More can be learned at LearnSEOLive.com.
Social Media Pitfalls: 5 Lessons Learned
November 20, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment
Allow me to introduce my friend Jordan Kasteler also known as Utah SEO Pro. His background is in organic search engine optimization, which has been doing professionally for 4 years now, and has stayed pretty focused on that and has’t delved much into paid search at all. But as of late, he told me he has been playing a lot lately in social media and there are quite a few things he has learned. He also told me that there were quite a few things historically done he wishes he could erase. He doesn’t want to look like an idiot, especially to the SMOs, but what he wants to do is save a few headaches for people getting into social media. Today I am going to take what Jordan has taught me and I’m going to focus primarily on Digg because, it seems to be the most complex social media site out there due to its sophisticated algorithm. I am going to write his exact words, of course with his permission. So everything below will be straight from Jordan, which is some great insights on Social Marketing.
Mistake #1: Abusing self-promotion
For the past year and a half to two years I’ve had social media accounts but I never used them. If I did ever use them it was just to submit some of my own blog posts or my company’s blog posts too.
Let me note that self-promotion isn’t bad all the time. If you’ve established an authoritative status in a community or are a power-user then you are more likely to get away with it if you do so sparingly. Nobody likes a self-promoter or person who is greedy. It is essential to contribute to other people and help them promote their stories. Karma comes full-circle when it comes to social networking.
Mistake #2: Not understanding the scope of the site or the community in its entirety
I’ve heard a lot of social media experts suggesting to take a look at the site and community before you register to understand what it’s about. That advice is half the battle but before you can really understand what it’s about you have to observe, participate, and test significantly. My mistake was not knowing that the one community perceives things differently than other communities.
For example, Digg.com hates SEOs. I learned this by my low response on SEO articles submitted. Good thing I was currently operating under the name “jordankasteler” instead of “UtahSEOpro”. This could have been bad had I started participating with the name “UtahSEOpro” and then realized, after much wasted time and effort, that none of my stuff will ever get promoted because nobody likes me.
Another example happened lately on Mixx.com. I submitted one of my own articles to a group on Mixx that had a rule strictly against self-promotion. Needless to say that didn’t go over well.
Moral of the story here is know the community, know the rules, know that goes hot and what doesn’t, know who’s hot and who’s not and imitate them.
Another tip is to seek out niche communities that aren’t as big as say Reddit, Digg, Delicious, or StumbleUpon. There are niche sites like sphinn.com for Internet marketers, Sk-rt.com for woman, and Hugg.com for nature lovers. Relevant content in niche communities can drive more traffic and links than broader communities sometimes.
Mistake #3: Not having goals When I very first started using Digg used it almost as a bookmarking service. At the time, I probably didn’t even know the difference between Digg and Delicious. When I found a site I liked, I submitted it to Digg not considering or caring if the community would like it or not or if it was news worthy. What a horrible waste, I now have 70+ submissions and only a small percentage of them are actual quality content that I’ve submitted with intentions of promoting news worthy or remarkable article, video, or image.
Start by creating goals for every piece you submit. Your goals should be to promote everything you submit and do so with pride. If you submit low-quality content then you’re a low-quality contributor and the community will recognize it quickly. Don’t just submit and forget. Use a tool like Digg Alerter to watch your submitted content. If someone comments on a post then respond back to them whether the comment was positive or negative. The key here is to engage with the community and try to start a conversation. Comments are a good quality indicator of a post so this is an important part detail. If you don’t have a good response for the comment at least vote it up or down depending on the quality of the comment.
Mistake #4: Choosing quantity over quality when it comes to friends
Initial thinking of a newbie would be the more friends the better, right? WRONG! I’m not sure if this is recent with Digg’s new algorithm change or what but what I’ve found out is that the more friend you have the higher the threshold is for a story to go popular. My mistake was adding too many friends and not monitoring if they were voting for my content or not. After decreasing my friend count on Digg from nearly 500 friends to about 65 friends I’ve seen the threshold drop dramatically. For most social media sites you want to keep your friends very relevant to your interests and make sure that they are active users. Having non-active users, people who don’t appreciate your submissions, and people who don’t help you promote your submitted content is useless. I’ll go back to Karma here, if you’re not being active and helping others yourself then don’t expect your friends to do the same.
