But as the number websites popping up everyday continues to grow, the fiercer the competition for getting traffic. Ideally, traffic to your website should be coming from a variety of sources. When it comes to generating traffic for your site, any method that does the job is considered good.

However, there are some methods for generating traffic to your site that you should avoid because they are not worth the effort. Two of these methods are paid hits and safe lists.

Don’t confuse paid hits with legitimate and worthwhile online advertising programs like Pay Per Click Marketing. The kind of paid hits you should avoid are those being offered by companies that promise to send XX number of unique visitors to your site for XX dollars. If a company is promising to send you 10,000 unique visitors to your site for just $9.95, be cautious.

Companies selling this type of paid hits are highly dubious. After all, how is it possible for them to deliver that many visitors for such a cheap price? The answer is that they can’t. What these companies do is either use a script to “hit” your site repeatedly or they are members of “paid to surf” programs wherein they pay people to visit sites. If a company delivers visits to your site with via their “paid to surf” program membership, all they’re really doing is adding your URL to their queue and simply pay people who visit your site.

The “visitors” who come to your site via paid hits aren’t really buyers. In most cases, your site will simply sit in the background while they do other things. Your site will be visited, but it’s very rare that a visitor will actually read what you have to offer.

Safe lists are another traffic method you need to avoid. Safe lists are composed of e-mail addresses of people who “supposedly” agreed to receive e-mail promotions. A big problem you’ll face if you use safe lists is that you can’t really know for sure if the people in a safe list really subscribed or really want to receive e-mail promotions. Th owners of these safe lists may have simply harvested the e-mails from sites, blogs, forums and discussion groups. If you use this method of advertising to generate traffic to your site, be prepared for the consequences. People who never opted in a safe list may report you as a spammer. Your entire site may be banned by your ISP and webhost.

It is not worth your money and time to use these two traffic generating methods. They are risky and can get your business and your reputation in trouble.

While the look of a website is important to creating the desired image you want for your online company, navigation is still just as important.  Having strong visuals and images that are the proper sizes are important factors to consider in web design as well.  The main point is to try and figure out how the website will be viewed by others – so put yourself in their shoes as best you can.

Good Navigation
Navigation can be thought of in more than one way.  You can create hyperlinks to your a target website page from within your own website.  You can also create hyperlinks from other websites to drive visitors to your website.  Many use articles databases or websites like Myspace, Facebook, and Youtube to do so as well.  Within your own website you might want to link to the product order page from every other webpage on your website.  All of this can be taken into consideration when coming up with your web design.

Poor Navigation
If visitors have a harder time finding your target website page, then one could consider this to be poor navigation.  One other point to consider would be the use of font that is too small or difficult to read.  Also, the navigation bar needs to be easy to access and find or this too could pose a problem for visitors, and ultimately lose business for your company.

When figuring out the best website design for your online company, good navigation will always be better than poor navigation.

1. Keep Your Press Release Brief
Communicate your message in 300 to 400 words. Whether you’re sending out your press release via fax or online, make sure that your press release is only one page long.

2. The Headline Should Be Your News
Make sure that your press release headline is newsworthy. Of course, you should craft a catchy headline to grab the attention of journalists and bloggers, but you should also make sure that they can immediately tell what your news angle is just by reading the headline.

3. Your Press Release Must Answer the 5Ws
In the first paragraph alone, your press release must answer the 5Ws: Who, What, When, Where and How. Make it easy for journalists and bloggers find the answers quickly and easily.

4. Provide Media Contact Information
Make it easy for journalists and bloggers to contact you for more information if they would like to write a story based on your press release. Include a contact name of the contact person, e-mail address, phone number, fax number and mailing address in every press release you end out.

5. Avoid Using Advertising Language
Resist the temptation to add first person quotes, testimonials or any hype in your press release. Avoid using adjectives too because they will make your press release look advertorial than informational.

All in all, make sure that your press release has all the information that journalists and bloggers need. The more quickly and easily they can have all pertinent information, the better your chances are that your press release won’t be ignored.

It’s more than likely now that when a TV commercial begins, the little device you attached to your TV set mutes the sound. Or maybe you get up and go get a snack, or swing your chair around and check your e-mail till the program resumes. As for print advertising, can you even remember the last time you actually read the ads in your Sunday paper? But guerrilla marketing and buzz marketing, along with web design have been around for a few years, and Toronto consumers have begun to recognize them for what they are. With recognition of marketing tactics comes the origin of immunity to them.

