Are you looking for referrals, website traffic, feedback, communication, or establishing yourself as an expert?  I already know your answer, “I want all of those things”.  You will get more bang for your time if you focus on one goal at a time. My personal recommendation to beginners is to focus on the goal of establishing yourself as an expert and authority.  By reaching this goal the other goals will fall into place.

What Can I Contribute?

Social media is not like traditional advertising or marketing. It is more like referrals, in networking it is not about making sales at the after hours mixers.  You need to build a rapport with your online network by providing good information, recommending resources, and sharing ideas and feedback. Think about what you can give to your audience. What information or ideas do I have that would be of interest to your network? Approach it from the attitude, ‘I am here to help’ before you even think about asking for the sale. Start by writing articles in the range of 300-500 words and posting them on your website or blog. Then read about how-to Repurpose Your Content and turn the same information in your articles into tweets, wall posts, and videos.

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• Write a blog post with the rule of three. The post contains an introduction paragraph, three supporting examples or arguments, and a conclusion.

• Turn the blog post into tweets. Take your main point from the introduction paragraph and post it as a question to your twitter followers. Then take the first sentence of each of your supporting examples or arguments and drip tweet them throughout the day. Make sure to link to your original blog post in all your tweets.
• Turn your blog post in to wall posts. The conclusion of your blog post summarizes the overall point you’re making. Take this nugget of an idea and find a related video, resource, or book on the topic. Post the video or resource on your Facebook wall along with a link to your original blog post.
• Turn your blog post into a video or podcast. Take the blog post introduction and personalize with your own voice and style. Take the three supporting arguments and find an expert in the opposing or supporting side and interview them. With a podcast format you can call them and record their voice. With video you can be like a journalist and interview a local expert in the topic. Suggest several resources for the audience to get more information and wrap up with your final conclusion. Don’t forget to plug your website and encourage folks to subscribe to your channel.

• Digg and Ping your blog & videos. After you post to your blog and video site of choice, make sure to recommend yourself on the social bookmarking sites. This introduces your content to folks and generates incoming links. If you’re using a tool like WordPress to write your blogsite make sure you have it set to auto-ping blog indexing sites like Feed Burnner and Technorati.

As you can see, one blog post can be easily repurposed into four different social media channels. This not only saves you time, but keeps your message consistent. If one blog post can generate four different pieces of content you can exponentially increase the reach of your online marketing.

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Authority sites generally have more content and more pages than other sites. The search engines feed on content-rich websites and those with many pages and much content per page will do better when going head-to-head with a smaller site. If your site has links from other authority sites, your site will be considered an authority site as well. Search engines generally give more weight to the incoming links from authority sites as long as their main keyword is the same as your own.

How do you establish your site as an authority site?

• Add more pages to your site
• Add informative and engaging content to those pages
• Get other authority sites to link to you

Article writing is a great way to “kill two birds with one stone.”  If your site is built using WorPress, then each time you add a post, you are adding a page to your site.  All your articles should use permalinks!

• Learn about Permalinks
• Learn about Marketing with Articles

You can write your own articles.  If you don’t have time, then delegate this task to someone else, or hire a copywriter to do this for you. If you already know how to write content-rich, keyword-rich text, then you can take this task on with very little expense. If this is not your strength, then you may delegate this task or hire someone else to do it. As an alternative, there are online article exchanges where you can pick up content simply by linking back to the author’s site.

Once you have more pages with more content, you will need to solicit other authority sites to becoming link partners with you. This can be accomplished through email. Some will and some will not answer your requests,  and of those who answer, some will and some will not link to you. The content and design quality of your website will determine whether others will want to link to your site.

Optimize your article pages to be crawled by the search engines. If you are using WordPress, make sure to categorize and tag your articles using your targeted keyword phrases. It also helps to have the title of your articles include some of your keyword phrases, because WordPress automatically makes that title’s H1 title tag.  Good luck!

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Tips for getting the most out of article writing:

• Write Original Articles: Create your own content. Don’t fall for the copy-and-paste trap. It’s okay to draw inspiration from other articles, but put your own spin and touch on the topic. This does three things for you: (1) positions you as an expert in your field,  (2) allows you to add a bio box to the bottom of the article, and  (3) lets you have full syndication and reprint abilities.

• Add a Bio Box & Reprint Gratis on Every Article: Let your article work for you. Allow other bloggers, news sites, and websites to re-post your article on their site for free, as long as they include your bio box at the bottom of the article. You can see how my bio box below positions myself as an expert, links to by blog, and has my top keyword phrases in it. Now every site that republishes my article will be an incoming link to my blog, thus helping my blog become an authority site in the eyes of the search engines.

• Submit Your Articles: The goal is to have your articles everywhere with the bio box on the bottom. There are article directories like Ezine Articles that bloggers, reporters, and website owners search to find content for their publications and blogs. By submitting your articles not only do you get an incoming link from Ezine Articles, but you get one from anyone else who decides to use your article. I have articles from almost five years ago that are still getting re-printed and driving traffic to my site. Think of every article as a tentacle to bring visitors to your site.

Writing articles may sound like a chore, but I encourage you to add them on a regular basis (daily works best) to get the best results. Most articles on the web are about three paragraphs and 300-400 words. That is not a lot of writing, and once you get the hang of it you can complete one in 20-30 minutes. The time you put into this marketing practice is worth it. Imagine adding 300+ new pages on your site every year. In less that six months you would out rank all your competitors because most website owners only have five page-static websites.

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