5 Ways to Weave LinkedIn Into Your Marketing Mix

From Facebook to Twitter to You Tube, there’s no limit to the number of social networking sites that can be leveraged to interact with customers and prospects, and build positive brand awareness.

LinkedIn, however, stands apart from the crowd. The roots of popular sites like YouTube and Facebook are founded on the entertainment side of things. But since its creation, LinkedIn has been geared toward the professional business crowd.

If you haven’t already incorporated LinkedIn into your online marketing mix, consider the latest statistics:

• LinkedIn has more than 60 million members
• A new member joins LinkedIn approximately every second
• Executives from all Fortune 500 companies are LinkedIn members

Get started with a LinkedIn marketing strategy today with these five tips:

1. Build a Network, Then Start a Group
Getting started with a LinkedIn marketing strategy involves two important steps, the second of which is dependent on the first:

• Create a personal account and build a network of contacts. Reach out to customers with whom your business has a solid relationship – those who truly know your company and its products or services. Ask them to write recommendations for your company, which will appear in your profile. And don’t forget to ensure all employees are part of the network as well.
• Once your personal account is setup, create a group for the brand. By creating a group for your brand, you’ll be able to maximize reach beyond your network. Within the brand group, you can start discussions, share news, post jobs and create subgroups.

2. Make the Most of Your Profile
For the LinkedIn community, your profile will be this first item they see, so treat it as you would any landing page. To make the most of your profile:

• Hyperlink using keywords. Include relevant URLs in your profile, and use links with anchor text. For example, instead of “My Blog,” use a keyword to describe it such as “SEO and Online Marketing Blog.” (see image below)
• Use keywords in descriptions. That includes the summary, specialties, experience and all other description categories.
• Include an image in your profile. LinkedIn, after all, is a social networking channel. So add as many personal touches as possible to maximize engagement and put a face to the brand.
• Caption: Include blog or website links in your profile using anchor text.

Include links in your LinkedIn profile using anchor text.

3. Leverage Third-Party Applications
Today, there are a host of third-party applications available to help you make the most of your LinkedIn activity. For example:

• Box.net: Add links to files like resumes and marketing kits
• Slideshare: Share business presentations and demos with your network
• Company Buzz: Monitor messages sent out on Twitter about your brand or other subjects
• TripIt: See where members of your network will be travelling to and when you’ll be in the same city

For an upcoming trip to Dallas, my contacts that will also be there are identified.

4. Update and Engage Frequently
Think of LinkedIn marketing efforts as you would blog, Twitter or Facebook marketingefforts: The more activity and interaction, the better the results. To consistently engage with your network:

• Sync blog posts to your profile with tools like Blog Link or WordPress LinkedIn Application
• Frequently update your profile with the LinkedIn status feature, much like Facebook status updates
• Leverage the LinkedIn Question and Answer function – participate in others’ questions and ask your own

5. Promote Your Profile
In order to expand your network, LinkedIn marketing efforts – like anything else – must be promoted in other channels. Include a link to your profile on your website and blog, in individual blog posts, in email signatures and even on business cards. Be sure to optimize your profile for important and relevant keywords. Allow enough of your profile to be public so search engines can rank that content accordingly.

These tips, of course, are just the tips of the iceberg when it comes to LinkedIn marketing tactics. What specific tactics have you found successful for marketing on LinkedIn?

5 Sure Fire Tactics to Promote a Business Blog

Relevant, Consistently Updated Content + Flawless Technical Functionality & User Experience = Perfect Blog Launch

What’s missing from the equation above? You guessed it: blog promotion.

Creating a glitch-free blog with informative content means next to nothing without attracting readers.

Start promoting your blog today with these five effective tips:

1. Involve influential industry bloggers.

By linking to popular blogs, you can gain the attention of both the influential blogger and his or her readers.

But your blog won’t be the only one to benefit. You’ll be giving the other blog a little link juice – and be paying them a compliment at the same time.

Try out a few of these ideas for leveraging other blogs:

• Create a post around an interesting concept published by an influential blogger:Be sure to attribute the information to the blogger and link to his or her post. And don’t forget to offer additional unique insight to make the post your own.
• Interview an influential blogger and turn it into a Q&A post: That blogger is sure to link to your post, and his or her readers are likely to visit your blog as a result. Side benefit: Including the insight of a thought leader will help position you as a thought leader as well.
• Create a list of influential blogs: Include popular blogs from your industry, and include a link, short description and even a screenshot. Online Marketing Blog has successfully done this with its BIGLIST of online marketing blogs. Publish a blog post each week highlighting one or two new blogs to promote the list and acquire another link to the list.

