Internet Marketing in 10 Minutes

I’ve recently started using a service called Twitter. I’m sure anyone reading this blog post probably knows about the service but I never know who might be watching. Actually to be honest I’ve had a Twitter account for almost a year now. I have simply not found any reason to use it or value in using it in the past.

I started with my old account and decided that I’d keep that one as private for my personal and close friends. So that being said, I created a professional profile to separate my personal and professional life.

My Twitter account will act much like a feed reader in regards to my blog. When I write a post I’ll update my Twitter with the topic and a link to the blog.

When I find an interesting article or post on a forum I’ll twitter a link to that article or may even quote parts of it that interested me.

If I’m doing research on any given topic you might find that I’ll include a twitter regarding the topic I’m researching.

So why am I doing this? A recent survey conducted by Rand Fishkin and the SEOMoz crew indicated that over half of the 3,000 survey takers hardly ever read blogs. For those of you that do read my blog from time to time I thank you. For those of you that don’t, if you have Twitter I’d like to invite you to follow me.

I’m doing this for awareness and branding purposes. I’m promoting myself and my blog through yet another marketing wheel. If I have 10, 100 or a thousand people following me then I now have an opportunity to update them on my happenings and possibly motivate them in some way or another.

Twitter is a social network after all and the key to a social network is being social. That being said… are you being social? I am!

John Jones

- 10 minutes of SEO, SEM & Internet Marketing

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Post Contributed by Jeremy Rivera

Quality links are becoming more and more important in the search engines. Almost every blog I read is talking about the importance of links and the anchor text being used on those links.

I own a website in a specific “vertical” and I was struggling to find ways to creatively get One Way In Bound Links. The difficulty is that most local people that I might get a link from that have a website want to make it a reciprocal link and I don’t have the budget to pay for directory links.

So, after some bumping around, I stumbled on a previous post on how social networking is becoming more important than search engines in terms of traffic.

I decided that I would create a profile for each of the Social Networks I could find and then link to every one of my pages with great anchor text and descriptions.

A few weeks later I checked my Google SiteMap for this site and saw that those links were listed as In Bound Links, and the anchor text also showed up in my “How other sites are linking to you” section.

I believe that it gave me a good boost in my reach for relevancy. But I can’t help but feel conflicted. I mean, as the owner of the site, it seems somewhat fraudulent to go to these social media sites, and create profiles just to promote my site. It seems like it might be something sneaky and underhanded that might even be considered “Gray Hat”.

I brought this up with a friend who was well versed in many different tactics in the search engines and he gave me some advice. He said:

If you think about it in those terms then most techniques used by SEO experts are “Gray Hat”.

I’m still not 100% convinced that it isn’t all on the up and up, but I can’t deny the benefits… What are your thoughts? Is it unethical to create your own social media profiles on social bookmark sites just to boost your quality links?

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Almost everyone in any Website related industry knows that Del.Icio.Us is a Social Bookmark service offered to everyone at no charge. They even have a handy toolbar that you can attach to your browser.

However what the system lacks is a little customization, color and verification! ClaimID is nice in that you can always verify your websites, blog posts and other contributions to the web. This is done with a simple addition of a meta tag to the page that has your original content is found on. They then send out their spider to check the URL for the meta tag and upon verifying that it does exist a little ‘Verified’ text is added to that link on your profile.

Because this blog is geared around Internet Marketing I will tell you that your profile page will most likely be crawled pretty quickly by search engine spiders, it does pass link juice and for what it’s worth my profile page went from a PR NOWHERE to a PR 4.

Lastly, when talking on the phone with clients, it is sure easier to tell them to go to ClaimID/search/ then it is to explain that Del.Icio.Us doesn’t have www before Del!

John Jones

- 10 minutes of SEO, SEM & Internet Marketing

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In every industry you will find right and wrong as well as people who have opinions of others within the same industry or even other industries simply because we are opinionated about what everyone else does or says that is different from what we would do.

Today a discussion was created on a social network I frequent often called Sphinn. The discussion was pretty much a direct opinionated assault on a well known SEOer that is also a speaker at many conferences.

I actually agree with the opinion of the poster but I’m not about to make my opinions of others known to the world by out right expressing my opinions of another person.

You never know when someone is going to be a friend or a foe over the years. It is also equally impossible to know who you’ll end up making as an enemy that might be supporting the person you don’t like.

With Social Networking comes the responsibility of reputation management and without a reputation no one will be around to criticize what you have to say.

While I may not always agree with this well known SEOer, I’ll give them mad credit for sticking to their usual response to attacks like this which is not responding at all. However I have no doubt that the following this person has will be more then willing to stand up for her.

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When I first decided to sign up for Sphinn it wasn’t without some thought put into it. Not every Sphinner is a Rustybrick or DoshDosh and feels completely comfortable putting out their views only to have them judged by their peers. I’m sure even these two even question from time to time what others are going to think about something they publish.

I was excited about getting involved in a community that wasn’t over saturated like Digg has become. However I was nervous at the same time because Sphinning isn’t the same as posting on a forum or writing on your own blog where it may or may not be seen. What I realized was that everything I posted on a social network would be seen by others and my thoughts and opinions would be criticized by others or adopted by others.

For my first few Sphinns I had decided to play it safe and the results were poor at best. Those two posts were confirmation at first that no one wanted to hear from someone who had little to no reputation.

