BrandingYOU&Co. » blogging

Social Media Marketing – is it worth your time?

Claire Morawski — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 22:33:08 +0000

A lot of people shun away from Social Media and Social Marketing, because many associate Social Marketing with just sites such as Facebook and often consider this a ‘waste’ of time spent chit chatting. The majority are not aware of how effective Social Marketing is to build a fan base, to brand yourself as an expert in your niche and to generate more traffic to your business. But this is only guaranteed if one knows how to use Social Marketing the right way.

In this article I am going to go over the several different types of sites that make up Social Media, and categorize them in 5 sections.

1. Social Networking (Community Sites):-
These sites are where one enters to network with different kinds of people. Each site is usually for a specific group of people.
 Facebook – student communities
 LinkedIn – manage and share your resume (CV)
 MySpace – friend site
 MeetUp – find common interests and organize meetings
 Twitter – update your followers what you are up to

2. Social Bookmarking (Social News Sites):-
These are the user-submitted and voted news sites where anyone can post stories and take advantage of the traffic flowing through the sites to get targeted visitors. Communities can share their favourite bookmarks, articles, videos, etc – anything that is news.
 Digg – submit links and stories; vote and comment on the content
 Technorati – find what people are saying
 Del.icio.us – store, share and discover web bookmarks
 Reddit – submit, rate and rank news
 StumbleUpon – discover great websites that match your interests

3. Content Sharing Sites:-
Websites where you can generate your own content and share it with the community.
 Wikipedia – contribute and get smart (can create a Wiki for your site)
 Squidoo – create pages (called lenses) for subjects of interest
 HubPages – submit magazine-style articles which are posted as individual webpages (referred to as Hubs)
 Gather – share, earn and gather information
 EzineArticles – expert authors share their best quality original articles

4. MultiMedia Sharing Sites:-
Websites which specialize in all kinds of media sharing and creation.
 YouTube – upload and share your video
 Flickr – manage and share your photos
 SlideShare – upload and share publicly or privately PowerPoint presentations
 JamGlue – create and personalize audio. Upload, record music and remix it.

5. Blogging Sites:-
Blogging platforms allow you publish content directly onto your blog, to communicate and share your knowledge with your customers.
 Blogger – a free blog publishing tool from Google for easily sharing your thoughts with the world.
 WordPress.com – another free blog publishing tool
 Movable Type – build websites, blogs and communities on a single platform
 WordPress.org – own your blog and install on a domain name of your choice

In future articles I will be showing you the different ways of how I use the above multi-faceted marketing strategies to promote my businesses (internet marketing business, service provider offline business, and service provider online business). In the meantime start contributing to the places and get links. Just do it responsibly and the way the other members of each community do it to keep from getting banned. You do NOT want to spam these places.

Be aware – this Social Media trend is HUGE and is extremely under utilized by the majority of online business owners, offline business owners and network marketers. However, be warned… there is a right way and a wrong way to use Social Media and Social Marketing to get massive levels of exposure – including more traffic and more leads – for your business.

If, on the other hand, you are aching to learn immediately the correct way of how to use Social Marketing Strategies, so as to start implementing the strategies ASAP to market your business, then Click Here if you would like to generate leads for your MLM business or Click Here if you would like to generate traffic for your Online, Offline or Small Business, especially if it is service related. You would need to input your e-mail to get access to some phenomenal training, and a chance to have a coaching session with me where I will personally show you the ropes and how to specifically use Social Media Marketing for your particular business.

To Your Success

How Can I Earn Money From The Internet?

Claire Morawski — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 23:25:57 +0000

Before going straight into how it is possible to generate an income from the internet, I will start first with discussing 2 mechanisms that you need to have in place, before thinking of earning money from the internet.

1. You need to work hard and consistently towards having good content on your blog. This will in return drive traffic regularly to your blog, because your readers are curious what your next post is about – what they are going to learn from you.
2. Build an e-mail list. This is usually an ‘opt-in’ box, where your readers will fill in their name and e-mail address to give you permission to send them a regular newsletter, such as once a week, on educational content, information about a product, a tip for them, and so on.

