by Stoney deGeyter

In Step 1 of the Go Blog Yourself series I discussed the need to know more about your audience. If you want to get someone’s attention you have to know more about those that will be looking. It does you no good to bring dinner to a dessert social!

Once you know who’s eye’s you’ll be turning your way, the next step is to really hone in on the type of content that they will want. In the world of movies, it’s not hard to generate a male audience. Show a little T&A, add some guns and explosions and you’ve got a movie almost any guy will watch.

But the world isn’t made up of only men. This something that Hollywood understands when it comes to selling TV advertising. There are the 18-49 year old male demographic, but there are also teenage boys, tween girls, older women, older men, etc. Each one of these segments has their eye on something completely different.

In the online blogging world, there is also a while range of audiences. You know who your audience is, but what are they looking for? The easiest way to figure this out is to perform a bit of keyword research. When looking for things to talk about you need to look at three different keyword categories:

Broad Topics

If you have a good handle on your audience, coming up with topics should be relatively easy. Of course this assumes you have more than a superficial knowledge of your audience, but you’re there in the trenches with them. In our illustration above we used keyword topics representative of a motorcycle battery site. If you want to write for an audience interested in learning more about motorcycle batteries you need to understand what topics they might be interested in.

Obviously the audience wants to know about batteries, but what other battery related topics might they want to read about? Some might want to know more about how to keep their batteries charged during the motorcycle off-season. Others will be interested in maintaining the life of the battery. More than a few might also be interested in various kinds of battery chargers. These are just a few broad topics that can be used to create good blog fodder.

Specific Desires

Next you want to research keywords that highlight any specific desires they might have regarding those topics. Some visitors will want information specific to Honda batteries while others will want battery information relevant for their Suzuki bike. You will find at some point your audience wants to know about different types of chargers such as solar, maintenance free or trickle chargers. And yet again, there may be more specific concerns regarding off-season storage ideas.

The key here is to let the keyword research help you find the terminology that your audience uses. You can write an article on battery maintenance and another on battery storage, and still another on battery care. Three different approaches to what is essentially the same topic, yet each blog post addresses the distinct terminology used by your visitors and can cover a different set of thoughts and ideas.

Immediate Concerns

Going beyond your reader’s desires, you can tap into some more immediate or urgent concerns. These can be found by looking at more specific phrases that show up in the keyword research. You’ll often see these in the form of “how to” type questions.

These questions can cover a wide range of sub topics using a variety of “long-tail” search phrases. This is really where you can get into creating dozens upon dozens of articles addressing all the various concerns that your audience might have.

In most industries there are no shortage of concerns that can be written about. Any question can turn into a valuable blog post. Any thought can be expanded on to provide your audience with new information, or at least new ideas to consider.

Any good keyword research tool will help you uncover the search patterns of your audience and provide you with dozens and even hundreds of search phrases that you can then use in your blog posts. Providing your audience with the type of content they want to see is essential to growing a blog that is well-read and respected in your topical community. Of course you have to write authoritatively on your topic but that’s another issue all together.

by Diane Aull

Recently on one of the forums I frequent, we were discussing social bookmarking. One of the administrators pointed out that traffic from social bookmarking sites is generally transient, only sticking around for (at most) a few seconds and rarely converting. Besides, many such sites now routinely “nofollow” outbound links, so they don’t pass along “link juice,” either.

Whereupon a poster remarked that it appeared social bookmarking was a complete waste of time.

I hear that from some marketers, not just about social bookmarking but about social media in general. I’m not sure I’d be so quick to characterize it as a complete waste of time, though. It’s not so much that social bookmarking and social media doesn’t “work” as it is that some marketers seem to approach it all wrong.

Bad approach = bad results

Typically, what I hear from those who think social media is useless is: they make a list of the most popular social bookmarking sites, and every time they create a new article or blog post they mass-submit the page to all of them. Then they sit back and complain about the poor quality traffic and how the entire exercise doesn’t seem to bring much long-term benefit to their site.

Now, the way I look at it, it’s not so much about the direct traffic you get from the social bookmark site. In my opinion, here’s where the real value lies: social media submissions — if done well — have the potential to bring your pages to the attention of people who might be interested in what you have to say. And those interested people can prove useful.

