feed hat blog

A Guest Post by www.lewishowes.com on driving traffic to your blog with LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is the most powerful, yet under-utilised social networking platform on the web.

Whether you just created your first blog, or you are considered one of the top bloggers in the world like Darren Rowse, Chris Brogan, or Tim Ferriss, you are always looking for ways to generate more traffic to your site.  Even more so, you are looking for qualified traffic to your site, (i.e people who are interested in the content you produce).

LinkedIn is a great way to generate free, organic, traffic to your blog.

“But Lewis, isn’t LinkedIn just a site to post my resume when I am looking for a job?”

No, wake up people!  Although LinkedIn has been great for job seekers during the most recent economic cycle, it is much much more than that.  Individuals and companies are achieving more professional goals than imaginable on LinkedIn.  For example, LinkedIn can help you:

• Sell products
• Find new clients or employees
• Generate leads
• Receive funding for your company
• Obtain sponsorships
• Sell hundreds of tickets to your professional event
• Get national and local press coverage
• And last but not least, drive massive traffic to your blog

Achieving these goals on LinkedIn don’t come naturally.  You’ve gotta work the system on LinkedIn and experiment with different methods.  I’ve come up with the best ways to achieve those goals.  Here are my top 10 ways to drive traffic to your blog using LinkedIn:

1.  Complete Your Profile:

Numerous individuals have told me LinkedIn doesn’t work for them. I always ask them how much time they have put into using LinkedIn, their response – very little.  If your profile is weak people will lose interest quickly and may never click on your website links.

If you want people to read your profile and click on your websites then make your profile concise, compelling and value driven throughout.  Complete your profile 100%, add a great picture of yourself, and take the entire process very seriously.  The more complete and compelling your profile is, the more people will read and visit links you have posted.

This advice goes beyond driving traffic to your blog.  If someone were to Google your name (which most people do when they are researching you) your LinkedIn profile is one of the first things that pop up.  Personally, my LinkedIn profile is the third result, and for Darren Rowse it comes up seventh (before Facebook or Twitter).  Google your own name and check out what position your LinkedIn profile shows up.  You must make your profile compelling.

2.  Increase Your Connections:

The more connections you have, the more people will have access to your profile.  Every time you take an action on LinkedIn (i.e. update your profile, join a group, recommend someone, RSVP to an event, etc… this shows up on the home page of your 1st degree connections).  If you only have 100 connections, this limits the amount of potential clicks on your profile and website links per day. Constantly be updating and adding new connections.

3.  Customize Your Website Links:

When you first create your profile your website links will look like this:

However this is not a “call to action” and you are missing potential traffic because of it.  No one actually cares what your blog is unless it is relevant to them or solves a problem.  Instead, customize your website links to attract more clicks and drive more traffic to your blog.  If I were Darren, I would insert this:

The second image is more compelling and explains exactly what the viewer will see on the next page when they click on each link.  In order to change your websites with a custom headline, click on the “edit” button next to one of the websites. View the image below for further details:

4.  Answer Questions:

This is a great way to drive traffic to your blog.  The more questions you answer, the better the chances are of that person asking the question to click on your blog to learn more about you. Not only will that one person be more interested in learning more about you, but also others answering that question.  Additionally, when someone rates your answer as “The Best” of the mix, it will improve your thought  leadership status. It moves you up the rankings as a “featured expert” in the category you answered in.  When you are a featured expert people become more aware of your profile, and the chance they will click on your link to learn more about what you have to offer improves.

5.  Update Status:

For you Twitter lovers out there, this should be an easy step to take.  LinkedIn also has a status update feature that is a lot like Twitter, only it gives you 148 characters to work with instead of 140. Why is it so important to constantly update your status?  Because it is the first thing that pops up the home profile for all of your connections.  Check out your home page on LinkedIn and you will see a few status updates of those your are connected to.  If they are smart, they will include some compelling copy with a call to action and a link back to their blog (something I do that drives traffic to mine).

