Social Media Loco

Mobile E-commerce Infographic

2011-06-24T20:35:00.001-07:00

View the Mobile eCommerce Infographic post at Microsoft Tag.

The power of QR Code!!

2011-06-11T01:03:00.001-07:00

Bonanza Internet Marketing SMS Marketing

2011-06-06T00:25:00.001-07:00

Mobile Marketing Webinar with Dan Hollings

2011-06-01T21:54:00.001-07:00

Social Marketing with Facebook and Twitter

2011-05-24T01:28:00.001-07:00

How to Build a blog and post in WP in less than 4 Minutes

2011-04-21T19:14:00.001-07:00

cropped with SnipSnip

A Coherent Social Media Strategy!!

2011-04-21T01:36:00.001-07:00

HSM Global-Madrid featuring Charlene Li

View more presentations from Charlene Li

What's the True ROI in Social Media?

2011-04-19T19:51:00.001-07:00

YouTube CopyRight School

2011-04-16T14:25:00.001-07:00

What Makes Videos go Viral? (Video)

2011-04-16T13:39:00.001-07:00

sme_bw2010_scott_stratten_v2 from Michael A. Stelzner on Vimeo.

6 Ways to Use Curation for B2B Social Media

2011-04-12T08:41:00.001-07:00

By Jeffrey L. Cohen

One of the continuing trends in B2B social media is curating content from other sources and presenting it to your followers and subscribers. Depending on the medium you use to present it, this may include your own comments about the curated articles. While it is important to create your own original content for your company’s social media outlets, one way to broaden the amount of content your provide to your network is to share content of others.

Curation is all about compiling and reviewing content and only sharing the best of it. Another way to curate content is to present content that is all about a single theme. Again, this would only be the best content about the theme, or maybe the most interesting or thought-provoking. The following are six ways you can use content curation in your B2B social media.

1. Create a Blog Post of Favorite Articles from the Week
This is the easiest and most obvious form of content curation. Keep track of popular posts during the week, or at the end of the week look for posts in your industry to post to your blog. An RSS reader or Twitter search streams are good ways to find sources for this post. We publish a post with five recent posts from other sources every Friday as a wrap-up to the week. I have also seen people publish this kind of post on Monday as a way to kick off the new week.
Tip: Use a compelling headline instead of 5 Recent Posts from This Week.

2. Create a Twitter Feed of Relevant Links
A big part of Twitter is sharing articles that you have found interesting. Since Twitter has become a news and content discovery engine for many people, it is worth seeking out information sources in your industry so you can share those with your network. It is considered a good practice to source your information on Twitter through re-tweets, but if you are sharing links, when readers click on a link, they are taken to the original source. Old style re-tweets (manual RTs) allow for commenting, while the newer style, inline re-tweets do not.
Tip: Use automated tools like Twitterfeed only for fully trusted sources.

3. Share Articles Regularly in a LinkedIn Group
As a participant in relevant LinkedIn Groups, you can share recent articles as a way to start discussions. Be mindful of posting too many articles in a Group, as you don’t want to overwhelm the discussions. Don’t always share your own content as a way to start discussions, but consider adding it to existing discussions if appropriate.
Tip: Look at LinkedIn Today as a source for content that is already being shared on LinkedIn.

4. Create a Regular Email of the Best Posts
Depending on your organization, you might want to consider sending a regular email to your customers or prospects with recent posts in your industry that are interesting. Make sure you include some content from your company in the email, but review every piece of content before sharing it to ensure it provides value. The important part about this is its regularity, so decide on a schedule that works for you at the start of the process and stick to it. If you have never sent regular emails before, start with a monthly approach, and include only the best content.
Tip: Pick a day and time for delivery so customers begin to expect it.

5. Share Articles with Your Sales Team
As you discover great reference posts or articles about your industry to share with customers and prospects, you should also share those internally with the sales team. These can be shared via a weekly email, internal blog or even an internal wiki. Provide these in a way that team members receive notification and they are not overwhelmed by all this content. This is an opportunity to comment how certain posts may relate to particular prospects.
Tip: Encourage the sales team to reach out to customers and prospects with content to help move them through the sales process.

6. Create a Weekly Audio or Video Podcast
Pick one or two important issues in your industry and create a weekly podcast where you discuss these issues. This can establish you and your company as people who are thinking about the industry as a whole, and shows your place in it. Five minutes or less should be your target length. Don’t start this unless you can commit to it.
Audio Tip: Use a microphone.
Video Tip: Shoot in a well-lighted room, so even if you use a webcam it doesn’t look blue from the light of the screen.

What are some other ways you have curated content and shared it with your network?

Excellent report about Social Media Marketing

2011-04-08T00:10:00.001-07:00

Social Media Marketing Industry Report 2011 from Michael A. Stelzner on Vimeo.

How Can B2B Marketing Become More Social?

2011-04-04T10:25:00.001-07:00

By Lee Odden on Apr 4th, 2011

B2B marketers have joined the social media marketing movement in droves. In fact, Forrester Research predicts that B2B firms will spend $54 million on social media marketing in 2014, up from just $11 million in 2009 (eMarketer B2B Social Media Marketing Heats Up).

Unfortunately, many of those efforts are entirely tactical, methodical and without a true understanding of the “social” aspect of social media marketing. B2B marketers that are early in their social media marketing maturity level tend to focus on message distribution such as Tweeting or posting Facebook links mostly to their own content vs. engaging with customers on a human level. That one-way communication profile doesn’t engender discussions and sharing, so social traffic level increases tend to plateau pretty early.

In order to grow and scale the return on social media marketing investments, B2B marketers need to think more about the “social” than the marketing. Here are a few thoughts on that:

Decide What You Stand for Topically

The social SEO benefits of being intentional about language that reflects your key business areas of focus as well as the conversations happening within your target community are essential. Topically fragmented blog and social networking content dilutes a company’s ability to “stand out” to customers amongst the sea of noise in social conversations as well as to search engines.

Practically, that means a strategy that identifies goals, customer personas, content & editorial plans and search/social keyword glossaries. A content marketing strategy is the plan that executes what your company and brand stand for as well as how it will communicate those key messages. A social SEO keyword or topic plan filters into all relevant web and social content creation. It can also flavor social network topic engagement and conversations. That means a guide for which blogs to comment on, which influentials to network with, word choices for Tweets, blog posts and tags.

Do: Create and participate where your customers and influentials spend their time and with a content plan that supports your key topics of focus. Be useful and share social content that’s worth sharing (whether it’s your content or others’).

Don’t: Overly self promote and publish social content that is not directly or indirectly in alignment with your key topics of focus. That doesn’t mean everything you create is keyword optimized. It means everything you create and promote is thoughtful about where it fits in your social & content marketing plan.

The outcome and benefit is that your own content creation and promotion efforts are aligned to inspire discussion, sharing and links according to topics and keywords that are important to brand, business and marketing goals. An ideal manifestation is that your target audience sees your brand in a positive way everywhere they look for topics XYZ and 123 on social channels, when they search and even offline (inspired by online) word of mouth.

Plan to Win

If you enter a competition half-assed, guess what? No matter what your talent is, the chances of a win are pretty slim. Unfortunately a lot of B2B companies approach social media participation with an attitude of using the least amount of resources possible. Oftentimes this means following structured best practices list from some self-professed social media guru. Checklist marketing works to make redundant tasks more efficient, but it’s no way to engage a community.

For example, one of the most common “plan to be mediocre” mistakes I see with B2B marketers is predictable social profile creation and publishing focused solely on LinkedIn, Twitter and a blog without researching those channels. Such a plan also involves a focus on promoting company content and superficial (at best) engagement with the community.

Planning to win means having a plan for networking into influentials’ sphere of influence and knowing what to do once you get on their radar. It means creating social content that will inspire engagement and outcomes to further your business goals. It also means providing training within your organization to distribute and grow the role of social participation within your brand.

Practically, this means forecasting resources (people, process and technology) for social media marketing as significant marketing channel, not just an experiment or a checked box on a list. It means an integrated plan to dominate your category through growing social influence & networking, content, search, word of mouth and media plus the resources to execute and measure.

Do: Hypothesize, forecast and commit resources to test, develop processes and scale social media engagement within your business. What starts as social media marketing can turn into social business as the impact of social media engagement propagates from marketing to other departments and throughout the organization. Winning the social media game for B2B marketing doesn’t just mean increased sales, it means dominating your category.

Don’t: Think that social media content promotion as part of a Search Engine Optimization program is the same thing as social media marketing or social business. It is not.

The outcome and benefit of planning to win in B2B social media is that you have enough resources to provide value to customers throughout the B2B buying and customer lifecycle, facilitating awareness, trust, confidence, word of mouth, sales and referrals. It also means developing a community in alignment with your company’s goals.

Social Marketing to the Business Customer: Eric Schwartzman’s Newest Book

2011-04-01T13:12:00.001-07:00

Awesome video about Facebook's iframe

2011-03-28T06:44:00.001-07:00

5 Keys to Unlocking Social Media Success

2011-02-23T22:38:00.001-08:00

Six reasons why your social business should be using APIs

2011-02-21T12:27:00.001-08:00

1. Increased sales

Depending on what you’re selling on your destination website, there’s a good chance that you’ll be able to drive additional sales by deputizing bloggers, affiliate retailers and boutique online shops into becoming part of the sales process.

Make it easy for ecommerce allies to grab relevant data and present it to the world using their interface but adhering to your standards. If you’re lucky, a web service developed by a third party could generate new sources of revenue.

2. Increased innovation

What if the community built new products and services on top of your brand’s foundation? The magic of APIs is that your development team and contractors don’t have to create solutions for every possible use of your product or service in the marketplace.

You do know that you can’t possibly handle every imaginable use case and build for every platform and media format, don’t you? In a sense, APIs are the ultimate form of crowdsourcing.

By releasing an open API with specific terms of use, you turn the community into developers and co-collaborators for your brand – at almost zero cost. By building out an external developer ecosystem, you’re essentially adding outside expertise and novel insights to your R&D process.

3. Synergy with new partners

Chances are that the marketplace holds potential partners for your brand that you’re not even aware of. APIs enable business-to-business interactions by opening data and processes to partners, either freely or through a commercial license.

APIs can target specific communities or networks. For example, Johnson & Johnson created an API offering discounted baby merchandise to mommy bloggers on BlogHer.

4. Increased customer satisfaction

We live in a social media world now. Customers are increasingly expecting brands to be social, to listen to conversations and embrace community input instead of just pushing out marketing messages.

APIs let clever outsiders experiment with finding out what customers want, and giving it to them. If your name is BevMo, chances are that your customers don’t just want to know which wines Wilfred Wong recommends, they’d like suggestions from their own favorite experts, or perhaps from fellow wine lovers.

And here are two reasons your brand should be using someone else’s APIs:

5. Authentication and curation

More and more companies are turning to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn as third-party authentication services – say, for websites, blogs or forums where it adds value to know people’s real names or identities (yes, believe it or not, people don’t want to register on your brand’s site just to leave a comment).

6. Increased reach

APIs are the rocket fuel powering Facebook’s batch of social plug-ins, which let you add Like or Recommend buttons to items for sale on your site.

The average Facebook user, nearly 600m of us, now spends 55 minutes a day on Facebook, and the average Like or Recommend may be seen by a few dozen of your customer’s friends on Facebook (Facebook has said that the average status update is seen by 40 people). Consider how Twisted Oak winery is smartly using Share and Like for all of its wines:

There are dozens of other open APIs your brand might plug into. Geo-aware APIs, like those from SimpleGeo and Foursquare, hold particular promise. Your brand should be innovating to connect with customer-friendly Internet features and, where possible, create something insanely great that a large number of people want to plug into. So start exploring!

Have a question about APIs? Want to discuss how your brand might use this approach? Please share your insights below.

Google Social Search Update!

2011-02-19T12:35:00.001-08:00

Using Linkbait to Gain Dozens of Targeted Links to Your Site

2011-02-16T00:14:00.001-08:00

by Daniel Scocco

Wouldn’t it be nice if dozens of bloggers in your niche gave you backlinks to a targeted post that could drive affiliate sales if you ranked well in Google? Well it is possible with a bit of creativity and by creating a linkbait post that boosts the egos of other bloggers in your niche.

I recently received dozens of backlinks and tweets on a post which was simply a list of personal finance books. The topic itself wasn’t anything special, but the way I created the post was beneficial because it drove enough attention that it now ranks on the first page of Google for my desired search term.

The idea is simple, poll the bloggers. I’ve seen it done before with several other blogs about blogging so I decided to try the same thing in the personal finance niche. Seeing as there are hundreds of blogs in my niche it wasn’t that hard to reach out to other blogs and ask them a quick question.

I created a list of about 100 personal finance bloggers and sent them all an email which said:

“Hi (bloggers name),

Ryan here from plantingdollars.com. I’m doing a post about the best personal finance books according to 100+ personal finance bloggers and I’m wondering if you could simply reply by telling me your favorite personal finance book. I’ll let you know when the post goes live and give you a backlink from it if you decide to participate.

Cheers,

Ryan

Granted I didn’t have a mailing list established beforehand so I literally emailed each one individually which took a good chunk of time, but following up was easy once the original email was set.

I waited about 2 weeks to see who responded. In total 38 bloggers did end up responding out of 100 which was more than I expected. I then created the post based on their responses and in the end gained an insightful post and a piece of linkbait simply by asking others questions.

After the post was written I also added affiliate links to amazon for each book that was mentioned and as promised gave each blogger a backlink to their site.

When the post went live I then emailed each one back with a personal message about their pick and let them know where the post was located so that they could easily link to it. This is what I sent the second time around:

Hey (bloggers name),

I Just wanted to send you a quick note to say thanks for taking the time to respond to my question about your favorite personal finance book. “Art of the Deal” was a book I also enjoyed quite a bit and was pretty inspiring.

I just posted the results from other bloggers here: (inserted link)

Hope you’re doing well and thanks again,

Ryan

In total I spent about five hours emailing the bloggers, compiling their answers, adding backlinks, and then following up with them, but the result was dozens of backlinks, and a post that ranks well for the term “best personal finance books” which should drive affiliate sales indefinitely.

I would consider the post a success considering it would take significantly longer to gain as many backlinks via guest posting. From this experience I hope to do a few more “poll the bloggers” type posts to gain a post that’s insightful for readers and provides a win win for backlinks for myself and the bloggers who participate.

Have you have any luck compiling information from other bloggers in your niche and turning it into a post?

Is social media good for lead generation?

2011-02-13T22:20:00.001-08:00

Let’s put it this way: if the online space, especially a company’s website, is such a huge marketing tool—the place where the majority of consumers (or other businesses) go to find out about your brand—then why wouldn’t social media/online interaction be a great place to find people seeking your product and/or service?

People are out there looking, and social media channels are the perfect way for them to ask questions about what they need to know. Usually a person’s social network consists of like-minded individuals (you choose who you follow/friend/engage with…right?), so needless to say if someone asks a question via social media it’s because they trust their peers to answer.

That being said, companies have an opportunity for lead gen if they only listen to what people are saying online. Are they asking about your industry? Are they seeking something you can offer? Find out. It’s as simple as setting up a search in your TweetDeck column for keywords that pertain to your industry.

There are other ways to monitor what’s being said about your brand online—ranging from free tools to very expensive ones—but if you’re still not sold on social media as a means for lead gen, then here are additional reasons that might convince you:

It’s more informed than cold calling

Assuming that you’re listening/monitoring social channels before reaching out to people, you’re already more informed than you would be by making a cold call. You at least know that the person(s) are a part of your industry/looking for something offered in your industry. You might have seen them specifically ask a question, or maybe they repeatedly talk about a subject. Either way, you can make informed interaction with them because you know they have an interest in what you have to offer (on some level) and can follow through accordingly.

You’re able to immediately engage with the person seeking something

As soon as you’re aware that someone might be a lead, you can immediately begin to communicate with them. What’s more: you can just as quickly direct them to any content on the web, whether it’s your website, other collateral, a blog, a YouTube channel for your brand, etc. The point is that you have an opportunity to immediately link to a plethora of rich media content within minutes of engaging with them. When, in the history of sales and marketing, has this been possible before?

It’s less invasive

Although social media provides an opportunity for real-time communication, it also can occur on both people’s schedules. Everyone gets swamped from time to time, but it doesn’t mean they aren’t interested in what a company has to offer. With social channels, you’re able to operate at everyone’s convenience. The “lead” answers when they can instead of getting turned off by your incessant phone call follow ups. Don’t underestimate the less invasive, yet still engaging approach that social media offers.

Overall, this can be an argument for why social media should be embodied by companies. It shouldn’t only be a part of marketing and PR, but also sales (as well as HR, customer service, etc.). If the sales team becomes well-versed in social media, you’ve now opened up yet another (possibly more popular) method for lead gen.

Know Your Rights with Debt Collectors

2011-02-13T11:17:00.001-08:00

by Odysseas Papadimitriou

Debt collectors make their money by successfully getting you to pay your debt, often with threats that are not even allowed by law. If you find yourself in a situation where debt collectors are hounding you, it’s important to know the rules that govern their conduct in order to deal with them effectively.

The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act determines the rules for many kinds of collections efforts including dishonored checks, rent, medical bills, utility bills, insurance bills and claims, student loans, credit cards, condo fees, attorney’s fees, judgments, and other personal debts.

Some collectors are excluded from the Act, however. These include creditors who are collecting on their own debts, service companies that have been assigned the debt (this does not include collection agencies), government employees, business creditors and non-profit credit counselors.

While these collectors are excluded from the Federal Act, many states, such as California, set stricter rules and hold all collectors under the rules set forth in the FDCPA.

So, basically all debt collectors must follow these rules:

Debt collectors can only contact you between 8 AM and 9 PM.
Debt collectors cannot contact you at work if you’ve let them know that your employer disapproves of the contact.
Debt collectors cannot harass, oppress or abuse you.
Debt collectors cannot lie when collecting a debt. (e.g. you can’t be told it’s a crime and that you’ll go to jail).
Debt collectors must identify themselves when they call.
Debt collectors must stop contacting you when you ask them to stop in writing. [This is known as a cease and desist letter, but be careful when you use it. If you stop the debt collector from contacting you, his only other means of collecting the debt is through a lawsuit.]
Debt collectors do have the right to contact your neighbors, but they can only ask where you are and they can only call once. They do not have the right to tell neighbors anything about your financial situation.
Debt collectors can only discuss your debt with your attorney, the creditor’s attorney, a credit reporting agency, a co-debtor, a guardian, or a parent. They cannot talk to any other third party about your debt.

One of the most common threats you’ll hear from debt collectors is that they’ll take you to court. They actually break law when they do that if they have no intention of actually suing you, they aren’t planning to do so in the immediate future, or they haven’t been given the right to sue.

For example, many states forbid lawsuits by collections agencies. If a collector threatens you with a lawsuit, don’t get scared, but do consult a lawyer to find out what your rights are in your state. The lawyer can tell you if the collector has a right to sue and whether the statute of limitationsfor your debt has expired or not.

The biggest mistake you can make when being hounded by a debt collector is to make a small payment in the hopes they’ll go away. Don’t start paying on a debt unless you plan to pay it off completely or negotiate a debt settlement that will end all collections. If you do plan to try to negotiate a debt settlement be sure to finalize that agreement in writing before making any payments.

Additionally, be conscious of how debt collectors report your debt to the major credit bureaus. Debt collectors often intentionally misreport the age of your debt in order to leave the option for a lawsuit available. If you believe that your debt has been falsely represented, send proof to the credit bureaus.

Negative information about debt can usually only stay on your credit report for seven years after you first became delinquent, and the credit reporting agency must show the actual month and year that this occurred. If a more recent date is shown on your credit report, be sure to correct it.

When collectors violate the provisions of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act they are subject to civil penalties of $2,500 per violation. So if you are being harassed by a debt collector who’s breaking these rules, don’t just ignore the phone calls and letters. Contact an attorney who can help you sue for the civil penalties. Proof always helps such an endeavor, so keep the letters you receive. Do some research before recording phone calls though, because many states have laws against recording conversations without the other party’s consent.

7 Lead Generation Tips to Make You Rich

2011-02-04T10:55:00.001-08:00

Guest post by Mark Simon.

Here are some Lead Generation Tips. Have you ever wondered what separates those who always seem to have an endless flow of incoming leads from the people who can’t seem to find a single lead each day?

Sometimes it is the ambition or work ethic of the individuals although many times it is the tactics each uses to generate leads. Here are 7 tips to help you generate more leads which will result in more sales so you can be rich with leads.

1. Find their hangouts

Too many times people expect leads to just come to them out of the blue; this is not going to happen. You must find where your prospective customers hang out and go to them. You should be doing these both online and offline. To find hangouts online check out the Big Boards forum directory; then head over to Meetup.com for offline hot spots.

2. Participate in social media

Every one of your customers is not on Facebook, Youtube or Twitter but there are enough of them there that will become evangelists for you. Seek them out and build a meaningful relationship; then they will send you leads like you have never seen before.

3. Share

Have you forgotten that all important lesson taught in pre-school & Kindergarten to share with the other kids? Learn it all over again and get busy sharing something useful, funny or insightful with someone else every day. If it relates to your business great; if not that is OK.

4. Be Charitable

Recognize that you have been given much then give back your time & money. You will quickly realize that paying it forward in this fashion brings you exponential benefit; sometimes in the form of leads other times with inspiration. You can find reputable charitable causes using Charity Navigator, Network for Good or Volunteer Match that jive with you.

5. Become a Content Creator

Content marketing is a very effective way to generate leads when the content is aimed at your customers. You probably have pages of knowledge pinned inside your brain that people want to know and don’t. We can all learn something from one another so start sharing your knowledge by becoming a content creator. This is not limited to writing either; you can take pictures, shoot videos or record audio podcasts. It all counts.

6. Promote Yourself

In all your endeavors you must tell people who you are, what you do and how it helps people. You need to learn to shamelessly plug yourself in social media, forums, meetup groups and the content you create. Don’t make it all about you however you should certainly drop a mention at least once in a while.

7. Review what works

Each of the actions above manifests many different opportunities; review every activity at least once a week to see what is working. Repeat those activities the next week as much as you can; the activities that have not paid off may just need more time to reap the benefits or could be valuable time wasted. Keep a keen outlook for things you have done over and over that have not brought rewards. You might consider eliminating those activities.

