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Wednesday, March 27, 2013
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
Business Blogging Mistakes–Are You Guilty?
Blogging Bad Habits, they are easy to fall into, believe me!
It seems that these days pretty much every business these days has a blog, but that doesn’t mean everyone is doing it the right way, If you’ve just decided to start a new blog for your business or you have been blogging for a long time, I have some tips that you may find interesting.
Something u may find interesting as well: 7 Blunders to avoid when starting your own blog in 2012
HubSpot “has found that companies that blog generate 55% more website visitors, 97% more inbound links, and have 434% more indexed pages than companies that don’t. Even if you’re posting once a week, you may not have leveraged the full power of content creation for your small business brand”.
1. Not Posting Consistently
Having a great idea for a blog is one thing, spending 1-2 days a week putting together lengthy articles is another, it is time consuming, but keep in mind it can be very rewarding. Before you launch your blog, decide how often you'll be able to blog, keep it fresh, you will want people to have a reason to come back to read what you have posted. A good idea is to write a few articles ahead of time so you have backup postings for the times when the kids got ya busy, or the husband/wife wants your attention. I get into more detail about this in my article: Small Business Blog, Where to Begin Pt.2
2. Thinking Your Blog Is A Good Promotional Tool
Your blog shouldn’t be a Billboard! think about you, when you read blogs, if your looking for some useful information on a topic, you don’t want to be flooded with advertisements, post articles that reflect what you like, that’s related to your specific business, Have fun with it, sure you can advertise your business but do it in a tactful way, for example, I Run a computer consulting company, I like to blog about helpful items related to the internet or computers, I can offer this resource to my customers, present and potential as a useful source of information, this gives me a link to my potential clients, but doesn’t make them feel like I am pushing my services at them.
3. Not Interacting With Your Readersyour blog isn't a static web page, its not a simple press release, its actually a great way for you to interact with your customers and potential clients, you will get comments and questions to your blog postings, be sure to respond to these in a complete and polite way, be informative and offer help, these tips will help you gain a interactive platform that people will enjoy returning to and contributing to. If you want to encourage this, be sure to make it easy for your readers to comment on your posting, For example I have a easy form at the bottom of all my posts, that you can respond to. (Shameless Request: feel free!!)
4.Not Listening To your Readers
Not sure what kind of content appeals to your audience the most? It’s not a mystery: Your blog analytics can provide valuable insight into what types of posts are resonating with readers.
By failing to pay attention to analytics, you’re ignoring valuable information that can take your blog to the next level. Continually track the responses to each blog post. Tinker with different topics, titles and types of posts. Which posts generate the most activity (comments, shares, likes)? Increase the frequency of the most popular.
Sunday, January 27, 2013
How To Get Traffic From Reddit Without Getting Blacklisted!
How To Get Traffic From Reddit Without Getting Blacklisted!
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| This is icon for social networking website. This is part of Open Icon Library's webpage icon package. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
If you’re interested in
doing wonders for your brand, or blog, you should already have accounts on most
of the popular social Sharing sites.
If you’re going to
Reddit, be warned that you should never spam your own posts, and expect to get
a positive reaction, and you will defiantly get little to no interests shown in
your topics.
The Reddit community frowns greatly on people
who only submit their own content, they also hate anyone that does what they
believe is “gaming the system” by using Reddit simply to get visitors to your
blog.
There are ways around these strict guidelines,
a way you can gain large numbers of users to your blog, but you need to be extremely
careful when doing these things.
In this post I will go over some of the key
things that are important to keep in mind when promoting your own blog posts.
1. Understanding Reddit
If you are not familiar with the Reddit
Community, you need understand how it all works. Basically Reddit allows its
users to submit anything they want in the form of a link, be it Webpages, Pictures,
or whatever.
Most Redditors share the same or like opinions
on a lot of the topics posted to the community, Reddit actually calls the large
part of its user base ‘The Hive-mind because they tend to share similar
opinions.
The users on Reddit generally frown upon submitting your own site,
so take caution when making mention that the content is your own in your title.
Its best just to let people assume whatever
they want about who created the content; your just need to make the title
enticing to click on and genuinely interesting.
Which leads us to…
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| Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian with the Reddit Alien (Photo credit: Anirudh Koul) |
2. Post the article with an interesting title & picture
When you post your article, remember that in
most cases, you only have the topic line of your posting to grab someone’s attention,
and get them to click on your link, think about asking a question in your
topic, this may get some to click, they may be interested in posting a response to something you have asked.
Try and pick topics that are controversial,
people like to ask questions and debate, they like to be involved in the topic,
so this will help you get comments posted back as well as people forwarding
your posting to friends and family.
Here are some of the posting Ideas I think do
best on Reddit:
§ Personal stories and personal challenge
stories, people facing incredible odds seem
to be the most popular
§ Educational sites do well and sites that deal
with science, or technology
§ Photography is a big one, people love looking
at pictures also art and comics
§ Politics & Religion grab a lot of readers.
§ Video games
§ Technology, Specifically Computers and
Programming
§ Science & History
§ Music
§ Marijuana
§ Food & Fitness
These are typically the subjects with the most
popular subreddits.
