Using Social Media in Building a Business Online

Imagine yourself in a business meeting, surrounded with your peers and colleagues who share the same passion as yours towards work. Each one of you speaks up and shares his thoughts about the latest market trends, in-demand products and cutting-edge technologies. After a while, everybody becomes involved with the brainstorming. The meeting ended with everyone becoming inspired to reach greater goals for the company.

This scenario is just an example of how a business could succeed if the people behind it share a common passion and interest. You could see how each person speaks up, and how everyone trusts one another. This is exactly why entrepreneurs choose social media as a tool in building a business online.

Millions of people around the world have set up their own accounts with popular social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. With the growing population of these sites, entrepreneurs are aware that social media is a great tool in building a business and establishing loyal customers.

What exactly do social media have that sets it apart from other income-generating methods? The answer is simple. It’s all about relationships. You are more likely to increase customer loyalty if you expose your business in social networking sites. This is made possible by engaging your customers in transparent conversations, thus making them feel that they’re an important part of the business too.

The beauty of social media is that you almost seem to get responses in real time. Customers are not required to post lengthy comments. They can write whatever they want without thinking of any rules. Of course, just like in any website, profanity is always not allowed.

Don’t be afraid to receive negative comments. Take them constructively and work your way towards the improvement of your products and services. Besides, some of your loyal customers are sure to provide positive feedback to counteract the negative ones.

Businesses also use social media to promote their products and services. As compared to the traditional advertisements, social media is relatively cheaper and definitely much better. Your own advertisements are not the only ones that do the work, but also the words that are coming from the people who’ve now been your patrons.

New customers are more likely to trust a comment they’ve read from Facebook or Twitter because these updates came from actual customers themselves. They would not dare risk their own reputations by making false advertisements.

Aside from social networking sites, you can also start building your business on discussion forums. Find forums that are related to your niche and start discussing about your business with other people who share the same interest as yours. You can create your own threads, answer inquiries and add links directing to your own business site. Forums surely can increase the exposure of your business to potential customers.

Using social media, your business can achieve what some other large businesses have failed to do, and that is strengthening customer relationship. It’s not all about making money online. The most important thing is building a business that cares the most about its customers.

Enhanced by Zemanta

Share and Enjoy:
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • NewsVine
  • Reddit
  • StumbleUpon
  • Google Bookmarks
  • Yahoo! Buzz
  • Twitter
  • Technorati
  • Live
  • LinkedIn
  • MySpace

Failing To Plan Equals Planning To Fail

The best laid plans of mice and men

Of Mice and Men
Image via Wikipedia

My guess is that most of you spent yesterday or at least a few moments before the “ball dropped” reflecting on 2008 and resolving to make 2009 different.

The question is, how exactly do you plan to make it different this year?

If you look at each day with the same resolve and retrospect that you looked at the past year last night you’ll find yourself making the changes necessary to ensure that this day, this week, this month and therefore this year will all be better than the one before it.

So what’s the best way to make a plan for the year?

In my opinion (and please comment if you hold a different stance, I welcome discussion), if you consider finances for example; we all want to make more money this year than we did last year or ever for that matter.

If you know that you want to add $25 K to your bottom line this year, that breaks down to adding roughly $480 per week to your income. Now as an Internet Marketer, that is a totally achievable goal. That further breaks down to less than $69 per day. That doesn’t seem so daunting or impossible now, does it?

Even if you’re at $0 per day right now, you CAN get to a place this year that will get you on track to make that goal and surpass it. The irony is that once you get into the habits that will make the $50 or $75 a day income possible, your entire thought process goes through a change and the light bulb over your head shines blindingly….you suddenly “get it” and your income then begins to grow almost exponentially.

Now when you look at that goal of an increased income you believe it to be attainable. The next step is to, well….set up the steps to get there.

You need to look at your existing business/es and website/s and ALL of your projects and ideas and decide for yourself what you need to do in order to “get there”.

For me that meant breaking up my year something like what follows, tho I won’t bore you with the minutiae, you’ll get the idea and be able to do it for yourself.

MY GOALS FOR THE NEW YEAR

  1. 100 Subscribers per month consistently on at least ONE of my domains.
  2. At least 1 site profiting at least $1000/month in sales, membership fees, etc…
  3. 3 Product releases to occur in April, July and December.

So, for me to talk about how I’ll achieve those goals, I will break them down something like this:

  1. 100 subscribers per month is only an average of 3.44 per day. Any blog that is properly SEO’d and then socially linked through article directories, Facebook, MySPace, etc, and also socially bookmarked through the network of Tweets and Diggs and so forth should be able to draw enough “interested” traffic to secure at least 3-5 opt ins per day. That’s the plan anyway.
  2. $1000 Profit per month is an average of $33.34 per day in sales minus your operating expenses for that site. In that case let’s just round it up to $40 per day, and that’s being very liberal with the operating cost estimate. Whether you’re selling your own products or as an affiliate marketer for someone else, if you can get to where you’re averaging a minimum of $40 in sales per day, that goal looks not only attainable but one easily surpassed.
  3. In staying consistent with the above goals, and using each one to build upon the next the product releases will also be a natural progression. Having my “BIG” product release next Christmas, I’ll be setting myself up to step into 2010 in a position to set and achieve even bigger goals. The releases in April and July will both be directing people toward the third and final product of the year and IT will be a natural progression of my product line.

What is YOUR plan?

Remember…

If you fail to plan, plan on failing.

Enhanced by Zemanta

Share and Enjoy:
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • NewsVine
  • Reddit
  • StumbleUpon
  • Google Bookmarks
  • Yahoo! Buzz
  • Twitter
  • Technorati
  • Live
  • LinkedIn
  • MySpace
Blog WebMastered by All in One Webmaster.