"Social Marketing Blueprint"  By: Ross Goldberg

©2006 Diamond SEO & Ross GoldbergAll Rights Reserved World Wide

Contents may not be shared or transmitted in any form.

In my time as an internet marketer I have learned one thing:

I have been utilizing social marketing since the beginning of my online business ventures. You have too! Social Marketing can be as simple as visiting a forumand posting, talking to your friends on Myspace, or blogging.

The techniques learned in this course will separate you from your competition. I can guarantee that your competition is not using these techniques to their fullest potential. I will show you how to utilize Social Marketing Websites to transformyourself and your company into a renowned expert in your industry.

Becoming an expert is the key to generating new business at all times.

I am going to touch on some fairly advanced SEO methods and topics in this report. SEO Diamond is an Internet Marketing Course that I designed. If you are having trouble understanding some of the concepts discussed here, I recommend picking up SEO Diamond for better understanding of how to properly perform SEO for your websites.

I could easily start things off by discussing the hype surrounding Myspace. A little fluff and filler never hurt anybody, right? I do want you to understand that it has surpassed Google to become the most visited website online, but I don’tneed to fill the pages of this Ebook with garbage.

1. Social Marketing Blueprint: Ross Goldberg

I was in your shoes not too long ago. Read, Learn, and Absorb and you could be in my shoes not too long from now… read on for the simple steps to take your business, website, and perceived value to the next level.

Table of Contents:

Part 1: Creating Your Social Web Presence

Part 2: Specific Sites and Their Quirks

Part 3: Generating Web Traffic through Social Marketing

There are integral parts of social marketing that must be set up properly to attract the type of paying customer you are looking to develop a relationship with.

Remember that social marketing will not only bring you customers, but new business contacts that can help you succeed.

I am going to be using the Myspace profile set up for Profile development. Not everything here will apply to some of the other social networking sites. There willbe updates regarding every different site in the Member’s Only Forum.

2. Social Marketing Blueprint: Ross Goldberg

Customizing your profile is the key to separating yourself from your competition.

I don’t know about you, but I’d rather work with a person with personality than someone who posts nothing about themselves and only talk about business (boring). Inject some life into the look of your profile and you will be adding new contacts every day.

The first step to customizing your profile is to customize your layout. You do this by finding code at the website below (or others like it) and pasting it into your “about me” section.

Above is my profile. The disco balls rotate and shine. I have a few classic music videos including Weird Al’s White and Nerdy. I added a Youtube video to my Myspace Blog in my last post.

These are the things that will set you apart fromyour competition. Be creative and come up with your own unique tactics to utilize the technological advances that the internet continues to bring us to your advantage.

Add your interests and tell people about yourself. Be sure to edit your profile and add information about you, images of you, and fun things for them to look at.

http://www.myspace.com/seodiamond

3. Social Marketing Blueprint: Ross Goldberg

You have to add quality content to your blog before attempting to develop any relationships. The more information you add to your profile, the better odds of keeping someone at your page and adding them as a contact.

The main problem with blogging and article marketing is that people are afraid to reveal great information due to the concern that someone will take your information and use it to take your business.

The proper method of creating blogs on social networks is to post your blogs as if they are articles. When doing article marketing, you create a useful article and distribute it all over the internet. At the end of your articles you are expected to put a resource box that talks about you, your business, and products.

Your blogs should be formatted in this manner as well. Post some good information (without shameless promotion) and finish the article with a paragraph on your website and specials.

You can get ideas for blog posts at any article website on the internet, but my favorite is:

4. Social Marketing Blueprint: Ross Goldberg

There are programs available called “adder bots” that will go through and addm contacts for you with little or no effort on your part. The problem with this is that the contacts are not “qualified”.

Another quick method of adding friends is to create a “train”. A train is a bulletin post (more on those later) that tells your friends to add everyone in the post. While they make growing your contacts easy, again they are not normally the contacts you would want to market your products to.

One of the largest problems with social networking at Myspace is the fact that it is overrun with children.I have a very simple method of finding qualified contacts easily. Use the innersite search function and search for people using the keywords for your industry.

Do this for every possible keyword you can think of. Don’t focus hours per day on this, but if you do this for just 15 – 20 minutes per day, you will build up a list of contacts that you can be proud of. Better yet, they will actually buy your products!

http://www.hittail.com

5. Social Marketing Blueprint: Ross Goldberg

To find the best groups, you need to look under categories that would have groups related to your main type of product. Next you need to narrow down your search to a few specific groups, preferably ones with the most members to reach the most people.

Contact the leader or group moderator to let them know you have a product that would be of interest to the members of their group. If you have an affiliate program, offer to make them money as an affiliate for anyone that buys from you through their specific affiliate link.

