Many people ask us whats the best way to get into social media marketing – What shall I do first? Is Twitter relevant to us? How can I do it?… and so on. Of course there are many answers and roads to travel depending on the type of business and where you are now with your internet presence.
However – there is one approach which works well for most companies, and provides a bridge to enable you to evolve into Social Media and at the same time act as a hub and focus for your other online marketing activities.
It involves building a blog. I’m a much bigger fan nowadays of blogs and I really do see them as the epicentre of all your web marketing – even more so than your website. Your website is still essential as the ultimate destination for visitors and a means to convert them to buyers or enquiries, but the blog can be the driving force.
What will your Blog do?
Below there’s a summary of the way you can use your blog to drive your social media and other web marketing activities. To set one up is easy – as we’ve discussed before using wordpress or typepad and integrating the blog within your domain is a straightforward process. (See previous post on this.)
Here’s one of my favourite blogs and notice all the ways youve got of ongoing communication with visitors – you can sign up by email, you can subscribe via RSS, you can socially bookmark, it links both ways to facebook and Twitter….
The bigger issue most people have is deciding what to blog about – but actually there’s no shortage if you consider the volume of information your company publishes:-
-new product information
-industry specific information – new legislation, new trends
-lessons and ‘how to do’s’
-’hints and tips’
-case studies
-press releases
…and so on. In fact everytime your produce any communication content consider your blog a receptacle for it – even your video footage.
Here’s a diagrammatic representation of your Blog at the centre of your web marketing…..
The crucial thing of course is to make sure there’s some value added content there – so a ‘good’ blog is really what we should be talking about. You can include all the other stuff but make sure (as we do on this blog) you are giving some valuable information away like lessons and ‘how to do’ guides. This will ensure people link to you (which of course helps with SEO) and sign up to receive info from you automatically – as illustrated on Seth’s blog above.
Your Blog and SEO
You will capture the ‘long tail’ as you blog – further, as we discussed above, you’ll develop backlinks naturally.
Your Blog and Email Marketing
As we do, send a regular newsletter to people with links back to the blog where the detailed relevent content is stored
Your Blog and Social Bookmarking
Give people the opportunity of bookmarking your site to increase your visibility and backlinks – also you might proactively bookmark your own posts in the major sites (Digg, delicious etc) – there’s a full list of around 125 of them here.
Your Blog and your PR
Any press releases you send out can be stored on your blog and linked to via emails and social bookmarking sites. Again this will help increase the value of your blog and the SEO
Your Blog and Social Media
The two everone’s concerned about are Twitter and Facebook. If you dont have time to frequent these phenomena then do as we do and link your blog directly to them. What happens when I blog is that it gets fed directly into Twitter and then to Facebook – saves loads of time.
Your Blog and your Videos
Upload your videos to your blog for greater impact and also to help visibility via search engines – courtesy of Google Universal Search these should show up in search engine results – post them on YouTube too
So, the key message is integrate your blog with your website then use it as the springboard to evolve your online marketing and engage social media. Over time this will increase your visibility via search engines as well as all the important social media sites.
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If you know of any more please let me know…
Backflip : Backflip is a free service currently being run by volunteers. Backflip was started in 1999 by Netscape veterans Tim Hickman and Chris Misner. As a research tool, Backflip is clearly of value to the education community, and that community (or at least certain segments) has certainly embraced Backflip. A Google search of sites that contain the term “Backflip.com” results in numerous education-related links, including Teacher Tools.
barksbookmarks : BARKS=BookmARKS is a website that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control.
BibSonomy :BibSonomy is run by the Knowledge Data Engineering Group of the University of Kassel, Germany. Its specifically designed for researchers, in sharing bookmarks and bibliographies
Blinklist :A social bookmarking site launched by Mindvalley. According to their site, they launch several web businesses a year and are focused in 3 areas. – Technology, media and Marketing. BlinkList does have a user friendly interface indicating that its being run well and efficiently. They also quote “fully profitable” on their site. Furthermore, you can label and comment about any web page on the Internet.
Blipoo :Meet Blipoo, a social bookmarking site for “cool” people sharing “cool” stories. It claims to help bloggers drive more traffic to their blog because they allow self promotion..
