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For those just diving into the realm of social media, social networks are sites that allow you to create an online presence for yourself. If managed properly, this presence can be a very powerful tool and enables clients and prospective clients to find you and get to know you and your business. Typically, these networks allow you to share information within the community of the site. In the beginning we had MySpace and Facebook, social networking sites have now expanded to the worlds of Linkedin, Twitter, Digg and Stumble Upon just to name a few.
So, what about WordPress? Isn’t it a social network too? No…at least not yet!
WordPress MU (multi-user), is releasing a new platform, Buddypress, that will have built in features similar to existing social networks, giving WordPress the "appearance" of being your latest social networking site. If you don’t use WordPress MU, which requires dedicated hosting, don’t worry because WordPress offers many social networking plugins to their users.
There is one other main difference between WordPress and all the social networking sites. On WordPress and other blogging platforms, individuals come online to their own specific location. With the popular social networks, while users have their own "page" or presence online, it is not really their own as it is just an extension of the social network that is hosting the user’s presence.
How do you implement the features of social networking while using a blogging platform?
The key is plugins, and WordPress has many free and user-friendly plugins available. Many of the networking plugins provide one-click access for your readers to other popular social networks where you have a presence. Most blog owners utilize either an icon or a form of drop-down menu appearing at the bottom of single posts or on their blog’s sidebar. Popular plugins include About Me, Social Links, Social Bookmarks, Social Dropdown, SocioFluid, and Tweet My Blog, just to name a few.
Some examples of WP plugins that help spread your online social presence.
- Socialite – This one publishes your WordPress posts to sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace.
- Twitter Updater – Just what it appears to be, Twitter Updater is a plug that notifies Twitter of your new blog posts. WordPress even offers a widget form of this plugin that will display your Twitter feed in your blog sidebar.
- Lifestream – Possibly the most complex, this plugin logs all your online social activity on other networks and provides a live stream for your blog readers to follow you socially online.
The key to successful social networking with WordPress is not just enabling your readers to follow you through your other connections, but engaging them to stay invested with your blog.
WordPress also offers several plugins to facilitate engaging your readers.
- WP-Polls allow you to build online polls you can then add to your blog post or your sidebar. Readers are able to interact with you and leave comments.
- FV Community News allows readers to publish news items to your sidebar.
- How about providing a space on your sidebar for top or recent comments? Top Commenters plugin facilitates this function.
As the Internet and the growing number of online communities continue to grow, you need to be ready to help plant your social networking seed and offer your readers their own presence on your site too and WordPress can help you do just that with the simple addition of a multitude of readily available plugins.
This video ROCKS and helps you understand the phenomenon surrounding Social Media!
Are you wondering whether to hire a Virtual Assistant to help you with your Social Media Marketing? Entrepreneur.com has published a great article on the benefits of outsourcing to a VA. Enjoy! Should You Outsource Your Online Presence? - Social Media Marketing - Entrepreneur.com
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Understanding the type of people who visit your site is a very important task because you can use that information to enhance your site to suit them. As a result, you will gain more loyal returning visitors that come back again and again for more.
What is the age level and what kind of knowledge does your audience have? A layman might linger around a general site on gardening, but a professional botanist might turn his nose at the very same site. Similarly, a regular person will leave a site filled with astronomy abstracts but a well educated university graduate will find that site interesting.
Take your audience's emotional state into consideration when building your site. If a very irritated visitor searches for a solution and comes across your site, you will want to make sure you offer the solution right up front and sell or promote your product to him second. In this way, the visitor will put his trust in you for offering the solution to his problems and is more likely to buy your product when you offer it to him after that.
When you design the layout for your site, you have to take into account the characteristics of your audience. Are they old or young people? Are they looking for trends or are they just looking for information served without any icing on the cake? For example, introducing a new, exciting game with a simple, straightforward black text against white background page will definitely turn prospects away. Make sure your design suits your site's general theme.
Try to sprinkle colloquial language in your sites sparingly where you see fit and you will create a sense that your audience is on common ground with you. This in turn builds a trusting relationship between you and your audience, which will come in useful should you want to market a product to your audience.
The basics of setting a goal is an open secret known by top-caliber athletes, successful businessmen and businesswomen and all types of achievers in many different fields. The basics of setting goals give you short-term and long-term motivation and focus. They help you set focus on the acquisition of required knowledge and help you to plan and organize your resources and your time so that you can get the best out of your life.
