Jennifer Slegg - Search Engine Marketing Consultant |

Do you think social media is either Facebook and/or MySpace, and that’s it? When I was recently chatting with a friend in the industry I mentioned I do social media consulting, he replied, “Oh, so you do Facebook?” Well, fortunately for all of us, social media goes far beyond Facebook! The problem is that people don’t quite know what to do when they have eeked out all the possible value out of their Facebook networking.

Chances are good that you have had an IM cross your computer with nothing but a link and a “can you digg it?” message but maybe you didn’t quite know what digging meant and never got around to checking it out. Or maybe have you heard of people talking about tweets, sphinns and stumbles, and want to know how you can do it too? If you want to dip your toes further into the social media pool, here are some easy ways to start broadening your social media horizons, both by joining specific social media sites, and by your behaviour once you join.

Sign up for a Twitter account
Twitter is a place where you can submit status updates of what you are doing (”Off to a meeting with the boss in 3..2..1..” or “Listening to the Daily Search Cast right now”). If you use Facebook, think of it as your Facebook status updates multiplied by 1,000. But you can also use it to write replies to other people about what they’ve said (”Ouch! Hope the meeting is a good one” or “Thanks for the reminder, I am off to listen too”). Chances are very good that at least a handful of your friends are already on Twitter, you can do a search for them once you set up your account or once you add one friend, check out who he or she follows and you will probably find plenty more people to follow. And you can follow me (@jenstar for my personal one and @jenniferslegg to follow new posts from this blog) to kind of see what it is all about. Then start posting little updates about what you happen to be doing. And if you are tempted to market with Twitter, you might want to read Ten ways to market your blog on Twitter without being a spammer.

Voting it up
If you are reading this blog, chances are good that you will find Sphinn interesting too. In a nutshell, people (including you!) submit interesting news stories and blog entries that the community would find interesting, and if others like it, they will vote on it (called Sphinning). Once it hits X number of votes, it will show up on the homepage of Sphinn. Sphinn is a nice way to get your toes wet before venturing onto the larger voting sites such as Digg, which will probably be your next post-Sphinn stop after you figure out how it all works. Because Spinn is so niche to the internet marketing world, it is much quicker to see the fruits of your labor there than if you immediately dive headlong into Digg! So sign up for a Sphinn account and then go and submit a fabulous blog entry you have recently read.

Start Stumbling
StumbleUpon is a site where people can give thumbs up or down to specific webpages they visit, which increases the odds of other people, such as you, visiting them. You download a plugin or toolbar, available on the site, and when you hit stumble, it will randomly show you a site that others have given a thumbs up on. When you are just beginning, try and narrow down your category as much as possible… sometimes people check off nearly all the categories and quickly become overwhelmed with just how much variety and seemingly off-topic pages there are. So stick with one area, whether you want it business related or even something like TV shows or video games, and start stumbling. As you become more familiar with it, you can suggest your own sites.

Sharing the love
Whichever social media platform or program you are doing, be generous and share the love…. this means don’t just promote your own sites, vote on or share other people sites and pages too. This could mean recommending a good blog entry you just finished reading on Twitter, doing a quick Stumble on it or submitting it to Sphinn or Digg afterwards. Be as generous as you can with those links because what goes around comes around - yes, you will find people do the same back to you - and people will notice if you are stingy on sharing others.

Thanking in return
If you see someone has Twittered that you have a great blog entry and includes your URL, take a quick moment to thank that person… and especially if you ASKED the person to do it for you. When someone asks me to Sphinn or Digg something, I am much more likely to do it again for that person if they thanked me the last time around. And if I have submitted something to a social media site without being asked by the author, and they go out of their way to thank me for it, you bet I will consider submitting the next great read from him or her. And returning the favor with a future mention/submission/vote/etc is always nice too!

Being successful in social media takes time and effort… which is why many attempts at it fail. But getting your toes wet in places like Sphinn, StumbleUpon and Twitter will help you get started in places beyond the usual Facebook and MySpace which have dominated the news in the past, and trying out some new places to test your skills. You might find you are a StumbleUpon maven and set your goals on becoming a top stumbler, or you might find you love Sphinn and then tackle Digg. But broadening your social media horizons should be the first order of business, so you can find what works best for you.

Don't miss a single post! Subscribe to my RSS feed

Press my buttons!

