How I used Market Samurai from Challenge 2010 to select a domain, and the first things I did to prepare to gather an audience.

Starting with a self-hosted WordPress website, I created a few posts, then I created an account at Twitter and Youtube – with a username as close to my domain name as possible.

I registered a profile with Slideshare and registered my blog with Blogcatalog – where my site will be reviewed by a human before being listed.

Then I registered my site with Feedburner. Many people use iGoogle, and using feedburner makes it easy to get your information out to a lot of places more easily.

The next piece of marketing material I put together was a Fan Page on Facebook. Following that, I imported the RSS Feed from my WordPress blog into the Notes section of my Business Page on Facebook.

The last thing I did was to create an account on Friendfeed, and pulled together the RSS feeds from all of the different Social Media accounts I had just created.

Now, when ever I do a post, an entire network of social media services are updated.

One thing I like to be sure to do, is include a link back to my own website within the first 150 words of the post. This way all of the services that syndicate my content will automatically provide links back to me – with my ideal keywords… which I had found using Market Samurai.

Watch for my next report on Challenge 2010 as the event unfolds!

Many thanks to Ed Dale and associates at http://www.challenge.co

you guys rock!

If it works for Lodge Owners, then it’s gotta work with other Niches too.

Research And Development

In order to answer the question “Do These Social Media Strategies Work?”, Quetico Internet Marketing has invested heavily in research and development over the past few months, setting up several variations of nearly identical social media strategies in several unrelated niches.

Learning From The Best

One of the greatest personal benefits I experienced from working with Social Media sites was the ability to learn from the Gurus. Twitter and Facebook let you get upclose and real-time with the people you follow – it almost seems personal.

I didn’t use Twitter as a means to chat with people, instead, I used it as a way to monitor the people and topics I was interested in learning about.

Right off the start I met and followed @marismith, and I’ve been creeping her profiles ever since – often gaining a boost by her sheer energy and enthusiasm – then a great social media tip to ride the wave with – and to create something productive out of!

Work At Your Own Pace

For Tourism Operators who must learn about Blogging:

Learn about Social Media from Mari Smith. Mari offers a number of outstanding course options that I’d like to pass along:

FREE Facebook Tips

Social Marketing Method – INTRO PROGRAM.

This is the most affordable way to access Mari’s introductory materials: The Intro Program

NEW: Social Marketing Method – QUICK START PROGRAM

The Social Marketing Method Quick Start Program includes three LIVE 90-minute webinar sessions. By popular demand, Mari put this program together specifically to help with more hands-on training. (Don’t tell her I said this, but you get three sessions for much less than the price of one individual session with Mari!) Here’s just a peek at what it includes!

Where does your website get most of it’s traffic from?

Most of us still focus on getting search traffic, and most of us focus on Google, because, frankly, that’s where everyone gets the most search traffic from.

It will always be important to have a search-engine-friendly website – but if you are relying on search as your biggest traffic source, then you are missing out on the activities within massive online communities.

The internet is much bigger than it used to be, and as it’s grown, people have started to “group” together in communities like Facebook, Twitter, Digg, YouTube, WordPress, Blogcatalog and many others.

In fact, there are so many places where you can create a profile and link up to friends, that a new breed of websites offer the service of collecting together, or aggregating all of your profiles.

Currently, I’m using a new network to promote the CanadianFishingBook.com Series of websites, blogs, ebooks and Lodge Listings.

The increase in traffic from various communities has encouraged further research and development, in fact, the results, in terms of

• downloads,
• subscribers,
• group members and
• participants,

are *much* more effective than search engine marketing.

Learn more about Working the Social Networks

Cheers – Doug