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Great post from Michael Fruchter on getting started in Social Media... Everything from personal branding to blogging to Twitter

Getting started with social media, whether for personal or professional use, requires learning the basic fundamentals. Social media is more than just creating a blog or Twitter account. The tools are great and give us big advantages, but they are simply extensions of how we engage and participate in social media, they are not the answers. The social in social media is all about the human element. This post touches upon 40 key elements to aid your success.

This is a great explanation of how you can start, run, and grow a business for free - with a good web strategy...

But in our evolving Web 2.0 world and with Google leading the way, the rules have changed: You can get something for nothing--and for entrepreneurs, that something can have a significant impact on their businesses. Today, the web is full of free tools to help entrepreneurs start, run and grow their businesses for next to nothing. It'll just cost you some time and an internet connection.

good "checklist" for website planning - a great start to a web strategy

In order to create the perfect Website, firstly you need to have a Website Planning document. Before you can start the process of Website Planning you need to know two key things: · What do you want your Website to say? · Who do you want your Website to say it to? Once you can answer these questions you are ready to proceed and begin "Website Planning".

This post will show exactly how one start-up improved their homepage conversion rate (visitor to sign-up flow) more than 20%, then 16% again, with a few simple changes and Google Website Optimizer.

This post will show exactly how one start-up improved their homepage conversion rate (visitor to sign-up flow) more than 20%, then 16% again, with a few simple changes and Google Website Optimizer.

With more than 120 million blogs in existence, how do people find YOUR content on the Internet? The key starts with great search engine optimization (SEO), which is an art and a science that helps search engines discover your content and understand how relevant it is to specific search queries.

With more than 120 million blogs in existence, how do people find YOUR content on the Internet? The key starts with great search engine optimization (SEO), which is an art and a science that helps search engines discover your content and understand how relevant it is to specific search queries.

Start with goals for well defined outcomes

Measuring the effect of SEO for Public Relations benefits should start with well defined outcomes. To get a good handle on SEO effectiveness, it's important to match the purpose for the effort with specific metrics. For example, if improving brand visibility is a goal, then documenting brand mentions in connection with news & PR content at regular intervals can demonstrate the effect of content promotion and link building.

Earlier today we shared 5 Bing SEO Tips and how Bing is starting to generate a good amount of traffic to our websites. Compete.com says Bing is the #13 trafficked website on the web now so it's a good time to learn how to optimize your website for Bing.

The article provides a quick overview if you want to start optimizing pages for Microsoft's search engine. Especially I never used the Bing webmaster center in combination with Google's tool before.

What a great resource! These folks have done simple training videos on many of the most popular and functional solutions around for Twitter, Wordpress, etc. This is a GREAT starting point to build a base of knowledge.

These are some great basic vids to give you an immediate boost of knowledge to start using some of these tools.

great link!

The days of a long-standing, static website are over. Start a blog (preferably integrated with your website) and start leveraging the power of these tools to bring fresh content and high-relevance to your website.

In 2009, an active blog at the centre of your Web presence says that you are ready to have an engaging conversation with your ideal guest today. As such, your blog needs to become the centre of your online Web presence, and that means it's time to prioritize your marketing efforts in the new year.

You typically have to create some number of social interactions to leave the trail of signals of quality to make Google want to trust a site enough to put it in front of a large traffic stream, especially if you are starting a brand new site and are trying to operate within Google's guidelines. As Bob Massa says "search engines follow people."

There are two points in this post that I want to emphasize... First off SEO is an ongoing process. There isn't a magic trick that pushes your site to the top of rankings. It takes work.. Rinse & Repeat. Analyze & Tweak. Secondly there is a great point that if you hire an SEO expert you will get your site in front of the thousand other relevant people in your niche. This is very hard and takes a lot of work. So, you should create Outposts. Creating outposts is part of a content marketing strategy where you distribute your content among various networks to build up multiple sources of traffic... Great quote from Bob Massa explains it perfect!

