I have several other goals like networking (reconnecting and especially new contacts), competitive research, recruiting and potential client prospecting. But content marketing is our bread and butter. It can be an effective tactic for you too, especially if you can learn to be highly efficient at liveblogging conferences.

Here are a few tips that will not only give you a tested and proven guideline but should improve your efficiency and quality of output.

• Create a schedule. Whether you’re blogging on your own or with a team, pick which sessions and related topics you plan on covering before the event. SXSWi has almost too many concurrent sessions and with such a large event, not planning will lead to getting to sessions late. That means a crappy seat in back and likely not anywhere near an outlet.

  It’s very easy to get distracted while at the conference and with live blogging, there’s no time to waste. If you know which sessions you’ll be covering, it can help to create draft blog posts ahead of time and include as much information in the draft as you can. This will make it easier to finish off the post as close to the session time as possible.

• Plan ahead. When planning out which sessions, interviews or events you’ll cover, put together a grid showing session names, times and who should be covering (if you’re part of a blogging team). Coordinate sessions coverage avoids duplication and ensures the topical mix of content you plan on covering is properly represented. The My SXSW tool makes it pretty easy to research sessions.

• Write the posts offline in an application like notepad, then transfer the post to the blog. Many session rooms have poor if any internet connection at all. Last year, ATT pulled out a big fail for anyone using iPhones or their wireless cards. Make posts in an offline document and transfer them over to your blog software when you’re ready to publish and have a good internet connection.

• Take photos. Photos of the panel or an individual speaker are great and can add a lot to what otherwise would be a text heavy post. Photos of the PowerPoint slides can be particularly useful if the presentation goes fast or doesn’t follow a logical order. You can reference the photos of PowerPoint slides later when finishing the blog post after the session ends. We tend to publish photos on a TopRank Blog account at Flickr just for conferences as well as to Facebook. On Flickr, we typically create a “set” for each conference event and are sure to link to those collections of photos from within the blog posts.

• Promotion tips for conference photos on Flickr: Be sure to add titles and descriptions to each photo. Include an anchor text link from the description back to the blog post it’s used with. With your Flickr account, be sure to network with other Flickr members that would be interested in conference photos. When we set up an account just for one conference, we exported our hundreds of network contacts from LinkedIn and used the feature in Flickr that allows you to invite 100 people at a time to our Flickr network. The more relevant people in your Flickr network, the more people that “see” what photos you’re posting. Images taken through out the day and eve should be uploaded, titled, tagged and commented/linked before the next morning.

• Take videos. Just about every digital camera can take web quality video. We added 16gb memory cards so each camera can take several hours of video. Interviews with attendees, speakers and exhibitors are particularly popular. You must keep in mind that with large companies, employees can rarely do a video interview without approval from their Legal and/or PR departments, so you need to schedule those ahead of time. You also need to be aware of the video taping policy of the conference. Most events do not want you to take videos of the sessions themselves. If you have an iPhone, you might consider using the UStream application to capture and post live streaming video.  UStream will save the video to YouTube and also announce it to your network on Twitter and Facebook.

• Add some flavor to your videos. You don’t necessarily need a pro level of post-video production to get good promotion value out of conference videos. You should however, be sure to use software like Windows Movie Maker (free) to add text to the video indicating the topic and your blog URL. Also, set up a channel on YouTube as a way to organize and promote your posts along with accounts at other video sharing sites.

• Sit close to the panel AND the screen. Also, if there is just one large screen in the room, sit between that and the panel. That way you can get clear photos of both the panel and PPT slides. If you have one of the most common digital cameras, don’t bother with a flash if you’re not close to your subject.

• Network with other bloggers. When in the sessions or in the press room (if your blogging on a press pass) be sure to connect with other bloggers. You have something in common – the formidable task of taking a mix of presentations, some great and some psychotically unorganized, and turning them into a story that makes sense to a savvy search marketing audience – all in real time. Connecting with other bloggers both offline and online can facilitate information sharing as well as links.

• Promote your posts. Once your posts go live, then be sure to make an effort to promote the posts to your network on Twitter, Facebook and other social communities. For example, promote screen shots of your videos to Flickr with a link to the video post. Let interview subjects and other bloggers know when you’ve posted. Leverage your social community networks (StumbleUpon, delicious.com, Facebook and niche/vertical specific sites) to draw attention to particularly “promotable” content.

• Tag your posts and media. For some conferences, the organizer will advise the attendees to use a specific tag to make it easy for readers to find posts specific to that event. The easiest example would be the #sxsw and #sxswi tags being used on Twitter for this event.  Keyword specific tags are also useful. Use these tags not only with your blog posts and Twitter, but also with photos, video and social bookmark/news submissions.

• Establish a few basic blogging guidelines or simple processes. Here are a few that we start with:
  • Create drafts of posts BEFORE the conference with notes.
  • After sessions posts are saved in draft form.
  • All posts must have images, ideally of the session panel.
  • All posts are associated with relevant categories and tags.
  • Alternate title tags with keywords are written.
  • Post titles start with a consistent naming convention along with a short description.
  • Once posts are edited, editor makes them live.
  • Better quality posts are vetted for promotion within blogger networks.
  • Round up posts are published at the end of each day or at the end of the conference.

The biggest takeaway for better liveblogging is to plan ahead and follow through with promoting your content once it’s live. What liveblogging tips have you found to be effective for content marketing? Any tips or tricks on being more efficient?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | 12 Tips on Live Blogging & Content Marketing at SXSWi | No comment | http://www.toprankblog.com

Just consider the statistics from social media monitoring site Pingdom:

• Males and females almost equally use social sites (47% vs. 53%)
• 61% of Facebook users are middle aged or older, with the average age being 37
• 18- to 24-year-olds don’t dominate any particular social networking site; they’re spread out all over

The bottom line: If you aren’t discovering which in social networking channels your customers spend time and include them in your ecommerce marketing mix, you’re probably  missing out on building relationships, community and increasing new customer acquisition through online word of mouth.

Leverage these five social media marketing tips for ecommerce to either get started with more social digital marketing or take your current social strategy to the next level:

1. Go Where Your Customers Are

Very few things in life promise endless options – digital and social media marketing being one exception. From Facebook to Twitter to LinkedIn to YouTube, there’s no limit to the number of social networking channels available for your business to leverage. Key to successful social media marketing for ecommerce is choosing the right channels to reach customers.

Find out where your customers are congregating by:

• Asking them. Sounds overly simplistic, but sending a formal survey to customers or more informally polling them on your website can provide a wealth of knowledge.
• Monitoring social sites. Use a free tool like Social Mention or Trackur. For something far more robust use tools like Radian6 to discover how and where customers are talking about your brand, your competitors or target keywords.
• Leveraging the stats. Some sites like Facebook are transparent when it comes to user statistics. Or leverage research conducted by third-party firms like eMarketer.
• Revivew backlinks, job postings, news announcements and keyword rankings of competitors on a regular basis to get a glimpse into their online marketing health.

2. Monitor What Your Competitors Are Doing

Whether your ecommerce business is new to social media marketing, or just need to take your efforts up a notch, competitive intelligence can be very useful. Spend some time by conducting a competitive audit of your top five competitors on the social web. Include:

• The social sites in which they are active
• The type of content they publish on the social web
• The number of followers/fans/views they have on each site
• How they promote specific products, programs or events via social media

For even more inspiration and insight into what works well on the social web, look to ecommerce sites in other industries or even successful B2B social media examples.

3. Promote Exclusive Offers Through Social Media

In order for your ecommerce business to gain a following on whatever social channel you choose, entice customers with something they can’t get anywhere else.

For example, promote a contest via social media. Last fall, TopRank® Online Marketing leveraged this tactic for one of its ecommerce clients. TopRank used the client’s blog and Facebook fan page to promote a Halloween contest to name the best costume. This initiative not only drove additional traffic to the client’s website, but also helped increase the number of Facebook fans.

Alternately, offer an exclusive item to social media followers or fans, such as free shipping or a weekly coupon. You can also offer “breaking news” that does not appear anywhere else, like pre-product release announcements or an inside look at your company’s inter-workings.

4. Don’t Just Push Products and Promotions

The primary goal of your ecommerce site may be to sell products, but your social media marketing strategy should encompass a wider range of tactics that simply promoting offerings. With too much product pushing and not enough engagement, you’re unlikely to experience optimal success.

Incorporate some of these ideas into your ecommerce social media marketing strategy:

• Share messages or news stories from external sources
• Create a blog on your website and feed blog content to your social accounts
• Ask questions, participate in discussions or poll your customers via social media
• Post pictures from company events or videos from your CEO’s speaking engagements

5. Sell Products Through Social Networks

1-800-Flowers maximizes the use of social media for its marketing efforts.

Many ecommerce sites leverage social channels to make it even simpler for customers to purchase their products. 1-800-Flowers has taken this idea to the max (see image above). It was the first ecommerce site to launch a Facebook store, allowing customers to browse and purchase its products directly through Facebook.

1-800-Flowers may be an extreme case, but ecommerce sites large and small can still indirectly sell products through their social profiles. For example, highlight new products or best-sellers and provide a link to the order page on your website. It may not be quite as simple as purchasing directly from the social profile, but it can be just as effective.

The five ideas are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to ecommerce social media marketing. What social media tactics have you found to be successful?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | 5 Social Media Tips for Ecommerce Marketing | 5 comments | http://www.toprankblog.com

Welcome to the post-Winter/pre-Spring version of the BIGLIST review of SEO blogs.  Snow is starting to melt and you can actually walk around outside (in Minnesota) without your eyelashes freezing together. We have a nice group for you to review so fire up your RSS reader and subscribe.

LyndiT blog gets our attention for great design and user experience in this BIGLIST update. Lyndi Thompson is a Social Media and Online Marketing Specialist and like me, is addicted to peanut M&Ms.  Besides writing about a mix of social media, SEO, web design and online marketing topics, you might be interested to know Lyndi lives on a mini farm, owns several animals including a donkey and supports some great causes in the Northwest.

