Search For and Connect with People

LinkedIn has a search function that allows you to look up members in specific industries, companies, positions, educational levels, by name, and even by keyword. Some of these features require you to upgrade your LinkedIn account to the Pro level in order to use them. But you will be able to find and contact people who have a need for your products, services, and opportunities.

Join Groups Filled with Your Prospects

Like most social networking sites, you can connect with likeminded individuals on LinkedIn by joining groups. Use the search function to find groups related to your interests or business type. Not only will you be able to interact with potential prospects but you can often trade ideas on how to make your mutual businesses better and more profitable.

Alternatively, Start a Group

If you can’t find a group that fits your needs or you have a unique idea for one that will attract people in your target market to you, then start a group. The one caveat to this is that you need to be prepared to run the group. A lot of people get caught up in the excitement of building an online meeting place that draws people to their business that they don’t realize the work involved in maintaining the group and keeping it relevant. If you are willing to put in the time, then you can definitely reap rewards from your efforts.

Use the Event Feature to Network Offline

LinkedIn has an event feature that lets you post information about events, both online and offline that you may be hosting. Additionally, you can find events that other people are hosting which will provide opportunities for you to meet with potential prospects in person.

Answer Questions in the Answer Section

Perhaps one of the best places to meet and impress prospects is through the Answer section of LinkedIn. This is the place where people post questions ranging from seeking business advice to how to better use LinkedIn. Taking the time to answer questions in this section helps to position you as an expert and encourages people to seek you out whenever they need help again. This can be just the thing you need to open the door to a long term relationship.

Direct Ads Campaign

If you’ve got money to spend, the LinkedIn will happy to post your marketing materials on their site. They have options for both companies with large budgets (over $25,000) and people with small budgets. Click on the Advertising button at the bottom of the LinkedIn site for more information on their program.

Because LinkedIn is a business oriented site, it makes the perfect place to look for prospects interested in joining a home based business opportunity. Take some time to get to know this often overlooked social site and you may be surprised at how much you get out of it.

For more social media marketing tips, read other articles I’ve written about using social media outlets to build your business. If you want to take the next step and build a green business that lets you make money while saving the planet take an online tour of a profitable eco-friendly e-commerce business or contact me directly.

(photo credit: nan palmero)

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LinkedIn is a place for businesses and professionals. It mostly used by people to connect with human resource managers, recruiters and companies who may be hiring for open positions. Networking on LinkedIn is also a good way to get connected with other business owners and to find entrepreneur types who may be interested in starting a home based business rather than rejoining the corporate grind.

The only drawback to networking on LinkedIn is that you are limited in your ability to contact people on the site. With their free account, you can only email up to 3 people per month through the site. Therefore, you will need to either upgrade your account or look for other ways to contact your prospects. Do note that you can write off the fee for an upgrade as a business expense on your taxes. Talk to a qualified accountant about how this works.

But don’t let that stop you from taking advantage of all that LinkedIn has to offer. Here are some tips on how to use LinkedIn to your advantage.

Get Connected on LinkedIn

Fill Out Your LinkedIn Profile

One of the tenets of attraction marketing is to position yourself as an expert in your field. This is the angle from which you should approach your LinkedIn profile. You should list job experience and other relevant information that helps paints a picture of you as the person to go to for information about your business opportunity. Depending on the industry your business is in, this may require some creativity on your part.

Build a LinkedIn Profile for Your Business

LinkedIn also provides an option to build a profile for your business. You will be able to submit a description, categorize it by industry, and even add a link to your business’ webpage. When people do a company search, your business will display in the results depending on the criteria they use. Be aware, though, that you must have an email address that is associated with the company.

Additionally, if you are in network marketing, be sure that the name of your company is in compliance with their rules. Some network marketing companies do not allow the parent name to be used in any marketing materials or websites you create.

Add Your Blog and Twitter Account to Your LinkedIn Profile

Adding your blog and Twitter account to your LinkedIn profile is easy and provides additional exposure to your other web properties. To add your blog to LinkedIn, sign in and then click on Profile. Click on “Add Application” and a list of items you can add to your LinkedIn profile will display.

If you have a WordPress blog, then select the WordPress option. For all other blogs, select the BlogLink option. On the next page, make sure the “Display on my profile” and “Display on LinkedIn homepage” is checked and then click Add Application. You will then be asked for your blog address and the application will automatically display the posts from your blog.

