Blogs have increasingly become valuable multimedia hubs where personal bloggers and companies provide information through all types of media in various categories of interest. When bloggers write posts and get them published, they expect readers to find them. The fact, however, is that your blog is one among millions of others – probably even hundreds of millions – existing in the Web universe. Instead of waiting to be discovered, you need to find a way of telling the world that you exist. The best way of doing this is to promote your blog to social media sites. Once your post is published at your ‘hub’, you should let your followers and fans find the post where they hang out. With more than 200 million Twitter users and about 800 million on Facebook, having your post promoted through social media is crucial in giving your blog much needed exposure. There are several major platforms where you can publish and enable people – Read the full article
Blogs are here to stay. (Call them “online magazines” if you’re not used to the portmanteau.) But gone are the days when you just signed up, went for the simplest blog theme or layout, added some cute Dear Diary posts, and suddenly had everyone finding you. These days, you’ve got to stand out. And standing out takes more than signing up for an account in your favorite blogging platform. (Our favorite, of course, is WordPress.) Go for something that will differentiate you – and which will also reflect your identity well. That’s why we came up with this list: to help you find the appropriate look of your WordPress blog, whether it’s a simple company news blog, a photo blog, an online magazine, a video blog, a friendly community for your fans and followers, a social media hub, or a tumblog. If you like this list of online magazine / blog-friendly WordPress themes, share the love by tweeting it, posting – Read the full article
So you’ve e-Commerce’d your site up. (Hopefully with Magento, our favorite.) And you’re ready to roll. The homepage is ready. The product shots have been Photoshopped to perfection. The design and the color schemes look very cool (ahem, an aesthetic term) and you’ve set up your checkout process with a secure third-party payment gateway. That’s it, right? Well – not if you haven’t dedicated as much effort as you already have to your product pages. Here’s a list of awesome tips for turning your product pages into awesome sales magnets: Optimize it. This, really, is a given, since you want the search engines to find you as easily and as often as the human visitors do. Great ways to make your product page SEO-friendly include: avoiding duplicate content and duplicate URLs; writing up unique and compelling text descriptions for each product (don’t just copy the manufacturers’ descriptions); and editing this content in a way that makes it relevant to your – Read the full article
So, you’ve finally decided to join the social media stream and now you’re looking for more creative ways to market your business. So far, you’ve built your Facebook page, a LinkedIn group, and your newly launched corporate blog is receiving a lot of positive feedback from readers. There is one more thing that can boost productivity: social media applications. These apps can boost your marketing efforts and make the process even more efficient. Here is a breakdown of the five most popular social media apps that you can use to accelerate your marketing success: Networked Blogs Join an online family of over 500,000 blogs and build an active community around your own blog. With the Networked Blogs Facebook app, you can: Import the blog feed to your Facebook profile Share your posts with a huge community of bloggers Gain massive visibility Promote your blog on Facebook The first step is to add your blog to the Networked Blogs via Facebook. Once you – Read the full article
If many who were expecting a blockbuster acquisition in the tech industry were disappointed with the recent Google-Groupon deal that never happened, well – a bigger deal just came through – to the tune of $8.5 billion in cash. In a definitive agreement announced Tuesday, software giant Microsoft Corporation has acquired Luxembourg-based Internet phone service and communications company Skype. The investor group, Silver Lake, which bought Skype from eBay in 2009, oversaw the transaction. The deal represents one of the highest-valued acquisitions in years, and is expected by both companies to soon increase market opportunity as well as benefit individual consumers and businesses. It will, in particular, integrate the Skype platform and connect its 170-plus million users to a portfolio of Microsoft products, including Lync, Outlook, Xbox LIVE, and Kinect. “Microsoft and Skype share the vision of bringing software innovation and products to our customers,” said Skype CEO Tony Bates, who will now become the president of the new Microsoft – Read the full article
Whether your business has 100 followers or 100,000 fans, you’ve probably already realized that your community needs to be cultivated – and monitored – on social media channels weekly, if not daily. Recent news about the Taco Bell class-action lawsuit, which was filed against Taco Bell for “misrepresenting the contents of its beef,” is nothing surprising. I’m sure most customers don’t expect they are eating wholesome, organic meals at Taco Bell. However, it’s not the lawsuit that is interesting here; it is the way that Taco Bell warded off a potential crisis by being proactive and effectual on social media. Taco Bell has already gotten some previous press for their impressive works on Facebook and Twitter; but this is more impressive, and the way they turned this particular misrepresented beef crisis into something positive is a great lesson for Internet marketers as well as for online reputation management professionals. First step: Address the issue A confident and clear message doesn’t – Read the full article
The Facebook “Like” button has a new friend. Or rather, a new “competitor”. After a series of unsuccessful attempts to incorporate social into search – such as Orkut, Buzz, Wave – Google is launching what observers believe can serve as a rival product to Facebook’s “Like” button. It’s called the Google “+1” Button. In an announcement made last week on the official Google blog, the search engine giant is rolling out the new +1 button as a way for users to share their recommendations to others, as well as to give a “public stamp of approval” on search results and linked sites that they like. This then enables other Google users to find more relevant – and more social – search results. “Sometimes it’s easier to find exactly what you’re looking for when someone you know already found it,” reads the explanation on the Google +1 Button page. “Get recommendations for the things that interest you, right when you want – Read the full article
Sometime last year, social networking giant Facebook launched an online Q&A product called Questions. It was thought to be a feature that would rival Yahoo! Answers or the much buzzed-about Quora – in that Facebook Questions would be a similar online database of knowledge, built by hundreds of millions of users – but the product eventually failed to gain traction. Few people used it. Now, Facebook Questions has been revamped and made more “social”. It’s probably less ambitious than its first version, but it’s certainly better and more useful this time. In a March 25 announcement made on the Facebook blog, product manager Adrian Graham explained the Facebook Questions update: “Friends are often the best source of advice when you’re trying new things. Friends know your tastes, and you have confidence in their opinions. Over the summer, we began testing Questions with a small group of people, and today we are beginning to roll it out to everyone…. There are – Read the full article
