social media, web 2.0 traffic, internet marketing

Bob Withers asked:


Social Media Optimization is an internet marketing technique that includes a number of methods to promote your product, service, business, or website on social media.

Social Media Optimization is associated with search engine marketing, but differs in that the primary focus is on driving traffic from sources other than search engines, though improved search ranking is also a benefit of successful Social Media Optimization.

Social media optimization is similar to viral marketing where word of mouth is created through the use of networking in social bookmarking, video and photo sharing websites.

It is still very much in its infancy and is only one element of being everywhere online. Social Media Optimization is essentially based on quality, or how good is my content?

It presents businesses with a way to connect and interact with their customers and prospective customers that was never available to them before. It is interacting with consumers wherever they are online and in whatever format they want the interaction to take place.

Social media optimization is all about creativity, finding creative ways to get your message out there and using creative tools to have your content easily found, distributed and shared online. It is about improving the linking structure of your website to make it highly visible in social media searches.

Social media optimization is the latest buzzword that is capturing the attention of webmasters and is simply the practice of ensuring that a website, article, or video is primed to become a part of the social media network. Social media optimization is utilizing these social media sites and the social media networks to popularize a product, a service, an organization or a concept.

It’s an excellent technique for website promotion and gives your Website and business more visibility and instant results. It is the process of distributing your content across all available Social Media networks and enhances your internet presence by effectively using these media, including social networking, social book marking, blogs, wikis, groups, and other social sites.

Social media optimization is driven by the technology of Web 2 and is all about forming groups of like- minded people and sharing information. Social Media Optimization is more than just writing content for the purpose of garnering links to your website.

It’s about optimizing your pages to help them connect with online communities and is defined by Wikipedia as a way to optimize websites so they would be more easily connected or interlaced with online communities and community websites.

According to Wikipedia: Social media marketing (SMM) combines the goals of internet marketing with social media sites such as Digg, Flickr, MySpace, YouTube and many others.

Social media optimization (SMO) and Social Media Marketing strategies are employed by empowered Search Engine Optimization to promote the site through the use of networking in social bookmarking, social networks, video sharing sites and photo sharing sites.

Social media optimization is a set of methods for generating publicity through social media, online communities and community websites.

The evolution of social media optimization will take some time in coming and has yet to reach its full potential but has the opportunity to replace Search Engine Optimization as one of the top Internet Marketing strategies in use today.



Leslie

John Kline asked:


Every website owner knows that website traffic is the key to financial success. Whether you sell products or run affiliate ads, traffic to your website is the most important aspect of making money on the Internet. But before you can generate the traffic you need, like any business, you need a business plan that states your dreams and goals.

 

The Dream

This may sound a bit silly or unrealistic, but without “dreams” or goals, how do you expect to reach them? Write down your goals and dreams first, no matter how unreachable they may seem. Taking the steps to try to reach them will certainly put you ahead, so don’t limit yourself. Write down your “dreams” in order of importance that of course is relevant to increasing your website traffic.

 

For example:

1. I want to make 10 million dollars or more a year from my website alone.

2. I want 100,000+ unique website visitors a day.

3. And so on…

 

Creating Good Content…and lots of it!

The more website content or web pages you have will increase your websites search engine saturation. The more web pages you have indexed my the major search engines, the more opportunities for your website to be found in search results. Always create content that is relevant to your website’s subject matter. Most traffic comes from Google, and Google loves “organic” pages. They should be readable in the real world, and the best way to do this is to “write like you speak”. I suggest creating the organic content for your website first, then begin “tweaking” it using the next step before you upload the web pages into your server. For information on creating Title and Meta Tags for your website which is equally as important, but this tutorial will focus more on getting your website traffic, and less on the aspects of “on-page search engine optimization”.Do the Research

There are many tools and resources online that can help you with “tweaking” your website’s content, but only the best that I have found will be mentioned. So what do I mean by research? You need to find the keywords that people “actually” search for to find websites with your subject matter or niche. Since Google is where most search traffic comes from, I find their tools are the best. Use Google Suggest and Google Adwords Keyword Tool to find keyword suggestions for your website. Google suggest works by typing words into the search box, and as you type, suggestions come up. Write down any relevant combinations you try show find. This tool also show the number of search results for that keyword or phrase. The less the result pages, the easier it is to rank higher. So I recommend finding several with low search results as well as some highly competitive keywords. The Google Adwords Keyword tool allows you to type in a word and find many search keywords and phrases related to that word. Once these terms are collected, reread over your content and replace and/or change words occasionally with the keywords that fit. Just make sure it is readable because your website visitors should always come first.

 

Get Indexed

The old way of submitting your website to search engines isn’t very efficient, so submit and forget. The best two ways to get your site indexed is one, submitting a sitemap XML file to Google using Google Webmaster Tools. The second way which includes all major search engines is to join forums related to your website’s niche. You can create a “Profile Signature” from the user control panel that has your website address (URL). If the forum is indexed by search engines, they will follow your website URL in your posts when they update their index. Be sure to contribute to forums and don’t spam. Keep your URL out of posts except for your signature. Besides, contributing will generate website traffic from your signature link from forum users in your post.

