New Media
Produce Once, Run Everywhere |
Imagine you are organizing a concert where a particular performer is your lead entertainer. You can search book marking sites, search engines, raid all their fan sites, social networks, groups, forums and blogs to pull content on them into one single web destination. How would the fan-base react when you tell them that the web destination you have build consist of the richest, most vast, most diverse, recent and relevant content on that artist to be found on the internet, including old articles, videos and podcasts? You haven’t created any of the content yourself, as it is driven to a single online room through RSS feeds from thousands of sources all over the internet. Over a period of a few months you could build a fan base up of 500 targeted fans that are all signed into the room following the content as ardent supporters of the artist. At even a 50% conversion, that’s as good as 250 ticket sales to 300 different fans without having spent any time or money on content creation.
You can create mash-ups of content by sourcing (syndicating) information from multiple sites and social networks all into one place. Typically, you would want to syndicate content from your blog (if you are writing one), your Facebook account, your Twitter account, your Flickr account and your Bookmarking accounts. These tell such a holistic picture about your activities that can help create buzz and traction around your events. Although there are multiple applications offering this service, the one that stands out the most is Friendfeed.com.
Syndicating content together may seem like a cloth being weaved slowly – but once it’s set, there is very little work that needs to be done on top of it for maintenance. It’s like a small time investment that you make to reap benefits from later. However, be prepared for combating mountains of information being thrown in your direction from all sides; the idea is not to allow yourself to get overwhelmed.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
Today’s tip! Every marketing campaign starts with keyword research. If you’re serious about earning money online you’re first investment should be a great keyword research tool.
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Content Sharing |
The past 3 years has seen content sharing to a degree that could never have been dreamed of 6 years ago. There is no business model in the world that could have funded the amount of content that has been produced for us all to consume for FREE online today. My kids can go to Google today and find information on almost anything in the world in less than a second. The downside to this is that information is so readily available today that it’s not worth anything. The best content in the world has no monetary value because if you look hard enough for long enough on the web you will find it for free.
As long as you have the time to look for it, you won’t necessarily need to pay. But what happens when you don’t have time? If you need some very specific content this instant, you will pay for it. It’s a basic trade equation – you have something of value (money) and someone else has something of value to offer for it (information). You can get that information instantly by asking thought leaders or other people in your social networks, who may offer it to you as a consultancy. Now imagine yourself on the other side of the equation. People from your network can come to you for information that you have.
If your content is good, other people may start promoting it for you. There is nothing better than free promotion. If someone big and popular talks about it - you’ll get the attention of their followers as well. So these are good targets to have for your content. When creating the content, don’t just put something without proper research. Find out who is already active in your niche communities. Who identifies viral videos most? Who has bigger followings? What kind of content makes it to the top?
Within the past 5,000 days, the web has evolved to a great extent and so has its penetration in to our daily life. Who would have thought a few years ago that sharing content with others would become so easy? Now we have blogging software for sharing ideas, Youtube.com for sharing video clips, Flickr.com for sharing photos, and great services like Digg and Stumbleupon that let us filter the best content from the web. We are not only using technology to stay in touch with our friends but also as a plausible tool for internet marketing; it is a drastic revolution in the marketing industry and is serving to provide endless advantages to event marketers.
Kevin Kelly’s vision of the future of web technologies is pretty much where we are heading. In his view, all data would be digital and converged: i.e. everything would be a part of the web. Every document, spreadsheet and file would be on the web, providing marketers with a haven of information. So you would be able to save and search all your files from the web, rather than on being dependent on your PC. You would not have to sign up separately on every social site to add your friends; all of this would be automatic. All your contacts would be in all your social networking profiles, as the data is going to be linked adding more personalization. We are already heading in that direction with new applications like Google’s Friend Connect and Facebook’s Connect already out.