These seven tips will help you generate more money from all your lead generation actions; however, they are only the tip of the iceberg. Always be creative and on the lookout for new ideas that can be applied to your lead generation strategies.

50 Easy Ways to Promote Your Blog

2011-02-02T22:16:00.001-08:00

What are the easy ways to promote your blog? When you start a blog, its just you and your blog. Later you ask your handful of friends to visit your blog for fun, then later on you ask Search engines to visit your blog, and then later on you ask other bloggers to visit and finally you’ve promoted your blog in a way you didn’t exactly planned for.

Promoting is as very important part of blogging just as the content writing. Some professional bloggers keep promoting rather focusing on content. You always scratch your head on how to get people’s attention, that the tricky part of blogging. As we all know “Great wall of China wasn’t built in a day, it took years!“. So will we, but not years though. Here are some solid tips where you can promote your blog in a professional respectable manner.

I’ll split this into 5 main categories and 10 subcategories so that you’ll find it easy to read.

Blog Promotion Basics

Make blogging easier and navigational.
Have good looking and attractive web design, so that people revisit your blog.
Patience is the key.
Self Motivation is required.
Have controversial articles and interesting discussions.
Have positive attitude and don’t frustrate yourself.
Be sure on your context, which belong to your niche.
Do some thing to your blog everyday, and traffic is seen. The more you do, the more you get.
Help out people with blogs similar to your level.
Be consistent and scheduled. Most importantly plan you every move.

Content is King

Write more and more unique posts.
Have more than 150+ resources and articles.
Guide people about something, teach them something new.
After you article is indexed by search engines, submit it to various article directories like ezinearticles.com
Write about Big shots and their controversy.
Interview big cool bloggers in your niche, and share about their views and ideas.
Look out for popular content that’s gaining traffic, and write about it in a humorous way.
Give a press release about unique news, if you have any.
Pay others to write good articles for you.
Be the first commenter on the posts of popular blogs, but let it be worth.

Viral and Social Networks

Create a Fan page on facebook. Also create a facebook app for your blog.
Customize the landing page of facebook.
Start an open group on Yahoo and invite people or have a widget on your blog.
Buy the accounts of popular YouTubers and then add your blog address to the descriptions of their videos.
Start Stumbleupon promotional ads campaign
Sign up at ping.fm and use twitterfeed.com to auto post your latest blog content to a bunch of social networks.
Have a facebook share and retweet button for every other post.
Have a squidoo page, as it will get indexed faster in search engines.
Include hash(#) tags in your tweets.
Twitter – Follow relevant, popular, and interesting people. And some will follow you back.

Bloggers and People

Tell you neighbourhood, family and friends about your blog.
Search for your niche and answer any questions people have.
Submit your content to dofollow social bookmarking sites.
Send out a Press release.
Signup for various communities and be active in relevant Ning.comcommunities.
Write some content as a linkbait.
If your post is relevant to other blogging sites, then try interlinking posts, so as to get deep inbound links.
Signup for every other social network you can.
Start a podcast and submit it to various podcast directories.
Talk to professional bloggers about your post and ask them to review it.

Viral Marketing

This one’s my favorite, (Funky) Forward a SMS saying “Forward this mssg to atleast 49 people, to get RC of 49 for full TT instantly” with a link of your blog address. And, its viral.
Install All In One SEO Pack for WordPress blogs.
Create a theme, that includes a link to your blog in the footer, and then release it for free.
If you are a developer, create a wordpress plugin and release it for free with a link to your blog within the admin area.
Sponsor some tweets and be an active stumbler to know what stumblers like.
Use blog search from Google to find fresh blog posts and then leave comments.
Write a guest post for a popular blog. You may not always get published, but when you do you observe a spike in Google analytics.
Use Thesis for better optimization and plugins.
Join relevant forums, add your blog address to your signature and start posting smartly.
Join a social blog network.

3 Reasons why you should manage your online reputation

2011-01-22T11:23:00.001-08:00

Having a web site is a must for any blog or business desiring to gain national or global recognition, however, many blog owners end the promotion of their web sites with simple SEO methods. Most underestimate the need for online reputation management as well, which can greatly increase a blog’s online power.

The most important reasons to properly manage your online reputation include:

The Protection of Your Brand

Negative comments made against your business can easily deter potential viewers from revisiting your site. Forums and discussion boards can be a breeding ground for negative remarks. To protect your business, or brand, from becoming tarnished by negative comments, online reputation management is a must. Managing your online reputation, which includes leaving comments of your own, will allow your blog to make sure the positive information regarding your site finds prominence in the search engines.

Increased Visibility

One of the most important tactics in gaining higher online visibility for your company is by gaining the top positions in the search engines’ results. By managing your blog’s online reputation on a regular basis through content creation, keywords, and other various SEO techniques, your company will be able to achieve a top spot in the search engines and maintain control of their position providing a higher likelihood of new clients.

Builds Trust

By properly managing your blog’s online reputation, you are able to choose how people see your company on the web. By allowing certain information to gain prominence online, you can create a trustworthy image of your company to your potential clients.

To properly manage your blog’s online reputation it’s always a good idea to perform searches frequently and to employ the help of an internet marketing company. An internet marketing company can not only help companies climb to the top of the search engines’ results lists, but they can also create a strong online presence which will entice interest in your site.

5 Ways to Get More Blog Readers

2011-01-22T11:17:00.001-08:00

Guest post by David WalkerA recurring question I get asked by frustrated new bloggers is how to attract more visitors to their blog. Some bloggers are getting a tiny trickle of traffic but a lot are getting no visitors at all, despite putting out some good content.

If you are just starting out or perhaps have even been blogging for a while but are looking enviously at other blogs filled with reader comments and social media interaction, while yours appears a lonely and desolate place in comparison, this post is for you.

There is no magic formula to guarantee a huge blog readership but here are a few pointers I have found useful while growing my own online following.

1. Success Does Not Happen Overnight

I expect this is not what you wanted to hear but I want to be straight with you from the off. It is very, very unlikely you are going to become an “overnight sensation” and hoards of readers are going to somehow “find” you as soon as you publish your first post.

Maybe for those who already have fame and leverage to call upon, but for the likes of you and I, we need to view our blogs as long term projects and try to build it one brick at a time.

2. Post Often

Again, this may also be something you don’t want to hear and you may think “if nobody is reading my blog, then why bother posting to it that often?”

The reason why is your readers will probably arrive one at a time at first and you want those readers to keep coming back while you attract more readers and so on.

If your blog is constantly updated you will see in your web stats the search engines arrive more often and as a result, your content will get indexed faster.

3. Allow Your Personality to Shine Through

It’s not enough to simply pump out blog posts with regularity, the content also has to be of a very high standard. Just think about the millions of competing blogs out there – you want your readers to visit you as a priority, right?

Create original and inject your personality into it. I have found the most popular blogs are always the most personal so don’t fall into the trap of writing generic content.

Remember, your readers are interested in you. They want to know your opinion on the hot topics in your niche and want your advice on how to go about solving their problems.

By producing blog content with a personal approach, I have found you can make even dry, mundane blog content a much more interesting experience for your readers.

For example, instead of just writing a generic blog post about building an email list through JV Giveaways, I wrote a post entitled “10 Reasons My JV Giveaway Rocked” and outlined my own experiences of running such an event and what I did to make it stand out.

More recently I wrote “Five Internet Marketing Lessons I Learned in 2010” which could have been a run of the mill “how to do internet marketing” type post but I wrote about my own experiences, what worked and didn’t work for me and ended each point with a mini “action plan” for 2011.

4. Share the Link Love

What I mean here is to link out to other bloggers to get their attention. If you read an interesting post, link to it on your blog and write a follow up or approach what was said from the opposing view.

The blogger you have linked to may see visitors arriving at their blog from yours in their statistics package or your link may arrive in their inbox if they have Google Alerts set up.

The blogger may link back to you in return on their blog in a follow up post as the conversation continues to flow. That way, some of their readers will visit your blog to find out more about you.

5. Leave Comments on Other Blogs

This is one of the easiest ways to generate some traffic to a brand new blog. You could set up your blog this afternoon, write your first post and get your first visitors shortly after leaving some comments on other blogs in your niche.

Visit other popular blogs in your niche and leave a comment on their most recent blog post. When you leave a comment you can also link back to your own blog.

Don’t do what a lot of spammers do and just write something along the lines of “hi, great post” because it annoys blog owners. Leave a thoughtful comment which adds value to the post and the blog owner as well as some of their readers, will visit yours to find out more.

I have written hundreds of blog comments over the years and it’s great when you get replies thanking you for leaving your comment!

I have also had experiences of bloggers linking out to me in their latest blog post based on a comment I wrote on a recent post of theirs. That is the way for a relatively unknown blogger to get attention in a crowded space!

Summary

As you can see from the above, there are no rules of blogging, nor are there any “magic bullets” that will flood your blog with thousands of readers overnight. In my own personal experience, blogging is all about consistency, quality, common sense and networking.

Your blog, however new, could be the start of something big, so just relax, be yourself and enjoy the experience!

Readers will appear over time, you just need to give them a chance to find you!

Which one of these strategies needs more of your attention? What tips can we add?

How To Integrate Blogging and Email Marketing

2010-12-11T09:31:00.001-08:00

What if you had a way to integrate two successful and different online tactics to reach a new level of success?

Consider extending the reach of your blog and website by creating a monthly email broadcast summarizing the most popular and engaging content.

Here’s How:

Determine popularity using web analytics data to your rank blog posts that receive the most visits and page views each month.
Offer brief summaries of the top content in your email along with clear calls-to-action to “Read More” on your blog or web site.
Heighten curiosity by seasoning your top content with further commentary, counterpoints or industry research.
Finally, offer access to this broadcast exclusively to your most engaged email subscribers.
Bonus tip:Add ShareThis functionality to your blog and your email using to provide a way for your audience to easily spread your ideas

Why This Works:

Time and Attention is Scarce – By compiling popular and delivering content, your audience will appreciate your efforts to help them efficiently stay updated with helpful and interesting information deemed relevant by peers in their industry
Preferences are Unique – Research indicates that people differ vastly regarding how they prefer to consume online content. Demonstrate your commitment to serve your audience by offering an option to receive blog or website content via email.
The Mix- Consumers exposed to a company’s message through blogs and social media are 3 times more likely to engage with email content and search for a company’s brand than users who are only exposed to a single messaging channel. Marketing is more effective when you “mix” it across multiple channels both online and offline.

The Car Woo Experience!

2010-11-11T22:24:00.001-08:00

For the last month my wife has been in the market to purchase a new Toyota Yaris and if you haven't been in the market for car purchase lately, you are in it for a treat, CarWoo gives you a couple of options to start receiving quotes from different local dealers, now what I think is coolest option is the fact that it lets all the dealers see each other's offers, so one can actually go neck to neck in the never ending battle to gain a new customer. So in a nutshell, the entire negotiation is done back and forth via email with the prospective dealers, rather than at the dealer, so when you come into the dealer, it is only to test drive, sign the contract and drive off your car. You see this is very important because if it's one thing that I detest the most is the game that car sales men play with their closer/manager when it comes to giving you the final price.

I was also impressed by CarWoo customer service who after a few days into the program, my wife received a courtesy email asking if she was satisfied with their service and if they could do anything else, at the time of that question she was not happy, so they went ahead and resent more offers for local dealers and then she received from that last attempt the winning offer.

So, thumbs up!!

Fanning the Social Media Flame for Viral Exposure

2010-11-02T22:42:00.001-07:00

by Lisa Barone

Are you a content marketer? If so, you have a choice to make.

You can sit around and wait for your content to go viral.

You can hope you’ll get sudden bursts of traffic, hope your readers will spread the word, hope your content will catch fire.

Or you can bring your own matches and lighter fluid to set the dang thing aflame yourself.

As bloggers and content marketers, which will you choose?

Sure, sometimes the passion you have for a subject will be enough to ignite a spark and compel your audience to share your content with their network. Being able to unleash something with such conviction and power that it combusts on its own is great.

Over at my SEO consulting firm Outspoken Media, we’ve been able to do it several times.

Sometimes we post something like The Power of the Unexpected, something that goes hot without us lifting a finger. As content writers, we live for these moments.

However, they almost never happen.

What is more common is that marketers need to fan their content to help it ignite and go viral. And sometimes that means stepping in when an accidental hit shows signs of life. How do you recognize those signs to take advantage? Here are some methods we use at Outspoken Media.

Identifying the spark

You know what’s normal for your community. You know how many comments an average post gets, how many tweets, how many shares, etc.

When you start to see activity that is double/triple what you’re used to seeing, act.

For example, early on we published a post called It’s Not The Recession, You Just Suck. Almost immediately after hitting the publish button I noticed the post being retweeted and passed through social media at a velocity that dwarfed anything we had seen prior.

Once we noticed we had a spark, we jumped in to add fuel and fan it.

Adding fuel to the fire

As soon as you notice a post showing signs of life, it’s up to you to keep the momentum going.

On the social Web, that means keeping the conversation alive. Find people who are talking about your post and encourage them. Respond to comments, engage, fan the debate, and keep the conversation on a healthy note.

When we called out Robert Scoble last year for spreading misinformation, he was the first person to come and engage on our post, and he did so negatively and aggressively.

The tone he set could have killed the conversation right there and caused people to be fearful of jumping in. But we weren’t going to let that happen. Instead, we went in there to engage Robert and show the community this was just the beginning of the conversation that would ultimately take place. We made it obvious that we were still in the post listening, and that everyone who commented would be heard and responded to.

No one wants to hang out at a party that’s dead or on its way out. Its important people see you’re still there.

Another way to add fuel is to allow readers to subscribe to comments so that they’re alerted each time a new voice enters the fray. This will keep them in conversation mode. It’s good for debate, but it’s also good in terms of SEO. The more page views the post receives, the more time people spend reading comments, the more it’s going to give off positive toolbar data to the search engines and help the post appear on an Alexa hotlist.

Fanning a positive flame

So, let me fill you in on something you already know — it’s really hard to have an intelligent conversation on the Internet.

Things always start out okay. Someone chimes in to offer an intelligent opinion and then, almost before your eyes, it devolves into threats, accusations and commentary about who still lives with their mother.

While it’s 100 percent entertaining to watch people have emotional breakdowns in public, conversations that get too far off track hurt your chances of going viral.

As the owner of that community, you’re responsible for fanning the flame in the right direction. When you see personal attacks being made, it’s up to you to steer the conversation back. If you think people are going too far, moderate.

Be careful, though. Viral conversations are typically rooted in debate. So you don’t want to discourage or squashit, but do keep things productive. You need to be the adult in the room, regardless of how good it feels to throw things.

Hitting the social streets

Once you’ve helped fan the flame, hit the streets!

Make sure your piece has been properly submitted to all the right social media sites, that it’s been Stumbled, that it’s on Reddit, that niche social sites are aware of it, and that it’s hit all of the communities and blogs you know are friendly to you.

Once you complete that, look outside your bubble to find other networks that may find your content interesting. What you’re trying to do here is pull people in from other networks so they’ll go out and talk about it with theircommunity, one that doesn’t currently follow you.

It’s great that your own readers are passionate and involved in the conversation, but you want to use the natural sparks to pick up on other readers to help grow your blog and authority.

Tipping off mainstream media

You’ve covered your bases on the social networks, now look toward news sites and blog aggregators that may be interested in the conversation happening around your post.

If you’re part of the marketing community, you want to watch aggregators like TechMeme and TweetMeme. If you have a hot social media story, you want to tip off someone at Mashable. If it’s Google or heavily tech-related, tip off TechCrunch. If it’s a broader tech story, tip off more mainstream outlets, as well.

For example, our post about what we perceived to be brandjacking by Seth Godin received coverage fromBusiness Week. My partner Rae Hoffman’s post on Google’s Real Time Spam Problem was noted in USA Today. And my other partner Rhea Drysdale is often featured on CNN.

These don’t happen by accident. They were opportunities created by tipping off the right people at the right time. This is where having a linkerati list comes into play. It helps you know who to contact for what type of story.

Making sure the post is optimized for SEO

The final thing you want to do is properly SEO your post to capitalize on search.

Going back to our Robert Scoble example, when we saw that taking off, we went back and edited the title tag to include Robert Scoble’s name. It was a small tweak that allowed us to take advantage of Google’s freshness factor and appear in his News results.

It’s a temporary rank, but it made sure that anyone who searched for Robert Scoble that day found our post. Sometimes that’s all you’re looking to do, to help keep the momentum going and get eyes to the page. You have to build awareness.

Content marketers don’t have the luxury of sitting back and hoping something goes hot. It’s up to you to help things take on a life of their own, whether it was planned from the start or you picked up on early signs of success.

Savvy content marketers always have the matches and lighter fluid ready for when a spark presents itself.

5 More Social Job Search Tools That Will Get You Hired

2010-11-02T01:09:00.001-07:00

It isn’t easy – or even very practical – to rely on just your local classifieds to find a new job or business opportunity anymore. That’s why we compiled a list of 20 Killer Social Job Search Tools That Will Get You Hired earlier this month. And as useful as those 20 tools are to network, find job openings and contracts and tap into your existing social networks for job opportunities, that list isn’t exhaustive. We’ve come across 5 more social job search tools that will help you find employment, so you can start looking for your dream job today.

BranchOut

Think of BranchOut as the LinkedIn for Facebook. It is a social career networking tool that allows users to access their Facebook connections and learn about the companies their friends and colleagues work for. Users are also connected to friends of friends through BranchOut, and can use career data to network – to find a contract, get a lead or score an interview. If you’re connected to BranchOut you can post, share and distribute jobs to potential candidates in your Facebook network.

Kai Fortney, Marketing Coordinator at BranchOut has this to say about the possibilities of landing a job through BranchOut:

“There are over 500 million monthly users of Facebook which allows for the largest career networking opportunity in the world. BranchOut users can tap into their direct friend network as well as their friends of friends. This is a network of trusted supporters on Facebook.”

Talentag

Part of landing that dream job is finding great references – and Talentag helps you do just that. You can ask co-workers and friends for feedback on your job performance, and collect badges indicating what they think of your talents and skills. Find out if you’re a Problem Solver, the Best in Finance or a Team Player, and let your accolades shine through to your resume. Think of this as a fun way to discover and share with potential employers what others think of your work ethic.

Andrus Purde, Co-Founder of Talentag tells us about its unique feedback system:

“Talentag is unique in the sense that is helps to see job seekers through the eyes of friends and (former) co-workers. The social aspect makes resumes on Talentag more trustworthy and provides a list of people employers can contact as references. Another thing that Talentag helps job-seekers with is getting feedback from friends and co-workers which indicates which personality traits to emphasise in applying for a job and which ones to work on.”

Weedle

Weedle is a social job search tool that combines a social network with a search engine. It allows users to connect with people who need their skills, and find people whose skills they’d like to use. At its core, Weedle is a practical, social classifieds ad. Employers can sift through potential candidates, but rather than relying on a stack of resumes they can gain insight into a candidate based on their social graph. Weedle gives users a searchable “Skills” page and the ability to network through their extended social graph, so it’s a great place to get “found” in your job hunt.

Ziggs

With Ziggs, you can create a professional profile that will help build your brand online. Similar to LinkedIn, Ziggs connects your profile to fellow co-workers, previous employers and other professional contacts. From there, you can browse available job openings within your network, communicate with those you’re connected to, and organize with your contacts by joining groups. Having a presence on a site like Ziggs will up your visibility – something that can’t hurt in a hugely competitive job market!

Worky.com

Worky is designed for individuals to find job opportunities and for businesses to promote their offerings. For individuals, Worky acts like a LinkedIn-style social profile and networking tool: you can create a professional profile, connect to other people in the Worky network, and leverage these connections to find a job. Worky also provides access to over 2 million job listings. For businesses, Worky is a platform to promote their services and find skilled employees and contractors.

HOW TO: Score a Job Through Facebook

2010-10-30T18:18:00.001-07:00

By Stephanie Marcus

If you’re looking for a job, ask yourself if you’ve tapped every possible resource. Have you scoured Craigslist and made Monster your homepage? Have you set Google Alerts for every possible word combination that could land you a job? Have you checked Facebook? And I’m not talking about Facebook’s rather useless Marketplace.

While Facebook is better known for helping people lose their jobs, it’s largely an untapped resource when it comes to job hunting. With 500 million users, it has the potential to be one of the largest. But finding a job through Facebook isn’t about pestering your friends and junking up their news feeds with status updates like “Unemployed and Looking For Work — Help A Dude Out.” It’s about making the most of your network in a positive way, not by being a nuisance.

By joining groups, keeping track of your friends’ updates and just keeping in touch with your network, you can turn Facebook into a site that does so much more for you than just keep tabs on your exes. Here are five ways to turn Facebook into another resource that can help you land a job. If you’ve scored a job through Facebook, we want to hear your story, so leave us some tips in the comments below.

1. Read Your News Feed

Amanda Flahive is known as the Diva of the Details at Sevans Strategy, a Chicago-based public relations and new media consultancy. She wears many hats in her job working with social media maven Sarah Evans. But Flahive landed the gig just from reading her Facebook feed.

Both Flahive and Evans attended the same college but were in different programs — while they knew of each other, they didn’t know each other well. About a year and a half ago, they were brought back together by a mutual friend’s wedding. Evans threw an engagement party, and the two reconnected. “At that time Sevans wasn’t in existence,” says Flahive. “[Sarah] was still at her old position as the director of communications at a community college. We talked about what we were both doing, but the conversation wasn’t too serious. Sevans might have been something in the back of her brain at the time, but it wasn’t something we discussed that night.”

Since they were both going to be in the same wedding, they decided to keep in touch on Facebook, the way many old acquaintances re-connect.

“I’m a person who pretty regularly reads my Facebook news feed. If it’s not something regarding Farmville orMafia Wars, then I most likely read it,” she says. “So I was reading through updates on a random day, and had been in one sales and marketing position, and moved to another, and I was OK, but wasn’t loving it.”

Flahive was keeping an eye out — looking on Monster, looking on Career Builder, but wasn’t really hitting anything. “Those sites are quite often so flooded with people that are looking for jobs, that it was my experience that you don’t get very far on those sites. I would send a resume in and either not have it go anywhere or in a direction that wasn’t right for me,” she says.

