52 easy ways optimize your blog while on your coffee break
Mar 27, 2008 Blogging, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing, Usability
So you have your cool little niche blog on your out-of-the-zip-file Wordpress or MovableType… and now you want to turn that side hobby into your day job. Even when you are a new blogger - or even an older one that just never quite got around to doing all that much after doing the initial install and maybe a few plugins - there are a lot of things you could do to enhance and optimize your blog that just never get done. Why not? Often its just an extreme feeling of overwhelmingness at “all that needs to be done” or just simply a time or skill issue. But it is these little enhancements - whether for reader usability, search engines, marketing or things just to make your actual blogging go a little bit easier and blogger-friendly - that can really take your blog to the next level… the one that actually earns you money.
Here are some quick and easy fixes you can make to your blog, and you can each one into the same amount of time it takes you to have your coffee break… yes, seriously, each one should take you 15 minutes or less! And it will leave you your lunch break as actual blog writing time. So now you have no excuse not to do at least some of these which will make your blog better for you, your readers and the search engines. And because each is such a quick thing to do, these are perfect for those who still have a day job but have dreams of being a full time blogger.
Some do require you to have FTP access to upload plugins. Many are Wordpress specific but could be easily adapted to your blog platform of choice.
Run far, far away from the default template
With the number of free blog templates out there, there is really no excuse to be running the default template on your blog unless you just finished installing it five minutes ago. To readers, this is the equivelant of running fingernails down a chalkboard. So even if you can’t afford to hire a designer to make you something custom yet, go and download a freebie one, just making sure it isn’t sponsored by “Buy Viagra” or “Texas Holdem”.
Where’s home?
If your logo is not linked to your homepage, make sure you have a clearly labeled link near the top that says “Home” so people can link to your website easily. Most Wordpress templates come with this, but some do not. The quickest way to do it is to add a new widget to the top of your Wordpress toolbar, although editing your header or sidebar file can be just about as quick, for those of you not using the widgetized Wordpress yet.
Get searching
Adding a search box can help those who wind up on your blog but can’t find exactly what they are looking for, whether because your categories re a bit too broad or you just have far too many entries for people to find a specific post they want to read. Wordpress has one by default, but if your blog is well indexed in Google, you might want to add an AdSense for Search box instead, so you could make a small amout of money from it as well.
Customize your 404 error page
If people end up on a page that doesn’t exist, a customized 404 page can go a long way to helping people find what they are looking for so they don’t simply hit the back button instead. Learn more on creating a 404 page in Eleven steps to creating a killer 404 page.
Underline your links
This is especially important if your blog is targeting a not-so-tech-savvy audience. So while those green mouseover links look hot, the lack of underline-ness can trick some people. And if you happen to be targeting the retired age group, you might want to go with the familiar blue underlined links, instead of just changing the green links to green underlined links. This can be changed in your template .css file.
Keep your navigation consistent
Yes, it can be tempting to make your entry pages with a completely different layout style than your main blog page, but this inconsistency can make it difficult for people to easily find what they are looking for when you navigation swaps sides, for example, or just looks completely different from what they saw on the previous page.
Keep your entries consistent
We all go through periods where we might post six times in a day but then go six weeks without a peep. If you know your schedule is going to get crazy next week, use your coffee breaks this week to write some short but sweet blog entries you can schedule to post next week when you are too busy to do it. Not every single blog post has to be posted the moment you write it. It is far better to post regularly and consistently than to suddenly write six posts in a day then nothing for a week… the better choice would have been to publish one of those blog posts each week instead. End up writing more? Then ramp it up to post two per week. Having a few blog posts saved in drafts that are not time dependent is also a good backup plan, then you can quickly post one when you realize you’ve gone three weeks without having time to blog.
Have a backup list of blog topics
Sometimes we just aren’t inspired by anything when we sit down to write a blog entry. Othertimes we think of ten different things to write about, but barely have time to write one. So when you come up with those blog ideas you don’t have time for, just write down the potential title and maybe jot down a couple of points and save it for one of those days when you have writer’s block and can’t think of a single thing to say.
Add a favicon
Many RSS readers use the favicon when they are displaying posts from your blog, so why not add a favicon to help your blog stand out more to readers when they go to their RSS reader. And not only that, the icon will show up in the address bar of the visitor’s browser, as well as showing in the tabs, if multiple tabs are opened to various other websites too. Don’t know how to do it? We have instructions here in Should a favicon be part of your online branding & marketing presence?
Add Sociable
Make it easy for people to share your content with other social networks by adding the Sociable plugin by Joost De Valk. You can see an example of it at the end of this post… and feel free to test it out 
Do some spell checking on older posts
Are you known for being a bad speller or typo maven (like me at the moment, since I have to replace my keyboard this week, since not all the keys are reacting like they should!). Pick a category on your blog and do some quick spell checks on your older entries, especially the more popular ones. There could be a “teh” or a “somethign” lurking in your content. It can be easiest to open up the entry in your control panel and use the built in Firefox spell checker, use ieSpell in Internet Explorer or even the Google toolbar built-in spell checker. Many of these support multiple languages as well. You will probably be surprised at how often you made spelling mistakes if you don’t regularly spell check first, at you will probably find you accidentily spelled some crucial keywords wrong too. Just make sure none of those mistakes are actually driving a sizable amount of traffic before you fix them, because misspellings can be money makers.
