Entrepreneurs are using the newest internet trend, professional social networks. Services like LinkedIn, Konnects, Ecademy, Plaxo and even Facebook provide professionals the opportunity to meet and collaborate with colleagues worldwide. One of my newest clients, Loren McCray is just venturing into this area with my help. Professionals like Loren fall into two distinct groups who utilize social networks:

1. Those for whom the emphasis is on the word “network”
2. Those for whom the emphasis is on the word “social”

Those who emphasize the word “network” seek to promote and expand their business. Those who emphasize the word “social” seek to promote and expand their Christmas card list. Social Media Marketing is the systematic approach to using social networks and other “Web 2.0″ and “Web 3.0″ technologies as a part of an all inclusive marketing plan.

“Begin with the End in Mind”
Steven Covey’s 5th habit (7 Habits of Highly Effective People) is one of the truisms of planning regardless of the purpose of the plan. The rapidity with which the field of Social Media Marketing is changing, new sites debuting, new functions and innovations make any treatise listing specific services obsolete before it can even be printed. However, when the social networks are viewed as tools the emphasis shifts from recommending specific sites to defining goals.

Step One: Define the goals then matching the tool to the purpose.

Goals vary from business to business and professional to professional, but the identification of goals is key to determining what characteristics are needed in a social network. Further, once a social media marketing program begins to meet with success, a deluge of invitations to other networks will begin to arrive. A prioritized list of goals will ensure that the social media marketing plan does not suffer “mission creep” by pursuing unrelated social networking opportunities.

Boundaries, Budgets & Bull’s-Eyes
The rule of cellular operations is that leadership sets the boundaries and budgets and allows the team charged with achieving the goal to “hit the Bull’s-Eye” on their own by any means that respects the boundaries and budgets sets. This form of leadership is used in all manner of situations that require high achievement in a rapidly changing environment. Special Forces teams, SWAT teams, corporate crisis teams, even medical resuscitation teams and Emergency Medical Services operate in this micromanagement-free manner.

Step Two: Set boundaries and budgets that govern the efforts expended in social networking while allowing the social networker “hit the Bull’s-Eye.”

Most professional social networks offer a free and one or more “premium” memberships. In most or all of those with “premium” memberships, it is possible to “earn” free premium upgrades by recruiting new members to the network platform. With all these incentives, it is only necessary to spend money on professional social network membership if a specific paid premium membership function or service is needed to achieve the goals set in step 1. This does not however mean that social networking is free. Most successful business social networkers agree that success requires a minimum of 40 hours per month spent building the network and communicating with network members and online contacts. The biggest area of budget bloat is time spent networking online.

I told Loren McCray to be very critical of the time he spent on social media marketing. Time has a definite value in real dollars and time spent on social media marketing must provide a real and measurable return on investment. It is all too easy to spend endless hours enjoying the many “features” of social networking sites. Whether answering posted questions and earning the tag “Expert” or racking up endorsements and testimonials, every minute spent online must have a purpose, must contribute to achieving the goals and must provide a return.

Create a Cult of Personality
Once the goals, budgets and boundaries are set, it is time to begin networking. Whether online or in person, the most important tool of the social networker is dialogue. Online networking must include direct and individual communications with every member of the network. This is the process that separates those using social networks to expand their business and those seeking only to expand their Christmas list.

Every time a new member joins the network, that new contact must receive a personalized email welcoming them to the network. This mandates that the new contact’s network profile be read and the contact’s interests made the focus of the email. The process of customizing the welcome to the new contact has a side benefit to the business because it forces the business to define its relevance to an ever expanding and ever deepening market demographic described by the social network developed online.

Step Three: Communicate and connect, don’t just collect.

The object of the entire social media marketing effort for Loren McCray was to build a network with a personal bond and the ability to refer paying customers or become paying customers themselves. This means the network members must become raving fans even before they make a buy or refer decision. Those who have been networking in real life for years know this is much harder than turning a satisfied customer into a raving fan. Unlike in person networking, online networking limits the level of interpersonal exchange and thus “likability.” A social network makes the transition to raving fans because of the personality of the network leader. Use the regular communication with network members as a “personality conduit.”

