Online Marketing-Social Networking Sources

Put it online and they will come and buy? If you've been using the internet to sell your artisan jewelry (e-commerce, E-Bay, Etsy, etc) ,you realize it is not just a simple task of putting on the www and customers immediately "buy"!

Content is the tool that drives online marketing
People are drowning in the volume of content, your job is to find and promote content that is relevant.

Content is the commerce of social media. But, relevant content, the stuff your customers and prospects actually want to know is the pure gold. Constantly cranking out this gold can sometimes present creative challenges.

So how do you know what to write about, how do you keep the ideas flowing, how do you keep the content relevant and popular?

There are a number of ways to address these important questions, not the least of which is simply paying attention to what your prospects and customers ask on the daily basis. There are also growing numbers of free tools that, not many small businesses know much about, but can provide a wealth of great content ideas.

Let me make one thing clear, however, I’m certainly not advocating using the sites below to copy and paste content. While some of the content you discover does come with permission to reprint with credit, I am talking about using these sites for inspiration and education for your own content creation.

Yahoo Answers – [answers.yahoo.com] Millions of people go to Yahoo Answers to get answers to questions on just about every topic known to man. Yahoo members are free to answer these questions. If a number of people are asking the same questions, and they are, then maybe the market is ripe for your blog post addressing the question.

Google Alerts – [google.com/news] By setting up custom searches on Google News you can receive daily emails, called alerts, on any subject, industry, company or name. This can be a great way to keep up with a topic on a daily basis

Digg – [digg.com] Members of Digg submit websites and other content and the most popular as voted by other members rises to the top. While this site is particularly heavy on tech, you can get a quick view of what’s popular and find sites that you may never discover otherwise.

StumbleUpon – [stumbleupon.com] When you create a free account and install the StumbleUpon Toolbar you can simply click on and button and be sent to sites that match your preferences. For example I surf to sites related to marketing. I usually hit 10 or so a day to see if I stumble upon any nuggets that I would never find on my own.

Delicious – [del.icio.us] delicious is a social bookmarking site. Members bookmark sites or content they visit and then tag or categorize it based on how them want to remember it. This is a great tool for doing your own research by bookmarking sites you want to revisit on a certain topic but it’s also a great way to see what sites others have bookmarked on the same subject. By paying attention the sites that make the front “popular” page you can also find rising trends almost immediately

DocStoc and [docstoc.com] Scribd [scribd.com] DocStoc and Scribd are online gold mines of forms and documents. Users upload templates, forms, contracts, presentations, white papers, you name it, and you can get some great ideas and shortcuts for creating just about document you might need to run your business.

Spend a little time getting familiar with the above tools and you will never want for great content ideas again.

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Reprinted with permission: John Jantsch is a marketing and digital technology coach, award winning social media publisher and author of Duct Tape Marketing. He is the creator of the Duct Tape Marketing small business marketing system. You can find more information by visiting www.ducttapemarketing.com