You’ve heard all about blogs. How about social community blogs?
If you’re ready to get started with your social community blog, you really want your thoughts, ideas, comments, and information about your product or service to get out there to the masses, then listen up.
How exactly should you get your social community blog started?
Follow these very simple tips on getting started with your SC blog in 5 easy steps, and you’ll be well on your way to success.
1. Pick your first social network, and build your profile there.
Many people get started with their blog with one of the “big” ones, such as MySpace, Facebook, or Twitter. These sites allow you to develop a profile-which you should fill out as completely as possible to show that you are serious about networking and building contacts!
2. Send out “friend” or “contact” invitations.
One great way to start is to send the invitations to friends you already have in your contact list for your email. It’s pretty likely that some of those people will sign up for the social networking service that you have subscribed to, giving you more contacts or friends there.
Not all of your contacts will be interested in this type of networking, but the way to increase your visibility and gain exposure is to build up your number of “friends” online.
3. Once you’ve tried to get all of your contacts to join (and it’s likely that many of them have at this point), then start growing your list of friends and contacts within the site.
Often you can search for common interests, geographical locations, and other targeted information that will assist you in building a useful, relevant network with your blog site.
Build up more and more contacts for your blog and build up your online “community.”
This is the best way to build credibility within the social networking world.
4. Now that you’ve got your first blog site up and running smoothly, and you’re starting to build a network there, look for other blog sites and social networking sites that are out there.
There are literally thousands to choose from. Each one of these sites is a little bit different in terms of focus, function, or purpose, so poke around and decide which ones might fit you best.
But, whichever ones you choose, you will want to build your list of these sites up and build contacts on each one-this will ultimately drive a lot of traffic to your site, based on how popular you can become with the social networking sites.
5. After you’ve gotten your blog site started, you will need to provide regular updates.
With multiple sites, this can become very time consuming, so it may help to have a rotation or a plan to keep current with all of them.
Add information consistently, so that your profiles stay current and lively. Join discussion forums, comment on other people’s blogs, leave trackbacks, exchange links, ask questions that stimulate conversations, and do everything you can to increase your contacts and network connections.
Do you have any other great ideas about how to get a social community blog started?
If you know those acronyms, you have no doubt wondered if and/or how they fit together. Let me explain… But first, a quick nod to the noobs:
PPC
Pay-per-click essentially refers to Google AdWords. Although Yahoo and Microsoft both have version of this marketing technique, AdWords is KING. Google AdWords allows for quick and easy search engine marketing. You create a short message, this gets displayed on a search engine results page with all the other results and, theoretically, you get “clicks”… visitors to your site. You pay for each click… pay - per - click… got it?
SEO
Search engine optimization is the art of making a web site “friendly” to the search engines. This involves adding “behind-the-scenes” code, structuring the content in specific ways or creating hyperlinks to/from particular pages to make the collection of pages comprising the web site more “valuable” to the robots that rank each page of content on the Internet.
SMM
Social Media Marketing (or Social Marketing) is the latest addition to the world of online marketing but is, in many ways, the easiest to understand. Social marketing can be simply described as “online word of mouth”. Wherever you find a relevant conversation about your niche/product or service, you join the conversation. Don’t let the simple definition fool you however, this easier said than done. There is even more of an art to social marketing. That said, the question most people have is how do these 3 pillars of online marketing fit together? As the title suggests, start with PPC.
Why Start With PPC?
To answer this question, let me ask you a series of questions… Try to answer these with quick direct answers.
1. What is your web site’s (blog’s) purpose?
2. What are you selling? (which will fund the hours you will spend working on your web site)
3. What do you tell your visitors to get them to buy?
The first question is easy, right? In fact, some, if not most, of you reading this post have been blogging or online marketing for a while and assumed the purpose of you blog was to sell your product(s). Sorry, but that just doesn’t cut it anymore. The purpose of any website, especially a blog, should be to create a rapport with potential clients, customer and buyers. So, question #2, was it simple to answer? Probably, but is your offer (what you are selling) actually, well… selling? If not, then it may be time to sell something else. If you are like most bloggers, you are working for free. And, when someone asks you why you work for free, you say something like “because I enjoy giving, I enjoy sharing, I love my niche, I have a passion for…”. if that is true, that’s great! But my experience with online marketing clients tells me that you would be thrilled to make sales too and will stop “sharing” pretty quickly if you don’t. I am guessing that question #3 is almost impossible for you to answer. I know this because, without some serious research, it is. There is no way to know what words (in text, audio or video format) will persuade your visitors to buy. You may be in tune with your niche but your frequency might be very different than the majority. Finding the “message that makes money” requires testing & tracking.
Good News…
There is a simple and cheap way to find the (almost) perfect answer to all 3 questions above… It is called PPC. With a few simple pay-per-click campaigns you can learn enough about your potential visitors to foster a quick rapport, create an offer/product they actually want, and compile the words they want you to use to sell it to them.
Bad News…
Most people will completely ignore this advice because a good PPC campaign will cost $20 - 50 and some thinking. 99% will plow ahead with this foundational step and “hope” to figure out what their market wants later. I know this because I did it too, and now my clients do it. We all naturally think everyone else is like us. We assume we know what people want and how they want it but this is simply not true, trust me.
