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The web(in context of social media optimization) can be divided into the following parts:
1. Social networks
Myspace, orkut, hi5, linkedin etc.
2. Social Bookmarking sites
d*gg, stumbleupon etc.
3. Content sharing sites
Slideshare, esnip, scribd, youtube etc.
4. Forums and community sites

sitepoint, webmasterworld, small business forum etc.

5. Blogosphere

influencing opinion by blogging yourself and promoting popular blogs like instapundit, boeing boeing, engadget, gigaom, specific and/or industry user blogs hosted on worpress blogs, typepad, blogger etc. and/or blogging communites like seomoz

6. Virals

7. Promoting feeds of your content using RSS, articles sites ezine,

8. PR sites/News Press releases on PR sites like prweb, spreadings news on news submission sites like topix.net

The list is by no means exhaustive. Each of these parts can be influenced to some degree in your favor.

The terms social media optimization is just another wannabe term to be honest its like search engine optimization which makes no sense as no one is optimizing a search engine here.

The cycle goes like this analyze:strategise:create: execute: track: iterate

A term like “social media promotion” is more adept for this than a confusing term like social media optimization in my opinion as with Google opening up open social platform will in effect make the whole web/mobile platform more social.

Web promotion is a important part of any companies marketing strategy. But most companies and individuals are get lost in the available sources online.

Here is are 10 most important steps for any company thinking of using internet to fill their lead pipelines.

1. Search engine optimization

In the information its best to attract your customers by information. Search engine optimization is a way by which you release quality content for your target audience and then nake sure the content is found on the major search engines.

This is why bigger companies like IBM, SUN, Microsoft let users create blogs on their website and write content.

2. pay per click advertising

Pay per click advertising means placing ads in search engines at the instant a user is searching for information, while being placed in the natural results would be the best option it is not possible to rank high for thousands of keywords. the next best thing is to pay search engine a per click price which decided by auction.

Be extremely careful with pay per click as it can rob of your marketing budget very quickly, the effectiveness of the campaign depends on campaign design.

This post is not complete, please visit back for further post.

3.  Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is increase leads and business by letting other people(called affiliates) and pay them a commission on sale or leads generated.

No successful business online can grow without an affiliate system in place, affiliate system lets you increase your sales power many times without actually hiring a sales team.

4. Email marketing

Email marketing as the name suggests means using emails to market your products or services. This can be the best form of marketing and lead generation or the best waste of marketing time you ever did if you do not do it rightly.

Email marketing can be further categorised as mass mailing, permission marketing to your list, permission marketing to someone elses list, email marketing to custom targetted lists developed by you or marketing to a email marketing database.

keep in mind everyone hates spam as much as y ou do. When you send a mail make sure its sent to a specfic audience who really would be interested in your product or service. Its waste of time and more importantly it hurts your brand.

This article is a stub and will be continued further…. 

Pay per click, pay per view, pay per action, pay per lead, pay per sign up, pay per call, pay per sale.

Our online advertising industry is facinated with pay per something models. We just did a quick study on why the popular models suck literally

Pay Per Click

Setting up a account is tough for a a person who is not net savvy
Expensive
Confusing
Time consuming
Click fraud can never be 100% beaten
One visit is not good enough for any

Pay Per sale

Too risky for a publisher and less returns

Pay per action

People would take action if the service provider is offering something good. If he is not and the user does not take any action the publisher is wasting time and valuable resource and most importantly opportunity to earn money

For any model to work

It should give high return to publisher for every qualified lead it can generate
It should ask for the right price in context of a service or product
It should send the target to the best advertiser so that a positive action is taken by visitor
It should be simple, straigh forward and easy enough for a kid to understand, which ppc is not

Whats the solution?

We propose sequential interaction model.

We believe the natural cycle of a visitor is.
Search
Find
See
Understand
Enquire
Interact
Engage

We believe charging unreasonable sum at any of these 7 levels will disappoint advertisers and visitors both.

Publishers should use tracking methods to gauge the particpation of a visitors through each level and charge a advertiser.
Publishers should also award better performing advertisers and penalise and caution the less performing advertisers.

As a user moves up the ladder the advertiser pays more. this way the pay per click price would drop so low that advertiser wouldnt mind paying for some additional fraud clicks and the better advertisers will convert.

We understand like any model this model will need lots of tweaks to work but time has come when many models are merged together to form a hybrid advertising and lead generation model