Techipedia | Tamar Weinberg » Blogging http://www.techipedia.com tamar weinberg is a digital marketing specialist, social media consultant, and tech geek at heart Thu, 02 Feb 2012 13:43:31 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Best Internet Marketing Posts of 2011 http://www.techipedia.com/2012/internet-marketing-posts-2011/ http://www.techipedia.com/2012/internet-marketing-posts-2011/#comments Thu, 05 Jan 2012 13:19:57 +0000 Tamar Weinberg http://www.techipedia.com/?p=4204 [ Best Internet Marketing Posts of 2011 is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

Like this post? Get my Internet Marketing newsletter, buy my book, The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, and subscribe to the Techipedia RSS feed.

]]>

It’s my birthday and I have some great news!

In January of 2011, I said that I’d make our Internet Marketing Posts of 2011 subscriber only. And I did. Many loyal readers have checked in on the newsletter throughout 2011 to get both evergreen content, the content that typically embraces these monthly updates, in addition to something completely new, monthly digital trends – the stuff you use for presentations and proposals, for arguing that social media and online marketing does have a firm place in today’s landscape. The newsletter, which was sent within the first week of the month, would include new research findings from surveys conducted by research groups such as the Pew Research Center, new discoveries from a marketing firm’s eye tracking study, or data that was recently culled across a multitude of SEO agency case study reports.

This year, I am pleased to bring back our Best Internet Marketing Posts of 2011 thanks to an excellent sponsor, HubSpot. HubSpot has recently launched a most amazing Marketing Grader tool to help you measure the effectiveness of your website. Please be sure to check it out as it’s one of the best tools I’ve ever seen, and I would be saying that even if they weren’t a sponsor!

And now, here’s what you’ve all been waiting for: the evergreen portion of my Internet Marketing best posts delivered straight to your doorstep on my birthday as you’ve come to expect year after year. Want the trends, news, and findings too? Sign up right now at a totally reduced cost for 2012 for a limited time.

SEO

  • Quick and Dirty Competitive Research for Keywords: If you’re looking for keywords to target in your SEO campaign, this guide will tell you what to do with available online tools and websites.
  • Internal Linking: The Benefits of Great Information Architecture for SEO: Sometimes you don’t have to beg other webmasters to link to you. Consider focusing your link building tactics internally — that is, on your site. Breadcrumbs, navigation, and related pages are a great way to start.
  • Does Google PageRank Really Matter?: The answer is no, but it’s still a metric that is close to Larry Page’s heart. Think instead about social media traffic, good content, a cleanly coded website, slow progressive growth, and your site’s authority.
  • SEO Checklist: 60 Essential Checks Before Launching a Website: Is your site ready to be launched? Ask these questions and then answer them.
  • The Meta Description Tag: Are you using the meta description tag effectively on your websites? Here are some applications of meta tags and arguments as to why you should be using them.
  • How to Do an SEO Audit: How well is your newest SEO client’s practices? Do an audit to find out. This audit will cover their keywords targeted, tools used, site architecture, backlinks, and other elements to make sure you have a full understanding of what the client needs to take action and do better.
  • 10 Metrics to Check When Your Traffic Crashes: With Google consistently trying to provide the best search experience, your rankings may fall at any time. This is how you can evaluate where it happened.
  • 12 Popular Keyword Organization Tips and Tools: This post contains a list of tools that help organize some unruly keyword lists and includes tools like Ad Group Filter, RKG Duck, Wordstream Keyword Grouper, Spyfu Keyword Groupie (obviously using a different “keyword group” name not to infringe on any copyrights or trademarks!), and a number of others.
  • A Guide to Geocoding Images for Local SEO: Image optimization is a big part of a cohesive SEO strategy. Wouldn’t you want your image to be associated with local places? This is the article you need to make that happen.
  • User Friendly SEO: These are the tactics that search engine optimizers should use to optimize for search engines and user experience.
  • 8 Necessary SEO Steps During a Website Redesign: Every so often, we have to redesign our site. But how do we make sure the search traffic we had stays intact? Auditing the site and working out which keywords and links are the top performers is a given.
  • The Heart of SEO: 8 Everlasting Truths: This is misleading; this is only part 1 so it has 4 truths. Part 2 hasn’t been posted as of the compilation of this report, but you should know that SEO is about a strong brand, that you must perform research, real value produces great results, and you must understand where to circulate the message to get the best results.
  • Technical SEO: Tools and Approach: Which technical factors matter for SEO? This is a review of what tools (e.g. wget, curl, Xenu, etc.) can help you assess how well your website is performing technically.
  • Duplicate Content in a Post Panda World: Duplicate content poses a problem for SEO because when two pages share the same content, one page may get indexed (the one you don’t necessarily want, perhaps) while the other gets hidden. This post is a somewhat technical approach toward dealing with duplicate content issues. It’s pretty exhaustive too. There’s even a 22 page PDF of the article in case you wanted to take it with you. :)
  • New Edition of the Ranking Factors for 2011 is Now Live!: SEOmoz recently came out with a survey that asked many practitioners their experience with keyword rankings. This data is compiled here. This is the newest data since 2009.
  • The Ultimate Guide to Keyword Research: …and the tools you need to use to do a great job.
  • Small Business SEO: 46 Experts on the Biggest Mistakes SMBs Make with SEO (and How to Avoid Them): What have small businesses done wrong in the ways of SEO? DIYSEO asked 46 experts who weighed in on many things, from forgetting a local focus, doing too much at one time, having bad quality links, not optimizing their online listings, and much more.
  • How To Take Your Keyword Research to a Higher Level: This post explores what differentiates quality keyword research from the junk that you get from a tool. Yes, it will take time. Yes, you’ll be happy with the results.
  • Infographic: SEO Salary Guide: If you’re looking for general salaries for SEO, this infographic might tell you what you can expect to be paid on average by city. If you’re looking for a good salary, you may wish to relocate.
  • SEO Checklist for Local Small Business Websites: If you’re ever planning on starting a small business website, this is a decent but basic checklist of the considerations you need to make in order to make sure it’s well SEO’d. Have a look.
  • Should I Change My URLs for SEO?: This beginner SEO question comes up often. And since it’s being touched upon in this post, I figured it’s worth including here too.
  • Introducing:  The Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors: All of this SEO in an easily digestible infographic.
  • Bing Rankings Cheat Sheet: People still use Bing, so understanding what works for rankings on that site is important. Here’s a list of what Bing seems to prefer for those top rankings.
  • SEO Best Practices for Restaurants and Eateries: I’m not sure how many of you readers actually have a restaurant or eatery (or know someone who does), but this was pretty solid advice.
  • The Complete Google Panda Reference Guide: Google’s Panda update has left site owners and SEOs confused and befuddled, but this guide summarizes the history and explains how you can be successful despite this algorithmic update.
  • The Responsibilities of SEO Have Been Upgraded: SEO is not the same today as it was 6 years ago. Today, we think about XML sitemaps, local integration, keyword usage in images, PR tactics, and so much more. Your strategies must employ content creation, community management, local/maps optimization, among others. How many of these new tactics have you adopted?
  • How User Generated Content is Changing SEO: This is an analysis of how search results changed in the last year alone and how it impacts your business. Get more reviews, people! That’s one of many ways to be more visible.
  • How Social Media Affects Content Relevance in Search: Why is social media so important? For those die hard SEO practitioners who don’t see the value in social, this article shows the last few months’ impact on search engine rankings. The more you share, the more likely the content will rank.

Blogging

Marketing Automation

  • A Guide to Marketing Automation: Inbound marketing tactics include marketing automation, a way to segment leads and scale personalized communications. This article introduces this element and explains how it helps a cohesive inbound marketing effort.
  • 4 Ways to Get More out of Marketing Automation: A lot of my general audience doesn’t understand marketing automation, but did you know that it’s responsible for more than $300 million in revenue? Here’s how to maximize it.
  • 4 Ways to Grow Your Business with Marketing Automation: Sometimes you don’t need to man everything in a marketing engagement. Automating your marketing efforts may be fruitful. Here’s what you can do to change your business course. Enjoy!
  • How to Fail at Marketing Automation: …and four characteristics that work.
  • 5 Disastrous Misconceptions About Marketing Automation: Marketing automation is not something you can do alone; you need to put it together with a strong inbound marketing plan. It’s about being active all the time, watching the progress of your campaigns as they go through their cycles. These facts are discussed in more depth in this article.

Link Building

  • 10 Years of Link Building Advice: Link building advice can be hit or miss, but some link builders have given us pretty good advice even as far back as 2001. These golden nuggets are shared and discussed.
  • Link Building 101: What’s link building? This is your introductory guide. (The next link goes even further.)
  • How to Build Links: The Ultimate Guide: This is one of several really helpful link building guides, covering topics in social media, viral content, guest posting, news, link requests, face to face networking, and much more.
  • A Guide to Long Tail Link Building: It’s always more advisable to target long tail keywords versus the broader ones (e.g. “travel,” or “jewelry”). This article explores how to get into this tactic and its benefits.
  • Creative Tips for Link Building on a Shoestring Budget: One of the best ways to get links is via writing guest posts. How many of you actually do that?
  • How to Train a Link Builder: It seems that there’s a lot of turnover in the link building space, so training new link builders will be a frequent occurrence.
  • Notorious S.E.O: The 10 Crack Commandments of Link Building: Link building as seen from the Notorious B.I.G. angle. This is a really creative piece.
  • 10 Ethical Ways to Buy Links: While some may argue that you need to nofollow links purchased via paid reviews (which is suggested here), link buying isn’t over and is a great way for many people to get the visibility they feel they deserve and the SEO value that may come from it.
  • 25 Reasons Why Another Site Will Link to Yours: How are you getting links to your site? Are you being resourceful? Offering discounts? Publishing videos? Helping people make money? This and 21 other reasons are why those links are coming.
  • Understanding Your Backlink Profile: Backlinks are important to find out the health of your site in search rankings. However, they could be manipulated. It’s important to analyze your backlinks regularly to see if there’s anything unhealthy going on.
  • Kicking off a Linkbuilding Campaign with Questions: If you’re link-building for yourself or for a client, these are questions you want to have answered for a good understanding of what you’re doing and where.
  • Link Building with the Experts – 2011 Edition: Every year, this interview series asking link builders about the trends in search engine optimization and how it impacts link builders.
  • Into the Minds of Link Builders: Three link builders are asked tough and fun questions on tactics and strategy.
  • Proven Ways to Use Content to Attract Links: This is part 3 in a series of posts that explain link building. To get good links, you don’t have to build brand new content. Repurpose! Add a new twist! Use forums. There are many ways to go with this.
  • Link Building for E-commerce Sites: Anchor text is important when it comes to link building – you want traffic but also conversions. Here’s a good framework for making that happen … and it isn’t necessarily only for e-commerce sites.
  • 10 Reasons Why Your Link Requests are Failing: If your requests are spammy, you don’t have clear messaging, the links aren’t converting to traffic, and you’re just building a link and stopping there and not focusing on a relationship, your requests will fail at generating the right response. It’s hard work. Are you prepared?
  • Link Building in 2011: This is an interview with 2 known link builders on the impact of SEO and links.
  • 99 Ways to Build Links by Giving Stuff Away (and Improve Your Brand Too): Want to build links? Here are 99 ways, from giveaways to community building to media connections to offering discounts and so much more.

Local Online Marketing

Branding

Content Marketing/Development/Copywriting

  • 3 Ways to Get Great Content from Your Boring Business: Shannon Paul suggests three ways to make your boring business exciting to prospects: through problem solving, through creativity, and by being the media.
  • SEO Guide to Creating Viral Linkbait and Infographics (Content Development): This is definitely one of the best articles in this year’s report. This Distilled guide to creating viral linkbait and infographics should not be ignored. It talks about how to brainstorm contnet to gathering data to presenting it with visual appeal to sharing the final copy.
  • Linkbait and Content Marketing: And now, a great walk-through of the mindset you need to be in to provide some amazingly great viral content that people will share and which will drive links to boost visibility for your business.
  • What to Look for in Freelance Writers: When you’re hiring a writer to produce content, you want to create a good business relationship with clearly communicated deliverables (which is the case in more than just writing engagements). Don’t commit to long term engagements unless you’re really sure about the writer, though.
  • Making the Leap: Egocentric to Empathy in Content Marketing: Sometimes you need to look at your company in the eyes of someone else: your customers. Once you do this, you can engage differently and get a different view of how to market. This post explains the process of how to think like your customer.
  • 5 Reasons Copywriters Need to Get Data … or Get Out of the Business: If you can put numbers and accountability on your copywriting skills, you are a winner. The future sees copywriters as having more responsibilities in analysis, since writing content nowadays just isn’t enough.
  • The 7 Deadly Sins of Content Promotion: Don’t be greedy. Don’t be gluttonous. Don’t show envy. Each of these sins is dissected as a strategy, a problem, and a solution.
  • 6 Content Tips: How to Write When You Have Nothing to Write About: I got a comment on my blog that other day from someone who felt she wasn’t inspired to write anything for her blog. But there are so many things you can write about! While this won’t have you scribbling notes (okay, typing posts) for months, you might be inspired to improve upon your content development strategy for good SEO. The more original content you have, the better your SEO. Always remember that.
  • A Kick Ass Guide to Growing Your Website Traffic Online: From platform to linking strategy, this guide covers everything needed to build a site that is networked enough for some good traffic.
  • 10 Steps to Writing Better Content : I love this tip – “write drunk, edit sober.” Aren’t you more creative when you’re a little tipsy?
  • 6 Steps to Making Your Infographic Work: Is your infographic going to resonate with your audience? By doing research among a social audience, communicating with your designer, getting outsiders’ opinions, including links, and publishing the infographic with all of these considerations intact, your infographic can travel far.
  • A Quick and Dirty Guide to Content Marketing: Whether you’re creating written or video content, cornerstone or spicy content, content that tells stories or solves problems, there’s an approach that will suit you and your readers. This article touches upon different content marketing angles and email autorepsonders to sell yourself and your services.
  • Copywriting Essentials from A to Z: From Action to Zing, here is what you need to keep in mind for a great copywritten piece of content that will grab the attention of the people who you’re looking to connect with.
  • Great Content for SEO: Simpler than You Ever Imagined: Build a survey, send it to your customers, record their responses, and leverage it to build what people want (via search, of course). Simple, right?
  • 21 Ways to Create Compelling Content when You Don’t Have a Clue: You can steal ideas, borrow name recognition, get inspired, and do so much more to create some really good content that works.
  • Infographics or Articles: Which Type of Content is Best for Your Idea?: This article takes a deep look at infographics versus linkbait articles and explores why you should do one (or the other).
  • A 5 Minute Guide to More Persuasive Copywriting: Or in five words: Write for a real person.

