Well, yes, I am still writing 30 minutes every day per my New Year's challenge to myself. Then where the heck all our your blog updates then (you might ask)? Lately I've been devoting all my time to finishing up our next book, titled something like:

Be the Magnet
(How to Use Social Media and Content Distribution to Attract Customers and Business Opportunities)

The book is about using social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Squidoo.com, in conjunction with a content distribution campaign (articles, blogs, etc.) to spread your brand, generate visibility, and drive traffic to your web site. The book is being finished up, I'm working on artwork, and am about ready to set up the review copy that we will order from our publisher.

So we're excited and believe it will be something a lot of people will want to check out. So that's why no blog updates lately...just too busy finishing up something bigger!

Labels: internet marketing, social media

Jerry Work here. I have returned to the business of finishing our next book, on the subject of social media marketing. It has been 90% written for a couple of months; I just haven't had the enthusiasm for the project to finish. But I've rededicated myself to getting it done and out to the public.

It's funny...as I read through what I've written, I keep saying to myself "man, that's a good idea...I should do that..." You see, I've spent a ton of time this year studying social media, experimenting with Twitter and whatnot, but then when things get too busy around the office, I tend to drop it so that I can concentrate on getting the work done.

But it can't be that way.

You have GOT to be systematic if you are going to use social media as a marketing strategy. If you post on Twitter once a week, that is going to do absolutely nothing. If you update Facebook once a month, you might as well be invisible. These things have got to be done every day.

I have blogged quite a bit here and in my Twitter marketing blog about automating certain tasks so that your accounts stay updated even when you don't manually update them yourself. But I've discovered something else about myself that I think is probably applicable to most people: once you stop doing something, it is difficult to start back up. So for the last few weeks, my Twitter account has pretty well been on auto-pilot. Sure, it is good because I have kept it going, but social networking is MUCH more effective when you involve yourself...when you read what others around you are saying...when you are part of the community.

So be better than I have been lately. Get your systems in place to automate your accounts, but make sure you set aside a little bit of time each day to log into Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or whatever you're into, and update your account. Respond to what some other users are saying. Look for new friends.

Just do it!

Labels: Facebook, internet marketing, linkedin, marketing, social media, social media management, social networking, twitter

The deeper we dig into the Twitter world, the more different ways we are finding to take advantage of it. I (this is Jerry) have to admit that I am much more intrigued by Twitter than I am with Facebook. I have yet to really realize the benefit of Facebook, although admittedly part of it is that I just haven't put that much effort into it. Part of it is time. I do all of our social media work, and after taking care of our clients, I have fairly limited time for self-promotion. But it is also that I just don't "get" Facebook like I get Twitter. Twitter is an incredibly simple concept, yet remarkably powerful in the things you can do with it.

I think the best way for a business to manage a Twitter account is with a combination of automation and manual posting. For automation, my number one tool hands down is Tweet Later. I really can't do Twitter without it now (the pro version, not the free version which is much more limited in what it can do). However, one issue with using Tweet Later to automate your account is that you pre-program your messages, so the tweets that originate from Tweet Later are not really tied to events actually happening.

That's why I have started combining Tweet Later automation with automatic posts from TwitterFeed. The purpose of TwitterFeed is to let you stream your own blog to your Twitter account. That is a nice feature, but what I have started doing is creating an RSS feed based on Google alerts, and then feeding that into TwitterFeed to in turn update my Twitter account with news items. So now, my account is automatically updated with a combination of pre-programmed messages about my industry, along with Google news results. And of course I do a fair amount of manual posting as well.

If you are active with Twitter, it can keep your name in front of a lot of people. And if some of those people like what you have to say and start retweeting your messages, then there is a powerful viral effect.

I have devoted many hours the last few weeks to a study of Twitter. If you would like to learn along with me, I invite you to check out my blog devoted to the subject, The Twitter Marketing Blog, at www.thetwittermarketingblog.com.

