Are you looking to promote your business via social media? Do you ponder over the following questions when you think about social media?

Will I be able to find time?
Will it pay off?
Will anyone listen to what I have to say?
Could I be spending my time in better ways?

The truth is that promoting your business via the social web is time consuming. The more time and effort you put in though, the greater the return will be.

With SEO, the intent is already there. A user searches, clicks on the result in the search engine and then visits your site. All you have to do is give them what they want. With social it’s different, as the same intent does not normally exist in the early stages.

Social media provides a wealth of opportunities for you to gain more customers, but It won’t happen over night. If you think about word of mouth and offline marketing, it takes time to befriend people, engage with them, interact and listen to what they have to say. Once this happens, you are building a relationship of trust. Once you have that, you then have what we refer to as “permission marketing”. Users will then be happy to hear what you have to offer.

You wouldn’t walk up to a stranger you have known for five minutes and try to pitch them something would you? You would build a relationship and grow things from there.

Remember. People buy from people, NOT salesmen. People like people, who are like themselves.

So the questions is: “How do I grow my social media circle when I don’t have much time to spare?”

Follow my 6 tips below to help you gain greater social media exposure and get more followers, more customers and who knows, even more friends. All this can be done in around 1 hour per day.

1. Comment on a minimum of 2 facebook pages every day. (Facebook)

Benefits: By commenting and offering something of value, people will look to click on your profile and send a friend request. This way, you will gradually gain more friends who you can build a relationship with.

Time Spent: 10 minutes

2. Make 1 New Friend Request Every Day (Facebook)

Benefits: Obviously by doing this you will get more friends over time. Remember to befriend people who have similar interests to yourself, or if your business targets a specific country or region, make sure they are in that region.

Time Spent: 10 minutes.

3. Comment On 3 Blog Posts Every Day (Blogging)

Benefits: By commenting and offering something of value to the conversation, you slowly but surely build your own authority and expertise on your niche topic. So for example if you are a web designer, comment on web design blogs and offer some good advice and solutions. People will appreciate that and click on your link or profile to find out more. If you give, eventually you will get.

Time Spent: 20 minutes

4. Follow At Least 3 People Every Day (Twitter)

With this one, make sure you follow people that are in your target country or area and/or have tweeted about your product or something you offer. So if you offer weight loss advice, search on Twitter for users who are speaking about losing weight and follow them.

Benefits: Generally, a high percentage of Twitter users will follow you in return. So by consistently following people, you will grow your own follower numbers and will be able to get your own message out to more people.

Time Spent: 5 minutes

5. Re-tweet At Least 3 Tweets Every Day (Twitter)

Benefits: Twitter users like their tweets being re-tweeted as this gives them more exposure. Most people are greatful and will often return the favour to you. If they have a good following then this will only help to get yourself out there in front of more people.

Time Spent: 10 minutes

6. Tweet Your Own Tweets At Least 2 Times Each Day

You can even re-tweet some of your old and better performing tweets and blog posts. It is also worth asking people to re-tweet your message.

Benefits: By tweeting often and consistently you will gain more direct followers.

Time Spent: 5 minutes.

You may find that you need to amend this slightly to fit your own requirements and schedule, but by following this and being CONSISTENT, slowly but surely, you will not only gain more friends and fans, but potentially a bigger tribe of followers and evangelists for your business.

Photo’s courtesy of PurpleMattFish and DanyRolux on Flickr.

Anyone who knows me well will know that I am a bit of a book worm and enjoy reading a wide range of literature including Law of Attraction, self improvement and Zen Buddhism.

Around a year ago I read Timothy Ferriss’ book “The Four Hour Work Week” who mentioned “Pareto’s Law”. (Yep, I’m still working on that four hour work week and have got it down to around 50 hours from 51. So I’m making progress.)

Pareto refers to Italian economist Vilfredo Frederico Damaso Pareto, who in 1906 observed that 80% of our results (output) were derived from 20% of our input (things we do). It is not exact and is merely a rule of thumb although numbers are roughly consistent.

Examples of this can be seen in everyday life. For example

20% of your clients give you 80% of your problems/headaches
20% of pea pods in your garden contain 80% of the peas.
20% of the employees do 80% of the work.

And so on. I am sure you can think of a few more.

If you look at the keywords which are used to find your site via your logs or analytics program, you will see that approximately 80% will be long tail keywords, i.e. keywords/search terms containing 3 or more words (or low search volume keywords. With the remaining 20% made up of broad keywords (common high volume keywords generally 2 or 3 words).

