All Entries Tagged With: "social media"
StumbleUpon Is Nixing Its Friends Limit
My favorite social website is StumbleUpon. I like it because it is so easy to use, especially if you have the SU toolbar. I can save a website that I like with one click and share it with a handful of friends very seamlessly. Plus, it’s fun to see what others are bookmarking too. Unfortunately, StumbleUpon has limited its users to only 200 friends. If you want more, you can’t have them so you’d better choose your friends selectively. This policy favors those who are less popular at the expense of those who are most popular. Is it fair?
Well, that’s a question for others to answer, but I’m happy to see that StumbleUpon has changed its policy. StumbleUpon is nixing its 200-friend limit.
Other changes are occuring at SU as well. I like the fact that StumbleUpon is deleting useless friends, known as “ghosts.” I blasted Propeller last week for making changes to its site and dropping half of my friends. In this case, if I lose a few friends at StumbleUpon, I’ll be quite glad. There are some users of SU who are just there to promote themselves and it’s really annoying. But it’s a time consuming process to go through all of your friends and delete the undesirables. So SU has offered to do that for me.
I’m anxious to see how the new changes at StumbleUpon will affect my experience there. I have high hopes and big expectations. Here’s to hoping StumbleUpon doesn’t let me down.
Does Your Blog Have A Purpose?
Many small businesses and companies entering the blog marketing arena for the first time are a little bit confused about the purpose of blog marketing. While it possible, and we’ve had some success with it, that blogging can lead to sales, that is not the primary purpose for starting a company blog. Most consumers are not going to make a purchase from a blog. That’s not what they read blogs for.
Blog marketing can be seen as a lot of like TV and radio advertising. No one buys an ad on TV or radio expecting the ad to sell their product – that is, unless they are in mail order. Local businesses that have a service or product to sell – especially retailers – use TV and radio to drive consumers to their businesses, either in person or by phone call, to discuss business opportunities. That’s when the sale is made – in a face-to-face or voice-to-voice meeting over the phone.
Blogging is a lot like advertising on TV or radio. The purpose is not to close the sale right then. You really just want to spark enough interest in the consumer to drive them to your website and that’s where you’ll close the sale. So what needs to happen before that?
How A Blog Fits Into Your Sales Cycle
Successful companies build their sales funnel then chart their strategy for making sure the sales process is followed. Do you have your online sales funnel drawn out? If not, then isn’t it about time?
For most businesses, the company website is the place where the sale is going to be closed. If you have a local retail store then you might use your website to provide information to people in your community who will drive to your store to purchase an item, or they may place the order online and pick it up in person. You may want them to call you to place the order. That’s fine. Whatever your sales cycle is, you need to define it and make it work for you. But where should your blog fit in?
Your blog should be seen as a pre-sales tool. Whether you close the sale on your website, use the website to drive traffic to your brick-and-mortar store, or have your customer call you, you’ve got to get them to the website. A blog is a great tool for driving customers to the website. Here’s why:
- Your website is a static tool that doesn’t change often
- Your blog is updated every day, increasing your chances of getting your website crawled daily
- A blog can be used to add new pages with fresh content to your website every day; that in turn brings the search engine spiders back to your website to crawl it more often
- An off site blog can be used to build link popularity for your website, which in turn affects the search engine rankings and authority of your site within its niche
- The longer you keep your blog running, the more effective you’ll be in gaining a loyal readership over time; that loyal readership can translate into increased links and traffic for your website
- Your blog can drive targeted traffic to your site as the traffic to your blog increases
So, to boil it all down, your blog can be used for three overarching purposes:
- Search engine saturation
- Link popularity
- Traffic
And, of course, all of that translates into branding.
