Are you scared of video for any or all of the following reasons?

Well guess what- you can now throw all of those reasons out the window.  Andy Jenkins shows you how any regular joe can become – A Video Boss.

For Free Tutorials on How to become a Video Boss Click Here

A rockin’ video review of Andy Jenkin’s The Video Boss

Here is a sample of what you will learn

How “Regular Folks” who are NOT professional Video-makers are CLEANING UP using simple video marketing strategies:

* How “James” created a short, 4 minute slide-show video as a gift to his dog, and how it went VIRAL and got over 4,000,000 (That’s Four Million) views.
* How “Robert” used camcorder Video of his wife exercising to ramp up to over 90,000 visitors per month to his YOGA site.
* How “Bill” made short, less than 2-minute long demonstration videos for his Artificial Christmas Trees site that are now 11 of his 12 most powerful converting web pages.
* The CURSE of Online Video Marketing – how to protect yourself and take advantage of what everyone else is afraid of.
* The absolutely fastest way I know how to make a killer sales letter video from SCRATCH, so you could be converting more visitors to sales in just a few hours.
* The most popular and powerful software you should use to make slick, professional looking online video. Some of these applications are so easy to use, you might not even need to read the manual.
* A silly, but hardly ever used trick to make the voice quality of your audio sound like it was recorded on an expensive, professional microphone.
* How to make “Flip-Cam” video look like “TV-Studio” video. This secret is a head-slapper.

I am not sure how long Andys going to have these videos available so get in while you can.

Go here to Become a Video Boss

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What’s that saying, “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail?” Well, just like any marketing strategy, social media needs planning. You cannot just jump on Twitter or Facebook and expect to make sales or generate a lead database without some planning. The fact is, most small businesses fail at Facebook and Twitter because they fail to plan strategies that convert followers and fans to leads and customers. However, when implemented properly, a customized Facebook fan page and a Twitter account can directly increase your ability to collect and message leads and boost sales. Take Papa John’s Facebook Page: it is responsible for improving sales by more than 28% for the pizza chain and their incentive initiatives like free pizza’s for friends helped them double their fan base in a single month. Conversely, check out Jet Blue’s Twitter Page: by tweeting their deal of day, they have directly improved sales and been able to prove ROI on Twitter. But neither of these companies jumped into social media without a game plan and nor should you.

Resources:

Incentivizing Facebook Fans: Papa John’s Doubles Fans with Free Pizza

Case Study: Papa John’s Finds New Facebook Fans

JetBlue Launches Twitter Deals – SmarterTravel.com

Build a Social Media Game Plan

Set a Goal

The very first thing you need to determine is what your goal is. Set a clear goal. For example – set a goal like “I want to exceed 10K fans on my Facebook page.” “I want to generate a database of over 25K subscribers I can remarket later. Or “I want to directly sell my products or services to increase revenues by 10%.” Like I said, be specific in your goal, so you can measure results based on expectation.

Allocate Your Resources

Be aware that social media is not some silver bullet that will save your business. It is one element of a successful online marketing plan and realistically accounts for 8% of all online leads according to a recent Hubspot study. So, figure out how much time and money you want to spend on getting this result. Quantify it and know the metrics of existing sales, leads or subscribers generated each month on your website or Facebook Fan page. The next step is to find the mechanism that will generate that result for you. For example – recently Shakira debuted her latest music video exclusively on her Facebook fan page. The goal? To build fan base in a single place online that allowed for easy messaging of fans. To drive fans in volume and within a limited time to that page by providing debut access to content irresistible to her audience. The result? 1.7 million fans visited and fanned that page.

I am not suggesting you are a pop star in need of fans – but what I am saying is find the irresistible offer that your market is looking for. If you are a web services company to small businesses, offer a limited time discount on services or a free eBook on conversion page design and marketing or even a white paper on social media – each requiring registration. My point is, set a clear goal for yourself.

Resources:

Twucked Up Twit in Social Media

Drive Traffic to Conversion Points

OK, so you have a goal. Making that goal a success requires that you drive the traffic from your social media accounts back to places where people can take action and deliver your result. I am a huge fan of single purpose landing pages. These are pages that you direct visitors to that have only one purpose – to call them to action and create a NEED for them to immediate buy or register their information so you can generate a lead.

Measure Your Results

Know how you will measure that goal before you begin the campaign. In the instances I mentioned you can measure the results even without third party tools – simply based on the number of new Facebook Fans, the size of your database or the number of downloads. Clearly you can get more rich data on your campaign from Google Analytics, Mint, Crazy Egg, Omniture or Visistat, but it is possible to prove ROI without them.

