social marketing strategy

The first part of this blog post is a reiteration sent to past subscribers. If you don’t know me head right to the meat of the eHow marketing lesson below.

I know it’s been a long time since I’ve written. We have just passed the two year anniversary of losing everything in the house fire. It has been a long haul of hard work, sorrows and exhaustion with, and I’m being brutally honest here, very little joy. Under-insured we found ourselves in some tight predicaments and it didn’t help that once my family was emotionally settled, I slipped into many days of dark depression.

Some days, I’m still there.

Today, however, I’m on fire and excited about online marketing again. Web 2.0 properties still get me excited over their power in every aspect of promoting a business online.

You see you can only walk away from your online business for so long until:

1. your search engine rankings slip,
2. your strength of presence on Web 2.0 sites slip,
3. and with that, your income slips.

That’s when you’ve got to pull up your socks and get busy.

Marketing on eHow

If you’ve been with me for any length of time you’ll remember the day I introduced you to Squidoo.

You’ll remember when I taught how to publish and market on HubPages.

If you took decisive action back then I have no doubt that you gained a consistent stream of traffic, an increase in your search engine rank and – as it stands to reason – subscribers and sales.

eHow is a similar story, although much quicker in time to task.

When I came out of ‘the dark place’ I started at square one with my keyword research. Every string of phrases that I love to rank for showed top results from eHow.

eHow is a powerhouse. Tens of thousands of pages on just as many topics and it’s growing in leaps and bounds daily. User generated content wins every time. I talked about this in my 2005 newsletter from the Stampede Secret remember?

eHow Particulars

You can share in the ad revenue (if you’re USA based). I never bother with this anyway. It’s usually pennies on Adsense dollars that aren’t worth all the hard work. I usually leave it all to the Web 2.0 property for operating costs or in the case of Squidoo, for charities.

You won’t get ‘link love’ from them.

The main reason you want to publish an eHow article is for the Resources box. Write a great little keyword-rich article (400 words suffices), that references your site as the authority. Sure, google may not give you any rank for the link but the spiders will take note and humans will click it.

The best part? I’m in the #1 position in google for my three word key phrase. Not the eHow article. The page referenced in my resource box.

Giving Your eHow Pages An Adreneline Shot

Once I wrote the article it sat in my queue for 3 days until admins made it live. Once live, I pinged the page and RSS Feed at Pingoat (under 1 minute). For a little extra juice I submitted the RSS feed to 3 other feed directories. 2 minutes.

This strategy is what I call “promoting the promoters” and it has worked everytime I’ve done it. Whether you are linking to your money sites from a Facebook Fan page, a social bookmarking account, an article directory or any other Web 2.0 property – submit the promotion and the search engines will follow the links and do the rest.

Feel free to ask questions or comment below.

Get busy. Gain rank. Love your business.

Site Specific Training ehow.com, marketing strategy, search engine ranking, targeted traffic

If you know me then you know I’ve been in this business a long time. Not that all those years amount to a hill of beans if a person doesn’t change with the landscape of marketing online. I discussed this three years ago on one of my other sites that dealt specifically with gaining website traffic. I surmised that many of the old time marketers would be looking for alternate income streams if they didn’t get their social marketing in order and fast.

For the first 8 years that we marketed online it was pretty simple really. Create a product, invite affiliates to promote our product and sell a bunch of copies using an auto-delivery method. This often equated to tens of thousands of dollars overnight even for the small time marketer. (I’m not kidding. On a little project of my own with a big name as a co-author we rolled over $10,000 by morning. Back in that day John Reese sold a million worth of product in the first 24 hours.)

What many of the big names then did was (a) take a long vacation, (b) take a sabbatical, and/or (c) pursue other interests – until more money was required.

Today life isn’t that easy. The web is massive. People don’t trust marketing ads. Everyone knows now to look for an affiliate link and by-pass it. The recession slowed down the buying frenzy. I could go on and on reporting on the changes – large and small – the first of which you should understand right now: Google isn’t driving the web anymore when people want to purchase information, shippable products, or online services.

Nope.

Today’s business has to be everywhere the people are – Facebook, Twitter, and so on – as well as Google. A lot more work for the marketer right?

Well, yes. But also, no.

I’m going to suggest that once you’ve created your social marketing strategy, that you learn how to romance the Web 2.0 properties a little first and as a direct result you’ll win over Google and the other search engines in the process. (Hint: Today, Google would rather ‘discover’ your content than be told. Rather like a child that way.)

Don’t believe me? Take 15 minutes looking through some of the top results for competitive keywords in Google…

Who ‘owns’ the results today? The Web 2.0 properties that’s who!

Does that mean you can’t compete in those niches? Au contraire!

Your involvement on those same sites can get you the top results and as the people come, they will also find a direct link to your business site, proposal or product, newsletter or whatever else you want to call attention to.

