How To Profit From Social Networking Sites
To really profit from social networking sites, you must optimise your website not just for search engine rankings but for high visibility on social media sites too.
Implement changes to optimise your website so that it:
- Is more easily linked to
- Is more highly visible in social media searches
- Is more visible in custom search engines (i.e. is more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs and podcasts)
Social Media Optimisation (SMO) should be a priority for website businesses. Many sites are “static” - meaning they are rarely updated and used simply for a storefront. That’s a waste of technology and a waste of an incredible opportunity to get more eyes on you.
In SMO-ing your website, the five main rules to follow are:
1. Increase Linkability - To optimise a site for social media, you need to increase the linkability of the content. One way is to add a blog. There are, however, many other strategies such as creating white papers and thought pieces, or even simply aggregating content that exists elsewhere into a useful format.
2. Make It Easy To Tag and Bookmark - Content features like quick buttons are one way to make the process of tagging pages easier. Make sure that all pages include a list of relevant tags and look for places to insert a link (which comes up automatically when you go to tag a site).
3. Give Rewards For Inbound Links - Inbound links are paramount to rising in search results and overall rankings. They’re also a barometer for the success of a blog (as well as a website). Similarly, listing recent linking blogs on your site provides the reward of visibility for those who link to you.
4. Put Your Content on the Road - SMO is not just about making changes to a site.
When you have content that is portable (such as PDFs, video files and audio files), you should submit them to relevant sites which will help your content to travel further, and ultimately drive links back to your site.
5. Be A Mashup Supporter - Share the wealth! In the freewheeling internet world, it pays to be more open about letting others use your content. Although there is definitely copyrighted material out there, YouTube’s idea of providing code to allow visitors to cut and paste so they can imbed videos from their site has fuelled their growth. Syndicating your content through RSS (Rich Site Summary) also makes it easy for others to create mash-ups that can drive traffic or augment your content. RSS is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it. That makes it a cheap, easy, and very dynamic way to reach your audience.
Strategies like that can explode your small business quickly, that’s why I’d suggest you go right now to http://www.freemarketingbook.org and request a copy of Jonathan Jay’s new book “Marketing Secrets of a Multi-Millionaire Entrepreneur”
Copyright SuccessTrack 2009