Marketing with social media has become a critical component of any marketing plans. However, not everyone who works in marketing knows the best ways to launch a social media campaign. This is to be expected: the medium is still in its infancy, so here’s a little primer on what to do when working with your social media. Marketing with social media is not terribly difficult, but it is something that you would have to learn.

First you have to decide what the company you are trying to promote is really about. What are their core values? Marketing with social media requires a great deal of direction, so you need to know exactly what you are trying to say. Is your company all about customer service, or is it really about innovation? Remember that you have to make a decision: if you try to be everything to everybody, then you’ll be nothing to nobody.

No matter what the vision, customer service is always paramount. That is one great strength that social media has over other types of marketing: it allows you to talk directly with your customer base. If a customer has a complaint, work with them to resolve the situation. If they have a question, do your best to try to answer it. If they have a comment of just how much they like you, respond with a simple sign of appreciation. This way other customers can see that you take them seriously and will be more likely to want to do business with you.

This brings us to our next topic: keep the conversation about on the customer. People don’t want to just read about a product or service; they want to communicate themselves. You should ask them questions, run surveys, and organize contests. Basically, everything should be done in order to make your customers feel like they are near to your heart

These are pretty simple, but this should give you a basic idea what social media really needs to be in order to be effective. Marketing with social media is not really rocket science, but it’s a bit of a shift when compared to different types of marketing you may be used to. Therefore, you should do what you can in order to learn everything you can about this new and exciting medium.

Is there something else you would care to know about marketing with social media? Or maybe you need a bit of help on your Social Media Campaign? Click on our links to find out more!. Check here for free reprint license: Marketing with Social Media.

Have you ever wondered how people get tons of leads everyday? Ton on traffic to their opportunity website? This post goes a little off my regular subjects but I thought it was a pretty neat stuff for me to share. Some do article marketing, some do video marketing and some use PPC to drive extremely targeted traffic. Discover how they do that and how it can benefit you!

If you are not familiar with PPC, it is a paid method available for you advertive on the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN. PPC is mainly used by affiliate marketers to drive traffic to lead capture pages or to link directly to affilate links. This is proven to be a very good traffic generator but it can also cost a lot of money. Today I wanted to share quickly with you this pretty cool tool that will let you check out how people drive traffic to their website with PPC.

Here is for example a screenshot of the google page when I search for “the best business opportunity”

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You can see the organix websites on the bottom left and the paid advertisement on the top and the right hand side of the search results.

How can you use it for your MLM marketing you may ask?

Very good question! I’m glad you ask. Well here is a little trick that I use and you can too:

1. Register to PPC 2.0: There is currently a free 7-day trial. You don’t even need to enter a credit card number. You have unlimited access for 7 days. After these 7 days, if you want to use it, you will be charged a hefty load of money. It is worth it only if you are really focusing on this. Personnaly I do not recommend it for the average Network Marketer. However, it is free for 7 days so I am checking it out, no risk!
2. Find your favorite business opportunity and grab a bunch of keywords that you may be targeting related it. If you want to attract everybody looking for a business opportunity for example (the broader example), you could target the keywords “the best business opportunity“.
3. Open GCD 2.0 and type “the best business opportunity” in the search box and click enter. Here is what you get.
   

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    You can see that the search returns more than 38,000 results! Now, you may wonder how this can help me with my marketing. Here is what I do next.

4. This is were it becomes interesting. Look at the top results, and grab the ones with somewhat high volume. Write them down, they will be your keywords that you will want to use to either create your own PPC or even better, they will become the keywords you want to use in your articles, videos, etc. i.e. create content for free traffic! Here are the ones I would grab:
   - best home business opportunity 12,100/mo $3.15
   - best business opportunity 18,100/mo $3.45
   - best small business opportunity 720/mo $3.67
   - best business opportunity small 720/mo $3.67
   - best business home opportunity 12,100/mo $3.30
   - best online business opportunity 1,900/mo $3.30
   - best business mlm opportunity 390/mo $0.05
   - best mlm business opportunity 390/mo $0.05
   - best internet business opportunity 1,000/mo $3.85
5. Check out what you have to pay for some of them to get traffic. That hurts! This is a very competitive market. That is why I like article marketing. It is free and drive traffic to you automatically. You can also use all those keywords in your blog or website to have them going up in the search engines and get organic traffic.
6. This is already a good feature but some will tell me that there are other free tools that can do that like the Google Keyword Tool. True. Although I am doing more with GCD 2.0
7. Let’s choose “best mlm business opportunity” which has about 390 search a month and cost about $0.05 a click. How would you like to have 390 prospects per month going to your website and checking out your opportunity? If you want to use PPC, go for it, and get some traffic but be carefull the PPC world can empty your pockets very quickly.
8. So now I can click on the keyword and then I can see all the ads that other people are using to promote their business or opportunity. Pretty neat isn’t it?

   

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    You can see that there are many people who have been running their add for a while and that nust mean that they are successfully doing so. If they are not, well, there business will not survive very long.

