People are talking about products, services, good / bad experiences, new ideas, moods, wants, needs and just about everything that can be expressed in 140 characters. This raw conversational data is your window into discovering what your audience is all about and through Twitter, you are able to effectively target the things of which your audience is interested.

Let’s take a look at how you can start producing market driven content that is easily monetized through the use of search.twitter.com.

The Importance of Knowing Your Audience

Basic marketing practices involve conducting market research, studying the preferences and nature of consumers and prospects, studying buying history and lots of other trends. All this data is important for marketers and online publishers like ourselves to ascertain a predictable outcome from our efforts and also help to define worthwhile, realistic targets.

You may have developed a passion for your niche and business but what good are your skills and knowledge if you have no idea who you’re trying to sell to and what they’re truly interested in. The marketers who know more about their audience will have a great competitive advantage since they will know precisely which direction to focus their marketing efforts rather than by chance. Almost like looking into the future through a magical crystal ball.

How Does Twitter’s Search Engine Apply To Blogging & Other Types of Business?

Let’s say you have decided to start blogging about cooking and initially you’re not quite sure how your potential audience will respond to your content. Using search.twitter.com we can do a search for cooking, baking, or food. Or a blog about exercise and losing weight could search for ‘lose weight’ and the results will show exactly what people are talking about, what they think about the topics and how they interact with others.

After spending some time to study this information, you should get a pretty good idea of the direction you need to take. Twitter is where people and conversations are and wherever there is a large crowd then the money will follow. So whether you are producing content for your blog or selling products and services, you have access to market insights through this unique search tool.

To start building your blog further, engage this new found crowd by following them, start conversations about the relevant topics, introduce yourself and let them know what you’re about and greatest of all, build relationships; do not spam.

Be Prepared!! Focus on Content

Above all things quality content is critical for the success of your online business. After you’ve captured the attention of the crowd, you need to have something on your site that keeps them coming back for more. This is where you need to go all the way. There is no room for mediocrity or copied, regurgitated content. Quality content will separate you from the average blogger and business person, placing you in the perfect position to excel, increase sales and attract deals that build your brand.

Ensure that you have calls to action like subscribing to RSS feeds, e-mail and following your social profiles. Capture all connections and visits.

Conclusion & Discussion

To know your audience is to possess the keys to the success of your business. Make studying interactions and prospects on Twitter a part of your daily routine and write down your findings. At the end of the day you should come to some solid conclusions about your niche and have discovered brilliant ideas for building your business and brand, as well as connecting and capturing the attention of your audience.

What’s your take on this? Have you ever used Twitter’s search engine for research? Let us know what you think in the comment section below. We would love to hear from you.

If you look at the top Youtubers, it’s hard to believe that they started with zero subscribers. There are now over 15 channels that each have a subscriber base of over 1 Million! (more than some sky channels!). It all starts with 1,000 subscribers and spreads from there! The power of Youtube and other video sharing sites can’t be ignored and offers a wide audience that you won’t reach by solely maintaining a blog.

Here are 15 very effective techniques for attractive new subscribers and leveraging that traffic back to your website or blog.

1. Choose a memorable channel name, make it quirky!

Channels that are easy to remember, complemented with great video content will have viewers coming back for more and begin to build your brand and viewer loyalty. Also, try to make the name relevant to your content and keyword rich to ensure they are easily found through search engines.

2. Include A Call To Action

Engage your audience at the end of your video telling them what you want them to do, its very important to give them this nudge. Whether its to share the video, visit your website, sign-up to a newsletter, etc. if its great content they will do it.

3. Number your videos – It creates anticipation for the next one.

Its easier for viewers to watch multiple quick videos so if you can, split your videos in multiple parts. This work on the human nature, builds excitement and also allows those searching through google to find various sections of the video that may apply to them.

Keep videos within 3 minutes in length. Viewership tends to fall off when videos are too lengthy, unless it is super amazing content.

4. Network with everyone in your niche

Networking is what social media is about; get to know other bloggers and designers. Oftentimes they will like your content, share it and offer ideas and opportunities for building your online business.

