Can social media really help you boost the profits of your small business? Yes, say experts from across the globe, provided you do it correctly. How do you define this “correctly”? Should you simply keep flooding the timelines of your followers on Twitter with updates promoting your products and services? Or should you choose to simply engage them in conversations, and hope they visit your website by checking the URL given in your user account at some point of time? It is this shadow of uncertainty that keeps a lot of entrepreneurs from achieving success, even after promoting their businesses faithfully on Twitter, or Facebook on a regular basis.

Let’s try to change the picture a bit, shall we? Here are a few ways in which you can greatly improve your chances of boosting profits through social media promotions:

1. Make sure that your business website has been properly optimized for search engines. You would not believe how many entrepreneurs simply forego this step, and then complain when their elaborate social media campaigns fail to deliver expected results. The truth here is that if SEO has not been properly done on your website, then your social media marketing attempts are going to outright fail – period. Do it yourself if you have the skill, or hire professionals to take care of it.

2. Purchase Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertisement slots on popular search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. It may seem like a bit pricey during the initial stages, but in the long run, this little trick can bring in lots of visitors to your website. Once again, if you are not sure about how to manage these advertising accounts, then do not hesitate to hire a professional to take care of it. Any experienced SEO professional should be able to manage your PPC campaigns just fine.

Once those two tasks are properly carried out, you can concentrate on your social media marketing campaign without any fear of failing. Now all you have to do is ensure that your promotional accounts on social networks do not just contain updates related to your business. Be sure to throw in a healthy mix of updates about topics related to news making waves on the Internet, and interact with your followers/ friends on a regular basis. Keep these pointers in mind, and your social media campaigns cannot possibly fail.

Ok, if a picture is worth a thousand words, let us give you not just one, but whole 10 of them! And that too, all together.

Infographics are the latest rage on the Internet. And they sure are very convenient. If you want a handy visual capsule of all the important information you need, sort of a ready reckoner that you can keep falling upon from time to time, nothing beats a well-designed and informative infographic.

And here are 10 of the best infographics that no serious online marketer can afford to miss.

So, let’s cut to the chase and show you the money. Here’s the link for you.

Social Media Marketing (SMM) is essentially a form of Internet marketing where a company creates brand awareness and markets its products through different social media sites. Social Media Optimization (SMO), on the other hand, refers to the attempt to attract more traffic to one’s website through unique content. There are several benefits of adopting social media marketing.

Brand Awareness:

The different forms of social media can help create better brand awareness and exposure through different communities. Traffic from social media sites is beneficial as you can target a large number of users and direct them to your site.

Links:

Links are an important part of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Search engines value the importance of links to your website. The higher the number of links back to your site, the higher the search engine rank that your website gets. Once your content is published on social media sites, the number of these links and the amount of traffic to your site will increase.

Managing your Reputation:

Social networking sites are good tools to manage your online reputation. Having a social media profile will give you better control over brand dialogues, which can be beneficial in the long run. As your content goes viral and gets promoted by site visitors, other people start noticing your content which will increase links and lead to a better search engine rank.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a form of marketing where you use search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing to market your products and services. There are almost 2 billion searches conducted online every day. SEM involves three elements- indexing, relevance and authoritativeness.

Search Engine Marketing is a broad field of advertising campaign that includes Organic Search Campaign as well as Paid Search Campaign. The purpose of both of these marketing campaigns is the improvement of the visibility of the ad campaign into SERP and to increase the number of targeted visitors. Organic Search Campaign is a free optimization technique where you need not pay anything to search engines. It helps improve your overall website quality and architecture. But the disadvantage of SEO is that it is time consuming and much more dependent on the right techniques and creativity. Organic search will give you more long term benefits than paid search. There are 4 major areas behind a successful Organic SEO plan. These are good quality, relevant keywords and meta title optimization, subject-wise user-friendly content, good quality and relevant inbound or back-links, and social media promotion.

On the other hand, paid search campaign like Google Adwords is a pay-per-click advertising technique that involves bringing about conversion through keyword bidding process; you pay and you get conversion. The fun part of this type of campaign is you have to pay your host only when your ad is clicked on. The higher you bid, higher the chance that your advertisement will appear at the top position in the search engine result page.

Authoritativeness refers to the popularity and the visibility of your site by search engines. You need to position your site as the trusted and knowledgeable resource of your industry. This way, it will be evaluated as more relevant and popular, which will help increase ranking. You can grow your company’s presence through social networking, blogs, publications, trade organizations, and associations. The idea behind this is to get as many link backs to the website as possible.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) includes Search Engine Optimization (SEO), paid advertising, and contextual advertisements.  You can optimize your website for SEM by following some of the tasks given below:

Research Your Plugins: Make sure that you choose software that has good SEM features and plugins that can be enhanced. WordPress has an All In One SEO Pack, which is a good plugin to optimize your website.

Understand SEO: Since SEM involves SEO, you need to have a basic understanding of Search Engine Optimization and how to make your site visible in search results.

Use optimized CMS software: You can consider using content management systems like Drupal or WordPress as they are optimized for SEM.

Increase Inbounds Links: Inbound links can help boost your website’s search results and give your site a higher ranking. Creating original and great content should be a priority.

Consider PPC Advertising: Pay Per Click advertising, or placing ads in search engines can help bring in traffic to your site. You can also keep track of site visitors using tools like Google Analytics and view which links, keywords and advertisements bring in most traffic.