• Frank Thinking About Internet Marketing – Frank Reed blogs on several sites including Marketing Pilgrim and Biznology. Here, he shares is talented writing skills to tell stories about SMB internet marketing topics. This isn’t a how to blog, it’s a broader topic and things to think about blog as the name implies about Search, Mobile, Social and Local.

• State of Search – What’s going on in the search and social media marketing space?  This new blog from Dutch internet marketer, Bas van den Beld of Search Cowboys fame, and friends promises to be a source for what’s happening in the world of search and social.  It also compliments a weekly radio show on WebmasterRadio.fm of the same name.

• ezlocal blog – If you’re in search of great advice on local search marketing, this might be your lucky day. You can expect detailed how to posts including those about Google Maps and Local Business Center and local marketing topics. ezlocal itself is a local business search resource and directory.

• Digital Marketing Zen – David Wells is a digital marketing strategist for an agency in Charlotte, SC and publishes a blog that documents his observations via posts, podcasts and a curated collection of videos on topics that include everything from Augmented Reality to SEO and Social Media to Web Analytics.

• Single Grain Blog – This agency blog is written by Sujan Patel and Ross Hudgens on SEO, PPC, Design, Link Building and some social media.

• Website Workshop – Buzzhound Learning Lab is a St. Louis, MO based agency with a newer blog that has started writing posts again about SEO and topics that support the SEO training courses offered.  Hopefully they continue.

• Aussie Internet Marketing Blog – Sean Rasmussen writes “down under” about practical tips on a variety of online marketing topics including SEO, blogging, social media and general web 2.0.

Did your SEO or SEM blog make the cut? Share the good news with your readers using the badge and link below or choose one from the badges page.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | BIGLIST Social SEO Blogs Update 031110 | 5 comments | http://www.toprankblog.com

The changing nature of social media marketing and optimization create the need for tools whether for research, marketing and promotion or analytics. Here are 11 social media and SEO tools you might find useful:

• howsociable.com – Social visibility score
• knowem.com – Profile building tool
• Social Media for Firefox – Build a powerful social profile on social news & bookmarking sites
• semrush.com – Find competitor organic search rankings
• Google Insights – Keyword demand trends
• Page Inlink Analyzer – Analyze inbound links, their Delicious bookmarks & keyword tags
• majesticseo.com – Historical back-link tracking
• trackur.com – Social media monitoring
• socialmention.com – Real-time social search & scoring, social keyword research
• bit.ly – Search friendly URL shortening with analytics
• analytics.postrank.com – Track social engagement with combined Google & social analytics

Below are screen shots of each tool with a more detailed description of how you might use them.

HowSociable is a useful tool to quickly gauge the social presence of a particular keyword or brand name. Agencies like TopRank Marketing will use this kind of tool (customized) to take snapshots of customer social presence metrics for social media optimization programs. For each social site polled, you can clickthrough to see specific mentions.  This is a characteristic of more advanced social media monitoring tools, but for those that want a quick glimpse, HowSocialble is easy to use and the price is right, just like these free social media monitoring tools. However, if you want more comprehensive brand search and monitoring, then a paid social media measurement tool is worth the investment.

KnowEm is both a free and a paid service that will help you easily and quickly check whether your brand terms or other keywords have been registered as social profiles on a wide variety of social media web sites. Everything from blogging platforms to social news and bookmarking services are included. If you don’t want to complete all those profiles yourself, you can pay knowem to do it for you.  Companies invest a lot in building their brand, so this tool is helpful both for creating off site promotion channels as well as guarding against brand name squatters.

Social Media for Firefox is the only browser addon in our list and can be a handy tool to identify upcoming news items that are gaining popularity on certain social news and bookmarking services. A big part of building a more influential user profile is to be a consistent source of submissions for articles that become popular. This addon helps identify articles that are becoming popular on services like Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon giving you a heads up to submit to other services.  The logic is that if a news item becomes popular on one service it has a good chance of becoming popular on others.  Relevance, timing and focus are key as is patience for this kind of tactic.

SEMRush is an interesting tool for identifying the keyword visibility, both organic and PPC, on Google for pretty much any domain name you might be curious about. Your own or competitors for example. A common question for marketers is, “What are my competitors optimizing for?”. This tool helps uncover that insight and in combination with other standard and social keyword research, can be very helpful insight in a social media optimization program.

Google Insights for Search is a handy tool to research trends in popularity of various keywords on their own or in combination.  Filters for search type, geographic location, industry or topical category and timeframe allow you to refine some pretty useful information about what’s in demand.

Eric Miraglia ’s Inlink Analyzer is a back link analysis tool based on Yahoo’s Site Explorer that not only counts and displays source links to a particular URL, but it also shows if the source links were bookmarked on Delicious and what keyword tags were used. This kind of insight can be quite useful for understanding the relationship between social keywords and link popularity. It would be nice if there was a CSV export option.

Majestic SEO is easily one of the most powerful and useful link analysis tools available. There is a free version that gives you link acquisition counts over time and if you are a site owner, you can get full reporting for your site once you validate it.  If you use the paid service, you can get the juicy link details on your competition.  This tools is useful for finding high impact links for standard SEO but it’s also useful for finding out which social media sites your site or competitors’ site are getting  the most links from.  Also, which of your own social destinations (blog, Facebook, Twitter, etc) are getting inbound links and from where.

Andy Beal’s Trackur service is a very easy to use social media monitoring tool that offers a free version that will satisfy many beginners in the social media optimization space.  Social media monitoring services are keyword based, (queries and negative or exclusionary) and that means some very useful information about how popular certain keyword concepts are on the social web. Of course you can use it to monitor what people are saying about your brand, identify a certain measure of influence and where they’re saying it. But seeing social keyword popularity trends can be quite useful for taking advantage of real-time marketing opportunities.

SocialMention is a free real time and social search tool that offers an array of search options (just blogs, just forums, just bookmarks or all) and output in the search results. You can get an indication of basic sentiment and the top social keywords associated with your query. As a free service, you don’t setup an account and save your search results, but you can easily download them into a spreadsheet. This is probably one of the most useful, free social search tools online.

Bit.ly URL shortening is very handy since they’re included as a default service on Twitter and many other Twitter applications. Bit.ly is rock solid reliable with uptime, which is pretty critical when you’re relying on their URL redirect to send traffic to whatever it is you’re promoting. You can also get basic statistics for each URL that your shorten to show how productive the site is where it was shared.  In today’s succinct social web with Twitter, status updates and micro-content, being able to conserve space with a reliable URL shortener is very helpful. Stats on top of that make this a “go to” URL shortening service.

PostRank offers a nice measure of engagement at the individual document level and if you pay attention, you can get that data on any web site in their database, not just your own. You can easily see what content on your competitors blogs are getting popular and where.  If you sign up for the PostRank Analytics service, you can incorporate Google Analytics data with social engagement metrics. These are essential comparisons in a social media optimization program and can help you understand where to plan your time on the social web.

This is really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to SEO and Social Media Marketing tools. What low cost or free tools have you found to be effective for social media optimization tasks?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | 11 Free Tools for Social Media Optimization | 34 comments | http://www.toprankblog.com

While in Dearborn, I visited The Henry Ford Museum, The Rouge Truck Factory and had an invitation to visit Ford’s Head of Social Media, Scott Monty at Ford’s World Headquarters where we did a short interview. We’ve talked to Scott and live blogged about Ford social media efforts in the past, but in this interview he talked about the place for social media with Ford’s new product lines, local social media work with Chapter 2 of the Fiesta movement and advice for companies on empowering communities.

Being able to learn about the history of this 100+ year old company through experiences at The Henry Ford and Rouge Factory tours was very informative. Being able to sit down with Bob Kreipke, Ford’s full time historian and hear stories about Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, company history and the evolution of Ford was priceless.

Fast forward over 100 years and Ford is a very different company, as is the automotive industry. It’s not enough to be innovative but to be able to innovate quickly and connect with customers in more meaningful ways. Based on my discussions with Scott, Ford is very committed to making those connections.  Watch the interview below to get more insight on how Ford is approaching social media:

Click here to view the embedded video.

By leveraging technology and the social web, Ford is moving from being known as “A truck and Mustang company” to a “Car, utility and truck company”.  I think the decision to focus on local social media marketing is great evidence of understanding audience in a social strategy. So much of what companies are doing in the social space is a shotgun approach based on popular applications vs focusing on where and how actual customers spend their time.

Check out the The Ford Story, a great example of a corporate social media aggregator not only of Ford social web participation, but of what others are saying about their brands. I can’t imaging any active brand online not launching a site like this.

What are some great examples of consumer brands you think we should focus on in future posts? What kind of insights would you like to learn more of from those kinds of companies when it comes to the social web?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Ford’s Focus on Social Media: Scott Monty Interview | 4 comments | http://www.toprankblog.com

The stock photo site we’ve been using for several years recently decided to essentially double their prices (no matter how they spin it, that’s what they did) and it prompted me to ask the excellent people I’m connected with on Twitter for their suggestions on royalty free photography and image web sites. Here is a collection of 9 such sites that were suggested via Twitter or researched by TopRank.  Which leads us to our poll for the most “blogger friendly” royalty free stock photo site:

For a list of over 100 free stock photo sites, visit this link.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Poll: Best Royalty Free Stock Photo Sites for Bloggers | 18 comments | http://www.toprankblog.com

LinkedIn, however, stands apart from the crowd. The roots of popular sites like YouTube and Facebook are founded on the entertainment side of things. But since its creation, LinkedIn has been geared toward the professional business crowd.

If you haven’t already incorporated LinkedIn into your online marketing mix, consider the latest statistics:

• LinkedIn has more than 60 million members
• A new member joins LinkedIn approximately every second
• Executives from all Fortune 500 companies are LinkedIn members

Get started with a LinkedIn marketing strategy today with these five tips:

1. Build a Network, Then Start a Group
Getting started with a LinkedIn marketing strategy involves two important steps, the second of which is dependent on the first:

• Create a personal account and build a network of contacts. Reach out to customers with whom your business has a solid relationship – those who truly know your company and its products or services. Ask them to write recommendations for your company, which will appear in your profile. And don’t forget to ensure all employees are part of the network as well.
• Once your personal account is setup, create a group for the brand. By creating a group for your brand, you’ll be able to maximize reach beyond your network. Within the brand group, you can start discussions, share news, post jobs and create subgroups.

