Social Media, Affiliate & Internet Marketing

I see too many people using social media websites in the wrong way. Yes they are a great source of incoming links to your site, but if that is the only purpose you submit your posts and links to Digg and co, then you are not maximizing your potential with traffic from these sites.

As we all know, social media marketing has turned the web upside-down over the last five or so years. Sites like StumbleUpon, Reddit and Mixx are a few examples of social sites that can literally help  make or break an online marketing campaign. If these sites are utilized well a social media campaign can result in thousands of visitors and incoming links to help improve your product brand awareness as well as increase the all important search engine rankings and sales.

There is an ever-growing number of social sites to utilise with your promotional activities. Here are some of my favourites as well as some of the most popular which you should know:

• Twitter
• Digg
• Facebook
• Reddit
• Propeller
• Delicious
• Technorati
• Newsvine

Now the chances are you are using at least one of those sites already, if not all of them. Damn, if you want to be successful utilising social media marketing, you should be using all of them.

Using a nice mixture of social bookmarking websites like ‘Google Bookmarks’ or ‘LinkaGoGo’ and social news websites like ‘Digg’ and ‘Newsvine’ is a good move. These websites allow quick and easy content and links to be added and tagged and allow others to vote for you. Should you have something of value or worth reading then chances are you can easily generate a good following of visitors funneled from their websites to your own. It is important to note that not all social news websites will allow all types of content, so a quick check up on each website will tell you whether or not to target them with your content.

Registering and adding your story, link or content is just the beginning. A steady flow of content and contributions is needed from the moment you add your first entry to the present day. Make sure you have added a decent profile to each website and add your website links if they allow it. Include a picture and a short blurb about yourself to make you appear more real to others. This will help you be identifiable and will improve your networking efforts. Over a short amount of time contributing good content, you will become a well known and popular member of the community. More people will be interested in what you have to say and therefore your traffic will benefit from higher click throughs.

This process is a two-way street. Don’t expect to simply submit content and receive a massive amount of traffic to your site. You need content that stands out from the rest. Once you are a respected member of the community, your stand-out content will become voted for at a much faster rate. Of course this content needs to be unique, interesting and not commercial in nature. Simply submitting your website homepage or a product page is doomed to succeed and gain results. Go for less obvious tactics such as submitting pictures for example, these are not seen as spammy or promotional submissions most of the time but can quickly become popular, particularly if they are funny. Also think about submitting breaking news if you have any, tutorials and guides, videos, statistics or other interesting articles. When adding content remember to never lie and back up any facts that you include by adding resource links.

The most important aspect of submitting to social media news sites is to include a catchy and informative title. You need to grab the potential readers attention very quickly to make sure they read your entry and to get votes to improve its visibility. I would say about a third of your success with social media news sites comes from the title alone, the remaining third from the presentation and lastly the actual content.

Social media marketing is not something that can be mastered over night. It takes a lot of trial and error to get the most from it. However if you think like a reader when you are submitting your content and try to visualise what you would and wouldn’t want to see, you can help yourself improve from your submissions and increase the chances of success alon g with it.

All it takes is for you to apply yourself, work out a social media plan and invest considerable time into perfecting your content. It is entirely worth doing as the results gained can be quite simply phenomenal.

Just remember the golden rule for these social websites is to use them for what they are there for – to be social!

I will soon be adding my free ebook for download on this blog. This is designed for the 2010 social media marketing professional and will include every social media site known to man and how to benefit from them. I aim to have this ready for the beginning of March so please bookmark my blog and download it for free when it’s ready. Thank you.