Esteban Panzera

Yesterday I was trying to convince someone of creating his/her personal SEO/SMM blog, but couldn’t really convince that person. This is the reason why I decided to create a list of reasons to have a SEO/SMM blog, lets see if now that person reads this list and gets convinced:

1. Socialize: after blogging for some time you inevitably get to know other SEOs/SMMs that also have a blog, this all starts when they leave a comment on your blog on when you leave one on theirs.
2. Personal Branding: if what you write is good content, and people start to love your content and your blog, you might even get to be known in the SEO/SMM world.
3. Share your knowledge: it is nice to write about what you know (or think you know) and share it with lots of persons over the world at the same time.
4. Increase your knowledge: as you would have to write about SEO, you would probably get to read more seo blogs to find inspiration and to see that you are not writing something that was already written.
5. Services: if you offer SEO/SMM services, with your blog you can show more people that you know what you are speaking about and more companies will be happy to hire your services.
6. Money: with a blog you can aswell monetize it by selling advertising, by using Adsense or just by using any affiliate program you find on the web.
7. Get a new Job: if you are looking for a new job, showing your knowledge in your blog will help other companies see that you know your stuff and you would get more chances of getting hired by that company.

Lets hope this 7 reasons get read by that person and encourage him/her to create a SEO/SMM blog.

I decided to do today’s post at the Youmoz section of Seomoz, the article is seo related, about page exchanges, what in my opinion will be the evolution of link exchanges as search engines won’t be able to detect it if done correctly.

You can see the post which is titled Link Exchange 2.0: Page Exchange, would love to hear your opinions about it.

I was writing new blogs posts for other of my blogs and ran across this problem, I wanted to target both social networks and search engines with that article, but I couldn’t find a catchy title that would also be good for SEO. So I started thinking how can I target both social networks and search engines when writing a title for a blog post, I found out 3 solutions:

1.- SEO Title Wordpress Plugin

One of the solutions is downloading and installing the seo title wordpress plugin, which will let us choose a different title for the document than the title of the article. This way what we would have to do is write a catchy title as the article title and write a keyword reach title for seo on the document title field.
This would really help with seo, but in my opinion won’t be the best one as we will be losing the weight of the heading tag we have on the article title. What we can do to fix this is add another heading tag that will put the document title as text inside a heading tag.

2.- SEO Title + SMM Title

Other solution would be combining both, the seo title and the smm title we have. For example if the smm title is “9 Steps to succeed in the Social Media marketing World” and the seo title (the keywords we want to target) is “Social media marketing success”, we could combine both and end with: “Social Media Marketing success in 9 steps”.
This one would be pretty good as we would be including the keywords in the heading tags and as the title of the document, but im\n my opinion there is a better way.

3.- Combination of 1 and 2

In my opinion the best thing we can do is combine number 1 and 2, what this would mean is using the document title wordpress plugin and combining the seo title with the smm title. What we would have to do is first combine the seo title with the smm title and then as document title write the seo title. This way we would have a really catchy title, with the keywords we want to target between heading tags and an optimal title for seo.

The other day, I started talking about where to check your reputation management, but I didn’t realised that I hadn’t made an introduction to what reputation management was. Glen Allsopp made me realise this with his comment.

So, What is Online Reputation Management?

Online Reputation Management (ORM) are the different techniques used to monitor and manage what people is saying about your brand, your product or even about you. For example, what is people saying about you on forums or blogs, or even what the search engine rankings say about you.

Why should you monitor your ORM?

Lets put it this way, if you were to hire a new company that would deliver food for you and your employees everyday, you would probably want to know what other people is saying about them, so you would go to Google and type their name, there you would enter to all results that seem to give their opinion on the company. All this opinions that you would see on different websites, would be really valuable for you as you will find them real, not paid by the company and not posted on testimonials page of the company’s website.
So what if someone do this with your company and they see all negative results? They would probably run away and never come back, that is the reason why you should monitor your ORM.
There are different types of results you can get when doing a search for any company’s name:

Possitive: results that have feedback that would encourage you to hire that company.
Neutral: probably informative results that wouldn’t change your opinion on the company.
Negative: resuts that have feedback that would make you not even call the company.

How can you monitor ORM?

I already gave some ways on the other post I made about ORM but will soon continue writing about more of them.

What can we do if there is a negative result?

It would really depend on the type of website the result is at:
Blogs: you could contact the blog administrator to let him know why what he wrote is wrong or leave a comment on the blog post.
Forums: you could register and post in the thread with your answer to the negative feedback.
Static Websites: you could contact the site administrator and ask him to remove the negative feedback if it is not correct.

