Online Assistant

In this age of network or no-work the need for a social network presence is imperative. And just what is a "social network?" Well, if you have to ask that, you have to have been under the nearest rock for the last five (or at least two) years.

Social networks are how the world communicates today. Facebook and MySpace are the new social meeting, greeting, reconnecting, and marketing forums of this techno-world we live in. Facebook, started by a 25-year-old Harvard dropout morphed from its original college campus based demographic to an internet absorbing phenomena that boasts an average of about 550,000 new members a day world-wide (Time, 2009).

And what was the biggest reason for the Facebook BOOM over the last two years?

You guessed it, Baby Boomers! MySpace, a significantly raunchier alternative to Facebook, a social networking website whose headquarters is located in Beverly Hills, California was at one time the most popular social networking site internationally (Wikipedia, 2009).

However, with the more mature 40-something crowd discovering the media and marketing possibilities of these social networks, not to mention connecting with old glory-day buddies, the more grown-up look of Facebook soon pushed the flashy and pimpy aside.

Social networking sites now abound in such a plethora of categories and formats that they are listed by the top 25 for the year. Facebook is number one (of course) with MySpace and Twitter following close behind.

Twitter, now there's another concept entirely. Not only can you post every passing thought that enters your brain, but others can choose to follow your "tweets" as you chirp along. What business executive wouldn't want to peep proudly every fanciful business venture that zaps across his corpus callosum?

WordPress allows Tom, Dick, Harry, Peter, and Paul to all have their own informative blogs on just about whatever subject the fellas can dream up. With Google, Yahoo, and Ning an individual can create an entire little online forum empire. There are also several truly, entirely business oriented networking forums such as linkedin.com and PartnerUp.com.

Social networking is not just limited to personal socialization, marketing, and business. It is becoming a huge and integral part of all forms of education. Online universities are one of the fastest growing internet presences today. Traditional universities are creating online curricula to supplement their in class lecture and in some cases entire courses are being developed for online presentation in lieu of traditional classroom instruction. Moodle and Joomla are just a few examples of interactive online presentation software that have social networking capabilities.

Needless to say, developing an online presence is imperative for any business in the online marketplace today. On a personal level, forums like Facebook and MySpace are actually keeping families connected and reconnecting old friends. People post memorials for loved ones to leave messages and pictures, sometimes it's the only way to talk to your temperamental teenager.

Most niches are so competitive, that on page search engine optimization and good content is no longer enough to rank well in the search engines. To achieve high positions in search engine results, you need back links. Not only do you need back links, but you need them to come from a diverse range of sources to achieve the best results.

Focusing all of your link building efforts on just one source, and on just once anchor text, will appear unnatural to search engines, and you will lose out because of this. You should spread you links between a wide range of sources to encompass directories, blog comments, article writing, social bookmarking, web 2.0 profiles and blogs, and forum posting. Even more valuable than this is obtaining links from high page rank relevant sites. This can be tricky for most small new websites though, if not impossible. Therefore webmasters of these sites should concentrate on obtaining links that are attainable.

Directories are website that list links to other websites based upon categories. For example, a directory may have a category on food, which will in turn have sub categories on Asian food, European food, and so on. You should submit you website URL to the category that best describes your websites content. There are large amounts of directories in existence, a link from a directory is not worth much, but when you have several links from several directories, the link power soon adds up.

Blog comments are a great way to direct targeted traffic to your website, as well as build links to your website for search engine rankings. You can search for blogs that are related to the theme of your website, and post a constructive comment on one of their articles. Within that comment you should post a link back to your website. Other readers of the blog may choose to follow this link and visit your website. These links can be very powerful for improving your search engine ranking, particularly if they are on high page rank blogs.

Article writing is my favourite method. You submit original content articles to article directories such as ezine, on a wide range of subjects. Within the article, you place a link back to your website. Not only is this method great for driving traffic, since the article directories have a huge reader base, but you also get a high value link for search engine rankings. Just a few of these links pointing to one website is enough to improve that websites ranking, provided the niche is not too competitive.

Social bookmarking your URL in sites like digg and reddit will again not only drive traffic from readers of those sites, but also give you another valuable link for search engine rankings. You should post your URL in a relevant section with constructive comments. If your link is considered spam it will be deleted.

Forum posting is also an extremely successful way of driving traffic and gaining links. Join a forum on a subject related to your websites niche, and start becoming a valued member of the community by posting helpful information and advice. You may be allowed to leave a link to your site in your signature. As your online presence grows, you will soon see traffic coming from the forum, and the links will also help improve your search engine rankings.

