Blogging for Geniuses
Sometimes the element of blogging that holds people back the most is over-thinking their blogs. That’s why this post is entitled “Blogging for Geniuses” as opposed to ‘dummies.’ Many companies will engage in paid search management or marketing analysis to determine what topics to blog about on their corporate web pages. But for individuals looking to get their voices out into the blogosphere, sometimes the easiest way to get started is to shoot from the hip and write from the heart. Here are some practical tips for the wayward blogger to get started, or to augment their productivity and blog performance:
Don’t tackle subjects that are beyond your area of expertise.
Most any subject you can think of will be covered six ways to Sunday by people who probably know the facts a little better than you. Stick to topics that you know about from experience. It will imbue your posts with an air of authenticity that speaks to Internet readers who are already inundated with duplicate material on a daily basis. Be sure to include links to the articles from your research, especially if they’re from sites with a high page rank.
Research before you write.
Even though you should blog from the heart, you still want to have your facts straight. It’s also good to be able to bring interesting historical perspectives to contemporary issues. Research is the best way to fact-check your blogs and give them original angles.
Use keywords to make sure your blog is optimized for search engines.
Keywords are excellent for SEO, as they give weight to your blog in popular search engine results, and they also help you to keep your writing focused. Blogging is not rocket science, nor is it brain surgery, but it is a powerful Internet tool. Combined with email marketing, SEO on your blog can earn you cash, prestige, and a loyal readership.
Use social media to promote your blog.
Once the writing on your blog is focused, it’s time to focus your blog as a whole by getting it into niche corners of the Internet. The best way to do this is with social media sites like Twitter and Reddit. They allow you to highlight links to your blog among relevant readers. Plus, you can have your blog shared, reTweeted, and listed by others.
Blogging is not exactly an art form—or rocket science—but that doesn’t mean there aren’t some complex tasks you must face when you get going. Many of the tasks involve writing in such a way so as to connect with your audience. Focusing your subjects, researching your topics, using appropriate keywords, and promoting with social media are the right ways to enter the blogosphere.
Read MoreOnline Marketing Tricks of the Trade
A question you may be asking yourself if you run an online business is: who exactly are my customers? Sometimes it’s shocking to think that hordes of people want your service. You get that “they love me, they really love me” moment so typified in Hollywood movies. But think about it like this, you’ve done your research, planted the seeds of your business, and are now reaping your due harvest.
You may not need to use Anywho’s reverse phone number finder to learn every possible customer detail on record, but you do want to stay knowledgeable as to who your customer base is. The reason for this is that the market is changing constantly. Social media and search engine customization is always in flux, forever waiting for the next big game-changer or the next big algorithm. Here are a few tips that will help you as you move forward with your online marketing endeavors:
Separate your personal profiles and your business profiles on social media sites.
First of all, you don’t want to harass your friends and family with every detail of your business. Yes, of course, a few times a month it’s acceptable to toot your horn and use your personal profile to discuss an element of your business. But any more than that and you risk seriously annoying your most loyal brand ambassadors.
Increase your exposure.
Configure your site for social bookmarking so that your customers can pass on news of your service to sites like Delicious, Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon. Also, create a Wikipedia page for your business. Contribute as much to conversation marketing as you can by taking part in relevant forum discussions and participating in Google groups.
Optimize your site.
Nothing leverages you for Internet success more than SEO. Become friendly with search engines by creating a sitemap, XML if possible, and good internal linking structures. Not only does this make search bots more likely to find you, it makes your site more structured.
If you have the budget for it, create accounts on pay per clicks networks like Google and MSN.
If you’re running a cheaper campaign, look for quality impressions on lower tier networks.
We’re just scratching the surface here. There are hundreds of tools and strategies for beefing up your online marketing endeavors. A successful campaign will require a lot of research and scouring the marketplace for the best models in your industry. No matter what field you’re in, social media etiquette, social bookmarking and SEO are going to be major components to a healthy campaign. Figure out your budget and create a game plan.
