Social marketing’s original ‘guide’, The Authority Black Book (ABB), is being re-released with loads of updates for 2008.
Jack Humphrey, of SocialPowerLinking.com and the author of the original ABB, has packed this new version with social marketing strategies, tactics and actionable lists that serve as a comprehensive reference for both beginner and experienced social marketing “mavens”.
What’s New in ABB 2008?
The giant portions of feedback received from the thousands of IMers and SMers that dowloaded ABB 2007 has obviously been digested by Jack and crew because the in ABB 2008 are primarily geared toward end user usability.
For example, Authority Black Book 2008 includes a call-out which labels certain social marketing tasks as “Critical”. With all the info in this free eBook, it might be easy to overlook a fundamental, but this critical tag prevents that from happening.
The 2-column structure and amorphous navigation buttons in the new ABB make it even easier to use as an everyday reference.
Lastly, the links, the videos and the social media lists have been updated to reflect the changes that occurred in the industry during 2007.
ABB 2008 Is Free But You Can’t Have It… Yet
So, where can you download your free copy of the updated ABB 2008? You can’t… not yet anyway.
Jack is having finishing touches put to the public landing page and has only released ABB 2008 to his private membership at SocialPowerLinking.com.
As soon as it is available, we will send a private post to all of our subscribers with the link.
Jack provides even more details about ABB 2008 on Friday Traffic Report, check it out.
There is no better way to irritate your readers and prevent new RSS subscriptions than to use a slow loading theme.
When we are online, everyone expects instant content. Three seconds or less!
None of us have the patience to wait for a page to slowly put itself together. Online, anything more than 10 seconds is an ETERNITY!
Imagine our shock then when we found out from a few readers that Web2Center was taking upwards of 10 seconds to load in some browsers.
Yikes!
Speeding Up
We thought we’d done a pretty good job re-coding this theme and cleaning out the turtle-ish elements. So, fortunately, our troubling discovery coincided with a post from my favorite SEO blogger that explained, from a insightful technical standpoint, what one could do to accelerate a Wordpress blog’s load time.
I recommend reading the comments in this post but don’t get overwhelmed by the tech-speak. These guys are super coders who like to analyze every aspect of Joost’s posts.
Just stick to the recommendations -line by line- and your load time is sure to decrease.
You Tell Us
So far, we have activated wp-cache and cleaned up the footer per the instructions. Next steps are the header.php tweaks that Joost suggests and adding a “function_exists” qualifier to appropriate php commands.
These adjustments have certainly improved load times on my end but, for me, it had always loaded in 3-5 seconds so… you tell us… is Web2Center still loading slow?
And… If you are a fellow Wordpress blogger, I hope you enjoy Joost’s SEO blog.
Before you get carried away in your problogging and social marketing efforts, take a step away from your computer and make sure you’ve answered a few simple questions.
I am not trying to be sarcastic with these questions, I am absolutely serious. Too many “serious” bloggers, social marketers, and internet entrepreneurs fail miserably with these fundamentals.
I see new bloggers veering off into the weeds of extensive keyword research and “easy button” gurus so often that it is beginning to depress me.
Before they know it, they have a big, messy blog with a 100 categories, a ridiculous tag lists, incoherent navigation and tons of broken links.
Don’t Let That Be You
This may take you a day or two of intermittent thinking but by putting answers to the following question, you’ll be ensuring the success of your blog. This is blogging 101!
Who is (or will be) the voice or persona of my blog?
Will the voice be in first person or reporter-style?
What is the main “desired action” I want readers of the blog to take?
How will they get from Step 1 to desired action?
What are the top 5 blogs in my niche and why are they on top?
Am I employing their “best practices”?
What differentiates my blog from the top 5?
Do I regularly promote this special quality to my readers?
What are my milestones for this blog?
Do I need to enlist other resources to achieve these milestones?
To be sure, there is a lot more to blogging than the above. We share detailed tactics and strategies here at Web2Center.com and there is a never ending supply of more from the recommended “Friends of W2C”.
Video content is increasingly important to online information seekers and search engines alike.
In a recent post, we suggested you try to graduate from the “school or TEXT” and get familiar with video publishing. So, we thought would stretch you a bit further and share some leading technology that may inspire you to get your graduate degree in Video.
Here are some of the latest companies pioneering the ever changing world of online video that should be of interest to you.
Channel Yourself
Quite a few services are offering technology that will allow anyone to create a live broadcast of everything they do. This is not a new idea (Justin.tv).
However, services like Mogulus are opening up “self-casting” opportunities to the masses by lowering the technology hurdle. Other services like Qik, Kyte and Yahoo! Live are in the mix as well, encouraging YOU to “channel yourself” to the world.
French Maid Made French
If you haven’t heard of the French Maid video series, you haven’t spent much time on YouTube.com. Imagine all of those poor frenchmen who long to understand the advice given but can’t makes sense of the English. C’est la vie…
No, forget “c’est la vie!”, with the help of dotSub.com, any video can be subtitled into the languages of the world.
Vmail
Has video email finally arrived? Well, you can be the judge of that. Check out Eyejot.com. This service is free (we like free) and quite clever.
Rather than explain Eyejot, why not let them show you. Check out this demo:
Hypervideo or Video with Hyperlinks
Affiliate marketers have been salivating over this technology for a while now.
Imagine a video promoting your affiliate product with a hyperlink right on the product itself (in the video). The video viewer watches the hosted video, sees a little hypervideo link, clicks through to the sales page and makes a purchase.
Impossible? Nope…
This is exactly why Asterpix.com offers. This video service lets you upload a video and add little hypervideo links which follow the selected objects around.
Asterpix is not the only player in this sandbox, you might want to take a look at Overlay.tv and BubblePly.com for more inspiration.
Online Video is Mainstream
While all of these services are a bit ahead of the curve, online video has made it into the mainstream. Even my grandmother (80’s) has seen a few YouTube videos and my parents (50’s) are regular visitors.
Making use of these free services will differentiate your video offerings from the ordinary and surely drive more interest back to your blog.
Here are 5 E-A-S-Y Wordpress tweaks anyone can do that will get you points with both types of visitors.
1. (SEO) Include your main keyword or key phrase in both the blog title and the tagline, preferably twice in the title.
For example: The key phrase Web2Center has recently locked in on is “Social Marketing”. Therefore, we updated the blog title to read: “Social Marketing Strategies from Social Marketing Expert Peter Lenkefi”.
2. (SEO) Clean up the header code by removing unnecessary links and scripts.
For examples: Joost Devalk provides brilliant advice on this, he says:
3. (VEO) Add “space” to your blog.
For example: If you have a text heavy blog and are not one to use line breaks, go back through and creates some. The online reader needs more eye “space”.
Also, consider adding some bold and italics, perhaps a few …ellipses (sparingly) but be careful of those exclamation points!!!!!!!!!!!
4. (VEO) De-clutter the sidebar.
There is no shortage of bling for Wordpress sidebars. While each widget has a purpose, not all of them give value to your blog. Check your stats, your analytics and your readers… I think they all will point you to “less is more”.
If you just can’t do without the all the bells & whistles, you can always put the flashy stuff and “extra” widgets in the footer.
5. (SEO & VEO) Graduate from the school of TEXT.
Google needs rich media on the first page for every keyword you can think of. Why not be the ONE who gives it to them?
Forget trying to rank by creating 100+ anchor text back links. One well tagged and titled video and you are there.
Your visitors will thank you for content options as well.
Thursday, February 28, 2008
3 Comments