Use The Right Tools

Google Analytics Social Media Tracking Plugin | This will display social media metric data in Google analytics. It can display your activity and mentions from a variety of social sites like Digg, Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, and Mixx.

Bit.ly | When you use a URL shortener, it’s always a smart idea to use one that has analytics information, like Bit.ly This will track information like number of clicks, traffic sources, and even at what time clicks occur.

Xinureturns | xinureturns provides a great dashboard overview of your website’s standing in social media. Run a report and you will receive information on Technorati, Googe Pagerank, Diggs, and even backlinks to your website.

PostRank | PostRank provides detailed information on Tweets, stumbles, diggs, and FriendFeed all in one place. It’s best for blogs and websites with a lot of content.

SocialToo | SocialToo is a comprehensive tool for creating social surveys and tracking social stats. It also will send you a daily email describing follows and unfollows on Twitter.

SM2 | If you are really serious about your social analytics you will use a monitoring service like SM2. SM2 is a software solution designed specifically for PR and Marketing Agencies to monitor and measure social media. As businesses and consumers increasingly utilize and rely on social media, your agency needs the best tools and expertise to stay competitive.

TwitterAnalyzer is one of the most comprehensive Twitter analyzer tools out there. It tracks followers who are online when you are, number of readers that have been exposed to your message, your tweet habits, who is retweeting your updates, twitter follow statistics, growth rates, conversations being made about you, the size of your audience and your followers’ demographics.

Resources:

Top 5 Twitter Analytics Tools

Conclusion

As a small business, you need to hold your marketing campaigns to the same standards enterprise sized businesses do and expect full return on the investments you make into them. Do not fully dive into the waters of social media if you are not prepared with goals and strategy. Results are what matter and using social sites effectively is the key, so plan for your success and know how you will measure that success against your expectations.

Mary McKnight serves as the Director of Internet Marketing for Fuel Records, an EMI Music Group Label and an outspoken blogger on music, social media, SEO and piracy. You can read more of her work on www.sacriliciousmarketing.com.

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Value is a relative term – right? What means something to me might not mean the same for you. But, we all understand that when we spend time or money to achieve a goal or solve a problem, we want to see some progress to that end. In order to realize value from time spent engaging in social media, you have to be clear on why you are “engaging” in the first place.

You need to know what you want from social media – are you looking for customers, clients, franchise prospects, channel partners or collaborators, newsletter or blog subscribers, web site traffic in general, colleagues, media opportunities, or members? Maybe you want a combo — I’ll take # 8 and supersize that!

Get your expectations out of the way would be my first bit of advice. Clear reasons are good, but expectations, not so much. The reason why, is that you may or may not be a natural or skilled networker offline – if you aren’t – don’t expect that your personality will click in when you click the keys. I see plenty of people get disappointed or frustrated after working social media for a few weeks and don’t quickly sense “anything happening.”

You might be a better writer than talker – that’s cool, but unless you like networking for business and know (this is big) how to make inquiries, you might be better off hiring a pro to manage your Twitter or Facebook accounts.

Not long ago, I was called to the office of a local community leader. He wanted me to “prove” to him that social media “works” – wanted to know the value. I had to smile. My initial thought – “he does know this is free, right?” My second thought – nobody needs to prove social media or push it on anyone. You either get it or you don’t. There are plenty of players in the field. And, the funny thing is that social media is just allowing you to do over the “net” the same thing you could do and have been doing in person for years. It’s networking. Faster…and, on a bigger playground, but it’s still networking. If it has worked for you in the past, with a little learnin’ it should continue working for you.

Final thought for the community leader that I’ll share here is that you should not approach social media concerned first with what value you’ll receive. You should be concerned with what value you can bring to others. If you nail that – then the value will be returned. Simple as that.

Still confused, visit me, Mary Kurek, at http://www.marykurek.com
http:/www.twitter.com/marylkurek
Visibility Consulting that focuses on using social media to secure professional introductions on behalf of clients.

Many thanks to my new Twitter friend, Doug Greathouse of Superhero Marketing for allowing me this big of space to deliver a few thoughts. He’s a pro marketer and networker and killer at working social media.

Working social media for business gain may surprise you. Doors may open to interesting opportunities that you couldn’t have guessed.