Set up a blog-centric Twitter feed
I do all my personal Twittering @jenstar but I try to be very conscious of not doing much self-promotion of my own blogs there. But more and more people are using Twitter as their first choice for getting industry news. So while I will continue to twitter my most important blog entries there, I will also have set up TwitterFeeds on @jenniferslegg for those who want to get updated on all the blog posts here, as well as @jensense which is a feed for all my new AdSense & contextual advertising blog posts on JenSense.com. So once you have set up a new Twitter account for your blog, go to TwitterFeed and set it up to begin automatically posing everytime you have a new blog post.
Don’t require registration to post comments
Sure, i would be nice to be able to say that you have X,XXX number of registered users posting on your blog. But the reality is that unless they are extremely motivated to post a comment, they just won’t bother commenting once they see they need to register first. A few years ago, blog spam made this option popular, but with a good blog spam tool and comment moderation, there should be no reason why you should be requiring people to register first. If you remove it and you have even the tiniest amount of blog traffic, you should the number of comments shoot up.
Comment on the blogs you read
Take a minute to comment on a great blog post you have just finished reading. It doesn’t have to be anything totally deep, even just a “Thanks for the article, I never thought of marketing ___ from this perspective before, it is definitely giving me ideas!” Just be careful it isn’t too blog-spammy generic, so you want to make sure it relates to the blog entry you read. But chances are good that not only will the blog author visit your site, but other readers who have read the blog entry after you will see your blog and click through to your site. Some days, I can see 100+ visitors coming from someone else’s blog entry I was early to comment on. Obviously, in this case, it was the fact I was one of the first few people to comment, so more people saw it, so try and stick with blog entries written within the last few hours or no longer than a day or two old. And yes, most blogs no-follow those links, so you don’t get link juice, but that doesn’t mean there are not many other benefits from that link too!
Comment on your own blog
I am surprised at the number of bloggers who have many blog comments, yet rarely - if ever - comment back to their commenters themselves. Interacting with commenters can go a long way to increasing the number of comments each entry gets, as well as providing a useful “forum” to engage and interact with your readers, all on your own site! Once you start responding to those who comment, you should see your comment ratio go up.
Make it even easier to comment on your own blog
So now that you realize the power of commenting on your own blog, make it easy to reply to comments posted to your blog from within the control panel, even as you are approving comments. Absolute Comments adds a reply link next to the usual “Edit, Delete, Unapprove/Approve, Spam” options when viewing comments in admin… when you click reply, a text box will pop up to enter your reply comment. This means you don’t have to go and approve a comment and then go view the post outside the control panel to then reply to it. You will find you will reply to many more when it is quick and easy to do it.
Highlight your own comments
This is actually something I first saw on MajorNelson’s blog (XBox.com blogger) where all the comments he made were highlighted in green. Since he can have thousands of comments on a single blog entry - and mere hundreds on a slow day - it made it easy for users to see where his comments were, especially if it was about a support issue. Matt Cutt’s has made a post on how to do this, which has been on my to-do list for a few months now, even before he posted this!
Recognize your top commenters
Everyone likes recognition. You will need to tightly monitor for comments made just to increase comment count (the more popular you are the more likely this will happen) so make sure you have a tight comment policy in place. And you will want to set a time limit on it, such as top commenters in the last 7, 14 or 30 days, so it gives the new users to your site a shot at making the list. There are plenty of plugins that do this.
Show off the recent comments made
Again, you will need a strong moderation in place to prevent blog spam, but you can show snippets from the most recent comments made on your blog. And as a bonus, depending on what comments are made, it will highlight older blog entries that might be long gone from the front page of your blog or recent posts list.
Add your blog to your email signature
Yes, many of us are lazy and don’t add a signature to our emails, whether it is because we send out emails that are totally not related to the blog, or just one of those things that has been on the to do list forever. Add a blog and a short tag line to intrigue people to visit. You never know, your daughter’s softball coach might actually be a fan of whatever you blog about and your signature just got you a new reader.
Create or update your about you page
Have you recently received any awards, guest blogged on a high profile site, spoke at a conference or quoted in a major newspaper? If they aren’t all on your About You page of your blog, they definitely should be! It should include relevant information such as your bio, but also things like your username (preferably with profile links) to thinks like social media sites you belong to.
Create a contact us page
Don’t put your straight email address on your website. Use a contact form instead so you don’t need to worry about the spam. And this will also make it easy for people to contact you for quotes (whether quotes for articles or quotes for your services!) as well as to give you heads up on anything new and exciting. There is a great contact us plugin that includes spam protection so you shouldn’t have to deal with contact form spam.
RSS Feeds
Make sure your RSS feed button is placed prominently. If your RSS button is hidden away or not noticeable, you just might find that people won’t bother to subscribe rather than hunting around for it. Working on increasing your numbers? Remind people at the end of each blog entry where to subscribe. And if you get one blog entry that gets a lot of social media traffic suddenly? Make sure you make it easy for those people to subscribe so you don’t lose any traffic because while the added traffic is great, you want them to keep coming back long after they initially arrive because of a Stumble or Digg.