Setting clearly defined short term and long term goals will enable you to measure your progress and achieve personal satisfaction once you have successfully met your goals. Charting your progress will also enable you to actually see the stages of completion leading to the actual realization of your goals. This eliminates the feeling of a long and pointless grind towards achieving your goal. Your self-confidence and level of competence will also improve as you will be more aware of your capabilities as you complete or achieve your goals.
The basics of goal settings will involve deciding what you really want to do with your personal life and what short term and long term goals you need to achieve it. Then you have to break down goals into the smaller and manageable targets that you must complete in your way to achieving your lifetime targets. Once you have your list waste no time in tackling your goals.
A good way to have a manageable list is to have a daily and weekly set of goals. By doing this you will be always in the position of going towards you life plan goals. Everyday will give you the opportunity to fulfill a certain goal giving you the feeling of accomplishment.
Here are some pointers that should be taken into consideration in setting goals and achieving them.
Attitude plays a very big role in setting and achieving your goals. You must ask yourself if any part of you or your mind holding you back towards completing your simplest goals? If there are any part of your behavior that is being a hindrance or puts your plans into disarray? If you do have problems in these areas then the immediate thing to do is to address this problem. Solutions may include a visit to a doctor or psychiatrist to control your emotions.
Careers are made by good time management practice. Failing in a career is often attributed to bad time management. Careers require a lot from an individual which often makes the career the life of the individual. Plan how far do you want to go into your career.
Education is key in achieving your goals. If your goals require you to have a certain kind of degree or require a certain specialization or demand a certain skill to be developed, make plans in getting the appropriate education.
Your family should never be left out of your plans. If you are just starting out then you have to decide if you want to be a parent or when you want to be a parent. You also have to know if you really would be a good parent and how well would you relate to extended family members
Personal financial situations also play a major role in achieving your goals. Have a realistic goal on how much you really want to earn. You also must be able to create plans or stages by which you will be able to reach your earning potential.
Physically gifted individuals may be able to achieve sports related goals like being in the National Basketball association or National Football League. Determining your physical capabilities should be one of your priorities. Physical limitations could however be conquered with proper planning.
As the saying goes -'All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy', or something to that effect, is by all means true down to the last letter. Giving yourself a little pleasure: should always be included into your plans.
To start achieving your lifetime goals, set a quarter of a century plan, then break it down to 5 year plans then break it down again to 1 year plans, then 6 month plans then monthly plans, then weekly, then daily.
Then create a things-to-do list for the day.
Always review your plans and prepare for contingencies.
The basics of goal settings should not be so difficult once you get to be familiar with them.
A sitemap is often considered redundant in the process of building a website, and that is indeed the fact if you made a sitemap for the sake of having one. By highlighting the importance of having a well constructed sitemap, you will be able to tailor your own sitemap to suit your own needs.
1) Navigation purposes
A sitemap literally acts as a map of your site. If your visitors browses your site and gets lost between the thousands of pages on your site, they can always refer to your sitemap to see where they are, and navigate through your pages with the utmost ease.
2) Conveying your site's theme
When your visitors load up your sitemap, they will get the gist of your site within a very short amount of time. There is no need to get the "big picture" of your site by reading through each page, and by doing that you will be saving your visitors' time.
3) Site optimization purposes
When you create a sitemap, you are actually creating a single page which contains links to every single page on your site. Imagine what happens when search engine robots hit this page -- they will follow the links on the sitemap and naturally every single page of your site gets indexed by search engines! It is also for this purpose that a link to the sitemap has to be placed prominently on the front page of your website.
4) Organization and relevance
A sitemap enables you to have a complete bird's eye view of your site structure, and whenever you need to add new content or new sections, you will be able to take the existing hierarchy into consideration just by glancing at the sitemap. As a result, you will have a perfectly organized site with everything sorted according to their relevance.
From the above reasons, it is most important to implement a sitemap for website projects with a considerable size. Through this way, you will be able to keep your website easily accessible and neatly organized for everyone.
When it comes to your website, extra attention should be paid to every minuet detail to make sure it performs optimally to serve its purpose. Here are seven important rules of thumb to observe to make sure your website performs well.
