Improve Conversion Rate

Your content marketing and social media marketing programs are going as planned but your web traffic and leads are down each month. Now what’s next?  How do you improve lead-to-customer conversion rates?  How to Transform Web Traffic into a Conversion Machine?  Ultimately, you’re still on the cost side of the problem until you can convert leads into loyal customers.

These tips will transform your web traffic leads into a potential clients and your website in a lively and attractive multiple-visit viewer hub. These tips won’t cost you a penny or take forever to succeed:

Develop a Content Strategy

CONTENT IS KING! Your content must be personal. I’m not recommending to talk about your deepest secrets, but personal in a way that the readers feel like you’re writing to them, talking about issues they have, offering solutions to their problems. You need regularly updated, relevant content on your site. You can do this through a blog.

If you don’t have a blog linked to your website, now is the time to set it up. Sing up to WordPress and create a blog for free. Then, link the blog to your website or incorporate it by adding an extra page to your toolbar (tutorial).

Write Q&As on influencers in your industry in your area and invite them to an interview. Ask them about the latest trend or related news, and copy down the interviews into blog posts. Ask them to link their own Facebook pages or websites to your post to give you more exposure.

I recommend blogging at least twice a week and writing 500 to 750 words per post. You don’t have to interview influencers in each post. Write about current events through the lens of your business expertise. You can also write about case studies. If you see someone in your industry doing something interesting, call and ask for an interview. Chances are they’ll be thrilled to get the publicity and the two of you can cross-promote—a win-win.

Enhance your Business SEO

Finding out about a business website in online business-listings is vital to the success of a small-businesses. Gives your business fast and localized exposure to millions users, plus helps build your authority with search engines. Every business owner should registered on sites like Yelp, Yahoo Local, Bing Local and Google Places. Doing this will not only help your search engine optimization (SEO), it will also validate your existence to customers searching for local and regional business listings throughout the country.

Make sure that your business is located on Google Places. Google Places promotes your physical location through Google Maps. So if your customers are local, and you want more exposure to them, then you really should appear on Google Places. Google Places has changed the way SEO works; creating a new playing field, going further than the required basics of a business website.

Include a Video

Content Marketing is definitely going mainstream. “Cisco Systems estimates that 90% of web traffic will be driven by video by the end of 2013.” Forrester Research Group says “video is 53 times more likely than text pages to appear on the first page of a search engine.”  Video should be a natural part of any Content Marketing strategy. Having a video on your homepage is a powerful way to instantaneously connect with the site visitor, giving you the opportunity to interact with your customers by allowing them to get to know you and your business, and feel comfortable with you. This is especially important for small, local businesses.

Adding video to a website has never been easier. Begin with a welcome video that explains what your business is about and introduces you as the owner. Put the video on YouTube or Vimeo and upload it to your home-page.

Consider posting a video blog every few week. Focus on a subject matter you’re passionate about or ask a client to give a camera testimonial. Interview industry thought leaders and video-record how to segments. Think about real issues people are facing and provide valuable information that will help them. It will build good will among potential customers and they’ll share it with others.

Offer Free Resources in Exchange for e-mails

Post-valuable information and you may snag a client for life. Create a box on your homepage called free resources. Write a list of useful information and save it in PDF format. Post the downloadable PDF in your free resources box, and allow downloads only if viewers subscribe to your e-mail newsletter.

The exchange is key; enables a business owner to establish a direct line to potential customers. Make sure to change out resources often. You don’t want your website to look like a brochure where there is no reason to go back.

Add Social Media Sharing Tools

Have you noticed how every article on every well known news website gives you the option to Tweet it and share it on your Facebook page? This helps to spread the word about what you do and your brand. If you don’t have a way to tap into Facebook, Twitter and Google+ on your site, you are missing out, people are really pay attention to what their friends share.

Search is shifting to social, every time you type a search term into Google, the first few links that show are related items shared by people in your network. Adding sharing tools on your site expands your reach to potential customers.

Provide Weekly Specials

As a consumer, nothing grab my attention more than a great deal. Try offering a weekly deal that is exclusive for your online customers and promote them on your homepage. Talk to your customers in person about these deals. Consider doing merchandising that promotes your website, along with an incentive to go there.