6.  Join Niche Groups:

Whatever your blog is about, there is an audience of people on LinkedIn that share interest with.  To make it easy to find these people click on the “Group Search” tab and type in some key words that relate to your blog.  I have a sports industry blog that focuses mostly on social media with an audience of professionals who work in the sports.  I joined all of the professional sports groups I could find:

Some of these niche groups have thousands of members who are actively involved in connect with other members.  If you are not in the groups where your audience for your blog is hanging out, then you are missing out on the opportunity for new readers, and organic traffic to your site.  Join as many groups as you can after doing a key word search that relates to your blog.

For starters – check out the Professional Bloggers Group.

7.  Post Comments In Groups:

Some larger groups are receiving hundreds of new discussion topics every few days (think of it as a forum).  People are sharing points of discussion, commenting and giving further feedback and suggestions on those comments.  Every time someone creates a new discussion topic, it shows up on the home profile of everyone in that group.  If there are 100,000 people in the group, then you are potentially getting the attention of 100,000 other individuals for your comment.

8.  Add RSS Feed to Groups:

Each group has a section that allows you to add a link to a website with the latest news you think is relevant to that group.  It also allows you to add your own RSS feed or website link so it will automatically update the group every time you post a new article on your blog.  This creates an automated flow of organic traffic that will show up on the home profile of everyone connected in the group.  Again, this gives you more opportunities for people to view your blog.

9.  Create a Group:

This may be one of the most powerful things you can do on LinkedIn.  I won’t go into all of the amazing details on how this has helped me, but I will tell you that owning a group drives a lot of traffic to your site. I own several niche related groups on LinkedIn.  For example, I created the Sports Industry Network group on LinkedIn and there are currently over 19,500 members.  When a new person joins the group, they see a brief description of the group, my name as the owner of the group, plus my website url www.sportsnetworker.com.  Since my group gets over 100 new members each week, that’s additional traffic from new members alone. That’s not even including the close to 20,000 members who are actively engaging in the group, and clicking on my blog links.

10.  Add the Blog Application to Your Profile:

This might be the most obvious suggestion, but I still see some of the top pro bloggers leaving this feature out.  This application posts the title and first paragraph for your most recent articles you have published on your LinkedIn profile.  It is a way to give viewers of your profile a sneak peak of what they will read on your blog.

Go to “applications” and download either the WordPress or Blog Link application and add your URL for your blog.

LinkedIn continues to be one of the top sites that drives traffic to my blog, thanks to these 10 examples, but the power of LinkedIn doesn’t stop here. What other tips have you found through using LinkedIn to increase traffic to your blog?

=====================================================

Lewis Howes is the co-author of the LinkedIn book, LinkedWorking: Generating Success on the World’s Largest Professional Networking Website. He founded the Sports Executives Association and SportsNetworker.com, which provides daily social media and marketing tips for sports professionals.  You can connect with him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/lewishowes or on his site at www.lewishowes.com.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Top 10 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Blog Using LinkedIn

Share This

More here: 
Top 10 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Blog Using LinkedIn

CC BY-SA 2.0

This week Google has made bold moves to extend its reach of Internet services. They’ve announced their intentions in the territories of ISPs, social networking, SEO consulting, and Google is now going after community-based question and answer.

Google is a threatening competitor in any market, bringing with it deep pockets and an impressive brain trust. So when news broke that Google has acquired Aardvark, a question and answer–based social network, it was clear that the big dog was going after Ask.com’s neighborhood.

So what do you do when Google’s coming after you? Doug Leeds, President of Ask.com-U.S., was able to give me a few minutes of his time to answer that very question.

Here’s some of our exchange:

Me: Does Google’s entrance into the Q&A space affect Ask’s strategy at all?

Doug Leeds: Bring it on. I don’t think it’s going to change anything really in the short-term. And Aardvark is very nascent; they have a very small user base. I don’t believe that they can scale quickly. Ask gets a million questions a day, and there’s no way Aardvark could handle that kind of volume without seriously changing their technology.

We think that people want this now. They don’t want to wait for a year, two years, to get their questions answered. Whether that means questions answered from Web pages that are already published and have the answers on them, or the answers that haven’t been published anywhere and therefore you have to index knowledge that people have in their head as opposed to what they published, and extract that knowledge out through routing questions to a real-time person — which is what Aardvark is doing and is exactly what we’re going to be launching in the spring — we’ve been working hard on it here.