5. Brand Your Channel

Add your logo, descriptions and other site info to ensure that your brand will stick in viewers’ minds.

6. Add Captions to your videos

YouTube, Google and other search engines index captions thus making your videos easier to find and understand thus increasing reach.

7. Tweet at the top guys – They sometimes respond!

There’s nothing wrong with attracting some attention from the high profile bloggers on the scene. If you know you have a killer useful video then share it. Warning: Don’t do this with every post to the same person, especially if its not relevant to what they’re about. That’s spamming! Don’t do it.

8. Link to your website on all video descriptions

Make it unforgettable!

9. Convince 100 facebook friends to start an account and subscribe to your channel.

Its guaranteed that some of them will help share it and spread your ideas.

10. Take advantage of your best video

If you have a video that has some popularity behind it, send the link to other bloggers and especially news websites that frequently feature user created content.

11. Read the YouTube blog

This will put you way ahead of most people, as some people don’t know they have one! The blog offers critical information for using YouTube effectively.

12. Go High-Definition (HD) – Future proof your work.

YouTube supports the best quality videos, so get out of the past, put your best image forward and start shooting videos in high-definition wide-screen format. They have a guide for recommended formats for video uploads. Usually, the best recommendations are:

• 30 frames per second
• HD quality video with 16:9 aspect ratio
• MP4 video file format with .H264 compression
• MP3 or AAC audio compression

Conclusion & Discussion

“YouTube” is a slow game, lots of channels are portrayed in the media as “overnight” success stories. If you can think of it as a 5 year journey and you enjoy the process of making and promoting videos then you will have a successful channel and the knock on effect is a successful website!

Most of these icons come with non-commercial licenses and can be used in your personal projects without any restrictions or obligations.

Circular Social Media Icon Set

Download the Circular Social Media Icon Set here

Hand Stitched Badge Social Icon Set

Download the Hand Stitched Icon Pack here

Metalik Social Icon Set

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Lustrous Icon Set

Download the Lustrous Social Icon Pack here

Free Style and Square Social Icon Set

Download the Stylish & Squared Icon Set here

Sketchy Social Media Icon Set

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Old Bottle Crowns Social Media Icon Set

Download Old Bottle Crowns Media Icon Set here

Jive Social Media Icon Set

Download the Jive Icon Set here

Hopefully you will find these icons useful!

The major social sites in the industry have captured the attention of a majority of internet users with Facebook currently catering to 500 Millions users, YouTube with approximately 400 Million and Twitter currently at 190 Million; and with Twitter about to launch its new interface, we should see more interaction within the community and brand new innovations.

To help you get started with building your business or brand through social media, I will be discussing 7 simple yet very effective methods for taking full advantage of social media and what it means for your product or service.

Establish Common Branding Across Platforms

Its very important to start maintaining your presence on the social scene. Create a solid logo, color scheme, tag line and a unique style that can be readily identified when users start interacting with your site and social profiles. Therefore, whether its twitter, Facebook or any other social profile, ensure that graphics and various styles used are common across all your profiles.

Some examples of well-branded profiles include:

• VisitJamaica.com | twitter.com/visitjamaicanow
• Popeye’s Chicken | twitter.com/popeyeschicken
• Mashable | twitter.com/mashable
• Digicel | facebook.com/digiceljamaicafan

You will find that these brands remain very consistent with their design on all their social profiles.

Off-Page Promotion

Although traditional methods of advertising are not quite as effective as they used to be due to advancements in technology and the web, there are instances where traditional methods such as newspaper and television ads are relevant. Within these opportunities, be sure to include dialogue that mentions links to your social profiles and website. Most of the information that users will research about your company and its services will be done through your social profiles and website; this is where you need to close the deal and capture the heart of the customer.

Also, include links to your profiles via business cards, promotional flyers and other printed promotional material.

Create Added Value Not Gained Elsewhere

If you’re in business and offering products and/or services, then you NEED to be catering to your prospects’ wants and needs; and an innate need for virtually every customer is to find value for their money. There are users who spend every waking moment browsing social sites and chatting with their friends; some are searching for deals and information while others just want to chat.

