Here’s an interesting You Tube video that’s going around about the growth of social media. Wow, that’s some insane growth.

Interesting Video About Social Media Growth is a post from: Dayton SEO Services

There’s been a debate brewing around the net as to whether using sites like Facebook and Twitter is more effective than good ol face to face, belly to belly networking.

To me, the debate is as silly as saying whether a ground game or a passing game is more important in football. The team with a ground game that can’t pass will lose and the team with a passing game that can’t run will lose. The team that is merely above average at both (assuming they also have a decent defense) will win every single time.

The same thing applies with networking. I’ve had online businesses where I didn’t know the people on my email lists. I’ve also had offline businesses where I didn’t use a lot of social media. The results from both were mediocre and frustrating.

Recently, with Dayton SEO Services, I combined the two worlds. Wow, when you truly, truly get this, you will be amazed at what you will find.

Here is my process now when I meet someone….

1. Attend events, meet people and get their business card
2. Enter their contact information into an Excel spreadsheet
3. Upload the spreadsheet into SendOutCards and send my new friend a card
4. Upload the spreadsheet into my email autoresponder and invite them to join my email list. Make sure to get your new friend’s permission by using double opt in. I use Get Response, but I hear Constant Contact is better. It’s a royal pain to move an email list so I just haven’t done it yet.
5. Import the Excel list into Facebook, Plaxo and LinkedIn to add them to my friends list
6. Paste the email addresses from Excel into Twitter and follow them
7. Blog on a regular basis and automatically sync it with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn
8. Send emails to the autoresponder list on a regular basis to invite people to read the blog. Constant Contact even has a way to automatically sync this with the blog through the blog’s RSS feed. Once it’s set up, you dont even need to log into your Constant Contact account. It just goes out automatically every time you update the blog.
9. Get people’s birthday from Facebook and Plaxo and add that info into SendOutCards so I can send them a birthday card. Facebook has a really cool calendar app (I think it’s called Hallmark Calendar) that does this. SendOutCards has a very slick set it and forget it feature called campaigns where I can set it up once in under 10 minutes and birthday cards go out to everyone on the right date.
10. Schedule one on one appointments to get to know my most important contacts. I just go to meet and learn more about them. I’m NOT there to sell anything.

I hope these tips help you out. If they do, please leave a comment below. I certainly didn’t make this stuff up. I want to thank Kody Bateman and the team at SendOutCards for teaching me this at their very powerful Treat Em Right Seminar. I also want to thank Tony Scelzo, Larry Kevin Adams and all members of the amazing Rainmakers team. I’ve learned so much in just the short time that I’ve been with them. If you haven’t checked out Rainmakers yet, what are you waiting for?

Combining Offline with Online Networking is Explosive is a post from: Dayton SEO Services

At a recent Rainmakers hub event at The Greene, Ric Moody of Dayton Commercial Realty asked me about my opinion of Twitter. He had heard from a social media professional that Twitter was pretty much dead and didn’t want to invest too much time with it. My answer to him was, “it depends”

Here’s what I mean…

The days of pontificating about every last thing in your life can certainly be a waste of time. For a business owners, it can be a time suck that produces zero results. If you are doing that, stop now! Even worse are those silly apps that tell people your exact location every second of the day. Who the heck cares!

Think of it this way. Would you forward your latest Twitter message to your friend by email? We forward jokes, quotes, interesting sites, interesting news. We generally don’t forward that we’re at Kinko’s making copies. Do you forward Mafia Wars or crazy, silly stuff to your prospects and customers with your business email account? Of course not! Don’t do it on Twitter either.

Twitter to me is a syndication partner. Nothing more, nothing less. Its simply another place to get my content out there. It’s one of dozens of places to get my content to. If Twitter goes out of business tomorrow, I really could care less since my content is all over the internet.

The key is to use the right tools that allows you to post once to your blog (back to that blog thing again!) and your get content into multiple places. My favorite free tools for this purpose are OnlyWire and Ping.fm, but there are several others you can use. This blog is attached to both of them.

If you don’t have a blog, in my opinion, don’t even bother registering your business for Twitter until you get one. Then, it really will become a time suck.