So on a random day, Flahive saw that Evans had posted that she was looking for a three-quarter time assistant. “From the exact Facebook post: Live in Chicago and love details? Looking for someone to work about 30 hours a week, checking e-mail, booking travel etc. E-mail Jen (her then assistant) for more details.”

Flahive didn’t respond right away, but figured she had nothing to lose since she knew Evans on both a personal and professional level. Evans called her for an interview, and they had a good laugh about it. “I said, I can’t believe we are having this phone call, but if it weren’t for Facebook, we wouldn’t be having it.”

In fact, Evans didn’t post the job anywhere else other than Facebook and Twitter (also the method that Sevans uses to hire its interns). The two had a conversation about the position and Evans ultimately offered Flahive the job through a direct message on Facebook.

“It’s not what I expected to get out of Facebook,” says Flahive who says it’s typically used to catch up with friends and look at baby photos. “I never thought I’d get a job out of it. But now that I have, it makes all the sense in the world. And what’s more, my job got a whole lot bigger after I accepted via Facebook. Now it’s full time, I’m doing development and marketing; it led to a much bigger job.”

2. Get Active in a Group

Web developer Enrico Bianco works at Post Rank but found his previous job creating web applications for theCanadian Society of Immigration Consultants, just by joining a Facebook group.

Bianco was in the middle of job search, looking to switch gears. At the time, he’d been doing mostly Java enterprise development and wanted to get into Ruby on Rails instead. “I started doing rather vigorous networking, and other job searching stuff. I used to answer posts on Craigslist, go to professional networking events for social media and Ruby on Rails.” On a whim, he says, he found a Facebook group for the Toronto Ruby on Rails community and left a message in the discussion board saying that he had something to offer, if anyone was looking for someone to do some Ruby on Rails development.

Lo and behold, he got a message back from the systems manager at CSIC, who asked for his resume, which in turn lead to an interview, and Bianco landed the job. “So it was really, very much a fluke, but a fortunate one,” he says. “She ended up telling me later that one of the key reasons she hired me was that she saw I was active in the community, and that I was engaging with others on the Internet.”

But Bianco casts it off as a fluke, and he admits it cost him nothing to do. “I wouldn’t use it as a primary tool for job searching, but at the time I was willing to use any resource I could.”

3. “Like” or “Friend” Companies You Want to Work For

Sandra Aaron is a Toronto-based event planner who was looking to expand her knowledge of the destination wedding scene, but she found it a difficult prospect. “It’s really hard to properly plan destination weddings without full knowledge of the travel industry,” she writes via e-mail. “So I decided I wanted to find a side job with a travel agency.”

Aaron spoke with many companies in her search to break into the industry, but the one company she really wanted to align herself with was difficult to get into, as their average new hire had 20 years of experience in the travel industry — something Aaron didn’t have.

Aaron says she spent a few months trying to find her way in, asking everyone she knew if they knew anyone with the company. Then one day, she saw a status update from the company’s Facebook Page that they were seeking experienced travel advisers. “With nothing to lose I commented, asking if they ever hired destination wedding planners. A couple of weeks later their marketing guy sent me a note on Facebook, saying he would be happy to pass on my resume to the right person.” Aaron’s resume ended up in the hands of the general manager who was so impressed with it, that within a few weeks, Aaron scored an interview.

Today, she’s an independent contractor for the company. She works from their offices, and says it’s a great situation. “I have access to their resources, and their staff has access to my knowledge and resources within the wedding industry. I would have never gotten the meeting if it weren’t for Facebook.”

4. Participate in a Contest

Andrew Miller scored his internship at Fast Horse, a Minneapolis marketing firm through a contest onFacebook. The company announced that its newest intern would be the candidate who could gain the most “Likes” in a week. Miller was tipped off to the contest by a college professor and quickly went to work on his campaign.

“I tried to tap into every single social network I had ever been a part of,” he said. “And just send out messages that said, hey if you have a few minutes can you help me win this dream internship? All it takes is liking my Page.”

Miller says he didn’t even start out with the most Facebook friends, but he was able to mobilize people by giving them simple directions to vote. That strategy won him 725 “Likes” and the internship.

“Having to market myself in this process has helped me in thinking about how to market actual products. The mobilization that I was able to accomplish is something I do all the time now, contacting blogs and newspapers, trying to get them to run stories,” he said.

Miller, who moved 1,700 miles from Portland, has completed his three month internship and it was extended another three months, which he says is a typical track to full-employment.

“If there is one thing I’ve learned, it’s that social media can be such a powerful tool for establishing those relationships. There is something so hollow about submitting your standard application, resume and cover letter. With this I was able to be in communication with the decision makers and be sure this was going to be a good fit for me. I would absolutely use social media again to engage with those decision makers.”

5. Start a Dialogue

Fast Horse, the company that hired Andrew Miller as an intern, is a big believer in the Facebook hiring process, according to its creative director and founder Jorg Pierach.

When Fast Horse launched its Facebook Page, it didn’t want the campaign to just be a megaphone for the work they were doing, but rather they wanted to use it as a place to interact with job candidates, sort of a digital informational interview, says Pierach. The company directs job seekers to its Facebook Page so its employees have a place to share information about the company, their culture and what they do.

“So instead of a resume disappearing into a file somewhere, we have a way to keep in touch, and the Fast Horse experience is the way to do that,” he said. “We started this about a year and half ago and we’ve hired about four or five people this way. They started a dialogue, and when a position opened up we already had a good idea of what that [person] was about.”

Pierach says that the intern search was about more than just finding candidates; it was a way to assess them as well, so the candidates could show off their marketing chops. The company asked for video introductions and interviewed 15 candidates before narrowing it down to three finalists who competed for the most “Likes.”

“In a sense it wasn’t about hiring one candidate, but seeing three strong people and their talents. As our needs continue to grow, we know that there are people out there that we liked. It’s about talent cultivation and about them showing us what they can do. But ultimately [it's] about keeping in touch with really talented people.”

Pierach looks at it as a different kind of interview — one that requires people to take the initiative to weigh in with their own thoughts. It’s also a method that saves the company a lot of time when looking to fill a spot. “We have a pre-qualified group of people we can turn to very quickly,” he said, noting that the company saves itself from having to post on job boards and slug through cover letters. They can bring in candidates they know are going to rise to the top, because they have been watching each other on Facebook.

“We recently had a new opportunity that was a very, very quick turn around. We needed a designer the next day. We turned to our Facebook Page and within a couple of hours we had six or seven people who raised their hands, all people we knew, to say they were available. We were able to get them in the next day and keep moving.”

In the future, you can expect to see more companies looking at the hiring process this way, and Pierach suggests that people coming out of college would do well to be aggressive in identifying the companies they want to work with and start the dialogue.

Untitled

2010-10-30T15:25:00.001-07:00

10 Ways in which social media writing is different from traditional web writing.

by Nick Usborne

Traditional web writing? It wasn’t so long ago that being an online writer was cutting-edge stuff. We were the new, new thing and looking down in pity at those poor folks still writing for print.

Well, things change. And online they have been changing really fast.

The skills that qualified us as hot online writers are no longer the skills we need to be effective social media writers.

Here are just 10 ways in which online writers are having to shift their thinking when working in social media.

1. You’re writing to individuals, not to algorithms or personas.

Many of us have spent a lot of time figuring out how to write text in ways that would please the Google algorithms. Not to mention Bing and Yahoo!

While constantly reminding ourselves that we needed to be writing for our readers, much of our attention was actually focused on writing for the search engines.

At the same time, we were learning to write both content pages and sales pages to “personas”. I never did quite get the hang of that, but some people are very good at it. The idea being that you aim your text or copy at a group of people who share a common set of emotional and intellectual triggers.

All that is well and good. But it doesn’t do you much good when you find yourself replying to an individual’s tweet from two minutes ago.

Writing to real people, one-on-one, takes a real shift in attitude and skill.

2. Instead of laser-like focus, now it’s about variety.

Many is the time that I have advised online writers to confine each page to a single topic. It helps the search engines determine the subject of your page, and increases reader conversation rates. Focus, focus, focus. Keep it narrow and drive those clicks.

That doesn’t work with social media either. You have probably seen Twitter streams or Facebook walls that comprise an endless thread of the exact same kind of entries.

These pages may have focus, but they are dead in the water.

Social media engagement isn’t about being focused in the traditional sense. It’s about engaging attention with variety. Yes, there is a goal. Yes there is a strategy. But you get there by engaging your audience with an irresistible variety of short-form entries.

You know there is an underlying plan and structure, but your audience shouldn’t see it. They should just see a compelling array of entries that inform, engage and entertain.

3. Social media really is a conversation.

Tip of the hat to the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto. How time flies. They were right, but arrived at the party ten years before it truly began.

For years we have persuaded ourselves that we are engaged in conversations with our prospects and customers online. But this was 90% BS. We just said it to sound smart and to persuade ourselves that it might be true. But we didn’t really have conversations with our audience. To really do that involved way to much work and money.

Well, social media, if you want to do it right, is finally forcing the issue.

The best Twitter streams and Facebook walls do include a degree of one-on-one conversation.

As a writer this means you need to make quite a shift in your mind. Instead of writing at an audience, you are having to engage in a one-on-one conversation.

4. Social media is written to be shared.

Ouch. Back in the days of print we could rely on reaching each of our readers in isolation. That gave us power. We could say ridiculous things like, “You are one of just a small group of special customers to receive this amazing offer.”

We could say that in the almost certain knowledge that the recipient wouldn’t be knocking on his or her neighbor’s doors to see if they had received the same mailing.

The web changed that quite a bit. If we crossed the line with our writing and offers, we could find ourselves being lambasted in forums or on blogs.

But social media changes that landscape completely. We are not wondering if what we have written might be shared, we are deliberately writing in a way that maximizes its potential to be shared. We want it to be shared.

This may sound obvious. But for writers and marketers it requires a shift in thinking.

5. We can’t just pretend bad news isn’t happening.

Again, in the good old days, if there was bad news about our company, brand of product, the best course of action was usually just to keep quiet, not feed the flames, and wait for everything to die down.

That doesn’t work with social media. If you haven’t watched it before, go to YouTube and search for United Breaks Guitars. That’s a perfect illustration of what can happen when you decide to ignore bad news.

This means, as social media writers, we have to interact with real, unhappy people, one-on-one.

It isn’t brain surgery, but unless you have some natural empathy for your unhappy customers, it can be quite a shift from the kind of writing you are used to doing.

6. You should sometimes praise the work of your peers and competitors.

Are you crazy? Nope. Again, when compared with traditional marketing and writing, social media turns our world upside down.

Only on Twitter or Facebook would one share great information created by a peer or competitor. It can happen on blogs too. But not very often.

Social media works best when you cooperate with your peers and competitors. Do that, and you’ll end up getting access to their audiences, when they retweet or post something great you have written.

And your audience will love you for it too. Instead of giving them a diet of your stuff alone, you’re pointing them in the direction of other quality content too.

Yes, it may stick in your throat. But if you want to be a great social media content writer, you have to learn to write things like. Fantastic article by @mycompetitor!

7. You ask real questions.

In traditional marketing we’re good at asking rhetorical questions. We know that by asking the right questions we can connect with our readers more deeply.

With social media, you need to ask real questions.

If you have ever managed or written for a Facebook wall, you know what the certain way to get more Likes and Comments is to ask a question. When you do that, you are inviting response. And unless you have a pretty dead page, you’ll get some answers.

Then what? Then you have to respond to some of those answers. See point #3 about conversations.

Again, the prospect of really asking questions and really taking notice of the replies may not come naturally to many traditional marketers and writers.

But do it right, and questions become a key way not only to win the trust of your readers, but also to achieve deeper insights into what they like, don’t like, and really want.

8. You need to turn on a dime, frequently.

As writers we always complain about tight deadlines. We need time to write well. And that’s true.

The trouble is, when writing for social media, we rarely have time. If a customer asks a question, they want it answered fast. If it’s a customer service question, it is expected to be resolved now. And if there is breaking news, you want to break it first.

On the plus side, social media content is short-form content. You don’t need to write an essay in order to do a good job.

But you do need to adjust to a new way of thinking about “writing”. With social media it’s no longer a solitary profession that takes hours and days. It’s often collaborative, and needs finishing in minutes.

9. Sometime you have to work odd hours.

If you write in the B2B space, lucky you. If you work in B2C, not so lucky. Perhaps not surprisingly, interaction through social media peaks before and after regular work hours, and at weekends.

So if you are engaging prospects and customers through Twitter and Facebook, you need to be more flexible with your work hours.

10. Achieving the results you want can take time.

As writers online, or as copywriters, we are used to writing a page, or an email, and then watching the results come in, often within hours.

This can be true of social media also, if you are writing about a time-limited promotion, or are announcing something new. But for the most part, the real benefits of social media engagement take time to appear.

It’s when you engage an audience consistently, and authentically for weeks or months on end that you finally convert people from some other company’s products to yours.

Social media is a mix of now…and way down stream. So don’t expect all your time to result in short-term returns. If you do that, you’ll be tempted to treat social media channels like direct marketing channels.

And that is a fast and sure way to lose trust and attention.

Summing up.

I originally had a longer list, but decided to keep it down to ten. The bottom line is that if you want to well writing for social media, to have to shake off a lot of previous assumptions and behaviors.

Writing for the social web is different from writing for the web. Just as writing for the web is different from writing for offline media.

And that’s what makes being in this space such fun. We’re always having to learn something new.

Applying for U.S. Citizenship? Be Careful Who You "Friend"

2010-10-13T20:57:00.001-07:00

According to documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the U.S. government is busily tracking social networks in a number of ways, including using sites like Facebook to monitor people who are applying for U.S. citizenship.

According to a May 2008 memo by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, "Narcissistic tendencies in many people fuels a need to have a large group of "friends" link to their pages and many of these people accept cyber-friends that they don't even know. This provides an excellent vantage point for FDNS [Office of Fraud Detection and National Security] to observe the daily life of beneficiaries and petitioners who are suspected of fraudulent activities."

In other words, social networking sites give the government an opportunity to reveal potential fraud by friending people who are applying for citizenship, then monitoring their activity to see if they are being deceptive about their relationships. "In essence," says the memo, "using MySpace and other like sites is akin to doing an unannounced cyber "site-visit" on a petitioner and beneficiaries."

Social Networking Surveillance

As the EFF points out, there are good reasons that law enforcement be able to use all the tools at their disposal to identify fraud and other illegal conduct. But the memo doesn't indicate that immigration officials should have any other indications about suspicious behavior before conducting social networking surveillance.

The memo also doesn't say that officials need to be forthright about their real identities when "friending" immigrants, "leaving open the possibility that agents could actively deceive online users to infiltrate their social networks and monitor the activities of not only that user, but also the user's friends, family, and other associates."

As EFF notes, this sort of surveillance is predicated on the assumption that users of social networking sites are posting things that are a true and accurate reflection of their offline lives - that what we post (or don't post) about our relationships on Facebook really means something.

6 Safety Measures for Buying and Selling on Craigslist

2010-10-02T15:04:00.001-07:00

Craigslist is one of my favorite places to buy and sell stuff. It’s one of my first destinations when I’m looking to purchase something that need not be brand new – used is just the same and it saves money. I love to sell there as well because it costs me nothing to list my items.

On Craigslist, both buyers and sellers enjoy:

Unaccountability. I can agree to sell or buy something and back out of the transact for no reason without the fear of any consequences (e.g. negative feedback or fees). There are no user accounts or histories on which to base the trustworthiness or performance of a buyer or seller. Each listing is unique and isolated.
Impersonality. Because there is no mandatory release of any real, identifiable information between the parties, the result is a lack of transparency. Effectively, a reliable method of communication is all that is needed to conduct a sale or make a purchase.
Instant gratification. Conducting business on the Internet is convenient on the front-end buy slow on the back-end. The buyer has to wait for delivery and the seller has to wait for payment. Craigslist offers face-to-face transactions in an era on online shopping. Buyers can inspect their merchandise before paying and sellers have cash in hand when a deal goes through.

But, these apparent benefits are also reasons for concern. There is no way to hold either party accountable and no way to regulate these transactions. We see unpleasant occurrences from activity on Craigslist on the news all the time. So, some safety measures should be taken when buying and selling on Craigslist.

1. Use a fake name.

Establish a proxy for your identity. Frankly, a real name serves very little purpose as long as the other party doesn’t have anything sinister up their sleeves. Using a fake name simply adds an extra layer of personal security.

2. Use a secondary Gmail account.

Remember to use your fake name for the Gmail account. Regardless of the purpose, everyone should have a secondary Gmail account for a multitude of reasons. While Craigslist may protect your initial email address (as a seller), any further correspondence after the first contact reveal your email. Basically, this is an account that you wouldn’t mind being hacked, stolen, or spammed.

3. Use a Google Voice number.

Google’s innovations are such a blessing. With the secondary Gmail account, link it up to a Google Voice number, which is a separate phone number that reroutes incoming calls to your phone without having to give out your real number. For those without a smartphone, it may be a slight hassle but

4. Bring a friend.

Most bad things happen to people who are alone because the bad guys target them. Whether it is jogging or meeting up with a stranger, having a friend greatly reduces the chances bad things happening.

5. Pick a time and public location with high traffic.

Whether or not you have a friend to accompany you to meet someone from Craigslist, you should always pick a time and location with plenty of other people. The ideal time and location would be during daylight hours at high foot traffic places. I’ve met up in malls, fast-food restaurants, coffee shops, Best Buy, Macy’s among many other public hotspots. Preferably, you should pick a place you are familiar with and don’t venture into an area where you don’t feel uncomfortable.

6. Never arrive first.

You know you have good intentions but you don’t know whether the other person has the same. By arriving at the agreed location first, you are exposing yourself without knowing who the other party is. If I do happen to be there first, I’d notify the other party, take a walk around the area, and come back when they let me know that they’ve arrived.

Don’t Be Afraid to Back Out
There should never be a situation where you feel forced into completing a transaction. Again, there is nothing on Craigslist that tracks your history so anyone can back out of an agreement at any time. Oftentimes, many people meet up and find that the item wasn’t what they expected and decided not to buy it.

While it may piss off the other party, don’t feel bad about it. It’s your stuff and your money and it’s within your rights to protect your interests.

Online Retailers to Offer Facebook Credits as Shopping Incentives

2010-09-27T19:32:00.001-07:00

You can already buy Facebook Credits (the social network’s virtual currency) as gift cards at brick-and-mortar stores. Soon, you will also be able to accrue Facebook Credits by shopping online, as it’s now possible for online retailers to offer the credits as shopping incentives.

Ifeelgoods, an e-commerce promotions provider for online retailers, has integrated Facebook Credits into the online shopping experience, meaning that its clients can use the credits to incentivize customer purchases and other shopping-related behaviors.

Essentially, what this means is that online retailers can now lure you in with the promise of Facebook Credits if you buy that pair of jeans you saved in your online shopping cart. Ifeelgoods will also allow retailers to offer smaller Facebook Credits incentives for e-mail newsletter sign-ups and social behaviors such as voting or Facebook

shares.

As Facebook continues to grow in size and its currency becomes more versatile, Facebook Credits may prove to be the perfect complement to the online shopping experience. Though virtual in nature, the credits are still more tangible than points, and for some customers, may prove to be more desirable than coupons or other rewards.

How would you prefer to be incentivized for your online purchases? Would Facebook Credits sweeten the deal? Let us know in the comments.

Three Good Reasons for Not Engaging in Social Media

2010-08-21T16:49:00.000-07:00

I am often asked by people if they should be on Twitter or Facebook or have a YouTube channel or blog. Since I am not a fan of throwing darts with a blindfold on, I always ask them, "why do you want to do that?" I get such incredible answers that I decided to take the top three and share them.
1. Because Everyone Else Is.
This is by far my favorite answer. Don't get me wrong, I believe strongly in the use of integrated media in the context of a well-thought out marketing plan. But just to jump in the pool because you see everyone else is in there, without knowing how to swim or knowing anything about the water is not smart. Jim Sterne said in his book Social Media Metrics, "You do not want to blunder onto the scene without a clear idea of why you are there and what you want out of it."

Before you consider any social media at all as part of your marketing/promotions plan, you need to ask yourself these questions:

• What is the problem/opportunity we have that social media can solve?

• Do we know what the time commitment is and do we have the time and people to pull it off?

• Do we know where our people/fans are getting their information (or have we engaged in a well-planned listening program)?

• What value will it add to our organization/product?

2. Because It's Free.
There may be a monetary advantage to social media, but isn't your time worth money? Social media takes time, resources, and people to pull off. After you have listened to your fans, devised a plan and found which platforms will add value to your organization, you need to find out exactly how much time your plan will involve. Then, you need to find the people with the extra time to manage it. Then, you need to find the training for the managers. None of these are impossible tasks, but they take time. Do you have the time for thoughtful, effective engagement?

3. Because We Don't Want our Customers/Fans Saying Bad Things About Us.
This one always puzzled me. It's like the question, "If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, will it make a noise?" Just because you aren't there, doesn't mean people are talking about you. They are. And you can't control it. And for that matter, you don't want to control it. Social media experts all agree that engaging your critics, not silencing them, is one of the benefits of social media. Becoming a part of the conversation in a constructive, informative way gives you credibility. Going online to delete comments and refute critical information will just get you in trouble. The corporate world is filled with examples over the last couple years--just ask BP, Toyota, or Domino's Pizza. Have a plan for engaging critics online before you start.

What other incredible reasons have you heard for starting a social media campaign?

How to use Twitter for customer service

2010-07-23T17:59:00.001-07:00

Great customer service is active because you want to be sure your customers are aware of your presence. Twitter gets the word out there fast, so why not take advantage of this social media phenomenon? Ask users to follow you on Twitter by placing a button on your website and getting involved.

Twitter employs a relaxed conversational platform. For instance, if someone complains or asks for help, you can reply to them immediately. In a few words, an unhappy customer can get right to the point, and you then have the opportunity to resolve the problem in a single tweet. If the issue becomes more complex, you can have a deeper conversation, but you also can have the option to supply the customer with another means of contacting you so that you may deal with the problem immediately, and isn’t that exactly what customer service strives to do?

Twitter can help you build a positive brand image because great customer service gets the “buzz” which leads to more customers through the attention. There have been many happy customer stories that have led to international news starting from a mere tweet. You can track conversations and see what others are saying about your brand by using keywords. It’s a great way to build your image, but remember honesty and transparency are key factors. It is very easy for customers to research your company, and if you don’t provide what you promise or don’t tell customers the truth, Twitter can have a negative impact on your business.