2. Make the Most of Your Profile
For the LinkedIn community, your profile will be this first item they see, so treat it as you would any landing page. To make the most of your profile:

• Hyperlink using keywords. Include relevant URLs in your profile, and use links with anchor text. For example, instead of “My Blog,” use a keyword to describe it such as “SEO and Online Marketing Blog.” (see image below)
• Use keywords in descriptions. That includes the summary, specialties, experience and all other description categories.
• Include an image in your profile. LinkedIn, after all, is a social networking channel. So add as many personal touches as possible to maximize engagement and put a face to the brand.
• Caption: Include blog or website links in your profile using anchor text.

Include links in your LinkedIn profile using anchor text.

3. Leverage Third-Party Applications
Today, there are a host of third-party applications available to help you make the most of your LinkedIn activity. For example:

• Box.net: Add links to files like resumes and marketing kits
• Slideshare: Share business presentations and demos with your network
• Company Buzz: Monitor messages sent out on Twitter about your brand or other subjects
• TripIt: See where members of your network will be travelling to and when you’ll be in the same city

For an upcoming trip to Dallas, my contacts that will also be there are identified.

4. Update and Engage Frequently
Think of LinkedIn marketing efforts as you would blog, Twitter or Facebook marketing efforts: The more activity and interaction, the better the results. To consistently engage with your network:

• Sync blog posts to your profile with tools like Blog Link or WordPress LinkedIn Application
• Frequently update your profile with the LinkedIn status feature, much like Facebook status updates
• Leverage the LinkedIn Question and Answer function – participate in others’ questions and ask your own

5. Promote Your Profile
In order to expand your network, LinkedIn marketing efforts – like anything else – must be promoted in other channels. Include a link to your profile on your website and blog, in individual blog posts, in email signatures and even on business cards. Be sure to optimize your profile for important and relevant keywords. Allow enough of your profile to be public so search engines can rank that content accordingly.

These tips, of course, are just the tips of the iceberg when it comes to LinkedIn marketing tactics. What specific tactics have you found successful for marketing on LinkedIn?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | 5 Ways to Weave LinkedIn Into Your Marketing Mix | 30 comments | http://www.toprankblog.com

Ah, back to a full sized Logitech keyboard and mouse. Much better.

Popularized by iPhones, there are apps for just about everything, including tools to help social media marketers on the go. In fact, there are over 100,000 iPhone applications to choose from. Many of those apps are extensions of social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Others serve as productivity tools for more efficient social web participation or for content creation.

As a content marketer that is also a big fan of social networking and sharing, here are a few of my favorites:

Echofon – Twitter usage on iPhones must be out of this world and while there are many great apps for Twitter including Seesmic, Hootsuite, Tweetie and Tweetdeck, I like EchoFon the best. It’s amazingly easy to switch between multiple accounts, its fast and there’s an auto-complete feature when typing in Twitter handles that saves a lot of time.  It works with lists very nicely but does not offer scheduled tweeting, which I don’t personally use much anyway.

Facebook – I probably use Facebook more on the iPhone than through the web site. Personal social networking or networking as an individual on Facebook is pretty easy to do with the app. What I’ve pictured below is where I also get a lot of productivity, which is being able to manage our blog’s fan page. We’ve gone from about 80 to over 1,400 fans in about 3 months and the convenience of adding to discussions via the iPhone has a lot to do with that growth.

Foursquare – You know those social media shiny objects that you’ve come to avoid but then they gain so much momentum and buzz that you have to try it out and then you end up liking them? That’s my Foursquare experience. It was the same with Twitter. Using Foursquare for marketing as an individual isn’t as obvious as what one might do with Foursquare location based advertising.

However, it can be pretty handy at conferences and events for announcing/leaking certain kinds of information. As a retailer or other business with a brick and mortar presence, can you imagine how useful it would be to know who your most active consumers are that are also active on the social web?

LinkedIn – While I’m not always by a computer (can you believe it?) I almost always have my phone with me and that makes accepting LinkedIn invitations (or not as you can see below) easy to do. Status updates are easy to do and can be seen by as large a social network as you care to develop. Thus the LinkedIn iPhone app makes it easy to feed that network. Quality trumps quantity here by far.

UStream Live Broadcaster – Capturing live video and audio plus the ability to poll viewers and promote on Twitter seems like a fantasy app for a social media marketer. Especially when you’re at an event and you want to capture something and get it out immediately. It’s amazing how easy the UStream iPhone app (U Broadcaster) makes this process.

Flickr – Capturing and sharing images is an essential part of digital asset marketing and social media marketing. The Flickr App makes it pretty easy to upload and manage images taken with your iPhone.

Google Buzz – Privacy issues aside, there’s plenty of buzz about Google Buzz and the only way I’ll use it is on my iPhone.  Let’s face it, with Google’s dominance and momentum, you can’t afford not to stay on top of their obvious efforts to become a social media powerhouse. It’s not exactly a standalone app though. However, Google makes it easy to add a bookmark to Buzz on your iPhone from Gmail so you can use it directly.

Update via Mashable: Apparently there’s a new app called Buzzie for Google Buzz on the iPhone.

AudioBoo – This is a handy tool for capturing and promoting on-the-move podcasts. It’s really a no-brainer except when you’re like me the first time I interviewed Vanessa Fox for a podcast and held the iPhone right side up, which for podcasting with an iPhone, is upside down since the microphone is on the bottom. Doh!

AnalyticsApp.com – What good is marketing online if you’re not MEASURING? For those with Google Analytics implemented on their sites and blogs (who doesn’t?) this app gives you insight into all the details of web visitor data you’ve come to love with GA.

Are these the bestest, newest and most awesome iPhone apps for Social Media Marketers? For this marketer, the apps I’ve listed above take care of 90% of my mobile social media needs. In fact, 4 or 5 would probably do the trick.  I do wish there were more social media monitoring iPhone apps though. Especially those that offer Social CRM functionality with your contact list. I’m also keen on finding task management apps that work well with Outlook.

What are your favorite iPhone apps for social media marketing?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | My Top iPhone Apps for Social Media Marketing | 33 comments | http://www.toprankblog.com

“If you don’t eat your meat you can’t have any pudding. How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat!” Pink Floyd, The Wall.

That quote from Another Brick in the Wall reminds me of the cart horse situation with social media marketing:  If you don’t know your customers you can’t engage them. How can you ever hope to engage your customers if you don’t understand who they are?

There are so many questions from marketers and agencies alike about how best to grow businesses through online channels.  Questions are particularly popular when it comes to best practices for social tools. “Always do this” and “always do that” is what most marketers have been bombarded with for as long as there have been conferences to attend and email newsletters to subscribe to.

Inevitably, many of the most pressing questions about social media come down to understanding who you’re trying to reach. For example, some common questions I hear a lot at conferences:

Q: Should we blog or focus on Twitter? Is Facebook or LinkedIn a better fit? Foursquare or Gowalla? (Or other shiny object)

A: Find where your customers spend their time and spend your time there too.

Q: What type of social content should we create? How often? Where?

A: Study your customers as they create, consume and share content.  Then you’ll know the what, how, when and where. They why has to come from your organization.

Q: What  is the most overrated social media site?

A: The one your customers aren’t using.

So much time is spent on tactics without a good understanding of goals, audience and how to measure success with social media programs.  As we discuss Roadmapping social participation with companies, audience research is one of the key areas of importance. As I mention above, how can you reach and engage customers if you don’t understand them?

Let’s say you’ve used a social media monitoring tool like SM2 to identify who is talking about your brand and topics of importance to your prospects and customers. Within this analysis, you’ve noticed that there’s alot of activity on Twitter.

A logical next step might be to further investigate influential Twitter users.  If a paid tool like Radian6 or SM2 don’t fit your budget you can try free tools Trackur or Social Mention to gain some insight into content types, commentary and sharing/publishing platforms.

Other tools you might use to identify influentials on Twitter include directories like wefollow.

Under the tag, “SEO” you can see that Matt Cutts is the most influential.  Since reaching out directly to a popular person on Twitter, especially a Google employee, might not be prudent, it can be helpful to learn more about that individual and who they are influenced by as well as who they influence.

Using the site Klout, you can see a Twitter influence score (78 is pretty high) and other information including predictions on who is most influenced by Matt and more interestingly, who may be an influencer of Matt Cutts.

There are other tools that show communities surrounding an individual such as Top Twitter Friends.

As for understanding what kind of content someone likes on Twitter, you can look at retweets and @ responses. You can also look at what kind of content and what user tweets get favorited most,. Favstar is a tool that does just that.

In this example, Favstar shows which Tweets Matt Cutts has favorited. The types of content and users can be noted for guidance with future outreach.

I mentioned free social media monitoring tools above including Social Mention. Below is a screengrab that shows how much information you can get from Social Mention with options to download into Excel friendly formats.

Other Twitter user analysis tools worth looking at include Twitter Analyzer and Twitalyzer.

The basic tools I’ve shared here are just that, basic. They’re good for poking around and getting familiar with discovery of social content and influencers.  However, it would take a more robust tool set (which is what Agencies and larger companies do) to scale monitoring over many topics, influencers and conversations.

Other customer social media research tactics include:

• Survey your existing customers for social preferences and behaviors
• Review web analytics for social media sources and behaviors
• Tap into Compete, Quantcast, Alexa  information on specific social sites
• Leverage profile information provided by advertising staff on social sites themselves

In combination with directly observed and experienced customer behaviors and preferences, general site data can compliment understanding of customer social content needs.  What are some tactics and tools you’ve found useful for researching customers on the social web?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Customer & Influencer Research in Social Media | 27 comments | http://www.toprankblog.com

What’s missing from the equation above? You guessed it: blog promotion.

Creating a glitch-free blog with informative content means next to nothing without attracting readers.

Start promoting your blog today with these five effective tips:

1. Involve influential industry bloggers.

By linking to popular blogs, you can gain the attention of both the influential blogger and his or her readers.

But your blog won’t be the only one to benefit. You’ll be giving the other blog a little link juice – and be paying them a compliment at the same time.

