It is important that with each blog post you write these 4 highly effective steps are followed to ensure that you create income from your blog post.

1. Write an attention-grabbing headline. Don’t be too forgiving or conservative with your headline. Be as creative as you can when it comes to your blog title. After all, it is the first thing your readers see. There are different ways on how you can craft it. You can state the benefit, ask a question, and allow them to anticipate a very good reward, or simply tickle their imagination. When you have a good title for your blog post, it becomes even a lot easier for you to get noticed in social bookmarking websites where competition among bloggers and other article writers can be tough.

2. Make sure that your blog post is pleasing to read. Who likes to read a post where words are unclear, or paragraphs are scattered everywhere? You may be the best writer in blogosphere, but definitely no one will hear you if you don’t follow organization.

Now, when it comes to organization, you can simply allow your blogging platform to take care of that. For example, Wordpress can easily wrap texts and break lines so you don’t need to hassle yourself with HTML codes and manually adjusting the paragraphs.

But what is really important is this: allow your article to be convenient to skim. With that, make use of bullets or numbers, as much as possible and as often as you can. These tools can actually highlight important points in your post, so those who are truly busy too read the entire thing can still appreciate the information you’ve shared.

3. The headline and the body should agree. Don’t underestimate the intelligence of your readers. They can instantly know if you’re just trying to trick them to read what you’ve written or not. If you want them to trust, ensure that you can deliver the message you want to convey in your headline with the body.

Your blog post should not be too long either. The most important thing is you can deliver the point right on the dot—with preciseness and conciseness.

4. Be persuasive. Your post will be considered weak or not effective at all if you cannot compel your readers to action. You can either push them to click on your affiliate link and share your message to their friends and family.

To do this you need to understand your audience: what do they need? What kinds of copies would they react to? When you can give them what they need, it will be very easy for you to convince them.

Started by a college student, Facebook has grown tremendously for the past 4 years, and is definitely an essential tool for social marketing. Its success can be attributed to different factors, and one of them is that it allows businesses to connect with one another and build relationships.

Here are 4 ways how you can use Facebook for social marketing for your business:

1. You can find colleagues and business associates at Facebook.

With countless faces and names stored in the Facebook database, it’s very likely that you can find at least 40 to 50 percent of your co-workers or business associates blogging about their work. What’s more, if you’re in the sales industry, for example, you can build your contacts using Facebook, allowing you to promote your products and services, as well as establish credibility, a lot faster.

2. Building profiles and adding applications have never been this easy.

There are hundreds of applications that you can choose from in Facebook which you can simply add into your profile. One of my favorite applications that I find really useful is one that allows you to link your blog to your Facebook account. This helps me promote my new blog to my Facebook network.

3. You can promote events.

On Facebook it is very easy to set up events and promote them to all your friends. In a matter of moments all your business associates have all the information they need about your upcoming events.

4. You can formulate groups.

Why don’t you create your own group on Facebook? This is a great way to find others in your industry or who may be interested in your business. Participate in already active groups or start your own. The more groups that you are in the more opportunity there is for your network to grow.  Remember not just to promote yourself but to be a social and useful member of the groups.

As you can see Facebook can be a great social marketing tool for business.

BENEFITS OF EFFECTIVE SOCIAL MARKETING

As you complete steps one to five above, you will experience the following benefits for your efforts:

• Creation of brand awareness – the more people that see your name and your link, the more brand awareness you are creating.
• Establishment of Trust
• Traffic from niche conversations
• High quality incoming links to your site as other community members link to you
• Increased visibility in search engines
• Decreased dependence on search engines
• Your content will be indexed faster
• You’ll be better on track of what is going on in your niche and what products and services your target market wants
• Management of your reputation

• You will discover needs, desires and trends that move your market niche to spend

Advantages of Social Linking

One of the primary advantages of using social networking is the ability to obtain incoming links to your website and/or blog. When you publish content on a blog or website, you can then bookmark the URL with social bookmarking sites, news sites and/or content sites for exposure and relationship building. The links that naturally happen through social networks are strategically placed everywhere your target market is visiting on the web, which creates visitors to your site who are most likely to be your targeted customers.

For more information on social marketing and social networking please feel free to contact me as we are holding a number of seminars on these topics.

STEP THREE OF YOUR SOCIAL MARKETING STRATEGY

In order to benefit from social networking sites, you will need to find out where your niche audience socializes online. For example, if you are selling musical instruments, you’ll want to find communities of musicians, including niche social networking sites, forums and blogs that are on the topic and allow you to leave comments.

Niche social networking sites have more deeply involved members and better content than a general interest networking site, like Facebook or Myspace. The people you meet and develop relationships with on niche networking sites will be more targeted contacts, and this is exactly what you want as opposed to just contacting large volumes of people who may or may not be interested in anything you have to offer.

STEP FOUR OF YOUR SOCIAL  MARKETING STRATEGY

Join the social networking sites, create your profiles, and interact with others. Don’t think of this as marketing – instead, just mingle and participate in online conversations. In fact, you will gain the best results if you focus on building genuine friendships and sharing interests than you will if you attempt to use marketing tactics. Give, listen and help other people to connect with people who share interests or have something valuable to another person.

You will gain the best results if you set aside at least an hour at a time to work on your relationship building via social networking sites, several times per week. Use social networking sites to generously link to, promote and trade content with other people within your niche, and build traffic to all the pages of your sites that contain links to your web properties.