But what can we do if we made a mistake and we can’t answer to them?

Here I will just talk what you can do with search engines, but I will try to cover more things about this in future posts.
What you can and should do is try to generate neutral/possitive pages and rank them above the negative ones, if you can manage to control the first 30 results of the serps, that should give you total control lon your search engine reputation.

In my opinion Social Media Marketing rules can be summarized into just one sentence: Act in social networks as you would act in life (or as you would like other people to act with you). It is really like that, on social networks you interact with other persons and most people often forget this, social media users like and dislike exactly the same things the people you see on the street like and dislike.
In case you need more detailed rules of how to be successful on social networks, I wrote a list of things you definitely have to remember:

1. Complete your profile: many people don’t even think of this, but by completing everything in your profile, you are showing people that you are a real user and that you actually care about the social network.
2. Be Generous: always think of helping others first, if you help them, they will probably help you later in return for your help, and if they don’t help you, they will probably remember you for another situation.
3. Get involved: everyone must see you are really engaged with the community and that you spend time on it to make it a better place for everone.
4. Don’t expect immediate results: most people starting into social media marketing think they will succeed with their first try, although this is not impossible, don’t expect it to happen, be prepaired to fail as many times as necessary for learning more about how to have success.
5. Remember users are real people: don’t do things real people won’t like, think what would happen if you do that thing you want to do to someone you know, that will give you the answer.
6. Don’t try to sell: never sell anything directly on social networks, what you should do is submit something that will make people go to your site and check what you are selling.
7. Don’t Spam: submitting content that no one likes and that is submitted just because you want to get benefit won’t help you to be successful at social networks.
8. Don’t get enemies: getting anyone to be your enemy on social networks can make your life impossible, imaging someone that convinces 5 friends to bury everything you submit.
9. Analyse the community: check what makes it to the homepage and what doesn’t, try to do some research to see what kind of contents people will like and what they will dislike.
10. Get as many Friends as you can: as in life, getting to know as many persons as possible is something important. Whenever you need some help, you know they are there to help you and that you can count on them.

The real purpose of this blog is not make money out of it, I really enjoy writing on it and sharing what I know, but I can’t lie saying I wouldn’t love to make a living out of it. This lead me to think that there are many people looking to earn enough money to live with their blogs, people that just write for the money and will probably not think on people, just money, so I needed some reasons to justify why you would want me to live of my blog.

1. Better Content: as I wouldn’t be working as a SEO or SMM, I would be able to tell everything I know about any subject and that wouldn’t be wrong for me as I wouldn’t need that knowledge. I would also be able to spend more time writing each article as I would have all the time of the world just for writing.
2. More Content: I just said this, but if I had much more time I would also be able to write much more articles about more subjects, and you would be getting much more quality content in one day.
3. Free: I wouldn’t have to charge for content as some people do, I would already be getting enough money from blogging, so I wouldn’t need you to pay for me to blog.
4. More Knowledge: if I didn’t have to work, I would have much more time, I could use that time for experimenting new things at Search Engines and Social Networks, what would make me have much more knowledge which I would also share on this blog.
5. Help Others: this is something I always wanted to do, help other people on anything I could help, even helping charitys with their SEO. Again, I wouldn’t mind to doing this as I wouldn’t be making a living of working as a SEO.
6. Prizes: if I made a living of blogging, it would mean I had many subscribers and I would really love to give them something for following me and what I write. I would also love to give something to the people that is following me today, but I wouldn’t be able to give them a valuable prize. If i made a live blogging, I would have enough money to spend on my subscribers each month to giveaway a prize.
7. Networking: today you are probably not even interested in knowing who I am, but if I made a living out of blogging, it would mean I am someone you would probably like to meet. As I would have more time, this would be something I would be really happy to do.

How you can help me make a living of blogging?

• By Promoting my Blog: more visitors and more subscribers would mean more people interested in putting money into this blog, what would help me make a living of blogging.
• By Getting Advertisers for my Blog: you don’t need much explanation on this one :P
• By Getting People interested in a review at my Blog: again, I think this one explains itself.

Once again, let me clarify, I am not looking to make a living out of this blog (it is not the objective of it), but it would be great if it was possible.

