There’s a Blog in my Soup

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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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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Image via Wikipedia

Friendfeed driving you nuts!?

Friendfeed is interesting, I’ve logged in a bit - but I find that it’s extremely hard to keep up with everything going on.

Yes it’s nice to have all this info in one place, after all it is the information age, but sometimes it just bombards us and we can’t make heads or tails.

Enter Moopz. Moops aggregates friendfeed conversations and groups them into relevant categories, it then features conversations which include links to the same “interesting story”.

Basically Moopz claims to weed out pointless banter that doesn’t link to anything exciting. On top of that Moopz tries to pull only the best information possible from each story to give readers a preview, so they can decide for themselves if they want to read more, or move on to the next.

Each story is tagged with related keywords, so you can search for stories quickly and efficiently by tag cloud or keyword.

Finally, you can also browse the “popular” category, for the most active conversations in the past 24 hours.

Moopz may be the answer to ending the clutter on friendfeed, only time will tell.

Have you had experience with Moopz? Please share your stories, ideas, and thoughts on this social network tool.

Related articles:

• Get A Less Noisy FriendFeed With Moopz
• Moopz.com - Reduce Noisy FriendFeeds

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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.

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:

• The Facebooker Who Friended Obama
• Obama and the Facebooker
• Chris Hughes, Facebook co-founder, Has Big Role in Obama Campaign
• How Barack Obama won Facebook

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I launched this blog a year ago this month, and when I first launched it my primary focus was to make money. I’ve learned a lot in that year, and made many mistakes. I actually gave up on this blog for about 7 months.

I came back to it on March 15th of this year. In fact I had lost all the previous posts, I’d done and had to start anew. (Roughly 130+ posts gone). My original theme was using the law of attraction to bring $1 Million into my life by the age of 30, which I believe was perhaps a bit over zealous.

My new goal - apply what I’ve learned in my year of blogging, and help other’s become successful. I’d also like to launch a few social related businesses eventually, that are currently in the ‘idea’ stages.

My 50 States Roadtrip / American Blogger Directory is just part of gaining an keeping an audience.

You’ll notice the most successful blogs out there aren’t just individual people talking while everyone listens. The most successful blogs are communities, where people interact with what the blogger is writing.

You’ll notice almost every post they write gets tons of comments, trackbacks, pingbacks, etc… It’s no coincidence - without this community atmosphere on your blog it is nearly impossible to keep your blogging growing.

Without interaction from your readers your blog will die. Just as a flower needs sunlight to live, a blog needs comments / reactions from the community at large.

Here are some tips to build your Community.

1. Tweet ALL posts to Twitter. There are some good wordpress plugins for this like Twitter Tools or Twitter Tools for Tweetburner. I highly recommend tweetburner because of it’s statistics and shorter urls.

2. Build your Social Presence. Many might call it spamming, but if you look at Robert Scoble, and Jason Calacanis this is how they got huge. They built up the max number of friends on facebook, and they have 15000+ followers, a lot of those were gained by initiating the follow, ie following first.

3. Comment Frequently on other blogs. There is a secret power method for this which I will mention in another upcoming post, I will show you how to build hundred of incoming links extremely fast and easy.

4. Respond to your Audience. If someone sends you an email, drops a comment, replies to a twitter comment you made, etc.. Take the time to respond. Now when you have 10,000 hits daily it can get hard, and you might miss a few here and there - in blogging you don’t need to be perfect, just do your best.

People like to know they’re being listened to, this will go along way towards building a large following.

5. Ask a lot of questions. People like to be heard, and asking your readers questions via blog posts is a great way to give them this opportunity to voice their opinions. This makes it more fun to visit your blog, and increases the interactivity of your blog.

A lot of times I will ask a specific question at the end of my blog posts, and it will usually garner a lot of comments.

6. Be kind to those who are kind to you.  When someone takes the time to follow you or add you on a social networking site - reciprocate. Also when someone takes the time to link to your site - go to the post and leave a thankyou comment.

7. Stumble incoming links. If you stumble all of your own links, you’ll eventually end up getting banned. One secret is stumbling any and all incoming links. If someone is kind enough to link to you in a post, go ahead and stumble or digg it, and you will get a lot of traffic, plus you’ll help them get traffic. It’s a win-win scenario.

