There are multiple ways to get traffic to your website for very little cost that can make you money online.

If you just got a small proportion of those visitors to convert to leads or sales, that has cost you nothing but your time.

There are two hard facts of any internet business that you cannot escape.

To make money online, you need to generate traffic to your website and second, you need to convert that traffic into buyers.

You might try to do this directly by sending them to a sales page or you may do it indirectly by sending them to an opt-in page to capture their details or to your information site or blog.

First, you should focus on identifying your killer keywords – the ones that attract the right kind of people into you business.

With a good match between what people are searching for and what you are offering, the actual traffic you generate will be more highly targeted and predisposed to your offer and so more likely to convert into buyers.

If no one goes to your site, it hardly bares a chance of generating an income.

BUT, it doesn’t take thousands to generate website traffic to your site.

While there are ways to jumpstart your traffic flows, the holy grail is knowing how to generate low cost website traffic without having to run up a huge daily advertising bill.

Here I present to you my top 7 strategies to generate low cost website traffic that could help make money online for you.

1. Link exchanges

This is a well known and proven strategy. It’s rare these days to see a website without a link to another site.

Many business owners are willing to exchange links with one another so that they could produce more visibility for their sites.

The more you create back links to your website from other pages, the more the traffic you’ll see coming as you’ll start to rank higher.

If you’re exchanging links with other sites, it’s important that the link is relevant. This usually means it is in the same niche or a relate niche as your own site.

This strategy pleases humans as much as it keeps the search engines happy.

Exchanging links with authority sites or sites with high page ranks will also increase your traffic even more significantly, as it will boost your rankings in search engine listings.

This is known as SEO or Search Engine Optimisation.

2. Article Marketing

There are many electronic magazines (called ezines) and online newsletters around on the internet which provide free space for you to submit articles.

If you want to keep your costs low, you can write the articles yourself. But you can save time, by using the many freelance writers who are willing to create articles on your best converting keywords or keyword phrases. The fees are much smaller than you might think.

Write articles that complement your website, product, business or other offer. Write on topics that you have expertise on so you develop your knowledge researching around the subject and can come across as an authority.

Write articles that produce tips and guidance on the subject or your niche. Looking at existing content on your chosen niche will help you find gaps so less competition and your article will rank more highly for those keywords.

At the end of the article submission process, you can insert a “resource box”. It’s here that can say something about yourself or your business and provide your visitors with a link to your site if they want to find out more.

If they do go there, they are already impressed and predisposed to your offer, wouldn’t you say?

Once you have your article accepted in your primary article directory, you can also send variations to other article directories.

There is a lot of free article submission software available to automate the process and if you are doing a lot of article marketing, a great paid service I personally use is SubmitYourArticles.

3. Video marketing

Video marketing can send literally thousands Of visitors to your primary business. It really is the social medium of the moment. Just look at the popularity of YouTube! 5-10 minutes is all you need to get your point across.

You can either use a camcorder to video your own talking head or create a footage around your product or offer and add the audio later.

If you’re not yet confident on camera, you can also create a series of photos and powerpoint slides and record an audio commentary around that.

Don’t forget to add your website URL as a running title along the top.

Once you have a few videos made, you then need to drive traffic to them. The best way is to submit them to video sites. The most popular are youtube.com, metacafe.com and dailymotion.com.

To really maximise exposure and get the most traffic back to you website, you can use video submission tools. There’s a free video submission service, TubeMogul. An even better tool is a paid service I use is Traffic Geyser.

Once you’re registered on the main video sites, this submitter tool will automatically submit your video to a whole host of video sites for you, resulting in tonnes of free traffic to your website.

4. Forum marketing

This is completely free – it only requires an input of your time. Do some initial sculking around to identify the kinds of problems people have in this niche.

Once you feel you understand the community, you can start to feedback a comment, start a post, here and there, using your knowledge and expertise.

You can get free advertising when you go to forums that have the same subject or niche with your site.

With every post, you can add a link to your site. But remember first to give value, not just blatantly advertise your site.

As you build your reputation, you also build the reputation of your site that could be frequented and trusted by many people.

5. Twitter marketing

Twitter and blogging go hand in hand. They help you build your authority and social networks within your niche.

Twitter has totally transformed the way that people communicate online and since it’s free, it really should be an indispensable part of your overall marketing strategy and link to your blog.

Twitter is free to join and you can get set up with an account in a matter of just a few minutes.

Twitter has proven itself to be incredibly addictive and, for business owners, very valuable too.