A wise thing is to constantly monitor your friend activity and trim down friends who aren’t beneficial to your success or not. This isn’t to hurt anyone’s feelings but if they aren’t going to play they need to get off the field.
Mistake #5: Not using RSS
I hate RSS when it comes to reading my news so I’ve stayed clear from it but I discovered that RSS is my best friend for social media. There are a couple reasons why. The first reason is if you’re contributing a lot of content, especially news worthy items, then timing is everything. It’s wise to subscribe to news sites like CNN.com or NYTimes.com so you can catch hot stories as soon as they are posted.
The second reason is that you can subscribe to what your friends are posting so you can help them promote their content without having to go to each profile and check up on them daily. It’s a huge timesaver and an easy way to keep tabs on your friend’s activity.
*BONUS Mistake* Not considering submission timing
There are certain times in each community where there are more eyes on the site or certain categories than others. Knowing those times and submitting during them is important. Generally, most people surf social sites in the morning or around lunch time during their break at work. It’s a good time to submit around then to capture people’s attention. It can make the different of whether your story goes popular or not.
If you’re up at 3:00 a.m. and you see a hot story pop up on your RSS reader from CNN then it’s probably not wise to save that until lunch-time the next day to submit because then you run the risk of someone else submitting it first. So be wise and use common sense.
Summary
Hopefully learning from my mistakes will help you avoid them in the future. I like to teach people the correct way of doing things based on my experience and hopefully you can take what you’ve learned and do the same.
How To Find The Ideal Freelance Business-to-Business Copywriter
November 18, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment
If you do a web search on how to find a good freelance b-to-b copywriter, you will get dozens of results purporting to give you good advice. Many of them, however, seem to just list some boilerplate answers without really going deeper into the issue. This story may give you a slightly different angle.Do your homeworkFirst, determine what you want. Make sure you have enough background and clear objectives set before contacting potential copywriter candidates. Remember, you’re looking for professionals, and professionals hate a waste of their time just as much as you do.Also, if you have a well-prepared backgrounder and a fixed target, it will position you as a client higher on the copywriter’s “most wanted clients” list than someone who makes the first contact empty-handed. Professionals like to work with professionals.Forget your prejudicesWith the World Wide Web, you are really operating worldwide. If your opinion is that you absolutely have to have a fellow New Yorker to do your job or “I can’t imagine working with a foreigner” or you couldn’t possibly consider anyone who hasn’t written anything for X Corporation, you might want to think again. Widening your perspectives may give you higher commitment, lower cost and better results you ever imagined.Search, query, find outUnfortunately, this is the most tedious part of your quest. Depending on how you formulate your search term — “b2b copywriter”, “b-to-b copywriter”, “business-to-business copywriter”, “freelance copywriter” etc — you will, in any case, get hundreds of thousands of results on Google, so some sifting, and thus putting in hours of work, is unavoidable.Having accepted the workload, look at the copywriters’ websites. Are they structured logically? Do they give you enough information on their expertise, specialities, work process? Is their self-promotion text free from grammatical errors? Does it flow naturally? If there are testimonials on their websites, are they plausible? Call some of the people who signed the testimonials and check if they remember giving such a testimonial.Do the people portray an easy-going, client-oriented image of themselves or do you get a feeling they are stuffy and conceited? Trust your instinct, your first impression is probably right.Questions tell more than answersNo matter how well you have prepared your backgrounder, it will not answer all of a good copywriter’s questions. Don’t worry, that’s the way it should be. The important thing is to analyse how they get back to you. Are they asking relevant, specifying questions or boldly announcing that they can do the job? Be more interested in the people who ask questions than in those who provide answers off the cuff.What, no samples or portfolio?Many of the boilerplate answers to finding a b2b copywriter tell you to look for online writing samples. Smart copywriters who know their job, however, seldom put up writing samples on their sites. There are a number of reasons for that.First and foremost, every client’s needs are specific. Even though the copywriter may have written copy for your industry, it is impossible to give all the background and the targets set for the piece accurately enough to give you a full picture of why the copy is like it is. The smart copywriter does not want to be judged on false premises.There are also jobs that, while not being exactly secret, are not meant to be publicised outside the target audience, and the copywriter may have chosen not to place them on his or her site for the whole world to see.You will do better if you contact your shortlist of copywriters and ask them to prove themselves. Give them your well-prepared backgrounder and then watch how quickly they respond to your query and whether they seem to understand what types of challenges your business faces. This is a better indication of their skills and commitment than an online sample which may or may not come close to what you’re looking for.There are even copywriters who are willing to provide a free copy sample based on your brief if getting you as a client is important