These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Getting a person to your blog for the first time is hard enough work as it is, but what can you do to encourage those readers to come back for a second (and third and fourth) visit in the coming days or weeks? There are some simple things you can do to encourage new blog visitors to feel at home so that they subscribe, return and participate in your blog.

First impressions
As much as we hate to admit it, first impressions count. Make sure your font is large enough - and “normal” enough - to be read easily. Make sure you have a clean yet unique design… one that people can identify as yours, even without seeing the URL. I have been to blogs where the content was decent but I was completely turned off by what it looked like. Black background and red text? No thanks.

Remind people to subscribe
Not only should you make it obvious and noticeable for people to subscribe, you should also hit them up with an RSS reminder at the end of each post. Look at the bottom of this entry to see how I do it… and be sure to subscribe while you are at it

Subscribing Made Easy
First, make it easy to subscribe to your blog and give them lots of ways to subscribe. Offer standard RSS feed links, but also offer quick links for adding to Bloglines, Google Reader and the other main RSS services (more on this below) to make the subscription process as painless as possible for frequent RSS readers. And whatever you do, don’t make people fill out a survey to get the feed link like one recent blog wanted me to do. Yes, the information can be useful for advertisers, but that blog lost at least one subscriber because of it, and likely many others. Always be sure to have your subscription options in the sidebar of your blog, and make sure it is on every page, not just the index page.

Offer solutions for subsciber reading preferences
Perhaps you have plenty of potential Google Reader, Feedburner or Bloglines subscribers. Make sure you offer quick buttons so that your visitors can subscribe to a variety of services quickly and easily. Feedbutton is one way to do it, rollover to see it in action:

Email subscriptions
Especially if your blog is in a market area where you have readers that have no idea what an RSS reader is, or what RSS is, offer to send new posts via email. This will enable you to make those who aren’t RSS savvy to keep updated with your new blog posts, which will make them return visitors.

Engaging
Comments are not just for visitors, they are for the blog writer too. If someone asks a question in your comments, answer it within the comments. If a new visitor has made a thoughtful comment, reply back to it, even if it didn’t require an answer per se. Visitors love to be engaged by the authors and this personal contact - albiet in a public form - will be remembered by many of those visitors. You can also make it obvious you are responding in the comments by making your comments a different color so they are easily identifiable. Major Nelson’s XBox blog is a perfect example, and it makes it easy to scan through the comments to see where he has responded, as his comments are in green. Likewise, don’t consistently ignore the oldtimers either just because they are regulars. They can easily find somewhere else to go to get their daily dose of whatever you are providing.

Showcase your most interesting blog posts
Many have posts that are way more popular than others. Be sure to include your top blog posts, or even just your favorite ones if you don’t have enough traffic yet. The blog post that brought that visitor initially might not have been enough to convince that reader to subscribe, but maybe the blog post you did a year and a half ago that you list in your sidebar is the one that will make him or her subscribe. There are many WP plugins that do this, I will be adding one shortly now that this blog is all WP 2.5 happy Not sure what you reader favorites are? Do a post with your top 10-20 blog posts and ask readers which 3-5 should be listed in the sidebar.

Offer a freebie or make a contest
Really want to get a lot of subscribers quickly? Give people an incentive for subscribing, whether it is a free ebook, report or whitepaper, or do a contest with prized which is based upon getting new subscribers. Shoemoney & John Chow held a contest with over $13,000 in donated prizes. I have seen others offer free books, t-shirts and even iPods. So think about what you have to offer that people might want and gain subscribers that way.

Make sure you write often enough
If people land on your blog homepage and see 2007 (or worse, even earlier!) as the most recent blog post, they are much less likely to subscribe. So make sure you write consistently, and if you can’t, try writing some blog entries that will still be relevant a month from now that you can set to automatically post in the coming weeks when you will be sitting on a beach in Hawaii instead of at your desk.

Make sure you have auto-discover feeds enabled
This means if someone goes to your homepage - www.jenniferslegg.com for example - in Firefox, you will see an RSS icon appear on the right side of the address bar, showing that Firefox was able to find my RSS feed right from the homepage. In IE7, the RSS icon will change to orange on the right side (placed between the home button and the print button). And also make sure it is pointing to the correct feed

Need help doing some of these things? I have more detail on how to make subscribing easy, how to highlight your own comments, how to add additional RSS buttons, etc in my post 52 easy ways to optimize your blog while on your coffee break

Don't miss a single post! Subscribe to my RSS feed

Press my buttons!

