In December of last year, I embarked upon an experiment to see if I could leverage a website with a blog combined with social media tools to increase traffic to a site. In that month, my sandbox site had a grand total of 670 pageviews. In the month that ended yesterday, I had a total of 15,985 — an approximate 25 fold increase in traffic! This morning I got 670 pageviews by 10:00. Here are some other statistics… Continue reading “Is your website a ‘billboard in the desert’?”
It’s always interesting to go back and see where you were a year or so ago thoughtwise and what you may have learned since then. My ‘old post promoter’ randomly brings up old posts and this one, looking back on 2009 is very interesting to me. In it we find the genesis of what I now call the ‘e1evation workflow’ which now consists of 10.5 tools — many of which have stood the test of time since 2009. The mainstays of this process have been working for me for over 18 months now and continue to produce consistent results across a wide variety of industry verticals. What follows is the original post…
- Image via CrunchBase
LOL! Here I sit looking back over the past decade, thinking that it seems like only yesterday that we were sitting in fear of Y2K. Now I’m making a living using tools that for the most part didn’t exist back then. It’s a wonderful [tech] life, eh?!
Wrapping up 2009, here’s the list of my favorite social media tools, organized according to their position and role within the e1evation system. This may look like a simple list but it took over a year to develop and that’s not because I’m a slow learner — it’s because I use rigorous filters for inclusion in my social media toolkit. I also am constantly using Einstein’s Razor [“Things must be as simple as possible but no simpler.”] to keep the toolset small. With that intro, here they are…
Perception
- Google Reader
- Feedly
- iTunes [for sme podcasts, silly!]
Publishing
- Posterous
- ScribeFire
- Shareaholic
- FriendFeed
- Facebook Page [along with key applications]
- WordPress
Propagation
- Facebook Page
- Twitter [along with Hootsuite]
- Feedblitz
- Tumblr
Preferences [other favorites tools]
- Delicious
- Evernote
- Instapaper
- Scribd
- SlideShare
- YouTube
Effectively using these tools together has elevated my business blog to #474,040 in the United States and #1,612,683 in the world in just 6 months according to Alexa. Imagine what you could do if you added one of these tools to your toolkit every month or so next year!
Questions? Feedback? Leave a comment or use the contact page. And, have a great 2010!
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- Facebook: 5 Predictions for 2010 (mashable.com)
Leaving for Germany as I am tomorrow morning, I’m moving way too fast to do this justice, but if you’re a social media maven or online community manager [or both!], tumblr is a tool that you may have overlooked for it’s sheer simplicity. If that’s the case, look again. Here are at leas 5 reasons why I’m adding tumblr to my social media utility belt..
- Simple yet powerful…
- It can auto-publish to both Facebook profiles and fan pages making it a great community manager tool
- It has a great iPhone interface making it the perfect onsite reporting tool
- It works with Shareaholic or it’s own bookmarklet making it a perfect page sharing tool
- Marc LaFountain, the Community Ambassador. He’s a god amongst men in the social media space…
This is just a partial list of all the cool things that tumblr can do — you’ll want to go here to get a more complete inventory. As I head to Germany to cover the Agritechnica show for AGCO, I’ll be liveblogging the trip as well as the event. Track me on my Dashboard and see how well it works as I run it through my FriendFeed…
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At least 3 reasons why I’m not Buzzing with enthusiasm
- Image via CrunchBase
At least two people in the Googleverse are underwhelmed with Buzz; me and internet maven Richard Scoble. Scoble bats first…
“Together with a lot of web workers, I depend on being able to skim through information sources quickly. Services like Google Reader are well-optimized for doing this, especially in List mode. (To turn on List mode, from the “All Items” view, click on “Show: List” in the blue bar at the top right of the screen.)
The List views in Gmail and Google Reader make it easy to look at the subjects of posts, and scroll through them quickly. Google Buzz, unfortunately, uses the threaded conversation approach of Google Wave, but without the tools for controlling what appears on the screen that Wave has.
I hope that the limitations of Google Buzz’s interface are just growing pains. Maybe the designers of Buzz didn’t anticipate that some posts would generate hundreds of comments. So let’s hope that they’ll give us the tools to use the service efficiently, or, as one commenter suggests, Google Buzz users might give up on it before it’s a week old.” Source: Google Buzz: Not Efficient? – WebWorkerDaily
On his own blog, Scoble goes on to say…
“OK, now I’ve had a bit of time to play with Google Buzz and everywhere I look I see a badly-executed copy of FriendFeed.
