Many people claim that Technorati is beneficial to any new blog. Its credibility to rank blogs is acknowledged by a large number of bloggers, advertisers and web users.  The sizable population single-handily has the power to influence.

I have gathered enough information on the benefits my blog can receive from signing up into the Technorati website, so I recently made the decision to list my blog. Here is my token, RH7Z7B5VTVRR. I hope that Technorati picks it up soon to verify that this is my claim and, therefore, index my blog. These are some of the reasons why I think Technorati can be profitable to blogging:

1. Technorati is a major search engine that specifically tracks blogs. This suggests that Technorati has the capability to drive highly targeted traffic to blogs.  With over 100 million blogs indexed, Google considers Technorati major enough that it set up a contender to it, the Google Blog Search. To rank high in Technorati search results, it is important to use the appropriate tags in unique blog contents as tags help classify search results.

2. Technorati is one approach any blogger can utilize for free to gain greater blog exposure to widen its readership base. It doesn’t cost anything to sign up into Technorati. Getting your blog indexed by Technorati means your content can be read and redistributed by their large community, any of whom can be likely subscribers to your feed.

3. Technorati is a blog content collection authority. Every new post made by each blog that is registered in Technorati immediately gets indexed to its directory listing and included in any web search made for any specified tags typed in.  This real-time synchronization of over 100 million registered blog contents ensures that any Technorati search always results in up-to-date online information. To the web consumer, this makes Technorati a valuable resource site for the latest information on just about any given topic.

4. Technorati is an influential community website that can help establish your blog social standing in the blogosphere and the entire web simply by endorsing your blog as informative and accurate to your niche market. Technorati determines your blog’s authority primarily by the number of incoming links to your blog in a six month period. The higher your Technorati authority, the more your blog can be considered as worth reading, worth sharing and worth mentioning by the blogging community. One way to boost your Technorati authority is to produce valuable content that other bloggers would want to link to.

5. Technorati is a blog ranking system which the blogging population and many advertisers recognize as weighty.  Blogs are rated through link building and through popular vote. A large number of bloggers and advertisers use the Technorati Top 100 Most Linked-to Blogs and the Technorati Top 100 Most Favorite lists to gauge blog popularity and authority.

Getting high traffic leads to greater exposure for your blog, this then results to a wider readership base. Many blog readers imply popularity, which then makes the blog appealing to advertisers.  That’s the profit-making effect of Technorati to any blog.

“Business is like a wheelbarrow–it stands still until someone pushes it.” Anonymous

A business strategy is the game plan for any business. An effective line of attack guides the business direction clearly. From the point of launch, to the moment the business levels off, encounters setbacks, and gains momentum again or pushes off to another direction, the business strategy is at work non-stop. It’s a working plan, a thought out strategy, you constantly refer to when making your business decisions and solutions. It’s Plan A, Plan B, Plan C — which one will you play out during specific conditions in your business? Without a business strategy as a guide, you will lose direction. Simply put, your business success or failure, whether you win the game or not, largely depends on the business strategy you as business owner put at play.

Like any trained athlete, I know not to get into the game without a game plan. I know I had to have a planned direction to maneuver my business or else I’ll fail. There is no perfect game plan at the onset of any business. Just like coaching, you review stats and tweak the game plan from time to time according to what’s working and what’s not.Here are a few basic rules I considered in setting up my own business game plan:

1. Outline the business as clearly as you can at the start.

• Be precise about your business idea and research your market thoroughly
• Take on the business mindset, know what challenges to expect in running your own business

2. Form your short-term and long-term goals

• Remember to be S.M.A.R.T. (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-directed) when setting goals
• Plan short-term for the quick-fixes and immediate deadlines. Plan long-term for your bottom line.

3.  Set your action plans, giving attention to the income-generating aspects of the business:

• Marketing (traffic-generating) strategies to make use of
• Advertising plan to promote the business
• Selling plan for finding leads, bringing in actual buyers, increasing revenue

4. Check your business progress.

• Implement your action plans, then measure and correct or adjust after that.
• Be ready to act on any setbacks. Time is critical in business, the sooner delays and drawbacks are dealt with, the better the chances for the business to get back on track.

I manage my business like going into a game — all geared up with a game plan, with several plan options on stand-by in case I need to change the game up at anytime. Each day, I go in for the play, put my best foot forward, change up the game plan when called for, and play the game all over again.