2. Promote your blog via social media.

If your organization already has a solid presence on Twitter, Facebook or other social media channel, leverage your followers or fans to promote your new blog.

For example, when a new post goes live, create a short tweet with a link back to the post – and provide the link on your Facebook fan page.

A few tips to keep in mind:

• Whenever possible (we know how quickly 140 characters can be used up!), include the blog name in tweets and other social media messages.
• Auto-feed new posts to your social media accounts with tools like FeedBurner. But if you choose this option, make sure your headlines are as compelling as possible for social media.
• Maximize promotional efforts by asking employees to add the blog URL to their signatures and personal social media accounts. Employees can also re-tweet posts that they find interesting.

3. Create “link-bait” posts and “sticky” headlines.

Creating compelling headlines or posts that resonate with social web users is another way to garner attention for your new blog.

Try some of these ideas:

• Write counter-intuitive posts – i.e, “The 10 Worst Online Marketing Ideas” or “The 5 Quickest Ways to Get Caught in the Spam Filter.”
• Incorporate celebrities into posts (if appropriate for your industry) – i.e., “Top 10 Celebrity Tweets of the Week”
• Leverage the sticky headline formula, “number + adjective + sticky message” – i.e., Lee’s recent post, “10 Must Read Tips to Start a Small Business Blog” (see image below)

4. Promote the blog on your corporate website.

It’s important to gain some valuable real estate on the homepage of your corporate site – particularly in the early stages of getting a new blog up and running. Create a button with a link to the blog to appear on the homepage, or at the least provide a link to the blog in the nav. The Otter Group does a good job of promoting its blog on the homepage of its corporate website (see image below).

In addition to the homepage, ensure the blog is included in the upper and right-hand nav on all website pages. The goal is to make it as easy as possible for visitors to find your blog.

5. Promote the blog offline.

For all of the online channels available to promote your blog, there are just as many offline channels to leverage. Don’t limit yourself to the online world. Instead:

• Add your blog URL to business cards.
• Promote your blog at industry events.
• Get print publications to pick up blog posts.
• Use word of mouth to let customers and business partners know of the new blog.
• Include the blog URL in the boilerplate of press releases (and in online releases, too).

Of course, these five tips are just a few of many ways to promote and market business blogs. Whatever promotional efforts you choose, look for tactics that will help you reach business goals whether they are increasing awareness, garnering buzz in the media or driving additional website traffic.

What tactics have you used to promote your blog?

Meta Tagging as an SEO Technique

During the early days of the Internet, much weight was placed on meta tags as they carry vital information that let users know of the content of a given website. Nowadays it seems meta tags are increasingly being deemed unnecessary.

A lot of people started implementing dubious means in an effort to push their rankings higher, often placing deceiving information in the tags. Meta tags are so susceptible to spamming that it practically renders the tags useless.

Consequently, most of the major search engines like Yahoo and Google done

How to get repeat traffic

1. Make sure you update all of the pages on your site frequently. Unchanged sites can be dropped by some sites and nobody wants to go onto a site and see something last updated in 2005 do they? It could be a good idea also to put a last updated counter so it shows to people you update it a lot so they will check back.

2. Allow customers and visitors to your site to be able to sign up for discounts and special offers. Put a form on your site to allow them to be able to sign up for a weekly, fortnightly or even monthly newsletter which they may be interested in.

3. Add a link to allow people to add your site to their favourites or send this to a friend, it will remind people about your site when they take a look in their bookmarks and think “Oh look, I wonder if this site has any updates”

4. Make your site stand out. Use a great brand with a great logo design so it sticks in peoples heads. Some of the best companies in the world have the simplest logos but everybody can remember them.

5. Make sure that your site is easy to find if people forget the address. I have wanted to visit a website but could never find it. The best thing to do is put links so users can add your site to social bookmarking sites, so even if their computer dies they will be able to find their way back.

6. Never spam anybody who has signed up for a newsletter. If people no longer wish to receive these then make sure you do take them off the mailing list. This makes you look respectful and that you are not a cowboy who will just spam peoples’ inboxes to try and sell their product or get the odd page view.

7. Make a “Whats New?” section. People will instantly go to this to take a look at what has recently been updating and following on from earlier they will like a site that is always updated and will probably come back to take a look at what is new and what has been updated.

8. RSS Feeds. Make sure you have one of these bad boys as they are amazing for repeat traffic. They will let people know what has been updated and when and if people have subscribed to them they are 99% likely to come back to your site when they see an update pop up on their RSS Reader.

