Ignore Social Networking at your Peril!

It's no good. I've discovered that no matter how much it goes against the grain, social networking is here to stay, and what's more it's good for business. Having spent the past year resisting these networks, reluctant to tell all about anything out there on the world wide web (well it's so public!) I've none the less felt obliged to learn more about them as a marketer. Well I can't miss any opportunities and besides it's fascinating to see how marketing online is changing.

So armed with lists of sites to look at, I've been trawling through them and learned that some are seriously scary until you master privacy settings and they're definitely aimed at different audiences. Facebook for example is increasingly used by businesses to raise awareness whilst Bebo is considered a "younger" network. I'm a fan of Linked In too, which is very much a business network.

Then there's social bookmarking, where you you can bookmark a website for other people to see. These also often allow "comments" like blogs do and the whole shared bookmarking thing is essentially about voting for your favourite websites. Then if enough users vote for a particular site it will appear in a "hot" list of the social bookmarking sites for its category.

All very clever and you can see how word starts to spread and of course more links are made to the original website that was bookmarked. There is, I discovered, a handy "add" tool which you can code into your website pages if you want to make it easy for people to bookmark your content. Have a look at www.addthis.com which provides an all-in-one button, very useful. Now we're looking at our online Marketing Plan Builder to add more of these options - internet marketing has become a much bigger part of the marketing mix and social networking justifiably counts as an important part of online marketing strategy.

Happy socialising!

Karen McNulty
www.MarketingPlanWiz.co.uk

PR Goes Online Too

PR (public relations) has moved on aswell. Having spent years drafting press releases and making friends with news and features editors at various local newspapers, it's mind-blowing to think that at the push of a button you can now get your releases on the web. Of course this means potentially very large numbers of people can see your news and if you're luck they'll pass it on too.

Bloggers like to trawl for good news items and if you write your release with the web in mind it could really have legs! I'm happy to report that the basic rules of writing new releases stays the same. You need a good headline, relevant first paragraph that sums up the story (in case your item gets cut short) and written well in clear language, with no spelling errors. Most journalists (on the web or in the more traditional media) are happier if they can cut and paste your text so bear this in mind.

The only other things to remember for the web are:

• Remember your keywords and make sure they're used in your text for optimisation purposes
  
• Add in your website address if you haven't already so that they can link back to your business website and any other links that make your article more interesting
  
• Don't use html, you must write in plain text to avoid potential formatting problems.

Where can you send your press releases online?

Many of these services aren't free but there are free elements to most of them. Here are a few to look at:

www.prweb.com
www.pr.com
www.pressbox.co.uk
www.prleap.com

Happy Marketing!

Karen McNulty
www.MarketingPlanWiz.co.uk

Affiliate Marketing

We've just sent out our monthly newsletter (wiz e-articles, you can sign up here www.marketingplanwiz.co.uk ) where we've been talking about producing an Internet marketing plan for your business. When we were looking at promotion we listed the (now) usual internet marketing techniques such as blogs, podcasts, linking and so on, adding "affiliate marketing" as another item. Affiliate marketing is where somebody sells your product for you via their website and they receive an agreed commission to do so. The other way around as an affiliate you can work with a third party to add a link on your website and receive that commission. Popular affiliate schemes are run by Amazon and Ebay for example.

This got me thinking that it's so easy to name lots of different ways to reach your customers using the Internet today as we're so much more used to it, but what I forget is how powerful some of these methods can be.

Affiliate marketing I recently discovered (thanks to a really switched on chap called John Kirk whilst on a training course to top up my internet marketing skills) can be one of those powerful tools. I had previously thought of it in the context of an affiliate, wondering if it works and could you ever really get a good return? I realised that I should have been looking at from the other point of view, which is that ultimately it does two really important things...1. Drives traffic to your website and 2. As you only pay commission when you've made a sale you're not spending money up front, just a percentage of your sale proceeds. It actually is an incredibly low risk method of increasing visitors and sales!

Why not think about developing your own internet marketing plan, can affiliate marketing work for your business?

Karen McNulty
www.marketingplanwiz.co.uk