9. You can now click on the ad title to see what the landing pae looks like. It can give you ideas of what people are doing in your niche or in your opportunity. You can find good article ideas, or even videos ideas. If you see something successful learn form it, get ideas and tips for your own marketing.

That’s it for this post folks, there are many more ideas on how to use this pretty cool tool. They have an easy to read and simple user manual inside after you log into your account. And the best part is that it is free so click on the image below and try your 7-day free trial. They don’t even ask for a credit card number so there is really zero risk!

PS: If you want to see the inside videos of how the Google Cash Detective can be used, click here and sign up. This is really cool stuff.

I received an email from Squidoo this morning mentioning some changes in their policy. I wanted to share that with you. If you are promoting your opportunity or some related material or products, it may affect your marketing efforts so make sure you read the “new” rules carefully. If you are not in compliance with those new rules, try to adapt your lenses, it would be too bad to have problem for a few minor tweaks.

Here is an excerpt of what they sent. If you haven’t received it you can find all the details on the Squidoo website directly.

1. No Spam. This one’s not new, but it’s worth saying again.

It’s simple: given our pedigree, our point of view and our dyed-in-the-wool, we-will-never-change-our-mind conviction on this issue, spam is not okay at Squidoo. For a few years now we have had a very strict and enforced stance against spam. That’s staying the same, and if anything, getting even more rigorous. If you actively spam people with your Squidoo lenses (by email, in blog comments, by stalking and harassing people on Twitter, by tricking people with the content in your lenses, and more) we’ll lock your entire account.

3. No Junk Topics from our “SquidDon’t” List

Lenses on free movie downloads. Toenail fungus cures. LoseBellyFatNow promotions. Reverse Phone Lookup 4U. You know junk when you see it. And lots more examples.

Unforunately, topics like these are overwhelmingly conditioned and proven to attract spammers. If a topic has displayed enough trickery and spam and bad activity, we choose not to support it. If we find a lens on a SquidDon’t topic or something very similar to it, we’ll lock it. For good. Our best recommendation: Don’t bother with topics like these. There’s plenty of incredible stuff to write about and recommend online without having to go near the edges of what we’re got going here.

4. A new limit on overly promotional lenses

Making a lens to promote or recommend something is a terrific endeavor. It’s a big part of why a lot of our people are here. But: Less is more! Sales lenses far too often turn into junk lenses, as described by the relentless number of outbound links to the same exact domain. Being overly promotional rarely works. “Buy here buy here buy here!” never does.

So to help you focus your lenses, and sell even better–and to help surfers find our pages more useful overall–we’re introducing a limit to the number of outbound links to the same domain that you can have on a lens. If you have more than 9 links to the SAME domain on a single lens, your lens will get locked for review. Of course we’ll have domains that are whitelisted out of this (meaning, you can have as many outbound links to them as you like), as well as sites that are blacklisted (meaning, even a single link to that domain will get your lens locked).

Please read all the important details on how this works.

What now? First, take a deep breath.

We won’t be flipping the switch on these new policies until July 20, 2009 or later. So you’ve got more than a month to review your lenses to make sure they’re playing by the rules.

In the meantime, here are 4 things you can do to get ready for these changes.

Keep the good work with article marketing but make sure you follow the new rules.good

If you are doing article marketing you are most likely using EzineArticles.com and other article submission websites. If you are actively doing article marketing you most likely saw the changes in the EzineArticles.com article submission form. Until today it seemed like a simple visual change but the people behind the changes made some modifications in the background to help us, the authors, publish better quality articles and get articles approved even faster.

Here is what they have done with this new submission form:

Here’s a list of the items that are automatically checked when you submit a new article. Each of these will result in an error window asking you to correct it.

Title

• No author name is allowed in the article title
• No pipe (|) character is allowed in the title
• No HTML/PHP/JavaScript is allowed in the title
• Title is confirmed as unique – You have the option to change or accept a duplicate title
• Title must be no longer than 100 characters
• Excessive or duplicate punctuation is not allowed (i.e. !! and ??, etc.) in title
• Title cannot contain a URL or domain name

Article Summary

• No author name is allowed in the article summary
• No HTML/PHP/JavaScript is allowed in the summary
• The summary must not be too short (less than two words) or too long (more than 200 words)

Article Body

• No links are allowed in the first (3) paragraphs (“above the fold”)
• Body must not be empty
• No images may be placed in the body text
• No JavaScript is allowed in the body text
• Article body must be longer than 250 words and shorter than 5,000 words
• Keyword phrases can comprise no more than (2%) of body’s total word count
• Anchor text (linked text) may contain a maximum of (5) words (we suggest 3)
• Body must contain more than one paragraph

Resource Box

• No PHP/JavaScript is allowed in the Resource Box
• Resource Box must be no longer than 300 words
• Anchor text (linked text) may contain a maximum of (5) words (we suggest 3)

Keywords

• Keyword fields may not be left blank
• No HTML/PHP/No JavaScript is allowed in keywords

 

As you can see, now, they make sure that your article is of quality, respecting some sort of “template”. Yes it brings some more rules upfront but the rules were already in place in the background. So this is great news. If you save 5 minutes per article because your article is approved immediately, imagine how many hours you will save after a year…