How You Can Make Money From Facebook, Twitter, Youtube etc…
Social Media plays a big part in most of our lives.
There is a pretty good chance that you use at least one of the social media sites above if not all of them.
Whether it be catching up with old school friends on Facebook, tweeting about what you had for lunch on Twitter ( Stephen Fry has about half a million people following his dietary schedule ???) , or showing the world a humerous video you made for Youtube.
If you are on the internet , the odds are pretty good that you are using these social media sites.
But is anyone making any money from them ?
Apart from the founders of the sites obviously, although even that can be a struggle. Facebook is having numerous problems trying to monetize it’s massive users numbers, because no-one wants to pay to use the service and the ad space they are trying to sell seems to be proving very difficult for advertisers to make money from.
As you know, when you’re on facebook, you’re in the midset of having a laugh with your friends and not looking to buy anything.
ITV are looking to sell Friends Reunited for £15m , having bought it for £175m in 2005.
So what can Social Media do for your internet business and how do you go about trying to make money from it?
After all, the traffic is free, so if you can figure out how to do it, you are on to a winner.
The best in the marketplace for this at the moment is probably a guy by the name of perry belcher. You can google him and find out how he makes his money from social media.
In a nutshell , it’s quite a simple concept.
I’m sure you are aware of the wrong way to go about building a business using social media. If you’ve had friend requests on Myspace and Facebook, followed straight away by a message saying “ I found this great site where you can get blah blah blah, ” you will know what I mean.
Now I’m sure there are people who have had some success using this method but I’m not sure that the social media equivalent of spam is the way to build a solid online business.
Perry belcher does things a little differently and it is all based around the model that we recommend on this site of building an internet business around a subject or market that you are knowledeable and passionate about and providing a quality experience and content for your prospective customers.
Sounds simple.
Well the basics of Perry’s model is . He merely treats his social networking contacts as he would people he has met at a party.
Meaning if you meet someone at a party, you don’t start trying to pitch them your product two minutes after meeting them. You would get a lot of yawns and soon find yourself standing at the bar by yourself.
It’s simply too early and not the time.
Perry has a set of social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and a Youtube Channel, all pumping out good contenet for free on subjects that he thinks his prosepctive customers would be interested in.
All of this content and these social sites all then push people to his blog for more good free content.
Then the more responsive and more likely to buy prospects, join his e-mail list in return for a free giveaway of some more content that they need.
And then through the e-mails on the e-mail list more content is deleivered mixed with sales messages and promotions.
It is a simple sales funnel that feeds the warm prospects through to his sales messages when they are ready for it, without upsetting his other contacts who may not be ready for it.
They can opt-in to his sales funnel at a later time as and when they are ready to do so.
It is the social media equaivalent of talking about your business with a new friend at your house, over a beer on the patio , rather than trying to pitch them within two minutes of meeting at a party.
Think about your sales funnel and how you can use social media to gather people with an interest in what you are doing, and slowly take them step-by-step towards your business and what you have to offer them.
Don’t go straight for the kill like a nervous teenager on a first date. Take the time to establish a relationship, provide the content and information that they are looking for, for free if possible and watch that one-off sale that you were going for, turn into a long standing business relationship based on respect and trust for you and your business.
Social Media is the perfect vehicle to start establishing that.