Try out a few of these ideas for leveraging other blogs:

• Create a post around an interesting concept published by an influential blogger: Be sure to attribute the information to the blogger and link to his or her post. And don’t forget to offer additional unique insight to make the post your own.
• Interview an influential blogger and turn it into a Q&A post: That blogger is sure to link to your post, and his or her readers are likely to visit your blog as a result. Side benefit: Including the insight of a thought leader will help position you as a thought leader as well.
• Create a list of influential blogs: Include popular blogs from your industry, and include a link, short description and even a screenshot. Online Marketing Blog has successfully done this with its BIGLIST of online marketing blogs. Publish a blog post each week highlighting one or two new blogs to promote the list and acquire another link to the list.

2. Promote your blog via social media.

If your organization already has a solid presence on Twitter, Facebook or other social media channel, leverage your followers or fans to promote your new blog.

For example, when a new post goes live, create a short tweet with a link back to the post – and provide the link on your Facebook fan page.

A few tips to keep in mind:

• Whenever possible (we know how quickly 140 characters can be used up!), include the blog name in tweets and other social media messages.
• Auto-feed new posts to your social media accounts with tools like FeedBurner. But if you choose this option, make sure your headlines are as compelling as possible for social media.
• Maximize promotional efforts by asking employees to add the blog URL to their signatures and personal social media accounts. Employees can also re-tweet posts that they find interesting.

3. Create “link-bait” posts and “sticky” headlines.

Creating compelling headlines or posts that resonate with social web users is another way to garner attention for your new blog.

Try some of these ideas:

• Write counter-intuitive posts – i.e, “The 10 Worst Online Marketing Ideas” or “The 5 Quickest Ways to Get Caught in the Spam Filter.”
• Incorporate celebrities into posts (if appropriate for your industry) – i.e., “Top 10 Celebrity Tweets of the Week”
• Leverage the sticky headline formula, “number + adjective + sticky message” – i.e., Lee’s recent post, “10 Must Read Tips to Start a Small Business Blog” (see image below)

4. Promote the blog on your corporate website.

It’s important to gain some valuable real estate on the homepage of your corporate site – particularly in the early stages of getting a new blog up and running. Create a button with a link to the blog to appear on the homepage, or at the least provide a link to the blog in the nav. The Otter Group does a good job of promoting its blog on the homepage of its corporate website (see image below).

In addition to the homepage, ensure the blog is included in the upper and right-hand nav on all website pages. The goal is to make it as easy as possible for visitors to find your blog.

5. Promote the blog offline.

For all of the online channels available to promote your blog, there are just as many offline channels to leverage. Don’t limit yourself to the online world. Instead:

• Add your blog URL to business cards.
• Promote your blog at industry events.
• Get print publications to pick up blog posts.
• Use word of mouth to let customers and business partners know of the new blog.
• Include the blog URL in the boilerplate of press releases (and in online releases, too).

Of course, these five tips are just a few of many ways to promote and market business blogs. Whatever promotional efforts you choose, look for tactics that will help you reach business goals whether they are increasing awareness, garnering buzz in the media or driving additional website traffic.

What tactics have you used to promote your blog?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | 5 Sure Fire Tactics to Promote a Business Blog | 48 comments | http://www.toprankblog.com

Marketo is one of the fastest growing software companies in the U.S. and this session is a case study for how Marketo has achieved that rate of growth.

Marketo launched their main product about 2 years ago. In 2 years, they’ve signed up 400 customers at a value of about $30,000 per year in recurring revenue. The current run rate is over $12 million which is pretty impressive for a 3 year old company.

Marketo revenue cycle benchmarks show that Marketo spends about 50% more than comparable companies on Marketing but less on sales. Their customer acquisition cost are much less than other software companies. Marketo has a very efficient marketing and sales effort. How is that so? They use their own product and have made smart investments in their marketing efforts.

Rather than a sales cycle, Marketo focuses on the revenue cycle that starts from awareness to becoming a customer.

Awareness > All Names > Engaged > Prospect Qualified > Lead > Sales Lead > Opportunity > Customer

Marketo keeps their landing page forms very simple. They then actual manually check the company web site and decides if that inquiry is a worthwhile prospect. Since they’re marketing automation company, adding a manual process may seem contradictory but such activity helps sales people evaluate companies a lot more effectively.  Contacts are then nurtured and scored. If they score above a certain level, they become a “lead”.

Awareness – Investments in awareness and brand have paid off in a very big way for Marketo. They’v found it to be very effective to focus on content and thought leadership through tips, best practices and ideas that are available without registering.

Marketo’s blog is their single most effective marketing tactic. They’ve actually diverted marketing investment away from other activities and focused instead on blogging.  Woot! TopRank gets a shoutout as Marketo’s SEO agency.

PPC is the top converting tactic and their best leads are coming in from inbound: search and word of mouth. Once a prospect is generated, sales follow-ups are personalized and very soft touch.

What is Lead Nurturing? The art of maintaining permission to stay in front of your buyers as they educate themselves. The key to lead nurturing is relevance.

Types of Lead Nurturing: Stay in touch, Incomin lead processing, Accelerators, Lead lifecycle.  If you get a new prospect, about 1/4 are sales ready. Putting lead nurturing in place resulted in 50% more qualified sales leads at 33% of the cost.

Content mapping. Make sure content is relevant to where buyers are in the buying cycle. Think big, start small and move quickly. It doesn’t have to be your content either. You can package other content with your observations surrounding it.

Companies with sales people that spend the time to qualify leads ultimately generate more revenue.

Lead scoring rules focus on behaviors: Latent and Active. Latent means people engaging with content. Active means showing interest intent such as Googling Marketo’s brand name as well as downloading reviews, visit web site 2x in one week.

There’s a certain threshold that’s met to initiate follow up. There’s a huge drop off for leads that are not responded to with 5 minutes or less.

Inbound leads are segmented: target companies, enterprise companies, other. Also segmented by latent or active. Response time is based upon meeting scoring criteria.  Inbound calls, contact us forms, and qualified free trial requests get “Active” follow up. ie speedy follow up.

At the end of the 21 day lead nurturing period, a final email is sent giving options for recipient to self score themselves in terms of interest in Marketo.

No lead left behind: There’s an automated process that reminds sales teams to follow up. This dropped unresponded leads from 33% to 5%.

Lessons learned: Focus on the entire revenue cycle, not just generating new leads. Do not understimate the value of creating content! Build trust and reduce risk vie thought leadership and social media. Leverage analytics.

You can learn more about Marketo on their blog and on Twitter.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | OMS10 B2B Marketing Case Study: Marketo | No comment | http://www.toprankblog.com

As prep for a presentation I’m giving Thursday at Online Marketing Summit on the intersection of SEO, Social Media and PR, I reached out to a few local journalists and industry news contacts and asked for examples of how they used search engines or social media to do story research.

Newsrooms are cutting staff and reporters and editors are hard pressed to do more with less. Tools like search engines and social media make available a tremendous amount of information in real-time.  The news world is a world of deadlines and it would seem the use of search and social networks to source experts or people/companies that fit a story angle would be ideal. Even respected news organizations like the BBC are encouraging their journalists to embrace social media.

This kind of insight is very helpful to understand how companies can make their news content more easily discovered via social web participation, content and optimization.  Why is that important?  According to TV News Reporter Jason DeRusha, “Private business does a horrible job cataloging their expertise in a manner that’s search engine friendly.  This is a real opportunity, as journalists become much more crunched for time, and use search as quick way to identify local experts.”

National Public Radio’s Jon Gordon uses search and social in a way that epitomizes the response we received from all types of journalists: “I use search engines on almost every story.  I use social networks to find additional sources, as well as for story idea generation and story feedback.”

Here are a few examples of how journalists use search engines and social media tools to connect with story subjects. Not all of them are business situations, but are helpful as feedback on where to spend time creating, optimizing and socializing news content.

I begin every day at search engine. It doesn’t matter what story I’m working on, it always starts with a search. I work on a segment called “Good Question,” so I often type my question directly into Google, and see what comes up. When searching for local experts, I’ll often take the subject matter, tack on the word “Minneapolis” and add the word “expert.”

For example, last week I did a story on whether cursive handwriting was vanishing because of e-mail. I typed “Minneapolis handwriting expert” into Google, and found several local handwriting analysts. Next, I searched for private schools (because public schools are often challenging to get permission to shoot at) and found the school we used for our story.

For my story on whether we get enough Vitamin D in Minnesota, I searched “Vitamin D” “Minneapolis” and “expert.” If a local company showed up very high with their own expertise in those results, I would have called that company.
Jason DeRusha, WCCO (CBS) TV News Reporter

Often times, the use of search engines and social media sites intersect. Here is an example provided in our initial survey:

I was writing a column about the planned partnership between Google and Yahoo. I tracked down potential sources first using Google and LinkedIn, and came across a white paper prepared by a senior fellow at the American Antitrust Institute. While I could not easily find an e-mail address, I went to Facebook where I located him, then sent a message. He replied and we followed up with a phone interview.
Marketing Industry Journalist

In some cases, news publications also run real world events. Example: iMediaConnection has ad:tech, MediaPost has OMMA, Search Engine Watch has Search Engine Strategies. Here’s some great insight from MarketingProfs on how they’ve used social media tools for finding writers, case studies and speakers:

We do use social networks extensively to find key writers or speakers for our events or publications. I also use it to monitor key issues to cover in our newsletters, seminars, research, and so on: Social networks are a great way to take the “pulse” of a topic. What are people talking about? Is this a hot-button issue or not?

For events: Social media is integral to programming the agenda. We always distribute the proposal form for potential speakers via various social channels (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn).

Same for our case study collections: We mine for good stories by asking Twitter/FB/LI. For example, “Who has a good story on social media ROI?”

We always harvest an abundance from this “social Google,” open-ended approach. Once we have harvested leads from those channels, our seminar programmer or writers can follow up via email or DMs, whichever.

LinkedIn is a great place to mine client-side folks. It’s especially valuable for us as we try to include a significant percentage of client-side speakers at our events, and often client-side folks are harder to uncover/book. And obviously, our case studies always feature client-side folks.

We also use Idea Scale to crowdsource topic ideas for our event agenda.

