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. ]

Read more about The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, a primer to social media marketing. Or you can subscribe to the Techipedia RSS feed.

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. ]

Read more about The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, a primer to social media marketing. Or you can subscribe to the Techipedia RSS feed.

I met her during my freshman year of college, though she was two years my senior. We’d exchange greetings when we passed in the dormitory hallways. Nine years later, we met again when we were assigned to the same tables at a local luncheon. She told me she worked in Internet Marketing, which I was quite excited to hear given that there was no marketing discipline taught at all in our alma mater.

We started talking about the last few years and our dreams for the years ahead. We then got into the nitty gritty of business. With Internet Marketing, there are many ways to go, from affiliate marketing to SEO to social media to email marketing. What was she doing? Her answer surprised me. Essentially, her focus was SEO, and her daily grind consisted of keyword stuffing clients’ websites.

Anyone who knows a good search engine optimization expert knows that keyword stuffing is not an approved tactic. Perhaps this is a fact that her agency overlooked, so as a good friend, I told her that it would be in her best interest to learn about approved tactics through the many free blogs, to engage in acceptable and informative (though not free) SEO training, and to read the best SEO book/training program (aff). Even though there is a cost for entry for some of the best resources, the solutions were highly worthwhile, I explained.

Over the next few months, I received multiple invites to various groups on Facebook and messages imploring me to participate in activities in which I had no interest. All social media etiquette rules were not heeded to. Rather recently, she told me that she had enough and was going to quit.

I was excited at the prospect that there might be some freedom for someone who was forced to clearly break every rule that was in the ethical Internet Marketing handbook. I suggested the same blogs and training courses and told her that she could potentially go out on her own and do her own thing after she learned the basics and knew how to apply them.  But first, I cautioned, “you must learn the material.  Your work environment didn’t allow you to do so.”

My friend ended up going out to do her own thing, offering “Internet Marketing services” to anyone who would bite. The instruction I gave her and resources I provided, though, were ignored. I am not afraid that she’ll find this blog post and know that she’s the subject of the story because I know she won’t. I’m honestly worried for her clients who are being cheated out of money and time.

A few weeks ago, another person connected with me on Facebook who was referred to me by a social media buddy I never actually met. “I am a relatively new internet marketer trying to break into the industry,” he wrote. “What are good companies to target? Should I learn a specific skillset?” Overall, the questions were basic and I worried that the individual was looking to target companies for clients before actually understanding the nuances of the culture of Internet marketing as a whole.

While this person’s intentions were more pure — I later learned that he was looking for agencies to target, rather than clients, and that he was willing to endure pain (learning) for ultimate gain (clients which would lead to money) — I began to worry that there are others out there like this college colleague of mine. There are others who sell internet marketing services who are ultimately clueless about changes in the industry that could ultimately amount to them not seeing any increased rankings or improved traffic. At all.

There Are Different Specialties in Internet Marketing

“What do you do for a living?” he asks.  ”I do Internet Marketing,” I say.

“Oh.”

If you’re involved at all in Internet Marketing, “oh” is not a suggested response. Internet marketing is a vast field.  There are different specialties to Internet Marketing. If you’re going to take “Internet Marketer” at face value, you’re being silly.  In the study of medicine, doctors have different specialties; Internet Marketing is no different.

If you’re a brand new Internet Marketer, choose a discipline and a niche that you can tackle head on and be successful at. You can’t do everything at once. Sure, a basic understanding of different Internet Marketing elements is fine, but it’s not practical to be everything to everyone. Here are just some concentrations you can explore:

• Search Engine Optimization:  Someone involved in search engine optimization is focused on building out websites in such a way to be understood by search engines (and by people).  A search engine optimization expert is usually focused on changing URL structure, optimizing title tags, and making code tweaks to a website to make sure the search engines find the site and the pages contained therein.
• Link Building: Part of a search engine marketing strategy includes the process of building relevant links to your website.  This often includes submissions to directories and contacting webmasters of related websites.
• Affiliate Marketing: Affiliates are individuals who market a particular product or service and who get paid commissions by a merchant when they make the sale.
• Pay Per Click Marketing: PPC is another search engine marketing strategy that utilizes contextual advertising; based on a search query or the content of a web page, ads will appear.  PPC requires understanding of keywords, having appropriate landing pages, and other factors.
• Social Media Marketing: In social media marketing, you are tasked with leveraging the social space through its media to market your products.
• Email Marketing: Email marketing relates to the promotion of products and services through e-mail.
• Content Marketing: Content marketing refers to writing relevant articles on your site (or having good site copy) that can bring awareness to your website property.

Most people that I know will excel in one discipline but have a working understanding of the others. If you know someone who is great at every single Internet Marketing discipline in the book, it’s likely too good to be true. If you’re studying Internet Marketing, learn everything you possibly can, but you’ll typically find an area you’re most comfortable in and end up going with it. For me, that’s social media marketing.

Get the Right Training Materials

Depending on the type of work you’re looking to do, your best bet is to learn everything you can on the subject matter. Some of the sites I recommend for educational materials include:

Free

• Sphinn: Sphinn is an Internet Marketing social news site.  Users submit timely news articles to Sphinn, and the community votes up the best stories to appear on the front page.  Normally, the front page consists of high quality content, though even the upcoming queue has good stuff that doesn’t always get promoted.
• There are hundreds of blogs on each specialty’s subject matter.  How do you find the signal through the noise, you ask? Find those who influence you, and then find out who they are engaging with. And read this post from Mat with some good suggestions.
• My top three forums include Cre8asite Forums, Webmaster World (which is mostly free but also has subscription-only discussions), and High Rankings Forum.

Paid

• SEO Book: SEO Book is the bible of search engine optimization.  Aaron Wall nailed it when he released his extremely informative PDF about a decade ago.  In the last few years, he moved his forever-changing content online in the format of members-only training guides and forums.  He also offers high quality tools, many of which are free.
• SEOmoz PRO: SEOmoz PRO features a rich library of informative guides, a myriad of tools, and a strong active and close-knit community.  If you’ve seen their free site and know what kind of great information is already provided, you can only imagine how much value is multiplied behind the pay wall.
• SEO Dojo: David Harry’s SEO program is the newest kid on the block, but it already has a very active group of members and engaging online discussions, in addition to easy-to-read training materials and video tutorials.
• Training Social: Samir Balwani has worked tirelessly to provide one of the most (the most?) comprehensive social media marketing training there is.  I highly recommend you follow his stuff.

If you like books, you should also check out Winning Results with Google AdWords, Pay Per Click Marketing, The New Community Rules (which was authored by yours truly), The Art of SEO, Search Engine Optimization, and Search Engine Optimization for Dummies.

Find the Right Agency to Work With

Unless you’ve been doing it for years, it’s never a good idea to go into Internet Marketing without an educational foundation. And most people won’t follow sound advice, instead eying dollar signs as soon as formal education ends.

If you’re serious about this kind of thing, beyond online training guides and books, you need to apply those skills.  Any educational experience in the work world, thus, will help bring you to the next level. Consider working at an agency, even in an internship capacity. Being able to work alongside the brightest minds in the industry can be extremely empowering. Having hands-on experience — the much-needed application of your learned skills — is incredible, especially when working alongside brilliant minds and analytical thinkers.

Every newbie should start working for someone before he embarks on the journey alone. Learning among the smartest in the industry is a sure-shot way to get ahead of most playing the same game.

Not All Agencies are Created Equal

As evidenced by the the story I provided in this article, not all agencies are competent. Keyword stuffing, for example, might have worked 5 years ago, but it’s not a successful tactic anymore.  If you’re about to start working for an agency, study it out before you actually work for it, because if you don’t, you might end up finding out that you’ve wasted years of your life learning the wrong strategies.

One of the easiest steps you can take is to look at their website.  The first thing I normally look at for “SEO” firms is to see if their canonical redirect is in place.  It’s one of the smallest things that can be done, but so many “SEO” firms, including the one I mentioned earlier in this article, actually don’t do it at all.  Also, check the website’s footer: are there keywords stuffed there?  If so, it might be a good idea to turn your back away from the opportunity.

Another thing you should do is to talk to people in the industry that you know to see if they can tell you anything about the company’s officers or about the company itself. If the right people have never heard of the company, that could mean that the company itself consists of self-proclaimed marketing experts who likely get websites banned from search engines rather than ranked higher.  It could also mean that the company is keeping a low profile,  so use the website check to see if the company is up to shady tactics not worth your investment — even if the job offer is there. (You never want to work for a company who has a bad reputation, especially if you plan to remain in this industry. Word travels.  If you’re already there, get out while you’re still ahead.)

It’s probably a good idea to step away from the agency if you find out that the tactics employed in the company don’t match what is taught in the training materials I recommended earlier.   These materials are written and maintained by real experts who know their material cold.  You can do better.

Going Off On Your Own

Only after you have spent at least 18 months to two years at a reputable company should you actually go at taking clients alone. Keep in mind that it’s not as easy as it seems. Doing the solo gig requires you to be the sales department, the financial and accounting department, the secretary, and the person you were hired to do: the marketer. You’re not only doing everything, but your salary is variable as you take and lose clients on a month-to-month basis.

If you’re choosing this path because you’re unhappy with your current company, look for another.  If you’re doing it because your freshman college friend is able to do so successfully, focus on the food on your own plate, Miss. If you’re ready to take on more responsibility, by all means, go ahead and do it.

Just don’t be the girl who leaves a company that wasn’t challenging you anyway — and then starts your own thing without the right educational foundation or skill-set. Be the student who mastered the subject through learning and application, and who eventually graduated to be the teacher. And keep in mind that the best teachers never stop learning either.

Internet Marketing Snake Oil

The Internet is rife with “experts,” but not all self-proclaimed gurus can actually deliver. A lot can talk the talk, but they can’t walk the walk.  They might sound great on the phone,  but they might not be able to actually increase traffic to your website through search engine optimization.  They might not have any clue how to effectively manage your Pay Per Click campaign to actually increase leads.

Unfortunately, not all “clients” will be so savvy enough to know the difference between someone who knows his stuff and someone who doesn’t.  As such, when the marketing dollars they invested actually result in nothing, they call the entire practice a scam.  There will always be a few rotten apples who ruin it for the rest of hard working decent folk who are truly looking out for the entire industry.

Buyer beware.  If you or anyone you know is looking to engage in this practice, do yourself a favor and do due diligence before going with your expert.  Interview prospects.  Comparison shop.  Don’t just look for the cheapest option; it might be the worst.  (“You get what you pay for.”) Then again, the most expensive option might not be better.  High costs don’t always translate to better quality.

Don’t Be that Guy

Every single profession has “snake oil” salesmen. There are doctors who don’t really know how to practice medicine and teachers who don’t know how to teach. If you’re an Internet Marketer who genuinely wants to sell your services, consider being well-educated and well-rounded. Consider focusing on a specialty where you can excel — and know your stuff cold. It’s hard enough that there are con-men and scammers who bring the industry to shame, but if you care about the future of the profession, don’t.

There’s probably not a single one of you reading this who is that guy. However, you might have encountered individuals who want to be just like you but might be looking for a silver bullet. Give them the full truth. Let them know that this profession is real work, just like any other type of profession. If they want to protect the integrity of this profession’s future, they should consider being well-read.

For me, Internet Marketing is not just a profession but it’s a passion. I read books and blog posts on the subject not only to further my career but because I love what I’m doing and I want to feel empowered personally and professionally. If you’re like me, you’re in the right place. You understand that this kind of work comes easy, and that you were meant to do it. But someone might approaches you for direction despite the fact that they don’t have gusto to do the work and to learn the ropes. They might just try to cash in simply because they see that some other people can do so successfully, even though those are the people who consider this more than just work: it’s a lifestyle, and they had to climb a ladder to be where they are right now.

Those of you involved in Internet Marketing for a long time might have faced this dilemma. Be up front. This is a discipline and it’s not a walk in the park. Knowing the tools doesn’t make you an expert. Ignoring the tactics makes you even less qualified. Ignoring the paid (and free) learning materials makes you a failure.

Everyone needs to work for success. As your role is now of a mentor, be the guiding light.

[ Advice for a New Internet Marketer (or How to Spot Internet Marketing Snake Oil) is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

Read more about The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, a primer to social media marketing. Or you can subscribe to the Techipedia RSS feed.

It’s my birthday! And like last year, I have a gift for you.

Every year, I read hundreds (thousands?) of articles on the topic of Internet Marketing, from SEO to social media to web usability and then some. And every year, I hand pick the best articles that I’ve read and compile them in a resource that I hope will last a long time. Here’s my list for 2008. Here’s 2007. Here’s 2006. I painstakingly go through these resources with the hopes that these posts will serve as references for you in years to come. Yes, that’s right. Despite the changing landscape, the articles I list here are typically those that I feel are “timeless” in that they could be referenced in the future and still have utility. These posts are not in response to newsworthy events, nor are they displayed in any particular order. They are strategic guides that hopefully will enhance your internet marketing experiences in the future.

Every year, I can only read so many articles. I try to keep this as exhaustive as possible, but even so, I don’t know every great resource. Like last year, I enlisted in help from my followers on Twitter, many of whom gave me some great posts to add to this list. If you’re looking to be included on 2010′s list, you now know what to do.

Like last year, if your article is highlighted in this comprehensive post, there’s a badge for you to proudly celebrate this achievement on your site. Thanks again to David Mihm who specializes in Portland Web Design for creating them. Scroll down to the bottom of the post to grab the code you need for your post or site.

Without further ado, I now present to you the best internet marketing posts of 2009.

Social Media: Getting Started

• Why You Have to Engage in Social Media, Even if You Don’t Want to (A Smart Bear): Jason Cohen (@asmartbear) makes a compelling argument into why social media must be considered, even if you have no interest in it. The article has examples of how social media worked too.
• The Poetry of Social Networking to Court Customers and Invest in Relationships (Brian Solis): Brian Solis shares his foreword to Sean Percival’s book, MySpace Marketing.  In it, he offers some thought-provoking insights into what must be understood before going into social media marketing.  And… Brian Solis is the most eloquent writer I have ever seen in the blogosphere.  This post is really poetry, as are all his other writings and blog posts.
• 40 Key Elements to Getting Started in Social Media (Louis Gray): Mike Fruchter writes an awesome blog post on Louis Gray’s blog about how to get involved in social media, from branding to blogging to Twitter to community. It’s definitely a worthwhile read.
• Marketing on the Social Web: A Few Key Ingredients (Michael Fruchter): I love the graphic. But more than that, Mike’s post explains that social media is really about using social channels appropriately to communicate and converse — and as an extension of that, you might just end up being able to sell something. It’s really not that hard!
• How Big Brands Can Start Testing Social Media (Conversation Agent): It’s really not that hard to get into social media marketing. It just requires a small shift in mindset.
• Why Social Media is Scary (Steve Radick): Why is social media scary? There are challenges to be overcome by junior employees, developers, managers, and even senior leadership. Steve Radick tackles them all in this post.
• The ABCs of Online Networking (Your Job Stop): I love Joanna Lord’s article — every single letter of the alphabet has an application in online networking. Don’t overlook these — at least consider them!
• What Social Media is and What Social Media is Not (Louis Gray): So many people don’t get what social media is. Mike saves the day by straightening them out.
• Is it Too Late to Catch Up? (Seth Godin): Seth Godin suggests ideas that will make social media slowly work for you as an organization.
• Creating Your Social Media Plan (Outspoken Media): This good primer talks about securing your brand, setting metrics, knowing who you are, setting a presence, engaging, and assessing success.
• 6 Steps for Creating a Social Media Roadmap and Plan (Green Marketing 2.0): Lorna Li writes very introductory post on what social media is and what you can do with it with some great insights.
• A Corporate Guide for Social Media (Forbes): Forbes actually gets it when it comes to social media strategy in the workplace. Have a read and see for yourself.
• 20 Ways to Drive Leads Through Social Media (Kyle Lacy): Here are some of the things you can do to start seeing some movement in this thing they call “social media marketing.”
• 10 Tips for Social Media Marketers (PR Squared): Todd Defren tells you how to jump into social media marketing. What can you do today?
• How to Create Measurable Objectives (Altitude Branding): We’ve talked about goals and strategies as it relates to social media marketing, but let’s break them down even further.

Social Media: Implementation and Execution

• 7 Reasons Why Social Media Marketing Campaigns Fail, and How to Fix them (Stuntdubl): Todd Malicoat never blogs, but when he does, he writes great posts like this suggesting that if your social media marketing campaign is failing, you may have had the wrong strategies in place. Good thing he proposes how to fix them also!
• Two Approaches: Shotgun vs. Laser (Web Strategist): There are two (of many) approaches you can take in your social media strategy. Which approach best suits you?
• How to Make Social Media Work for Non-Consumer Brands (Mashable): This is a good B2B social media article which is chock full of examples.
• Ways to Be Human at a Distance (Chris Brogan): Chris Brogan always talks about how businesses can be human again. So what are they to do? He breaks this article into some of the basics of presence, how to converse, how to add multimedia to those conversations, and the topics of conversation.
• How to Manage Successful Social Media Promotions (Mashable): How can you get feedback from social channels to offer exclusive deals to your followers on social media communities? Read this Mashable guide.
• How to Build a Social Media Cheat Sheet in Any Topic (ReadWriteWeb): Marshall Kirkpatrick writes an amazing guide on how you can find thought leaders in any industry.
• The 12 Step Social Media Program for Traditional Marketers (HubSpot): Here are a few things agencies looking to replace different pieces of their business with social media can do.
• 10 Creative Contests Powered by Social Media (Mashable): You can use social media to do many things: build community, make business decisions, and more. Let a contest help make these ideas a reality.

