1. Your website (includes getting ranked in the major Search Engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo)
2. Facebook (you have a fanpage, right?)
3. YouTube (upload your own videos and market your website through them)
4. Twitter (engage some of the best minds in online marketing)
5. LinkedIn (this is where the big players in industry hang out)

Today, I'm here to talk about #5. LinkedIn is commonly thought of as the place people go to find a job. In fact, that's true. It's the best job networking site there is. LinkedIn has it all: Major industry players, tons of traffic, high interactivity, built in social media, and much, much more.

Those qualities above are what make LinkedIn a fantastic "job board." But it's so much more than that.

People are making major business deals in terms of B2B. In fact, LinkedIn is probably the single best place online to go to conduct business. If you want to make a contact with a company you covet for your business, LI is the place to go.

So let's talk about several things you can do on LinkedIn to market your business.

First and foremost, create a fully-fleshed out profile for yourself. YOU are the brand. Sell yourself here. Tell me, the potential business partner or client, what you can do for me. Sell me on you and your business. In other words, if I choose to work with you or hire you, what's in it for me?

That really is the golden rule of business: What's in it for the customer? How can he benefit from a relationship with you?

Secondly, there are a few things you can do with your LI account that can help you enhance your perceived value with current and potential partners.

You can–and should–add a few "applications" (or "apps") to your account. Did you know you can add your Twitter stream to your LI account? Whenever you tweet, your LI profile is updated with your last tweet. This is powerful.

If you've ever been to my site, you know I'm all about automation, systematization, and content syndication. LI makes all three dead-simple easy.

You can also add a WordPress blog to LinkedIn. Imagine creating a post on your site and that post getting automatically added to your LinkedIn account. Well, you don't have to. By adding the WordPress app right within LI, you now have that exact ability.

Another neat application that I like is Amazon's reading list. Here, you can let anybody who looks at your profile know what you're reading right now and have read in the past. I'm a firm believer in continuous improvement, personally and professionally. This app shows others what you're reading to improve yourself and your business.

Did you know that you can answer questions on LinkedIn on a variety of topics? You can establish authority and expertise in a subject by actively engaging in the "Answers" section of LI. Remember, LinkedIn is where CxOs hang out and do business. Movers and shakers live here, too. Anybody and everybody in all sorts of industries have established online presences here. They're watching. You can quickly turn this visibility into dollars by impressing an important person who reaches out to you and asks for help.

That is truly super-powerful.

Above are just a few of the many ways that you can leverage the social networking power and reach of LinkedIn.

To set the stage, here are some random facts and figures behind mobile computing (not just mobile marketing, but more focused on mobile use).

First off, what is "mobile," what is "mobile computing," and how is "mobile marketing" done?

The definition of mobile, according to The Free Dictionary, is the following:

Capable of moving or of being moved readily from place to place

So mobile computing and/or use must be using a computer, or computing device like a tablet or smartphone, in a capacity where moving freely is possible. A mobile device need not be "connected" to anything. However, for the purpose of this discussion, by "mobile computing" we are referring to some interaction between a network and a mobile device.

Let's not confuse mobile with wireless, though. For instance, your desktop PC may be connected to the internet via a wireless connection; however, it is most certainly not a mobile device because you cannot readily pick it up and move to another location.

Laptops can be mobile devices. They use either wi-fi or a cellular network to connect.

Let's not limit ourselves to thinking of mobile computing as only connecting to the internet. Mobile devices can interact with a variety of networks, not just the internet. For example, here are a few "networks" that mobile devices can connect to:

• SMS (short message service)
• MMS (multimedia message service)
• in-game
• mobile web marketing
• bluetooth
• infrared
• proximity systems

Mobile marketing is simply marketing to people who use mobile computing devices. If you have a cell phone that is either "smart" or has SMS enabled, you can be marketed to exclusively through that device.

Here are some facts that I found interesting when researching mobile marketing. These are in no particular order, other than that this is the order in which I found them

• Mobile users are 25% more likely to respond to advertising
• Of the 4 billion mobile phones in use today, smartphones = 1.08 billion, or ~27%, and the majority of them are SMS-enabled (3.05 billion or ~75%)
• By 2014, mobile internet should take over desktop
• 1/2 of all LOCAL searches are performed on mobile devices
• 29% of mobile users are open to scanning a mobile tag to get coupons
• On average, Americans spend 2.7 hours per day socializing on their mobile devices
• 1/3 of the Facebook user base uses Facebook Mobile
• 50% of twitter the user base uses twitter mobile
• 200 million YouTube views on mobile every day (YT gets over 1 billion total views per day)
• WOMEN: 35-54 are most active group in mobile socializing

While there is a plethora of ways to market to your mobile users (QR codes, banner ads, text, SMS, etc.), we will take a close look at mobile text marketing today.

