Webside Chat with Jim Stroud, TheRecruitersLounge.com
September 1, 2008
Jim Stroud has worked with the likes of Google, Microsoft, Siemens and MCI and is the social media development manager for EnglishCafe.com.
While you might assume I prepped Jim before the show to give such a great list of tips on how to become a big deal in your niche, it isn’t so. He’s just really good at giving step-by-step tips for social media, content development and networking!
Enjoy this actionable chat with an accomplished social media expert, Jim Stroud…
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Social Marketing Zen
July 7, 2008
The Web is a bit different than it was 10 years ago. Finding places where your target market was spending time back then was a matter of finding the one or two forums that were active, if there were any at all, in a niche.
Today groups of of people are lined up on the web, neatly and categorically, and can number in the hundreds around a single topic across myriad social networks. One need only Google their top keywords to find an endless supply of places to hang out to generate interest and links to their site.
Belly Up
Social media offers site marketers an All-You-Can-Eat buffet of links and tools to interact with like-minded people in every niche you can think of.
So why do I get emails from newer site owners who are just as perplexed about generating publicity and search engine rankings as we were 10 years ago? If everything is easier today than it was then to generate near instant traffic and notoriety, why do people still fail to deliver the traffic they need?
A lack of perspective doesn’t help. Who cares how much harder marketing online was 5-10 years ago? We’re in the “now” man!
The other problem is the same as the solution. There are tons of places today to get traffic. Now marketers can become frozen in place wondering which sources they are going to focus on to deliver that traffic among the thousands available.
Horse Sense
There are over 400,000 search results in Google for “horse lovers community,” for example. Not all of those results are social media sites. Some are old fashioned forums which might also be traffic producers for a horse related ecommerce site or blog. Others include a surprisingly high number of horse lovers’ dating sites. I guess horse lovers want to find love within the herd as much as anyone else does.
The point is, there are a lot of places to check out, and with a lot of the market research is already done for you. Markets are lined up in well-defined, easy-to-find groups on the web these days. You know right from the start where the major groups of people in any market niche like to hang out just by Googling keywords.
Too Many Choices?
After Facebook, Digg, Mixx, BlogCatalog, MyBlogLog, Propeller, and the various niche-specific social communities that exist around a single topic, a marketer has a lot of choices to make about where to spend precious time meeting, greeting, linking, and advertising.
This is where the Type A personality gets bogged down. Type B’s don’t do much better. In the face of so many choices, many marketers freeze up and wonder if social marketing is going to be worth the time to get organized and effectively go after the traffic available to them.
Questions many people are asking me about social media marketing include:
1. How do I know spending time in these communities and on Web 2.0 sites is going to pay off?
2. Which sites to I focus on most?
3. Which TYPES of social media sites will produce the most traffic and interest?
4. Is “social traffic” as responsive as search engine or paid traffic?
Most Common Comments:
1. There are too many choices.
2. I don’t seem to be getting anything other than sporadic socializing done.
3. It doesn’t feel like a “business” and it is hard to measure the effectiveness of the time I am spending.
Taking the Zen Approach to Social Marketing
Following is my advice for the overwhelmed and “not-so-sure” marketers.
1. Break off a dedicated amount of time each day to focus on the sites you’ve isolated as the “core” social sites to interact with. These will include the biggest sites with the most concentrated group of prospective customers. You should only have around 5 sites to deal with, so choose among all the sites you find your target market hanging out on wisely.
2. Set aside another block of time weekly to research new places to set up accounts and test them for interest. Interest is measured by the amount of traffic you can pull out of these sites with the least amount of interaction. For example, how many visitors can you generate from a site by blogging there once a week? Or once a month?
3. Over time you will build a pretty sizable network of places you feel you need to visit often. This is where people usually break down. And this is where the Zen approach comes in handy.
For sites that are moderate to “unknown” traffic producers, just let them be. Give them what time you can and stay focused on your main traffic earners with a concerted effort.
