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Social Media is the wave of the marketing future. Any companies that have not already embraced social media are quickly being left behind.
It is the place to connect directly with your customers – Marketers know that they need to go where the customers are – and customers are online and using social media!

Social Media Strategies

Lets take a quick look now at the main social media outlets and their functionality:

Facebook
One of the biggest and most popular. Any product can find its customers on Facebook. Facebook allows businesses to create a fan page for their product or business. This fan page can be accessed and  ’liked’ by anyone on Facebook. Once one person ‘likes’ a fan page, everyone on their list can see this on their newsfeed. People who also know the product/business can ‘like’ the fan page. In this way, the advertising for your product/business can be seen worldwide.
You can also create a group for your business/product. In much the same way as a fan page, users can join the group who know and enjoy the product/business.  People who have joined the group will then get updates from the group page. You can update all the members on your latest products, sales and offers and business happenings.
Check out what some of the International big brands are doing on Facebook now, just search for them in the search function. Facebook is one of the most widely used social media strategies.

Twitter
With millions of users on Twitter, it can be daunting to try and find legitimate users to market to. Some say that Twitter was created specifically for copy experts to get sales messages out there. Others say it is a simplified version of Facebook. In any case, its a social media strategy you cannot ignore.
You can easily register your business with a twitter account. Finding people in your target area is easy – simply search for the topic of your business, and you will see the users that are tweeting about this. Follow people who make informative and useful posts in your business area. Add your twitter to all sales messages going out, be it from your website/blog or email. People can then choose to follow you. By creating your list of followers in this way you are creating a database of people that you can market your message to.
Ensure that your copy skills are up to scratch as 140 characters is not a lot, but should be enough for you to send a convincing message.

Digg
Digg is a social bookmarking site. Different from Facebook and Twitter, it enables you to post website/blogs that are interesting and informative.  You can become friends of users, and users can become friends of you, similar to twitter in the ‘following’ function. You simply bookmark an interesting article/website/blog and then it appears in the live feed. New bookmarks will appear on the front page for a while, and they will stay on the front page if people ‘digg’ them. By ‘digg’ing a bookmark, people are saying that they like it.
You can submit pages from your business on a regular basis and your friends can be updated on your business happenings in this way.

Social media strategies are essential in today’s business marketing plans. Take the time to investigate what is right for you and implement the strategies to ensure your business is not left behind.

Getting traffic to your website/blog is a primary function of Internet Marketing. You increase your sales figures, by increasing your traffic. The more people at your website/blog, the more people buying.
But is all the traffic you can get better than targeted traffic? Let’s look at this now.

What is Generic Traffic?

Generic traffic is any visitors to your website. Your website/blog may be about fishing, and the generic traffic that visits your website may not necessarily be looking for fishing. These people may be inspired to buy a fishing product from you once they are on your website/blog, but most will not.
Among the generic traffic there will also be people looking for fishing products. These people are more likely to buy from you.

What is Targeted Traffic?

Targeted traffic is traffic that specifically is looking for your product. So as with the last example, targeted traffic would be people who are looking for fishing products. These people are much more likely to buy from your website/blog than people from generic traffic.

What’s better?

Obviously targeted traffic is better. The conversion rate is much higher. However it is harder to get targeted traffic than it is to get generic traffic.
You can get generic traffic from marketing on the net in a general way. Marketing in a general way would include submitting posts about your website/blog to Facebook groups that you belong to that are not related to fishing. It would also include placing classifieds. While there are people here that will see your website/blog, unless they are interested in fishing, they will click away.
Getting targeted traffic would include joining fishing facebook groups and posting updates to this group, joining a fishing online forum and update the forum with your website/blog details, writing an article on fishing and submitting it to various article depositories. People who are interested and looking for fishing products will find your communications and visit your website/blog. They are already interested in your area of business, and will therefore be more likely to make a sale.

When getting traffic to your website, targeted traffic is much better than generic traffic. Spend your time wisely online, and aim to get as much targeted traffic to your website/blog as possible.

Once you have created your blog or website to conduct your business online, the next thing you need to look at is how you capture your customers!
You capture your customers through maintaining an online database. But how do you create an online database?
It’s simple, easy, and an essential step in your on line business plan.

An online database will have information on your customers. Name, address, contact details, and most importantly email address. By collecting this information, you can not only analyze the buying pattern of your market, you can update your customers on your latest offers, specials and business information.

Be mindful of the information that you are collecting. Make sure it is relevant to your needs and useful. Asking for too much information will also be a turn off for your customers. So you need to find the right balance.

• Keep a sign up widget on your blog/website so that people who visit your website can sign up for your regular communication. This will only require name and email address.
• For customers that make a purchase, collect name, address, email address, items bought. You can use the information to analyze trends.
• If you have a free item to give away, e.g. ebook or product, create a separate page on your website/blog and get people to sign up with information that you need in return for the item. In this way you are increasing your database with buyer information.

There are many online companies that provide database support. You should research this and find the one that is right for you. One that is popular is Aweber. Aweber provides database storage and retrieval. Aweber also allows you to create and send correspondence to your online database all from their platform.
Research and choose the option that is right for you.

Online databases are a natural progression in online business. Help capture repeat customers and ensure that you harness that traffic to your website or blog.

When creating effective SEO, keyword research is paramount.