Social Media: Small Business

• Why Small is the New Big in Social Media Marketing (Jonathan Fields): Jonathan Fields explains why small businesses have a real advantage over large ones when it comes to biting the social media bullet. This is a great read.
• 5 Advanced Social Media Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses (Mashable): Here are five techniques proposed by Samir Balwani that go beyond the mere social media presence, including contests.
• How to Promote a Small Business Website (Small Business Trends): This article isn’t totally social media focused, but it’s part of it.  If you want to market a small business website, social is just part of your overall marketing mix.

Hiring for Social Media

• How to Evaluate Social Media Street Cred (Logic+Emotion): Do you know if that person is able to handle a social media marketing initiative? How omnipresent is he? How well-versed is she? David Armano suggests to study out the candidate first; they shouldn’t just be focused on Twitter, for example.
• 25 Signs You’ve Got a Strong Social Media Consultant or Agency (The Buzz Bin): Beth Harte and Geoff Livingston explain that social media consultants need to know a lot more than about the basic tools out there.
• Why You Shouldn’t Trust Social Media to SEO Consultants (Social Media Explorer): The fact that a few in the SEO community have a narrow approach with regard to social media engagement troubles me.
• 10 Questions to Evaluate a Social Media “Expert” (Conversation Marketing): Well, how did you fare in this quiz?
• I’d Like to See a Social Media Consultant or Agency That… (Direct Marketing Observations): I really liked Marc Meyer’s post here. It was actually how he and I built up a relationship.
• 25 Tips to Choosing a Social Media Consultant (Kyle Lacy): How do you find a social media consultant? They might want to pass this test with flying colors.
• Hiring for Social Media: What I’d Look For (Altitude Branding): Amber Naslund has a great series on good and bad approaches for social media job description and tops it off with what she’d look for if she were to hire for the position.

Social Media: Measurement and ROI

• Measurement Strategies for 5 Social Media Goals (PR Communications): John Cass talks about the various goals you might get through social media and the various ways to measure these goals.
• Are We Too Worried with Finding the ROI of Social Media? (The Viral Garden): What are big brand saying about the ROI of social media? Check Mack Collier’s post to find out.
• 100 Ways to Measure Social Media (Inside the Marketers Studio/David Berkowitz): Who said you can’t measure social media?
• Social Media Metrics: What We Need to Track Sales (Samir Balwani): Samir Balwani writes a great post on some of the ways you get ROI from social media.
• Measuring Social Media ROI: Does Size Matter? (Mark Hayward): Mark Hayward shows the ROI of social media. With a plan, you can measure effectiveness of SM.
• Social Media: Who Can Show Us the Real Value? (Econsultancy):  I like the measurements this article provides. The Online Consumer Engagement Value report idea is a good one.

Social Media: General

• Web Promoters: What Qualities Make Up the Effective Ones? (The Future Buzz): Adam Singer writes an excellent piece on the qualities that make up the most popular “power users” of the social web — that is, those individuals whose content people want to consume always.
• 11 Ways to Lose Friends and Followers Online (Social Media Rockstar): This reminds me of my social media etiquette post; there are just so many things you can do that will not win you any friends on social networks. Brett Borders explores the behavioral triggers that don’t win you any new friends at all.
• The A-Z of Social Media for Brands (Econsultancy): They say it’s “social media for brands.” I say it’s “social media for everyone.”
• Is Social Media Overrated? (Samir Balwani): This post serves as a reminder that social media is just one part of the marketing mix, and you still need to strategize and allocate resources intelligently. What is social media about? At the end of the day, it’s about real connections to consumers. (No, it’s not about the tools!)
• 10 Ways to Be a Great Social Media User (Search Engine Journal): Vince Blackham writes a great post on Search Engine Journal about how to be a great social media user, with tips such as contributing, diversifying your efforts, being real, being meaningful, and more.
• Experts Talk About Social Media Training (Samir Balwani): Samir has a great interview on the background on social media marketing with 5 experts. (Note: I was interviewed. Normally I don’t self-promote in this roundup, but the quotes are good, and Jason Falls, who was featured, is one of my role models.)
• Social Media Tips for Optimizing Time Spent by Marketers (Online Marketing Blog): Social media takes time, but yes, you can optimize it with tips from Adam Singer.
• Answers to Social Media Questions You Should Know (Online Marketing Blog): Here are some great questions and answers from Lee Odden on the typical questions you face in social media marketing.
• The Social Media Conversion Scale (Logic+Emotion): David Armano provides a graphical chart showing the various stages of social media acceptance. Where are you on the list?
• The Hardest Things to Teach Your Clients About Social Media Marketing (10e20): A collaborative list of what things you should or shouldn’t expect of social media marketing.
• The Seven Deadly Sins of Social Media (Search Engine Journal): I love how Jennifer Horowitz equates social media with the 7 sins. She has some great comparisons.
• 23 Social Media Marketing Tips from Dell, Comcast, HP, Wells Fargo, Best Buy, General Mills, Ford, UPS, Home Depot, Cirque du Soleil (Online Marketing Blog): Lee Odden takes advice from the best minds in social media who have worked in the corporate world. This is a fantastic interview!
• The Real Lesson in the Yelp User Review Lawsuit (Nine by Blue): The bottom line is that people need to realize that they can’t control the message. The best solution is to proactively address the situation and make it work for you.
• 5 People Who Broke the Rules of Social Media and Succeeded (Mashable): Real success stories and the experiences learned is the subject of this article.
• Which Social Media Channels Should You Be Using? (The Jordan Rules): This is a great chart and article on the best social media channels for both B2B and B2C companies.
• Share This or Else! What Makes People Share Content? (Samir Balwani): What prompts people to share content — and how does one capitalize on this? Samir discusses human psychology and explains how this correlates to content that is shareable.

Twitter

• Twitter, the Most Important Website Since Google (97th Floor): Yes, Twitter is that important. Chris Bennett features some great parallels in his article.
• Twitter, Customer Service, and Good Brand Management (Conversation Agent): Valeria Maltoni writes a great primer to why Twitter is important for customer service, but then goes a step further and tells you what tools you can use to monitor your brand (and some that cost money and let you respond).
• A Twitter Basics Primer (The Buzz Bin): When you use Twitter for marketing or whatnot, you should consider why you intend to use it and what you plan on getting out of it. This is a basic article but goes into great depth.
• Who Should Tweet? (Samir Balwani): Samir talks about the pros and cons of Tweeting by company representatives, from the CEO to a brand. He suggests a “character” to be the face of the brand on Twitter, sort of like a mascot.
• 8 Twitter Networking Tips: From Online to In-the-Flesh (Twitip): Whether it’s getting instant responses or meeting people in real life via tweetup, some Twitter tips are not to be forgotten.
• The Ultimate Guide to Everything Twitter (Webdesigner Depot): This is a crazy in-depth guide on Twitter, but it’s already outdated since there have been a lot more news and apps that have come out since. Still, though, you can tell that there has been in immense amount of work put into it, and it definitely deserves recognition.
• You’re On Twitter, Now What? (Conversation Agent): How do you want to use Twitter? There are many goals you can achieve with the site.
• 4 Real Offline Uses of Twitter (Dream Systems Media): Twitter marketing is happening online, of course, but it’s happening offline too. Just a few weeks ago, I saw a Twitter decal on a car. It was rather cool. Here are four other ways people are promoting their Twitter accounts.
• How to Use Twitter to Grow Your Online Business (here.org.uk): This is a nice beginner business guide of the various things you can do in order to be seen as a credible and useful Twitter user.
• 101 Tweets on How to Use Twitter (SEO 2.0): Tad offers 101 ways to use Twitter in retweetable format. Tips include being active and tweeting daily, limiting using Twitter for broadcasting, focusing on company-wide social media policies, and more.
• Connecting with Customers on Twitter: 9 Tips for Success (10e20): Jake writes a great piece on what you should be doing on Twitter in order to be successful.
• Top 10 Reasons Your Company Should Not Tweet (BL Ochman’s Blog): Not everyone will be able to use Twitter. Here are 10 reasons why you as a company entity should avoid it.
• How to Integrate Social Media into Product Marketing (Social Computing Magazine): This is a nice detailed guide on how you can market products via social media. (P.S. Sending products to bloggers helps too!)
• The Tao of Tweeting (Mashable): Good art via Twitter is not that hard to achieve. Soren Gordhamer shows you how.
• Breakdown: 4 Ways Brands are Earning — and Buying — Followers on Twitter (Web Strategist): Jeremiah Owyang explores the Twitter space to see how followers are being earned (or not) on Twitter.
• The 10 Twitter Commandments (Econsultancy): Patricio Robles says that doing these sins is like shooting yourself in the foot.
• How to Use Twitter to Find Local Blog Content (Hyperlocalblogger): Twitter can bring you local traffic, so use it wisely to build friends and a following in your neighborhood.
• 137 Small Business Twitter Tips (Small Business Trends): One hundred and thirty seven people were asked to offer their best Twitter tips, and this has been aggregated and put in a document (PDF, but not linked to this page) for all to see.
• From Corporate to Personal: The Four Types of Social Media Profiles (Web Strategist): What kinds of brand profiles do you find on Twitter?
• 62 Ways to Use Twitter for Business (WebWorkerDaily): Be it credibility, growing your network, or marketing (and then some), this article is a good way to inspire yourself to grow your business Twitter presence.
• 8 Lessons Learned as a Brand on Twitter (tins/Rick Klau): Rick Klau works for Google. He talks about what he has learned by maintaining a brand presence on Twitter: specifically, Google’s Blogger account.
• Make Tweet Love: Top Tips for Building Twitter Relationships (Brian Solis): This is an excellent compendium of tips to get the most out of Twitter, both by Brian Solis and then his own Twitter friends.

Facebook

• How to Create Rich HTML Tabs on Your Facebook Page (10e20): I know Jesse just contributed an awesome article on this blog but Victor’s guide here is also pretty good.
• Why You Need to Create a Facebook Fan Page (Quick Sprout): Neil Patel decided to build a Facebook fan page that was interactive, using it as a case study for why it would benefit you as a business to maintain one and what would be necessary to make it engaging.
• 10 Key SEO Strategies Every Facebook Owner Should Know (Inside Facebook): We all know Facebook tips and tricks, but did we know we can marry the schools of thought of Facebook optimization and SEO? Let’s dive into Justin Smith’s tips.
• How to Build Facebook Community (Socialbrite): If you’re looking to meet some goals with Facebook engagement, you have to actually be able to engage your audience and participate. This article presents fourteen tips for achieving this goal, most of which are common sense but which may inspire you to get more active.
• How to Win Facebook Friends and Influence People (All Facebook): Nick O’Neill’s post on how to become a Facebook power user (read: genuine) is great.
• The Beginner’s Guide to Advertising on Facebook (Jonathan Volk): If you’re looking to advertise on Facebook, be it for your product for via affiliate marketing (in Jonathan’s case), take tips from this guy. He makes 6 digits a MONTH.
• How to Violate Facebook Etiquette and Piss Off Your Friends (All Facebook): Sure, there’s no right or wrong way to use social networks, but there are still socially acceptable limits.
• Are Your Facebook Fans Truly Engaged? (Conversation Agent): Valeria Maltoni shares the findings of a Frozen Frogs study with regards to engaging Facebook followers.  It’s good to know that there are ways to bring Facebook community closer together.

LinkedIn

• 10 Ways to Use LinkedIn to Find a Job (How to Change the World): Thought you couldn’t get a job on LinkedIn? Think again!
• 10 Tips to Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile (SEOptimise): This is a beginner level LinkedIn howto, but it’s amazing to see how many people actually do not follow the basic rules of engagement for LinkedIn!
• Top 10 Reasons Why Your LinkedIn Question is Getting Mostly Pitches (Conversation Agent): Valeria Maltoni writes a great piece about why your LinkedIn community involvement may not be so great for you when you start getting an abundance of pitches. What can you do differently?
• 7 Ways to Get More Out of LinkedIn (Mashable): Taking advantage of the professional network isn’t hard. Here are 7 ways to get the most out of it.
• How to Ensure Your LinkedIn Profile is Effective (Web Worker Daily): Meryl Evans has a good writeup on how to optimize the features of LinkedIn to make a pretty spiffy looking profile.

Leveraging Other Social Media Sites

• How to Get Media Attention and Traffic Out of BusinessExchange (Small Business Trends): Not many people know about BusinessWeek’s Business Exchange, but Anita does, and she explains how you can get visibility out of it.
• 10 Tips to Get the Most Out of Posterous (Make Tech Easier): Posterous is the new lifestreaming app. Shevonne tells you how to actually use it and take advantage of its features.
• 10 Useful Tips to Using FriendFeed (Make Tech Easier): FriendFeed is still going strong, and its community is pretty powerful. Shevonne Polastre tells you how to make the most of it. Big emphasis on point #9. That’s the way to maximize the potential of FriendFeed.
• How I Use FriendFeed (Webomatica): If you wanted to know a little more about the potential of FriendFeed, check out Jason Kaneshiro’s post.
• FriendFeed Groups – The Fast Track to Content and Community (Knowthenetwork.com): How can you use FriendFeed groups to your advantage? Easy.
• Tools to Analyze Delicious Tags, Bookmarks, and URLs (Search Engine Journal): I normally do not put toolbox posts in my yearly roundup because I look for posts with actionable ideas to be put to use. However, how many of you actually knew that Delicious has tools to help you get the most out of it?
• 3 Easy Tips for Improving the Potency of Your StumbleUpon Account (Search Engine Journal): This post by Ryan Caldwell explains how you can improve your StumbleUpon account, but I’d argue that the information could be applied to other social bookmarking sites or social networks as well.
• Getting Links AND Content from Flickr (Search Engine Land): Using Flickr to build content isn’t so hard once you get inspiration from this article which features a case study and suggested scenarios that you can use Flickr with to help.
• 4 Tools to Track Flickr (Search Engine Journal): If you are tasked with monitoring Flickr for the purposes of listening to the conversation or finding out statistics on the photos you’ve uploaded, you should check out these tools to make your job a whole lot easier.
• 6 Tips for Getting the Most out of Foursquare (Mashable): Foursquare is new for many, so learn it and soak it in while it’s still hot.