for them. Go ahead and ask boldly. This will give you a much better view of their capabilities of identifying your problem and their style of writing.No need to jump in at the deep endMany good copywriters offer a copy review service. Whether they call it copy review, copy critique, copy analysis or whatever, the point is: this service is a low-cost, risk-free way of finding out a lot more of the copywriter you’re interested in.Give the shortlisted copywriters an existing marketing copy (of course not forgetting to state what it was supposed to achieve) and ask for a review. If you inform them that this is a competition that will result in choosing a long-term partner, you will probably get a very good price on the job, if not a free analysis.Most good things in life are not freeEven if you don’t need to invest a lot of money in the project, finding your ideal b2b copywriter will take time, as pointed out above. Being prepared to spend some money will help. If you’re really after a good, committed copywriter and building a long-term relationship, consider either the copy review route suggested above or offering every person on the list a small sum of money for a sample text. Within reason, of course. What you should aim at is a short landing page or a magazine ad, not expect them to provide a whole website for 100 dollars.The benefit of investing a small sum of money will help both you and your copywriter candidates. You, because the sum is small. The potential copywriters, because you’re establishing a lot of credibility by being willing to pay for their effort.To summarise: if you’re willing to put in a little time and perhaps even some money, your research will produce results. Honest, open-minded professionals feel comfortable with honest, open-minded clients. For a long-term partnership, a real win-win situation.
Kimmo Linkama is a copywriter and marketing communication consultant who has helped business-to-business companies get more out of their marketing budget for more than 20 years. He provides communication planning, copywriting, editing, transcreation and other marketing communication services, as well as related training. More information at www.linkama.com
Twitter for Real Estate Professionals: What’s All the Tweeting About?
November 17, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment
Tech savvy real estate agents understand the importance of using the Internet’s global reach to their advantage. They build informative websites that are optimized for search engines, they blog regularly, and have started to create profiles on various social networking sites like ActiveRain and Squidoo. A relatively recent addition to the social networking sphere is Twitter, a place where you have only 140 characters to write something about your day, ask a question, or link to an article or website of interest. Some consider Twitter to be a place where users “micro-blog,” while others see it as more of a chat room with thousands of users ‘chatting’ all at once.The original premise of Twitter was to provide a venue for people to post short, simple status updates; to answer the question: What are you doing? Users share stories about their pets, upcoming appointments, their moods, and much more. You can follow the adventures of other users, and accumulate followers of your own. You can direct questions and answers to specific people, or send out calls to everyone all at once. The appeal of this type of technology baffles many real estate agents who’ve never used the service, but those who have stuck with Twitter see the benefits of this new type of networking. Rather than trying to see Twitter as a revenue producer, it’s important to understand that Twitter is first and foremost a networking tool. Don’t be overtly promotional in your posts (known as “tweets”). If self promotion is your primary M.O., you’ll quickly lose followers. Users aren’t interested in being bombarded with spammy posts, so if you want to use the site to advertise your services, be very subtle and make sure that your personal posts far outnumbers the more professional ones.While it may seem counterproductive to be laid back when you’re trying to promote your real estate business, you have to keep in mind the intention of social networking sites. They are meant for people to connect with others who share similar interests, or who live in the same community. The mood is casual and definitely more personal than your business website. Grammar and spelling rules are relaxed, and you can talk about the pizza you ate last night or the rotten movie you just watched. People following you will find your posts interesting because you’re being authentic.The more people that get to know you and like you, the more opportunity you have to gain clients in the future. It’s the same as expanding your circle of contacts in the real world, and it can be invaluable for your business in the long run.The idea of social networking being effective over the long term is critical to understand. Unless you are very lucky, you probably won’t gain any new clients right away, but you’re building a solid foundation of online friendships that may develop into business relationships.In addition to being a vehicle for finding potential clients, Twitter is also a great venue for networking with other agents. You can share tips, ask questions, and refer clients to agents outside of your service area. Other agents will do the same for you. Building relationships with other real estate agents can be educational and emotionally satisfying, as they can relate to the stresses you encounter on a daily basis. Twitter is free and it only takes a moment to create an account. Search your area for people with accounts, or see if anyone you already know has an account. You can start to follow their tweets and engage people in conversation. Soon you’ll have followers too, and you’ll begin to appreciate the possibilities that this kind of networking can offer. Be open-minded and creative, and soon you’ll see how you can make Twitter work for you and your realty business.
