by Alfred Edmond, Jr.

January 4, 2009

If You Like Our New Site, Tell Your Friends. (If You Don’t, Tell Us.)

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An important part of our strategy for driving the success of the new BlackEnterprise.com is to harness the power of social networking sites to extend the reach of our content and attract (as opposed to traditional marketing, which aims to drive) traffic. I have personally been encouraged and inspired by the example of the campaign of President-Elect Barack Obama, which used social networking to historic effect to win the White House, as we detailed in the TechWatch article “The Politics of Web Strategy” in the November 2008 issue of Black Enterprise. As the editor-in-chief of BlackEnterprise.com, I am more determined than ever to apply some of the lessons of that article to our efforts to make our web site one of the top web destinations on the Internet.

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Our site has been built with a number of tools and features that make it easier than ever for people to find our content and share it with others in their networks. I’ve put together a brief list of things that everyone who believes in the Black Enterprise mission of wealth creation and financial empowerment for African Americans–especially those who are already on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Linked-In, etc.–can do to draw traffic to our site. The Black Enterprise Interactive team would appreciate you taking some time to do the following:

SHARE OUR ARTICLES
Click on the “Share This” link, which you’ll find at the end of every article and blog posted at www.blackenterprise.com. You’ll have the option of e-mailing a link to the articles for others to click, which will bring them to the site to read the item. Better yet, you can post the article on your Facebook, MySpace or other social network profile page or blog. That way, all of your friends can click and read, or may even be inspired to repost it or send it to their friends, who can send it to theirs, and so on. This works really well with Facebook, where you can post articles to walls or e-mail them to your network of friends.

JOIN OUR FACEBOOK GROUP ON NETWORKED BLOGS
BlackEnterprise.com is a member of NetworkedBlogs via Facebook. If you are already on Facebook, go to http://www.networkedblogs.com/blog/blackenterprise.com and follow instructions to join our network. Once you join the group, you can invite up to 20 of your friends to join every day. So far, after only a month or so, we have more than 260 people in our network and counting. If everybody in the Black Enterprise audience who is on Facebook did the same, we should be able to reach more than a thousand people,