The weekend brought some interesting developments. Howie Schwarz is a very devout guy and doesn’t do any work from Friday night through Sunday morning. Due to Google releasing there social search algorithm into the main SEO results last week Chris Lang had to write a report on how you can use these changes to the algorithm to outrun your competitors and claim those top spots on the keywords you’re targeting.

Since this delay in opening the training isn’t your fault I’ve been talking with Chris to do a webinar this Thursday on the 3 main pieces of Google:

1. Youtube
2. Social Search
3. Google Friend Connect (exciting new features for marketers added in)

And a probable bonus 4th piece. Will let you know the details and time once they’re finalized. The product is scheduled to be opened this week.

Follow my twitter updates and stay tuned to your email inbox for the updates.

• Why You Deserve to Be in Social Traffic Last week, I gave you a hint at what was coming down the pike. And here's another email about social media help. So I wanted to address this question which I know comes up a lot because I'm seeing it and others I work with are getting asked it too.......
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Hey Taggzilla member and reader. If you happened upon this post you’re lucky because I’ve been seeing lots of stuff out there that is questionable at best.

I just got a story from a source I trust that a big guru you may have heard of got entangled in a launch where the results were based on paper trading and not actual live investing. This obviously, was outside the “marketing your business” market but all the same the lack of integrity out there seems to be growing.

As you know I don’t participate in many launches because I’m careful about who I do business with. My job is to protect you as a reader, subscriber, member of the taggzilla community. Or just a new person coming in.

Chris Lang is a well-recognized expert in social marketing. He’s a google expert in friend connect and google wave which are 2 huge tidal waves which are gaining in height and strength as we speak.

I’ve known him for over a year and spoke to him on the phone for probably over 50 hours of conversation. I consider him part of my mastermind group and regularly bounce ideas off him.

He’s making a very solid offer. I’m not going to give you any hype here. The offer is for his entire suite of tools and will be at a price not offered before and he assures me not available again.

No fake scarcity or anything here just an excellent value package to boost you in the new year and build his satisifed customer base.

I invite you to check it out. It’ll be open tomorrow so join the email list over on the right sidebar and you’ll get the update tomorrow when it’s open.

Follow my killer twitter updates.

• King Tut Exhibit - Marketing Done Right & Wrong King Tut exhibit at the Dallas Museum of Arts was a special and very enjoyable experience for me because I've always been extremely interested in ancient history. I was struck by a few glaring omissions both from the exhibit as well as from the way it was marketed and the......
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• 30 DC Highlights - 2009 Summary of Thirty Day Challenge Update Day 14 - Day 31 New additions to the Web 2.0 week were Weebly(weebly.com) and Facebook Pages http://www.facebook.com/advertising/?pages. These came to light in Day 14 and should be used. Facebook pages is new and powerful so you want to be using it a great deal in your promotion......

I’ll start by saying my disabled Facebook account is back live and in action.

It was officially reinstated on January 27th, roughly 5 days ago.  And for thoroughness I have logged in today and my account is back to normal.

In Facebook’s typically cryptic way they gave me very sketchy details on what caused the shutdown and also why I was reinstated.

I believe it was the faithful support and proactive e-mails sent by my friends and maybe even you. After I sent out a twitter message, made my initial blog post about my Facebook account being shutdown, and sent out an e-mail to my subscribers asking for my friends to send a quick e-mail saying to reinstate Alexander Alaric within two days my account was back on.

Obviously, I can’t be 100% certain this is what caused it to be re-enabled.  But I have my suspicions since my two previous e-mails a week before had gotten no results nor even a response.

Maybe they just had a tremendous backlog in the disabled account Department of Facebook to work through.  But I believe even with over 140 million users now when you have other people who want your account back and will tell FB it seems to get far more traction and action from the powers that be inside Facebook.

I had six people who actively took the time to send an e-mail on my behalf and my thanks to them is included below.  I also had seven people make comments on my blog post with their support and my thanks to them is also below.

Here is a screen capture of the e-mail I finally received from Facebook:

As you can see they make some vague reference to a photo but I haven’t uploaded any photos to Facebook in quite awhile.

