Blogging

blogger outreach / shutterstock

Once you've gathered your intel, you're ready to start reaching out to your Influencers and building a relationship with them. Remember, everything in social media is about relationships. Sometimes a relationship can blossom overnight, but in most cases you'll need to harness it, to nurture it.[read more]

Posting incriminating evidence tends to be a regular habit of a lot of social media users. It happens enough for us to shake our heads in disbelief and wonder why. It’s my contention Gatsby was one such person who lacked the will or awareness to exercise due discretion.[read more]

In honor of the impending demise of Google Reader coming up in July, I wanted to offer an even better way to share your online goodness. People who write content on their websites need to make it easy for others to access it and unfortunately, those other people, even if they like your content, will forget to go to your website. It is so true.[read more]

Publishing meaningful content is incredibly important for businesses to cultivate, maintain, and grow their business. A strong digital and social media presence can be a deciding factor for many consumers who are increasingly looking to digital and social platforms to assist them with their purchase decisions. To develop a strong social media and digital presence, it is critical for businesses to create and sustain regular publication calendars.[read more]

Controlling how news is reported and disseminated is inextricably linked to power. That's why dictatorships have always censored or removed the free press and run state TV stations with a rod of iron. While much of the western world has moved on from that, media is often controlled by a certain group, making citizen journalism a vital part of the opening up of reporting to everyone.[read more]

Storytelling rocks!

Done right, sharing information through stories makes a message sing like NOTHING else can do. Someone who's great at it: Mark Hermann – music producer turned storyteller – on the Rock and Roll Zen blog. Inspired by his bio page, I shot him an email to pick his brain for bits of wisdom to share.[read more]

Photo credit: Dave McLear

The blogosphere is a pretty big place these days. So big in fact, it seems to be getting more and more difficult to pull in a decent readership let alone garner a healthy dose of engagement on your posts. This problem is particularly frustrating because of the incredibly rich content and innovative ideas that often go virtually unnoticed.[read more]

Ever wonder how much time you should devote to social media each week? While there is no set formula, this infographic breaks down the components of maintaining and measuring a social media strategy, based on a 40 hour work week.[read more]

Online communities for the anonymous

To date, social media has been used for one primary purpose: self-promotion. This has meant that online spaces that leverage the benefits of anonymity have been neglected. Now a small but growing number of sites are moving in the opposite direction -- prizing anonymity over fingerprinting.[read more]

Having troll trouble online? Trolls have been with us from the day that computers were linked together and that online anonmity was made possible. As more and more people adopt social networks, encounters with these seedy denizens of the web rise in frequency, tainting many a person's first forays into online spaces. Here is a field-tested technique for dissuading trolls in forums and social networks.[read more]

One of the trickiest parts of link building is keeping all of those links consistent. You want to always make sure your links are on reputable sites, and you want to always make sure that the links remain intact even years after they have been published. Unfortunately, links can go bad quite often because links are hard to manage.[read more]

One of the fastest ways to kill off your readership is to write blog headlines that stink. You might have all the SEO and social media tactics in the world, but if your headlines are awful, getting people to find you in a search won't do you any good if no one wants to read your content.[read more]

If you’ve seen the Day of Week data from Hubspot’s social media scientist, @DanZarrella, then you know that the weekends are the best time to publish your blog. As you see from the chart here, weekends are not just a bit better – they’re a LOT better.[read more]

case in point

A website or blog is often the first place that you go to learn a little bit more about the individual or company. So if your online content has many spelling errors or grammatical mistakes, then why should your visitors take you seriously?[read more]

content marketing strategy / shutterstock

Cold calls, or in this case cold e-mails, made to outlets that you are interested in contributing to are never easy to write – they always seem to wind up sounding stiff and rigid. Formulaic pitches, however, can be effective if done right. Make sure to answer these three questions before crafting yours.[read more]

Content marketing (Kookkai_nak / FreeDigitalPhotos.net)

People are hungry for information. If you are writing blog posts for your company or yourself and you are using social media as a channel for distribution, people will notice your writing. Blogging gives you the extra branding piece that helps people identify you and your company.[read more]

Writing is not an easy task, especially if you're one of those bloggers who constantly need to be “inspired” in order to be able to write. This can work against your career if you're near your deadline and there's no time to wait for your “inspiration” to come to you on its own. In this case, it might be better to do your own motivational steps to bring your muse to the fore – a process in writing loosely called “prompting.”[read more]

Pinterest linking

One of the lucky things for those who are looking for how to link build is that we have access to great niche communities like Pinterest for free. There’s no need to buy a list or pay a fee to sign up; you just sign in and go. Here are some ways to find links and build relationships using Pinterest.[read more]

Content writing has proved itself to be one of the most valuable SEO techniques – a process that involves writing a unique and informative post. It is extremely important to write content meeting high quality standards relevant to the users’ interest. Quality content writing demands respect as it is the most productive way to help you stand out in the crowd.[read more]

Many executives express resistance to social networking because they lack the understanding of how to preserve their personal privacy while guarding their corporate identity.[read more]