1) Do not use splash pages
Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like "welcome" or "click here to enter". In fact, they are just that -- pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the "back" button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.
2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements
Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valuable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.
3) Have a simple and clear navigation
You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don't know how to navigate, they will leave your site.
4) Have a clear indication of where the user is
When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don't confuse your visitors because confusion means "abandon ship"!
5) Avoid using audio on your site
If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they're not annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it -- volume or muting controls would work fine.
Like anything else, you’ll get out of Google Adsense what you put into it. The following optimization tips can help you grow your Google Adsense dollars:
Write interesting content and write every day.
Have more than one site. The more sites you have, the more ads have the potential
to get clicked.
Set up channels and monitor your statistics across all sites. If one site is performing poorly, consider changing the content or the ad layout. Experiment!
Change the ad layout and notice which layout works the best for you. There are
many different layout options and there’s no way you can know going in which
one will perform the best.
If you’re blogging, writingup.com has a list of profitable topics. They state that
you don’t have to write on those topics but you might give it a try or at least plug
some of them in to the search engines.
Google different key words and phrases and notice how much and what kinds of content and ads you see.
Don’t be afraid to ask questions.
It’s the dream of every online blogger to be the acknowledged king of the hill. When it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), to be king of the search engine hill is to have as many people link your site to theirs. One-way.
Search engine optimization is a method of preparing a site for high ranking in search engine queries. Methods on optimization vary between legitimate ways like continually improving content relecvancy and ease of navigation to tricks like keyword stuffing, link farming, etc.
The term used for people to have your site linked to theirs one-way is to have an inbound link. With search engine giants like Google and its PageRank system, it places significant value on the number of links pointed to your site because it is considered a vote of confidence and relevance by that site.
As stated by Google: “In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B.” And a large vote of confidence online not only means fame but most likely even fortune. This is because the relevancy of a site causes it to rank higher in the search engine search strings, attracting more attention from consumers and attracting revenue from companies willing to pay to appear on the same site.
In effect, one-way inbound links are now as good as gold.
So far, there are five effective ways to acquire inbound links:
1. Wait for Offers. The normal way of getting inbound links. This method is the most ethical of the strategies. This methods banks on the fact that if the site has great content that is constantly fresh and interesting, with a navigation system that does not require rocket science, people will eat it up. Offers will come of their own volition. Then you get your links.
2. Play Musical Chairs. A devious way of getting inbound links using reciprocation with a twist. Reciprocation is the most common form of getting links which doesn’t hold much water with page ranking systems of search engines.
Normally search engines can detect reciprocal links, but if reciprocation is layered, i.e. indirect, it takes the engine much more work to detect it, requiring more complex algorithms. The price for doing this trick is steep, though. You have to have more than one website. Some people make a pretty penny putting up links one-way.
3. Apply for Inbound Links. Yes, it’s not a crime to promote your site. You can submit your site for review at people-run directories whose interests run into the subject matter of your site.
If the world wide web is the analogy of the earth, a directory can be best described as a town, where almost everybody knows each other. Any new arrival gets a thorough once-over and the whole town votes to see if you can get to stay.
4. Links for Sale. Some high-ranking sites are willing to sell their outbound links to the highest bidder. Sites that are popular with PageRank or other search engine ranking systems use this extra capacity for extra income sometimes.
However, the drawback to this is that the sites are only mercenary, selling their sites for rent. You have no link-equity other than the amount of cash you shell out to keep on existing on their site. Search engines such as Google are actively trying to dampen these efforts as it degrades the relevance of their search engine results.
5. Be Generous, Distribute Content. Of all the strategies stated, this is a highly effective method of getting better quality, legitimate one-way links. You give other websites a reason to put a link on their sites to point in your direction.
All sites are always looking for fresh content for their sites. A site cannot expect to stay number one in relevancy if they just keep on refreshing the content of their sites once every month. Most of the time these sites will even pay for fresh online content to a slew of writers. For a discounted offer, you can have a “about the author” link posted on the site with your own content. Be creative. The key is to make it mutually beneficial.
Ultimately, with a little patience, elbow grease, and luck. It pays to just be honest and stick with the stuff you like to talk about. You don’t regret eating up the time and you enjoy the process.
You can build your list simply by writing articles, whether you have thought of it or not.
