Month: January 2010

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The Social Connection Phenomena But Should You Take the Plunge?

If you use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, a blog, and other online news and link sharing tools you are ahead of the curve and taking full advantage of some of the newest ways to drive traffic to your website, connect with readers, and share news and information. If you are not doing these things, should you be? Where should you invest your time? How should you get started?

First, if you are doing any of the things I mentioned and you are serious about growing your website presence, want to start to lower your pay per click budget, and want to tap into new ways to reach customers, it is time for you to get involved.

If you are not willing to invest the time or money to dive into the social connection phenomena that is growing on the Web, this may not be the right time for you personally to get involved. However as time marches on, don’t sit on the fence too long as those that are embracing these new media resources will have the leg up on you for organic web position and web authority over time.

For those of you that say YES, I am ready and feel that I have been missing out on the social connection and am ready to get started here is the plan I suggest.

  1. Get involved with Twitter right away. It is easy to use and you don’t need to hire a writer if you have time. Tweet three to five times a day. Provide value of cool sites you find on the Web, interesting articles in your field. Take a moment to thank others for retweets and comment on other’s tweets. Remember this is about connection and conversation.
  2. Integrate Twitter badges and your Twitter feed with your blog and website. You may need help in this area, but make sure you are promoting that you are using these cool tools to your audience.
  3. Start on Facebook right away.  Don’t get hung up on doing a private page for friends and lock out business resources. Do a fan page but don’t lock your personal page and open up your fan page. Why? It creates so many problems with application interaction and auto status posting and scheduling applications when you do this. I recommend using your website email address for a Facebook page. Accept anyone as a friend to this site. Consider it your business face. If you want to build a fan page for your business do that as well tied to this business site. If you want a Facebook page just for personal friends and family set up another account but tied to a different email address not the one tied to your domain. Lock this one down and point your family and friends to this much smaller private site.
  4. Get going with LinkedIn, Tagged, Naymz and other social sites that make sense for you. There are services that you can use to auto publish your status at these locations with one click to make it easy for you. Even if you don’t regularly update these sites, set up profiles and work them for a bit to at least get a presence.
  5. If you are not blogging, you need to get going right now. You may want to hire a writer. You will most likely need help getting the blog set up and integrated with your website. The minimum posting we recommend is three times a week with about 200 to 250 words per post. Don’t snatch content and paste it in your blog post. You need unique content – there’s no fooling Google.
  6. Optional – you can integrate into your website Google Friend Connect or Facebook Connect features. These can be fun and help other to share and comment on your content.

The big key to take away from this blog post is that to just have these social services and a blog is not enough. You must use them and work them. I have found that if you do not work to connect with others your friend list, followers, and subscribers will not grow. Having them is not enough, you must use them to reap the benefits.

The benefits are huge and will play an even bigger factor in organic search placement in the very near future. If you don’t believe that, check out Monday’s blog post on Google’s experimental Social Search feature. There is no rolling back the clock, social media is here to stay. Now it becomes a factor of are you going to embrace it and get the visibility and “authority” before your competitors do?

This post is not about selling, but rather information, but we do offer many services that can help you grab the “gold ring” when it comes to social media. Check out our website for more information on our services.

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Entrepreneur Magazine Features McCord Web Services Blogging Program

Well I guess I have made it into the big time. Entrepreneur Magazine interviewed me several months ago and the article is finally out. It is called “The Ghost Speaks”.  In the article our business and several others are highlighted. My firm is given some very favorable press and one of our clients was interviewed as well. The article can be found in the print and online magazine.

Our blog writing services provide unusual quality at a very low price. With blog posts ranging from $18 to $32 there is a price level for almost any business client.

If you read the adjunct article “Deconstructing a Blog Post”, keep in mind this client paid $18 for this post. Even the Entrepreneur Magazine experts think that it is pretty good. Now, not all of our writers provide more words than the word count one of our specific price level requires of them, but many of our blog writers are writing because they love to write and don’t watch their word count when they are on a roll.

We have an excellent blog writing team with seasoned professional journalists all the way to stay at home Moms who really know how to weave an excellent story. The post that Entrepreneur Magazine deconstructed was written by one of our Junior Level writers. She has a wonderful chatty writing style that is wonderfully engaging. I don’t think that you could find a better value for $18 any where else. Check it out and see what you think.

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The Power of Social Bookmarking Sites

Okay, I am not a big embracer of social bookmarking sites like Digg and Reddit, but I may need to rethink my position on these services. This past week I got an incredible amount of traffic on my blog and many, many comments on one fairly innocuous blog post. I was mystified over the traffic and wondered what had caused the spike.

Finally, in one of the comments left by a reader the mystery was solved. My blog post was bookmarked and made it to the home page of Reddit, a social bookmarking site. I had an AHA moment.

Social bookmarking is a way for others to share and comment on pages they find on the web. Instead of posting a note on Twitter of Facebook with a new site that you love and a link, if you rate the site on Reddit, Digg or one of the other popular social bookmarking sites you share the news with a huge network.

Based on my findings I am seriously considering writing my next whitepaper on social bookmarking and how to use it to drive traffic. Typically a whitepaper takes me about 30 days or longer to research and write so it may be a month or two before I report my findings but it sure seems like time to put the full social media arsenal together for our clients and readers.

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Google is Trying Out Social Networking Integration on Search

I just checked this out yesterday and as I was doing testing on this new Google.com tool I said to myself, “now, this is really cool”. What I am speaking about is Google’s integration of your own social media networks into your personal search results.  To get involved in the project sign into Google.com and then enter this URL: http://www.google.com/experimental/index.html select the first experiment at the top of the page called Google Social Search.

Once enrolled you will see a new feature at the top left of every Google.com page. The feature says Web and then a show options + mark. Open the + and you will now see a new left navigation bar that stretches down the page.  From here you can search in Google.com sectors such as images, video, news, blogs, updates, books, forums, and even social.

The take away from this new experimental project is that when you yourself are personally involved in social media like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other platforms, the information you post is now searchable by others in your expanded social network all tied together in one neat interface using Google’s Social Search.

This is a real boon for web exposure and the creation of web authority for business owners and serious entrepreneurs. With some saying that social media is too time consuming to pursue, I say think again look at this new Google experiment which will most likely be the “face” of search to come and rethink your position on social media and social networking sites.