Blogging

• 13 Tips for Marketing Your Business with Your Blog (Problogger): Most businesses have one goal with their blog: marketing. Darren Rowse gives you 13 ways to do just that.
• 25 Things I Wish I’d Known When I Started Blogging (Web Distortion): Paul Anthony (@webireland) writes an incredible high-level blogging guide, which, if followed, will definitely bring you ahead of the competition. Guaranteed.
• Do You Make These 10 Mistakes When You Blog? (Michael Hyatt): This is a good article on the common pitfalls facing bloggers, from not posting enough to posting too much and everything in between.
• Blog Post Ideas that Always Generate Buzz (The Future Buzz): In case you needed to be inspired even more to write good blog posts, Adam Singer covers even more angles for the aspiring blogger.
• A Crash Course in Comments (Chris Brogan): So many people don’t value the connections that can be had if you write meaningful comments on blogs.
• How to Find the Best Free Images/Photos/Graphics for Your Blog Posts (Smackdown!): Some really great public domain image search tools are reviewed in this article. Plus, of course, there’s Creative Commons licensed images too. And I’ll add another favorite: everystockphoto.com.
• 10 Things to Do Before Launching Your Blog (Small Business Trends): Maybe everyone reading this already has blogs.  Maybe you don’t.  If you’re about to start, read this guide.  If you’re starting a new one later on, read this guide.
• How to Write a Review (Blogging Tips): This is a different kind of blogging post, one that pertains to writing reviews of products. If you want to write a complete review of something, be sure to follow the guidelines highlighted in this post.
• 100 Ways to Find Ideas for Your Blog Posts (LifeSnips): If you’ve lost blogging inspiration, Steve Aitchison will bring you out of the blogging slumps. You can’t really run out of blogging ideas after reading this article unless the motivation isn’t within you.
• How to Make (and Keep) Your Blog Content in Demand (The Future Buzz): Adam Singer explains how you can keep your blog in demand, making it referenced and looked at regularly.
• 101 Ways to Promote a New Blog (Daily Blog Tips): Some of these ideas are rather unconventional, but I like ‘em.
• 19 Reasons Why You Should Blog and Not Just Tweet (The Future Buzz): Everyone Tweets nowadays, but there are reasons why you should blog instead. Some of Adam Singer’s points include demonstrating passion, getting full analytics, limits of 140 characters, and being in full control of the content and the website.
• How to Make Blogging Work for Your Business (Wordtracker): This is a great guide by Chris Garrett into what blogs can do for you and how you can build your blog to be successful for your business.
• Suggested Guide for Writing Effective Blog Posts (PMA Media Group): Blogging isn’t always just about opening a “new post” link and typing your thoughts. For some, it’s just not that simple. You might want to start with ways to inspire yourself and include some SEO keyword ranking tips as well.
• 10 Steps to Creating an Authority Blog (David Walker): Bloggers, take note: the presentation and the content of your blog is everything. There’s more than that, though, and David Walker walks you though it.
• 5 Ways to Increase Your Blog’s Search Traffic (Search Engine People): In Glen Allsopp’s guest post for Search Engine People, he says that you can increase your blog’s search engine traffic by applying some tactics to old (already published) blog posts.
• 5 Ways to Turn Blog Comments into Conversations (SEO Scoop): Blog comments should be ongoing conversations, but how do you do that? Barry Welford explores ways to make blog comments more engaging.
• The Complete Guide to Video Blogging (Mashable): Ever wanted to be a video blogger? This in-depth Mashable article by Leah Betancourt talks about the roots of video blogging and how to get started.
• How to Use Curation to Make Your Blog Better (Influential Marketing): I love how Rohit Bhargava compares PostSecret to success in blogging. He offers great tips here.
• Starting a Blog? These 50 Lessons Will Help You Succeed (The Future Buzz): Using data gathered from the Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2009, Adam Singer gives solid actionable tips on how you can start a blog and why it’s important that you do.
• 22 Reasons for You to Blog (Gloson): The youngest person who will ever make it to my top posts is totally Gloson. He’s 11 and gives you 22 reasons why you should blog.
• 8 Tips for Building Community on Your Blog (Problogger): If you really have a strong blog, you have potential to also grow a strong community. But how? Darren Rowse provides the insights.
• How to Create a High Quality Blog (Dan Blank): Pretty pictures and solid advice make this blog post a winner for anyone — companies and people — looking to craft a high quality blog.
• A Short List of Content Elements for Your Consideration (Broadcasting Brain): Before you publish your blog, ask yourself the following questions. Due diligence, my friends.
• How to Make Your Corporate Blog More Social (Social Media Explorer): Dan Zarrella shares small ideas but smart ones that can make your corporate blog a lot more approachable.

Reputation Management

• Top 10 Ways to Save Your Online Reputation in 2009 (Small Business Trends): Business need to step up a notch and be a lot more personable to avoid a reputation management fiasco. Most companies need to start by simply acknowledging each and every incoming request from a customer as alluded to in #2.
• Using Social Media For Reputation Management (DirJournal): Some of the tips here aren’t discussed in other articles, such as focusing on video and optimizing for local search.
• How to Build a Reputation Monitoring Dashboard (aimClear): This is an incredibly huge post by Marty Weintraub on how to set up a reputation management monitoring dashboard, from doing the keyword research to finding additional keywords to monitor to actually building it. It has lots of screenshots and good actionable information that you can get started with today.
• A Common Search Reputation Management Timeline (Search Cowboys): To summarize this post, if you don’t act to prevent reputation management issues, you’re doomed in the search world.
• Be Proactive With Your Reputation Management (Vertical Measures): My book talks about how maintaining social media profiles can help you with your reputation management issues. This post echoes that sentiment and provides specific social networks that you should establish your presence on.
• How Companies Should Respond to Negative Reviews (Outspoken Media): You shouldn’t always let criticism sit.  Sometimes you can respond.  What would you respond to, though?  How should you do it?
• The Dos and Don’ts of Online Reputation Management (Search Engine Journal): This article is a simple easy list to follow for reputation management issues. Yes, you can push down negative search engine results, but you need a plan. You can get some direction on that plan by reading this article.
• 5 Ways Negative Reviews are Good for Business (Small Business SEM): Matt McGee explains why negative reviews aren’t too bad after all. Just make sure you don’t get mentioned on Consumerist or Boing Boing. (Of course, if you get there, it’s probably because your customers exhausted all avenues, which you should’ve been abreast of earlier!)
• Online Reputation Management in the Future (WebProNews): Chris Crum interviews several experts about the possible diminishing impact of reputation management services — that is, when everyone has a reputation management issue, is it going to be less of a concern?
• The Online Reputation Management Guide (Outspoken Media): Outspoken Media has produced an incredible online reputation guide. Rhea Drysdale talks about the nuances of assessing, building, tracking, and monitoring your reputation online.

Content Development/Marketing

• Writing Content for the Buyer’s Decision Journey (Conversation Agent): Valeria Maltoni talks about the buying funnel and gives good examples of companies that do it well.
• 10 Secrets for Creating Viral Content (The Buzz Bin): It’s all about others — NOT yourself.
• The Doctor McCoy Guide to Healing Sick Content (Copyblogger): What do Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy of Star Trek and good writers have in common? Mark Dykeman offers a few parallels that just might get you thinking of your article-writing (or blogging) strategy.
• Beyond Headlines: How to Get Your Audience to Read Every Word (Copyblogger): Dave Navarro’s article on Copyblogger explains how to entice an audience and force them to read every word. The idea is to communicate similar tastes, triggering a sense of need, and promising valuable information.
• 30 Simple Ways of Improving Bounce Rate and Conversion Rate (SEOptimise): This article has some great ways to convert visitors into members, buyers, or regular users of your site. Are you listening?
• 12 Types of Content Strategies SEOs Should Know and Use (Search Engine People): If you want to build traffic and links to your site, you might want to get some ideas from Jeff Quipp. Hint: this type of post is in the article, but that’s not really why I do it. At the end of the day, it’s great to provide a valuable resource for me and for you!
• 9 Strategies for Finding Incredible Content (Search Engine Journal): This post on Search Engine Journal actually proposes some pretty unknown sites that you can leverage for article content inspiration.
• Practical Guide to Finding Link Bait Inspiration (SEO Smarty): Ann Smarty presents a pretty good guide for content inspiration, but not just any type of content: her guide gives you ideas on finding great link bait topics.
• The Psychology of a Linkbait (Search Engine Journal): Loren Baker paraphrases this article by saying, “You can increase your chances of linking success by remembering one simple rule : the best links come from real human beings. Here are ways to appeal to those real human emotions in linkbaiting.”
• Why Most Get Content Marketing Wrong (The Future Buzz): It’s a matter of formatting your content properly. If you miss the ball, you will fail.
• Top 10 Reasons Why Your Content Marketing Strategy Fails (Conversation Agent): Might as well try to get it right, right? Let Valeria help.
• The 10 Commandments of Content Marketing (Social Media Explorer): I like Kat French. She explains why your content marketing strategy might just not work in a nice list format with good descriptions.
• 49 Creative Ways You Can Profit from Content Marketing (Copyblogger): To be ahead of the game, you should be creative about it. Here are 49 things you can think about right now.

Web Development

• The “Just Create Compelling and Useful Content” Lie (Sebastian’s Pamphlets): Sebastian highlights the elements of a successful website. Hint: it’s not just great content alone.
• Things to Ask Before You Redo Your Website (Seth Godin): Seth asks thought-provoking questions that are to be considered in your next website redesign.

Video

• Online Video for Business: The Three Types of Business Video (ReelSEO): We’ve heard about viral videos, but that’s only one type of business video. There are two other types of videos, according to Daniel Sevitt. He goes into each type by explaining what they are and providing metrics for success.
• How to Succeed on YouTube (Search Engine Marketing Group): If you’ve been looking for some good ideas for how to achieve viral success on YouTube, read what Sheena Melwani says from experience.
• 5 Important Web Video Lessons for Small Business Owners (Mashable/OPEN Forum): How are you going to make your video stick? Josh Catone highlights 5 videos and explains the lessons learned.
• How Video Promotion Launched a Rap Career: A Complete Guide (Shoemoney): This article might be specific to a rapper’s evolving career, but there are general video promotion ideas in here as well.
• 34 Ways to Use YouTube for Business (WebWorkerDaily): These tips are broken down into expertise, advertising, and customer service.

SEO: Strategy

• The SEM Toolbox: 79 Tools and Tips Every Search Marketer Should Have (SEO Contrarian): Ari Ozick provides a list of the best tools ever needed to do your job as a search engine marketer. Categories include backup tools, backlink discovery tools, link management tools, competitive research tools, keyword tools, domain tools, and a whole lot more.
• SEO Hierarchy of Needs (Bruce Clay Blog): What step are you on when it comes to your SEO needs? What must you do next? This article by Virginia Nussey features a graphic that mimics Maslow’s hierarchy with an SEO spin.
• Search Engine Ranking Factors (SEOmoz): Every year, SEOmoz comes out with a list of search engine ranking factors, which is incredibly valuable if you do anything remotely related to SEO or search engine marketing. Of course, it’s not perfect since the algorithm is kept under wraps, but this information has been guesstimated by trial and error.
• Big List of Search Engine Ranking Factors (Huomah): David Harry revisits the discussion of the factors that he believes affects search engine rankings. And since he just came out with the recent training course SEO Dojo, which has been an incredible success, it’s a good idea to read this and listen.
• What Aspects of SEO Should You Be Spending Most of Your Time On? (SEO Book): Peter Da Vanzo gives a good beginner’s guide for how to get into SEO for your new website.
• Google is the Other Woman: The Relationship Algorithm (Foot in Mouth): This article uses an interesting parallel to judge how Google judges your site for algorithmic preference, but I actually would contend that all search engines typically follow the same rules of thumb. I love the analogies!
• Future-Proof Your SEO (Huomah): Here’s an article which will actually likely be outdated in a few years, but I thought it was still good enough for the purposes of understanding the search landscape today with regards to what works and what doesn’t in search engine optimization.
• The 100+ Ranking Variables Google Uses, and Why You Shouldn’t Care (SEO Book): In January, Aaron Wall predicted that search marketing success will come from engaging people. This is absolutely starting to take hold, especially as people actually talk about their favorite websites and search engines respond in kind. Twitter integration in search results, anyone?
• Big Project, Small Budget: Where to Begin Your SEO Campaign (Search Engine Guide): If you are trying to SEO your site, you may want to start thinking about the areas you should put more emphasis on–perhaps because your budget constraints may limit you to only one of these areas.
• 12 Easy Mistakes that Plague Newcomers to the SEO Field (SEOmoz): Even though this is a basic article on SEO, sometimes even seasoned professionals lose sight of this stuff. You can count on the “reciprocal linking” (read: link exchanges) to be a big mishap in “established SEO firms” from the amount of emails I get with that request daily across all my blogs. UGH
• SEO for Large eCommerce Sites (AudetteMedia): Adam Audette is the SEO for Zappos. That means he knows a fair bit about optimizing billion-dollar business websites. He explores the techniques he uses for his big client in this article.
• Creating a Sweet High Value Keyword List in 5 Minutes (SEO Book): Aaron Wall shows you how to create a high-value keyword research list in 5 minutes, then features a video on how to actually see what you just did.
• 5 Free SEO Tools You’re Probably Not Using Yet (Search Engine Marketing Group): Here’s my question. Have you even heard of these yet?
• How to Optimize for Conversion in Organic Search Results (Search Engine Land): SEO should be ROI-centric. If that’s not on your agenda, read this article and start thinking along the lines of driving real conversions.
• 7 Rules for Writing URLs (Small Business SEM): If you do anything related to search engine marketing, understanding the URL structure and how to actually optimize it is important. Matt McGee offers tips on how to do this.
• How Using Google AdWords Can Be the Best SEO Tool in Your Arsenal (RedFly Marketing): Dave Davis presents some pretty invaluable information on the potential for Google AdWords to be an incredible asset for search engine optimization. Yes, you read that right.
• How to Up Your SEO Income by a Factor of 10 (SEO Book): Ari Ozick’s guest post for SEO Book is a darn good one – you won’t know until you test. It’s really that simple.
• SEO Best Practices: New Policies Based on Updated Correlation Data (SEOmoz): It’s time to start reevaluating your SEO tactics. SEOmoz has looked at what works and reported on their findings.
• 5 SEO Essentials: Charting Effective Search Engine Optimization (Online Marketing Blog): Dana Larson’s approach toward effective SEO is great. Most people forget about that in such a social media centric world.
• 6 Key Tactics for Organic Success (Search Engine Guide): Jen Laycock provides six great tactics for organic success: keywords, content, code, optimization, links, and patience. Yes, patience is a big one!

SEO: Information

• Small Business SEO: Costs, Expectations, Realities (Small Business SEM): This isn’t a “SEO how to” article. We always see enough of those. What this is is a good article by Matt McGee on what you should expect when you actually buy SEO consulting.
• 5 Tips for Avoiding Deceptive SEO Companies (Small Business Trends): Since we’re talking about SEO, we might as well tell you what to look for so that you do NOT do business with some of these companies. Look for reputable companies if you ever need to focus on search engine optimization. Your rankings depend on it.
• Setting Up an SEO Shop Overnight! (High Rankings): Jill Whalen rants about the “SEO shops” that give SEO the snake oil bad name. There actually are good SEOs out there.
• 8 Short Steps to Forecast and Estimate SEO ROI (SEO ROI): Want ROI for your SEO efforts? Gab Goldenberg offers 8 steps on how exactly that can be achieved.
• You Don’t Need SEO to Rank in Google (Sugarrae): Rae explains that SEO by itself simply isn’t the key to high rankings. Good content and marketing is really the key; SEO is just a secondary requirement.

Link Building

• Get Your Link Building Requests Answered (Dream Systems Media): Matt Siltala writes an incredibly valuable article that answers how to get people to link to you once they’ve already established rapport with your competitors. He also brings in four experts who weigh in on the question.
• Why Link Building May Not Work (Best SEO Blog): Sometimes your link building practices won’t work. Michael Martinez explains why beginning about 1/3 of the way down in this article.
• How to Get Backlinks (Internet Marketing Techniques and Theories): Leo calls this post “very long.” I think I agree with him.
• Secrets of How to Escape the Link Building Trap Now (SEO Theory): If you don’t want to build links, you might pursue these other opportunities to build links that don’t violate any guidelines. There’s also a service review in here for a link building program run by a pretty well known guy in the SEO space.
• Buy Text Link Ads with these 101 Sneaky Tips (Search Engine Journal): Gab Goldenberg tries to stay under the radar when buying text links with 101 ideas that hopefully won’t get you caught.
• Indispensable Link Building Applications (Wiep.net): Wiep Knol has a toolbox filled to the brim of great link building applications. If you do any link building at all, make sure to familiarize yourself with these applications.
• Link Building Techniques, Interactive Agency Approach (Zeta Interactive): I get about 4-5 link building requests across multiple web properties a day. When reading this article, I realize that for 99.9% of these requests, none of these techniques (personalized requests, transparency, knowing the target website, etc.) are employed at all. Is that really so difficult? I guess it is when you outsource link building to interns.
• A Big Bunch of Link Building Ideas (Search Engine Land): Debra Mastaler is a link building genius and when she talks, I always listen. In this article, she explores the consequences of actually linking out to other websites and what you can do to build other types of links.
• Link Building from A to Z (SEOmoz): Wiep Knol is one of the foremost link building experts and has covered an entire alphabet of ways to get new links.
• 10 Goals for Link Building Campaigns: Moving Beyond “Get More Links” (Search Engine Land): Garrett French writes a great in-depth guide on how you can build links, suggesting countless tactics and link prospect sources.
• Link Building Evaluation Journal (Search Engine Journal): Building links to a website? How could you enhance your link portfolio? Dave Snyder suggests different ideas for different metrics of the link, be them the age of a domain, the anchor text, or the relevant authority of the link page.
• 10 Link Building and Tracking Tools for SEO (Online Marketing Blog): Got links? Start testing them. This Top Rank Marketing blog post explores ten possible tools from which to do this.
• 11 Effective, Efficient Ways to Use Limited Time to Build Links (Search Engine Land): If you’re tasked with building links but yet do not know how to manage your time, you might want to read this and follow Debra Mastaler’s suggestions.
• Link Mixology: The 12 Kinds of Links Your Site Needs (Michelle MacPhearson): Michelle MacPhearson writes a good point on what kinds of links you should be getting if you intend to market your website.
• 21 Link Builders Share Advanced Link Building Queries (Search Engine Land): Not all link building tips and tricks have to be Link Building 101. Here are 21 great advanced tactics that can help you get a little more out of link building.

