I am sure you have heard the latest buzzwords, social media, social media marketing, word of mouth marketing, buzz marketing and web 2.0. Where did all these terms come from and will you find these terms in the English language dictionary is debatable. However these terms provide a serious benefit in the search engine optimization ranking services and should not be ignored.

Social media websites and networking web sites provide you an easy way to connect with people who share similar interests like you. Some social networking websites group people with common interests, but some websites are “traditional networking sites” and allow you to search for friends based on your interests. So now how do these websites really operate. In websites like MySpace users share music which was what helped rocket MYspace into the well renown place it is today and in Facebook, users create their personal information that they want shared and use pictures, software programs and audio, videos to display or depict their business environment. In websites like Fastpitch, Joe Popular and Adlandpro the users create product and sale pitches and work with each other. Promotiing your website using these new tools is termed social media marketing.

So how can you take advantage of this obviously new but what seems beneficial activity? When you use social media marketing and social networking , you have the opportunity to expose your website to a much larger group of people. When your site becomes popular in a social media site, people talk about your site and the post that becomes popular. Do this is taking advantage of a form of marketing that you may know it as word of mouth. The additional links means that as you grow these natural links from a large number of relevant websites, your rankings improve in the search engine due to increased organic search traffic.

Another advantage is that search engines programs that roam the web are keen on social media and networking websites and typically go after links on these websites. This means if you have your site link on social networking and bookmarking websites, your search engine optimization ranking is better and your website site will be indexed quickly. Getting bookmarked from different users and different social media websites will definitely help your site rank better on search engines.

Like it or not, social media websites have become an integral part of the internet because social marketing is easy to do, search engines love social links and hence your business by default will benefit. So if you are engaged in operating a website, and search engine optimization is important then you must realign your site to exploit the popular social media websites for increased traffic. To take advantage of this new method of building business you need to know what steps to perform? Well explore search engine optimization services. Also explore social media marketing and the difference to social networking websites.

Generating a buzz to get massive amounts of traffic to your website is best done using social media websites?

The easiest way to accomplish this is to leverage the clout of influencers within the social media community.

Influencers are people within a social network that are respected and liked by others in that community and are able to popularize discussions on topics of interst in that community. 

Influencers stimulate the conversations, connect people to ideas and can capture the mindshare or opinion of an audience within a social sphere. All social media websites have a few select individuals who stand out for their activity within the community and their expertise has gained the trust and support of the social media users.

These are the people you are are looking for and the ones you want to influence.

There are so many social media sites and the points we make in this article can be applied to any of them. We’ll be studying how to develope your own strategy for targeting the influencers of these sites to engage  their social network with your content.

Let’s look at a social news site like Digg for example. Digg and other sites like it allow the audience to vote on the value of content with a simple thumbs up and thumbs down vote. By actively participating in the community you can develope a following and become and authority and with that comes influence.

Over time supporters will share your content with friends or add it to their websites and blogs. Social media users can be pitched just like a blogger or writer can be pitched with a simple introduction at first gradually building a relationship that’s mutually benefitial. The goal is to leverage their brand of influence by influencing them to promote your website content within their community.

The main steps are Targeting, Networking and then Pitching the influencer in question.

1.Targeting
Finding a social media influencer that shares your point of view about your content and is relevent to their website or sphere of influence is most important. Making your content in-line or coherent with the influencers interests makes it much easier to get them to promote or agree with your content.

Go to the public user ranking list of the social media site in question, in this case Digg, and visit each profile on the listed looking for who has influence and also who resonates with what you’re promoting. Get a feel for what interests them. You can also do a keyword search on the social media site looking for content based on your keywords and find the users that rank high within the site on those keywords. If they have consistently submitted content around those keywords they are likely to be open to suggestions of simular content. You can also do a URL search of your keywords to find people that may be open to more content of that type.

Using the site yourself will help you discover little details about the user you’re targeting that can help you reach them and develope rapport. For example, while top Digg user MrBabyMan submits a great amount of stories, most active Diggers are familiar with his avid interest in Cracked.com, a popular pop culture/men’s portal/magazine.

