There, the final general rule of thumb is to always put importance to get the conversation started, no matter what form of Web 2.0 you are using. Whether you’re firing off an @reply on Twitter or discussing some important topic on your Facebook fan page forum, it is important to take the initiative to get people involved. While a lot of people tend to come off strong on the internet since they are not meeting others face-to-face, there are still a lot of potential customers who will not ask or say anything unless encouraged. That is definitely why you must always make the first move.

When you first start your web 2.0 marketing efforts, the only person who will be invested in your business is you. You must accept this and understand that growing your network of followers is ultimately your responsibility and no one else’s. If you do a good job, the responsibility will slowly shift over time from you to people who will become heavily invested in your network and will want to play a role in making it happen.

Starting an online business and using various Web 2.0 marketing strategies can help you attain your goals, but only if you are careful and wise. Always create a plan before you act, be patient, and surely, you will achieve success.

Google Plus is a continuously rising network that will allow you to easily interact with your customers, business partners, and family. It is a strong rival to Facebook and provides innovative takes in features such as friend and post segmentation. 

As of this writing, Google Plus is still in beta phase. Nevertheless, new features are being added and adjustments are being made based on feedbacks gathered. Some current notable features of Google Plus that you can take advantage of are the following:

• Circles- this feature guarantees that specific things you post are shown only to a certain group. For example, family matters are shown only to your family circle, and so on.
• Hangouts- regardless if you are starting a mini-conference with friends or business associates, this video chat system will be of help.
• Games API- a lot of marketers like us doesn't really appreciate getting bombarded by game updates. This nifty tab helps us get rid or, at least, effectively and easily ignore them.

That is why once you have your fan page in place, you must consider promoting it with a Facebook ad.

Since Facebook can capture a tremendous amount of demographic information about its users (because they freely post it in their profiles), you can drill down carefully to determine which types of profiles your ads should be placed near.

The great thing about this is that it is both an inexpensive and highly-targeted strategy for bolstering the ranks of your fan page. If you have just created your fan page and are looking to make it grow faster, then I highly suggest that you promote it with Facebook ads to get the ball rolling.

After Google launched its service on June 28th, he created his own profile and quickly covered the top spot.

It was a cool move of him. That he created his own Google+ profile exuberated an aura of self-confidence.

‘We’re cool with Google+, we’re not afraid.’

Guess what?

Within days, Facebook’s coolness vanished like morning mist in the rise of a supernova.

Google+ received raving reviews, and its user base grew faster than any social network before. News started to popup that Facebook banned accounts and apps who promoted Google+ in any way.

Facebook suspending ad accounts.

On July 15th, Facebook suspended web developer Michael Lee Johnson’s advertising account because one of his ads promoted his Google+ profile.

The ad said: "If you're lucky enough to have a Google+ account, add Michael Lee Johnson, Internet Geek, App Developer, Technological Virtuoso."

Facebook said: "Your account has been disabled. All of your adverts have been stopped."

Not so cool anymore.

Getting cold feet?

On August 11^th, just hours after Google+ launched its games tab, Facebook announced improvements to its own games platform. One can’t help but wonder if Facebook is starting to work hard to stay ahead of Google+.

I’m not saying they hadn’t been working on that for a long time, but the timing of the announcement is suspicious.

Are they rolling out their features in a mere response to what Google+ does?

1. Facebook didn’t announce their group chat and video call feature until after Google+ had beta launched, getting great feedback for their video hangouts.
2. Shortly after Google announced it will offer a custom profile type for businesses, Facebook launched its ‘Facebook for Business’ page.
3. Then Facebook announced their game improvements, just a day after Google+ launched its own games.
4. Well, just read below…

The news today, Facebook likes the clarity of circles, straight from Facebook’s blog.

Facebook says: “Today we're announcing a bunch of improvements that make it easier to share posts, photos, tags and other content with exactly the people you want.

You have told us that "who can see this?" could be clearer across Facebook, so we have made changes to make this more visual and straightforward.”

Facebook should say: “Today we're announcing a bunch of improvements that make it easier to share posts, photos, tags and other content with exactly the people you want.

Google+ circles are such a success; we finally had to make a move. Our users did complain in the past, but we didn’t care as much as we do now.”

It's not only a response to the targeted sharing that is possible with Google+, it's also a response to the frequent privacy issues, that Google+ addressed better than Facebook.

What do you think? Google+ banks on the weaknesses of the old Facebook. Did Facebook need the competition to improve? Are they afraid now of big bad Google+?

Mini Reveiw: Tim O'Reilly isa bit more on the technical, abstract side, while Bradley Horowitz is more on the practical side, so a few of the questions aren't really going anywhere. Also don't expect any breaking news about Google+. But overall it's an interesting watch.

It covers topics like:

• How’s Google+ different from other social networks?
• How to keep up with the increasing speed and volume of the stream?
• Why is it called a field trial?
• How circles eliminate the need for multiple accounts.
• How Google works on keeping Google+ speedy.
• Is there Spam in Google+?
• How can users control their information across different social sites?
• What about Facebook's announcement this morning? Looks familiar?
• Creative ideas for video hangouts.
• Is a pause button to stop the stream coming?
• Are threaded comments coming?
• Implicit circles – how commenting builds new relationships.

Tim O'Reilly had collected user questions on Twitter and Google+ in advance, these are some of the questions discussed:

• What about the 'real name vs. pseudonyms' controversy?
• What about Google+ for businesses and brands?
• How to offer Google+ to children?

It also goes into more technical and abstract concepts behind Google+, like:

• Web stacks.
• Data liberation.
• Is this a platform developers can rely on?
• How Google+ wants to protect users from bad apps.
• Is there a future for open social?

In the end Bradley announces 'new unexpected features, that will change how people think ofthe service entirely.' Ah, too bad he's still hush hush about the details.

Another way in which you can use your Facebook fan page is to promote fan photos and testimonials. As I mentioned earlier, you should make a concerted effort to extract testimonials, photos, and relevant artwork from your customers and visitors; this is one of the reasons why you should.

Once you get them, you have to add then to your Facebook fan page (if they’ll allow it). This will provide you with some evidence that you are running a legitimate business and selling good products. With such testimonials and photos, you can rest assured that people will be more willing to accept your friend invites, join your fan page, and give you traffic and sales.

Now, just what could this something be?

It seems Google has figured it all out, and that is why it has added a good number of games to its new social network.

Games Invade Google+

Google+ is still in its beta phase, but new features are frequently being added. One of its new features is the games API. This new tab allows members to gain access to all the games Google+ has to offer. Although it currently has only 16 games, Google made sure that it is offering nothing but the best. Some of its starter games are Angry Birds, Bejeweled Blitz, Bubble Island, and Zynga Poker.

Crowd favorites like Farmville and Mafia Wars are yet to be added, but rest assured that Google+ are working on getting more quality games up on their network soon.

The great thing about this new feature is that you have all the game notifications in just one place. Invitations, updates, high scores, etc.—they are in that one tab for you to check and access. This makes it a lot easier since you won’t need to click on multiple buttons just to see what your friends are up to, if you are leading or losing the top high score race, if you want to check out new games your circles are going crazy for, and so on.

Even better, this new tab helps game haters like me.

Game Haters Don’t Need to Hate

Now, one thing that I didn’t really like about Facebook—and probably one of the factors that made a lot of users like me favor Google+—is the fact that it bombards users with game notifications.

I mean, I created an account with business purposes in mind, and my business is far from being related to games. That is why I do not really appreciate all those game notifications cluttering my news feed.

Are you the same?

If yes, then you will surely like that Google+ had that in mind when it created the games tab. That is to say, since there will be one separate tab for the games, we won’t need to see all those game updates when we are not interested in them. Our feed tab will be clean and be full of only real news and personal updates from the people in our circle.

Calling Interested Developers

With its aim to bring the best games to its members, Google+ has also opened its doors for developers. It even created a separate developers’ blog for fast and easy communication with any parties interested in the offer.

If you are a web app developer and you want to take this opportunity, you can simply head over to the Google+ Platform.

Google+ is definitely still on its way to developing a top-notch social network. However, if it continues to bring well-thought features like this one, I’m sure it is going to win over a lot of users faster than anyone ever thought possible.

One of these often-ignored features of Facebook fan pages is the “insight” feature.

This feature lets you break-down your fan site traffic in great detail. It provides you with traffic info such as:

• Location
• IP addresses
• Likes and dislikes
• Other details about your fan site traffic.

This information can prove extremely useful if you are trying to analyze your visitors to determine what types of people buy your product and have an interest in your niche. Try it today, and see how your business is doing and how you can improve it to get better traffic and sales.

Basically, what happens is that the news feed filter, which categorizes your friends' or fans' posts, is removed. This means whenever you post something, all your friends or fans will immediately see it, if they are logged in at that specific time.

With appealing posts and irresistible offers, this can greatly help in our marketing campaigns. And if your fans or friends "like" your posts, this can mean instant viral boost. Of course, you will still have control over who gets to see your posts and don't. That is the control Facebook is now offering to developers, business owners, and common users.

Facebook News Feed Floodgates Are Finally Opened!

Although it might seem that users are able to see feeds in real time—exactly after they are posted—the opposite is actually true. That is to say, up until now Facebook actually controls what feeds users are able to see: the feeds you get are from friends who are active users or those you constantly communicate with. That means if a relative or a close friend does not post often on their account, it will be likely that when they do post, it will be buried beneath all the posts of those who log on to their Facebook regularly.

Now, this is something that is disadvantageous not only to common users but particularly to business owners—to internet business owners like us.

Why?

First off, Facebook is meant to be a marketing platform for developers and businessmen. Now, with millions of us competing on this popular platform, getting recognition is tough. With the Facebook administration filtering what users see and don’t, our chances of getting more attention are further diminished.

Second, internet businesses don’t just use Facebook for marketing but also for research. To know what our target customers really want to have, what changes they want to see, and what we can offer to guarantee sales—that is one of our primary goals in starting a Facebook account. Sure, there is Facebook Insight, and yes, we might be able to track leads with our web links. However, those alone can’t provide us with concrete information. Only the posts, opinions, and activities of our target customers can really give us easily actionable data.

Last, without enough data, we can’t guarantee that our new marketing plans will exceed or at least reach our expectation. While it is common for business experiments and first launches to deliver mediocre results, it definitely pays to gain as much market data as possible for our results to continuously improve.

That is why the former stance of Facebook in filtering news feeds is highly unfavorable.

Fortunately, Facebook now understands that users, especially developers and businesses, need more freedom with regard to what feeds they get, what they don’t, and what they want others to see; Facebook finally understands that while letting go of valuable content might become a weakness, it is also the only real way for this social network to continuously grow and, perhaps, beat continuously rising competitors like Google+.

Internet Businesses Taking Advantage of the Revamped News Feeds

Although I keep saying that this big step Facebook is taking will be of benefit to all type of users, there is no denying that developers and internet businesses will be the ones to get the most out of this change.

Basically, this revamped news feeds answer the three problems I earlier noted.

• First, it allows us to stand out in our target customers’ news feeds, once they “liked” our page or accepted our friend request, if you are using a personal account. When we post something, they will instantly be notified on their home pages.
• Next, we will gain instant access on their activities. We will effortlessly discover what activities they like to do, what things they love to have, what apps they often use, what games they will willingly recommend, and so on. This new wealth of information may be a little unorganized in the beginning, but once you get the hang of it, it will beat any simple statistics tool out there on the market.
• Last, with the information we are able to gain, it will be easier to create marketing plans and products that the market will definitely grab. There is no more trying in the dark; with enough data directly acquired from our target consumers, production costs will be reduced and revenues can increase more rapidly.

With this big change on the news feeds, Facebook might just regain the spotlight that Google+ is trying to steal away.

Another good use of YouTube is to make live announcements. This is not for everyone, but if you decide to use it, it has the potential to lend a significant amount of credibility to your business.

