Your smartphone is a resource for social media that cannot be ignored. Accessing social networks from Blackberry.com business phones or other smartphones increases the opportunity to monitor what others are saying about you, and communicate with your audience. As social networking from mobile devices has become more popular, a variety of tools made specifically for smartphones have emerged. Take advantage of them, and your social media strategy will be off on the right foot.

Get Apps

Rather than loading your phone’s Internet browser each time you want to get onto a social media site, get the apps that are designed specifically for your social network. This allows you to get to your social media account much more quickly. The BlackBerry Facebook application and iPhone LinkedIn app are among the tools out there — and you can also get instant messaging tools like BlackBerry Generation. Chances are, if you have a smartphone from a major manufacturer, apps have been designed to give you fast access to sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Download a Dashboard

Dashboards let you see multiple social media accounts at the same time. As an added bonus, many social dashboards let you schedule future updates. That’s right — you don’t have to log on at noon and send a Facebook update or Tweet, you can just ask your dashboard app to send it for you at that time. This strategy will lead to more consistency in your posts, something that is valued by your followers.

Take Advantage of the Camera

Your smartphone has a camera — so take advantage of it. Instead of just sending a tweet about how great your company event is, snap a photo of the packed crowd and upload it you your social networking site. Adding media to your posts gives your friends and consumers a more vivid picture of what you’re talking about. When they comment on what you’ve posted, a new opportunity for conversation is born. Many sites also allow you to upload videos from your device.

For more information on how to manage your social media accounts from your smartphone, take a peek at this article from Social Media Magic about how to best manage a social media presence via smartphone access.

This is a guest post by Neil, head of marketing for eMobileScan one of the Uk’s newest providers to the data capture industry.

A higher click-through rate translates into more sales. A click-through simply mean readers liking what they read in an email, hopefully they will like your proposition enough to click through to your site.  Because they have read your email and have subsequently clicked through they are interested in what you have to say making  it easier to convert them to loyal customers via a good landing page, forceful sales pitch and ending with  a sale. This is what companies want from their email marketing endevours. However accomplishing high click-through rates (CTRs) is not as easy as it sounds, and is possibly only with a series of concrete steps to qualify your email list and make them more receptive to what you have to say.

Once you begin to understand what it is that your customers and prospects want and respond to, the better position you will be in to make more sales. Some of the steps that can be taken to ensure a higher CTR include:

A single message per mail

A single message per mail is far more effective than multiple messages in a single mail.  Your email list will at best skim through the mails you send and only pick out the main idea and the rest fall flat and unnoticed. Hence it is better to focus on portraying one solid message per mail.

A single specific and clear offer

An online business has lots to offer, but it is better to start with a single offer at a time rather than confusing the viewer with vague and ambiguous offers. An offer such as free shipping, a flat discount rate of 10% and so on, is always better than a general statement like “discounts offered”.  The focus has to remain on generating a click through and everything has to be geared towards it.

List clear steps to be followed to avail of the offers

These must be listed clearly, so that the viewer can spontaneously follow them instead of trying to figure out how, when and where he must act to get the offers. Timing is crucial and if the offer is for a short period, the viewer must know he has to act immediately.

Click-throughs come with clear subject lines

Subject lines of emails must be descriptive and distinctive. If the subject lines of the emails you send don’t grab their attention, they will be ignored. Instead, a subject line that is different and explains what lies ahead after they click on the mail, will attract the viewer’s attention. Needless to add that the mail must deliver what the subject line promises.

Embedded links are an advantage

This is because it becomes easier for the viewer to click on the link rather than follow a set of steps. Hence the link embedded text proves to direct them to the desired website.

Customized recommendations appeal and raise CTRs

Customers live to feel special and if the site remembers past searches and makes recommendations on that basis, they would be impressed enough to act on them. If past behavior online reveals a need, it can be fulfilled to enhance the appeal of the site in his eyes.

Conclusion

Clickthroughs take place when the reasons to do so are convincing enough. Lack of substantial reasons makes every viewer a fence player who could swing either way.

