Social Networking and Blog Spider Webs » “social networking spider webs”

How do I promote my business using social media marketing.

mark — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 17:21:47 +0000

I recently received this email message from a friend of mine named Tyler. Tyler is a personal trainer with a passion for fitness. He wants to expand his business and get his message out to people using “social media marketing”. Tyler asks some great questions, so I thought I would use this as a good time to answer the same questions that many small business owners also have.

My answers are at the end of Tyler’s email message……

“Hi Mark,

I revisited your website on Social Networking Spider Webs and very excited to get my Spider Web going! I created a blog especially on my site for it. I have talked with you in the past about setting one up. I am very excited to use your information here you are sending out via email list. I just have one question before I begin my Social Networking Spider Web, but a little back story. I got a bad taste in my mouth for SEO after an SEO dude that I hired got my website banned. Not sure quite what he did, but I undid all that and got my website off the Google ban. So that experience has kind of disillusioned me a bit, but I am journeying down this road again and would like to make sure I do it right

So I have a website: http://flowlifefitness.com

and set up my blog at: http://flowlifefitness.com/fittoflow

My first question is this. When I start my Social Networking Spider Web is it okay to sign up on all the important Social Networks that I should be on and create separate user accounts for my Website and my Blog at with the different email addresses that I have? I know the Blog is the center of this Social Networking Spider Web. It’s not too much to do both? Google won’t penalize me for this?

And the second question is this… I want to build up my blog very big to be a legitimate source of info for fitness and really bring in traffic. If I sign up my blog under the url http://fittoflow.com instead of the http://flowlifefitness.com/fittoflow with ‘fittoflow.com’ still linked within flowlifefitness.com will flowlifefitness.com get all the traffic and google points? Because that is the website I want to boost on the Search Engines. Or is there a way to go about doing this?

Thanks!

::Tyler”

Tyler, these are great questions so I will give you my opinions. These are short answers just to get you started down the right road. There are a lot more things to do besides my starter answers below……

But first, here are some things to do.

Go to http://socialprofitformula.com and watch Don Crowther’s 3 videos on social media marketing using his social profit formula. They are free (it will cost you your email address).
You can use Onlywire and Ping.fm to simplify your social networking efforts. Once you set up Onlywire and Ping.fm you can syndicate your content and articles to the web’s top social bookmarking and networking sites with a single button click. Set up 5 sites per week on Onlywire and Ping.fm. Go to http://onlywire.com and http://ping.fm and sign up for your free accounts. BIG HINT: Sign up for either RoboForm (www.roboform.com/php/land.php?affid=m1953&frm=frame10) or LastPass (https://lastpass.com/) to help you manage all the Usernames, Passwords and demographic data you will need to enter when you sign up for all the Social Bookmark and Networking sites. Either of these tools will make your job a lot easier. Both offer Free versions.
Go to http://markvschwartz.com/168/google-profiles-creating-your-social-networking-spiderweb-tip-08/, http://markvschwartz.com/174/live-profiles-creating-your-social-networking-spiderweb-tip-09/, http://markvschwartz.com/177/yahoo-profiles-%e2%80%93-creating-your-social-networking-spiderweb-%e2%80%93-tip-10/ to see how to set up a google, yahoo and live profile.
Go to my Youtube at http://www.youtube.com/user/markvschwartz1#p/u/0/qYcjRWFvLiA to see a video on setting up Onlywire and your blog spider web.

Now, the answers to your questions.
Having a blog attached to your primary website, i.e. http://socialnetworkingspiderweb.com/blog/ is great for SEO and you will not be penalized by the search engines.
When you sign up for all of these social networking accounts I recommend that you create a second email account to use for all of them. You will/may be getting a lot of email and you don’t want it to clog up your primary or business email account. You can use the same email address for all accounts you set up. You can also use the same Username, etc. Vary your profile information a bit fo each of them.
Set up 5 accounts per week. Only sign up for accounts that are relevant to your niche. Example, don’t sign up for a teenage, girlie social network if you are promoting Harley Davidsons.
Install the Onlywire WordPress plug in to your primary blog. http://flowlifefitness.com/fittoflow
Put links from your blog to your website and to website to your blog. Don’t just link to the main page, link to sub-pages and posts.
After you build out your Onlywire and Ping.fm accounts (Ping also has a wordpress plugin), create your google, live and yahoo profiles. Then find some other social networks in your niche or business networks to create accounts on (like Biznik) to help promote your main site and blog.
Set up some free blogs on wordpress.com, blogger, typepad and post articles to them with links back to your main site and blog. Try to make unique, not duplicate content, by re-writing articles/posts from your main blog. Use KEYWORDS in the name for your blog. e.g. if you want to be found as a “personal trainer seattle” or “personal training capitol hill” these should be the names for your satellite blogs.
If I sign up my blog under the url http://fittoflow.com instead of the http://flowlifefitness.com/fittoflow with ‘fittoflow.com’ still linked within flowlifefitness.com will flowlifefitness.com get all the traffic and google points?