PPC

• PPC Advertising Pitfalls: Don’t Just Do What Simon Says (Search Cowboys): Lisa Myers talks about the common pitfalls when engaging in a Google AdWords PPC campaign and explains that most people fall into these because Google AdWords is so easy to set up that many business owners waste money every day.
• The Golden Rules of Keyword Research (SEOptimise): Choosing keywords for PPC should not be too difficult, as long as your keywords are relevant, specific, local, smart, sneaky, and flexible. Explanations within.
• Top 5 Mistakes Made by PPC Newcomers (Latitude Group): Maybe you’ve decided to go into PPC marketing. If you do, don’t make these mistakes in Google AdWords.
• When Pay Per Click is NOT Right for You (Search Engine Journal): PPC? What’s that all about? Brian Carter explains why PPC is an asset and why it might be detrimental for you. If you have no idea what this is and might consider trying it, read this article first.
• How to Write PPC Ad Copy (Search Engine People): If you’ve ever done Google AdWords or any other PPC, you know that the best copy is important to drive clickthroughs. Just HOW to optimize those messages is the subject of this article.
• 6 Habits of Highly Effective PPC Managers (NVI Solutions): If you do any Pay Per Click, you should possess these six traits at the minimum, which include the desire to test and tweak, leveraging your web analytics, and staying informed of policy updates.
• Writing Your Best PPC Ads (Search Cowboys): If you’ve ever done Pay Per Click marketing, you might want to follow some of the tips Kate Morris offers on this post.
• SEM Training Strategy: Overcoming Common Mistakes (SEO Book): Aaron Wall explains how to maximize your PPC and SEO campaigns.
• How to Prevent Competitors from Seeing Your AdWords Ads (Jennifer Slegg): If you are really the competitive type and don’t want your competitors to see your Google AdWords ads, take Jen’s advice and lock ‘em out!
• 9 Tips to Write Effective Google AdWords Copy (Search Engine Journal): Saad Kamal knows his Google AdWords. Do you?
• 7 Incredibly Valuable but Underused Free Tools for PPC Marketers (Search Engine Land): Brad Geddes talks about some of the most useful tools to help boost your Pay Per Click campaigns.

Affiliate Marketing

• Cut the Fat: Some Quick Tips to Instantly Gain Profit (Jonathan Volk): Jonathan Volk’s gives affiliate marketing tips based on his own trial and error.
• Are You Ready for an Affiliate Program? (NVI Solutions): I usually talk about affiliate marketing on the hows of setting it up. But what if you’re a merchant who is considering it? Then read this and see if you’re ready.
• The Most Powerful Way to Presell Any Product or Service (Dosh Dosh): Dosh Dosh discusses the way to lure potential buyers into buying your product like all affiliate marketers should really be doing.
• PPC Affiliate Marketing 101 (Jonathan Volk): In case you were new to the affiliate game, here’s what you can do to get started with affiliate marketing using Pay Per Click.
• Interview with Rae Hoffman AKA Sugarrae (SEO Book): Rae Hoffman talks to Aaron Wall about her success as an affiliate marketer. This interview is pretty damn good.

Analytics

• 6 Tools Every Google Analytics User Should Have (Unofficial Google Analytics Blog): I’ve never heard of any of these Google Analytics tools before!
• Google Analytics Mega Post: 23 Google Analytics Tips and Tweaks (Search Engine People): Google Analytics out of the box is a powerful package. You can tweak output even further, though. To get started, read this article.
• The Complete Google Analytics Power User Guide (VKI Studios): This is the most in-depth Google Analytics user guide that I’ve ever seen.
• Using Analytics to Measure SEO Success (Search Engine Land): Jill Whalen explains that rankings aren’t good success metrics. Instead, focus on your analytics. Here’s how.
• Google Analytics for Local Search (seOverflow):  This is how you can use Google Analytics for some great local optimization.  This article is choc full of great detail, and while it’s local-focused, there’s good actionable insight for anyone using Google Analytics in some way.

Usability

• Is Your Website Easy to Buy From? Tips You Can Test to Improve Your Site’s Checkout Process (Conversion Room): Want to make sales on your website? You better hope it’s usable. Here are some areas you can test to find out if your site is good for the average buyer.
• Are You Guilty of Crimes Against Usability? Let the Jury Decide (Search Engine Guide): In this usability blog post, Stoney deGeyter equates your customers with the jury. Business owners should study those juries to find out what judgments they are passing on your site.
• Why Usability and SEO Go Hand in Hand (Search Engine Land): Search engines like usable websites, just like people do. It’s in your best interest to appreciate the value of this.

Landing Pages

• 9 Effective Tips for a Better Landing Page (Search Engine Journal): Saad Kamal offers good tips for great landing pages.
• 30+ Principles to a Better Landing Page Design (Landing Page Optimization): You’ve read about the types of landing pages, but how do you actually design one? You can follow the tactics tried by people who already have found success.
• Landing Page Types (Lyris HQ): This article presents a concise list of landing page types, from PPC landing pages to transactional landing pages.
• 7 Tips to Increasing Landing Page Conversions (Search Engine Journal): Lauren Vaccarello explains how to craft the content on your landing page to actually see conversions. One great tip: avoid marketing speak and use simple English instead.

Local/Mobile Search

• Mobile Search Guide (cellphones.org): Now more and more people are using their cell phones and searching on their favorite search engine. My phone is old as heck but even I do it. But if you’re a website creator, have you optimized for mobile search? If not, perhaps you should, since your visitors might end up going elsewhere.
• Local Search Ranking Factors (David Mihm): Just like there are SEO ranking factors, there are also local search ranking factors.  David Mihm gives you an exhaustive list of them for your perusal.
• A Closer Look at the Local Search Data Providers (getListed.org): Any local business presence will want to make sure its information is accurate online.  Take a look at the providers listed to figure out where your information needs to be updated.
• Blocking and Tackling: 10 Fundamentals of Local SEO (Search Engine Land): David Mihm, our resident local expert, provides a basic list of what you should do as a local business to get ranked in search engines.

Personal Branding

• How to Start or Start Over Building Your Personal Brand (Skelliewag): Skellie talks about why a brand is important and how you can do it.
• How to Build Your Personal Brand on YouTube (Mashable): Dan Schawbel is a personal branding expert and shows you how to build a strong YouTube brand. Really, this is a pretty good general YouTube how-to article, but he ties it into the personal branding element, which works for me.
• SEO Tips for Building Your Personal Brand (Search Engine Land): I don’t really consider these “SEO” tips, as they’re more social media centric. But they’re great for building your brand, that’s for sure.
• 7 Ways to Land Great Consulting Work While in Between Jobs (Personal Branding Blog): How to build your brand when finding a job, according to Monica O’Brien!
• What a Personal Brand is NOT (Tom Peters): It is NOT a perk, among other things. You have the privilege of a personal brand. What are you going to make of it?
• 50 Ways to Make Limoncello When You’ve Been Laid Off (Conversation Agent): Valeria Maltoni highlights an incredibly inspirational video and gives you some great ideas to build your brand when you’ve been laid off — and I’ll add when you’re not. You should always be building your personal brand.

Building a Brand/Brand Evangelism

• Checklist: Develop a Successful Advocacy Program (Web Strategist): Jeremiah covers some of the other aspects of a brand ambassador program, detailing the nuances and the like.
• 19 Presence Management Chores You Could Do Every Day (Chris Brogan): Chris Brogan shows how you can be involved in the conversations around you — tangibly.
• What Do You Love? (Cranial Soup): This article is about marketing coming from the perspective of the consumer. Consumers have a duty to market their favorite products or risk losing them from store shelves. Marketers should do this for their favorite products for free. I would. (Call it brand evangelism if you will.)
• How to Create Advocates for Your Business (Logic+Emotion): Brand evangelism. Customer Advocacy. It’s all the same. Now how do you actually get there?

Public Relations

• The State of PR, Marketing, and Communications: You are the Future (Brian Solis): This is the longest “blog post” in the history of the world but it is one of the most brilliant things I have read in all of 2009.
• PR Gone Bad: How to Anger Bloggers and Hose Your Client (Jonathan Fields): This story by Jonathan was so good that I even wrote a story about it which was published to Brian Solis’s blog as well.
• Shift Your PR from Push to Pull (The Future Buzz): Why should you move to a pull PR strategy? Adam Singer gives you the lowdown.
• 3 Steps for Effectively Using Social Media for PR (Online Marketing Blog): Social is everywhere, and you can use it in your public relations efforts. In fact, you really should.
• 25 Questions to Ask Before Hiring a PR Firm (Idea Grove): These questions test competency, prioritization, cost-efficiency, and compatibility.
• How to Use Social Media in Your PR Pitch (Mashable): Interaction is key, according to Susan Payton.
• The Art of the Pitch (Jonathan Volk): Want to pitch a busy blogger? Follow these steps. This is a short read with good insights.
• How to Woo a Blogger (and get coverage) (Outspoken Media): This is an excellent guidebook into what you should to in order to get a blogger to talk about you.  If the proposed content fits the blogger’s audience and you follow these rules, you very well may see more mentions of your clients’ products/services in blog posts.
• How to Write Effective Press Releases in the Age of Twitter (OPEN Forum): It’s not really just the “age of Twitter” – it’s the “age of social.” That said, where’s your multimedia? Is it in your pitch?
• A Poor Man’s Guide to Finding Influencers (The Buzz Bin): If you’re not going to buy a Cision subscription to find the bloggers and people interested in talking about you, try this guide to get you to locating who to reach out to.

Community Management/Engagement

• 5 Myths of Community Management (Altitude Branding): This is a great post on what a community manager REALLY does. Newsflash: it’s not only about walking the halls of social media sites.
• Community Manager Responsibilities and Goals (Connie Bensen): Connie writes a great post about community management (revised from July 2008).
• Social Media Community Manager Job Description (aimClear): Here’s an “official description” for a social media community manager.
• Community Engagement (The Buzz Bin): Geoff Livingston talks about engagement as discussed in his book, Now is Gone, and how it has evolved in the last 1.5 years.
• How to Kick Start a Community: An Ongoing List (Web Strategist): Jeremiah suggests some great ways to build a real online community in your little neck of the woods.
• 10 Rules for Increasing Community Engagement (Mashable): A big point that Leah Betancourt makes here is the emphasis on user generated content (UGC). Other important points are identifying and nurturing power users and welcoming newbies.

General Online Marketing

• Definitive Guide to Word of Mouth Marketing (Samir Balwani): Samir Balwani writes an awesome guide on word of mouth marketing, broken down and categorized into sections (why it’s important, elements of WOMM, web influence, what elements facilitate sharing, campaign tracking, and more!)
• How to Send a Personal Email (Seth Godin): Seth Godin writes about email etiquette. My favorite? #14 (especially due to all the LinkedIn spammers who have been targeting me as of late).
• 6 Powerful Principles of Persuasion for Influential Internet Marketing (Winning the Web): In a post emphasizing the parallels of the book “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” by Robert Cialdini, Gyutae Park applies these principles to Internet Marketing and explains why you need to apply them in any online marketing campaign.
• 6 Buzzworthy Laws All Internet Marketers Should Understand (The Future Buzz): Do you know what the long tail means? Probably. How about Metcalfe’s Law or The Streisand Effect?
• 11 Ways to Influence People Online and Make Them Take Action (Dosh Dosh): If you’re marketing to individuals online, you should target your messaging to the three brains of the human body. Don’t understand what I just said? Read the article.
• 6 Fool-Proof Steps to Make More Money With Your Website (Dosh Dosh): Dosh Dosh wrote another great article on how to monetize your most popular web pages. This is great for anyone, from the affiliate marketer to the SEO to the small online shop.
• “Don’t Put Your Eggs in One Basket” is Bad Advice for Internet Marketers (Winning the Web): While I argue that you must not spread yourself too thin, I actually am going to take Gyutae’s advice on this one.
• 3 Reasons Why it Pays to Go Niche (Literally) (Winning the Web): Gyutae Park explains that some markets are saturated. You’ll be more successful if you focus on niche markets instead. (Good luck starting a brand new social media blog tomorrow!)
• 11 Internet Marketing Skills that Should be Second Nature (Conversation Marketing): Are you well versed in internet marketing? Being knowledgeable in social media doesn’t cut it. You should also know these 11 tips as suggested by Ian Lurie.
• Social Impacts Every Customer Touchpoint (Web Strategist): This article touches upon the different elements of online advertising (and then some) and highlights market maturity and brand impact.
• Internet Marketing Isn’t a Buffet: Why You Need Quality Traffic Over Quantity (Winning the Web): Quality is more important than quantity, and Gyutae explains why this is the case.
• 10 Things You Can Do in the Next 60 Days to Market Your Business and Close More Sales (Small Business Trends): This article was talking about how to end 2009, but since you’re probably reading it for the first time now, how about using these to begin 2010?

Everything Else Under the Sun

• Being Socially Aware: Because a Smile and Fast Talk Don’t Work on the Internet (ob81): For a successful marketing effort, the bottom line, according to Howard O’Berry, is that you need to be socially aware of your surroundings and know who to pitch to. He even refers to a case study that impacted him to drive this point home.
• 12 Steps to Upgrade Your Business (Small Business Trends): Here are some great ideas to upgrade your business, from being more approachable to learning a new web technology to NETWORKING! woo!
• Rage Against the Sales Letter (Jonathan Fields): The long sales letter is a tactic that you may not really appreciate, but some marketers swear by it. Read why Jonathan Fields considers long copy a must-have.
• Business Ethics & Mistakes You Should Avoid! (Tony Adam): Tony Adam explores some business ethics moves that you should avoid. Some include reporting your competitors, burning bridges, and more.
• Your Customers’ Hierarchy of Need (Ignite Social Media): Ignite Social Media writes a great post on how customers relate to brands using Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
• How to Identify and Deal with Different Types of Clients (Smashing Magazine): If you’ve ever had a nitpicker or family friend as a client, what are you to do when issues arise? Smashing Magazine has your answer.
• 9 Reasons Your Online Business Will Fail (Shoemoney): Discipline and focus are two of the nine reasons.

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Closing Notes

The year 2009 was incredibly huge for me. I gave birth to my first child, a little boy, who is my pride and joy. I published a social media marketing book. I’ve made great relationships, big and small, and I’ve worked on some fantastic projects that I could have only dreamed of just a few years ago.

In the past decade, I’ve graduated college, married the love of my life, switched careers to find my passion, and now I live through it every day. Every morning, I wake up excited to see what the day will bring. I’m aiming higher for the next 10 years — let’s see if I can top this. I’m truly excited to see what next year will bring.

May you all have a happy, successful, and wonderful 2010.

[ Best Internet Marketing Posts of 2009 is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

Read more about The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, a primer to social media marketing. Or you can subscribe to the Techipedia RSS feed.

If you’ve been abreast of the strides and developments in the marketing space in the last few years, you’d know about both Chris Brogan and Gary Vaynerchuk. Both are incredibly popular public facing success stories with very strong brands, traveling often to make public appearances at a variety of conferences and venues. But while that’s a common trait about both marketers, that’s only the end result. It’s in the way that both Chris and Gary got there that is important. Let’s explore their characteristics and see how you can apply them to build your business or personal brand.

They are human. The brands of Chris Brogan and Gary Vaynerchuk are extremely well known. Both have incredible followings, and they often get cornered when making public appearances. It’s no surprise that both are asked to speak at events on a very regular basis. Clearly, both are celebrities in their own right. Their success, though, is contributed by the fact that they are down to earth individuals who are very personable. They are real people, and they make it known that they are more than just celebs. They are not afraid of being human despite the fact that they are in possession of incredible knowledge, which likely made them famous.

They have passion. Both Chris and Gary are extremely passionate about what they do, day in and day out. If you’ve ever seen Gary speak at an event or even just on his Wine Library TV appearances, you can see the exuberance of gusto in his presentations. There is not a single person I know who is more passionate about what he does while speaking in public. Similarly, Chris takes this passion in his writings, which are posted to his blog at least once a day. He gets up when it’s dark. He is extremely devoted to empowering individuals and companies about marketing, networking, reciprocity, and social media. And to lead into the next point, this passion emanates to who they are in real life.

They care about their followers. I started poring through the “list” of people I’ve met over the past 3 years at industry trade shows and events in my mind to see if anyone else really came close to the level of caring that Chris and Gary exhibited when they met with people face-to-face. I could not think of a single person who was on the same level with either. When I first came face-to-face with both, they genuinely seemed to care about who I was and what I was about. And they’d do it to you if you approached them for the first time too. They want to know about you. They want to learn from you. They celebrate the people around them. It’s about you also.

To that end, Chris often talks about how he rewards his followers by retweeting them, because this small act of reciprocation really resonates. And have you recently seen Gary’s Twitter stream? I don’t think I have ever seen that many @ symbols in my life. It appears that Gary responds to each and every single tweet directed to him, a task which is probably rather difficult for a man of his caliber. Yet he does not hesitate to show appreciation for his fans and peers and to develop relationships with each and every single one of them.

The Lesson

We’re all professionals, but expectations have changed of “professionals,” and putting a face — a human face — on an interaction is now expected of us. In fact, simply making ourselves seem human, just like everyone else, is a tactic that makes us appear more approachable and respected. Your customers want to hear from people who are just like them, so why not be a little more open about who you are?