This is a guest pot by Amanda who is a writer & blogger who enjoys writing about Social Media &Search Engine Marketing. You can find her work at Bestrank.com.

Social media is a powerful tool for increasing traffic to your website. Many of the most popular websites on the Internet are social media sites, so there is a huge base of users from which to choose. Moreover, social media websites are free, so the only reason you would need a budget is if you work with an Internet marketing company to help you expand your traffic. The following is a guide to help you promote your blog through social media.

Pick a Topic that is Buzzworthy

Before you post anything to your blog, you want to make sure that your content is interesting to your readers. There are several topics that you can write about to help engage your audience better. Adding graphics, whether it’s a photo, clip art or video, will also help improve reader experience. There are several routes to take including news, top 10 lists, controversial topics, opinionated columns, or popular product reviews. Infographics are a growing trend that can help you to engage your audience while also providing useful or poignant information.

Decide Where to Submit Your Posts

Now that you’ve got your post ready, you’re going to need to make a list of the various sites that you want to submit your posts to. There are plenty of sites to choose from such as Facebook, StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, LinkedIn and MySpace, just to name a few. If you plan to create several accounts, keep in mind that standardizing your usernames can help make it easier for your viewers to remember you across several social bookmarking sites. Using social media marketing to your advantage like this can help to increase your site’s organic traffic and improve your blog’s online reputation.

Make Your Blog Social Media Friendly

Once you have a feel for the social bookmarking sites that you plan to promote your site on, start adding buttons to help make the social bookmarking process easier for your readers. Consider installing a Sphinn button, a Facebook “Like” button, a Retweet button, or just install a widget that will add a bevy of social bookmarking buttons. To help your social media marketing efforts, try to make your blog more “time-friendly” by organizing the format of the post itself. Paragraphs with headers and bulleted or numbered lists are a great way to help improve readability for your readers, too. Busy people might skim through your post, so make sure that they can still derive some sort of value from it.

Keep it Fresh

If you rarely update your profile, or rarely engage in any activity on a social network such as Facebook, people will quickly lose interest in you and your profile. Remember the adage, out of sight, out of mind. If you have a twitter account, send out a tweet when you put up a new blog post. If you have a Facebook account, make a status update when you incorporate new products or services. Be careful not to get carried away; if you bombard users with updates about your blog, they may very likely get tired of it.

Avoid Appearing Like an Advertiser

While you should be using the social media websites to promote your blog, you should behave as a part of those communities. Whereas search engine marketing gives you visibility to search engine users, on social networks you can look at each user’s profile and personalize your interactions with them. Comment on other users’ posts and profiles.  If all you do is post about your blog, you will lose the interest of other users. If a person really enjoys the blog post, he or she may look through your archives to read older posts as well.

There comes a time in most websites’ lifetime when it is necessary to transfer to a new web host. Hopefully, your reason for transferring when the time comes is due to a substantial rise in traffic and you require greater resources to handle it, and not because of a troublesome web host. At that time, the availability of your website is crucial and there is no room for downtime if you’re building your business online, since this can mean missed opportunities.

Here’s a simple tutorial to help you complete the web host transfer with absolutely zero downtime and without hiring a professional to take care of the task for you.

Step 1 – Backup All WordPress Files

Once you have your new hosting account ready and activated, you can start creating a copy of your existing files with your current web host. Login to your old web host’s control panel and navigate to your File Manager. The folder you will need to backup is the one that contains all WordPress content including images and core files. This is usually within the public_html folder as shown below.

The simplest method for backing up these files is to select all files and folders within the directory and execute the compress command which will compress all files within the folder into one manageable zip file. The option usually looks like either image below:

Step 2 – Optimize Your Database

You will be creating a backup of your WordPress database but before you do, you will need to optimize your WordPress database tables. An easy way to do this is to use the optimize tables option with the WP-DB Manager plugin. This is necessary to reduce the size of your database backup.