But a common question I get asked is this - how do we manage content that is our IP, content pertinent to our event and businesses? Do we just publish it into the public domain freely? Brad Fallon stated at a recent STOMPERNET conference that in the next 12 months alone, more content will be published for public consumption than has been published in the history of time. That said, I think it’s fair to say that whatever it is you are doing has been done before. The question you need to be asking yourself with the surge in open (social) media and content sharing is this; if you keep on doing what you are doing for your events locked behind a firewall and your competitors don’t. Who is going to prosper over the next 5 years? I know who I would be betting on.
I believe sharing content is very important - at a recent conference we discussed the fact that over 60% of media content being consumed by the new generation of people is content that was discovered and shared by their friends. Sharing information that would be useful to people and to their friends is not just an important emerging way of promoting events or getting the word out about something, but to create credibility among people who would want to find you and follow you over time. The social web makes it incredibly easy to find the truth about a person - if a person wants to be perceived as an expert, that expertise will truly be tested with the strategies employed when sharing content.
Here are some of my own recommendations on content sharing:
1- Be Authentic and Consistent. This is incredibly important - the best strategy for sharing content is to genuinely want others to grow to understand and appreciate the space in which you are an expert. If you keep focused on this mindset, and on the subject matter that you want people talking about, you will find yourself sharing very relevant material about that subject consistently.
2- Share incredible content. Having content by yourself doesn’t make you the expert - your expertise comes from how you have interpreted, thought about, and applied that content over years. So it’s ok to give your content away - this is the best way to build meaningful relationships with your potential consumer base.
3- Share content meant for learning. You should think about sharing both content which represents the cutting-edge stream of thought in your subject, but also content that allows newbies to get excited about what you’re talking about. This will not only increase the community of people who follow you but also enable you to start conversations with the experts on the best paths of teaching new comers. A community of participants starts to evolve from these interactions.
4- Time your multi-media content. What you are sharing at any given time is going to be perceived as how you are thinking about the subject at that time. The content starts becoming what you are exploring or what you are excited about, and that in itself gives your audience a hint about who you are. While creating a full roadmap of how you will “unfold” content may not be a bad idea, it is very important to share similar content across all mediums. E.g. if you are sharing links on del.icio.us and also videos on Youtube, then make sure they are all touching on similar topics at any given point in time. Be sure each piece of content fits into your game plan and whatever story you are telling at the time. People like dealing with experts when it comes to business, they won’t invest in a jack of all traits like they will an authority.
How do these techniques tie back into marketing and promotion? What you are trying to aim for here is to become a reliable source of good knowledge about a subject matter - if people can begin to expect good things from you, they are likely to invite their friends to follow you as well.
You will over time become the go-to authority on your subject, and if people trust the content you share to be good, they are also likely to trust you when you talk about your events, your services and your products.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
Today’s tip! Every marketing campaign starts with keyword research. If you’re serious about earning money online you’re first investment should be a great keyword research tool.
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Getting Articles Published On Partner Sites |
We want sites that will take your articles and place them
1. Write articles and publish them on Ezine articles as available for distribution.
2. Wait until marketers grab them to place on their sites with your name as the author in credits.
3. Go to Copyscape.com which is a site that back matches content on one site, finding an exact % match of the same content of full text on other pages across the internet. This will lead you to all these pages / sites that have your articles on them.
4. Go to the “who is” info or search the site for contact information.
5. Contact and ask the webmaster if they want more articles written for their site.
6. Have your writing team write 5 to 10 articles per week for each of those sites with 2 back-links embedded in the articles back to your articles, blog posts, video pages or Event Pages on Events Listed.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
Today’s tip! Every marketing campaign starts with keyword research. If you’re serious about earning money online you’re first investment should be a great keyword research tool.
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The Inside Scoop Of Article Marketing Trends |
Ezine articles and Squidoo attracts significant traffic from over 100 articles we have published on each of these platforms back to our website however this traffic spends less time on our site than traffic from Hub pages. We have a total of 100 articles on Hub pages that get a lot of internal Hub Page readers visiting them. Our 100 articles on Hub pages have been read more than 15,000 times in the past 4 months yet only 600 visitors have come through from these articles to our site. These results suggest Hub pages are a loyal community, so readers tend to stay on the site. However of those 600, that do come across from Hub pages their average stay on our site is much higher than that from Ezine or Squidoo.
