12/13/2010

Social Marketing

Social Marketing is a low cost and effective way to market your organization, business or yourself. There are many different ways to use the internet and social marketing to promote your business and organization. The following is one way - the way I do it.

First create your Blog. For blogging I prefer blogger.com which is part of google, but there are numerous free and low cost services.  You can get up and running in a few minutes. Keep it simple at first. You can always make it more attractive later on.

http://blogger.com/


Write a few entrys on your Blog - My Example



After you have the blog working add Linkedin, Facebook, and Twitter pages. These are all pretty simple to use
  • http://www.linkedin.com/in/
  • http://www.facebook.com/
  • http://twitter.com/
Then write a short blast on Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin, directing people to the blog.

Use the blog as the main focus - Put information on the blog that your target audience will find interesting.  I use the other services to point people to the blog.


Each time you write a new blog post make an entry on twitter, linkedin, and facebook telling people about your new article.

My Examples - And I am older then dirt 

If I can do it  - you can. 

So simple even a cave man can do it.






Pictures are worth a 1,000 words. If you are marketing yourself, a photo of yourself can be used.  If you look like me, a distant fuzzy shot with a large map covering your waste line is best.
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If you prefer a .com address instead of the longer and harder to remember blogspot.com address, you can get low cost .com address that will point the reader to your blog. I use http://godaddy.com.


That is what I did with this blog. 

My example below - different address to the same blog.

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http://craighullinger.blogspot.com/

You can also use direct email to your contacts.  I usually just send a link to my blog to my contacts so if they are interested they can go to the blog, or if not, just delete the email.  You can send the email to an undisclosed@list.com with the actual addresses to a bcc address - that way spammers won't pick up the addresses and harass your email contacts.


It is your choice whether you use a simple email format or one with an attractive photo or letterhead - the attractive letter head looks nice but takes longer to open, and does not look well on all email systems.

Social marketing is evolving rapidly, but you can get underway quickly with no cost and a little effort. It takes a reasonably computer savvy person a couple of hours to get all this up and running, and then some time to develop a little skill. 


I will be glad to help you get going if you need help. Have fun.

http://CraigHullinger.com


309 634 5557

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