Video marketing and blogging is an extra winning combination to educate, entertain and connect to get effective online branding, prospecting, marketing, building expertise and growing your network.

Videos don’t need to be recorded with expensive equipment. Quality is as much about the information the video contains and not the superficial effects. Good quality videos are just like high-quality written content. To be effective as a marketing tool, video content will need to be well thought-out, adequately informative and convincing.

Think through the following guidelines prior to recording:

1) Target to your market.

• Who is your target audience? For your message to hit home it needs to be heard by receptive listeners.
• What do they need? What information can you give them in relation to your brand message?
• How do you connect to them? Your online personality will need to be expressed here.

2) Give attention to value entertainment rather than selling.

• What is the purpose of your video? What do you want your audience to do after giving them some information you think they need? Your message needs to be convincing enough to be able to convert your audience.
• How is your video valuable to your audience? What improvement, what help, what profit, what benefit do they gain from watching it?
• While you need to sound convincing and powerful, you need to do it with good-humor, holding their attention the entire short-span of your video.

3) Highlight audience participation.

Effective marketing values the customer. To add value to their viewing, get your audience involved. Make them feel that they are a part of something. Videos are interactive by nature so it’s easier to keep the communication two-way.

• Solicit viewer response by asking them to rate your video, leave comments, suggest opinions. It would be way cooler if they reply back to you in videos.
• Feature a blog contest to get your audience to share their own videos on a common theme.
• Ask them to submit lists of “Top Videos” or “Favorite Videos” of most helpful online business tools, topics, related blogs, etc.
• For more effective product endorsements, create videos of  live customer testimonials of people who have actually used your products

4) Grab attention, then maintain and sustain.

Create a series of vlogs to prolong interest and keep your audience coming back for more. Just like written content, if a topic is too long, break your videos down into several parts and post them in succession.

• Make videos about progress reports, if you’ve installed a new plug-in for your blog that you think can be very helpful, make a video to talk about it. Make another video for a how-to tutorial, then a third video to report your progress.  I’m sure your audience will stick around to find out if the plug-in worked for you or not.
• For more fascinating product presentations, create a string of videos to promote a range of products movie-trailer style, spotlighting one product at a time.

Video marketing is all about creating video content that will attract and engage prospects. The whole point of using video is that it’s a different way, at times maybe an even more absorbing way, than written content, to capture the attention of targeted consumers. Make them listen to a strong message so as to convert them to actual buyers.

There are blogs that put video onto their mostly text blogs, and some blogs that will use text on their mostly vlog sites. There are a that few will make use of the two just about equally. However which way, video blogging or vlogging, is another creative way to take your blog to the next level.

The world is all set for more videos on blogs as we see video sharing sites on the rise everywhere and YouTube taking the #2 rank in search results next to Google.

To me, recording a vlog is very much like preparing for a TV or radio interview or public speaking appearance. In order to successfully get the right message across:

1. You need to sound powerful while engaging and entertaining your audience
2. You need to consider overall vlog quality output, because a poorly made vlog takes a direct hit on your brand image

I learned a few tips along the way as I got the hang of video recording:

1) Grab attention quickly and prolong interest.

• Keep the vlog short and direct by delivering your message within three to five minutes
• Hold attention by using a strong voice, change up your tone and pitch so that it’s not a dull monotone
• Keep facial expressions subtle: Smile, move your head and shoulders from time to time and use your eyes to emphasize your point

2). Look professional and comfortable.

• Portray yourself in a good way by dressing up properly, appearing clean and neatly put together
• Talk to your audience pleasantly, come across as agreeable and good-humored
• Whether you’re standing, sitting or reclining, position your stance in a relaxed and composed manner
• Stay focused on the video, as it will show if you are distracted

3) Prepare before recording.

• Rehearse before a take so that you sound articulate. Gather the whole idea of your message together and study what you need to say, otherwise you’ll falter and hesitate due to a lack of words.  A script works, but memorize it to keep things natural.
• Check equipment – Make sure batteries are charged, AC adapter attached, lighting is adequate, sound is clear, ensure the camera is steady (use a tripod if needed) so you don’t catch wobbly images.

4)  Record and prepare for publication.

