With the growth of internet marketing, another platform has quickly emerged in the industry – social networking. Social networking is one of the most important areas that you can enter your business into. With social networking sites, you can reach an entirely new group of people that otherwise would never know that you exist. Sites like MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, and Squidoo have literally taken the internet by storm. You’d be hard-pressed to find someone that doesn’t have an account with one of the aforementioned sites. This means that if you do things right, you can reach all the people that could benefit from your service or product. However, with the way things are growing, how could you possibly keep up with all of your social marketing tasks? Without some sort of help, the tasks can seem pretty daunting.

When you jump into the social marketing arena, there is often a lot of foreign ground to be covered. You have to set up a profile, which if done right, can take some time. You have to fill out all kinds of online forms and upload pictures, videos, and other information. This step alone can take hours of work. If you’re joining YouTube, you’ll have to make videos and figure out how to upload them. If you’re not experienced with this, it might be difficult at first. Basically, there is a lot to do right off the bat, as well as the daily and weekly tasks. If you don’t know what you’re doing or don’t have much free time, it can be overwhelming. Other than just buckling down and doing it, what other option do you have?

Actually, there is another fantastic option that you might not have thought of – hiring a virtual assistant. Virtual assistants can take care of all of these tasks and more when it comes to social marketing. They can guide you through the entire process or just handle most of it for you. Their level of involvement is totally up to you. Have your virtual assistant put together a spreadsheet listing a dozen social sites that would be perfect for your business and industry. The virtual assistant will be able to guide you on just what type of social networking steps you’ll be able to take on the various sites.

When you start to look for a virtual assistant to help you with social marketing, there are a few things that you’ll want to consider. You want to find someone that has real-world experience in these matters. You want someone who has done social marketing successfully for their business or others before. You don’t want some newbie who has never done this before. You want a proven track record that can pay dividends. You’ll have more confidence in a virtual assistant that has walked the walk. Look for virtual assistants that have a certification in internet marketing. They’re out there. They have been trained specifically to support your internet business.

It’s also great to have a virtual assistant that is proactive in their marketing efforts. You don’t want to have to lead them along by the hand. Someone with initiative to get up and get things done is who you want. However, with that being said, you don’t want someone that won’t even consult you. You need to make sure that they have a very clear understanding of what you want. They should know all of your goals and desires for your social marketing plan before they do anything. Set up some rules and guidelines for what you want accomplished. Putting out some preliminary deadlines and outlines of your goals is probably a good idea for your virtual assistant. If you want to portray a certain image when you interact with your online contacts, the virtual assistant should have a clear understanding of this. You want to portray a certain image in the marketplace. This should always be seen in every bit of marketing that you do. You want a virtual assistant that will remain consistent in their efforts and message.

A good virtual assistant can handle many of the tasks that take a lot of time. For example, if you are wanting help with your participation in Twitter, you will still need to be the one who updates your current status. At a minimum you will email your status to the VA and they will post it for you. Keep in mind there are many time-saving techniques that the VA can put into place to make it easy for you to do things, such as emailing your status update and have it sent to 20 different social networking sites. Updating your Twitter status aside, what can a virtual assistant do for you? Using Twitter search and notification features your virtual assistant can monitor for your keywords, keep an eye on what your competition is doing, and reputation management (very important). And that’s just Twitter. Think of how helpful a virtual assistant will be to you in all the other social networking sites.

While your virtual assistant can take care of many things for you in the social marketing world, it should be a team effort so you won’t be so overwhelmed. Your involvement is crucial to the success of the campaign, even if it is limited. If you don’t take some kind of ownership over your social networking sites, it will start to show. It will be just another commercial website that is out there to sell products. None of your own personality will show through. However, if you actually take the time to develop some contacts and relationships, your business will flourish. There is only so much that you can hand off to someone else. Get in there and work with your virtual assistant. Your social marketing results will grow as a result.

Social Marketing Traffic

Learning the skills to research and leverage the social media space is a very important part of setting up your traffic system. With Social media, you are able to use microblogging platforms like Twitter as well as online communities like Squidoo and Facebook to grow your outreach and target your targeted markets quickly and easily.

While you are a marketer first, friend second, you want to form a personal connection with your target audience. Here are some of the best social communities to get involved with: Twitter: Friend Feed: Facebook: Stumble Upon: Del.icio.us: MySpace.

Article Marketing Traffic

The concept of article marketing is a very simple one: You write high quality content and distribute it amongst popular article databases and directories online, generating tons of traffic from the back links in the attached resource box. It really is as simple as that.

Think about it, writing a 1,000 articles that don’t convert, versus 12 that do, which one would you choose. If you rush your articles without conducting some keyword research and coming up with articles that consist of a solid headline, fluid content and no call to action, not allowing the reader to click the links within your resource boxes, leaving the article directory itself to find out, you are literally throwing money away.