Now, before you actually start creating the video, whipping out the webcam and getting to work, you must first spend some time planning out how your video will look. What do you want to communicate and how do you want to organize your message? These are important things to ask and answer before delivering a scatterbrained or confusing video message. You do not necessarily need to create a script; you just need to prepare an outline, which you can easily look at while filming.

It's just a quote from this video that I found. Actually, I never liked Facebook at all. That's why I'm promoting Google+ so much.

If you're a happy Facebook user, click below and take a look:

Another thing you may want to consider doing to get more traffic to your site is adding a “Tweet This” and “Post This to my Facebook account” button to your blog posts. Facebook and Twitter are very popular media people use to share ideas, photos, and videos; if your post is interesting, this will become your number one marketing tool

These buttons will make it easier for visitors to promote your site to their friends and family members, which will ultimately benefit you.

With social buttons you can usually do 1 of 3 things:

1. You can share something you find interesting with your followers. When you share, it will show up in your stream or on your wall. The ‘Tweet’ button works like this.

2. You can give your vote for a piece of web content. The Facebook ‘like’ button or Google’s ‘+1′ button work like this.

3. You can invite people to visit your profile and follow you. Think of  ‘Follow Me’ buttons for Twitter.

For Google+ so far we have seen the +1 Button. You can use it to mark some web content as worthy. When you put it on your own site, your readers can add their vote to your posts. That’s good for your reputation, but it doesn’t actually connect anyone to your social profile at Google+.

What’s missing is a button to invite people to follow you and your Google+ profile.

Earlier this evening April McGowan gave me the idea (thanks April!), so I asked my graphics guy Andy to create a set of buttons. There’s no fancy programming, it’s just images. You can download them, add them to your site, and link them to your Google+ profile.

Either call it ‘Follow Me At Google+’, or call it ‘Add Me To Your Circles.’

Here’s what the buttons look like. You can download any button by right-clicking and choosing ‘Save as.’ Or you can download the zipped set of all Google+ follow buttons.

As I mentioned before, it’s always a good idea to try to get your customers and site visitors to follow you on Facebook and Twitter. However, those are not the only websites you can get a lot traffic from. It is also worthy to try to get your customers to help you promote your internet business through sites like Digg and Reddit. These are the top 2 social bookmarking/news-sharing sites, taking pride in gaining millions of daily visitors

For your customers to easily promote your business, you have to create buttons. This buttons have to be posted on your blog posts and on your site pages to allows visitors to “Digg It” or “Vote Up.” The more diggs and votes you get, the higher your posts will rank on the respective social bookmarking sites. The higher the rank you get, the higher your chances of getting massive web traffic as well.

If you have not done it yet, then you are getting left out. It is best to start using Twitter to promote recent updates about your website. You can give links to articles or reviews you have made, new products you have to offer, or even the maintenance schedule.

In this case, you don’t have to say anything blatantly commercial. Instead, you can simply point out that your site has been updated and mention that followers should check it out and let you know what they think.

Once you’ve completed your iPhone application, the next thing to do is to modify it. By doing this, you can easily distribute your application for use on other platforms such as Palm OS, Windows, and Android.

In many cases, programs that allow you to create applications uses a drag-and-drop interface. This lets you create versions of the app for multiple platforms. In this case, the process will be relatively simple; you just have to follow the instructions laid out in the program.

If this is not the case for you, then you may want to consider hiring a programmer to make the adjustments. With a professional programmer, you might have to spend some more time and money. Nevertheless, the resulting Smartphone app will be feature-packed and easy to use. If you are unsure where to find a good programmer, you can start by looking at freelance sites such as Elance.com.

As I’ve mentioned before, some of the tips we will cover are broadly applicable while others are not.

It may be best to take some time to read the process before deciding whether or not this is beneficial to your and your business.

The idea here is to create an iPhone application that showcases your web 2.0 campaigns. For instance, you can create an iPhone app that allows people who download it to:

• Follow your blog RSS feed
• See your tweets
• View your Facebook update status.
• Have a calendar for your internet business that provides product, sales, and coupon updates.

It’s important to note that you don’t need any programming experience in order to create a great iPhone app. You can do it using a program such as the following: http://www.taplynx.com/.

One recent trend in this web 2.0 site is to create “re-tweeting” contests. The idea behind these is both simple and brilliant. If you can do this properly, you can rest assured that your Twitter account will get a tidal wave of new followers.

Creating a “re-tweeting” contest is very easy. Here are the steps you need to take:

1. Start by coming up with a sufficiently desirable contest prize. After all, if you are not willing to give good prizes, you won’t be able to convince anyone to join. Some prizes you might want to offer are: $150, free products, or a gift card.
2. Once you have decided on the prizes, then you can already announce the contest. You have to discuss the details of your contest. You have to say when it will happen and how the winner will be chosen. Ideally, you can give prizes for free via a raffle. There is a catch here, however; in order to enter the raffle, a person must a) be a follower and b) must re-tweet your contest announcement.
3. Hold the contest on the scheduled time and date. Tweet reminders every day, for the last 4 days before your contest. Once the day and time arrive, start drawing raffles and discussing prizes with the entrants.

The idea behind this, as I’ve said, is simple: each entrant in your contest will re-tweet to tens, hundreds, or even thousands of followers. The followers of your followers will see the re-tweet, become your follower and then re-tweet to others. This is a viral strategy that allows you to gain not only more followers but a lot more potential customers.

As a rule of thumb, it is always a good idea to cross-promote your web 2.0 marketing campaigns. Let us use the example above. Say, you have a Facebook and Twitter account. Every now and then, you can post a link of your Facebook account on your Twitter. You can also publish posts about your Twitter account on Facebook.

Doing this will give various benefits. Some of them are:

• Increases exposure in both campaigns
• Increases your chances of getting sales from both campaigns
• Increases your customer engagement

Frequently, businesses and organizations will leave their “info” or “wall” pages as the default arrival page. However, one recent trend is to make a “splash” page as your default page.

Splash pages are basically initial pages wherein info about the website (in this case, your Facebook fan page) is included. Splash pages may include a lot of things like

• Coupons
• News
• Sales information
• Product inventory information
• Upcoming events
• Awards, if any

Creating splash pages is beneficial if you want to easily attract fans. After all, who can resist a page that offers not only great information but discounts to products they are longing to have? Try creating splash pages for your Facebook fan page today, and start seeing the difference.

Facebook fan pages allow you to create a forum section. In this forum, you can create threads where you can better interact with your business fans.

You can discuss your old and new products. You can answer common questions your customers have relating to your offers. With every post, you can provide a link to specific parts of your website where they can get more information.

You can easily create forum threads by adjusting the settings to the “discussion” tab on your Facebook fan page.

This is a feature of Facebook fan pages that is most underutilized. Today, forums are a hit as they allow members to share their opinion freely; this is something you must observe on your discussion page. Do not just allow your members to reply on threads you yourself have created. Rather, encourage them to start their own threads and provide your own thoughts.

If you are able to fully use this feature, you can gain a lot of benefits, some of which are as follow:

• Ideas about new products
• Solutions for problems existing customers are having
• Ways to develop your marketing strategy, products, prices, etc. to better appeal to your target audience

The discussion forum on your Facebook fan can be very handy. Try using it more, and you will soon see how it ca help you and your business reach success faster.

If you don’t know anything about creating applications, don’t worry;  we will discuss the basics of Facebook app creation today.

While you might be eager to create a Facebook app, keep in mind that you don’t actually have to program the application yourself. Rather, you can simply work through the Facebook app steps we will share with you.

Facebook App Creation

One: Create a Facebook app draft. Before anything else, there are several questions you need to answer. These questions will determine what kind of application you will create. These questions are:

• What is the purpose of your application?
• How do you want your fans to interact with it?
• Do you want them to play an interactive game?
• Do you want it to serve some other purpose?

Two: Review your plan. If you leave your Facebook app plan and return to review it after a day or two, you will find that there are things you will want to change, things you want to add, and things you simply want to polish. Go through your plan thoroughly, so that someone who knows nothing about your project can understand it.

Three: Post your product on Elance. As mentioned earlier, you do not exactly need to be the one creating the Facebook app. Once your Facebook app plan is complete, you can simply post it on freelance sites like Elance and allow programmers to bid on it. Provide some time to gather bidders, and carefully consider offers that are at or below your budget. Visit the bidders’ portfolio and settle on the one who has the greatest examples.

If you work through this process, you should be able to get a good Facebook app at a reasonable price. From there, it will be up to you to promote it not only through Facebook but through your blog and website as well. You can even write an article and press release about it, if you like.

The success of your product launch is crucial to your achieving business success. With the help of social networks like Facebook, you can easily reach out to hundreds or thousands of people with a few clicks. By creating a Facebook event, you can easily tell people about your product launch’s itinerary. It’s important that you spell out exactly what it means to participate in the launch event, so you will have to give specific details. Aside from the date and time, you can also describe what the launch is all about. For instance, you might explain that on the launch date, you are going to hold a variety of contests and award prizes, ranging from cash awards to coupons for products.

It is also vital to remind fans that they must confirm if they are attending the event in order to be eligible to receive prizes in the contests. This will create a buzz about your event and possibly encourage new people to become fans.

Depending on how many people are attending, you can plan different sets of prizes: smaller ones if you have, say, 50 attendees or less, or bigger prizes when you are able to get hundreds of confirmed attendees. It is also best to post reminders on your Facebook page to ensure that your business fans will not miss your product launch.

Three Things to Get from Your Customers with Your Facebook Fan Page

1. Filled out survey form about your internet business. To adapt to the changing needs of your customers, to triumph over your rivals, and to continuously gain attention, reputation, and sales, it is best to learn what your customers feel. If you can get your fans to fill out surveys about your products (perhaps by offering some incentives), you have a good chance of capturing vital information that you can use to create, market, and fix your products. This is a surefire way to make your road to success smoother.
2. Photos or art related to your internet business. There are not a lot of cases where this can be applied, especially if you are focused on creating and selling virtual products like ebooks. However, if you can collect these, you can rest assured that you will have powerful proofs of your products’ or services’ excellence. To do this, you might want to ask your fans to post pictures of themselves using your products; this can be a very useful way to draw in additional people on Facebook.
3. Testimonials. Regardless what kind of business you have started or what niche you are targeting, testimonials can play a vital role in improving your credibility. For this reason, you should make a concerted effort to get testimonials from your customers through Facebook. You can post a link to a testimonial form or leave an email address where they can freely send their thoughts about the improvements your product or service has brought to their lives.

There are a lot of things you can do with your Facebook fan page. Getting feedbacks is just one good way to use it to enhance customer experience and help yourself achieve success.

There are a lot of ways through which you can send updates with your Facebook fan page. Some of them are:

• Post on your fan page wall.
• Start a discussion.
• Upload a photo and caption.
• Upload a video.
• Post a link to your blog or website.

What kind of updates or information can you give to your customers and colleagues? Well, you can talk about different aspects of your business such as dates of sales, coupons, and upcoming product launch information. You can even use your Facebook fan page to collect feedbacks and suggestions from your customers. This way, you are not only giving updates but getting ideas for further developing your business.

What if they go out of busines, put your articles way back down the archives, or simply decide to ban your content any time in the future?

It’s crucial to focus your efforts on YOUR OWN WEBSITES that you have complete control over.

An easy way to get your own website is to get a domain and install a blog from WordPress.

Most web hosts offer a 1 click installation that requires just about zero technical knowledge; check the features of your chosen web hosts to determine if they can do this for you or not. With 1 click installation, your WordPress blog will be set up in minutes, and you will be ready to go and post content to your own site. Later, you can promote this new blog through other Web 2.0 properties that you’ve already build.

WordPress takes pride in its vast range of plugins and designs (the latter called “themes” in the WordPress world). You have to take advantage of these themes and plugins to make your new hosted blog relevant, professional, and protected against threats such as spams. Here are some other thoughts that might be of help:

• If you do decide to start a WordPress blog, I personally recommend installing a good SEO plugin for starters. This will allow you to increase your chance of getting search engine love. (More good traffic is equal to more sales, so you can’t miss this.)
• After you do that, it’s a good idea to begin filling your blog with relevant content. You can do this by writing yourself, hiring a ghostwriter to create your blog entries for you, or taking free content from article and ezine directories.

