Social media marketing might be something your company is just getting started with. You have established that the fish, your customers are using it. They are using it to share information, keep tabs with friends and family, and, most importantly, use it to make important research and purchasing decisions. You should have a set of objective and goals created before you throw up a Twitter or Facebook account and start broadcasting to an empty silo. Social media, unlike other forms of online marketing, is a two-way form of communication. This is where the boat is skipped by many beginners, who broadcast about me instead of we. In no particular order, listed below are ten general tips for online marketing. This is basic stuff, but it applies to newbies or anyone just needing a refresher.

1.Register brand names and create online identity:

At this point, I’m sure you have done your due diligence, registered and incorporated your business name and have started to operate online under its assumed identity. The priority is registering your domain names. Any spelling variations and domain extensions should also be noted. Buy the .net, .org, and any relevant country extensions before someone else does and purchase them for multiple years upfront. Most domain name registrars offer discounts for more extended registration purchases and renewals.

We will not only use the social media platforms to create awareness, identity, and community should have the same vanity URLs, handle-names, logos, and overall look-smell-and-feel as the rest of our digital assets but also integrate manual strategies to improve the rankings. Our messaging needs to be clear and concise. It all starts with our digital properties and corresponding hyperlinks.

2.Learn the webmaster basics:

It’s the years of day-in-day-out experience of a content marketing agency in Mumbai that has taught us a several things about wearing a webmaster hat. Educate yourself on the basics, starting with domain names, DNS, FTP web hosting, and a basic control panel to create an excellent digital marketing plan. You should know how to register a domain name; make and admin a hosting account; create email accounts, and get familiar with MYSQL and PHP’s basics. The majority of this can be done through set up wizards and control panel automation, it depends on your web host, but it’s a pretty standard feature. Bluehost, the company that hosts blogs, for example, offers automated script installation. If you needed to set up WordPress, it’s a three to four click process. Learning the basics will also save you in development costs.

When it comes to graphic and website design, this is not an area to skimp and save dollars. One must look for the top digital marketing agency in your vicinity. If you’re talented and have a background in design, by all means, create your brand’s online identity, but if not, spend the dollars wisely and let a professional do the work. You don’t have a second opportunity to make that first impression, as the old saying goes. In a digital world, your web site is the introduction to your organization. With an abundance of available Internet sites, consumers have virtually limitless options. It is essential to get it right and accurate the first time more than ever. It all starts with a clean, polished, professional and effective web site. That polished image needs to carry over into everything you do online. It must be uniform and consistent across the digital board.

3. Don’t fall for the snake oil:

You will learn just as everyone does, through trial and error, what works and doesn’t work. It’s all about arming yourself with the resources and knowledge to get the job done. Temptation can set in for beginners to take shortcuts and cause them to veer off the best practices beaten path. There is too much misinformation floating out there. There are tons of getting rich marketing schemes disguised as lead generators, Twitter software to auto-follow thousands of random people and self-proclaimed marketing gurus that can make you a millionaire overnight. The fact is, no magic bullet is available, book, application, or otherwise, that will reveal where, how and by when you will be successful with your business. Align yourself with industry thought leaders, read their blogs, comment on their content when you have something to say and most importantly, learn how they do it. It is good to look for the best online marketing sites in India for better reach and guidance.

4. Add value to the communities you participate in:

Adding value to your community is essential. It helps you stand out from the crowd and identifies your motives as pure and not self-serving. It might require a lot of time but don’t just like anything else to be accepted into an existing community. Add value by answering questions; help by lending a hand with graphic or coding expertise, and sharing relevant quality content that will benefit the community and its members as suggested by the social media consulting company. Once you have established trust, you can gradually ease into promoting your other interests. Be yourself and act accordingly; after all, this about business, and we all should know how to act like adults when using the Internet.