Celebrities get Interviewed at TV programs > Top users get interviewed at blogs

What celebrities say appears on gossip programs > What Top Users say appears on Internet Marketing blogs

Everyone wants to be the friend of a celebrity > Everyone wants to be the friend of a top user

Celebrities get on Magazine’s frontpages with catchy titles mentioning them > Top users write catchy Titles and make it to the frontpage

People wants celebrities to give them their signature on a sheet of paper > People wants top users to comment what they submitted

Celebrities don’t get out of their houses much > Top users don’t get out of their houses much

Celebrities are generous with charities > Top users are generous with other users

Celebrities make a living of being celebrities > Top users make a living of being top users

Everyone wants to be a celebrity > Everyone wants to be a top user

Colin Cochrane wrote some days ago about what happened to him when he tried to do a search inside his bookmarks at Del.icio.us but using Google, he couldn’t find any results. With some research done by him, he could find out that Del.icio.us was preventing Search Engines to index its pages by using robots.txt; what search engines see when trying to access it, is a 404 error page, what doesn’t let them index the pages.

This decision by Del.icio.us affects everyone in at least 3 different ways:

- Links: links on del.icio.us pages aren’t worth anything for Search Engines as they can’t even see the page. However they still got the value of needing them to be on Del.icio.us’ popular links page.

- Reputation Management: another use marketers gave to del.icio.us was for reputation management on search engines, but they won’t be able to use it any more for that purpose as Del.icio.us won’t even index the pages.

- Search via Google: it won’t be possible to search your bookmarks by using Google, I loved using Google Search for my bookmarks on del.icio.us as it always displayed the most relevant content first (yes, i have too much bookmarks).

Why I think del.icio.us took this decision?

As you might be aware, del.icio.us is owned by Yahoo, so the decisions behind del.icio.us were really taken by Yahoo. But they also blocked the content from Yahoo!’s Slurp bot, in my opinion, the real reason why they are doing this is because Yahoo doesn’t want other search engines to benefit from del.icio.us content, and they blocked themselves as they don’t need a crawler to know all the pages of a site they own.

1. Blogs: bloggers are getting more and more authority each day, some places where you can check all blogs at once are:
   • BlogPulse
   • Google BlogSearch
   • Technorati
   • IceRocket
   • BlogDigger
   • Sphere
2. Forums: if someone creates a new thread about your company and how what you offer sucks it would give a really bad name to your company, so you definitely need to follow this, you can use:
   • BoardTracker
   • Omgili
   • BoardReader
3. News: what if your company makes it to any news site because of something embarrassing that happened? You have to know this, for this you can use:
   • Google News
   • Yahoo News
   • MSN News
4. Social Networks: they have become of common use and nearly everyone has an account on one of them, you definitely have to track them. Some of them are:
   • Digg
   • Reddit
   • Facebook
   • Twitter (use TweetScan)
   • Youtube
5. Search Engines: probably the most important one, everyone makes a search before buying something, it is definitely a must for your company to track this. Most important Search Engines:
   • Google
   • Yahoo
   • Live
   • Ask

Everyone knows that the process of checking all this everyday can be a bit tedious so the best thing you can do is use Google Alerts and MonitorThis to track every place where your brand could appear on the web.

Why you should submit your own content:

1. Correct Title and Description: if you submit your own content to social networks, you can be sure you will be sure you are submitting it with a catchy title and description. If someone else submits it, he/she could change the title and description and make your content fail.
2. Friends: you probably have some friends on that social network (you should), they would help you by voting on what you submitted. If someone with a new account submits your content, he/she would have no friends and would make your content fail.
3. Success: if your content has success on that social network, you would be one step closer to being a top user. If someone submits your content, that person would be one step closer to being a top user.
4. Responsability: if what you submitted to the social network doesn’t succeed, you would be completely responsible for it and you wouldn’t be able to say it was because of another person. If someone else submits your content and it doesn’t succeed, you could blame that person for that and you wouldn’t ever know what would have happened if it was you who submitted that content.
5. Analysis: if you submit your content and it doesn’t succeed, you could analyse why it didn’t have success and if you find out it was because of your profile, you could change it. If someone else submits your content and it doesn’t have success on social networks, you wouldn’t be able to know why it was.

Why you Shouldn’t submit your own content:

1. Users hate it: most users on social networks hate when you submit your own content to it, as they feel you are just there to promote your website. They want the social network to be a place to exchange great content, not to promote websites.
2. Spammy: you might submit one article from your site, but after you submit a couple of article, it would really look spammy that you are always submitting content from the same site, that would have a negative impact on your name and on your website’s reputation.
3. Not permitted: some social networks (some do permit it), don’t want users to submit their own content to social networks, so by submitting your own content you wouldn’t be following the Terms of Service of that social network.
4. Top User: a top user of that social network might visit your blog, find your content interesting and submit it to social networks, that would bring you great possibilities of succeeding.
5. Better Title: if someone else submits your content, he might come up with a better title you didn’t think of, which could be the reason your content succeeds in social networks.

Everything in life has got its pros and cons, submitting your own content to social networks isn’t an exception to this. So it is your choice.