Social Media Marketing | How To Really Use Social Media To Build Your Home Based Business

As you may know already if you've been reading my articles, I build a home based business with a company called CarbonCopyPro and write a lot of articles explaining the pros and cons of this particular internet based business model. I do this for two reasons;

1. Over 500 people search for the term "carboncopypro reviews" every day on Google and many more on Bing, Yahoo and numerous other search engines. By providing content which is unbiased and informative, I can get my information in front of people who are considering
joining carboncopypro and starting a small business from home. They may chose to join carboncopypro through my link or they may not but with a potential 500 + people per day searching for advice there is a chance I will benefit from some of this traffic, agreed?

2. The second reason I provide information in this way is so that I can teach Google what I am about. Have I lost you with that one? Okay, let me explain and this will lead on to a more detailed look at how I use social media (with some success) to build a home based business
with carboncopypro for free (well almost)..

Here goes;

If you've been using social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and have thrown in a few social bookmarking sites like Digg, Deli.cious, Furl, Technorati and have ventured into the world of Twitter for a quick look into the twittershpere you may be wondering what it's all about and how people are really using it to make money online. Well, sit back, pour yourself a nice warm cup of coffee, and read on. This article will explain the steps you need to take to get rich online using social media marketing tools, tricks and techniques to take your online business (or off line business for that matter) through the roof.

(Eight ways to build your audience using FREE social media tools , techniques and a little bit of know-how...)

For more detail take a look at my other hubs on each topic which I'll link from this hub in the next few days. I'll also upload a few video tutorials on each topic as I complete them but for now this should give you a few ideas to get going. Here we go...

1. Build Your Business On Facebook The Right Way

Want to find customers for your business? There is no better place to look than Facebook. After all, this social networking powerhouse has over 300 million users, so there must be a few out there looking for your business opportunity, product or service. But where are they and how do you find them?

Free advertising is vital if you're going to survive online and that's exactly what facebook can give you if you use it right and follow a few simple steps to remain active while not annoying for your potential audience.

Market research

First off, think about your customers and where they might be before you start adding friends from all over the place. Although you can have as many as 5,000 friends on facebook, its no good adding 5,000 guys who are interested in fast cars if your business is selling ballet shoes to school girls.

Focus on your customers needs, desires and wants and then follow the next step to find them.

Facebook search

If you haven't already realised, there are now three very different search engines at war online. No, I don't mean Google, MSN (Bing) and Yahoo. I mean..

Facebook
Twitter
Google

Facebook offers a search function that allows you to search the entire network using the small search tab on the top right of your home page. This allows you to type in a search term, click on the search tab and almost real time results will be returned into your home feed.

Now here's the trick to using this to your advantage in building your business on facebook.

Facebook will return results in one format offering all results across the network and here's what you need to do.

On the left of your page you'll see various search filters;

People
Pages
Groups
Applications
Events
Posts by Everyone
Posts by friends

Use these filters to find your target market in groups, on fan pages and commenting on the topic of your choice. Follow the steps below for each area...

Pages

Fan as many facebook pages in your niche as possible. Strange as these guys are your competitors right? Correct but here's why..

By becoming a fan of a product or business in your niche, you will receive updates every time the fan page administrator has something interesting to say to his or her audience. When this happens, you can chose to either ignore it, give it a thumbs up of approval or comment on it and when you take the third choice your image will be added to the update.

Now, if you have a brand and a good logo (or if you have a great photo of yourself and you keep this as your profile image and dont change it) by adding your comments to fan pages across your niche you will place your brand, logo, photograph in front of a potentially massive audience as some fan pages are in the hundreds of thousands in size and each and every one of these people will see your comment.

Groups

Join groups in your niche and use the wall of the group to introduce yourself. Don't spam, post links or simply self-promote. This is social networking and if you are seen as a spammer then nobody will listen to you when you have something interesting to say.

Remember the boy who cried wolf?

Facebook is a great place to build your business for free using nothing but good manners, a little bit of knowledge and some good old fashioned gorilla marketing techniques for branding and market exposure.

2. MySpace Marketing Tips to Take Your Business Into Orbit!

Remember MySpace? Well, it's still there and if you use it right you can still benefit from free traffic and ongoing exposure for your business, product or service. Here's a quick guide to using MySpace;

Set up an attractive profile

Make the right first impression! The person who finds your MySpace profile has viewed hundreds of other profiles so make yours unique.

Introduce yourself and add a short bio to tell people who you are, who you're not and what you do. Ask people to visit your website. Invite comments to your page.

Next set up a blog on MySpace and add content, article and videos to get the word out about your business.

MySpace may seem like a place for just teenagers, artists and musicians to hang out but if used right it can still offer some good sources of free traffic so get out there and use it as part of your ongoing social media marketing campaign.