Consumers tend to be intrinsically cautious, especially where their money is concerned. They know that the marketers’ and web designer’s single goal is to persuade them to spend their precious money on one product rather than on another. In some cases, a marketing scheme is intended to convince people that one brand is better than any other. For example, almost everybody now spends at least a few minutes every day online. People shop via the Internet for all sorts of commodities, from clothing to food to entertainment. They make travel arrangements online, they keep up with their friends by e-mail, and they even pay their bills online.

Thus, it’s up to companies to compete against each other for your patronage. Will you still choose a dial-up connection, which is usually your cheapest option? There are dial-up companies waiting to tell you how much faster, cheaper, and better their connection is. Do you want much faster connection capability? The companies want to talk to you about speed, value packages, and technology. Whatever questions you can come up with about Internet service, the service providers will have a variety of answers for you.

In other cases, it’s not only a matter of persuading customers to buy a particular brand, but of convincing them that they even need this type of product in their lives. Now we are talking about the luxury goods market. This is the level of sales that is most lucrative for the marketers, and most expensive for the consumer. The luxury market attempts to make consumers believe that by owning a (fill in the blank: fancy car, designer jacket, wall-size television screen…) they will become fashionable, hip, cool. They’ll be part of the trendy scene. For this kind of market, word of mouth has been found to be especially effective. Buzz, too, is useful: the trick is to get people talking about your brand or your product because it’s trendy, exciting, and newsworthy.

Unfortunately for the marketers, even word of mouth and buzz are getting a little tired. And so are consumers: they are becoming fatigued just by the effort to keep up with fashion and ahead of their neighbors. One sign of this “fashion fatigue” is the increasing popularity of magazines like “Natural Living” and “Real Simple.” These publications focus on getting back to the basics of life, “going green,” recycling and reusing old stuff in new ways. Their readership is growing rapidly.

We are becoming almost as bored with the cleverness of alternative marketing as we have been with the insipidness and shallowness of the traditional marketing media. The cynicism and irritation we once reserved for commercials are beginning to spill over onto street team campaigns and viral videos on YouTube. How will the alternative marketers and web design companies find new ways of building trust in what they say about the products they are pushing?

Blogs to the Rescue!

Wikipedia.com defines “blog” – short for “web log” – as “a website, usually maintained by an individual, with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video.” Similarly, Merriam-Webster Online tells us that a blog is “an online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer.” Sounds friendly, comfortable, believable, doesn’t it? When you are considering whether or not you should purchase a particular product, would you sooner trust a corporate web site, fancy and slick, cleverly produced, or an online personal journal?

Anyone who can connect to the Internet can set up a blog. You can buy the services of a webhosting company to create a website exclusively for your blog; or you can use the free blogging that comes with social networking sites like Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Classmates.com, or LiveJournal.  Or you can pay a marketing company to set one up for you. There are so many possibilities for blogging on the Internet that the term “blogosphere” has been coined to encompass blogs and their interconnections.

Blogs began as online diaries written by ordinary, everyday people in their own personal voice. Many still function that way; but others have taken on the role of commentator on news events, often in contradiction and criticism of the media. Such commentary is usually expanded by the inclusion of links leading to backup stories.

It was inevitable that the marketing sphere and the blogosphere would intersect at some point. Generation Y-ers and hip young Toronto professionals go to the Internet to find services their parents look for in print. You can get instant driving directions from any place to any other place. Whole telephone directories are online. You can look up people you haven’t heard from in years, and find them wherever they may be. And increasingly, this segment of the population gets its daily dose of world news online. The Internet is the perfect place to attract new customers; and blogs – friendly, homespun blogs – are the perfect medium for creating credibility. What better way to create “buzz” for a product than through the interconnection of personal online conversations?

Business Blogging

At the same time, that very quality of friendly, personal, down-to-earth communication that’s found in many blogs is exactly what makes blogging tough to use in advertising. Consumers need to trust that bloggers really are just everyday folks who want to share their thoughts and opinions online. They will pay attention if one of those everyday folks says something positive about a brand or a product, only because they believe that the blogger is, indeed, just an ordinary person.

