How to blog?
Thursday, August 23, 2007

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SMO: What is Social Media Optimization?

How does business leverage the opportunity to connect with people using consumer generated media tools?
1. Get In.
Go where where your market is and investigate the Long Tail for related niches for your products and services. Get your brand is fair percentage of minds hare.
2. Fit In.
Create community around your brand for your percentage of minds hare to pay dividends. Go interactive and create conversations and networks around your brand. Participation is mandatory or someone else will start the conversation that you should have had to begin with. Meet your community where they are and find out what they want and deliver it. Fit in with the new expectations and habits of social networking.
3. Make Friends.
Do actually engage your market through community. Create interactive contests, polls, user feedback loops whatever allows your community to choose, create and contribute to the improvement of your brand. Allow them to submit home grown videos, photos, naming contests and any other unique and interesting experiences that will reinforce your brand and a great experience. This leads to trust. When you’ve been authenticated and validated by your community that can rightly influence the message of your market about your products and services. You'll find yourself in a cooperative position where consumer involvement becomes a vital contribution to your success and word-of-mouth marketing is lifting your business profile in a positive manner that helps you acquire new business.
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Distinction from traditional media

Social media has a number of characteristics that make it fundamentally different from traditional media such as newspapers, television, books, and radio. Social media does not have a finite limit: there are no set number of pages or hours. The audience can participate in social media by adding comments or even editing the stories themselves. Content in social media can take the form of text, graphics, audio or video. Different formats can be mixed. Social media is typically available via feeds, enabling users to subscribe via feed readers, and allowing other publishers to create mashups.^[1]

Social Media is a term that is used for a broad spectrum of topics, and has several different connotations, however in the context of internet marketing, Social Media refers to a collective group of web properties that primarily driven by the users. For example, blogs, discussion boards, vlogs, video sharing sites and dating sites. Social Media Optimization (SMO) is the process of trying to get one's content more widely distributed across multiple Social Media networks.

There are two sides to Social Media, the first side is known as SMO as stated above. This refers to on-page tactics that a webmaster can do to improve their website for the age of social media. Such optimisation includes adding links to services such as Digg, Reddit and Del.icio.us so that their pages can be easily 'saved and submitted' to and for these services.

Social Media Marketing on the other hand is the off-page characteristics of Social Media. This includes writing content that is remarkable, unique and news-worthy. Marketing this content can be done by trying to get the content 'popular' on the services mentioned or even creating a video that is likely to be viral on the likes of Youtube and other video sites. Social Media is about being social so this off-page work can include getting involved in other similar blogs, forums and niche communities.

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How To Blog 101 - What is Blogging and Why Should I Blog?

In this article your will learn what blogging really is and why you should start blogging. Unless you've been comletely internet free for the past several months to a year, you have probably heard about these "blog" sites but you may not know what a blog is. Or perhaps you know what a blog is but you want to learn more about how blogs are being used and if blogging is something you could benefit from. In this article you will learn exactly what blogging is and what blogging is not and why you should or should not start blogging.

I will attempt to dymistify the definition of blogging if you absolutely aren't quite sure what a blog really is. A blog is generally defined as an online journal that is updated frequently and where your articles are listed in reverse chronological order when they are published. That means your articles are published with the most recent article listed first in date and time order.

What Is A Blog?
The term "blog" is derived from the term "Weblog" or web log. In the early days of blogging circa mid to late 1990's, web logs were used to track updates and references to other resources on the internet. Weblogs, as journals were also used as a stream of consciousness publishing tool where you could share and comment on anything and everything under the sun. As a results and to this day, there are lots of blogs that publish opinionated commentary as diverse in tone as there are a diversity of topics to talk about.

A blog is technically a content management system (CMS) albeit a more simplified version of one. A CMS allows you to easily publish to a website and manage content without having to deal with having to know how to program code. Blog publishing software provides you with a graphical user interface (GUI) for point and click publishing of your content. Your blog software will require you to perform intial easy-to-do setup and configuration so that it will know how to automically organize your published content in the future. After that, you can publish quickly and instantly using your blog software editor that is built into your blog publishing software.

Publishing A Blog Is Easy To Do!
You can also publish content to your blog by using blog publishing tools call bookmarklets or with blog editing and publishing software like WB Editor 2. Again, publishing with a blog can be done easily and instantly. You simply type something into a web-based texted editor and push a button and you published!

Some of these setup and configuration tasks include providing the name of your blog, providing archival intervals, providing the names for categories of content and provide names of other publishers. There are other settings also such as deciding to allow trackbacks, how to handle commenting in your blog, security settings, RSS syndication settings, site layout and more. Once these simple tasks are completed blogging becomes fun, fast and flexible and even profitable.

