Social Media Marketing: The Top Four Reasons You Should Try It

So, you want to get your name out there, to be known, to market yourself to every possible venue. By delving deep into the social media marketing realm, you can produce significant results.

Just what, you might ask, is social media marketing, and how does it work? For starters, social media marketing is a way to embrace many of the web’s social facets and use them to promote your business or website. For example, you can blog, post viral articles, and reach out through social networking sites all in the name of increasing traffic to your website. If it’s done right, it can be extremely effective.

The question remains: Why is social media marketing important? In addition to just drawing traffic to your website, there are a number of reasons (not to mention benefits) behind this marketing strategy. Below, and in no particular order, you will find the top four reasons why you should adopt a social media marketing campaign.

1. Connect with your customer base. Say you begin a blog that relates to your website. Eventually, that blog will begin to attract a readership base, and your customers will be able to respond to these blogs. Or “hang out” with your client base on social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn where you can personally interact with your customers – even on a one-on-one basis – and learn all about their needs and wants as it pertains to your company. Also, you can search review sites and forums to see what your customers are saying. Whether the feedback is positive or negative, you will have a solid grasp of their reactions to your products and services … which leads me to my next point.

2. Manage customer relations. When you are sifting through your customers’ reviews, forums, and blog responses, it can be exhilarating to read affirmative feedback on your services. On the flipside, it can be downright disheartening to read the negative stuff. But don’t fret. This kind of criticism can give you a chance to respond gracefully and show the consumer that you care about what they think. You may not be able to right all of the wrongs all of the time, but you can acknowledge each one personally. This way, your customer base knows that you care and are taking measures to create better results in the future.

3. Establish yourself as an industry expert. Publish articles and blog about anything and everything related to your specific industry. If your content is good and interesting enough, it might be picked up by users of social bookmarking sites, then spread all over the Internet. All the while, you are not only gaining credibility but more hits to your website.

4. Show off your name. Saturating the Internet with useful and viable content rich in keywords related to your business can help to bring a greater number of hits to your site. When a website sees regular updates and activities, such as that seen on blogs and forums, search engines are more likely to deem it trustworthy therefore ranking it higher in search results.

How to Gain Credibility on the Web

Our economy is changing – we buy things now from people we never have met (and never will meet). Websites like eBay and Amazon use a customer rating system to add credibility to sellers, but independent websites don’t offer the same peace of mind to visitors. So, how can you inject some credibility into your website to help differentiate you from the phoneys? A few tried-and-true methods can help put your future clients at ease:

• A “Testimonials” page with quotes from past clients. If you don’t have any testimonials, start asking for them now.
Case studies, including any real statistics or real results (i.e. don’t round “103 clients” to “over 100 clients” or “47%” to “about 50%).
• Lists of previous clients and projects.
Facts about your reputation and stability (including the number of years in business, number of employees, and the size of your operations).
Photos of real company employees (no stock photography, please!).

Cool Stuff for Every Writer

There’s tons of cool stuff available for writers on the web these days – some of which you may not even know existed. Listed below are a few of my favorites to help you think, organize, create, manage, and most importantly, write.

The Narcissistic Typewriter.JPG


Photo by deglispiriti

Buzzword: This is a free online word processor from Adobe. It runs just like any other word processor – just through a web processor. As long as you are connected to the internet, you can access your Buzzword documents. Cool features include a “share” button which allows you to share your document for edits with other buzzword users without having to email. Additionally, the same version of the document is available to all viewers no matter what edits are made – a definite plus for documents that go through multiple edits with multiple collaborators.

WriteWith: Just like its name says, this web application allows you to work on documents with others, in one functional program, without having to email. It was designed by two news editors who recognized the need for an efficient program to allow collaborative work and project management. WriteWith lets you upload documents directly to the site, assign tasks to other users, edit docs and see the changes immediately. It even keeps a history of all the edits you’ve made – just in case. This program is great for group projects and is extremely efficient.

Wrike: This project management software will send “to do” reminders to your whole team, create tasks from your email, and will create easy-to-read Gantt charts of project timelines. Also, different parts of the plan can be communicated to employees depending on their parts in the project. It’s a great way to keep your whole team on the same page while offering one, simple collaborative environment. One word – efficient.

Mozy: This program is awesome for copywriters, or any writer for that matter, who must save multiple drafts of multiple projects. The free version of Mozy lets you store up to 2GB of your docs online. This means, if your computer crashes, your office gets struck by lightning, or you simply want to make some room on your hard drive, your documents will always be safe and accessible online.

FreeMind: This is super cool mind mapping software that helps you brainstorm, map out your thoughts, keep track of projects and timelines, and lets you change fonts and colors. Basically, you can organize your thoughts any way you want. Sure, this is a good tool for creative writers, but it’s also great for other types of writers who lack organizational structure otherwise.

Draw More Traffic to Your Website

Question: How do I draw more traffic to my website?

