Are you killing yourself over your Internet marketing effort but seeing little or no return? You may be like millions of companies that have killer content and maybe even a piece or two that went viral but paid advertising isn’t gaining the traction their content deserves. You need to follow up with solid Internet marketing in order to capitalize on your world-class content.

Whether you are an industry leader or just starting off, here are some tips that will help accelerate your brand.

1. Embed Your Videos

If you are posting links to YouTube on your social media, you’re wasting your clicks. Embedding video (especially from YouTube) is easy as pie and when the video is on your site, you have much more flexibility with the viewing experience and the action items to which you want to direct your users (such as Facebook likes). Also, when you post the video yourself in this format, you can give it a catchier name and description. I created an app on ZankRank so that I can keep users in my website while I promote someone else’s great videos.

2. Create Memes

Status messages can be absolutely brilliant, but Facebook clearly favors images over plain text in their post-sharing algorithm. People want to see pictures. Facebook knows this so they display image posts more often than text or link posts on friends’ or followers’ feeds. To take advantage of this principle, you should try to frame your content in a bite-sized meme and make an image out of it to share. Add a link in the caption as an action item that will direct users to your content.

3. Partner with Established Organizations

If you have original content, include links to established organizations that complement your message, then share the link with that organization. They may share it with their millions of followers. I wrote a blog piece about Paul Krugman’s contradictory ideology and linked to the Ludwig von Mises Institute in support of the ideas then shared the post with them. They re-posted the link twice and I received tens of thousands of views from it and dozens of FB likes for the page.

4. Co-opt Good Content

If you receive good press or want to link to a really good article through your social media campaign, you should write a blog piece describing and quoting from the original article. When you promote the article or good press, you’re capturing the reader and exposing them to all of your FB likes and advertisements before you send them eventually to the source. Acton Blog and Juggernaut are great at this technique.

It’s important with this to actually add your own content and not just copy and paste someone else’s content. Also, make sure you’re posting to the original content. As a user, it’s disturbingly annoying to click on a FB link that goes to co-opted site with links to yet another co-opted site. This technique is worthwhile but has its limits.

5. Make People Laugh

Everyday life is stressful and riddled with problems. The last thing we need is some organization pumping out further depressing material in order to market their product. It just doesn’t make for viral material. I have some phenomenal quotes from my books along the lines of:

but nothing spreads ideas faster than a laugh:

(From thekronies.com)

Bonus: Jump on the Bandwagon:

It’s important to initiate conversation on social media, but it also pays to sometimes join a conversation already happening. That’s what we did with the #fullCommunism hashtag, which gained some steam when a girl posted a picture of herself with a printout saying, “I want full communism because I value a fair society.” Naturally, people responded to the picture with videos of the mass-murdering communists this person was evidently supporting but through Freedom Memes we posted a response image with her sign auto-corrected:

The result was a doubling of followers to the Freedom Memes page and %30,000 increase in activity.