Social networking seems to be a major part of the average business owners marketing plan. People are spending several hours per week (or day) updating their profiles, looking for connections tweeting, and more in the hopes of building their business.

While many businesses declare that most of their marketing success is due to social networking efforts, I am skeptical about the value found in these claims. Yes, I am extremely positive that there are a lucky few that have landed a great sale based on a connection they made through LinkedIn, or someone they “friended” on Facebook or something they tweeted about on Twitter. Nevertheless, the majority of us have not had this type of success.

Working with clients on their marketing plan, I have heard claims of great social networking success. When we drill down into the statistics of what was achieved, however, more often than not, the greatest success from these networking sites lies in the number of connections, friends and followers that have been collected. Generally speaking, no actual personal contact with these people has been achieved – in fact, most of the people on these lists are completely unknown to the account holder. We are making “friends” with people that we have never met, don’t know, and will, in all likelihood never meet. In some cases, we will never even know their real name!

If one of your marketing goals is to grow your social networking fan base, then by all means, count this type of activity as a win. If, however, you are interested in more traditional business growth as defined by increased sales, customer loyalty, an expanded customer base and better branding, then perhaps more effort needs to be put into other marketing outlets. After all, you may have tens of thousands of people following you on Twitter, but if your business doesn’t turn a profit, can you really say that this is a successful marketing tool for you?

Don’t misunderstand, I do believe that social networking sites have a place within a comprehensive, well-thought out, integrated marketing plan.

Active participation with people linking back to you and/or your posts are a great boost to your website rankings. These sites also give you the opportunity to brand your business at no cost to you. They can also be used to drive traffic to other marketing media in your arsenal (e.g. your website, a promotional event, a TV/radio/newspaper advertisement).

If social networking is a part of your overall marketing plan and your branding and message are consistent and professional within the parameters of those sites, then you can certainly glean some type of success from them. If, however, you just sit at your computer updating your sites and letting people know of your latest adventures in anticipation of your thousands of connections, friends, and followers to start doing business with you, then you may be in for a very long wait.

I’d love to hear your comments and your thoughts on how you use social media and what steps you take to make sure that it returns a positive ROI.

Have a wonderful day.

I recent read an article on the New York Times that was entitled “The Web Means the End of Forgetting”

And one paragraph in-particular talked about “The Library of Congress” where it stated:

There are more than 100 million registered Twitter users, and the Library of Congress recently announced that it will be acquiring — and permanently storing — the entire archive of public Twitter posts since 2006.

Now, not only the Library of Congress but, more and more employers are looking to the internet as a part of there search for new employees. In some cases this is a good thing, but then again maybe not.

If you have posted something in a negative light, that could be used against you as stated in the above article by JEFFREY ROSEN Published: July 19, 2010

So in leiu of all of this, does thing change your perception of social media? Does it change how you look at social media?

If you are outsourcing your social media tasks to a third party I would clearly define what they can or can not do, and if your doing it yourself I would be very careful how you portray yourself online.

What are your thoughts? I encourage you to be careful in your social media usage.

Have a wonderful day
Timothy

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…

Just recently I put on a birthday sale where I thought at least a few people would take me up on my offer, but low and behold not one single taker on over 1,200 visitors to the post that I put out last week.

And I made it real simple.

• 1. I had a contact form so everyone could ask away
• 2. had descriptions of all the products I was putting on sale
• 3. reduced the prices by almost 50%
• 4. and included the by now buttons

and low and behold still no takers.

Since I didn’t get any takers it got me to thinking if I was doing anything wrong. And to be truthfully honest with you I didn’t think there was anything wrong with that.

So I joined www.Fiverr.com and placed one gig and got one sale. Now granted, I only got $5.00 bucks for doing a custom twitter background, but a sale none the less.

Now don’t get me wrong I had a wonderful time creating the twitter background and I gained a new customer and a referral from that.

But it almost made me believe that you have to practically give away the farm in order to make any money. Now I know some designers and developers that are getting twice what I charge and they are in the same boat as I am, we’re just not making any money.

What gives?

What do I have too do to make any money from my services.

