I’ve found tools and tricks that  make  my social networking life simpler.  I hope you’ll find them helpful too.

For posting to your networks and monitoring posts:

• Lately I’ve been using the tool HootSuite to broadcast posts to one or all of my networks. Just sign up and set up your account to link to your other social network accounts and then when you make a post you can choose to broadcast to any or all of your selected networks.  You can also monitor your SM feeds with the HootSuite site–click on my LinkedIn tab and I see my network status updates; click the Facebook tab and I see my Wall; click the Twitter tab and I see my twitter feed.  And with the Twitter feed you can set it up to monitor various topics.  For example, I have it  set it up to show feeds about SEO; another tab monitors pilot supplies, and yet another tab shows my standard Twitter feed.
• TweetDeck is another application I’ve used in the past.  It’s similar to HootSuite but  allows you to connect to FaceBook, Twitter and/or MySpace.  Since I have a LinkedIn account, but not a MySpace account, I find HootSuite works better for me.
• If you’re a smart phone user, there are apps for managing your Twitter and Facebook accounts while you’re on the go.  I’ve tried Twidroid and Twirl on my Android  and I have Facebook mobile set up too.

Use your blog to feed your networks:

One of the smartest things you can do to minimize your workload and maximize the effectiveness of your blog posts is to feed them to your social networks.  All the SM sites have the capacity to take a blog feed in some form or another.  Here are some tutorials to set up feeds to some of the  social media sites.

• Facebook – http://www.ehow.com/how_2031209_import-rss-feed.html
• LinkedIn – Open up your profile to edit and click on Applications where you’ll see a WordPress tool or a BlogLink tool.  Both tools will pull your blog posts into your profile.
• Twitter – Go to Settings > Connections and you’ll see a couple of apps, FeedBlitz and TwitterFeed that will help you feed your blog posts to your Twitter account.

It may take you a few minutes to set up your feeds, but once you’ve set it up you’re done.  Now whenever you make a blog post, it posts to your blog and all the networks you’ve set up to receive it.

It’s been a year since I first stuck my toe in the twitter water and honestly I wasn’t so sure that I’d find Twitter to be a useful tool.  But I’ve found that it can be a very useful tool both as a a customer service tool and marketing tool.

For example, Monday morning I came into the office to find that one of my managed servers was down.  Not only my server, but it looked like the whole data center was down.   Not a good start to a Monday.  My first reaction was to call the data center’s technical support for answers but while on hold with the 20 million (give or take a few million) other clients I realized I might find answers more quickly on Twitter. I typed in a search and instantly knew what was happening without having to talk to anyone.  With a couple of 140 character posts, the hosting company answered my initial question (what the heck is going on?) and assured me that the problem was in the process of being resolved.  Within minutes, life was back to normal.  As a wholesale customer I was relieved to find the answers and be able to provide answers to my customers quickly.

Twitter also makes it extremely easy to post status updates to my website or to the other social networks.  I’ve setup my website  to always show my most recent Tweet.  It’s right there in the middle of the home page, so when someone comes to my website they always have a snippet of current information, even if I haven’t had a chance to update my website information in a while.  I try to tweet about things that my client base might find useful. Currently, there is a post linking to an article I read earlier today entitled “What SuperHero Are You?” It’s about defining your unique value and creating a good elevator pitch.  But once I publish  this to my blog that headline will be replaced by the headline for this article as it’s set up to post to my blog, my Facebook, my LinkedIn, and my Twitter account.  And the Twitter post will post to my home page, so there will be a link on my home page that links back to this post.  It’s a happy little circle.

Thought leaders are seen as trusted resources. Prospects gravitate toward thought leaders. Statements made by thought leaders have added weight and credibility. Here are seven steps that can turn you into a thought leader.

1. Pick your niche
Not even Tom Peters and Steve Jobs are thought leaders across all business topics. The narrower your thought leadership area, the easier it will be to rise to prominence.

It may be near impossible to become the thought leader for your entire industry, but you can be the thought leader for a small highly targeted niche—a specific product, customer need or application. For example, don’t try to be the thought leader on politics. Become the thought leader on 21st century town politics in New England.