Technology such as Twitter has the potential to give us more than just an opportunity to tell others what happened in our day. We can use it to reach more people in a meaningful way.

Imagine if you had cost-efficient and fast marketing tools that met existing customers where they are and that also helped you acquire new customers.

Imagine if you had the power to build a network of like-minded peers, a community of shared ideas and creativity.

6. Blog marketing

You blog should therefore be one of the main hubs for your business. It’s all about YOU Inc.

As your name gets passed around, you can widen your public awareness and build an opt-in list and RSS subscribe feed for people who regularly visit your site.

People buy from people they know, like and trust. A blog is like dating – you wouldn’t propose on the first date so why shove your sales pitch down a new visitors throat.

You can point your articles, videos, forum posts and social media activities all through your blog.

This may sound like hard work because of all the articles you may need to use to build a blog but on the contrary, this is not so. There are many many sources of ideas and inspiration for your blog, which come from your day to day activities and your own personal development.

7. Facebook marketing

Social networking has always been a main part of many internet marketers strategy. But most don’t use it effectively at all. They flood the likes of Facebook and Myspace with offers and promotions. This won’t work.

If you want to use social tools like Facebook to generate traffic to your website, you first have to identify the right groups and then invest something of yourself.

You need to be prepared to make a personal connection with other folks in the community. This kind of media thrives on authentic networking.

Posting up useful content on social networks will get you some awesome rankings on Google. The search engines seem to put a premium on sites like Facebook, Myspace, YouTube, Squidoo and Hubpages.

In all these free or low cost traffic generation methods, it’s all about giving value to your niche community.

Leads generated in this way will be far more valuable as leads back to you – interested, highly targeted, committed and profitable.

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Jay Allyson Get Rich Lifestyle Pro Marketing Consultant http://www.JayAllyson.com

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Seven Inexpensive Ways to Generate Traffic to Make Money Online

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Seven Inexpensive Ways to Generate Traffic to Make Money Online

There are a number of important factors that go into the production of a first-class blog. Quality of content, the layout of the page, how best to integrate video, formal versus informal tone, each of these is a decision that must be made during the creation of the project. That all comes before more esoteric concerns, which include the integration of meta tags, link building, traffic generation, and keyword/SEO implementation.

Yet underlying these important issues is one that many people wrestle with: How often should the thing be updated? Innocuous as it sounds, post frequency is actually vital to the success of any content project, and especially to blogs. Equally, it is a surprisingly complex decision that can involve numerous factors. Time, place, and availability of content all have parts to play in determining just how often you need to update your blog.

Finding the Right Frequency

Blogging is an extension of the principles of marketing. You want to get your content the exposure you feel it deserves, so you market it as best you can to cultivate an audience. This involves doing the legwork and research necessary to act on good information, and testing your ideas while allowing room for adjustment as you work and grow. Chances are you will not hit the right rate of posting immediately, and that is all right as long as you’re prepared to adjust when it’s required.

No single article can cover every eventuality of course, but we can break down a few core principles to get you thinking in the right direction. The key is to consider these ideas and extrapolate from them, using the other lessons you’ve learned, to build a solid, whole-picture approach.

1 – Make content king.

More than almost any other community, web users are keenly attuned to fluff pieces that don’t really say much. This isn’t true for 100% of the community of course, but those who can pick out an airy, pointless piece will almost invariably be sure to point it out, leading to some word of mouth you probably didn’t want. Don’t pick an update schedule that can’t live up to the content you have available. Stick to a schedule that you know you can provide a quality post for, every single time you sign on.

This has a twofold effect. One, it keeps the ‘pressure to post’ at a minimum. Content drives the posting, and you aren’t struggling every third day to come up with more information, or worse to rehash the information you’ve already posted. Secondly, it shows you have respect for the community, and keeps them interested and coming back.

2 – Set the time and day.

Even though the web never sleeps, a great part of the world still functions on a Monday to Friday, 9-5 schedule of sorts. Taking these rhythms into account can help you build the ideal web traffic for your project. For example, a blog focusing on home and family concerns and selling books related to it might not find as much of an audience during traditional business hours as during the time when people are at-home with their families. Granted this is only a rule of thumb, as many people surf the web for their favorite blogs during lunch breaks.

Another part of this element is the Monday-Wednesday-Friday cycle. Many business blogs and publications settle on a three-a-week update schedule, and the MWF routine works out very well for this. They’re all business days, and the schedule covers the start, middle, and end stretches of a workweek.