Step 3 – Disable all Plugins

Login to your WordPress dashboard and disable all plugins.

Step 4 – Backup your WordPress Database

Login to your old hosting account and select your phpMyadmin or manage MySQL option to gain access to your databases. Create a backup of your WordPress database and download the SQL copy to your computer.

To backup your database within phpMyadmin:

Once you’ve completed the steps in the diagram scroll to the bottom of the screen and select “Go.” This will download the SQL file to your computer.

Step 5 – Upload the Downloaded Zip File

Login to your new hosting account and upload the compressed file you downloaded in Step 1. This should be uploaded to your root directory. Once uploaded, go ahead and extract the files to the directory. You will then see that your WordPress folders and other content are now present.

Step 6 – Create The New Database

Within your new hosting account, you will need to create a new database. Most web hosting accounts provide a “Database Setup Wizard” that will take you through the steps for creation. Use this option and it will allow you to assign the database name, user, password and account privileges. Ensure the user is assigned all privileges and copy all these details to your notepad for use later.

Step 7 – Restore Backup Database

Within your new host, select your phpMyadmin option and select the database you created in Step 6. After selecting the database, you will notice that it has no tables. Then you should select the Import tab to import the old tables into the new database.

Click “Browse” to search for the database backup file you downloaded in Step 4, then select “Go.” This will begin the upload process which can take a while depending on the size of your database backup file.

Take note of the maximum file upload size on this screen as you will not be able to upload anything larger. If it is larger then you would need to contact your new host’s tech support.

Step 8 – Edit the wp-config.php File

Browse to the file manager of your new hosting account and search for the wp-config.php file within the root directory. This is where you will enter your new database details. As shown below, edit this file with the new database credentials and save.

Ensure that you download a backup copy of the wp-config.php so that you can revert to the backup in case you make any major mistakes.

Step 9 – Assign The New Name Servers

Now that all files and database tables have been transferred to the new hosting account, its time to change the name servers so that they point to the new host provider. Usually, the name server is displayed along with general statistics and account details. However, if you can’t find it then contact tech support.

The name server normally takes the format of ns234.hostprovider.com & ns235.hostprovider.com.

Your host provider will tell you that it takes up to 72 hours for the new names to propagate but it usually takes about an hour or two. As long as you following the steps above accurately you will not even notice when the change is complete.

Conduct Thorough Testing

Ensure that once the transfer is complete you conduct a thorough testing of all plugins and features of your site and WordPress dashboard to spot any potential problems.

That’s it, you have successfully transferred your WordPress site to a new host.

Troubleshoot

If you receive the error message “Error establishing a database connection” after the transfer takes place then you will need to check to ensure that you entered your database credentials correctly in the wp-config.php file and that it is uploaded to the new host directory.

If you experience any difficulties or would like to contribute a better idea for making this process more efficient, feel free to leave us a comment below.

Twitter right now is one of the largest social search engines on the web and though, in the past, there have been some talk about Twitter replacing Google as a search engine, ultimately it has become the perfect complement for Google and traditional search engine marketing. With over 200 Million tweets per day, Twitter is a massive database, storing and facilitating conversations that are visible by practically anyone who is willing to look.

People are talking about products, services, good / bad experiences, new ideas, moods, wants, needs and just about everything that can be expressed in 140 characters. This raw conversational data is your window into discovering what your audience is all about and through Twitter, you are able to effectively target the things of which your audience is interested.

Let’s take a look at how you can start producing market driven content that is easily monetized through the use of search.twitter.com.

The Importance of Knowing Your Audience

Basic marketing practices involve conducting market research, studying the preferences and nature of consumers and prospects, studying buying history and lots of other trends. All this data is important for marketers and online publishers like ourselves to ascertain a predictable outcome from our efforts and also help to define worthwhile, realistic targets.

You may have developed a passion for your niche and business but what good are your skills and knowledge if you have no idea who you’re trying to sell to and what they’re truly interested in. The marketers who know more about their audience will have a great competitive advantage since they will know precisely which direction to focus their marketing efforts rather than by chance. Almost like looking into the future through a magical crystal ball.

