Social Media & the Appreciation of Meaningful Content

March 23, 2011 by

image credit: Stallio

My social media story begins almost four years ago when I was given the assignment for a company where I was working at the time, to explore the implications of social media on businesses. While there was a fair amount of resources online, I found what I was looking for in a book that I’d read about and hunted down at my local Barnes & Noble store. The book cost almost $60 and not having a budget to purchase, I spent a few hours sitting in the cafe at the store, reading and absorbing.

I regret that today I don’t even recall the title of the book because I would have liked many times to have reached out to the authors and thank them for their work. What was clear to me that day was that social media was a must for my firm to explore on behalf of our clients and also for our own marketing communication efforts. I don’t know if I would have reached that conclusion had it not been for their superb content.

Since that day in June 2007, I’ve written hundreds of blog posts and have used a number of social media channels e.g. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc. in my work and personal life. Needless to say, I continue to learn something new every day.

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Why Companies Need Authentic Social Media Experiences

March 10, 2011 by

image credit: Jonas Boni

When I started writing about social media in the Spring of 2007, the field was still relatively new. Many of my early blog posts explained what social media was and educated on the reasons why businesses of all sizes should create presences. Over the past four years, we’ve witnessed a huge jump in businesses who have joined in the conversations. Large companies with well-known brands jumped on board. And, slowly but surely, medium and small businesses started to follow suit.

The Super Bowl saw an unprecedented use of social media marketing this year, and the predictions about the 2011 Oscars have been split between who will take home the award and what companies will be streaming live, and posting updates to Facebook and Twitter. From the local brick and mortar businesses to the big online giants, companies have been embracing social media.

So the question I think we have to ask ourselves now that every Tom, Dick and Harry have created social media presences, has it made a difference? Do you really care that your local bakery has a Facebook page? Or, that the Mom & Pop corner store is sending out tweets? Or that Coca-Cola has the most fans on Facebook?

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Why I’m Removing Twitter From All of My Sites

December 14, 2010 by

A few days ago I decided to take some time and focus on increasing the speed and load time of my sites. To accomplish this I used the popular Firebug addon for Firefox alongside of the Google Page Speed addon which analyzes every element of a webpage and gives you performance recommendations.

Even though my sites are on dedicated hosting and I have spent a lot of time on optimization after I ran the test my pages would only score 75 / 100 at BEST.

This bothered me because my competitors were scoring much higher than that, and Google is now factoring in site speed to some degree so it’s more important than ever to have a quick site.

After adding W3 Total Cache and doing more optimization I raised my score 7 points to 82/100, however this was still lower than many of my competitors so I decided to dig a little deeper. I noticed that the “tweet this” button at the top of each post (you can see an example at the top of this post because I haven’t removed it on this site yet) was having a fairly dramatic impact on my sites speed so I wanted to see what would happen if I removed it.

Once I removed the tweet button from the equation my score jumped from 82/100 to 89/100 and my pages loaded 25% faster!

Going forward I’m just going to have a self hosted static Twitter button on all of my sites, so technically I’m removing Twitter but still linking out to it. Hopefully one day, when the fail whale is an endangered species the fully functioning Twitter button and widgets can return – but until then – good riddance.

Has Twitter (or other third party services) impacted your site’s performance? If so what have you done about it?

Google Now Requires You To Pay To Appear On 1st Page Of Some Search Results

September 3, 2010 by

If you need a reason to diversify your business and focus on social media and traffic from sources other than Google look no further. Over the past year I have watched as Google has progressively tried to milk more money out of their search results by continuing to add more paid results and links to other Google services. This has effectively pushed everyone else below the fold of the page.

Lets look at a basic example, say you create a site about cell phones and are trying to rank on the first page of Google (above the fold) for that term. Well I think it’s pretty safe to say that this is no longer technically possible. Take a look how the results below are formatted – I’ve highlighted all paid results and results for other Google services in red.

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The Complete Guide to Hiring and Managing Blog Writers

September 25, 2009 by

One of the first, and most important things I figured out when I started blogging full time is that hiring a team to write for you can be much more profitable than doing all of the writing yourself. Two or three writers can manage to crank out way more content than I could flying solo. The best part is that the writers begin to pay for themselves very quickly, here’s why:

  • Having multiple writers allows me to increase the content of my sites at 2 – 5x the rate that I could when writing articles myself (depending on how many writers I hire). More content and more frequent updates equals more traffic which leads to more revenue.
  • I now have more time to spend on marketing and promotion. Many successful bloggers will tell you that when first starting a new site, 70% or more of your time should be spent on marketing and promotion.

Many people decide not to hire writers because they worry about the quality of the writing. My philosophy has always been that if I can do it myself, I can probably hire someone to do it better than I can, for less than the cost of my time. The trick is to give the people that work for you all of your expectations up front, and not to settle with anything less than what you outlined initially. If the writer ends up writing on the wrong topic, make them rewrite it. If the article isn’t formatted correctly, make them reformat it etc.. There are always going to be bad hires out there but most people do just fine with clear instructions.

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