Online Marketing Using Twitter and Social Media Marketing

Today, every smart business knows that social media marketing is the new yellow pages, and twitter marketing is right at the top. Twitter Marketing: An Hour a Day is an awesome tool to promote and grow your business on the internet. This book makes it extremely easy to follow and implement this online marketing strategy. By using the hour-a-day homework assignments, and following every trick in this book, you will be able to take your business to a new level.

In the first few chapters, you will get a rundown on how to market your business with twitter, setting up goals and other exercises to help you create action plans for you to follow. This book is not just a list of suggestions with very little results. As you move through it, you will start seeing tangible results and reaping the rewards of online marketing.

After chapter 3, the book makes a transition from a text book to a social media marketing guide as it goes into Part 2. This section consist of an hour by hour, day to day, and week to week training to advance you from a Twitter marketing rookie to a serious power user. The author does a very good job at clearing out all the noise of the web, and consolidates the necessary requirements a business person needs to know about online marketing. This book does exactly what it claims to do which is help you market your products through Twitter.

Another thing that makes this book worthwhile is all the resources it provides to the reader. Though the intended audience for this book is mainly companies looking to use Twitter as another form of online marketing, the average Twitter user can easily find value in it as well. The layout is well thought out and easy to navigate.

With so many Twitter experts on the net, it’s refreshing and helpful to get practical how-to advice from someone who has clearly guided others to achieve real business results from Twitter marketing. Despite your current knowledge of Twitter, you will be able to easily unlock new applications and methods to improve your results. As your comfort level rises, you will learn how to leverage this powerful tool as an online marketing platform. This book is meticulously organized and presented in a step-by-step manner that makes it easy for beginners as well as experienced Twitter marketers. If you desire to be among the Twitter superstars, this book will undoubtedly help you find your way.

How Affiliate Marketing Works: The Basics

Despite the popularity of affiliate marketing, some people still ask the question “What is affiliate marketing?” or “how can I make money with affiliate marketing?” This article will answer that question and tells you what you need to make money in affiliate marketing.

Simply put, affiliate marketing is a kind of marketing strategy whereby a person (the affiliate) promotes the products/services of other people or companies for a commission. The company whose product the affiliate promote is called the merchant. In some programs, you get commission when people just sign up or download a software through your link.

You can join an affiliate program through affiliate networks. An affiliate network serves as a broker between the affiliate and the merchant. The network handles payment processes and ensures that no one is dupe. Few examples of affiliate networks are ClickBank and Commission Junction (cj.com). While registering with an affiliate network, you’ll be required to provide some personal and payment information. Once registered you are free to choose and start promoting any product of your choice. For each product you want to promote, you will be provided with a special affiliate link. Whenever somebody makes a purchase through your link you’ll receive a commission. Apart from crediting you for a sale, another thing the affiliate link does is to drop a cookie into the computer of anyone who clicks on it. This way, even if the person who clicks on your link does not buy immediately, you will still be credited if the person comes back and buy within a period of 30 or 90 days, depending on how long the cookie is made to last.

The above is basically how affiliate marketing works, that is, you sign up with a network, choose some products and start promoting them through your affiliate links. This is not as easy as it sounds; the real work is in the promotion. There are many smart tactics super affiliates use in their promotion but the most important is lead capture. To make it big you must capture the email addresses of visitors to your website. This is because in order to persuade a visitor to buy, you must educate them on the benefits of the product while feeding them with valuable information. Having your visitor’s email means that you can sell more than one products to a customer.

Another important thing you’ll need to make money with affiliate marketing is traffic, you have to be conversant with both free and paid methods of traffic generation. You can get free traffic from article directories, blog comments, forums, social networking sites, search engines and free to use websites. Paid advertising can be in the form of pay-per-click, link advertising or cost-per-mile advertising.

There are other things you need to make money with affiliate marketing, for example, you have to choose the right niche and products if you want to see good result. You also have to learn things like search engine optimization (SEO), keyword research, HTML coding, how to use autoresponders effectively, how to write engaging articles, article marketing etc.

The final truth is that making money with affiliate marketing requires some work and effort. You must be determine and believe that you can succeed. Many new affiliate marketers fail because they lack an action plan. Your action plan contains a list of things you’ll do daily in order to achieve your goal. Having a sort of one week marketing action plan can go a long way to help you.

If you want to fasten your learning process and learn how to do things the faster way, then you have to get a good affiliate marketing guide that already contain a step-by-step one week marketing action plan.

7 Truths of Social Networks

While mainstream use of Social Networks is only a few years old, it is well known how consumers use them. Besides, a few years is a generation in Internet parlance anyway.

Here are 7 truths of Social Networks that you can / must rely upon to help guide your thinking regardless of what you do with Social Media.

1. Social Networks is the preferred way for people in younger demographics to communicate with each other. Nothing else comes close!

2. It is based on the concept of friends, but that term today is very loosely applied. Similarly, profiles are loosely defined & can be used in a variety of ways by people, companies, brands, & so on.

3. The more active a consumer is on the internet, the more likely they will participate in multiple Social Networks. Often times, these people are influencers within a circle of friends & have a tremendous impact on the opinions of others.

4. Once information is shared on a Social Network, it is out there & can’t easily be contained. Everything is out in the open & largely visible for other people to see.

5. Social Media is best applied in addition to existing internet marketing programs & alongside other web assets. When building a strategy, you must think comprehensively.

6. The rules are still being made. Social network “etiquette” is still relatively immature. Tread carefully.

7. The seventh & final truth involves the factors that contribute to usage. Everyone is motivated by a combination of one or more of the following human needs:

Love: Finding love, keeping up with loved ones, & so forth.

Self expression / Emotion: Sharing life’s’ details with friends.

Sharing opinion / Influencing friends: Using these Networks as a platform for influencing opinions, usually about politics, religion, or other things we don’t typically debate in person.

Showing off: Sharing life’s success & / or achievements with others.

Fun / Escapism / Humor: Using social media to get a good laugh.

Memories & Nostalgia: Catching up with old friends & sharing old friends.

Making Money: Using social media primarily to support professional pursuits.

From the above, one can infer that the motivation for using Facebook varies significantly depending on your customer. No Social Media can match Facebook’s current momentum or broad international customer adoption. It hosts a range of Social applications and has been the market leader in Social Media since April 2008.

Facebook Marketing is integral to online social marketing – in that, a very key component of Internet Marketing!