Use your profile to publish special deals not found offline, engage your audience and customers by tying in prizes, coupons and discounts with user interaction. So prospects will know that they need to interact and share their ideas with you to gain certain benefits. This interaction will expose you to what customers really want which would not be as easily accessible through traditional methods of advertising.

The dialogue between you and your audience can only strengthen the relationship.

Social Media Is Not Only About Self Promotion

Maintaining a social profile is not solely about promoting new products and services or offering discounts, but should rather be a combination of support and advice for existing customers, getting to know your customers and prospects and sharing experiences of which users can relate.

Profiles that are only about self promotion at some point are ignored and oftentimes appear “spammy” since relationship building activities and a truly human presence are absent.

Spend A Little To Gain A Lot

Make provisions in your budget for paid advertising, approaching it from the point of view as an investment and not an expense. Facebook advertising is particularly very effective because its platform gives you the ability to define the demographics of the audience you wish to advertise to, thus giving you more control of your ads and their ability to target specific niches.

A client of mine spent US $100 for a Facebook ad that ran for 5 days and due to the nature of the services and deals being advertised, they gained approximately 4,000 clickthroughs (CTR) which in turn gave their service great exposure in a short period of time and on a light budget.

Facebook “Like Box” Widget

Though I do not usually recommend the use of too many promotional widgets on websites, the Facebook fan widget is particularly quite effective when attracting your site’s visitors to your Facebook fan profile.

Similar to the widget on the lower end of my sidebar, visitors will have the option of immediately “Liking” your page and in another version, view your wall posts. A visitor “Like” is very important since that action creates a constant link between you and those users allowing for continuous contact.
Click here to get started with creating your own Facebook Like Box Widget.

Link From Everywhere

Take advantage of every linking opportunity to link back to your social profiles as this will provide more exposure for your activities and promotions on your social profiles.

Conclusion

There are many other simple techniques that can be practiced to gain exposure and sales through social media. The methods mentioned above have worked wonders for my clients, so what do you have to lose?

What other techniques have worked for you and what did you learn? Please share your ideas and experiences with us in the comments below, we would love to hear from you.

To help us understand what’s really happening, there are a few kind, hardworking and blessed individuals who spend the time and money to do the research to find out who’s blogging, how, when, where and why. Thanks to them, I’m, able to compile this post and reveal some very interesting facts about blogging and social media and their impact.

So here are some mind-blowing statistics that show what’s really happening in the blogosphere, social media and beyond.

Statistics of the Blogosphere

1. More than 133,000,000 blogs have been indexed by Technorati since 2002
2. 77% of Internet users read blogs according to Universal McCann
3. Blogging is equally popular among both men and women with 50.9% of bloggers being female and 49.1% being male.
4. The United States has the largest share of bloggers with 29.22% of bloggers coming from the U.S.
5. 60% are 18-44, 75% have college degrees and 40% have graduate degrees
6. One in four has an annual household income of $100K
7. Around half of Bloggers are working on at least their second blog
8. 86% have been blogging for at least a year
9. 70% of all respondents say that personal satisfaction is a way they measure the success of their blog
10. 61% say they blog in order to supplement their income.
11. 53% of professional Bloggers are interested in attracting new clients from blogging.
12. 57% say that their future plans include blogging even more (including 74% of 18-24 year olds).
13. Part-Timers, Pros, and Self-Employed Bloggers are blogging more than ever, while Hobbyists are blogging somewhat less.
14. 15% of Bloggers spend 10 or more hours each week blogging.
15. One in five Bloggers report updating on a daily basis.
16. The most common rate of updating is 2-3 times per week.
17. The majority of blogs use tags (85%).
18. 82% of respondents say that they post photos to their blog, making images the most popular form of multimedia.
19. Bloggers participate in an average of 5 activities to drive traffic to their blogs.
20. 72% of respondents are classified as Hobbyists, meaning that they report no income related to blogging
21. 38% of bloggers post brand or product reviews.
22. 56% say that their blog has helped their company establish a positioning as a thought leader within the industry.
23. 58% say that they are better-known in their industry because of their blog

Blogging Platform Traffic Statistics & Demographics

According to Compete.com, WordPress.com dominates the blogosphere with approximately 35 Million unique visitors per month as of May 2010. The graph below shows a comparison of monthly unique visitor traffic between WordPress.com, Tumblr, Posterous, Typepad and Blogger over the past year.

