How Networking Online Is Inspiring Many Social Groups To Take It Offline

A growing trend in the online world and social media in general is the proliferation of social groups and networks that are taking their services and members offline. Businesses like Yelp, Biznik and many others are looking for ways to maintain their user base and gain new customers.

In some cases the company holds sanctioned events and group networking meetings, but members often take it upon themselves to set up networking events. This is slowly creating more tight knit communities that are great for meeting people for general purposes and for networking.

The value in this lies in the fact that community members get to meet with each other in person, conduct business, swap stories and reviews, and generally have a good time with like-minded people.

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Social Media Conversion On The Enterprise Level - From Static To Interactive

Whew! Last weekend we went live with Real Estate Magazine’s new enterprise level conversion from a static magazine site with over 20,000 pages to a full blown interactive social media platform, with user generated (well not yet) and user-filtered interaction. Read more

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Msm Vs. Online Publishing - Freedom Of Expression Is A Valuable Commodity

It annoys me to no end that people in popular MSM publications who know almost nothing about the internet feel they are qualified to comment on some aspect of it.

For example, I recently happened upon an article in the Sunday times by columnist David Bullard.

Here’s a sample of what can be found:

“Most blog sites are the air guitars of journalism. They’re cobbled together by people who wouldn’t stand a hope in hell of getting a job in journalism, mainly because they have very little to say. It’s rather sad how many people think the tedious minutiae of their lives will be of any interest to anyone else. It’s even sadder when someone reads them. Many bloggers prefer to remain anonymous and with good reason. The content of their sites is so moronic that even their best friends would disown them if they knew they were the authors.”

Instead of a well-written, informed op-ed piece looking objectively at the flaws and beauty of the blogosphere we have someone who is mostly out of touch with what the blogosphere represents and doesn’t have a clue what its all about.

Talk about ignorance.

Sadly, this attitude is simply indicative of a larger attitude towards blogging and bloggers in general that is entrenched in the minds of those who don’t understand the internet and those who are scared of it.

The article appeared to be about “shameful” and “offensive” bloggers, but on a deeper level focused on the general idiocy the author seems to find in the blogosphere.

Yeah, there are a lot of bad, pointless blogs, but that’s not the point; the point is that the blogosphere creates a rich, vibrant ever-changing community where a Muslim girl in Afghanistan can report on what’s going on in her country, a soldier can show us videos of the realities of war, a search engine marketing company can offer tips on how to improve a website and a stay-at-home-mom can make it big as a columnist.

It is a world that is self-moderating, where the flow of information is continually updated and analyzed and people have the freedom to express themselves however they want.

And that’s what he misses. No, there aren’t enforced standards; perhaps some sort of loose journalistic standards should be set, I’ll agree with that; however, when all is said and done, what is the point in policing a world where freedom of expression is one of the most highly valued commodities? The beauty of a blog is that anyone can say whatever they want and people can read it if they choose to. Information is free and it is up to the reader to do the research and form educated opinions. It is the user community who organically chooses which sites to give their time to and which to leave in the dust.

If you don’t want to read about X’s new adventures in being a mommy or why A hates B, don’t. It’s that simple.

He says, “are there really 70 million bloggers out there hoping that their writing talents will be recognized, or is this just another example of modern narcissism?”

The world is shades of gray, not black and white. The reasons people create blogs,the way they use them and what they do with them are so varied a statement like that makes me shake my head, bemused. People make such large generalizations about blogging and other online publishing media (e.g. video) without realizing the potential of this vast online community is far more powerful than mainstream media is even capable of anymore.

Not to mention the fact that “print standards” and journalistic ethics are often tossed aside by mainstream media (MSM). Look at Michael Finkel, Janet Cooke, Jayson Blair or Stephen Glass. These are just some of the more well-known journalistic “sinners” of MSM; there are plenty of others.

Additionally, its rather hypocritical to point fingers at bloggers while writing for a paper that, like most print publications today, takes a wealth of information from the blogoshpere.

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5 In 10 Parts: Link-building And The Popularity Of Your Website - Social Media Marketing

This week’s column focuses on link-popularity, an important piece of the search engine optimization puzzle. It is not good enough to optimize and submit your Web page; search engines must be able to find your page often by following links on other, related, updated, listed, submitted pages on other servers, each tied to a unique IP (an Internet address).

Due to recent changes, it is best that these website which link to you have relevant information (similar industry-related information that pertains to your topic on your website); and a high page rank pertaining to that relevant industry is desired.

