“social networking spider webs” Archives

I recently received this email message from a friend of mine named Tyler.  Tyler is a personal trainer with a passion for fitness.  He wants to expand his business and get his message out to people using “social media marketing”.  Tyler asks some great questions, so I thought I would use this as a good time to answer the same questions that many small business owners also have.

My answers are at the end of Tyler’s email message……

“Hi Mark,

I revisited your website on Social Networking Spider Webs and very excited to get my Spider Web going! I created a blog especially on my site for it. I have talked with you in the past about setting one up. I am very excited to use your information here you are sending out via email list. I just have one question before I begin my Social Networking Spider Web, but a little back story. I got a bad taste in my mouth for SEO after an SEO dude that I hired got my website banned. Not sure quite what he did, but I undid all that and got my website off the Google ban. So that experience has kind of disillusioned me a bit, but I am journeying down this road again and would like to make sure I do it right

So I have a website: http://flowlifefitness.com

and set up my blog at: http://flowlifefitness.com/fittoflow

My first question is this. When I start my Social Networking Spider Web is it okay to sign up on all the important Social Networks that I should be on and create separate user accounts for my Website and my Blog at with the different email addresses that I have? I know the Blog is the center of this Social Networking Spider Web. It’s not too much to do both? Google won’t penalize me for this?

And the second question is this… I want to build up my blog very big to be a legitimate source of info for fitness and really bring in traffic. If I sign up my blog under the url http://fittoflow.com instead of the http://flowlifefitness.com/fittoflow with ‘fittoflow.com’ still linked within flowlifefitness.com will flowlifefitness.com get all the traffic and google points? Because that is the website I want to boost on the Search Engines. Or is there a way to go about doing this?

Thanks!

::Tyler”

Tyler, these are great questions so I will give you my opinions.  These are short answers just to get you started down the right road.  There are a lot more things to do besides my starter answers below……

But first, here are some things to do.

  1. Go to http://socialprofitformula.com and watch Don Crowther’s 3 videos on social media marketing using his social profit formula.  They are free (it will cost you your email address).
  2. You can use Onlywire and Ping.fm to simplify your social networking efforts. Once you set up Onlywire and Ping.fm you can syndicate your content and articles to the web’s top social bookmarking and networking sites with a single button click.  Set up 5 sites per week on Onlywire and Ping.fm. Go to http://onlywire.com and http://ping.fm and sign up for your free accounts. BIG HINT: Sign up for either RoboForm (www.roboform.com/php/land.php?affid=m1953&frm=frame10) or LastPass (https://lastpass.com/) to help you manage all the Usernames, Passwords and demographic data you will need to enter when you sign up for all the Social Bookmark and Networking sites.  Either of these tools will make your job a lot easier.  Both offer Free versions.
  3. Go to http://markvschwartz.com/168/google-profiles-creating-your-social-networking-spiderweb-tip-08/, http://markvschwartz.com/174/live-profiles-creating-your-social-networking-spiderweb-tip-09/, http://markvschwartz.com/177/yahoo-profiles-%e2%80%93-creating-your-social-networking-spiderweb-%e2%80%93-tip-10/ to see how to set up a google, yahoo and live profile.
  4. Go to my Youtube at http://www.youtube.com/user/markvschwartz1#p/u/0/qYcjRWFvLiA to see a video on setting up Onlywire and your blog spider web.
  • Now, the answers to your questions.
  • Having a blog attached to your primary website, i.e. http://socialnetworkingspiderweb.com/blog/ is great for SEO and you will not be penalized by the search engines.
  • When you sign up for all of these social networking accounts I recommend that you create a second email account to use for all of them.  You will/may be getting a lot of email and you don’t want it to clog up your primary or business email account.  You can use the same email address for all accounts you set up.  You can also use the same Username, etc.  Vary your profile information a bit fo each of them.
  • Set up 5 accounts per week.  Only sign up for accounts that are relevant to your niche.  Example, don’t sign up for a teenage, girlie social network if you are promoting Harley Davidsons.
  • Install the Onlywire WordPress plug in to your primary blog. http://flowlifefitness.com/fittoflow
  • Put links from your blog to your website and to website to your blog.  Don’t just link to the main page, link to sub-pages and posts.
  • After you build out your Onlywire and Ping.fm accounts (Ping also has a wordpress plugin), create your google, live and yahoo profiles.  Then find some other social networks in your niche or business networks to create accounts on (like Biznik) to help promote your main site and blog.
  • Set up some free blogs on wordpress.com, blogger, typepad and post articles to them with links back to your main site and blog. Try to make unique, not duplicate content, by re-writing articles/posts from your main blog.  Use KEYWORDS in the name for your blog.  e.g. if you want to be found as a “personal trainer seattle” or “personal training capitol hill” these should be the names for your satellite blogs.
  • If I sign up my blog under the url http://fittoflow.com instead of the http://flowlifefitness.com/fittoflow with ‘fittoflow.com’ still linked within flowlifefitness.com will flowlifefitness.com get all the traffic and google points?

