These days the idea of social media is not changed, but we have much more fancy tools to share our articles. The most important factor for a big success is the number of members in your social network. If you network is to small you can share whatever you want, no one will notice your activities.

Quality above quantity

To build a social network with members related to your blogs or maybe services and products you offer on your website, follow the following rules:

• Be selective with your friends, don’t send requests to everyone and don’t accept any friendship request. Connect with friends where the profile is complete and where you can see enough activity. Don’t connect to people with non related interests.
• Build your network slowly. It makes no sense to invest all your time in building the network. Sharing your experience, thoughts and links is important too.
• Don’t join too much social network sites. Start with the biggest sites like Twitter, Facebook and maybe MySpace. Select social sites where you find enough people intrested in the same topic you do.
• Don’t forget the day has only 24 hours.

You need to be an “interesting” person or other network member will not request you as a friend. Take care that your profile is active and has a lot interesting comments and links.

In this this article we don’t want to explain how great Twitter or facebook is, but we want to showcase some great services which have very nice features and are great time saver.

No Blog without RSS

If your site is a blog you need subscriber! Burn your RSS feed with feedburner to get an idea how many subscriber you. Note each new feed URL is a new start, you don’t loose your subscribers if you create a new one but you should inform your reader. Create a redirect to the new URL. After you get your first stats from feedburner you will notice that a lot of your readership is using the Google Reader to read your blogs. Google Reader has a lot of features to share content in your network: A user can comment articles share them with other readers and you can send links to other social sites like facebook or Twitter. In the current Reader it’s not easy to make friends, but you can use this tool for your own subscriptions. If your shared articles are interesting enough you will get “Follower” very soon. Use also the Bookmarklet from Google reader to share new stories in Google Reader.

Share you blog comments within your network

There are many blogs offering the possibility to authorize with Facebook Connect. Use this option, most blogs doesn’t provide direct links for the URL entered with each comment, so it’s more effective better to share your comment on your facebook’s wall. Other people will visit your facebook profile if they like your comments and maybe the will ask your to become a friend. Another great comment service is Disqus, a comment platform and community.
Disqus Pofile – As a Disqus profile member, each posted comment is stored on your profile page. People can reach your profile with each comment you have posted by a Disqus comment form used by the blog owner. This way people can read all your other comments and if they like your writings the will subscribe.
Disqus Comments – If you install the Disqus comment tool on your own blog, people people get connected with your blog with every comments they posted. This could be another source for traffic. A single comment on your blog from one “popular” Disqus member might have a reach to thousands of other Disqus members. All comments are stored in your own blog database as well.

Share interesting articles in your network

In the RSS part we talked already about sharing content using the Google Reader. If you like to use a tool that makes your shared content more interactive, you should try Posterous. According the developer of this “light blog service” is the service very powerful because a member is able to send very advanced blog posts by email. Sending an email is the way how you join! I like Posterous because I’m able to share my comment about existing articles and blogs via Google Reader and using their Bookmarklet. I’m able to “autopost” my comment to facebook, twitter and many more networks. There are many more features like: Use your own domain, tagging, comments, custom themes, statistics and much more. If you visit the Posterous site it looks like a blog site, but as the owner has much more functions.

Spread the word on Twitter

If you like to get your article mentioned on twitter you need some tool to keep it on top at twitter. Because your network members getting so much tweets on their twitter list it’s almost impossible to reach them with your new article. The solution is Tweetmeme, a link community which looks like Digg, but has more the function to repost a tweet by other twitter members. The rankings on their homepage are a welcome additional feature. If you write blogs, use their Plugin or button even for your older posts. Just imagine to get new traffic for older articles! A reTweet is not like a duplication on digg.com but more like an update.

While using all these social media services and communities it’s important to keep your social media sites unique. Don’t post the same article or link twice or more. If you discover somthing interesting, think about how to share it. If you have the time post/comment it on posterous otherwise share the link on twitter, facebook or Google reader. To reach new follower or friends, you should add a feed of latest tweets or shared items to your blog or website. As always, build an online personality and don’t spam.

If you like check my profile pages and maybe we get connected:
finalwebsites @ twitter – finalwebsites @ posterous – finalwebsites @ facebook – My Shared Items @ Google Reader – My Profile @ Disqus or maybe you like to subscribe to my Friendfeed
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StumbleUpon (SU toolbar fun)

Each SU member can add friends while stumbling other member pages. Members of stumbleupon use a browser toolbar for voting and navigation (stumbling), will say you need to send links to your friends via this toolbar. Your friends will notice your “shout” because of some tiny red number in their SU toolbar. After they stumbled your page they see your message and it possible to send some message back. If you have some active SU friends and they like what you send them via the toolbar it’s possible that this “Stumble” becomes hot and the stumbled page becomes a hot item and is presented more often to other stumblers.

