Online Marketing Blog

Not too long ago I queried a number of online marketing and public relations peers ranging from Aaron Wall, Matt McGee and Neil Patel to Todd Defren, Triss Hussey and Peter Himler about sharing a few of their social media marketing tips. Out of that informal survey in combination with community specific solicitations came posts about marketing with MyBlogLog and Twitter.

However, there are many more social media communities and channels besides MBL and Twitter that I received tips on and from very reputable sources which you’ll find below. Enjoy!

Todd Defren from SHIFT Communications shared two of his own posts from a series on social media: Tips on using Twitter for finding and developing relationships and another post on using Del.icio.us for PR “edgework” or direct interactions with consumers.

“Of all our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most universally understood language.” Walt Disney

Jennifer Laycock Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Guide helped the audience understand the value of images and 3 benefits to submitting photos to image sharing sites, like Flickr.

She made an excellent point by demonstrating what impacts people the most:
Copy OR Images

Let’s try it. What impacts you more, the description of how I dressed my dog up for Halloween OR the picture of it?

Description: For Halloween, I dressed my pup up as an angel.

Image:

Without the image – or having to include a lot more copy – questions are left unanswered. In this example, questions that are answered through the image, but not the copy include:
-what Wrigley looks like
-what color(s) he is
-what kind of dog

Editors Note:  As part of our continued effort at diversifying contributors to Online Marketing Blog and providing a public communication platform for our merry band of search marketing enthusiasts, here is a post from Blog SEO and Designer, Thomas McMahon:

Yahoo is by many accounts, the grandfather of search. They’ve been around a long time and have quite a few popular services to offer but continue to trail behind Google in many areas. I’m a fan of Yahoo and think there are a few things that could make Yahoo better. Here are a few of the improvements I’d like to see Yahoo implement to make them a better search engine:

In case you haven’t noticed, social media optimization (SMO) is the new big search marketing term. I think you’ll be hearing a lot about it this year and thought I’d give you an easy tip to get started.

First thing you need to know is what social media optimization is. Basically, it’s just getting exposure and traffic from social media sites like Digg, del.icio.us, MySpace and many others. For a more in depth explanation, check out the new rules for social media optimization.

What I’d like to share with you is one extremely easy way to get some social media exposure. It’s as easy as photo sharing.

Using photo sharing sites to host the images you use in your blog posts will give your site added exposure on other sites. Some photo sharing sites to check out include Zooomr, PhotoBucket and Flickr.

This session covered things from what a small business owner should be paying attention to, what you shouldn’t, and gave ideas, tips an information for the small business owner. All great tips to consider when trying to compete with the larger companies.

• Stop algorithm chasing and forget about magic formulas like % of keywords on the page.
• Link age is becoming more and more important.
• Click backs becoming more important. Example: If someone clicks on your listing in Google, then returns seconds later to the Google results, it tells the engine that that ranking wasn’t a good match for that person.
• Latent Semantic indexing is becoming more important.
• Speak the customers language and don’t just optimize for search engines.

One of the things that bugs me about WordPress is this WYSIWYG editor. It’s nice, but it has a tendency to eat your code. However, I found out a few cool features.

Did you know that you can put in basic HTML code into the WYSIWYG editor and it’ll render out as HTML when you hit save or publish? You can put in bold, italic, span, link and image HTML tags all in the WYSIWYG editor. Have an image on Flickr you want to post? Put the entire raw code that Flickr gives you into the editor, and it’ll be converted into a pretty image when you post it. That’s quite handy when you don’t feel like toggling back and forth between the HTML window.

If I look back over all the blogs I read, most have photos associated with their posts. Maybe not every day, but quite often. It makes me wonder, do photos increase the number of subscribers to a blog?

If you stop and think about it, there are two kinds of people out there, the analytical/text people and the visual people. There are those than buy the New York Time’s best seller books and those that would prefer a magazine with less reading and more pictures. So, with that in mind, if your blog posts don’t include images, are you just targeting one audience then?

Traffic, everyone wants it and is trying really hard to get more people to their site. Good news, there are creative ways to bring people in without doing a lot of work.

1) Social Bookmarking. It’s been around long enough that some people know all about it and have a tendency to just search del.icio.us or Furl for what they want. Social sites are basically like a user defined search engine. Are you listed? Make sure to bookmark yourself every now and then and add social bookmark links to your blog posts and/or web pages so others can bookmark you too.