If you want promote your main website then set that one up in your social accounts.  Most sites will let you set up more than one so you can also promote your primary blog.  You should have your primary website and blog together.  i.e. flowlifefitness and flowlifefitness/blog.

If you are going to set up other URLs, like fittoflow.com, I recommend you set it up as a wordpress blog in the root directory.  Skip the website portion and have it a blog only.  If you can have it on a different web server you will have a different IP address which the search engines like.

So these are my short answers and by no means is a comprehensive list of everything you can do.

One major thing most people miss is the use of keywords in their URL names, free blog names, and articles.  You need to start with 4-5 keywords that you want people to find you by.  As I mentioned earlier, “personal trainer seattle” or “personal training capitol hill” (geo targeting).  The more specific your keywords (and URL names, etc.) the higher you will rank in the search engines.  Just using a keyword like “personal fitness” you will have too much competition.

…..I hope this helps.

Hello, Mark Schwartz here, And I can’t believe I am writing about Twitter.  :)

Twitter is a very popular micro-blog social site, where its users set up profiles about themselves and then network with others.

It is very similar to Facebook.  People “subscribe” to your profile, and then receive an update from you every time you make a post to your profile. Imagine, if you are selling something, how nice it would be to automatically notify everyone at once about a new product!  Well that seems to be the basic allure for most people.  It seems that 90% of all the tweets I receive are nothing but sales pitches.

My personal opinion of Twitter is that it’s nothing but a big SPAM festival.  But, there are many people that swear buy it so it deserves mentioning. I hate to say it, but I really only use Twitter to help me build my Blog and Social Networking Spider Web.  I have little use for all the Spam i get.

Here are a few things about Twitter that may be interesting….. You probably already have a twitter account, but I suggest using a twitter name that says who you are or what you do. Many social media experts suggest not doing this and using your own name so that you don’t seem like you are out to sell something. However, I have found that having a name that includes my profession, allows me to be found by more people doing their own searches. I have gotten many of my followers because of my name alone ( I have six Twitter accounts with differing names and purposes).

I have never minded if someone has a professional profile as long as they are not trying to sell me. I quickly unfollow anyone who is sending out updates that are constant sales pitches. Some people spend days following interesting links and even smiling at someone’s every tweet.  Personally, I don’t have time to read someone’s tweet that their dog just ate their kid’s breakfast, etc.

If you are an active Twitter user, load your tweets so that others can find you easily. One way I have found to do this is to be sure to add at least one tweet a day with hashtags for your key words. If you are tweeting about social networking, put #socialnetworking at the end. If you are tweeting about an event, put that there with a tag. When other people search those key words, your words will come up.

Here are a few Twitter related tools that I use. Again, I am not a big Twitter user, but these are kind of cool.

1. Social Oomph – Let’s you schedule tweets across all your Twitter accounts, send Direct Messages to all your followers. Vastly improve your productivity on Twitter.  The f*ree version is what I use and here is a link => http://www.socialoomph.com/86849.html

2. Twitbacks – Let’s you create free Twitter backgrounds in less than 2 minutes. (Well that’s what their website says, but you know how it goes – it takes me longer than 2 minutes).  You can help to brand yourself on Twitter by creating your very own Twitter background.  Here’s the link => http://twitbacks.com

3. Twellow – Twellow is a directory of public Twitter accounts, with hundreds of categories and search features to help you find people who matter to you.   You can set yourself up in their directory and hopefully people will find you.  Here’s the link => http://www.twellow.com/

Of course there are many, many more Twitter tools.  Do a search on Twitter Tools and you’ll find a zillion of them.

