More Food for Thought

The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best is now. Chinese Proverb

Part 2 of So What Comes Next - How to Market Using Social Media

You are at the point where you have a blog posting schedule. You are advertising your blog posts on FaceBook and Linkedin. You are also tweeting regularly about your blog posts, other interesting things and, of course, re-tweeting other peoples tweets. While you are accomplishing a lot doing these things, there is still a lot of Social Media Marketing to do.

All of your Social Media Marketing efforts are designed to drive traffic to your blog. Beyond FaceBook, Twitter and Linkedin, there are many more Social Media platforms and applications that you should be using to do the same thing.

First, you need to start with visuals. You should be using photos, drawings and videos in your blog to make it easier to read. Further the use of visuals, and especially videos, enhances the sales potential of your blog. Simply put, today, people are driven by video. They simply respond more favorably to a blog that has it.

Your photos should be included in your blog, and they should also be served through a photographic site such as flickr (which is free, by the way). Similarly, your videos should be included in your blog and served from a site like YouTube (or Vimeo if you prefer better video quality).

Once the photos and videos are set up, you should show them (or the link to them) on your Facebook and Linkedin accounts. You should also be tweeting about the visuals as often as possible. Don't go overboard here. Keep the material fresh. Two or at most three tweets of a single image, and then move on to tweeting the next image.

Photos and Videos don't necessarily have to have anything to do with your blog, even if you put them in your blog. The idea, again, is to get something out into the Social Media world that broadcasts your brand. I often tweet images directly from my iPhone to both my photographic and Social Media Twitter accounts, that are just nice, colorful pictures. Nothing to do with the blog or it's posts subjects. Tweeting the images keeps my name in front of people.

So now you are broadcasting your blog and the visuals that come with it. The next step in your Social Media plan are bookmarking sites. The top two bookmarking sites are Digg and Stumbleupon. With bookmarking sites you want to get someone else (say your best buddy or Social Media Marketing Consultant) to submit your blog to these two sites. You can submit your blog yourself, but the blogs credibility gets marked down and it gets seen much less often.

Once your blog is posted to a bookmarking site, other people will see it and give it a positive rating (negatives are possible too). The more positive ratings your blog gets, the more it gets served up and seen by other Digg and Stumbleupon viewers. The extra exposure is obviously a good thing.

You can also submit just your pictures (which is why we needed a flickr account) or Videos (likewise) to the bookmarking site. They too will be rated and can direct more traffic to your blog.

There are still more Social Media Marketing platforms and tools. I will write about more for you at another time.

Your questions and comments are always appreciated.

On Starting

"The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing."  
Walt Disney

Numbers

Tonights numbers show that I have close to one 1,000 (965 actual) Twitter followers across my three Twitter accounts. Just a few short months ago I had none. The business is growing, it is doing well. It requires a lot of work, but t can be done. A hopeful thought going forward. I think persistence, a positive attitude and quality content all help in my success. Would you like me to help with your Social Media Marketing?

I am now offering Social Media Marketing consulting services. My services are affordable and the service is personal. Check out the Services page on this blog for more information. Or just call me at 203 909 0697. Cheers, Brad

Food For Thought

"There are a million and one ways to make a million dollars" - Timothy Ferriss 

Social Media Marketing and Search Engine Optimization

You can have simply the best web site or blog in the world. That will not matter if no one can find it. Social Media Marketing does a great job of getting your blog found. But if you leave your marketing to just social media you are not getting the maximum return from your web site.

To get the most exposure for your blog you should be using both Social Media Marketing and Search Engine Optimization (other marketing avenues such as newspaper and radio advertising, mailing lists and even handing out flyers should not be forgotten but are beyond the scope of this post).

Search engines (such as Google) are designed to return to the user the best return for the key word used.  Your job then is to develop tactics for your blog that will bring you as close to the top of the search engines rankings as possible for the keywords for your blog.

Choosing the correct keyword(s) for your blog is a huge topic involving statistical testing and analysis, using a variety of quantitative tools. As an introduction, you should keywords for your blog that you would use to find your blog. If you are a photographer, for example, you would use the simple keyword, photographer. But a word of caution here. If you use a simple key word like photographer, you will never be on the first return page and if you are not on that page you may as well have not bothered.

Think about how many photographer are out there with blogs and web sites. I just did a key word search on the word photographer and Google returned 332,000,000 results. Impossible. To get to the top of a Search Engine return you are going to have to dig deep into what it is that you are. For example, if you specify "Journalistic Style Wedding Photographer in Burlington Vermont" (if that is your speciality) you are competing with far fewer returns.

Once you have determined your keywords you take the following simple steps to get the best possible search engine ranking for your blog:

1. Use key words in your blog title. Journalistic style wedding photographer located in Burlington Vermont is too long to use as a blog title, but shortening it to Journalistic Wedding Photos could work. 
2. Create page titles for your web pages or blog post titles for your blog that have key words in them.
3. Have key word rich posts. There is a lot of debate on how many keywords should be used in which parts of your post. If you use too many, your writing is going to become unreadable, too few and you won't get a good search engine ranking. The old school line is that you should have many keywords in the first 100 words of your post. I think you should remember who you are writing for, an audience that you hope will one day buy from you, and write your blog posts first and foremost to deliver information to them. Don't count key words used. Just write for your audience. You can't go wrong when you do that.
4. Build back links with influential sites. When someone else puts a link to your blog in their site, they have back linked to you. The more back links you have, the more credible and reliable Google sees you as being. Further, the more influential, which is to say, the more back links the site linking to you has, the better it is for your search engine ranking.  There is an entire industry that has grown up around getting back links. I will post on this further at another time. For the moment, suffice it to say that if you are buying back links, they are not going to do you much good.
5. Always test and measure the effectiveness of your key words and their impact on your search engine optimization.

