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Social Media Marketing

These have been the buzz words for a couple of years now and there is every reason to be buzzed by it.

This new media channel is witnessing explosive growth and companies taking advantage are reaping huge benefits and rewards.

One must understand that this media is not a single channel for marketing but comprises of multiple channels of online marketing and leveraging the modern tools and the marketing drive sites of today such as Facebook.

The marketing efforts consist of conducting marketing campaigns in the new environment and pulling the necessary traffic to your site.

Such activities include blogging, utilizing Facebook, inbound marketing and effectively creating a web-hub where businesses are interwoven with your users(customers) daily habitual activities.

Making money online – example through online dating - part 36 >>>

<<< Making money online – example through online dating - part 35

If you have not included an ‘Articles’ or a Blog section in your site, it is highly recommended that you do so.

These are the primary vehicles that will used to create unique content for your users and drive the necessary traffic to your site.

Consumers are now more than ever empowered with a proliferation of options of where to buy, when to buy and what to buy.

Within a single moment one can visit Amazon.com to look up reviews of a given product and then choose whether to buy from the multiple reviews available for that product or service.

The traditional ‘sales pitch’ of yesteryears are taking a back seat and the consumer now controls the market and the business needs to follow.

This paradigm shift in buying and selling calls for new methods of conducting business and one needs to ‘inform’ rather than ‘sell’ to customers of today.

Making money online – example through online dating - part 37 >>>

<<< Making money online – example through online dating - part 36

The social media marketing requires businesses to rally behind their products and services and this means having a loyal following of customer who can vouch for your product.

It is imperative more than ever to make sure that the consumer’s requirements are met as well as educating the new customers to the value of your service or product.

In the case of the online dating site example, having a blog or article section gives extra credibility to users who are interested in joining your site.

Once the user has joined, the service must match their expectations and requirements and anything outside of this can spread like wildfire and ruin your credibility.

The speed at which this happens is astonishing.

Take the recent example of Google copying Bing and adding a background image to their humble home page.

This was met with so much resistance from the general public that Google reverted back to their original page in less than a day.

Making money online – example through online dating - part 38 >>>

<<< Making money online – example through online dating - part 37

Creating your hub

The free dating site (tigerdates.com) we have in this example may have to cross some hurdles before finding a loyal base of users.

In particular the term free may put off some users primarily because they may not see the website as having any credibility to its product over say a paid site.

The questions they are likely to ask is ‘how is this site making any money’ and what do they do with your email.

Unfortunately in this hotly segmented dating category market there will be fake websites that have been purely setup to collect emails and users information without offering any kind of service.

Fortunately in recent times, those sites have been filtered exceptionally well by Google and these sites are rarely found.

It is one of the many reasons why Google is such a popular search engine because it values what the end user is looking for.

Making money online – example through online dating - part 39 >>>

<<< Making money online – example through online dating - part 38

Once you have established your free dating site on the internet, your next set of tasks is to market your site as aggressively as possible.

Expect anything in upwards of 3-6 months before you see any real traction in your work.

It is important that you do not give up easily as it takes time to create a presence.

As you continue to market your site try to become familiar with all the tools available at your disposal.

The beauty of doing an online business is that you have a vast capacity of resources available right at your fingertips.

You can instantly know how many users came to your site, how many signed up to your registration process of the dating site, how many of them logged in and added their photos.

In essence you can see exactly what the users behavior is on your site as well as where this traffic is coming from.

This gives you exceptional power to tap into the wide resources available on the internet to pinpoint your marketing with accuracy and much effectiveness.

There is no other business like an online business.

— End —
Author: Ferdouse Khaleque PhD is the director of Semibase, Inc. an internet solutions provider now in its twelfth year of operation.