Peter Butler

I made this post to my core “Smarter Websites” site but the same principal applies to Mortgage Brokers.

There’s a lot of ways you can leverage off social media marketing to build your business and increase traffic to your website.

Social media marketing is a form of viral marketing – which is effectively getting others to share your message with the world, mostly using the social media networks.

How that might look is simply this – the visitor to your site has read your stuff and they liked it, great!

How can you take advantage of that and make it easy for them to share it with the world?

Have you ever read a ‘post’ on a website and noticed the nifty little icons down the bottom? – like facebook, digg, linkedin, my space maybe and a heap of others.

Giving your readers a quick and easy way to share and promote that ‘post’ or article to whatever social media sites they use will be the smartest marketing move you ever make.

I’ve done it many times with my own clients – I’ve read their post, liked it and thought others would too – I’ve clicked the social share button and bang – there it is on my facebook for all my friends to view it. Once its set up it runs on auto pilot and your clients and visitors will literally run it for you. When you set it up right there’s nothing more for you to do.

There a literally hundreds of social media and bookmarking sites in the world.

How can you tap into those in the easiest way possible?

The WordPress platform and plug ins is the perfect model to minimize your time and effort with social media marketing but maximize the result.

Today we’re going to focus on a WordPress plug in called sociable. Specifically we’re going to show you how to set it up to maximize its use by your clients and therefore your exposure to the world.

That’s the theory now let’s get down to actually setting it up. This video shows you step by step.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiu4rI6WGlY

First you need to go to your WordPress admin area. For non WordPress users this is where you get to control your entire website.

In the video I’ve already opened the sociable tool from within the settings section. There are already 105 social media and bookmarking sites to choose from within ‘sociable’. All you need to do is simply click the radio button to select it.

Now the trick is to know which sites are going to give you maximum exposure.

You need to put yourself in your client’s shoes.

• Where do they go ‘online’ socially’?
• How old are they?
• What do they do by day? … or night!
• Who do they hang out with? … or want to hang out with!
• There’s also a sexy print function and email function too, which might be useful for your particular group.

You need to consider all the demographics.

But here’s the thing – you don’t have to have all of this exactly right from the get go. Just review your settings in a month. With there being hundreds of social and media sites to choose from you only want to include the ones relative to your ‘group’, otherwise it really is overkill and you will lose the effectiveness of the whole concept.

You might be wondering – what do half of these mean and which ones should you choose?

Here’s some links that will give you an overview of that.

Vladimir is well respected and comes out with some great info along with some of his own plug ins. This list is very cleverly set up.
http://www.prelovac.com/vladimir/top-list-of-social-media-sites

Here’s a site that lists social and bookmarking sites by category – very handy. http://traffikd.com/social-media-websites/

Neither of these are definitive but they’ll give you a handy quick start.

Let’s go back to the 3 best tips for using LinkedIn.

Here’s the catch. The most important thing is how to prompt your reader to promote your page or post – oh, yeah…

When you do a new post or page you get to choose whether you want the ‘sociable’ option to display. Sometimes it might not be appropriate, like on a thank you page. All you do is just tick the radio button, it’s that simple.

So – back to prompting your reader. The ‘share and enjoy’ is just not going to cut it. You need a strong call to action – your actual tag line will depend on your clients and target market – but don’t be shy!

I have a client who runs a back-packer hostel. He might say – “Help Share Planet Inn With the World – Click Your Social Fave Site Below”

If you’re a Mortgage Broker, Coach or Consultant you might say “Referrals Are the Greatest Compliment – Click Your Social Fave To Share and I’ll Love You Forever” or whatever. Just don’t use a pathetic line – if you’re boring it won’t get shared.

The tag line I’m testing is “Reap, Sow… Click Your Social Fave Icon To Share and It’ll Get Shared Back”.

I want to try and prompt people using networking as the psychological trigger. If you think that might work for you feel free to plagiarize.

The last couple of settings are simple.

• Post – yes
• Pages – yes, it might be a squeeze page – would you like to see that up on Facebook or LinkedIn? Um, yes.
• And the last setting is ‘open in new window’ – I set it to yes.
• Click ‘save changes’ and you’re good to go.

Presto –all ready for social and viral marketing – It’s a beautiful thing.

Let’s have a look at what actually happens when the facebook icon is clicked on.

It will take them straight through to their facebook profile. They’ll get to choose a thumbnail image direct from your site and they’ll also get to make a comment. It places an excerpt of your ‘post’ to their facebook profile complete with a link back to site – all within seconds. That means that their friends will now see your post.

What makes this so powerful is that ‘what others say about you is infinitely more powerful than what you say about yourself’. It’s very powerful and so underutilized.

So, if you want people to do it on your posts then do it on other’s –

“Reap, Sow… Click Your Social Fave Icon To Share and It’ll Get Shared Back”

If you enjoyed this tutorial, hit your social fave icon or three and the universe will see it’s returned.

I hope this was helpful.

Next time around I’ll be showing you a really simple but powerful way to get back links to your site. Why would you want that – hey, the more people looking at you the more the Google Gods will smile upon you?

So, go to it. Start sharing and make sure you don’t miss out on the next vid by hitting the blue button on my site or just sign up for the weekly website prosperity tips.