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Online Marketing Tips Video: Twitter Tips - URL Shorteners, Blogging & ReTweeting

By Li Evans

This week for our Tuesday's Tips in Online Marketing Video, I'm discussing some Twitter Tool that you can integrate into your strategy to get a better handle on what's happening with all those URL's you are tweeting out.

Full Twitter Tips Video Transcript after the jump....

Online Marketing Tips Video: Free Blogging Tools

By Li Evans

It's been a few weeks without a Tuesday's Tips in Online Marketing Video so I pulled one that I hadn't yet posted to SMG.  This week its all about tools, free tools for Bloggers and their blogs.  Google's got three really great tools that any blogger can integrate into their blog to take it to the next level.

In today's video we'll discuss Google's Feedburner, Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer.  It's quick and to the point, and maybe it'll help you to decide to install one of these free tools to help improve your blog.

Free Blogging Tool Tips Video Transcript after the jump....

The Power of a Twitter Suggestion, Product Reviews & Video Sharing

By Li Evans

Earlier this afternoon I was getting a little disheartened by some .... pardon the expression,.... lame ass marketers touting that everyone needs a Blog .. type promoting social media marketing.  You know the type, they think they know social media because they have a blog and a twitter account.  A friend of mine asked me to check out some links from some webinars that .. well frankly, some schmuck put together who thinks social media is about links from a blog directory.  Pardon my candidness - but schmuck is about the best way to describe who presented the information.

For the record, like my respected pal Mike Grehan, I hate the term Social Media ... there's got to be a better term to explain this form of conversation/promotion/marketing.

With that all said, I set off then this evening to find a shredder.  Yes, something as plain Jane and utilitarian as a shredder.  See I got new checks, but the bank made an error and put the wrong number in the account area - so they sent me the correct ones.  I also have a bunch of CDs I need to shred.  Thus started my quest.

I went to Twitter and asked:

Low and behold a local pal Shawn Collins of Afflilate Summit tweeted me back:

Of course I thanked him!


But .... me being me not only did I watch his review:
 

I did a search.  

Look closely at what I have highlighted in red boxes (click image for larger view), it's all Shawn.  Shawn's review ranks highly from the website I visited, not only that his YouTube VIDEO ranks highly.  Followed by the OfficeDepot.com listing (highlighted by blue box).  Funny thing - Shawn's link links right to the Office Depot product.

Now, If I wasn't such an in-depth internet user that I am, and as loyal to Staple as I am, I wouldn't have done a search on the Ativa™ DQ120D Diamond-Cut Shredder in Google to find alternate sources for this product.  However neither Staples nor Amazon carry this product.

Point is, I trust Shawn - he's one of my followers on Twitter who actually holds conversations, I've met him in person, and he even runs a respected conference called Affiliate Summit.  He's got authority in my book, a trusted authority.  Add to the fact that he's ranking in Google for all this, I'm buying the Ativa™ DQ120D Diamond-Cut Shredder from Office Depot.

That's not just the power of Twitter, it's the power of a blog post review and video sharing - Social Media Marketing (by an Affiliate Marketer) in action.

Online Marketing Tips Video: Online Reputation Management

By Li Evans

This week's online marketing tips video is all about online reputation management in social media and search marketing.  It's a little different look beyond just monitoring with Google alerts and buzz monitoring tools (the first tip).  Buy building relationships and loosing your grip, these tips can also help you with your reputation online.

Reputation Management Online Tips Video Transcript after the jump....

Online Marketing Tips Video: Community Building

By Li Evans

Finally I'm back with our Tuesday's Tips in Online Marketing!

Today I decided to focus on Community Building in Social Media.  It's under 3 minutes, quick and to the point about 3 tips for helping to build the community around your blog, forum, or even networking group like those on Facebook or LinkedIn.  Enjoy!

Full Community Building Tips Video transcript after the jump ....

How to Get Over the Ouch Syndrome in Blogging

By Li Evans

Let's face it, no one likes to hear "bad" things about themselves.  It's never more true when you have a corporate PR or Marketing department who's only job is to "spin".  But negative thoughts, comments and situations are a given whenever a company enters into the public spectrum.  There is always a detractor somewhere.  This is why companies who are entering into the social media space really need to be prepared to accept the love as well as the "non-love" with their brand, products or services.