Two More Tools To Make Your Blog More Effective
Your blog fits into your overall sales funnel by being a conduit between the search engines and your website. As more and more websites compete for your key terms due to more and more businesses going online, adding a blog can give you an added advantage in your niche. New businesses entering your niche to compete are less likely to start a blog so you’ll be ahead of the game. Your blog can be most effective in achieving the three stated purposes above if you make it effective in these three areas:
- SEO
- Social Media Marketing
- Viral Marketing
We’ve talked about SEO – remember? Search Engine Saturation and Link Popularity? – but what about social media and viral marketing? The key to social media is to use sites like Digg, Technorati, and StumbleUpon to reach traffic that you might not find through SEO. Plus, SEO and social media marketing reinforce each other. When fellow Stumblers and Diggers see your website in the search engines, they’ll recognize it because they’ve seen you on the social sites. Again, that’s branding. That’s why we offer the additional service of social bookmarking, to add to your edge.
Viral marketing is a bit different. Social bookmarking can be a part of that, and so can SEO. But viral marketing involves giving your customers a reason to do your marketing for you. One term that is used is customer evangelism. It’s a term that encompasses the idea of customers talking you up and driving traffic your way. One tool that is excellent for doing that is a newsletter. Some of our customers use a blog marketing newsletter to keep loyal readers. The newsletter goes out weekly and highlights that week’s blog posts so that busy professionals who don’t have time to stop by your blog every day and haven’t quite figured out the RSS thing (which is most small business people and new Internet consumers) can receive your newsletter in their e-mail inbox and visit the blog posts that interest them based on this unique viral marketing tool – and you can make it easy for them to share your newsletter with their friends!
So, you see, it’s all about your marketing funnel. If you have not added a blog to your sales cycle or you’re not quite sure what a blog can do for your company, find out more by paying a visit to Blog Content Provider or give us a call at 786-317-8774.
Two Social Media Sites You Can’t Live Without
I recently discovered two social media websites that are absolutely invaluable for any website in any industry and I highly recommend them. One of them is a lifestream website that will organize all of your social media efforts under one umbrella. Lifestreaming is becoming popular now in ways that a few years ago were unimaginable.
Lifestreaming is all about keep tracking of your online life. If you have accounts at several social media websites (and who doesn’t?) then it can get quite complicated trying to keep track of them. That’s where Profilactic comes in.
Profilactic is the best lifestreaming tool available. It’s totally free and will help you keep track of 142 social sites. You can add your blog URLs and RSS feeds to them as well. In fact, if a site isn’t listed with Profilactic then you can add that site to your account settings and Profilactic will track your activity and your friends’ activities. Instead of visiting every single site every day to see what is happening, you can view them all in one interface at Profilactic and visit only the sites that you need to visit when you have new activity on them. This is a huge time saver and a worthwhile tool.
The second tool that I recommend is StumbleUpon Exchange. If you have a StumbleUpon account, this is an incredible tool. When you sign up you are give five points and you are allowed to add as many sites that you want to the exchange. You spend three points for each site you add so you can only add one site initially, but you do earn a point for every site in the database that you stumble. And there are thousands of sites in the database!
The idea is to stumble the sites of other members of the exchange and they in turn will stumble yours. This is one incredible tool. It is perhaps the easiest, fastest way to ensure that you get your websites stumbled and I can’t think of any other tool that benefits users the way that StumbleUpon Exchange can.
You can also earn 10 stumble points through the exchange by referring other users. Click my link from this blog and I’ll get 10 stumble points. Then you can join and recruit your friends. Market your website and your blogs through StumbleUpon Exchange.
I encourage you to sign up for these two web sites today. Login right now before you forget:
Contrarian Blog Marketing Advice From One Remarkable Blogger
I like Michael Martine. He’s a competitor, but he’s earned my respect.
Recently, Michael posted a video on YouTube in which he tells his audience NOT to use social media to market their blogs. It seems like bad advice on the surface, but I’ll have to agree with him. The nuance that might go missed by some is that social media is a good tool for marketing, but that using it as a tool to harp on your blog is not a good idea. You’ll have to see Michael’s video to catch the full drift, but do pay attention to what he’s saying because it makes a lot of sense:
If I wasn’t having a bad hair day and wasn’t pressed for time this morning, I’d offer a video response. I would like to address one thing about what Michael says in the video, namely, that he got no benefit out of marketing on Facebook. Frankly, I’m not surprised. Facebook is not a good venue for Michael’s services and it likely wouldn’t be for ours either. LinkedIn, however, is a much better social media choice for Michael, and for us at Blog Content Provider.
