Monday Power Linking

Found some neat stuff tonight I wanted to get up on the blog for your morning coffee.

• Lynn Terry has a great post on Social Networking that really does a better job than I’ve ever done breaking it down to basics without getting as technical as I tend to get.  Great read for beginners and pros alike.
• Walt Breuninger has a thoughtful piece called “I feel guilty about not clicking on more ads” which is about how you can pay for the great content on the blogs you read.  It might be seen as risky business but if you think about the idea for a moment it makes perfect sense to click on ads that interest you.  After all that’s all the advertisers are hoping you’ll do.  Then it’s up to them and their product whether they get your business or not.
• The Blog Joint has a great list of top Wordpress plugins you should add to your favorites.  I’m a sucker for a good linkbait piece especially if it is on plugins!
• Still stuck on this RSS thing?  Peter Lenkefi gives you two really nice RSS how-to resources including a video by Robin Good and Lee Lefever.
• Finally, from Marketing Soapbox comes more news on Firefox “The COOP” development and what it is going to do for those of us with too many irons in the Web 2.0 fire to organize everything.  Very informative look into the future of staying organized in Web 2.0.

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Tags: power linking, rss video, Social Power Linking, web 2.0, Wordpress Plugins

Targeted Traffic From Social Networks…

I’ve been completely floored this week by the way MyBlogLog.com has taken off.

Sometimes it seems like a big company has to buy in to really get the current community to explode! And it has.

My MBL network has grown a lot this week and everyone seems to be posting comments on each others community pages like mad now.

My traffic from the MyBlogLog.com community has tripled this week just from participating and surfing over there.

If you are a blogger and you aren’t in the MyBlogLog world yet, you best get stompin’! And don’t forget to join the Blog Promotion group as your first order of business.

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Spicy Page is also really taking off. It is really fun to watch new communities grow. And I like helping them do it.

It is a blog voting and popularity community. People who sign up seem to be surfing through the other members and commenting on other blogs, usingthe system to discover new content in the blogosphere.

I like the neat twist they put on the community system and I can’t wait to see what they do with the video hosting tab which is still under construction.

My traffic from SpicyPage.com is going up and I am getting new readers and subscribers from them.

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I will have a list of all the new social networks I’ve discovered soon. Things are definitely going vertical instead of just large, general communities.

For instance, I found a new story posting place like Digg, but just for marketers and marketing content. It’s called PlugIm.

This site is sending me daily targeted traffic just by posting my posts and articles there for readers to pick up.

Make sure you take some time soon to “get social.” My stats are up across the board from taking a bit of time each day to interact with neat services like these, so it is time well spent.

Tags: blog promotion, mybloglog, plugim, social networks, Social Power Linking, spicy page

Web 2.0 in 2007: The Free-For-All Is Over

If you dream of setting up your own little social networking, widgetized, diggable, video sharing, community-based Web 2.0 site and making millions out of the gate, it’s time to get real.

A gut check is taking place around the web with people realizing that, while it is far cheaper to start a YouTube.com than one of the original portals VCs sank tons of money into in the first internet gold rush, the party is over for simply launching and getting bought for millions.

Does that mean Web 2.0 is dead for the little guy? Not at all. It’s just getting started.

But the easy traffic and instant community is not so easy or instant as it was for the trail blazers of last year.

Now that everyone and their sister knows about the craze, and the fact that you can start a YouTube of your own for chump change, competition for buzz and novelty is absolutely sky high.

There is a growing list of video sharing sites. Gazillions of Digg wannabe sites. Who knows how many Myspace’s.

And everything is going vertical with smaller, niche oriented networking sites popping up where there is far more room and interest in being a bigger fish in a smaller pond.

There is some good discussion going on out there about what to expect now that the market for the first iteration of Web 2.0 is starting to normalize.

Fractals of Change: Web 2.0 – Greater Initial Investments Required

Tags: social marketing, Social Power Linking, startups, venture capital, web 2.0 bubble

Are you broken down on the side of the information super highway?

A friend told me something last week that cracked me up. She has a son who was making fun of her for not having a computer or ever getting online.

(I know, there are still some of them left!)

He told her the funniest thing I’ve heard so far this year.

He said, “Mom, you are broken down on the side of the information super highway and, pretty soon, you won’t be cute enough to hitch hike.”

What gave me a laugh also gave me pause.