PPC Marketing & Paid Search

Public Relations

  • How to Create a Good Blogger Pitch : This is the best blogger outreach post I have ever read.
  • The Front Page Isn’t What it Used to Be: This is a simple reminder why you can’t rely on your website alone. You need to be firmly grounded on all major platforms serving as the “new front page” and aim for placement throughout these new mediums.
  • 9 Essential Tips for Warm Blogger Outreach Pitches: Every so often, I share a blogger outreach article because people always do it wrong. My key takeaway from this article is to do your research. No, seriously. People pitch me all the time despite the fact that I clearly say I don’t want pitches. Obviously, the research part is overlooked. I wonder how much traction those PR campaigns really get if that’s the case?!
  • Blogger Outreach Guide: How to Get Started: If you’re tasked with doing outreach on behalf your client or perhaps for yourself, it’s important to find the right people. This guide gives you tips on creating that pitch and finding people who can seek out the right people — your community manager.
  • Recommendations for Blog Commenting as a Marketing Strategy: Blog commenting can be a great way to market yourself and your business if you do it right. This writeup explains the benefits and illustrates best practices for making it worth your time.
  • 8 Tips for Blogger Outreach: Networking is important, but how do you reach the influencers you’re looking for? I blogged about this last year, and while those points are incredibly valid, so are these: flattering people on Twitter, finding them on a social network (especially if you can’t locate the email address), searching for opportunities via Twitter, and other lesser-known tactics are discussed.
  • Outreach Tips and Tricks to Increase Efficiency and Effectiveness: If you’ve done any personal outreach, doing something above and beyond can certainly help make that campaign a bit more effective for you. The suggestions here are quite smart yet simple to implement.

Social Media

  • Why Most Social Media Departments Fail: This is my own post and most popular post on Techipedia this year, highlighting some case studies encountered by myself and colleagues on why social media sometimes just doesn’t work for companies. Hint: it’s in the approach and communication, not in the fact that viability isn’t possible in some industries.
  • Process: A Pragmatic Approach to Social Business: A social media planning process requires 8 full steps to execute and measure effectively: education, research, strategy, planning, implement, manage, measure, renewal.
  • Blog SMO Guide: How to Apply Social Media Optimization to Your Blog in 33 Steps: This is a HUGE list of great tips to make your site social friendly. Tips like minimizing obstacles to comment, displaying voting icons after the article, having a well-written title, and more are discussed in this lengthy article.
  • Why Social Media Departments Fail: This post speaks from the heart (and is my own) on why social media marketing initiatives are completely useless without goals and a cohesive marketing plan.
  • How To Find The Perfect Network For Your Content Promotion Campaign: Today, we look at all of the social media sites out there to see what’s worth promoting where.
  • 14 Best Practices for Long Term Social Media Success: These are the traits that successful online businesses exhibit day in and day out: they have governance and rewards, guidelines, a training program, an editorial program, a mission and purpose, and they serve their customers and prospects.
  • 10 Considerations When Creating a Social Media Policy: If you ever need to create a social media policy, look at this list of advice for things you may need to consider:  an understanding of chain of command, disclosure information, monitoring of usage, and much more.
  • 21 Types of Social Content to Boost Your SEO: Viral content helps build links. Whether you write something that’s passionate, that’s controversial, that’s epic, that lists a bunch of great resources, and that’s visual, you can definitely reap benefits if you truly understand what a social audience is looking for.
  • Who Should Represent Your Brand on the Social Web?: Whether you create a social media council that integrates many team members or you take it on yourself, humanizing the brand is a primary goal for social media, since it’s all about human interaction. How do you approach it?
  • The Social Media Marketer’s SEO Checklist: Social media influences SEO, so this post tells social media marketers how to best craft your social messages to yield the best SEO value for search effectiveness.
  • Tracking the KPIs of Social Media: With social media analytics, you should track traffic, fans/followers/ social interaction, and how well the content is performing. Here are tools on how you can do these measurements.
  • Social Media for Small Business: 6 Effective Strategies: Businesses starting in social media may need this most, but I think it is valuable to any business. First, the customer is always right. (Well, almost.) Second, sometimes you have to pay. Third, followers are just a number. Fourth, [constant] self promotion won’t help you. Fifth, benefit from expertise. Finally, there are people you can hire to help.
  • An Insider’s Guide to Social Media Etiquette: I’ve written about social media etiquette myself, but this one makes it more business-centric, like not using logos (if you’re representing yourself as a person, not a company, that is) and refraining from retweeting praise about you. This is good stuff.
  • Don’t Abuse Social Network Pings: Social media gives you ways to connect with people you know easily, but there are certain etiquette rules to take into consideration.
  • Social Media for SEO vs. Customer Engagement: You should be doing social media for customer engagement (relationships) but also for SEO value. Are you coordinating both efforts? Are you doing both?
  • How to Grow Social Media Leads: New Research: The more you blog, the better it is for your leads. Also, the more Twitter followers you have, the better you will fare as well in leads. They call that social proof. You also get better results with a larger Facebook fan base. Do these findings surprise you?
  • Social Media Consultants, Experts, and Gurus, Oh My!: Earlier this year, I worked on a campaign with a client who wanted nothing more than LOTS of new followers. He didn’t know why he wanted it, but he wanted it. Naturally, it felt odd to just build numbers for him, and I gave him the explanations as to why. This is the blog post that I could’ve used before the campaign to align expectations. Numbers aren’t everything.
  • 6 Areas of Your Business that Should be Listening: Amber Naslund and Jay Baer show the benefits of listening across sales, marketing, customer service, R&D, HR, and management.
  • The Rules of Social Media Engagement: It’s important to put rules into place when you involve yourself in the social media space. It makes you more productive as a company. This post includes 25 guidelines that you should consider when crafting those company policies.
  • 9 Companies Doing Social Media Right and Why: Here are some good case studies of businesses who do social media the right way. What’s your business doing?
  • Secrets of Social Media Revealed 50 Years Ago: Research by Ernest Dichter in 1966 has found that there are 4 motivations that people use to communicate about brands: product involvement (a great experience), self involvement (sharing information about oneself), other involvement (desire to help others), and message involvement (a great message). Do you think all of this is still the same today? This and other discoveries still hold true.
  • Optimizing Social Media Campaigns for Search: Together, search and social are extremely powerful. Come up with ideas, get your external content on your main site, get tracking in place, optimize, and consider load times to create a powerful social and search machine.
  • Your Secret Weapon for Standout Social Media Success: In a real time world, your response times need to change. That means when someone wants your attention on social media, you better reply within minutes. This post includes the various desired response times for a variety of channels.
  • The Number One Least Asked Question in Social Media…Why?: Why are you as a business engaging in social media? Why should your customers follow you? Because you rock? Do your customers think so?
  • 50 Kloutless Ways to Get Value from Twitter: …or any social network, really. Summary: network (the verb).

Social Networks

Usability

Conversion Rate Optimization/Landing Pages

Affiliate Marketing

  • 12 Ways to Pick the Best Affiliate Program: Looking to engage in affiliate marketing? There are dozens of programs out there. How should you choose the best? Consider product, competition, EPC, tools, and other elements to make the best educated decision.
  • When to Launch an Affiliate Program: If you have an online marketing program that’s working well, it may be time to get an affiliate program on board as well. But do you have the staff to handle it? Can you handle the inbound support? These are questions to ask before you launch.

Brand Evangelism

  • Inspiring Brand Ambassadors: If you’re looking to help get your customers to do word of mouth marketing for you, a brand ambassador program is something to look into. This guide lists the benefits and explains why and how you should proceed.
  • Fans Aren’t Just for Rockstars: For big brands, it’s time to connect more closely with your customers. This is a process you can follow that makes that all possible.

Web Development

  • Why User Experience Cannot Be Designed: This is a theoretical way to view UX, complete with why you cannot design it (it’s based on how the user interacts with the product). But you can design for UX.
  • 7 Simple Fixes for Your Small Business Website: Does your site have good navigation? A contact page? A good About page? Title tags that are informative? Well, if not, it’s time to review these guidelines and create a website that truly will resonate with your prospects and customers.
  • HTML5 and SEO: New Strategies for Optimizing Code: If you code for SEO, you’ll find that HTML5 takes things to a different level. This article discusses some tags you can do without (as they’re deprecated) and tags you should start considering instead.
  • What Potential Impact Can HTML5 Have on SEO?: Each major element of code is dissected with some indications as to how it will fare with the search engines.
  • Top 15 Free Things Every E-Commerce Website Should Do After Launching: Once you launch a new site, you need to think about product feeds, a sitemap file, getting analytics set up, and much more.
  • How to Make Your Website Look More Legitimate: Beyond having a presence online that you are happy to share with legitimate pages and information, to be truly legitimate, you need to get a media kit, press mentions, social profiles, a reusable logo, and a website that looks very professional.
  • Does Good Web Design Really Matter?: Do you hate some websites? Why? If your issues stem with bad design, you’re with 94% others who agree that design can make or break a website. Therefore, it’s paramount to create a design that really resonates with your potential viewers

Community Management

  • 8 Ways to Deal with Negative Comments in Online Communities: There are many things you can do with negative comments: ignoring it, lawyering up, changing it to a positive discussion, removing the comment (and possibly banning the commenter), educating the customer, confess and beg forgiveness, fight, or own it. What are you?
  • 8 Ingredients that Make a Community Manager: Who are the best community managers? They need to be passionate, available, and good communicators.
  • What Does a Community Manager Do?: There’s no one-size-fits-all job description for a community manager. It’s actually a LOT of work. Here’s what it might look like, though.
  • The 2011 State of Community Management: Year after year, this report has served as one of  the best resources for community managers. It covers strategy, leadership, culture, content, and so much more. It’s a 95 page report primarily based on survey findings of 109 individuals which you can download as PDF for your personal pursuits.
  • How to Build a Great Contest: This is a case study of how a contest was run successfully via Twitter and Facebook. What contest ideas are you trying for your business?

Reputation Management

  • Our Online Reputation Management Playbook: Ever search Google and see “companyname scam”? The writer has. Here’s how he successfully conquered this reputation management problem.
  • How to Combat Fake Reviews While Managing Online Reputation: Who cares if you have some negative reviews? Try to get as many positive (legitimate!) reviews as you can and you’ll find that conversions will soar.
  • Using Google Analytics to Monitor Your Brand: With a few tweaks, you can learn a lot about how your brand is faring across search results.
  • How to Avoid Negative Reviews and Bad Publicity for Your Online Store: The more someone is unhappy about an experience, the more likely his friends have to hear about it. (Surprisingly, though, in this case, the store was unnamed even though the writer says that “word travels fast.”) Still, the lessons to take away from any negative experience is that marketing and customer service go hand in hand, and you could truly make a difference and prevent negative reputation marks against your business if you actually are proactive about what people are saying about you.

Web Analytics

Domaining

  • Practical Domaining: People buy domains for many reasons — for search traffic, misspelled words, exact match, and more. If you’re into the art of domaining, you already know this. If you’re not but want to learn, here is your introductory guide.

Video Marketing

  • Video Posts: Are You Doing it Wrong?: If you ever blog about video, and many people don’t realize this, it’s not useful just to include the video without any detail. I can’t stress how many sites just let you submit the video without ANY detail whatsoever. Here are the steps you should follow to get people passionate about what you’re posting. The video alone still doesn’t cut it.
  • 8 Ways to Maximize Your YouTube Marketing Results: With YouTube being a powerful search engine, it’s the go-to place for video marketing. Compelling videos coupled with a branded page can yield great results.

