Using Google bookmarks to track your social outposts

(At the outset, I have to apologize for the housekeeping over at robertworstell.com - going through some changes as I optimize the site for better bandwidth consumption. And generally evolve it.)

But the point I wanted to bring up tonight is using that Google Toolbar with it's bookmark function to track your own social outposts.

Social outposts is a term coined (more or less) by Chris Brogan. Essentially, the social sites you visit and leave your profile at are advance scouting parties for your content-production-line.

Trick is that you can sign up for stuff and then forget where you'd been a month later. So these various places are just sitting out there - while you've been moving on and creating all sorts of content everywhere else.

. . . .

The trick is to be valuable with your content - and release it in valuable formats.

Using your Google Toolbar with it's bookmarking simplicity looks to be a key tool to use.

Good Hunting!

Direct Marketing over to Social Media Marketing - a strategy

(photo credit: Wolf Tracking)

Moving from Direct Marketing over to Social Media Marketing - a strategy (that might just work...)

Anyone covering this blog for the last year will see that I went into a "quietus" as I researched eBay (expensively and at length). And then find me rolling along into Jack Humphreys' rather involved methods of training people to become "Authorities" in their chosen niche. As well, I checked out a very user-friendly "30-Day" program (link eludes me at this point).

Today, while riding on my tractor picking corn (does wonders for intensive thought to be away from computers) - anyway, I found that I had completed all the training I needed to do. I now feel I know how to move from conventional marketing over to social modes.

A Summation

Basic facts:

1. Social media is social, not broadcast. They reject broadcast announcements here and embrace personalities who interact, not just pontificate.
2. The basics of marketing work - if you throw out the methodologies of the 50's-80's and start embracing the core principles from history - the local community marketplace/bazaar/farmers' market. (Visit one of these festivals with small booths selling a handful of items and you'll see what I mean.)
3. Problem is that marketers are trained (even today) to do broadcast methodology, not socially interact. And the largest corporations are having the hardest time with this. Smaller start-ups almost intuitively embrace these features, since they personally only deal with a handful of staff and can talk with their handful of customers on a one-to-one basis as well.
4. There are actually broadcast technologies within social media. These are the bookmarking sites. You are supposed to put your bookmarks up there. And the most popular bookmarks win.
5. However, self-promotion is frowned upon. Posting your own stuff up on the "news" sites will get you banned sooner or later.
6. Basic principle: develop word of mouth.
7. Basic technique: craft clever link-bait that people will talk about and make this easily sharable.
8. That's pretty simple for corporate trained marketers, since this is their stock in trade. However, properly done - the ROI or conversion rate is much, much higher with social media, since you can get free evangelists to do your marketing for you. (See "Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell as an introduction to this concept.)

The trick to social marketing and word of mouth

Trick is to get the ball rolling, since if you are an individual - they don't know you. If you are a corporation, you are in the hole - since they don't trust you.

Jack Humphrey pointed out one hole in this, along with his own technique of making yourself an "authority". Essentially you craft your link-bait and then "buzz" it yourself by using free blogs that you control and post links back to your link-bait on your main blog. He also says to contribute back to these communities by posting links though those free blogs to other areas, in ways that each free-blog community would embrace and appreciate. The more you contribute useful posts and comments in your niche, the more people trust you and look to you as as an authority in that niche. Your traffic goes up and then you can convert this to sales.

Why use a blog? Because it is an easy way to add content and update it. Plus it has built-in community support through comments. Google loves blogs more than corporate sites - because they are more popular, and popular content drives blog use (and advertising).

Here's the interesting part. Through various programs like the Blog-Rovr plug-in for Firefox, and also using Google Alert (now with RSS feeds), you can keep track of influencer's and evangelists in your niche and comment on their blog posts. That piques their interest eventually, and they start visiting and linking to your blog. Meanwhile, you post from your main-blog with links to these - which then then give you a trackback for, which increases your link-love.

You also apply these same tools to see who is linking to your main blog. Track them, comment on their blogs. Also do this for appropriate forums and groups.

You also need to do articles, podcasts, and videos, but your main approach above is to:

1. Create Linkbait Weekly.
2. Bookmark (OnlyWire) each one to as many as possible.
3. Buzz your linkbait - using varied text and graphics - from as many free blogs as possible (preferably several overseas as well).
4. Track posts about your blog and return the favor - both blogging about their site and also commenting on their blog posts.
5. Also track anyone who posts anything about you, post and comment as above.
6. Similarly, track forums and groups - both post and comment.
7. In your spare time, put up viral media - such as articles, podcasts, videos, and anything else that comes along. All prominently feature your main blog - and link back to these as simply as possible. (You'll need to overlay your blog address on the video, for instance, as well as getting a live link in the comments.)