2. Research and update
Even if you think you know 99% of what there is to know about your area of expertise, do research. Do lots of research. And create a system that will keep you up-to-date. As a thought leader, you must always be investing in acquiring new knowledge. Perhaps you devote 60 minutes a day to reading about your subject area. Have the mindset that you want to know everything possible about your subject. Rely on many sources to keep yourself current.

3. Write
Here’s the meat of the process. You must share what you know and do so in the right way. Put the readers’ interests first, not your own. Give away some of your best information (you’ll stand out and draw people to you). Be different. If you write about what others do, you’ll come across not as an expert but as an equal.

Begin by writing a list of article ideas. Check your list to make sure each idea will help promote your business and your thought leadership. Rank you ideas and write about the most powerful, most innovative one first.

4. Publish
Find editors (online and off line) who run articles about topics like those on your list. Get published. Remember to submit your work to leading websites, ezines and blogs. Check the editorial guidelines before you submit so you make certain your article meets the publication requirements.

5. Promote
Congratulations, you’ve joined Shakespeare and Stephen King as a published author. Let everyone know about your article. Post it on the company website. E-mail a link to your business contact list. Hand out copies to employees, customers, colleagues, prospects and vendors.

6. Speak
Get the articles you publish in front of convention planners and others who select business event speakers. Tell them you’re available. Wherever you speak, make copies of your articles available. And mention that you’re open for other speaking engagements.

7. Repeat and Repeat
Neither one article nor one speech makes a thought leader. Keep writing. Keep speaking. Keep learning.

Exposure brings exposure. Promotion snowballs into more promotion. Speaking leads to more speaking. Get on a roll.

With the video you can see the rapport that she develops with her clients and subjects — usually small children. You see how much fun she makes the shoot for the children.  You see how she treats her clients and how much they appreciate her work.  In two short videos–the trailer on the entry page and the longer version on the video page of the site — you see just how pleasant it might be to hire Lynn Damon.

Check it out at lynndamon.com.  I’m sure you’ll enjoy the videos and the portfolio.

Focus on one main point.
Give specifics.
Honor the reader’s intelligence.
Include power words like “you” and “money.”
Just get to the dang point.
Know your audience.

Leave the cliches out.
Make it new, interesting or important.
Never forget the importance of readability.
Organize your ideas logically.
Proofread, proofread and remember to proofread.

Question your reader to elicit a response.
Repeat your main point creatively.
Simplify difficult concepts.
Talk reader benefits, not product features.
Use strong active verbs.

Vary your sentence pattern.
Write for the head and the heart.
X out jargon.
Yield understanding.
Zero in on your readers’ true needs.

So how do you get people to your site? A combination of practices will increase the number of visitors. The first, of course is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I know I’ve mentioned this before (more than once) but it’s essential for driving traffic to your site. The key point here is that SEO is not a one time deal but a continuous process. You need to constantly review your site stats, determine what is and isn’t working and adjust accordingly.

Another method to get people to your site is simply let them know you’re there. When creating a new site, you should send out an announcement. This is something that we did in the 90’s but got away from. For some reason we began to believe that people would magically find us if we uploaded our site. We know this isn’t true, so by all means send out a notice to everyone in your address book once your site is on-line. This is something you should do every time you have a change to your site that the viewers may be interested, which will be every time because why make a change to a site if no one’s going to be interested?!

Finally don’t omit social media! It is probably the single most useful and cost-effective  tool available today to spread the word about your business. Tweet about it, mention it on your Facebook page, post a YouTube video, and let everyone in your Linked-in account know about it. Your social media strategy may vary from business to business, but every type of business can use social media to communicate with their client base.

If I Build It They Will Come…But Only If They Know It’s There!

Just for fun I took a visit to the Wayback Machine to see how my business website has morphed over the past 10 years.  Here are 3 samplings–the first from 2001, the second from 2005 and the latest version from 2009.

