Team Alpha 375

Leveraging Social Media for Leads, Sales, and More!
By Wendy Montes de Oca

Although many marketers still don't understand how to take advantage of social media, I'm here to tell you that it's a crucial strategy.

It's a key element of my marketing plans. And it deserves a lot of credit for the six figures in revenue that my consulting business was bringing in -- only 10 months after I got started.

I have fully utilized social media -- for myself and for my clients -- with sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Twitter, FaceBook, and more. It's cost effective and casts a wide net. Where else can you get your message out to the masses for zero advertising dollars? These "communities" are filled with like-minded individuals who crave information. Your job is to target those communities and release your message.

To promote my consulting business, I've had the most success with LinkedIn, a professional networking community, as well as doing press releases that got republished by bloggers, social pages, and online news aggregators like Yahoo and Google News.

On LinkedIn, I simply joined several "marketing and small business groups" where my target clients would be. I then repurposed relevant, useful articles from my blog and uploaded it as "News" or "Discussions." This is a great platform to create awareness, build expert credibility, drive website traffic and generate leads.

Disseminating that repurposed content through LinkedIn -- which took less than an hour per week -- generated an average of 25 qualified consulting leads for me per week. It cost me absolutely nothing to get those leads -- and when you consider my minimum 3-month retainer fee, we're talking a profit margin of more than $10,000 for each lead that turned into a client.

For my clients, especially those with little to no advertising budget, I've made social media tactics a staple in their marketing strategies. By leveraging social media, I helped one client, for example, a best-selling author and well-known anti-aging nutritionist, increase website traffic and signups to his newsletter. In just four months, we collected nearly 5,000 e-mail addresses at $0/CPL (cost per lead). In addition, his revenues increased year-over-year by nearly 40 percent.

If you learn to think outside the box and harness the power of social media marketing -- before you know it, what started out as a "hobby" or side job, just may turn out to be your cash cow.