Techipedia | Tamar Weinberg » Internet 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. ]

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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 How To Monitor Your Three Essential Internet Marketing Strategies http://www.techipedia.com/2011/monitoring-online-marketing/ http://www.techipedia.com/2011/monitoring-online-marketing/#comments Tue, 22 Nov 2011 13:50:49 +0000 Guest Author http://www.techipedia.com/?p=4144 [ How To Monitor Your Three Essential Internet Marketing Strategies is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

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This is a guest post by Andy Havard.

Internet marketing strategies vary depending on the nature of the blog, brand, or business and alter with accordance to their physical and digital size and their particular niche. When it comes to marketing any organization, product, or service on the web, there tends to be three essential ways of doing so:

  1. Dominating social media platforms
  2. Utilizing Internet video
  3. Driving traffic to websites

This three-fold plan appears to be a timeless marketing approach on the net, but how do you know you’re succeeding in these areas? How do you know your campaign is ticking all the right boxes?

The following article addresses the best practices for measuring and monitoring your marketing campaign in these three areas, and provides an easy to digest guide to some of the best tools for the job.

Broad Social Media Monitoring

Depending on how social your Internet presence is, you might only be interested in certain aspects of social media data. Let’s imagine your blog, brand, or business operates a wide variety of social media from the likes of Facebook and Twitter to StumbleUpon and Instagram.  The time it would take to collect such a wide variety of data could eat up a good chunk of your day. When you’re operating in this way, the most time- efficient data to gather is a broad overview of how your overall approach is going down on the ‘net.

A great tool to collect this kind of data is a site called Klout. Klout allows you to sign in and link up a variety of social media platforms. It takes in your activity and data from all of these platforms to give you an overall social ranking – the higher the better.

 

This kind of information is incredibly powerful as it updates you on how much influence you’re having on your audience and your network, while giving you a tangible indication of how big your online presence is in your niche.

Oh, and it’s completely free.

In Depth Social Media Monitoring

Klout is a great way of measuring overall influence in your niche and on your social media sites as a whole, but overviews still aren’t quite as valuable as the actual facts. Obtaining the true facts and figures surrounding your social media networks are the crucial pieces of information that alert you when your approaches are soaring like an eagle or rapidly plummeting back down to earth.

HootSuite is your essential tool for monitoring in depth social media analytics. Here’s a quick glance at the data it can provide.

You can add custom reports for a whole host of your social media profiles and even incorporate essential pieces of Google Analytics data. This information is incredible valuable as it indicates the actual impact of any new approaches you take to your social media profiles, be it daily updates, frequent photo and video uploads, or competition giveaways.

As you can see, HootSuite is also great for monitoring brand awareness amongst varying genders and age groups, which will be able to affect the approach you take to upcoming marketing strategies on your social platforms.

Internet Video Tracking

The only thing rivalling the popularity of social media on the Internet today is Internet video. Sites like YouTube, Vimeo, and On Demand Television Channels are enjoying staggeringly large online viewershipsevery day. Online marketers have gotten wise to this popularity and as a result of this there has been a huge spike in video uploads and new and exciting uses of video on the Internet.

These videos are all well and good, but they offer little value to bloggers, brands, and businesses if they can’t track the actual statistics of these videos. YouTube offers a great free tool to track these kinds of facts and figures through its YouTube Insight feature.

YouTube Insights can inform Internet marketers where their video strategies are being found, the demographics watching them, which videos are the most popular, and their Channel’s overall viewership. These pieces of data are fantastic ways to monitor the implementation of video approaches to new products, services, and the building of online brand awareness through video. By being able to assess the sheer popularity of specific video content, marketers can track what styles of video benefit their brand, business, or blog the best.

A great feature along these lines is YouTube’s Hot Spot feature:

Being able to spot what parts of your video content are boring your viewers and what parts are being re-watched again and again is crucial information when it comes to planning your next Internet video marketing strategy.

Precise Website Analytics

The uses of social media platforms and Internet video are all ultimately about driving audiences to one final website destination. Conversely, some organizations actually use their website as their home-hub for all of this activity by creating forums for social interaction, and embedding videos onto their website, doing away with any other website platform but their own.

Regardless of which approach is being used, a designated website is usually the final destination for any marketing strategy. With that being the case, the analytics of online users interacting and visiting such websites are imperative. This is where Google Analytics comes into play:

Google Analytics offers a huge array of monitoring tools for free users and even more for users willing to pay for their (rather pricey) Premium package. Above, you can (somewhat) see the array of free tools on the left and the very informative Visitor Overview in the middle.

Not only does this tool easily display the traffic generated in a certain time period, but it also informs the users where in the world these users are visiting the site from. In-depth tools within Analytics can also indicate if users came to your site through your other video and social media campaigns.

It’s crucial to notice areas like Page Visits and Bounce Rates as it clearly shows whether users are interacting with your website, taking in your message, and fulfilling the criteria your strategies had intended to achieve.

Not bad for a completely free tool, right?

Summary

By using these affordable online tools to track your Internet marketing strategies, you can ensure all of your approaches in the online world are ticking all the right boxes. Being aware of rises and falls in your content, online presence, and Internet influence will be exceptionally valuable when planning your next online marketing campaign.

Have you got any extra handy tools to share? Be sure to drop a comment and share your knowledge.

Andy Havard is a Marketing Executive at Skeleton Productions, a UK based Internet video production company.

[ How To Monitor Your Three Essential Internet Marketing Strategies 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/monitoring-online-marketing/feed/ 6 QR Codes, Email, and Mobile Marketing: Tools for Small Businesses to Compete Digitally http://www.techipedia.com/2011/digital-small-business-tools/ http://www.techipedia.com/2011/digital-small-business-tools/#comments Tue, 18 Oct 2011 13:29:41 +0000 Guest Author http://www.techipedia.com/?p=4036 [ QR Codes, Email, and Mobile Marketing: Tools for Small Businesses to Compete Digitally 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.

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This is a guest post by Julian Rockwood, a product manager at Signal.

For small businesses, marketing often takes a back seat to day-to-day operations. They acknowledge that marketing is important; yet there are only so many hours in the day. Compounding the challenge: Consumer use of emerging technologies is moving faster than a typical business owner can keep up with.

That’s why at Signal, we’ve dedicated a piece of our business to providing an affordable and simple product to help small businesses leverage mobile marketing, social media and email to grow and nurture their customer base.

While it seems like there’s a new tool added to the marketing toolbox each day, these methods are gaining traction thanks to their captivating call-to-actions and instant-engagement capabilities. Based on our experiences, we’ve developed the following tips to help small businesses understand how to incorporate text messaging, mobile-optimized email, and QR codes to complete digitally.

Good Things Come on Packages

To see creative, effective uses of QR Codes in action, check out upcoming food manufacturers. Competition is stiff in the consumer-packaged-good (CPG) space.  Small farms, chefs, and foodtrepreneurs jump through hoops to get a SKU of their product on shelves at the local grocery chain. They have to do something to differentiate themselves from the larger brands.

To keep consumers engaged, aware of their product, and demanding more, small CPG brands have incorporated text-driven calls-to-action and QR codes on packaging. This simple tool allows them to deliver content to their consumers in real time, wherever they are. This connection equips small CPGs to collect data with a web form, share a video about their commitment to quality, provide recipes, register a loyalty code, or even survey their customers.

For example, Food Should Taste Good is a small company focused on making healthy snacks that taste good (duh!). Looking for simple ways to incentivize people to try their product and opt-in to learn more about their brand in the future, they launched a sweepstakes this summer that used QR codes as the entry method. Customers could browse down the snack aisle, see the QR code and call to action to enter on their package, scan the code from their smartphone and be taken to a mobile web form to provide their email to enter.  Food Should Taste Good knew that adding new subscribers to their email-marketing list was the ticket to providing their fan base information and offers that will continue to drive demand and grow their customer base.

They’re not alone in this field.  Signal customer Smart Chicken, maker of organic chicken products, recently decided to reinvest in QR codes after a successful test-run.  During the test, Smart Chicken created recipe cards that doubled as as a shopping list. The cards included QR codes to take viewers to  a mobile web page with videos of chefs preparing the recipes.  After experiencing an 80% increase in sales during this promotion, Smart Chicken was eager to expand their use of QR codes.