Are you unsure whether WordPress is good enough or not? There’s an easy way to test WordPress before getting your own website. You see, it has a counterpart. WordPress.com , another Web 2.0 site, is a free publishing platform. Hence, it is filled with user generated content. Here, you can sign up and create your own blog using their wordpress platform. Try out different themes, look at how plugins work, test how possible content will look, and analyze whether all of what you see and experience will be good for you and your business.

However, doing the reverse can actually be very beneficial as well. That is to say, you can use Twitter and Facebook to grow your email list.

Can you just imagine it? With Facebook and Twitter, you can reach out to hundreds of thousands of prospects; getting even a mere 5% of those you are able to befriend will already give you a big mailing list. You can then use this list to continuously promote your products and services.

But before we get too excited, let us see how this will work.

First, you need to deal with your marketing campaign and mailing list. To make best use of email marketing, you need an autoresponder. Everything else is just too much work, especially if your list grows over time. This is how autoresponder works:

1. If you don’t already have an autoresponder, get one such as Aweber.
2. Create an email series that includes several product pitches.
3. Begin capturing subscribers.

Once you have setup your autoresponder, you can announce this on Twitter or post a status about it on Faceook. You can’t simply just say “Subscribe to my email course today!” or something similar. Rather, tell your fans and friends (on Facebook) or followers (on Twitter) that you are giving free, useful content through a free subscription. Once they subscribe, you can send the promised to them and start sending pitches and informative emails after.

Firesale

What is a firesale? A firesale means bundling several of your products together and offering them for a price significantly lower than what the products would usually cost.

When it comes to achieving success with a firesale, here is something you must remember: You must set a time limit for your firesale, the shorter the better.

Of course, for a lot of people to participate in your firesale, you’ll have to promote it. Here is where Twitter comes in. Here is what you have to do:

• Let your followers know you’re having  a short-time steep discount.
• Tweet reminders of the firesale each day of the firesale.
• Thank everyone who participated and, if you would like to, ask for feedbacks.

A firesale, if attractive enough, can put quite a few new customers on your list. While the initial firesale may not give you the biggest profits due to low price, you can then continue to market and upsell to your list of customers.

Twitter for Promoting Products

It is quite easy to start promoting and selling products on Twitter. What you just have to do is to gather followers, which would be composed mostly of your customers, prospects, and colleagues. You can then start tweeting.

Naturally, most of your tweets should be quality information about your industry. However, it makes complete sense to use Twitter for selling your products and especially create buzz around product launches.

When you have a new product coming out, you should also tweet frequently to let people know about the upcoming launch. You can tweet reminders every few days and every day, five days before the actual launch. You can also upload twitpics and start re-tweeting contest. There are a lot of things you can do to make sure that Twitter will help you profit with your product.

Of course, there are certain things you have to keep in mind. One thing you must remember is this: Obviously, you should have your Twitter account(s) in place looooooong before your product launch or promotion. Why? Simply because you need to have followers to get your promotion seen. Aside from that, it will also help you if you have already established your online presence and credibility before you start selling with your Twitter account. So, create your account early and start building up your followers.

Also, you must know that this article relates not only to your customers but, especially for newly launching products, to JV partners as well.

When planning a product launch, consider early enough how you can use Tweets to drive customers and JV partners to your related web sites. Don’t make the mistake to mix customer and JV promotions, though; each has its time, and each has its own communication channels.

Real Way to Make Money from Social Networks

A friend of mine built a Twitter following of more than 1 Million followers. One day, I asked him if he was making money from it. Do you want to know what he said? He didn’t really give me an answer. It was something like “going to be soon.” But, how soon is soon?

That’s something I see happening with promotional and web traffic efforts a lot. It seems there is really no goal, and that is why no achievement is being made. Sure, people put work into it, but at the end of the chain, there isn’t really a proper plan for monetization.

What does it mean? Simple. It means you’re just wasting your time and money on something you won’t get anything from: you’re working on something that’s not profitable.

So, what can you do about this? You have several choices:

• One obvious route is to use your social networking accounts (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc.–whichever you prefer) to channel traffic to your products and services. You can lead visitors either to your website or to a specific sales page. Of course, for this to succeed, you have to try to make sure that your networking efforts were targeted at the very crowd that is interested in what you have to offer.
• Another way to monetize your traffic is to generate revenue by selling ad space on your site. You can do this directly by selling banner ads, text ads, and other ad space. This is a very lucrative thing once you’re really getting big traffic. How do you use social networks for this? They will be your promotional platforms. You can tweet and post updates about the ad spaces you offer, possible prices, and so on.
• With low or mediocre traffic, you’d better go for a simple pay per click solution, for example put Google AdSense on your site. Once your ads are running, you can start getting traffic from your chosen social networks to your site.

Assuming you’re running a business, whatever you do, there is just one question you need to ask yourself: How will I monetize this business step I took?

If you can’t figure out the answer to this question, then you might want to stop what you are doing for now, reevaluate your position, go over your goals, and then continue once you find a good answer.

How to Get Social Network Members

Before you think about getting thousands or millions of members, you must first aim to get a hundred or more people to join. There are various methods you can employ. Some of the best ways are:

1. Look for members in broad and popular networks like Facebook and MySpace. You can do this by seeking out people who look like good matches for your network and then casually exposing them to the network, so that they can decide whether or not to use it. It will actually be best to persuade your close friends or some acquaintance sharing similar interests to join.
2. Make a “Get More Members” Campaign on Twitter.” TwSince your Twitter marketing campaign will revolve around capturing people who already work in your niche, most of the people who are following you on Twitter will already be good matches for your network.
3. Search for new members on blogs in your network. There will always be people interested in the niche-based social network you have created, and a lot of them will be talking about this interest on their blogs; you just have to find and capture them by commenting on their sites and including a link to your new social network as well as your contact info.
4. Participate in niche forums where your crowd naturally hangs out. Forums are virtual communities where people who share similar interests come together: that is exactly why they are great places to get new members for your social network. Your goal here is simple: you must participate in discussions without blatantly promoting your site. Use the signature and make sure to have a good, catchy line that makes people curious about your new social network. As you build your reputation, start inviting people to become members of your new social network.

Whatever you do, remember that creating and populating a social network is not a trivial task. However, if you decide that it is a good route for your internet business, then make sure you spend the time and resources to make it work.

Do you want to create a social network of your own? You might think it is tough, but nowadays, it is actually a relatively easy task to accomplish. This is made true by the fact that there is now software you can use to make the social network creation smooth and easy.

ABC: Make a Social Network For Me

One software you can use to create your own niche-based social network can be found at www.phpfox.com. It makes creating social networks relatively easy and allows you to do so entirely through a user-friendly control panel. Although there are many products that now allow you to do this, phpfox is one of the best and allows a great deal of customization.

I can’t exactly narrate all the steps for creating a social network with phpfox. However, let me just give you some friendly reminders:

• Before you venture into creating your own social network, it is probably a good idea to spend some time thinking about whether this approach is compatible with your current internet business.
• Carefully consider whether you can come up with a good strategy to monetize the social network you will create in the long run.

Creating a social network can be your very key to success, and with phpfox, there is no doubt that you can build a network in as short as a couple of hours. However, before you go on and create your own, think of the future and decide whether it is really going to be your stepping stone toward fame and fortune.

Monetizing Your Forum

We all take on different businesses and strategies online. Regardless of the choices, however, we all have one thing in common. What is it? We all consider how we can get returns on our investment. There are actually tens of choices available for you, but personally, I would suggest that you adopt one or more of the following three strategies:

1. Use a service like Adsense to place pay-per-click ads on your forum- this is the easiest choice. You simply have to create an account of Google AdSense, have your website verified and embed those ads on your site.
2. Use the forum to announce product launches and to promote sales- if you already have your own line of products, if you are getting a commission from other marketers’ product launches and sales, or so on, you can easily use your forum for spreading an announcement.
3. Use the forum to promote your products through sticky threads- you can use sticky threads as announcement area for your products.

As I’ve mentioned earlier, there are a lot more strategies you can use for monetizing your forums. However, it is best to start with any or a combination of the above options.

Alternatively, you might consider using your forum to address customer service issues and questions about your products. This is a good way to increase customer engagement and to encourage customers to buy new products. If you are spending a good amount of time on your forum, it will even become a great tool for constantly getting feedbacks from your customers; it will allow you to get data for polishing products and creating new ones.

Top Ways to Get Forum Members

Numerous forums are being created every day, and a lot of them begin and end as ghost forums–forums nobody have heard of and forums nobody caresabout. Why? This is because the their owners never take the time to populate them, to ensure that there are hundreds of member who continuously post and participate in discussion.

If you want your forum to be successful, you will have to take the time to populate it with individuals who will engage in lively discussions and who will help you reach more people by promoting it in other platforms like their blogs and social networking accounts.

There are several ways to find hundreds of new members for your newly created  forum. Let us look at some of the best methods:

1. Create threads on the forum about important topics in your niche. Since new visitors will find that the forum is empty, they will be hesitant to post. However, if there is at least one other person posting threads, they may take the time to respond. That said, it is essential for you to create new threads and post about specific topics about your niche. You can  even create another spare account to encourage others to start posting.
2. Pull forum members from blogs and forums. What better places to get new members for your forums than in places where individuals already engage in active discussions? Find blogs and forums where there are members actively posting and solicit them for your forum indirectly. You can do this by frequently posting, giving relevant and quality info, and including a signature with your forum and blog posts that links to your forum.

Once you start getting new members, remember that you will have to keep them engaged if you want to retain them. Otherwise, you will soon find new members leaving your forum one after another. So, as you step up your promotion efforts, remember to simultaneously scale up your forum engagement efforts.

Creating a Forum

Many hosting services now allow you to create a forum with a plugin. If you want to create one, you might want to check your web host to see if it offers a feature that will allow you to do this.

Once you created a forum, you can simply manage the site through the control panel, adding threads, managing sticky notes, and deleting posts as you find necessary.

If you are thinking that it will be rather easy to manage your forum one you have created it, you are mistaken. The process can actually be rather tricky. You must also understand that it is unlikely that your forum will be successful unless you dedicate a significant amount of time to the launch phase and try to acquire as much members as you can. You must also need to keep in mind that you have to continuously encourage people to participate.

Without dedicating sufficient time to your site, it will be hard to get it to go from a “ghost forum,” where no new members join and much less post, to a forum where there is lively activity. What you want is a forum teeming with life; make it one by becoming a good example, posting regularly, answering questions, and so on.

Optimizing Your Use of Disqus

Disqus is a great commenting platform that allows you to build an interactive website and allows both you and your site commentors to simultaneously post updates on Facebook and Twitter. While you might think that Disqus is something solely used for facilitating comments. However, you can actually use Disqus for the following purposes as well:

1. Ask visitors to leave feedback about your site. You can use the feedback you get to adjust your current marketing plan, make changes on your products and services, and so on.

2. Ask visitors to post product ideas. Sometimes, it ‘s hard to get new ideas. When you are feeling stumped, it is best to ask your customers and visitors for ideas. You will not only have new ideas, but you can also rest assured that your new product is something your customers really want to purchase.

3. Ask visitors to post testimonials and product reviews. Testimonials can be very powerful persuasion devices. That said, you have to encourage customers to leave reviews and testimonials which you can attach or use for further promoting your products or service.

There is no doubt that allowing anyone to freely comment is similar to allowing your site to be spammed. However, asking for people to sign up separately just to leave a few words will appear demanding and might discourage customers to share their ideas. That is why using platforms such as Disqus can be very beneficial.

With Disqus, your site followers will feel more comfortable with leaving a comment or two every now and then. Even better, they can share your posts and their comments in their favorite social network. or set them up so that they need to be approved before they are posted. Of course, you still have to look over comments to make sure they are okay or useful. For this, you have to set your comment system to manual approve.