I hope you enjoyed this quick little tip and get syndicating!

Is Twitter Dead For Dayton’s Small Business Owners? is a post from: Dayton SEO Services

If you have been following my other posts, you now know the basics of Twitter and you also know how RSS feeds work. If you have not read those posts yet, please read those before continuing.

Today, I’m going to show you how to put it all together and automate your social media. These services are not anywhere close to all of the services available for social media. However, these are the ones that I personally use and recommend. Best of all, they are all free for basic accounts.

The first service that you should know about is twitterfeed.com. With twitterfeed.com, you simply link your RSS feed  one time during set up and your status update will automatically post to Twitter, Facebook and a few other services when you update your blog. It’s really slick!

Another great service I use is called Hoot Suite. Hoot Suite offers a little bookmarklet that goes in your Firefox browser window. With Hootsuite, whenever I’m doing my normal internet surfing and I find something useful that could be Tweeted, I press the Hootlet button in Firefox and Tweet out a link to the content in under a minute. With Hoot Suite, you can also schedule your status updates in the future you don’t post too many updates at one time. This is an excellent time management strategy that I highly recommend.

I also use a free service called Social Oomph (formerly known as Tweet Later). Social Oomph actually has quite a bit of services in their free package, but I only focus on one, the automatic direct message. With the automatic direct message, I will automatically send a welcome message to people who are my followers.

There is some controversy brewing as to whether using automated direct welcome messages is a good idea. People who use Twitter a lot pretty much expect that the very first message is going to be an automated one. Personally, I think it’s ok to use it as long as you are not giving a sales pitch. Even giving away something for free can come across as too salesy. Personally, I just say “thanks for following me” and cross promote my Facebook profile. Simple, non threatening messages like that are fine.

Finally, if you really want to go crazy with your social networking, I recommend that you sign up for Ping.fm. Ping.fm allows you to automatically update your status updates on 30 social networking sites all at once. This is a great way to get your links out there and is also great for Search Engine Optimization.

I hope you enjoyed this social media series of posts. If you need any help getting this set up, shoot us an email and we can discuss it.

Advanced Social Media Strategies is a post from: Dayton SEO Services

This is the second installment of the Twitter series. As I’ve mentioned on previous posts, before embarking on a Twitter campaign, I highly recommend that you have the follwing systems in place:

1. A website that’s keyword optimized and looks professional
2. A blog that’s updated regularly
3. An autoresponder to capture names and email addresses

If you read the first post on Twitter, you know the basics of Twitter and how to set up an account. Now, you need to get people to follow you. If you don’t have followers, you can’t make money.

However, there’s quantity of followers and there’s also quality. Having people follow you that aren’t in your target market won’t help you either.

When you first get your Twitter set up, you will need to proactively go out and get followers. Once you get to about 100 followers, people will find you and you can focus more of your attention on keeping your followers.

The first thing you should do is find out if you have any friends or family already on Twitter. As of right now, you cannot upload any kind of list. The only thing you can do is get names uploaded into a free email account like Yahoo Mail or Gmail and then have Twitter link into that account. Once that’s done, it’s quite easy to see who is and who isn’t already on Twitter. If they are there, go ahead and follow them and most likely they will follow you back.

Once that’s done, you will need to start finding people in your target market. Follow them and many will follow you as well. Think about the kinds of places your target market hangs out. For example, my target market is small business owners in the Dayton market, so the first two organizations that I followed were Dayton Business Journal and Dayton Chamber of Commerce. Then, I went into the list of people on their follower list and followed them as well. Keep doing this until you are following a couple hundred people.

Next read the tweets you are getting from the people you are following. Are they interesting? Are they spamming? If you are getting spammy tweets, then it’s time to unfollow them so you can find new people to follow.

Next, increase your Twitter visibility. There are a few places online that you can post your Twitter profile and get more followers. The most popular one that I highly recommend is a free site called Twellow, the Twitter Yellow Pages. It’s also a good idea to link to your Twitter profile from your website or blog and any other social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn. It’s a good idea to also add your Twitter address on your offline advertising like newspapers and television.

