Below is what social authority begins to look like after you’ve mastered the art of social marketing. The list includes all my main profiles on social communities, social news sites, marketing groups, and remote blogs and pages. They are the sites I visit most frequently and get the most out of as far as traffic, links, and branding.
Note what Darren Rowse outlined in his video about keeping a consistent profile across all your sites as much as possible. Clicking through the sites below you’ll see that I’ve tried to do just that over time and it really helps with branding.
Social Power Linking is about showing up everywhere your target market surfs. This list isn’t complete. I just got tired of building it and stopped at what I thought were the main sites in my arsenal. I consider the value of belonging to the site (traffic it generates, link love it sends, and the value of the networks of contacts generated).
Digg – Pownce – Tumblr – Squidoo – LinkedIn – HubPages – YouTube – Twitter – WetPaint – SpongeFish
Tipzu – My 9rules – Revver – Mashable – Ojeez – Social Marketing Central – Blog Marketing Search
Delicious – PlugIM – Sphinn – MySpace – Facebook – Propeller – StumbleUpon – MyBlogLog – Blog Catalog
SelfGrowth Network – FriendFee – Fave – Entrecard – Windows Live Spaces
Add to the main sites above all the 2nd tier sites you inevitably join to test them out and check out the community “liveliness,” and the list quadruples in size.
Now, looking at the sample sites above, is it hard to imagine why social marketing works as well as it does? Everything we do in life, if it is worth doing at all, is a lot of work. Social marketing is no exception.
But while most of my competitors are doing traditional SEO, JVs, list mailing, and basically the same as everyone else in my niche, I am out there grabbing fresh prospects who are not on anyone’s list in my niche.
The “Born On Date” of the list members of many experts in my niche indicates a large number of people on all these lists have “expired.” You will find a good percentage of the most jaded, tight fisted prospects on great big lists whose owners have not been adding fresh prospects. Rather, they trade jaded, non-viable list members, clients, and customers back and forth depending on who is launching what at the time.
Freshening the customer base in my niche is where the money is.
People who haven’t been scammed or become jaded are far more receptive to good quality offers and tips than people the big gurus keep trading back and forth as they mail for each other.
Therefore I don’t need to have a list of 1 million people just to get by. The list of devoted, regular readers you create by authority blogging converts better, far better, than traditionally generated readerships and lists.
Consider that as you decide who to listen to when it comes to marketing online.
Every niche has this problem to a lesser degree. But none beats the IM niche for stale lists. It’s because everyone does joint ventures and simply “swaps spit” without bringing in significant new, fresh faces. Social marketing allows me to reach out and capture high quality prospects who surf the social scene and who have never heard of any of the gurus of internet marketing. (If you wanted to know one of my secrets – there it is!)
So, social marketing in any niche will also produce very fresh faces to inform and then sell to while increasing your search engine rankings, link popularity, branding, and overall niche authority. This is because most people do it wrong who are trying it without professional guidance.
Man cannot exist on “free blog tips” alone where social marketing is concerned!
Social Power Linkers “get it” and they are doing really well with social marketing compared to the results they were getting before learning Social Power Linking.