So with a little inspiration from the group on Sunday night's #blogchat group and from Debra Mastaler (who I've personally called the Link Goddess) I present some ways for companies to get over the "ouch" of starting a blog.

1. Grow a Thick Skin
   Everyone has a detractor.  That old saying that you need a "thick skin" or just let it roll off like "duck off a waters back" is very true when it comes to blogging.  Blogging naturally attracts emotions of all kinds.  People love you, people hate you, you as the company or blog owner need to have a thick skin to be able to accept both the negative and positive comments the posts on your blog will attract.  The biggest thing is don't freak out!  The next biggest thing is don't go into the standard "defense" mode.  Think things through before you actually respond to a negative comment.
2. Don't Engage (or Feed) the Trolls
   Don't feed the trolls anymore goats than you need too. It's a bit tough to pick out the constant complainer & avid troll, from that customer who loves you but just has this one complaint or two.  Understanding the difference is key.  It means the difference from having a constant enemy to having the most evangelical fan out their for your brand, product or service.
3. Allow Comments on Your Blog
   Don't be a one way communication device.  The days of just jamming a marketing message down your audience's throat is gone.  Even though it is technically your soapbox, blogging requires at least two way communication.  Even more it requires community participation to become authentic and authoritative, that's why comments are vitally important to a successful blog.
4. Post a Comment & Trackback Policy Prominently on Your Blog
   To make things clear, and fair, companies should post (very visibly) policies about what types of comments and trackbacks they will recieve and publicly post.  This protects both the audience and the comment poster (not to mention the blog itself).  Having a policy that points out you will not accept comments that are vulgar, defamatory on a personal nature or racist in any way avoids companies from having to post such negative garbage and having to defend themselves against it.  Post a link to your comments & trackback policies prominently on your blog to avoid this type of nonsense.
5. Don't Moderate for Negative Comments
   As much as anyone hates negative comments about themselves, you have to let them through, you can't moderate them out, not if you want to be taken seriously.  Even if the person thinks you are the worst brand to walk the planet earth, you have to have that think skin (referr to bulletin item #1) and just let that negative roll right off your back.  Look deeper into the comment and try to understand why the commenter is upset.  A lot of times negative commenters are really people who like you but are just really upset because you disappointed them in some way, shape or form.  By taking the time to figure that out and addressing it, you have the opportunity to turn that negativer commenter into your biggest evangelist!
6. Admit When You Are Wrong
   If you were wrong, or your company did wrong, don't avoid it - just admit it and get it over with.  By admitting that you did wrong on your blog - whether its through blog comments or through a blog post itself, just admit you were wrong.  By admitting you were wrong, you'll gain a lot more respect from your audience, as well as loyalty.  We're all human, we all make mistakes, but when you can admit to those mistakes in a public forum, something that sticks around for a while, it creates a whole new dimension to your "trust factor" as will s strengthening your relationship with your audience.

I'm sure there's other tips out there for dealing with the "ouch" syndrome, do you have something that worked for you?  Would love to hear about it!

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President Barack Obama & His Social Media Agenda in the First 50 Days

By Li Evans

Quietly, without trumpets, fan fare, ticker tape parades or walks outside of the limo that give the secret service heart attacks, President Barack Obama has been changing the way the executive branch of the government does business online.  Not only that he's influencing the other branches, in particularly the legislator, both Congress & Senate.

In the first 50 days of his presidency President Obama's team has pushed forward a number of new sites to help citizens of the United States understand better what the President and his staff are doing. This was something we have never seen before, all we ever got before was a static WhiteHouse.gov site that people continually tried to Google Bomb for "miserable failure".

I stated back in November that President Barack Obama was going to be "Our First Social Media President", within the first 50 days of this presidency he's sure living up to that moniker I tacked on him (sure hope he doesn't mind).  We also know that Blackberry is sure thankful for the free press, since he wouldn't give up his and got that super dooper James Bond one.  Besides the Blackberry, in the first 50 days of his presidency, President Obama and his team have launched a number of new sites above and beyond just WhiteHouse.gov and that's what I'd like to focus on today, along with some other things.

Online Marketing Tips Video: Blogging & Gaining Subscribers

By Li Evans

I hope you can forgive me that this video is a day late.  It was made yesterday, I just ran out of time and energy to get it posted for you all.  Blame my 6 year old nephew if you must, he tuckered me out yesterday with playing in the snow and yes he didn't care it was only 15 degrees out. 