“Because of our success with the holiday recipe card promotion, we’ve decided to take the next step and explore printing QR codes directly on a few select product packaging to ensure that Smart Chicken offers our customers this same interactive experience,” said Mark Eckstrom, director of marketing at Smart Chicken.

While critics argue over whether QR codes use will reach critical mass with consumers, it’s entirely evident when you walk down store aisles that small brands are picking up on this engagement tool and creating relationships.

Couponing Goes Digital

While brick and mortar businesses, like restaurants, face challenges similar to  CPGs when it comes to engaging customers in real time, getting someone to try a $3 bag of chips in store is one thing. Asking someone to visit and spend freely at your restaurant is another. This is where digital engagement tools, specifically email and text offers can help.

The old standard of simply having a phone line and a menu in the window is no longer enough to lure a pop-in customer. Today’s prospective diners are more connected, informed, social, and thrifty than ever. Decisions are being made based upon peer reviews. Plus, the rise of daily-deal sites has created a stigma that a “deal” is somewhat a requirement for a first time visit to a restaurant. According to a recent Harris Poll, offers and prices are two of the most valued factors for people making dining decisions. Knowing that, restaurant owners are turning to digital tools to level the playing field. For example, restaurants are trading instantly redeemable offers for email addresses or mobile phone numbers.

Thankfully for small businesses, creating these simple text or email coupons takes very little time – just minutes, really. But, making this kind of offer can increase sales and serve as the catalyst to spark new, long-term customer relationships.

One of our customers, a large Midwestern QSR known for its amazing Butter Burger, took this approach and generated 400+ additional sales of a menu item in one day by promoting a simple dollar-off-deal.  This is just one scenario, but we’ve also seen some remarkably successful BOGO deals and “free upgrades.”

Instead of thinking about these offers as a one-time marketing gimmick, focus on using digital tools to foster long-term relationships with customers. The business is the ultimate winner: Developing a 1-to-1 relationship with the customer, owning and growing a database of valuable contact information,  and keeping all the profits to themselves (unlike with daily-deals sites).

At Your Service

Rather than bombarding potential customers with too much information (see: radio advertisements), a QR code or text keyword can quickly link people in the community to information about their product or service, which is exactly what they want. Interestingly, 52% of the QR codes scans last year were to acquire “additional information”.

QR codes and Text Keywords make a difference for small business service providers who print them on business cards, signage, and other marketing collateral. This simple addition can connect prospects to pricing, videos, case studies, details about their product/service, and contact information.

How does it work? The real estate industry has aggressively embraced QR codes and text keywords, using them to instantly capture information or provide virtual property tours. Apartments.com, a Signal customer and online search destination for renters to connect with apartment communities, provides property managers with QR codes and text keywords to put on outdoor banners, print advertising, and small marketing collateral, including mugs and brochures. By taking this extra – but relatively easy step – renters get easy access listing information, or a mobile web page with property photos, pricing and available units.

These printed call-to-action methods for service providers are endless – from small grocers providing additional details on the origins of their produce … to salons using scans to take appointments from passers-by.

Know Your Goals

With the wealth of options available to digital marketers, it’s easy to become overwhelmed. Keep things simple and remember the end goal. Don’t slap a QR code on something just for the curb appeal or giveaway a coupon without some semblance of a strategy.  In the examples above, there was a clear objective (growing your subscriber base, stimulating sales or enriching existing content) that justified the use of the tactic.  No matter the initiative, think about how you can add value to customers – their delight will lead to bottom line results.

Julian Rockwoord is a Product Manager at Signal, a Chicago-based company that gives small businesses a simple product that unifies email, mobile and social marketing in a single platform.  Recently named #108 on the 2011 INC 500 report, you can get more great insights from Signal on Twitter, Facebook and on their blog.

[ QR Codes, Email, and Mobile Marketing: Tools for Small Businesses to Compete Digitally 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/digital-small-business-tools/feed/ 4 Email Overload: The Secret to Getting Inbox Zero Every Time http://www.techipedia.com/2011/email-overload-inbox-zero/ http://www.techipedia.com/2011/email-overload-inbox-zero/#comments Tue, 20 Sep 2011 12:48:23 +0000 Tamar Weinberg http://www.techipedia.com/?p=3897 [ Email Overload: The Secret to Getting Inbox Zero Every Time is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

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I hit inbox zero for the sixth or seventh time this week in not one but two email accounts which feed in 13 email addresses total. Once an impossibility, it’s now an everyday occurrence. In fact, it’s now a true mindset. Because I’ve streamlined this process so well, I figure other people would benefit from my tips to make inbox zero a true reality. This is especially important as web users have the expectation of fast replies in our fast paced social media world.  My workflow works great, so I’m offering the below to those of you who may want to use these tips for their own internal processes.

Inbox Zero

Use a Conversation Email System

This solution really is best suited for those using Gmail. In my case, 12 email accounts are fed through one gmail.com account. (I also have a dedicated Google Apps account for my Mashable emails.) Why is this so important? Gmail’s mail system offers the tools needed to be an email ninja: labels and threaded emails. Plus, its shortcuts (A for archive) make management a snap.

Labels are color-coded “folders” that designate inbound emails. You can either use filters (explained later) to automatically label emails, or you can manually set up labels. Labels can be color coded so that you can see everything at a glance and know exactly what type of email it is:

Inbox Zero: Labels

Threaded emails is a unique feature that I haven’t yet seen in a third party app where all emails with the same subject line are sent in one single frame. For example, let’s say someone emails me about a possible project. I reply back to him, and 3 weeks later, he replies back to me, keeping the same subject line intact. With Gmail, the previous two emails (his initial email and my reply) are still visible in the same window in a feature known as a conversation, so I know exactly what he’s referencing and can click to expand the entire correspondence accordingly. While Outlook, Thunderbird, and other email clients let you see the replies, they’re often cluttered in a bunch of >> and >>>> and eventually these emails get much too much out of control; this threaded window functionality is probably one of the best features ever for Gmail.

While I respect standalone email applications, having true portability for your email is killer and I have no plans to move back. Interestingly enough, I was never a fan of web-based email until I got hooked on Gmail. There’s a method to this madness.

As a catch 22, those rare instances when people change the subject line actually breaks the functionality that makes this system so productive; it’s happened 2 times in the past 6 years but is annoying enough that I still remember who they were. In those cases, I ask nicely for those senders to keep the subject line intact and not change it to reflect their new reply. :)

Answer Everything Quickly

What are you doing about that email that JUST hit your inbox? Are you saving it for later? If it takes 10 seconds to read and reply, take 10 seconds to read and reply to it. Can you stop doing what you’re doing without being less productive? If so, stop and reply, then return to your work. (If you adopt this mindset, you won’t lose 15 minutes of productivity when you switch gears; in a real-time world, you have to multitask to survive!) If not, allocate several blocks of time throughout the day that you can dedicate to email only where you read and respond to everything in your inbox. Make sure to do this so that when it’s time to sign off for the day, there’s nothing left in your inbox.

The answering part is crucial. Once you reply, you have to make a decision on what behavior you should be doing next:

  • Is the email no longer actionable by you? If so, archive it. If you’ve enabled Gmail shortcuts (use the ? key to confirm; if not, turn it on in your account settings), hit A to archive and file it away.
  • Does the email require a reply from the person you just emailed? If so, file it away anyway! You don’t need it sitting in your inbox if there’s nothing actionable by you. If you need a reply eventually, make a note (I use Remember the Milk; read about my widget integration here) to follow up with the person on a designated date. You can also use Boomerang to set reminders. RTM emails you a reminder right before your task is due, so you will be sure not to forget!
  • Does your email reply depend on yet another person’s reply? I work with many teams on many different projects. Sometimes, I need to get an answer from someone and cannot immediately reply to the original sender. In that case, I keep the email in my inbox (it’s actionable) but am sure to chase down the reply as soon as I possibly can. Thankfully, my teammates are responsive, so it may take a few hours or a few days, but that email eventually gets filed. That makes them good teammates. Also, if I’m waiting for a reply from someone else, I usually still take the time to let the original sender know that I’m waiting on a reply from one of my colleagues. This makes me look responsible and also gives the people I’m dealing with confidence in my follow-through. It’s amazing how many people don’t instill confidence at all!
  • Does the email require you to sit down and truly think about your reply? Keep the email in your inbox. Set aside time to get to this assignment as soon as you can; make a personal goal that it will be done by the end of the day if feasible or at least by the end of the week. Sometimes this means that I’m actually “working late,” but this also means that I don’t have anything on my plate by the time I’ve gone to bed and that’s a great feeling!

