For those of you who claim social media cannot help you due to the niche you are in, I highly doubt it. Here is a list of the top social media sites per their niche. Check them out and start using them to your benefit, these sites can generate a large amount of traffic when used properly. Don’t Forget To Bookmark!

You have yourself a well built website, filled it with content, and you’ve been online for months but not much seems to be happening. Your blog is an important tool especially if you are a business. It can cut large amounts of work and save money by providing a place for up to date information. Here’s the top 7 reasons your blog may fail to perform.

1. You Have No Blueprint - Be sure to have a sole purpose when you create your blog. If you still don’t have one months in then its time to reevaluate what you what the website to do for you. After setting goals for the website, move into keeping on track. A steady work flow will ensure that people can count on the website to produce.

2. No Use Of Social Media - Branch out to various outlets to make your site known. If you have a defined market you will find that relevant websites drive much better traffic, consistently. I would take 350 primed users compared to 1,000 random hits any day. Get involved on Twitter, Digg, FaceBook, and the millions of others to start branding yourself or your company. Social media marketing is powerful already and it will continue to grow as the online world becomes more prevalent.

3. You Need The Right Audience - Before you worry about what an audience will like, you need to get one. Demographics have been used forever for a reason, they work. Being able to know how old, what gender, location, and much more can be very useful when marketing your brand. Once you have built this audience, you have an army of targeted traffic to play with.

4. Site Performance - People on the internet are whinny babies. With today’s high speed internet people don’t want to wait for crap, not even pictures of what you ate for dinner. They want everything literally at their fingertips and in an easy to follow fashion. Another bad idea is to have more ads than content on your pages… just another rule of thumb. Try to keep your page loads snappy and install WP Super Cache if your on WordPress. If you don’t use WordPress, quit blogging.

5. Features Are Not Up To Date - Stay up to date on certain trends within web design. Keep your website looking fresh with new features that take advantage of advanced scripting and browser capabilities. They can not only add functionality, but cut down load times. Keep in mind that people like to think they have something exclusive.

6. Your Not In It To Win It - Your website is going to require commitment to sustain growth. For real, your website is never, ever going to be finished. And if you are thinking of doing a website full time for your source of income, this rule goes doubly for you. This does not mean that you need to post 40 pieces a week to your site. Not giving anything new back to your visitors will leave them feeling either two ways: 1) They leave feeling like there’s no point in returning as the website has not been updated in months. 2) You have built a large audience and your content flow is normally consistent and high in quality. Your readers could be the addictive type that visits daily if not hourly (lol) to see if there is anything new. While this is a great feat, you need to be careful. If you wait to long people may think you are going dorment.

7. Your Not Benefitting From Your Competition - Your competition is a great source of information! Lets be real people, you don’t think anyone looks at your site for ideas? So, why not look around the web and see whats up in your industry. Your all preaching to the same crowd so don’t let your competition become more appealing.

One question I hear so much of is how can I make myself (or my company) stand out from the crowd. The problem is, most niches are becoming highly competitive thanks to the large increase in affiliate marketing. There are also many people developing their own personal brands. So how can you stick out and become noticed online?

1. Start From Scratch - At this point there are so many impersonators out there, you need to be original. Obviously someone else is most likely going to have a similar idea so you need to stand out in other ways. The number of business and personal brands is essentially limitless so it comes down to your online presence. Create a better wheel when it comes to your blog or company page. Make your brand visible and have a professional design, not just a stock template.

2. Set Goals For Yourself - Without knowing what you want to accomplish you will have a hard time creating a website for your own brand or company. Start to network with those in your niche, keep your friends close and your enemies closer right? Also start to think about what keywords and terms you would like to be ranking for. This information will come in handy when you go looking for a domain name. One of the reasons my blog grew so much in these first few weeks was because I set a goal for creating content. I set a small goal of just two posts per day. Over the course of a day it may not seem like much, but over the course of a month that’s 40 + posts. You will soon find that once you get into the groove of cranking out content, it becomes much easier and you won’t have any problems surpassing your goals.

3. Be The Capo - If you work at taking the position as leader of your niche, you will obviously be much more successful. You want to be the person with the latest and greatest info, tips, and insider news around the block. This will build you a reputation for having above average content and this is sure to sway visitors, to subscribers.

4. Be More Social - Attending local (or even… not local) events is a good idea to extend your brand. Whether its a conference, round-table, lecture, mixer, or even just a dinner event, this is your chance to network. I would say this is something you cant put a value on because you are interacting with real branding potential. Wear a company shirt or hand out some swag and people will be sure to remember your site.

5. Be Yourself, Be Interesting - The reason some people almost fanatically read some blogs is because they enjoy the views of the writer. Or perhaps their style or whatever it may be. Bottom line is not everyone is going to like you no matter what. There will always be people who are fans, and their will always be haters that envy your success. With this being said why not just be yourself, it’s much easier and readers will be more likely to get into your content. Make your blog or site more interesting as well. Out of the ordinary writing styles (me?) and providing a view that many don’t normally think with is a great strategy.