Offer full RSS feeds over snippets
Popular bloggers with thousands of subscribers are able to get away with offering snippets much easier than new bloggers who are trying to build up their readership. Many bloggers want them “on the site” rather than just in the RSS reader, but it is better to get them reading, enjoying and anticipating a full blog entry in their reader than it is to just give them a snippet they might only click through on 5% of the time. Once you have a large readership, then you can change to snippets if your heart is really set on it. But as you are in the phase where you are trying to attract and maintain readers, offering full feeds is definitely the best way to go.
Start tagging
The new Wordpress has built-in tagging, and there are plugins for the older versions. But make a point of tagging a few of your older blog entries a day, and before you know it, you will have a great tag representation of your posts for others to use.
Recommend related blog entries
You just wrote a fantastic blog entry that has been Stumbled and Dugg… but do you make it easy for those new-found fans to write other articles you have written on the same topic? It is easy to add a couple links to the end of a blog entry if you happen to notice it getting a ton of traffic suddenly. But sometimes you just won’t notice until the traffic is gone or you suddenly notice the comment numbers have shot up on a particular entry. If you install a recommended entries / related posts plugin, it will automatically pull several related blog entries to recommend to your readers at the end.
Highlight your most popular posts
What are your most popular posts of all time, either by page views or comment count? Add a list of popular posts to your sidebar. This gives them a bit of extra link juice, since chances are good it has been a long time since they saw the homepage. But also it gives your new readers a chance to see what they have missed but which were highly popular with readers.
Recommend other blogs
You don’t live in a closed world and believe it or not, some people won’t just read your blog and nothing else. So why not recommend other blogs you enjoy? Add them to your blogroll so readers can see what else you read. Not only are you sending traffic and links to blogs you admire, but you just might see some of those bloggers reciprocate and recommend your blog back to their own readers.
Get your own domain
Still lingering on yourname.wordpress.com or yourname.blogspot.com? Even if the yourname.com isn’t available, in the longrun it is still best to have your blog on your domain. So spend your coffee break looking up domain nams for your own yourname.com. Worried about your old blog entries? If you use Wordpress, they have ways to import from various hosted blog platforms either built in or as a plugin. So don’t let that stop you from moving to your very own domain name.
Don’t get too widget happy
Ah, widgets, they are great little things. But there are definite blogs that go overboard to such extreme measures that they overshadow everything else on the page - even the fantastic content you have written - or worse, stall the loading of the page completely so that I can’t even see what you have written. How to avoid widget overload? Don’t sit down one day and add twenty new things to your sidebar. Start with two or three, then slowly ramp them up. This way you can identify any load issues, and you won’t be stuck figuring which of the twenty you just added is causing problems.
Check for blog spam
Never got around to getting your Akismet API key? Do it now. Sure, if your blog is new, maybe you have been fortunate enough to only get a handful of spam comments and/or trackbacks on your blog, just enough that you can easily handle it in simple comment moderation. But trust me, there will be a tipping point when the slow trickle will become a flood. Has the flood already hit and you are knee deep in masses of comments awaiting moderation that you are certain legitimate ones are caught up in? Once the key is added, there will be a link to recheck the queue for spam and it will remove the bulk of spam. Think some blog spam might have slipped through unnoticed? Do a search within your Wordpress comments tab, because it will search for keywords not only in the text but in the URLs as well. So do a search for the usual suspects of keywords such as poker, holdem, viagra, cialis, mortgage, loans, debt, payday, xanax, phentermine. That said, don’t go and delete all comments with those keywords without reading them first… they could be completely legitimate comments that are using one of those words for a legitimate reason.
Check for signs of hacking
Similar to checking for spam, this involves doing a site:yoursite.com search in google, and appending one of the usual suspects of blog spam keywords (ie. “site:yoursite.com viagra” would be the search term). This could show up comment spam as well but will also show if there are any exploits or hacks where spammers have injected links into your site it should show up here.
Check those title tags
Wordpress has this nasty habit of putting the title of your blog first before the title of the blog entry. So if you have a longish blogname, you could be pushing the title of your individual entries right off of the Google search results. Even worse, depending on the version you use, could also be adding things like “Blog Archive” before getting around to displaying the title of the post in your title tag. More on this from Wordpress or just install the SEO Title Tag plugin.
Make sure you have good permalinks
Are your blog URLs something along the lines of http://www.yourfabulousblog.com/p?=89 Not very descriptive nor search-engine friendly. Make sure you are using permalinks that include information from the blog title such as http://www.yourfabulousblog.com/how-to-optimize-your-blog You can see how the second would be much more beneficial In Wordpress, you will find this choice under Options then click the Permalinks link. You can chose your link structure there, but do remember you may need to manually update or add a .htaccess file to do it depending on what your server permissions are for the relevant files.