Situation: You run a social media program at a corporation, and you need to measure to improve your program, but more importantly to show to your bosses that this 'new media' program is worth it's weight. Challenges: You see the immediate value of a community program but your management is unconvinced. Furthermore, the brand police and the traditional hard-liners don't like your 'open-thinking' type of revolt. There may be other challenges too: lots of activity but few people, or you simply don't know where to start. Goals Deliver a report that demonstrates the value of a social media program as well as helps you improve the program over time.

Great overview on how to measure the social media aspect of your business's web strategy...

This is an AMAZING digest of internet marketing posts from 2008 covering SEO, Social Media tools and strategy, twitter, facebook, friendfeed, blogging etc. This is a must read for any internet marketer from beginner to advanced.

Here's how this works: In the Internet Marketing Best Posts "series," I take posts that are typically timeless - they're not confined to a specific event or news occurrence - they're valuable for the long haul in terms of Internet Marketing and creative strategy. Hopefully, you'll see that these posts are still relevant in a few years down the road. These posts range from beginner to advanced with a greater emphasis on the more intermediate posts. I'd argue that if you're starting your Internet Marketing business with not much know-how, you should check out the 2007 posts; in fact, most may still find them relevant regardless of the skill level.

It's fantastic that interest in social media is so high, but I'm alarmed at the number of brands and agencies that are ready to jump into social media to take "advantage" of audience concentration in Facebook, Twitter, and other fast-growth outposts. What's lacking in most social media programs is an actual strategy. If you don't know precisely why you're in social media, with whom you want to engage, and how you're going to measure success, you're not ready to start.

14 killer tools to help you evaluate the user experience of your website.Excellent tools to help you figure out who your audience is, what they are doing, and most importantly - why they are leaving your website.

Here's a big problem with web design: If you want to make your website better at turning visitors into customers (or subscribers), you need to understand why most of your visitors are leaving! But those people come and go without trace! How do you know what they wanted? How do you know what would have persuaded them to take action? If you owned a real-life bricks-and-mortar store, this would be easy: You'd hear their objections. You'd be able to ask questions. You'd hear what they muttered as they headed for the door. Capturing the voice-of-the-customer is more difficult with the web, but it can be done. Here are 14 free tools to get you started!

To survive, publishers have to let this one go. Digital (online and mobile) is the future; younger people have already adopted digital media as a lifestyle, and they're not going to miraculously start reading print newspapers in any significant numbers as they grow older. Print will continue to decline as its core audience ages. So put the future at the center of the company, not the past. Now, and not before it's too late.

I had the opportunity to do a podcast with Avinash to discuss some areas where marketers are doing things right and wrong but all of them are simple but extremely powerful uses of web analytics to make their websites and businesses better on the web. We also took some live Twitter questions as we were doing the podcast. But stop reading this and start listening to Avinash - its 25 minutes long but positively electric!

Know your objectives in advance. Start small, when possible: think "proof of concept." Track the metrics obsessively. Make sure that your interactive marketing efforts are tied to the sales funnel (e.g., your vp of sales ought to be able to determine where most leads are coming from online). Report frequently.

A great starter guide for SEO - if you want to start learning, this guide is a great start.

Our Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide covers around a dozen common areas that webmasters might consider optimizing. We felt that these areas (like improving title and description meta tags, URL structure, site navigation, content creation, anchor text, and more) would apply to webmasters of all experience levels and sites of all sizes and types. Throughout the guide, we also worked in many illustrations, pitfalls to avoid, and links to other resources that help expand our explanation of the topics. We plan on updating the guide at regular intervals with new optimization suggestions and to keep the technical advice current.

An example of bad email marketing...

Let's start with the subject… They used the horribly generic "Newsletter" in their subject. What most people don't realize is the easiest way to fail at email marketing is to use generic, non-descriptive subjects in their emails. A subject must be compelling, brief, and indicate the content of the message. This fails at all three and it doesn't even indicate a brand. This will be passed up in most users' inbox.