Use Labels

As I’ve explained earlier, labels are very important to help you figure out exactly what needs to go where. With Labels, I can see everything I need at a glance and can reference it quickly via search. A search like “label:bloggers techipedia” will find mentions of “techipedia” in all emails that I have assigned the Bloggers label to. It’s an incredibly organized way to make things happen. As you can see, you can assign multiple labels to a single email, and sometimes that’s necessary.

A very important part of true management is hiding those folders. A beautiful inbox is an organized inbox. To label something and archive it, I highlight the email (or have it open), type L and then choose the label on my drop down list. Then, the email is immediately labeled (and then archived after I hit A). But after that, I don’t want to be reminded of it, so I keep my labels out of sight (and thus out of mind). As you can see in the screenshot above, I have 50 labels. I also don’t see them very often, but they’re there and that’s all I need to know. :)

Use Filters Liberally

I receive anywhere from 300 to 1500 new emails daily. However, most of these emails never hit my inbox. That’s because I apply Gmail filters; that is, rules that immediately archive emails that I want but don’t have time to read. Emails about new followers on Google+, new DMs on Twitter, new newsletters from my favorite bloggers, cron job notifications, HARO emails — these emails are being auto-archived. Do I need them? Maybe not. Do I want them? Yes, because they’re searchable in an incredible archive of over 27 GB of emails (oh yes, I paid for storage). I can search and find out why someone’s name may sound familiar (“oh, he added me on Twitter in April 2009!”). I can read newsletters at my convenience. I don’t always check them, but I know they’re there.

I currently have over 100 filters (107 at the last count, and I probably missed a few!). How many of you have such a robust filtering system? Last I checked, Yahoo! Mail only supported 100 filters.

Report Spam Freely

Just like I have a great system for filters, I also have a great system for spam. The lesson is this: if I’ve never opted into your email list, I will flag your commercial message as spam. That goes for social media newsletters from my LinkedIn connections. That goes for people I may have met once at a trade show who got my business card who sent me an email with a template that clearly screams that it was sent to hundreds of people. That goes for people who contact me for link exchanges with my blog. That goes for anyone who sends me messages that are not personalized and are clearly for profit and commercial gain. If you can’t take time to clearly send me a message that is truly meant for Tamar Weinberg, my spam hammer awaits.

Even though I am pretty aggressive about reporting spam, my spam folder gets very few false positives. That said, I check it 3-4 times per day to make sure that nothing is there that doesn’t belong. When you’re aiming for true inbox zero, any numbers detract from truly reaching that goal. Seeing Spam (5) doesn’t make me sit at ease.

Mute Updates Not Relevant to You

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I’m on an alias that I just don’t care to be updated on. For example, someone may email moderators@somedomain.com and I just happen to be on their list where they are all congratulating each other because their child is finally potty trained. It may go in my inbox once — and that’s enough. But when everyone else decides to reply to all wishing their best, it’s a little overwhelming. That’s why muting is so important. As long as it’s not going directly to you, muting actually works wonderfully and hides emails sent to aliases that you may be a member of. That way, you still have the emails, but they’re just not visible. To Mute, the shortcut is the letter M.

…But Don’t Delete Your Emails

With email systems having storage of 7GB minimally (and more if you elect to pay for it), I don’t understand why you would want to delete an email. Archival is just as good as deleting it except archival allows you to actually reference it again if you need some information in the future (and you may never realize when you do!) A company I work with recently hired a new person, and she told me that we emailed once before at her old job. It wasn’t a very important email, so by some users’ standards, it would go into the delete pile. But if I did that, I would never have known what she was talking about! And I’d have just had to pretend I remembered everything.

Using a plugin like Rapportive, something I have praised in the many times over as one of my most indispensable tools ever, you can read more about the person as they email you AND you can see some of the most recent emails.

Use Macros

Did I just suggest something that isn’t truly personalized? The email purist in me is wincing, but it makes a lot of sense when you handle redundant communications. Macros are short phrases that are expanded to larger ones. For example, instead of typing out my address whenever people ask for it, I can type “myaddy” and it will be immediately expanded to the larger format. Since I often book phone calls on a free conference call system which has a dial-in number and PIN number, I don’t have to memorize the phone number when sending it to colleagues; I just type “freeconf” and it expands to the email. It also helps when you sometimes need to send a canned response that you’d later personalize; the Gmail Labs functionality just doesn’t cut it. For my PC, I use freeware app Texter. I recently converted a colleague to the Mac equivalent TextExpander and she hasn’t gone back.

Don’t Forget Common Courtesy

I know I do a great job replying to emails, but I also know it’s a skill that took me years to perfect (again, this is something I only succeeded at recently). One of my true lessons would be to reply when you can! It frustrates me to no end when someone truly took the time to email you and yet the recipient sits on a reply and/or doesn’t reply at all.  It angers me when one invests hours in an email reply, only to be met with total silence. It also irritates me when someone emails you asking for something, and you took the time to reply to their initial correspondence but requested more information, but they decided that the email thread ends there despite your insistence to keep the conversation going (after all, you asked and they merely are trying to help. Why would you ignore that?). That’s not something you’d do in real life, so why is online any difference? You’re still dealing with people.

When possible, take time to reply. I don’t care if the response is ultimately a “thanks but no thanks,” it’s still more suitable to being totally ignored.

What about Holidays or Vacations?

Yes, I really do reach inbox zero on a daily basis. And yes, I really do receive hundreds of emails per day. Sometimes I do sign off for the night and there are still emails in my inbox simply because I didn’t have time or needed someone else’s help to reply. Sometimes I even step away for longer periods of time. I observe the Jewish Sabbath AND Jewish holidays (25-75 hours of downtime minimally) and don’t touch the computer or any electricity at all during those times. While the recovery of total disconnection is a bit of a challenge and I feel buried, if you’re truly motivated, you can make this system work and still take some breaks just as long as you’re willing to work at achieving inbox zero on the days or even hours that follow (it’s doable, I promise).

Your To-Do List

The best way to handle inbound email is to consider your inbox your to-do list. Do you feel at ease when there are items on that list knowing that you’ll have to get to it sometime? If you aspire on a daily basis to clear your list, you’re well on your way to getting closer to inbox zero.

As most people who have emailed me can attest, I reply within minutes and never longer than a day (with some aforementioned exceptions). The system works for me, and with some small tweaks in your approach, it hopefully will work for you. Let me know if you try this and what you think about it.

Do you have any other ways to manage email overload? Sound off in the comments.

 

[ Email Overload: The Secret to Getting Inbox Zero Every Time is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

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]]> http://www.techipedia.com/2011/email-overload-inbox-zero/feed/ 34 The Productive Online Business Toolbox: My Must-Have Tools http://www.techipedia.com/2011/business-owners-web-toolbox/ http://www.techipedia.com/2011/business-owners-web-toolbox/#comments Tue, 22 Mar 2011 13:48:39 +0000 Tamar Weinberg http://www.techipedia.com/?p=3427 [ The Productive Online Business Toolbox: My Must-Have Tools is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

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As many of you know, I’m a work at home mom who operates as a consultant, ad sales manager for Mashable, and soon-to-be startup founder all from one single Dell laptop which I use as a desktop. Having a home office is both a blessing and a curse; the ability not to commute makes my life easier and saves me about 3-4 hours per day. However, that also means I’m working from morning until night. While some would like to have a defined 9-5 schedule, I do not, and I actually thrive in this environment.

I don’t think that’d have been the case without the web-based toolbox and the PC apps that have saved my life more than once. Hopefully, they’ll do the same for you. Here’s a list of what I use that makes me productive, from time savers to the must have tools that rock my world.