Labels: Facebook, internet marketing, social media, social networking, tweeting, tweetlater, twitter, twitter management, twitterfeed

There is a classic business metaphor that associates being in business with walking down a hallway with lots of doors. Just walking down the hallway (the state of conducting some kind of business) will reveal opportunities that you could not see until you walked down the hall. In other words, moving forward with some kind of business plan will cause you to meet people and come upon situations that may change the course of your business. That is fine, however, because it means that you are recognizing opportunities that you would not have seen if you had not taken action.

The concept of using social media to promote your business falls very nicely in line with this idea. Sites like Facebook and Twitter will allow you to make a social (sort-of) connection with many people you would not have otherwise known. And that is where opportunities come from. The more involved you are with these sites, the better your chance of using them as a tool for opportunity creation.

However, your chance of creating opportunity is better if you focus your friend/follower generating activities on those with some type of connection to your industry for geographic market. For instance, a bankruptcy lawyer in Memphis would be well served to follow and be followed by residents and business owners in Memphis. When one of those people needs help with a bankruptcy issue, they will know who to contact.

It is also necessary to keep your eyes open. If you operate your account in such a way as to get as many friends or followers as you can but you never read what those people have to say, you will not be aware when the possibility arrives to offer assistance or propose business alliances. If the number of people you follow is small, then you might be fine just using the default twitter interface. However, as your accounts grow, it can quickly become difficult to keep up with what is going on. Therefore, it is highly advisable to use a software solution to help you manage your social media accounts.

There are several on the market, and I have spent time finding a solution that works well for me. It would be a good idea for you to do the same. The one I like the best is TweetLater (http://trytweetlater.com), which automates many functions of managing a Twitter campaign, such as posting tweets, sending direct messages, and searching for new relevant users to follow. A good application for just keeping up with what people are saying is TweetDeck (http://tweetdeck.com), which lets you view your Facebook friend updates and Twitter follower updates in the same interface.

Labels: Facebook, internet marketing, linkedin, social media, social media management, social networking, tweeting, twitter, twitter management

Work media is enjoying our new office located in downtown Dickson. Our productivity is up and our travel time is way down. We can all get to the office in 15 minutes or less, which uses more time to spend researching Internet Marketing strategies and applying them to our clients accounts. If any of you ever find yourself in Dickson (about 1/2 hour drive west of Nashville), we invite you to stop by for a visit. We are in the old Ragan arcade on main street.

We've been getting really heavy into social media and video. We have begun recording a lot of video footage, including short 12 second video four 12 seconds/twitter. Of loading videos to 12 seconds has a definite SEO advantage, in that it can result in the creation of a lot of web pages with a keyword links pointing to your main site. This is somewhat of an advanced strategy that could have a powerful long-term impact on a search engine optimization campaign.

Combining video, social media, and content distribution is definitely the state of the art in search engine marketing. We invite you to contact us today to talk about creating and implementing this type of marketing campaign for your business.

By the way, if you're into Twitter, you should check out our Twitter blog, http://twitterforbusiness.blogspot.com.

By the way one more time, I invite you to check out our 12seconds page, http://12seconds.tv/channel/lawfirmseo. As the name implies, this particular channel is intended to discuss law firm marketing, but it pretty much all applies to any type of business.

Labels: internet marketing, ppc search engine marketing, search engine optimization, social media, social networking, video, video distribution

Once your Twitter account gets up to a couple thousand followers, it can be difficult to manage. Unless you're rich and don't have anything better to do, you can't really sit around all day and do nothing but read tweets. However, checking out what the people you follow are saying is sort-of the whole point of Twitter's existence.

A program for organizing your account so you can keep up with those you find interesting or useful is TweetDeck. TweetDeck is a client side program that presents your Twitter information in an efficient, organized way using columns. By default, the tweets from all of your friends are listed in a column on the left-hand side of the screen (although columns can be moved around however you want). The next column lists tweets that mention your user name. The third column lists direct messages. The last column, by default, shows TweetDeck recommendations, which I found to be a waste of space. I use that column to build out groups.

If you take the steps to build up a large list of people you follow (and who follow you), there are going to be many people that you're really not that interested in reading. Likewise, there are going to be some people who you really want to keep up with. The way to account for this is to place those you really want to read into groups.