Now let’s talk about you!

Which of the 20% of tasks that YOU do, produce 80% of your results each day?

Or put another way, where are you wasting 80% of your time each day?

If you’re an SEO it’s not yet another tweak of text here and there that will bring you the results, it’s that cool piece of viral content you’ve just created or that high authority link that just gave you a 20% rankings boost or even that social media influencer with 1,000 friends you’ve just connected with.

The thing is this. Give someone 8 hours to complete their work and they will use 8 hours. Encourage them to be creative, productive and more efficient, and they can achieve the same results in a fraction of the time.

So, whether you do SEO for a living or another form of work, take a look at where your being most productive and try and work out which of your 20% is giving you’re the best return on your investment.(Your Time)

Tweet

I’ve already covered in Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, 7 jaw droppingly simple methods you can use to attract more fans to your Facebook fan page. After all, whats the use in posting updates if nobody is listening?

In today’s post I will give you three more really easy methods. I’m sure that you can think of many more yourself? If so, please leave a comment and share some ideas on how you promote your own fan page to the world.

So here we go. No more small talk.

Link From Your Personal Facebook Profile

Doh! You mean I can do this? Why didn’t I think of that?

So, if you have a personal Facebook account (most likely unless someone just made you an admin of the page) you can add your link to your profile which can then be viewed under the “info” tab. Now that wasn’t hard was it?

Suggest To Your Friends

Whenever you visit a Facebook page you will see a link that says “Suggest to friends” as can be seen in the image below. So if you have a lot of friends, why not share your Facebook page with them also?

Facebook Like Box Plugin

Another dead easy way of telling the world about your Facebook page is to use the Facebook Like Box widget. Simply choose your requirements, add your page id and then click on “get code”. Place the code into your site wherever you want the like box to appear and there you have it.

This series of three mini posts has shown you 10 simple ways to promote your Facebook fan page. Please share via the comments any ways that you personally use to attract more fans.

As ever, please feel free to become a fan on Facebook, follow me on Twitter or subscribe to my RSS feed.

In part 1 of “10 Simple Ways To Promote Your Facebook Fan Page”, I gave you three easy ways of how you can promote your facebook fan page in order to attract more fans.

Facebook, if used correctly, is a great tool for building your brand and in turn, gain greater mind share within your niche. With over 500 million registered users, it’s important that you use Facebook and other similar social media sites, as a part of your marketing mix.

Due to it’s viral nature, Facebook represents a great opportunity for those who have a product or service which has the potential to really engage the online masses and humanize your brand.

So, enough jibba jabba. You DO want more fans don’t you? Good! Check out 4 more simple ways of promoting your Facebook fan page.

Make Use Of The @ Tag

Like Twitter, Facebook also makes use of the @ tag to reference a user or in this case, a Facebook fan page. When doing a status update on your wall, simply reference your fan page using the @ symbol. For example you can see a screen shot of myself referencing my own fan page via an update. As you type, there is an auto complete mechanism that helps you in referencing the page that you require.

Use Sharing Widgets and Plugins

Using sharing widgets is a really easy and effective way of allowing users to effortlessly share your content with their friends or bookmark them for later reading. A few can be seen in the images below but there are many including addthis, share this, Facebook like button and wordpress sociable plugin but there are many out there. The bottom line is this. Make it easy for users to share your content with their social circle and you will ultimately be rewarded with more traffic to your site.

Link To Twitter App

If you use twitter to market your business (and if you are not you should be) then why not post your Facebook fan page updates there for the world to see?

The Link to Twitter app is very easy to use and can be setup in seconds. URL’s are automatically given a shortened URL by Facebook and messages are also automatically truncated as Twitter has a 140 character tweet limit whereas Facebook has a 420 character update limit.

Place Your Link On Printed Media

Printed media including business cards, letter heads, brochures, flyers, posters and even company t-shirts, are all prime candidates when it comes to advertising your fan page to the masses. Most of us already include email addresses and websites so why not our Facebook fan page as well?

So there you go. Another 4 dead simple ways to promote your Facebook fan page and attract more loyal followers. Stay tuned for my final post in this series with 3 more brain numbingly simple methods.

If you like this post please feel free to hit the “like” button below and tell all your Facebook buddies. Please feel free to follow me on Twitter, become a fan on Facebook or subscribe to my blog via RSS feed. Until next time.

