7 Ways Social Media Will Change Your Business Forever

Social media is one of the most powerful new marketing tools for business. In fact it is safe to say that if your business is not taken advantage of social media, then your business may get left behind in the dust. The proliferation of social media into our daily lives has exploded in 2009. Every day reveals a new form of social media from our phones to new social networks appearing on the Internet.

Some may argue social media today is chaotic with so many apps, widgets, countless features, and tools all fighting for a piece of the social media pie. However, like almost everything in business, there are key fundamentals that you’d need to address to give yourself a competitive edge in business.

The truth is the social media is continuously evolving. While many others try to keep up with these ever-changing factors, the savvy business owner should be creating a powerful social media presence that covers the essential areas of social media and creates a solid foundation for future growth.

1. It’s All About The People And Communications: Social media is just that, social. Just as social media is creeping into business it is a much more rapid accepted by your target market that is continuously bombarded by this new media. As such, you need to make sure you have a solid presence on such social media platforms as Facebook and Twitter. Ideally, these starting networks will provide time to adjust and grow your social media exposure and provide a solid starting point to grow from. Social media is about connection and communication. The true globalization and amalgamation of social media behavior has opened up a large door of opportunity for businesses that are forward thinking enough to take advantage of the situation.
2. The Perception Of Value And Trust: One of the key advantages of social media is that it breaks down the barriers that separate business from customer While many businesses hide behind this war as some sort of protection. Smart entrepreneurs take down that war and allow the target market to see behind the value. By doing so they create a warm rapport and build trust with their target market. Essentially, they are putting on a human face to their company and by developing closer connections to their customer base, they can increase sales and ultimately grow their profits using this medium.
3. Connectivity, Convergence and Productivity: One of the major problems for businesses starting to social media is the fact that everything is so disconnected. For example, if you release a new article or blog post, it can take a while to manually post these two-faced book, twitter, or wherever else you are aggregating your information to. Thankfully, there are many ways to integrate and connect all the social media services into one funnel. Using services like Ping.fm you can post to one service, which then feeds your post to your many other social networks. Ping.fm for example supports over 40 different social media platforms. Believe me, this can be a major timesaver and can still help you get your message out to every single social network you may be involved with.
4. The True Application Of Social Media: If you know anything about Facebook, you will know that Facebook apps are one of the primary ways that Facebook uses interact and get hooked on using the service. If you have a Facebook presence for your business, one area of social media you should consider is getting your own application built. You don’t have to have any programming or technical knowledge, as you can outsource this very easily. However, this can take some out of pocket startup capital to get going, but once it does it’s incredibly viral and powerful marketing tool for your business. Ideally, think of something to related to your business or target market that is fun and entertaining. Creating these apps is actually very simple to do and for some larger businesses that have taken this route, it has been incredibly lucrative.
5. Creating a True Network and Community: As mentioned earlier, some business is high time the wall that separates the business from the customers. This wall really does create a barrier to communication and customer involvement as well as loyalty to your business. By taking advantage of social media and creating an actual network between all of the social networks that you are involved with, you can actually create a viral community that actually helps to promote your business. So make sure that in each social network you promote your other networks and openly invite your customers to join the other networks to stay informed.
6. The Evolution Of Social Media Advertising: One thing you’ll find in social media is a lot of people advertising incorrectly. Twitter at is a great example of this. I see too many people sending out nothing but links trying to sell their products or services. However, any marketing expert will tell you that this is business suicide. In social media, direct advertising is often frowned upon because of the nature of social behavior. The savvy social media enhanced business owner will quickly realize that the soft sell approach works infinitely better than trying to communicate a powerful sales message in only 140 characters. By building a reputation of value and trust, as well as creating a solid rapport with your target market, you’ll have a much greater chance to convert the website visitors you will generate for your social media activities into an actual paying customers. That is not to say that cannot to use “Hooks” to draw interest into your promotions, that is just common sense. However, blatant hard sells will ultimately tarnish your reputation and damage any long-term prospects.
7. Making Money – The Main Reason For Your Social Media Presence: For most people, social media is about being social and connecting with other like-minded people. For a business, our goal is to make money. It is our sole reason for existing. Often times it is hard for a business to break the social media bubble and resistance to business efforts. Unfortunately, among many social media purists, there is a common perception that all business should be banned from social media.

Of course, that is not only unrealistic but impractical. However, by taking the correct approach to social media by being personable and putting a human face on your business you have a much greater chance of creating a solid and profitable traffic and revenue stream in the long-term. Most businesses do this by branding the person rather than the business. For example, a lot of top CEOs and executives of companies are the “front man” for their businesses in terms of social media.

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How Social Media has Changed SEO

Social media websites have spread like wildfire over the past couple of years. Today, so many people spend more time on Facebook, Twitter or some other social network than any other website.

Aside from connecting people, social networks also provide advertising opportunities. Take Facebook, for example. What do you do when you come across a website with half a billion active users? Develop Facebook Web promotion strategies and use the website as a marketing tool, of course.

