When we talk more, we believe more people will listen, but the opposite is the truth. Everybody wants to be heard and if you just talk and don’t listen, you miss opportunities in your daily life – and in Social Media.

Check out many Twitter messages and LinkedIn forum posts: “My company does this” and “I can do this for you”. Do you think this approach works?

The most important question for anybody is consciously or subconsciously: What is in it for ME?

Always remember this when you want to talk to your target market – or even to your loved ones. Everybody wants to be heard and the best you can do for your people is to listen first, not talk first. Listen to their problems and questions. Then you can come in and help them. Give advice, give genuine opinions without asking yourself what’s in it for you. Your clients and target market (and loved ones) will thank you for it.

How will they thank you for it? By following you, trusting you, liking you and eventually buying from you.

That’s what Social Media Marketing is all about. Look out for opportunities to help the people on your forums of choice and don’t spam them with your company messages. This is how you gain their trust and how you become known as an expert in your field.

Start with it today! Social Media is called Social Marketing, but it is more so Social Communication. Bonding, trusting, sharing, acknowledging, listening, discussing, building groups, making friends, helping are the most important marketing methods in the Social Media realm of Web 2.0.

I went to a local workshop for coaches on Social Media and Marketing and noticed that many newer, and even established, life coaches are having trouble with Social Media and its relevance for their coaching practice, and ultimately their bottom line.

Some coaches particularly asked about Twitter and LinkedIn and why one should even consider using it. Today I’m going to briefly look at why a life coach could benefit from participating on LinkedIn.

The first thing to consider is the overall Social Media and Business Strategy. Unfortunately, we can’t just dive into a Social Network and expect great results, we need to deliberately plan it. Why are we using LinkedIn and does it actually fit into our business model? Very important questions.

Research is always a good start. Stroll around in LinkedIn.com and look who’s around. What kind of people do you see on the forums, what kind of people do you see in the profiles? Do they fit into your target market? How about your colleagues, are they on LinkedIn?

If none of them is on LinkedIn, this could either indicate that coaches like you don’t need to be on this social network or maybe coaches are still a bit hesitant about using Social Media in general. This doesn’t help you, of course. So scroll through LinkedIn’s groups and see what kind of groups are available and what kind of questions are posted on the forums. Is there something that catches your eye? Are there interest groups dealing with coaching? Are there groups that may have the answer to some of your business questions, such as Internet marketing or Social Media questions? It may be a good idea to join those and watch the questions and answers and learn more about online marketing.

Another aspect to consider is the exposure from simply having a LinkedIn account and profile for you and your business: it definitely helps you to get found online if someone types in your name into the search engines. Social Media networks rank extremely high in search engines and it is beneficial for you to have a presence online.

LinkedIn is a bit different to Facebook and Twitter. The audience is more “professional”, that means you will find lots of professionals and even corporate companies on it. This can be a good thing as many life, business, leadership, life balance, and career coaches target this segment of the market. Many coaches deal with people who are employed or who are executives in a company. So you are in the right place to attract ideal clients for your coaching services.

If you join groups where these people hang out you have one foot in the door. Look at the groups these professionals would be interested in, such as business, leadership, marketing, etc. Try to post meaningful messages, helpful tips and ask good questions in these groups to stand out from the crowd. You’d be surprised how easy it is to get noticed with helpful, informative posts on the right messageboards! But beware of spamming and advertising your services. A great way around this is to have your profile well written, fully filled out and a signature created so that each post shows who you are and what you do, for example: “Linda Doyle, Career Coach, website address.”

Be aware that a good(!) photo is highly important. Don’t make the mistake and download a casual holiday photo, one with friends around you or in too casual wear. Many photographers take a nice headshot of you for little money, make use of this.

Summing up, yes, LinkedIn can be a great Social network for a coach, especially for those coaches who deal with professionals. You are doing it to find out more about your target audience, read their questions, see their troubles and get them to know, like and trust you through helpful and informative participation.

Jay Bear, Social Media consultant, was interviewed by Social Examiner’s CEO, Michael Stelzner, about Social Media Marketing, and brought up very interesting thoughts.

Jay Baer Interview from Michael A. Stelzner on Vimeo.

This interview gave me a different view on Twitter’s development during the last year. Jay felt that Twitter used to be the Social Network that described “where you are and what you are doing”, but has moved into a more resource sharing tool where people tells others about good resources and important news they feel others need to know about. Foursquare and Yelp are increasingly taking up Twitter’s former role of “where am I right now” with local/ized Social Networking. Jay also stressed to not undervalue Yelp for its role of local social networking.

Facebook’s Fan/Business pages can be viewed in a way of replacing company’s newsletters and convert previous customers into repeat customers through relationship building communication.

Jay also described that “tools”, such as Twitter and Facebook, are only “tools” and usually interchangeable. He stated he believes  current dominant Social Media networks will change in the future, just in the same way as dominant Social Networks of the past, eg. MySpace, lost its dominance and got replaced by Facebook. It is important to have a content strategy using the Social Media tools, but not solely seeing the Social Media networks as the end all without having a proper strategy. Without a strategy that connects all utilized tools and social networks the social media campaign is worthless.

