Grab Attention
Twitter is a way to announce a message quickly and to a large group of people. By using #hashtags, a business can have their tweet appear in an aggregate stream of everyone that has used the same #hashtag and those that are searching for the #hashtag. What is a #hashtag? They are similar to a tag or optimized keyword. Just about any word or phrase that is associated with your business or the subject of your tweet can become a #hashtag. It is important to note that random #hashtag use is ineffective. Take a few moments to see what topics are trending in #hashtags streams, apply those to your business then attach them to your tweet. This is a great way to attract potential customers along with keeping an eye on your competitors.

Instant Feedback
Twitter is one of the fastest ways to see what your customers are saying about your business. Everyone is talking about what restaurant they just visited and what product they just purchased. By searching your @username and any phrases that are associated with your business, you can see what people are saying in real time. This opens the door to delivering top-notch customer service. If a customer is dissatisfied and says they had an awful meal, the twitter account for that restaurant can offer an immediate reply and extend a positive resolution to the disgruntled customer. Likewise, if a customer gives a glowing review, the business can reply a word of gratitude, showing the customer that their opinion is highly valued.

Stay Ahead Of The Curve
Even if your primary demographic does not use Twitter on a frequent basis, a business should not ignore Twitter as not being important. Your competition is on Twitter. The easiest way to see what your competition is doing and how they are engaging with their customers will help you stay at the top of your industry. When a business sees what their competitors are saying and what their competitor’s customers are saying, they will discover ways to improve their own business. They will also receive reinforcement for what they are doing correctly. If your top competitor has many disgruntled customers due to a price increase, you will see that raising your prices may not be the most effective way to cut costs. Additionally, if the competitions customers are repeatedly asking for a specific product, your business can be ahead of the curve and offer that product before your competitors.

Twitter is an effective tool to both market your business and to keep tabs on the competition. Businesses can quickly ease the frustration of disgruntled customers or offer appreciation to satisfied customers. Businesses can also keep an eye on the competition. No matter how your business uses Twitter, the information gained by paying attention will prove valuable.

1. Take It Slow

Twitter is a powerful new tool, and provides amazing marketing opportunities. But don’t just jump down people’s throats all at once. You have to make friends first. If you move too quickly, they will un-follow you, which is exactly the opposite of what you want to happen.

Make friends with people, and engage them on a meaningful level, before you start trying to sell them things.

2. Build your Base

First and foremost, Twitter is a numbers game. It doesn’t matter if you’re writing War and Peace, one tweet at a time, if you don’t have any followers. Which begs the question – how do you get more followers. Building a substantial base of followers is primarily a matter of following other people, and interacting with the community.

To find other people to follow, just search for your interests with a hashtag (#) in front. Once you’re searching in your industry, find people who have a lot of followers within the industry. These are the thought leaders, the people whose tweets are most influential. Make sure that you’re following, and engaging with them.

Which leads into the second point. Engage with and interact with people as much as possible. Respond to people’s tweets, and re-post the good ones. People like it when you re-post their tweets, and they will respond in kind by following you and reposting your tweets.

3. Respect the signal/noise ratio

I understand that twitter is a social and personal tool in additional to being a business tool. Thus it’s inevitable that you’re going to have some tweets about what you’re cooking for dinner or the film that you just saw. In fact, Twitter’s creators reportedly envisioned it as a sequence of updates about users’ personal lives.

However, you should ascertain that a certain percentage of your tweets are actually providing value to your readers, and not just telling them about your life. The ratio of valuable tweets to total tweets is called the signal/noise ratio.

The ideal ratio varies from person to person, but if you find that you’re making your followers look at pictures of your dog every single day, you might want to scale back your noise a little bit.

4. Write Regularly

Nobody likes a lurker, and nowhere is this more true than on twitter. You don’t run the same risks of being thought weird as you do when standing against the wall at a party, but you do run the risks of being forgotten.

Ideally, you should post a couple of times per day. This isn’t as hard as it sounds, because twitter posts do not need to be very detailed. An interesting thought, a useful link, (nearly) anything goes.

If you do not tweet frequently enough, you will have almost no impact. You will just be sound in your listeners’ streams.

5. Use Common Etiquette

Although twitter is a brave new world is terms of social relationships, it does not mean that you can forgo common etiquette. If you are addressed directly, you should reply. If someone reposts your tweet, you should thank them or return the favor in kind. And lastly, do not talk about yourself too much. Link back to your own sites only occasionally.

It may sound quaint, but people will appreciate your etiquette in an age of spam, and you’ll see yourself more like, and more followed.

