Monthly Archives: May 2009

Can Professional and Personal Boundaries Be Easily Defined in Social Media?

3 Replies

Here’s an issue that experienced and aspiring social marketers will face: How to effectively balance publishing content related to your business, and your personal life on the social web. While personal content can help create a connection and rapport with your audience, it can sometimes be a double-edge sword.

In an episode of TheSpew, a business-related podcast on the GeekCast content network, I had the opportunity to discuss this issue with Missy Ward, Lisa Picarille, Connie Berg and Karen White.

While Missy and Shawn Collins are able to effectively inject personal opinions, together with the business content in their twitter streams and blog posts, some of us who’re focused towards corporate clients who are less familiar with the social media environment and operate on a more “rules-based” corporate culture, seeing someone tweet about how great “Lost” was last night or “Free Cone Day” at Ben and Jerry’s might be perplexed, confused and even get riled up because they can’t figure it out.

If you’re a consultant/trainer, there’s a split between presenting a professional image because that’s what’s expected, compared to having the free rein to say what you really think.

It was insightful hearing Lisa, Karen, Connie and Missy who are all engaged with consulting, share their experience in managing these expectations. And any social marketer can get some food for thought in handling this personal vs professional dichotomy on the social networks.

Check out TheSpew Episode #8 on GeekCast.

How Much Money Do You Need To Get Started In Affiliate Marketing?

7 Replies

In these uncertain economic times, figuring out how much you need to get started as an affiliate marketer is a concern, especially if you’re holding down a 9-to-5 job. But there’s more than just the cash at stake.

The one key issue to realize is that whatever you do, it’s a toss up between time and money.

If you are short on money, you will need to invest the time to do everything yourself.

If you’ve got the money, you can hire an employee, outsource a task, or otherwise pay someone to do your work for you.

time is money

Realistically, you can’t expect to do everything yourself, so you will still need to budget funds for a designer or a programmer, or a writer if any of those are your weak areas.

Going long-term, you need to Continue reading →

When A Blog Isn’t A Blog…

Leave a reply

With the multitude of functions that blogging platforms are currently being appropriated for (especially  WordPress software), is blogging in danger of losing its identity.

It’s no surprise that blogs are highly optimized for search engines, tend to be the weapon of choice for linkbait campaigns and are usually the chosen weapon when a single individual (or marketer) decides to take on an airline, supermarket chain, or budget airline.

confused

Add to that the fact that affiliate marketers are also employing it’s flexible architecture to construct landing pages, opt-in forms, affiliate content sites, shopping/shopping comparison sites, coupon sites, customer loyalty sites (plus the occasional or maybe not so occasional affiliate cookie stuffing site) and you’d realize that it’s not just a diarying platform anymore.

In a tweet yesterday, Top Ranking Marketing CEO Lee Odden fired Continue reading →

Friday Podcast: Article Marketing Traffic Strategies With Rachel Rofe

1 Reply

Rachel RofeI’d invited return guest Rachel Rofe on the Friday Podcast to talk one of her most effective traffic sources – article marketing.

Besides covering the basics of article marketing, Rachel also talked about some of the intricasies of:

  • How you can use the “useful, but incomplete” strategy to get high clickthroughs on your resource links
  • An update on her weight loss membership site which had received publicity as the cover story of Woman’s World magazine (more popular than Rolling Stone, The New Yorker and Forbes)
  • The benefits of article marketing and how you can get more bang for your buck for each article you publish
  • Recommended article directories, article submission services, article analytics and social bookmarking strategies to enhance your profits
  • Incorporating press release strategies into your marketing campaigns
  • Going the multimedia route to further boost your traffic generation efforts
  • Her new meditation niche site
  • Her new article-based traffic generation service

Check out the podcast below:

[display_podcast]

Links:

Will Twitter Search Change The Search Engine Landscape?

5 Replies

At the sidelines of an entrepreneur conference, TiEcon, yesterday, CNet Webware editor Rafe Needleman reported on Twitter’s ambition to power up its usefulness as a search engine contender. But will this be enough to give Google or one of its competitors a run for it’s money.

On the looks of things, Twitter is doing the right thing like bringing Google’s former manager of search quality operations Santosh Jayaram over to Twitter as its new vice president of operations.

In the works:

  • Introducing indexing and crawling capabilities to spider links contained within users tweets
  • A reputation ranking system to give weightage/priority according to a Twitter users authority

As an example, Santosh cited examples of the Twitter.com sidebar would containing “trending” hot topics, which already appear in Twitter users web profile pages now.

To be viable as a search engine alternative, not just against the big 3, but also sites like YouTube, Facebook and MySpace which feature their own search engines, Twitter will need to leverage on its immediate nature and use this advantage to provide real-time updates like Twitter API-powered site TwitterFall.

As hot upstart Twitter continues to introduce unique and creative values for its users, we might see the internet users expectations to demand real time updates from search results, with a corresponding change in user behavior.

Overcoming Blogging’s Style Versus Substance Challenge

5 Replies

The answer to an old question whether it’s more important to focus on style or content (also sometimes refered to as “form or function”) when it comes to content publishing on the internet will have most listeners responding “You need both quality content and an interesting way to generate traffic and monetize it.”

Easier said than done though.

challenge

From my research, most podcasters and video bloggers who generate “interesting” (ie not boring) content tend to be clever/witty, use cool background music, broadcast/guerilla-style video effects and transitions, to the point of being Seinfeld-ish (ie being about nothing) in nature.

If anything, the message is Continue reading →