Professional Social Media Accounts: The Essential Secret

When I started out as a writer/contributor for Comic Booked.com, I was briefed on the importance of social media networks for online businesses. We needed to publicize ourselves, our articles, and the site as a whole--and the more sharing, the better. We had to build our follower bases as much as possible and then tweet/share/+1 everything we wrote on as many platforms as possible. That makes sense, of course... but then people lost interest in everything I had to say. I started losing friends and followers that were people I knew and cared about, because as far as they were concerned I was just spamming them with the latest comic book news. Ouch.

I've mentioned this before on this blog, and I have to say that it's one of the trickier dilemmas I've had to face as an online professional. I found a solution to the social media problem soon after I started writing this blog by opening up a separate Twitter account for E.O.I.P. (@onlineincome19), where I focus exclusively on tips relevant to my business and this blog. My followers here are not my personal friends, and neither are those I follow. Instead, I use this account as a way to connect solely with professionals and information sources who can help me and/or hopefully benefit from what I have to say. I have only experienced growth from this account, and only positive reactions from others who have found it. Why? It's targeted. I'm sharing information with people who actually want to hear it, while at the same time preserving my other social accounts for my personal life.

Three questions that come up regarding professional social media accounts are when, why and how. I've already tackled a lot of the why. The timing depends on your business. You should open new social media accounts as soon as you're ready to start seriously promoting whatever you have to offer. "How" is a bit trickier. I want to stay as far from spamming others as I can, and I also want my updates to be regular and consistent. There's a super easy way to manage a professional Twitter account: find good sources of information and subscribe to them. Every blog has an RSS feed that you can find if you look around a bit, and if you go to your new Twitter account information, you'll find a place where you can input the RSS feed. That way, whenever the blog updates, the new article will show up on your Twitter account without your having to do anything. This has helped build my following and establish my reputation even though it took only a few minutes to set up.

If you run or are heavily involved with an online business, a professional social media account is essential to your success. It's also something that takes only moments to start on and no time at all to monitor, and will bring you traffic and popularity in a way that nothing else can.

My Study "Ends"

Day thirty has come and gone, and I'm so busy that it's hard to find time to write. My latest escapade is Twitter Marketing, which I'm trying after reading an e-book on how to make money online. It's surprisingly easy--establish your niche, provide quality content (often by subscribing to the RSS feeds of related blogs that you know and trust), and then sell only the best products. You can open as many accounts as you want in as many niches as you want, and selling as many products as you want. This method is actually much more work than it sounds, but I'm taking it one niche at a time, for now focusing only on my Online Income account. The trickiest thing is building a following, as last time I checked I had only about twenty-seven people. But I'm following more and hopefully it will build up (supposedly I can pass a thousand in a month if I do it right). If I have a thousand people on each of ten different accounts, and if only three or four of them buys anything per week, I'll have reached my goal! The best part is that it's mostly automated, and I can be sure of providing people with quality insight and content, which has been one of my biggest fears about monetizing Twitter.

In other news, results, etc.: I am now making three times my original rate at Neobux. Granted, twenty cents a day is still pathetic, but at this rate I'm expecting it to pick up nicely. Now it should be only about three or four days until I can rent my next three referrals, and then very soon after until I can rent three more. I've had bad luck with Clixsense lately, only making a few pennies a day instead of dollars, but hopefully it won't matter too much--I should be able to upgrade my account soon anyway, since my sponsor doesn't seem to be following through. I do have a good $3 coming in for sure next week from Protypers.

As for getting paid to draw, I took and drew several pictures I thought would be good... but they weren't high enough resolution to sell. I'll see if there's anything I can do to fix that, and if not I'll have to request a refund, as I just don't have the supplies needed.

I have not been paid yet from Richgo PTR, and I expect I never will. That makes it painful to go on the site every day and watch several ads to remain "in good standing." I'll admit, the way they do the payments is sketchy. They pay out only $50,000 a week, supposedly, and upgraded members (again supposedly) get first dibs, and they're drawn at random. The only way I can get paid is if they genuinely run out of upgraded members demanding payment and just so happen to draw my name instead. So... this would be kind of like winning the lottery, only with a lot more work put into it. I don't know if I'll bother waiting the full thirty days or not.