BlogBookMark : Designed specifically for Blog hunters, BlogBookmark.com claims to have the hottest news, gossip, and blog chatter from around the web. I highly sugggest that mainstream bloggers bookmark their entires here.
BlueDot : This basic social networking service allows users to save and share bookmarks.
blurpalicious : Get Blurped! Not too different from other social bookmarks, but I love the tagline.
Bmaccess : Social bookmarking with thumbs 
Bookkit : BookKit.com is an absolutely free web service designed to facilitate bookmark (favorites) management needs.
BookMarkAll : Bookmarkall is an online bookmark community where users can create, organize and share their favorite web links online and access them anywhere.
Bookmark-manager : Organizer for bookmarks, calendar, diary and knowledge.
bookmarktracker : Free online storage, management, synchronizing and RSS sharing of your bookmarks.
Bookmax : You can store your bookmarks and links to your favorite sites online and access them from wherever you are : basic Social Bookmarking.
Buddymarks : The online personal, group and social bookmarks manager.
Bukmark : Bukmark is a social bookmarking website.
Chipmark :Another basic social bookmarking site.
Citeulike : A free service to help academics to share, store, and organise the academic papers they are reading.
Claimid : Manage your online identity. Although this is not a normal social bookmarking site, users can bookmark sites which reference their identity and build backlinks in this fashion.
Clipclip : Clipclip allows you to save images and text, with a “bookmarklet”.
Cloudytags : A unique word analyzer connects to your page, gets all the words and suggest you the real tags your site is showing to the world.
Complore : Derived from com-(with,together) and explore-(search, research). As the name suggests, complore is a vision to connect people from diverse backgrounds
Connectedy : Lets you establish a personal link directory online. As you surf the web, you collect links, categorize them in a way that makes sense to you.
Connotea : Social bookmarking (for researchers).
Contentpop : It has the latest Web 2.0 features such as social bookmarking, blogging & RSS. It also uses the word POP in the title which means it must be good.
coRank : coRank is a site where you can share whatever you find interesting on the web with people who value your opinion
Crowdfound : CrowdFound is essentially a social bookmarking website, but with a different vision in mind
de.lirio.us : Store, share and tag your favourite links. Open source clone of del.icio.us with private bookmarking, tagging, blogging, and notes
del.icio.us : THE social bookmarking site : It allows you to easily add sites you like to your personal collection of links and to categorize those sites with keywords. Not to mention that if enough people save your site in a bookmark, it will make their popular page and send a lot of traffic. Delicious is owned by Yahoo and is a MUST for your social media and bookmarking strategy.
Diigo : Social bookmarking on steroids.
Digg : The social news site that changed the Internet, Digg is a high power authority and a listing in Digg for a site, even if it only has a couple of votes, will rank highly on Google and other search engines for certain terms. If your site is shared and voted upon on Digg, and makes the Digg homepage, you’ll get a lot of traffic and attention from other bloggers who read Digg.
Dropjack : DropJack.com is a social content website and owned by the ExactSeek company.
Easybm : Allows users to bookmark their frequently visited sites on their private page, allowing 1-click access to their favorite web sites.
Enroll : Social bookmarking system based in India.
ez4u : Social Bookmarking – Ez4u to Bookmark : “Ez4u to Organize Ez4u to Share with Others Ez4u to Remember”
Favoor : Favoor is your personalized new start page. Collect your favorite internet addresses.
Folkd : Folkd is a social web-service about pages, news, audios, videos and blogs.
Freelink : Freelink.org provides free pages of links that you can access anywhere at anytime.
Freezilla : FreeZilla claims to be the first Web 2.0 freebies and promotions social networking site.
Fungow : Fungow was designed to help better organize and keep track of your bookmarks.
Furl : Like Delicious, LookSmart’s Furl.net is one of the first social bookmarking sites and considered an authority by the major search engines. Listing your sites in Furl will lead to traffic from organic rankings and its popular page drives traffic.
Gather : Gather is a place to contribute articles and content, blog, tag and connect with people who share your passions. (Plus you can link out from the articles in this authority site).
Getboo : GetBoo.com is yet another free online bookmarking service which allows you to store, edit and retrieve your bookmarks from anywhere online.