• You can’t perfect a take at one go. It’s best to take several takes of footage and then edit using video editing software to change around scenes, correct sound levels, add in music, effects, titles and links to get one quality video recording.
• Post your video on your blog, on your sales page and share to other video-sharing sites like YouTube, MySpaceTV, MetaCafe, Google Video, Yahoo Video, Revver, Vimeo, MSN’s Soapbox, to name a few

Blog content shouldn’t be just all text. Short and straightforward videos are just as powerful and even more engaging than text, since the greater part of the population like to watch than read. Try adding video together with your blog content as part of your entire online marketing efforts.

As an internet entrepreneur, I use Twitter and Facebook as part of my online marketing plan. In addition to these two social network sites I also use YouTube.

I know how YouTube videos can be a great time sucker sometimes. I go in there thinking to watch one video, but always end up watching several. Maybe because it’s easier and more amusing to watch than read, plus the TV-like craving that fuels attention is what makes YouTube a very influential and effective communication tool to educate, entertain and connect.

I find YouTube very useful as a communication tool to promote my baseball activities and as a business tool for branding and to market and advertise my products.

1. It’s fun and simple, but it also challenges my creativity as I get to mix in video, music and marketing all in one medium
2. It’s cost-effective. All I need is a videocam and a great marketing plan and I’m all good to set-up and broadcast
3. YouTube traffic is huge. It’s currently the third largest site on the internet

Here are some of the ways I get the most out of YouTube as a marketing and branding tool for my business:

Setting up your YouTube business account

• For great branding, it’s best to use your name or the name of your company for the user-name as this will be displayed in the URL of your YouTube account (youtube.com/profilename)
• For transparency, complete your business profile information. Put in a professional-looking picture or company logo, use appropriate keywords to describe your business, and put in a link back to your site in the Website section.

Optimize your video content

Focus on the following pointers:

• For better search results, use video titles and video file names that are more keyword-rich and have more specific descriptions about your kind of business/product/service
• To drive volume traffic to your site, always upload your videos into YouTube with a link back to your website from the video page or put it within the video clip to get more exposure back to your own business site.
• Use tags that are appropriate to related videos, use as many tags you can relate to it
• Tag your videos using the same keywords you used in the video title/filename/description

The Video Channel is a great branding feature

Edit your channel in your profile page by changing the title, set the type of channel to label your business, fill-up the business description using keywords, add in related tags, allow comments, upload a custom background to polish your company image.

Using the YouTube marketing strategy

The marketing strategy of YouTube is to gain a bulk amount of viewers to cause hype and action within the video clip page. The more video views you have, the easier it is for the video to go viral. Therefore, as in any social media site, your YouTube strategy is to get those numbers and connections.

• Interact with popular related videos by posting comments on their videos or channels or rating their videos
• Generate interest to your YouTube page by making lists of favorite Videos or YouTube Videos
• Share the video using social networking sites. Share among your YouTube friends and their friends inside the YouTube community. Share through email

Measuring your video’s success

As with all other social media channels, YouTube is no exception. You need to understand how your audience responds to your content so that you know what’s working and what is not so that there is a guide for improving future content to target it to the right market. In addition to direct viewer feedback you get from video ratings and comments, YouTube has Insights to give stats to users. All the data is available for free.

• Insights – helps you identify total views, viewer demographics, video popularity, video life-cycle
• Forum Community – shows the expressed viewer opinions about your video by means of their rating, comments, and the number of times the video is tagged as favorite
• Insight Hot Spots –  helps you identify which parts of your video get watched a lot and which parts get skipped so you can analyze viewer interests and attention span

YouTube as one part of your online marketing strategy can really be a valuable source for website traffic.

The changing face of Social Media can make you the king of the business jungle.

It’s a running commentary that with it’s population of over 400 million active users worldwide, if Facebook were a country it would be the third largest in the world. Those numbers, for one thing, make Facebook a more useful method of communication and marketing tool for businesses than other social media site. Plus, it has all these other incentives as well:

• Zero-cost to set-up and get free website traffic
• Facebook has the professional quality of LinkedIn, but it’s more relaxed and fun setting makes it less intimidating to connect with people
• Facebook has a Twitter-like simplicity in that it is an open platform where communication is free-flowing, the “Comments Box” allows users to easily comment, the “Live Stream” allows users to share and post updates in real-time
• Facebook can be an expansion of your blog or website as the interactive pages can be publicly seen by Facebook users and non-users, the HTML box can help a business get their own content onto their Facebook page, the simple tab applications allows the posting of events, photos, videos and music giving you the ability to create custom landing pages to promote certain events

Facebook can be one way to grow a business because of it’s ripple-like networking and advertising global reach, but like any of the other popular social media sites, a strategic marketing plan to target your promotional efforts to relevant customers is key to success.

