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How To Motivate Employees to Contribute Content

cgseo — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 14:10:22 +0000

Sometimes it can be like pulling teeth to try and get others in your organization to contribute to your content development strategy. Of course the excuse is inevitable “I have no time” or “I am still working on it”, amongst probably hundreds of other reasons why employees can’t help. But its funny how when you add an incentive with it, everyone can somehow find time to contribute. Like magic, peoples schedules suddenly free up or that post they have been working on for 2-3 months, is finished the next day. Lets face it, many people are not motivated unless they are compensated for their time. Which is understandable. If someone is going to take time out of their day or work on something at night or on the weekend, they should see some reward or gain from it. Before we get into the different ways you can encourage employees to contribute content, it should be said that you should set standards to keep only high-quality content that is being produced. If you just say, we will give each employee $25 per post…you will be amazed at what will get put in the queue to be approved. Depending on your blog or type of content you are looking to create, try to make sure there are best practices being implemented. Internal Linking to Other Posts Write About Topics That Have Not Been Covered Yet Add Relevant Images and Videos Minimum Word Count (debatable depending on the post style) Ok, so now lets talk about the different ways you can go about motivating your employees to help contribute to your content development strategy. Performance-Based

Social Media Time Saving Tip

cgseo — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 14:20:43 +0000

What I am going to share with you is not new, but I am surprised at how many people do not use this time saving source. Ping.fm is a resource that I want everyone to know about. If you aren’t using it then you need to rethink the reason why. If you are using this wonderful tool then maybe I can share with you some more helpful tips to help in your successes. In there own words: “Ping.fm is a simple and FREE service that makes updating your social networks a snap!” To me the best part is that the service is free and you can post from anywhere with their mobile, instant messenger and email apps. They also work along with hundreds of other 3rd party apps to make updating your status simple and fast. Ping.fm was recently acquired by Seesmic making the service much more powerful. You can send an update and it can be submitted instantly to 50+ social networks including Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Ning, WordPress, TypePad, Yammer, Status.net and many more. My favorite part about using this valuable resource is that I can post from my iPhone from anywhere sharing with my friends and family something cool. For example, I recently sent an update to all my friends to over 20 of my social networks right from my phone. The update was sent from the beautiful mountains of Utah stating that I had just finished a Half Marathon. Here is a very short video I created showing how easy it is to sign up and start using Ping.fm today: There is also a trick to update your Google Buzz account via Ping.fm and here are the steps: 1. Of course you must have a Ping.fm account, sign up here – http://ping.fm/ 2. Add Gtalk by clicking “Add Network” at the http://ping.fm/networks/ page 3. Next enter your email address and password associated with your Google buzz account then click submit: 4. And for the last step, you need to add Gtalk as a connected service by logging into your Google Buzz account. See images below for steps: That is it, your Ping.fm posts will now automatically post to your Google Buzz account. Most other social networks are much easier to add as you can see in the video I shared above. There are some things you need to know with using Ping.fm as a social media tool. You need to remember that it is simply a tool that will help save you time. It is not an automated tool that will make you millions or get you more followers necessarily. I see many people abuse the tool to the point that they are not being social anymore with their friends and followers. As we know, Social Media is all about the conversation and being social. If all you are doing is submitting updates and not a part of the discussion then you will loose out on what social media really is. Here are some helpful tips and reminders to save time but still be social: Only use Ping.fm as a status update service and not your only means of connecting to your social networks Post your status updates and make sure you still login to your social network profiles to be a part of the dialogue Don’t overdue it with your submissions, you will loose a lot of friends and followers this way Use other tools to help you in the conversation (e.g. Seesmic , Hootsuite , or Tweetdeck ) In conclusion, Ping.fm is simply a tool for us as marketers and individuals to use to help us save time when conversing and sharing stuff with our friends and followers. This free resource has the ability to help us be more productive if we use it correctly and wisely. Bear in mind that any tool can be abused, so just be careful. Also always remember to have fun. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Social Media Time Saving

Facebook: What, Why, Who, How?

cgseo — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 13:00:26 +0000

I’ve noticed more and more Facebook Fan Pages popping up and it’s great. Fan Pages are a great way to connect with people, build your credibility and ultimately generate leads and grow your business. The problem is most people are making one BIG mistake when it comes to their pages. More on that in a minute. First let me give you an overview on what I’m going to talk about today…. What Are Fan Pages? Why Are They Important? Who Can Build A Fan Page Who Should Build A Fan Page The “Big Mistake” So Many People Are Making How To Build A Good Fan Page What Are Facebook Fan

