Who is Patrick Curl???

Patrick Curl is a Professional Blogger & Podcaster, this is what he does. Patrick's passion is blogging and social media. He offers help to individuals and companies in need of growing their online presence. Patrick Curl is also many other things...

About this blog...

Conversational Marketing, Technology, Social Media, Social Networks, Blogging, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Making Money Online, Social Marketing, Wordpress, Firefox, Technology, and Ghost Hunting (I know Random, huh?)

Archive: Marketing

Corporate blog? Why not a create a blog network utilizing every employee?

Corporate Blog, or Corporate Blog Network?

A corporate blog, is of course a wonderful way to build seo, and recognition of your company. Most corporate blogs only have a few writers, and blog posts are often few and far between.

Enter the corporate blog network.

What if you had everyone in your company write 1 blog post daily? Say your company is a call center and you have 1000 employees. You give each employee who wants to blog, 45 minutes to do their research and blog. You could even do this just as a test project and only accept a certain number of applicants.

One good thing would be to train them on blogging. Blogging is NOT just about writing blog posts. It is about socializing and bringing a conversation to the table. To be successful at this, you would need to hold regular training and teach them how to use conversational marketing techniches and build relationships.

You’re best bloggers are a goldmine, and if you can afford to, it would be well worth it to make them full-time bloggers, give them weekly requirements, make sure they’re in the know with company happenings, and they could also be the managers of the lesser bloggers.

You can manage the tone of the blog, by making sure that each blog post is edited first for professionalism, language, and grammer. If someone isn’t cutting it, whether they’re not proofreading or using the best language skills, you can drop them from the program and add new bloggers.

If you’re a company that sells products you could have each blogger blog about certain makes / models, give reviews, etc.. The key here is building keywords. You want as many related and relevant keywords pointing from google to your website as possible.

6 Conversation Marketing Tactics to get you Started!

1. Link out to other’s blog posts as often as possible.

2. Comment on related blog posts EVERY time you have an a+ article. An a+ article is a top notch article that you’re certain will bring value to your site. Usually it’s lengthy and in-depth. When you comment, instead of using your website address, use the address directly for that blog post.

3. All bloggers working for the corporate site should have full-profiles on as many social networks / social media sites as possible, and they should have as many contacts as they can add without distracting them from their writing. The top three networks to focus on, are facebook, linkedin, and myspace.

4. Use video. Social media is huge right now, and getting a video on youtube can bring huge results - especially if it’s humorous. You may also have your corporate staff do interviews with bloggers.

There are many bloggers who would love to interview a CEO of any big company - all you need to do is ask. Also note - When submitting videos, don’t just limit them to youtube, submit them to all the big video sites.

5. Along with conversational marketing should be an emphasis to get people to subscribe to a newsletter AND to your blog feed.

6. Use Twitter. Twitter is huge right now, and there are plugins that will automatically post blog updates to a twitter account. There are many plugins and tools for twitter. You should use twitter, and so should all the corporate bloggers. Twitter is a great place to get feedback, and build relationships. There are also some clones, and similar sites, some good ones include: friendfeed and plurk.

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Tags: bloggers, blogs, company happenings, marketing tactics, professionalism, relevant keywords

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Add Social Bookmark Links - or be Damned to Marketing Hell!

Are you Using Social Bookmarks like a Pro?

When you add a social bookmark link, whether it’s one of your own or not, you are helping other people sort the web, so to speak.

By tagging each link that you submit, others looking for the same material are able to find only the best information on a given topic.

By building a network of friends, and working to expand your network as far as you can, you can in turn build your brand recognition, and your website’s traffic as well.

If you have really good content to share, or really targeted content, it will get shared between many different users. Don’t ever discount Social Bookmarking - it does work.

Now that you know what social bookmark links are - are you using them?

You should have a script or program setup where every page that you want traffic to is easily bookmarkable.