Chris and Gary are devoted and extremely hard workers, but they make the work seem easy. That’s because this is fun for them and they live and breathe their work everyday. The passion for what they do is obvious in their interactions with individuals, their public appearances, their videos, and their writings. It’s clear that they belong where they are, doing what they love to do. If your work is not fun for you, it might be time for you to explore alternative possibilities.

When I was a young kid, I had a favorite teacher in every grade. Either they were knowledgeable about the subject matter or they cared about me as a student. I used to lump the knowledgeable and caring teacher together as a “favorite.” I remember having a discussion about favorite teachers with an older student who once said, “XYZ teacher is a great teacher, but is not a good person” and “ABC teacher is an excellent person, but she’s an awful teacher.” I realized that I’ve had nary a teacher who really excelled in both areas.

Little did I know that once I stepped out into the real world that I’d meet teachers that were both knowledgeable and caring, and Chris and Gary are examples of both. If you are looking to succeed, you need to know your stuff, preach it, but also reward your students and celebrate their importance. The bottom line is that both Chris and Gary are really nice guys.

I understand now that many teachers work merely to collect a paycheck. Few work to honor the achievements of their students. Few took the opportunity to look beyond the textbook and make the educational experience an enriching one. But these two web celebrities are doing this and more. The big question here: are you passionate about what you do? Do you live it every day?

If you are looking to become successful, love what you do. Reward your customers and followers by appreciating them, honoring them, and highlighting them in the work that you do. And don’t be afraid to show who you are behind the corporate face. Your customers — and you — deserve it.

[ What Chris Brogan and Gary Vaynerchuk Have in Common, and What You Can Learn from it is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

Read more about The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, a primer to social media marketing. Or you can subscribe to the Techipedia RSS feed.

This is a guest post I wrote for new media and PR expert Brian Solis, but I also wanted to share it with my readers. Brian Solis and Deirdre Breakenridge just published an excellent book, Putting the Public Back in Public Relations. It’s a must read for any PR professional moving into or active in this space.

As bloggers, we’ve all experienced it: the completely off topic pitch. After pouring blood, sweat, and tears into our blog that clearly is known for addressing a specific subject matter, we get an email from a public relations agency that takes us for someone completely different. Where do they come off doing that?

A few months ago, Brian Solis talked about an off-topic pitch about a social network for plants. (Somehow, I think nature lovers would be more interested in socializing shrubbery.) I’m sure you can relate. With some of these pitches, I scratch my head. With others who address me as Jennifer or Dakash, I wonder if these individuals representing both small and large companies really realize that their lack of research reflects poorly on their clients.

There are thousands of public relations professionals. There are even more bloggers. With online interactions comes the conception that public relations outreach is all the more easier. Email facilitates communications. There’s no effort in adding thousands of email addresses to an address book, performing a mail merge, and sending off a generic press release. The thought is, “How about I target everyone I possibly can and hope for a handful of those folks to blog about the service I’m pitching?”

Guess what? The reason PR professionals are succeeding down this path is because of bloggers like us who are receptive to this impersonal and poorly researched messaging. Of course, not all of us will respond to a generic press release, but there are those who want the new shiniest gadget or a preview of the next greatest webapp or even the newest self-help book and they’ll immediately jump at the opportunity for a freebie.

Jonathan Fields blogged about his PR outreach nightmare. In a nutshell (and one that is hard to summarize given the chunks of gold in his communications), an email was addressed to “Mr. Jonathan Fields Self Help,” asking him to review a new book. More disturbing to Jonathan was the fact that the email itself “showed no regard for who [he] was and what [he] wrote or cared about.”

You’ve probably gotten emails like this to and decided to toss them in the trash.

Jonathan’s saga continues when the PR representative followed up with a stern email, chastising him for not considering the book.

It is the second time I wrote to you Jonathan. I am trying to interest you in perhaps one of the most important self help books ever written. You didn’t reply the first time and I thought that you might respond the second time.

Sorry if this doesn’t appear to meet your needs.

I will certainly respect your wishes, but it sure seems an ironic shame that you are choosing this course of action.

Great. The provocation begins. Jonathan decided he had to spin into action. He retorted back to the representative with the following statement:

The “ironic shame” is that as someone who represents the legendary [Big Publisher] and books based on respect and honoring human individuality, you’ve not taken the time to understand the fundamentals of how to pitch a blogger in a manner that’s not insulting and spammy.

The PR representative wasn’t done. His response? He’s been doing it for 35 years and “it works.” Further, it’s “simply unrealistic” for him to tailor his press releases to bloggers, and it’s “close minded” for bloggers to expect this of him. Why? Becasue “bloggers are only one of over 25 prime media and online technologies.” And as such, they’re not important. After all, “most media respond favorably … Dozens and dozens of them are responding simply by saying, ‘sure, send us the books.’”

I read this post with my mouth open. Not so much from Jonathan’s expected response but because of this PR “professional” who clearly lacks the understanding of acceptable blogger outreach. “It works,” he says. It’s easy, with over 750,000 journalists listed in the Cision database, to compose an email without regard for who the person is and to make an immediate decision to hit the “send” button without actually spending 5 minutes on the blogger’s website and discovering what tickles their fancy.

If bloggers are receptive to this kind of lazy outreach, other bloggers need to step up and make it known to the PR representative that this behavior will not last. Some have gone as far as outing the companies who have trodden down this path. While public pages and blog posts can be effective, though, the low-key communication style may be just as powerful. Unfortunately, there are simply not enough Jonathans in the world who explictly respond to the PR “pro” to let them know that their behavior won’t win them any influential friends in the blogosphere. After all, there are more folks receptive to the freebies than those who feel the need to stand up to these spammers.

Blogger outreach does not need to take a significant chunk of time and can translate to long-lasting relationships that can really benefit your business or your clients. Search for blogs via paid tools such as Radian6, TruPulse, and Trackur. If you are going down the free route, use Google Blog Search, Technorati, and blogrolls to find relevant blogs. BuzzStream is a brilliant new tool that lets you gather contact names and addresses and chart your history of communications with each individual blogger. The process of doing outreach does not have to be so difficult and can be easily managed.

If your responsibility is to reach out to more than just bloggers, it might be a better idea to get someone more qualified — someone who knows how to put the public back in public relations — to cover the blogger outreach. Jonathan was too kind and did not identify the spammer, but next time, you might not be so lucky. Would you really want to become another Lois Whitman?

Writing on social media strategy has still gotten me my share of dance and fashion clothing pitches. I’ve yet to blog about either. (However, when responding to a PR agency in the past about this, I was told, “We thought it was a fashion blog.”) Further, I’ve made it clear that I only blog about services I have firsthand knowledge of and strategies I have worked on. I don’t blog about new products unless it suits me or my readers. However, this phenomenom has gotten so bad that I’ve asked people not send me press releases. No later than a week after my blog’s contact form was updated did I receive three spankin’ new press pitches. And all of them, again, were not relevant to my interests or my subject matter.

Is the PR pitch dying? Will there be other bloggers who follow in my lead and ask public relations professionals to stop sending messaging that doesn’t fit with their beat and doesn’t account for the blogger’s feelings, thoughts, and ideas? Probably not. But those of us who do receive those off-topic and spammy press releases have the responsibility to put these PR spammers in their place. Use this opportunity to empower yourself as a blogger who deserves to hear the right messages and not the wrong ones.

[ The Nightmare Public Relations Professional and How to Stop Him is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

Read more about The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, a primer to social media marketing. Or you can subscribe to the Techipedia RSS feed.

Today is my birthday, and I decided to give you all a gift that few of you have been highly anticipating for a few months now. My most popular post on this site — probably by far — was last year’s Best Internet Marketing Posts of 2007 compilation. I spent about 3 days (and nights) on it (without sleep) and I was quite happy with the turnout. This year, I began starting to write this compilation in the first week of December. The collection begins with posts that start in January of 2008 and have been collected and shared in the last 12 months. Like last year, I’ve grouped them into different categories and written short descriptions on each post. There’s no order to the posts; I’ve used my bookmarks and a variety of social sites and peer recommendations to create this list. I hope this year’s list surpasses last year’s. Let me know how I did in the comments.

Here’s how this works: In the Internet Marketing Best Posts “series,” I take posts that are typically timeless — they’re not confined to a specific event or news occurrence — they’re valuable for the long haul in terms of Internet Marketing and creative strategy. Hopefully, you’ll see that these posts are still relevant in a few years down the road.

These posts range from beginner to advanced with a greater emphasis on the more intermediate posts. I’d argue that if you’re starting your Internet Marketing business with not much know-how, you should check out the 2007 posts; in fact, most may still find them relevant regardless of the skill level.

New for 2008: If your article is highlighted in this comprehensive post, we have badges for you! Feel free to link to this post with the top right hand image, which was contributed by David Mihm who specializes in Portland Web Design. Every post is a winner!

Search Engine Optimization (SEO):

• The SEO Success Pyramid: Matt McGee talks about the process of making great websites. He illustrates this in a graphical pyramid. You can even download it but you have to go to his post to get it.
• Online SEO Tools: The Ultimate Collection: At Search Engine Journal, Ann Smarty has compiled a list of the most valuable tools to perform SEO analysis.
• WordPress SEO: Definitive Guide to High Rankings for Your Blog is written by WordPress optimization expert and coder Joost de Valk and gives you some great tips on how to use WordPress in a search engine friendly fashion.
• How Much Money is a Top Google Ranking Worth to Your Business: Aaron Wall discusses the cost of that #1 link backing up the data with some hard research.
• SEO Mastermind Aaron Wall Brings Bad News: In an interview with Entrepreneur magazine, Aaron Wall talks about all things SEO.
• The Web Developers SEO Cheat Sheet: Danny Dover of SEOmoz shares the “mother of all technical SEO cheat sheets.” Nuff said.
• The SEO Guide to Information Architecture: How do you design a website for efficient crawling by search engines? If you don’t have a clue, Adam Audette is here to help.
• What is the Definition of SEO?: Jeremy Schoemaker asked a number of online marketing experts about their definitions of search engine optimization.
• How to be an SEO Service Provider: So you want to provide search engine optimization services? Here’s what you should do so that you can get the best return for your efforts.
• Don’t Sour Your Link Juice by Forgetting Basic SEO: Loren Baker explains that you could have lots of links — and that’s still not enough if you don’t follow basic search engine optimization techniques.
• 4 Reasons Many Big Brands Downplay SEO: Why aren’t all Fortune 500 companies engaging in SEO? Laura Callow tells you why.
• How to Get New Web Sites to Rank Quickly: Aaron Wall discusses some strategies to get high rankings with a brand new site — and we know those are sites that often need to take time to build trust.
• Keyword Density SEO Myths: Hobo SEO asked a bunch of established SEO experts about their opinions on keyword density.
• How You Can Get Your Google Rankings Back: Ever get a search engine ranking penalty? Aviva Directory did and they tell you what you need to do about it and how to address it.
• Content is NOT Always King and SEO is not always bad: Wil Reynolds explains that search engines can’t choose the best content and those pages with great content may not rank so high.
• Ranking as the Original Source for Content You Syndicate: According to Vanessa Fox, you can get the ranking control over that article that some lame blog just ripped off. As for me, I threaten DMCA takedown notices. It usually works.
• The Beginner’s Checklist for Learning SEO: SEOmoz’s Danny talks again about how newbies can get their SEO learn on.
• SEO Guide for Designers: This is especially useful if you code in Flash or like your graphics.
• The Most Powerful SEO Tactic: Simplify, Simplify, Simplify: Eric Enge simplifies (no pun intended) the essentials of SEO.
• Tools of the SEO Trade: There are a lot of tools out there that make search engine optimization simpler.
• Google Double or Indented Listings: Andy Beard shows you how to get an indented listing on Google.

Social Media: Generic Strategy:

• 50 Ways to Use Social Media: Jeremiah Owyang shows how you can apply social media to some standard social computing objectives.
• What is the ROI for Social Media?: Jason Falls explores the commonly-discussed (but not easily answered) question about social media.
• Scared of Social Media? You May Already be Pro!: Jill Whalen has been active on forums and online communities for 10 years now. But “social media marketing expert?” She didn’t think she was one.
• Top 10 Reasons Why SEOs Fail on Social Media: This is a practical guide for search engine optimizers and their shortcomings with new media.
• The Limitations of Social Media: Social media may seem to be awesome, but sometimes it just doesn’t work.
• The ABCs of Social Media: For every letter of the alphabet, you have a way to relate a word to social media.
• Social Media Marketing: How to Win Friends and Influence People: Sound like a famous book you’ve read? It is. But you can apply these tactics to social media relationships too.
• A Sample Social Media Toolkit: Chris Brogan talks about some of the ways you can tap into the social media field.
• 50 Steps to Establishing a Consistent Social Media Practice: Great tips all in one single post.? What could be better?
• Social Media Will Change Your Business: This is an update to an old article from BusinessWeek on how blogs have changed your business. Not anymore — it’s about social media (which typically encompasses blogs too).
• How Does a Company Dip its Toes in the Conversation?: If you’re new to social media, how do you engage as a company? Let Valeria Maltoni tell you — she’s that good.
• 7 Videos About Social Media You Need to Watch: Samir Balwani has gathered the best videos on social media so that you can further expand your knowledge.
• What I Want a Social Media Expert to Know: If you are Chris Brogan, you might have specific demands of your social media expert.
• Will the Real Social Media Expert Please Stand Up?: On the other hand, if you are Brian Solis, you need to know what to do as an expert and where to listen to the ongoing conversations.
• Intel Social Media Guidelines: Last month, it was discovered that Intel had pushed its social media guidelines out in the open. You can learn a thing or two from it.
• Starting a Social Media Strategy: Perhaps you’d call this a beginner’s piece — perhaps not — Chris Brogan touches upon considerations for implementing social media strategy.
• Big Brand Social Media Interview: Lee Odden interviews Wells Fargo, Home Depot, UPS, and Graco to get a feel of how they are engaging in the social media playground.
• Best Social Media Advice from this Site: Uh, I’m sorry, I just gave you a lot more reading material from Chris Brogan. Please read it after you’re done with this post. That’s all I ask.
• Towards a More Social Organization: Chris Heuer says that we’re becoming more social, so start realizing the importance of this trend and evolve accordingly.
• How to Measure Social Media ROI for Business: Aaron Uhrmacher explains the factors you must consider to see if your social media campaign has had an impact.
• Social Media ROI: Janet Fouts explains other ways to calculate your ROI on social media.
• A List of Social Media Marketing Examples: Peter Kim has an exhaustive list of companies engaging in social media. Is your company on the list?
• Social Media and Business Marketing Links: Related to Peter Kim’s list above, we see other business uses of social media.
• Biggest Mistakes Made by Social Media Gurus: You can still screw up in social media, but you don’t have to. Some people have lived and learned; read the Mashable post to avoid the same mistakes.
• Online Communities and Their Impact on Business: The key to success is engagement, but Michael Mace says that there are some concepts you need to understand first.
• A Social Media Guide: Steve Spalding writes nearly 8000 words on what he’s learned on social media over the past few years. It’s also available in PDF format.
• How to Measure Success in Your Social Media Marketing: So is ROI for social media really hard to calculate? Here are even more ways to measure ROI on your campaigns.
• Social Media Marketing Guide: Barry Welford at Cre8tive Flow talks about political success in social media marketing and explains how to be good at it for business success.
• How to Change the World Using Social Media: Can you really change the world? “Yes — when you turns to we,” Brian Clark says.
• Involve, Create, Discuss, Promote, Measure: Valeria Maltoni gives you 5 key ideas that you must understand fully for social media success.
• How to Champion Social Media at Work: Own social media at your workplace with some solid tactics presented by Jason Falls.

Social Media: Strategy for Social Sites:

• Building a Popular Social Media Profile: Seven Essential Characteristics: If you plan on being active in the social media space (where voting is a big part of promotion), you have to make sure you’re doing the right things.
• Top 10 Reasons Why Great Content Fails on Social Media: In case you’re still emphasizing submissions on social sites, here’s why your content … uh, appears to suck.
• 7 Social Media Websites and their Impact on SEO explores Mixx, Sphinn, Twitter, Digg, delicious, StumbleUpon, and Reddit and shows the positive and negative impact of using each.
• How NOT to Manipulate Social News: A Sphinn Experience: For those not familiar with social news, gaming is clearly something you can spot if you know what to look for.
• How to Commit Social Media Suicide: Some people don’t get social media.
• The 2008 Social Media Network Analysis Report: Brian Chappell reveals geographic, demographic, and traffic data for a whole lot of social media sites.
• 10 of the Best Alternative Social Media Sites because not everything social media is Digg, Mixx, and Reddit.
• 6 Social Media “No-Brainers” You Shouldn’t Forget: Social media tips and tricks that aren’t always on the mind.
• How to Promote Yourself on Social Sites Without Actually “Promoting Yourself”: David Wallace presents a practical way of becoming a social media rockstar.
• The ‘El Farol’ Problem in Social News: Muhammad Saleem explains that the community is happy when social news submissions occur in moderation. Not excess. I suppose most things do very well in moderation.
• SEO Explained for Small Business Owners: If you work in a small business and the articles above scared you, then read this one instead.
• The 10 Commandments of the Social Web: Building a social network? At the minimum, you need to follow some rules, according to Nick O’Neill.
• Social Media Marketing ROI: Metrics and Analysis: If you promote content on social networks, you should have some metrics in place to see how effective your campaign was. Here’s a guide to start with.
• Are You a Super Influencer?: Given social sites, there are new influencers in town. Make way.
• How to Get Started in Social Media: There are so many sites out there, so Shana Albert explains how she got involved and the sites you can use for both business and personal purposes.
• How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media: Beth Kanter interviews a nonprofit employee to see how he has found success with social media for awareness.
• Free Online Resources for Finding Missing Persons Through Social Media: This is a bit different but still very important as I’ve read about some amazing stories about how people use social sites to reunite old families.? The bottom line is that social sites are great for marketing a lost person and hoping that they can be found again.