Pay Attention to Keywords

The better your search-engine ranking, the better your potential to capture more page views and the end result more customers. How do you secure yourself on Google’s first page?

Pay attention to the Google Keywords Tool, run a few searches for words that describe your business. The tool will tell you what keywords perform well in search and the ones that don’t. Incorporate popular words into your site to increase your ranking.

Study your Metrics

Check out the backend logistics of your website and you will be surprised by what you find. Google Analytics gives you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. You’ll be able to see which blog posts are doing best on your site, what keywords are bringing up your homepage and which pages are getting the most clicks. Pay attention to these analytics, they will help you in creating more content that is meaningful to your audience.

What are you doing to improve your conversion rate? What web traffic improvement ideas can you share with me?

Alirio Pirela is Founder of Pirela Creative Solutions, Creative, Love Analytics, Blogger, Designer, Art Director and Content Marketing Strategist working as a Community Manager for several small businesses, providing tools and advice for social pros and business owners.

Topmost Marketing Mistakes That Businesses Should Avoid.

Marketing is critical to the success of every business, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard businesses complaining about attempting marketing tactics that don’t work. It may be true that a particular or given strategy is not suited for this specific industry or audience, possibly this is why a high percentage of small businesses fail. In my experience working with small businesses the tactic is not to blame, is the execution of it. In reality, a lot of small businesses make the same mistakes many times due to lack of understanding of how marketing actually works. To help you to avoid and conquer your next marketing campaign below you have some of the most common marketing mistakes that small businesses make:

Overlooking a marketing plan

Most small companies are trying to sell without first creating a marketing plan. Why marketing plan? Because it’s the starting point of your business and it helps to design your product or service, identify target audience; provide a roadmap and tools to ensure you are heading towards your final destination. But most importantly, a marketing plan give the specific details needed to expand your customer base, increase visibility and provide quantifiable tactics to measure your return on investment (ROI).

No measuring campaign effectiveness

There are many different marketing platforms and ways to market your small business. Having said that, it is crucial that you take time to measure the effectiveness of your different marketing campaigns. You must understand what is working and what is not for your business so that you can be extremely effective.

Lack of communication with customers

After spending valuable time getting the word out about what your product or service using social media, spreading business through referrals, and offline word of mouth to get new customers, make sure to keep constant communication. However, don’t ignore current customers, request their feedback, listen to their comment and suggestions, and provide them with a valuable long-term relationship. Focus on keeping new customers happy but take care of your existing client base for more business. If you want to stay in business and grow, keep your customers happy and turn existing ones into lifetime advocates. This is the key to market your business effectively.

Stop selling on social media sites

Don’t jump into social media to sell products or services. The intention to make a sale will drive people away. Instead, try to help and do what’s best for your follower or fans. Social media is about getting to know your audience and most importantly listen what they have to say about your brand. People are looking to connect with others, not to buy. Check out this post for more information on how your company can be more social.

Marketing to the wrong target audience

When it comes to sales and marketing you can’t be everything to everyone. Narrowing target audience can increase the power of brand’s appeal. This is why identifying your target audience and choosing the suitable marketing techniques to reach potential customers is vital to your success. If you are targeting and selling kid’s products, be kid-centric with your marketing, advertising, and PR campaigns.

Writing ineffectual headlines

Think about magazines at the grocery checkout: the headlines grab our attention because they shout out over the top news. When you write an email message or press release, you must create an infectious headline. Research indicates that your headline is the most important part of your ad. It’s definitely essential that you draw your prospective customer into your ad and keep them interested in what your product or service is all about.

Confusing call-to-action

I can’t stress enough the importance of a compelling call-to-action that can turn visitors into qualified leads. Every time you create a specific marketing strategy, you want to direct potential customers to take a specific action, don’t confuse your visitors. This action can be various types of offers to generate the best conversion rates. If you fail to tell your visitors exactly what you want them to do, they won’t do anything. Take them and show them what they need to do next to complete the sales process.