Professional SEO Companies

SEO is a continuous process which requires a huge amount of effort and time dedicated in regularly updating and revising a website. This can be a tedious work, most especially for beginners who are up against a very tight competition. However, through reliable companies that offer services for search engine optimization, even starters can get high ranking and increase traffic volume to their sites. All it takes is to choose the right SEO company to handle your needs and maintain your site. But how do you really know which company will provide the best services to your advantage?

First off, determine if the SEO company in question is able to gauge its own ability and giving its own rank as a company. It is best to know if the company positions itself as a reliable one, but still make sure to be wary of their proposals. Oftentimes, companies who assure to get your site fully optimized in just a span of four weeks are giving false promises and unrealistic goals. A dependable SEO company should be able to help you set realistic goals, familiarize you on how search engine promotion occurs and how positioning is calculated through algorithm.

Moreover, SEO involves a lot of technical jargons. The company must be able to explain to you what these terms mean in a straightforward and comprehensible manner.

When hunting for a SEO company, ask if they can provide you with analysis reports regarding your website

The Best SEO Tools

There are many Free SEO Tools on the internet as well as tools that you will have to pay for. There are tools which can submit your site to 100’s, even 1000’s of link and article directories at the same time, toolbars which will check page ranks and sites which will check page rank, backlinks nd give an estimated value of your site all in one go.

Here are a few of the best SEO Tools:

Page Rank Checkers / Backlink Analyzer

dnScoop is a website which shows you a few statistics about the SEO state of your website. It shows you Google Page Rank, Inbound Links, Domain Name Age, Domain IP Report (See which other sites are hosted on the same server)

Page Rank Predictor – Want to find out what PR your site will have? Try here. I would not take this guesstimate as an accurate prediction though, more like a bit of fun.

Keyword Tools

Keyword Suggetion Tools – This tool will show you links to suggested keyword monthly search volumes and much more, so you can see what terms are searched for most on all of the search engines.

Hittail – Hittail tells you what keywords your visitors you are using to find your website from search engines. It also suggests what you should optimise your site for. It can be as easy as putting these terms in a ir tag and they will help a lot.

Firefox Plugins

Live Page Rank - – This is a plugin which will display the Google Page Rank of the page you are viewing in the bottom right hand corner.

SEO For Firefox - – This will show up when you do Search Engine searches, under each search result it will show information like Page Ranking, links in DMOZ, Backlinks, Technorati links and .gov links.

Blog Tools

Everytime you post on your blog you should ping. These sites will help you get in the largest blogging directories online.

Free SEO Google Desktop Gadget

To help keep you up to date with Free SEO Articles we have created a Google Desktop gadget which will allow you to have a box in the corner of your screen (or on your iGoogle) page which will keep you up to date with all of our latest articles.

SEO Explained in Plain English

In a nutshell pages appear in a Google search result because their content matches the search and they have links to them from other pages indicating their importance. So in simple terms SEO involves writing pages that use keywords, words people use in searches, and securing links from other pages to show how important your page is compared to others.

Content + Links = Search Engine Success

A Simple 1-2-3 Guide to Getting Better Search Results

1. Write content that uses keywords used by people who search
2. Build links to your pages to show they are important
3. Keep doing it!

Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is the simple activity of ensuring a website can be found in search engines for relevant words and phrases. In many respects it's simply quality control for websites. Check out these great free SEO videos The Basics of SEO in 12 Minutes Part 1 of 2 and The Basics of SEO in 12 Minutes Part 2 of 2.

Our SEO blog has a wealth of simple plain English SEO help and advice. However if you boil SEO right down to the absolute basics it can be described as:

• Creating a website the search engines can index so your site can be found when people carry out a search.
• Creating content that describes your products and services using words and phrases used by your potential customers.
• Securing links from other sites so show the search engines how important your site is.

Obviously there's a little more to it but that's SEO in a nutshell.

Add Your Blogger Blog to Facebook

In today's Blogger tutorial I will show how to add your Blogger blog (Blogspot blog) to Facebook so that your updated content can be read right from your Facebook profile. Importing your Blogger blog into Facebook will only take you a few minutes to set up but will likely produce quite a few extra readers.

By importing your blog into Facebook your Blogger posts become available to all your Facebook friends and family. Everytime you post new articles to your Blogger blog they will automatically appear on your Wall in Facebook and in your friends News Feeds. It is also possible to remove any content that you do not wish to be displayed which may be handy for some.

Advantages of Importing Your Blog into Facebook

• Increase your web presence
  
• Enjoy added interest in your blog articles and new readers
  
• No need to replicate your blog articles or content on Facebook

Disadvantages of Importing Your Blog into Facebook

• If you blog for profit think carefully about importing your Blogger blog into Facebook as you are likely to experience a drop off in traffic and a reduction in revenue earnings as fewer people will visit your actual blog. One possible way around this is to set your blog's RSS feed to show summaries only that way ensuring that anyone interested will need to visit your blog to read the whole article.