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I am going to start this post off with how I feel personally about the enforcement of the no recurring tweet rule from twitter. Last night I went to my Socialoomph account to write up a scheduled tweet. I was alarmed to see a lot of tweets surrounded in a light red box with this message :

This tweet was not published. This recurring tweet has been deactivated. Please see our blog post at http://www.socialoomphblog.com/recurring-tweets/ for more information.

My first reaction was WTF? Then I proceeded to Socialoomph’s blog and read all the comments left on the post. So many people were very upset, like their whole business just collapsed. Given the time of day that I read this (10:30pm) I decided to sleep on it before I posted my feelings to to the world. I am glad that I did. My post if done last night would have come from a selfish perspective. I was able to step back and look at the whole picture. Although I used the recurring tweet feature to make sure all of my followers were kept up to date with our latest blog posts at SuperHero Marketing and to post valuable marketing tips. There were far too many true spammers pushing porn, miracle drugs, and many other no-value products. For the record we have promoted a “product” ourselves recently in twitter. It is for someone selling those “talking models” that hover over your site and deliver a sales or information message. I still think they are really cool. That is the only “product” we have pushed directly with our twitter account and that was as a test.

If you look at this from the perspective of Twitter, they were in serious danger of being overrun by spammers. Too much spam and you lose the people the site was intended for. Plus, Twitter is still looking for a monetization strategy and has investors chomping at the bit for results. They had to do something and stopping recurring tweets certainly puts a damper on spammers. That being said this does put a hurt on true content creators to get there message out. Many of us have many followers around the world and in different time zones. It will be much harder for us to reach as many people as we would like to. One of the most heralded tweeters out @guykawasaki used recurring tweets. I will be interested in his reaction to this if he has one.

So what do I think happens next? Twitter will have less Spam (Yeah!) and the amount of people on twitter may drop. Most of those lost will be spammers but unfortunately many of them could be content creators who do not believe they have the resources (time or money) to get their message out effectively with Twitter without the help of automated recurring tweets.

Now let’s take yet another step back and not forget the world was still spinning before Twitter cut out recurring tweets. As business owners we need to adapt with technology. Twitter is just one of many tools at our disposal. The greatest tool we have is our minds, continue to use that to think of new and creative ways to grow your business. My message to twitter: You broke my heart a little but I still love you! Twitter can still be used effectively to build your brand. SuperHero Marketing’s Top Secret Twitter Traffic Guide is filled with  tips on how to use Twitter to grow your business!

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Last night we, at Arcimedia, went to our second event hosted by the Social Media Club of Charleston.  While last month’s gathering came down to a few getting-to-know-you beers during happy hour, yesterday’s meeting format was more akin to an open-discussion, social networking symposium; with one word dominating most of the dialogue:  Twitter.

It seems that there are still many people, those who are social networking engineers included, who still do not understand the big deal about Twitter.  Who cares?  Why do people enjoy it so much?  Where is the power?

To answer this, let us go back to around 2002/2003 when Nextel came out with their mobile-to-mobile instant walkie-talkie service.  At that time I used Nextel as my carrier, and if they didn’t screw me over with all kinds of extra fees and charges, I might still be with them today, but I digress.  Ask anybody who used the service and they will tell you that the Walkie-Talkie feature accelerated the rate of communication by getting rid of the bull-crap in conversations.

Fast-forward to today.  In the world of online communication, Twitter is the Walkie-Talkie of the internet, except it is more than that.  In the days of Nextel, my communication was limited to one person at a time.  Today, not only can I communicate with multiple people simultaneously, all of those posts are shared so that everyone else can weigh in and add to or benefit from the discussion.

To me, here’s where the problem is.  A lot of people think of the 140 character communication format as “Twitter,” just as people think to put a “Band-aid” on a cut, not an adhesive bandage.  Twitter is just a brand name of technology, and this exact same functionality can be found using an open-source platform like identi.ca, building it yourself in php (but why reinvent the wheel), or to somehow pioneer your own social media SMS technology.

“Twitter” isn’t really the big story here; it is the rapid-action, cut-the-crap style of communication that people need, use, and want as part of their daily discussion platform.

If you can understand the power of the walkie-talkie *beep beep*, then perhaps you can grasp the strange power and force of this entire social media trend.  Twitter is simply a glorified social networking walkie-talkie

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Let’s face it folks, We all want to be entertained. You cannot sell anything by boring people with your “fancy” industry lingo. Do you remember your favorite classes in school? I bet they had teachers that were engaging. You loved going to class because not only did you learn from that teacher but it was at least a little fun. The same principal applies to marketing your business. You want to make it very hard for your clients and prospects to forget you. I am not saying you need to be an “entertainer” but you do have to be engaging. If they are talking about you they are also indirectly talking about your business.

