social marketing strategy

The first part of this blog post is a reiteration sent to past subscribers. If you don’t know me head right to the meat of the eHow marketing lesson below.

I know it’s been a long time since I’ve written. We have just passed the two year anniversary of losing everything in the house fire. It has been a long haul of hard work, sorrows and exhaustion with, and I’m being brutally honest here, very little joy. Under-insured we found ourselves in some tight predicaments and it didn’t help that once my family was emotionally settled, I slipped into many days of dark depression.

Some days, I’m still there.

Today, however, I’m on fire and excited about online marketing again. Web 2.0 properties still get me excited over their power in every aspect of promoting a business online.

You see you can only walk away from your online business for so long until:

1. your search engine rankings slip,
2. your strength of presence on Web 2.0 sites slip,
3. and with that, your income slips.

That’s when you’ve got to pull up your socks and get busy.

Marketing on eHow

If you’ve been with me for any length of time you’ll remember the day I introduced you to Squidoo.

You’ll remember when I taught how to publish and market on HubPages.

If you took decisive action back then I have no doubt that you gained a consistent stream of traffic, an increase in your search engine rank and – as it stands to reason – subscribers and sales.

eHow is a similar story, although much quicker in time to task.

When I came out of ‘the dark place’ I started at square one with my keyword research. Every string of phrases that I love to rank for showed top results from eHow.

eHow is a powerhouse. Tens of thousands of pages on just as many topics and it’s growing in leaps and bounds daily. User generated content wins every time. I talked about this in my 2005 newsletter from the Stampede Secret remember?

eHow Particulars

You can share in the ad revenue (if you’re USA based). I never bother with this anyway. It’s usually pennies on Adsense dollars that aren’t worth all the hard work. I usually leave it all to the Web 2.0 property for operating costs or in the case of Squidoo, for charities.

You won’t get ‘link love’ from them.

The main reason you want to publish an eHow article is for the Resources box. Write a great little keyword-rich article (400 words suffices), that references your site as the authority. Sure, google may not give you any rank for the link but the spiders will take note and humans will click it.

The best part? I’m in the #1 position in google for my three word key phrase. Not the eHow article. The page referenced in my resource box.

Giving Your eHow Pages An Adreneline Shot

Once I wrote the article it sat in my queue for 3 days until admins made it live. Once live, I pinged the page and RSS Feed at Pingoat (under 1 minute). For a little extra juice I submitted the RSS feed to 3 other feed directories. 2 minutes.

This strategy is what I call “promoting the promoters” and it has worked everytime I’ve done it. Whether you are linking to your money sites from a Facebook Fan page, a social bookmarking account, an article directory or any other Web 2.0 property – submit the promotion and the search engines will follow the links and do the rest.

Feel free to ask questions or comment below.

Get busy. Gain rank. Love your business.

Site Specific Training ehow.com, marketing strategy, search engine ranking, targeted traffic

If part of your social marketing strategy involves answering questions and positioning yourself as an expert on YahooAnswers, consider these two methods to make your efforts more profitable.

Be The First, Every Time

As discussed on the top tips for YahooAnswers, it is beneficial to be the first to answer a question. Here’s an easy way to do so without spending your day on the site. This technique helps you answer more questions before others by subscribing to the RSS feed for your chosen keywords or phrases. You then receive a listing of recently asked questions that are still open and available to be answered that are related to your chosen niche markets, as they’re posted. Read more…

Intermediate, Site Specific Training landing pages, marketing strategy, rss, save time, swipe file, yahoo.com, yahooanswers

Targeted traffic. Every website owner wants it, will jump hoops, pay through the nose per click, tweak source code, submit feeds – on and on – to get more of it. Yet when you’re actively involved in your market you can get all kinds of free traffic to your offers, subscription forms, and web pages just by doing what you do best – answering questions.

This is especially true if you own a retail shop or are marketing books that you’ve authored, but it is also true for service oriented companies on a local level. Think about it – you’re the expert, people walk into your shop, stop you on the street or call in to ask questions all the time. They’re considered a ‘warm’ prospect at that point.

Now imagine an online location where all of these potential prospects can be found, asking questions that you could be answering – all the while positioning yourself as the expert on a global scale. Utopia, yes? In fact there are more than 21 million unique users in the U.S. and 90 million worldwide using Yahoo Answers right now, just waiting for your help. In return you’ll be rewarded with rank, traffic, sales and subscribers – whichever you’re after – or all four.

