Archive for category Bloggging
Just Attended: Social Media Club
Posted by seo in Bloggging, social media, twitter on January 22, 2010
Last night, we braved the rain and made it to join, “Social Media: Getting it Right in 2010”, with the Social Media Club of San Gabriel Valley. Moderated by Sally Falkow, the panelists included: Dana Chinn, James Macpherson. and Jessica Gottlieb. With good people and good fudge, what more could we ask for?
In about 2 hours, a wide array of topics were covered. It started out with what’s changed in the media. Nowadays, you small businesses can take advantage of bloggers to monitor your brand and listen to what customers want. No doubt, the theme of the night was to measure your efforts and adjust accordingly. Just because we’re talking about social media marketing, doesn’t mean that you should throw the basics of marketing out the window!
Useful Tips and Takeaways
- When it comes to social media, you don’t necessarily need to be everywhere. Utilize the right platforms that will work with your overall goals.
- Make use of location-based review sites: Foursquare and Yelp. Listen and be nice to your customers!
- Don’t forget to be engaging. Leave comments and interact with your fans and friends frequently.
- Communicate your passion. Chances are, there are many readers out there who share your enthusiasm for certain topics. Even if they don’t, your excitement is a great way to bring them in.
All in all, it was a fun and informative night. Looking forward to more of them in the future!
Effective Copywriting for Web 2.0
Posted by seo in Article Optimization, Bloggging, twitter on December 7, 2009
I recently read a magazine article describing the profession of copywriting as “sexy.” After giggling for half a second, it dawned on me that “sexy” was just the right word to use. Copywriters, through the power of the written word, are responsible for “seducing” their audience. They have the fun, yet daunting, task of generating interest and then developing that interest to lead to some sort of fruitful relationship, not unlike the dating world. And, just like the dating game, the rules have changed.
The more information that technology makes readily available to consumers, the less time these consumers have to spend on any one particular product, service or idea. The attention span of the average web user has steadily decreased as the barrage of online information continues to overwhelm human senses. With this in mind, the web copywriter must truly embrace the concept of “less is more.” Relevance and credibility are still important principles to keep in mind when writing content, but Web 2.0 consumers now want relevance and credibility…in cliff notes format. A great example of this trend is the micro-blogging phenom, Twitter. Twitter’s popularity and success is a smack-in-the-face realization that web users’ tolerance for information has been Mini-Me-ed down to 140 characters!
With that said, here are some key guidelines for downsizing a seven-course meal of content into a snack-size bar without losing the essentials:
1. Listen to data: Conduct A/B testing on different versions of headlines to determine which works best.
2. Waste not, fluff not: Don’t make claims you can’t support. Consumers can smell a phony sales pitch a mile away!
3. Forget “short and sweet”: Just keep it short. Jargon, hype, gimmicks are all unnecessary sugar-coating. Give them what they want to know.
4. Know your audience: This one seems obvious, but is worth repeating. Write copy that speaks in a voice that your target market, not only understands, but listens to.
5. Format for easy reading: Use headlines, sub headlines, short paragraphs, lists, and an eighth-grade reading level. Have your 13-year-old read the copy. If he/she doesn’t “get it” by the time their attention is lost to a new YouTube video, it’s time to rewrite!
Blogging Basics
Blogs have reached a new level of popularity in the past several years. Many websites and companies have started one or more consistent blogs in order to add quality content to their sites, which helps to increase their ranking. According to the numbers provided by New Media Lab in Austin, blogging grew by 68 percent in 2008; 356 million people worldwide read blogs; and 77 percent of active Web users read blogs. New Media Lab provided these statistics regarding who is blogging in the United States:
* 51 percent male
* Age 35+ (58 percent)
* Age 18-34 (42 percent)
* College educated (74 percent)
What is blogging?
Blogging is a social networking tool that can be used for personal and/or professional reasons. A blog is like an online journal that allows you to write about whatever you want. Individuals often use blogs to share personal information and personal opinion with family and friends whereas organizations or companies often use blogs to advertise their services and provide helpful information to clients and potential clients. Setting up and maintaining a blog is simple and usually free of cost, making it an exceptionally useful tool for companies when it comes to educating the public on their business, their products or their services.
Blogs are an easy way for people and businesses to publish their ideas and their opinions. Commenting is allowed on most blogs, making it a kind of conversation. Blogs allow readers to actively participate in the blog by responding to posts and thereby sharing their opinion as well.
Setting up a blog
The first step to setting up your blog is deciding on a unique name. Once you have a name, you should lock in a domain name for your blog. Next, you need to pick your content management system, which will provide you with the tools needed to manage your blog. The two most popular platforms are Blogger and WordPress. Blogger is free, but is somewhat limited in comparison. Next you must design your page. Several tools can help you customize your blog design, including WordPress Themes, Template Monster, and Unique Blog Designs. Also, remember to turn on the comment option. Comments are a good way to get feedback and make your blog appear popular.