Of course since this ends up being something of the default, it means that Tuesdays and Thursdays end up with comparatively little content for people to peruse. Sundays suffer a lack of content as well, for the obvious related reasons. If you find yourself preferring less frequent, longer posts, consider a T-Th routine to take advantage of the ‘gap’ between other updates.

3 – Have a conversation.

One of the most interesting contributions to modern marketing is the blog comments section. Every blogging software out there has some feature for allowing or disallowing comments. As we’ve discussed before, consumer input can have an incredible effect on any brand, and blogs are no exception.

Taking advantage of this resource requires a certain amount of patience. Conversations develop in the comments section as people discuss, dispute, and debate the merits of what you’ve posted. In short, you need to not just let this happen, but cultivate the effect. Allow reasonable discussions to grow, and comment yourself on the more relevant points. Let the consumer know their input is being seen, and that you care enough to respond to it. Posting new blog posts too frequently overruns this tendency, and could rob you of vital feedback.

4 – Be nimble.

As we’ve mentioned, you are not likely to get it right just out of the gate. You may bite off too much to chew, or update too infrequently for people to care. Evaluate the data, ask your consumers questions, and be prepared to change as needed. Flexibility is the ultimate survival tool on the web, and your blog will benefit if you approach the affair with an open mind and a willingness to try several approaches. Pick an update schedule, observe it, and then experiment with others until you have the one that best fits your needs.

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Enzo F. Cesario is an online brand specialist and co-founder of Brandsplat, a digital content agency. Brandsplat creates blogs, articles, videos and social media in the “voice” of our client’s brand. It makes sites more findable and brands more recognizable. For the free Brandcasting Report go to http://www.BrandSplat.com/ or visit our blog at http://www.iBrandCasting.com/

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Hitting Your Stride: Four Keys to Timing Your Blog

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Hitting Your Stride: Four Keys to Timing Your Blog

Two weeks ago, I noticed that termites were eating the wood around my front door. I was concerned, but not alarmed, since my house is bricked all around the exterior.

I called an exterminator who came out and eased my mind even more. He explained that while I did have a termite infestation they were the subterranean termites rather than the feared Formosan Termites.

If you Google the term “Formosan Termites,” you’ll come across pictures of a creature so veracious that houses infested by them often fell in half. House that are really infested by them often cannot be saved.

So, I felt lucky to have a less serious termite, and simply arranged for the exterminator to send a technician out to treat my house.

When the very polite exterminator came, he explained that he was going to drill holes near the sides of the house, every eight inches wherever there was a concrete slab (such as front porch, back patio, and driveway). He pumped poison into those holes and filled them back in, forming a barrier.

Next he dug a trench, all the way around the house, right against the foundation. He pumped poison into this trench, and filled it in.

Then he asked me to sign a paper, saying that he was finished and that soon my termite problem would be GONE.

He went on to explain that the termites would actually kill each other by being too social. Termites groom each other, and so what happens is that a few termites get the poison on them, and they take it into the colony. Then by grooming each other, they spread it throughout the colony, whereby they eventually wipe out the entire colony.

This is a case where being social is deadly.

I spend time in another world where being social can be deadly, and where you have to watch out for creatures carrying poison. That world is the world of online social networking. Fortunately, if you follow just a few rules, you avoid the poison, most often spread in the form of negativity.

Here are the very simple rules that I follow when interacting on social networking sites and why.

1) Avoid negative people. I control my thoughts and feelings. I don’t let people filled with negativity “rub off” on me. When someone that I encounter on a social networking site comes across as overly negative, I simply remove myself from their world. I stop following them.

2) Don’t talk religion. My religious beliefs were passed to me by my parents, grandparents, and other elders, while I was still a child. As I grew older, I examined what they taught me, and developed my own belief system, still based largely upon what they taught me. That’s how most of us arrive at our current religious beliefs, or lack thereof.

During my 50 trips around the sun, I’ve noticed that no matter what you say to many people you will never change their religious beliefs to the same as yours… and I personally don’t believe that you should try to. I’ve also noticed something VERY strange about many of us… we naturally assume that other people that we interact with believe the same as we do.

People KILL each other over differences in religion, and it’s a topic that I simply choose not to engage in on the social networking sites.

3) Don’t talk politics. In American society, and in many other societies, it’s actually our civic duty to participate in electing our leaders, and making sure that they serve the will of the people.

The problems with discussing politics are the same as with religion… people assume that you believe the same as they do. Just as in religion, they are so convince that they are right, and they assume that you are a rational, intelligent creature… therefore how could you NOT see the world the same as they do.

