We very often forget how blogging started as a personal diary, but has become a venue for businesses to connect with their clients. Personalized bloggers are finding it more difficult to find an audience. Mohsin sheds some light on the topic sharing tips of how to become a semi-problog.

Are you suffering from computer issues like Steven has recently? Well don’t fret, the folks at freelance folder have some tips in order to avoid computer catastrophe.

Considering video-blogging? CT Moore shares tips from the top video bloggers to get the show on the road.

If want to improve your blogging, make sure to read what 10 great bloggers tell us about mistakes they made As beginners.

Viral Marketing is a technique we all wish we can implement. Linda Bustos shares a great story of great customer service that resulted in a strong viral campaign.
Have a great weekend!

Tags: link-building, link-love
Posted in Blogging, Miscellaneous

Traffic is the fuel of a web property. Without traffic you just have potential. No traffic, no sales, ad clicks, leads, feedback, community.

It is easy to understand why webmasters are obsessed with it.

Now as you know, there various sources of traffic, from free to way expensive. All have their place, and the less budget you have the more work you are likely to have to put in.

Small business operators seem to be getting the idea more recently. Larger businesses seem fixated on three tactics; Adwords, banners and SEO.

I am going to let you in on five “secret” sources of traffic. In fact they are common sense, but because common sense is rarely common practice they might seem like secret traffic sources to your clients …

1. Expired Domains - Old domains can be picked up when expired really rather cheaply. What many people do not realize is a lot of them have links pointing to them, or even garner some type-in hits. For a real snip of a price you can find some real bargains. Buy a whole bunch of them and funnel the search juice and hits to your main property.
2. Site Purchases - It’s not just expired domains that you can pick up on the cheap. Look out for sites for sale that have inbound links and steady traffic. Avoid the pumped and pimped sites from savvy sellers, what you want are the sites that can attract visits from a variety of sources naturally already but with a bit of tweaking can really perform. Again this traffic can be funneled, 301-redirected or just used as is.
3. OPT - Other Peoples Traffic. This is the heart of the Squidoo, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace etc tactics. Find a location that naturally attracts attention and leach off it. Another route is to build something attractive that friendly blogs will want to link to. I could even put guest posting under this heading!
4. Huge and Influential Lists - This is the oldest tactic in the book. It’s so old it makes people overlook it in favor of Social Media Marketing and any other recent buzzword. People forget, but you know it works, right? The key is how it is presented, and absolutely not spam. Call it a Joint Venture, an advertisement, a friendly mention, whatever, getting on a powerful list with a glowing endorsement can be the best converting traffic you have seen. The challenge is getting the right deal on the right list.
5. Hitching a Ride - Let someone else worry where the traffic is going to come from and just tag along for the ride. This is related to the last point in a way but it stands on its own. Think about the last big promotion in your niche. The PR, the advertising, the fanfare. While you might only be able to siphon off a small percentage of that attention, you will also pay little or nothing to get it. There are two versions of this tactic; partnering or freeloading. When you partner you actually give the main event some of your value, be it as a bonus, a prize or some other service. For example a big product launch might get a free pass to your seminar or ebook. When you freeload what you are doing is finding a bandwagon that is about to start rolling and jump on it. So you look for a story that is about to break big and you do all you can to suck down on some of that traffic.

Those are my lesser known traffic sources, what are yours? Share your secrets in the comments …

Tags: increase-website-traffic, link-building, sales-leads, viral-marketing
Posted in SEO

Viral marketing, buzz marketing, word of mouth marketing, grass roots marketing; call it whatever you like, but getting people to talk about your product or service is marketing at its best. Forget about your marketing department promoting your company, and let’s talk about everyone “else” doing the marketing for you. Of course, it’s easier said than done. The problem is not in the “what” but in the “how.” If it were that easy to create a viral marketing campaign, everyone would be doing it. But that is the beauty of the whole thing. Not everyone can do it. I spent the last two weeks analyzing some of the successful viral campaigns our clients ran the last few months. My goal was to create a model that we can replicate with other clients, and even, to be more honest, implement at INVESP. Here are some of the common success factors I noticed:

3, 2, 1: Prepare to Lose control

You’re no longer in control, your clients are. They will run the show. It is not B2B or B2C anymore, it is all C2C. You will not have control over negative messages, aggravated customers or bad reviews. This is easy in theory but many companies find it hard when they put it into practice. Most companies are used to a structured marketing. Every detail of the marketing campaign is planned, events are scheduled, staff is organized and results are tracked. Viral marketing by its definition is not structured; it is not organized nor is it planned.

The other aspect that scares everyone: no one can guarantee results. You can take some steps to prepare a campaign but who knows if it is going to work or not. I was looking at some of the linkbaiting services available out there. Some are managed by expert SEO companies. You will have to pay close to $6,000 for the service and there is no guarantee of the results. Without getting into a discussion of whether linkbaiting is viral marketing or not, I have to say that $6000 is a lot of money to invest with no guarantee.

Even worse, how about a viral campaign that produces negative affects?

Do you have something worth talking about?