Do you have a Tumblr account? Tumblr is a very popular publishing platform today and is also a good marketing platform you can use. If you have thought or are already using it for marketing, then you have to know how useful comments are as well as how beneficial using third-party commenting systems like Disqus can be.

Tumblr and Disqus

Tumblr is a favorite blogging platform today as it is easy to customize, user-friendly, and allows for sharing just about any type of media. If you are a Tumblr user and are thinking of a great way to encourage your blog followers to comment and repost your posts, then you should consider using Disqus.

How does Disqus work with Tumblr?

Simple. Instead of requiring a Tumblr account for someone to comment, you can just configure your account to use Disqus’s commenting system. With Disqus on, your blog followers  can login and comment using accounts for which they already have profiles.

For instance, if your visitors already have Facebook or Twitter accounts, they can login using their account username and passwords for those sites instead of creating a Tumblr account (if they don’t have one yet). They can then post comments that are linked with their social network identities. The great thing about this is that if they don’t want to be identified, they can opt to post comments as guests.

It’s indubitable that this strategy can help divert more traffic and probably more sales to your website. However, it can actually be more beneficial if you are using your website to lead people to your other Web 2.0 accounts as well.

Getting More Followers in Your Web 2.0 Accounts

In addition to pulling people from your Web 2.0 sites and directing them to your website, you should also think about doing the reverse: taking people who visit your website and getting them to follow you on your Web 2.0. You might be a little hesitant about this step. You might even ask: Aren’t we supposed to lead people to our sales pages to get profits? Why should I do the reverse?

Well, your concern is understandable. However, this reverse approach can actually be very, very profitable. The reason for this is that it increases customer/visitor engagement, which ultimately translates into more contact and then more sales.

One way you can do this is by creating a “Find Us” box. This box is like a badge you can use on your website. Within it, you can put links or icons directing to other accounts you are using for your Web 2.0 marketing campaign such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. With these buttons, your site visitors can find you in social networks or blogging platforms where they are members as well and decide whether or not they want to follow you or become your friend/fan.

Overall, this is a simple strategy that can yield very great benefits. One of the best things about this is that it is entirely hands-off. Once you create the “Find Us” box and put your Web 2.0 account badges on it, there’s no need to do anything else about; you just have to look at how many new friends, followers, or fans you are getting.

How to Attract Site Visitors with RSS Feeds

A lot of people opt to subscribe to RSS feeds because they do not want to miss out whenever their favorite websites are updated. However, you must also know that they choose to get RSS feeds so they won’t need to go to individual sites all together and simply read updates through their RSS readers. This is quite a disadvantage if you are looking to get more web traffic for your site.

Fortunately, there is a way to get followers who rely on RSS feeds to continuously visit your site. What is it? Shortening or truncating your RSS feeds!

Rather than simply allow them to gain all of the information from the reader without re-visiting your site, you should consider shortening your RSS feed. That is to say you will set a certain character limit for your feeds. This way, you will prevent people from reading the entire message through their reader. Instead, they will get hooked by your catchy opening line and end up coming to your site to read the entire post. Of course, for this method to work, you have to make sure that you have very appealing headlines as well as opening sentence(s).

Why RSS?

If you decide to use a service like Tumblr, or if you generally start utilizing blogging platforms, you have to understand how critical it is for you to setup an RSS feed.

Today, a lot of people are engrossed with finding and reading information online. That is exactly the reason why blogs and info products are much sought-after. However, while people love to discover new blogs, you must know that most of them do not visit a blog more than once. Instead, what they do is:

1. They assess the blog.
2. They determine whether the blog provides high-quality content or not.
3. If it does, then they add the blog’s feed to their aggregator.

With that in mind, is absolutely essential to generate an RSS feed for you blog. This way, those who exclusively use readers and are unlikely to follow your blog closely will have an option. By providing RSS feeds, you also gain an advantage over your competition who do not provide feeds.

Using Email List to Get More Twitter Customers

If you began your email marketing campaign using a free email account, say, like Gmail, and then opted to use an autoresponder, you will need to manually copy your contacts from your mail to your autoresponder. Now, if you are going to use your email list to find more customers on Twitter, you will have to follow the same steps. That is to say, you will use Twitter to search for each person by email address.

Every time you find new people, you will request to follow them. Of course, not every one you wish to follow will respond and follow you back. Nevertheless, doing this will help you jump start or expand your Twitter marketing campaign, giving you a significant boost to your reach.

To achieve success with this strategy, however, you must remember to continuously stay focused on developing your list of Twitter followers and ignore all other objectives for the time being. You see, it is good to have a clear strategy. Sure, you can benefit from working on multiple revenue streams at a time.

Also keep in mind that handsome profits will not come to you overnight. Hence, if you cannot sell your products to your followers immediately, you must think that it is okay. You just have to worry about getting them to follow you in the beginning. When you already have a big follower base, you can then focus on trying different Twitter marketing strategies.

Turning Friends to Facebook Fans

While you might think that having Facebook friends is similar to getting business fans, they are actually quite different. For one, with your Facebook fan page, you can create a forum and start various discussion threads with fans. With this, you can easily collect data for product creation and marketing plan adjustment–something you just can’t do with just a personal profile. Hence, it is essential to invite your personal friends to join your Facebook fan page.

Of course, you must first begin on your mailing list. Once customers choose to become your friend on Facebook, you can then suggest that they become a fan of your business. While doing this, however, you must remember not to spam them or be too pushy. Otherwise, they will refuse to join, or worse, they will block you. Also, you must realize that many will decline or ignore your invitation.

It is important for you to take this approach rather than just building a Facebook fan page and silently looking if there are new fans coming every day. By taking this step, you can rest assured that your Facebook marketing campaign will have higher chances of leading you success.

You see, a fan page offers more benefits such as follows:

• A personal Facebook profile limits you to 5,000 friends; a Facebook fan page allows you to have millions of contacts
• A personal profile lets you communicate through wall posts, polls, and private messages; a fan page lets you easily acquire more data through wall posts, polls, and discussion threads

How to Get More Facebook Fans

It is undeniable how beneficial a Facebook fan page can be for you and your business. After all, the more fans you have, the more people you can market to on a recurring basis. Aside from that, with more fans, you can instantly have more fan referrals without doing any additional work. That is to say your fans will help you get more fans.

However, the only problem you will encounter is this: How do you get more Facebook fans?

The answer is rather easy.

A good place to start when it comes to building a fan base is to take your email list from your autoresponder. Here are the steps you need to follow:

1. First, you must create a spare Gmail account.
2. Add all of your autoresponder contacts to it.
3. Next, login your Facebook account.
4. Select the option to locate friends using email addresses.
5. When you have done this, use the option to search from an existing contact list (here is where the spare Gmail account you have created will come in handy).
6. Let Facebook quickly determine whether anyone from your original autoresponder list is already a member.
7. When you have found customers using Facebook, start adding them as friends.

Of course, with this approach, it will be crucial to have a good mailing list to begin with. Nevertheless, if you have already acquired some subscribers, the process will be smooth and easy for you.

Getting Facebook Fans

When it comes to using Facebook to promote your internet business, it is almost always a good idea to have both a business/personal profile and a fan page. Doing this gives you a great deal of versatility when it comes to recruiting new fans as well as provide you with options for collecting valuable consumer data.

Now, one problem all marketers encounter, regardless which platform is being used is the fact that it can be difficult to get lots of customers (in this case, Facebook friends and fans). Fortunately, I have an approach that might be easy and beneficial for you to use.

Here is the “Get More Facebook Fans” approach:

1. Locate people who could be potential customers for your business- you can do this by finding your customers (if you have their email addresses) or joining groups and fan pages related to your niche.
2. Use your business/personal profile to add them as a friend- this is purely based on the hope that they will accept.
3. After you’ve added the people in question as friends, you can then use Facebook to suggest that they become a fan of your business. As earlier mentioned, it is best to have both a personal profile and a business fan page. That is why after your prospects accept your friend request, you can start inviting them to join your fan page. Remember, though, that at this stage, a lot may ignore or reject your offer. Nevertheless, some will join and this will add to your fan base.

To make sure that your invitation appears friendly and not spammy, however, remember not to send invites multiple times. For instance, each time you add a friend, do not suggest that they add other people that you know. Also, do not ask them to join the fan page multiple times.

Last.fm

In a nutshell, Last.fm is a form of Internet radio that automatically creates playlists for you, with the help of a program called the “Scrobbler.”

How does this music network work?

After joining the site, you will be able to list your favorite music, either manually or by letting it capture the music that you listen to on iTunes or elsewhere. Every time you do, Last.fm records your choices. Then, it adds them to your profile, which any user may view.

But how will this help your business?

This may sound like a fringe idea, but if you happen to be in the music business or if you are selling “how-to” music products, you can easily find potential customers Last.fm. Not only that but this site will also help you establish a more solid reputation; your customers will recognize you as a real person (and not just some mysterious person trying to hammer products down people’s throats). Aside from those, you can also exchange ideas and music preferences with your customers–a great way to establish customer loyalty and perhaps gather data.

Tumblr Alternatives You Must Consider

• Ping.fm. A very versatile system, Ping.fm allows you to update your various social networking accounts at once. That is to say, if you want to post something on Twitter, but you wish for it to be posted on Facebook and MySpace as well, then you can easily depend on Ping.fm. Compared to regular social networks, Ping.fm is definitely a time-saver worth using, especially if you are a really busy businessman.
• WordPress. If you’re not satisfied with Tumblr’s blog interface, then you might want to consider using something like WordPress. WordPress is a very popular publishing platform today–one you can use for creating simple free blogs or even websites. Not only is this website easy to use, it also offers a lot of options when it comes to themes and plugins; you will surely get satisfied, and, if you spend enough time on creating your blog, you will feel like it is a professional website.

Ways to Get Your Perfect Tumblr Theme

It does not matter if you are leading people from Twitter or your articles toward your Tumblr account. What you always have to remember is that: first impressions last. If you want to make visitors stick around and keep coming back, you must select a clean theme that you can use on your Tumblr blog. Make sure that you create a good impression quickly. Otherwise, you risk losing a potential customer before you’ve had any time to present your pitch.

There are basically two ways through which you can get the perfect Tumblr theme:

• Select one of the available Tumblr themes. Tumblr offers largely clean and professional blog designs. These are very easy to use and install. However, you have to keep in mind that your theme will be similar to hundreds or thousands of other blogs.
• Use custom theme. Another option is to go to your Tumblr dashboard, and then click “customize,” “theme,” and then “use custom HTML.” You can then take HTML code from any site that offers free Thumblr themes and paste it into the form.

Themes are a great medium to express your feelings and your business’ purposes. If you want to make sure that your visitors turn into customers, then you have to make sure that your theme is appropriate and appealing.

For one, Tumblr easily integrates with your Twitter and Facebook account. There is no doubt that websites today, regardless if they are regular sites, blogs, or social networks, are focused on creating a sort of unity. This is a way for users to easily share information with family and friends.

Aside from that, once you create an account, you will surely find that Tumblr is one of simplest blogging platforms you can find today. You might think that WordPress stands out for its simplicity, but once you try Tumblr, you will discover that it offers a more basic user interface that allows you to choose between functions such as “text” and “pictures.”

This can be very important if you want to use Tumblr quickly and move on. The downside, though, is that it does not allow complex customization like WordPress does.

Nevertheless, if you are looking for a publishing platform that is easy to use, easy to market with, and easy on the eyes, then Tumblr is one you can’t miss to use.

Tumblr for Longer Tweets?

Tumblr has always been known as a publishing platform–a blog where you can share thoughts and pics. However, those are not the only great things you can do with Tumblr; you can use it for a lot of other things, too.

For instance, if you find that you are often unable to communicate enough information in a 140-character Tweet, you may want to consider using Tumblr to Tweet instead. This will allow you to write a message of any length; and then allow Tumblr to automatically Tweet the first 140 characters of it with a link back to the blog post.