As I watched the conversation on Twitter during the most recent presidential elections, one thing was really reinforced. It’s very difficult to change a person’s point of view. People watched the presidential debates, and their comments on Twitter were basically that their candidate had won…regardless of which candidate they supported.

4) Connect with those interested in the same topics as you are. When you follow, and are followed by those interested in, or even passionate about, the same topics that you are interested in, you’ll naturally discuss things interesting to both parties. This makes for a satisfying interaction.

You’ll naturally share fact and resources of interest to both you and your followers.

Speaking of sharing resources, be yourself and you’ll say the right thing most of the time. When the authentic YOU shines through, networking on the social networking sites is effortless. I often have people who are new to social networking ask me what they should say. My answer is be authentic!

Back to sharing resources, I see no problem with sharing links to useful resources that you feel will be of interest to your followers. That’s where connecting with others with like interests becomes important though.

I also don’t see anything wrong with sharing affiliate links. When you are recommending something that you really believe in, what’s the problem? The “purist” who DO have a problem with your periodically having links in your posts will simply exit your world – they’ll unfollow you. That’s not a bad thing, since you don’t really resonate with them.

You DO need to study the culture of the social networking platforms that you are on. Some are more open to certain types of interactions.

As an example, if your primary purpose in being on the social networking sites is to promote your business (if you are a Type-A personality… all business) then you want to seek out sites where a lot of people like you hang out. Those sites do exist. An excellent example, is the site Sokule, pronounced “So Cool.” Sokule was set up by marketers, for marketers. You are actually encouraged to advertise on the site.

Sokule has several levels of memberships, starting at free, but with upgrades that give you more built-in applications at each level. I am a member at the top level (a “Founder”) and the tools that I have even allow me to direct message ALL of my followers every three days. That in effect even means that I can consider my Sokule followers, those who choose to connect with me, as being a quasi-list.

You can check out Sokule at http://budurl.com/fjnk

Go ahead and grab a free Sokule account if you market anything online. It’s the perfect platform for marketing your business. As you dig into Sokule, you’ll discover that within three weeks of my starting to actively promote Sokule, I was in the top THREE all-time referrers, and the NUMBER-1 referrer of upgraded members. So, I’m telling you about a platform that I know like the back of my hand and generate a LOT of business from.

I also know Twitter well. As I rapidly approach 30,000 followers, I am getting the hang of being a good citizen on “Planet Twitter.” That’s why I felt compelled to share this article with you.

I saw a lot of Twitter users who, like the termites, are unknowingly taking poison back deep within the colony, and spreading it onto the community members that they interact with. Don’t you be one of those people poisoning the community. Awareness, is the key to not being a spreader of Twitter toxins.

I’ll close with one final reason that you don’t want to come across so toxic on ANY social networking platforms, with Twitter being the one garnering all of the buzz right now… when many companies are considering hiring an individual, a routine part of their pre-employment investigation is to see if you are on the social networking sites, and if so, what you are like there.

Companies, potential business partner, etc., understand the importance of NOT bringing those with toxic personalities into their folds. Now hopefully you do too. Now, hopefully you also understand why you absolutely must not be a “Toxic Twitter Termite.”

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Willie Crawford is a 13 year veteran of internet marketing who was voted one of “The 50 Most Powerful and Influential Men In Social Media” in 2008. You’ll find Willie on most of the major social media sites using the username WillieCrawford. Willie also shares his thoughts, experiences and internet marketing advice at http://WillieCrawford.com/blog2/

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Don’t Be A Toxic Twitter Termite

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by Jennifer Laycock

As a small business social media strategist, I’m very happy to see so many companies finally beginning to recognize the need to invest some of the marketing dollars into social media. I’m ever more happy to see how many of them are willing and able to dedicate some internal staff to the matter. On the other hand, I’m finding that many of these companies have absolutely no idea WHY they need a social media strategy. They just feel the pressure to get involved and hope something will come from it.

Unfortunately, that’s no way to build a strategy. What good does it do to invest time and money into a blog, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or any other number of social media outlets if you have no goals, no measurement and quite frankly, no idea why you’re there.

What companies need to do is embrace the benefits of social media while very carefully thinking through the goals of their outreach efforts. Different goals will require different strategies. Taking a shotgun approach of simply trying to “get out there” will rarely result in a solid payoff. It’s far better to sit down and carefully consider what your company’s goals are and to build backward to create a strategy that’s most likely to meet those goals.

