Social Marketing Snowstorm
It’s everywhere! If you didn’t realize the marketing potential of social media sites then surely you do now! There’s been a snowstorm of social marketing launches as if the Internet Marketing community have just woken up and thought, ‘damn that facebook traffic looks good’.
Lasy year we had the excellent 30 day challenge from Ed Dale and Dan Raine which blew the lid open on a myriad of web 2.0 marketing strategies.
Rich Schefren of Strategic Profits Blog, gave away the excellent Attention Age Doctrine II as a prelude to his Business Acceleration Program – lots of bonuses and coaching for just under the $2k mark
We’ve had Social Media Traffic Strategies (Smarts) launched this week from the Stompernet crew. The course covers an impressive range from search engine domination, using video marketing, harnessing the power of blogs, podcasting etc. Make a cheque out for $1397.
Jack Humphrey of the Friday Report has unleased the altogether much more affordable (apart from FMB of course 
) SocialPowerLinking which currently stands at just $29.95 per month.
Advertising 2.0
Online advertising has moved on slightly since the early heady days of google pay per click and the follow on from competitors.
We are in a web 2.0 world, make no mistake and from a marketing point of view this is great news. Targeted advertising is what increases conversions and there are several new PPC that are worth looking at.
Facebook
The fastest growing social network online has released its’ Pay per Click advertising model recently (it also does Pay per Impressions) Advertisers can target down to specific groups, You can focus on 18-25 year old males who are interested in star wars, are single and live in Alaska!
This is extremely powerful form of advertising. It’s extremely likely advertisers will get a high click through rate and more importantly high conversions.
Squidoo Offers
Squidoo offers allows you to show an offer for a specific amount of time in a certain category, of which there are 63 to target. At the time of writing you can have an offer displayed on all the pages in your chosen category for $25 a week. Only the top five offers, as rated by Squidoo’ers, will show initially on the sidebar of each lens. A link clicks through to the other offers.
When your SquidOffer is approved, it will go live in whatever category you selected. If you get your Offer voted into the top 5 in your category, it goes live on every participating lens.
StumbleUpon
You can buy stumbles, although this shouldn’t be the sole aim of your strategy on SU. Gain enough ‘thumbs up’ and you will get free visits off the back of your paid exposures.
Just a few options to think about when promoting your business!
Feedburner Video Tutorials
A couple of videos are now uploaded in the ‘Shout it out loud’ section of the membership site covering RSS syndication using feedburner. Feedburner is an excellent piece of online kit that can syndicate all your blog posts, whether they’re articles, podcasts or video, to your subscribers!
Using the wordpress blog as an example we look at intergrating feedburner.
Basic steps:
Step 1. Put in your blog feed URL into the home page at feedburner.com
where it says ‘Start feedburning now’ and create your account.
You now have a feedburner URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/yourfeedname
Step 2. Go through the steps of Optimizing and Publizing. You’ll want to activate the ‘browser Friendly option’
Make it easy for potential subscribers to preview and subscribe to your text or podcast feed. Applies clean visual formatting to the eyesore of raw feed XML for much improved readability.
If you’re doing a lot of podcasts select ’smartfeed’ to optimize your audio. Link to MP3s, videos, images, and other digital media in your site content and SmartCast creates enclosures for them automatically.
Get the ‘chicklet’ code under the Publize tab, onto your blog to gain new subscribers. There is a drop down if you use TypePad or Blogger to get a widget code otherwise just copy the html and put it where you want the RSS subscribe information.
Use Pingshot to get your feed ‘out there’!
You can also monetrize your feed with adsense and the Amazon affiliate program!
Step 3. Post to your blog and syndicate that content.
Check out the FMB membership area for videos on all the above and more!
New media intro podcast
A quick introduction podcast to the Future Marketing Blueprint concept and membership benefits. Free membership is available
Click here for the FMB Intro podcast
RSS Hugger
We will always shout for the power of blogs and when useful resources are discovered they will be posted here. RSS Hugger was developed to help bloggers promote their blogs, and to help visitors discover new blogs that write about subjects that the readers are interested in.
To get a permanent RSS page on rssHugger, all you need to do is write an honest review of the website on your blog. If you do not want to talk about rssHugger on your blog, we do offer an alternative of a $20 review fee, which runs down to only $2 per year!
Benefits
For the blog owners:
Click here for our new media marketing Blog Page
New Media Marketing
In the new media age that we’re now entering is a consumer driven culture where the users and customers hold the power of opinion.
The mass media don’t get it and that’s fine because for the likes of you and I and far sighted entrepeneurs this is a massive advantage!
The power of this new media cannot be measured but we’ve seen it flex its’ muscles on a few occasions now.
Power to the people indeed!
In 2004 Bloggers dug into the facts presented by 42 year old broadcast veteran Dan Rather on 60 minutes.
In less than one week CBS admitted it could ‘no longer vouch for the memos.’ Rather retired soon after.
Kryptonite Bike Locks.
In 2004 a bike enthusiast named Chris Brennan made a post to a biking forum stating that an expensive Kryptonite bike lock could be opened with a ball point pen.
As others found out this was true, the word spread like wildfire until the mainstream media picked up on the story and profits plummeted, damaging Kryponite’s reputation forever.
Dell Hell
Jeff Jarvis blogged about his problematic Dell laptop after getting the runaround by
clueless Technicians. Hundreds posted with similiar stories. Today there are over 2million references in Google to Dell Hell.
The mass media can no longer rely on decent results from ‘broadcast’ advertising such as television, radio and newspapers and are increasingly turning to the more targeted nature of online advertising and other innovative advertising such as pay per play.
90% of homes that have a TIVO or DVR (Digital Video Recorder)
skip all adverts.
Only 18% of all TV ads generate a positive ROI!
Media Mogul Murdoch told a group of newspaper and magazine owners:
‘Power is moving away from the old elite in our industry’