There Are Many Types of Blogs
Bloggers of all types whether for business or personal publishing, normally publish content around niche topics and subjects that they are passionate about. Examples of niche information topics would be politics, how to build pc's or pet care. Business oriented blogs will always be more niche oriented in their information content because they need to be tightly focused on their product or services and getting connected with the audiences they serve. Business blog content will cover a topics that promotes their subject matter expertise, educates consumers on their products or services, communicate announcements or provides customer support for example.

Personal blogs may cover a wider range of related or unrelated topics within the same blog because personal blogs lend themselves to more stream of consciousness publishing on a whim and according to mood. This style works well for personal blogs. There is an ever increase number of the "types" of blogs out there or rather the "way" in which blogs are being used to communicate. A few examples would be public relations blogs, affiliate marketing blogs, health care blogs, law blogs, car blogs and of course yet another blog about blogging...mine, the one reading right now! :)

Blogging is HOT! I strongly believe it is more than a trend as well. With that said lets talk about what a blog is not. A blog is not just a website. It is a type of website but your typical website content takes much longer to update, publish, share and distribute. A blog is no longer just a online journal. While "online journal" provides an easy to understand point of reference for how a blog is used and how it works, bloggerss have extended the use of blogs far beyond the personal pundit type of posting. As outlined above blogs lend themselves to many audiences for communication and publishing.

Why Should You Blog?
So why should you blog? Well, you shouldn't blog before you understand how a blog can best support your online communications. You will have the most success with your blog if you understand before you start what outcome you desire. At the end of the day your blog should be fun or profitable to you or both!

If you aren't blogging that doesn't mean that you shouldn't be blogging. If you are in business and especially if you do business on the internet then you absolutely must determine if blogging works for your business model. Without going into a very long article on this topic I will say that if you are doing business online there is a good chance your competitors are blogging or preparing to blog. Blogs are expaning on what are called "market conversations" and your markets are talking to each other about your products and services in your industry and niche and they want to talk to authorative sources in those niches.

Those businesses bold enough to open up an honest dialogue will capture more audience which can result in prospects becoming customers. Right now blogs have taken center stage as the premier communications and publishing tool for businesses to communicate authoratively and demonstrate subject matter expertise in their market niches. If you aren't talking to your market your competition is and your markets are definitely talking back. That alone is powerful motivation to at least investigate how a business blog can enchance and drive new business for you online.

A Business Blog Is Especially Worth Considering
The last point I'll make on the the case for a business blog is the SEO advantage. Search Engine Optimization is a big benefit to blogging. If you have a website promoting any product or service and any type of content that you use to drive any level of business and commerce then you require a blog. Blogs are very light weight and text-based compared to traditional website content. This cuts down on the crawl time by search engine spiders and allows them to take back more of your pages to the search directories much quicker. Blogs are dynamic in that they are frequently updated. This makes blogs relevant and popular and causes the searches engines to crawl blogs more often. The result is that your blog will have more pages going back to the search engines much quicker and more frequently than your competitor who is using a static and standard website.

This is not good however if YOU are the competitor with the static website. :)

If your blog content is targeted and link density for your keywords is healthy you will burn your competition in the content war if he doesn't switch to a blog. Ultimately a blog alone isn't the holy grail for publishing content online for top search engine rankings. You will need to to other other things like write good and relevant high-value content for your audience. You will need to target the keywords that target your markets and you'll need to build link partnerships to help with your Google popularity.

Personal Blogs Are Fun, Interesting and Exciting
For personal publishing you could blog as a means to keep family and friends updated about your life and times. There is lots of fun to be had with personal blogs. You can share many interests online with other people. You can share and publish photos online from your your mobile phone or digital camera with a service like TextAmerica. You could share humor. You could share gossip. You could collaborate on homework and research projects.

You can setup a personal blog about anything you are passionate about. A business would create a blog around their industry and niche and a personal blog could do the same thing from a customer point of view. Blog about your favorite products and services if it lends itself to that kind of passion and fanfare. You could do a resume blog that highlights your skills and experience and you can demonstrate your knowledge and expertise as well and network by writing about what you know which would be of interest to potential employers. The sky is really the limit here. What's your passion? What do you want to say about your passion? Do you want to network your passion and teach the world something new? Do you want to finally show the kwow-it-alls how smart you really are?