Make your post slugs more manageable
This is one thing I consistently forget to do, and I know I’m not the only one! When publishing a new blog entry, your post slug (the permalink URL title that is usually the same as all the words in your blog entry title) should not be thirty words long, as some blog entry titles wind up being on occassion! So if you have a massively long title, you want to make sure you change the post slug from a-really-long-and-wordy-and-keyword-rich-title-of-my-blog-entry-that-is-super-exciting to keyword-rich-super-exciting-blog-entry or something else that is much shorter but is also descriptive enough for someone seeing it as well as having your all-important keywords included in it. I don’t always remember to do this before I post, but I generally remember something I have set to publish in the future sometime between the time I finished writing it and the time it actually goes live on the blog.
Write killer article titles
When you have a good article title, you can entice people to read something they wouldn’t have read with a poor title. The ability to write great titles is definitely a gift, but it can also be learned with the practice makes perfect rule of thumb. A blog entry with a great title is also much more likely to go viral because a lot of people that submit things to Digg, Sphinn etc just can’t be bothered to rewrite the title - nor would you really want them to. So a great title is crucial.
Have you optimized your images?
Sure, people either love love love the traffic they get from Google image search, or they despise it because they end up with image leechers. If you want to get as much traffic as possible, make sure your images are optimized so people can find them easier, especially if you tend to use images with cryptic filenames like tw445seo.jpg which might make perfect sense to you, but do absolutely nothing for anyone else. You can do this manually as you upload each photo, depending on your version of Wordpress, or you can use a plugin like SEO Friendly Images which does it for you automatically.
Add a technorati widget
Make it easy for people to favorite you on Technorati. First, you need to sign up and claim your blog, if you haven’t already. Then add a button like this:
(That is to this blog, if you’d like to favorite it!) You can go and grab the code to to this button right in Technorati, along with a whole host of other widgets, even adding links to the most recent blog entries on your personal list of favorites in Technorati.
And add some other easy RSS subscribe buttons too
Add links to things like Bloglines and Google Reader so your readers can subscribe to them easily. You can add them individually, use one of the wordpress plugins or use something like FeedButton which makes a rollover like this:
Fix for RSS scrapers
Don’t you just love it when you post a new blog post and then see it syndicated immediately on other websites? And especially if you see it ranking above yours… which can happen, if you know of the story about Search Engine Journal’s Journal. But, you might as well make sure you at least get some credit for it, so make sure you have a link going back to either your blog or your blog entry so that people who stumble upon the scrapers can find their way back to the original source… you! If you are code-savvy, you can edit the RSS yourself or you can use the RSS Footer plugin. Bonus tip: It works for ads too, your RSS ads will be displayed wherever your blog entries are scraped.
Make sure you are pinging Google
Are you pinging the Google blog server? The Google blog search updates incredibly fast - as in within minutes of pinging, you will see your blog entry in the blog search results, and it isn’t much later than most blog entries end up in the regular Google search too. Learn more about pinging Google here. Or you can submit your feed to Google here for a one-shot ping.
Label ads as ads
People hate being tricked, and this can impact whether people want to follow you or not. So if you accept advertising, label it as Sponsors or Advertisers. Add no-follow if you are concerned about appearing as though you are selling links. Bonus tip: This makes Google happier too.
Avoid going into advertising overload
This mistake seems to be made primarily by newer bloggers, but longtime bloggers can be just as guilty of this one too! You can make far more with one or two well-placed ads than you can with 10 different ads plastered all over your blog. And too many ads can also lead to poor usability for your readers, especially if there are a lot of flashy image ads going on.
Use nofollow on links if needed
Essentially, if you are selling links or you are linking to a site that you cannot vouch for its authority or trustworthiness, you should pop a nofollow on the link to stay in Google’s good books (if Google search traffic is important to you, that is). There are more penalties for sites identified as having sold links, so using nofollow can help prevent any future problems - or fix any current ones!
Link to other bloggers as you’d like to be linked
Remember the song Money for Nothing? Well, apply it to links. When you link to other’s blog entries, link to them as you would like them to theoretically link to you. You hate it when people refer to your blog but don’t include a link… or include an unlinked URL. So why should you do the same just to hoarde your link juice? The same applies to anchor text too… link with the blog entry title or blog name instead of things like “read the blog here”.
Subscribe to competitor’s RSS feeds
Yes, you can do this, it isn’t being disloyal to your own blog But you can great great ideas by seeing what your competitors are talking about and linking to, and you can use it to bounce off of for your own blog entries.
Link to your competitor’s blogs
Sure, you might see them as competitor who have more of the blog traffic you want. But a news flash… many of those subscribers might also subscribe to you too, it isn’t a case where readers have to pick one over the other. And chances are pretty good that other blogger isn’t viewing you as “competition” but rather a cool new look into the same market area. So link to those blogs you view as competition to yours, and good things can happen, such as that person now discovering your blog and maybe sending a link your way too. If they publish their trackbacks, your blog could show up on a blog entry they did that you wrote about. Blogging is an entirely different animal when it comes to linking to competitors, so just do it
Check on old links
You should definitely do a link health check on your blog on a regular basis. Visit your outbounds, check to see if you should nofollow anyone (especially for those blog entries you might have done before nofollow even existed) and just do an overall look at all your links to ensure they are all helping and not hurting you!