Twitter:

• Twitter Wrote his Column For Me: Clearly, this post itself demonstrates the power of Twitter and the collective.
• 7 Tips for New Twitter Users: Shel Israel talks about how you (as a new Twitter user) should use the service for maximum gain.
• 17 Ways You Can Use Twitter: A Guide for Beginners, Marketers, and Business Owners: People are raving about Twitter, but are they using it to its fullest?
• How to Get Customer Service via Twitter: Which companies are listening, and should you join the conversation? If you’re new to the area, you can check out how to start following what pople are saying.
• How to Use Twitter to Grow Your Business: This recent post on Copyblogger quotes how many businesses has found success with the microblogging service.
• How to Use Twitter to Build Brand Integrity: These are some solid tips for Twitter users to follow in order to add value to the conversation.
• Why Twitter Matters: BusinessWeek cites examples of why the microblogging website is a must-use for everyone.
• 50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business: Chris Brogan covers a lot of ground with this piece.
• The Evolution of Brands on Twitter: Jeremiah Owyang explains how you can evolve your brand using Twitter.
• Getting Intimate (with Customers) on Twitter: Some companies really get it. And they profit. Are you one of them?
• Twitter Goes Mainstream: More and more people are using it. Are you?
• How to Build Community on Twitter: If you want more followers, take some solid advice from Sarah Evans.
• How to Pick Up Followers on Twitter: Guy Kawasaki adds to the list of how you can get more followers on Twitter.
• Building an Effective Business Profile on Twitter: Michael Gray’s guest post on Twitip is golden.? He suggests personalization, professionalism, and humor, among other tips and tricks.
• Twitter Tools for Community and Communications Professionals: Brian Solis is constantly updating this post which includes great tools to make your Twitter experience a much more pleasurable one.
• How to Become a Twitter Rockstar: Now that you’re armed with tools and have the Twitter basics down pat, how do you use Twitter to your advantage?? David Brown explains it all.

Sphinn:

• Beginner’s Guide to Sphinn: Surely there are some of you out there who have never used Sphinn before, but if you are remotely interested in this post, you can imagine that half of the posts I put here were also submitted to Sphinn.? That said, join up and read this Problogger post for some rules of engagement.
• Top 10 Signs You’re Spamming Sphinn gives you more insights into how to use social news sites properly.
• Crappy MP3 Sites, Comment Spamming & Enough Already: Danny Sullivan rants about how there are “search marketers” trying to manipulate Sphinn (and other social news sites). He explores examples and shows how hard it is to be a moderator of a site like this. Hey, I hear you.
• An Analysis of Sphinn: 175 Homepage Homeruns Dissected: This post shows you what people are loving on Sphinn.? It also somewhat correlates to the categories on this post since some topics just happen to be a lot more popular than others.

LinkedIn:

• Why LinkedIn is the One Social Network I Couldn’t Work Without: Jennifer Laycock explains why she hearts LinkedIn.
• Make Your LinkedIn Profile Work for You: Having a LinkedIn profile is one thing. Having a solid LinkedIn profile is a different story.
• Business Uses for LinkedIn: LinkedIn is very powerful, but how do you use it? Valeria Maltoni explains that it’s about community, connections, and more.
• How to Get the Most out of LinkedIn: Mashable’s guest writer Brian Wallace explains how LinkedIn can be used as a valuable tool.
• Elements of a Good LinkedIn Recommendation: If you’re recommending someone on LinkedIn, strive for quality, not quantity.
• 100+ Smart Ways to Use LinkedIn: Just in case the articles above didn’t suffice, this one has many more in-depth articles on making LinkedIn work for you.
• How to Use LinkedIn Jake Swearingen of BNET says that you need to create a good profile, build your network, get the most from your connections, and then manage your network.
• Successful Networking Tips for LinkedIn and Facebook: Loren Baker shows that LinkedIn and Facebook aren’t so different and building your network is key.

Digg:

• How to Level the Playing Field with Digg: While I personally don’t like Digg anymore and find that it’s useless for marketers, Skellie think it’s still valuable. (I’d argue “rarely” nowadays.)
• How I Became a Digg Power User with a 75% Popular Ratio: I got banned in October from Digg with a 67% popular ratio and 278 front page stories and offered very similar tips in 2007, but some people still want to use Digg for this kind of thing.? Personally, I think Digg will ban you when you get popular.? The guy who wrote this blog post speaks from the same kind of experience.

Wikipedia:

• Using Wikipedia to Reveal Web Traffic Data: Jonathan Hochman writes a piece on how, when using Wikipedia, you can find out about how much traffic a top search ranking will send.
• How to Overthrow a Wikipedia Result: This is a good tactic but you should use it in moderation!? Don’t get caught!
• Wikipedia 101 for Marketing: The awesome Todd Defren explains how you can use Wikipedia to market your business.? But as many of you who have attended SEO conferences know, don’t do it from your company IP address or face the banhammer.
• 3 Awesome Wikipedia Tools and How they Could be Useful: I’ve never really known of any real good Wikipedia tools except for WikiScanner until this post (and this post doesn’t even talk about that IP scanner program).? ? So there you have it — 4 tools for your Wikipedia enjoyment.
• What to do When Your Company Wikipedia Page Goes Bad: The problem with editing your own company page when you work for the company is that there are moderation issues and biases.? So what can you do once someone adds bad content to that page?? Jessica Bowman tells you how to make the nasties “fade into the background.”

StumbleUpon:

• The Idiot’s Guide to StumbleUpon: Tim Nash, an active StumbleUpon expert, has offered some strategies on using the social discovery tool.
• How to Write Posts that Set StumbleUpon on Fire: Skellie utilizes real-life experience with the social discovery site to show you how you can get a whoosh of good traffic.
• 28 Tips to Make You a StumbleUpon Superstar: I personally love StumbleUpon — a lot. And you should too when you apply these tactics.

Fark:

• Definitive Guide to Fark and Getting Mass Traffic: One of the lesser tapped social media sites among search marketers is Fark. But not for Glen Allsopp, who reviews it here.

Facebook:

• Ten Things You Didn’t Know About Facebook: Guy Kawasaki is right — you probably don’t know some of these things (like #7)!
• Facebook Insider’s Guide to Viral Marketing: This article on docstoc has good tips if you’re looking to market on Facebook.
• 5 Reasons Why Whole Foods Gets Facebook: Businesses can make a difference on Facebook. Whole Foods did.
• Facebook Ads 101: How to Set Up and Track Facebook Ads: While people like free Facebook advertising, there are wonderfully targeted ads that may even be more effective.? Now you can understand how to leverage them.
• 5 Tips for Promoting Your Business Page on Facebook: If you created a business page on Facebook and actually want people to know about it, you might want to make sure it’s one that people actually are interested in joining.
• Facebook for Those Over 40: How do you explain Facebook to a group of folks who find this technology a little daunting?? We’re so involved in social media today that we may lose sight of the beginner explanation.
• 3 New Ways to Target Your Audience with Facebook Pages: Did you know that you are able to restrict access to Facebook pages by demographic information?? I didn’t.? But doing this can ensure that you get the right kinds of users.
• The 25 Most Popular Pages on Facebook: There’s nothing truly eye-opening about this discovery, but you can learn a thing or two about the power of marketing that has made some of these individuals so popular.
• Facebook Pages and Local Search Engine Optimization: Andrew Shotland offers a little-known tip on how you can possibly find prospects via Facebook through search.
• Facebook vs. LinkedIn: Which is Better for Business? In a 7-page article, ComputerWorld assesses the pros and cons of both.

delicious:

• 6 Ways to Make Life Easier with delicious: How many of you actually use delicious as a search engine? Maybe you should.
• How to Analyze Your Site with Delicious: Ann Smarty dissects the various parts of delicious.com and shows you how you can learn more about your website.

Flickr:

• How to Market on Flickr: While Flickr itself isn’t seen as a community that you would market to, you can find out how to become a respected community member AND market your services as well.
• An Insider’s Guide to Marketing on Flickr: Rohit Bhargava gives some very detailed tips on how you can use Flickr to successfully market products.

FriendFeed:

• FriendFeed Can Disrupt Search and Reshape Advertising: Steve Rubel offers his initial impressions of FriendFeed.
• 25 Different Uses for FriendFeed: FriendFeed power users Michael Fruchter and Louis Gray team up (well, Mike posted the guest post on Louis’s blog) to share some tips on how you can get the most out of this service.? As an FYI, I LOVE FriendFeed (and as another FYI, I said the same about Twitter in 2007 and everyone joined up in 2008.? Just sayin’).? By the way, Louis has a ton of great posts on FriendFeed on his blog and this isn’t the only one.

Blogging:

• The Most Important Difference Between Websites and Blogs: Tad switched his website over to a blog. He reflects on why this was a smart move.
• 10 Ways to Improve Blog Traffic in 30 Minutes or Less gives you some lesser-known (or implemented) strategies to bring you (possibly) more blog visitors.
• You’re Not Just a Writer, You’re the Editor-in-Chief: Dosh Dosh explains that your approach toward blogging needs to be more than just of a freelance nature.
• What Suggestions Would You Offer a Beginning Blogger?: You need to “learn to” do a few things as a blogger. Bill Slawski explains what they are.
• Practical Guide to Starting a Corporate Blog: Jason Falls discusses the steps you need to take before you actually launch that much-needed corporate blog.
• How to Start a Professional Blog: 10 Tips for New Bloggers: Andrew Chen gives some detailed insights on how your new blog can take off.
• 10 Commandments of Business Blogging: If you want to be taken seriously as a business blogger, there are some rules you need to follow.
• Does Blogging Really Work? Here’s the Proof: Mack Collier uses the examples of Dell Hell and Stormhoek to show that blogging is a powerful marketing tool for both the positive and the negative.
• 27 Secrets to Linking Like a Master Networker: This post shows how you can network via blogging.
• 45 Ways to Power Up Your Blog: Here are small things you can implement to make your blog a little more appealing to your audience and search engines.
• How Much Do Top Tier Bloggers and Social Media Consultants Get Paid? We Asked Them!: Marshall Kirkpatrick, you didn’t ask me!
• How to Blog Design Style Guide goes into detail about blog design, from the header to the content area to the comments.
• 3 Phases of Flagship Blog Growth or How to Fall in Love with Blogging: Tad explains that perseverance is important to keep your blog going strong.
• How to Get Piles of Links, Subscribers, and Comments: Skellie explains the ways you can use your blog for awareness and then some.
• The Ultimate Guide to a Wildly Sticky Successful and Outstanding Blog: Liz Strauss takes a bunch of great blogging guides and puts them all together for this tool for serious bloggers.
• 27 Resources fr Evaluating Blogging ROI: Is blogging working for you? You can check against the experts to find out.
• A Sample Blogging Workflow: From the goals of blogging to the tools you should use, Chris nails it.
• 21 Ways to Make Your Blog or Website Sticky: Yes, this is from Darren Rowse at Problogger. Yes, it’s about blogs. It’s also about websites. Read it whether or not you have a blog as it has some great tips on keeping your visitors hooked.
• Ariana Huffington Shares 4 Secrets of Creating a Successful Blog: Learn from someone who knows. HuffPo is a very popular blog.
• Case Study: The Launch of a New Blog: A serious blogger from Traffikd shows how his third blog fared after it launched.
• Why Start a Blog and 25 Tips to Make it Work: A very in-depth article on why you should create a blog and engage in blogging.
• The Sweeney Todd Guide to Blogging Sonia Simone equates characteristics of Sweeney Todd to blogging, marketing, and communication.? An example: Sweeney Todd improvised to get multiple streams of income; bloggers can strategize to get different sources for readers.
• Is Your Blog Going for the Gold? This article discusses the pros and cons of blogging for businesses.? One of the main cons, of course, is the fact that you may be starting a blog with no brand recognition whatsoever.? That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try, though.

Viral Marketing:

• The Top 10 Viral Marketing Campaigns of All Time: Patrick Altoft reviews the most popular YouTube videos and explains why they rock.
• Hard (but Important) Lessons About Viral Marketing: Having realistic expectations is important so that you don’t fail at your viral marketing campaign.
• The Viral Marketing Glossary: Dan Zarrella gives definitions for a bunch of terms related to viral marketing.
• What is Viral Marketing?: Seth Godin’s post from the last day of 2008 is the reason why I held publication of this post till 2009.? He explains viral marketing and then shows a case study of how it works.

Link Building:

• Link Building: A Complete Walkthrough: Many of you may be reading this and have no idea about link building at all. That’s where Saad Kamal’s in-depth introductory guide comes in.
• The Fundamentals of Link Building: Adam Audette also gives you some in-depth but beginner information into the art of link building.
• 11 Experts on Link Development Speak Out: Rae Hoffman has gathered some great authorities in the area of link building and asked them several questions about sources, strategy, and more.
• Link Building Secrets Revealed by Top Linking Experts: In this article, twelve link experts talk about lesser known strategies. The report is also available in PDF format.
• The 30 Easiest Was to Get Links and Exposure suggests some strategies to get more links to your website.
• Link Building Strategies: 69 Solid Tactics for 2009 tells you even more ways to get links to your site.
• 30 Ways to Get Links Naturally and Stop Link Building: On the other hand, if link building is too time consuming, you may want to think of other strategies.
• A Linkbuilding Method So Effective I Can’t Believe It’s Not Blackhat: The basic premise is that you should find pages/sites that used to offer a service and no longer do. The fill that void.
• Where Do You Start Your Link Marketing Campaign?: Wiep Knol discusses some strategies on where you can think of gaining some new links.
• 6 Sure-Fire Tactics to Re-Ignite Your Linkbait: You wrote something awesome. It sucked on your targeted social media site. Now what?
• How Getting a Link is Like Picking Up a Woman: Link building is not much different than flirting. Really.
• There’s No Such Thing as a Worthless Link: …because they all end up pointing to your site, right? But Deb Mastaler shows that there’s more.
• Get In Touch With Your Inner Link Self: Finding out where your customers go and targeting those areas is a golden way to get links.
• The Definitive List of Link Building Techniques in 2008: Jeff Quipp gathered every single link building tip he could find.
• Link Exchanges: It’s Not the Size of the PR, but How You Use it: Not everyone likes link exchanges (raises hand), but then again, I’m a blogger who gets 384824 link exchange emails a week.? However, there are legitimate non-blog websites that get a lot.? The question: how do you research sites for link exchanges?? David Leonhardt offers solid strategies on how to choose sites for link building and link exchanges.
• The Ultimate Guide to Internal Linking and Part 2: In two posts, Pete Wailes uses some PageRank formula to guide you through an internal linking strategy and then brings quantum theory into it.? Yes, really.

