In our opinion FeedBlitz edges out Aweber for blog marketing.
Even though Aweber recently announced integration with Feedburner, FeedBlitz has a few one-uppers that make it the premium choice for bloggers, social marketers and authority site builders alike.
Listen to the 20 minute interview we did with Phil Hollows, the CEO of FeedBlitz. Here, he explains that FeedBlitz is a fully functional autoresponder that pure email marketers love but also packs some unique features that cater to blog marketers, who need both RSS technology and an autoresponder.
PS: Did you know that FeedBlitz offers a free ad-supported plan and an plan without ads that starts at less that $3 per month?
As a former PPC affiliateer, I became enamoured with social marketing because the guru’s were saying,
“For the same amount of work, you can get the same amount of traffic, from the same type of qualified prospect… for FREE. Now, buy my progam…”
Of course, over the past 2-3 years there’s been many a guru selling social marketing know-how. The best of which is actually quite FREE, The Authority Black Book.
But, sadly, I have a confession or revelation or, even better, a revealing confession…
Social Marketing Can Be The Biggest Waste of Time You’ll Ever Find!
Before you freak, let me confirm that the marketing tactics and strategies that utilize social media (like those offered here at Web2Center) can and do bring BIG traffic.
Social marketing works! But it has a dark side.
There are so many options… so many sites, so many communities, so much to do that unless you are focused and deliberate you may find yourself wasting days, even weeks and months, but feeling OK because you’ve spent nothing (but countless hours).
Does this all feel a bit familiar?
Do you:
Forget or neglect to keep track of your social marketing efforts?
Do a little of what one guru says, then move to the next and do a little, then move to the next and do a little?
Sign up to one social networking site after another and then have to sign up to a site like Profilactic.com to keep track of them all?
If so, it’s OK because everyone else does the same (or similar) things…
Let’s Change That Right Now - Efficient Social Marketing
Where should you spend your valuable time? Which social media sites will give you the most stars for your social marketing bucks?
Each niche requires something different; there is no one-size-fits-all list. So, instead of randomly signing up for all the web 2.0 sites on someone’s “list”, use the following qualifiers to laser in on the social sites that are sure to provide a generous return on your valuable investment of time.
Indexed by Google
Some social networks (like Facebook for instance) do not show up on Google. The pages inside Facebook are not indexed by Google so, if you are “bending the web” or creating anchor text backlinks, all your efforts on Facebook are bust. Before you sign up, do a quick “site:www.domain.com” Google search and check to see if there are lots of pages indexed.
General or Niche Related
Before you sign up, don’t forget to take a look at the categories. Is there a category for you? Or, even better, is the theme of that social network related to your niche? Of course, you want to stand out but, trust me, you don’t want to have to create a category just for you.
Popular Content
What do you think would be the best indicator of whether your content will rank well? How about the posts that are already ranking well? Simple huh? So, before you sign up, look at the category(ies) that you will submit to and check the stories getting lots of votes or attention. Can you create content similar to it? What’s popular might be stories that you don’t like and would never post to your blog… this may not be the social media site for you then.
Member Activity
Before you sign up, browse around your potential social media site, check your categories and take note of the energy and tone. Ask yourself, “Is this community active?” “Do they vote, comment and otherwise participate?” “Do they hate anything that is intelligent?” “Do they hate anything that even hints at marketing or salesmanship?” Make sure your tone and energy matches that of the site.
Seasoning
This refers to the length of time the site has been around… has it seasoned? If the site is brand new, you take a risk spending hours developing authority only to see it all washed away when the guys behind the curtain decide to pull the plug. On the other hand, you may be gambling on getting in early so that when this site becomes the next Digg you will be sitting on top of the mountain. It’s your choice but you may want to do a bit of research to see when the site launched and how well funded it is.
Now It’s Your Turn
These are the qualifiers I use… If you have found other qualifiers that have helped you waste less time on the duds, please share your insights with our readers. We gladly approve comments that help us all!
In a recent article published by Popular Science, a fascinating investing idea involving the monitoring of chatter on blogs and social news sites like Digg was proposed, it is called “neuroinvesting“.
According to a man named Richard Peterson, who went to medical school to study Psychiatry for the sole purpose of decoding what happens on Wall Street, it is possible to use social media activity (like that on Digg) to accurately predict market activity.
As he puts it, “I was looking for qualitative and emotional explanations for the way the markets move… I looked at the language that was making people buy stocks”. In other words: “tracking the mood on Wall Street as it moved.”
Based on this hunch, Peterson started MarketPsy and developed software that “churns through the daily malestrom of” votes, chats, rants and clicks on blogs and social news sites, weighing each word and looking for telltale signs of “overreaction and underreaction”.