This social marketing strategy will be presented in a step-by-step format that you’ll easily be able to incorporate into your existing marketing hours. In fact if you put all the other stuff on automation – Twitter updates and campaigns, and bookmarking-syndication-commenting-voting – you’ll have time to manage an hour of day of this very hands-on approach. You should also see results quickly – seeing just how powerful this strategy is when analyzing your traffic and seeing just how much Yahoo Answers sends. YahooAnswers is, after all, the largest knowledge-sharing community on the Web. Read more…

Beginner, Site Specific Training marketing strategy, search engine ranking, targeted traffic, yahoo.com, yahooanswers

ATTENTION: Login or out using the controls in the sidebar (at top of right hand column of every post on this site). If you aren’t currently a member, you can register here.

Social Marketing Strategy is a website that provides beginner and beginner-plus information, content and training on social marketing for free, but charges a small fee for intermediate and advanced training.

You have either landed on this page because you are interesting in purchasing a membership or because you were trying to view videos, pdfs, or strategies that require membership status to access.

Membership to the entire website, unlocking all videos, training documentation, strategy related posts and step by step instructions are available for a one-time fee of $27 and includes:

• 12-20 (and potentially more) videos on specific social networks and bookmarking websites. These walk-through videos are full of tips, strategies, and are actual screencasts of the website. The primary purpose of each video is to give you a quick overview, discuss how to market or solicit on the site as well as use the website to drive traffic to your own domain or offer.
• My advanced notes and strategies within membership-only posts on this blog. Look I just got tired of it…5 years of sharing my secrets on three other blogs, strategies and shortcuts that others happily profited from without any attribution, and in some cases not even a link back to my site. I’m still happy to share my ideas and post notes about what’s working now in social marketing, but I’m not about to give it all away free anymore. Besides, I don’t think anyone who is serious about their online business, or needs to market their website and make more sales will feel the sting of investing $17 for a lifetime membership to SocialMarketingStrategy.com
• My strategy and training pdfs. Currently I am including only one (my latest) ebook on social marketing. Entitled “Why Your Social Marketing Sucks and What You Can Do About It Today” originally sold for $47 but is listed on a few of my other websites for $37. Not only will you get the videos (above), plus my advanced strategy posts (coming over the next few weeks, but you will receive the ebook at a savings of $10. This offer is only available at www.SocialMarketingStrategy.com

Finally, I have to be blatantly honest with you here. I’ve not written some massive sales letter to get you drooling and I can’t promise that this website will be my top priority at this time. The videos will be added over the next few months, the commentary and strategies after that, but the pdf (which will provide a huge wake up call to many) will be available immediately.

I have reasons for not giving top priority to the project, and they’re honest ones. If you don’t like them, I completely understand and won’t feel bad that you learn the beginner material and just move on…really.

1. Last year our house burned down. We’re rebuilding. This is time consuming stuff and one of my top priorities.
2. I have just been commissioned to write a hard cover book in my industry. It has a deadline, therefore it is another of my top priorities.
3. I have a teenage daughter. If you’re a parent I don’t need to say another thing, now do I? I also homeschool my girl.
4. I am working on my own websites, my own marketing, in my own niches. People often ask me why I don’t just pay someone else to do the work. Its because I love this work and performing it keeps me on top of what is happening in online marketing at all times.
5. I volunteer at the local high school. Yes, it is true. My own daughter is home schooled, but every Wednesday we are in the school cooking meals for the other teenagers as an act of community.
6. I am now also involved in the redevelopment and awareness of my local town. Not sure why, it just sparked an interest…

So where does this project, this SocialMarketingStrategy.com project, fit on my list of priorities?

Somewhere just above or below item 4, dependant on the day.

To sum up, if you can spare $17 to save yourself hours of work time, cut through the confusion, and start getting more use out of your social marketing, the PayPal button is below (will be by March 01, 2009). After payment and membership has been processed, you will immediately access the training pdf(s), the videos and the posts. You will also be informed by email everytime a new post (Web 2.0 site and matching strategy) or video is added. As a lifetime member you will always have immediate access.

Thank you for your time reading this. I completely understand how valuable every moment of every day is, and appreciate your attention.

To your success!

Laura Childs
SocialMarketingStrategy.com

Social Marketing Strategy marketing strategy, membership, social marketing, videos, web 2.0