How Does Twitter’s Search Engine Apply To Blogging & Other Types of Business?

Let’s say you have decided to start blogging about cooking and initially you’re not quite sure how your potential audience will respond to your content. Using search.twitter.com we can do a search for cooking, baking, or food. Or a blog about exercise and losing weight could search for ‘lose weight’ and the results will show exactly what people are talking about, what they think about the topics and how they interact with others.

After spending some time to study this information, you should get a pretty good idea of the direction you need to take. Twitter is where people and conversations are and wherever there is a large crowd then the money will follow. So whether you are producing content for your blog or selling products and services, you have access to market insights through this unique search tool.

To start building your blog further, engage this new found crowd by following them, start conversations about the relevant topics, introduce yourself and let them know what you’re about and greatest of all, build relationships; do not spam.

Be Prepared!! Focus on Content

Above all things quality content is critical for the success of your online business. After you’ve captured the attention of the crowd, you need to have something on your site that keeps them coming back for more. This is where you need to go all the way. There is no room for mediocrity or copied, regurgitated content. Quality content will separate you from the average blogger and business person, placing you in the perfect position to excel, increase sales and attract deals that build your brand.

Ensure that you have calls to action like subscribing to RSS feeds, e-mail and following your social profiles. Capture all connections and visits.

Conclusion & Discussion

To know your audience is to possess the keys to the success of your business. Make studying interactions and prospects on Twitter a part of your daily routine and write down your findings. At the end of the day you should come to some solid conclusions about your niche and have discovered brilliant ideas for building your business and brand, as well as connecting and capturing the attention of your audience.

What’s your take on this? Have you ever used Twitter’s search engine for research? Let us know what you think in the comment section below. We would love to hear from you.

What is the most powerful, effective and surefire way, above all things, toachieve your goals and become a success in life? Pursue your passion! Regardless of how ripe a particular niche or market maybe, if you’re not doing business with a burning desire to win then you need to go back to the drawing board.

If you check history, a vast majority of the most successful entrepreneurs were extremely passionate and had an unwavering faith in their ideas and areas of expertise, even if the world is against them. Many persons live their entire lives regretful of lost opportunities and you will soon realize that the pursuit of happiness lies very closely with the discovery of PASSION.

Discovering Your Passion

The discovery of your passion is one of the greatest treasures you could ever find and before launching any venture, you need to analyze and determine whether or not it aligns with your passion. To discover passion, we need to truly live and living comes from experiences and taking risks. Get out, socialize with your neighbors, business people, ask questions and never back down from a challenge. Your passion will inevitably reveal itself, and when it does, that’s when you can effectively make your move. You can incorporate this passion into most aspects of an online venture. First things first though, choose a related domain name and register it. Try going to www.intuit.com/domain-name-registration/ for an easy, convenient way to accomplish this. From there, the rest should start coming naturally.

Eliminate words such as can’t, never and impossible from your vocabulary. These will block opportunities that lead to your passion. When challenges are presented, rather than thinking about how difficult it is, focus on what you will achieve when you overcome; think about the prize. Every experience will lead you closer to the discovery of passion.

The Right Blogging Niche For You

Many persons will say that the best niche is the one with the largest audience, prospects and a market hungry for new ideas and competition. Well I say the best niche is the one you’re actually passionate about. Regardless of any recession or how saturated a market may seem, there is always room for brand new innovations.

Great ideas begin with passion and if you’re truly passionate about your online blogging business then it won’t be difficult for you to go one step farther than everyone else, to do more, read more, sacrifice more and go the extra 100 miles to please your audience and customers. Your efforts will be multiplied by your passion and success and profits online will be well within your reach.

Passion Is Contagious

With Millions of blogs currently in existence you cannot afford to be just like everyone else and honestly, I see hundreds of blogs that seem like they were produced in the same old factory. Oftentimes there is no passion and you can sense that they’re just going with the flow trying to make an extra buck or two. I don’t read these types of blogs and hundreds of millions of other persons don’t either.