To understand the solution you must understand the problem.

In order to get your Web site to come up on a very competitive key word search in the organic first page results on the search engines, you must get thousands of unique users to build properly optimized, related, constantly updated, popular, well-connected, submitted, listed Web sites, containing every coveted, related key word, in every order, to link directly to your Web page: which must also have all these characteristics! Read more

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Semantic Images And Seo

Very rarely do I come across software that makes me go “WOW”

Keep in mind that I read almost everything covering new social software.

Microsoft has a project team working on a piece of software called SeaDragon. Read more

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4 In 10 Parts Updated: Feeds And The Changes In Submitting Your Web Site To The Search Engines

There is a science behind feeding your data to the search engines. It has become a complicated specialty. As the search engines and the internet have become more and more complicated to avoid spam and clutter, the criteria for placement on the first page results of coveted search terms has become more stringent and the competition has increased.  First of all, the often-used terms “over-/under-submission” refer to recent changes in the way the major search engines rate pages. Submitting your message incorrectly has rendered previously successful systems useless or even detrimental to search engine recognition.  Now the best way to achieve placement is to establish a regular, reliable feed of industry and/or niche market related data, which is then syndicated through RSS (really simple syndication) to establish the source of that data (a website with social media technology) as an authority source for that topic.

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Getting Personal | A Quick Look At Personalized Search

The next logical step in the evolution of the web is personalization as search engine algorithms become smarter and more complex. The people who are fighting it are fighting the future. There’s no ideology; it’s all about the individual and what they’re looking for. So yes, in my opinion, if I don’t like A and prefer B, please show me more searches about B and less about A, which I will just ignore anyways. This is of course a huge oversimplification, but you get the idea.
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Which Traffic Sources Should You Target? | Website Search Engine Marketing Strategy

Recently I’ve read about otherwise sane Internet Marketers (also called SEO’s) targeting Digg comments at an attempt to direct traffic to a particular website. The first thing that came to mind was that running a campaign specifically to garner traffic from the comments of a techie social media site is probably not going to have a great ROI. I may be wrong, depending on your target market, but nonetheless blog posts abound SEO’s spending lots of time on ineffective strategies abound.

There are virtually unlimited markets and communities that can be used (and exploited) in order to increase the traffic to a website. The cost to use them is either your own time and effort in comparison to the results that same time and effort would earn using alternative methods / strategies or the cost to pay a professional to do this for you.

What does a particular traffic source do when they get to your website? Do you they buy a product or service, do they subscribe to your blog, or do they leave without doing anything? Going back to my Digg traffic example. In general (also true of other traffic sources from techies) Digg traffic has a high bounce rate, so digg comment traffic (being less direct) will probably have an even higher bounce rate. Conversions and ROI can easily be tracked with Analytics and I recommend every website at least have Google Analytics installed so they can begin looking at the ROI of each of their main traffic sources. Use this information when engaging in a long term campaign to figure out the particular value of investing time and money in different traffic sources.

[tagssearch engine marketing strategy, website traffic sources[/tags

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3 In 10 Parts: Content Is Still King For Search Engine Marketing

Back to the hat scenario:

Consider, if you will, that the search engines are a hat with a hole in it: billions of pages are constantly being dumped into the hat, billions being purged out of the hat constantly.
In order to build real presence, you must not only get enough cards into the hat, you must get them to stay in the hat, when everybody else’s are falling out of it. Read more

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2 In 10 Parts - Search Engine Marketing With Content - Not Advertising:

Nobody cares that you are the top in your industry, how much you sell, how much you make, or what a nice face you have. People are looking for inventory (cars, real estate, clothing, books, investments) and/or information (consumer information, statistics, demographics, pricing information, quality testing, ratings, advice). In order to be found by these shoppers, you need to be found under what they are looking for. If you provide that real content, you will have a shot at their business. Effective internet marketing and search engine placement are now about the content, not the ads.

Suppose there are 100 cards in a hat, and one of them is yours. Your chances of randomly drawing your card from the hat are one in one hundred. If you add a card, you nearly double your chances. So how many searches do you come up under? More is better.

The Internet is made up of searchable databases linked together by service providers, search engines, directories, and networks (i.e., AOL, MSN) - and now social media communities like My Space, Active Rain, Linkedin… now most everything is findable by a specific key-word-search on Google in seconds!