I have several groups set up in my account - one for those who post about legal marketing, one for those who post about affiliate marketing, etc. This lets me track posts on specific subjects from specific users, rather than having to dig through thousands of tweets that I really don't care about.

You may choose to use groups differently, instead just grouping anyone you find interesting regardless of their line of work or the nature of their tweets. That is fine. The main thing is just to find SOME way to keep up with your most followees, rather than just having a big unorganized mess.

Labels: internet marketing, marketing, social media, tweet, tweet deck, tweeting, twitter

Using a tool like Ping.fm, you can integrate your blog, your Twitter account, and your Facebook account. We're talking about dynamically combining content from multiple sources into content for a third or more web page.

Here is a hypothetical example.

Let's say I run an Internet marketing company in Nashville...wait a minute, that's not so hypothetical is it? Anyway, I update my company's blog every Tuesday and Friday. A couple of times per day, I also update our Twitter account. Assuming it takes me one hour per blog post and five minutes per tweet, that would represent a total time investment of just under three hours.

At the moment, I am only updating my blog and my Twitter account for those three hours. With a little ingenuity, I can also keep a major social networking site such as Facebook updated with very little additional time.

With an application like Ping.fm, I can have my Facebook status updated every time I post a new tweet. Taking it a step further, I can use the Facebook Notes application to update my Facebook account every time I update my blog. So now, for those same three hours, I am not only updating my blog and Twitter, I am also updating my Facebook page.

One problem is that just having a Facebook account doesn't do us any good if we don't have any friends in the account. So I may need some additional time to periodically log into Facebook and search for new friends. I could even automate that part using a tool like Facebook Blaster. But I would still want to periodically log into my Facebook account to check things out. You never really want to automate something and then just forget about it.

Since I'm using Ping.fm, I could also choose to set up some more social media pages and have them update every time I update my blog. In this case, it will be important to separate blogs from update sites using groups. Otherwise, I will end up with a bunch of extremely short blog posts with no titles. I have made that mistake before and it looks really bad.

So, the whole point of this exercise: whereas before I put in the time and only managed to update my firm's blog and Twitter account, I can now update the blog, Twitter account, AND a Facebook account.

Labels: blog, blog management, Facebook, internet marketing, social media, social networking, twitter

This weekend, it seems that many thousands of Twitter users had their accounts suspended for no reason. Twitter's excuse is that there was a "spamcloud" that had to be dealt with...

So, my first question is: what the heck is a spamcloud?

My second question is: is the only way to deal with it really shutting down the accounts of thousands of innocent users?

Twitter may just be a victim of its own success. I'm sure it is difficult managing and scaling an application that is growing as rapidly as it is. But come on...shouldn't Twitter have a plan in place for managing things like this? I think Twitter risks driving away many users if it continues to operate in this fashion.

This whole episode highlights an important point about Internet marketing:

You should focus your efforts on driving traffic to Web properties that you own. Otherwise, you are at someone else's mercy. Do you own your Facebook page? No. Facebook does. Do you own your LinkedIn account? No, LinkedIn does. Do you own your Twitter page? Nope. Twitter does.

What do you own? You own your web site.

So if you've spent all your marketing time and energy promoting your Twitter page, and Twitter suspends your account (like it probably did this weekend), then you are stuck. But if you devote your energy toward getting people to your main web site, then you have more control and more freedom. You are not at anyone's mercy (except maybe your hosting company).

I do think you should promote your Twitter page and your Facebook page and whatever other social media accounts you have, but first and foremost, promote your own web site.

Maybe next time you can avoid the meltdown on Twitter Street.

If you are having a hard time with this social networking stuff (or anything else related to online marketing), contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or www.WorkMedia.net.

For maximum control of your Twitter account, I advise the use of Tweet Later, which you can try for free at www.TryTweetLater.com.