While duplicate content may go unnoticed on Squidoo; Hub pages and Ezine cracks down on it with knives and forks. Ezine is the toughest as they use a combination of human editors and software. I have tested this with dummy sites, so have a useful insight for anyone interested in driving traffic with article marketing tactics. According to Ezine’s policy; if an article is purchased as ‘private label rights’, more than one person can have rights to it thus making the article indistinctive. If you post that article on one of these sites and the article is posted elsewhere on the internet by someone else (who also purchased the right to publish it) it would still be considered duplicate content. The article marketing site will ask you to remove the article if two coexist on the internet regardless of who published it first. Even if you modify the article so its 50% altered from its original form, they still won’t care, as it won’t be unique content.
However if you write your own article with your own labelled resource box and post it as one author onto 500 different article marketing sites across the web, it won’t be considered duplicate content. So you can reuse your own content across multiple article marketing sites without a worry as long as you are the sole author of each version.
To establish if an article is unique, all you need to do is copy a sentence from the article and search for it in Google with “inverted commas around it”. Google will show all pages on the internet that have the exact same sentence, so if there are any duplicates you’ll know. You can also use Copyscape.com to find duplicate content.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
Today’s tip! Every marketing campaign starts with keyword research. If you’re serious about earning money online you’re first investment should be a great keyword research tool.
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Links |
Each page of content across the internet has what’s known as a page rank. Google rank pages with numbers between 1 and 10 but in reality the page rank is a number anywhere between a micro number way less than zero and infinity. This number is a major influence in a page’s ranking in search engine results against keyword phrases. The best analogy to explain how page rank works is to look at each page on a website (domain) as a bucket of water. A link pointing into one of these pages (buckets) from a page on other website (inbound links) are like hoses of water (link juice) pouring into the page (bucket). Links on a page that point to other pages within the same website (internal links) act like hoses connecting each of the buckets (pages) throughout the same website. Now, if inbound links represent link juice (water) being poured into the bucket (page) and each page is connected across a website (domain), the link juice (water) that lands in one bucket (page) will disperse across the connecting buckets (pages) throughout a website (domain). The formula for this is that the page rank of the page a link comes from multiplied by .75 (15% is lost in evaporation) / the total number of links (hoses) off a page (bucket) to other pages (buckets) within a website. Now, this is complicated and advanced stuff so I am not going into more detail than this because this book is not about SEO. I did want to explain links at a fundamental level so that you understand enough to appreciate the fact that there is a well calculated scientific method behind the madness of our article marketing linking strategy.
The aim is to attract more inbound link juice into each article page (bucket) than you send out so that our buckets fill with water. By linking our pages (buckets) in sets the way we have we are maximizing the water flow throughout our buckets whilst extracting as much water (link juice) passing into them from the article marketing sites huge water system of millions of pages.
Outbound links: Each article should have two to three links off each page pointing to your other content pages that can include your website, your blog posts, your Youtube video pages, Facebook pages and or your Events Listed event pages.
Inbound links: You work to attract as many back links from other sites into your Main Article page and your Category Article pages as possible. The link juice that these links bring into the page will be passed on to the other articles within the set. The Sub Articles at the bottom of the flow should all link back to Main Article page passing any residual link juice back to the top again creating a loop.
Ezinearticles.com: At first I was under the impression that it accepted junk content - but to my surprise, they are very strict about the quality of content. Your articles have to be one hundred percent original and provide value to readers to be accepted there.
