Is It Shareable?

If you truly want to become an authority over time on an authoritative niche you might have, you need to ask yourself if the content you write is shareable or if people will share it. That is hard to explain until you see it in action and it is in action every day on Twitter and Facebook for starters. There are groups and followers of every imaginable niche out there, you just need to find them. They do exist. Some bigger than others, some smaller. Once you have a handle on your niche and research done, you can build the product pages. I must admit that these are not shared as much as articles and blog post are, but keep the reader in mind when building them. When adding articles and blog post later, make sure they fit a need, a search need and the content is the quality that others would share it. You can post this on Twitter and Facebook your self, perhaps on some group pages in Facebook even, but the true magic happens over time as others share it naturally. It does happen. Watch what type of content others are sharing in the niche? Videos? Toplist? Pictures? How to? You should get the drift by now. Sure you can build automated sites. I do, but my big, big money comes from several, several niches I am high in authority on and the content is VERY shareable. Look around. What is being shared in your niche on Twitter or Facebook?

SEO Checklist For The Social Media Marketer

A bit under the weather tonight as the weather pops back and forth to warm and cold. I hate this time of year down South. I wanted to make sure I passed on this absolutely great post by jennita on SEO Moz in which she gives a complete SEO checklist for the Social Media Marketer. Read it slow as it might be tough to digest if you are new, but she does a great job explaining the why and the why nots. As you should already know by now, Google and Bing use Twitter and Facebook to influence regular search results. If you are using Twitter and Facebook in certain niches, especially ones you might be or close to authoritative, this will certainly help. I have to admit that I am using Twitter more and more as a search engine for timely updates of news and recent blog post. This is a great post and worth book marking.

Introduction To Facebook Marketing

I was emailed a question about Facebook marketing and while I am still pretty much on the learning track and experimenting side of things myself with it, I had this great Introduction To Facebook Marketing post bookmarked from earlier this year by Tim Soulo. Soulo gives a step-by-step Social Media Marketing strategy for promoting a business on Facebook. He has gathered, in his opinion, all the best practices and tips that he has used himself along with some advice he has gotten from others and is confident will work. Facebook and Twitter are heavily integrated into the social web world. Facebook even moreso than Twitter from my own views. I am willing to bet if you randomly polled 10 people, more would admit to using Facebook than the would Twitter. I myself will be diving even heavier into Facebook in 2011 and if you are new to it, this is as great as any place to start the learning process.

IMAutomator Secondary Submissions Are Now Live

I have used the IMAutomator by Caroline Middlebrook for a while now and she is now proud to annouce that Secondary Submissions feature is now live! This new feature for Pro members will allow you to gain many more new backlinks by re-submitting your existing links to any new sites that were added to the system since the original submission. In the case of members who have upgraded from Free to Pro - all those links you submitted as a free member with the 15-site limit can now be re-submitted using the Secondary Submissions feature to gain all the other possible backlinks! For members who have been with us for a long time and submitted hundreds or even thousands of jobs in that time - you guys have a LOT of new backlinks waiting for you! To understand how the feature works and how to use it you can see this training page or watch the tutorial video below.

Rand On Improving Share-ability Of Your Content

I am a little under the weather today as it feels like the flu bug might be coming on. I wanted to point you to the SEO Moz Whiteboard Friday video and post today in which Rand goes over Improving Content "Share-ability". Another well put together segment and very informative as well.

SEOmoz - SEO Software

69 Days Until Christmas

I keep a little app on my computer that runs your around that lets me know how many days there are before Christmas. Why? It really motivates me year around. I can already tell that online buying has started for Christmas as it shows in my traffic and earnings. Realistically the real HEAVY buying season does not start until Thanksgiving, so you just have over a month to try to get a few new sites built, indexed and backlinked. With the right niche and the proper use of social media, it is never too late to start. Let the countdown to Christmas motivate you. I myself have a few sites I installed a little while ago with the Keyword To Websites Plugin that are ready for their makeover with purchased original content from my writers. These sites are primed in some hot niches that I expect will do even better once we get past Halloween. It is never too late to start, even if you build out of the box sites to break the ice.

Using Social Network Profiles For SEO

I am getting caught up thisd evening on some blog reading and have not been to SEO Moz the last few weeks to see the Whiteboard Friday videos. I am glad I did though as Rand had a great video the first of the month about Using Social Network Profiles For SEO. In this video, Rand goes over five ideas for using these types of sites to help with your SEO strategy.

Video Marketing At SES London 2009 & Facebook Jumps To #2

I have talked a ton about video over the last year and recently Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR discussed YouTube and Video Marketing at SES London 2009 in a video interview below. There is also a post up on Search Engine Watch that covers the comScore Video Metrix of US video sites where not so surprisingly, Facebook.com has jumped one position to capture the #2 spot with 58.6 million viewers of video in the US.