We use Flickr all the time to find creative common graphics for use on the blog (or for the contributed pieces I do for AMEX Open Forum); we use YouTube and Slideshare to see possible speakers or presenters in “action.”
Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer, MarketingProfs

Some Journalists are more tech and social media savvy than others resulting in some unconventional uses of social channels to create efficiencies in reaching sources:

“One of my key social-media tactics for work is a bit obscure: I autofollow everyone who follows me (using SocialToo). The reason for this: Crucial exchanges for stories occur via DM, which is why I do not want to ever think about whether there is reciprocal DM-ing with this or that person. Once this is set up, I can use Twitter as a sounding board with questions related to stories, get initial responses via public tweeting, then take them into private DM-ing as needed (or switch to e-mail or the phone). With close to 10,000 followers now, this is a system that works well – with parallel sourcing via ProfNet and HARO, which I see as two legs of a tripod. Twitter is the third.”
Julio Ojeda-Zapata, Technology Editor at St. Paul Pioneer Press

Sometimes the information found isn’t what companies or individuals would want a reporter to find:

I routinely track down potential interviews by sending out a Tweet. Most recently, we came across a number of Toyota car owners who fell under the recent recalls. It would have been very difficult to find those people in a short amount of time without this type of technology.

Just today I was feeding and getting information through Twitter on the house explosion in Edina that helped our crews navigate around the situation and get better pictures of the breaking news.

Also, I used YouTube to find video of a man who is being investigated by a Ponzi scheme by the Secret Service. It turns out he had many videos of himself giving sales pitches to potential customers. We used the video on the air where otherwise we would have never known what the man looked like.

We often use Facebook to get photographs of crime suspects and or victims. And police investigators tell me Facebook is one of the first places they check when investigating someone involved in a crime.
Chris O’Connell KSTP (ABC) TV News Anchor/Reporter

Sometimes it’s not your content that gets discovered, but a connection to someone else that leads to being found:

This fall I was working on a feature about ethnic weddings in the Twin Cities, for our Weddings magazine. I was looking for recently married couples of various cultural backgrounds. I posted a query on Facebook to my recently married or engaged friends. Their responses led me to three of the five couples interviewed (via email contacts). After initial email correspondence, I interviewed the couples by phone and in person.
Senior Editor, Mpls.St.Paul magazine

I think this quote from Chris O ‘Connell sums it up nicely: “social networking has changed the way we do business and how we are able to get news and sources faster when deadlines matter.”

We’ll be conducting a new survey on Journalist Use of Search soon and will be posting more detailed data on how stories are sourced, tools used, preferences of types of information and more.

If you are attending #OMS10 be sure to check out our session on Social Media, Search and Public Relations at 3:15. It will be a very informative and engaging set of presentations from: David “dk” Klein, Dana Todd, Rand Fishkin, myself and moderator duties handled by Sally Falkow.

Does your company incorporate news optimization as part of your online marketing and content strategy? Do you optimize and promote news content differently than marketing content? Do you track whether the media finds your content via search or social media?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | How Journalists Use Search & Social Media | 6 comments | http://www.toprankblog.com

That’s a lot of people for a panel, so moderator Jason Baer decided that in the spirit of Twitter, we’d keep bios, questions and answers succinct and at 140 characters or less.

For those that can’t be here I thought I’d share the prep questions and my short answers with you. If you’re at OMS and you live blog this Social Media Leaders Forum, please leave a link in the comments.

What’s your advice for individuals just getting started using Twitter?

Have some idea of what you want out of Twitter. Connect with people of similar interests and goals and engage with them.

What’s your advice for individuals just get started using Twitter?

Have some idea of what you want out of Twitter. Connect with people of similar interests and goals and engage with them.

What’s the #1 myth preventing companies from embracing social media?

To start when you’re ready. You’ll never be ready. But you need to do it anyway because it’s the only way towards progress.

What’s the best way to integrate social media with other marketing efforts like email, direct mail, etc?

Strategically. Learn what customers want and leverage social technologies across channels to make it easier for them to get it.

What are the main differences between B2B and B2C social media programs?

More romancing in B2B & emphasis on qualitative interactions. Mass appeal of B2C provides large audience engagement opportunities.

Is social media best used for customer acquisition, or for customer retention?

Both. Social media is essentially word of mouth and once you start facilitating that and customer conversations, you create a cycle of acquisition & retention.

How do social media and SEO work together?

Yin & Yang. Social network channels of distribution promote content & attract links. Optimized social content grows networks via search discovery.

What’s the biggest mistake most companies are making in social media?

Outsourcing customer engagement. Companies know their own business and customers best and lose opportunity by not participating themselves.

What’s the most overrated social media site or tactic today?

Google. LOL. Actually, the one your customers are not using.

When is it okay for companies to not engage with their customers in social media?

That’s like saying when should you not answer the phone at your business? For severe dissenters invite offline discussion.

Does it make sense to make a Facebook fan page at the core of your social media initiative?

If the audience to reach is all about Facebook, then why not? Only caveat is that you don’t “own” 3rd party web sites.

How can agencies work best with their clients in social media?

Be a guide, partner, educator, trainer and source of ongoing support and innovation. Help them help themselves.

What’s the one social media skill set that you wish more potential employees had?

Honesty about skills. Social media user & expert are very different. Passion, curiosity and ability to really listen, learn and create value using social technology.

How important (really) are geo-location services like Foursquare and Gowalla?

If you were a brand, how interested would you be to know all the most active people visiting your stores? Many Advertising & social networking tie-in opportunities.

With so many companies now using social media, what’s the best way for a brand to stand out?

Find remarkable people to curate & tell your brand’s story. Listen to, engage with & empower customers.

How can you measure the effectiveness of social media efforts?

Start with goals, outline a strategy and how to best reach audiences. Then pick the right tools and metrics aligned with those goals.

There you go. I think this exercise proves that shorter is not always better. There’s so much more that’s meaningful to say about each of these questions. I may come back and add to this post after the session or we might just use them as inspiration for a series of blog posts.  Until then, be sure to read this roundup of 25 social media marketing tips.

What are some of your most pressing questions about social media? About integrating social media with other channels?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | 15 Social Media Answers From OMS10 | 5 comments | http://www.toprankblog.com

[Last week, we shared some web analytics basics for small businesses or web site owners new to tracking website visitor data. Building on that, this post explores what you should do next to report that data.]

It’s an exciting time to be a small business owner or communications professional. Why? We’ve never had more data and metrics at our fingertips. Actually, we flew past merely having data to having real-time data.

Surprisingly some don’t initially like web metrics. Common concerns I’ve heard over the years include:

• It’s too confusing
• Information overload
• What am I supposed to do with all this data?
• Won’t all this tracking be expensive?

All understandable to someone new to digital marketing but ultimately unfounded. Web metrics are simple to interpret, can be parsed to provide just the information you need, and provide actionable insights for your products or marketing without requiring an expensive research firm. When introduced and walked through the process, most companies quickly fall in love with the accountability provided.

Getting web analytics setup is step one. Once you’re tracking, the next step is reporting in a way that is meaningful to stakeholders and using the data to provide actionable recommendations at the strategy table.

Beginning the reporting process:

1) Learn the basic and advanced functions of your analytics package

If you’re using Google Analytics and are new, learn both the basic and deeper functionality, such as creating advanced segmentation. It’s critical to understand your tool before you get into creating reports. Inevitably after making reports questions will arise asking for specifics, so you’ll want to know how to answer them. Smashing Magazine has a fleshed out guide to Google Analytics that will give you a crash course in the app.

2) Pull key data from your analytics package and document monthly in your own dashboard

While there’s little concern major web analytics services will lose data, you should (either automated or manually) pull metrics out monthly into a customized dashboard. Now here’s the critical part: just pull out the data relevant to your objectives and defined KPIs. You can always go back into your analytics package for more detailed metrics (and you should be doing that anyway). By pulling out the data relevant to your objectives, you are being your own best friend and making it simple to craft internal reports/memos, create presentations, share metrics with your team and have it in a malleable format.

3) Know the difference between KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and objectives

More traffic to a blog may be nice, but if your goal is to build subscribers traffic is just a KPI. More traffic will logically build more subscribers and it’s something you want to track, but it’s not your success metric. Most web pros are extremely conscious of this difference, however I’ve seen many businesses and marketers either confusing these or not bothering to define them in the first place.

4) Draft detailed insights and an executive summary

If you’re doing something like emailing a report with the monthly web analytics summary, don’t send just the data. It’s up to you to interpret what the data means to recipients. Remember, even though you’re taking the time to learn how to report on web metrics the digital divide is still very real. Many won’t even know basic web analytics definitions. If your company is still new to web reporting, it’s an opportunity for you to become the internal analytics evangelist and educate your team. The more they understand, the more valuable the web reports will become.

In addition to the detailed insights behind the data, create a brief executive summary each month outlining the major trends in a quick to skim format. If the summary is compelling – you may hook team members to read the whole report. With that said, many will never get past the summary no matter how interesting it is. So it’s a critical component to influence decision makers who don’t have time to read a 1,000 word report.

5) Create goals that push you, but are realistic

Great – you’re now not just tracking web analytics, you’re analyzing the data and creating insightful reports. A potential outcome is someone will say: “we want to increase X metric by Y %.” Goals are a good thing and will keep you focused, but make it a policy to keep them realistic. Growing organic web traffic is a long-term process which unless you’re a seasoned digital marketer you may not be able to project realistically (and even then there are too many variables for it to be predicted with 100% accuracy). If you’re new, stay on the conservative side so you don’t set unrealistic expectations.

Now that we’ve gone through some basic tips for web analytics reporting – let’s outline a skeleton of some SEO and social media specific metrics worth reporting on.

Basic KPIs to monitor relating to SEO

A healthy stream of search traffic is vital to the success of any business’ visibility. You’ll want to monitor some specific KPIs to provide insight into your organic search traffic.

With the rise of personalized search, it’s smart to set your objective as organic search engine traffic, not search rankings. In a world where search phrases are getting longer and we all see a different SERP for the same phrases due to personalized search, rankings should just be a KPI.

