In years past, all advertising was done through a newspaper classified ad, a notice on the pegboard at your local grocery, commercials on television, and ads received in the mail. In the world of advertising, today you still have the television commercials, newspaper ads, and a new form of advertising called Social Media. Seeing those two words side by side just do not seem like they go together. When you break the words down social means meeting new people and having fun and media means some type of advertising. Putting that all together, it sounds as if social media means meeting people, having fun, and advertising. That does not sound like advertising, but it is.
With today's modern technology, social media sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter lets you to combine fun with advertising. If you have one of these social networking sites, you can use them to advertise. On each of these sites, you have a page that you can make a profile, which includes your name, location, schooling, work, and interests. The work section does not limit you to adding one work site. Put the name of your business there, and on farther down, there is a space for a website, so list your business website here.
With Facebook, you have opportunity to make daily entries, letting people know what is going on with your life. You can also use this space to advertise your products/services that you offer on your website. You can even mention any specials you are having. With MySpace, you have a blog where you can make it just about your business. With Twitter, you can do daily Tweets up to 160 characters.
Now that you have the general idea how to use these social media sites to advertise your business, you need to know how to get traffic, potential customers, to your social media site. You can accomplish this by using Social Media Optimization (SMO). Social Media Optimization is organizing social media activity with the intent of attracting unique visitors to website content. There are two ways to do this. The first way is to add social media features to the content by using RSS feeds, sharing buttons, incorporating functions like videos and images, and social news. The second way is using other promotional activities like blogging, commenting on other blogs, and posting status updates on your social networking profiles.
The primary focus, on Social Media Optimization, is to drive traffic to your website from sources other than search engines. It is a technique in viral marketing where word of mouth is not created by family and friends but using networking. Networking includes using social bookmarking, photo and video sharing websites.
In addition, there is another avenue to drive traffic to your website. That is using Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Search Engine Optimization is the process of improving the visibility of your web page, or website in search engines. It means that the higher on the page and more frequently a site appears in the search result lists the more visitors it will receive from the search engine.
There is a variety of ways that can increase the visibility of a webpage within the search results. One way is to cross-link between pages of the same website to provide more links to the more important pages. A great way to increase traffic to your website is to include frequently searched key words, and key phrases that pertain to your site. You would not use key words and key phrases such as cooking, baking chocolate chip cookies, and variety of cookies on a site that is selling automotive supplies. You also need to keep the content on your website updated so search engines keep crawling back frequently. In order to get a fair share of traffic to your website, you need to make sure that your website is promoted on the first three pages of major search engines like Google and Yahoo.
In addition, you can use word of mouth from satisfied customers, offer specials weekly if this applies to your website, contests, asking the visitor to register with your site, and more. If a visitor visits your webpage, a very important factor to remember is to return the favor by visiting their website and posting a comment in their visitor's guestbook. You can even share links to give each website more exposure.
You can now see that having fun and advertising is possible. You just need to learn how to combine them and apply it to your website to bring in more traffic. The more traffic, the better chance you have to make a sale. Once you make a sale, do not dismiss the customer. Ask permission to send them email updates. If you do not have their permission, sending emails can be considered spam.