Twitter can save you money on customer service. It requires less time and less money than traditional call centers. Since Twitter is so precise, there is less time involved solving customer problems. Of course you can’t eliminate entire customer service departments, but how many times have customers called in with questions or issues that could have been happily solved in 140 characters?

A lot of companies use Twitter to promote their businesses almost daily. Starbucks posts new offers and participates in discussions. JetBlue promotes Twitter based customer service and names the representative. Even Home Depot twitters customers offering home repair and decorating advice.

Twitter works; it’s popular, and it’s free!

5 Credit Card Mistakes That Can Cause Divorce

2010-06-27T17:01:00.000-07:00

Even though you can save your marriage with credit cards, you can just as easily wreck your romance with help from your latest account statement. Avoid these five common ways that spouses get into money trouble:

#1: Hiding Credit Card Debt from Your Spouse

If some financial advisors had their way, we’d all be getting credit checks in addition to blood tests before getting our marriage licenses. How can your spouse really trust you if you’re not honest about that extra $7,000 in debt you’ve been keeping secret?

#2: Forcing Your Spouse to Suffer Under Your Pre-Wedding Credit Card Habits

Even if you were totally up front with your spouse about your debt before you got married, you might still need to talk about how your credit report got in that condition. It might have been easy to rationalize a missed credit card payment or an over-the-limit charge when you were single. Now that your credit scores are intertwined, it’s time to play by the rules.

#3: Making Secret Credit Card Purchases

It’s harder than you think to bury a questionable credit card purchase. Bank Web sites, credit monitoring services, and online budgeting tools make it very easy for spouses to uncover visits to stores, restaurants, or hotels. Unless it’s an anniversary gift, don’t keep it a secret.

#4: Shifting Gears with Credit Card Balances

Some folks love to cycle large credit card balances, just to get cash back rebates or other rewards. Other people prefer never to touch their credit cards, except in the most dire emergency. Wherever you fall in that spectrum, it’s important to agree on your household strategy and make some compromises.

#5: Failing to Use Credit Cards Responsibly

Stress in other parts of your marriage can trickle into your credit card habits. Is missing your monthly payment just forgetfulness or something worse? Talk to your spouse early if you’ve got some unexpected money trouble that could impact your credit score.

Most of all, don’t attempt to use credit cards to hide behind any of the real issues causing friction in your relationship. If you’re overspending because your spouse isn’t spending enough time with you, budget issues could drive you apart for good. If you’re hiding new lines of credit to assert power in your relationship, expect to lose it all when your spouse finds out. Seeing any of these signs should spur you to see a marriage counselor before things really get out of hand.

5 Things You Should Do in Social Media to Get Heard

2010-06-18T00:48:00.000-07:00

Image via CrunchBase

Getting yourself noticed on social media websites is not an easy task especially when you are using these social media websites for your commercial purposes like promoting your brand, trying to get sales. Though social media provides lot of opportunities and benefits to the business owners, the question is that how business owners can get themselves noticed without getting themselves marked as spammers or getting shunned from the community and leverage the social media benefits. Although, social media is evolving and social media users are still on a learning curve. Here are the few tips which can help you to get yourself heard and noticed amongst your target audience on social media websites.
Keep Your Message Simple – Your audience doesn’t have time to read long and complicated promotional messages. So it is your duty to keep your message simple and clear. Remove the clutter which is not relevant to your offer from the message. A complex message is hard to understand and to remember and hence it is less effective.
Customize it – Every social networking site is different and hence has a different eco system. The way your Facebook audience thinks is completely different from your target audience on LinkedIn. So make sure to customize your message according to the place where you are going to present it.
Make it about them – Nobody cares about your products so make sure that your content is not self centered and is about you. Your content (messages) on social media websites should focus on the needs of your target audience and how your products can benefit them. The best strategy is to write your messages in second person. Use words like “you” and “your” and make them about their problems and needs.
Promote in Right Places – Make sure that you are promoting your message at the right place and right time. The right place depends on the product you are promoting. For e.g. – Promoting a music store on LinkedIn is not a good, you’ve to go to Myspace for that. Similarly it is hard to find partners for your new venture on Facebook, you should go to LinkedIn.
Reach out at the appropriate time – The best time to reach out to your audience is when they actually need you – like while making a buying decision or need some latest information about the industry. Avoid bothering them with your promotional messages again and again as it will frustrate them and they will start hating your company.
Social media is an art. And like any other art, the more you will practice social media, the better you will become.

5 Social Media Best Practices for Business

2010-06-18T00:46:00.000-07:00

Image via CrunchBase

Social networks and blogs are changing how consumers find places and services, how and where they share their experiences, and eventually, where they will spend their time and money. Without an understanding of, and participation in, social networks, you can miss shaping and contributing to the decision-making process of those who define the success of your business.
While social media cheat-sheets and short cuts are available almost everywhere you look, the truth is that we have some work ahead of us. To help, I’ve assembled a list of five best practices to help you build, cultivate, and measure success in the new web right now.
1. Dedicate the time
We’re all very busy and our to-do list is never ending. Because time is a big concern, think about social media as an opportunity cost. Will your investment in identifying and connecting with prospects, customers, and influencers outperform your other activities? The answer is yes for most businesses, so carve out time for strategic experimentation. In short, you get out of it, what you invest.
2. Conquer your fears
Many business owners believe that social media gives people a chance to criticize their business. That’s true, but avoiding social media doesn’t mean that their opinions will never see the light of day. Your brand is at the mercy of those who take to social media to share their experiences, so you might as well take an active role to contributes to the stature and perception of your brand. You might even learn how to improve your product and service in the process.
3. Listen and research to learn and contribute
Social networking is far more effective when you realize that creating profiles and updating social networks aren’t arbitrary. There’s an art and science to all of this, and the process begins with listening and research. Step one: create a list of keywords that represent your market and then use the search box in each social network to see what people are saying about you. As you examine the results, you’ll identify the people who are leading conversations and the dialogue that invites and inspires participation. If local business is paramount to success, use services such as Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, LinkedIn. Also monitor location-based networks such as Foursquare, Gowalla, and Loopt.
4. Establish an attractive and expansive presence
Your presence online is far more valuable than you may realize. While you may think that you should focus on your website, your social-media presence also represents you and what you offer. The ability to showcase your products and services to attract customers and spark conversation is arguably greater on social networking sites than your own website. In any case, connecting the dots between social networks, websites, and the real world is now as important as the service and products that you offer.
5. Use engagement as the new customer service and marketing
It’s not what you say about you, it’s what they say about you that counts. Customer service and engagement overall is a new and genuine form of unmarketing. Customers, prospects, and influencers are already engaging with others to contribute, learn, and discover. They are forming and sharing opinions and making decisions based on the information they find online—with or without you. You should use engagement as a fast, free, and powerful way to reach and serve customers.
This is your time to engage! Doing so will earn you permanent residence in the hearts and minds of the people who make up your markets. This will expand market opportunities, build brand awareness, stimulate demand, and engender loyalty and advocacy.

4 Things to Remember When Shopping Online

2010-06-18T00:42:00.000-07:00

Image via CrunchBase

When shopping online, it is very easy to get caught up in the anxiety of hitting the “Submit Order” button that we forget to do a few more things that can help us save more money. I’ve been guilty of missing out on coupon savings and online rebates in a bit of haste due to my excitement. Just as easy as it is to find something and buy it on the Internet, it doesn’t require that much more work to save a few bucks.
Here are four money saving reminders during your online order checkout:
1. Search for coupons. You want to look for coupons first because they usually offer the most significant savings compared to everything else. I typically like to give these sites a rundown to see if there are any coupons available for my purchase:

RetailMeNot.com – Popular website with coupons for over 50,000 merchants.
Slickdealz.net Forums – Online forum community with threads dedicated to coupon sharing.
FatWallet.com Forums – Another online forum with members who share coupons.
eBay – #1 auction site where you can buy coupons and gift cards.

2. Check for educational discounts. If you are a college student or a member of the school faculty, you could be eligible for education discounts that could mean a bunch of savings. Popular merchants that offer educational discounts are:

Dell
Apple
Hewlett Packard
Adobe

3. Use online rebate programs. Shop through these websites and they give you a small percentage back because they earn commission for the referral. There is no risk and nothing to lose. Some of the top rebate sites are:

Bing.com – The top cash back program for the most popular stores(program will be terminating on July 30).
FatWallet.com – A one-stop destination for rebates, coupons, and hot deals.
Ebates.com – A cash back site with promotional codes and coupons for over 1,200 stores.
BigCrumbs.com – Another cash back site where you can shop from 570+ stores.

Your credit card may also have their own cash back or rewards program that pretty much acts like any other rebate program. They often cannot match the percentage offered by the sites stated above.

Tip: Do not sign up for too many different rebate programs. Stick to one or two. Otherwise, you’ll take forever to reach payout levels. You may even miss out on the cash back because you couldn’t reach payout – meaning you didn’t really save.

4. Always use your cash back or rewards credit card. This is a no-brainer… In fact, the only type of credit cards I have are cash back credit card so I’m always getting something back.

Tip: If you are using your cash back or rewards credit card through Paypal, always move any funds in your Paypal account into your bank account first. Having a $0 Paypal balance will mean you’d get the most cash back or rewards possible on your purchase.

How to Remind Yourself
Sure, you and I know that we should go through this list every time we are about to check out our order. But, when we are caught in the spur of the moment, it doesn’t come across our minds. We’re just anxious to receive that order confirmation in our email inboxes.
My trick to remind myself is:

I have a Post-It note stuck over the digits of my credit card number with “THE LIST” written on it. The credit card is the only thing in the whole shopping process that would grab my attention because I must take it out to make my payment. With the Post-It reminder covering the credit card number, I’ll be sure to check this list – hopefully be able to save some money.

17 Techniques For Driving Traffic To Your Blog

2010-06-14T08:41:00.000-07:00

Image via CrunchBase

riving massive amounts of search engine traffic to your blog can be a lot easier than you think, it really depends on some key factors like the niche you’ve chosen, your marketing and SEO techniques and even how dedicated a blogger you are, to name a few. There are billions of search queries per day across major search engines and you need to be taking advantage of this consistent and predictable source of traffic if you truly want to dominate your niche. So here are 17 techniques to put in action and practice to help you rank higher in search engines and attract tons of relevant visitors to your blog.

1. Optimize Your Blog’s Loading Speed

Google has since started using loading time as a factor to rank a site’s authority in search engines. Google gives sites that perform better higher authority and ranking because these sites will provide a better experience for their searchers. Simple techniques such as reducing the sizes of your images, using a reliable web host and caching plugins such as W3 Total Cache can help to reduce your blog’s load time.

2. Article Marketing To Increase Backlinks

Not many bloggers consider using article directories like Ezinearticles.com or Hubspot.com but article marketing can be an excellent way to gain quality backlinks to your blog, gain popularity and increase search engine traffic since they are so frequently and readily indexed by search engines. This works excellently for getting new blogs indexed quickly.

3. Ensure Your Blog’s Code is W3C Compliant

This is extremely important and a poorly coded site can prevent search engine crawlers from effectively indexing your site. Use the W3C Markup Validation Service to check for any errors on your site. Having a few minor errors will not be detrimental for your blog. However, if there are many, you may want to go through those errors and make corrections or employ a developer to do so.

4. Avoid Black Hat SEO Techniques

Black hat SEO techniques are practices that mislead and degrade the relevance of search engine results like keyword stuffing, spamming, using link farms, text hiding and article spinning. These techniques will get your blog banned from google and other search engines. Which means zero search engine traffic for your site.

5. Web Directory Submissions

This is another under-rated technique and yet it can be very effective for increasing the trust level of your site, provided that you submit to trusted high quality directories. Submit your blog to directories like DMOZ, Yahoo Directory and Best Of The Web Directory to name a few. Ensure that you submit your blog within relevant categories. These will help to increase pagerank and authority.

6. Choosing The Right Domain Name & Niche

Once you have decided upon the niche for your blog, try to ensure that your domain name has a couple related keywords in it while keeping the name short, sweet and easy to remember. Launching a website with iPad in the domain name while providing spectacular iPad related content will drive thousands of visitors to your blog who are searching for iPad info, especially if you register and market the domain in anticipation of the product launch. So choose a specific niche and take advantage.

7. Use Google & Bing Webmaster Tools

Google and Bing Webmaster tools pages allow you to submit your blog’s sitemap to the search crawler queue which will help your site get indexed faster and in a more in-depth and complete manner. These webmaster tools pages provide feedback on your site’s performance and offers advice on how to improve.

8. Consistently Create Original Useful Content

Ensure that your blog is a source of original link-worthy content that people will enjoy and share and is not just a copy of posts on other sites. Google does in fact pay attention to how far reaching and how much your content is being shared and this is an indicator of the authority of your blog. Never copy content from other sites, this may not get you banned immediately but will destroy your site’s authority.

9. Take Advantage of Trending Topics

Its an awesome technique if you can build a blog around popular events like World Cup, the launching of the iPad or any other trending topics. Millions of people are searching based on these hot topics and if you can get the stories, news and reviews out quickly, google will rank you highly for these topics and bring traffic your way. These are awesome opportunities for selling related merchandise and monetizing targeted traffic through advertising.
Use the Google Trends tool to find out what people are searching for and a history of trending search topics.

10. Frequently Update Your Blog

Google especially places high priority on fresh new content. As a blogger, you will notice that on the first two days that you publish new articles, you should see a rise in search engine traffic for those particular post keywords, then it will eventually get lower and taper off. This is because google picks up your content as being new and sends some traffic your way. Continuous and frequent blog posting will give your site the upper advantage in search results and google will index your site more frequently than the average.

11. Guest Posting To Increase Backlinks & Trust

Guest posting on quality, trustworthy blogs will get your site indexed quickly, increase backlinks and improve the authority of your blog. This is very effective for new blogs.

12. Write New Product Reviews

Writing timely product and book reviews can send tons of traffic your way from searchers who want to find more information on products before making their purchase. Also, if you can gain the attention of the product owners or authors they will readily share your reviews if they are in-depth and useful for the buyer which means more traffic for you.

13. Twitter As A Search Engine

Twitter is fast becoming a search engine on its own and using appropriate hash tags can gain you extra traffic when sharing your articles this way. For example, when I post new jobs to my job board, I commonly use the hash tags #jobs and #jobsearch with the tweets since many users search for jobs on twitter using these keywords. So start taking advantage of that and use tags that match your site and content when sharing.

14. Effective SEO Techniques

Ensure that you know a little SEO so that you can easily and consistently optimize your blog for search engine traffic. Techniques such as using Alt tags for images, using appropriate link text, good keyword density within posts, usage of heading tags, internal link building and having simple navigation structures can allow searchers to easily find your blog’s content and attract more relevant quality visitors.

15. Social Bookmarking is a Must!

Social bookmarking sites are among the most frequently indexed sites on the web and creating links in sites like Delicious.com, Digg.com, Reddit.com, StumbleUpon.com and so on can get your articles out on the wide web quickly and higher in search results.

16. Maintain A You Tube Channel

Google owns YouTube and displays search results that match videos in the YouTube database. Create channels for your blogs and have supporting videos for the content that you produce on your site. If you publish technical tutorials on your blog upload supporting videos to YouTube. When uploading your videos, ensure that the titles and descriptions contain the most relevant keywords that will attract the best targeted traffic.

17. Use Paid Press Releases

Publishing a paid press release through a site like PRWeb.com can significantly get your articles out on the web and go viral. You’ll even get Google advertising credit, get inclusion in Yahoo, Google and Associated Press releases that are viewed by millions of people. Its very important that your content is unique and captures the attention of readers.

Conclusion & Discussion

Following the tips above will get you started on an excellent path to start dominating your niche and attract relevant interested visitors to your blog through search engines.
Are there any techniques not mentioned above that have helped you to gain massive amounts of traffic? Please share in the comments below, we would love to hear from you.

5 Google Search Tricks for SEO

2010-06-14T08:22:00.000-07:00

Image via Wikipedia

5 Google Search Tricks

“intitle:”/”allintitle:” Start your query with this tag and follow with your keywords to see who is using good SEO by targeting these keywords in their title tag. Using only “intitle” will show pages with title tags containing any of the keywords you search for, and “allintitle” will only show pages with title tags containing all the keywords. Doing your search with this tool will help you determine who is tightly targeting your keywords by using them in the title tag.
“inanchor:”/”allinanchor:” When trying to find what backlinks any particular page has, there are several options. Google itself will not display every backlink, but using this tag can help you determine who is using the searched keyword in their anchor text for backlinks. This can be used to find both your own site’s anchor text use and how your competition is doing with anchor text.
“intext:”/”allintext:” If you’re trying to determine which pages are using your searched keywords most effectively in the page content, this is your tag. Results here will display which pages are using the target keywords most in their visible content.
“link:” This is another tag you can use when doing backlink research. When you use this tag with a domain or a full page URL you can see what pages Google has listed that are linking to this page. Again, Google will not list all backlinks, but this can give you a quick rundown of backlinks to specific pages.
“site:” This is a tag that is often missed for its true value. When you use this tag and follow it with a domain name, it will display all pages that Google’s robots have crawled. If, in addition to this, you add keywords – it will display only pages inside that domain that match the keyword query. This is an easy way to determine if Google has cached a specific page, or for finding out relevant information within a particular domain. You can even do a partial search with this tag to find out all sites of a certain class that match your query. For example, typing “site:.edu” will list all relevant results that only have domains with the “.edu” extension.

Using any (or all) of these tags can help you in your SEO research quite nicely. They are valuable tools to research competition or even measure your own levels of progress.

Did You Know You Can Buy Twitter Followers?

2010-06-13T02:07:00.000-07:00

Image via CrunchBase

Since internet marketing first started, email addresses have been scraped, sold, bulked up and spammed to death… so why should Twitter be anything different? Yesterday Jon wrote a post on a service called Followers for Sale. The concept is simple… pay these advertising networks to bring new followers to your Twitter account. In addition to Jon’s post, I also had a request this week to review a paid Twitter service on another blog I run. With two Twitter services gaining my attention in one day, I thought it would make for an interesting case study to see how well these companies work, what they charge and if these followers will actually stick around… or most importantly, are of any value!
First I had to go out and find what services are available. The best way of doing this is just going to Google and searching “buy twitter followers“. You will get a big mess of results.
The best way to setup this case study and to measure results, is to create a few new Twitter accounts and use them separately on each of the Twitter follower services. This is also necessary because Twitter limits the amount of people you can follow daily. Using the same account along with each of these services would be a huge red flag and would ultimately ban your account.
For this Twitter Follower case study, let’s use 10,000 followers as the price point and what I will order for each Twitter account.
Here is a list of paid Twitter services and their rates.
BuyTwitterFriends.com = 10,000 Followers for $49.99 (0.0049 each)
TweetSourcer.com = 10,000 Followers for $60.00 (0.006 each)
UnlimitedTwitterFollowers.com = 10,000 Followers for $74.95 (0.0074 each)
Twitter1k.com = 5,000 Followers for $104.97 (0.0209 each)
SocialKik.com = 10,000 Followers for $150.00 (0.015 each)
USocial.net = 10,000 Followers for $447.30 (0.044 each)
Tweetcha.com = 10,000 Followers for $474.99 (0.047 each)
PurchaseTwitterFollowers.com = 5,000 Followers for $249.99 (0.049 each)

As you can see, there is a bit of swing between follower services. USocial.net being the most expensive. For this study, I will use the first three providers, test results, the possibly compare to the most expensive solutions and see if it’s actually worth the money.
The majority of these sites specialize in bringing you “untargeted” followers, but for a higher price it’s possible. If you are looking for a self managed and cheaper solution, I’d recommend Tweet Adder. Instead of paying a service to send a select amount of users for a one time cost, you can use your own software to continually bring in new targeted followers every day, and for multiple accounts. It can be a pain to follow users, then remove the ones that aren’t following you back… but you can build up a 10,000+ Twitter account for under $100 with adder software programs.
I’ve setup the new Twitter accounts, made orders with the first three follower services listed above. Now we just play the waiting game and I will report back next week on first results.

Twitter Is A Better Marketing Tool Than Facebook

2010-06-12T23:20:00.000-07:00

Image via CrunchBase

A study of over 1,500 consumers by market research firm, Chadwick Martin Bailey and iModerate Research Technologies revealed that both Facebook and Twitter are effective marketing tools – 60% of Facebook fans and 79% of Twitter followers are likely to recommend brands they follow. On purchasing persuasiveness, 51% of Facebook fans and 67% of Twitter followers are likely to purchase products from the brands they follow. In both aspects, Twitter fared better than Facebook, which essentially means that it is a more effective marketing platform out of the two. But these statistics may vary from product to product. A restaurant may have a higher recommendation and purchasing rate compared to a real estate agent.

Increasingly Demanding Consumers

Like it or not, consumers are increasingly demanding, and they expect businesses to be on these social platforms. Below are several comments made by the surveyees when asked the question “What does it say about a brand if they are not involved with sites like Facebook or Twitter?”

“It’s expected that a company have some digital face – whether it’s on FB or Twitter I don’t know – but they need a strong electronic presence or you doubt their relevance in today’s marketplace.” Female 50-54

“Either they are not interested in the demographic that frequents Facebook and Twitter or they are unaware of the opportunity to get more exposure in a more interactive method.” Male 35-39

“It shows they are not really with it or in tune with the new ways to communicate with customers.” Female 18-24.

“If they’re not on Facebook or Twitter, then they aren’t in touch with the “electronic” people.” Female 55-59

It is Up To Us to Use the Tools

The statistics provide a good insight but they should also be taken with a pinch of salt. On a fair note, Facebook provides many features that aren’t available on Twitter, like photos, videos, discussion threads etc. The success rate highly depends on how businesses use them to create value and engagement. Ikea’s Facebook campaign would be a good example.

3 Benefits When Using Twitter As A Customer Service Tool

2010-06-12T23:15:00.000-07:00

Image via CrunchBase

When we, the customers have a complaint or query directed to a company, we either visit the corporate website or ring up the busy hotline.

But how many times has the inadequate FAQ list frustrated us? And how long did we have to wait before we finally hear an unrecorded voice at the other end of the call?

