Business owners are completely overwhelmed with digital options. Too frequently "experts" offer advice on Google Pay Per Click, Facebook, Twitter, Text Messaging, Loyalty Cards & Programs, Pinterest and the onslaught of sites/tools as though they are separate entities unto themselves. They are not unto themselves! Also, they are not new. Using third parties to drive traffic to your website is not new. For decades it has been a well-known fact of marketing and sales that getting noticed is important. This is most certainly not a new concept by any means? Getting noticed will distinguish you from online competitors. Staying top of mind is as important as ever. The primary difference is that there is myriad new tools that empower business owners, especially small business owners, to stay top of mind, drive qualified website traffic, and increase sales conversions. The problem is that the number of tools frequently overwhelms business owners. To drive the point of this article we will coin a phrase. Rather than talking about linkbacks, social media, blogs, Pay Per Click, we will call it what it really is. Most are familiar with the term OPM, or Other People's Money. Our new phrases are Other People's Traffic, or Tools, OPT, and Other People's Content, OPC.

More important than a strong OPT strategy is using powerful tools and implementing best practices with the tools. Proper selection of "Other People's Tools" will make or break your online strategy. What tools will you use to increase exposure and remain top of mind?

Digital Requirements:

- Email Campaign Management

- OPT: Other people's traffic: Facebook, Twitter, Popular Blogs, Popular News Sources, Popular Discussion Boards.

- Customer Loyalty

- Website Management

- Text Messaging

- Mobile/Smart Phones Redemption & Communications

- Tracking and Statistics for sites/portals

- Telephone Tracking and voice recording

Other People's Tools should include a combination of the big four - Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and YouTube. You should also utilize large forums, blogs and sites for your online, OPT, strategy. This series of sites should be coordinated in one place from which you can post to all networks. In addition, it is best to have one portal to manage all your posts.

What should a post consist of and how many should you post per week? It is surprisingly simple really. How much information do you have and how often do your fans, subscribers, friends read the information you post. If you have highly pertinent information, then post it as often as you have it. If you use RSS data, or repost/retweet to use OPC, Other People's Content, which you should, then try to have at least two original posts for every shared post. Do share Other People's Content, but don't JUST do that!

NEVER do information dumps. Some have articles and original content that they have saved for years. Use that, but DON'T dump it. Google would rather see a slow burn in an upward turn rather than a data churn.

Top Five Ideas for Content:

1) Photos - Post pictures with well-planned descriptions, titles and tags where possible. Remember, with all content, don't dump it. If you have ten pictures from your event, post them every other day with rich content to generate comments over time.

2) Specials - ONLY specials available to loyal Facebook fans, customers, etc. Never run the same old special that you already run elsewhere, in print, etc.

3) Contests - IF you have not run a Facebook contest, then DO IT TODAY! These generate large numbers of followers.

4) Questions - Ask your fan base and followers questions. Either in the form of regular questions, like "How did you like the last Dancing With the Stars?" or in a poll/voting format. If you are a restaurant, you ask how they liked the last Hell's Kitchen!

5) News - New products, product updates, etc. Industry news from other sources. Just be sure to give credit and add your comments or input. Be careful about discussing politics or religion. Employee news, hiring, job opportunities, great reviews, testimonials, etc. PRWeb and Blog Talk Radio are now great tools to gain keyphrases in Google in third party, or Other People's Tools.

Now that you can use Other People's Traffic efficiently, you need to use your sites (Mobile, blogs and forums) to collect more data. Collect emails, cell numbers, etc. Then, use that data to bolster your own content network. Your Digital Media Strategy should integrate the use of other people's traffic with your own traffic and content networks that you own. If these efforts are successful, you will begin to see other people using your content network as their OPC source.

Finally, use every metric available to decide what keyphrases to target in upcoming rounds of your online strategy. Review your metrics, website, Facebook, etc. as a tool to move forward and implement more of your own best practices. Analyze which keywords and phrases send traffic versus how highly ranked you are with the phrases to determine which are having the biggest impact on your online marketing efforts. If you get traffic from, u are ranked poorly, then it stands to reason that you need to integrate that phrase into your marketing efforts.

Tools of the Trade:

PRweb - Meticulous use of PRWeb WILL add a lot of value to your off site search marketing efforts. Write three news releases per week and pay to get at least one into maximum distribution in PRWeb. Use keyphrases carefully and create highly optimized hyperlinks to highly pertinent content in your blogs, website and social network.

Blog Talk Radio - Try to set aside fifteen minutes a month to read and talk about your news and releases on Blog Talk Radio. Be sure the title, description (With hyperlinks) and tags are highly rich in your keyphrases. Try to appear on other radio shows in Blog Talk Radio and request tags for the show you appear on. Here's an example: Search Google for Andy Kurtzig* - You will find the Blog Talk Radio show "SpotLight on Success" ranked number one. That is ranked above the link to the Wikipedia post about Andy Kurtzig. Powerful!

Just Ask Google! - When you want to know how to honestly boost your rankings in the search engines, mostly Google, then why not ask Google? Google has vast resources for online marketing through which it will tell you best practices and even empower you with the ability to tell Google how to use your websites resources when Googlebot visits your site to catalog it. When you search for phrases in Google, it will recommend other phrases similar to those you searched.

Web Rankings & Traffic Travis - These are both great tools to utilize to track your rankings in the top engines for many keyphrases. I recommend paying for professional versions so you can track hundreds of keyphrase combinations over time, track changes in rankings and monitor competitors. You might be surprised who some of your competitors are online.

WordPress - WordPress is a great tool for blogs and websites alike. There are thousands of plugins that help to enhance your online presence. The problem is that many of the very plugins you might utilize can break your site, or worse, open your site up to hackers. Like anything, if you pay professional coders for the plugins, the likelihood that the plugin is a tool for hackers is less. But, you can build a WordPress empire on free plugins if you have tested them.

Top WordPress social networking plugins:

• NextScripts

• WPMUDev

• BlogGenie

• SiteMile

• WPRobot

• Autoblogged

• Feedwordpress

• Jetpack

The data used herein was gathered in part from research conducted by Rob Thrasher, a Digital Media Expert & Researcher, for the SpotLight on Success radio show and Loyalty Noggin. Loyalty Noggin is a digital customer loyalty management system. Andy Kurtzig did not endorse this content.

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