STEP FIVE OF YOUR SOCIAL MARKETING STRATEGY

After a few weeks of participating actively in social networking sites, you can step back and analyse where the majority of your traffic and profits are coming from. Once you have pinpointed what is giving you the best results, you can focus your time and effort into those areas ongoing.

Part 4 of Social Marketing Strategy coming soon

STEP ONE  OF YOUR SOCIAL MARKETING STRATEGY

A large part of social marketing involves the use of a blog. The blog can be seen as your social marketing tool, and certain technical functions of the blog are essential. Firstly, the blog should not only become a source for information, but also a place for niche oriented conversations. As you begin participating in social media site discussions and communities, you’ll want to carry over those conversations into your blog.

When you make your blog addictive and popular, people will want to come just to see what you’re saying and to join in the conversation. Are their blogs that you enjoy visiting on a regular basis? Consider what makes you read them or what makes you watch a tv show over and over again when you are writing your content.

Encourage people to leave comments on your blog posts by asking questions and directing them to answer within the comment section. The comments from other people serve as social proof to first-time visitors to your blog because they show that there are other people reading and responding to your blog. Keep track of which topics receive the most comments because you can assume that they are “hot topics” that people want to know more about.

Within your blog’s sidebar, you need to have links to your main social site profiles or feeds. Social sites often have widgets that can be included easily on your blog, but if not- you can link to them directly from your blog. You also need to link to your blog from your main website, shopping cart, social media profiles, within forum and email signatures, your eBay page – basically anywhere you go online that allows you to generate links!

STEP TWO OF YOUR SOCIAL MARKETING STRATEGY

Not only is it necessary to keep up with your own blog for social marketing, but you also need to find other high quality and popular blogs within your niche to visit and comment on. Leave insightful comments that are worth reading. From your blog, link to other blogs within your niche and they will likely return the favor by promoting you on their own sites and blogs.

Comments on blogs are how blogs are changed from articles to conversation. You can ask questions or leave funny or controversial comments when visiting other blogs.

Part 3 of Social Marketing Strategy coming soon

Over the next few days I will be discussing a social marketing strategy for you to follow. Please feel free to get involved by commenting or posting questions.

Word of mouth advertising has always been the most powerful form of marketing. Our social marketing strategy increases the chance of promoting yourself and your products through word of mouth selling, with the overall goal of getting other people to promote what you do and sell. We can do this through social websites. Social marketing is basically building relationships online.

Social websites are online communities where people come together to communicate. This is where you will meet your potential target market. Generally, people are more trusting of social sites than they are a site selling a product or service directly, because the users of social media websites feel that fewer people have something to gain by reviewing and recommending another’s product or service.

You will need to become an active participant with social websites. You become active by discussing, reviewing and recommending products, services and companies. As you get to know people in these communities, you will effectively be establishing trust and becoming more well-known to the people who are more likely to purchase your goods or services. The connections you make via social websites will generate additional traffic to your website (whether you have eBook sales pages, shopping cart sites or a site offering affiliate products).

Part 2 of social marketing strategy coming soon.

This is a recent press release sent out for Barnaby the day Barack Obama announced victory over Hillary Clinton as the presidential nominee for the US democratic party.

Barack Obama’s victory over Hillary Clinton is a perfect example of the power social networking sites such as Facebook and You Tube can have when used to promote your business.
Obama’s campaign saw him use the power of web 2.0 such as social networking sites, You Tube and Facebook to gain personal access to millions of people that he otherwise would have not been able to reach.
Social networking guru Barnaby De Palma of Alive Online says this is an excellent example of the power of social networking sites and how it can be applied to ordinary business.
“Social networking is not just for young people or a time wasting site as many people believe and Obama’s campaign has been a great example” De Palma said.
Social networking is a powerful tool and anyone in business should be learning how to use it to promote their business De Palma said.
“Facebook has over 70 million users and the fastest growing demographic is over the over 25’s, there is massive potential to gain exposure for your business and the best part is that it is free” De Palma said.
Facebook has many great applications that can be added to help promote a business and is an excellent networking tool, it is just a matter of knowing how to use it De Palma said.
“I run workshops teaching people about web 2.0 and the impact it can have on a business, the clients are amazed as most of the sites are free but are extremely powerful” De Palma said.
Obama’s campaign is a sign of a new age and all business people need to get smart about using the Internet De Palma said.

Barnaby discusses how to use blogs

See me live - speaking on Blogs and Web 2.0

In the past you could succeed by yourself online - now Web 2.0 demands the support of communities online to get behind you - how will you make best use of these

It is no longer a question of are you interested in becoming part of the next wave to online success, but rather you can no longer afford to get left behind.

Now is your oportunity to become informed about how all of this works.

I’m about to give a seminar on blogging and how to make effective use of Web 2.0 to drive more traffic to your webiste.

In this seminar you will learn:

• How blogs can help you attract more traffic to your business - quickly and simply
• What are online networking and why you do not want to ignore this vital information when it comes to your business and online activities
• How to get fre’e high Google rankings through the use of Blogs and online networking websites
• Training on latest internet trends and how to take advantage of these in your business

If you are interested in registering click here to attend the Blogging Secrets seminar.

Seminar Event: “Blogging Traffic Secrets”

Dates: Wednesday 7 May
Time: 6.30 for a 7.00 pm start
Broncos Leagues , Fulcher Rd, Red Hill, Brisbane, Australia
Parking: Free parking available