Video Never Killed The Radio Star & It Will Not Kill Your Site

I might be showing my age, but I remember the first video ever played on MTV. The video was "Video Killed The Radio Star", by the Buggles and you can see it below. The song is about the golden days of radio, describing a singer whose career is cut short by television. The talk and interpretation of that time was video was going to kill radio, but as we know all these years later, it only helped record/cd sales and music videos are as popular today as they were back in 1981. Everyday I am willing to bet everyone reading this post has watched some sort of web video today. If it was indeed only one video, I would be surprised. Web surfers expect video these days. Every site from non profit to shopping giants like QVC use it online. The Youtube nation is alive and strong. It is so easy to make your own video and submit it to the several free video sites out there. Not enough people take advantage of this and not enough people use the free videos done by others to help engage their own visitors. Look around you, look at the sites you visit on a daily basis. How are they using video? What are they doing that you could be doing? Video did not kill the radio star and it will not kill you to start finding ways to utilize it more. Now excuse me, I have some old Van Halen videos I tracked down I want to watch. I want my MTV!!!!

Future Of Social Media 5 Years Down The Road?

I love social media and have said it time and time again. I get it and have seen the results first hand. Adam Ostrow had a story surface on Mashable a few days back in which he takes a look at the The Next 5 Years in Social Media. Ostrow points out several ideas and the most interesting in his point that people need learn how to leverage the social media giants like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube as opposed to how to build the next mega social network. I certainly agree as these giants are already ingrained into the culture and are not going anywhere. There are still ideas that pop up every day in using the Twitter API and Facebook is as p[popular as it has ever been. If you are not learning to market on it or how to do paid ad placement on it, it is not too late. A great read with several offshoot links as well I suggest clicking and reading.

Rae Hoffman On Identifying Industry Leaders On Twitter

A comment and an email came to me wanting to me to devote more time on Twitter per my post the other day. It just so happens that the great Rae Hoffman posted on Search Engine Land a post about, How To Identify Industry Specific & Mainstream Media On Twitter. Rae goes over some great resources to find some leaders in certain industries and how to engage them once you do find them. Going right for the jugular is not the way, as I too have asked too early. Remember that you are networking and often times you have to give first before receiving. Some of these backlinks are very powerful and well worth the time invested in only acquiring just a few. Remember that with these links it is quality over quantity. Just a few of these can catapult a properly SEO'ed and properly researched site in the rankings. Don't forget to ask to guest blog and write content for them as well for the link. Trust me, it works. It just takes some time and patience.

Are You Networking Enough With Twitter?

I make no secrets that I love Twitter and have done so for quite a while, it helps me stay up to date with happenings in several niches, spurs ideas and topics to write about as well as being a tremendous way to network with other webmasters. This very post was spurned by one of my sites having an article go semi viral inside it's niche today thanks to Twitter. It is so powerful. I have found webmasters willing to let me guest post on their sites, trade links and in some cases even buy some links. In addition, I have picked up several marketing techniques just by watching a few different niche leaders in action on Twitter. I follow around 55 niches daily using the free Tweetdeck software and probably have picked up about that same many of very solid backlinks over the year as well and countless other not so solid links. I also have used it to get in touch with newspaper and magazine writers and have even picked up a small handful of backlinks that way as well. In my opinion, Twitter and Facebook continue to be under used as a marketing method, even though neither is considered new in the social media world. If you are not in the process of using both in some way every day, you are being left behind in the digital age. Do not fight it any more.

Tags, Tags, Everywhere Tags

One of the most under done task in video, picture or other 2.0 type sites is the tags section. You have seen these before and they are to be filled out much like a Wordpress blog post would be. If there is a description area, that goes hand in hand as well. Not only will filling these tags out help searches on those particular sites find you easier, it also helps the autoblog sites find you easier as well. When filling out these tags, some will have minimum words or characters so I go from specific to broad with my tag words. I will use every space allowed. With the desrcption area, treat it like you would a description meta tag on a web page. If allowed, throw in your site URL as well. You never know where these pictures, videos, documents or widgets will show up or who will find them, so do it right the first time on upload and you are covered. Little things like this add up over time.

Deliver It With Dlvr.it

Another great way to deliver your sites RSS feed to various social network sites has emerged in the form of Dlvr.it. Dlvr.it enables publishers, bloggers and brands a means to immediately syndicate their content or post and broaden their reach on the social platforms and into new content channels. Watch the video below to learn more on how you can deliver it with dlvr.it.

