Socially Bookmarking Content Using Shareaholic

Shareaholic makes it easy for you to submit articles, blogs, video, images and many other content types to sharing or bookmarking service, including: digg, del.icio.us, facebook, friendfeed, google bookmarks, google reader notes, magnolia, mixx, reddit, stumbleupon, tumblr and twitter.

Shareaholic also lets you know how many times the web page you're on has been dugg or saved to del.icio.us.

You can get Shareaholic at http://shareaholic.com/.

Using the Amazon S3 (Simple Storage) Firefox Add-on

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any user access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites.

To use Amazon S3 you need to first be using the Firefox Web Browser, if you already don't have it you can download the Firefox Web Browser.

Once you have the browser installed you can use right in the browser using the Amazon S3 Firefox Organizer. It gives you access to the Amazon storage in a interface very similar to FTP.

Once installed you will have to add an account for the Amazon S3 service. You will have to add the key and secret key provided to be able to access.

Once added you can then upload and download files freely.

Managing your online reputation

As you will come to find out, we're a large fan of the google tools. Most people rely on Google Alerts to monitor their online reputation. Google alerts works by sending you an email any time a new relevant result for a certain search is found. People will set it up to be notified for their company name and sometimes even competitor names.

We like to take this a step further and setup a google home page tab for reputation watching. Inside that tab, we'll add various RSS feeds created from searching various search engines for our key terms. Some of the sites that we consider a must add for repuation watching are:

• Technorati


• Yahoo! Answers


• Google News


• Yahoo! News


• Google Blog Search


• Blogpulse


• Bloglines

This should give you a good monitoring base for both blogs, news and the randomness of Yahoo questions. It would definately be a good idea to customize this list for your own personal niche market, but this is a good base to start from.

Keyword Sniping

The folks over at Courts Internet Marketing School have an excellent article up about Keyword Sniping.

What is keyword sniping? It's a method of SEO where you setup up an entire site based on one keyword in hopes of capturing a niche market.

I agree with them in the sense that it's very important to do keyword research. They mention Wordze (paid service) and WordTracker (free service) other options are Google AdWords: Keyword Tool and Submit Express. Google's solution is nice because it shows advertiser competition as well as avg monthly search volume and past month search volume. However, google uses graphs instead of actual numbers like the others. I'd recommend spending the extra time and using both Google's solution as well as WordTracker (or if you're really serious - Wordze).

Targeting something outside of the tech market is another great idea. The majority of "tech" people ignore ads or have ad blocker installed. Try thinking about things your mom, grandpa or child would search for.

The article also provides great insight into how much content to have and how to load it with keywords, domain name consideration, setting up inbound links and also good guidelines for site branding.

Joining Conversations? What ARE conversations?

The web has gone through a large transformation in the past few years. Before the whole "Web 2.0" explosion the web consisted of a lot of static pages. People presented their information and that was it... Read it and move on (but please click the animated gif ad first). Lately (last few years) sites are becoming a lot more focused on interaction and community.

Besides the obvious giants - MySpace and FaceBook - there are tons of other socially based sites. Flickr, Dopplr, Digg, Reddit, YouTube, Classmates.com, Fotolog, Friendster, Linkedin and Plaxo to name just a few. All these sites are based around communities. Sharing photos, suggesting new articles, keeping in touch with highschool classmates and sharing addresses are all examples of the basic ideas behind these sites.

These are all examples of one for of conversation to join. Registering for any of these sites (that are relevant) is an early step in the marketing campaign - but a step we'll talk about in a later post. Other examples of conversations going on on the web would be Yahoo Answers where people post a question and then members of the interweb try to answer... users rank others answers and the best answer is chosen.

Of course another form of conversation is blogs. Blogs allow readers to comment on the authors posts. The good blogs (in my opion) have th author respond to those comments... this allows readers to ask questions, point out errors and then the author can reply... and there's your conversation.

One of the largest forms of conversations has actually been around since, I guess you'd call it, web 1.0. This would be forums. There are forums out there for almost everything. Forums work a lot like blogs where someone posts a topic and then anyone is welcome to join in on the conversation. Forums can be a great place to join in on conversations and get your name out there.

Now that we have some examples of conversations, in my next posts I'll start explaining how to utilize them to your benefit.

Social Graph - Extending Your Presence Out On the Internet.

One of our goals when implementing a social marketing campaign is "Joining the Conversation". It's not our goal to increase page rank or sell throughs on pay per clicks. Our goal is to drive traaffic to the site because people are interested in our clients content. One of the best ways to do this is to slowly build a reputation in the clients industry.

Lets say our client is a supplier of specialty products for Salt Water Fish tanks. This is a pretty specialized market that deals with a lot of educated customers. Chances are good that we aren't going to have a Campaign Manager that is a specialst in this area so we will dedicate the first 40-80 hours of the project to just educating ourselves - nothing more.

The first step in a campaign should ALWAYS be educating. Many places make the mistake of jumping right into the conversations and talking about thing that they are not educated about. It is very important to actually have a base of knowledge to pull from. Of course 40-80 hours is not nearly enough time to become experts on any subject, over the next few posts, i'm going to take you through a sample campaign using the Google platform to help create the illusion that you are knowledgable about your client, that you want to join in on conversations and are not just their to market yourself (even though that is the main reason).

DNS Joy and Stabilitiy

I was so excited in the 2002 when I finally grasped all the concepts of DNS. Well at least the concepts that apply to my world. I'll never get it all. And I truly understand what a big world network addressing is.

Recently I am moving all my DNS up to the Registrar level. Most of the registrars I use offer a DNS management panel for me to handle most of my DNS needs.

So I am using this, I am decommissioning R2D2 who has been a loyal DNS server for several years.

Thank you R2D2 for your loyal server in addressing and routing all my clients.

Thanks especially to GoDaddy for their wonderful DNS interface which allows me so much control for 80% of my domains.