We have heard it before, social media is big, web 2.0 rocks and online marketing is *the* way. But is that all true? Sign up for facebook and twitter and blast your lenses over the channels? Not quite.

It boils down to this: find your way to engage with your audience and move with it. For example I am currently working for a money-saving small business and I was asked to move along side them and support their backlinking strategy. My fortune, they have a blog and regular content coming through, but to be honest: living in Germany and working for an American business owner can be more than a challenge. How am I supposed to develop a web 2.0 backlink strategy with them if their actual topic is of little interest to me by the very merit that their information is useless to someone living in Germany?

I have two goals when helping on these kinds of projects: to be true to myself and to be true to the brand I am hired to work for. And after some careful consideration, I found a way to combine those goals into a platform which hopefully will encourage social media traction as well as provide value and benefit to the “target audience”.

This is what I did: took my ignorance of the market (and general theme “save money”) and created first a mini-video series on “How to Save Money Buying a Home — Can You Trust Your Real Estate Agent?” with the purpose to embed those videos on a squidoo lens (web 2.0) which offers an existing community, great opportunity to interact and expand as time goes on and information is gathered, thus hopefully turning “How to Buy a Home” into a growing source of information and authority.  For that is the cool thing about this project:  I am not selling anything, so I can concentrate of giving value to those who click on over.  The web 2.0 property is leveraged only by giving valuable anchor-texted backlinks back to that small business in the States.

If you take a moment to look at the second video which I offer you here, you will notice also how I have crafted them to a) offer value while b) being authentic and true to myself by c) gaining value myself from the interaction, responses I get.  This will help me in the long run as I can profit from other people’s wisdom while coming closer and closer to actually moving to Canada and buying property when we get there.

I would love to hear what you have to say about this kind of marketing specifically, however if you have something to reply to the content of the video, please consider hopping over to “How to Make an Offer on a Home”.