Bill McRea

Get paid to share your links!

If you use Twitter.com for marketing, you know how challenging it can be to keep up with anyone or anything especially if you’ve got a large following. When you want to use Twitter for networking and getting to know your followers you’ve got to find a way to parse your big list of followers into sub lists that will help you to keep everything straight. Enter Twitter lists. These came along a few years ago and they have really become quite popular. In today’s post we’re going to explore how you can make the most of Twitter lists so that you can more effectively engage with your followers and get better results from your social media marketing efforts.

• What is a Twitter list?

A Twitter list is simply a sub list that you create or that you can get added to. Because people can create any kind of list they want, they tend to vary wildly. You can use lists to curate tweets into categories, themes or whatever inspires you.

• How to create a Twitter list

Go to your Home page on your Twitter profile and click on the ‘Lists’ tab.

You’ll see the option to create a list if you’ve not created any yet. If you have lists already, you’ll see: lists by you, lists you follow and lists following you.

Give your list a name that does not exceed 25 characters, whether you want the list to be public or private and a short description. (Others can subscribe to a public list. A private list is visible only to you.)

Save your new list.

To add someone to your list, click on their Twitter avatar which will bring you to their profile. Click on the button with a head and shoulders icon and a down arrow on it. You’ll find the option to ‘Add to list.’ This will bring you to a pop-up box called, ‘Your lists.’ You decide which list to add the person to, click the box to the right of the list name or choose the, ‘Create a list’ option to start a new list with that person on it.

• Where can you find a massive list of Twitter lists?

Twitter can be great for networking, for sending traffic to your sites, and sharing your knowledge and expertise with your audience. If there are people that you follow that you’d like to keep closer tabs on, add them to a list. If you are an expert in a specific topic and you’d like to stay in touch with others in your industry or niche, create a Twitter list and add them to it.

The good news is that you don’t have to go digging around in your list of followers to find people to add to your lists. Check out a social media site called listorous.com, which is a big, giant list of twitter lists. You can use it to find people by topic, region or profession. You can add people that you find to your list, and you can find cool lists to follow.

Try creating and following a few Twitter lists today and see if it doesn’t help you to stay in closer touch with your audience.

For more ideas and tips about social media marketing and how you can use it to build or grow your online business visit, http://mcreasite.com/blog today.

Get paid to share your links!

If you have made social media marketing part of your overall marketing plan then you’ll want to take the next step and set up social media monitoring tools to help you keep your finger on the pulse of what is being said about you, your brand, product or service.

Now, you can totally geek-out and sink way too much time into trying to find out about who is talking about you and what is being said, but the purpose of this article is to help you to set up some simple, free tools to monitor your social media presence that will not suck up a ton of time.

Before you start monitoring your social media presence and tracking your buzz online, make sure that you have clearly established goals and benchmarks so that you know what success looks like for you. Are you looking to generate more traffic, or maybe more engagement, (shares, retweets, mentions, conversations)? You want to get more people talking about your brand? Decide what the goal is so that you will be able to effectively measure your progress.

The first thing you want to keep track of is who is linking to you. Go to google.com and type: Link to: www.yourwebsite.com into the search box. You’ll get a list of all of the sites that are linking to that page so you can see who is linking to you so maybe you can start creating relationships with those blogs or websites.

Type either your name, your product name, or brand into the search box with quotation marks, for example, “The Super Widget,” and you’ll get links to pages that mention that phrase.

Use Google Analytics to see who is linking to you, talking about you and sharing your content.

Google Alerts is the most basic way to cover your bases as far as monitoring your buzz online. Set up Google alerts for your name, your company name, competitor’s names, etc. and the information you are looking for will be emailed to you in digest form every day.

Use your Google Reader to set up a social media monitoring dashboard. Use this RSS reader to subscribe to the feeds of your favorite blogs, competitors blogs, industry news sites, supplier sites and even Twitter searches.

