Social Networking: Marketing Businesses Online

Several complaints from marketers have been cropping up recently out of attempting to use popular and prevailing social networking sites to market their respective businesses. These marketers primarily complained about not getting any real traffic in order to make sales by advertising through these sites. Essentially, the social networking sites that they are referring to were a waste of time to market on because these did not produce any immediate marketing results. Nevertheless, these marketers are really missing the whole point of the social networking process. This article somehow makes a bit of clarification regarding this issue.

Barefaced marketing on social networking sites just would not work. The marketing approach has to be far more subtle. Marketers who wish to use social networking to their advantage must somehow aim their target quite differently. The goal is increase your presence on the Internet by building back-links from a major traffic site, and building your brand so that potential customers can indeed find you on the Web.

Increasing your presence on the internet is especially important if you are a novice when it comes to marketing your products and services on the Internet. You have to establish a presence, and a big one, if you want to be actually discovered by your target market. The mantra of those who are so overwhelmed by their egos is, “build it and they will come.” These people mistakenly think that their sites will be found without any marketing effort at all. This is of course anathema to successful marketers. One has to get out there and promote oneself in order to sell one’s products and services. Because social networking sites are high traffic, you have a better chance of being found if you get out there and build a presence.

The search engines are constantly “spidering” these sites. If you want to get your site “spidered” then building a profile on these sites will help the search engines find you and then ultimately, your customers can find you. Nevertheless, one should remember not to blatantly sell on these sites. Create a profile that tells everyone about you and your products or services. Include links to your website, or if you have more than one site, all of your sites. Make your profile keyword rich with keywords from your topic.

By branding yourself, whether you are a writer, or you are simply selling your own products and services, you will need to resort to shameless promotion if you want to make the sale. When you brand yourself, you are attaching yourself to a specific topic. You become an expert on the topic. Writing articles and posting them on your blog on these social networking sites can help others become aware of your products and services. This in turn builds and establishes value, and by contributing to these sites, you are not only building value for them, you are building value for you.

The key is to use a soft sell approach wherein you need to establish your credibility and expertise in order to be trusted by prospective clients. Get others to trust you and believe in your products. Then you will make the sale. It might need quite a deal of effort in building your credibility, but there is no reason to neglect the effectiveness of marketing your business online through social networking.