Finally, another of my favourite methods is creating a blog on web 2.0 sites like hubpages. Links from these sites are very powerful, and the online blogging community is huge. If you create a valuable interesting blog, many people from those communities may also choose to visit your website.

These are some of the cornerstone methods that new webmasters can use to build links. The key is to ensure that your postings are relevant and not spam. If you provide useful content to accompany your links, you will surely be on the road to search engine ranking success.

Free quality back links simply don't exist. If you don't have a budget to spend you must invest a considerable amount of time getting them.

The reason is obvious - besides building quality content that interest other marketers, you also need to run a strong promotion campaign for the community to notice your work.

The best approach is to quit chasing links and focus on creating timely content that a) interests, b) draws attention and c) builds interaction/controversy around it.

You're probably well acquainted with the classic link sources but in this article I'll try to broaden your perspective with a few more pieces to the puzzle:

1. Alternatives to classical content syndication

2. More elusive methods of building links from private websites

3. Social media as a link provider

Although linking opportunities may be sprinkled in every corner of your niche market, in most cases your eagerness isn't met with the same feelings by your potential partners.

Instead of barging in with your one sided proposal, a better approach is to show your available for creating a unique piece of content to be added on their site, with the afferent link pointing back to your own site.

To prove your expertise, consider rendering a fragment of the future article. This shouldn't be a discarded advice due to the fact that today's web content is ninety percent repackaged information.

If you lack the qualities for producing a block buster article, but still have a solid understanding of your market, consider hiring a ghost writer to put your thoughts in print.

Lack inspiration or just want to exploit your existing work? Give it a thorough rewrite. This way you promote your writings to new readers and further enhance the site's relevancy due to keyword variation.

Article and press release directories should remain on your list of content destinations. The reason why I suggest supplementing them with topic related sites is because with some ADs, approving and indexing your content by SEs takes up to 2 weeks.

Plus, working with private blogs you can enjoy a certain doze of exclusivity, a rare commodity for directories with hundreds of registered writers.

I highly recommend making sure you target well positioned sites. Check their Alexa rankings and authority (PageRank) before contacting them.

Tip. One of the easiest way to find the best sites and directories to publish your content is by tracking established authors and get your content on the same sites; that's called piggy backing on their resources.

When providing a testimonial, the recipient, invariably, must embed a link back to your site. If they don't, you might as well retract your feedback.

Also testimonials can be translated in reciprocal promotion within an established marketing partnership.

At all times, be sincere in your appraise because promoting junk products could hurt your credibility.

Just promote products and services from recognized marketers which deliver results.

Social bookmarking sites are an easy-picking source for free back links, granted that you don't "succeed" in getting you accounts canceled for promoting exclusively your own content.

The top social bookmarking platforms have strict rules regarding abusive behavior, but this benefits you in terms of fast indexing by search engines and link juice or authority as they're well regarded by Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Apart from social bookmarking you can use social media platforms like HubPages and Squidoo where you create useful tutorials and "how to"s of interest for your niche.

HubPages and Squidoo ranking power is often neglected but the truth is that young business websites don't stand a chance against even newly launched pages (or lenses) on these two domains.

So, in order to expose your content rapidly, publish it on these sites, then improve the authority of these pages with a basic link building campaign. Finally, point some back links from these platforms back to your own site.

Avoid bookmarking on sites powered by open source software like Pligg and Ning because they don't get indexed on a regular basis by search engine.

A standard social media campaign helps spread the word about you and encourages other people to as well.

An explosive social media campaign has inherent viral exposure, inspires community driven communication, helps make the web a better place, and even brings joy to people, however fleeting.

When you share in social media, if your goal is just to get more people to see your links, you're on the right track, but at the same time, you're limiting your potential. You may think that getting explosive results from social media will take more time, energy and money, but this doesn't have to be the case.

If you're a business owner, you know that working harder doesn't necessarily mean better results - what if you're working hard on the wrong thing?

Sometimes the remedy is working smarter. Here are a few small changes you can make to your social media approach that can propel your social media results from lukewarm to smoking hot.

Explosive Social Media Tactic #1 - Hot Content

The cornerstone to any social media campaign is the content. If you get this component wrong, it doesn't matter if all other elements are perfect. Study what's going hot in your targeted topic and find a unique angle to tailor your content into what people already like, without stealing their ideas.

