Monetization

Many of the smartest marketers I have had the pleasure of knowing, agree that building an email list is essential to long-term success.

Profiling is a term I use to partition my list into separate sub-lists that can help you identify what products or services are of the greatest interest to your list subscribers. A profile can be any way you want to separate the list members into groups of like interests, wants, needs, demographics or any other predictor of future buying behavior.

Currently, looking for the money in social media marketing is like asking directions in a foreign land when you don't speak the language and don't know how the locals connect and communicate. Social media is commonly defined as comprising "primarily Internet-based tools for sharing and discussing information among human beings."

Once they’re hooked, use that attention to increase ROI.

Budgets are tightening, and advertisers need to boost ROI- fast. The social Web is gaining value not only as a medium that delivers measurable results, but also as a resource for gaining insight a company can use to make all of its advertising (TV, print, online) more effective, to increase ROI across the board.

Thanks to social networking sites such as YouTube, online video has quickly become an everyday part of the online experience. While marketers have been slow to capitalize on video so far, the low cost of producing content and potential for increasing reach will make it essential to performance marketing.

Facebook, of course, is the social networking site college students used to call their own. Since the site opened up to the general public, its profile has definitely been on the rise. Bay Partners' Facebook program - called AppFactory - will be aimed at giving entrepreneurs microbursts of funds as they need it, from $25,000 to $250,000 in as little as a few days' turnaround.

That venture capitalists would sustain a program for such a niche field as social network applications on a single website speaks volumes about how strong the tech sector is these days.