Do you have a fan/business page on Facebook and need to attract some fans?

Well start reading my 3 part series and find out how you can do just that using some simple techniques.

Facebook represents a fantastic opportunity for any business looking to make its mark on the web. If you can attract enough fans initially and create some great posts, then there’s a great chance that word will spread virally between Facebook members gaining you more followers and brand exposure.

Facebook recently announced that it had over 500 million users. With this many people now using the service, it has become a great place to gain new business. It also gives you the opportunity to interact with your customers and humanize yourself.

So lets get cracking!

Email Signatures

If you are like me, you will be sending out tons of emails a day to both new and existing friends and business colleagues. If you have a signature, simply add your Facebook fan page to the signature along with the normal contact information.

Shops and Restaurants

If you are the owner of  a bricks and mortar business, you have a number of ways that you can promote your business page. Try adding your Fan page address to your flyers, brochures, coupons, a sign on the check out desk, in a take-away menu(take-out to your American visitors) or why not place it on your receipts?

Facebook Ads

Facebook has its own advertising service where you can advertise your Facebook page or regular website or blog. The great thing about it unlike Google Adwords is that you can target certain demographics. So if you want to target 18-25 year olds, living in Greece, who like football then no problem.

Before you place the ad you can even see how many targeted users you will reach. Another option is to bid by the click or to bid by CPM(cost per thousand impressions). Compared to Google Adwords, Facebook ads are also cheaper!

So there you have it. Three simple ways to attract more fans to your business page on Facebook. Stay tuned, follow me on Twitter, become a fan on Facebook, or subscribe to my RSS feed to see part 2 and part 3 over the next few days.

If you liked this post, please feel free to click on the like button below.

Blogs are great. They enable you to interact with potential customers and other visitors, promote new offers, content and other important information.

But for every blog owner, allowing comments can be a real chore to say the least. Blog comment spam is rife. It’s not nice taking hours to write a well researched blog post, only to have half the planet descend on your blog in order to place a comment that says something like:

NICE POST!

or

I have been doing some research into this…..will definitely tell all my friends!

or

On a post about real estate for sale you may get something like:

Hey! This is really cool, exactly what I was looking for. The designs here are so fabulous!. Thanks for uploading this stuff.

These are some of the good ones! Others may have pornographic links inserted or may appear to be complete gibberish.

So you see. Total garbage! A real pain in the butt!

Blog commenting, when done badly looks like this. The “people” who do this are basically looking for easy links back to their sites as most blog software platforms allow for comments, although you can turn this off or nofollow the links automatically.

The truth is, if you allow your blog to be comment spammed, you run the risk of losing rankings as well as genuine visitors. Just have a look at Richard Baxters blog post about comment spam penalties and his own experiences.

A lot of blog commenting is done by automated software and  quite often you will notice that the comment is totally irrelevant to your blog post. Poor sods. Can’t even get that right!

As you can see with the examples above, the commenter had no intention of providing a comment of any value whatsoever. After a quick link and then off to some other poor soles blog. Kind of like the get rich quick scheme of link building!

Considering that a vast majority of the links are nofollowed and hence have no SEO value why do they bother?

The answer is because it’s all they know. Many of these blog commenting “services” come from wanna be SEO’s who lack any real knowledge in the field and who generally just don’t GET IT!

So this leads me to the title of today’s blog post.

Does blog commenting work?

The short and sweet answer is YES it does.

Blog commenting servers a number of purposes when done right.

It enables you to add your opinion on a post to show visitors to the blog that you are someone who has knowledge in a certain area and is willing to share this knowledge with other visitors. This means you are GIVING(advice) and not just TAKING!(a link back).

One of my mantra’s is, “You have to give in order to get”. The same applies to blog commenting. Give a good comment with some great knowledge, tips or an insight, and visitors will click your link back to your blog or site to find out what else you have to offer. This is inbound marketing in action.

You can also get a link back to your site which may be followed(have benefits in terms of pagerank passed) but this cannot be guaranteed. Google and the  other engines are very aware of comment spamming, and it’s possible that they may be giving hardly any benefit to these kinds of links due to the association with SERPS and anchor text manipulation.

So when blog commenting, forget about whether the links will give you a rankings boost or not. Focus on the value it will give in establishing yourself as a leader within your field.

The title of my post today is “What is Your UVP?”.

So what is a UVP? Many of you I am sure know that UVP = Unique Value Proposition. And if you didn’t know, you do now!