Can you help me solve my problem?
Hopelessly confused.
Tim

It’s my birthday and I’d like to pass on the savings to you, my valued visitors and subscribers.

For the remainder of this week, I’d like to give you the opportunity to acquire my services at a greatly reduced rate. You can view all may services below, then fill out the form below this list and let me know what I can do for you.

Complete 5 Page Website: Current Price $247.95 (Birthday Sale Price $147.95)
Includes the following:
1. – Header & Footer Graphic
2. – 5 Pages (Content Pages)
3. – Contact Form
4. – Thank You pages
5. – Additional Pages @ $19.95 each.

Custom WordPress Themes Current Price $127.95 (Birthday Sale Price $69.95)
includes the following
1. – Custom Header & Footer Graphic
2. – All PSD or PNG Source Files
3. – Plugin Installation (For SEO and Additional Functionality)

Custom Twitter Backgrounds Current Price $87.95 (Birthday sale Price $47.95)
includes the following
1. – Unlimited Revisions
2. – All PSD or PNG Source Files

Fill out the form below and let me know what I can do for you on my Birthday.

Help me have a wonderful birthday serving you
Tim

I hope your week is going well, I just wanted to drop you a quick note and let you know about a friend of mine that has some excellent thoughts and ideas on driving traffic to your blog or website,

Her name is Denis Wakeman, and she also has a 5 part Video Course that will really open your eyes over at http://masterbusinessblogging.com/

Here’s her article below:
Enjoy!

16 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Blog
You’ve got your blog set up and you’ve started posting pithy, useful information that your niche market would benefit from and enjoy. Days go by, you keep publishing, but no one comments and your traffic stats are barely registering. What do you do?

Like any website you own, you must do some blog promotion to start driving traffic to your site. Here are 16 steps, in no particular order of importance, that you can start doing now to get traffic moving to your blog.

1. Set up an email subscription form on your blog and invite everyone in your network to subscribe: family, friends, colleagues, clients, associates.

2. Set up a feed on MyYahoo.com so your site gets regularly spidered by the Yahoo search engine.

3. Read and comment on other blogs that are in your target niche. Don’t write things like “nice blog” or “great post.” Write intelligent, useful comments with a link to your blog.

4. Use Ping-0-matic to ping blog directories. Do this every time you publish.

5. Submit your blog to traditional search engines.

6. Submit your blog to blog directories.

Tip: Create a form to track your submissions; this can take several hours when you first start so schedule an hour a day for submitting or hire a VA to do it for you.

7. Add a link to your blog in your email signature file.

8. Put a link to your blog on every page of your website.

9. If you publish a newsletter, make sure you have a link to your blog in every issue.

10. Include a link to your blog as a standard part of all outgoing correspondence such as autoresponder sequences, sales letters, reports, white papers, etc.

11. Print your blog URL on your business cards, brochures and flyers.

12. Make sure you have an RSS feed URL that people can subscribe to. The acronym RSS means Rich Site Summary, or some may consider its meaning as Really Simple Syndication. It is a document type that lists updates of websites or blogs available for syndication. These RSS documents (also known as ‘feeds’) may be read using aggregators (news readers). RSS feeds may show headlines only or both headlines and summaries.

13. Post often to keep attracting your subscribers to come back and refer you to others in their networks; include links to other blogs, articles and websites in your posts

14. Use Trackback links when you quote or refer to other blog posts. What is TrackBack? Essentially what this does is send a message from one server to another server letting it know you have posted a reference to their post. The beauty is that a link to your blog is now included on their site.

15. Write articles to post around the web in article directories. Include a link to your blog in the author info box (See example in our signature below).

16. Make a commitment to blog everyday. 10 minutes a day can help increase your traffic as new content attracts search engine spiders. Put it on your calendar as a task every day at the same time.

Tip: Use a hit counter to track your visitor stats: how many unique visitors, how many page views, average length of visit.

And now I would like to invite you to claim your free instant access to my 5-part video course to learn more about how to get the best out of your blog. Visit http://masterbusinessblogging.com

From Denise Wakeman, Founder of The Blog Squad and Online Marketing Advisor. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Denise_Wakeman

Have a wonderful day
Tim