It's not surprising to find so many businesses utilizing Facebook Web promotion these days.

In fact, lots of businesses have an FB page as their second homepage. So, the challenge here is how to use social media SEO to your business' advantage.

Social Media SEO

It's not so hard to advertise via Facebook Web promotion. FB and other social networks allow you to post ads, updates, pictures and videos in a snap. When it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), on the other hand, there is some doubt whether Facebook SEO is really effective. For one, this particular social media site uses the “nofollow” tag. This means that your backlinks from Facebook aren't given any value by search engine crawlers. Thus, those links aren't affecting your search engine rankings at all (but they will still give you traffic).

Facebook links may be nofollow, but this doesn't mean that the website completely doesn't have social media SEO opportunities. Here are a Facebook SEO tactics:

• Post links to your website in less obtrusive areas. A good thing about Facebook Web promotion is that it presents ads and links in a rather subtle way. If you can notice, most of the ads on FB are at the right side. Although links can be found everywhere, they aren't slammed right in your face. By posting links only in your bio box, info tab, right side panel etc., you won't be turning off users by spammy messages. Thus, there are more chances of people checking out content in your site and linking to it.
• Don't stop the posting. Many a time have companies felt excited about reaching fans via Facebook Web promotion, but find that the excitement dwindles after a month or two. Keep on posting --- send out daily posts, and write about interesting things regarding your business, services, and products. These posts can encourage conversation, likes, and comments. Besides, if all your status messages are all about your products and services, your page will lean more on spammy.
• Give away free stuff. Almost everyone loves free stuff. Start a contest or coupon codes with enticing value to encourage fans to participate in your social media SEO campaign. If you get fans excited, they just might tell their family or friends and blog about it. This Facebook Web promotion tactic can result to more links pointing to your main site.
• Don't hesitate to ask for a link. It never hurts to request, or even beg, for a link. Once you have a minimum of 25 fans, post an update and ask your fans to post a link pointing to your site on their blog. If they're truly your fans, chances are they'll help you out with this Facebook SEO strategy. To increase the chances of getting that link, give out coupon codes or other free items.

@Addme

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What can SEO do for your company?

Stand out from the crowd and surf online with SEO! SEO stands for search engine optimisation. It helps drive traffic to your website. How? Well it makes your website as searchable and accessible as possible to internet users. SEO aims to get your website to the top of a search engine results page, such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, Go Fetch etc. Surf through the web

If you get SEO your web presence can double, depending on your current rank listing. It’s amazing, makes my heart swing, now it’s up to you.

SEO is a cost effective strategy for increasing your business, and provides a sound return on your investment.

You can either have onsite SEO or offsite SEO

• Onsite SEO involves your HTML code, enabling it to be an accurate reflection of what each page on your site is about, for example, key words.
• Offsite SEO is essentially the process of link building. The more links you have on other relative websites the higher your ranking will be and the more quality traffic you will hook in.

It’s time you maximised results and ranking on search engines for your website. Having quality content and links is also the key to success. The search marketing industry is growing, don’t get left behind!

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Hot to Get the Most Out of Google Adsense

If you look closely you’ll notice that on almost every single blog out there you’ll see something known as Google Adsense, If your unfamiliar with them and don’t know how they work, its rather quiet simple, you take some code place it in your blog and from there Ads are displayed from thousands of publishers who use Google Adworks and when someone clicks on one of those ads you make money.

If I had to guess I would say that at least 70 to 80 percent of people who use Google Adsense have no real clue how to maximize their profit with them, most people just set up some ads and place them on their site and don’t do anything else, if you are one of these people then you are not making as much as you should be by doing this and I’m going to explain some ways of how you can improve your profit with them.

First I want to point out that every blog will generate different amounts of money by using Google Adsense, this is because the Ads come from people who are paying Google Adwords to display them and some people pay more then others, so a blog about the sky might not pay as much then a blog about technology because the technology sector is much more competitive then the sky and people will pay more to have their ads displayed.

So how do we get an idea of the amount of money we can generate using Adsense when we are not allowed to discuss it?. Well one of the simplest ways is to use the Google Adwords External Keyword Tool. Using this tool is extremely simple, lets say you’ve got a blog about Computers and in the majority of your posts you use the word “Computers”, what you do is type “Computers” into the tool and press “Get More Keywords”, this will generate a list of several keywords that people are paying for, what you want to focus on is the green bar under “Advertiser Competition”, the higher the green bar, the more competitive that keyword is and the more money you’ll make if ads about that keyword are being displayed on your blog.

That sounds fairly straight forward doesn’t it? Now comes the question of targeting those keywords, most people think that there is no way to tell Google which Ads to display, this is a common myth surrounding Adsense, now you cannot exactly tell Google to display car ads on a biology blog, that simply will not happen, but lets say your using the word “Computers” in the majority of the posts you make and from what we can tell from the Adwords Tool the keyword “Computers” is very competitive and it should pay quiet well.

