How To Start A Social Marketing Campaign
Social marketing is a relatively new, often misunderstood
form of online marketing that is reaping huge rewards for
website owners who incorporate it into their marketing
plans.I work with clients and customers who, while being
very new to social marketing, are seeing results in the
following areas:
1. Higher search engine rankings for their top keywords
2. More rankings of additional keywords or "long tail"
keyword phrases
3. More link popularity from sites linking on their own
accord
4. More link popularity from social media sites
5. More activity on their blogs, such as more commenting
and interaction
6. Direct traffic from incoming links on social media sites
(One good StumbleUpon.com submission can net thousands of
visitors alone.)
7. Fast traffic increases and steady growth in unique
visitors month after month
8. An increase in subscribers and sales. Social traffic,
properly acquired, is very warm to your message and
products.
The problem for most people when thinking about social
marketing, after getting a taste of all the hundreds of
sites there are to interact with, is becoming overwhelmed
and paralyzed into inaction.
They assume established social marketers gained their
"social authority" in a short period of time. This is
simply not true. Although the opportunities for driving
serious traffic and rankings from hundreds of social sites
exists, it is an embarrassment of riches.
And it cannot be conquered over night. It is a gradual
process you manage with all your other responsibilities and
grow as time allows.
What I encourage my clients to do is set aside enough time
each day to get one more link, participate in one more
conversation, or sign up for one more account on a social
site.
A little goes a long way and social marketing is not an
"all or nothing" situation. Eventually you will have
established yourself on the major social media sites you
need to be on. And you will have a schedule that allows you
to keep up with your other work while adding this extremely
powerful marketing method to the mix.
10 Steps For Starting a Social Marketing Campaign
1. Schedule a bit of time each day to do some new things.
Don't just say you are going to do them. Write the time
into your day and follow through.
2. Sign up for the major social news sites: Digg.com,
Propeller.com, Mixx.com. Don't submit anything to these
sites until you have filled out your profile completely and
submitted news from elsewhere on the web to generate a real
presence and avoid being labeled as a spammer.
In fact, BE a real presence and don't try to push your own
content onto the networks you belong to. It should feel and
be natural and you will know what "natural is on each
network by participating, commenting, voting and getting a
general sense of what members think is good and bad
content. Watch their comments and votes and you will know
how to proceed with your own site's content from there.
3. If you don't have a blog, you must install one
immediately. This is not an option. It is an absolute
necessity on today's web. I recommend Wordpress which can
be downloaded and installed by you or your webmaster.
Wordpress download: http://wordpress.org/download/
Option #2: Check with your web host to see if they have
Fantastico available to you and, if so, that it installs
the latest version of Wordpress. If so you are very lucky
because the software can be installed by you very easily in
just a few steps with Fantastico.
4. Once you have your blog set up, join the following
networks. (These are blog communities that will help you
generate visitors, authority, and links and most bloggers
belong to them.) MyBlogLog.com (install the widget on your
Wordpress blog), and BlogCatalog.com. (they also have a
widget to install)
5. Join groups, make friends, and interact with other
bloggers on these networks. Especially the people who would
be most likely to link to your blog and send you traffic
who write about similar things or have an audience similar
to yours who'd benefit by knowing you. You can even start
your own group, promote it in the network, and send
"shouts" to the group when you have announcements or need
attention to a new post.
6. Once you have established yourself on all the sites
above, meaning you have a decent profile in each that shows
you've been active and involved, move on and search for
networks that are geared toward your particular market
niche. There are a lot of new "vertical" social sites
popping up that focus on much more narrow markets and their
membership is far warmer to your kind of information than
on the bigger, more general networks above.
Add a new site to the mix as often as you can and repeat
the steps for becoming established there as mentioned in
Step 2 above.
7. Join a group dedicated to social marketing to pick up
tips from other social marketers and find new places you
can sign up with to continue building your social
authority. New sites pop up every single day. Follow places
like Go2Web20.net to find new opportunities to connect with
your market.
8. Remote blog. Join blogger.com and put content there that
is good, just not good enough to go on your main blog. This
serves two purposes: 1) you get to use more of the great
content you find as you travel through all the social news
sites and 2) it gives you another place to link back to
your main site and pass on traffic and link popularity over
time.
9. Track your progress diligently. If something you are
trying on a social network isn't working, you need to know
that in order to save time and move on to something more
fruitful. MyBlogLog.com (above) has a tracking system which
will show you where your traffic is coming from so you can
avoid time wasting efforts and focus more on the sites that
are really pulling in good traffic for you.
10. Don't freak out! This is only overwhelming if you act
like someone at an all-you-can-eat buffet with no self
control. You have other things to do and this needs to fit
into, not dominate, your current business and marketing.
Social marketing, once you've established some authority,
will replace some things you are currently doing to promote
your site. Many people completely drop their paid
advertising or PPC campaigns once they see the organic,
natural traffic and search engine rankings pile up from
social marketing.
Until then, just take it one step at a time and do some
social marketing. A little goes a long way and before you
know it, you will reach a point where a lot of traffic and
lots of search engine rankings are piling up because you
simply started doing something each day.
There's a lot you can learn about social marketing. And not
all of it can be found on free blogs.
----------------------------------------------------
Jack Humphrey is the author of The Authority Black Book at
http://www.AuthorityBlackBook.com and the creator of a
powerful social marketing community at
http://www.socialpowerlinking.com .