LAST YEAR SAW THE ARRIVAL OF ONLINE SOCIAL MEDIA. If you
operate a website or blog, you would be well advised to
realign your site to exploit the popular social media sites
for increased traffic.
You should also introduce social media components to your
site because web users are experiencing these new forms of
interaction on more and more sites and they will have an
expectation of the same from your site too.
If you want to attract repeat visitors and want them to
stay longer, your focus for the next few months should be
on the social aspects of your site.
Social media uses technologies like RSS, blogging,
podcasting, tagging, etc. and offer social networking
(MySpace, Facebook), social video and picture sharing
(YouTube, Flickr), and community-based content ranking
(Digg, MiniClip) features.
The central theme of these sites is user generated content
used for sharing amongst other users. The social aspects of
these sites allow users to setup social communities, invite
friends and share common interests.
You don't have to change your site immediately to take
advantages of these new technologies. Introduce small
changes incrementally and you will be well on your way to
measure up to your visitors' new expectations.
Step 1. Declare who you are to the online community. People
should be able to relate to you. Unless they know more
about you, you will be just an unknown identity and most
people don't like to deal with people they don't know.
Create an About Me page to list your achievements skills
and aspirations.
Step 2. Create a MySpace page and link your biography in
the Profile of your MySpace page. Also provide a link back
from the MySpace page to your website. Spend an hour every
week to develop your online social network in MySpace.
Invite a few of your new friends to write blog articles at
your site about your products or services.
Step 3. Install a free blog and start publishing at least
one article in your blog every week. Provide an easy
bookmarking feature to social bookmarking sites like
delicious (just like the ones at the bottom of this post).
This is done by providing an action button for each article
in your site. The action button takes users to the
submission page of the bookmarking site.
Step 4. Provide an action button for direct posting of blog
articles to digg. Digg is a popular news ranking site. A
well dugg article will bring thousands of visitors to you.
Step 5. Provide a forum at your site for users to discuss
your products and services. Don't delete negative comments
because they provide insights into the improvements needed
to serve your visitors better. However, censor hate
speeches and meaningless bantering. Register your forum at
BoardTracker. BoardTracker is a forum search engine.
Step 6. If you are offering products, allow users to review
and rate your products. This will help you in inventory
management because you may want to discontinue low rated
products.
Step 7. Provide RSS feeds for your new products, blogs,
forum postings, etc. An RSS feed provides teasers of your
contents. Users will use RSS readers to scan your teasers
and visit your site for more information if the teasers
interest them.
Step 8. Publish all your feeds at feedburner. Feedburner
provides media distribution and audience engagement
services for RSS feeds. They also provide an advertising
network for your feeds. If you have quality contents, you
will be able to monetize your content using their services.
Step 9. Create short how-to or new product videos and post
these videos in social video sharing sites like YouTube,
Google video. Provide a few start and end frames in these
videos to introduce your site with your site url. Post
these videos using catchy titles, teaser descriptions, and
appropriate tags to make them easy to discover.
Step 10. Provide embedded links to your remotely hosted
videos on your site. This will save your bandwidth and
storage space because the videos reside in the video
sharing sites rather than on your own site's server.
Step 11. As well as videos, use social photo sharing sites
like Flickr and SmugMug to share pictures related to
contents in your site. Use the same title, description and
tag techniques discussed earlier for social video sites.
Step 12. Provide a "Send to Friend" feature for all the
products and services you offer. This feature is a link
that sends the article, product description, etc. to a
recipient via e-mail.
Social media is not a fad. It is here to stay and brings a
profound change to web surfers' experiences. Now is the
right time to implement features that will make your site
Social-Media-Friendly. Also, using marketing techniques
that utilize popular social media sites, you will see a
massive increase in traffic to your site.
----------------------------------------------------
Dave Foster owns and operates the "Solo Profits" blog and
podcast, guiding individual entrepreneurs and home-based
business owners to online success using audio, video and
multimedia techniques. Dave also explores the virgin
territory of multimedia psychology and how to present your
message effectively through these new communications
channels. Want to discover more? Go To ==>>
http://www.soloprofits.com
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