This Blog will Make You Rich

So what do we mean by social media? As the Internet has evolved increasing numbers of people have taken to sharing ideas, opinions and experiences through a combination of text, blogs, audio, video and message boards etc. More recently RSS and podcasts have also captured the imagination of many in their lust to get their message out to a wide audience. Social media has lead to a revolution in the way many people now interact and learn about world events. The repercussions are that the views of media giants are no longer taken for granted. Now almost anyone can put forward their perspective on any issue they wish. Some organisations have been quick to catch on and realise how their products or services can be promoted by this phenomenon, a kind of social marketing mix unlike anything which as gone before.

One of the simplest ways to begin social media marketing is by creating your own MySpace page. MySpace offers anyone the option to build a free web page where you can share your ideas or express your views in a particular topic. By inviting friends who share similar interests it's possible to quickly build a cult like community while covertly linking them to your own website.

The social web revolves around sharing opinions…..be they good or bad. With this in mind, websites that are packed full of content can lever recommendations from readers in the form of bookmarking. Bookmarking has become popular with some web users who'll share their lists with others who have a common interest. Assuming your website has some decent content, bookmarking sites such as Digg, Technorati, Del.icio.us and Reddit provide downloadable code and links etc that'll soon get you stated. A wise alternative is to link up to AddThis.com, which will then save you alienating those with a bookmarking preference by giving access to numerous bookmarking sites in one go.

A great method of keeping users up to date with your content is to set up a RSS feed. Otherwise known as Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Syndication, RSS provides a notification to users that new content has been added to your site thereby keeping your visitors up to speed with new developments or product launches and so on.

Enabling people to communicate directly through your website is at the core of social media and forums can be a great way of providing just that. The best forums are well managed but not overly censored. Both good and bad comments should be encouraged. While it's easy to assume that bad comments are best filtered out, leaving them in gives the forum greater credibility. A well managed forum provides an excellent, not to mention free, means of gathering customer feedback and carrying out market research etc. To give a forum momentum you may need to regularly stimulate discussion by starting new topics and by spending some regular time weeding out the spam and nonsense.

Showing your expertise through video is a clever way of grabbing an audience. Sometimes the only real way to demonstrate something is in a visual form. If you are dealing with something computerised it could be worth considering using screen capture software where you can easily take people through a lifelike demo. Video can be downloaded from your own website or posted on sites like YouTube for instance. Its always good to stamp your video with you website address so people know where it originated from. If your video impresses people they may want to seek you out. In much the same way still photographs, graphics and audio can be posted to websites; again not forgetting some kind of link back to your own website.

Lastly but by no means least you can get social media savvy by creating a blog. In essence blogs are little more than short articles often centred on current affairs, similar to writing a column for a newspaper. If you set up a blog it requires regular updating. Much like running a forum people expect blogs to evolve preferably on a daily basis. The biggest no no is to be lame on updates as any audience you've gained will soon be lost.

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About The Author

It doesn’t matter how great your website, if no one sees it,
you’re not going to make a penny. You can spend days
producing the perfect design, weeks tweaking the copy, and
months writing the code and uploading the pages, but if no
one knows where you are, how are they going to know they
should buy from you?

When I first started selling on the Web, the first major
problem I ran into was bringing customers to my door. I put
banner ads on other sites, organized reciprocal links and
joined Web rings. Those methods all worked to some extent,
but what really did it for me, what turned my business from
a small earner into a major money-grabber, was figuring out
how to use search engines.

Sure, I’d submitted my sites to the major search engines as
soon as I’d finished building them, but I didn’t really pay
them much attention. After all, I figured search engines are
just for people who are looking for information; they’re not
really good for commercial sites. Boy, was I wrong!