2. Networking
After you’re done targeting a specific social media website you need to contact them and develpoe a relationship. You can get in touch with them from their contact info in their user profile and join the site as a registered user. If contact info is not available Google them by their name and user name to see if you can find it elsewhere. Look for their blog or other profiles they may have listed on other sites.

Once you have their contact details initiate a conversation by just send them a note and thank them for their contributions. Trying to pitch to promote your content right away is very bad etiquette and annoying. You can stand out from the crowd of self-interested crowd by genuinely showing your appreciation for their contributions.

Take a genuine interest in them and engage them in a dialog of common interests and do so continuously until you have a good idea what material they would support and do favors for the user by giving them publicity or links to free resources and interesting content (not your own).

Real social media users are always interested in buzz-worthy news or opinions that can boost their own authority within the social media community. Your content or anything else you offer should not only meet the integrity of their personal brand, but it should improve it and the reputation of the user within the community.

Offer them free invites to unrelated websites, give away exclusive information on certain topics. Share some links to excellent websites. Do little favors without asking for anything in return at all. Give them a reason to be interested in you.

Networking is really just about making friends. It’s that simple. This will gradually lead you into the third and final stage: Pitching the influencer.

3.Pitching
So now that you’ve built a rapport with this person what next?

A. Ask Casually. Do your pitching in a light hearted and casual manner and do not
aggressively push the user to promote your content. This is a huge turnoff and
you should understand that the user has a perfect right to refuse you.

B. Disclose Your affiliation. I would recommend letting the user know that you
are affiliated with the specific website, particularly if you plan to have a long
working relationship with the user. He or she will appreciate your honesty and it
will also make it easier for you to ask the second time round.

C. Space out your pitches. The biggest mistake you can make is to ask the influencer
to promote every single piece of content that comes out on your site. This is a major
irritant so only offer the user your best work, while pitching your material only once
per week or every two weeks.

Continue to keep aclose contact after they are promoting your site. Building a long-term relationship will have longterm results and targeted in-bound links to your website for years to come.

Good Luck!

Talk soon, 

Frank Tocco–Marketing Mentor

A quick walkthrough of how to use article marketing to generate free traffic for your website. Learn how you can earn money by submitting articles at www.articlesgoneviral.com

Press releases provide an effective way of announcing interesting, important and unique news about your company. However, it is essential to remember that what is important to you is not necessarily important to the world.

A well-crafted, target market oriented press release captures the attention of journalists as well as others who matter and can give your business a tremendous boost.

Here are three tactics that will guarantee the success of your press release:

1) Offer something valuable for free

The lure of the freebie is too powerful for most people to resist. Why not use this to your advantage and offer your customers something for nothing. Make sure what you are offering has some value to the customer; and if it can be downloaded, so much the better.

Here are a few ideas for valuable giveaways:

Offer your customers an electronic information product and place your advertisement somewhere on the product. Whether it is an autoresponder to a downloadable eBook or perhaps a simple report that’s posted on your website, it is important that the information product should relate to your target audience.

Offer potential customers the opportunity to ask you questions specific to your business. By dispensing with free advice you can prove your authority on the subject giving you instant credibility.

2) Be different and offer real information buyers can use

98% of all press releases are promotional hype. Offering your customers something different makes you stand out from the crowd and get noticed. Pay close attention to the content of your press release.

These are the few important factors you need to keep in mind when writing your press release:

Make sure your content is newsworthy and not mere fluff. Your main purpose is to inform your customers about a new business development and not sound like an advertisement. Your press release should be about answering the why, who, when and where of your business and not a sales pitch telling customers why they should buy your product.

You have but a few seconds to grab your customer’s attention. Make it count with an attention grabbing headline and a strong first paragraph. You can provide the details in the rest of the press release. Readers will continue to the end only if they like what they see in the first paragraph.

Use your press release to illustrate real life examples about how your company helped a customer solve a problem. Identifying the problem and illustrating why your solution is the right one speaks volumes about the value of your product.

Write a newsworthy story that any online media would love to run in their publication.

3) Look at paid PR services for the widest distribution

Paying a PR company to handle your press releases could prove to be better than trying to handle it yourself. PR companies are more experienced and hence more adept at handling various issues. They understand the timing of your press release, how and where to distribute it for widest coverage and will also select the best platform for reaching your target audience.