Readers are looking for leadership, inspiration and a powerful voice to propel them. They quickly pick up when writing is just ordinary. They are looking for bloggers and entrepreneurs with passion, direction and authority and they follow these figures because they know that there is always something to be learned from passionate people.

How Long To The Millions?

There’s no set time period for reaching sustainable success and making millions but the closer you are aligned with your passion, your road to success becomes more certain. When pursuing passion, you need to ask yourself these questions:

1. Do I see myself doing this for the rest of my life?
2. Would I do this for free?
3. Do I get excited every time  someone asks about my passion?
4. Do I have unwavering faith even when others have negative things to say?

If your answer to these is yes then the time it takes to achieve the ultimate millions won’t really matter because you will be doing something you love. Whether it takes a year or ten you will be happy where you are and all the time you’ve been waiting, within your heart you will know that your success is certain.

Conclusion & Discussion

Think about it, what are you truly passionate about? Food, music, pets, blogging, comics? Wherever it lies there is an opportunity for launching yourself out there and finding success. If you find yourself investing in a blog or business that is the complete opposite of your passion then you need to elegantly depart and start pursuing the real deal.

As your passion grows, ideas increase, audience grows and business multiplies; live and do business passionately! Share your passion with us in the comment area below as well as what you’ve learned on your journey. We would love to hear from you.

Photo credit: h.koppdelaney

Coming up with the perfect domain name for your business idea, product or any type of creative work requires a lot of imagination, strategy, originality, research and good linguistic design practices. Purchasing your domain name is quite similar to buying a piece of real estate as it truly is an investment that can help you make millions from your idea or zilch.

Essentially, its not a decision that should be quick and impulsive; take the time to think about the name and the factors discussed below. Whois.domaintools.com is a very useful website that provides information on whether a domain is available for registration or not.

Types of Domain Names

There are 2 types of domain names, those that are “discoverable” and the others “brandable.” The type you choose depends a lot on what your traffic generation strategies will be. A Discoverable domain name is one that can be found by someone who does not know about your business but is conducting searches on keywords and topics that are related to your business. These types of names are generally descriptive and depend greatly on keyword competitiveness.

A Brandable name, however, creates a distinct identity or image and evokes interesting ideas and feelings in the user. Names like Google, Yahoo and Flickr have unique character strings and will be best found on the original website. People who know of your business can easily use a search engine to reach you, though this may not be a great source of traffic initially. This means, however, that when your name is mentioned, it dominates search results and this establishes greater credibility and recognition.

Avoid Trademark / Copyright Violations

Copying a successful brand or business name might seem like a profitable short term idea since the qualities associated with those brands may be shared but the truth is that this is a recipe for disaster and will prove very unproductive. Copying trademarks will only lead to potential lawsuits that could cost hundreds of thousands of US dollars to mitigate and lots of time wasted.

Short, Catchy, Easy to Spell & Memorable

There may be times that you will come up with a name that has some sentimental significance to you in some way and all your days you dream of launching your business with it. The reality is that if that name is too complicated and does not “roll right” with the tongue it could mean a bad start online. If your domain name requires a lot of attention to detail to type correctly then you’ve already lost some of your branding and marketing value.

Try to avoid using words that contain too many of these letters: “q,” “x,” “z” and “p”

Ensure the name blends well

For example: Microsoft, Farecast, YouTube

A blend combines part of a word with another word or word part. The name Microsoft combines the “micro” part of “microcomputer” with the “soft” part of “software.” When blends involve a surprising overlap in sound between the two words, they’re a form of wordplay. Farecast is like that. It combines the words “fare” and “forecast,” and “fare” resembles the first syllable of “forecast.” Don’t pile up consonants in ugly ways (like in the name Syncplicity), and don’t use important words to replace syllables that aren’t emphasized (the way the names Mapufacture and Carticipate do).

