Social Networking / Media Marketing Guide
Building Communities, Maintaining Communities, and Leveraging communities is something that takes time and its a task. The first stage is to build the community and then maintain the community of course and there on out you can leverage the communities which of course its a pretty big process and a lot of work involved, but the outcome of it is just fabulous and nothing else can out beat it. If you read on I’ll list some tips on how to build communities, maintain communities, and how to leverage them such as for more traffic, sales, links which results in higher search engine rankings organically, and etc.
Building Communities
- When promoting content through social networks such as Digg, Reddit and Stumble Upon make sure your content is made for users. Promote content that people will love and link to or at least bookmark it another thing is to make sure the content your creating will catch there mind set right away and draw there attention and ways of doing this would to test certain things such as your title, colors of website, and content ;).
- Become part of communities and make friends, when you establish more friends such as associates and etc your creating a community your self basically. Let every one know where its happening at for example when you was growing up or maybe still today, or maybe in college is there certain places that you hung out at because its fun and every ones having a blast well the same thing for your blog if you offer something they like such as your friends and etc that you’ve met there going to tell there friends and there going to tell there friends take for an example look at My Space a very popular social networking site and one of the most popular that has grown very large due to the social networking through out friends, colleagues, and you name it (Its been promoted everywhere, your content should do the same).
- Building links into your website can help gain more traffic and give you a kick start, but if your going to build links or buy links personally I would recommend promoting viral content at the same time. If your someone that hates to write just hire a great content writer and have them do research for you to promote viral content if they are a good writer and you can implement the ideas then it will work out great. The person does not necessarily have to be a viral marketer there self as long as there a great content writer they should be able to establish links for you speaking you do your part and create the ideas and what to promote.
- Landing pages can be great, the idea behind a landing page is to create a page thats going to prove to users that your blog will help them whether its financially or just educated them in general. This can fall back under the category of building links into a landing page and then generate traffic to it from search engines whether its through PPC or Organic search or better yet both. Once the user hits the landing page make sure your e-mail subscribing list or RSS feed is very visible and from there on out take there mind over tell them who you are and etc, just test it and see what works.
Maintaining Communities
Maintaining communities is something that takes persistencey such as staying involved with then the community. After so long you should be able to set back speaking you have the community built really strong and other people are keeping the community alive such as content writers and etc, but generally if you built a strong community all on your own its probably a good idea you stay writing and participating because if not you can lose it pretty quick or at least keep it at a level pace and if you want to leverage it into something larger put that extra hard work in to make it expand.
Take a look below on just some of the things that keep the community leveled.
- Keep creativity in mind, never forgot what your doing. This would fall back under the category of staying persistent and motivated. When you have a community try to keep it creative and every ones mind hooked such as using images, videos, free give aways, and viral content.
- Stay communicating with people such as replying to comments, and stay active with then your communities in your niche, or at least to where you can keep your community leveraged like I mentioned above.
- If at all possible answer your e-mails speaking its a reputable questions now you don’t have to go through there consulting people no one would do that unless you feel the need to, but consultants get paid for a living the best thing to do is reply and answer questions the best you can if it has to do with someone asking trade secrets or just plain out simple educational information tell them to stick around the blog and keep reading (its all at the blog).
The idea of maintaining communities basically is to stay persistent and on top of it like I mentioned above and keep in mind no one can build that community better then you because you’ve done did it and know the ins and outs of how it was built and how you can expand it if you needed to. Maintaining a community is not that hard now if your someone that is lazy most certainly its going to be hard, but remember three things and always keep in mind persistency, motivation, and effort is the key to success.
Leverage Communities and how they are Beneficial
I have some prospects such as clients tell me that online communities are a waste of space actually I had one guy tell me that he does not want people hanging out on his website, and I set there for a minute smiling in my head, but at the same time thinking does this guys even know anything about marketing online or just general marketing on the outside world any one thats been in the marketing game knows that building clientele and word of mouth is very important for marketing and with online communities you can do this (you can do several thing with them)
Most generally in the beginning stages of building an online community you won’t get much from it, but as time comes and you stay persistent you’ll start to establish more of an image and things will grow more gradually. As your community grows this gives you more leverage to build out through other social networks such as word of mouth marketing and the path will continue through other networks just depends on how strong the viral is.
Take a look below on a few tips on how to leverage your communities and benefit from it.
- Remember to always think virally when building communities because when you think virally your expanding your network every day, and your content is probably getting linked to. And for any one that is famaliar with SEO we know that links produce higher search engine rankings.
- Try to leverage your community around your products such as maybe promoting products directly through your blog post or forum what ever type of community you built process this information to them. Now don’t get to carried away with promoting your self make sure the content is still quality and there.
- You can also leverage your community into giving you links for example have a free give away or something and tell them part of entering the contest it to link to your site with your desired anchor text if the contest is interesting enough you might have just earn 1000 unique links if not more.
There are several ways of leveraging communities once you have them established, but keep in mind like I stated earlier the idea behind building one, maintaining one, and leveraging a community is to stay persistent, motivated and use effort. Another great thing about a online community is that generally when you have it built strong enough you don’t have to do any advertising on other sites I mean you community is built so strong and so big you can control it any way you want and advertise any way you like.
Related Articles and Content
O’Reilly Network - Building Online Communities (Great Article!)
Bruce Clay Building an Online Community
Tips for Building Online Communities (ProBlogger)
The Secret To getting a popular blog and getting Tons of Readers (Dosh Dosh)