Free Internet Marketing Tips and Resources Blog by Stuart Stirling

Be A Social Networking Marketer? Simple Strategies Revealed

YouTube, Facebook and MySpace get millions of visitors daily! That is a lot of traffic! Social Networking and Social Marketing allow you to tap into some of that traffic and increase your own web presence. But there is a knack to it.

Marketing in Social Networking Websites is becoming more and more popular with online marketrers. And looking at the traffic stats from above, the reasons are clear.

The social networking websites mentioned above are just a couple of top examples of social sites which online entrepreneurs use to promote and market their own websites and products. When used properly, these sites can drive loads of unique and targeted traffic to your site on a consistent basis.

Here's how to be a Social Networking Marketer.

Social networking sites allow users to interact with each other like in the real world, if not better, with video, audio, file sharing, blogging, chat and discussion groups. While these sites provide a huge arena for social networking, they also offer invaluable use to online entrepreneurs and social marketing.

As with most things on the internet, they quickly grow and branch out into niches. Today there are many Social network sites that allow you to interact with users that have very specific interests and new social networking sites are built around these niche topics every day.

When it comes to niche social networking sites, there are always be people in forums looking for advice on that niche topic. Once you find a site or group comprised of users interested in your niche, you have a good chance of becoming an authority on the subject, and opens the doors for your chance at social niche marketing.

A word of caution though: Although social networking sites are used by thousands upon thousands of online marketers to promote their products, you'll wear out your welcome fast if you just breeze in and try to promote your product or service without
any real interaction.

These are called spammers. Spammers aren't welcome at these sites, or anywhere so you could do your business more harm than good if you don't utilize them properly.

While it may take a while to build up real contacts, remember this is only one way to promote your site or product; you don't want to depend entirely on one site or even one format.

Networking on the Internet works in much the same way as networking in the brick and mortar world. It's a give and take situation where you express interest and contribute with the others in the network. As you do this, others will express interest in you and what you have to offer. Afterall, people are people and not robots just because they use a computer.

Here's how to build your credentials, and make you an expert.

Why not upload a short video tutorial at YouTube, create one or more blogs at the various free blogging sites such as blogger or wordpress.

Create pages at MySpace, Facebook, or any other social networking sites that appeal to you and show the world what you know. Of course, don't show them your best stuff as you want to save your best info for your products you can sell!

Getting involved at social networking sites can give your online business a boost and drive a lot of targeted website traffic as long as you develop a genuine presence at the sites and make the time and effort to create relative content as there is a lot of competition. So make sure you go about it with sincerity and passion. Go hard, or go home.

Stuart Stirling

Labels: facebook, myspace-marketing, niche-marketing, social-marketing, social-networking, web 2.0, youtube

posted by Stuart S @ 12:14 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

Is Web 1.0 Dead? Welcome to Web 2.0

What is Web 2.0? You've probably heard a lot of talk about the term Web 2.0. It's not a piece of software, but the new 21st century platform for user generated content.

It's All About Interaction.

Instead of users merely surfing the web, they're interacting with other users and enterprises. Web 2.0 has become the new environment at the heart of the Internet, with audience participation in overdrive. Websites like Youtube.com, MySpace.com and Facebook.com are perfect examples of Web 2.0 in use today.

SIDENOTE: If you ever take a look at the top 100 website rankings for traffic, you'll see web 2.0 website DOMINATE. eg. Youtube.com is No.2 in the world!

A good example of the difference in Web 2.0 and the era of the Internet's infancy, or perhaps Web 1.0 is that while surveys have not been abolished, they were a reigning presence in the early days of the Internet to gauge a customer's preferences and experiences. Now customers impressions can be displayed over a wide range of areas.

The evolution of Web 2.0 brings customers the ability to make themselves part of the website. They can create a membership account, add a photo, add a video, write a blog post, leave a comment, ask a question, rate a product, send a message to other users and use a number of other interactive tools immediately.