Gmail

I still talk to so many people who use Outlook. It’s a nice tool but it’s not as portable as Gmail, and I stick by it. Here are my tips for the best use of Gmail:

  • Use Gmail as a one-stop destination. Currently, I use Gmail as the exclusive “destination” for 11 email accounts.
  • Take advantage of labels. I have 50 labels, with the important ones having prominent color coding.
  • Use keyboard shortcuts. Keyword shortcuts on Gmail are probably the one thing most overlooked, but it’s also a godsend. I often find myself hitting *u (mark unread) and automatically archiving them, especially if I’ve already read them or if they’re not actionable.
  • Filter! You could simply opt out of Facebook messages and notifications about new followers on Quora. You could dedicate another email account to newsletters. Or you can just use your Gmail filters and automatically label and archive those emails. Therefore, at least they’re searchable to you when you need them.
  • Use Gadgets: If you have an app that has a Gmail gadget that adds to (and doesn’t detract from) your work, add it to your sidebar. For me, this is task management web app Remember the Milk. I’ll go into RTM in the next section. Using this gadget, I can immediately mark tasks as completed and add new tasks without opening a new browser, making task management rock. I also have the Google Calendar gadget on my Gmail sidebar, so I have an easy way to access my upcoming meetings, appointments, and phone calls.
  • Get notifications via Gmail Notifier: Google Notifier is a small app that tells me about new incoming email, much like Outlook does with its native app. Because I use the app with https, I have to install this patch too. I know desktop notifications now exist, but I guess the developers of that new feature didn’t realize a better tool that isn’t confined to Chrome has been around for 5 years now. In my opinion, this is the one to use.

I also pay for increased storage space. As you can see based on how many GBs I’m currently occupying, it’s worth it. But the only thing I’d ask for is for more support for those times when Gmail has their timeouts! (Gmail is free, but the storage space will cost more money.)

Remember the Milk

With Remember the Milk, I’m able to be on top of every single upcoming task wherever I go. RTM has gadgets (as seen above), applications for all mobile platforms, an API, and much more. I’m a paid member and it’s well worth it. You can also specify whether these tasks repeat, such as weekly. Once you complete the weekly task, it’s assigned for next week. I have billing reminders on the 1st of the month to repeat every month. I could set up business calls to repeat every fourth Wednesday of the month, ending on May 18th. I also have weekly reminders like the one to the right.

I get email reminders for every incoming task 30 minutes before it’s due and then the day it’s due. I also get an email every day at 12:00AM with the upcoming tasks for the day. With the popups from Gmail Notifier, if I’m in the middle of something, I get a reminder of my upcoming task. (RTM is free, but extra functionality such as mobile access costs $25/year.)

Rapportive

One of the most awesome apps and Gmail extension which I use via a Chrome extension is Rapportive. Rapportive is a social CRM, giving you important information about the person who is emailing you. If they’re connected via social networks, you get their picture, their location, and job titles, in addition to their Twitter feed and Facebook updates (if available) and links to their social profiles. I recently admitted during an interview that I had been emailing someone for 3 years, assuming she was a male, and until I installed Rapportive, I had no idea that she was female! It really helps. :)

The image below shows you an edited version of what you get from Rapportive (I removed some job titles and tweets so that it wouldn’t be so long). This is one of the best tools — hands down. Free.

Rapportive FTW

Google Reader

I don’t care what people tell you about RSS dying — Google Reader is still pretty darn awesome. Whether or not you want to be part of tech elite who consumes RSS is your choice, but RSS is here to stay. I read my friends’ Facebook updates via RSS. It doesn’t include new photo uploads or any shared links via the Like button, but it’s pretty good at keeping me up to date on my friends’ whereabouts and news in their lives. I consume all of my other media via RSS, be it from the social media blogs, the tech blogs, the photographs I love seeing, the NYC-specific news, and whatever else I’m interested in. With millions of pages online that have RSS capabilities, using a tool like Google Reader to keep abreast of all the latest happenings is a smart thing to do. Plus, as Steve Rubel once illustrated, whether or not you read your Google Reader content on a regular basis, you definitely can use it as an awesome database. Free.

Google Docs

I don’t live in Google Docs. I still am pretty partial to Office (2010 is nice with a few acquired tastes) for my own work, but I think Google Docs is great for collaboration. I update a dozen files regularly, especially when I need to send them to team members. It’s much easier to use Google Docs than have to worry about updating a Word or Excel document, saving it locally, uploading it, and then making sure someone sees it. It’s especially cumbersome to do that when you have to update it daily. For that reason, Google Docs reigns supreme. Free.

Dropbox

If there is one tool I won’t be able to live without, I’d have to give this one to Dropbox.  Dropbox is the most amazing tool ever. Why? I can access my critical files (proposals, invoices, insertion orders, client files, personal files, etc.) no matter where I am, just as long as I have the software installed locally. And I’ve been pleasantly surprised to see how awesome this tool is. Last week, when I was on my plane en route to SXSW, I realized I needed to work on an IO for a client. Expecting Dropbox to only operate when I had an Internet connection, I powered up my laptop thinking I’d have to start from scratch. I was ecstatic to see that my Dropbox files were fully intact; they sync locally and the newest copy from whatever computer is then synchronized to the main Dropbox location. Seriously, this thing is the best tool since sliced bread. I strongly recommend Dropbox. (And yes, that’s my referral link.) (Free for up to 2GB, or get 50GB for $9.99/month or 100GB for $19.99/month.)

Digsby

If you’re a PC, you’ll love Digsby. It’s a full fledged and free IM client which supports everything — including Facebook chat (making me look like a serious addict) — except Skype. In fact, I use Jabber for internal communications as Community Manager of Namecheap. It works and it works really well. It also has great IM logging, which is awesome because I log everything to a central Dropbox location. That way, when I go on Digsby from another computer, it accesses my logs seamlessly instead of logging different people’s conversations on different computers. That alone is a feature that I absolutely love. Free.

Skype

I don’t live on Skype, but I do occasionally interface with clients, both overseas and locally, who like Skype voice. For them, I think this is the tool to use. Skype isn’t perfect, and if you ask me, my biggest gripe is not having local logging, especially since it’s incredibly important to me to be able to reference something if need be, but it accomplishes video and voice chat over the Internet pretty well. Free for video/IM, but phone plans cost money.

LastPass

I have to hand it to my former boss at Lifehacker, Gina Trapani, for turning me onto LastPass. Before LastPass, I’ll be honest, I had a few passwords that I recycled time and time again. Thanks to the Gawker password breach of December 2010, I’ve had to go into a few hundred accounts and make some changes, and LastPass helps me keep track of it all. LastPass seamlessly integrates into all major browsers and is compatible with all OSes. All passwords and sites are encrypted, and you can log onto sites with one click. LastPass also has mobile apps and so much more. You can unlock premium features for $1/month, which is totally worth it and I have a 2-year license at this time.

HootSuite

My major public Twitter and Facebook online activity is handled through no other application but HootSuite (aff). It’s a great application to handle multiple accounts. You can schedule tweets, view stats, and so much more all from the browser and mobile applications when you aren’t able to get on their website. I pay for my account, and I recommend that if you need the features it affords you, you should do the same. (The $5.99/month plan is probably all you need.)

Performable

Performable is a nifty tool that gives you data about various activities others perform online. It’s essentially a goals funnel with reporting detail. I get a daily email with changes in behavior, and I notice how changes I make (ever so slightly) can impact user behavior on my site. Performable isn’t the cheapest solution out there, but it’s a darn good offering and they’re working on cheaper plans for small businesses.

Mint

You’ve got Performable for goals, and you may have Google Analytics. But I happen to really like Mint (no, not the financial tool, but I happen to like that too). It shows you a nice dashboard of traffic to your site, broken down by bar graphs and by lists showing your recent traffic. For example, the screenshot below shows that someone is very curious to find out about a blog post of mine where I talked about comments. Or something. I really don’t know. As I write this, they’ve been at it for about an hour.

For the record, all blog posts have a word “comment” on the page, because that’s how people engage with me after the post, so this query isn’t very helpful. I guess that’s why they’re still at it. ($30/domain one time cost.)

Texter

As much as I love sending personal messages to every single message sent on the ‘net, I like to save time, and current Lifehacker editor in chief Adam Pash’s Texter is oh-so-awesome. Texter is a text expander of sorts; instead of writing a lengthy reply to something asked repeatedly of you, you can use Texter instead. The Mac equivalent is TextExpander, I hear, and my colleagues who were introduced to it say that it’s fantastic. For example, I have a few phone numbers stored in Texter; instead of worrying about both my free conference number AND my PIN number, I can type “freeconf” and it will be immediately output to screen. I can shorten anything from Los Angeles, CA (which is actually “la2″) and use Texter to file DMCA reports to submit copyright violations to the appropriate web host. I use it for many other purposes, but you get the idea. It’s a great app and it’s free.

