Archive for the ‘Social Media’ Category

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Joel Comm is one of the world’s leading experts on web-based, money-making strategies. He is author of the New York Times bestsellers, The AdSense Code and Twitter Power.

Today he is releasing his new book KaChing: How To Run and Online Business That Pays And Pays.

Click here to get a copy and find out all the cool bonuses he has in store for you!

Here is a terrific audio interview I did recently with Joel Comm…

Three Biggest Mistakes Business Owners Make With Social Media

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For more Social Media Superstar interviews and posts click the top social media tab.

The following post is excerpted from YouTube Expert, Julie Perry’s chapter in Success Secrets Of The Social Media Marketing Superstars.

Scoring lots of video views on YouTube is only useful to you if you can get your audience to take an action step once they’re on your channel and enjoying your videos. So how can you increase the chances they’ll make their way over to your main website, blog, or other online content?

1. Insert your website domain into your videos using video editing software. Remember that the sharing mechanisms on YouTube might lead to your video being embedded elsewhere online, such as in a forum or on someone else’s blog. Since those off-site viewers won’t have immediate access to your YouTube channel or a video’s title and description, you want to be sure your main website domain appears at the beginning, middle, and end of your video. Consider adding it via a watermark so it’s always visible (just don’t obstruct the view). You can always outsource such video editing tasks, or take a stab at using the free video editing software that should have come installed on your computer: Windows Movie Maker for PCs or iMovie for Macs. More expensive video editing programs are also available, such as Pinnacle, Final Cut, and Premiere.

2. Get your website domain into your videos using the YouTube Annotations tool. If you don’t have time or money to delve into video editing, your domain can be added to the beginning, middle, and end of your videos using YouTube Annotations—a way to add interactive commentary onto your videos from within the YouTube interface (and without having to use any video editing software of your own). Add such annotations after your video is uploaded. You control what the annotations say, where they appear on the video, and when they appear and disappear. You can even create a live link from an annotation to another YouTube video, channel, or search result. Annotations will also show up on YouTube videos embedded elsewhere, off of the YouTube site.

3. Ask and You Shall Receive. As I mentioned earlier, it never hurts to ask your audience to do what you want them to do. My “Ask and You Shall Receive” rule goes beyond simply flashing your website domain on the screen. Say it out loud several times, and for goodness sake, tell us what all we’ll find when we get there. “Visit my website at www.xyz.com because I’ll give you (more information, a free report, a downloadable coupon).” Or just drop hints to tempt us to go there.

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The following is an excerpt from Mari Smith’s chapter of  Success Secrets Of The Social Media Marketing Superstars (Entrepreneur Press August 2010)

Facebook is the brainchild of Mark Zuckerberg and co-founders Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin. The college friends launched Facebook from their Harvard dorm room in February, 2004. For the first two years, Facebook was only available to colleges. Then, gradually, Facebook opened their doors to the general public along with opening their API up to third party application developers. The newest gold rush began!

Since 2006, Facebook has continued to increase in popularity and always seems to stay one step ahead of the competition such as LinkedIn, Twitter, MySpace, even Google – in terms of being the most popular site for connecting with friends, family, colleagues, etc.

I have great admiration for Mark Zuckerberg. He’s a modern day visionary – I often liken him to Bill Gates back in the 1980s.

Mark’s mission for Facebook is “to give people the power to share, and help make the world more open and connected such that world problems might be solved.”

Social networking, particularly Facebook, has completely changed the way we do business and the way we connect, build, and maintain our relationships on both a personal and professional basis.

These are my “rules” for succeeding on Facebook – you’re welcome to adopt them if they speak to you:

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By Barbara Rozgonyi (excepted from Success Secrets of The Social Media Marketing Superstars. Aug 2010 Entrepreneur Press)

At over 50 million worldwide users, LinkedIn is the place to search for, connect to and develop business online. To transform your LinkedIn profile into an always-on global networking hub, follow these 12 steps.

1. Use Keywords to Help People Find You.  Keywords are the search terms people use to find information online. The keywords people use to find you and your business might point to your profession, service, location, area of expertise or even the problems you solve. Optimize your LinkedIn profile with keywords in your headline, summary, expertise and your job title and descriptions.

