When used right Social Media is a key financial marketing tool that is cheap and has recurring effect since all the comments in the blogs and pages like Facebook pages are always there as evidence of success for new fans, clients and members to see.

Below is a quick list with a bit of descriptions to help us understand how these social media and networking sites can befit you and your firm or organization. These are also some of the new or popular social sites that you can use to make more audience for your business or personal blog faster. Here we go.

• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Stumble Upon
• Flicker
• Mezee

If you look at these prospective social media marketing sites, you will realize that I have listed them according to how popular, effective, user friendly they are in descending order. And so to group them together we quickly need to understand what you can achieve using these networking sites. Press releases- Like promotions and prices changes. These is possible with LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter as long as you provide free quality content and the audience does not perceive that they have been oversold to. Brand reach-How people respond to certain new released service, products or info, in the market. You can use Twitter and Facebook for these with the help of Tweetdeck. Advertisements- since the latest social media roomers are that when traffic from the above listed sites is put together is bigger than China’s population.

This way you will get great audience you can’t get advertising in Google in weeks. Brand social justice-Redirecting misinformation that is normally done by malicious fans or agents hired by competitors. Recruiting-You can initiate a viral word of mouth that can give you a thousand qualified candidates in a day. Good examples are like LinkedIn and Facebook. Source of reliable intelligence-You subscribe to a competitor’s page to always be the first to know what they are releasing or planning. I believe that everybody knows how these can be useful when in a competitive market. Social Networking: This should have been number one to me since public leaders, celebs and representative want to use social interactions and social connections to let their fans and prospects know a little about themselves.

As Facebook and twitter can be very popular, videos and pictures are not part of the center of attraction. That is where Flicker, Picasa and Mezee.me come in. You can share, learn and archive a lot. Catch the early birds in small and new chat sites like Mezee since you will be found easily and as a matter of time, be popular and you can remain popular as opposed to starting afresh in near old major sites like Facebook. You will need to be like Nike or Coca-Cola to be popular outside these networks and also use lots of efforts. But this is not to say that Facebook and other major sites should be avoided.

Written by Ludwing, full-time web entrepreneur.

Here are some tips

Publicize Your Account and Follow Others

The first step in effectively tweeting your brand is getting people to read your tweets, and to get people to read your tweets you need followers. So how do you achieve this? First off, make sure you publicize the fact that your company has a Twitter account, and give your customers an incentive to follow you; for example, you could tout specials or discounts that are only available to Twitter followers.

Another way to gain followers is simply by following other Twitter members. Any friends, acquaintances, businesses etc. that you follow open you up to more people seeing your account and following you in return.

Respond to Your Followers

The whole idea of social media is that it’s based on interaction, and when people participate in it they generally expect some sort of back-and-forth. If people ask you questions or make comments concerning your brand, respond to them! It lets followers know you care, and allows you to start a dialogue that could help you figure out what you can do to provide a better experience for your customers. It also gives people an incentive to follow you; if they see you’re responsive to their questions/concerns via Twitter, they’ll use it as an avenue of correspondence

Interesting Profile/Background Image

Your profile and background images are the face of your account; people will glance at these and make a split-second decision about your brand. You want a profile picture that represents how you want to be perceived, whether it’s fun and zany, hip and youthful, or professional and respected. You can also customize your background, which is a good opportunity to insert imagery related to your brand and get your name/logo into people’s brains even further.

Share Content Relevant to Your Brand

You have to give your followers a reason to be interested in what you have to say; otherwise, they will not have an incentive to follow you anymore. Keep it interesting by posting links and content related to your brand, and make sure that it’s actually fun and engaging stuff. Posting special deals and discounts for your followers is another good way to keep them coming back for more. You can post updates about your business, but just be sure you are not spamming your followers.

Have a Nice Website to Direct Your Followers To

Having a following on Twitter does not mean much if you don’t have a good-looking website to send them to. You need a website that looks nice, functions well, and makes it easy to buy whatever you are selling. If you need help setting one up, there are companies out there that specialize in small business shopping cart software and all the other various ins and outs of getting your site up and running. Madeline Marshall is a writer living in Northern California.