Perhaps the greatest value of Web 2.0 for marketers on the internet, other than a great hosting platform for potentially skyrocketing profits, is that users and customers can instantly read, hear, or see what other users and customers think about a product or service, which has a greater impact on sales.

While the surveys of yesterday provided information solely to the marketers, Web 2.0 interfaces share the opinions and experiences of customers with each other. This platform gives "word of mouth" a new meaning and a much faster and effective vehicle.

Web 2.0 embraces the same technologies for social networking as it does for enterprise. This enables users to communicate across a wide variety of sites using the same material while it forges much more of a community bond than the earlier technologies.

Web 2.0 advances have even allowed politicians to take advantage of the interactive interface by communicating with voters in ways never before possible. And, perhaps most exciting of all, e-commerce has profited and continues to profit handsomely from the Web 2.0 phenomenon.

Therefore, the Web 2.0 trend is rapidly changing the Internet for all kinds of users. For Internet marketing entrepreneurs, we have to keep up with the technological changes found in Web 2.0 or we fear to lose to the competition. People just won't stick around if we all they can so is look and read, which is so typical Web 1.0.

Web 2.0 marketing does not necessarily mean you have to build your own Myspace or Youtube. While it is a great idea, the other important aspect of Web 2.0 marketing is to
utilize the current websites like Youtube to direct traffic to your own website, offers etc.

The point: CAPITILIZE!

Luckily, there is Web 2.0 marketing help that will show you how to do this. A small group of marketing experts have combined their skills and created a membership website that will teach you Web 2.0 Marketing. I personally have access to their training materials and I can say this stuff is simply amazing. They really know what they're talking about.

All the info they share about Web 2.0 Marketing comes from experience, NOT theory, like so many other products on the market. So, for expert help at a reasonable price, I highly recommend Web 2.0 Marketing: Traffic Ramp-up Blueprint.

If your serious about making money online in the present, you need this. If you want to make money online in the future, it will be almost impossible without this. Claim one of the 1000 exclusive memberships available and start profiting today and into the future with Web 2.0 Marketing.

To your success,
Stuart Stirling

Labels: e-commerce-advances, home-business, internet-marketing-2008, web 2.0

posted by Stuart S @ 1:33 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

It started on Saturday. Myself and a few other budding marketers entered a challenge to see
how well we could do using one of web 2.0's most lucrative sites, squidoo.com.

If you haven't heard about squidoo.com, let me tell you about it briefly. It's f'ree to sign up for an account and you can build your own page/website on anything you like.

It's a bit of a mix between blogger and myspace but 10 times more fun. Once I start creating,
I find it hard to stop. It's really addictive!

I heard about it late last year and that it was a great place to get f'ree traffic. I experimented
and made a few "lenses" (a squidoo page is called a lens) and experienced some traffic but nothing to write home about....until I entered this competition!

There are approximately 67,000 lenses in total on squidoo right now and mine jumped from around 38,000 the first day I made it (Saturday), to 966 today.

"I made the top 1000 lenses in just 3 days and climbing!"

As you can imagine, I was more than impressed with my efforts seeing that my highest ranking lens up until now never reached the top 10,000.

I did however put in extra effort with this one and I'm quite happy with it. I loaded it with
awesome info on my favourite topic.......

......"Affiliate Marketing!"

I know you're probably thinking "Give me the link already!", so here it is-

-> http://www.squidoo.com/affiliatebucks

There is a place for you to leave a comment and add your link. I also suggest you get your own
f'ree squidoo account like me and start building your lens. A great way to get f'ree exposure!

-> http://www.squidoo.com/affiliatebucks

Please don't forget to vote for my lens at the top of the page by clicking on the stars.

When you've signed up and created a your own lens, send me a quick link to it and I'll be more than happy to check it out and vote for it!

-> http://www.squidoo.com/affiliatebucks

To your Squidoo.com success,

Stuart Stirling

Labels: affiliate marketing, increase web site traffic, squidoo, web 2.0

posted by Stuart S @ 5:32 AM 0 Comments Links to this post