Well that’s a bit of work isn’t it? Not only are you now expected to build your business website but you’re also expected to be active in social networking and have content on Web 2.0 properties! Not to mention you have a business to run! Who’s got the time for all of this?

Here’s the ‘easy’ answer…

The Do Nots: Stop promoting your home page. Slow your efforts at tweaking keyword metas for search engine optimization. Give up the back-linking game. Don’t ping your pages. In fact, throw out nearly all your old ways of working and promoting in the past.

The Dos: Post excellent, keyword-rich content. Delete your massive ping list (you know you were only doing that for Google’s sake anyway). Take a (keyword-rich of course) snippet of your content and post it to your social network pages and/or Web 2.0 properties. Bookmark your new content with (keyword-rich) tags. Let Google do the rest. Repeat again starting with posting new excellent, keyword-rich content.

Who This is For: This strategy works best for those who are running one to three websites only. Marketers who are managing (should I say juggling) multiple websites in as many markets need to automate or delegate (see below). Of course I’ll always take automation from a good service over delegation because outsourcing bills add up pretty quickly but you likely have your own ideas on how you want to run your business. The automation service I’ve been using since the original beta is here – and I’ve enjoyed top ranks for very competitive keywords as a result.

---

The link above is my link for the service – if you become a member please understand that this is a super robust service only intended for ‘players’ – full training is provided. You have to want to get and keep top placement in the search engines to make it worth your while and I will also suggest that you don’t over-do your automation. The service has more tools and more traffic and rank methods than you’ll ever need. You don’t need to use them all to see results. In fact in my earlier test I only did about 25% of the work suggested to gain my top positions and haven’t had a slip in Google since. Not to mention the increase in traffic as direct result of social and Web 2.0 marketing.

Advanced, Social Marketing Strategy content, google, seach engine ranking, social marketing strategy

If part of your social marketing strategy involves answering questions and positioning yourself as an expert on YahooAnswers, consider these two methods to make your efforts more profitable.

Be The First, Every Time

As discussed on the top tips for YahooAnswers, it is beneficial to be the first to answer a question. Here’s an easy way to do so without spending your day on the site. This technique helps you answer more questions before others by subscribing to the RSS feed for your chosen keywords or phrases. You then receive a listing of recently asked questions that are still open and available to be answered that are related to your chosen niche markets, as they’re posted. Read more…

Intermediate, Site Specific Training landing pages, marketing strategy, rss, save time, swipe file, yahoo.com, yahooanswers

Let’s talk about some brilliant ways to use FriendFeed…

Across the top of your Home page on the left half, you can see this:

The search feature is self-expanatory as it is a simple site search engine for your FriendFeed. If I want to find Seth Godin or maybe subscribe to people who are talking about him, I would type his name into the search engine and see what I can find. If I find someone worth subscribing to, I simply hover my mouse over it and click the subscribe plus sign that pops up.

Apart from using the search field let’s talk about the posting and advanced marketing options. Read more…

Site Specific Training friendfeed, rss, social network, targeted traffic

If you’re tired of logging in to twitter for every blog post you write, why not use the Twitter RSS Blog Poster? You can find it over at TwitterFeed.

This is a great tool for marketers involved in multiple niches with multiple Twitter accounts, but even if you just have one online business, you can use TwitterFeed to keep your Twitter followers updated on new posts without any extra effort on your part.

Twitterfeed needs to know your twitter username and password so it can post your blog updates to your twitter account. You can use your OpenID if you have one.

You simply need to login, add your blog’s RSS feed, and select a frequency (i.e. how often the service should check for new posts on your site).

Both RSS and Atom feeds are supported.

Site Specific Training blogging, saving time, twitter.com, wordpress

The world of Digg can be harsh to business owners and marketers just wanting to share their content or news with the world at large. What most fail to understand is that even though everyone knows about Digg, Digg is a world of it’s own. A world where not everyone, nor every story is appreciated. In fact Digg may not suit your business model or your marketing strategy, so I’ve put together a list of insights and tips on using Digg to help you decide – before you waste your time there.

1. Spend some time exploring the Digg site before committing to a user account. Be sure you understand how Digg works.
2. Pay attention to user comments, and be prepared to respond as well as become an active part of the conversation.
3. Get a feel for how and why certain stories become popular. This will give you a better understanding of Digg, and also give you insight into how to make your stories and postings more popular.
4. Once you sign up for an account, plan to participate daily. A sometimes-on, sometimes-off attitude will make you appear uncommitted to fellow Diggers.
5. Try to accumulate as many friends as you can. Much like Twitter, you want as large of a network as possible. This way, you affect more people with your message and gain more feedback into what the Digg world wants.
6. Start a buddy list. This list is designed to give you a one on one ability within Digg. It allows IM use, but try to not use this feature too much or you’ll turn people off. Read more…

Site Specific Training business, digg.com, rss, social network, website traffic