Online Marketing Blog

The Social Job Seekers

The social media job market is hot! This infographic visualizes the 2011 Social Job Seeker Survey that was conducted by Jobvite.  It examines who the job seekers are and how they are utilizing social media to find jobs.  Some interesting statistics you may not be aware of:

• 61% of all employed Americans are open to a new job or actively looking for a new one.
• 4 out of 10 job seekers are “Super Social” and have 150+ contacts on Facebook, Twitter, or Linkedin.
• 1 in 6 job seekers found their last job through an online social network.

Blogging is one of the top sources of online content creation for many companies. Blogs are a great vehicle for interacting and engaging with current and prospective clients.  Blogs are also an effective way for prospects to associate stories, anecdotes, and personalities with a company or brand.

Taking on a blog can be a large undertaking.  There are many things that should be considered including cost, availability of resources, strategy creation, time commitment, and measurement.  Simply creating content and expecting instant success is not realistic.  If you have recently decided that you would like to start a business blog, or have started a blog and are not seeing the success you had anticipated then the tips below are for you.

After a successful Blog World Expo New York, I’m very much looking forward to BlogWorld Los Angeles in just under 2 weeks.  Judging from the conference agenda, there’s an impressive roster (275+) of experts, pundits and long time bloggers presenting on just about every relevant topic you can think of.

Blogging has been cited as one of the most effective forms of social media marketing for achieving top visibility in search and on the social web and corporate investment in social media is growing significantly. This is as true for agencies like TopRank Online Marketing as it is for any business with a good story to tell. We’ve promoted blogs as the centerpiece of a hub and spoke model that has been adopted by many other agencies and corporate marketers.

At the SES conference this week I gave several presentations on Content Marketing: “Content Marketing Optimization” and “The Convergence of Search, Social & Content Marketing”.  In the CMO session, I provided SEO tips for each spoke in a hub and spoke model. The hub in this situation was a blog and one of the most common issues with business blog success is fresh content. In fact, one of the most common reasons companies don’t start a blog is over their concerns with creating useful content.

I can empathize with that concern and have addressed it with many companies over the past 7+ years that I’ve been blogging here on TopRank’s Online Marketing Blog. To help anyone interested in ideas for creating business blog content, check out the following 8 tips. They’ve worked for us and for many of our clients and may very well work for you too.

At BlogWorld Expo in New York this week I presented a session about Dominating Your Niche with Social Content and SEO.  It was crammed with information and I know there are many online marketers looking for practical advice on business blogging and blog marketing that didn’t attend.  Based on the blog marketing we do here at Online Marketing Blog and in the consulting that I do, here are  7 practical steps online marketers can take for social media and SEO success with a blog.

All marketing efforts should start with a goal and means for measuring success, so I do not get into specifics on those tasks in this list, but focus more on the content and promotion.

1.  Social SEO Personas

BlogWorld Expo is holding it’s first conference in New York this week and I’ll be presenting “Dominate Your Niche with Social SEO & Blogging” on Tuesday at 10:15am as part of the Social Business Track. This post is a light preview of that session and I hope to see you there.

Is blogging dead? A number of high profile bloggers and news media sites from Scoble to Wired to the New York Times have opined the demise of blogging as a consequence of growing social destinations like Twitter and Facebook.

Alright, you’ve just come up with a brilliant and revolutionary idea that will forever change the face of your industry. So what do you do now?

If you’re like a lot of people, you run to Facebook and share it with your friends, colleagues, and anyone that will listen. Is that a bad strategy? Not necessarily, as Facebook and Twitter can be great places to reach large audiences. In fact, Facebook continued to grow even stronger in its use as a sharing site in 2010.

However, you can’t safely assume that Facebook is the only or best method of content distribution. Social media is a hot market right now and use of these channels are not a bad thing. Though a strategy of a few tweets and a fan page update will not get you to your goals. Ultimately there is no singular model that is always the ideal for any company but a few points to consider include:

This post is one of a series of liveblogs from the 2010 MIMA Summit.

When you think of geotagging, or checking in, what do you think of? Probably GPS, FourSquare, Facebook Places or letting a photo site like Flickr know where a photo was taken. But it can also be done for blog posts.

Geotagging in blog posts is still relatively new, but it well on its way.

WordPress.com already supports geotagging on profiles and posts so that you can let others know where you are posting from. They will also soon launch a Geo Search feature that will allow people to find posts based on their location.

Marketers like formulas and what better metaphor for successful online marketing with blogs than a recipe?

At the upcoming BlogWorldExpo conference in Las Vegas, I’ll be giving my recipe for success using Social Media and SEO in two ways:

First, I’ll be doing a solo presentation on Social Media SEO, giving bloggers a tested methodology for making the most of their content and social networks.

This presentation will focus on the value of combining SEO best practices with social media marketing to amplify the reach and traffic for blogs. I’ll outline and share examples of how to  build a Cycle of Social Media Interaction.  Specifics will include:

• How bloggers can leverage keyword research to develop a blog editorial calendar
• Best practices on creating and promote optimized content

Army Golden Knights: SFC Dave Herwig (@gkdave), SGM Steve Young (@gksteve), LTC Joe Martin (gkjoe)

My presentation on how to leverage Social Media SEO to improve the reach and effectiveness of blog content for marketing at OpenCa.mp DFW this weekend ended up being a lot of information in a very short period of time. The use of a video interview I did with Brian Clark as the segue into my presentation ate into some of the 30 minutes I had to present plus I simply had too many slides.

(Thanks to Lt Colonel Joe Martin for the photo taken right after the presentation. His team were literally sponges for information at the event.)

One of the most common challenges of business blogging is sourcing content. The range of things that can interrupt content creation are important obstacles to overcome because without content there is little reason for readers to return.  Blogs are fairly easy to start and if you’ve been a reader of this blog, chances are pretty good that you have started your own blog (personal or for biz) at some point in time.

Many of the companies TopRank Marketing consults with have either started business blogs and need help or want to start a new blog to advance a variety of business goals. In fact, in our blogging survey earlier this year, 95% of respondents indicated they incorporate blogs as part of their search engine optimization efforts. Many others use blogs for public relations, customer service, product support and recruiting.

54 Million.

That’s what Forrester Research predicts for US B2B Social Media Marketing spending by 2014.

As a living example of a B2B company that fully leverages blogging and social media in our online marketing, TopRank Marketing has a lot of first-hand insight that we can share with clients. I know there are many B2B marketers that are uncertain about their place on the social web and over 6 1/2 years of B2B blogging experience can provide the companies we work with a unique perspective.

Working smarter with developing and implementing blogging strategy, content planning, promotion, SEO and the intersection with other online communications channels such as PR and social networking saves time, resources and improves results.