All these speak failure.

Could Twitter be a solution? It might not be perfect, but it certainly could help patch up some of the major flaws of other customer service tools.

1. It is fast

At least from the consumer’s perspective. Rather than waiting for an operator to pick up, or looking through a whole chunk of FAQs, tweeting allows a customer to send the query directly to the customer service personnel.
The biggest challenge faced by businesses on Twitter is the speed of replies. Hence, having a dedicated Twitter customer service representative is crucial. His or her job scope would be to handle the account during office hours.

2. It is fun

The Twitter experience is cool and refreshing as compared to engaged hotlines and boring FAQs.

It is fun because it involves interaction. Except for the sales people, businesses don’t normally speak to consumers directly.

It forces businesses to speak, leading to a more intimate relationship between customers and businesses.

3. It is effective

Did being fast and fun make it effective? Partly yes. But the best part of Twitter is it being a social networking site.
While FAQs, hotlines and even emails are all very much a one-sided customer service tool, Twitter helps you initiate conversations and gain feedback. You don’t have to wait till someone complains to care, ask followers how satisfied they are and start casual chats.
Your following list can only keep growing unless you give users reasons not to. Over time, your Twitter account will slowly become an asset as Twitter reaches worldwide adoption.

Summing it up

Twitter is powerful but using it as a sole tool is suicidal.

FAQs and hotlines are still very much required in most businesses to give customers more options.

However, with a customer oriented approach, Twitter can greatly value add the customer service system, in a way no other platforms can. Try it and be pleasantly surprised by great customer response!

How Much Is a Facebook Fan Really Worth?

2010-06-12T00:44:00.000-07:00

Image via CrunchBase

Lots of companies — more every day, it seems — want to have Facebook “fan” pages, where customers or would-be customers can connect with them and become part of their online community. But what are those fans actually worth to a company? Everyone has their own views on that question, but now a social media measurement firm called Syncapse has come up with an actual dollar value in a report released today (PDF link). The answer? An average fan is apparently worth about $136.38, although for some very successful social marketers the value can be dramatically higher, while for some less successful companies it can be virtually zero.
Syncapse came up with the figure by asking 4,000 fans of 20 of the top brands on Facebook — including Nokia, BlackBerry, Victoria’s Secret, Adidas, Nike, Coca-Cola, Starbucks and McDonald’s — why they were fans of those companies or brands, and about their past and future purchasing behavior. Syncapse then tried to estimate what the value of each fan’s spending would be to a company, as well as the value of continuing to have that fan as a customer over time.
The key findings of the report are likely to come as music to the ears of advertisers that have been pursuing a Facebook-based social media strategy. According to the survey:

On average, fans spend an extra $71.84 they would not otherwise spend on products they describe themselves as fans of, compared to those who are not fans.
Fans are 28 percent more likely than non-fans to continue using a specific brand.
Fans are 41 percent more likely than non-fans to recommend a product they are a fan of to their friends.

That probably helps to explain why, according to recent statement by the company, the number of advertisers working with Facebook has doubled in the past year. But Syncapse also said that its results showed how the value of a fan can vary widely:

An average fan may participate with a brand ten times a year and will make one recommendation. But an active fan may participate thirty times and make ten recommendations. The impact this has on fan value is quite dramatic. In the case of Coca- Cola, the best case for fan value reaches $316.78 but is $137.84 for an average fan. In the worse case scenario, a fan is worth $0.

Some might argue that these conclusions aren’t exactly rocket science — after all, one would assume that if someone goes to the trouble of becoming a fan of a product on Facebook, that person would be enough of a supporter of the brand that they would buy it more often, recommend it to their friends and so on. And Syncapse’s results may also not be 100 percent reliable if extended to the entire universe of 500 million Facebook users, since a few thousand users is a relatively small sample. But it’s still interesting to see someone try to put an actual dollar figure on the value of a Facebook friend.

3 Ways to Turn Your Company Into a Blogging Machine

2010-06-11T23:29:00.000-07:00

Image via CrunchBase

Method 1: Share Experiences Using Your Product

Let the whole company use your product. It can turn them into great evangelists for your brand. People will see that you love your product, which gives them more reason to love it.
The Kodak 1000 words blog is not about cameras - it is about the power of photography. Kodak employees blog about all that they can do with a camera. Through sharing their photographs and the stories behind them, they show their true emotional connection to Kodak's product.
Even if your employees are not your target market, crowdsourcing content from your actual customers is a great idea. At HubSpot, even though we use our own software and we also showcase case studies from customers.

Method 2: Share Your Expertise

If people are in an industry, they should be knowledgeable about it, and might even be passionate about it. People love talking about something they're good at and passionate about.
Consulting company Accenture allows employees to blog about delivering high business performance. By doing so, Accenture has inspired a collection of some of the most prominent business blogs today. They show that they know their industry, and gain trust from potential customers.

Method 3: Share Your Company Culture

Southwest Airlines created an unconventional yet successful blog around corporate culture. While sprinkled with company news, the blog draws mostly from employee stories.
While your company doesn't need to have a left-field culture like Southwest, you can still let people know how you get things done. This can help you gain a reputation as a thought-leader in your industry, and improve your image for potential customers.

Marketing Takeaway

It's hard to get employees interested in blogging. Adding a marketing bolt on to your organization can only help you distribute news about your company more aggressively.
Turning your company into a blogging machine is a great way to produce useful content that is relevant and interesting to your customers. It enables your employees to advocate for their work and interact directly with customers.

How To Get Traffic from Facebook Social Plugins

2010-06-11T23:24:00.000-07:00

Image via CrunchBase

Social Plugins are a new initiative from Facebook to allow website owners to integrate their content into Facebook’s social graph. Put simply, that means if you start using their plugins on your blog, any interactions your visitors make with the plugins will be reflected in their Facebook profiles, and thus to their friends.
There are a bunch of plugins on offer which you can find more about here. Most of the plugins show visitors information about their friends on your pages, but two of them are great for bloggers looking to try and get back a little traffic love from Facebook.

1. Like Button

Facebook have fallen in love with “Like” buttons – you’ll start to see this as the action of choice for everything in Facebook, be it your friend’s comments, Facebook Pages, etcetera. You can now put a Like button on your web pages, which means when your visitors click it, your web page potentially shows up as a story in the user’s public profile when they click it, meaning their friends may see it and click as well.
If you’re running WordPress, it’s easy – there’s a plugin you can grab here which does all the hard work for you.
If you need to implement the Like button manually, go this setup page where Facebook will generate code for a Like button for your site. You’ll have to put an address in (don’t worry we’ll hack that in a bit). Setup the other options (I’d recommend unchecking “Show Faces” to keep the size of this small) then click “Get Code” and copy the IFRAME version. This is the version of code you will need to put in your site. There’s an example below:
You’ll need to change the URL part (highlighted) for every page you put this on, and I’d recommend adding the height constraint (also highlighted) which will keep the plugin from creating too much white space.

2. Like Box (for Facebook Pages)

The Like box is an option for Facebook Page owners to show a feed of information about your Page – recent stories, how many users like it, and the all important Like Button. Unlike the Like button for your web pages, this will create a permanent connection between the Facebook user and your Facebook page, which means any updates you make to your Facebook page may be shown in the user’s main news feed, thus increasing the chances of them visiting your site again.
If you haven’t got a Facebook page for you Blog, I would highly recommend it, it’s free and can be created here. You can configure all sorts of options for your Facebook Page but even if you just publish your blog posts to your Facebook page, it is likely to drive you some traffic.
Once you’ve created your Facebook page you’ll need the number (id) of the page to paste in this page to create a Like Box. For example, from my page, it’s the last set of numbers on the url:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/ReallyUsefulWebAppscom/227364020017
Again, if you’re running WordPress there’s a plugin here, otherwise play with the options to create the Like Box, and copy the code for your site.
Summary
Unlike the many other plugins and widgets competing for space on your blog, these two plugins provide a real benefit by virally spreading your blog through the biggest Social Network on the web. From my perspective, that’s a very hard offer to turn down. Go check them out.

How to Make Money and Join YouTube Partner Program

2010-06-11T22:32:00.000-07:00

YouTube is pretty much the whole of online video, and a lot of video creators rely on YouTube to generate their income but how do you make money from YouTube? Well first of all you need to join the YouTube Partner Program.
Acceptance to the YouTube Partners Program means that uploaders can earn revenue from their videos. However, YouTube dont really outline their criteria, but this video below should help you understand what you need to do to get accepted into the program.

DailyBlogTips Exclusive: How To Get Thousands of Visitors To Your Blog

2010-06-11T01:08:00.000-07:00

7 Factors To Consider Before You Follow Someone On Twitter

2010-06-11T00:44:00.000-07:00

Image via CrunchBase

Two of the most common questions asked when some begins using Twitter are, “Who should I follow? and “What should I look for when doing so?”
There are a couple of schools of thought on the answer and it ties directly to what your goals are with your account. Some focus on growing the follower number as high as possible as quickly as possible. Others focus on building a targeted community of like minded people, associations, and brands – with the goal being more focused on the quality of the list versus the quantity of followers.
For me, I take a combined approach – find and follow as many people, brands, associations etc. as possible that share common interests, feelings, situations and experiences with me and that align with the buyer personas I have for Make Good Media and B2Bbloggers.com. It is a very systematic and careful approach to who I follow with both of my Twitter accounts. Why? Because I have a specific purpose defined for each account. So in this article, as my aim has been with all of our Twitter for Business related posts thus far, I am sharing a how-to.
The 7 factors to consider before you follow someone on Twitter.

1. Tweets

The tweets of the Twitter account are going to reveal the most important information about the account (person or brand) and will likely have the highest impact on your decision. I suggest at the very least you should review the first page of tweets that are displayed. Here are some things to look for when making your decision to follow:

Are the tweets topical, interesting, and relevant to your interests and your Twitter account?
The amount of tweets that are “noise” or random, non-specific thoughts. Now, realize every account on Twitter is going to have its share of “noise.” It’s inherent in the nature of the medium, you’ll need to determine your tolerance level for it.
The number of tweets that are broadcasts versus conversational.
The number of tweets that are promotional.

2. Background, Profile And Link

Most users of Twitter take advantage of the 160 character BIO to describe themselves and the nature of their tweets. Twitter also allows users to provide one link to anywhere on the web. This could be to a blog, a LinkedIn profile, a corporate website, a book for sale … you name it. If need be, take a minute and check it out, you’re bound to learn more to help you with your decision. And finally, many accounts utilize the background image to share even more information. Be sure to check there too

3. Followers

First thing to look at is the number of followers. Don’t let it be the sole discretionary factor in your decision.

Pop-Up Window By Hovering Over Username

While it does give you a sense of the accounts influence within the network, it tells you nothing about the type or topic of the account.
Next take a quick look at a couple pages of the account’s followers, do you have common interests? With the new @anywhere platform, you can hover over Twitter names to reveal the account’s bio for quick look. This can give you a sense of the types of people that are following the account you are assessing.
Do you share common interests with them? Also when you first get to the page, if your accounts have followers in common, you will see “following” next to the name.

4. Lists

Twitter lists provide uses the ability to organize and categorize groups of Twitter accounts any way that they would like. Every user’s Twitter page displays the number of lists an account is a member of. By clicking the number, you can see the lists the account is on, but more importantly you can see the “names” of the lists. This is yet another quick way to see how other members of Twitter are describing and categorizing the account.

5. Favorites

Did you know that Twitter allows you to favorite tweets? Yep,that’s right, in the case of my favorite tweets, I use them as bookmarks so I can go back later to read the content. So what does that tell you about me? Exactly, things I like, and things I am likely to tweet about. Simply more information to help the decision making process.

6. Follower To Following Ratio

When an account is following thousands of people and is in the teens for followers, that’s a BIG warning sign and I don’t recommend following these accounts.
But what do you do in the case when, the ratio is not so drastic – say following 1,400 and is in the 300s for followers. Make recommendation is to take pause, and further assess the content of the tweets, tweet volume, etc. Many people (in their thirst for knowledge) may spend a lot of time early on following lots of people … and suddenly realize whoa, no one is following me back. Just in these cases when the tweet volume is low (i.e. a newer account), don’t be too quick to not follow. Look at the other information a bit closer and decide from there.

[Sidenote: Do I sound like I speak from experience? Yep, that was me, in my thirst for knowledge, when I first joined Twitter I think I was following 500 people in a few days – lesson learned and now shared with you.]

7. Tweet To Follower Ratio

You are bound to get followed by an account who has sent 4 Tweets and has 14,321 followers. Honestly, I don’t know how or why or what these accounts are, but I don’t follow them and usually I block them from following me.Phew –
That is a lot of information to review, digest, and assimilate just to decide whether or not to hit the Follow button.
But the fact of the matter is you are inviting someone into your stream? And your intention is to have them return the follow. Why not be prudent? Right?
You tell me though, did I go too far? Are you thinking, uh, all it takes is a second to unfollow someone, why bother with all this? It is certainly a reasonable thought – let me know what you think below. I’d be interested in the dialogue. Oh and tell me too – what am I missing?

3 ways in which low quality content can damage your business

2010-06-10T23:45:00.000-07:00

Image via CrunchBase

Companies are adding content to their websites at a faster rate than ever.
Someone told them it was a good thing to do.
The pitch probably started something like this:
"The more web content pages you publish, the more organic traffic you will get from the search engines. If you add hundreds, and then thousands of new pages, you can optimize each page for a specific, long tail keyword and make out like a bandit."
True enough.
Then someone at the company did the math, and realized that adding thousands of new pages would cost a fortune and take forever. Talented writers don’t come cheap, and they always complain if you ask them to write faster.
It is at this point that the lure of low quality content raises its ugly head.
Some smart soul at the company says, "Never mind paying our writers. How about if we outsource content writing to India or the Philippines? I bet we can get new pages written for about a dollar each. Or less."
Someone else says, “Or we could hire one of those content mills, and buy content in bulk.”
And the third stooge says, “Or we could invite our readers to contribute, and then automate the aggregation of all their submissions into new pages of content!”
Before you know it, the company’s website has a thousand new pages. And sure enough, they start getting a flood of new traffic through the search engines.
All is well, it seems. Never mind the quality – just focus on the quantity.
But over time, three significant problems with this approach arise.
1) Google is no longer fooled by low quality content.
One of the pillars on which low quality content stands is the fact that the Googlebot does a great job of determining the subject of a page, but is deaf, dumb and blind when it comes to the quality of the content.
In other words, Google can tell what a page is all about, but it can’t automatically determine whether the page is useful to its readers. For that, it depends on looking at the links pointing to the website. Numerous links to a site from authoritative sources give Google a good insight into the quality of that site.
This has always been a weakness, and many marketers have been quick to take advantage. First they create a body of high quality content which attracts plenty of inbound links. Then they add boat loads of lower-quality content. Google knows the site is a good one, and by default assumes that all the new content added to the site is also good.
What’s the problem then? The problem is that Google knows the games marketers play. And their latest update, the Mayday update, directly addresses the issue of bulk, low-quality, long tail content pages.
In the words of Googler Matt Cutts, ”This is an algorithmic change in Google, looking for higher quality sites to surface for long tail queries. It went through vigorous testing and isn’t going to be rolled back.”
In other words, it seems that Google is no longer going to be relying just on inbound links as a way to judge the quality of page content.
So if you have hundreds of cookie-cutter content pages, optimized for long tail keywords, don’t be surprised if they start dropping from page one to page twenty of the Google search results.
2) Low quality content doesn’t get shared.
Unless you have been living in a cave for the last couple of years, you know that content can get massive distribution through social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, Sphinn, StumbleUpon and others.
But if you want to have your content distributed far and wide through these sites and services, you had better create content worth sharing.
One thing you can be sure of is that those low quality content pages you had written for a dollar a page are not going to get on page one of Digg, nor are they going to be retweeted on Twitter.
Social media may seem to be chaotic, and often generates some fairly frivolous content of its own. But here’s one thing you need to understand: Every person using social media is an editor. They will read your content and then decide whether or not it is worth sharing.
This means you have to pay attention to the quality and value of your content. To get shared, content has to be engaging, entertaining, interesting or useful.
3) Low quality content damages your brand.
Your brand is not about your tagline or your logo. It is about people’s ongoing experience of your company and its website.
Great content adds value to that experience and builds your brand.
Low quality content disappoints your readers and undermines your brand.
Put another way, why create hundreds of pages of long tail content, attract thousands of visitors to your site, and then leave them feeling disappointed? That’s just a fast way to shoot yourself in the foot.
The answer lies in an ongoing investment in quality content.
There is no 'easy-button' when it comes to creating a quality website. Some people and some companies will tell you they can magically create zillions of new pages for you at an incredibly low price.
But if you take that route, you will ultimately do yourself and your company a great deal of harm.
Instead, focus on creating quality content that attracts links, is ripe for sharing, and makes you or your company look good.

World Cup 2010: A Social Media Gooooooal!

2010-06-10T23:35:00.000-07:00

Image via Wikipedia

The world’s most widely viewed sporting event, FIFA World Cup 2010, begins today.
Every four years since 1930 (with the exception of 1942 and 1946), soccer teams have fought, kicked, run, defended, and left everything on the field in fierce matches in the world’s spotlight. This year, 32 teams battle in South Africa.
And for the first time ever, the World Cup is playing in the digital age. During the last World Cup, social media was barely kicking: Twitter hit the field on July 2006; Facebook wasn’t public until September 2006.
In 2010, it’s a whole new World Cup.

The World Is Watching

From June 11 to July 11, hundreds of millions of soccer fans around the world will be glued to their TV and computer screens to watch the FIFA World Cup. And unlike the last World Cup, fans who couldn’t afford to jet to the hosting country are no longer limited to screaming, jeering, and cheering just in sports bars or their living rooms. Thanks to Twitter (@FIFAcom) and Facebook, fans can have their shouts and whistles heard around the world.
How important is social media to World Cup 2010? FIFA president Joseph S. Blatter says, “… social media websites will play an important role in connecting everyone who cares about the game of football. I’m very excited to be sharing my own personal experience of the 2010 FIFA World Cup with football fans from all over the world.” And Twitter employee Robin Sloan says, “… The World Cup will eclipse everything we have seen so far on Twitter, including the U.S. election, the Oscars, or the Super Bowl simply because it is so international.”
He’s not exaggerating. Fans everywhere are putting on their country’s jerseys and cheering on their teams in the world’s most anticipated sporting event at:

Facebook’s official group for worldwide fans of World Cup 2010
@fifacom on Twitter (official news from FIFA)
their country’s soccer team Twitter feed
tweetbeat

Get in the Game

With such a tremendous audience, consider taking advantage of the soccer love and fandom by putting a touch of soccer (or “football” if you speak English anywhere outside the United States) on your business, tweets or blog posts. Ask yourself:

Are there ways that your business can join in this worldwide event?
Do you have a product or idea to share with soccer enthusiasts around the world?
Can you share about your country’s team on the corporate blog or Twitter account?
Is there someone at your company who is a soccer enthusiast and can tweet, blog or share about World Cup 2010?

Today begins a month-long experience of breathing, eating, drinking, sleeping, and dreaming soccer for World Cup 2010 fans. Don’t be late to the game.

3 Things You Need to Know about Twitter Links

2010-06-10T23:31:00.000-07:00

Image via CrunchBase

Internet marketers are all atwitter about the changes Twitter is making to links. This week Twitter announced their plans to step up their malware defense (to see what we had to say about Twitter and malware read this post) and change the way links are sent. Here are the 3 things you need to know about Twitter’s new linking plan:

1. Twitter will be wrapping all links with a ‘t.co’ URL

Since tweets have a 140 character limit, tweeting a long link has long been a problem. Twitter is introducing t.co is a replacement and an upgrade to twt.tl, the URL wrap they currently offer. To make it easier for users to see where the link is coming from, how it’s relevant and if it’s safe to click on, the new t.co ‘wrapping’ (which is how Twitter shortens the link) will trim the link but display key descriptive terms.
The example the company used in their announcement is a link to Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh’s book, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose, on Amazon. Instead of a very long link including book title and a series of product or page id numbers, with the new t.co wrap the link could show up as http://amazon.com/Delivering. This way if you tweet a longer link to a new product or promotion on your site, your followers will be able to see on text message (SMS), Twitter homepage, or via web app, an abbreviated but still relevant link.

2. Links will be routed through the Promoted Tweets platform.

Twitter’s Promoted Tweets platform is part of Twitter’s advertising plan. Announced back in April (and written about in Even Twitter’s Monetizing Twitter) Promoted Tweets are tweet ads from Twitter’s advertising partners that will appear in your Twitter stream if they are relevant to your tweets.
Twitter is routing links through the Promoted Tweets service so that t.co can become a part of the Promoted Tweets algorithm. Basically, this means that Twitter is learning from the links you click as they figure out how to measure relevancy in the Twitterverse.
This increases protection for users, as routing t.co through Twitter’s system means any link will be checked for malware.

3. Links will count as fewer characters.

T.co will also change how links count against the 140 character limit. As a result of the t.co wrapping, links will be a predictable length, which has enabled Twitter to set a stock count of 20 characters per link (post t.co wrapping). This means when you tweet a link, you’ll have a bit more room for text. (For ideas about how to use that space, check out GetFreeTwitterTips.com.) The tweet displayed will cap out at 140 characters, but since you won’t have to count each digit or letter in the link, you can include more in your tweets.
Right now, only a few accounts have t.co capabilities, but over the coming summer months, Twitter will be expanding the service and wrapping each link tweeted. You can see how t.co wrapped links look by checking out these three accounts: @TwitterAPI, @raffi or @rsaver.
With shorter, clearer and safer links and more character room, Twitter’s new linking plan packs a lot of benefits into a small t.co wrapped package.

How to Customize Your Facebook Page Using Static FBML

2010-06-09T00:31:00.000-07:00

Image via CrunchBase

Is your Facebook page dull and uninviting? Maybe you’ve seen those really attractive Facebook pages and wondered, “How’d they do that?”

Given Facebook’s powerhouse status for marketers, isn’t it time you upgraded your Facebook page?

How can you help your brand stand out from the competition and increase the relevancy of your Facebook page?

The answer: Static FBML. This article will share what you need to know to conduct a Facebook page makeover.
What Is Static FBML?

FBML stands for Facebook Markup Language, which is a subset of HTML.