Quite simply, you write and submit your articles on your topic of expertise or business nature to popular article directories where eZine publishers and readers are looking for the information you provide.
Leveraging your viral marketing efforts on article writing can be rewarding, if done right. In the real sense, you are actually proving your worth and demonstrating your expertise about your business through the articles you write.
So, how can this method in effect build your mailing list? The answer: the resource box you attach to your articles. In your resource box (also known as bio box), you include a brief detail about yourself and your business site together with its URL.
It is strongly suggested that your resource box URL links to your mailing list’s landing page where you can get your visitor’s name and email address, which will in turn help you build your mailing list at no cost.
If your articles are found worth sharing, eZine publishers will republish your articles together with your resource box for their readers and subscribers. The wonderful result: viral marketing without effort on your part!
You can start by writing and submitting your articles to trusted article submitter sites such as http://www.articlemarketer.com and begin your article marketing journey today.
Here are six ideas to help you start your viral marketing campaign:
1. Purchase the branding rights to a viral E-book. Allow people to give away your free E-book to their visitors. Then, their visitors will also give it away. This will just continue to spread your ad all over the Internet.
2. If you have the ability to set up a forum or other bulletin board, you really have a great tool. Allow people to use your online discussion board for their own website. Some people don't have one. Just include your banner ad at the top of the board.
3. Do you have a knack for web design? Create some templates, graphics, etc. and upload them to your site. Then, allow people to give away your free web design graphics, fonts, templates, etc. Just include your ad on them or require people to link directly to your web site. Make sure that you include a link back to your site in the copyright notice and require them to keep your copyright notice in tact.
4. Write an E-book. Allow people to place an advertisement in your free E-book if, in exchange, they give away the E-book to their web visitors or E-zine subscribers.
5. Write articles that pertain to your product or service. Allow people to reprint your articles on their website, in their E-zine, newsletter, magazine or E-books. Include your resource box and the option for article reprints at the bottom of each article.
6. You can easily find products on the Internet that will sell you a license allowing you to distribute the product free of charge to other people. Look for those products that provide "branding rights". That is where you can include your own name, website, and contact information.
When you purchased an item or availed of a service of a certain establishment and are satisfied with what you got, don’t you recommend that to a friend? And when you give your recommendation, doesn’t your friend buy or avail of it as well?
More often than not, we express our satisfaction with some product or service by telling our friends and relatives about our experience. Some of them will actually try the same product or service that we recommended. Essentially, we have just successfully advertised the product through word-of-mouth without the establishment having to spend a penny on it.
That is the idea behind viral marketing. Viral marketing is an advertising strategy that entices people to pass on a marketing message to their relatives and friends. It is called as such because of its similarity to an epidemic that easily spreads out, with an exponential growth, once an individual gets “infected.”
How did this marketing phenomenon start?
The concept of viral marketing, which is passing along a message, has been around for a long time now, even for centuries. There was just no specific name for it until 1997 when Steve Jurvetson, a venture capitalist, came up with the term “viral marketing” to describe Hotmail’s marketing practice then.
Hotmail’s practice was to append an advertisement of itself on each message that is sent using their service. When a recipient gets interested and clicks on the ad, it will lead to Hotmail’s website for him to signup. This will go on and on, and the growth is similar to an exponential curve.
Types of Viral Marketing
There are different ways to apply viral marketing strategy.
- Pass-along. This is the most common type of viral marketing. Web sites that ask their users to tell-a-friend about their products and services is an example of pass-along messaging. However, there is a risk of the message being labeled as “spam” by email providers. Thus, it is important that the “from” and “subject” lines do not contain any word that may be tagged as spam.
- Incentivised viral. This is a marketing technique used by companies in which users are offered rewards when they refer somebody to the company. This becomes more effective when the referred person needs to take action for the reward to be given.
- Undercover. The most difficult viral to spot, undercover marketing sends a viral message that is disguised as just an unusual page or piece of news without obvious link citations.
- Edgy gossip or buzz marketing. This type is most common in the entertainment world. A good example is the spread of different controversies, like getting married or divorced, involving the stars of a movie that is yet to be released. This is like a word-of-mouth advertising for the movie.
Methods of Transmission
Spreading the viral message can be done in different ways.
- Email. This is the most common type, when people forwards messages such as inspirational messages, jokes, funny clips and pictures that advertises a certain product or service.
