How To Build a Powerful Online Presence
The Big Picture
The key is to focus on the areas that matter the most and ignore the lower-priority areas. Make some smart decisions about which Internet marketing tools you’re going to use and which you can afford to ignore.
How To Build a Powerful Online Presence: The key is to be consistent. Your online presence is based on small, consistent, high-quality contributions rather than a few sporadic marketing campaigns.
You can group these tools into four broad categories based on how you use them to deliver high-quality content:
Create
This will typically be your website itself. You create it once and then adjust it as required. You do need to be able to update it yourself, but most of the updates are promotional (for example: adding testimonials, promoting new events, adding new products and services).
When you start doing specific marketing campaigns, you’ll be updating this much more regularly – for example, fine-tuning the keywords on pages, creating landing pages for search engine marketing campaigns and so on. However, you don’t need to do this immediately, and you can first focus on the other activities below.
Generate
These are the tools you use for generating and distributing your content regularly. The two main tools are your blog and email newsletter, and these are supplemented by other regular content distribution tools such as YouTube videos, SlideShare presentations, a podcast (an audio newsletter) and article directories.
You don’t have to create brand-new content for each platform. Later in this report, you’ll see how easy it is to adapt one piece of material into different formats.
Automate
If you don’t have the time to get fully involved in social media, at least get a simple presence by automating the process. Every time you publish a blog post, let your followers know on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. (The free TwitterFeed.com service will do this for you.) You can also manually post links to Google+ and Pinterest.
This gives you a minimal – but useful – social media presence. Like anything else, social media will work better when you put some serious time, effort and focus into it. However, you still need to earn the right to use it as a marketing platform, and this is a way of creating a presence slowly until you’re ready to do more with it.
Participate
Finally, you can participate in online conversations. This can happen on the big social media platforms like Twitter, Google+, Facebook and LinkedIn; or they can be niche on-line communities of your customers, clients and colleagues.
This is important, and eventually it will probably give you the greatest return. It’s also what many social media consultants will advise you to do. However, it does take time, so make sure you choose the right communities and engage in the right conversations.
Summary
Here’s a summary of the four stages, written as a marketing plan:
More Articles:
Using LinkedIn Effectively
Effective social media strategy
Tips And Advice For Great Article Marketing
How To Use Google+ For Content Marketing
This post is based on the extracts from an article by Gihan Perera, he is a consultant, speaker and author, who helps thought leaders and business professionals leverage their expertise. He is the author of the book Webinar Smarts and Fast, Flat and Free, among others.
