Social Media and Marketing Continued

In a previous post on social media, I mentioned several applications that most of us are familiar with through using them ourselves or by having heard about them. This is a continuation in my series on social media and the effectiveness of marketing your business through social media. I hope readers will find the information presented useful in helping them to take advantage of the social media applications they are using just as the top online moneymakers are now doing.

Turning your Facebook, MySpace, or Twitter account into a successful marketing machine is not difficult at all. Keeping the following tips in mind can help transform basic online socializing platforms into mega-successful traffic, income, and profit generators. I have condensed things a bit here by only mentioning 3 of the many popular social interactive sites available to users online today. Insert the name(s) of the social media applications that you use if they differ from the ones I have listed. The principles for using them to your advantage in business marketing remain the same nonetheless.

Ø Let the popularity of top social media applications do the work of finding traffic for you. Make sure that you set your profile or updates page to ‘public’ so that the larger flows of traffic to these sites can find you. Keeping it private will mean that you will have to find and invite people to visit your pages, which can be time-consuming and slow to show positive returns for your efforts.

Ø If you are using your social account for promoting yourself, your business, or business programs, be careful about posting negative opinions without some substantial information to back it up, or stuff you would be embarrassed for strangers to know about you. You will find that posting some personal things like having attended a concert or what you had for dinner will bring visitors and a lot of times followers to your social pages. You never know what seemingly mundane activities or subjects may spark someone else’s interest until you post something about it and gain traffic from it. Just temper such personal postings with common sense. Remember that once you post something in cyberspace it can exist forever.

Ø Do not use your social media applications to hard sell your business interests. No one responds very well to such tactics. Include links to articles, web tools, and sites that are likely to be of interest to your target audiences. Space these between your regular updates on your business products, services, etc.

Ø Learn how to create intriguing headlines and short sentences that really grab people’s attention. Space for communicating with others is typically limited in these social media applications so make the best use of the space that is available to you.

Ø Shortening links to your websites, blog entries, or articles you have posted online will give you more room for expressing why someone should want to click on the link(s) provided on your profile or updates pages. Many people use http://www.tinyurl.com/ for this purpose and I have used it myself.

By following these tips, you can supercharge the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns using various social media platforms with less effort and time. Did you find this article helpful? Please share your comments.

In the next in this series on social media and social media marketing, we will be looking into synchronizing your site, blog, and forum RSS feeds and updates for greater visibility and productivity, and blog and forum postings for creating web presence and for branding and marketing your business products, services, and programs.

Author: Julie Morris. Freelance writer and blogger, all rights reserved. Visit my website: http://thewritestation.yolasite.com/ Contact me: twsstaff@yahoo.com

Beginning Series on Social Media and Social Media Marketing

This is the first in a series of articles on social media and channeling the power of social media into massively effective marketing campaigns. Many of us are already using popular and highly trafficked social applications like MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Plaxo, Linkedin, and others to connect with family, friends, and colleagues. Then there are the zillions of blogs, bulletin boards, weblogs, vlogs, podcasts, forums, and niche sites that exist in cyberspace to enable people from around the world to socialize and communicate with one another on small and mass levels. Let us not forget communication tools like Skype, MSN Live, Yahoo Chat, IGoogle, and other instant messaging applications that also allow people plenty of online socializing opportunities as well.

The Internet has Granted Media Access to Everyone

Traditional or broadcast media remains primarily a restricted medium with access reserved mostly for industry professionals with a few exceptions. Social media on the other hand is an open-access medium that allows almost everyone with an internet connection to generate web content and to share that content with small or large audiences, locally, internationally, and as most of us know-globally! You do not have to have professional associations, media-related degrees, or a huge bankroll to participate in social media. Most social applications are free to use and basic spelling and grammar skills or a quality program that checks for mistakes before publishing to the web, is all one really needs to begin building an audience of readers The more skills that you have the more you can take advantage of all that this platform known as social media offers

Well-informed entrepreneurs have found these online social media applications to be great sources for excellent business advertising and branding with little or no costs to them and requiring barely any effort at all besides catchy headlines and some carefully chosen words. We will be exploring social media business marketing, branding, and other concepts involved in utilizing the power of social media successfully in other articles in this series.