This has not necessarily lead to good social media practices however. There are still companies that engage in poor social media management and poor social media strategies. This article will outline three of the biggest social media strategies that you need to avoid if you plan on entering the social media world.

After reading this article you should be able to understand what turns consumers off and how you can avoid doing that with your own social media strategy.

• – Spamming

This is the worst of the worst. If you want to turn your potential customer off, this is exactly how you do it. What exactly constitutes spamming? It is simple really. If you are interacting with the user in a way that they do not want to be interacted with, that is spamming.

We often think of spamming as sending unsolicited sales emails, but it can extend beyond that. For example, sometimes businesses will send tweets or Facebook messages to individuals that are completely unsolicited. It is OK to do this if you are honestly reaching out, but if the message is entirely sales based in nature, this is spamming.

Not only is spamming annoying, but it is also illegal. In the United States, Congress passed a law that regulates spammers. If you engage in spamming you could end up facing a very heavy fine.

• – Copying Content

Being original is hard. On the Internet, being original is absolutely necessary for success. So how do some people get around this’? They simply copy others content. Not only is this low down and dirty, but also paints a very poor picture of your company’s brand.

It seems that there is story after story in the online news blogs of companies getting caught either copying content, or not giving the appropriate credit where credit is due. Users online are very loyal and respect fair and equal business practice.

Avoid copying content at all costs. It may be difficult, and it may take more time than is convenient, but creating original content to be shared the via your social media channels is the quickest way to success.

• – Selling

Consider the following: why do people love YouTube? Is it because they can watch funny videos? No, they can watch funny videos on TV. Is it because they can watch more variety of programming’? No, satellite TV has hundreds of channels. People love YouTube, like they love the Internet in general, because advertising online is not so “in your face”.

Seth Godin, a popular marketing author, called it “permission based marketing”. Essentially, the Internet has managed to maintain a softer approach to marketing. If you are a business that uses social media while still using the old tactics of “in your face” marketing, you will stick out like a sore thumb, and not in a good way.

Users will run away from you faster than you can upload a YouTube video. Internet users do not like being sold to. One of the worst things you can do for you social media strategy is to focus on selling when you should be focusing on connecting.

By avoiding these three social media strategies, you can also avoid some of the conundrums that have befallen other businesses. Stay true, stay relevant, and your customers will love you for it.

Ludwing Hernandez is an experienced blogger, Community Manager at Mezee online chat. Follow Ludwing on Twitter @Mezeeme

Visitors find your site by looking on the internet for the product or service you sell. For any given search term a visitor could use, there is probably hundreds of thousands, and more likely millions of results that will be returned to him. Everyone knows that searchers rarely go beyond the first pages, so this means there is slim to no chance they will find your site. Search engine optimization is designed to achieve better rankings so you are on those first pages and therefore, found.

Here is what SEO companies will do to improve your rankings and draw more visitors to your site to, hopefully, buy.

-Analysis.  Keyword analysis, traffic analysis, click in and click through rates are all important components of making a web site rank well. Following which pages draw in the most traffic, and then which make sales is really important if you want to concentrate on the more lucrative portions of your site.

- Marketing expertise. Unless you have your own marketing department, chances are you are not developing strategies that are designed to bring in viewers and customers. Marketing is an art, and using the expertise of the professionals in this field will yield better results than if you try to go it alone.

- Continually refine your site. Fads come and go, expressions change, and people simply search in different ways for different things over time.  Do you really have the time to continually redo your keyword strategy? SEO companies have automated programs that do that for you constantly.

- Testing. Running and evaluating tests to continually learn which strategies work, and which don’t is important if you don’t want to waste your time and money. Running A and B versions of your content, ads, ad placement, etc. is complicated and time consuming.