Let email notifications from sites you interact with only occasionally be your reminder to step back into them and do a little blogging, posting, voting, friending, or commenting. Otherwise, keep them off your “must do” list.
4. Pay attention to your stats and only spend time on sites that are producing traffic for you. You will find some of your top 5 sites will change over time as you find new sites that offer more potential. That’s okay, but you must keep your top 5 list at 5 sites. Many people’s top 5 list expands to 10 or 20 and, again, this leads to burn out and frustration as they try to keep up a demanding schedule of social marketing.
This inevitably leads to something else suffering in your marketing plan. And it will cause many to question whether the whole social marketing thing is worth it at all.
Be like water and flow through social sites. Let the activities each sites “wants” you to participate in flow around you and don’t freak out thinking you must interact with every site you are a part of just because you can. Many times are not the right times to drop what you are doing to go answer friend requests.
Do it when you can do it. The people and the sites are not going anywhere.
Social Marketing Really Works
With a perspective gained from over a decade marketing online, I sometimes get frustrated by how “spoiled” we are today as online marketers. I would have killed for all the choices we enjoy today for pulling traffic to our sites outside of the search engines back when they were among the few choices we had for getting traffic.
When sitting at an all-you-can-eat buffet of traffic, just like a real buffet, you will get full fast. And you will lament the fact that you wanted to eat so much more before you got full.
Realize that you have tomorrow, next week, and next month to sample from this social media buffet. It is the largest buffet ever created and you’ll never get much out of it if you try to eat it all at once.
Get into the flow of social media marketing. Swim in the opportunities that exist to bring your site targeted, willing readers and customers. Don’t try to master it in a month. Put it to work for you in the time you have allotted each day, week, and month.
Gradually you will feel at peace in your part of the vast ocean of places to grab traffic and links and you will become comfortable in the knowledge that it will always be there to supply you with what you need, when you need it.
Social Marketing Resources
- Authority Black Book: Jack Humphrey’s free guide to social media marketing.
- Social Marketing Central: A free community to learn what other marketers are doing with social media marketing, ask questions, and find new places to check out.
- Social Power Linking: The most inexpensive way to learn absolutely everything there is to know about ranking well in the engines and getting a lot of traffic with social media marketing.
Software
- Web2Submitter: Submit content to the top social news and bookmarking directories easily. Reduce the amount of time you spend on promotion.
- Video Utility Poster: Makes video blogging (vlogging) super easy, putting the entire internet’s video content at your disposal for great, relevant, sticky content.
- TrackBoost: Software to drastically increase your links, traffic and rankings.
Building True Social Authority
March 27, 2008
Below is what social authority begins to look like after you’ve mastered the art of social marketing. The list includes all my main profiles on social communities, social news sites, marketing groups, and remote blogs and pages. They are the sites I visit most frequently and get the most out of as far as traffic, links, and branding.
Note what Darren Rowse outlined in his video about keeping a consistent profile across all your sites as much as possible. Clicking through the sites below you’ll see that I’ve tried to do just that over time and it really helps with branding.
Social Power Linking is about showing up everywhere your target market surfs. This list isn’t complete. I just got tired of building it and stopped at what I thought were the main sites in my arsenal. I consider the value of belonging to the site (traffic it generates, link love it sends, and the value of the networks of contacts generated).
Digg - Pownce - Tumblr - Squidoo - LinkedIn - HubPages - YouTube - Twitter - WetPaint - SpongeFish
Tipzu - My 9rules - Revver - Mashable - Ojeez - Social Marketing Central - Blog Marketing Search
Delicious - PlugIM - Sphinn - MySpace - Facebook - Propeller - StumbleUpon - MyBlogLog - Blog Catalog
SelfGrowth Network - FriendFee - Fave - Entrecard - Windows Live Spaces
Add to the main sites above all the 2nd tier sites you inevitably join to test them out and check out the community “liveliness,” and the list quadruples in size.