Answer: Write and publish articles online. Not only will pull more traffic to your website, but you gain credibility by establishing yourself as an expert in your field.

For example, if you are trying to attract people to a website promoting your Kickboxing Academy, then you would write articles like How to Throw a Punch, 10 Reasons to Try Kickboxing, Self Defense Techniques, and so on. Anything and everything having to do with Kickboxing is fair game – even How to Start Your Own Kickboxing Academy.

Since you are the expert, assert yourself as such so that your readers know your website is the real deal.

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Question: What do I do with the articles after they are written?

Answer: There are tons of free, online article posting sites where you can submit your articles, and webmasters can use them as content for other sites. Some article posting sites include www.ezinearticles.com, www.articledashboard.com, and www.shorttext.com. These are just a few, but a simple Google search will give you lots more.

Question: What happens to my articles after they are posted?

Answer: Webmasters can use your articles for their sites as long as they don’t change any of your content, and they give a link back to your website. While they get free content, you get to keep your copyright on the material, tell a bit of information about yourself and your site at the bottom of the article, and get a link back to your website. The more sites that pick up your article, the bigger the boost you will see in traffic to your website.

Web Writing: It’s Ok to be Redundant

Websites need to be written to accommodate a wide audience of readers – the on-the-go information gobblers, the meticulous fact verifiers, the image-minded visual learners, and the web savvy personalities who love interactive tools. This is why demonstrating important information on the same page so that it accommodates many different learners is actually a good thing.

There are several ways to reinforce your message so that it appeals to different learners. For instance, perhaps you want to show how much money your widget will save customers. You can demonstrate this point by:

1. Just writing it. Perhaps the headline in your copy will read “Our Widget Saves 32% Over Others” — and then expound on that idea in your copy.

2. Making a chart showing how much money your widget will save over those conventional widgets, for the visual learners.

3. Adding an interactive tool to your page, like a calculator where customers can type in how much they’re currently spending on widgets versus how much they could be saving. Some readers really gravitate toward interactive tools.

4. Creating graphics that illustrate how cost-effective your widgets are (maybe a graphic of a widget handing someone money – the sky’s the limit here).

By demonstrating the same information – namely, your widget’s money-saving value – in four different ways, you have effectively communicated your message by accommodating many different types of learners. Though it may seem redundant, you can grab the attention of more people by offering the same information in different ways. If a reader missed the headline, interactive tool, and graphic, but you were able to catch his eye with the comparative chart, that’s effective web communication.

Not ending sentences with prepositions is an antiquated rule of which we want to get rid.

That was annoying, right?

I’m not normally one for change, but I am all for the evolution of grammar rules. We don’t all need to talk like our third-grade English teachers.

Most of the outdated rules have gone the way of the dinosaur, but there are a few stragglers. One in particular that keeps lingering is the rule against ending sentences with prepositions. The title of this blog post is an exaggeration of course, but even in other, more casual instances, writers still balk at sentences ending in prepositions.

In most instances, it can actually enhance your writing to go ahead and close with the preposition, especially in cases where you’re trying to sound less formal. Most of the time, by trying to avoid ending with a preposition, the sentence gets really convoluted and unnatural.

Let’s look at this familiar little adage:

There’s nowhere to go but up.

“Up” is a preposition, which means that every American textbook from the 1940s would decry it. So let’s try it this way:

Up is the only direction one can go.

Wow. If that had been the saying, it probably wouldn’t have stuck around long enough to become a cliché.

There’s just no reason to detract from your stellar sentence structure just to keep your old English teachers happy. Go ahead – try it out. Unless you’re writing in the most formal of tones – or if you’re writing for someone that might pick you apart for doing it – ending with prepositions can only take the level of your writing up.

Writing for Web Scanners

It’s time to swallow your pride and face facts – visitors to your website aren’t going to put the same effort into reading you web content as you do writing it. If you’re lucky, a reader will scan your headlines, bolded items, and the first sentence or two of your paragraphs.

You can’t expect visitors to read every single page on your website. So make sure that you get your message across by repeating key information – especially your company and product differentiators – on multiple pages. Go ahead and direct readers via strategic links to your warranty, special offers, product benefits, and other important information, just in case they happened to miss one of your main points on another page.

Don’t overlook one of the most essential pieces of information: your contact information. Don’t make readers search for your contact information — frustrated visitors may leave your site if they can’t find what they’re looking for. Clearly marked contact information – including a phone number, email address, and physical address, if possible – is necessary for establishing credibility. Include a “Contact” button on your navigation, and put your contact info at the bottom of every page.

Change-ups: Not just for baseball anymore

Varying sentence length in your writing sets a lot more than the tone or rhythm. It allows you to set up and emphasize points.

Consider this:

Many people consider New York a place they’d rather visit than reside in because of its reputation as being the city that never sleeps. New York, however, is a vibrant city divided into boroughs that are all cities within themselves. There’s something for everyone in this expansive city.