And here’s the fascinating part that could start a finacial phenomenon and open up a new position at every Charles Schwab office across the country… the “Diggvestor”.
Think about this…
Peterson’s theory is solidly based on the assumption that most of us have a sort of “herding” mentality.
I think any one of us who has been around Digg or other social news sites for a while can see a little herding going on. Right?
Once a story gets some Digg-mentum (pardon the awful conjugation but I’m on a roll) it skyrockets to the first page as the masses Digg it because, well… everyone else is Digging it.
Financial markets are no different.
And this is the magical bit of wisdom that will, heretofore qualify you as a Diggvestor.
When you see the masses headed in a direction (remember: overreaction or underreaction), a financial opportunity is created.
Perhaps it starts with one negative story about XYZ Company that quickly gets Diggs, then another, then another… soon, everyone scanning Digg for potential content jumps on the “down-with-XYZ-train” and posts a negative story.
Is it really too hard to believe that this Digg activity is a preview of a significant dip in XYZ stock performance?
The implications of this are absolutely fabulous!
(Warning-Slight Exaggeration Coming)
This means that in a few short years, all uber-Digg users will become the new financial geniuses of the world with a finger on the financial pulse so tight that Warren Buffet will be “friending” them and sending daily “love-shouts” just to get a chance at a private convo.
Subsequently, Diggvestors will create a billion dollar hedge fund that will spawn a secret society that ends hunger and provides free healthcare to every citizen on the globe (except Canada ’cause they already had it).
To read the article I am referring to (that is much less exaggerated) in Popular Science you’ll need to check their site later, it’s not posted yet. The article is in the February 2008 issue and is titled “Money Minded” by Robert Armstrong and Jacob Ward.
Unless you are asking yourself : “Is It Pingable?” after every step of your social marketing efforts, you are bypassing oodles of potential RSS subscribers, trackbackers, pingbackers, and customers.
What Is A Pingable?
A pingable is “technoratically” (pardon the pun) any url that contains your “unique” content and has been formatted as an RSS feed.
Most bloggers, authority site owners and even some experienced social marketers think that their blog’s original RSS feed (for example: http://www.yoursite.com/feed) is the one and only feed they’ll ever know.
However, I am here to tell you that it is time to go out there and cheat! Cozy up to lots of feeds. Call up the sexiest feed on the planet -Feedburner- and replace the orignal blog feed (that did nothing but take up space in your header) with this younger and sleeker version.
But don’t stop there… You need to be a real “Feed Pimp”…
What you may not know is that practically every social network, whether it be a bookmarking service like del.icio.us, a social news aggregator like Sphinn or Mixx, or a community forum, has a personal feed that you can hire and manipulate… as you strut around in a feathered hat and a white fox fur coat and snake skin boots… (sorry, daydreaming…)
Your Pingables
So, before you do anything else today, you have to get your pingables in order.
Break the news to your original feed and start hooking up with as many feeds as you can.
Open up an Excel spreadsheet and begin listing each RSS url from every social site that you have content on. (We are assuming that you are already a social marketing disciple or have just recently paid hundreds of dollars for SMARTS and have frantically began to add content to lots of social sites.)
A bit of a warning however. The feed link is not always easy to find but, trust me, it’s there… you have to look around.
Check your profile page, it might have an RSS feed.
Check your tags, check your votes, check your faves and notes, they all might have a feed.
Add them all to your pingables list and start pinging!
Pinging the Pingables
So, you’ve got your list of pingables in hand, right?
Now, head to pingomatic.com, input each RSS url (one at a time please) and ping to each service possible.
(IMPORTANT: Don’t ping your blog’s original RSS feed or Feedburner that you should have set up in Wordpress to ping automatically. Just ping the feeds on social sites so you don’t “over-notify” the ping services and get a ban or restriction.)
Doing this will give each of these content sources Marion-Jones-like “legs” and push them further up the chain on the SERPs and the social rankings, giving your blog a bigger footprint on the net.
So don’t leave those free traffic opportunities dangling, put your feed pimping outfit on and get that pingables list started.
Before you start uploading your entire hard drive to Scribd, thinking that you will get a bombshell of backlinks buzzing to your site, you need to watch this short video.
If you spend a few hours uploading docs in the wrong format, that will be a few hours you’ll be revisiting.
Let me show you what file types to upload in and invite you to the “Social Marketing” group on Scribd that promises to be a hot commodity for all anxious social marketers.
As always, you can watch the video on our homepage (if you excellent nano-vision that is), watch the video here (see below), or hop on over to Youtube.com/web2center and see all of our Weekly Videos.
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
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