- by Dave Foster

Copyright © Dave Foster – All Rights Reserved

http://www.soloprofits.com

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Last year saw the arrival of online social media. If you operate
a website or blog, you would be well advised to realign your
site to exploit the popular social media sites for increased
traffic.

You should also introduce social media components to your site
because web users are experiencing these new forms of
interaction on more and more sites and they will have an
expectation of the same from your site too.

If you want to attract repeat visitors and want them to stay
longer, your focus for the next few months should be on the
social aspects of your site.

Social media uses technologies like RSS, blogging, podcasting,
tagging, etc. and offer social networking (MySpace, Facebook),
social video and picture sharing (YouTube, Flickr), and
community-based content ranking (Digg, MiniClip) features.

The central theme of these sites is user generated content used
for sharing amongst other users. The social aspects of these
sites allow users to setup social communities, invite friends
and share common interests.

You don’t have to change your site immediately to take
advantages of these new technologies. Introduce small changes
incrementally and you will be well on your way to measure up to
your visitors’ new expectations.

Step 1. Declare who you are to the online community. People
should be able to relate to you. Unless they know more about
you, you will be just an unknown identity and most people don’t
like to deal with people they don’t know. Create an About Me
page to list your achievements skills and aspirations.

Step 2. Create a MySpace page and link your biography in the
Profile of your MySpace page. Also provide a link back from the
MySpace page to your website. Spend an hour every week to develop
your online social network in MySpace. Invite a few of your new
friends to write blog articles at your site about your products
or services.

Step 3. Install a free blog and start publishing at least one
article in your blog every week. Provide an easy bookmarking
feature to social bookmarking sites like delicious (just like
the ones at the bottom of this post). This is done by providing
an action button for each article in your site. The action
button takes users to the submission page of the bookmarking
site.

Step 4. Provide an action button for direct posting of blog
articles to digg. Digg is a popular news ranking site. A well
dugg article will bring thousands of visitors to you.

Step 5. Provide a forum at your site for users to discuss your
products and services. Don’t delete negative comments because
they provide insights into the improvements needed to serve your
visitors better. However, censor hate speeches and meaningless
bantering. Register your forum at BoardTracker. BoardTracker is
a forum search engine.

Step 6. If you are offering products, allow users to review and
rate your products. This will help you in inventory management
because you may want to discontinue low rated products.

Step 7. Provide RSS feeds for your new products, blogs, forum
postings, etc. An RSS feed provides teasers of your content.
Users will use RSS readers to scan your teasers and visit your
site for more information if the teasers interest them.

Step 8. Publish all your feeds at feedburner. Feedburner
provides media distribution and audience engagement services for
RSS feeds. They also provide an advertising network for your
feeds. If you have quality content, you will be able to monetize
your material using their services.

Step 9. Create short how-to or new product videos and post these
videos in social video sharing sites like YouTube, Google video.
Provide a few start and end frames in these videos to introduce
your site with your site url. Post these videos using catchy
titles, teaser descriptions, and appropriate tags to make them
easy to discover.

Step 10. Provide embedded links to your remotely hosted videos
on your site. This will save your bandwidth and storage space
because the videos reside in the video sharing sites rather than
on your own site’s server.

Step 11. As well as videos, use social photo sharing sites like
Flickr and SmugMug to share pictures related to content in your
site. Use the same title, description and tag techniques
discussed earlier for social video sites.

Step 12. Provide a “Send to Friend” feature for all the products
and services you offer. This feature is a link that sends the
article, product description, etc. to a recipient via e-mail.

Social media is not a fad. It is here to stay and brings a
profound change to web surfers’ experiences. Now is the right
time to implement features that will make your site
Social-Media-Friendly. Also, using marketing techniques that
utilize popular social media sites, you will see a massive
increase in traffic to your site.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Dave Foster owns and operates the “Solo Profits” blog and podcast,
guiding individual entrepreneurs and home-based business owners to
online success using audio, video and multimedia techniques. Dave
also explores the virgin territory of multimedia psychology and how
to present your message effectively through these new communications
channels.

Want to discover more? Go To ==>> http://www.soloprofits.com

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^