No Numbers & Hyphens

Hyphens and numbers make it very difficult when giving out your domain verbally. There is the confusion of remembering whether the number must be spelled out or typed in numerals; and hyphens are often forgotten.

Have 5 Phrases in Mind When Brainstorming

When brainstorming your domain name it is good to have 5 terms or phrases in mind that best describe your ideas. Once you have this list you can start pairing them or adding prefixes or suffixes to create a great name.

Create & Fulfill Expectations

When someone hears your domain name it is great if they can immediately correlate it with what your site will do for them and what type of content they will find there. Names like careerbuilder.com, newser.com, hotmail.com and webmd.com do that easily. Google.com, amazon.com, etc. required more branding since they were not intuitive, although they are pretty much now after great investment and hard work.

Conclusion

As domain names become even more scarce, you will need to approach the naming process in a strategic, sensible and rational way. Bearing in mind that your name is an investment in your business and can even help to determine the ultimate value of your idea in the long-term.

What are your thoughts on domain naming? Share them with us.

The voice of the blogosphere has grown over the years to be a well respect medium for disseminating information as well as a tool for launching businesses and opening doors for ordinary people to making a decent living and achieve their dreams online. Blogging today is not quite as simple as it was in past years and with over 200 Million blogs in existence the competition is quite fierce.

However, one thing I have noticed is that not many bloggers are extraordinary in their efforts to making their blog a success. Lots of mediocrity and sub par performances are abundant as most don’t truly respect the art and are just not hungry enough to seek to be better day-in day-out.

There will never be a perfect blogger but we can work to achieve the best of the best by continuously reading, tweaking, studying, designing and learning to ensure that we stand out in the crowd.

Here are 20 excellent resources that will help you to get started on the right track if you’re new to blogging as well as links for the seasoned blogger who needs to tip the scale.

Excellent Books

Crush It! Why Now Is The Time To Cash In On Your Passion – By Gary Vaynerchuk – Through his own success, Gary highlights useful and unique methods for making the most out of social media to grow your business online through the power of passion.

31 Days To Build A Better Blog – Darren Rowse provides a daily “things to do” course that instructs you on what to do to get your blog off the ground and driving traffic.

Digging Into WordPress – This book provides the most concise, easy to follow guides on how to master the most powerful blogging platform on earth, WordPress.

Purple Cow – Transform Your Business By Being Remarkable – The thoughts and strategies of a marketing mastermind, Seth Godin. In this book, he provides practical and effective marketing techniques that apply easily to every online business venture.

Design & Coding

How To Be a Rockstar WordPress Designer – Teaches how to truly make your WordPress blog extraordinary in design and content.

Lynda.com – This site has a plethora of unique, easy to follow video tutorials to help you master blogging, WordPress and anything digital.

WordPress Codex – From the developers of WordPress themselves, here you will find detailed explanations of every element within the WordPress CMS.

WordPress Themes

Within these sites you will find some of the best WordPress themes on the web.

Elegant Themes

Woo Themes

Awesome Sites You Should Follow & Use

Problogger.net – One of the best blogs you could ever read which gives practical advise from it’s founder, Darren Rowse, as well as the greatest minds on the net.

My Blog Guest – Excellent community, useful for finding Guest Blogging opportunities.

2Createawebsite.com Blog -Another experienced leader in the blogosphere who freely provides the knowledge to help you master blogging while earning from your efforts.

Sam’s Web Guide – Although fairly new, my blog provides articles that hit the nail on the head by pointing you in the right direction on your blogging journey.

WP Beginner – This site has amazing tutorials for tweaking and customizing your WordPress blog.

Other Online Resources

Google’s SEO Starter Guide – Forget about what so-called SEO experts have to say. Find all the information on SEO you will ever need from the creators of the biggest search engine.

SEO Book – Massive authority on Search Engine Optimization and is a powerful community for dominating your niche through search.

Google’s 20 Things I Learned About Browsers & The Web – To be an effective blogger, its very important to know the basics of the web, browsers and how it is presented to users.