Our special guest, Brian Schilling, is here to talk about text messaging, how it works, why it's effective, and how best to use text messaging in your marketing efforts.

There's a lot of hubbub going on now about social media and social networking. When Facebook started getting more traffic than Google, displacing the world's #1 search engine, the fury over social media came to a boil.

But is social media overhyped? Does it deliver on its promise? And what is its promise, anyway?

These are a few questions we will explore in this post. First, a definition.

Wikipedia defines social media in the following way:

"Social media are media for social interaction, using highly accessible and scalable communication techniques. Social media is the use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into interactive dialogue."

Social Media Primer

The web is not only a great place to find information; it is also a fantastic place from which to disseminate information and share knowledge.

Social media and all that such a term entails is about creating, building, and fostering relationships. Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn are but just a few social media and networking sites that help with these relationships.

They are also places where you can do “damage control” and manage your reputation or the reputation of your business. They are great for building your brand as well.

Additionally, there is another benefit to social networking and building out solid internet properties: Establishing expertise.

Finally, there is the nitty-gritty, nuts-and-bolts utility: Content syndication. You can use all of these web properties to take one piece of informational content and spread it–or syndicate it–over multiple channels, thereby casting a wide net across many very popular web properties. This content syndication not only delivers your message over a wide swath, it also performs an incredible SEO function by getting your main website dozens and dozens of backlinks.

Wrap it all up and the entirety of your content helps to establish your expertise in your field.

Obviously, strategic use of the web and all of its incredible “new technologies” has many benefits.

Signing up for all of these properties–while tedious–is a worthwhile endeavor. You need not, however, register for every “social media” or “social networking” site under the sun. Remember, too, that simply signing up to these websites is just the beginning: You have to constantly add content and make updates to keep the sites–and your information–current.

Having said all that, there are various “global” and “local” web properties that I recommend any business or business person use when trying to establish a solid social media and web presence. The global social sites are, in order of relative importance, the following:

• Your own website. If you are to be taken seriously as a business, you must have your own website.
• Facebook. It is an incredible social media platform that reaches–as of this writing–over 600 million people. For free.
• Google Places. Google is making a big push with Places by inserting Places business listings right within the “organic” Google search results. Location-based commerce is an emerging trend that will only get bigger, especially as mobile devices take over PCs (which has already happened, by the way).
• Twitter is an incredible “micro-blogging” web application that–in 140-character chunks–is powerful not only for selling your goods and services but also for syndicating your content.
• YouTube is a phenomenal social site that can make your content go viral. Savvy businesses use YouTube as a marketing and sales channel.
• LinkedIn, thought of as an employment site just a short while ago, has become the social network that Corporate America uses to make valuable B2B connections. A lot of profitable business alliances have been formed out of the relationships in LinkedIn.

There are, of course, local-specific social sites, too. They are:

• Merchant Circle. This is a phenomenal social-networking-based business directory. Founded by a pioneer in the social media space, Merchant Circle is on the cusp of local business social networking sites.
• Insider Pages is a more traditional-looking business search engine. If you want to dominate your local market, it behooves you to appear on this website.
• HotFrog is another high-value local search engine and business directory. This is another local-based social site you want to be on.
• Your local Chamber of Commerce. This is a surprisingly good source for getting your community to recognize your business.

The great thing about all of these sites is that you do not have to reinvent the wheel each time you set up a new profile on one of these pages. Much of the content, like names, addresses, and phone numbers, can be used over and over again. So, too, can pictures, office hours, and overall descriptions of what your business does.

Summary

There are literally dozens and dozens of “social media” and “web 2.0” sites on the ‘net. It would be foolhardy to try to sign up–much less use–each one. In most cases–especially for businesses concentrating on a specific location–taking advantage of the above-referenced web properties should be sufficient to establish a brand image, expertise, reputation, and other qualities that were brought up previously.

A blog without readers is pretty much useless. If you’ve been blogging for a while and have only been getting a trickle of viewers to your posts, you need to put a traffic building plan into action. Building traffic is just as an important skill to bloggers as writing quality posts is. Many bloggers are terrific at creating content but don’t know a thing about building traffic. Here is a quick guide to the five most popular (and most effective) traffic building techniques.