2009 is coming to a close and most companies are already deep in planning with their 2010 marketing budgets. With that in mind, here are four key reasons why your company needs to consider planning and launching a social media campaign next year.

Reason #1: Social Media Gives You Unprecedented Ability to Listen to Your Customers

For companies that don’t already have some type of social media strategy in place, this is usually the best place to start. While it takes a little bit of common sense and guidance to create an active and vocal outreach plan that will deliver results, pretty much anyone is capable of listening to the existing conversation.

The goal here is threefold.

1. Find out where your customers are: The first thing you’ll need to do is find out where your customers and potential customers are spending their time. You can run a search for groups or fan pages on Facebook, search for keywords related to your business on Twitter Search, set up Technorati and Google Alerts or using a free service like Social Mention. You can (and should) also check your log files to see what types of social sites (blogs, forums, Twitter, etc…) are sending traffic to your site.
2. Find out what your customers think of you and your competitors: Once you’ve figured out where to look (or as part of that process) it’s a great idea to run searches for your company (and products) and for your competitors and their products. This lets you know what your customers like and don’t like which gives you an excellent starting point for making changes, playing to your strengths and otherwise building offerings that will appeal to your audience.
3. Find out what your customers’ passion points are: This becomes one of the keys of a social media listening strategy and it’s one that’s often overlooked. Social media listening isn’t just about hearing people praise or complain you, it’s about identifying subsets of potential customers and learning about the things that drive them to conversation. Finding out what makes them tick and finding the hot button topics that get them focused.

Basically, companies need to view social media as a sort of endless focus group they can tap at any point in time. For companies that invest in listening and really sit down to consider how this information impacts them, there’s amazingly valuable information available. Using this information to impact all forms of marketing can make this specific strategy perfect for companies who don’t have time to invest in a social media voice, but who want to reap some of the benefits.

Reason #2: Social Media Gives You the Chance to Build or Introduce a Brand

Sometimes, the entire goal of a social media strategy is to create awareness about a new product, a service or a brand. Consumers are heading online in droves to have conversations and thanks to the explosion of interest in microblogging, social networks and blogs, they’re talking about more topics and reaching more people than ever before.

Getting a customer to talk about your product used to mean they mentioned it to a handful of friends or co-workers. These days getting them to talk about it might mean they share it with hundreds of friends on Facebook, thousands of contacts on Twitter or even tens or hundreds of thousands of readers on a blog. That’s a massive amount of potential exposure.

Let’s take a look at three different ways of approaching this one:

1. Use social media to introduce a brand new company to the world: This is one of the most popular ways of using social media. New companies are springing up all the time, often in very competitive markets. Finding (or paying for) brand evangelists to go out, build relationships and educate communities about these companies can be very effective. The key here is to come at things from the relationship and educational side of things. Plugging or pushing products on social media rarely works, gently creating opportunities for exposure by becoming part of the community can get the job done very effectively.
2. Use social media to introduce an existing brand to a larger audience: For companies that simply haven’t gotten into the social media space yet, there’s tons of opportunity to grow beyond their current reach. These are the types of companies that benefit most from looking at their analytics and talking to existing customers to find out what communities they’re part of online. From there, it’s a matter of branching out into new and similar communities (i.e. if you get great traffic from parenting forums, seek out new parenting forums) or finding creative ways to equip your current customers with the desire to evangelize you to their friends.
3. Use social media to introduce a new product or service from an existing company: This tactic is very similar to introducing an existing brand to a larger audience. These companies generally have the head start of an existing base of loyal customers from which to build. This means they can approach existing customers who have active voices in social media and offer them the chance to test and experience the new products or services.

Reason #3: Social Media Gives You a Unique Way to Gather Feedback

Another excellent reason to turn to social media is the ability to gather feedback from your target audience. While this may sound similar to the concept of listening to the conversation, there’s a strong difference in the two goals. Listening is focused purely on listening to the existing conversation without trying to influence it’s direction. Using social media as a feedback channel is all about actively soliciting input, ideas and even complaints about your products or services.

The thing to remember with this type of social media strategy is that it takes some serious investment. You can’t just show up on a popular social media channel and ask people to tell you what they think. You have make a heavy investment into building relationships first.