Static FBML is a Facebook application that allows Facebook page administrators to create custom boxes and tabs on their Facebook pages. This application is only available for Facebook pages, not for personal profiles or Facebook groups.
Adding Static FBML to Your Facebook Page

You can add Static FBML in four easy steps.

#1: Make sure you are an administrator of the Facebook page so you have the ability to edit.

#2: Go to the Static FBML application.

#3: Click “Add to my Page.”

#4: A window will appear that contains a list of the Facebook pages for which you are an administrator. Click “Add to Page” to add the application.

Static FBML is now added to your page.

Before you add content to your FBML box, you should have an idea whether you want to set up your FBML box as a tab or keep it as part of your wall on the left-hand column. That way, you can make the necessary image or video size adjustments so these components fit in the space provided.
Setting Up Static FBML as a Tab

To set up your FBML box as a tab, click on “Edit Page” under your Facebook page logo/avatar located on your wall.

Scroll down to the “Applications” section and locate the FBML app and click “Application Settings” (see below). Make sure that the “Tab” setting is “added”. Your FBML box is now added as a tab.
To the left of application settings you will see an “Edit” option on your FBML. This is where you will ultimately paste your HTML code. You can also add a “box title.” The box title becomes the name of your tab.

Please note that your FBML box must be coded for a maximum width suitable for a tab. The maximum width for an FBML box for a tab is 520 pixels.
Setting Up Static FBML to Your Left Column Wall

The ability to have multiple FBML boxes encourages you to have an FBML box on your tab as well as part of your wall on the left-hand column (or JUST on the wall). Let’s add an FBML box to your wall.

Go back to your wall and click on “Edit Page” under your Facebook page logo/avatar.

Find the FBML box and click on “Application Settings” (shown below).

Make sure the “Box” settings are “added”. The “Box” setting is important so that you have the option of moving your FBML box to the left-hand column of your wall. Go back to your wall, find your boxes tab and locate your FBML box. Click on the pencil icon (shown below) and select “Move to Wall tab.”

Your new FBML box is now added to your wall.

Please note that your FBML box must be coded for a maximum width suitable for your wall. The maximum width for an FBML box on the left side of your wall is 180 pixels.

Click here, go to the wall and scroll down to see the ‘Useful Links’ box on SocialMediaExaminer.com’s wall. You can drag boxes up and down the left side of your wall.
Adding Content to Your Static FBML Box

Now that you have an idea where you want to place your FBML box, it’s time to edit and add content. To begin, click on “Edit Page” located under your Facebook page logo. Scroll down to the “Applications” section and locate the FBML app, but this time click “Edit.” The FBML box will be empty.

This is the area where you can name the FBML box and add HTML code. Please note that FBML does not work with all HTML code. For example, JavaScript does not work. You’ll need to experiment.

If you scroll down to the bottom of the box, you can add additional FBML boxes.

The maximum number of FBML boxes you can have is 10.

Now let’s spice up your Facebook page. I’ll go over the two most popular enhancements using Static FBML – adding a clickable image and embedding a YouTube video.
How to Add a Clickable Image in Static FBML

When adding an image in the FBML box, I’ve found that the best place to host images is Photobucket. Using Flickr or Facebook photos caused issues for me. If it works for you, stick with it. The maximum width for an image in the FBML box for a tab is 520px.

There is no maximum height, but think of it as a landing page by keeping the scrolling to a minimum. Ask yourself: do you want users to scroll down to get the message or do you want to get the main point across once they’ve landed on your page?

Upload your image to your Photobucket account. Copy the direct URL to the image you intend to use in your FBML box. Next, you want to use this code:

Replace the xxxxx with the target URL. Replace the yyyyy with the direct link to your uploaded Photobucket image. Replace the ## with your width and height in pixels.
How to Embed a YouTube Video in Static FBML

As with images, I would recommend a maximum width of 520px for a tab. After uploading your video, you want to use this code:

Replace the xxxxx with your YouTube’s video ID. In both examples below, “MqqKPWhY4es” is my YouTube ID.

Example 1: In this YouTube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqqKPWhY4es, all the characters after the “=” are the YouTube ID.

Example 2: If your YouTube link looks like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqqKPWhY4es&feature=player_embedded, all the characters after the “=” and before the “&feature” will be the YouTube ID.

You can change the values of “swfbgcolor” and “imgstyle” to your preferences. The “imgsrc” is a bit trickier because it is a preview image. When a user clicks on the preview image, it turns into the video. To see a real-life example, you can go to the Marketwire page (see below screen shot). In order to change the preview image, you can replace the URL to a direct link to one of your Photobucket images (or any other source).

Make sure you open and close all tags and quotes.

Example of a clickable image with an embedded video
How to Set the FBML Box as the Default Landing Tab

The option of setting your FBML box as the default landing tab, rather than the wall, is one of the most relevant enhancements you can make to your Facebook page. This is where adding Google Analytics to your Facebook page helps tremendously with tracking.

In order to set your FBML box as your default landing page, go to “Edit Page” under your Facebook page logo and scroll down to “Wall Settings.” You’ll notice a section called “Default Landing Page for Everyone Else.” Visitors who are not fans of your page will see your newly created FBML box. Visitors who are fans will land on your wall.

That’s it!
Static FBML a Must-Have for Facebook Pages

The ability to enhance your page as a marketing vehicle by driving traffic to your website and engaging even more with your audience should warrant consideration. Many administrators shy away from Static FBML because they’re intimidated with coding.

My suggestion: review this post, research a bit more on Google and try it out. In the words of Ben Stiller from the movie Starsky & Hutch, Do it! Do it! Do it!.

I hope this tutorial has given you some insight on how to implement Static FBML to your Facebook page.

What are your thoughts on Static FBML? Is there a reason why you haven’t added it yet? Comment below and let’s get this discussion going!

How Dana White Built a UFC Empire with Social Media

2010-06-09T00:21:00.000-07:00

Image via Wikipedia

When the media refused to cover the Ultimate Fighting Championship, the league cultivated its own massive following through grassroots social media rapport. Now the UFC is the fastest growing sport in the world, and its firebrand CEO, Dana White, still spends almost every day reaching out to fans on the Internet.

I had the opportunity to pick White’s mind about how he leveraged social media to beat his competition. Below are several keys to his success.
Social Media Boot Camp

Much of the UFC’s commitment to social media outreach comes from White himself, an avid Twitter (Twitter)-er. In order to bring his organization up to speed, White hired PR firm Digital Royalty to teach the fighters how to properly use social media. He gave the fighters a simple instruction: “I want you to Twitter your asses off,” recalled Amy Martin, Digital Royalty’s founder and CEO. Digital Royalty ran a one-on-one boot camp with the fighters, churning out 200 new media mavens over the course of three days. After the boot camp, fighter education is still an ongoing effort. “We’re constantly doing one-on-ones with them,” Martin said. “They also have my personal email address and mobile phone number.”

In addition to education, Martin helps orchestrate a real-time “behind the scenes” look at the fighters preparing for a match, video blogging their outlook on the fight. A guest fighter live-tweets from the official UFC account during each event. All this gives die-hard fans as much interaction as they can possibly handle. “The volume is pretty intense,” she said.

Martin maintains that the UFC’s openness and willingness to experiment with social media has been the key to their success. Many large sports franchises are still just dipping their toes in the social media ocean, and are missing an opportunity to capture fan enthusiasm as a result.
Raw Honesty

White is known for his unflinching honesty and his confidence to share even embarrassing or shameful moments with his fans. These important traits have become part of the UFC’s social media brand. When one of the UFC’s star fighters breezed through a prizefight with noticeably little effort, for example, White gave this apologetic interview (which has been viewed over one million times).Transparency, outreach, and openness are now more important than ever, as social media allows fans to subvert traditional channels and voice their opinions directly. White is willing to meet them halfway, foregoing false showmanship in order to genuinely connect with fans: “Some fights are going to be the best fights you’ve ever seen, and some are going to suck,” White said. “And I think you’re better off to go out and talk about why the fight sucked and you know, be honest about it. You’re not going to fool anybody.”
The Power of Twitter

Before broadcast media would air the fights, the UFC was vaulted to popularity through direct interaction with fans on fighter enthusiast blogs. Now, in order to scale with the UFC’s global reach, White has a new favorite sounding board: Twitter. “I love Twitter,” said White. At more than one million followers, it’s clear that the love is mutual. White’s unusually strong commitment to @reply’s and real-life meet-ups has cultivated an incredibly responsive audience.

During the run-up to big fight in Montreal, a marketing agent asked White how he quantified Twitter. White responded, “How do you quantify billboards? How do you quantify newspaper adds? You can’t quantify it. But let me show you how [expletive] strong this is.”

White and his dinner companion strolled over to a local gas station at 11:30 p.m. and tweeted his location. About 36 seconds later one fan had shown up, after three minutes White estimated there were about 100 fans at the gas station.

“Twitter is amazing,” he gushed, “you can talk directly to your fans instantly.” A pessimist could chalk up White’s commitment to fan interaction as a crude PR calculation. The more he talks, however, the more it’s likely that White is a textbook case of what happens when someone has an unmitigated passion for their job.

“Why would I not want to talk to somebody who loves what I do just as much as I do,” White said. “Makes no sense to me… I could sit there and hang out and talk with the fans all day.”

3 Tips for Email Newsletters

2010-06-09T00:10:00.000-07:00

Image via CrunchBase

Sending out an email newsletter is a great way to engage your audience. You can connect with your website’s users, while sharing with them your expertise, how beneficial it is to work with your business or how much convenient and efficient your company is.

This is because your newsletter can be anything; insider information on your niche, coupons, discounts and reminders of upcoming sales, opinion pieces, editorials, and Q&A columns, how-to’s for the weekend or guides. Your newsletter can be an extension of your site and a way for you to solidify your brand and boost your business.

Producing a newsletter does take time and real effort – you need to commit a few hours a week to writing or editing your material. Here are a few tips to get you started:
1. Plan Before You Go Public

Before you announce your newsletter or offer an opt-in on your site, make sure you have the time to follow through. At the beginning, a weekly newsletter covering niche news might seem easy to pull off. But what happens when life gets in the way of your deadlines?

Planning ahead is crucial. Organize a calendar; make a list of topics for future newsletters so you’re not caught with nothing to say or no one to write. Make sure you can meet your deadline commitments, because skipping an issue is not an option – definitely not in the beginning when you are building a reputation. This leads us to our second tip, which is:
2. Start Slow

A weekly newsletter is an excellent way to wedge yourself (and your business) into your customers (and potential customers) everyday life. But to get your newsletter to land in inboxes as regularly as the daily paper landing on the doorstep takes a lot of work.

You need to build an audience, and more importantly, you need to build your content!

Starting with a monthly or quarterly newsletter is a good way to make sure you meet the needs of your target audience, find the right voice, provide enough of the right information to be useful, and the right balance of promotion to encourage sales, not irritation.

You’ll have time to build your list and you can get used to sending out a newsletter, without fear of deadlines. Four weeks will fly by when you’ve got to put together content, coupons or guest columns, so make sure you follow step 1.
3. Get Help

No, we’re not talking about a therapist or an assistant (but both can be useful), we mean use an autoresponder service.

An autoresponder service is a computer program that automates emails. It’s the best way to prepare and send newsletter. You can use the service to maintain your email list, send an immediate email whenever someone signs up for your newsletter (which is a best practice) and you can, of course, prep your message and design your newsletter before sending it out through the service.

There are three autoresponders services we recommend: AWeber, iContact and ConstantContact. The prices range between the three; and you can sign up for different service offers depending on your newsletter needs. The monthly fees are low, and definitely worth the cost. Trying to manage an email list and send a newsletter without an autoresponder can take so much time and effort that it will divert your attention from your website and its needs, which can hurt your business.
Lastly,

Before you sign up for an autoresponder service, do a little Internet legwork. See if your competition offers a newsletter, and if they do, sign up for it. See what the authority sites in your niche offer. Take a look at your schedule as think long and hard about what you can move around to fit in creating a newsletter. Think about what you’d like your newsletter to look like and what it would include. We’ll be back with more tips on newsletters to help you create, produce and publish.

Twitter is Looking To Hire A Government Liaison In Washington D.C.

2010-06-08T02:57:00.000-07:00

Image via CrunchBase

According to a job post today, Twitter is looking for a government liaison to serve as a point person for the company in Washington D.C. The staff member will be the first D.C.-based employee for Twitter.

The post reads:

You’ll be our first D.C. -based employee and the closest point of contact with a variety of important people and organizations looking to get the most out of Twitter on both strategic and highly tactical levels. You’ll help Twitter understand what we can do to better serve candidates and policymakers across party and geographical lines. You’ll support policymakers use of Twitter to help them communicate and interact with their constituents and the world. You’ll work with nearly every group at the company and at every level to pursue your vision for how Twitter ought to be. You’ll help set the culture and approach of a fledgling public policy department and be an important part of our very small company.

It looks like the staffer will help government employees and politicians use Twitter in their everyday activities and also serve as a public policy liaison for the company. The employee will also serve as an advocate for government and political users within Twitter and courage more political engagement among citizens on the microblogging network.

It’s not surprising that Twitter would want a presence in the Beltway. As more politicians flock to the microblogging network to engage with citizens, it makes sense for the company to have an evangelist to help aid this process. And it doesn’t hurt to have a representative serving Twitter’s policy interests in the area as well.

10 Things That Broke People Usually Do (That Keeps Them Broke)

2010-06-08T02:43:00.000-07:00

Image via Wikipedia

We’ve all got friends in our lives that are nice people, but they always seem to be broke. They don’t have a dime to their name, and if you ask them why, they don’t have a clue. It never seems that they can figure out why they’re short on cash.

Today I want to look at a few reasons why broke people are broke, and why they’ll most likely continue that way (unless they make some major changes).
10 Reasons Why You’re Broke

Here are a few of the reasons why people find themselves without money.

* Their problems are never their fault: Broke people don’t like to take responsibility for their problems, they will often shift blame and say it’s someone else’s fault. They blame their friends, family and the government. They believe the old saying, “the little guy just can’t get ahead“.
* What’s a budget?: A lot of people who are broke find themselves that way because they have no idea where there money is going. They’ve never done a budget. Their money quickly disappears every month into an endless black hole of large and small expenses.
* They don’t plan for the future. Today is all that matters: Money doesn’t stick around for future uses because it is all spent today. Saving and planning for the future are foreign concepts.
* Money gets spent on things that aren’t needed: We’ve all got those friends who just can’t help themselves – they already have a couch, but they find a design they like better and buy it – even though they can’t afford it. They have a phone, but decide to buy the newest greatest Iphone.
* Keeping up with the neighbors: Far too often people will buy a house in a neighborhood they can’t afford, and then they end up spending even more money on the other lifestyle accessories to keep up with the Joneses. They end up buying a nicer car, a boat, expensive landscaping, etc. One bad spending decision begets another.
* You paid what?: Broke people far too often don’t know how to find a good deal and even more often don’t negotiate to get a better deal. Why pay more than you have to?
* Credit is their best friend: They don’t practice delayed gratification, and they would never save for something they want. Just put it on the credit card until it’s maxed! We’ll figure out how to pay it some other time!
* They rely on others to get them out of trouble : We’ve probably all know someone who always ends up going to their parents, family or friends to help them pay for one of their debts. They get in debt up to their ears, and then when they can’t pay for it, it’s back to mommy and daddy’s house to beg for money.
* Why budget for the future when I can have fun today: They don’t like to plan ahead for tomorrow because it seems so far away. Instead, let’s eat drink and be merry today!
* They are all about appearances: Broke people often are broke because they would rather have others think they are doing well, or are wealthy, than actually do the hard work of actually finding a way to be wealthy. The result? They spend a bunch of money on things they don’t need in order to appear like they’ve got power and influence.

Obviously this list of things that broke people do isn’t exhaustive, but it is more of a way to get people thinking about how and why they’re making the decisions about their money that they are. If you can catch nip some of these behaviors in the bud, you’ll be much better off for it.

Have you ever engaged in any of these behaviors? Do you have a broke friend or family member that just can’t seem to get out of a hole? Tell us about it in the comments!

Dealing with bad customers

2010-06-07T11:10:00.000-07:00

Image by DavidErickson via Flickr

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If your online business involves products or clients, there is strong probability that you will have to deal with bad customers at one point or another. There is a big difference between bad customers and constructive feedback, and you should soon be able to differentiate between the two after you have been running your online business for a little while.

You will be pleased to know that bad customers really are few and far between and it is a sad fact of life that some people will never be happy no matter what lengths you take to keep them satisfied but, on saying that, if you are selling a sub standard product or are offering a shoddy service, then you basically get what you deserve. Sorry for being so blunt but I have come across many instances during my years on the internet where some customers are treated as nothing more than a slight annoyance.

If you are treating your customers in a fair and proper manner and your products are top quality, then the first thing to remember is not to take any rudeness from the odd customer personally. They are probably either just plain rude by nature or are having a really bad day. Sometimes you find that they may be new to internet marketing or in some cases new to computers. They may be having problems downloading your product and are feeling frustrated.

The thing to remember is just to keep calm and answer their questions politely and with understanding. By acting in this way you can soon turn a situation around and end up with a happy customer who could very well stay a customer for a very long time.

One thing to be aware of is the serial refunder. If you offer a guarantee, you will find that these people have got no intention of paying for the product, and if it is downloadable they know only to well that they can keep the product and not pay for it. There are various ways to combat this which I won’t go into here but if you are offering a no questions asked a guarantee then you most definitely have to issue a refund with a smile on your face.

If you are offering a service or online help and you are faced with a bad customer who is with you for the long term, you really have to ask yourself if it is worth keeping them as a customer. If your dealings with them is putting a dampener on your day and affecting other aspects of your business or even your family life then to be honest, it just isn’t worth keeping them.

Give them a refund and let them go. Let their negativity go elsewhere and get yourself back to your normal positive self. It is important that you realise that having someone like this on board is just not worth the hassle.

16 Lessons on Using Social Media for Business

2010-06-07T10:58:00.000-07:00

Image via Wikipedia

It’s been over 6 months now since I started this blog with the aim of sharing a few ideas, developing my own book content and learning about the social web. As a result, I’ve learnt a few things along the way that I wanted to share with you so that you can apply them to your business if you are using social media or are thinking about using social media in your business.

Here are the 16 lessons that I’ve learnt so far:

1. Define your goals to keep you on track – this all has to have a purpose otherwise how will you know what you are doing, where you are going, what you are creating and how you are getting on.
2. We can be everywhere – the internet opens up potential markets across the globe and, so, thinking globally will help you expand your reach. Don’t be limited by geography.
3. The internet has a long memory and is an echo chamber – Be careful what you say and how you act as the internet has a long memory as everything gets archived
4. It doesn’t have to be expensive – most of the social tools on the internet, at their basic level, are free.
5. Don’t try and be everywhere – reflecting on lesson 2 can mean that we get over-stretched. So, pick what fits and works for you.
6. Be helpful and contribute to others – be social, comment and help. If you write a blog…offer to write (guest post) for someone else
7. SEO is important but great content is more important – this is a bit of an art/science that I have not mastered. It is important but don’t spend too much time crafting SEO-optimised content. Concentrate on generating good content first and foremost
8. This use up a lot of time – limit yourself to a set amount of time/activity to make sure that it doesn’t take over your time.
9. Get to know and learn from the players in your niche – this is all about leverage. If you can get to know them that’s great and they can be a great help. But, realize they are busy people too and always be respectful. Reading and commenting on their stuff is a great start.
10. Spamming your readers = no traffic – be social and act social. You wouldn’t/don’t sell to your friends, do you?
11. Not everyone is going to like you – there is so much truth in the variation of the old saying ‘You can please all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot please all the people all the time’
12. Do a little often – social media takes commitment and so doing a little often is a better way of getting results rather than showing up on an infrequent basis. Remember: if you only show up some of the time what does that say to your readers or followers
13. Find the niche forums for your interest or business – forums are places where people with niche interests gather. Find one that applies to you and get involved answering and posting questions.
14. It takes time, persistence, consistency and commitment to generate results - relationships, trust and credibility are not built overnight so be patient. However, don’t forget to measure your progress to see how you are doing. If not on track then do something about it.
15. Anyone can do it, but NOT everyone ‘does’ it - It will make sense for many businesses to have a social media presence and many businesses are talking about it. However, there is a lot of talk and your competitive advantage may come from actually doing something rather than just talking about it. Only, if it makes sense for your business.
16. Pick and keep refining your niche – Your niche will not always be what you think it is so keep think about your target market and refine your content accordingly. Alternatively, listen to your readers/customers and let them tell you what your niche is or is becoming.

7 BIG Adwords Mistakes You Should Avoid

2010-06-07T10:38:00.000-07:00

Image via CrunchBase

7 Big Mistakes You Might Make When Setting Up Adwords

"Googling” things has become the default first step in our quest to find answers to any questions we have.

Because those questions include things like “where do I find this product?” and “who can help me fix this?” businesses have recognized that paid search is a great way to connect to potential customers.

Also, paid search allows businesses to easily monitor how effective their Internet marketing spend is.

Noting these advantages many businesses have created Adwords accounts, but due to some common mistakes, they may be unknowingly reducing the effectiveness of their online campaigns.

Here are 7 BIG Mistakes that should be addressed in order to maximize the return from your Adwords account…

1. Leaving the Content Network On

Content targeting, which is active by default, is what Google uses to match the keywords in your adgroups to thousands of publishers within the Google network, known as Adsense.

Instead of relying only on relevant queries in Google to return your ad, it places your ads on sites within the network that contain content it sees as relevant to your keywords.

For example, if you are a snack food company and are targeting “mixed nuts” in Adwords, Google may place your ad next to sites with recipes that require nuts and articles that explain the “health benefits of nuts” which are somewhat relevant, but it may also place your ad on sites with articles about “peanut allergies” which is not relevant at all.

Leaving this feature on is an easy way to spend a lot of money fast without reaching qualified customers. The simplest way to manage the content network is to turn it off.

If you choose to use content targeting it is very important that you create separate campaigns for just the content network so you can adjust the budget (discussed more below). You should also start out with a smaller budget and test the effectiveness before allocating more money to this method.

2. Not Implementing a Geo-targeting Strategy

If you do not create location-specific campaigns, then your ads will be served at the national level by default, and you may lose money from users who click your ads that live outside of your reach.