CrashPlan

A lot of people ask me what service I use to back up my computer. Until 2008 or so, my app of choice was Carbonite. Then I learned that Carbonite didn’t have USB drive support, and it wasn’t compatible with Linux servers (I actually own a physical Fedora 14 build, so this is important to me. To this date, Carbonite doesn’t support Linux). And most recently, strong contender Mozy introduced new pricing. I’ve never been a fan of Mozy for its tiered services, so after I realized Carbonite’s shortcomings, I jumped to CrashPlan. I’m so glad I did.

I have the unlimited Family Plan, which is a super affordable flat rate for up to 10 computers. And I have 3.5 TB (yes, terabytes) of data stored to my CrashPlan server across my family’s various machines. The cool thing about CrashPlan is its “unsupported” headless client feature, which lets you back up remote Linux servers, like your web host (restrictions may apply under the family plan, though, so please check!). I have personal files saved to CrashPlan plus my Linux box, of course. (Various plans, all paid after a free trial.)

FreshBooks

If you want to invoice clients, you want to use FreshBooks. It’s a beautifully-formatted system that lets you send invoices at any time. You can also automate your invoices and designate the month or day you are billing for. For example, I bill some clients for the previous month, so I specify ::month-1:: in the template and it automatically emails it to the client on the first of the month for the previous month’s work. It’s simple. Plus, FreshBooks boasts some amazing support and a really great team. I actually think of these guys as a mini Zappos. They’re fun, passionate, and they throw good parties at SXSW — I guess when you have 2,000,000 customers, you have reason to celebrate! (Free trial, then paid plans.)

Launchy

For Macs, there’s Quicksilver. For PC, there’s Launchy. Launchy is a bit difficult to explain, but if you want to avoid using your mouse, you’ll want Launchy. Upon installing the app, you can run it any time by pressing ALT + SPACEBAR. It opens something like what you see on the right hand image. Then, type what you’re looking to open, such as an application or file. It can open those for you, perform calculations (you can type 3+5 and it will display the output), and so much more. It’s such a simple and lightweight app that saves so much time. I actually never (and I mean never) use my start button on my computer simply because Launchy is my start button. Free.

Everything

If you’ve ever wanted to do a search for files on your hard drive, you could go to Windows search. Better yet, download Everything and you’ll find the files you’re looking for in seconds, even on a computer with thousands of files (and more than 1TB!). I can’t live without this app at all, and David Carpenter, the developer, can confirm that fact for you as well after the dozens of emails I sent him these past few months about how it wasn’t syncing properly with Dropbox. Thankfully, David fixed it in his latest alpha version. ;) Free.

Clonezilla

Clonezilla is hardly meant to be used regularly, but I throw it in the productivity pile because it saves a ton of time. Clonezilla is a tool that clones your hard drive. Basically, if you get a brand new computer or install an OS for the first time, your computer is as good as new, right? Well, this is when you want to use Clonezilla. The next time my computer has problems or is slow or there’s some configuration issue that pulls at me and I realize I have to reformat, I just load up Clonezilla and restore that fresh new copy of Windows, complete with all my files and configurations. This is a tool not necessarily intended for the non-tech savvy (I actually back up through my local Linux server) — but if you have the resources to back your files up, do it. Clonezilla is a godsend. Free.

Other Tools

The tools above are the ones I use regularly, but I also love the tools below which are used as-needed.

  • Clutterpad: Many of you know what Basecamp is, and I like it but I don’t think it has the best pricing structure for small businesses. Clutterpad aims to make collaboration easier with project management and so much more. It’s a beautifully designed app which I use for those teammates and clients who need a little more structure outside standard email. (Free and paid plans are available.)
  • RescueTime: Want to know if you’ve been productive? RescueTime, which I covered in 2007 for Lifehacker, is a little app that is running on your computer in the background (you wouldn’t know it’s even there) but gives you graphs of how productive you’ve been, showing you which websites and applications you’ve been frequenting and giving you a score from -2 to 2 on whether it was a productive or distracting use of your time. Want to find out how much time you were working on that spreadsheet? Want to find out how many minutes you’ve spent on Facebook? RescueTime to the rescue! (Free and paid plans are available.)
  • Free Conference: If you’ve ever needed to get on a call with 30 or so people or needed to call someone overseas and couldn’t make that outgoing call, Free Conference is the tool for you. I get a dial in number and PIN and provide it to those who need to speak to me, and we do all of our phone meetings on this number. It’s free — unless you want a premium 1-800 number instead. And after every call, you get a summary of how many minutes participants have spent on the call. (You’ll probably use the free plan; paid plans are also available.)
  • Notepad2: Notepad2 is like Windows Notepad but with more features. You get line numbers, color coded text, and so much more. (Free.)
  • Irfanview: If you do any editing of images, Irfanview is a lightweight application that crops and edits screenshots and photos. The only annoying thing about it is that it has a roadkill icon, but otherwise, it’s a great tool that I’ve been using for years. (Free for personal use.)
  • Snarl: If you’re familiar with Growl on the Mac, you’d be happy to know that Snarl on the PC does the same thing. It’s a notifier that lets you know when it’s 3pm, if your laptop is unplugged, the amount of space on your recently inserted USB stick, your internet connectivity, and a lot more. It’s got a nice suite of features out of the box with more options supported as well. (Free.)
  • VLC Media Player: I find that the best video player is VLC, which is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. It has a good deal of codecs so you don’t have to find something compatible for your video to play. Just install VLC and it will likely play with no issues. (Free.)
  • FlashFXP: My favorite FTP client is FlashFXP, a really lightweight and super customizable FTP client for Windows. It also lets you transfer from FTP server to FTP server, in a process known as “FXP”, which helps me move data over from one of my websites to another web host. I really like this feature. The best part? Once you buy the license, you get free lifetime upgrades. (Free trial, then you buy it. It’s worth it!)
  • WinRAR: My favorite unzipping tool is WinRAR, which lets you do so much in such a small package. (Free trial, and then you buy it. It’s also worth it!)

I’ll give a very small honorable mention to Evernote, but I’m a premium user who just can’t figure out how best to use this software. I use it to save web pages on an infrequent basis. I just wish their PDF engine was better since my ideal implementation would be to save PDFs in a searchable environment. I also wish I could save files separately instead of in one batch.

Hardware

I mentioned in the introduction that I use my Dell computer for just about everything. It’s an old Dell XPS M1710 (17″) laptop which has been really good to me. If anything, I’d want more screen real estate, but that’s something I’ll address when I buy a new computer in the future. I travel with a Dell Latitude E6410 laptop, and that’s a great and super fast machine which is perfect for those times away from home. I build my desktops, and I currently have two: one for Linux (and tweaking websites), and one media center PC which I run my Spotify account on. I love Spotify. I also love RealVNC and SecureCRT to connect to my remote computers. No, I do not have that many separate monitors and keyboards (just one, really), but I do have an old-school KVM switch.

I don’t have an iPad yet, but with my new soon-to-be-announced startup, it will be a necessity. In the meantime, I have a Samsung Epic 4G which is laden with productivity apps (and no games… unless you count Angry Birds and Meganoid). I also have an iPod touch for music. Not apps. Not really, anyway. Coupled with my UE 700 headphones (which are miles better than my old Shures), I’m a happy gadget camper. I travel with the Kensington Portable Power Outlet (aff) to make sure I can keep as much juice as possible with me. This thing rocks.

So there you have it: my web based productivity toolbox. But what’s in yours? The comments are all yours.

[ The Productive Online Business Toolbox: My Must-Have Tools is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

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]]> http://www.techipedia.com/2011/business-owners-web-toolbox/feed/ 83 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. ]

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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:

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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 13 Characteristics Of Successful Digital Schmoozers http://www.techipedia.com/2010/successful-digital-schmoozers/ http://www.techipedia.com/2010/successful-digital-schmoozers/#comments Tue, 07 Dec 2010 14:06:51 +0000 Guest Author http://www.techipedia.com/?p=3106 [ 13 Characteristics Of Successful Digital Schmoozers is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

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This is a guest post by David Siteman Garland, author of newly released book Smarter, Faster, Cheaper: Non-Boring, Fluff-free Strategies for Marketing and Promoting Your Business.

Digital schomoozers. You know the type. They have REALLY engaged social networks. It seems no matter what they post, their readers and followers respond and engage with them as a result. And in many cases, it could literally be anything ranging from a new product to asking how everyone is doing to some TMI information about how their cat ate the wrong kind of food and threw up everywhere.