Some products are easy to talk about. When I bought my first TIVO back in 2002, I made sure everyone I know heard about it. How about something simple such as the Mach3 razor from Gillette? Most razor advertisements, including the one for Mach3, are silly. But the product was so good that many guys told their friends about the razor when it first came out. Ordering DVDs online was a novel concept which got everyone talking about NetFlix few years back.

What’s the common thread among these examples? They spread like wild fire initially and then suddenly they get cold or die off. That is an affect of viral marketing as well. Campaigns spread because people want to talk about something new, after the word spreads about “the thing,” it becomes boring! And remember, no matter how much you love your product or service, few are actually worth talking about in themselves. I hope that did not shatter any of your hopes or dreams.

So, how do you create a viral marketing campaign if you there is nothing interesting about your product? You can always find an interesting angle in something that relates to your product or service.

• For example, a special offer with 20% off as boring at it sounds can be something worth talking about.  
• How about if you operate an auto websites, there is nothing interesting about pages upon pages of car listings. But how about a contest where you ask visitors to send and rate pictures of the ugliest car they own?
• Who cares about buying books online, but Amazon product reviews were definitely worth talking about when they were first introduced.
• How about a bag of chips? There is nothing worth mentioning about Doritos. However, their super ball video contest was worth talking about.
• NetFlix is not new anymore. However, their contest for programmers to come up with better recommendation system and win 1,000,000 is worth talking about.

Let’s say that you sell shoes. Is there anything interesting about your shoes themselves? Maybe, maybe not. But how about hosting a contest to create the best video promoting your shoes?  And let the YouTube users spread the word! What about a contest to create the best ad copy for your shoes? Let the copy writer community spread the word.

SEOmoz held a contest asking copywriters and designers to create the best landing page for their services.

Simple idea = Viral idea

Do you want to create something viral? Make sure you can “say” the idea behind viral campaign in less than 5 words. Nothing should be fancy about what you are trying to spread. It is not about your mission statement, and it is not about who you are; it is about creating something easy for people to talk about. We are lazy so make our job of spreading the word about your campaign easy. Many viral campaigns start when friends, family and colleagues tell each other, “did you hear about —-?”

Find talkers

A great idea will not go anywhere without people talking about it. You always hear that content is king. Without marketing, content is a king in a very lonely and sad place.  There are millions of new pages added online every day. You have to let people know about the great idea you just created. You can do the marketing yourself but that is not viral marketing. You will have to do a bit of initial marketing to your talkers but then let them loose to do most of the work. Remember it is only viral if your customers do the marketing for you.

How do you find the talkers? Google and technorati are your best friends. You will need to create two lists: The first list will be of bloggers/opinion leaders who talk about your market and area of specialty regularly. The second list is more important for viral success. This list will be of people who are interested in the nature of your promotion.

If you viral idea is about creating a video to promote a contest, then your list will include “leaders” in producing videos on youtube. If your viral idea is about creating a successful ad copy for your company, then your list will be of active members of in copy writers forums and blogs. Reach out to people on your list and establish relationships with them. People are not interested in someone who wants to use them to spread his/her ideas. They are interested in a genuine relationship. So, interact with your talkers, invest time in cultivating your relationship with them, and it will pay off.

Need more places to find talkers? Online forums are a great place to establish good relations. You can introduce yourself to the community and participate as well. But they are a great place to find talkers as well. Select some of the top online forums that your community participates in. Find the members who post regularly in these forums and who have interest in your topics. These are your talkers.

Talk to them

I do not approach bloggers with my idea until I feel that we have established a good relationship with them. Others seems to disagree with me on this. It seems very common for people to shoot me an email telling me about “some content” that my readers may be interested in. It doesn’t work for me, but you need to figure out what works best for you.  And it does not always have to be in email format. Sometimes, if you find an online community where your talkers hang out, then you need to run some advertising to target them. Doritos ran banner ad in the publisher areas of youtube. That worked out very well for them. 

Are you really that good?

The bad thing about viral marketing, well that it is viral. If your products or services stink, viral marketing will do you a lot of harm. Make sure that you can support your claims. Make sure your product or service will actually deliver the results people expect.

All good things come to an end or get copied!

Like I mentioned, people love to talk about new, hot things. The more people talk about your viral campaign, the more successful it will be. But eventually, your campaign will be yesterday’s news. Successful viral campaigns can run for few months or maybe even for a year or so. Most viral campaigns, however, run for less than couple of months at best. So always be prepared to look for new ways to get people talking about your business. The other thing you will notice is that your competitors will start copying your efforts and campaigns. There is not a whole to do about that. But the copy affect will also hinder and slow down your own campaign.

So, what are your next steps?

• Brainstorm ideas with your team about ways to create a viral campaign for your business. You need to come up with at least 5 different suggestions.
• For each of the possible 5 viral suggestions, identify the target community for the idea.
• Contact someone from that community and run your idea by them. Ask them for feedback. Many will be glad to tell you if they think your idea will work or not.
• Come up with a campaign budget to figure out how much money the campaign is actually going to cost you.
• Identify the main ways you will market your campaign initially.
• Create your two lists of “talkers:” The two list should contain at least 50 names.
• Over the next month start establishing relationships with your talkers.
• Create the actual campaign.
• Promote your campaign by either telling your talkers about it, or asking for their help to spread the word around.
• GOOD LUCK!