Think of all the companies and brands that have used characters or strong personalities to extend our launch their brands. The recent passing of Billy Mays really brought this idea back to the forefront of my mind. The reason he was such a great “pitchman” is because he was engaging, entertaining, and likable. Another great example is Gary Vaynerchuk, his personality enabled him to connect with a whole new audience of wine lovers.

People love to learn about wine and spend money with Gary because they like him. Part of his great personality is that he is transparent and shares who he is and doesn’t “hide” behind his brand but in a sense is his brand. He has taken his company viral by injecting it with personality. People are spreading his videos all across the internet. In short Gary V has just nailed it. Put bluntly, do not expect your marketing to spread if most of it looks or sounds like a technical journal. Industry jargon has zero chance of going viral.

Granted not every small business owner is outgoing enough to put this magic to work, my recommendation to them is to find that dynamic person and add them to your team. In today’s social media crazed world it is vital to the growth and possibly the survival of almost any type of business. I know there are a lot of businesses that have products and services that by their very nature are just plain boring (aluminum siding comes to mind) but if you are able to put some dynamic human personality behind what would normally be a ho-hum product or service, you may be amazed at the results that you get. Billy Mays did a great job of this with Oxy-Clean. I do not know about you, but Oxy-Clean by itself does not get me very excited. I leave you with a couple of things, I urge you as a business owner or entrepreneur to brainstorm on ways to inject more personality in your product or service. I also have listed below some links and videos of  examples of great “personality” marketing for inspiration.

You must watch at least one video on Wine Library TV

Marina Orlova / Hot for Words

The Late Great Billy Mays

My Friend Patrick Riddle/ Real Estate Investing Coach

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If  your business is not using social media you are missing out on a huge opportunity to increase your exposure and sales.
In examining the question of why a business has not yet taking the plunge and started establishing itself on social media, we have heard the following “excuses”

• Lack of time
• Lack of understanding
• It will not work for my industry
• Social Media is just a fad
• Do not think it is an effective marketing medium

In response:

If you or your staff does not have time, there are marketing companies that already have a great understanding of brand building through social media that you can hire. Depending on the size of your business you may consider hiring an in-house social media director.

Social media in some extent is  able to be tracked. You can monitor traffic coming from social media sites to your website. That however does not give you the entire picture when it comes to  how well your social media campaign is working. Social media is not as “Instant” sales driven as other marketing channels. Social media is more about “connecting” with your market.  Done correctly the ROI is much better than most other media advertising. In addition it creates an “in-touch” feeling about your company. People will always buy from a company or person they feel more connected to, giving you a distinct advantage over your competition that is not using social media or doing it ineffectively.

I could right a book to explain social media to you. As this is just a blog post, I will explain what you need to know as a business owner

• Social media “marketing” is a skill and you will not receive the maximized effects unless you learn how to do it
  correctly, hire a professional, or receive training for you or one of your staff.
• Social Media is growing at an alarming rate
  • 355 million + on Facebook. Thats more than the population of the U.S.A (304 million+ as of April 2009)
  • Twitter is doubling every 90 days and by Christmas will be at 50 million users
  • 75 million videos are on Youtube
• Much of social media is free advertising. It costs nothing to set up a Facebook Page, Youtube channel or twitter account.
• There are some tools that you can purchase to increase your effectiveness and efficiency with social media. They range from $20 a month to upwards of $500 a month. If you consult with a social media consultant they should be able to walk you through the best tools.
• There is definitely a right and a wrong way to do social media.
• Your audience is on social media.
  • The highest targeted demographic 18-34 year olds spend 40% of their free time on social media sites. That even beats video games!
  • The highest growing segment of Facebook right now is 50+ ( At 355 million plus they have already captured all the other age groups)
  • Youtube is the second most used search engine after Google.
  • Users spend on average 19 minutes a day on Facebook
  • Youtube videos are watched more than the 4 largest TV networks combined.
• Even more so than your website your social media exposes you to people around the world, not just your local area.
• Most of your social media can be “connected”. Enabling you to expose your brand using different mediums (video, microblogging, blog,etc…) to your market.
• Even small businesses can compete with large corporations.
• Your message can be delivered to more eyeballs with  less of a cost than other forms of advertising.
• You need to be entertaining  and/or informative. This does not need to be expensive.

Watch this video for Red House Furniture

Over 1 million views for a small business in a small city!