Robots.txt for duplicate content
Sometimes how the date archives are done on blogs you can end up with duplicate content because blog posts might be indexed under their own pages, their category pages and then a couple of date pages as well. Create a robots.txt to prevent Google from indexing the unneeded date pages. And be sure to run your robots.txt file through a robots.txt checker to be certain you haven’t accidentily made a mistake and told Google to not index your entire site… this has happened to bloggers, so it is better to be safe than sorry when it comes to your site’s indexing status!
Set up a Google Webmaster Central account
Sign up here and then verify your site. This will give you information on your site such as any 404 pages Googlebot has found, the number of subscribers (using Google Reader or iReader), top search queries and top clicked queries. And it will also serve to alert you if Google finds anything suspicious on your site that could affect indexing, such as if you have been selling text links and they caught you
Keep your blog updated with the latest version
It is important to ensure you keep your Wordpress, MovableType or whatever blog platform you use updated with the latest version. Yes, it can be a pain, but it is even a bigger pain to clean up a blog that has been exploited in some way. If you are too scared to do it yourself, hire someone to do it. Unfortunately, some exploits (such as ones that insert hidden links in your footer) can get your blog booted right out of Google. This one might take you a little bit longer than your coffee break - do this one on your lunch break or set aside some time in the evening or weekend to do it. But it is crucial to do this.
Backing up your blog
And while we talk about updating your blog, it is also important to backup your blog files and your database on a regular basis, so if disaster strikes you won’t discover you have lost all your template files and two years worth of blog posts…. believe me, I have seen it happen. So definitely take the time to backup all your related blog files.
Whew! That’s all folks Fifty-two quick and easy changes you can make to your blog to make it more user friendly, search engine friendly and yourself friendly too. Anything I missed that can be done quick and easy?
Why you really should care about social media marketing
Mar 24, 2008 Social Media Marketing
I have been talking more about social media marketing on JenniferSlegg.com lately, and I had a reader who came over from following JenSense ask me about why social media marketing is all the rage. It is definitely true that there is so much buzz and hype about social media marketing, and that can definitely leave the impression to people that it is the “popular†thing to do. But some people don’t see the full picture of WHY it is the popular thing to do, other that the obvious things like getting thousands of visitors from a front page Digg. So if you aren’t concerned about a social media campaign, here is why you should sit up and start doing it.
First and foremost, the traffic
Traffic you get from being on the front page of Digg can be server-impacting significant. And who doesn’t want all that extra traffic into a site, even if it is a huge burst over a period of an hour or two? You just need to ensure you have something in place to convert those visitors into something, whether it is RSS subscribers, newsletter signups or AdSense clicks.
More opportunities to dominate your serps.
In social marketing, the sites will all lead to you. If someone links to you on a Digg post, it has so much authority it can rank for keywords in the title that you just don’t have enough authority to rank for on your own. But, since there is really only a snippet or paraphrase of your original page or article, chances are pretty good that if it looks as though the article has what the visitor is looking for, he or she will click through to your site. This is why pages that are Dugg can still send traffic well after they made it to the front page – and even those with a smaller number of Diggs. So when someone searches for your brand, company name or keywords, you have blocked your competitors from more of the top ten if you are the end result of many of those results, whether it is your Facebook page, Twitter page or even an article on Digg or Sphinn.
Links
True, you get links from Digg, Sphinn, Delicious or which ever social media platforms you are using. But it also goes well beyond this. When you get great exposure on social media sites, this also results in a cascade effect where people who read it find it interesting enough to put it on other social media sites (if they see it on Sphinn, they might Stumble it or submit it to Digg) not to mention they might blog about it themselves, meaning even more direct links. One well written article that goes viral can lead to hundreds of links, if not more. And who doesn’t want that many natural links added to a site in a day and age when it is getting even harder to find them?
It’s not just the linkbait
Someone recently mentioned to me they couldn’t do social media because they hated everything about link bait. But while link bait is certainly one aspect of social media marketing, it isn’t only about link baiting either. An informative, quality article that goes viral does not have to be link bait. I generally don’t link bait and I never call out people just to create a buzz, yet I never have problems getting articles to go viral. So you definitely can make things go viral without having to be controversial or a bit of a jerk to do it, which tended to be the spin given on early link bait where often it was the biggest jerk who won the battle of the links. Fortunately, people are smarter, especially with the usage of nofollow.
Engaging the audience
It can an opportunity to interact with others about your site, even if it is just in Digg comments. Be sure to interact with those who comment, and then be sure to followup on any other blogs that might have picked it up from seeing it on Digg. Ideally, these comments should be made within the first hour to have the maximum impact, so be sure you are tracking the appropriate sites and keywords in your blog search of choice.
Buzz effect
Being on the front page of Digg or Slashdot, even something not promotional in any way, can have a huge effect on your Buzz factor. Suddenly people who had never heard of you will be seeing your name prominently, and especially if you combine it with an overall social media marketing campaign that goes beyond he initial buzz. If you see some company name buzzed about enough times, many people will be curious enough to at least Google it so they can see what on earth it is people keep talking about.