Promoting your business online has become harder an harder. The web has become a saturated cesspool of billions of pages and websites, lots of which offer the same old thing. This trend, is set to continue for sure.

A few years back, you could do business online with little competition. Today, well, this is just not the case. Want to start an ecommerce site and sell sunglasses. Competition. Want to sell holidays. Competition. Want to sell real estate. Competition. I think you get what I am saying.

Like the picture above depicts. You are shouting and shouting but is anyone really listening? If not, why?

The picture above kind of reminds me of 99% of Twitter users. I follow 5,000 and am followed in turn by 5,000. You follow me, I follow you syndrome. How many of those 5,000 are reading your tweets? Very few! How many of them are just dying to blast you with their own promotional crap? Almost all of them!

I can promote your website, rank you well and drive traffic to your site but this is only half of the problem. It’s how you get your visitors to take action and keep them coming back which is also just as important.

It’s never been more important to differentiate yourself from the crowd. It’s no use just putting up a website and hoping everyone will come to see it. It just WON’T happen!

So how DO you differentiate yourself from the crowd?

There is an old saying. “You have to give in order to get”. So what do you offer your visitors that they can’t get anywhere else? Please don’t say “We offer a great service”! Oh well, whoopee do. So does the rest of the web.

Well how about things like:

Free downloads
Infographics
Free software
Informative well researched content
Videos
E-Books
White Papers
Interviews
[Add dozens more here]

If you are “real expert” and not some fly by night blagger, creating such material should not be that hard. Should it?

Once you can really offer something of value to your visitors, marketing your site is a lot easier. Hell, if you offer something really useful, others will market it for you free of charge via social media. That’s the ultimate aim right? To get greater brand exposure, using minimal effort?

Trying to promote a website which has nothing to offer is like trying to flog a dead horse!

So I will ask again. What IS your UVP?

Ever wondered how the social media graph may affect the search algorithms in the future?

I personally have, and its my view that Google is showing many signs that it is using the “social graph” more and more to influence its ranking algorithm.

Google recently introduced its new product, Google Buzz, which is incorporated into Gmail. Google Buzz is like twitter in that you can share what you are doing, share videos, images and links etc and generally provide your followers with status updates.

I have had a brief play, and I think it will be a big hit.

It’s my personal view that eventually users will move away from search engines. “What?” you say. “You must be mad mate!”. Well a little yes but let me explain.

The world has changed big time in recent years, not only how people interact online but also in terms of trust. Word-of-mouth has always been a great source of leads and information and I personally think this is the way the web is going. People will not be looking on Google or Bing or any other search engine for information. They will be asking their hundreds or thousands of connected followers that they have within the social sphere in order to find what they are looking for, or answers to questions they may have!

What do you think? I would love to hear your point of view. Feel free to send me a tweet, connect on facebook, mail me or leave a comment below.

Below is the latest blog posts from the guys at SeoMoz. Rand speaks about how they think search is changing. Enjoy.

So, you have a Twitter account, signed up to Facebook, registered with all the best social media bookmarking sites and are blogging like a maniac in order to get your site noticed.

But how can you track mentions, links and opportunities in order to interact with potential and existing customers via the social web?

Lucky for you, I decided to write this post to give you an idea of the kinds of tools that are available to not only monitor brand awareness on social media sites, but to also assist in your companies reputation management.

If customers or potential customers are talking about your business in a negative way, its important that you are aware of this and have the opportunity to join the discussion and rectify things.

So here we go. 7 great tools to help with your reputation management and track brand awareness on the social web.

1. TweetBeep – http://www.tweetbeep.com

Tweetbeep is to Twitter what Google alerts is to Google web search. It allows you to track keywords on twitter and then mails you the results just like Google alerts.

Alerts can be setup hourly or daily and it’s totally free for the first 10 keywords. If you want to track more it costs only $3 per month for 30 keywords, $6 per month for 75, or if you just want to monitor twitter all day you can plump for the premium package at $20 per month allowing you to monitor 200 keywords.

It’s a great tool for tracking not only keywords your competitors maybe targeting, but for also finding recent information, find new clients who are tweeting relevant keywords related to your business or simply for monitor mentions of your domain name or brand etc.

2. Facebook Search – http://www.facebook.com/search/

Facebook has become so popular in last few years. With over 350 million registered users, it’s important that you keep track of anyone that is talking about you.