Email Marketing

  • Top 10 Ways to Use Email Marketing Effectively (Email Marketing): Whether you’re focused on design, goals, or social media promotion, email marketing should be considerate of some of these elements so that you do create an effective campaign that works.
  • 4 Steps to Understanding the ROI of Your Newsletter: By understanding email marketing metrics, defining a baseline using historical data, assessing ROI, and testing (and retesting, of course), you can learn much about how to improve your newsletter for greater engagement.
  • 4 Mobile Email-Marketing Tips: People are reading their email on mobile, so it is important for you to think about mobile email marketing in the same way that you do regular email marketing.
  • 5 Email Marketing Tips for Increased Open Rates: If you’re looking to get people to open those emails you’ve sent, you should make a good first impression, time your emails appropriately, format the email in such a way to avoid spam filter traps, get rid of those folks who just don’t read the emails, and continually optimize the sign-up process.
  • Email is (Still) Important and Here’s Why: Email is my best method of communication, but so many people think that Facebook and Twitter have replaced that. (Oh, and phone calls.) Nope. Not for everyone. Email has suffered the fate of value theory — but for me, it’s incredibly valuable. Do you think email is dead?
  • 7 Email Case Studies: Publishers Who Forget About the Fold: Did you forget about the fold? Your core messaging should be easily visible. Don’t require people to scroll down.This report dissects many emails and shows where they failed.

General Online Marketing (and everything else)

  • 109 Ways to Make Your Business Irresistible to the Media: Want to be quoted in the media? You can be — just follow some of these steps, which include being social, thinking visually, launch a brand new product, write an e-book, give the interviewer control of the discussion, and much more.
  • The Ultimate Small Business Website Guide: This guide is truly ultimate. It talks about the benefits of creating a website, how to plan one, how to set one up, how to integrate social media and email marketing, and how to review your analytics.
  • Drip, Drip, Drip – Building Prospect Trust One Drop at a Time: A lot of websites fall into this trap of assuming someone checking out your site wants to buy now or later, but this thought process is fundamentally incorrect. It’s important to build relationships via your website for these people to convert when they’re ready.
  • A Holistic Approach to Marketing: Integrating Social, Search, and People: A great online marketing initiative integrates search, social, and paid together.
  • The Noob Guide to Online Marketing: This exhaustive article also contains a tremendous infographic that you might as well hang up as a poster on your office wall; it covers the gamut from social media to analytics to PPC, email marketing, lead gen, and whatever else. The “Wheel of Marketing,” as he calls it, has so many spokes.
  • Jedi Mind Tricks: 17 Lesser Known Ways to Persuade People: Using support from numerous studies, these tips help you get what you want, which is great in business. For example, if something happens often enough, you’ll be persuaded. How many of you have friends or family that were Facebook holdouts but eventually joined due to the prominence around you? Also, did you know that men prefer email than face to face discussions? (This woman prefers email too.)
  • 7 Repeat Business Strategies for Small Businesses:  Why does repeat business make sense? Because they’re targeted, easy to reach, cheap, and there’s no middle man. So here’s what you can do as a small business to get more repeat purchases.
  • Marketing to Early Adopters: This is a great article from Mukund Mohan on how he identified adopters and reached out to them for his business.
  • 21 Big Marketing Ideas for Small Marketing Budgets: I really like the tips in this article because they don’t require the deepest of pockets to implement. You’ll probably just need a community manager who can be active on blogs, message boards, social networks, and blogging to succeed at most of these tips.
  • My Dad Taught Me Cashflow with a Soda Machine: …or how to teach your child to become a kick ass entrepreneur. The lessons you can pick up from selling soda are really applicable in business, and I love the approach.
  • Tasty Ideas to Maximize Online Marketing for Events: This post explains how to promote an event with a model focused on Audience > Objectives > Tools > Tactics > Measurement. Plus, there are 27 great online marketing and public relations tactics that can help!
  • The 100 Rules for Being an Entrepreneur: This isn’t a bad article, but he should have used numbers and not roman numerals or whatever he did there. :) It also has a good number of questions and answers from readers.
  • 100 Ways to Connect: Relationship building at its finest.
  • 14 Best Practices for Brands to Grow their Audiences in Social Media: Successful brands have gotten to that point because they designed an effective channel strategy, constructed a listening framework, initiated training programs, served customers and prospects, among other things that kept them at the front of their customers’ minds and hearts.
  • Know. Like. Trust.: This is a reminder of the failures of many businesses with their own marketing; they forget to get consumers to know them, to like them, and to trust them.
  • Email Overload: The Secret to Getting Inbox Zero Every Time: Answering email is good customer service. Good customer service is good marketing. Why this falls on deaf ears for perhaps 85% of people I email to is beyond me. These are my personal tips on how you can truly conquer your inbox. As we speak, it’s over 3 months after that post was written and I still have nothing in my inbox.

Thanks again to HubSpot’s Marketing Grader for making it possible for you to enjoy these great content pieces again on Techipedia. Again, it’s a fantastic tool: it analyzes all of your marketing — not just your website — reviewing over 30 different factors and then providing an overall Marketing Grade on a 1-100 scale, including:

  • Competitive Benchmarking: Is my marketing more or less effective than my competition?
  • Lead Generation: Are my marketing efforts generating enough leads and sales?
  • Mobile Marketing: Is my web presence optimized for mobile devices?
  • Social Media: How effectively are we using Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter in our marketing?
  • Blogging: Is my blog driving results that justify the time investment, or are we wasting time doing the wrong things?
  • Overall Analysis: What are the strong points and shortcomings in our marketing?

Marketing Grader also outlines why you should take particular steps to improve and what your top priorities should be. With customized action items to help the top of your funnel, the middle of your funnel, and your analytics, Marketing Grader makes it easy for you to figure out your next steps.

Don’t forget that you can get this all monthly (plus more!) by signing up to my monthly newsletter, reduced 80% for a limited time :)

[ Best Internet Marketing Posts of 2011 is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

Like this post? Get my Internet Marketing newsletter, buy my book, The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, and subscribe to the Techipedia RSS feed.

]]> http://www.techipedia.com/2012/internet-marketing-posts-2011/feed/ 38 Is Your Business Worth An Extra Hour Per Week? 5 Reasons Why Your Business Should Blog http://www.techipedia.com/2011/business-blogging-reasons/ http://www.techipedia.com/2011/business-blogging-reasons/#comments Wed, 02 Nov 2011 12:35:36 +0000 Guest Author http://www.techipedia.com/?p=4068 [ Is Your Business Worth An Extra Hour Per Week? 5 Reasons Why Your Business Should Blog is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

Like this post? Get my Internet Marketing newsletter, buy my book, The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, and subscribe to the Techipedia RSS feed.

]]>

This is a guest post by Preston Ehrler.

As a business owner, do I really have time to blog?  I’m a business owner too, and I realize that we are already pressed to our limits for time.  We are responsible for everything, including finding new business, working with our existing customers, interfacing with suppliers, running our books, and infinitely more.  Attempting to convince a business owner that we should add yet another task can understandably seem like a herculean endeavor.  For anything that is going to take more time, the rewards must be tangible and immediate.  As many of us cannot clearly identify what the rewards are that can be reaped by blogging, it is not placed high on the list of priorities.  It should be.

So, you ask, how important could blogging really be for my business?

My answer:  Instead of spinning out a list of theories we’ve heard again and again, what if we looked at blogging from a different perspective?  Employing a new paradigm by utilizing real data, what can we learn about how blogging, coupled with an effectively constructed website, can affect your company?  What, specifically, can we extrapolate?  How do we know blogging is worth the effort?

Fact:  According to a recent survey by HubSpot, businesses that blog increase their site visits by as much as 55%.  My personal experience with my company has been even higher:

Providing your site works hard to convert your visitors (using “Siloing” techniques to push your visitors to the correct interior pages along with quality well-written content, and “Calls to Action” on each page), a single additional visitor can be worth hundreds or thousands of dollars for your business. If you only spend an hour each week blogging and it helps bring in only an additional $20,000 of revenue, your blogging is worth $400 per hour.  Interested?

Let’s look at what, exactly, blogging can do for your company.

1.  Enhance Your SEO

The most popular question I hear when speaking to a prospective customer is “We want to be number one on Google, how can we do that?”  People want it easy and they want it yesterday, and why shouldn’t they?  A high organic ranking on Google virtually assures your site more traffic.  And while there are certain aspects you can undertake, if you have a small website (under 20 pages), what SEO can do is very limited.  Proper title tags, inbound links, and meta information are important, along with keyword placement on your pages. Yet, the most important aspect of SEO for a small site is blogging.  Simply by creating a new blog post, you add a page to your website that will be indexed at some point.  Therefore, the more posts on your site, the more pages your site becomes, the much greater chance your site has to be identified and ranked accordingly.  Although Google’s algorithms are a secret, it is widely believed that there has been a manifest move toward identification of quality content, and away from “junk content.”  What does that mean if you blog?  It means that Google will notice your posts and will rank you accordingly.  Therefore, the very act of blogging, adding great content, and keeping your site “moving” vs. “static,” will enhance your SEO ranking.

2.  Interest New Customers

By enhancing your site’s optimization and increasing your site’s number of visitors, you will have the opportunity to convert more visitors to qualified leads and even customers.  At the same time, through your blogging, you will be creating quality content that your visitors will appreciate in many ways, some of them very simply.  By posting content such as your restaurant’s specials, or your bar’s live music, or items you have on special at your furniture store, you’re enticing new customers to come and visit you.  Finally, if you go so far as to give your site the ability to sell certain products or to take advantage of an offer, you are already creating new customers.  Let’s say you own a local restaurant that keeps its content moving by posting a weekly blog about your specials.  Before blogging, you were averaging about 100 visits per day, and from those visits you booked 5 reservations online per day average.  When you started blogging your visits jumped to 150 visits per day, and your conversion rate of 5% remained the same, and you booked 7.5 reservations per day.  On average each reservation is for 3 people, and each reservation averaged $40 per person.  Therefore on average, that’s $300 more revenue per night, and over a month, that’s $9000, and over the course of a year, that’s $108,000 of top-line revenue.  Yes, blogging works for brick and mortar businesses!

3.  Engage Existing Customers

Everyone knows new customers are difficult to find, especially in this economic environment.  As one of my friends recently said, “it’s a slugfest for new clients out there.”  What are you doing to keep your customers interested?  How are you creating value for them?  One of the most important yet overlooked aspects of blogging is that it allows you to reach out and offer quality-content vs. a static site.  A static site, which most sites are, is a site with seldom, or never changing content, offering little reason to return.  Quality-content offered through a blog creates an engaged customer base that will return to your site to access that content.  Therefore, the act of blogging creates a customer who values your changing content and therefore values you.  Through the content, your customer will be much more difficult for one of your competitors to poach by simply under-cutting you on price.  Without the content you create by blogging, the perception of your company’s value, over time, can wane, and your product or service will become commoditized, putting you at great risk.

4.  Highlight Your Expertise

This past weekend, I had a twenty-minute conversation with two owners of a fireplace shop who possessed an incredible amount of knowledge on their products.  As they had been in business for thirty years, there was no question that they had the ability to create a blog on their all aspects of their business.  They knew everything, and I was impressed.  Everyone, to some degree, is an expert in their field, and blogging allows you to leverage your expertise for the whole world to see.  Selflessly imparting the knowledge you have through a blog will quickly begin to highlight you as an expert in your field.  The deeper your level of expertise in your niche, the more your blog will be read and passed on, therefore growing your traffic, minimizing bounce and increasing your conversion rate, all of which equates to more business.  Even if you just post one high-quality blog, from an expert’s standpoint, per week, over time Google will index those posts and when people search for keywords contained in your posts, up comes your site, and you have an opportunity to convert yet another visitor.  Impressive, most impressive.

5.  Create Online Revenue

Ultimately, the goal of any business oriented website is to augment revenue.  But why then are so many sites not built to easily enable the creation of revenue?  Recently, we had the chance to discuss redesigning a website for a prospective customer who sold their product by the pound.  They had a very enviable margin (65%) and sold approximately an average of 900 pounds of their product per order at $0.65 per pound.  Essentially their website would pay for itself after a handful of orders, yet the key aspect became their concern that existing customers and new customers would not find or embrace their website.  The solution offered was to create a blog on their website that would enhance their SEO, interest new customers and engage their existing customers, all while highlighting their expertise—which was significant.  Meanwhile, by creating the ability for customers to order their product right from their computer or smartphone, in conjunction with the additional traffic created by blogging, a new revenue stream would be created where one had not previously existed.  Giving their customers the ability to place an order 24/7/365 would also enable the company to leverage technology where their competition had not, therefore strengthening their client relationships.  How wonderful to have orders flowing to you, without having to ask for them, while simultaneously making ordering quick and seamless for their customers.

Conclusions

Of course, all businesses want to climb the Google ladder up to page one of organic search, and while SEO has become the buzzword for CEOs and presidents, the fastest way for a small company to achieve this is by blogging.  While most of us don’t want yet another task to add to our list, when closely examined, blogging is worth the effort.  By simply keeping new content flowing onto your website Google, new customers and existing customers will take notice, and engage you at a much higher level—as the expert you are.  Additional revenue, the ultimate goal, will undoubtedly follow.

Preston Ehrler started Webvantix to bring professional website design to businesses that need help. The Webvantix blog also discusses ideas for marketing your business online.

[ Is Your Business Worth An Extra Hour Per Week? 5 Reasons Why Your Business Should Blog is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

Like this post? Get my Internet Marketing newsletter, buy my book, The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, and subscribe to the Techipedia RSS feed.