Keeping consistent marketing message is the key

In today’s competitive market you need to communicate a key message(s) about your brand that is quick and reverberate. Make sure your message and images are consistent. The last thing you want is to puzzle a potential customer by losing focus on what is really important. Latest research suggests that on average consumers are exposed to more than 3,000 marketing messages every day, your customers will need to see your marketing message between seven and twelve times before they even notice it. That means you can never rely in one message; instead, you need to send frequent messages over and over. Find the appropriate channel to hand over your message and then develop an ongoing relationship with your customers.

Understanding what marketing tactics are working and which ones are not for your business can give you the right tools to map out a highly effective marketing strategy. You need to remember that is a lot of competition out there, and only by pouting out what make your business better and more useful than other businesses will make your brand stand out from the crowd and will help you to get more customers.

Alirio Pirela is Founder of Pirela Creative Solutions, Creative, Love Analytics, Blogger, Designer, Art Director and Content Marketing Strategist working as a Community Manager for several small businesses, providing tools and advice for social pros and business owners. @aliriop

It’s turkey day! Do you know what you need to have for a harvest Thanksgiving dinner? If not, Butterball has developed an amazing interactive website with tips and ideas in how to create a turkey celebration, with videos and a telephone helpline for last-minute kitchen emergencies. Martha Stewart hosted an annual “Thanksgiving hot line,” a live episode of her TV show in which she invites fans to send in their last-minute questions about Thanksgiving foods via Facebook and Twitter. Also, you can add your questions or tune in live via Skype the Food Network’s Thanksgiving Live! show to get tips, solutions and recipes for cooking the best meals.

The integration of social media on Thanksgiving is quite seamless and impressive, keeping in mind that not long ago, audience interactions were usually limited to book recipes, calls to relatives and extensive cooking shows.

For those that just want to snuggle in the couch and watch the 85th year Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade is getting a technology update by an official mobile app. The Parade app will be available on both iOS and Android for today event, and feature a route map, NYC tips, a wifi hotspot finder and a way to track specific participants in the parade.

Obviously, most of us will be gobbling down some turkey, but what else are we eating? Or at least, what are we talking about eating? Meltwater Buzz has gathered some interesting data on the number of social mentions of some of our favorite accompaniments on Thanksgiving and visually arranged them for your viewing pleasure. Who would have thought wine beat out potatoes, and that pie would take the cake?!… After the turkey, of course.

Note: This infographic was originally posted on the Meltwater Group blog.

Alirio Pirela is Founder of Pirela Creative Solutions, Creative, Love Analytics, Blogger, Designer, Art Director and Content Marketing Strategist working as a Community Manager for several small businesses, providing tools and advice for social pros and business owners. @aliriop

Inbound Marketing the Key to Success

Inbound marketing involves getting found by your potential customers through search and how can we make Inbound Marketing Practices the Key Ingredient to Success? With Inbound Marketing through the Web you need to create a useful, informative website for your industry that attracts visitors naturally through search engines, social media, blogosphere, forums, and let visitors find you and come to you. These inbound methods pre-qualify the leads, so your company message is a friendly and familiar welcoming to the ears rather than casual outbound marketing contacts. By bringing these leads into you, you will enormously save money and time instead of the old outbound strategies. A frequent misconception about Inbound Marketing is that it’s a puzzling technique that can only be done by the search marketing masters. Nothing could be further from the truth. Inbound marketing is something that, with the right system in place, you can do yourself.

One of the key ingredients of successful Inbound Marketing strategy is creating relevant content that will bring people into your sales process. A well-writing and updated company blog will accomplish this goal, raising your organic search results, creating linkable content, and helping you to educate your audience. All of these outcomes will help you bring in welcoming leads that have been pre-qualified through a Google search for relevant terms or by reading similar content that links to you. A blog can provide many benefits for your company or organization, and almost all of them relate to Inbound Marketing.

