Explode your Client Portfolio with Social Media Optimization

Most internet business owners are after the same thing; gaining an increase in the amount of "traffic" to their websites. Traffic is the name given to the amount of people surfing the web in search of things. Generally speaking, the more traffic you can direct to your own website, the more chance you have of making sales. The latest phenomena of the internet are social media sites, and these are fertile grounds for cultivating more traffic to your website. There are several millions of people that use Social Media sites, so if you can convert only 1% into your potential clients, you are talking in terms of thousands of new visitors.

The first rule of social media optimization is to increase the chances that other people will create links to your website. To do that, you need to become a subject matter expert in a field and write content that other people will be interested in reading. Use popular websites such as Digg, Facebook, Furl, and Reddit and create links to your material. If you can get yourself on the front page of Digg for example, you can create a viral marketing campaign where other people enthusiastically tell their friends about your content.

What you are trying to achieve through Social Media Optimization (SMO) is two things; to attract more visitors to your website, and to get more people to create their own links on their own websites, bloggs and articles, back to your own website; this will potentially create infinitely more visitors for you as word spreads. In order to gain initial interest, you must generate articles and content that are of great interest and appeal that will attract lots of interest. Viral marketing, is marketing that spreads just like a virus, with more and more people becoming "infected"; as they become infected with interest, they pass that "infection, (that interest), onto others, just like the spread of a virus. Viral advertising is also specifically related to social media activity.

It helps if you can make it simple for people to be able to share the good news. One way of doing this is by using "buttons" and "widgets". Digg is one of the most popular social networking websites and they have produced something called the "Digg this" button. If you add this to your website, blog, or article, you make it very easy for the people who appreciate your content to click on the button which then registers back at the Digg website. The more votes your content gets, the more its popularity is noted, and if it gets a sufficient numbers of votes, it can even get to the number one page on Digg which will increase its exposure quite dramatically.

Everyone appreciates help with raising their profile, and creating a list of websites that have linked to your website, that everyone can see, will enthuse people and will persuade them also to link to your site. It works on the "one good turn deserves another" principle.

Don't hesitate to let others use your content as long as you have rules in place to prevent abuse. For example, YouTube has incorporated that idea by allowing people to embed videos onto their own page. You can also take advantage of RSS feeds to make it easier for other people to drive content to your site.

If you want to get more exposure on the web, you should be prepared to share your content. RSS feeds are a great way of doing this although you may want to consider some ways of limiting how people can use your content. SMO can be quite hard work to actually get started and gain momentum; but it can also be tremendously rewarding, as you will soon experience for yourself, when the effort you have expended results in increased rates of traffic coming through. It can be quite intoxicating and will make all of that effort seem really worthwhile.