Read MoreTechnology and Today’s Social Interaction
Guest Post by Pat Tate
Two sides of the same coin
We all enjoy spending time chatting with friends. It is such a wonderful world, isn’t it? It is such a pleasure reading through micro-blogs written by our friends and looking through the photographs on Facebook. It probably makes us happier than anything when our display picture is ‘liked’ by so many people.
Board games were fun, but that was a long time back when there wasn’t much interesting online. But today, the world is different! Information sharing and networking has never been easier. E-bay is such a boon, when you can pretend like you have spent days looking for that perfect gift for your girlfriend!
And then comes a point in time, when you lose all the fun abruptly! Your mother asks you to get yourself out of that room and go along to the vegetable market. The heat outside makes you wish you could shop for vegetables also online! However, tough times do not last, and you get back into the protected and very comfortable zone of the air-conditioned room with your very own laptop!
Things get better with each passing second in from of the laptop with you over whelmed in the extraordinary world of Internet while you conveniently forget that you were going to purchase Lego Hogwarts Board Game for your best friend’s birthday!
This surely is not an uncommon event. Everyone must have had a similar, if not exact occurrence in life. And surely, we all try and ignore it as stress and infrequent absent-mindedness. But there is something else that researchers have to say about it.
Well, for one point, the scientists working on theories that explain about stress and depression hold an opinion that the high levels of stress are directly related to their addiction to Internet and computer based life. They say that slowly but surely the whole world is turning into a place of web-addicts.
They say that a group of people classified as ‘heavy users’ of computers in general and Internet in particular, are found to have severe stress and also in a lot of cases acutely prone to depression. They find it extremely difficult to mingle with the normal social groups and show a variety of signs of a consistent unhappy life. Of course, this is only in regard with people who are heavy users.
Also, taking into consideration the fact that this research was done was back in 1998, when Internet was a treasure for a limited lot, we have to be forewarned that these symptoms would have grown more common in today’s world. We need more surveys and statistics in order to know how the world today is faring against the Internet invasion.
Despite the fact that it is a very small fraction of people who suffer this syndrome critically, it is important to note that a large majority of us are prone to it today. Most of the users of computers already show typical signs of stress and depression though the effects are very mild.
Carnegie Mellon University was one of the foremost places in the world where the issue of computer addiction was taken up seriously as a matter of mental illness. Lots of work in terms of study, research and documentation has been done since. Also, surprisingly, even without Facebook or Twitter still active in the plethora of online applications researchers at the university had found an abject need to study the negative consequences of computer addiction.
Today, computer addiction has overgrown to a stage where it has become a threatening possibility of an epidemic. Think about a time when pastimes were still playing a game of chess with a neighbor or practicing music. Surely, they would have thought it lame to imagine a world obsessed with the electronic machine, trying to make friends with people you don’t even know.
An addiction beyond anything that man had ever known before!
They said alcohol was the root-cause to all problems in life. With alcohol came instability, monetary loans and losses, losing track of personal life, irresponsibility, gambling and other vices. Trust me, Internet addiction leads to all these vices; in fact, only more directly. With Internet addiction, you tend to lose track of life and most importantly social responsibilities and the tactics to deal with the society.
A medium of communication that keeps you from doing it!
Yes, isn’t that exactly what the computer communication is doing to us these days? Yes, we agree the social-media is in itself a massive tool for communicating what you think to the world. It gives us a variety of options through which you could speak up your mind to the world. You could speak to people; make friends, exchange information and shop on the web. You could actually even look for Top Toy Christmas 2011, right a click away on the Internet, instead of going all the way to the store!
However expressive the ‘smileys’ in Facebook might get they surely cannot bring forth the expression that dwells on your face. Communication in the face-to-face mode is often a mixture of facial expressions, mannerisms and mild modifications in voice and tone. All this cannot be accommodated into the set of words that make up your conversation during the online networking.
Scientists say that meeting people everyday makes one a more confident person in general. Face-to-face communication on a daily basis apparently, also serves as a magnet to pull you away from web-addiction. And then, there is of course the advantage of making real friends that know you better than just your words.