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Having a press release published in your local newspaper or trade magazine is one of the best (not to mention cheapest) methods around of publicising your business. But press releases can also be used to drive traffic to your website. Here’s how:

What is online press release distribution?

When you write a press release, your main objective will probably be to have it published – either in a newspaper or magazine, or perhaps online, on a website relevant to your industry. In order to do that, you’ll need to distribute your press release to a carefully targeted list of journalists and publications – the ones that are most likely to want to print your story.

There is, however, another method of distributing press releases. News wires are organisations which “blast” your press release out to their own list of media contacts. These are journalists, editors and webmasters who have signed up to receive press releases on specific subjects.

What’s in it for you?

When you distribute through an online newswire, your press release won’t just be picked up by the media. In theory, it could be picked up and published by anyone with a website. If you’ve included a link to your own website in that press release (and you should always include a link to your website in your press release!), that means that your link will appear on all of those sites. Because the likelihood is that anyone choosing to publish your press release will be running a site to which that release is relevant, you gain valuable inbound links, from relevant websites. And you get them for free.

Press release distribution case study

As an example of how well press release distribution can work, we recently prepared a press release for http://www.thefashionpolice.net on the topic of The Oscars. Because the subject of the release was a topical one, it was immediately picked up by a number of relevant websites (including Google news), resulting in a large increase in the site’s traffic and revenue.

How to distribute your press releases online

There are a number of different online press release distribution sites which will distribute your release for free, or for a small charge. Custom-Copy.com is just one of them. Here are some others:

http://www.prweb.com

http://www.prfree.com

http;//www.free-press-release.com/

http://www.prleap.com

http://www.pressbox.co.uk/

http://i-newswire.com/

Each of these sites offer a free distribution option, although many also allow you to “upgrade” your press release for a fee.

Social Media Optimization is an internet marketing technique that includes a number of methods to promote your product, service, business, or website on social media.

Social Media Optimization is associated with search engine marketing, but differs in that the primary focus is on driving traffic from sources other than search engines, though improved search ranking is also a benefit of successful Social Media Optimization.

Social media optimization is similar to viral marketing where word of mouth is created through the use of networking in social bookmarking, video and photo sharing websites.

It is still very much in its infancy and is only one element of being everywhere online. Social Media Optimization is essentially based on quality, or how good is my content?

It presents businesses with a way to connect and interact with their customers and prospective customers that was never available to them before. It is interacting with consumers wherever they are online and in whatever format they want the interaction to take place.

Social media optimization is all about creativity, finding creative ways to get your message out there and using creative tools to have your content easily found, distributed and shared online. It is about improving the linking structure of your website to make it highly visible in social media searches.

Social media optimization is the latest buzzword that is capturing the attention of webmasters and is simply the practice of ensuring that a website, article, or video is primed to become a part of the social media network. Social media optimization is utilizing these social media sites and the social media networks to popularize a product, a service, an organization or a concept.

It’s an excellent technique for website promotion and gives your Website and business more visibility and instant results. It is the process of distributing your content across all available Social Media networks and enhances your internet presence by effectively using these media, including social networking, social book marking, blogs, wikis, groups, and other social sites.

Social media optimization is driven by the technology of Web 2 and is all about forming groups of like- minded people and sharing information. Social Media Optimization is more than just writing content for the purpose of garnering links to your website.

It’s about optimizing your pages to help them connect with online communities and is defined by Wikipedia as a way to optimize websites so they would be more easily connected or interlaced with online communities and community websites.

According to Wikipedia: Social media marketing (SMM) combines the goals of internet marketing with social media sites such as Digg, Flickr, MySpace, YouTube and many others.

Social media optimization (SMO) and Social Media Marketing strategies are employed by empowered Search Engine Optimization to promote the site through the use of networking in social bookmarking, social networks, video sharing sites and photo sharing sites.

Social media optimization is a set of methods for generating publicity through social media, online communities and community websites.

The evolution of social media optimization will take some time in coming and has yet to reach its full potential but has the opportunity to replace Search Engine Optimization as one of the top Internet Marketing strategies in use today.