1. Be My Fan? If your business spends tons of time importuning people to become a fan, it is wasting time. Certainly you want to offer the option, but sending out massive numbers of requests or making hundreds of posts to that effect will not have the results you are looking for. Sure, it is tempting to simply spam the forum to try and pick up some high fan numbers, but it will not lead to conversions and long term success. Some people will certainly add your company, but then they will block it from their news feed, completely negating the benefit of them adding you in the first place.
2. Spamming. Internet users as a whole are not happy with spammer tactics. Most people will simply ignore items they perceive as spam. When it first started to be used via email decades ago, it had some success in the market, but it is not a tool for a legitimate business. Long term success requires that you establish your business as a legitimate expert in your industry. Spam does just the opposite. If you are confused about the term as it relates to Facebook, there are some actions that can be considered spam, even though they do not involve email. Posting direct sales information that is not on topic on multiple forums is an example of Facebook spamming.
3. Never Lie. The Internet always remembers, so never, ever lie or misrepresent a product or service on Facebook. The recipient will not hesitate to call you out on it on your Facebook page. Sure, you can delete their post, but that often leads to more backlash than the original post would have as consumers perceive you as trying to sweep the mess under the rug. Facebook is a forum where consumers appreciate the truth. Sure, you may lose out on one sale, but the potential customer will remember and value your honesty for the future.

Do not fall into the trap of thinking you can enjoy instant success without effort. It simply is not true. However, when you put in targeted effort to maximize your marketing attempts, you will see eventual success. Pursue legitimate marketing efforts to create an image the will lead to long term, consistent, sales increases.

Because social media is now a determining factor in search engine results, it needs to be prominently displayed on all of your web content. Make it easy for people to become a fan with a quick link to Facebook. Let them subscribe to your feed with a Twitter link and join your network via LinkedIn. Don’t forget to offer them a button for your YouTube channel as well. The easier you make participation, the more likely people are to click a button and improve your rankings. Do not only place these buttons on your web page. Also include them on any web content you post. If you have a blog include the links, if you write and post articles, embed the links. Get those links posted as far and wide as possible to create the results you are looking for.

Keep in mind that unlike other advertising and marketing efforts, social networking is not passive. You can not simply post something and expect a desired result. You must interact with fans and other interested people to generate additional page views. The basic fact of social media is that it is social. That means that you must engage in conversations and post regularly. If you don’t keep your interaction levels high, fans will quickly stop visiting your site and sharing your posts. By keeping the tone more casual and informative in this setting, you create the needed atmosphere for growth. Users on sites like Facebook are often looking for a break from daily activities. Include a certain level of humor to encourage them to relax and communicate on an individual level.

Incorporating social media in your marketing campaign is a necessary part of growing your business online. By maintaining several social media outlets, you maximize your potential market place. Users that prefer Twitter don’t always login to Facebook and vice versa. YouTube content is very different from the expected posts on text based systems. You must seamlessly integrate all of these communication methods to open your business to the widest possible audience. Placing artificial limits on your profit potential is not a healthy way to run a business.

With SERP placement also dependent on social media, it is no longer something that you can afford to ignore. Build a fan page today and start sending tweets with current promotions and sales. The dual result of a higher page ranking and direct social media marketing can help your business expand exponentially.

Start with a Question
It is always better to begin by asking your customers questions and providing links to different possible answers. If a customer starts on your landing page and the first thing they see is a question, they are more likely to stay and look for a service that can meet the need mentioned in the question. For example, if you own a company that provides payroll services, you might ask customers about a situation where a payroll error created problems for the company. Where employees where short changed or tax information wasn’t recorded correctly. You begin by asking about errors, and then you provide links to different payroll services that address different needs. By asking the customer to identify the service they are most interested in, you engage them and encourage them to continue browsing. By using a question format for all page and paragraph headings, you encourage the customer to read further to discover the solution.

Provide Information on Solutions
You are familiar with what most customers seeking industry services you provide want. Read your content as if you were a customer. Ask the stupid or inane questions, because what seems obvious to an industry insider is often gobbledygook to those shopping. Make sure your content offers actual solutions to a problem using as little industry lingo as possible. Never assume a customer is familiar with your products, they often come looking without a clear idea of what they want. Tell them what the solution is before you try and sell them a product. If you sell management training courses, describe what they need their managers to offer, before telling them that they can learn the information on your site. Always provide as much detail as possible without overwhelming the consumer. They don’t need the minutia, but they do need enough information to motivate them to make contact.

Getting contact from customers through your website is the purpose of online marketing. If you sell products, you want to drive direct sales. If you sell services you want people to email or call your company for more details. Convincing customers to take action is the hardest part of online marketing, but offering solid content with actual solutions can be all the motivation they need to take the next step. Once you have them engaged in conversation, via telephone or email, it is a short step to convince them to buy.