Twitter is another key ingredient of successful Inbound Marketing strategy, a way to deepen relationship with costumers. The currency of your business should be relationships. Twitter, blog and forums help to share the company’s culture with the world, help to learn more about your customers and make easy for people to communicate with your company. When we started using twitter and Facebook we saw that people were talking about us there. Even that we have a blog, e-mail and we answer the phone. We just want to make it easy for our costumers to communicate with us. Now people help us to do the support and answering questions. What we are learning is to listen and let the others do the talking.

One dilemma many businesses struggle in social media is determining the right balance between personal and professional. When employees are representing the company online, what polices and guidelines should there be in place? Do companies really have a say in what an employee might post to their twitter account if the post is not related to the business?

When you hire people into your company, they already have their own online network developed. So don’t try to put a work face on them and encourage them to be themselves. Many of your customers are brought in through the personal relationships of our team members, friends, networks. People tent to use their personal profiles when participating where there are personal relationships.

Your company should implement a separate business account that a specific and dedicated team within the company must manage to ensure that the tone of the company message and branding stay consistent. Keeping some style guidelines the company can allow employees to write articles for the blog, twitting, and posting on Facebook but using editors that ensure the content is relevant and fits with the company or organization brand message.

Some word of advice for businesses that are just getting started with social media and how to make Inbound Marketing practices the key ingredients to success:

• Tell your story, because is what people respond to.
• Quick follow up to comments. Always remember you are setting the tone for your community.
• Be open and treat people as you would like to be treated (my mom always just to tell me this all the time.) This builds trust, which is the foundation of any great relationship and social media is all about building relationships.
• The wonderful thing about communities is that they serve as a living breathing focus group. If you listen right you can probably learn everything you need to know about your customers and business.
• Social Media is a way of doing business; it’s not a campaign. It needs a long term investment, support and organizational commitment. The results will not be easy to tie to direct outcomes, but the impact of a community that is well nurtured grows rapidly.

In addition, there are many other forms to create relevant content that will bring interested visitors. Offering e-books for download; hosting webinars, and developing microsites will all attract leads that are interested in your offerings and are avid to engage in a conversation with you about your organization. Another important element is make sure that your site is optimize to close leads into deals and engage visitors once they land on your website. This requires that you create constantly quality content and try new ideas to bring traffic to your site.

The leads you gain through Inbound Marketing are pre-qualified and are looking to buy your particular product or service. This enhances your chances of making a sale and makes a big difference on the relationship you can build with that customer. They come to you ready to spend!

If you sell someone on your services, there’s a cautionary skepticism about spending their money with you.

By keeping with these Inbound Marketing practices, you will successfully bring in new leads and grow in authority, having said that, it won’t happen overnight. While Inbound Marketing will save money and time, it does take a generous commitment and patience. You won’t be at the top Google result overnight, but by making a long-term commitment to Inbound Marketing you will see results.

Have you seen success with Inbound Marketing? How much did your organization saved in advertising dollars? We’d be thrilled to discuss your current marketing efforts and help you to earn new and qualified leads through Inbound Marketing.

Alirio Pirela is Founder of Pirela Creative Solutions, Creative, Love Analytics, Blogger, Designer, Art Director and Content Marketing Strategist working as a Community Manager for several small businesses, providing tools and advice for social pros and business owners. @aliriop

MIT Whirlwind

This is a guest post written by Andrea Cook. Gold maker, speaker, coach, writer, mentor, co-worker and branding and design consultant.

Never in history has the death of a CEO made such an impact in American lives. While the top broadcasting channels interrupted the evening’s regular scheduled programs, 90 seconds after Twitter friends broadcasted the passing Steve Jobs, I was driven to share a tribute to a man who lead the way for creatives like me giving us the opportunity to develop careers past generations could not comprehend. Apple, the leading company Jobs founded and grew into an epic juggernaut in technology, retail, manufacturing, media and music updated its homepage with a simple image that marked the life of Steve Jobs and an era of innovation that impacted the world.

MIT´s Whirlwind 1951As I am deeply saddened by the death of this important figure in my life, my emotions run deeper with encouragement. Steve’s leadership allowed for humanity to evolve starting with a mainframe that was once as large and distant to the common man as the moon or the tallest building in the world. He transformed the Goliath technologies into devices so intimate that I could hold the technology in my hand and form relationships with others across the globe. For this I am grateful.