Meh. It’s pretty bland – not only because of its weak word choices, but because the sentences are all roughly the same length. Its dull tone becomes lulling. Most people, including the author, wouldn’t think twice to skip it.

Let’s try this:

New York. The city that never sleeps. Outsiders may find it difficult to image living in the middle of the bustling Big Apple. But who wouldn’t want to live in a city that houses beaches, historical monuments, and stellar shopping?

I picked a pretty boring subject matter on purpose to illustrate just how crucial varying sentence lengths could be. Once I captured the reader’s attention with a short sentence, I gradually increased my sentence length to encourage the reader to keep reading. I broke up two longer sentences with a shorter one.

There’s no pattern or set of rules to follow, but you should always keep in mind the basics. You don’t want to write only in short sentences or they lose their punch and become disruptive to the reader. Use longer sentences to establish tone and comfort, or to inform readers about something.

By varying the lengths of your sentences, your audience will pick up on all the nuances that you’ve poured into your writing. It just makes reading more fun.

Blog 2.0

Continuing my theme from a previous post about professional blogs, I want to talk a little bit about using your blog as a networking tool. So you’ve started your blog – now what? Learning how to navigate through the blogosphere is essential to building a solid readership and increasing your web visibility.

First, enroll in a blog search engine. These search engines are basically large indexes that encompass the blogging world, making it easy for readers to search for useful blogs in any given category. There are a lot of search engines out there, and most are free, so be sure to put your blog’s url in as many directories as possible. To get you started, some of the more popular blog search engines include www.technorati.com, www.blogsearchengine.com, www.blogsearch.google.com, www.icerocket.com, and www.blogdigger.com.

Start frequenting other blogs and leaving comments. Get your face out there – read other blogs (preferably in the same or similar genre as your own) and comment! Starting a rapport with other bloggers is essential to your blog’s health. Once you increase your visibility with these bloggers, you can start a relationship by asking them to link to your site, and vice-versa. Remember, just like a new friendship, these relationships take time to build.

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While you’re at it, start a blogroll, a list of other blogs and websites that you find interesting. The links in your blogroll should direct readers to useful or similar blogs to your own – think of it as your blog’s “Recommended Reading” list. Check your specific blogging system to find out how to start a blogroll.

Once you start networking among other bloggers, use trackbacks frequently. Now, what’s a trackback? A trackback sends a message from your server to another blogger’s server every time you reference one of their posts on your site. Trackbacks are great tools to use because, if that blogger supports trackbacks, they’ll know you’ve linked to them in your post — and that’s a great way to start connecting with bloggers in your industry. Once they know you’ve linked to them, they’ll be likely to start visiting your blog, and they may even decide to link back. Every blogging system has different rules and requirements for trackbacks, so a little research may be required before getting started. For more information on trackbacks check out the trackback tutorial at http://www.optiniche.com/blog/117/wordpress-trackback-tutorial/.

For extra points, install buttons to social bookmarking sites on your blog. This encourages readers to recommend their favorite posts to others. Make it easy for your readers to recommend your particularly interesting articles by installing del.icio.us, digg, reddit, and furl buttons directly on your site. These social bookmarking sites can increase traffic to your blog exponentially if you get a large enough following.

In order to have an effective blog, someone out there needs to be reading it! Increasing your web visibility may take a little time and some savvy research skills, but once you get the hang of the new web 2.0, the benefits will be invaluable to the life of your blog.

After you’ve established a rapport with some of your fellow bloggers, it may be time to approach them about checking out your product or service (and possibly dropping a mention of it on their blog). This has to be done pretty carefully. Check out some tips on email pitching bloggers here: www.searchenginehelp.org/social-media/suh-wing-and-a-miss/.

What is Web 2.0?

I’m not afraid to admit that I’ve been a little behind the curve when it comes to the whole dotcom thing. I wasn’t the first on the facebook bandwagon, and I’m still trying to wrap my head around the concept of digg and others like it. But with the emergence of more and more blogs, wikis, and social networks, it’s impossible to escape this new Web 2.0 society.

But what, exactly, is Web 2.0? Some argue that it’s a marketing buzzword coined by the industry while others disagree. Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media and the man attributed with coining the term Web 2.0, describes it as “the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and the attempt to understand the rules for success on that platform.”

In layman’s terms, Web 2.0 encourages users to collaborate creatively and share everything from ideas to information. It’s not actually that the technology of the web has changed; rather we are learning to use it in a more social and mutually beneficial way. That’s why blogs run rampant on the web, and if you’re not involved in some sort of online social network, you obviously live in the Stone Age.

Terms like search engine optimizing, tagging, wikis, and the like are important to know in order to grasp a full understanding of the new and improved World Wide Web. Familiarizing yourself with these terms will help you use the web to your full advantage whether your goal is to generate more hits to your website or simply blog your heart out.

For a full explanation of Tim O’Reilly’s take on Web 2.0, click here.