These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Every day, social media consultants pull off very successful social marketing campaigns for clients as well as for their own sites. But often when those less experienced with this fairly new type of marketing try and pull off similar feats, they end up failing miserably. So what makes some social marketing successful while others are doomed to never leave the starting gate? Here are some of the top reasons why social media campaigns fail, and what you can do to ensure you are not mistakenly making the same ones.

Time
If you want your social marketing efforts to pay off, you need to put in the time. And this is one of the most important areas that people tend to neglect. But surprisingly, even though some of those efforts might take all of 30 seconds a day, people just don’t do it. A friend was bragging to me that he has 300 Twitter followers. But when I checked out his Twitter profile, he had tweeted four times in six months. Even if he had to request his password every time he posted to Twitter, his total time spent putting into Twitter was a mere five minutes. Further questioning revealed he thought it sucked because it didn’t send him any traffic. Well, no surprise there! Imagine what he could have done with five minutes a day… or even a week, but he simply didn’t put the time in. No social media campaign will work if you don’t have time set aside to be social with it.

Effort
And what is time without effort. Sure, you could happen to get on the front page of Digg with your very first submission. But chances are you will need many, many more than that before once of your submissions hits the front page. Whether it is building your profile with submissions, voting, commenting, stumbling, etc, it can be a tremendous amount of work, especially if you are focusing on more than one social media site at once.

Hunting
We all can’t be the one who creates that killer blog post that is begging to be on the front page of Digg or Sphinn… which means you actually have to search out interesting - and timely - things to submit in order to build up your profile. And that means having a ton of blogs on your RSS that tend to post entries that Digg/Sphinn/Reddit/Mixx etc love… AND then you also have to be the first one who submits it. In the time it takes to fill your coffee cup, someone can scoop that next submission that will hit the front page.

Consistency
On StumbleUpon, to be a top Stumbler, you have to put the time in… and this means stumbling A LOT. And we are not talking minutes, try an hour a day… but consistently. And if you aren’t consistent, you will fall off the top stumblers list, and your Stumble value has just dropped considerably. If you don’t tweet regularly on Twitter, you will miss out on the natural interaction between followers that result in other people discovering you and becoming a follower. The same can even be said for writing killer headlines, especially if writing is not your forte… if you take a month hiatus from submitting to your social media site of choice, you will be rusty when you come back to it. Consistency is key - and yes, this can mean every single day, or at the very least the weekdays. But it will pay off with success.

Visibility
Along with consistency comes visibility, which can be a make-or-break scenario when you are active on many social sites. When other people see you on other sites they are also active on, they become much more aware of who you are and what you are doing. If someone is your fan on StumbleUpon, they will probably give your submissions a closer look if they see you on Digg… and those extra votes that came strictly because of your visibility on other sites could be the votes that promote your submission to the front page. If you aren’t visible - and this even means ensuring you share the same username across the sites as well as using the same avatar, because they won’t know RyGuy, LVUGrad and HotTaco across various sites are actually all the same person - you lose the visibility value of cross networking.

Brute Force
You have that initial excitement when you notice that one of your pages has been submitted to Digg and it has a good chance of hitting the front page with the number of votes it already has. So what do you do? Send a notice around asking all 32 people in the office to Digg it too. Well, unfortunately for people who do this (and this happens a lot more frequently than you’d think!) not only will that entry have no shot of making the front page, but you will probably end up getting most, if not all of those accounts banned too along with your IP for good measure. If you have an office with multiple employees, just make a rule that they are not permitted to be logged into their social media accounts where this could be an issue (Digg is notorious for this) and voting or submitting to any of them from the office. Instead, request that anything they want to do be done from home instead. And yes, make sure they know this covers their breaks at work too!

Tunnel Vision
Sure, we all would love our own stuff to be on the front page of Digg or to get Stumbled… but we don’t live in a bubble so it doesn’t take long to cross the line where it seems that the only sites you are aware of that exist are all your own. So you need to be sure you mix it up with sites you have no relation to, whether it is larger news sites, techy sites such as Wired or even a small blog that posted a very submission-worthy entry. So while you might Stumble one of your sites, don’t submit or stumble another one from that site. Trust me, your fans will be able to tell exactly which sites are yours when they notice the same ones pop up again and again and they will be turned off by it. So make sure you are submitting, voting, stumbling all kinds of other sites… a good ratio would be to have only 1 self promoting one for every 30-50 non-promoting ones. Of course, this can definitely vary depending on the specific site you are doing as some have more leniency than others… for example, with Twitter you can self-promote all you want and Twitter is fine with that but your followers might not be though! A good rule of thumb is to see what the top users of the site are doing and follow their lead.