Sysomos, a provider of social media analytics, has also presented a report based on an analysis done on 100 Million blog posts showing bloggers’ age, gender and locations. You can find the full report here and below you will see a table of percentages of bloggers by location.

Based on the table above, we see that the majority of bloggers in the world reside in the United States by it does not deter the fact that blogging is truly a global activity and can be launched successfully from any country.

Social Media Statistics

We cannot deny the power of social media and its endless possibilities when it comes to launching and growing your business and truly connecting with the world. The statistics below will give you an idea of social media’s reach and impact on the world and should help convince you of its effectiveness if you’re still doubtful about it.

1. Over 50% of the world’s population is under 30-years-old
2. 96% of them have joined a social network
3. Facebook now tops Google for weekly traffic in the U.S.
4. Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
5. 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
6. Years to Reach 50 millions Users:  Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…
7. Facebook added over 200 million users in less than a year
8. iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
9. We don’t have a choice on whether we DO social media, the question is how well we DO it.”
10. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 3rd largest ahead of the United States and only behind China and India
11. Yet, QQ and Renren dominate China
12. 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
13. 80% of companies use social media for recruitment; % of these using LinkedIn 95%
14. More than 700,000 local businesses have active Pages on Facebook.
15. More than 80,000 websites have implemented Facebook Connect since December 2008 and more than 60M Facebook users engage with it across these external sites each month.
16. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
17. Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres (combined) have more Twitter followers than the  populations of Ireland, Norway, or Panama.  Note I have adjusted the language here after someone pointed out the way it is phrased in the video was difficult to determine if it was combined.
18. 50% of the mobile Internet traffic in the UK is for Facebook…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
19. Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé – some universities have stopped distributing e-mail accounts
20. Instead they are distributing: eReaders + iPads + Tablets
21. What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
22. The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
23. While you watch this 100+ hours of video will be uploaded to YouTube
24. Wikipedia has over 15 million articles…studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
25. There are over 200,000,000 Blogs in existence
26. Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
27. If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $1,712.32 per hour
28. 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
29. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
30. Do you like what they are saying about your brand? You better.
31. People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services  than how Google ranks them
32. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
33. Only 14% trust advertisements
34. Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
35. 90% of people that can TiVo ads do
36. Kindle eBooks Outsold Paper Books on Christmas
37. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation
38. 60 million status updates happen on Facebook daily
39. We no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
40. We will non longer search for products and services, they will find us via social media
41. Social Media isn’t a fad, it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate
42. Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like Mad Men Listening first, selling second
43. The ROI of social media is that your business will still exist in 5 years

Discussion & Conclusion

What can we learn from these statistics? The main thing anyone should realize is that blogging and social media are here to stay, at least for now, and any viable online business can be launched beyond traditional boundaries and truly excel globally.

What are your thoughts on the distant future of blogging and social media? Please leave a comment below, we would love to hear from you.

Sources:

Socialnomics by Erik Qualman
Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere
Sysomos Analytics

The whole idea is that your friends and other contacts play a key role in your online life. These persons that you are connected with publish all types of information through tweets, blog posts, status updates, etc. This means that you can now have access to this public social web content that has special relevance to you. So this is where focusing on Keyword Optimization for Social Media plays a huge role and will especially affect these types of social search results.

Take a look at the videos below to get a broader picture of where Google is heading.

Also take a look at this video by Matt Cutts who is a part of the Google Search Quality Group. He will dive a bit further in the details.

Well that’s it. Are you convinced that you should start doing some SEO when using social media? I know I am.

The Relevance of Search Results Improved

Through Google’s Social Search, more priority is placed on getting results from our social circle, which is presumably more trustworthy than some random results from the search engine. We have a great deal of control over who and where social results come from and as Publishers what information is made available through google social search.

