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Here is my checklist for effective social media strategies in the Web2.0 era:

Give Back/Add value

• Facilitate community – be a focal point for discussion
• Participate in existing communities - become an ‘expert’
• Give something for free - but make it something useful
• Promote your fans - feature them and/or their posts/comments on your site
• News, advice, database

Content

• Blogs are of the moment – events drive posts
• Get ideas from anywhere
  • Techmeme
  • Business Wire
  • Smaller Blogs
  • Google Alerts
  • Yahoo! News Alerts
• Why is your post important?
  
  
• You only have time to argue one point
• It must be interesting
• You must invite people to link to it
• Get exclusive info
• Blog regularly – you never know what will work

Headlines

• Headlines are 75% of a post
• Be plausibly sensational
• Do not over promise, viewed as SPAM

Templates

• Small news Announcements – intro/facts/analysis
• Round-up posts – top XYZ – used as Digg bait
• How to
• Editorial – you are all wrong and here is why!

Distribution

• Feedburner
• Digg
• StumbleUpon
• Yahoo Buzz
• Other Blogs
• RSS
• FriendFeed
• Facebook
• Techmeme
• Article Marketing

Recommendation: Bookmarking Demon - neat software to create social media backlinks for your site or blog..

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There is one hard and fast rule in generating income for your website: A steady flow of website traffic. If no one goes to your site, Your business is dead. Many sites have tried and failed to drive traffic to their site, some of them spending large amounts of money in the process. But it’s not as hard as you may think and can certainly be done on the cheap!

It’s true that many of the really big traffic sites are spending tons of money to attract traffic, investing in many advertising campaigns and different forms of marketing schemes. This is all worthwhile because, well, they are what they are now, high earning, big hitting websites. But before you spend a dime there are many ways to generate low cost website traffic without having to spend cash you maybe do not have.

Here are the Top five ways to generate low cost website traffic.
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Now here’s an interesting point. There are so many people obsessed with optimizing their sites for search engines they forget the fundamentals of web publishing - that you have to have a site with quality content in order to get visitors to come back…

Many webmasters spend so much time searching for reciprocal links that their site content actually suffers.

The crazy thing is, if we spent more time providing quality content, that would actually in the end result in the making the Search Engines happy…

I’m wouldn’t say that SEO is not important. In fact I practice it daily. But this article is a good reminder that there is more to what we do than optimizing… We can not get so caught up in some of the strategies that our website suffers…

You can have all the traffic on the internet, but if you don’t have a good, solid content site, the traffic will mean little.

Addendum: My recommendation for SEO software based on personal experience is SEO Elite. It takes away much of the pain in trying to optimize your site for SEO and leaves you more time to concentrate on the quality of your content. It is a tad on the high side at $167 (at the time of writing) but for me it has paid dividends many times over. If you are serious about promoting your online business this is one tool you cannot do without.

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Here is a quick glossary of common SEO terms. I will add to it over time so if you have anything you would like to see included, feel free to contact me or add a comment. Cheers.

Adsense - Google Adsense is a way for any website to display relevant Google ads anywhere on their web pages and earn money from clicks.
Adwords - Google Adwords is a way to advertise online. Your ads are seen in the Google Search Engine Results or on a network of other search engines and content based websites. You are charged Per Click. So it only costs you money if a visitor clicks on your ad and comes to your website.
Algorithm - This is a mathematical formulae that search engines use to rank websites. It’s based on a number of different factors that weigh a web page’s importance. [Read more]

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There are more things to worry about than PageRank…

If you don’t know what Page Rank (PR) is, these links will introduce you: Google PageRank Explained

People have been trying to figure out how PageRank works for a long time. I’ve seen people debate on & on in forums. Articles have been written… Much of it is pure speculation. The thing is, no one really knows anything. Sure we have a general idea, but that’s it!

We know that it takes into consideration the Inbound Links to our website. We know that the better PR the links to our site have the better. We know relevance is a factor. But beyond all that, it gets fuzzy.

Google doesn’t tell us, so she forces people into a feverish debate about PRs importance, validity, and uses. Google isn’t dumb. They know what’s happening and they’re changing their algorithms to match it.
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