Labels: domain names, internet marketing, social media, social networking, spamcloud, twitter

I am a big fan of marketing integration. Your offline marketing makes reference to your online marketing, your online marketing ties together with real world promotion, and everything links to everything else. This includes your social networking. One of my favorite techniques for combining blog content and static web page content is to stream the blog to the static pages via RSS. Sometimes it can be tricky to work out the code to make it happen, but it's a beautiful effect when your entire web site gets updated every time you make a new blog post.

In keeping with that tradition, I am now exploring the idea of streaming your Twitter content to your web pages. Fortunately, there is really no code to figure out, although you may have to do some in-line styling to get it to look right. To use it, first log into your Twitter account, then visit the following URL:

http://twitter.com/downloads

You can also get there by clicking the "Apps" link at the bottom of the page. To stream your Twitter posts, click the Widgets link. Then select the type appropriate for your site. You can create a Flash-based widget, or one that is HTML-based. I suggest going with straight up HTML because, for search engine purposes, you really want to have the actual words from your Twitter posts on your web pages, rather than a Flash movie.

Then just copy and paste the supplied code into your web pages. At this point, it is also VERY helpful if your site makes use of include files. For example, our law firm Internet marketing site, www.law-firm-internet-marketing.net, uses an include file for the left side of the pages, which looks like this:

#include virtual="leftside.asp"

So when I want to update the left-hand side of the web pages on the site, all I have to do is change this one file, rather than manually updating every single web page.

Initially, the design of the widget did not look right on my pages, so I used some in-line styling, as shown:

ul id="twitter_update_list" style="list-style-type: none;"

I did not like the way the bullet points looked, so I inserted the style code to tell viewers' browsers not to display bullet points by telling it the list style type is "none."

New widgets are coming out all the time, and we will discuss some more, but if I were you, the first one I would look into using is the Twitter widget that lets you stream your Twitter posts onto your web site.

Need some help using social networking to promote your web site? Contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: internet marketing, social media, social networking, twitter, twitter widget, widget

I have spent a good bit of time the last week using Excel to sketch out a social networking management system. The resulting spreadsheet will be a tool that we will give away for free for use of our readers. And the concept will then be carried forward into an online database-driven application that will be used for our own purposes and our clients'. But the exercise has been very helpful at helping me think through the process of how a social networking campaign should be organized.

First off, I consider content distribution to be a major part of online social networking. If you leave this part out, and just concentrate on meeting people online, then you are not taking advantage of the Web's ability to spread your name and marketing message. So writing blogs and articles and distributing that content should be an integrated part of what you do. The system I am setting up makes the assumption that you will be doing this.

Social networking is one of those things that tends to happen haphazardly, as time permits, whenever you think about it. It can be done much more effectively if you create a monthly social networking/content distribution schedule that tells you exactly when you should be doing things and what you should be doing.

To begin with, I suggest you create a simple calendar of when blog posts should be posted and articles written. Aim for eight blog posts per month and three articles. If you can do more than eight blogs, that's fantastic, but a minimum of eight is sufficient. In a year's time that is nearly a hundred blog posts, which is a lot of content. Three articles in a month may be aggressive, but try.

When you lay out your blogging and article writing schedule, go ahead and write out an idea for each blog post in advance, and create groupings of two or three blog posts in a row that elaborate on the same general topic. Then for each of those topic groupings of blog posts, specify a date to write an article that combines the information from those blog posts. This way, rather than trying to always think of a topic for an article from scratch, you can just use the content you create in the process of blogging as the basis for those articles.

Just doing the above things will go a long way toward giving your content distribution efforts more focus, but we're not done. In my next blog post we will continue talking about scheduling and hit on some other functions that should be included in your calendar.

Work Media is here to help with your social networking, content distribution and search engine marketing. If it involves driving traffic to a web site, we're into it. Give us call at 888-299-4837 or email info@workmedia.net.

Labels: internet marketing, search engine optimization, seo, social bookmarking, social media, social networking

Today I begin Twittering with renewed enthusiasm. Last night I even updated my profile and image. I've got a yellow post it note stuck to the side of my monitor to remind me to update Twitter. If you don't update, then the whole exercise is pointless.