1).  Start off a professional image with your Facebook Business Fan Page

For great branding, customize your Facebook fan page just like your website’s pages so that customers relate you with just one consistent identity throughout the web and can easily form brand awareness on product details, special offers, and business events in just one glance of your page.

• Fill out the information page with complete contact details, such as your physical office address, phone numbers, email address, web link, operating hours, and company stats.
• Attach your business logo in the profile picture
• Fan interactions with your page show up in News Feeds of their Friends, so actively use the wall features, photo, video, discussion, links and events tabs to interact with customers for greater branding exposure, to announce product line-ups and  new sales offers, create new buzz for the business and communicate effectively with them to value customer loyalty and manage customer expectations.

2).  Promote and advertise non-stop

Remember that with social media it’s very important to intermingle on a regular basis to build your community. Here are a few tips to promote your page on Facebook:

• Join Facebook Groups and Communities ~ Connect with groups or communities that will benefit your business to boost business exposure and gain potential customers. Become a fan of well-known experts in your field, you can gain exposure through a working association with them. The online world is always receptive to anything new and exciting.  Collaborate on innovative events/promotions with competitors or non-competitive businesses, either through sponsorships or joint ventures, which will create buzz within and outside the Facebook community.
• Share your page information on other websites by leaving your Page Badge, which contains your contact information on email and forum signatures or as a sidebar on your own website or blog
• “Suggest the Page” to your friends and have them invite their “Friends” to “Become a Fan”
• Use Facebook ads to promote your page. Facebook offers a range of cheap advertising programs to businesses with a limited online advertising budget. Find these ad programs on the business page when you click on “Promote Page with an Ad”

3). Monitor Fan Base Traffic

The Facebook Insights link provides businesses a basic structure for tracking their fan base. The data here will help you grow your fan base as it gives you insights on total page visits, how content and posting frequency influence fan interactions, where your fans come from and what sorts of fans to target.

Imagine the countless possibilities for your business that lie within the Twitter population alone:

“And, with 75 million total accounts, an active user base of around 20% still leaves around 15 million highly active tweeters,”  see complete statistics here: The Metric System A blog About Data by RJMetrics. Plus, projections are already set to more than 26 million active Twitter users by end of 2010 (Mashable The Social Media Guide).

Those substantial numbers spell growth, and it’s potential growth no wise business person can simply ignore. If Twitter is not a part of your business marketing strategy now, I suggest that it should be, so you too can ride along with it’s growth.

Here are really good business tips to put into operation when marketing in Twitter so that it can be a really great business tool:

#1: SET UP A TWITTER ACCOUNT FOR BUSINESS ONLY

To help in branding, use a Twitter account with your business name. Don’t forget to put in the link to your business website. Separate what’s business and what’s personal. Make one Twitter account for business and another account for personal use and never link both to each other.

#2: EXPRESS SOME PERSONALITY

If you come across as too business-like, you’ll be seen as too stiff and hard-core and that turns people off. When you’re too open, especially when you tweet nonsense like “…eating jellybeans now,” or “…in bed and reading the papers,” you also come out as silly to your customers and peers. Set a balance between professional and approachable, an expert in the field who is open-minded and easy to talk to. Show a bit of personality to convey that you are real, share your thoughts on familiar topics like music, sports or relevant current events and give just enough personal information to begin rapport and maintain the business relationships.

#3: CREATE A TWITTER MARKETING STRATEGY

A single tweet can make and break your business image, so I think that from the very start you need to have as much control on how you influence people’s opinions about you and your business. In order for Twitter to be a really successful business tool for you, go into it with a studied approach using a pre-planned strategy.

If you have more than one online business venture, then you should manage different Twitter business accounts for each. There are great tools you can use to manage multiple Twitter accounts. Keep them all separate from one another so that you’re organized and you don’t confuse your followers so that your promotion and communication efforts specific to one business are focused to just that particular group.