Bloggers are not television actors portraying fictitious characters for entertainment. They are real people, expressing real, personal ideas and opinions. The television audience is entertained by the actions of the characters, but entertainment comes with a price: the suspension of disbelief. Bloggers interacting with other bloggers are unwilling to suspend their disbelief. Trust and transparency are the very essence of blog communication. To pay a blogger for promotion of a product would be a violation of the audience’s trust.

But of course, now that they are emerging as a viable marketing and web design tool, blogs will be commercialized. In fact, it’s happening already. Commercial blogging websites like Smorty, Reprisemedia, and ProBlogger offer endless tips to web designers on how they should use blogs to sell their products. Here are a few from Macromedia, a blogging pioneer:

•  Realize that blogs are not the voice of the company; they are the voice of individuals who are passionate about something.
•  A firm and unfailing commitment to honesty in blogging is a necessity.
•  Guidelines for postings need to be established from the start.
•  Blog authors and web design owners should be chosen from among your “company evangelists.”

And most importantly: if you’re hoping to market your product through blogging, never forget to keep it real!

With the emergence of new media devices such as camera phones and digital cameras, the creation of many viral videos have become as easy and as prevalent. The accessibility of low cost video editing and publishing tools or software applications have allowed amateur videos shot on camera phones and simple digital cameras to be easily disseminated across various media devices and the Internet. Bluetooth technology is also one way of making the fast spreading and sharing of viral videos between friends, colleagues and family as easy as possible. Daily instant messaging and email also add to the faster distribution of such media files.

With the concept of the viral video phenomenon in mind, a number of business marketing organizations are trying to come up with new ways and strategies where they can adopt the viral video concept into existing marketing strategies. This is for their pursuit of generating an increase in brand awareness and customer responsiveness. A few companies, counting in Kodak and Ford, have spearheaded this new trend in marketing strategy.

The presence of humor, comedy, wit and creativity in joint collaboration with the unpredictable power of the word-of-mouth theory have made distribution of viral videos among a wide range of random people a very tempting technique for brand exposure and promotion for these companies. Many small businesses have proven that these low cost viral videos have often sky-rocketed their brand’s popularity as opposed to high cost commercials and advertisements. A lot of marketing companies and strategists are now focusing on the development of viral video creation.

While it is common knowledge that a happy and satisfied customer tells an average of three people about good services or products that they were happy about, it is not well known that they also inform eleven more people bad products or bad experiences on services that they’ve had. With this, the concept of viral video marketing has encompassed the scenario where viral videos that carry their brand names in a funny and humorous way cannot negatively affect their products and services, so they promote it and make use of it. Just as the case with Coca Cola, there was a viral video made by two individuals – The Diet Coke and Mentos Experiment – it was so popular that Coke decided to play on its popularity with a contest on YouTube.

In the emergence of the Web 2.0 networks and technologies, viral videos have sprung the new online marketing concept which is Viral Video Marketing. Backed up by the concepts of Viral Marketing wherein the goal of marketers to create successful viral marketing programs by aid of identifying high Social Networking Potential, individuals have now become goals to identify the highest level of Viral Video Optimization as a new way to spread messages and ultimately brand awareness to viewers across the many virtual social networks. Viral video outlets are now considered as new global marketing tools that will effectively change the way business and companies advertise themselves.

In a recent online study, it was stated that viral marketing is now one of the most powerful ways to market online. This means that viral marketing through videos is also the easiest and cheapest. The study led to a list of essential tips to optimize the potential of viral marketing videos in terms of the advantages it can create for business institutions. Here are a few of those tips:

1. Keep videos short and most preferably less than five minutes. There are way too many videos available for viewing. Having long videos will likely result to abandonment.

2. Always make sure that content is of utmost importance. Videos that are interesting, provocative and entertaining are top on the most watched list. If it doesn’t credit a “WOW”, then most likely they wont have the initiative to share the video across their social networks.

3. Be very careful in including commercial advertisements and promotional content. Make the videos as interesting as possible as to lure viewers into logging on your site. Once they’re on your site, then that’s the time they should be seeing your promotional sales messages.

4. Create as many short videos as you can. One of these videos will surely find its way to the enjoyment of people and will eventually turn itself viral. Having just one video will not work as it is hard to determine and predict what and which kind of videos will catch the virality characteristic. With this, always plan on creating and deploying a series of video clips and learn from each of them the points that made them best.

5. Optimize video clips to take the full advantage of distribution across vast social network websites. Make use of tags and keywords or bookmarking links to make it easier for people to search, find, save and share your created videos.

