Top Ten Rules of Social Media Marketing

These rules apply to any product, service or opportunity. These views are consistently expressed in many tutorials from various experts in internet marketing. Following these rules will ensure that you get the best return on investment from your social networking.

1 - Never Spam! Do not greet new friends with a pitch or your product or opportunity (do you realize how many of those that people in networking receive every day?). It is especially rude and unprofessional to post biz-op ads on someones personal profile wall. This is akin to walking into someone's house without invitation and pitching your business while they are entertaining family and friends or business associates of their own! This makes you stand out as an amateur.

2 - Personalize your profile, do not make your profile look like a biz-opp ad or product ad. Allow people to get to know YOU! After all, your goal is to build TRUST.

3 - Build Relationships First and Foremost! Do this .through personal contact, both online and ultimately on the phone if you truly plan on long term business relationships.  Relationships come first in social media as a given, business second!

4 - Provide Value - for Free - your content / information must be at least one of the 3 E's; Entertaining, Educational or Enlightening, even if it is from another source, just give credit to that source!

5 - Join groups which are part of your target market

6 - Make contacts / friends with people in those groups. Build a huge following, gradually over time.

7 - Contribute value to those groups, DO NOT Spam

8 - Make comments on members' posts to the group(s), vote and promote theiir content

9 - Follow up with and thank everyone who promotes / helps to syndicate your content, comments on your posts, comments on your comments

10 - Post your content from your various postings to your blog, increasing its SEO by updates, and post links back to your blog posts as an alternative to posting the entire content in a forum discussion. If your article has value then provide links to the content within your social media so that it may be syndicated.

To Your Success in Marketing and Happy Networking!