In fact, some scientists also claim that friends made over Internet break up too easily. They say that these bonds are based on unreliable factors which make them weak and easy to lose. In turn, a life full of such empty relationships tends to become superficial and fake. It doesn’t take too long for a person to feel distressed about being unable to make real friends and the end-result without exception is low confidence and depression.
Smart bloggers- Shy speakers
The young mind is often the devil’s workshop, because it is so easily influenced. Parents have relentlessly found a problem with their kids’ addiction to a lot of things- junk food, television- and now the Internet. It is not surprising that there are so many under-age owners of Facebook profiles today!
We shouldn’t forget that it is often more serious an issue than just ‘sticking to the laptop always’. What is more important is the adverse effect of this inappropriate addiction.
Youngsters today often suffer from under-confidence and lack of focus. In working environments they find solace in closed cabins instead team building activities. This is not checked in the right time could lead to isolation from social circles, which is not such a good thing, after all!
Real problems need real solutions
Life is never fair. Life is imperfect. You might feel that you are a little too heavy for your height. You might think you do not have the most perfect face. You might think your more successful colleague is a fake. You might not want to face embarrassment, failure or disgrace.
The Internet, in these problems, offers a quick and short-term solution- escape. Social-networking sites offer you a new world. In this world, you can afford to be everything you actually wish you were in real life. You can be your hero, and can hear everyone sign your praise.
However, what is not in place is the fact that however much we choose to run from real problems, they keep chasing us back. Solutions lie not in the glorified fake world of social media but in the dull and boring everyday life full of challenges and questions.
Realize that escaping to a virtual world will never solve your problem. Find the nerve to tackle your situations with smartness and positivity, life in reality is much more beautiful than any glorified fake.
The common-place thing
This has over the past two decades become the in-thing. Back then, there were board games for people to play. And they would have expected that we would be playing better versions of the same board game in the years to follow. What we did, is buying a Lego Hogwarts Board Game online or rather playing an online version of it, altogether!
Everybody loves chatting online and creating profiles on Facebook. Each one is busy interacting with a large bunch of online-friends. Everyone loves doing this, so this must be the right thing to do. With so much inspiration, we all definitely know what is right. Right?
Sometimes, it might also be the easier thing to do, to sit online, than go out and play basketball with a bunch of friends.
A good thing after all!
It is common sense to understand that if something were to get as popular as the Internet and other forms of computer usage, it had a reason why it did.
The Internet is a big mass of information. It connects you to knowledge and people from different parts of the world. It creates a platform over which you could connect to a diverse range of people from different countries and languages. This surely gives you an edge over the non-users when it comes to the variety of friends you make.
The Internet is a place that connects people. It connects people with friends, buyers with sellers, actors with fans, writers with readers, and you with the world! You could get anything by booking it on the Internet- from a fresh pizza to Top Toy Christmas 2011.
There have been researches, which say that people connected through the Internet to a wider population have shown to recover from ailments by mutual understanding and connection due to similarity.
So, what should you do? Is the Internet good, or is it bad?
It doesn’t take extreme smartness to understand that everything in the world comes with advantages and disadvantages. It is always a package of good and bad and in the end, it is for us to choose what proportions of these qualities we choose into our personalized pack.
- Time limits are often easy ways to analyze your Internet usage. Once you know how much you are using today, you have your solution. They say, half the solution to the problem lies in understanding the problem itself.
- Read, write and listen to music. Try and list out what you used to do way before the Internet became such an indispensable part of your life. Make them a part of your life now. It’ll help you de-stress in addition to getting you rid of your web-addiction.
- Did you ever spend hours on the Internet changing pages and not sticking to anything in particular? It could be because of boredom. Maybe it isn’t really what you want to do, but end up doing as a mere matter of lethargy to think of options. Answer this question, and find a solution for many other unasked ones.
- Make a detailed time-table as to how you would rid yourself of the addiction. Like de-addiction from alcohol or drugs, Internet-de-addiction also needs a serious forethought a plan. Make it a point to plan easy steps and achievable goals and begin the program right away. Tomorrow never comes!