When starting your website, you know what area you are focussing on. However there are many different ways of describing this area through keywords. What you need to do is find the right keyword that describes your business as well as ranking well. However you need to choose a keyword that is a popular search term – but not too popular that you will not have a chance to rank on this. You need to find a happy medium in your keyword research.
This along with appropriate website design, traffic tools and marketing will ensure a good and successful website.

Researching Keywords
When researching keywords, its crucial that you get the right one for your business. It’s easy to lose focus in your research as you move off on a tangent. Stay close to your business topic. Check out the websites of your competitors and see what keywords they are focussing on. You want to be different and unique, however at the same time available and searchable online.
During keyword research – remember these important rules:

• Short tail keywords (i.e. one word) will generally be more competitive than long tail keywords.
• Try to steer clear of overly long keywords – these are unlikely to be searched on a regular basis, and you should see this through your keyword research figures.
• Try to use everyday language rather than scientific or overly intelectual words.

Keyword Insertion
When completing SEO remember the following things:

• Include the keyword in the headings
• Include the keyword in titles
• The keyword should appear in the first paragraph
• The keyword should appear in the URL
• Be bolded and italicized once each in the text

A final word on keywords – less is more. Do not get carried away and place your keyword in your text too many times. Enough times to SEO adequately is enough!

Online success is not accidental. Any successful Internet Entrepreneur can tell you. When creating a presence online, it’s essential to use all the tools and techniques available to you.
One of these  techniques is URL submission to search engines.

Search engines drive and directories drive website ranking, so ignore this technique at your peril!

Submitting your URL to search engines is simply that. However you need to go into a bit of detail about your website in order to list. You will need to list the URL, and then provide a description of the website. Some directories require even more information than this, some less. So it is a time consuming technique, however greatly worth it.
There are hundreds of engines and directories out there. If you submit to all, you can get many backlinks back from them. Each one of these backlinks contributes to your pages popularity and ranking. Good popularity and ranking means more hits to your website, and therefore greater online success!

When starting out submitting your URL, aim for the most popular and reputable directories. This will boost your rankings straight away. As you list more and more, go down the list to the least popular. Every directory counts, so don’t ignore some for others, just tailor your submission to the most popular first.

URL submission is an excellent way to boost your ranking, however it should not be the lone technique you use. It should be paired with your whole SEO strategy.
URL submission also goes hand in hand with backlinking. You should aim to backlink as often as you submit your URL. You can backlink through blog/forum/web 2.0 commenting, article submission and general URL adverts.

Make URL submission a target in your SEO strategy. The rewards will be great with targeted traffic to your website.

In order to complete all facets of SEO, you must consider backlinking. Backlinking will help you to achieve top level Google ranking – but how?
We will show you some easy ways to get backlinks for yourself.

Firstly – what is backlinking? Backlinking is when you leave a comment on a blog or webpage and leave your URL with your comment. People who read the comment may then click on your URL link, thus linking back to your website/blog.

The main place that you can leave comments and your link are blogs, forums and web 2.0 pages.
Now having said that – you must ensure that the places that you are leaving comments and your link must be relevant to your website. You can’t leave comments on someone’s blog about knitting and link back to a heavy metal website. Find blogs, forums and web 2.0 pages that are relevant to your industry. Backlinking does require some thinking!

When making comments, commonsense rules here. Follow these simple tips:

• Comment in blog/forum/web 2.0 that is relevant to your site
• Make a comment about the content of that actual blog/forum post/web 2.0 page
• Make a good, genuine, helpful comment. Keep in mind that most people still approve all comments on their pages so if it isn’t useful, it’s unlikely to be approved.

When adding your comments to forum posts you may need to register as a member in order to comment and leave your URL in your signature. This is o.k. as you want to do this as an ongoing measure anyway. Not only that, being part of an industry forum is a great way to get real time info!

Web 2.0 pages (Squidoo and Hub pages) may not allow you to specifically backlink, however you can leave your YRL within your comment. As long as the comment is helpful and informative, people will click on your link.

Take the opportunity backlinking wherever you can - after all, it is advertising for your site!

When deciding on what domain name to use, you need to be confident in your choice – this domain will represent you!

First of all, you need to work out where your domain will be based – are you going to be using the worldwide .com or the local .com.au?

If you have a global market then you would chose a “.com” or a “.net” where as if you customers were only based in Australia then you would choose a “.com.au”

The reason why you would do this is because Google is all about relevancy, so this is just another factor they use when ranking site.
So if  someone in Australia put in a search term for Kitchen and there were two competing sites out there. One site was located here in Australia and it’s domain was www.kitchen.com.au and the other company had www.kitchen.com, all things being equal with SEO then the site that would be ranked 1st would be the “.com.au” as Google knows where the person who is searching for a ‘kitchen’ is located, therfore wanting to give them a more relevant kitchen site. Simple!

The only difference is that .com’s have been around much longer than .net so .com is in the top of people’s minds. If a “.com” is available over a “.net” then it’s best to choose a “.com”.
Better still, if your domain name is available, why not buy both, and have the “.net” permanently redirected to the “.com”. Google won’t rank a “.com” over a “.net” based of the extension alon, it’s got more to do with the domain name and other SEO factors.

Choosing a domain name all comes down to keyword research. What specific keyword are you targeting for your business. The domain name is part of the SEO equation so its best to choose a domain name that is related to your industry. It’s best to get your keyword as your domain name.