Adding Scrolling Twitter Feeds

Adding scrolling Twitter feeds is actually quite easy. Basically, you will just add a script that cycles through all of your tweets, displaying them in sequential order in a nice-looking frame.

This is always a nice touch to add to your site. Not only will it make your site look more appealing and dynamic, but it will also encourage your visitors to join Twitter and follow you. This way, you will gain additional point for your site and you will get additional customer for your Twitter marketing campaign as well.

To create such a feed, all you have to do is use a widget like this: Scrolling Twitter feed widget. This widget will let you generate code which you can simply copy-and-paste into your site editor and voila! You already have scrolling Twitter feeds on your website!

It can be very beneficial to market on different social networks. However, it can also be tiring–logging in and out and continuously posting updates on different accounts every time. If you feel like this routine is starting to weigh you down, then you might want to start using Tumblr.

Tumblr

Working on various social networks can be really tiring. If you are already feeling the weight, it may be a good idea to consolidate your workload. This way, you will not need to spend a large chunk of your time repeating the same tasks. One medium you can use to consolidate your workload is to start a Tumblr account.

By creating a Tumblr, you can easily post an update to all of your accounts at once. This means you can tweet, post a Facebook status update, and post to any of your other social networking accounts at the same time.

When it comes to becoming a good businessman, being knowledgeable is good, but having a heart is better.

How to Sincerely Build Your Reputation

If you want your business to flourish and if you sincerely want to help others as well, then you should consider doing regular give-aways or charity events. You can either:

• Give your product to someone who needs it but cannot afford it
• Hold a firesale and give a portion of the proceeds to charity

If you are sincere in sharing your blessings, it will surely come back to you, more than you would have probably expected. As they say, “What goes around comes around,” and when it’s good karma you will get, then why will you avoid doing it? Besides, doing such acts of charity will make you feel good about yourself–you are helping people become better, personally and financially. It will also help demonstrate what kind of person you really are and how well you will treat your customers.

In the eyes of your customers and those you help, your credibility will be boosted and your business will be seen as reputable; it will give you a good social standing. So, why not try doing it today?

Conquering Your Fear of Making a Mistake

A lot of people start internet businesses because they think here is where they will get a lot of profits fast. However, their fear of making a mistake, of falling before they achieve one of their goals, is so strong that they end up with fear of making mistakes.

And when they do make a good progress, they start fearing more that they would rather stick with what they already have than create a Facebook fan page, a Twitter account, or a blog to reach more audience and open more revenue streams. In other words, they fear that they will may make an embarrassing mistake that will reflect poorly on their businesses.

This is definitely something you must avoid!

When it comes to Web 2.0, it is definitely possible for businesses to make embarrassing mistakes. However, more than the grave mistakes you read other marketers commit, the most serious mistake you can ever make is to not take action and strongly establish your business and customer base.

Let’s face it. How can you even imagine committing some mistakes about social networking when you are not even trying it in the first place? And how can you ever get the wonderful benefits We 2.0 provides if you are not giving it a shot? You will lose more if you choose to try anything!

Hear my personal recommendation: Work hard to build up your network and spend less time worrying about making mistakes. If anything, you’re more likely to make these mistakes in the early stages of your campaign, which is exactly when the fewest people will be able to observe them (because you won’t have many followers).

In short, stop being too much of a worrywart! Instead of worrying about mistakes you might commit, start working on campaigns that promise good fortune!

However, there is a pressing question that relates to this site. What is it? Will my privacy a an individual person be secured?

Question of Privacy

Many who are new to Web 2.0 marketing are anxious in using sites like Facebook, worrying that these media will expose too much information about their personal lives. It is understandable. After all, although we put up internet businesses and uses strategies to establish our online presence and build our credibility, we are still individuals who have reputations to protect and privacies to secure. However, while this concern certainly is valid, it is often much less important than people think it will be.

Personally, I suggest that you avoid making your privacy a top priority. Why? Because if you are a decent and hardworking marketer, associating your name and photo of yourself with your products should make you proud and not embarrassed.

Of course, giving more personal information like your address or home phone number will be another case that you should carefully consider whether it will be good for you and your business or not. Nevertheless, for minor pieces of personal information, there are good reasons to believe that giving it out will do nothing other than help you.

There is an old adage that says, “Time is gold.” However, for serious marketers like us who want to achieve success, time is definitely more precious than diamonds.

Making the Most of Your Time

As a business owner, you value your time greatly; I do, too. It is essential for us to understand that every move we make affect the productivity of our entire business.

This is exactly why you must pay close attention to how you manage your time and how you come up with important decisions.

Web 2.0 has completely changed how the internet works and how users and web masters interact. If you want to optimize the results you get from your web 2.0 marketing campaigns, then you should aim to engage your customers as much as possible. You must always keep in mind: In this type of strategy, over-engagement is always preferred over under-engagement.

Just because you need to engage customers, however, does not mean you have to devote all your time to them–you still have a life to live! If you want to create a harmony between your personal and business time, then you have to take steps to automate certain procedures of your campaign. This way, you cam engage customers efficiently without forsaking the time you would love to spend with your loved ones. For example, if you want to save time in posting to different social networks, you have to look for a service or website like Ping.fm that will allow you to post an update to, say, Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr all at the same time.

While I’m pointing out that it is important to save time for yourself here, you must still remember to treat your Web 2.0 marketing campaign like a true marketing campaign. If you are wasting a lot of time in one aspect and are not getting any good results, you must either:

• Stop the part of campaign entirely and start a new one
• Adjust that part of your marketing campaign and observe the changes in the results you get

That does not mean you won’t have to do anything about angry customers, though. Today, you will discover a way to make angry customers love you and develop your business into a very reputable brand everyone talks good about.

Turning Upset Customers to Happy, Loyal Ones

Here is an easy way to make upset customers happy and make them fall in love with you:

1. Use Twitter Search Engine- Using the Twitter Search Engine, try to find all instances where your products and services have been mentioned. You must specifically look for bad reviews of your products, complaints about customer service, and generally anything else that speaks about your company and offers negatively.
2. Find negative comments and respond- Once you found negative comments, create a list and start offering a response to each and every one of those bad comments.
3. Give freebies or other solutions- Along with your response, you can offer free products, give a solution to the problem they are having, or let them give their suggestions. If you find that people are complaining about a certain feature of your product, then you should take that chance to announce a change you will make on your product and then offer a free updated release to all who have already purchased.

If you carefully follow the strategy laid out above, you should be able to turn any negative press you find into positive press, as people are likely to say good things about you after you promptly redress the problems they presented and offer compensation.

Make Your Customers a Real Part of Your Business

One of the most important functions of Web 2.0 is that it allows businesses like our to receive and actually encourage feedback from customers and visitors. These feedbacks are very valuable. Why? Because you can use feedbacks to develop your business. You can use it to:

• Establish customer loyalty
• Polish existing products or services
• Create new products or services

But, how can you easily collect feedback from your customers? One of the best way to is by using your Facebook fan page. These are the methods you can employ:

• Post an update, sincerely asking visitors to post or send you a story about how they’ve used your product
• Hold a contest where the person who wrote the best story gets free products or discount coupons from your online store
• Open a discussion thread and let customers air their thoughts

In traditional marketing, what simply happens is that you’ll create an ad, purchase ad space somewhere, and then wait for the buyers to come in. They might come, or they might not.

It’s quite the opposite with social networking sites.

In Facebook, Twitter, or other social sites, you can’t just create a profile, add some information, and then wait for people to show up and buy. You have to take the initiative: you have to take action!

Web 2.0 is All about Conversations

If you are going to use social networks for marketing, then you have to know that you are expected to socialize and to talk. A lot.

Look at Twitter for example.

You’ll see that the majority of the posts are from people engaged in communicating, reacting to each other’s posts. Some of the tweets will be:

• A directly response to what someone else has posted. This starts a nice, long conversation.
• Re-post of their friends’ message, so that more people can read it. This is commonly called retweeting.
• Suggestion of specific profiles to friends and followers.
• Recommendation of links to other people’s web sites. The owner of the websites can be friends or followers.

To get something from Web 2.0 marketing there’s no doubt you need to start similar conversations, too. By engaging with people on your network, you’ll get more attention and you will get connections to real people, both customer and professionals. Start conversations today; otherwise, you will find yourself losing more than you are gaining.

Why Start Conversations?

“So, I might get losses instead of gains if I don’t start conversation. However, if my products and services are good, and if am courteous and approachable, shouldn’t that be enough?” Well, that is true. However, you must know that the more you engage in conversations with your friends or followers, the greater your base of people will become.

At some point, it’ll become self-perpetuating, so that your friends bring in new friends on a regular basis. However, if you can’t maintain good conversations, your efforts might be in vain. Here are some ways to start and maintain conversation:

• Start responding to your friend’s posts.
• Keep up the conversation when some else sends a response to you or when a follower recommends or retweets your post.
• Actively recommend/retweet other people’s posts if they are useful and you think your friends will be interested in them.
• Recommend links to interesting web sites.

This strategy, of course, is not only true for Twitter but for all Web 2.0 sites, regardless if it is Facebook, MySpace, or a blog that you are using. As long as you are using a medium where people might engage in conversation through commenting or trackbacks, you should always to take the initiative, start conversations, and keep them alive.

On a final note, I suggest not to do Web 2.0 conversations randomly. Also think about focusing only on a couple of sites at a time. This way, you can guarantee that you will have enough time to engage in conversations through each of your selected medium and build strong relationships with the people who follow you on those Web 2.0 sites.

If you really want to use several social networks at a time, say, 6 or more, then here is what you have to do:

• Choose 2 or 3 main sites where you will take the time to engage customers.
• For the rest of the sites, choose to post and react only when you have spare time or when absolutely necessary such as in cases wherein someone is posting bad things about you.

In the end, it’s more profitable, not to mention more fun to heavily engage in only 1,2, or 3 sites and ignore the rest.

Establishing Good Online Reputation

No matter which Web 2.0 sites you are using, be it Twitter, Facebook, forums, or blogs, there is something you have to remember: you’re always representing your business.

That said, you have to make sure that you will talk and act in a nice manner around customers as well as colleagues. Engaging in flame war on a forum or personally attacking a blog reader will not make a good impression. It is better to hold back and stay calm. Otherwise, you will get yourself a good number of enemies, and your reputation will surely be tarnished.

In addition to creating enemies, flaming will also make your business look unprofessional. Your existing customers and prospects will go about questioning your integrity. They will go about, wondering, “Is this the kind of merchant I want to associate with?” Surely, the answer to that question will be a big “NO!”

Therefore, when you start an internet business, you must always be cautious. Keep these 2 points in mind as well:

1. Never start criticizing and bashing others publicly. If you have nothing good to say, then don’t say anything at all.

2. Be very conscious when others start a nasty discussion with you. Don’t react emotionally; instead, think about the best possible response. If you stay collected and think things thoroughly, you will find that sometimes, it is best to not react at all. Sometimes, it is enough for you to keep calm, lay out facts, or just expressing that you don’t see any value  in fights.

However, not all marketers have enough money or products to give away. If you feel like you don’t have enough resources or you are simply feeling lazy to organize such a scheme, then you have to learn this other “Get Fans and Followers” scheme.

Easy Way to Get More Fans and Followers

Facebook and Twitter have become very powerful marketing platforms, thanks to them being home to thousands and millions of our targeted customers. However, if you can’t get a good number of fans and followers, marketing on these media will be in vain.

Do you want to get more followers for your Twitter account or more fans for your Facebook page? Why not try this approach?

1. To get started, simply ask your readers to tell friends about your Twitter page or your Facebook fan page through a status update or tweet.
2. In your status or tweet, include 2-3 lines of encouraging text. You can simply say that you will appreciate if they recommend your page to friends, should they find your content and resources useful.
3. Let your current friends and followers do the scouting and inviting for you.