80% of Google Buzz Powered by Bots & Feeds

cgseo — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 21:55:50 +0000

Google Buzz may be a centralized microblogging system, but for the most part, its not run by humans .. instead; robots. What better way for Google to gain access to real time Twitter data (if Microsoft ever buys Twitter and blocks Google access) than have Google users run auto tweeted material through Buzz? PostRank has an interesting study on the percentage of Buzz that is powered by feeds and bots. Turns out, approximately 60% of the content on Buzz is from Twitter! Many users have hooked up their accounts to automatically repost their content from Twitter either directly, through FriendFeed, or via another service. The runner up to Twitter? Another set of bots! This time, it’s automated alerts from feeds, e.g. CNN publishes a new story and a bot pushes it out to the Buzz stream. All in all, those two sources account for almost 90% of the Buzz stream, and even in the remainder there is a long tail of Google Latitude updates, ping.fm, and others. Unfortunately, there just doesn’t seem to be much original and/or human-generated content in Buzz. For one, I’d like to see a comparison between Buzz and Twitter on these stats, but for the most part, this is what I expected out of Buzz … another version of Friendfeed. How about you? Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . 80% of Google Buzz Powered by Bots &

Who Doesn’t Need SEO

cgseo — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 14:00:20 +0000

Aaron Wall of SEOBook was recently interviewed on Small Business Trends Radio about SEO. During the interview, Aaron was asked which companies should and shouldn’t invest in SEO. His answer, and the question itself, brought up some legitimate questions that I hadn’t yet seen addressed in the SEO space. Does every company really need SEO? Does every website out there have a legitimate need to link build and optimize on page? Unfortunately for us SEO professionals, the short answer is no – the long answer is this post. Completely Forget About

Local Business Listing Marketing vs. Data Services

cgseo — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 13:31:54 +0000

As local business marketing as become a hot topic in the Internet marketing industry, business owners are finding themselves confused about the various types of services that can help them tap into this local marketing tool. Of course additional confusions arise from the variations of service fees too. Let’s take a look at defining these services, the fees and local listings as a marketing tool. This will also shed some light on why there are monthly management fees by the marketing services. Local Listing Data Services We have discussed this service in a previous article about companies that provide “get listed” services. What this service provides is to push your business information as data into local listing websites. The entire process is automated through programs known as API’s. There are limitations as to what information can be submitted. They certainly do not allow you to protect your brand by claiming your listing through this process. The claiming process is most important as it allows you to manage your local business listing not only with marketing information, but also consumer reviews. Our argument with this service is that most businesses are already listed and why do you need to get “get listed”? Fees for this service are less than $100 per year Local Listing Marketing Services This type of service is the service that will allow you to use your local business listing as a local marketing tool to reach the local consumers through web searches and mobile searches most effectively. Because this service is a combination of automation and manual labor the fees are higher and range with one time setups to ongoing monthly management fees. Here are some of the services that are included with local business listing marketing services. One question you should ask yourself. Do you have the time resources to manage this marketing tool at multiple local listing websites? This will certainly help answer if you need help with this process. 1. It is important to claim your listing at multiple local listing websites. If the marketing service is only with Google, then you are missing out at a variety of other sources ling Bing, Ask, City Search, Local.com, Yelp, Yahoo, Merchant Circle and many others. Consumers and mobile application developers will decide which website they will use for local business listing reviews and data. Google is not the powerhouse in this case. 2. Claim your listing to protect your brand from being hijacked . Claiming is a crucial and important first step with local business listings. If you do not claim the listing at multiple local listing websites you are open to hijackings and having your information re-directed to another business or criminals pursuing the local consumers. This is the part that tends to cause much of the frustrations you read about from business owners on the web. 3. Update your listing with your business marketing information to include not only text copy for web searches and mobile searches, but categories, photos, coupons, videos, images, etc. Because this information changes throughout the year (particularly your coupons, offers, discounts and events) the monthly management service will help insure everything is update to date at multiple locations. 4. Clean-up mis-matched data . Because local listing websites get their data from multiple sources, businesses are finding that there are multiple listings for a single address of their business. Deleting or merging these listings is an important process to insure the duplicates are not hijacked or consumers posting reviews in a listing that is not monitored. 5. Monitor your consumer reviews . Your customers have already been posting their reviews about you at multiple local listing websites. Monitoring and subsequently managing these reviews at multiple local listing websites for local public relations is an important process and one that will be new to most local businesses. This is also included with most local listing marketing services within their monthly management fee. 6. Citations are in important step in this process to have your listing ranked higher on web searches amongst the listings next to the map. This is not always included in the lower priced marketing services and an addition to be considered as this industry and marketing tool evolves and matures in the upcoming years. Future technologies will make local business listings more effective as a local business marketing tool. QR Codes, mobile applications, mobile coupons and other technologies will have to be managed for the local business to insure they are being used to be most effective. Hopefully the above information has helped you at least categorize the different local business listing services between data services and marketing services. The benefits of the marketing services far outweigh the data services and are the most effective to reaching the local consumer. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Local Business Listing Marketing vs. Data