]]> http://www.techipedia.com/2011/business-blogging-reasons/feed/ 8 How to Use Social Media Strategy to Reach Mommy Blogs http://www.techipedia.com/2011/mommyblog-outreach/ http://www.techipedia.com/2011/mommyblog-outreach/#comments Thu, 08 Sep 2011 12:38:41 +0000 Guest Author http://www.techipedia.com/?p=3945 [ How to Use Social Media Strategy to Reach Mommy Blogs is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

Like this post? Get my Internet Marketing newsletter, buy my book, The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, and subscribe to the Techipedia RSS feed.

]]>

This is a guest post by Vanessa Van Petten.

If you have a brand or product for parents, targeting and partnering with mommy bloggers is a great way to get exposure. I run a website for parents written by kids called RadicalParenting.com, and when we first started, we had 2 unique visitors: me and my mom. Since I had no marketing budget, I decided to spend all of my efforts partnering with other mom blogs and asking them to post about us. This increased our traffic to over 200,000 uniques per month and exposure through guest posts got us on a number of media outlets like CNN, Fox News and the Wall Street Journal — no PR person involved.

Here is how you can reach out to Mom Blogs:

Make a Target List

You want to start with a list of mom blogs that you like — ones that jive with your brand, are in your target demo, and look like they get medium to high traffic. For example, if you have a product for teenagers you would not want to pick a pregnancy blogger. Here is the list I use. You are welcome to start with this list.

Offer Something Good

Mommy bloggers do not love broad press releases. They also do not like being pitched without being offered anything. If you have a free product, gift card, or ebook, send one o them! This is a great way to tell them you appreciate any post or review. You can also offer to link to them as a favorite resource!

Have a Specific Ask

Since we are a quasi-mom blog (a blog for moms written by kids), we get a lot of pitches as well. Sometimes the pitches are so broad, I do not know what they want from us. Ask for something specific. Do you want them to post your link? Review your product? Come to your mom blogger event? Make your request as specific as possible.

Connect with Them Where They Are

In addition to sending them an email, friend them on Facebook, become a fan of their page, and follow them on Twitter. You want to meet them where they hang out. Supporting their social network feeds shows them that you are also in support of all of their efforts to get more traffic and followers. I also highly recommend commenting on some of their articles and sharing some of their posts on social networks.

There are a few different vehicles for social media strategy. Here are some popular social networks and websites where you can connect with mommy bloggers. If you become familiar with these websites, you will not only get to know your target market better, but you can also post comments, blogs, and updates on areas where moms already are.

Where Can You Find Mommy Bloggers?

Here are the social networks where mommy bloggers hang out.

  • Facebook: Moms do love Facebook and following some of the ‘Mommy Mavens’ moms who post a lot and have a lot of followers and likes can clue you into trends and some of the popular mom blogs of the moment.
  • CafeMom: CafeMom is one of the fastest growing social networks out there and a lot of mommy bloggers actually get their start here! Follow some of the most active users and contact them while (or before) they are growing their following.
  • Twitter: I have a list on Twitter called “Top Parent Twitterers” where I am constantly adding some of the most active and popular parent bloggers. Follow the list and reach out to some of the Twitterers on there by retweeting them, following them, and maybe even direct messaging them.
  • StumbleUpon: A lot of mom bloggers use StumbleUpon to cruise the web, find other mommy websites, and meet related Stumblers. I highly recommend going on and liking the list of mom blogs on your target list. That way, when you begin to stumble, you will get related websites and more ideas for websites to reach out to. Mom bloggers also love when you send them website suggestions through StumbleUpon or write a great review for their website.

Websites Mom Bloggers Read, Comment on and Write For

  • MomLogic: MomLogic features mommy trends and news. A lot of bloggers read this website. You can leverage the popularity of MomLogic by keeping up on trends and participating in the comments of posts. I often make connections to other mom bloggers in the comments of articles.
  • HuffPost Parents: Huffington Post’s parenting section has some very active mommy users. Many of the writers on Huffington Post (including yours truly) also have their own parenting blogs. Commenting, connecting with other readers and writers. and reading about mom trends is a great way to connect with mom blogs.
  • Parent Hacks: Parent Hacks is a website that specializes in parenting tips and advice. They have a very active Twitter feed, Facebook page, and comments section. Get connected with some of the parent hacks writers and then reach out and see if they have their own parenting website. Many of the commenters on Parent Hacks also have links posted back to their own websites.

Mom bloggers can be different than your average bloggers because they are more concerned about their personal brand and can be more choosy about what they decide to post. If you reach out to them because you genuinely enjoy their site and help promote it, they will be much more likely to enjoy your brand in return. As the above tips show, the more you can connect with them in a variety of ways, the more you will stand out to them and the more they will want to partner with you.

Vanessa Van Petten is the creator of RadicalParenting.com, a parenting website written from the teen perspective to help parents understand them. She is also the author of the parenting book, Do I Get My Allowance Before or After I’m Grounded?

[ How to Use Social Media Strategy to Reach Mommy Blogs is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

Like this post? Get my Internet Marketing newsletter, buy my book, The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, and subscribe to the Techipedia RSS feed.

]]> http://www.techipedia.com/2011/mommyblog-outreach/feed/ 7 Best Internet Marketing Posts of 2010 http://www.techipedia.com/2011/internet-marketing-posts-2010/ http://www.techipedia.com/2011/internet-marketing-posts-2010/#comments Wed, 05 Jan 2011 13:43:48 +0000 Tamar Weinberg http://www.techipedia.com/?p=3120 [ Best Internet Marketing Posts of 2010 is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

Like this post? Get my Internet Marketing newsletter, buy my book, The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, and subscribe to the Techipedia RSS feed.

]]>

Want more than what you see here? Get the monthly newsletter, new for 2011.

As many of you know, I have an annual tradition of giving back to the community on my birthday, which is why this year is no different. Of course, then, today is my birthday, & it’s a big one. Today, I’m 30.

I started this “best posts” idea 5 years ago & it’s grown huge. 2010 by far was the biggest year yet in the Internet Marketing realm. That’s why this is the biggest post I’ve ever written (with over 10,000 words). In honor of my 30th birthday, I have 300 posts.

Here’s how I do it: I read & review hundreds — thousands — of articles yearly, on all Internet Marketing topics from SEO to social media to general entrepreneurship (new for 2010!), also gathering intelligence via their rankings on top social sites & by stumbling upon new items in my feed reader. Since I can’t read everything written by the Internet Marketing community, I ask my Twitter & Facebook followers for their own recommendations. Based on specific criteria, normally actionable takeaways & evergreen content, I review the content & post it here to share with Techipedia readers & new visitors. The content is typically introductory but occasionally more intermediate/advanced, so there’s a mix that should work for everyone.

This list is very long, but I hope it’s not any less valuable. I’m sure you’ll have a year (or more) of reading to do, but it’s worth it to empower you with all this great content that has been written by brilliant peers. Enjoy!

Special note: This is the LAST wrap up post you’ll ever receive via Techipedia. If you found this content valuable & would like to receive new articles on a monthly basis, please subscribe to the monthly newsletter, available at a super low rate for a limited time.

Social Media: Getting Started, Implementation, and Execution

Social Media (and Beyond): Small Business

Social Media: Hiring and in the Workplace

Social Media: Measurement and ROI

Social Media: General

Twitter

Facebook

LinkedIn

Leveraging Other Social Media Sites

Blogging

Reputation Management

Content Development/Marketing

Web Development and Website Strategy

Video

SEO: Strategy

SEO: Information

Link Building

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Marketing

Affiliate Marketing

Analytics

Usability

Landing Pages

Local/Mobile Search

(Personal) Branding

Building a Brand/Brand Evangelism

Public Relations

Community Management/Engagement

Entrepreneurship

General Online Marketing

Everything Else Under the Sun

And in case 300 wasn’t enough, here’s the best 2010 posts on Techipedia:

Badges

Get featured? Put the badge on your website.




Closing Thoughts

It’s been a great year. My son is thriving and just started walking. He brings a lot of great joy to our family. My book has been published in three languages: Italian, Portuguese, and German, and the German editorial team is already working on a second edition. I’ve been involved in some incredible projects, including plans for my own social startup (to be announced), and I think there will even be another one in the works very soon.

I’m starting to act as an advisor on several new social projects created by some highly motivated colleagues and peers; the social space looks extremely promising and there’s no shortage of some excellent things coming our way these next few months. I’m open to working with you on your social startups, so please be in touch.

I’m always interested in hearing about how I can help you on your business at any level, so please do connect with me and let’s see what we can do together.

Best wishes to you, your colleagues, and your families this year!

Photos by Shutterstock.

This post takes me an entire year to write due to reading and reviewing the posts and ultimately compiling them, and therefore consumes hundreds of hours of time. Since it happens every single year, please do not reproduce this on your site in any format. If you’d like to share this with your audience, please link to the post.

Oh, and if you like this post and/or want to say happy 30, I’m finally throwing in my Amazon Wishlist.

[ Best Internet Marketing Posts of 2010 is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

Like this post? Get my Internet Marketing newsletter, buy my book, The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, and subscribe to the Techipedia RSS feed.

]]> http://www.techipedia.com/2011/internet-marketing-posts-2010/feed/ 71 3 Golden Business Rules for Social Media Engagement http://www.techipedia.com/2010/business-social-media-engagement/ http://www.techipedia.com/2010/business-social-media-engagement/#comments Wed, 25 Aug 2010 13:07:17 +0000 Tamar Weinberg http://www.techipedia.com/?p=2895 [ 3 Golden Business Rules for Social Media Engagement is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

Like this post? Get my Internet Marketing newsletter, buy my book, The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, and subscribe to the Techipedia RSS feed.

]]>

If you’re doing social media for your business, there’s nothing better than to do it right. Many companies partake in this “shiny toy syndrome” and do it all without a plan or strategy in place. Worse, many don’t really understand what to do once they start. They hear about tools, put forth a miserable effort, and are either too busy or just lazy.

With social media, an abundance of resources are at your fingertips. However, without a successful plan and any adequate preparation, your social media efforts will fail. Here are three dos and don’ts you should think about before you move forward.

Don’t self promote.

Okay, so this should be obvious, but there are so many businesses that don’t get it. On a particular forum I am active on (yes, I still use them!), I noticed someone asking for advice. A response came from a business owner who had the perfect answer on her website and directed the original poster to the website for a detailed reply. Sadly, this person’s post was pulled by the strict moderators on that forum; the post was purely self-promotional and nothing but. When I reviewed the poster’s account, I understood why. I noticed that she had done the same thing on other discussions on the same forum over a period of several months and all of them were pulled!

Want to self promote? You can! Just do it while giving back to the community as well. Engage in dialogue. Participate and offer genuine feedback. If you’re only on the forum to tell other people to visit your website or to use your product, you won’t go far. Maybe the moderators of the forum you visit won’t care, but the incessant messages eventually annoy your followers and they’ll unfollow you, report/bury your submissions, or find another place to congregate that doesn’t include your spam.

Do engage during business hours, especially if that’s your job!

Many of you who have hired me know that some of my best work may not come between 9 AM and 6 PM. I reply to emails around the clock like a robot. If I’m managing your Twitter account, you might find a response from me at 11 PM on a Saturday night or 2 AM on a Tuesday. But that doesn’t mean I go silent during business hours, and neither should you. While I respect that most of the world isn’t on the same schedule as I am and that most of the world is tweeting when they’re on the clock and won’t go the extra mile because it’s “just a job,” I do have the expectation that you should respond to your customers during business hours, and preferably within a reasonable amount of time (1-2 business days, but closer to one when using a social media channel). Don’t make your social media efforts half-assed. Don’t check in on Twitter and Facebook once or twice a week and only for 10 minutes.

I understand that some people may have other responsibilities on top of social media. That’s why this is more of a message for large and not necessarily small brands. Not long ago, I tweeted praise to a business and followed up with them about something else via email. Neither the tweet or the follow up direct message was responded to in a timely fashion. This is a well known brand, but yet they’re not building up their social media presence despite prominently advertising it on their website. Their Twitter account has less than 500 followers but they’re not engaging enough. The Facebook page could be totally overrun by bandits and they’d never know because they aren’t paying that much attention.

If you’re going to engage in social media, do it! Just do it head first, not with one foot.

Do study your influencers

Want to reach out to influencers? Yeah, most of us do. We want to get the people of a certain level of authority to talk about us. It can be potentially huge for everyone involved.

Thing is, some people don’t really reach out correctly to influencers. They don’t read 20 blog posts and comments. They don’t follow guidelines on contact form policies on what will be covered and what won’t be. Influencer outreach may possibly be the most powerful outreach tactic that PR practitioners or marketers are laziest about. This turns bloggers sour, thinking that everyone in public relations or blogger outreach is just a spammer.

I can tell a zillion stories about off topic pitches, but other posts have already told some of those tales. But before you gloss over this bullet point and say “it won’t happen to me,” guess what — it probably already did. In a recent campaign, I was reached by a social media agency about a topic that was totally irrelevant to my audience and would never be something I’d blog about. Some people get that. Meanwhile, this agency contracted one of the biggest social media rockstars in the space, a guy who has a stellar social media record. Yet he’s also the reason why I was on this agency’s distribution list using an email address I don’t publicize. If this rockstar knew better, he’d have used my contact form and read my coverage policy (short answer: I won’t cover anything you send to me). He’d also have done the outreach personally since I’ve met the guy at social media events. Instead, he passed on my email address without regard for it being a private email, and the agency sent me a clear newsletter blast with fancy fonts and the whole nine yards — with no regard for who I am and what I write about.