3. Don’t post in the wrong subreddit!
A subreddit (referred
to simply as a ‘ Reddit’) is the way Reddit organizes its content.
If you choose a subreddit that is overcrowded
your article may get lost in all of the other postings, for example positing
anything but an image in the images subreddit would be pointless as your
posting would just be looked over.
But if your posting showcases some great new
food recipe, posting in the r/Food subreddit would bring in users that are interested
in Food rather than posting your post in the r/pics because the cheese cake
looks great, you’ll get more responses from r/Food for the simple reason that
its less crowded than r/pics
To check how many
people have added the Reddit to their page, open a different tab, and after the
Reddit address, type in /r/Reddit-name.To the right, you are going
to see the number of people who have the Reddit on their front page.
The other reason for
submitting to niche subreddit and not the big ones is that you can
make the top post more easily in these smaller subreddit. So, if you make it to the top of r/Joomla with
your post, that is still 3000+ subscribers to the Joomla subreddit that could
potentially click through (just make sure your post is excellent, and has to do
with Joomla specifically!)
4. Be an active contributing member
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| Reddit Eats (Photo credit: GaryRHess) |
As with any online community, you need to be a
active contributor to the site, you cannot expect for gain respect from other
user if when they look at your posting history all they see is a bunch of spam
for your website, as with anything you need to spend time cultivating and
caring for your reputation.
A handful of great and informative postings
will go a lot farther for you then just spamming your blog or site, and believe
me the community on Reddit knows the difference anc can spot a spammer a mile
away.
In Conclusion: is Reddit worth it?
Reddit is certainly a lot tougher than Digg,
if you want to be successful on reddit make sure your niche is unique and
through, present your postings in a professional manner.
Keep in mind when posting to Reddit, you are
dealing with one of the hardest crowds on the internet, expect to see a few
nasty comments, and quite possibly you might fail the first couple times, just
follow the advice I have given you here, and you many land on the front page of
a bigger subreddit, when that happens you will never question the potential of
Reddit, your site will see thousands and thousands of visitors from one posting.
Please check out our other blog postings:
and our 2 Part Series:
Friday, January 25, 2013
Facebook Cuts Off Friend-Finding Access to Vine, Twitter’s New Video App
Facebook Cuts Off Friend-Finding Access to Vine, Twitter’s New Video App
Don't go and try to add your Facebook friends to your new VINE app, expecting to be able to share your videos, Facebook has shut off the API hose to Vine, is this because of Twitters relationship with Facebook?
That was fast!
Within hours of Twitter launching its Vine video-sharing application on Thursday, Facebook has cut off access to Vine’s “find people” feature, which
lets used to let Vine users find their Facebook friends using the Vine application.
What does that mean? It’s basically an annoyance, a hindrance on an easy way to connect with all your existing friends using the service. It would have been a good way to jump into a new product, rather than manually trying to find all of your friends using the app.
No comment from Twitter beyond the error message we’re seeing pop up when we try to use the Facebook friend finding feature in the app, and no immediate response from Facebook as of yet.
But the cutoff isn’t exactly surprising, given Instagram recently snipping Twitter cards integration, and Twitter cutting off access to Instagram’s “Find your Friends” feature. Welcome to the new, competitive landscape of social tech companies.
The loser in all of this? Sorry, user, but it’s you.
Please check out our other blog postings:
and our 2 Part Series:
The internet is an 'essential' part of life, says German high court
A German federal court this week ruled that consumers have the right to monetary compensation whenever their internet service is interrupted. In what German media outlets are calling a "landmark" ruling, a judge at the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe determined that the internet is an "essential" part of life, echoing similar decisions from courts in France and Finland.
The ruling, issued Thursday, came in response to a complaint filed by a citizen who was unable to use his DSL internet connection for two months between late 2008 and early 2009. The plaintiff's provider had already provided compensation for the interruption in landline and fax services, but the man claimed that it wasn't enough, arguing that he should be compensated for the loss of internet service, as well.
Thursday, January 24, 2013
Vine: Twitter’s New App for Adding Six-Second Videos to Your Tweets
Tweeting Video!
They say a photo is worth a thousand words and a video is worth a lot more. By that math, six seconds of video should be worth a whole lot more than 140 characters of text or a Tweet.
And that seems to be the point of Vine, an app launched by Twitter today that allows you to add short video Clips to your tweets. The app, which as of now is available only for the iPhone, is really simple to use and works a lot like Instagram. (Many have been calling it the Instagram of video.)
Sign in with your Twitter account or via email, hit the video camera button and press down on the viewfinder to record video. Release your finger and the recording stops, so you can easily move to record something else, but you only have six seconds of space (or tape).
Watch your video and then share it with others on the service. There are options to then share it on Twitter and Facebook too.
The Twitter tie-in is the big one though. When you tweet from Vine it embeds your looped video — or what looks like an animated GIF — right in your tweet.
Tech4000 Newsletter - January 2013
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Wednesday, January 16, 2013
New Technology Community on G+
I am putting together a online community of friends that enjoy technology, web stuff, and just hangining out Old School Geek Style! :) Feel free to visit us here: Technology Today and join the fun!
Thanks!!
Rich
Thanks!!
Rich
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