Getting people to read your articles is the first step. You do this by commenting on other peoples articles within the article site member communities. Article sites are social communities like any other, each time you comment on another article within the site those comments link back to your profile page which should have links to all your articles. The link back to your profile page counts as an internal link from the other article pages to your profile page. The more internal links to your pages within these sites, the higher they will rank when people search for articles about your topic. Always comment on recent and relevant articles that have high page rank. Once you attract internal traffic within the article sites you can get to work attracting external back links from other websites onto your article pages to further enhance your pages rank until they are listed in the top 5 search engine results for each articles targeted key word phrases.
Always try to end your articles with a call to action or an incentive to get readers to follow a link off the page onto one of the content pages within your sales funnel. Tie this strategy in with your other marketing strategies - you will be surprised at how much traffic this alone can generate for you. As one example we embed all of our Youtube videos from our video marketing campaign into our articles on these sites.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
Today’s tip! Every marketing campaign starts with keyword research. If you’re serious about earning money online you’re first investment should be a great keyword research tool.
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Article Marketing |
There are various dedicated article marketing sites like Squidoo.com, EzineArticles.com and Hubpages.com. Your article on these article sites (e.g. Hubpages) will rank much higher than your article on your site because they have millions of pages indexed, optimal internal linking structures and a high index page rank through thousands of back links. If you want to get high page rank in search engines quickly, write a good article in a top article directory and drive a heap of links into it and it will rank top on Google in days. Try doing that with your own site and it would take months, if at all. This is because your article will be riding off the rankings of the SEO optimized article site.
Unless you have a big budget and want to spend the appropriate money on your own website, you don’t need one to build a powerful online presence. There are multiple ways in which you can leverage existing web 2.0 sites and platforms for your business without ever needing to spend the time and resources in building, optimizing and maintaining your own site.
EventsListed.com is a web 2.0 platform that allows you to publish multi-media rich content to dedicated pages that promote your events, collect subscriptions from fans, set auto responder email campaigns to go out in sequence automatically, to build communities, and sell tickets or merchandize off your event pages. If you combine this strategy with a blog on a FREE blogging platform like Wordpress or Blogger along with a great article marketing plan and you included a social networking strategy and linked them together, you’ll have an online presence much more powerful than your own website could ever be.
Article Marketing is an important part of SEO to help rank your content pages, your articles on article sites, your videos on Youtube or your event page on Events Listed. Search Engine Optimization is (in a way) the Holy Grail of web traffic, because it’s steady, consistent, voluminous, targeted traffic that costs nothing once established…
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The Grand Blogosphere |
Blogging is one of the most defining inventions of our time. While there are thousands of blogs that are just used as personal journals or ways to rant and vent; useful and meaningful blogs have a strong presence as well.
It’s amazing how different people hold separate opinions, have individual preferences, perceive things differently, have their own ways of expression, and think with unique mindsets. It’s amazing how much variety there is in human personalities. It’s amazing how societal and other external factors influence our perspectives. It’s amazing how two poets would always come up with different lines, even if they are writing on a similar topic. Human psyche and behavior amazes me. I have heard that close to 50% of all searches in Google are new word combinations or phrase structures which is astounding if you consider the number of searches each day.
That’s when the power of blogs as a means of transferring one person’s thoughts, experiences, opinions, knowledge to the rest of the world at a just a click of button becomes so immense. It’s a remarkable medium of conveying messages to your audiences in a meaningful, personalized and rich manner. This is why whenever I come across someone who shrugs and says “oh I don’t know about blogging for my business, I’m not much of a writer”, I just can’t help but feel bad for them. You’re selling to people online, you are putting up online advertisements and banners in different websites, but you can’t blog?
I often question the thought process behind such an attitude of working online, do these people honestly think they can compete online today with little more than a product, service and a sales pitch? If you can’t write, hire someone to write it for you. If you’re busy, get someone else involved. But if there’s ONE sure way of communicating directly with your audiences and customers in an open channel that builds a list of names into a community of buyers, it’s through blogging. It tells a story, paints the inside picture, creates a personalized feel and introduces people who may never, ever meet you to who you are and what you or your company stands for. If someone isn’t getting the least thrilled by reading your blog, he/ she’s probably not your target market or your blog is not providing value or insight to them.
