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Posts Tagged ‘Blogging’

Glad to see you again! Be sure and check out the Blog page. Feel free to send me an email if you have any questions. Have a great day! Lina

where is the best place to post my blogs for ultimate traffic

I just saw an to a question on here about blogging and it said that the legal age to blog is 18. WTF? Why do you have to be an adult. Why do you have to be a certain age to voice your opinions?

<rant>I’m listening to The Influencer Project. It’s a really interesting project – 60 minutes of 60 second tips from the Who’s Who on the web talking about creating influence online. I could be a little bitter that I didn’t get invited to help, but as I’m listening to these folks… I came to the realization that many of them are just plain full of crap.

First, as you read through the list, do your homework… most of those people actually did not build their influence online. They were already influential and then went online. Still others were influential because they wrote successful books or created successful businesses. In other words, they already had influence. That said, I respect all of them for the hard work they’ve done… I just disagree that they are experts in influencing people online.

Don’t believe me? Go down the list of people and circle the ones that actually created their own influence online.

Anne Handley, Anne Holland, Brian Clark, Jason Falls, Liz Strauss, Hugh MacLeod, Dan Schawbel, Steve Woodruff, Chris Garrett… to name a few… no one knew who these people were before they scratched, bled and crawled their way to influence. They did it by taking risks, saving in piggy banks to travel to conferences, working until the deep hours of the morning, juggling day jobs and speaking gigs, losing their jobs, writing blogs and ebooks…

These folks achieved influence in their networks with tireless hard work.

Some people I know are amazed that I started a successful business in less than a year. In less than a year? Really? Folks – I’ve been working on this for a decade! Ten years of getting in trouble with my bosses for blogging about clients. Years of no sleep. Years of 7 day work weeks. Years of living on the Internet. I’m not even close to the same neighborhood of influence as those people on the project – but I know how hard they’ve worked to get where they are.

The funny part is, as you listen to the Influencer Project, some of these influencers have actually forgotten exactly how they got there! I didn’t hear things like…

Join a high-risk startup that happened to make bajillions, write a best-selling book, be a humorous caustic intimidator that cusses a lot, start a successful traditional agency and then make the move online, be an expert off-line…

I heard crap like join a social network or start using some tool online. Are you kidding me? Tools are just that… tools! Give me a box of paints and a few weeks and I’ll show you a painting that barely matches the skill level of a fourth-grader. Giving people online tools for influence isn’t going to help them influence anymore than giving me a lab is going to help me win the Nobel prize.

There are some great messages in with the project, don’t get me wrong. I’m really not bitter… really.

So… you want to influence people? Hone your craft until you know it inside and out. Take every opportunity to lead or volunteer to get your name out. Help everyone. Invest in your own future instead of your employer… or that next pay raise or promotion. Fail. Fail. Fail. Fail. Fail. Fail again. Get your name out. Call yourself an expert. Get ridiculed. Go speak – you’ll probably suck, but you’ll get better. Work hard.

I think my 60 seconds are up. </rant>

NOTE: Looks like Fastcompany is running its own Influencer Project.

This post was written by Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is the founder of The Marketing Technology Blog. Doug is President and CEO of DK New Media, an online marketing company specializing in social media, blogging and search engine optimization. Their clients include Webtrends, ChaCha and many more.

Did you know Douglas Karr's book is coming out in August? You can pre-order Corporate Blogging for Dummies now on Amazon. Check out our new site, Corporate Blogging Tips, to find out what events that we'll be speaking at.

Got an event? Let us know that as well - we're looking forward to going on tour later this year.

Don't forget to follow @corpblogging on Twitter or become a Fan on Facebook!

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So many companies I work with focus so much of their time on their home page, navigation, and subsequent pages. Many of them are bloated, with unnecessary marketingese and pages that no one reads – yet they still ensure that they are out there. Designers and agencies sit down and develop the site with a great hierarchy in mind that typically looks like this:

They hope that ‘link juice’ is properly flowed from the most important page in the hierarchy to the least important. That’s not the way it always happens, though.