Now, looking at the sample sites above, is it hard to imagine why social marketing works as well as it does? Everything we do in life, if it is worth doing at all, is a lot of work. Social marketing is no exception.
But while most of my competitors are doing traditional SEO, JVs, list mailing, and basically the same as everyone else in my niche, I am out there grabbing fresh prospects who are not on anyone’s list in my niche.
The “Born On Date” of the list members of many experts in my niche indicates a large number of people on all these lists have “expired.” You will find a good percentage of the most jaded, tight fisted prospects on great big lists whose owners have not been adding fresh prospects. Rather, they trade jaded, non-viable list members, clients, and customers back and forth depending on who is launching what at the time.
Freshening the customer base in my niche is where the money is.
People who haven’t been scammed or become jaded are far more receptive to good quality offers and tips than people the big gurus keep trading back and forth as they mail for each other.
Therefore I don’t need to have a list of 1 million people just to get by. The list of devoted, regular readers you create by authority blogging converts better, far better, than traditionally generated readerships and lists.
Consider that as you decide who to listen to when it comes to marketing online.
Every niche has this problem to a lesser degree. But none beats the IM niche for stale lists. It’s because everyone does joint ventures and simply “swaps spit” without bringing in significant new, fresh faces. Social marketing allows me to reach out and capture high quality prospects who surf the social scene and who have never heard of any of the gurus of internet marketing. (If you wanted to know one of my secrets - there it is!)
So, social marketing in any niche will also produce very fresh faces to inform and then sell to while increasing your search engine rankings, link popularity, branding, and overall niche authority. This is because most people do it wrong who are trying it without professional guidance.
Man cannot exist on “free blog tips” alone where social marketing is concerned!
Social Power Linkers “get it” and they are doing really well with social marketing compared to the results they were getting before learning Social Power Linking.
Tags: getting links, Link Building, social authority, social marketing, social media marketing, social power linkingThe Value Of Social Marketing Is Growing
January 6, 2008
Even though people still trust offline media advertising more than any other form of advertising, social marketing and “one voice” blogging can become the exception in the coming year.
When you dump “word of mouth” advertising into the pot you get a wider view of the power of showing up on a “one voice” blog in your target market. Word of mouth is the most trusted form of advertising on which decisions are made almost instantaneously by people who trust the “mouth” giving the word.
“Despite an ever-expanding array of advertising platforms and sources, consumers around the world still place their highest levels of trust in other consumers, according to a recent global Nielsen Internet survey.” See the full study at Nielson.
In blogging, one way to measure trust is via RSS feed subscriber counts. Not at any given time, but by how the feed count grows and how long people stay subscribed.
Trust can also be measured by what the blogger has generated in affiliate commissions for products endorsed in the last year. One would expect with a high degree of certainty that conversions are higher for trusted one voice blogs than any other form of affiliate marketing. They certainly have been for me and my clients since we started blogging and building trust.
Search Engines Get A Bad Rap As Peer Marketing (Social Marketing) Grows
Search marketing is all the rage and is what gets the most attention and books written about it.� But surveys are showing people are starting to look elsewhere first for opinions on products and services from their peers (other consumers). Then they use the search engines to find merchants because they know they will be hit with a lot of advertising when they Google, and the merchant or best price is bound to be in one of the ads.
This says a lot about what people are starting to think about search engines as they’ve become more and more financially successful vie more and more advertising. If people are starting to think of engines more as billboards or yellow pages, this doesn’t bode well for the traditional search industry.
Indications are that more and more searches are started on non-traditional sites than on Google, Yahoo, or MSN. They’d almost have to since new vertical search and community sites pop up every time you blink. People definitely are finding value in social sites and communities where they feel fewer people there have something gain (other than good will) by reviewing or recommending a product or service.
