Quote:
Originally Posted by francis84
Social media is more on marketing aspect. When you create an account in any of those social networking sites, you can share you blogs (even your website!) to your friends that you are going to add. In adding friends, target those you think will be your potential visitors/buyers.
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Yeah, but it's not good business practise to use social circles as a customer base of any sort. And it's not good for your social life to be a salesperson to those you call or want to call your friends.
I made 300,000 USD of sales for affiliate networks in 18 months and not a penny of it came from the money my friends and family spent online in the same period. You know you're in a much stronger position if you don't sidestep any of the basic laws of commerce - such as thou shalt not talk shop in the smoking room.
The sad thing is that there is
so much scope for commercially sound moneymaking out here - content-publishing is currently one of the biggest and, as well as the obvious moneyspinner called Google (whose search content generates a fortune for Google's owners) there are so many small sites making a fortune from selling off their adspace.
And to get the traffic to go to those sites, so many successful methods are used from paid advertising to optimised pages to press marketing; content produced for your own sites draw in traffic themselves, and having the content there is worth much more than getting links to it in some social network where there are about 20 billion links at any given moment.
Forum posting is not the same as social network bookmarking but it has a much more tangible, longterm and mutually profitable (for the forums and the users) result.
Content networks like helium, AP, about.com, and no doubt looooads of others, pay users for the content they put up, rather like being paid for posting on a forum - a few cents a day for every 1000 posts, and that all helps to prove that content itself is really very valuable.
Spend more time on producing content than linking to it, that's my advice, and remember that social networks are a good place to socialize, well, maybe just a place to socialize, if you don't think them very good, but either way it is inappropriate and without due consideration for the longterm to use social space for promoting anything other than the one exception, music gigs (we all love to listen to our friends' music and go to their gigs, that's why myspace is a very good exception to the whole 'do not use social space for selling' point - except that nowadays most of myspace is filled out with artists, professional and amateur, so in a way I'm right there too).
Ah, do what you like.
