How do I promote my business using social media marketing.
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.
