We’ve compiled ten of the most compelling reasons that you should consider using social media tools to promote your business.

1- Brand Recognition: Using social media allows your company to reach the highest number of potential customers possible. Getting your name out there is incredibly important – studies have suggested that customers need to hear a company’s name at least seven times before they will gain the trust and respect needed to become a customer.

2- Brand Monitoring: Having a social media presence allows you to better understand what current and potential customers are saying about your product or services. Through active social media monitoring, you have the opportunity to address negative comments and correct false or inaccurate information about your brand.

3- Be Forward-Thinking: Your target audience is becoming savvier when it comes to the using social media sites in their daily lives. If you want to appear relevant and in-step with the latest advances in technology, your potential customers will want to see you on these sites as well.

4- Find New Customers Through Friends: You shouldn’t neglect your personal social media accounts as potential avenues to promote the activities of your business. Posting regular updates relating to your business and activities can remind your friends of what your company does and either to use your services or refer one of their friends.

5- Find New Customers Through a Company Profile: Your company profile is a great opportunity for you to post regular updates on your activities, but also about important news and trends in your industry. This will catch the attention of new customers interested in your industry and increase your reputation as an expert in the field. It’s critical to post regularly if you want to increase your followers or fans and convert them to potential leads.

6- Generate Site Traffic: By updating regularly on sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn with posts that link back to your site, you can create additional traffic to your site. Social media bookmarking tools like Digg, Stumbleupon and Slashdot can also generate additional traffic to your site if you create frequent articles and blog posts.

7- Links for SEO: Many social media bookmarking sites use NOFOLLOW tags that limit the outbound link value of posts made on their sites. There are still many leading social media sites that allow DOFOLLOW tags including Slashdot, Digg, Furl, Mixx and FriendFeed. However, you can see benefits from posting to social media bookmarking sites that use NOFOLLOW tags if people read your posts and link back to your Website.

8- Increased Search Engine Rankings: Social media profiles frequently rank highly with major search engines. Using brand names and keywords in your profiles can help you to generate traffic for your social media sites and company homepage.

9- Integrated Social Media Results in Search Engines: Search engines like Google and Microsoft Bing are increasingly interested in indexing and ranking posts and other information from social media sites. Videos from popular Internet sites like YouTube can also be optimized for indexing by the major search engines.

10- Niche Marketing: Social media allows you to reach very specific subsets of individuals based on their personal preferences and interests. You can create social media strategies based on reaching individual interests or even create unique social media profiles to target these audiences.

Top 10 Reasons to Use Social Media for Business published at Start a Business Building Websites

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• Send consistent messaging about your blog entries through social networks and sites (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Digg, StumblUpon, etc). This includes the formatting of your messages (i.e. dashes, commas, capitalization, hash tags, etc.), the voice of your messages (first, second, or third-person), and the style of your messages (humorous, serious, political, etc.).
• Use key terms. Include words like “Finance, HR, or IT” when sharing your blog entries with others. This will increase the SEO value of your blog. The stronger your SEO, the larger your blog audience will become.
• Include the link to your blog. As simple as it may seem, sometimes people forget or delete the link to their blog, only including the blog title. Make sure to include your blog’s link so that users can go directly to your blog!
• Remember your audience. What value does your message convey to readers? Are you providing them an angle to frame the context of your blog? Why should they read your entry? Adding short introductions to your blog entry and URL link can make a world of difference and will reinforce the importance of your message with others.
• Take advantage of all social networks and sites. If you normally use only Facebook or Twitter to share your blog entries with others, branch out! The more sites you share your blog on, the more extensive your reach will be, resulting in a larger audience.

Bring Attention to Your Blog and Make the Most of It published at Start a Business Building Websites

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• Be consistent. Set a schedule to post on a regular basis. The more frequently you post, the more opportunities you will have to draw in new audience members and be selected for promotional placement in newsletters.
• Get involved. Extend your reach by interacting with fellow community members outside of your blog. Participate in group discussions, host Featured Discussions and make connections.
• Build relationships. Network with other bloggers by frequently supporting their blogs with insightful comments. By collaborating with others on their ideas, chances are they will be much more inclined to collaborate on your own.
• Get personal. Give readers variety by blending professional editorials with personal workplace experiences. Your audience will subscribe to your blog based on the content’s topical focus, but will choose to stick around because they can identify with you and the content you provide.
• Commit to your blog. Growing an audience to critical mass takes time, patience, perseverance and, most of all, dedication. If you prove yourself as a source of continually credible and identifiable information, your body of work will give community members due reason to subscribe.

