision, holographic imaging, and virtual reality tactile-experience suits are reality, we can better recreate the actual store-bought experience. Until then, we have pretty pictures, even video demonstrations. Get Elastic has a pretty comprehensive guide to making the photo experience better for customers.

One more list and we’re done. The e-tailing group reports these ten features and functionalities as the most important to customers, according to a survey.

1. Product overview
2. Merchant’s guarantee
3. Stock status/availability
4. Quality of image
5. Customer service links
6. Product specific information
7. Long description
8. Size chart
9. Toll-free number
10. Ratings and reviews

Good Luck, if you missed the post this one was referring to, look up 24 Ways To Provide Amazing Satisfaction To Online Shoppers Part 1

Three-quarters of online shoppers surveyed said website content is insufficient to complete research or purchase a product online always, most, or some of the time. Nearly 80 percent rarely or never purchase a product without complete information, and 72 percent will take off to a competitor that does supply that information.

It seems that consumers really want to buy online, but retailers aren’t making it easy for them. Sometimes, it seems like retailers go out of their way to lose customers.Testing for myself, I did a search for information about a camera. In that experience, the manufacturer didn’t have top ranking for its own product (not even in the top ten), and didn’t have sponsored search ads targeting very product specific keywords. The retailers who seemed to pick up the slack in the paid results—big names like Circuit City, Target, and Wal-Mart—failed to offer a relevant landing page. When I did find product reviews or pages, the information I wanted (price and specs, mainly) were either garbled by nonsensical rhetoric or was nonexistent.

If researching for myself and not for an article, I would have long before that said, “Screw it. I’ll just go to the store myself.” All of them lost a potential online customer.

Problems like these aren’t uncommon. In fact, it seems many sites are severely lacking in the customer service department. If customers don’t prefer online shopping to brick-and-mortar shopping, it’s because retail sites haven’t done enough to make the online shopping experience a good one.

Here are ways many sites have failed to serve their customers:
1. Only 37 percent offer multiple images views of products.
2. Only 33 percent offer customer reviews.
3. 62 percent have difficult to read fonts.
4. Only 14 percent allow customers to change the font.
5. Only 43 percent offer free shipping.
6. Almost two-thirds do not offer in-stock information on the product page.
7. While just over half of online retailers have physical stores, only 10 percent offer in-store pickup.
8. 58 percent do not offer shipping costs early in the checkout process. One third have checkout processes with more than 4 steps.
9. Only 58 percent correctly answer an e-mail question within 24 hours.
10. Around 80 percent don’t seem to get that more ways to pay means more ways to buy. 20 percent offer pay-by-check, 10 percent offer Google Checkout, 20 percetn accept PayPal and 18 percent offer Bill Me Later.

That’s a lot of ball-dropping. Fortunately, it can all be corrected to give yourself a leg up on the competition. How? Sales is about find a need, fill the need. The need is shown above, how to fill it, is to understand it and implement solutions in your business.

By combining the best of what online networking has to offer (quick introductions, transparency) with offline networking (human interaction, personal branding) professionals who practice Onffline Networking have a higher likelihood of getting noticed and eliminating the potential of alienating a particular demographic.

Online is simply being online and getting involved in a commuinty. The same formula exists in the real world. Networking with real people, face-to-face, creating human intereaction can produce just as amazing results.

As technology improves and professional networks continue to grow, the two types of networking will converge. Most people you meet offline will have an online presence, and many people you meet online will want to eventually connect offline. It’s the best of both worlds.

