Social media has gone from being a pastime to a necessary component of any brand and business. To build up your stockpile of social media knowledge, you need to stay informed of the latest news and trends by reading the best blogs in the business. You already know about the “famous” social media blogs – but what about those logs that consistently publish good information but just haven’t been exposed to the same traffic? Similar to my list last year of top social media blogs to follow in 2011, I wanted to update that list with 10 more blogs who …
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The New Year is a great time to either start a brand new blog or revamp your exiting website. One of the ways to improve your blog in 2012 is by using plugins that make it more social media optimized and SEO friendly. Having the right plugins can give you an edge over other blogs and can also assist you in gaining the extra functionality you need for your WordPress-powered site, especially if social media is an important part of your marketing strategy. Let’s have a look at the top plugins that I recommend you utilize in 2012. There’s a few …
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I get asked by a lot of companies as well as bloggers as to ideas on what they should be blogging about. My golden rule, as a tool of Inbound Marketing, is to try to blog about topics that my potential clients might be interested in. As you know, I believe a blog should be an essential component of any social media strategy. Now, since I provide consulting and coaching services to companies as well as sell books to individuals, my target audience is pretty broad. However, I always try to blog to showcase my expertise as well as attract …
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Religion is one of the oldest pursuits of mankind while blogging has only been around since the advent of the Internet. Just as social media permeates every aspect of a business over time, it has the the potential to do so over many parts of our daily life. Upon the introduction of, Michael Myers, an SEO guru who started out in his profession by helping his church hit the top of Google search results for their niche, I had the opportunity to interview someone who is considered a global expert on the relationship between social media and religion, Brandon Vogt. …
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Chances are if you’ve attended any seminars in the last few years on leveraging new technology, social media, and the mighty power of the Internet, you’ve been told that you and your business must blog. Chances are, you’ve also been told just how easy it is to start a blog and that a monkey can do it. Throw up a page of some kind on any of the popular hosted blog platforms (WordPress, Tumbler, Posterous et. al.), or hire a broke youngster via some crowd-sourcing firm who’ll gladly hook you up with a self-hosted blog for a price of a …
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I recently blogged about why companies should blog and also why blogging is a great way to start your social media marketing efforts. Once you start blogging, you will soon want to increase the number of website visitors and RSS subscribers as well as get the word out about your blog. The problem, though, is that if your blog isn’t set up and maintained right, you could be promoting your blog to a transient audience. Whatever the purpose of your blog, you almost certainly want to reach as large an audience as possible, so here are 8 insanely simple tips …
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Social media is an important medium that every small business should be embracing to help develop new business, understand what others are saying about them and/or their competitors, engage with and increase the loyalty of their customers and fans, and potentially even provide another avenue for customer support over social channels. There are many choices of sites in which companies can invest money and time in building a presence on, with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube being the most popular. At the end of the day, however, one of your primary objectives for your small business in engaging in social …
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When I taught my first Twitter workshops back in 2009, I mentioned one of the many reasons why I was bullish from the start about using HootSuite as a Twitter client: It gave you the ability to seamlessly import RSS feeds. At that time, I mentioned that this was efficient for your blog content, although now I would say since you spent 2 hours (at least I do!) to create a blog post, you might as well spend a minute or two to customize your tweet to promote it. However, I also told those in the workshop that, should they …
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Wow. It’s hard to believe it’s been 5 weeks since my last blog post. This is the first time in many months that I haven’t blogged for such a long period of time. It isn’t that I didn’t want to blog, as I am always thinking of things to say, but I really needed to use all of my creative time to finish my 2nd social media book, which I hope to be formally announcing next week. Not blogging for such a long time gave me some time to think about what blogging means to me and why I feel …
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Business blogs are becoming an increasingly common way to expand a company’s online presence. Six months ago I asked does your business blog? According to Hubspot, the number of companies that blog has risen 17% in the last two years to represent 65% of all businesses surveyed. That increase is not at all surprising to me. After all, as well as improving search engine rankings, blogs can be one of the most cost-effective marketing tools available to businesses. With so much competition online, they have become a powerful channel for both developing brands and generating sales. While blogs continue to …
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