To add your Twitter account, go back to your profile. Make sure you are on the Edit My Profile tab. Click on the Add Twitter account option and fill out the information. Your latest tweets will then be displayed on your LinkedIn profile.

Customize Your Links

You probably already know that you can add links to your website and blog to your LinkedIn account. What you may not know is that you can customize the titles of those links to actually reflect the name of your site. On your profile, click Add Website. From the dropdown box select Other and in the box that appears enter the name of your website.

Add Recommendations from Clients or Business Partners

In marketing, social proof is very important. People take what others have to say about a person, company or product into consideration when making purchasing decisions. Connect with customers and other business associates on LinkedIn and ask for recommendation through the Ask for a Recommendation link (found on the Edit Profile page). These will display on your profile once they have been completed.

Add Presentations Using Slideshare or Google Presentations

Additional marketing on LinkedIn you can do is to upload a business presentation to your profile using a Slideshare account or Google Presentation. Since there is no video widget available on LinkedIn at this time, a presentation is the next best thing. You can make your own presentation or check with the network marketing parent company for presentations you can distribute.

Create Your Profile in Multiple Languages

If you are targeting a non-English speaking demographic, such as the Spanish community, you can create a LinkedIn profile in another language. This will make your profile more accessible to people who may have difficulty with your primary language. You will also extend your exposure on the network.

Now that you have your profile attractively put together, next week I’m going to detail some ways you can reach out to others on LinkedIn.

For more social media marketing tips, read other articles I’ve written about using social media outlets to build your business. If you want to take the next step and build a green business that lets you make money while saving the planet take an online tour of a profitable eco-friendly e-commerce business or contact me directly.

(photo credit: Mario Sundar)

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Between newspapers, education, business websites, personal blogs, social networking, and online magazines, the amount of information available on the internet continues to grow exponentially. Users turn to search engines to sift through it all and find the information they need to solve a problem they have. Search engine marketing is all about making sure your site gets listed within the first few pages of the search engine result for keywords that bring qualified prospects to your business.

Search enging marketing is a great way to increase website traffic.

Make no mistake, search engine marketing is complicated endeavor. In fact, a whole million dollar industry sprang up around the concept of optimizing web pages so that they rank well in the big three search engines. However, I’m going to share a few simple search engine marketing tips that will give your website the boost it needs to rank well and generate leads.

Choose Your Keywords Carefully – Keywords are the foundation of your search engine marketing strategy. So to say it is important that you choose the correct keywords to target is an understatement. You are going to have to do some research here and find out the keywords your customers are using to source the products, services, and information you are selling. Luckily there are several tools online that can help with that.

- Aaron Wall’s Keyword Tool will tell you how many times a specific keyword, and variations of that keyword, have been used for in all of the search engines.

- Google’s Keyword Tool will generate a list of keywords based on a starting word you input.

Keyword research is an art in and of itself which we will cover more in-depth in a later article.

Optimize Your Web Pages for Your Chosen Keywords – It is important that the search engines associate your website with the keywords you have picked out. Therefore, for your search engine marketing to be effective they need to show up in the right places on your web pages.

- The title of your articles should include the keyword, preferable within the first 4-5 words and you should use your keyword within the first few and last sentences of your article.

- The keyword should be sprinkled liberally throughout the written content on the page. You want to shoot for a keyword density of 2-3% but definitely no more than 5-7% of the total amount of words on the page. Over usage of keywords can get your website flagged as spam and kicked out of the search results.

- Video and audio need an accompanying text description. Search engines can’t parse video or audio so you need to add keyword rich descriptive text that tells the search engine what it’s all about.

- Images should contain keywords in the alt tags. Not only does this allow your images to get ranked in image search engines but it helps impaired users understand what the image is about. Special browser read the image text and tells the user that there is an image and what it is.

- The categories and tags you use should be keyword rich.

- The description meta tag of both your website and individual web pages should include a keyword rich narrative of what the user will find when they click through to your website. Search engines use this description on the search result pages.

Build a Portfolio of Keyword Rich Backlinks – Offsite optimization is just as important to search engine marketing as onsite optimization. When you or other people link back to your website, you want to make sure they use keyword rich anchor text. This also helps the search engine associate your web page with your targeted keyword.