To the outside eye, this looks a little ridiculous. Why are these schmoozers so popular? What are the top 1% of these digital schmoozers doing that the other 99% of online citizens seems to be missing out on? How are they able to build quality relationships and a large following for their brand with seemingly little effort?

More importantly, how can YOU (if you choose) leverage those same principles to become an influential leader in your niche?

Over the past two years, I’ve been on a quest to answer the questions above through:

  1. 200+ interviews with the world’s most creative entrepreneurs on my web show The Rise To The Top (including Techipedia’s very own Tamar Weinberg!) and developing the “human” case studies and stories for my just released book Smarter, Faster, Cheaper.
  2. My own journey of building The Rise To The Top and focusing on social networks to build relationships which has led to over 100,000 viewers a month, tons of media exposure and…what I’m most excited about, valuable two-way relationships with some of the most interesting, passionate and amazing people I’ve ever met.
  3. Thousands of random conversations in person and online with all kinds of people.

Young and old. Male and female. Ranging from the tech-savvy to not knowing the difference between a megabyte and spider bite (and that is perfectly OK).

Without further ado…here are the characteristics:

Selectively Present

The folks with the most traction don’t attend every party, they attend the right ones and go all out. For some it is Twitter and Facebook. For others like master schmoozer Lewis Howes, it might be LinkedIn. Sure it is great to be everywhere, but why not put full effort into a few sites you enjoy and see what happens?

As I share in greater detail in Smarter, Faster, Cheaper, attending the right parties is a combination of your personality and of course where the people you want to hang out with are located online. For me personally, my two favorite parties are Twitter and Facebook.

Show Their Faces

No, this isn’t earth shattering. But, it is extremely important. Faces have the advantage over logos. Why? Because it is hard to schmooze and form a real relationship with a logo if we don’t know who is behind it. Is it the intern? A marketing firm? Who is it? The best schmoozers are humans, not faceless companies. Are you showing you?

Share Valuable (and Relevant) Content

Dan Schawbel from Personal Branding Blog is great at this. He shares all kinds of great content related to personal branding and careers. Some of it is his content from his websites. Some of it is from other people. When you share entertaining, educational and/or inspiring content, you begin to become THE go to resource for something. For Dan it is personal branding. What is your something?

Promote Others More Than Themselves

Chris Brogan actually has a ratio for this: 12:1. He promotes others twelve times for every one thing he promotes himself. A little extreme? Perhaps. And while an exact science might not be necessary here, the idea is critical. When you promote others more than yourself, you will not come off as a product-pushing jerk. And that is a good thing.

What does promoting others actually mean? It means helping other people out. Sharing with your network something they created (a valuable blog post for example), a product, cause, whatever it might be.

Helpful On Their Own Sites & Social Media Sites

Being helpful on your own website and on social media sites is like being — brace yourself for the terrible analogy — Mother Theresa in public (I know, I know…terrible). You are helping others…and everyone can see. And this isn’t about contrived manipulation (yuck), it is about genuinely helping others for the sake of just doing it (without expecting anything). It might be retweeting someone’s question about the best place to host a web video or answering the question if you know yourself. Helpfulness builds relationships.

They Show Up Consistently

No way around it. A great quote from one of my good friends and super creative entrepreneur “The Nametag Guy” Scott Ginsberg: “Consistency is better than rare moments of greatness.” Does this mean you need to be glued to your computer/phone and be “in real time” all the time? Absolutely not (and your family probably won’t love it). What it does mean, is the people with the most engagement are there. They don’t disappear for days or weeks at a time without a heads up. They are there. Talking with people. Sharing valuable information. Schmoozing. Hanging out. Slow and steady wins the race.

Tastefully Promote

There is a misconception on social networking sites that you are either a conversationalist or a marketer. Sort of like there are two massive compartments and you either fall into one or the other. However, the best schmoozers DO promote at some point. It might be an event. Or a book. Or a product/service. But, the key is it isn’t a hard sell wrapped in a tight marketing message. Instead, it is conversational and fun. Chris Guillebeau is the master of this with his Unconventional Guides. Sure, he promotes his digital products, but he doesn’t promise you a get rich scheme or make you feel any less valuable if you don’t buy. Try it.

Masters Of Small Talk

Check out Danny Brown. You might find him asking how the weather is, helping people with business problems, joking around, talking about the local pub…who knows. Danny is a master digital schmoozer. And the secret? Actually caring. Taking off the marketer, business owner and sales hat and instead getting to know people on a one-on-one level. Small talk is the #1 most underrated thing you can do on social media sites.

Introduce & Vamoose

In Malcolm Gladwell’s insanely popular international bestselling book, The Tipping Point, one of the most valued type of influencers is the “connector.” You know the type. They seem to know everyone and connect the dots for people through introductions. In the social media schmoozing world, being a connector is massively valuable. For example, uber-entrepreneur and blogger, Neil Patel is the master of the intro. It might be in public on Twitter (“Hey (insert name) and (insert name). Do you two know each other? If not, you should!”) or it might be a private email introduction doing the same. The value of being a connector and catalyst of helping others form relationships is invaluable.

Take Relationships Further

Can you take online relationships into the offline world and vice-versa? How can you get to know your followers and friends better? One thing that worked personally was hosting RISE lunches in my hometown of St. Louis, Missouri. Local creative entrepreneurs all came together for some great food, laughs and even some short presentations. The cool thing is most of the folks who came out were friends and followers I hadn’t met in real life yet. Combining online and offline is like relationship magic – just without the magic bunny trick.

Actively Expand Their Networks & Meet New People

I know we all want to pretend we are really important and everyone should want to connect with us unless they are some kind of dumb-dumb. In reality though, the best schmoozers stick themselves out there to meet new people. It might be a NON-generic LinkedIn invitation or a Facebook invite with a quick little introduction. Personal touches go further than you think.

Honestly and this sounds like common sense, but reaching out to someone and complimenting them is a great start. People like to be flattered. For example (and this is made up I hope):

“Hi Mary,

Just wanted to reach out and introduce myself and connect. I’m a massive fan of your blog Awesome Funny Cats. I’m obsessed with cats too and own 498 of them. Loved your last post on funny cat tricks. Looking forward to staying in touch!”

-Karen”

Grow Bigger Ears

Think of it is a pulse on your industry or topic of choice. The top schmoozers are all also news breakers. Sarah Evans (known as PRSarahEvans) is the master of this. As soon as something breaks in her industry, boom! She is all over it and announcing it to her networks. Are you keeping tabs on the blogs and news source in your industry? And more importantly, are you a DJ finding the most valuable and timely information and sharing with your network? Give it a shot. Do you have breaking news all in one place online? It might be as simple as setting up Google Reader and subscribing to the major news blogs in your industry. A great (and free!) way to keep your pulse on your industry.

Schmooze Randomly

This is the most interesting. When you study the networks of the some of the top digital schmoozers, you will find that not only are they connected to nearly everyone in their industry (influencers, bloggers, up-and-comers, fans, etc.) but they also have people outside their specific industry which to the outside eye might seem completely unrelated. For example, @rizzotees Chris Reimer has an expansive network on Twitter. Not all of the folks though are t-shirt lovers. Yet, this aspect of Chris’ network is equally valuable. He helps them if they need help. And they help Chris. Sometimes it is the random connections that end up being the most valuable to both parties.

Wrapping It Up:

What about you? What characteristics would you add to the list? What has helped you connect with others online and build a following for your brand?

David Siteman Garland is the Founder of The Rise To The Top, The #1 Non-Boring Resource For Building Your Business Smarter, Faster, Cheaper. He hosts RISE, a web show for entrepreneurs featuring unique interviews & advice, and The Rise To The Top TV show on ABC. He is the author of the newly released Smarter, Faster, Cheaper: Non-Boring, Fluff-free Strategies for Marketing and Promoting Your Business (Wiley 2010).

Photos by Shutterstock.

[ 13 Characteristics Of Successful Digital Schmoozers is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

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]]> http://www.techipedia.com/2010/successful-digital-schmoozers/feed/ 47 11 Common Mistakes That People Make With Their Personal Brands http://www.techipedia.com/2010/personal-branding-mistakes/ http://www.techipedia.com/2010/personal-branding-mistakes/#comments Thu, 07 Oct 2010 14:02:03 +0000 Guest Author http://www.techipedia.com/?p=2892 [ 11 Common Mistakes That People Make With Their Personal Brands is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

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This is a guest post from James Adams.