- Create content. The more quality content your site contains, with pertinent keywords, the higher the ranking your site will earn on the search engines.  You may have written some of the first pages of your site, but if you are not a professional writer, you have probably run out of things to say. Let the professionals do it.

The best background check service can be your best friend if you decide to hire an SEO expert. The internet is fraught with legal and scamming terror and a background check can help you stay safe.

First of All – What Is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization is basically a set of techniques that will help you create web content that search engine bots will love – simple as that! If you do this properly, your website or blog will rise up in the search engine results, and fly up to that often-illusive first-page ranking everybody is talking about. So, the first thing you need to do is make yourself knowledgeable about SEO techniques in general, and make sure you understand what those three important letters stand for.

When an Internet user types in something in their search bar, the search engine will display a number of relevant results that match the user’s query. One of the most important factors are the results in which the keywords are displayed. It is best to use logic here, as well as to do some research, and come up with a list of keywords that you should use in your web content. After this, make sure you use these keywords, but never overuse them – as this will result in creating spammy content. So, make sure your web content sounds natural and reads well, bearing in mind to use your keywords whenever you get a chance.

Use Keywords with Images

Even though many people omit this step, you should always make sure to use keywords with all of the graphics found on your website. This is usually called Alt Text, Alt Tag, or something similar, and you should use this option to insert your keywords. Again, make sure you use an image that has to do with your keywords, so that you do not end up looking like a big-time spammer. For example, if a keyword you are using is money, you shouldn’t put an image of a tablecloth and put the word ‘money’ as the tag.

Beware of Your Anchor Texts

When creating hyperlinks, make sure you are using descriptive anchor texts. This will not only help with search engine bots, but it will also help your readers determine whether the link is something that they are interested in or not. Many people make the mistake of doing things like this: To find out how to make money from home, click here. Instead of this, you should do something along the lines of the following: Find out more about how to make money from home!

Abhishek Khandelwal is a SEO consultant. He offers SEO services to clients across the world. His clients also include many SEO company and companies spread across different sectors like IT, telecom, real estate and so on.

Before taking a plunge into the backlinking arena, here are some vital points which you must consider.

1. Your backlink building strategies are totally worthless if you don’t have the right set of keywords to promote. That is why it is very essential to take the time researching the best keywords for your site.

2. Submitting your links to link directories, link farms, and any other search engines is totally a waste of time. These have all been devalued by Google recently, so don’t bother wasting effort.

3. You have to identify the main reason why would you want massive traffic for your website. There is no point driving lots of untargeted traffic to your site which will never convert.

Why Are Backlinks Essential For Your Site?

Backlinks are much more like the votes towards your site. Needless to say, the more backlinks your site have, the higher its ranking will be. However, you have to take note that these backlinks should be of high quality and are relevant to your site as Google and other major search engines give greater weight towards such links. But the question here is how could you be able to gain such quality backlinks towards your site and eventually increase its overall rankings?

To give you the answer to that question, here are the essential factors which you must consider when planning to perform backlink building strategies.

Dofollow Links Are Truly Essential
A link which is attributed with the “nofollow” tag indicates that the search engine bots are instructed not to crawl that specific link. This only means that no link juice is passed onto that link and provide no search engine link value at all. Due to this, you have to consider looking for sites which are dofollow as these pages tend to pass on link juices to the links within.

However, this doesn’t mean that you have to totally do away with nofollow links as they are still essential to preventing your site from being tagged as spam. And in spite of that, nofollow links still have the potential to bring in a small amount of traffic even though it has no SEO value at all.

It also helps build a more natural looking backlink profile, with a diversification of dofollow and nofollow links.

You Don’t Have to Worry About Your PageRank
Google PageRank is only one of over 200 indicators which could affect your site’s rankings. It is only a metric which shows your authority within the search engines and does not primarily impact your rankings in the SERPs.

There are in fact a lot of SEO metrics which you have to consider rather that focusing on your site’s PageRank and these include your conversion rates, ROI (return on investment), quality of traffic and a whole lot more.