More People are Digging Before They Buy
An excellent article entitled “Searching for Alternatives” was done by Alexandra Wharton for Revenue Magazine. Wharton reports that people are using sites like Digg.com to see what their peers or other regular consumers of a product think before they hit the “bias engines” to find the best deal. That’s word of mouth advertising on the web. Digg searches very often end up on blogs, one voice blogs, where people feel a high degree of trust even if they aren’t subscribers or have never seen the blog before.
This is based solely on the fact that people trust other people, not marketers or manufacturers, first and foremost.
Social Marketing Silly?
So, still think social marketing is a “silly waste of time?” Lots and lots of people made such brash statements about social media marketing last year. Yet with more and more people using alternate methods to search for and read up on products and services of all kinds, now is a very bad time to get caught saying such things.
Consumers are actually using sites like StumbleUpon.com, Reddit.com, Digg.com and many other “peer information finding engines” and are straying away for the traditional use of algorithm-based search engines which are becoming known for heavy advertising and less trust of results.
Algorithm search is becoming popular for finding the right place to buy something after you’ve made up your mind to buy based on what your peers are saying about the product over at Digg or TechCrunch.
So my questions are, how much social media marketing is in your marketing plan and are you putting your business in front of people looking for trusted information on which to base their buying decisions? Can any trusted information be found on your products or services? Or are all your eggs in the in-your-face advertising methods that are turning people away in growing numbers?
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More Social Marketing Wisdom…
On Social Marketing and Social Change: Viewing the Conversations Sessions
Why Social Media Matters, and Why Kia Doesn’t Care | Internet Marketi..
Social Media Marketing Campaigns: How to Set Goals and Define Your Target M..
Influential Marketing Blog: Blogger Social 2008 and the Art of Personalized..
Social Marketing Metrics: Insights From A Corporate VP | PodTech.net: Techn..
How to Make A Blog Post Go Viral with Social Media
The Best Authority Site Building Advice On The Planet | Social Media Market..
Study Shows Social Media Marketing is Popular But Funds Not Allocated
Misconceptions on the importance of Digg
December 14, 2007
There is a good discussion going on at Sphinn surrounding a story put out by SocialNewsWatch.com. The title of the story is “SEO Spammers: Leave Social Media Sites Alone!” and it is interesting the different takes from Sphinners on the topic.
Not just that, but the folks who are upset about how the title, without reading the whole article, could back up Diggers’ opinions about SEO which are not flattering to the industry.
My take is who cares how the “industry” of SEO is viewed as by Diggers?
The point is to get them talking because all the A List bloggers in many niches care about conversations. Postive or negative.
Attention is all that matters.
Digg users are no one’s target market. Or they shouldn’t be. Digg is a star-maker, and that’s it. Everyone (in my niche and several others) reads it. Getting the the front page with a stunt, a negative piece, or whatever kind of bait is good business.
Not because you got 1000 diggers to come to your site and buy nothing, subscribe to nothing, and leave snarky comments on your post. Because influential bloggers read Digg and other social news sites. If they pickup your story for their blog, you’ve hit the big time. Maybe just for a moment in time, or maybe it really sets your site off and sends your traffic through the roof of the people who DO matter to your business.’
All the link building you’ve done by hand in the last 6 months could be eclipsed by the links, rankings, and new direct traffic one front page story on Digg or other sites like it generates for you.
Again, not because the social mavens on those sites visited and subscribed or bought anything, but because getting on the front page means getting in front of incredibly influential bloggers you could work a whole year to even get a response from otherwise.
All bloggers are news junkies.
None more than big sites that have taken off and have over a million visitors per month. They need the best scoops they can possibly get to stay cutting edge and on top. And they use the social news sites as a way to find those scoops.
So who the hell cares what the misfits at Digg think about a piece as long as they are talking it up, or down. It doesn’t matter. The attention from them breeds attention from influencers whose opinions do matter to you. If you did a good job, they’ll reward you by telling their readers (who are your best prospects) about it.