This is what users see today and we believe we’re perfectly positioned. We’ve got the brand, we’ve got the legacy, we’ve got the percentage of traffic many, many times higher than the number of questions that Google does or anyone else in search. So this doesn’t change our strategy at all. It just makes us redouble our effort and focus more and it kind of tells us and anybody else that says, “Is this the right strategy?” that absolutely it’s the right strategy. At least to the extent that Google believes it is, too.

Speaking to the need for social Q&A is today’s announcement on the Norwegian Inside AdWords blog that site clinics will be offered. In this case one can use a translation tool to find out what’s being said in the post. But that’s not always the case, and there’s nothing as reliable as a person who knows their stuff.

So when the BCI writers wondered what was really written in the post, Susan sent out a quick tweet: “Anyone know Norwegian?” Her friend knew a friend who was happy to volunteer her time to translate the post. And know what? The human-translated version is more readable than the auto-translated version, and I’m guessing, more in keeping with the Google blogs usually familiar tone.

Yes, humans are still good for something. That Ask and now Google are using technology to tap into the human resource is a development full of exciting potential. Ask has the impassioned head start, Google has the muscle, and users are the winners in the world of Q&A.

Google and Ask to Battle for Q&A Supremacy was originally published on BruceClay.com, an SEO services company.

More:
Google and Ask to Battle for Q&A Supremacy

Many blogs display a list of “recent” blog posts or “most popular” blog posts in their sidebars, using a plugin widget. But those lists of blogs stay the same regardless of who is visiting the blog.

Imagine a sidebar widget for a blog that can consider the online activities of visitors at sites like Facebook, [...]

Here is the original: 
A Yahoo Widget Using Social Network Activity to Recommend Blog Posts? Working with MyBlogLog?

I’ve still got a hmm-ahh kind of relationship with Twitter. On the one hand it brings me content that I might not otherwise see, but as a communications medium I think it’s pretty woeful. Stupid little things like having to remember how many direct messages I had last time I checked so I can work [...]

Twitter Local Trends is a post from: Dave Naylor’s SEO Blog.

Related posts:

1. Using Twitter Trends to Pick Up Easy Search Traffic
2. Google Flu Trends a Winner
3. Twitter adds more Nofollows and robots.txt

View post: 
Twitter Local Trends

On today’s episode of SEM Synergy, Bruce Clay, Inc.’s weekly podcast on WebmasterRadio.fm, I interviewed the CEO of a newly launched search engine and aggregator that seeks to bring search up to speed — at least to a pace that’s as fast as the Internet evolution.

LeapFish is a Web search aggregator that has been designed with the new Web in mind, culling content from traditional, social and real-time Web sources into a customizable interface that acts as a dashboard for the Web.

The recent public launch of LeapFish boasts a number of features that help users search and share content across popular sites, locate real-time content and create a custom search experience fitting of online life today.

Founder and CEO Ben Behrouzi was our guest and I had a chance to ask him about LeapFish and what benefits can be found in a customizable Web dashboard that integrates social, real-time and rich-media content.

As Ben explained, significant changes have come about thanks to social networking and community platforms. We can receive breaking news as it happens. Everyone has the power to be an online publisher. Rather than rankings calculated by machines, our trusted contacts, colleagues and friends act as information filters, sharing only the highest quality content that strikes a chord with like-minded friends and followers.

Add to all that the ability to feed social media content, along with traditional search and rich media, directly into a search engine or aggregator through APIs and other technologies, and it’s clear why a robust Web search and aggregation experience is the next logical development for search.

There’s no doubt that we’ve become increasingly dependent on our online social networks to provide us with breaking news, product or service recommendations, and the most worthwhile opinions and analysis. But what’s on the flip side of our info consumption?

There’s a weak link in the honor system that real-time content sharing relies upon, and this point was highlighted by last week’s tragic events at Fort Hood. In NSFW: After Fort Hood, another example of how ‘citizen journalists’ can’t handle the truth, TechCrunch blogger Paul Carr uncovered the dark side of real-time content: the lack of accuracy and the sensationalized nature of unverified reports from the scene. Carr writes:

Unsurprisingly, Moore’s coverage was quickly picked up by bloggers and mainstream media outlets alike, something that she actively encouraged by tweeting to friends that they should pass her phone number to the press so she could tell them the truth, rather than the speculative [BS] that was hitting the wires.