The best way to do this is add a script or plugin (if you’re using wordpress or another such blog platform). You can use third-party widgets two good ones are: AddThis and Sharethis

You could lose out on a huge amount of traffic and clicks to your website if you’re not using bookmark icons on every important page. Here’s a good video overview to make social bookmarking even more clear:

Social Bookmarking in Plain English:

Social Bookmark Strategy: Diversify.

When you do decide to add social bookmarking links to your blog or website, you absolutely must go big - add at least 10-20 of the most popular sites. The major ones include digg, stumbleupon, reddit, mixx, delicious.

You absolutely must build networks of contacts on these social bookmarking and news networks, the more the merrier because they will be able to see the links that you bookmark, and they will share them and it will make for something pretty darn exciting - if a web page goes viral on a social bookmark site it can bring as many as 50,000 hits over a 1 week period.

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Tags: AddThis, amount of traffic, bookmark link, Bookmarking, delicious, digg, Marketing, mixx, network of friends, news networks, Reddit, social bookmarking, stumble, stumbleupon, video overview, widgets, wordpress

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Win a Wii, Iphone, or Equivalent Prize, and get 1 FREE Year of Web Hosting!

Xbox 360 ArcadeImage via Wikipedia

Have you tried out the Google Nemesis program?

If you sign up with Google Nemesis, and comment on this blog post, you’ll get FREE web hosting for 1 year, and a free domain name. Not to mention the fact that you’ll be entered into a great contest to win a Nintendo Wii, Xbox 360, Iphone, or equivalent prize.

Not to mention the fact that many people are using Chris X’s brilliant tactics and software in Google Nemesis to make thousands daily(yes daily, not monthly).

Read my complete review on Google Nemesis.

Zemanta Pixie

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Obama: The First President of America 2.0?

Obama is somewhat of a newcomer on the political scene, and yet he has garnered a huge following.

He has beat great odds to become the number 1 candidate for presidency. He is even beating McCain out by many points in states that normally go to republicans, like Montana.

Why is this?

Because Obama has embraced web 2.0.

Obama-on-facebook

He has embraced sites like facebook, twitter, and youtube. He, and / or those on his marketing team know the power that social media holds. Not to mention many fans of Obama can be found embracing social media - for instance this popular video by Obamagirl.

Obama, is also the only candidate suggesting a cabinet position aimed at web / technology.

I personally believe that Obama’s use of web 2.0 and social media may be the beginning of a paradigm shift in America. I believe that we may be on the verge of a new era in US politics. Call me optimistic, but I believe with social media, politicians will hold less power, and more power will be put in the hands of the people.

Most Americans believe that we’re headed in the wrong direction. Many believe that a huge catastrophe is on the horizon. Whether natural or economic, our future is not certain anymore.

All things change, and many things always need change but go unchanged. I believe for America to survive that there will come a day of reckoning where the great minds of the country will have to get together and re-organize our country from the ground up.

The reason we have a representative democracy and not a full democracy is mostly because in the days of the founding fathers it would’ve been a logistical nightmare. They didn’t have the lines of communication that we have today.

If you’re a skeptic on the power of social media, you really should check out opencongress.org it is a refreshing social network brought to us by: Participatory Politics Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation.

This is a great site for following the politicians that you want to follow. You can see their voting patterns, history, etc. You can also see other politicians like them, or those who are totally the opposite.

You can follow the issues that matter most to you, like Access to Health care, Abortion, etc…

You can actually vote on the issues, and bills that you’d like to see pass legislation.

The site doesn’t get as much publicity as it should - yet. But I can see it becoming a huge playing field for bi-partisan politics to take hold.

Those who aren’t net-savvy may miss out here on this great opportunity to share their voice / opinion, but I believe this is a great start to a new democracy 2.0.

To read more about the features of OpenCongress.Org check out this article at ReadWriteWeb.

Here are some good related articles:

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Tags: abortion, cabinet position, catastrophe, day of reckoning, facebook, founding fathers, logistical nightmare, many things, marketing team, mccain, new era, obama, paradigm shift, presidency, president, representative democracy, skeptic, Social Media, Social network, Technology, Twitter, web technology, wrong direction, youtube

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TNX Text Links Ads - Make Money with your Site - I’ll give it a thumbs up.