It’s time consuming to look at which bloggers to target, read posts, and then write a personal message to the blogger along with the actual pitch. However, if you want really good coverage, you’ll do it. Study your influencers out; don’t take the lazy path because you can. Nobody passes a difficult exam with little to no preparation (unless they’re really smart!)

This may be nothing more than a refresher course in the Captain Obvious department but even the savviest of companies is still missing the boat. When it comes to social media, social should always be carefully weighted before the marketing is put forth. In social media, it may be more important to market slowly and the right way or not at all. It’s not always about numbers and it’s not about sporadic participation. It’s about building relationships, spending time on the networks, and having regular conversations with the people you want to connect with who you will value for more than just helping move the needle and getting to the bottom line. All of that will come — but it comes more effectively once you put forth true effort into connecting with the people who matter.

Photos by Shutterstock.

[ 3 Golden Business Rules for Social Media Engagement is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

Like this post? Get my Internet Marketing newsletter, buy my book, The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, and subscribe to the Techipedia RSS feed.

]]> http://www.techipedia.com/2010/business-social-media-engagement/feed/ 52 7 Deadly Blog Writing Sins http://www.techipedia.com/2010/7-deadly-blog-writing-sins/ http://www.techipedia.com/2010/7-deadly-blog-writing-sins/#comments Thu, 15 Jul 2010 13:29:04 +0000 Guest Author http://www.techipedia.com/?p=2663 [ 7 Deadly Blog Writing Sins is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

Like this post? Get my Internet Marketing newsletter, buy my book, The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, and subscribe to the Techipedia RSS feed.

]]>

This is a guest post by Frank Lee.

These days, many people have started a blog for hobby or business. The trouble is, with so much competition out there, your blog really has to stand out from the crowd. In fact, not only does your blog need to stand out from the average ones that are popping up every day, but you also need to compete with established blogs, with their loyal fan bases, that have been around for years. In short, in order to have any impact whatsoever, good is just not good enough. Your blog has to be excellent.

Your Blog Is Not Getting Traffic?

Maybe you’ve set up a blog to advertise your business. Maybe you’ve set up a blog to run AdSense and earn money from the search engines. Maybe you just have a message you want to share. Whatever your motivation, your blog needs traffic to achieve those goals, and to do that, you need great content.

Today I will share with you some blog writing tips from my own experience that are pure gold, and will have you building traffic, and repeat visitors, in no time!

Get Your Blog Read and Followed

When it comes to the internet, there’s one golden rule that stands head and shoulders above the others: content is king. Although there are other types of content out there that you could post on your blog, that usually means you need to write great blog posts. Here are those sins, and how you can avoid them:

Using Jargon or Technical Terms

If you think writing blog posts that require a degree or a post grad in nuclear physics to understand, you’re not going to get a big following. No one cares how smart you are, or how smart you think you are. What they want is concise, interesting, and most importantly, intelligible content. Always write in layman’s terms (unless you are really writing for nuclear physicists – in that case, you’re on your own!)

Using Complex, High Brow English

You might be interested to find that the average internet user reads at high school level. That means that that entire high brow English you think is impressive is actually a giant yawn fest. When it comes to the level of language, I follow the K.I.S.S. principle: Keep It Simple Stupid! That way, everyone can read and understand your posts.

Writing As If You’re Authoring a Textbook

Blogs are not designed to be highly technical pieces of literature. They’re designed to be chatty – as if you were having a conversation with a friend. Write your blog posts to be funny, interesting and most importantly, as if you were talking to an actual human.

Not Using Keywords

Okay, so your blog posts need to be people friendly. That doesn’t mean they can’t be search engine friendly too. A peppering of keywords here and there will help your blog be more visible to search engines. This is especially useful when your blog links to a site, or when you are using AdSense or another service to earn off your blog.

Keyword Stuffing

All right, so it seems contradictory, but if you’re going to use keywords as I mentioned before, you can’t just stuff them in everywhere! Slow down! Remember, your posts still have to make sense to actual humans, so save the keywords for places where they actually make sense, and where using them won’t confuse your reader.

Long, Unbroken Chunks of Text

People read blogs and other web content to get information. However, when faced with a screen dominated by a solid block of text, it’s very hard for them to follow your train of thought. Use headings, subheadings, bullets and lists to break up the monotony, and make your text easier to scan through. You’ll have far more chance that visitors will actually finish reading your posts!

Not Including Images

Okay, so I know I said that content is king, and it’s true that the text content of your blog is what people are visiting for. That having been said, well chosen images can add interest, and help to put what you are writing in context. Think of it as eye candy for your readers! Just make sure that the images are relevant and copyright free!

Avoid doing the above when doing your next blog post. Blogging is fun to do once you got the building blocks right. As you develop the habits to write great blog posts, you will see your readership increase. And it is such a reward to see when your blog post helping people to make breakthrough or to learn a new idea. Those comments on your blog are great way to hear the feedback and to improve your blog constantly.

It is vital to master writing great content on your blog. Next step you need to market your blog to reach your target audience. Social media marketing, SEO, and forum marketing are the great ways to expand your market coverage.

Develop a systematic way to achieve your goal by doing content creation and traffic generation regularly rather than a shotgun approach. Schedule those important activities in your weekly calendar.
Keep building more valuable content and engage in marketing this content. Your consistent effort will payoff quickly.

Frank Lee shares a Free Gift to guide you step-by-step to “Breakthrough Article Marketing” – simply visit his site today and discover how you too can generate loads of free buying traffic using a simple 5 step unique article writing method in his Internet Marketing Systems. Frank also runs a list building program that will easily help you build your email subscribers.

Photos by Shutterstock.

[ 7 Deadly Blog Writing Sins is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

Like this post? Get my Internet Marketing newsletter, buy my book, The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, and subscribe to the Techipedia RSS feed.

]]> http://www.techipedia.com/2010/7-deadly-blog-writing-sins/feed/ 72 Analysis of Five Top Blogs and What You Can Learn from Them http://www.techipedia.com/2010/five-blog-analysis/ http://www.techipedia.com/2010/five-blog-analysis/#comments Thu, 01 Jul 2010 13:41:05 +0000 Guest Author http://www.techipedia.com/?p=2611 [ Analysis of Five Top Blogs and What You Can Learn from Them is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

Like this post? Get my Internet Marketing newsletter, buy my book, The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, and subscribe to the Techipedia RSS feed.

]]>

Inspired by my recent post on How Young is Too Young?, I was contacted by 16-year-old blogger Onibalusi Bamidele who has guest-written this post.

There is a trend among many new (and even old) bloggers. I discovered many of them tend to quit, lose hope, or even become less dedicated to their blogs when it seems they are not seeing any result for a period of time.

In blogging, however, we all know that there is nothing like overnight success and you will only get what you put into it. If you invest your time and hard work into your blog, then you surely will get something great in return.

This post will analyze five of the most popular blogs on the Internet and will detail a lot of factors about them that contribute to their success; hopefully, you can examine some of the factors and improve on yours.
The following blogs will be analyzed:

  1. ProBlogger
  2. Copyblogger
  3. Daily Blog Tips
  4. Steve Pavlina’s Personal Development Blog
  5. Entrepreneur’s Journey

The following factors will be analyzed:

  1. Their blog age.
  2. Their domain name
  3. Their post type – length, frequency and value.
  4. Their monetization strategy
  5. What they have in common

Their Blog Age

I will be using when they started writing blog posts to calculate their blog age which can be found in their blog archives. Based on my findings, Problogger started in 2004, Copyblogger started in 2006, Daily Blog Tips started in 2006, Steve Pavlina’s Blog started in 2004, and Entrepreneur’s Journey started in 2004.

You will notice that all these blogs did not just start yesterday or even last year. They have been around for years now. Yet many bloggers who have not even spent up to a year on their blogs keep complaining about not achieving any results. It is true everybody loves success but we should also not fail to understand that success does not come overnight; it comes after a lot of hard work, persistence, and patience.

I have yet to see a top blog that has not been around for years now, and that is what brings about the joy of it.

Similarly, this is applicable to the “make money online” niche. If that becomes too easy, then everybody will be doing it and it will lose its value.

It takes hard work and patience to make it offline and this is exactly applicable online.

Their Domain Name

Another great thing to analyze from these blogs is their domain name. I personally believe that your domain name will affect your blogging career and how people look at your blog.

It is very important to have a domain name that communicates what you blog about without even visiting it to get that assurance. To that end, if we take a look at the above domain names, we will notice that almost all of them made it easy to know they are about blogging. The only exceptions are Steve Pavlina and Entrepreneur’s Journey which are naturally not in the blogging niche.

Another great thing to note from the above domain names is that they are user friendly and very easy to remember, and most of them are less than 15 characters.

Further, if we also take a close look at some of the domains, you will notice they try to establish a type of authority for the blogger. For example, by looking at ProBlogger, we are being told that the owner is not an amateur but a pro blogger.

Many bloggers will ask “why should I use a name like ‘problogger’ when I don’t know much about blogging?” I will answer this question in a simple manner. Darren registered this domain name when he was not known and when he had no readers. It is how you treat yourself that your readers will treat you. If you begin to call yourself a mediocre now then your readers will regard you as such and it will affect your overall blogging career.

It should be noted that a blogger can still succeed irrespective of the domain name, but the better and more memorable your domain name, the easier it is for you to succeed.

Their Post Type – Length and Value

Many bloggers believe that you should be writing long posts (like Glen does), but I can tell you it depends on you, your writing style, and how best you can convey your message.

Let’s take Techipedia for example. Most posts are long but you will discover that the posts here are not just rehashed junk and have great value to add to you (the reader). It is simple because Tamar discovered that is what works best for her and she adapted to it.

I also love writing long posts because I love to give great value in my posts and I believe that can be done better in a long post. For example, if I’m blogging to tell you the importance of traffic then I should also tell you how to get traffic in the same post.

Short posts also work but you must be ready to update regularly. You will notice Tamar does not post everyday (Glen also does not) because their single posts already convey a lot of information. I prefer this method than a blog that just passes out anything and posts everyday.


Below are the posting frequency of the above blogs:
ProBlogger provides updates everyday, Copyblogger updates almost everyday, Daily Blog Tips has provides updates everyday, Steve Pavlina updates anytime (but regularly), and Entrepreneur’s Journey updates anytime.

You will notice that only half of the above blogs update everyday, while the other half updates when they like but I think this your own choice should depend on your online business model.

If your online business model is to make money from advertisements like AdSense and banner ads then I will suggest you should be updating regularly because the type of visitors who work most with this model are the search engine visitors, so the more regularly you update your blog, the more search engine visit your content and the more you get indexed, the more traffic you will gain.

It is also important to note that these blogs are not just popular because of one thing but because they give value. If you take a look into their blogs, you will notice that they don’t just write anything but they write high quality and informative posts.

Their Monetization Strategy

Many bloggers are of the assertions that using some types of monetization strategy will hinder the growth of your blog; this is true and is not true. You should know that using some types of ads like Kontera (contextual advertising) and the likes on your blog will irritate a large percentage of your readers but using AdSense the right way will not affect your blog.

Even the most popular of these blogs (ProBlogger) uses AdSense and banner ads and I don’t think it is affecting the growth of the blog.

My suggestion is for you to start monetizing now so that you curb the expectation of “free” amongst your readers. For example, my blog is three months old. I have never written a product review on my blog and my posts average 30 comments. However, after writing a product review on my blog recently, after 24 hours I only had 3 comments on the post (which is very unusual). This means I have built an audience who love free information only. Now I must work on correcting this.

All of these blogs also make use of affiliate marketing and it works for them since they have a large audience. However, what I don’t see them use is contextual ads, and I wouldn’t advise any new blogger to use it.

What They Have in Common

What all these bloggers have in common is passion and patience. If they were not patient then they would have quit years back. I am very sure there were some bloggers who started with them and were inspired by them but are no longer blogging. Blogging is really great only if you are ready to work hard and wait patiently for the results.

It is also important to notice that all these bloggers don’t just write anything on their blogs; they write valuable posts only.

MY TIP: Examine your blog now. Is it where you were some months ago or you are improving? It is true all of these blogs were not overnight successes and it took time for them to be where they are but you should also note that growth is a gradual process. If you are where you were six months ago then I would advise you to think twice and examine your blog to know what you are doing wrong, and if you can’t find any then my best advice for you will be to change your niche.

Onibalusi Bamidele is a 16 year old entrepreneur. He blogs at youngprepro.com where he shares some not so common tips. He also write about wordpress on wpkube.com. Get his free ebook on how to make it online.

Blog photo (bottom) by Shutterstock.

[ Analysis of Five Top Blogs and What You Can Learn from Them is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

Like this post? Get my Internet Marketing newsletter, buy my book, The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, and subscribe to the Techipedia RSS feed.

]]> http://www.techipedia.com/2010/five-blog-analysis/feed/ 44 How Young is Too Young? http://www.techipedia.com/2010/how-young-is-too-young/ http://www.techipedia.com/2010/how-young-is-too-young/#comments Thu, 10 Jun 2010 12:45:13 +0000 Tamar Weinberg http://www.techipedia.com/?p=1910 [ How Young is Too Young? is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

Like this post? Get my Internet Marketing newsletter, buy my book, The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, and subscribe to the Techipedia RSS feed.