After facilitating hundreds of networking events around the country over the past five years, I’ve met many people (mostly in their 40′s and 50′s) who naïvely think that face-to-face networking is the only way to network. Some comments I often hear are:
• “I’ve always found success networking face-to-face. Why change?”
• “Online networking is for kids. I’m a professional!”
• “Online networking is too impersonal. My business requires human interaction.”
Conversely, as the owner of an online business network called Fast Pitch! I’ve watched people (mostly in their 20′s and 30′s) place blind faith in online networking. Some comments I hear are:
• “It takes too long to meet people the old-fashioned way. I can meet 1,000 people online in a week!”
• “Offline events are expensive and time-consuming. It’s so much cheaper to network online.”
• “Offline networking is a thing of the past. Online is the future.”
Each of these arguments holds merit; however; they fail to embrace the big picture of networking in the 21st Century. For example, while it is true that you can potentially meet a lot of people in a short amount of time by networking online, it is also true that many of these connections may lack substance because they lack real human interaction. Conversely, limiting yourself to offline networking decreases your potential to connect with millions of other people who are actively networking online everyday.

The point is … why not do both?

Make Keywords Your #1 Goal

If you didn’t know, this is the single most important factor for most online success stories. Focus on making keywords and high ranking for keywords in all search engines your main objective if you’re marketing online. Many new marketers don’t truly understand how important getting top rankings for your chosen keywords will be in your online success.

Autoresponders and Líst Building

Keeping in contact with potential buyers is mission critical. You must use autoresponders to send follow-up messages to build trustful relationships with your potential customers. Look at the success of social networkers on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace. 

Your Unique Selling Position

Give potential customers some very good reasons for them to buy from you or your links. Offering special bonuses and discounts works wonders for your sales. Some of my most successful pages simply consist of coupons and discounts offered by different companies. If buyers can save $100′s OFF by buying thru your links, they will.

Go With The Flow

Don’t give up, most times you will try countless ideas or tactics – once you have found a process or system that works, really work it or scale it up. Making your first dollar is the hardest, but once you do something that earns you that dollar, just repeat that “something” a thousand times.

Target Recurring or Residual Income

Leverage your customers purchasing habits,  promote and sell products and services that give you a recurring or residual income. Make one sale and get paíd for years or for the life of that referred client. Find services like web-hosting, telephone, marketing programs… once customers sign up to these services, they will likely keep them for years.

Automate Everything

The magic of having a business online is that you can automate just about every process in your marketing system. Make it a point of automating everything you do… use autoresponders to follow-up with potential buyers, use automatic check-outs, automatic reporting… just set-up your whole internet marketing system that runs itself with little or no supervision from you.

Find The Top Online Marketers      

Tony Robbins say’s “Success leaves clues.”  The fastest way to explode your online business is to find someone successful and model your business like theirs.

Make Google Your Friend

As the largest engine on the internet, making Google your number one ally should be your focus. Google has just about conquered the world-wide search market, Yahoo and MSN are still important, but Google is the deal-breaker when you’re selling stuff online. Consumers have enormous respect for Google, a number one listing for a lucrative keyword simply means money in the bank.

Take these 8 points into your business and have a strategy for success.

Having a website that effectively communicates your image can be a rewarding and profitable experience if you follow five basic concepts:

1. Know you Audience, you can be proud of your site but remember, it’s the customer who buys. You are designing your website and logo for your customers, not for yourself. Your likes and dislikes may be similar to your clients’ likes and dislikes, but since they come first, your website and logo should reflect what they need and will respond to.

2. Simplicity, fancy over functionality is a guaranteed path to frustration.
Simple is better. A neutral background with accents in bright colors looks more professional than a rainbow-colored site with white text. When you visit a site, you do not want to be bombarded with overwhelming confusion–and neither do your customers. 3. Color influences the viewer, choose and influence your audience, don’t just get the one you like. Many people arbitrarily choose the colors for their logo and site. The issue with choosing the right colors is that they mean different things to different people on a subconscious level. Please take a look at http://www.squidoo.com/colorexpert to give you a good idea of how to start choosing your colors.
4. Readability is important, I can’t tell you how many sites I can’t read because the red text is on a black background. No matter how well designed your site or logo is, if it is not readable to visitors, it is useless. For example, putting blue text on a red or highly textured background is not a very good combination. If it’s hard to see or hard to read, your customers won’t even look at it.
5. White Space does not literally mean white space; it means “space that does not contain text or images.” Well placed white space lets the eyes rest when viewing a site. If you do not have white space on your website, visitors’ eyes could become strained and cause headaches.