Bad points; There is a limit of 200 friends, you can’t add more! Sure this is still enough because you need to send each link to your friends one by one. Only the tiny red number is a notification that a friend has send you some link, I think it’s to hard to notice.

Good points; Less spam, because the sender need to select each friend one by one (yeah that also a good point). Because of the interface (send back a message) the system has a great community value. While selecting your friends it’s very easy to select only those friends which similar interests, this way you can create your own small community (groups) and the links you send to others are more interesting for your friends (yeah right, this is up to you).

digg.com – become famous on their main page.

Adding friends at digg.com was not so important in the past because it was not very useful. Since a while this is changed; you can send stories submitted to digg.com with the share option to all your friends with only a few mouse clicks! Since this feature is introduced, digg.com members are making a lot of friends and it looks like that there is no limit (at least I didn’t noticed one yet). Okay, what to do with all those friends? A lot of webmasters are dreaming of a listing on the digg.com main page, while sending a shout to hundred of friends (and maybe some of your friends will do the same) a lot of digg.com members will notice your story and maybe the story will get enough votes and will reach the main page. Is this GREAT?

Bad points; Digg is sending an email to each member if a new friend or shout has arrived, this could become a problem if mail services like Gmail will flag those mails as spam. While adding friends you need to click a lot to find friends from your interests (digg.com is based on news submissions and not on the members). Voting and sending a comment to the link sender is very complicated (it’s all web based, yeah digg.com needs a toolbar)

Good points; Sending a link to your friends is very easy and fast. Because with each shout a mail is send to a member and your submission becomes more visible. Digg.com has this great vote button for your website. You can disable the “shout” function to stop your friends sending shouts to you (I think thats very important soon)

At the end…

Both social communities have their good and bad points and both sites invite to abuse the system. While SU has some logarithm which is used to decide which story is hot or not the cheater is often not very successful. With digg.com it’s different because the stories rank on the digg.com website is a result of the digg users. If the group of digg.com users is big enough to promote a “boring” story to the main page the other users need to search more to find the good stuff between all the entries… Now I have to stop because I need to look to get some more friends Similar Posts:

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Why running a mailing list can increase sales

It’s statistically proven that on average a person must be exposed to a website or offer 7 times before they’ll make a purchase. While the underlying reason for this fact is not as clear as the “magic number” itself, running a mailing list allows you to keep your primary offer in front of perspective buyers until they purchase or they unsubscribe from your list.

Of course, a mailing list that is sent to potential consumers that is blatantly sales-focused will undoubtedly suffer from a high unsubscribe rate. Giving your potential customers value amongst subtle recommendations is a much better practice than blasting advertisements with no real value to their email inbox every other day. Get to know your subscribers and know what kind of questions that they are asking; if you cater to their needs with free information or free resources, over time they will learn to trust your insight and will be more likely to act (purchase a product or service) based on your recommendation alone.

Running an email list can increase website traffic

This fact is directly related to what we shared above; giving your email list subscribers value. You don’t have to give away the farm, so to speak, in order to give value to your email list, simply by knowing they type of information that your subscribers are looking for and providing the answers to their questions without coming across as trying to get into their wallets will undoubtedly help to increase trust in your relationship.

As your mailing list grows, you’ll see the positive effects of your relationship with your mailing list. Not only will this help to increase sales for your personal products and products or services that you are promoting as an affiliate, you’ll notice that your subscribers will frequent your website more often, undoubtedly looking for more insight that you’ve proven that you can give.

Creating a profitable mailing list

People who initially subscribe to your email list do so with the assumption that you have something valuable to provide them. They are looking for answers, and they think that you have the solution. By catering to the needs of your mailing list subscribers, you are establishing a name for yourself where you are seen as helpful and trustworthy. When you’ve established yourself as a helpful and trustworthy individual, people will naturally pay close attention to what you have to say. When people are listening closely, they’ll receive your suggestions for a certain product or service as advice given from a trusted friend, thus much more likely to buy a product or service than if they’re casually browsing a website.

Running an email list is really like starting a relationship with somebody. Successful relationships are not all about giving advice; they’re about listening to what your friend has to say. Undoubtedly, if you take the time to listen to what your subscribers are asking, you’ll build a solid relationship with them, and at that point you will be able to say from firsthand knowledge that the money is, in fact, in the list.Similar Posts:

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