You are now ready to put your brand into motion online. Following these tips should definitely get you started in the direction. Stay real people…

Twitter is going to be one of the tools you either hate or love, you will see it as either a time waster or one of your top new tools. As you start to tweet away you will notice that people will begin to follow you possibly even flock to you. Whether or not you follow them back is up to you. Here are seven tips to get you started on twitter.

1. Start Tweeting First - Once you get those first few tweets out of the way, it will become much easier for you to make posts on Twitter. Another way this will help you is that people are looking for other people that are into the same things. When people come to your Twitter page and there’s no tweets, they won’t know whether or not to follow you.

2. Reveal Yourself - People want to have conversations with other real people. You will see that most people have pictures of themselves in avatars. I personally tend to sway to real pictures instead of the lame cartoons that many use. Also, fill out your bio and link to your blog if you have one. The more people feel like you are another member of the circle, you have a better chance at fitting in on Twitter.

3. Read Those You Want To Follow First - Start to read up on conversations before you get involved. You will find that simply following everyone you see can make the service a bit harder to use when you really want to use it for communicating and reading up on recent tweets. If what they are tweeting is not interesting to you, keep on movin’

4. Don’t Be A Spammer - Are you following 197 people and only have 6 following you? You might be a spammer. If your not, this would make you appear as one and most people don’t like this bread of Twitter users. Reveal yourself and let people know you are there to add to the Twitter community. Build up your account and you will find that people will start following you regardless.

5. Stray From Twitter Celebrities – Even if you do become followed by someone like Scoble, they are just doing it to build up their visibility. Many Twitter celebrities are there simply for the popularity contest and depending on how you want to use Twitter, following these types most likely won’t help you. Being in their list of followed people really provides no value as they follow everyone and anything.

6. Play Favorites - Use those little stars next to each tweet to your benefit. By favoring certain tweets you let people know what interests you, and what you are passionate about. If you are debating whether or not to follow someone, checking out their favorites is a great way to see what they are all about.

7. Pump The Brakes - Most of the time you will notice that many conversations on Twitter do not really lead anywhere. Sometimes however, conversations can evolve into business ideas, new clients, and new friendships. Take time to tweet and build a reputation before you start to really get yourself out there. Taking your time in the beginning to learn the dynamics will be much more beneficial in the end.

Alright you Twitter n00bs, it’s time to get out there and give it a go. It won’t take long before you decide whether or not it’s a tool you want to stick with.

Once again I find myself face to face with yet another Twitter related service and I have to say this one is pretty useless. Great… you can find out where you stand against the masses in terms of followers and profile completeness (wtf?) but does it really matter or help you in some way? I like to think of Twitter more as a tool than anything else. One that I try to keep myself using as it does reap small rewards (need to increase my followers ) but this service does not give you any real information.

I would say judge your Twitter account based on what you use it for, and what you need it to do. If you simply use it for communicating with a few co-workers, than the value of your account would be based on how vital communicating with them over Twitter really is. I see this as another attempt at a viral service that uses Twitter’s popularity to stimulate growth.

If you ask me the Seinfeld & Gates ads wernt really that bad. Granted I didn’t really get the point but I get a chuckle out of Gates being in the ads. Microsoft has released three new ads recently focusing on real Microsoft employees and users. A much better tactic if you ask me.

My fave: Big Billy G and multi-millionaire rapper Pharrell.

This one has Eva Longoria and Gates:

No Gates?

So I was on my way home (speeding… obviously) and wouldn’t you know it the day I don’t have my radar detector I get snagged by a state trooper. Like most people my age (yes cops do discriminate…. in case you didn’t know) the cops like to give us a hard time. Maby its my 5% tint windows in a state that only allows 70? Why it was necessary for officer Irland to walk up on me with his hand on his gun (holster undone) I don’t know… Last time I checked going 76 in a 55 was breaking the law, but not punishable by being shot on site.

Anyways back to main point. Just recently I guess the NYSDMV has made the move to online ticket processing. If this doesn’t say something about NY, you would have to live here to experience the joys of our massive police force. To make up for what the state is missing in taxes, they hit us with tickets for pretty much anything you can imagine and charge outrageous surcharge fees. They do all of this to pay for the necessities of course… The new 2008 model police interceptors, 2008 Chevy Tahoe’s and the 2008 Ford Explorers. Lets also not forget the importance of having numerous 2008 Mustangs, Dodge Chargers, and Corvettes. People are getting so many tickets in NY, that they had to make an online “transaction center” to pay and plead guilty online. Pretty sad when your police force is more worried about catching speeders than people killing each other.