- Get yourself some exercise. Often it might happen that you might get stressed out working on the computer. Your mind might be tired, but the body not-so-tired. This is when it leads to insomnia and restlessness. Find the sport you enjoy most and engage a couple of friends to join you play it. This way, you’ll reduce stress and make friends; two birds in one catch!
We must always know and understand that the Internet got to our doorsteps all the knowledge in the world. It is a symbol of information and communication. It got to us people and places that would never have touched our lives otherwise.
We must take Internet as a boon and use it responsibly. Choose what part of it helps us become better people and carefully filter out the over-dependency. That is the key to a great, informed and happy life!
—
As a senior Pat Tate started to explore Internet Marketing. She uses her blog as a journal to keep track of the people and programs that she has met along the way. Grandma’s Internet Marketing/blog. She is an avid golfer and invites women to join her to talk golf at Women’s Golf Center. She has always loved toys and as the proud Grandmother of five beautiful Grandchildren she gets to play with new ones at Grandma’s Toy Review.
Read MoreHas Photo Sharing on Facebook Met its Match?
Photos are always an excellent way to attract more people to your personal website. Facebook has always been the best way to store your photos and share them with the people on your friend list. By sharing a glimpse into your personal life, your readers will associate a more human element with your website, blog, or company. Over the summer, Twitter unveiled a new photo sharing service that is set to rival Facebook’s dominance and make it easier to market your website.
Facebook has recently changed the privacy settings on how you can tag people and places when uploading a photo. The steps to posting a quality photo for your followers to see are more complex than they have been in the past making it a more selective way to share photos with friends and family.
Twitter’s ease of access and openness make it a simpler tool for people to share content quickly. Recently, bored New Yorkers stuck in their apartments due to Hurricane Irene used Twitter as an escape mechanism to deal with their boredom. As reported on Yahoo News, they posted pictures from the movie “The Day After Tomorrow” where the Statue of Liberty was destroyed by tidal waves.
If you are a marketer using an integrated social media campaign over several different platforms such as Facebook, Foursquare, Flickr, Twitter, and YouTube; it has always been a struggle to seamlessly blend all of the social networks together. By posting a photo or video and sharing your location directly to Twitter, the need to market on other social media websites becomes less of an issue.
A couple of months ago, in order to share photos through Twitter, users had to use a third party service like Yfrog, Twitpic, or several other similar sites. Facebook had the advantage of offering a centralized photo sharing service that made it easy and convenient to store content. Now with a centralized gallery available on user’s profiles powered by Photobucket, pictures sent to these photo sharing websites are collected and stored in a gallery on Twitter profile pages.
Because tweets are searchable through Google, you can optimize your post with organic SEO keywords so it will appear higher in search results. Twitter’s new photo sharing service will soon be available on smartphones and will be easy for LG Android phone users to instantly upload a photo for their followers to see. This will give you the opportunity to perform important search engine marketing while at the grocery store checkout lane or out for a jog. You can easily attract new followers while away from your computer.
Facebook is still a great way to organize and store personal photos, but Twitter’s new photo gallery is an excellent way to make your content public as well.
Read MoreFour Good Reasons to Try Photo Sharing on Google Plus
Guest Post by James Martell
We’ve waited long enough, don’t you think?
Google has had several false starts with Google Wave and Google Buzz, but it appears that Google Plus just might be some serious competition for Facebook.
At the moment, Google Plus is accessible by invitation only, so it’s hard to predict just how many Facebook fans will be willing to make the conversion. Based entirely on the response from habitual pic posters, however, I think Facebook ought to be sitting up and taking notice.
Charlie Sorrell offered some insight from his listening post in the Gadget Lab at Wired.com; “It has been said that the biggest feature of Google Plus is that it’s not Facebook. However, there’s another feature that may be of interest to all you Gadget Lab photo nerds out there: the photo integration. It turns out that G+ is a pretty sweet way to manage and view your shared photos.”