- Instant Messaging. People who receive links from friends through instant messaging servers, like Yahoo or MSN, are more likely to check it out because of the notion of urgency of the sender.
- Web sites. Most of the articles now published online have a link that says “Send to a friend.” This is one way to make the article reach a good number of people by just posting it in one site.
- Word of mouth. Of course, this is the traditional way of passing on a message to another person; and most of the time, the most reliable method too.
Though there are several ways on how to do this kind of advertising, there are also barriers to it. One was already mentioned, which is the risk of the message being labeled as “spam.” Since a lot of companies now are using this method and promoting their products through email, email providers proactively created some sort of filter in their system to separate potential spam emails from the more trusted ones.
Other barriers can be the size and format of the viral message. If the content is a video clip, its reach may be limited because of size limitations of most of the email providers. Media format is also one thing to consider because not all recipients of the message may have the right application to open the file.
But despite of these constraints, businesses are already getting into this style of marketing. Indeed, this technique helps in dramatically increasing revenues by reaching a huge number of the target market without having to spend a big chunk of money for advertisements. Viral marketing will definitely go a long way, especially in the World Wide Web.
Nowadays, even the smallest company uses the Internet as a main tool in building a customer base, keeping in contact with their clients and this is also their most basic means of advertising.
Designing a company web site is cheap and effective, not to mention essential because the world wide web is the only medium that offers instantaneous information access to millions of users around the globe.
Any web developer worth his salt should know about search engine optimization or SEO.
This is the key towards building an effective web site that would get a lot of hits and visitors. A web site that nobody visits is useless so the challenge lies in leading Internet users to visit your web site.
Thus, your web site need to be "found" when users type in keywords in search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, Altavista, AOL and others.
Once a keyword relating to the products or services that you offer is keyed into a search engine, a direct link to your web site should emerge on top of the list.
You should employ search engine optimization techniques to lead traffic your way, and get more hits that would later on lead to more profit for your company, which is your goal in the first place.
Here are some tips on how you can make it to the top of the list of search engines, and use your SEO techniques to benefit your web site and your company:
1. If you have an existing web site and domain, just optimize the one that you currently have instead of purchasing a new domain.
It will take some time before your web site will show up in a particular search engine, like Google, so it better to use the one that you currently have instead of switching to a new one.
2. Know who your target audience is and aim for them.
If you are in the manufacturing industry and a user types in your product in a search engine, then you would immediately have your target right in front of you.
As soon as the user hits the Enter button or clicks on 'Search', then the person will be lead to your web site.
Make sure that your target market will get 'hooked' on your web site. Once the search engines show the link to your web site, their job is done.
What you should do next is to make sure that your visitor will not leave your web site without them trying out your products or services, or at least leaving some pertinent information so that you can contact them in the future for marketing and advertising purposes.
When hitting a particular target market, learn about their interests, location and age to have an idea of what you can offer them in return.
Also, you can somehow link their interests to your products and services.
3. Search for the right keyword.
You should be creative, persistent and flexible when looking for the keyword or keyword phrases to use in optimizing your web site.
Google and Yahoo offer some tools and tips on how you can come up with keywords that will yield results.
Do not settle for just one keyword. You can also vary the words and phrases that you use for each page on your web site so that you can have more hits.
4. Consider your target market when designing your web site.
The design itself would include the general theme of the web site. You should also pay attention to smaller details such as color and font style and size.
Make sure that the web site is user-friendly and do not forget to insert helpful articles, tips, hints and related links that can be shared to other users.
It is a good thing to have an option to send a link or an article to a friend, which will add more users and increase your client base.
There should also be various ways to browse through your web site, to fit each user.
A person might find it to difficult use the scroll down option so you should also provide hyperlinks which are accessible to them.
5. Concentrate on the web site content.
Regularly update the content of your web site so that old and new users can find something new when browsing through your site.
Make the content brief and precise. Writing a content which has more than 600 words will make the users lose interest, since most of them do not actually read but just skim through the text.
Strive to be the best and most comprehensive web site and you will make your mark when it comes to information about the products and services that you offer.
It helps a lot to pay attention to detail, too.
Finally, keeping your web site's content updated is a must.
Spread the word about your web site and use the basic search engine optimization techniques and you will surely gain positive results once users visit your web site.