The next place to look is Twitter...

3. Twitter Tips To Help You Grow Your Nest-Egg !

(Five Steps to Grow Your Marketing Presence Using Twitter - listen up!)

Twitter is recognised as the fastest growing social network but has also been acknowledged as the king of spam bots (fake profiles et up purely to market automatically) so how can and how do you use Twitter to market your business online? Here goes..

How to tame the twitter tiger?

set up a good profile with a picture of yourself or your company logo.

Make your profile unique with a photo, short description of yourself and link to your website. If people like what you have to say they will visit your profile page and if they like the look of that they will visit your website and may even become your customer.

How to find your target market.

Search a site called twellow.com to find people in your industry. It's a kind of yellow pages for twitter and is completely free. Follow a few leaders in your industry, connect, re-tweet them and their followers and they might just take notice of you and what you have to say.

Time savers and automation tools

Twitter is renowned for automation and for every real direct message you receive there will be twenty or even thirty automated messages.

Is this a bad thing? Not in my opinion if used right and here's why;

The right tools can help you to build your business and your customer base while you sleep and thats why we use the internet to market and not the High Street, isn't it?

Okay, so here's my top two tools to get you started...

Hootsuite - this free platform allows you to manage your account and see what's happening, while also enabling you to track tweets, add multiple RSS feeds to your stream of updates to keep your audience engaged and send pre-set messages at set times to target particular
users in different parts of the world.

Twollo - A free automated follow tool that you can set to find and follow targetted friends.

Do you need any more than this..? Not really, although every man and his dog will try to sell you something that will explode your twitter following in days (believe that and you'll believe anything!).

Now, still with me? Good.. then let's take a look at video marketing on YouTube;

4. YouTube Marketing to Keep You In Focus!

(Simple and Not So Simple Marketing Steps to Explode Your Business Using YouTube)

Video marketing is a simple, free, and increasingly powerful way to get your business in front of people and there is no better place than YouTube to start. In fact, I'd say forget the other video sharing sites, concentrate on YouTube and you'll soon find you have built a good audience of potential customers, sent a fair amount of traffic from YouTube to your website and may even have started to show in Google search for your chosen keywords.

Okay, here goes;

Building your business on YouTube...

Design your YouTube channel to meet and greet

This is an area you have to get right and again, just like your facebook and twitter profiles is all about branding and market exposure.

Pick your name and stick with it.
Chose a url and channel name to match that your customers will be searching for.
Chose a design to expose your work to the world and pick a channel type that will allow you to do this (Guru is the one I would go for when given the options by YouTube)

Creating videos

Keep your videos light and informative and no longer than 3 minutes or people will swith off.
Use punchy keyword targeted titles and descriptions to get found in search.
Add a link to your website within the videos description using html format for the link.
Get started and get better!

Submitting your video

Simple steps to follow;

Submit on a Tuesday, Thursday or Saturday at these times to get the best results;

Tuesday 12-1.00pm EST
Thursday 12 - 1.00pm EST
Saturday 7.00-8.00am EST

Don't ask me why just believe me this is when most people consume their content.

Getting it out there!

The next step is to get your video seen and hopefully by the masses..

use these places to give you a start and embed, share or distribute at will to your target market.

Social bookmarking sites
MySpace
Wordpress Blogs
Facebook
Squidoo
Hubpages
Google sites
Blogger blogs

Having fun? Okay, we're not done yet... let's take a look at LinkedIN

5. LinkediN Marketing Tips to Keep You Connected!

Facts to think about;

There are 8.5 million LinkediN members.
LinkediN has grown byover 500% in the last couple of years.
LinkediN is full of business executives, serious players and ambitious entrepreneurs, no better place to find a good business partner.
Over 150 countries and their citizens are represented on LinkedIn.

Worth your time? I think so...(some of it at least)

Here's how to make most of your time on LinkedIn.

Profile set Up - Put Your Glad Rags On!

LinkedIN is the most business orientated of all social networking sites and its a bit like going out for a meal to a smart restaurant. You
will want your best suit or dress on and a positive, business related profile bio to captivate and impress the other diners. Be honest but be the best you can be and LinkediN will like you for it.

Groups - Get About On LinkediN

There are thousands of Linkedin groups to meet all areas of business interest, so join a few and interract.

Using LinkediN Questions and Answers

LinkediN Q&A is a great way to show your business knowledge, find potential partners and customers or find an answer to a specific query or question, so get out there and get some LinkediN knowledge.

Okay, so now we need to move on to the King of free marketing...

Article marketing - now I'm preaching to the converted!