Adding Social Media and Links
Add links onto your blog to any of your other social media profile pages, such as Twitter and Facebook. It is also smart to add links to any other personal or corporate pages you have. After you have done this, add links onto these other social media profile pages back to your blog. Many social bookmarking plug-ins can help promote your blog, including:
* Digg
* Sphinn
* Twitter
* Delicious
* StumbleUpon
New Google Site For Advertisers
Posted by seo in Bloggging, Google, SEO Tools, Video Marketing on April 29, 2009
Well Google is at it again with another new site. This brings the Google site count up to 6,341*. Wow! There newest addition is for advertisers! There’s plenty of information on it which will help you in the advertising world. There’s a great case study on the home page which is a ‘worst case’ case study of a pet stick campaign. I love it! I’ve inserted the image here for a laugh. 
The pet stick case study shows you the various tools you can use to market your product which I hope is better than a pet stick. Although I’m sure people would buy the pet stick! So from media planning, new keyword tools, buidling a social media site through OpenSocial, setting up ads on Google, creating a YouTube video, engaging YouTubers, (just learned this is an actual word) you can see how Google can help. The site gets into how TV and mobile ads work as well.
My favorite section was the free marketing section. We’ve discussed some of these tools in past posts, such as Webmaster Tools and the Local Business Center, but there are many more such as Product Search, FeedBurner, Gadgets, OpenSocial, Maps API, and YouTube. I recommend reviewing these free tools and making them work for your site.
It just occurred to me that a lot of these free tools were companies that Google bought out. We’re actually in the process of creating a tool for our clients so maybe Google will try to buy us out in a few years. We shall see! Please forward this blog URL to Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google Co-Founders) so they can start preparing for the buyout!
* just kidding – I’m sure there are plenty but I just picked this number out of thin air 
Advanced Business Blogging Webinar by Hubspot Review
Posted by seo in Bloggging, search engine optimization, social media on January 24, 2009
I attended a webinar today on advanced business blogging by Hubspot. Don’t let the advanced part in the title scare you away. Hubspot, an online marketing company similar to emarketed, does a great job on providing webinars. Today’s webinar focused on blogging and can be viewed here. A few notes about the actual webinar that really made this interesting. First they had a powerpoint of the webinar that can be accessed here through SlideShare and a live video feed of the presenter that was being pulled from Mogulus. You can view Hubspot’s channel here. Mogulus provides a free service and a paid version which removes the advertisements. There were no advertisements on the webinar but when I viewed the video on Mogulus there were advertisements. So I’m assuming that Hubspot is using the free version. They have over 800 viewers on the webinar today! You can view all of their shows on their Mogulus channel or here on their site. Hubspot also integrated their Twitter account into the presentation so you could ask questions through Twitter during the webinar. There were also links to Facebook and LinkedIn as well from the webinar page. These are all free tools that any one can use. The use of these social media tools was very impressive and is definately something that we’re looking to integrate into our next version of our emarketed site. They were able to utlize these free services which can be used by anyone: Twitter, SlideShare, Facebook, & Mogulus
Ok, lets get into some of the key points from the webinar. A lot of the content which I’m proud to say has been discussed by emarketed in past blogs. Hubspot goes into why you should blog with 5 keys to a successful blogging:
1. Pick your target personas
2. Create a mix of posts
3. Write great posts
4. Sustain it
5. Spread it
One of the great take aways from this webinar is that your SEO (search engine optimization) efforts can start from your blog. You should write content that relates to your products and/or services. One thing to remember though is that SEO takes time and this is the same for writing blog posts. You will not see the direct results of your blog writing for several months. You also have to promote your blog once it’s up. It’s the same for your website which our clients are starting to understand. People will not just magically stumble across your blog when you write content. It must be promoted. Some of the methods Hubspot discussed were the following: post to twitter, comment on other blogs, post to facebook, start building a list of subscribers to your blog. They also had a great tip about using images through Flickr so I took their advice for this blog post. We do not always uses images in blog posts but I can see how it makes the blog easier to read with an image.
For more information regarding the webinar you’ll have to watch it at the following link.
Great Example of a Catchy Blog Headline
Just read an interesting blog post that I thought I’d blog about. First of all I subscribe to about 20 blogs and they all get fed into my Google Reader which is great. I also just added a gadget to my iGoogle home page so the most recent blog posts are displayed. Now I’m not able to read all of these everyday but I do read headlines and this headline caught my eye today. The topic was something I’m interested in but it was also tied into a movie that I like which was a double whammy for me. So of course I read the article. Here’s the headline and a link to the blog post:
What Jason Bourne Can Teach You About Social Media
With the amount of conent out there you have to figure out ways to get people to read your content and having a great topic is sometimes not enought. So try and figure out the double whammy for your niche and I’ll do the same.
You can’t ignore social media!