So go ahead, sign up for a Google Profile Here and start experimenting to realize the benefits of Social Search.

Discussion

The face of search is changing rapidly as search engines find more unique ways of providing the most relevant search results. Do you think that this new service from Google will improve your overall search experience? Will you start optimizing for social search results? Give it a try and leave a comment to let us know what you think.

There will be a massive collaboration between search engines and social media that will further enable improved relevant and real-time results through search. Now is the time to take advantage of the changes that are taking place and position your sites and ideas to benefit and go viral.

Here Are 3 Major Search Engine Facts

1. Google is now including Twitter conversations in search results. This means that if I search for the keyword phrase, “earthquake in California” I will see the latest real-time conversations about those keywords from twitter.
2. Social Media sites are being indexed at a much higher frequency than the average site. For example, when I update my active public facebook profile or fan page, google will see it in at least an hour.
3. The most popular Social Media sites are trusted by google and usually have high page ranks

Major search engines are recognizing the fact that there is a huge exchange of content through social media. The business of search engines is to provide the most relevant content in accordance with what the user is searching for.

Start Using Social Media Sites to Boost SEO

To start taking advantage of social media for SEO, you will need to start creating social profiles and start networking and building your communities. Here are the major ones I have started using:

Facebook – Create both Personal Profiles and Fan Pages. Ensure that your websites and other relevant information is listed in your profiles with relevant keywords that you want to be associated with. Use the descriptions to talk about your sites and products. For fan pages, ensure that you are publishing your blog posts regularly on the wall so that your content is accessible through search and to your fan base. I recommend using the Networked Blogs application which will automatically publish your blog posts to your facebook profile. Most importantly, through your security settings, make your facebook profiles public. This way they can be found through search engines.

Linked In – This service is very public and can provide any relevant information to search engines that will help your ranking. Your business affiliations, websites, blogs, products, etc can be optimized by using a functional Linked In profile.

Hub Pages – This is another huge community that is frequently indexed by google. Here you can build your own massive following of readers and also create some link juice for your sites.

Squidoo – Squidoo is another great site and publishing platform that gets indexed by google frequently. Here you can build your authority within your particular niche or topics while using relevant keywords, anchor texts and links to point back to your site and increase your google pagerank.

Twitter – Twitter is one of the fastest growing social hubs with millions of users and growing. Twitter allows you to share any type of information over their network with your followers and provides the benefit of your published content reaching across to millions of users when retweeted. Google is now actively indexing twitter conversations which will benefit all who are publishing content this way. One major factor to note: Always try to use actual URLs where possible when sharing links with others instead of URL shorteners like Bit.ly. Actual URLs have more link juice and are more relevant for search results.

Blog Engage – Blog Engage is an awesome community to connect with other bloggers, increase traffic and gain some link juice. This is another powerful medium for enhancing link popularity and perfecting SEO for your site.

All the social sites listed above are excellent for increasing link popularity and SEO for your sites. When linking back to your sites, always remember to use relevant keywords, anchor texts and links which will make links more relevant in search engine results pages (SERP). These sites are also great for increasing your site’s credibility in a shorter period of time as well as your google pagerank.

Awesome Bookmarking Sites That Help SEO

Social Bookmarking sites are excellent for passing link juice and search engine traffic to your site. Google actually treats the social bookmark as a “middle man” and bypasses them for getting to your content and displaying results to searchers. So when someone searches for content that matches your site, they will be sent directly to your site’s content rather than to the bookmark site.

Here are a few great bookmarking sites that are readily indexed by google:

• Digg
• Sphinn
• Stumble Upon
• Delicious
• Design Float
• Propeller
• Socialogs

Download and use the the Sexy Bookmarks Plugin that will display a beautiful list of possible social bookmarking sites that your readers and yourself will have easy access to like the one below.

Using YouTube To Build SEO

YouTube is now owned by Google and is indexed constantly. Create and upload videos to YouTube with relevant descriptions and title information to ensure that your content is associated with your site and links back to you.