For best results, you might want to use any of these tools or posts they can easily use and re-post or re-tweet:

• Tell-a-friend scripts
• Direct links for social bookmarking
• Pre-written e-mail copy
• Facebook update/comment
• Pre-written tweets

You might be wondering: Will this bring instant massive traffic to your Web 2.0 business profiles and primary website? The answer? Probably not, but if you combine many of these tiny steps, which take very little time to do, you will surely reap a combined result that’s worth it!

Giving a Behind-the-Scenes Tour

You can gain a lot of benefits from freely interacting with your customer base. Some of them are:

• You can collect important information, which you can use to adjust your marketing plans or products as well as create new products or services.
• You can easily give them an update about your internet business.

Now, the question is: How do you engage your customers?

There are various methods you can employ. However, one good strategy is to use your Facebook fan page to offer a behind-the-scenes look at what goes on with your business on a daily basis. Basically, what you do here is:

1. Post status updates to announce the various stages of your product launch, announce new product ideas, or present changes you are planning for your website.
2. Provide photos, screenshots, or videos, if possible.
3. Allow your customers to share their thoughts, comment, or share their own stories.

If I do this, what benefits will I exactly get?

If you are asking this, then here are the answers:

• It will increase customer engagement by exposing them to your thought process and daily business happenings
• It will show them how much thought and work goes into the products you create. Eventually, they will grow to appreciate your brand and efforts in connecting with them.

While it is beneficial to market on both social network, however, in time, you will find that it can be tiring; you will need to post an update in Facebook and then tweet it on Twitter. Logging in and out and doing several tasks twice can be boring, don’t you agree?

How to Save Time When Marketing with Facebook and Twitter

One way to save some time while maintaining your presence on both Facebook and Twitter is to link the two accounts. This way, whenever you post a new tweet, a status update will instantly be posted on your Facebook account. The process it involves is very simple. Aside from that, you won’t need to hassle yourself and move between the two accounts and re-post the same messages multiple times.

Does that sound good to you? If yes, then you should check this out: http://apps.facebook.com/twitter/. Here, you will need to login to directly access the app. Once you are logged in, the Facebook page will present you with a request from Twitter app to access your information.

All you need to do is click the “Allow” button. Once you do, your Twitter and Facebook accounts will be connected. After that, every time you post a tweet, your Facebook account will will automatically be updated.

Well, there is nothing wrong with starting your Web 2.0 marketing campaigns with these networks. However, it is worthy to consider going after smaller, niche-based networks, too. 

Why Niche Networks?

Today, there are a lot of niche-based social networks you can find. For instance, there is ActiveRain, a social network exclusively for real estate professionals. There are also networks focused on internet marketing, aviation, golf, and virtually any topic you can imagine.

Why should you join niche networks? One of the biggest benefits you will find is that everyone on these networks is a potential customer. This is especially true if you sell business-to-business products or services. While you and your fellow members are both professionals, you can rest assured that there will be people there who will need and appreciate the products and services you provide.

Of course, there are still rules that you have to follow, if you want to achieve success with niche networks. Some of the most important ones are:

• Don’t spam members with commercial advertisements
• Strive to offer something that is truly valuable for free, regardless if it is information or sample products

Use the above strategies at attract members, provide them with valuable information, and when the time is right, you can start selling your products to them.

Now, you don’t exactly need to get returns overnight. In reality, it might take months or even a year to realize your goals. Nevertheless, your end goal should still be a return.

Keeping that thought in mind, you have to think about how you can make your Web 2.0 ventures more profitable.

One way you can do this is to cut down the amount of time you spend doing things that aren’t profitable. Let us look at an example. Let us say you have a Facebook and Twitter account. Every day, you might get several Facebook friend requests, Twitter follower requests, and other requests. You might want to accept these requests as they come. However, accepting all invites once a week is actually more beneficial. This way, you will be more focused on doing other tasks, and your schedule will be more consistent.

Alternatively, you might consider using social networking sites with your mobile phone. This will let you do the following even when you are not in front of your PC (e.g., if you have a meeting, on your way to the office, or if you simply have some free time):

• Make requests
• Accept requests
• Perform updates

These hot shots are marketers from your niche who stand out and, therefore, have tens of thousands of fans on Facebook and followers on Twitter. If you want your business to further develop, then it will be beneficial for you to associate with these influential. However, you must be careful when searching for these successful and influential personalities; remember that they are different from movie stars and politicians who do have social networking accounts.

To properly identify the important people in your niche, you can do a quick research. Look at forums and see who are creating a buzz. When you are sure who to look for, you can then start searching for them on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks. Become friends with these people and then aim to solicit their help in discrete ways. Maybe you can ask for their opinion about your product, software they are using for their own business, and so on.

As we have pointed out in previous Web 2.0 marketing tips, you have to make sure that you are not directly pitching to them. Rather, make them pay attention to you by providing useful information and insightful commentary. On Twitter, this might buy you an influential re-tweet and in the blogosphere, this might buy you a link to your site from a high-traffic blog. It can be tough to get a hold and connect with great people, but the result is definitely worth it!

Also, whatever you do, never try to spam the influential people you contact. They probably receive hundreds of similar pitches every day and have grown accustomed to simply ignoring them, so don’t expect them to do different for you. Therefore, you have to work hard and stand out from the crowd for them to give you attention and assistance.

However, not a lot of marketers realize how forums can be powerful marketing tools. That’s the reason why, in this We 2.0 marketing tip, we will discuss:

• How you can get traffic from forums
• How you build network through forum marketing

Most marketers know that forums can be used for marketing, but not all know how powerful they can be. If you’re like the majority, you are probably “lurking” on a few forums and posting on a few threads, too. However, are you using forums to boost your profits?

When it comes to forum marketing, it’s important to keep in mind …

… that you have to observe all the usual Web 2.0 marketing rules.

For instance, just as you wouldn’t make shameless pitches on Facebook, you also shouldn’t do that on forums. The only difference is that a forum has a section dedicated to promoting products like, say, the WSO section in the warrior forum.

Easy Traffic Generation on Forums

Forums offer great potential when it comes to capturing visitors for your site. However, there is a certain strategy you have to employ. The best strategy is to post useful information and then send readers to your site through a link on the signature part of your profile and posts. The more interesting your posts are, the more likely that fellow members will check out your web site.

Why this strategy?

Because with this method, you can avoid high-pressure sales situations; with this, your prospects won’t feel as if you’re only after their money, and they will be your subscribers and customers willingly.

Network Building on Forums

You’ll find that your network builds naturally if you contribute a lot of useful posts to the forum. Instead of you trying to push yourself to specific people (your ideal customers), people will start noticing and looking up to you based on the ideas and tips you share on the forum.

The  natural style of a forum thread encourages conversations, make good use of it. Respond to what other forum members are writing, and give answers to whatever they might respond to your posts.

Have you been planning or are you already using to promote your business and products or services? If yes, and you’re still not getting your desired results, then you should start taking action! You should strive to do the following:

• If you’re not active on forums yet, your first step is to use Google and find a few forums related to your niche.
• From any forums you find through search, or you already are a member of, you must now decide which ones are the best to spend your time with. Prefer the busier and bigger forums; they will give you more exposure and more contacts.

If you follow the above two steps and if you continuously provide other members with useful information, your web site is sure to get more traffic and more sales.

Your web sites, blog, and Web 2.0 accounts are probably created at different times, and at such, you are using them for separate purposes. Perhaps, you did not have the big picture at that time, so never planned on how to interconnect these different “points of contact” for your prospects and customers.

Need for Integration

While you might be getting good profits from your Web 2.0 accounts, it is still a good idea to connect all your sites and Web 2.0 profiles. This way, you can deepen the connection with your visitors easier, as you are giving them more ways to stay in touch with you.

For example, it has become common on news channels to refer watchers to company and reporter Facebook profiles and Twitter profiles.

The reason for this is simple: by getting people to follow them through social networking sites, those news stations gain yet another medium through which they can advertise and engage watchers. Aside from that, their customers are able to know more about them, further establishing their loyalty.

If you opt to integrate your Web 2.0 accounts with your other marketing website and blog, you can gain those same benefits as well.

Cross-Promotion

Aside from integrating your marketing platforms, you should consider cross-promoting, too. You can try any of the following cross-promotion methods:

• If you do print advertising, you might consider using it to channel traffic to your social networking site profiles.
• You can add a badge for your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social networking accounts to your web sites and blog.
• You can use your blog’s news feed and publish them on your Web 2.0 accounts.
• You can add links to your web sites and blogs on your Web 2.0 accounts.

If you use the above strategies, you can rest assured that the traffic all your marketing platforms get will be boosted, and your profits will generally increase. Aside from that, you will have more ways to keep in touch with your customers, and you will have a lot of options for tasks such as:

• Collecting consumer data
• Product launch advertisement

Using LinkedIn for Web Traffic Generation

How can you use LinkedIn to get more organic web traffic?

Simple. By getting your customers to give you a positive review on LinkedIn.

With each positive review, your profile’s search engine ranking position will improve. And as you already know, getting better rankings for your profile will give you a lot of benefits. Two of the most important benefits you’ll get are the following:

1) It will send more people looking for products or services in your niche to your LinkedIn profile.

2) It will get more people to find your website through your LinkedIn profile.

In either case, you have the potential to capture a great deal of extra traffic from individuals who are highly-targeted and who are interested in purchasing a product or service in your niche from the get-go.

Next step for you:

Now that you know how useful your LinkedIn profile can e, you should begin collecting positive review. Start by sending an email to your customers and ask them to review your business on your LinkedIn profile. If you have a physical store, you can talk to them directly, or you can choose to give them a call.

It’s paradoxical – you might now be asking whether or not you should follow this tip, since I’m suggesting that you follow your own intuition rather than MY advice.

Nevertheless, when it comes to building your brand online through Web 2.0 platforms, it is important that you think about your own internet business rather than the generic business that experts have in mind when they write guides like this.

While experts may give you some good general advice, in the end…

• You know your business better than anyone else
• You know your customers better than anyone else
• You know your industry better than anyone else

Sure, you can use other’s people words as guideline. However, you must always have a firm opinion of your own. If you find any advice that conflicts with the brand you want to create for your internet business, then you should go with your own ideas rather than misapplying advice that may be useful for other business models but not your own.

Everyone says you should be on Facebook and on Twitter. However, those may not be the best media for you to use; there might be better places where your real target customers hang out.

Everyone says you should promote through Web 2.0 this way or that way. However, maybe you have OTHER ideas that fit your market better and thus provide you with better results.

That said, you must never hesitate to try something different! Don’t just listen to what other people say; be your own man and don’t hesitate to do things your own way! That is the key to real long-term business success.

The Power of Your Facebook Fan Page

Taking some time and encouraging your customers and subscribers to visit your Facebook fan page and to become a fan can be an advantage to your business. It will provide you with various benefits, and two of those are especially vital for your business to flourish.

The two benefits you must aim for through your Facebook fan page are:

• First, you can get additional exposure for your messages besides using the paid mediums (such as Facebook ads, PPC ads, or any paid advertisements)- you can use the money you save for your other ventures or for new software you might need.
• Second, you can market new products and services to existing customers without pitching to them directly- regardless if you admit it or not, customers don’t like getting pitches, especially those that make them feel you’re only after their money. With your Facebook fan page, you can appear friendly and nonchalantly share thoughts and ideas.

If you are able to lead your prospects to your Facebook fan page, even if they overlook your email offers or opt out of your mailing list, you will still have a way to communicate with them; you can readily establish contact through something as simple as a quick status update.

Whenever your customers log into their accounts, even if they have no actual interest in purchasing something from you, they’ll see your status update on their feed. If you don’t spam them (e.g., post updates every half hour), then surely, once they find something you’re offering as useful, they might go and buy it immediately.

The best part of all of this is that you don’t have to make a high-pressure sales pitch, which might be awkward to do with existing clients. Instead, you can simply let them choose which pitches interest them and which do not.

Next Step to Take

So, you have discovered how powerful Facebook fan pages can be, and you now want to use it to your advantage. What are you to do? The next step you ought to take is to find ways to tell your customers about your Facebook fan page. Start by sending a link of your fan page to your subscriber list, and then work your way from there.