It almost goes without saying that you are answering questions and interacting realistically/honestly with everyone who posts and comments.

Means a lot of work on your part. Welcome to the geek club.

Where's sales and monetization in all this?

You also still have have some part of your week devoted to creating more products to offer and getting them sold - your backend.

What you want is followers and subscribers. Preferably paid subscribers. Possibly eBay's one contribution to this is that you can get a "reverse funnel" (they buy first and then subscribe) from selling on eBay and getting them to your site. You really want them to opt-in to your mail list and then use the various write-ups on sales pages, repetitive contact, a "sales funnel" of increasingly higher valued/priced items - and ultimately turning them into affiliates and evangelists for your site (as well as starting them over from the beginning of your funnel with the new products you are creating all the time).

And this last paragraph above is the subject of several posts and ebooks. Too much to go into here.

- - - -

And now you see how to move from gratuitous broadcast marketer to a social marketing genius, in just a few steps outlined above.

I'll tell you that it isn't easy; it's a lot of work. But then, so is marketing as you may have understood it up to this point...

Social Media isn't Marketing - it's a Conversation

Even when I'm dense, I get pretty close to the mark.

People don't use social media to buy things, or sell things. (That's eBay's community.) People use social media to discuss things. They are seeking meaning in their lives by examining others' views about things. That's why people like stories, that's why people like to talk about things.

Social Media Marketing doesn't actually exist.

True, marketing is a conversation, and there are tons of conversations going on in these social media. But that doesn't mean they translate to sales. So get over it. People like to have conversations because they are fun. That's right - fun.

If you're trying to convert people to subscribers, you're way, way off the beam. Go back to article marketing. Go back to affiliate marketing. Go back to forum marketing.

Social Media is like the insurance salesman who joins half a dozen social groups. Meeting people is a way to find potential leads. Simple. But the sales talks take place waaay after that group meeting is over. They come to that salesman because they need some insurance and they know he deals in it. But as a salesman, he can contact them at their workplace and ask if they need some more insurance...

You don't try to spam social media - it doesn't work. Same way link-farms don't work.

There are lots of reasons to participate in social media. One is to make your research easier - you match up with people who have the same interests and find what they've already studied up on. The below selection from Ann Smarty says all I've been trying to find out today.

I spend hours looking up one blogger who had won all these awards and was so hot, only to find out that he was trying to market through Stumbleupon and others and by the end of it (nearly 180 scraped pages later), reversed himself thoroughly.

It's true that you can get search engine traffic easily through social media. But you can also get this by simply posting Slidecasts or posting to Internet Archives.

Look - search engines are after new, quality content. Period. Because that's what people want. Social media are another way for people to find new content - find what their friends are looking at.

You want people to find your site interesting - create great content. Period.

If you have something worth subscribing to, they will. Provide great content regularly through that subscription and you'll keep them.

I spent today double-checking my work on marketing ideas through social media, and found that I was right and wrong at the same time.

And found that where I should really be spending my time in selling stuff is on that great community - eBay. They've got blogs there and shops and all sorts of ways to send traffic to your site - who want to buy stuff.

However, the real key - as Ann covers below - is to be social on the social networks, and then you can get people interested in what you do and who need your product.

(I edit and publish self help books, so should socialize around self improvement groups and so on, eh? A book on marketing would be best sold to marketers - and so I should become part of marketing social groups, right? That is, if my analogy of the insurance salesman above works out...)

Social Media Marketing - Think Long-Term:

"Web marketers who view social media as a promotional tool can be roughly divided into three categories:

1) Those who blatantly spam (in a hope to get quick traffic). They usually have no valuable content to offer the community and their main goal is to get people click on an ad.
2) Those who link bait (hoping that their article will generate some links from other bloggers). These webmasters usually focus on a catchy scandalous headlines with no truly valuable post following it;
3) Those who strive to become a part of the community and establish business or friendly connections with niche webmasters."

How to publish your work - and why we're here...

These plethora of niches, what do they tell us? Of the "many paths up the mountain", you won't know other paths unless you sample them, they won't know of your successes unless you publish broadly and through several venues.

My current ways to post:

Text - for my own use.
Blog - for other subscribers (and I maintain a separate blog for each type of message depending on relative content.)
Static mini-web -
Press release -
Slidecast - much wider approach, and picked up by search engines extremely rapidly
Stumbleupon / social media - much, much, wider way of telling people about something
Video - a pretty saturated medium, but again - wide in ability to let people know

(My blogs all send emails to my gmail account, where they are automatically archived and able to be searched through Desktop Search - so I can find anything I've written. Nice for research, as long as you remember your own keywords...)

Reasons for all this posting? Because others might get some use, some traction, get some lessons from my own learnings.

