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

New and Amazing YouTube Numbers

The Official Google Blog has put out some pretty outstanding growth numbers for YouTube.

Yesterday, more than 48 hours worth of video (that is two days worth!) were uploaded to the YouTube every minute. That represents a 37% increase over the last six months and a 100% rise over the past year!

Think about that for a moment. That is a lot of video to watch.

And ... Over last weekend, YouTube viewers drove this Social Media monster past the 3 Billion (that is Billion, not million) views a day mark. That represents a 50% over last years.

Google happily provides the following information to put that 3 billion views in perspective:

That number of views is the equivalent of nearly half the worlds population watching a YouTube video every day, or its is equal to each and every citizen of the USA watching at least nine videos a day.

These are the kind of numbers that I find staggering.

Getting Started in Social Media Marketing

Just have a look at that photo to the right. It is filled with the labels of just some of the organizations, business and web sites that are involved in the Social Media Marketing world. Just some! And then they all have interconnections. Seem impossible? It did to me when I first started doing Social Media Marketing. But I took the time, approached the project step-by-step, and am in the process of mastering the challenge.

You can do that, or you can make your life simpler, focus on your business and hire me to do all that work for you. (Yup, that was a plug for me, it is my blog after all and this is what I do for a living, so I had to throw one of those in somewhere).

But whether you use my services or take the do it yourself route, you are going to have to break your Social Media Marketing campaign down into small, doable steps.

The first step may seem ridiculously simple, but taking the time to think about it now will save you grief later. That step is choosing your name.

The choice of your name is critical because what you choose to use as your name is going to represent your brand. It is going to be used on all of your Social Media Marketing platforms to tell the world who you are, what you are about and where you want to go with your viewer.

It is said that the first impression in business is made during your handshake and that you have only 5 seconds to make that impression good. The same applies to your brand name. In this day of information overload, your efforts are going to often be judged by your brand name. Does it reflect what the viewer wants to find? If it doesn't, they are moving on fast.

Sometimes your name is the best brand name. For my art and photography site, I use just www.bradrickerby.blogspot.com.  You might wish to use your name and a professional accreditation. My mother would love it if my brand were, say, www.drbradrickerby.com (alas for her, that brand does not exist). Or you might want a brand name that is memorable, perhaps silly or whimsical and talks a little about what your brand is about. I just opened http://muttsmuttsmutts.blogspot.com.  I'll bet you know what that one is about!

Your brand name should also be short (a rule I violate frequently) because a short brand name will be more memorable and easier to type. And you should be sure that your brand name is available across all the platforms you will be using (typically a blog, Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter).

It really is not as complicated as it sounds and you should be able to come up with a brand quickly. But is is important to give it just a little thought.

Next, you need to define the goal of your Social Media Marketing Campaign. I will go into that next.

Finding Twitter Followers

In Twitter there are a number of ways of finding people and of having them find you. First, there is the whole following dance, which will follow shortly. The second is through keywords, which are called hashtags (#) on Twitter. The use of hashtags is a fundamental formatting thing (one of the things I am going to write about in my Twitter usage guidelines. 


But for now ... after the message of your tweet you should put a number of keywords in that Tweet. These keywords are formatted so they read, #keyword, or #marketing, or #landscapephotography (Tweeter only reads the first word after the #, so two or more word keywords have to be compressed) or #Hypnosis or ... well, you get the idea. 


Twitter then takes all the hashtagged words and compiles a list of them. You can look up everyone who is tweeting about marketing or hypnosis or anyone of more interest to you, like everybody who has used a hashtag in your client demographic (we have to talk about client demographis one day soon). 

Knowledge

"To know that you do not know is the best. To pretend to know when you do not know is a disease". Lao Tzu.