Blogs are really easy to use content management systems or websites that allow you to publish instantly and in real-time. Blogs can open up new opportunities to connect and communicate with others both personally and professionally.
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Make Blogging and RSS Pay Off by Driving Traffic and Sales Through Optimized Blogs and Feeds


In the intensive session I led during the ACCM in Boston on May 21, the overriding theme was that search engines judge a site’s worth on its inbound links. Translation: No links = no rankings.

Blogs, meanwhile, are great at attracting links from the blogosphere, because bloggers are rather cliquish and mostly tend to link to each other. So you’ll earn links as a blog that you wouldn’t normally earn otherwise.

Nonetheless, intentionally work to boost your link popularity; don’t just expect links to your blog to come on their own. One of the best ways to do this is by building relationships with bloggers by posting thoughtful comments on their blogs, by networking with them at real-world conferences like the Blog Business Summit and BlogHer, and by blogging about them. They’ll be more likely then to follow your blog and give you “hat tips” when they piggy-back on something interesting you’ve found online, and hopefully even include you on their “blogroll” (a link list of favorite blogs they read).

Internal Hierarchical Linking Structure

You pass all that hard-earned link popularity (PageRank) down through your blog’s archives through the blog’s internal hierarchical linking structure. Internal linking is one of your secret weapons, so make the most of it. Create a Top 10 list of your best posts and link to those posts from your blog’s home page. All your posts should include “Next Post” and “Previous Post” links, as well as a linked list of related posts. When writing blog posts, get in the habit of referring to any relevant old posts sitting in your archives.

Don’t use “click here” or “permalink” or “read more” in the anchor text of your internal links, because the search engines associate that underlined anchor text with the page to which you are linking. The engines will start to think all your pages are about such bizarre things as “click” or “here.” Given that, you’ll want to include important keywords in your internal links. The post’s title makes for a great anchor text, so make sure your post titles are clickable links.

Use the Neat-o tool to review the anchor text on your inbound links. Then ask your blogger friends who link to you with throwaway phrases like “click here” to change their wording.

A very powerful, somewhat advanced tactic is to provide visitors and spiders with a “tag cloud” full of keyword-rich text links that point to “tag pages” hosted on your blog. These are created automatically using a tagging plug-in like Ultimate Tag Warrior.

Importance of Title Tags

Title tags are the most important piece of text on a Web page. They’re given the most weight by search engines. So take the time to craft keyword-rich title tags for each post, category page, and of course, home page. If you must include your blog name in the title tag (not recommended), put it at the end of the title rather than at the beginning. Override the automatically generated title tags that are based on the post titles and replace them with custom-written title tags, using a blog plug-in.
URLs are very important to your blog’s rankings, too. Use “URL rewriting,” which is supported on most blog platforms, to create keyword-rich URLs that have no “stop characters” (question marks, ampersands or equals signs). Separate keywords with hyphens, not underscores, as Google doesn’t treat underscores as word separators.

Set up permanent (301 style) redirects from pages at yourblog.com to corresponding pages at www.yourblog.com, or you’ll end up with a duplicate site in the search engines. If you ever decide to switch blog platforms, maintain the old URLs through permanent redirects to preserve those valuable inbound links that point deep into your archives.

Heading tags (like H1, H2 etc.) get extra weight as opposed to regular body copy by the engines, so mark up post titles with H1 tags. Don’t mark up dates with heading tags (a fairly common mistake). On category pages, wrap the category name within an H1 tag. And on your tag pages, wrap the tag name within an H1.

Get ‘Sticky’

“Sticky” posts, which are posts that always appear at the top of the page regardless of the date, offer a clever way to add keyword-rich intro copy to a category page or tag page. The Adhesive plug-in will provide this “sticky” functionality to any WordPress-powered blog.

Optimize your RSS feeds too. Go with full-text feeds, not summary feeds. Provide at least 20 items in the feed, not just the default 10. Offer a range of feeds (not just one) by category, latest comments, comments by post and by tag. Have a keyword-rich title for each item, because that oftentimes will become anchor text.

For the same reason, put your most important keyword in the site’s title. Write a compelling site description because that gets displayed in various important places, such as in the “Related Blogs” results in Google Blog Search. Resist the temptation of appending a tracking code like source=rss to the URL, because it reduces the linked item’s link popularity potential. Include podcasts in your RSS feed as enclosures, as that can gain you additional visibility in podcast directories and search engines.

Stephan Spencer is president and founder of Netconcepts, a Web design and consulting firm specializing in search engine, optimal Web sites and applications. Reach him at sspencer@netconcepts.com .
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Posted by gzleus 4:34 PM    

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