There are several different ways to do this:

1. Use your blog to run ideas past loyal readers before you launch them: The great thing about building up a reputation as a company who listens is it gives people reason to talk. Southwest is one of the best examples online of a company who has established a strong feedback channel with their loyal customers via a blog. If you regularly take ideas to your readers and demonstrate that you not only listen to, but act on their advice, you can open amazing doors of opportunity. Listen to your customers. Talk to your customers. Use social media to find out what they want and then deliver it. You won’t be sorry.
2. Use social media to recruit a team of beta testers: Sometimes you have ideas or products you need feedback on, but are not yet ready for public consumption. While social media seems to be the very essence of “public consumption,” it can still be a very valuable outlet for beta testing. Why? Because you can use social media to establish the types of relationships needed to put together a small group of beta testers. You can reach out into the community to find influencers, build relationships with them, and offer them exclusive and early access in exchange for their feedback and ideas.
3. Use social media to ask direct questions: Sometimes using social media is as simple as asking a direct question to a larger audience. Twitter, Facebook, Blogs and even YouTube can be immensely valuable in terms of getting your question out to a group of people you already know share an interest in your topic or your product. The ability to ask your customer base what they want so you can find a way to deliver it is one carries a lot of value.

Reason #4: Social Media Gives You the Chance to Demonstrate Personality

One of the single greatest advantages the Internet and social media has given small business owners is the ability to once again go head to head with their big box counterparts. A decade ago, this was because web sites gave no indication of business size. The small mom and pop shop could have a site that looked just as good, was priced just as good and carried just as much inventory as a company like Sears or Walmart. These days, smart small businesses are using social media not only as an equalizer, but as a competitive advantage.

You don’t have to look far to find a story of a consumer who feels unappreciated or ignored by a larger brand who has made them unhappy. No one likes to sit on hold for 2 hours trying to lodge a complaint or have a product replaced. Smaller brands who sell the same product at the same price but actually answer the telephone have the chance to differentiate themselves and bring in loads of new customers. Beyond that, small companies who establish a voice via their blog or social media outlets have the chance to build credibility by building relationships directly with consumers.

Here are a handful of ways to use social media to do just that:

1. Demonstrate your unique personality by communicating as a person and not as the company: Companies are faceless, people are not. Using social media to tie your business brand to a personality can go a long way toward making even the largest company feel small and approachable. Whether it’s answering questions on Twitter or sharing anecdotes or stories on your blog, letting some of your personality shine through goes a long way toward helping consumers feel connected to your brand.
2. Use various social media outlets to make yourself both available and helpful: This may be the single biggest way companies are using social media to establish personality right now. Whether it’s the president of Zappos making lunch plans with a complete stranger while he’s in town on business or someone from Comcast responding to customer frustration with a solution…big brands are using social media to communicate openly and helpfully with consumers and it’s paying off.
3. Use social media to communicate in the way that’s most natural to you: Back in the early days of social media it was all about blogs. The problem with this is not everyone is a good writer. These days, a lack of natural writing ability won’t keep your personality from shining through. Whether it’s shooting video, recording a podcast or simply sharing unique finds and quick insight on Twitter, social media has opened up a ton of ways (other than writing) for people to communicate. This lets everyone play to their strengths and gives you a chance to be “you” in the best and most comfortable way you know how.

To be honest, there are dozens…maybe even hundreds of reasons to get involved with social media next year. These are just some of the strongest. What it all boils down to is this; your customers are online and they are using social media to communicate. If you aren’t, you’re business is missing opportunities. No one says you have to master every use of social media all at once, but you’re doing yourself (and your bottom line) a disservice if you don’t at least give some thought toward creeping into the social media space next year to do a little listening.

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Four (ok twelve) Reasons to Build a Social Media Strategy for 2010

Every SEO uses different tools and resources. Some tools are paid, some are free and some are internally developed tools that we use for ourselves and our clients – but we all use them. Very often I get asked what tools people should use if they’re looking to optimize their own sites and what resources they should use to keep up with the latest going’s on. While telling people how to optimize their own sites and what the tools we use isn’t generally the best of business practices – I just can’t help myself. If your budget doesn’t allow for the hiring of a professional SEO company – trying it yourself may be the only option. I also try to remember that once-upon-a-time I was optimizing my own sites and was new to SEO and without the open advice of others already involved in the community – I wouldn’t be running a successful SEO company today. To this end, it only seems right to provide a list of some of the main tools we use on virtually every site.

When I initially started writing this article I was going to cram a slew of various tools and resources into one article, but the article was going to end up running WAY too long to hold your attention (or mine) so I’ve cut it into three EZ parts (as opposed to three EZ payments which you’ll be familiar with if you too watch late night TV with a laptop in front of you writing things like SEO articles). But let’s get to the meat of this article shall we? The series will be divided into three parts: