Social Media

iClimber provides free services for social media marketing

For anyone looking for help with their social media marketing plans, I’ve discovered a great site that should be a big help for you. It’s called iClimber, and they have some great resources for people looking to get going with social media. They have a great social media dictionary that explains the definitions of some of the biggest social media buzzwords such as API, niche blog and widget.

They also keep up-to-date with the latest social media news, highlighting key industry trends and new breakout companies. Along with all of this, they offer a wide range of services including social media set-up and promotion, social bookmarking and Web site copywriting.

Check them out for yourself and see how they might be able to help you: http://www.iclimber.com/

Podcasts Are a Fun Way to Generate Traffic

Creating your own podcasts and putting them on-line for everyone to download and listen may seem a little daunting at first. What if I sound stupid? What if I am not saying it right? These are the type of questions that keep popping in to your head as soon as you think about creating podcasts. Well, it’s not that hard and it is far less complicated. The challenge is to create your first podcast.

Start with a topic you are familiar with. Don’t drone on for a long time and keep it simple. You can then ask your listeners to let you know what they would like to hear about next. Most people love to know that they’ve been heard and their opinions taken in to consideration. If your listeners request for a podcast in a field where you are not an expert, do the easy thing and interview someone who is an expert. Variations like this will generate a lot of hype and excitement amongst your listeners and they will tell others about your podcasts.

Using podcasts to generate traffic means you need to let people know that you’ve added your own podcasts. So make sure to submit your podcasts to as many directories and websites as possible. You may also want to look at social bookmarking sites like Digg.com, Tagfoot and Lensroll. You can also submit your podcast to Facebook and promote your website further. It is important to ask your listeners to check out your website at the end of each podcast. Have a splash page dedicated to your podcast listeners.

Website Promotion – Know the Basics

Once you have developed your website you need to tell everyone that it is available. If you do just the basics right, you should see traffic starting to flow to your website within a matter of days. Here is how to do it.

Search engine submissions – make sure your website is search engine optimized. Add meta tags, meta and title tags and make sure that the web page is in order. Submit your page at as many search engines including Google, Yahoo, Bing and Alta Vista. These search engines will crawl your page, but that could take weeks. Therefore it’s better to submit it manually to see results faster. Here is a good search engine submission company.

Submit to Directories – Submitting your website to directories like Yahoo, Looksmart and AOL means that users of these directories can easily find your website under a specific category. Being listed in a directory also helps with link popularity. Follow the guidelines for submission by the directory owner as your site will be reviewed by humans and will be accepted or rejected based on specific criteria.

Build Link Popularity – Building link popularity is important for search engines to find your site and rank it and for people to navigate to your website. Having a blog means you can link to others while writing and they will most probably link back. Post comments on related stories on other blogs and articles thus creating a link back to your website. A good way to tell how powerful your link popularity is, is to check your Google PageRank. You can read here how Google Pagerank works.

Advertising – once you have used up all the free resources, you can use online advertising to promote your site further. Google, Yahoo and Facebook are great places to start.

Short Explanation of a Social Network

Did you ever try to find an analogy you can use to explain to people what the concept of social network really is? I for one have tried plenty of times.

A lot of people are asking me to explain what Twitter is. The irony here is that Twitter can’t really be explained in under 140 characters. I’ve tried myself to explain it, and I guarantee you that it took me a good few sentences to make my point. You can try though, and I for one have used “it’s like a water cooler, group IM and market research, in a single wrapping.”

But how can you explain social networks to people in a way that will allow them to understand what each one could be used for. The lines between these sites are blurry lately, one example being how Facebook becomes more like Twitter everday.

A lot of people create profiles on every big social network out there, but I only use three sites: Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Explaining Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter in less than 140 characters
Below you can see how I’ve described each social network so far, with some measure of success:

Twitter is a lot like a cocktail party, Facebook is pretty much like a conversation in a hallway and LinkedIn is like a business meeting.

The most professional network that I’m using is LinkedIn, where I have the possibility to connect with people from my own field of work. Twitter is a much more free environment, while on Facebook you can get both personal and professional with other people.

What I find interesting about them is that they are becoming more and more like each other. For example, LinkedIn has groups and applications, just like Facebook does. Facebook, has the “What’s on your mind?” question that is so much like Twitter. We’ll see in the future how much alike these social networks become.

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