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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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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