• Branded to non-branded keyword mix - if all you’re getting is branded search traffic, you’ll want to conduct a technical and content SEO audit of your site as something is probably not in order. A well optimized site (unless it’s a brand with strong marketing prowess or has broad terms in their name) should see a majority of traffic from non-branded terms.
• Total organic traffic – increases in search traffic can potentially impact your other organic referral sources as well (for example, more people find the site via search engines, share via social channels, which spawns more referral traffic).
• Search engine rankings – they still matter to keep an eye on. An unbiased report of rankings in search engines for priority terms is something to monitor as it relates to the SEO health of your site.
• Most popular phrases – keeping track of the popular phrases sending you traffic is important – this data allows you to show correlation between rankings and web traffic.
• Unique pages on your site – if you’re interested in more search traffic, you should be adding content to your site over time. By adding fresh content at regular intervals, you’re creating signals to the engines to crawl more often and also create more potential search phrases users can find your site for.
• Depth/length of visit – if you’re optimized for certain terms but traffic from those terms is bouncing or leaving the site quickly, you may want to adjust your glossary.

More advanced users will want to track things like conversion rate per keyword, most popular pages, backlink volume and quantity, etc. But don’t become a victim of KPI creep – start simple and add more as you get comfortable.

Basic KPIs to monitor relating to social media

Along with your small business website, do you have a blog or forum where you’re nurturing a community? Below are some social-media specific metrics to monitor.

Your objectives could vary quite a bit (and may even be one of the KPIs listed below) as social media application is as open as your creativity.

• Number of subscribers – how many people are reading your blog through RSS or email every month? You’ll want to pay attention to this, as subscribers are a vital element of an online marketing growth strategy.
• Branded searches/non-branded – again, it’s important to know how many people are actively seeking out a community or blog you are monitoring/marketing. This number should grow over time as a byproduct of all marketing activity, digital or otherwise.
• Overall unique visitors - how much traffic does your community generate?
• Search engine traffic – search traffic to a blog or web forum should increase month over month as more content is added, links are acquired and authority is gained. If you execute properly increased search traffic is a by product of your social destination.
• Visitor to subscriber conversion ratios – how many people are coming to your blog but not bothering to subscribe? Might it be worthwhile to experiment moving around the subscription CTAs or adding another below content? You can’t know unless you’re tracking this data. Just compare unique visitors monthly to new subscribers and reduce. I.E. – if your blog had 1,000 visitors last month and 10 new subscribers, you’re converting roughly 1 subscriber per 100 visitors. It’s a rough number because certain referral sources will send better traffic but over time you’ll see the trend emerge.
• Followers/fans in outposts – Chris Brogan talked about using outposts in his social media strategy. Darren Rowse went ahead and fleshed out a visualization behind this. Outpost is the perfect word to describe how many of us leverage social sites to feed self-hosted communities that live in the open web. Track the growth of these monthly, and remember to do things that actively bridge the connections between them to strengthen your presence.
• Referral traffic – is StumbleUpon your #1 referral source month over month but you’re not calling it out specifically as a sharing button on your site? Are certain types of blogs sending you highly relevant traffic you can form deeper relationships with? A social program should be extremely sensitive to referral traffic.
• Number and quality of conversations/posts inspired externally - as your blog starts to grow in popularity it will spawn organic conversations/posts externally. You’ll want to know both how many have been inspired and if they were high quality (score them). Knowing this data, you can line it up next to your blog posts published each month and see trends in the the kind of content that resonates.
• Number of shares of content across platforms – in addition to conversations/posts inspired externally, you’ll want to know how many people Dugg, Stumbled, Tweeted or otherwise shared your content. Same process – line this up with content and you’ll start to see what is resonating vs. falling flat.

Wrapping up

Web analytics reporting is a requirement for modern businesses.  It allows your marketing to be more accountable and enables you to support key decisions with data – a powerful selling tool.  If you’re new, don’t let perceived complexity or jargon scare you off:  start simple and get into a rhythm with reporting on the basics.  Over time as your team becomes fluent the process, then you can add additional depth.

As many of you reading are extremely savvy in web analytics – what advice would you add to help those who are new?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Small Business Tips For Reporting Web Metrics | 12 comments | http://www.toprankblog.com

Being social on the web isn’t natural for everyone and certainly not for every company. Once people and companies “get it” and develop processes, listening programs and overall strategy, social media policies tend to lighten up and move towards being productive vs limiting.

Some people really shine in their social web participation and companies often see increased social networking and engagement by individuals as an uncertain area. Some see building personal networks and attention as a threat to the brand that prompts questions as to whether individuals are simply building their own brand, (brandividual) on the company’s dime or are they acting as they should on the company’s behalf?

This issue has come to light several times in the past. As an example, there are some interesting arguments surrounding Forrester’s recent policy decision to limit staff blogging to non company topics. Forrester’s product is their IP, so they want to control what IP is released. At the same time, analysts discussing those topics on their own blogs can build more attention and awareness of the products Forrester sells.

The issue of corporate brand and brandividualism will only increase in importance. The real and perceived loss of control for managers has to be dealt with eventually.  Concerns from managers are totally reasonable since not all individuals promoting themselves and growing their networks during business hours are doing so with corporate business goals in mind.

On one hand, the employee is paid to promote the company brand. Because of so many opportunities for self promotion with corporate brand promotion, there can be “distractions”.

It’s essential that the company and employees acting on behalf of the company operate with a congruent vision and mutually agreed upon expectations.

Many budding brandividuals have an over-inflated sense of importance because of what they perceive to be end goal successes which are often more like proxies or stepping stones to what’s really important for a business.

For example: attracting friends/fans/followers, being mentioned by influential blogs, networking with other “known” digerati can seem uplifting to an individual that seeks increased visibility and credibility.  Those are important events, but they’re not the end goals that help companies make payroll. They’re a means to an end (revenue, brand, customer acquisition and retention). I think a lot of the folks that get “amped up” by social celebrity confuse notoriety with the ability to generate revenue.

Of course customers might become aware of a company’s services because of their social connection with a brandividual and may even stay with a company due to their relationship with that individual. But that’s not the issue I’m describing.

I did a post about the crack-like addiction to online fame in the SEO industry a while back, observing newer SEOs giving away loopholes and “secret” tactics to gain notoriety. Seeing fame as an end goal vs. a tool to extend brand exposure and shorten sales cycles created a situation in the Search Marketing world where individuals would focus all their efforts on becoming “known”, missing the business objectives entirely. “It’s hard to pay the bills with a pocket full of famous“.

On the other hand, empowering staff to become better known and influential with which to promote your brand can be a great investment. The employee gets something to take with them when that time comes (and it will eventually) and at the same time, they have more to work with when promoting your brand.

Some managers will look at such activity and try to control it. That’s not the productive thing to do in my opinion. Others will embrace it and encourage their staff to be all they can be to meet personal goals and company goals at the same time.

It’s critical to set expectations and have a strategic perspective of what the brandividual’s efforts are to achieve. Managers have to talk to these staff members and get involved with what they’re doing more than other types of company marketing. That’s a bit of a rub sometimes because executives hire community managers or digital marketing managers for the purpose of promoting the company because they don’t have time and expertise themselves.

I think in most cases, the best thing to do is keep in perspective that the stronger the brand of the individual that is tasked with promoting a business, the more reach and impact they may have. Getting exposure themselves will indeed benefit them personally, but if they’re doing so as a member of your brand’s “team” then it’s no different than an all star on a sports team drawing more attention to the team franchise.

What do you think? Does “brandividualism” put companies and their brands at risk? If you work at a company and have become a bit of a brandividual yourself, how has the company dealt with it? If your company has some “rock star” social media staff, how do you best empower them? Or does your company prefer to try and control such activity?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Brandividualism: Dilemma or Opportunity? | 9 comments | http://www.toprankblog.com

Fortunately, social media masterminds at companies like Seesmic, TweetDeck and HootSuite — to name a few — have developed tools to make our Tweeting lives easier. Or at least more efficient.  We use such tools here at @toprank to grow own Twitter presence as well as for clients on a daily basis and have learned quite a bit about Twitter best practices and which tools work best.

Here are five Twitter account management tools to help you keep your Twitter activity in check – whether you tweet for one account or many.

1. HootSuite.com

HootSuite is a great – and free – tool for managing multiple Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Ping.fm accounts.

The Twitter and social media management tool allows you to personalize columns, so you can view multiple feeds from the same social networking account or multiple feeds from different social networking accounts. For example, with my personalized Twitter tab (shown above), I can view my Twitter home feed, Twitter mentions, sent Tweets and a saved search for “online marketing” – all from one screen.

Plus, HootSuite allows you to create a message and choose which social accounts you want the message to be automatically posted to.

2. CoTweet

Like HootSuite, CoTweet is a free and easy tool for managing multiple Twitter accounts – up to five – with a single login. It also allows brand and keyword monitoring through Twitter search.

This Twitter management tool’s true distinguishing feature is its workflow management capabilities (shown above). When an @ reply comes in to an account, you can assign it to a person on your CoTweet task to respond to.  They’ll be notified via email and on their own CoTweet page. Plus, the tool allows you to take notes on Twitter users for your co-users to see.

3. EasyTweets

EasyTweets is a low-cost Twitter management tool for managing multiple Twitter accounts – the more you pay, the more continuous searches, feeds and accounts you can track.

With this tool, you can automatically post RSS feed content and track RSS traffic in Google Analytics. That way, you can easily track traffic from Twitter and understand what users do when they get to your site.

Another useful feature, the Twitter management tool lets you set up continuous searches for brand mentions (shown above), and auto follow some or all users who mention your brand. Plus, you can be set up to send SMS or email alerts when people mention your brand. So wherever you are, you won’t miss your chance to respond to a prospect.

4. TweetDeck

This free desktop browser helps you keep track of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace activities from multiple accounts. Like the other tools mentioned here, you can update your accounts, follow topics with saved searches, and manage conversations with @ replies and direct messages from within TweetDeck.

But the social media management tool offers some more advanced features as well. TweetDeck allows you to record, share or watch video clips, and view YouTube videos, from within the tool (shown above). Plus, you can share and view photos, as TweetDeck now supports Flickr, Twitgo and mobypicture.