Apply these 5 simple concepts when you are considering creating a website for your business and you will avoid a lot of headaches.

Since business may soon be tougher, it’s critical for entrepreneurs to take steps to up-end any damage that could happen as a result of a recession.

The secret to weathering a particularly nasty economy is to diversify your customer base, free up cash flow and cut costs where you can. Here are some steps for recession-proofing your business: If three employees are doing the job of one, you may need to make job cuts. Additionally, if you have two product lines and one is successful while the other one isn’t, consider selling off that division. When times are tough, it’s best to focus on core markets and spend money in those areas, not in areas that haven’t been more profitable.

Ratchet down inventory. When a recession hits, the last thing you’ll want to do is get stuck with shelves of needless inventory. If spending $30,000 a year on boating gear, for example, isn’t necessary, make sure your purchase orders reflect that. For a better idea of what you’ll need as the year progresses, keep an eye on leading consumer indicators such as those offered by the National Retail Federation and the Conference Board . Also, establish inventory targets and make sure the sales and purchasing departments are talking.

Maintain prices. You may be tempted to slash prices to free up cash flow. That’s a mistake, says Bradley J. Sugars, a business coach in Las Vegas. Sure, you’ll sell products but you’ll also cut your profit margins and likely dilute your brand in the process. Plus, if customers decide to buy again from you in the future they may expect similar discounts.

Reserve discounts. “Don’t go into a discounting war,” says Sugars. Since you don’t want to dilute your brand’s value and you especially don’t want to start competing on price with discounters such as Wal-Mart Stores and Target, tread lightly when it comes to offering discounts. Be sure to reserve them only for current, repeat customers. “You’re trying to breed loyalty” without diminishing your brand’s value, says Sugars.

Focus on service. While expanding your business into markets abroad may be avenues for growth, many small-business owners should focus on their existing customers and clients for a boost in revenue. With this in mind, Sugars suggests focusing on service. “It is one of the best ways to add value without costing money,” he says.
Invest in employees. When the going gets tough, the employees you have will be your productivity all-stars, says Lenhart. Make boosting productivity — within reason, of course — a focal point. For those that rise to the top, be sure to reward them accordingly. “You don’t want to lose your most productive people at this time,” he says. Consider offering vacations or time off, which can be cheap incentives.

Free up cash flow. While you’re attempting to cut costs and grow sales, “now is the time to call in favors,” says Howard Applebaum, chief lending officer of Sterling National Bank in New York. Be sure to free up your business’s cash flow by asking to have payments to suppliers extended. Also, if you have old debts, call them in. Having a good amount of cash on hand, especially in light of the credit crunch, will help you do everything from make payments to employees and vendors to spend on marketing campaigns that may grow future business.

Renegotiate contracts. If a contract, a lease or other obligation will soon be up for renewal, try to negotiate lower prices. At this point, you may be able to also make cuts, says Applebaum. If you don’t need 50,000 square feet of office space, consider paring down. “It is really a reality check that requires a tough look at your expenses,” he says.

Look to expand your business. If, on the other hand, you’re sitting pretty, Carmen Bianchi, director of San Diego State University’s Entrepreneurial Management Center, suggests giving the competition a gander. “Look for weaknesses and instability,” she says. If they’ve been having trouble, you may be in a good position to pick up their business at bargain-basement prices. Obviously, make sure you can afford it, says Bianchi, but their loss may be your gain.

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WordPress is the most visible of the CMS’ “Content Management Systems” and performs to a SEO dream. Since WordPress 2.5, things have changed markedly. 

Since version 2.5 there’s been a wealth of feature expansion in the core application, the availability of plugins, expanding core functionality, and the advent of professionally designed Themes that have taken WordPress to new heights. All of this has allowed WordPress to blossom into a fully-matured CMS with exceptional Search Engine Optimization features.