As you learn more about Twitter, you will be tempted to take shortcuts in building your follower list. There are several software packages on the market for this purpose. For the most part, these packages are junk and could even get your Twitter account banned. Don’t give in to the temptation.

You will also see these free things called “Twitter trains” that promise to get you a lot of followers in a short period of time. You could get some followers, but they are often spammers. Even worse, these programs will start sending spammy messages in your account. Again, don’t do it!

I hope you learned a lot from these simple tips and if you need more help with Twitter, send us an email and we will be happy to assist you.

How To Get Laser Targeted Twitter Followers is a post from: Dayton SEO Services

Twitter is the place to be online at the moment. Many business owners know that they should be on Twitter, but sadly, very few use it correctly. They are either not using it at all or if they are using it, they are disappointed with their results.

Here are some Twitter basics:

Twitter is a simple microblogging platform. Each post or “tweet” has to be 140 characters or less. Instead of friends, Twitter has whats called “followers.” You follow someone and they can follow you. Unlike Facebook or My Space, the “friends” don’t have to be mutual. You can follow someone without getting followed back and vice versa.

Twitter has its own set of abbreviations. If you are replying to someone else’s tweet publicly, you will use @theirusername. This is very similar to the “reply all” feature that your email program has. Yes, the person you are replying to will see it, but so will all your other followers. If you want to reply privately, use the direct message feature instead.

Twitter also has something called “retweets”. This is like when you forward an interesting email to your friends. These tweets will say RT@orginalusername in the beginning of the tweet.

Now that you have a basic understanding of Twitter, here are some ideas of things you should and shouldn’t be tweeting.

A lot of people like to post simple little things like “I’m at the store”. That sort of thing is a real waste of time as a business owner. Don’t do it. Show value or keep quiet.

You should also avoid putting blatant pitches in your tweets. Your specials and coupons  are ok, especially if you decide to make the special exclusive to your followers.

The real secret to Twitter is adding true value without sales pitches. This is where most business owners fail on social media. Add in tips related to your industry. If you can make people say, “wow, this person has great tips” you are on the right track.

This is easier than you think because there are several tools that you can use to automate this process. I will be going over the best ones soon. Stay tuned!

Many Dayton Business Owners Use Twitter. Do You? is a post from: Dayton SEO Services

Here’s a nice introduction to RSS feeds. I will be posting some Twitter tutorials soon and it’s very important that you understand what RSS is and how it works. Enjoy!

What is an RSS Feed? is a post from: Dayton SEO Services

A commenter recently brought up some good points on my backlinking article about social media and linking. Here are some additional tips about getting links from social media profiles.

The first two sites that everyone should be on are LinkedIn and Plaxo. They are both free to use and you don’t need to have a website. There really is no excuse not to be on those sites. It’s great free visibility and I highly recommend getting on there from day 1 in your business. They normally will have email forwarding turned on so you can get the messages sent through the site forwarded to your normal email address.

I also think you should join Dayton based social networks like GoRainOhio.

Having a Facebook personal page is also a good idea. If you are going after the youth market or are in entertainment, then MySpace is also a good idea.

With any of these, take the extra time to fill out the profile completely with photos and a full profile. Don’t just “drop a link” in there.

Next listed in online phone books and small business sites like Merchant Circle.

You might notice that I haven’t mentioned things like Facebook Fan Pages, You Tube and Twitter. Those sites are excellent places to get customers, but they take a lot more planning as you will need good quality content to attract business. Before getting into those types of sites, complete the following steps.

1. Have a high quality website with good keywords
2. Have a blog and update it regularly
3. Have a way set up to collect email contact information

Once these are done and if you have the resources to do so, then you can work on these higher touch websites. If you take the time to plan it out, the process will be a lot easier as there are tools that you can use to link these things together and save you a lot of hassles and headaches.

If it sounds like a lot of work, you’re right, it is. But, it’s worth it. Your time is valuable, so why not outsource this task to us. If you need any help getting these systems set up, do not hesitate to call or email us.

Dayton Internet Marketing Tip- Getting Quality Links is a post from: Dayton SEO Services