Establish the following while planning your Twitter marketing strategy:

• · Target audience – Who do you target to be your followers? Where do you find them? How do you tweet to them? Who do you follow?
• · Manning – Who manages the account? How often and how much time should be spent Twittering? Guidelines should be ready in case staff members need to deal with negative customer reactions.
• · Interaction style – Replies and interactions will be decided in view of what business details can be shared to the public.
• · Monitoring results – What are your preset factors to determine success in Twitter? Is your Twitter strategy effective? Which areas of the plan are working and which are not? What Twitter tools do you use to measure stats?

#4: USE THE HELP OF TWITTER APPS AND TOOLS

There are very useful free and low-cost third party apps and services that work together with Twitter. Use them to get the most out of Twitter as a business marketing tool. Some examples:

• Tweetdeck and Hootsuite are desktop applications to help organize your tweets, manage multiple Twitter and other social media accounts, schedule tweets, track statistics,
• hashtags helps to increase your Tweet visibility, use Tagalus as a dictionary for hashtags, Twubs can help distribute information on a hashtag

#5: FOLLOW TWITTER DO’S AND DON’T’S

Twitter is designed to be a very open forum, but there are unwritten rules with which the Twitter community abide by to control misuse and abuse.

• Potential customers respond positively to a complete Twitter business profile as it conveys transparency, so put up your company logo or personal picture and give very clear details about what your business is all about.
• To perfect your business image, it’s a good idea to have your staff (especially the one’s managing your business account) read up on some Twitter etiquette on how to follow and un-follow, replying using @ replies or using a D message (direct message) instead, and using acronyms that people can easily figure out.

#6: TWEET ONLY ON WORK DAYS

Twitter may be hot, but people do have a life and they have other things to attend to than business in Twitter.  Send business tweets only on work days. Show consideration for weekends and holidays.

One very good marketing tip is to start a blog. Blogging is a necessary part of a company’s overall marketing plan as a blog can be several things for your business: a sales tool to promote products/offers, a communication tool to update customers, and a branding tool to build up reputation.

Blog marketing has advanced. With over a hundred million existing blogs and more being created daily, it’s not enough anymore to just build it, post good content and hope readers will come. Nowadays, you need to find your readers and really put effort to drive traffic to your blog. These tips are the standards in marketing a business blog:

1). It all starts with your blog domain. Your blog domain or URL must be definite to your market. It is what people will use to locate your blog every time they do a search so you would want them to locate your blog specifically. For a great branding and SEO strategy, choose a domain name that clearly relates to you or your product, so if you are, for instance, a baseball blog, you would want your URL to say www.allaboutbaseball.blogurl.com.

2). Write and post regularly. Content is the vital element to making your blog useful to your target readers. You really can’t go wrong with content that’s original and useful. Posting 3-5 times weekly keeps them coming back, maintains their interest and increases your chances to get noticed by the search engines to help buildup your page views.

3). Submit your blog to the search engines and other blog directories. Hit on the submit link of major search engines and blog directories and give them your blog URL and RSS Feed. This doesn’t guarantee that you appear at the top rank in search engine results but it simply lists your blog in their directory and when the search engines start their crawl process your pages get included in their search results.

4). Tailor templates to help brand your blog. The color scheme, font style, overall layout will convey the first impression on what your blog is all about.

• Put in RSS subscription option, social bookmarking links in highly visible areas
• Unique title tags because those are the words that will initially tell search engines if content is original and what will appear in the clickable link in search engine results page
• Sitemap to help readers and search engines access all the contents in the site
• Keywords listing to help readers easily find your content when they do a search
• Use your blogroll to get links from influential bloggers in your field and to help initiate an association with them

5). Maximize plug-ins. Make the best use of plug-ins provided by your blog software. Powerful plug-ins are:

• Comments plug-ins: the “Recent Posts” and “Popular Posts” act as sneak previews to what your readers can expect to read and what they can read back on if they’ve missed a visit to your blog, “Recent Comments” plug-ins can invite topic discussion, “Related posts” provide readers with easy access to more information within your blog
• there are plug-ins to help in SEO
• Allow automatic trackback. Trackbacks will allow you to let other sites know that you have linked to them, and lets you know when other sites have linked to you. Allow anyone to place a link to their site on to your blog because it’s other people’s stamp of approval on your posts. Trackbacks will always show a link back to your blog in the comments field of the post that it’s originally linked to.
• Allow ping function. The ping function will let all of the blog directories you’ve set up into your blog (ex: http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping, or http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2) know that you have published a new blog post in your blog.