To monitor your buzz on Twitter.com, there is Tweetstats.com. Just type in your Twitter username and TweetStats will give you a granular breakdown of how many times a day/month you tweet, what times of day you tweet the most, who you re-tweet and @ reply to. You’ll see a tweet cloud where you can get an idea of your top most common words, and your most used hash tags. After you’ve been using Tweetstats.com for awhile you can even get follower stats.

Now the most important step in all of this is to use what you learn as you monitor your social media presence. As you find other sites linking to you, strike up a conversation with them and maybe offer to do a guest post or reciprocate by mentioning them favorably. Keep an eye on your competition and learn from them to improve your marketing. Social media monitoring is an effective way to measure the ROI of the time you spend on social media marketing.

If you want to learn more about how social media marketing can help you get more traffic to your website, visit http://mcreasite.com/blog to learn more about growing your business online.

Get paid to share your links!

Content marketing is an effective way to gain valuable exposure online and earn credibility as a trusted authority in your niche. Junta42.com defines content marketing this way: “Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”

So, if we break that definition down you’ve got to create relevant content and distribute or syndicate it in a way that attracts the attention of your target audience. Using content to drive profitable customer action is our goal with content marketing, but guess what? Chances are this is something you’re already doing if you’ve been marketing online for any length of time. We’re just going to get intentional about it and focus on implementing a strategy that will generate the results we are looking for.

When you are considering your content syndication strategy there are five hot spots  that you do not want to miss. Let’s take a look at each one briefly and see how they stack up when it comes to driving profitable customer action.

1. Your blog

Your website or blog serves as the hub of your online operations. Post SEO optimized, relevant content that your audience is searching for here first. Put energy into making sure that your website ranks for your primary keywords and that you are taking the necessary steps to become a trusted authority in your industry or niche.

2. Facebook

Facebook is exploding with exponential growth. Your customers are here, so you must engage them, share, inspire, question and get them to take action. Use the Networked Blogs app, keep your fan page current with valuable content and grow your list with this powerful social media platform.

3. Twitter

Twitter is the spot for networking, seeing and being seen. Share excellent content. Be a resource, but also be a living breathing person who sometimes eats pistashio ice cream and then Tweets about it, but nothing beats the engagement you’ll enjoy from a successful Twitter party. You’ll generate targeted traffic and gain invaluable exposure when you work Twitter consistently.

4. LinkedIn

This may be old school power networking at its best, but don’t overlook LinkedIn’s power to help you build your professional network and drive targeted traffic to your site. Creating and participating in groups, sharing your content, answering questions and becoming a resource are ways to grow your reach using LinkedIn.com.

5. Youtube.com

Video marketing is one of the most powerful ways to generate lots of targeted traffic to your website. Convert some of your text content into video and share them on youtube.com and some of the other video sharing sites and watch your traffic stats go through the roof.

Then, of course in addition to the place I’ve mentioned there is the tried and true article marketing and forum marketing for driving targeted traffic and building high page rank backlinks to your website to improve SEO and traffic using content marketing strategies.

Content marketing is just one of the ways you can drive traffic and gain exposure online. Visit http://mcreasite.com/blog today to discover more about growing your online business.

Get paid to share your links!

Bloggers and website owners know how important it is to have a lot of relevant backlinks to their site. Off page factors such as backlinks are a major factor in your site’s search engine rankings, but getting new backlinks can be a tedious, time-consuming pain, right? So, let’s look at a simple way to somewhat automate the creation of new backlinks using tumblr blogs and ping.fm.

Tumblr blogs are sort of a hybrid between a regular blog and a microblogging platform like Twitter. Just like a typical blog you create blog posts, but they add in the social media element where you follow other blogs, and you can also reblog other blogs.

So, with Tumblr you can build backlinks, and you can also leverage the efforts of others who will distribute your backlinks for you.

Now if we want to automate this whole operation, the first thing you’ll have to do is set up a profile on ping.fm, and then select the social media platforms that you use and would like to update automatically for you.

