My father worked in the corporate world for most of my life. He was one of those men who wore a suit coat and tie and worked behind a computer desk all day. I learned a lot of what I know about computers because of him. My mother however, she owned her own business. When it came to advertising and marketing a business, I learned that from her.
My mother owned a painting business and for her only one means of advertising worked, social advertising. One of the best ways for her to advertise believe it or not was by going to local church functions. What I learned was that people who go to church want to help other members of their church. So they started recommending my mothers services to their friends and acquaintances. In less then one year of her starting her business, she had so many customers she started refusing some.
The truth is this is the best method of advertising a business, but its also the hardest. As a blogger who wants to make money social marketing is everything! Why? Because you are effectively a writer on your given topic and your audience are people who want to hear what you say. A blog is within itself a social networking medium! However effective social marketing is different for every situation and this is what makes it so hard.
First their is offline social marketing. This type of social networking always works best. Whenever you can sit with like minded people, you are marketing yourself socially. MLM marketing professionals know this method well. That’s why it has become a common practice for MLM marketers to meet offline to try to build up their down lines.
The problem is its hard to target an audience offline and no one can give perfect details. For example if you own a blog about dogs, pet care, and pet services going to dog shows, pet walks, and other pet events is going to be a great way to network socially. If you have a blog about music you may want to go to concerts and music events to do your networking. If you have a fashion blog going to local avon and makeup parties and other fashion events are great for social marketing. The thing is each topic in life has its own audience. Its a matter of figuring that audience out and being social with them.
Not every market is so easy to figure out though. Take this blog for example. Its a blog teaching others about blogging. How does one market a blog like this offline? Well honestly I reach out to bloggers! They have blogger meets where bloggers talk about the newest and best marketing methods and get to meet others who also blog. Also places like job fairs are a great place. Honestly everyone has an offline market its just a matter of figuring out who your market is.
Now I said earlier that offline social marketing is the hardest. The truth is its the hardest for one reason and one reason only. Your personality is everything. You see with online social marketing is easy to fake a personality however offline its not so easy. You actually have to be a likable person and a social butterfly. Others have to want you around.
However online social marketing has its twists and turns also. Online is both easier and harder to network socially. For example its easier for a person to glue on a smiley face and pretend to be a nice likable person even if they are really a rude crude unlikable jerk, however its much harder to find people who are genuinely interested in what you have to say. Whereas offline all you have to do is make a presence at the social events you are targeting and talk to a few people, online you have to not only talk to people but you have to convince them that out of the millions of people online, you have something original to say and something original to promote.
The truth and reality is that the internet is one giant advertisement after another. Because of this people have become very accustomed to seeing advertising and hearing people talk about their great new websites and website services especially in the social network realms. Now when a person online has a friend who out says “hey I have a blog” or “I have a website” they look at that friend and say “oh so you want to sell me something”. With online social marketing you have to convince them that you are not trying to sell them anything, that they will be genuinely interesting in your offers, or you must somehow give them some other reason to visit your site over all the millions that are also marketing!
So far I have talked a lot about the online social market known as twitter. I have told you about auto tweet services like Tweet Later (I highly recommend this service and will make an official post about it at some point) and I have told you how to build your following up. I also have recommended that for myspace people use the program Myspace Blaster to build up a following and to market their blog posts and articles (another program highly recommend I will go into full detail about sometime soon).
What I haven’t really talked about is your actual socializing. This is where 99% of online social marketing fails. You must be social on a social site. You must build real interaction with your friends. For example on myspace, its great if you have 10,000 followers. Its great if you play all the little myspace apps with them. However its not really productive. You want to be even more real to your clients then that. You want to email them and say “hey I noticed you were interested in blah blah blah and thought I’d drop you a line because of it. Honestly I LOVE to talk about stuff like that.”….. etc. You get the idea.
You can also use little things like, visit the profiles of the people on your friends list. When your friend adds new things, comment them telling them what you think. When they add new pictures comment them and tell them which ones you like best least, etc. The more real you become to these people, the more likely they will consider you a real cyber friend, not just someone they follow/returned request of.
This is also true with twitter. Sure you can just use it as a news ticker for your favorite topics and you may find great success with that, but I also promise you something else. It will be a short lived success. If instead you read the tweets of those you follow and you talk back and forth with them, you get them to see you are different and not just another person marketing something. You become real and they become interested. As a blogger this is exactly what you want! This is also exactly what social networking and social marketing is all about.
This is the practice commonly known as branding. It does take time but as I have tried to show over and over again, you can still cheat the system and do things a lot quicker. Hopefully this little bit of information can help those out their who are misinformed about social marketing. Hopefully someone will read this and say to themselves that perhaps they can be a bit more social and a bit less marketing to make a business name for themselves.
Just remember unlike paid marketing, social marketing is something unique and different.
Article Written By Bruce B.
of Blog Marketing
http://theda420.info
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