Reputation Management:

• Dealing with “Impossible” Online Reputation Challenges: Brett Borders goes through the various problems relating to reputation management and lets you know if they’re solvable — or not.
• Five Steps for Recovering from an Online Reputation Crisis: Two different events, two different responses. You need to handle your reputation issue appropriately.
• 12 Reputations Every Company Should Monitor Online: When you are a public facing company, reputation management issues can come at you at all different sides. Make sure you have your bases covered.
• How to Remove Negative Posts and Links: From asking to suing, you have a way to [usually] remove those bad search results.
• How to Bury Negative Online Mentions of You: Search Engine Watch covers some intermediate-level strategies on how to deal with a reputation management crisis.
• The M&Ms of Online Reputation Management: We’re not talking candy here.? Actually, we’re talking M&M&M&M: monitor, manage, measure, and mediate.
• Digital Reputation Management with SEO, Social Media, and PR: Taking a proactive approach toward ORM (online reputation management) is important.? This post touches upon the surface and unfortunately Lee Odden discussed the rest in person at a conference.
• Reputation Management: Because You’re Worth It: In a lighthearted post, a female working for a search engine marketing agency explains how reputation management is like a beauty emergency.
• Treat Me Mean, I Need the Reputation Tom Critchlow shows you what negative reputation looks like.
• Online Reputation Management: What Goes Around May Be Total Crap: Kim Krause Berg talks about the ethics of reputation management and then some.
• Pre-emptive Reputation Management Comes of Age: Don’t fret about reputation managment.? Tackle it before it becomes a problem with preemptive reputation management.? ? The ideas Jeff Quipp presents in his article are really clever.
• Reputation Crisis Management: 8 SEO Triage Tips: Marty Weintraub says that reputation management isn’t much different than SEO.
• Reputation Management Tips from Around the Web: Many search marketing experts weigh in on one very important reputation management tip.
• Online Reputation Management for the Small Business Owner Providing high quality service will avoid the reputation management issues you could encounter.? If you get a negative review but provide great service thereafter, the newer positive reviews will mitigate the negative review.
• Ten Tactics that Could Save Your Online Reputation: Perhaps you’re not in an online reputation crisis yet.? Maybe you’ll never have to be if you read these tactics.
• Your Seven-Step Online Reputation Crisis Plan: If you already have a problem on your hands, now you need to create a strategy.? In seven steps, you can successfully avoid the crisis.? ? Here’s how.
• Reputation Management and Defending Your Brand: This is a good beginner article for smaller businesses and gives some solid tips on how your local business can be more visible in a positive way.
• Online Reputation Management is Hot — But is it Ethical? Some companies discuss their failures due to a reputation management issue.? Others talk about how they are helping address the issue.
• Online Reputation Management for Individuals: We’ve talked about business reputation management, but you can still lose your job using social media channels and lose out on good opportunities.? Don’t forget that your personal brand is still something you may want to protect.

Analytics:

• 8 Awesome Google Analytics Hacks, Tips, and Tricks offers tips on how to get more out of Google Analytics rather than what comes out of the box. Note: Some programming may be required!
• The Huge Collection of Google Analytics Tips: In case the previous link wasn’t enough for you, get tracking of your outgoing links, links to banner ads, downloads, and more.
• How to Use Bounce Rate as a Metric to Improve Your Website Performance: A lot of people ignore bounce rate. Maybe you shouldn’t.
• 8 Stupid Things Webmasters Do to Mess Up Their Analytics: Google Analytics isn’t that accurate after all. Find out if you’re being impacted.
• How to Analyze and Improve the Bounce Rate for Your Website: Dosh Dosh gives insights into the hated bounce rate and then suggests strategies on how to reduce that percentage.
• Context is King Baby! Go Get Your Own: Avinash Kaushik argues that the single most important missing ingredient in understanding your analytics is the context you can place around the analytics data you’re provided with.
• Using Stats and Goal Tracking for Your Blog: Want analytics for your blog?? Michael Gray gives some tips on how you can get some.? And yes, you should.

Personal Branding:

• Resumes are for Sh!t: The 4 Things You Really Need: Want to build your personal brand? Dave McClure says you need LinkedIn, a blog, keywords, and social media.
• How to Get Noticed: Jeremiah Owyang offers tactics for becoming noticed in this space.
• Seth Godin: Profile of a Marketing Guru: How’d Seth Godin score his own action figure? Read this.
• Gary Vaynerchuk’s Keynote at Web 2.0 Expo NY: Sure, while this is a video (!) and I still emphasize articles in my yearly post, I actually attended this 15 minute keynote, and it’s a real morale booster. Watch it. It’s worth it.
• Why You Need to Care More About Your Personal Brand: Mitch Joel explains why personal branding is important.
• We Are in a Recession, so Build Your Brand on the Internet Now: It’s a perfect time to build your Internet presence.? This Internet Marketing firm did it for their clients by establishing its presence on multiple channels.? Find out which ones they used (and feel free to just use this as a starting point — there are more channels to leverage!).
• Personal Branding: What a Difference a Year Makes: Dan Perry was nobody in 2007.? (No offense, Dan!)? But in 2008, he became somebody according to Google.? What were his takeaways?

Local Search:

• Local Search Ranking Factors collects advice from 20 experts in the area of local search marekting on a variety of ranking factors.
• Local SEOs Share Geolocation Tips from Around the World: The Distilled guys who are in the UK ask several SEOs around the world about how to optimize for search engines.
• The Mother of All SMX Local/Mobile Recaps: David Mihm attended a conference and shared the top takeaways. The post provides very valuable information even though it’s a conference summary!
• Local vs. Traditional SEO: Why Citation is the New Link This is a very detailed post explaining some new discoveries about local SEO.? Links aren’t that important in local SEO, and David explains why.
• Website Optimization for Telephone Leads: Surely there are companies out there that get a lot of leads via phone.? If your phone number is prominently displayed on your website, you will likely get a lot of good leads. (I’d add that it’d be a smart idea to get a number specific for web-only inquiries to ensure that the lead came from there.)
• Free Local Marketing Options that Bring Real Traffic: Mat Siltala takes a look at easy local search tweaks you can use that will bring some valuable traffic.? The sites he mentions are high-trafficked ones, and if you cover your bases, you can benefit from a gift that keeps on giving.
• How to Create Effecitve Local Business Landing Pages Are you missing any of these essential elements from your landing pages?

Content Development:

• The Secret to Compelling Content: Anna Bourland describes how you should organize your website and create a hook that drives your visitors to perform a desired action.
• How to Have a Constant Flow of Content Ideas: Sometimes, getting that idea in your mind is the hardest obstacle. Here’s some help.
• Writing Killer Headlines: Top 20 Viagra SPAM Email Subject Lines: I feel like my email subscribers just got this email blocked due to this actual post, but it’s a REALLY good read, so I had to include it.
• Link Bait Ideas: Lyndon Antcliff gives some strategy into creating the ultimate piece of content.
• 12 Tips on Creating Content for Social Media: Let’s face it, people are talking social media nowadays. It’s time to create content that works.
• The 5-Step POWER Copywriting Method: Want to be persuasive and rock? Follow some guidelines.
• 5 Great Marketing Lists and What You Can Learn from Each One: Make a list. Profit. Rohit Bhargava explains the benefits of 5 popular lists.
• How to Maximize Current Events for Social Media: The 10e20 blog shows what you can do with current events to create compelling content.
• How to Write an Article in 20 Minutes: Let me put it this way: this article did NOT take 20 minutes to write.
• Writing Content that Works for a Living: The key takeaways of this article are to make it simple and do it right.

Web Development:

• 50 Questions to Evaluate the Quality of Your Website: Explore questions of accessibility, navigation, design, content, security, and more with this checklist.
• The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist, Period: Stoney deGeyter breaks down the intricacies of web design into easy-to-digest categories with this exhaustive but awesome checklist.
• I Can Make Your Site Run 10 Times Faster: Site not running fast enough? Search engine spiders and visitors may not appreciate it. Mike Peters tells you what you can do to get that needed boost.
• 101 Five-Minute Fixes to Incrementally Improve Your Website is a great checklist on usability, writing, and design, and refers to 101 more articles just in case this list of posts wasn’t enough.
• A Design is Finished When: Twenty-three designers offer their insights on when your website design is complete and you can take it the next level.
• Let’s Talk Landing Pages: Rebecca Kelley at SEOmoz shares some really great tips on how to make the most out of your landing pages.
• Website Checklist: Getting to the Close: Peter da Vanzo outlines the steps for beginner web designers to get visitors to perform a desired action.

Affiliate Marketing:

• Five Effective Copywriting Tactics for Affiliate Marketing: Want to sell your affiliate offers? At the minimum, make sure you follow these tactics.
• Jonathan Volk Interview: If you don’t know Jonathan Volk, meet this kid through this interview, because he’s in his early 20s and is making 6 figures a month.
• Three Killer Content Strategies for Building Affiliate Marketing Assets: Brian Clark gives even more affiliate marketing tips.
• Only Wanting the “Thrill of the Chase”: Why do most affiliate marketers fail?? Because they have an initial rush of motivation but then get annoyed at the hard work required, according to affiliate marketing mastermind Rae Hoffman.
• Managing Risk: Legal Issues for Merchants and Affiliate Marketers Affiliate marketing is not a risk-free endeavor, so be sure you are aware of all the risks before you take the plunge.
• The Diary of a PPC Newbie and Why You Should Expand: As you’ll see, this article isn’t really about Pay-Per-Click.? ? It’s how you can use PPC and affiliate marketing to make some money.? Don’t you want to do that by now?
• 81 Useful Affiliate Marketing Resources: If you’re ready to start with affiliate marketing, here are some tools that can make your life easier.
• Making Money Online with Local Affiliate Programs: This great post by Jeremy Schoemaker was suggested by @ronhekier and gives some great advice on how you can make ends meet especially if you just got laid off during the recession.

Domains and Domaining:

• How to Pick a Kickass Domain Name: Lisa Barone gives solid tips on choosing the domain name that’s perfect for your company.
• On Domain Names, Size and Quality DO Matter: Daniel Scocco looks at the top 250 domains on Alexa and shows how the most popular sites actually all have very powerful domain names.
• How to Find Available Domain Names: With the Google AdWords tool and a bulk whois checker, you may be able to get some great SEO-friendly domain names.
• 2018: A Domaining Odyssey: Experts weigh in on the future of domaining in this article.
• How to (Really) Make Money with Domain Names: Finding a good domain name is half the battle.? Once you’re done with that, there are some good strategies you can use to make money with them.? One key is defensible traffic.

AdWords/PPC:

• Eight Keyword Research Mistakes that are Costing You Money: You may be spending lots on Google AdWords, but are you spending smartly? Christine Churchill gives you some points to review.
• Marketing Lessons Learned from Pay-Per-Click Analytics shows what you can learn about general marketing from reviewing your PPC analytics.
• Landing Page Optimization: 5 Elements that can Impact Conversion Rates: While this could fit in this blog post’s “web development” category, it is a better match for giving you the biggest bang for your buck if you engage in pay-per-click marketing.
• How I Optimize My PPC Campaigns: Harrison Gevirtz, a teenage genius and CEO of a company, teaches us tactics that made him successful in a guest post on Shoemoney.com.
• PPC Spend Should be More than SEO: John W. Ellis explains the correlation between Pay-Per-Click and Search Engine Optimization but still contends that your PPC budget should exceed your SEO budget.
• 7 Ways to Save Money During a PPC Campaign: Saad Kamal offers practical tips on how to reduce your Google AdWords or Yahoo Search Marketing ad spend.

Internet Marketing:

• The Internet Marketing List: 59 Things You Should Be Doing But Probably Aren’t: Ian Lurie presents what you may want to put into a checklist — things you should be doing on your website and that you may have ignored.
• How I Turned My Mediocre Website into a Million Dollar Business: Erica Douglass speaks from experience. The bottom line: customers deserve great value.
• Colorize Your Brand: How Color Builds Your Brand: Ann Smarty presents “color in business” theory and shows its application to Internet technology.
• Firefox 3 Shows How a Good Landing Page Can Convert Seven Million Visitors a Day: Test, retest, and enjoy the benefits.
• The Digital Rules of Engagement: If you’re going to engage, make sure you know what you’re doing. This AdWeek article ties in well with social media, but it has some other important concepts that caused me to put it in the Internet Marketing category instead.
• The Internet Marketing Handbook: SEOmoz has compiled a huge list of almost 100 tools and resources. Sweet!
• 14 Must-Have Resources to Launch a Small Business: How many people have you spoken to who say they want to start a business but don’t know how?? Maybe you should point them to this checklist.? (It’ll help if they know exactly what kind of business they’re looking to start, though!)
• The “Poochie” Effect: While I love social media, one-way advertising is still practiced by many companies. In this post, you’ll consider the questions that you need to have answered before you engage on an advertising campaign.

General Marketing:

• Top Experts Dish with their Best Kept Marketing Secrets: Some of the most brilliant experts provide their one best marketing secret.
• 38 Things I Wish I Knew When I started in Marketing offers some advice that I kind of still don’t apply myself.
• Tell Us Your Most Outrageously Creative Money-Saving or Business Growth Tip: Anita Campbell delivers again by gathering expert quotes and offering some brilliant insights into what they’ve done to take their businesses to the next level.
• What Do You Know?: Seth Godin’s list that is 3 years old (and counting) never grows old. Yes, this is a reprint from 2008 with some newer tips.
• The Essentials of Guerrilla Marketing: Jay Conrad Levinson shares concepts that will make your business rock.
• 8 Strategies for Successful Realtions with Clients: Since social media is within the scope of Internet Marketing and is a lot about customer service, client relations should follow. If you have good relationships from the outset, you may avoid those reputation management crises and more.
• How to Deliver the Perfect Client Pitch: Client acquisition is all the rage, but are you actually getting new clients?? If not, perhaps you need to adjust your pitch.
• Why Clients Won’t Buy: The Hierarchy of Choice: You could be an awesome salesperson but your customers still won’t necessarily buy from you. Find out why.

Best of Techipedia 2008
I typically don’t put posts from my blog in the “Best Internet Marketing Posts of 2008″ list, but this year, since I’ve grown a considerable number of subscribers, I’ve decided to give new users the opportunity to read the two best posts without feeling that they need to dig through the archives.? Of course, if you don’t mind reading the other posts I’ve written, by all means, go ahead.? There’s some good stuff there that I’m not highlighting here (including two on FriendFeed, which is a great content discovery and community building tool which simply doesn’t get much love).

• The Ultimate Social Media Etiquette (or Netiquette) Handbook: My most popular post of December 2008 was about social media etiquette and goes through a variety of social sites to suggest what should and shouldn’t be done.? The comment discussion is great as well.
• What Traits Define a Social Media Marketer?: Experts on social media marketing weigh in on the essential characteristics of the ideal social media marketing guru.

Thanks again to the Portland Web Design company for their awesome badges (and to Jill for the idea).? Also, thanks for all your contributions to this series.? Stay tuned for next year’s!

Badges: If you would like to use any alternative badges on your site, please choose one of the below and copy the corresponding text on your website:

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Happy 2009!

[ Best Internet Marketing Posts of 2008 is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

Read more about The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, a primer to social media marketing. Or you can subscribe to the Techipedia RSS feed.

This is a guest post from kd kelly. kd kelly, aka dotlizard, who has learned a harsh lesson or two in her time on the internets, and wants to warn us about the dangers of social media as it relates to trusting relationships that end in lies, deception, and hurt. She’s a very social creature and is known as “dotlizard” pretty much everywhere.

Smile, I’m sending you some sunshine. Did your room just light up?

What can you say about a beautiful girl who died? In the words of noted internet hedonist Halcyon Styn, from a Flash animation he created in her honor: “I want to introduce you to the bravest person I know / She is a warrior of the finest sort / She shoots sunbeams from her fingertips / makes rainbows shine on sunny days / and leaves a wake of smiles in her path / Kaycee, warrior supreme”. Kaycee Nicole Swenson brought her sparkly brand of wholesome, flirtatious courage to a wide audience on the internet from 1999 through May 14, 2001, when her mother Debbie announced that Kaycee had passed away suddenly. At a family gathering in celebration of her remission from leukemia, sometime around sunset, a blood vessel burst in Kaycee’s chemotherapy-weakened body; she died peacefully in the arms of her loved ones.

I can tell you that when I read this news, I cried off and on the rest of the day. I can also tell you that Kaycee Nicole did not, technically, exist. She was created and portrayed entirely by her “mother”, Debbie Swenson, a middle-aged Midwestern housewife with some serious issues. For nearly two years, thousands followed and supported this fictional construct as she fought a deadly disease, an astonishing run when you consider the challenges involved. Kaycee was a chat host at the now-defunct CollegeClub.com, she spoke at length by phone with many of her internet friends, she emailed, she sent gifts, and she blogged vividly and poignantly through the horrors of her chemotherapy, often closing with her trademark, “Smile, I’m sending you some sunshine. Did your room just light up???” She was quoted in the New York Times, and some of the most prominent internet personalities of the day considered her a close friend, and somehow none of them realized that she was a complete work of fiction.

This is not to say that no one doubted her. As early as September, 2000, there were suggestions that Kaycee was too good to be true, but they were shouted down by her ardent supporters. The final, successful inquiry started with Kristin at online conversation site Threewayaction.com, then moved to Becky-Says’ blog. In February of 2001, Becky was expressing her skepticism, and as you can clearly hear in the defensive tone of her subsequent posts on the subject, her theories were not well-received. By May 18, the MetaFilter community dared to ask the same, very unpopular questions Becky and some of her friends had been asking for months. The delicate tone of the MeFi post is absolutely uncharacteristic of that site, which tells you just how touchy a subject this was. The initial responses were mild and respectful, and even with that there were vehement objections from close Kaycee friend, web host, and confidante the BWG (Big White Guy, Randall VanderWoning). No one wanted to believe this lovely, tragic young woman was a lie.

The investigation on MetaFilter lasted the weekend, 309 comments that moved through all the stages of grief while slowly and painstakingly picking apart the whole story. There were inconsistencies in the medical aspects of the story, conflicting personal data on various websites including some question as to age and birth date, and a dearth of pictures, some of which were clearly photoshopped to remove logos from sweatshirts. The majority of the comments still expressed a belief that there were basic truths within the story, even if they acknowledged that some details were obviously altered. Debbie Swenson, who’d been living with her deception for years, finally broke down early Sunday on May 20, 2001, posting a confession on her blog. The discussion moved to this thread, where the posts ranged from expressions of grace and forgiveness, to rage and calls for federal prosecution.