Since photo sharing is the most commonly used application on Facebook, it makes sense that Google Plus should launch with its photo sharing applications up and running. The question I wanted to answer, though, is how Google can improve on Facebook’s well-established and familiar photo gallery function.
Conveniently enough, I found four answers.
Google Photo Images Will Upload Faster.
The difference in loading time per picture between Facebook and Google plus isn’t impressive. Google won’t require you to toggle or configure pictures before loading them on Google Plus, while Facebook will. For the causal user, this will amount to no difference at all. However, if you come back from your Alaskan cruise with 200 pictures to post, an extra second or two per picture will make a difference.
Google Photo Images Will Look Better.
The difference between the visual display on Facebook and Google is very impressive. Google will accommodate high resolution shots of up to 2,048 pixels, so kittens on a laundry basket will look more adorable and your latest experiments in digital infrared photography will look like they came from NASA.
I have a friend and colleague in Brooklyn named Vinny, who recently attended the 4th of July fireworks show over the Hudson River. He took plenty of pictures with his Android and was able to upload them to Google Plus directly from his phone quickly and easily, and with stunning results.
Google Photo Images are Android-Friendly
As my friend Vinny discovered, you can easily access and upload to Google Plus directly from an Android. As several thousand annoyed consumers have discovered, iPhone and Blackberry users aren’t so lucky yet. Google has assured us that the iPhone and Blackberry apps are on their way, but Google’s favoritism may have been a good thing for the Martell household.
My son Justin loves his Android, and has been using it to educate me about the shortcomings of my iPhone. I may not be a fast learner, but I have finally decided that my next phone will be an Android, so I won’t lose much sleep if Google takes it’s time developing an iPhone app.
Google Photo Images are Easier to Share (or Not)
You and I are both aware that photo sharing is wildly popular, and we also know that it should be done responsibly. Google knows better than to promise a perfectly safe method of photo sharing, but they have come up with a few improvements over the Facebook model, and one in particular that has my attention.
Facebook allows you to categorize your visitors as “friends” or not, but Google allows you to place people in circles. The circles let you to share certain images with certain people and other images with others.
Of course, Google offers the same opportunity for tagging and re-sharing pictures, so you still shouldn’t post anything you don’t want your boss to see. However, using selective “circles” could keep your co-workers from getting too much information about your escapades at the Comic-Con last summer.
This Should be Interesting..
Google Plus is much more than a new Google photo gallery, and it will take more than photo sharing options to get folks to switch from Facebook. However, if the photo sharing options are any indication, Facebook could have a fight on its hands.
Google plus’ photo gallery will appeal to nearly everyone who posts snapshots. Grandparents will be able to safely post and share birthday party pictures, and whether the shots come from camera phones or infrared digital cameras, they’ll all look like they could be posted on the National Geographic site. Sort of.
So, is Google Plus the new Facebook killer? David Seaman from BusinessInsider.com weighs in with a measured response; Google Plus “.. will be a huge success, and Facebook is in trouble – although by no means obsolete.” It appears that only Facebook
can decide whether Google Plus will kill it or just make it stronger.
Hopefully, Facebook will respond with equal amounts of innovation and marketing savvy. If they do, then both the Facebook faithful and the Google groupies will be able to enjoy the same outcome; more toys for everybody!
—-
James Martell is well known as an affiliate marketing specialist in outsourcing and SEO. He is a sought after speaker, affiliate marketing trainer and podcaster. James is host of the longest running affiliate marketing podcast on WebmasterRadio.FM (since 2003), and creator of the Affiliate Marketers “SUPER BootCamp”, where he teaches others how to make money with affiliate programs. James lives in White Rock BC, a seaside suburb of Vancouver on west coast of Canada with his wife, Arlene and their 4 kids.
Read MoreHow to Add Twitter Followers Every Day…And for Free!
Guest post by James Martell.
If you have a Twitter account but are clueless about how to get more Twitter followers, then you’ve come to the right place! I’m going to share with you three very useful strategies that will enable you to get free Twitter followers, guaranteed.