Google : Allows users to save and create bookmarks in their Google toolbar that can be accessed anywhere online. Google is getting more social by the day, so take advantage of their Google Bookamrks and citations, because one day they probably will have some kind of influence on external meta data considered by the Google ranking algortihm.
Hanzoweb : Hanzoweb – Bookmark, tag & share knowledge online
Hyperlinkomatic : Hyperlinkomatic – bookmark list manager.
i89.us : i89.us offers a free service which allows you to save your favorite website/links at one location that can be accessed from anywhere.
Icio : Danish Bookmarking engine.
Ikeepbookmarks : Popup feature allows you to add links while surfing the web
Iloggo : Simple web based bookmarking tool that you can use for attractively displaying your favorite websites on one page.
Jigg : Jigg.in is a socializing community with the latest stories / news submitted by users and has a familiar name
Kaboodle : Kaboodle is a 2.0 shopping community where people recommend and discover new things.
Kinja : Kinja is a blog guide, collecting news and commentary from some of the best sites on the web.
Lifelogger : “LifeLogger is a great way to keep things that matter to you alive and sparkling.” And worth considering in a bookmarking campaign.
Lilsto : Lilisto lets you store, manage and find your favorite links (or bookmarks) and removes the need to maintain them through your browser.
Linkagogo : Favorites and Social Bookmarking Application, its unique dynamic toolbars automatically adapt themselves.
Linkarena : German Social Bookmarking site.
Linksnarf : Social link sharing with groups of friends.
Listerlister :ListerLister is a social list building community where you can create, add to, and vote for both lists and the items added to them.
Ma.gnolia.com : Like Furl and Delicious, anoter major bookmarking site which lets users organize bookmarks, search other people’s favorites and make friends and contacts.
Markaboo : MarkaBoo is tool for saving websites, files, and notes from your browser, email or mobile phone.
Marktd : Marktd is a reference & voting system that highlights marketing articles considered valuable by the marketing community.
Memfrag : memFrag stores your favorites personal notes, making them globally accessible from any computer.
Memotoo :Lets users centralize and share your personal data.
Mister Wong : Mister Wong is a social bookmarking site that originated in Germany, and has since become a popular and widespread tool.
Mixx : An up and coming bookmarking and social news sharing network which should rival Digg, Reddit and others, Mixx blends popular photos, videos and stories.
Mobleo : Allows you to easily add, organize, and share your mobile phone bookmarks with your friends using your desktop computer.
Multiply :Florida-based social network Multiply, which reports nearly 3 million users and $6 million in funding,opened its social bookmarking site recently and has done well. Definite authority
Murl : My URLs is a free online bookmarks manager, think of it as a bookmarks community.
MyBookmarks : MyBookmarks – access your bookmarks anytime, anywhere. Free productivity tool for business, student or personal use. Another popular bookmarking site.
Myhq : Store your bookmarks in one central location. Fast, text-based, banner free!
MyLinkVault : A free online bookmark manager. Other bookmark managers can be so clumsy to use – trying to rearrange your bookmarks can be slow and frustrating.
mySiteVote : mySiteVote is a community where you can vote your favorite site/s and view how popular a site is.
MyWebDesktop : A collaboration and communication tool, designed to be as generic and easy to use as a telephone and email.
Newsvine : The mission of Newsvine is to bring together big and little media in a way which respects established journalism
Newsweight :NewsWeight is a democratic news, information, and entertainment resource.
Oyax : Oyax is a social bookmark manager which allows users to easily add sites you like to personal collection of links, categorize those sites with keywords.
Philoi : Person-to-person link sharing community. Save bookmarks and share links with your friends.
PlugIM : PlugIM is a user driven internet marketing community. Submit content, share articles, comment on projects and promote your favorites to the front page
Propeller : Formaly known as Netscape, AOL’s Propeller has become a great social bookmarking news community tool which is considered an ultimate authority by Yahoo Search and passes link juice in its news story profiles. Propeller is also going to redesign very soon, which should be quite exciting.
QuickieClick : QuickieClick is a second generation social bookmarking website with a visual twist.
Rambhai : An Indian social bookmarking community
RawSugar : A social search engine powered by user contributions. Its an online community, with over 130,000 URLs already tagged by their members.
