Blogging and Social-Media

I will first start by stating I am not an SEO expert. Over the years, I have studied and tested various methods, guidelines and techniques for generating search engine traffic. Back in 1997, I took on paid clients and SEO became a full time career for a few years. AltaVista was the dominant leader in search in those days. Learning how to control and manipulate the engines to get front page search results became my main objective and an obsession. Today, things are a lot different, as there is basically one dominant leader in search, and the playing field is more level than it's ever been.

I've only been Social Networking for a little over a month and I have learned so much in that short amount of time. I am certainly no expert in Social Networking as I have a whole lot to learn. But, I do know a thing or two about marketing. When it comes to brand recognition, the rules don't change when shifting from Corporate Branding to Social Network Branding. Name and Icon recognition are critical when it comes to building your Social Network. Here are a few quick tips to help you quickly gain name recognition in the Social Network Arena.

You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed, and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you just how deep the rabbit hole goes. No, this is not going to be a post about what kind of bloggers Morpheus, Trinity and The Architect would be. That would be cute, but not terribly useful. But I will use Neo, Agent Smith, Spoon Boy and Persephone as symbols of a different type of matrix. A matrix that allows you to see things for what they really are and become more effective.

Last week I made some alterations to my site's design, but no one seemed to notice. In fact, few people have ever commented about my blog's design at all. The same goes with the music intros for my podcasts. I can change the music each time, and no one ever responds. In contrast, if a post has good content, I see a steady stream of comments. My experience leads me to conclude that content is about 90% important, and design is 10% important.

Blogging is as varied in its applications as using the telephone or taking a picture. The tool doesn't predict the output. You might be using your blog to post recipes, or to inform the local community about information you find elsewhere on the web. Maybe you're just trying your hand at writing, and the web is as good a place as any.

With 10 years of experience in the online news release distribution industry, PRWeb has a unique understanding of what makes a news release successful online. The following tips will help you write a professional, concise and powerful news release.

12 powerful ways to link building for your sites for SEO, Internet Marketing that are also great sources of direct traffic and website promotion.

While I was preparing my presentation for "Starting the Conversation," a social media workshop hosted by SocialMediaClub, I wound up drafting version one of the manifesto for helping marketers adapt to the rapidly evolving realm of social media. In the past, I've spoken at PR, tech, and communications events about Social Media and how companies can engage in the conversations taking place with or without them. As much as I wanted to look into the future, I was rooted in the present as a means to connect it to the past. There are just too many new things to introduce to people and even more reasons why they should care.

16 Essential PC Applications for Bloggers 1. Mozilla Firefox Mozilla Firefox is the king of all browsers. Limitlessly extendable, fast, and lightweight. If you're still using any other browser (even Google Chrome), then switch to Firefox immediately, it'll boost your productivity - guaranteed.

So you just signed up for Twitter. You make your first tweet and you realize you don't have any followers. "What a dumb idea!" You say. "Who the hell would be interested in what I'm doing anyway?" Don't worry. You're normal. That is a sign that you are a Twitter beginner. A lot of us Twitter users (or addicts) went through the same questioning routine. And look at us now. We're geeks who are on Twitter all day and night and we can't stop tweeting.

Even in a world where high-speed internet is just a tall house blend away, anyone can get stuck with a slow or uncertain connection at home, in the office, or at the worst possible time while traveling. There are, however, measures anyone can take to ensure they're getting the most information and functionality they can when crunched for time or pressed for bandwidth-or if you just don't like waiting for things while online. We're offering up today 10 tweaks, downloads, and work-arounds for slow connections, slow computers, or just fast-minded people. Read on for the tips that might just save your life some night when 4 Kb/s is all you can muster.

:: Looking for detailed online reputation management services? Contact Andy or buy his new book: Radically Transparent: Monitoring and Managing Reputations Online ::. Every single day, someone, somewhere is discussing something important to your business; your brand, your executives, your competitors, your industry. Are they hyping-up your company, building buzz for your products? Or, are they criticizing your service, complaining to others about your new product launch? A great brand can take months, if not years, and millions of dollars to build. It should be the thing you hold most precious. It can be destroyed in hours by a blogger upset with your company. A new product launch could take hundreds of TV commercials, dozens of newspaper ads, and an expensive ad agency. It can also spread like a virus with the praise of just one customer, at one message board.

A personal site by Derek Punsalan sharing personal interests with technology, WordPress, design, and general geekery. WordPress Grid Focus was originally a personal project designed and coded for 5thirtyone.com. After much debate as to whether the project should be released to the general public, and after a collection of thoughtful emails from readers & fans, I have decided to share the project with the WordPress community.

Check out these GabFire NewsPro themes for WordPress!! I personally love 'em! Check out that extended footer! What do you think?!

Twingr is a new platform that allows you to create your own microblogging communities. It's pretty much a scaled down version of twitter that allows you to create your own groups for specific tweets. Anyone hear of tweetdeck?

There's something that needs to be made blatantly clear regarding the internet: One million unique visitors that spend less than one minute on a website and do not return is not really "traffic." I hear so many companies (and you know who you are) that throw out these lofty, excitable "numbers," as if they're pulling in a large, coveted audience, but that is the equivalent of a million people driving by McDonald's every thirty days, taking a look, and not one going in to order a sandwich.

As regular Techdirt readers are surely aware, Tim Lee has been writing a series of posts here about issues having to do with network neutrality. The five part series, was based on research he was doing for a position paper for the Cato Institute on network neutrality. If you haven't read the series of posts, you can find them here:

Webmasters often ask us at conferences or in the Webmaster Help Group, "What are some simple ways that I can improve my website's performance in Google?" There are lots of possible answers to this question, and a wealth of search engine optimization information on the web, so much that it can be intimidating for newer webmasters or those unfamiliar with the topic. We thought it'd be useful to create a compact guide that lists some best practices that teams within Google and external webmasters alike can follow that could improve their sites' crawlability and indexing.

Ultimate Guide to use Digg for bloggers. Get insane amount of traffic, increase your readership, and get your blog a new reputation. Every blogger want to be successful, or as I like to say every blogger have a vision for success. Success is very subjective. For a blogger it can mean a lot of subscribers, tons of traffic, a lot of quality articles etc etc. To achieve any vision of success, bloggers give digg a try. Now whether they succeed or not is out of a question, but they give it a try. Now I talked to a few people, they didn't know how to function digg. A lot of people are clueless on how else you can use digg other than promoting your own article. So I will give you guys a brief overview of what is digg, and how a blogger can make use of it.

I'm making an effort to become less reliant on visiting websites for the data I need. Spending a majority of my time in Google Reader, I decided RSS could help me accomplish this task. I no longer have to visit Yahoo to read my horoscopes or sports scores. I now track my Ebay auctions from Google Reader. These are some of the ways I started to recently use and rediscover RSS. This post touches on 30 different ways RSS can be used.