You have now given them a reason to recommend your product(s) to the members of their group. This equals huge money for you depending on how large their group is and how attractive your product is to that group.

6. Social Marketing Blueprint: Ross Goldberg

To monetize Squidoo properly, you must advertise yourself in every lens you create. Whether you do this by posting an article with a resource box or byposting a link to your blog or website, you must include something about you in every lens.

I recommend creating at least 5 subject-related lenses. Squidoo advertises your lenses for you to other members of the site which will help with your online visibility.

Affiliate links are a great way to earn an income on Squidoo. I search the Clickbank marketplace for products that match my lens. I then post my affiliatelinks with a simple review of the product in my list of valuable links.

I separate paid products from free products with a * to identify the difference. The key to doing this right is to be sure you only offer the best products with a good reputation. If someone sees a garbage product on your lens, they will not come back.

7. Social Marketing Blueprint: Ross Goldberg

Stumbleupon creates targeted traffic by you recommending your sites to the masses. You download their toolbar for Internet Explorer or Firefox and go to one of your sites, you then add your site to their cue.

You choose a title, category, and tags. These will all help people looking for your information find it easier. This is easily my top traffic generator for all Web 2.0 sites, so use it!

Your Toolbar has functions that will allow you to submit any site you visit. Click on “I like it” and a popup comes up where you enter information regarding the website.

Once you complete this, people visit your website by stumbling. To stumble, click the Stumble button on the far left and you’ll visit a website that someone found interesting.

This site has groups and a community that can gain you attention to your websites. Join groups of like-minded people (for fun) and other groups that match your business.

There are plenty of options and this is definitely an active site. Take advantage and watch your sales go up.

8. Social Marketing Blueprint: Ross Goldberg

Gather is a website of educated (mostly college graduates) people that get together and talk about everything from politics to children.

The key to monetizing Gather is to post your links at the end of your articles, in your resource box. Of course, the article should be something that relates to what you sell.

Make sure you use anchor text links on Gather as they will count as backlinks and help your ranking in the search engines. Gather takes more time than the other sites to truly build a following and set you apart from everyone else.

Become a valued member of the group and you willmeet some great people and get some high quality visitors to your website. Comment on Images, Articles, and People to generate a footprint of yourself on Gather.

9. Social Marketing Blueprint: Ross Goldberg

Youtube showcases viral marketing at its best. Any one can post videos on Youtube. These videos can be about literally anything. So, why not create avideo advertisement in the same manner you would create an article.

Offer great content and information (make it entertaining if you can) and include an advertisement for your site or products at the end. Not only will people find your video and watch it, but they will tell their friends about it if it’s good enough. This is everything you could hope for with social marketing.

To create a video, I recommend you download a piece of software called Wink. Wink will take everything you do on your screen and turn it into a video. You can also talk over the video, so you can tell people what you are doing and what they could do.

Your video could be as simple as showing someone how to navigate your website and see your newest products or content. Your limitations are only in your head and you can create literally anything you want.

Be creative and watch the visitors pour in by the thousands.

10. Social Marketing Blueprint: Ross Goldberg

I recommend incorporating Podcasts into your social marketing campaign.

Podcasts are an MP3 file of you talking about any thing you can imagine. Once again, these should be informative, entertaining, and valuable. I’ve includedsome software with this course that will make podcasting a breeze.

You must then take these podcasts and submit them to Podcast directories. People will load them onto their MP3 players and listen to them at their leisure.

I recommend incorporating podcasts and youtube videos into your blogs to generate more interaction from your visitors.

Here are lists of Social Marketing Websites you must take a look at. You do not need to join every single one, but I recommend joining as many of them as youhave time for. I have 2 separate lists: 1 for Business and 1 for General Interaction.

Be cautious on non-business sites and don’t advertise in any obvious ways. Stick to that and you’ll do just fine.

Name URL:

Affinity Engines: http://affinitycircles.com/

Contact Networks: http://www.contactnetworks.com/

Ecademy (mostly UK): http://www.ecademy.com

Econozco (Spanish): https://www.econozco.com/

Entremate: http://www.entremate.com/

Friendly Favors: http://www.favors.org/FF/

I’m Not From Here: http://www.imnotfromhere.com

Knowmentum: http://www.itsnotwhatyouknow.com/

Kickstart Connect: http://www.kickstart-connect.com/

Konnects: http://www.konnects.com/

Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com

Matcheroo: http://www.matcheroo.com/

Open Business: Club http://www.openbc.com

Order Generator: http://www.ordergenerator.com

People That Click: http://www.peoplethatclick.com/

Power Mingle: http://www.powermingle.com

Refernet: http://www.refernet.net/

Ryze: http://www.ryze.com

Select Minds: http://www.selectminds.com

Teng: http://www.theteng.org/

Visible Path: http://www.visiblepath.com/

Zero Degrees: http://www.zerodegrees.com

Zoominfo: http://www.zoominfo.com/

11. Social Marketing Blueprint Ross Goldberg

Name URL:

Backwash: http://www.backwash.com/index.php

Breedster: http://breedster.drunkmenworkhere.org

Buddy Bridge: http://www.buddybridge.com/

Chosen Net (Jewish): http://www.chosennet.com/

Christianster: http://www.christianster.com/

Encentra (Internet & Web Design):

http://www.encentra.com/ 

Everyone’s Connected:

http://www.everyonesconnected.com/

Friends Reunited: http://www.friendsreunited.com/

Friendster: http://www.friendster.com/

Hi 5: http://www.hi5.com/

Huminity: http://www.huminity.com/

Hummingbird: http://www.hummingboard.com/

Isocialite: http://www.isocialite.com/

Link Your Friends (UK):

Http://www.linkyourfriends.co.uk/

Myspace: http://www.myspace.com

Netfriendships: http://www.netfriendships.com/

Orkut (Invite Only): https://www.orkut.com/

Pal Junction: http://www.paljunction.com/

Peeps Nation: http://www.peepsnation.com/

Tagworld: http://www.tagworld.com/

Tribe: http://tribe.net

Worldshine: http://www.worldshine.com/

12. Social Marketing Blueprint: Ross Goldberg

Social Bookmarking is just like adding a website to your favorites folder. The difference is that you are posting them to the web where anyone can find them.

These websites have risen in popularity very quickly and are the secret to ranking well in the major search engines. Follow these rules and you’ll get tons

of traffic quickly:

1. For every link of yours that you post, post a link of value that doesn’t belong to you.

2. Bookmark every single website and page you own including your profiles on every networking website.

Wikipedia is one of the busiest websites online. It contains more information than any other website I’ve seen.

You can generate some of the highest quality links from this website by modifying pages and adding information to them. The key to this is that it is easier to post an informative site (like a Squidoo lens) thanan obvious sales website.

The other key to utilizing Wikis is to use deep inner pages. I’m referring to at least 10 links deep. That way your competition won’t delete the links you post.

Links in Wikipedia will not generate huge amounts of traffic, but the search engines love this site and it will boost your rankings quickly.

Maintaining a Blog or many Blogs is integral to running a business online. This blog should be used to inform customers about specials, new products, and most importantly provide valuable information to your customers.

Social Marketing Blueprint: Ross Goldberg

hosting your Blog on your own website. This way you are not limited by terms of service (Blogger.com and Wordpress.com) and can say whatever you want.

When you post to your Blog, you have to ping the important Blog services. Here is a list of the best ones:

An RSS Feed is a syndication method for blogs and social websites. RSS Feeds are one of the best promotional tools on the internet today. They allow you to inform your customers of changes to your blog, website, lenses, and just about anything else.

You can create an RSS Feed at this site:

http://www.webreference.com/cgi-in/perl/makerss.pl 

The best part of RSS feeds is that they are automatically included in your blogs. They are also a part of every Squidoo lens, Myspace Blog, and Social Bookmarking Website.

Take every single RSS feed you have access to andsubmit them to over 100 Directories quickly with this free Firefox RSS Submitter Add-on.

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/3240/

Forum marketing is the oldest method of Social Marketing. It is also one of the most effective. Join forums and provide solid content, this will show that you are a decent person and people will grow to respect your expertise.

Add links to your lenses, Myspace profiles, blog to your forum signatures and posts. This is where posting valuable information to your sites comes in handy.

If you’ve already answered a question that someone asks in your blog, just post a link to your blog and tell them that the answer awaits them there. Not only will the person you are helping visit your blog, but many others will as well.

14. Social Marketing Blueprint: Ross Goldberg

©Copyright 2006 Diamond SEO and Ross Goldberg

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this ebook may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any other means: electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the copyright holders.

DISCLAIMER/LEGAL NOTICES: This ebook is supplied for information purposes only and, as experienced in this subject matter as the contributors are, the material herein does not constitute professional advice.

The information presented herein represents the view of the contributors as of the date of publication. Because of the rate with which conditions change, the contributors reserve the right to alter and update their opinion based on the new conditions.

This ebook is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information with regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher and the contributors are not engaged in rendering legal, accounting, or other professional advice.

If legal advice or other professional assistance is

required, the services of a competent professional should be sought. The reader is advised to consult with an appropriately qualified professional before making any business decision.

The contributors, Diamond SEO and Ross Goldberg do not accept any

responsibility for any liabilities resulting from the business decisions made by

purchasers of this book. Any perceived slights of specific people or organizations are unintentional.

EARNINGS DISCLAIMER: Actual results may vary with the use of this product.