Kaycee Nicole never came out and asked for money, although the subject of the financial burdens of her illness did surface from time to time in her posts. She did receive many gifts, and emails circulated frequently taking up collections: “We want to fill her room with flowers, buy her a digital camera, a scanner, send her to Disney World”. People did donate, and when the hoax came to light federal authorities were notified, but in the end no charges were brought. Some said we lost our innocence in the Kaycee Nicole scandal, but there still exists a vast network of potential support out here in the social networks, and from time to time scammers succeed in tapping into this resource. This happened last week on the tightly knit community on Plurk, which has a unique and friendly atmosphere as Tamar described a few weeks ago.

It began with a Plurker calling herself LillyAnn, who projected an image of sweetness and light, punctuated with occasional vague references to difficult circumstances in her life. Her bio states she is “Lilly Calandrello, personal growth expert, MS, MA, Ph.D, is a relationship, marriage, family therapist, motivational & inspirational speaker, spiritual intuitive counselor, and author”. It does not list links to her various websites, however from time to time she would post links to recent posts on her StumbleUpon blog, many of which are also featured on her business website, Whispy.com, a portal which offers a wide variety of spiritual and psychic services. The blog and the business site both feature many lengthy inspirational articles, some of which were copied and pasted, word for word, from their original authors. No one suspected any of this until Lilly Ann, aka Barbara Calandrello, made a desperate appeal to her social media friends for financial assistance with life-threatening medical conditions for which she was uninsured and being denied treatment until she could pay. Someone claiming to be her 17 year old daughter, Gabrielle, posted using her accounts on Plurk and Twitter with an urgent appeal for donations, which were accepted through her PayPal account. Gabrielle then (claiming someone helped her) set up a ChipIn account, which was promoted on Digg and StumbleUpon by Lilly’s very close friend, DaveJazzHound. They collected a little more than $350 on the ChipIn page, and a number of PayPal donations including at least two for $100.

We may never know why someone who (by her own claims on Google Groups) was pulling in $5,000/month via counseling fees, affiliate marketing programs, and essays posted to paying websites such as Squidoo, would risk it all in a scheme that only raised a few hundred dollars. Her image as a successful professional advisor with lucrative hobbies like raising sea horses was in direct contradiction with this sudden, urgent need for cash, and this is one of the reasons it took several days for the questioning to begin. No one wanted to think that LillyBarb, whose online persona was always warm and supportive, brave and kind, would deceive her friends for money. By the second day, the threads on her Plurk profile were still overwhelmingly concerned and gracious towards her plight, but at least one person came out and said that she would love to send flowers, and where should these go? There was, of course, no answer to this, but it sparked a private discussion that lasted until three in the morning, during which a long list of contradictory information came to light.

By morning of the third day, there had been one thread deleted, and the remaining thread had shifted in focus from kindness and worry, to doubt and frustration. I was at this point in possession of a growing list of disturbing information, but to be honest I did not want to be “that person”. I did not have the luxury, as Becky did in her initial posts about Kaycee, to make pointed but nameless references and know that people in the know would recognize what I was talking about – the social media world has grown by several orders of magnitude since those days. I waited to see if anyone else would take up the task of summarizing and archiving the information, but by the end of day three I knew I had to do something.

So I did, but I did it in the most apologetic tone, practically falling over myself saying I was being a horrible mean awful cynical bitch and I was probably wrong but here’s the information anyway. Like the first person to suggest Kaycee was a fraud, I came forward with information I felt needed to be shared, but you can see in both cases, these posts were made cringing and bracing for attack. No one wants to step up and accuse someone of committing fraud, only to discover one has just kicked the poor sick person while they were down. In fact this trait is one of the main reasons people will always use these kinds of heart-tugging stories, because they know it’s really difficult to be “that person”.

In the days that followed, the evidence built up. More and more instances of plagiarism came to light, along more and more conflicts in the stories we’d been told. LillyBarb’s daughter Gabrielle, who had been very active in the early stages of the discussion, stopped responding to the posts. This 17 year old girl claimed she wasn’t allowed on the social networks, but knew how to navigate them with uncanny skill for a newbie, and knew when to fold up shop when the consensus had turned against her. At this writing the pretense is still active on StumbleUpon, and all of the plagiarized content is still up on the commerce-based websites. Apparently the scam is still far from over in spite of the little teapot tempest we’ve had about it over on Plurk. The energy to pursue this fraud has dissipated a little, and the truth is that the amounts involved are probably not enough to compel a criminal investigation. The story is still developing, but there is nowhere near the intensity directed at it than there was towards the far more high profile Kaycee Nicole case. And let’s face it, the level of fraud and malice necessary to catch the attention of the federal authorities is significantly more than what we’ve seen so far with LillyBarb.

So, if the feds aren’t going to protect you from imaginary dying teenagers and psychic kidney patients, who is? Well, you certainly cannot count on the crowd wisdom in social media, as we’ve seen this is very much subject to the fears of individuals to speak out against tragic figures and risk being wrong. The common theme of “I thought there was something wrong about this but I didn’t want to say anything” repeats over and over in these discussions, telling us that the majority would prefer to hold their suspicions waiting for someoene else to speak up. And we know that it feels good to be generous, to give back to the world when we are fortunate enough to be in that position. Psychologically, this creates an atmosphere in which it is very easy to be deceived. Even the short-lived LillyBarb fundraising drive caught a lot of very kind-hearted, generous people before anyone said a word against it. The only protection you really have is yourself.

Now rest assured I am not suggesting you become hardened and cynical, disbelieving everything by default. I could never do this myself so I would never recommend it to anyone else. My solution, which I came up with after the day I spent intermittently weeping over Kaycee Nicole, is that I consider each story I encounter on the internet to be neither true nor false until I have direct knowledge supporting one conclusion or the other. I like to think of this as “Schrodinger’s Blogger”, referring to the famous thought experiment which explains to us the rather odd concept of the quantum state, in which an event exists only as a waveform of possibilities (1 or 0) until it is observed, and that the act of observation changes the outcome of the experiment. In reality we know that this is not the case – the cat in the box is alive, or it is dead, whether or not we know the answer, but in quantum reality, it is both until the very instant we lift the lid and have a look.

So, when confronted with situations in which you are being asked to invest either your emotional energy, or your money, insist upon opening the box. Ask for proof. Demand it, and do not be put off if offense is taken and excuses offered – when someone is asking for you to commit something of yourself to help them, they forfeit their rights to anonymity and privacy. You have the right to know who you are helping and exactly what your help will do for them. Stand firm, and don’t be afraid to advocate for disclosure in public, encouraging others to do the same before they chip in. Realize that no one wants to be the first one to speak up, and the longer this goes on, the more profitable it is for the scammer.

There are many good and deserving people who may find themselves in a situation where they must ask a community of online friends for help, and for the most part they will be very open and forthcoming with proof of these circumstances. There is almost no conceivable reason why any honest person would withhold verification and insist that help be provided on faith alone. As long as you make the effort to suspend both believe and disbelief, and to accept and enjoy your online interactions at face value until such time as it becomes necessary to look deeper, you stand a decent chance of not being taken to the cleaners by sweet and eloquent liars. Be observant! Oh, and smile, I’m sending you some sunshine. Did your room just light up?

[ Quantum Entanglements: The Social Media Scandals is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

Read more about The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, a primer to social media marketing. Or you can subscribe to the Techipedia RSS feed.

Earlier this month, Plurk was discovered and has had social media addicts abuzz with the “new Twitter clone,” especially as a result of Twitter downtime.

After using both closely, the comparison to Twitter shouldn’t even be the case. Plurk and Twitter are two entirely different beasts. Personally, I don’t even see the need to compare the two at all. The only similarity is a 140 character limit for posts — so Plurk is essentially a microblogging platform. But Plurk is a lot more, and Twitter still has its place.

Plurk: Real Nested Conversations Brought to the Microblogging Platform

A few days ago, I noticed via Twitter search tool Summize that Aaron Brazell had been talking about me on his Twitter stream. Normally, when I catch onto such a discussion, I navigate to the person’s particular Tweet and try to find the context of the message. In Aaron’s case, it was a lengthy dialogue with another Twitter user that I couldn’t exactly figure out, so I direct messaged him for clarification. There was no easy way for me to follow the conversation easily, and as much as I tried to read and understand everything in the Twitter timeline, I couldn’t understand the ongoing discussion. Even Quotably didn’t prove to be much help.

This is where Plurk would have totally rocked the house.

Do Plurk and Twitter really need to be compared?

When it comes to a basis of comparison, nested conversations are probably the only aspect of Plurk that has brought it much success (save for the lack of downtime, though it does suffer some quirks here and there). On the other hand, Plurk is really new, and thus, Twitter wins on followers (and the fact that mobile access — via SMS — totally owns), so the Plurk discussions (for now) are at a minimum. For what it’s worth, though, I have 10% the number of followers (already) on Plurk compared to followers on Twitter, which is a huge number considering that I’ve been a Plurk member for only 3 weeks.

Twitter and Plurk Behaviors: not the same (at least not for me)

The thing I like about Plurk is that I can be completely and entirely random; at this point, it doesn’t matter. I feel that my Twitter usage is drastically different. In a nutshell, I focus on Twitter for mostly professional discussion (sharing social media news and information), whereas Plurk is a less rigid platform and feels a lot less formal to me. If you want to see two entirely different sides of Tamar Weinberg, go to Plurk now and compare it to my Twitter stream.

But is there much more to Plurking?

The downside about Plurk is, well, there’s not much appeal besides wasting more valuable time online (otherwise known as plurkrastination, which I’m proud to admit that I coined!). I think this may be partially in part due to the time-line layout (it’s not very organized, though the design is entirely understandable). It’s a lot noisier without risk factors involved: it’s harder to really follow every single Plurk from a person, whereas in Twitter, you can read everything in one page (as you can see, I’ve primarily exercised caution with my Tweets). I’ve yet to see people admit that Plurk is a beneficial tool, as most are aiming for karma, which are points that are provided to users for participation, and they admit that Plurk is a time suck. Perhaps, however, I haven’t seen it all yet. When Twitter first came out, its earliest adopters weren’t entirely sure about the fate of the microblogging service either. With that in mind, Plurk probably still has a lot going for it that many of us have yet to discover.

What are we arguing about again?

Is the debate really “Twitter vs. Plurk?” For me, you can clearly tell that I use both for different purposes (with a tiny bit of overlap), though some are already considering canceling their Twitter accounts. I say: wait until Plurk gets better and keep waiting for Twitter to fix its scaling issues. Then, everyone will go to his/her respective home(s) on the web. You may have more than one.

After using both Plurk and Twitter pretty heavily, I’ve come to the conclusion that Plurk is best at its features for community-building, whereas Twitter succeeds more with its interface that bolsters information-sharing. Plurk is a good site for nonsensical ramblings primarily because it’s harder to keep tabs on people and users admittedly flock to Plurk because there’s “less thinking” involved.

Therefore, I suppose the nested conversations and time-line layout make complete sense. Both of these features continue to support my argument that Twitter is not Plurk, nor is Plurk a new Twitter. They both have their places in the web 2.0 and social media sphere. You may find yourself comfortable using just one or both. But it’s only fair for you to give a chance to both services to see which one fits you best.

[ Twitter versus Plurk: Not Even in the Same League is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

Read more about The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, a primer to social media marketing. Or you can subscribe to the Techipedia RSS feed.

Over at the Blog Herald, Chris Garrett says that Twitter is changing his news consumption habits.

How do you get your news? In the past I have variously read newspapers, watched TV news bulletins, read news.bbc.co.uk and obviously more recently sites such as Digg. Now it seems I get most of my news from Twitter.

Twitter: The Upside and the Downside

Three days ago, Heath Ledger passed away. The actor was found dead in his apartment. He was 28. As more and more people discovered the news of the actor’s passing, Twitter was inundated with news links and statements of surprise. If you were using Twitter at that time that his death was announced in media outlets, you knew that Ledger had died. It was impossible to ignore it with the hundreds of Tweets that were filled with emotions over the talented young man’s death.

If you use Twitter regularly, you’d see that it wins as a social news site that provides instantaneous news — at least of that caliber. As Chris Garrett explains in his post, if you follow numerous feed bots, you can get the news all the time. The issue, of course, is engagement. If you’re not actively engaged, the news won’t come at you. It’s like any other news medium. If you’re not watching the television, you’ll find out the news later.

The downside, however, is that Twitter has a lot more than just news. Maki explains that there are 17 ways you can use Twitter. News consumption, of course, is just one of the things Twitter is used for. Twitter is also a tool to get feedback, to network, to take notes, to market your product, to communicate with customers, to set up meetings, and to find prospects — among other things. If you rely on Twitter for the sake of news and only news, you might miss out on newsworthy materials with all the other chatter going on. I just took a quick glance at my Twitter home page. Of the twenty items displayed (all posted within the past 9 minutes), eight were chats to specific people (@username). Three users shared posts that they wrote with their followers. One asked about dinner plans. Another provided his phone number to the world to see. A third person talked about her children. A fourth said goodnight to everyone. With the constant flow of information on Twitter, it’s certainly possible to miss out on newsworthy items.

Digg: Newsworthy, Informational, and Funny

Chris also mentions that he has used Digg as a news source. The story announcing Heath Ledger’s death was made popular with 13 minutes of submission to the social news site. Twenty-two minutes after it hit the front page, it sat at 2099 Diggs. Seven minutes after that, it had 2661 Diggs. A day later, it had over nineteen-thousand Diggs. (A regular Digg user would consider this a record of some sort.)

The right news will hit the front page of Digg quickly. If it impacts enough people, it will rise to the top. The downside of this, of course, is that social news is dictated by the wisdom of the crowds, and enough people need to deem it newsworthy to actually be considered news.

I’ve acknowledged in the past that I use Digg to satisfy a thirst for knowledge, and that hasn’t changed. Digg provides the kinds of news I seek: technology related news, celebrity gossip, and more. But beyond that, Digg has its share of funny pictures and informational articles. That’s why I like Digg as a “social news” site. As previously stated, users in the social news sphere find what’s newsworthy (e.g. Heath Ledger’s passing, Apple’s Q1 Earnings, and information about the RIAA’s plans to incur extra costs for students), but I enjoy the pictures (like this funny one or this beautiful nature scene) and the feel-good articles (20 Pictures of “Flat Pack” Urban Furniture, 60 Elegant and Visually Appealing Designs, and 5 Exercises You Probably Aren’t Doing). Digg is an amalgamation of interesting articles that the populous votes upon. As such, not all “news” (at least, as defined by each individual person) will become front page material, but that’s not to say that Digg doesn’t provide timely information. It’s just mixed with other stories, but in comparison to Twitter, it’s not as noisy.

StumbleUpon: The Funny, the Informational, but Not So Newsy

StumbleUpon is probably the last social site that I’d consider going for “news” — at least not for “current events.” Touted as more of a “content discovery” engine than a news engine, StumbleUpon lets you discover news, but not necessarily in a timely manner. For example, just the other day I stumbled upon an Apple press release from 2003. Sorry, guys, it’s five years later. That’s not so much “news” anymore.

StumbleUpon is still a great tool that I use almost equally as often as I use Digg and Twitter. The service provides you with interesting information as frequently as you choose to consume it. And that differentiates StumbleUpon from the other social “news” networks. As I pointed out in a recent Problogger post, Digg is not so much of a “social bookmarking” site, but StumbleUpon certainly is. Because the information I find on StumbleUpon is typically timeless and more referential rather than content that shows up on Digg or Twitter, I make sure to tag StumbleUpon pages and review those that I want to look back on. Then I can just go back to my StumbleUpon page and refer to the notes I left there for a reminder of what I’ve seen and why I liked it.

The Blog Covers Everything Else

Whether you’re looking at serious announcements, humorous anecdotes, or breaking news, the blog fits the category that still accommodates any audience, whether the microblogger who prefers Twitter or the media snacker who goes with Digg or StumbleUpon for their daily dose of information. In Wednesday’s post, I stated that blogging is a form of social media that should not be ignored. That’s because it encompasses everything readers seek and more.

Conclusion

Can I make the claim that I get my news from one source? Definitely not. Twitter, which started off as a site where you shared what you are doing, has emerged into a useful site where sharing news is only a small part of what you’re doing. (You’re usually typing about other things.) Digg’s news is voted upon by its users, so it’s possible that some news items are neglected. StumbleUpon just doesn’t work as a news site, since bookmarking is its game. Using one or two of these methods may work in getting your news, but I’d say that a healthy combination of blogs and these social networks ends up giving me what I want. I simply cannot give any of these up in favor of another.

[ Every Social Network is Different: Here’s What You Need to Know is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

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