One of the best approaches of starting blogs is finding your own special niche and focusing on it until you become an authority in that area. Authoritative blogs command a higher presence level and have greater number of followers (readers). If you are marketing events, then writing about the events in the pre-launch phase, is one of the best ways of keeping your prospects in the loop, all the while raising the hype levels. Through your blogs you can link them off to your social networks and vice versa. There are a number blogging tools and services that you can use. WordPress.com is definitely one of the better options out there.
The blogosphere is fascinating - on the one-hand it is an open environment of people sharing interesting ideas between micro-mediums of influence, and on the other blog-based business are making bloggers increasingly more political in how they interact with others.
The best analogy for blogging I have heard is that it’s no different to a dinner party where all the guests are knowledgeable on a particular topic. Throughout the evening conversations, comments, reports, statements, stories and lessons would be traded. As the night wore on, it would become evident to all those present that the knowledge base and more importantly the ability to articulate this knowledge was not equal across all participants. In fact it would be most probable that one or two of the parties at the table will have established themselves as unrivalled authorities on certain subject matter.
I heard another good analogy of how to blog from Dave Taylor who said “you look at the blogging community like it’s a university campus.” If you want to get a lot of people to come to your party you don’t advertise it. You don’t walk into another party that’s pumping and ask the guests to leave and come to your party. They are already at the happening party, why would they want to leave it to go to yours unless all the cool people are going with you. You would attend all the other hot parties and slowly get to know the most popular people there. Once you know them all and they trust you, all you need to do is suggest a party and invite them all. If you do, everyone will want to come to your party. The same applies to your blog. You can’t just visit a top bloggers site and make a comment attempting to lure the traffic away from his blog to yours. You have to gradually build rapport with their community and back it up with consistently good quality content. Investing time to build good quality posts will increase your chances of getting other respected bloggers in your industry to visit it. Frequent visits and participation from industry leaders can lead to attracting a larger crowd to your blog posts, thus increasing your traffic. Just like a campus party, it would take time.
Blogging is, in my view, a very large dinner party that spans the world and it never ends. In a dinner party you give toasts that are heard by all the people present, and at times you engage specific people in direct conversations, or while talking you refer to an attendee’s comic anecdotes. In quite a similar way, there are thousands of blogs all across the globe with content published regularly - the grand blogosphere. Then we have hundreds of thousands of readers reading these blogs and participating in them. Some bloggers are given more attention by these readers because of the quality of their content. The most popular amongst them are called the A-list bloggers and are followed by massive audiences. These people are heavy influencers and trend initiators. Generally, when you look around, you see bloggers linking to other bloggers in their blog posts or engaging in direct conversations with their readers etc. All of this cross linking, conversations, and constructive discussions are like a dinner party. The only difference is that this dinner party is online and has no geographical boundaries and the conversations are being recorded.
So if you have an event you’d like to promote, what is the best way to get other bloggers and influencers to engage into a conversation with you about it? You have to be in a conversation in order to be considered an authoritarian contributor to it, right?
Here are a few tips:
* Don’t be anonymous to a blogger - get to know them. Bloggers don’t like being used as a promotion tool. You can’t make that as a premise of knowing them. Most bloggers write because they want to meet interesting people and share ideas with them, they too are looking for conversations with other bloggers who can challenge them and their views. So to begin with try to establish a relationship with bloggers you respect by participating as a commenter and also otherwise.
* Make it easy for the blogger to research you. Bloggers have a lot of demand on their attention from people trying to get in touch with them. They will try to make very quick decisions on whether or not they want to get to know you. So make sure you are active enough in social media that it is easy to discover who you really are. Consistency in your online activities will help other bloggers form quick opinions on who you are and if they want to enter into a conversation with you or not. Remember, cream always rises to the top if it’s in the bottle.
