Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, what is all the buzz about and how do I actually make it work?

Follow, then Lead…

The first step is to dedicate a small amount of time every week to building your profiles on the most trafficed social media websites – especially if your clients, prospects, colleagues and/or networking partners are using them.  This is Follow.

Once you have established a good network and a good visual presence, as well as some good archived reading for your audience, now you can begin posting links to articles on your blogs, new specials you are running and client’ stories of success – all LEADing back to your website – this the lead.

Your website should be your best marketing.  When you finally begin getting visitors, then hopefully you will do business with some.

Look forward to a  further expansion of this article as time permits – also stay up with more on this topic at Locally Social.

Who are you targeting? 

Your target audience should play into how you design your website – especially when it comes to customizing.  The first rules you may want to follow are:

Simpler is better.

Bold graphics for your bold statements. 

Where are they?  Why will they visit your website?

Are you planning to utilize the website in your sales cylce?  Are you going to use the website for lead generation or is the website going to help you sell more products to your current clients?

When (in the sales cycle) will your shoppers visit?

As a lead generating website, it will be new prospects that visit the website vs you referring a client to your site.  It’s important to address both audiences if both will exist.

What are you selling online? 

Are you just enhancing your reputation, moving buyers closer to a decision or do you actually have a BUY NOW button?  Is your buy now compelling?  Does your audience actually buy online?

Web design as a service is rarely purchased online – more often, by a magnitude of difference, web design and marketing sales are made in person.  With this in mind, a website for web designers is often designed to highlight the talents and services – as opposed to actual products. 

Keep these things in mind and look for a rewrite of this article in time – the 5 w’s of web design.

Luckily, on the internet, generating buzz can be done relatively simply through a consistent dedication to the task.  Several pieces of the formula include article writing, social bookmarking, and snippet posting on social media websites.  The first step produces new content and information, the second and third steps bring visitors.

Article writing can take a few forms.  One of the early Internet PR and marketing puzzle pieces that continues now is article writing and submission to article directories.  These directories can be submitted to manually, and other software can speed the process of copying/pasting so that your article can be submitted to 100 sites in a couple of hours.  By varying the article content you can up the number of original content counts and links Google (Yahoo and Bing also) give you.  Once the content is varied, then you can submit to even more directories.  Social Bookmarking and Social Media don’t apply to this type of article writing as much, but this is a strong tactic for generating internet buzz.

A more current and possibly more beneficial form of article writing – is blogging.  This is very important to any company, and requires certain steps to be effective.  Look forward to our article on proper blogging techniques very soon.

After an article is published on your blog, social bookmarking sites like Stumble Upon, Reddit, and Delicious can be used to build links to your site and send actual visitors.  The better your content, the more visitors you can expect.

Same goes with Social Media Sites like Facebook and Linked In.  After the article is published you post a snippet or teaser with linkbait like “free download” or other types of attraction marketing verbiage, and look for visitors from your social media networks.

This internet buzz is people talking about your company, visiting your website, and buying your products or services as a result.