Social Media is Social
The first thing to remember about all social media is that it really is about being social. Marketing on Facebook requires interaction. Browse the site and look at other pages that are relevant to yours. Engage in conversations and answer questions. Make wall posts on other pages. By participating in the site, you encourage others to visit your Facebook page. Don’t advertise as you browse, these interactions should be genuine. Advertisements are off-putting and won’t build long-term sustainable customer relationships. It seems obvious that interaction is key with social media, but many companies fail to put in the time that is needed to truly develop an online presence on Facebook. Take the time; it is well worth the eventual results.

Pictures Grab Attention
Once you have begun building a Facebook fan base, there are some simple things you can do to keep people engaged all the time. Make your posts graphically oriented, never simply post a block of text. Facebook users browse so rapidly, text is often ignored. Pictures catch and hold attention longer and are more likely to generate comments. Keep the pictures interesting and fun and you may find your fan base growing exponentially, in less time than you might expect. Pictures are more likely to be shared, so more people see them than a text block.

Questions Encourage Answers
Another tactic to engage readers is to ask questions. Don’t simply tell people about you, find out about them. A quick and fun question will often garner a significant number of responses. Asking questions does a couple of things. First, it allows people to talk about themselves, which they are much more willing to do. Second, it lets your fans know that you are interested in what they have to say. People respond in a positive way to companies that are approachable.

Successes should be Shared
Don’t just appear approachable, be approachable. Your fans should feel like they are your friends. Include them in your company by posting about successes and company info that is not directly related to sales. Posting about winning an achievement or producing an award winning product lets fans know that you want to celebrate with them, which helps them feel connected with your company’s success.

A Little Genuine Interest Goes a Long Way
While give-a-ways and viral videos are a great way to bring in new fans, the only way to keep them is by always having updated and fresh content. Stale pages don’t keep fans and while they may forget to un-fan your page, they aren’t interacting anymore. Treat fans like real people; address them by name in your responses. Just because the interaction is online, doesn’t mean that you should be any less personable, genuine and polite than you would be in real life. In fact, to generate successful Facebook marketing you need to be more genuine and give fans more information. Take an interest in other people and they will return the favor. Listen to what people say and respond. Don’t make posts and never follow up. Facebook is like a conversation that you are holding with several thousand people simultaneously. When someone asks a question, make sure to provide an answer.

Taking the time to interact with Facebook fans will increase your business success. It won’t happen overnight, but it will happen. People will develop brand loyalty to companies that listen to consumer wants and needs.

However, to generate traffic and get better search engine placements, you have to do more than just submit articles to popular article directories. The days of simply submitting your articles to content farms in order to get backlinks are pretty much over (owing it to the fact that major online search engines have started to “disqualify” backlinks coming from article directories). What does this mean for you and your site? It means, you have to explore new ways of distributing your SEO content on the web to get backlinks and higher search rankings.

When you finish writing an article, your first goal is to post it online and be credited by the search engines as the original creator of it. This is important because no matter how many copies of your article gets reposted on various webpages later, search engines will always give you the credit for it, and you will receive priority rankings for that piece of content. How do you do this? Well, the easiest way is to simply post the article as a separate page on your site. This way, your article can have its own tags for page title, page description, and meta keywords. Instead of being at the mercy of article submission sites, you can have total control over the SEO of your own piece of content, because you posted it in your own site and did the on-page SEO yourself.

The next thing you need to do is to get instantly noticed or “indexed” by the search engines. You do this by socially bookmarking your article in sites such as Stumbleupon or Digg. You don’t have to repost your article. Just submit your link on these sites, and because search engines visit these social bookmarking sites often, they will easily “find” your link there and include it in search engine results as soon as possible.

After you get indexed on search engines, you need to generate backlinks (a backlink is generated when the link for your website is posted on another site, more preferably a high authority site in your niche). To get backlinks for your main website, your goal is to get your article published on other blogs similar to yourself (which includes your website link at the bottom of the article). It is highly recommended that you find these blogs and find a way to contact the blog owner and offer to make a guest post. Some will be more than willing to repost your article and website link on their website if your content is good. And the more guest posts you make, the more backlinks you can generate.

But before we talk about “on-page SEO” mumbo jumbo, let us first discuss what “optimizing” truly means. To me, optimizing does not mean the mere structuring your landing page to attract as much organic traffic as possible. Instead, the true meaning of optimizing is to arrange your landing page for better search engine traffic, and to get higher conversion rates at the same time! Simply put, your landing page should be an intermarriage of high-quality traffic and conversion.

