If you have been in sales or marketing for a while you probably have heard of the term "Relationship Based Marketing".

This type of marketing differs from other forms of marketing in that it recognizes the long term value to the firm of keeping customers, as opposed to direct or "Intrusion" marketing, which focuses upon acquisition of new clients by targeting majority demographics based upon prospective client lists.

Relationship marketing also relies upon acquiring the knowledge of what the consumer needs solely through existing customers in a mutual exchange. Relationship marketing is also dependent upon viral marketing for the acquisition of new customers. But as we have seen in very successful campaigns, viral marketing can have extensive effects.

What is viral marketing? Viral marketing refers to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives (such as product sales) through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of pathological and computer viruses. It can be word-of-mouth delivered or enhanced by the network effects of the Internet.

So how are people using the Internet to utilize viral marketing - in many ways.

Web 2.0 and Social Media



According to Wikipedia, which is a perfect example of Web 2.0, the term Web 2.0 is defined as "commonly associated with web applications that facilitate interactive information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration on the World Wide Web. Examples of Web 2.0 include web-based communities, hosted services, web applications, social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs, mashups, and folksonomies."


Web 2.0 gives more tools to those who utilize relationship-based marketing to promote their product or service. With Web 2.0 you are not only reaching a large base of people but you are also giving more marketing power to your website through the spider web of connections behind each of these types of media. If you are promoting yourself through Wikipedia, you are getting a two-fold force of marketing, one, directly to your potential client and two, promoting your website's viability due to Wikipedia's highly spidered site.


Blogging



Blogging has probably been around longer than the other types of relationship based marketing techniques. What better way to promote yourself and your product then to sit down with a one-on-one conversation with potential clients? With your blog you can share your interests or passions with others who will then share that information and thus you have viral marketing.


If the idea of creating a blog scares you, this too has been made easier. Not only is there software out there making it easier and easier to blog but there are also people who you can hire to write blogs for you.



Comment on Existing Blogs



Once you write your blog, it does your blog well to have people comment on it. This has to do with the way search engines work as well as plain ole viral marketing. To bring in more people to read your blog and comment, become a frequent visitor to sites that are related to your professional expertise and you may find yourself becoming the go-to person for those in need of that expertise.



Facebook and Other Social media


It is quite possible you have heard or even used Facebook by now. And if you haven't used Twitter, certainly you have heard the term. These along with MySpace, and LinkedIn are common forms of social media. Sites like Facebook and MySpace have a broad focus while LinkedIn is more business focused. Sites like Facebook, provide the opportunity to add a customized page you can use to promote a business.


Relationship based marketing takes time and patience but is possibly one of the most viable and reliable forms of getting your name and company out to the public with the greatest long term value.

Pamela Ravenwood is a copywriter for ArteWorks SEO. She is an award winning writer, journalist, SEO specialist and strategic planning consultant. To learn more about this search engine optimization company, visit www.arteworks.biz.

There are millions of blogs online these days and with those blogs are people finding ways to improve their website’s search engine rankings. Yes, blogs have more than one purpose.

Sure they are informative and have lots of fresh content, but they also link back to corporate or business websites, which in turn helps those websites move up the search engine rankings scale.

So why are blogs so successful in increasing your website’s rankings? To start, blogs have no specific special powers of high rankings on their very own. What they do have potentially is fresh, unique content. Most search engines tend to like this, regardless of the format. If the search engines know any given site is adding new articles on a frequent basis, they will come around often to index it and indexing in turn means better ratings.

This leads us to making sure your site’s content is fresh and how to draw people to that content. Good content is probably the best thing you can do to draw attention to your blog and maintain a following. To do this, try covering topics that nobody else is talking about. By writing about niche subjects, you can grab traffic that is looking for what you have to say. Second, spend the time and effort to research and write about your subject, don’t just repeat what everybody else is talking about.