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A Trek Through Wordpress Mailing List Plugins - Email Mailing List Manager

I recently had a client who needed an easy way to manage e-mail lists from within their wordpress blog. The requirements included the ability to support multiple lists with additional properties and an easy import / export feature. I thought finding a wordpress plugin to take care of these tasks would be simple, but I was wrong. It appears that one of the big features left out of the 15 or so wordpress mailing plugins I tested was the ability to export the user list in .csv format so it can be used in other programs (like CRM). Technically you can export this list directly from the mySQL database, but that’s cumbersome and not “client friendly”. I wanted an option that worked through a simple admin interface that allowed for easy exporting and importing.

There was a nice solution which still integrated into wordpress. I installed PHPlist a stand alone, open source, powerful mailing list manager. I then used the wordpress plugin PHPlist form integration to integrate the various forms. So users can subscribe, and unsubscribe without leaving wordpress. The customer can then login to PHPlist and have access to a powerful but simple admin with capabilities that including multiple import and export options.

Here is a brief list of the wordpress mailing list plugins I checked out in no particular order.

MailList for Wordpress

http://blue-anvil.com/archives/maillist-for-wordpress-a-mailing-list-mass-mailing-mailer-plugin

Looks great, but couldn’t get it to work. The author is no longer supporting it, so I don’t recommended using it.

WordPress Email Notification Plugin

http://watershedstudio.com/portfolio/software/wp-email-notification.html

Mainly designed for sending e-mail notifications when your blog is updated. Isn’t this sort of thing outdated by e-mail RSS subscribptions?

Subscribe 2

http://subscribe2.wordpress.com/

Contains a nice widget version widget compatible themes. Works with the latest version of wordpress , but again setup mainly to send updates on when blog is updated. Seems unnecessary with e-mail RSS.

Subscribe Me

http://www.octeth.com/products/freetools/subscribeme/

Didn’t get a chance to test this one, but it looks the most promising out of this list because it includes the ability to export subscriber data to a common CSV format so you can use it easily with other programs as well as having a confirmed opt-in and opt-out. By default it only records the visitors e-mail and name. You’ll have to do some code editing to expand the list and attribute sections.

WP-Campagin-Monitor

http://www.instinct.co.nz/wp-campaign-monitor/100

very simple with no way to export users, but comes with built in integration with WP-liteecommce plugin so is an excellent way to capture a mailing list if you’re using that shoping cart. Also is very fast to install and supports a sidebar widget “out of the box”

Wordpress Newsletter Plugin

http://www.shiftthis.net/wordpress-newsletter-plugin/

Full features, excellent easy administration features. Can create multiple lists, send mail or newsletters, contains every feature I wanted except 1. There is no included, fast or easy to export the lists. So you can’t get the lists out without using other software. I need the client to be able to export the various maililng lists in a standard format like CSV. Not to mention this plugin cost $20 (which is cheap if it ONLY had tat one feature).

PHPList Form Integration

http://projects.jesseheap.com/all-projects/wordpress-plugin-phplist-form-integration/

A nice simply way to integration the forms form PHPList into wordpress. Includes admin functionality so you can adjust the list options and attributes from PHPlist in the wordpress admin. I love this plugin and I’m using it for all my mailing list needs. Only problem is you have to install and work with a separate program PHPlist, but once you get use to it, PHPlist is full featured and does everything I need it to do including multiple import / export options.

PHPlist Helper

http://zeroasterisk.com/w/WP_plugin_PHPlist_helper#Download

Another PHPlist integration wordpress plugin. This one requires changing a few lines in the core of PHPlist so I choose to use PHPList Form Integration instead.

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Ppc Negative Keyword List | What About Google’s Negative Keyword Tool?

This week I setup and optimized a medium size PPC Campaign on Google Adwords targeting travel related words. Adwords recently launched a new tool “Google’s Negative Keyword Tool” and I wanted to publish some thoughts on that in addition to providing a sample list of words I usually include in my PPC negative keyword list.

Negative keywords are search terms that prevent your PPC ad from being shown. They are helpful to increase ROI by eliminating searches that are on the same topic and match your target keywords for your PPC ads, but have a non-commercial intent, so are unlikely to purchase your product/service and convert to commercial customers.

In PPC figuring out conversion ratios for specific keywords is everything. By identifying and eliminating words that don’t convert or are less likely to convert you can modify your bids to increase ROI.

