When you are ready to take your business to the next level, you have to put the social networks to work for you. Many of the social network purists are dismayed that so many businesses have joined twitter and many other social networks, but we have to face it that business will follow the money.

Money is being made by people who are using the applications that bring them into the groups of people who are interested in their services. That is like Budweiser joining a beer drinking social network. It only makes sense.

As the start of the Social Net Effect, you have to sign up for a Twitter account, a Facebook account, etc. But you do not want to sign up to these and just spam everyone, because your follower numbers will drop like a blue popsicle from an airliner at 30,000 feet! You want to interact with people, give them good information and keep people talking. So you mission is to engage as many people as possible in the shortest amount of time.

One of my tools for doing that is http://postlater.net because it allows me to remember birthdays, anniversaries and to spout great quotes on autopilot. By attaching your Postlater account to your http://ping.fm account, you are setting up a content machine gun. Let me explain how these work together.

Ping.fm Collects Social Networks & Blogs

Over 30 different social networks are connected to ping.fm. You should go through the ping.fm add accounts section and create an account at each of the networks that ping.fm services. Connect them to your ping.fm account, so that you are set for blogging (with blogger, livejournal, typepad, wordpress, etc) or for status updates (twitter, identi.ca, plurk, myspace, facebook, etc) from your ping.fm account. You can even connect ping.fm to your skype account and send updates from your skype! That is so convenient!

Postlater.net Gives You Powerful Distribution Capabilities

With Postlater you get the ability to set and forget common items you want to have go out. I use it for my Follow Friday messages, because I have at least one hundred followers that I want to recommend, and that gives me the ability to add a couple of new ones each week as I find new followers in my group. This way, I never leave out the best ones, and my time is freed up for making new friends. This is easy because you set it up as a weekly recurrence with hashtags and all in your tweet, although you want to leave room for the other networks, because some of them will add characters to your update (utterli.com is one that adds some characters to a post).

Quotes are a good one for Postlater to handle for you, you set up a list of quotes (4 per day for each week) for about four weeks, one every 4 hours during the best tweet times. Make them recur every 4 weeks, one quote every four hours (which means one entry per quote – 4 entries per day – 28 entries for a week). The reason I choose to do it this way is to make it so that my quotes will come out once each month, and people will not see the same quotes from me all the time. You would be amazed at how many retweets these quotes get!

Obviously you should also include some advertisements in your Postlater entries, since you want this to pay for itself, too! Add one ad 4 times a day spread 4 hours apart, so that your sales message is surrounded by your content (quotes, tips and tricks, etc.) and not too noticeable by someone who is trying to decide whether they want to follow you.

SU.PR, Man!

When you ad links, Ping.fm will shrink them down, but they are not very easily trackable. I recommend you sign up for a StumbleUpon account and then head over to the SU.PR site and place all your links in the SU.PR link shortener. Not only does it make nice short links, but it also uses the StumbleUpon network to track your clicks, retweets, etc. and even allows people to recommend this to their friends using the Stumble feature of StumbleUpon, which can get you a LOT of traffic if a lot of people Stumble it! I have sent some content links out that got over 1000 Stumbles in addition to the retweet traffic! Do this especially with funny videos and photos!

Your StumbleUpon account will tell you how many times each link was visited using the SU.PR link and how many times it was Stumbled, so you will be able to see how much traffic was generated for your links. This is much better than your Ping.fm links, which don’t give you any data, and force you to use an extra tracking link to get more info. If you start with SU.PR, the link does not get shortened any more, and for some reason people click on them much more than ping.fm links.

Want More?

If you like this kind of information, leave me some comments and I will keep posting this type of great information. I love showing people what works for me, and I can also teach you how to connect this Social Net Effect to your blogs.

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