6. Make videos with a lot of guest appearances by strangers or celebrities. They will tend to patronize and share the videos with their families and friends.

Click here to see some examples of great viral videos.

Just as we thought that all forms of online chat and instant messaging software applications or tools have reached their full potential, it still keeps on getting better. It has now become a full blown business tool to help and expand online businesses. Just a few years back, corporate companies were very much pleased with how e-mail had changed since it had made business transactions faster and more efficient. But with the introduction of online chat systems, corporate colleagues can now interact with one another in a global manner.

Instant messaging is in essence the text version of a live phone call. Large and small businesses have preferred the use of instant messaging over emails and phone calls. These business establishments prefer its immediacy and efficiency in obtaining real-time information from colleagues working remotely, partners across the globe, suppliers in other regions of the world, and customers in the global market. Online live chat has also become a frequent scene between customers and company websites since it provides an avenue for customers to inquire about products and services, send their feedback or reviews, and pay/order online in real time.

As instant messaging or online chat systems begin to flourish on the World Wide Web, it also continues to change and develop. Web developers and operators say that if used tactfully, online chat may be a very much powerful way to increase sales by ultimately engaging the customers in an approach very much similar to how showroom salespersons engage with customers face-to-face.

In the application of the online chat technology, businesses should be able to learn the basics of applying new sales methods and tactics depending on the type of products and services they provide. This is since customers and potential customers will always have the prerogative to close down their chat windows.

In using the live chat software as an online sales tool, the sellers and dealers need to learn the fundamental creation of trust. Customers trust the seller in terms of not only being there just to make a deal or close the deal with a sale. Rather, the seller is also there to provide customers with assistance regarding their needs. The sellers should communicate to customers that they are not going to put their money and efforts to waste because of fraudulent products and substandard services.

It is suggested that certain techniques and tactics should be applied on existing consumer-marketer relationships. These include offering consumers a more friendly approach and open conversations instead of greeting them with the usual “how may I help you?” manner. Try to make use of ellipsis instead of ending statements with periods. This will make the customers feel that they are engaged in the conversation and that their comments are always welcome.

As soon as a prospective consumer expresses interest in a certain product or service that you provide, try to ask a bit more and don’t offer the sales script right away. Try to learn more about the needs of the customer. This in turn will also help determine if the customer will actually make a purchase. This is because online sellers usually try to break the sales pitch too early that this tends to scare potential customers away. It is very easy for customers to drop the chat conversation on the other end once they are bombarded with premature deals.

Using a streamlined online chat system as a formidable business tool also requires a multi-channel communication platform backed up by effective software and compatible internet systems. It would be an eminent loss if the potential customer is about to make the purchase when the systems suddenly go haywire. This would also mean that the seller cannot successfully close the deal.

The online chat systems should be compatible and user friendly to attract more customers and make them feel at ease with the sales transaction. This would require research on the differing types of market audiences, products, and/or services that the business will provide. Businesses will definitely see and reap benefits in no time once a good working lower-key approach coupled with the other new online technologies such as email management and a good database are mastered.

Business Networking is a marketing method by which business opportunities are created through business networks. There are a number of business networking organizations that construct models of networking activities. These business networks allow such institutions to build new business relationships and business opportunities. These business networks often help one another and even evaluate each other. Thus, they learn from each other’s successes.

Business networking also allows business networks to generate solutions for a wide range of business problems. This is done by brainstorming business ideas and planning collaboration schemes. Oftentimes, business conferences are held in order to strengthen the different industries populated by such business institutions.

Online Business Networking may serve purposeful to online sales, general marketing and job-hunting, recruiting, knowledge exchange, and business development among others. Many people from the business sector believe that online business networking is a more cost-efficient and effective method of generating new businesses than advertising and public relations efforts. Just the same as with all the other Web 2.0 technologies that have emerged recently, business networking is a low-cost activity that entails more personal dedication and commitment.

Oftentimes, business networks may be have an agreement of holding weekly or monthly meetings such as business conferences and summits. These conferences are intended to facilitate the exchange of business leads and referrals with fellow members. To supplement this activity, business network members may meet outside of their business circles to deepen their business relations with one another and ultimately increase and strengthen the business partnerships.

Today, online business networks are extremely widespread since it has proven to increase business contacts and increase business promotions. With the use of Internet technology, communications and transactions for business networks are made easier in a global scope.