Edkirkland.com has everything you need to get started in the Destin real estate market. Buyers and sellers here can search homes and compare deals for free, and get tips on entering the market. There’s also a local information section with details on our featured markets, including the Santa Rosa Beach real estate area.
Twitter for Real Estate Professionals: What’s All the Tweeting About?
November 7, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment
Tech savvy real estate agents understand the importance of using the Internet’s global reach to their advantage. They build informative websites that are optimized for search engines, they blog regularly, and have started to create profiles on various social networking sites like ActiveRain and Squidoo.
A relatively recent addition to the social networking sphere is Twitter, a place where you have only 140 characters to write something about your day, ask a question, or link to an article or website of interest. Some consider Twitter to be a place where users “micro-blog,” while others see it as more of a chat room with thousands of users ‘chatting’ all at once.
The original premise of Twitter was to provide a venue for people to post short, simple status updates; to answer the question: What are you doing? Users share stories about their pets, upcoming appointments, their moods, and much more. You can follow the adventures of other users, and accumulate followers of your own. You can direct questions and answers to specific people, or send out calls to everyone all at once.
The appeal of this type of technology baffles many real estate agents who’ve never used the service, but those who have stuck with Twitter see the benefits of this new type of networking.
Rather than trying to see Twitter as a revenue producer, it’s important to understand that Twitter is first and foremost a networking tool. Don’t be overtly promotional in your posts (known as “tweets”). If self promotion is your primary M.O., you’ll quickly lose followers. Users aren’t interested in being bombarded with spammy posts, so if you want to use the site to advertise your services, be very subtle and make sure that your personal posts far outnumbers the more professional ones.
While it may seem counterproductive to be laid back when you’re trying to promote your real estate business, you have to keep in mind the intention of social networking sites. They are meant for people to connect with others who share similar interests, or who live in the same community. The mood is casual and definitely more personal than your business website. Grammar and spelling rules are relaxed, and you can talk about the pizza you ate last night or the rotten movie you just watched. People following you will find your posts interesting because you’re being authentic.
The more people that get to know you and like you, the more opportunity you have to gain clients in the future. It’s the same as expanding your circle of contacts in the real world, and it can be invaluable for your business in the long run.
The idea of social networking being effective over the long term is critical to understand. Unless you are very lucky, you probably won’t gain any new clients right away, but you’re building a solid foundation of online friendships that may develop into business relationships.
In addition to being a vehicle for finding potential clients, Twitter is also a great venue for networking with other agents. You can share tips, ask questions, and refer clients to agents outside of your service area. Other agents will do the same for you. Building relationships with other real estate agents can be educational and emotionally satisfying, as they can relate to the stresses you encounter on a daily basis.
Twitter is free and it only takes a moment to create an account. Search your area for people with accounts, or see if anyone you already know has an account. You can start to follow their tweets and engage people in conversation. Soon you’ll have followers too, and you’ll begin to appreciate the possibilities that this kind of networking can offer. Be open-minded and creative, and soon you’ll see how you can make Twitter work for you and your realty business.
Edkirkland.com has everything you need to get started in the Destin real estate market. Buyers and sellers here can search homes and compare deals for free, and get tips on entering the market. There’s also a local information section with details on our featured markets, including the Santa Rosa Beach real estate area.
FREE Viral Twitter Marketing Tool Review
November 7, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment
Viral Twitter Marketing Phenomenon
Twitter has been exploding as of late and many marketers are trying to take advantage of this huge social networking phenomenon by building massive Twitter followings.
The thing that they don’t seem to get though is that even if they do have over 2 or 3 thousand followers, they still can generate little to no results simply because self promotion isn’t effective anymore.
If you claim that your product is the best one on the market, what makes you different from the rest? Everyone claims his products are best. There is a reason why the real Twitter masterminds never abuse Twitter and still generate insane amount of traffic, leads and sales with it.
Self Promotion = SPAM
Self promotional tweets will probably result in you looking like a spammer. No wonder, it’s not the way you do Twitter Marketing.