Here are 10 of the most prominent among the many opportunities to achieve this individualizing your pages:

1: SEF URLS: Search engine friendly URL’s are important, because inclusion of keywords in page URL’s are taken into account, and have a bearing on rankings – particularly on Yahoo. Being able to exercise total control over page URL’s is important, and WordPress allows this with Permalink mod_rewrite functionality, coupled with manual URL control on every page or post!

Meta-Tags: There are several WordPress plugin tools to provide total control of title, descriptions and keywords, and these are easily installed and configured.

2: Titles: Being able to control the off-page Title separately from the on-page heading is very important. The title’s 70 character limitation needs to be exploited to maximum effect. It’s the single most important on-site page SEO element! Page Headings are usually space-constrained, and in systems where the Heading automatically becomes the Title, you are deprived of a significant advantage.

3: Description: The off-page Description (meta-tag) is a vital element in accurately describing the page contents. If each page has accurate, custom-written Description content, it’s used verbatim in the search engine results pages (SERP’s). In contrast, if you are forced to use a generic Description, then Google will helpfully do its level best to generate an ‘ad lib’ Description of the page based on content. The result of that can either be not so bad, or truly awful. Regardless, its essential that YOU have control of the Description, and that you use it to maximum effect!

4: Keywords: The Keywords (meta-tag) still has it’s part to play. Stuff it full of vaguely relevant garbage unrelated to page content and it will be ignored. Use it wisely, with specific / relevant long-tailed keyword search phrases and it can give you a little bit of SE traction – even on Google!

5: Image File Names: Accurately name your image files, and include keywords relevant to the page. WordPress allows you to upload media and retain the original files names even when auto-generating thumbnail images etc.

6: Image ALT Tags: Accurately describe your images using the Image ALT tag, and include keywords/phrases relevant to the page. WordPress Add Media tools allow you to add ALT text and captions, enabling inclusion of additional relevant text content. Used wisely, without spamming, it’s another useful element.

7: Anchor Text: WordPress Link Editor allows full control of anchor Text links, including the ability to specify “Hyperlink Title” which essentially works like Image ALT text – the title of the link pops up when the mouse pointer hovers over the link… Again, used wisely, its another useful SEO element.

8: CSS Dropdown Menus: Many of the new, highly professional WordPress CMS Themes utilize CSS dropdown menus, which is extremely important in aiding search engines to locate and index internal pages. This also facilitates Google’s ability to pass Page Rank!

9: Google SiteMaps: Automatic Google Sitemap Generator is another delightful WordPress plugin. Once installed and configured, every new page, post or edit of a page or post automatically updates the sitemap.xml page!

10: RSS Feeds: WordPress RSS feeds are easily extended by installation of an onsite Feedburner email subscription service, where your posts and pages are automatically distributed to subscribers by email. Moreover, your Feedburner account and site feed gives your site a pipeline directly into the Google index! I regularly see WordPress posts that make it into Google Alerts distribution in less than 4 hours!

For SEO functionality and for ease of use, WordPress earns a 10 out of 10. Couple that with more than 3,000 available plugins to extend the core functionality, the thousands of available design templates or themes, the ease-of-use factor, robust software, ease of installation etc, and I think we’ve got a winning CMS formula.

Search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN are really just databases. When you do a Google Search you’re not searching the Web, you’re searching Google’s database. There are two ways to get into these databases. One is to submit your site to the different search engines. In 6 to 9 weeks the search engine will index your site. They capture key elements from the code on your page and your content. These are then stored in the database. Typing in keywords into a search engine signals the algorithms to determine the which links should be displayed as a result of your search.

The other way to get added to the search engines database is to have the search engine software find you through a link to your site from another Web site back to yours. The software, known as “spiders,” will periodically “crawl” your site to see if you’ve updated it.

It’s important to know that each page on your site is indexed individually, and each page stands on its own. The rankings are based upon the combination of correct Meta-tags, relevant content to the keyword they’re trying to get rankings for and link popularity.

As long as the search engine can index the site, clearly read the meta tags and content, the better. An issue is when a site is built using Flash and little content (search engines cannot read or index “Flash” sites). Also, if the bulk of the relevant content is in PDF format, search engines cannot read the documents. If the search engines cannot index the relevant text there won’t be any rankings.