With two important exceptions:
1. Google Buzz actually has a lot of users and much better information flowing through its veins. There’s a reason that FriendFeed doesn’t have many users: it has some very anti-user features that retard user adoption (back when I was excited about FriendFeed I kept hoping that FriendFeed was going to fix some of their issues).
2. It has pretty nice location features built in, especially if you use Google Maps on Android.” Source: Google Buzz copied FriendFeed’s worst features, why?
If you want to read the rest of his rant, go to the source. Here’s my random list of pet peeves…
- I don’t even like to get electronic newsletters because they’re a distraction; email is for email and needs to be segmented from social media…
- Information comes into Buzz, but it can’t get out; no rss output for the things I want to share
- Insufficient keyboard shortcuts; what happened to e for email like Reader? Google Reader is perfect for my needs — Buzz is like a fly droning around my head while I’m trying to concentrate…
What do you think?
Writing a killer blog
…without killing yourself in the process. Good thoughts from Louis Gray…
With new Facebook Groups, FriendFeed’s gone mainstream. Two years late.
- Image via CrunchBase
What’s really striking about the new Facebook Groups is that they truly are “FriendFeed gone mainstream”.
When I first saw the new Facebook Groups I thought, “My, they look a lot like FriendFeed”. That’s no surprise either, the team that pioneered realtime discussion and sharing groups at FriendFeed now works at Facebook and its co-creator Bret Taylor is now CTO there.
FriendFeed was, and still is, loved by a loyal following for its fast, powerful social sharing and discussion possibilities. Just before Facebook bought the company last year it really had become something special, a technical feat of beauty that I loved. The problem was that the mainstream public never took to it. It was just too… well, geeky. Now with the newly re-imagined Facebook Groups we see how FriendFeed can finally be accepted by the masses – by being less geeky, more streamlined… and built right into Facebook.
Like FriendFeed, Facebook Groups have the ability to share and discuss text, images, photos, videos and links in realtime. The ability to import feeds is missing, as are other “advanced” features of FriendFeed like cross-posting, exporting RSS feeds, posting via emails and the like, but by stripping those out what we have here is essentially FriendFeed’s vision gone mainstream.
People certainly seem to be taking to the new groups’ potential. Here at The Next Web we already have lively Apps and Apple groups among others, and Robert Scoble has a group for tech news reporters and bloggers that has got off to an interesting start.
via thenextweb.com
Related articles
- Facebook Groups: Ingenious Or Annoying? [POLL] (mashable.com)
- New Facebook Groups Designed to Change the Way You Use Facebook (mashable.com)
- Facebook Groups Don’t Have A Privacy Problem, But Someone Needs To Can The Spam (techcrunch.com)
- The Benefits of Using Facebook Groups (labnol.org)
- How to create a Facebook Group (telegraph.co.uk)
Every once in awhile…
…I stumble upon something that I had used once and had forgotten and can’t remember why I stopped. This morning I fell in love with Shareaholic all over again…
“Shareaholic makes it easy for you to submit the web page you’re on to your favorite sharing or bookmarking service, including: digg, del.icio.us, facebook, friendfeed, bit.ly, connotea, google bookmarks, google reader notes, gmail, kaboodle, magnolia, meneame, mixx, myspace, plurk, reddit, soup.io, stumbleupon, tipjoy, tumblr, twine, twitter, weheartit, yahoo buzz, and ycombinator. You can also e-mail the web page directly to a friend.” Source: Shareaholic – The browser add-on extension to share, bookmark and e-mail web pages quickly
Why is this important? Let me try to net it out quickly…
Finding a great website may help you advance your knowledge but what if you had a way to share it with others that required little or no additional effort? Wouldn’t that be worth it? Sure, there are some websites that I keep for my own private use, but for the sites that contain good information for my ‘followers’, I can post those sites to my ‘rooms’ in FriendFeed and they show up as featured articles in the right hand column of my blog. That way, these bookmarks benefits me as well as the rest of the world and make my site more of a destination because of the valuable resources that are there! If you want to drive people to your website or blog, give me a call at (920) 486-4798 or drop me a note using the contact form above. I can help!
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Hmmm. I think I may need to rethink Posterous…
I’ve been a fan of tumblr for a long time, but the fact that Guy Kawasaki chose Posterous for his ‘Holy Kaw‘ blog got me thinking and testing this morning. My jury’s still out, but I’m curious. Here’s a video tour from the ‘digitalchiropractor’ on YouTube — forget the doctor content and follow along. I think you’ll see why I’m intrigued — Posterous may just be the perfect social media front-end…
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxeFOD5lZ4k
Bright, shiny objects! 