8. Link to other blogs often. I’ve talked about this a lot - but linking to other blogs will get you on their radar as it shows in the dashboard on wordpress, and secondly you’ll get a pingback / trackback from their site.

9. Start a meme. My Twitter Meme: Feed the Twitter Monster, has taken off hugely and gained a ton of incoming links and traffic, be creative though, and make it your own idea. Do something unique.

10. Start a resource for bloggers or website owners. I’ve just launched my American Blogger Directory, but it has already received a ton of hits and results. This of course is also part of my 50 state roadtrip, which is looking to be getting a lot of acclaim online as well.

11. Network with other bloggers. Friends will always give you more attention, and having more blogger friends never hurt anyone.

You can use some tips from my article on becoming friends with A-listers, many of the tips relate to networking in general.

12. Build your subscriber feeds. Market it anyway possible. The simple fact is you need subscribers, if you haven’t read it - here’s 39 great ways to get more RSS Subscribers.

13. Make your posts simple to follow and you’ll have mass appeal. Make sure the text doesn’t run together, as most people have low-attention spans and can’t be bothered with reading whole paragraphs anymore. Lists are huge in fact I try to write 1 list every week, as they tend to bring me a lot of traffic just because they’re lists. - I know it’s crazy!

14. Get active in Forums. If you have the time, you might want to try being active in popular forums, or just answering questions on the different answer sites like yahoo answers, this will help build credibility, and lead to more traffic.

15. Share and share alike, then share some more! When you launch a new resource, pillar article, etc you definitely need to tweet / send it to your social networks. However, you should also retweet it, if it is bringing in traffic, and subscribers.

I generally send my rss feed link to twitter once every 3-4 days asking for more subscribers. Especially when I get close to the next big number like 200 - asking people to help you ‘break’ a number is a great way to get them to actually subscribe, it might be tricky but it works.

I also send my best links, resources, and posts to my followers on twitter and ask them to digg or stumble the posts. This usually brings in a huge amount of traffic. When doing this make it extremely simple, though. Send them the actual link to digg or stumbleupon, so they don’t have to work. People are lazy and want instant gratification.

Another good tip is to help out other bloggers by forwarding their promotions to your followers, they may do the same for you some day. This can lead to some very interesting viral marketing.

16. Write your damn content, already! Last and foremost the #1 method to building a community blog is frequent posts. The more the better, I’ve said it a hundred times the more content you have,  the more traffic, comments, and interactive your site will become.

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I’ve been a member of twitter for a long time, ever since I heard about it from mashable.com.

I usually try a lot of the stuff I hear there, but sometimes it’s hard to really use, and get into a social network.

For me, at first anyway, I didn’t get nor even understand twitter. Months went by where I had about 5 followers and I followed 0 people, myself. The only real interaction I had was my blog posts getting posted to twitter, me thinking - any promotion would help my blog.

This weekend I was taking a little closer look at twitter, and I noticed Robert Scoble’s account. He has 15,000 followers, which is a lot, and makes sense he has a popular blog, only seems right that he’s got a lot of twitter followers. However, I also noticed he is following about the same number of people, and it dawned on me, that if someone who’s already successful, is following that many people, then perhaps that is at least one step to becoming successful myself.

So over the weekend, and during the week, while at work, between phone calls(yes, I work in a call center - the secret is out).. I’ve been following as many people as I can, so far about 4,000. That has translated into about 600 followers, and I find as I contribute to conversations, and others see people responding to me on someone elses’ account, they too start following, as nobody likes to be left out of the conversation.

Speaking of Robert Scoble, he wrote a really good post, himself on “The secret to Twitter”.

Once you have the following on twitter - you simply need to post high quality blog posts, and make sure your posts get added to twitter, some people will click through, many will subscribe, and some might even blog about your posts(so if you’re reading this post, and like it, feel free to blog it!).

There are some plugins you can use to send your blog posts to twitter, and there’s also a service. The main plugin I use is: Twitter updater.

Here is a good service -that lets you add any feed to twitter, there have been some who’ve used yahoo pipes to create some cool twitter feeds. The service is actually called: “TwitterFeed“.

In closing, I would highly recommend, if you’re looking to increase traffic and subscribers, that you make sure to follow as many people as possible, and of course approve anyone who follows you, I seriously went from 32 subscribers to 47 in one night, and I’m excited to see what tonight holds in store.

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