As Google discovers your site and you links get discovered that point to your content, Google begins to develop its own interpretation of your site hierarchy.

You may have a single post that is optimized well for specific keywords, and has a ton of links to it, actually driving the importance of pages in your site in reverse with Google. “Link juice” may flow from a blog post to a category, from a category to a home page rather than vice versa.

Of course, in reality, neither hierarchy matters as much as the path that is utilized by your web visitor.

Every single page is a home page and you should both encourage and prepare that they will be the entry page into your site and that you have an effective path for engagement – either through a contact form or by developing calls-to-action to landing pages.

It’s difficult to understand that just because you think that you’ve designed a hierarchy that matters and that focuses attention where you’d like it to be, doesn’t mean that’s how your site is discovered and actually utilized! Design accordingly!

This post was written by Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is the founder of The Marketing Technology Blog. Doug is President and CEO of DK New Media, an online marketing company specializing in social media, blogging and search engine optimization. Their clients include Webtrends, ChaCha and many more.

Did you know Douglas Karr's book is coming out in August? You can pre-order Corporate Blogging for Dummies now on Amazon. Check out our new site, Corporate Blogging Tips, to find out what events that we'll be speaking at.

Got an event? Let us know that as well - we're looking forward to going on tour later this year.

Don't forget to follow @corpblogging on Twitter or become a Fan on Facebook!

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My friend Arik Hanson started compiling a reader’s choice awards for public relations blogs last year. Arik is a smart guy and a hell of a blogger in his own right and the program was both a kind way of elevating good PR bloggers in several different categories but also a smart way to drive traffic, interest and links for his own blog, which deserves to be nominated in a few of the categories, too.

The 2010 PR Reader’s Choice Awards voting is now open on Arik’s blog. If you’re a PR person who reads some blogs, go vote. You should also go subscribe to all the ones listed for the various awards. They’re good.

This year, the people who have participated in nominating candidates have chosen Social Media Explorer as a finalist for Public Relations Reader’s Choice Blog of the Year for 2010. I’m honored to be recognized, though I’ve always shrugged off awards for blogs. Blogging is not a competition. The winners are the readers who get to learn from smart people.

But I am appreciative that a few folks threw my name into the hat. The finalists for Blog of the Year include Todd Defren’s PR Squared (which won last year, I think); Danny Brown’s blog; my buddy Mark Schaeffer’s {grow} and Gini Dietrich’s F.A.D.S. (The Fight Against Distructive Spin) blog. I read each of them regularly and am friends with three of the authors, kindred spirits with the other.

The other categories, which include some awesome blogs, too, include best Up-And-Coming Blog, Most Educational Blog and Most Thought-Provoking. You can vote for the various categories on the PR Reader’s Choice Awards post on Arik’s blog.

Please vote for the most deserving candidate. Not me.

Social media is easy. Search engine optimization is easy. Blogging is easy.

Stop saying it. It’s not true. Technology is daunting. Conventional companies struggle with leveraging technology and newer channels to get positive results. Many abandon or avoid it altogether. Online, search and social media is no less daunting.

Twitter is simple, right? How hard is it to type 140 characters? It’s not… unless you are tied up at work with a number of other responsibilities, under pressure to deliver results during this recession, and want to blend a great tweet with some healthy tracking to drive traffic back to your site to convert a customer. And do it all without alienating the following and doing damage to your brand.

Optimization is easy, right? Just find keywords and repeat them a ton of times. Sure… unless you’re actually competing for a keyword – then SEO is much more difficult.

Pay per click is simple. Set a budget and press go. And subsequently run your budget dry without getting any conversions. Improving ad quality scores, setting up calls to action, targeting your content, scheduling your ads, initiating a negative keyword strategy, and optimizing your landing page isn’t quite that easy.

