You’re invited to attend Social Media Essentials for Business - a free teleseminar on Wednesday, May 20, 2009. 

Executive Coach and best selling author, Marsha Egan, will interview me on why, as a business owner or manager, it’s essential that you add social media to your marketing mix. We’ll discuss the major social media platforms and give examples of how you can use these to build your brand, establish your authority, create relationships and turn those relationships into partnerships, prospects, customers and profits.

View the following video for a message from me as to what you’ll learn when you tune in on May 20th! (By the way, even if you can’t attend, go ahead and register for Social Media Essentials for Business and you’ll receive the free MP3 recording of the session to listen to at your convenience…

Michael Stelzner surveyed 880 marketers to create his Social Media Marketing Industry Report. He started out asking what is the most important question you want answered about Social Media Marketing.

The #1 Question social media marketers asked was, “What are the best tactics to use?” Find out the rest of the Top 10 Questions Social Media Marketers want answers to along with insight as to …

• How much time marketers are investing in social media
• Social media’s benefits
• The correlation between time invested and results 
• Top tools for social media and much more.

Michael’s making this invaluable report on social media marketing available for free (<– click the link!). It’s full of great ideas for adding social media to your own marketing mix as and provides social media marketers (like myself) plenty of inspiration for what products and services we can offer our clients.

One of the best ways to build traffic to your web site continues to be with a consistently published, compelling blog. I was forced to lay off blogging for over a month due to circumstances I couldn’t control. The upshot, my site’s traffic tanked. After a couple of weeks back in the blogging saddle my traffic, over the previous, non-blogging period, increased by almost 1600%. Yeah, I know what your thinking, “he went from 1 to 4 readers, big deal.” Ha ha.

Blogging Builds Website Traffic – The Proof is in the Google Analytics Pudding

Okay, enough about me, the following chart illustrates the effect blogging is having in building website traffic for a client who I recently worked with to setup a WordPress blog. She’s still working to find the right editorial mix and she’s not blogging enough but the proof is irrefutable that when she blogs, her traffic soars. You’ll notice that her traffic numbers aren’t huge but then again her site sat virtually stagnant for a number of years with little or no search engine optimization.

Is a 510% Increase in Website Traffic Significant? Doh!

The chart above compares the current month with the previous month just to more graphically illustrate the spike that posting to her blog had on daily traffic versus a ‘regular’, non-posting day. In general she saw a 380% increase in site visits on the days she blogged and a 359% increase in page views. When you subtract her blog posting days from the equation, the numbers are even more dramatic with her site traffic showing an increase in visits of 560% and 510% in page views!

Adding Social Media to the Mix

Our next step is to increase her overall social media marketing effectiveness by integrating her social networking presence on sites like LinkedIn and Twitter with the content she produces on these sites. By bringing her Twitter feed into her blog, for example, and feeding her blog content through her LinkedIn profile her traffic will increase that much more.

The Ripple Effect of Social Media

The beauty of an integrated social media marketing approach is that you can create these outgoing content ripples that expand well beyond your content’s original entry point.

The truth is that this site doesn’t have a lot of traffic … yet. But, it has about 3 times the amount it did before the site’s owner began blogging. As we integrate the website’s content with that generated throughout her social network and increase the frequency of publication, her traffic will increase at an exponential rate. The ripple effect will kick in and the same amount of effort will result in an ever-widening scope of distribution; and influence.

Lessons Learned

The web, like nature, abhors a vacuum. In the case of a website that vacuum translates to stale content and static websites. The easiest way to correct this is to establish and regularly contribute to a blog. And, while your at it, start posting to Twitter and claim your space on LinkedIn, MySpace, Naymz and other relevant social networking sites.

Need help? Call or email me. That’s what I do. 303.882.8252. tom.gray @ gemsolv.com.

What’s Your Experience?

Leave a comment about your success, or lack thereof, in the blogosphere or social media space. Don’t just stand there. Join the conversation!

What is it? By my definition, Social Media Marketing is the web as conversation. Available to all, accessible to everyone. The skill set you need to participate in the Social Web? The ability to type, point & click. The technical setup? A computer (or smart phone) and an internet connection. That’s it.

Here’s an analogy; if the ‘traditional’ web is Marcus Buckingham on stage addressing thousands of adoring fans then social media marketing with Web2.0 is the reception afterwards where you have an opportunity to interact not only with Marcus but with all the other attendees of the event. You can listen, you can contribute, you can connect, you can create opportunity.

It’s no longer just Marcus Buckingham (the one) pontificating to his audience (the many), it’s the many interacting with the many with opportunities commensurate to the connections & contribution you make to the conversation.

Social Media Marketing is an opportunity to translate your talents and passion into traffic and treasure.

NSA-MAC Intensive, Philadelphia, PA

Speaking of opportunity, I had a great opportunity this weekend to present to the National Speakers Association Mid-Atlantic Chapter for their annual ‘Intensive’. I led a morning session on Social Media Marketing and they brought in Philadelphia area topic experts for the afternoon:

Dr. Sally Witt of DrSallyWitt.com (and a popular contributor to BlogTalkRadio) on getting the most from social networking. Sally is just a dynamo; full of insight & enthusiasm…

Karyn Greenstreet from Passion for Business™ – what a great resource for Search Engine Optimization and Marketing including effective pay-per-click (PPC). What I appreciate about Karyn is that, as an expert, she’s not just interested in ‘fishing for you’ but she’ll teach you how to fish as well.

Rick Simmons – Dinkum Interactive – offered solid advice for getting the most from your blog, finding your voice and/or face via podcasting as well as great advice on the experts panel at the end of the day. (Visit Rick’s exceptional website to download his powerpoints on blogging and podcasting.) The thing that I noticed about Rick is that he doesn’t just offer advice or insight; he offers 3 points on this, or 5 ideas for that. Listening to him talk was like reading an informative blog post.

Finally, Steve Coscia of Coscia Communications shared with his audience the tips and techniques he used to bolster his online revenue from zero to 30% of his company’s gross revenue in less than 3 years. Steve’s a past president of NSA MAC and quite a hoot. I had the pleasure to have dinner with Steve and other chapter members and truly enjoyed watching this outsized personality as he made friends with everyone in the restaurant from wait staff to fellow patrons. Steve could teach Bill Clinton a thing or two about networking.

I’d link to thank the meeting organizer and the NSAer responsible for bringing me out to this great group, Marsha Egan, the LeverEdge Coach. Marsha is a leadership coach and an expert in detoxifying your email inbox. In fact Marsha’s new book, Inbox Detox And the Habit of Email Excellence, is being released today (1/12/2009). If your email is out of control, and whose isn’t, then Marsha Egan can definitely help you detox your inbox!

Of course I’d like to thank the 80 intent speakers, authors, and entreprenuers in the audience who are now eager to add their voices to the conversation that is social media marketing.