Five Things Every Online Retailer Must Learn to Succeed with Social Media

The Social Arena includes hundreds of sites and millions of users. An understanding of these networks will turn your business into an automated vehicle for profit creation.

With the information below, you will have the tools necessary to drive extraordinary qualified traffic to your web site and build your brand as a knowledgeable expert in your industry or niche market.

Learn What Keywords and Phrases Potential Customers Will Use to Find You

How would you find yourself online?
Imagine that your business was at the top of every search engine (good image, huh?), but you just couldn’t remember your own domain name (…it could happen). What keywords or phrases would you type into your favorite search engine to find your own business?

As your thinking about this, make a list and write these words down. Usually, the first ones that come to mind are the best ones… they probably are the first to come to mind for a majority of your customers.

Building Your Traffic Generation Keyword Power-List
Ok, so you have your list of words? Great! Now you are ready to find out what are the keywords that everyone else would use to find you. Here’s how:

• 1. Take your list of words (you should have at least 5-10 main keywords or phrases), and go to this Keyword Research Tool (it’s free, but the there is a paid version which provides greater capabilities).
• 2. Enter in each of your keywords or phrases that you have on your list, and save the results in an excel spreadsheet. Tip: Copy only the text for the daily searches and the related search words. When pasting into Excel, choose Paste Special… > Unformatted Text. This will paste your results into two columns instead of one. It will also allow you to sort this list using Excel.
• 3. Once you’ve completed this, you should have a list of 300+ keywords. If you are familiar with Excel, you can sort by the number of searches performed per day and start to get a handle on all the different variations there are going to be out there and which ones have the largest number of people using them.Save this list, it will be used for future reference.
• 4. In your Excel file, copy only the keyword column, and go to Google’s Keyword Tool. Paste the entire list of keywords you created from steps 1 thru 3 into the text box. Enter in the security word, and click “Get More Keywords”. This should return a list of all the related searches performed in Google related to the first list you built. Click “Add” to save the keyword in a list within this tool. This will allow you to perform this lookup multiple times on different words or word lists.When you are all done, you can click the link to download your saved list to a text file. Open it up, copy all the keywords within this list, and then save this text file for future reference as well. Tip: Enter just the top 5 or 10 searched keywords from your first list into Google. You can do repeat the process with different words to get additional related words from Google’s tool. This will really help you shape your list and come up with all the possible variations.
• 5. Now you have a long list of keyword variations from multiple search engine databases, and some information on what keywords are searched on more than others. The next step is to esimate which keywords will have: High Search Volumes, Low Competition, High Click-thru ratios.Google has another great tool that will allow us to do just that. Armed with your full list of all possible variations on your original keywords you would use to find your own business, visit Google’s Traffic Estimator Tool.
• 6. Paste in your entire list of related keywords and phrases into the Google Traffic Estimator Tool, leave #2 (Max CPC) and #3 (Daily Budget) blank, choose your language, and choose the area you will be marketing in, then press Continue.The results will contain your entire list of keywords, with the estimated clicks, the esimtated cost (if you were to buy adwords), an estimated search volume, and the estimated ad position. What’s important is the clicks, cost per click (CPC), and the volume.
• 7. Click on the header for the Avg. CPC to order it from greatest to least. As you scroll down, you will see the CPC get lower, but some of the numbers in the Estimated Clicks column will be high. For these, take a look at your Search Volume, and if you see any size green bar, you have successfully found yourself a Most Valuable Keyword.With this result set, we can assume for our analysis that the greater the cost per click, the greater the competition. All data here is relative, so there is a slight art form to picking the correct words.You will want to pick out 10-20 Most Valuable Keywords. These will be the keywords you will want to use for your “Keyword Focus” — the 1-3 keywords focused on within each individual page of your web site.To make finding your Most Valuable Keywords easier, you can build a Keyword Heatmap using Excel. To find out how this is done, you can check out our article on Creating a Keyword Research and Analysis Heatmap Tool.

Learn What Networks Have a Large Population of Your Target Market

Use Chief Ingredient’s Social Media Web Site Mind Map
Chief Ingredient has put together a mind map containing over 60 of the largest social networking, social bookmarking, professional networking, classified ad sites, blogs, forums, and many more. Use this list to help find the specific web site and networks that contain large populations of your target customer.

Although the site list will save a lot of time, Google is also a great resource. Start out by searching for “___________ networks” or “_________ forums”. This will usually return a list of sites that are social-based and targeted towards your niche or industry.

Finally, you can search this list of over 300 social bookmarking sites.

Be sure to save the list of sites you find as social bookmarks, or in another list. This list can become extremely valuable to you, and participation in the perfect networks can bring you more web site visitors then expected.

Social Arena Marketing is not Spamming

The users of web sites within the Social Arena are smart, they can spot an ad miles away. The worst possible strategy would be to make a contribution that is a poorly disguised ad. Not only will you not get traffic, but you will also be seen as a less credible resource in that community. You will be working away from expert status, instead of towards.

As Lorelle puts it in her post about Getting Dugg on Digg , “Digg users do not click ads. Webmasters should stop trying to game the system to get the traffic.” Well put. If you are looking to just get traffic for the sake of traffic, you should be reading a different article.

Learn to use Popular Trends for Explosive Traffic

Using popular trends can take a normal article or top 10 list and make it a fantastic tidbit of trendy information. Just the type of information people are dying to get their eyes on. Just the kind of info that can be used to draw quality traffic back to your site.

Here are some popular trends to help you get your brainstorming sessions thundering in the distance:

• Going Green / Global Warming
• Racial Diversity
• Luxury / Materialism
• Gay Rights
• Safety / Fear
• Obesity

When you are working with trends and creating powerful and useful content, make sure you do research. Dive deep into the subject and generate extreme value by combining proven solutions with cutting-edge trends.

Learn to Track, Measure and Improve Your Results to Multiply your Profits

If you are not tracking your visitors with a web analytics program make this the first thing you do after finishing this article.

Not only are there some fantastic free solutions out there, they are also very easy to install.

Google Analytics
Google offers Google Analytics . It’s free and should provide you with everything you need for a very long time. If you have a blog and are using WordPress, there is an easy plug-in available for Google Analytics as well.

Web Side Story
Although this option is not free solution, Web Side Story offers a powerful and inexpensive web analytics solution as well.

SiteCatalyst by Omniture
For those that are looking for the best-of-breed solutions, SiteCatalyst may be the application you are looking for. Omniture provides a number of add-ons and related solutions to SiteCatalyst which when used together can make for some unbelievable analytical capabilities.

If you really want to see some powerful demonstrations of what your web visitors are doing and could look like visually, sign up for a demo of Discover by Omniture. Amazing stuff!