Notice the excess of white space on the 2001 version.  That’s because back in 2001 the most commonly used  screen resolution was 800 x 600.  Now the most common size is above 1024 x 768 so on a modern monitor the 2001 version looks  like a postage stamp.  The 2005 version took up a little more screen space and incorporated a animated Flash header.  The 2009 version incorporates social network links and RSS feeds from relevant blogs.  It also is built using a custom WordPress design.

What’s changed in the last 10 years?  Specifically, what’s changed that  affects the online marketer and website design?  Here are a few things that are now commonplace now, which 10 years ago were a rarity online (if around at all) :

1. Higher resolution monitors. It’s obvious viewing the samples above how screen resolution has changed over the last 10 years.  A well-designed site will make good use of screen space.
2. Online video: Expanded broadband usage along with more personal computing power has allowed the usage of online video on websites to become the norm when only 10 years ago it would have been painfully slow on the majority of home computer systems. In addition the cost and quality of digital video cameras in the past few years has made video far less cost prohibitive for savvy online marketers. And of course  YouTube might have had an effect too.
3. Social networks: Forums and discussion boards have been around since the internet began, but the widespread popularity of social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter and others as well as the use of blogging have changed how marketers communicate and network in the last few years.  The savvy business person is incorporating social networks into their marketing strategy and is expanding their network worldwide.
4. Smartphones: As more people access the web via their smartphone, the savvy business person will make their web presence more usable on the smartphone screen and will make sure they show up in Smartphone search results by getting listed in directories such as Google Local.
5. Google power: Is there anything Google can’t do now? Google’s been around for at least ten years, but they continue to develop tools for webmasters and site owners that are essential for managing and monitoring your website strategies.  Not just Google Search, but Google Local, Google Analytics, Google Checkout, IGoogle — these are  just a few of the Google tools I use on a regular basis and there’s many more.   Go to Google and search webmaster tools and see what they have to offer.

If you’re contemplating how to freshen your website for 2010, take a good look at the design and make sure the look is not dated.  Consider adding video.  Expand your online network through the social networking sites and make your presence there known on your website.  Consider how your website looks on a smartphone and if your’re found when someone searches for your type of business on their smartphone.   And finally, check out the Google tools and suggestions for managing your website.

Roy H. Williams, The Wizard of Ads, has helped small companies grow into big ones for 20 years. Roy uses a simple five step marketing process. The steps are easy to understand but hard to do. Understand and complete them and your company can flourish.

1. Focus.
What are you trying to make happen? How will you measure success? See it clearly. Say it plainly.

2. Evaluate.
Who’s the competition? What’s the customer looking for? What’s holding you back?

3. Prioritize.
When two of your goals come into conflict, which one bows the knee?

4. Strategize.
What’s the shortest route to your primary goal? What tools can dislodge any impediments?

5. Implement.
Quit talking and DO something. Nothing changes until you take action.
________

Chris Amorosino, Amorosino Writing, LLC
Upcoming Workshop, January 14, 2010: postwritingworkshop.eventbrite.com

Although this can be a bit frustrating we do know that there are a few things we can do to make sure a site improves its ranking. First and most important is content–making sure that the keywords used in a search are in the content of a website is essential. The more comprehensive the content of the site, the more likely it will rank well on search engines.

The second way to improve search engine rank is to make sure that the keywords used in a search and in the content are included the meta and title tags . The most important terms should be included in these 2 tags. This is also important because the title and meta description may be what the search results will show and you’ll want to make sure that it correctly conveys your message.

Also important to SEO are incoming links. The more links you have from other sites to yours, the higher you may rank. The key here, however, is QUALITY links. You’ll often see ads to get you 15,000 links. Most of these won’t be applicable to your site and can even hurt your ranking. Quality links would be regional, industry directories, etc.

The bottom line is…SEO is a continuous process. Since search engines constantly update their way of looking at sites, SEO is not a one time fix and although there are no guarantees, it’s not something you can ignore.

How is SEO like a college degree? With a degree you’re not guaranteed to get the good job, but without it, you’re not likely to get it. Similarly, SEO doesn’t guarantee a first place search engine rank, but without it, you’re not likely to be found.

Smart and accurate. Fun way to end a Monday afternoon. Enjoy.