The social network sites are a fantastic tool for internet marketers.

If you have a product or service to sell you need to get to know your customer and more importantly get them to know you and in turn like and trust you before they will buy from you.

This is now why internet marketers and network marketers are turning to Facebook and Twitter. So let us look at some of the reasons why.

First and foremost, it doesn’t cost anything; they can both be used as free marketing tools.

If I refer back to that buzz phrase “the money is in the list” I’m sure you have heard this before, people spend a lot of time and effort and sometimes money, to build a list of people interested in their niche to market to. These lists will stay very close to people’s chests but with social networking these lists are on show for everyone to see!

There is an important approach for marketing in this way. Once you build up your friend list or list of followers you need to respect them. You maybe connected but they still don’t know you yet, so sending endless adverts to your websites or products will result in them un-following you, nobody likes to be spammed!

Think of it as a relationship you need to build, you wouldn’t jump in to bed with someone you have just met.  You want to be wined and dined first, you want to know that this can progress to a place that makes you happy. I may be the first to compare on-line marketing to sex but keep that in mind and you’ll be on the right tracks.

In this day and age everyone is looking for “something for nothing”, we are a world full of freebie loving people so take this knowledge and use it wisely. While networking with your followers and friends always try and help them, inspire them with food for thought quotes or send them to your videos and blogs that give them help and advice, in essence solve their problems. They also want to know you more personally, let them see pictures of you and videos of what you get up to when you are not tweeting.

Only then can you hope to potentially get a sale. If an individual gets to know you, and you have helped them then yes they will look seriously at what you have to offer. Then you can turn one of the biggest growing pass times in to your personal cash machine.

Writing Articles can generate you some fantastic website traffic.  The concept is simple.  Write an information packed article and submit it to as many article directories as you like (the more the better).  The key part of the article is the Signature Box, this is the small box at the bottom of the article where you tell the reader a little about the author.  You can have links in this box so this is where you would put links to your website.  If the reader has found the article useful they are likely to click on your link to find out more about you.

A traffic exchange is a website you can post a link to your own website on.  You then surf other peoples websites through this site and you earn credits for every website you view.  The more credits you earn the more times your website will be shown to others. 

Traffic Exchanges can be a very good means of getting free traffic to your website, it isn’t always the most targeted of traffic though.  I found the best success using traffic exchanges is to have a specific capture page to use on the traffic exchange website.  

Generally you have about 20 seconds maximum to capture the persons attention so you need a hard hitting headline and an opt in box.  Your autoresponder can follow up later.  Be as specific as possible on your capture page, even mention the traffic exchange name.  Remember people use traffic exchanges because they want more traffic for free so something along those lines will net the best results.  I’ve promoted some free viral traffic builders on traffic exchanges and this works well.  In fact I think I was first made aware of them from a traffic exchange, just goes to show it works!

TrafficSwarm is one of my favourites.  It’s quite quick to set-up and you can start surfing for credits quite quickly.