I would love to read your thoughts or any additional information and knowledge that you could share with readers about social media and social media marketing.

Professional Directory for Freelance Writers launched

Writers: Submit your free listing in the new Professional Directory of Freelance Writers. Most writers spend a bulk of their time looking for writing jobs. With a Free or Paid listing in this directory, you can gain more exposure and help employers find you to offer writing work to you.

Employers looking for qualified writers for their writing projects can save themselves a lot of time and hassle by looking through the author pages of listed writers in this professional freelance writer’s directory to find writers whose qualifications meet their business writing needs.


Writers can submit their information for listing in the directory, and employers can browse the directory to look for qualified professional writers by visiting Find/Hire Writers, the professional freelance writers’ directory.

The Marketing Power of an Opt-In List

Your online business can soar to new heights with a powerful opt-in list. You can build one gargantuan opt-in list and then duplicate that same winning formula to build multiple big and profitable opt-in lists for your business. Why are opt-in lists such a powerfully effective marketing tool for business owners?

An opt-in list by its very name tells you that this is a list populated by people who OPT to place their names on your business list to receive information about your products and services and offers from your company to purchase those products and services. They do this because they have a high interest in the products and services that your business offers. You can easily deduce that people with a higher interest in the products and services that you sell are more likely to make purchases from your business. You could spend a great deal of your time trying to convince “cold contacts” as to why they should want to buy a product or service from you and not get the same high sales response from them.

Building a large opt-in list may take you awhile the first time around as you become more familiar with the best methods there are for building them. In fact, there are numerous ways to build solid opt-in lists. For the most part though, none of them is as complicated as those who would like to sell you their opt-in list building services would like you to believe. We will explore some of the best ways for you to build a powerfully effective opt-in list for your business in subsequent articles.

However, here is one to give you a start on building an opt-in list for higher sales and profits. Have a contest that rewards a winner with a prize. People love getting free stuff! You can either offer one of your products as a prize, or purchase a low-cost branded business promotional item to offer as a prize. Create a form to place on your website that allows people to enter your contest easily and conveniently. ( All Forms lets you create forms to use for this purpose at no cost. Web Address: http://allforms.mailjol.net/ ) When someone uses the form on your website to enter the contest your business is sponsoring, this person is also opting to receive future offers from you. These forms are essentially an opt-in list that provides you with the information needed for future marketing campaigns. Now how easy is that?

I hope you found this article helpful and will come back to read additional articles on opt-in lists, and building them with ease.

This Writer Has Had Enough With A Particular Writing Jobs Board

What you are about to read here about what I consider to be absolutely the worst place for online writers and content seekers alike, is strictly my own opinion.

The write jobs bidding board site that I cannot stand is that one that tells article buyers to get freelancers. Which from pursuing post after post for over two years now, I guess means an open invitation for content seekers to lowball writers with measly offers of compensation for writing articles for them? Like $1.00- $2.00 for a 500 word article! The fact that there are writers from another region of the world more than happy to accept such exploitation of their writing talents and labors does not help the situation either.

Two and half years ago, I sent a message to this job board’s owner to explain my frustration and disappointment that they allowed such practices. I received a reply back from them after a couple of weeks, in which they said that they were working on correcting these issues so that writers would be presented with projects offering just compensation, for their services only. The board owners assured me that content seekers who continued to make outrageous job projects like $30 for 50/ 800 word articles would find themselves banned from the site. Yeah right. In my inbox, this morning was another list from them of writing jobs created by content seekers offering next to nothing for quite a lot of work.

I am a rather patient person and that is why I have given them so long to change their ways before parting with them for good. I have no respect for the company running this board and continuing to allow these unfair practices to writers. I have even less respect for the content seekers guilty of these practices, which are the outright exploitation of the writers there, no matter how willing some of them may be. It would serve these underhanded content seekers to get poor quality content to match their unbelievably poor pay rates. I have to say that there are ethical content seekers in the mix who do offer writers respectable amounts of pay. However, the ones with little if any apparent ethics literally bury those who are willing to offer writers due compensation for their written works.