6. Article Marketing To Get The Word Out!

The steps to successful article marketing;

Step 1.Keyword Research

If you want to get found then find out what your customers are searching for! Use Google to give you the information you need or download a firefox plugin called SEO for firefox and pay a few dollars a month to give you everything you need in terms of search results, competition and associated searches. Learn to use your chosen keyword tool well and apply the necessary keywords to the following areas within your article;

Title
Introduction
Body
Final paragraph
Url
Tags

Step 2. What to writen and how?

If you want your article to stay alive then it has to offer some value, so that other people will share it, rate it up and perhaps even submit it to Digg (like I hope a few of you reading this content may do?) . The only way to do this is through good content and informed, educational or entertaining information.

Keywords will only get you so far - great content will carry you much further!

Step 3. Where to send or submit your one and only article?

Don't be fooled by what people term duplicate content - listen up!

YOU CAN SUBMIT THE SAME CONTENT TO MULTIPLE ARTICLE SITES! (sorry to shout)

But, you must be the author, your name must be on the article and you will NOT show in search with the same content for the same keyword tags. So, if you have a great article about a home business opportunity you can use it on several article sites and tag it to show in search results for terms like;

Home business, home based business,small business,work from home when submitting it to different directories.

Step 4. So where do we submit our article to?

Here's a quick list of article sites to get you going;

Web Pro News
Site Reference
articledashboard
eArticlesOnline.com
ArticleSnatch
Talkin Mince Article DirectoryEzine Articles.com
GoArticles
DirectoryGold Article Directory
Article Friendly
Your Free SAtellite

Articles will give you some great free traffic for as long as your content is searched for if you get this area conquered but how do you get

FAST Traffic? I mean really fast?

Read on....

7. Press Release Marketing Will Bring You Fame and Fortune!    

(Building Your Business Using Press Release Sites)

When you look at Google search results these days you will see a variety of different content offered up to meet your demands for immediate information on a particular topic. Google wants to please everyone and anyone and so they offer blogs, websites, video results and what it terms News Stories and this is where Presss release comes in. But...

How do you use Press Release to build your online business?

Keyword Research - are you getting it yet?

Just like article marketing its all about keyword research and the same rules apply so read back and take the same steps to produce keyword targeted content to get found in search.

Writing a good Press Release.

This is the part that most people find difficult. It's all about putting yourself into the shoes of an interviewer and asking yourself the right questions about your business, product or service. Third party voice is needed here so get practising in front of the mirror and start asking yourself those questions that your customers want the answers to. When you have the answers write the conversation down and put it together as a Press Release.

Where to send your Press Release?

Here's a quick list to get you going (there are hundreds more!);

PRLeap.com – Distribution to RSS feeds, newswires, search engines.
PRLog.org – Distribution to various search engines as well as Google News .
PRUrgent.com – Distribution as well as lessons in Press Release production.
PressAbout.com – Press release service in the shape of a blog.
PRCompass.com – Distribute your press release with a free or paid submission.

What next? Wait for the phone to start ringing?

Not quite! Like anything that goes out online you need to promote it and build links to it. So back link at will and get your Press release found in search!

one of the best ways to build links is by using social bookmarking sites and if you're still with me at this late hour, here's my quick guide (okay, not so quick but pretty thorough all the same!) to social bookmarking. Hey, I told you to sit back and enjoy the coffee didn't I? time
for another cup..?

Read on...

8. Social Bookmarking to Make The Most of Your Content!

(Social Bookmarking power lessons..)

Speaking the lingo...

Bookmarking sites came about as a way to allow people to save and tag their favourite content online, this grew into small communities of people with similar interests and created huge social bookmarking sites where those same people began to vote and share each others
content.

As a marketer, you need to be aware of this history in order to know how to operate in this arena. It's all about sharing, submitting and digging (as an example) good content. Don't be seen to self promote or youand your content will go knowhere fast!

Social bookmarking sites

Where to go.. here's a quick list to get you started;

Buddymarks
Digg
Folkd
Furl
Ma.gnolia.com
Mister Wong
Mixx
Propeller
Reddit
Spurl
StumbleUpon
Technorati

Social media marketing is a term used by many and understood by a few. To fully understand how to market using social media tools and networks like those described in this article takes more than just a knowledge of the mechanics of the application or a view of the network.

To be successful in building your home based business online or any other business for that matter, you need to also understand the mindset of people using social networking sites. The bottom line is they are NOT there looking to buy your product, join your business or invest into your services. They are not there looking to buy from you. But..

If you learn how to build your audience and engage, entertain and educate them then they will reward you in numerous other ways and in the eyes of Google you will become an authority within your chosen niche.

And one day, when they need your product or service they will turn to you and without prompt or push might even buy something from you.