However, there is one great way to generate massive traffic for your blog without doing any of those!

Yes, there is actually a strategy like that, and that approach I’m talking about is simple: Get direct traffic from other blogs by commenting frequently!

Blog Commenting: Secret to Massive Traffic

Commenting on other blogs is a surefire way to get more traffic that cuts all the need for keyword and data research as well as article writing. But of course, it’s important to understand that when I say “comment frequently,” I don’t mean spam other people’s blogs with irrelevant information. Rather, I simply mean that you should look for relevant posts in niche blogs and then make a useful, intelligent comment that links back to your blog. Don’t just randomly comment; it will make you look bad and desperate.

By providing useful information, you can easily attract both customers and potential partners without appearing as if you are directly after more profits. Well, you are, but it’s best to do it discreetly. Besides, if you spend a lot of time making useful comments, there’s a good chance you’ll re-direct some of the traffic that lands on the big name blogs to your own. You can then pass this traffic through your sales funnel.

This way, you may also get the attention of other blog owners. Don’t overdo it, though; don’t start commenting on the same blog again and again just to connect the owner. It might be tempting to mass comment on some guru’s blog, but they’ve seen it all before and might already be aware of most of the things you share–mass commenting is something they don’t like it, and they might block you if you do it.

So, if you are going to do blog commenting as one of your primary web traffic generators, this must be your overall guideline: “Is my comment a good contribution to the given blog post?” If yes, then go on, hit the “Submit” button, and let traffic come to your own blog or website.

As I’ve mentioned in previous We 2.0 marketing tips, though, it is always better to give, so you can receive more. That is to say, when it comes to optimizing the profits you get from Web 2.0, you must strive to provide something truly useful for your readers.

For example, you can give them free information about topics related to your niche. Give such free tips every now and then sincerely, without thinking of profits ahead, and you’ll find yourself a good spot in the internet marketing world.

If you are wondering what kind of free and useful information you can give, you can offer any of the following:

1. Links to important news related to your niche
2. Commentaries and opinions on important happenings within your niche
3. Links to sales and coupons (even if they’re not your own)
4. Links to useful resources and web sites.

If your readers can trust they will get useful information from you, they will come back to your pages (your Twitter, Facebook, and the like) again and again.

Hence, I suggest you make it a habit to quickly post whatever useful information you stumble upon during your day. It takes only 1 minute, or just a few seconds when tweeting, to get a tiny but useful post out there.

Once you use these strategies to build rapport with your visitors, you can then begin to reap the rewards by marketing your services and products to them.

Why? The reason is simple: in general, people will be hesitant to interact with profiles that don’t have faces attached to them. It’s just like when you are out in the market, and somebody–who happens to be cloaked and masked–approached you and offered you something. You won’t accept anything from such a person, right?

That is basically similar to offering your products to people. Of course, this is a personal decision and is ultimately up to you; however, if you plan to take your web 2.0 marketing efforts seriously, this is an important step to take.

This is especially true…

• If you want to brand yourself as a person, expert and authority
• If you are the main person in your business getting in customer contact
• If you are the official spokes person for your business.

What to Do

There are actually 2 things you can do to get a nice picture for your Web 2.0 accounts:
1) Get a nice photo, taken either by yourself or by a professional and post it to your web 2.0 profiles individually (if you don’t have one, you can easily get a nice haircut and then have your picture taken).
2) Go to Gravatar, register an account, and upload your photo there. This will allow you to put your photo on other people’s sites–sites where you can leave your comment and email–such as WordPress blogs. With Gravatar, everywhere you go and leave a comment using your email, your photo will be shown; you will easily be recognized by both the blogs’ owners and readers. It also saves you time as one photo submission can be used on many, many sites.

If you are going to do the first option, it will probably take 3 minutes of work per site. However, those 3 minutes can give your profile a face for years to come and for thousands of visitors to see.

Today, we will look at another big player in the web 2.0 world: LinkedIn

LinkedIn is currently (May 2010) at #17 at Alexa’s rank of the world’s most important web sites.

I bet you didn’t know that! Getting such a good spot on Alexa’s list, it certainly is an asset for your business!

LinkedIn: The What, How, and Why

In a nutshell, LinkedIn is a social network focused on gathering professionals–teachers, graphic designers, writers, engineers, marketers, and on. If you’re not familiar with LinkedIn, you might be surprised to find out that they’ve already collected information about you and have used it to construct a profile that might include some or all of the following information:

1)    Where you went to college

2)    What jobs you hold or have held in the past

3)    What businesses you have owned or own

4)    Miscellaneous personal and professional information about you

That might sound creepy. However, you can look at it in another light: that is another tool for you to present yourself and your business as well as showcase your skills and experience. Of course, you will still have the ability to change what the profile shows and you can always opt to use it to establish connection with other business owners and potential clients. You can do this simply y creating a profile.

Once you have created your own profile, you will gain a lot of options in terms of promotion and networking. Nevertheless, for now, you don’t need to worry about anything but getting the ball rolling by creating a profile.

Hop right over to their site and sign up. It’s only 5 minutes, and you’ll own another piece of Web 2.0 real estate.

Today, if you want to get your message to your audience through the most effective medium, then you will  find videos to e very beneficial. However, there are many ways in which you can use YouTube improperly and, in the end, get nothing out of it. In fact, that is what most internet businesses do when they try to make money off of YouTube or video content in general.

The Real Way to Profit from Videos

If you decide to use Web 2.0 video sites for marketing, then I suggest that you start by…

… creating a tutorial series. This could be something like 5 videos, each covering a topic in an area related to your business. Of course, these 5 videos must be connected as well. For example, you can create a 5-video series about how to set up a website and make it ready for handling customers.

If you find a series to time consuming, you can choose to just put up one video instead.

If there’s something you have to remember about video marketing, though, it’s this: Don’t go for beauty, and don’t go for perfection. Just get the ball rolling.

What do I mean by that? Two things.

First: Don’t make your plan too big

You don’t have to deliver 52 installments on your topic right away. Start with anything between 1 and 5 videos. This will make your task seem easier; the easier your goal is, the faster you can finish and move on to your next project.

Second: Don’t make the production process too complicated

When I created my first online videos, I used green screen technique for special effects. It was nice, but it took much more time to finish a video. Today, I just skipped all the fancy stuff. I put up some good light, point the cam to my face, and start shooting the video.

That’s what you should do. Instead of making your video look very professional or high-class, it’s more important to make your video USEFUL. After all, you want to position yourself as an expert. You want to show your web site visitors that you are the-go-to-expert in your niche. Therefore, you must always provide your viewers with valuable information.

This is the est way to position yourself as expert in your niche and the best way to give credibility and good reputation to your company.

If your videos are well-made and if you market them well to get the ball rolling, there’s a good chance you can see a viral effect, where others begin referring friends to your videos without any compensation for doing so. The more viral your video gets, the more traffic and sales you can possibly generate.

This is a Web 2.0 marketing tip that requires a little more effort, but one that’s well worth it: Integrate your video marketing strategy with your overall Web 2.0 marketing plan to achieve optimum results.
(See web 2.0 marketing tip #16)

They hope that by simply creating a Twitter account, or any Web 2.0 accounts in general, adding every person who is willing to follow them, and spamming blatantly commercial messages will make them lots of money.

Quite obviously, this is a misconception. In fact, this is one of the worst ways to make money with a social network, as potential buyers will see through it easily and will choose to opt out.

On the other hand, marketers often miss the great opportunities that Twitter presents…

…such as doing market research.

Market Research with Twitter

In the past, it was very hard to observe your customers when they talked casually about your products or about competing products. However, this is something you can easily do with Twitter today.

In Web 2.0 marketing tip #7, I recommended that you use the Twitter search engine to find tweets related to your business niche. The idea was to find people suitable as followers or people to follow.

Today’s idea is: using Twitter search for your topics as part of your research about your business.

What to Search in Twitter

There are a lot of things about your business that you can discover through such a simple task. Some keywords that can help you with your search are:

• Your name
• Your company’s name
• Your web site’s name and URL
• Your products’ names

You can also use Twitter search for finding out:

• The names of your competitors as well as their companies’ names, products, and web sites
• Other keywords related to your niche and the problems your products solve

Finding out what your customers think about your business and products can help you develop your business and achieve long-term success. Learn everything that can help you business by using Twitter search today.

One great way to utilize Twitter to get more sales is to use the Twitter search engine to find tweets related to your business’s niche. This is an easy way to locate people who might be interested in your products or services.

This strategy involves a simple process:

1. Determine keywords related to your business
2. Use the Twitter search engine to locate tweets that include your chosen keywords
3. Follow the tweets back to the source
4. Determine whether the person involved might be interested in your niche
5. If yes, invite him to follow you

Initially, a lot of people you add may not follow you back. Nevertheless, if you persist, over time, you will find it relatively easy to accumulate 50 new followers each day; when this happens, you’ll gain momentum. Of course, you must not only think about getting new followers. You must also strive to create interesting tweets, come up with offer coupons, or provide vital information. If you do, you will find that most of your messages will get re-tweeted, expanding your reach and possibly bringing in new followers without you exerting extra effort.

Why not try it today? Log on to your Twitter account, do a search for some important keywords related to your business, and start getting new followers.

When it comes to using any form of Web 2.0 services to promote your internet business, it is always a good idea to think in terms of building social media capital that will generate flows of returns over a long period of time.

It’s very important for you to understand this because many marketers treat Web 2.0 sites like pay-per-click (PPC) advertising services.

That is, they expect to see returns immediately after creating an account on Facebook or Twitter. That’s impossible!

In reality,…

…using web 2.0 sites requires that you build up a large following over a long period of time.

You can think of these networks that you are building as a form of capital.

Once sufficiently large, you can easily get additional members for your fan page and additional customers, practically without doing anything.

What does it mean?

Consistency is key to success with social networks.

It’s just like starting a habit; you have to do it for every day for you to succeed, and even if you are already getting positive results, you must continue the tasks to ensure that you will maintain the traffic and sales you get.

Basically, there are two things you need to remember:

• Do a few steps every day (adding friends, updating your status, starting polls and discussion threads, etc.), and soon, your influence will grow.
• As your influence grows, so does your social capital, and you’ll start earning “compounded interest,” providing you with handsome profits.

Tracking how your campaigns and marketing plan is doing is important if you want to discover:

• If you are getting profits
• If there is something that can be done to improve your products or services
• If you have to adjust your current marketing strategies or use entirely new ones

As with any marketing campaign, you should monitor your Twitter promotional campaigns by tracking the results…

Twitter Tracking Systems to Use

If you want to track your Twitter results but are unsure where to start, then let us offer several tools that can do the work for you or ways to discover your results:

• http://search.twitter.com/ -One free way to find all instances of people talking about you or your business on Twitter; this can give you a rough idea of how your marketing plan is fairing.
• Tweet Beep: http://tweetbeep.com/ - This service will automatically email you whenever something about you or your business is tweeted.
• Analytics/traffic statistics program- this kind of program will help you determine how much traffic you have received from Twitter. If you don’t currently have a good traffic statistics program, you can get one for free Google (http://www.google.com/analytics). Google Analytics is a tool will tell you where all your visitors come from, including those that come from your Twitter profile or your Facebook fan page.

Aside from tweets, you might also find it beneficial to track whether the links in your tweets get clicked and how often. I’m using HootSuite for this as it has lots of useful features for professional tweets. However, you can easily find a more suitable one online, if you prefer.

We are not going to focus on those, though. Rather, we will discuss one of the best ways to use Facebook: Creating a fan page on the site and using it to draw in potential buyers.

Creating a Profitable Facebook Fan Page

You can start your Facebook marketing plan by investing some time to create a high-quality fan page.

This page should include…

• Links to your site and/or blog
• A well-written description of what you do or what your business is about
• A brief description of the purpose of your fan page

A sample for the purpose could be: To provide all of your loyal customers with free information about upcoming product launches, product give-aways, and coupons.