]]>

I started blogging at age 20. Glen, too, got an early start. Today, there are young bloggers who have their own websites and blogs. Some even boast high rankings and good sized communities. As someone who is nearing 30, I look at these younger folks and am really impressed with their accomplishments, and I especially admire these youngsters as they chase their passions and dreams and still have time to do their homework.

I contacted a handful of young bloggers, all under the age of 17, to get an idea of whether they see their age as a hurdle and what advice they would give to new bloggers.

Let’s learn more about the kids and teens behind the blogs:


Ben Lang will be 17 in September and based in White Plains, NY. Ben’s blog, which covers entrepreneurship and social media, is wonderful despite him blogging for less than a year (he started shortly after his 16th birthday!). In March, he came out with a list of social media blogs you should be reading, and no, I didn’t play favorites here; Techipedia is not included. :)


Adora Svitak is amazing. Her blog reads better than some blogs I’ve stumbled upon that are written by adults. Adora is actually known as a “tiny literary giant” and is a voracious reader. Would you believe that she’s only 12? Yeah, that’s right. She’s been blogging since she was 7 and currently resides in Redmond, WA.


Josh Budde is 16 years old and had been blogging for three years. In fact, since we last corresponded, Josh moved blogs from this one to this one. A resident of Western New York, he’s not just a blogger but a podcaster. Josh also enjoys writing crime and law stories and uses his blog to share personal stories with his friends.


Marly (right) and Ani (left) are sisters and have both been blogging for about a year. Now 13 and 10 (note: Ani’s URL is private; she is 10, after all!) and residents of Southern California, they blog about personal life and whatever comes to mind. Also pictured (center) is mom Ciaran Blumenfeld, who is also a blogger.


Gloson Teh is one of my favorite social media kids. I met him on StumbleUpon over a year ago and he is one of those kids who never ceases to amaze me; he totally understands social media and his 22 Reasons for You to Blog was even featured in my annual Best Posts of 2009 roundup. What’s more surprising is that Gloson lives in Selangor, Malaysia and is also only 12 years old. He started blogging at age 10 and says that his mother encouraged him to get into it because of his online gaming addiction. Now a blogging convert, he says, “Indeed, blogging is really more fun than online games!”


Shelby really liked the TV show Jericho, and at the age of 9, started a site called Jericho4Kids. A 12-year-old resident of Missouri, Shelby’s Jericho website features a blog and has turned into a social good campaign with her promotion of charitable efforts for US troops, and even includes interviews with the cast and crew of Jericho as well as with US Air Force Thunderbirds and Alex O’Loughlin. (And yes, she has taken a photo with Skeet Ulrich.)

Carl Ocab has been blogging in the “make money online” niche since he was 13. Now 16, he ranks on the first page for a super competitive search phrase (that even John Chow tried to seize once upon a time). And he’s been compared to some hugely popular bloggers. Carl lives in the Philippines.

Sean McGee is a huge U2 fan like his dad (yes, that Matt). He’s 12 years old and lives in Tri-Cities, Washington. His blog is full with regular small byte-sized updates about U2, sports, movies, and more. He also tweets regularly.

I asked two questions, and here are their answers:

How Young is Too Young?

Ben: There’s no too young! I keep hearing about 13 year old bloggers, 10 year old entrepreneurs, the younger the more impressive.

Adora: I wouldn’t say there’s a set age where you should or shouldn’t be on a computer (well, I wouldn’t quite hand my laptop over to a one-year-old); I think that kids should have some amount of computer literacy by the age of eight. One of the reasons I type so well today is because I started typing on a laptop when I was six, and really fell in love with it. Technology, and blogging, offers a lot to kids. At the same time, I think it’s imperative that kids, both my age and younger, get the opportunity to play outside and experience nature, family, and some good old-fashioned reading before they start using computers heavily. After all, they’ll be using them for the rest of their lives. :)

Josh: Anyone under 11 is too young to be blogging, in my opinion.

Marly: Nine! No, Eight. No. Haha! You can blog at any age. Anything that you want to do, to express – you can do that on your blog. You just need to get your parents help to make sure the stuff on your blog is ok.

Ani: If you can’t write you are too young! Any age is okay if you can write.

Gloson: I believe there is no age limit as long as the person knows the basics of internet security and can administrate and write the blog by himself. ;)

Shelby: You are never to young to go after your goals, you just might need a little help getting them accomplished when you are younger. I was 9 years old when my web site went up, and it was my dream, but a lot of people helped me to make that dream come true, so as kids we might need a little help but we can still go after our dreams.

Carl: Possibly when you don’t even know how to type yet.

Sean: Anyone under the age of 8. If you don’t know how to type or just put something like, “cupcakes are awesome” then you’re too young.

What Advice Can You Give to New Bloggers?

Ben: Most importantly, be persistent. It took me 6 months to acquire a good amount of traffic and cultivate a community on my blog and the same goes for any new blogger. It’s impossible to do it all in one day, it takes time, providing new content consistently, maintaining your blog and networking with other bloggers.

Adora: My advice to new bloggers would be: don’t look at it as something that you have to update every day in order not to disappoint readers, or because you have to stick with it; rather, enjoy it as a journey and write about whatever interests you. That’s what they’re for!

Josh: Anyone who is thinking about starting a blog or podcast: First, find a niche. Second, podcast and write away… And finally, third, write about what you want to write about. You control your blog, not someone else.

Marly: Write something that you are interested in and that you enjoy and want to learn more about.

Ani: Choose something you really like and won’t get sick of because you’ll be stuck with your blog for a long time. People will get used to your blog and if you stop, they’ll get depressed and you’ll have to start all over.

Gloson: Firstly, you must be patient if you don’t get visitors immediately (I haven’t got my first comment until the fourth month I’ve been blogging!). Many bloggers give up too quickly because they feel that no one is reading their blog.

Secondly, you must be dedicated, because even if you’re patient, you won’t be successful unless you are dedicated too.

Thirdly, get social and join social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and StumbleUpon to connect with people and make friends! Blogging is so much fun with friends! Social media is also a great way to promote your blog posts.

Fourthly, read great blogs to be inspired (like Techipedia)! And be sure you pick a topic or niche you are passionate about so you will stay motivated!

Last but not least, remember to give more than you receive!

Shelby: Really think about what you want to do, make a plan, and do it. I started wanting to have a web site when I was 8, I kept drawing plans for one. Then all of this Jericho stuff happened and I sat down and drew most of my site on paper. I asked for other peoples opinions too and added a page for my brother and for my dog Bailey. I wanted to be able to blog but to also have a web site, so my site is a combination of those two things and it works. The site looks A LOT like my original designs and that is because volunteers helped to make my vision come to life.

New bloggers should find interesting things to write about, do interviews with people who do the things they are interested in and most importantly they should use their site to help charities and our troops. We need to let people who need help or just need someone to say Hi and Thank you to them know that we really do care. Use your blog to do great things! Also, be respectful on your blog, that doesn’t mean you have to agree with everyone all of the time, but disagree in a way that doesn’t make you look like the “mean blogger”.

Carl: Have a vision, plan then act. Top it off with a mentor and sprinkle Focus and you’ve got something cooking!

Sean: My advice to new bloggers would be, who cares if your friends think it’s dumb, just do it because you like it.

We can certainly learn a lot from kids. I know I’m learning from kids who aren’t even able to talk yet.

(Special thanks to Debra Mastaler for the inspiration behind this post.)

[ How Young is Too Young? is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

Like this post? Get my Internet Marketing newsletter, buy my book, The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, and subscribe to the Techipedia RSS feed.

]]> http://www.techipedia.com/2010/how-young-is-too-young/feed/ 72 Social Media Strategy from A to Z http://www.techipedia.com/2010/social-media-strategy-a-z/ http://www.techipedia.com/2010/social-media-strategy-a-z/#comments Fri, 28 May 2010 13:03:40 +0000 Tamar Weinberg http://www.techipedia.com/?p=1838 [ Social Media Strategy from A to Z is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

Like this post? Get my Internet Marketing newsletter, buy my book, The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, and subscribe to the Techipedia RSS feed.

]]>

Social media might be old. It might even be a dead buzzword. That’s why you need to paint a picture that’s more meaningful and encompasses what “social media” as a label really is.

Some of us have been thrust into social media simply because the online landscape showed potential for online conversations. Others have been there for over a decade. Regardless of the many years of experience you have in the online space, the ideas behind social media and social media marketing are applicable to everyone. Let’s take a look at some lessons, takeaways, and tips.

Always be Listening. Social media rocks because it’s one of the most amazing tools for “free” market research. Your investment is merely that of time. Take the time to hear what people are saying about your business. If you’re the frugal type, take advantage of the free alerts from Google, YackTrack, Social Mention, BackType (which gives you alerts from blog/article comments, which other services do not include), and Trackur.

Blogging. Who said that blogging was dead? Perhaps 140 character streams have replaced regular blogging, but I’ve been blogging more than ever lately. Blogging helps you build community (especially via comments), establish thought leadership, bring links to your website (both internally, perhaps to products or to other articles on your blog, and externally, when people like what you say and opt to link to you), and get you some nice traffic. If you can blog, you should. And read these tips on how to become a great blogger.

Customer Service. The letter “C” could be a lot of things, like “content,” “consistency,” and “community,” but customer service is a big part of the evolution of social media. This shift is becoming increasingly more obvious. The role of customer service online is becoming equivalent to social media marketing. If you use the online space to offer customer service, you are essentially marketing yourself. Showing a public interest in your customers and genuinely offering help helps nurture a positive perception of your brand.

Drive Leads through LinkedIn. Lead generation and client acquisition can be had on LinkedIn, especially in the B2B space, just as long as you’re active and engaging. Linkedin lead generation requires commitment to answering and asking questions on Groups/Answers, taking advantage of the deep searches, and connecting directly with those around you in your network. Effective use means more business.

Engagement. It’s not enough to broadcast. “Look at this! Twitter! Let me port my RSS feed to it and be done with it!” Nope, that’s the wrong approach. Engagement requires regular interaction between you and others. These are conversations, not broadcasts. You may not want to do it super frequently, but you should do it everyday. Be responsive. Offer value. Give to your community.

Friendships. Thought I was going to say “Facebook?” Sorry. The best types of social media marketing arise from genuine concern as if your customers are true friends. How many of you have made true friends from merely engaging in this space? Exactly. There’s so much to gain from being networked, and you’ll find that there’s a real reward in finding out that these relationships turn into something much more.

Goals. You shouldn’t jump into social media just because “everyone else is doing it.” There’s a lot of potential, of course, and it looks mighty appealing, but setting goals is advisable as well. You might want to consider the SMART formula for specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely goals. Whatever goal methodology you adopt, don’t jump into social media without having something you want to gain from it.

Human Business. Social media marketing is what you might call “human business.” I often use explain it as follows: “social media marketing is all about ‘leveraging’ the social through its media to market to your constituents.” “Leverage” may sound a tad too exploitative, because the idea is to build genuine relationships that put the customers first before promoting your own agenda. As such, it’s important never to lose sight of the “human” in the business. Social media marketing recognizes the fact that this online space allows millions of people to congregate and to communicate with one another, and it’s not much different than sitting in a real room talking to real people. Never lose sight that the online space is a human medium.

Influence. Social media gives you an opportunity to exert influence onto customers and prospects. If you’re active in any particular medium, you become influential. That influence often translates to interest; people want to hear what you have to say. Here are tips on becoming an influential blogger.

Join the Community. It’s not enough just to sit back and relax and hope that people notice you. Joining the community, and more importantly, participating, is crucial. Everyone needs to do work — real work — to reap the benefits of social media marketing. You can’t hope that someone remembers you when you’re not aggressively and actively doing that which makes you remembered. You need to court new customers. You need to keep your current customers happy. By joining various communities, you have the opportunity to meet with prospects and build relationships with current customers.

Kirtsy and Other Niche Social Networks. Did you know there’s a social news website catered to women called Kirtsy? There is. For any interest in the world, there’s an online community for it. You just need to look. Kirtsy is a social news network; there are also forums and even Yahoo! Groups. It’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with these communities and not to focus merely on the big players. Your target market might be hiding in a niche forum somewhere out there. Start digging and maybe you’ll reap some serious rewards.

Location. People always ask me what the “future” of social media is. I think that where we are will continue to evolve, but we’re seeing that face-to-face connections have a role in social media marketing as well. FourSquare, Gowalla, Loopt, and other location-aware services are social networks, unifying real connections. Beyond that, though, there’s the potential for businesses to run with special promotions, bringing more people to a business location and maybe even cultivating new friendships as well.

Marketing Beyond the Social. This is a blog post intended to address social media strategy, but social media marketing is not a panacea. It alone is not the only marketing solution. There’s display advertising, print/TV ads, SEO, PPC, email marketing, snail mail, etc etc. Focusing solely on social media might be nice, but your marketing reach should be a little more extensive than focusing on Twitter and Facebook. That said, marketing beyond the standard mediums (see letter K) should also be a given. I’m going to bet that 99% of you have not tapped into some the most powerful online communities that can serve you or your own clients.