 

Reach Out and Socialize

There are many other ways to get traffic besides search engines (Google being tops). Deciding what to do next may depend on your website’s niche. If you write articles well, add them as part of your content and submit them sites that allow you to submit articles, like Digg. The other options out there are the all to famous social networks like FaceBook and MySpace Although these social networks can generate a lot of traffic, your website’s niche can be a factor. They do not provide targeted traffic, so if your website sells toasters, it’s unlikely you will get visitors that will buy. Yes, they may eat toast, but most of the users still live with their parents…who already own one. “All kidding a side”, if your site sells iPhones for example, then this is your target audience.

 

So to sum up…because you have a lot of work to do, there are many ways to increase your website traffic. The traffic generating ideas mentioned here do work, they just take time and we all know that nothing great comes easy. So be patient, diligent, experiment and the website traffic will increase. Good luck!



Tamara

AirSafe Media asked:


Since we have entered into the digital world, the electronic advertising has gained a magnificent attention of the businesses. Now people don’t want to waste their precious time in wandering into the market streets and shops to get the required product or services rather they sit in front of the computer screen and with few clicks, they get their requirement done within no time.

A single word in a search-engine, explores a variety of websites where we can select over a core interest and can reach easily to our requirements. It is higly observed that, only sites on the first or the second search-engine page can get the luck to be viewed by the searchers and in a result can make some revenue by the end.

Now, the problem is raised that, "how to get on the first page of the search-engines"?

Here comes the roll of Social-Media marketing. Yes, they have come up with certain strategies and techniques to over-come the problem of business owners. They use techniques like text link building, banner advertising, contextual linking and many others used in SEO to optimize the site for the search engines.

Google.com is a search engine that crawls the websites with a peculiar algorithm and rank them according to their contents, back links, layout and some other factors. Alexa, can be reduced in a similar way that is also counted as a major factor involved in website’s values. So, the social media has played a significant roll in promoting websites and providing businesses with a better ROI.



Jordy

George Watson asked:


Any profitable affiliate marketing business relies heavily on website traffic. Affiliate marketers and most any website owner looks to get as much targeted website traffic as possible.

Depending on the webmasters motivation, this traffic can help he or she build a community or increase sales and website conversions. Here are five ways most successful affiliate marketers use to increase website traffic for long term success.

#1 Blogging. This is similar to keeping a journal where you write informative and interesting articles for your readers. The articles you create for your blog can also contain links to your static website.

These are called backlinks and the links provide extra weight in the search engines which gives your site higher rankings and more website traffic. Make a blog on Blogger.com and you will start getting traffic in 2-3 days from Google. Google will also spider and promote your blogs RSS feed in many sites across the net for free.

#2 Forums. This is a fun and guaranteed way to promote your online affiliate marketing business. Simply find a few forums related to your niche market and interact with other members by asking questions and posting answers.

This is also a great way to learn your market, help others and sell to your target market more effectively. It is not okay to blatantly advertise in a forum but most forums will provide you some space below every post you make in what is called a signature to add a link back to your website.

You usually set this once in your forum profile area and every post you make in the forum automatically has your signature attached to it. It can be changed any time.

#3 Viral Marketing. This is one of the oldest, most effective yet least used forms of online marketing. It can be done in many ways to good effect and can bring you steady website traffic and income for life.

You can get your feet wet with viral marketing by giving away an ebook on your website and have a couple of links to an affiliate product or back to your website right in the ebook.

Give the ebook to your visitors who sign up for your newsletter and if it has useful information, they will happily send it to their friends. This can easily make your website traffic snowball as new people are reading your content who want to read it all from this initial promotion.

#4 Social Marketing. One example being MySpace, one of the largest websites online, which is now widely used by Internet marketers to market products in very specific markets. MySpace is a social site that makes it very easy for people interested in a topic to get together and share content, and for marketers to blend in and promote their niche products and services.

#5 Article Distribution. A powerful way to increase backlinks and website traffic, there are hundreds of article directories that will accept your article and small resource box with links back to your website, and post it on their site. From there, other website owners will pick up your article and post it on their site!

This will bring you direct website traffic from people reading the article on the other sites, clicking to visit your site. You will also increase search engine traffic to your own website from the increase in backlinks you get from these other websites publishing your article and its author resource box with links back to your site.

Of course, all of these traffic generation techniques are different in how hard they are to do for a beginner affiliate marketer. The smart affiliate marketer tests each technique by itself and learns how it works before testing a new technique or method.

They also differ in how much money you may need to really make a decent impact in the use of the technique. For example, in viral marketing you may want to hire a flash designer to create a viral video for you, and hire someone else to submit the videos to the 50 or so video sites to get maximum exposure.

Or you can start for free by submitting free rewritten articles to article directories. This will increase targeted traffic to your website and some affiliate programs now give you free articles to use to make getting traffic and thus selling their products easier.



Tracy