There was just one problem: Moore’s information was [BS] too.

While the Internet has ushered in new means of communication and commerce, the unreliable nature of word-of-mouth communication is nothing new. It’s gone by other names: gossip, rumor, hearsay. The risks of trusting flawed info are familiar and something we deal with everyday. The Internet simply magnifies the issue.

Sure, misinformation can be written off as something easily corrected down the line. But our brain power is a limited resource.

With so much information available at our fingertips today we find ourselves spending additional time and resources to consider the source of content. There are incredible technologies now available and we can decide what to engage with, but the heightened access requires us to be ever-more discerning of our information intake.

Super brain Frank Schirrmacher raises the comparison of information consumption to food intake (among other heady, enlightening ideas):

I think it’s very interesting, the concept — again, Daniel Dennett and others said it — the concept of the informavores, the human being as somebody eating information. So you can, in a way, see that the Internet and that the information overload we are faced with at this very moment has a lot to do with food chains, has a lot to do with food you take or not to take, with food which has many calories and doesn’t do you any good, and with food that is very healthy and is good for you.

When it comes to the object of our attention and brainpower, learning is a lot like eating. Culture, experience and personal taste play a big role, though through the Web and progressive technologies, the whole world is now our oyster. With increased access to the expanding Web, we have a dual opportunity to broaden our taste buds and to be picky connoisseurs. As the saying goes, you are what you eat.

Thank you to Ben Behrouzi and LeapFish for joining us on the podcast today. You can read more from Ben on his blog benbehrouzi.org and follow him on Twitter, @benbehrouzi.

More here:
Information Consumption and the Real-Time Web - SEM Synergy Extras

When it comes to starting a business online, most people seem to miss one of the most important elements, which is branding yourself. It is a good thing to try to create a brand for your particular company or website, but it is critical to establish a brand for yourself more than anything. A great example is Steve Jobs. He is the current CEO and innovator for Apple. The brand that he has built for himself and his life story has helped Apple achieve some of the things that it has achieved today. With his powerful speeches at the Apple expo to his front-page headlines about his battle with cancer, he has distinguished himself as a true icon and a person that is highly respected in the industry.

Everyone needs to start to realize that the Internet should be no different. It is more important now than ever to start branding yourself as the expert or coach because the economy is starting to shift dramatically and you need to make that same shift as well by creating a brand for yourself. Just use the FTC’s new online laws that they recently enforced as your personal warning. I have come up with 8 different ways on how you can brand yourself online.

1 – Building a Tribe

Most bloggers or marketers that I talk to are unfamiliar with the strategy of building a tribe. Seth Godin defines a tribe as a group who are connected to one another, a leader, and an idea. These are quite easy to build, you just need to go out and find like-minded people that are interested in sharing their ideas and promoting each other. This is absolutely phenomenal concept that should be implanting in your personal brand development strategy.

2 – Creating a Personal Blog

I would say this is the second most important thing that you need online besides a newsletter. You need to start blogging about yourself, your experiences, and the one thing that you are most knowledgeable that you feel other people will benefit from the most. You need to create the mindset that you are the expert and the coach that will lead your team to victory by providing them the knowledge and wisdom to empower themselves to success.

3 – Networking on the Social Networks

Most people that doing any kind of marketing online, fail to understand how to leverage the social networking in the right way. You should never try to promote any product or company to anyone until you build and establish a relationship with them first. This is where 99% of the people online fail. They fail to add value to the relationship and fail to help out others achieve their goals before helping out themselves. I call this relationship marketing because it is all about branding yourself through these relationships and get other people to brand you by recommending you to others.

4 – Blog Commenting

When I first started blogging, I didn’t realize the importance on commenting on other blogs in my industry. I just did it as a means to get backlinks to my site as well get on the top of everyone top commentators plugin. I quickly realized the true benefits of doing commenting because it not only sent new visitors to my website, but it also allowed me to develop many relationships and brand myself as an authority within the industry. If you currently have a new blog or website, I would definitely recommend that you take a little bit of time to do some commenting on other blogs within your industry.