Done with some creativity social media can work for any industry. Its all about appealing to your audience.

Stay tuned to the blog and The Super Show for more info on how to use social media to market your business.

For great twitter tips and tactics fill in your name and email below and I will send you a copy of
The Top Secret Twitter Traffic Guide.

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If as a business owner or budding entrepeneur you are not aware of the power of FaceBook to build your brand and communicate with current and potential customers, I highly recommend that you explore the role that FaceBook can have in your marketing efforts. As I am not one to reinvent the wheel, and Hubspot has done a wonderful job of explaining this in their presentation, I am going to supply you with this link to there webinar. Using FaceBook For Business. They show you how to get setup in Facebook and how to use it as a marketing channel for your business.
Enjoy!

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Part One: Tips 1-3
If you are deciding on whether a blog is something you should incorporate into your business please read my other blog article “Are You Using a Blog to Explode Your Business Like Everybody Else?” and/or this article in Business Week:“Social Media Will Change Your Business” If you are ready to take your blog to the next level and get an edge on your competition, this is the series of posts for you. I had to break it up into a series because of the amount of valuable information that I am giving you. I will not only give you the top 10 tips for making your blog successful, I will outline the steps for each tips to get you started. So let’s get started

#1 Read And Comment On Other Blogs That Are Relevant To Your Industry.

First let’s create a time-saving system for you to read and comment on blogs. If you are already an avid blog reader of industry blogs and already can pick out about 3 to 5 favorites then that is your first step. If you do not yet have any favorite blogs related to your industry use Google Blog Search and type in industry related keywords to find some that you like. You can always change which blogs you read as well as the number of blogs later if you find blogs you like better. The easiest way to read the blogs on a daily basis is with Google Reader (make it your home page) You can add the blogs to Google Reader by going to the blog and subscribing  thru their RSS feed (look for an icon like this ) and once you click the icon click add to Google Reader. Once you have the blogs  in Google Reader you can read over the posts you would like to comment on and then click on the posts title (which is a link to the blog post) and you will be able to comment there.

Why do you want to comment on other blog’s you may ask?

1. It builds you and your business’s credibility: People that are interested in the topic you that is covered  will not only leave comments themselves but,  peruse the comments of others. If you leave a good comment they will remember it. Bottom Line is that you and your company begin to get noticed.
2. Establishes the first step in communication with the blog’s author. This is good for  many reasons. The blog’s author may now check out your blog and comment on your posts as well. ( The more comments your blog posts have, The more credible they seem.)This also could lead to a possible Joint ventures and/or guest post’s on each others blogs.
3. Provides a link back to your blog. Much like many of the social sites, a lot of blogs have no-follow links. This basically means that it does not help your page rank with search engines. That however does not mean that it is not a good link. If you ask me any link from a relevant site that can bring my business blog traffic is a good link.

What is a “Good Comment” on a Business Blog ?
Here are several ideas to get you started on leaving “Good Comments”

1.Expand on the topic in two paragraphs or less. Both the readers and the blog’s author will appreciate this as long as you your expansion sticks to the posts main points. You can validate the post with your own experiences and facts. This type of comment helps you further establish your credibility.
2. Add a link to relevant content on the same topic. Use a link to your own blog sparingly as the readers and author may take this as you spamming their blog.
3. Disagree. I know what your thinking, wouldn’t the author be upset and not even publish my comment? Not necessarily. If you validate your argument with sound logic and facts they will probably not only publish your comment but seek you out for more information. Guest Post Opportunity? In the cyber world of blogging it is very hard to determine someones sensitivity or pride level. If you have been reading the blog for awhile and have seen other argumentative comments published, then there is a good chance yours will to. If you know your comment is purely constructive than go ahead and post it.
4. Ask A Question. Get the author to elaborate on his points a little further in the comments or maybe he will create another post that answers your question.

Bonus Tip: Do not leave just your business name in the name field in the comment form. This is too anonymous. Leave your name and business name in the same line like this: John Doe – Acme Supplies. This accomplishes linking you to your company as well as not looking like a spammer by putting your company’s link in the comment text box. Your name will link to your companies website or blog, depending on which you put in the website field of the comment form.

#2 Make Your Blog As User-Friendly As Possible

Integrate good design and functionality in your blog. I recommend using WordPress over the other existing blogging platforms. It has a lot more options and flexibility than the rest. I also recommend either springing for a good premium template or hiring a web design firm to create a custom template for you. Even when purchasing a premium template it’s design and functionality should be customized for your needs.