5. Create good quality content:

You hear this one all the time because there’s a lot of truth to it; content is king. If your objective is to mark yourself as a thinker; or plan on sticking out from the crowd for any particular reason, you will need brand name recognition or quality content with a compelling story to get you there. Quality content comes in many different shapes and forms across multiple platforms. You could establish your persona with a blog. With a commitment to extended writing time, you could brand yourself and your influence as an expert on your subject matter. The same goes for video if that’s your cup of tea. You or your brand could become a YouTube social media rock star with a little creative brainstorming and editing. Then there’s always podcasting. Good content will work on any platform, and it should be optimized as such. Good content gets noticed but can be overlooked. Ensure you encourage social sharing and voting of your content by asking people to Tweet it, Digg it, rate it on YouTube etc. and give them the tools to do it automatically.

6. Guest posting:

When you start with social media, you need exposure. Guest posting allows you on higher, more relevant industry-related platforms than your own to get your voice heard. This is a common strategy used by startups on a shoestring budget, bartering expertise in the form of 500 words or more for targeted traffic. Remember what you write and how you write it is a representation of your business and brand. If it’s intended to be a business driver, make sure you’ve done your fact-checking and use opportunities to link to other content you have written on your blog or website. Guest posting on sites with a higher PageRank, in theory, should boost your SEO due to the inbound links that you can embed on your author byline and content. In addition to your guest post, your byline contains an opportunity for branding yourself and your area of expertise. Craft your bio for the audience you’re writing for, and of course, include a link back to your website, blog or a particular landing page that you have created to track any byline clicks.

7. Use the tools wisely:

Your time will be better managed and more efficient using a social media tool kit that makes sense for you. Social media, after all, is just a set of tools we use to communicate with. The devices are great, but they tend to make us complacent. Use automation services to your advantage, but be very careful about auto-posting duplication issues that can arise when crossing. I highly recommend and use the micro-blogging service to capture life’s precious moments, and it works well for that. The service can be used for a professional blog when adding a domain name and masking it. It’s an excellent platform for a micro-blog or for short-form blogging. It offers particular design adaptations and can most importantly post your content to other social networks like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, Clubhouse and more. It is also available for auto-posting services. That is where you have multiple networks rebroadcasting and reposting the same content. This is when you have entered the twilight zone, officially known as crossing the streams

.8. Don’t overextend yourself:

Here he goes with another Cliche, Rome wasn’t built in a day. It’s true. Invest your time and passion where the fish are first. Yes, establishing a presence on Facebook and Twitter should be a top area of focus and marketing priority, provided your fish are there. Maybe the fish are feeding elsewhere or changed their diets, use different bait to catch a different niche of fish. Only then should you build your Rome if you know who your fish are and where they swim. After you have an established customer base or are revamping marketing and advertising efforts, you should cast a giant net and focus on being genuinely omnipresent.

9. Track everything:

Track everything as much as possible whenever possible. Analytics is critical for measuring and tracking the performance of website traffic. Was a particular campaign a success? Did we see spikes in traffic? How are customers finding us? Generating online PR consists of developing inbound links, links you need to be monitoring and tracking for. Google Analytics will give you reporting on all of this information. This makes you better informed about the people visiting your website and how they interact with it. It’s all about working smarter, not harder. Tracking links off-site is quickly done with URL shortening services such as bit.ly or Hootsuite. Both of these services do offer Twitter analytics and management. Tools exist that track just about anything; most are free. You can use something simple as Gmail, in combination with Google Docs, an excel spreadsheet or create a roll-your-own social media dashboard. Paid brand monitoring services are abundant and can be found easily by searching Google.

10 Don’t be fooled, and it’s about quality, not quantity.

With all the spiked Kool-Aid, newbies tend to lose sight of the real value factors, quality and instead focus on the numbers game. Numbers don’t mean anything if none of them listens or responds to your active call. Focus your time on creating quality content and rewarding it by sharing. One hundred fifty online connections can be as powerful, if not even more powerful than 150,000. The numbers game is played to stroke blogger egos and to inflate numbers for advertising. Your network in time will grow, granted you stay active in some form of participation or content creation—beginners who are just starting need to start small, slow and focus on content production and syndication. Focus on network building with the relevant people by using your content. Quality content builds quality inbound links, which builds quality relationships and opportunities.