5 Ways Social Media Can Enhance Your Presentation Skills

April 14, 2008

Do you have to present at meetings at work? Or perhaps you are building your personal brand and platform as a professional speaker? Maybe you have a desire to get in front of the media on TV or radio? One of the great ways that I’ve developed my skills in presenting and in speaking to the media is not through attending courses but by two other approaches:
  • watching other presenters
  • speaking and presenting often - not always to groups of 200 or more people, but often to small groups of less than 40 people.
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10 Ways to Improve Blog Traffic in 30 Minutes or Less

April 12, 2008

This is a guest post on improving blog traffic from Courtney Tuttle. Courtney writes about marketing online at Court’s Internet Marketing School.

1. Create link clusters within your blog

A link cluster is a group of links that you can point at a post or page to improve its search engine ranking. Let’s say you have a post that’s ranked for ’stupid business ideas’. Edit 10 of your other posts to create links (using ’stupid business ideas’ as the anchor text) to the ’stupid business ideas’ post and you will surely move up in Google for that keyword. This process can be implemented in about 10 minutes and can be used for any keyword your site ranks for or is trying to rank for.

2. Rework HTML title tags of trafficked posts

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Why Do You Write?

April 11, 2008

Why Do You Write? In this post Muhammad Saleem asks why do you write? Muhammad is a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on many social sites. image by mezone

Why Do You Write?

Sounds like an odd question at first, doesn’t it? The reason why you write actually has a big impact on how you write and what you write about, and understand that identifying this reason can actually help you write better and work faster towards achieving that goal. For example, when I first started writing online, I was writing a personal diary of sorts. Since I was writing it more as an outlet for self-expression and not as something for public consumption, the blog didn’t look very pretty, it was unstructured, and I didn’t care much about editing the content or writing regularly. However, when I started writing my first social media blog, I approached the matter very differently. What changed? Read more

Personal brand pack

April 9, 2008

personal brand packYou probably already have a few accounts dotted around the Internet on social networking sites like MySpace, YouTube, Facebook etc and have reached the point where you’re thinking about building your own website, your own dotcom, somewhere to present yourself, your business, your thoughts… your BRAND.

Brand-Forge.com’s Personal Brand package is designed for people with some knowledge of how websites work (HTML, PHP, FTP, Flash etc) but are not interested in the technical jiggery-pokery behind managing your own webserver and other time-consuming and unrewarding activities. For those who have no interest in getting down and dirty with a bit of simple code customization and plugin configuration, don’t worry, Brand-Forge.com offers a fully managed service from as little as $10 (£5) per hour.

Now, for the first time you can order, at the click of a button, a complete suite of tools to help you realize your dream and begin the process of building your own online brand.

The personal brand package includes: Read more

Sphere: Related Content

BG #002: Marketing To Baby Boomers Using Social Media Part 2

April 9, 2008

BIZ GROWTH PODCAST #002 : APRIL 9, 2008 MARKETING TO BABY BOOMERS PART 2 - ENGAGING THROUGH SOCIAL MEDIA In this second edition of the Biz Growth Podcast we continue our conversation with Marilynn Mobley, SVP with Edelman PR and the author of the terrific blog Baby Boomer Insights. We continue our conversation about marketing to baby boomers, but this time explore how baby boomers engage with social media and what that means if you want to connect with baby boomers through social media platforms. If you missed part 1 of Marketing To Baby Boomers on the Biz Growth Podcast, you can access it here. Read more

115 SocialNews Sites

April 8, 2008

115 Social News and Bookmark Sites Ranked and Rated

How to Target the Right Social Media Sites

April 7, 2008

This is a guest post on targeting Social Media Sites is from Steven Snell. Steven writes about social media marketing at Traffikd. Social-Media.jpgMost bloggers recognize the incredible potential that exists with social media marketing. Many want to maximize the traffic they receive from social media, so they add a Digg button to their posts or sign up for an account at StumbleUpon. What too many bloggers overlook is that Digg and StumbleUpon are just two of the hundreds of available options, and they may not be the best fit for every blogger. In order to get the most out of social media traffic you’ll need to put some thought into choosing the social media sites that are the most appropriate for your blog and your audience. Unfortunately, none of us have the time to be an active member on more than just a few social media sites, and trying to target too many of them by adding countless buttons and widgets to your blog will only make it cluttered and ineffective. Among social media sites there is a huge variety of audiences, types of content that is popular, amount of traffic that is sent to popular links, etc. I think most of us would agree that quality traffic is more important than quantity of traffic. The quality of traffic that you receive from social media will be largely dependent upon finding the right fit for your blog. You’ve probably read that social media traffic is very low quality. From my experience, this is not always the case. Traffic from poorly-targeted social media sites will be low quality. Read more

The Age Of Conversation 2008

April 5, 2008

Did you miss the conversation in the blogosphere last year about The Age of Conversation - the collaborative book project that brought together some of the leading names in blogging and social media? One of the fantastic things about the book project is that all the monies raised from the sale of  ‘The Age Of Conversation‘ go to Variety, the Children’s charity. Well this year, ‘The Age Of Conversation: Why Don’t People Get It’ has almost 300 authors contributing who will be covering the following subjects:
  • Manifestos - Declarations, up front, on the Age of  Conversation and why don’t people ‘get it’
  • Keeping Secrets in the Age of Conversation - With  everyone talking so much, why do we need secrets and what is the role of privacy?
  • Moving from Conversation to Action - The practical steps that businesses and brands can take  to move from conversation to something more valuable to their business
  • The Accidental Marketer - What is the attraction of marketing and are there company’s or brands that happen into marketing success?
  • A New Brand of Creative - With the changes in the way  that people communicate and collaborate online, marketing and advertising  companies are needing to reach out and work with a new type of creative team.  What do these “creatives” look like and what are the challenges that they face?
  • My Marketing Tragedy - covering projects that have failed and what was learnt from the failure?
  • Business Model Evolution - Just as the markets and  people are changing, so too are the business models around both clients and  agencies - this chapter will explore the implications of the new business model
  • Life in the Conversation Lane - Bringing it all back to  the individual and  how is life in a digitally connected, social world impacting us all?
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Personality Not Included: Remember To Vote To Win A Copy Of The Book

April 1, 2008

A couple of days ago you might recall I invited you to read the interviews for the book launch of ‘Personality Not Included’ by Rohit Bhargarva. Well Rohit has created a short list of the top 12 interviews and you can vote on your favourites - and by doing so are in with a chance of winning a copy of the book yourself. Do go over to read his article as Rohit also shares his learnings about doing a social media book launch. You see Rohit is going to present the 5 interviews with the most votes with a copy of the book - and as I wrote about earlier, if you vote for my interview with him, I’ll gift you my copy AND there will be a donation to charity too. Read more

Should I Change My Website Into a Blog?

March 30, 2008

“Hi Darren, I’ve got a website at www._____.com which I’ve had for a few years and not really done much with. I’ve heard that blogs are a good way of building traffic and making money, should I change it to a blog?” I get this type of question on a weekly basis so I thought that I’d tackle it as a post. There are a number of factors to consider when deciding whether to change an established website into a blog.

6 Reasons to Consider a Blog

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