Not De-Spamming
Sure, you have a fabulous new product you feel everyone would love to have… but post about how great this new must-have product is on Digg and it will die a quiet death with about 3 Diggs, unless it happens to be about a new video game. Spin it around about how a product does something unexpected (think what mentos do when put in diet Pepsi), how a celebrity ironically endorses it (okay, I am sure Nicole Kidman is a smart woman, but she wouldn’t be the first person I would chose to endorse More Brain Training for the DS), or even the funny/interesting/must-watch commercial that goes along with the product, such as the Dove commercial that went crazily viral a year and a half ago or any of the “Get a Mac” commercials.

While there are other reasons why social media campaigns can fail, these are the ones I see popping up again and again when discussing with clients how to best promote themselves in the social space. If you are making these mistakes, set aside time to think about how to best handle your campaigns, and then make sure you are implementing them properly so that the next time you decide to tackle your social site of choice, you have increased your odds of being successful and reaping the benefits that come from it.

Don't miss a single post! Subscribe to my RSS feed

Press my buttons!

These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

So, you want to start a blog… but don’t we all? First, you have to figure out what you want to blog about. Then secondly, you have to consider the market area, because does the world really need another mesothelioma blog? But while some areas are definitely over saturated, there is definitely room to find a blogging niche in a crowded blog market… and yes, even in the over saturated markets, so long as you are looking at it from a unique perspective.

Here are some things to consider before you decide if you really should add another mesothelioma blog to the world, or if you should perhaps chose something a little lower on the spam radar.

What do you like?
Sure, someone told you once that mesothelioma is the highest paying keyword on the net, and last I checked, it still was. But does this mean it would make the perfect blog niche for you? If you are a physician who researched it for a patient, or have a close family member with mesothelioma, then you probably know enough about the topic to easily start a blog. But if you had to check wikipedia just to find out what mesothelioma is, consider the fact that every time you want to write a blog post that you’d need to not only think about what to write about, but research it. And trust me, it is a much better idea to choose a topic that is much less labor intensive.

So what does this mean you should do? Think about the blogs you regularly read. Now think about what is missing from those blogs that you wish they did… that is probably a good niche idea that you should run with, because if you think it is something those industry blogs are missing, chances are other people do too, and you have just found yourself some readers. When you have less - or zero - competition, the better off your new blog will be.

Can you write about it?
Make sure it is a topic you can write about easily, with minimal research required. Perhaps you are just rewriting the latest Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan gossip while including your own cynical comments. If you just need to watch for anything newsworthy about the particular celeb in question and add your own caustic comments, that is a pretty easy blog to do.

Don’t forget that sometimes topics you are interested in can be very hard to write about. Maybe you consider yourself an armchair hockey player… but when you actually have to write a post a day about NHL, could you come up with something fresh and new while giving it your own unique spin? There are only so many ways to recap a hockey game with “He shoots, he scores!”

Do other people care about it?
Look to see if there are other blogs on your chosen topic. Does the blogger post frequently? Does he or she seem to have a lot of subscribers? Plenty of comments? Or are all the blogs on the topic more akin to a barren wasteland due to reader disinterest? Looking at competitive blogs in the niche can help you see if there are enough readers and interest to support another blog… or readers that care at all. Having a hard time finding if there is interest? Check out message boards that discuss the topic to see if there are people actively talking about your niche in a forum setting. If the most recent post you can find on the subject was back in 2003, interest could be an issue!

What is the competition like?
Can you even compete with the big boys or girls in the space? Unless you can provide something the others aren’t, or doing something to generate the readers, you might be better off choosing something a bit less competitive. Instead of an all-encompassing poker blog, maybe change it to a Chick Poker Players in Vegas blog instead or a blog catering to seniors who play poker. Poker isn’t niche. Targeting a specific demographic of poker player is a niche.