P.S. Twitter uses nofollow links so you will not get any SEO juice or backlinks from tweeting.

LinkedIn Can Be One of your Greatest Traffic Sources

LinkedIn is often mentioned as a powerful social networking tool and a significant tool for enterprise professionals, employers, and job seekers. What isn’t often mentioned is the site’s capability to easily drive traffic to your site.

LinkedIn can be a powerful source for driving visitors to your blog and therefore should be part of your strategy in building out your “Social Networking Spider Web”.

In some respects, LinkedIn visitors might even be more precious than visitors from other social networks and sites. That is simply because of the generally professional nature of LinkedIn itself.

If you contemplate that LinkedIn could possibly be one of your biggest traffic sources you should you put enough effort into cultivating it as such.

Once you register, put together a complete profile following the steps listed below (you can come back and do some of them as your time permits.)

1. Complete your profile
2. Improve and grow your personal connections
3. Add and Customize your web site links
4. Answer questions
5. Update your status on a regular basis
6. Join area of interest groups
7. Put up feedback in groups
8. Add RSS feeds to groups
9. Create a group
10. Add the LinkedIn weblog software to your profile
11. Put your LinkedIn profile badge and links on your other Social Network sites, e.g. your Google Profile

LinkedIn is also now offering integration with Microsoft Outlook.  So if you use Outlook I suggest taking a look at getting that set up as it will make doing things on LinkedIn easier in some areas.

The thing I like most about LinkedIn, are the groups. Go to the top where it says Groups and click there…go to “find a group” at the top right and do a key word search for groups that interest you. Hint – set up daily updates so you don’t get overwhelmed with email messages.

With Linked In, you’ll be able to promote merchandise, find new customers, build your brand and yourself and continue to build your Social Networking Spider Web.

MORE ON SOCIAL BOOKMARKING

Today we are covering How to use “Social Bookmarking” to Build Your Social Networking Spider Web and get massive traffic to your business.

This topic is on how to get a lot of sites to link back to your website or blog and to create a lot of targeted traffic by using “social bookmarking”!

Social bookmarking is very popular with marketers in every business, hobby or personal niche.  Social bookmarking sites such as StumbleUpon, Digg, Del.icio.us, and Technorati let users add links to sites they like and make those links public so that other visitors can grab those links and add them to their own lists.  This makes your URLs (website links) go viral.

Social bookmarking sites are a great way to get traffic to your own websites and blogs.  What you do is bookmark your sites and then hope others will share the links.  On some social bookmarking sites like Digg, viewers can vote for your entries and make them even more popular.

If enough people vote for your particular link (that has an article or blog posting associated with it), it might make it to the front page of that bookmarking site.  A front-page listing can yield thousands of visitors a day to your site. However, because of the very nature of social bookmarking sites, if you want to get tons of traffic from the bookmarking sites, you need to make sure that the links you submit are interesting – and not just your sales pitch page.

Take a look at current events to use as a source of information to write about – and then bookmark.  For example – let’s say your blog is in the interior design niche and you have a site on high end interior design.  A simple how-to site may not get shared a lot.

But let’s say you read an article about using simple products from Ikea or KMart for making high-end interior design work on a limited budget.  With this type of topic you’d have a pretty decent shot at having a lot of home owners or interior designers share your links with others.

If your blog tends to be less newsworthy and more general, then you don’t need to worry about how many people vote for your story or share your links.  In this situation, just concentrate on using the social bookmarking sites to build back links to your sites, which will increase your search engine popularity.

Concentrate on bookmarking the index page (home or main page) of each of your sites first.

The key to social bookmarking is to become a participant in a community that shares interesting information. Create a good, personal profile that tells a little about you.  Make sure to add some photos, and if the site offers it, start building a friends or fans list.

Be careful not to add too many links each day. Don’t go crazy and add 100 links a day. Try to keep it to 10 or less per day and you will be okay.

After you’ve been a participant for a few weeks, you might be able to get away with up to 50 per day.  And…. make sure to keep bookmarking stories on other websites and vote for a few of the popular stories that made it onto the first page.  This will help to make your profile look a lot more legitimate in the eyes of the community.