Reputation management
The more places that come up when searching for your company name that lead back to you, the better, especially if there are some sites ranking for your name that portray a less-than-positive spin on your company or its business practices. Social media marketing can be a great way to help dominate the serps with fuzzy warm listings rather than companysucks.com listings. You might not be able to get rid of all of them, but it definitely can help for reputation management.
Budget Marketing Option
A long as you are willing to read up on social marketing and the dos and don’ts on specific social sites, it can be a very affordable marketing option, as long as you don’t mind doing some legwork and putting in some elbow grease. You don’t need to invest in paid links or pay per click campaigns. Accounts on social media sites are almost always free to join, then it is just up to you to put the time and effort in so you begin to see a financial return on your time. So set up that Twitter or Facebook account, or begin Stumbling and Digging to get your feet wet, then look at how you can leverage it for greater return.
Using social media can be a powerful propeller for your business. No one should be focusing on just organic optimization or just search marketing optimization when social media can have such a strong effect on both.
Why people you follow on Twitter don’t follow you back
Mar 14, 2008 Social Media Marketing
Twitter can be a great marketing tool… but one of the things that has to happen is that people actually follow your feed. Otherwise you will be talking no one, and that is not the way to market yourself or your business 
After all, the more the merrier.
But have you ever followed someone but they don’t end up following you back? I don’t follow back everyone who follows me, simply because I still want me Twitter feed to be manageable. But ever wonder why some of the people you follow just don’t follow you back? Here are some of the reasons why I don’t immediately follow back people who add me to Twitter.
Who are you?
If you have a blog, give me the URL, but also include it in your bio if you have room. Twitter truncates just about everyone’s URL (unless you have a super short one like @oilman) and sometimes those six characters I get to see of your URL after the http://www. part just doesn’t cut it for me, especially when it seems that half of the people I follow start off with something like http://www.search… Drop the www. part and you will give your potential followers an extra four characters (for a total of ten) to try and figure out what blog is yours without having to mouseover the URL. If I read your blog, you can pretty much guarantee that I will follow you on Twitter too. If your bio is short (like @jenstar) you can also add your website or blog URL at the end of your bio.
Give me a visual
Make sure you either have a photo of yourself, in case I know you from the conference circuit and but don’t realize your handle is actually studmuffin89. Or you can use some other easily recognizable logo (ala @shoemoney) or avatar (ala @doshdosh) that you use not just on Twitter but all the other places I might have seen you (such as on forums or other social media sites).
C’est what?
I seem to have a following of people who must be able to read me in English, but only Twitter in something that I just can’t read. Since I can’t read it, why subscribe? Do you want some of those English followers too? @jdevalk is one I follow that Twitters about half of his updates in English. So in that case, I have no problem following him because I know I can read about half of what he says
Sure, you use Twitterfeed but….
If you have an account you are strictly using as a Twitterfeed “hey we have a new blog post” that no one at the company really follows anyway, why not follow all those people who are following it? Not only will you give people who are following you an extra follower in their list, but the page won’t look so barren when it is missing all those friend icons on the right side. And following lists are set up so you can go and follow all your followers quickly from that page, without having to go and look at each profile individually (unless you want to).
Haven’t updated yet!
If you have signed up for a Twitter account, but have yet to tweet, your Twitter profile page will announce to everyone Haven’t updated yet! And you have to be pretty fabulous for me to follow someone who signed up ages ago but has either said nothing or the last update was over six months ago. The problem with this is that you might be using it to follow people, but when you decide to bite the bullet and actually start tweeting, people just might not even notice because you were formerly a non-tweeter. So if you have signed up but aren’t an active tweeter, try and make a point of saying something - anything - once every week or two, and add it to your calendar to remind you if you need to.
Following too many people
Ever notice those people who are following 3,972 people? Most (although not all) are definite chronic followers, meaning they troll friends of friends and add anyone and everyone, and hope you will follow back. But if you are one of those 3,972 people he or she is following, do you think you will get any benefit from that person? Not a chance. Don’t believe me? Find one of those people who is following 3,000+ people and click on the “with others” tab, and you will discover that by the time you scroll to the end of the page of updates, you are still looking at people who have only twittered within the last minute. Do you think he/she will have noticed what you tweeted 20 minutes ago? Not likely. That said, I do follow those who are following thousands, but those tend to be those who are extremely well known, such as @jasoncalacanis.
Who are you @ with?
If I look at your profile and see that you are sending @ messages to people I already follow, your odds of me following you just went up exponentially. So there is value in interesting with others on Twitter by sending them @ messages, because not only can I see that you are following (and actively participating) followers of mine, but you will also get more followers if that person you just @ with ends up @ you back in his or her own messages. And if it happens to be at a conference, and it is obvious from your own tweets or other people’s @ tweets that you are there too, your odds of being followed just went up exponentially again.
Lastly, don’t take it personally if people don’t follow you back right away. I often go through the list of people who have followed me once every week or two (I am hoping to go through mine in the next day or two, before I leave for SES, if you are wondering why I haven’t followed you back yet!) and add people at that time, rather than doing it multiple times a day as people follow me. It is easy to quickly sort the email notices I received, since Twitter doesn’t offer any kind of sorting function yet to sort my followers by date they began following me.
