Define your Social Media Marketing strategy.

Marketing for a Minipreneur business is a critical component for ensuring success. In the old days, marketing entailed spending lots of money for television, radio and print ads. Seth Godin has defined these old tools as “Interruption” marketing. In today’s world, Social Media marketing (Seth defines this as “Permission” marketing) can deliver tremendous results for the small business and it is much less expensive then traditional marketing.

But just because Social Media marketing is free, does not mean it is easy. You still must adhere to the five P’s of marketing, you still have to do a marketing plan and you still have to do marketing research. What’s really changed is the media that you have available to you to do marketing in a new and an affordable way.

Your strategy should be realistic. It’s not practical to incorporate hundreds of Social Media tools into your business, so we will focus on the top ten tools and how to build a Marketing plan around them. The key goals must be for you to increase traffic and customers to your “money page” (on your website), to develop your business as “an authority” in your segment and to increase your business’s Search Engine ranking. Each of these tools require different strategies and techniques, for information and tips click on the tabs located on the pull down menu located under Social Media Marketing.

The Social Media tools for you to concentrate on are as follows:

1. Your business website

2. Blogging via your own self-hosted blog

3. Twitter – Believe it or not, this is a fantastic tool for creating “followers” of your business..provided you do it correctly

4. Facebook – Another great tool for building fans of your business, provided you do it correctly

5. YouTube – Videos often get the top search engine ranking when compared to regular “non-video” web pages. To drive to your website, videos can be linked via several methods

6. Hub Pages – Fantastic auxiliary site to post content and get increased search rankings for your site. The search engines rank Hub Pages very highly, so it is a great strategy to publish articles on Hub Pages and link those back to your website.

7. Stumbled Upon – Currently, the best “Bookmarking” site is Stumbled Upon. Bookmarking is a shared activity among millions of people and the sites with the highest number of bookmarks (also known as “links”) obviously get higher Search Engine ranking.

8. Squidoo – Founded by Seth Godin, Squidoo’s pages are called Lenses and can incorporate videos and links

9. Podcasting- Can be used to broadcast audio shows to create your own subscribers

10. Flickr – Picture sharing to again attract the attention of people with interests similar to yours and drive them to your web site.

Steps or components to be included in your Social media Marketing plan should include the following.

1. Define Your Objectives and Audience Your social media objectives must be tied to specific business objectives that drive sales (or Conversion). Doing so will help identify not only your choice of social media tools but also the metrics that will indicate success (or lack of) within those channels. The ultimate goal of Social Media Marketing must be “Conversion”.

2. Set up and maintain a business website that you own and control. What is the timeframe to build it, what will be your keywords and what will be your strategy to monetize it?

3. A Blog – Yes, you absolutely must have a blog because it allows constant updates that are picked up by the Search Engines and RSS feeds. What is the timeframe for you to get it online, how will you create daily content for it, what is the strategy to link it to your website or “money page”?

We recommend that you use WordPress to build your blog, but that you do NOT have it hosted by WordPress. With the advanced Plug-ins now available via WordPress, a properly configured Blog may also serve as your primary website.

4. Put a plan together for creating and publishing content not only on your Blog, but also on Twitter, Hubpages, Squidoo, StumbledUpon and on YouTube. The more frequent your updates, the better will be your Search Engine ranking, and the more potential customers will find your business.

5. You must add to your Social Media content and communications on a DAILY basis. This is a primary activity to explore for the possibility of Outsourcing. You must still control every aspect of the content to ensure it contains the exact information you want to post, but somebody else can easily create the content for you.

Think of your Social Media marketing as a “Linkwheel”, where the tools link back to your website or “Money page”. A cardinal sin in the Social Media world is that of Spam. You do NOT want to be seen as constantly promoting your product or business. You need to develop trust by potential customers (and to become an authority on a particular topic).

A typical morning involved with Social Media might include the following:

• Write a blog post so the RSS subs get it

• Scan Twitter followers for relevant conversations to join, and post 10 to 20 Tweets of your own. Use a scheduler to trickle these out through the day

• Scan Google Reader subscriptions to stimulate ideas

• Share Google Reader favorites and publish to Facebook and Twitter

• Bookmark interesting blog pages

• Stumble any blog pages

• Scan Google Alerts for my name, brand, and products—in Google Reader as RSS feed—respond as appropriate

• Add comments to blogs as appropriate—mostly response types—Google Reader and BackType

A great resource for developing your daily ans weekly Social Media Marketing plan is “Social Media Marketing an Hour a Day“.