If you want promote your main website then set that one up in your social accounts. Most sites will let you set up more than one so you can also promote your primary blog. You should have your primary website and blog together. i.e. flowlifefitness and flowlifefitness/blog.

If you are going to set up other URLs, like fittoflow.com, I recommend you set it up as a wordpress blog in the root directory. Skip the website portion and have it a blog only. If you can have it on a different web server you will have a different IP address which the search engines like.

So these are my short answers and by no means is a comprehensive list of everything you can do.

One major thing most people miss is the use of keywords in their URL names, free blog names, and articles. You need to start with 4-5 keywords that you want people to find you by. As I mentioned earlier, “personal trainer seattle” or “personal training capitol hill” (geo targeting). The more specific your keywords (and URL names, etc.) the higher you will rank in the search engines. Just using a keyword like “personal fitness” you will have too much competition.

…..I hope this helps.

How do I promote my business using social media marketing. is a post from: Social Networking and Blog Spider Webs

Tags: "social networking spider webs", "social networking spider webs" Tips Series, Blog Spider Webs, google, media marketing, small business owners, social networks, spider web, spider webs

Twitter – To Me It’s Garbage, but I Guess I’m a Minority

mark — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 00:10:45 +0000

Hello, Mark Schwartz here, And I can’t believe I am writing about Twitter.

Twitter is a very popular micro-blog social site, where its users set up profiles about themselves and then network with others.

It is very similar to Facebook. People “subscribe” to your profile, and then receive an update from you every time you make a post to your profile. Imagine, if you are selling something, how nice it would be to automatically notify everyone at once about a new product! Well that seems to be the basic allure for most people. It seems that 90% of all the tweets I receive are nothing but sales pitches.

My personal opinion of Twitter is that it’s nothing but a big SPAM festival. But, there are many people that swear buy it so it deserves mentioning. I hate to say it, but I really only use Twitter to help me build my Blog and Social Networking Spider Web. I have little use for all the Spam i get.

Here are a few things about Twitter that may be interesting….. You probably already have a twitter account, but I suggest using a twitter name that says who you are or what you do. Many social media experts suggest not doing this and using your own name so that you don’t seem like you are out to sell something. However, I have found that having a name that includes my profession, allows me to be found by more people doing their own searches. I have gotten many of my followers because of my name alone ( I have six Twitter accounts with differing names and purposes).

I have never minded if someone has a professional profile as long as they are not trying to sell me. I quickly unfollow anyone who is sending out updates that are constant sales pitches. Some people spend days following interesting links and even smiling at someone’s every tweet. Personally, I don’t have time to read someone’s tweet that their dog just ate their kid’s breakfast, etc.

If you are an active Twitter user, load your tweets so that others can find you easily. One way I have found to do this is to be sure to add at least one tweet a day with hashtags for your key words. If you are tweeting about social networking, put #socialnetworking at the end. If you are tweeting about an event, put that there with a tag. When other people search those key words, your words will come up.

Here are a few Twitter related tools that I use. Again, I am not a big Twitter user, but these are kind of cool.

1. Social Oomph – Let’s you schedule tweets across all your Twitter accounts, send Direct Messages to all your followers. Vastly improve your productivity on Twitter. The f*ree version is what I use and here is a link => http://www.socialoomph.com/86849.html

2. Twitbacks – Let’s you create free Twitter backgrounds in less than 2 minutes. (Well that’s what their website says, but you know how it goes – it takes me longer than 2 minutes). You can help to brand yourself on Twitter by creating your very own Twitter background. Here’s the link => http://twitbacks.com

3. Twellow – Twellow is a directory of public Twitter accounts, with hundreds of categories and search features to help you find people who matter to you. You can set yourself up in their directory and hopefully people will find you. Here’s the link => http://www.twellow.com/

Of course there are many, many more Twitter tools. Do a search on Twitter Tools and you’ll find a zillion of them.

P.S. Twitter uses nofollow links so you will not get any SEO juice or backlinks from tweeting.

Twitter – To Me It’s Garbage, but I Guess I’m a Minority is a post from: Social Networking and Blog Spider Webs

Tags: "social networking spider webs" Tips Series, mark schwartz, network with others, spider web, tweets, twellow, twitbacks, twitter

LinkedIn – A Powerful Way to Generate Traffic

mark — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 23:09:27 +0000

LinkedIn Can Be One of your Greatest Traffic Sources

LinkedIn is often mentioned as a powerful social networking tool and a significant tool for enterprise professionals, employers, and job seekers. What isn’t often mentioned is the site’s capability to easily drive traffic to your site.