A visionary who could transform technology into a new world of emerging industries from dropping out of college and tinkering in his garage has brought new careers to creative souls throughout the world. Starting from Apple II and the “Lemonade Stand” in grade school he started to make an impact on education as I learned about economics and entrepeurship while playing a computer game in the 1970s. Now that there are more than 10 million creative professionals currently employed in the United States, Steve leaves the creative class a legacy of leadership and innovation worthy of pursuit.

Steve’s ability to make an impact proved to be relentless. Who will now take the wheel and drive innovation forward? Innovation with passion, dedication, ethics and leadership like Steve Jobs is what it takes to make a difference that is necessary to change the economy, education and community.

Steve’s timeline was rich, resolved and represented his hunger for the next big thing. He wasn’t distracted by insecurity or greed to measure his success. A man so progressive, rather than whining over the competition stealing his ideas, he created new ideas and improved products some with the purpose to help protect the creative community.

Like most announcements Apple showcases on its homepage, including their iMacs, iPhones, iTunes, iPods, iPads, they cannot be described by any language known by man. The products must be experienced to be understood. The products are as mysterious as the their names and within days or weeks after they are announced, they enter into the homes and become part of our casual vernacular. Today’s image and message shown on Apple’s homepage is as powerful. The image is as elegant and simple as any of the products Apple has ever announced. That dash between the numbers? Those 56 years represent the richness of choices, goals, lessons and character of one person’s life. A creative genius who made impact and became an innovator and an all-American change agent. That dash inspires me to be more.

I want to be like Steve. I’m restless with a passion to not only be innovative and creative, but to make an impact on jobs, industries, community and my family. I want the line in between to represent something meaningful.

May we all aspire to live our purpose as we were uniquely designed. Long live Steve Jobs and his legacy to the creative class.

Andrea Cook has brands buzz on the brain and is a builder of brands-n-buzz through a mix of old-n-new marketing and social media. Gold maker, speaker, coach, writer, mentor, co-worker and branding and design consultant for hire. Learn more about.me/andreacook

Wisestamp

We are always trying to find ways to expand the publicity of our social hubs, attract new people to share our content, and add a social dimension in unique ways. I discovered an easy and simple way to utilize all the social assets that you have, with you and your company sending out a considerable amount of emails every single day it would be foolish not having a link to your Facebook, twitter or LinkedIn page in your email signature. A new extension called Wisestamp now allows you to add a full box of all your social media sites to your email signatures. This browser plugin will take you through a couple of very easy install steps, but once you are connected you can choose which of the pages or personal profiles you manage that you want to share and add a social dimension to your email in one step. You can add Twitter, Facebook, RSS feeds with your latest blog posts or a variety of other social profiles. Once you are set it up, you are ready to go and every time you send an email it will be automatically pulled in for you.

Alirio Pirela is Founder of Pirela Creative Solutions, Creative, Love Analytics, Blogger, Designer, Art Director and Content Marketing Strategist working as a Community Manager for several small businesses, providing tools and advice for social pros and business owners. @aliriop

1. If you are already playing around with Facebook, so log into it.

2. Enable developer mode, by typing “developer” into the Facebook search box, click the first result (it should be an app made by Facebook), and add the app.

3. Go to the developer app (it should put you there automatically, if does not it should be in your left-hand tool bar)

4. Create a new app . Give to your new app any display name and namespace you see fit. Read through and agree to the Platform Privacy agreement. After this you wait few minutes to get verified.

5. Make sure you are in your new app’s main settings screen. You should see your app’s name near the top of the page.

6. Look for the “Open Graph” header on the left side column, and click the “Get Started using open graph” link.

Create a test action for your app, like “read” a “book”, or “eat” a “sandwich”
7. This will take you into an action type configuration page. Change a few of the default settings (Changed the past tense of “read” to “red”), and click through all three pages of settings. Also change the layout if you want.

8. Go back to your Facebook homescreen. An invite to try Timeline invite should be at the top of the page.

Now you are done! Let me know how this works and how do yo like you Timeline Page.