It’s Called the “Web” for a Reason
The highest accolade for a business person using social networks as a professional tool is to become a “meta-leader.” Based on concepts taken from disaster healthcare and emergency management, the “meta-leader” is a bridge for communications across industries and a role modeling leader within their own business. In social networks, whether professional or personal, this is a truly pivotal role because as a “network node” the meta-leader is the point at which multiple individual networks begin to overlap. The meta-leader is the connection and the conduit for all these networks and even across social networking websites.

Step Four: Attract Like Minded People, Then Lead Them

The key to becoming a meta-leader in a market niche is to become a gathering point for other online professionals and their respective networks. All the professional social networking websites have the ability to create clubs, or groups, or collectives. By volunteering to create and manage such a group the meta-leader becomes the point of convergence for everyone interested in the topic.

Time to Get Real
Once the goals are set, the network built and the like minds have gathered, it is time to expand into the non-virtual world. The popular term for a social networking group meeting outside of cyberspace is “In Real Life” or simply “Live.” Virtually all local chapters of online professional social networks have a “Live” meeting. This is where meta-leadership changes a list of network members into life long business relationships.

Step Five: Make it Real in Real Life

Depending on the local culture and networking traditions as well as the subculture of the online network, a traditional “dinner and drinks” networking event may be in order, but a “picnic in the park” or a “burgers and baseball” format may be more appropriate. The key is not the surroundings, but the opportunity for people who have built an online, but nonetheless real relationship to put a handshake, or a hug, to the profile and prose.

Online professional social networks and social media marketing are the newest tool in the entrepreneur’s business success kit. Properly used, it promises business expansion and profit growth.

Online, reputation is everything. It drives you professionally, personally and algorithmically. Have a good one and you’ll see positive returns. Develop a bad one and you’ll have to work doubly hard to come back into your customers good graces.

While it’s impossible to monitor every venue showcasing public opinion and reviews, you can work to protect your business’ reputation by registering your company’s name with as many social media, forums, and discussion sites as you can, especially the popular ones in your niche.

Why? Well anyone can register any name at a social media site and pass themselves off as you. Or just register the same name and tie it up so you can’t.

If you’ve worked hard at promoting your name (or a forum nick-name), people will assume it’s you they see on various social media sites.

Imagine their confusion when some interloper starts posting differing opinions or ridiculous comments! By not registering your name you’ve lost the opportunity to build on it and promote yourself in that location.

It’s very true. Anyone can come along and register your username, no verification or identification required.

Once they become “you”, they can seriously damage your reputation by making outlandish accusations or promises on behalf of your company.

At the very least they unintentionally cause confusion. It could go on for a while before you find out about it and by then… negative opinions are formed, reputations are damaged and people are left scratching their heads.

If you think it’s a big waste of time to go around and establish your branded username, consider the time and expense it will take to get those negative comments deleted and the confusion straightened out.

Also consider the added link bonus you’ll get by taking possession of your username; many of the social media sites allow clean links in their profile.

Be pro-active and register your brand/name on as many social media sites as you can. Tie up your username and avoid damaging your reputation, don’t make it easy for anyone to steal your online identity.

Here are some sites to get you started. Just set up your profile so you can claim your restaurant’s name…and your name also if you want.

1. www.Facebook.com

2. www.MySpace.com

3. www.youtube.com

4. www.flickr.com

5. www.digg.com

SEO (search engine optimization) is an incredibly young and volatile marketing realm.  I was telling a new client of mine, Loren McCray, as a business owner, or marketing manager with great expectations for SEO, you likely feel intense pressure to generate a great ROI, but you also feel dizzy from the possibilities and risks inherent to any internet marketing adventure.

Before you and your accounting team pull out your calculators and Excel spreadsheets, you MUST organize your strategic marketing goals. If you don’t spell out these goals explicitly - and harmonize them with your vision for your company - you will burn up your investment and fast. Think of building a budget for SEO like designing a house. Unless and until you select the right neighborhood and style of house (vision) and map out the architectural skeleton (strategy), you will be hammering nails (budgeting tactics) essentially at random. And this will inevitably lead to a big mess.