I thought there would be an abundance of such negative keyword lists online for me to link to. Unfortunately, there aren’t very many floating around for searches of “ppc negative keyword list”. Below this post I’ve included some general categories that can be applied to most PPC campaigns to eliminate clicks from non-commercial intent searches. As with anything there are many examples when these won’t be negative keywords, so please do not cut and paste this list, but in my experience these types of customers are likely to have an extremely low conversion rate for PPC ads which aim to convert to direct sales of products and services.

Google recently launched the negative keyword tool, which helps you identify specific searches related to your “positive keywords” that could potentially differ in intent. You can enter in positive keywords directly or select from one of the campaigns you’re currently running. This tool brings up some very specific negative keywords and I’d recommend at least running it and evaluating the results from each of your PPC campaigns. Unfortunately though, it doesn’t give you any general negative words like the ones I’ve listed below and many of the results are very related to the positive terms, so be sure to add your own negative words (I would especially add the employment negative words) in addition to what you pick up from the Google negative keyword tool.

If you run the Google negative keyword tool with “travel” you’ll get back a list that includes “air” “fares” “hotels” etc. Well.. those results could be targeted searches for a PPC campaign aimed at “travel” and have a potentially commercial intent. So definitely use discretion and track everything with analytics. After your initial campaign is setup be sure to monitor your conversions with analytics and if you notice a correlation between a specific word and an extremely low conversion rate consider adding that to you negative list as well.

Example Non-Commercial Intent –
Looking for jobs or hiring opportunities –
Looking for PR info or Press information
Education related – research etc
Has a technical problem with service / product
Is looking for pornography or is searching compulsively (random keyword associations)

To try to cut back on paying for clicks from searchers with the above intent here is a basic divided list of negative keywords that can be applied to most campaigns.

Employment Negative keywords
jobs
job
interview
interviews
search
monster
employment
hiring
human resources
part time
hr
career
careers
salaries
corp
corps
resume
résumés
salary
opportunities
opportunity
government
gov
recruitment
recruit
positions
position
vacancies* - be careful with this one
help wanted
employers
employer
recruiters
staffing
volunteer
volunteers

Public Relations Negative Keywords
public relations
pr
publicity
press
pr agency
pr agencies
pr firm
pr firms
public relations firm
public relations firms

Education Negative Keywords * only use if this coincides with your marketing message
education
college
colleges
research
book
books
university
universities
schools
school
library
libraries

Problem Negative Keywords
problem
problems
warranty
returns
parts
complaints
complaint
sucks
suck
hate
protest
indictment
illegal

Technical Negative Keywords
warez
crack
serial
serials
cracks
rss
xml
hack
hacks

Porn Negative Keywords
… (sorry, but you’ll have to make you own list)

Profanity Negative keywords
… (sorry, but you’ll have to make you own list)

Other Resources on Negative Keywords and the Google Negative Keyword Tool

• Google AdWords Negative Suggestion Tool: Useful? Visible? | Search Engine RoundTable
• Negative keywords, Excluded keywords why you need them | PPC Marketing Guide

[tagsppc, negative keywords, Google negative keyword tool[/tags

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10 Part Series Updated: Creating A Comprehensive, Integrated Marketing System Online

Years ago, I wrote a ten part series still reprinted here on z57’s website, and at Real Estate Magazine’s site where it was first published.

At the time, talking about organic search engine placement was revolutionary; we’ve been using the term for years. Since then, things have changed a lot!   So here is installment number one of the redo of that series, updated for changes since then:

1. Following the rules:

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Is The New York Times On The Way Out Due To User-generated, User-filtered Content?

With the New York Times likely to change hands for the first time in over fifty years, and the AP reporting the fastest newspaper circulation decline in over 15 years:

NEW YORK (AP) - Average weekday circulation at U.S. newspapers fell 2.6 percent in the six month-period ending in September, the latest sign of trouble in the newspaper business, an industry group reported Monday. Sunday circulation also fell 3.1 percent at newspapers reporting to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, according to an analysis of the data by the Newspaper Association of America. In the previous six-month reporting period ending in March, weekday circulation fell 1.9 percent at U.S. daily newspapers and Sunday circulation fell 2.5 percent.

Circulation at the country’s three largest newspapers was relatively stable, but many others showed significant declines.

Gannett Co.’s USA Today, the largest-selling daily, slipped 0.6 percent from the same period a year ago to 2,296,335; The Wall Street Journal, published by Dow Jones & Co., fell 1.1 percent to 2,083,660; and The New York Times Co.’s flagship paper rose 0.5 percent to 1,126,190.

One must truly consider that this is not just a sign of the times (the internet); but also a huge shift in trust factoring: Read more

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