You can hope your tweets will go viral, but let’s face it – you’ll have to be really-really good at “Twitter Copywriting” and deliver an insane amount of value in order for someone to go the extra mile of copying, pasting and clicking the update button.
Twitter Clients
Sure, a lot of Tweeple do use clients with an option of an easy ReTweet, but one very valuable thing I have learned throughout my internet marketing career is to NEVER MAKE ASSUMPTIONS.
According to a study conducted by ReadWriteWeb.com, Over 56% of Twitter users still use Twitter.com to send out tweets. The rest 44% are using all sorts of different Twitter clients. The picture below displays the exact statistics.
Key Takeaway: Twitter.com is a good enough for the majority of Twitter users. That means that if you are relying on someone to ReTweet your content, than there is more than 50% chance that he will have to go through quite a hustle in order to do that.
Viral Twitter Software
Using Viral Twitter Software will increase your content’s chances of going viral because:
- The tweet with your link in it will not be coming from you. It will be coming from another person which makes your content much more valuable in the eyes of the receiving party, since it was recommended by someone other than you.
- The tweet will be going outside of your reach. While your tweets are only visible to your followers, if someone else ReTweets your content, it goes far beyond your maximum zone of reach.
- The process of ReTweeting is very simple. No need in “copy, paste, update” sequence. It is either a one button ReTweet or “enter your twitter username and password” operation.
Recommended Tools
- ReTweet Wordpress Plugin. If you are into blogging, you’ll love this tool.
- ReTweetNow. Viral Twitter Script which you can install on any website, blog or page. Moreover, according to it’s developer, you can integrate the ReTweetNow with your autoresponder.
The funny thing is that ReTweetNow’s total equivalent – ViralTweets, actually costs $47 while having the exact same features as the ReTweetNow does…LOL!
Twitter For Business â Does It Work?
November 6, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment
Twitter For Business â Does It Work? When Duct Tape Marketing founder John Jantsch was asked about the effects twitter has on his business he replied: 1) âI get great insight when I ask questions, (2) letâs face it, I get traffic and (3) people on Twitter spread my thoughts to new places.â We want to congratulate John for this answer. He is essentially hitting the nail on the head. It is simple enough to follow people and businesses you respect on Twitter, and if you run a legit operation most of them would follow you right back. Being able to address Twitterville with valid questions and receiving the opinions of respected professionals as a response, constitutes a great resource for feedback. All that is expected of you in return, is to follow basic courtesy rules and to get involved when being asked for your opinion as the interaction is reciprocal. When it comes to traffic, Twitter takes the ordinary website and blog to the next level; people who introduce valuable content often get recognition by gaining more followers. The reason for that is once people realize that they have been exposed to valuable content, they do not want to risk missing the next great article. When a solid following has been built on Twitter, the business that is being followed could engage in self-promotion for marketing purposes. It is vital to do so carefully, so that followers would still find value in the content they are being provided and would not be deterred from remaining a follower. When people feel that they gained important knowledge from one personâs tweets they go on and redistribute that information and that is called a Retweet. More often than not, the person who introduced the content to begin with gets the credit and gains additional followers. Many businesses would attest that although conversions cannot always be linked directly a specific tweet, the microblog is capable of significantly adding to the growth of a brand. Twitter makes the connection between customers and the business less formal, much faster and a lot of fun. And letâs not forget the SEO value of a twitter account. Twitter enables you to add a link to business website, the more popular your twitter page is, the larger the amount of incoming links it will generate. This will enhance the search engine importance of your twitter page as well as your business website. Here at LookupPage, we tweet quite a bit. We use Twitter to share content that we find valuable on issues such as online branding, web visibility and online reputation management. We also highlight our own blog posts on Twitter. Become a follower of LookupPage on Twitter now
Twitter For Business â Does It Work?
When Duct Tape Marketing founder John Jantsch was asked about the effects twitter has on his business he replied:
1) âI get great insight when I ask questions, (2) letâs face it, I get traffic and (3) people on Twitter spread my thoughts to new places.â
We want to congratulate John for this answer. He is essentially hitting the nail on the head. It is simple enough to follow people and businesses you respect on Twitter, and if you run a legit operation most of them would follow you right back. Being able to address Twitterville with valid questions and receiving the opinions of respected professionals as a response, constitutes a great resource for feedback. All that is expected of you in return, is to follow basic courtesy rules and to get involved when being asked for your opinion as the interaction is reciprocal.