Reddit : Timely and shocking news oriented, Reddit stories are instantly voted upon and if liked by the community as a whole, can drive incredible traffic and users.
Searchles : Owned by the DumbFind search engine, in my opinion Searchles is a much overlooked bookmarking tool and loved by Google, Yahoo and the other major search engines with its passing of link juice and high rankings for terms within search results themselves. Do not overlook Searchles.
Segnalo : Italian Social bookmarking site.
Simpy [late addition]: Social bookmarking & search, Simpy lets users “save, tag, search and share bookmarks, notes, groups and more.”
Sitebar : A solution for people who use multiple browsers or computers and want to have their bookmarks available from anywhere without need to synchronize them
Sitejot :Free online bookmark manager. Like every other social bookmarking site, it allows users to manage all of their bookmarks online in one convenient place.
Sk*rt : sk*rt is a social media ranking platform of “pure goodness”, targeted towards women. Given the right story, Sk*rt can send A LOT of targeted traffic.
Slashdot : The godfather of social news, SlashDot bookmarks are still quite powerful .. keep in mind the site has a heavy slant towards Linux and Open Source issues.
SocialDanger : SocialDanger is a Web 2.0 open source content management system.
Socialogs : A Digg-like Social Bookmarking Service.
Sphinn : Very popular search marketing oriented social news and discussion site run via the Pligg system.
Spotback : Spotback is a personalized rating system that recommends relevant content based on personal rating history using collaborative filtering
Spurl : Another cherished bookmarking and tagging site, Spurl lets users keep online bookmarks & tags while offering full text searching, recommendations & storing of entire documents.
Squidoo :Kind of spammed out, Squidoo is a 2.0 property which lets people and businesses set up a ‘lens’ which lists links, tags and relevant RSS feeds to different subjects.
Startaid : I’ve noticed that StartAid bookmark pages rank highly in Google and other search engines. This basic bookmarking service allows users to describe, tag and categorize sites.
StumbleUpon : Owned by eBay, StumbleUpon is an amazing blend of social bookmarking, voting, networking, web surfing, search and blogging. Best of all, StumbleUpon can send major traffic with its userbase of around 3 million users.
Stylehive : The Stylehive is a collection of all the best products, brands, designers and stores discovered and tagged by the Hive community
Syncone : SyncOne is an Internet aggregator of bookmarking and browsing.
Tagfacts : Basic bookmarking and tagging, a social knowledge base.
Taggly : Store, share and tag your favorite links.
Tagne : TagNe.ws is user-submitted, community voted links and resources related to SEO, Blogging, RSS, Tagging, Internet Marketing and more.
Tagtooga : Says that this bookmarking engine can be used to discover great sites difficult to find in Google/Yahoo by browsing categories.
Tagza : A very young Social Bookmarking site mostly being used by Indian and Pakistani web masters.
Technorati : Always changing and reinventing themselves, this recognized authority offers links to blogposts, tagging and a social bookmarking WTF section.
Tedigo : Personal and social bookmarking in Spanish and English made simple.
Thinkpocket : Lets users pocket websites you find valuable. It is a web service that aims to help store, organize and share your favorite sites
Thoof : Thoof is a user generated news and information service that claims to learn about what users are interested in and delivers news that they care about.
Totalpad : TotalPad is a new online news and article community where people are free to voice their opinions
Urlex : With URLex system users are able to leave a comment regarding any internet link on any site. Possibly good for linking
Uvouch : Another basic social bookmarking site, users can save their findings with one click, at one place and access it from anywhere.
Vmark : An online bookmark and online favorites manager.
Voteboat : VoteBoat is a user-controlled rating and voting site.
Votelists : VoteLists lets users create a list of rankable items. Other can add items, comment on them, rate them and more!
Vuju : Vuju allows user to submit/publish content which can be tagged and promoted.
WeTogether : Social bookmarking site where people will have great opportunities to promote their own sites.