In case you can’t see it because of the image being too small it says violent or graphic photos are a violation of Facebook’s terms of service.  But of course it doesn’t say the photo they’re referencing falls under this category.

And I don’t see how it could because the only photos coming into Facebook were from my blog because I drag my blog posts into my FB account using one of their RSS pulling applications.

The only photos coming in were from the articles I did about tribes.

One was a group of Indian women doing some sort of pose maybe a yoga class, and the other was a group of Buddhist monks so certainly nothing violent or graphic because all people depicted were wearing robes with all graphic body parts fully covered.

So the mysteries of FB continue.

One thing I can say for them is they seem to respond to grassroots movements.

So if your account gets shut down (and you didn’t violate their terms, or do anything unforgivable like add 21 friends in a span of 21 seconds) then I believe if you get your friends to e-mail Facebook on your behalf asking them to reinstate, you’re likely to get a good result.

I’d like to thank:

thank you Glen McNiel. Once you accept my friend request I’ll put your FB link in here!

Diane Branovacki

Glen Crosier

Kim Fleming

Jana A Murray

Karen Kramer

Paul thanks for your comment and email to FB though I don’t have a photo or even your last name.

Jussi, Corinne, Dat To thank you for your kind words and comments.

Joey Ross

and Rob Bell

Also, I’d like to thank you for taking the time to get educated about Facebook and I want to thank all my friends and supporters who I don’t even know about helping me behind the scenes.

Good luck, I’m glad to be back, and happy Facebooking.

Originally posted 2009-02-02 10:32:53. Republished by Old Post Promoter

• 30DC - Thirty Day Challenge Internet Marketing Recap Normally, I don't do extraordinarily long posts. But summing up 30dc aka thirty day challenge in 1 post is a mouthful. So I've formatted it nicely in an easy to read way with clickable links to the resources. Right upfront there's been much discussion about what sites to post content......
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• Why You Deserve to Be in Social Traffic Last week, I gave you a hint at what was coming down the pike. And here's another email about social media help. So I wanted to address this question which I know comes up a lot because I'm seeing it and others I work with are getting asked it too.......

StumbleUpon is a social website of both randomness and predictability.

Random because it allows you to discover websites you might have never found any other way and it’s tailored to the interests you checked on your profile.  As you stumble, you are encouraged to rate your finds with a thumb’s up or a thumb’s down. Your thumb’s ups are recognized by the site so your next stumbles will be in line with your interests. The more you stumble, the more specific your interests will be, allowing Stumble Upon to generate more websites more useful for you.

This makes it predictable. And its predictability has led over 7 million active users to take advantage of the site and drive traffic to their own websites. The following are the most popular tips in attracting steady traffic.

1. Make an effective website. Since users just “stumble” upon your site, it’s necessary to make it attractive. Make it visually appealing. Use colors that appeal to your audience. Use bold prints and readable fonts. Choose designs that are easy on the eyes. Be brief on your homepage, yet be in-depth in the rest of the content. It should be attractive enough to entice users to visit your site again.

The key is eye-catching because if you don’t they’ll stumble away as fast as they stumbled in.

2. Build your profile. Build your network. StumbleUpon is, again, a social website. You gain legitimacy and authority as a user when you have a trustworthy profile and a great network of friends. Friends here are tagged by shared interest. This makes it easier for users to gather links to the websites that are of interest to them. Also, it does pay to make friends with high profile users with enormous networks.

3. Leave links. Link-building is now a fast-growing business. You may hire people to get you to Google’s first page; you may get the same traffic by building links in StumbleUpon. All you have to do is stumble websites and leave links to your website. This way, you also get to invite users from outside you network. This is possible when they have a links/resources page or a blog with commenting turned on.

4. Choose the right topic. This technique can easily make or break your stumble. Submitting to the wrong topic will have your stumble go to people who are most likely disinterested in your content. Conversely, submitting to the right topic will bring your stumbles to relevant eyeballs that will probably give you thumb’s ups. And as all thumb’s ups are bookmarked into the user’s page, you can be sure of repeat, and possibly long-term viewers to your site.