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Social bookmarking sites are sometimes called content “aggregators”. Internet marketers see them as places where users “store” their favorite website links and share them with others. Although many Internet users “bookmark” interesting website links in their browser lists, more and more people are using social bookmarking sites to help them keep track of interesting websites and to learn which ones their friends like.

How Do Social Bookmarking Sites Work?

By design, social bookmarking sites aggregate content submitted from multiple sources and display the most popular on their home pages. Many of these sites actually “read” like online magazines. You find an interesting site, add it to your bookmarks, and give it an appropriate “tag”.

Begin Sidebar A tag is like a category, and a single article could be given dozens of different tags. A story about Star Wars would be tagged “film,” “science fiction,” “george lucas,” “robots,” and so on. End Sidebar Most social bookmarking sites allow members to vote for their favorite links. The website links that receive the most votes receive greater visibility and appear at or near the tops of the first result pages for tag searches.

The Difference Between Social Networking and Social Bookmarking

People use social networking to interact with others and make business connections. The major purpose of social networking is to make contacts and interact. Social bookmarking, however, is all about information sharing. Social bookmarking sites are specific sub-categories of social networking and social media sites. Users share links, add stories, vote, tag content, and participate in discussions about specific content. Unlike most other forms of social media, social bookmarking is not about developing and sharing original content; it’s almost exclusively about discussion or reviewing content that exists elsewhere online, including articles from newspaper and magazine sites, blog posts, and the like.

Social bookmarking sites are about sharing content, but do not overlook the fact they can be useful networking too! Get “influencers” to notice you and they will be more inclined to make a connection. After you decide whom you’d like to “befriend” on these sites, you should vote for and comment on their articles, interact with them, and promote their best content. These sites are an excellent electronic way of doing favors for people.

Top 4 Social Bookmarking Sites

Every niche, subject or, audience type is likely to have one or more social bookmarking site catering to them. You should, however, start somewhere at the top of the chain. Although there are many sites we could list among the ‘top’ social bookmarking sites, I suggest you begin with these first.

Digg.com – Currently the most popular of all the social bookmarking sites in terms of delivering raw traffic, although the site’s popularity means it is currently very difficult to garner much attention if you are new to the site.

Delicious.com – One of the older social bookmarking sites, it is the site most used as a bookmarking tool rather than for social voting or news aggregation.

Reddit.com – Much like Digg.com this site is used as both a source of news and as a traffic generator. Unlike Digg, however, it still is possible for new users to make their stories “popular” on merit. StumbleUpon.com – With StumbleUpon (also called “SU”), it is relatively easy to get traffic. This site is also the easiest to use. A browser toolbar makes submitting links and voting very straight forward.

Mixx.com – Mixx is vying to be just like Digg when it grows up, but has a long way to go. If you want to get your fit in the door for the next big thing in social bookmarking, however, Mixx is definitely one to watch.

The preceding was excerpted from Chris Garrett’s Social Bookmarking chapter in Success Secrets Of The Social Media Marketing Superstars (July 2010 Entrepreneur Press)

The following excerpt is by author and blogger, Andy Wibbels from the upcoming book, Success Secrets Of The Social Media Marketing Superstars (Entrepreneur Press July 2010).

Nobody Has Time to See How Awesome You Are

We’re all occupied living our ‘busy lifestyles’ created for us so we fit into nice little consumer groups. We pack our days working jobs we don’t like to buy things we don’t want; to impress people we don’t like.

From the time we get up to the time we hit the pillow, we are surrounded by thousands of carefully crafted corporate marketing messages. Waking life has become a relentless deluge of brands and slogans and logos, all trying to convince us that we are awful people if we don’t buy something.

Then we go online.

The white noise increases even more in the online realm. Pop-ups, auto-play videos, spam blogs, spam tweets, and spam profiles crowd the screen, vying for our attention. The fake and the faux, the concocted and calculated, the dried-up and the watered down… cold messages masquerading as warm caring quickly turn us off.

But sometimes, something or someone breaks through.

When we see something memorable – something hot with the heat of passion or provocation or simply something unplanned – we’re jogged out of the rat race. We sit up. We pay attention. We feel like real people again.

We’re relieved that there is a breathing flesh-and-blood person on the other end of this series of tubes we call the Internet. Things seem a bit calmer.

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