Brad Powers

Google is well-known as one of the largest companies in the world- with the smallest advertising budget. They have managed this by using a strategy that produces an enormous amount of word-of-mouth advertising, or, viral marketing. Viral marketing is an advertising technique which uses videos, photos, articles or audio clips which are ‘cool’, interesting or amusing that are spread throughout a large social group.

In Google’s case, their “Gmail” email service was available only for people who had been invited in by current members. The Gmail rules created the feeling of some sort of elite club, and drew its social networking-users into the role of salesmen. Viral marketing professionals such as Brad Powers are familiar with this, and various other marketing techniques which are used throughout the web.

Viral marketing or viral advertising is a marketing technique which uses well known social networks to promote awareness of a brand or to accomplish other marketing goals through self-replicating viral processes.  Viral advertisements are usually found in the form of videos, images, Flash games, ebooks and more.

Marketers who are interested in creating successful online marketing programs know to look for people with high Social Network Potential, and to create viral messages that will appeal to this area of the population. Brad Powers is an example of an experienced internet marketer who specializes in viral marketing techniques.

If you’re a social media specialist like Brad Powers is, you may find this posting intriuging.  Learn about your options as an online marketer for using Facebook ads.  Facebook advertising works in a slightly different way than do search engines – so it’s important to read up on it and to see if it’s the right tool for you.

As the article states, “Branding can be an important element of success measurement for Facebook. There’s no denying it’s a highly trafficked site and one that many online marketers feel they simply need or benefit from a presence on Facebook as part of their competitive strategy. Since CTRs are on the low side and pricing is CPC based, there are a lot of free impressions being generated for an advertiser.”

According to the annual Unisfair marketing survey in May 2010, social media is the hottest channel for lead generation among technology marketing professionals.  For instance, another study showed that 51% of Facebook fans and 67% of Twitter followers found that they were more likely to buy the brands that they like on Facebook and Twitter. This, again, strengthens the tie between social media and lead generation.  Certainly, for lead generation experts like Brad Powers, this news can be very helpful for the development of future campaigns.

This article offers helpful and quick tips about how to use lead generation for social media. It explains that you need to share content that showcases your expertise.  The article continues by giving helpful examples of how to do so. It’s definitely worth a quick read!

For an informative and interesting summary of the importance of blogging and how this popular form of communication can help small and large businesses, take a look at “Blogging: Important and Necessary To Your Social Media Marketing Plan.” This brief article can help even the least computer savvy person understand what is meant by SEO and the potential benefit to a company that writing a good blog can bring.

Blogging is an important tool for internet marketers.  Having a blog is perhaps the single most important element in a business’s social media marketing strategy. There are several reasons this is true, and perhaps the most important of those reasons is what is known as SEO or Search Engine Optimization.

In a blog that you are writing, you are in control of the content. In order for your blog to be recognized by “web crawlers” or “bots” you need to include “keywords” so that your blog becomes visible to those potential customers who use those keywords in a search on a search engine which uses those web crawlers to find results for those searches. To gain even more visibility it is very helpful to have people that are reading your blog to put the link to your blog on their Facebook or Twitter pages. The more readership and fans you have, the greater linking opportunities your blog will have, and the more traffic to your site you will bring to your blog.

Taking this to the next level, the more interesting and informative your blog is, the better the chances that one of your readers will decide to repost your blog on to a social media bookmarking site, such as Mixx, Digg, StumbleUpon and others. These are places where you can really boast your readership and traffic to your site, and hopefully begin to see real results.

Internet marketers such as  Brad Powers and other experts in the field, are always searching for better, faster and more efficient ways to  maximize their business and marketing successes using the powerful tool of the internet.

In an article that Brad Powers wrote in 2008 called, “Leveraging Social Networking Sites: Online Lead Generation” he evaluates how powerful advertising really is on social networking sites.

He states that two out of every three Internet users visits a social networking site each day, and that they find that these online visitors really do pay attention to the advertisements that they see. Such users are inherently good at multi-tasking.

As Brad Powers explains, “Marketers have found that social network users not only see the ads, but interact with them. Members of this group are, after all, the ultimate multi-taskers. Which is why lead generation firms have found some of the new inventory available through social networking sites to be high converting inventory.”