People often brand themselves as an expert in a field or an authority on a topic, but are careless with the way they present themselves, calling into question their expertise, and injecting doubt into the minds of potential customers. Here you will find 11 common mistakes that people make with their personal brands and suggestions that will help you avoid them.

Inconsistent Behavior

Customers tend to value consistency. That’s why Coca Cola strives to produce its products so that they taste exactly the same no matter where they are made or sold. Similarly, you should be consistent in your thoughts and opinions as you present them. If you are supporting one product today, try to avoid turning against that product tomorrow, barring any unforeseen or unknown information. If you change your opinions or positions too often, customers will begin to question your credentials, something that will have a devastating impact on your personal brand. Define your thought patterns and opinions so that your brand is always consistent.

Lack of Detail

If you are an expert about a topic, you should be able to discuss it in detail. When you avoid questions or cling to generalities, you convey the impression that you do not actually have the understanding and the experience required for someone in your position. This diminishes your value and leaves your credentials suspect. Show that you know what you say you know: doing so will establish your brand.

Oblivion

If you are an expert on a subject matter, you should know the latest news, findings, and opinions about it. People often advance themselves as a technical expert on a brand, but seem unaware when that brand is in the news for having a defect or a major product announcement. If you say that you are in the know, people expect you to know something: when you don’t, your personal brand gets hurt. If you are to represent your personal brand as one that is expert, you should at least take the time to stay up to date with news, trends, and opinion.

Poor Communication

Whether you write with bad spelling and grammar or speak with slang and poorly conceived sentence fragments, you are going to have a hard time selling your brand to someone who has developed a certain amount of decorum. Even if you have mastered essential material that helps you support your own brand, you sabotage yourself when you neither speak nor write correctly. Take the time to listen to yourself talk. Read your own writing. Get a handbook of style and learn how to communicate with properly constructed sentences.

An Army of One

If you are such an expert, than why is your personal brand completely unknown? To have credibility, you need to have other people in your field willing and able to testify to your competence. Many people stay to themselves, failing to participate in the community and to build rapport with others in the same field. Rather than stay in your own zone all the time, get out there and meet people. Learn what the current issues and trends are in your field and share your thoughts and opinions with others.

Dishonesty

Lying about your knowledge, skills, or experience will not pay much in the way of rewards over time. People will expect you to back up your brand with the truth, so when you fail to perform, they immediately begin to question your competence. Save a lot of trouble and build your brand and your life with the truth. You probably have heard that “the truth hurts.” Sometimes the truth does hurt, but your personal brand will always do better if you deal with it up front.

Negative Beliefs

People often fail to believe what they expect others to believe about their personal brand. Do not say you are an authority: be an authority. Often people limit themselves because they do not believe they can succeed. No matter what strikes are against you, you can find a positive aspect of your brand. Once you have found it, promote it and believe in yourself that you are the ultimate authority on a particular subject or product.

Unrealistic Expectations

People make the mistake of expecting results too quickly when it comes to their personal brands. You have probably heard that patience is a virtue. We all want instant success, but it rarely comes. Your personal brand can take some good points if you communicate to yourself and to others that you are into the creation of your brand and that you are prepared to spend the time, money, and other resources to make it the best in its field.

Social Media Advertising

Building your personal brand is about interacting with others and establishing your credentials. Logging onto social networks only to propagate self aggrandizing propaganda will turn off potential clients. If you let people get to know your personal brand by knowing you, you will have the ears of a lot more people.

Poor Personal Management

How will you expect people to trust your capability to manage their affairs or to meet their needs when you do not do the same for yourself? By exemplifying self discipline, punctuality, and organization you will establish yourself as one to be both admired and hired.

Negativity

Everything and everyone has both good and bad characteristics. It’s hard to build a desirable personal brand if you never have anything good to say about anyone or anything. Even if you have had a difficult life, employers and clients don’t care: they want someone who will build them up, not tear them down. Get control of your thoughts and your words: you’ll be surprised at how popular you become once you focus on positive things.

To be successful, you must avoid these 11 common mistakes that people make with their personal brands. By building your brand on high quality substance, you will rarely have trouble when you seek to persuade clients to choose you over others.

James Adams is a writer and researcher who works at CartridgeSave, an online specialist supplier of printer cartridges based in the northern English city of Manchester. When he isn’t writing guest posts, James analyses and reviews printer hardware and accessories. He also posts on their blog where he focusses on covering new hardware releases in the print industry. In his spare time he spends too much time on XBOX Live and enjoys nothing more than food from his native South Africa.

Photos by Shutterstock.

[ 11 Common Mistakes That People Make With Their Personal Brands is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

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]]> http://www.techipedia.com/2010/personal-branding-mistakes/feed/ 23 Social Media Insecurity: What to do When Online Activity Affects Your Offline Relationships http://www.techipedia.com/2010/social-media-insecurity/ http://www.techipedia.com/2010/social-media-insecurity/#comments Wed, 18 Aug 2010 12:45:20 +0000 Tamar Weinberg http://www.techipedia.com/?p=2866 [ Social Media Insecurity: What to do When Online Activity Affects Your Offline Relationships is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

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As social media enthusiasts, we often forget that we live in a different type of world than everyone else. We might be more keen to open up to strangers and share our feelings with people we don’t know. It’s the world we’re living in — for us, at least, and it will continue as we spread these ideas to our peers and colleagues, all of whom will likely slowly open up to this world in due time. All paths will ultimately lead to here whether or not these “outsiders” have chosen to accept it yet.

I can empathize with the holdouts. I have family members who are really confused with how omnipresent I seem online, but at the end of the day, they take pride in that. My uncle knows a young girl from his community, a recent college graduate, who is looking for a social media job. When she found out I was his niece, she became ecstatic. I told her to reach out and I embraced the opportunity to help her. (If you’re hiring for entry level in NYC, let me know and I’ll pass on her info!). Meanwhile, I did my uncle proud. Social media is about helping one another and building real strong friendships, usually around a certain interest or activity.

This is what we should be here for. And I’ve been doing it for seventeen years now while still being able to get married, have a family, and not let any of these online interactions affect my personal life. (I do have one!) It comes from a real trust with your partner. It comes from a mutual understanding of each other and our true commitments to our real-life interactions.

Those of you who read Techipedia regularly know that I won’t add you as a Facebook friend if I don’t know you. Not yet, at least. I’ll open up to you after we meet face to face or after a lengthy mutual friendship online. I understand that some people might have similar reservations. I guess it’s assumed in social spaces that when s/he initiates the friend request, you can comment on anything on their Facebook wall or tweet back at them about something personal or even comment on a photo.

Unfortunately, there may occasionally be times when one’s significant other has difficulty appreciating his/her partner’s engagement online. A combination of distrust and insecurity can cause extreme discomfort both online and in real life. When that starts to impact the “social” peers online who do not mean any harm, nothing can be expressed except disappointment. Sadly, sometimes an online “friend” becomes embroiled completely unnecessarily in the middle of what seems like serious marital issues.

There’s a real lesson from this experience. If your partner isn’t comfortable yet with your social media involvement, all hope is not lost. There are things you can do to rediscover why you really married or committed to one another. Here are five steps you can take:

Review

In a committed relationship, if there is any hint of disagreement in the social space, it’s time to sit down and look at one another’s social networks. Go through each individual account and set guidelines where you both can agree to what you feel comfortable revealing online. Given that social networks are, in fact, social, it should be mutually understood that “outsiders” unknown to the partner may comment on status updates or posted photos or comments. Unless the comments are not appropriate, no offense should be taken at all by the other person.

Set Boundaries

I don’t know all of the people my husband knows. I don’t know all of the people my father knows. (I can say right now that I know all of the people my 14-month son knows, but not for long! ;) ) In a trusting relationship, you should understand that you may not know everyone in each other’s network but you should trust that you respect each other’s ability to create personal boundaries. Unless there are excuses being made and your significant other is not being attentive to your family’s needs (and perhaps is even out late at night on a regular basis, indicating something else entirely), don’t read too much into what’s going on online. (“Liking” a comment isn’t malicious. Really.)