These 2 tools will give you leverage – because now that you have built traffic, attention and an audience to your blog, it is time to convert that into money.

7 ways to earn money from the internet

1. Affiliate promotions. This is one of the ways that I personally like, of earning money online. So to give you an example, let’s say that there is a piece of software that I like and use for my business. I have personally bought it and use it regularly myself. I will write a review of it with links to the software’s sales page, and when my readers will click on this link and buy the software I will earn a commission for promoting this product. My Review of the Automatic Article Submitter is an example of this.

You can actually promote anything – a physical product such as a book, a downloadable e-book, a subscription service, a software, a system, and more. It is basically anything that offers an affiliate program. For my part, I prefer promoting stuff that I personally use, but you can also choose to subscribe to affiliate programs, without actually buying the product, and selling them through your blog.

The advantage of this is that there is no physical product to move, since your ‘job’ is to direct your traffic to the product’s sales page, and the company will take care of the rest. You are given an affiliate ID which is unique to you, which will look something like this: www.aweber.com/?333695 – with the first part being the product’s website and the second part being your affiliate ID, so you will earn a commission when people buy from your link.

Now if the product is a one time payment, you just get a commission once, but if the product is actually a subscription based service, then you are actually getting a commission every month. And each product will have a different percentage. However, all this adds up, especially if you have a successful blog.
Affiliate marketing uses the concept that word-of-mouth from the customer is the best advertising. So they actually reward you for promoting their product for them.

For affiliate products check Claire Morawski’s Recommendations (they are all products that I personally use for my business – and most of them are affiliate products). Can also have a successful blog on a particular topic, such as fishing, go to Clickbank (a retailer of e-books and digital products) and Amazon.com (a popular online superstore), search for products which are relevant to your topic, example fishing, and sell the products on your blog.

2. Once you have an audience, you might want to consider having people sponsoring your blog. You would accept adverts on your blog and get paid for it. You can come up with a service like Yaro Starak’s Advertise Page, where he explains the different packages that he personally offers to people who want to place an advert on his website. Like this he has complete control over the adverts.

3. Another way is to go through other sites, where in a way they will place the adverts themselves for you – the only problem with this is that you don’t really have total control over the adverts and the companies. Such sites include,
 Google Adsense that enables you to display relevant Google text ads and earn a commission when people click on the ad,
 TextLinkAds place static text links on your blog, and finds the sponsors for you,
 Chitika puts little advertisements on your blog and you get paid if people click on the adverts. Great for people who have blogs with topics such as computers, electronics, digital cameras, etc.
 Widget Bucks puts advertising on your blog, similar to Chitika,
 Kontera puts hyper-links inside your content. So actual words in your posts will become advertisement. If people click on the links, you actually make some money.
 Commission Junction is like an affiliate network. You will find people who want to advertise their products or services, you’ll place their advert on your blog, and you will get a commission for each sale, each click or each lead you send them.

4. Writing paid reviews or a blog post is another way of generating money online. This does not necessarily require that you have your own blog. Review Me is a broker that finds people who want to find paid reviews from bloggers. You are paid for writing a review about someone’s website or product. With Pay Per Post you are paid to write a blog post. It’s a good way to start making the first money, if you do not mind writing about something that in a way you are ‘forced’ to write about.

5. Become involved in a multi-level marketing (MLM) company, and earn money by selling a product and by recruiting people. The products can be anything – insurance, memberships, vitamins, gold, etc. The only advice that I would give is to choose a company that reflects your values. With such companies you are usually given a generic website and basic marketing training. I would strongly recommend building your own website (a self-hosted blog) to brand yourself and have a unique presence on the internet, and to learn how to market effectively to once again brand you as a leader in your niche. If you are selling products, you can add a cart to your blog.

6. As you travel down the lane of internet marketing, you will find that time and experience has been a great learning curve. And you might decide to start selling YOU. Using the knowledge you have gained, you might want to start writing ebooks and selling them. Or you could also venture into selling your services such as training new entrepreneurs on how to succeed online, or consulting businesses on website building and search engine optimization,… The list is endless, and the potential of internet marketing is huge and untapped – so you never know where the road will lead you to.