5 Ways to Grow Your Blog published at Start a Business Building Websites

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2) Short Term / Long Term Goals

Related to the point above, setting realistic short and long term goals are great ways of staying motivated. Keep the short term goals towards longer tail search terms. If you already have a relatively established site, which terms are currently driving significant amounts of traffic? How easy will it be to increase the ranking of this term? Use click through rate data to predict the number of clicks you can achieve. For example, if you rank 9th for “purple mice”, and receive 22 visitors per month, if you increased this 4 places to 5th, you could expect to almost double this number. Look through all of your search terms looking for good short term search strategies. Longer term goals should be your more competitive keywords, often with a 6 -8+ month timescale (depending on industry) for achieving good rankings.

3) Research
Spend a lot of time researching every aspect of your strategy. Keywords, potential link building strategies, onsite work, content, industry authorities, competition. In order to have a credible search marketing strategy, all of these factors need to be analysed in as much detail as possible.

4) Competitors
One of the most important individual factors to focus on is the competition. How good is their onsite SEO? Have they missed obvious tricks? Can you take positive things from their site design /structure and implement it yourself? How impressive are your competitors’ backlink profiles? How are they going about obtaining back links? Is there scope to replicate strategies, or further improve on strategies your competitors have implemented?

5) Use available tools
There are a number of useful tools out there today to help with all aspects of SEO and search marketing. The use of Google webmaster tools, and rank checking software are a definite must. Google trends and Google adword keyword suggestion tools are great resources for keyword research. Other handy tools include SEO plug-ins for the firefox browser, spider simulators and keyword density tools. There are multiple versions of many tools, it is worth spending a little bit of time trying each tool.

6) Stay Up to Date
The SEO industry is changing all of the time, so it is important to stay up to date with the latest developments. Reading SEO blogs and browsing SEO discussion forums are a great way of staying informed of the latest developments. By doing so, you will also learn a lot, be it a new link building idea or a new handy plugin which may save you a lot of time.

7) Wider Picture
Look at your search marketing campaign from broader picture, what else could you be doing in online marketing that will have a positive impact on your backlink profile / traffic / rankings? For example, if your site has a blog, are you using blog pinging services (Googles own service or services such as Weblogs and Feedburner). Are you utilising local search, universal search elements? How appropriate is your site to social media outlets?

Stay White hat
There are a lot of SEO practices that are frowned upon by the search engines, if you are unaware of them, the chances are that you are not doing them. If you have heard or read of “new” SEO techniques, spend a lot of time researching their potential negative impacts before implementing them. Search engine algorithms are getting better and better at detecting techniques used to purposely manipulate their algorithm. Read their guidelines and stay within them, if you decide to implement grey hat or black hat techniques, it is only a matter of time before you are found out and penalised.

8 General Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tips published at Start a Business Building Websites

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1. Be a Guest Blogger – Some bloggers solicit guest articles, in which case you can create a blog post and submit it for consideration. For example, my articles can be found on blogs like Cathy Goodwin’s Copy-Cat- Copywriting Blog. A great resource that will help you find bloggers who want content is: BloggerLinkUp.com

2. Submit your articles to the top, targeted websites and ezines. For example, I get traffic every day from my articles that are being found on sites like About.com, Microsoft Community Dynamics, Fast Company, Bank of America Small Business, MarketingProfs, SiteProNews and thousands more. You can get a complete, customized database of websites and ezines that you should submit articles to at: ArticleSubmissionSiteDatabase.com

3. Trade Newsletter Articles – If you like the idea of trading content, then consider trading newsletter articles with other people in your niche. Here’s a great tip for you: Look for those who also post their newsletter issues on their blogs, as you’ll get the benefit of a backlink and ongoing traffic!

4. Invite people to become your affiliate. Then provide your affiliates with articles and videos that they can use on their websites, on their blogs and in their newsletters. If you’re in front of your affiliates face all the time with new content for their readers,they’ll be more willing to promote you – and send you ongoing traffic.

5. Compile your articles and create viral, re-brandable special reports. Using a tool like ViralPDF.com, you can create a report that allows others to change the affiliate links in a report to their affiliate links. This way anyone who distributes the report has the opportunity to make money on the backend. The more money they make, the more they’ll distribute the free report, which means more free traffic for you.

6. Turn your articles into videos and promote them on sites like YouTube. You can use services like Traffic Geyser to get your videos broadcasted on hundreds of sites that your audience goes to. Now, not only do you have articles bringing you free traffic, but you also have videos working for you as well.