Also read: Ten ways market your blog on Twitter without being a spammer.
Follow me on Twitter: @jenstar
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Ten ways market your blog on Twitter without being a spammer
Mar 6, 2008 Blogging, Social Media Marketing
Since I have been playing around with Twitter, I have noticed a trend amongst certain people… all they really use their Twitter feed for is to spam all their followers with their latest blog posts. And when they aren’t giving links to those posts, they are instead giving links to Digg & Sphinn where, you guessed it, they want you to vote for their stories on those sites too.
Now, as a follower who sees this, you can bet those peopole won’t stay on my Twitter feed for long. That said, Twitter is a brilliant way to market not only yourself but your blog. However, you need to be a savvy marketer and make sure you don’t cross that invisble spam line.
If you want to spam, do it right
First, considering grabbing two Twitter accounts so that you can do a bit of separation between you and your blog. Now, @sengineland has a feed that is nothing but titles and links to their blog entries. But, the key thing is, I expected that when I signed up. If I want stuff from the man behind Search Engine Land, well, @dannysullivan is twittering to his heart’s content about all kinds of things (and maybe Chris Sherman is too, but I haven’t found him yet) so I can sign up for that one too. So if you want to use your Twitter to keep your fans updated the instant you add a new blog post, signup an account with @yourblogname and use it just for your marketing stuff. Then save your @yourname or @yourusername Twitter account for your everyday twitters and just an occassional heads up to your best posts.
How much is too much?
So now that you have your account, how often can you get away with twittering your latest blog post? Well, a lot of it depends on how often you Twitter. If you Twitter something 20 times a day, I can easily handle one or two links to a blog entry a day But if you only twitter a few times a week and they are always to your blog entries, I will tire of following you pretty quickly, unless your blog entries are pretty stellar. A good ratio of about 10-15 non-marketing twitters for every 1 marketing twitter you do…. but put a cap on it at one or two per day. Worried you aren’t twittering enough to make your feed seem less spammy? Make sure your do some @whoever replies to the people you follow, which also has the added bonus that when they reply, other people might see it and follow you too.
Think about your headline
If you are going to send out a link to your blog entry on Twitter, at least make the effort to give it a killer headline that still works in the 140 character count once you have the URL in there too. This is one of the unfortunate problems with Twitterfeed, a program that will automatically send blog entries to your, surprise surprise, Twitter feed. First, don’t repeat your blog name, especially if your headlines tend to get cut off at the end and especially if your blog name is a lengthy one. When it comes on my Twitter feed, I see who has posted it, so cut out the repeating of the blog name and give me a better headline. And if you use a tinyurl.com link, it will free up space for more characters in your headline.
Breaking News
Another useful way to market is to make a post about something that is “breaking news” in the industry. For example, I saw this week’s news about Ask.com on Twitter before anyone had gotten around to blogging about it. Several people posted it as breaking news (@LisaBarone & @rustybrick are two I remember), then as the discussions @everybody went on, people began posting their own blog entries with their own thoughts on the news. In this case, it was breaking news and totally appropriate for everyone to post their blog links. And because they were following Twitter at the time, many more people posted their links that might not neccessarily have posted links if it wasn’t a huge discussion being followed a the time. And an added bonus, because you learned it on Twitter before it ever hit your RSS reader, you have time to have a blog post written and posted by the time the news hits and people start looking for reactions and more information on the whole Ask.com decision.
What are you doing
There are things you can say in your twitter feed that while being promotional, are also informative to your followers. When I was on Webmasterradio.fm this week co-hosting with @shoemoney, we both twittered it and we saw many people twittering us back with comments or questions about what we were discussing on the fly. It was far easier for me to pick out the comments on Twitter than it would be for me to follow it in the Webmasterradio.fm chat room where the noise ratio is so much higher. In fact, we ended up with two guest callers into the show simply because they twittered us while we were talking (@rustybrick and @tamar). I personally have also tuned in to several other podcasts (both live and when they were uploaded) because people twittered something along the lines of “just on the air with @whoever, listen live at ____” or “@whoever just uploaded the podcast we did with @whoever last week.” Likewise, if you are at a conference with many fellow twitterers, Twitter when you are about to head to a session you are speaking at, or even when you are in the bar to network.
Too much information?
Sometimes people get right into twitter and twitter everything, including things I really would rather not know about. If you are worried what you are about to post is TMI (too much information), think about reading it as if someone else posted it, then make your decision to post it or rewrite it. If you find your personal social life twitters might offend your business contacts who also follow you, think about having a social persona and a business persona… then stick the business to your business Twitter account and have a personal one where you can tweet about your drunken exploits, sexual exploits and bodily functions just to those who can handle it… and if you are worried about it coming back on you, chose the “protect my updates” checkbox in your settings. That said, some people just don’t care if the two worlds collide, but do consider the fact that some of your followers might unfollow you or even get turned off from reading your blog because of it.
