One of the reasons it’s so important for you to choose the best author for your blog is that they will need to represent your company all over the Internet if you are to take advantage of all the free marketing opportunities that are available online. The Internet is becoming increasingly social and interaction with your audience is vital. Answering comments on your own blog is a start, but to truly take advantage of the power of socializing, you will need to spend some time building up some profiles, increasing your reputation and joining the conversation.

Free classified ad services and article directories only require a one-way discussion; from you to your prospects. This style of marketing only works so well. What really gets people involved in your company is getting involved with them or letting them get involved with you or your company. How can you get involved? Try some of the ideas below.

• Join a social network - Social networks like MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn have proven to be great marketing tools for the creative mind. Create a profile, build up a friend and contact list, send out bulletins, post about events, find marketing or business partners and create your very own community. Think about your prospects, the things they want and how you can involve them in the process of giving it to them
• Submit to social news sites - Sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit and Netscape are excellent tools for spreading information. If your content is valuable, others will promote it to the front pages of these giant networks of news hounds. Understand how each works and submit your best content to the ones your prospects use most
• Join forums - Just about every industry has a forum or four aimed at your prospects or other businesses in your field. Join them and participate. Most of them allow you to customize your signature and the more posts you have with quality answers and information, the more you will be seen as an important part of that community. This in turn builds trust for your business and brand

The important thing to remember is that if you want your time to pay off, you need to really spend the time to offer valuable information and to stay active over long periods of time. You can’t show up on one of these sites and disappear a couple of weeks later. Most of them keep track of your activity and others will see that you may not be as dedicated as you say or that you may have been using them as a marketing ploy. Be sincere. Reach out to others in your industry and see how you can come up with better ideas than you have been.

As people, we are very powerful creatures, but when we team up with others, we are even more powerful. I believe this is true for businesses, as well. The best businesses participate with their clients and reach out to other businesses to combine their strengths to offer better products and services. Prevail PR was built almost entirely on joint ventures and has maintained a dedication to creating as many mutually beneficial engagements as possible for not only ourselves, but our clients, too.

Many of our joint venture partners were discovered through our participation on social sites. Many others came about from an idea spawned from our participation on social sites. Take the time to be sincere with others. You never know who might be looking for a partner just like you or a product or service like the one you are offering. Your prospects are out there. Everywhere. That means you need to be “your company” everywhere. What does your company stand for? You need to stand for that. Everywhere. All the time.

By putting the time in on these sites, you gain credibility and an active audience. There’s also a great side effect: search engine rankings. Because many of these social sites are so popular, they rank very highly in the search engines. If you search for Prevail PR on Google, not only will you find posts on our blog, but entries on any number of other sites we have participated on. In many cases, your posts on other sites will come up for other search engine terms, very often as a specific answer to a question a prospect has. Your site may not rank for a certain term, but through social participation, you have another opportunity to compete for very little money.

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