Communicate

Usually, committed offline relationships arise from being good communicators in “real life.” In the online world, you might be able to have a great relationship through digital chatter, but it may never amount to anything in the real world. I’ve had relationships online that have been completely awkward in person. I’m married to a guy I can’t even chat with online. ;)

If you ever see something on your partner’s profile or social network that makes you uncomfortable, it’s your duty to stay committed to your relationship and to address it with your partner offline. Try to stay calm and collected when you do so. This relationship deals with two equal partners, and they need to be equally involved and committed. Involving the third individual who is a friend to one partner and a stranger to another puts them in an awkward position, especially when there was no harm done. Communicate with your partner and no one else.

Understand Your Role

I use social media both personally and professionally. Your mileage may vary. If you’re reading this, you’re probably using social media professionally and personally as well. If either parter is using social media professionally and you’re not, respect their need to do so and keep your distance. Social media is used for work by millions of people and this number is only growing. If my actively engaged social media colleague James posts a photo of his young son Harold on his Facebook page, James might expect comments by me and other peers who may not know the mother of that child. His wife Penny should respect that there’s no harm being done if I say that Harold is a real cutie. Likewise, if James sings praise about Penny on his wall, his colleague Victoria might thumb up the comment. Why? She’s happy to hear that he loves his wife. Penny should relish this attention by Victoria and not take offense to it.

If you’re using social media in a personal capacity, do simple gut checks like discussing which photos are appropriate to post on your Facebook wall. If you’re blogging in a personal capacity, ask permission before going forth with it. A big factor of this is regular communication, so be sure to make sure nobody feels uncomfortable with any personal broadcast.

Get Help

If you’ve sat down and spoken at length about this issue, and yet there’s still too much discomfort where she does not seem to embrace your active social media lifestyle, despite the fact that it is what you do for a living, it’s time to speak to someone else. Perhaps you can confide in a friend who has been there. Perhaps you can confide in the help of a licensed therapist who can give you more guidance and work out what may amount to be serious trust issues.

If you’re oversharing, or if you’re not comfortable at all with what is being shared, and direct communication is failing, you might also want to consider talking to someone offline.

Don’t go out and confront the people you feel uncomfortable with with guns blazing, especially when you haven’t met them and don’t understand the online space. Online friends are still people even if the place of meeting just happened online.

Relationships of all levels of commitment exist online and offline. Who you see every day face-to-face should be the person you’re most committed to, and there should be a mutual understanding of this. If there’s any doubt at all, you should address all insecurities since the long term viability of your relationship might be at stake. Don’t involve the colleagues who did not mean any harm. It just exacerbates the situation and makes things very uncomfortable for all parties, including the third wheel who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

A deep understanding and full support of your partner’s activities online and off will translate to a long and happy relationship. If one party feels uncomfortable that the other is too “open” online, it’s important to sit down and follow these aforementioned steps to rectify any insecurities to create a beautiful and fruitful relationship.

Have you ever encountered this type of issue? How did you handle this?

Thanks to Lauren Rubin for contributing to this post. Photos by Shutterstock.

[ Social Media Insecurity: What to do When Online Activity Affects Your Offline Relationships is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

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]]> http://www.techipedia.com/2010/social-media-insecurity/feed/ 29 How You Can Benefit from Real Time Search http://www.techipedia.com/2010/real-time-search-benefits/ http://www.techipedia.com/2010/real-time-search-benefits/#comments Thu, 22 Apr 2010 14:33:01 +0000 Guest Author http://www.techipedia.com/?p=1638 [ How You Can Benefit from Real Time Search is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

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This is a guest post by Evan Britton, founder of Sency.

It was recently reported that there are over 50 million updates posted to Twitter every day. In addition to Twitter, there are a slew of other social networks which enable users to post status updates, links, and information daily. All of this data that is posted is changing everyday – so most of today’s updates won’t be relevant tomorrow. However, today’s updates are certainly relevant as they can give you a window into people thoughts and opinions. A real time search engine allows you to scour all of this data to see what’s being said right now about any given topic.

When you search “Tiger Woods” on a traditional search engine, you will get results which include news stories from major media outlets, links to Wikipedia and espn.com, and Tiger’s official site which happens to be TigerWoods.com. However, a real time search on Tiger Woods will let you see what the public is saying right now about the famous golfer. This is a new type of search, one which gives you a window into the public’s thoughts – in real time.

A real time search engine should not be used for the majority of your searches. For example, if you wanted to research historical information, like to learn what year World War 2 ended; or if you wanted to find out how many games your favorite professional team won last year, a traditional search engine will get you this information. Also, if you want to find a new website – for shopping or to play video games – a traditional search engine is the way to go. Probably 80% of your searches will be better utilized on a traditional engine. However, if you want to see what people are thinking and saying, about any person, place, or thing – a real time search is the way to go. Also, when breaking news happens, a real time search can also clue you in to more information. For example, I am Philadelphia Phillies fan – and last week, Jimmy Rollins was not in the starting lineup. I wanted to find out why. A real time search showed me a status update from a fan saying that he heard on the radio that Jimmy Rollins got hurt in the pre-game warm up. That is the power of the real time web: it lets you instantly access the public’s consciousness. Two weeks ago, when San Diego and Los Angeles were shook by a 7.2 earthquake, a real time search showed you updates from people who experienced the earth quake firsthand. While a traditional search engine would show you news stories about the quake, a real time search showed you people’s comments and experiences – in real time.

There are a variety of tips which will help you dig deeper when executing a real time search to get more information. With the tons of data that exists on the real time web, it is important to have more descriptive searches so that you can get the information you are looking for. For example, instead of searching for Jimmy Rollins to find out why he was not in the starting lineup – you can search for Jimmy Rollins Lineup. This will show you any results that include all 3 keywords. Or, let’s say you wanted to see what people were saying about the recent Tiger Woods press conference. A search for Tiger Woods will show you all of the latest updates about Tiger Woods. And with millions of updates each day, you are going to get a lot of commentary that mentions Tiger Woods but not his press conference. However, if you perform a search for Tiger Woods Press Conference, you will be able to see what people are saying specifically about the press conference. Therefore, it is important to qualify your search with the keywords that you know will be in the types of status updates that you want to see.

There are a variety of tools which help you to navigate Twitter and the real time web. Sency (disclosure below) is a real time search engine which makes it easy for ay internet user to see what’s going on right now. Sency has a two tabbed approach to its search results. The first tab, which is the default tab, is titled What’s Being Said. This tab strips out all of the links, and exclusively filters its results by time. This allows the searcher to easily see what the public is saying right now, without having any potentially spammy links mixed into the results.

You can also visit TweetCloud to learn more about a given topic. By entering a keyword into TweetCloud, you’ll see all of the other keywords that are currently being mentioned alongside the keyword that you entered. The keywords which are being mentioned the most will be displayed in a larger font.

Lastly, another free tool to check out is TrendsMap. This will show you what people are saying right now in specific places across the globe. It offers a visual way to see what specific states or even countries are talking about right now.

As for the business purpose of real time searches, all of this information can certainly be used to benefit a marketing or research project. If you work in the movie business, a real time search will show you early reviews of how fans are enjoying your movie. If you work for a company that just had a Super Bowl ad, a real time search will give you a window into how people interpreted the advertisement. Moreover, whatever your brand is, it is very likely that there is chatter going on about it. And, by monitoring this chatter, you will be able to get raw feedback from current and potential customers. You can also perform a real time search to identify and potentially contact power users who talk about your product or service to wide audiences.

With tens of millions status updates posted every day, there is a wide spectrum of information that you can learn from. Plus, the information is instant, so you can potentially use this information to quickly improve on a current initiative. However, keep in mind that the real time search is about today: the archiving of old results is still in its infancy, so its important to stay on top of this information immediately after launching a new campaign or product.

For years, new search engines launched attempting to take away market share from traditional search engines. However, these search engines failed to do something different and unique, and a lot of them went belly up. However, the real time search is different; it offers a unique perspective of the internet, and internet users and marketers can benefit from this new method of searching. Also, with real time search engines, you don’t have to be a user of any social network to benefit from the data and information, so anyone can use these tools from day one. As time goes on, as more data becomes published on the real time web and the technology and archiving improves, real time search engines and tools will continue to offer more functionality and information for all internet users to benefit from.

* Disclosure: This guest post was written by Evan Britton, founder of Sency.

Tiger Woods photo by Shutterstock.

And for a bonus: SEOmoz is conducting a search engine marketing survey. If you’re in this industry in some capacity, please participate — it doesn’t take too long.

[ How You Can Benefit from Real Time Search is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

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