What To Do First
Regardless of whether you have a blog that is brand new or months, even years old, you probably need to begin the process of identifying & creating strong relationships with your buyers. In Part II you’ll get a sneak peek into a PPC campaign I recently conducted to see if, where and how much interest there is in a product I’m developing. This info is unique in that what I discovered basically showed that there is NOT significant interest to move forward and that my product needed to be adjusted. It is a screen capture video inside my AdWords account with tips and pointers on how to conduct a quick, cheap and easy PPC “research” campaign. Now, you may be wondering when the SEO and SMM stuff is coming… I assure you, we will get to that but, more importantly, the next article builds on the this PPC “research” campaign and explains how to get your customers to teach you the message that would mesmerize the wallets from their pockets. A link to Part II of “PPC, SEO and SMM - In That Order” will be posted here when its ready…
Regular readers of Web2Center know how much I like Linkify. However, I recently stumbled across another blog content tool that is equally interesting.
I have only used it on 2 client posts so far so I have to take a minute and investigate. Why don’t you join me…
This video/post will let you look over my shoulder so we can see if this Zemanta blogging tool is worth the real estate in your admin panel.
So, here’s what I’ve done so far. I found Zemanta on the GoToWb20.com site as soon as it came out. Actually, I have a Google gadget on my iGoogle homepage that keeps a running list of all the new web 2.0 services that post to GoToWeb20.com.
I visited Zemanta.com and installed the Firefox plugin, restarted and then spent about 5 minutes looking for some sign of it. I found an enable/disable command in the Tools dropdown in Firefox but thats it.
A bit confused, I went back to Zemanta.com and forced myself to read and realized that it would be something that shows up inside the Write Post module of Wordpress. And, sure enough, there it was top right.
So, I start typing and…. nothing. Type some more… nothing. OK, now I am wondering if I have fallen for some sort of unfunny April Fool’s joke.
Then, I thought, perhaps I need to hit the “Save and Continue Editing” button. So, after a refresh, Zemanta went into action.
Multiple choices appeared right there in the Write Post module.
1. A “Gallery” of images appeared in the sidebar, one of which was this image: Image from Wikipedia
I have no idea how this image fits or why it was suggested but the other images were more closely related to Firefox and Wordpress.
2. An “Articles” list appeared with links to articles from blog like techcrunch.com, readwriteweb.com and, of course, this one from Zemanta.com about “experimental” WP 2.5 support.
And, just below the wysiwyg, 2 more choices.
3. A “Links” list of terms related to the article like web 2.0, Firefox and April Fool’s joke that allow for a one-click link back to Wikipedia or the website itself. I clicked April Fool’s joke and it created the link above.
4. And finally, a set of suggested tags that I won’t really know what is for until I publish this post.
I just clicked on the tag “Zemanta” and noticed that Zemanta was added to the tag list along with some code just prior to this sentence.
So, here we go. Publish post….
Check out this video for an inside, over-the-shoulder look at how Zemanta works on your blog. (to be posted soon)
We are always looking for web 2.0 tools that will make problogging, authority site building and blogmastering easier. (did I stuff lots of keywords in there or what)
Adding images to a custom Wordpress blog is never “easy”. Maybe it is on other platforms but I am a Wordpress only dude. I have found a few plugins that speed the process up a bit but these source from Flickr or Picasa and return pictures that are, well… crap.
A new web 2.0 service in Beta may offer a solution for some.
However, there is a catch…
Its Called PicApp
Let’s see, how do I explain this…
Quality free images that you can embed right into your post. Pretty simple.
The catch is probably apparent to you already from the puppy dog image I’ve embedded in this post. There are ads embedded in that there image.
This is not a big deal for some blogging folk, but for other bloggers, this is a deal breaker. And… keeping in mind that this service is still in Beta and thus, will presumably be improved, there are other who are concerned about the technical wizardry being used to make PicApp perform.
Should You Use It?
Hey, that’s up to you.
One thing is for sure though, we all should have more images in our posts. As much of a hassle as image editing and adding is, there is nothing better than a quality post with an insightfully relevant image.
Whether you use PicApp depends on your level of aversion to ads in your blog and how much geekery you are willing to add to your html code.
I’m sure PicApp speeds up the image adding process but, as with most technology in Beta, the “cost” for this free service needs to be considered carefully by both the developer and the consumer.
Are you creating valuable content for your blog (or website) on a regular basis?
Or, are you feeding your audience leftovers gathered from other bloggers syndicated “junk food”?
I hope not, because consistent, valuable content (text, audio and video) is the ONE aspect of your web presence that MUST exist.
As a fellow social marketer, I struggle with this too. So, here’s a great “pneumonic device” that helps me keep content creation on track:
QU.IL.LO
Questions
Notice the beginning of this post. It started with a question, right? I could have started with: “A good blog creates valuable content on a regular basis.” And you would have said… “Duh!”. But, I bet the question made you think to yourself… “Is my content valuable, am I posting consistently?”
You tell me, which reaction is better?
Illustrations
Now, take a look at line #2 above. Just in case you did not get the point with the initial question, I threw in a brief illustration that may have poked a few article marketers in the ribs.
Imagine… serving up leftover junk food from someone else’s garbage… how disgusting. Sadly, this is what the majority of bloggers do.
So, this illustration made the point in a way that caused the desired emotion (disgust) in just one sentence.
Logic
Once the question is raised and the illustration causes a reaction, the logical statement will have meaning and impact.
See line #3… I now restate the point phrased as a question in line #1. But now, you get it, you believe it and you are more likely to trust what I have to say next.
Social Suicide
As a serious social marketer, you may be busy…
Blasting Squidoo with loads of keyword rich lenses.
Casting articles to dozens of article directories with SubmitYourArticle.com or iSnare.com.
or what)
Friday, May 16, 2008
0 Comments