If you are a local plumbing company based in the Chicagoland area, it would make sense to allocate your budget to people searching for plumbers in that region instead of people all over the country. Needless to say, a Californian with a leaky faucet is not going to be the ideal customer for a Chicago plumbing company.

3. Not Tracking Conversions

The only way to determine if your paid search efforts are successful or not is if you are tracking conversions or the action you want the customer to take on your Web site. This may be obvious, but we see businesses make this mistake more often than one would think. Conversions can be anything from a purchase to a form submission, and you are not limited to tracking just one.

If you are a service company that does not sell anything online, then you want your ads to direct the user to a landing page with a form that they can submit with all of their information. If conversion tracking is setup properly, you will know exactly which keyword led to the form submission instead of just knowing how many total forms were submitted.

Knowing this information then allows you to go back to your campaigns and adjust budgets and bids according to which campaigns and keywords are bringing you the most conversions for the lowest cost.

NOTE: Before going onto Big Mistake #4, it might help to discuss how keywords, ad groups, and campaigns are organized within Adwords.

If you look at the tree structure below, you will see there are multiple keywords within each ad group, and multiple ad groups within each campaign. You can have as little as 1 or as many as 1000 ad groups within each campaign.

You want to group similar keywords together within ad groups to create targeted ads, and you want to group related ad groups within campaigns to allow for proper budget adjustment.

Looking at the example structure below: if you realize that a lot more of the people that are searching for “London homes” are converting compared to the other cities, then you can create a separate campaign for London in addition to the “UK Cities” campaign and add more budget to the London one.

4. Not Having Enough Campaigns

A very common mistake that we see is that all of the ad groups in the account are confined to just one or two campaigns. This is a problem because budget is adjusted at the campaign level. If everything is in one campaign and some ad groups are outperforming others, then there is no way to put more money towards the groups that are converting more without also funding the poorly performing ad groups.

If we see keywords that are performing well, we may even create a campaign just for the one keyword so we can garner the maximum amount of conversions possible from that word.

5. Not Having Enough Ad Groups

Organizing similar keywords into multiple ad groups gives you a better opportunity to have higher click through rates (CTRs) and quality scores.

The quality score is a rating from Google that ranges from 1 (not relevant) to 10 (highly relevant), and the main reason you want that score to be high is that it will enable you to bid lower for higher placements.

If your ad groups have too many keywords that are unrelated, then Google will not know which words it should base its relevancy rating upon and your CTR will most likely be lower leading to a low quality score. Generally if your quality scores are around 7 or higher you are in good shape.

6. Not Having Multiple Ads

It is best practice to have two or three ads per ad group to allow for A-B testing and optimization. If you only have one ad you are missing out on the opportunity to test different messaging, and to serve more relevant ads based on search queries.

For example: There is a sporting goods store and they have a 50% off sale on baseball bats, and are also offering free shipping on all of their products. If someone searches for “discount baseball bat” they know to serve a text ad that has copy about their “50% off discount on bats” whereas they may want to place a text ad with “free shipping on all bats” for the search query “baseball bats with free shipping.” If they find that one of the two ads is receiving more clicks and conversions, then they may want to modify the other ad to try and increase its effectiveness as well.

7. Using Only Broad Match Type for Keywords

When you are setting up the keywords in Adwords, you can choose between three different match types: broad, exact, and phrase. Google uses the match type to determine when to serve your ad.

Broad matches will give you the most placements because your ad will be served any time your key word(s) appear in a search query in any order. Exact match will serve your ads only when the query matches your keyword, and Phrase match looks for your keywords in the exact order they appear within search queries even if the queries have other words in them.

In most cases you can safely avoid the broad match type altogether, but it should never be the only match type you are using. If someone is searching for “red laces for shoes” and you have “red shoe” as your keyword using broad match type, you will serve an impression and potentially pay for a click if the unqualified user decides to browse your site at that point. It is very unlikely that the click from that user will lead to a sale.

If you do elect to use broad match type for some of your keywords, then you must use negative keywords (like “laces” going back to the example above) to prevent your ad from being served to unqualified users.

Addressing these seven big Adwords mistakes will enable you to
run an effective paid search campaign for your business.

It is important to remember that you must continually optimize your campaigns, ad groups, text ads, and keywords based on your return on ad spend (ROAS) and conversion goals.

5 Plugins to Boost Contact With Your Readers and Users

2010-06-07T10:23:00.000-07:00

Image via CrunchBase

A blogger or admin who takes the time to answer visitor questions, engage commenters or interact with readers always gets return visitors.

If visitor loyalty is important to your blog, you should do all you can to solve their problems, answer questions, respond to comments and messages – and even let them call you from your website.

Here are a few great Wordpress plugins that give you various ways to get in touch with your readers, streamline the communication process and answer some questions if need be.
1. FAQ Builder

FAQ Builder is a Wordpress plugin that lets you create a FAQ (frequently asked questions) page for your users.

FAQ Builder

Once you install the plugin, you can add it on any page. You can use the simple plugin interface to add questions, answer user generated questions, and organize your FAQs for ease of access. You can also add a search field for users to search through your FAQs.
Google Chat Badge

Google’s chat badge is a wonderful tool that lets you talk to your site’s visitors using the familiar Gtalk.

google-talk-badge

If you have a Gtalk account, you can create a custom code and paste it into your blog. This will create a chat window for your visitors, and it will show if you are available for chat. Using this system, you users can talk to you from your website.
Click2call Plugin

You can use the click2call plugin to allow users to call you directly from your website. You can modify the code to customize the design of the interface.

click2call

You can also download the optional Kermit app to setup a voicemail system that sends you an email transcription of your voicemails. Currently, you need a US or UK number to use this plugin.
Support Tickets

Support tickets are important if you are running a major website with an active help and support forum.

support ticket

They let you track visitor support queries and respond to them in an organized and efficient manner. Support Tickets is a Multilanguage enabled plugin that lets you create support tickets for your visitors. It uses the Contact Form 7 plugin to let you answer your users’ technical questions.
Wordpress-to-Lead

Wordpress-to-Lead is for bloggers or businesses that want to use the functionality of the Salesforce CRM and adapt it to their WP blog. It converts emailed contact info from your WP contact form into CRM entries that you can manage easily.

salesforce-wordpress

The plugin adds its own contact form for this purpose. Using the form will automatically convert emailed user data to CRM entries for you, and you will not have to go through the cumbersome stages of copy pasting this data into your Salesforce CRM.

5 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Blog with LinkedIn

2010-06-07T02:14:00.000-07:00

Image via CrunchBase

I was introduced to LinkedIn in August of 2009. I’ve been using it almost obsessively since then and it’s been my third highest source of traffic for my blog since I started using it.

Why Linkedin?

LinkedIn is a smaller version of Facebook specifically for business owners and for people in career transition. LinkedIn currently has over 65,000,000 professionals, but here’s what’s really interesting.

According to Quantcast, the average household income for over 38% of Linkedin Users is over $100k per year. That means that a big chunk of LinkedIn Users have money to spend. That’s great news for your online business.

5 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Blog with LinkedIn from Hani Mourra on Vimeo.

If you’re new to LinkedIn, it’s pretty easy to get up and going. Here are 5 ways you can take to start using Linkedin and Drive Traffic to Your Blog:

Method #1: Create Your Profile

This should be your top priority. You want to make your profile as compelling as possible so that people want to click on your links and find out more about you.

There are two specific places where you can add links to your blog inside your LinkedIn Profile.

The first spot is under “Websites.” This is a place where you can add live links to your blog. When creating these links, you want to make sure that you have a compelling call to action that gets people to go to your blog. As an example, instead of using the default setting of “My Blog,” I’ve used “Coaches: Get Clients” Much more compelling and it shows because I get a lot of click-throughs from my profile.

See the video below for a more detailed description on how to do this.

The second spot to add a link is under your Profile Summary. Here the links are not clickable, but it’s still an opportunity to add links to your Newsletter and squeeze pages. I’ve had a lot of people send me messages on LinkedIn to thank me for the resources under my summary. This is a good place to add additional links so that your connections can find out more about you.

Method #2: Post An Update

This is similar to posting an update on Facebook. When you post an update on LinkedIn every one of your connections will see it on their profile. I try to post a new update about 2 times per week to get a flood of new people coming to my blog.

When posting an update your focus should always be on adding value. Once you’ve got the value the next most important step is to use language in your update that is compelling. That way your connections will want to click through.

Method #3: Add the WordPress Application

This is a great application to use on LinkedIn. What happens is that your latest blog posts will automatically be added to your LinkedIn profile. That way users can see your latest content and posts so they can click through if they want to learn more.

Method #4: Get More Eye Balls on Your Profile

There are a few ways to do this. The first way is to join LinkedIn Groups. This is similar to online forums. Once you join a group, you want to participate in the Group Discussions. Each time you comment in a group, a link to your profile pops up so that other users can click back to your profile and check you out. Participating in groups is a great way to network and get more eyeballs on your profile.

The second way to get more eyeballs on your profile is to answer questions on LinkedIn. There is a section on LinkedIn called Answers. One of the best ways to get more eye balls on your profile and a steady stream of traffic to your blog is by answering other peoples questions.

The trick to getting noticed is to not only provide value, but to also aim to be in the top spot. The more often you answer questions in the top spot, the more likely users will see your name and check out your profile.

Method #5. Start Your Own Group

This is the most recent way I’ve used LinkedIn. What’s great about having your own group is that you can post a link to your blog right in the group profile. That means everyone in the group can click through to your blog to check you out.

That’s the first way to get traffic to your blog with groups. The second way is a lot more exciting. A great feature with LinkedIn Groups is that you can personally email all the members in the group. LinkedIn allows you to broadcast up to one message per week to your members.

And here’s the magic in this method. When you broadcast a message using Groups, your message is received by your members twice: once to their regular email account and a second time to their LinkedIn Inbox.

This is not only a great way to get more traffic to your blog, but you can message members anytime you have a free offering or training that you want your members to know about. Watch the video below to see how you can setup your first Group on LinkedIn.

These are just a few ways to drive traffic to your blog with LinkedIn, but there are many others? Are you using LinkedIn? How has it helped your blog?

How Social Media is Changing CRM

2010-06-07T02:06:00.000-07:00

Image via CrunchBase

There’s no getting around it, social media is changing CRM in big ways. Social media allows consumers to spread their thoughts about different companies, their products, and their customer experiences. Whether it’s a blog, a tweet, or a message on a FaceBook wall, consumers are making their voices heard – louder and faster than ever before.

Consumers are no more vocal than they were a decade ago, but their reach goes out much farther with the dozens of social networks available to them. So, business owners must listen. Gone are the days of only focus groups, sales data, and surveys. Sure, those things are still integral parts of successful CRM, but so is social media. It’s opened up a whole new dialogue for CRM professionals.

Social media has thrust companies’ focus back onto pure customer relations. It allows consumers to convey their thoughts and feelings immediately and without any filtering. Smart business owners are using these expressions to swiftly deal with unhappy customers, make improvements to their products and services, and connect with their audience.

Today, businesses are actually listening to their customers with high regard and attention. It is unavoidable as they are constantly inundated with messages from various social networks. Social media has allowed consumer thoughts to go viral while allowing businesses to respond more efficiently.

Apple Expected to Announce Apple iPhone HD Monday

2010-06-06T02:22:00.000-07:00

Image via CrunchBase

Steve Jobs is expected to confirm the new Apple iPhone Monday at the WWDC.

After a series of leaked prototypes, it’s almost a given that Apple Inc. will unveil a new version of the iPhone, possibly named the ”iPhone HD” during its annual software developers conference that opens Monday in San Francisco.

The revelation of a splashy new iPhone would clear up one of the highest-profile Apple mysteries of the year — second to the existence, confirmed in January, of the iPad. Yet it would leave another unknown simmering at Apple, one with far-reaching implications for how we listen to music.

First, let’s talk iPhone.

Apple won’t comment on its plans, but it has used this conference to launch the last two generations of its smart phone. In April, Gizmodo, a tech blog, paid $5,000 to obtain a working iPhone prototype that was lost by an Apple engineer in a Silicon Valley bar. Apple didn’t say the prototype represented the next model of the iPhone, but if the descriptions posted online are accurate, the device will be getting a clearer display, longer battery life and a front-facing camera that could be used for videoconferencing. It’s also likely to have the updated iPhone software Apple previewed in April that makes it easier for users to run more than one program at a time.

In another sign Apple is readying a new model, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. in late May halved the price of one kind of the iPhone 3GS, the model that debuted last year, to $97. And as of Monday, AT&T Inc., the sole carrier — at least for now — of the iPhone in the U.S., will stop letting new customers use an unlimited amount of wireless data for a flat fee. Instead, in an attempt to reduce iPhone-driven congestion on its network, AT&T will offer plans that will cost the biggest users of data more money.

It may not make an appearance during CEO Steve Jobs’ presentation Monday, but Apple is also likely working on a service that could change the way many of us think about buying and listening to music.

The success of the iPod and the iTunes store has made Apple the world’s largest music retailer, but now there’s another revolution stirring in the digital song business. As Apple’s iPhone and other smart phones became more popular, several new services started sending music over the Internet straight to the devices, letting users skip the step of plugging in and transferring songs from a computer as iTunes still requires. Such services, including Rhapsody and Spotify, which operates in Europe, give people access to just about every song imaginable for a monthly fee.

Forrester Research analyst Sonal Gandhi said these streaming services are still too small to lure Apple into directly competing. But Apple does need to keep an eye on Google Inc., which is building music-streaming technology into its increasingly popular Android phones. Google acquired a company called Simplify Media this year and said in May it plans to build a desktop program that can beam people’s iTunes libraries over the Internet to Android phones.

Apple may be cooking up something similar. In late 2009, Apple bought Lala.com, which gave customers a way to listen to songs online, anywhere, if they had already purchased and stored the tracks on their own computer. Lala users could add new songs to their mix, paying 10 cents per song for an unlimited number of plays online or more if they also wanted to download the song to a device. Lala had built an iPhone application, but Apple bought the company before the app was made available to consumers.

Apple shuttered Lala’s service in May, and technology analysts believe that was a temporary step before Apple transforms the service into a way for iTunes shoppers to access music from the Web, the iPhone and other Apple devices.

Jobs was asked Tuesday at The Wall Street Journal’s “D: All Things Digital” conference about Apple’s plans for over-the-Internet access to music and other data, but he didn’t show his hand. “There’s a lot of things we’re working on,” he said.

Even if the technology is ready, letting people stream music online — even music they have already paid for — requires new agreements between Apple and recording companies. Apple and the recording labels had general talks about possible plans for Lala several months ago, but there haven’t been substantive talks since then, according to executives in the music industry.

How to Make Twitter More Useful for Your Business

2010-06-04T22:32:00.000-07:00

Image via CrunchBase

If you’ve been using Twitter, you’ve likely checked out an app or two to make your Twitter experience more robust, or even just a bit easier. TweetDeck, Twitpic and Tweetie are all examples of Twitter apps.

What if I told you there was a magical place that could easily be your one-stop shop for all your Twitter needs? Yes, this place really does exist. It’s called OneForty.com, the Twitter equivalent of the Apple App Store.
Twitter Still Rocks for Businesses

Before I jump in to tell you about all the benefits of OneForty, I want to point out that in recent months two reports have surfaced that show Twitter being the #1 choice of all social sites for professionals.

In a recent Burson-Marsteller study, 65 of the largest 100 international companies have active accounts on Twitter (the second being 54 on Facebook).

In addition, according to the 2010 Social Media Marketing Industry Report from Social Media Examiner, 96% of marketers with years of social media experience are using Twitter (and 91% are using Facebook). That’s pretty impressive considering there are far more people on Facebook than on Twitter. But these studies show that when it comes to business, Twitter is the social tool of choice.
The Ultimate Resource

If you find yourself gravitating toward Twitter as a business tool, OneForty is a site you don’t want to miss. The service catalogs the best extensions and apps for Twitter through a community of users who share and rate each specific tool.

As of this writing, the site lists nearly 3,000 free and paid applications and services that leverage Twitter. Here you can search, rate and buy Twitter services. It’s a social app directory for Twitter that also has a social networking aspect focused on an ecosystem of sharing and supporting others.

When you sign in using your Twitter login, you’re able to create a profile in which all of the apps you currently use will show up for others to see. You also get a list of recommendations based on the type of desktop and phone you use.You have the option to tell people about what you’re doing on Twitter, who you like to follow and where else you can be found online. You’ll be asked such questions as:

* How would you welcome someone who clicked here from your Twitter page?
* Top picks for #FF (Follow Friday) or favorite Twitterers overall? (Use @name to link to them.)
* Got a snappy one-liner about yourself?
* Where else can you find me online? (URLs will auto-link.)
* What are your favorite blog posts or resources about Twitter?

These questions allow you to showcase who you are and what you’re about, possibly leading to new conversations and partnership opportunities. Also, because you have the option to review any of the apps, a community of sharing is active throughout the site.

In addition, on almost every page that features apps, you have the option to share the info via your Twitter feed by clicking on the “Tweet This!” button. When I clicked on the button from the “What’s Hot” page, the message below appeared in my Twitter feed. Now all of my Twitter followers can see what I’ve been up to on OneForty and check out the service for themselves. This tweet allows me to provide a link to a great tool for my followers and allows OneForty to advertise their site (a win/win!).The “Tweet This!” feature, no matter how insignificant it may seem, proves that the company walks the talk. Every aspect of the site encourages social sharing and overall connection via consumer reviews, app suggestions based on preferences and developer spotlights. It’s the real deal.

There are three sections of this site that stand out the most: What’s Hot, Essentials, and Toolkits. All three are worth checking out a little closer.
What’s Hot

This list does just what it says: it lists the top 100 apps that are the most popular right now across all categories.

The list is extremely valuable because it allows you to see what others are using. If you’re new to Twitter, you can model what’s working for others instead of guessing what might work for you. And if you are an experienced Twitter user, this list will allow you to find great apps fast without doing the research and testing yourself.Essentials

This is a collection of must-have apps to get the most out of Twitter. It’s a fantastic list of the best of the best apps for specific categories such as your phone, analytics, desktop solutions, browsing and following. Below is a snapshot of what you might find on the “Essentials” page. Notice how the different categories with app suggestions make searching for what works best for your needs quick and easy.Toolkits

This was a brilliant idea from the folks at OneForty and really speaks to the spirit of social networking and sharing. Toolkits are a way to share your Twitter knowledge and know-how with others. You put together a collection of Twitter apps that works within a specific category you create and then share it with the world.

Some examples of toolkits include a Community Managers Toolkit, a Small Business Owners toolkit, New Media Tools from Real Estate Professionals toolkit, and a Cancer Killing Chemo toolkit. If you need a Twitter app toolkit for your special needs, you’ll likely find it here.

What I find most beneficial here is the caliber of social media celebrities who have created their own toolkits to share, including Brian Solis, Guy Kawasaki, Steve Rubel and David Armano.

By taking a look at their toolkits, you get a glimpse of some of the more up-and-coming apps you might have initially passed over. You also get to see what the pros are using. Priceless, to say the least! Here’s a snapshot of a few apps inside Guy Kawasaki’s “Twitter Indispensable Tools” toolkit. TweetDeck and Tweetie 2 are my favorites. Take a look and see if you’ve used any of these apps as well. If not, I encourage you to test out a few. Guy Kawasaki is a social media expert (and a Twitter guru) so his recommendations are invaluable!
About The Company’s Founder & New Plans

Just a few years ago, Laura Fitton was a struggling presentation consultant who initially used Twitter to build a business network when she moved to a new city.

According to Laura, “I was just my goofy, enthusiastic self, and I used the site to connect with interesting, like-minded people.” She was quickly a huge draw on Twitter as people began to see her as Twitter’s expert marketer and she began to get job offers and major exposure. As they say, the rest is history. She went on to start Pistachio Consulting and became the co-author of Twitter for Dummies.

OneForty.com is currently in an alpha test of an e-commerce platform for one-time app purchases. Now developers will have the opportunity to sell their apps directly from this site.

I encourage you to take some time exploring this extremely useful site because you’re likely to find a handful of tools that you can apply instantly.

While doing research for this article, I stumbled upon a few apps I now can’t live without. One is called Topsy, a search engine powered by Twitter conversations that I use to find the best social media articles. The other I found was Overheard.it, an app purely for fun that gives you a glimpse of all the funny things people overhear on Twitter. It’s pretty entertaining!

Now it’s your turn! What Twitter apps are you using. Share them in the comment box below.

6 Ways to Constantly Produce Quality Blog Content

2010-06-04T22:24:00.000-07:00

Image by Kbedi via Flickr

Are you suffering from blogger’s block? Is it hard to find time to create content for your blog? If so, look no further. This article lists some easy-to-implement tips to help you get over the hump.

But first, there’s a big myth (and it may be your roadblock) that needs attention.
The Myth: I Have No Time to Blog

Every now and then I poll my blog readers and ask about their challenges with blogging. Without fail, most people say that their number-one challenge is that they don’t have time to write on their blog. Frankly, I think that is a false problem because you make time for what’s important.

I suggest reframing the challenge from “I don’t have time to write on my blog” to “I make time to market my business.” In the context of your business, blogging is a marketing tool.

A business blog is one of the best tools you can use for extending your online visibility because it’s the dynamic hub of your business on the web. The content you create can be leveraged in many ways that will work for you 24 hours a day, so making time needs to be a key part of your marketing plan.

I propose you devote a minimum of 30 minutes per day focusing on your blog marketing activities.

It’s not really that much time when you think about it, especially for the return you can get from consistent effort. Yet I know there are other social marketing tasks competing for your attention. Just keep in mind that the content you create on your blog can be syndicated and leveraged on other platforms as well.

So how do you make time? I’ll state the obvious: you’ve got to schedule it. That’s how I advise my clients and it’s how I manage my blogging time. Following are six tips for how you can efficiently tackle your blogging tasks.

#1: Create an Editorial Calendar
There are two steps to creating an editorial calendar. First is to assign your blogging to time slots when you know your creative juices are flowing, when you typically feel inspired and productive. For me, that’s usually in the morning.

To build a body of content that is quickly indexed by the search engines, I suggest writing on your blog two to three times a week at minimum. So block that time off—for example: Monday, Wednesday, Friday from 9:00 to 9:30 am is blogging time. That’s the time you spend writing.