Once your ping.fm profile is complete and you have subscribed to the services that you will be updating with your content, go to the dashboard and type your message in the box. If you include a link, it will be shortened automatically for you. You have the option of just copying and pasting the title and first few sentences of your blog post, or you can take a minute and come up with a bit of original content that describes the blog post.

With one click of the ‘Ping it,’ button, you’ve just updated several social media sites including your tumblr blog at once and created a fresh batch of relevant backlinks.

Here are a few tips to help you make the most of your tumblr blogs:

• Use relevant tags for your posts

• Follow other Tumblrs in your niche & reblog their posts

• Post consistently

• Connect all of your other social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Youtube.com with your Tumblr blog

• Submit your Tumblr blog’s sitemap to the search engines

http://yoursite.tumblr.com/sitemap.xml (replace “yoursite” with the name of your blog)

As with any kind of blog you create online, having quality, relevant content is the key to getting people to link to you and reblog your stuff. Tumblr blogs can be viewed and updated on mobile devices easily so it might help to choose a topic that is suited to those that are on the go. The easy to use platform makes it simple to add video, audio or photos to your blog.

Community is a big part of getting lots of followers and reblogs with Tumblr. Get in there and network with other bloggers. Leave relevant comments and reblog generously. Soon others will start reciprocating and reblogging your content as well.

Adding Tumblr blogs into your backlink building strategy can be a fun, engaging way to boost your search engine rankings, get some good exposure in your niche and attract relevant traffic to your blog.

Blogging is just one way to boost your site’s SEO. For more tips and strategies for growing your online business visit http://mcreasite.com/blog today.

Get paid to share your links!

LinkedIn.com with its 119 million users can be likened to a sleeping giant in the social media marketing space. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, which cover a combination of business and personal networking, LinkedIn is a strictly business social media platform where 58% of its users are male, and North America and Europe represent 68% of its users. Over 40% of LinkedIn users work in companies with 10,000 employees or more, and over 40% of its members are managers, directors, owners chief officers or a VP. Clearly LinkedIn has some power players as members that you might want to get to know. Source: Digital Buzz Blog

With a million new users added each week, LinkedIn offers a tremendous opportunity for you to gain some targeted exposure, establish your credibility as a market leader, and grow your network. Let’s dig in and look at some practical ways that you can use LinkedIn to get some results.

Complete your profile

Take the time to complete your profile. Import your resume, fill out all of the fields that apply to you. Include all of your skills and certifications. Upload a clear headshot of yourself. If you do not have a suitable photo, spend the money to get some professional photos taken. There’s a button at the top of your profile that says, “Improve Your Profile.” If you click that button you’ll get recommendations on ways to make your profile better. Give recommendations and then ask for recommendations from your key connections.

Create a company profile

You can add details about your company, it can import blog posts from your blog, and display your company’s activity on LinkedIn.

Participate in groups

You should search for groups in your topic area, and in areas where you have interest and knowledge and join a few groups that look active. Read the group’s guidelines to find out when it’s appropriate to share your links.

Establish yourself as a leader and trusted authority in your topic

Starting a group on LinkedIn is a great way to establish yourself as a leader, however, only do so if you have the time and interest level to be active in the group several days a week. You will have to foster the growth of the group and encourage interaction at first, but eventually there will be regular contributors and the group should begin to grow on its own.

Interact with others

Use the site for its intended purpose and network with colleagues in your industry, scope out possible joint venture partners, establish relationships with other authorities in your industry.

Import your company blog

You can import your blog to your profile so that it displays your recent posts. You can also import videos and other presentations on your profile so that when visitors check out your profile they can learn all there is to know about you and your business.

LinkedIn provides a perfect platform for you to expand your visibility online. Take the time to get comfortable with the site so that you are not neglecting the powerful connections that you could be making on LinkedIn to grow your business and your network.

If you want to learn more about leveraging the power of social media marketing to grow your business, visit, http://mcreasite.com/blog, where you will discover lots of strategies for marketing your business online.