Twitter other people’s posts
I usually find that the blog entries I read most often because of tweets are the ones made by other people. So if you find something especially interesting, write a short but enticingly sweet headline, pop up a link and a @whoever shoutout. They could return the favor to you in the future, or those seeing your shoutout could end up back to your main Twitter page and follow a path down to your blog. And if you are trying to build up credibility as a submitter whose submissions go hot regularly, you do have a better chance of getting that vote if you do the @whoever shoutout or make note of where the original article or blog entry is from, so we know it isn’t you blatantly spamming your own stuff
Can you Digg/Sphinn/Whatever this post
There are a couple people I followed that I unfollowed because I was barraged with all kinds of vote requests for all his sites. And it will probably be only a matter of time Digg adds some sort of algorythm into their votes where those entries that have a lot of Twitter/tinyurl/etc referrals either get buried or take even more Diggs to make the front page… if it isn’t already happening. And again, it is all about ratio. If someone asks for a Digg or a Sphinn once every two or three days, I am much more likely to indulge that person than the one who asks me for a vote a couple times a day. Drop it back to once a week, combined with a twitter feed I find useful and/or interesting? You have just increased your odds exponentially of getting a vote from me. But don’t make the fatal faux pas of asking more than once for a Digg or Sphinn on the same post. Last week someone asked for a Digg four times in a single day, all for the same post, and I got annoyed and unfollowed them… and no, they still didn’t make the front page of Digg. I do sometimes see people do it twice to cover friends in different continents (once for the UK and once 6-8 hour later for the US) but then use the disclaimer “retweet” when doing it. But again, don’t go overboard and constantly retweet either.
Twitter other people’s posts
I usually find that the blog entries I read most often because of tweets are the ones made by other people. So if you find something especially interesting, write a short but enticingly sweet headline, pop up a link and a @whoever shoutout. They could return the favor to you in the future, or those seeing your shoutout could end up back to your main Twitter page and follow a path down to your blog.
Absentee Twitterers
Did you sign up for a Twitter feed, have somehow amassed a few hundred followers but have not given them anything for their following effort? You can definitely get away with a once a week “hey, I have a new blog post” type of tweet, because people will simply be so happy to finally get something from you at all. It can be a nice way to slide into the whole twittering thing, if you just aren’t that sure about it, especially when you get all the @you replies back from people who see you have actually made it back to Twitterland. However, be aware that if this is all you consistently do, people will tire of it and unfollow you.
To leave you with one last thought… if you are wondering if you are that spammy Twitterer that all your followers hate, well, you probably are.
Why you should not use email tracking pixels to determine readership loyalty
Mar 4, 2008 Reputation Management, Usability
I received an email from a website today saying that since I hadn’t been reading the weekly newsletter, they were going to automatically unsubscribe me unless I resubmitted by subscription. Now, I thought this was odd for a number of reasons.
First, I am a paying member of this website. In fact, it is the only website I can think of off the top of my head that I pay for the content behind the login screen.
Second, I visited this site and logged in within the last week. I know this for certain since it is a cooking site, and I was grabbing a recipe I have made from the site previously.
Third, this email newsletter is (I believe) for paying subscribers only.
Fourth, I still have six months left on my current membership cycle.
So I next looked in my Outlook and noticed “Click here to download pictures. To help protect your privacy, Outlook prevented automatic download of some pictures in this message.” Ah, yes, a 1×1 tracking pixel was in the email. So yes, because Outlook didn’t download images - and honestly, it wasn’t obvious there were pictures missing, since there were no other images within the message that I could click to get the images - I am being automatically unsubscribed.
Now, I can see the fact that websites might not want to send newsletters to those who aren’t reading them. But I am a paying member, who has logged in very recently, yet I am being unsubscribed because my current email program of choice doesn’t download images…. nor do many of the other email programs that the majority of people use these days.
What should this website have done instead? A few things…
First, why not aknowledge the fact that I could really be reading your newsletter even though your tracking pixels say otherwise? Adding something like “Some email programs don’t open images, so you might be reading our newsletter with eager anticipation the moment it hits your in box, but we just don’t realize it. Confirming your subscription will help us know that you are indeed reading your newsletter, even if our techies think you aren’t.”
Check if the lack of reading is because it is getting caught up in a spam filter. Include something along the lines of “Is this the first time you have heard anything from the ____ newsletter since you first signed up? If so, reconfirm your subscription, then be sure to add us@somerecipesite.com to your white list, so the next one won’t accidentily end up in your spam folder.”
Check my subscription. It can’t be hard to match active subscribers with non-active ones, especially when its all tied to the same email address.
Then, if I don’t reconfirm my email address, then step up to the plate and email a couple of weeks later with the
We know that unwanted e-mail can be a hassle, so we want to make sure you’d like to continue your subscription. If you’d like to keep receiving weekly newsletters from us, please click here. If we don’t hear from you, we’ll unsubscribe you.
message that I actually did receive today from this website.
Moral of the story: Don’t use 1×1 tracking pixels to track just who is reading your email newsletter, especially when you are using it to automatically unsubscribe readers from that newsletter. Not only will your numbers be waaaaay off, but you will lose loyal readers who might forget to reconfirm or are annoyed by the fact they are getting automatically unsubscribed. And of course, not to mention the impact it has on those who suddenly are reminded that big brother is watching to see which newsletters they are reading and how often they read.
And for the record, I decided not to resubscribe because of how they handled it.