That said, it was time for Loren McCray and I to get down into the nitty gritty and discuss SEO budgeting tactics that work.

Three ways to gauge your project’s budget:

1. base your numbers on a (successful) past campaign that’s similar to yours.
2. aim to capture a specific share of your SEO market, and work backwards (based on figures published by competitors) to determine what SEO resources to deploy and where.
3. designate a target percentage of total sales you wish to achieve though SEO marketing and work backwards to make this figure a reality.

What percentage of your total marketing budget should go into SEO internet marketing:

• if you’re selling pharmaceuticals or herbal products, you may want to go as high as 25%.

• the average (across industries) is somewhere around 6%, but this figure will likely grow as SEO gains prominence as a marketing tool.

• If you advertise primarily in the brick-and-mortar realm and/or have an unusual online demographic, your percentage could dip to 2% or lower.

Other important info I told Loren McCray to keep in mind:

• nearly 90% of all business traffic generated from Google, Yahoo, and the other search engines comes from organic listings.

• every month, nearly 6 billion search engine queries are made.

• The top three search returns generate over 91 percent of traffic.

Far too often, Search engine optimization experts spin their wheels obsessing about link building. (I myself included) It’s easy to forget that classic on page and site-wide SEO still works.

Recently, this hit home. While working on a page on one of my sites, I accidentally left a link pointing to a page that was irrelevant to the actual anchor text in the link. In other words, the keywords in the anchor text had nothing to do with the actual text of the page. Despite this, Google quickly picked up the page for the target search phrase, replacing the page I intended to optimize for. Despite having at least a dozen good quality, keyword specific external links pointing to the page I intended to optimize, the other page now replaced it in the SERPs because the weight from the 1 internal link trumped all the external links.

This situation reminded me that good SEO starts on-site. In my opinion, you shouldn’t even start link building until you:

1. Build Several Internal Links: Search engines care immensely how webmasters categorize and label their own content. The best way to do this is with one time occurring links within a body of content. In my opinion, 1 relevant contextual link from your own site can be worth more than 10 good external links. In Sugarrae’s great link building interview, Andy Hagans recommends having at least 5 internal links to every landing page.
2. Sculpt Your PageRank Flow: SEO Fast Start has a great explanation of using the no-follow tag to sculpt your PageRank. Basically, the idea is to cap off the flow of PageRank using the no-follow tag to pages that are unimportant from a search point of view. For example, while your Privacy policy page may be important to customers already on the site, it’s probably getting little to no action from the SERPs. By capping off PageRank to pages like this, you will increase the relative importance of your product pages and product category pages.
3. Do On-Page SEO on Your Landing Pages: Title tags, H1 tags, keyword rich content, alt tags, and even Meta tags should be optimized before worrying about external links.

Since many experts think effective link building tactics are going underground, I believe on page and site wide SEO tactics such as these will become increasingly important.

Linking will increase your SEO and writing articles with your main website address in the author’s information area will provide a one way link which is the best link you can get.

If you want your articles spread all over the internet with your one way link, paid article submission services are by far the best and easiest way to go. But if you want to save money you can get a lot of linking action from choosing several between 5 -7 free article sites from Google.

Website directories are also a good source for lining and many do not require a matching link, and many are free.

Be sure to use target keywords in your link description. By writing an article that is relevant to your webpage, you can get targeted visitors when they click on the link in your article.

I cannot stress enough that you must write about things that have to do with what your website is about. By doing so you get targeted visitors.

You will spend hundreds of emails and letters to webmasters requesting links to get a single link. One link for hours of work. It was not worth it.

Getting links into your site is a major part of your web development. High SEO is based on links.

Many webmaster won’t link if you do not have a really good page rank. So getting links to a site that is not Google ranked or has a very bad ranking is very difficult, hence articles, article submissions, and web directories are so important to a new site in increasing web linking.