Be Careful:
Even if, for some reason, you decide not to use my strategies, I do want to caution you about using software programs supposedly designed to increase your Twitter following. Most of these programs don’t work, and they certainly don’t teach you how to get more Twitter followers.
What’s worst of all is that they are almost always against Twitter’s term of service. This means that they can actually cause you to lose your Twitter account, leaving you even worse off than when you started. So stay away from these programs, and instead follow my steps for how to increase Twitter followers.
What’s Twitter?
I have to tell you that I was once in your shoes – maybe even worse. Just a few years ago, I didn’t get the “Twitter” thing at all. But I decided it would be a good idea to at least try it out.
Now, it’s a huge part of my business. I might not have millions of followers like all the major celebrities, but I do have 5,403 loyal followers to date. Also, since I’ve started using the three strategies we’re going to discuss, I’ve watched my following grow a little each and every day!
I can promise you that no matter what you’re promoting with twitter- whether it be kids rocking chairs, dental services, or joovy caboose reviews – my strategies can and will work for you.
Strategy 1: Syndicate an Online Newspaper
So, let’s get going with Strategy 1! For this strategy, all you have to do is syndicate your own online newspaper based on a Twitter list, user, or a keyword. Then, you publish the newspaper to your Twitter followers each day.
My newspaper, The Guest Blogging Daily, was created using paper.li, my Twitter account, and a Twitter list. You can check it out here: http://paper.li/JamesMartell/1308523225.
I absolutely love paper.li, and I can’t recommend it highly enough!
Not only does the site create a lovely paper, but it’s so very easy! Everything, and I mean everything, is 100% automated, so you barely do any work at all. The site posts to your Twitter when each daily paper is released, and it even tweets to your followers.
Plus, contributing authors are tweeted as well. These writers will often follow you and –best of all- retweet the newspaper. This means that not only will you gain the writers as followers, but some of their followers as well!
It doesn’t get any better than this. So, start out with strategy 1 today! Simply pick an interesting and informative topic for your paper and then use paper.li to get your idea up and running!
Strategy 2: Become a Guest Writer
There are a lot of sites out there – this one included – that are always on the lookout for guest writers. Also known as guest blogging, writing for such a site is an excellent way to gain positive publicity and, best of all, more Twitter followers.
When acting as a guest writer, make sure that you are a good communicator and that you provide worthwhile information to your readers. Take the time to respond to their comments and/or emails. The more they feel they know and can trust you, the more likely they will be to follow you on Twitter.
Of course, it’s up to you to ask them to do just that! A great place to include the invitation is in your author bio. I guarantee if you follow these steps, this will gain you more followers, so get started today!
Strategy 3: Using Your “Thank You” Page
The easiest and most effective strategy is the last one. Once you hear it, you’ll wonder why you didn’t think of it yourself- it’s really that simple. I can’t take the credit either, though. It was my friend, Joshua Sloan, the former Director of Online Marketing for the world’s largest and fastest growing hosting company, 1&1 hosting, who shared the idea with me.
To carry it out, you simply set it up so that visitors who fill out your option form, either to request more information or sign up for a newsletter, are redirected to a “thank you” page.
On this page, you then invite them to follow you on Twitter. Remember that these visitors went the extra step to find out more or request more information, and they gave up their contact information in order to do so. This makes it very likely that they will follow you on Twitter if you only ask.
The Choice is Yours:
I’ve laid out my three proven strategies, and they couldn’t be any more simple! Now it’s up to you to put them to work and to make them work for you. I personally guarantee that no matter what you’re promoting – and I mean anything from a Bumbleride indie twin stroller to dental services to bar stools – these strategies will work!
—
James Martell is well know for his podcasts and affiliate marketing trainings, as well as outsourcing and a specialist in SEO. James is host of the Affiliate Buzz podcast on WebmasterRadio.FM (the first ever and longest running podcast about the affiliate industry), and creator of the Affiliate Marketers SUPER BootCamp. He lives in White Rock BC, a seaside suburb of Vancouver on west coast of Canada with his wife, Arlene.
Read MoreSponsors