LinkedIn can be a powerful source for driving visitors to your blog and therefore should be part of your strategy in building out your “Social Networking Spider Web”.

In some respects, LinkedIn visitors might even be more precious than visitors from other social networks and sites. That is simply because of the generally professional nature of LinkedIn itself.

If you contemplate that LinkedIn could possibly be one of your biggest traffic sources you should you put enough effort into cultivating it as such.

Once you register, put together a complete profile following the steps listed below (you can come back and do some of them as your time permits.)

1. Complete your profile
2. Improve and grow your personal connections
3. Add and Customize your web site links
4. Answer questions
5. Update your status on a regular basis
6. Join area of interest groups
7. Put up feedback in groups
8. Add RSS feeds to groups
9. Create a group
10. Add the LinkedIn weblog software to your profile
11. Put your LinkedIn profile badge and links on your other Social Network sites, e.g. your Google Profile

LinkedIn is also now offering integration with Microsoft Outlook. So if you use Outlook I suggest taking a look at getting that set up as it will make doing things on LinkedIn easier in some areas.

The thing I like most about LinkedIn, are the groups. Go to the top where it says Groups and click there…go to “find a group” at the top right and do a key word search for groups that interest you. Hint – set up daily updates so you don’t get overwhelmed with email messages.

With Linked In, you’ll be able to promote merchandise, find new customers, build your brand and yourself and continue to build your Social Networking Spider Web.

LinkedIn – A Powerful Way to Generate Traffic is a post from: Social Networking and Blog Spider Webs

Tags: "social networking spider webs" Tips Series, linkedin, networking tool, Social Network, social networks, traffic sources

And Here’s More Info on Using Social Bookmarking to Build Your Spider Web

mark — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 22:31:37 +0000

What’s with all this Social Bookmarking Stuff? Building a Social Networking Spider Web

mark — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 22:27:20 +0000

SOCIAL BOOKMARKING

Hello, Mark Schwartz here with another installment on building your Social Networking Spider Web.

It started with Myspace, then Facebook, then Youtube, and now its social bookmarking. All fall into the Web 2.0 genre. The use of these sites for SEO purposes and simply to get massive exposure to your websites and blogs has become the latest trend in internet marketing.

Too me, they are a fundamental part of building a Social Networking Spider Web and driving massive amounts of traffic to my core blog.

Have you ever bookmarked a webpage in your browser so you can go back to it later? They allow you to save bookmarks online and Tag/Categorize them with keywords instead of saving them as bookmarks in the favorite’s list of your browser. This is what social bookmarking is, except everyone can see what you bookmark. Note: Social Bookmarking is different than Social Networking, which we will cover in the next post.

A big reason that savvy business owners and “seo experts” spend so much time and effort on social bookmarking is because of the power of Web 2.0. For instance, Google, Bing and Yahoo absolutely love all of these Web 2.0 sites.

Here is the main reason why you need to have a social bookmarking campaign. Google puts a lot of emphasis on one way back links to your website to help determine its page rank. Not only does Google look at the number of links but they look at the quality of the links. There is a transfer of page rank that occurs from the higher ranking site to yours. Social bookmarking is one piece of your overall campaign, is a simple traffic generation technique and is a very “low cost seo” tactic.

It is free to sign up at the popular social bookmarking networks, and it doesn’t take too long to bookmark your site. Bookmarking a site or blog is easy, but to consistently bookmark all of your new blog posts does take some effort. Also, setting up the bookmarking sites for the first time does take an effort. But, once you set them up you are good to go.

When your site receives a bookmark, it shows the search engines that people are talking about, and interested in your site. This is a great way to get a ton of high quality backlinks and get “top rankings”.

Here are just a few of the top social bookmarking sites:

•   http://del.icio.us
•   http://digg.com
•   http://furl.net
•   http://simpy.com
•   http://redditt.com
•   http://kaboodle.com
•   http://netvouz.com
•   http://fark.com

And the list goes on and on……..

What’s with all this Social Bookmarking Stuff? Building a Social Networking Spider Web is a post from: Social Networking and Blog Spider Webs

Tags: "seo experts", "social networking spider webs" Tips Series, bookmarking sites, internet marketing, mark schwartz, page rank, social bookmarking spider webs, spider web, traffic generation

Social Networking and Blog Spider Webs » “social networking spider webs”

How do I promote my business using social media marketing.

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