The first commandment: be interesting

Perhaps someone will see your page link on that social bookmarking site, be intrigued and visit it, find it informative or entertaining and link to it or write about it (or both) on their site, thereby encouraging their visitors to check you out. At the very least, they’ll vote it up in the social bookmark site itself, thereby helping bring your content to the attention of others and increasing the possibility of someone finding it useful enough to highlight on their own site or blog.

In other words, social media can lead to “real” links (that is: the kind that aren’t nofollowed) and “real” traffic (that is: the kind that sticks around to buy stuff).

The key bit in that is that the people who see your stuff on a social site have to find it intriguing enough to visit, vote up and/or link to and/or write about. Which means wholesale submitting every new page you create to vast numbers of social sites without regard for the relevance of that page to each site’s audience is simply not a productive strategy. It’s the easy way, it’s the way a lot of marketers seem to approach social bookmarking, but it just doesn’t work.

Focus, focus, focus

Each social site has its own focus. Some are all about breaking news, some about women’s issues, some about technology or politics or marketing or arts-and-crafts or kids’ activities or whatever. Some are filled with edgy or controversial content, while others are more mainstream. You need to explore each site you’re considering deeply enough to make sure you have a good handle on the kinds of things that will appeal to the “citizens” of that site.

Think “niche.” Try to identify as many bookmark sites as you can that relate to your business/industry — these may not be the “big guns” of the social bookmarking world, but they’ll be much more likely to be receptive to what you submit.

Start by making sure your submissions aren’t just your own stuff. Be generous to a fault. Try for at least a ten-to-one ratio of other people’s stuff to your own — and make sure you’ve already got a good, balanced submission history before you submit the first page from your own site.

You don’t want to get known as one of the spammers who only drops in to submit his/her own pages (and mostly irrelevant pages at that). That’s a quick way to get ignored by alot of people. You don’t want to be ignored. The key term in social media is… well… social.

Get by with a little help from your friends

In other words, it’s all about exposure. You need friends on the social site to visit, recommend or vote up your pages. If they do, their other friends may then be exposed to your content, which they in turn can visit and pass along to their friends, and so on and so forth. Most of them will probably just visit quickly and leave, but a few may stick around… find your site useful… link to you.

But if you’ve self-identified yourself as a link dropping spammer, you’re not going to have many friends (and even fewer influential friends). No friends, no recommendations, little exposure. Simple as that.

Beyond that, be selective about what you submit. When you have content that is especially interesting, newsworthy or relevant to that particular site’s topic, submit it. But be aware, not every new bit of content you create is worthy of submitting. Just the super-relevant really good stuff. (And be honest with yourself — there’s no way every page on your site is “the good stuff.”)

It may even turn out you submit different pages to different sites. Perhaps you have a somewhat irreverent, humorous blog post that’s perfect for one social site, and a scholarly serious article on your main website that’s ideal for another. So submit the pages to the site(s) where they “belong.” Don’t just willy-nilly submit everything to everybody. You want to target each submission to the site(s) where it’s most likely to do well.

Is this more work than just “carpet bombing” every social site you can find with every new post or article you create? You betcha.

But, ya know, nobody ever said taking the easy way out is a shortcut to success.

by Jennifer Laycock

One of the questions I hear most often when I’m teaching a social media seminar is how to balance their professional social media presence with their personal one. People ask me if they should blog and Tweet as themselves or as their business. They ask if they should mix business contacts with friends on Facebook and LinkedIn. They want to know if they can talk about their hobbies on their business profiles. Basically, they want to know the pros and cons of mixing business with pleasure in the blurry-lined landscape of social media.

It’s a question I’ve had to ask myself many times over the years. For the past decade, my business and personal life have mixed and mingled without incident on the web. I spent two years sharing my life and my thoughts as a nursing mother of two young children on a very public blog called The Lactivist. I shared my obsession with cute lunches when I wrote a series on my bento hobby blog and I shared my daily diet plan with the SEO industry while dropping nearly 20 pounds for charity. If you followed me on Twitter, you were just as likely to hear me talking about a night out with friends, my thoughts on home birth or the last recipe I tried as you were to hear me debating organic search tactics. Basically, my business persona and my personal persona were one and the same.

Or at least they were until last November when I all but vanished from my blogs, Facebook and Twitter. Those who know me well enough to touch base with me at conferences or on Gtalk know I’ve had quite a bit going on in my personal life over the last six months. The rest of the social media world? They just know I vanished.

