Buzz Marketing, aka Social Media Marketing

Buzz Marketing (also known as social media marketing) includes blogs, community sites (i.e., MySpace, Facebook), RSS feeds, social bookmarking, social news sites, Web 2.0 and video (YouTube). These are just a few of the methods used and it all falls under the label of Web 2.0.

If you’re new to internet marketing, these methods may seem overwhelming to try to learn but it’s a critical component to your online success. Why? Because Web 2.0 is an important part of your search engine optimization.

First, Web 2.0 gets backlinks to your site and will increase traffic to your site within your chosen niche market as fast as possible, especially if it’s one of the more competitive ones like internet marketing, health, fitness, etc.

However, if your niche is small, it won’t take you long to get to the top of the search engine heap using buzz marketing. Let’s take the example of the cornhole niche. Since there aren’t that many cornhole players out there, your site can be the "authority site" if you provide good information and resources.

Even though it’s a small niche, cornhole players are known to spend money on games and accessories so don’t discount the value of a small niche. If there are 1000 cornhole players out there and your site is the one everyone knows about, then all those 1000 players will be coming to you to get what they need to play cornhole!

How it Works

The basic idea behind buzz or social marketing is to build online "buzz" about your site so that search engine spiders will visit and index it. Remember how important backlinks are to your site's search engine optimization? That's what we're doing here with links from Web 2.0 sites. We're building backlinks!

One of the first steps you can take is to start a blog. Search engines really like blog content because it changes frequently and it's usually original content.

You can start a blog for free on blogger.com, wordpress.com or typepad.com, just to name a few. All the templates are included and all you need to worry about is writing it!

These types of blogs are publicly-hosted blogs. That means that they have their own web server that hosts the domain. Your blog is simply a sub-domain of the main blog.

It is for this reason that I would not put any commercial content on the blog you build on one of these public sites.They don't like too much commercial content on their blogs (some will allow a little bit of ads) so you might end up spending a lot of time on your content and placing ads but then one day, you may log in and your blog will no longer exist because they've decided that your blog is too commercial. All that work for nothing!

It's best to follow their rules in regard to ads. And you should treat this blog as a way to send traffic to your other site or privately-hosted blog, where you can do whatever you want because you're hosting it yourself (i.e. paying for a web host account).

After starting your public blog, make sure you open up a Twitter account and Facebook account so that you can let your friends know about your latest post.

Once you set up your Twitter account, do a search for people who are interested in your niche and folow them. You never know what you might learn from following someone else in your field. You'll also be networking and this could always result in joint ventures down the road.

Same idea applies to Facebook. Find people and friends that are interested in your niche. You might also use it for your personal life as well and that's okay. Just remember that your friends and family are going to see what you're up to and that may be uncomfortable for some people.

With Facebook, you can also join groups of people who are interested in the same niche that you are involved in.

With both of these communities, the idea is to form relationships with customers and colleagues. Commenting on other people's comments is a good way to start but always contribute meaningful content. Nothing is more annoying than a comment that says "nice post" !

Next Level of Social Marketing

The next level for effective social marketing is to go to the social news sites and promote your blog posts and web site pages.

Every time you post something new, go to the social news sites like Digg.com, del.ici.ous.com, and mixx.com and submit a link to your story.

This can be very time-consuming so one site I've used that makes this process a little more streamlined is Socialmarker . Use the free option where you enter all the information for your site and then click on the sites where you have an account and submit your links. Otherwise, you'll have to do this submission over and over again. Not fun.

Sometimes I've found socialmarker to be a little buggy so there's an option I use when I am in a hurry.

You can insert a social news site plug-in that you simply click to share your content on all these sites. If you have accounts set up, it's easy enough to just click on that and your content will also be shared that way.  

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