Whitelinks : Securely store and quickly access favorite websites whenever connected to the Internet,:
Wink : A social search engine where users can share results and answer questions. Users build profiles which can link out to bookmark pages or other web sites (hint hint).:
Wirefan : Social bookmarking, news articles submission site.:
Xilinus : Organize and manage bookmarks online.:
Xlmark : xlmark is an easy social bookmarking site:
Yahoo! Bookmarks: The MOST POPULAR social search and bookmarking service on the web. It’s similar to Delicious and something they launched before acquiring Delicious. Yahoo Bookmarks lets users store bookmarks using their Yahoo Toolbar and access them from any computer.
Yattle: Bookmark Management and Mini-Blogging Service.
Zlitt: Zlitt is a social bookmarking system which gives users the opportunity to share and tag favorite news, images and videos.
Zurpy: Saves bookmarks, text clippings, images, files, and news feeds in one place.
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Here are some new considerations to drive your SEO success in 2010.
What follows is a little information on some key factors. Over the next month or so I’ll send specific lessons and guidelines on what to do in these areas – for now I would just like to flag up for you what they are….
SITE SPEED
Google has publicly stated that it wants to make the web faster. Its gone so far as to offer a range of tools you can use to check the speed of your site.
Although not specifically stated by Google, most people in the SEO world expect that site speed will increasingly be considered as a ranking factor as we move into 2010.
Here’s a link to the tools and more information from Google – How Fast is Your Site
If you dont perform too well you’ll need to consider re-hosting and/or a whole range of other ‘code’ related issues to increase the speed. Hopefully though the tools will deliver good news for you.
PERSONALISATION
If you spend as much time looking at rankings as I do you will probably have noticed that rankings can be different for different people and different times. Initially Google only showed different results if you were ’signed in’ to your Google account, nowadays it doesnt matter if you are signed in, they monitor your surfing/clicking behaviour and tailor rankings accordingly.
Fortunately there isnt too much variance – maybe you see your site at position 3 and I see at at position 5, but what does this mean to SEO?
As far as we are concerned, although rankings are still important, a more important metric for measuring your success is through analytics. Specifically, given that different people see different rankings, its the visits to your site which you need to measure as the ultimate success metric.
SOCIAL MEDIA
In this area I plan to provide much more detail on what you can do in to enhance your online marketing and SEO success. At the moment I’ll just mention a couple of things…
- If you are not already engaging in social media you should give it serious consideration. As well as driving traffic directly to you – videos on YouTube, your Facebook presence, LinkedIn etc – activity on social media relating to your site is increasingly used by search engines as a signal for ranking purposes. Simple example – your site/products are mentioned a number of times on the Facebook community – Google will pick up on this and reflect it in rankings higher rankings.
-In addition of course is the ‘link equity’ you could gain through some of the social media sites. (notwithstanding ‘no follow’ usage by some major sites)
I will post specific lessons on what you can do here over the next couple of months so dont worry too much about the specifics yet – althgough you may want to do some preliminary research
REAL TIME SEARCH
…Is something that Twitter does and Google doesnt. For example Michael Jacksons demise was flagged on Twitter within hours of it happening. Recent earthquake activity in California was reported on Twitter within minutes of the event. Google is always out of date – typically 2-3 weeks for most small businesses – since that’s how often Googlebot returns on average.
Of course both Google and Bing have now done deals with Twitter to include tweets in the search engine ranking results. So if you tweet about something relevant keyphrase searches will throw up the tweet. Here’s an indication of how important Google regards Twitter – you can see in a search for ‘Jan Klin’ my Twitter presence is second only to my own web site presence…
Again, more specifics on what you can do later – meanwhile you may want to do some research on Twellow (Twitter’s directory) to see the activity in your industry or sector.
UNIVERSAL SEARCH AND DIGITAL ASSETS OPTIMISATION (DAO)
Another 3 word acronym folks which may or may not get integrated into the search marketing lexicon. DAO of course suggests that nowadays people are increasingly concerned about getting their videos, images, blogs, tweets, etc optimised and ranked on Google as well as their website.
Because of Google Universal Search (scroll past the interview) – you have the opportunity of getting multiple sources in the search results, or, different sources at different times depending on what people search for. You have to make sure you optimise your digital assets though and submit to the relevant indexes – there’s a really good summary of some of the more important things to do here
There will be new things no doubt as the year progresses, but as of right now it seems these will be to most significant – so, lessons and guides on the detail coming soon….
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