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

Let’s talk about some brilliant ways to use FriendFeed…

Across the top of your Home page on the left half, you can see this:

The search feature is self-expanatory as it is a simple site search engine for your FriendFeed. If I want to find Seth Godin or maybe subscribe to people who are talking about him, I would type his name into the search engine and see what I can find. If I find someone worth subscribing to, I simply hover my mouse over it and click the subscribe plus sign that pops up.

Apart from using the search field let’s talk about the posting and advanced marketing options. Read more…

Site Specific Training friendfeed, rss, social network, targeted traffic

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

YooNo: Moving up in the ranks, this high profile Web 2.0 site is great for building more of a presence resulting in targeted traffic, backlinks and if all goes well more subscribers and sales.

Site Specific Training targeted traffic, yoono

Yahoo Answers: If you’ve been wondering how to capitalize on all the traffic that Yahoo Answers receives daily, this video may hold your ‘answers’ to more targeted traffic. Non-members will also find some free social marketing training here (use the tags at right ‘yahooanswers’).
[This content is protected for Pro members only. Click here to learn more about membership] - it is cheaper than you'd think!

Beginner, Site Specific Training targeted traffic, yahoo.com, yahooanswers

Web 2.0 Traffic vs. The Way We Used to Do It…

Making the most of Web 2.0 for traffic is a very different lesson plan than the one I taught on blogs and RSS feeds in 2004.

Keep in mind as you continue to work through and on your own social marketing strategy that one size (style/strategy) will never fit all. Although I had hoped to create a membership site that provided point and click answers, I’m certain that no such thing exists. This is especially true if you’re in a tightly defined or highly specialized niche. Read more…

Social Marketing Strategy social marketing strategy, targeted traffic