* Request, don’t ask. Even if you know a blogger well, don’t ask or expect them to talk about your event or product. What you want to focus on is just talking to your friend, the blogger, and talking about your new product to that friend alone. Whether that person chooses to share it onwards with his friends or community is entirely his or her choice.
* Make life easy for the blogger. Again, bloggers have very limited attention to give to your product, so if there is a set-up time involved in them getting into your product (for example, maybe people need to sign up and set up their profiles to use it) try to spend the time to do that for them. Other bloggers will appreciate that and then pay a little more attention to what actually matters.
* Refer to interesting incidents from the blog. Each blog has interesting incidents happening in it - E.g. maybe they wrote about something that was controversial and there was a big debate on the topic in the comments. Only people who follow that blog would actually remember such things, and if you can refer to one of those incidents (maybe to show which side of the fence you stand) the blogger would appreciate that and understand that you are not just an anonymous one-time visitor.
* Refer to the bloggers thesis. Every blogger talks about a particular subject, and every blogger has a core set of beliefs related to that subject. Maybe that bloggers has a particular definition of conversational marketing. Maybe he or she has invented terms they use frequently in posts. Only people who follow a blog frequently would understand this. When you are communicating with another blogger, make sure you touch on those important parts and give your position on them. This would also help him or her treat you like a regular reader.
* Feel free to polarize, but make sure you can. If you also have a blog, feel free to take something that another blogger wrote and polarize yourself against it by arguing a point against his argument. But do this only if you really have something to say, because doing this will not only give you a critical eye from that blogger, but also his or her audience. If you survive their critical analysis of your counter-argument, though, you will win to earn their respect in future interactions.
Most importantly, though, remember that the aim is for all your interactions in the social media space to create additional value to the overall sharing of thought. Don’t be evil, and play fair, and people will be fair to you when you need them to be.
Earlier last week, I was having a conversation with some people about blogging, and was surprised to see that most people still consider it a cost rather than an investment.
I agree that random blogs with unauthentic or irrelevant content are pointless. But if you are doing business, you need to have a strong blog presence, and here’s how:
1- You need to have a personal voice for your business that people can relate to, communicate with and understand. One of the best ways of doing that is with a good content blog. For authority blogs you have to provide value and insight, instead of following the crowd. Your posts should be authentic, original and unique. That’s the best way for you to make a mark on the niche and get a following. Whatever business you are in, make sure you have a good voice for your community.
2- It’s a platform for you to connect with people. Once you have people reading you, try to engage them in conversation. Get them as involved and connected with you via the blog as possible. An active community is one that spreads the most. If you are an event manager, cover your events or engage your audiences in activities through the blog.
3- You can also use your blog as an effective messaging board. Turn it into a key source for your company information. Use it for answering questions or giving clarifications. Use it for announcements and updates. Use it for publishing case studies of your clients.
4- When you are connecting with other bloggers, try to give away links or look for points of synergy. It’s good to be open and friendly with the blogosphere at large. This helps to make your blog stronger and more visible to potential readers.
5- Make sure your content is relevant to your niche and that you keep posting to it frequently. This is where good resource allocation skills come into play. Don’t think that you have to do everything yourself - get over your inhibitions and get a team onboard. Did you really think Donald Trump writes blog posts himself?
6- Set realistic expectations and goals for the blog. Your blog has to have a long term plan and shouldn’t be sporadic or spontaneous. Know exactly what your goals are (whether it’s something measurable like direct increase in traffic or something un-measurable like brand awareness).
7- Have a good feedback mechanism in place. Get hold of a good trackbacking software and actively engage in comments and responses. This is as important as writing the posts itself, so make sure you can schedule dedicated hours to it.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
Today’s tip! Every marketing campaign starts with keyword research. If you’re serious about earning money online you’re first investment should be a great keyword research tool.
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Same brand, Multiple Faces |
You may have different aspects of your brand to focus on in different audiences and situations. If you want, you can divide your social networks into groups. The way you do this is completely up to you. Some people keep their professional contacts on LinkedIn, their prospects on Friendfeed, their social contacts on Facebook and so on.