Online Business Networking also supports business development as it provides feedback and valuable strategies that entrepreneurs can utilize. The relationship between business partners transcends from strategies into opportunities. Business partnerships will bring out potential market and will provide more in terms of achievements to be gained in the long run.

A Blog is a portmanteau – a fusion of two words – of the words web and log. Jorn Barger, an American journalist, came up with the term weblog on December 17, 1997, describing the practice of logging the web while browsing through the Internet. His concept in mind was to pick up interesting facts or topics and writing stuff about it along the way. The year after, Peter Merholz used the shorter term – blog, by jokingly breaking the word weblog into the phrase we blog, thus giving the term both a noun and a verb definition; to blog – meaning, to create or edit one’s weblog.

Blogging is a bit complex to define due to it being a fairly new concept. Today, blogging is not only the act of updating, editing, creating a blog post into personal websites. Rather, it has become both an art and a continuous ever-evolving set of process applications to the emergence of new ideologies, technologies and media devices. Blogging can be anywhere between just posting daily diary entries to creating an intricate webpage where an individual or a group of individuals can showcase talents, creativity and innovation by use of new tools and software applications based on the attributes of the Internet.

Blogging has been purposeful in a number of ways for several industries. Blogging has been able to inspire improvements in the concept of customer service, interactive journalism, communications, self-expression and self-marketing, learning, and community building. It has also been instrumental in the realm of knowledge sharing and management, campaigning, social reforms, storytelling, and experience tracking among others.

For the small business communities, Blogging has also been proven beneficial in a number of ways. Here are some of the benefits that small businesses can gain from blogging:

1. Building a Community: Business blogs have provided small businesses the opportunity to share their knowledge and expertise in the form of products and services with a bigger audience. The chance to connect with a community base client is also beneficial to the development of consultants and workers. Within these communities, small businesses can use blogs to serve as channels for promoting their brands. Blogs can also act as a place for their businesses founded on a particular niche in the community and industry.

2. Easy Weblication: Weblication or Web Publication is the combination of technologies and ideas used for publishing web blogs. Easy to use blog software applications are now easily available to service a wide range of users. Creating a more personalized and custom-made blog entry for the small business is much easier than hiring web designers. With these custom-made blogs, the businesses can speak of their brands and services in a more direct, open and honest tone with the clients and customers.

3. Increase Popularity in Search Engine Rankings: Search engine marketing is the newest trend in online businesses recently. Internet users are using search engines more often than the past few years. The optimization of search engines has been proven successful to advertise brands more effectively with directly proportional results to profits. The cost of having your business brand posted on a search engine marketing is much lower than the traditional media.

SEO or Search Engine Optimization techniques can greatly increase popularity in search engines. Blogging can greatly help maximize these techniques based on the fact that search engine rankings use link popularity and easy to index regular content concepts. So if bloggers practice the basic skills of search engine optimization and good content management, they are surely off to better and higher search engine rankings.

4. Decrease Costs: With blogging, small businesses can maximize the low-cost alternative of having web presence. Small businesses without the luxury of advertising funds to create a web html or to pay for a web developer and a web designer may now just use the principles and advantages of blogging to get the business brand out on the Internet. Blogs are a whole lot less inexpensive to setup, operate, and maintain.

5. Better Benefits to Communications: With blogging, businesses can offer up to date feedback to clients and customers. It can serve as a time saver since businesses don’t need to provide a lot of interviews but can send out messages, notices or updates to many people at once by the use of blogs. Because blogs give the opportunity to tell the brand story over and over again, blogs helps set the brand apart from competition. With blogs, communications between business and customers can become personal, custom-made and long-lasting. This can in turn encourage trust and loyalty.

Blogs can also enhance communications by enabling businesses to articulate viewpoints, information, and expertise on matters pertaining to the business. This allows the business to position itself as an expert in the niche.

These emails usually contain customer loyalty messages that encourage repeat business. Sometimes, these messages also allow prospective and existing customers to avail of certain promotional campaigns or grab opportunities that will help them gain more out of their purchases.

There are several advantages to email marketing. These include the capability of distributing information on a wide range of particular groups of prospective and existing customers at a relatively minimal cost. It also allows businesses to drive and press their promotional materials through emails rather than waiting for these customers to visit the website and view their advertorial messages.