Let’s Get To Work!

Bear in mind that it takes time to build a large network of followers and customers through using social media.

The powerful techniques, practices and sites above can especially help new websites and blogs to get indexed within as soon as 3 days of being launched. Its very important to have a clear plan outlined for your site’s success and exposure. Pretty soon you will start to see lots of search engine traffic starting to flood your sites as well as increases in page rank and rankings in SERP.

So its time to get to work, start promoting your websites and I will see you at the top of the search engine results pages!

Discussion

How has Social Media helped your site to become more popular, especially through search results? Please share any other methods that may have worked for your site. We would love to hear about them.

Activities I Consider a part of Social Media Marketing

Just to set the stage for the discussion, I consider the activities below as part of social media marketing:

• Commenting on other blogs
• Connecting with other bloggers
• Using social media sites to talk about products / ideas
• Creating online profiles that promote your idea / product
• Guest posting on other blogs
• Collaborating on projects with other bloggers

Going Viral & Spreading Like a Wildfire

The word “Viral” is defined as “…to do with or caused by a virus.” So when we go viral with our blog, business or idea we are spreading like a virus throughout the social internet and infecting and affect the minds of our readers and viewers of whom we did not even have direct contact with. So suddenly, 100 visitors become 1,000 visitors, then 10,000 visitors and so on. This is especially effective if we have a unique product or idea.

Social Media has afforded many business and personal websites to reach out to thousands and in some cases millions of persons across the world at a very minimal cost and time.

So my questions is this: Are you spending enough time on social media marketing or are you waiting for the visitors to come to your site?

I can guarantee you that if you have the quality content to market, engaging in social media will bring great improvement to your site’s traffic and long-term growth and success.

Here are 2 social media sites from which I am enjoying an increase in readership to my blog and have made some brand new connections with other bloggers:

Twitter – Ensure that your site or blog makes it easy for visitors to tweet your posts by using the Tweet Meme share button. Its very important to work on building your twitter presence by engaging other users by following them and connect with persons you find interesting within your niche. Having a large targeted following on twitter can bring you massive traffic when you tweet your articles.

Blog Engage – This is an excellent site to use as a tool to connect with other bloggers and get your articles out on the web. Blog Engage allows you to publish your blog posts to a buzzing community and allows others to vote on your articles and you can add friends so it pretty much works like Facebook but is built for bloggers. Create an account, start publishing your posts, vote on other articles that you may like and watch the traffic flow to your site. Be social! Get to know others in the blogosphere while sharing your thoughts and ideas. Be very active, make your presence felt in a non-intrusive way and watch yourself grow as a blogger.

The sites above will definitely help you to see an increase in traffic to your site especially when combined with reaching out to other bloggers by commenting on their sites and creating quality content / services that users will be interested in.

Engaging in online social activities is a very proactive way of attracting visitors to your site rather than waiting for persons to use a search engine to stumble upon your site, which in basic terms may be by chance.

Actual Results from Social Media Marketing vs. Search Engine Optimization

Well I cannot discuss this topic without showing some actual numbers that represent the idea. So here is a glimpse of what my traffic looks like from social media activities versus results from search engines. The samples are shown over a 1 month time frame using Google Analytics

Visits from Social Media sites & Referring Sites that I have interacted with:

Based on the graph above we see that visitors are spending some time on my blog reading and are engaged. You will also note that readers from referring sites accounted for 59.24% of total traffic. Traffic within this group was typically obtained from sites like Twitter, Technorati, Blog Engage, blogs that I have commented on and guest posted, etc.

Visits from Search Engines:

The graph above shows traffic from search engines with a much higher bounce rate with less time spent on the site and accounts for only 8.82% of total traffic. The search engine traffic here comes from Yahoo, Google and Bing.

Note also that in the graph above the spike in search engine traffic at about April 6 seem to have occurred because of my blog being upgraded to a Page Rank of 2.

So the conclusion is clear: Social media activities encourages better quality traffic than that obtained from search engines.