Google Analytics* is One Essential Means of Tracking Your Results
Google Analytics is one essential tool which you should utilize in tracking your results. You can find several metrics such as landing keywords, landing pages, number of visits and a whole lot more. This will enable you to identify which keywords work out for your site and which don’t. Usually, the best trick for maximizing your traffic through Google Analytics is to consider those keywords having the most traffic and focus on doing backlinking strategies for them.

*other analytics packages are also available.

Various URL Structures Offer Different Values
By this, we are talking about canonical URLs. As an example, http://www.mysite.com differs from http://mysite.com. Even though it refers to the same website, the link juices passed onto them are way different from the other. This only means that you have to focus only on one URL structure for your backlinking strategy as this will give you more edge towards gaining a better site ranking. It also will help avoid ‘Duplicate Content’ penalties from the search engines.

Use Blog Commenting To Your Advantage
Blog commenting not only helps you a lot in building backlinks towards your site, it also helps you interact with other webmasters and build your reputation at the same time. Leaving quality and insightful comments on any active blog page entitles your site to almost instant traffic thus encouraging other commenters to visit your site as well. Looking for blogs which are dofollow and have CommentLuv and KeywordLuv features really are essential for building quality backlinks for your site.

You have to take note that not all backlinking strategies will work for your website. There are some which do help in increasing your rankings while there are those which may get it penalized. But as long as you know which factors to consider for your backlink building strategy, gaining better rankings won’t be that hard.

Do you have any other tips that we have missed in this article? If so then you should add them to the comments section below; We would love to hear from you on this very interesting topic!

This guest article has been contributed by Steve Rendell, who amongst other things finds time to run online invoice software company Paper Free Billing. He also likes sushi and fast cars.

Here are 6 tools for Twitter that users of all walks should be using to promote themselves and any business interests that they may have:

1. HootSuite
   The wildly popular Twitter client allows management of multiple accounts and social networks, scheduled posting and brand monitoring. HootSuite is much more powerful than the default Twitter account and has features any user would love.
2. FollowerWonk
   FollowerWonk helps segment Twitter users and has a wonderful set of data available for marketers. If you wanted to promote a home design product, for example, you can use FollowerWonk to see who is influential about motorized shades or interior decorating. The list allows you to personally reach out to those influencers and build your audience.
3. Buffer
   Ever stumble upon a person who tweets a little bit too much? Recommend that they use Buffer, a tool designed to help people tweet at the optimal times to best reach their target market without annoying their users. Buffer also offers in-depth analytics and reports on each and every tweet that gets sent out.
4. Storify
   Storify is a beautiful application that creates “stories” based on Twitter discussions. You can view a pretty flowchart of all tweets relating to a trending topic or hashtag, for example. You can also post up a conversation between two people. This is a great way to bring Twitter content onto a blog.
5. Twemes
   Twemes helps the less-informed or hip Twitter users figure out why certain topics are trending or what exactly they are. Lots of memes can be difficult to figure out because they are based off of obscure culture references. Thankfully, Twemes saves the day!
6. Klout
   Klout has become the standard for measuring influence on Twitter. It scores and classifies users based on their network, influence and topics. Learn what your account is influential about, who you influence and who influences you. Klout will also spell out your Twitter style so you can see if your strategy is reaching the right types of users.

Guest post written by Michelle, a lover of all things social media.

Andrew Handley is an SEO and social media specialist doing campaigns for elevator and escalator companies on Long Island. Currently testing out Pinterest and the possibilities it offers for businesses.

Blogs and Search Engines

Search engine spiders crawl millions of sites on the internet. They look for a few key things: quality content with well thought-out keywords, user interaction, and frequency of updates to sites. These along with a multitude of other mystifying factors determine what pages will show up in the top spots of search engines like Google and Bing.

Bloggers have some of the best content online because they understand the only reason why they do well is to give the people what they want: relevant, unique, quality, interesting copy that’s frequently updated. By posting blogs that include the aforementioned content elements, people will take notice, comment, and follow. This keeps the search engine optimization cycle going.

