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Can You Really Outsource Your Social Networking?

December 15, 2008

I know that this sounds very funny at first. After all, you wouldn’t send your secretary to attend your local Chamber of Commerce event. But, you might have her put the event on your calendar and send follow up thank you cards to the people you met there. She might set up a system for you to follow up with the people you met at the event. Social networking is the same way. There is no reason why you can’t outsource a very large part of your social networking busy work so that you have more time to develop strong relationships with your clients.

Also, having as assistant do the work means that you will develop a system and post to your various communities more frequently.

Here are 7 Ways Your Assistant Can Help

1. Finding Potential Followers and Friends

Your assistant can easily build your network by looking at networks of people who are following the people in your community and sending friend requests. They can also keep up with automated contact managers like Plaxo to make sure that all of your contacts are connected to your network.

2. Responding To Friend Requests

Your assistant can take care of most of this for you once you have developed a template “thank you for being my friend” message. A good assistant can also tailor the template to suit the person who is getting the message. You can also develop a friend policy to help decide which requests to accept.

3. Connecting the Dots

Make Your Posts Do Double Duty A good assistant will be able to help you connect the various pieces of your social networking empire. Your blog posts can automatically show up on Twitter, your Twitter posts and Facebook profile can show up on your blog…. Etc. Once the connections are made, your networking becomes much easier and much more effective.

4. Strategic Posting

Your assistant can send tweets and post Facebook announcements about your events, when the event is about to start, etc. She can also publish information about your event in all of your different social networks. She can also programs like TweetLater to schedule your Tweets to occur when you are not at the computer.

5. Birthday Wishes

One of the most powerful ways to build personal relationships is to send birthday cards. Social networking tools like Plaxo and Facebook make this very easy. Your assistant can send either e-cards, or (even better) actual cards. Send Out Cards is a great way to send real cards. Your assistant types the message into the computer and the company mails a real card – for less than a dollar. You can try out Send Out Cards for free to see if it will work for you.

6. Keeping Up with Your Peeps

You an learn a lot about what is going on in the lives of your circle through social networking. Your assistant can be invaluable in keeping tabs on people so that you can build the relationship. She can scan the updates and let you know when clients have launched new products, had babies, gotten new jobs – so that you can send out personal congratulations.

7. Pimp Your Profile

A good assistant can make sure that your profiles (the social networking equivalent of your business card) are in tip top shape. She can add videos, links to other people, pictures from your latest trip and more. She can expand your empire by creating and updating profiles on different social networking sites. A good VA does this sort of thing for other clients too. Don’t be afraid to rely on her expertise to help you keep up on what is new and important in the world of Social Networking.

So, start making an impression in the social networking world…hire a virtual assistant today.

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Link Building Strategies – How to Build Back Links and Get More Website Visitors

November 21, 2008

building links
Lynne Lee asked:


If you want your site to rank well in the search engines you need an effective link building strategy. The search engines like to see links pointing back to your site, the more links they see, the more important they think your site is and the higher your site will rank. But you don’t want just any old links. The best kinds of back links are links with relevant keywords.

Link building needs to be an ongoing part of your search engine optimization strategy, the more back links you have the better. But don’t rush and suddenly get thousands of links pointing to your site, you need to grow your back links naturally.

It seems more natural to get a few back links every day than to suddenly get thousands of back links overnight. The search engines watch for unnatural patterns, and if they think you are trying to manipulate them, they will drop your site from the search results.

The one thing you don’t want to do is give the appearance of anything that looks contrived. Resist the temptation to buy thousands of links, exploding your link popularity overnight will get your site penalized.

How do you get back links to your site?

There are many ways to get back links:

Develop relationships with other webmasters to get reciprocal links from related sites.

Involve yourself in forums related to your niche and include a link to your site as part of your signature file.

Create Squidoo lenses or HubPages with a link back to your site.

If you have a blog, add your blog feed to your Squidoo lens or HubPage.

Write articles for article directories and include a link back to your site in the bio box or author’s resource box.

Use Social Bookmarking services to bookmark your pages and encourage your visitors to do the same.

Use Twitter to send a ‘tweet’ when you post a new article.

Create profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn and Naymz and include links to your site

This is not an exhaustive list; it is just to give you idea to get you started.

Get lots of back links using relevant keywords

How you link is important. Create anchor text using keywords for your back links when you can.

Anchor text is a clickable link, it is simply the text used to link to your site. The search engines use this text to help them decide what your page, is about. So, when possible, choose what the anchor text will be and make sure it includes your keywords.

You want to use both your main keywords, and variations of your keywords. Try to vary the text you use to link to your site so that it looks natural. And remember that each page on your site ranks for its own keywords so the keywords you use when you link to a specific page on your site won’t necessarily be the same as when you link to your home page.

You won’t always be able to specify the anchor text, but make sure you seize the opportunity when you can.

Reciprocal links are the least valuable but it won’t hurt to have a few reciprocal links from a few well chosen sites. If you swap links with another site, make sure you say what you want your anchor text to be.

When you create Squidoo lenses and HubPages, or create your forum signature you have full control over your anchor text. Create links using variations of the keywords you want the page to rank for.

Link building is just one aspect of search engine optimization, but it’s an important one, so create a link building strategy and keep on building links to the pages on your site. You will see an improvement in your search engine rankings and an increase in the traffic to your site. Building back links is well worth the effort.



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