SOCIAL BOOKMARKING

Hello, Mark Schwartz here with another installment on building your Social Networking Spider Web.

It started with Myspace, then Facebook, then Youtube, and now its social bookmarking. All fall into the Web 2.0 genre. The use of these sites for SEO purposes and simply to get massive exposure to your websites and blogs has become the latest trend in internet marketing.

Too me, they are a fundamental part of building a Social Networking Spider Web and driving massive amounts of traffic to my core blog.

Have you ever bookmarked a webpage in your browser so you can go back to it later?  They allow you to save bookmarks online and Tag/Categorize them with keywords instead of saving them as bookmarks in the favorite’s list of your browser.  This is what social bookmarking is, except everyone can see what you bookmark.  Note: Social Bookmarking is different than Social Networking, which we will cover in the next post.

A big reason that savvy business owners and “seo experts” spend so much time and effort on social bookmarking is because of the power of Web 2.0. For instance, Google, Bing and Yahoo absolutely love all of these Web 2.0 sites.

Here is the main reason why you need to have a social bookmarking campaign. Google puts a lot of emphasis on one way back links to your website to help determine its page rank. Not only does Google look at the number of links but they look at the quality of the links.  There is a transfer of page rank that occurs from the higher ranking site to yours.  Social bookmarking is one piece of your overall campaign, is a simple traffic generation technique and is a very “low cost seo” tactic.

It is free to sign up at the popular social bookmarking networks, and it doesn’t take too long to bookmark your site. Bookmarking a site or blog is easy, but to consistently bookmark all of your new blog posts does take some effort.  Also, setting up the bookmarking sites for the first time does take an effort.  But, once you set them up you are good to go.

When your site receives a bookmark, it shows the search engines that people are talking about, and interested in your site. This is a great way to get a ton of high quality backlinks and get “top rankings”.

Here are just a few of the top social bookmarking sites:

•    http://del.icio.us
•    http://digg.com
•    http://furl.net
•    http://simpy.com
•    http://redditt.com
•    http://kaboodle.com
•    http://netvouz.com
•    http://fark.com

And the list goes on and on……..

HOW TO PROMOTE YOUR BLOG

With having a business blog to build your “social networking” spider web it can become a success only if you know how to promote it: in other words, you have to attract traffic. Developing a Social Networking Spider Web is one way, and we are going to cover that in more detail.  But for now let’s cover some other methods.

There are several ways to do promote your blog. First of all, you should take a look on the web and see what your competition is like.  Perform a Google, Yahoo or Bing search using the keywords you have selected (in previous steps) and see who else pops up.  If a gazillion sites pop-up using the keywords you selected you need to go back to the “drawing board” and pick some better ones.

There really are no boundaries related to how you can promote something online. Perhaps the easiest is to promote your own blog using other sites you already own or from other niche sites related to yours, by the use of friendly links.

There are many, many ways to promote your blog, and we will cover many of these methods in future posts)….

Here is the simple, straight-forward, best bang-for-the-buck way to promote your blog and your business.

  • Write Good Content on a Regular Basis
  • Submit your content to the “Social Networking Spider Web” you Have Built

As I mentioned, there are lots of other methods, but build your Spider Web first, but you can only do so much at one time. Later on you can get in to press releases, article submission, forum postings, blog commenting, directories, etcetera, etcetera, etc.

FINDING QUALITY CONTENT FOR YOUR BLOG

Trying to figure out what to write about for your blog can be one heckuva challenge.  There are some days when you just can’t write or have no idea what to write about.  Well here are a few ideas.

The best way to get unique content is to write new unique content. This is not very hard, but for some this may be time consuming and you may not want to. The easiest way to get unique content is to combine various free articles and edit them as if they were new articles.

Search some Article Directories or just do a general web search using your keyword and you will find tons of articles and ideas. Once you have a few articles about the same topic you just need to combine it and make it unique.

Another method I use is Google Alerts.  I can generally find a consistent supply of good quality content to write about by setting up a Google Alert for my keyword.  I find plenty of ideas to write about.

Note: If your use someone else’s content, without re-writing it substantially, make sure you give full credit to the author and a link to the original source.

Double Note:  Remember to submit all of your blog posts to your social networks so you continue to feed them fresh content.  It’s all about building your Social Networking Spider Web.