Google Brings Google Mobile App to Your iPad

cgseo — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 21:31:21 +0000

It pains me to cover anything iPad-related news right now as I’m having a rough experience with our local FedEx Broke which has been “detaining” my iPad for a couple of days now. But in the spirit of reporting, I have to forget about this issue and cover this Google-iPad related news. So, here we go, Google just announced that its Google Mobile App for iPad is now available for free download from the iPad App Store. If you have previously used Google Mobile App on your iPhone, it’s basically the same app, only this time it was tweak a bit to fit into the iPad interface. The new iPad-friendly Google Mobile App features practically everything that you’ve enjoyed in the app’s iPhone version. The app features several search-related functionality including – search by voice, Google suggest, search history, contact search and vertical search. In addition, the app also recognizes your current location. This useful when you are searching for nearby location while on the move. The app also lets you navigate to Google’s web-based apps including Gmail which incidentally was also optimized for the iPad. Coming up are new features that will take advantage of the iPad’s features. To download Google Mobile App for iPad, check out the iPad App Store. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Google Brings Google Mobile App to Your

When Promoting Link Bait, Twitter is King!

cgseo — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 13:46:34 +0000

A few weeks back we were promoting a link bait article on digg. Before long, the submission hit the front page but in a matter of minutes was then buried. In the meantime, however, it was quickly picking up steam on Twitter. Within a few hours, the article got picked up by a major online news source, retweeted, and it exploded from there. (and is still going 3 weeks later) As of today, the link bait article that went viral on twitter has 32K backlinks (according to Aaron Wall’s SEO toolbar ) many from highly trusted websites and news sources. While I don’t usually give much credence to pagerank, after the recent PR update, the article’s page has a PR 6 while the site’s homepage remains a PR 4. This simply speaks to the quality of the links to the article. Because it’s a client, I can’t link to the site or link bait piece (trust me, I REALLY want to). Instead, what I’ll do is give you some insight as to why if part of your social media content strategy is to obtain links, Twitter is king. The goal of link bait First, some background… If you’re well versed in the art & science of link bait, you can skip this section. The goal of any link bait campaign is to (you guessed it) attract links. The idea is to create content that evokes an emotion in webmasters that causes them to want to either spread or perhaps talk about your content from their own site (ideally) with a link back. There’s a variety of emotions that can accomplish this, and if you want to learn more about the subject, I highly suggest reading Todd Malicoat’s article on link bait hooks . The trick to link bait, however, (beyond having FANTASTIC content) is making sure that content gets in front of the right webmasters. This is where social media promotion comes into play. Now, you don’t need to go “viral” in order to attract links; sometimes a link bait piece simply targets a small group or niche of webmasters. Still, in order to attract links, you need to have a promotion strategy that successfully places your content piece in front of the right people. Social Bookmarking & News Sites Sites like Digg, Reddit, and Stumble Upon are great for promoting link bait. If you’re successful in hitting the front page or becoming popular on one of these services, the potential for a high volume of traffic in a short period of time is difficult to match. This type of success, too, nearly guarantees you’ll see links from it. Bloggers and webmasters are generally active in these communities, and tend to use them for inspiration and ideas for their next post or article. While these communities are great, the larger ones reach such a broad audience, that niche content can sometimes go un-noticed or get buried. There are a variety of niche social bookmarking communities, however, that may be a much better use of your time. For example, Tipd.com is a fantastic (albeit small) community for financial news and resources. Networking in these niche communities, too, can form more fruitful relationships, particularly if your content is similar to your new contacts’. You won’t see a tremendous amount of links here, but a few good and relevant ones could be worth the effort. Why Twitter is King Social bookmarking sites (like Digg) are great for promoting link bait, and usually shouldn’t be overlooked when promoting your content. However, Twitter has some distinct advantages over these services, particularly for attracting links. Here are a few: Twitter is where the webmasters are – If you’re a blogger or own a website that adds content on a regular basis, chances are, you have a twitter profile. Probably more than one… If links are your goal, you can’t afford to overlook twitter. Even Facebook can’t claim this. Tweets are a more active (and personal) method of sharing content – If someone tweets or retweets your content, it shows up directly in their followers’ feeds while social bookmarking content usually needs to be found. Twitter is much easier to target a niche, group, or even an individual – This takes the proper networking strategy, but it’s something Digg, Reddit, and SU can’t quite claim and is an important aspect of many link bait tactics. RT: > Dugg – When someone Diggs your article, you’re simply one step closer to the front page. When twitter users retweet your article, it’s literally spreading your content exponentially. Twitter has no down vote (bury) button – Whether your link bait is controversial and evokes a “negative” emotion, or whether it appeals to only a smaller group of individuals, twitter will never “bury” your content. If people wish to express their opinion about your article on twitter, they’ll need to do so in a retweet, which only spreads it further. Social bookmarking sites make down voting content too easy. Twitter power users > Digg Power users – More than sheer numbers, twitter power users have more influence over their followers than Digg power users. On twitter, users are more likely to click, read, and engage in the content, while on Digg, many times users will digg an article without even clicking through (let alone reading it). Sheer size – One advantage of Digg is that hitting the front page puts you in front of nearly the entire community all at once. The problem is: the community is barely a fraction of the size of twitter’s. The sheer size of twitter gives your content an advantage in terms of the scope and speed that it spreads. Time Line – A disadvantage of Digg is that your content has limited time in front of the community. Once it’s off the front page, it’s all but gone. Articles can pick up tweets and retweets weeks (even months) after your initial push, giving you further opportunities to be noticed by webmasters. The success of link bait relies more on the quality of your content rather than the strength of your network. It’s no coincidence, that the same applies to the success of spreading your content (and having it go viral) on Twitter. Think of tweets as the micro-blogging version of back links. You do still need a strong following to get content going, but once it starts to spread, there’s no telling how far it will reach. And as a result, the potential for links is un-matched. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . When Promoting Link Bait, Twitter is