How effective has viral marketing been for you? Do have any suggestions for anyone who wishes to go viral?

Tags: Blogging, Build-links, link-baiting, link-building, online-marketing, viral-marketing, word-of-mouth-marketing
Posted in Blogging, Sales & Marketing

It’s no doubt that building links to your site has multiple benefits including increasing site traffic and increasing your search engine ranking. Larry Chase came up with a list of 53 ways to build inbound links, and the following are my favorite 10:

1) Widget Linking - What this means is creating a “widget” which is a tool that performs some kind of task or function, and entrench your site’s link in it. An example of this can be found in Lee Odden’s online marketing blog where he created these two widgets: an RSS Button Maker and a Social Bookmark Creator. Users greatly benefit from these tools and his site has the traffic to prove it.

2) Content Keyword Tagging - Tagging is used to help organize information in an understandable way on the web by assigning keywords to content or to bookmarks. They can be assigned to blog posts, RSS feeds or any content on your website. Using tags combined with social book-marking can be a very effective way to organize resources on the web.

3) Social Media Linking - Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon get most of the attention these days and can drive a significant amount of traffic to your site provided you have the “right” news. However, it’s important to realize that these social outlets may not be visited by your target audience.

4) Mapping Link Hubs and Tag Neighborhoods - Find sites that are similar to yours and they will be highly likely to link to your site. You can find these sites with Similicio.us, which is a search engine that finds relevant sites based on tags off of del.icio.us. It follows the users that have visited a certain site and lists other sites that were visited by them.

 5) PDF Linking - Adding PDF files such as whitepapers that have content in it is very beneficial. Every time someone downloads your files they have direct links back to your website. Also, when you embed metatags in your PDF files, when a search engine spiders your site and looks at your content, it can read the “invisible” metatags and add your PDF to its database.

6) Blog Optimization - Blogging becomes pointless if its not done well and doesn’t accomplish the goals that it intends to. A couple of things to keep in mind is to: comment on other blogs and link back to your site; submit your blog to the list of blog-specific search engines, Google offers a blog specific search engine. You can find other many beneficial tips at Stephan Spencer’s Scatterings blog which is deservedly pointed out as a good resource on blog optimization.

7) Link Analytics - There are a variety of link research tools that can be used to research new link opportunities. This site offers a directory to 136 of the most popular ones. Useful tools to be aware of are those that enable you to:

• Analyze the inbound links and outbound links of your site and your competitors’ sites;
• Assess the quality of a site to determine if it is worth going after for a link;
• List your inbound links according to each search engine;
• Analyze the text of said inbound links to make sure it is keyword rich;
• Find the valuable .edu, .gov and .org inbound links to your site;
• Compare the link popularity of your site to that of any other site; etc.

Press Release Optimization - This method will generate links to your site when done well and picked up by news search engines and other sites. News wire services evaluate each press release and categorize it based on the relevant keywords found in them.

9) Content Repurposing - this is submitting your published articles and other content to article banks, where other sites can pick up your articles and linke to them or publish them on their sites. Some examples of companies that offer a directory of already published content are: Ezine Articles, Go Articles and iSnare.com.

10) Link Insider Tools - Google or Yahoo provide info on who is linking to you through Google Webmaster Central and Yahoo! Site Explorer. These tools provide a detailed list of inbound links and give you and idea of who is linking to your site.

What do you think? Do you have other ways that worked for you?

Tags: link-building, link-love
Posted in SEO

I was inspired by my blog about “the highest paying jobs” to search for the real highest paying jobs in the US. As I mentioned I was disappointed with the results provided by both Career Builder and Monster. But then, I stumbled upon www.payscale.com. The site builds itself as “a trusted market leader in online salary.” Surely a trusted market would have accurate data. When I did a search on Neurosurgeon pay, here is the data the site gave:

Median Salary by Years Experience - Job: Neurosurgeon (United States)

Compare your salary: Get a free Salary Report

I spent few minutes trying to make sense of the data. Here is what I came up with:

1- If you have less than one year of experience as neurosurgeon, you will make an average of 258,000 per year.

2- If you have between 1 to 4 years of experience, your pay will go down to 200,000 per year. So, more experience = less pay.

3- If you have between 5-9 your pay will go up to 250,000. It is still not as good as your first few months of work but things are getting a little better.

4- Things improve when you have between 10-19 years of experience because you will make around 284,000 per year

5- You would think that experience counts for something but after working for 20+ years  your pay will actually go down to a level below the years between 10-19 of your practice.

I think you get my drift. The data does not make any sense. It makes me wonder if it is too much to expect the “trusted market leader in online salary” to have accurate data.

Tags: blog-contest, blog-series, bloggers, Blogging, link-building
Posted in Blogging