When it comes to traffic, Twitter takes the ordinary website and blog to the next level; people who introduce valuable content often get recognition by gaining more followers. The reason for that is once people realize that they have been exposed to valuable content, they do not want to risk missing the next great article.
When a solid following has been built on Twitter, the business that is being followed could engage in self-promotion for marketing purposes. It is vital to do so carefully, so that followers would still find value in the content they are being provided and would not be deterred from remaining a follower.
When people feel that they gained important knowledge from one personâs tweets they go on and redistribute that information and that is called a Retweet. More often than not, the person who introduced the content to begin with gets the credit and gains additional followers.
Many businesses would attest that although conversions cannot always be linked directly a specific tweet, the microblog is capable of significantly adding to the growth of a brand. Twitter makes the connection between customers and the business less formal, much faster and a lot of fun.
And letâs not forget the SEO value of a twitter account. Twitter enables you to add a link to business website, the more popular your twitter page is, the larger the amount of incoming links it will generate. This will enhance the search engine importance of your twitter page as well as your business website.
Here at LookupPage, we tweet quite a bit. We use Twitter to share content that we find valuable on issues such as online branding, web visibility and online reputation management. We also highlight our own blog posts on Twitter. Become a follower of LookupPage on Twitter now
Ehud Furman is the CEO of LookupPage. LookupPage specializes in improving the online visibility of professionals and businesses. LookupPage Pro guarantees online visibility on the first page of Google.For more information and case studies about branding, online reputation management and social media marketing visit the LookupPage Blog
The SEO Pro’s To Ping Your Way To Internet Backlinks
November 6, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment
Here’s a technique that works great on blogs hosted on either the Blogger or Wordpress platforms. Not only are they free but Google seems to love these blogs which in turn means that all of your blog posts will rank on the first pages of Google!
Not everyone does but you can also host your blog using your own domain. You’d want to do this if you’re starting any type of e-commerce site or are planning to use it for self-promotion.
Ok, before you start just realize that you will only receive little traffic towards each blog post WHEN YOU START OUT. Using the strategy outlined below this will grow with each additional post you add to the blog. It is a quick way to get a lot of traffic to your site over time so don’t be discouraged if the first couple of posts don’t bring in thousands of visitors.
Step one is to research keywords that have less than one million results. Remember with this strategy all you are going to do is post content on your blog, not getting backlinks towards each blog post.
What you are trying to do is to get backlinks that drive traffic to your blog homepage. The more the better although there is no need to start doing link building on your other pages until you’re in the SERPS.
So the keywords you choose must have less than a million competitors, the lower the number the better. These keywords probably have little traffic, but regardless, if they only get ten a day it will be enough to start showing up in the search engines.
Pick a keyword and construct a title for your blog post trying to use that same keyword in the sentance. For example, If the keyword you choose is ‘fancy pants’, then you make a attention grabbing title like (for example): ‘fancy pants on parade,’ or ‘Celebrity fancy pants,’ or even my personal favorite ‘Trend of the week – fancy pants.’ Next create a five hundred to six hundred word blog post. You need to make the blog post decent by provide some value to your visitors. Never lose sight of the fact that your goal is to make money as well. Lookup information at the library on your keyword for help with what would work as “quality content.” Other tactics that work include writing spoofs on popular topics or engaging in America’s favorite past-time, talking about celebrities. AdSense and other types of on-page advertising works great with this content!
Don’t forget when creating the heading to the blog post do not change the keywords, or mix them. Keep the words in the keyword in oder that you previously determined. Next you can put the title before you begin the post and at the end of the post. To draw the readers attention put the title in either bold or have it underlined.
Publish your post and make sure to ping each time you do. There are numerous of different sources that you can use to do this but I’ve had the best success with a free one called Ping Ninja. A lot of these types of ping services take forever, require you to sign-up or don’t actually work (even though they claim to) but this one has never failed to get me traffic! They claim to be the fastest blog pinger on the internet. I don’t know if that’s true or not but it only takes about 5 seconds for it to ping all of my sites. This last step is the way to get traffic and rank because by pinging you will notify websites like Google and Yahoo to come and index your site. After you have a few posts you can then ping the link to your RSS feed (provided by Blogspot and Wordpress for free on each page) which will help your ranking in the search engines and have more and more sites link to the article from their sites. It’s a safe bet to not post more than a few times a day, so it is smooth and search engines have a chance to index the page. Make also sure that on your langing page you have a section called previous posts, that lists all your previous posts. This is so that the posts to get indexed.