The bottom line is this – paid search means you pay for your position. The benefit is if you have the funds you’ll get instant traffic. Stop paying and the traffic dries up quickly. Natural search is free traffic but it’s built over time. The advantage is that if done right, it can provide visitors for a long time to come.

Search traffic (paid or natural) is the BEST traffic to have because people who are specifically looking for what you have are able find your site.

I was inspired by this and wanted to share it with you, an article from the famed sales guru, Brian Tracy…

When Vince Lombardi took over the Green Bay Packers some years ago, he was asked what he was going to change. The players? The plays? The training process? How was he going to turn this team around after a string of failures?

Lombardi is reported to have replied, “I am not going to change anything. We will use the same players, the same plays, and the same training system. But we will concentrate on becoming brilliant on the basics. Before I am finished, we will be the best team in the National Football League in kicking, passing, blocking, running and catching. We will run our plays with such precision that the other side will know what we are going to do, but will be unable to stop us. We will be brilliant on the basics.”

This principle applies to you as well. Your job is to become brilliant on the basics of selling. This begins by identifying the seven essential parts of the professional selling process and then developing a plan to upgrade your skills in each area.

Fortunately, all sales skills are learnable. It does not matter how well you have performed in different areas in the past. You can learn any sales skill that you need to learn to achieve any sales goal that you can set for yourself.

Everyone in the top 10% of your field started in the bottom 10%. Everyone who is doing well today was once doing poorly. The top people in your industry were at one time not even in your industry and did not know that it existed. But once they began, they committed themselves to becoming excellent in each of the key result areas that make up the successful sale.

Improve a Single “Weak” Skill
Here is an important discovery. Your weakest key skill sets the height of your income. Just as a chain breaks at the weakest link, the skill at which you perform the worst determines how many sales and how much money you will make. By improving a single skill, the one skill that can help you the most, you can increase your sales and your income faster than in any other way.

Here is the key question: What one skill, if you were absolutely excellent at it, would help you the most in doubling your sales and your income?

This is one of the most important questions you will ever ask and answer. The answer usually jumps into your mind. If you are not sure of the answer, it is essential that you find out, and find out quickly. Ask your manager. Ask your best customers. Ask your colleagues. You must know your weakest skill if you are going to improve in that area and unlock your full potential for higher income.

Measure Your Abilities for Success
In this article, I will give you the first three of the seven key result areas of selling and show you how to measure your ability in each area. Next month, I will explain the next four critical skills, and how you can master each one of them.

Give yourself a grade of 1 to 10 in each of the key result areas of selling: 1 means that you are low in that area and 10 means you are highly skilled in that area. Be honest with yourself. If you are not sure about the accuracy of your answers, review your personal scores with your sales manager, or someone else who knows the truth about your sales ability.

The starting point of personal improvement is when you become absolutely honest with yourself and others about the areas in which improvement can have the greatest impact on your sales.

1. The first key result area of selling is prospecting. This is defined as your ability to get face to face or ear to ear with qualified prospects who can and will buy your product or service within a reasonable amount of time.

Please note that this does not mean that you talk to lots of interesting people who may or may not buy your product sometime in the future. Prospecting requires that you spend more and more time with people who can buy and pay for what you are selling in the short term.

A score of 10 means that you are fully occupied, every hour of every day, and you have so many prospects that you cannot take on any more. You probably have an appointments secretary who keeps a backlog of people who are eager to talk to you and to buy from you. If this is your situation today, you would give yourself a 10.

A score of 1 means that you are a lonely person. You sit around the office like the Maytag repairman. You don’t phone anyone and no one calls you. You probably drink a lot of coffee, read the newspaper, play on the Internet, and chat with your friends much of the time.

It is easy to give yourself a grade on the subject of prospecting. Just calculate what percentage of your time is spent each day with prearranged prospects. If it is 50%, give yourself a 5. If it is 70%, give yourself a 7.