It’s the peril of letting your personal life get too intertwined with your business life on the web. If something happens that gives you cause to go silent, all the work you’ve done to build up that social media presence can get thrown out the window and that can hurt your business. While social media has helped move all of us into the celebrity world of living out our personal lives on a stage, many of us choose to keep the most intimate details of our personal lives personal, not realizing just how much our every day conversation reveals until we find ourselves in the midst of personal changes we’d rather not share with the world.

It makes a strong case for keeping your personal life separate. That said, there’s an equally strong case for mixing business and pleasure. It’s each person’s job to weigh the pros and cons and decide for themselves. With that in mind, let’s consider it from both angles.

Personal Connections Strengthen Online Bonds

There’s a challenge to doing business online. The lack of face to face contact makes it difficult for us to make the personal connections that so often influence our purchasing and partnership decisions. We mix and mingle at Chamber of Commerce meetings because we like to have professional contacts we can trust. We form opinions of people based on our conversations with them, on the things we have in common and on the way we watch them interact with others. We sign deals over a game of golf or a round of drinks. In fact, our personal lives often open doors in the business world by helping us establish connections with people.

That’s why despite my own disappearing act from the world of social media, I’m hard pressed to take a hard line stance against allowing your personal life to infiltrate the social media accounts you use for business purposes. While it could be argued my limited participation these past several months has set back my professional growth in the social media community, it can also be argued that my social media profile never would have been as large as it was had I not spent so many years blogging as Jennifer Laycock, kid-wrangling, Buffy-loving, bento-making marketer, and not simply as Search Engine Guide.

With that in mind, let’s consider some of the pros of mixing business and pleasure while building your social media accounts.

1. You can connect stronger and faster with valuable business contacts. It never ceases to amaze me how many people come up to talk to me at marketing conferences because they were a nursing mom or had a wife who nursed. The Lactivist blog did an amazing job of moving me out of the realm of “conference speaker” and into the realm of “hey, she’s a mom too!” Sharing bits of your personal life can be a connection catalyst because it opens doors for conversation.
2. You give a human face to your company. This is something companies like Zappos and Southwest have done extraordinarily well in the social media space. The voices of their leaders have provided a “personality” for what might otherwise be nothing more than a logo and a line on a credit card statement. If we like these personalities, they draw us to a business over and over again.
3. You can build a following and a brand more quickly. Internet users have flocked to social media sites because they crave connections. Giving them a way to connect to your business or your brand not only builds loyalty more quickly, but it helps spread the word. People talk about the companies that talk to customers and it leads new customers into the fold.

Don’t Take an Open Forum too Far

I think the key to remember is that not everything you have to say should be said publicly. Whether it’s a celebrity interview that dives way too deep into someone’s personal life, or a co-worker venting about finances or relationships, we’ve all sat through uncomfortable moments where we knew someone else was telling us something we really shouldn’t be privy too.

This is something I see happening regularly on Facebook. Whether it’s because people mix up “post to wall” and “send a message” or because they simply don’t care who sees the conversation, I regularly see the intimate details of people’s lives (and the lives of their friends and family) being publicly discussed. We’re slowly moving toward an online community that thinks every aspect of their lives are fair game. While that’s fine and dandy when they are sharing their own life, it starts to get sticky when their life includes other people.

1. Nothing you say is private. It’s all too easy for people to forget that most social media profiles and services are at least somewhat public. Unless you’ve locked your Twitter stream, anyone can type in your direct address and read it, even if they don’t “follow you.” If you post a comment on someone else’s Facebook page, any of their friends can read it too. I’m often astounded at the amazingly personal conversations people have in public on social media sites, as if they believe no one else is watching or listening.
2. Not everyone is going to agree with you. This especially holds true on matters of faith, politics and misappropriated adoration for the University of Michigan. (Everyone knows Ohio State rocks!) It’s fine and dandy to have your thoughts and opinions, but you also need to realize sharing them may alienate just as many people as it connects you with.

The Reality

The truth is, personal issues present challenges in life no matter what. Hollywood celebrities and political figures live out the trials and crisis publicly that the rest of us get to face in the relative quiet of our personal lives. The niche celebrity that comes from building a social media profile for your business can thrust us into the same challenges on a smaller level.

For the most part the problems are few and far between, but the truth is you take risks any time you make your personal life public. Consider the pros and cons carefully, look at the type of business model you’ve set up and decide which factors are most likely to come into play. Ultimately, there’s no right way to build a social media profile. Like nearly every other business and marketing decision you’ll make, you’ve got to weigh the risks and do what works most effectively for you.