Need some inspiration? Check out the article on 13 Ideas to Inspire Your Blog Content. Maybe once a week, spend an additional 15 minutes and write a longer, more detailed blog post.

Next, two days a week, spend 30 minutes reading other blogs in your industry and leaving comments where appropriate when you have something of value to add. Not only does that help give you more visibility and more exposure, it also can drive traffic back to your own blog. It positions you as being active and brings you to the attention of other people who you might not have known before.
#2: Plug in the Types of Posts and Topics You’re Going to Write About

This will make your blogging time more efficient because you don’t have to spend precious time trying to figure out what to write every time you’re scheduled to write.

Make a list of categories that are of interest to your audience. Take a look at your categories and make a list of 5 to 10 subtopics that relate to each category.

If you have 10 primary categories and 5 subtopics for each category, you have 50 blog posts at your fingertips. You can add another layer to your planning by assigning each topic to a style of post:

* How-to
* Top 10 List
* Opinion
* Case Study
* Q&A
* Interview

Finally, assign each subtopic idea to a date on your editorial calendar and you’ve got four months of blog post ideas so you’re not facing a blank page. Of course this system serves only as a guide. There’s nothing stopping you from being spontaneous when a current event or hot topic in your business must be addressed with a blog post.

#3: Keep a Running List of Blog Topics
The more you blog, the more ideas you get. Everything you do, every conversation you have, every book, article or blog you read, becomes fodder for your own blog posts.

I have a long list of ideas and links that I find and want to share. Most of them will never become blog posts, but if I’m stuck or uninspired, I’ve got my list to prompt me.
#4: Write Several Blog Posts at One Time

Many bloggers use this time management strategy. Maybe you really do only have one hour a week to focus on your blog. If that’s the case, grab your laptop, head to your favorite coffee house and pump out a series of blog posts.

Queue articles up to publish over the course of a week or two. All blogging software I’m aware of has the option to schedule your blog posts.
#5: Find Guest Bloggers to Help You Out With Content

Occasionally if you’re pressed for time, find someone to help. Depending on the purpose and goals of your blog, a great feature to add is the voice of others in your industry. Perhaps once a month you showcase the ideas of other members of your team, your vendors, your colleagues and thought leaders in your industry.

If you’re a solo blogger, a great service out there for finding guest bloggers is Blogger LinkUp. Submit a request of what you’re looking for, and people who write on that topic can contact you and provide blog content for you. You can indicate whether you want original material or will accept content that has been previously published.
#6: Interview Experts

Finally, another great way of creating content quickly is doing interviews. This could be a weekly or monthly feature that you plug into your editorial calendar.

Identify 12 to 20 industry leaders who’ve written books on your subject. Prepare a written interview with five to seven questions and invite them to respond, then post the interview on your blog. Not all of them are going to take the time to respond, but some will.

Tell them what’s in it for them… Exposure to your audience and links back to their blog, website or book. I don’t know of any authors who don’t want more readers and more visibility for their book! What’s in it for you? Content you don’t have to create that positions you as a credible expert and trusted filter of the best information for your readers.

Don’t forget to plug the interview posts into your calendar – either weekly or monthly depending on the posting schedule you’ve created.

This is a sample model that may or may not work for your business and schedule. You need to develop a schedule that works for you so you can maintain an active blog.

Posting two to three times per week keeps your blog fresh and relevant. Investing a couple of hours a week on creating content that works for you 24/7 will pay off in more traffic, more leads and more opportunities for your business.

These are a few ways to save time and be more efficient with your blogging time. I know there are many more and would love to hear how you manage your blogging time.

What’s your top tip for managing your blog writing so it doesn’t suck up too much of your time? Share your comments in the box below.

Find Jobs Through Your Facebook Friends on Simply Hired

2010-06-04T02:25:00.000-07:00

Image via CrunchBase

Job search engine Simply Hired has integrated with Facebook to help job seekers discover new, more relevant positions via their social network.

Users who log in to Simply Hired with their Facebook accounts can now search for jobs at their friends’ companies and send private messages to inquire about openings on the site.

SimplyHired also pulls profile data about current and previous work titles, location and interests (including companies users “Like”) to make more personalized job recommendations.

These features are currently available to residents in the U.S., UK, Australia (Australia), Canada and India.

“Simply Hired is showing what’s possible when you make it easy to find jobs through friends,” said Ethan Beard, director of the Facebook Developer Network, in a blog post. “Personal relationships and professional networking have always been the best ways to find a new job. By integrating with Facebook, Simply Hired is bringing this to life online and helping users tap into their social connections to personalize the job search process,” he explained.

The integration helps Simply Hired move a step closer to the services provided by LinkedIn (LinkedIn), which helps users organize and leverage their professional networks to make connections and obtain referrals while job hunting, among other things.

In its current state, Facebook is not optimally designed for professional networking; the site does not offer a job board nor does its search engine help users easily identify individuals based on workplace. However, Facebook has a great deal of valuable data about users’ connections, data that SimplyHired can effectively leverage to help users find relevant jobs and obtain referrals for those jobs.

What do you think of the integration? Can Simply Hired use Facebook data to effectively replicate some of the functionality of LinkedIn? What’s your preferred method or site for finding jobs?

10 Surefire Ways to Land More Customers

2010-06-04T01:58:00.000-07:00

Image via Wikipedia

So many people all around the world have great ideas, products and services. And yet some businesses do well, and some fail.

What separates the businesses that starve from the businesses who feast?

For the answer, we turn to another way people have been setting their feast table for hundreds of years: fishing.

Landing a fish, just like landing a customer, requires strategy and know-how if you’re going to come home successful.

Here are my top 10 ways to land the catch of the day.

1. Know what you’re after

In fishing, you always use the best bait possible for the particular type of fish you’re after.

So many times clients come to me and say, “I don’t have a target market”. They’re always wrong.

At a minimum, you should understand:

* The problems your customers have
* Their buying habits
* Their potential objections to your product
* Where they go to find information
* What influences them (their heroes and idols, TV shows they watch, websites they enjoy, magazines they read, etc.)
* What their core demographics and psychographics are

Even if your product “appeals to everyone,” typically 20% of your audience will generate 80% of your revenue. Your job is to figure out who those 20% are, so you can find the kind of bait that appeals most to those customers.

Bait that works for trout won’t necessarily let you land a great white shark.
2. Know where to fish for your customers

Determining the right fishing location can be the difference between a successful fishing trip and going hungry.

Knowing the places where your customers hang out online gives you a much greater chance for marketing success. Figure out which sites your customers frequent and you’ll have a much better chance of reeling one in. Try seeking out:

* Blogs they read
* Forums they participate in
* Social networking sites and other membership groups
* Entertainment or other non-work related sites

You don’t want to use a top water lure if the fish you want are feeding on the bottom.
3. Be aware of your competition

All fishermen guard their secrets closely, but newcomers can still pick up plenty of tricks by watching what their competition does.

I’m not saying it’s smart to copy your competitor exactly. “Me-too” marketing doesn’t work.

But learn from them and get a feeling for the overall marketplace you’re in. Incorporate those insights into your own marketing and content strategy.

By analyzing your competitors you can also figure out how you can position your brand to stand out from the crowd.
4. Use good bait

When you’re hoping to catch a fish standing side by side with a row of other fishermen, you have to make sure your bait is the most appealing fish food dangling the water. Otherwise, that fish is liable to go for one of your neighbor’s hooks instead.

Consumers have lots of options and offers dangling in front of them in any marketplace. You’ve got to have some pretty juicy bait to stand out from that crowd.

So what makes good customer bait?

* Magnetic headlines
* Compelling images
* Content that’s valuable in its own right
* An attractive niche that makes your customer feel “this is for people like me”
* Easy-to-swallow landing pages

5. Setting the hook

Just because a fish bites doesn’t mean you can reel it in. Many a marketer has a woeful tale about the big one that got away.

Once a customer is interested and bites by clicking through to your sales page, you have to set the hook by making an offer that’s so great it’s practically unfair.
6. Forget catch and release

Remember, it’s a lot easier and more profitable to re-sell an existing customer than acquire a new one.

So if you land a big fish, keep it! Don’t throw it back for someone else to catch.

Re-marketing, high-quality affiliate offers, and up-sells are great for keeping the customers that you currently have, instead of letting them drift back into the stream for some other savvy marketer to reel in.
7. Test the waters

Fishermen often track different variables, like what time of day they went fishing or what bait they used. They measure their results over time to figure out the smartest way to get certain fish.

Similarly, in marketing it’s always wise to test various aspects of your marketing campaign. Measure your results to see what works best, and track your results over time.

Try different images, headlines, or layouts to see which one maximizes time spent on your site, lowers bounce rate, and produces the best ROI.
8. Don’t get discouraged

Some days the fish just aren’t biting.

Sometimes you are not going to be as successful as you’d like, but it’s a process. Continue to educate yourself about business and marketing, keep analyzing your competitors, keep talking to your customers and refining your message.

Keep going and don’t get discouraged. Tomorrow’s the day you’ll get the big one.
9. Partner up to get a bigger catch

Fishing with a buddy helps you to both cover more water and come home with a bigger catch than usual.

If you’re hoping to land more customers than you’ve ever reeled in on your own, find a partner. By knowing your own skill set, you’ll be able to effectively select partners that complement your skills. This strategy can also help you get bigger customers than you could have handled on your own.
10. Enjoy the trip

It’s definitely a lot more fun to catch the big one than to see it get away, but no matter what happens, remember to enjoy yourself.

Entrepreneurship is a lot like fishing. Even when it’s not going as well as we’d like, it’s still a privilege to be able to spend our days doing it.

Twitter Testing New “You Both Follow” Feature

2010-06-03T01:09:00.000-07:00

Image via CrunchBase

Twitter is apparently testing a new feature that helps you figure out how you know — or if you want to follow — a given account.

If you catch a glimpse of this feature in the wild, you’ll see a slim strip of avatars on a user’s profile right above the grid of people that user follows. The headline above this reads, “You both follow.”

You can also choose to click the link below this avatar-strip snapshot to see all the people you and the other Twitter user both follow. We’re thinking this will make Twitter a lot more interesting for stalker-types, as well.

Overall, this new feature is a quick reference tool that shows deeper connections in the social media grid, and it’s a simple addition that makes Twitter seem less like a one-way communication tool and more like a robust, legitimate social network. Also, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to deduce that this feature is ever so similar to Facebook’s featuring mutual friends when you visit the profile of one of your current Facebook friends. But we won’t be so petty as to accuse Twitter of stealing the feature; we might, however, say that the mutual friends snapshot is sufficient weregild for Twitter features that Facebook has appropriated over the years.

Will this feature, if and when it’s rolled out to all users, make it easier for you to keep track of who’s who — and who you might actually know in some meaningful context — on Twitter?

IRS wants a cut of online sales on eBay, Craigslist

2010-06-03T00:58:00.000-07:00

Image via CrunchBase

Many people think of online auction sites, such as eBay and Craigslist, as virtual garage sales -- a convenient way to clean out cluttered closets and attics stuffed with old clothes, books and knickknacks inherited from Aunt Gladys.

But if you're a frequent or big-time seller, the government might consider your proceeds to be income and could come after you for taxes.

Andrea Fabiana Orellana learned that lesson the hard way. The Internal Revenue Service claimed Orellana hadn't reported more than $41,000 of income from about 1,800 eBay sales of designer clothes, shoes and other items during 2004 and 2005 and said she owed nearly $15,000 in taxes and penalties. Orellana appealed to the U.S. Tax Court and lost. The court said she didn't provide adequate documentation of her costs and expenses to offset the income.

Orellana said she didn't consider herself to be in "business" and thus didn't think she had to keep records, according to the court decision last month. She said she originally bought the auctioned items herself or received them as gifts. "Unless there was some really bizarre reason why I kept a receipt, there were no receipts," Orellana testified.

Special trial Judge John F. Dean noted she was working for the IRS at the time. "With this background, she has a wider range of knowledge of tax issues than do members of the general public," he said.

Despite the circumstances, hers is a timely tale. As online commerce grows, it is drawing increased attention from tax collectors. Beginning next year, a new law "requires the gross amount of payment card and third-party network transactions to be reported annually to participating merchants and the IRS," according to an IRS summary. For their 2011 tax returns, "taxpayers who annually sell more than $20,000 worth of goods and have more than 200 electronic transactions" will receive a new IRS form, known as 1099-K, reporting the proceeds, said a spokesman for H&R Block, the nation's largest tax preparation company.
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Those tax issues shouldn't be a concern for people who sell just a few small items online for less than they paid for them. As the IRS points out, income from auctions that resemble a garage or yard sale "generally" isn't required to be reported. But if an online garage sale turns into a business with recurring sales and purchases of items for resale, "it may be considered an online auction business." And the complexities can be manifold.

The idea behind the law is simple: Research shows taxpayers do a much better job of reporting taxable income when they know the IRS is receiving information about their transactions.

With an estimated $290 billion tax gap, the difference between what is collected and what the IRS thinks is owed, it is politically easier to raise additional revenue from people who haven't paid their fair share than by raising taxes.

"Time and time again, we have seen that better information reporting helps the system by ensuring that everyone pays what they owe," IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman said late last year. "The new law gives us an important new tool for closing the tax gap and also provides business taxpayers better documentation to compute and report their income and expenses."

Although nobody knows precisely how much the new law will bring in, or how much it will cost to enforce, congressional staffers have estimated it will make only a very small dent in the total tax gap.

According to the Tax Court, Orellana was involved in more than 7,000 eBay transactions between 2000 and 2005, although the case dealt only with 2004 and 2005. She said she was just taking things in her home and garage and selling them in what amounted to an "online garage sale" and testified that she didn't understand why the IRS persistently asked for proof of her costs and expenses.
To be sure, the judge said the court might not expect someone to keep records for "a few small items sold on eBay." But in view of the large number of transactions in 2004 and 2005, "she should have realized that her activity might be subject to question." (The decision can't be reviewed by another court because the case was heard under a special tax code provision for smaller cases.)

Eric Smith, an IRS spokesman, declined to comment on the case or on whether Orellana is still employed by the agency. Orellana, identified only as a California taxpayer, couldn't be reached.

The basic tax issues in this case apply not only to Internet commerce but also to other areas, such as garage sales and classified ads, H&R Block officials said. The IRS issued a fact sheet in 2007 summarizing the key issues, such as whether those activities represent casual sales, a hobby or a business.

"The intent and frequency of the sales determine the taxability, not just the dollar amount," said Amy McAnarney, executive director of H&R Block's Tax Institute. "Some of these sellers may unwittingly be operating businesses, which could trigger tax consequences."

H&R Block officials pointed out that many "casual sales" of household goods aren't reportable because the seller receives less than the cost, resulting in a nondeductible personal loss. If something is sold for a gain, that personal gain is reportable, H&R Block said. As the IRS puts it: "A person must report a gain from a sale whether he or she operates a business or not. A reportable gain is the income above the original cost or basis of the item. These gains may be business income or capital gains."

There can be gray areas, such as figuring out the difference between what constitutes a "hobby" and a "business," an issue so complex that it leads to Tax Court cases. H&R Block said a typical hobbyist is someone who "sells items occasionally without intent to make a profit." But if sales become "regular activities done to make a profit," it might be considered a business. Someone with a hobby has to report all income generated from sales and can deduct all related expenses, but not more than the total profit.
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With a business, the rules are more complex and worth consulting a tax pro, unless you have deeply immersed yourself in the fine print. For a genuine business, you may be entitled to deduct certain business expenses. Unlike a hobby, a business can have an operating loss (where costs exceed revenue), the H&R Block spokesman said.

The IRS has posted "tax tips for online auction sellers," to help taxpayers figure out where they stand.

Yahoo to turn subscribers' e-mail contact lists into social networking base

2010-06-03T00:48:00.000-07:00

Image via CrunchBase

Yahoo plans to announce Tuesday that it is jumping into social networking by using its massive population of e-mail subscribers as a base for sharing information on the Web.

Over the next few weeks, its 280 million e-mail users will be able to exchange comments, pictures and news articles with others in their address books. The program won't expose a user's contact list to the public, as was done by Google through its social networking application, Buzz. But unless a user proactively opts out of the program, those Yahoo e-mail subscribers will automatically be part of a sweeping rollout of features that will incorporate the kinds of sharing done on sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

The plan could spark criticism from Yahoo e-mail users, who signed up for the free service perhaps never imagining the people they e-mailed would become friends for sharing vacation videos, political causes and random thoughts throughout the day. And the move comes amid growing concern by federal lawmakers and regulators over how firms such as Facebook, Google and Microsoft have handled the privacy of Internet users.

After backlash, Facebook last week announced new privacy tools to make it easier for users to block Web sites from tapping into their information, as well as a simpler way to configure who on the site can see personal data. Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, asked Facebook on Friday to explain what kind of user data it had shared with third-party sites. Conyers also asked Google to retain, for federal and state regulators, the data the company scooped off WiFi networks as it collected Street View mapping photos around the country.

To allay privacy concerns, Yahoo said it would give users a week's notice before launching the new features and provide a single button on the site for opting out entirely. "We've been watching and trying to be thoughtful about our approach," said Anne Toth, head of privacy for Yahoo.

Specifically, the company will launch a product called Yahoo Updates that allows e-mail users to see what other contacts on their lists are commenting about or sharing on sites like Yahoo Finance, Facebook and the photo sharing site Flickr. Updates will initially include 15 sites and partnerships and will eventually expand to include partners such as Twitter this summer.

Yahoo has tiptoed into social media, launching a similar tool last year called Connections, which allowed each user to customize a list of contacts with whom to share information. The company also tried two years ago to build a competitive product to Facebook, where users sought "friends," or contacts, to join micro-networks within Yahoo in the same way Facebook users amass friends through requests. Yahoo abandoned that project and instead decided to tap into its captive audience of e-mail users.

The move is part of a revamping of the once-rudderless Internet pioneer. Chief executive Carol Bartz, brought in last year to lead the firm, has stripped the company of unprofitable business units to focus on its greatest strengths -- its popular free e-mail and messaging programs, and its library of sports, news and finance sites -- to keep users in the Yahoo universe longer.

The longer a user stays on the site, the more advertising dollars and e-commerce it generates. But it remains to be seen if users will view their contact lists as the kinds of people they choose to socialize with on the Web. When Google launched Buzz, some users complained that they used Gmail for business and to correspond with strangers and that they didn't want to share birthday videos with their plumbers or bosses.

Yahoo will begin notifying users of the change on June 7, one week before the launch. Users who don't want to participate can click one button on the settings page to opt out. Or they can customize each piece of information -- a Facebook update or a comment on a Yahoo news story -- to either be shared with Yahoo e-mail contacts or Facebook. Eventually, Twitter and other partners with social-networking platforms will also be included.

"What Yahoo has done is recognized that your e-mail or messenger network is a useful resource and that you may be interested in knowing what your contacts are interested in knowing about, and they stop there," said Jules Polonetsky, the director of the Future of Privacy Forum, a privacy think tank. "That's opposed to the idea that then, therefore, your relationship with them risks being exposed."

8 Tips to Keep 1st time Visitors Coming Back to your Blog

2010-06-02T17:55:00.000-07:00

Image via CrunchBase

You work hard to create quality content for your blog, so you owe it to yourself to make sure that you’re doing everything that you can to generate traffic to your blog, and to keep visitors coming back. I’ve been blogging now for about 18 months, so I thought I would share some tips on what has worked for me. There are obvious tricks like including the TweetMeme button or the ShareThis button, but in my experience there’s less awareness about the tips I’m sharing in this post.

1) Post at consistent intervals. For myself I post every Thursday. Determine what frequency & time works best for both you and for your audience, implement a schedule and stick with it.

2) Develop a cycle for your e-newsletter and send it consistently. Consider an rss-feed e-newsletter. About 6 months ago I switched to an rss-feed driven newsletter using MailChimp, and now I never miss an e-newsletter, or send them out late. This may not be the most dynamic way to share your content, but it is extremely practical and still allows for weekly tinkering and adjustments to content and layout. FYI: This is not an affiliate link, and MailChimp does offer both free & paid plans.

3) Add a text link in each post that encourages readers to sign up. I’ve started to include the following text (with appropriate links) at the end of each blog post, and I’ve seen dramatic improvement in sign up for both my e-newsletter and rss feed: “Like what you’re reading? Have you signed up for my weekly e-newsletter yet or are you following my blog’s rss feed?” I’m doing this in addition to the graphic prompts that are included as part of my blog, and I’m finding that I’m getting more clicks/sign ups from the text links.

4) Respond to comments in a timely fashion. Keep the conversation going. Does the commenter’s expertise mesh with yours? Review the blog of the person who commented and see if you can return the favor by commenting on one of his/her posts.

5) Continue to circulate your older posts via your existing social media outlets like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.

6) Write posts that reference other’s in your social network. These types of posts will generate more traffic than any others. I recently wrote a post titled “My Definitive Short List of the best Nonprofit Blogs and Consultants.” I listed some of my very best contacts that I’d developed over the course of the last few years. Those listed helped to circulate the post to their followers. The day after I posted this, I had one of the highest traffic days ever on my blog. Who are the experts that influence you/your industry? Have you taken the time to share this information as a blog post?

7) Exchange blog posts. Nothing has made a larger impact on the traffic to my blog than exchanging blog posts. You’ll be introducing your blog to a whole new set of potential followers. When you include a link back to your own blog, this also works as a link building strategy which helps with organic search. Seek out partners with complementary products or services so you can be sure that your guest post will resonate with your new audience.

8 ) If you’re struggling with having time to do posts, keep your posts shorter, or consider breaking longer posts into a 2-part or 3-part series. Comments & questions from the earlier posts can influence the direction of the later posts that continue the topic. In addition to saving you time, this also help to keep your readers more engaged.

In his new book, Linchpin, Seth Godin talks about the importance of “shipping” which is essentially getting your product out on time even if it’s not perfect. The same applies with blog posts. You can always find an excuse to delay or skip a scheduled blog post, but if you commit to it, you will get it done. You still have the option to go back and add more content or edit it, but you owe it to your audience to stick to your schedule. Keep your posts short so that you’re not overwhelmed, and this will give you more time to share guest posts on other blogs and respond to comments on your own blog.

What methods have worked for you? Please share in the comments section below, and if you found this post helpful, please retweet!