7. Another point worth mentioning is that you can build an online presence to promote your offline business. Let’s say you have a small restaurant, and you build a self-hosted where you brand you and your website. The blog can have the recipes of items off the menu, calories of each meal, recommended wine pairing for each dish, conversations you can have with the chef, ratings of each meal, comments and suggestions from customers, videos teaching people on how to cook, and so on. This kind of blog for sure will generate a vibrant online community, which will in turn market the restaurant, and bring in more business.

I totally believe that as a platform, one should have a self-hosted blog – which can be considered as you business or your store online, where you can market yourself, brand you, place ads, add a cart, communicate with your readers, and more. It’s worth noting that without a self-hosted blog most of the above won’t work. However, if you don’t have a blog, don’t let that stand in your way towards your financial freedom, as creating a self-hosted blog is quite easily achieved with a little bit of training. Visit Here For Blogging 101 Training. Once you have a blog in place, and a little bit of good content, then focus on building an audience through marketing strategies such as Article Marketing.

When it comes to making money online, in the beginning, focus on one or two of the above 7 strategies and make them work for you. The trick is to be consistent, and to keep testing and optimizing each system. Once you have one working for you, keep at it and gradually introduce another strategy. Eventually test all the 7 systems to find the best combination that works best for you. The internet is a huge marketplace with huge potential. Enjoy the ride.

To Your Success

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How a Podiatrist Blogs to Generate More Business For His Practice

Claire Morawski — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 14:52:49 +0000

This is a short post from me for today, but if you are a service professional and would like to see a ‘live example‘ of how a podiatrist (foot doctor) created a blog to:
* syndicate his offline business with an online presence,
* get more clients for his existing, offline business – his clinic,
* be viewed as the person-to-go-to for any foot problems,
* be seen as an expert in his niche.

Take a time today to visit Dr Andrew Schneider’s Blog and read through some of his interesting and informative articles, such as:
<< Ten Important Foot Facts for 2010 >>
<< Is That A Bunion On TOP Of My Foot??? >>
<< Why Suri Cruise and All Children Should Not Wear High Heels >>
<< Five Items Every Runner Should Have On Their Holiday Wish List >>

Thanks to Laura Roeder for the tip to check out Dr Schneider’s blog!

To Your Success

Article Marketing – is it the best marketing strategy?

Claire Morawski — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 04:48:20 +0000

Once you have your blog up and ready, there are many forms of marketing your blog. By up and running, I mean your blog is prepared for its visitors – in the sense that you already have some valuable content, good pages and a call to action, where once your readers arrive, they want to spend time clicking here and there, reading this and that, and would want to visit again or best, subscribe to your feed. One of my best strategies to generate traffic to your blog is Article Marketing – especially if you are new.

In his e-book, Blog Profits Blueprint, Yaro Starak lists Article Marketing as a traffic stream – meaning that it takes a while to generate traffic with article marketing, and usually it only comes in ‘streams’. On the other hand, the other strategies that he mentions under the Traffic Rivers, although it’s true they would bring in traffic by the hoards, you need to be somewhat already successful with a list of subscribers or readers or followers. In addition, Yaro doesn’t mention the software which I personally use which allows me to submit different versions of my articles to multiple directories in a legitimate way. So, if you are just starting out, have some time, are determined to be consistent, plus the help of a stellar piece of software which will relieve some of the load of uploading articles manually and will hence save you time and money, then Article Marketing is my best choice by far, especially if you are looking for long-term success.

Why is Article Writing a good Marketing Strategy?

Before going into the list of positives about article writing as an effective marketing strategy, I wish to emphasize that I am discussing article marketing the way I make use of it.
 It’s free for the most part of it – if you would like to benefit more from this strategy, then there might some software, such as the Automatic Article Submitter, which would make your life easier, saving you time and money, since it will ‘automatically’ upload your article to multiple directories.
 It’s long-term. Once you write an article, the search engines will ‘find’ it for years to come.
 It’s interactive. People can leave comments on each article, which encourages communication between you and your readers.
 You can build a relationship with your readers – they get to know more about you through your articles, and hence trust you more.

