Social media is all the rage at the moment. Twitter... Facebook... YouTube... everybody's talking about it.
And there's a lot of myths and lies out there. Personally, I don't know many people who are profiting from it. And I think there is a lot of "shovel selling" happening (i.e., the people who made all the money in the gold rush were the people selling the shovels). For example, with twitter everyone is following everyone out of courtesy, not because they are interested in = what they have to sell. And I've seen dozens of "how to make a profit via twitter" notes buzzing around. My advice is just dig in and get stuck into it. I caught up with a friend the other night. And he didn't want to get involved in it until he understood it 100%. Fair enough.
I have a different approach: dive right in. Otherwise known as ready... fire... aim. Just go to Facebook and set up an account... set one up on twitter as well... and do the same on YouTube. But the question remains: does it work? Personally, I cannot claim to have made a lot of money out of social networking sites. I know for a fact I have made some. I have used it to get more subscribers to my web site. I also know it can be great for increasing your rankings on search engines. I did an interview with search engine marketing expert, Niro Thambipillay and he explained the fact if you linked to your site from some of the major social networking sites, it actually improved your rankings in the search engines. I thought that was interesting.
So one way you could use it is by having a blog. And then writing comments on Facebook which link directly to that blog to automatically drive your search engine rankings up and drive people to your site. I have also read an interesting book about social networking by Jeff Jarvis. It's called "What would Google do" and is an interesting read which talks about how big companies are using social media to manage relationships and turn profits. The reality is I think the key to social networking is building relationships. And there will be spammers... get rich quick scammers... and a range of different people trying to take advantage of this medium.
After all, it doesn't cost anything. I came across an interesting report on the subject today from a guy all the gurus are saying knows what he's talking about. If nothing else, it's an interesting read about how to monetise social media without pissing people off. The guy claims to have devoted his life to learning about social media. He also claims you can get $1 per month per follower you get via social media. It's worth a read. After all, social media is only likely to get bigger and bigger in the months ahead.
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