5. PeopleBrowsr

This Twitter and social media management tool, currently in Beta version, offers a very simple, visual browser-based dashboard view of social activity. PeopleBrowsr uses an interface similar to email, with the Twitter or other social feed appearing as a list in the center of the screen, and additional options in the left nav (see above).

PeopleBrowsr allows you to create and manage groups by adding public or private tags to any users from any of your different social sites. Then you can view everyone in a group in a widget of their own.

Whatever time you dedicate each day for Twitter – whether its hours or minutes a day – there’s a tool available to help you better manage activities. Try out some of our suggestions, and let us know what you think.

Of course there are more Twitter management tools than what we’ve mentioned here including: Seesmic, Tweetvisor, Splitweet and others. What’s your favorite Twitter management tool?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | 5 Twitter Management Tools You Can’t Live Without | 19 comments | http://www.toprankblog.com

Photo credit: freezelight

Dear “SEO Consulting Services New York” and you too “Starting A Home Business”,

I have an admission to make: I don’t like comment spam. You are comment spammers. Our readers don’t like you. I don’t like you. You’re not welcome here.

Our Akismet filter has been doing a good job of filtering out spam and our commenting filters within Disqus catch most of the non-automated spammy comments. But they still persist. Most people active online have real names (obvious I know, but stay with me). If they don’t use their real name, it’s popular to use a “handle”.   I can see that it might be reasonable for some people to have a few different handles, but for the most part, singular identities are the norm.

Where the “identity crisis” comes is the persistent and pervasive use of what I consider, spammy handles in blog comments. Doing this is as old as blogging itself.   It started with legitimate beginnings though. For example, I used to put “toprank” in the name field when making comments on other blogs since that’s my handle. Today, I just use my own name.  Apparently, there are a large number of people named, “internet marketing minneapolis” or “insurance leads”. I don’t think so.

We “no follow links” within our blog comments due to abuse by SEO spammy types. Actually, most of them are not professional SEO’s at all. Pro SEO’s would not be so obvious and stupid as to blatantly use keywords as a person’s name when the links are no followed. It’s a waste of time.

So, to “internet marketing india” and “buy viagra and ciallis here”, I’m pretty sure those aren’t your names or your handles. My position with this blog is that if you opt NOT to identify yourself as a person, then the comment has no place here.

My preference is for readers to use real names. When people do that, their comments also tend to be more thoughtful, intelligent and useful to other readers. Additionally, when people use a handle or nickname to reference themselves online, it’s usually a good comment. However, with the popularity of Twitter, most people use their Twitter handle which is often a one-word name anyway.

I simply draw the line with people (or bots) that insist on using keywords they want to rank for in search engines as their “Name” in our blog comments.  Same goes for those that decide to use a two word name that then decide to link to a sales letter for some kind of “automate all your online marketing” software.

We’ve published a blog comment policy several years ago, but after adding Disqus as our comment management system, we cannot link to it in the same way. However, there should be a link at the end of each blog post now so readers can our guidelines for commenting.

After blogging for 6 years, I’m not ambiguous in my thinking about this. I’d be curious to know if readers think this is extreme, but I have no problem saying that I’m pretty firm in this policy and not buying in to the argument that there’s an implied reciprocation that should happen when people comment that involves a keyword link in exchange.

If you’re a long time blogger, what decisions have you made about a blog comment policy?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Open Letter to Blog Comment Spammers | 48 comments | http://www.toprankblog.com

For many companies that are new to web analytics the idea of digging in and finding useful information can be daunting.  It’s common marketing sense to measure what you’re marketing, but making sense of analytics data doesn’t always find time in the mix of duties a small business or new web site owner is responsible for.

The amount of information that analytics packages deliver isn’t always easy to sort through and turn into business decisions. So what should those that are new to web analytics do? Keep it simple and start off with the basics.

Each analytics package is different in features, price and learning curve. I’d suggest starting out with Google Analytics as it’s free, feature rich, and not too complicated to learn. Start off by looking at the items below.

• Unique Visitors – Unique visitors are are an important metric as it counts everyone as one for any given time period. This means that if you had 250 unique visitors, 250 different people visited your site at least once. If your unique visitor number is low, it could mean that your site is either having issues in search engines, or need more content.
• Traffic Sources – Are you getting traffic from Google, Yahoo, Twitter, or other sites? Referring information can help you see where your traffic is coming from which you can then use to make decisions on where and how to promote your future content.
• Referring Keywords – These are the phrases that someone put into a search engine and arrived at your site with. Ideally they’d be keyword phrases that related to your company. If not, then it may be an indication that you’re either not optimized, or optimized for the wrong phrases.
• Top Content – No matter what size your site is, knowing what pages get the most traffic can help you when building out new pages. Using the same format, or building out content on that topic, can help drive more traffic. These are also pages that call to action (CTA) buttons should be added if you want your visitors to do download a white paper or do something specific.
• Location – If your business wants a strong local presence, the location area in analytics can tell you country, state and city of where your visitors are coming from. Are your visitors actually local? That’d be a good thing to know.
• Campaign Tracking –  Track visitors from sources where you are marketing to a particular goal page or conversion.

As you feel more comfortable with Google Analytics you can then start to explore other actionable data including conversions, trends and features such as the most often used search terms on your internal search engine. Features like goals, top entrance/exit pages, bounce rates, and time on site are also a good metrics to use in understanding how visitors are interacting with your content. Visit the Google Analytics Help page to find out everything you need to know to make the most out of GA.

Web analytics can be overwhelming as there is a lot of information to be analyzed and then decisions that need to be made from that data. Instead of trying to jump in and consume it all, take it one step at a time.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Basic Tips on Web Analytics | 8 comments | http://www.toprankblog.com

Understanding the needs of their “customers’ customer” is essential for PR agencies and communications professionals to remain relevant and productive. “Push PR” is increasingly being complemented by “Pull” tactics – optimization for discovery. Being able to provide value is essential and here are 3 ways a better understanding of SEO can do just that.

1. Fish where the fish are.

There were over 14 billion core searches in Dec (comSore) vs 285 million who watch TV in a given month (Nielsen). Consumers rely on search daily to find news and information. PR and communications types need to understand the consumer search behaviors and preferences (keywords) of their clients as well as the publications they want their clients to be covered by.

2. Journalists rely on search.

According to TopRank’s “Journalist Use of Search survey”, 91% of journalists, editors and reporters surveyed use standard search engines such as Google, Yahoo or Bing to do their job. That preference was mirrored by findings in a recently published “Social Media & Online Usage Study” (pdf) by George washington University and Cision where 100% of those surveyed use Google to research stories.

3. Optimization is about more than SEO.

Search engine optimization, digital asset optimization, social media optimization and even micromedia optimization (ie real time SEO) are buzzwords all representing opportunities for Media Relations and communications professionals to influence discovery by making it easier for various types of search engines to find, index and rank their content.

It’s imporant that communications people understand the different search options consumers and the media are using to distribute and consume news. If content can be searched on, it can be optimized. That includes everything from press releases to video to Tweets.

Search Engine Optimization or “SEO” as an umbrella term is typically concerned with any kind of work that influences any kind of search engine to do what it does best and hopefully in favor of the content being promoted. Most people mean optimizing content for better visibility in Google, Yahoo or Bing when they employ SEO tactics.

It’s important to note that many publishers are already using SEO tactics to make their news stories better suited for discovery and ranking on search engines. These efforts have resulted in substantial increases in traffic to online news sites, improving the attractiveness of advertising.

Digital Asset Optimization or “DAO” is a term TopRank has used and promoted since 2007 that makes reference to the different types of media search engines like Google have started to display (aka Blended or Universal search results) depending on the query. Search results are no longer limited to web pages and can include images, video thumbnails, news, blogs, books and local information. Optimizing for these different types of media involves understanding what digital assets can be created, keyword optimized and published online for search.

Social Media Optimization or “SMO” is a term initially made popular by Rohit Bhargava and added on to by several others in the SEO world including TopRank. While many social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn keep the bulk of their content behind a login and away from search engine spiders, many social interactions produce content that can be indexed and included in search results. Journalists and consumers increasingly participate with social channels to watch, share, contribute and curate information. If PR and communications can understand how to influence keyword use of social content then their news will be easier for analysts, reporters and journalists to find.

Here’s a story related to me by an editor in the TopRank Journalist use of search survey that illustrates the intersection of search and social media:

“I was writing a column about the planned partnership between Google and Yahoo.”

“I tracked down potential sources first using Google and LinkedIn, and came across a white paper prepared by a senior fellow at the American Antitrust Institute.”

“While I could not easily find an e-mail address, I went to Facebook where I located him, then sent a message. He replied and we followed up with a phone interview.”

Micromedia Optimization is a new term that basically means real time optimization of status updates and content sources that are indexed and included as real time content by search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. The same micromedia content can be shared and discovered on platform specific search engines such as search.twitter.com and across social networks that provide the opportunity to syndicate such content. Google Buzz, Facebook status updates and LinkedIn updates are also included in this category.

The takeaway that I think is most important for communications professionals is to understand the nature of search and how to match up optimization tactics with channels of disccovery. Using keyword research for both standard search and social search optimization of news content along with ongoing web analytics and social media monitoring are key.

I’ll be discussing these strategies, tactics and a lot more at SMC Louisville tonight 6:30 p.m. until 8:30 p.m. ET on at the Louisville Visual Art Association. I hope folks can brave the snow (safely) and make it out. You won’t be disappointed!

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | 3 Reasons PR & Communications Pros Need to Know SEO | 24 comments | http://www.toprankblog.com

This is a new small business, so considerations for what to do about a web site included: cost, functionality, flexibility, ease of maintenance and marketability. The web site needed to serve as both an online representation of the business, but without transactional functionality, as well as a host for landing pages used with email and PPC campaigns.

My recommendation for a low cost, easy to use and search engine friendly content mangagement system? Blog software.

What often happens when friends ask for advice regarding web marketing is that I’ll make some recommendations in a casual setting or email links to a few resources like this one on blog marketing tips, then a few weeks or months later, the conversation will turn to, “So, how is your blog or web site doing?”, and I find out that the site/blog was either not started at all, it was created in a way that blows away any chance of SEO or marketability outside of advertising or it was built using resources with no cost of entry but without the capabilities to scale if successful.

