Amid the Noise and Haste

Top Ten TypePad Traffic Tips

TypePad publishes their list of Top Ten Traffic Tips to help drive traffic to your blog.

There's no such thing as too much traffic. You could read SEO blogs until your eyes fall out but the truth is you don't need a PhD in statistics to build your blog's traffic. It's pretty simple, really. To help you out, we've got the top ten things we tell our best friends to do for their blogs:

Tip #1: Post More Often

Tip #2: Turn On Google Sitemaps

Tip #3: Invite Compliments with Favoriting

Tip #4: Build Your Following

Tip #5: Share Posts to Twitter and Facebook

Tip #6: Optimize Your Post Titles

Tip #7: Harness the Power of Twitter

Tip #8: Add Email Alerts

Tip #9: Follow Others

Tip #10: Reach Your Followers' Followers with Reblog and TypePad Micro

via everything.typepad.com

Making Twitter More Useful for Business

John Jantsch over at Duct Tape Marketing has some great tips for making your tweets more useful, especially for tracking ROI...a few of his suggestions include:

• Let’s say I find a site I think is cool and tweet it. From my dashboard I can see lots of folks jumped on that and passed it around and also thought it was cool. Bingo! - I’ve got a topic for an expanded blog post.
• Let’s say I write a blog post and point it out on twitter - I can get real-time feedback, over and above comments, on how hot the topic was
• Let’s say people seem to like certain types of tweets, judging by how they interact, than others - could that help me tweet better?

Really, this is all about connectivity and thinking outside of the box to find new ways to share content, and other's.

Helpful tools John shared for doing this, and tracking results include

HootSuite

CoTweet

SU.PR

Objective Marketer

Delays, Timing, Hold-ups

So it has been quite a while since I posted.  It will begin to pick up slowly again...I have recently changed jobs which has taken me away from the blog with preparations, training, etc. 

I hope to be back soon, posting more about customer service and much more.  Please stay tuned!

Tools that Make Blogging Easier

Jantsch from Duct Tape Marketing posted awhile ago about a few desktop tools you can use that make it easier to blog.  Here are the ones he mentioned:

• ScribeFire Firefox extension - officially not exactly a desktop client as it works inside of Firefox (I use this and I find it very easy to use)
  
• Windows Live Writer - a great tool and part of the growing Windows Office Live offering
  
• ecto for MacOSX and Windows - created for Mac users and still the king

Basically, these tools let you blog directly from your desktop without logging in to your blog.  I like using ScribeFire because I can click on an icon and it opens up a window on the bottom half of my screen.  This allows me to see what I am blogging about in the top half (see below):

Technorati Tags: blogging, FireFox, Live Writer, Ecto

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Is Price Your Only Differentiator?

John Jantsch over at the Duct Tape Marketing Blog points out a key flaw in many business descriptions - and how to break out of that mold!  Here is the exercise he suggestes

Go to the web site of your four biggest competitors, copy the
introductory paragraph from their home page and paste each on a
document. Now add the same from your own web site. Lastly, black out
any mention of the names of the firms and pass this page around the
office or to anyone familiar with your business.

Now what can this show?  Can you even pick your company's description out from the competitors?  As John points out, "what is usually painfully obvious is that each of the companies is saying essentially the same thing."

Can your customers really read the difference, the reason why they should pick you instead of their customers?  If not, all they can do is choose by price.

Instead of dollar signs as a differentiator, I suggest that you describe your company with the most simple words - no jargon!  Amid the noise and haste of business-speak and language, filter the noise and simply tell your customers what you do.


Technorati Tags: marketing

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Pecha Kucha - "The Sound of Conversation"

You have a meeting, the conversation goes round and round, nothing is accomplished and worse yet people go off point, get distracted and you walk out wondering how to get that last hour of your life back.

Enter Pecha Kucha, Japanese for "the sound of conversation."

• 20 slides
• 20 seconds per slide
• Power point off!

That's it.  As Seth Godin so aptly states, "Tell me a problem that can't be outlined in six minutes and I'll show you a problem it's probably not worth having a meeting about."

Read more about Pecha Kucha in this month's Wired from Dan Pink. 

Social Bookmarking - Video from Common Craft

The folks over at Common Craft have done it again.  Another great little tutorial video explaining social bookmarking and how easy it is.  I hand over the mic:

We made this video because we want others to feel the power of social bookmarking and how it works to make web pages easier to remember, organize and share.

This video is focused on Del.icio.us, but you could also try social bookmarking sites like Magnolia or Furl.

Click To Play

I have my del.icio.us bookmarks set in the right hand column of this blog, take a look!  You can also read more about social bookmarking in a few of my other posts:

• Social Bookmarking as a Knowledge Management Strategy
• Social Bookmarking to Generate Traffic for your Blog

New Function for Sifting Through the Noise and Haste

I just installed a nice little tool on this site called Snap Shots that enhances links with visual previews of the destination site, interactive excerpts of Wikipedia articles, MySpace profiles, IMDb profiles and Amazon products, display inline videos, RSS, MP3s, photos, stock charts and more.

Sometimes Snap Shots bring you the information you need, without your having to leave the site, while other times it lets you "look ahead," before deciding if you want to follow a link or not.

Should you decide this is not for you, just click the Options icon in the upper right corner of the Snap Shot and opt-out.

ALM sold to Incisive Media

The company I work for, ALM Media was sold, as announced last week. Our new parent company will be London-based Incisive Media, a rapidly growing international business-to-business publisher with a firm focus on the financial and capital markets, good reporting, and research and information.

News reports have picked up in the last few days (see sampling below), but amid the noise and haste, the opportunity to expand internationally and on the Internet is a great deal for both sides. Incisive Media has operations in London, New York, and Hong Kong while ALM has publications in DC, Miami, NY, San Francisco, Dallas, Philadelphia, Fulton County, GA and more. In the deal, Incisive was represented by Simpson Thacher & Bartlett and ALM by Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom.

News reports:
The American Lawyer
WSJ Law Blog
Shore Communications

NY Times

PaidContent.org
Crain's NY

Reuters

Folio

Press Releases

ALM Media: http://www.alm.com/pressRelease.asp?record=285
Incisive Media: http://www.incisivemedia.com/public/showPage.html?page=456433

Bloggers and the Law - What you Should Know

If you blog, like I do, then you should be aware of certain laws about blogging.  For instance, do you disclose whether or not a post is a paid post?  Well, by way of the ALM Research Blog we get a post from Aviva Directory which helps answer this question and more with a comprehensive list providing simple and practical information.