If you want to succeed in internet marketing, making online friends can help you. Once you make online friends, it can get you some great results such as:

• Get you new leads
• Get you help in the social sphere
• Help You sell more stuff
• Get help with problems

Get new leads when you stay in touch in online water coolers or make friends with someone who’ll pass along helpful info.  This can also apply when you’re in a jam. Maybe you’ve got some online friends with technical skills that can talk you through that problem. Get help in the social sphere when you need a great article Digged or Stumble’d or want someone to write a helpful review or testimonial for you and sell more stuff because your online friends can help you do that by talking about you as the “Go-To Guy/Gal” in a particular area of expertise.

How Do You Make Online Friends?

The web can be a little bit cliquish but the cliques are not impenetrable. Here are five tips to help you get started:

1. Find blogs in your niche and comment on them, blog roll them and post on your social networking sites how great they are. The website owners will take notice of you
2. Be helpful in online community forums in your niche for newbies. You can find some great protegees who will happily promote you
3. Sign up for all the social tools you can and befriend people who are either in your target audience or in your peer group (preferably BOTH if it’s suitable for that application)
4. Do something philanthropic online and do a giveaway to get some attention.
5. Join an entrepreneurial group. There are groups online dedicated to helping each other build their businesses. Some groups are available on group sites like Google, Yahoo and MSN and there are paid memberships sites such as StomperNet, Internet Entrepreneur Club or Universal Wealth Creation as well that help people and some even offer conventions.

Over time, a bit of socializing can bring you some profitable dividends and if you can find some friends in high places you can definitely make more of an impact online and become sought after as an online friend to others as well.

Have a most outstanding day.

Dana Prince
Internet Marketing Blog
www.SeanSEO.com © 2008

When trying to make money online, who you know can often impact your success levels. If you have online friendships, make the most of them! Here are some things you can do:

1. Ask for a blogroll exchange. You link to them, they link to you.
2. Ask for Stumbles, Diggs, etc. when you write a great post.
3. Consider doing a joint venture where you work together to promote a product and split profits.
4. Ask them to Tweet about you on Twitter. Re-tweeting your tweets or telling people you’re a great person to follow can be helpful.
5. Ask for a testimonial for your sales page  and / or review of your product on their site linking back to your site.

As you can see there are a lot of things your online friends can do for you. They can also share tips and advice and be a sounding board for you at times as well. Don’t forget to reciprocate and do things for them as well. Through mutual back scratching with online friends we can all be more successful.  The more online friendships you have, the better! Need to make more online friends? We’ll talk about that tomorrow!

Have a most outstanding day.

Dana Prince
Internet Marketing Blog
www.SeanSEO.com © 2008

Here at SeanSEO.com we know that commenting on blogs can help your site’s SEO. We knew this already but we especially know this when we look at our spam filter in the back end of this blog!

If you’re not already commenting on blogs, you might consider doing so because:

• Blog commenting can get you relevevant links pointing to your blog which is good for SEO
• Blog commenting can get you reciprocal comments from the blog owner you visit
• Blog commenting can bring you new visitors to your site (when you post in relevant topics to your topic)

Some people go off and try to get their links at any cost. They simply go off and comment with links in their comments and little other value.  Chances are that when you do that, the blog owner is going to just zap your comment out into spam oblivion instead of approving it.  We get all sorts of comments from adult themed blogs as well as non-sensical comments and paragraphs filled with weird links or strange characters.  We don’t approve them.  We love Askimet (a free anti-spam WordPress plug-in! as it catches a vast majority for us so we don’t even have to look at 90% of the spam that comes in.

When we do get comment notifications, what we do approve includes:

• Interesting comments that provide value to our readers or the topic
• Questions that are genuine, not just an effort to get a link published
• Comments that aren’t filled with obvious self-serving links
• Comments relevant to our niche here at the blog

P.S: Don’t build nofollow into your comment. Talk about obvious!

When you go out into cyberspace to promote, look to related blogs and provide value when you comment. Not only does that value help you get your comment approved but you may also get interested people clicking on your link so see what your site is all about.

Happy promoting!

Have a most outstanding day.

Dana Prince
Internet Marketing Blog
www.SeanSEO.com © 2008

Community forums can serve many purposes for the successful internet marketer. There are thousands online on just about every topic you can imagine. Some are very busy and can have lots of members as well as a high Google page rank.

Here are a few of the ways you can use forums to your advantage:

• Your forum signature appears on every post so the more posts you write, the more links to your website(s)
• Many forums have classified sections so you can utilise this to advertise your products / services
• Talk to the webmaster / admin about link trading or displaying your banner. Forum ad fees are often very reasonable
• Chat with like minded people and get some visits to your website
• Get information about your niche
• Some forums offer revenue sharing
• Some forums allow you to feed your blog(s) into your control panel

Forums: A Social Marketing Goldmine!

Not only can you meet people, sell your wares and learn about your niche but forums offer a great opportunity for off-page SEO for your own websites.  Don’t abuse them or else you might get banned but follow the rules and be a valuable member of each community you join and you can definitely reap some rewards.

Have a most outstanding day.

Dana Prince
Internet Marketing Blog
www.SeanSEO.com © 2008

If you’re looking for ways to sell and ways to promote what you’re selling, Squidoo lenses are great tools. They’re a lot like HubPages.  These sites allow you to set up a robust looking page with all sorts of tools to help you promote including:

• polls
• pictures
• text boxes
• sticky notes
• eye catching headline boxes
• RSS feeds
• links
• and more

Not only can you use Squidoo lenses as a free online tool for link building to your other  websites but you can also monetize them.  You can add affiliate links, Google ads, Amazon links and images and more. While HubPages lets you use your Adsense ID to get paid directly, Squidoo pays you via PayPal when you reach a specified payout level.

Having a tool kit of promotion and monetization tools is a great idea. If you’re article marketing, you know that most sites won’t let you put affiliate links into your resource box. You can, however, put a link to your Squidoo lens which could contain calls to action or hoplinks.

Squidoo also has a great user community so encompasses monetization, article marketing, off-page SEO and social media.

Have a most outstanding day.

Dana Prince
Internet Marketing Blog
www.SeanSEO.com © 2008