Blogging and Social-Media

In recent months it's become apparent that a lot of people find themselves overwhelmed by too much information. Subscribe to too many RSS feeds and follow too many people of Twitter and FriendFeed and suddenly you find yourself struggling to keep up with what is mostly irrelevant nonsense. Louis Gray wrote a commonsense post on his blog this weekend: "You Control Your Noise Velocity". Louis' straightforward point is that rather than complain about too much noise, you should just make sure you only subscribe to as much as you feel comfortable with.

Thomas Nelson CEO Michael Hyatt's musings on personal productivity, life balance, book publishing, WOW experiences, and inspirational leadership. On Saturday, I posted Four Surprising Conclusions About Author Websites. Yesterday, I posted on Why Every Author Needs a Powerful Online Presence. Today I want to address the how of building your author brand online.

Welcome to the thirteenth edition of email marketing tips on November 10, 2008. This week's edition comes to you two days early. Better than late,… What do you think? My favorite article this week has been written by Yaro Starak, who explains to us how he profited big time from better targeting the message to his readers. Improving the conversion rate of your email campaigns is almost like free money. It's amazing, but over time you can give yourself a great pay raise. One that your boss - if you still have a boss - could and would never give you.

It always amazes me how many bloggers insert unoptimized images in their posts. As a result thereof, their home page, which often contains a couple of posts, sometimes in full length, loads slow or not at all. I get many questions about the latter. Almost always the load time of a home page can be improved right away by optimizing the images. That requires some extra work though. And extra time. But at least your visitors don't click away because your page takes way too long to load. So, if you want to use an image in your posts, optimize it first.

"No one can become a master salesperson if they compromise false-hood. Even if no one ever catches them red-handed in expressing what they do not believe, their words will fail in the accomplishment of their purpose because a person cannot give their words "flesh" if they do not come from the heart, and if they are not mixed with genuine, unadulterated Enthusiasm." The Law of Success By Napoleon Hill~ Chapter on Enthusiasm

"This is the moment when we must come together to save this planet. Let us resolve that we will not leave our children a world where the oceans rise and famine spreads and terrible storms devastate our lands." Barack Obama

"When Failure is just not an option, what better motivation is there to succeed?" Donny Deutsch

"Every failure is a blessing in disguise, providing it teaches some needed lesson one could not have learned without it. Most so-called failures are only temporary defeats" By Napoleon Hill

I stumbled across a debate going on about personal branding, started by Geoff Livingston of The Buzz Bin a few days ago with his blog post I Don't Care About Your Personal Brand.

Tabbloid is a free web based service designed to turn RSS feeds into a PDF newspaper. The web site requires no registration and the process is straight forward. Single or multiple RSS feeds can serve as the source for your PDF. You can opt to have the site compile the PDF immediately or delivery it by email at a future date based on hourly, daily or weekly frequency. In the dozen test feeds I threw at Tabbloid the service performed as advertised, however a few of the feeds generated a glitch that caused the articles to appear in duplicate within the PDF. For another method of converting RSS feeds to PDFs, check out RSS 2 PDF.

Whether you're attending an event or want to follow one from afar, one of the most useful tools is Twitter, the 140-characters-or-fewer messaging service.

Sometimes it seems like the social media world is divorced from the business world. Sure, there are small Web 2.0 companies that embrace everything, and there are companies like Oracle that present a social media face to us, but there still seems to be an invisible barrier between the social media world and the world of real work. So I was somewhat surprised to see this headline: Twitter Tools To Turbo Charge Your Microblogging The headline itself isn't what surprised me - it was the fact that the headline appeared in InformationWeek.

Flickrfolio creates professional looking portfolios using your images from flickr.com.

I know everyone is talking about commenting on other blogs as a marketing strategy, and I have to agree. Blog commenting would have to be one of the easiest ways to gain new and constant traffic to your blog.\n\nI personally have used it as my primary method of building traffic to this blog. But other than traffic what are the benefits of communication with other bloggers? Surely there must be more to networking with your fellow bloggers than just to see them visit your blog.

I visit a lot of blogs every day and am always coming across new ones with amazing designs. Which gave me the thought that, with blog design being such an important element of the blogging process, why don't I spend some time searching out some of the most creative blogs to provide some inspiration for those looking to design a new theme for their blog, or even those who just want to take a peak at whats on offer. There were so many wonderful designs and I could have quite easily made this a top 100 or even 200, but I only wanted to display what I saw as the most creative blog designs out at the moment. So here are 50 of the most creative blog designs around! (In no particular order)…

I've used Delicious for a long time to manage my Web bookmarks. It was easy to use, accessible from any browser, and worked well with Firefox. For all my needs, it was a great bookmarking service. Then I found Diigo, and suddenly Delicious didn't look so good anymore. Diigo is another social bookmarking service (and one we've covered before), offering all of Delicious' relevant features and much more. I left Delicious, and haven't ever looked back. There are a lot of things I love about Diigo, but there are seven features that sold me on using Diigo for all my bookmarking needs. These are all in addition to the features I deem non-negotiable for social bookmarking sites- tagging, Firefox extensions, looking at popular bookmarks, etc.

Small business blogging and internet marketing tips from a blogging expert.

On May 16, 2008 I placed my order for ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income via Amazon. A week later my book arrived, however, due to it being the end of the school year and everyday family chaos, I placed the book on my nightstand with the promise I would read it eventually. We all do that, don't we? June 4th was the morning my world came to a screeching halt. We'd had several days of steady, non-stop and, at times, heavy rains here in Indiana. That morning I woke to over three feet of water in our finished basement. When we opened the basement door and saw the water pouring in around the windows and down the walls, there was little else we could do besides close the door and let Mother Nature have her say.

We just implemented our "influence ranking algorithm". So we ran it against the ~1000 'social media marketing' blogs we monitor on an ongoing basis (along with tweets, forums, Q&As…). Below is the top 150 list: ( When compared to the Adage Power 150 reference, remember we zoomed particularly on social media marketing. Plus the list contains only blogs written in English). Just click on the link!!

With an ever-growing number of applications out there enabling you to get near-instant access to news stories, friends' status updates, and social networking activity, many people are feeling panicked. A not too uncommon refrain I've seen is that there is too much "noise", and this fear of noise is what is holding back the growth of some services, or stopping people, who may have already chosen one they liked, from signing up to more news sources and social networks.