I've got three more blogging tips, to round out my tips on blogging.  Theses tips aren't as technical as last week's online marketing tips video, in fact anyone can implement these tips!  So check it out.

Full Blogging & Gaining Subscribers Tips - Video Transcript after the jump.

Online Marketing Tips Video: Building Your Blog Audience

By Li Evans

After a little hiatus the Online Marketing Tips Videos are back! This week I'm discussing three tips that can help you build your audience a bit more around your blog and the community that forms around it.

Full Building Your Blog Audience Video Transcript After the Jump....

SES London 2009 - SEO Through Blogs and Feeds

By SEOidiot

Moderator: Andy Atkins-Krüger, Managing Director, WebCertain Europe Ltd

Speakers: David Naylor, SEO, Bronco
Sante Achille, Consultant, Sante J Achille
Maile Ohye, Senior Developer Programs Engineer, Google

Maile:

Lead for the webmaster central blog Blogs
Think about Blogsearch as a way of adding opinionated content to the search results

Triggered by hot topics

• Entertainment
• Tech
• Politics

Publish > ping > indexed (typically less than 10 minutes)
If you aren't using a service like blogger or wordpress you can ping the service manually

SEO faqs

Publish full content or snippet?

It doesnt make that much of a difference but its mildly better for Google to get the full (only makes a few minutes difference)

Can I robots.txt some of my categories etc to avoid dupe content

If you are confident with robots.txt yes but google will try to sort it at their end

What about tweets?
Not currently in the ping service, crawled if linked to on the web.

Security, blogger and webmaster tools

Receive 'hackable software' notification in webmaster tools message centre
Blogs seem especially vunerable
Up-to-date software software can prevent attacks
Verify your site with webmaster tools

Feeds for product search

Back end is Google Base
Google.co.uk/products
Submit your products through feeds, text, xml, api or even manual submission

Product feeds appear in universal search via the onebox
Extended Product pages show in uk (electronics) and us for (electronics, books, dvds etc)

Best practices for feeds

Strive for accurate information
Good attributes to include in your base feed.

• UPC (unique product code)
• MPN (manu part number)
• Brand
• Accurate description
• Image

In the US there is a data quality tab that will help verify UPC's and checks if titles are correct lengths

Google base discussion group is a good resource More of these features coming to the UK

Sante:

Architecture
How to optimise your blogs architecture

Avoid starting on free portals
By starting on a free service and growing there its hard to take all that work with you.

Showed an example of a site that moved from moveable type to wordpress and gave up due to the work involved in trying to migrate so many inbound links

Make the urls better

Recommended www.domain.com/category/title-keywords

Custom structure in wordpress /%catgory%/%postname%/

Should I change to keywords from ?=
If its working well now then leave it

Theme templates
Choose a theme that privileges your content so the content is prominent rather than the sidebar being first in the code.

Move the get_sidebar to below the content loop

Personalisation
Plugins
Be cautious to avoid problems and badly written plugins
Check the number of downloads
Research who is using it and whether there have been problems
Mine your content to identify keywords that help you create new content

Wordpress as a multi lingual platform
Blogslot (Plugin to help group content by language)
Group your categories into languages

Dave Naylor;

It starts with what software to use Wordress, Drupal, Movable Type, Blogger etc....
Wordpress is the best to choose

The fact that wordpress pings google blogsearch
Its a solid CMS

Check the plugins carefully as there are many out there that can cause problems

Considerations for the blog Root sub dom or subfolder

Tend to put them in subs for clients Hosting - put the subs on different servers and therefore ip's so you get a gain from google thinking they are external rather than internal links

Making the blog SEO friendly

• Make the title of the post count
• Make use of heading tags - H1's H2's etc
• Change the url structure to be your-doamin.com/your-post-page/

Blog linking

If you dofollow (eg using the do follow plugin) you have to be sure to spend the time moderating
Link to relevant sites Social networking
Add the relevant buttons to your blog posts (Dont go crazy, just add the relevant ones)
Submit your stuff to digg, stumble etc

RSS feeds

Snippets tend to help bring people to your site and see your ads etc but full feeds make people more likely to subscribe
Use Joost's (http://www.yoast.com) RSS-Footer plugin to add a link to you in your feeds
If someone is using your feeds and not linking back email them and give them a deadline to remove or add a followed link.