That’s all you need. Once the right people are coming to your site and they see that you are offering something they want, you have yourself a bunch of new readers/customers. Most of whom have never heard much or anything about a site called Digg and who will never see the story that launched the post that brought them to you.
Tags: digg marketing, social marketing, social media marketing, social news sitesWeb 2.0 Blogger Asks “Is Web 2.0 Your Enemy?”
March 21, 2007
From Laura Childs at StampedeSecret.com:
“Is Web 2.0 Your Enemy?
Web 2.0 sites are your competition (for eyeballs and positioning in the search engines), but they’re not your enemy. After all, you could build your own Web 2.0 site, market the snot out of it and take back your rightful position…”
In her post, Laura makes it clear that Web 2.0 is not a thing to fear, but to adopt as part of your own marketing plan.
Since it isn’t going anywhere (interactive, user-controlled sites are being popped out onto the web at a break-neck pace) everyone with a website and formerly great rankings needs to understand and utilize the positives about Web 2.0 instead of trying to bully their way through their markets with old tactics that don’t work anymore.
There are many good points made by Laura in her post, and she also has a lot of other great information to help online marketers understand where the web has been, where it is now, and where it’s going.
Further Web 2.0 Marketing Resources
- Great Web 2.0 Marketing Sites
- StumbleUpon Some Web 2.0 Traffic!
- The Free Authority Black Book: I bet you’ve never seen a better free guide to Web 2.0 marketing in your life!
Making sure your linkbait (content) gets picked up everywhere!
February 21, 2007
Garrett French has posted “5 Tips to Maximize the Distribution and Value of Your Link Bait” today.
He comments on Lee Odden’s piece about social media campaigns not being for everyone and that they are “one hit wonders” for the most part.
I disagree with that assessment of social marketing unless people who use social marketing only use it one time.
I feel that if you don’t have a system for producing results with social media regularly (everytime you post content) then you are going to get mighty tired and quit doing it.
People who don’t have a system or a staff member who keeps their content in the limelight usually question the usefulness of social media marketing.
Social Power Linking, as I call it, is an ongoing campaign that works like many other forms of online marketing, in that, will stop producing results when you stop doing it.
(Although the links it produces are far more valuable long-term than doing old fashioned reciprocal linking!)
When you add up all the things we do in a well-rounded marketing campaign these days, there are fewer things you can do today “just once” to get a residual effect.
More than ever the engines are geared toward up-to-the-minute news and content while the lasting rankings are reserved for the major keywords your site scores best for overall.
I have some core phrases for this site (a handful), yet I am topping 2000 keyword phrases people use to find me each month that would be considered longtail.
Longtail search is a very dynamic, fluid and “evergreen” with pages moving all over the place month to month for our longer phrases.
Because I score for so many phrases a month, I am not about to cut off my social marketing just because it generates the bulk of its traffic around the time I publish something that catches on out there.
The links are valuable for as long as they stay live, which Odden did not mention in his post.
If I were to stay within the confines of traditional marketing, I’d have far less search engine traffic and for only a relative handful of phrases.
In the end, it is all important. There isn’t a best method or, to my mind, a choice between any methods out there that work on their own.
If you want to dominate your niche, you use traditional and new media marketing in tandem, and on a daily basis.
Tags: getting links, link bait, linkbait, social media marketing, social power linking, Website PromotionDoing a call this afternoon with Mark Hendricks
January 31, 2007
Want to hear about some of the adventures of “FTR Man?”
There may or may not be room on a call I am doing today with Mark Hendricks on the latest tactics I’ve been using to drive targeted traffic to this here blog ‘o mine.
Give it a shot - you might make it in if you call in early.
Despite the title of the page, we are not giving away free joints on this call.
Tags: mark hendricks, social media marketing, targeted traffic, targeted traffic teleconference