2. The second key result area of selling is establishing rapport, trust, and credibility. People will not buy from you until they like you, trust you, and are convinced that you are their friend and acting in their best interest.

A score of 10 in this area means that you are a positive, cheerful, high-energy individual with a warm, empathetic personality. You also get along wonderfully with almost everyone you meet. A score of 1 means that after you talk with someone for the first time they never want to talk to you or see you again.

3. The third key result area of selling is identifying needs accurately. The biggest mistake that you can make when you meet or talk to a new prospect is to assume that you already know what this prospect needs, wants, and is willing to pay for. Each prospect is unique. In the initial stage of your conversation with the prospect, your single focus is to ask questions and listen carefully to ascertain whether or not a genuine need for what you sell exists in the mind and heart of the person you are talking to.

A score of 10 in identifying needs would mean that you have a careful series of questions, from the general to the particular, which you go through, one by one with the prospect to clearly ascertain if the prospect needs the product or service you are selling. At the end of your questioning process, it is abundantly clear to both the prospect and yourself that the prospect can use, benefit from, and pay for what you are selling.

Scoring 1 means that your approach to each prospect is random. You ask whatever questions pop into your mind and say whatever falls out of your mouth. For you, every sales call is a new adventure. You have no idea what is going to happen or how it is going to turn out. The mark of the professional is preparation. He has thought through and prepared every part of the sale conversation. He leaves nothing to chance.

Give yourself a grade on the three key result areas of selling explained above, and think about how you could become better in each one. Next month, I will explain the final four skills that you require to move to the top of your field.

Be brilliant with the basics.

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An increasing number community managers have become visible within social media sites like Twitter, on blogs and Facebook from various sized companies. Consider how the content creation and outreach efforts of a community manager can also be of benefit to an organization’s search engine optimization efforts.

Many search engine optimization consultants that engage social media channels have noticed how their efforts resulted in community building effects.  Building up profiles on various social media sites and participating in communities to share and promote content attract links, but it also builds trust. 

Community building with SEO effects in mind isn’t so different than Public Relations or Interactive Marketing with SEO in mind. Content + links = better search visibility.

Community building with SEO benefits typically involves:
• Monitoring brand terms as well as keywords important to the organization using a social media monitoring tool
• Create content and interaction destinations: blogs, social profiles
• Content with unique urls can be linked to
• Content that is optimized with keywords and proper IA is good for search engines and good for users
• Content that is relevant and useful will attract links from those empowered to publish (bloggers, blog commenters, forums, consumer reviews, consumer generated content such as images, video, audio)

Social media monitoring is keyword based as is SEO.  Social media monitoring counts links and SEO builds links.  Search engines discover and follow these links and when factoring in context and keywords used, will use that information when sorting documents in search results. ie, Content + links = better search visibility. And in this economy, who doesn’t want to show more visibility and value for their efforts?

Still feeling a little frustrated getting started on E-Bay? Don’t feel too bad, recent changes like “Detailed Seller Ratings (DSR)” and “discounts for sellers,” have made it challenging for even the experienced sellers.

To some, the changes didn’t sound like anything to be concerned about, but some saw  through the plan and noticed other phrases in there, like “removal of bad feedback for buyers” and saw the potential for smaller businesses to be shut out. This is a notion we are seeing proven accurate months later.

BusinessWeek took a look at some real-world examples of businesses being affected by eBay’s policy changes and the frustrations that have plagued sellers.

WebProNews has covered such frustrations in the past as well (that also includes payment policy changes and a boycott of the site by sellers). After scouring the Internet, reading various articles and comments, and even contacting some sellers first-hand, the following list of the top ten things that sellers are frustrated with about eBay:

1. Management

2. Feedback Policy

3. Small Businesses Get Shut Out

4. Lack of Communication

5. Payment Policies

6. Fees/Lack of Profitability

7. Unwarranted Account Suspensions

8. The Buyers Themselves

9. Glitches

10. Lack of Innovation

Don’t get too frustrated, if you think you are alone, your not.  Ask other eBay Sellers and ask how they met the challenge.

