I’d like to thank MyBlogLog Community Manager Robyn Tippins for the invite to join the MyBlogLog Advisory Group (which I’ve accepted) and I’d also add on to my guest post on the MyBlogLog blog.
First the MBL Advisory Group: I’m looking forward to working closely with MBL to further bring the service to a new level. The other advisors are experts in their own right, like:
MBL is on the forefront of social networking especially for bloggers. In 2006, some naysayers were predicting that “blogging was dead, and Digg was the future”.
Uh huh.
Until Eric and the MBL team launched the MBL widget late last year which has become pervasive. In recent times, Scott Jangro’s BumpZee and BlogCatalog have launched their own variants of their social widget.
And lately you’ve got a number of wayward MBL users who’ve devised a number of dubious ways to generate income by comment or widget spamming the heck out of sites which use the MBL widget.
I think there’s a lot of bad information going out there. If you want to game social traffic or social media (depending on how you call it), you might like to (more…)
Last Friday, blog social network MyBlogLog co-founder Eric Marcoullier posted on the official MyBlogLog blog his “So Long and Thanks For All The Fish” post, announcing he would be leaving the company with the most commonly displayed blog widget, a company which Yahoo! acquired for $10 million earlier in the year.
Every MyBlogLog blogger will have some relationship with Eric. After all he’s the default “friend” when you join the network.
With Eric’s departure, will new MBL members be greeted by Yahoo! Community Manager Robyn Tippins?
It was just a little over a month ago that MyBlogLog ran their ad on StandoutJobs to hire two wickedly good developers.
In the video ad, Eric, seen with MyBlogLog co-founder Todd Sampson were talking about the atmosphere at the young company, and it’s a pity to see Eric’s departure.
He’ll be gradually phasing to becoming one of the bloggers in the MBL community, creating the moniker bpm140 and will be blogging over at marcoullier.com.
I’m thinking bpm140 could be an abbreviation for (more…)
In this episode of the Friday Podcast, we look at ways of creating an impact through social marketing and avoid crucial social faux paux.
For the session notes, click “more”
(more…)
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’d have seen news reports that marketing guru Seth Godin‘s Squidoo social networking site has been Google slapped in recent weeks. My friend, black hat marketer Howie Schwartz, interviewed Seth and in the process elicited a number of nuggets for social marketers from the Internet Marketing community.
In recent weeks, there’s been news coverage from the likes of TechCrunch that some Squidoo pages have seen as much as a 75% drop in traffic, due to lower rankings in Google’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
With a Google PageRank 6 and Alexa 493 traffic ranking, Squidoo is among the Internet’s most popular sites. [You can see my earlier: Squidoo review]
The reason? A number of marketers have been using Squidoo lenses as a parasite host for hosting pages for spam marketing purposes. [The Squidoo team lists their anti-spam measures]
With the drop in Google’s SERP positions, a number of marketers have since moved their pages over to Hub Pages (PR6, Alexa 3,220)
But does adopting a “nomadic” approach of shifting to another authority site solve the puzzle of generating a continual stream of traffic?
It seems more like a “slash and burn” forest clearing measure. You forage in an area, turn it into a wasteland, shift to the next plot – slash the trees, burn it to the ground – and move on.
Sure, there are a lot of “forests” on the Internet, but if we were to take the “Live Earth” idea of a sustainable, long-term and long-tail approach to Internet Marketing, wouldn’t it be better to master the dynamics of social networking and build a brand AND a business from there?
Howie’s interview with Seth provided a number of insights. If you’ve read Seth’s works like Permission Marketing, Purple Cow, the Idea Virus and All Marketers are Liars, the interview will reasonate with you and you’ll see the principles put into action.
 Master Marketer Seth Godin
If you’re not familiar with Permission Marketing, Seth provides a good illustration of the evolution of marketing from disruptive to a permission-based model:
“Marketing has become a consensual process. In other words, you can’t yell at people (on TV, on the radio, on the web) and hope that you can earn enough to yell more. As a result, the most successful marketers are the ones who have a product that people are eager to use and talk about (think iPhone). This is great news for people who have useful information to sell, because human beings are drawn to insight and knowledge and things that help them succeed.
Like Seer Interactive’s Wil Reynolds had mentioned at Affiliate Summit East, building a site optimized for humans, rather than search engines will bring you the biggest returns.
You may detect a bias towards “content development” and “content sites” in recent posts, but that’s only because “content IS king”.
As Seth skillfully illustrates:
Like the booth at the carnival that has a great barker outside bringing people in, but not much in the tent, at least as far as I can tell.
So SERP rankings can bring you so far, but you’d need (more…)
If you’ve recently invested in a copy of the recent CMS Infusion software or are planning to setup a membership site, or build a social networking/community site, you’d want to take a close at a forum product launched today by forum expert Ryan Chua.
When I was setting up my first forum, I approached fellow Internet Marketer Ryan Chua. Ryan’s one of the founders of BMW-Sg.com, one of the most profitable automotive-focused forums on the net.
He helped set up my vBulletin-based forum and configured plugins to optimize its traffic visibility. Along the way, he’s also helped a number of other established Internet Marketers develop their forum and community strategies.
If you’ve plans to add a community elements to your site, you might want to check out the free installment of the forum guide that Ryan has released.
The 80-page forum guide gives you a breakdown of forum setup, factors in your planning process and compares various forum solutions. You likely already have this in your hosting account from the likes of Bluehost, but from what I’ve seen, the documentation thus far tends to be very technical or sketchy. Ryan’s guide brings it down a notch so it’s more easily accessible.
Here’s an extract from Ryan’s Forum Secrets Revealed contents page:
If you’ve been experimenting with building your community or have hit a brick wall in your efforts, you might like to head down and get a copy now.
MyBlogLog can be a source of highly-targeted, relevant and free traffic if you know how to use it effectively.
But increasingly, spam marketers have been bombarding the social networking site, such that there is a toggle to view messages only from members of your social network (and cut out messages from non-members (potentially spammers).
MyBlogLog obviously views the matter seriously enough to take further measures.
Witness the latest salvo:
I was in the midst of posting messages to PepperJam’s Kris “Mr Pepperjam” Jones and Robyn Martin‘s MyBlogLog profiles. [To comment on the latest Meet the PepperJam Team video]
There’s now a daily message cap of about 20 messages sent per day.
[Check out the MBL blog post “Spam-a-lama-dama” for details]
In my opinion, MyBlogLog is one of the most, if not THE site, for (more…)