Nurture Perception. Sure, people don’t want to lose control of the conversation. That’s one of the biggest reasons for companies not to engage in social media at all. They like dictating and broadcasting, and they’re afraid of a two-way conversation and the potential negative impacts of engaging. They’re especially worried when people are already saying negative things about them. That’s where you as a business, one that genuinely cares about building true relationships, can shine. You may not be able to change perceptions overnight, but you can certainly nurture those perceptions and give customers reasons to give you a chance in the future.

Opt-in, not out. Using social media is a privilege, but someone friending you on a social network doesn’t mean they agree to receive unsolicited messaging. This explicitly references the LinkedIn or Facebook connections that give you access to a person’s precious “commodity,” his email address. Just because you have access to it doesn’t mean he wants your newsletter. A relationship is not a newsletter opt-in, and quite frankly, it’s spammy. If I give you my phone number at a dinner party, it’s probably because I want to know about you, but I’m not inviting you to start hounding me with sales calls. Don’t opt someone into communications just because they’re your newest LinkedIn contact. Do it because they want to be a subscriber and explicitly opted in first.

Participation is Marketing. This term was coined by Chris Heuer five years ago and still rings true. The idea is that when businesses participate in social media (and do so because they want to actually be members, not marketers), their sheer presence and activity on the service translates to marketing. What does that mean for you? By engaging, being yourself, being altruistic (and coming bearing gifts, looking to offer value and not to receive), you’ll gain some followers and fans, and maybe even customers.

Queen. That’s what marketing is, according to Gary Vaynerchuk. Content is king, but marketing is the queen, he said. (I even have the shirt.) Content alone is not enough. Blogging is wonderful, but if you’re not going to market those blog posts, you might as well not be blogging at all. With billions of pages of content and yottabytes of data, marketing is how you’ll get people to see what you have to offer to the world.

Reputation Management. If you’ve seen a negative search result for your business name, social media marketing might be able to help. By creating social media profiles, updating content regularly, and actively participating on social media networks, you may be able to successfully push down those negative mentions of your business name.

Simplifying with Tools. One of my favorite things about social media marketing is simply the many tools that make your life so much easier. Tools that especially help consolidate the actions across social networks in one single location are quite helpful. Social media doesn’t have to be a challenge thanks to tools that help you track measurement, assess the reach of campaigns, give you updates when someone talks about you, and more. I’ll go into some tools in future posts (and we’ve seen some great listening tools under the letter A), but it becomes obvious that those of us involved in the social media space are quite fortunate; our jobs are made much easier thanks to so many software applications out there. Of course, never forget that this is human business, and the tools aren’t supposed to replace relationships.

Time. Want to be an “overnight success?” Sorry, that’s not something you can do in social media marketing. Sure, you can have viral campaigns that truly rock, but at the end of the day, it’s all a substantial time investment. I’ve said it before; social media is not a silver bullet. While some campaigns are formulated to broadcast and promote on social channels quickly, true social media marketing relates to building relationships with customers and constituents. That takes time. It won’t happen overnight and you shouldn’t expect it to happen in one month’s time either. If you’re in it to win it, you better be doing it for the long haul.

Understanding Your Community. Three years ago, I wrote that owning your community requires understanding of who they are. People love the prospect of submitting to Digg, for example, and some immediately submit the spammiest articles to the service. I’ve seen press releases, non-English releases, and everything else in between. Before you jump in, you need to actually observe and understand the culture on these services. Learn the rules, the language, and the things that make them tick. You can’t succeed in social media without understanding the community.

Value. Your success as a blogger and promoter really comes from offering value to your audience. It’s not about regurgitating content through twitterfeed, and it’s not about summarizing a post from Mashable without giving additional insights. Value-add comes from injecting your own thoughts, opinions, and feelings. It’s about giving someone else an education and/or leaving them with something to think about.

Word of mouth marketing. Social media is a big part of word of mouth marketing. After all, you’re using social media to talk, but hopefully you’re also working harder to get people to talk about you. People listen to their friends’ recommendations. In fact, are you surprised that Google now takes advantage of this in the form of social search?

Xperiment. Okay, that’s not a word. But experimenting is critical for success. You won’t know until you try. You can always run with some tests, get some feedback, and see if you can run with it full scale. Use the feedback others give you to improve or to go ahead with it. And don’t be afraid if you fail. Just consider that an opportunity to grow and do better the next time around. If you as a newcomer to the space see social media marketing as an experimental pilot program and use any feedback you receive as input for tweaks, you’ll consistently see improvements.

YouTube. YouTube now has 2 billion views per day. It’d be silly to ignore YouTube as a potential medium for marketing your business. It would also be silly to limit distribution of video by preventing them from being embedded onto other websites. That’s how the message spreads. If you’re considering video, do something creative; look for the traits of the most successful videos and do it better. And of course, don’t only focus on YouTube; there are other video syndication sites that you can spread your message to.

Zealous. Let’s put it this way: the most successful social media marketers are both passionate about what they represent and the act of marketing. They don’t shy away from putting their best foot forward — they know that the fact that your favorite search engine does not forget means you need to be on your best behavior always. This doesn’t get to them; they’re still offering service with a smile.

Sure, this only scratches the surface of social media marketing, and there are only 26 takeaways, but hopefully these tips, tricks, and tools will be able to get you thinking. What other social media ideas would you add to the list?

Photos by Shutterstock.

[ Social Media Strategy from A to Z is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

Like this post? Get my Internet Marketing newsletter, buy my book, The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, and subscribe to the Techipedia RSS feed.

]]> http://www.techipedia.com/2010/social-media-strategy-a-z/feed/ 55 How to Get an Influencer’s Attention http://www.techipedia.com/2010/influencer-attention/ http://www.techipedia.com/2010/influencer-attention/#comments Wed, 24 Mar 2010 13:25:36 +0000 Tamar Weinberg http://www.techipedia.com/?p=1328 [ How to Get an Influencer’s Attention is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

Like this post? Get my Internet Marketing newsletter, buy my book, The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, and subscribe to the Techipedia RSS feed.

]]>

Influence is everywhere, but it’s up to you to spot it. As information flow is infinite, many find that it is of utmost importance to capture the attention of the select few who serve as influencers — these are the people who can actually stop their followers in their tracks to help spread your message. Perhaps this might serve as the start of a real relationship. If nothing else, these influencers will help to share your story with their own audience.

I contacted a number of influencers to see what grabs their attention. I selected influencers in all different “walks of life” and areas of influence, from the blogosphere to the power users of Digg to founders of successful startups and authors of bestselling books. The question I asked, simply, was “how do you recommend people grab your attention?” The question was purposely left open-ended; I wasn’t necessarily seeking out attention in the form of a product pitch, despite the fact that many of those asked are prominent bloggers. As such, the responses are varied — just the way I wanted it. Here’s what they told me:

Craig Newmark

Craig Newmark is the San Francisco-based founder of the nearly 15-year-old extremely successful classifieds site Craigslist. As of January 2010, Craigslist boasts close to 50 million unique visitors per month, according to Compete.

For me, it’s just asking, via email, Twitter, or Facebook.

Seth Godin

Seth Godin is the bestselling author of numerous books, including his latest, Linchpin. He also writes for the most popular marketing blog, is the founder of Squidoo, and is an extremely dynamic public speaker.

PR people shouldn’t try to get my attention.

Readers with something to say should email me.

Marketers should make great products that loyal readers or long-time friends or trusted colleagues choose to tell me about!

Pete Cashmore

Pete is the twenty-something founder and CEO of Mashable and is also a CNN columnist. Mashable currently boasts over 20 million pageviews per month.

I think keeping it short and to the point is most likely to get a response — having a clear message or request that gets the idea across in a couple sentences. Everybody is short on time these days, and the more succinctly you can express yourself, the better.

Mark Frauenfelder

Mark Frauenfelder is a co-editor of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE Magazine.

It’s simple: talk or write about things that interest me!

Nicholas Carlson

Nicholas Carlson is a Senior Editor at The Business Insider. Previously, Nich wrote for Valleywag and InternetNews.com.

People can get my attention by helping me. For example, I write a lot about AOL, and after the recent layoffs, I wrote how the entire mobile advertising team took a voluntary buyout and quit the company. Now, a couple weeks later, a PR rep came to me and said, hey a lot of those people are joining this one company (that I rep), would you like to learn more? Because I know that my readers care about that story, I jumped on it so now this PR rep is going to get her company coverage because she approached me in a way that will help me.

Jesus Diaz

Jesus is the Senior Contributing Editor of highly popular gadget blog Gizmodo.

Read what I write about and imagine what can interest me. No amount of pitching will make me write something unless it excites my gonads.

Chris Brogan

Chris Brogan is a blogger and president of New Marketing Labs. He is also the author of Trust Agents and Social Media 101.

The way people get my attention is simple, and yet so few do it well. They start by telling me all about what they need from me. They start by telling me all about their wants, their angles, their client, etc. By contrast, the people who get my time, and who keep my time, actually have read my blog enough to know what I cover and what I don’t. (For instance, I rarely talk about software.) They know that I look for the “human business” angle for most of my stories. They know that I actually care about my community and that they’re not an audience. They understand brevity. And they understand that promoting others is every bit as important as promoting themselves.

Adam Pash

Adam Pash is the Editor-in-Chief of the highly popular blog, Lifehacker. He has also authored How to Do Everything With Your iPhone.

It’s about a lot of dos and don’ts for me.

  • Don’t send me what’s clearly a form note.
  • Do be direct.
  • Don’t try impress me with your funding or whatever industry related things you think you do really well. My eyes glaze over at the site of industry jargon.
  • Do make it easy for me to understand what your thing does, and what’s interesting or awesome about it (and do it as quickly as possible).
  • Don’t make me read a press release to figure out what’s special about whatever you’re trying to highlight.
  • …and so on.

Honestly, the best way to get my attention is to make something cool and show it to me. I love talking with developers about things they’re clearly and genuinely passionate about.

David Chen

David Chen is currently the Managing Editor of /Film and the host and producer of both /Filmcast and The Toblowsky Files.

Do your research and select your targets smartly. I’m a content/podcast producer, so I’ve spent literally hundreds of hours talking and writing about the types of movies (and other products) I love. You don’t need to listen or read all of my work to get a taste of my personality, but if you put in just  a little bit of effort, you can easily figure out what types of things I’m likely to enjoy and eager to promote. In other words, blast e-mails and form letters with no personalization will usually go ignored.

Robert Scoble

Robert Scoble is a prolific early adopter and blogger. He currently serves as the community guy at Building 43.

Do something interesting.

OK, that’s a lame answer.

But to get my attention you should look at what’s getting my engagement at http://twitter.com/scobleizer and the other places I write.

To tell the truth, this is difficult to say in an email. Why? Because, well, if you have something worth paying attention to you probably already have my attention.

Jason Calacanis

Jason Calacanis is the founder and CEO of Mahalo. He also co-founded Weblogs Inc. and the Silicon Alley Reporter. Jason is also the host of This Week in Startups.

Do something epic.

Matt Cutts

Matt Cutts is a blogger and Principal Engineer at Google, where he heads Google’s Webspam team.

I think it’s sometimes overused to call someone out by name; it can backfire. An introduction from a trusted contact can make a big difference. Getting to know the person first without asking for something (e.g. tweeting stuff back and forth without a specific “ask” in the beginning). I would say great research or a catchy piece of unexpected data that appeals to me. And of course a snail mail letter is likely to at least get opened.

Peter Rojas and Ryan Block

Peter Rojas and Ryan Block are the founders of gdgt. Both come from popular gadget blog Engadget, where Peter was founder and Ryan was former editor-in-chief. Peter is also the founder of Gizmodo, Joystiq, hackaday, and Engadget Mobile.

Peter: That’s easy: just do something interesting!
Ryan: …and keep doing it. I’d say being consistent and tireless amounts every bit as much as doing something interesting or worthwhile.

Danny Sullivan

Danny Sullivan is the Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Land. He also founded Search Engine Watch. Danny is currently Chief Content Officer of Third Door Media which operates the Sphinn social news site and organizes the popular Search Marketing Expo conference series.

I guess it depends on the attention they’re after. If they’re writing about something and trying to spread the word, I can be reached through email using a form on Search Engine Land, plus I do see tweets that are addressed to me. If it’s interesting, I love to spread the word. Point me at so-so, ho-hum content, and you’ve wasted a first impression. If they’re after coverage, email remains best. Be to the point, succinct, and that’s the best.

Anita Campbell

Anita Campbell is the Editor of Small Business Trends and an expert in everything small business.

Participate in my site’s community. Leave comments; tweet “with” me; share information that is valuable to readers (not self-promotional stuff, but something that gives freely of your expertise to others).

Also, while I appreciate requests to do guest posts, I strongly prefer those who have shown a propensity to contribute to the community on an ongoing basis. “Hit and run” guest posts are of little interest to us, for two reasons: (1) there’s a certain amount of work involved in getting someone set up as a new author and showing them the ropes; and (2) the community responds much much better to those they get to know and converse with regularly.

Louis Gray

Louis Gray is a prominent technology blogger and Managing Director of New Media at Paladin Advisors Group.

People can get my attention an a lot of different ways. The easiest way is interacting with me in my data flow. That means making comments on my blog posts, interacting with me on FriendFeed or Google Buzz, and sending me notices on Twitter. I will see all of those, every time. But I also have my e-mail addresses public and cell phone number on the Web site. People reaching out to me in those ways will also get me.