You need to have some pagerank on your blog so this tactic will work within minutes. So if you have a empty new blog, you need to optimize it first by getting other sites to link to it.
To get your site some authority, you can do blog link exchanges, submit your rss field to rss directories, submit your blog to blog directories or if you are a good writer, you can become an author of another blog. Then you post great articles on whatever blog/site being sure to link back to your own blog.
There are many more methods to get traffic to your blog, meaning those that work for your website will also be sucessful on your blog, like link exchanges or forum posting.
Remember the most important thing is to make the necessary keyword research, make usefull blog posts and get your blog interior pages some authority rank. You can find great keywords which get a ton of traffic and have a low number of competing sites, something does happen on occasion. They are called hidden keywords, which you are lucky enough to find if you take the time to do the keyword research often.
Here’s the method in a nutshell:
1. Begin a free blog on Wordpress or Blogspot
2. Research keywords that don’t have more than one results in Google
3. Create a blog post on that topic using the keyword in the title
4. Ping your blog when finished, later run it again on the link to your RSS feed.
5. Watch the traffic start to grow with each new post. Repeat.
A SEO consultant for some of the leading news publications in the UK, Amy is excited about sharing new ways of helping families earn extra income by writing on the internet. Her guides prove that all you need to make money on the internet is quality content and a fast blog pinger
To Discourage People From Following You on Twitter — Do These 9 Things
November 6, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment
Twitter is an extremely powerful social networking tool if you understand how to use it effectively. While it takes whole books to explain the most important elements of using Twitter effectively, below is a list of the top 9 things to do IF you want to discourage people from following you.
(On the other hand, if you want to encourage people to follow you, do the opposite of these actions.)
If you want to telegraph to potential Twitter followers that you don’t know very much about Twitter or branding yourself or a business, keep the Twitter default background. It’s uninteresting and thus says you’re not that invested in learning how to use Twitter effectively. (Using one of the Twitter-provided templates and changing the colors is better than the default background, but not by much.)
If you want to make sure that potential Twitter followers have no idea what your name is, your URL, and your bio information, use dark type on a dark background. In this case it’s almost impossible to read anything.
If you want potential Twitter followers to be unable to recognize you at an in-person tweetup or conference or elsewhere, use a photo that blocks your eyes or a photo of your dog as your Twitter profile photo.
If you want to convince potential Twitter followers that you are an uninteresting person, be sure and tweet constantly about what you had for breakfast, lunch, dinner and late-night snacks. (The exception to this is if you are in the food business and are actually sharing informative tweets on food.)
If you want to demonstrate to potential Twitter followers that you are only about self-promotion, be sure to only tweet about your own products and services.
If you want to showcase that you do not actually participate on Twitter, make sure that all your tweets are automatic feeds from your blog posts.
If you want to demonstrate further that you are not actually participating on Twitter, be sure to never respond to any replies sent to you.
If you want to get a reputation as unhelpful on Twitter (a social networking site that is all about being helpful and sharing information), make sure to refuse help to someone when he or she asks you for it.
If you want to demonstrate even further that you aren’t pulling your weight in the Twitter community, send a tweet only once every 10 days or so. Potential followers will clearly get the message you are NOT on Twitter to engage in conversation.
Here’s the bottom line: If you aren’t going to actively engage in Twitter and share valuable information with potential followers, why bother to be on Twitter at all? Instead of being a half-hearted Twitter participant, find a social networking site that you truly like and participate there. Leave Twitter to those people who truly enjoy tweeting.
Phyllis Zimbler Miller has an M.B.A. from The Wharton School and she is also a National Internet Business Examiner. Download her company’s free report on “The Top 3 Internet Marketing Elements” to enhance your own Internet marketing experience – download the report now from www.TeachMeToTweetNow.com
Twitter And 15 Ways To Use It
November 2, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment
15 Ways You Can Use Twitter: A Guide for Beginners, Marketers and Business Owners
Twitter is a micro blogging platform which allows you to publish short messages of less than 140 characters through different mediums like IM, cellphones and the web.
