Online Networking: Using Social Media to Increase Your Work-at-Home Business

Social media is responsible for transforming the consumer from a person targeted and talked "to" - to a person who is engaged and talked "with." Social media sites are where consumers and business professionals are talking to each other about their preferences, ideas and needs, and as a new work-at-home professional you would do well to get into the conversation.

Online networking used as a marketing tool can allow you to brand yourself as an expert in your field, as well as drive customers directly to your business. By getting in the conversation, you can create buzz, customer loyalty, and get your information shared.

Social Media can be defined in two broad categories:

1. Content sharing, which includes blogs, podcasts, videocasts, widgets, wikis, and various other forms of user-generated content (UGC). It encourages the sharing of information, whether through comments in the case of blogs, or applications that encourage sharing such as podcasts and videocasts, photo sharing (wikis) and the sharing of full applications (widgets).

2. Community sites, which are social networks like Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn, as well as private, sponsored, or corporate communities created around common interests, brands, and the like. These communities provide a platform for users to communicate with each other and share their interests, whether they know each other or not. There are a multitude of online communities for every hobby, industry, and regional area. Joining such a community could put you in a position of thought leadership when you share information about your service or product.

Here are some practical tips before you plunge into a social media strategy:

• Search for sites where your customer and prospects connect, and monitor what they're saying.


• Think of the monitoring of these sites as market research and see what trends they're reporting and what issues you need to address in your own business.


• Until you have real, valuable information to share, and are ready to join the conversation regularly, don't leave comments that will be taken as spam or self-serving.


• Building a relationship with a prospect, and leveraging that relationship into a business connection takes time and a commitment to provide interesting information and advice.


• Use the information you receive to understand the mindset of your customer, and make your offers more relevant. Think like your customer instead of looking at online networking from your company's perspective.

If you choose to jump into the online networking marketing world, here are some strategies:

• Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn allow you to join niche groups or networks within these popular sites, providing mass or targeted exposure, depending on the network you choose. You'll have opportunities to meet and share not only with prospects, but with business professionals you can partner with. Become a participant by joining the site, growing your network of friends, and contributing to conversations with relevant comments. Leave your website URL at the bottom of your comment to drive them to your site for further information. For a limited time you can receive 3 free Twitter howto videos from our University. Free Twitter Training Videos


• Contribute your comments to topical blogs at sites that are specific to your company's business to continue and expand the conversations. Next start to post your own helpful, newsworthy blogs on topics that are relevant, and point readers back to your site for further information. If your posts are good, you'll start getting a loyal following.


• Many larger social media sites allow you to create your own groups within them, usually on a specific niche topic. Start a group and invite membership with you as the moderator or leader, posting conversation starters.


• Create your own networking site through applications such as Ning, or your own blog at a site like Blogspot. Creating an online community from scratch will take time to populate and build interest, it will need on-going maintenance and a real marketing effort to reach people to invite and give them a reason to join you. So you must have a real, compelling platform on which to build a community, and a marketing strategy to get people to join.


• Create your company's own wikis, podcasts and videos to share and post. These are great viral marketing tactics because they'll bring you exposure to all of their "friends."


The inherent benefit of online networking as a marketing tool is that it can expose you to thousands of new prospects, it can allow you to be seen as an expert in your field as you give helpful advice and solve member's problems, and it can effectively drive customers directly to your business. Although it is "free" in the sense of not having to pay fees to join, it is expensive in that it takes time and commitment. As a business owner, you need to balance your time with the everyday running of your business.

If you would like to learn more about becoming Magnetic or how to become an Attraction Marketing magnet, we here at StarksEServices would like to help you. It doesn't matter if your goal is to become a coach to teach others or to just become a student; we all start out in the same position and that's first as a student. We must first become teachable ourselves before we can ever teach others.

Our mission here at StarksEServices is to introduce you to our step by step system, that anyone from the computer savvy to a complete computer novice can both follow along with ease. We invite you to take a free test drive of our system and we appreciate the honor you've given us by trusting in us as you embark upon your journey to learn more about the art of Attraction and Magnetic Marketing.

To your success,

Starks E Services