10 Easy Steps to Automate Your Social Marketing

Two of the biggest trends in web site marketing in recent years have been SEO and Social Marketing. While sometimes they can go hand in hand, other times the approach is quite unique. I've been spending a fair amount of time developing my Social Networking presence, both personally and professionally. Today I wish to share the 10 steps to automate your social marketing and how to get more out of it.

Your web site: Your business is what makes you money. Your web site is how you sell your products. SEO will take care of the search engines, but while you wait for that #1 ranking, you need to find other ways of getting targeted traffic to your web site.

Your social network: Networking is an important aspect of any business and online social marketing takes it to a new level. Your choice of networks seems endless, with new ones popping up all the time. Where to begin?

Step 1. Start a blog related to your business. Don't use your blog as a place to simply advertise your products, that's what your web site is for. Post relevant industry news, events, opinions, and write interesting, original content. For more blogging tips and ideas check out this article.

Step 2. For the purpose of the article this step is not mandatory, but this is something I always do with my blogs so I will include it. Use Feedburner to burn your rss feed. There are many benefits to using Feedburner and it's good practice.

Step 3. Create company profiles on Twitter, Facebook, Identi.ca, Delicious, MySpace, and LinkedIn to get started. There are many more obviously, but these ones are important and a good start.

Step 4. Spend some time on each of these social network/bookmarking web sites. Build up contacts related to your industry. Here's an article I wrote recently about specifically how to do this on Twitter.

Step 5. Go set up an account at Ping.fm. This service allows you to enter a status update, much like you would on Twitter, and it will automatically update your social web sites, such as the 6 I listed in step 3. You will find many more you can use as well.

Step 6. You will need this later, but while your logged into you Ping.fm account go to this url and take note of your unique application key.

Step 7. Set up an account at Twitterfeed. This service is not limited to just Twitter, but more importantly it can feed Ping.fm, which in turn feeds that list we just set up in step 5 including Twitter. You will need your blogs rss feed and your Ping.fm app key.

Step 8. Continue to build more relationships on the social networking web sites. This process does take some time, but will be worth while. Spend a few minutes each day for a few weeks and you should have a really good size following that will continue to grow on its own.

Step 9. Post to your blog, and make your posts informative, creative, and well written. Post the occasional special or promo, but don't go overboard otherwise it will appear spammy. Provide good quality information related to your industry, become a legitimate resource of knowledge.

Step 10. Sit back and watch the traffic flow to your blog, and in turn your web site. Statistics show that 2% of your Twitter following, for example, will click the link in your post. If you have a following of 10,000 that's 200 targeted visitors going to your web site for each post.

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By John Simmonds @ 11:45 AM