Posted by seo in Bloggging, Video Marketing, social media on December 15, 2008
I just finished a webinar by ClickZ titled “Conversational Marketing: How to Develop a Successfull Social Media Strategy” presented by Dave Evans, author of Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day. The webinar should be available later today or tomorrow to watch. Dave Evans is a social media guru and was able to do a good job in the limited time he had to discuss this subject.
One of the key takeaways for me was that you can’t ignore social media. It’s here to stay and he gave a great example of a user that created a fake ExxonMobil twitter account and amassed a huge following while ExxonMobil was not aware of this. They finally found out and shut down the twitter account. Click here to see this shut down account. Mr. Evans thought that the better use of this twitter account with the following it had amassed would of been for the company to actually take it over and start using the twitter account for PR. I agree.
The webinar also talked about how social media is just one function of your overall marketing campaign and how this should be integrated in with your print, tv, and any other advertising campaign you’re running.
Social media involves participating with your potential customer or existing customers. Social media inlcudes some of the following mediums: blogs, microblogs (twitter), photos, audio, and videos
Get started today! emarketed currently is ramping up as well with social media and is offering this as a service to enhance your search marketing campaign. Sign up for a Twitter account today and start following us on Twitter and follow other companies in your related industry to see what they are doing in the social media space. Also start a blog with a free account through WordPress and follow other bloggers in your space. Also signup to YouTube as well if you have some videos or presentations to share with others. We’ve been using YouTube more agressively over the last few months and have found it beneficial to our business. You can preview our channel to see some of the videos we’ve created for our clients which has been part of a social media campaign for our clients which involved website video marketing. And lastly also sign up for a Facebook account and start using facebook even if you don’t plan on using it for your business right away. It’s imperative that you start using Facebook so you can see how people are using it and how adverters are starting to target their demographics.
Blogging Tips & Helpful Blogs to Follow
I’m currently putting together a presentation for an event we’re hosting in Los Angeles on November 12th in a few weeks that will discuss blogging, local search engines, social bookmarking, and how to monitor your business and was inspired to post this blog about blogging. If you’re new to blogging these links will be very helpful. I’d sign up to follow these blogs so you can see some successful bloggers in action.
You might also want to follow a few blogs that relate to your business so you can see what others in your space are doing.
Here’s a list of what to look out for when you’re observing these bloggers.
- Use of catchy headlines
- Links to other sites and blogs from within content
- Free downloads and how they capture your email
- How often they post
- Comments – post a link back to your blog if you can in the comments field (Start commenting on other blogs!)
- Ad-ons (what else do they have on their blogs that add value to the user experience – twitter feed, list of users, advertisers, links to other social media sites such as Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon)
And lastly I’d start putting together a list of ideas for your own blog. Thanks for reading! Please feel free to post some blogs you’ve found helpful.
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6 Tips to Start a Successful Blog
Posted by tommy in Bloggging on October 12, 2008
It’s becoming more and more apparent to me that you must learn how to blog to stay ahead in search marketing. Search engines love fresh content and blogs allow you to easily add fresh content. In the last 2 years I’ve noticed entire sites in our industry turn their entire site into a blog. The blog platforms out there are very robust and offer you many benefits.
Here are 6 tips to create a successful blog:
1. Get a unique domain name. If you sign-up for a blogger account or a wordpress account you’ll get a sub domain and it will be tougher for search engines to find your content. Domains are going for as little as $7 a year now so make the plunge and buy your own domain name. Go to mydomain.com if you’d like to register a domain today.
2. Setup hosting. Hosting is also very cheap these days. You can spend as little as $5 per month to host your blog. This along with the domain name adds up to $67 for the entire year. Make sure and pick a hosting company that has 24/7 support and that has been around for some time. There are many hosting companies out there and some will not be around for the long haul. A few of my favorites are Dream Host and Media Temple.
3. Create an outline ahead of time so you have some topics to talk about. Make sure it is relevant to your businesses. If you sell books online than you could do book reviews and link directly to the books on your site.
4. Promote your blog. There are blog directories out there where you can submit your blog so you’ll start to get some readers. Also promote your blog on your main site. We (emarketed) have a banner on every page of our site pointing people to our blog. Also include a link in your email signature to direct people to your blog.
5. Get involved with other blogs. Comment on other peoples blogs and include a link back to your blog. This falls in line with promotion as well but helps you with getting in to the habit of reading others blogs which helps you get familiar with blogging. You’ll start to notice how blogs are written, how people interact with blogs, and hopefully gain some readers for your blogs.
6. Setup Google Analytics to track your blog traffic. Google Analytics is an amazing free program that can be installed on your blog in a few minutes. Wordpress has a plugin where you install and just input your Google ID number for Google Analytics. You can see what site someone found you on, how long they stay on your blog, what size monitor they are viewing your blog on and so much more.
Hope this helps. Feel free to leave a comment if you think of some others that I missed. I know there are many but this will get you off to a good start.
blog directories, blogged, blogger, business, comments, dream host, dreamhost, email signature, emarketed, Google Analytics, hosting, links, media temple, my domain, mydomain, promote, wordpress
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