Web Hosting

Host Gator – Host Gator is one of the best web hosts I have used since I first started building websites. My sites have never been down with them, they provide excellent support and sites load much faster than most other hosts I’ve tried in the past. I recommend you give them a try.

Online Tools

Firebug Extension for Firefox & Chrome – If you’re tweaking and customizing your own themes then you need to get this extension. It allows you to view and identify HTML and CSS elements that are crucial for making real time changes while growing to understand how your theme works.

Conclusion & Discussion

Whether you’ve been blogging for years or a newbie, the resources above will present something new and will help to grow or ignite a passion for blogging; and open your eyes to effective ideas over-looked by the masses.

Do you have or know of an awesome resource not mentioned above? Please share it with us in the comments section below. We would love to hear from you.

This is a guest post by David Edwards from Asittingduck.com.

If you look at the top Youtubers, it’s hard to believe that they started with zero subscribers. There are now over 15 channels that each have a subscriber base of over 1 Million! (more than some sky channels!). It all starts with 1,000 subscribers and spreads from there! The power of Youtube and other video sharing sites can’t be ignored and offers a wide audience that you won’t reach by solely maintaining a blog.

Here are 15 very effective techniques for attractive new subscribers and leveraging that traffic back to your website or blog.

1. Choose a memorable channel name, make it quirky!

Channels that are easy to remember, complemented with great video content will have viewers coming back for more and begin to build your brand and viewer loyalty. Also, try to make the name relevant to your content and keyword rich to ensure they are easily found through search engines.

2. Include A Call To Action

Engage your audience at the end of your video telling them what you want them to do, its very important to give them this nudge. Whether its to share the video, visit your website, sign-up to a newsletter, etc. if its great content they will do it.

3. Number your videos – It creates anticipation for the next one.

Its easier for viewers to watch multiple quick videos so if you can, split your videos in multiple parts. This work on the human nature, builds excitement and also allows those searching through google to find various sections of the video that may apply to them.

Keep videos within 3 minutes in length. Viewership tends to fall off when videos are too lengthy, unless it is super amazing content.

4. Network with everyone in your niche

Networking is what social media is about; get to know other bloggers and designers. Oftentimes they will like your content, share it and offer ideas and opportunities for building your online business.

5. Brand Your Channel

Add your logo, descriptions and other site info to ensure that your brand will stick in viewers’ minds.

6. Add Captions to your videos

YouTube, Google and other search engines index captions thus making your videos easier to find and understand thus increasing reach.

7. Tweet at the top guys – They sometimes respond!

There’s nothing wrong with attracting some attention from the high profile bloggers on the scene. If you know you have a killer useful video then share it. Warning: Don’t do this with every post to the same person, especially if its not relevant to what they’re about. That’s spamming! Don’t do it.

8. Link to your website on all video descriptions

Make it unforgettable!

9. Convince 100 facebook friends to start an account and subscribe to your channel.

Its guaranteed that some of them will help share it and spread your ideas.

10. Take advantage of your best video

If you have a video that has some popularity behind it, send the link to other bloggers and especially news websites that frequently feature user created content.

11. Read the YouTube blog

This will put you way ahead of most people, as some people don’t know they have one! The blog offers critical information for using YouTube effectively.

12. Go High-Definition (HD) – Future proof your work.

YouTube supports the best quality videos, so get out of the past, put your best image forward and start shooting videos in high-definition wide-screen format. They have a guide for recommended formats for video uploads. Usually, the best recommendations are:

• 30 frames per second
• HD quality video with 16:9 aspect ratio
• MP4 video file format with .H264 compression
• MP3 or AAC audio compression

Conclusion & Discussion

“YouTube” is a slow game, lots of channels are portrayed in the media as “overnight” success stories. If you can think of it as a 5 year journey and you enjoy the process of making and promoting videos then you will have a successful channel and the knock on effect is a successful website!

