In 2010, Twitter had 75 million user accounts, while LinkedIn had 50 million members worldwide. Facebook led the social networking sites in terms of popularity, with more than 350 million users worldwide. With the skyrocketing popularity of these networking sites, social media marketing for small business has begun to play a vital role in reaching the global market and targeting potential customers. If you wish to succeed in online marketing, it is important to know the basic strategies of social media optimization.

How to Succeed in Social Media Marketing for Small Business

Many entrepreneurs and advertisers sometimes fail to achieve the desired result while opting for social media marketing for small businesses. Below are some tips to prevent the risk of these marketing failures:

1. Do not misuse the power of optimization. Many search engines can block your content if you over optimize it to manipulate the search engine results. With the right search engine optimization strategies, sooner or later your search engine rankings will improve.

2. Expand your social network by linking to relevant business website pages. Identify websites that provide products and services that complement your offering. Form strategic alliances, exchange website links and promote each other’s business.

3. When you create your profile on social networking sites, give a link to your ‘About Us’ page instead of ‘Home’ page. This would provide information that visitors wish to know when they visit your website.

4. Do not spend more time on advertising but on the quality of the content that you post on websites. If you provide effective and keyword rich content, you need not try hard to promote your business, as your content will do this job for you.

Where to Learn Social Media Marketing for Small Business

The technique of social media marketing for small business demands a lot of patience and careful planning to be successful. There are many marketing guides available in the market that can teach you the strategy of establishing your business presence on the internet. By creating its online presence, a small enterprise can grow rapidly and obtain a larger client base than with conventional promotional techniques.

Online marketing can be tough for local businesses. It seems almost like a new subject that was never taught in school. There are so many factors that play into it. If I’m interested in online marketing, as a local business, what does that entail? Do I just put up an ad in an online business directory? What if I don’t have a website? How can I make myself an online presence without knowing where to start? We can help you understand Total Syndication Marketing for starters.

There are a few tasks that a local business can set out to do right from the start, even without a website. There are some online business directories that allow you to customize your advertisement. You can create coupons, add pictures of your business, as well as write some background information about yourself and/or your business. This will allow you to have an online presence without even having a website. Now, this is not to say that you shouldn’t have a website and that this technology can replace the functionality of your website. Instead, it allows you to have a presence while developing your website.

Another task that a company might do is set up a blog for themselves. People love blogs! People want to connect with each other, including businesses, on a much more personal level. The plus side to this is that you don’t even have to go out and develop a blog site yourself, if you don’t want to. You can create a blog utilizing a template from someplace like WordPress. There are numerous sites that offer blog services/hosting. Once you’ve done some basic steps to set up your blog, it’s as easy as posting a note every day or so letting people know what you’re up to. You don’t need to be an accomplished writer to maintain the blog either. People want to connect with real people, and that means if you occasionally make a spelling error or grammatical error, all that does is humanize you even more!

These are just two of the many, many tasks that a local business can easily accomplish to get them started on the road to online marketing success. The list is endless. There are other tactics like video marketing, pay-per-click campaigns, participating in social marketing, and much more. Ultimately you achieve Toal Syndication. However, the key point is to start somewhere…anywhere. Learn what you can about one online marketing tactic that really interests you, implement your knowledge immediately, and then begin educating yourself about the next tactic that interests you. Online marketing is where everything is heading…it’s revolutionary in and of itself. The key to having a successful local business is learning how to keep up with the revolution.

Once you have determined to enter the Multilevel Marketing arena, you will soon realize that leads are the heartbeat of your business. Without leads your business will fail. It’s that simple.

Some of the gurus say that you need to put up some money upfront and purchase leads. That is certainly an option but for the most part the leads that you purchase are usually not targeted for your business and can end up costing you anywhere from 5 cents a lead to 5 dollars a lead. The more expensive the lead, the more targeted they are to your opportunity.

Free MLM leads are just that. They are free of charge to you. The following are ways that are most useful in generating free MLM leads.

Before starting, you will need to have a website to drive traffic to. Probably the easiest way to create a website is to create a blog. There are many blog sites out there. The easiest way to find one is to type “blog sites” in the Google search engine and they will give you all kinds of places to put up a blog.

The best source, by far, is to create a blog using WordPress. If you use WordPress, you will also need a hosting account and a domain name. Go-daddy is a good place to obtain that. The cost is minimal. You will be required to pay around $90 – $100 dollars a year to have your domain name hosted on your website. The benefits to this method far out way the benefits of using a free blog site. However, if you want to do it for free, you can search Google and find a good site to place your opportunity. Blogger.com is a good place to start to drive free MLM leads to.

#1. Video Marketing. This is a very popular way and a very effective way to generate free mlm leads. Most people who spend much time on the internet have a webcam or maybe a video recorder in their home. With a little bit of practice you can make decent videos that people can see on websites such as YouTube, Flickr, Metacafe and many others. There are free video conversion programs that can be downloaded to your computer to convert videos that you have produced into formats that can be uploaded to YouTube or any of the other video sites.

While making the video you will want to promote your business opportunity and make sure in doing so you point them to your blog where they can see what you have to offer or promote. The more creative you are the better opportunity of driving them to your site.

#2. Article Marketing. This is my favorite way of generating free MLM leads. There are literally hundreds if not thousands of article directories out there on the internet. Most of them allow you to post articles that you have written on any subject imaginable for free. You can also place as many as you want and they even encourage you to post as many as you like.

Some of the directories are better than others depending on your business opportunity. You will need to spend some time and research that information. The best site and most accepted is ezinearticles.com. They go out of their way to make sure that your articles are formated right and have good content. If they accept your article you will have a better chance of ranking higher on the search engines.

#3. Social Marketing. Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and others are ways to create free MLM leads. I would recommend that you sign up for all of these but you focus on one. You will have a hard time at first keeping up with all that is required in all three of these sites to generate free leads. The idea with these social sites is to network with other like minded people and in doing so develop a relationship that can turn into a lead. Any of these sites can become addicting and therefore you will need to take caution not to spend too much time interacting and not enough time on your business goals. 30 minutes to an hour a day should be plenty of time to develop those relationships.

There are other ways to create free leads and ways to optimize your efforts. These three are a good start and will help you in your efforts to obtain free MLM leads.