If the question is not just connection but actual attention, they need to find a way to be differentiated and interesting – helping to solve a known problem, or finding a new approach that has entertainment value. I am always interested in hearing about new approaches to solve today’s issues around information overload, content discovery or new ways to discover interesting people.

Brian Lam

Brian Lam is the Assistant Managing Director at Gawker Media and Editorial Director at Gizmodo.

Make noise, but backed up by fact!

Andrew Sorcini

Andrew Sorcini is also known as Mr. Baby Man and is Digg’s #1 User. Andy has submitted nearly 15,000 stories to Digg and over 4200 of his submissions have hit the front page of the impossible-to-game social news site.

First and foremost, show me something original.

Steve Gebhardt

Steve Gebhardt is the Content Editor of the COED Magazine, one of the fastest growing online publishers in the 18-24 year old market.

When it comes to work related instances the best way to get my attention is to be introduced formally by a close contact we have in common or email me at my “personal” work gmail account with a subject line that includes my name and something that I find interesting.

Steve Rubel

Steve Rubel is a prominent marketing blogger and SVP of Edelman Digital. He also contributes to Forbes and AdAge.

Basically, it’s really easy – provide high value content that’s targeted to my interests and those of my internal Edelman and external audiences. They can use any channel they would like – email, Facebook, Twitter, etc. (just not IM or the phone). I am very accessible.

This doesn’t necessarily mean pitch me, however. There are lots of people and companies that have secured my attention because they provide regular value. One example is Mint and the insights they offer via their blog. Another is Google, which is putting out gems on their Twitter feed – like this http://twitter.com/Googletech/status/10184907622

Kurt Kohlstedt

Kurt Kohlstedt is the Founder & Editor-in-Chief of Webist Publishing & Misnamed Media, which includes the famous WebUrbanist blog.

Offer me something of value to me – no, it does not have to be money, or free samples, or anything of that sort. This can be as simple as some sincere praise for a project I work on or a truly interesting tip on something I would really enjoy learning more about. The key here is: make it relevant and personal – let me know through your words that you have actually read about me or a publication of mine, and explain briefly (ideally with real examples) why you believe you have good reason to reach out and contact me.

Alternatively, if you would prefer negative attention and a quick trip to the email recycling bin, send me a link to something that you did that has no relevance to anything I do, ask for support with a clearly commercial venture in which I have no professional or personal interest, or my personal favorite: ask to swap links with one of my publications and offer a link from an obscure page of your e-commerce site in return. The last is most likely to get you a response, though not of the sort you want.

Dharmesh Shah

Dharmesh Shah is the founder and CTO of HubSpot, a software company that focuses on Internet Marketing. Dharmesh also blogs at OnStartups.com.

To get my attention you have to do one of two things: Create something that is so amazingly awesome that all who regard it are amazed with its brilliance. Or, another alternative is to connect to someone I know and trust and have them tell my this is so great.

Note: I rarely take direct messages from people I don’t know.

Owen Thomas

Owen Thomas is the online editorial director for NBC Bay Area executive editor of VentureBeat and founder of Ditherati an on-off again site that has been around since 1997. He has previously written for Valleywag and brought it to its greatness.

You know, I think I’m going to refer back to Louis Rossetto’s original instructions to people who wanted to write for Wired:

http://valleywag.gawker.com/333152/the-ultimate-luxury-is-meaning-and–chocolate

“Amaze us.”

Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin is a former attorney turned blogger and author of The Happiness Project among other books.

People most get my attention, I have to admit, if they come to me through someone else I already know and trust.

Marshall Kirkpatrick

Marshall Kirkpatrick is the Vice President of Content Development at ReadWriteWeb and a technology consultant.

I recommend people do fantastic things, then reach out to me through whatever channel works best for them. Maybe more than once. I am generally looking for engineers more than marketers though, so if I don’t respond to you it might be that our definitions of fantastic are different.

Gary Vaynerchuk

Gary Vaynerchuk is the personality behind Wine Library TV, author of Crush It!, and a dynamic speaker.

Tweet about the NY Jets :)

Also write an honest email … and the biggest mistake everyone makes is the ask or sell instead or greet or welcome in their 1st interaction.

Ben Huh

As CEO of Pet Holdings Inc., Ben Huh is the mastermind behind sites like I Can Has Cheezburger? and FAIL Blog

Speak your mind freely and clearly. Provide a perspective that isn’t usually offered. Then take other people’s opinions with a grain of salt and an open mind. And do it often.

Aaron Wall

Aaron Wall is a search engine optimization expert and is the founder of the very famous SEO Book ebook-turned-training program.

I think too many people are sales all the time. Everything is about them and how much they can sell and how great they are and so on. Lots of jerks want to put you on a sales call or try to hype their trash to you without giving you anything for your efforts. In their eyes you are simply a conduit for their misinformation and sales materials.

I typically tell those kinds of people that they can go to hell or that they can buy an advertisement or an hour of consulting. Since they are typically greedy one-sided pieces of trash they get nothing and they help me pigeonhole their product as something to never talk about (if it was worthy of discussion they wouldn’t need that sorta hard sell strategy). In essence they are doing anti-marketing for themselves by pissing off the people they want to connect with.

You know what is easy and works well? No hype. No sales pitch. None of that crap. Simply give a person a 3 or 4 sentence email explaining

  • what it is & does
  • why it was created
  • how it can benefit them

and then…if it is something where incremental access costs next to nothing (like a SAAS offering) then give them a free account to check it out. SEM Rush did that to us…and I have promoted them aggressively (even before they had an affiliate program) because their service was valuable and useful and original and they priced it reasonably while using soft sell marketing asking for me to check it out and setting up an account for me.

Even if an item costs $50 or $100, that is how much a crappy link costs…so the product give away strategy should apply to just about anything which retails under something like $500… because if you get exposure on one good site that makes it easier to get exposure on another good site, and the more expensive the item is the more likely people would be to appreciate that you gave it away and mention it.

Other ways to get attention are to buy ads in some well read spots, participate in the target market in a meaningful way for a while before you launch, and/or to develop an affiliate program. Some people also like to start out a non-commercial website and then later slowly transition into commerce. If you build a media channel of your own with readership and throw off attention + links, then that can lead to relationships which make it easier for you to promote something. This is one of the reasons group interviews and such are so popular…they allow you to select the people you hope to gain attention from WHILE giving those people a reason to want to talk about you. :)

Jeremy Schoemaker

Jeremy Schoemaker, aka Shoemoney, is a blogger and founder of Shoemoney Media. He is also the co-founder of AuctionAds.

The best way to get my attention is to get right to the point of the email. Don’t patronize me, don’t ask me to honor your embargo, don’t ask me if I would be interested in your product — just tell me what you want.

Darren Rowse

Darren Rowse is founder of b5media and ProBlogger.net. He is also the co-author of ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six Figure Income and one of the cofounders of Third Tribe.

A few quick thoughts:

  • Be personal – impersonal ‘pitch’ emails are a turnoff.
  • Be useful – whether its being useful to my network/readers, business, me personally or just the world in general – I tend to pay attention to people who are solving problems and meeting needs.
  • Introduce yourself – I get a lot of emails and don’t always remember everyone I’ve talked to before – help me out a little :-) Being ‘polite’ goes a long way too.
  • Keep it brief – the longer the initial contact the less likely it is that I’ll get to the bottom of it – unless it’s VERY compelling
  • Let the Relationship Evolve – I’ve had quite a few people ‘pitch’ me on really big and complex stuff in a first email to me (including people wanting to go into business together). I tend to be pretty cautious with people I don’t know – I need time to warm up to bigger stuff!

I’m not as high maintenance as that sounds – but I’ve had ALOT of bad ‘pitches’ over the years :)

More on this type of topic – http://www.problogger.net/archives/2007/10/30/how-to-pitch-to-bloggers-21-tips/

Jay White

Jay White is a blogger at Dumb Little Man, a successful productivity blog.

My attention span is short, like a dog. The best way to communicate with me is in short bursts of information. Your Value, Intent, and the Desired Result need to be conveyed for both of us: If you can summarize those in 2 sentences, odds are you will get a response from me. If you notice, things like name, credentials, work experience, where you’ve guest blogged, etc., are not on the list. You know why? Because it doesn’t matter. I know plenty of MBAs successful entrepreneurs, and downright blowhards and many of them aren’t bright so a paper trail of “I am great” doesn’t cut it with me.

To me, the value you bring to the conversation speaks for itself. You tell me how my audience gets smarter or lives a better life by knowing you, now you’ve got my attention.

Corvida Raven

Corvida Raven is the author of SheGeeks.net, and co-producer of EverythingTwitter and TheSocialGeeks Podcast. Her passion for Technology and Social Media has made her one of the most Influential Women in Technology (FastCompany, 2009).

The easiest way to get my attention is to be excited about what you’re showing me. If you don’t care about it, no one will. So many people lack passion and enthusiasm for the things they do.

It leaves me wondering why I should be paying attention. Their presentation should say it all, otherwise we’re wasting time.

Mark O’Neill

Mark O’Neill is a freelance writer who serves as the managing and publishing editor of successful software blog MakeUseOf.

How would I recommend people get my attention? If you mean if they want to promote their product, I would immediately say “get to the point and keep it simple”. People spend so long waffling and rambling, and all I’m thinking is “when are they actually going to get to the point?”. They spend so long saying how great their product is but I still don’t know what the product actually is!! I’ve read so many bad email press releases.

Brian Solis

Brian Solis is a blogger, photographer, and principal of FutureWorks. He is also the author of a brand new book, Engage and co-author of Putting the Public Back in Public Relations.

Interesting phrasing of this question…I assume that by responding, I consider myself an “influencer.” It’s easier to say that, like anyone living and breathing new media these days, my attention span is testing its elasticity. Truthfully, it’s a difficult question to answer. Cleverness, wit, tenacity, and most importantly relevance are the ingredients for assembling a plan for attracting my attention. It’s important to connect with me where I’m actively engaging…when I’m present. Make it easy for me to digest, providing the value and the action up front…prompt me to respond or ask for more information…turn it into a dialogue.

Tara Hunt

Tara Hunt is an entrepreneur, speaker and author of The Whuffie Factor, among many other things.

How would people get my attention? I guess I’d say to build relationships far before you need to get anyone’s attention. Do good, positive things for the community. Help me out when I ask questions from time to time. Interact positively in lively discussions and debates. Then, when you need to get anyone’s attention, it doesn’t feel like an imposition or spammy. It just feels like you are calling in a favor from friends. :)

Vitaly Friedman

Vitaly Friedman is a web designer, author, and editor-in-chief of popular web design blog Smashing Magazine.

Be short, be precise and convince me. Instead of explaining features, tell me what makes you or your product different, what’s unique about it and what advantages it has.

My own advice

Do it more than once. I get a lot of messages directed at me. I am more inclined to notice people when they tweet at me again and again. (I respond to emails pretty quickly, so you don’t need to email me more than once. Of course, pitches that you send that are off-topic normally won’t get a response.)

Not too long ago, I asked my Twitter followers for a service provider. One person who caught my attention through repeated exposure stood up and offered herself. I was excited about meeting her and told her that I was giving her preference explicitly because she made the effort to catch my eye. She was the epitome of this example! (I was pretty bummed when she proved not to be reliable, but I did reach out to her first.)

Today, I look at a few things. I look at effort put forth in comments. I look at tweets. I look at engagement. I look at what looks like a solid personalized effort versus just a blast. Show me you’ve put the time into it and you’ll be acknowledged.

If you’ve elected to email me, make the email short and sweet. Brevity is all the rage these days simply because there is so much noise vying for my attention. Make your pitches succinct. I don’t care who you are or what brought you where you are today. I might be interested in your life history at a later date. For now, if you want me to know about your service or a cool startup, try to use the Twitter format: tell me in 140 characters words or less.

Summary

It’s pretty obvious, then, that there are some underlying themes behind the responses I’ve received. If you’re reaching out, keep it short and sweet. Submit content that jives with the recipient. Get to know the influencer’s influencers. Be a purple cow. Immerse yourself visibly in the influencer’s community. Put effort into the outreach attempt and make it obvious that you are passionate about it.

Yes, this is a process, but hey, do you see all those influencers up there? You’ve gotten the secret sauce. It’s now up to you to heed to the advice given and make a real splash.

Disclosures and Credits: Affiliate links are added to all the book links, but I recommend them wholeheartedly. Photo credits: Jesus Diaz by Diana Levine, Brian Lam by Brian Solis and Wired, Pete Cashmore by Lisa Bettany, Brian Solis by Brian Solis, Anita Campbell from a UPS video, and others that have been so frequently distributed online that I do not know the source. Know the photographer or source? Let me know so I can update this section. :) (Note: Non-collage photos of Aaron Wall, Ben Huh, Gary Vaynerchuk, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Jeremy Schoemaker, Danny Sullivan, Robert Scoble, Nicholas Carlson, Chris Brogan, Matt Cutts, Louis Gray, Adam Pash, Owen Thomas, Darren Rowse, and Jason Calacanis were all taken by me.)

[ How to Get an Influencer’s Attention is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

Like this post? Get my Internet Marketing newsletter, buy my book, The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, and subscribe to the Techipedia RSS feed.

]]> http://www.techipedia.com/2010/influencer-attention/feed/ 237