How to Import or Add Your Blogger Blog to Facebook

1. Login to Facebook or Sign up to Facebook if you are not already a member
   
   
2. From your Facebook profile page go to Settings > Application Settings which you will find in the top right hand corner
   
   
   
3. Select Notes from the list of applications displayed on the page
   
   
4. Click on Import a Blog in the right sidebar
   
   
   
5. Enter the URL address of your blog
   
   

   either website URL:
   http://seobook7.blogspot.com
   
   or your Blogger feed: http://seobook7.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss
   Please note it is not necessary to add the feed of your blog as Facebook will autodetect this

   
   
   
   
6. You will need to tick the box below this to confirm that the content is not illegal or obscene and that you have the right to permit Facebook to reproduce the content of your blog. Any problems click Cancel and reenter your blog URL address
   
   
7. Click Start Importing
   
   
8. Facebook will now import your feed and you will be taken to a preview screen to make sure the content matches your blog. If it does go ahead and confirm the import by clicking on the Confirm Import button
   
   
   
   
9. Go to your Wall in Facebook to check that your Blogger posts are now available to all your Facebook friends and family.
   
   

Tips and Troubleshooting

• If your Blogger blog is members only the blog import will fail as Facebook will be unable to detect your blog's feed
  
  
• To remove a blog post from your Wall in Facebook click on the Remove button on the righthand side
  
  
• If your images are not displaying (there seems to be a bit of a glitch with this) then you may need to try importing your blog using Networked Blogs
  

In this Blogger tutorial I have discussed how to import your Blogger blog into your Facebook profile. I have also pointed out some advantages and disadvantages of adding your Blogger blog to your Facebook profile. I will be talking some more about importing blogs into Facebook in the future which is likely to be of interest to those with multiple Blogger blogs.

Add Profile Images to Blogger Comments

Today I will show you how easy it is to have Blogger (Blogspot) display profile images in the embedded comments section of your blog even if you are using a custom template.

About a month ago Blogger announced that it was enabling profile images (profile avatars) in the embedded comments section on Blogger (Blogspot) as part of its 10th birthday feature series. The new profile image feature which has been available on other commenting options has now been extended to the embedded comments option. This is good news if you are using a default template as you will now see a small avatar next to your visitors comments and your own avatar if you have uploaded a profile image.



Default Blogger Templates - Enabling Profile Images
Profile images work on default Blogger templates and have been automatically enabled by Blogger. If you are using a default Blogger template with embedded comments enabled and have recent comments on a post you will see a profile image to the left of visitor comments (provided they have uploaded one that is). Your profile avatar will also display when you respond to visitor comments again provided you have uploaded one. (To upload your profile photo click on Add Photo at the Dashboard). If profile images are not displayed enable them by going to Settings > Comments and checking the Yes radio button at the bottom of the page which says Profile Images Enabled.

Custom Blogger Templates - Enabling Profile Images
If you are using a custom template you may still be able to see profile images in your embedded comments section. Check out Settings > Comments to make sure Profile Images are enabled. If you can't see profile images you can still add this feature by tweaking your Blogger template. Follow the instructions below to have Blogger display profile images in the embedded comments section of your custom Blogger template.

Add Profile Images to Comments Section of a Custom Blogger Template
If you are using a custom Blogger template you can use the following method to add profile images to the embedded comments section of your Blogger template.

1. Login to Blogger if not already logged in
   
   
2. Go to Layout > Edit HTML
   
   
3. Back up your Blogger template as a precaution by dowloading the full template to your computer
   
   
4. Expand Widget Templates by checking the box on the right hand side
   
   
5. Find the following line in your Blogger template by using CTRL + F:
   
   

   <dl id='comments-block'>

   
   
6. Change the above line to the following:
   
   

   <dl expr:class='data:post.avatarIndentClass' id='comments-block'>

   
   
7. Scroll down a few lines and find the following line in your Blogger template:
   
   

   <a expr:name='data:comment.anchorName'/>

   
   
8. Directly before the above line paste the following code block:
   
   

   <b:if cond='data:comment.favicon'>
   <img expr:src='data:comment.favicon' height='35px' style='margin-bottom:-2px;' width='35px'/>
   </b:if>
   <a expr:name='data:comment.anchorName'/>
   <b:if cond='data:blog.enabledCommentProfileImages'>
   <data:comment.authorAvatarImage/>
   </b:if>

   
   
9. Click Save Template
   
   
10. Click View Blog and navigate to a page with commenting to see avatars next to comments in the embedded comments area
    

Tips and Troubleshooting

• If you have added the author commenting highlight hack to your Blogger template there will be 2 instances of the code at Step 7 to change
  
  
• If your template does not have the code mentioned in Step 5 and Step 6 check that dl has not be replaced by div. In this case leave the div as is and replace the rest of the code in the line.
  
