via problogger.net
Believe me, if you’re a blogger, you want to follow the ‘via’ link and read the rest of the article…
When’s the Best Time to Publish Blog Posts?
7+ Tools for Turning the Tide
I had the honor yesterday of team teaching a social media ‘bootcamp’ with super smart social media guy Dana VanDen Heuvel [I know! Why was I team teaching with him?!]. Apparently Dana finds some value in my ‘practical, tactical’ approach to social media implementation so he asked me to share it with the class…
Me? I think people who believe that social media marketing could be valuable for their business are immediately faced with the question of ‘how do I add social media to my overflowing plate and still get home for supper?’. If that’s true then we need a simple toolbox to help us go from being overwhelmed by data to effectively managing and producing it. This is my current thinking about the ‘7+ Tools for Turning the Tide’ [the plus is for retail destinations that would also benefit from location-based social media]…
Before you tweet back that this is way oversimplified, remember where most aspiring thought leaders are at! That’s why I use three maxims to guide my choice of tools:
- “Things must be made as simple as possible but no simpler.” Albert Einstein
- “Never use two tools where one will do.” Paraphrase of Thomas Jefferson
- “The tools must be ‘good, fast and cheap’, completely cross platform, and available anywhere/anytime [which means they are web and mobile based].” Todd Lohenry
This mindmap is a revision of my now ‘world famous’ series ‘The Top 10 Tools for Tightening your Tribe‘ — the missing technology toolkit for Seth Godin’s book ‘Tribes‘. You’ll see that some of the tools have changed [I’ve moved to Chrome from Firefox, for example] but the principles are enduring and many tools have stood the test of time over the past year — a lifetime in the social media space…
Questions? Feedback? Comment, call or use the contact form to connect so we can talk about how this applies to your business…
25 Ways to Use the Web to Find Content for Your Blog
via dannybrown.me
Hmmm. Not one mention of rss feeds and news aggregation. Interesting! You can follow the ‘via’ link above to go to the source and read the rest of the article if you’re interested in learning more…
Will blogging make your newsletter obsolete?
Things move so fast these days it’s possible to see perspectives change radically on an issue in a short period of time. For instance, as little as a year or so ago, the topic of how a nonprofit might use Facebook sparked a lot of debate and resistance. Do we really even need it? What’s the value? Who’ll manage it? But these days, it’s more common to hear Facebook discussed as a ‘given’ in a nonprofit’s online communications landscape.
Blogging’s like that, too. Until fairly recently, the nonprofits we work with here at Big Duck and speak with were more likely to not have, or even want, a blog. It wasn’t that they didn’t have the time- it was that they didn’t see the value. Now, more and more organizations understand that blogging provides a fluid way to break down some of the walls that separate you from your clients, donors, peers, and other constituents. Not only can you share a broader range of content with them more fluidly, you can do it faster, more responsively, and engage others in online discussion about the topics. Great stuff!
This adoption of blogging has got me wondering: will the nonprofit newsletter go the way of the annual report? That is to say, could blogging replace the need for an organization to produce a more formal document that gets printed or emailed? I’m thinking yes.
via bigducknyc.com
Eventually, maybe, but for right now, the winning answer is a blog + MailChimp that will take everything you post to your blog and automatically send it to your users when you post. Comment, call or use the contact form to connect so we can talk about how this applies to your business…
10 Reasons Not To Ignore Your Blog For Facebook
- Image via CrunchBase
Brace yourself: Facebook is trying to take over the world. Or, if not the world, at least the entire Internet. With Facebook partnering up with popular sites like Yelp, many SMB owners may feel as if their load got lighter. I mean, why waste time worrying about your building your blog or your own site when you can grow your Facebook presence instead? If Facebook’s opening up the doors so that people can take you with them, you don’t have to worry about anything else anymore, right?
Wrong!
It doesn’t matter how hot Facebook or any of the other social media sites are looking right now. You still need to be focused on using your blog to create your own authority and brand. Want to know why?
Here are ten reasons.
You can follow the ‘via’ link above to go directly to the source to get the whole story if you’d like to get the 10 reasons. #1? You don’t own Facebook…
To Tweet or Not to Tweet: Expert Tips about Using Social Media
The tools being trumpeted as paving the new road to riches—Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogging—depend on fundamentals common to most good business plans: People buy things from companies they like, trust, remember or that provide them with value. All this is happening in a new way as social media transforms how people make connections and do business. “We can be more intimate with our marketplace, customers and peers,” explains Mari Smith, president of the International Social Media Association. “Consumers are developing the expectation that companies are going to be more available and respond more quickly, that people are listening.”