Aside from email marketing being the second most effective online marketing tactic next to search marketing, it is also relatively easily to track. There are several softwares such as web bugs, read-receipts, un-subscribes and bounce messages that informs businesses if their promotional emails were read or deleted without being read by their recipients. These can be used to gauge and determine positive and negative responses. It can also be used to associate sales with marketing.

But despite these several advantages, email marketing have also presented some disadvantages that led to companies dropping this initiative as their chosen business marketing tool. With the influx of companies sending unwanted and unsolicited email to almost all email users, spam came about. A lot of email users now tend to delete a lot of promotional emails that they conclude as spam since it is frequently difficult to determine whether an email is legitimate or spam. In addition, there have been a lot of instances where computer malware and spyware applications were distributed through email. This is amongst the main reasons why a lot of email users are turning down or rejecting emails from unknown sources that have the potential of infecting their computer systems and networks.

Due to the spam phenomenon, web developers have created spam filters and spam blockers to protect email users from receiving these unsolicited emails. Many legitimate corporations complain that most of their promotional emails get caught on these spam filters and puts efforts and costs to waste.

In order to be successful in email marketing programs, the business needs to know and promote awareness of the Spam laws. These business institutions should also have the capability of incorporating this with their email marketing strategies.

But it has been a frustration for some companies whenever they find out that once a user has tagged them as spam, they will automatically be blacklisted and loose in the end of the email marketing battle. This is regardless of the fact that they integrate strict compliance with spam regularizations and policies.

Aside from the already mentioned disadvantages of email marketing, privacy has also become an issue with email activities. Today, every email has to go through several numbers of computers or servers before it actually reaches the intended recipient. This potentially exposes the email to the prying eyes of hackers who can physically tamper with the content of the email.

But email marketing can still be a solid marketing tool despite these challenges and disadvantages. This is only if email is used tactfully and with appropriate strategies. Email marketing has gone down in terms of popularity among marketers, but it may not be long before an innovation revolutionizes email marketing.

Social networks, aside from being able to play a significant role in many ways to the development of business networking, are also beginning to be embraced by the medical community as a global way of managing institutional knowledge or information. These sites can now disseminate social knowledge that highlights new medical breakthroughs. Individual physicians or medical institutions are now able to share and set new standards when it comes to healthcare and medical products through these web portals. The role of social networks is also of great interest to pharmaceutical companies that are spending a huge amount of their marketing funds for attempts to create influence over leaders of medical social networks.

Different language groups and even countries have been touched by the scope of social networking. Popular social network sites have been replicated to cater to different countries and languages. These social networking portals have also extended to connecting a network of cross-country students and faculty members in the academic world. Several websites have also begun using social networking as a means to spread social good – tackling environmental awareness issues, aids and cancer prevention discussion groups, and Volunteer Peace Corps groups along with theological and Christian Community groups. These places provide users with a means to interact with like minded community members and thus find channels for their purposes.

Social Networking Services, in general terms, are web sites designed for members to create and post content in the form of profile pages primarily in order to communicate with each other. Each social network uses a variety of features and privacy controls to attract different groups of users and networks.

Today, since social networking is a relatively new concept to the industry, very few charge for membership fees. Social networks earn and own profit through online advertising and/or selling professional information and social connections to large and small scale businesses. Social Networks still have a lot to learn in terms of establishing targeted advertising to their members.

A recent online research stated that more advertisers and marketers are now making use of social networking sites to apply suggestive influence and solicit brand advocates for their benefit. By the year 2007, there were as many as 48% of brand marketers deploying marketing tactics on different social networking channels. This is where the “trust your peers” concept comes into play. More often than not, friends will influence one another when it comes to purchasing decisions.

Rather than just trusting an advertisement which they see online or anywhere else, social networkers will most likely listen to their friends and even discuss about purchasing decisions through message boards or online chat rooms. Marketers have grasped this new norm of social networking and have been able to catch on by engaging in several tactics as seen on some social networking sites by the use of skins, widgets, and forward-to-friend functionality to spark engagement.

There are various ways where a marketer can show participation in social networking sites. It may be in the form of paid advertisement, a feedback or a comment to a user dialogue, tagging or rating brands or creating custom pages for their brands.

Through Social Networking, Marketers now have the ability to predict client or consumer behavior by closely following the trend or the hype of a certain group base. Marketers may in turn also suggest certain products or services to their chosen client base. But because of social networking, it will seem that they are just like any other member user who has come into the group to share ideas and have interesting points and comments to share.