Explosive Social Media Tactic #2 - Niched Network Nuances

The more tightly focused your submissions to social media sites are, the more likely they are to go viral, whether they are links you share by other people or yours. Here's the logic.

People follow other people with similar interests. They're on sites like Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Delicious and Digg actively looking for new content. Put those two things together and you have a whirlwind of clicks happening. The only question is, will it be your link that gets clicked or passed over?

Having 5000 connections on Twitter or Facebook is useless if you are connected to people who don't want your broadcasts, and you're just as useless to them if you don't want theirs. If my interest is in improving my existing business and you're trying to get me to sell your network marketing products, it doesn't matter how many times you ask me. If I'm not interested, your continued broadcasts will be ignored, or worse yet, blocked completely.

It's about the perfect balance of quality AND quantity.

And if I'm not paying attention to you, I can't and won't spread your message. If you are in network marketing, why not go after people who love the network marketing concept but can't seem to find the right company? That's a perfect match, and can dramatically cut down your search for the right partners and prospects.

Explosive Social Media Tactic #3 - Simplify Sharing

It amazes me how many people miss this one.
You've got great content. You've got a massive, niched network.

Why feed them content that's hard to share? Does that report have to be in PDF format? If so, does it have to be behind an opt-ín wall if you're spreading it among people who have Already opted in? Anyone connected to your business through its Facebook page, or your Twitter stream is also part of your opt-ín list. Yes, it would be best if they were on your email newsletter list, but what faster way to get them there than to show them you don't need to hold them prisoner there?

If your whitepaper is of such high value that you don't want it to spread, well, that's something different. But if you're sharing it so other people will spread it, make it easy for others to share.

Put a few sharing links on your page.
Make it easy for them to Retweet.
The easier it is for them to share, the more likely they are to do it.

Explosive Social Media Tactic #4 - Consistency

And now we come to the area I fail at the most. It's one of the things I know I need to do, but I haven't quite gotten the hang of how to brainstorm, create and distribute quality content consistently, and still give the best possible service and support to my customers and clients. I always err on serving people who have bought from me, figuring that next blog post can wait until tomorrow.

Then at some point, I noticed a decline in return traffic - people weren't coming back because they'd already heard everything I had to say. The solution? I got help for my content creation process. The ideas are still mine, but I was able to barter help for research, transcribing, and editing. I am also able to get audio and video polished much less expensively than I thought, though I don't always use this option due to time constraints.

The other thing that helped a lot was getting over my perfectionism complex. Release your content as soon as you can. I can't tell you how much money I've left on the table from my old fear of the typo and grammar police. Not to mention the fact that I felt like I was leaving my audience hanging.

You subscribe to something because you want to get regular updates. If your favorite daily news show started coming on once a week, you'd probably switch channels. If you're inconsistent without explanation, your audience numbers will drop and your network will fade.

Explosive Social Media Tactic #5 - Think Engagement

Measuring your results by page view alone is a thing of the past. When the web was mostly text and images, it made some sense that how many pages a visitor viewed at your site was a true measure of engagement.

Nowadays this isn't the case. You want to look instead at how long people are at your site. The exception, of course, is when customers are coming to your site to buy, and the order processing system takes them off your page. But if people aren't leaving your site because they're ready to buy or subscribe, you truly must look at why they aren't paying more attention to your content, and what changes you can make to get them to stay.

This is critically important in understanding which content will go viral naturally. What posts are people staying on your site to comment on? When do they take a few extra seconds to retweet? Are they watching your videos all the way through?

Twitter is a wildly popular microblogging service. It involves writing Tweets, which are short updates of a maximum of 140 characters that tell your followers what you are up to. Although your Tweets are technically supposed to answer the question, "What are you doing?" Twitter has moved far beyond that. Have a look at my Twitter profile @anandtvpm. Tweets are used to share stories, link to photos, promote content, break news, and a whole lot more. Twitter has also become an incredibly important tool for social media marketing professionals. Here are 12 ways in which Twitter can be used in your social media marketing campaign.

As soon as you read something online that you think is interesting, it is easy to share it on Twitter with all of your followers. Twitter is highly effective in this manner because it is such a quick way to be able to reach a large group of people. You can also get a lot of great ideas for blog posts from Twitter since many new ideas and stories are floating around that haven’t even made it to the blogosphere and definitely not to mainstream media.