Are you on the Twitter yet? It may seem like an unproductive use of your time, and I can't really blame you. But if you ain't on the Twitter, you got a problem.

Here's the lowdown. Twitter really can help you build up an online network of people who are interested in what you have to say; who can influence events in your life; who can recommend your products or services to others. It is a legitimate business tool. And it's free (not counting the time you spend actually doing it).

So start today. Go set up an account if you don't have one, and make your page look interesting. Upload an image of yourself so you don't have the default brown loop-looking thing as your image. Fill out the fields on your profile page. People want to learn who you are.

Your Twitter posts should: contain relevant keywords; be industry specific; and be interesting to read. If you can make them funny, that's even better. You want to entertain as much as possible.

I'm a professional search engine marketer, but I'm a newbie at using Twitter. But if I've learned anything in the short time I have been using Twitter, it's that you've got to be interesting!

By the way, you can look me up on Twitter at http://twitter.com/jwork.

Labels: internet marketing, ppc search engine marketing, social media, social networking, twitter

Take the time to set up your profiles on social networking sites. I know, I know, it takes forever...but it must be done. And it is my suggestion that you have lots of such accounts. It is not sufficient just to have a LinkedIn profile. You should create accounts at Squidoo and LinkedIn and set up good profiles there. You also need accounts at the major article directories like EzineArticles.

To create all these accounts and set up profiles, you will need to devote at least a half day to it, if not the whold day.

This is the kind of work that would be good to hire someone else to do. I suggest you create a document that has your bio, contact information, links, and any other information you may want shown on your profiles, and then find an intelligent young person to do the work for you. Paying a kid $10 per hour to do it is a bargain compared to using your own time, which you probably value a lot more than that.

Do people really look at other people's profiles on social networking sites? Absolutely. So don't blow an opportunity to brand and market yourself to people who are potential sources of business or leads.

Labels: internet marketing, search engine optimization, social media, social networking

I (Jerry) have been heavy, heavy into article marketing this year. It has become my personal favorite way of increasing link count. However, I am beginning to experience what I believe may be some resistance on the part of Google to rank sites with a large number of links primarily from article-related sites.

You gotta mix it up. In an attempt to do just that, I have also been doing some social bookmarking. But I have to admit, the social bookmarking component has not worked quite as well. The problem there is that for social bookmarking to be really effective, you need lots of other people to bookmark your site BECAUSE THEY REALLY LIKE IT and think others would enjoy it as well. So ultimately, it's out of your hands.

What can you do about this? It's simple, really, although also quite complex. You have to create content that is REALLY interesting. Just being a source of useful information is not enough. You need a gimmick. A hook. Something that makes people laugh, or gasp, or something...you need a reaction!

Simply bookmarking your own home page will not do it. Your site needs to be loaded with interesting content. You may not even want the content on your front page if it detracts from your core marketing message. This is only something you'll use as a hook so that people want to bookmark your site.

I'm not at all slowing down on article marketing. We have seen fantastic results, and it has benefits beyond search rankings, such as direct-click-throughs and credibility. But if you engage in article marketing, you should supplement it with other link building strategies.

If you need some help coming up with interesting ways to build a catalog of links to your site, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: link research, linking, linking campaign, search engine optimization, seo, social bookmarking, social media

For a blogger, I don't get out much. Most successful bloggers spend all kinds of time reading other blogs, posting, being active in blog communities...and I don't know how they do it. How the heck do you do that and still get any work done? We still don't visit many blogs and get into that community stuff too much, simply because of the time required. But we have started doing something that moves us in that direction that i think may be of value to you.

We've been going to "answer" sites and responding to questions that deal with search engine marketing topics. A couple of good examples of the types of sites I'm talking about are:

http://answers.yahoo.com

and

http://linkedin.com/answers

To answer questions on either site, you have to have an account. Signing up doesn't take long, but you might want to spend some time working on your profile just in case people reading your answers want to find out more about you.

You may or may not receive any boost in your search engine rankings from these sites. Linkedin, for example, uses a redirect for your web site link, so it's not a link straight to your site. And Yahoo! inserts a nofollow attribute in links contained in answers. But with Yahoo!, we have seen many links contained in answers appear in search engine lists of links to a site, so we think you are getting some value there.