5 – Forum Posting

This is also another strategy that I didn’t realize the importance of. By just adding value and answering questions in the forums, you can quickly gain a following in the forums and additional traffic to your website by putting a link in your signature field. If you are an Internet marketer or blogger and you aren’t an active participate in the Warrior Forum, then you need to head over there immediately and start adding value to the forum.

6 – Writing Quality Content

When writing content on a blog or starting a new blog, this should be your #1 reason for doing it. You need to add value and do it with the intention of helping or educating others. The reason why blogs were design is to tell your personal story and write about your life experiences. I see to often that many bloggers just blog to promote products and sell others on the services that they provide. This is definitely not the way to do it and it saddens me every time I see a blog that is full of commercials. This needs to stop and bloggers need to start providing quality content for their visitors.

7 – Article Marketing

If there is any form of online marketing that you should be doing, it definitely should be article marketing. It has stood the test of time and is proven to be one of the most effective forms of marketing online. It helps you both to build a personal brand for yourself, as well as one for your company. What most people don’t understand about article marketing is once you create a unique article and submit it to the article directories, it stays there forever and has the ability to be seen and placed on thousands of other websites. It is one of the most effective forms of viral marketing.

8 – Guest Posting

Just by you reading this post, you can already see the benefits of doing guest posting. It can quickly help you gain notoriety within your industry as well as help you create and identify a brand for yourself. Make sure when you are doing guest post to add value and relate to that particular audience that you are in fact writing to. Guest posting will jump-start your blogging career and help you capture a new audience for your blog.

I hoped that everyone gained value from this post and I would like to thank John Chow for letting me share my knowledge about branding yourself online.

Donny Gamble writes a blog about creating wealth by combining Internet Marketing with Network Marketing and explains why every Internet marketer should have an MLM business.

Discover the SECRETS I’ve Learned to go from zero a month to over $40,000 a month from blogging. Download Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com for FREE!

See the rest here: 
How To Cultivate Your Audience by Branding Yourself

First time I’ve seen this, but search for ‘Trafigura‘ on Google right now brings up the Twitter search result for the #trafigura tag.

The reason isn’t that hard to divine – internal links on Twitter for the #keyword things are dofollowed, so the domain power of Twitter, allied to the prominence of this story and the whole QDF thing that seemingly obsesses Google at the moment means that Twitter is going to rank.

Does that make it a good result? No. Twitter’s stream of ‘content’ consists largely of retweeted references to external sites that are hidden by URL shorteners and stripped of any context. In a way it’s kind of like seeing a directory result up there. Does Twitter really tell you more than some of the sites below it in the rankings like The Times? I’d argue not.

Original post: 
Trafigura, Twitter and Google

The game has changed. Whether public bodies, legal institutions and our lawmakers like it or not, the internet is poking holes in precedents and laws in a way that was unimaginable only a few years ago.

The Guardian announced today that it had been banned – for the first time in history – on reporting parliamentary proceedings. Traditionally, anything that is said in Parliament is public record and can be freely reported by the media. However, a firm of solicitors, Carter Ruck (of long renown if you ever read Private Eye) has managed to get an injunction banning the Guardian from reporting (in its own words):

Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.

I’m sure in the offices of the lawyers they were high-fiving each other at their success in getting this unprecedented injunction passed. I’m equally sure that their joy will be shortlived. Their client is a company called Trafigura – who have been implicated in a toxic-waste dumping scandal which is alleged to have injured thousands of Africans.

When the news broke, there was the usual non-committal shrug from the universe at another tale of corporate evil, but clearly the company would have been desperate to quieten down the news of the story. After all, despite all the recent hoo-ha about how amoral markets are, most people would hesitate to invest in a company that dumped toxic waste on a quiet stretch of African coastline. So, hire some bigshot legal team to gag the press and job done.

Only, if you want to read what the Guardian can’t say…

When I started writing this post a few minutes ago, there were 114 Tweets on ‘trafigura’. Right now, there are 2,354. I type pretty fast, so that gives you some idea of how quickly this is blazing through the public conscious right now. And in that small figure, allied to the link I just shared with you, lies an important lesson about how the world has changed since the creation of most of our legal laws.