Some of the platforms, like Facebook, offer flexibility to build multiple pages and groups against your profile - so you can disperse only relevant information. This does not mean that your brand is inconsistent; it just means that you are showing those elements of your brand that fit the platform and market best. To be able to do this, you need to be able to understand the user-base of all social platforms and the typical interactions on those platforms before you can decide how to go about it.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
Today’s tip! The first step to being super organized is to manage all of your passwords in you’re browser. Being able to share them across your team is a bonus.
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Quantity vs Quality Debate |
The etiquettes of following people just because they follow you, has a split argument. Some people like Ed Dale are set right against this because they believe that having a large number of followers doesn’t mean that you can effectively follow so many people as well. So if Guy Kawasaki (blog.guykawasaki.com) has 20,696 followers on Twitter (as of October 3rd, 2008), he cannot possibly follow all of them back. More than that, he doesn’t need to. People follow him because they want to hear what he has to say, they may not necessarily have something valuable to say themselves.
The number of people who follow you is a greater yardstick for measuring value of content than the number of people you follow. So make sure you set your content up in a way that would be an incentive for people to follow you. Usually the best way is to let people feel that they have learned something new. This argument is the ultimate conflict in social media - Quality versus Quantity. What’s more valuable; a- having countless contacts across several different networks that result in thousands of crappy connections with a 3% conversion on a call to act, or b- a network of far fewer but quality contacts who all know and trust you personally and respond to you, a tight network of people that all have similarly responsive networks each.
My own personal view on this is that the last 5 years have been about creating vast networks which is about to change drastically. We have been like kids in candy stores traversing distance and time where sheer volume of friends mattered. Popularity or Thought Leadership was measured by the number of connections we can boast. I believe the next 5 years will focus more on the quality of relationships. Communities of 100 people who are all closely connected with a point of common interests will become far more valuable than 1000 people shoving links in each other’s face.
If you can get your message in front of someone who has 100 loyal listeners in your niche you would want to take your online relationship offline with them. You would want to invest time into this person and 10 others like them because if you do, you can effectively sell 1000 widgets with 10 calls. The line where quality meets quantity of relationships is going to find a resting ground and is going to be the nucleus for the most valuable internet opportunities. This is the line where online meets offline; where the amount of time invested into a quality relationship reaps more profitability than servicing a quantitative numbers game for the same financial gain. Balancing this line to the best effect will become the science of social networking into the future.
The rule of thumb is the more value you bring to other people’s daily lives by what you do and say; the more people will follow you. It’s no different to life offline, except its far less forgiving than real life.
Web 2.0 platforms take life as it has always been and makes it possible to maintain relationships with far more people that the offline world ever could. It takes away the factors of space, distances, travelling and communication logistics - and voila, there is no limit to the number of people you can befriend online. Um, yes, you will need high-speed internet. The thing you need to be careful about is that in the online world everything is recorded.
Everything you do leaves a footprint so there is less room for error. In the off line world if you say something you regret, the damage can be limited to those who hear you say it first hand, those that hear what you said second hand and to a lesser extent those who hear it third hand. Make the same mistake online and what you did or said spreads like fire.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
Today’s tip! Twitter delivers Events Listed more traffic than Google search on any given day. Become immune to the Google slap by managing your Twitter campaign professionally.
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Commenting & Linking |
You’d be surprised at how many relationships start off online that begin merely by commenting on each other’s blog posts or articles of work. Comments are a great ice-breaker and conversation starter and are one of the best ways of approaching people. Be sure to know that when you leave comments on popular blogs you may or may not get the same kind of response back as you would on smaller blogs. This is simply because popular bloggers get a lot of comments and consequently have less time to filter through and answer every one of them.
Sending links off to other bloggers in your blog posts or articles is also an appreciated gesture when done in moderation. There is software that you can use for finding relevant blog posts by keywords that will automatically post quotes on your blog with track back links to the original article in a topic specific manner…
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