And I'm here, like the rest of us, to learn and to continue to evolve. But my progress is limited only by how I help others.

The continuing slow death of SEO...

And so the reason for SEO dying that slow death. People are still needing search engines for their normal traffic. However, search engines like Google are giving more sway to the social media.

So we then are being lead down a very social trail - by people who know that the search engines can be managed through social channels (and probably sensationalist media which are populist-oriented, however degraded it makes them...Yellow Journalism also had excessive rumors about its death.)

Understand humankind and you will know where all this is leading us. Understand hope and you will find how to solve that puzzle.

The Tiny Linkerati
According to a Pew Internet May 6 study, 49% of the US audience are those that have “few “tech assets” and limited use of technology”. The survey goes on to show how little of the US audience are among the Web 2.0 Internet savvy. They are so little of them. Is it worth the effort on being on Yelp, Twitter, Digg, MySpace etc to appeal to them?

Of Course, It Depends
It is important to understand that you can create online marketing success without getting caught in the buzz about about “influencers” or the Linkerati. It depends what market your client and your customers are in. Of course, innovation carries risk - but this is not to forsake the long-hanging fruit for risk taking and vice-versa. You need both.

SEO is Dead! Where is Your Audience Searching? at Emergence Media

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SEO is Dead! Where is Your Audience Searching? at Emergence Media

Fascinating view from a year ago. SEO being dead and all, it's a very slow death.

And so, what drives people and what are they looking for. See my book for some "old" starter material on Virus Marketing

SEO is Dead! Well, maybe your Google SEO

Why is SEO important? Because the majority of people search on the Internet to find things…reviews, contact numbers, shopping etc. But what is Search? Google? Yahoo?If you’re search engine optimization campaign is targeting Google, then what are you doing about the “searches” on Del.icio.us, Technorati, StumbleUpon, Yelp, Wikipedia, Oodle and even Digg? Maybe those searches are not for the mainstream (yet), but it maybe where the Linkerati, the savvy “Influencers”, go?Is your SEO really just “Google Search Optimization”? Have you brainstormed with your marketing team to see if your company, product and/or service needs to do more?

SEO is Dead! Where is Your Audience Searching? at Emergence Media

- - - -

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How do you do that?

• Most SEO is built around establishing keywords prominently on your pages.
• Web 2.0 uses all the "New Media" to spread the word for you.
• When you use your keywords in your social bookmarks, your site becomes "viral" - other people spread it for you.
• Using audio, video, and slideshows, people tell others about your stuff.
• And search engines love Web 2.0 more than static pages.
• So use "New Media" to promote your static pages and get top real estate in the search engines.

This book gives you all the theory and examples of how you can create a Web 2.0 buzz and use it to bring paying subscribers to your mailing lists.

Sign up for An Online Millionaire Plan Newsletter!

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The Digg It strategy - and why this social bookmark raises your Google rank

Just so I can find the reference again. Social bookmarking has some which are more unequal in effect than others. Digg is one of those.

ezSEO Blog » 2008 » February:

" 3. Digg It
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Web 2.0 is here to stay. Anyone who dabbled with Web 2.0 strategies cannot fail to have seen their webpages improve in rankings. Here is a little tip that I use to consistently get pages indexed in hours, and usually a few top 10 results as well.

1. Create a high quality themed article and upload it to your site. Make sure the article is of a very high quality, and well themed.

2. Create an account at digg.com if you don’t already have one.

3. Login to your Digg account, and dig your article.

Sit back and wait.

Usually within 24 hours I’ll start to get traffic to the page on my site, and often for quite competitive search phrases.

e.g. over a year ago I used this strategy on a new PR 0 site. I wrote an article and “digged” it. Within 24 hours my page was #1 in Google, and #1 in MSN.

I know a lot of you want to know if the ranking was temporary. Well, today, over a year later, that same page is #3 in Google (and has a PR 2) with around 15,000 competing pages (searched in quotes). The other pages in the top 5 are PR 4 or PR 5.

The page has slipped out of the top 10 at MSN though.

It does not seem to matter if anyone else “diggs” your story. That original story on Digg from a year ago still only has 2 diggs.

Go out and test it yourself. See what results you get."

= = = = =

Now for part two (don't worry, he explains this numbering down the page...):

– — – — – — – — – — – — – — – — –
1. Get a link - Part I
– — – — – — – — – — – — – — – — –

In the newsletter last week, I gave you one great way to get a link to one of your pages on your site. That method not only gets the inbound link, but can often get your page indexed and ranking high in Google in only a few hours (assuming the content is high quality).

While on-page factors are increasingly important, it is still true that off-page factors are more important. In other words, Google wants to know what other sites are saying about your site.

If lots of similar topic sites link to your site, then Google will assume your site is important, and will rank you accordingly.