How to win “fans” for your facebook fan page?

The way to get more traffic and sales for your web site is to get as much fans as possible. If you don’t have enough fans to get the ball rolling, it might make sense to start by giving people an incentive to become a fan.

You can do something like these:

• Offer everyone who joins your fan page a 20% discount coupon for one of your products.
• You can say something like “If this fan page has over 5,000 members by July 10^th, every fan will get product X for free.”
• You can start a contest where you will give a nice prize like a free product, a ticket to a seminar or something similar. The only thing they need to do is to join your page and post an update on their walls about your page.

There are a lot more ways to get more fans for your page, but the above are already enough to get you started. Of course, before you actually plan ways to get more fans, you should first create your fan page.

No reason to put it off; it takes only a few minutes.

Login to your facebook account now.

Creating a Twitter Profile

It’s actually very easy to create a Twitter profile. First, you must go to http://twitter.com and look around.

Once you are familiar with the site, go to the sign up page (https://twitter.com/signup) and create one or more accounts. (See Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #1.)

Once you have setup your Twitter account, it is critical that you spend some time to personalize your profile: this is the key to achieving success with Twitter marketing.

Why Personalize Your Profile

Personalizing your Twitter profile will help you establish a credible identity. This way, you will not be perceived as spammer when you ask Twitter users to follow you.

When it comes to setting up a personalized profile on Twitter, there’s not much to do. It’s very easy and takes only 5 minutes. All you have to do are:

1. Login to your Twitter account and go to your Twitter settings page
2. Select a pre-existing background (or create a customized one)
3. Select or upload an avatar thumbnail photo
4. Fill in your “Bio” and “About me” section (you can put short descriptions here)
5. Add your primary web site URL

That is all there is to it! Here are some useful reminders, though:

• Avatar- As far as your avatar goes, it is probably a good idea to use the logo for your internet business. If you don’t have one, you can choose to upload your picture instead, if you feel comfortable enough to do so.
• Background- It can be a good idea to create a custom background, so that it includes your logo.
• Bio- Regarding the bio section create a bio section that briefly explains what your business does and what the purpose of this Twitter profile is (i.e. to give away free stuff, to hold contests, or to provide free information).

Twitter can be a great platform for reaching out to a lot more customers. If you plan your actions well, it can surely be your key to success.

Have you already set up your Web 2.0 site profiles? If yes, then, here are the next 2 steps you have to take:

1. Start finding followers or fans. Ideally, they must be people interested in your line of products or services or, at least, generally interested in your niche.
2. Using your followers and fans to collect information for adjusting your marketing plan and creating new products. Also aim to market your products to your followers and fans.

This is a rather simple process, and through this, it is important to maintain a coherent message.

For this reason, it might make sense…

… to spend some time planning a general “theme” for your Web 2.0 profiles.

You have to ask yourself some questions to determine the most appropriate theme to use:

• Is the purpose of your Web 2.0 profiles to alert people to sales and to tell them about contests you are holding?
• Are they made to discuss with your customers the general industry in which your internet business falls and mention your new products casually?

There’s not necessarily a best approach to take here, but it is important that you pick one and stick with it. This way, your customers will not be confused about what your profiles are about, what they are made for, and you will get more targeted followers and fans. Status, posts, and tweets can deliver your message easily. However, the theme you use will definitely remain the best way to deliver a specific message to those who visit your Web 2.0 profiles.

Before you go out and spread the word about your business through We 2.0 sites, it’s important for you to spend some time carefully thinking about your Web 2.0 identity. That is to say, before you create a Twitter account, launch a Facebook fan page, and begin to market your business through web 2.0 channels, you need to know what image you want to project.

Beginning Your Web 2.0 Campaign

When it comes to Web 2.0 marketing, the first thing you will want to do is…
…decide whether you should create profiles based on:

• Your business
• Yourself
• Both.

Each of the three options has benefits, but it is ultimately up to you to decide which will work best for your particular situation.

Once you have selected your route, you should create accounts on web 2.0 sites and setup a profile that reflects your choice. For instance, a Twitter account for your business should focus exclusively on business activities and not your personal life.

What you probably need is a simple step by step plan to implement web 2.0 marketing to your business.

Well, you guessed it: here it is!

If you follow through with this simple step by step plan, you’ll achieve a presence in the web 2.0 sphere that very few of your competitors can match.

The rise of web 2.0 has transformed internet business as we once knew it.

In the past, business owners were limited in

• how they interacted with customers,
• how they collected information about them,
• and how they marketed new products and services to them.

Today, these strictures have been removed, permitting business owners to gather information, learn, and respond much faster than ever before.

It has also transformed the internet business landscape in another way:

by creating a rift between those who know how to navigate web 2.0 sites and services; and those who do not.

Those who don’t know how to use web 2.0 services may find themselves on the defensive constantly—doing anything to retain customers—even if they had a successful business model only years ago.

Those who feel comfortable with web 2.0 may now find themselves at a significant advantage.

Whether you’re currently using web 2.0 to promote your internet business or are thinking about doing so, it is important for you to understand how to do it correctly.

No matter whether you’re inexperienced or a veteran social marketer, if you don’t have the right information, it can be easy to botch a marketing campaign or simply run out of ideas.

Fortunately for you, this blog post series was designed for people in your exact position: those who know that web 2.0 is an important part of doing business today; and who want to learn how to use it correctly.

In the rest of this blog post series, I’m going to provide you with 77 easy top tips that you can use

• to integrate web 2.0 into your internet business,
• to market your products,
• to find new customers,
• to manage existing customers and extract information from them.

They are stand-alone tips. You can do them step by step from start to finish, or you can just do a few of them.

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #1: Consistent Web 2.0 Identity is Key

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #2: Keep Your Web 2.0 Message Simple

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #3: Twitter Profile Tweet

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #4: Facebook Fan Page for Success

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #5: Tracking Your Twitter Results

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #6: It Is All about Social Capital

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #7: Using the Twitter Search Engine to Find New Followers

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #8: Use Twitter for Market Research

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #9: Earn Instant Credibility and Expert Status through YouTube

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #10: Get A Profile at LinkedIn.com

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #11: Put a Photo in All Your Social Networking Site Profiles

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #12: Get Loyal Followers by Posting Useful Information

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #13: Promote Your Internet Business through Blog Commenting

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #14: Encourage Your Customers and Subscribers to Visit Your Facebook Fan Page

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #15: Trust Your Own Intuition and Experience

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #16: LinkedIn.com Reviews

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #17: Integrate Your Web 2.0 Marketing Efforts with Everything Else

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #18: Use Forums for Traffic and Networking

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #19: Connect to Influential People

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #20: Web 2.0 Marketing is Still Marketing

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #21: Going After Niche Networks

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #22: Power of Twitter and Facebook Combined

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #23: Get Closer to Fans with Your Facebook Fan Page

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #24: Make Readers Your Facebook and Twitter Advertisers

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #25: Courtesy Is a Must

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #26: The Need for Conversations

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #27: Give Freedom with Your Facebook Fan Page

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #28: Build Your Reputation with Charities

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #29: How to Make Angry Customers Love You

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #30: Harmony between Personal and Business Time

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #31: Keep It Private but It Keep It Real

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #32: Conquer Your Fears

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #33: Quickie Posts with Tumblr

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #34: Twitter Feeds on Your Homepage

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #35: Create Longer Tweets with Tumblr

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #36: Tumblr vs. the World

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #37: The Perfect Tumblr Theme

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #38: Tumblr Alternatives to Discover

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #39: Last.fm Your Music Network

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #40: Seduction Tip for Getting Facebook Fans

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #41: Getting Facebook Customers with Your Mailing List

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #42: Easy Way to Get More Facebook Fans

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #43: Email to Twitter

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #44: Spreading the Word with RSS Feeds

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #45: Short RSS Feeds that Get Readers Hooked

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #46: Vital Use of The "Find Us" Box

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #47: Disqus and Tumblr for the Win

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #48: Give Identity with Disqus

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #49: Making a Moneymaking Forum

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #50: Go and Multiply

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #51: Start Reaping Profits from Forums

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #52: Creating a New Sensational Social Network

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #53: Draw in Members

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #54: Turn Social Networks into Money Generators

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #55: Use Twitter to Sell Your Products

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #56: Create a Firesale

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #57: List Building with Twitter

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #58: Creating a WordPress Blog

Web 2.0 Marketing Tip #59: Update Customers with a Facebook Fan Page

2 Days ago, on Friday January 29 2009, another important figure of public life embraced web 2.0.

Pope Pope Benedict XVI commented on benefits and dangers of social media and announced the new vatican channel on youtube.

Here’s an excerpt of his remarks:

… the new technologies which have made the internet a resource of utmost importance, especially for the so-called “digital generation”.

Undoubtedly, wise use of communications technology enables communities to be formed in ways that promote the search for the true, the good and the beautiful, transcending geographical boundaries and ethnic divisions.

To this end, the Vatican has launched a new initiative which will make information and news from the Holy See more readily accessible on the world wide web.

It is my hope that this initiative will enrich a wide range of people including those who have yet to find a response to their spiritual yearning through the knowledge and love of Jesus Christ whose message of Good News the Church bears to the ends of the earth.

Vatican’s youtube channel.
http://www.youtube.com/vaticanit

The source for the Pope’s quote is here: http://www.vatican.va/news_services/or/or_eng/text.html#3

Also interesting: The Media: At the Crossroads between Self-Promotion and Service. Searching for the Truth in order to Share it with Others.
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/messages/communications/documents/hf_ben-xvi_mes_20080124_42nd-world-communications-day_en.html

The Pope On Youtube? Why Is It Important?

I’m amazed how fast the internet changes the world.

When I was in school. …

• The internet wasn’t even there.
• There was no iPod, nor an iPhone to watch youtube videos. Even Sony’s Walkman (the rightful predecessor of any ‘carry with you’ device)  wasn’t invented.
• And of course there was no such thing as a ‘Personal Computer’ to be found in any household.

Then the internet came and people had no idea how fast it would grow into our everyday lives.

Roundabout 5 years ago we internet geeks started to embrace the idea of web 2.0 as we published our first blogs. They were ugly and for geeks only.

• Who would have thought 5 years ago a presidential election would be decided by social media sites?
• Who would have thought 2 years ago the Pope would deliver his gospel through youtube?

Social media is no longer for geeks only.

The people and the leaders of the world embrace it and we can’t even begin to imagine the consequences this will bring.

Through social media we will see dramatic changes in:

1. How people educate themselves.
2. How they create relationships and mastermind groups, evolving much faster than ever possible offline.
3. How they build their opinion on political, economical and ethical topics.
4. How leaders will use the internet to influence (manipulate?) the masses.
5. How campaigns and propaganda sweep the planet across boarders – not only when delivered by leaders, but by any individual who puts his mind to it.

The geek in me is happy. I’m an early adopter and I love to find the  new stuff before it hits the mainstream.

There’s tons and tons of opportunities waiting for us internet marketers, and through new technology and new ideas our ‘universe’ is expanding each day.

I’m excited about it.

How about you?

We’ve seen shooting stars like youtube and myspace rake in billions.

Newcomers like Facebook, Twitter and the like are the big hope for marketers and business owners to profit from networking.

All the internet traffic is attracted to the web 2.0 properties like being sucked in a black hole.

If you’re ignoring the trend, you’re bound to lose your business.

How can you secure your share of traffic?

There are 4 main questions about leveraging web 2.0 for your business:

1. Can established web 2.0 sites like Facebook be tricked into sending loads of traffic to your site?
2. Can you make personal contacts to leaders and important people in your industry?
3. Is it possible to gain #1 search engine rankings for your own home pages using the web 2.0 sites?
4. And finally: What about creating your very own web 2.0 site tailored to your business niche? Is it worth the investment in time and money?

The web 2.0 category of Internet-Business-Mastermind is here to answer these questions and inform you about the most profitable web 2.0 strategies.

Make sure to sign up for the newsfeed on the right hand side to get notified about these profit producing articles.