I often go on about Web 2.0 and how we should all be using social networking sites to help us promote ourselves or the products and/or services we’re selling.
I was even planning on making a video about this very topic but lo and behold, Perry beat me to it and he did such a great job, I’m passing it on to you.
This is a very clear explanation of the right way to use social media to generate buzz. Great stuff.
While a lot of people still talk about PageRank it really doesn’t seem to be as critical as it was a year or so ago. PageRank, for those of you who may not know, is the importance that Google assigns to every page it has visited. It ranks each page on a scale from 1 to 10 with 10 being the most powerful. Not surprisingly, the Google homepage itself is one of the only (if not the only) sites with a 10 ranking.
We’ve all heard about Web 2.0, right? If you haven’t, I’ll briefly sum it up as any site that allows the visitors to add and/or ammend content on the site. Think YouTube, Wikipedia, MySpace and FaceBook.
In the old days, a company used to put up a site (typically in html) and it was a one-way advertising medium – like a brochure or a TV ad. We could extole all of our company’s virtues and only share the marketing messages we wanted to share.
Let’s call these the ‘good old days’ shall we?
It could be said that the Internet is making business less personal. Five years ago I would have agreed with that statement. Many of us were hiding behind websites and email and never really making a lot of face-to-face contact.
While a lot of people still talk about PageRank it really doesn’t seem to be as critical as it was a year or so ago. PageRank, for those of you who may not know, is the importance that Google assigns to every page it has visited. It ranks each page on a scale from 1 to 10 with 10 being the most powerful. Not surprisingly, the Google homepage itself is one of the only (if not the only) sites with a 10 ranking.
Nobody knows exactly how Google ranks sites but it is safe to say that content and backlinks each play major roles. A site needs to have a decent amount of content for Google to believe that it is of any worth and it also has to have a other sites linking to it. The higher the pagerank of the sites linking to your site, the more value Google gives those links and subsequently, the higher ranking your site will get.
At least that is the theory.
How does all this relate to web 2.0 and generating traffic and sales leads to your site? Easy. There are a number of social networking sites that allow you to promote (either actively or passively) your own website and some of these networking sites have incredibly high pagerank. This means you can leverage the pagerank on these sites to drive traffic and valuable inbound links to your own site.
This may sound too good or too easy to be true and unfortunately, it is. These sites are a lot like Google in that they want you to build out quality content with them so that their visitors receive decent value before you whisk them off to your site. As such, you can’t just build out a page on HubPages.com that blatantly tells visitors to leave HubPages and visit your site.
Don’t get me wrong. You can do this but you need to be tactful and play by their rules.
Sticking with the HubPages.com example, let’s apply this to your business. Let’s say you have a site about Online Degrees (a topic I know well) where you are generating sales leads for online colleges. This is a highly-competitive market and you’ll go broke buy Pay per click ads at $13 or so per click if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Leveraging HubPages’ pagerank of 7 (as of this writing) you could build out a hub about your topic, making sure that you use all of your site’s keyword phrases. The lower the competition on your keyword phrases the better the chance of your hub getting picked up by the search engines and all the free traffic that comes with this ranking.
Speckled within the information you provide visitors about online degrees, you will want to link one or two keywords back to your lead generation site. This allows you to leverage HubPages’ powerful pagerank with your main keywords to build a link from a site that Google and the other search engines see as an authority. By doing this you not only drive immediate traffic to your site (which is nice) but you’re also building strong links and positioning your own site as an authority.
You can imagine what would happen if you try this strategy on as many of the big web 2.0 properties that you can. You would have multiple, high value links pointing to your site and get all of those visitors following links from MySpace, FaceBook, YouTube, etc.
This strategy takes some time and planning to implement but it is a long-term strategy that is sure to pay dividends both now and well into the future.
Article by Eric Haaranen
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