At the time, that I made contact with the company behind this job board to let them know of my dissatisfaction with the dismal substance of the writing jobs being offered there, I expressed a concern for new writers who might think they had to accept such low pay to get a start in online writing. I still have that concern today.

Although you may have to start out on a lower paying scale for writing an article that say I do now with the experience I have as a ten-plus online freelance writer. That does not mean you have to accept $2.50 for a 500-word article, because you are a new writer without any writing credentials to show a client. You may have to do a few of these 500 word articles for $5 each, but no lower than that. Only agree to do a few of them to give a client a chance to evaluate your writing skills.

It is wonderful that there are people out there who are willing to give new writers a chance to prove themselves. The opportunity to get our feet wet as new online writers is why many of us are willing to take a little less pay for our writing work in the beginning. Just be careful not to sell yourself and your writing skill too short. Luckily, the decent people who buy articles and other content from writers respect the work that we do, and are willing to pay a decent amount for our writing services. They may ask for a lower fee during an initial evaluation phase of receiving content from a brand new writer. However, they will typically offer to increase your pay after you write a few articles for them.

If the person or company that you are dealing with only wants you to keep writing articles indefinitely on a low pay scale, politely tell them you have taken on new clients and cannot continue providing content for them. I say politely, because we should all be careful about the bridges we burn behind us. I also unequivocally say that you should move on if you do not see higher pay in it for you within a reasonable period and number of produced articles. There are plenty of respectable content buyers out there more than willing to pay professional freelance writers fair wages for their services. To them I say “Thank You!” I really appreciate the clients that make it possible for me to afford to do the writing work that I love so much.

I only made a real-close association to the actual name of this shoddy writing job board at the start of this article to protect myself from possible litigation. I am sure many of you have heard of this place or can figure out its name anyway. Have you had an experience with them similar to mine? Alternatively, have you had a positive experience with them that you would like to share with readers? Click on the comments tab to leave your comments if the comment box is not already open.

The Advantages to Hiring Professional Freelance Writers

There are many advantages to relying upon a professional freelance writer to provide you with dynamic content for your business.

1. Professional freelance writers have the expertise to create vibrant articles and content for use in a variety of business purposes.

2. Choosing to outsource your businesses content needs to professional freelance writers is an important step in managing your time and resources well for success.

3. The dynamic content for your business website that a professional freelance writer can skillfully put together for you will boost its page ranking assigned by search engines.

4. Search engine optimized articles and content is highly attractive to the search robots that crawl websites for indexing. Most professional freelance writers who write articles and content for the web have a great deal of experience with SEO.

5. Business websites that provide visitors with educational, enlightening, entertaining, and engaging webpage content, articles, and interactive features, have higher traffic streaming to them and higher conversions of traffic into customers. A professional freelance writer can provide you and your business with the content materials needed to make this happen.

6. Professional freelance writers create persuasive and cleverly worded articles and advertising materials that can be powerful call-to-action incentives for drawing in new customers for your business.

7. Well-researched articles and other content materials can help you to foster strong business relationships with your customers. Professional freelance writers have honed their researching skills in order to be successful in the very competitive realm of freelance writing.

8. Highly interactive and interesting newsletters created by professional freelance writers can help businesses to grow multiple customer bases and to build profitable opt-in lists.

9. Outsourcing to a professional freelance writer is more affordable than delegating the task of constructing various polished content materials for your business to an employee.

10. You can grow your business and encourage more sales and profits through the premium writing services that professional freelance writers can offer to business owners.

There you have it. Ten compelling reasons to consider contracting with a professional freelance writer, or several writers to provide you and your business with superior content to help you accomplish your goals of great success in business. Take advantage of all that professional freelance writers have to offer by enlisting their aid in helping to raise your business to new heights today. ((I am always accepting new clients and have a team of writers ready to work with me on larger writing projects. Send your content requests to the writers at The Write Station, via our email address. twsstaff@yahoo.com ))

What Content Can Do for You

Julie Morris, April 2009, All rights reserved.

*This is available in PowerPoint Presentation format, and as a movie file (with music) for viewing in Windows Media Player. Contact me for Usage License Pricing. Attn. Julie:twsstaff@yahoo.com