How is this done? Well, a smart marketer will combine elements of basic on-page SEO and good copywriting to get traffic and conversion going on within the landing page. Your main goal is to attract 1) the search engines, and 2) attract people. That’s how money is made in online marketing. Consider the following tips to optimize your landing page for long term business results:

1. Put Your Main Keyword In Your Domain Name. This is a fundamental SEO principle that you probably already know. However, this is becoming harder and harder to apply nowadays. Because of tight competition in the online marketplace, keyword rich domain names are usually already taken. If the .com is no longer available, usually the .net and .biz domain extensions are already taken too. The challenge is to research and choose a keyword with long term traffic potential, and become creative enough to come up with a unique and keyword-based domain name that other marketers in your niche has never thought of before.

2. Install Wordpress On Your Site. Several hosting brands, like Hostgator (mention of brand name is not intended for promotional purposes), allow you to install a Wordpress blog on your site. This will allow you to create a unique relationship based platform on the internet to promote yourself and your business. But another side to this is that a blog hosted on your site is actually great for SEO purposes. Without adding any new pages or subdomains on your site, you can put fresh keyword-rich content on your site whenever you want – all by using a simple blog! If you could get organic traffic going in through your blog posts, your traffic amounts can increase exponentially.

3. Optimize Each Blog Post. Treat each blog post like a separate webpage that needs to be optimized for the search engines. Before writing anything, always start with research of two or three short keywords, and five to ten long tail keywords. Then put those keywords strategically on your blog post for that day. You may not be able to use all those keywords in one sitting, but at least you will have a chance to fill up your site with keyword rich content whenever you want to. If you commit yourself to posting SEO content on your blog on a regular basis, you will experience long term increases and your business will thrive online.

In the old west when a new general store opened settlers had no choice as to where they shopped. As the population grew and more stores opened, the additional choices demanded merchants develop new ways to get customers in the door and leave their money behind. Today, the internet could be called the old west of the electronic age but more towards the era in which new markets are opening and more stores are available. Additionally, shoppers are not limited by geography and can just as easily buy what they want or need from the store across the street as easily as they can buy from another store on the other side of the world.

Networking has become the most efficient means of letting people know you exist and to advertise your wares online. Finding a method to get your message in front of the customers who will use your services the most is the only way to assure success. You no longer can count on localized messages to deliver a wide audience and since your visitors will be travelling long distances to your internet store, your message must also reach further than ever before.

There is actually no way that any one sire can offer something for everyone and those sites that try are only kidding themselves. You will need to put your focus, as well as your energy, in finding a place where your message will be heard by the very people that will buy what you are selling. You might start by using the shotgun approach to your advertising until you can identify your customer base, but when that is done you will need to use a more focused approach to get your message out to those who want to hear what you have to say.

If you have the right message and put it front of the right customers they will be heading to your store with their guns, or rather credit cards, blazing. However, the best-looking websites and those offering the best deals will only keep customers by keeping them satisfied. You will have to make sure that you have the best support team available to exceed your customers’ expectations in all aspects of your business.

This may also be happening to your visitors. In today’s internet age people expect instant gratification and that applies to their internet exploring as well. How many times did you click on a link and after five to even 10 seconds close it down with the inner voice comment that you don’t have time for this.”

If you were patient enough to wait you could be rewarded with a glimpse of one of the best looking sites ever built. When flash programming first hit the internet the bandwagon couldn’t hold everyone jumping on it and it didn’t take long for programmers to realize that the search engines just weren’t interested in sites built with flash.

By appearance alone, flash delivers some of the best graphic representations available. In reality, pretty doesn’t always translate into sales. In the case of search engine optimization it may not even translate in to being indexed by search engines let alone showing up in the search engine results pages. However, as good as it may be to produce a simplified website to be engaging to your visitors as well as to search engines, no matter what business you are in you will need to make a professional statement.

Your 10-year-old child may be good on computers, but do you want your visitors to see someone’s first-ever effort as representing your company? If you are going to have a website you will need to design it to make a case for customers to enter. Think of it is the front door to your business. Ask yourself, if it was a traditional brick-and-mortar business how likely would it be for customers to feel comfortable walking when they pass by?

The old adage of keep it simple is part of the equation for a well-designed website, but it also has to be functional. A good looking website, to be attractive to search engines should also be without frames. They tend to limit the spiders in their thirst for knowledge and leave your site as low as possible, if indexed at all. To investigate customer ease, go through your site like a customer and insure everything works as expected. Dead links are the bane of the internet and frankly, there is just no good excuse for them.