Our laws were set up to muzzle big institutions like newspapers etc. By and large, those organisations still live in fear of due process and legal threats. But when knowledge passes into the hands of the many, that law becomes worthless. Is there even a way you can gag 3,271 Twitter users (latest count)? I doubt it. And since the information is spreading like wildfire, it will now gain a vast amount of attention that it probably never would have done before. Hell – if Stephen Fry tweeted about eating Spam, their sales would probably double.

The lesson here is that companies need to wise up. Fast. The days when corporate malfeasance could be hushed up by a deal cut in the smoke-lined back rooms is over.

4,487 tweets and counting….

See the rest here:
The Guardian / Trafigura Thing – Gagged by Carter Ruck Solicitors? Fail.

Why do some people easily get hordes of comments on their blogs and quickly build a massive following, while others struggle?

It’s not because they hit the front page of Digg.

It’s not because they’re super-connected with A-listers.

It’s not even because they’re really smart.

It’s because they kill their good ideas.

And because they kill all the “good ideas,” they don’t chase the stuff that seems to have potential, but doesn’t really matter. They only do the stuff they must do: what they’re insanely passionate about and what they were born to do.

Of course all the other things, like great headline writing, social networking, and SEO, matter too.

But they’re all secondary to caring. No amount of hype can make up for it. While you can certainly create an outward shell of success with publicity and marketing tricks, that success only lasts until the next marketing gimmick falls through.

Working toward something you genuinely care about is like laying your roots deep in the earth. Trying to fake it at something you don’t like is clutching at sand.

Faking your passion for a product is like dipping a salmon-flavored ice cream cone in chocolate and hoping no one can taste the fish.

The sad part

Every day, vast amounts of time, money, and energy are put into creating things that people don’t want and don’t care about.

Brochures and fliers are made by the millions, and when handed out, it’s like they’re saying “Here, you throw this away.” (Thanks, Mitch, for that one.)

Tons of graphic design, copywriting, marketing, and all kinds of finagling is done in attempt to sell people things they don’t really need, and could care less about.

Sometimes these efforts work, at least temporarily. But there’s always a sense of something false beneath the surface.

When you don’t care about the work you do, not only does your audience know you’re not excited, you’re also unmotivated. The work is slow and painful, because you are easily distracted. You have to psyche yourself out to start your day.

The awesome part

The good news is that there are vast amounts of amazing endeavors you can pursue right now. You don’t have to do boring work, trying to slap feel-good emotion on top of boring products.

The even better news is that when you actually care about the work you do, it’s easy to stay motivated about communicating your message. You’ll still have to figure out how to market it and how to get people’s attention, but once you do that, the heavy lifting is already done.

Plus, you can delete all that nauseating highlighted text and neon-orange, fear-based marketing.

Take a deep breath. Notice the lack of carcinogens? It’s called fresh air. That’s what authentic marketing tastes like.

Some cool side-effects of caring

The nice thing about caring about your work is that it leads directly to respect for your audience.

It feels good to know your doctor actually cares about your health. It’s nice to know that your mayor actually cares about pesticide-free drinking water, too.

Caring builds respect. It also builds trust. But most of all, it helps you connect.

If we care about the same things, you’ll probably listen to what I have to say. A relationship is formed. You open up the channels of trust and permission.

Character may almost be called the most effective means of persuasion. ~ Aristotle

Caring emanates character and builds trust; the most powerful method of persuasion.

Sure, you can slap as much marketing as you want on top of a hollow product that you really couldn’t care less about. And if you’re skilled enough, you can probably get a decent amount of people to take out their wallets.

But why not use marketing to back up something that lights your head on fire with passion? Then, all of your tools of building curiosity, persuasion, and conversion not only get people to take out their wallets, they will tell their friends.

Kill your good ideas. Don’t do what you think might be profitable. Don’t do what you think is “sensible.” Don’t do what you think you might be willing to live with.

Do what you can’t not do.

About the Author: Jonathan Mead is a professional ass-kicker (life coach), raw foodist, and student of Jeet Kune Do. He recently released a free ebook called The Zero Hour Workweek, aimed at helping people find freedom from the 9 to 5.

Go here to see the original: 
Kill Your Good Ideas