Alirio Pirela is Founder of Pirela Creative Solutions, Creative, Love Analytics, Blogger, Designer, Art Director and Content Marketing Strategist working as a Community Manager for several small businesses, providing tools and advice for social pros and business owners. @aliriop

If you cannot wait to see and want to see the way your Facebook profile is going to look in the future, here’s how to sign up. Facebook has a page about Timeline, and there’s a button at the bottom for signing up.

Beta Facebook Timeline

Facebook Subscribe Button

What you need to know about Facebook Subscribe button, an attempt to copy Google+ and Twitter, will provide control over what your friends share with you. Allow users to Subscribe to people’s profiles and see their updates without being their Facebook friend. The updates of people you subscribe will become visible in your news feed along with your friends’ updates. You can also subscribe to your current friends and you will be given the option of what type updates and how many updates you receive about them in your news feed. However, you will only be able to see the updates that the poster marks as “public.”

In the past, if one of your friends played games (that I’m not fond of any of them) and love posting constant updates of their gaming activity, you can now block out this updates and only request updates that you consider “important.” Before you would have no choice to either block specific game from your News Feed or physically remove that persons updates altogether. Subscribe allows you to condense friends’ random posts without missing out important news.

Intriguing move for Facebook because they were actually saying to people to forget about pages and instead focus on getting people to subscribe to their personal profiles. The concept of Subscribe who are not your Facebook friends seems a little bit unusual, but for thought leaders, celebrities, and public figures the new feature may become a powerful tool. Now, public figures can also broadcast directly from their profile to interested followers, much like a Twitter account. This will be substantially important for journalists, musicians, and other small public figures that don’t have a Facebook presence at the present time. It seems strange to see Facebook move people away from Pages, where they make advertising money, but probably it’s all intended to make the site more social and maybe is a special spot reserved for pages with more significant sharing of content.

For those who are concerned about the privacy of posts, note that if you have your settings on “friends only,” subscribers who are not your Facebook friends will still not be able to see your updates. And if this still isn’t satisfactory, you can always dismiss the subscribe option altogether so you will not begin accumulating subscribers.

Although, Facebook Subscribe button has substantial benefits for individual users and public figures, the button doesn’t bring anything to the table for businesses. You can’t subscribe to a company page, but Facebook will be rolling out a tool to migrate all Fan Page’s fans over to subscribers on a personal account, the downside is you will lose all of your Fan Page content. Additionally, they don’t have analytics associated with them and can’t be updated by multiple administrators, which poses a problem for companies.

In conclusion, Facebook Subscribe button automatically subscribe you to your friends’ updates, giving you a simple way to control which updates you receive, will help thinning out your news feed, and help popular public figures to build their Facebook presence; the impact of the tool is somewhat limited. The Facebook Subscribe button appears to be an imitation of Twitter “follower” model.

Have you started to use Facebook Subscribe button? Do you have any comments or experiences to add to my post?

Alirio Pirela is Founder of Pirela Creative Solutions, Creative, Love Analytics, Blogger, Designer, Art Director and Content Marketing Strategist working as a Community Manager for several small businesses, providing tools and advice for social pros and business owners. @aliriop

How to Get Found in Social Media Sites

Why we should care about Google? Is the same as why we should care about getting found in Social Media? Maybe, because is a great way to engage and connect with potential customers. Most people you know hang out sometime during the day at the social media watering holes, so this is  where you need to hang out if you want to engage with them.

There are so many social media sites on the web, and each has its different uses and most share the ability to create a user profile, connect to others, and interact and share information with a vast community of people. To get started we need to start building a social media presence and one of the most general aspects is creating a well planned user profile. Spend a generous time thinking about how you approach building your brand in social media and how to get found in social media sites:

Pick a Username Based on your Goals:

Pick the right username, don’t create a fictitious person because is a violation of terms of service of these sites and is likely to get kicked off. Based on your goals, different approaches to username might make sense for a business or person to grow marketing reach for product or service. Use your real name, make it simple and clean, and avoid using numbers. Use a name that is available on all prime social media sites and keep it consistent across all sites as possible. The goal is to build your brand online so people start recognizing you.

