I don’t like to label myself a social media ‘guru’ but I am in the trenches getting it done every day. Here’s my strategy in a nutshell – 1. Build a community of fans using social media by providing useful information, and 2. Eventually monetize a percentage of that community via your products or services. One of my main online businesses is in e-learning, specifically guitar lessons online.

1. Build a community of fans/customers online.

How do I build a community? I go where most people are these days: YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. My YouTube videos have 700,000 views and over 2200 subscribers. I have a Facebook fan page (separate from my personal profile) where I encourage people to become fans. I only put certain information on my Facebook fan page to make joining more attractive (new lessons, updates on upcoming live events, etc).

I also tweet useful information and links to relevant and interesting information. I’m now doing live Ustream.tv streaming video lessons/Q&A sessions. All of this leads to my Online Guitar Coaching site.

Let’s assume you’re a small to mid-size business/entrepreneur who doesn’t want to spend a ton of money just on branding (ie. getting awareness of you or your company). No matter what you are doing you need to be creating a dialogue between your company and your customers/fans. Customers want to be involved and listened to, and are tired of fighting against the corporate walls. But I believe that every person has the potential to build a brand around their knowledge or experience, and that they can monetize this brand.

So we build up fans on a Facebook fan page and add interesting and useful content to the page such as videos, articles, live events as well as encouraging interaction among the community by getting them to post things, contribute to discussions and commenting on the posts.

I create content via video, articles, blog posts and upload them to my websites, YouTube (and all other video sharing sites via TubeMogul). I then tweet the links (via Ping.fm that sends the update to all my social networks). When people respond I get email notifications so that I continue the conversation.

2. Conversion to paying customers

Here’s the basic assumption – if you have a large, engaged community of followers for your business, some percentage of those will turn into paying customers. Up until now this concept was usually applied online to email marketing – build a big list of people who subscribe to your email newsletter and sell things to them over time. You can even segment this list into ‘freebie seekers’, paying customers, etc by moving them into different groups when they purchase something from you.

So when people are getting great content on the Facebook fan page, some of that content will be links to your own website, blog and you can link to your products or services in the blog content, have certain menu items (Consulting, Coaching, Products/Services), or put things in your sidebars.

What I also do with my membership site is provide teaser content. This is where I might show half of my lesson then the second half is protected and requires a login.

Think of all these social networks as tentacles leading back to your main website. A much more subtle approach than beating people over the head with advertising.

Measurement/ROI

Let’s be honest – ongoing measurement of your ongoing social media efforts is very difficult, especially if you are also using advertising and other methods to promote your business. If you launch a short ad or PR campaign of course you might see a spike in sales or email signups, etc. But at a bare minimum you can measure the number of clicks for each link you post on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. And you can track sales as to where they are coming from (your social networks or other places). If you haven’t used social media you can record a baseline of sales before using social media and compare it to results over time after using social media.

Brand monitoring/Customer Service
Other possible strategies, especially for larger existing companies, are brand monitoring and customer service using Twitter. The idea is you search for mentions of your company or products (eg. Westjet, Comcast, BestBuy, etc) and help people that are frustrated (often diffusing the situation).

For some businesses, they need to justify the time and expense of using social media marketing. For my business, it’s the main way I market my business. So less about advertising and more about engaging your customers. For more information on ROI you can read this article on Social Media ROI.

For skeptics
If you still don’t see the value in social networking for business, keep in mind that money flows where attention goes, and if everyone is on these social networks that’s where your business should be. Think about where you would create ads to market your business in the past – on tv, radio, newspaper, magazines. Why? Because that’s where people are, that’s what they are paying attention to. Well now there are spending more and more time online so doesn’t it make sense to follow them there?

If you have questions/comments please post below so I can add to this post.

Whether you have a  local ‘brick and mortar’ business or are strictly web-based you will want to use the Internet to obtain leads for your business. In order to do this you need to get traffic to your website. Many business often tell me ‘I want to be on page one for Google search’. This is a great goal to have, but the question I usually ask in treturn is ‘For what keywords’?

Many of us will put up a website and describe our products or services, features and benefits, portfolio, contact us page, testimonials/clients page and some of the more astute of us will even create a blog. But most of us have no idea what keywords we should be targeting and if we do we often don’t do the things that will get us ranked for those keywords.

1. Pick some keywords you would like to be ranked for and find related keywords – write down some keywords that you can think of for your market. Use the Google keyword tool to find related keywords
2. Find out if enough people are searching for them – look at search volumes for those keywords
3. Find out if these keywords have ‘commercial value’ – use the Google advertising rates to determine which keywords are worth more to existing businesses
4. Analyze the competition – find out how many webpages you’re competing with, and how strongly they are ranked based on a variety of factors (domain age, backlinks, HTML tags, etc). See where the weaknesses are and where you can get ranked more easily.
5. Choose the optimum keywords and get ranked for them – start a campaign using these optimal keywords (fairly high number of searches but reasonable competition), getting backlinks to your webpages from other websites (via articles, videos, social networks), and so on
6. Create a local Google business listing – a little known feature of Google! By creating a local listing for your business, you can often get on page on very quickly, and your business will be located on a Google map in the search results making it easy to find.

This can be done manually by using software such as the free Google keyword tool, but I use a powerful software tool called Market Samurai that integrates everything into one package and speeds up the process tremendously, especially for competitive analysis which can be tedious. For more information and assistance you can contact me.

Being from Calgary I’m excited to let you know that Richard Branson, Stephen Covey, Dalai Lama and many others (including internet marketers Frank Kern, Eban Pagan and Alex Mandossian) will be in Calgary, Alberta from September 30 to October 3, 2009 for a four day conference of business and life balance. Go here for more details about Engage Today.

When the Internet was fairly new, entrepreneurs would throw up a website that provided some contact info. Then they might add some information about their services, rates, clients, etc. That helped to reduce the number of questions that customers would ask. Instead you could send them to your website. So it was basically an online brochure

Today a website is much more important even for ‘offline’ businesses (typical brick and mortar businesses). Customers search for local businesses using Google and other search engines, much more than yellow pages these days. Will they find you?

Google and other search engines use the content on your website to determine when to send people to you. When people tell me ‘I want to be on the first page of Google’, I often ask them ‘Ok, but for what keyword phrases?’ You need to spend some time discovering the keywords that people are typing in to search for your business. And then put these keywords in your content which doesn’t always happen naturally.

For example if you are in the document serving business, do people type in ‘process servers’, ‘document server’, ”affidavit or ‘I need a restraining order’?

Getting found on Google is much more than just putting up a website and submitting your site to them. Google uses a series of criteria to determine how to rank your site. It also uses ‘backlinks’ which are links that other sites have that point to your site. These can be considered ‘votes’ for your site, and the more popular the other site is that links to you, the better you will be ranked as well. You can get links yourself by posting articles that contain your link to EzineArticles.com for example.

To set up an inexpensive website that you can easily maintain yourself, as well as building email lists, shopping carts or membership sites, please see our internet consulting services.