Social network marketing: Taking your blog to next level

Image by glenn.batuyong via FlickrOne of the reasons most successful bloggers are successful is because they market their blog through social networking.The reverse is also true, most bloggers fail because they don't market their blog socially.Social network marketing ,also called as social media marketing, is one of the arsenals that web 2.0 has given us to promote our blog.But most of you are not able to take full advantage of it because you simply don't have an idea how to use it.

I am writing a series of post where you can learn about social network marketing and thus, you will be able to promote your blog socially. This is the first post of the series and in this post I will just outline the things that you would discover in the rest of the posts of this series.But before I would do this, it would be nice thing to define social network marketing.

What is Social network marketing?

"Social network marketing is a process of building relationships with target audience, to market principles and ideas for the purpose of societal benefit by winning trust."

If you take a close look onto the definition ,you will find three key factors of social network marketing-

1. Building relationships with target audience.
2. Marketing for purpose of societal benefit.
3. Winning trust.

These three points are key to social marketing and through out this series I will expand upon these three key factors only.

Now the next question that would be hovering in your mind is- What should I do to market my blog through social networks or social media sites? Well, social media sites are complex to deal with as you have to deal with a variety of people having different behaviours and opinions.But this can be made easy if you can follow a couple of steps.These couple of steps are part of social media optimisation.

Social media Optimisation-

Social media optimisation is simply the things you do to market your blog or products socially.You have to follow just a couple of steps (with a few sub-steps) to successfully market your blog socially. These steps are-

1. Choose most popular social network that suits your blog's need.
2. Apply some social media marketing tactics.

Choosing the most popular social network-

One of the mistakes most of you do while using social media sites is, you don't research to find out which network site is suited for your need. I have seen many bloggers using all the social networking sites that come their way.So, they will stumble, digg , and reddit and will twitter also without researching what they really need to use.

Choosing the most suited social sites is not hard either. Just you have to answer some questions-

• What do you want your blog to do? Whether you want to make money through adsense or through affiliate or you just want to get noticed or is it just a fun for you.
• What niche do you cover in your blog? Whether you write about computers or making money or news orany other thing in this world.
  
• What do you want the social sites to do for your blog? Whether you want to build links or get subscribers or generate some traffic through social sites.

The answer to these three questions are vital to select suitable social sites for you and your blog.I have separate posts on these questions where I shown you how answers to these questions affect the choice of social networking sites.

Applying social media marketing tactics

Once you are done choosing a social site for you, the next step is applying some tactics to make your social network marketing campaign more effective. I have categorised these tactics into three steps-

1. Creating the hook- This is basically a tactics to tell others , how you are different from your competitors.
2. Communicating like a skilled person-The way you should communicate online to make an impression and win trusts of others.
3. Redirecting the users to your blog- It is quite easy to redirect users to your blog once you have won the trust. But you need to be careful while doing this as you may loose the trust by doing it wrong way.

I will discuss these three points in separate posts.

This post was just an outline about what you will learn about social network marketing in this series of posts. Social network marketing is crucial for success as a blogger.Without networking it is impossible to be successful so, you must learn the art of networking on popular media ssites.

I hope you would enjoy this series and be benefited from it.If you fear loosing a part or whole of the series , you may subscribe via email to get the posts delivered in your inbox.