For example, if you are using search engine marketing to rank high for the keyword ‘home based business’, you want to make sure that when your website is referenced that the keyword ‘home based business’ is used when linking to you. Search engines interpret these types of links as a vote that your website or web page is the best source of information on that particular topic.

This is, by no means, is an exhaustive tutorial on search engine marketing. However, using these tips will get you going in the right direction towards dominating the search engines. For more tips and information on using search engine marketing to grab prospects and explode sales, visit RockYourBusinessOnline.com.

(image credit: Edgeworks Limited)

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A good SEM strategy can send a constant flow of traffic from search engines.

The definition of search engine marketing, also known as SEM, is optimizing your website and internet marketing strategies so that your site ranks high in the search engine for targeted keywords. If you remember, keywords are those words and phrases your prospects use to find information related to the product and services you offer.

For example, people looking to start a home based business may enter the keywords, ‘start a business’ or ‘home based business ideas’. Unless the results they get have a lot of spam in them, most people will not continue past the first 1-3 pages of the search results. Therefore, the goal of your search engine marketing efforts is to get your website to rank within those first three pages, preferably the first page, for the keywords your target audience is using.

Now before you rush to your website and start loading it up with keywords there are a few things you should know about search engines that will make your search engine marketing more effective.

* Search Engines are Dynamic – Google, Bing, and Yahoo are selling a service just like you. They want to provide their users with the most relevant results for their search terms as they can. They are constantly evaluating web pages to make sure they are still good enough to be included in the search results pages. This means you must always be doing some kind of search engine marketing to maintain or improve your position in their indexes.

* Search Engines Don’t Rank Websites – Now this may seem like crazy talk especially after that long explanation on how search engines rank websites based on keywords. In all actuality, search engines rank individual web pages. This is a good thing because you can target a wide range of related keywords to maximize the amount of search engine traffic flowing to your site.

* All Keywords Are Not Created Equal – Ranking well for specific keywords is at the heart of your search engine marketing strategy. However, not all keywords are the same. Some keywords will send you prospects who are only doing research on a topic and others terms will send you people who are ready to buy or invest in the product you are selling. You need to rank for both and build a sales funnel that will send them to your “Buy Now” button.

In next week’s follow up article, I will go over some specific search engine marketing tips that will move your site to the front page of the search result for your targeted keywords. Search engine marketing is just one of a ton of internet marketing strategies I use to generate leads for my business. Get access to other effective ways of grabbing customers and exploding sales by heading on over to RockYourBusinessOnline.com and signing up for my free report on why 97% of home based businesses fail and what you can do about it.

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Here are a few suggestions for using social media marketing tools to increase website traffic:

Create Profiles at the Major Sites – Your first step to social media marketing success is to build profiles at the major social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. These sites provide a platform for you to network with people who may be interested in your business. Don’t forget to include links to your website. Facebook and LinkedIn specifically allow you to submit the RSS feed of your blog which will help generate website traffic from people visiting your profile.

Bookmark Yourself – Another social media marketing tactic to get traffic to your website is to submit links to your website and articles to social bookmarking sites such as Delicious, Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon and Blinklist. When submitting sites, be sure to write an attention grabbing headline and description as well as use general and specific tags to categorize the material so it appeals to your target audience.

Create a Traffic Jam to Your Website

Submit Content to Targeted Social Sites – There are a number of social media sites and forums that cater to specific audiences. Many of them allow you to submit original content that is useful to the members. Submitting posts that tap into the needs of the community is a good way to get more website traffic. Be sure to close your articles with a strong call to action that directs the reader to your website.

Use Social Media Marketing Widgets – Your website should be outfitted with bookmarking widgets that allows visitors to submit your site and content to their favorite social media websites. WordPress has a number of plugins such as Tweetmeme, Sexy Bookmarks and OnlyWire that visitors can use to promote your website and increase your website traffic. If you don’t have a blog, or don’t use WordPress, tools like ShareThis and AddThis will work on any website.

Interact with Prospects – Possible the best social media marketing tactic you can use to get traffic to your website is to socialize with people. While the previous suggestions will help you spread your name around, you’ll make yourself more memorable if you actually interact with the members of these websites. You don’t have to have to be active at all of them. Pick one or two that you enjoy using and just starting connecting with people. Show an interest in what they have going on. Not only will you convert a prospect but you’ll make a friend and that is what social networking is all about.