Is there money in it?
We all have niches that we could blog about until the cows come home. But just because you are passionate about underwater basket weaving doesn’t mean it is the best topic either, because last I checked, there probably aren’t many people paying to advertise on it. A quick way to check is to pick the main topic for the keyword, and then do a quick Google search for it. Are there millions of pages on the topic or do they number in the tens of thousands… or worse, hundreds? Then look at the AdWords advertisers. Underwater Basket Weaving with 47,000 results and no AdWords ads tells me that it probably isn’t going to make me much money. True, you could do the basket blog just for fun or to practice your writing skills, but if you are looking towards blogging as your day job, you might as well start with a blog that can be your day job.

Are there related affiliate ads?
Don’t just look at AdSense and consider it your get-rich-quick method of making money from your new niche site or blog. Are there affiliate ads that you can run alongside the AdSense to increase your revenue potential? Not sure about how affiliate ads work? Read my article over on JenSense, Supplementing AdSense with Affiliate Ads. But if there are targeted affiliate ads that are related to your niche - the more targeted the better - you can often make much more money with affiliate ads, and AdSense would end up being the supplement.

In the end, writing what you know and love will go a long way to help you become a successful blogger. Then, following the other tips to help you discover if your chosen blogging niche is one that will find readership and pay off financially, even in a small way… but preferably in a BIG way!

Don't miss a single post! Subscribe to my RSS feed

Press my buttons!

These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

There are some bloggers who link to everyone everywhere at anytime. They just love dishing out the link love! However, not all bloggers are living in the free love world. Since the advent of the nofollow tag - which was marketed to bloggers as a way to stop blog spam - bloggers have seemingly become much more stingy with when and where they dole out those links in their blog posts… and that is if they aren’t nofollowing them in the first place. And if they are PR-conscious - that’s PageRank, not public relations! - they tend to be even stingier, under the impression that their PageRank will be better if they hoard it all to themselves.

But there are benefits of actively linking to other sites and blogs from within your own content.

More value to your readers
If you can provide useful links or additional commentary of your blog topic du jour, your blog has just become that more useful to your readers. If they are just going to go and Google your topic to find out more, instead of staying on your blog, why not just link to other sites in the first place? Then you also have the added bonus of choosing where your readers go off to read more next, instead of letting Google pick the sites.

Networking
With the great dashboard implementation in Wordpress, if you link to another blogger, they will know it… even if they never look at their blog stats. If they aren’t familiar with your blog, chances are pretty good that they will click the link to check you out and see what you wrote about them. And if they like your blog well enough, you have just got yourself a new subscriber by the mere act of linking to another blogger’s post from your own entry.

Sharing link love
If that blogger you linked to likes your stuff, chances are good that if they aren’t adding you to their blog roll, that they just might follow your stuff for the opportunity to link back to you one day. So that single outgoing link in your blog post can easily result in another link back to your own blog.

Promoting smart anchor text
Try and avoid linking with “here”, although sometimes that is what will happen so it doesn’t seem out of place or interrupt continuity in a blog entry. But do your best to link with the blog entry name or the blog name if possible. This will help those you link to, but also encourage others to link that way as well, and hopefully a few of those will be in links back to you!

Linking to Authority vs. non-authority
If you are blogging about Chevy trucks, you should link to Chevrolet’s official site, which definitely falls under the category of an authority outgoing link. But you might also want to link to your local Chevy dealership (which I would here, if they actually had a website I could find in Google!), which could be considered non-authority. I try to link to authority websites as well as some non-authority, but just do a check to make sure that non-authority site isn’t also lurking in a bad neighborhood! (Not sure what makes a link or site be in a bad neighborhood? Read Revisiting your linking strategies for a health check). There are also SEO benefits to linking out to authority sites, so definitely include them in your links.

Great for writer’s block
Stuck for a few days with nothing to write about? Do an entry where you link out to favorite blog posts you have read in the past week or two. But instead of doing snippets from the blog you link to, provide the link and your own blurb about each, such as why you think people should read it or something useful you got out of it. This will help differentiate these kind of posts from the usual “links of the day/week” that many bloggers are fond of.

Avoid the nofollow
Unless you are linking to someone with nofollow for a specific reason (which can be anything from being in a bad neighborhood, or you just don’t personally like the blogger!) dole out straight non-obfuscated links in your blog posts. If you link to a blog with a nofollow, trust me, they will notice and chances are pretty good they will either not link to you at all, or you can guarantee if they do, it will definitely be nofollowed back. There are far more benefits for you if you actively link out with straight links.