Even if you receive no search engine ranking boost, you will expose your expertise to people looking for help in your area, so chances are good that you will receive some traffic. It's just another form of on-line networking. You've got to get your name out there, and answering questions is a good way to do it.

You do need to be careful not to use the answer sites simply for promotional purposes. Your accounts will be banned quick if you do that. If you're going to do it, you need to look for questions for which you can honestly provide some insight, and type out complete, well-written responses.

If you could use some help implementing a search engine optimization or pay per click management campaign for your business, give us a call at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: internet marketing, social bookmarking, social media

For one of our clients we are currently promoting, we are doing a lot of linking - pretty standard stuff for a search engine optimization campaign. As part of this process, we are doing a fair amount of social bookmarking of our client's web pages. We started with del.icio.us, probably the top social bookmarking web site.

We bookmarked every page of the site and tagged each page with a static set of keywords plus keywords specific to that page. Within a couple of days, our main social bookmarks page about those topics was near the top of Google's rankings for some of the keywords - actually above the client we're promoting! So while that's not exactly what we're ultimately trying to achieve, it proves the point that search engines place a lot of stock in information that is categorized via social bookmarking. And in the long run it will help our client rise in the rankings. Although, if someone clicks our link, they will be presented with nothing but links to our client's site - a win, win situation.

Another point is that by bookmarking our client's site, we exposed it to lots of other people who use the same social bookmarking site. If some of them bookmark our client's pages as well, then that strengthens our client's position. And del.icio.us is only one of probably dozens of similar sites, all of which can be used to promote a web site about a particular subject.

So is you have not socially bookmarked your own site's web pages, we strongly recommend it. And have all of your employees sign up for their own accounts and do it as well.

If you need some help promoting your site in the social bookmarking sites (or anywhere else), contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: internet marketing, search engine optimization, search marketing, seo, social bookmarking, social media, web marketing, web site marketing

It is possible to weld the core business motive of generating profit with virtues such as charity and environmentalism. Not only is it possible, it is advisable.

If you incorporate an element of charity into a marketing campaign, such as giving a percentage of earnings to a particular charity, it gives you the opportunity to tap into a whole new network. It also gives you a hook for public relations purposes. It goes without saying that the charity should be one that you have researched and want to be associated with.

Having an environmental element to your marketing is another great way to gain the participation of socially aware prospects. People who are devoted to a particular cause are aggressive about dissiminating information in support thereof. So if you associate your marketing campaign with that cause, then you will win the loyalty of and help from the people who believe in the cause.

If you can combine the above elements with a discount or money-saving offer, then you compound the effectiveness of the offer. You will also have all of the makings of a strong press release campaign. Online PR can be used to distribute your message to thousands of web sites. If you push the right buttons, you can generate a ton of traffic from environmentally-conscious individuals who will be receptive to your offer.

If you need help crafting a socially responsible marketing campaign and message for your business, give Work Media a call at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: advertising, charity, email marketing, environmentalism, internet marketing, marketing, pr, publicity, social media

Ma.gnolia is a very nicely designed social bookmarking site that is easy to use. It has a Google Page Rank of 7, so it can be a nice boost to your site to acquire links from it.

To sign up:

1. Visit http://ma.gnolia.com.

2. Click the Join button on the top menu. The URL is: http://ma.gnolia.com/join.

3. Type in the required information and click “Join Free”.

4. In a few minutes you will receive an email from Ma.gnolia that you will click to
activate your account.

To bookmark a web page:

1. On the front page, there is a box on the right side of the screen labeled “Add a
bookmark”. Click the arrow beneath the textbox to expand the box to give you
options to add a title, description, and tags (separated by a comma).

2. Type in the information and click Save. Leave the checkbox labeled “Keep
bookmark private” unchecked.

3. As before, make use of the keywords someone would use to search for your web
site in the tags and in the title.

To see the top tags being used on the site, click the Tags link on the top menu. Then click
the tab labeled “Everyone’s Top Tags”.