The third and fourth posts happened when I discovered I could Sphinn other articles not written by me. The first was an ever popular list titled, “101 Resources to Help You Build a Better Web Form” and the second was an article by Danny Sullivan titled “Supplemental Results Have Gone Supplemental”

I’ve had the pleasure of seeing many popular names come to my blog over the last two months. I can also say that a well known public figure in the industry didn’t agree with what I had to say and then I had nerve enough to stand my ground. I am glad that Jill Whalen commented on a post I wrote titled, “The Dirty Truth About SEO”. I think I grew up a little that day in regards to not worrying about what others think about what I write just so long as I’m not so far off base as to saying retarded things.

Gone are the days when people completely rely off of the latest industry newsletter from a handful of different sources. We live in a world where RSS, Blogs & Social Networks are quickly spreading and are being utilized by hundreds of thousands if not millions of users. We happen to be in the leading industry in regards to being able to see all of this technology unfold before our very eyes. I plan on making myself known through Social Networking and I owe a large part of that to the environment Sphinn has provided me.

Getting involved has been the single most important decision I’ve made to enhance my career objectives. I’ve established business connections, made friends and have put myself on the line to all that read my Internet Marketing blog. My advice to anyone in any industry is to make a commitment to be involved; It’ll be worth your time and effort.

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Today I received a forward from one of my real estate clients. The e-mail was titled “Social Networking Fatigue”. Since I had just sent her an evaluation geared around some additional Social Networks she could be taking advantage of I figured I had better read the e-mail and be prepared to provide her with something else or choose to encourage her to proceed.

It turns out that the forward wasn’t a complaint about more Social Networking at all. Instead it was an article she had found on a popular real estate news site called Inman. The article asked the question:

…does anyone know a Realtor who has sold a home from Facebook or MySpace?

Good question; I certainly don’t know if any of my clients have landed a closing from their Social Networking efforts. However I also feel that the two example sites are not appropriate for real estate agents to expect serious buyers from.

What I do know is that a report came out over a year ago stating that over 80% of home buyers start their search on the Internet. I also know that almost all of that 80% start their search on their search engine of preference.

I’m pretty sure we can find a real estate agent that has successfully closed on a home thanks to their networking efforts online. The author of the article I’ve read may not have given Active Rain a fair enough chance to work for him. Active Rain is a Social Network for real estate agents and it isn’t uncommon for an agent to pass on referrals through this network.

So I’ll restate the question so it is a little more geared towards the general Social Network public:

Does anyone know anyone that makes a living off of selling services or products from Social Network type websites?

 

I’m fairly confident that others make money off of Social Networking through Google Adsense and other advertising systems like AdBright.

There is plenty of money to be made from Social Network Marketing however let me point out the biggest advantage of this kind of marketing… it isn’t the ability to make a direct sale through the Social Network, while that is a nice side affect it simply isn’t the purpose. The biggest benefit is reputation building / management. Youre reputation is what will bring in a good deal of money depending on which niche you are involved in.

Reputation alone can make someone money. Becoming an authority in any industry can be accomplished through Social Networking efforts. I’ve made a small amount of money through my Social Networking efforts and I’m starting to become known a little more within the industries I work in. I may not be making as much as others right now but I can’t say it hasn’t been fruitful.

So, how are you taking advantage of Social Networks in order to make money? It is possible, all it takes is commitment and patience along with a little advertising. I’ll be Sphinning this blog post for example in order to get it posted on the Internet Marketing related Social Network Sphinn. Others will most likely Sphinn the article and it’ll potentially ‘go hot’ which will drive more people to read the article.

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So directories allow you to add your link to a page that has 50 – 100 – 200 other advertisers all in the same area. This often costs a reciprocal link or an annual fee. Why bother anymore when there are new technologies in play that give you the ability to, for the most part, control your own page on a site that doesn’t belong to you? Having the authority to only link to your website or blog and writing content for a page that doesn’t solicit your competitors services is a pretty useful tool for search engine marketing.

Blogging, Social Networks, Social Bookmarks and other user interactive sites have been spreading for a few years now. Take MySpace.com for an example; it started out without much competition and allowed people to post to their very own blog hosted on Myspace.com. Today it gets more daily traffic then Google.

Active Rain is considered a Social Network for real estate agents, Del.Icio.Us is considered a Social Bookmark site and You Tube is considered a Social Video site. Either way, they are all social and require interaction.

So yesterday I was working on link research for one of my clients. I decided to spend my time reviewing the linking practices of his competitors and came across one particular competitor that had a constant pattern amongst his many links. He had created for himself several Social Identities. I found that he had an Active Rain (AR), MyBlogLog, Del.Icio.us, and a ClaimID profile among a dozen or so more of these links.

I quickly noticed that he was neglecting a large amount of these Social Identities but he did provide a link or two to his main website from them so they were passing some link love. In addition to the link love to his website he appears to randomly be linking to a few of his other Social Identities. In this way he passes value to each of the Social Identity profile pages that in return pass greater link love to his main website. I imagine he isn’t linking all of them to all of them in order to avoid being looked at as a link farm.

So now I have a new direction to take when looking for links for my clients. However if this is helpful for one person then it should be helpful for others. My only advice is to not just create an account and let it sit unused. Take advantage of this marketing tool and build upon each of the Social Identities you’ve created. This will not only help search engines not devalue the empty page(s) but it can also encourage other Social Networkers out there to reference (link to) your social contributions.

Since yesterday I’ve started establishing five Social Identities that will work on promoting this Marketing Blog and maybe even pass some link love to client websites and other sites that I frequent often. The one I’ve spent the most time on so far is my ClaimID Social Identity. Bookmark it and keep watch with my progress over the next few months as I put this concept into play and build a case study.

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