These obviously aren’t the only reasons why linking out is good But definitely some food for thought if you are one of those bloggers who rarely links out because you don’t want to share the link love!

Don't miss a single post! Subscribe to my RSS feed

Press my buttons!

These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

It is a fact that when I am searching for any number of random products or services on the internet - those things where it doesn’t matter if the product is shipped from my hometown, across the country, or even in a different country - I tend to pay attention to those ads that are geospecific to me. I give them a second look, even if they don’t have the best PPC placement in the bunch of ads. I notice them because their use of geolocation jumps out at me.

First, consumers are driven by price, especially when looking at buying a product. But there is still the mentality of “support the little guy” and “support the local guy” and the desire to buy locally rather than from “big box” or “multi-national corporation”. Then there is consumer confidence and the feeling of value and service one gets from a local company versus a large corporate company. So if you are competitive on price - or even slightly higher - you can actually increase conversions by giving potential visitors the idea you are local, simply by using geolocation targeting in your ad copy.

Let’s use Seattle as an example. Now, first off, you don’t want to actually lie and tell people you are located in or shipping from Seattle, unless you really are. But there are many ways you can use to imply your service is targeting those in the Seattle area, which can then be replicated across many other cities and states. You could make your url seattle.greenwidgets.com. Your description could mention something about express or free “shipping to Seattle.” Or if your product is somehow customized for Seattle, you can use that in your description too.

That said, don’t go overboard You don’t need to be repititious and mention Seattle four times in a single PPC advertisement because not only does it waste space you could be putting to better use with more keyword-laden ad copy, but it also starts to sound a bit spammy and unprofessional if you have repeated the same word over and over again - especially if it isn’t the most important “widget” keyword. Once in the description or title and once in the URL would be fine. Or if you really need that ad copy space, start off testing with Seattle just in the URL.

Now, once you have created your Seattle-specific ad copy, you need to geotarget that campaign so that it just shows to Seattle. It isn’t as effective to show your Seattle ad to someone in Boston, and it will very likely cause your CTR rate to drop dramatically… not to mention the problems a low CTR rate can bring with it in Google AdWords. So you should specifically geotarget Seattle, and perhaps some areas outside Seattle as well. Then remember which areas you target, especially if you create ads for other other Washington State cities, or if you then create a specific one that covers Washington State as a whole.

If you product or service is world-wide, even creating a country-specific ad would get the attention of users, especially outside of the United States. When I am searching for products, those that mention Canada specifically will always get my clicks first, because if they mention Canada, odds are pretty good that they either ship to Canada or are located in Canada. And that has just cut my work significantly from hunting and clicking on sites where the second page I view is their shipping information to see if they ship to Canada.

When you create your campaigns, you should also do A/B testing with a generic non-location-specific ad copy. In AdWords, Google will automatically auto-optimize your ad copy by doing testing in rotation and then showing the one that performs best, so you don’t need to do that work. You might discover that your Seattle specific ad rocks, but for some reason, those in Boston prefer the non-location one.

Not sure where to start? Start by testing a metro area local to you, or maybe pick 3 or 4 locations throughout your country to test. And Google has anything and everything to do with AdWords location targeting and there is also information on Yahoo Search Marketing Geo-targeting and Microsoft adCenter’s geolation targeting. Funny how all three call the same thing something different

Don't miss a single post! Subscribe to my RSS feed

Press my buttons!

These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Many people have the misconception that all PPC clicks are created equal when they come from the same source with the same keywords. But user intent plays a huge part in conversions, and if the people who click your ads are looky-loos without any intention of buying what your ad is advertising - at least not at the stage of the buying cycle they are in - then those clicks you have paid for don’t convert at all.

When you are selling a product that is not exclusive to your site, especially with high-ticket items or items that people tend to shop around for to find the best pricing, you end up paying for clicks from people who are just checking to see if you have the best price or not, and they don’t have the intention of buying from you right then… unless you were fortunate enough to be the last site they checked (which goes against regular PPC techniques where you want to be the first click) AND you had the best price. And obviously, you will have lower conversions and a low ROI (return on investment) when you do have a high percentage of non-buyers. Keep reading…

Don't miss a single post! Subscribe to my RSS feed

Press my buttons!

These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

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?

Please Digg

Don't miss a single post! Subscribe to my RSS feed

Press my buttons!

These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

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.

Don't miss a single post! Subscribe to my RSS feed

Press my buttons!

These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

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 sit