To add the functionality to your browser to bookmark sites without having to go do the
Ma.gnolia web site, visit: http://ma.gnolia.com/support/bookmarklets.

We suggest that you create an account and bookmark every page on your site that has strong content. Hopefully some other people will see your bookmark, check out your site, and bookmark it themselves. Another strategy is to get people who know you or are associated with your business to create their own accounts and bookmark your site as well.

For help integrating social bookmarking sites into your online marketing strategy, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: content, content creation, internet marketing, ma.gnolia.com, marketing, social bookmarking, social media

Yesterday marked out 80th blog post. We're proud of that because it really took us quite a while to get the hang of it, but we're on a roll now. If you've been reading this blog for a while, then we thank you for sticking with us. If you're new, then we thank you for helping us grow. Now onto something related to Internet marketing...

Today we're going to talk about how to use del.icio.us to promote your site. We're beginning with the assumption that you already have an account and have already installed the tool to bookmark web sites.

When you take the action of bookmarking a web site, you will have the options of typing a title, comments, and tags for the site, separated by a space. The title should incorporate the most popular search phrases people are using to search for your product or service. And it should make the reader really want to click the link. Strong copy writing skills are handy at this step. It is also a good idea to type some comments because others may read your comments before deciding whether or not to visit or bookmark the site.

Then you will type in a list of keywords your customers might use to find your web site. It would probably be a good idea to do some keyword research to find the search phrases people are using to find web sites like yours. Keyword research is a detailed topic unto itself, so we will not discuss general purpose keyword research in this document. But one good way to find keywords searchers are using is to do a search related to your business in the del.icio.us search box, then select one of the top results to inspect it to see what tags people have applied to that web site.

For example, if you search for “log cabins” in del.icio.us, the top result (at the time of this writing) has a header that starts “Log homes & log cabins from scratch –“, which is a link to a builder of log homes. Highlighted in pink next to the listing are the words “saved by 30 people”. Clicking that pink link will show you the comments people have made about the site, as well as the most common tags used for the site (on the right-side of the screen). Clicking “list” in the common tags box shows the exact number of times that each tag was used. In our example, the tag “building” was used 8 times, and the tag “loghomes” was used 5 times. The “cloud” view does the same thing, but visually rather than with numbers (heavier used tags are bigger). The term for displaying tags in this manner is a “tag cloud”. You will also notice that above the search results is a section called “Related tags” which will show you more tags related to your search.

Using the above technique will give you a good idea of the tags other people are using to bookmark web sites in your industry, which is a good way of building a list of tags for your site. We recommend bookmarking one page from your site every day, with a set of tags that apply specifically to that page. If you can get some of your co-workers, friends, employees, etc., to also do this on a regular basis, you expose your site to many more people who, hopefully, will like your site good enough to bookmark it themselves.

For help using social bookmarking sites to promote your web site, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: del.icio.us, internet marketing, marketing, social bookmarking, social media, web marketing, web site marketing

According to Online Media Daily, Yahoo! and Create With Context surveyed 2,261 customers who had recently engaged in an online transation such as consumer electronics, automobiles, hotels or loans. Their conclusion was that 40% of those surveyed could be classified as "brand advocates" - meaning they discussed and endorsed their preferred brands with others. For instance, they might discuss their favorite brands on message boards or on a mySpace page.

40%.

This definitely underscores the importance in building a strong "brand" for your company. Working like hell to sell your product or service is a bit of a waste if you don't have a "brand" by which your market can identify you.

So think long and hard about the colors on your web site, your logo, the "look" of your web site. And think long and hard about the story of your business. And what it is that differentiates you from others. If there isn't anything, create something. Because it is likely that 40% of the people you sale to online will go on to endorse your brand and spread your brand to others. If they feel you're worth it.

And if you have a brand.

Contact Work Media at info@workmedia.net or 888-299-4837 for help building your Company's brand and infusing it into your Internet marketing campaign.

Labels: brand, branding, internet marketing, marketing, online branding, social media, surveys, Yahoo