This blog, as you already know, has been a total failure in terms of making money. I did what I was supposed to, but it went nowhere. I also fell dramatically short of my goal of $100 a week--making a measly $5-10 a week instead. But I still have two months to figure it out before my wedding, and there are still many options I haven't tried yet! As I continue to earn money and re-invest it, I'm able to move on to more and more advanced options and services. I'm hoping to climb it like a ladder and stop after I've reached my goal.

As the thirty days have now ended, this blog will probably cease to be much of a priority for me. I'll try to keep you posted on the big things, but I really have much more important stuff going on in my life right now. Cheers!

Day 11.3: Social Media: Acceptable for Business?

My most recent entrepreneurial endeavor was joining an interesting service I just learned about that uses Facebook and Twitter to advertise. You don't advertise your own link--you go with someone else's instead, and then someone else will advertise yours. I'm curious to see how it works out in a while. I'm using my personal Twitter account, which has a bit over 300 followers, almost all of whom are total strangers. I feel kind of bad about it, though. When I first got Twitter about a year ago, I posted tiny short stories on it or cheerful thoughts. After I joined Comic Booked, I used Twitter almost exclusively to advertise for it, and then now I'm using it to advertise some links. I still post something more personal once in a while, but there's no question that my personal Twitter feed is nothing fun to read. Just a list of ads. Is that ok?

One of my big fears about running an online business is that I'll start abusing social media. I've said before that I hate spam and I don't want any association with it. I've also said that I'm a horrible advertiser, and so anything I post promoting anything winds up just like an annoying ad. How far is too far?

One of the most common advice given to those who want to promote anything, online or offline, is to tell friends and family! Get the word out! Post about it on Facebook or Twitter! My big question is... will anyone still want to be friends with me if I do?

I don't know the answer. My current views are that if you're going to use social media for business, then get a separate business account for it, just as I've done with Twitter. But I don't want to have a dozen Twitter accounts and five Facebook accounts just to get my point across to the right audience. I want to advertise, but not spam. How can I do that? How can I get my notices to people who actually want to sign up instead of just shouting out to everyone? I guess I still have a lot to learn.

Day 6.1: Am I a Spammer?

I hate getting spam. I hate the idea of spam. I especially hate the idea of my being associated with spam, with those creeps who sit behind their computers sending out mass emails every day. I prefer to think of myself as a young entrepreneur, trying to see if I can make it big time on the internet--or at least, trying to see if I can make it small time with a decent income. I use methods that I have learned from experience or that have been advised to people in my predicament. I try not to go too overboard with my advertising... but have I already blown it?

Ok, let's see what's happened. Reddit is awesome. I got an account only a few days ago, and it's a fun site to explore and get a good laugh out of the latest meme. Really. It's also a good place to get your voice heard on the internet and to share your views with others... isn't it? I've been told before to take advantage of Reddit. Honestly, I thought half the point of Reddit was to share your thoughts... but I guess I was wrong. I was banned from one of my favorite groups, Writing. No reason was given, but the only one I could think of was "blogspamming." Is that what I was doing? I only submitted each link once, and for the most part, they've been positively reviewed if anything. And only one or two were even addressed to writing. But two have also been voted down, and my views dropped substantially yesterday. I've lost my favorite audience. Why?

What constitutes spam? I usually think of it in terms of junk mail or excess "newsletters" that no one wants to read, or annoying tweets by robots. On the internet, I think of it as posting the same thing over and over again on forums and sites. On Reddit, I would have thought that submitting the same link two or three different times would count as spam. I didn't think there was any problem with "harmlessly" promoting my own work, my own thoughts and ideas. I only wanted to engage a community of interested readers.

I was almost in tears as I went to bed last night, thinking about the ban. Why couldn't it have been just a warning instead? I had no idea I was doing anything at all wrong! But apparently, the misunderstanding was on my part. I have decided that until further notice, I will not post anything I write to Reddit. Of course, I'd be honored if someone else did, but that will be left to the readers. I never intended to bother anyone at all with this blog, and I can take a hint if I'm not wanted.