But social media comprises just one piece of an overall marketing pie, say practitioners, who stress that it must be planned and executed well to be successful.
You can read the rest of the article here: successmagazine.com
How To Blog On The Go Using Your iPad
via makeuseof.com
Personally I think the author of the article blew it by giving Posterous short shrift, but I think the rest of the article is worthy of your consideration. Follow the ‘via’ link to read her article…
10 Reasons Why New Blogs Fail
Many bloggers don’t even make it to a full year. The truth is, blogging is much more difficult than most people realize. It seems easy enough, keep an online diary on a topic you love and people will read it, right? Wrong. I’ve witnessed so many blogs rev up…and burn right back down. Avoid these common pitfalls to stick around for the long haul!
If you’re interested in blogging, you’ll want to follow the ‘via’ link above to go to the source and read the rest of the article — it’s worth the price of a click… :-D
Related articles
- Load Up Your Arsenal with the Right Blogging Bullets (famousbloggers.net)
Turn Your Expertise Into Dollars Online
- Image via Wikipedia
Small business owners possess a wealth of knowledge about their industry or sector, and when they share this knowledge with Internet (
) searchers, it lends credibility to their business and attracts new customers. Blogging is a key medium for sharing your expertise. The most recent Merchant Confidence Index, a survey of 10,000 small business owners conducted by my company found that nearly 30% are blogging and 35% plan to blog in the next three months. Those who are blogging have found that creating impactful content that people can find online is one of the best marketing tools available — and it’s free. According to data published by Internet marketing firm HubSpot, companies that blogged realized 55% more visitors to their site, 97% more inbound links and 434% more indexed pages.
Michele Gorham, owner of the Andover, Mass.-based Cookie Central bakery, is one small business owner who has turned her expertise into dollars online. She has created hundreds of blog entries about how to build a business, run a bakery, and other helpful topics; and she continuously answers customers’ direct questions through various social media platforms, including Facebook (
) and Yelp (
via mashable.com
If you’re as interested in thought leadership marketing, you’ll want to follow the ‘via’ link above to go to the source and read the rest of the article…
The Blog Is Dead: Long Live the Blog
How do you define what a “blog” is? Back in the day, a blog was a weblog—an online journal. This definition had connotations of timeliness, of narrative, and of a personal focus.
But these days, blogging has expanded. Bloggers may be hobbyists or corporate CEOs. Blogs may be personal or professional. Even the tools that bloggers consider decidedly blog-focused, like WordPress, are used increasingly on news and other content sites.
So what is a blog? Where are the boundaries around blogging? Do they even exist any more?
via problogger.net
You can follow the ‘via’ link above to go to the source and read the rest of the article…
Five Key Ingredients for a Successful Corporate Blog
- Image via Wikipedia
So what are the keys to a successful corporate blog? Here are five tips:
1. Content that provides insight, perspective and information. At its core, a corporate blog has to give its readers information they can use to increase their knowledge, learn new things or receive insight.
2. It has need to be well written. A blog with spelling and grammatical mistakes reflects badly on the person writing it and their employer. As well, a blog posts need to have good flow and provide an engaging narrative that makes it easy to read.
This is particularly important given many people scan content online as opposed to reading it. This is why a good headline so important to capture someone’s attention.
3. Posts have to happen on a regular basis. It could be one, two or five posts/week. Whatever the editorial plan, it needs to be consistent to establish expectations within the company and among the blog’s readers.
The worse thing a company can do is post four or five times a week for a few weeks, and then once a week or not at all afterward. When the audience doesn’t know what to expect, they start to drift away.
4. It can’t operate as a standalone entity. There are two angles to this advice. One, a blog needs to be supported and nurtured within a company. It needs to be actively promoted within communications, marketing and sales collateral, business cards, letterhead and email signatures.
It should also be promoted on social media services such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. A blog needs to be seen as an integral part of a company’s brand and identity as opposed to be left alone to its own devices.
Second, a corporate blog needs to be integrated into the blogosphere and the blogging community. The people writing a blog need to be reading and commenting on other blogs. You can’t write a blog in isolation otherwise there are no connections with the “outside” world.
5. It needs to look good and have a user-friendly design. As much as a company will spend time and money to create a good Web site, its blog also need to be functional and attractive. In many senses, it is a public marketing vehicle that reflects a company’s brand, culture and approach to business.