Focus on your Social Media Marketing, but do keep these actions in the back of your mind and implement them whenever possible. Combining Social Media Marketing withe Search Engine Optimization is going to increase your visibility which should in turn, increase your cash flow.

On Naming Your Blog and or Website

The name of your website and /or blog is important, in terms of both branding you as a professional and helping your site be found.

When you start your blog you will have to create a name that will read, "yourname.blogspot" if you are on Blogger or "yourname.wordpress" if you are on Word Press, where "yourname" is the name you choose. The .blogspot or .wordpress suffix makes your site name look unprofessional (at least by comparison to your competition) and makes your name needlessly long. Everyone is used to looking for website with a .com suffix. You will lose traffic when searchers look for your site, type in the .com address, get frustrated and move on to their next task. Attention spans are limited. Make sure you make yourself easily findable.

You should purchase a web site domain name, such as "yourname.com" and set up an automatic forward so that any time someone types "yourname.com" they are automatically forwarded to your blog. You then use the web site name in all of your promotional activity.

Web site domain names are easily purchased with prices ranging from $5 to $15. Automatic forwarding should be done for free by the company you purchase the domain name from. If it is not, move on to another company. There are hundreds. I purchase all my domain names and set up forwarding from www.GoDaddy.com. If you prefer, this is a task I can do for you.

Ideally, The "yourname" section of your blog address will match that of your web address. For example, if you want your blog name to be XYZCompany.blogspot.com then your web address should be www.XYZCompany.com. You may need to search around for different names depending on their availability.

Your site name should fit three criteria:

1. It should be short,
2. It should not contain hyphens, and
3. Description is more important than cuteness.

Short names and names without hyphens make your site name easier to remember. A description of what your site is about in three words or less will attract more readers. Further, the descriptive words should be keywords for your site. This will help with your Search Engine Optimization and lead to more traffic (SEO is a huge topic that we will get to later.).

Your web site name will have the option of coming with a number of different suffixes. You should choose a .com, .net or .org. These are the three most used in the USA and, reportedly, these three get higher rankings in Google searches (although Google denies this). I only use .com. and suggest that you do as well.

Finally, while you are about buying domain names, you should buy the domain name with your name as well. If you are, say, Susan Martison, you should buy the domain name, www.susanmartinson.com. If that name is taken, you may wish to consider www.suemartinson.com or www.smartinson.com or some other variant thereof. Purchasing your name as a domain name will open many options for you as you build your business.

Blog Writing, Part 1 On Form

Your blog post must be written to catch the readers interest within the first sentence or two! Your opening must be compelling and well written. Remember that your blog reader is always crunched for time and bombarded by other media. Respect your reader and given them your information in a concise and readable format.

At the same time, while respecting your reader, you should be writing for them at around the sixth grade level. Your average reader, like the average newspaper reader, has the reading skill and attention level of a 6th grader. People have come to expect material to be written for them at this level.

Your blog should be between 350 and 400 words. The average newspaper story is about 550 words. This size is not an overwhelming task to read or to write.

Keep your paragraphs on the short side. Aim for three to four sentences. Using more, while necessary at times, will decrease the readability of your post.

Whenever possible, break up your text with visuals. A graphic or photograph will make your text more readable. A quote from the text works too. Never have one long dense block of text. No matter how interesting, the average reader is just going to pass on it.

The visual does not necessarily have to relate to the post, but if it can, so much the better.

Along the same line, lists and numbered items help move your readers eye through the text, while at the same time breaking the text into readable pieces. Numbered items also provide your reader with a specific end point, so they can know how much time they will have to allocate to reading your post.

While your information may be extraordinary, if you present it to your reader in a format they find difficult, the information will not get read. Keep your form simple. Keep your ideas readable.

So What Comes Next

You have your blog started and an account on FaceBook. Your Twitter is set up and your picture has put the final touch on your Linkedin profile. You are ready to go, to start your Social Media Marketing effort. So now what the hell do you do? Perhaps a more daunting task even then setting up your Social Media Marketing platforms, is figuring out what to do with them when they are set to go.

Step by step, here is what you should do:


1) You are going to need content for your blog. Your blog content needs to be informative, well written and brief enough to be wholly consumed in the short time that most blog posts get from their readers. I will have more on guidelines for the forms of blog posting later, but for now, aim for about 350 to 400 words. You should post a minimum of two blogs per week. More is better, but don't burn yourself out too quickly.

2)  Once your blog is posted, Tweet about it.  Tell all your followers in 140 characters or less about the great information you have put out on your blog. The purpose of the exercise, remember, is to funnel traffic to your blog.  Always Tweet with your blogs, but find other times to Tweet as well. A great tool to manage your Tweets is TweetDeck.

3) Post information about your blog to your Linkedin account. Linkedin is a bit of a stuffy place, so choose carefully which blog posts to tell your Linkedin followers about and what form you let that information take.

4) Facebook, perhaps that should be in all CAPS. Facebook has 500 Million users. Let them know as well about your blog post. Put a summary of your blog post up on your Facebook account. The summary can be up to 400 characters long, but keep it shorter. Tease your reader here and entice them to click through to your full blog post. Remember to have a link to your blog visible and easy to click.

5) Any photos or video that you have that help tell your story should be freely used along the way.  You may have to open a YouTube account to help with the video, but the extra effort is so very worthwhile. Statistics show clearly that visuals and particularly video, command attention.

6) You must be Retweeting. Retweeting is an art form and as such, gets a whole blog posts to itself