I see a lot of people broken down on the side of the road as opportunity passes them by because they are not learning the right things about what makes traffic happen on the web today.

Before Web 2.0 there was well over a decade of factory-line production of pretty much the same materials, courses, and seminars on how to drive traffic.

But now there is a whole new and massive world of social, interactive marketing out there.

I teach it here, and subscribers are having a lot of fun picking up easy traffic. (Ever recall the old way of marketing being FUN?)

But I monitor what’s going on around the web and all the old stuff is still there, with newbies coming online and thinking it is new.

YOU are in the right place, but you are in the minority. If you know someone who needs to call a tow truck to get them back on the highway, send them this URL or link to FTR from your site.

There’s a long long way to go before we have even a tiny percentage of the new marketing content to compare to what the last decade has produced on generating traffic on the old web, but we are here for the long haul.

Let’s help the tens of thousands of site owners broken down on the side of the road (submitting classified ads, buying “500,000 Search Engine Submissions!” and trying to understand how search engines work - or worse - hiring an SEO firm to get ranked!)

Tell your friends about the Friday Traffic Report.

They have to be wondering why you have that big smile on your face lately!

Tags: Blog Marketing, internet marketing, Social Power Linking, Website Promotion

Myspace for Professionals

The Content Desk partners started one of the first (if not THE first) social networking sites for online business owners and professionals awhile back.It is called MyWebTop.com and without much in the way of promotion, it is growing at a good clip.

Why MyWebTop?

 

• For networking, a free blog, a killer free desktop news reader, and more networking!
• The best of social networking without all the childish and pornographic stuff you find on the big, wide-open networks, MyWebTop.com gives business professionals a place to connect, create, and keep up with industry news important to us.
• It’s all completely free and it works!

Deals are being made. Partnerships are forming. Rolodexes are getting fatter. And people you need to know in your industry are waiting to meet you right now.

So get signed up at MyWebTop.com and see what it’s like to belong to a quality, informative networking space for business professionals!

Tags: my web top, myspace for business, Social Power Linking

Marketing on Myspace

We recently did a call on [tag]Myspace marketing[/tag] tactics with Michelle MacPhearson.

If you want to download a great, insightful call where we openly amazed ourselves with million dollar ideas that we should have sold, grab this recording now - absolutely no strings attached!

Biggest misconception about Myspace:  “They are all kids with no money.”  Listen as Michelle debunks this myth and shows us how to capitalize on the wide range of age groups and other demographics few of us knew existed on Myspace until Michelle enlightened us.

There’s definitely money to be made if you know how to fit into the most massive [tag]social network[/tag] on the planet.

Tags: badder adder, marketing on myspace, Michelle MacPhearson, myspace, myspace marketing, social network, Social Power Linking

LinkedIn Is Finally Getting Noticed!

In the recent Business 2.0 I read an interesting article on LinkedIn.  Actually, at first, it was work to start reading an article about LinkedIn.com.

I mean, they’ve been around for years and years and I got invitations every so often, usually ignoring them, and wondering why anyone in their right mind would waste their time with it.

Well “The Missing Link,” Michael V. Copeland, Business 2.0 December 2006 changed my mind.  Big time.

It seems that Reid Hoffman, creator of LinkedIn, is realizing a long awaited dream.  For LinkedIn to become a major player network of business professionals of all shapes and sizes.

And there are some of the biggest power players in the world in this group.

If you want to know more about what can be accomplished by belonging to LinkedIn, check out the following resources:

• The Business 2.0 article mentioned above…
• How to build a successful network on LinkedIn…

Tags: business networking, linkedin, michael v. copeland, myspace for adults, reid hoffman, Social Power Linking

Social Bookmarking Explained

Although social bookmarking might be something you’ve only just come across, it has in fact been around for a few years.

If you’re involved in Internet marketing, it’s also a great way to help generate traffic and page rank to your site. So the sooner you learn about it, the quicker your Internet business can benefit.

Put simply, social bookmarking is simply a way of saving your favorite URLs online. You probably already have a “Favorites” folder on your computer. Well, social bookmarking is just an online version of that. The main difference is that your social bookmarking favorites are publicly available for anyone to see. So, the big question is - how can this benefit your business?

If you do a Google search you’ll soon come up with a list of the most popular social bookmarking websites. Take a look at http://del.icio.us, which is one of the most popular.  All you need to do, once you’ve joined the social bookmarking site, is to start adding your URLs. With each URL you also add a list of tags, or keywords, so that people know what that URL is all about. So if you’ve bookmarked a site about dogs, for example, then make sure you use the word “dogs” as one of the tags.

