How’s Your List-Building Going?: Maximizing Your Social Networking with Article Marketing

When it comes to marketing hot topics, social networking has definitely been stealing the show lately and hogging the press.

While I am indeed a fan of the big three (LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter), I’m a little concerned that some folks may be making the mistake of kicking valuable veterans like article marketing to the curb in favor of the current golden child.

The smart marketing money is on a strategy that combines the tried and true with the new, rather than favoring one over another.  Making connections through social networking is a good thing, but having a plan for turning those connections into relationships is critical.  You can do this by incorporating list-building tactics into your social networking strategy and thereby maximizing its impact. 

Here’s a sample plan that you’re welcome to take and make your own.  In fact, I hope you do. It all starts with an article.

1. Pick a topic that you know a lot about and that your audience wants to know more about.
2. Choose the top three things that they need to know about that topic and call your article “The Top 3 Things You Need to Know about ______”
3. Write a 300- to 500-word article about it.  (That’s not as bad as it sounds.  The end of this sentence brings this article up to 224 words.) To make it really easy on yourself, use numbered bullet points, just like I’m doing here.
4. Add a resource box at the end that goes something like this: WANT TO USE THIS ARTICLE IN YOUR E-ZINE, BLOG OR WEBSITE? Please do, as long as you include this complete blurb with it: An E-marketing Strategist, Lisa Almeida, shows business owners how to leverage technology with ease to achieve big business results with small business budgets.  If you are in the market for simple and effective client attraction strategies which are designed to generate repeat sales, then visit www.PlanitwithLisa.com today.
5. Sign up for a free account with a good article directory like EzineArticles.com and submit your article. 

Once your article is published, there are lots of things you can do with it. 

• You can offer it as a helpful resource by tweeting about it and including a link directly to the article in your tweet.
• Since your Twitter audience is probably a different group of people than your Facebook people, you can post it there too (did you know that you can link your Twitter and Facebook accounts so this will happen automatically?)
• And your LinkedIn folks are probably another group altogether, which means you can repeat the process there as well. 

The result of all this link posting is a whole lot more traffic going to your article.  Some of those readers will surely click through to your website and sign up for your mailing list.  And voila! You have crossed over the bridge that leads from the land of connection into the land of relationship-building!

If you’ve gotten this far and you’re thinking, “this sound GREAT, but what do I do about article number two?”  you can use this link and listen to a recording of a teleclass I did last week with freelance writer, Nora Hall.  And if you still have questions, use the comment box below or email directly.