How I’m Going To Pay For Obama’s Health Insurance Reform

cgseo — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 13:30:52 +0000

I’m a huge fan of the Obama’s health insurance reform bill. It’s not that often that such a significant societal opportunity occurs that allows me to take decisive action to better my family’s welfare both presently and for many years into the future. Do you think I’m getting political on you? Not at all…I’m talking about the rare opportunity to purchase relevant domain names at their registration fee which had no intrinsic value before health insurance reform but significant value after the bill became law. How can I figure out which profitable domain names I should purchase? Well, I certainly don’t have to read the 8 billion pages of the legislation. In fact, I don’t even have to know much about health reform at all. All I need to do is be able to look at the news coverage and be able to perceive what might be a good choice for a (preferably dot com) domain name. So, let’s take a look at a news article that talks about some of the changes in the new law…and my eyes are drawn to the following words: “ The individual mandate does not go into effect until 2014 partly because it will take a long time to set up the state-run exchanges at which individuals and small-business employees will be able to comparison-shop for policies” State run health insurance exchanges in 50 states…50 obvious possible permutations of domain names…let’s check availability, shall we? If you check “name of state + healthinsuranceexchange” for .com and .org, there isn’t any availability…someone bought almost all of these names last year (and he is my domaining hero). However, if you check .net, you’ll find significant availability (as of the time I am writing this). .net isn’t as brandable as .com or .org, but if you’re making an SEO play, those names will definitely work well for you. Not as brandable but good for SEO is healthinsuranceexchange + name of state. Plenty of .com and .org availability for these names (again as of the time I am writing this). A couple footnotes: I’ve already “cherry-picked” the names I’ve wanted from health insurance reform and I’m not going to lead SEJ readers down any paths where I’ve been fishing / might want to fish in the future :.) A cursory study of the health insurance reform law offers many other paths into profitable domain purchases. If you have the ability to perceive the elements of a good domain purchase (either from a branding or SEO perspective), just study the details of the legislation…I’m sure you’ll be able to make quality choices. Happy hunting :.) Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . How I’m Going To Pay For Obama’s Health Insurance