Create a Profile Image or Logo:

Along with your username a profile image is a crucial part of your online identity. It’s very discouraging to follow or accept a friend request when the person or brand does not have a face. Use the same image across all of your social media profiles. If you are setting up an account for your business, the image should be some variation of your logo. Your profile image is part of your overall brand and it should be something distinctive, memorable, and consistent.

Take Advantage of Web Site Links:

Social media sites allow you to submit one or more links to web sites where people can learn more about you or your company. Unluckily, these links do not generate SEO value but can still generate traffic to your selected website, so you should take advantage of them.

Create a Facebook Business Page and Build Brand Advocates:

In addition to your personal page, you should create an separate page for your business. This is what Facebook calls fan page. Over five million users become fan of pages each day. But you need to have first a personal account  to create a fan page, you shouldn’t  use a standard user account for your business because is a violation of Facebook’s terms of service and your account will be terminated. Don’t create a fake account and be genuine and link to your Facebook page from your business website and from other online platforms.

Create a LinkedIn Account and Start Connecting:

I’m particularly fond of LinkedIn, because is a website for professionals social networking and is all about business, the average age on the site is 35. Unlike other social networks like MySpace and Facebook, which focus on a wide set of users. Their fundamentals are similar to Facebook. You register your account and build you profile including a brief summary or bio and employment history. LinkedIn allows you to connect to others and mostly work colleagues. Such a valuable information about million of professionals, including their connections is what make this social network a powerful tool.

Create a Twitter Account and Start Gathering Followers:

Twitter is micro-blogging platform with millions of current users and thousands of new users every second. You post articles, comments, tips and stories in real time with a maximum of 140 characters, these short updates are called tweets. You can start by creating your Twitter account with a simple registration that take few minutes to get you up and running. But the most important step is to decide whether your username is based on your name or the name of the company. Twitter let you to complete an online profile. I recommend to take few minutes to complete your profile because I found that the more complete your profile is, the more likely people will connect with you. After you are all set up start posting few tweets and sharing some useful information or insightful comments. You need to do this before you start reaching out and connecting with others and building a following. People are unlikely to follow an empty twitter account, also make sure to have a photo in your image profile, this’s another mistake most people have and others will find it odd and won’t connect or follow you.

Driving Incredible Traffic with Digg:

Digg is like a big newspaper with hundreds of readers who visit the site to find the best articles across diversity of topics. However, these articles are not written by Digg journalists or editors, they are selected from thousands of different web sites and submitted to Digg by the users themselves. The user decides through a voting process, instead of an editor which articles will be shown. Social news sites like Digg are remarkably powerful way for businesses to spread their content to an incredible amount of users.  Articles that get visibility on the front page of Digg can get hundred of thousand of views a day. A good deal of Digg users are bloggers, and they are more connected and influential than average web users and can help to spread content on other social media sites, generating more traffic for your site.

Get Discovered with StumbleUpon:

StumbleUpon is a social discovery site that help you to discover new content that you might like. Like most social media sites, you register and create an account, and is free to use. You indicate your areas of interest from a variety of different topics. Download and install StumbleUpon toolbar for your browser, start voting and liking, is very much like Digg. Web pages that get more votes are shown to more users and receive hundreds of visitors. With StumbleUpon, you get gradually more traffic as you get more votes because there are not a front page concept like Digg. Also the traffic here is longer lasting than Digg because continues to be sent for a long time through the years.

Now you can start submitting content, spend time familiarizing yourself with the community, engage in the conversation, connect with others, tell your story, participate, follow up quickly to comments, set the tone for your community, and treat people as you would like to be treated.

Build trust, which is the foundation of any great relationship and social media is all about building relationships. Social media is a long road and a way of doing business, it’s not a campaign.

Alirio Pirela is Founder of Pirela Creative Solutions, Creative, Love Analytics, Blogger, Designer, Art Director and Content Marketing Strategist working as a Community Manager for several small businesses, providing tools and advice for social pros and business owners. @aliriop