If they where smart they would leave us alone and start going after the drug dealers. In NYS our officers are allowed to seize (keep) any money, cars, property, etc. when acting in a raid. They claim this money has strict regulations placed on it for how it should be used but I highly doubt it goes were they say it does.

If you want to make stacks of money, dominating your niche is a sure fire way to get there. One of the most basic, fundamental elements of Social Media is the ability to create dialog… most likely through comments of some sort. Developing a community on your site not only strengthens your site, but provides for a quickly growing organic (free) user base. Essentially what this gives you is power. The power to post something on your blog or company’s news feed and instantly put that message out to your audience. Websites like TechCrunch have at times had 1 million plus RSS subscribers. In a way this gives them a lot of power and influence over their niche. If you are a small business looking to dominate your niche an online presence with a strong community can put you in that position.

People Will Come To You
With an online community people will come directly to your looking for what you provide. All of the time and money spent on advertising can be greatly decreased over time. Creating a strong online community will also put you in a good position to network and build relationships with various online authorities. Content is so easily shared across the internet that your audience will be able to share it with others in many ways. This insures that as you grow, your reputation and brand have a much further reach than your competition’s.

In-House Solutions
Another benefit to building a community is the ability to do all of your news publishing with a direct path to your target market. Outside PR is always important but why not tap in to social media and establish your company or website as the go-to spot for your niche. Being able to develop an idea and publish it online to your community takes no more time than it does to write it with one click publishing.

Just an interesting look at how effective social media marketing can be. I can easily see this becoming popular for certain niche based small businesses. The ability to build a massive online community around your brand can bring a lot of power and dominance to you in your niche. It’s not going to happen overnight but once it starts to grow, all you need is fuel for the fire.

The other day I was watching a TV program on USA networks and I remembered a pretty slick domain I had picked up but had forgotten about. I couldn’t even believe I had snagged it as it was one of USA’s top new shows. I had bought it last summer and apparently forgot about it to long because I lost it and it’s now in the redemptionPeroid.

redemptionPeriod is a 30 calendar day period were the original owner can make a request to get it back. I’m not really big on domaining but I did not know there was a hefty fee involved with this process.

My rep at NameCheap.com were I got the domain from told me it costs $9.29 to renew the domain, plus a $200.00 fee. These orders are specially processed by the management and they ensure the domain will get back to you. Don’t get me wrong, $210 beans ain’t shit if you lapsed on a fully developed domain but I had it pointed here to smmguru.com collecting dust. Hopefully ill be able to snag it when its out of redemption

Becoming top dog in your niche can bring you the power, authority, and reach to generate large amounts of traffic and revenue. If you try and try but continue to fail you could be falling victim to some of the follow situations.

You Serve No Purpose
Many authorities not only create there own quality content, they act as a central filter for their niche. Being able to provide all of the best content in your niche and act as a filter for the recycled mess that has become most of some niches (SEO anyone?) You want to be the go-to spot so you need to provide the best of everything or people will not have any reason to come back, especially in a crowded niche.

You Don’t Know Whats Going On In Your Niche
If you are not following what’s breaking in your niche it will be dam hard to become an authority. Being an authority is not just a title you get, it’s more work and only the people who can work for it will get it . Know what services are popping up in your industry, who got bought out on Monday, who may be selling etc. Staying current can provide you with a strong platform to build content, and a reputation for knowing everything in your niche.

You Don’t Have Anything O.G.
Being able to provide content that’s highly original and contains more details will set you apart. Being able to do it first, and more informative, will send you even higher. Coming back to knowing your niche, researched content will build a much better reputation.

You Don’t Have a Community
Building a strong community on your website can become quite rewarding. Some blogs have almost cult followings now which should tell you that they can no doubt drive a message effectively. Once a community is developed, it won’t take long before it’s blazing if you work at it. That community can then be used to generate large amounts of traffic, useful for generating revenue and buzz to new projects.

You Don’t Sell Yourself
In order to become the authority people have to first know what your about. Post on relevant sites, social media outlets, and submit guest posts on relevant blogs. “Well, why would an authority promote themselves?” At first, you are starting with nothing. The idea in this stage is to get as many people as you can to see what you got. If you have developed content suitable to the above tips, people will most likely realize that you are a better source of information. This will then lead to you becoming more of an authority and you will grow organically without having to promote yourself.

You Don’t Work For It
In order to be an authority you have to work at it. Develop a plan for how you will create a constant flow of content and ideas. Being able to provide the most up to date information and new ideas first will make you an authority. Sitting back and recycling content is not going to take you to the level of an authority. Set daily goals to establish your online presence and continue to follow through.

I think you get the idea now, making money online can be easy if you are willing to invest time in the beginning. Playing the authority role can also prove as a viable way to buzz another project. Lets say you decide to launch a web service, leveraging your community you can move high volumes of targeted traffic. If blogs are not your bag, you can always use forums.