6). Tag Posts. Tags are like keywords/phrases and labels that describe your content to make it easier to find. Tags help display everything you’ve posted about that related tag when readers or search engines do a search so make sure each blog post have tags on them before they are published and think like your readers so use tags that your readers would actually use when doing a search.

7). Interact with comments. Comments are what make blogs alive because of the interaction from your readers. Make sure it’s a 2-way conversation by responding to their comments in a timely manner. It’s also important to screen comments so you have control over your reputation management.

8). SEO is crucial for sending traffic to your blog. Optimize your blog posts and pages for search engines by making use of related keywords, practice effective keyword placement, manage well-timed posting and invest in finding significant one-way links. Blogs naturally attract more search engine traffic because they’re already structurally built with simple navigation design so that all pages can be found and linked to easily.

9). Think outside of the box. In terms of creativity, always change your usual blog format from time to time to give your audience something new to experience. It’s a great way to maintain interest and create new buzz for your blog. Few examples

• Plan on a blog design make-over and hype it up
• Posts using podcasts or vlogs instead of the usual written format
• Invite guest bloggers for a fresh angle
• Run polls, blog contests
• Join in the latest list craze going on in the web in order to attract traffic to your site. Use your blogroll to link to more famous and influential blogs and websites for outbound resource links, create your own “favorites lists” in Twitter and link back to your blog

10). Work on networking. Growing your following is the only way to become better known online and with more followers to support your blog, the higher the chances for  traffic buildup.

• Initiate contact with related bloggers, associate with other famous bloggers in your field, mention authoritative groups or individuals you admire or have worked with in your blog posts
• Social media is a must so join the major traffic generators Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, and StumbleUpon

11). Form a link building strategy. It’s a slow progression but links are valuable so that search engines can find you. The more you make it easy for search engines to find you, the easier to get higher page results and the easier to buildup blog traffic. Link building can be done by trading links with other sites, link building software, being listed in E-zines, newsletters, directories, search engines, etc.

12). Grow the number of RSS subscribers to your blog’s feed.

• Let your readers know that they can subscribe so position your subscription link and subscription reminders in plain sight on every page of your blog, highly visible spots are at the top and in between blog posts.
• Offer perks for additional benefits readers can get for subscribing to your blog like a free ebook, free newsletter, or a free gift that’s related to your posts or anything that you think adds value to their subscription.
• Display your Feedburner badge, it’s a stamp of approval to let others know your blog has a good number of readers and is therefore worthy to be checked out.

13). Promote your blog and connect with other bloggers by using NetworkedBlogs app for Facebook. Set up the application by typing in your blog name, url, description and then claim the blog. Your Facebook page will show the blog feed, permit readers to rate the blog, gather new readers from the Facebook blogging community, and automatically post your blog contents to your Facebook page.

There are many other ways to promote your blog to buildup traffic but these tips are great to start with. I think the best formula to find out what’s really working for you is: trial-measure-modify. And keep blogging! … hard work, patience and persistence  are all part of the formula for success.  Do you know of any other awesome ways to buildup blog traffic? Let’s discuss… 

The clout of social media is really viral nowadays as we see small businesses from all over the world following a social networking strategy to promote their business online through social sites as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Multiply and MySpace.

Internet big-wigs did foresee this social networking development early on in the last year. With the ongoing rough economic times pressuring small business owners to take a hard look at their marketing budgets, I think it is only a natural progression to see start-up and small businesses change their marketing direction away from costly traditional TV, radio and print advertising and go the way of less costly, even free, social web tools, because all things considered, social media has proven it’s mark and is consistently proving that is  a low-cost yet effective way to promote a business, manage customer relationships, gain leads and uncover new channels for sales.

While many small business owners are reaping pretty healthy return of investments for all their social networking efforts, we also see a good number at the other end of the spectrum, struggling in frustration to get somewhere. Small and start-up business owners need to keep in mind that social media networking is time-intensive and chancy. Therefore, like any traditional or online marketing effort, it is always a good idea to start things on a balance, go into it with a focused and manageable strategy in place.