If these readers fail to follow through, your article was for nothing. You should think of your resource box as a 20 second commercial. What is the strongest message that you can use to motivate your readers to click on your link?
If you are not sure what you can offer within your resource box, here are a few things I have used successfully for over a year now:

– A Free Report
– Subscription to your newsletter
– A free eBook
– A free sample of your product
– A Free Membership
– A Free Video Guide
– A audio transcript or call

Forum Marketing: Quick Back Link Strategy

Forum marketing is probably the easiest ways to generate quality back links to your website (higher ranking in the search engines), as well as potential subscribers and customers. .Don’t burst onto the scene, spamming all the threads “me, too!” responses, because before long your find yourself banned or simply ignored. start off helpful, share tips, resources and information, approach forum marketing as you would approach social networking, by offering help and building your brand.

Viral Marketing: Spread It Like Wild Fire

You’ve most likely heard of Viral Marketing, but might not really know how to set up a Viral marketing campaign that is likely to go viral, basically being carried from person to person, eager and willing to share your website link with friends, family and online acquaintances. Creating a viral marketing campaign is nowhere near as difficult as most people believe, and can yield an impressive return on investment if you do it correctly. Here are a few simple ideas to help you set up a viral marketing campaign of your own:

#1: Offer Incentives Viral marketing always works best when a valuable product or service (including tangible items) are offered.

#2: Be Incredibly Different If you want to generate a buzz around your website.

#3: Run A Contest Or Challenge One of the easiest ways to create a viral campaign.

#4: Save People Time & Money
Consider creating a package that you can give away with resell rights.

Squidoo, HubPages, Blogs – Instant Traffic

There are three tools that I use to instantly generate traffic to my website, at absolutely no cost, and they are: Hub Pages: Squidoo Lens: Blogs: & Blogger.

Here are a few tips to help you create your first
Hub:

#1: Use ORIGINAL content only!

#2: Add modules to your HubPages for additional revenue.

#3: Add links with your keywords within your hub page content, leading to your websites, blogs and landing pages. Add at least two text capsules.

#4: Do NOT post affiliate links within your HubPages

#5: Add fans to your hub and be active within the community and its sub groups.

#6: Encourage RSS subscriptions to build a following and expand your outreach.

Press Releases: Quick Traffic Bursts

Press Releases are one of the easiest ways of getting your message in front of thousands of prospects in your target market very quickly, as well as picking up affiliates and potential JV partners. You want to make sure your press release appears to be news, rather than an advert. The back links that a press release creates is phenomenal, I have seen a huge surge of traffic literally within minutes of the press release being published, and months later, I was still receiving traffic from the circulation of that press release. What you do need to be careful of is that you model your press release so that it provokes an emotional response in your viewers. Your press release title should be no longer than 150 characters in length.

What is social Networking?

In the broadest of senses, social networking can be defined as an online community of people who share similar interests, likes, or activities. These sites are web or internet based, and they provide the community the ability to communicate with one another through various platforms, such as email, instant messaging, bookmarking, or web based platforms.

There’s been such a buzz over the past few months about Web 2.0 or some of its other names like Social Networking or Social Marketing. You’ve heard all the names: MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, Squidoo, but you don’t really understand how to leverage those sites to drive traffic back to your website.

Traffic to these sites is immense. How big you ask? In going to Alexa, I pulled up the traffic statistics on Facebook, the most popular of all the social networking sites. Over 10% of all internet users world wide visit Facebook. To put that number into comparison Reuters, which is seen as the trusted world wide site for news in the English language, pulls in on average only 0.35% of internet traffic. In simplest terms, Facebook pulls in 20 times the traffic as Reuters, and the numbers are similar when looking at MySpace as well.

The best part about getting traffic from these networks is the cost. It’s absolutely free traffic. For marketers who’ve used pay per click advertising to generate traffic, they see the value of this type of traffic immediately. Free targeted traffic can add so much to the bottom line of each of your marketing campaigns.

Another great thing about these sites is that the search engines absolutely love them because they give the search engines the one thing that they crave, FRESH CONTENT. These sites are updated many times per day each and every day. They tend to have tremendous page rank, and links to your site from one of these hubs is great for helping your webpage rank higher in the search engines.

What makes using these sites tough for marketers is that all of these sites don’t like marketers using them as a place to plaster their website and/or affiliate links. If you happen to go too far over the line, they tend to ban you, and that isn’t going to help you generate traffic.

So, that leads us to the big question. How do you go about using these sites to drive traffic (FREE traffic) back to your website? Wouldn’t it be great if there was a step by step guide to show you exactly what you need to do and how to go about doing it?

I’ve found a comprehensive video series that shows you exactly how to do it. These 8 videos show you step by step exactly the plan that experienced marketers use to generate massive amounts of targeted traffic from these sites. The videos will show you everything, from first registering your username, setting up your profile, and customizing your profile with the purpose of generating traffic back to your money producing webpages.