Conclusion

The conclusion is apparently very clear; traffic obtained from Social Media Marketing outperforms Search Engine traffic, especially for new blogs that do not yet have a reputation on the web. For a site to be truly successful in a shorter period of time the owner or author needs to be super active on the web interacting with others and working to make themselves and their site known.

Discussion:

Please leave a comment and let us know what you think? How has SEO and Social Media Marketing worked for you? Do you think it will be the same 5 years from now? Let us know.

7 Very Powerful Tips for your Community Building Success

1) Show Love 

The best way for bloggers to connect with others in the blogosphere is to show their love by commenting and contributing their thoughts to posts. This works great especially for new bloggers who are scratching their heads wondering how to attract traffic to their blog on a zero dollar budget. 90% of bloggers will visit your blog if you contribute a thought of value through commenting on their site. Use the commenting opportunity to link to an article that supports their post and ask for feedback. This is a surefire way to start blogging relationships.

2) Guest Posting 

Guest post, guest post, guest post, I cannot stress this one enough. Guest posting can bring you excellent unique traffic especially if you guest post on really popular blogs like Robswebtips.com and Sitesketch101.com. Through guest posting you improve your credibility as a blogger, gain exposure, increase great organic back links and achieve a higher page rank. Find out how you can guest post on Sam’s Web Guide here.

3) Be Prepared! 

If you’re going all the way to attract new visitors to your site and you’re a dedicated blogger, you need to have something to offer your visitors when they arrive. Imagine attracting 1,000 unique visitors today, but you only have 2 or 3 posts on your blog because its new. What do you think the visitors will think? More than likely they will not return because you will seem really new, unprofessional and not serious about your blog. Of course, we are all new at some point but we don’t want to promote ourselves as newbies. Spend some quality time to build up your blog with some great posts with your unique views or have some excellent tutorials on how to overcome common challenges. 10 or more posts will do.

4) ASK! 

There is nothing wrong with asking for what you want. Whether its help, subscribers or comments, you’ve got to ask for what you want. As with the sales profession you need to ask for the sale, you need to ask for that comment or that subscriber. How will anyone know what you want if you don’t ask. Plus, you would be surprised at how generous bloggers on a whole can be.

5) Reply to All Commentators and Offer Assistance

As your blog grows, you will definitely begin to get lots of visitors commenting on your site, provided that your content is interesting that is. Firstly, always thank your readers for commenting on your site, ensure that you clearly understand what your commentators are saying, engage them with questions and by giving further insight. Before all of this gets going though, ensure that your commentators can subscribe to your blog’s comments by downloading this plugin. This plugin allows your visitors to receive comment updates in their e-mail. So when you post a reply to a comment, the visitor will be notified via e-mail and would be able to reply.

6) Use Comment Luv

Show more love by using Comment Luv along with your comment box. This plugin displays your visitors’ last blog post whenever they leave a comment. This is a great way to help other bloggers advertise their posts on their blog in a very non-intrusive way. The plugin can be downloaded here.

7) Collaborate with other bloggers

Do not treat other bloggers as though they are competitors, but treat them as partners. Although that may not be their “official title.” In any business, treating other entities as competitors often stifles business relationships and limits what you can learn from each other because you will be more focused on beating them rather than being successful with them. Try collaborating on a blogging project with other bloggers in your niche and you will find that the ideas will flow like a river and income opportunities will skyrocket beyond what you expected. Plus, if you are really interested in learning all there is to learn, then try to collaborate with an experienced blogger. You have nothing to lose!

The tips above will definitely kick start you on your way to building a massive blogging community. Always write your articles and design your site in a manner that stimulates visitor interaction and participation. SEO is great but community optimization can be even greater especially when launching your new blog.

Hope this helps you to go Viral!!

Group Discussion:

What other methods or practices do you think would fit within Community Optimization? Is SEO more important? Please leave a comment to let us know what you think.

Watch this video and see the power of the social media revolution explained and get an idea of things to come.

Discussion: What do you think about the future of Social Media and what other massive changes do you expect to see? How has social media helped you to promote your brand. Please leave a comment and let us know.