What to write?

There is no hard and fast rule on what type of articles you write – first of all you just have to experiment and start writing articles, then you would be able to gauge what your readers like most. You also have to find your style of writing – just be yourself. Articles can be controversial, humoristic, personal reflections, informative,…

Think why you are writing the articles – if you are doing it for a hobby it’s usually because you love writing and the articles tend to be either your opinion on something or your personal musings. However, if on the other hand you intend to make money out of your articles, you must first focus on building a relationship with your readers. The article has to be enjoyable to read and offers value to the reader – remember, ‘what’s in it for the reader?’! Then, and only then will readers keep coming back to you to read your articles, and start viewing you as an expert in your field. Nobody likes reading articles, where the author is trying to persistently and obviously sell you something.

My advice to you is:
 to read other articles and analyze everything about it… what you like, what you don’t like, what is it in the title that attracted you to read the article, how is the flow, what is the call to action, what can you improve, …
 another tip is to keep a file with a list of titles that attracted you, and this will help you get ideas when you are stuck with what to write.
 a good starting point is to ask Why? Who? How? What? maybe even going as far as Where? and When? of the topic you intend writing about.

In the meantime, here are some key characteristics which can get you started:
 How – To Article e.g. How to Write a Traffic-Pulling Article in 1 Hour
 Present an Argument e.g. Article Marketing Doesn’t Work
 Lists e.g. 5 Tips to Improve Your Article Marketing Strategy

How does Article Marketing work?

 Think of a topic / title which would interest your blog’s readers
 Do your research – as in what others have written about it and maybe comments of other readers.
 Write your article (a good article should be between at least 300 words to a good maximum of 700 words)
 Now for your article to be an effective marketing strategy you need:
o Your keyword, that you want to rank for, in your title
o A content-rich article
o A Call to Action. This is very important. In the signature box, you would need to write who you are (with a link to the original article) and a link to a call to action for your readers to click on – all this in 2 sentences.
 Upload the original to your blog – tag it appropriately.
 Upload the same article to the Automatic Article Submitter Software – here you would spend a good amount of time ‘spinning’ an article. You would be actually taking each sentence and rephrasing it once or twice, so you would end up with different variations of the article. It’s important to note that you have to actually do the spinning, as there are some other software which does the spinning for you, but then you end up with a load of nonsense. In a future article I will be writing in further detail about this software in my Review for the Automatic Article Submitter.
 Then submit your article to different directories through the software. It’s important to note that now the original article has different variations, but all with the same message that you want to send out. The only thing is that instead of submitting the same article to multiple directories, you actually took the time to rewrite each sentence at least once, which will in turn increase your search engine optimization.

The bad about Article Marketing?!

 You have to write good posts, and enjoy the writing part.
 It’s slightly time consuming, especially when compared to other marketing strategies such as pay-per-click (PPC). But then it’s free and it’s more long lasting, in the sense that once you take the time to write an article and submit it to different directories, then it will be found on the search engines for years to come. With PPC, once you stop paying and placing ads, the results will cease too.
 You have to be consistent for it to work – readers like coming to your blog and see constant changes, as otherwise they stop visiting.

What is Your Next Step?!

Now before getting excited about article marketing, it’s imperative that you have a blog and a call to action. When people visit your blog, they will find lots of ‘rock’ posts and information, which in turn will lead them to subscribe or fill out their e-mail addresses, so that you can then build a relationship with them. If you have a blog in place (preferably a self-hosted blog), then fine – focus on writing ‘rock’ posts and submitting them to different directories on a constant basis – you might want to consider the Automatic Article Submitter Software to enhance your search engine optimization and hence increase your traffic to your blog. If you are still new and would like to have your own self-hosted blog, then visit my blog and sign up for my Free 5 Day Training, where in a matter of days and a few dollars, you can create your own professional, self-hosted blog.

To Your Success