Something along those lines happend with my friend’s blog.

What was the issue? The blog was started using Blogger.com, which by itself is not a problem, but the blog address selected was: nameofstore.blogspot.com. This is understandable because it’s the default URL selection when you create a blog with Blogger.com.

However, picking a third party domain for the blog address violates one of the most important rules in sustainable blogging: Always host the blog address with a domain name you control. That means yourdomainname.com/blog or blog.yourdomainname.com or yourdomainnameblog.com.

Otherwise, you give up control. How so? What if the blog host goes down? Free services rarely provide support. Also, what if the service does not support the functionality you need? You can’t change their entire platform to suit your individual needs.

There are other reasons for keeping the blog address as part of your own domain name including the ability to change blog software services without having to change your blog address.

Of course there’s also a benefit for search engine optimization if you host the blog as a sub directory of your main company domain name such as yourdomainname.com/blog. Blogs are very linkable entities and other blogs tend to be enthusiastic about linking, so any links to your blog can be percieved as a vote of credibility to your main web site since the blog and the web site share the same domain name.

Now back to our tale of the small business blog. My friend had only made one post on the blogspot.com URL so nothing would be lost by moving to a dedicated domain name. My own experience with Online Marketing Blog was different. After blogging for nearly 2 years at a blogspot.com address, I decided to move to a dedicated domain name and Wordpress. It took some talented optimization and 6 months of aggressive promotion to recoup the linking footprint (100,000+ inbound links) that was lost. Of course, now our traffic is multiple times more than what it was.

What my friend decided to do was register a domain name and setup a hosting account. Since there was no main company web site to attach the blog to, this makes the most sense. Essentially, the blog became the company web site. With more and more businesses, this is becoming a very practical, cost effective and functionally efficient way to manage web site content: Using blog software as a content management system.

As my friend asked what to do next, writing everything down in a notebook, it became clear that there’s a litany of things you COULD do with setting up a blog. Even if we filtered it down to what one SHOULD do, the list was amazingly long. As someone new to the whole idea of blogging and this not being a formal consulting arrangement, I decided to create what I think, is a short list of what a small businesses CAN do when starting a blog.

1. Decide the purpose of the blog.

Do this before going out and registering a domain name or anything else. Is the blog going to serve as a journal for starting the business? Is it a search marketing tool? Is it to be used to demonstrate thought leadership and create credibility? Will it be a communication tool for customers? Will it also serve as the main company web site? Is the purpose some or all of the above?

I could elaborate on setting up each of these types of blogs if I ever decided to write that book, but for now, we’ll stick with a blog that serves as a company web site, hosts landing pages, serves as a small business resource and marketing tool.

2. Pick a URL.

If the purpose of the blog is to support company brand and audience, then the URL should be part of the company web site. Ideally, the blog hosting situation allows for a sub directory such as companysite.com/blog.  Otherwise, a sub-domain such as blog.companysite.com will work and you can can host the blog elsewhere, separate from the company web servers. IT will like that.

If the purpose of the blog is independent of the primary company brand, or messaging, then a dedicated domain name such as topicgoeshereblog.com might work better.

It’s tempting to use a keyword only domain name, but those keywords will not be a silver bullet for search engine rankings. A catchy, meaningul brand name for the blog will go much farther as content can always be optimized for search engine rankings.

3. Pick blog software.

In most cases, WordPress is the way to go. An inexpensive Linux platform hosting account that supports PHP and mySQL can be secured for $10-$20 per month. However, should the blog get really popular, expect to upgrade to support increased demand. It’s entirely worth it.

The blog software will need to be installed on the server that will host it and the database will also need to be set up. This is fairly straightforward, but in all honesty, it’s best to have someone that knows what they’re doing help. As an example, I do very little of the technical work on our blog and prefer to have a specialist (Thomas McMahon) take care of maintenance, adding plugins, design and functionality updates. We have outside programmers do any heavy lifting in the application development department.

Wordpress software is open source, ie free, so if you are code/technically savvy and you have the time to figure it out, it’s certainly doable. There is no one “right way” to setup a blog. There are literally hundreds of shades of gray.

It can cost a hundreds to thousand of dollars for a blog consultant to install, setup and customize the design of your blog. You’re not paying for the software, you’re paying for expertise that will save you MONTHS of time and allow you to get to market more quickly and efficiently.

4. Customize the blog.

After installation of the core blog software, there are a number of customization tasks.

First, the blog design should be modified to match your branding. If you don’t hire a consultant to do this, there are many free templates that can then be customized, but many of them require a link to the author at the bottom. Personally, I’m not a fan of those, but they are a low/no cost place to start. Design customization involves modifying the CSS, JavaScript, graphics and possibly a few database elements.

The second set of customization tasks involves plug-ins to improve the adminstration, front end functionality and the SEO friendliness of the blog. Thanks to Twitter and Thomas for this recommended minimum list of plug-ins:

• Redirection
• HeadSpace2
• Google XML sitemaps
• Gravity forms
• All In One SEO
• PostPost
• ACE WP Plug
• ComLuv
• Disqus
• Members only
• Cookies for comments
• Section widget
• Page order
• Related posts
• FeedSmith FeedBurner Plugin
• Sociable
• Askimet or WP-SpamFree
• Post Teaser

5. Create a content plan.

In concert with the purpose of the blog, it’s important to generate a basic editorial guideline for creating content. The easiest way to manage this is by creating categories for the kinds of content you plan on posting.

Before you create those categories, it’s a good idea to do some keyword research as the categories will become excellent repositories of related content. Why not make it even easier for search engines to understand and rank them?

Common keyword research tools include: WordTracker and Google. Paid keyword tools include WordStream.com and KeywordDiscovery.com

Once you identify which keyword phrases best represent the content you’ll be publishing, use them to name your content categories. Each time you make a blog post, that entry will be associated with one or more categories, creating a very search engine friendly repository of content.

Create an editorial calendar or schedule of posts to keep you on topic for your audience and true to the purpose of the blog. Leverage interactions with blog readers as well as your analytics to know if your content and keyword picks are productive or not.

6. Pick your blogging team.

In the case of most small businesses, the blogging team is a team of one. That’s fine, just be sure to document what’s working and what’s not so when the time comes, you can get your blogging team mate up to speed quickly.

Since blogger’s block (like writer’s block) can really dampen a good thing for a small business blog, go ahead and keep a good number of posts in draft mode. Add to them as you get new ideas and inspiration. Or facts and examples. That way, you’ll have a steady stream of blog posts ready to publish in advance. In fact, you can schedule blog posts in advance using WordPress.

7. Make it easy to share.

Blogging in a vaccum is inevitable blogging death. It’s essential that you solicit comments in your posts, respond to comments quickly, create and enforce a commenting policy. Being responsive is an essential part of attracting subscribers.

Don’t covet the comments either. Visit other blogs in your industry and write useful comments. Those bloggers may notice you and it can become something more, like an invite for a guest post, collaboration or simply a new online friend.

Make it easy for readers of your blog to save and share your content with sharing buttons or widgets. It pays to create accounts on the more popular services and develop social networks there. Your contacts on Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon and similar services will watch for your next post and vote for the good stuff, which can drive your content to be exposed on more popular areas of those web sites. More exposure can mean more traffic. The social bookmarks tool is handy for adding such functionality to any web page and Thomas offered several new blog promotion tips last week.

8.Get your social on.

RSS feeds come with blogs and it’s worth taking the time to make sure the RSS feed is readily available and obvious for people to subscribe. Submit your blog and RSS feed to our HUGE list of blog and RSS directories.

Set up social profiles on sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn as appropriate and automate the sharing of links from your blog posts to those services. In other words, you could use a service like TwitterFeed to publish your latest blog post to Twitter and Facebook automatically.

Be sure to publish your blog URL everywhere you publish your web site address.

9. Make static.

If you’re using the blog as a CMS for a small business web site, then make your static web pages such as those for About our Company, Product/Service pages, Contact Forms, etc. The blog can be customized to have a home page like any other web site as well. That way, visitors arriving on your site can see what they expect from a company selling products/services. At the same time, blogging creates a rich and frequent source of useful content that’s syndicated via RSS, promoted automatically to relevant social channels and leaves the door open for interaction via comments.

10. Measure. Test – Test. Measure.

It’s important that you set goals for the blog, a plan to execute tactics and most of all, measure progress. Most web site measurement is focused on web analytics and metrics specific to different types of marketing such as with email, SEO or PPC. Standard web analytics software such as Google Analytics will address the vast majority of your needs.

I would also recommend social media monitoring and analytics. Monitoring can be as simple as the RSS feed from search.twitter.com combined with the RSS feed from the results of a search on Google’s blog search. You could also use services like socialmention.com, trackur.com or more robust social media monitoring tools such as Techrigy SM2, ScoutLabs or Radian6.

Social monitoring tools will help you understand what your customers are saying about you on the social web as well as uncover new interaction opportiunities with influentials. Real time search means real time marketing and social monitoring can facilitate that. One example would be if a competitor Tweets a deal on a product. Your Twitter search on that competitor or product would create an alert. You could then decide to offer a deal at a lower price or some other counter offer.

Another example is if a customer complains about your company. Before others jump on the bandwagon, your social monitoring tools would alert you and you can then qualify and address the situation quickly.

As web analytics and social media monitoring tools become increasingly intertwined, you’ll be able to identify many other key metrics for the effect of your social participation on bottom line business goals.

There you go. Ten tips for starting a small business blog.

This was a long post and yet, it’s nowhere near a comprehensive guide to create a small business blog. Even though there is plenty of free blog software and advice available online, many companies would benefit from having professional help with a business blog.

The funny thing is, my friend will look at this post and say, “This is the SHORT list?”. Blogging can be simple to start, but no one said it wasn’t hard work.

If you’ve created a blog for your small business, what has your experience been? Did you do it yourself? Do you get expert help? Have you set up a small business web site using blog software? we’d love to hear about your experiences, challenges and successes.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Ten Must Read Tips to Start a Small Business Blog | 26 comments | http://www.toprankblog.com