Facebook search is excellent that it allows you to search within different areas of this monster social site. Areas of search include people, groups, posts by friends, posts by everyone, applications, events and pages.

3. Digg Search – http://www.digg.com/search

Nobody can deny that if you are fortunate enough to have your site dugg by someone (hopefully many people) and can lead to lots more referral traffic to your site. But how do you monitor this? Via the Digg search feature. Simply type in your websites address in the URL above and then view a list of the pages on your site that people have dugg and the amount of times people have voted for it.

4. BackTweets – http://backtweets.com

Backtweets is one of my personal favorites and allows you to monitor links to your site from Twitter.

The interface is dead simple to use and you can also subscribe to the RSS feed for your search OR get alerts via email. So if you want to measure your exposure on Twitter, give BackTweets a go.

5. Social Mention – http://socialmention.com

Social Mention is one of my favorite social media and reputation management tools.  Simply hit the site, enter your url, choose from the dropdown box the places you want to search for mentions of your site, and away you go. Search options include blogosphere, news, comments, networks and others. You can also filter by pagerank and by period.

Another great feature is that it shows you the “sentiment” of each mention, i.e positive, neutral or negative. Not sure how they work this one out but hey who cares, as long as all my mentions are positive, I’m happy.

You can also subscribe to the search results via RSS feed and email like other similar sites which is really handy.

6. Google Alerts – http://google.com/alerts

Google Alerts is a fantastic tool for searching for mentions of yourself, your brand or just keywords you are interested in. When searching you have a number of options including new, web, videos, group or if you want the whole lot go for the comprehensive option.

You also have the option of when you want to be notified of results including “as it happens”, “once a day” or “once a week”. This is an excellent tool. If you monitor some broad keywords, you can get a good picture of which of your competitors are actively promoting their sites.

7. Delicious Search – http://delicious.com/search

When it comes to social media bookmarking, delicious is a giant. Although the links from delicious are no-followed meaning they do not pass any link juice, you may get some click throughs and who knows, maybe some credit from Google? You don’t really believe what Google tell you about no-follow do you?

When you land on the page above, simply enter your url, your brand or related keywords and see what you can un-earth.

As usual, please feel free to bookmark this below or retweet. You can also follow me on twitter , become a fan on Facebook or subscribe via email to the right.

After sitting through yet another SEO webinar and reading more and more posts on the web in recent days, it has become very clear to me that there are a huge amount of new and experienced SEO’s out there who seem to be fixated on trying to reverse engineer the Google ranking algorithm.

Many of them spend hours writing about what they “believe” to be the case but have no substantial evidence to back up their claims. Just visit any SEO forum and you will find hundreds of threads created by people claiming that this is the best approach or this is the best method in building links. What is clear is that a lot of these people spend an awful lot of time hanging out in forums. What is it they say? “advice is the cheapest commodity around”. Everyone has some to share!

Strategies built on speculation and taken from those who either claim to have the knowledge, or listen to the other lemmings, are doomed to failure. So people. Stop trying to read Google’s minds and reverse engineer the algorithm, as you just can’t do it. Even if you can work out that H1 tags are no longer of any value, or that links from a certain site appears to pass link juice, the algorithm is constantly being evolved with Google changing their 200+ signals on a regular basis.

One thing you can take to the bank though is that Google are ALWAYS looking for the signals that reflect trust, authority, relevance and value. Let me say that again “TRUST”, “AUTHORITY”,”RELEVANCE” and “VALUE”!

The key steps to any online marketing strategy are:-

1. Build a site that DOESN’T have all the bells and whistles but serves a purpose, provides great unique, interesting and ground breaking content in the form of blog posts, articles, videos, downloads and other great content.
2. Add a blog to your site with RSS feed, sharing widgets and email subscription.
3. Setup accounts on social sites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Youtube.
4. Promote your content on these channels by building a community around your brand, products and services. Your site becomes a hub.
5. Bookmark your new posts and content on sites such as digg, reddit and delicious.
6. Contact industry leading bloggers in order to help promote your content further.
7. Make sure you post consistently with well researched content.
   Interact online via social media in order to build trust, transparency, brand awareness and mind share.
8. Monitor and track your progress using your key performance indicators and ascertain and put more effort into best performing channels.

This is what users want! So give it to them and they will love you for it and tell the world just how great you are.

Who knows, you may even get a sale or two.

As ever, please feel free to subscribe to my blog via RSS or via email, comment below, follow me on twitter or become a fan on facebook.