The same principles that are used for good web design should also be used for the design of your blog. Your visitors should know what your blog is all about within a few seconds of landing on the blog’s home page. They should never be more than three clicks from the homepage.Navigation links or bars should be displayed attractively and prominently on your blog. Visitors should never feel like they are “leaving your site” when they go to any of the pages in your site. The design should stay relatively the same throughout.

WordPress has a lot of available “plug-ins” and “widgets” that you can place in your sidebars, headers, or footers, I recommend using only the ones that enhance the visitors experience. If you use to many your site can begin to look overly busy or cluttered. A good technique in regards to “plug-ins” and “widgets” is to spread them out. You can put the most important ones in your header or sidebar ( anything that makes you more money or increases traffic substantially like opt-in forms or social media tools) and any others that you feel are valuable in the footer. For Examples of two very successful blogs that do this with their design are ProBlogger and John Cow.

#3 Post Great Content

Would you continue to go to a store that sells junk? Even if that junk was free? Than do not put Junk content on your blog. If you really want to talk about what you did over the weekend or the last movie you saw ( unless your business is rating movies ), then get a personal blog separate from your business blog that you can turn into a personal journal. Your business blog is ther for all or any of following purposes only:
1. To Make Money
2. To share your expertise in your field
3. To build your company’s brand
4. To keep your blog’s visitors updated with relevant information about your company or industry.
5. To build traffic to your company’s main site.
Keep these points in mind whenever you add a post or other content to your blog, if it is not accomplishing any of the above you probably should scratch it.
Take a look at your competition’s websites and blogs. If they are successful, What are they doing? Do not reinvent the wheel! What you can do is improve the wheel by giving more value to your blog’s visitors. Your posts should be entertaining and informative.

In the next post we will cover these blog exploding tips…
#4 Post To Your Blog Frequently
#5 Search Engine Optimize Your Blog
#6 Track Your Blogs Success

Then in part three we really turn it up a notch…
#7 Use Eye Catching Headlines
#8 Use the right URL For Your Blog
# 9 Share Your Blog With The World
# 10 Seek Out Joint Venture Opportunities with other Bloggers.
Bonus Tip: Be Creative And Incorporate Other Forms Of Media On Your Blog

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Is your businesses web presence as big as you want it to be? Where other than your domain can people find out about you or contact you? Only having a website is not enough in today’s social centric Internet. You have many options when it comes to expanding your business’s exposure on the web from directories to social networks. Consider the largest of the social networks My Space and Face Book your business should at least tap into these resources and their millions of users. Their has been many success stories based on exposure on these networks. Linked In is another social network that is built around making business contacts. Building your businesses presence on these sites will require some time commitment but, the more you put in to these networks the more you will get out of them.

You may have some arguments as to how much relevance social networking sites have to your business. My reply is simply are customers or business contacts relevant to your business? Face Book and My Space are not set up to cater to businesses but rather individuals. Here is how to get around that, Is there someone that is the face of your business like a CEO or better yet a mascot? The Charleston River Dogs ( a very successful minor league baseball team) have down a very good job of doing this with their mascot. You can also just put your business name in the name field when signing up. Facebook only lets you see profiles of people you are already friends with. Some may see that as a roadblock to building their friends list and/or potential customers and business contacts. Here is the solution: Groups! You can search groups for keywords related to your industry. Are you in the auto industry search for cars in groups. The results you receive will depend on the keyword used. In case of the keyword cars your results will be over 500, with many of these groups having over a thousand members. You can join relevant groups and even start your own. Then you can begin to send requests to other group members, after all you do share similar interests. If you have some money you can even take things a step further and create an application such as a game for users to add to their profiles and share on these sites. Of course this application would be branded with your company logo. How do you feel about putting your business on a social site now?

Not all social sites operate the same, so it is important to navigate around and learn how you can best utilize it to your business’s advantage. Another notable network is Twitter, where you can post small snippets about what is happening with you or your company. You may even be surprised to find there may be a niche social network on the web that is relevant to your industry. It may be loaded with individuals or businesses already looking for your products. Search Yahoo or Google for communities related to your business or products by typing in an industry keyword and something like community or social network. Example: If you sell car parts search car community. In addition to all the social networks there are numerous directories and search engines (other than the big two) that you should submit your site to. If you have a dedicated marketing team or individual, I suggest you put them to the task of truly building your online presence. If you are a small business in which an owner or manager handles most of the marketing, you should tackle this a little everyday.
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