A good blog should follow best practices by including things such as an RSS feed (both through an RSS reader and via e-mail), information about the writers, the ability to leave comments, links to social media services, and links to other corporate resources.
This quote is a little longer than the content I normally curate, but it’s such good stuff, I grabbed almost the whole post for you…
Related articles
- 10 Tips for Corporate Blogging (mashable.com)
- 5 corporate blogging trends for 2011 (commetrics.com)
- Corporate Blogs In The Fortune 500 (socialmediatoday.com)
- How and Why Corporate Blogging Can Help Your Site (verticalmeasures.com)
- How to Make an Awesome Corporate Blog (entrepreneur.com)
6 Easy Ways to Get More Visitors to Your Blog
- Image via CrunchBase
A blog is an important asset to any business. It allows you to gain visibility as a thought leader, engages your audience in conversation, and acts as link bait. But you can only reap these benefits if you can actually get visitors to your blog. By now, we all know that content is king and that creating remarkable content on a regular basis will pay off sooner or later. But here are some simple strategies you can apply to each of your blog posts that will make your blog traffic soar quickly.
Click here to go to the source of the quote: blog.hubspot.com
Good stuff from HubSpot — one of my favorite internet marketing resources. Go the source if you’re interested in discovering the ‘6 ways’…
How To Provide Attribution in the Blogging World
- Image by Old Shoe Woman via Flickr
Though the Internet has no set guidelines for how to provide attribution, one rule is clear: Links are the currency of the Web.
If you use someone else’s content, whether licensed directly or through fair use, it is important to be sure to provide a clickable link to the original site if at all possible. This not only helps visitors to your site find the original work, but also provide SEO benefits for the creator of the content and guards against your site from being mistaken by the search engines as the original work.
With that in mind, let us take a look at several common situations many bloggers find themselves in and the way most feel is appropriate to attribute them.
- Quoting: If the original work is part of a larger work, for example block quoting part of another article, an inline link is usually all that is required. Typically, when inline linking, you mention the person’s name and/or the site they write for and link to the original article. This can be done very easily in any blogging application and takes only seconds to do.
Go to the source of the quote here: blogherald.com
Many of my students ask me about my curation style. My understanding is based on articles like the one I quoted here. To date, only two people have ever complained about being quoted on my blog; John Maxwell and an obscure blogger from South Dakota. With over 2,700 posts I’m satisfied that I’m compliant with internet standards. Questions? Feedback?
6 Ways to Optimize Your Blog for Search Engines
- Image via Wikipedia
In an earlier article, I talked about the importance of blogging and search engine rankings. However, once you’ve got the blog up and running, the next thing to do is to start optimizing your posts for the search engines. Although search engine optimization (SEO) can be overwhelming to the newcomer, once you understand a few basic concepts, you’ll soon find it’s really not that difficult.
Good SEO copy and a search engine–optimized website accomplish three things:
- They’re easy for the search engines to read
- They’re easy for the target audience to find
- They’re easy for people to read
Everything you do to optimize a post is based around those three basic concepts.
So with that in mind, here are six things you can do to optimize your website or blog posts for the search engines…
You can follow the ‘via’ link above to go directly to the source to get the whole story if you’d like to get the 6 ways…
You need to use social services to understand them
I don’t know if Malcolm Gladwell is right when he claims “the revolution will not be tweeted,” but I can say with certainty that the Twitter he describes is not the Twitter I know. Gladwell’s central argument is that Twitter creates weak ties but social movements require strong ties. I’ve made more strong ties through Twitter (and blogging) than I have through any communications medium I’ve ever used before. The relationships start off weak – a retweet, @ reply, or blog comment – but often strengthen through further discussions and eventually become new friendships and business relationships.
I can see why Gladwell gets this wrong – he doesn’t seem to really use Twitter (he does blog occasionally). I barely tweeted or blogged for a long time too. I read blogs basically since their advent, but social services are fundamentally participatory: reading blogs/tweets is to social services as watching TV is to a real life conversations. I finally relented at the insistence of Caterina, who had the foresight to insist that everyone at Hunch blog, tweet, contribute to open source projects, etc. I now get some of my best ideas from responses to tweets and blog posts, and have developed dozens of strong relationships through the experience.
I made some jokes on Twitter the past few days about Kleiner Perkins’ new social fund. These were meant to be lighthearted: I only know one person at KP and from everything I’ve seen they seem to be smart, friendly people. But underneath the jokes lies a real issue: the partners there don’t seem to really participate in social services (something they only underscored by announcing their new fund at a press conference that targeted traditional media outlets).