When you are looking to get better traffic from the local community, make sure they can find you easily.  What businesses need to do to ensure their customers are finding them easily, is still to make sure they are listed in these local search results. For Google Maps, follow the following steps:

1. Sign in to the Google Local Business Center. If you don’t have a Google Account, sign up for one.

2. Return to Google Maps by clicking on the icon in the upper corner of the Local Business Center.

3. Search for your listing.

4. Click on the “More Info” link next your listing. This will expand the information window.

5. Click “Add or edit your business” under the address and phone number.

For Yahoo Local:

1. Search for Your Listing and click on it

2. Update your business contact information, hours of operation, business category, etc.

3. You can also invest in a “Local Enhanced Listing” according to Yahoo, which lets you include your company logo and tagline, up to 10 photos, a detailed description, inclusion in up to five business categories, and two customizable link to coupons or special offers.

Searches for all sorts of terms on YouTube are turning up. Notice the videos on the right-hand side of results?  Those are the “promoted videos” the searches are turning up as well. Every one of the ads consists of one small image and Google Adwords style text ad.These are hybrid ads that combine Google type text ads with video content from YouTube. The ads link to a sponsored page on YouTube that consist of user generated content found on you can see on the right-hand side of results pages YouTube itself. For instance, a company may sponsored a page featuring a top ten list of inspiring YouTube videos. Below the videos, are promoted items with links back to their site. Sometimes these ads link to customized profile-like sponsor pages, while others will simply play a video.

Most visitors aren’t often at YouTube to buy products. So the benefit is in furthering the brand with YouTube’s younger and “hipper” audience.

Many companies have already had good experiences with online video (specifically YouTube). Consider how many times Free Credit Reports commercial has been viewed on YouTube, and plenty of other companies have seen fit to create YouTube channels.

The real value to utilizing YouTube and video in general from a marketing standpoint, is that it’s become a great launching point for viral marketing. If a video turns out to be particularly successful in terms of views, then it could eventually be turned into a full-blown television ad. Look how “internet popularity” on the internet has affected what’s on TV, Tila Tiquila got her own show (even though she became popular on MySpace).

YouTube is really branching out in terms of making money from its popular service. So keep an eye on that right column, as YouTube’s likely to start letting in more advertisers and it may just be the next big thing for Google and possibly even marketers too.

Here are 8 points you NEED to know to have success in emailing campaigns.

Point 1,  Know your audience
Before you sit down to write your email sales letter, you`ve got to determine exactly who your audience is. This is a
master key to getting results from email marketing, knowing what appeals to your target market.

Point 2, Get the emails opened with great subject lines
Before an email can generate results, recipients need to open it. But what can you do to spark their interest and get their interest “motor” revved up? The SUBJECT LINE.

Point 3, What’s in it for them?
Sit down and write every conceivable benefit your product has. The Features appeal to logic…logic justifies emotion…emotion drives sales.

Point 4, Have an emotional appeal
When promoting anything to anybody, you must remember that buying decisions are based upon emotion and later backed up by logic. Before you write a single word, determine what emotional hot buttons you can use.

Point 5, Create Credibility
To convince people to buy your product or service, you must make them believe that your offer is credible and that you (or your product) will deliver as promised.

Point 6, Security
Have a strong guarantee that makes your customers feel secure, the stronger your guarantee, the better your response will be. And here’s an interesting fact: The longer the time period, the fewer returns you’ll have.

Point 7, Ask for the Order
It happens all the time. Someone makes a fantastic sales presentation, and then doesn`t close the deal because he/she
didn`t clearly ask for the order or made the process confusing rather than simple. Just Ask for the order.

Point 8, Easy on the eyes
It`s a well-known fact: Large blocks of copy are intimidating and will often send people running for the
hills or at least the Delete button. The solution? Break up paragraphs into two to four
sentences. Use several subheadings throughout the email letter. And use asterisks, dashes, and ellipses (…) to
give your copy more rhythm. Bullet points are excellent eye-catchers – use them whenever appropriate.