For years the art of search engine optimization has been praised as the end-all, be-all in runningasuccessful, money making website; and because of this thought, many persons self proclaimed as “SEO Experts” started popping up all over the web creating a lot of hype surrounding SEO practices and in the process, sent a lot of their dedicated followers on wild goose chases that yielded little worthwhile results.

The truth is that Google, the biggest authority on SEO and search, provides all the information and strategies required for mastering your niche through search. The information they provide is surprisingly very simple and straightforward and will prove to be less hassle and reap more rewards.

So let’s do some myth busting to shed some light on the truth about SEO.

Myth #1: WordPress plugins like All-In-One SEO Pack Automatically Boosts Search Traffic

The idea of a plugin that automatically does your SEO is pretty cool, most automated features can do
more harm than good actually. For example, the auto generate meta description feature which creates an extreme case of duplicate entries in certain themes. Other than that, you will need to manually edit certain elements of your site like title and alt tags, etc. The plugin simply facilitates easy editing and does not automatically boost search engine traffic.

Myth #2: Linking To Authority Websites Will Help Your Reputation

Although linking to website within your niche or chosen topic is best, it will not help your reputation in search engines and improve ranking. If that were the case, then everyone would start doing it and then it would just not make much sense.

Myth #3: The Only Way To Get Indexed Is To Submit To Search Engines

I have proven this one wrong over and over again as there are many other elements that initiate the crawling and indexing process. For example, a healthy dose of incoming links from sites that are crawled and indexed quite readily will help your site get indexed too.

Myth #4: High Pagerank Guarantees The Best Search Traffic

Sam’s Web Guide is currently a pagerank of about 3 and receive targeted search traffic for specific keywords that outrank many popular websites. The pagerank score reported by google’s servers are different from what they use internally for their search ranking algorithm.

Myth #5: Meta Tags Will Boost Your Search Ranking

Because of the abuse of meta tags over the years by black hat SEO’s to dominate search engines, google no longer places any weight on them. In addition, the keyword tags, meta description, meta author, and meta robots do not carry much weight either so do not spend a lot of time editing them.

Myth #6: More Internal Links Are Better

Its not the quantity that makes internal linking effective but it really depends on how relevant the linked content is to the original. Relevance is most important.

Myth #7: SEO Is Set & Forget

SEO is not a quick fix and requires consistent and persistent effort in building back links and real authority. This is why it is necessary to continuously guest blog, promote your site and create link worthy content. If your content is solid and useful, then others will readily link to you which builds authority and popularity on the web.

Myth #8: Large, Deep Directory Structures are Bad For SEO

This is not true. Provided that your linking strategy is accurate and contain no broken links or endless loops you will be fine.

Myth #9: Crawlers Don’t Read CSS

The google bot especially does scan CSS for spam type activity and hidden divs.

Myth #10: Using Online Services That Promise To Register Your Site To Hundreds of Directories & Search Engines is Good for Rankings

I have tried this many times in the past with various websites with very little success. The links are not really placed and if they are placed, the linking structure is usually irrelevant and on pages that are not even crawled. Don’t waste your time or money.

Google actually ignores unnatural link building strategies and obtaining 100 or more links per day in directories and other listing sites is very unnaturally. However, this is not the case when you have hundreds of websites reporting similar popular news. These are treated differently.

Google & Other Resources

The best place to find the truth about SEO is Google itself. They provide the most concise, effective and simple techniques for mastering the art and provide guidelines on what to avoid. Here are some excellent resources to help you build your sites’ authority in the long-term, eliminating the need to hire an SEO professional to do the work that you could easily learn to do yourself.

- Download Google’s SEO Starter Guide

- Search for questions and tips on Google’s Webmaster YouTube channel

- Use Google webmaster central

- Read 26 Major Google Search Engine Ranking Factors Every Blogger Should Know

Discussion

What rumors and myths have you heard about SEO that is not listed here? What are your thoughts of SEO and its future practice? Share your thoughts and experiences with us by leaving a comment below.