I’d love to engage in a debate with smart people like Gladwell about the impact of the social web on culture, politics, activism and so on. I also think it’s great to see savvy investors like KP allocate significant resources to the next wave of social web innovation. But it’s hard for me to take them seriously when they don’t seem to take their subject matter seriously.
via cdixon.org
Will blogging become essential for lawyers to establish trust?
- Image via Wikipedia
In order to establish trust these days, producing helpful content for your target audience is essential. This per John Jantsch, publisher of Duct Tape Marketing, a leading resource on small business marketing.
…[P]eople today have come to expect to find information about any product, service, company, individual, cause or challenge they face by simply turning to the search engine of their choice. So, if they’re not finding content that you’ve produced that provides them that information, even if someone referred them directly to you, there’s a pretty good chance you won’t be worthy of their trust.
I guess I am going to tell you that you’ve got to commit to content production, but you’ve got to make it a part of your overall strategy and you’ve got to produce content with an eye on doing two things – educating and building trust.
What’s the leading way to produce content to build trust? Blogging says Jantsch.
I think a blog is the absolute starting point for your content strategy because it makes content production, syndication and sharing so easy. The search engines love blog content as well and this is the place where you can organize a great deal of your editorial thinking. Content produced on a blog can easily be expanded and adapted to become content for articles, workshops and ebooks.
Other content that can establish trust, per Jantsch, includes social media, reviews, testimonials, white papers, and FAQ’s. But with so many people reading blogs these days, including in-house counsel, and with blog content being regularly shared on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook, it’s difficult to see other content having the impact of a blog.
People looking for a lawyer are as apt to be doing research on the underlying legal issue they face as they are to be looking for a lawyer. For example, someone looking for an estate planning lawyer is also going to be looking for information on the estate planning issue they face, whether it a type of trust, a tax issue or something else. They’ll still hire a lawyer. They’re just doing research so they are informed.
5 Ways to Make Your Blog Posts Outstanding
- Image via Wikipedia
Are your blog posts just “okay”? Want to make them great? If so, keep reading.
A great blog post respects the needs of three distinct entities. It educates and informs your audience (your subscribers and visitors), optimizes for the search engines and sufficiently energizes you so that you do a good job creating it.
Every blog post should address the following five components to ensure it hits the mark for your audience, the search engines and you.
You can follow the ‘via’ link above to go to the source and read the rest of the article if you’d like to dig a little deeper…
Related articles
- 7 Perfect Posterous Themes for Multimedia Blogs (mashable.com)
- Posterous or Tumblr (thesignofthecross.blogspot.com)
- Posterous Redesign Highlights Ways to Share Beyond E-mail (mashable.com)
Answered: 10 Questions About Website Redesign
- Image by mikevolpe.com via CrunchBase
Website redesign can be lethal or liberating for your business. Know what you are getting into before you sign the contract.
Most recently, we covered the website redesign topic in a webinar with HubSpot’s VP of Marketing, Mike Volpe. We received nearly 400 questions during the live session and wanted to address the most frequent ones here, offering a platform for discussion.
via blog.hubspot.com
If you’re interested in redesigning your site, you’ll want to follow the ‘via’ link and read these 10 answers. HubSpot is also offering a free guide if you’ll provide your info. Comment, call or use the contact form to connect so we can talk about how these 10 answers apply to your business…
Election Blogging
via pewresearch.org
The top stories in the blogosphere are often an eclectic mix of topics from technology and pop culture to science and war. But last week, with the 2010 midterm elections looming, each of the top five subjects focused on the election or a closely related subject — the economic issues helping define the campaign.
For the week of Oct. 4-8, two of the top five stories on blogs were connected directly to the election according to the New Media Index from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.
Last week, 17% of the links in blogs highlighted two stories about the 2010 campaign. One was an Oct. 4 Washington Post piece about interest groups spending far more in this election cycle than in the 2008 campaign. The other was an Oct. 5 Washington Post story about how the political landscape remains strongly tilted toward Republicans.
Another 11% of the links concerned a major force in the 2010 political landscape — the Tea Party movement. The debate was generated by Sen. Sherrod Brown’s (D-OH) op-ed in the Oct. 3 USA Today arguing that Tea Party populism is driven by anger at the government and divides the country, and is therefore not real populism, which fights for all Americans.
via pewresearch.org
Bright, shiny objects! 
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