I have been using a number of social media marketing strategies to increase website traffic to my blog. To learn about other powerful techniques you can use to explode your traffic meter, visit RockYourBusinessOnline.com.

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Whether you are just learning how to market your business or you’ve been doing it for years, here are few tips for running a successful internet based marketing campaign that will attract customers to your business.

image courtesy of mbowlersr

Do offer a compelling reason to do business with you

The first question your customer will ask themselves when they come across your internet based marketing campaign is, ‘Why should I do business with you?’ You must provide them with a good reason otherwise they’ll just click on over to someone who will.

When crafting your offer, one thing to keep in mind is that your customer is not always motivated by price. People make purchases for many different reasons and only a few of those reasons deal with money. Entice your customers with an offer that benefits them in several ways and they’ll be happy to give you what you’re asking for.

Don’t launch without a plan

A good way to waste time and money is to just run out into the internet and begin haphazardly doing whatever seems like a good idea at the time. Not only is this the least effective way to run an internet based marketing campaign but you could end up sending out the wrong message and damage your reputation in the process.

Take a moment to think about the goals you want to achieve and carefully research the best internet marketing methods to use to accomplish those objectives.

Do track your results

An internet based marketing campaign is only successful if it gets results. And the best way to ensure you get results is by monitoring your progress. You can use something as simple as a spreadsheet program to track how well your marketing activities are doing at generating business. Drop anything that is either hindering your growth or just plain isn’t working.

Don’t get involved with social media to spam

Social media is all about the conversation. While a certain amount of advertising is acceptable, charging into a social networking website and immediately spamming members with your sales message is an unforgivable faux pas.

While your internet based marketing campaign must include time spent networking on social media sites, such as Twitter, focus first on building your reputation. Remember, most of the members on those sites have never heard of you. Make a good first impression by giving something of value to the community before presenting your sales message.

Running a successful internet based marketing campaign is really just a matter of using common sense and being consistent. Use the old adage of treating others the way you’d want to be treated and customers will be lined up at your door in no time.

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photo courtesy of webdivasuccess

Promoting your brand with a social media marketing campaign focused on addressing the needs of your target audience is an almost guaranteed way of driving customers to your business.

Before the internet came around, the only way to reach potential customers was to either advertise on the media outlets available at the time – i.e. newspapers, television and radio – or to directly connect with them by interrupting their day with a telemarketing call or approaching them on the street.

These days, however, social media has turned the sales process upside down and inside out. Customers hate being sold to and thus are resistant to the outdated sales tactics, such as cold calling, still being used today. Customers know what they need and use social media to seek out people they can trust to help them. Therefore running a social media marketing campaign has become a necessity for successfully attracting these customers to you.

Social media marketing is the art of promoting yourself and your brand on social networking websites. It is different from other forms of marketing because social media is dynamic and offers the opportunity for quick success. Social media marketing is also inexpensive and gives you the ability to leverage the popularity of the social networking site to get your brand in front of a large audience.

In order to use social media marketing effectively, you must first have a brand to promote. Without a properly formed brand, your marketing campaign will be unfocused and may fail to attract the customers you want.

Your brand is your story on a bumper sticker. It is the image that pops up in your customer’s mind when they hear your name. Take advantage of the innumerable resources on the internet to help you figure out what your brand is and why people should be attracted to it.

A second necessary component to successful social media marketing is knowing who your target market is. Though it sounds counter-intuitive, you don’t want everybody in the world to be your customer. You only need the people who want, and can afford, to do business with you. Focusing on only attracting those in your target market will make it easier for you to design a campaign that reels them in.

It goes without saying that promoting your brand with social media marketing requires that you be active on social networking websites. You’ll want to focus on working a few popular sites rather try to be active on all of them. You don’t want to spread yourself too thin and once people get to know you, they’ll spread your message to those other sites for you anyway.

The bulk of your social media marketing efforts will focus on interacting with the members of the site. You want to actively engage your target market by sharing useful information that is in line with their needs as well as respond to things that they share on site.

Last but not least, make sure your brand’s physical presence is consistent wherever it appears. This means the information about you should be the same on each site including image you use to represent yourself and you should customize your social media profiles to reflect your brand wherever possible.

Social media marketing is a tool that no internet marketing strategy should be without. Just remember to focus on addressing the needs of your target audience and you will find your business overflowing with customers in no time.

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