Speak Directly to your Target Audience and Build your Credibility

So say you have a company that offers potable water and you want to stand out from other water purification companies. To have a blog or to be a guest blogger is one way to stand out from the competitors in your market.

When others read a blog that gives them a piece of information that they did not know, it’s like having an “aha moment”. So just think about how you can write a blog post to make your readers say “hmm… I never thought about that before.” The result is you being seen as an expert in your field. You increase your credibility in your market share.

Your blog connects your business with customers who are interested in the services you have to offer. This is the information age and the company that offers different channels for their customers to receive the information they want, when they want it, will stand strong.

Making it Work

To make the most of your blog posts, think of what would be useful and interesting to your target audience. Industry news, tips and tricks, etc. are always welcomed by the information-hungry masses.

Also be sure to get involved in the conversation. If someone leaves a comment, you should respond, especially if that comment is actually a question or complaint. Transparency in your customer service gives you the chance to establish your business as customer-focused. Another plus for a business blog.

This guest post was written by Shane who likes to write about marketing online. All businesses like ones that offer potable water through a water purification machine can use this information to educate their audience on the benefits their business has to offer.

1. Do Not Underestimate the Survey
Surveys are an incredibly powerful tool. Tools like Neolane make make it simple to produce and distribute surveys among your existing customers. There are two great reasons to encourage surveys:
- Interaction – This is best for public surveys, especially if they are about interesting or controversial subjects. These kinds of surveys have a way of spreading through social networks like wildfire. They keep people interested and spark debates. When you are the platform for your discussion, you become an important part of your consumer’s world. People love to share their opinion, especially the same type of people who love to share what they think of brands and other pieces of content on the web.
- Feedback – A campaign that is customized for your audience is incredibly powerful. Surveys allow you to segment your customers and target them in the way that appeals the most to them. By tailoring your message to each of your customers, you can dramatically improve engagement and keep your customers interested.

2. Social Media Engagement
A surprising number of brands and bloggers fail to make this work properly. This happens for an understandable reason. For nearly a century, brands have relied less and less on word of mouth and more on broadcasting. Social media has managed to reverse this trend in less than a decade.
- How Old Spice Dropped the Ball – This deodorant company made waves by transforming a brand that had the name “old” in it into an exciting company that consumers wanted to be a part of. They did almost everything right: connecting the character from the commercials directly to their social media outlets and communicating directly with their customers. They responded to comments with videos and boosted sales. Then, nothing. Their commercial campaign ended, and they stopped communicating with their fan base.
- Marry Your Customers – As Gary Vaynerchuk has said, brands need to stop trying to pull a one night stand on their customers and marry them instead. The game going forward is going to be all about keeping customers satisfied so that they don’t stray. Loyalty is the name of the game, and this means you need to start offering genuine value and foster an actual emotional attachment with your customers.

3. YouTube: The Right approach
Users are becoming increasingly difficult to capture. They spend more time online and yet feel much more obligated to spend it wisely. They will not waste time on a piece of content if they think they have better things to do with their time. Video has a way of pulling people in and keeping them interested through the entire piece of content, especially when it is done right. People are also much more likely to share videos with their friends.
As with everything else, don’t neglect the SEO. Use your keywords in the title and file name of the video. Link from the description back to your site. Organize your videos into a playlist so that they’re easier to find and so that users will watch more than one of your videos and become more interested.

Be sure to keep posting on a regular basis so that people have a reason to subscribe. The more frequently you post, the more likely they will rank your videos higher. Make sure to include calls to action in your videos, and let them know how often you’ll be updating.

4. Emotional engagement: Psychology in the service of marketing
Combine these three emotions to get the most out of your efforts.
- Freshness – The more novel you are, the more interesting you become.
- Trustworthiness – The safer users feel, they more likely they are to stick around and promote you.
- Joy – The happier you make your visitors, the more they will remember you and think good things when they come across your brand again.

Andrew is a search engine specialist examining the visitor flow for http://www.anexcelsiorelevator.com/.