Developing a Social Media Strategy

As our culture becomes more niche, it becomes increasingly difficult for advertisers and companies to reach their target audiences. However one needs a strategy to leverage social networks ethically. I've outlined some steps in order to develop a strategy to utilize these networks.

(1) Identify your niche. This may seem obvious, but it does not hurt to think about the search keywords that would be most relevant to identifying one's niche. Sometimes people do not give significant thought to not only the most relevant keywords, but permutations or misspellings of those keywords.

(2) Find blogs and tweets relevant to that niche. Find out what is going on in those niches. It is imperative that one keep abreast of the interesting conversations that occur within members of a niche. In order to do this, one can utilize any number of softwares, like technocrati and twitscoop. Only by reading what people are interested in, can you gain real insight into your niche.

(3) Determine if what you are selling is of value to the niche. Even though you may think that your product is fantastic, it may turn out that for whatever reason your niche is not interested. This may be due to the fact that there may be a better option, or that the issue the product addresses no longer is an issue, or that you are targeting the wrong niche. You can learn whether your product or offer is relevant through the insight gathered in the last step.

(4) Develop your delivery method. Will I market this product through text ads, banners, or some combination? How will the offer look? What will it say? Will a person that clicks on the ad first go to a landing page or straight to the offer? Delivery method is a crucially important step. In fact, a good relevant delivery method is a huge factor in how well the offer does.

(5) Measure, measure, and measure. It is important to track your offers to determine what works best. Often times two offers that sell the same product will have tremendously different results. You must track these offers in order to determine what elements make them effective.

As always please comment on how helpful you think this post is....

Be Wary of Certain Affiliate Networks

I am wondering if anyone out there has worked with shady affiliate networks. I have had the unfortunate experience of doing well with an offer from one of these networks and then not getting paid. The network's reason for not ponying up was that the advertiser was having fiscal troubles and could not afford to pay the commission. I found this very suspect and decided to terminate my relationship with that network.

Have any of you had similar stories or other issues with networks? Would appreciate it if you could post your stories here.

Paying Attention to Current News

Perhaps the best way to select offers on lead and sale networks is to follow the current news. This probably sounds obvious, but you would be surprised at how often marketers ignore watershed events because they are not paying attention to the popular culture.

For instance, reality television is very popular right now. Therefore if you can tap into a niche associated with a personality on reality television then it can appeal to a certain segment that would then be more interested in relevant offers. A good example of this is American Idol. Typically people root for a particular contestant or judge that has a certain style. Those people would be more receptive to skinny jeans or another artist that has a similar style.

Ideally you'd like a scientific approach to your offer selection - that is, select those offers that appeal to relatively untapped or misunderstood segments. However this is becoming more difficult as the SEM space gets saturated. Therefore creative and interesting strategies for not only marketing, but selecting offers are increasingly valuable. What do y'all think?