Yesterday I worked with my sister to work on promoting her ebook using the online marketing strategies that are getting a lot of buzz these days – the social networks.
Preparation – information you will need

Your profile name
profile email address
small profile picture
150 word intro paragraph
set of best 5 keyword phrases
website address you are marketing

Purpose – why are you doing all this?

Ultimately, all the social attention should gain you new visitors to your main website, new email subscribers and new customers.

You achieve this by establishing a relationship with people who are already in your niche – and by building a means to communicate with them in the future.

Day One

Step One – Register Everywhere

Now you can find WoWGrrl on your favorite social networking sites! And add her as a friend! We started our social networking journey at www.profilactic.com.  It was easier to tackle the project when two of us split the list of sites that are supported, and started registering a new profile on every social bookmarking, file sharing, video sharing, Web 2.0 sites we could find.

As we went through this list of almost 200 Web 2.0 style sites, there were a few that stood out – these were ear-marked for another visit and more development.

These exceptional information sharing sites also included a way to build a friends list and create groups on your topic.

Step Two – Aggregate the Feeds

Another social networking service I found were a few rss feed aggregation sites.  After creating almost 200 new profiles across the full range of social networking sites, it seems impossible to monitor and manage everything.

List all of the sites you have registered with with services like profilactic.com, blogcatalog.com, superglu.com and pownce.com – the beta toluu.com my also be of interest.

Day Two

Step Three – Get Connected
within each community site, join groups, search on your topic to build your friends lists.

Update your profiles – before you start adding friends, be sure to upload a profile image, copy and paste a description the includes a link to your site or offer…etc.

Step Four -
Create a unique ‘Group’ on a theme relating to your topic, update the Group Profile page to include links to your offers then invite your new friends to join your group.

One Week Later

Community Building

A simple and effective way to bring people to your group – a fun contest on pictures and videos.  These simple contests give reasons for members to invite their friends to the group.

One Month Later

Community Partnerships

After your friends list and group membership has grown to a few hundred people, you can start making promotional swaps with other group owners. i.e. I’ll send out a notice about your group to my members if you’ll send out a notice about my group to your members…

Now your groups can start growing to be in the thousands!

http://www.ustream.tv/

Within minutes, broadcast and interact with a global audience of one to thousands!  All it takes is a webcam and high speed.

After I created the first internet guru watch podcast, my sister reviewed it, and she asked – “who is your target audience” – I gave her a quick answer, but, after thinking about it for some time, really, the audience is… me.

I’m doing this podcast for my own eductation, and so, you may not be on the same path as me and you may not find all the tips that I’m searching for and that I’m finding useful, they may not apply to you.

But you never know when I’m going to talk about something that could be useful for you, as I share the path of my quest.

Many of you have been thrown into this quest of learning how to market on the internet, because, all of a sudden, you busines is dependant on getting your bookings online.

And so you’ve been thrown into the internet marketing business and you’re on the same path as me now,

• Learning how to make your website convert,
• Learning how to connect with your visitors.
• Learning how to make money,
• How to make a living,
• How to sell your product over the internet

 …to people you may have never met before.

In the spring of 2008, the Internet Guru Watch Podcast is going to focus in two main areas. Mostly because of the projects I’m working on, and that I want to develop.

I’m taking some good advice from Micheal Campbell, to only bring into my marketing mix, the strategies that are going to go with will the projects that I currently have ongoing right now. Strategies that will push and add to what I’m already doing, rather than start me off in a different direction.

And so, as you listen to the Internet Guru Watch podcast through the spring of 2008, I’ll be focusing on how to set up and interconnect with people using all the social networking and social bookmarking sites that are out there.

Right now that process may seem daunting and overwhelming, there’s just so many of them, if you go to prophilactic.com, you see over a hundred of different places where you can set up a profile and start building a community.

Just the hours of registering to all those places and setting up your profile, and managing all those logins and all of those accounts, its overwhelming to start off with. But, like most hills that we choose to climb, the effort of the climb is well worth the view at the top, and it’s sure easy coasting down the other side…

The other area the Internet Guru Watch Podcast will focus on, is the process of launching an ebook – The pre-launch and the launch process, and I want to learn from Gurus who know how to set up venture partners for Launching the eBooks.

I’m currently participating in the Launch of a new ebook – a useful guide that will be of interest to millions of people who are active in this niche.