1. Get SOCIAL!

Social networking and blogging go hand in hand. Your blog posts can be distributed across social networking channels in many different ways. Sign up for Twitter and tweet about your posts as soon as they are added to your blog. Update your Facebook status with a link to your new blog posts. Submit your stories to Digg.com, Reddit.com and StumbleUpon.com. Remember that in order for social networking to be effective, you need to participate with other people on your list. If you visit their links and respond to their updates, they’ll be likely to do the same for you.

Check out the bottom of this post. See the little icons underneath "Share and Enjoy?" That's the "Sociable" plugin for WordPress. I also employ Hootsuite to automatically update my Twitter status and my Facebook fan page. I'll put together a tutorial on how to use Hootsuite for this purpose if you express an interest.

2.Get SEEN!

Find blogs in your niche and start following their posts. Make sure to add insightful and interesting comments on their posts. Not only will the blog owner take notice and visit your blog, other commenters will visit your blog to get more of your great insight into the topic. Don’t spread yourself too thin with blog commenting, but make it a point to comment on a few related blogs each week.

Not only will you get direct traffic, but you'll also get valuable, relevant backlinks from commenting! Win-win, baby!

3.Get SYNDICATED!

RSS feeds are a way to syndicate your blog’s content so that it is sent to many different people in their own blog readers or on their own sites. Most blogging systems have RSS feeds automatically included but you can add a lot more functionality to your feed by using a free service like FeedBurner.com. With FeedBurner you can add things like sharing the feed via e-mail so it will pull in new readers and encourage previous visitors to come back to the blog again.

See the little icon in the upper righthand corner of the page? That is the RSS feed link for Internet Marketing Muscle. You should click on it

4.Get PUBLISHED!

You may think that by being a blogger you can ignore article marketing. However, you can get a lot  of traffic to your blog by tweaking some of your popular blog posts and adding them to article directories. You can post your popular posts as articles with a link back to your blog in many different article directories. Not only will you get a valuable backlink but your article may also be used by ezine owners which will bring you more traffic.

Plus, your article will get direct traffic from visitors at the article directories. Another win-win. Except this time it's win cubed – you get a backlink, direct traffic, possible syndication, AND you will become known as an expert in your field. But don't call yourself a guru! Let others do that

Oh, yeah, you also get to leverage content you've already written! That's 5 benefits to article marketing! Very powerful stuff.

5.Get BACKLINKS!

Speaking of backlinks, you should work to build backlinks to your blog through several different means. By creating backlinks to your blog, you’ll improve your blog’s ranking in search engine results. You can get lots of traffic from search engines if you are within the first group of search results for your keywords.

Check out 5 x 5 A System for Building Backlinks for a simple backlink-building system.

These five ways of building traffic can be used over and over again to help build traffic to your blog and increase your readership.
 

Happy Tweeting!

Of course, you can still reach me at my old twitter account, billspaced. Either way works. Let's just say this is an experiment.

MyBlogLog (an unusual name, for sure) is different. Essentially, you can see 3 things that are very important. It's a tool I use every day.

The 3 things are:

1. How visitors got to your site
2. What they looked at when they got to your site
3. Whether or not they clicked something on your site

To me, it's critically important to find out where a user came from. Most of my traffic comes from search engines, most specifically Google. The cool thing about MBL is that it shows you the exact URL a visitor came from, which means you get to see the search term(s) that a visitor used to get to your site.

This is extremely valuable information.

You can do a lot with just this simple information. For example, you can build a page incorporating that exact search phrase. Then, you can link that new page to the page the viewer visited (link both ways). You can also tweak the original page to target that key phrase. Now, you have 2 potential pages that are reachable by that search phrase.

You now also know what potential customers are looking for. Why not write a short report (that's an affiliate link to an awesome report on how to write short reports that sell) that addresses this most obvious need?

MBL also has a neat social networking aspect to it. Your visitors can join your "community" and you can send public and private messages. You can use this small subset of your readers (face it, not everyone will sign up to join your community) as a test bed for offers, as a way to find out what your readers really want, or a host of other things. The potential is limitless.

You can also connect with your readers by adding them to your contacts. You can quickly amass hundreds of contacts, and you know what? Because all of your sites are posted on your profile page, your contacts see them all and — more importantly — they visit!

MyBlogLog is a fantastic way to accomplish multiple things with one tool: It's a social networking tool, it's a stats package (albeit not fully-fleshed out in the free version, which is the version I use because a) I'm cheap and b) it's all I need for now), and it's a great way to find like-minded individuals who write some incredible blogs.

I encourage you to check it out.

By the way, I get nothing out of recommending MyBlogLog, other than you might happen across my profile and connect with me. There is no financial incentive.