Another strategy in creating a successful blog includes the writing of quality title tags with two audiences in mind. First and foremost, you're writing a title tag for the people who will visit your site or have a subscription to your feed. You also want to think about search engines when you title your posts, since the engines can help to drive traffic to your blog. Once you have finished your title tags, now you will want to make sure all of your entries are tagged. Technorati is the first place that you should be tagging posts. Tagging content can also be valuable to help give you a "bump" towards getting traffic from big sites like Reddit, Digg & StumbleUpon.

Tagging posts is one method if getting your content out in front of your potential audience, another way is through Twitter. Although Twitter is a social media tool meant to create community and relationships, it does have an SEO value. For example, Twitter can affect positively your Alexa rankings by sending visitors to your pages. Usage data is a sign of quality for Google and all the other search engines. If you can make people come to your site via Twitter, then this is an SEO advantage you cannot afford to miss. When using Twitter, don’t worry about shortening your URL’s, the link will still have value. These TinyURLs are dynamically created URLs that redirect users to the real URL via 301 (permanent redirect). Search engines do not index TinyURLs, but index and pass PageRank to the actual URLs instead.

While we are talking about the backend, make sure you are pinging your articles each time you write them. An easy way for search engines to quickly find your new content is through the process of pinging. Using a tool like Pingomatic is very helpful in this process. Pinging seems to help get blog posts spidered and indexed very quickly.

Last, add social book marking links to the end of each blog entry. This helps your reader pick your article and add it to their favorite book marking software and simultaneously promotes your site. Having your blog’s articles submitted to book marking sites such as Delicious helps you also build links back to your blog. Backlinks are important because each time someone links to your site it counts sort of as a “vote” for it, moving it higher up in the search engine results pages.

These are just a few ways your blog can grow and along with it your website’s rankings. With a little time and some patience, before long your site will surely make its way to the top.

Pamela Ravenwood is a copywriter for ArteWorks SEO. She is an award winning writer, journalist, SEO specialist and strategic planning consultant. To learn more about this search engine optimization company, visit www.arteworks.biz.

Have a few minutes? Want to spend some time checking out fascinating websites that relate to your specific interests? Maybe you want to see what is out there on astronomy, the environment, or even the entertainment industry. StumbleUpon is an amazing one-click stop to meet your curiosity needs. With over 4 million users already, StumbleUpon makes it easy for people to surf the web in a care free, channel flipping sort of style, stumbling on the most interesting material the web has to offer.

How does it work? After downloading the toolbar and setting up your personal category preferences on StumbleUpon, you are ready to go. With a single click on the Stumble Button, you are launched to one of many extremely high-quality web pages recommended by thousands of similar users. This creates an extremely valuable content source by sending StumbleUpon users directly to sites that match their personal interests. Not only that, but these sites have also been approved by like-minded individuals.

Many people might say that this is just one more of many social media sites that doesn’t really do anything. On the contrary, it has become one of the most enjoyable searching tools I have. I spend at least a few minutes every day “stumbling,” just seeing what is out their in my world. Everyone should give it a try. Once you have learned to truly enjoy this unique Internet community, you will also quickly realize its value for Internet marketing and search engine optimization.

As the number of “Stumblers” increases and ratings become even more relevant, StumbleUpon will increasingly impact search engine results as well as wide spread viral marketing. If your company provides content that is considered valuable by the relevant web community, features on social media sites like StumbleUpon will certainly increase exposure by introducing your brand as well as baiting valuable links. Social Media is the wave of the marketing future, and familiarizing yourself with StumbleUpon is just one way to capitalize on the ever-changing information age.

About the Author: Peter Hamilton is the Project Manager in charge of the Seattle office of ArteWorks SEO. He has a Bachelor's degree in radio, television and film and extensive experience in social media optimization. Mr. Hamilton also heads up the ArteWorks SEO educational video series on topics related to Internet marketing and search engine optimization. If you would like to view the free educational SEO video series, please visit www.arteworks.biz.