Getting links to pages is one of the areas that most people neglect. Why? Simply because it takes too much work… Or does it.

Over the next few weeks, I want to give you link building tips that will help build quality, natural links to your site. These tips will build into a good link building resource that you can apply to any and all of your sites.

Let’s say tip #1 was the one from last week.

Tip #2 - getting links back from other people’s blogs. The way this works is that you leave comments on other peoples blogs, with a link back you your site in the comment.

Now, you are probably thinking one of the following:

1. Blog “auto-comment” posting software is spam.

Yes it is. Don’t use it.

2. Leaving crappy comments on other people’s blogs is spam.

Yes it is. Don’t do it.

3. Most blogs use the nofollow tag rendering any link back useless.

Yes they do. Find ones that don’t use the tag.

OK, so what is the best strategy to use here to avoid the spam trap?

Well, you need to find on-topic blogs that do not use the nofollow tag, and then leave comments that are high quality and informative. The information you leave should be complimentary to the original blog post.

Great. We have a plan.

One question though.. How do you find related blogs that do not use the nofollow link?

Well, I have a special treat for you, and it is fre.e.

Neil Shearing has created some software that he is giving away, and it does just that. Type in your main niche keyword, set a few options, and the software will go off and find these blogs for you. Just make sure you use it for good rather than evil ;O).

1. Find on-topic blogs.
2. Post genuinely useful comments

You can find the software here:

Real Link Finder

= = = =

Part III here - plus comments on it:

– — – — – — – — – — – — – — – — –
2. Get a link - Part III
– — – — – — – — – — – — – — – — –

I know, last week was Part I, so why is today part III? Well its simply because the first “Get a Link” was the Digg technique described in newsletter 191, but I hadn’t numbered that one, as I had not come up with the idea of running a series on this.

Part I - Digg technique
Part II - The Blog Technique described last week, using Neil’s excellent fre.e tool for finding quality blogs to post in.

Part III - Forums.

You are allowed a “signature” in most forums. This gives you an ideal opportunity to include a link back to your site. The idea of this link capture method is this:

1. Find quality forums in your niche that allow a link in your signature.

Make sure that the forums are spiderable by the search engines (do the posts of this forum appear in Google?), and look at the source of a page from the forum - are the links in people’s signatures tagged with nofollow?.

2. Read the terms of use for the forum so you stay within guidelines.

3. Spend a few days reading posts in the forum, to get an overall impression of how the forum is run and what type of stuff people post about.

4. When someone asks a question that you can help with, answer it with as much detail as possible. Your post will have your sig, and your sig has a link back to your site.

5. Continue with this for a while, so that you “brand” yourself as an expert in the field.

6. After you have written a dozen or so quality replies helping others, if an opportunity comes up to mention a product of yours, do so. Don’t make it obvious selling spam. Simply answer a question, and then point out that your site (mentioned in your sig) has XYZ that might help them. Or, refer to an article on your site in response to a question.

e.g. Someone asks “Which firewall is the best for Windows Vista”, you can reply something like:

“I personally use Zone Alarm as I found Comodo caused problems with my anti-virus, but you can read a comparison of several firewalls that I wrote here:” and supply a URL. Most forums wont have a problem with this.

The two immediate benefits of forum posts are easy to see:

1. Links back to your site from every post you make on the forum.
2. If you get recognised as an expert on that forum, you will have non-stop traffic from people on the forum who respect your opinion and want more information from you.

As a method of getting inbound links to your site, this one can be very good, and even if the inbound links were not counted (e.g. the forum used nofollow on all links), I would still do it because of the traffic it generates.

I like to find 3 or 4 different forums in a niche, and spread my help around a bit ;o)

– — – — – — – — – — – — – — – — –
3. Feedback on the Digg Technique
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A couple of weeks ago, I told you about the Digg technique I use to get pages indexed quickly, and ranking well. If you missed that issue, you can read it online at my blog here:

ezSEO Newsletter Issue 191

Anyway, I had an email from Martin who had tried it with an article his writer had done for him.

Here is what Martin wrote:

“Just as an aside, I uploaded my first theme article yesterday and submitted it to Digg like you said. It was indexed in Google within 24 hours and during the next 24 hours it was found for 8 different, new phrases. I feel really good about sticking with it and making sure the writer did a good job (I didn’t know a TQS of 70% was ok so 60% of them are 100% and it feels even better that what you are teaching actually works! It takes work to master the process, but it’s obviously very much worth while. Thank you.

- Martin”

NOTE: TQS refers to the “Theme Quality Score” of the article, as reported by the Fat Content Creator - part of my Fat Content Course.

What Williams discusses under Forums, is covered in the Online Millionaire Plan as Comment Marketing (Right there next to Article Marketing...)