Blogging is a piece of cake. Install WordPress on a $6 hosting account and write content every day. Optimize your theme. Optimize each post. Promote the blog. Syndicate the content. Every day write about the same products, services and customers. Every day make the content rich for search, compelling for visitors, and pull prospects into sales. Day 1 is easy. Day 180… not so easy.

We’re working with a client right now that has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on traditional media, with very poor results, but never fully invested in an online strategy for a couple reasons. First, they did not have the expertise internal to fully define and execute a winning strategy. Second, they didn’t bother to hire consultants because everyone made it out to be easy. They made a half-ditch effort and didn’t get results… so they returned to traditional media.

The opportunity for them is incredible, but they’ve been disillusioned by reading article after article on how easy things are. It’s not easy, folks! On this specific client, I’ll probably be working with no less than 5 different firms… a pay per click management firm, a search engine optimization firm, a content strategist, a branding and graphics firm, and employing my own strategies for search and social media with them. It’s intense strategy that we have minimal time to develop, execute, and begin measuring results on. If we can’t get the cost per close down within 6 to 9 months, we’ll lose the client.

That’s not easy.

This post was written by Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is the founder of The Marketing Technology Blog. Doug is President and CEO of DK New Media, an online marketing company specializing in social media, blogging and search engine optimization. Their clients include Webtrends, ChaCha and many more.

Did you know Douglas Karr's book is coming out in August? You can pre-order Corporate Blogging for Dummies now on Amazon. Check out our new site, Corporate Blogging Tips, to find out what events that we'll be speaking at.

Got an event? Let us know that as well - we're looking forward to going on tour later this year.

Don't forget to follow @corpblogging on Twitter or become a Fan on Facebook!

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Love this video that the folks from Techpoint put out by Cantaloupe.tv:

If you don’t see the video, watch Web 3.0 on the blog.

Google is still just a search engine, only providing you dumb data indexed on keywords that match your queries. I’d really like someone to build a find engine next… I’m tired of searching, aren’t you?

This post was written by Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is the founder of The Marketing Technology Blog. Doug is President and CEO of DK New Media, an online marketing company specializing in social media, blogging and search engine optimization. Their clients include Webtrends, ChaCha and many more.

Thanks for subscribing! download Doug's eBook on Blogging for SEO on us!

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Social Media Revolution 2 is a refresh of the original video with new and updated social media and mobile statistics that are hard to ignore. Based on the book Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business by Erik Qualman.

This post was written by Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is the founder of The Marketing Technology Blog. Doug is President and CEO of DK New Media, an online marketing company specializing in social media, blogging and search engine optimization. Their clients include Webtrends, ChaCha and many more.

Thanks for subscribing! download Doug's eBook on Blogging for SEO on us!

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Today’s business environment is tough and unforgiving. And it is getting more so. At least half of the visionary companies extolled in Jim Collins’ classic book Built to Last have slipped in performance and reputation in the decade since it was first published.

One of the contributing factors I have observed is that few of the tough problems we face today are one dimensional – what appears to be a technology problem is seldom that simple. Your problem may manifest itself in the technology arena, but most often I find that there are people and process components to the problem.

As our use of technology has matured, it has become intertwined with the business processes it supports. Similarly, the complexity of business has driven complex processes that could only be supported by sophisticated technology and well-trained people.

Leaders aren’t born they are made. And they are made just like anything else, through hard work. And that’s the price we’ll have to pay to achieve that goal, or any goal. – Vince Lombardi

The lesson in all this is that technology by itself is not a silver bullet for every problem your business faces. It offers a tempting solution because you can buy it or outsource it. In contrast, fixing people issues and business processes requires hard work.

This post was written by Harry Howe

Harry Howe is passionate about leadership and supporting our community of entrepreneurs. As president of Howe Leadership, he provides hands-on consulting support to business owners who have become victims of their own success, working alongside them to develop the business processes, supporting technology, and people who will sustain their business over the long haul.

Thanks for subscribing! download Doug's eBook on Blogging for SEO on us!

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