  
• Blogger has only enabled profile images for Blogger and Google profiles so if your visitors comment using identities such as "Anonymous" or "Name/URL" their image profile will not be displayed. If OpenID, AIM or other identities are used these favicons will be displayed instead.
  
  
• Profile avatars load last so they will not prevent visitors viewing your content if you have a lot of comments on some pages

In today's Blogger tutorial (Blogspot tutorial) you have learned how to enable profile images in the embedded comments section in Blogger. If you are using a default Blogger template this can be achieved by enabling profile avatars in your Blogger template. If you are using a third party custom template I have shown you a Blogger hack that will display profile images next to comments on your blog. As always I am interested in how you get on with this tweak. Good luck
!

10 SEO Tips

It is not hard to be barking up the wrong tree when it comes to getting search engine traffic because there is so much out of date information being circulated.
That is why it is always best to also learn many other traffic generation methods like viral marketing for example.

Not only is there out of date or invalid SEO advice getting around, there is also information which if acted upon, can result in your pages being banned.

The SEO tips below should assist the reader in forming a basic understanding of how to create human friendly web pages which are easily understood by the most popular search engines.

Know this. There are thousands of search engines but only two of them will bring you most of the traffic. They are google and yahoo. Another search engine that brings me a little traffic is msn but I do not focus too much on tactics for that engine.

Focus your attention on the engines that will bring you the most visitors first and work your way down.

Basic SEO

1.Insert keywords within the title tag so that search engine robots will know what your page is about. The title tag is located right at the top of your document within the head tags. Inserting a keyword or key phrase will greatly improve your chances of bringing targeted traffic to your site.

Make sure that the title tag contains text which a human can relate to. The text within the title tag is what shows up in a search result. Treat it like a headline.

2. Use the same keywords as anchor text to link to the page from different pages on your site. This is especially useful ifyour site contains many pages. The more keywords that link to a specific page the better.

3. Make sure that the text within the title tag is also within the body of the page. It is unwise to have keywords in the title tag which are not contained within the body of the page.

Adding the exact same text for your h1 tag will tell the reader who clicks on your page from a search engine

result that they have clicked on the correct link and have arrived at the page where they intended to visit. Robots like this too because now there is a relation between the title of your page and the headline.

Also, sprinkle your keywords throughout your article. The most important keywords can be bolded or colored in red. A good place to do this is once or twice in the body at the top of your article and in the sub-headings.

4. Do not use the exact same title tag on every page on your website. Search engine robots might determine that all your pages are the same if all your title tags are the same. If this happens, your pages might not get indexed.

I always use the headline of my pages as the title tag to help the robots know exactly what my page is about. A good place to insert the headline is within the h1 tag. So the headline is the same as the title tag text.

5. Do not spam the description or keyword meta tag by stuffing meaningless keywords or even spend too much time on this tag. SEO pros all agree that these tags are not as important today as they once were. I just place my headline once within the keywords and description tags.

6. Do not link to link-farms or other search engine unfriendly neighborhoods.

7. Do not use doorway pages. Doorway pages are designed for robots only, not humans. Search engines like to index human friendly pages which contain content which is relevant to the search.

8. Title tags for text links. Insert the title tag within the HTML of your text link to add weight to the link and the page where the link resides. This is like the alt tag for images.

My site contains navigation menus on the left and right of the page. The menu consists of links not images. When you hover over the link with your mouse, the title of the link appears. View the source of this page to see how to add this tag to your links.

9. Describe your images with the use of the alt tag. This will help search engines that index images to find your pages and will also help readers who use text only web browsers.

10. Submit to the search engines yourself. Do not use a submission service or submission software. Doing so could getyour site penalized or even banned.

Here is the submission page for google:

http://www.google.com/addurl.html

Submit only once. There is no need to submit every two weeks. There is no need to submit more than one page. Robots follow links. If your site has a nice link trail, your entire site will get indexed.

My site has a nice human friendly link trail which robots follow easily. All my pages get indexed without ever submitting more than the main index page once.

More SEO Tips

Get the facts here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/. This page will explain most of what you should focus on along with what you should forget about.

If you have been thinking about handing over the task of SEO to someone outside of yourself, you should read some warnings before you part with any money