You can also choose whether to make the listing public or private. Use a public listing if it’s a website you want other people to find, such as your own website. A public listing will also show other information such as who created the bookmark, when, and give an indication of how
popular that particular keyword is on the site. But you can use the private setting for other URLs that you know you will want to access while
you’re traveling around, and don’t have access to your home computer.

In some ways, then, a social bookmarking site is like a search engine, except that it only searches entries on its database. But the good part about that is that only sites that other people recommend will be listed. It’s easy to find a list of sites on any topic you might be interested in. Type in dogs, for example, and you’ll see sites that other people have recommended.

For [tag]internet marketing[/tag] purposes, then, you would add your website to you social bookmarking account, pick your main keywords and use them as tags, and potentially generate traffic to your site.

Another idea would be to have a link to your social bookmarking account from your blog page, so that people can see a frequently updated list of your recommended websites about that topic. You also get a backlink from the social bookmarking site to your website, which helps to boost your popularity in the eyes of the search engines.

For optimal results, you should open as many accounts on different social bookmarking sites as you can. The only problem is that posting your website to these accounts can become very tedious. Especially if you have a large number of websites or if you are adding the bookmark to a large number of accounts.

Recently a new Wordpress plugin has been released to eliminate some of this tedious work. It can automatically add bookmarks to all of your bookmarking accounts hands free. It is a great time saving tool that I highly recommend to anyone who wants to take advantage of social bookmarking without spending hours bookmarking their pages manually.

Social bookmarking is only in its infancy, and will probably develop in ways that nobody has even imagined yet. In the meantime, there’s no doubt it’s a great way to get traffic to your websites, so what are you waiting for?

Check out this Wordpress plugin NOW!

Tags: Blog Marketing, internet marketing, marketing, Social Power Linking, Website Promotion

Social Media Optimization

SMO is way better than SEO!

Problem is, how do you optimize your site and content for social media? That’s a question we try to answer with new ideas every week at Content Desk.

Here are several great ideas and tips for optimizing your site for social networks to get more links and more traffic.

Tags: blog promotion, seo, smo, social media optimization, social networks, Social Power Linking, tagging

Getting Links: Investing in new sites reaps rewards!

This is a tactic for [TAG]getting links[/TAG] that I have used for years.

Supporting new sites, especially the types of sites that are hot right now like [TAG]social networking[/TAG] sites, is not a 100% guaranteed return on your time invested, but when they pay off they pay off big!

Spotting potential winners and investing the time in setting up with them before they take off, whatever kind of site they may be as long as they are relevant to mine.

Case in Point: Marktd.com

I found this site early on when it was just getting started. I found it to be promising because it was the only site like Digg.com but specifically for marketers and online businesses.

The uniqueness of it and some other factors that led me to believe the owner was really into this site and dedicated to its success.

I took a chance and started posting “stories” there, banking on it becoming a high traffic site. I also started promoting the site actively on conference calls and training.

If you don’t help the site grow by telling others about it, you are just sitting there sucking whatever you can out of a startup and giving nothing in return. Bad investment protection plan!

This gamble paid off. Now MarkTD has great pagerank and I am seeing more and more traffic from the stories I post there.

Lesson: Do not ignore new sites because they currently have no traffic to offer you. Be careful how much time you spend “investing” in new sites because most still fail or move very slowly.

But do take advantage of new sites that seem to be on the right track because when they explode, the [TAG]free targeted traffic[/TAG] they send you can be enormous. But for people just discovering and using them after they go big, often it is not as easy to get in and get as much out of them.

Another gamble I have taken is Seth Godin’s Squidoo. I put up a lens there and am getting trickles of traffic so far. I expect I have put my “money” in the right place though because Seth is no slouch at drumming up publicity.

The other benefit from adopting sites like this early is you get to post or blog to an account where your main keyword is still available.

Example: My Squidoo lens address is http://www.squidoo.com/websitepromotion. Want that URL? Can’t have it. It’s mine forever.
That is going to be an awesome link when they take off. Or not.

Nothing ventured nothing gained.

Tags: digg, free targeted traffic, getting links, internet marketing, linking tactics, marktd, seth godin, Social Power Linking, Website Promotion

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