Jay also pointed out that many companies have different people handing Social Media and email marketing, which leads to a lack of coherence in their campaigns. It is important to link them together and also make sure that email newsletters have “share” buttons included so that your messages and blog posts can be shared easily by readers.

Video and Youtube is still underutilized by companies in its importance of improving search rankings. Companies need to catch on to use video more often.

Many people come to my website because they search for more information on Traffic Geyser. Traffic Geyser has been strongly promoted in the past half year as the new way to earn money online. So what’s the story about this? Is it just another “get rich quick” scam?

No, it is not. If you want to set up a business and are prepared to put in the work to run this business and help other small business owners, you will have a good resource and system in Traffic Geyser to make this happen.

The system leverages the whole Internet Marketing “pie”, which means it sends out your message (about your business and services), to the whole spectrum of Internet Marketing media. Traffic Geyser makes it easy to make use of Mobile Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, Article Marketing, Blogging, Search Engine Marketing, Email Marketing and Social Media Marketing in “one click”. Ok, it’s not really one click, but the Traffic Geyser system enables the user to spread information and relationship building messages in an easier way and ion a less time consuming fashion.  It utilizes a variety of tools to get the message out to your audience and in different media channels so you can be sure that your message, and the message of your clients, will be heard and found.

Many small businesses have a website and engage a bit in Social Media, but don’t really get much traffic to said website nor get known in their target niche as the expert. They are one “player” in a big pool of” players” and have little chance of being found by clients. Webdesigners promise their clients to optimize their website to get an optimum number of traffic, but in reality it’s not that easy and even if potential prospects find your website, it’s not guaranteed that they stay on your website nor buy from you.

That’s where relationship marketing and Social Media comes in because you can foster relationships and become visible and trustworthy in the eyes of your target market. Video marketing is one of the best tools to help with this and Traffic Geyser relies heavily on Video Marketing. Additionally, it helps re-purposing content to get your marketing messages out in different forms, such as articles and blog posts.

Seeing someone in a video instantly makes them feel familiar. A website itself will never bond with an audience as well as a person in a video will do. We are people and we love looking at other people.  Around 30 billion videos are watched in the USA alone per month and they make up almost 60% of all web traffics, so you can confidently say that video marketing is a good option for you to get “known”, “liked” and “trusted”, the foundational pillars of Internet sales.

Traffic Geyser is a complete system tool that helps non-techy people use online tools successfully without knowing as much as an online expert or virtual assistant would know about the technical things. When you log into your Traffic Geyser account you will get instantly to the tools you need to market your services or you can use your Traffic Geyser account to help your clients, such as local business owners, get visibility online for a fee. This is the trick of earning money with this system. You are the person offering the video marketing service to your small business clients and they will pay you a fee for it. If you employ all the tools that Traffic Geyser uses by yourself, without the system in the background, it will take more time and you will require more technical skills and training to do so.

That’s why Traffic Geyser is so popular. You can do it without the system, but it takes more time (and time is money, we all agree!) and you need a lot of training in the technical side of Internet Marketing and Online business tools. And not everybody is happy to put in that time or wants to become a technical person. Many people rather utilize Traffic Geyser’s help and “done for you”-services and sell the benefits of the system to their small business clients for an instant reward.

Some hot news from Hubspot: as Facebook and LinkedIn already cater for businesses and their communications with the public, Twitter is now rolling out a specific Business Centre to help businesses with their client relations even better than before.

Some businesses already employ staff members to manage customer services and complaint issues via Twitter with those staff being online on Twitter all day long to deal with clients in 140 signs or less, so the new Business Centre functions will be a more streamlined and customizable solution for many businesses. Read more here: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/5967/Twitter-Gets-Business-Savvy-with-New-Business-Center.aspx?source=Blog_Email_[Twitter+Gets+Busines]

This is a welcome addition to Twitter and will make it more competitive in it competition with Facebook.

I couldn’t resist embedding this Video by Mari Smith in here. It’s a great announcement of the awesome Social Media Summit, happening in May 2010. I have joined already and am excited about the excellent topics and line up of speakers.

Everybody who’s the who is who in Social Media will be there, such as Mari Smith, Guy Kawasaki,Chris Brogan, Darren Rowse, Brian Clark, Denise Waikeman, Michael A. Stelzner, etc. etc. Just too many to mention, check it out on http://www.socialmediasummit10.com.

I’ve also joined the Social Media Summit LinkedIn group with many interesting threads and am amazed at how many different industries are represented. If you think only online entrepreneurs would attend, think again. There are many industry professionals and corporates mixing and mingling as well as doctors and coaches and trainers and …

Check it out in Mari’s video, I’m looking forward to seeing you at the SMS10 forum:

A few days ago I read an amusing article on my favorite Social Media site, Hubspot, about the excessive automation in Social Media. Here you will find the post: Sense and Sociability – Why Zombies don’t belong in Social Media.