Using Twitter is a great way to build your network because it allows you to find and follow people with similar interests. You can use Steeple to find people who live in your geographical area. You can also use other tools that help you find new people to follow based upon who your Twitter friends follow.

People in different networks often use Twitter to connect with their contacts instantly rather than using instant messaging for that purpose. Furthermore, many people use Twitter to connect with their network during events like conferences.

Twitter can be used to redistribute content from your blog or website. However, you should take care to do this thoughtfully since many of your Twitter followers may already read your blog. For that reason, you may want to avoid using a blog plug-in that automatically Tweets your posts. Your best bet is to Tweet your content manually and customize each Tweet so it doesn't get old.

Twitter launched at SXSW last year, catapulting microblogging conferences to fame. Live Tweeting events are great because they are a form of citizen journalism that allow you to connect with several new people in your niche while making active and valuable contributions to current discussions in your community.

You can send a direct message to a journalist who is following you on Twitter to pitch a story idea.

You can use Twitter as a company intranet that connects all of your employees. Twitter can be particularly useful in this regard if you have a virtual business with employees in different geographical locations. You can set your updates to private for security reasons. Anytime you are working on group projects, you can stay in touch with your team members using Twitter.

Stay up to date with any mentions of your business on Twitter. If there is anything negative, you will be able to counter it quickly. You can also use Twitter as a way to receive feedback from your customers and improve your business. Just ask your followers to give their opinion on something. For example, if you designed a new website, ask your followers what they think about it and get their constructive criticisms so you can make your site design even better.

If you have submitted a story to Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, or any other social voting website, tweet a link to that submission to try to score more votes from your followers. If your followers like what they see, they are sure to vote for your content.

Looking for a programmer, designer, or writer? Whatever type of professional you seek, try finding them on Twitter. Simply send your followers a tweet telling them you are looking for someone for a job. They can either recommend someone to you or offer themselves for the job. Using Twitter in this way is ideal for finding qualified freelancers. It is much more convenient than putting out a classified ad.

When you use Twitter to talk about things as mundane as what you ate for breakfast or how you are going to sleep early tonight, you make your followers feel like you are casual and approachable. Even those running a company that has a cold, corporate brand image could create more appeal and build a unique personal brand using Twitter.

When you use Twitter, you’re likely to find yourself using IM, email, and other electronic communication methods less. Twitter not only provides public chatting through Tweets, it also allows you to send direct messages. Twitter will help you streamline your electronic communications, allowing you to scale back online.

Video SEO is about optimizing the search potential for online videos. When performed effectively, it can increase traffic to your site and lead to higher conversions in sales or whatever the purpose it of your site is. There are a few simple tips which can be applied easily to any online video to yield better SEO for your video.

Selecting appropriate target keywords for your video is the first important tip in relation to video SEO. Each video should not use more than two or three keywords. The keywords must be such that they give an exact idea of the video content.

After you have selected your target keywords these are to be used wherever possible - in the title, tags, description etc. When you create back links to your video use these target keywords. By selecting good target keywords and optimizing your video to use them, your video will be ranked more highly for the same search terms.

Google, probably the most popular search engine, owns YouTube. As such, posting your video on YouTube possibly affords some advantage for your video so far as video SEO is concerned.

You are not in any way restricted in posting your video to any number of sites in the internet, but you should give major consideration to a posting on YouTube.

If you want strong SEO for your video you should create separate page for each. As each page has a unique URL, each of your videos will also get unique URL which gives certain advantages like using your target keywords in the page title, metadata and in the description of your video on this page.

In order to improve SEO for your videos, you should seriously consider adding a video transcript. Transcripts generate data which are read by search engines. Search engines cannot watch your video directly. The transcript generated for your video is an excellent way for additional use your target keywords.

One of the key facets of SEO is to get other sites in the internet linking to your video. These are called back links. Back Links from relevant and popular sites, targeting keywords while referring to your video are most beneficial for video SEO.

Blog comments and forum postings by adding the URL to your video are also popular and easy ways to create back links.

However, you should keep in mind that the link to your video must not be out of place for the readers of the blog or forum as in that case your comment or post can be treated as spam and will eventually be removed or will be ignored for being not interesting.

In order to improve video SEO you should bookmark your video in social bookmarking sites like Digg, Stumble Upon, Delicious etc. When you bookmark your video on all these sites and use your target keywords while doing it inbound links to your video is created which increases the chance of more people viewing it. Put buttons next to your video so that viewers who like it can easily add a link to your video to one or more social bookmarking sites of their choice.