Here are a few tips to take into account before launching a social media networking strategy with the aim of meeting marketing goals in the end:

START SMALL. From the very beginning, plan a doable strategy, one you can actually manage and accomplish within realistic time-lines. Control the following factors at the onset:

1. the number of social sites you start with, it’s best to set up profiles in 2-3 social media sites initially and cross-promote across all the sites you launch in to keep them all connected
2. the time you spend interacting and link-building in them, you can start with a daily 2-hour schedule perhaps then convert to a weekly schedule
3. your branding components, which are your company message and personality, the key is to convey just one consistent brand image all throughout

The key point is to keep your social networking strategy at a scale you can manage, so start small and then grow it as you gather an understanding of best practices and techniques along the way which you can include in the process.

STICK WITH IT. Social media is time-consuming. Real results from all the efforts you put in may take several months up to a full year before showing any evidence of success. Steady persistence is key to:

1. Growing your network. A loyal group of followers is the only way to create an online presence. Without them, there is no one to act upon your call of action. Spend time bonding with your fan base/customers. Communicate with them constantly and keep them informed about any new company developments. Create buzz to promote business such as holding a unique contest or an exciting publicity stunt in your site to get new people to sign-up and existing members to keep coming back.
2. Building an expert reputation. An expert standing is a natural pull to people. When you are deemed as a leading expert or have a high-ranking blog/site, people will naturally refer to you first and foremost.  Collaborate on a shared venture like related affiliate programs, create multiparty webinars, or join blog carnivals. The strategy is to associate with prominent people in your field to get expert branding so you are further seen as an authority by your following.

INTERACTION IS THE NAME OF THE SOCIAL GAME. The only way to form connections is to interact with people. Two strategic points to keep in mind:

1. Always keep the flow of information 2-way
2. Interact on a regular basis

Social media can never work if you barely set up your business profile pages, start conversing a couple days and then walk out and come back a month later.

• Work together with your group of followers, share expert content and link-up to their content, request for links and reciprocate with your own links, refer their business and they will likely recommend yours
• Intermingle, initiate conversations and exchange ideas through blog comments or website forums remembering to always include a link back to your own content or site
• At the start, work at building relationships on a fixed schedule. Set a certain appointed time during which your following can expect you so that they are online at that particular time to interact with you.

A strong brand identity is your sign of value and worth and gives your customers the very reason to choose you over your competitor. It’s going to act for, speak for, and stand for you over and over again in countless ways throughout the lifetime of your business.

While all of the artistic components of your business, the product, the logo, slogan, jingle, mascot, color scheme, etc., help to form your brand identity, it is actually all of these combined with the daily customer interaction in the storefront, your communications, your dealings with them, that make up your total brand identity. How your customers know you and remember you and what everything about your business stands for to them, is always related to the overall experience that they have with your company.

A brand name lives within the reality of a highly competitive marketplace. How it manages to survive largely depends on how you go about managing it. Branding is more than just putting a name or label to your product or service. It’s about putting a name to a product plus making certain that your customers find value in it. It’s not just supplying for a need or a want, but, in addition ensuring a pleasurable experience from meeting the need or want. Branding has much psycho-social aspects to it. It‘s a mental and emotional game to win customers.Effective branding should voice out your offer of promise loud and clear to potential customers and then guaranteeing the satisfaction of that promise to them so that they not only choose you over the competition but that they see you as the only business that can satisfactorily provide the solution to their need. Branding simply works by meeting customer expectations because it’s the only way they can find value in your brand.

Building up value can only be achieved by building trust through an offer of promise that is honored, satisfied and experienced over and over again. Customers find value in a brand based on whether the offer of promise which the brand holds is delivered to them or not. When the offer of promise meets customer expectations, then the brand is associated with value, they trust it and they can come back to it and expect the same positive experience over and over again. When the offer of promise is not delivered, customer expectations are not met so of course they cannot associate positive value with the brand identity. Without a loyal customer base supporting your brand, it is only an unfamiliar name, a worthless product, a meaningless symbol.

Brand identity guides customer buying decisions. A strong brand will always convince a loyal customer base to choose that brand over the competition. A strong brand is achieved by effective branding; by communicating a clear offer of promise to a target customer base through the use of symbols that represent your business identity which consistently provides value experience for your customers ultimately conditioning their minds so that it is easy to summon up instant and exclusive brand awareness.