This post came really timely because I have to admit that I’m getting quite bored with some of the zombies on Twitter, for example. I am a big believer in automation in online business, but too much is too much.

I have to even admit that I don’t read direct messages from Twitter anymore. It’s bad, I know, but almost every Twitter member sends out those typical “visit my website to buy blabla” or “become rich by doing that on this website” messages automatically. I am sure I’m not the only person who feels like that (otherwise Hubspot wouldn’t have a post on it, anyway).

Social Media is a relationship building tool and despite all of us talking business and sending out links and advice on business related topics, we can still be human and responsibly use the social networking channels to talk to people, not to plaster our environment with braindead messages that no one reads anyway. This defeats the whole purpose of Social Media.

The same applies to faceless Twitter profiles. Ok, there are some big networks that have a profile which is administered in a less personal way, such as news profiles (CNN and the like), but if you sell Internet Marketing and you ARE an individual, why do you need to disguise yourself and post some photo with cash on it?

This is not intended to anybody in particular, but these are the profiles that I often discard and not follow.

What do you think? Do you feel the same?

Sheri McConnell is a successful entrepreneur I admire greatly. Here I share with you her latest article:

Create a Timeless and Focused Marketing Plan for Your Business
As you probably have heard by now—you aren’t in the business of (fill in the blank here). You are in the business of marketing. Your marketing must be automated and systemized. Period.

This article is by our team member, Eleanor Marks Prior:

No business man would stop thinking about great innovations for their business. Whether you are in  a small business or a big one, you are looking for advice on how to make more profits, or you’ve never stopped researching how other successful businesses are taking advantage of their success. We could never deny that the new online marketing techniques have a great role. There has been a lot of craze and hype in the media recently about the impact of social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. While some of it is overstated much of what is going on could be called a revolution in the way people do business around the world.

Many people are jumping on the Twitter bandwagon, for example, and are opening up accounts, but few have any real idea of what to do once they get into the Twitter world–and the same with Facebook. Especially when it comes to business many business owners simply get an online presence and hope for the best. Even fewer take any real advantage of YouTube as a free advertising vehicle, or even know about what article marketing is.

All these social media sites can help you drive masses of traffic to your website. This is much like people coming in off the street in a busy business district to browse in your store. Once they are in the door the chances that they will buy something are pretty good. The same thing can be done to attract people to your small business online. You just have to learn the ways of the social media and social networking world.

Many small business owners think social media is only useful for large brands, like Dell or Southwest Airlines. The truth is any small business that effectively invests time in social media marketing can improve customer loyalty and increase the best kind of marketing there is: word of mouth.

Social media makes businesses more accessible and personable to customers and potential customers. It enables small businesses to maintain long term relationships and connections, increase referrals and increase trust. Used correctly, social media is extremely powerful for establishing and growing an online reputation.

Constantly maintaining online reputations is one of the reasons why Online Reputation Management exists. In real sense, Online Reputation Management (ORM) was created to help business owners and professionals deal with bad press.

Even a large company or a small one could not get rid of the receiving end of negative publicity. Remember that the internet never fails to forget. Everything we do online leaves a digital mark that will never go away. This gives a reason why Online Reputation Management serves as a necessity in the field of business today.

See the advantages of Online Reputation Management for companies:

• It improves customer satisfaction by gaining insights from consumers about what is good and bad about their product or services. This increases perceptions of brand/ product by creating opportunities to listen to and engage consumers.
• It helps on gaining insights about their competitors and their customers’ perceptions about their products and services. This helps in the understanding of the relationship between user generated content and traditional forms of online media, e.g. news, print, etc.
• It maintains shareholder value by mitigating risk by having ears close to the ground where opinions about a business are being formed and propagated.
• They’re likely to be engaged in more effective Public Relations by understanding who the real influencers are.
• ORM takes a role in providing early warning systems for reactive and defensive PR.
• This may also help in reducing marketing dollars by learning how to reach out to customers more cheaply.
• May reduce internal costs by employing services which save time and effort, as well as money.
• ORM helps to identify gaps for products and services which can be developed for profitable niche markets.
• It gains insight into online networks and keywords and key phrases found in user-generated content, which can help to bolster natural search results about the person, product, or business.

Tips for maximizing the efficiency of your online reputation management endeavors:

1. Set up your social networking sites with your own name.

In other words, you need to create an interlinked “web” of these powerful social networks – that all point to you. This is profoundly important because it establishes your presence in the major search engines like Google. Using aliases, pen names or otherwise will not help establish your branding effectiveness.

2. Try to get the same username set up for all of your social media engagement profiles.

3. When you add any type of content to your social networking sites, keep your online reputation management plan in mind. You should add relevant materials.

Seeing the advantages of Online Management training, I can say that it’s a mistake for companies to launch an online reputation management campaign after the damage of bad press has already spread which is a mistake. Everyone must take a preventative approach to protect  business.

This great post was contributed by Eleanor Marks Prior, WordPress Whiz and Social Media maven.