Will I keep blogging? Of course! Will I keep trying to engage online communities? Yes, if I can. Will it be a success? I'm very doubtful right now. Losing Reddit means losing most of my publicity, and without publicity a blog dies. I don't want it to die. Help me, Internet! Please... just keep reading. And I'd love if you could follow me on Twitter or join me on Clixsense or Swagbucks while you're at it!

Day 4.3: Using Social Media for Business

When I first started my work as an editor for ComicBooked.com, I was told of the vital importance of social media. In today's world, that's one of the best ways to get across to people. Use Facebook, use Twitter, use StumbleUpon and Reddit--in fact, most of you reading this probably discovered this blog from one of those sites. It's vital to have accounts and share your work as much as possible. But like everything else, there are ways to abuse it as well as use it.

There are two ways to go about social media if you want it to benefit your business--either use your own personal account or open a new one. If you use your personal account, you already have many contacts who are personally interested in what you invest in. Your family and friends are interested in you, and it's easy to share with them to help get the word out. But there's also a problem: people tune out if they get bored. If you're too enthusiastic, if you post about your business or site constantly, people will ignore you or (even worse) get annoyed with you. This can be avoided easily if most of your posts remain fun and personal, but it's easy to forget that. When I was starting out at my editing job, I started focusing largely on Twitter I posted every article I wrote, and almost every article I edited, onto Twitter. I tried to put on some regular posts as well, but I didn't have enough interesting things to say to keep up. Before long, almost every post I made was just advertising articles. I began to lose followers. When I went to look up which ones had left, I found the names of some of my own friends among them. I was heartbroken. Why were my friends abandoning me? Why didn't they like me any more? I was horrified as I realized what had happened. I was spamming them. I was sending unwanted notes to people over and over again, and my personal life had all but disappeared. They had no reason to follow me, and now I was harming my own work.

I was thinking earlier about new ways to publicize this blog. Twitter came to mind easily, but I didn't want to make the same mistake. I decided to take a different path. I got a new account for this blog, under the name of @onlineincome19. I have to start building a following from scratch, but this time I'm going to look for people who are interested in saving and earning online. I'm not going to post only links to articles, but also share bite-sized tips and links to sites I find helpful. I don't know how hard it will be for me to find a good balance for Tweet content, but I think that at any rate it should be better than my last attempt. I'm also considering starting up a Facebook page, but one thing at a time.

Day 1.2: Publicity, Publicity, Publicity!

If you're going to make money by writing online, you're going to have to do more than just write. I know that. Every time I've tried "just writing" in the past, my blogs have flopped to the point where I might as well have kept them in private journals. So... how do you get the word out?

1.Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one important way to let people find you online. I first learned about it when I worked as a writer and editor at Comicbooked.com--the best entertainment news site ever. The biggest thing to remember is to take advantage of keywords and tags. The more of those you have, the better chances there are of people stumbling onto your site. How do you choose a keyword? Examples for this post would include "search engine optimization," "keywords," and "comicbooked.com."

2. Another way is to take advantage of social media. Don't overdo this one--I've lost friends by advertising my writing too much. Use Twitter, Facebook, and Google + to get the word out about what you're doing, and your own personal friends and family will be much more interested and likely to tell others. Not interested in social media? Open accounts anyway. All you have to do is send out the link every so often with a friendly note about how awesome it is. Now, as I said, it's easy to overdo this one, and people don't like when you spam them, even if it's something really amazing. Keep your tweets and statuses personal and witty, if possible, and try to balance your business notes with your personal notes. But do stay active, and do promote your own work.

I have a confession to make here. So far for this blog I haven't done anything more than a simple Facebook post. No social publicity, no nothing. That might be part laziness on my part, but largely it's out of my personal desire to keep something as experimental as this blog to myself until I have an idea how it will work out.

3. And now for the hard part, the real labor: put your posts in directories. Ok, so what's so hard about that? Aren't there ways to submit to a bunch of search engines and directories at the same time? Of course there are... if you have money. If not, tough luck. Digging around, I have found some good search engine submitters, but directories? Not a one. At least not so far. I'll keep you posted if I find anything worthwhile.

Publicity is vital to monetized blogging, and it's work. For me, more work even than the blogging itself. But with eight views to this blog so far today since my last check, I know I must be doing something right.