One day, I sat down and checked out which sites were popping
up first in the categories that suited my businesses. I
found that all the top-ranked sites were my biggest
competitors. And when I say biggest, I mean these guys were
in a whole other league. They had incomes that were ten or
twenty times the size of mine—no wonder they had top billing
at Yahoo! and Google! And then it clicked. Search engines
don’t list sites by size, they list them by relevance. These
sites weren’t listed first because they were big; they were
big because they were listed first!

That was when I began to ‘optimize’ my pages and think about
meta-tags and keywords. As my sites rose through the
listings, my traffic went through the roof. And not just any
old traffic! The people that came to my sites from search
engines hadn’t just clicked on a banner by accident or
followed a link from curiosity, they’d actually been looking
for a site like mine. My sales ratio went up like a rocket.
I’d created my own big break.

In this chapter, we are going to discuss all proven
strategies of Search Engine Optimization. We would discus
how to optimize your site, submit your pages and pick up the
targeted traffic you need to make cash. This chapter is
probably the most important chapter in the whole book. It’s
crucial that you read it carefully.

Let’s start with search engines.

How Search Engines work

Internet search engines are special sites on the Web that
are designed to help people find information stored on other
sites. There are differences in the ways various search
engines work, but they all perform three basic tasks:

- They search the Internet -- or select pieces of the
Internet -- based on important words.

- They keep an index of the words they find, and where they
find them.

- They allow users to look for words or combinations of
words found in that index.

Early search engines held an index of a few hundred thousand
pages and documents, and received maybe one or two thousand
inquiries each day. Today, a top search engine will index
hundreds of millions of pages, and respond to tens of
millions of queries per day.

Spidering

Before a search engine can tell you where a file or document
is, it must be found. To find information on the hundreds of
millions of Web pages that exist, a search engine employs
special software robots, called spiders, to build lists of
the words found on Web sites.

When a spider is building its lists, the process is called
Web crawling.

In order to build and maintain a useful list of words, a
search engine's spiders have to look at a lot of pages. How
does any spider start its travels over the Web? The usual
starting points are lists of heavily used servers and very
popular pages. The spider will begin with a popular site,
indexing the words on its pages and following every link
found within the site. In this way, the spidering system
quickly begins to travel, spreading out across the most
widely used portions of the Web.

-Indexing

Once the spiders have completed the task of finding
information on Web pages, the search engine must store the
information in a way that makes it useful. There are two key
components involved in making the gathered data accessible
to users:

- The information stored with the data

- The method by which the information is indexed

In the simplest case, a search engine could just store the
word and the URL where it was found. In reality, this would
make for an engine of limited use, since there would be no
way of telling whether the word was used in an important or
a trivial way on the page, whether the word was used once or
many times or whether the page contained links to other
pages containing the word. In other words, there would be no
way of building the ranking list that tries to present the
most useful pages at the top of the list of search results.

To make for more useful results, most search engines store
more than just the word and URL. An engine might store the
number of times that the word appears on a page. The engine
might assign a weight to each entry, with increasing values
assigned to words as they appear near the top of the
document, in sub-headings, in links, in the meta tags or in
the title of the page. Each commercial search engine has a
different formula for assigning weight to the words in its
index. This is one of the reasons that a search for the same
word on different search engines will produce different
lists, with the pages presented in different orders.

An index has a single purpose: It allows information to be
found as quickly as possible. There are quite a few ways for
an index to be built, but one of the most effective ways is
to build a hash table. In hashing, a formula is applied to
attach a numerical value to each word. The formula is
designed to evenly distribute the entries across a
predetermined number of divisions. This numerical
distribution is different from the distribution of words
across the alphabet, and that is the key to a hash table's
effectiveness.

The search engine software or program is the final part.
When a person requests a search on a keyword or phrase, the
search engine software searches the index for relevant
information. The software then provides a report back to the
searcher with the most relevant web pages listed first.
Is Your website search engine friendly? If you have any
doubts, it may be time to take a look and make your own “big
break”.

Warmly,
Sam

About The Author

Make more money with the Law of Attraction.