Like Michael, I get annoyed with the silly vampire bites, what’s your favorite color questions, super duper walls, and other crap on Facebook. I think a part of that has to do with your choice of friends. But even if you choose good friends, you can still get poked by retards. It can be quite annoying.
LinkedIn is set up differently. There’s no poking, no gargoyles, no silly little high school dating questionnaires or virtual college frat parties. It’s a professional organization that caters to traditional professionals who just want to do business with other mature and professional people online. Much more conservative. That’s why I don’t like it.
Why Social Networks Are NOT One-Size-Fits-All Prom Dresses
Now, wait a minute, Allen. You just said LinkedIn would be a good place to network for BCP.
Yes, I did. And it would. If I had the time to actually get in there and rub elbows with people. But I don’t.
I could make the time. It would probably benefit me if I did it right. But I don’t have the inclination – right now. That could change in the future. But right now, LinkedIn is not the social network of choice for me. I am working on other things.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m totally dedicated to BCP. But I also have my own websites. I’ve been writing poetry for over 20 years and I have a poetry website with almost 100 pages and a blog with 150 blog posts. My poetry blog is on page 1 of Yahoo! and moving up in the other search engines. I have pages on my website that are on page 1 of Google, page 1 of Yahoo, and ranking well at MSN and Ask also. I have discovered that I can bookmark a blog post or web page at StumbleUpon and get massive traffic. I can bookmark the same blog post at Digg and get nothing. On the other hand, I can bookmark a BCP blog post at StumbleUpon and get only meager results, even less at Digg, but if I bookmark it at Propeller or a bookmarking site designed specifically for Internet marketers then I’ll get much more traffic.
The reason why I think that happens is because of the personalities of the different social media sites. People on StumbleUpon are a lot more free wheeling and artsy than people on Digg. There is a type of informational blog that will get a lot of votes on Digg if the information is valuable and those pages don’t do real well at StumbleUpon. When we apply this principle to the social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn, it becomes evident that you have to use the networking tool that is most appropriate for your audience.
Which Social Network Is Right For You?
Poets like to hang out at Facebook. When I browse the Facebook profiles, there are so many groups and applications that appeal to people who write poetry, fiction, and other types of literature. There aren’t so many on LinkedIn.
That doesn’t mean that LinkedIn is a bad place to network. It’s just a bad place to network for people promoting themselves as a poet. On the other hand, if you are trying to hire yourself out as a business writer then LinkedIn is the perfect place to network. Facebook may or may not be based on who your target market is.
Since I only have so many hours a day that I can devote to social networking activities, I’ve decided to spend my time on Facebook instead of LinkedIn. I’m not worried that my blogging business is going to suffer if I don’t network. On the contrary, BCPs blogging business is steadily growing. But if I don’t spend a little bit of time each day promoting my poetry then it won’t get promoted. That’s why I make the point to do a little bit of networking and content creation each day, usually in the evening.
The Right Way To Use Social Networks
Now that you understand where I’m coming from, what’s the best way to use a social networking site? I believe that Michael Martine has hit it on the head. Instead of promoting your blog or your website, which people don’t really care about, promote yourself. People join the social networks to make friends, not to find material that they can read. They have plenty of that. What they don’t have plenty of are friends who take a genuine interest in them and what they have going on in their lives.
When I was an active user at MySpace, I got frustrated at all the comment spam that came across my profile. I, like a lot of other users, would accept any and every friend request without considering whether or not that person would truly be of benefit, or whether I could benefit them. I was going about it all wrong. I ended up abandoning my MySpace profile because of it.
Social networks are not friend collection receptacles. They are places where you can find people interested in the same things that you are interested in. If you do it right, you’ll make friends and those friends will eventually turn into business partners, customers, or other people who can benefit your business (and your business theirs). Do it wrong and you’ll end up frustrated, on the outs, and wondering why no one likes you. I hope this improves your social karma.