7. Host a teleseminar. Ask an expert in your industry to come onto your very own teleseminar. You can host as many teleseminars as you’d like for little money with services like Instant Teleseminars. Ask the experts to promote the call to their list and have everyone sign up on your own squeeze page. This way, you capture everyone’s name and email. Make sure you gettranscripts, and then turn them into articles that you can submit and get more website traffic.

8. Become a teleseminar guest. On the teleseminars, promote a squeeze page where you offer a free special report or special incentive. For example, I often promote: Free Article Writing Templates where you can get 3 free article templates. From there, I have an autoresponder series, which further educates prospects on article writing and articlemarketing. And, of course, I promote the complete article template product that you can get at: StartWritingArticlesFaster.com

9. Provide thought leadership content and share information that no one else is providing. This way, others will want to Tweet and retweet about your content. They’ll share it on their Facebook pages. And, email their list.

10. Promote other people’s products in your own articles and special reports. One of my new article marketing coaching clients has a walking shoe reviews site. The first thing that came to mind was to create a special report “The 2010 Top 10 Best Walking Shoes For Your Health!” Inside this report, he’ll reveal the best walking shoe brands and why. He’ll show you how to buy the shoes online (through his partnership link so he can get money!)And, more importantly, he’ll write articles that promote the special report as well as a press release so he drives traffic to his site. He’ll also write a press release for the shoe companies to submit as well for even more exposure and website traffic.

Now, if you like implement these ideas, you will begin to get more website traffic now without spending lots of time and energy.

10 Ways to Get Other People to Send You FREE Traffic published at Start a Business Building Websites

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When I needed SEO White Label provided everything I needed to get more hits on my web site with minimal web site disruption. I just went to my office computer, opened up a search engine web site (like everyone else), typed in “SEO White Label” in the little text box, and clicked the little search button with my mouse. Before I knew it, I had all the information I needed to take advantage of Seo white label style! When you are looking out for SEO White Label should be one of the first groups you check with, because they are experienced, dedicated, accessible, timely, and, last but not least, friendly!

For SEO White Label provides great service, and you should make sure you make an appointment with you for a consultation, and which they will discuss all your search engine optimization needs. In the world of SEO, they are really the tops because of their high level of experience, their comprehensive search engine optimization services, and their specialization within the field of web site promotion. So, don’t forget, when you start to become interested in SEO White Label can meet all of your needs!

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A Step-by-Step Guide to Writing a Great How-To Article:

1. Pick a Topic in Your Niche – Think about things that you have done that require a specific set of steps, like how to install a toilet, build a bookshelf or make a 3-bean salad.
2. Lead with a Great Title – What is the top benefit of your informative article? Use that as your title. Try this template: “How to [get/save/become] and [insert big reward here].” In his book, Advertising Headlines That Make You Rich, copywriter David Garfinkel gives these examples:
   • How to Save Time and Get Things Done (Time Management Coach)
   • How to Get a Better Job and Make More Money (Recruiter)
   • How to Save Money and Retire Rich (Financial Planner)

   You don’t have to use the words “How To.” You could just say “Install a Toilet Yourself and Save a Pile of Money” – or whatever.

3. Begin with a Simple Introduction – Maybe relating a personal experience as to how you came to know about the topic the hard way – or, conversely, how simple it was to learn.
4. Include a List of Supplies, Tools and/or Resources – If your reader is going to need something besides their wits to accomplish the task, tell them upfront so they can prepare everything in advance.
5. Write Instructions in Chronological Order – Don’t make your instructions convoluted or confusing – keep it short and simple (KISS) and don’t include more than one thought per step.
6. Create Mental Images – Since your article can’t include photos or illustrations, use words to paint a picture instead. Clearly describe what your reader will experience to avoid confusion … and a loss of credibility for you!
7. Conclude with Cautions, Tips and Advice – This is a great place to add some goodwill and wrap things up on a positive note. It’s also a wonderful way to lead readers into your Resource Box.

Using this incredibly flexible and powerful template, you’ll be able to create article after article that will not only benefit your readers, but you as well with increased traffic, credibility and exposure.

Guide to Writing a Great How-To Article published at Start a Business Building Websites

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5 Secrets of Social Media for 2010 published at Start a Business Building Websites

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Free SEO Analysis Tool published at Start a Business Building Websites

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Choosing Search Engine Optimization Companies published at Start a Business Building Websites

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