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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2. Insert images into your web pages. I checked my logs and I have proof that images draw in a lot of ‘extra’ traffic. People search for images as well as web pages. So if your web page is about ‘how to buy a laptop’ and you have a picture named ‘how-to-buy-a-laptop.jpg’ – you will cover both the image searches and text searches.

3. Participate very actively in ONE forum. If you participate in an online forum, you will slowly build credibility with your web readers. Don’t spam – please – just contribute and solve others’ problems. And my style is to select only ONE forum to participate in. That way, you can build up your contribution base very quickly. If folks see you have 1000 posts in a forum, they tend to read what you say. And that means they are more likely to click your links or signature.

4. Send out your newsletter regularly. This is another important point. I personally fail to send my SBI newsletter regularly and it is costing me traffic. If you judiciously send your newsletter out, you get more and more traffic because folks come in to your website, read the latest articles and spread the word around. You also load a fresh copy of your newsletter in the SBI site so folks can search and find your newsletter page.

5. Respond to emails your readers write. Try to make it a point to solve problems and answer your readers emails. Trust me, if you build credibility this way, soon the word gets around and you will get more traffic.

6. Write more content everyday. Try to commit to write 2 articles a day. Don’t give up – writing consistently is the surest way to build traffic over time. Keep it up, don’t give up!

7. Don’t try to do small tricks. Ok, this is not exactly a way to build traffic. But it does indirectly focus your energy and time, so in way, you will do the correct things to build traffic. What I mean here is to avoid doing small tricks to get traffic. For example, posting answers on Yahoo Answers, posting stuff at WikiHow, setting up scam auctions to attract people to your eBay page containing your URL – stuff like that. These things, when added up, take up a tremendous amount of time. Instead, cut away all these time wasters and just write those 2 articles a day. Then distribute them to an article directory.

8. Set goals. It is very important to set goals in this Internet stuff. I used to plod away randomly day to day writing content. Now I know better. I set a goal of 50 fresh articles per month. What I do is set up folders everyday in my laptop (e.g. ‘20 May 2008, ‘21 May 2008′). I make sure that every one of those folders gets filled with 2 articles a day. That way, I will surely meet my goal each month. 50 articles a month = 600 articles a year – believe me, the traffic WILL come with that volume of content.

9. Choose a topic where you can write a lot of ‘how-to’. Here is something I learnt from experience. I know a lot of you choose SBI website topics based on your passion and interests. However, I’d like to add one more tip to guarantee greater success in building traffic. Choose a theme where you can write a LOT of ‘how-to’ articles. Why? Because ‘how-to’ articles build credibility. And they’re easy to write. For example, for one of my sites, I chose a topic on digital photography (heck of a lot of ‘how-to’ I can write there). On another site, I chose a topic on baby strollers (there is not much ‘how-to’ I could write there). Needless to say, I closed down the baby stroller website.

10. Faith and passion. I don’t mean to make this sound like spiritual advice, but having faith in your SBI site is very important in building traffic. Faith and passion is the fuel that will make you come back to write articles day in and day out. So keep that plenty of that fuel there inside you. One day, you WILL succeed.

10 Tips I Use To Build Traffic published at Start a Business Building Websites

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After all, blogging isn’t just about speaking your mind; it’s about joining a conversation, reaching out to new people and exposing yourself to new ideas and cultures. When you read a smart, funny or engaging blog post, there are a lot of different reason to leave a comment: to learn, to convince, to reinforce, or just to be part of a community.

Plus, not only does commenting let the person whose post you’re reading know what you’re thinking, you may also attract a few new friends, neighbors… and comments of your own! And, if you’re not sure what to say, [this is good] is a quick and easy way to let someone know you enjoyed her post.

Leaving comments will likely get you more comments in return, but if you want to ensure you get more comments from your friends and neighbors, here are a few simple things you can do:

Ask for them. Pose questions. Be open-ended. Respond to those who do leave comments.

The Comment Box published at Start a Business Building Websites

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1. I tweet with links to my pages. I tweet (auto tweet with tweetlater.com) about every 2 hours 1 tweet, 24/7.
You have to find what works best for your audience.

2. Every so often I upload an image to Twitpic.com and people click on my Home Page link on twitpic.
Twitpic uploads a link to the image and your text as a tweet to twitter.

3. Every time I update my site my SBI blog is being updated and the RSS feed is “tweeting” for me.

I also have a “ask a question” content 2.0 page and ask people to ask me questions.
Once in a while someone asks a question and when I answer my blog is updated and the RSS feed automatically tweets it for me.
(This may take minutes or a few hours but it will appear).

I also ask for reviews and once in a while I receive a submission. That can only grow the more followers I have.

If your auto follow from twollo.com (and also the auto follow from tweetlater should be checked so that you auto follow everyone who follows you)
doesn’t provide enough members to follow, use more keywords. At this point in time I have an average of maybe 75-100 new followers daily.

Twitter is driving a nice steady growing stream of traffic to my site daily. It’s a little slower on weekends but still good.
My bounce rate of the traffic from Twitter is close to zero and most people stay for several minutes on my site.

I started with this Twitter automation 3 weeks ago and I am very happy with the results and
I am also happy with the nice increase in Adsense revenue.

It can only get better. The exposure is great.

Another “nice” gesture is to “retweet” which mean that if you think that someone’s tweet is so profound or amusing or otherwise remarkable,
you would retweet it to share it with others.

Reply to someones tweet and type RT in front of the tweet. The origional tweet will be “retweeted”.

Others will do the same for you and you have greater exposure to a larger audience,
especially if someone retweets your tweet who has thousands of followers.

Drive Traffic to your site using Twitter published at Start a Business Building Websites

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1. Does the article have zero self-serving links in the article body?

Loading up the body of your article with affiliate links or other obvious self-serving links is a liability and will keep your article from ever seeing top results.

2. Does the article have no more than 2 self-serving links in the resource box?

Your resource box at the bottom of your article should be short and to the point. It should also be less than 10% of the total word count of your article. Ezine publishers don’t mind giving you name credit and a link for sharing
your article with them, but they don’t want to look like a fool by being required to reprint a short novel about all of your websites and accomplishments.

3. Is the article within 250-700 words?

Readers want instant gratification from your quality, original content. No one has the time to really go deep when it comes to reading email newsletters. It’s proven that shorter articles achieve a much higher distribution rate than longer ones.

4. Does the article deliver quality, original content with numbered lists, bullet points or easy to glean information their audience would deem valuable?

Key Point: Make sure your articles are 100% original content. Anything less is considered an insult.

5. Is the article’s author well recognized or respected within their market niche?

Ezine publishers have an ego just like you. They want to use articles in their email newsletters that make them look good. The more you use your articles to help yourself gain credibility for your unique expertise within your niche, the greater the chances you’ll find your articles getting picked up by your ezine publishing peers.

Free Website Content

Introduction to Article Writing and Marketing published at Start a Business Building Websites

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