5. Tag wisely. It is generally advised to use specific tags for your stumbles. But that is no longer a popular  technique for tagging. Many now recommend more general tags, like “sports” instead of “surfing.” These tags gets your stumble to a lot more people. The setback here though, is to show up on a largely uninterested audience. I’d say a good balance of both specific and general tags will give you the best of all worlds…interested users will see it as well as you getting maximum and massive exposure.

In more practical terms though, you just have to use the site more frequently to see how you can be most satisfied. So get out there and Stumble upon cool sites.

If you have any other tactics or tips which have been useful in your stumbling talk about em here. I’ll look forward to your comments.

For more social media ideas Follow my Twitter Updates

Originally posted 2009-04-27 09:13:17. Republished by Old Post Promoter

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One of the fastest growing social networking internet services must have some use for business!

Thus, declared a seasoned entrepreneur. So why would an internet “newbie” who is one of a growing number of businessmen and company executives looking for ways to leverage these internet networking services want to use it?

Twitter, comprised of a large number of self-organized networks of communities and friends, is a free micro-blogging service that enables members to send and read other people’s updates called “tweets”. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length sent to a member’s “followers”. These can be received by going to the Twitter site as well as affiliated websites, via cell phone SMS service, and also some external applications like tweetdeck and twhirl.

I personally use tweet deck right now.

The concept of the service is easy enough to understand, but the implications of how it can be used for business may be surprising. Here are some of the ways it can be used – my top 5 ways to Twitter, for business.

1. Twitter can help direct people’s attention to your company, product or service

It can work like a personalized, free ad service and works better the larger your network of followers. The key here is to get people to follow you. You can do something like add your twitter feeds to other social networking profiles and leverage on these groups to reach a larger audience. Do more than just promote your agendas, and be consistently courteous, professional and interesting as well.

Starbucks, for example posts new offers to their Twitter followers. So does Dell, and many others in the ever-growing bandwagon of companies taking advantage of the service. It’s rumored Dell drives over $1 million dollars in sales from their tweets!

2. Twitter works well as an opinion poll

Want feedback on a new idea, product, or service? Want to know what people think of a competitor’s product in the market? This will be a good source for free, fast feedback from your potential market.

This works well for Popeyes Chicken, a quick-service restaurant that uses its Twitter account not only to update followers on current deals and discounts, but also to respond to feedback from their customers. They do so in such a courteous and customer-friendly way their followers don’t mind and actually like being heard.

3. Twitter may be used to improve customer service

Why not? It may make it easier for you to reach your customers, while providing a friendlier (less formal) and easier avenue for them to contact you.

Comcast, a leading provider of digital broadband cable services uses a customer-friendly Twitter support that goes to the extent of showing a photo rather than a company logo to make customers feel like they are talking to a real person.

4. Twitter works great in posting company updates, industry news, and organizing meetings

News headlines and updates published in a company website may be broadcasted to Twitter-followers of the company. Ford’s Twitter account, with currently more than 6,000 followers worldwide, is doing just that.

Twitter also works as a handy group-sending tool to broadcast meeting announcements. Just make sure you send it to the right group otherwise undesirables might show up too. One way to do this is through hashtags.

5. Twitter can hook you up with mentors and business partners

If you find and follow the right people, it may turn out to be a rich learning environment and source of ideas you could use.

This will allow you to network with like-minded people who you can collaborate with, or at least observe in order to gather information and ideas. You may follow a consultant for example, who tweets regular updates on the progress of tasks accomplished as well as issues encountered in a particular project.

Simple tool, free service, great idea!

The applications for Twitter as a communication tool are as many as your imagination can conjure. Just keep in mind that with the absence of regulation, it is also subject to abuse. So using it for classified company or business information is unwise. Still, it is clear that there are ways to utilize it beneficially, just for “listening” at the very least.

I look forward to your comments on how you’re using Twitter in your business both what works and what’s flopped.

Follow my Twitter social media and marketing updates here.

Originally posted 2009-05-29 11:49:06. Republished by Old Post Promoter

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