TNX - pronounced ‘thanx’, as in sms texting language is an up and coming Text-Link Exchange marketplace.

The premise behind TNX is that by increasing the amount of ‘quality’ links coming into your website, you will also increase your search engine rankings, and thus get more traffic.

It’s a good practice when using services like these not to disclose the fact that you are using them as google frowns at the practice. As a rebellious blogger though and not a fan of being told what I can / can’t do - I recommend giving them a try - both as a monetary source as well as a source for more traffic.

One thing I like is that they have a market where you can buy / sell / trade TNX points - you could also give them away in contests and what not. It’s like a liquid commodity, and personally I like them a lot better than Text-Link-Ads.

They do offer full-control over what kind of links are placed on your site, as well as what kind of sites your links show up on.

If you’re looking for an affordable method of ranking higher in google and a new way to make some money online go ahead and give TNX links a try - and when you’re done swing on over and let me know how well they’re working for you - I would also like some tips to share here on how to use them more effectively if you have any - feel free to leave a comment.

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Tags: blogger, Google, google rank, incoming links, search engine rank, search engine rankings, Seo, text link, text link ads, text link advertising, text link exchange, text links, TNX

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Ebay Auction: 1 Year of Ads on our Car + Website. This is Huge!

Today I’m launching an ebay auction for sponsorship of the 50 Bloggers in 50 States Roadtrip. I am going to be travelling a huge distance for this project. I figure might as well sell ads on the van, right?

You can view the auction here: Roadtrip - 50 Blogs in 50 States - Extreme Ad Package!

The starting price is $497. Which in my opinion is way under-priced, I can see this going as high as $2000 or more.

What you receive:

  • 1 ad on my van in the back window for everyone to see. I will be travelling more than 5000 miles over the span of this roadtrip - it will definitely get a lot of eyes.
  • You will be one of my featured sponsors and be listed on ALL posts relating to the Roadtrip.
  • You will also receive a link on my blogroll.
  • A 125×125 pixel banner ad.
  • A 468×60 pixel banner ad. In the top header by the search bar.
  • Vocal mentioning on EVERY Video / Podcast relating to the Roadtrip.
  • I will be taking a picture of each blogger we interview holding up a poster with the logo’s of my Featured sponsors.
  • I will also be stopping by any radio stations / tv stations / etc who will let me.

So far my site gets 1000 hits per day. IF that were the only feature it would be a steal - that’s 365,000 banner views spread out over a year. 1 banner for one month alone currently runs $30.

Imagine the exposure your website, blog, product will get. This is huge.

Each interview will not only be featured on my blog -but each blogger will also be writing a blog post about the event linking back to my site. I currently get 1000 hits a day - I’m expecting this roadtrip to bring raise that to 20,000/day - and you will have a 1 year banner. Not to mention your 1 year of van-side advertising.

This is the surest way to explode your business. If you want to take your business to the next height you need to place a bid TODAY the Auction ends in 10 days. Don’t wait. Don’t get left out in the cold!

BY THE WAY IF YOU HAVEN’T SUBMITTED YOUR BLOG TO THE DIRECTORY - You better do so now - it’s the ONLY way to get a chance to be interviewed!

Submit your Blog to the American Blogger Directory

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Tags: 50 state roadtrip, blogging roadtrip, car ads, car advertising, ebay auction, ebay auctions, nascar style ads, road trip, roadtrip, roadtrip advertising, roadtrip marketing, roadtrip sponsors, sponsor roadtrip, Summer Roadtrip, van ads

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My Virgin Podcast Experiment. Episode 1 of Patrick’s Adventures in Podcasting.

Today, I’ve decided i’m going to try my hand at podcasting.

This is my introduction to the world of podcasting. I will be delving deep and revealing my results as to how well podcasting can help improve a blog’s reach.

Feel free to subscribe to my podcast.

 
icon for podpress  Standard Podcast: Play Now | Play in Popup | Downloads 93

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