When you build your blog platform with a good foundation (your oil rig) and add content to the blog (your algae), this will attract people to start commenting on your content (clams).

Because of your third party comments (from your clams), you’ll soon have customers (fish) swimming around your blog (oil rig) wondering why it’s so active and what is the benefit for them to be there.

… and if you have a free eBook (your fishing hook), then you have a good chance to catch some fish.

Once you learn how to catch small fish, it’s only a matter of time before you have enough knowledge to catch bigger fish.

Thanks Alex!     ……. Happy Fishing

The book covers the reasons for Social Media Marketing, the SEO element and ways of using banner advertising. Raymond Fong advises that unless you have a sales funnel and products in place, his section is a little advanced. So as a newbie, I’ll have to come back to that section.

More Friends = More Money, but the initial section advise on the dangers of automation tools and artificially building a friend list. Whist it is possible to get thousands of friends very quickly, MySpace can and have wiped out accounts at a stroke when they think the system is being abused.

Google are also changing their algorithems to identify whether backlinks are being created by systems or real individuals.

But the beauty of Social Media Marketing is that by creating good content that people find helpful and want to read will result in your readers creating links to your blog by going viral.

So the suggested route to succeed with Social Media Marketing is to search out niche communities, to join and listen in order to find out what the communities are talking about, what problems they have  as a way of identifying subjects and content that the community actually want to read about.

By providing what the community wants, you can position yourself as a useful source which people will want to follow and share with others.

So the messages that I’ve picked up from the book so far;-

• Identify Industry leaders for your niche.
• Sign up for their RSS feeds in order to get notice on the current ideas they’re working on.
• Add an RSS feed sign up option to my blog
• Add a sign up form to capture visitors name and emails
• Join four or five communities (Marketing with Alex being ideal for us newbies to help each other) ……. Mike Dillard has also created a network specifically for network marketers in which you can create your own niche and become a leader of that niche …. check out www.betternetworker.com  (I’ll pass on details of other networks as I find them if anyone is interested).
• Start Cross Promoting; As your posts get pushed down the page, a good idea is to develop relationships with both leaders and newbies in order to share and promote their ideas. As relationships grow, they will share your ideas and over time your articles will reach a wider audience from going viral.
• Document your Cross Promotion in order to create a case study. Whether the idea succeeds or fails, writing about the experience will help other to copy the idea if it works, or not bother if it turns out to be a waste of time.

I hope this short review was of interest. If anyone wants to work with me to cross promote ideas and write up a case study, we might have the start of our own eBook product.

Just let me know ……. Bye for now …. John

So far it seems to compliment Alex Jeffries message of building relationship and providing good content to a targeted market.

Has anyone else read this? ….. I’ll go through the book and pass on the tips and ideas.