LinkedIn is a great way to market yourself as a professional. It’s not much use for a business as a whole, but if you’re a freelancer, contractor or independent consultant it’s one of the most important digital business cards you can have, and you neglect it at your peril. Despite being around for a while, I’m amazed at how some people just fail at using their LinkedIn profiles to sell themselves.Before I make a list, there’s just one thing I want to say about LinkedIn - it is not Facebook. That means that Facebook rules and customs do not apply. You want to be connected to everyone you’ve ever met, and everyone they’ve ever met - because you never know when one of those connections will turn into a business opportunity.
Twitter is undoubtedly a useful tool for promoting just about any business, but it’s application needs to be properly understood in the context of your business. Here are a few tips for using Twitter to promote your business.
1.Don’t underestimate Twitter’s usefulness
If you are in an extremely specialized niche market, don’t expect to suddenly have thousands of Twitter followers. Rather focus on entering the circles that are relevant to your business. Identify “power tweeters” in your area, and engage with them. Tweet at them, mention them, etc. Find trending topics relevant to your area and participate in these discussions.
social bookmarking is the practice of posting links to articles and web pages to various “link aggregator” or social bookmark sites, such as Digg, Stumbleupon and so on. Social bookmarking sites rise and fall in popularity fairly quickly, but they generally have a few common features:
“Seeding” is the practice of carefully distributing content online through various channels, in the hope that it will become “viral” and be spread of its own accord. If this content is an advertising campaign cleverly disguised as a joke or some other kind of content that is noteworthy, the company that created it can reap huge benefits.Twitter is uniquely suited to seeding viral content, because of its unique “trending” feature. A trending topic on Twitter can be seen by everyone - not just the people in your immediate network. This means that all you have to do to get tweets about your “topic” (for lack of a better word) seen by millions of people is reach a critical mass where that topic begins to “trend”.
Fiverr is a great website where people can share ideas and ways of doing things on the Internet for a nominal amount of money. The offers you find on the site are helpful, fun and some quite extraordinary things, the list is almost endless. This includes how to create a cheap and cheerful background for your Twitter page.There are some great ideas which are very simple to get hold of by just contacting the person who is willing to sell you the background they have on offer. Many of the backgrounds are done in Photoshop CS4 so the quality of the images is usually very good.
MSN commands almost 15% of all searches although some sources believe that the figure is somewhat less than this. It does however have a loyal audience which is unique to it. This fact is often ignored by many SEO specialists who tend to lean towards Google or Yahoo!But if a serious SEO campaign is planned then MSN cannot be ignored as it has less competition to cope with. Rankings will be higher using less popular keywords because of this fact. Traffic to a site may benefit from enough visitors to make it a worthwhile option.The same common rules when optimizing with MSN as with other search engines, in order to gain a higher rank with a search engine and it can be reasoned that if a site ranks well in either Google or Yahoo!, it will rank just as well in MSN. But the opposite, sadly is not the case making it vital to keep an eye on Google ranking at all times.
1. Have a profile that has lots of SEO keywordsThere are over a billion people searches a year on LinkedIn. This means they are searching for keywords, different types of people, positions, and brands. Your profile should be littered with keywords that relate to you and your business. These keywords should be the ones that search for to find you. They should range from broad to highly specific and targeted. A good place to put these besides your bio is in the Specialties category.Think in terms of SEO here, content is King. The more keywords you have the better chances you have of being found. This goes for an internet search as well as a LinkedIn search. Beyond getting you more visibility on LinkedIN it will also get more click through traffic from the internet.
There have been countless trends popping up and subsiding on the Internet since it first broke out in a big way during the mid 1990s. Truthfully, it's hard to recall everything that didn't quite pan out. We're just so inundated with viral and digital these days that it's really hard to believe anything else existed before, and social networking has been the new king for a few years.Social networking is used by millions upon millions of people around the world. Sites like FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter, Linkedin, Hubpages and hundreds more have made it so everyone, whether a regular Joe looking to connect with other people or a businessperson looking for customers, can use these sites to market themselves. The advantages of using social networking are numerous. It would take a full length novel to fully describe just how essential social networking can be to your Internet business. So, to keep it short, we'll just cover a few of the genre's most flattering aspects and how they can relate to big business on your end.
When you think of home business opportunities, you may immediately get a picture in your head of an envelope licking scam or a pyramid scheme. These ideas sell in huge numbers under the false premise that there's a magic formula to making money online. Well, there are surely ways to make money via the Internet, but there's certainly no magic involved. In order to create a successful online business, you basically have to make your own opportunity. Everyone wishes that there was some golden opportunity out there, where you could double-click your mouse and have cash flow into your PayPal account it just doesn't work like that. The brutal truth about the Internet situation is that the real opportunities haven't changed much at all. The best business ideas today have been the best business ideas for nearly a decade. The only real factor that's changed now is the marketing possibilities via social networking giants like Digg, HubPages, FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter and YouTube.
Networking has been through a lot of ups and downs over the past few decades. Before the Internet came along and took business to an entirely new level, networking was catching a lot of grief from people who couldn't find success. They would toss out business cards at random, buy advertising space for inferior products, and expect to become rich in their respective market. Most failed drastically and opened the door for more qualified contenders. These beginning networkers insisted that networking was a wasted effort. However, the Internet has changed that completely. Now, essentially, you cannot operate a successful business without networking.Networking is not all about advertising your product. That's the first mistake people make. Networking is more about getting your name out there, meeting people, making connections, and tapping into markets using both your person and your business.