Easier To Get Hit By A Car If You Stand In The Middle Of The Road

A reader emailed me and asked me to sum up what the new WPSyndicator Wordpress plugin does in a few words. I replied with, it is easier to get hit by a car if you stand in the middle of the road. If you blog or auto blog, this plugin does exactly that so to speak. It puts your content or blog post right out in the middle of the road. It increases your exposure and provides more door ways into your site. In addition it provides more opportunities for the syndicated content to be picked up by other bloggers or website owners. You increase your chances of getting hit by a car. If you get creative and combine this plugin with tools I have recently blogged about such as ping.fm and Pixel Pipe, you can see the bigger picture of how one post can automatically get syndicated all throughout the net. Do not take social media sites and Web 2.0 properties lightly. It is the future of even search perhaps. The more embedded you can be in it the better. Sit back at draw out the big picture of how all of this comes together and you will see how easy it is to get hit by a car. The WPSyndicator Wordpress plugin is indeed now launched today and I thank all of you that have already purchased it.

Pixel Pipe Distribution Tool & WPSyndicator Launches On Friday

If you have read recently, you know how much I have been pushing ping.fm for pushing out content to social sites. A new free service has surfaced called Pixel Pipe and I just started playing with it early this morning. Like ping.fm, it is very impressive. It is touted as being able to distribute your content to over 110 social media sites at the push of a button, and it is free, including your video to over 50 video sharing sites. Amazing. You can even send your content to pixelpipes with your GoogleTalk account if you use that. You never know where or how these submissions will be picked up and where they will land. Get acquainted with this site today.

Also I wanted to note that the WPSyndicator Wordpress plugin goes live tomorrow at 3pm GMT. I have used this plugin since it was a beta fund raiser project and it is quite impressive. I have been posting links to the sales page and several of you have emailed me that they could not purchase it yet. My apologies as I thought it was available to the public by now. If you buy this plugin, you will not be disappointed. The developer has this plugin running at full speed. Thanks to all that alerted me of my error.

Twitter Fall & Tweep Search Twitter Tools

I love Twitter and have made it very clear in the past. There are some good paid tools out there to increase your followers and I stumbled across a few good free ones as well, but you do have to dedicate about 30 minutes a day to them on days you want to increase your followers. The first free tool is called Twitter Fall and if you use the searches filters to show only the Twitter user you are hunting, you can follow the target users and hope the reciprocate. Below is video that shows you the settings and it will take you some playing to get the feel for it. The second tool is Tweep Search and you can use it to do a bio search of all Twitter users to find those that list your target interest in their bio. If you use these two tools for about 30 minutes in total every day. You can build up followers in all of your Twitter accounts over time and increase traffic to your websites in the process with targeted surfers.

WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin For Building Readership

I came across the WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin last night and played around with it extensively on a test site. I makes a great plugin to help you increase your blog or site exposure and build loyal readership. Not so much for sites that are not updated regularly, but for sites you might add content to on a regular basis or even auto type blogs. I am adding the video below, because it is just too damn funny. My apologies if it offends you. Enjoy the plugin.

Tweepi - A Fairly New Twitter Tool

Tweepi is a fairly new free Twitter tool that will help you build your Twitter followers by finding and following quality followers in a certain niche by researching popular Twitter users already in your niche. If you use Twitter already, that makes perfect sense to you. This tool is safe to connect to your Twitter account and I have tested it myself on a specific account of mine and got the hang of it. Even if you do not use it to build followers, it is good for cleaning out the list of people you follow who might not be following you back or are not as active or Tweeting about things that you want to follow. If you utilize Twitter, this tool will make perfect sense. If you don't use Twitter, it is never too late to start. I always like to refer people to this tutorial by Mashable.

Web 2.0 & Social Network Syndication Tools

Advancements in social networks, web 2.0 sites and RSS feeds is making it easier and easier to get your blog post or content syndicated out quickly through a network of sites with a simple push of your publish post button. I have talked about the Ping.fm simple and free service that makes updating your social networks a breeze. In addition to it already being a great service, it has gotten even better with the addition of the RSS by Superfeedr feature. Using this feature, you can update your social networks in real time using any RSS feed of your choice. Right now you can only use just one feed, but they plan to support multiple feeds in the future. It of course takes time setting up all of your accounts, but well worth it for a niche that you are wanting to become an authority in and blog about often.

Another great tool for syndication to web 2.0 properties is the new Wordpress plugin called WP Syndicate. The plugin syndicates your content from your blog to web 2.0 properties like Twitter, Blogger, Wordpress, Tumblr, Plurk, Multiply, Live Journal, Typepad and Vox with more properties being added soon. It automatically integrates with the Bit.ly API link shortener, so you don't even need to bother shortening your URL. This plugin normally sells for $49.95, but you can get now until July 19th for $9.97 as the owner is trying To raise over $10,000 by that date for Asthma research. If you do not need the plugin now, buy it for use later as it is a great plugin and for a great cause as well. There is a video below that explains it more in depth.