What you can do is place these two bits of code around the text that you want Google to target, the first one looks like this and the last one looks like this what these two tags will tell Google is that instead of taking every keyword on your blog, it will only take the keywords in the text between these two tags. This will refine how well Google displays ads on your site.

If your using Blogger or some other sort of blogging program the easiest way would be to wrap these two tags around the tag in your template, from there Google will only display ads based upon which keywords each of your posts have. Google will generally display ads based upon how much your keyword density is, so if your using the keyword “Computers” in the majority of your posts, you’ll get more relevant ads about Computers and we know that this keyword should pay quiet well and you’ll be making more money from it.

Now I want to cover one more tag that you can use with Google Adsense if you don’t want to use the two tags I just talked about, they have another tag which looks like this and when you wrap these tags around certain parts of your blog, Google will simply ignore all the keywords in those sections, as you can tell by doing this you get much more control over the type of ads that are being displayed and once you use these systems together you can start to maximize your potential profit with Google Adsense.

These few examples will help you increase the amount of money you get when someone clicks on your ads and it will allow Google to target the content on your site much better, by having more relevant ads on your site you should see your click through rate begin to go up.

The last thing you should be aware of is the colors of your ads, the size of your ads, and the frequency of the ads showing up on any given page. The first thing you want to do is make your ads blend in with the rest of the content, you don’t want to make people think all your after is a bunch of clicks, you want them to flow very nicely with the rest of your content, so if the majority of the links on your site are blue then make your Adsense links blue and if your text is black make the Adsense text black and so on.

The size of your ads also influences the amount of clicks your going to get, if you blatantly place huge ads all over your site people will start to trust you less and when you loose a readers trust you loose that much more clicks, its better to provide your users with quality content and ads that don’t say “HEY CLICK HERE”. Have a look at this particular blog and see how I’ve got my Adsense blocks laid out, as you’ll see they blend in quiet well, they obviously could blend in a little bit better because they do pop out a bit but they don’t scream at the user, this mixed with good quality content makes the stand out more acceptable.

The very last thing is the frequency of the ads being displayed on your blog, Google only allows you to display 3 ad blocks on any one page, so if you try to place twelve ad blocks only three will show ads and the rest won’t even be noticeable, as well you have to remember that the more ads being shown on your site takes away from the amount of money you’ll get per click, I’m unsure of exactly how this all works with Google but simply put the more ads means less money.

Now I’m not telling you to only display one ad on your entire blog to gain maximum profit, you could but you won’t be reaching maximum profit, simply because the less ads you have displayed means the less people will click on them and the less money you’ll make. The best way to deal with this is to test different ad placement on your site to see which area’s gain you the most amount of clicks while maintaining the least amount of ads, you can monitor your results in Google Adsense.

Just keep an eye on your CTR (Click Through Rate) and remember how many ads are being displayed on any particular page, you’ll eventually find exactly how many ads you should be displaying and which area’s those ads should appear. If you employ all of these techniques there is no reason why your Adsense profit should not go up.

@Dotcomreport

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How to Make Money with Expired Domain Names

Everybody is searching for more ways to make money successfully and efficiently in the world of online marketing and business these days. One untapped resource that you are probably not yet taking advantage of is the field of expired domains. An expired domain name can potentially earn you a great deal of cash and it can be another powerful tool to have at your disposal in your quest to be as successful as possible in the online marketplace.

First of all, you must of course recognize what an expired domain name is. It’s a domain name that was purchased by somebody else and either forgotten about or not renewed. That means that the original owner no longer has possession of it, although there may be a period of 30-45 days before it hits the open marketplace again.

As somebody looking to make money from expired domains, the first step in the process is being able to keep track of these names. You can do manual checks for this kind of thing and of course that can work although it will eat up a lot of time. The good news is that there are now many automated tools, services and sites out there that will allow you to quickly find expired domains based on dates, keywords, topics, traffic and more.

Now that you know about how to find some of these expired domains, you of course need to know how to actually go about earning some cash from them. You will have several different options at your disposal, and different situations call for different courses of action.

Perhaps the best case scenario is when you purchase an expired domain that was made into a real website and was able to establish itself somewhat. This site will have a supply of traffic already, and will also having incoming links leading to it. You can then redirect that traffic to your own website to quickly add more visitors.

An alternative in this situation is to throw up new content on that existing website that produces affiliate income or displays other advertisements. This way you can keep the site and its traffic intact for a time, but you can quickly and easily start squeezing some money out of it.

Even if the website never really was built and therefore doesn’t have any traffic, you can still quickly start earning. Build a micro-site based around the keywords in the domain, and use it either as a direct push for a product or affiliate program, or as a launching pad to your main site. Either way it won’t take you long to develop at all.

These are just a few of the ways that you can make money with expired domains. It’s all about being able to find them and being able to find the right ones. From there, you can build new content, sell affiliate products, redirect traffic and more, whichever solution is best for your particular case.

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