GETTING QUALITY CONTENT ON YOUR BLOG

Well, here we are talking about blogs some more.  I guess you’ve realized the importance of the blog to the foundation of our strategy in building a Social Networking Spider Web.

All Internet marketing guides stress the importance of using only quality content on blogs.  What is good content and where the heck do I get it?  I can’t write that much!!

Take a look at the very nature of blogs and what your blog needs to be: a highly informational and personal site which addresses a set of topics in a specific niche. Also, when designing your blog don’t make it too complex, stick to the simple themes that allow users to perform actions easily on the page.  You do not need to run out a purchase a premium WordPress theme.

We’ve also discussed how you need to create the content for your site around some high-in-demand keywords that users type in the search box of Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. In some respects, the more the keywords you have in your content, the higher the chances to have your blog appear in the first result pages.

However, many bloggers understand keyword density the wrong way. The blog content should naturally include the keywords in an easy-to-read kind of way; a keyword density that goes higher than 2 or 3% could make the articles less appealing to the reader.

For example, one of my primary keywords for my business is “social networking spider webs”, if I used the term “social networking spider webs” in every other sentence, you would get tired of the term “social networking spider webs”, plastered everywhere.  Sorry ‘bout that, had to do it…….

There are some tips you may want to consider when creating quality content for a blog. First of all, regardless of the domain and the target audience, it should be reader-friendly and even reader-targeted if it be the case. This means that you need to keep your content on-target for your niche/blog.

You should also write everything in short or medium-sized paragraphs so that the information naturally flows without being too hard to track when being read on a monitor.

Statistics show that blogs that include links in the very article content are more successful than those who present links at the bottom of the page.  For example: links inserted in the natural flow of the article allow the reader to get immediate access to the concept being discussed and to provide the opportunity to show interest for specific products or services.

Common sense ways for Optimizing your blog for search engines

Competition is fierce online and the top places on the search result pages are the most hunted for; therefore, any blog owner who tries to make money on the Internet needs to use a comprehensive strategy to attract the best visitors and the highest traffic.  By having a blog and building a social networking spider web around it, you will be working to optimize it for the search engines.

As mentioned in our last post, the primary factor for blog optimization for search engines is the keyword. When you start the race for SEO (search engine optimization), you already have an advantage: blogs are usually the ones to receive more traffic then other complex sites due to their highly informational content. By keywords we mean those sentences or structures that a user types in the search box of an engine like Google, Bing or Yahoo.

Blogs mainly rely on articles that are regularly updated and re-freshened, so that they have something new to offer all the time. Before you write your blog content, you’ll need to make a list with all the keywords related to your niche/domain and which are most likely to be typed in the search box by Internet users. A brain-storming session is ideal to find the best structures you need to include in the articles; keep in mind that there are some rules you may have to follow here as well.

For example, choosing some very general keywords is not the best way to promote a business via. The explanation is very simple here: search terms that are too broad attract all sorts of users, even those that are not interested in purchasing something. SEO experts use all sorts of parameters to check the profitability of a blog, and one of them deals precisely with the number of relevant users the web-page gets.  (More on stats and analytics later.)

Once you start to use the most high-in-demand keywords you’ll still have to do a lot of other types of work in order to keep your blog position high in traffic. There are many strategies for this and we are going to get to them, after we build our Social Networking Spider Web. Building a Social Networking Spider Web offers the greatest bang for the buck ROI of all the tactics, except for having a lot of quality content on your blog.

Quality content remains the golden rule of search engine optimization: quality informational content is the foundation of any successful blog!

Alex Goad, Brian Johnson and Jared Croslow have launched their new Auto Content Cash” system – It’s on Fire.

I spent $77 on this last week and from what I have seen so far this is the best bang-for-the buck product I have bought on the Internet in one heckuva a long time.

I do believe the price has gone up since I bought it. …….. glad I snagged it at that price.

This is NOT a get rich quick offering, where the only ones getting rich are the folks that sold you the program.

BUT, Auto Content Cash is a good, solid program that lays out every step and provides almost every tool you need to make some money online.  How much you make is up to you, not me or this product.

Check it out….. ==>> Auto Content Cash

Catch it before the price goes up ……

Related Blogs

    Powered by Yahoo! Answers