Launching a new product into a new niche is vastly more successful when you enlist some established heavy-weights to partner up and give your project a boost. 

After all your preparations are in order, the product is completed, days of detailed attention has gone into your sale copy, the website is tested and working, the promotional materials are ready for affiliates to run with – after all your preparations – it’s the partnerships that will make or break the success of the project.

Finding good Venture Parnters is no easy task – and many people don’t leverage this amazing power.  After focusing so intently on the product creation, many capable entrepreneurs create worthy products that just don’t make it out to benefit the people who could use the information. 

A Joint Venture Product Launch is another process in itself.  Almost as much work and planning must go into the proper launch of your product, as goes into the creation of the product itself!   Over time, it should be the goal of any website owner to continually seek out and develop online partnerships with other businesses in your niche.   Because of the enourmous audience potential, and because of the established trust that these partners have with their email lists and customers, the relationships with your potental Venture Partners is actually higher leverage than the relationships you have with your individual clients or customers.

The importance of your Venture Partners to your success cannot be under-estimated, nor can it be exaggerated.

On the same note – start positioning yourself NOW – to learn where to find a valued Joint Venture Partner.  You will start receiving requests to partner with others, and your business will re-launch to a whole new level!

Cheers

I’m starting my way through the growing list of sites listed on profilactic.com

My first start – 43places.com

This site looks interesting, in a random manner of flitting thoughts. 

But I couldn’t find a common navigation system and found the site to be organized by a process as random.  After a 10 minutes, I was glad to close it – thinking… wtf?

First, there’s a List of Social Networking sites, (see profilactic.com) then there’s a List of Social Bookmarking sites, (see addme.com), and several other lists of Web 2.0 style websites for video, audio, pdfs, photographs, business listings, news releases and the list goes on.

THEN there’s a list of Social RSS Feed Aggrigator Sites to tie it all together…

Here’s a List of web-based news readers I’ll be slowly reviewing over the next while:

My Yahoo!
NewsGator
My AOL
Rojo
Bloglines
Netvibes
Google
Pageflakes
Plusmo
FeedLounge
The Free Dictionary
Bitty Browser
NewsAlloy
Live.com
Excite MIX
Yourminis.com
Attensa for Outlook
Webwag
netomat Hub
Daily Rotation
Podcast Ready
Flurry
FeedDemon
NewsFire
NewsGator Outlook Edition
RSSOwl
Shrook

The anticipated Social Dashboard will strengthen the BlogCatalog community - the soon-to-be-released BlogCatalog Dashboard will help you keep up on the activities of your friends. It’s almost like having the ultimate social network feed reader made up of your friends.

In the next couple of days, BlogCatalog is launching Social Dashboard beta, a new feature that displays your latest activities across many social networks — Digg, Flickr, Last.fm, Twitter, YouTube, and many others. That means automatic cross-networking and promotion right from your personal profile page. It also means that the your post updates, Twitter comments, Digg submissions, and other activities will appear on the Social Dashboard of all your BlogCatalog friends, and maybe their friends too.

This is the kind of networking that can make posts go viral. 

And that’s just for starters.

http://blogcatalog.com

Wouldn’t it be nice to have all the RSS Feeds from the Blogs of today’s top internet marketers all in one place?

Well now they are!  www.ipmal.com

ipmal.com is a Mashup of RSS and XML Feeds from top online marketing experts.  We are collecting every RSS feed produced by any of the best know marketers – and letting you pick and choose your favorites – so you can view your personal collection of RSS feeds all together on one page.

The List of Internet Marketing Guru’s we have collected so far:

	Douglas Lampi
	Jim Edwards
	Ken Evoy
	Marlon Sanders
	Matt Bacak
	Michael Campbell
	Michael Cheney
	Todd Lucier

Our List of Top Internet Marketing Sources is brand new and very small. 

WHO ARE WE MISSING?

My List of Web 2.0 Sites contains over 200 Categorized Websites and already growing!

There is such an explosion of New Web 2.0 Sites - there’s no way I can find and list them all.  In fact, I’ve likely started out with a List that is missing some of the biggest and most powerful Web 2.0 Sites.  That’s where you come in. 

You are welcome to submit new entries for review by adding a comment to the appropriate Category.  If you submission is accepted, the moderated comment will be posted, with credit to you, and the new entry will be added to the master database for the next round of site and PDF updates. 

I welcome your participation!