It has a social element as well, as it allows users to befriend and monitor each other’s messages or updates. So what you have here is a publishing tool that can be either public and private.
Twitter gives you a fragmented experience of opinions, events, news, ideas and feedback largely because its structured to accommodate non-contextual usability: You can easily follow thousands of users and listen in and enter into conversations conducted among multiple users at any point. And this is usually the case.
On the other hand, Twitter can be actively used as a tool to push out messages that capitalize on the attention you’re receiving from other users. Yes, I’m talking about self-promotion and marketing. This involves active user engagement.
For businesses, Twitter is another channel which connects current and potential customers with your product or brand. It allows deeply infiltration into the lifestyles of interested participants, which helps to build brand persistence/loyalty.
In its most obvious form, Twitter can be seen as a traffic generation tool. The placement of links within profiles and conversations can direct visitors to a specific website and is especially powerful if you pitch to early adopters and influencers.
So here are 15 ways to use twitter:
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Anastasia Fiatmita was crowned Miss Bali 2003 and Miss Indonesia Tourism 2004. Born and bred in Bali, she now blogs regularly at Bali Travel Guide where she gives free Bali information, tips and Bali Hotel Review. Do visit her recommended project – Search For The Cheapest Hotel Rates Across All The Booking Websites With Just One Click
Twitter for Real Estate Professionals: What’s All the Tweeting About?
November 2, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment
Tech savvy real estate agents understand the importance of using the Internet’s global reach to their advantage. They build informative websites that are optimized for search engines, they blog regularly, and have started to create profiles on various social networking sites like ActiveRain and Squidoo.
A relatively recent addition to the social networking sphere is Twitter, a place where you have only 140 characters to write something about your day, ask a question, or link to an article or website of interest. Some consider Twitter to be a place where users “micro-blog,” while others see it as more of a chat room with thousands of users ‘chatting’ all at once.
The original premise of Twitter was to provide a venue for people to post short, simple status updates; to answer the question: What are you doing? Users share stories about their pets, upcoming appointments, their moods, and much more. You can follow the adventures of other users, and accumulate followers of your own. You can direct questions and answers to specific people, or send out calls to everyone all at once.
The appeal of this type of technology baffles many real estate agents who’ve never used the service, but those who have stuck with Twitter see the benefits of this new type of networking.
Rather than trying to see Twitter as a revenue producer, it’s important to understand that Twitter is first and foremost a networking tool. Don’t be overtly promotional in your posts (known as “tweets”). If self promotion is your primary M.O., you’ll quickly lose followers. Users aren’t interested in being bombarded with spammy posts, so if you want to use the site to advertise your services, be very subtle and make sure that your personal posts far outnumbers the more professional ones.
While it may seem counterproductive to be laid back when you’re trying to promote your real estate business, you have to keep in mind the intention of social networking sites. They are meant for people to connect with others who share similar interests, or who live in the same community. The mood is casual and definitely more personal than your business website. Grammar and spelling rules are relaxed, and you can talk about the pizza you ate last night or the rotten movie you just watched. People following you will find your posts interesting because you’re being authentic.
The more people that get to know you and like you, the more opportunity you have to gain clients in the future. It’s the same as expanding your circle of contacts in the real world, and it can be invaluable for your business in the long run.
The idea of social networking being effective over the long term is critical to understand. Unless you are very lucky, you probably won’t gain any new clients right away, but you’re building a solid foundation of online friendships that may develop into business relationships.
In addition to being a vehicle for finding potential clients, Twitter is also a great venue for networking with other agents. You can share tips, ask questions, and refer clients to agents outside of your service area. Other agents will do the same for you. Building relationships with other real estate agents can be educational and emotionally satisfying, as they can relate to the stresses you encounter on a daily basis.
Twitter is free and it only takes a moment to create an account. Search your area for people with accounts, or see if anyone you already know has an account. You can start to follow their tweets and engage people in conversation. Soon you’ll have followers too, and you’ll begin to appreciate the possibilities that this kind of networking can offer. Be open-minded and creative, and soon you’ll see how you can make Twitter work for you and your realty business.
Edkirkland.com has everything you need to get started in the Destin real estate market. Buyers and sellers here can search homes and compare deals for free, and get tips on entering the market. There’s also a local information section with details on our featured markets, including the Santa Rosa Beach real estate area.
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